The Age of Structuralism: From Levi-Strauss to Foucault by Edith Kurzweil

Author:Edith Kurzweil [Kurzweil, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351305822
Google: mfhADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-30T01:40:43+00:00

VI

Production de la société (1973), a collection of essays written between 1969 and 1973, recapitulated in systematic form most of Touraine’s previous ideas. His complicated formulations not only accounted for historical residues but duplicated the Parsonian four-cornered diagrams. Touraine included grids illustrating the interactions between people and systems, as well as structuralist notions that derive from Lévi-Strauss and allusions to “ruptures” in knowledge that resemble Foucault’s theories. Touraine attempted to allow for institutional upheavals and the eruption of conflict by creating a supersystem.

With sweeping rhetoric, he postulated sociology itself as one of the social productions. (It can emerge only at a specific historical juncture.) He rejected all sociologies of values (because, he said, they pertain to individuals rather than to systems), of ideologies (because they are generated by the dominant class), and of phenomenology (because it ignores political domination). He constructed systems that incorporate conflict by providing counter-elements to allow for class conflict, because he wanted to recognize the reality of class relations by looking at actual conflicts between those who control values, norms, and policies and those who struggle against them.

One of Touraine’s key concepts is historicity—the creation of a model of knowledge formed on the basis of a state of activity (in which it also interferes). Historicity is said “to transform the activity into a social system in which conduct is governed by a set of orientations, themselves determined by the society’s mode of action upon itself.”29

But historicity within a society differs and is explicable only by the meanings attributed to actions within the particular society, thereby creating its own System of Historical Action (S.H.A.). This S.H.A. is the complex of cultural orientations through which historicity operates—according to hierarchization, needs, mobilization, resources and orientation. Class relations—conflicts over the control of the System of Historical Action—are the most important components of Touraine’s scheme, a scheme that was basically composed of a “type of knowledge” which results from the specific system of accumulation.

In Production de la société, Touraine’s discussion of the political and institutional system ranged, for example, from analysis of history to organizations, from the construction of the political state to the rule of its dominant class, from government to dependence and autonomy, from institutional rhetoric to the way institutions actually operate, and from the source of social conflict to its institutionalization. Touraine found that

the institutional system is neither the simple transposition, in political terms, of fields of historical actors, nor the locus of societal values that differentiate themselves directly in organizational norms; it has an autonomous existence, but is the locus where historicity is transformed into organization. To study its functioning, the consequences of its position must be defined in relation to the historicity and the organization of society.30

Simply put, the less industrialized a society, the weaker will be its historicity, the more it will rely on oral tradition, and the more likely it will be for symbolism to outweigh rationality. According to Touraine, four principal conditions (objectives, exchanges, norms, and equilibrium) would express these factors in a functioning system.

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