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 “social”) 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.”
Andy’s summary is excellent. I commend it to everybody, and this it is a useful point of discussion.
One of the immediate responses I have is that this is a very specific story about what “the social” is. It does not include a large number of things that were done to govern collective life in the name of society. And the story that he tells coming out of the 19th century is also a very particular one. A similar story about the transposition of moral categories onto “social characteristics” could be told 100 years earlier in Britain — indeed, that is the entire story of Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation.”
There are many things on this level, but I think that the broader point is that we may be sharpening how we pose the question “is vss about the social?” I think that Andy correctly points out here (and inthe earlier exchange) that vss does not involve the detailed knowledge about the regularities of collective life (although I am not convinced that these do not reappear at times in a different guise). And I think that it is also the case that vss does not seek to regulate the routine, recurrent, structured activities of individuals as social beings, at least not in the way that Rose thinks about them. So indeed: neither the knowledge-form nor the modality of intervention resemble those of “social modernity.”
But that said, it does not seem right to me to say that the field over which vss operates is not that of the social — or “society” in the sense it was “discovered’ in the late 18th and early 18th century. Systems are “vital” precisely because they are essential to the functioning of collective life — including political institutions and the economy, but also including things like hospitals, systems of supply, markets, upon which we all depend. It is the reality of all these interconnected elements of collective life that the French Physiocrats and the British liberals “discovered” as the new basis for human life. So clearly we have need for further terminological clarification.
Andy’s last point is particularly well-taken, as the smallpox work I’ve been doing suggests that interventions oriented towards vulnerabilities associated with the disease are operating on new configurations of groups of people. “First responders” are an excellent example of a group of people occupying various institutional and professional domains, who have come to be constituted as a) essential elements of various vital systems, and b) critical as a first layer of defense in the shoring up of various vulnerabilities. By (identifying and then) vaccinating “them”, previous specific vulnerabilities are lessened, but of course, new ones are then produced. Think only, for example, of the families of first responders or immunocompromised patients in an ICU who are now at increased risk of acquiring smallpox by virtue of exposure to live virus, as shed by vaccinees. While babies and cancer patients tend not to be thought of as constituting the human stuff of most vital systems, per se, the very fact of increased risk feeds back on decisions by first responders to get vaccinated in the first place.
The point, then, is that there do indeed seem to be relatively new ways of constituting these groups, with new demands placed upon them. While first responders have, of course, existed prior to either preparedness or vital systems, they are now being thought of in different ways.
Equally as important, the specific mechanisms that enjoin these groups to do certain things (e.g., get vaccinated) are tenuous, and ironically, perhaps less effective than previous similar efforts. The irony is that the technology involved in this instance — vaccines — is essentially the same. Think only of the requirement of healthcare workers (and infants, and school attendees, and daycare providers, and first responders, and…) to get hepatitis B vaccine. Rates of vaccination are extremely high, generally speaking. Obviously, there’s a lot more that can be said, but I’ll just end with what I see as a need not only for terminological clarity, but empirical rigor as well: How are groups like first responders being constituted as, in fact, vital?
In my view, the social refers in Foucault primarily to a problem, and the population to its corresponding object. I think it is helpful to keep the two separate. Just as there was not simply a population out there that called to be governed, there are not simply critical systems out there that need to be secured. Since these critical systems are very old partly and have always been vulnerable, I think it might be interesting to think more intensely about why there is so much concern about them today. So what is the problem that gives rise to vss if it is not the social? And if the interventions do not take the form of normalization, what shape do they take instead?
And: How can we arrive at a critical account of some of the concerns around vss? For Foucault, genealogy was a form of critical intervention. It might be interesting to think about this in more detail.
Dale’s example is interesting. So while in the case of smallpox hospital staff is being vaccinated by means of a massive federal program for a largely hypothetical event, you have a rate of influenza vaccination among healthcare workers that remains far too low. Money and resources are going into fancy preparedness rather than old-fashioned prevention.
What a welcome relief to see a discussion beginning.
One view: It has become the case that multiple points of the apparatuses of the social– instituted to protect and insure and motivate the health, well-being and productivity of the population and the people — have become the sites of vulnerability. If there is a post-social form emergent or emerged than it must have elements outside the previous form. And must be in a transformed problem space (as Carlo is indicating).
I wonder whether the demand for “social consequences” as the subject matter or substance of ‘ethics” is a change beyond the social? Strathern’s suggestion that society must be invented, not protected, so that it can be ethically regulated is an excellent starting point. Perhaps we could explore this some more.
Bureaucracy permitting I hope to write something on this topic. HELP!
This is excellent. Just consider Nowotny’s felicitous phrase of “society speaking back to science” and you’ll see how far this is from Durkheim. How do we call this new object of representation and intervention that is not the population?
For another measure of distance from classic notions of “the social”, see Dutch Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm recent commentary on the relation between the public sphere and the economy (specifically in reaction to proposals by French presidential candidates Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy to make national politicians more involved with the European Central Bank):
“If you discuss a problem without solving it, the effect will only be more uncertainty and more unrest … We spend too much time talking about the economic situation — it is like talking about the weather.”
Habermas this is not. But it does speak to Andy’s suggestion that humans with VSS are more akin to “things” than social beings. For Zalm, in fact, sociality (in the form of incessant discussion) is itself a vital risk.
you can see the whole article at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/45d6e49a-bbd0-11db-afe4-0000779e2340.html
[...] energy out there. Inspired by at least three different conversation going on right now (”The Social” on the Biopower and the Contemporary Blog , The discussion of metaphor and ideology on Lab [...]
I think that one distinction that might help in this conversation is:
“a social” vs. “the social”. Based on Deleuze distinction between “a life” and “the life”; or “an event” and “the event” (ideal events/ real events). Whereas the former is the virtual; meaning, it centers on multiplicities and singularities, the latter is always one actual form, even if it presents a collective, global, general form.
“Immanence and a life thus suppose one another. For immanence is pure only when it is not immanent to a prior subject or object, mind or matter, only when, neither innate nor acquired, it is always yet “in the making”; and “a life” is a potential or virtuality subsisting in just such a purely immanent plane. Unlike the life of an individual, a life is thus necessarily vague or indefinite, and this indefiniteness is real…. We are and remain “anybodies” before we become “somebodies”. (Deleuze, 2001: 13-14)
“The social” is the term for the “individual” the actual version which differs from the multiplicity of “a social” (even if it is indeed presented as a collective form with the logic of “we”, or a perspective of “the entire” social, yet it is always one alternative, “the social” and not “a social”). In that line of thought what Carlo suggests in terms of problematization, is at the level of “a social”, and the question will remain whether the problem of VSS is of “a social”? The genealogy Rose suggests is tracing the specific types of “the social”. In this level we should ask “what specific type of “the social” is configured in the current VSS? This might be “a post- social” to a previous one, yet it is always another version of “the social”. All forms (solutions) of “the social” are related to “a social” as a problematization. With this distinction we are still dealing with the problem of “a social” which is “always yet” in becoming, yet observing a new “the social” yet to define periodically.
“Problems are of the order of events- not only because cases of solution emerge like real events, but because the conditions of a problem themselves imply events such as sections, ablation, adjunctions. In this sense, it is correct to represent a double series of events which develop on two planes, echoing without resembling each other: real events on the level of the engendered solutions, and ideal events embedded in the conditions of the problem.” (Deleuze: 1994, 188)
I like what Limor says about encountering “post socials” to prior socials, yet still encountering a necessary “social” in certain arenas. This relates to Rabinow’s earlier post on whether ethical “social consequences” research might signify a post social arena. I think that what Strathern is doing, arguably, is indicating a form of the “social” that remains, or that is remediated and “demonstrated” in the place of an operationally obsolete prior social (if i may be allowed to mix analytics). So, perhaps we can begin to think that the term “post social” is not very sharp as it cannot shed light on these recent and remediated socials? But it has been useful in pointing us toward contemporary performances of the social, so we must give it some credit.