There is no such thing as society – again…
In After the Crisis Alain Touraine’s thinking appears to have reached a place where Marx-oriented pessimism sits all on its own – alone. In the post-crash world of TTIP and ideological ‘austerity’ economics and society appear to be sundered. There has been a fatal polarisation of society, between a very narrow elite and a highly dependent workforce producing massive wealth, for the elite; some are ‘masters’ most are ‘slaves’. Touraine says that the social is derived from the economic, as people struggle to tame and bring into service economic and technological powers. When the economic realm becomes separated from the social this suggests that there is no longer society; when the possibility of effective social action, by identifiable social actors, disappears so dies the social.
Touraine seems to believe that has happened. We are in what he calls calls a post-social situation (or more accurately, but more lumpy, a post-social society). Marx’s progress to the end of economic history towards human history seems to be moving in reverse.
This depends from Touraine’s very particular definition of ‘society’. Sociology’s possibility in this post-social world is also depended from a very particular definition of sociology.
Sociology must search for society and social subjectivities (2007), or evidence of their possibility. We are an evidence gathering enterprise, and our evidence gathering activity must be guided by, “A general analytical principle regarding… actors and their conflicts.” If there is no conflict there is no social life, it seems. Conflict becomes the vital sign of life, the twitching of the body social. Properly constituted actors and their conflicts would be evidenced by …
“a recognised historical context”, the emergence of “organised and visible economic and social actors”
“the possibility of intervention by a central authority, “usually a political one, to resist domination by the richest”
“and to maintain a certain compatibility between opposing interests.”
if we cannot find these “we can no longer refer to a type of society.” p14-15
In his 2007 essay on public sociology in the Clawson et al collection (Touraine, 2007) Touraine further holds that sociology is in the business of looking for hidden, suppressed or occluded subjectivities. Sociology is part of a human rights world; rights that can be defended against power/s (the state, bosses, etc) were created – in and by legal rational structures – by people. These rights to be a recognised subject must be constantly defended/re-constructed, and (public) sociology has a central role in this – by observing, recognising, analysing the powers that continually seek to ‘de-subject’ people, groups, ethnicities, genders, classes etc.
By bringing personal and group subjectivities into view, sociology creates publics (Warner, 2002). This is “…the central subject matter of sociology…the study of all forms of resistance to power-loaded transactions and institutions.” by individuals, groups, ethnicities, classes, genders etc (Touraine, 2007; 71); “public sociology … is the search for actors…” (op cit; 72), and by finding them and describing them, bringing them into view, and into play.
But by 2014 pessimism seems to be winning over optimism, of spirit and will. Globalising processes have metastasized the sundering of the social from the economic (I use d the cancer term pointedly!):
“The phenomenon of the decline of social actors must be seen above all as the consequence of the split between a globalized economy and social conflicts or political actions which are not on a global scale, but which exist on a local or national level. One could even go so far as to claim that once the separation between economic or technological issues and social or political interventions of all types becomes more or less definitive, the notion of a society becomes meaningless, and even damaging.”
Society is that which enables (effective?) social actors to come into being. If social arrangements (institutions etc) do not allow action to come into being, then economic wealth/power rules unchallenged and society is not. I find it interesting that, in a situation as Touraine observes where it is no longer realistic to talk of society, the notion of ‘society’ can become ‘damaging’.
We may be doing no-one any favours by insisting that ‘society ‘ is a meaningful concept, when there is no possibility of social action, or effective oppositional conflict with the economic. In this situation, to insist on doing sociology, being a sociologist itself becomes ‘damaging’. Presumably the damage is done to nascent social actors rather than to those benefiting from economic dominance. It will also be that the standing of sociology/ists is also damaged by the continued existence of a departed god.
But this moot point continues to be mooted – in the past (Mills, Gouldner), and the present (Holland & Stanley, Wallerstein, Savage & Burrows, Beer, Back & Puwar, etc). Burawoy’s interventions on behalf of the addition of a public face and spirit to sociology (2005) is part of this too. In his contribution to this debate Touriane (2007) himself has made a useful, if ultimately pessimistic, point. He describes sociology’s enduring role as that of bringing into to being social subjects, and thus (possibly) social actors. “all types of sociology are part of a general sociology of actors, that is, a public sociology.” Sociology is society.
Touraine sees struggles for human rights as the thing that may bring the economic crashing down to rejoin the social and political. This is because human rights are not socio-economic. The concept stands above that fray, where the dis-connected economic is now separated from “the real economy”. As I have suggested, for Touraine sociology proceeds by bringing into view, and then into being subjectivities. Law, Savage & Ruppert (2011) make a similar point about sociological method. Sociologists are in the business of identifying and bringing to light forgotten or subjugated subjectivities – women, subjugated races, forgotten disabled, erased ethnicities, the demonized working class, etc. Touraine makes the case that “all types of sociology are part of a general sociology of actors, that is, a public sociology” (2007; 73). Sociology is society; we must continue (as if we could not) to do (public) sociology.
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References:
Back, L. & N. Puwar (Eds.), Live methods (pp. 6–17). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Beer, D. (2014). Punk Sociology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot.
Gouldner, A. W. (1975). For sociology: renewal and critique in sociology today. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hollands, R., & Stanley, L. (2009). Rethinking “Current Crisis” Arguments: Gouldner and the Legacy of Critical Sociology. Sociological Research Online, 14(1).
Law, J., Savage, M., & Ruppert, E. (2011). The Double Social Life of Methods. CRESC Working Paper 95.
Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. (1974 reprint). London ; Oxford University Press.
Savage, M., & Burrows, R. (2007). The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology. Sociology, 41(5), 885–899.
Touraine, A. (2014) After the Crisis. Cambridge: Polity.
Touraine, A. (2007). Public Sociology and the End of Society. In D. Clawson, R. Zussman, J. Misra, N. Gerstel, R. Stokes, D. L. Anderton, & M. Burawoy (Eds.), Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-first Century. Los Angeles/London: University of California Press.
Wallerstein, I. (Ed.). (1996). Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Warner, M. (2005). Publics and Counterpublics (new edition). New York; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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