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).
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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).