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1 Artalk Revue 6 – Winter 2021 Jodi Dean: Society doesn’t exist

Society doesn’t exist Jodi Dean

Introduction

Over roughly five years, eons in Internet time, the term “social media” has become

ubiquitous. Taking the place of the contestation and uncertainty over “new media,”

“digital media,” “networked media,” “personal media,” “participatory media,” and

even “tactical media,” “social media” has effectively hegemonized the field, not only

producing a generation unaware of pre–Facebook and pre–Twitter connectivities, but

also reformatting prior digital experiments as so many failures or advances on the way

to mediated sociality. Perhaps most indicative of the theoretical dilemma social media

poses: there is general, assumed agreement on what social media is even as there is

significant doubt as to whether society exists.

Three claims for the non–existence of society

For the last 30 or 40 years, society has been said not to exist. The claim appears

in at least three versions. The neoliberal version of the claim that society doesn’t

exist was voiced most famously by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In

a 1987 interview with Douglas Keay published in Women’s Own following her third

term win, Thatcher emphasized personal responsibility and hard work.1

Wanting

and working to get more money, she said, was “the great driving engine, the driving

1 Transcript archived at the Margaret

Thatcher Foundation, at http://www.

margaretthatcher.org/document/106689.

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2 Artalk Revue 6 – Winter 2021 Jodi Dean: Society doesn’t exist

force of life.” Against basic principles of social welfare, she argued that it was not the

government’s role to look after the misfortunate; it wasn’t society’s fault that they were

homeless, sick, or unemployed. “There is no such thing as society.” Rather, “there

are individual men and women and there are families.” The neoliberal version of the

claim that society doesn’t exist, then, emphasizes individuals and families. Even when

churches are acknowledged, they are treated more as sites for the individual practice

of faith than they are as social forces. The claim that there is no such thing as society,

moreover, is raised critically. It is part of the ideological justification for the attack on

the welfare state as a social solution to the social problems inevitably accompanying

capitalist markets. Neoliberalism says that the idea that society can deal collectively

with common concerns is an illusion. The reality is that it’s every man for himself.

People are first and foremost individuals.

A second version of the idea that society doesn’t exist is the network version.

The network version appears in a variety of guises in contemporary social and media

theory, the most prominent of which is Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory. He

writes, “It is no longer clear whether there exists relations that are specific enough to

be called ‘social’ and that could be grouped together in making up a special domain

that could function as ‘a society’.”2

Starting from the position that there is no such

thing as society, Latour advocates a sociology that can trace the actions through

which things are assembled into associations.3

Groups form and un–form; they are

groupings of previously disparate elements rather than fixed or constant collectivities.

The methodology Latour proposes for critical sociology also manifests itself as

a solution: the non–existence of society can be fixed with the proper technologies.

If we attend to the ways collectivities are assembled, or if we ensure that they have

the right techniques and technologies, procedures and processes through which to

connect, then we can put together social moments and political issues.4

To be sure,

these moments and issues are always disruptable, but that is both liberating and

unavoidable.

A third version of the claim that society doesn’t exist can be called the radical

democratic or post–Marxist version. In Hegemony and socialist strategy (1985), Ernesto

Laclau and Chantal Mouffe write:

“... we must begin by renouncing the conception of ‘society’ as founding totality

of its partial processes. We must, therefore, consider the openness of the social as the

constitutive ground or ‘negative essence’ of the existing, and the diverse ‘social orders’

as precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate the field of differences.

Accordingly, the multiformity of the social cannot be apprehended through

a system of mediations, or the social order be understood as an underlying principle.

There is no sutured space peculiar to ‘society’, since the social itself has no essence.”5

Society doesn’t exist. Conflicts, forces, power, struggles, competition,

and oppression, however, do. “Social orders” attempt to suppress, evade, and

“domesticate,” these processes, making them appear as ruptures of a whole rather

than as contingent relations among diverse and antagonistic elements.

The primary difference between the network and the radical democratic version

of the claim for the non–existence of society is that the network version thinks that

objects (things) exist and considers their creative, combinatory action, their agency,

as a primary associative force. The radical democratic version pays less attention to

things, emphasizing instead a variety of uniting and dividing forces.

2 Bruno Latour, 2005. Reassembling the

social: An introduction to actor– network–

theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

p. 2.

3 Bruno Latour, 2003. “What if we talked

politics a little?” Contemporary Political

Theory, volume 2, p. 143.

4 Noortje Marres, 2005. “No issue,

no public: Democratic deficits after the

displacement of politics,” dissertation

submitted to the Faculty of Humanities,

University of Amsterdam, at http://dare.

uva.nl/document/17061.

5 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,

1985. Hegemony and socialist strategy:

Towards a radical democratic politics.

Translated by Winston Moore and Paul

Cammack. London: Verso, pp. 95–96.

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3 Artalk Revue 6 – Winter 2021 Jodi Dean: Society doesn’t exist

What do these three versions of the idea that society doesn’t exist have in

common? First, they are from the same basic historical period, the period of the end

of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism. Second, they all reject the idea of

an organic social whole or grounded totality; since society doesn’t exist there is no

need for a conceptual account of its ground or basis. Third, and relatedly, they reject

notions of natural hierarchies, which would only make sense in a relatively fixed

setting. It follows, fourth, that they also reject the idea that there is or could be some

central myth, theme, story, or authority that gives structure to society. Rather, there are

mutually productive entities (individual persons and objects) and forces.

If society doesn’t exist, what would social media look like?

If there is something right or true about any of these accounts of society and the

sense in which it doesn’t exist, what would we expect social media to look like?

The neoliberal version replaces the idea of society with the claim that there

are individual men and women and there are families. These men and women are

responsible for themselves. They are motivated by money in a competitive, capitalist

environment. We can imagine, then, that they are concerned with jobs, maybe with

finance, with security, and likely with finding mates and making families that can take

care of them with they are old or infirm. We could also expect that these individuals

might try to find ways to measure themselves and others so that they can determine

who is the most successful, the most powerful. Such knowledge could conceivably

help them in the job market as well as let them know who to pursue as a mate.6

We might also expect that people would deal with the pressures of competition by

forming alliances and building networks.7

Individual competitors might see it as in their

self–interest to combine, so they would probably look for ways to do this easily and

efficiently.

They would want to know what others are doing in order to keep up with or

even get ahead of their competition. They might also want relief from the loneliness of

temporary work on short–term contracts, desiring connection to others insofar as they

work from home or shift from office to office. Their social lives might be increasingly

screen–based since their preoccupation with making money and getting ahead might

estrange them from more community–based activities. In short, if the neoliberal

claim that society doesn’t exist is true, we would expect a social media tailored to

individualism, competition, alliance, entertainment, and pro–creation. We would expect

it to be concerned with individual interests — privacy, security, property — much in the

way that companies and entrepreneurs are always trying to protect their advantages.

If the actor network version of the non–existence of society is true then we would

expect social media to be focused on making, on invention. Insofar as the problem

of politics is building issues and enabling association, we would expect ongoing

innovation in technologies that facilitate collaboration. We might imagine more apps

that let people share — the content would be less important than the fact of sharing.

Overall, we would expect enthusiasm with respect to the activity of associating and

relatively less concern with the content, substance, or purpose of association.

The social media we would expect if the radical democratic version is true would

be basically the same as what we get from the actor network version — a tumultuous

media environment. The primary difference would be that whereas the former delights

6 Michel Foucault, 2008. The birth of

biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1978–79. Translated by Graham

Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

7 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello,

2005. The new spirit of capitalism.

Translated by Gregory Elliot. London:

Verso.