Jenni Brichzin’s research focuses on the two areas of sociological theory and political sociology. In political sociology, she primarily examines processes of instituting and differentiating democratic practice (for example, in parliaments) and phenomena of political regression (for example, along the lines of the question of the position of right-wing radicalism in Chemnitz). She also traces the social imagination of the political: How does society imagine democratic politics (and politicians in particular), how must democratic practice present itself in order to be considered legitimate? Closely related to these research interests in political sociology is the social-theoretical focus on fragility, contradictions and dialectics of social order. What makes a social status quo, which was long perceived as irrefutable, shake? In answering this question, the focus is not primarily on the behavior of certain actors and their intentions, but rather on unintended side effects and dialectical processes – which at first sight seem contradictory or paradoxical from a logical perspective. In this context, the analysis of societal and social-theoretical (for example, explicitly anti-essentialist) epistemological practices is also of particular importance: How is truth addressed socially?

Kritik anti-essenzialistischer Soziologie

Critique of anti-essentialist sociology

DFG-Project (443532822)

by 2020

This research project revolves around anti-essentialist thinking, which can be understood as one of the key characteristics of contemporary sociological theorizing. Its significance is considerable – not because anti-essentialist approaches convey a somewhat different perspective on society, but because they oppose the classical notions of how to achieve scientific knowledge with a fundamentally different understanding of science. Instead of attempting to gain knowledge by unambiguously determining the object of research – for example, by uncovering essences, causalities or general laws of behaviour – they assume, conversely, that it is indeterminate in principle. The crucial scientific achievement, then, is not to show how the object of research is determined but to reveal what degrees of freedom it possesses.

The aim of the project is to comprehensively work out the contours, potentialities and limits of the anti-essentialist mode of doing science across theoretical boundaries for the first time. This is such an important undertaking to tackle right now, as anti-essentialist approaches are currently – in the context of political distortions such as the proclamation of a ‘post-truth era’ – put into question. Could it be possible, critics ask, that the current crisis of truth is linked to a scepticism nurtured by anti-essentialists? It is this and similar questions that must be explored in order to find out: how to proceed with anti-essentialist sociological thinking.

The project approaches its task from three different angles. Firstly, by systematically reconstructing the anti-essentialist scientific logic from key works of pragmatism, poststructuralism, systems theory and network theory. These anti-essentialist theories are four of the most important theoretical approaches available to sociological theorizing at present. While those theories are different, sometimes even drastically different, with regard to how the social and the society are conceptualized, remarkable commonalities emerge with regard to the underlying understanding of science – especially in what concerns a common renunciation of ontological, epistemological and methodological essentialisms. Secondly, the project’s aim is approached by historically reconstructing important anti-essentialist figures of thought present in crucial sociological debates – debates that revolve around the question of how and when statements about society are true statements. Here, special attention is paid to the early dispute over methods, the positivism dispute and the essentialism-constructivism-debate. Finally, a third facet of anti-essentialist thinking is reconstructed empirically, by a qualitative discourse analysis on the question: what influence anti-essentialist theorizing has, in practice, on the contemporary political discourse. Together, these three research measures uncover the scientific program of anti-essentialism, and they help to show how it may be further developed in future.

Preliminary Work:

Brichzin, Jenni; Schindler, Sebastian (2018): Why the wish to look »behind« things can be a problem. Ways of knowing politics beyond conspiracy theory. Leviathan 46 (4), pp. 575-602. German.

Brichzin, Jenni (2018): Network research. Review of the anthology: Löwenstein, Heiko; Emirbayer, Mustafa (ed.): Networks, Culture, Agency. Problem solving in relational methodology and social theory. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 70 (2), pp. 315-318.