Introduction

Abstract

Despite many claims to the contrary most sociologists and social theorists are the victims of fashion. Although many of us in the academic world tend to believe, even if not explicitly proclaim, that our analyses are somehow beyond the banalities, trivialities and ever changing silliness of everyday life, we are far from being immune to the latest intellectual trends and scholarly fads. We may detest, scorn or even ridicule the newest craze and popular obsession with celebrity entertainers, but our world too has its own pop idols and hip acts. Although, as a rule, our idols tend to be more often dead than alive and our fashions change in a matter of decades or centuries rather than months or weeks, we too have our Beckhams and Byonces as well as our Mammas and Pappas. If this was not the case we would not look at the highly influential Miliband-Poulantzas debate of the 1970s as something irrelevant if not obscure by today’s standards, or at the structural-functionalist icons of the 1950s and early 1960s, such as Davis and Moore, as outdated relics of the past. As soon as old icons are discarded new ones are embraced: Althusser is passé, Foucault is in; Marcuse is out-of-date, Bourdieu is trendy; Žižek and Butler are chic, Sartre and de Beauvoir are yesterday’s news. As academic celebrities fade so do their concepts: hence instead of ideological state apparatuses and interpolation we prefer discourses, archaeologies and genealogies, instead of class consciousness and repressive desublimation we favour jouissance, différance and so on.