Transcending Modernity with Relational Thinking

Front matter

Routledge Advances in Sociology

TRANSCENDING MODERNITY WITH RELATIONAL THINKING

Pierpaolo Donati ao ar F 7 i Dă Ts

Contents

List of figures ix List of tables x Introduction: Towards a relational society 1 PART I The emergence of aftermodernity 13

1 Beyond the modern dilemma freedom (/ib) vs control (lab): What after? 15 2 Overcoming the market/state binary code 35

3 Shedding light on society through a relational (not relationist) gaze 51

Part II

Insights into the morphogenetic changes of social morality 69 4 Relational society as a morphogenetic configuration 71 5 The morphogenesis of social morality 111 6 Morality and social networks 130

Part III

Why and how can the new society be “good”? 147 7 What does the good life consist of? 149

8 The emergence of new social subjects generating relational goods 167 viii Contents

PART IV The hybridisation of society: shall we forget about its human character? 10 Prospects: Should we abandon the dream of a human(e) society?

References Name Index Subject Index

231 242 245

List of figures

1.1 1.2

4.4 4.5

4.6

4.7

6.1 8.1

9.1

The relational hyperbola of late modernity

The hyperbolic relational nature of aftermodern society

at its beginning

The economic logic of a lib/lab society

The economic logic of a relational society

Aftermodern society as a societal network intertwining system and social integration

Different orders of social relationality: processual (interactional/transactional) and structural

The basic general scheme of the morphostatic/morphogenetic process by which social relations are reproduced or changed The model of the social relation as a “molecule of the social” and its environments

The structure of the social relation (social molecule) typical of modernity

The transition from modernity to aftermodernity

The molecular structure of the social relation typical of an aftermodern society

The different meanings of the value added by the relation

to something/someone (analytical dimensions of a

relational complex)

The generation of relational goods through social capital (and vice versa)

How system morality and agential morality are mediated by the morality of social networks

The interplay between individual and relational ethics

The morphogenesis of the subject’s relational identity

(along the time steps T1-T7)

A scheme of the process of hybridisation (structural, agential, and cultural)

30 31 37 39 43 56 16 84

86 88

115 140

List of tables

8.1 Three ways of defining identity 9.1 Four types of relations generating hybrids when mixed together 10.1 A comparison between substantialist, relationist, and relational approaches

Introduction Towards a relational society

Introduction text

““The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” (Marcel Proust)

Premise

After many years of theoretical work and empirical research on social relations, and on the paradigm of relational sociology, I think the time has come to outline the vision of society to which these reflections and field research lead.

As far as I can see, from the 1980s, from year to year, the relational perspective on society has proven to be increasingly topical. The reasons for this growing relevance are many. I could mention the processes of globalisation, the advent of new technologies (information and communication technologies [ICT], artificial intelligence [AI], robotics), the dematerialisation of society, the diffusion of scientific theories based on the principles of relativity, indeterminacy, the progress in quantum physics, genomics, and many other sciences, not to mention the Covid-19 pandemic which showed the importance of social relations in spreading the virus as well as in avoiding it. Overall, all these factors have accelerated the process of creating a new “relational environment.” The various economic crises of the first decades of the 21st century and then the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 did the rest, making the social relationship the protagonist of social and cultural change, for better or for worse.

This book is an attempt to show how the reality of social relations is profoundly changing modern society and will lead it to be another society, no longer modern as we have known it in the past. Of course, the book is not against modernity, which has brought so many benefits to humanity. Nor is it a question of taking sides for a conservative or progressive position. It is simply a matter of understanding that we are going beyond modernity. It is the exit from one world to go to another world. This exit is as problematic as any creation of a new societal formation.

2 Introduction What is modernity?

Modern society has been defined in a thousand ways. Sociology has been particularly rich in contributions. Obviously, it is impossible to mention even a few of the main texts. I limit myself in recalling some representations with respect to which I intend to highlight the novelty of the idea of a relational society. I think about the Capitalist Society (Karl Marx 1848), The Acquisitive Society (Richard Tawney 1923), The Achieving Society (David McClelland 1961), The Active Society — “one that is master of itself” (Amitai Etzioni 1968), the Information Society (James Beniger 1986), and, more recently, Risk Society (Ulrich Beck 1992), Reflexive modernisation (Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash 1994), The Rise of the Network Society (Manuel Castells 1996), and up to the Knowledge Society that many have talked about.

I mentioned these authors only to point out that the various definitions of society have marked an evolution of modernity characterised by a crescendo of dematerialisation of the concept of modern society.

All the connotations of what has been and still is modern society are obviously linked together. They have tried to capture the various phases and changes of the modernisation processes up to the so-called late modern, postmodern, hyper-modern, and so on. It is not the task of this book to directly address these complex issues, which are rather kept in the background.

The purpose of this book is to argue that modern society encounters a social and cultural morphogenesis that leads to “beyond modernity.” We are entering an aftermodern, or trans-modern society that I call “relational society.” I propose to speak of a society that abandons modernity and transcends it, while maintaining certain aspects of it.

This new society radically alters the guiding ideas of Western modernity, in particular the idea that society, albeit with ups and downs, is marked by a linear or multilinear progress, that time is quantitative, that science and technology are the basic factors of development, and that culture can entirely replace nature. All these ideas encounter a profound crisis. It must be recognised that the changes are moving in uncertain directions and that the configuration of society opens up to the world of the “otherwise possible.” It is, therefore, also possible for society to regress to a permanently worse configuration than in the past. Among the phenomena that contrast modernity, we must mention the fact that time becomes qualitative and circular, that science and technology prove to be the causes of perverse effects, that nature rebels against the domination of culture.

The discontinuity is not just about one or more dichotomous differences between the past and the new that emerges, because it is the same dichotomous thought used by modernity that is put into question. New ground of social phenomena feeds a new thinking about the possible relationships between opposing entities, such as conservation/change, past/future, quantitative/qualitative, and nature/culture. What relationships?

Having to choose, for simplicity reasons, a dichotomy that represents the most significant nucleus of modernity, as it marks its apogee and its decline, I assume that modernity, as a cultural and structural configuration, is defined by the opposition between two symbolic codes, which I call /ib and lab. They are still at work, as evidenced by the race to the Covid-19 vaccine which saw the free market advocates opposed to those who rightly wanted the vaccine to be considered a common public good.

At the beginning, and for a long time, the two codes took on the ideological meaning of liberalism (/ib) and socialism (/ab), freedom vs equality. The third pole of the French Revolution, fraternité, never had a significant role. Subsequently, the two codes were reformulated in various ways and became increasingly abstract. Lib has become the point of reference for individualistic approaches. Lab has become the point of reference for system or holistic approaches.

The relevant fact, from my point of view, is that /ib and /ab have been and still are used as binary codes (0/1) which exclude the “Third.” The Third can be interpreted in many ways, but what matters to me is that it is not a combination of lib and lab (as in the “Third Way” of Giddens). The Third is what transcends both the lib and the lab. It is another symbolic code. In this text, I will try to explain what it is.

From Georg Simmel to attempts to portray the future of society

The modern world is characterised by the confrontation between progressives and conservatives, left and right, and lab and lib. This world is over. Neither is the winner, although liberalism seems to prevail at times. Why can we no longer describe society with modern categories? Simply because, in the meantime, society has gone somewhere else. Where has it gone?

Who anticipated the new world, beyond the very important contributions of other classic authors such as Marx, Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, was Georg Simmel. An author who experienced the drama of the “tragedy of modern culture.” Simmel argues that the tragedy of culture comes about when the objective culture comes to dominate the subjective culture of the individual. In other words, the tragedy of culture occur when the individual’s will and self-development become submissive to the product of its own creativity, without the hope of being able to “reverse” the situation (as Marx prophesied).

As Papilloud (2018: 212) reminds us, to respond to the dissolution of values and social life, Simmel develops all his ideas on the rock of the concept of relation. The relation summarises the interpenetration of three processes: Wechselwirkung (reciprocity effect), Vergesellschaftung (socialisation), and Tausch (exchange). Simmel places different importance on each of these concepts throughout the development of his works. In his late writings, he extends the meaning of Wechselwirkung to a cosmological principle of life energy. Papilloud (2018: 212-213, italics mine) writes,

Each of these three concepts describes the same shift in modernity from substance to function, that is, from a social differentiation resting on socially defined positions to a social differentiation that itself defines social positions. For Simmel, this cultural turn in modern society leads to an abstract society in the sense that social forms play an increasingly important role for the definition of these social positions, and finally, for the determination of the possibilities that will make society concrete. To put it in a less abstract way, modern society is one in which social actors, groups, and institutions grow by concentrating ever more content in forms capable of occurring in every possible relation. In this regard, money as well as love are good examples of such modern social forms which tend to be life principles, highlighting the indifference of these social forms towards their contents, and ultimately the exchanges that they mediate, as well as towards the actors, groups, and institutions using them to build society. For Simmel, the indifference of such generalized forms potentially fosters strong social inequalities not only because they tend to be monopolized by the actors but also — and maybe above all — because they reduce the concrete work on relations to an abstract game with social forms. The tragedy of modern culture and modern society eventually finds its sociological expression in this ambivalent situation, where modern society is possible as a concentration of its most contradictory tendencies — which means, at the level of Simmel’s relational sociology, that modern society is based on relations which, at the same time, it tends to substitute against social forms.

I intend to resume Simmel’s work from where he left it as an exploratory and unfinished project. For him, modernity envelops itself in itself without being able to get out of it. As Beck will then say, modernisation becomes “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself” (Beck 1992: 21).

Simmel fragments have been developed in various directions. Luhmann (1998), for example, developed the theme of modernity in terms of shifting from substance to function. The theme of the abstractness of social forms was taken up by network analysis. Relationists, such as Powell and Depelteau (2013), have constructed a concept of relational sociology understood as an abstract game with social forms.

For me, the key to getting out of modern tragedy would be a new vision of relationality. Simmel saw such a possibility through the concept of Wechselwirkung, but the point is that this concept can only be elaborated with a theory of emergence in morphogenetic processes and with a stratified ontology that he did not possess.

Introduction 5 My proposal

My proposal starts from the need to develop the Simmelian discourse on the relationship as that reality which constitutes the only solid element in critical conditions of uncertainty, darkness, disorientation, and sense of helplessness. It is a perspective that opposes an abstract, purely relativistic, and procedural sociology.

I start from the assumption that society is not made up of people who exchange something with each other (as in the Aristotelian tradition), but that it consists essentially of social relations acted out by people who belong to a relational social context in which they are embedded. Society is not a space that contains relationships, but it is relationship itself (society does not “have relationships” but “is relationship”).

What I mean by social relationship is said in all the chapters of the book, in particular in Chapters 3 and 4. Along the whole text, the reader should keep in mind the polysemic and ambivalent semantics of the concept of social relation, which has a double meaning as a process and as an outcome of that process. It may be helpful to consider the analogy with the concept of “association” which denotes both the process of becoming fellows/members (i.e. joining) and the outcome of this process, that is the association as an organised entity with its structure. In the same way, when we say that two agents/ actors “are in relation” or “have a relation,” we can mean the process of reciprocal action (interaction and transaction) taking place between them or the product of this process, that is the emergent effect, which is the social relation as a new reality existing between them with its own structure. The latter is a social structure to the extent that it operates as a stable connection between the positions of those who are in relation. Therefore, from the ontological point of view, the social relation can be viewed both as an element essential to the process of emergence and as an emergent (structural entity) in itself.

What I care to anticipate and underline here is my critique of sociological relationism based on a radical pragmatism grafted on that postmodern culture that enhances relativism, processuality, and indeterminacy, a perspective to which Simmel himself tried to react with his Lebensphilosophie.

All relational sociologists agree that we are facing a “relational turn,” whose common denominator is the rejection of both methodological individualism and holism. But they give very different interpretations, generally of two types, sometimes combined with each other (Luhmann’s theory is an example). These two types are objectifying relational sociologies (e.g. structuralists and systems theorists) and subjectivising relational sociologies (e.g. action theorists and those who claim that knowledge is totally observer-dependent). Neither of them satisfies me, because they don’t have a properly relational concept of social relationship as I conceive it.

These two ways of looking at social relations are in continuity with the foundational symbolic code of modernity, which I call /ib/lab, where lib stands for subjectivity (free agency) and /ab stands for constraint or bond

(social structure). The two polarities are continuously transformed and recombined while keeping one point still: the exclusion of the Third. The Third is precisely the relationship.

In the past decades, there has been a wide debate on the agency vs structure issue, which has tried to connect the two polarities. But, in the end, most scholars placed themselves either on the side of the agency and the transactions it triggers (e.g. Emirbayer 1997 and his followers, who devalue the structure) or on the side of the structure (e.g. Luhmann 1995 and his followers, who consider the agency as an environment outside the system).

The search for a micro/macro link has not paid off, simply because these ways of thinking do not see the relationship between agency and structure, and, for this reason, they do not include the meso level in which the Third is located.

I consider the morphogenesis/morphostasis scheme elaborated by Archer (1995) as a fundamental methodological tool to highlight what connects micro and macro, that is relationships at the meso level, where the linearity of time leaves room for its circularity, and quantitative time becomes qualitative. I must add that, differently from Archer (2003), I think that the link of conjunction between agency and structure is not personal reflexivity, but relational reflexivity, which entails the fact that the relationship has its own reflexivity (the relational feedback mechanisms).

In this text, I will try to explain why and how the relational turn leads to a deep discontinuity with the qualifying key concepts of modern society. By way of example, I list some of them.

1 The Marxian concept of capital, precisely as a social relation (Shaikh 1990), has been radically changed: on the one hand, at least in advanced countries, it is more and more limited and regulated against the exploitation it entails, reoriented for social purposes and re-embedded through corporate social responsibility, the civil economy, and so on; on the other hand, it is redefined as social capital, which consists of relationships of trust, cooperation, and reciprocity.

2 Durkheim’s concept of division of social labour, from functional and organic, becomes relational, that is it becomes networking; the functional differentiation that, according to Luhmann (1995) characterises modernity through binary processes that enhance functional specialisation, gives way to forms of relational differentiation, which follow non-functionalist or suprafunctional logics.

3 The Weberian concept of bureaucratisation of society is radically modified by what I call the Digital Matrix surveillance system (algocracy), which destructs hierarchies and favours a more horizontal, reticular society.

4 The condition of incredulity towards metanarratives, which according to Lyotard (1984) characterises postmodernity, erodes the metanarratives of the past, while new metanarratives are born, such as those of the post-human and trans-human, the new ecological cultures oriented to a reappropriation of nature, and those of new religious movements.

Clearly, modern society does not disappear in an instant, it continues to exist. What I want to underline is the fact that, through these transformations, a “relational society” is born that generates unprecedented social forms that escape the old oppositions, such as conservation vs progress, freedom vs control, agency vs structure. On the one hand, the new forms seem to require a liquid and fluid society, but on the other hand, they seek a new connective social fabric.

From an ontological and epistemological point of view, the turning point lies in taking note that human persons are neither the architects of social relations, nor actors who passively perceive them. Interhuman relationships need to be redistinguished from other types of relationships. System reflexivity is by no means sufficient. Personal and relational reflexivity are needed.

My thesis is that only a realist and critical relational sociology accounts for the fact that human beings are both internal and external to social relations, and therefore to society, while constructivist-type relational sociologies consider human agents/actors it either internal or, vice versa, external to society. The relational society of which I speak can be envisioned only if humans are seen as operators of the boundaries between the inside and outside of society and are capable of transcending what exists in a given situation. Human subjects are positioned on the border between the inside and the outside of the structures that condition them, and by acting on the borders, they can change them.

To see the borders properly, one needs to get out of the binary code inclusion/exclusion, according to which one is on one side or the other, totally included or totally excluded, without any mediation. I argue that there is another way of seeing things. There is what I call “relational inclusion,” which allows human beings to look at society from the outside, even though they are included in it, and vice versa. This can be seen only with the “relational gaze.”

If relationality (not communication, or culture, or structure, or agency per se) is the constitutive fact of society, then agents (individual and collective) are certainly embedded in a certain context, but potentially also capable of transcending their social relations and positions. The ability to transcend given society derives not so much from scientific discoveries and technological artefacts but from the ability of human beings to change the boundaries between their interior (internal conversation) and their exterior (the relational context), because they can only live in the relationship with others, so that existing social forms can be transcended only by transforming these relationships, with and through them.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced us to “measure” relationships, their properties and qualities. The next pandemics will do the same. All epidemics have the task of showing us that the social relationship is not only a vehicle, a channel through which the virus passes, but it is also the remedy if handled properly. In a sense, we can say that the relationship brings the virus, but it is also the means to avoid it. Relationships decide the quality of our life and our destiny. They do it for better or for worse. We need to measure the distance and strength of the relationship, its qualities and causal properties. Getting sick during an epidemic like Covid-19 has strong analogies with being prey to other kinds of pathogens, such as fake news carried by ICTs or harmful consumption offered by the market. Social relationships must be measured in terms of penetration capacity. Knowing how to involve and detach ourselves from others becomes fundamental.

The underlying imperative of this book is the need to empower our “culture of relationships.” Relationships are ambivalent and enigmatic because they can generate good or evil, and therefore require competent observation and evaluation. They are a reality different from our feelings or ideas. Normally, we do not see them, because they are immaterial and invisible like air. Precisely for this reason, they have the power to manage us if we do not know how to map and handle them. However, relationships are never what we want them to be. They are never just the projections of our interests. They affect our lives even if we are not aware of it. Hence, there is a challenge.

Contents of the book

The target of this book is to show the power of social relations in generating a new society beyond modernity. To understand this epochal change, the book proposes to equip us with a new ontological and epistemological paradigm that I call “relational thinking.”

Part 1 is intended to explain the exit from modernity.

The thesis of Chapter | is that the transition from modern to aftermodern society is driven by the need to overcome the dilemma freedom/control distinction to go towards a post-/ib and post-lab society. We must seek a sociological approach which may allow us to see the new, historically unique aspects of social formations that are taking place before us more clearly.

Chapter 2 deals with the recurrent societal crises connected to the processes of globalisation. We are still short of a deep sociological interpretation of these crises differing from interpretations centred upon economic, moral, and political factors. My argument is that, in order to avoid permanent societal crises, we have to break away from the self-referential logic of the /ib/ lab configuration of society. Such a new set-up shall be capable of allowing for the emergence of new social subjects that can generate and adopt certain ethical standards of conduct and change the economic-political systems. This transformation should be structural. Luhmann would say that this is not possible, because — in his view — society operates with autopoietic mechanisms insensitive to social subjectivities. I propose to meet the challenge of Luhmannian sociology by showing why and how the emergence of a new society is as possible as it is necessary.

Chapter 3 tackles this challenge by suggesting that the solution lies in having a “relational gaze” on social reality. Today, many sociologists invite us to see social “objects” (societies, institutions, social movements, social classes, etc.) in a processual way, that is as being made of always fluid, dynamic relations. In my view, they offer a reductive and misleading vision of social reality, because they rely upon a flat social ontology rather than a stratified social ontology, so that social relations are reduced to eternal flows underestimating the weight of structures. On the contrary, in my view, a truly relational sociology should attribute a relative autonomy to structures, even if they are produced by processes. The relational gaze distinguishes between different orders of reality, the processual-interactional and the structural one, so to be able to see how ethically oriented interactions can generate new economic and political structures. It can show how the economic, the political, and the ethical are intertwined with each other. The topic is expanded upon in subsequent chapters.

Part 2 is intended to clarify how a new society is generated through morphogenetic processes, in which the moral dimension of social life plays a fundamental role.

The aim of Chapter 4 is to understand how the morphogenesis of society comes about through social relations, which are the connectors that mediate between agency and social structure. The generative mechanism that feeds social morphogenesis resides in the ways in which social networks alter the social molecule of the structures already in place. From viewpoint of relational sociology, social morphogenesis is a form of surplus of society with respect to itself. This surplus is produced through the relationality that agents/actors create in their interactions, so as to alter the initial structures. The morphogenetic surplus is not so much the product of structural effects as of “emergent relational effects.” Society increases (or decreases) its potential for surplus depending on processes of valorisation (or devalorisation) of social relations. Empirical references are given in order to show how the /ib/ lab societal arrangement is overcome by an aftermodern society that can be called “relational.”

Chapter 5 explores the germs from which a relational morality could arise. In modern social sciences, moral norms are generally explained as a product of individual actions or as a manifestation of adaptation to sociocultural institutions. In recent decades, theories that combine these two paradigms in various mixes have multiplied in so-called institutionalised individualism, a distinctive trait of Western morality. In my views, these modalities for explaining morality reflect the structural and cultural dualisms of modern Western society (based on the individual/State, private/ public, and micro/macro axis) and their compromises, which today face a profound crisis. The basic thesis is that moral norms are meeting processes of change characterised by the need for new relational behaviours between humans and between them and nature. The emergence of a trans-modern social morality takes place in those social spheres in which social relations are considered a reality endowed with sui generis qualities and causal properties, so that relational normativity becomes the fundamental moral criterion of new social practices.

Chapter 6 focuses on morality of social networks. Premodern traditional ethics has imputed the morality of action to the “acting subject” on the basis of a principle of linear causality. With the advent of modern social sciences, the social, economic, and cultural conditioning weighing on the human subject have been evidenced. The result has been to attribute moral responsibility to a “conditioned subject” who, in turn, attributes the responsibility to the existing societal structures, including so-called unjust laws. In this way, responsibility has become anonymous, and its weight has been transferred to the welfare state. A sort of vicious circle was generated, which now can only be broken by new relational subjects, both individual and collective, who take responsibility for social networks that produce relational evils at a distance. Ethics is required to make itself relational, in the sense that the attribution of responsibility for acting for good or bad cannot be limited either to a single act or to structures, but must invoke the reflexivity of relational subjects and the reflectivity of social processes that take place in networks of relations. The ethics of intention is no longer sufficient. It must be integrated with an ethics of responsibility that is not restricted to the direct consequences of individual acts but takes into account the indirect consequences of relational networks.

Part 3 tries to identify who are the bearers of a societal change that can avoid the relational evils to which the /ib/Iab configuration leads.

In continuity with the previous part, Chapter 7 wonders, in which ways and why do hyper-modernised societies change the concept and practices of the “good life?” What are the prospects for the next future? Human happiness is being redefined as the possibility of enjoying opportunities that present themselves in contingent situations. It becomes a matter of analysing who offers these opportunities, how they are used, and what effects they produce. I argue that there are three main sources offering opportunities: the /ib/lab systems, a global communication matrix of an impersonal nature, and new collective subjects of civil society organised in social networks. The opportunities afforded by these three sources are selected on the basis of a multiplicity of logics (individualistic, systemic, or relational). I claim that these different moralities of the good life are generated according to different ways of addressing the relation between “the social” and “the human,” and, more generally, according to the diverse ways of considering social relations as the decisive reality fostering human fulfilment. In the end, my thesis is that, in a society conceived as a field of opportunities, the discriminating factor of “living well” becomes the relational or non-relational nature of the good that is sought and realised by the acting subjects. This guiding idea is what supports relational social work in dealing with welfare and well-being issues. The good life is a matter of the modalities with which agents and social networks produce relational goods or, vice versa, engender relational evils.