Ruinous Natures: The Approach of Social Timespace

This Dissertation advances across three areas: first, a theory of social timespace that borrows from critical social theories, post-ontological systems theory, and literary critique; second, it proposes a revisioning of sociological ‘methods’ by an historical reproachment: how sociology is a method among others for the study of society and culture, what are called variously the social sciences, and how sociology also has a method of its own developed in the work of the first sociological institutions in the United States, Germany, and France, that is parallel to linguistic structuralism in the same historical period and has mostly been advanced outside the discipline in narrative and discourse analysis; third, the substantive matter of this dissertation concerns a shift in the sociology of the environment to a political ecology, and critique of the latter. The binding theoretic development, mode of analysis, and the object of a political ecology formed in environmental sociology, are configured under the singular term of socioanalysis. The technique of socioanalysis, its eco-environmental object, and theory implied by the practice of socioanalysis are the guiding proposition of this research.