Afterword: Beyond a Materialist Sociology

Abstract

As a child I always enjoyed taking clocks to pieces. There was a real pleasure in examining each inner piece of the system. The precision of this machine that measured time delighted me. When I held the spring that energised the system it felt as if I held the soul of this time machine. Yet, as you may guess, I was never able to put the clock back together. This is the problem with systems—we can pull them apart but something reconstructive always eludes us. Even though the spring held the energy my young mind thought of as the soul, the spring itself lay loose and unmoving upon its extraction. This has led me on a long search for the soul in things. I have discovered that we cannot access this intangible element through conventional methods of reductive analysis, even though this process is its own reward. My approach has been to solicit various intuitive, embodied, creative, aesthetic and spiritual modalities to delve beyond the conventional givens of my Western tradition’s epistemic processes.