Introduction
After the parallel demise of modernization theory and its critical opponent, the neo-Marxist theory of late capitalism, which together dominated the sociological analysis of contemporary societies up to the 1970s, no new convincing approach to understanding current socio-political configurations has emerged. Neither neo-modernization theory nor the ‘multiple modernities’ approach, which stand in loose relation to modernization theory and its critics, respectively, have the same coherence and comprehensiveness of their predecessors, and, indeed, they suffer from considerable weaknesses. I have discussed the changing conceptual constellations in the analysis of modernity elsewhere (most recently, Wagner, 2012: Chapters 1 and 2) and will not return to this matter in any detail here.
For current purposes, I want to suggest that one of the fatal problems of the sociology of modernity up to the 1970s was its peculiar division of normative labour. In neo-Hegelian fashion, considering the real as rational, modernization theory assumed that ‘modern societies’ were superior to other societies and that modernization, indeed, was a process leading to normative progress. Critique could only ever be the critique of incomplete, delayed or distorted modernization, never of modernization as such. In contrast, the neo-Marxist analysis of late capitalism – as objectivist as its opponent – claimed critical insight as its specificity, the exclusive capacity namely of unveiling forms of domination and exploitation hidden behind the facade of modernity, unrecognizable for both ordinary people and mainstream scholarship.
If we are currently living in a new constellation of modernity, a theme taken up by the editors in their introduction to this volume, one of its features is certainly the repositioning of critique. Rather than either making reality immune from critique or monopolizing critique for the critical analyst, the emphasis is now placed on the critical capacity of human beings themselves, aiming to identify the appropriate action as well as the adequacy, or not, of institutional arrangements in the light of a plurality of registers of justification (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991; Boltanski, 2009). In historical perspective, social change is no longer seen as steered by an actorless and predetermined dynamics of progress, either smooth or conflictive, but crucially as driven by the critical engagement of actors with their situations and with the institutional arrangements that they inhabit, emphasizing the contingency of outcomes (Wagner, 1994: Chapter 4; 2008: Chapter 13; 2012: Chapter 4; Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999).
World-Making or Worldlessness: The Stakes of Global Modernity
This repositioning of critique is certainly related to the social transformations of the recent past, an issue that I shall try to address towards the end of this chapter, as a point of arrival. To get to this point, however, I want to first suggest that the new understanding of critique is also connected – maybe somewhat obliquely – to a rethinking of modernity that has been underway since the 1970s. Until that moment, modernity was analysed as an institutional arrangement, characterized in different ways but always including bureaucratic politico-administrative institutions, a capitalist market economy and other institutions that were seen either as having functional specificity or as being hierarchically determined by the most basic institutions. More recently, however, the emphasis has been placed on the ways in which human beings conceive of their living together, on the institution of society through imaginary significations (Castoriadis, 1987 [1975]). The specificity of the imaginary signification of modernity, in Castoriadis's language, was the centrality of the human commitment to autonomy (Castoriadis, 1990).
In its most straightforward sense, the commitment to autonomy means that human beings do not rely on external resources to determine their ways of life, but (have to) find themselves the solutions to the problems they are facing. The absence of external resources entails that every solution that has been arrived at in a given moment – the instituted moment, in Castoriadis's terminology – can be contested, and a process of re-instituting can set in. It is in this sense, in general, that modernity is closely related to contestation and critique. If there is no external measure, no institutionalization of modernity is ever entirely stable, in contrast to the view held by modernization theory. The commitment to autonomy associated with the power of political imagination, furthermore, entails that the target and direction of critique are not determined either, in contrast to Marxist thinking.
For Castoriadis, human beings collectively institute ‘world’ by creating significations. Any such instituted world is always ‘social’ because it is a creation of society, of ‘instituting society’. And societies create ‘world’ in the sense that ‘it can and must enclose everything […]. The institution of the common world is necessarily the institution of that which is and is not’ (Castoriadis, 1987 [1975]: 370–1; see Karagiannis and Wagner, 2012a). Castoriadis's use of the term ‘world’ is similar to that of Hannah Arendt (1958), who explicitly added a distinction between ‘world’ and ‘earth’. Earth is the planet on which we live, the ground of our existence; world, in turn, is the social space that human beings create between each other. There is only one earth, but the political imagination of human beings can institute different worlds – worlds that can coexist with each other, and worlds that can be the imaginary point of reference for action (Karagiannis and Wagner, 2007, 2012b).
Significantly, Arendt's reflections on ‘world’ were driven by her concern about the loss of the human capacity for world-making. The modern commitment to autonomy certainly involves mastery: to give oneself one's own law (auto-nomos) means both freedom and giving laws, creating an orderly world. However, giving laws does not necessarily entail considering others, nature or oneself as an object to be used for a purpose – instrumentality is a possible form of mastery, understanding another. From the moment onwards, symbolically, that human beings can look at the earth from the outside, due to space travel, Arendt thought, the planet might cease to be recognized as the ground for existence and become an object to be instrumentally treated. This instrumental attitude is mirrored in the ways human action is considered in the behaviorist and quantitative social sciences. When human action merely follows signals and society is nothing but the statistical aggregate of many of those actions, then world disappears and ‘worldlessness’ reigns.
These reflections – both Castoriadis's and Arendt's – on world, world-making and worldlessness gain particular significance in a time of the so-called globalization. This latter term suggests that something becomes global, in the sense of extending across the round planet earth, that had not been so before, but most of the debate fails to specify what this is that becomes global. It can neither be the globe itself, which has always been global, nor our human lives, which have always been and will always be local. Regardless of all communication and transportation technology that is and may become available, if I am at one place I cannot be at another. If it has any sense at all, the term globalization, thus, must refer to the extension of relations between human beings, the possibility of effectively connecting to others over long, global distances in very short time – be it stock brokers, Chinese traders or activists of contestation.
This is a reasonable view, but it begs further questions, at least two. First, such relations do not exist as such, as ‘social facts’, they need to be created and sustained through the action of living human beings (following what I take to be one outcome of the agency-structure debate of the 1970s and 1980s). Thus, ‘globality’ – if this is a term that describes the consequence of ‘globalization’ – is never just there, or at best latently so. It needs to be manifested through persistent action. Second, if such globality is seen as the unintended outcome of numerous human actions, then the process leading towards it, called globalization, is not one of world-making, but one leading to worldlessness.2 These are questions that cannot be answered by further conceptual exploration; they require engagement with the socio-historical transformations that created the current global constellation as well with the forms of interaction across long extensions of social relations that we witness today, sometimes referred to as ‘globalization from below’. This short chapter can at best indicate ways of doing so, but it will try.
