Dreamworlds of Alabama (review)

At the outer limits of Sociology, indeed, at the farthest reaches of disciplined academic writing itself, it is now possible to find discourse such as the following:

Smithy's house was a rough-cut box cobbled together out of exposed insulation, sheets of fiberglass, and asphalt shingles. He and his shotgun were out of sync with the air conditioners, vinyl siding, and higher property values. But there were other notable features in the landscape. Scattered through the valley were long aluminum chicken houses that floated like moored dirigibles in the full sun, each spreading the smell of chicken shit for three-quarters of a mile in all directions. On the dirt road that wound through Crooked Mountain were piles of garbage mixed with refrigerators, melting horses, and cows with beetles swarming over their guts next to stands of deciduous azaleas and oakleaf hydrangeas. Objects, flora and fauna, and practices from different worlds were jammed together in aboveground geological patterns. In the sixties one of the buses in the Freedom Ride from Washington, D.C., was burned on Highway 78 nine miles down the road. . . . Michael Taussig, an anthropologist who worked on the violent remnants of the rubber trade in Columbia, would describe the valley around my grandfather's farm as part of "a culture of terror, a space of death." For Taussig, landscapes can soak up stories and practices and then ingest individuals in a whirlpool of sticky signifiers, coating the person in a prosthetic as natural as a baby's skin and as complete as anything the German sociologist Max Weber imagined with the "iron cage." What neither Weber nor Taussig directly articulates is the coordination between the body and the surrounding landscapes. The fit or coordination is more than an ecological adaptation. It is radicalized habitus in which two landscapes are sewn together by the same "set of needles."

(60–61)

Immediately striking about the above passage from Dreamworlds of Alabama are the care and beauty that Shelton has lavished on his writing—in a pronounced effort to graft his own neighborhood, the northeastern corner of Alabama, a district associated often enough in the popular imagination with segregation, post-agrarian decline, and cultural deprivation and denial, into the swirling flows of the modernization concentrated, perhaps most of all, in the Paris of the Second Empire. The overall thrust of Shelton's demonstration is that the disarray in an abandoned tool shed can be as magical as the iridescent depths opened up by an aesthetic trigger in Proust; that the landscapes of all the habitations in our cosmopolitan, post-global world have become, in Manuel De Landa's as well as Taussig's senses, molds contouring the dwellers' procedural and cultural as well as material lives. Indeed, the landscapes of cultural locality bottom out into distinctive dreamworlds. Unlikely candidates including Franz Kafka, Proust, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Jorge Luis Borges, Gilles Deleuze, particularly in collaboration with Félix Guattari, and W. G. Sebald become Shelton's sociologists of choice not by dint of their inculcation into the discipline and its protocols over the past half century, but as consummate avatars and steersmen into dreamworlds in general, into those climates of the Imaginary through which the regimes of power, the vicissitudes of desire, innovation, and fulfillment, and the limits of socio-political interaction and achievement are back-lit in their most lucid relief. As the informed references to Weber, Kracauer, Taussig, and other major contributors to the literature of Sociology throughout the book make abundantly clear, Shelton's sociological interest in and commitment to the dreamworlds recurrently opening up to his gaze is by no means casual.

Shelton's primary implement in this updated mission for the social sciences, surely foreseen by the above-listed writers and by Jacques Lacan's shift to a more cognitive process-oriented psychoanalysis, is writing—Derridean écriture—itself. Sociology, if it has any chance of unraveling the imaginary landscapes on the underside of power, and the economic regimes, technological machines, and hegemonic institutions by which power is delegated and implemented...