Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Postsocial theory attempts to develop an understanding of current changes of sociality and social forms. Human beings may by nature be social animals, but forms of sociality are nonetheless changing; the term postsocial refers to contemporary challenges to core concepts of human interaction and solidarity that point beyond a period of high social formation to one of more limited sociality and alternative forms of binding self and other. Postsocial analysis assumes that social principles and structures as we have known them in the past are emptying out in western societies and other elements and relationships are taking their place. It assumes that new forms of binding self and other arise from the increasing role non-human objects play in a knowledge-based society and consumer culture and from changes in the nature of objects and the structure of the self. One of the great legacies of classical social thought is the idea that the development of modern society involved the collapse of community and the loss of social tradition. Yet what followed was not an asocial or non-social environment but a period of high social formation – a period when the welfare state was established, societies became societies of complex organizations and structures, and social thinking took off in ways captured by the idea of a social imagination. Central to our experience today is that these expansions ... log in or subscribe to read full text