S y m p o s i u m : N e w Perspectives on Mil ls 's The Sociological Imaginat ion

Re-Reading The Sociological Imagination

NORMAN K. D ~ z ~

Every sociological generation has its book; a text which captures the imagina- tion of newcomers entering the field. In the 1960s that book was C. Wright Mills's ( 1959) Sociological Imaginat ion. ~ It issued a calling to sociologists trained in the 1960s, challenging them to develop a sociological imagination that wou ld self-consciously read biography, history, wor ld politics, and particular societies as totalities, while making sense of the traps and personal t roubles of ordinary, little people. 2

The Sociological Imaginat ion 3 is a work of Mills's imagination. In it he thinks and wri tes vaingloriously and constructs images and pictures of society, men and history which are real only in so far as they exist in his text. Organized in ten chapters, 4 the book represents a summary of his two earlier works on the Amer- ican class structure: White Collar (1951) , and The Power Elite (1956) . These studies carry forth his self-appointed task, after Balzac, of covering all the "major classes in the type of society in the era he wished to make his own" (1959, p. 200).

Like all theory, it is a rhetorical work (see White 1973, also Marcus and Fischer, 1986, pp. 14-16), 5 moved by multiple voices. In the appendix he is "the intel- lectual workman [who] forms his own self as he works toward the perfect ion of his craft" (p.196). In these oxymorons Mills combines terms which clearly es- tablish the point that he is one of the workers, but an intellectual worker, and hence not one of the workers after all. 6

It is s t ructured by the interplay of three conversations and four texts. Conver-

Norman K. Denzin is professor of sociology, communications, criticism and interpretive theory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 618020. He is the author of several books, including On Understanding Emotion (1984), The Alcoholic Self (1987), The Recotmring Alcoholic (1987), Interpretive Interactionism (1989), and the forthcoming Film and the American Alcoholic. He is past president of the Midwest Sociological Society.

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sationally, there are Mills's interactions wi th himself, wi th the influential theorists who look over his shoulder, and there is the discourse be tween the reader and Mills book (see Mills 1956, p. 363). 7 Textually, we have Mills's personal history wi th himself as a sociologist and public figure, as well as his interpretations of the texts of his sociological contemporaries , the texts of the classical social theorists he emulates, and the text of American society which he is at tempting to read and make sense of. These texts and conversations are conver ted into a system of discourse which allows Mills to have the final word on h o w his imagination will bring about the kind of sociology he has constructed. Here there is a double-play on imagination. Mills has creatively imagined and cons t ructed the texts he criti- cizes from the vantage point of his sociological imagination. In so doing he has turned the sociological imagination into a force which can change history. But this force is one he has created; it is a product of his imagination, and his imagined readings of the classic theorists. It is nowhere present in cur ren t sociology, except in his work. He is the sociological imagination. By performing this transformation of self he is then able to locate himself outside history and outside sociology and to become the objective observer of world history and America's place in that history (see Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 109 on the impossibility of this). He becomes the hero of his own text and the reincarnation of those dead theorists he so admires.

This done, he no longer has to be the empirical social scientist he once was. 8 He has become America's p reeminen t "classical theorist" of the contemporary age. He has displaced Parsons and Lazarsfeld. With this identity he can now read the social s t ructure through the lens of his heroes. This means that what he imagines to be the case is the case, for his imagination is real and has been verified by his experiences. He will go beyond even Balzac. Having already "covered" the class structure, he will n o w wri te the book on h o w to do that, or rather on how he did it. All that's left is for readers to come and reason with him so that they can participate in a dialogue about "the higher circles of America" and sociology (1956, p. 364).

How does he do this? He creates a spurious, or false dialogue with his reader, for in fact what we have is a monologue; an ex tended tirade by Mills on the state of affairs in mid-century American life. This tirade is cloaked in the languages and grand "metanarratives" of the classic age: reason, freedom, democracy, enlight- enmen t and positive knowledge about men and their troubles (see Lyotard 1979/ 1984).

The dialogue is modernist. It is molded by the language and the phrases of classic social theory: alienation, anomie, totalitarian, capitalist and feudal societ- ies, class, status, power, key variables, quantifiable indices. 9 The words are care- fully chosen. Mills has the classical social theorists in his head. Their voices direct him to wri te a totalizing theory of early post -modern American society that would yield yet another version of the gemeinschaft-gesellschaft myth which haunted those theorists. Despite his nods in the directions of relativism, biographies and personal troubles, power and knowledge and the legitimation crisis surrounding

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modern science he was t rapped inside the rhetoric of the theories he so valued. He failed to take seriously his own sociological imagination.

H o w did he fail? I as a flesh-and-blood reader sit here and hold Mills's book in my hands. Mills peers out at me on the dust jacket. Here he is. The man in the black shirt with his thumb cupped over his belt, staring off into the distance, presumably contemplat ing the sociological imagination. Mills's b o o k has intruded into my extranarrative life. I want to bel ieve Mills and be like him. I want to have his sociological imagination.

Here is h o w this happens. Read this sentence: "Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps" (1959, p. 3). I come to Mills's book as a believing reader. By the end of the first sentence I am willing to be on his side. Who wouldn ' t be? Little men [and women, w h o m he e lsewhere calls "darling little slaves" and "suburban queens" (1953/1963, p. 344)] are Mills's foil. He purport- edly speaks to these persons ' existential traps, to the lack of meaning in the everyday life (1959, p. 197), to their failed marriages, their unemployment (1959, pp. 8-10), and the horrible, ugly cities where they live.

Nowhe re in the pages of his work ( s ) do these little people and their personal t roubles speak. Mills speaks for them, or he quotes disparagingly from others w h o have wr i t ten about them, usually novelists, like Sinclair Lewis, Booth Tarkington, Chris topher Morley, or James Cain. When he wri tes his "nowadays" sentences he is ei ther writ ing about what others have wri t ten about men nowadays, or he is writ ing about what he imagines people nowadays feel about their lives. Perhaps Mills has wri t ten himself into his text, and he is the person w h o feels t rapped and finds no meaning in his personal life. But this is not so. Mills the intellectual craftsman finds meaning in his theorizing about these lives w h o m his texts nei ther touch nor allow to speak. His use of the "nowadays" line is a purely rhetorical device for immediately aligning the reader with his populist, emancipatory text.

The Imagination is a hypocrit ical text, wi th dubious ethics. It is filled with bo th upward and downward hypocrisy. 1~ Mills pre tends that he and I (as reader), because of the current state of sociological affairs, are worse off than w e really are. This is downward hypocrisy. He wants me to bel ieve that my life really is a series of traps. He even suggests that his has been (1959, p. 201). At the same time he wants me to be moved by an altruistic stance of moral indignation about the way sociologists like Parsons and Lazarsfeld do sociology. This is upward hypocrisy. Mills is playing games with me. He moves me first one way, and then another. He doesn ' t care about my welfare. He will sacrifice me for his larger aims.

This is tragic, for it makes my relationship to MiUs's text less than it used to be, or less than it could be, for I can no longer be ennobled by his project. I no longer trust him. He has manipulated me, his flesh and b lood reader, to his personal ends. His book is unethical. 1 ~ A presence w h o wro te us out of Parsons and led us back to Dewey, pragmatism and symbolic interactionism, Mills emerges from this read- ing a tarnished hero.

As sociologists, the company w e keep, using Wayne Booth's (1988) phrase, and the books that w e read and write, tell a great deal about w h o w e are. Sociologists,

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since Mills, have, in the main, kept company with the "great" social theorists and empirical researchers w h o together, r eproduce the idea of a social science that many have come to value and like. The list of names is long, or short, depending on your preferences, and the ones you pick, and those who keep them alive for you, fill the pages of our prestigious journal which carry the sociologist's positivist and postpositivist versions of news about society (Maines 1989). Mills kept good company. The best of his day. And whe re did it get him?

He p roduced a dishonest text that was unresponsive to the very needs and demands that he felt we re central to the truthful workings of the sociological imagination. His project failed for four reasons. He kept the wrong company. He created the wrong version of the sociological imagination. He failed to listen to the little people. And, most importantly he formed an ethical bond with me, the reader, which he later broke.

Notes

Portions of this c o m m e n t are elaborated in my, "The Sociological Imagination Revisited," The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 30, 1990. I am especially grateful for the comment s of the following persons on earlier versions of the longer manuscript which the present s ta tement draws from: Carl Couch, David Maines, Peter Manning, Arthur Frank, Michal McCall, James Carey, Katherine Ryan-Denzin, John Johnson, David Altheide, Patricia Clough, Norbert Wiley, Charles Smith, and Raymond Schmitt.

1. Gouldner (1970) was such a text for s tudents enter ing the field in the 1970s. Giddens, Habermas and recent French social theorists (Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, etc.) are supplying the texts for the late 1980s; earlier generations drew on Parsons and Merton. As a generation comes of age, it has an obligation to re-read those texts which brought its members into the field. What I offer is a re-reading of Mills. This t ime through his text I find points and meanings that I did not discover on earlier readings, including those made in 1959 when the book first appeared (see Denzin 1987 on how texts change meanings with successive readings).

2. The relationship be tween personal troubles and public issues was central to Mills's argument (1959, pp. 8-13). However, he failed to deal with troubles that never became issues, and issues that were never troubles. Nor did he examine h o w troubles are both created and transformed when they become public issues. David Altheide and Raymond Schmitt suggested these points.

3. "Imagine": To form an image: To think vainly. "Imaginary": Existing only in the imagination: Not real. "Imagination": The act of imagining: That which is imagined.

4. The titles are: "The Promise," "Grand Theory," "Abstracted Empiricism," "Types of Practicality," "The Bureaucratic Ethos," "Philosophies of Science," "The Human Variety," "Uses of History," "On Reason and Freedom," "On Politics," and the famous Appendix, "On Intellectual Craftsmanship."

5. It is comedy, parody, romance, and tragedy. 6. See Goldsen's (1964, p. 90) account of Mills's involvement on the Puerto RicanJourney project: "He did

not interview migrants or try to share their views. He interviewed English-speaking officials and intellec- tuals."

7. In fact there are six persons in conversation who structure the text: Mills the immediate teller of his story, Mills the implied teller, who knows this is a made-up version of the imagination, and Mills, the flesh- and-blood writer, and alongside these immediate, implied and real authors, are parallel identities for the reader (see Booth 1988, p. 125 on these dimensions).

8. He tells the reader (p. 205) that "I do not like to do empirical work if I can possibly avoid it." 9. See the discussion of variables and quantifiable indices on pages 207-109 of The Imagination.

10. I borrow these two terms from Booth (1988, pp. 253-56). 11. By this I mean he has produced a totalitarian text which manipulates me, and the "nowadays" men and

w o m e n to his personal ends.

References

Booth, Wayne C. 1988. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Denzin, Norman K_ 1987. "Under the Influence of Time: Reading the Interactional Text." Sociological Quarterly

28: 327-41.

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Goldsen, Rose I~ 1964. "Mills and the Profession of Sociology." Pp. 88-93 in The New Sociology: Essays in Social Science and Social Theory in Honor of C Wright Mills, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gouldner, Alvin. 1970. The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press. (originally published in 1979). Maines, David IZ 1989. "On the Liminality of Post-positivism and the Conceptualization of Culture: An Editorial

Introduction." Cultural Dynamics, special issue on "Conceptions of Culture." Marcus, George E. and Michael M.J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Mo-

ment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Mills, C. Wright. 1951. White Collar. New York: Oxford University Press. _ _ . 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. �9 1953/1963. "Women: The Darling Little Slaves." Review of S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1952). Pp.

339-46 in Pow~, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C Wright Mills, edited and with an intro- duction by I.L. Horowitz. New York: Ballantine (written in 1953 and previously unpublished).

White, Hayden V. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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