Dorothy Smith - The Everyday World As Problematic, Chapter 2

I The Line of Fault

The chapter is about creating a sociology for women and how currently and historically the discipline has not made room for women or our viewpoint. She proceeds from her own experience and the experiences of other women and asks "how it is organized, how it is determined, what the social relations are that generate it" (pg. 50).

She looks to early women's movement writings (1960s) such as Friedan, Millet, de Beauvoir, Barnard, as the point at which women began to recognize the ideology at work to keep us in our places. We became aware a "rupture in experience, and between experience and the social forms of its expression, was located in a relation of power between women and men, in which men dominated women" (pg. 51). The way we think, the ways we express ourselves and formulate our experiences are made or controlled by men, making women appear as objects (even to women ourselves).

She discusses ideology in the usage of Marx and Engels as "those ideas and images through which the class that rules the society by virtue of its domination of the means of production orders, organizes, and sanctions the social relations that sustain its domination" (pg. 54). These ideas created by men penetrate social consciousness and create a disjuncture between the world as we know it by experience and the world as we are provided the means to think and understand it. In other words, there is a disjuncture between what the world is and what it is said to be.

Smith points out that sociology is a part of this ideological structure. The discourses, themes, etc are organized and articulated by men. Women may now take part in sociology and in academics in general, but the discipline is still a masculine one. The male perspective has been instutionalized. The ruling class (men) control the means of production and the dissemination of ideas and images, leaving us with very few places to hide. The most powerful mechanism of this control is the educational process by which we are taught to accept the ideology and lose connection to our real experience. Smith advocates beginning from "the center" as some women poets and artists have done by focusing on a woman's actual experiencing unmediated by the ideology of the male ruling class.

II Sociology: Women are Outside the Frame

Smith argues that the exclusion of women from important and influential positions in the discipline has prevented, until very recently, our contribution to the themes and topics within the sociological discourse. The proposed remedy have not been satisfactory because they take the "agenda" of the discipline as a given and simply add to it or critique it. Smith argues that the agenda itself is "grounded in the working worlds and relations of men, whose experience and interests arise in the course of and relation to participation in the ruling apparatus of this society" (pg. 62). Women are simply outside of the frame. The world as sociology knows it is organized according the ruling apparatus. Women's positions are subordinate and we are largely silent within the discourse.

Smith's proposal is to start from experience and actualities of women's situations. The assumptions and social organization of the discipline would thereby be challenged because they do not fit with the organization of our experiences. For example, she points out that women's lives and work routines do not conform to the models presented by sociology, particularly the "rational man" approach that assumes more control over one's life than most women experience. Women relate to the world in a different manner as a result of our subordinate position and the more varied types of work (i.e. public and private) that we are responsible for. She gives an example of novelist Joan Didion whose shows the "episodic discontinuities of the life of her protagonist" (pg. 67). Society has created for women a different relation to the world. Therefore, attempts to apply standard sociological frames do not fit the experiences of women. We have been unable to free ourselves from this ideological framework and method.

III Sociology as a Constituent of a Consciousness Organized by the

Abstracted, Extralocal Relations of Ruling

Smith points out that the cognitive domain of science is a social relation. "Sociology is an organization of practices that structure our relation to others in the society of whom we speak and write, concerning whom we make assertions, into whose lives and experience we inquire, who are the objects of our study, and whose behavior we aim to explain" (pg. 72). It is not a neutral and impartial science, it is an active part of the ideological apparatus as Marx and Engels conceive of it. She describes the development of a viewpoint of society that was extralocal. A perspective that is outside the local and particular and organizes the world from an abstract conceptual level that is seemingly external. When we take up sociology, we take up a perspective that is located outside of ourselves.

IV The Standpoint of Women is Outside the Extralocal Relations of Ruling

To take up the standpoint or women means to take up a standpoint that is outside of this frame. Smith does not mean to imply, however, that women have a common viewpoint. Rather, she argues that what we have in common is an organization of social relations that has excluded us. We have not been able to do sociology from a position of our own experiences. This is the most significant argument in this chapter: Smith points out, using a master/slave analogy, that the relations and reality of the world cannot not be accurately seen from the master's point of view. The nature of the relation prevents the master from being conscious of how the relation is organized. "The social organization of the forms of consciousness characteristic of a ruling class cannot be examined from the standpoint of the ruling class because that organization is not visible from that perspective or in that mode of action" (pg. 80). The slave, on the other hand, is able to see the entire set of social relations. Smith argues that it is the same for women in sociology. The standard sociology mode of inquiry is incapable of examining the full set of social relations by virtue of the ruling class, ideological perspective that it takes. Women, however, in the subordinate slave position are capable of seeing these relationships.

What happens is a bifurcation of consciousness (for women and men; this idea comes from Schutz). Two modes of knowing/experiencing/acting are established: one located in the body and the space it exists and moves thru, and another that is beyond it, an abstract mode of action. In order to participate in the abstract mode, one must be freed from concerns to the concrete."At almost every point women mediate for men the relation between the conceptual mode of action and the actual concrete forms on which it depends. Women's work is interposed between the abstracted modes and the local and particular actualities in which they are necessarily anchored. Also, women's work conceals from men acting in the abstract mode just this anchorage"(pp. 83-84). The two sides of the bifurcated of consciousness are not equal: entrance in to the abstract cannot occur without passing through the concrete and immediate experience.

V The Everyday World as Problematic

So how do we proceed? How do we analyze the world in a way that avoids the problems of the established sociological framework? Smith proposes that we take "the everyday world as problematic, where the everyday world is taken to be various and differentiated matrices of experience-the place from within which the consciousness of the knower begins, the location of her null point" (pg. 88). We focus on the directly experienced world, it is local and historical and organized by social relations that are not observable within it. This is not the same as making the everyday world the object of study. Rather, it is a procedure of beginning from social actuality to develop a conceptual framework for understanding its properties. "The problematic can be characterized in a preliminary way as an abstraction of organization from the everyday world and the location of organizing processes in externally structured and differentiated relations" (pg. 94).

VI Conclusion

So, basically, her proposal is to begin with real everyday social relations between people rather than beginning within a discourse. She calls this a Copernican shift in sociology. She argues that locating the knower in the everyday world pulls the microsociological and the macrosociological into a determinate relation. It allows us to examine the total set of relations that a grounding in the ruling ideology prevents one from seeing.