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Articulating the World: Social Movements, the Self-Transcendence of Society and the Question of Culture

Recent developments in social theory, and especially in movement research, have deepened our understanding of the self-instituting and self-transformative capabilities of society. However, as the case of Alain Touraine's notion of historicity shows, there is a real danger that social praxis is being reduced to the function of self-thematization and self-programming, enshrining society in a self-referential circle. Ideas of self-transcendence and the non-identity of society with itself cannot be adequately accounted for as long as full scope is not given to the interpretive dimension of human articulation. Moreover, the human ability of self-reflexivity and critique and the recognition of self-transformative faculties are often and principally denied to those societies which do not fit into the framework of modernity, thus subverting claims of universality. Against this Johann Arnason has suggested a return to an anthropology of the social subject which, over and above the constituting faculties, foregrounds the hermeneutical ability of (self-)distantiation and broadens the reference of human action and interpretation, or, rather, transcends the idea of a specific referent: constitutive of the human condition is the opening towards other possibilities, the opening towards the world. What seems required is an interactional approach towards society and culture which takes difference as constitutional, for society as well as social theory, and not as something which can be relegated to a secondary level of complicating conditions.

Key Words: culture • modernity • reflexivity • self-institution (of society) • social movements

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