The Vitalist Alternative

Over the past decades, much social theory has registered a shift in modernity from social closure to social openness. Bureaucracies have been superseded by market forces, lifelong jobs by precarious gigs, and institutionalized discipline by pervasive control. Society’s bounded units have become porous networks, and social agency has shifted from the system to its environment. This impulse by what I call sociologies of openness has cast suspicion on the theory of rationalization. In “theory” as such, the impulse has led to critiques of autopoiesis in the form of Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis and Mark Hansen’s concept of system-environment-hybrids. In social theory, it finds its strongest expression in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire-project, which argues that modernity's rationalized metrological systems have dissolved into immeasurable networks. This chapter argues that these theories take on an incoherent profile, because their dissolving the environment into the system finally disallows them to theorize the agency of the environment. Instead, it argues that to achieve the theoretical aims of these authors, one needs to think through society’s paradoxes of closure and openness.

Agency (philosophy) · Autopoiesis · Bureaucracy · Criticism · Ethos · Late modernity · Modernity · Rationalization (economics) · Social theory · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Digital Education and Society · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism