Abstract
It has been fashionable of late to declare the end of the basic concept of society in the social sciences. The impact of globalism, it is argued (usually by tenured sociology professors on contracts guaranteed by the state), has undermined what we think of as national societies. Capitalist globalization, growing economic interdependence, the power of multinationals and the rise of global civil society, not to mention the spread of regional blocs such as the European Union, suggests that the connection between society and the social no longer holds – and should indeed give sociologists pause for reflection on whether the link was ever sound.
The assertion that globalization involves, or will involve, the disintegration of national societies – as with other recent arguments about the end of modernity or history – appears premature to say the least. For globalism, as Nicholas Gane writes in his introduction to these interviews with prominent social theorists, is not simply eroding the power of national societies; rather it is reconfiguring and reshaping it. On this view, the nation state is no clapped-out sociological fantasy but a continuing institutional feature constantly transformed and decentred by the operations of global capitalism itself. On the one hand, the reassertion of American military power after 9/11, in which the world's sole superpower sought to show it is unanswerable to anybody but itself, is a stark reminder of the political power of the nation state. On the other hand, the global economic and informational flows of multinational capitalism plainly have no time for considerations of national states or societies.
Are national societies, not multilateral institutions, the key players of the 21st century? Or does globalization inaugurate a new age of cosmopolitan borderlessness, which freezes national state power to control global flows of finance, information and people? It is surely only possible to get to grips with such profound issues, as these interviews conducted by Gane powerfully demonstrate, by looking at how the globalization debate transforms many key sociological controversies – such as the nature of social structure or the powers and limits of human agency. And much depends, again as these interviews show, on whether one is considering the sociological, political or cultural / aesthetic features of the fabric of the global. In Gane's interview with Zygmunt Bauman, the doyen of post-postmodern sociologists, globalism is liquid, fluid, multi-layered, and produces a form of social life that is shot through with uncertainty, unpredictability and ambivalence. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck describes in detail today's world of global high tech as one of terrifying risks and pregnant with stunning possibilities. American feminist Judith Butler criticizes the linear narratives of Enlightenment, and reflects on the overcodings of the global as they impact upon the performance of identity strategies; she speaks, interestingly, of the global emergence of ‘a certain nationalist grip on the socius’, in which Islam in particular has been recast as pre-social or anti-social. And the Foucauldian social theorist Nikolas Rose suggests the critical task is to critically probe the concept of globalization, looking in particular at the ways in which notions of the global influence and shape the conduct of individual self-design and self-fashioning.
Gane organizes his book around topics, not around the development of his interviewees’ intellectual histories. The central issues raised include, principally, the restructuring of the social, along with matters concerning identity transformations and the individualization of society, the cosmopolitan turn, as well as possibilities for global justice and the force of uptopianism. The book offers an interesting and informative overview of some current trends in social theory, as the reader is presented with an abrupt leaping from post-Marxism to complexity theory, feminist to deconstructionist forms of social analysis. Along with Bauman, Beck, Butler and Rose, there are interviews with John Urry, Bruno Latour, Fancoise Verges, Scott Lash and Saskia Sassen.
Which brings me to the issue of the social theorists selected for inclusion in the volume and of its coverage of the diversity of trends in social theory today. One suspects that Nicholas Gane selected social theorists for this book rather in the sense that one invites people along to a party – send out the invitations and leave it to chance as to who turns up. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, and I certainly found the interviews with, say, Bauman, Beck and Butler to be rewarding and rich in social-theoretical insights. But what is perhaps equally important is what's left out of the book. Clearly preferences in social theory can be as subjective as tastes in popular music or designer jeans, and yet I would have thought that some consideration of other theoretical idioms – especially alternative feminist, as well as post-colonialist and psychoanalytic traditions – is necessary for grasping the sheer diversity and imaginative sweep of current social-theoretical attempts throughout the academy to get to grips with the changing contours of both the social and global. Thus, one suspects that a good many of this book's assumptions about globalization and social reproduction might have been called into question had, say, Julia Kristeva or Luce Irigaray been questioned on the gendering of the social; or if social theorists of the media, like John B. Thompson or Mark Poster, had been queried on the impacts of global communication networks today; or if psychoanalytic critics such as Slavoj Zizek or Jean Laplanche had been asked about the emotional contours of individualization; or, certainly, if post-colonial authors such as Homi Bhabha or Gayatri Spivak had been probed on the relations between globalization, the polished cities of the West and the Third World.
There's also curiously little here of American social theory, which in our post-9/11 era of unilateralism is all the more a pity. The book would have certainly have benefited from discussions with, say, Jeffrey Alexander, Charles Lemert or Richard Sennett on restructurings of the social in our age of globalization. That said, what is on offer here is engaging. The Future of Social Theory offers fruitful insights into its subjects, not all of whom are uniformly celebratory of globalism and globalization.