assess john urry's claim that sociology must now be understood and pursued beyond societies

8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies

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Marc Kushin

3312818602

Intellectual Foundations of Social Theory

MC52014

January 2011

ASSESS JOHN URRY'S CLAIM THAT SOCIOLOGY MUST NOW BE

UNDERSTOOD AND PURSUED BEYOND SOCIETIES


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Although it is no new phenomenon that societies may overlap on multiple levels, that

an individuals place in the world can become less and less fixed in space and time,

the twenty-first century experience of human relations and communities suggests that

a new perspective on the analysis of these ideas and the concept of society may be

necessary. The subject matter of sociology within the west has generally focused on

individual societies and the generic traits of those societies (Urry, 2000). But now we

seem to live in a 'global age' where the boundaries that define one society, even one

nation, from another are becoming dizzyingly blurred and hard to distinguish, and

inhuman networks - technological, informational, financial and multimedia provide

the basis for many of our interactions.

The language of 'globalisation' often saddles on the lap of any discourse about

contemporary society yet most of the talking (and doing) seems to have come from

one side of the fence, namely western post-industrial societies. But, of course,

discourse does not flow in one direction nor does it travel merely from one set of

ideas to their counterpoint and back again. As Foucault (2007) argues, discourse is the

process of multiple statements working together to form a discursive formation

where statements exist in a system of dispersion. There are no unified statements

that can provide the backbone of a discourse; rather, the statements in a discursive

formation dialogically pull in elements from other discourses creating an open system

of true and false, right and wrong. Yet, true/false dichotomies for Foucault have no

clear distinction as discourse is always implicated in power, it is one of the systems

through which power circulates (Hall, 1992: 294). For Foucault, then, when power

seeks to enforce the truth of a statement its discursive formation is producing a

regime of truththat is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function


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as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false

statementsthe status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true

(Foucault, 1980: 131). It is with the relationship between discourse and power in

mind, the relationship between the West and the Rest (Hall, 1992), that one must be

aware of who the language of globalisation serves and, in terms of Urrys claim, the

historical and current positions of sociology as a discipline before one can analyse

its future.

Urry argues that sociologys dominant discourse focusing on the idea of society was

partly constructed from the autonomy of American society throughout the twentieth

century thus representing a universalisation of the American societal experience

(2000: 6). Institutionalised sociological practise was the result of the emergence of

industrial capitalism in Europe and the United States, an extension of the

Enlightenment goal of the understanding of and the domination over nature. It was

humanitys power over nature, the antithesis to society, that created industries that

enabled and utilised dramatic new forms of energy and resulting patterns of life (10)

(the division of labour, the rise of bureaucracy, the emergence of cities and so on) that

sociology has specialised in describing. According to Urry this insular sociology has

neglected to examine in its analysis how the notion of society connects to the system

of nations and nation-states (7, my emphasis), quoting Craig Calhoun Urry remarks:

No nation-state existed entirely unto itself (1997: 118). It is via an interdependence

that societies are constituted and defined through their differences. It is a worthless

exercise, in Urrys view, to analyse the processes and development of multiple

national societies as if they existed in a vacuum, when they have in fact formed as a

response to world-scale processes (Wallerstein, 1991: 77).


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While historically the social sciences have examined at their core from Rousseau

and Locke to Marx and Weber the theorisation of society in relation to sovereignty,

citizenship and governmentality these notions have traditionally been theorised within

the territorial boundaries of a society. Currently, Urry claims, in the global age, an

era of inhuman networks, 'flows' and scapes of technology, global media, floating

capital exchanges and transient ideologies (Appadurai, 1990: 589):

sociology...appears to be cast adrift once we leave the relatively safe boundaries

of a functionally integrated and bounded societythere is a theoretical whirlpool

where most of the tentative certainties that sociology had endeavoured to erect

are being washed away' (Urry, 2000: 17).

To rescue sociology from this theoretical impasse Urry proposes a manifesto that

seeks to redefine sociological research and thought through the study of mobilities.

The social is no longer society the social is now mobility. His manifesto demands

that sociology moves on from the banal nationalism (8) of bordered territories and

examines the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information and wastes;

and the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, these

diverse mobilities (1). Multiple mobilities, for Urry, are at the heart of social life and

should be central to sociological analysis. This is to be achieved primarily through the

use of various metaphors of mobilities. Like a great number of theorists and

philosophers, following Lakoff and Johnson, Urry seeks to harness the power of

metaphor in the form of a sociological tool as a fundamental human thought process

(Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 6, original emphasis) as opposed to being just a matter of

language and communication. While all metaphors are open to interpretation, and

indeed, validity, it is by combining empirical analysis and metaphor, Urry suggests,


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that new meanings and realities can be proposed to develop a more thorough

understanding of a new realm of the social.

The use of metaphor, of course, goes as far back to pre-modern times, the age of

myths, legends and widespread religious life. But in terms of modernity the French

poet Baudelaire painted a picture of modern life as the transient, the fleeting, the

contingent (Baudelaire, 1964: 13). The ephemeral and fragmented have been a

consistent theme in analyses of modernity and its legacies. From Simmels description

of the metropolitan individuality that depends on the swift and uninterrupted change

of outer and inner stimuli (1997: 145) to Marshall Bermans much quoted passage

that said:

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure,

power, joy growth, transformation, of ourselves and the world and, at the same

time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know,

everything we are. Modern experiences and environments cut across all

boundariesin this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a

paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of

perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity

and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, all

that is solid melts into air (1982: 15).

The grouping of modernity, ephemerality and air in critical theory, then, goes back to

Marx and Engels; it is nothing new. The metaphor lives on with Deleuze elaborating

on the modulating society of control...where the corporation is a spirit, a gas (2004:

75). It is Baumans (2000) model of liquid modernity, however, that provides Urry

with his fundamental category of description for the global-social as fluid with the


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metaphors of liquid and flow (Urry, 2000: 33) replacing the sociological regions and

territories. Indeed, Urry seems to jump onto the metaphors of others throughout his

manifesto. Spatial metaphors such as Harveys time-space compression (1989),

Castells' networks (1996), Appadurais scapes (1990), and those concerning

mobility, among them Benjamins flaneur (0000), Deleuze and Guttaris nomad

(1986) and Baumans pilgrim, vagabond and tourist (1996). Urrys metaphorical

tool-box may seem to offer little in the way of innovation, running counter to his aims

to develop new categories of sociological discourse in the twenty-first century, but it

is how he uses these tools to build a new analytical landscape with which he attempts

to offer insight. Indeed, it could be said that there are no new tools left in the artisans

collection, no new sounds emanating from the musicians instrument, no new colours

on the painters easel. However, it is through the potentially radical application of the

resources at hand in the spirit of bricolage - that new ideas are formed and new

permutations of understanding can be developed.

Urrys networks and flows, then, describe the nature of the social in an age of

postmodern globalisation. Following Castells network society these networks are

not just social formations they produce complex and enduring connections between

people and things (Urry, 2000: 34, my emphasis). Within these networks flow, as

well as people, money, information, goods and images across the social terrain within

and beyond individual societies. These objects are not mere receptacles of the human

subject but can function as actants, defining the roles played by humans within

networks (75). In this sense the human actor is de-centred from all agency, rather, by

hybridising with the in-human the accomplishment of agency is determinate upon an

interaction with the flows and scapes of the global era and the objects that travel

within them, from the banal (say, a Coke can) to the dramatic (an intercontinental


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Nomadic metaphors find in Deleuze and Guttari a concept that defies settled power, a

dream of radical liberty subverting set conventions and the control of the state that

never ceases to decompose, recompose and transform movement, or to regulate

speed through a politics of immobility (1986: 60-61). While the use of the nomad is

perfectly reasonable for describing a counter-hegemonic force, again, following

Peters, it is all too easy to come up against the inevitability of fantasy. In the

exigencies of political struggle he says some things get said that are far from robust

truths about human experience (1999: 36). Forced migration and imposed exile do

not afford the privilege of an extravagant identity construction displayed by western

theorists; metaphoric projection and political persecution go together (34).

David Morley notes that the mobilities paradigm only really applies to 1.6% of the

global population (2002: 429). The romanticizing of trans-border mobility as

progressive in all its forms can easily hide from us the very real experiences of those

who have their mobility forced upon them. What we sometimes see emerging,

Morley points out, rather than the much advertised fluid and hybrid forms of

postmodern subjectivity, are new forms of consolidation of old patterns of social and

cultural segregation (432). What Morley and Peters are suggesting is that the ability

to construct identity is unequally distributed, that a certain level of cultural capital is

required to be in the position to do so. What solace can a forced migrant find in an

imperceptible subjectivity imposed upon them from afar despite, as Papadopoulos et

al describe, their metaphorical ability to oppose the individualising, quantifying,

policing and representational pressures of the settled liminal porocratic institutions

(2008: 217)? This ability is debatable and goes beyond the causes and the

consequences of the position such an individual or community may find themselves

in. The one thing it may not go beyond, however, is societies. The system of states


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in Urrys discourse, as well as the networks and flows of the immovable (yet very

mobile) forces of globalisation that distribute violent inequality, are states in

themselves. Not nation-states, but states of play, states of mind, states of being, that

while very far from the corporeal experience of the sociologist, who may be

privileged with the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true

(Foucault, 1980: 131) are often tragically real for a great many who live in their

metaphorical universe.


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Foucault, Michel, 1980, Power/Knowledge , Harvester Press, Brighton.

Hall, Stuart, 1992, The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power , in, Hall, Stuart,

Gieben, Bram, (eds.), 1992, Formations of Modernity , Polity Press, Cambridge.

Harvey, David, 1989, The Condition of Postmodernity , Blackwell, Oxford.

Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 1980, Metaphors We Live By , University of Chicago

Press, Chicago.

Massey, Doreen, 1991, A Global Sense of Place , in, Marxism Today , June 1991,

[online], Available from < http://www.westga.edu/~awalter/teaching/global/

massey1991.pdf >, [Accessed 06/01/2011].

Morley, David, 2001 , Belongings : Place, Space and Identity in a Mediated World , in,

European Journal of Cultural Studies 2001 4: 425, [Online], Available from

< http://ecs.sagepub.com/content/4/4/425 > [Accessed - 04/01/2011].

Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Stephenson, Niamh, Tsianos, Vassilis, 2008, Escape Routes:

Control and Subversion in the 21 st Century , Pluto Press, London.

Simmel, George, 1997, The Metropolis and Mental Life , in, Frisby, David,

Featherstone, Mike, (eds.), 1997, Simmel on Culture , Sage, London.

Urry, John, 2000, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First

Century , Routledge, Oxon.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1991, Unthinking Social Science , Polity, Cambridge.
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