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Society
Published in: Society 5/2019

07-10-2019 | Interview

“I Break in Order to Reveal”. Fran Morente Interview with Gary T. Marx

Authors: Fran Morente, Gary T. Marx

Published in: Society | Issue 5/2019

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Excerpt

She [jury member] was extremely liberal. She was a sociologist, and I don't like sociologists. They try to reason things out too much.
--Florida Prosecutor (after losing case involving the undercover purchase of a 2 Live Crew album, New York Times, Oct. 22, 1999
…
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Footnotes
1
For additional biographical information see http://​web.​mit.​edu/​gtmarx/​www/​bio.​html and articles in section “7. Academic Career and Some Social Research Issues” at www.​garymarx.​net.
 
2
Marx (2012) deals with personal and professional encounters with surveillance in http://​web.​mit.​edu/​gtmarx/​www/​survhandbook.​html. In it, this is discussed more fully with additional biographical details and references on coming of age in the late 1950s and 1960s. A brief excerpt:
“A mélange of values, preferences, orientations and beliefs formed the psychic backdrop which ordered a career and defined a sense of self and personal style. These include: — appreciation of the intellect, rationality, empiricism, irony, paradox, thresholds and curvilinear truths, the concrete as against the grand abstraction (but appreciation of mid-range ideal types); authenticity/honesty; surprise; humor; nature reverence and transcendence; resilience; individualism and a naive belief in an almost pre-social self-able to endure the slings and spears of destiny and the pressures of the crowd; fascination with the outsider; courage; challenges, relentless perseverance and struggle against the odds; performance; awe, enthusiasm, cool and hot, precision and passion; testing but respecting legitimate limits; and asking “says who and why and based on what empirical, moral, legal and measurement standards and serving what interests?”, “are things what they appear to be?” and “who or what is behind the mask and screen?”; initial skepticism and tentativeness, but with awareness of the need to believe and act; and the struggle for justice and being a person of integrity”.
The cultural backdrop for Marx’s formative years include: “Ayn Rand and her sophomoric characters in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Sinatra’s swingingly having it his way, Hemmingway, Chandler, Hammet, Bogart, Brando, Newman, Dean, Traven, Kipling, Sartre, Camus, Kerouac, the lyrics of Cole Porter and the Gershwins, the singing of Chet Baker, June Christie, Chris Connor, Anita O’Day, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, The Beach Boys and Mose Allison, Southern California in the 30s, 40s and 50s, the hazy, lazy days of summer, the beach and desert, palm trees and stucco homes with red tile roofs, on a clear day you can see Catalina, convertibles and girls, girls, girls. In the background Sandburg, Mencken, Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Conrad, Kafka, Orwell, Huxley and Europe. And closer to home Groucho Marx, Jack Webb, James Dean, Natalie Wood, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy and Erving Goffman”. (Marx 2009) http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/hitherthither.html
 
3
Regarding such models Marx (2002) wrote: “I took elements I most admired: intense dedication to scholarship and hard work, engagement with the great social issues of the day, clear writing for multiple audiences with both theoretical and applied concerns, interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives, persistence, independence, risk taking and a certain cultivated marginality, reflexivity and self-criticism, and honesty, helpfulness and civility with students and colleagues. I avoided elements I least admired: a one-dimensional life in which work overwhelmed everything else, one-trick theory or method ponies, arcane arguments and misplaced certainty. I sought to establish a recognizable and effective writing and research style and a set of questions around social control and technology that felt right and nourished my soul. I was drawn to issues out of passion, while seeking to apply the most rigorous standards of scholarship and writing, often with a mercurial eye to complexity, interdependence and tradeoffs..... This was informed by a noir sensitivity or realism, but without noir’s degree of cynicism or attitudes towards gender and violence.” His 1997 article, “Of Methods and Manners for Aspiring Sociologists: 37 Moral Imperatives” offers advice for beginning social studies scholars.
 
4
Elsewhere Marx (1991) deals with inner and outer dialogues as these relate to marginality and negotiating contradictory pulls.
He notes he is, “… both the intensely driven, hardworking, competitive, ambitious person (like those I encountered early in my career) and the laid-back bohemian surfer of my California days; the intellectual interested in ideas for their own sake and one of the progeny of Karl Marx and C. Wright Mills who wanted to see ideas linked to change (perhaps a committed spectator); the quantitative and systematic sociologist and the journalist seeking to describe in language that people could understand what Robert Park called “the big story”; the scholar and the handyman; the athletic, river-running, beer-drinking, former fraternity man who could admit to still having some Neanderthal-like macho attitudes and feelings and the righteous carrier of a new gender morality; a Jew with German and Eastern European roots and a secular American at home on both coasts (and in northern as well as southern California); the pin-striped suiter who could easily pass among elites and yet announce when the emperor was scantily clad or naked --but always with civility and in the King’s English.”
 
5
A nice example of Marx’ approach to the imbalance in such social research is in Windows (pp.121–124) where, drawing on existing tools, he imagines what the “Soft Interview of the Future” could look like.
 
6
FM: ‘Monkey wrench’ here refers to Albey's (1975) book and a tack in the shoe to stepping on a thumbtack in one’s shoe to thwart a polygraph exam. This is considered in chapter 6 of Windows and an earlier paper ( http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/tack.html ) on neutralizing and counter-neutralizing moves within surveillance.
 
7
Les utopies apparaissent bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: comment éviter leur réalisation définitive?… Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique moins “parfaite” et plus libre.
 
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Metadata
Title
“I Break in Order to Reveal”. Fran Morente Interview with Gary T. Marx
Authors
Fran Morente
Gary T. Marx
Publication date
07-10-2019
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Society / Issue 5/2019
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-019-00396-z

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