Adam Arvidsson - Sociology ABC
Reboot8
Unstable bond of sociology
Language
Simian vs. Human sociality
Simian sociality is unsntable, monkeys have to continuously reaffirm relations
Humans have more stability inherent because of technology eg. language
Religion is also an important technology
Early religions:
-totems, identity, who you are
-myths, explains how the world works, purpose, why, how
-rituals
Make society possible, enduring set of social relations specific to human beings
Technology: state, print, government etc.
New set of technologies, industrial production, mass consumption, mass literacy, state, bureaucracies, rational organizations
Il Principe as the first sociological tract?
Sociology as a academic scientific discipline develops in the 1850s
Community, permanent enduring in time, linked to the land
vs.
Society, money, state etc.
Society: Social facts, regularities within the mobile mass
Statistics, application of arithmetic ot the administration of population and territory
Modern society consists of a network of social facts which is called social structure
Parsons: we have values that influence culture (norms, principles, tangible forms of behaviour) which influences personality (internalized version of social structure) which influences the biological structure of action
Agency
Parsons: people act according to the implementation of the structure
social structures construct actors, can be different social structures
when two actors interact, the outcome is uncertain, the relation is still undetermined
Where does social structure end and where does agency start?
Symbolic interactionism, how people construct social relations in the freedom they have
how do people use items from social structure to construct relations
Experiment: told students to take other people literally
Disembedding
Remediation
Uprooting
Taking apart the natural bonds of community
Society marked by social structure, large scale regularities in behaviour maybe institutionalized maybe immaterial
Critical Theory: continuation of German romantic philosophy…
21st century sociology
Structure is gone, dissolved into flows of money, people, information
Agency dissolves into intensities
20th century agent had a coherent personality re: Freud
different contexts situation yield different personalities
home vs. work
net vs. real life
Different intensities
Return of the social object
Conclusion:
21st century society begins to look like simian society
Much less stable social bonds
Type of sociality now continuously activates us as productive agency, have to keep reproducing the social bond
