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

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

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).

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,

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

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

missile). Societal and cultural boundaries in the new nomadic age, Urry suggests, were spearheaded by consumer goods, circling free from the conditions under which they had been produced, and moved and located within new patterns of social life (64).

Ulrich Beck asks the question, however, whether the fluid movement of social objects through the networks and flows Urry and others speak of are so independent of national, transnational and political-economic structures that enable, channel and control the flows of people, things and ideas (2002: 25). While Urry insists that the nation-state is an impotent category in sociological inquiry it should be taken into account, when moving through the system of states and the web of objects, what instruments of power currently enable mobility within this new cosmopolitan social landscape? Rarely does Urrys manifesto pause on the question of the political-economy of mobility and globalisation. Doreen Massey investigating the importance of place speaks of the power geometry of time-space compression in which different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections...differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already weak. The time-space compression of some groups can undermine the power of others (1991: 25-26). Tangled up in in the geometry of power, of course, is the Coke can and the intercontinental missile.

John Durham Peters continues in this direction when he conveys the danger of using metaphors of exile, 'if institutionalised without care, it can distort the relationship between representation and oppression disastrously and excuse a tyranny over permissible forms of identity (1999: 36). For Peters, this use of metaphor is born from 'the inescapability of fantasy' - the self confronting itself as a fantastic other. (37).

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

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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