Archer's Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing

Structure, Agency and Reflexivity

My discussion of recent developments in critical realist social theory in the second edition of this work left ‘in the air’ the debate about how to conceptualize the relation between social structure and the agency of individual social actors.

Archer’s development of her distinctive view of key problems in social theory can be traced through a series of monographs, most notably Culture and Agency (1988, 1996), Realist Social Theory (1995) and Being Human (2000). Her central contribution was to elaborate a concept of the formation, reproduction and diversification of social forms, which she labels ‘morphogenesis’. On this view, the activity of social agents and social structures are mutually constitutive. Social agents are formed by the constellation of social structures that form the context of their development, but their activities, as individuals or in social groups also have reciprocal effects, which may be intended or unintended, on the social structures, either reproducing them or transforming them. This latter sort of effect is sometimes characterized as proliferation of diversity, or innovation. It is accepted that social activities of human agents are constitutive of social structures, but, at the same time, that social structures are irreducible to their constituents: in other words her commitment is to a view of the ‘emergent’ causal powers of social structures.

This potentially historical understanding of structure/agency is a valuable addition to thinking within this approach. The mediation between the levels of structure and agency is understood by Archer in terms of a universal, but unevenly distributed, capacity for humans to ‘reflect’ on themselves and their relation to their social contexts. This social ‘reflexivity’ takes the form of an internal conversation through which individuals come to an understanding of themselves and their values and goals in relation to their surroundings, and develop appropriate courses of action on that basis. Reflexivity may take several forms, but of particular interest is ‘meta-reflexivity’, which involves the development of a critical relation to the normative requirements imposed by the prevailing structures, so the outcome is not a strategy of ‘adaptation’ but, rather, of some form of dissident response.

Archer’s ideas have been taken further, and sometimes challenged, by a group of fellow researchers in a series of conferences and subsequent edited collections (Archer 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017b). In the course of this process, the concept of morphogenesis itself seems to morph from a way of conceptualizing the relation between structure and agency towards a substantive approach to understanding contemporary society - as, perhaps, an ideal-typical construct through which to identify current social trends. The morphogenic society now appears as one in which morphogenetic processes outweigh morphostatic ones, by way of ‘feedback mechanisms’ that generate ever-intensifying change and proliferation of diversity. Although Archer dismisses possible empirical methods for measuring change in her introduction to the 2017 volume, Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing, the presupposition of the discussion is that current society is in a process of intensification of change - of ‘morphogenesis unbound’ (though the concept of liquid modernity (Bauman 2012) is, rightly, I think, rejected as taking this too far).

In line with the core legacy of critical realism, there is a concern for the relation of social science - and the social life it studies - to values - and, in particular, to the possibilities for human flourishing, conceptualized here by way of the Aristotelian concept of ‘eudaimonia’ (though some express reservations on religious grounds). The discussion in the volume devoted to this question centres on the significance for human well-being of the opportunities (or liabilities) made possible by rapid diversification of social life, of innovation and novelty - does intense proliferation of new forms and practices provide people with new avenues for personal development and fulfilment, or, rather, do they provide new opportunities for vice, exploitation and distracted loss of coherence in life? Those who emphasize the latter tendency might supplement the concepts of morphogenesis and morphostasis with that of ‘habitus' (Bourdieu 1977). Whilst Archer has sought to reject Bourdieu's notion of habitus, most notably in her Making our Way through the World (2007; see also Archer 2010) as she believes it is incompatible with the emphasis she wishes to give to reflexivity, both Nicos Mouzelis and Andrew Sayer have offered powerful counter-arguments for combining the concepts of habitus and individual reflexivity (Mouzelis 2008; Sayer 2005, 2010). Clearly recognition of the necessity of some reliable and sustained features of social life is surely required for the persistence of identity through embodied routines.

Al-Amoudi (2017) takes on the social philosophies of Rawles, Nussbaum and Sen in a very interesting argument drawing on the necessity for the capacity for reflexivity in a morphogenic (rapidly changing) society. If reflexivity is required for individuals to deal with the challenges posed by change in their social context, and if, as Al-Amoudi claims, the capacity for reflexivity is both unequally distributed but also capable of being learned, then justice demands equity in this capacity.

The Natural, Practical and Social Orders of Reality

Though initially tempted by the more optimistic view of the morphogenetic society, Archer in this volume is suddenly taken by the looming existential threats now posed for the human species by such issues as nuclear waste and climate change. Thus far self­reflexivity has been a matter of the individual orienting him- or herself to the social context, and morphogenesis theorized as the intended and unintended actions of human agents. However, in her essay ‘Does Intensive Morphogenesis Foster Human Capacities or Liabilities?' (2017a), Archer denounces the ‘sociological imperialism' that ignores the complex natural and practical orders of reality in favour of a hegemony of the social. On the question of climate change, she bemoans the ‘silence' of sociologists, in particular, despite more than twenty years of natural scientific concern. Not until, she suggests, the work of Dasgupta, Ramanathan and Sorondo (2014), Dunlap and Brulle (2015) and a papal encyclical was this silence rectified.

It is true that sociologists were slower than the economists to take account of our environmental crisis, but as early as 1978 Catton and Dunlap in the United States were actively promoting their ‘new environmental paradigm' for sociology, while Michael Redclift (1984) in the UK was writing about sociology of development and the environment and Raymond Murphy (1994, 1997) was writing about ‘society and nature', and an approach to the study of science and technology was forming in which the interaction of beings and objects was analysed in ways that transcended society/nature dualism (see discussion of actor-network theory in Chapter 8 of this book, and see Benton 2001a and 2003 for reviews of the diversity of early sociological approaches to environmental sociology).

Nevertheless, this new assertion of the importance of nature for social understanding is very welcome. So is the strong recognition of the dire threat posed by climate change, though it is important not to consider this issue in abstraction from other dimensions of the growing crisis in our relations to nature (see Chapters 13 and 14). Archer's approach to this range of problems distinguishes three orders of reality - the Natural Order, the Practical Order and the Social Order. Humans must fare adequately in relation to all three Orders if they are to survive and thrive, but climate change is an existential liability for all humans, calling for the development of global capacities for cooperation if it is to be addressed.

The Natural Order is defined as physical realty, to which we relate as material bodies, and to which correspond such emotions as fear, disgust, anger and relief. The Practical Order is the domain of our material heritage of artefacts, of tools, techniques and technologies, in which we experience the affordances and resistances of material objects, and struggle to learn skills. The relevant emotions are frustration, boredom, depression, or, when a skill is mastered, elation, joy, euphoria. The Social Order is defined in terms of linguistically encoded discursive knowledge, though, in her diagrammatic representation, the social is also defined more broadly in terms of the distribution of scarce resources.

The relations involved in the three orders are ‘object to object' in the Natural Order, subject to object in the Practical Order, and subject to subject in the social order. The three orders contribute differently to our chances of well-being, or flourishing: from the Natural Order we gain physical well-being, from the practical order, performative competence, and from the social order, self-worth. Embodied and practical knowledge are wedded to an instrumental concern: ‘does it work?' But there are major problems now in all three Orders. In the Natural Order we are confronted by climate change, in the Practical Order with the capitalist imperative of growth and in the social order the predominance of what Archer thinks of as social evils (mainly associated with the effects of pervasive social media and consumerism).

While the attempt to take account of the importance of non-human nature for social scientific explanation is very welcome, there are some questionable features, especially in the way Archer characterizes her three orders of reality. First, the Natural Order is reduced to physical reality, abstracting from the populations of living species and their ecological relations which are both related to us through evolutionary inheritance, but with which we are indispensably interdependent. This has consequences for her view of the Practical Order, too. Relations here are defined as subject to object, and governed by instrumental concerns. Anyone who has engaged in ethological research on wild species, let along the many millions of pet-owners, will be well aware of the subject-status of many non-human animals. The Unavoidability of recognition of the subjective life of other mammals and birds extends to taxa even further removed from ourselves. The interactions with cephalopods such as squid and octopus described and analysed by Godfrey-Smith in his cleverly titled Other Minds (2017) are remarkable. And the evident affective character of Godfrey-Smith's developing relationships through his encounters with these life forms calls into question the necessity, even appropriateness, of the instrumental concern governing practice. Although many relations between humans and other animals historically, and in many practices today, have been predominantly instrumental in character, this has never been consensual, and is now strongly challenged by animal rights and welfare movements, as well as by contemporary zoology and many aspects of legislation (Singer 1975; Midgley 1979; Regan 1983; Benton 1993).

But the limitations of this way of understanding human embodied, practical and social relations to nature go beyond the failure to recognize subjectivity in other species. The dominance of instrumental concern as the preferred mode of engagement with non-human nature more generally seems to omit a great range of other orientations, which may be contemplative (non-practical), enquiring (non-instrumentally cognitive), wonder-full (aesthetic, awed, loving) and so on. Although Archer rightly notes that the historical project of ‘mastery of nature' has now been set in reverse by its own unintended consequences, there is no clear critical recognition that the dominance ofthe ‘instrumental concern' has been at the core of both capitalist and state-centralist destruction of our naturally given conditions of life. There are associated ambiguities in the characterization of the Social Order, too. Archer's diagrammatic representation includes distribution of scarce resources in the social order, but elsewhere represents social life as essentially discursive. Although she rightly identifies the connections between climate change, the growth imperative of capitalism and consumerism, there is little room in the analysis for conceptualization of the forms of collective action that might (in her terms) take us away from self-imposed destruction and towards ‘eudaimonia, or universal human flourishing. More substantively, too, the absence in the analysis of non-human living beings both misses the important role that biodiversity plays in climate stability, but also fosters a potentially dangerous abstraction of climate change from other dimensions of the crisis in our relation to the rest of nature (see Chapters 13 and 14).