January 28, 2007
The Social
We have been working to specify the concept of "the social" in relationship to concepts such as biopolitics and vital systems. One approach has been to look at how various authors working in a Foucaultian tradition have used the term in recent work. What follows is a brief summary of Nikolas Rose's discussion of the historical emergence of "the social" as a political and analytic category in his book, Powers of Freedom. Rose's approach is that of historical ontology - ie. looking at how the social came into being as an entity with its own positivity, in response to specific problems of government. Thus, for Rose the social is one distinctive way of problematizing collective life. And one that is now operating in relation to other ways of thinking about and intervening in collective life. . Rose writes that his analysis is not a history of the welfare state, per se, but rather of ‘government in the name of the social’ in the United States and Western Europe. He initially defines the social as “a way in which human intellectual, political, and moral authorities, within a limited geographical territory, thought about and acted upon their collective experience for a century.†While it had important precursors, Rose dates “the invention of the social†(as an object of government) to the early 20th century. Its immediate precursor was the “moral†domain, which had been distinguished from the economy in the 19th century. While the economy had its own intrinsic laws that limited external intervention, the moral was a proper territory for action by politicians, the clergy and other reformers. In the second half of the 19th century, states established legal measures to govern the moral and physical (not yet “socialâ€) capacities of individuals, such as: restrictions on child labor, establishment of workhouses for the poor, compulsory education and vaccination of the poor, factory inspections and compensation for industrial accidents. There was a demand for data about collective life: registration of births, marriages, illnesses, number and causes of death, etc. Detailed statistical mapping of urban spaces (poverty, illness, crime, suicide, etc.) rendered moral events knowable and calculable. When seen collectively rather than individually, events that had been in the moral domain showed regular fluctuations. The moral domain now attained a specific positivity: it was a reality with its own regularities and laws. Rose terms this new reality “the social.†It was formalized, Rose writes, as two distinctly knowable entities: population and society. Population referred to the biological regularities of the national collectivity: its rates of death and disease, cycles of scarcity, endemic levels of mortality, spirals of labor and wealth. Society, too, had its own laws – which were the subject of sociological investigation. In the early 20th century, states began to govern “in the name of the social.†This meant reducing economic risks – mitigating the effects of the market on individuals. As the British reformer Hobson put it in 1911, the state had “a moral function to reassert the quality of human life in the face of industrialization.†Early 20th century ‘social’ interventions included: workman’s compensation, old age pensions, minimum wage, and unemployment and health insurance. The social is thus clearly distinguished from the economic, for Rose. If the 19th century saw the invention of the calculable individual, he writes, the 20th century was the origin of the social individual – “whose character is shaped by social influences, whose satisfaction is found within the social relations of the group.†After WWII, the domains of the economic and the social were still distinguished, but were governed according to a principle of joint optimization (Keynes): for example, deficit spending to counteract unemployment. The government had an obligation to play an active part in reshaping economic conditions for social ends. Through social insurance and economic government, the state assumed responsibility for the management of a variety of risks in the name of society. Social government sought to prevent risk and danger through preemptive means ranging from social insurance to full employment. Today we find a de-totalization of society; collectives are defined, rather, in terms of networks of shared identity – “communities.†In turn, strategies of government act upon the dynamics of communities. “Society exists,†Rose writes, “but not in a ‘social’ form.†How does all this relate to our discussions on vital systems security? If one key thing that VSS protects is "the economy", we might want to ask: is this part of "the social" for Rose? And: are the humans that are at stake in VSS apparatuses "social" beings? Here one might want to look at the kinds of knowledge-intervention objects that VSS constitutes. My own sense is that the humans at stake in VSS are not social beings, but rather things like: "first responders," "the public", and "victims."Buy Cheap Acomplia Online
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