Contemporary Social Theory

An Introduction

Anthony Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000475739
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Now in its third edition, Anthony Elliott's comprehensive, stylish and accessible introduction continues to be the indispensable guide to social theory. Fully revised and updated, the book examines the major theoretical traditions from the Frankfurt School to posthumanism, and from feminism and post-structuralism to globalization theory and beyond.

Classical debates in social theory are given careful appraisal, as are the major contemporary theorists – including Jurgen Habermas, Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Žižek, Manuel Castells, Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman, Shoshana Zuboff and Bernard Stiegler. This edition includes a new chapter on the digital revolution, with consideration of how digital technologies in general and artificial intelligence in particular are reshaping societies.

Like its predecessors, the third edition of Contemporary Social Theory combines stylish exposition with reflective social critique and original insights. This volume will prove a superb textbook with which to navigate the twists and turns of contemporary social theory as taught in the disciplines of sociology, politics, cultural and media studies and many more.

chapter 1

The textures of society

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228387-1

Contents

• What is society?
• Society and social theory
  • Coping with climate change: Anthony Giddens
• Key themes in contemporary social theory
  • Living in the world after Covid-19: addressing the future
• Further questions
• Further reading
• Internet links

Natalie is a 26-year-old fashion designer living and working in London. Her design studio is located at Notting Hill Gate, where she spends part of her working week; for the rest of the week, she is regularly in Paris – attending to the business details of her fledging fashion company. Or, at least, these were the general contours of Natalie’s life prior to the onset of the Covid-19 global pandemic. The routine air travel between London and Paris is something that now seems ‘distant’ to Natalie: after four years of flitting between cities, she now has been rendered ‘immobile’ due to the pandemic. The travel she had been undertaking to see her boyfriend Ross, who relocated to Finland a year before the outbreak of Covid-19, has now been rendered impossible to schedule. Thinking back to life before the pandemic, Natalie finds it amusing that she found it previously frustrating to travel. Time was a resource that, for Natalie, was in short supply. Now, she has an abundance of it.

Natalie, a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants to America, grew up in Brooklyn – where her parents still live. Her father worked as a waiter, and her mother worked long hours in a dry-cleaning store. Natalie’s life has been remarkably different to that of her parents – largely the result of her parents’ efforts to get a good college education for their only daughter. She keeps in regular touch through Zoom and ongoing email. In communication as they are, Natalie misses direct contact with her parents and often feels worried that she lives so far away from them. These anxieties had been tempered somewhat, as Natalie had planned a holiday to the US. In addition to seeing her parents, she had also wanted to meet Ross in Brooklyn – to introduce him to her family. All this has been on hold throughout the pandemic.

What might Natalie’s life have to tell us about the world today? What might her professional and private life reflect about the changing direction of society? To begin with, it seems evident that Natalie had, until recently, lived a life – like many in the expensive cities of the West – which required ongoing communication and travel across large distances. Natalie’s professional success, as well as her private life, depended upon the routine use of systems of transportation (motorways, rail, air) as well as new communication technologies. Yet if technological innovation lies at the core of how Natalie traverses – or, more accurately, had traversed until Covid-19 – the large distances she has to cover in terms of travel and communication, these social developments are less evident in the lives of her parents – who rarely ever leave Brooklyn. Still, Natalie’s parents travel in a kind of ‘virtual’ way – making use of email communication and Zoom. Equally significantly, they traverse the different cultures and social landscapes of which they are part, or to which their lives connect – Taiwanese, American, British.

If we seek to broaden out these points, we might say that Natalie’s life reflects the dynamic changes occurring within social, cultural and economic life today, and on a global scale. Think, for example, of how her use of new digital technologies reflects the social changes now affecting how people and places interweave. There are today more than four billion users of the Internet worldwide, to which Natalie’s parents are merely some of the latest users. All of this ‘digitalization’ has been significantly ramped up as a result of the global pandemic of Covid-19. Or think about Natalie’s previously intensive carbon footprint across the globe, as she travelled regularly between the UK and Europe, as well as across the Atlantic Ocean. There had been more than a billion international air flights undertaken each year just prior to the outbreak of Covid-19. At the current time of writing, those kinds of figures would appear well out of reach for the near future. Yet if mobility has been seriously impacted for people like Natalie and her family in the expensive cities of the West, the situation is even more disturbing in terms of enforced mobilities. I refer to those living without the rights of place or citizenship, the many tens of millions of refugees and asylum-seekers experiencing the social humiliation and bodily degradation that the Italian social theorist Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’. The notion of bare life might well be apt to describe the plight of illegal immigrant workers scrambling to earn a few dollars or displaced peoples living on the margins, yet it might equally serve to capture the political mood of a world in which three billion of its inhabitants receive the same total income as the richest 300 individuals.

To raise the question of the ‘textures’ of society is thus to consider social trends that are intensely worrying on the one hand, as well as those of the most extraordinary potential on the other. However much Natalie might be aware of the global realities of bare life – of peoples living on the margins; of peoples dispossessed, displaced and humiliated – it seems unlikely that she could end up in any such situation herself. For the society to which she belongs is well insulated from too great an awareness of the shocking trends of enforced human migrations in these early years of the twenty-first century. The society to which she belongs, we might suppose, is that of the West – with its mesmerizing information networks, its dazzling digital technologies and its seductive consumer culture. But if we stop and pause for a moment, the question remains: to which society does Natalie actually belong? She was raised in the US. Yet her family immigrated to America from Taiwan when she was an infant. She now lives in London, but had worked (until recently) in Paris. And her boyfriend is based in Helsinki. To which society does she belong?

What is society?

One answer to the question ‘to which society does Natalie belong?’ derives from common sense: she belongs where she lives, her homeland, her nation. In social theory as in everyday life, this answer emphasizes that social life must be constructed within the province of the nation and its assured rights of belonging – the entitlements and duties of citizenship. On this view, Natalie is an American citizen, one who now lives and works in the UK, and who holds a permanent British visa. Talk about the connections between nations and societies in the social sciences tends to be fairly general, and yet it remains the case that nations have been regarded as providing societal homes for a remarkably long historical period. Nations, of course, have many different powers and forms at any given historical time, but one reason why they might no longer provide a good enough societal home in our age of intensive globalization is that people are on the move as never before. Just think of Natalie’s existence. As noted, she grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in the UK. But she spends part of every week in France, and many weekends in Finland. In which national homeland that we call ‘society’ does she belong? Still further, we might also wonder, how does her multidimensional experience of nations and the world actually affect both her experience and her conception of society?

Perhaps a better answer to the question then of ‘to which society does Natalie belong?’ is that of the globe. Globalization is an answer to this question when, like Natalie, we universalize the daily operations of our lives, compressing the dimensions of time and space through new technological innovations in such fields as travel and communications. On this view, Natalie emerges as a ‘global citizen’, one with a cosmopolitan appreciation of the complexities of living in an age of transnationalism, and thus becomes defined as one at home wherever she happens to find herself. A citizen, in other words, of global society. But whether it is meaningful to speak of global society in the same manner in which we might speak of national society is a contentious issue – as we will see in the discussion of globalization in Chapter 11. For whilst there is a very specific sense in which we might say that Natalie is a citizen of America or the UK, in what sense is she actually a citizen of the globe? To define society in purely national terms is to circumscribe its operations in terms of, say, territories, boundaries and geopolitical spaces. To define society beyond the terrain of the nation seems to open the textures of human belonging and association in ways which appear to have no limit, pushing the boundaries of social and political understanding to the edge. In one sense, this might be described as a core and intractable problem of our time – a problem that preoccupies social theorists, but one that also arises at the centre of public political debate today.

These considerations bring us to the heart of a core issue in contemporary social theory – namely, the nature of society. There is, to date, no single adequate definition of society in social theory – and indeed one objective of this book is to trace the various definitions of society that have emerged in social theory during the course of the twentieth century and into the early 2000s. To indicate the range of meanings attached to the notion of society that we will encounter throughout this book, consider the following random list of definitions currently emanating in social theory:

1. the institutionalization of unequal power relations and domination;
2. the conjuncture of reason and repression;
3. the structuring of social institutions and social interactions;
4. the process whereby linguistic structures are converted to social regulation;
5. the social forms in which signifiers and signifieds are interwoven;
6. forms of thought structured by social differences;
7. ideas and ideologies governed by patriarchy, promoting unequal relations between the sexes;
8. the gendered process of encoding sexual signs and human bodies in social life;
9. systematically distorted communication;
10. reflexively orientated social practices;
11. liquidity;
12. the networks or flows in which self-reflective social actors organize their daily activities;
13. the globalization of the social, involving an interweaving of global and local happenings.

There are a number of points that might be noted about this list of definitions. For one thing, some of these definitions view society positively, others negatively, and some are clearly ambiguous. The more positive of these definitions see society as an indispensable medium for the production of social relations, emphasizing the benefits of interpersonal relationships and the potential gains from intercultural communication. In this sense, society is viewed in a largely technical way, as a process that facilitates not only the constitution of identity and elaboration of forms of thought but also the reproduction across time and across space of social interactions (think, for example, of family life across generations) and of social institutions (think, for example, of schools, hospitals or prisons). Some of these definitions, however, view society pejoratively – as the inculcation of false beliefs or ideology – and thus emphasize the role of economic and political forces in various forms of human exploitation.

Another point is that this list of definitions carries a range of implications for understanding the world in which we live: not just in academic terms but also for everyday life too. Some formulations identify profoundly transformative processes, such that the very existence of a thing known as ‘society’ appears as either an illusion or an unnecessary hangover from classical social theory. This is a fertile line of social inquiry which emerges out of structuralist social theory, in which society is recast as a language or linguistic process, and runs through in our own time to postmodernism and other forms of critical social thought. A number of conceptual approaches in this respect, from post-structuralism and postmodernism to globalization studies, suggest that the social sciences must radically rethink their subject matter – as a world of ‘bounded’ societies no longer exists, if indeed it ever once did. Other traditions of thought are much more cautious. Some argue that the so-called openness of the social has been exaggerated: society, according to some critics, is alive and well, and it is only in the writings of obscure social theorists (particularly the French) that the notion recedes into the shadows.

Society and social theory

As it happens, Natalie often thinks about ‘society’ – or, at least, those societies through which she regularly passes and moves. She has an especially powerful sense of the breadth and speed of social change currently sweeping the globe. She believes, for example, that no single force – neither governments nor corporations – is in control of the global economy. She thinks the idea that the nation-state can manage capitalism has been exposed as fatally flawed. Consequently, she is concerned that the welfare state – an institution she has grown to admire whilst living in the UK, but which was pretty much unknown to her whilst growing up in America – will not be able to meet the demands placed upon it by citizens, especially the growing numbers of elderly people. But there are other anxieties too, perhaps deeper ones, that Natalie has about the future of society. She feels that the entire globe is in a ‘state of emergency’. There are tremendous new risks; terrorism, and particularly the threat of high technology nuclear terror, convinces Natalie that the world in which she grew up is gone, and gone for good. Other high risks of today’s world that she mentions include global warming and environmental destruction: she worries, for example, about her own carbon footprint and its consequences for the world of tomorrow. And yet she still identifies other social trends as more promising for her future, and the future of the next generation. Her life today she describes as a constantly shifting terrain of exciting experiences. As she moves between cities and countries, her professional and personal life brings her into regular contact with people who think differently, and live quite different lives, from her. She embraces this social complexity and welcomes moves towards increased cultural diversity and cosmopolitan living.

Natalie’s instinctive sense that the world in which she lives is changing fast mirrors contemporary intellectual assessments of the human condition in the present age. What the ‘deep drivers’ of society are, and whether they are in point of fact new, are the focus of intense controversy in social theory. I discuss many of the most significant assessments of society – of the complex ways in which we now live – throughout this book. Some of these social theories, as we will see, seek to develop a ‘structural method’ which holds that social structures – such as the economy or bureaucracy – operate in ways invisible to the naked eye; such a method has been extended by various contemporary analysts of society to encompass, among others, social processes, organizational life, institutional transformations and global networks. Other social theorists have developed more culturalist perspectives – concerned with, among other topics, the body, desire, the unconscious, sexuality and gender – to comprehend the novel global circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

New times demand fresh thinking. Tracing the rise of contemporary social theory from the 1920s to the present day, this book explores how groundbreaking theoretical and sociological concerns have brought topics li...