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17 Overview A psychology that is soundly understood cannot attempt to know consciousness by describing it as some sort of analogue to objective reality: it must rather see the fact of consciousness as something irreducible and ultimate, which can only be disclosed as such but which cannot be explained in accordance with the categorial forms of our knowledge of things, and in particular not in accordance with the categories of substantiality and causality. —Ernst Cassirer, The Phenomenology of Knowledge Far closer to man than the order of nature stands the order which he finds in that world which is peculiarly his own. Here, too, it is by no means mere arbitrary will that governs. The individual sees himself determined and limited from his first movements by something over which he has no power. It is the power of custom which binds him; it keeps watch over his every step, and it allows scarcely a moment of free play. . . . Custom is the abiding, unaltering atmosphere in which he lives and has his being. . . . It is little wonder, then, that in his thoughts the vision of the physical world cannot free itself from that of the moral world. These two visions belong together and are one in their origin. —Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities T he immanence and irreducibility of the social is virtually axiomatic in the discourse of the human sciences despite the lack of consensus about the meaning of the term and despite the continued prominence of individualism as the default position in the philosophy and practice of social science. In other words, it has proven difficult even to approximate the programmatic obligations imposed by Durkheim’s identification of society as an autonomous form of life (1961, 60). Taking the concept as primitive may allow one to select with confidence certain nameable entities (nations, licensed organizations , police, etc.) or “families” of such entities (the “system” of higher education , culture, etc.) for sociological, historical, or political study and provide a basis for generalization. But confidence comes at a cost. Here, it begs three crucial questions: How can such an entity move itself on its own behalf? In what sense is it capable of self-reflection? What kind of knowledge, and knower, corresponds to it? As things stand, intentionality and self-critical reflection are two conditions of recognizing any form of life as human. I have argued that they can be addressed productively by substituting the notion of a course of activity for the concept of an action and by substituting the idea of reflexivity for 288 Chapter 17 self-reflection. The positive arguments in favor of these substitutions remain to be developed, and introducing them is the main task of Part III. Parenthetically, it must be remembered that the arguments are intended to expand on an idea of the social that I take to be sub-theoretical to the human sciences taken as a whole, what Foucault refers to as “a sort of de facto axiomatization,” and that offer the prospect of coherence to the field of reference that authorizes those disciplines and in regard to which each discipline can legitimately claim to constitute knowledge, with its own objectifying procedures and methods of completing those procedures (2003, 182). In that respect, this investigation should provide support for two critical projects. First, it should open the way toward a critique of the human sciences different in important ways from what has been, for the most part and with the important exception of the intersection of Marxian theory and post-structuralism, available in the contemporary critical literature. Second, it should contribute to a fuller recognition of the incompatibility of many of the most important concepts and models in the social sciences with the intuitively compelling character of the sub-theoretical notion of sociality on which the validity of those concepts and models ultimately depends . I have been arguing that this is so given what appears to be an unavoidable condition of validation—namely, that what is human is intelligible only in the context of the human sciences taken as a whole—on the premise that sociality is, in its irreducibility, irrepressibility, and immanence, the uniquely shared object of those disciplines. I have discussed some consequences of ignoring the difficulty of clarifying what is meant by “sociality.” Several that I now focus on have a special bearing on three important topics: the relationship between the idea of theorizing in contrast with its ostensible product (a theory), the social as a form of...

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