The Theory of Structuration & the Politics of the Third Way
For Giddens, the main philosophical trends in modernity are caught in the subject-object dualism, just as social theory is captured by the structure-agent dichotomy. He sees the major tendencies in recent philosophy as converging, however, since post-positivist philosophy of science and postwar hermeneutic philosophy have both recognised the complexity of their antagonists’ positions and actually accommodated a number of significant criticisms. Science is no longer seen as solely a process of explanation, but a complicated interaction between explanation and interpretation. Hermeneutic philosophy regards interpretation as situated within the “horizon” of an interpretive tradition, and suggests that modifications to this horizon happen as the result of the conflict of interpretations, but it also accepts that concrete social reality may decisively rupture or transform all interpretive horizons in certain cases (for instance, the French Revolution).
Therefore in both cases, the ontological question of the character of the existence of entities (scientific realism versus social constructivism; philosophies of difference versus philosophies of the subject) becomes primary compared to the mode in which knowledge is obtained. What exists is more important than how we know about it - indeed, in the lens of the ontological turn, the former question largely determines the answer to the latter, since any theory constructs its object and determines what is visible and what is invisible. Giddens’ position seeks to combine the critical scientific realism of Roy Bhaskar with the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans Georg Gadamer.[7]
The critical realism of Bhaskar seeks to build a “common sense ontology” based on the realist and materialist premise that the objects of science exist independently of the activities of science and condition the limits of scientific theories. This means that realism is centrally an ontology before it is an epistemology. Scientific explanations do not invoke universal laws - rather, science exposes the causal mechanisms beneath the phenomenal forms registered in experience or experimentation. Bhaskar is therefore not committed to a “unified field theory” nor to the unity of scientific rationality - only to the concept of inference to the best explanation and to the realist principle that the causal mechanisms disclosed by science exist.[8]
Yet Giddens, while sympathetic, retreats from Bhaskar’s programme for a science of society.[9] (Bhaskar is a Marxist.) For Giddens, the distinction between nature and culture means that social theory is predominantly hermeneutic and not scientific. Although Giddens proposes that social ontologies are pragmatically oriented towards the solution of particular problems, in specific regional contexts, in reality the theory of structuration provides a general social ontology and political hermeneutics. It is this ontological orientation to the self-understanding of agents that informs Giddens’ rejection of functionalism.
Functionalism proposes that social systems have “needs” that have to be met by social institutions so that the social structure can reproduce. Societies are therefore quasi-natural organisms with institutional “organs” directed to maintaining organic functionality and social reproduction. For Giddens, this is vacuous. Social systems have no “needs” - only human agents have needs. The assumption made by functionalism that the society is in functional equilibrium means that the dynamics of social conflict and transformation are neglected or theoretically barred. Giddens also criticises the tendency of functional social theory to view human agents as “cultural dopes” - he calls Althusser’s agents (bearers of social structures socialised by ideological state apparatuses) “cultural dopes of an astonishing mediocrity”. Social institutions are not “needed” by the society but rather are contingent historical products of the actions of human agents under determinate conditions. Hence Giddens rejects, for instance, Marx’s explanation of the reserve army of labour.
Giddens does not mention it, but there is another significant problem with functionalism, brought out by G. A. Cohen’s functionalist social theory, as presented in Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (1978). Functional explanations involve a temporal loop: an action (increase of the mass of unemployed) is undertaken now because it will benefit the rate of profit in some future state of affairs, but this action is independent of the will and consciousness of the individual agents in the system. The functional explanation, however, is validated retrospectively: because the rate of profit fell, it is “clear” that an increase in the mass of unemployed was a functional requirement of the recovery of the rate of profit. The system therefore acts as if it had intentionality and the ability to predict future states of itself: the rationality and will denied to the agents is secretly allocated to the system, which acts as a macro-subject. The perspective of systems theory can to a certain extent rescue this explanation - systems do have self-reflexivity since they have information collection and processing capabilities, including self-monitoring capacities - but the explanation still requires a plausible mechanism involving system decisions. The straightforward functional explanation is forthrightly metaphysical.
It is typical of functionalist explanations to conflate physical constraint with social determinations. To see that Giddens is not dreaming here, consider Norman Geras’ defence of Marxism from the postmarxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Geras cannot believe that Laclau and Mouffe claim that the theory of base and superstructure is a crude functionalism - he finds their claim simplistic and wrong-headed. Laclau and Mouffe argue that if the structure of the mode of production determines that the economy is “determinant in the last instance,” then the “relative autonomy” of politics and ideology is just a smokescreen, since the principle governing the limits of the independent roles of economics, politics and ideology is in reality contained in the structure itself. The term autonomy is misused, they argue: the apparent “relative autonomy” of the various levels of the structure is really only an effect of the structure and therefore there is nothing autonomous about any of the social instances in Marxian theory. There are many replies that could be made to this claim, but it is significant that Geras selects one in particular: “A length of chain secures me by the ankle to a stout post. This limits what I can do but also allows me a certain freedom. ... I can say that I enjoy a relative autonomy”.[10] But in reality, the metaphor of physical constraint cannot explain (or defend) the theoretical relation between structure and social instances in Marxian theory, since this relation has to be specified theoretically in relation to the problem of the social determinations of a phenomenon. All it does is act as a symptomatic “slip of the tongue,” betraying the presence of a functionalist explanation that dare not speak its own name.