Social Action of Playing Self as a Response to Challenge of Nihilism

1. Social Action of Playing Self as a Response to Challenge of Nihilism Shujiro YAZAWA, Seijo University, Tokyo, Japan March, 15th, 2018

2. Information-Globalization-Individuation • An undefined society • Asking new questions, but providing answers with no content using old language • We do know empirically what society we are talking about, but theoretically we cannot define society. • Awareness of this limit, reflexive sociology

3. Reflexive Sociology • Beginning to define one small piece through understanding of specific aspects of society • To and from movement between the specific objects and broad issues in the background is essential.

4. Information (1) • Some consensus among observers • Information is becoming the main resource, thus accentuating the reflexive, artificial, constructed side of social life. • Globalization (Planetarization) of the system • The system has reached its limits, beyond which there is neither time nor space.

5. Information (2) • Any space and time is systemic. • Planetarization of space, delocalization of space, presentification of time • Information is a symbolic and reflexive resource. Information cannot constitute a resource as long as basic needs have not been met. Information society is a postmaterial society.

6. Information (3) • The capacity to use a reflexive resource depends on the human biological and motivational capability to transmit and receive information. • To handle and control of information as a resource becomes one of the most important problems in information society, In order to do it, it is essential to control or possess the codes organizing this mutable, elusive element. • This control is not equally distributed. This type of code is shaping the new forms of power structure and giving rise of new types of discrimination

7. Individualtion process • We are now faced with increasingly less visible forms of power. • There must be socially distributed resources so that individual can function as individuals. The very movement by which these social systems distribute these resource for individuation simultaneously serves to strengthen the forms of control and transfer them to that basic level at which meaning and individual identity are shaped.

8. Individual (1) • Individuation processes are highly ambivalent. • Individual: Time-Space-Body-Language-Tool-Behavior (Action) • Time as dot. The End of History, Losing of Future • Space of Flow, De-contextualizing of Space, Re-Contextualizing of Space, Defining of Place

9. Individual (2) • Body as Language, Body as Meaning • Meaning comes from self-producing organic system, that is language. • Langue based on organs rather than parole in flow. • Ｉｔ includes organic elements and a function of free decision of selection. .

10. Individual (3) • Inner Planet: needs, norms, motivation, habitus, perception, sentiment, emotion, passion, conscience, Identity • Body is the boundary between inner planet and outer planet. All events happens on body and individual.

11. Singularity • Individuality rather than Individualization • Autonomy, Subject →Interdependence • Conflict rooted in physiological level • Individual and Others, especially third person, Jumps with the cost of life are needed. . • Indeterminacy of individual identity • Playing self and multiple identiry

12. New Level of Social Differentiation • The availability of resource creates a new level of social differentiation and new forms of inequality. We must think of inequality and social class less in simply material terms, and more n terms of unequal access to the new resources of individuation. • New forms of conflicts related to the deep individual level. • Personal Reality, Subjectivation of Social Facts

13. Theory (1) • Explanation and Prediction of Empirical Generalization • Social Structure: Individual Physical Behavior (IPB)-Within Aggregates of IPB-Across Aggregates of IPB-Forms of IPB Coincidence • Cultural Structure: Individual Psychological Behavior (IPB)-Wuthin-Across-Forms of IPB

14. Theory (2) • Spatial and Temporal Regularity • Hierarchic Structure of Complex Social Phenomena • Description-Explanation-Prediction of Social Phenomena • Scientific Social Science

15. Two Ways of Creating of Globalizing Social Science • From Sociology in japan • Information/Program Science: Gene Information through Mass Communication to Cosmic Scale • Theory of Structure of Alienation and Reification: from Symphonic Commune, accumulation of alienation and Reification Structure to the Present Civil Society

16. References (1) • Albert Melucci, Playing Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. • Albert Melucci, Challenging Code, Oxford: oxford university Press, 1996. • Alberto Melucci, "Individual Experience and global Issues in a Planetary Society" Social Science Information, 35(3), London; Sage publication, 1996, 485-509.

17. Reference (2) • Wallace Walter, The logic of Scientific Sociology, Aldine Publishing, 1971 • Wallace Walter, Principles of Scientific Sociology, Aldine Publishing, 1983