Chris Burford wrote:
>
> It addresses the subjective exeriences of living in a late capitalist
> society to which many of us react subjectively but without knowledge of our
> subjectivism.
Michael Perelman wrote:
> The Corrosion book does not come anywhere near the Hidden Injuries.
>
A brief note while I'm conscious:
Sennett can be an interesting thinker. With grave limitations. Ultimate failures. _Corrosion_ must needs be read in relation to _hidden injuries_. Sennett's subject here is in part generational, the son of his subject in _hidden injuries_ is foregrounded in corrosion_. But importantly, I'd suggest that _hidden injuries_ and _corrosion_ are reflective footnotes to his work primarily rendered in _the fall of public man: the social psychology of capitalism_ and his work on the construction of urban space, _ Flesh and stone: the body and the city in western civ_ and _the uses of disorder_. hidden injuries and corrosion are in part about attempting an anthropology of the subjects matters of earlier theorizing. _hidden injuries_ is an ethnography meant to render the empirical reality of _fall of public man_. _corrosion_, i'd suggest is rather a reflection on ethnographic methodology. in particular what happens when on tries to theories history anew as it puts its (history that is) boot on one's subject's neck in a slightly different position.
Sennett has a nice piece with Foucault in the London Review of Books from 1981 (I see the archive there only goes to '97, thus history eludes us with links I can give up) that some what unintentionally spell out some important differences and how sennett is unable the train his erudite criticism against his historical premises. (Sennett also has a nice picture of foucault in an old _Christopher Street_, talk about not being able to get back to history, baby, i think that was 1982.)
_Discipline and Punish_, etc., remains necessary to reading the a way of thinking that sets aside this notion of 'internalizing', of various 'false' and 'true' consciousness and while trapped in dialectal methods go round and round like Ping-Pong. outside of liberalisms long arm.
Sennett wants also to be outside the language of dialectical materialism. and wants also the deal with subjects of liberalism. but maybe as we profligately place the prefix NEO in front of liberalism these days as a moniker on this regime of totality and oppression and that ostensibly makes manifest capitalism's heart at the end of the 20th cent., we would be will served in revisiting a language of liberalism's past and how those subjects, outside of other left-ical canonical understands of 'liberal' depredations, with variously understood oppositions, resistances, coming into being, and other bug bears of what, whatever, it is that we need now.
ok, i needs to go to my night job, outside of sennett a couple suggestions _Crowds and Power_ by Cannetti, and something I read recently Christopher Newfield's _The emerson effect: individualism and submission in america_.
yours,
michael