For “Central Conflation”

Introduction

The perennial social theoretical debate over the relationship between individual and society, agency and structure keeps taking new forms. Today it may sometimes seem as though the differences between theorists in this debate are merely semantic. Doesn’t everyone know that individuals have social scientific relevance and that their agency is (to an extent, at least) “autonomous?” And doesn’t everyone also know that sociocultural structures, or the social forms of people’s activity, are important, too? But the debate, the battle, rages on, and there are useful maps to be drawn of the battlefield terrain and the aims and strategies of the combatants.

Perhaps the most important distinction among theorists concerns how much weight they place on the mutual ontological dependency of agents and structures. There are many theorists who emphasize this dependency, who think of individuals’ agency and collective features as mere aspects of the flow of social practices; they might admit to a “duality” of structure and agency, but never their “dualism” (e.g., Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Collins 2004; Dépelteau 2008, 2013b; Elias 1978; Emirbayer 1997; Giddens 1979, 1984; King 2004, 2007; Latour 1986, 2005). I call them antidualists. ¹ But there are other theorists who claim that antidualists are blurring an important ontological distinction between agency and structure. These theorists play down the mutual dependency of individuals and sociocultural structures, insisting on their relative autonomy. I call such theorists dualists, although this is not a term most of them use. Emergentists (in the sense of ontological irreducibility) is the name many prefer (e.g., Bhaskar 1979, 1986; Bunge 1979, 1997; Elder-Vass 2007a, 2007b, 2010; Hodgson 2004; Lawson 1997; Popper [1972] 1979; Sayer 1992; see also Kaidesoja 2009). ²

As Charles Varela (2007:204) points out, this is the new pivotal debate in ontological social theory, with the battle line drawn between what we might call “social psychologizing” (antidualist) and emergentist (dualist) theories. It has largely replaced the old debate between individualists and holists. (See also Archer 1995:59–64, 104–105; Ritzer 2001:128, 139–41.) There are still individualists who subscribe to the claim that individuals and their psychological states are more real or fundamental than social structures and thus provide the ultimate key to social scientific explanation (at least in principle) (e.g., Elster 1989; Hedström and Swedberg 1998; Searle 1995, 1997). And there are also some theorists willing to step to the collectivist side of the fence, asserting that institutions or sociocultural forms are in some sense more real or have more explanatory significance than individuals and their alleged autonomy (e.g., Fuchs 2001; see also Kincaid 1997). However, if we were to picture the field of present-day social theory as a multilane freeway where the lane farthest to the right was old-style individualism and the farthest to the left extreme collectivism or functionalism, we would find most theories today approaching one another in the middle lanes. That is, even those who identify themselves as individualists or functionalists rarely give absolute priority either to the autonomy of individual intentionality or to the powers of collective entities. And on the other hand, as I just noted, there are those emergentist social theorists who argue that collective entities and individuals’ intentional agency are ontologically irreducible to one another: relatively independent levels of reality.

A major proponent of a relatively extreme version of dualism is Margaret S. Archer, one of the best-known sociologists in the UK. She is a former President of the International Sociological Association (1986–1990) and an eminent representative of the “critical realist” movement in social theory (see Archer et al. 1998). Archer started her academic career in the sociology of education (see Archer 1979; Vaughan and Archer 1971), but then went on to develop a sweeping “morphogenetic” theory of culture, society, agency, and reflexivity (Archer 1988, 1995, 2000a, 2003), one that has had a considerable impact on social theory, especially on the agency-structure question (Elder-Vass 2007a; King 2010). The morphogenetic approach separates structures from agentive interactions and insists that we analyze their development as cycles. In such cycles, structures inherited from the past causally condition agency in the present, which then works on the structures and leads to their elaboration, thereby altering the structural setting of future agency (Archer 1988, 1995). It is indeed a dualistic approach. Archer contrasts it with the theories of Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984) and Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1990), who question the dualism of individual (agency) and society (structure) (e.g., Archer 1982, 1988:72–96, 1995:93–134, 2000a:6–7, 2007a:41, 2012:47–86). Archer terms the alternative to dualism “conflationary” theorizing, which means either reducing structure to agency or agency to structure, thereby denying the reality of one or the other, or tying them too tightly together, making them but different aspects of one thing or process and denying the autonomous powers and sui generis existence of both (Archer 1995:6, 13–14, 2000a:4–7). ³

Of particular interest is that last—“tying together”—variant of conflation, which Archer calls “central conflation” or “elisionism.” This variant does not favor the reality of agency over structures or vice versa but simply denies the dualism of the two, their ontological separateness or independence (see Archer 1995:13, 59–61, 81, 93–134). Central conflation is at the core of middle-of-the-road antidualism. In this article, I contest Archer’s arguments for dualism and present arguments of my own for an antidualistic ontology. I hope to show that antidualistic central conflation survives the criticisms directed against it by Archer and that central conflation accordingly does not deserve to be used as a term of abuse. In fact, I hope to “hijack” the term from Archer, to “clear its name” so that theorists can start speaking of central conflation in a neutral or positive sense. ⁴

Margaret Archer’s Ontological Realism and Dualism

Archer has always been an emergentist dualist in one sense or another, although before she joined the critical realist movement in the early 1990s the ontological implications of her “analytical dualism”—the methodology of keeping individuals and their agency separate from structures (see Archer 1979, 1982, 1988)—remained somewhat unclear. In fact, before her realist turn, the distinctness of Archer’s emergent levels was open to empiricist as well as instrumental interpretations. Perhaps the dualistic ontology was implicit already in that older work (King 1999:201), and the “morphogenetic approach [then just] fully developed . . . [that] ontology” when she found the philosopher Roy Bhaskar’s books on ontological under-laboring for science and “became involved with the nascent group of what came to be called ‘Critical Realists’” (Archer 2007b, see also 1995; Archer et al. 1998). But it could also be said, following R. K. Sawyer (2001:569), that Archer’s ontological position changed quite dramatically in the 1990s when she ontologized her concept of emergence and, along with it, analytical dualism, turning them from merely methodologically useful instruments of explanation (see Archer 1979:31, 1988:xiv, 143, 228) into conceptualizations presumed to refer to and thus entail sui generis strata of entities with causal powers (Archer 1995:14–16, 174). For at that point Archer (1995:12–30, 57–64) started to think of theories as attempts to refer to reality and to insist that methodology go hand in hand with ontology: “An ontology without a methodology is deaf and dumb; a methodology without an ontology is blind” (Archer 1995:28). Analytical dualism was now joined at the hip with emergentist ontology: it was justified only insofar as it referred to something real—to the real separateness of irreducible levels of entities that have independent causal powers (see Archer 1995:14–16, 60–76, 159–61, 170–74).

On these grounds, many commentators have objected to Archer’s continuing habit of calling her dualism (merely) analytical; after all, the “analyticity” of a distinction carries connotations of it being a semantic matter, a question of different meanings of words or vocabularies, and that is not what Archer as an ontological realist is saying. Rather, her position implies metaphysical dualism (Domingues 2000:226; Hedström 2005:74–75; King 1999:207; Sawyer 2001:569–70). For as a Bhaskarian realist, Archer claims that structures and agency “are not different aspects of the same thing but are radically different in kind” (Archer 1995:15; see Bhaskar 1979:42), that they are “distinct from each other and irreducible to one another” ⁵ (Archer 1995:14; see Bhaskar 1979:42–48), separated by an “ontological hiatus” (Archer 1995:196; also Bhaskar 1979:46). Crucially, although the powers of structures are not causally efficient—in the sense that they could make things happen by themselves (Archer 1995:90, 195–96; see Bhaskar 1979:43)—they are still structures’ own causal powers, irreducible to present people and their agency, and the effects of such powers are evidence for the sui generis existence of structures (Archer 1995:14, 50–64, 167–77; Bhaskar 1979:15–19).

To be sure, Archer still claims that her dualism is “not philosophical,” but this is mainly because she defines “philosophical dualism” as a very peculiar outlook that would deny even that “structures . . . emerge from the activities of people, and . . . only exert any effect when mediated through the activities of people” (Archer 2000b:465)—as an outlook, that is, which would apparently have structures come to existence by some other means than by emerging from people’s activities, and to affect the world more directly than through such activities. As no sociologist would defend dualism in that sense, Archer’s position with its distinct levels of entities that “have relative autonomy from one another” and “exert independent causal influences in their own right” (Archer 1995:14) remains just about the most extreme case of philosophical or metaphysical dualism there is.

As such a dualist, Archer has been accused of both reifying structures and fostering what Norbert Elias (1978:14–16) called the “naïvely egocentric” view of man—the view that individuals’ social connections are but outer layers on top of the hard core of an essentially solitary being. The challenge for her is to answer those accusations in a manner that nevertheless avoids undermining the respective metaphysical autonomy of agency and structure.

Archer meets this challenge with her concept of emergence. As emergent entities, structures are “something quite different from an overt and relatively enduring patterning in social life,” Archer (1995:172) tells us, “something other than observable features such as ‘institutional patterns’, ‘social organizations’ or ‘socio-economic classes.’” They are real, powerful entities, that is, and yet, because emergent, need not consist in any peculiar “social substance” (Archer 1995:51, 167–77, 195–201, 2000b). Likewise, individuals and their intentional agency are real too, because anchored in our emergent “human being[, which] is both logically and ontologically prior to the social being, whose subsequent properties and powers need to build upon human ones” (Archer 2000a:190). This basis is what guarantees us true individual agency, according to Archer. As something that emerges from the relations between the world and our embodied human nature, a person’s reflexive decision-making power and thus his or her agency are irreducible to anything else. We must not accept any theories “discrediting” those mental powers by “explaining them away as the results of childhood influences, society’s discourse or brain states” (Archer 2003:38–39).

But what, then, are Archer’s arguments for ontological emergence? Let us consider them and see how antidualists can answer them.

Archer’s Arguments for Emergent Separateness

One important line of argumentation Archer uses notes the temporality of emergence—the fact that “emergence takes time since it derives from interaction and its consequences which necessarily occur in time” (Archer 1995:14). She thinks this is absolutely crucial: “Basically, analytical dualism is possible due to temporality” (Archer 1995:183). And certainly the fact that structures have arisen from past actions may be thought to dispel the air of paradox surrounding dualist ontology, because if structures are dependent on past actions, are they not to that extent independent from present agency? (See Archer 1995:14, 84–90, 137–49, 166–79.)

But many critics—including some other ontological emergentists like Dave Elder-Vass—have rejected this argument because they find that emergence is chiefly a matter of present “synchronic” relations, not of “diachronic” developments in time (Elder-Vass 2007a:27–28, 34–37), ⁶ and a property’s preceding its current constituents is no guarantee of its present ontological distinctness from those constituents. The “emergent” property may just as well “supervene” on its contemporary constituents, which means it does not really have causal powers independent or autonomous from them (Sawyer 2001:570–71.) For example, A’s “supervening on” B implies that there is no A-difference without a corresponding B-difference (McLaughlin and Bennett 2005). The criticism is that that Archer’s argument from temporality just “ontologizes time,” as King (1999:211) puts it, “convert[ing] the temporal priority of other people’s actions into the ontological . . . autonomy of structure.”

Neither are critics impressed with the particular variant of the argument from temporality that can be found in Archer’s (1982:468–70, 1995:76–79, 2000b:465–66) illustrations of structures’ powers—illustrations that draw on the fact that it takes time to change structures (no matter how eager people are to change them right away). It takes time to turn illiterate masses into literate ones, for example, or to change the demographic structure of society, and just how much of structure there is to be changed—how much work to be done—is certainly not anything that the present agents can choose but, rather, something that they find waiting for them as a piece of external reality. Yet these are weak arguments for structures’ ontological autonomy because it would take time to eradicate illiteracy even if that was just a matter of changing individuals’ properties. How would one distinguish a case where the time it took to change a structure resulted from the structure’s sui generis powers resisting our efforts from another, otherwise similar case where that time was due only to all the individuals’ properties together resisting our efforts? (See Domingues 2000:227; Elder-Vass 2007a:34–37; King 1999:209–11; Piiroinen 2013:281–82.)

Another argument often used by Archer and, for instance, Elder-Vass (2007a, 2007b, 2010), draws directly on the fact that emergent structures are inherently relational—that their being and powers arise from “internal” (as opposed to merely “external”), constitutive relations. As examples, Archer refers to the structural powers arising from the relations involved in the division of labor in a factory and to the powers emerging from the landlord-tenant relation (Archer 1995:51, 2000b:465–66).

However, undeniable though it is that there are structures essentially comprised of social relations such as these—relations that are not just statistical correlations or otherwise contingent—the question remains: do these relations give rise to emergent entities wielding powers that withstand what Archer conceives as “the litmus test which differentiates between emergence on the one hand and aggregation and combination on the other”—the test of it being truly the emergent entity “X itself . . . [that] has the generative capacity to modify the powers of its constituents in fundamental ways and to exercise causal influences sui generis” (Archer 1995:174)? Not necessarily. There are many interpretations of relations and many kinds of “relationalisms” in social theory, quite a few of which deny the ontological essence, or powers, or separateness of relational entities (see e.g., Powell and Dépelteau 2013).

In fact, even individualist reductionists agree with Archer that social scientists need to pay attention to relations (Watkins 1968:270–71), but they argue that relations and hence relational structures and whatever causality is involved with them are reducible to individuals. This is the debate between emergentists and reductionists, one that can hardly be said to have been “decided” one way or the other (see Porpora 2007:198). Second, even “antiessentialists” who choose to neglect the conceptualization-independent essences of things (e.g., Fuchs 2001; Kivinen and Piiroinen 2006; Rorty 1999:53–69) may acknowledge relations and their constitutive role in structures. Yet for them, those relations and structures are not “out there,” they are conceptualizations we deem appropriate in some of our practices. This is the debate between transcendental realists and antiessentialist empiricists, another unresolved philosophical tug-of-war. Finally, and most pertinently for this article, there are those who agree with Archer that social relations are real but insist that they do not separate but rather, tie together social structures and individual agents. This is the debate between ontological dualism and antidualism. Dualists think that relations crank structures and agents apart, where antidualists think they amalgamate agents and structures together because, arguably, relations make not just structures but also the individual agents what they are (Piiroinen 2013:282; see King 2007:214; Powell 2013:187; cf. also Archer 2013:146, 152–54, 160).

So relationality as such is no argument for dualist level ontology. In fact, as many critical realists also admit, relations do not hover anywhere above or between people and do not literally constitute a tangible higher level (e.g., Porpora 2007:198). If anything, the relationality of structures would seem to speak against level ontology because, obviously, if we all just suddenly lost our memories and other relevant neural dispositions—if no one was able to remember his or her own name, let alone relatives, friends, possessions, occupation, place of residence, and so on—there would be nothing left of social relations and structures. So it is hard to understand why Archer wants to challenge the individualists’ conviction that “whatever the origins of the social tendencies and features we observe, their present existence is due in some way to the people present” (Archer 1995:44). After all, it cannot really be doubted that the present existence of social features is due to present people: there is nowhere else for the relations and hence structures to be than in those people, ontologically speaking (whereas epistemologically or methodologically or semantically speaking we do often separate them).

Yet I think individualists are wrong in their assumption that since the existence of structures is dependent on people, the basic unit of social science is therefore the individual. Archer is right to question that idea and actually proves it untenable quite handsomely with her slippery slope argument against methodological individualism. She argues convincingly that were we to adopt as our most essential guideline of science the doctrine that one must always try and reduce things to their more fundamental components, it would become hard to find a reason for stopping the reductions of the human world to individuals and their psychological states. Why not reduce these, too, to their components; why should they be taken as the basic elements of social reality? Archer suggests—much like Durkheim [1898] (1974), in fact—that this slide into absurdity can be halted only by means of the icepick of emergentism, which allows us to think of individuals and their mental states as entities irreducible to their components. And once we start using that tool, why stop applying it to individuals, Archer asks? Why not also think of collective entities as emergent realities (Archer 1995:39–41; see also, e.g., Elder-Vass 2007a, 38–39)? So, according to Archer, individualists “are on the horns of a dilemma and either way their ontological claims about individuals as the ultimate constituents of social reality seem bound to crumble” (Archer 1995:41).

To be sure, individualists can grasp the horn of emergentism and try and explain how it applies to minds but not to collective entities. ⁷ And it is not clear that Archer can satisfactorily contest such explanations and prove that structures are as emergent realities as individuals’ minds. But antidualists avoid the problem. As they see it, the force of the slippery slope argument lies not in proving that structures are as independently real as individuals but in bringing out the vagueness of the concept of “individual,” too—that it is by no means self-evidently clear and basic (see Piiroinen 2013:282–83).

This leads us to what I think is the main battleground between dualists and antidualists, the mind of the individual. The question is: how social is it?

On the (Social) Nature of Individuals

No one could question that there are singular organisms we call members of the biological species Homo sapiens, but the antidualists wish to remind you that these are not distinctly human individuals, not to mention social scientifically interesting agents, until they are in sociocultural relations with other people and thus components in sociocultural wholes that contribute enormously to their being the kinds of individuals that they are (see e.g., Bourdieu 1977; Dewey [1920] 1988:187–94, [1922] 1983, [1927] 1988:351–53; Elias 1978; Fuchs 2001; Giddens 1984; King 2004; Mead 1934; also Kivinen and Piiroinen 2013). As John Dewey put it a hundred years ago:

The real difficulty is that the individual is regarded as something given, something already there. . . . [For, actually,] social arrangements, laws, institutions . . . are means of creating individuals. Only in the physical sense of physical bodies that to the senses are separate is individuality an original datum. Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out. (Dewey [1920] 1988:190–91)

For central conflationist antidualists like myself, indeed, the “micro” focus is not the individual so much as specific encounters and other small-scale situations involving specific kinds of people-in-relations and their interactions (see Collins 2004:3). In effect, “the stuff of the social is made of relations, not individuals” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:179). But Archer, in contrast, needs to keep individuals free from their social relations in order to pull those relations away from agency and turn them into the essence of structures. So relations and thus structures must be external to individuals and their beliefs and concepts, according to Archer, and relational roles, institutions, concepts, and ideas cannot be allowed to “invade” or “determine” individuals’ identities and decision-making processes. Basically Archer is saying that we must not stuff too much of the sociocultural world into people’s heads, that this would leave us with an insufferably unstratified and thereby too burdened concept of individual (Archer 1995:37–38, 121–32, 2000a, 2003:19–92, 2007a:5–22). She wants “to defend Kant’s relatively autonomous self from Durkheimian attempts to render it socially dependent” and warns against “confusing the capacities of the (human) mind with its (social) contents” (Archer 1995:285–86).

Thus, much of Archer’s (2000a) argumentation against the elisionist amalgamating of structure and agency comes down to defending the sui generis nature and autonomy of the individual’s self and reasoning, which she suggests must be rooted in people’s non-social bottom layers. “One of the most important properties that we have, the power to know ourselves to be the same being over time”—our very “sense of self, or self-consciousness”—“depends upon practice in the environment rather than conversation in society,” Archer (2000a: 7) argues, and she claims this sense of self alone can provide “the necessary anchorage for the person, agent and actor alike” (2000a: 257)—for all our social levels, that is. As Archer well knows, elisionist theorists insist on “letting more of the social get under the agential skin” (Archer 2010:274). They think that the Archerian individual is too solitary and voluntaristic, in possession of too much autonomous power of “self-creation” (King 2010:256–57). ⁸ For one thing, elisionists reject the Archerian notion of non-social self-consciousness—that bottom level of his or her stratified self that is supposed to develop early in life and remain forever “proofed against language” and other sociocultural influences because rooted in our embodied, non-social “Humanity, as a natural kind” (Archer 2000a:3, 7–9, 17–18, 121–53, see also 113–17, 159–73, 189–90, 253–57). For antidualists, the very nature of humanity is most essentially social. There is no non-social core to be demarcated and laid down as the bottom level of self.

Obviously, humanity is not just social, let alone just linguistic, because we have our biological bodies too, based on genetic blueprints (which make us socially disposed already at birth, in fact, yet allow much by way of variety also in that regard). But the biological make-up is constantly transforming (all the way down to epigenetic processes) as reactions or adaptations to the environment we transact with, and the most peculiarly human parts of our environment, of our evolutionary niche, are the sociocultural elements—other people and their habits and customs, social practices, symbolic meanings, and institutions (see e.g., Dennett 1995:335–69; Kivinen and Piiroinen 2013; Weber and Depew 2003). Many of these involve multitudes of artefacts and individuals’ skillful use of them, which Archer underscores in Being Human (2000a:121–90), but they also involve social life, lots of people doing things in a coordinated way, and usually some language- or other symbol-use, too. So human individuals, their habits, and (thus) minds may be conceptualized as mixtures (or “interpenetrations”) of the biological and sociocultural elements involved in the organism-environment transactions wherein alone those organisms are what they are and their environment is exactly what it is. To put it another way: habits and minds may be seen as sociocultural “functions” in biological bodies. (See esp. Dewey [1922] 1983; also, e.g., Brothers 1997; Clark 2008; Cozolino 2006; Dennett 1991; Dewey 1991:30–65; Giddens 1984; Mead 1934; Noë 2009; Piiroinen 2013.)

And this is not what Archer wants: she knows perfectly well that even “social constructionists” admit that people have a biological constitution that reacts and adapts to the sociocultural world, and she wants something more, more than the biological plus the sociocultural (Archer 2000a:4, 188–90, see 1995:81–84, also 2003:9–16). Apparently the needed extra ingredient emerges from our relations with the non-social world—or from the “important field of non-linguistic practices which are conducted in the context of non-social relations” (Archer 2000a:159). These play such a pivotal role that, Archer tells us, “the embodied practices of human beings in the world [are] more important than their social relations for the emergence of selfhood . . . and reflexivity” (Archer 2000a:121).

According to central conflationists, however, there is no such sharp distinction between non-social and social relations; nor are there any purely non-linguistic practices. As naturally social beings we learn our habits of action and thought—including the habits of symbolic communication most essential to our self-consciousness—from others, so they are thoroughly social affairs. To be sure, “an individual can be separated from this, that and the other grouping,” antidualists like Dewey ([1925–1927] 1988) admit, but they insist that this must not induce us to take seriously the “image of a residual individual who is not a member of any association at all” (p. 355). That non-social, “egocentric” image of Self would certainly encourage dualism by portraying individuals as “surrounded by society yet cut off from it by some invisible barrier,” for this picture also reifies structures—other people and forms of social life—into external objects, turning Society into a “‘thing’ which sociologists investigate” (Elias 1978:13–15; see Dewey [1925–1927] 1988:351–55; cf. Archer 1995:1). As Dewey put it:

Then “society” becomes an unreal abstraction and “the individual” an equally unreal one. . . . [And] there develops the unreal question of how individuals come to be united in societies and groups: the individual and the social are now opposed to each other, and there is the problem of “reconciling” them. (Dewey [1925–1927] 1988:355)

Dewey saw this as a completely artificial, unnecessary problem. His antidualist take on the individual-society issue is very different.

Central Conflationist Process Metaphysics

Not all who call themselves antidualists propose any particular kind of ontology (e.g., Kivinen and Piiroinen 2013; Powell 2013), but many do, and so will I here (although, I should add, not in any transcendent or “intransitive,” but “transitive” sense: understanding ontology as a take on people’s conceptions of reality, not as a take on the conception-independent Nature of Reality; cf. Bhaskar [1975] 2008; see also Blackburn 1996:94). To this end, I argue for process metaphysics, challenging essentialist metaphysics of distinct entities (distinct both from each other and from the subject who may come to know them). Process metaphysics presents (social) reality as a continuous process of life, which will in practice be cut into “things” and “events,” including “actions” and “structures,” as experienced in subject/object transactions, but only from some particular, active point of view (see Emirbayer 1997; also Bourdieu 1977; Dewey [1925] 1988; Giddens 1984).

It is in this spirit, I take it, that Giddens replied to Archer’s criticism: “Structure and action cannot form a dualism, save from the point of view of situated actors, because each is constituted by and in a single ‘realm’—human activity” (Giddens 1990:299). For although we cut this continuous process of human activity into specific actors and other objects, events and instances of agency, and other factors explaining events, factors such as individuals’ intentions and institutional structures, elisionists see no reason to suppose that these terms have metaphysically distinct, clear-cut referents. As Elias (1978:125) put it: “the concept ‘individual’ refers to interdependent people in the singular, and the concept ‘society’ to interdependent people in the plural.” The terms carry different meanings, to be sure, but even when we focus on the particularities of those meanings, “‘individual’ is not one thing, but is a blanket term for the immense variety of specific reactions, habits, dispositions and powers of human nature that are evoked . . . under the influences of associated life,” Dewey ([1920] 1988) observed, and “society,” too, is “infinitely many things. It covers all the ways in which by associating together men share their experiences and build up common interests and aims” (p. 194). Indeed, these words “are hopelessly ambiguous, and the ambiguity will never cease as long as we think [of them] in terms of an antithesis” (Dewey [1925–1927] 1988:351). So Dewey urged us to quit playing with general notions and to concentrate instead on concrete “inquiry into . . . specific, changing and relative facts”—inquiry designed to solve problems people experience (Dewey [1920] 1988:194; see also Kivinen and Piiroinen 2006).

To follow Dewey’s exhortation, I argue, we should replace the vertical metaphor of levels with horizontal notions such as “webs,” “networks,” “fields,” or “figurations” (or, perhaps, “niches”) of social life (see e.g., Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Collins 1998; Elias 1978; King 2004; Latour 2005; also Dépelteau 2013b; Kivinen and Piiroinen 2013; Powell 2013). This terminology will allow us to say, with Collins (1998:21), that what is called the “macro-level of society should be conceived not as a vertical layer above the micro, as if it were in a different place, but as the unfurling of the scroll of micro-situations.” And that micro-situations, for their part, tend to abide by the large-scale consistencies of structures, as if “embedded in macro-patterns, which are just the ways that situations are linked to one another.”

Thus, on the one hand, micro-events—what happens in the encounters of certain kinds of people-in-relations—can be partly explained by macro-patterns, while, on the other hand, those macro-patterns are not reified as self-reliant objects but seen as something that we pick out from the dynamics of networked encounters (Collins 1998:21). Both macro and micro are sociological perspectives, macro picking out large-scale patterns and micro focusing on the small-scale situations involving few people. “The difference between society as a whole and the myriad of collective events of which it is comprised is one of scale, . . . not ontological quality” (King 2007:215).

Archer (1995:7–12), in turn, is explicit in rejecting this idea: she thinks that the (in particular, American) tradition of seeing macro as bigger or wider and micro as smaller, more focused scopes is fundamentally mistaken. Social structures and individual agents are qualitatively different levels, not the poles of a quantitative continuum of size and complexity. And she claims that if we fail to think of them like this, as qualitatively distinct strata of reality, we will remain unable to fulfill our central sociological “task of understanding the linkage between ‘structure and agency’” (Archer 1995:1).

Now it is true that, as we elisionists think of structures and agency as two aspects of one process, we cannot see much point in speculations about the ontological “linkage” between them—just as we cannot see much point in Descartes’s speculations about the pineal gland providing the linkage between body and mind. But that does not mean that we cannot investigate the causal connections between specific (types of) agents—who, of course, exemplify and are constituents in multiple structures—and specific (kinds of) structural forms of social life and agency. In fact, I think antidualism offers a better ontological backcloth for such discussions than dualism (which is not to say that dualisms cannot also be of some restricted use for some specific purposes). It offers better food for thought and most crucially avoids setting up unnecessary philosophical obstacles. Next I turn to arguments for that view.

Arguments for Antidualism

One fundamental type of argument for antidualist process metaphysics is a compound one combining some individualist and some collectivist insights. Basically, from the individualists we antidualists pick what we need to question the autonomous existence and powers of structures and from collectivists their best arguments disputing the independency of individuals.

For instance, it sounds rather individualistic when Rom Harré (2001:25) suggests we should understand structures as taxonomies, as conceptual tools referring not to any powerful entities but to “cluster[s] of practices by which groups of persons are classified.” “Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer think that people are trapped in social structures,” says Harré. “But if social structures . . . are only taxonomic categories, then people can’t be trapped in them. One can be trapped by a herd of elephants, but not by the species to which word ‘elephant’ as a classificatory category refers” (p. 26). Yet most antidualists will not swallow Harré’s (1997, 2001; Varela and Harré 1996) related ideas about individual people or persons being the fundamental “powerful particulars” of social reality either. And at this point they might refer to collectivist arguments such as the Durkheimian–Archerian slippery slope discussed previously and state that the concept of individual person is as vague as the concept of structure—and as much just a conceptual tool by means of which to pick something of interest out of the process of social life. The undeniable relationality of social roles means that “even the most personal forms of agency are in fact the product of collective action” (King 2007:212), after all.

Here we may join Stephan Fuchs—whose book Against Essentialism (2001) was much praised by Collins (2003)—in saying that “powerful people” (as well as powerful organizations or institutions, certainly) are picked out as such only from one or another standpoint: “Power is the way in which an observer in or outside the network observes how the network is able to accomplish anything,” and no observer is supremely privileged in this regard: “different observers attribute power to different sources,” and none of them can be said to have identified “the one true source of power” (Fuchs 2001:260). A better metaphor for the powers of social world, then, is “the juice that flows through the network, without ever being concentrated in a single source or reservoir. In this, power is much like electricity, which is also not ‘in’ any of the components of a circuit” (Fuchs 2001:260; see also Latour 1986). This image helps us avoid the conviction that the social sciences need to track causality down to particular entities at a particular level of reality. By contrast, we can understand causality as explanatory and occasionally predictive descriptions of what happens in networks of people, where people in relation to each other together give normative power to one another but none of them alone have any (social scientifically interesting) power (see Fuchs 2001:240–41, 256–60; King 1999:214–15, 2007:212–13; Latour 1986; Piiroinen 2013:288). ⁹

This is how we avoid both reifying agentive and structural features and also the desire to reduce either to something more fundamental. As Archer (1995:61, 2000a:6–7) observes, too, elisionist antidualism is “areductionist”—as opposed to the Archerian emergentism’s “antireductionism.” That is to say, the instances and properties of agency and structures found most useful in understanding and explaining the world-as-experienced are quite real for us antidualists, but we see no reason to believe that they are independent from one another, that there is an ontologically real hiatus between them.

Now this “we see no reason to” in the last sentence takes us to another compelling argument for antidualistic philosophy, a pragmatic one saying that, quite simply, we do not need the dualistic idea of the essential separateness of individuals’ agency and social structures or the idea that they constitute their own levels of entities with sui generis powers. We do not need these ideas in our sociological explanations. We do need, of course, analytical distinctions between structures and agency, but only analytical distinctions, which can be made between any terms or vocabularies that can be said to have different meanings (to us, in some of our practices). What we oppose is the “depth ontology”–based reading of dualism, presented not as just a convenient instrument useful for given explanatory purposes, but as a distinction allegedly capturing real separateness of autonomous (levels of) entities (cf. Archer 1995:12–30, 45–47, 57–58, 135–61, 170–74).

Why does Archer think that neglecting this metaphysical gap or separateness means losing the ability to make useful conceptual distinctions between experienced features? Why does she claim that instrumentalism in this regard would turn out to be “fatal” for sociology (Archer 1995:161)? I think she has too much faith in Bhaskar’s ([1975] 2008) realist philosophy. In fact, denying or asserting metaphysical separateness has no necessary connection with our capacity to make analytical distinctions (see Derksen 2005:147–48; Rorty 1999:47). The shoe is on the other foot: as Peter Hedström (2005:69) argues, ontological emergentism exemplifies a counterproductive “tendency to reify and to treat as real purely analytical distinctions between different levels of reality.” Actually, antidualists can even analyze developments as Archerian morphogenetic cycles (of structural conditioning → agentive interactions → structural elaboration) whenever that is the most useful instrument to use, but they avoid the implication that the usefulness of that tool entails different strata of causally powerful entities. And this helps them to understand that morphogenetic cycles are indeed just one tool among many, not the most crucial all-purpose tool.

So I disagree with Archer’s (1988, 1995) suggestions that the idea of morphogenetic cycles of distinct levels of entities is methodologically indispensable for good sociology. I do appreciate how analyses in terms of morphogenetic cycles may have seemed helpful to someone who had been investigating historical developments of educational systems (e.g., Archer 1979; Vaughan and Archer 1971), for example, because retrospectively one can deal with such developments by conceptualizing and picking out specific structural constellations (of people and their agency) that in a sense channeled agency during a particular period of time, and distinguish various interest groups and other agents that strove to change some of those structures, each “for their own purposes,” and finally state what structural changes followed from those agents’ interactions and by which year. But this is hardly the most typical kind of sociological research work. Empirical studies into topics such as attitudes toward the legalization of marijuana, or the effects of long-term unemployment on the self-conceptions of working-class men, or recent trends in social media, or correlations between given population cohorts and dietary or drug-abusing or exercising habits may not naturally break into any specific inherited structures first conditioning the relevant agents, those agents working and interacting so as to change or maintain the structures, and structural elaborations then taking place. Analysis in terms of separate levels of autonomous entities would seem pointless in such cases, whereas analyses in term of fields or networks of agency may conceivably turn out quite fruitful. In fact, as Latour et al. (2012) argue, with the development of computer technology and digitalized data making it possible to handle vast amounts of information and thus very complicated histories of social life, the importance of level-theoretical abstractions or indeed of part-whole dualism is rapidly lessening even with respect to our need to make social complexity more manageable.

In any case, the main theoretical point in this connection is just that both dualists and antidualists can use any conceptual distinctions they want, while the dualist alone inflicts himself or herself with the burden of sorting out the metaphysical mystery of two autonomous levels and thus with the extra epistemological problematic of linking them back together. And this brings us to a version of the good old empiricist argument from uncomplicatedness, which can also be used to defend antidualism. As Archer herself says,

only if the ontological difference between “structure” and “agency” is accepted . . . does the question arise as to how the influence of the one is mediated to the other. . . . [I]t is only if the subjectivity of “agents” and the objectivity of “structures” are credited not only with being different kinds of properties, but also with the capacity for exerting different kinds of causal powers that the process of mediation becomes problematic. (Archer 2003:14–15)

Central conflation offers a way to avoid this problematic because it portrays structures as but people and their (habits and other dispositions of) thinking and speech and action and conceives people as social animals who adopt their (habitual and other dispositions-dependent) ways of thinking and acting from other people (Dewey [1922] 1983; Mead 1934; see also, e.g., Gronow 2008; Kivinen and Piiroinen 2013; Piiroinen 2013). The antidualistic solution to what Archer (1995:1) sees as “the central sociological problem”—“the problem of the relationship between individual and society”—is more dissolution than anything else: there is no such (general) problem. “There is no problem in all history so artificial as that of how ‘individuals’ manage to form ‘society,’” Dewey ([1922] 1983:44) said; it is an “unreal question” ([1925–1927] 1988:355) and has inflicted much unnecessary nuisance to social science ([1920] 1988:190–200, [1925–1927] 1988:351–55; Elias 1978:13–32). Neither is there any general problem of how young people come to adopt many of their parents’ skills and (relatively) similar kinds of minds and structural forms of social life. That problem dissolves if we grasp that the newcomers never interacted with any super-human structures in the first place, but with other people (their parents, playmates, teachers, etc.) (e.g., Harré 2001:24; Piiroinen 2013:286).

To talk about the priority of “society” to the individual is to indulge in nonsensical metaphysics. But to say that some pre-existent association of human beings is prior to every particular human being who is born into the world is to mention a commonplace. These associations are definite modes of interaction of persons with one another; that is to say they form customs, institutions. (Dewey [1922] 1983:44)

The avoidance of unnecessary metaphysical complications in this matter may conceivably be thought to count in favor of antidualistic outlook. And it does not mean that elisionists are taking an oversimplified view of social life, either. I should rather say that it is the other way round: antidualism offers the better conceptual framework for us to appreciate the richness of social life and humanity, whereas dualists are in danger of fostering an overly simplistic picture of that complexity. As King (2004:238) says, antidualistic hermeneutics offers tools superior to dualism to truly understand the “vibrant reality of social relations,” precisely because it refuses to petrify aspects of the process of sociocultural life into “marble simplicities of ontological dualism” and instead encourages close “observation of the details of human social practice.” In fact, this constitutes one more argument for antidualism, one that deserves a bit more elaboration. In the final section of this article I turn to such an elaboration.

Understanding the Manifold of Sociocultural Life

As antidualists deny any metaphysical hiatus between micro-scale agency and macro-scale structures, they encourage us to effortlessly zoom back and forth between the micro and the macro: to zoom as close to small-scale encounters and as far back to the consistencies of large-scale dynamics as needed to understand the spatiotemporal chunks of the social practices of people-in-relations that are most relevant for the case at hand, in all their relevant details and big-picture connections. And, arguably, antidualists manage this precisely because they avoid the self-appointed problematic of the linkage between individuals’ interactions and sociocultural systems.

Of course, Archer will counter that it is a vital strength of her dualistic position that it demands us to study the link between individuals and society, that this link is the key to social mechanisms. In particular, she tells us, she has recently taken major steps toward understanding that key, how it boils down most crucially to individuals’ reflexivity (Archer 2003, 2007a:1–22). But in fact, antidualists appreciate reflexivity just the same as Archer, and besides avoid the need to place it on the categorically subjective (as opposed to objective) side of a metaphysical divide, in the supposedly structures-independent and intrinsically private mental space inside individual heads (cf. Archer 2003:19–150). They may admit that Archer’s (2003, 2007a, 2012) investigations into reflexivity have provided some interesting and even useful conceptual tools, but add that those tools would be more useful within an antidualistic framework, without any ontological levels (Dépelteau 2013a; Piiroinen 2013). Instead of Archer’s (2000a) stratified self in a stratified society, antidualists speak of relational selves in a relational society and argue that good sociological work can be done with that notion (see Silver and Lee 2012; also e.g., Collins 2004; Fuchs 2001; King 2007; Powell 2013). That way we avoid Archer’s undersocialized concept of humanity, self and mind, which unnaturally externalizes sociocultural influences such as symbols and habits from the individual’s self and reflexive reasoning powers (see Gronow 2008; also King 2010:256–58). ¹⁰ Because of her philosophical outlook, Archer is wary of such sociocultural elements slithering into and constituting the individual’s mind; she favors vocabularies in which the individual “finds” and “confronts” these factors as external objectivities (e.g., Archer 2003:78–150). The way she sees it, sociocultural factors, although they can of course affect a subject’s decisions, sometimes even without his or her full awareness, “do not first have to become internalised as part of a subject’s dispositions” (Archer 2007a:17–18).

Doubtless, it will be asked, “Don’t these social factors affect people’s motivation and thus the very projects they pursue?” There are indeed structural properties, such as vested interests, and cultural properties, such as ideology, which can motivate by encouraging and discouraging people from particular courses of action without their personal awareness. These are the unacknowledged conditions of action, yet, whilst it may seem paradoxical, it is maintained here that they have first to be found good by a person before they can influence the projects she entertains. . . . [A]ll those conditions need to do in order to shape a subject’s motivation is to shape the situation in which she finds herself. (Archer 2007a:17)

Of course, this view goes together with Archer’s (2000a) notion of non-social self-consciousness preceding social life, a notion that culminates in very curious claims such that “any form of social interaction . . . requires that subjects know themselves to be themselves,” that “[w]ithout this, no two-person interaction could begin, let alone become a stable relationship” (Archer 2003:19). Antidualists, in contrast, see this as “an entirely unsociological” conviction, for they believe, as previously noted, that the “individual is permeated through and through by social influences, down to the internalized conversation that makes up our conscious minds” (Collins 1986:260). And they can refer to cumulating scientific evidence about the workings of the human brain/mind that makes it simply unwarranted to try and protect (a piece of) the individual’s mind from all social influences, to demarcate, as it were, “the True Self” supposedly able to step back from all sociocultural influences ever inflicted upon it and to choose to accept some of them, valiantly fighting off others (Dennett 1991:207, 1995:365; see also Brothers 1997; Clark 2008; Collins 2004; Cozolino 2006; Dewey [1922] 1983; Mead 1934; Noë 2009; Piiroinen 2013). We are socialized through and through, starting from before we can talk or crawl, and we “find” specific sociocultural elements only as socialized beings—using concepts and schemata and habits of thought and behavior learned in social practices, adopted or assimilated from others.

Archer’s dualism fails to do justice to this social nature of ours. She does have the concept of “double morphogenesis in which actors themselves change in the very process of actively pursuing changes in the social order,” and in her mind it captures “one of the principal . . . ways by which the social gets inside us” (Archer 2010:274, see 1995:247–48, 257–65). But that phrasing of the issue betrays just the kind of overly rationalized and individualistic picture of humanity that antidualists campaign against: a picture of agents changing their social selves in the first place by pursuing changes—if not in themselves then at least in the structures around them, the changing of which changes their own agency. Elisionists stress that in fact one need not intentionally pursue anything, not to mention try and change something, in order to be continuously changed by the (“intentional” and “unintentional”) biological-sociocultural transactions with the environment that he or she is necessarily engaged in all the time, especially by other people around him or her, who are usually not trying to change one as a person but are just habitually living out social practices with him or her every day, doing thousands of more or less meaningful things.

We are parts of various sociocultural structures and at the same time subtly change other people and ourselves when we use language, for instance, but also when we just laugh at an appropriate or inappropriate moment, or make others laugh, raise our voice and look mean, walk with a “swagger” and tell vulgar jokes, sit with our knees together and talk with small voice, imitate the dance moves we saw on YouTube earlier, go to the local pub every Saturday afternoon to have a couple of beers and watch football on TV, or when we are that “kind old lady” or “cursing big boy” some 11-year-old sees, or simply wear a piece of cultural significance—a wedding ring, a cowboy hat, a five-thousand euro wristwatch, a shirt with wide cleavage and push-up bra, an army cap, a jacket with a motorcycle gang logo on it.

Archer’s rationalistic notion of people using their personal reflexive powers to choose strategies for their subject-object relationships with the Society and the rest of the world, trying to “make their way through” it, seeking a balance between their different interests so as to find their own personally rewarding “modus vivendi” (a way of life) (see Archer 2000a, 2003, 2007a), is too unnatural and clumsy a tool for sociologists. It leaves out too much of the truly significant, hugely intricate, continuous buzz of social life. And the problems with her theory are too deep-seated to be remedied by any small adjustments. The Archerian picture of reflexive internal conversations emerging, from the social connections where one learns the meanings of the words, as the individual’s own, “personal power” (see Archer 2003:66–70, 94–95, 116–29), is rooted in her earlier, Popperian dualism between people’s “socio-cultural interactions” on the one hand and what she calls the “cultural system”—all the propositions that people may in principle come to formulate and the logic governing their use—on the other (Archer 1988:Chs. 5–6, also xiv–xxv, 4, 88–93, 319–320, 1995:179–83, 2007b; Archer and Elder-Vass 2012; see Popper [1972] 1979:153–66). ¹¹ That dualism generates an overly rationalistic view of culture that leaves aside much of the truly interesting stuff of life.

Consider someone cheerfully identifying himself as a “nerd” or “geek” and dressing up as a “stormtrooper” (from the Star Wars movies) to participate in the Comic-Con event in San Diego, socializing with countless likeminded people who share with him similar identities and may also dress up as stormtroopers, or as “Princess Leia,” “Spider-Man,” “Dracula,” a “barbarian warlord,” “little grey man” or “zombie,” or any of thousands of iconic pop culture characters or archetypes instantly recognizable and meaningful to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Notice that logic and reasoning play no important role in that regard. There are true and false propositions that can be formed about pop cultural items, and there are even more vaguely explicable “intelligibilia,” as Archer (1995:180) calls them, “item[s] that have the dispositional capacity of being understood by someone,” but understandability, to say nothing of logical consistency, is not a key notion in sociology of culture, it is not why cultural phenomena are sociologically important. Rather, they are important because there are people who care—rather passionately—about those items and interact with others who also care about them. It is a social affair.

Archer’s conception of culture does not help us understand (the identities and behaviors of or social phenomena related to) pop culture enthusiasts, or hardcore fans of, say, the heavy metal band Iron Maiden or neo-punk band Green Day, or lifelong fans of football clubs like Manchester United or Borussia Dortmund. The key elements binding such identities and behaviors and social phenomena together are not any specific propositions that these people have evaluated and decided to accept, but just the raw, emotional charges related to iconic images and tunes and idolized persons, charges that are intrinsically social because they are created by, stirred up in the presence of, and ultimately dependent on other people—a “tribe,” it is sometimes called—who wear specific kinds of clothes and chant the same slogans and sing the same songs. This happens both in small-scale gatherings and in bigger, occasionally very large-scale and in a sense climactic events (which, of course, are nevertheless on the same continuum with micro-encounters, not on a qualitatively different level of reality) such as stadium rock concerts and big football games, where the social energy of people coming together and exciting one another with their sheer embodied presence and tribal cohesion accumulates from tens of thousands of people, many of them shouting and singing until they lose their voice, jumping up and down, bewitched by the “ritual” happening (see e.g., Collins 1986:253–55).

Fandom is an extreme example, but it is not all that different from other instances of sociocultural identity such as being a “hipster” or a “weedhead,” or one of the “iPeople,” or gay, or Native American, or someone who describes oneself first and foremost as a movie freak, rap artist, amateur marathon runner, fashion blogger, gym rat, Harley Davidson motorcyclist, or World of Warcraft enthusiast. The list is endless these days. ¹² When one’s identity is made up of such elements, one’s mind and self are imbued with sociocultural meaningfulness that shows in many ways in one’s thoughts and actions and predisposes one to react positively to other people who are similar to oneself in this respect, to one’s tribe members, who may form a social circle of their own and perhaps every once in a while have huge gatherings, mass events like festivals, parades, fairs, exhibitions, and conferences. Not much by way of reflexive decision making needs to be involved when individuals grow or drift into some such elements of identity. In fact, as such phenomena have little to do with subscribing to specific, consistent sets of propositions, there may not even be that much room for rational decision making in this sphere. Central conflationist framework is well suited for providing conceptual tools for making sense of this.