The Relocation of the Social and the Retrenchment of the Elites

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The Relocation of the Social and the Retrenchment of the ElitesAuthor(s): Jonathan FriedmanSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, Vol. 48, No.3 (Fall 2004), pp. 162-168Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23175142 .

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The Relocation of the Social and the Retrenchment of the Elites

Jonathan Friedman

This is an age of regression, the amplification of class relations and their polar ization, the withdrawal of the new political classes into luxurious lives along with other dominant classes, while the declining lower end of the social world recedes into poverty and chaos. Overstated as a description, perhaps, but it

does, 1 suggest, situate current trends.

One Generation's Experience

The social has not disappeared, not by any means, but it has become frag

mented and redistributed into smaller worlds of sociality. Retreat as intentional

practice occurs as a result of the failure of the larger social arena. Let us consider the parameters of this process with respect to elites, middle classes and minori

ties, and proletarian and sub-proletarian populations. One might rightly ask to

what extent the social in just the sense of a public sphere is an imaginary con

struct of intellectuals rather than a concrete reality. There is a notion of the retreat of the social that has been discussed for some years by Touraine (1992,

1997) as part of a model of the transformation of contemporary society from

'modernity' to postmodernity, from industrial to postindustrial. Modern indus

trial society, held together by the complementary opposition between classes,

has come apart and begun to fragment into smaller, culturally based tribes, sodalities, and movements. Social movements are understood as attempts to

gain control of the historicity of society, that is, the direction in which change ought to take place. They are in this sense the basic political activity of the mod ern universe. Class movements were totalizing movements in the sense that they

were oriented to the transformation of society as a whole. The Green move

ments, by contrast, are only interested in this scale of change to the degree to which more narrow goals can be achieved. Thus, Greenpeace is a radical move

ment that makes no demands on the general structure of contemporary society

Social Analysis, Volume 48, Issue 3, Fall 2004, 162-168



The Relocation of the Social 163

as long as the destruction of the environment is halted. The traditional class

response to this would have been that the environment cannot be saved with

out a total transformation of the social system that produces such deleterious

effects. Other movements are even more limited to issues of the recognition of

identity and accompanying rights. This transformation might be that which

leaves the long lasting impression among members of the generation born in

the 1930s and 1940s that the social has begun to disappear. The eclipse of

social movements is of course only one aspect of this experience of change, but

it is an expression of the changing conditions in the larger social arena. The entire issue of engagement is crucial: social undertakings of all kinds and the

feeling of being part of a larger endeavor, a more or less coherent social world

organized in terms of major projects and counter projects.

Exit Peoplehood

'The people' was once a notion associated with sovereignty that is with the col

lective control of one's destiny. This is the core of what is expressed in the term

'democracy' in a much weaker way. The power of the people is the power over

one's own representatives, governance by the extension of peoplehood. Clas

tres's (1987) definition of the 'anti-chief' was equivalent to this. The chief was not a representative of the gods to the people, but a representative of the peo

ple to the gods, and thus a mere instrument of the people. By defining power in such terms, as a virtual position of control, to be filled by its own absence, the evolution of state power could, in principle, be negated. This was the par

ticularity of primitive societies, not before the state, but against the state. Now whether or not Clastres's definition has any validity when applied to the soci

eties that he researched, there is a more general logic in his propositions that

reflects the condition of modern society, the logic of the nation-state.

The public sphere may well be in regression. This has been pointed out by

people as different as Baudrillard (1983) who experiences it and Putnam (2000) who has tried to research it. It might be suggested that the logic involved here is one in which position within a socially conceived whole is being replaced by self-definition in terms of internal cultural properties such as ethnicity, gender,

and other related categories that serve as a basis of a new bricolage, a totemism

which by definition is independent of the larger society at the same time as it

might serve as the foundation for a new kind of social order, one that would be

systematically pluralist where the cultural categories themselves would be con stitutive of the social order. This would amount to a (re)establishment of a kind of homo hierarchicus, on the individualist ashes of a burned out modernism. But we are still clearly in the ashes for the most part, perhaps still burning out as well. Why is this reconstitution a strong possibility? Because the atomization of extreme individualism is, simultaneously, a narcissistic regression that demands

a larger field of recognition and tends to produce new forms of group coagula tion. There is in my understanding a paradox in what is being referred to as



164 Jonathan Friedman

increasing individualization. While the body is increasingly the focus of interest and desire and a source of meaning in all forms of discourse, the self has also

become increasingly fragile. This new individualism is in fact a narcissistic individuation predicated on a loss of identity in the sense of an implicit life pro ject. Contemporary individualization is a most extreme form of social frag

mentation of social existence. This can be contrasted to an individualism

implying 'strong' subjects in conditions in which there is a clearly defined pub lic arena based on a collective project of general human realization. It is the

modernism of Goethe in which movement is the goal, movement toward an ideal state which may never be attained but which provides the subjective

engagement necessary for the integrity of the self. The decline of the social pro ject of modernism pulls the rug out from under the self-propelled subject who finds himself/herself increasingly lacking any direction.

In this kind of world social projects are replaced by the new cultural proj ects, referred to above, that have characterized the West over the past two

decades. Among these, re-identification has become paramount. Roots, gene

alogical identification, ideologies of hybridity, multiculturalism and the like are products of this situation. They are not distributed evenly throughout social space. I have suggested that roots tend to gravitate to the bottom of the

social order while hybridity is more common at the top where cosmopoli tanism reigns. But it should be noted that hybridity and roots partake of the same logic insofar as the former term is primarily a mixing of roots and gath ering of differences.

The ideologies of globalization, diasporization, and transnationalism, all enmeshed with one another, are expressions of this process of fragmentation

and redistribution of public spheres. The celebration of the diaspora as pro ducing new public arenas (Appadurai 1993) and the various statements con

cerning new forms of global citizenship are all part of a reduction of the social

inclusiveness of the public. In Appadurai's work this is also clearly linked to a call for the transformation of the nation-state into a contractual system of

degrees of participation and membership, in which the individual clearly takes

precedence—in principle, if not in practice—over the collective insofar as iden tification with the latter is considerably weakened and reduced to a question of

utility. What we are left with are what promise to be very strong groups, orga

nized transnationally, with their own public spheres, with either contractual or other exchange relations with similar groups. The latter may tend to entail a set of state functions presided over by third parties,1 perhaps a kind of royalty so as not to be identified with any particular transnational group. Nothing is pre supposed about the nature of these transnational corporations, but there is

plenty of evidence today to strongly question the degree to which they permit the kind of individual autonomy that is the point of departure for Appadurai's argument. The most obvious model of this totality is something that we have

already seen in history, the Empire or the pluralist colony, about as far as one

can get from the Clastrian notion of sovereignty.




Retrenchment

If what I recount above concerns the transformation of social experience, and

of subjectivity, there is a real social process to which this transformation is

closely linked which returns us to the initial paragraph. This is an age of real

social retrenchment, an age of gated communities. The social has been increas

ingly relocated within such communities and the gates are both proliferating

and taller. This transformation is not one that can be easily generalized. It

refers to the past twenty years and it has occurred to different degrees in dif

ferent parts of the world. Retrenchment eradicates commonalities and enforces difference. At the summit of the world system there is strong evidence of the

forging of a number global elites who share the same hotels, clubs, cosmopoli tan values, paintings and sculptures, ethnographica, charities, and even 'blood'

(intermarriage). There is evidence of internal ranking within this population

(Wagner 1999), i.e., not any wealthy cosmopolitan can get into the Jockey Club. More important here is the fact that the nature of the position has not

changed over the past several hundred years. The cosmopolitan aristocrats of

previous centuries identified in ways comparable to today's elites, which con sist not only of corporate elites, but aristocrats and political elites. The appar ent mystification involved in cosmopolitan identity is that while representing itself as open and including the entire world, it is socially at least as restricted

as any other strong ethnic identity. A recent study testifies to this in the self identifications of cosmopolitan elites:

... j'ai le sang ex-patrié ... Je suis américain, de passeport et de nationalite, mais

ma famille et celle de ma femme aussi ont un grand nombre de ramifications

dans beaucoup de pays, ce qui fait qu'on a toujours eu un pied aux Etats-Unis,

un pied á l'étranger. (Wagner 1999: 116)

Mon pére était un peu vagabond, et on avait ?a dans les ueines. Mes freres, c'est

pareil: j'ai un frére en Autriche, un en Finlande, une soeur en Espagne. Mon pére

se déplacait beaucoup, et j'ai dü prendre ga. (ibid.: 116)

The hybridity of elite identity that defines itself in terms of openness and mul

ticulturality is at the same time closed in class terms. This is why the metaphor

of blood is so apt in self-descriptions. It is in fact the metaphor of class

endogamy, i.e., social closure.

The Transformation of Politics and the Exit of the Elites

This retreat can be envisaged as a powerful systemic updraft. This is why it has

a generalized effect on all elite formation. Sweden is an instructive case since it expresses such extremely rapid change, having so often been associated with

a more local national identity, a high degree of homogeneity, and with'an egal itarian emphasis and stress on the Clastrian representativity described above.




First in what was once the most egalitarian of European societies, the Gini index (statistical measurement of degree of class stratification) suddenly in creased by 25 percent in the 1990s. Since then there has been a rapid cos

mopolitanization of political elites, to such an extent that they are now often

referred to as a political class. They have raised their own salaries faster than

any other salaries in the country, so that this once rather ordinary middle class

category now adheres to the upper class in economic terms. They have also

increasingly identified out of the country. In an interview some years ago, a minister of integration argued that he was not in fact Swedish because his

genealogy included Scottish, German, and Danish descent. In this same

period, another minister who had bought a hat for more than $4,000 claimed that she had to look her best when representing the people. While in the 1970s and 1980s Social Democratic prime ministers would never have inhab ited the national palatial structures made available to them, today things are

quite the inverse. And the current prime minister has bought himself a huge estate as well, one that he can surely afford on his current salary. He has also

increasingly avoided political debate and has expressed a certain distance to the issues under discussion. While he is against referendums in general, he has curiously avoided the recent debate on the European Constitution. Gov

ernment officials have been involved in innumerable scandals—using a gov ernment jet to return from a football match in Portugal in order to attend a

celebration of the Social Democratic union, having a ministerial workshop in luxurious quarters in southern France—all of which has hit the media and been waved away with aristocratic flourish. There has been a general skepti

cism, referred to above, concerning referendums, which are characterized by

many as simply undemocratic!? Most interesting is the fact that the Social Democratic press itself has led the way in this 'internar criticism that has risen

to quite furious proportions. The separation from 'peoplehood' is in effect a widespread phenomenon in

political strategies that has accompanied the fusion of the old left and right into a new center of respectability, while the 'people' have become the new danger

ous classes. A recent proposition in the EU commission on the reform of democ

racy has called for the institution of a new form of governance, referred to as

'organic democracy,' in which the major actors are Parliament, 'civil societies'

(in the plural), public spheres that are established by self-organizing agents, such as NGOs; interest groups, such as ethnic groups; and other collective

actors, even, apparently, companies. Only the demos is absent (Burns et al.

2000). Interesting in the presentation is the fact that while Parliament, including its parties, is present, those supposedly represented by Parliament are not. Now it might well be argued that in a period in which there is virtually no dif ference between left and right—since both adhere to a certain Third Way or Neue Mitte governed by rules of efficiency in which there is only one way to

rule, la voie unique, which both left and right have appropriated in Europe—there

is little left for the people to chose between, reflected in the increasing lack of interest in elections and in a generalized concern among elites that the function




of representativity is rapidly disintegrating. The solution to this quandary is exit and the direction is upwards, into the stratosphere of pure governance.

Thus, the political representatives tend to join the other elites in identifying with the world as a whole. It is interesting in this respect to note that the real

global citizens are located here and not at the bottom of the social order. In 1999,

Thomas Middelhoff former head of Berteslmann, one of the world's largest media

companies has said of himself: "We're not foreign. We're international... I'm an

American with a German passport." Bertelsmann financed the Network for Bet

ter Local Government which espouses what is called New Public Management as

a replacement for formal democracy, adopted by many international organiza

tions including the World Bank as a model for world governance. The logic of

global elite consolidation combines political reconfiguration and the invocation of

cosmopolitan identity. This not something new, of course, and 1 would be wary of defining it as such. The identity form itself is part of the long durée of capital ist civilization from the Free Masonry to the "Anglo-American Establishment"

(Quigley 1981), including Cecil Rhodes's "Society of the Elect," to the Mount Pelerin Society, the Bilderberg, and other interlocking elite formations. The ques tion is not their existence but their salience. And these are not governing bodies

but clubs in which elite identity is forged and reproduced. That is, there is no intentional conspiracy involved, but there are clearly effects to be reckoned with

in all this overlapping of elites who already have power. The social retreat of the global elites is reflected in the contradiction between

cosmopolitan self-identification and the fact that they live in the same small social worlds as the rest of us. Yet they complain of the fragmentation at the bot

tom of society as a product of xenophobia. Thus, while they have retreated

upwards the people in the street who do the same thing do not fit their perspec tive of the world. This enclavization is not, of course, any newer than the process

described above, but it is something that waxes and wanes in changing histori

cal conditions. The past twenty years of Western social history have been

marked by increasing segregation and the fracture of the public sphere into a

plethora of more local spheres. In Los Angeles, where enclaves have proliferated,

it has been said that the reason that crime has declined is that so few venture

into the no-mans lands anymore. People stay more or less within their enclaves.

Just as in Northern Ireland the violence was concentrated to the border where

there was most contact between Catholics and Protestants, where they shared

the same bars, streets, and sometimes marriage partners. These are the true

hybrid zones (Arantes 1996, on Sao Paolo), the unstable contact zones and vio lent border areas that have been so well described in the literature. And there are

today more borders than ever because there are more people retreating into their

own spaces of security. Again, Sweden is exemplary by way of its embracing an official state and elite multiculturalism with hybrid tendencies, while at the same time it is one of the most segregated societies in Europe, with levels of violence, now publicly recognized, that have increased dramatically over the past few

years. The elites have taken on, however imperfectly, the Dumontian practice of

encompassment of the differences over which they preside.




If we were to use the metaphor of privatization here we could say that the elites have privatized the state and most of its functions, a phenomenon that has

been limited in recent literature to the class-states of Africa (Bayart, Ellis, and

Hibou 1997). It should not be surprising that everyone else is doing the same

thing, from middle class gated communities to the gangs and other associations

that can be found at the multicultural bottom of society. What has disappeared in all of this is the centrality of the national public sphere, one that depended for its very existence on a presupposed people. The retreat of the public is the prod uct of these developments, and it is reinforced by all those discourses that mys tify the process by endowing it with the evolutionary properties of millenarian

capitalism, the age of globalization, and other euphemisms for our social regres sion, however modernized it might seem, into a Blade Runner (1982) society.

Notes

1. Third party in the sense of not belonging to or representing the population over which

they preside.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1993. "Patriotism and Its Futures." Public Culture 5: 415-440.

Bayart, Jean-Francois, Stephen Ellis, and Beatric Hibou. 1997. La criminaUsation de I'Etat en

Afrique. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe. Arantes, A. 1996. "The War of Places: Symbolic Boundaries and Liminalities in Urban

Space." Theory, Culture, and Society 13, no. 4: 81-93.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or, The End of the Social, and

Other Essays. Thins. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton. New York: Semiotext(e). Blade Runner. 1982. Ridley Scott, director.

Burns, Tom R., Carlo Jaeger, Angela Liberatore, Yves Meny, and Patrizia Nanz. 2000. "The

Future of Parliamentary Democracy: Transition and Challenge in European Governance."

Green Paper prepared for the European Union Speakers of Parliament. Brussels: Euro

pean Commission, Secretariat General.

Clastres, Pierre. 1987. Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. New York:

Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Quigley, Caroll. 1981. The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden. New

York: Books in Focus.

Touraine, Alain. 1992. Critique de la modemité. Paris: Fayard. . 1997. Pourrons-nous vivre Ensemble? Égaux et Différents. Paris: Fayard.

Wagner, Anne-Catherine. 1999. Les nouvelles élites de la mondialisation: Une immigration dorée en France. Paris: PUF.



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