The Relocation of the Social and the Retrenchment of the Elites

Abstract

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