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Analytical Method
At least since Plato's cave there has been recognition of a difference between 'things-in-the-world' and the way we interpret them. A tree may be a real thing in itself, but the name we give to it, how we understand it, requires a first level of description for us to make the most basic sense of it. A tree doesn't need to know it is a tree: for a multitude of reasons and in a multitude of settings, we do. The most commonly used word in this social-theoretical method - abstraction - is a more complex way of saying that our characterisations or interpretations of the world are descriptions. The word description itself implies an accurate reflection of the reality of a 'thing-in-the-world'. To use the word abstraction instead draws out the fundamental insight that any description is not just that, it is informed by prior understandings of 'being-in-the-world', 'knowing-the-world' and 'engaging-in-the-world' that are shaped by the lived being of the person—or god, or society—who attributes the description. There is no absolute 'state of nature' from which descriptions of the world or social interactions can be formed. To be able to describe, we are already involved in a world-view of one form or another. In the first instance, the repeated use of the word abstraction can be alienating and confusing, but if this basic explanation is kept in mind, that need not be the case.
There is also a second sense in which the word abstraction is used that it is extremely important to absorb: it is a mobile concept, inasmuch as abstractions from the 'things-in-the-world' that are being described can be more or less intense. It is a basic tenet of this theory, for example, that the increasing technologisation of almost any sphere you care to name—communication, reproduction, war—carries with it a complementary intensification of the level of abstraction of the 'thing-in-the-world' being described. For example, embodiment—the physical and mental experience of existence—is the condition of possibility for our relating to other people and to the world. Fully able or seriously disabled, it is through our physicality that we function as social beings, whether in face-to-face communications, through hand-written letters, printed missives, or by keying disembodied electronic symbols into a computer to 'stay in touch' with someone half a world away. Embodied social relations exist both as the context (the prior circumstances) and as an outcome (a consequence) of given social formations, given systems through which we create and gain social meaning.
To expand, the ways in which different societies constitute social practice affects how that meaning is shaped, presented or represented. And both within and across societies those meanings can change. Rules of bodily probity, for example, vary enormously across cultures. People living in tribal or traditional societies have a fundamentally different sense of their bodies and their embodied relations with their community. These differences also occur across time within a given culture. The dead body of someone you knew—possibly your neighbour—was an unremarkable sight in medieval Europe, particularly during the plagues, even if it was never normalized as a moment emptied of emotions. The physicality of death was relatively open, public, and ritually managed. In more recent times, the publication of such images as the assassinated Pym Fortuyn lying in a Netherlands street, a man who many people felt they ‘knew’ through the promulgation of his physical image in the media during his life, is considered shocking not just because of the violence that led to the fact. In contemporary Western culture even the photographic representation of death—unless it is in some safely ‘anonymous’ war zone or natural disaster—is now seen as a deeply private matter, unspeakable, and to be resisted. The naked, floating dead damming the waterways of Bandah Aceh are fit fare for the nightly news, but the returned bodies of US soldiers killed in Iraq are not.
This theoretical method offers a schema for analysing, or approaching reflexively, social formations (world-views) across time, across cultures and across space, without reducing any of the intricacy or complexity of the very real differences between world-views. The schema is built up of what may in one sense be an amorphous and arbitrary set of levels that stand in relation to each other across a series of planes. These are certainly not the only levels that could be used, nor is social theory the only sphere in which this method could be applied, and nor are the categories within those levels the only categories that could be used. And it should be noted that the only way in which any of these levels is 'ranked' is in terms of the degree of abstraction involved within its purview, there is no question of value or status inherent in the ordering. But for the purposes of what is being analysed here, they are enough to encompass the generality of societies within the world now and their antecedents, without becoming so bogged down in details that we would descend into arcane, incomprehensible unworkability. I suggested some time ago that the use of multiple, crosscutting levels was a 'matrix': I think that it is, in all of the senses of that word. In terms of the tables that are used to try and concretise those levels of abstraction, it is most literally a mathematical matrix, three dimensional, with traceable relations between every vector within its form. If one wanted, it would even be possible to build a physical model—a cosmology—based on the tables supplied in Paul James's social theoretical work.
It is a huge task to provide an over-arching general theory of how societies appear in the world. But to return to the opening above: there are levels to this theoretical method of social (world-view) formation and the first of them is the one we most take for granted.
How do we interpret the world at large?
Level One: Empirical Analysis
The method begins by presuming the importance of a first-order abstraction, here called empirical analysis. It entails drawing out and generalizing from on-the-ground detailed descriptions of history and place. §
The first level of analytical abstraction is an ordering of 'things-in-the-world', before any kind of further analysis is applied to those 'things'. One of the strengths of this method is that its insistence on reflexive analysis forces us to separate out the first, second and any further levels.
Level Two: Conjunctural Analysis
Thus the second step of the method entails examining the conjunctures of various modes of practice in any particular social formation, from production to communication. §
The second level of analytical abstraction, conjunctural analysis, draws on the strengths of neo-marxist approaches to historical materialism while rejecting any moves to reduce social practice to the determinations of the mode of production. It similarly rejects the argument of writers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss when they posit that the basis of all life is the mode of exchange.
The second level of analytical abstraction involves identifying and more importantly examining the intersection of various 'modes' (established sociological, anthropological and political categories of analysis) of practice, or ways of framing the 'things-in-the-world' defined in the first level. The continuities or contiguities between these modes are not generally well addressed and to do so allows for a more complex and finely-nuanced reading of historical, political and social events, and social facts.
Level Three: Integrational Analysis
The third level of entry into discussing the complexity of social relations, integrational analysis, examines the intersecting modes of social integration-differentiation. These different modes of integration are expressed here in terms of different ways of relating to and distinguishing oneself from others—from the face-to-face to the disembodied. §
The third level of analytic abstraction involves categorising ways in which people define themselves, particularly in relation to their differences from 'others'. These vary with the kinds of societies people live in, and are deeply related to variable understandings, and abstractions, of lived social being. These integrational-differential categories or modes will be explained in much greater detail elsewhere.
Level Four: Categorical Analysis
Finally, the most abstract level of analysis to be employed here is what might be called categorical analysis. This level of enquiry is based upon an exploration of the ontological categories such as temporality and spatiality. §
The fourth level of analytical abstraction outlines four fundamental social formations—tribalism, traditionalism, modernism and postmodernism — within which the levels of analytical abstraction one through three can be integrated. These social formations have historical precedents but are not restricted to a particular time or place: they can and do exist side-by-side, in tension. Each of them is characterised by particular understandings of (knowledge systems/ontologies) and ways-of-being in the world.
Each of these four levels has within them (at least) four levels of analysis that elaborate upon and differentiate levels of intensifying abstraction of the general observation being made within each of them. You will note that because it describes fundamental social formations, level four can also integrate the three categories that precede it within this schema, depending on which angle you choose to view the matrix from. In fact, if we now look at the overview table, we begin to see how deeply inter-related and inter-penetrating these categories and levels are.
| Being |
Knowing |
Engaging |
Ontological Abstraction
Ways of being in relation to others and to nature, understood in relation to the modes of categorization: embodiment and knowing, spatiality and temporality.
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Epistemological Abstraction
Ways of seeing and enquiring about the social and the natural
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Deontological Abstraction
Ways of thinking about what is 'good' and 'right'
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eg. Modes of Integration
• face-to-face
• object-extended
• agency-extended
• disembodied
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eg. Modes of Enquiry
• perceptual
• analogical
• technical
• analytical
— empirical analysis
— conjunctural analysis
— integrational analysis
— categorical analysis
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eg. Modes of Engagement
• relational
• exemplary-universal
• codified
• reflexive
— an ethic of agonism
— an ethic of rights
— an ethic of care
— an ethic of foundations
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If we look at the second column, we see our four levels of analysis. The level from which we draw the four fundamental and over-arching categories of social formation, categorical analysis, along with its companions, appears as the outcome of a 'mode'. We saw above that 'modes' are integral to conjunctural analysis, two levels prior to categorical analysis in the same list of levels. In the first column, within another (conjunctural) mode, we find the four categories of being-in-the-world that are described at length (in the chapter proper) as characteristic of integrational analysis, which we can see between conjunctural and categorical analysis. What is happening? We are moving into a three-dimensional framework using a two-dimensional graphic form. If we viewed this table from the 'bottom' we would see how the levels fall in terms of social formations. If we view it from the left hand side, we would see much of what would appear in a table that describes the interpenetrations of ongological abstraction. If we view it from the right hand side, we would see much of what would be in a table that described the levels of ethics in relation to epistemology, or the social formations of categorical analysis, if one were to appear. Viewing it from above, we see how the levels of abstraction fall within ways of being-, knowing- and engaging-in-the-world, each of which are implicit in all the levels here described.
This may seem tautologous, but I do not believe it is: it is just very sophisticated and complex. Which is why the image of a transparent cube made up of vector points works so well as an exemplar.
Each point within the cube represents an intersection of the levels of this method, each of which can be viewed from any one of the planes of being, knowing, engaging. If one then imagines that each of the parallel planes to each of those three is categorical analysis, not as an end-point but as a level of abstraction that permeates through each of those three planes we begin to see how over-lapping and interpenetrating are the influences upon the vectors or moments of those intersections.
To quote Paul James,
all we are doing is providing a method for sensitizing research and political argument. ... By moving back and forth across the levels of analytical abstraction and attempting to understand the ontological changes of our time, it is intended that Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism will illustrate its argument about the emergence of a globalizing and postmodernizing political community as it overlays other continuing forms of community-polity. In terms of the present condition of the world, the most general argument made by the book is that polity and community are increasingly held together at the level of disembodied extension and structured by the emergence of increasingly globalized and abstracted modes of practice. §
Kate Cregan
§ All these passages are excerpted from Paul James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In, London, Sage Publications, 2006.
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