Comments on: Margaret Archer on the morphogenetic society and the implications for peer to peer socialisation

By: Geof

Geof — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:59:08 +0000

Hmm. I wonder if the collapse of finance capitalism and the ensuing collapse of the service economy will alter this outline. Wasn’t change just as alarming in Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class? Where is the underlying logic driving these surface social trends and if the logic falters (ie the present crash) is there a reversion; or more likely, the creation of new social forms. Where is the impact of the coming crises (environment, consumer economy). This appears as the broader sociological form of the epidemiological health crisis (particularly obesity. There is too much sociology here and not enough psychology (where are the deep structures?), economics, or forwards history (ie it presents forward the present when the present is rupturing.

By: Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:11:15 +0000

Thanks for that comment.

I would also argue that the tenuousness of current peer to peer socialization, demands a strong institutional meta-regulator, including state forms, that compensate for weaknesses in existing ‘spontaneous’ social structures,

Michel

By: donald

donald — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:47:57 +0000

Seems this must entail a sort of hyper-individualism, a continuous low-lying alienation previously only reserved for French writers on cloudy mornings.

Seems there might be a middle ground between the collapsing family and tenuous peer-groups. Socialization has always involved a blending of the two, and to presume otherwise is to accept a fairly groundless image of cultural history. “Families” are almost always extended kin groups, and the idea of “kin” is generally more nebulous than the blood ties we tend to accept now. And religious communities are very often communities bound around a particular social project, not simply some ethnic identifier. I mean this is sort of a problem, right? Are the categories of social association “ethnic” descriptors, or are they shared projects? Historically association has always entailed both general tendencies, to varying degrees, because ultimately any social clustering is based on the sharing of memes, habits, and experiences.

The difference now seems to be that the speed of communication, alongside the destabilization of the nuclear family in the West, is just tilting the balance a bit more towards raw association without public ritual and routinized habit. I think that means that we have to reinvent sociality to accommodate this new dynamism, which people clearly are trying to do.

So instead of focusing so much on “people” as the unit of socialization- the family, the peer group- for an individual subject, maybe we should just shift the focus to actual projects. Projects, partially discrete, partially open, bring together family and peer bonds, emotional, aesthetic, and utilitarian needs, etc. A project group allows a sort of collaborative reflexivity, taking the edge off a little.