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What Does the “Social” in Social Change Mean?
The Social Field in Flux
Calvino’s story, “A Beautiful March Day,” raises important issues about the stability of social ties, the nature of political acts, and the historicity of interpretation. The view of social life in this story suggests a provisionality and a fragility of the social realm that is not usually in evidence in the standard discourse of social theory, where it seems that social forces have the power to shape just about everything. In these classic accounts, “social” refers to a special arena, force, or medium that guarantees the coordination and meaning of all activity. According to this paradigm, the “social” functions both as the glue and the governor of activity. It is assumed to have an independent existence, with its own properties and powers, while at the same time being the most general feature of all human activity. Although typically distinguished from politics, economics, and culture, which are conceived as subsets of its more general category, “society” and “the social” nonetheless in fact have no readily identifiable defining quality.1
Sometimes this fundament or force is conceived, à la vulgar Marxism, as thoroughly saturating everything, so that nothing escapes its shaping power. Sometimes it appears to be less potent, as in Michel de Certeau’s work on everyday practices, where it permits some individual creativity but only within set limits. In any case, its theorists assume that this force pre-exists the activities it conditions, arguing that it serves as the very ontological ground of all human activity and relationality. They take it as axiomatic that these various activities acquire their meaning and function by means of this “social” force.
Bruno Latour has identified this view of the social as the default position of contemporary sociology which assumes “the existence of a specific sort of phenomenon variously called ‘society’, ‘social order’, ‘social practice’, ‘social dimension’, or ‘social structure’.”2 He elaborates the familiar tenets of this sociology, which have come to seem incontrovertible:
For sociologists, the social “force” governs all sorts of activities from behind the curtain, or it is what guarantees that these activities all have the same context, conditions, and causes.
But what if the social is not a specific domain or force standing behind these activities? What if, instead, we understand the “social” to be merely the provisional product of “re-association and re-assembling,” as Latour puts it?4 Latour likens the assumption of an a priori social domain to the theory of ether in physics, an entity brought in to explain what classical physics could not. Just as the ether theory’s explanatory value dropped to zero once physics adopted the framework of relativity, so “social forces” become superfluous once we recognize that individual activity is always working – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – to regenerate the space in which the individual can be meaningful. The social isn’t always already there, holding individuals together. Rather, individuals act in order to “re-assemble” the social.
Even the most “objective” and “fact-based” parts of our world are functions of this activity, as Latour details in his work on the production of science. He starts his inquiry into the assemblage of the social with what he calls the “simplest of all possible situations: when someone utters a statement, what happens when the others believe it or don’t believe it.”5 He summarizes the various responses and rhetorical strategies which can result (such as misquotation, enlistment, neglect, embedding) – and the many venues in which these responses may appear (such as scientific journals, classrooms, laboratories, dinner tables) – to demonstrate the production of facts in science:
Remember, Latour is describing the process by which scientific discoveries are made and validated. As he sums it up: “the fate of what we say and make is in later users’ hands …[and] the construction of facts and machines is a collective process.”7 The commonplace and obvious elements of our world emerge only on account of the possibility of their being (mis)construed, taken up, or appropriated by others. His point is not that facts are fictions but rather that the most provable, useful, true fact only comes to be accepted as such through negotiations, appropriations, debates, and so forth. All facts are liable to appropriation, contextual embedding, and deployment in the service of some agenda.
This is not to say, however, that the social is reducible to culture or discourse. Making the move to replace “social” with “cultural” or “discursive” does nothing to establish more specificity or to create greater theoretical reach. In this book, I will be following the suggestion of Keith Baker and William Sewell that we use “social” to refer to “the totality of the ‘interdependence of human relations.’”8 These relations are always both fluctuating and creating flux, stabilized and stabilizing. But what is most important about them, what makes them susceptible to analysis, is that they are mediated. As Sewell puts it, “the various mediations that place people into ‘social’ relations with one another …may not make them companions but …[do] make them interdependent members of each other’s worlds.”9 So, rather than taking as given the various units of society and then studying them as autonomous, already constituted entities (individuals, institutions, nations, etc.) which can have some impact on one another or come into conflict with one another, we must consider the ways in which specific modes of relationality make different properties of the entities in question signify differently. What is more, we must consider how, at a given time or over time, these various signifying modes articulate differentially with one another.
As we shall see, the impossibility of immediate (immanent) communication will be decisive for the generation and sustenance of social subjects in a social field. It is particularly important to keep in mind that signification – the process of bestowing meaning – does not function by way of the intentions of speakers or authors but rather by way of the appropriation of the signifier by the auditor or reader. That is, in the hypothesis we are pursuing about the nature of the social field, any act of signification not only articulates differentially to other acts embedded in different modes of relationality and signification but also involves aleatory processes, such as unpredictably linked affects, unconscious motives, or unintended consequences, which may or may not be knowable by individuals or even cognizable at the level of the individual.10
Let’s return to Calvino for a moment to see how these reflections have a bearing. Calvino describes a social world in danger of disintegrating: this is where he parts company with the larger traditions of social thought. When the narrator realizes he cannot control the interpretation of his act, he imagines that he risks becoming completely meaningless. He feels alone in an empty world, infinitely distanced from others. To him, the inability to guarantee how others will interpret him spells the dissolution of the social itself. The story registers this fragility. Yet the narrator’s fear that his vulnerability to interpretation renders him meaningless and destroys his social ties is based on a mistake about the effects of interpretative unpredictability. The fact that he cannot know his meaning for others does not doom him to meaninglessness, nor does it radically disconnect him from others. It simply speaks to the reality of social life. We are always in the process of trying to re-assemble what is threatening to disperse.
Calvino’s story allows us to glimpse a social world that has to be put together from “connections” that are neither secure nor produced by some special, a priori force. This world has to be generated anew continually by countless acts of interpretation, innumerable efforts to make oneself signify in a particular way, even though one can never know for sure if one has succeeded, within constraints or modalities of relationality that operate at a level beyond the cognizance of individuals. The “social” itself refers to hard-won yet ever-precarious outcomes of activities undertaken precisely because signification is not a function of intentionality but of appropriability. Put another way: if the possibility of appropriation did not exist, there would be no social realm.11
Jean-Luc Nancy has commented extensively on the mistake that theorists of social change make when they distinguish the “social” world of such interpretations and assemblages from a world of human interaction assumed to be comprised of ever-present, perduring, and predictable links between people (“community”). Communality, in their view, is prior to all signification, impervious to destabilizing interpretations, and grounded in ontological realities that lie beneath, behind, or beyond the activities of humankind. Communality, it is imagined, guarantees communication as communion. Such critics lament the substitution of the observed fluctuation of “social” ties for the (fantasized) more stable, authentic, organic, or immanent ties of a “lost” community:
When theorists nostalgic for an assumed bygone immanence argue that society is a falling off from community, a falling off generated by “the dissociating association of forces, needs, and signs,” they say more than they know.13 From a Latourian perspective, such dissociating of association is crucial for the establishment of any communication/community whatsoever. The world of social ties depends not upon perfect – immanent – communion but rather upon the imperfections of communication, a function of the excess that attends signification. For no communication is possible without signs, and signs by definition work by being appropriated, that is, taken up in new contexts to produce new meanings. The excess necessary for signification enables associations by dissolving previous associations: without such dissolution, the link between signifier and signified would ossify and signification would be impossible. So, if we understand “society” to refer to a realm of contested needs and contested meanings, if it is formed of fluctuating bonds and imperfect communication, then society is not the impediment to community, it is the only possible basis of community. As Nancy puts it: “community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us …in the wake of society.”14
Here and throughout the rest of the book, we will be working towards an understanding of the “social” as a term describing the “un-working” and “re-assembling” that Nancy and Latour describe as the signature of the social realm. Coming to grips with the fact that the “social” does not refer to some special capacity or force or medium means accepting that it neither enables the fullness of community nor registers an unfortunate loss of that ideal. Only in this sense is the social the pre-condition of all political, economic, ethical activity: each of those spheres offers different ways of grappling with the reality of excess, that is, with the impossibility of immanent communion and with the appropriability of the signifier.
At the same time, this picture of a fluctuating social field is incomplete insofar as it does not clarify how power is generated, accumulated, channeled, directed, or exercised. It does not explain the mechanisms by which individuals become groups, how and why institutions, ideas, and arrangements perdure, or how apparently autonomous activities may be linked. If we are interested in social change, all of these issues must be addressed from within the framework of this alternative picture of the social field. Latour’s empirical project of describing these forms and the activities which sustain them may not provide all the answers to the question of the nature of the social, but it serves as a useful corrective to the dominant paradigms of social thought in contemporary academic discourse. At the level of the empirical, however, one must make choices about which variables to consider and how to rank their importance, a task that requires some model of the causal relations operating in the social field. What is more, an empirical focus on particular pathways and networks that develop, as Latour describes, to knit together actors at specifiable historical junctures may easily leave out of account macro-and micro-processes that transpire at different scales to those observable within the empirical study. So, empirical work such as Latour’s can tell us what happened – who and what was woven together in the trajectory of the “fact” – but may have no way to account for why it happened. The value of conceptualizing the social realm in terms of fluctuating social bonds and dissociating significations may dwindle unless we also articulate the means for finding and differentiating forms of mediation with varying degrees of staying power (such as relatively perduring institutions) and multiple modalities of relationality (such as instantiations of power relations). Talking about social change requires a conception of the social that either explains phenomena in terms of underlying causes or establishes why it is impossible to do so.
This need to find the cause of social phenomena drives the return to the assumption that the social realm is composed by a priori forces. Given that this assumption is flawed, each effort to theorize the cause of the social will necessarily reveal its own limitations. If our approach is guided by the insights furnished by Latour, Sewell, and Nancy, we will be able to identify these limitations in a way that leads us to a new understanding of the properties of the social field and its causes. It will be useful, therefore, to take a quick look at the problems that the notion of the social as a special domain or governing force creates for theories of social change before tackling the difficult issue of social causality based on other premises.
Some of the problems that result from the assumption of a special “social” force are well known. For example, when we seek to explain individuals by their social conditioning we assume that this conditioning stems from forces that stand “behind” the individuals, inculcating them with just those properties which facilitate their alignment with each other and positioning them within a social medium that transmits whatever is necessary to coordinate them. This presumed force of inculcation, transmission, and coordination appears to give the individuals within it access to something fundamental about the way the society works: as a consequence, or so it is said, these conditioned individuals are able to assess problems at their source and address them.
But the explanatory advantage conferred by recourse to this metaphor of a common medium (conditioning forces, disciplinary regimes, or discursive channeling) is immediately lost when we realize that conditioned individuals are also those least likely ...
