No serious investigation into the political can escape the question of the social. These words belong to Claude Lefort (‘Rereading The Communist Manifesto’, 150). The opposite also holds true: no serious investigation into the social can escape the question of the political. These formulations, however, raise serious problems for theory and analysis alike. They refuse to specify the positive content of each concept. All we know is that the social and the political are different, yet they are also inextricably imbricated in one another.
Political sociology is the attempt to apprehend and intervene into the ever-changing relation between the social and the political. Strictly speaking, the impossibility of political sociology makes it important. (This point will be expanded upon below.) This simple formulation, like Lefort’s, belies its complexity as it assumes a number of propositions: if both the social and the political change throughout history, how can one apprehend them as distinct objects? Have they always existed? As concepts, were they invented? Or were they always present, but only discovered at particular moments and for particular purposes? It is clear that political sociology cannot be agnostic towards the past. While ‘doing political sociology’ may attempt to intervene in the present in order to direct the future, such an intervention is only possible if one takes account of the past. Following Marx, it is correct to assert that “in the social production of their lives men enter into relations that are specific, necessary and independent of their will” (‘Preface’, 159). At the same time, it is necessary to remember that “What theory cannot designate is the face of the future, of the society in which the old relations of domination and exploitation will be abolished. But its refusal to make predictions by no means implies that it recognizes its own limitations, for that which cannot yet be represented is strictly predetermined in the present” (Lefort ‘Rereading The Communist Manifesto’, 155). In other words, the present relation between the concepts only makes sense in relation to previous configurations between the two. Thus, we are left not with a substantive definition of either concept, but rather with principles that may help us discover them.
- The presence of a word does not indicate the presence of a concept. Similarly, the absence of a word does not indicate the absence of a concept. Thus, the word ‘social’ may be present without the concept and vice-versa. This applies to any and all word-concept relations that one will employ while ‘doing political sociology’; for instance, race, gender, class, nation, people, sovereignty, state, force, violence, power, law, etc.
- The contingent relation between word and concept creates problems of definition. Thus, following Nietzsche, we are forced to conclude ‘only that which has no history is definable’ (Genealogy of Morality, II, 13). Consequently, the essential concepts of political sociology are indefinable. But, at the same time, it is necessary to stake a claim in the contest of defining the field.
Where the first principle indicates a relation of absence/presence between concepts and words, the second principle indicates a relation of impossibility with respect to the definition of concepts associated with words. The former necessarily leads the latter. If political sociology is concerned with the relation between the concepts of the social and the political, it is not possible to enter the investigation with an already complete definition. Max Weber’s ‘ideal types’ are of no use to us here.
The definition of a concept attached to a particular word is dependent upon its context: the meaning of ‘moral’ in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments differs significantly from the meaning of ‘moral’ in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality and both differ from the meaning of ‘moral’ in contemporary ‘moral politics’. We cannot conclude from this that one must be right and the other two wrong, but rather the word-concept relation is not fixed and cannot be fixed: each relation is equally valid, but that is not to imply that each relation is equally correct. The difference between validity and correctness correlates to the difference between ‘having an opinion’ and ‘having a position’.
It is therefore necessary to introduce a certain epistemological relativism (or, more accurately, perspectivism) into the discussion. There is no privileged point of access to the true essence of any given concept. It is not possible to penetrate through the surface of the word and directly access the concept-in-itself. That is to say, the ‘view from nowhere’ in neo-Kantian moral philosophy is exactly that: from nowhere. Equally, one could approach the question from another direction: the Hegelian ‘Absolute Knowledge’ of ‘the Sage’ is as impossible as the ‘view from nowhere’. At this point we can return to Marx: “These abstractions in themselves, divorced from real history, have no value whatsoever” (German Ideology, 43). A view is always from somewhere. (Even the ‘view from nowhere’ is from somewhere.) It is the material location of ‘the somewhere’ that prevents the word-concept relation from floating off into space. Thus, while signifiers may ‘float’, they do not ‘float away’; they are always tethered somewhere. Rather than a metaphor of floating, it might be more appropriate to make a comparison with a puppet: the strings controlling the movement of the puppet are always grounded somewhere, even if they are pulling in divergent and contradictory directions.
While both contingent and relative, the word-concept relation is nonetheless grounded in material reality. That is to say, the relation is material and real in the sense that it has real effects. How one attempts to define the relation has real effects on real people in real situations. This, however, is not an argument in favour of consequentialism. A definition is not evaluated morally. The consequentialism endorsed here is not moral, but epistemological. A word-concept relation that has effects (that is to say, causes consequences) is said to be real.
The result, therefore, is that the concepts of the social and the political have no necessary positive content. Rather, positive content is generated through conflict of the nature of the concepts themselves. In this sense, the concepts are, in W.B. Gallie’s phrase, ‘essentially contested’. The impossibility of definitively specifying the concepts is why they are so powerful. Following Gallie, it is correct to claim that the social and the political are of the sort of concepts that “are essentially contested, concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users” (‘Essentially Contested Concepts’). While it is impossible to specify the concepts definitively, this is not to suggest that it is worthless and pointless to do so. On the contrary, the essentially contested nature of these concepts demands that they be treated as concepts commanding high stakes. Any given outcome of the contest has real effects and, therefore, it is necessary to assert a stake in the contest lest one suffer undesirable real effects.
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A view is always from somewhere. (Even the ‘view from nowhere’ is from somewhere.) It is the material location of ‘the somewhere’ that prevents the word-concept relation from floating off into space. Thus, while signifiers may ‘float’, they do not ‘float away’; they are always tethered somewhere. Rather than a metaphor of floating, it might be more appropriate to make a comparison with a puppet: the strings controlling the movement of the puppet are always grounded somewhere, even if they are pulling in divergent and contradictory directions.
You know, I’ve waited a real long time for you to say something like this. While I’d go off in a rather different direction from this point, I think we could have called a truce on a great number of discussions if you had simply posed this easy dichotomy.
Which: somewhere/nowhere or float/float-away? In part, the problem was that it never occurred me to ground epistemology in, so to speak, the body. By no means an original insight, but one I hadn’t come across until comparatively recently.
float/float-away, actually. It’s a good dichotomy and one I can (mostly) get behind. Then I can say one of the things I’m interested in is how, while things may float, they don’t float away.
Some floating things, of course, crash. Like balloon floats at the Macy’s parade. But that is more symbolic than linguistic, strictly speaking. So, how is it that things don’t float away?
I’ll have more thoughts on this in the winter once I get going on my second comprehensive. These are, clearly, just sketch notes of what needs to be said now.
They don’t float away for at least two reasons that I can think of:
1. For me to have formulated or uttered a concept, I had to have had the capacity to do so. The process from formulation to expression is grounded and limited in that capacity.
2. Barring solipsism, the concepts we express have, at least in the aggregate, effects on us and our capacities over time.
Does the first refer to the physiology of the human — i.e., some sort of hard-wired cognitive ‘language faculty’ and the proper organs to do so? Or, to the fact of being born into a social context in which there is a previously existing language?
To some extent, both. But if I had to say which one was in some way “prior”, I would say that the cognitive part is prior. You can’t have social contexts with previously existing languages, until you have people that can interact socially. However trivial you think biology and cognition are in terms of overall influence, they are still necessary conditions.
However, I can also agree that for the purposes of the things that you are talking about, the previously existing language is probably the more important component of the anapaeronechia (a word I just coined from Ancient Greek for “not floating away”).
Yes, indeed, they are necessary conditions. Fish, for instance, don’t regularly speak human languages. In part, no doubt, from their lack of a human brain (or, at the very least, a hominid brain). I’m by no means an expert on this (nor do I strive to be), but it seems to me that the condition is not in-itself sufficient. We can imagine situations where language does not develop in humans or, alternatively, where human-esque brains did not develop language. But I’m neither a linguist nor an anthropologist. I have no specific examples.
The paradox of language is that it is a fully human and fully social endeavour which always-already is. You don’t invent language; I don’t invent language — no one invents language. It is always-already there. We all know from Linguistics 100, Anthropology 100 or whatever that there are numerous cultures where you don’t have the status of human until you are inducted into the symbolic order of language. Thus, you can strongly say that although language was never invented, at the same time it was invented tens of thousands of times.
It is not as though some people got together one day and decided it would be a great idea to have vocal communication! I’m even inclined to suggest that language likely developed before we were properly human: that it has a large residual animality to it – barks, chirps, whistles, clicks, etc.
I’m going to steal your word one day.
We broadly agree now on the terms of inquiry, but I do believe language has been observed to occur de novo. Deaf street children, for instance, come up with sign language on their own. Sign language bears most of the characteristics (syntactic, semantic, morphological, “phonological”–but obviously not phonetic) of spoken language.
It is considered highly possible in some important quarters that the original “purpose” of the capacity for language was not communication or any social function at all. That it serves such is a happy (?) bonus. How far this bonus can be related to the specific properties of the language capacity is still up for debate. Within whatever constraints the language capacity places on linguistic expression, I expect that the potential for investigation is still vast.
Oh and feel free to take any word I coin. I just look up the roots in Perseus/LSJ anyway.
(More pre-bed rambling.)
For the most part, speculating on the origin of language (lately it seems music, harmony and melody is given credit contra, say, Pinker who as I understand it claims that music has no evolutionary value) is as about as useful as speculating on the origin of humans (specifically) or life (generally). An interesting metaphysical — or theological — question, but in terms of ‘scientific’ value, the quest is largely mythological. Even if, say, life was made in a laboratory somehow and it evolved to a point where they creatures invented language, there is no reason to believe that that particular course of evolution in any way relates to ours.
While the street children example likely provides interesting and useful analogical data, the children have not, strictly speaking, invented language, but rather invented a language. Even as deaf street kids, they are, nonetheless, aware of language as such; as something occurring around them, even if they don’t immediately participate in it.
I don’t know about claims regarding music. I know that some people view the “externalization” of language as being necessarily posterior to the glossogenesis (another word I coined, but I’m not sure it’s the right coinage). That is, language as a structure of constrained, recursive infinity may have had its original use in organizing “thought” before it organized communication, which technically doesn’t really require anything we know of as human language.
An interesting metaphysical — or theological — question, but in terms of ‘scientific’ value, the quest is largely mythological. Even if, say, life was made in a laboratory somehow and it evolved to a point where they creatures invented language, there is no reason to believe that that particular course of evolution in any way relates to ours.
Careful here. This is a dangerous and controversial claim. There’s a serious case to be made that the paths of evolution is actually highly constrained by the fundamental features of the “growth medium”, so the paths of a de novo evolution would be highly informative as to what happened de re. The dice may be loaded.
The question of origins cannot be dismissed so easily with claims of it being “mythological” or “metaphysical” or “theological.” The question of origins isn’t even irrelevant to science about “contemporary” things.
While the street children example likely provides interesting and useful analogical data, the children have not, strictly speaking, invented language, but rather invented a language. Even as deaf street kids, they are, nonetheless, aware of language as such; as something occurring around them, even if they don’t immediately participate in it.
It’s hard to see how they would invent sign language following the constraints that sign languages do from constraints that they can’t perceive. They can obviously perceive the activity and effects of language, but that isn’t the same as perceiving language as such.
I think that your “language”/”a language” dichotomy is also a dangerous one or at least a weak one. What you call “a language” is simply a continuum of convergent individual idiosyncracies. “Language” is a capacity for that convergence. The street children example is intended to illustrate that capacity. Of course, there are weaknesses in that demonstration, and they actually emerge from the ethical situation. I mean, the best way to find out would be to lock a small group of newborns for several years in a room with robots to feed them and a camera, but we shouldn’t do this.
Careful here. This is a dangerous and controversial claim. There’s a serious case to be made that the paths of evolution is actually highly constrained by the fundamental features of the “growth medium”, so the paths of a de novo evolution would be highly informative as to what happened de re. The dice may be loaded.
I don’t deny that it may be illustrative and informative. I maintain, however, that it is analogical at best. Presented with the exact same conditions, it doesn’t seem necessary that the same outcome is always ensured. In other words, were we to reverse time to before the origin of life and press play again, it isn’t necessary — it is neither inscribed in the events themselves or into the fabric of the universe — that (1) life develops, (2) we arise as a consequence of that development, (3) evolution follows the same path.
The question of origins cannot be dismissed so easily with claims of it being “mythological” or “metaphysical” or “theological.” The question of origins isn’t even irrelevant to science about “contemporary” things.
A search for origins whether “scientific” or “religious” is always mythological. In terms of strict casaulity, there was a “before” and an “after” coinciding with the event of the origin, but that event can in no way be determined precisely. At best, all we can hope for is a general explanation: proper amino acids, proper environmental conditions, etc. Similarly, once the process of life starts, there is a “before” and “after” of the event of the creation (as it were) of humans, but that cannot be isolated with any specificity. To claim otherwise is dogmatic, dangerous and entirely mythological. While some explanations might be preferable to others (say, evolution versus creation), this does not impact upon the mythological nature of either explanation.
I’m quite (French) Nietzschean on this point — origins, that is. I’ll write something more coherent later on this point.
I don’t deny that it may be illustrative and informative. I maintain, however, that it is analogical at best. Presented with the exact same conditions, it doesn’t seem necessary that the same outcome is always ensured. In other words, were we to reverse time to before the origin of life and press play again, it isn’t necessary — it is neither inscribed in the events themselves or into the fabric of the universe — that (1) life develops, (2) we arise as a consequence of that development, (3) evolution follows the same path.
There are two issues here. First of all, there is the unsettled issue of determinism, which may never be settled until we figure out how to press rewind and actually do that experiment. And determinism is ultimately a physical issue. Secondly, I think there is a false dichotomy here: you seem to be saying that it’s a choice between always achieving us no matter how often you replay the universe and achieving an unconstrained range of possibilities. The situation is probably somewhere in the middle: there is a highly constrained range of infinite probabilities (constrained infinity is hardly a contradiction).
And if so, it’s more than trivially analogic knowledge, if what you mean by analogy is what I mean by analogy. It suggests a principle behind the interaction between evolution, development, and the environment. And if that’s analogical, than all experiments are trivially analogical to another, including first-year physics “ball dropping” experiments. In which case, it hardly matters whether it’s analogical or not.
A search for origins whether “scientific” or “religious” is always mythological. In terms of strict casaulity, there was a “before” and an “after” coinciding with the event of the origin, but that event can in no way be determined precisely. At best, all we can hope for is a general explanation: proper amino acids, proper environmental conditions, etc. Similarly, once the process of life starts, there is a “before” and “after” of the event of the creation (as it were) of humans, but that cannot be isolated with any specificity. To claim otherwise is dogmatic, dangerous and entirely mythological. While some explanations might be preferable to others (say, evolution versus creation), this does not impact upon the mythological nature of either explanation.
Let me put it this way. I don’t really care if it’s “mythological” or not. If it makes you happy to think of anything built on indirect evidence and deduction as essentially “mythological”, then from a scientific perspective this is not a relevant observation in that it tells us nothing about how to proceed. Of course analyzing how scientists may talk about the question is an interesting goal as long as its understood that these matters are all still anapaeronechic. (See? It’s useful!)
As a side note, your offhand mention above is very interesting to me:
In part, the problem was that it never occurred me to ground epistemology in, so to speak, the body. By no means an original insight, but one I hadn’t come across until comparatively recently.
See, for me it’s precisely the opposite. Without much formal training in this sort of thing, it has always occurred to me that epistemology is grounded ultimately in the “body” if you mean by that what you think I mean, which you probably do. In fact, it was hard for me to imagine that someone could not do that and still be sane. That you put it this way is very illustrative for me.
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