Dialectics in Social Thought

The Present Crisis

G. Skoll

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137387066
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia sociale

Dialectics in Social Thought examines the work of thinkers who used dialectics in their attempts to understand the world. Among them are foundational thinkers such as Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche; seminal social critics of the last century such as Camus and Sartre; and current contributors like Badiou, Rancière, and Žižek.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Dialectics and Social Thought: The Present Crisis

HUMANITY STANDS AT A CROSSROADS IN THIS first part of the twenty-first century. The crossroads appears as a precipice, a time of crisis. The crisis is the greatest faced in the last five hundred years. The social system that has tied societies into a human system since Europeans invaded the Western Hemisphere is collapsing.

Ulrich Beck (1986) popularized the term risk society to describe a social shift from the past when the main hazards faced by humans came from the natural world. In the new social world, the main hazards are human products. According to Beck, the present crisis comes from the ascendance of a risk society. Risks threaten systemic and irreversible harm. Most hazards, according to Beck, used to be personal, whereas in the risk society, they are global. Furthermore, they are often beyond ordinary direct detection. For instance, in the case of nuclear explosives, much harm comes from invisible radiation. Beck gave the example of odors in medieval cities as the old-style risk: “Hazards in those days assaulted the nose or the eyes and were thus perceptible to the senses, while the risks of civilization today typically escape perception and are localized in the sphere of physical and chemical formulas” (21).

The present crisis contrasts with the crisis just past: the Cold War. Between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, two blocs entrenched the world in a standoff of violence. The United States and the Soviet Union led coalitions of national states. Each had massive armed forces and enough nuclear fire power to end civilization. The crisis had ossified. Granted, at any time, through accident or calculation, world war might have erupted with massive destruction and billions killed. But all was held in stasis. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the stasis shattered. Chaos replaced it.

Zygmunt Bauman called it “liquid times” and characterized it as a time of fear. “Fear has now settled inside, saturating our daily routines . . . self-reproduction of the tangle of fear and fear-inspired actions comes closest to claiming pride of place” (Bauman 2007:9). Bauman proceeded to argue that the pervasive sense of fear is rooted in contemporary political economy, a neoliberal global empire, led by the United States. They “have brought about as their ‘dangerous side-products,’ ‘nationalism, religious fanaticism, fascism and, of course, terrorism—which advance hand in hand with liberal globalization’” (8). After the rigidity of the Cold War, the world faced the crisis of chaos.

So-called chaos theory, or the theory of nonlinear dynamics, originated in the natural sciences. It is a type of systems theory and one appropriate for thinking about the present crisis. That is because the present crisis emerged from collective human activity. Those conditions that seem perilous did not occur because, for instance, a massive meteor is headed for a collision with earth. Several past crises may have come from just such an event, one of which may have led to the extinction of dinosaurs. The crisis we face now is of our own making. In order to deal with it, we have to understand it, and in order to understand it, we have to explain what we observe. Therein lies the relevance of social theory.

Social Theory

Hegel’s dialectic haunts social thought because humans make dynamic social systems. Here, “human” operates as both a noun and an adjective because humans are social systems. Before delving into bodies of thought as applied to human sociality, three examples illustrate dialectical thinking about society. Each offers an analysis that appears deceptively brief. The first is from a journal article about relations between apartment house janitors and tenants. The second example comes from a book on the processes of social stigmatization. Finally, a relatively longer piece comes from a presidential address and subsequent article about the proper subject matter for the study of social problems.

In his study of apartment house janitors, Ray Gold (1952) noted that the occupation of janitor holds a low social status in the United States. In interactions between low-status janitors and their higher-status tenants, one of those elements of the janitorial occupation giving it a low status also gave the janitors an advantage in their status negotiations with tenants. Low-status occupations often coincide with work that is dirty. Dealing with garbage epitomizes dirty work, and janitors typically had responsibility for garbage in their tenements. Nonetheless, garbage work allowed janitors to find out details of their tenants’ lives that put the tenants at a status disadvantage—for example, unpaid, unopened bills, excessive empty liquor bottles, and so on. Garbage mediated the dialectic between janitors and tenants. On the one hand, it symbolized janitors’ low status, and on the other hand, it favored them in status negotiations.

While Gold’s study focused on what sociologists have traditionally termed achieved status, Erving Goffman examined ascribed status in his monograph on stigma (1963). His study focused on the social stigmatization of mainly visible identities, including race, disabilities, and mannerisms. Particularly relevant to the social dialectic, he observed that, “when normals and stigmatized do in fact enter into one another’s immediate presence, especially when they attempt to sustain a joint conversational encounter, there occurs one of the primal scenes of sociology [emphasis added]; for, in many instances, these moments will be ones when the causes and effects of stigma must be confronted by both sides” (Goffman 1963:13).

Goffman’s use of the term primal scene has special force because of its association with the psychoanalytic primal scene, which refers to children observing parental sex. To translate to Goffman’s sociology, the scene is primal because it shows an origin of the social, just as the psychoanalytic primal scene calls forth the origin of the observing child. Here Goffman addresses, without further elaboration, the primal dialectic. That dialectic takes the form of a question. How can discrete individuals create a society? The answer lies in their forming relations through interacting with one another. To create a society, their individuality must be both paramount and subsumed at the same time—this is the primal dialectic.

So far in this discussion, microsocial interaction functions as the tableau for social analysis. Frances Fox Piven moved up the scale of organization by bringing in violent conflict among masses and classes. In her 1980 presidential address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems, she pointed to the history of violent conflict and the use of physical force in history. She particularly called attention to the use of force by the rich and powerful few to control the poor and individually powerless many. In her critique of what she called the societal reaction school of sociology, she said that many of the favorite subjects of study (drunks, drug addicts, prostitutes, mentally ill, and so forth) acquire their labels and stigmatization as the outgrowth of violent clashes in the past. Medicalization of deviance, for instance, would not be possible if labor conflict in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had not led to the medical treatment of the victims of industrialization (Piven 1981:504). “In other words, the expansion of the health system, the mental health system, and the disability system can each be viewed as large-scale and cumulative, and as institutionalized societal reactions to a history of rule violations which over time come to channel the human capacity for resistance into the individualistic and self-destructive forms we usually call social deviance, as distinct from political deviance” (504–5).

Piven’s analysis raises the issue of an ineluctable conflict between individuals and society. She showed how mass conflict based on conflicting interests of classes can appear as individual conflict in which persons treat themselves violently and self-destructively. Moreover, she stresses that what may appear as largely symbolic conflicts and violence are rooted in physical, concrete, historical conflicts and violence.

The Ghosts in the Dialectical Machine

The unifying theme in the foregoing summaries from Gold, Goffman, and Piven hinges on their recognition of immanent contradiction, which holds central place in Hegelian dialectical logic. Simply stated, individual human beings have no existence outside of society, and society cannot exist without individual human beings. Yet, following Hegel (1830), the dialectic is not a thing but a process—one that consists of three, not two, moments. This process, Aufhebung, usually translated as sublation, points to the third moment in contradictions of the kind: individual versus society—namely, social conflict. By implication, society is a dynamic system made up of continual conflicts. Moreover, for each conflict, say labor versus capital or instincts versus inhibitions, there is a countervailing force, a third force, that reconciles, or more technically, sublates them. The ghost of sublation haunts social thought because it answers the question, how is society possible? Without it, without some reconciliation, neither society nor human beings would be possible because as Clifford Geertz (1965) observed, there is no such thing as an unsocialized, unenculturated human being.

A second ghost takes the form of observable rationality in sociation. Note the use of sociation rather than society to stress that the social too is a process not a thing. That which is observable and therefore subject to explanation—that is, subject to a rational and scientific understanding of what people observe—whether or not anyone can truly and completely explain it at present, must be rational itself. This is what Hegel meant when he said that that which is actual is rational. He was not saying that only the rational, or reason, is real, but that whatever is comprehensible must have an internal logic that humans can grasp. Hegel identified three syllogisms (as he called them) of social existence: (1) the individual or person; (2) the particular concrete as will or action of the individuals, their interactions and their relationships; and (3) the universal, society, or as he termed it, the state or government. Setting aside his statist bias, what makes society possible and our comprehension of it consists of these three syllogisms: “Each of the functions of the notion, as it is brought by intermediation to coalesce with the other extreme, is brought into union with itself and produces itself: which production is self-preservation. It is only the nature of this triple coupling, by this triad of syllogisms with the same termini, that a whole is thoroughly understood in its organization [emphasis added]” (Hegel 1830:264–65).

Bracketing other sorts of things like the physical universe (Davies 2008; Wheeler 1998) or nature (Mandelbrot 1982), the social must not only be made by humans but also be conceivable by humans because of the nature of humans, the rationalizing animal. That means that in any social phenomenon, including the social universal, there lurks something, some pattern, some process capable of observation and rational explanation. So the second ghost consists of the existence of some rational core of social existence. Incidentally, this is the point Giambattista Vico made in 1725 in his Scienza Nuova.

The third ghost consists of the triadic nature of the first two ghosts. Social structure is triadic. This triadic structure appears in every social form, at all levels of social organization, and every social interaction. In abstract terms, the third leg of the dialectical stool is determinate negation, which exposes and deconstructs the terms of immanent contradiction—that is, the two terms that appear as irreconcilably opposed, again like labor and capital or instinct and inhibition. Determinate negation entails a new term within its own opposition. Nonetheless, these three legs of the stool should be understood as moments in a continual process, wherein any one element can take the place of one at one moment, another at a second moment, and so on. As Tony Smith interpreted Hegel’s logic, “Hegel insisted that neither a syllogism in which individuality is the middle term, nor one in which universality is [the middle term], nor one in which particularity takes that position, is adequate by itself. Only a system of syllogisms in which each is mediated by the others can capture the full concreteness and complexity of the sociopolitical realm” (Smith 1993:21).

I take Smith’s rendition to mean that social knowledge requires a model of analysis using a triadic dynamic structure. In it, neither methodological individualism, nor structuralism, nor situated narratives are adequate for understanding. They all must serve. That is why I argue that Hegelian dialectics are ghosts in the machine of social thought. Students of the social who neglect or eschew the dialectic triad present one-dimensional and ultimately false, if not mystified, pictures of social realities.

Social Thinkers and the Dialectic

The three examples at the beginning of this chapter illustrate the application of the dialectic. None relies only on an individualistic, structuralist, or narrative approach. Each uses a form of sociological hermeneutics, moving among particular, a universal, and individual positions or moments.

Several figures in the history of social thought stand out as working within the Hegelian dialectic logic. They are, in no particular order, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Simmel, Sartre, Camus, and C. S. Peirce. The last, Charles Sanders Peirce, usually is not identified as a social theorist, but his works on the logic of science and his semiotics have led to fruitful social thought. While Marx and Freud frequently make the pantheon of social thought, Sartre and Camus hold more ambiguous places. Freud’s psychology tended to concentrate on the intrapsychic. Nonetheless, his body of work shows his recognition that individual psychology cannot and ought not to be understood in terms of individualism. Sartre was arguably the best-known philosopher and public intellectual of the mid-twentieth century, and he examined the human condition in society in both literary and philosophic writings. Considering his novels and plays, Camus gained renown as a literary figure, but his writings are shot through with a social analytic, and his philosophical discourse, The Rebel, certainly qualifies as social thought.

The dialectic also appears, indispensably so, in various kinds of systems theories about the social. Among these, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory seems especially relevant to contemporary events. In addition, Giovanni Arrighi, Niklas Luhmann, and Pierre Bourdieu have developed social systems and in Bourdieu’s case, social fields. Descriptions and analyses by these thinkers either implicitly incorporate or explicitly use the dialectical approach. Social critics associated with the Frankfurt School have also employed the Hegelian dialectic. My discussion highlights Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse.

Other social thinkers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (such as Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, David Harvey, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, to name some of the most relevant), have developed the Hegelian dialectic by drawing on the works of Marx and Freud, among others. They apply them to analyze social developments and dynamics from a number of different perspectives and with differing objects of study. However and on whatever they apply dialectical thinking, the dialectical method resides in their work.

The following summarizes and critiques the work of those mentioned previously and others. My argument remains that successful social thought, the kind that illuminates the social world, uses the Hegelian dialectic. Moreover, it is successful because it is dialectical, because the social is dialectical in nature.

Consummate Dialecticians of Social Thought: Marx and Freud

The thought of Karl Marx and that of Sigmund Freud illustrates the operation of the dialectic. They are both contradictory and consanguineous. On the one hand, they offer contradictory analyses, so much so that they undercut each other. A simple example would be Marxians criticize Freudians for elevating a historically situated social condition, bourgeois social relations, to a general psychology. Freudians criticize Marxians for a neurotic misapprehension of the human condition and engaging in an Oedipal revolt against authority—infantile, would-be revolutionaries. Nonetheless, the two strains of thought have a deep correspondence, as certain of one the Frankfurt School theorists tried to elucidate. I argue that Marxian-Freudian correspondence does operate at a deep level, and that level shows their dialectical epistemology; that is, they are more alike than different. First, both are humanists, and both hold up reason as a defining human characteristic and a goal toward which humanity strives. They are both rational humanists. Second, both point to conditions that interfere with the exercise of reason—Marx in mystifications of political economy and Freud in neurotic self-deceptions. Third, both offer critiques of barriers to rational life, and those critiques aim at freeing people from restrictions of deception. Marx and Freud aim at freedom. As good dialecticians they also recognize that gaining freedom is a process that always has conditions of unfreedom.

Freud

In a double reversal, a Hegelian negation of the negation, I start with Freud. Of course. Marx preceded Freud by two generations. He died in 1883 shortly after Freud received his medical degree in 1881. Also, Marx’s political economic theories appear to start with the patent such as industry, labor, and the things people make and use. Freud, on the other hand, famously began with the unobservables, dreams for instance. Still, the method of starting with Freud recommends itself because Freud’s social thought begins with what at first seems irrefutable—individuals. In a sort of Cartesian maneuver, individual psychology seems to offer bedrock for social thought. Anyone can see that society is some kind of conglomeration of individual people, and in fact, nobody can see, or touch, or smell society, but such empiricism is eminently possible with respect to individuals. Nevertheless, Freud’s psychological researches convinced him otherwise. He included psychology with other sciences in that it examines what is not obvious, since surface appearance springs from unseen and unseeable hidden depths.

. . . behind the attributes (i.e. qualities) of the object under investigation which are directly given to our perception, we have to discover something which is more independent of the particular receptive capacities of our sense organs and what approximates more closely what may be supposed to be the real state of things. There is no hope of our being able to reach the latter itself, since it is clear that everything new that we deduce must never the less be translated into the language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible for us to set ourselves free. (Freud 1940:105)

Another apparent difference between Marx and Freud rests with their respective methodological focuses. Marx concentrated on ontology; Freud explored epistemology. Again, the difference is more apparent than real. Freud’s psychology explored unconscious mentation, while Marx explained the workings of political economy. Freud began his last written work, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940), by stating his starting point: namely, what is known. “We know two things concerning what we call our psyche or mental life...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Dialectics and Social Thought: The Present Crisis
• 2. Marx and the Dialectic of Capital
• 3. Freud and the Dialectic of Psychology
• 4. Peirce, Mead, Goffman, and Interactional Social Science
• 5. Culture and Society
• 6. Critical Theories
• 7. Rebellion
• 8. The Phenomenologists
• 9. Contemporary Social Thought: Agamben to Žižek
• 10. The Dialectics of Contemporary Society and the Present Crisis
• References