Browne. Critical Social Theory. by Craig Browne

Author:Craig Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-10-14T13:30:05.416605+00:00

Conclusion: The Globalization of the Lifeworld and its Variegated Displacements

The dynamic of exclusionary integration has been a constant feature of modernity, however the manner of its articulation has acquired some new dimensions in modernity’s third phase. In my opinion, the tendencies that result in the consolidation of the half-positions of workers without citizenship and citizens without work represent a major contemporary form of reification. The reifying experience of being subject to processes that appear independently of your actions and those institutions that supposedly provide some measure of social protection has generated displaced reactions and contemporary forms of disorderly contestation. The tendencies of disembedding and real abstraction that result in half-positions are not exclusive to developed nation states, although the connection to the deterioration of the basis of citizenship’s social rights in the welfare state is distinctive to them and reflects differences in the normative expectations that have underpinned social integration. Despite the enormous disparities in material conditions, Partha Chatterjee (2004) highlights an analogous mode of exclusive integration in contemporary India. Chatterjee argues that the current phase of primitive accumulation involves a substantial and almost complete disembedding of the peasantry, yet there is not sufficient work available in the labour market for this dispossessed population. In his opinion, a portion of the dispossessed are now in the intermediate position of being part of ‘political society’, that is, subject to intense state regulation whilst ‘not regarded by the state as proper citizens possessing rights and belonging to the properly constituted civil society’ (Chatterjee, 2008: 58).

The analysis of the 2005 French riots served to highlight the disintegrative consequences of the globalization of the lifeworld and the types of social contestation that diverge from the more standard forms of social movement contention and their objectives. In the case of the 2005 riots, the pathological effects of half-positions was evident in the violent reaction to stigmatized personalities, the anomic relations to the institution of law that functions as a medium of forced coercion, and the cultural breakdown that is conditioned by the tension between a commitment to universalism and a restrictive interpretation of national identity in the public sphere. No doubt there is a specific intensity to the 2005 French riots, yet my allusions to parallel analyses suggest that conflicts over half-positions may become more pronounced in modernity’s third phase. Indeed, structural adjustment regimes and austerity programmes only seem to consolidate the misalignment in the institutional channels of integration. Finally, my analysis suggests that whilst much contemporary Critical Theory underestimates social complexity, the older assumption that the structural contradictions of capitalist modernity have not been resolved and that they manifest themselves in displaced forms remains relevant.

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