Sociality with Objects:Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies
Abstract
Sociality with Objects Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies Karin Knorr Cetina IN THIS article, I begin to develop an analysis of object-centered social- ity as a social form that constitutes something like the reverse side of the coin of the contemporary experience of individualization. Individualization, however defined, always focuses on human relationships. It implies that single human beings win dividends of modern freedoms at the price of the loss of the benefits which they used previously to accrue from their being embedded in communities of other human beings. This understanding of the disembedding of modern selves as exclusively a human relations issue ignores, I shall argue, the ways in which major classes of individuals have tied themselves to object worlds. It ignores the degree to which the modern untying of identities has been accompanied by the expansion of object-cen- tered environments which situate and stabilize selves, define individual identity just as much as communities or families used to do, and which promote forms of sociality (social forms of binding self and other) that feed on and supplement the human forms of sociality studied by social scientists. Objects may also be the risk winners of the relationship risks