Social theory for damaged times
Microverses comprises over a hundred short essays inviting us
to think about society—and social theory—in new ways. Lockdown
created the conditions for what Adorno once termed ‘enforced
contemplation’. Dylan Riley responded with the tools of his trade,
producing an extraordinary trail of notes exploring how critical
sociology can speak to this troubled decade. Microverses
analyses the intellectual situation, the political crisis of Trump’s
last months in office, and love and illness in a period when both
were fraught with the public emergency of the coronavirus.
Riley brings the theoretical canon to bear on problems of
intellectual culture and everyday life, working through Weber and
Durkheim, Parsons and Dubois, Gramsci and Lukács, MacKinnon and
Fraser, to weigh sociology’s relationship to Marxism and the
operations of class, race and gender, alongside discursions into the
workings of an orchestra and the complicatedness of taking a walk in
a pandemic.
Invitations rather than finished arguments, the notes attempt to
recover the totalising perspective of sociology—the ability to see
society in the round, as though from the outside—and to recuperate
what Paul Sweezy described as a sense of the ‘present as history’.