Download - 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
1/11
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
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
2/11
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
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
3/11
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).
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
4/11
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,
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
5/11
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
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
6/11
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
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
7/11
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
8/11
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
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
9/11
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.
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
10/11
-
8/6/2019 Assess John Urry's Claim That Sociology Must Now Be Understood and Pursued Beyond Societies
11/11
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.
http://ba%20hons%20media%20+%20comms/2nd%20year%201st%20term/Final%20Drafts/%20http://www.westga.edu/~awalter/teaching/global/%20massey1991.pdfhttp://ba%20hons%20media%20+%20comms/2nd%20year%201st%20term/Final%20Drafts/%20http://www.westga.edu/~awalter/teaching/global/%20massey1991.pdfhttp://ba%20hons%20media%20+%20comms/2nd%20year%201st%20term/Final%20Drafts/%20http://www.westga.edu/~awalter/teaching/global/%20massey1991.pdfhttp://ecs.sagepub.com/content/4/4/425%20http://ba%20hons%20media%20+%20comms/2nd%20year%201st%20term/Final%20Drafts/%20http://www.westga.edu/~awalter/teaching/global/%20massey1991.pdfhttp://ba%20hons%20media%20+%20comms/2nd%20year%201st%20term/Final%20Drafts/%20http://www.westga.edu/~awalter/teaching/global/%20massey1991.pdfhttp://ecs.sagepub.com/content/4/4/425%20