Page 131 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

Social Movements 117

if he himself uses a much narrower definition of politics. Melucci has been
influenced in this respect by Touraine ’ s re - thinking of Marxism, particu-

larly by the way in which Touraine puts historicity at the center of his
analysis. Both theorists have clearly taken seriously Marx ’ s dictum that
“ Men make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own
choosing. ” Melucci, however, is clearer than Touraine that it is the con-
testation of collective identity which is the key activity of social move-

ments in cultural politics; there is no “ objective ” definition of the stakes
of the conflicts in which they are engaged.

This understanding makes Melucci ’ s work especially important for the
cultural turn of contemporary political sociology. He sees identity as
constructed by the manipulation of symbols which are effective in par-
ticular social contexts. There is no clear separation to be made between

the way social life is defined and understood and the way it is lived: both
are implicated in ongoing social practices. Melucci makes the implications
of his work clearer in this respect in his last work, putting forward the
view that it is the development of post - industrial society that increasingly
makes symbols effective in reality. He argues that to see information as
mirroring or representing reality is simplistic; information encoded in
language and images increasingly contributes to the construction of social
reality:

Technological power has been accompanied by an exponential growth of

symbolic possibilities, by an increase in self - reflective activity: by the height-

ened capacity to reflect and represent reality through a multitude of lan-
guages. This capacity seems to be gradually replacing reality itself, so that
we are in the process of coming to inhabit a work constructed out of the
images that we ourselves have created, a world where we can no longer
distinguish reality from the reality of the image. (Melucci, 1996 : 43)

What was previously implicit in Melucci ’ s work – that it is in the manipu-
lation of symbols and signs that collective identity is forged through the
production of common meanings – is now made explicit. The question
for social movements in contemporary society is, he suggests, “ How and
for what purpose should we use the power of naming which allows us to
fabricate the world and to subsume it to the signs with which we express
(or do not express) it? ” (Melucci, 1996 : 131).
Melucci ’ s understanding of the cultural politics of social movements as
taking place in everyday life is an important contribution to our under-
standing of contemporary society. There is no doubt that the way in which
he sees social movements as active in civil society, rather than as oriented