UChicago summer session: Durkheim, Weber, and a lot of questions

Almost one week in, and I finally feel enough distance from this week’s reading, so that I can write about it rather than do it. Feels like a small victory, considering how many ways the first couple of days could have gone.

Durkheim first. We read some of his work on social facts; the idea that society is something larger than a collection of individuals, a force that weighs down on you from the outside in a way that’s often invisible, like gravity. I was thinking about familial obligations during this entire section – the specific gravity of the things that no one says out loud, but that everyone still knows and follows.

It’s not a new thought for me, necessarily-I’ve felt that push all my life without really understanding it – but having a name for it has shifted my perspective on it slightly.

Naming a feeling doesn’t take away the feeling, but it does make it easier to handle.

Then Weber, shifting from Durkheim’s abstract and impersonal social forces to an investigation into the meaning individuals themselves lend to their actions. The transition felt intentionally like the two were setting up to duel it out, and sure enough, my group debated for an hour whether structure or meaning explained more, ultimately concluding (for what it’s worth) that they each alone explain too little, which feels like a cop out but might be the honest answer.

The hard stuff hasn’t been the ideas, oddly, but the reading load itself. Rafi wasn’t kidding. Tonight I have about a hundred pages; tomorrow will be too.

It’s a different kind of fatigue than recreational reading has always provided.

I find myself stopping every page or two to digest what I’ve read, rather than simply letting it wash over me, and over three hours this adds up to a type of exhaustion I hadn’t anticipated, despite talking myself through the prep work.

Still, the thing that keeps pulling me through is the knowledge that the ideas relate directly to topics I’ve been orbiting all over this blog for months – family, food, history, belonging – but now with actual frameworks and vocabulary. I’m not yet clear if this will sharpen my intuition, or slow it down, making it more qualified, more footnoted. Two more weeks to learn.