Page 188 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 171

Telecommunity 171
of movement, to ‘travel’ weightlessly, whether corporeally or in the
imagination, is to establish networks of communication in which commu-
nities have their life.

The ‘end of the social’ and the new discourse of community

The rise of the ‘network society’, together with the contentions that social
ties and practices are of a much more capillary nature in modern society,
and that anything like a ‘social whole’ can be effective in the integration
of persons, has informed recent proclamations concerning the ‘end of the
social’.
In a 1996 article on ‘The Death of the Social’, Nikolas Rose argues
that, with the assistance of postmodern theory, ‘the object “society”, in the
sense that began to be accorded to it in the nineteenth century (the sum of
the bonds of relations between individuals and events – economic, moral,
political – within a more or less bounded territory governed by its own
laws) has begun to lose its self-evidence’ (Rose, 1996: 328). For Rose, ‘“The
social” ... within a limited geographical and temporal field, set the terms
for the way in which human intellectual, political and moral authorities,
in certain places and contexts, thought about and acted on their collective
experience’ (329) – which is, for Rose – the nation-state. 1
Similarly, Alain Touraine (1998), in a account of the ‘end of Homo
Sociologicus’, proclaims:

We have learned to do without the idea of society as it was defined by ratio-
nalist thought from the 16th to the 18th century, and as it was renovated
and reinforced by the theorists of modernity, of industrial society, of the wel-
fare state and also of national development policies. We have come to
the end of the road to which the founding fathers of sociology led the way
a century ago. (127)
For Touraine, society is neither a ‘state of nature’ nor a progressive
framework of human development; rather, it has become a technology of
managing populations which has recently exhausted itself. Since the
1970s, in texts like The Self-Producing Society, The Voice and the Eye and The
Return of the Actor, Touraine has promoted the idea of a ‘programmed
society’, namely that advanced industrial societies have developed ‘the
capacity to choose their organization, their values, and their processes
of change without having to legitimate these choices by making them
conform to natural or historical laws’ (Touraine, 1988: 40).
The problem with such a society is that it produces a setting in which
norms are rapidly changing because they are constantly being redefined,
generating a crisis for how individuals are integrated. Individuals whose
roles were once highly defined, what Touraine calls ‘actors’, must increas-
ingly become more self-forming and self-active, without the programmed