📚Reading the Archers: an intensive summer 2026 reading group

From June through to September I’ll be rereading what Frédéric Vandenberghe once called ‘the Archers’ from start to finish. I’ll be hosting a weekly zoom meeting for anyone who wants to join me, likely with 2-3 chapters per week. I’ll post a schedule in advance so people can drop-in for particular sections. There’s no expectation to attend them all – come for particular books or particular sections. I’ll also be blogging about each week’s reading to support participation.

If you’re interested in taking part please get in touch.

#archer #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach

Some thoughts on reading Margaret Archer’s work as a unified project

There were a range of points at which questions of the digital were addressed in her work, particularly in the later volumes developed collaboratively within the Centre for Social Ontology (CSO). But the tendency here was for ‘the digital’ to be subordinated to the questions of social change were the object of the CSO’s first two projects: The Morphogenic Society and the Future of the Human. It was addressed as an element in a broader process of change, rather than a vector of change in its own right. Nor will I argue for an Archerian digital sociology, as if there is a specifically realist approach to digital sociology latent within her work. Instead my ambition is far more modest. I will identify the points in Archer’s substantial body of work where Archer addresses questions of the digital: two with a micro-sociological focus and two with a macro-sociological focus. The degree to which these accounts were elaborated varies, with two being the focus of late papers, one being a concept she frequently invoked without ever explicitly addressing and the other being an elaborated concept to which the relationship with the digital was never explicitly addressed. In exploring these fragments in term I will argue that they are mutually consistent, unsurprisingly so given the intensely systematic character of Archer’s thought, without constituting a theoretical whole. This distinction raises a broader point about her body of work which has relevance for the collective project expressed by this volume. 

These engagements with the digital are elements of a broader project rather than focal points in their own right. Rather than limiting Archer’s relevance for digital sociology, I will argue this partial character actually creates the space for digital sociologists to work with these ideas in varied and multifaceted ways. They suggest micro/macro linkages, modes of historicisation and connections between familiar and emerging technologies which could be drawn upon in a range of ways. They offer morphogenic conditions for scholarly reflexivity, encouraging it to develop according to its own parameters within the spaces which are left opened within the corpus. There is a lot of space to think creatively about how to connect Archer’s work to questions of the digital, reflecting how it was not a primary focus of her consideration but something which at most got caught in the slipstream of other inquiries. In contrast the systematic character of Archer’s work more broadly, though producing an epistemic integrity which is hugely desirable, creates a different relationship to the corpus. Archer (1988: 177) suggested that “the more complex the internal structure becomes, the more difficult it is to assimilate new items without major disruptions of the delicately articulated interconnections”. In other words, the more densely interconnected a body of work is, the more difficult it is to elaborate and refine it with regards to novel items. 

This creates a tendency to relate to it as something which must be accepted or rejected in full because the logical interconnections make it different to affirm or reject one element, without taking a parallel stance in relation to the many other elements to which those items are internally connected. This is a trend which I suggest can be seen clearly in the literature, even if I cannot substantiate the claim here without turning the present article into something entirely different. There is a tendency to uncritically adopt Archer’s categories, sometimes with a superficial grasp on their sense in a way compounded by points for further development within them, which inhibits their elaboration over time. The parallel tendency is to react to Archer’s work as something which needs to be rejected tout court on the basis of a specific disagreement or, as we will see, a mis- or partial reading. In suggesting this is a problem for Archer’s legacy I’m not advocating a free for all in which the integrity work is abandoned so scholars might scavenge from it with the pragmatism of magpies. While I’m not personally frustrated by attempts to ‘hybridise’ or ‘synthesise’ her work in the way that she herself was, I share her perspective that these tend to be strategic attempts to enact synergies in the cultural system which are mainly imagined. It’s not that synthesis is inherently wrong but rather that Archer’s work doesn’t easily lend itself to such intellectual moves by virtue of its systematicity, imbuing these attempts with a slightly forced and sometimes self-serving character. 

The explanatory nature of her project mitigates this tendency because it was ultimately intended as a framework for thinking about the implications of social novelty. The fact it is saturated by these empirical reference points ensures that it doesn’t become a conceptual hall of mirrors, providing points of entry which make engagement possible. Consider the vast literature which has emerged in recent years deploying Archer’s account of reflexivity in order to explore a remarkable range of substantial topics. This makes it accessible in the sense of being applicable to an almost infinite range of contexts. But it is an extremely densely connected body of work nonetheless, with problems flowing from this which feel even more significant when considered in terms of her intellectual legacy. There are misreadings which thrive because elements of that project are taken in isolation from each other. For example Atkinson (2010) castigates Archer as the fourth individualization theorist alongside Bauman, Beck and Giddens without citing any text before Archer (2000). King (2010) similarly imputes an epistemic break in her work in parallel to the turn towards personal life within Anthony Giddens, without acknowledging that the multi-scalar ambitions of her project (macro, meso and micro) were present from her work in the sociology of education onwards, with individual reflexivity posited as the mediatory mechanism far in advance of the reflexivity trilogy (Archer 1995: 209). What King (2010) calls a move from a “structural orientation in the 1980s to a pre-occupation with reflexive individual agency in the late 1990s and early 2000s” more accurately reflects a clearly stated theoretical position that the ‘structural’ and ‘reflexive individual agency’ cannot be adequately considered in isolation from each other. The work exceeds the interpretive horizon used to critique it in ways that Archer herself found (justifiably) frustrating and which ought to concern her intellectual collaborators to the extent they are concerned about the sustainability of her legacy. But equally the notion that someone needs to read thousands of pages before legitimately offering an appraisal of her work obviously fails as an intellectual strategy to safeguard the integrity of her corpus. There is a problem here which risks leading to the ossification and neglect of this remarkable body of work, even if it is one which his the mirror image of the epistemic qualities which makes the corpus so remarkable in the first place. 

The point I’m making here is less to critique the oversights of these authors as much as to consider the density of Archer’s corpus and how it instills a certain vulnerability to such oversights. If you read these books closely as an interconnected project, the systematicity of them is obvious. They are a single inquiry pursued over the course of her career rather than a fragmented series of projects embodying a shifting series of interests. For avoidance of doubt I am not suggesting this was planned at the outset, as opposed to being a process of refining the conceptual questions and following the threads which led from one project to the next. This tendency to approach one book in the terms established by the previous book is the primary mechanism which accounts for the conceptual density of her work. The consistency is not absolute. For example Piiroinen (2014) is correct to suggest there is a subtle shift in the meaning of ‘analytical dualism’ as Archer’s (1988, 1995) approach becomes more avowedly critical realist. Furthermore, her engagement with Donati’s (2010) relational sociology and subsequent work together tracks a shift in how she conceived of relationality (Donati and Archer 2015). There are undoubtedly others which jointly illustrate how the conceptual density I am imputing to her corpus, the remarkable systematicity of her life’s work, should not be understood as a claim of absolute self-consistency. But the degree of interconnection, as well as the overall parameters of her project which emerge as a function of it, mean the work needs to be addressed in an interconnected way in order to adequately understand it. The problem is this takes time to do well and it can be difficult for people to know where to get started. In an academy marked by an escalating rate of publication, it is far too easy to skip over this work in order to keep up with the escalating expectations of those around you (Carrigan 2016, Vostal 2015). 

My suggestion is the systematicity of Archer’s work creates the risk, at least in the aforementioned context, that it is treated in a fragmented or shallow way. It is categorised as critical realism, Catholic social theory or a mystifying individualism in a way which precludes meaningful epistemic engagement with it (Bacevic 2023). This systematicity creates a parallel tendency for readers who have fulled engaged to feel as a consequence of that engagement they either have to accept it as a totality or reject it. Once they have traced out the interconnections, it is difficult to gain a critical distance from it on order to develop one’s own reflexive stance in relation to it. MacIntyre’s (1981: 257) suggests that a ‘living tradition’ is an “historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition”. The nature of Archer’s work creates challenges for establishing such a scholarly tradition, inclined to work within the M/M framework in confronting social and cultural change, in the process developing the approach through such confrontation. This means finding places to stand within the framework which permit of such an undertaking, by virtue of being less densely elaborated and offering the space for development. The empirical applications which have proliferated in recent years, particularly with regards to reflexivity, suggest this is tradition which is alive and well. But I want to highlight other routes in Archer’s work, which neither ‘apply’ nor ‘rethink’ but rather find strands and synergies which can be pursued in Archerian ways. 

In this sense my chapter is trying to demonstrate a way of engaging with Archer’s substantial corpus that works within it without being restricted by it. If we seek to preserve the M/M framework in amber then its intellectual vitality will rapidly drain away, until it becomes a rigid set of steps for thinking sustained only by self-conscious adherents. But if our engagements are not grounded in a working understanding of the systematic character of the approach, attempts to ‘refine’ and ‘hybridise’ will be scattergun interventions that drain the intellectual vitality which initially motivated us. A less elaborate way of framing this would be to ask how we think with Archer, rather than trying to think as Archer or (intentionally or otherwise) think against her. I have chosen to explore this with questions of the digital because they are the ones I’m most suited to address as a result of the biographical factors described above. But the approach I sketch out here could be used to engage constructively with other aspects of her work, particularly those were there was comparatively less systematicity in the original text and thus more room to intellectually manoeuvre. I have argued there will be a significant challenge in ensuring Archer’s work becomes a ‘living tradition’, neither reproduced in its entirety out of respect for authority nor picked apart in partial and contradictory ways. Identifying how we might approach writing on her work in a reflexive way is one means to mitigate this challenge.

For sake of brevity I will assume an existing familiarity with Archer’s work. The elements I explore in this chapter figure predominately in her later work, though the interconnected nature of her corpus means they need to be understood in terms of the wider project. There was one set of questions concerning structure and agency, even if those terms were ones she only came to later, developed from frustration with her PhD research which informed the subsequent trajectory of her work in more or less explicit ways (Carrigan 2016). I would suggest the morphogenetic approach can be understand, at least at the level of intellectual biography, as a formalisation of these concerns i.e. how do we explain social and culture change in a way adequate to the reality of both structure and agency? There were distinct objects of inquiry to which this was applied and/or  through which it was developed (education systems, social ontology, reflexivity, the morphogenic society, the future of the human) but there was a unified thread, both in the analytical imperative underlying it and her own recounting of this over time (Archer 2024). The systematic character of Archer’s work can often be an obstacle towards comprehension of it, lending it to misreadings  in a way compounded by an unwillingness to accept the scope of what she did. For a broader encounter I suggest the collected papers contained in Brock, Carrigan and Scambler (2016) and the interview about her trajectory in Morgan and Archer (2021).

#margaretArcher

Some notes on Margaret Archer’s theorising of digital technology

There are four major strands in her work where this is addressed directly:

There are a number of other points in her work where Archer addressed digital technology but these tended to be more marginal and less systematic. For example social media platforms were becoming mainstream during the later stages of the fieldwork for her reflexivity trilogy, leading to it featuring recurrently as a passing empirical object in a number of works. Her instinctive scepticism towards social media tended to highlight the constraints and obscure the enablements, but underlying cultural criticism which could at times seem overstated should not obscure the meaningful recognition of the structural significance of these developments. In a couple of later papers, Archer (2021, 2022) approvingly cited my own notion of ‘distracted people’ in this respect, which was itself a straight forward attempt to consider the causal powers of social media in terms of the capacities and liabilities of the Archerian subject (Carrigan 2024). This included the parallel argument I made in Carrigan (2019) that distracted people will tend to lead to fragile movements: movements which rely primarily on the affordances of social media for assembly will tend to lack the durability which otherwise characterises collective agents who have solved the problem of coordination.

There is some rich discussion in Archer (2007) in the case of Shirin concerning the role the internet played in her development. For example Archer (2012: 259) reports on the difficult context in which Shirin found herself prior to university in which “enforced isolation threw her back on her own meagre resources and encouraged her to use whatever opportunities were available”. Her step-mother left with her three step-brothers when she was ten, leaving an abusive father who held her responsible for the departure of his wife and sons. The internet was a lifeline for Shirin through which she found the knowledge necessary to escape from these increasingly oppressive circumstances, including the university bursaries which provided her with the eventual means to escape her natal context and leave it behind. In the categories of Archer (2012) Shirin is classed as a ‘rejector’ who, understandably given these circumstances, found nothing she could endorse in this environment and sough to escape from it. The internet was a mechanism through which she could identify opportunities which were not legible to her in these circumstances. As Archer puts it, “Shirin had confronted ‘contextual incongruity’ as the clash between life in a traditionalist ethnic ghetto and the opportunities proliferating in modern Britain, knowledge of which even infiltrated her bedroom through the internet” (2012: 260-261). It provided the knowledge which enabled her to form projects such as entering the civil service through the fast track, while doing nothing to provide her with the social and cultural capital necessary to leverage this knowledge in a practical life plan. In Shirin’s case it left her aware of the Oxbridge bias of the civil service fast track, leading her to apply for a summer placement which she failed to be awarded following her performance on psychometric tests (Archer 2012: 272). 

There is certainly a sense in which Shirin was empowered by this knowledge, enabling her to formulate life projects which might not otherwise have emerged from within her context. It also raised her awareness of structural constraints on her mobility and suggested potential means through which she might circumvent them. It did nothing to support her in enacting these projects, at least in this instance. This case study illustrates how the internet emerged for Archer (2012) as a feature of empirical investigation. In this case it was a mechanism through which knowledge was diffused, with implications for the development and exercise of reflexivity and the biographical trajectory which was the outgrowth of this. It captures the importance of the internet in facilitating access to what Archer (1988) called the cultural system and which she came came to call the ‘universal library’ in later work.

It is striking from the vantage point of the mid 2020s how the empirical manifestation of these developments is categorised as ‘the internet’. There is certainly an element of under-theorisation here, in the sense that a complex object susceptible to conceptual differentiation is treated as if it is a singular thing. Particularly from the perspective of digital sociology, as well as cognate disciplines and fields, it would be expected to specify exactly what software or services are enabling the diffusion of knowledge. The internet would be, at most, the field of possibility within which we consider the specific mechanisms through which knowledge is mediated, such as social media. This reflects Archer’s relative disinterest in these questions, with her engagement a response to how it emerged within fieldwork rather than featuring in the questions which motivated that research. However the role assigned to social media in Archer’s work also needs to be understood in terms of the timing of her empirical projects. The reflexivity trilogy consisted of three interconnected empirical projects: a pilot study reported in Archer (2003), a large empirical study in Coventry reported in Archer (2007) and a longitudinal study of university students reported in Archer (2012). The first wave of social media platforms emerged during the 2000s during this period of empirical research: LinkedIn (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006). However there was a considerable interlude before these became the dominant cultural forces which we recognise them as today, being joined by a second wave of platforms and a number which looked poised for dominance before falling by the wayside. 

At the time this fieldwork was being conducted (the late 2000s and early 2010s) social media was in the process of breaking out from university campuses into wider society. It was far from the contemporary level of penetration within UK society (as the context of this research) but it was in the process of becoming the mass phenomena we confront today, in which it is difficult to understand social and cultural dynamics without accounting for the impact of these platforms. It was in the process of becoming something which impinged on the life of everyone, even if they were non-users who rarely encountered the outgrowths of these platforms. 

It figures as an explicit object more frequently in her later work, usually as an aside pointing to sociocultural decline. For example Archer (2020) drew attention to the “quest for new friends’ which drove social media, as well as the decline in social integration which drove this impulse. The role of online profiles in mediating this quest expanded the performative register of identity, creating a relationship to the idealised self who would accumulate these online friends. She linked this to the account in Archer (2012) of expressive reflexivity, in which a possibly growing array of subjects limit their temporal horizon to the present tense, relying upon gut feelings rather than reflexive deliberation to make their way through the world. This meant foregoing the challenge of “designing a course of action; one that necessarily entails future time and the (fallible) understanding of how events and action are linked”. 

Earlier in this paper Archer (2020) draws attention to the time spent watching TV, alongside factors such as declining membership of parties and unions, suggesting a broader trend towards expanding passivity. What might otherwise be collective agents, individuals coming together through various means to pursue coordinated ends, instead unfurl into the growing ranks of primary agents defined by their involuntary social placement. Even if this is a loose sketch, constituting part of a much wider macro-sociological narrative produced in what was originally a keynote speech, it illustrates how Archer saw the influence of digital media through a multifactorial lens. It was not an element which in itself could drive large scale shifts but was rather tied up in these broader patterns of social and cultural change.

It was only in the process of preparing this chapter that I noticed a curious tension in how Archer treated the digital in her later work. There was a profound pessimism about the implications of digital platforms for human agency, particularly with reference to what she termed, following Frankfurt (1988), the ‘cultural wantons of the new millennium’ (Archer 2020). There is a fundamental passivity which social platforms generate in agents at both the individual and the collective level, which chips away at the hope we might have for agentive reengagement in a run away world. The enablements of social media rarely figure in these reflections, leaving a slightly bleak picture. I would suggest that Archer was a macro-sociological pessimist about digitalisation, at least when we consider the actually existing outcomes rather than the unrealised potential. This was particularly prominent in her later work which, given the direction of travel within the UK and wider world over the last decade, should perhaps be seen as unsurprising. 

If we want to understand the role of the digital within Archer’s thought, this pessimism needs to be placed into a dialogue with a more optimistic current we can find in her thought. Alongside this recognition of how digital technologies can undercut the capacities of subjects, there was also a belief, as she puts it in Archer (2017: 116) that “culture can digitally outdo structure”. The reason for this optimism was her ontological commitment that “culture is not, in kind, a scarce resource” and that it can only “be made so by the imposition of artificial controls (such as intellectual property rights, patents and restricted access)” (Archer 2017: 104). There is a tendency in how Archer (1988) treated culture to neglect the role of infrastructure in constituting such restrictions. Carrigan (2017) explores how the digitalised archive is still mediated in ways which shape and limit access to the contents within it, leaving a challenge for agents with regards to how to realise the latent potential of access to the archive. But her broader point still stands that (a) restrictions on access are structural phenomena extrinsic to culture itself (b) digitalisation leads to a precipitous drop in the viability of these restrictions. Even if there are reasons we might despair when faced with the contemporary landscape, such as the ubiquity of ‘fake news’ and the contribution it makes to the consolidation of reactionary populist movements, there is a reason for optimism in the deep structure of the transformation which is underway. Even if it was never an explicit object of inquiry for her, Archer was alive to the technological shifts in the cultural machinery. The possibilities opened up when the universal library of humankind, the heart of  her notion of the cultural system, went digital (Archer 2007).

There is certainly an apparent tension here between her pessimism when considering the digital on one level (personal reflexivity) and her optimism when considering the digital on another level (the cultural system). It could easily lead an uncharitable reader to impute incoherence, suggesting Archer was vacillating between conflicting reactions based on impressionistic characterisations of digital change. The reality I would argue is far more sophisticated, with Archer (2015) providing the missing link with its focus on the role of the double morphogenesis, the (re)grouping of corporate agency, as the explanation for how cultural possibility can co-exist with agentive decline. 

#DigitalSociology #margaretArcher

Lacan on the anxiety of love

From On Anxiety by Renata Salecl, loc 1320:

Love is linked to the fact that in the end we know nothing about the object that attracts us in the Other, and that at the same time the Other knows nothing about this object that is in him more than himself, i.e. what makes someone attracted to him. But today it looks as if we try to alleviate this essential anxiety that comes as part of love. People do not want to deal with uncertainty, so either become more and more enclosed (i.e. are able to maintain mostly only cyber-relationships which allow them to never actually meet the partner) or want a very precise answer from the Other (and are buying tons of self-help books which will supposedly help them to figure out the desire of the Other).

What I find so provocative about the Lacanian approach is how this recognition is tied up in a broader picture of relationality. It is radically different to the rather optimistic account of intersubjectivity found in thinkers like Charles Taylor and Pierpaolo Donati* which deeply shaped my thinking. Our own trajectory is driven by the gnawing incompleteness lurking behind the account we give of who we are and what we want, with our demands always failing to satiate our ceaseless desire. The manner in which we grapple with ourselves, with our place in the world and our experience of it, has always already failed. This leaves us prone to fantasising about the completeness we imagine in the Other, access to the fullness we crave which they might under certain conditions invite us into. Or perhaps the Other has stolen this fullness from us in a dastardly scheme to deprive us of what we are due.

I was struck when writing this post how powerfully Morpheus’s question in the original Matrix film captures the ubiquity of this experience, with the red pill being a symbolic fantasy which offers us the possibility of resolution:

What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

The reality insists Lacan is that our mind was splintered from the outset, with the alien machinery of language violently inserting itself into our being, in a wound we only become even dimly aware of once our personhood has constitutively formed around it. The problem is that it is not only we who must also grapple with troumatisme (the trauma caused by the hole we find in the Other)… the concrete others we share our lives with are constantly engaged in the seem arduous fumbling towards a sense of wholeness that will forever elude them. They are imputing wholeness to us, or seeing us as a means through which they might get to where they distantly sense they need to be. They are just as incomplete and fragmented, driven mad by the splinter in their mind in a way so familiar as to fade into the horizon of quotidian experience.

The dazzlingly depressing element of Lacan practice, as I understand it, is that there’s no resolution to this dilemma. We can’t escape the trap of desire but we can approach that trap with greater poise. To the extent there seems to be a normative philosophy underpinning the theory and the practice, it involves how we comport ourselves through the process: how lightly or heavily we stumble through it, how orientated we are to the satisfactions or fixated on the outcome. The same is true of love, I think, though I’m still not hugely confident in my interpretation despite two years of trying to teach myself Lacan. There’s no way around, or even through, troumatisme because that implies a resolution. Can we instead inhabit the anxiety Salecl talks about in the opening quote? Furthermore, can we do that together? Can we see the anxiety as anchoring a space of authenticity, as much as Lacanians would cringe at the term, marking a neurotic mirror image to the humanistic vision of encounter found in a thinker like Taylor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pNhrlPU-fA

My understanding is that Lacan would insist that such a meeting is fundamentally impossible. I wonder however how this might reflect the individualising technology of the clinic, as well as constituting an overcorrection to the psychic naivety of humanist accounts of intersubjectivity. The fact there is always a missed understanding between people does not mean there can be no understanding. There is a deeper being-with-others made possibly in recognition of that gap, rather than seeking to overcome it. The gap is a condition of that depth, an anchor, in which a moment of meeting is marked by anxiety. It’s a practice rather than an outcome, a precarious achievement rather than a project that can be completed. It necessitates living in confrontation with one’s own lack, in the process of encountering the lack in the other. While Lacan says “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you”, I wonder if the mutilation can be suspended (at least some of the time) in that moment of encounter.

This Lacanianism with Taylorian (or Archerian!) characteristics which I’m awkwardly gesturing towards suggests a notion of authenticity which I suspect Donati could, perhaps slightly reluctantly, endorse. Authenticity consisting in navigating lack and anxiety together rather than seeking to foreclose it. The authenticity moment as in jointly holding and inhabiting the ontological gap, however precariously, rather than the imagined moment of having transcended it. There’s a possibility for new meaning and insight to arise in this encounter, the partial integration and symbolisation made possible when the fantasy of symbolically mastering the Real is dispensed with. There’s a register of partial success and partial failure, which is sociologically and psychologically generative, which I think Lacan forecloses too hastily. These partial successes and failures might themselves elicit fantasy responses but these can in turn be held, to varying degrees, in order to be integrated in partially sucessful or failing ways.

*Though Donati certainly confronts what he terms ‘relational evils’, it is still fundamentally optimistic about the relational potential of human beings.

#charlesTaylor #desire #donati #Lacan #love #margaretArcher #relationality #RenataSalecl #romance #sex

I’m getting preoccupied by the parallels between the design theorist Christopher Alexander’s metaphysics of form and Margaret’s Archer morphogenetic approach. The best critique of Archer I’ve read is Mouzelis arguing that she systematically prioritises time over space, leading her to neglect the spatialised exercise over power. I’m increasingly wondering if Alexander’s (somewhat power-blind, it seems to me) architectural theory of morphogenesis as a spatialised process, could be integrated into Archer’s morphogenetic approach.

From Christopher Alexander’s The Process of Creating Life, pg 509:

Why is freedom associated with the morphogenetic character of social processes? Because it is the shape-creating, organization-generating, aspect of process which ultimately allows people to do what they want, what they desire, what they need, and what is deeply adapted to life as it is lived and to experience as it is felt. The humanity of the environment comes about only when the processes are morphogenetic, are whole-seeking, are placed in a context that gradually allows people to work towards a living whole in which each person plays a part. If this point is not clear from what you have read in this book, please read Book 1, chapter 10, to understand more fully what I mean.

I believe we may take on this task, collectively, and can gain effective, instrumental knowledge of our generative system, and thus some measure of awareness and control over the system of processes that generates the world. I choose to define society as that system which creates the human world, and say that its primary ongoing function, and the criterion we should use to judge it by, is its capacity to create and re-create a living world for us.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/11/08/why-is-freedom-associated-with-the-morphogenetic-character-of-social-processes/

#ChristopherAlexander #margaretArcher #morphogenesis

From The Social Origins of Educational Systems loc 967:

A basic mediatory mechanism is postulated which carries out this shaping process. It consists in the structural relations of contradiction or complementarity distributing frustrating or rewarding experiences to different situations in which actors find themselves. Where contradiction characterizes relations between elements, strains are experienced as exigencies by groups associated with the impeded operations. In other words, operational obstructions are translated into practical problems which frustrate those upon whose day-to-day situations they impinge.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/09/reflexivity-was-always-integral-to-margaret-archers-macro-sociology/

#macrosociology #margaretArcher #reflexivity

The emphasis placed in Lacanian psychoanalysis on symbolisation isn’t an open-ended matter of putting everything into words. It rests on an account of libidinal economy in which some inarticulate matters are stumbling blocks for the subject, whereas others are not. This is how Bruce Fink describes it in the Lacanian subject:

One of the faces of the real that we deal with in psychoanalysis is trauma. If we think of the real as everything that has yet to be symbolized, language no doubt never completely transforms the real, never drains all of the real into the symbolic order; a residuum is always left. In analysis, we are not interested in just any old residuum, but in that residual experience that has become a stumbling block to the patient. The goal of analysis is not to exhaustively symbolize every last drop of the real, for that would make of analysis a truly infinite process, but rather to focus on those scraps of the real which can be considered to have been traumatic. By getting an analysand to dream, daydream, and talk, however incoherently, about a traumatic “event,” we make him or her connect it up with words, bring it into relation with ever more signifiers.

Contrast this with what Roy Bhaskar once characterised as the ‘free-wheeling’ conception of freedom found in someone like Richard Rorty, for whom self-articulation is a perpetual project without centre or foundation. Or the articulation of Taylor’s subject for whom, as Margaret Archer once (critically) put it, the emotions act as a ‘moral direction finder’.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/20/the-libidinal-economy-of-symbolisation/

#charlesTaylor #Lacan #libidinalEconomy #margaretArcher #reflexivity #richardRorty #royBhaskar #symbolisation

Following our recent symposium we are inviting short blog posts (750-1500 words) reflecting on the intellectual legacy of Margaret Archer. These will be published on the Critical Realism Network blog. Here are some examples of themes these posts could address:

We welcome submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, including graduate students and early-career researchers. We also encourage interdisciplinary perspectives and contributions from scholars working in related fields, such as philosophy, anthropology, and political science.

If you’re interested in submitting a post, please contact Mark Carrigan with your idea initially.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/08/%f0%9f%93%8dcall-for-blog-posts-the-legacy-of-margaret-archer/

#criticalRealism #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach #socialMorphogenesis #socialRealism

I’m so glad we did this in Warwick, even if it meant it took ages to happen 😊

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQu2Q8M4ETk

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/03/rest-in-peace-maggie/

#margaretArcher

I just heard Doug Porpora give a great explanation of Archer’s morphogenetic approach as an approach to thinking about social change. The problem is that, as he put it, people get bogged down in all the t’s which litter these diagrams:

In contrast suggests Doug, rightly I think, the claim she is making is extremely straight forward. All action takes place in a context, which has structural and cultural aspects to it. How people act then contributes to either transforming or reproducing that context. It’s a post-Marxist formulation of Marx’s famous proposition from The Eighteenth Brumaire that men make history but they do not make it in conditions of their choosing, with a view to operationalising it at the level of social explanation.

It does this with what Doug describes the broadest ontology possible, in contrast to approaches which try and restrict the ontological repertoire e.g. praxis theorists building culture into action or structurationists redefining structure as culture. In this sense I think we can frame Maggie’s work as aligning with two important impulses in contemporary social theory she was (simplistically) seen as being hostile to: the post-Deleuzian affirmation of heterogeneity and the ANT insistence on opening up black boxes. The former because of this aforementioned ontological broadness, the latter because it went hand-in-hand with insisting we examine the independent variability (as she would put it) of these elements rather than assuming their connection by ontological fiat.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/01/a-simple-way-to-understand-margaret-archers-morphogenetic-approach/

#dougPorpora #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach #socialRealism