Discovery (The Social II)

(Second in a series of short thoughts.)

The discovery of society introduces a radical break into history.  It is co-extensive with the destruction of what Michel Foucault calls the 'classic episteme' and the birth of the 'modern episteme'; "it is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge."  Foucault's periodization of the break suggests certain problems -- problems that are common to his entire school limiting 'the social' primarily to statistical regularities and, in the case of Donzelot, 'the policing of families' through 'social work'.  On the one hand, 'society' had been mobilized as a term designating what we might want to call a club or association; that is, a group formed between the 'public' and the 'private' for specific purposes.  In this way, The Royal Society, founded in 1660 stands out as a marker of a new use of the word.  Yet, for these natural scientists, 'society' had as of yet to be discovered.  What remains certain, however, is that by 1748, when Charles Louis de Secondat (the Baron de Montesquieu) published The Spirit of the Laws that 'society' had been discovered in the epynomous concept.  And, certainly, by 1789 it was taken for granted that society was an object of action; that is, it could both act -- society could make demands -- and, on the other hand, it could be acted upon -- society could have demands made against it.

The positing of this theoretical object with, nonetheless, a 'real' existence, that is, as something that can both cause effects and be effected upon by causes introduces a radical break into politics, as well as knowledge.  For, on the one hand, it became possible to distinguish 'social science' in contradistinction to both 'natural science' (especially physics) and 'moral science' (especially philosophy).  Social science, of course, remains torn between these poles to this very day.  On the other hand, a new political project is born: socialism.

The rupture between the classic and the modern episteme is a shift in the representation of knowlege and its relation to the world.  The modern episteme introduces, according to Foucault, drawing primarily upon Kant at this point, a 'transcendental-empirical doublet'; thus, "man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows".  The place of 'man' is parallel to the place of 'society', but on a different ontological level.  The discovery of society, therefore, is the discovery of a certain representation.

The point of this is that the discovery of society introduces a rupture into knowledge and politics.  Let me make myself more clear for I have been dancing around the issue.  What is the rupture?  Why is this so important?  Why does society matter? 

The essential point -- not unique to our 'modernity', but also, at least, found in certatin respects in the modernity of Athens and Rome -- is that as an object, society becomes disconnected from transcendent determinations.  Chararcteristic of all 'non-modern societies' (in this nomenclature) is that society finds its source in a radical Other; something that created society and continues to ground society as source and origin: God, Nature, Ancestors -- and, indeed, even Reason.  The discovery of society is the discovery of the radical idea that society is immanent to itself; that it is 'free' from external determinations.  Politics, then, becomes a battle between 'heteronomy' and 'autonomy' -- the attempt to resist the imposition of external determinants as source and origin; God and Market included. 

The 'project of autonomy' is democracy.  Democracy presupposes the belief that everything is open to questioning.  For democrat, the division between sacred and profane is one to be challenged and questioned.  When anything is open to question, anything can be challenged -- and questioning introduces a break in the 'naturalness' of the object; if questioned, why not changed?

(Cross-posted to Theoria.)