A Network-Location Theory of Culture

Sociological Theory 21:1 March 2003 69-73

 

RANDALL COLLINS

University of Pennsylvania

Stephan Fuchs's Against Essentialism is the most important work of general theory that has appeared in the last 10 years or more. It is grand theory on the level with Luhmann, Habermas, and Giddens, encompassing society, culture, knowledge, and philosophy. It is general theory both in the sense of giving a framework for all of sociology and in the sense that the word "theory" is now used in humanistic and especially literary fields, the orienting perspective on what cultural knowledge consists in. Fuchs confronts the deconstructionist school of Derrida and Foucault as well as the cultural field analysis of Bourdieu, and in general takes on the main intellectual action in recent decades. His own position, which might be called a network-location theory of the observer, gives us a new position that is more comprehensive and less narrowly contentious than the positions he critiques.

Fuchs's theory of culture is a present-day development of classic sociology. Its basic conception stems from Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society, Primitive Classification, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It is social morphology in just the sense that Durkheim argued: the form of society determines the form of ideas held by people within it. A low degree of division of labor (what Durkheim called mechanical solidarity) produces concrete, particularistic symbols, which social members treat in a reified way; in contemporary terminology, we would say that a dense social network produces a culture in which collective representations are dogmatically treated as essences. Conversely, a high degree of division of labor -- a differentiated network with sparse and long-range connections ‑ produces a culture that is abstract and relativistic.

Fuchs radicalizes this Durkheimian social morphology and brings it up to date with network theory and the findings of contemporary empirical research. Fuchs's radicalism is especially [evident] in his conception of what are the units with which we are dealing. Where Durkheim simply would have referred to "society" without probing just where this abstraction is located, Fuchs points out that there are no intrinsically fixed units of social life, but only what kinds of units are determined by the condition of social networks of interaction in that particular region at a particular time. All identities, as Harrison White would put it (in his 1992 book, Identity and Control), all group boundaries, all organizations, all states or nations are not fixed but temporary crystallizations of networks in flux. They are results of networks of communication communicating about themselves, usually to outsiders. The same applies on the level of individual selves, what we in a reified or essentialist mode would call personalities; these too are fluxes, temporarily fixed in the micro-level of face-to-face communication when these micro-networks communicate about themselves. As Goffman said in the conclusion to The Presentation of Self, the self is the outcome of an interactional performance, not the cause of it.

In dissolving identities, Fuchs sounds like a late-20th-century deconstructionist - but with a difference: the state of affairs Fuchs describes is not postmodern, but has always been the case. In the late 20th century, it was popular among intellectuals to [70] tout the historically new condition of reflexivity. The emphasis on reflexivity, however, goes back to Fichte and Hegel, and in an important sense deconstructionists like Foucault and Derrida are inheritors of Hegelian dialectics - indeed, rather straight-forward continuers of the Hegel revival that took place in France starting around 1930. One might describe the deconstructionist movement as Hegelian reflexivity, with Hegel's evolutionary trend of world history taken out.

Fuchs writes in the vein of late-20th-century hyper-reflexive consciousness, but unlike some of the French deconstructionists, he most decidedly avoids drifting into Idealism. Fuchs is above all an empiricist, looking at empirical variations. He escapes from relativistic and social-constructivist conundrums by an adroit use of [Niklas ] Luhmann's system theory. There are different levels of observers; the level of an observer observing a social network is not the same as the level of an observer inside that network. This analytical scheme is related to another of the key ideas of the early 20th century: it goes back to Bertrand Russell's theory of types, devised in order to build a logic that could encompass statements such as the liar's paradox (If I say "I am lying," am I lying or telling the truth?); the argument that each of these statements must be taken on a different level of assertion was developed in Kurt Gödel's philosophy of mathematics and was paralleled by Husserl's phenomenological method of distinguishing successive levels of bracketing or epoché. (In this connection we should recall that Derrida launched his career by a book on Husserl's philosophy of mathematics.) The crucial point here is that reflexivity is not necessarily self-undermining, as many postmodernists suppose; reflexivity is just a fact about certain locations in social networks. Fuchs makes this into a sociological theory: observers in these different levels of reflexive location see the world in predictable ways.

Fuchs is an empiricist, and in my interpretation a materialist, in the sense that the social world consists in real human bodies communicating with or attuned to each other in networks. To repeat a phrase from my The Sociology of Philosophies, the network is the actor on the stage. Social individuals are shaped by communication; what they think and say comes to them from the outside in, reshaped by the exigencies of communicating it to someone else; thinking is a loop in the ongoing process of communicating, in the dialogue among imaginary audiences and parts of the self that make up an individual's mind. This is orthodox George Herbert Mead and orthodox Durkheim, taken seriously, and expressly broken free of the modern ideology of irreducible individualism, agency, and other conceptual vocabularies that reify an ultimately nonsocial individual actor

Fuchs has written a big systematic treatise, but it unfolds from a few central ideas, making the argument relatively easy to follow. There are no essences or "natural kinds" or "rigid designators," entities or distinctions that divide the world into an either/or that we must choose between; instead, everything consists in continual variations. It is the stance of observers occupying different positions within social networks that determines which distinctions they make; the very extent to which distinctions are made is itself a variable that can be sociologically explained. Tightly connected and self-enclosed networks see the world in terms of essences, sharply defined realities; loosely connected, decentralized networks see the world as fluid and relativistic; in between these extremes, category schemes have greater or lesser essentialism or relativism. But even on this continuum, nothing is fixed; over time, networks can transform, so that new, contentious, open networks can become solidified into cores that make fixed realities out of their beliefs; conversely, the cores of old networks can break apart and confident realism can shift toward greater relativism. A second key point is the relation between the network in which an observer is located [71] and the network that is being observed; when these locations are close, the interpretations are nuanced and individualized, but when they are distant, the interpretations become simplified essences.

Fuchs proceeds to breathe fresh air into key debates. A touchstone is the "science wars," the well-publicized attacks and counterattacks between the new constructivist sociology of science allied with feminism, standpoint theory, and deconstructionist literary theory on one side, and defenders of the truthfulness, realism, and impartiality of the natural sciences on the other. Fuchs points out how the debate is carried on in terms of dichotomous essences, using popular ideological dogmas on both sides: the defenders of science presenting its idealized Goffmanian frontstage, its attackers tearing away the facade and declaring there is nothing there but another form of privilege and arbitrary power. Fuchs is a specialist in the comparative sociology of science, and he draws on his analysis of scientific networks to show that both sides are debating with shadows; science is not a fixed entity but a variety of fields and subfields with different levels of network tightness or looseness, hence promoting scientific ideas that vary in the realism or relativism with which they are regarded by the scientists themselves. It is the same with technology: here again there is a continuum, historically ever-changing, between the tightly encapsulated techniques in stable networks that work reliably [versus] technologies in transition, where the networks of machines and their users are in flux. Fuchs is adept at playing off the extremes against each other; science can neither be replaced with social activism nor reduced to physical objects or brain neurons; these are endpoints of different kinds of network structures, but the world of science is a large number of networks in flux between both extremes.

Moving to sociological theory and its borderline with epistemology, Fuchs notes the tendency to argue between polarities, where either standardized research methods work or they are rejected in favor of intuitive participation and interpretation. Fuchs neatly straightens this out with a distinction between first-level and second-level observers, who are thereby located in different networks and have different priorities from each other.

 

[FHEAP Query: and what of the education debates? Can this help us with how to understand standardized testing? In a bureaucratic context? Or education itself?]

 

He delivers a witty critique of ethnomethodology on the "myth of going native"; he also notes how official observers, those acting as spokesperson for a group in its relations with outsiders, always distort reality with the language of essences. Science, properly understood, is the best we can do under the social circumstances; its knowledge should not be overestimated, but it should not be underestimated either. A science holds as long as its statements stay inside the network where they make sense; outside that network, disputes arise and essentialist ideologies are invoked, which distort everyone's perception.

A striking application of Fuchs's network-location argument is his critique of contemporary philosophy in Chapter 3, with its Nietzschean title, "How to Sociologize with a Hammer." The ideas of Quine, Habermas, Kuhn, and Giddens are put in perspective: the famous problems of underdetermination of facts by theory, the indeterminacy of translation, demarcations between science and nonscience, incommensurability between one Kuhnian paradigm and another, and Giddens's double hermeneutic are all shown to overstate their insight. All apply to parts of the continuum, in these cases, typically taking very loosely connected networks for granted; Fuchs rights the balance by showing that various fields of knowledge also move toward tight networks and thus under some conditions do manage to achieve factual determinations, translations, and demarcations.

Although having some fun poking at the misstatements of his targets, Fuchs is quite fair-minded about these issues, much more so than the antagonists in most of these debates. Unless one is emotionally wedded to one side or another, a reader would likely appreciate Fuchs's way of rising to a conceptual higher ground.

In another chapter, Fuchs considers the movement of rational choice analysis and its critics. Again he locates the constructions that both sides are making and shows where and how rationality holds and where it does not, instead of treating these as stark alternatives. A particular interesting point is that analysis of the rational decision-maker requires that persons must be unified, consistent entities; but this unity of the person is not naturally given (Fuchs makes nice use of micro-sociological research here) but is posited by observers in certain kinds of contexts. Fuchs does not rule out the possibility of individual calculators weighing costs and benefits, but shows that such individuals are constructed by certain types of organizations for their own purposes of accounting.

The general principle applies: the farther away the observer from the observed, the more the perception is construed as fixed essences.

On issues of culture, Fuchs neatly uncovers essentialist assumptions that vitiate Habermas, Bourdieu, and others. Fuchs marshals the evidence of conversational analysis to show how arguments, business meetings, and casual talk actually take place, and how consensus is constructed as a statement to outsiders rather than an accurate description of what actually happened in the social encounter. Habermas's ideal speech community assumes sociologically contradictory conditions. On the other hand, Bourdieu's model of the reproduction of stratification in fields of cultural production is overly tight, the equivalent of Mary Douglas's "high grid/high group" structure that is, one network configuration out of several possible ones. A sophisticated point that emerges in this chapter is that a discourse of tautology or circular reasoning is not so much a logical flaw as a characteristic of tightly connected networks; in such network locations, all items of discourse circulate back upon each other without being questioned, whereas the very issue of tautology is raised only where networks are separated and in conflict.

Fuchs gives a comprehensive model of social organization in which, not surprisingly, networks are the master category. Everything originates in networks and may go no further than network modes of organization. But some networks crystallize, for shorter or longer periods, into three levels:

 

(1) Encounters, the smallest unit of social organization. Fuchs's radical micro-sociology holds that the individual self is not the building block of social organization, but rather its result; individuals are constructed as ways that larger organizations sometimes use to make observations and issue communications; the individual body and brain can then adopt this observational language to communicate about itself. A typical Fuchs-move: the extent to which people are individuals is a variable outcome of observations made from different locations in networks.

(2) Groups, which Fuchs views as Durkheimian pockets of repetitively reassembling solidarity. Here Fuchs applies his analysis to contemporary worries that technology will end groups, showing that both utopian and dire predictions about the future world of the Internet (and whatever comes after that) are sociologically unsophisticated, since groups will always be an important option on the continuum of ways of organizing networks. Social movements are groups that expand their solidarity, which eventually either dissolve back into unconnected networks or routinize into organizations.

(3) Organizations are treated as a continuum of formality and informality; formal structures are those that define themselves in terms of "bottom line" [73] essences of monetary property and payments and communicate officially on Goffmanian frontstages for outsiders. But behind the outward-facing facade is the inner structure, which looks more turbulent the more closely one views it. Applying his argument about individuals, Fuchs notes that "leaders" are constructs that the official network uses when it wants to attribute merit or blame, rather than explaining the complexities of what the entire organization actually did.

Finally, Fuchs defends a version of sociological realism against both absolutists and postmodernists. Firm realities are neither impossible nor everywhere; it is a mistake on the postmodernist/deconstructionist side to make the distinction between essences and lack of essences into an absolute contrast, forcing one to make a choice. It is a continuum, and again social networks determine where and when these kinds of realities or relativisms exist. Monopoly and hegemony, too, are not absolutes; these too are historically varying constructions.

Among works of general theory, Fuchs stands out as remarkably well written. Against Essentialism is full of clever phrases, sharply worded titles and subtitles that point up the keys to the argument, lapidary formulations that could serve as catch-words. Fuchs is surely one of the wittiest writers in sociology and many other fields. Through rather complex arguments he retains a crisp and clear writing style, making the book eminently readable. The book bristles with lines that call out to be quoted. There are not many sociological writers whose books can be recommended as bedside reading; dip into it anywhere, and you are likely to find something entertaining.

In conclusion, some advice for any graduate student-indeed, for any sociologist who has not yet closed his or her mind as to where theory should go next: Take Against Essentialism and go through it seriously, as a comprehensive statement of where sociology stands now, in the beginning of the 21st century. It is considerably farther along than the cliches of French and German thought in the 1960s and 1970s that many of us pass around as contemporary theory. Intellectual history moves along, even as we contemplate what was said by the last generation back. Fuchs's book is an excellent way of catching up with the forefront.

REFERENCES

Collins, Randall. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fuchs, Stephan. 2001. Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.
White, Harrison C. 1992. Identity and Control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.