Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory

Afterword: Social Theory Today and Towards 2025

From Giorgio Agamben to Manuel DeLanda,

In the course of this book we have critically considered a number of key perspectives in contemporary social theory. From the Frankfurt School to globalization theories, we have looked at the profound troubles arising from the whole language and culture of modernity. Social theory, we have seen, is vitally engaged with the repression, oppression and indignity of unequal social relations: it is a deeply political, sometimes melancholic, but profoundly humane critique of the structural forces which underlay the self-destructive pathologies of contemporary societies. Indeed, so serious is the damage done to human life today that much social theory insists it is only by confronting the worst and most painful aspects of current global realities that we might hope to develop plausible alternative social and institutional possibilities. Hence the surprising innovations of recent years – post-feminist, queer, postmodern, risk and liquidity theories – which address anew why modernity leaves so large a number of the world’s population unsatisfied, displaced and outcast.

When social theory does the excavating work of digging behind cultural illusions, it engages most directly with the public sphere and the whole issue of the future direction of political society. Yet some critics claim that social theory is merely obscurantist jargon. The criticism, in brief, is that social theory inserts arid abstractions which have little to do with the concrete realities of politics. Still more, the charge is made that social theory is near powerless in changing how we think about politics and social things.

Against the backdrop of such criticism, let us in conclusion briefly consider some recent public interventions by social theorists – both for what they have to tell us about the political nature of social theory and also its capacity to impact upon our worlds. In a series of articles over recent years, published in the Opinion columns of such newspapers as International Herald Tribune and The Guardian, Anthony Giddens has addressed the massive disconnect between the high-consequence risks of globalization on the one hand, and the lifestyle changes necessary to combat these worldwide risks on the other. He has argued, in a provocative and polemical fashion, that the big issues of our time do not reduce to traditional divisions in politics between left and right. From climate change, to energy security, to coping with international crime, today’s major political problems transcend nation-state boundaries, as well as traditional national categories of thought used for so many years to frame nation-state politics. The core changes arising from the global electronic economy help to create, says Giddens, a new agenda for politics – at least in terms of policy thinking. The political challenge today – on global economic crises, transnational terrorism, global warming – is for nations to find new ways of working together, cooperating through transnational forums and processes and inter-governmentalism to develop novel models of ‘global governance.’ This is, in effect, the quantum leap for politics in the early twenty-first century: shifting from nation-state politics to globally cosmopolitan politics.

Giddens’s call for a more cosmopolitan approach to politics in our age of globalization is born partly out of his social theory of reflexivity and structuration – discussed in detail in Chapter 9. This, to be sure, is not necessarily easy to spot or to substantiate. In the large bulk of his newspaper articles, for example, Giddens does not use the more difficult social-theoretical terminology of ‘structuration,’ ‘time-space distantiation’ or ‘reflexivity.’ To the extent that he shies away from such specialist discourse, his political interventions might be likened to, say, a pediatrician or computer scientist commenting in plain language on some aspect of their research competence. There is thus something of a divide between the conceptual analysis informing Giddens’s recent political contributions and his media framing of them. But the point is that social theory is at the core of this analysis, at least for anyone who cares to look. Giddens’s arguments in favor of ‘positive welfare,’ for instance, derive from his social theory – which holds that globalization ushers into existence an increasingly reflexive citizenry. In the shift to post-traditional or post-industrial society, the old social stratification has gradually been replaced by a new pattern of ‘individualization’ – where people are much more involved in the self-design of their lifestyles. This necessitates for Giddens a transformation from the traditional welfare state of support and dependency to novel forms of enabling welfare.

It is one thing to write opinion articles, and yet another to actually influence the shape of contemporary politics. But it is just that which Giddens has done, giving the slip in the process to the charge that social theory is removed from concrete politics. For Giddens, as noted in Chapter 9, developed the notion of ‘the third way’ in political thinking, first as an advisor to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair (where he also played a role in Blair’s dialogues with US President Bill Clinton from 1997 onwards), and second as a member of the House of Lords in the British Parliament. The level at which Giddens has moved in British political circles clearly represents an extraordinary contribution to civic and public life. But the power of Giddens’s social and political theory does not end there, as both his account of ‘third way’ politics as well as his broader social theory penetrates well beyond the UK and US to encompass Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. At work on projects as diverse as the future of the European social model on the one hand, and the obesity epidemic and associated lifestyle issues on the other, Giddens has become the most sought-after social theorist – by political leaders, think-tanks and universities – in the world today.

Compare Giddens’s political interventions as a social theorist with those of Manuel Castells. In 2008, Castells appeared as part of the ‘Big Thinker’ lecture series sponsored by Yahoo! Research. Acknowledging that for too long social theory had sidelined the social implications of communications technology, Castells reappraised the relationship between society and the Internet. Social theory may have been silent on the socially beneficial aspects of new information technologies, but so at the same time had been nearly everyone. The media was especially to blame in this connection. ‘Media sensationalism,’ argued Castells (2008), ‘is responsible because it always picks up on bad news.’ Yet there are many ways in which the Internet extends and reshapes social relations, and Castells is particularly attentive to how such technology might be harnessed to create a more autonomous society. ‘The Internet,’ says Castells, ‘does not isolate users, nor does it depress or alienate. The more you use the Internet, the more social you are offline. The Internet adds, rather than subtracts, sociability.’ Elsewhere, Castells details statistics on blogs and the Internet thus: of the 60 million blogs worldwide, one is created every second and 55 percent of new bloggers remain active after two months of Internet use. Whilst only 9 percent of blogs are directly political in scope, Castells points out ‘still, that’s a lot of blogging.’ In the end, says Castells, the Internet in general increases political interests and activities.

But, as it happens, there is no need to rehearse the exceptional contributions of Giddens and Castells as somehow unique in terms of the import of social theory for public political debate. In fact, the bulk of luminary social theorists reviewed in the course of this book have not only contributed to the public sphere and politics, but have found ways of extending and enriching it. The pioneering contributions of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have been of lasting value to debates on both repression and freedom in contemporary politics. Jürgen Habermas, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Fredric Jameson, Homi Bhabha, Julia Kristeva: these too are social theorists who have spent their lives not only studying the social world and its struggles, but as politically engaged public intellectuals. Their contribution has been, among other things, an engagement with fundamental questions about power, domination, repression, identity, sexuality and intimacy in contemporary social processes. And it has been through consideration of these matters – in outlining social theories which are, admittedly, sometimes dense or difficult, but for the most part arrestingly original – that these authors have had a great deal to say about contemporary politics, culture and society.

There remain some key questions which as yet have not been raised. What is the future of social theory? Do recent developments in society, culture and politics give us any indication of where social theory might be headed over, say, the next five to ten years? And will social theory continue to promote the general good of society? Will social theory still engage sizeable publics in 2025? These questions cannot be answered in a simple fashion, partly given the complexity of social theory as an interdisciplinary enterprise and partly because social theory is not really in the business of seeking to predict the future. Yet there is another reason, too, why it is not easy to speculate about the future of social theory. The review of contemporary developments in social theory provided in the course of this book suggests that the prevailing violence, risks and dangers facing the planet are coming closer and closer to crashing the established social structures of modern life. This is perhaps but another way of saying we may be facing the end of the world as we know it – although whether new, more dynamic types of societies and spaces are likely to emerge remains, as some post-structuralists are fond of saying, ‘undecidable.’ But what surely is self-evident – at the levels of both professional and practical social theory – concerns those radical transformations in social institutions with which intellectuals, political activists and policy makers, as well as ordinary people, have long traded. I refer to core transformations in the very institutional units of society, from identity and sexuality, to the family and work, to the nation and politics. These institutional units are both eroding and recombining right before our eyes in these early years of the twenty-first century, and in the remainder of what follows I want to briefly examine some of the more interesting attempts in social theory to develop, if not exactly the answers, at least some interesting sounding questions about our possible global futures.

Contemporary social theory, I have suggested, began with the German school of Frankfurt critique. In the works of Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm, there was a powerful attempt to understand the pain of those who suffered under Hitler – as well as the wider society living under conditions of ‘the administered society’ – in both emotional and historical terms. Social theory following the Frankfurt School, right through to the present-day, has continued to be shaped by forms of political and ideological turmoil occurring in contemporary societies. In more recent social theory, for example, Zygmunt Bauman has also discussed political themes like violence, suffering and death, and how they apply to our increasingly global world. For Bauman, the killing of six million Jewish people by the Nazis cannot be explained as a simple reversion from civilized modernity to pre-Enlightenment barbarism. The Holocaust, says Bauman, could only happen because of modernity’s twin combination of bureaucracy and technology. Along with gas chambers and other modern technologies facilitating mass murder, the hold of bureaucratic rationality in Hitler’s Germany created the social conditions in which moral responsibility evaporated. Similarly the keynote to life lived in today’s so-called global cosmopolitan society, at least according to several leading European social theorists, remains that of the concentration camp. In the relatively short historical march from Auschwitz to Guantanamo Bay, says the Italian social theorist Giorgio Agamben, a ‘state of emergency’ has been turned into the norm for constitutional political power in Western democracies. Whilst legal systems may make provisions for intermissions of various kinds, there is a wider change of governance across the world – or so Agamben argues – in which the rule of law is routinely displaced by the ‘state of exception,’ understood as the platform through which extra-judicial state violence is inflicted upon citizens.

Agamben understands the political emergence of permanent states of exception largely in terms of Foucault’s critique of biopolitics, of which the United States response under the Bush presidency to the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 is surely a signal example. The political irony of post-9/11 biopower politics, for a critic such as Agamben, is that the state of emergency that was the ‘war on terror’ was meant to protect the general population from terrorism – whereas it resulted, arguably, in a weakening of the freedoms of democratic society. What Agamben calls ‘bare life’ is precisely an attempt to think through the violence, degradation and suffering of extra-judicial violence inflicted upon the bodies of individuals today, from camp inmates to terror hostages. Agamben’s ‘bare life,’ in the words of Malcolm Bull, ‘provides the perfect metaphor for the naked and humiliated prisoners on Abu Ghraib’ – the notorious prison in postwar Iraq, where U.S. soldiers brutalized Iraqi prisoners.

One newly emerging task of social theory, broadly conceived, consists in the dissection of the political conditions under which the planet is shared – probing the structured violence underpinning mass death, diseases and malnutrition, and ever-rising levels of poverty. From this vantage point, over half the world’s population might be said to live the hell of ‘bare life.’ As David Held summarizes one of the most pressing global issues of our times,

[e]ach year some 18 million die prematurely from poverty-related causes. This is one third of all human deaths – 50,000 every day, including 29,000 children under the age of five. And, yet, the gap between rich and poor countries continues to rise and there is evidence that the bottom 10% of the world’s population has become even poorer since the beginning of the 1990s.

(2008)

Held’s summary of the global challenges to be faced reflects not only the extensive and intensive reach of ‘bare life’ today, but perhaps also the possibility that such a truly shocking reality might just one day erupt unpredictably on the political scene, transforming the very structured violence which maintains modernity’s self-destructiveness. Any such possible eruption is what the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou (2007) calls an ‘Event,’ some exceptional break with the status quo or political consensus. According to Badiou, whose work has influenced Agamben, an Event can erupt on the edges of the very coordinates of social reality, at that point or void where meaning threatens to dissolve into non-meaning. As a result, new truths can be expanded, to the extent that individuals and groups are genuinely committed to the radical implications of such an Event. There is, no doubt, a good deal of French philosophical idealism about this notion, but it is worth noting that Badiou’s thinking has inspired various new directions in social theory for confronting some of the most pressing global issues of our times.

If Badiou’s work has pursued the philosophical possibilities for the break up, symbolic ruin and broader transformation of received political meanings, other social theorists have been concerned to map the restructuring of the very coordinates of social reality. Whilst the motive driving society has been interpreted by Marxists and post-Marxists as economic or materialist, and by Freudians and Lacanians as unconscious or affective, there is an emerging consensus that today’s social coordinates are being rewritten around the politics of survival itself In High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them (2002), Jean-François Rischard sets out core global challenges ranging from water and energy deficits to global warming, from toxic waste disposal to nuclear proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But given the complexity of global social processes, it is far from settled or secure whether it is still possible to speak of a ‘we’ for confronting the variety of political challenges faced today. In The Sense of The World (1997), Jean-Luc Nancy reflects on what it means to say we live in ‘the world.’ Worlds, rather than world, is for Nancy a better way to grasp our ‘being-with’ others – including all the others separated from us in space and in time that we are unlikely to ever meet, but to whom we have a ‘radical responsibility.’ What Nancy calls ‘naked existence’ represents our increasing exposure today to a post-traditional world – one in which the meaning and destination of life is far from fixed or pre-determined. The global challenge, according to Nancy, is living within a plurality of worlds without guarantees. The challenge lies in embracing human contingency.

We have seen that a particular version of post-structuralism, sometimes transmuted as postmodernism, was the essential relay by which the whole notion of contingency entered the terrain of radical politics in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. In our own time, there has been a further inflation of the value of the ‘contingent’ in radical social theory. In a number of works bridging complexity theory with Deleuzian philosophy, Manuel DeLanda firmly rejects the kind of determinism of classical physics – which rendered the past as given and treated the future as preset – and instead faces head-on the radical implications for society of indeterminacy, multidirectionality and the ‘politics of becoming.’ In New Philosophy of Society (2006), DeLanda considers the disabling gap between subject and object, between past and future, pointing out that there is in fact no given order in social reality at all. Behind this Nietzschean approach to theorizing social space and time lies DeLanda’s attempt to conceptualize history without a determinate beginning or end. Speaking up for the contingent, the indeterminate and ambivalent, DeLanda is out to capture multiple times, plural spaces and divergent social possibilities. Such a heady decentering of causality has a certain undeniable euphoric quality, in the sense that there may be nothing more life-affirming than to say ‘we can become whoever we wish to be.’ (This may be the point to note that, whilst born in Mexico, DeLanda now resides in the United States.) But if this can-do philosophy is uplifting at the level of considering possible alternative worlds, it may be less than useful for grasping why my credit card statement arrives at the beginning of every month without fail or why the rent is due at the month’s end. In other words, this is a social theory that makes more of the world’s future possibilities than adequately theorizing much of the social control exerted over cultural affairs that we take for granted.

Whatever we might make of these political limitations, DeLanda is much preoccupied with creation, but refers this issue to certain frames of reference derived from biology and ‘matter.’ What DeLanda calls ‘morphogenesis’ refers to particular states of ‘becoming’ (both at the levels of identity and society) which are organized intensively – involving differentiation, profusion, excess. The creativity of society for DeLanda is plastic, the future is radically open-ended, and the shaping of self and society involves a shaping of plural temporalities and spaces and a multiplicity of values. A similar sense of the unpredictable, but nonetheless ordered or contained, emerges as central to complexity theory dealing with the intricate interrelations between the physical and the social worlds (see, for example, Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life, 1996).

The notion of ‘creation’ suggests, finally, the writings of the late European social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis. Whilst I have not introduced the work of Castoriadis in previous chapters, there is a sense in which much of the argument of this book would not be possible without his contribution. For what has come about with the later development of global capitalism, so Castoriadis argues, is a progressive hollowing out of the radical imagination of individuals, social relations and the resources of cultural tradition. Such radical imagination, bound up as it is with selfhood and the Freudian unconscious, lies at the core of human creation in the strongest sense of the term. It is this creative dimension of both identity and society to which the large bulk of Castoriadis’s writings is devoted. What he wishes to capture for social theory is the creation of an imaginary which is radically new, multidimensional and invented, literally, out of thin air. In the broadest sense of the term, he writes of imagination as an unconscious eruption, of creation ex nihilo – meaning ‘out of nothing.’ The flip side of such imaginative creativity is the personal and emotional straight-jackets resulting from a socio-cultural system based on bureaucratic know-how and capitalistic greed – both of which enfeeble the depth and power of human creativity.

In The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), Castoriadis argues that the creativity of the psyche is a site of multiple, fractured and contradictory representations of the individual in relation to self, to other people and to society and history. He argues that the psyche is continually elaborating representations, fantasies, affects; as the flow of representations are produced, so new positionings of self and other are defined, which in turn leads to newer forms of fantasy, identification and cultural process. There is, for Castoriadis, a delicious indeterminacy at the heart of the Freudian unconscious, such that the regulative hierarchies of self, sexuality, gender and power are constantly rearranged and sometimes transformed, at least partially as a consequence of this ceaseless psychic flux.

At its simplest, Castoriadis’s emphasis on the creative nature of the imagination underscores the permutation of fantasies and identifications that selves produce endlessly in relation to society and history. We insert ourselves, through the psychic flux of imagination, at one and the same moment as both creator and created, self and other, identity and difference; we draw on existing social institutions and cultural conventions to produce new images of self and society, which in turn feed back into the cycle of representations. In all this, Castoriadis’s central theme is creativity – of the individual self and the broader society. Underlining creativity, his theoretical position is a far cry from the insipid, commercially constructed notion of the ‘ever-new’ in popular culture. What distinguishes his position from popular understandings of creativity is his stress on the open-ended and ambivalent nature of psychic representation and cultural production, and it is this stress which necessarily involves reflecting on the more distressing aspects of violence, aggression and destruction in contemporary culture. ‘Creation,’ writes Castoriadis (1991:3–4), ‘does not necessarily – nor even generally – signify “good” creation or the creation of “positive values.” Auschwitz and the Gulag are creations just as much as the Parthenon and the Principia Mathematica.’ It is hard – says Castoriadis – to grasp, and harder to understand, that socio-political paths or fields of imagination stretch all the way from progressive politics to fanaticism and fascism. But the search for alternative futures, and the search for autonomy and justice, are both among the creations in Western history that people value highly and judge positively; the practice of critique, of putting things into question, forms a common starting point for a radical challenge to received social and political meanings.

Agamben, Badiou, Nancy, DeLanda, Castoriadis: these are just some of the ground-breaking social theorists of recent years. Will their originality and political ambitiousness be discussed and debated in 2025? Possibly. But the point is that no one can say with any degree of confidence what the future for social theory holds. Social theories derive from the serious attempts of women and men to make sense out of the unthinkable social things that harm, constrain, repress or damage life; social theories are of value when they most directly engage, and seek to transform, the political and ideological turmoil out of which they were born, and in the process offer alternative visions of how our personal and social lives could be lived otherwise. In terms of the important writers I have been discussing, it is clear that the themes of human creation, imagination, our ‘being-with’ others, and the question of autonomy present social theory with fresh challenges. In other words, what social theory requires are multi-perspectival approaches through which it can at once critique the failure of human life to flourish under specific social conditions on the one hand, and defend human needs and desires for alternative forms of life concerned with pleasure, creativity and autonomy on the other. Undeniably, the global challenges we face demand global solutions, and ones that are both future-regarding and geared to the actual needs and desires of others.