Karin Knorr Cetina. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Editor: George Ritzer, Volume 2, Sage Reference, 2005.
Postsocial analysis attempts to develop an understanding of current changes of social forms and of sociality in general. Broadly speaking, what postsocial theory aspires to is the analysis and discussion of an environment in which the social principles and structures we have known hitherto are emptying out and other elements and relationships are taking their place. While it may be correct that human beings are by nature social animals, forms of sociality are nonetheless changing, and the change may be pronounced in periods of cumulative historical transitions. The term postsocial shines an analytic light on contemporary transitions that challenge core concepts of human interaction and solidarity and that point beyond a period of high social formation to one of more limited sociality and alternative forms of binding self and other. Postsocial developments are sustained by changes in the structure of the self; these changes are captured by models that break with Meadian and Freudian ideas proposed during a period of high sociality and that emphasize the autoaffective side of the self and its nonsocial engagements. The notion postsocial refers to the massive expansion of object worlds in the social world and to the rise of work and leisure environments that promote and demand relations with objects. A postsocial environment is one where objects displace human beings as relationship partners and embedding environments, or where they increasingly mediate human relationships, making the latter dependent upon the former. Postsociality also implies a shift in the collective imagination from social and political preoccupations to other topics. We no longer seek salvation in society but elsewhere—in the biological sciences, in financial futures, in information knowledge. What some of these areas promise can be captured by the idea of life rather than by that of society and by the notion of enhancement rather than that of salvation.
Sociality As a Historical Phenomenon: Expansions and Retractions
The current retraction of social principles and structures is not the first in recent history. One of the great legacies of classical social thought is the idea that the development of modern society involved the collapse of community and the loss of social tradition. Yet what followed was not an asocial or nonsocial environment but a period of high social formation—a period when the welfare state was established, societies became societies of (complex) organizations and structures, and social thinking took off in ways that stimulated institutional changes.
The first region of expansion of social principles during the course of the nineteenth century and throughout the early decades of the twentieth was that of social policies, and this was linked to the rise of the nation-state. Social policies as we know them today derive from what Wittrock and Wagner (1996) call the “nationalization of social responsibility” (p. 98ff.)—the formulation of social rights alongside individual rights and the positing of the state as the “natural container” and provider of labor regulations, pension and welfare provisions, unemployment insurance, and public education. A second region of expansion, connected to the first, was that of social thinking and social imagination. A corollary of the institutionalization of social policies were new concepts of the forces that determine human destiny: They were now more likely to be thought of as impersonal, social forces. Rather than assuming the automatic adaptation of individuals to changing environmental conditions, these ideas focused on the prevailing imbalances and their social causes: the social causes of occupational accidents would be an example (Rabinbach 1996). Sociology played an important role in bringing about the shift in mentality through which individuals came to be seen as the bearers of the individual costs of collective structures. When Mills (1959) argued for a “sociological imagination,” he tried to capture in one concept the phenomenon of societal processes that individuals do not recognize but that affect and change their lives. A third area of expansion of social principles and structures was that of social organization. The rise of the nation-state implied the rise of bureaucratic institutions. The growth of industrial production brought with it the emergence of the factory and the modern corporation. The advent of universal health care became embodied in the clinic, and modern science in the research university and laboratory. Industrial, nation-state societies are unthinkable without complex modern organizations. Complex organizations are localized social arrangements serving to manage work and services in collective frameworks by social structural means. A fourth area of expansion was that of social structure. The class differentiation of modern society is itself an outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution and its political consequences as well as of processes of social and political measurement and categorization.
It is central to our experience today, however, that these expansions of social principles and of socially constituted environments have come to a halt. In many European countries and in the United States, the welfare state, with all its manifestations of social policy and collective insurance against individual disaster, is in the process of being “over-hauled”; some would say “dismantled.” Thatcherism in Britain and “neo-liberalism” in general could be viewed as a partially successful attempt to contest some of the social rights acquired in the previous half century (Urry 2000:165). Social explanations and social thinking run up against, among other things, biological and economic accounts of human behavior against which they have to prove their worth. The mobilization of a social imagination was an attempt to identify the collective basis for individuals’ predicaments and dispositions to react. This collective basis is now more likely to be found in the similarity of the genetic makeup of socially unrelated members of the population. Social structures and social relations also seem to be losing some of their hold. The individual of industrialized society had already been portrayed as a “homeless mind”—an uprooted, confused, and inchoate self, whose predicaments contributed to the expansion of social principles discussed before (Berger, Berger, and Kellner 1974). But well into the twentieth century, this self appeared to be sustained by traditional family relations. What analysts see dis-integrating today are these “primordial social relations” (Lasch 1978). When complex organizations are dissolved into networks, some of the layered structural depth of the hierarchically organized social systems that organizations used to represent gets lost on the way. The global architecture of financial markets, for example, is enabled and supported by complex technological rather than social organizational systems. The expansion of societies to global forms does not imply further expansions of social complexity. The installation of a “world-society” would seem to be feasible with the help of individuals and electronically mediated interaction structures, and perhaps becomes plausible only in relation to such structures. The concept of society itself, geared as it is to the nation-state and to horizontal concepts of social structure, loses much of its plausibility in an era of globalization.
Postsocial transitions of this kind imply that social forms as we knew them have become flattened, narrowed, and thinned out; they imply that the social is retracting, in all of the senses just described. What sociologists have posited, accordingly, is a further boost to individualization (e.g., Beck 1992). This interpretation is not wrong in pinpointing subject-centered rather than collective structures as being on the rise in contemporary cultures. But it is nonetheless one-sided in looking at current transitions only from the perspective of a loss of human relationships and received forms of the social. What postsocial theory offers in the stead of the scenario of simple “desocialization” is the analysis of alternative forms of binding self and other, changes in the structure of the self that accommodates these forms, and forms of social imagination that subordinate sociality to new promises and concerns.
Social and Postsocial Selves: From the Inner Censor to Structures of Wanting
The core model of the “social” self of the period of high sociality is the idea of the self as composed of an ego and an internalized “other” that represents society and functions as an inner censor. In Mead, the inner censor is called the “generalized other”; it is closely coupled to the intrasubjective conformist past of the self and the self as an object, which Mead calls the “me.” At the opposite end of this side of the self lies the “I,” the spontaneous, unpredictable, disobeying self. The “I” has the power to construct reality cognitively, and by redefining situations, can break away from the “me” and the norms of society. The “me” and the “generalized other” can be likened to Peirce’s “you”; Peirce held the “you” to be a critical self that represented society and to which all thought was addressed. These notions are also roughly similar to Freud’s “super-ego,” the rule-carrier that functions as a regulative principle in an internal dynamic of morality and deviance. In Mead’s theory, the self first originates from such a dynamic. It arises from role taking, from taking the perspective of the other first interpersonally, when engaged with a close caretaker, and then also intrapersonally.
This “I-you-me” system of the social self and its most sophisticated version (Wiley 1994:34ff., 44ff.) can be contrasted with a second model that understands the self not as a relation between the individual and society but as a structure of wantings in relation to continually renewed lacks. This notion of the self can be derived from Lacan, among others (Wiley 1994:33). Like Freud, Lacan is concerned with what “drives” the subject, but he derives this wanting not as Freud did from an instinctual impulse whose ultimate goal is a reduction in bodily tension but rather from the mirror stage of a young child’s development. In this phase, the child becomes impressed with the wholeness of his or her image in the mirror and with the appearance of definite boundaries and control—while realizing that she or he is none of these things in actual experience. Wanting or desire is born in envy of the perfection of the image in the mirror (or of the mirroring response of the parents); the lack is permanent, since there will always be a distance between the subjective experience of a lack in our existence and the image in the mirror, or the apparent wholeness of others (Alford 1991:36ff.).
The two conceptions may seem similar in that both emphasize the discrepancy between the “I” and a model, but they are in fact quite different. From the idea of the self as composed of an inner censor results an ego subjected to feelings of guilt, experiencing rebellion, and attempting to “live up to” social expectations. In contrast, the self as a permanently reiterated lack gives rise to the desire, also permanent, to eliminate the lack. The former model would seem to result in actions that are perpetually curtailed as an ego attempts to adapt them to internalized norms; it will also result in deviant actions that transgress boundaries of which the actor is well aware. The second model yields actions spurred on by the unfulfillability of lacks, or by new wants opening up simultaneously with the (partial) fulfillment of old ones. In the first model, the actors’ free fall from society is continually broken as they catch themselves (or are caught by others) in compliance with social rules and traditions, and return to their ontological security. In the second case, no society of this sort is in place any longer to provide ontological security. The “you” is the idealized self in the mirror or the perfect other. The actor would seem to be freed from guilt complexes; but he or she is like a vagrant perpetually searching, stringing together objects of satisfaction and dismantling the structure again as he or she moves on to other goals.
This search system is autoaffective and self-sustaining, indeed self-energizing; as a structure of wanting, the self is extended through continually renewed and discovered lacks that renew its motivation and affectivity. The Meadian “I-you-me” system neglects the autoaffective side of the self, which is not its self-love but its willingness to become engaged in circuits that renew wanting. What we need to retain from the Lacanian “mirror” stage is the idea of a self that is susceptible to such autoaffective pursuits. We need not find the mirror stage itself plausible as a description of what actually happens to the infant when it first recognizes itself in a mirror. In contemporary society, the mirror is exteriorized in a media, image, and knowledge culture; it is no longer either a physical mirror or the caretakers’ activity of “back-projecting,” their activity of “reflecting,” like a mirror, the child’s being in relation to parental idealizations and expectations. Instead, the mirror response is articulated by the media and professional image industries that project images and stage “wholeness.” The mirror is also present in the “cathedrals of consumption” Ritzer (1999:8ff.) analyzes in the shopping malls and other places that offer enchanted displays of possible selves.
In a media, image, and knowledge culture that continually reactivates a lack-wanting dynamic, the reflexive (mirror image) self may describe contemporary selves better than the “I-you-me” system and may in fact be in the process of displacing and reshaping it. In this sense, a media, image, and knowledge culture is also a postsocial culture that stimulates and sustains postsocial selves. The seeming fit of the lack-wanting model with contemporary life may also result from the problems of primordial social relations, which no longer offer the kind of normative guidance and tight structures of control that are needed to give rise to an inner censor and a dynamic of guilt and rebellion, compliance, and transgression. The liberalization of partnership and family life that Lasch (1978) and Beck (1992), among others, describe, the detraditionalization of education and the individualization of choice, all conspire to prevent a strong “I-you-me” dynamic founded on the internalization of a censor. Mead, Freud, and others who contributed to the “I-you-me” model were not only proposing abstract theories of the self. Their conceptions were also rooted in existence, in particular patterns of attachment and socialization that are no longer dominant in contemporary society.
Binding Work and the Binding of Self and Other
If a media and image culture plays into postsocial trends, so does a knowledge culture. The self that is caught in a lack-wanting dynamic can easily be tied to the “wanting” objects of knowledge-oriented environments. This extends questions of postsocial development to contexts of work and brings up the issue of nonhuman objects.
A knowledge society is characterized by professional work that can hardly be seen as corresponding to the Marxian notion of alienated labor. Industrial (“instrumental,” “alienated”) labor has been characterized in terms of its machinelike functionality where the action of the worker becomes an intrinsic part of a machine process, its lack of uniqueness or general reproducibility by anyone with comparable training, its measurability, the divisibility of the work into components that seem freely exchangeable, and the separation of means from ends such that the work is abstract and divorced from the product (Berger et al. 1974:24, 39). The logic of the production process may also dictate the management of social relations and cause the identity of others at the workplace as well as one’s own identity to become divided and anonymized. But in today’s Western societies, under 20 percent of the workforce are employed in the production sector. An increasing percentage of employees work in knowledge-based industries and services that include the image industries and science and education. These industries and services are marked by a complexification of the work process rather than by job simplification and rationalization: sophisticated instruments replace simple machines, performance criteria relate not so much to speed, quantity, and large volume than to quality, innovation, and personalized service, there are fewer specific rules and room and demand for human agency, and an emphasis on information seeking and the upgrading of knowledge (Hage and Powers 1992:50ff.). The objects of this work are not only the goal and output of activities but things to which workers relate; they make relational demands and offer relational opportunities to those who deal with them. As objects of innovation and inquiry, they are characteristically open, question-generating, and complex. They are processes and projections rather than definitive things (Rheinberger 1992). Work with them reveals them by increasing rather than reducing the questions they raise. In this sense, they are the polar opposite of tools like hammers and drills. These tools and instruments are like closed boxes. Objects of knowledge-based work, on the other hand, are more reminiscent of open drawers filled with folders extending indefinitely into the depth of a dark closet. Since objects of knowledge are always in the process of being materially defined, they continually acquire new properties and change the ones they have. But this also means that these objects cannot quite ever be fully attained, that they are, if you wish, never quite themselves. What we encounter in the work process are stand-ins for a more basic lack of object.
The open, unfolding character of such objects uniquely matches the “structures of wanting” by which the postsocial self was characterized: Objects provide for the continuation of a chain of wantings through the signs they give off of what they still lack, and subjects (experts) provide for the possibility of the continuation of these objects by attempting to define and articulate them. This basic mutuality binds self and object. Object relations of this sort imply a level of reciprocity, perspective-taking, and at times solidarity (exemplified in Knorr Cetina 1997) between human subjects and nonhuman objects. Intimate object relationships of this sort may also be realized in industrial work, but they would seem to be far more of a structural requirement—and a source of innovation—of knowledge-based work. It is difficult to imagine a successful scientist or a high-tech specialist who is not intimately involved with his or her object of work. These involvements illustrate object relations as forms of binding self and other. As the respective work environments expand and encroach upon home life, object-relations may substitute for and mediate human relations. Objects may also be the risk winners in the context of the increased relationship risks in human relationships. Empirical studies suggest that for many in these industries, work is by no means a negative experience, but rather the place where they feel emotionally more at home than in their actual home life (Hochschild 1997).
Object relations have expanded into the domain of consumption, an area that takes us back to the working of the media and image industries but that can also be considered in the light of the objects involved. Objects that are acquired to be used also make relational demands, offer binding sites for desires, and display similar qualities to those in knowledge-based work environments. Many consumer objects have a dual structure in that these objects can simultaneously be ready-to-hand usable things and, absent objects of inquiry, developed further by technological research (cars, computers), artistic design (fashion, commercials), or analysis (finance). This duality repeats itself when a device like a computer is on the one hand “ready” to be used but also retains an interior indefiniteness of being—a potential for further discovery and exploration involving a relational engagement of the subject with the object. In addition, a subject that develops an intrinsic relationship with a consumer object like a car, a computer, or a fashionable outfit will be lured into further pursuits by the referential nexus of objects and their continuous transmutation into more attractive successor versions. Thus, consumption illustrates the sense in which objects not only attract a person’s desire but allow wanting to continue, by giving it its serial, chainlike structure.
Object relations tend to involve more than a formal correspondence between a self as a chain of wanting and the transmutational character of postindustrial objects. They are enriched by a semiotic dimension (an object signaling what it still lacks and a subject interpreting these signals), role-taking (subjects putting themselves in the position of the object), crossover (objects occupying a subject’s mind), and flow experience (the subject becoming a “flow” of concentrated object experience). All these dimensions together account for the lure of object relations. The different relational components are marked by an interspecies reciprocity of a subject doing one thing and an object “reciprocating” with another. Postsocial binding is a form of liminal sociality, when compared with human binding.
The Culture of Life and the Rise of a Life-Centered Imagination
Object relations as construed above point away from a human-centered picture of society and back to nature and the material world. On the subject’s side, they point not only to a temporalized self—pursuing wants in object worlds—but also to the possibility that this self is closer to material objects and to “nature” than the enlightenment concept of humans, that has been foundational for sociology, suggested. As assumptions about rationality give way to research into human cognition, homo sapiens loses IQ and gains emotions and visceral definition (Elster 1998). He or she also gains openness and “transmutability”—through technological, biological, genetic, and surgical as well as psychological enhancements and alterations. Just as the notion of an object in a knowledge and media era no longer fits in with received concepts of objects as fixed material things, so the notion of a subject no longer fits in with received notions of humans as defined by reason, intentions, and agency and perhaps inner conflicts, as the main characteristics of interest to the social sciences. The postsocial subject is also a posthumanist subject. Yet it is part of a “culture of life,” by which is meant a culture capacitated by and centered on material, technological, and informational processes.
The expansion of a social imagination had involved, since the Enlightenment, hopes for the perfectibility of human society in terms of equality, peace, justice, and social welfare, with the high point being Marxist visions of a socialist revolution. These ideas have not disappeared with the retraction of social principles and the collapse of Marxism. But the promise and hope and the excess imagination that went into visions of social salvation have been extended to other areas where they find progressive inspiration. What has become thinkable today is the perfectibility of life—through life enhancement on the individual level, but also through the biopolitics of populations, through the protection and reflexive manipulation of nature, through the idea of intergenerational (rather than distributional) justice. The notion of life can serve as a metaphor and anchoring concept that illustrates a cultural turn to nature and how it replaces the culture of the social. “Life” bridges divisions between the natural, the human, and the information sciences and stands for an open-ended series of phenomenological, biological, economic, and other significations and processes. In the social sciences, “life” thinking is illustrated by those areas that have turned the individual and its search for Ego and “I”-related pleasures and affirmations into topics of investigation. But from a broader perspective, many areas focusing upon the subject can be seen to play into life-centered thinking—and in the social sciences today, the phantasized unit is more the subject than society. Theories of identity and identity politics and of the self and subjectivity provide examples of such trends, as do ideas embodied in the vast numbers of self-help books derived from psychology that counsel individuals about how to enhance their lives. Hope and promise in reference to individual life also come from finance, where excess imagination—supported by the profession of financial analysts—is invested in financial scenarios as ways of enriching the self and the life course. What feeds into this situation are institutional changes in pension schemes that have moved from solidarity-based principles, where income from the working population is redistributed to retirees, to personal investment schemes where one plans and pays for one’s retirement benefits over the course of a lifetime. One massive source of life-centered thinking is the life sciences themselves. They produce a stream of research that inspires imaginative elaborations of the human individual as enriched by genetic, biological, and technological supplements and upgrades. These ideas relate to the enhancement of life through preimplantation genetic diagnosis and screening, germ-line engineering (genetic changes that can be passed down to an individual’s offspring), psychotropic drugs that improve emotions and self-esteem, biotechnological means of enhancing the life span, and human cloning. The ideas suggest the perfectibility of individual life, but they also strongly implicate unrelated populations, those sharing particular genes, exposures, or histories of adaptation to environmental conditions, and benefiting in the aggregate from genetic measures and drugs. On a more conceptual and theoretical level, a return to human nature-based theories of rights and justice can be associated with life-centered ideas (Fukuyama 2002), as can Heidegger’s temporal notions of human existence as “being towards death” and vitalist concepts (Lash 2003) that can be linked to Bergson and Tarde. The lack-wanting temporalized self and its processual, transmuting objects captures dimensions of this vitality. A theoretical notion used in several fields is that of flow. Though authors define flow differently, with concepts ranging from flow as a state of consciousness and experience to that of information as flow, the notion captures the dynamic dimensions and temporal structuring that “life” suggests.
Liminal Sociality
For neo-Marxist thinkers, post-Fordist knowledge-based systems appropriate workers’ lives rather than their labor, with work encroaching upon and difficult to distinguish from free time and coinciding with the individual’s lifetime. The life-enhancement literature, bioethical controversies about the rights to genetically and technologically enrich lives and gene lines, and the literature depicting individuals lured into object pursuits and searching for optimal experience would suggest individuals and populations deeply involved in the appropriation of their lives and those of their offspring. Conflicts over the “appropriation of life” (Lash 2003) rather than over the appropriation of surplus value—between economic agents, individuals, and the state and nonhuman objects (such as viruses)—may well be what defines postsocial environments. But the divides may not run along traditional lines; for example, many of the individuals mentioned pursue their wants in structural cooperation and collusion with (rather than in structural opposition to) their corporate environments—with the knowledge firms and services in which they work, or with the media, image, and aesthetic industries that collect individual pursuits in sports, fashion, and design into marketable lifestyles. In knowledge areas, the new constellation is one of knowledge workers empowered by object relations and finding additional embeddedness in epistemic communities that collect around object worlds. In areas of self-testing “edgework” (extreme sports, high-speed trading, etc.), individuals also appear to gain empowerment from their engagements and show a similar tendency to aggregate in object-focused groups. Human relations may take second place vis-à-vis these engagements. The welfare state, with its goals of social solidarity and redistribution, also operates in terms of a logic orthogonal to a culture of life. It is geared to horizontal social structural divisions rather than to intra- and intergenerational life, skeptical vis-à-vis some of the newly feasible life advantages, and dedicated to the provision of services that often seem deficient in the light of projected and phantasized technological possibilities and the powers of collective human, nonhuman, and hybrid agents.
Postsocial systems include sociality, but in reconfigured, specialized, more mediated, and limited ways, as liminal forms of sociality. Postsocial relations are human ties triangulated with object relations and forming only with respect to these relations. A postsocial system may be one where information structures have replaced previous forms of social coordination, as when sophisticated hardware and software systems substitute for social networks and enable expanded, accelerated, and intensified global financial markets. Postsocial is what one might call a level of intersubjectivity that is no longer based on face-to-face interaction and may in fact not involve interaction at all but rather “communities of time” formed by the joint observation of common, electronically transmitted content. Postsocial systems may arise around the sort of relatedness enabled by the Internet, for which the characteristics that have traditionally defined human relationships (feelings of obligation and trust, etc.) are not constitutive or even relevant. Postsocial forms are not rich in sociality in the old sense, but they may be rich in other ways, and the challenge is to analyze and theorize these constellations.