Keith Kerr - Postmodern Cowboy: C. Wright Mills and a New 21st-century Sociology

POSTMODERN COWBOY

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POSTMODERN COWBOY

C. WRIGHT MILLS AND
A NEW 21ST-CENTURY SOCIOLOGY

Foreword by Stjepan Mestrovic

Keith Kerr

Photograph of C. Wright Mills and documents are used with permission by Nikolas Mills.

First published 2009 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kerr, Keith.

Postmodern cowboy : C. Wright Mills and a new

21st-century sociology / Keith Kerr.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59451-579-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. SociologyUnited StatesHistory20th century. 2. SociologyUnited StatesHistory21st century. 3. PostmodernismUnited States. 4. Mills, C. Wright (Charles Wright), 19161962Political and social views. I. Title.

HM477.U6K47 2008

301.092dc22

2008015133

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-579-8 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-580-4 (pbk)

With love to my first child.

A boy.

May your journey be joyful.

How does one introduce Keith Kerrs work on C. Wright Mills as the Texan, Aggie, and postmodern cowboy vis--vis many intellectual giants in social theory, and most especially David Riesman and Jean Baudrillard? As my students know, when I lecture about David Riesman and his work, I transmit ideas that captured the hearts and minds of several generations of Americans since the 1950sideas that influenced scores of intellectuals ranging from Jean Baudrillard to Christopher Lasch, among others. Although Riesman is largely forgotten today, he was the rare sociologist who made it to the cover of Time magazine for his masterpiece, The Lonely Crowd, which is still the best-selling sociology book of all time. But my students also know that I transmit emotions from an era and a sociologist who was an unusual teacher, mentor, and friend. I tell my students what Riesman told me, and others: if you want to do significant research, go out and really look. Facts do not speak for themselves, he used to say, and I keep repeating to my studentsfacts must always be interpreted by someone in some group (even an imaginary peer group) in order to hold meaning. We always believe someone, not just something.

Riesman advised me to go into sociology because, he said, the field was and remains like the Wild West, and you can still make new discoveries. He advised against psychology and neighboring disciplines because they were too civilized, by which he meant that they offered paved highways that constricted and forced thought into specific directions (so much like Baudrillards must exit metaphor, based on American highways), whereas sociology, like Americas frontiers, still offers paths that have never been explored. I say much the same things to my students. More important, Riesman did not ever really lecture: he engaged students in conversation and dialogue even as he lectured. Those in his audiences soon learned that if they dared ask a question, he would find or fashion something brilliant in even the most stupid questions. If there is one major lesson that I learned from Riesman, and try to transmit to my students, it is that we learn and teach others primarily through conversation. (And how often we forget that George Herbert Mead, who also influenced several generations of sociologists, albeit at the University of Chicago, spoke about inner conversations among the I, Me, and Generalized Other.)

It seems like some sort of strange destiny or Jungian synchronicity that after leaving Harvard, I wound up lecturing (holding extended conversations) in Texas; that my students are primarily modern cowboys; that one of sociologys most important theorists, C. Wright Mills, had once been a Texas Aggie at the very same university where I engage in conversations; and that one of my graduate students, Keith Kerr, went out and looked at C. Wright Mills in this physical context, and also as part of this ongoing conversation since Riesman. Kerr found that it was Mills, not Baudrillard, who invented the concept of postmodernism. He found that it was a lonely Texas upbringing that influenced Mills as much as the education he received later. And among his many other discoveries, he found that in describing postmodernism before the concept became cool, Mills owes his intellectual roots to American thinkers, from the pragmatists to Riesman. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Riesmans other-directed type is a forerunner of the postmodernist type.

Of course, some readers will object immediately that I make too much of a vague piece of advice by Riesman to go out and look. Some of my colleagues have responded harshly to this phrase by saying that it amounts to a license to muck around. Part of Riesmans innocent outlook was that if one went out and really looked, one could find something to be true and share it with others. Against this seemingly naive outlook, graduate students and colleagues have been socialized into a conversation-stopping framework that teaches that one can never prove something is true, only that a hypothesis is false. This anticonversation can be traced back to Karl Popper or perhaps the tendency to deconstruct (it is taught dutifully that one is not allowed to reconstruct after one has torn down an idea or person or apparent truth) or some other source. Perhaps it is even part of the other-directed tendency uncovered by Riesman in which the peer group cuts down to size anyone or anything that seems to shine too much in relation to the peer group. One sees this tendency even in contemporary politics, wherein Barack Obama, the harbinger of hope and change, was immediately cut down to size by his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as the media. Those who wax nostalgically for an inspirational leader such as JFK or MLK forget that these were inner-directed leaders who lived in a predominantly inner-directed era, which, despite the real social ills that existed at that time, allowed someone to stand for something, and admired people who believed passionately in some truth that was important to them as well as others. I mention this conversation-stopping tendency from the outset, which seems to grow progressively stronger with each generation, as something to guard against in reading Kerrs book. One cannot engage Kerr in a conversation about what is new and worthy of being rediscovered about Mills if one holds the corrosive belief that ones duty is to tear down and find what is false in anything.