Before I found an interest in sociology... well, I was a film student. But before I was a film student who later became a sociology student, I was a chemistry student. A depressed, unmotivated and directionless chemistry student. It was a long time in the making, my falling out with chemistry. I continue to find interest in it, but I lacked the ability to forge my own imagination within its tradition. However, I've come to recognize one moment as THE moment where everything fell through.
It was October, so one month and some change into the first term of my second year as an undergrad. I was enrolled in analytical chemistry, a requisite for all chemistry majors. The class was an absolute fucking hassle, but I found some solace in the couple of lab periods we had up to this point. During a lab period, we were getting our first hands-on experience with a piece of equipment called a mass spectrometer. I haven't any idea what this thing does, or even really what it looks like, but what I do remember was the emotion with which our lab instructor's assistant introduced the plastic wizard.
This grad student introduced the piece of plastic with palpable admiration and awe. I remember being drawn to this so much so that I wasn't even listening, just watching. Observing. The lab assistant was presenting the machine as though it were a friend of his. He almost always had his hand resting atop of it, lifting and gently laying it back down. A smile would creep in between his introductory descriptions, as if the two had some kind of inside joke, or, at the very least, a long history of mutually shared experiences. It was as though everything about the machine that the assistant knew was cast aside and become something more familiar and less technical. The assistant when introducing the thing didn't seem to be drawing from a basis of knowledge, but a personal history; a relationship. The machine became more than the sum of its parts for the assistant. The machine was presented as something with endless possibility and the awe this inspired in the assistant was without question.
It was almost immediate that this energy and interest was completely unattainable for me in that situation. I was sure that I would never become as passionate about chemistry as it was being displayed to me by this lab assistant. Soon after I ended up dropping out of the class and switching majors all together.
Now, there's a reason why I'm telling this story. What happened to me yesterday is what I suggest is the 'mass spectrometer test' for any practising sociology student. I don't believe that this story itself is a test of how one stands in relation to sociology, but that, if this seemingly mundane, yet incredibly complex and oddly, I guess, fateful experience were to happen to you and you didn't feel absolutely mesmerized and drawn to it, than you should probably do some reconsidering. Much like the assistant and his mass-spectrometer, I'm sometimes confronted with the most mundane of social interactions and find myself less so wanting to explain than just taking a step back, recognize it and shake my head with a smile of fascination.
How it began was with a liked tweet, specifically a tweet of mine that was liked by someone else. Everything on the twitter linked to this blog is my entire experience with the social media platform. So, when a tweet of mine is liked, I become curious. After figuring out, through a google search, how to find the user who likes ones tweet, I ended up going to their profile. It wasn't long before realizing that more or less everything was in German. I ended up skipping a lot of the user's twitter history until I saw my tweet, along with a link to a, of course, German book by Dirk Baecker, an author I hadn't recalled at the time, but soon came to realize was the author of an article I read a year or so back. Anyways, I did a google search of Dirk Baecker and came across an incredible bibliography that included collaborations with Niklas Luhmann, the theorist of choice for me at this moment.
At this point, I had just recently came out of a discussion at r/sociology. I shared with the board an article idea I have concerned with culture and where it goes in Luhmann's theory of society. I'm happy with the discussion that came out of this, but I couldn't help but feel as though there were a chance that I was completely off. I feel like this probably happens with a lot of researchers. You get a good idea, but it's less an informed idea as it is an inspired one. So, you go to your peers for help and, because of how little information there seems to be on the specific subject, no one really gives you an answer, or a lead on a potential source, as simply ask you more questions. I began to doubt not only whether or not this article was worth it, but whether or not my reading of Luhmann was completely off.
Than, thanks to this twitter user (@ pschwede, I hope they don't mind), who liked a tweet of mine that wasn't concerned with my tweet concerning my article idea, I was introduced (well, reintroduced) to this Dirk Baecker. Lo and behold, Dirk Baecker is not only a collaborator with Luhmann, but has a good amount of work (unfortunately mostly published in German) on the idea of culture in social systems. This was great news for me, mostly because it validated my interest in culture and Luhmann as being one that isn't completely off the mark (my MA advisor told me that I shouldn't be concerned about this kind of stuff anyway, and to follow those inspirations until I can no longer. Obviously, I should have reminded myself of this before coming across Baecker). Than it got even more wild.
After doing some trawling through a journal called Soziale Systeme for which Baecker is an editor, I came across a recent publication, in English, concerned with terrorism. Counter-terrorism and nationalism through a Luhmannian lens is my idea for not only another article, but what I hope to pursue as a Ph.D. student (once I can get into somewhere). At this point, I am floored. Suddenly, after feeling not only as though that I was out at sea, but that the material I was reading concerning these topics were beginning to show some redundancy, there is a new trove of reading for me to get through.
But what really came to fascinate me after I was able to remove myself from it all, was how it all came together. A liked tweet about a blog post on Luhmann, theory and passion. A mention of Dirk Baecker by a user who, I'm assuming, is over in Germany. A database query in a seemingly bottomless knowledge base of information shared by people across the globe. A sense of comfort in finding another with similar concerns as me in a theoretical model that is still nascent in its application (at least when compared to others). I stand in front of these connections not in hopes of explaining it all, but in awe. All of this happened in what seemed an instant, and yet, when I step back and look at it, it seems almost impossible.
I feel like I've achieved the feeling that lab assistant displayed towards another similarly mundane series of connections.
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