'tendency on the part of the community to consider the Negroes as comprising one practically homogeneous mass,' is embraced in Souls. The homogenizing of African Americans is transformed into an enabling device; African Americans become a self-identified and therefore empowered collectivity. Souls explodes some other powerful sociological myths as well. The trajectory of Philadelphia is from South to North, as the book charts the making of a modern African American populace, a narrative of liberal progress that pictures the race's 'fittest' rising to the top. Souls, however, moves from North to South, thus implying that African Americans must come to terms with the roots of their experience in America, by returning to 'the scene of the crime,' as it were. The static evolutionary reading of African American history in Philadelphia-history in the sociological vein as a grand narrative that explains the present via the past-is -208- replaced by history as bricolage. Souls is annales history: an amalgam of tales, songs, mythologies, critiques, autobiography, elegy. Its concern is not progress measured in terms of the dominant society but the shaping of collective identity.
Souls seems in every way opposed to its social scientific predecessor, yet in fact Du Bois never strays very far from an implicitly sociological agenda. His achievement is that he manages at once to criticize and to revitalize the new science of society. Souls is filled with critical references to 'the cold statistician,' the 'sociologists who gleefully count' African American 'bastards' and 'prostitutes,' 'the car window sociologist. . who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unravelling the snarl of centuries.'
Du Bois's answer to these limitations is the aestheticizing of sociology. The sociological method of typecasting becomes exploratory, experimental. Far from merely typologizing, Souls elaborates a theory of types. For what is the color line but the penultimate type or boundary demarcating the limit of African American possibility? The book is a sustained effort to extend the boundary around the African American self. Du Bois devotes each chapter to elaborating a different unrealized potential: the African American as failed transmitter of a generational legacy (chapter 11, on the death of his son); the African American as failed educator (chapter 4, on his teaching career in Tennessee); the African American as failed spiritual leader (chapter 12, on Alexander Crummel). These promising but unfulfilled types are played off against the degraded types of the dominant society. The book is thus a dialectic of typological categories, and Du Bois's major insight is that the African American self internalizes them all. Thus the 'warring' within that derives from this 'doubleconsciousness': 'looking at one's self through the eyes of others. . measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.' The African American self is alienated from both versions of self: the type of the white society, and the inner soul with which it conflicts.
But as Du Bois suggests, this condition of double-consciousness is also basic to the practice of sociology. As a discipline that enacts the dilemma of being subject and object simultaneously, whose practitioners are inevitably the objects of their own investigations, sociol-209- ogy epitomizes the circumstances of the African American soul. Because contemporary sociology failed to come to terms with this paradox, it could not realize the promise it held out to Du Bois.
By conceptualizing a different kind of social science founded upon a critique of capitalism, as well as an awareness of its own perilous objectivity, Du Bois pointed the way toward a critical social theory that would not be fully articulated until the rise of the Frankfurt School thirty years later. This perspective, formulated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, among others, rejected orthodox social science, the American version in particular, as an apology for capitalism. They adopted in its place a theory based on the method of negative dialectics, critical of all reigning forms of analysis, and directed toward fundamental social change. For W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as for Adorno and Horkheimer, a social theory without this commitment was unworthy of the name.
Du Bois's ventures in literature after Souls had limited results. His first full-fledged novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), has all the trappings of socialist realism, with its cast of dark and light characters: the idealized African American hero and heroine, Bles and Zora; the weak and selfish whites, most of them monstrous vessels of capitalist greed; the weak African Americans who succumb to the evil temptations of capitalism. It is telling that however ambivalent Du Bois was toward the sociology of his day, he never equaled the powerful blend of literary and sociological imaginings he achieved in Souls.
'Mostly no one knowing me can like it that I love it that everyone is a kind of men and women, that always I am looking and comparing and classifying them, always I am seeing their repeating.' So writes Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans, expressing her era's simultaneous attraction and resistance to social categorization. Her own most obvious response is parody. The lists of human types that pervade Stein's 'great American novel' are often absurd. One such list runs to: 'being one liking swimming, being one tired of ocean bathing before they have really been in more than twice in a season.' But despite such parodic attitudes, she was deeply committed to the enterprise of knowing human kinds. How did Stein come to be a maker of lists? What brought her to desire a unified knowl-210- edge of America? A clue to these questions lies in her pursuit of social science.
Stein's advanced education began at Harvard in the 1890s, where she studied mainly psychology, and ended at Johns Hopkins at the turn of the century, where she studied brain anatomy. Both of these educational experiences suggest provocative sources for The Making of Americans. Stein's Harvard research (which was published as 'Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention,' in The Psychological Review, 1898) was based on experiments with Harvard and Radcliffe students. It addressed the question of how automatic behavior can be cultivated in human subjects; how can subjects be made to internalize suggested actions as their own habits? Among the issues that Stein's experiment takes up is the question of gender difference: is there a consistent opposition between male and female responses to suggested action? Another is the problem of change: once learned, how can subjects be induced to abandon old actions and adopt new ones? Stein's research produced its own catalog of human types. Type I, 'girls. . found naturally in literature courses' and men bound for law, is 'nervous, high-strung, very imaginative.' Type II, 'blond and pale,' is 'distinctly phlegmatic,' a general 'New England' type that is repressed and selfconscious. The parallels between Stein's research and the ideas of William James are revealing. James describes habit, in the famous essay of that name, as 'the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. . It also prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.' With this observation, James links the intricate psychology of habit to larger mechanisms of organization and control. And this points to the larger arena Stein will create for her psychological studies in The Making of Americans.
At Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she went on the advice of James, Stein sought even more objective knowledge of human minds. Garland Allen, a historian of biology, has characterized the dominant tradition at Hopkins during this period as 'descriptive naturalist.' This involved an emphasis on morphology — the study and classification of form — which assumed the underlying unity of diverse organisms. Among the techniques taught was the construction of -211- family trees and phylogenies, which identified a single common ancestor as the progenitor of modern lines.
Stein's developing interest in typology culminated in her preoccupation with the work of Otto Weininger, the German psychologist, whose book Sex and Character (1906) inspired her during her writing of The Making of Americans. A precursor to Nazi ideology, Weininger's book offered a system of characterology, whose main purpose seemed to be the identification of human types that threatened the deterioration of nations. However rigidly schematic Weininger's ideas, he was willing to accept ambiguity, by admitting that some despised characteristics were present to varying degrees in all human types. Significantly, in light of Stein's Jewish-lesbian identity, the two main sources of degeneracy in Weininger's system were Jews and women. The extent of feminine possibility for Weininger was prostitute, mother, servant, saint, and masculine woman. Jews occupied a unique position in Weininger's typology since Jewish traits were confined to the race alone. They therefore provide an opportunity for the in-depth study of degeneracy.
What is so obviously startling about Stein's adoption of Weininger's ideas, which she claimed expressed 'her own thoughts exactly,' was that it required the complete suppression of her own identity. Indeed, she seems to have identified so fully with Weininger that she sometimes referred to his system as her own. As she wrote in her notebook, 'That thing of mine of sex and mind and character all coming together seems to work absolutely.' Stein's engagement with Weininger points to an important feature of The Making of Americans.
