Teleology, contingency, and networks

Barney Warf

pp. 255-267

in: Peter Meusburger, Joachim Funke, Edgar Wunder (eds), Milieus of creativity, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with some implications of how time, space, and social change have been powerfully retheorized under the impetus of poststructuralism. Social science has steadily jettisoned long-standing teleological conceptions of social structure and change that pervaded Marxist and Weberian accounts. Inspired by structuration theory and philosophical realism, disciplines such as geography and sociology have increasingly come to emphasize the contingent nature of social reality, that is, the manner in which it could be different. As part of this transformation, poststructural theorizations have focused on the rejection of simplistic dichotomies such as individual/society, culture/economy, nature/society, objective/subjective, global/local, and time/space, all of which thwart their effective integration.I assert that the theorization of social and spatial life necessarily involves the rejection of an additional dichotomy, that between the real and the imaginary, the actual and the possible, the ontological and the epistemological. If what is defined as the "real" is not simply equated with the observed, the definition of "reality" broadens to include not only what is, but what might be, and the lines between the real and the possible become blurred in productive and imaginative ways. Poststructuralism elevates unmaterialized possibilities to the level of ontology. In other words, what is taken to be real is not simply what is observable or actual but forms one outcome secreted from a broader universe of possibilities. Social reality includes events that never happened in fact, but could have happened plausibly as defined by theory. Thus, the distinction between what did happen and what could happen is not obvious or unproblematic. History and geography are the understanding of not only why things happen, but why they do not.

Cited authors

Marx Karl