Olli Pyyhtinen

We have never been only human: Foucault and Latour on the question of the anthropos:

Today, the impact of the work of both Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour is increasingly evident in anthropology, most notably in the subfields of medical anthropology and the anthropology of science and technology. However, so far the oeuvres of these two thinkers have not been compared in a systematic fashion in the secondary literature. The present consideration intends a sustained comparison of their work to the end of problematizing the notion of the human or the anthropos. We suggest that both Foucault and Latour provide us with vital means to question human exceptionalism. Instead of calling upon the essence of human subjectivity by drawing on the notion of intentionality, for instance, they break open the interiority and autonomous hidden essence of the human. While Foucault does this mainly with his notion of the death of Man, Latour’s work calls human essence into question by asserting the respective birth of non-humanity. We argue that it is especially the two thinkers’ mutual concern with relationality that makes their work central to recent discussions of ‘posthumanism’ by proposing a form of ‘ahumanism’. However, at the same time Foucault and Latour tend to neglect the ‘outside’ of relations, although both see it as providing the resources for every assemblage.

Simmel and 'the social'

Introdction The Social in Social Theory? Relationality, Life and Philosophy Event Dynamics Excluded Thirds, Included: On Being-With Relations and Circulating Objects Individuality and the Outside of Relations Conclusion: Simmel and Contemporary Social Theory

Being-with Georg Simmel’s Sociology of Association

The article discusses Georg Simmel’s theorizing on the social in the light of his treatment of the ‘dyad’ and the ‘triad’, constellations of two and three elements. What makes the dyad and the triad particularly interesting is the fact that they express the difference between the primary intersubjectivity immanent to the individuals and the objectified social forms in numerical terms, as quantitatively determined. In the article, it is argued that in its basic, methodologically simplest form, the social amounts for Simmel to dyadic interaction between I and you, that can be conceptualized as ‘beingwith’. Nevertheless, a third element is always included also in the dyad, be it only as an excluded third. Therefore, it is claimed that in order to fully understand the dynamics of social relationships, one must look at the interplay of two socio-logics, bivalent and trivalent. The ‘third’ not only interrupts the supposedly immediate relation between the two elements of the dyad, but it is also capable of transforming it into a completely new figure: a social whole, a ‘we’, which obtains a supra-individual life independent of the individuals.

Event dynamics: the eventalization of society in the sociology of Georg Simmel

Commencing from Georg Simmels notion of the general tendency of modern thought as the ‘dissolution of substance into functions’, the article analyzes Simmels own thought as an apotheosis of that dissolution. The focus is on Simmels conception of society as an ‘event’ (Geschehen), which rejects the reifying conception of society as a substantive entity, but does not reduce the social to action nor actors either- event has primacy both over subject and substance. The article asserts that the Simmelian event has two main aspects: that of reciprocal causation and inner antagonism. Along with clarifying the event dynamics in accordance with these aspects, the key sociological implications of Simmels philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) are also unfolded: it is claimed that event expresses the deep continuity between the vital and the social in Simmels thought. In the end, the uses of the notion of the event are elaborated by connecting Simmels reflections to more recent insightful conceptualizations of the social.

Life, Death and Individuation: Simmel on the Problem of Life Itself

The article argues for the relevance of Simmels life‐philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) for the contemporary thought about life and death. By considering life, paradoxically, at once as a pre‐individual flux of becoming and individuated, Simmel manages to avoid both reductionism and mysticism. In addition, unlike Deleuze, for example, Simmel thinks that we can experience and know life only in some individual, actual form, never in its pure virtuality, as an absolute flow. During the course of examination, Simmels insights will also be discussed in connection with Heidegger. The article maintains that what remains on the Simmelian side beyond the striking affinities between the two thinkers is a kind of animal vitality. Though Simmels life‐philosophy is mainly concerned with the world‐relation of humans, when it comes to death, it places humans on a par with all living organisms. A death that is immanent in life is appropriate to anything that is living. Thus the human individual, too, is dying precisely as a living organism, as some‐body that is alive.

More-than-Human

This chapter suggests that the relation of sociology to materiality is by and large characterized in terms of a forgetting of materiality. Sociological accounts have tended to privilege language, discourse, and culture and assign primary dynamism to the human realm. Against this, the chapter develops a more-than-human sociology, which commences from the idea that we need to take seriously various non-human or not-onlyhuman materials and things as integral elements of our collectivities. Society does not exist apart from material things and flows, but it involves a wide range of heterogeneous materials in its constitution. In conclusion, the chapter argues that this insight has radical implications as to how we perceive matter, human relations and ultimately what it is to be human.

Introduction: Bringing Imagination Back In

This chapter outlines the topic, main objectives, and structure of the book. It identifies the pathologies distorting the traditional virtues and calling of sociology, and suggests how the sociological imagination needs to be restructured. To render sociology responsive to the ever-more complicated world, the chapter argues that it is important, first, to take seriously the share of objects and materials in the constitution of our living together; second, to liberate sociological thought from the reifying mode of thought by beginning from relations, alloys, and assemblages; and, third, to refute the micro-macro model and attend to the multiplicity of scales on which things exist.

Matters of Scale

This chapter discusses the misgivings of the micro-macro problem and argues that scales are much more varied and multiple than the dual model usually assumed by sociological analyses. The problem with the shifting between the individual’s point of view and the social context, suggested for instance by Mills, so the chapter argues, is that it ignores the laborious work of mediation and thus misses crucial steps. What is more, by assuming a fixed, pre -given scale, the bifocal model remains blind to the practices ofproducing scales. Abandoning the micro-macro distinction, the chapter opts for an altogether different scalar imaginary, discussed through three examples: the city of Paris; the manufacturing chain of a can of cheap, ready-made food; and a stock trading disruption at the New York Stock Exchange. It gives sustained attention to how scales are enacted and maintained in associations involving heterogeneous elements, from humans with their sayings and doings to technologies, things and materials.

Turn to Relations

This chapter discusses the challenge presented by relational thought to familiar and common sociological categories. In particular, it argues for a specific kind of relational approach that it calls rhizomatic and explicates the ways in which it revises the prevailing — still dominantly substantialist — sociological imagination. Rhizomatic sociology conceptualizes the relational field in terms of ‘lines’ and associations of various kinds. What is more, it places emphasis on constant modulation, multiplicities and the connectivity of heterogeneous entities, be they organic or non-organic, human or non-human. The chapter also explores how the establishing of connections is always accompanied by exclusion and disconnection and touches on the issue of how entities are irreducible to their actual relations and yet they are constituted by relations.

Conclusion: The Promise of Sociology?

The concluding chapter critically reassesses the future of sociology and C. Wright Mills’ vision of the promise of the sociological imagination, and discusses Michael Burawoy’s call for ‘public sociology’, a more recent attempt to address sociology’s cultural relevance. As Mills’ original idea of the sociological imagination has become even something of a truism in latter-day sociology, to continue stimulating thought and provoking novel insights we need new concepts and a new sociological imagination. The chapter also maintains that it is only by imagining a different sociology that we can make sociology responsive to life in the 21st century and to understanding the world in which we live as both a human and a non-human world, marked by, say, computed sociality, ubiquitous waste and global climate change.