The Future of Social Theory (review)

This is an excellent book that will serve more than one purpose well. Nicholas Gane has interviewed several leading contemporary social theorists (Zygmunt Bauman; Judith Butler; Scott Lash; John Urry; Saskia Sassen; Ulrich Beck; Nikolas Rose and Françoise Vergès) and the result is a lively and accessible reflection of the state of the discipline. It works as an introductory text but also serves to point up some of the most interesting horizons in social theory today. The main themes of the book, touched upon in all of the interviews, are the question of society itself—whether it exists, what it is, and its relation to sociology—the nature of modernity, and the place of technology. The book is well structured so that, while they each express divergent and sometimes even conflicting views, each interview illuminates the others in various ways. The overall effect is a compelling sense of the questions that currently drive sociological reflection, as well as an accessible review of some of the ideas that have been important to the discipline over the last decade or so.

In an era dominated by reflection on "globalization," sociology cannot take the territorially bounded "nation" or "society" as an empirical given. The first problem we have in social theory is to identify a methodologically valid primary unit of analysis for social enquiry. In his interview Zygmunt Bauman presents his notion of "liquid modernity" as a response to this, according to which the fact that we have no stable reference points to work with is the defining characteristic of life in "hyper-modern" times—indeed, looking for them is probably a strategic error, in life as much as in theory. This is related, in the course of the interview, to the question of computer technology, since networked computers are at once both infrastructural and inherently fluid and dynamic. Those who have access to what Bauman calls "cyberspace" are the most mobile parts of the social fluid, while others are disempowered and more prone to illusions of solidity. If this seems somewhat over-metaphorical, the next interviewee, Judith Butler, usefully clarifies the role of language, indeed the writing of social theory itself, in terms of a political conception of theory, according to which it is either a practical intervention, or irrelevant. This more parsimonious attitude towards metaphor and conceptual word play is also emphasized by John Urry in his interview.

One of the pleasures of reading an interview, as opposed to a journal article, is that people occasionally let fly with polemical outbursts that wouldn't normally be permitted by the rules of academic discourse. Bruno Latour doesn't disappoint here, with some derisive (and amusing) comments on the overblown interpretative schemas of other thinkers. Denouncing other (left-wing) sociologists for studying little and debunking often (87), he argues that before the discipline can become scientific, it will first have to stop being so bad! His own (in my view dubious) contribution, in this interview and elsewhere, is to introduce the notion of human-technological hybrids and to insist that, rather than studying societies as if they were essentially human, we should shift perspective and study what is "actually there." Societies are networks involving things and people in patterned behaviors. Scott Lash provides some reflections on this particular metaphor and describes how he has used it in recent years, while also hinting at some interesting ideas still in development.

In her interview, Saskia Sassen emphasizes the role of nation states and other social agents empowered by digital technologies to produce new social forms, especially what she calls the "global city." If the book started by heightening our sense of the flux characteristic of modern, technological societies, this discussion serves to restore a focus on territorial entities that are loci of real struggles with concrete outcomes. The global city is a place where the fluidity and mobility of some social agents is consolidated and the exclusion of others reproduced—globalization and its technical politics are "endogenised" (130) and mechanisms of control are constructed and...