Social Theories 3002-2TS1CE

The programme is founded on the assumption that existence has logical priority over the symbolic. The adjective “social” in the title of the course therefore has a dual meaning: it refers not only to a specific dimension of the reality under examination, but also to the conditions of possibility of knowledge about the human world. From this perspective, every theory and every form of knowledge, including self-knowledge, is social in character, since it emerges and is practised within a concrete social context. Theories are therefore not instruments that enable an objective description of reality. Such a description is fundamentally impossible, since it is always entangled in the social and historical contingency of the subject. To describe human reality is to account for the social character of the genesis of that description. It is, in this sense, a particular exercise in the “sociological imagination” (C. W. Mills), equipped with a suspicion toward claims to objectivity.
In particular, we shall examine phenomena and processes that will interest us not so much as the completion, culmination, or consequence of cultural history, but above all as beginnings of what is oriented toward the future, of what cannot be closed by a historiosophical conclusion. The aim of the course is not futurology, but rather an inquiry into how human beings anticipate the future and what strategies they develop in order to cope with it.
Increased social mobility and intensified communication, strengthened among other things by so-called new media, have led to a reversal of the traditional questions of the social sciences. Today we ask less frequently what social structure is and how its transformation is possible, and more often how people, goods, ideas, information, and emotions move, and how, in this context, the reproduction of social order remains possible. Even such classical concepts as “domination” or “capital” acquire new significance. Moreover, new communication media have reinforced the recognition that, in the face of new forms of human association, it is no longer possible to continue narrating modernization simply as the progressive individualization of individuals.
The end of the Cold War, the economic transformations initiated in the societies of the former Eastern bloc, new forms of communication such as the internet and mobile telephony, the facilitation of free movement across state borders, and the collapse of traditional institutions of state censorship in Central Europe are only some of the momentous phenomena that have created the new framework of the world in which we live. However firmly situated we may be in a specific place, we are, more than ever before, participants in processes unfolding on a global scale.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has at the same time revealed both the fragility of these frameworks and the limits of the Western imagination concerning the durability of post-war normality. For the societies of the integrated West, accustomed for roughly three decades to thinking of peace, mobility, economic interdependence, and the communicative accessibility of the world as an almost natural state of affairs, the return of full-scale war to Europe has become an experience of cognitive shock. What has been interrupted is not only a particular political sequence inaugurated after 1989, but also a certain horizon of expectation: the belief that the future would be an extension of ongoing normalization, expanding freedoms, integration, and institutional stabilization. The war in Ukraine has shown that globalization, communication networks, economic dependencies, and transnational institutions do not abolish violence, borders, or imperial claims, but may themselves become their field and instrument. Thus the question of social anticipations of the future acquires a new urgency. It no longer concerns only projects of development, modernization, or emancipation, but also ways of coping with uncertainty, threat, the sudden loss of a sense of continuity, and the need to rethink what had long been taken for granted.