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SOCIAL REALITY IN DISCOURSE OF «OBJECTOLOGICAL TURN»
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Ilya Katerny, PhD
MGIMO-University (Moscow, Russia)
Paper published in and translated from:
Katerny I.V. (2014) Social’naya real’nost v diskurse “ob’ektologicheskogo povorota” [Social reality in
discource of “objectological turn”]. Vestnik MGIMO 4(37): 264-274. (In Russian).
Abstract: Since the late 1970s - early 1980s a large body of research has been
under way to discern social manifestations of physical space and to perceive the
social role of objects within - from familiar utility devices to frightening nature
disasters. Recent decades of social change feature the transformation of initially
non-social substance (material objects, virtual images, cyber-messages, as well as
natural disasters) into active modulators of social processes. This results in the
"trans-social relations", that is social enaction of various kinds of objects, which
leads to the fact that non-human, non-living and even non-physical objects are
increasingly replacing humans as partners to communicate with and deeply
mediating social relations, making the latter dependent on them. Thus, the
explosion-like expansion of object-centered milieu in the human world
consistently fuels the intellectual interest in the analysis of non-subjective
dimension of the social. This trend in the social sciences and humanities may be
defined as objectological turn. The proposed paper summarizes some
developments in the social objectology, a new research domain related to studying
the practice of mixed (hybrid) communication of people with various material and
non-material objects. The author highlights the relevant approaches and their
contributors, and provides analysis of the “objectological thought” in the history of
social theory. Also, in the paper there is the classification of social objects based
on their spatial scale, forming object-centered environment from the micro to the
macro level.
Key words: mixed communication, social objectology schools, classification of
objects.
Humans have for a long time been evolving in a world where intensive social
behavior could be generated only by other fellows and where all the present objects
were nothing but taken for granted physical environment. In line with the above,
sociology was initially a science of people's ‘consensus’ (A. Comte) and
‘solidarity’ (E. Durkheim) effective against the background of materialities. In fact,
1
the entire history of sociology has been the history of the research of sociality
nature as an area of ‘communication and organization forms of humans that
reflects their comprehensive mutual dependence (italics are mine – I.K.)’
[Davydov, 1998]. However, new phenomena are enriching social experience, and
these days, when ‘smart objects’ have become omnipresent and messages on such
social networks as Twitter and Facebook can lead to global upheavals like the
‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, the enactment of various object forms in daily routine
makes it possible for non-human, non-living and even non-physical objects to be
increasingly replacing people as communicative partners and deeply mediating
social relations making those dependent upon them. According to Austrian
sociologist K.Knorr Cetina, “one distinctive characteristic of contemporary life
might be that perhaps for the first time in recent history it appears unclear whether,
for individuals, other persons are indeed the most fascinating part of their
environment – the part they are most responsive to and devote most attention to”
[Knorr Cetina & Bruegger, 2000: 142]. It is against this background that there
develop the ‘mixed communication’, in which contacts between the living and
non-living prevail, thus, forcing out traditional social connections. This brings up
another question: who or what has the biggest social capital in ‘organized
complexity’ networks today – living humans or the object environment that
surrounds them? The most ardent scholars demand that a new social contract with
the science be executed when “hidden and despised social masses of inhuman, who
make up our morality, still knock up at the door of sociology as stubbornly as the
human masses did in the nineteenth century” [Latour, 1992: 227]. In other words,
the discourse of objects requires now recognition and reflection.
Even though in the history of sociology there have been a handful of scholars who
studied certain materialities as early as in the nineteenth century, the implicit
attitude therein has always been that any social activity or ‘agency’ worth studying
is a prerogative of humanity. Even the study of money as a pivotal phenomenon of
the modernity in the years since M. Weber, K. Marx and G. Simmel, who
acknowledged its essentially antisocial, depersonalizing and reificating
2
functionality nature, has been considered until recently as ‘insufficiently
sociological’, according to R. Collins. As for physical objects, according to Emile
Durkheim's competent judgment, they can affect social processes but only with the
‘vital forces’ of the (human) society itself, which is the only source of any
activity1.
The first systemic attempt to reanimate the material social environment as an
active and socially meaningful space was undertaken by the sociologists of the
Chicago School of Sociology (R. Park, R. McKenzie, E. Burgess, et al.) in the
beginning of the twentieth century in terms of urbanism research. Studying the
‘web of life’ of a human society gradually transitioned into an ecological context
and was then interpreted as an attempt to “apply the type of analysis previously
employed in studies of plant and animal interaction to that of human
communication” (R. Park) with due consideration of specific social and cultural
factors. This implied that the ‘human ecology’ was trying to explain a social
‘symbiosis’ (R. Park) that was just as fundamental in the society as in the realm of
nature. Such social symbiosis stems from the spatial-temporal co-organization of
four elements – (a) population, (b) artifact (commodities and technology), (c)
customs and beliefs, and (d) natural resources [Park, 1936: 15]. Contemporary
French sociologist I. Joseph assumes that the environment in the ‘human ecology’
is no longer perceived as “a cover, an empty space serving as a backdrop for
certain events or actions”. It is currently considered as a “high-capacity space from
which individuals or various communities draw necessary resources for adaptation
or cooperation activity”. [Joseph, 2003: 337]. However, interpreting the objective
space as a ‘pillar of social activity’ or as a ‘resource container’ still did not alter the
perception of the society as a ‘society of human beings’.
In the 1920's, another noted scholar from the Chicago School G.H. Mead
formulated his own views of the symbolic interactionism theory without reference
1 Durkheim states, “Material objects <…> are the matter to which the vital forces of society are applied, but they do
not themselves release any vital forces. Thus the specifically human environment remains as the active factor”
[Durkheim, 1982:136]
3
to his colleagues R. Park and W. Thomas. While still elaborating on the traditional
pragmatic course of American philosophy (J. Dewey et al.), Mead puts forward a
radical thesis that few could appreciate at the time – that the entire universe is a
social experience, including culture, nature and psyche. Sociality in the form of
symbolic interaction among people underlies any possible experience and
knowledge about the environment. However, the system of social practice connects
not only human subject with each other but also subjects with objects, and objects
with other objects. Even the Solar system, according to Mead, is social in this
regard. So society is an ‘inter-objective’ as well as inter-subjective environment2.
Later, in 1969, another major figure in symbolic interactionism H. Blumer, when
summarizing the latest development of the theory, suggested that all the ‘worlds’ a
human lives in are not comprised of subjects ‘per se’ but of various ‘socially
generated’ objects, which are both the goal and the product of the actors' symbolic
interaction. Understanding the human environment requires understanding “how
the actors see the objects, how they have acted toward the objects, and how they
refer to the objects in their conversations” [Blumer, 1986: 51].
Among the worlds of meaningful objects that exist in the social realm, Blumer
discerned in tune with Mead a (a) world of physical objects (a chair, a tree, etc.),
(b) a world of social objects (people with their statuses and roles of a student, a
friend, a priest, etc.), and (c) a world of abstract objects (from thoughts to
philosophical doctrines). In other words, an object is anything that can be pointed
at and attributed a certain (symbolic) meaning. Thus, symbolic interactionism
demonstrated that the human environment emerges as a process of producing
‘common’ objects: “To indicate something is to extricate it from its setting, to hold
it apart, to give it a meaning or, in Mead's language, to make it into an object”
[Ibid.: 80]. It must be emphasized that from such perspective, objects are not
separated from subjects, they do not pre-exist the latter but appear and function in
consistently vibrating hermeneutic loops of special construction. In this context,
2 Even though G.H.Mean did not use the terms ‘intersubjective’ and ‘inter-objective’, his philosophy can be named a
precursor to both the promptly evolved social phenomenology with its highlight on the intersubjectivity of the ‘life
world’ (A.Schütz et al.) and the modern actor and network theory (B.Latour et al.), which first put forward the social
world inter-objectivity concept in the 1980's and has been actively developing it ever since.
4
the opportunity and ability of a subject (Self) to transform into an object (Another)
becomes a core mechanism, through which a human interacts with the
environment. Even though Blumer, unlike Mead, denounced an object's
stimulating impact on a subject, underlining its passive nature, further development
of symbolic interactionism tended to prove that individualization processes in the
late modernity result into an increasing dependence of subjects (individuals and
groups) on the created universe of physical and virtual objects, which come to life
before our eyes as a source of social identity, social activity and social involvement
[McCarthy, 1984]. From personal gadgets to infrastructure complexes, from
domestic robots to forces of nature, from virtual images to real mega-events –
whether it be in the intimacy of every single person's life or in the global scheme of
things – they all transform the nature of sociality to such an extent that a basic
classification of social objects proposed by Blumer can no longer be deemed
comprehensive for research purposes. Mixed communications, i.e. communications
involving various ‘irrational’, ‘invisible’, ‘complex’, ‘non-human’ and ‘inanimate’
objects, are taking up more and more time and space in our environment. This is
consistently leading to the actualization of intellectual interest towards the analysis
of the non-subject side of sociality and existence at all.
1960's-70's saw the publishing of Neo-Marxist works dealing with the analysis of
the consumer society. J. Baudrillard in his first major work The System of Objects
(1968) focuses on the consumption discourse and for the first time introduces his
main neologism – ‘the simulacrum’ – to denote imitative simulations of the natural
world by ‘intelligible artificial objects’ (primarily, technical objects). Baudrillard
immediately concludes that “the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an
effective organizer of reality” [Baudrillard, 1996: 57]. Baudrillard believes that the
‘socio-ideological system of objects’ in the affluent society constitutes a brand new
environment where people are surrounded not so much by other people, like it used
to be at all times, but rather by objects of consumption3. In 1973, E. Fromm's The
3 Baudrillard describes the world people live in today in his following book The Consumer Society (1970): «Their
daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather -- on a rising statistical curve -- with the
reception and manipulation of goods and messages. This runs from the very complex organization of the household,
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Anatomy of Human Destructiveness comes out where he theorizes on the
‘necrophilous character’ spreading in the industrial society. Such character features
passion towards inanimate objects complemented by a utilitarian, mechanical
attitude to living people and oneself as objects of consumption. According to
Fromm, “The world becomes a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to
synthetic organs <…> Sexuality becomes a technical skill (the "love machine");
feelings are flattened and sometimes substituted for by sentimentality; joy, the
expression of intense aliveness, is replaced by "fun" or excitement; and whatever
love and tenderness man has is directed toward machines and gadgets” [Fromm,
1973: 350].
Research in sociology of science and technology conducted from the late 1970's to
the early 1980's by French scholars B. Latour and M. Callon became a significant
milestone in the development of the objectological thought. While inquiring into
the process of scientific and technical innovation, they concluded that ‘material’
factors have a considerable impact on the production of knowledge on the micro
level of laboratory work. Established objective scientific facts are to a large extent
contingent effects in a constantly ‘becoming’ (unstable) environment of the
influence people (scientists), their aspirations and interests, their equipment, tools,
materials, work algorithms, etc. have on each other4. The same networks of acting
with its dozens of technical slaves, to street furniture and the whole material machinery of communication; from
professional activities to the permanent spectacle of the celebration of the object in advertising and the hundreds of
daily messages from the mass media; from the minor proliferation of vaguely obsessional gadgetry to the symbolic
psychodramas fuelled by the nocturnal objects which come to haunt us even in our dreams. The two concepts
`environment' and `ambience' have doubtless only enjoyed such a vogue since we have come to live not so much
alongside other human beings -- in their physical presence and the presence of their speech -- as beneath the mute
gaze of mesmerizing, obedient objects which endlessly repeat the same refrain: that of our dumbfounded power, our
virtual affluence, our absence one from another <…> We live by object time: by this I mean that we live at the pace
of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession. Today, it is we who watch them as they are born, grow to
maturity and die, whereas in all previous civilizations it was timeless objects, instruments or monuments which
outlived the generations of human beings» [Baudrillard, 1998: 25].
4 Moreover, it is quite different effects that are the most frequent: «If microbes, electrons, rock seams, do not have to
be protected against biasing the experiments, it is not because they are fully mastered by their scientists, but because
they are utterly uninterested in what human scientists have to say about them. It does not mean that they are ‘mere
objects’, but that, on the contrary, they will have no scruples whatsoever in objecting to the scientist’s claim by
behaving in the most undisciplined ways, blocking the experiments, disappearing from view, dying, refusing to
replicate, or exploding the laboratory to pieces. Natural objects are naturally recalcitrant; the last thing that one
scientist will say about them is that they are fully masterable. On the contrary, they always resist and make a
shambles of our pretentions to control» [Latour, 2000: 116].
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elements, or ‘actants’, including human subjects and non-human objects, make up
the substance of society in general. What separates human interactions from those
in the animal world is not a mere presence but a significant and ubiquitous
enactment of the materialities. This is why Latour asks, “Why not appeal to
something else – to those innumerable objects that are absent for monkeys and
omnipresent for humans – whether localizing or globalizing an interaction? How
could you conceive of a counter without a speaking grill, a surface, the door, walls,
a chair? Do not these, literally, shape the frame of the interaction? How could you
compute the daily balance of an office without formulae, receipts, accounts,
ledgers – and how can one miss the solidity of the paper, the durability of the ink,
the etching of the chips, the shrewdness of staples and the shock of a rubber
stamp? Is it not these things that enable totalization? Are not sociologists barking
up the wrong tree when constructing the social with the social or patching it up
with the symbolic, whilst objects are omnipresent in all the situations in which they
are looking for meaning? Why does sociology, in their hands, remain without an
object?” [Latour, 1996: 235].
Ever since the 1990's, objectological research has arguably become the most large-
scale cross-disciplinary school in modern science and philosophy. This
phenomenon goes under the name of a ‘material’, ‘materialistic’ or ‘material-
cultural’ turn [Kipnis, 1988; Vakhshtain, 2006; Kravchenko, 2012], which is fairly
accurate, yet we believe, contains overly reduced connotations pertaining to either
a strictly material ontology or the philosophy of materialism, which narrows its
scope, regardless. That said, the entire range of mixed communication studies
could be called ‘social objectology’5, implying both fundamental epistemological
interest on approaching the communicative structures of collectivity and focus on
the performance of the enacted non-subject substances within the area of
5 The terms ‘objectology’ and ‘object ethology’ were for the first time ever mentioned by European and American
designers (Marco Susani) and architects (Jeff Kipnis) in the late 1980s – early 1990s in connection with the
investigation of performative functions of electronic objects and architecture in social space [Susani, 1992; Kipnis,
1988; Kipnis, 1989]. Today the term ‘objectology’ continues to be used in the humanities field by both architects
and artists to define a research perspective, “aiming to unveil the political, cultural and historical forces articulated
by objects, which are sometimes invisible, due to their modes of production, history or the manner in which they are
constantly re-appropriated, and also illuminate resistance movements by objects to these larger political and
discursive investments” [Objectology project, 2012].
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cognizable social ontology. The scope of social objectology, defined in such terms,
includes a variety of new actively developing research schools and approaches
with the following ones standing out: object-oriented philosophy, or the so-called
‘onticology’ (G. Harman, L. Bryant et al.), mobile sociology (J. Urry), material
anthropology (A. Appadurai, I. Kopytoff et al.), anthropology of art (A. Gell),
microarchaeology (F. Fahlander, P. Cornell et al.), as well as the actor-network
theory (B. Latour, J. Law et al.), urban metabolism (P. Baccini, P. Brunner),
‘postsocial relations’ concept (K. Knorr Cetina), radical or ‘corporeal’ feminism
(E. Grosz, M. Gatens et al.), a range of industrial sociological theories, including
sociology of urban space and transport (H. Lefebvre, I. Joseph et al.), social
construction of technology or the so-called ‘technological constructivism’ (W.
Bijker, T. Pinch et al.), sociology of science (A. Pickering), ecosociology (A.
Schnaiberg), scientific and technical art and design or the so-called ‘studio-lab’
(M. Century, C. Salter at al.) and, of course, an entire array of academic and
practical developments in Science and Technology Studies (social robotics,
android science, cyborg anthropology, etc.). They are all aimed at the re-
conceptualization of hybrid ontology within the social space and time that reveals
an unprecedented scale of the extensively social impact of object environment onto
different aspects of human life.
Human society, on the one hand, is in fact drawing an increasing amount of
physical capitals from the environment, as proved by industrialization theorists (D.
Bell, et al.), – first it acquires the muscle force of living creatures, then natural
energies and materials and, finally, information and intellectual technologies. On
the other hand, though, the consistent conquest of the environment results in the
transformation of the passive resource-containing space and the emergence of an
active hybrid network reality, or (global) ‘fluids’ (J. Urry), where immense flows
of social, symbolic and physical capitals (in the form of human, information,
money, image and risk masses) being intertwined no more call for triggers, control
units and distinction between them. Materiality in all the diversity of its practical
enactment and attachment to a human is no longer ‘insufficiently sociological’ (R.
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Collins) to be ignored. The question is not of whether materialities have social
enactment but what kind of enactment they have.
Meanwhile, the whole collage of works on various aspects of objects' social
enactment is still lacking a thorough approach in terms of analyzing multiple
object manifestations in the social world. Sociology originates with Durkheim's
description of social facts that had to be considered as ‘things’. The metaphor of a
‘thing’ in this context emphasized anti-psychological orientation and was supposed
to synthesize the categories of distance and necessity: ‘collective representations’,
or social institutions, just like material things exist autonomously and objectively
constrain human behavior. However, in his later works, Durkheim in tune with M.
Mauss сoncludes from ethnographic material that ideal objects (collective
representations) do not exist on its own but get perceived through and mediated by
the world of real objects: «In order to express our own ideas to ourselves, it is
necessary that we fix them upon material things which symbolize them», as he puts
it [Durkheim, 1965: 228]. The ritual nature of social relations conspicuously
demonstrated in prehistoric forms (potlatch, sacrifice, totemism, initiation) is
directly related to the reproduction of the ‘course of nature’ that features the
experienced eliminability (up to complete dissolution) of ontological gap between
social matter (ideas) and non-social matter (objects) identifying with each other
humans, animals and inanimate objects [Durkheim, 1965; Durkheim & Mauss,
1969]. Studies on everyday life by E. Goffman and H. Garfinkel [Garfinkel, 2002;
Goffman, 1967], who openly referred to Durkheim's late works, showed that any
mundane practices make up a whole ‘apparatus’ in which cultural, stratification
and behavioral elements are intertwined with material ones. Therefore, according
to French sociologist B.Latour, intentionality and rationality of any action are not
objects' properties in the same way as they are not exclusively individuals' traits –
they rather manifest themselves as a systemic characteristic “of institutions
[collectives of humans and non-humans], apparatuses, or what Foucault called
dispositifs” [Latour, 1999: 192].
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Social objectology comes from studying social facts as things to analyzing things
(in a broad sense) as social facts. All together they make up the omnipresent ‘fabric
of life’ or fibres – structural socio-material layers where objects can be embedded
into each other, penetrate each other, be extracted from each other or form complex
constellations with each other. There are at least five layers of fibres: (1) body and
corporeity; (2) artifacts (material culture); (3) epistemic objects (information
technologies, etc.); (4) sub-human objects and bio-objects (from fetuses to
climate); (5) assemblages (i.e. ‘places and events’ and supercomplex objects, e.g.
android robots).
Three simple examples from different areas demonstrate the way substantially non-
social objects change the social fabric of life.
(1) In 1981, the Supreme Court of Georgia adopted a precedent-setting decision
whereby a pregnant woman refusing from any medical treatment for religious
purposes was compelled to undergo a caesarean section to save the life of her fetus.
The Court concluded that the state's interest in protecting the life of a potential
person outweighed the principle of parental autonomy and the right of every
citizen to the freedom of religion. Thus, the ‘natural rights’ of an embryo were
recognized as not only morally underpinned but also legally valid. This case
known as ‘Jefferson v. Griffin’ significantly contributed to the development of
modern bioethics.
(2) In 2008, an American woman from San Francisco officially changed her
surname to La Tour Eiffel after she had made a marriage vow and got engaged
with the Eiffel Tower in Paris. According to her, she had previously had a close
relationship with ‘Lance’, her favorite bow, and it had helped her to become a
world champion in archery. She then loved the Berlin Wall for a long time and
finally decided to formalize her relationship with the Parisian landmark. Today,
there are a few dozens of people who are in love with different objects. And all
these people are women known under the special term ‘objectum-sexual women’.
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(3) In April 2013, the American Stock Exchange saw a so-called ‘flash-crash’ – an
abrupt and deep plummeting of security prices. The crash was caused by a brief
message “Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured” in Twitter
online micro blog network. The market lost around 200 bln dollars in the 3 minutes
of raging panic before the official denial was issued. It turned out that the message
was a hoax published by some hackers from the account of a reputable news
agency. The stock exchange managed by automated programs accepted that new
information ‘at face value’ and immediately responded to it. Traders later said that
they had been taken aback by the impact the seemingly harmless Twitter could
have on the world economy.
What could these three virtually random cases unrelated to each other have in
common? On the one hand, these events lack conventional sociality features.
Sociology has always rested upon the idea of an unbreakable bond between
sociality and (communicative) rationality that ensures any communication among
competent individuals based on inter-subjective understanding. Furthermore, A.
Schutz, criticizing M. Weber for the inadequate rationality of his ideal social
action, already argued that mutual understanding is impossible without “affecting-
the-Other as the in-order-to motive of social action”, i.e. without social motivation
aimed at being understood by the Other [Schutz, 1967: 147-148]. In this regard,
social situation in sociology, whether it be in a constructivist or normativistic
sense, implies the agency of (a) humans, (b) competent (understanding each other)
humans and (c) acting (toward each other) humans. However, given the
aforementioned cases, we do not find these sociality features there – there are no
peers, communicative competency and (inter)action. At the same time, those facts
cannot be considered non-social. Therefore, the modern world features the so-
called ‘objectualization’ of social relations appeared to change traditional social
identification structures (class, family, communities) in emerging system of
relations, where various configurations of social objects serve as active factors for
constituting (and re-constituting) social communities, social norms, social events,
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etc., i.e. structures of social solidarity or, rather, ‘collectivity’ (B. Latour) as a
foundation of social order. The basic sociological concept of ‘agency’, employed
to specify human social (inter)action, evolves into ‘assembling’ or ‘agence-ment’6,
highlighting the connotations of both ‘agency’ and ‘element’, i.e. distributed and
interconnected activity of subjects and objects within a single ensemble of
(mutual) dependencies and attachments. ‘Agence-ment’ becomes a new definition
of sociality, inclusively embracing the entire physical and virtual space with all the
real and virtual ‘actants’ inhabiting it.
Thus, social objectology profoundly redefines the status of (practical) reality as a
strictly (inter-)subjective agency. Normative dissolution of boundaries between
three kinds of ontological oppositions becomes a key premise for the
transformation of the ‘fabric of life’ toward trans-sociality: (1) oppositions
between the human and sub-human (e.g. animal rights); (2) oppositions between
the cultural and natural (e.g. nuclear waste); (3) between the animate and inanimate
(e.g. robots); (4) between the physical and non-physical (e.g. the Internet).
This transformation results into the deconstruction of the very notion and practice
of ‘possession’ that has at all times legitimized human power over objects. The
current abundance, complexity and mobilities of objects bring them beyond control
taken for granted in the past. Nothing can be utilized or possessed in full because
objects are becoming too ‘strange’ – active in a human-like way, or unexplored, or
too frightening, or unreliable. Power and possession are giving place to the new
practice and ethics of peeping at and keeping an eye on the world of objects. Man
is rather learning to be a visitor and a warden in the world around him where,
instead of ruling, he is assigned to protect, look after and take care of, or maybe
even worship the non-human.
6 The French word ‘agencement’ was first used by philosopher G.Deleuze in terms of his post-structuralist concept
of ‘machinic assemblage’ describing organization principles of the environment as an elaborate stratified system of
joint material (‘content’) and symbolic (‘expression’) objects. “There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere
the same Mechanosphere”, Deleuze writes [Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 69].
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The latest ‘objectological’ kind of challenge that sociology is facing today is
certainly not the first one over the 200 years of its existence. Such phenomena as
feminism, post-industrialism, globalization, etc. have constantly been updating our
views of the modern society. However, the existence of the very society as a purely
human space, whether it be two interacting humans, a nation or the entire
humanity, has never been questioned so sensibly. Contemporary objectological
studies break through society's last bulwark – social order on the micro and macro
levels no longer depends on humans alone. The ‘Ontic principle’ of the object-
oriented ontology, by resuscitating the Aristotelian concept of ‘(primal) substance’,
assumes that all detectable manifestations, including human beings, cultural
artifacts, symbols, environmental objects, have the same status in the Universe,
making up a unique, a non-hierarchical, or flat, reality, for all they exist
‘objectively’, but, however, having its own ‘subjectivity’ within: “If it is the case
that there is no difference that does not make a difference, then it follows that the
minimal criterion for being a being consists in making a difference. If a difference
is made, then that being is. These differences can, of course, be of an inter- or
intra-ontic sort. A difference is inter-ontic when it consists in making a difference
with respect to another object. A difference is intra-ontic, by contrast, when it
pertains to the processes belonging to the internal constitution or essence of the
object as a system of ongoing differences. The key point here is that if a difference
is made, then the being is.” [Briant, 2011: 269].
Mixed communications reform (traditional) sociality into collectivity
(‘assemblage’). And this has not only epistemological, but also moral and political
consequences. Social progress, from the sociological viewpoint, can be considered
as a process of de-stigmatization, i.e. ‘normalization’ of the spoiled identity of
certain social groups based on the granting them fully-fledged social and moral
rights. The most significant examples of de-stigmatization in human history are the
abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, racial desegregation, the legal
inclusion of sexual minorities, and, last but not least, the involvement of animal
and embryo rights into the area of morality. And in the future, when completely
13
artificial creatures, virtual characters and cybernetic organisms claim their rights
too, we should expect new discoveries in this field. This way, in a supercomplex
society, sociology will serve not only to provide effective tools for the analysis of
social changes, but also to substantiate ways to resolve arising issues in the area of
social, cultural and personal security of people.
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