Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2181772

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Contrasting Social Entities with Social Praxes: A Methodological Enquiry

P.Madhu

Human social life can be understood in many ways. It can be approached in terms of

essences, identities, subjects, subjectivations, impressions, social facts, phenomenon, cause &

effects, structures, class relations, categories, fragments, networks, functions, social action,

processes, narratives, interactions, conflicts, conspiracies, memories, habitats, praxes and so

on. One way of understanding the social is through processes, events, praxis, hiatus, ruptures

and transitions (Madhu, 2011a). The other way is to understand it in terms of cultural, social,

political or economic categories. The approaches understand social through processes is

explained as praxis approach and the other is called entity approach in this paper. Of these

two, entities approach is the oldest and most popular.

The entities approach to human sociality is substantialist. The approach takes human

entities as social things, cultural objects, essences, substances and facts. This approach tends

to take social or cultural objects such as race, gender, caste and even sexual orientations as a

priory entities, the given ones. The entities approach is popular since the time identities

emerged as markers in human civilizations. The approach has rebound within the realpolitik

of democratic atmosphere as it is pragmatic to polarize people according to their identity

profiles. In the yester centuries, identity profiles were invoked for the claims of racial,

gender, aristocratic, imperial or caste superiority and currently they are invoked to claim the

other end of the spectrum: marginality, victimhood, oppression and exploitation. Politics of

the social according to the entity approach is taken as that of the entities, categories and

identities; their status, privileges, and position within the hierarchical array of the social; the

conflicts, conspiracies and strategies of the identities; their uniqueness, particularities,

multiplicities, or victimhood; the hegemonic or even diabolic nature of the other identities,

the political incorrectness of the ‘others’ and so on. The approach is methodologically

preoccupied with exploring identities in conflict with other identities. The social from this

point of view is an ongoing game of identities pitted against or colluding with each other

from multifarious identity particularities. The social science endeavour from this position is

to take sides with one or other fungible mix of identity positions.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2181772

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The entity approach has its credible justifications because the entities such as South-

North, East-West, developed- under developed, haves- havenots, rich-poor, class-gender-

caste- race & religious categories and dichotomies are real as much as they are imagined. It is

argued that entity approach has its moral justification so long as the political outcome is

progressive (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 127-34; Laclau 1990: 17- 26). The political classes

including the activist fraternities internationally find the entity approach to the social is

pragmatic in mobilizing masses especially in democracies. The approach is immensely

influential in guiding public policies of the governments. Social science academics too are

shaped by the overwhelming demand for the entity based social analyses. It is no wonder

large numbers of academic papers in social science are published from entity perspective.

Entity approach is popular among the researchers because cultural entities such as race,

gender, caste, tribe etc., have greater visibility and farther emotional appeal than that focuses

upon their generative processes. Entity approach has emerged the dominant approach also

because of intellectual justifications it received from the quarters that claims to appreciate

particularity over universality, multi-culturalism over mono culturalism and post-modernity

over modernity and also from the angles of political correctness (Soja and Hooper 1993: 187;

Wolfe and Klausen 1997; Calhoun C. 1994: 9–36; MacKinnon 1989; Winant 2000;

Hollander 1994). The approach has its strength also in its empirical simplicity.

Entity approach fudges the meshworks of social phenomenon into categories. Said in

terms of categories, they acquire numbers, quality, and positions. Categories are referred in

terms of individuality, totality along with their hierarchical or parallel position within the

array of categories. Culture is a meshwork phenomenon fudged into ‘category’. Social or

cultural phenomenon while fudged as categories they are presented as ontological or

substantial entities while actually the phenomena are collective thought objects. Once fudged,

the idea of culture takes numbers and acquires labels such as mono-culture or multi-culture

(Baumann 1999: vii; Kymlicka, W. 1995). Both mono-culture and multi-culture makes sense

only within the entity based categories of epistemologies. The mono-culture has become

synonymous with intolerance and rigidity and the multi-culture in contrast is believed to be

tolerant and flexible. Since the ‘mono’ is synonymous with one and ‘uni’ the logic is

extended to ‘universal’ and later it was perceived that the universal is rigid and intolerant.

Proponents of this approach tend to associate everything universal with totalitarianism,

imperialism and exploitation. Further, the universal is taken to be the dichotomous other of

the particular and hence, it is to be opposed at all cost because they perceive that the universal

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if allowed would dismiss their unique identititarian experiences. However, universality is not

a transcultural code. Universality, Zizek makes it clear, exists beyond, above or beneath the

particularities of identities. Entities are not merely the particular identities with which they

are known as it is proposed by entititarians and identititarians. Also, the universal is not an

obfuscator of antagonisms rather it is a field of antagonisms, contradictions and uniqueness

becoming something different from what they already are (Zizek 2006: 34-35). Universalism

and particularism are not necessarily opposed to each other (Wallerstein et al. 1996:57).

However, within the identititarian language game, the ‘particular’ being an antonym for

‘universal,’ it is clubbed with attributes of ‘multi-culture’: tolerant, flexible and

cosmopolitan. Interestingly, since post-modernism in its critical departure from modernism

appreciated pluralism over dualism, the categories of multi-culturality, particularism are

clubbed together with postmodernism by the proponents of entity logic (Nicholson and

Steidman 1995: 21). The identity politics though is as old as the human history itself, has

been given a post-modern face-lift in spite of its non-flexible fixities and self vs. other

dualisms that are incompatible with the postmodern positions. Further, since post-modernism

is contrasted with modernism, genres of identity politics too, by linguistically asserted

association, is contrasted with anything ‘modern’ especially with the ‘class politics’, all

within the language game. Examined closely, identity politics can neither be associated with

the philosophies of modernity nor post modernity. Notwithstanding its sophisticated

presentation, identity politics belongs to the genre of sectarian thoughts prevalent throughout

the history.

Entity approach numbers and qualifies categories. It categorizes entities into

universals and particulars. While numbered they are recognized in terms of mono or multi.

Also entities are qualified as good or bad. Good and bad takes the character of victimhood

and conspiracies. Accordingly, identities are divinized or demonized. Once conspiracy angle

is given, every entity of the other side is conspirator and those of one’s side are victims. The

conspiracy angle smudges unintended consequences and unacknowledged conditions in its

analysis. Further, entity approach is not sensitive to the processes hence it hardly

problematizes unintended or unacknowledged aspects of social figuration. The categorical

schemata of good and bad are sensitive to the political correctness, the excess of which

constitutes the public domain into a zone of an elite normative order of ‘political correctness.’

(Eitzen and Zinn 1989: 369f; Bourdieu 1986: 480f., Hughes 1993: 76; Sparrow, 2002).

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Entities are meshworks, processes and assemblages frozen and presented as totalities,

wholes and essences. The fibres of meshworks are integral to their fields of production; they

are not automous entities independent of the meshwork assemblage (Menon 2008). Entities

approach can never explain the relations which constitute the whole of their configurations.

Race, caste or gender identities that upsurge within the process of the social meshwork are

not themselves causes of the identities thus erupted rather they came into existence as

processes and consequences of the social meshwork in the making.

Property of a system of relations or processes cannot be reduced to properties of its

component. This is because the system is not resultant of the aggregation of the constituent

inherent properties, but of the actual exercise of their capacities. The actual capacities of

entities have nothing to do with inherent entity-ness such as race-ness, gender-ness or caste-

ness because such properties are resultant of other interacting fibres in the social-meshwork

such as the ongoing or historical relations, contingences, milieus that are quite external to the

caste, race, or gender entities (Delanda 2006). In other words, looking for causes in entities is

methodologically flawed because entities themselves are not causes.

Unlike that, the praxis approach treats the social as relational praxis within the flux of

the social meshwork (Madhu 2011a). Meshworks are the ecologically responsive live-strings,

which are themselves made of micro-meshworks, capable of endless praxes and novelties.

Entities are on the contrary, a posteriori virtualities upsurge from the active meshwork of the

social. Entities are meshworks and assemblages misconstrued to be essential categories while

they are historical construction came into existence through processes of territorializations

and legitimizations (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 120). Entities are known by their

stereotypical characters, meshworks are understood for their potency. Potencies upsurge,

transform the whole of the meshwork into indistinguishable another. Meshworks never

remain the same they burst into neo-thetics of pro-thetical counter-events or anti-thetical

events (Madhu, 2011b). Contrarily, entities are static identities.

Politics of the social, from the praxis perspective, is about the power pervading

through the veins of meshwork that constitutes the assemblage (Madhu, 2012b). While the

entity approach reduces politics exclusively to the politics of constituent identities, the praxis

approach problamatizes the pro-thetic power-play internal to the meshwork. In this approach,

the identities, categories and entities are a posteriori sets of virtualities impending to be

busted at the thrust of authentic politics (Menon 2008; Madhu 2009). Politics is more

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appropriate if it is focused towards unwinding the counter-events of minoritizations rather

than politicising entititarian identities (Madhu 2012b).

The methodological focus from praxis perspective is towards exploring the series of

processes, thoughts and sensations culminating into pure ‘intensities’ that break the symmetry

of a mesh-field exceeding its factualities (Žižek 2006:193; Deleuze 1994 165, 281). In other

words, the praxis approach focuses upon intensive capability of the personal and the social

meshworks constantly renewing themselves exceeding the repetitive currents of identities,

habitués and structures. Entity approaches unlike the praxis approaches are about persons,

organizations, social things, social facts, and identities. Entititarian arguments are linear,

simplistic, and rely upon the fallacious mechanical causality. Entititarians are holders of the

Newtonian clockwork logic, inappropriately. The praxis approach on the other hand is

advocated to recognize the non-linear, complex, creative pulsation of the social meshwork

and its non-equilibria.

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