A New Philosophy of Society – Introduction

Seeing as I’m running a little behind with the DeLanda Reading Group (DRG) I’m going to try and be as brief as I can to catch up. Levi Bryant has already posted his commentary (here) on the Introduction and Chapter One (here), while Alex Reid has also weighed-in on Chapter Two (here). I’ll try and give a short overview of some of points and comments that interest me most in the next couple posts before it’s my turn to write a little ditty on Chapter Three.

To start things off Bryant provided a really nice summary of the main issues appearing in first part of the book. As Bryant notes, DeLanda is quite explicit about his aim for the book in the very first lines:

“The purpose of this book is to introduce a novel approach to social ontology. Like any other ontological investigation it concerns itself with the question of what kinds of entities we can legitimately commit ourselves to assert exist.” (p.1).

And DeLanda follows up this statement by letting the reader know that he will be arguing for an explicitly and decidedly "realist" social ontology. What does this mean? DeLanda is equally clear in this regard:

“…a realist approach to social ontology must assert the autonomy of social entities from the conceptions we have of them. To say that social entities have a reality that is conception-independent is simply to assert that the theories, models and classifications we use to study them may be objectively wrong, that is, that they may fail to capture the real history and internal dynamics of those entities” (p.1).

If DeLanda wants to hammer out a realist ontology of society he does so, perhaps, with many wondering why such a project is needed? Aren’t there already many researchers making great use of empirical methodologies and realist conceptions of the world? As Circling Squares says in his comments on Bryants post, “‘[m]ind independence’ is in no way a new idea, it is the mainstream view for social scientists of all stripes.” In fact, among many social scientists there really isn’t much of debate about whether things exist independent of our conceptions of them. And outside of some fringe new-age ideologies or isolated academics, I think we would find it quite difficult to find people arguing for the position that human minds create reality.

Even so, on a sensual level we find ample evidence that our world is permeated by intruding realities beyond our conceptions and control – including such “realities” as viruses, pepper-spray, commodities, shopping malls, private ownership, product fetishes, dictators, famines, police, wars and banks. Many people in the world live “the real” everyday, and in ways that are often detrimental to their personal well-being. So, at first glance, DeLanda’s thesis might even seem somewhat banal.

While, for the most part I agree with that line of thinking, it must be acknowledged that DeLanda’s audience are not those people. DeLanda is, first and foremost, a philosopher – and specifically a Deleuzian philosopher drawing extensively on what has come to be known as the “continental” tradition. So DeLanda’s project must primarily been seen as philosophical - as an attempt to reach out to those thinkers who, having learned from the intensities of critical theory of the 80’s and 90’s that focused on language and interpretation, may, again, be seeking out a way to supplement their thought with a new concern for material life and the more tangible dimensions of human experience. And in order to contextualize his arguments DeLanda must place his philosophical project among academic debates between the so-called ‘realists’ and so-called ‘anti-realists’ – often about access to knowledge, the role of language and interpretation, materialism, methodology and similar topics.

Of particular interest is DeLanda’s shrewd attempt to refigure assumptions about the relationship between subjective experience and language and physical entities or objects in the world. As Bryant notes,

“Within this framing of the realist and the anti-realist debate, everything revolves around the opposition between subjects and objects. Anti-realists are those who favor subjects (or the social or language), while realists are those who favor objects or the natural.” [source]

DeLanda doesn’t waste words in dispensing with the awkward formulation of objects v. subjects, and instead argues for the recognition of language and texts as material entities that necessarily circulate among other equally real objects. Bryant clarifies:

“In calling for a realist ontology of society, DeLanda brings about a short-circuit, crossing wires that aren’t supposed to be crossed. Within the frame that defines the discourse of Modernity as articulated by Latour, DeLanda draws a transversal line across the heterogeneous domains of subject and object. A transversal line is a line that crosses two other lines. In calling for a realist ontology of society, DeLanda declares that the social, too, is real, that it exists, that it has being, that it isn’t simply mental.” [source]

What results from recasting human activity in terms of material entities and processes is a conception of the social as a collection of real objects and systems, or set of systems, that can be tracked and understood as assemblages. DeLanda does recognize the role of meaning and communication, but wants us to consider the ways in which those realities interact and are generated through various material and expressive processes. What is important, then, is to try to figure out and understand how objects and subjects socially interact, and on what scales do these interactions take place. As DeLanda goes on to tell the reader, his intention is to take them on a journey through these various scales of reality, from the pre-personal to territorial states and beyond, in order to (re)construct a plausible story of how complex social life actually is. Here is how DeLanda puts it:

“It is only by experiencing this upward movement, the movement that in reality generates all these emergent wholes, that a reader can get a sense of the irreducible social complexity characterizing the contemporary world” (p.6).

For me, the power of DeLanda’s project in the book is not so much contingent on his ability to convince us that there is a real world, but in the novelty of his particular theoretical apparatus, and it’s ability to highlight the complexity and most salient features and forces of our social realities.

Another issue DeLanda raises in his introduction, and one Bryant mentions in his summary, surrounds the notion of “social constructionism”. DeLanda writes,

“ …sociologists use the term ‘construction’ in a purely metaphorical sense, ignoring ‘its literal meaning, that of building or assembling from parts’. By contrast, the realist social ontology to be defended in this book is all about objective processes of assembly: a wide range of social entities, from persons to nation-states, will be treated as assemblages constructed through very specific historical processes, processes in which language plays an important but not a constitutive role”(p.3).

I completely agree with Bryant and DeLanda that we need to rehabilitate the notion of “construction”. I won’t get too much into that at this point, for fear of meandering too far from the path, but I suggest that DeLanda’s recasting of human communication and expressive capacities in dynamic materialist terms – explored in this book and in detail in his other works – offers an opportunity for us to not only to confront the fact that human language and conceptual life contributes to social reality, but also to understand how human expressivity and language are only one element in much more complex and diffuse social ecologies.

As Bryant suggests:

“…the concept of constructivism advocated by DeLanda, Latour, and Stengers refers to the arduous work of building out of real components. It is not a sovereignty of thought that creates reality however it might like, but is rather a grappling with entities that always resist in their own ways and that constrain what can be built.”

Taken further, I would suggest that it is precisely the “grappling with entities” that should compel us to reconsider our relationship with ‘the real’. Human life is animated with a primal concern (or care) with real world problems, having evolved for hundreds of thousands of years grappling and coping with the sometimes harsh, sometimes bountiful realities and forces of the world. Therefore a “new” social ontology - one that is worthy of our attention - should tap into this drive to reconsider ‘the real’ by extended the primordial project of adaptation and interpretation and yield new insights into our practical existence. And it is in this sense, that “social construction” becomes, for me, not simply a mental process, but also technical, political and ethical imperative.

It is in this vein, also, that I agree with DeLanda’s suggestion at the end of his introduction that the theoretical work he will lay out in the next hundred pages or so is deeply relevant to social scientists. The models and classificatory schema social scientists use are full of presuppositions about what constitutes not only the ‘social’ or the ‘cultural’, but also human agency, political solidarity, sovereignty, justice, community, personal identity, etc., etc., etc… It is therefore important that social scientists, as well applied social engineers and policy-makers, begin to look closer at their own implicit ontologies if they are going to accurately and effectively model, map and intervene in social contexts. Only after researchers have made their ontological commitments explicit and have traced the logical consequences, affects and effects of their conceptual tools can they then begin the arduous task of actually reporting back something meaningful and useful about the world at large.