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BOOK REVIEWS David Silverman, Reading Castaneda BOOK REVIEWS David Silverman, Reading Castaneda : A Prologue to the Social Sciences. London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. XI + 113, $ 14.60. Too often sociological work on language, especially literature, tends toward platitude or obfuscation. Silverman's Reading Castaneda does neither. It is almost as important for the incidental points it makes. Not purporting really to be a work about Castaneda's Teachings of Don Juan, it is nevertheless one of the best works on Don Juan. Not presuming to be a work on literary criticism, it nonetheless presents some brilliant suggestions on possible success- ful syntheses for four major generic critical approaches, intentionalism, affectivism, historism, and structuralism or formalism (especially in earlier chapters) . Silverman addresses himself to the basic irony of sociology: "It seeks to study socially organized practices. Equally, it itself is inevitably a socially organized practice. Sociological descriptions, methods and claims to truth are brought off and recognized (like lay descriptions, methods and claims to truth) by and for members of a certain community. Their intelligibility resides in the games that each community plays and in the mode of existence which is ex- pressed in playing these games. Necessarily, then, sociological accounts exemPlify the very practices that they would describe. Near at hand, by every such account, stalks the demon of the infinite regress, threatening to push it (and the accounter) down a slope of unending accounts of accounts" (p.ix). He calls this a happy irony, "because a perceived need to counter this threat has produced some of the most significant work in the sociological tradition" (ibid). He sees Don Juan's "often exasperating opaqueness, expressed in an appar- ent failure to clarify even what seems to be the most simple issue" as the occasion which challenges Castaneda's sense of rationality; and he addresses Casta- neda's "honesty in expressing his own doubts and uncertainties" (p.x). Nor- mally, he says, in problem-solving we are confronted with two difficulties : "First, how do you find out?... Second, what do you find out?" (p. 6). In Cas- taneda's encounters, Don Juan will not tell him unequivocally the nature of the problem (what?), so that Castaneda can solve it (how?) This predicament is the paradigm Silverman addresses. His three central chapters are on the nature of description, method/rule, and truth. He says, "to be 'mad' is to be seen to engage in activities which appear to propose an unknown society," and, "Yet even my very act of seeing things 'differently' from my fellows is only recognized as 'different' through the common language which we share. Once again, this common language is the way in which we live our lives together. So the claim to 'difference' and its iecognition - whether as madman or genius - re-presents the sameness and unity of the mode of existence of our community" (p. 31 ) . Thus, he concludes, "If speech is always a token of our commitment to some possible society, to be a member of a society is to play its language-games. To understand a society is to speak its language and so to 'see', 'look', and 'listen', `properly"' (pp. 31-32). 301 He uses Durkheim, Wittgenstein, Barthes, Heidigger and Borges in the process of determining how one can exist "properly" in one community or another. (His use of Sartre, the most specific reference to literary criticism, seems to fall somewhat flat.) He presents a skilful argument that presents subjective views of objectivity and objective views of subjectivity and neatly pulls the two together. It is a breathtakingly level-headed work, all the more impressive for its saying so much in so little space. If this is comparably as expensive in other countries as in Australia ($A 14.60) there is a great chance that its 113 pages will largely go unread. That would be a pity. Western Australian Institute of Technology, BRIAN D IBBLE Perth, Australia Werner Pelz, The Scope of Understanding in Sociology : Towards a More Radical Reorientation in the Social and Humanistic Sciences. London : Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1974, pp. XI + 283, £ 5.50 net. At an orientation talk for University of Chicago graduate students in history, Karl F. Morrison argued that sociology, along with history and polit- ical science, now belongs among the "unstable subjects," those "in which no basis of knowledge or method is commonly accepted as authentic." Werner Pelz seems alive to such a difficulty and tries to answer some of the questions the social sciences have evaded, among them: "What is a sociological, psycholog- ical, historical or economic fact?" (p. ix). His book has at least two minor drawbacks which must be acknowledged and then forgotten. One is its heavy reliance on German thinkers, largely We- ber and Freud. The other, less important but more irritating, is that at times - despite Pelz's explanatory passages and parenthetical translations - parts of the book sound like snippets of monologue from a comic's routine on the crazy German professor: "It is impossible here to enter into the intricacies of Sein und Seit, of Zunhandensein [sic] and Vorhandensein, Sein and Dasein, between 'to be' and `being(s)', and how the various connotations and associations of 'is' reflect the intimate relations between all of those forms of being and between them and time" (p. 169). By far its greatest excellence resides in its attempt to go back and look again at the original potential of earlier thinkers' ideas which has not subsequently been turned into real import. His treatment of Freud is a good example of this, for Freud is now being subjected to a revisionism which facilely believes that there must be a perfect congruence of genius and morality in a thinker for his ideas to be valid, or fashionably assumes that a disproof of an example is a disproof of a thesis. Pelz isolates some of the literally epoch-making character of Freud's work: "1 His insights have made fluid the frontiers between body and psyche. 2 They have done the same to those between the individual and society. 3 They cut across old distinctions such as those between psychology and epistemology, philosophy and sociology, emotion and reason, religion and enlightenment. 4 They open up new possibilities of inter-subjective explora- tion-which already Freud himself partly closed again. 5 They have demon- strated new patterns of discovery in method and communication" (p. 16). .
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