Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

A peculiar deficiency of the emphasis on dialectic so
central to a sociological argument is that the
insistence is frequently not itself dialectical;
indeed, it is as likely as any other to become
theological, though the privileged deity is now
neither the god of our forefathers nor the god of the
laboratory nor the god of consciousness, but instead
the god of history. This deity is a particularly
truculent being who necessitates change for the sake
of change, a turbulent renunciation of the very idea
of tradition – as in the case, for instance, of Mao’s
Cultural Revolution – all in the interest of
ideological purity with little consideration of the
effects of radical change on the human beings who
must endure it for theory’s sake. […] We have
plentiful enough evidence of the potential for
inhumanity in contemporary socialist political
experiments to suggest that Marxist and other
presumably dialectical arguments nurture the same
oppressive capacity as any intellectual commitment
when they divorce themselves from the dialogue and
reconstitute a hierarchy of voices in their own
favor. (272, emphasis mine)
What Knoblauch is describing is a severe yet straightforward
reversal of perspective. The “Word” of the Judeo-Christian-
Islamic tradition and the very dichotomous, “we-right-good vs.
other-wrong-bad” perspective that it both necessitates and
nurtures has been traded for the “Word” of a secular Post-
Modernity. One “god” has become traded for another, but this
new “god” promises his (or her) disciples the very same boons if
they should worship him: order, stability, authority, and
control. This “trade” is simply a counter-polarization, as it
were, like when you look upon a photograph’s negative: the
lights become dark and the darks become light but the thing in
the photograph, whatever it may be, remains the same. Again,
the same old thing all over … again. For Knoblauch, it would
seem that without that “dialogue,” your perspective of “reality”
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