The question that really fascinates me is that of how social assemblages hold together. When we look at the world about us we notice that social assemblages are patterned, that they have a certain degree of regularity, and that they have a certain durability in time. Why don’t they fall apart? Why do human beings maintain regular and ongoing patterned relations in the way that they do? Why don’t they succumb to entropy? There’s a scene from the Travolta film Michael that gets at this point. The arch-angel Michael is talking about his contributions to human history, and among them he lists the invention of standing in line. “Before that”, Michael remarked, “people just kinda milled about. It was a mess.” So that’s really the question. Why don’t people just mill about? How do people come to routinely stand in line? How do regular patterned relations that endure in time emerge when, by all rights, the social world should just be a sort of chaos with people milling about in a sort of endless Brownian motion without order?
Social theory and the social sciences give us a lot of answers to these questions. Sometimes we’re told that it’s the domain of representation and meaning that holds people together. Representation is here treated as the glue of social assemblages. Here I use representation very broadly to include norms, laws, signs, beliefs, narratives, ideologies, myths and all the rest. While clearly these must be important components of social assemblage, I think we need only look at any online discussion list to see why it falls short. Even among discussion lists composed by people who have very similar aims– say a political discussion list devoted to a particular party –we encounter just how diverse the representations are that inhabit people. Endlessly we encounter just how different people are in their beliefs, their understanding of the world, the narratives that inform them, their interpretations of others, and so on. Doesn’t this reveal that the domain of representation is a pretty weak glue? Can representation really account for why people don’t just mill about in Brownian motion, in a high state of entropy? We are elsewhere told, in a similar vein, that society is held together by “structures”. Yet the concept of structure doesn’t really seem to tell us very much. In a way structure is like Newton’s concept of gravity. Newton’s told us that there are certain regularities in the motion of objects, but it did not tell us the mechanism by which gravity is exercised. For many centuries this was a question quietly brushed under the carpet. We also talk about power, yet here we face again the question of why people internalize power, how different people internalize it in a regular or similar fashion, and why we recognize it at all.
It seems that social theory needs a shift similar to that between the shift from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics. Newton conceived of gravity as a sort of force that somehow attracts bodies to one another. The big mystery was how such connections could take place between objects located vast distances apart in space. Einstein’s revolution consisted of seeing space-time as a sort of fabric that is bent, warped, and curved by the mass of the objects that populate it. Here there is no force that exercises gravity, but rather, there is a curvature of space along which objects “roll” in relation to one another. The manner in which the sun curves space creates a sort of curve along which the other planets “roll”, keeping them in the orbit of the sun. Likewise in the relation between the moon and the earth.
read on!
Increasingly I find myself thinking about the regularity of social assemblages by analogy to this sort of curvature of space that we call gravity. Under this model, it is not so must the domain of representation that holds the social realm together, but rather the manner in which nonhuman objects “curve space-time”, channeling human bodies in particular ways, generating patterned regularities. Here representations can be quite diverse, people can fundamentally disagree, fail to understand one another, etc., yet their motion is still channeled in particular directions by the nonhuman entities (technologies, environment, institutions, microbes, natural resources, food, etc.) that structure their environment. Just as it is very difficult to escape the gravity of the earth, the manner in which these entities organize the environment make it very difficult to escape the regular pattern of the social assemblage. We literally “fall” in certain directions due to the material topography of the world in which we live. It would not be ideology that holds us in place– though that too –but this material topography that channels us in particular directions.
In this connection, I’m led to think of Braudel’s analysis of rice production in Asia. The benefit of rice, unlike many other grains (especially wheat), is that it is a hardy grain that has a fairly reliable and abundant yield. Rice can be harvested two to three times a year. The drawback of rice is that it is an extremely labor intensive grain to both plant and harvest. A social assemblage that attaches itself to rice as the source of energy that will sustain it is thus led to organize itself in particular ways. Rice production will, on the one hand, come to organize spatial and temporal relations. Braudel recounts how the Chinese highlands weren’t developed as a result of the abundance that rice provided, while the raising of livestock took on a highly secondary status so is not to take up valuable land where rice can be grown (spatial relations). Similarly, rice production comes to structure time due to the harvest and planting patterns. Finally, because of the labor intensive nature of its planting and harvesting, rice lends itself to a certain form of collective organization and social stratification. Here a nonhuman entity exercises a sort of gravitational field that channels people in a particular direction. While people might find this form of life abominable and envision all sorts of alternatives, because they are dependent on both rice and their social relations, they find it very difficult to escape the orbit of this sort of life. To do so would require a restructuring of the material field, of how the world has geographically been put together as a result of labor and the cultivation of the land, along with the social organization that has arisen around this field.
In proposing such a thesis, my intention is not to reject the domain of representation, nor the domain of the phenomenological.
Nor do I wish to propose a relation between base and superstructure, where materiality is treated as a base upon which superstructure arises like a sort of illusory foam. Rather, I want a sort of modified Borromean knot composed of three interlocking rings– the material, the symbolic, and the phenomenological –where we analyze the interpenetration and interaction of these domains in relation to one another. Sometimes the material will outpace and structure the symbolic and the phenomenological in certain ways, as in the case of being trapped in an ally where your movement is restricted to either going forward or backward. At other times the symbolic will outpace the material as we saw in Egypt last week, where the evental declarations of revolution challenged the existing state of power, but where institutions still need to catch up and be restructured and where economy is such that 40% of the population is living on less than two dollars a day. These evental delcarations in the order of the symbolic, no doubt, will provide an impetus to the restructuring of the material. Here all sorts of questions will emerge surrounding the inertia of the material, how it patterns social relations, and whether and to what extent it might be possible to overcome that intertia. At other times it will be the phenomenological that outpaces both the material and the symbolic. This, for example, would be Ellison’s Invisible Man where the lived experience of the social world is well beyond the symbolic structuration of the world about him in terms of institutions, laws, ideologies, and so on, as well as material conditions.
How do all of these domains interact and influence one another? What sort of topology must we develop to think them? How can we simultaneously think materialist forms of criticism (Marx, Kittler, Ong, McLuhan, Braudal, Diamond, Latour, etc), symbolic forms of criticism (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Zizek, Adorno, etc), and phenomenological forms of criticism (Husserl, Heidegger, Uexkull, the cyberneticians, the autopoietic theorists, Luhmann, etc), without trying to reduce the other two rings to one privileged ring?
Larval Subjects . 
February 15, 2011 at 7:06 am
Larval subjects wrote:
‘What sort of topology must we develop to think them?’
The power of love – or ‘mutual acceptance’ (Maturana – the one who gives you hives – he is ‘annoying’) – and I have been the brunt of it sometimes…sounds so ‘new age’ – how ‘love’ got turned into a commodity…
i don’t believe there is any ‘topology’ that would do justice to this….borromean knots will never cut the mustard….
‘As in Hungary or Poland, collective existential mutation will have the last word!’
‘Poetry today might have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences and psychoanalysis combined’,. ( Guattari, Chaosmosis).
Of course, those quotes were not meant to legitimate anything….
And one can have fun with topologies…..
February 15, 2011 at 10:40 am
Is there a secret hidden message suggested by the fact that your knot is not a knot at all?
February 15, 2011 at 10:42 am
(not meaning to be silly – I think this is a highly positive direction of enquiry).
February 15, 2011 at 6:27 pm
this seems to be The question in many ways, on the required reading list for clearing some ground for possible frames/prototypes should be Stephen Turner’s The Social Theory of Practices.
February 15, 2011 at 10:05 pm
on a more constructive note I would recommend Paul Rabinow’s Anthropos Today&Marking Time, Avital Ronell’s Test Drive and
http://herts.academia.edu/DanielDHutto
Click to access SB1.0_Rabinow.pdf
February 15, 2011 at 11:01 pm
Wish I had a video of what I’m about to attempt to describe (I searched, but there was nothing on Youtube): I may have accidentally been a sentient witness to a truly Local Manifestation! If you could visualize it, however, it might possibly make for a more dynamic model than the Borromean Knot. In any case, I offer it for your consideration and use value.
I recently had occasion to see three ingenious country-dancing “cowgirls”–older ladies all–who had invented a modification of the Texas Ten-Step for three partners [M, S, and P] rather than the usual two. Instead of holding hands at shoulder height, their hands were joined, crossed at the wrists, and held out before them, waist-level. Side by side by side they stepped in sync to the music, and on the count of ten without breaking their hold the cowgirl on the far right was able [outpacing and thereby structuring the others who had to quicken their shorter steps] to twirl her own position all they way over to the far left: the one who had been on the left was now in the middle, the one in the middle now on the far right, and so they carried on for the duration of the dance. Breaking hold (which they did not do; would‘ve fallen on their spurs at the very thought!) privileges no one, reconfiguring them all equally as part of an open-ended curlicue.
Why can’t an Onticology have a few down-home yet festive flourishes? The little I know of Lacan’s personality I think he might’ve gotten a kick out if it, though no doubt he would‘ve passed on the poorly seasoned chicken ‘n dumplings dinner.
February 16, 2011 at 12:37 am
I like this idea that rice exerts some kind of compulsion like a gravitational field…
February 16, 2011 at 3:48 am
I enjoy the idea of ‘falling into’ and, like the above comment, of compulsion. I think in terms of compulsion there is something here- compulsion being a behaviour that one simply must carry out given certain conditions.
I’m reminded of Frere Dupont’s essay ‘On Earthen Cup’, in which the idea of ritual is put forward as a possible reason for assemblages holding together- although s/he doesn’t use that term.
Drawing on the ICD-10 criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder, Dupont writes that;
‘They are counting and counting, they are arranging objects, they are finding importance in cleaning, they are pacing a number of steps, they are repeating a set of words, they are balancing left and right, they are holding their breath, they are making a noise to drown out a thought. They are setting boundaries and defining territories. Obsessive compulsives are trapped within the most basic mechanical gestures of inventing social rules, their’s is a perpetual volcanic activity that sometimes succeeds in causing new islands. Social organisation is first founded from compulsive, irrational, rituals, but these rituals are also performed by all currently existing people at distinctive junctures in their lives – potential new societies are being sketched out, and returned, to all of the time, it is very rare however for any specific ritual to be communicated and become the nucleus of practical organisation.’
February 16, 2011 at 4:24 am
Wouldn’t the sociology of religion and the study of ritual have significant resources to add to those with which you would address the questions that you raise in the first place? It would seem to me that works by Marcel Mauss, Emile Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu, or Catherine Bell all address this question of how social assemblages assume some regularity in pretty compelling ways.
February 16, 2011 at 4:29 am
Not that you didn’t mention social theory… It’s just that I wouldn’t see Durkheim or Bourdieu as focused exclusively on representation of the sort that you seem to be critiquing.
February 16, 2011 at 5:15 am
Thomas, I see Durkheim and Bourdieu talking a lot about practices and habits, but I see them saying next to nothing about the role that nonhuman entities play in the patterning of social relations. The rice itself is the protagonist of the story in what I outline here. This is not to exclude Durkheim and Bourdieu. I’ve learned a lot from them. I just don’t think they attend to the ring of materiality, that’s all. That said, I don’t think Badiou’s habitus can do the sort of work required. Just as meaning is incredibly varied, so too with the formation of habitus. Good on paper, but when we look at the assumptions being made about how people internalize the social it doesn’t quite work. It is ampart of the story, but only a part.
February 16, 2011 at 10:06 am
Really like this post. It provides access to a non reductive possibility for interaction between three very different theoretical perspectives. When you argue (linked to the agency of rice): “Here a nonhuman entity exercises a sort of gravitational field that channels people in a particular direction.”; it reminds me of reading some of Sarah Ahmed’s phenomenological theory of direction, objects and affect. She argues that an object like happiness, something that we might be directed towards, always includes social assemblages that also “curve” us towards it (whether we like it or not, because they, “objects”, are already deemed as “social goods” in a socio-political “universe”; cf. the family as a source of happiness). For the queer deviant, this “object” of happiness which curves “us” become difficult, but remain “curving” the direction of the queer subject [even though the queer subject might live perfectly happy while rejecting the reproduction of family life, the “happiness” that family life promises – as a social good – is continuing to “curve” queer subjectivity because of the pain “it” induces on, for instance, a father or a mother of the queer deviant; “I support you in whatever you chose to do, I just want you to be happy” [i.e. queer subjectivity thus includes rejection of the happiness that a family promises to provide] Therefore, changes within the material fields [access to various resources such as income, health insurance, a healthy body et cetera] need to be thought together with changes within the phenomenological and the symbolic fields. A social assemblage like the family works in tandem with the symbolic role of happiness-objects and curve phenomenological experience and direction. This analysis, of course, lacks a clear cut view of the role of things and the material, but that could be added through, for instance, the role of bodies in proximal relation to each other and the material settings included in what constitutes family life, almost like an Latourian “set up”.
February 16, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Yeah, there’s always the question of how bodies would be put into motion in such a way as to generate the division of ritual and quotidian times or something like that in the first place (which is something you seem to be addressing with the rice)– without simply saying ‘well, that’s what humans do.’ My thought was that the discussion of ritual, practice or habitus does lend itself to a consideration of materiality in a way. There are times when social patterns, bodily dispositions, or even “collective representations” feel entirely nonhuman themselves in Durkheim et. al. in their total irreducibility to accessible mental states. And, still, it might bear considering the intersection of bodily hexis and material objects more rigorously than they do — which is what I gather you’re doing! (Niklas, I think you’re saying something similar via Sarah Ahmed). Bataille and the college de sociolgie’s discussion of mouvements d’ensemble also seems dedicated in part to exploring a non-human basis for social assemblages (and there is a kind of turn to physics there, too), albeit totally without the object-focus that you have. Rather, drawing on Mauss in particular, Bataille situates humans within the movement of an “excess wealth of living nature,” for example.
February 16, 2011 at 3:00 pm
I’m interested in the role of Work in producing and maintaining social assemblages. This could be the force of non-human entities in the environment that compels us to behave in certain ways, or it could be the repetition of certain behaviors over time. In other words, I’m interested in the thermodynamics of social systems. Without some kind of energy being put into the system it will decay over time, right? The question is what are those energies and how do they work in social systems?
February 16, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Interesting observations Jeremy. A couple years ago there was a debate on this blog about the show Life After People (not the greatest show, I concede). My thesis was that the show is actually not about life after people, but about life with objects. By taking humans out of the picture and exploring what would happen to objects and infrastructure in our absence, the show draws attention to all the infrastructure that underlies social relations and life as we know it, also showing all the work that goes into maintaining these assemblages.
February 18, 2011 at 1:12 pm
[…] Falling and Social Assemblages […]
February 18, 2011 at 1:17 pm
[…] The question that really fascinates me is that of how social assemblages hold together. When we look at the world about us we notice that social assemblages are patterned, that they have a certain degree of regularity, and that they have a certain durability in time. Why don't they fall apart? Why do human beings maintain regular and ongoing patterned relations in the way that they do? Why don't they succumb to entropy? There's a scene from the T … Read More […]
February 19, 2011 at 5:54 pm
http://www.continental-philosophy.org/2011/02/18/bruno-latour-where-is-res-extensa-an-anthropology-of-object/
February 22, 2011 at 3:46 am
[…] funded, etc), create a sort of inertia that channels us in particular directions. In my post “Falling and Social Assemblages“, I compared this inertia to a sort of gravity structuring the social. This is why, in […]