Sociology after Postmodernism

Sociology after Postmodernism

SOCIOLOGY AFTER POSTMODERNISM

edited by David Owen

SAGE Publications London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi

Introduction and editorial selection © David Owen 1997 Chapter 1 £) Malcolm Waters 1997 Chapter 2 © Samantha Ashenden 1997 Chapter 3 £: Paul Connolly 1997 Chapter 4 © Nigel South 1997 Chapter 5 © Alan Hunt 1997 Chapter 6 © Ralph Schroeder 1997 Chapter 7 s a strategy that seeks to make these local centres into independent centres of budgetary calculation, or 'budget units' or 'cost units'. The regulation of services and the management of budgets of such units is undertaken by the polymorphism of the audit and various kinds of accounting. Professionals are also regulated by a strategy that is deployed from below as it were. Here the language of sovereignty and its instruments are used. This takes the form of the enshrinement of 'user rights' in the internal regulation of government departments and the service providers (whether private for profit, or non-profit 'third' sector) with which they contract (Yeatman, 1994: 107). Needs formation is no longer a matter of the scientifically informed production of truth by professionals employed under the welfare state; it is allowed to enter into a space of negotiated settlement conducted in the name of user rights. From below, the agency and voice of users and carers enters into contestation with professional practice and knowledge. From above, user rights become the criteria for the evaluation

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of performance of professionals and a technique by which authorities can be open to a rich source of innovation and critical information about changing demographics, markets and environments. Further, the law, and particularly the fear of litigation, is deployed in a way that dovetails into the new emphasis on the rights of the clients and users of services as active citizens (Rose, 1996: 350-1). A pluralisms of aggregations Finally, I want to draw attention to the way in which all of this has led to a new kind of cultural and political pluralism. The targeted populations, through technologies of agency, can be empowered by, or enter into partnership with, professionals, bureaucrats and services providers. With the help of the markets in services, agencies and expertise, they are enjoined to manage their own 'communities', e.g. as gay men, ethnic groups, drug users, users of mental health services, victims of abuse and domestic violence, perpetrators of the same, and victims of violent crime. In place of a unified welfare state, we have a series of fragmented and discontinuous agencies. These may be public, quasi-autonomous, 'for profit1, or from the rapidly expanding community or 'third sector'. All of these are agencies and specialists for dealing with targeted groups. They employ technologies of agency to transform 'at risk' and 'high risk1 groups into active citizens. These citizens are to become self-managing, to enter into political participation, and to demand action from governments. The eliciting of the participation of the 'gay community' in the fight against HIV/AIDS is perhaps a signal instance (Bartos, 1995). So too might be the way the victim status and the 'refusal of victimhood' have become a necessary component of our practices surrounding crime and punishment. Community is quite evidently a key term in what I have just described (Rose, 1996). However, it is crucial to recognize that it is one among many second-order constructions of contemporary pluralism. Community, as much as the autonomous citizen, is a resultant of detailed work of political construction. It is an attempt to normalize particular sets of relations and practices, to transform local and transitory identifications into stable identities, and to establish relatively continuous regimes of authority. It works on the much more open and fluid identifications that characterize contemporary forms of sociality we have termed "aggregations' (Maffesoli, 1990, 1991). Indeed, nothing illustrates the death of society and the political construction of community and its agency better than the sphere of criminal justice. There has been an extraordinary' political reinstatement of victims of crime. The criminal is no longer the victim of environment, social conditions, or heredity, to be punished and rehabilitated and returned to society after paying his or her 'debt'. We have seen a kind of metamorphosis of homo criminalis discovered a century earlier by criminology (Pasquino, 1991). Now, however, criminal behaviour is simply a manifestation of a level of

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risk that exists within populations. Homo criminalis is an element within each and all, to be removed and contained, to be eliminated and neutralized, even, if possible, before its manifestation in crime. The victim of crime, however, now takes centre-stage. These victims need counselling and help (for example, post-traumatic stress counselling). They have failed to manage their own risk as individuals, as households and as neighbourhoods (O'Malley, 1992). Thus they need to be empowered, form support groups, acquire a political voice, reclaim risky times and spaces (feminist 'reclaim the night' marches, for example, and the use of private security firms, surveillance cameras, secure housing developments, 'neighbourhood watch' and 'community policing' schemes). The agency of victims is then mobilized (via 'victim support bureaus' and 'victim impact statements') to demand harsher penalties through such measures as 'truth in sentencing', 'three strikes legislation', and even, in the USA particularly, capital punishment. Our practices of punishment are no longer in the service of a social restitution in which justice is decided and regulated by the executive and juridical arms of the state. Rather, they are a contest between a criminal manifesting danger and a (politically constructed and institutionally supported) community at risk demanding a new form of retribution and a new type of social defence. The 'state' can then present itself as a neutralized and neutralizing referee in this contest. At least in this case, if not in others (the fight against AIDS, for example), the 'refusal of victimhood' would seem central to the political mobilization of the status of victims. We have thus been enjoined and come to think of ourselves as selfmanaging individuals and communities, enterprising persons, active citizens, and as agentive members of a whole range of what Durkheim would have called 'intermediate groups' - households, families, work teams, associations, user groups and communities, rather than as members of a social and political community coincident with the national state. Now, however, these groups no longer stand as a mediation between Society and the Individual but as the plurality of agents that are constructed so that they might be put into play in diverse strategies of government. Government, if one likes, has become more multiple, diffuse, facilitative and empowering. It is also, however, strangely more disciplinary, stringent and punitive. The national state takes on less a directive and distributive role, and more a co-ordinative. arbitratory and preventive one.

Sociology after society There is a case to be made not so much for the 'end of the social' as for the 'death of society'. We must no doubt understand this proposition in an entirely nominalistic fashion. What is called into question is not the empirical existence of societies but the notion of society as a particular

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thought complex within contemporary liberal ways of governing. 'Society' in this sense unifies the epistemological field over which authority is to be exercised. The historical and intellectual correlative of this unified object of knowledge is the claim to the monopoly of legitimate authority by the national state. This type of knowledge of society naturalizes the ultimate unity of power relations and its anchorage in the state and thus allows a codification of diverse practices, rationalities, techniques and ends of governing within a common political vocabulary. The death of this notion of society does not signal the end of the social or even sociality; in fact, it is a condition of the rediscovery of the multiple, reversible and loosely aggregated forms of sociality analysed by Maffesoli (1990, 1991). The thesis I would finally like to advance can be expressed in three parts. First, for advanced liberal rule, we are ceasing to understand and act on ourselves as members of society, in which society is the totality of interactions and relations among a population existing within the territorially defined jurisdiction of a national government. We have ceased to act upon the social bonds that cement us into a collective totality through the agency of a unified social service animated by the ethos of the welfare state. Rather we seek to act upon ourselves and others as self-actualizing individuals moving within and between loose aggregations, as persons existing in intersubjective but a-logical relations of mutual adjustment, as professionals and workers, as service providers and consumers, as members of households, neighbourhoods, communities and regions. Secondly, all this is both a condition and a consequence of a transformation in our regimes of government. We witness the utilization of two distinctive, yet intertwined technologies of government: technologies of agency, which seek to enhance and improve our capacities for participation, agreement, and action; and technologies of performance in which these capacities are made calculable and comparable, so that they might be optimized. These two technologies are a part of a strategy in which our moral and political conduct is put into play as elements within systems of governmental purposes. Together these technologies seek a new linkage between the regulation of conduct and the technical requirements of the optimization of performance. Third, these technologies form components of the assemblage of current governmental practices together with the polysemous rationality of risk. This assemblage is a condition of and conditioned by a form of pluralism that acts upon our loose forms of identification and aggregation to construct certain types of durable entities (communities, households, regions etc.) which discover themselves as social and political actors in partnership with markets in services and expertise. This argument seems to suggest that the ethos of the 'welfare state' has been displaced by the ethos of 'performance government'. With the first, a unitary apparatus sought to act through and upon 'the social' to secure 'society'. With the latter, multiple agencies seek to put our actions into play so that they might be acted upon, rendered calculable and comparable, and

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so that we might optimize our capacities for performance as various types °f persons and aggregations. Here the 'social' and its agencies (social workers, nurses, counsellors, community bodies, government departments, educational authorities, even social movements and support groups etc.) become our partners and facilitators, as well as being tutors in the multiple forms of risk to making the most of our lives, our skills and our capacities. Security - a key element within the liberal regime - becomes a matter of constructing centres of agency and activity, of making them durable, and of ^planting continuous relations of authority. These centres are then placed under the discreet and indirect surveillance of regulatory authorities in order to normalize, stabilize and optimize activities, identities and power relations. What, then, can be the tasks of sociology after society? The first, most grand, but perhaps least satisfying, one is to contribute to the task of Political invention. In this regard, I wonder if there is not the possibility to construct a political rationality on the basis of this new regime of governmental practices that can translate the particular problems, struggles and actions of these plural agents and groups into a broader domain. I think we can hear the rumbling of such a rationality in the ceaseless calls for going beyond Left and Right, for rejecting both market- and state-based solutions. A key task of the social sciences, then, is one in which we try to find a way to produce a vocabulary, a mode of governance and a system of financing that can ensure the self-provision of communities and their associations, so that they might act upon and for themselves in ways that they feel necessary. This is the project of associationalism or associative democracy (Hirst, 1994). A central problem with this project, however, is that the looseness, transitory character and permeability of many contemporary forms of sociality do not fit the model of rational, durable association. More modestly, but more in keeping with the project of sociology exemplified here, there is the task of naming and the recovery of the power °f naming. This more than anything seems to account for the success of those who arc defining the edge of contemporary social analysis - from, for example, Ulrich Beck's risk society' and 'sub-polities' (1994) to Michel Maffcsoli's 'postmodern sociality" (1990). I have sought to provide a set of names for more humble and mundane features of our present that might prove useful in locating where we are. Naming is a key function of sociology as a contemporary form of parrhesia. To know how to act, we roust know 'what's going on'. Yet it is crucial that we develop a language with which to engage our present. As parrhesiast, the sociologist is obliged to speak to the present in a way that might divide, if later to bind and cure