Towards asignifying modernity: a

critique of the interests that shaped

social sciences and social work
P.Madhu *
Abstract
The paper is about interests. It attempts to point out that politics of historically sustained
and discursively reproduced interests constitute the assemblage of modernity. The
politics is traced through exploring how social sciences and social work replaced political
philosophy and charity within discursive planes of modernity yielding to the interests
forming them. The first part of the paper discusses modernity as the subjective
individuation of its formative interests. Second part deliberates on semantic and
incorporeal significations that presented modernity as tightly networked truth. It is argued
that the modern social is a hierarchically ordered predatory force field sustained through
networks of significations. Towards the end, in lieu of the conclusion, the paper invites
for discussions counter-signifying modernity.
Keywords
asignify, interest, metaphysics, modernity, social, work

1.1 Positioning modernity

Modernity was both an event 1 and a counter event, 2 making up the social milieu
anew. It was an event because it broke with theocratic interests. It was subjecting the
planet and its beings to financial world order, hence, it is a counter event. Modernity
broke into discursive singularity in the contexts of revolutions and uprisings of 18th
century crafted out of the intellectual anvil apparent since 17th century Europe (Wittrock,
et.al, 1996:12; Barlow, 1997: 1). It prevails in its cultural diversities expressed in the
realms of art, literature, science and philosophy (Nicolescu, 2014: 3-7). Modernity is
constituted by and expressed as intensive manifold.3
-------* Associate Professor, Amity Institute of Social Sciences, Amity University, India.
Email: madhu.iuc@gmail.com

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2768192

Modernity is not a natural process of updating human rationality. It is not an ideal set
towards autonomy or freedom; it had sprung from its enunciative modalities and
originary interests 4. (Foucault, 2002:55-61). It is originary as effective history in
ethological and genealogical sense (Deleuze, 1988: 125; 2005:87; Foucault, 1984). It is
enunciative in construing the order of the discourse (Foucault, 1981). Interests are the
underlying text of milieux, methodical and calculative. Modernity was not a project of asocial partners bereft of motives or interests in an unintelligible interaction in the contexts
of scientific rationality, enlightenment, or industrial revolution. It is the triumph of
financial-utilitarian interests investing and expanding on a global scale and beyond
(Nicolescu, 2014: 139-142; Greenfield, 2001:33-34; Dirlik, 2003; Adorno, 1974: 287309). Sustained by its enunciative interests, frameworks and theories, methods of
modernity are biased towards the order of market expansion and capital accumulation. It
operates through sovereignty of nation states, which, in turn, is gradually collapsing into
corporate sovereignty (Collins, 1989: 4-32; Greenfield, 2013:6; Barkan, 2013:7-8).
Objectification and appropriation of existence as exploitable resources by a
hierarchically tapered order is the modo (now) of modernity. It is the hierarchized order
[ir]rationally parasiting its base (Adorno, 1974:308). Modernity is made of interests of
modo enframing time: using past to colonize future (Dupre 1993:3-5, 87,145).
Temporality, as it is rightly recognized, is the dimension of the subjectivation (Nancy,
2007:18). It is the dominant praxis of active time in the making (Dupre, 1966: 178).
Modernity is the modo of the dominant praxis modulated through and through the
network of significations, sustained as the logic of practice and social action (Bourdieu
1990; Weber, 1978:4).
Modernity is a plane of networked consistency modulated by dominant praxis and
interest sustaining it (Deleuze, 1987:69). Interests sustained the plane of network is
nonhuman for Foucault, and das-man for Heidegger (Foucault, 1988: 39; Heidegger,
2008: 164; Galloway and Thacker, 2007:154). Affective individuations, sociations and
their historical extensions formulated it. Interests that are invisible projected onto the
screens of subjectivations trigger their subjects. Discursively, they constitute the
assemblage of consistency as powers that diminish impulsive life. It is the affect of
externality of relations, an active field, which is, a whole organization which effectively
trains thought to operate according to the norms of an established order (Deleuze,
1987:18). They affect being human and reverberate modifying their ecology. Their
geological effect on planetary scale is termed by historians among ecologists as
anthroposcene (Arias-Maldonado, 2015; Morton, 2014). Anthroposcene is the
phenomenon of ecological colonization by hierarchized human order playing as pervasive
and profound active force rivaling the great forces of nature and pushing the Earth as a
whole into planetary terra incognita (Clark, 2015: 1).

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2768192

II

2.1 Politics of modernity

Utilitarian atomism and triumphalist evolutionary discourses of the late eighteenth
century trajectorized the gaze of modernity into dangerously reductive circularity
(Kankava2013; Marcuse, 1989:179). It was dangerously reductive because complexities
of subject- object, culture - practice, philosophy and metaphysics were all fused to its
circular logic. Got into loops of circular logic, methods of modernity replaced visionary
seeing, meditative listening and ideations into acquisitive eyeing, selective eavesdropping
and positivist constructs of reality (Heidegger, 1977). Tenaciously hegemonic cultural
articulation foreshadowed processes of capital accumulation in new guises of scientific
rationality (Pred and Watts, 1992 xiii-xiv; Adormo & Horkheimer 1997; Derrida,
1982:322-326). It was a movement from nous to logos (Lee and Long, 2007; Wanker,
1991; Arendt, 1978: 110-111; Levin, 1993:2). Modernity was circular in logic because
the end of the chain of its logic portended to reduction of a wide range of symbolic
structures and processes mutually reinforcing its apparently unchanging causal
connections. Narratives consequent on financial-utilitarian interests, racial claims of
evolutionary superiority, discourses on sovereignty, governance, polity, protestantism,
nationalism, commercial growth and colonial expansion converged into forming
modernity (Goody 1993; Greenfield 2001; Dickinson 1989). Modernity was an
intellectual and political response to the time in making, projecticing its telos.
Revolutions of the 18th century and their aftermath accelerated modernity as a
movement from vestiges of tradition, which were invented by modernity as a contrast to
itself. Revolutions were intellectually interpreted as rebellion against tradition and
hence modern enlightenment had become the alternative (Gilmartin, 2002:296; Berg,
1980:118). Moneyed interest along with men of letters, Edmund Burke noted,
engineered the revolution and response to it too (Burke, 1989: 131-134). Interests in
the formative era of modernity abhorred radical political philosophy and feared the poor
because their combination was thought to radicalize the social, obstructing economic
prosperity (Wagner, 2005:37-56; Desai, 2014: 303; Young and Ashton, 1967:9; Berg,
1980:117). Modernity is an active force field. It contrived both marginality and
emancipation. It invented madness and its treatment. It divided society into categories of
poor and rich and then suggested alleviation from poverty all within its schema of
economic productivity and work ethics. It projected individual to centre stage and
contrasted individual from society. It distinguished wasteful from productive and urged
for the cure from wastefulness (Bataille, 1991; Derrida, 2001:317-350). Modernity
invented tradition and pretended a rupture from it (Latour, 1993). Rise of modernity was
also rise of bio-politics where life is subordinated to the order of governance in
accordance with privileged interests (Thacker, 2012:28-29). It is a simulacra, contrived
autopoetic hyper-reality, drawing times that existed before and future yet to come, suited

to its calling. It drew time unto itself and blinded historical processes into inauthenticity
of its calling (Marion, 1996:103).
2.2. Modernity, science and order
Apparently, modern science was an endeavour to let the nature speak: and so was the
claim of social sciences (Lelas, 2001:248). It was an attempt to discover the social
scientifically. It was an attempt to produce a science of humanity. Together, it was
projected that modernity would produce an unified science that would explain things and
processes objectively. Nevertheless, such a unified science of modernity is a suspicious
project as such an objective science is hardly independent of the interests enframing it
(Habermas, 1972). The unified science of humanity was neither objective science
nor human because it was tacitly entangled by governing interests and non-human
autopoesis of discursive ordering that deprives agential politics from below (Foucault,
1977: 138; Foucault, 1981: 67; Foucault, 1994: 37). It is non-human because
governance is right disposition of things: men in their relationships, bonds and
complex involvement with things like wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the
territory with its borders, qualities, climate, dryness, fertility and so on (Foucault, 2007:
96). Social interests and their sustenance is concerned about material environments and
technical networks beyond human actors.
Being human-in-time is having resolute to counterpoise interests that reduce them
into non-humans, thrown to das-man of discursive interests. Following Heidegger, it can
be said, intelligibility as the counterpoise of being-in-the-world is being human
(Heidegger, 2008:204). Being human-in-time is the only option to be ethical and taking
care of the self (Foucault, 1987). Taking care of the self is giving care to the self
rescuing it from the interests of subjectivation and governmentality. On the contrary,
practices within discourses are the discourse in practice (Foucault, 1988: xix). It is being
lost to the constitutive interests of the discourse. Reflexivity, if it is constituted within the
discursive momentum, it is more of an irreflexive reflexivity. The irreflexive reflexivity
lets its subjects to be an-ethical: having no scope or autonomy to be ethical or unethical.
Since, uncritically being subjects of modernity is being in captivity, for a greater human
freedom, a rupture in the discursive fetters is inevitable. Nevertheless, being in captivity
is not our destiny; for, time is infinitely open to beings (Ricoeur, 1995:63).
2.3 Vacating metaphysics and charity
Historically, social sciences and social work have come into existence with a claim of
replacing metaphysics and charity with social science and scientific charity
respectively (Quigley, 1996; Lewis and Suarez, 1995: 1769). Thoughts and actions
grouped into modernity discredited political philosophy and religious charity and
replaced them with social sciences and social work (Wagner and Wittrock, 1991;
Nowonty, 1991). Thinking and action were divided into academic social science and semi
academic social work. They emerged as scientific apparatus capable of solving political
issues by means other than metaphysical or philosophical. They were to replace

normative principles of political metaphysics into positive scientific laws (Boltanski and
Thevonot, 2006:29, 31; Mignolo, 2002; Mignolo, 2006: 456). However, they appeared to
echo the concerns of political metaphysics. Social sciences are products of modernity that
privileged social order over the chaos of politics. The new emphasis on society
science and work drifted intellectual gaze away from polity, metaphysics and action
(Wagner, 2006:26).
Thinking metaphysically is a method of approaching physical or experiential reality
beyond its appearance. It doubts real of the reality and seeks for its virtual roots.
Methodologically it is rhetorical, poetic and ideational. Essence of metaphysics for
Heidegger is seeking what is active though buried beyond apparent reality. For instance,
politics is the metaphysics of society, or the doing of being is the metaphysics of work
ethics. Metaphysics explicates unnoticed obviousness. It reflects on the ontology of
relations resisting their reduction into ontology of substances (Bachelard, 1985; Badiou,
2005:162). It looks for what cannot otherwise be noticed empirically. It declines to count
the becoming of multiplicity into a finished product (Badiou, 2005: 55). It problematises
politics of incorporeal significations and historicises their milieu (Guattari, 1989;
Bouldrillard, 1981; Tetsuro, 1961). Metaphysics is potentially political. It is thoughtful
thinking (Heidegger, 1993). It springs from ideation, novelty, reverberation and the direct
ontology of poetic imagination of the life force (Bachelard, 1994: xv). It is thoroughly
subjective imaginary endeavour, often contrasted with empirical, objective, and truth
claims of science. Canonical forms of religions are neither metaphysical nor scientific;
nevertheless, they switch to either of the side for survival of the canons. Votaries of
modernity, since 17th century Europe, to accelerate progress, drew metaphysics into
battle with science towards stalling canonical faiths obstructing thinking-free or
imagining. Sciences of modernity, especially social sciences, for reasons different from
their counterparts in physical sciences, dismissed metaphysics as redundant and nonverifiable and hence claimed them to be meaningless. Historically, physical sciences
resisted religion as metaphysics towards their struggle for free thinking. On the
contrary, in social affairs, religious interests joined with that of expediency for progress
towards eliminating metaphysics and there by politics from social and poetics from life.
2.4 Replacing political with social
The social unlike political is merely an association of individuals, groups and
communities (Greenfield, 2001:2). Underlying premise of the transition was that issues
concerning the common could be solved by other means than political solutions. Political
issues, unlike that of the social cannot be resolved other than by comprehensively
addressing the political contradictions. Unlike polity, the idea of society referred to
voluntary and purposive association of ontologically separate individuals (Wagner,
2005:49). Social, when conceptualized as the aggregate of individuals, groups or
communities, fades away the politics, clearing hurdles politics may pose to individualist
libertarian order. Since social is merely connectivity, solving social issues unlike
handling the political, is solving the connectivity issues of associations. Social that

appears self-explanatory is a modern conceptualization, processed by interests separating

it from the idea of political. Social work emerged in this historical milieu as a
professional engagement expediting hands-on solutions to connectivity issues through
adjustments and coping. Hence, social work literature takes the idea of social simply as
humans as social beings (Kirst-Ashman, 2010:5). For them, definitional aspect of the
social does not matter greatly (Sheppard, 2006: 233).
The idea of society conceals the relations of contradictions of human political
existence. One among the pioneering thinkers who warned against apolitical character of
society was Karl Marx. He, unlike many thinkers who succeeded him, held society as
product of human reciprocal action. He also warned in his Paris Manuscripts against
conceiving society as an abstraction vis a vis individual because for him individual is
a social being. He emphatically summarized the idea of social by stating, My own
existence is social activity (Marx, 1994.:72). Simmel, differing from most of his
contemporary sociologists, explained society as forms of sociation beyond dualisms of
individual/ social (Simmel, 1895:52). Nevertheless, with the emergence of social
sciences, especially sociology, the idea of society had been reductively hypostatized into
society and its units (Spenser, 1904: 436). Logically otherwise, social appears to
include political; hence, its schema of apolitization remains disguised for social sciences.
Presupposing purposive voluntary association of individuals, the idea of social
order foreclosed problematizing its undermining political chaos (Heilbron, 1995: 87). The
category of society was brought into existence categorizing the process of social
existence and further dichotomizing that into individual and society. Individual, in this
discursive schema, is a pre-formed natural identity category and society is the mold
formed of individuals. Theorizing society within the discourse of modernity indeed had
sprouted from the historical a priory of the already constituted upper echelons of the
social order. By defining society as aggregation of individuals, interests that shaped
modernity naturalized the hierarchical society of order- from individuals to nation up to
global- and thereby denaturalized contradictions of chaos or disorder (Greenfield,
2001:32). The idea of society by preferring order for chaos tacitly anomalized social
mobility. It disguised the fact that pioneering interests and dispositions had always
triggered the catallaxy of social order. Order emerged in the social world through the
impetuous interests historically portending to be potential. Taken for granted, the
presupposed placidity gave leeway to governmentality through pretexts of governance
towards containing plausible turbulences (Boltanski and thevenot, 2006:40).
2.5 Work ethics and the perversion of work
Words like society or work appear self-evident until contested because they
modulate operating interests of the plane of organization. Apoliticized social existence
and individualized work roles are the two major aspects of the force-field of modernity.
Battle for defining work as labour and bringing the contested idea within ethical
framework was a major theoretical endeavour of modernity. Within the discursive

premises of modernity, the idea of labour was processed by the history of colonial
expansion: need for labour in colonies, slave trade, slave schools, division of labour,
industrialization, invention of machines and the use of religion to justify labour
extraction. Work was any exertion of body or mind towards doing some good other
than the pleasure derived directly from the work (Everman, 1985:27). Gradually,
processed by the spirit of modernity, it was turned into morally obligatory work ethics.
Before modernity, work meant sacrifice. It was sacrificial and voluntary toil, exertion,
effort, slog and drudgery offered voluntarily for common goodness in terms of spiritual,
communal or ethereal bonds. (Marshall, 1907: 65). Ontologically work is the aspect that
connects beings together. For Heidegger, ability-to be is being in work (Arbeit Sein)
(Blok, 2015: 110). Work is a beings active response to its situation and time. That which
constantly aeteiolates difference between what is now and what is after-now is work
(Holquist, 1993: x). Work is the act of creation. Work transforms the plane of consistency
of being towards well-being. Ontology of work is the act of transforming ethereal,
communal, filial or spiritual bonds towards a greater integration by sacrificial efforts.
Work is response to the void of being, response that drives ongoing event of being
(Bakthin, 1993: 31-32). The act of work is a deed of personal resolute within the
singularity of ones existence and not a mere happening.
Work is not merely a service sold to its purchaser. The question of work is
ontological. Heidegger makes it clear by saying any work with which one concerns
oneself is ready-to-hand not only in the domestic world of the workshop but also in the
public world (1962: 100). Work, Lukacs explained, is human activity which can be
shown to maintain, establish or change commonly valued social institutions, whether
these activities have this as a goal or not (Lukacs, 1977: 407). Work is creative
engagement with webs of meanings and culturally produced values. Work is also, where
workers care to direct their attention to during its practice. Essence of work for Heidegger
is the essence of being, in the sense of becoming (Heidegger, 1986:196). Work is not
merely working towards producing surplus value or limited to the productivity of
individual worker (Heller, 1981). However, within protestant theology processed by
commercial interests, work was semantically transformed into work ethics, a legally
enforceable personal obligation. Rationale of work penetrated into public conscience and
activity as semantically embedded social action. For Weber, the rationale is the spirit
of capitalism (Weber, 2012). For Weber, it is action of social and not vice versa. In the
context of modernity, for the interests of expansion, colonization and progress, the idea
was a passport for forced or waged labour towards transforming human and physical
nature for greater material accumulation. Under the premises of modernity, work ethics
had become mandatory obligation of existence, avoiding which was either to be cured or
punishable. Positioning work as work ethics from a narrow theological foundation is the
work of modernity: its telos realization (Eyerman, 1985: 16).
2.6 Political Science and the perversion of political philosophy
The plane of interconnectedness called society, had replaced politics as
communis, a common-field of contests and consensus. Gradually, polity had become

society and later it assumed the label economy: a movement from historicizing the
common to futurizing individuated social or economic order (Wagner 2006). Social
sciences bereft of the commonality, that political philosophy had, have become
rationalist-individualist behaviorist and positivist. Interestingly, political science too had
become a discipline dealing with issues of unit citizens with a stake of their own in the
determination of the common at micro level and at macro level an epistemic field
concerned of nation states, international relations and diplomacy, tacitly severing itself
from metaphysics of polity. Before sixteenth century Europe, the word nation referred
exclusively to political and cultural elite and people or commons to the lower orders
of the political hierarchy. With modernity, the words went under semantic transition to
refer a composite entity of people with elite, under sovereign nation states (Greenfield,
1993:6). Political science, in disconnect with political philosophy, in the oeuvre of
modernity, had become a science of individualist liberalism, nation states, globality and
a science advocating frugal governance of free-marketeering (Walters, 2012:30,31). As a
result, it had been severed from the wisdom of political philosophy that saw individuals
and nations tied into pre-existing network of social relations held together by common
values and beliefs (Wagner, 2005: 53, Wagner, 2006:29-30). In sum, separation of
social from political and science from philosophy marks the birth of social sciences.
Discursive context of modernity has reinvented every idea suiting it to the impending
economic world order.
2.7 Social Science and its governmentality function
Society as an object and social science as a discipline has been a postrevolutionary discovery (Wagner, 2006:28). Moreover, social sciences emerged as
pragmatic replacement for philosophy and metaphysics within the intellectual climate of
post-revolutionary aporias because they were compatible with the elite class impetus.
Modernity discursively upheld economic prosperity, work ethics and the art of
governance which were convincingly projected as undoubtable principles of social
universality. Social Universality as a principle of totalizing the social from utilitarian
point of view was a consequence of systematic dehistorization and ontologization of the
forms of socialities from a hierarchically tapered evolutionary bias of Eurocentric
Protestantism (Wolin, 1992:61; Adorno & Hokheimer, 2003:22-24). Social sciences had
come into existence because of the dehistorisized and false ontology. But for the premises
of the false ontology, social sciences could not have approached human existence in
restricted terms of economics politics, anthropology or history. They were
universally applied to all humans existing in past and those yet to come. The gaze of
history, sociology, anthropology and even studies of natural resources had never been
neutral as they were otherwise implied as objective by their scientific status. Other
fields like religion, governance, polity, production, and labour had to adjust and claim
their place within new assemblage of modernist semantic convolutions. The perceived
necessity of governmentality tacitly worked as the enunciative principle for the
emergence of social sciences and social work (Foucault, 1994: 29; Eastwood, 1991: 162;
Wagner, 2001:2; Kemple, 2006:4). A closer look into the transition would reveal that it

was not a neutral science replacing moral philosophy, but a certain form of political
interest that had the individualist libertarianism presuming scientific guise. The regime of
social science academics, despite its radical appearance, performed the governmentality
function in the intellectual sphere. Homologically, social work shares discursive
footprints of modernity with social sciences. Social work philosophy in its formative era
was grounded on the utilitarianism of nineteenth century, as they were sphere headed by
Bentham, Malthus, James Mill and Ricardo (Young and Ashton, 1967:16). It presumed
the role of a moral premier in the secular world in which reasoning was replacing faith
and professions were replacing positions of theocratic domain (Payne, 2005:182). Social
Work, like psychiatry, was authorized to be a profession towards scientifically managing
the hampering antisocial impediments that may constrain the system of economic
freedom and the immense potential of free pioneering individual initiatives (Robbins,
1952:19).
2.8 Social Work as the practice of governmentality
Social sciences, in their pursuit for generality, had to consider beliefs, values and
representation as generic objects or collectivities and not as situationally emergent
contingent phenomenon (Boltanski and Thevonot, 2006: 16). In addition, it was desired
there should be mechanisms for the governance of exceptions, pitfalls, consequences of
progress at the margins. Since the profession of social work came into existence in the
context of modernity, the objective of social work, corresponding to the then existing
discursive environment, was towards containing the effects of marginality on the elite
social order. Immediate milieu leading to the birth of social work was the intellectual
context of work ethics and the policy frameworks that led to the enactment of English
Poor Law. Within the logic of work ethics, poverty was understood as the consequence
of idleness and moral turpitude (Lewis and Suarez, 1995: 1769). Free doles are said to be
breeding laziness, and charity which had been a virtue till then, under modernity, became
scientific charity. The idea of charity was transforming from nomothetic philanthropy to
ideographic social diagnosis and treatment towards curing the social from its idleness
(Popple, 1995:2283). The idle, it was believed, hurt their own souls and that of others
to the high displeasure of the Almighty God (Slack, 1990: 59-60). Gertrude Himmelfarb,
in her study on poverty echoed the mindset of the era in the following fashion,
[the poor], like rats, could indeed be eliminated by this method, or at least
driven out of sight. All that was required was the determination to treat
them like rats, on the assumption that the poor and luckless are here only
as a nuisance to be abraded and abated (Himmelfarb,1984: 193).
Getting rid of the poor, being politically incorrect, resulted in social work emerging as the
second option towards monitoring and controlling them. In his critical commentary on
the attitude of elite interests, Brian Inglis comments,
. . . the case gained ground that the destitute were expendable, whether or
not they were to blame for their condition. Had there been any way simply

to get rid of them, without risk to society, Ricardo and Malthus would
certainly have recommended it, and governments would equally certainly
have given it their favourable attention, provided that it did not entail any
increase in taxation (Inglis, 1971:75)
The earliest of charity missions of modern social work are relief-work towards
repressing mendacity among the growing pauper semi-criminal class that was thought
to be rising tide of pauperism and crime which threatens grave social consequences
(Anonymous, 1870; Mooney, 1998: 68; Pratt, 1997:42). Poor was believed to have the
professional assistance in the wide open world as prostitutes, vagrants, mad people,
criminals, blasphemers had state sponsored professional assistance in confinement.
Within the regulatory context, social work profession was the legal apparatus with
statutory authority under the poor law towards containing the dangerous classes
(Young and Ashton, 1967:43; Stedman Jones, 1971). Beneath the passion to help there
was always undercurrent of profound biases that let the social workers to be merciful
towards the -so called- insane, feeble-minded, blind, crippled, epileptic, immoral,
prostitutes, addicts, alcoholics and others of defective eugenics (Hansen, 2013). David
Ricardos seminal work on taxation exposes the spirit of the governing class,
The clear and direct tendency of the poor laws, is in direct opposition to
these obvious principles: it is not, as the legislature benevolently intended
(Ricardo, 1817).
Ricardo, further wrote, every friend to the poor must ardently wish for their abolition
and continued,
[u]nfortunately, however, they have been so long established, and the
habits of the poor have been so formed upon their operation, that to
eradicate them with safety from our political system, requires the most
cautious and skilful management.
Social sciences performed the function of governmentality at intellectual spheres and
Social Work was part of the art of governance at grassroots level. Social Work was
born in the twilight era in which pastoral sovereignty was phasing into the art of
governance (Foucault, 1991). Poor had to be professionally disciplined preventing
them from rebelling against the rich (Swift, 2001:69-70).The profession was seen as an
anathema for revolution. The uneasy conscience of the middle class combined with the
demand for art of governance was the leitmotif of the state sponsored social work in its
inceptive era. Society, social science, social work, poverty, work ethics, governance,
progress, property & expansion are homologies of modernity. They are multiple, however
they have a plane of organization animating them to co-evolve homologically. Together,
they form into a galaxy of semantics mutually reinforcing one another towards producing
a phantasmagoria of experienced realities. The interests that triggered the prevailing
plane of stratification are force fields of human interests of the foregone past and of the
forthcoming futures (Benjamin, 1989:60). Modernity is triggered and constituted by

10

heterogeneous interests of multiple pasts, singularized and percolated as sense-making

capillaries producing subjects, their discursive environment and its momentum. Authentic
social science or work is impossible when subjected to the discursive processes, milieux
and politics of relationships or production of subjects.

III

3.1 Politics of modernity as politics of governmentality

Politics of modernity is politics of governmentality (Foucault 1991). It is politics
of the governing interests. It was a project of hegemony of ruling interests in disguise.
Resistance to the governing interests as revolutions was sporadic outbursts of chaos
against order. Protestant religious uprisings and French revolution necessitated and
justified governmentality over pastorality. Response to chaos is order. Interests of order
are hierarchical. They trigger protocols of governance. In other words, hierarchically
privileged within the network of social relations are triggered to safeguard and maintain
order, and more so when it is challenged. Financial interests, throughout the history,
since the invention of money, were privileged to be at the top of hierarchy above
religious, cultural or regal interests (Madhu et.al., 2014). They were always tending to be
geographically global and temporally futuristic. The interest was finding its actors
throughout history. Modernity is the expression of ruling interests expressed as our
collective subjective time. Social is privileged over polity because the spirit of
modernity is to privilege order over chaos in accordance with the governing interests of
hierarchical order. Politics of the order is to privilege and expand order. Politics since has
been gradually drawn away from agonistics. Privileging positivistic social sciences over
political philosophy and metaphysics were the impendent strategy of the historical force
field of modernity (Lewin, 1943). It is the tactic of unconscious program superseding
conscious rational calculations as practical mastery of logic in the immanent necessity of
the force fields of portending interests (Lamaison and Bourdieu, 1986).
3.2 Social as communis
Social is political. Social is both of sensus communis and polis communis. Sensus
Communis is a whole set of shared but unstated mores, prejudices, and values that exist in
a social milieu often taken for granted. Polis Communis is the discomfort and
contradiction shared but often unstated. They tacitly work through the culture of making
sense. For Gadamer, sensus communis is never solipsistic but always communal. It is
the ability to make ones own that which comes to one out of communal relations. Sensus
Communis is counter acting polis Communis that emerge out from and return to praxis.
Their work is a double state of bisociation where the individuation is in communion with
the social where by both are modified in the interaction (Koestler, 1989:35). Sensus/Polis
Communis is the site of creation. Sensus is the seat of creativity; Polis is the site of

11

contradiction. Communis is the affect of the force field of contradictory or shared,

unstated social force field (Lyotard, 1991:227). Communis is the transitory subjective
mobility that revokes totalizing endeavours. It is the work of the affective sensus and
polis on the communis. Sensus and polis are the inter of the interaction that
makes the social. Inter is the quodlibet that opens (Agamben, 1993: 66). It is work of
the unthought passing through and opening up towards the potential. Work of the inter,
is the inner energy of an intelligence which at each moment wins itself back to itself,
eliminating ideas already formed to give place to those in the process of being formed
(Gadamer, 2006: 23). The communis is agonistic and political. Loss of the agonistic
polity, Arendt observes, expels man from humanity (1961: 297). Modernity is the
mode of subjectivation that expelled man from humanity.
Ontologically, social is neither physical nor mere aggregation of individuals.
There are no individuals, there is only individuation; individuations as the affect of
communis (Agamben, 2009; Agamben, 1993:17-23; Deleuze, 2004:86). There is no
society; there are only sociations (Simmel, 1908: 23, 62, 178-179; Wolf, 1950: 409-424).
Social is metaphysical. It is a networked assemblage of subjective judgments in the
making. Social is a derivative affect of subjective prejudices (Gadamer, 2006: 273) 5.
Politically, the social is agonistic at its source. Interests of governance make it an
aggrandized totality constituted of statistically calculable empirical generalities. Problem
of modernity is not absence of metaphysics, but excessive presence of unexamined
metaphysics. Ironically, totalized constructs of individuals and society are metaphysics
unscrutinized. Farther, modernity is preclusively blind to its metaphysical imperative
(Puhek, 1982). It is extravagant expediency to reduce them into self-contained empirical
entities of independent identities or categories. It is erroneously metaphysical first and
empirical second and hence, its formative interests passed on to create a world order,
unexamined. Virtue of science lies in examining. A science that is not capable of
examining is inauthentic. Persisting positivist empirical assumptions combined with deep
unawareness of its metaphysical imperative made social sciences inauthentic and
counter-evental. It is counter evental because it is historical unconcious in scientistic
action tapering the world order hierarchically.
Modernity is there since governmentality of state replaced pastoral
responsibilities of erstwhile sovereign. State is increasingly emerging multiple in the
sense of many and in terms of its composition as manifold. There are converged states
and unified governmentalities. Social sciences and social work mostly work for the
multiplicities of the states and governmentalities, uncritically. They work towards telos
realization of modernity. Within the logic of governmentality, politics is an anathema,
science is an instrument, and work is purchase and employment of alienated labour. The
modern social is a hierarchically ordered predatory force field sustained discursively
through networks of significations.

12

3.3 Discussion: Asignification

Modo of modernity, gravitated by the interests, which make it, appears to me as
profoundly counter-political and in-agonist. The modo works out through networks of
incorporeal significations. Invention of work-ethics in tune with its modulating interests
is one of the key significations that conceals the ontology of work. Hence, to transcend
the modo of modernity, pure-work should be triggered to replace work-ethics. Pure
work is the work of activating the pure immanence, the spine of existence, the creative
force beyond the concepts that subjectivates (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994:39, 90).
Metaphysics, imaginations, and ideations facilitate to break thick signifying networks of
persistent discursivity. To break the loop of its signifying consistency, we may have to
refurbish our intelligence from the pre-modern, pre-philosophical forms of imaginations.
The pragmatic of work is in the practice of listening. In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari
observe:
It is only from this point of view that Chinese hexagrams, Hindu
mandalas, Jewish sephiroth, Islamic "imaginals," and Christian icons can
be considered together: thinking through figures. Hexagrams are
combinations of continuous and discontinuous features deriving from one
another according to the levels of a spiral that figures the set of moments
through which the transcendent descends. The mandala is a projection on a
surface that establishes correspondence between divine, cosmic, political,
architectural, and organic levels as so many values of one and the same
transcendence. That is why the figure has a reference, one that is
plurivocal and circular by nature. Certainly, it is not defined by an external
resemblance, which remains prohibited, but by an internal tension, that
relates it to the transcendent on the plane of immanence of thought.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 89)
How to asignify the overload of significations discursively sustained as the
modern truth is an important question to be meditated upon. For, it cant be a science if
not free from overarching interests. Therefore, how to shape future social sciences
towards energizing the communis is an important concern. Energizing the communis is
reversing the social time. It implies the politics of counter protocol: the politics of desingularising networks by demodulating its nodes. Counter-protocols should attend the
tensions and contradictions within the system (Galloway and Thaker, 2007: 98).
Methods of listening torpedoes pre-established significations of the modo of
modernity. Modernity speaks; the route to asignify is through listening. Appearance,
manifestation, existence and production had been the prime function of thinking and
acting throughout the mode of the Western Philosophy. Communis triggers the politics of
asignification by way of participants listening, experiencing, interacting and questioning
the prevalent order (Lyotard, 1991:218). Listening is the counterpart of speaking.
Speaking privileges the louder. Listening leads us out of the noise. Listening lets us to the

13

reverie of imagination (Bachlard 2014). Sonorous outweighs the forms (Nancy, 2007:9).
It means countervailing research methods should be eager to listen than speak. Speaking
confirms; listening ruptures. To listen is to be straining towards a possible meaning and
consequently one that is not immediately accessible (Nancy, 2007: 11). Listening is
understanding; watching is governance: visual surveillance. Listening is being reflexive,
in which subject is referred back to itself as object. Visual is tendentiously mimetic, it is
imaginary capture. It expands outwards. It colonizes. On the contrary, listening is
sonorous. Listening expands through resonance and reverberance. It is stretching ones
ear to the other. Sonorous is methexic. It is participating, sharing, and understanding. It
penetrates, ruptures, prepares for further cracks, and awaits event (Nasio, 1998:98).
Listening is invitation to alterity: to alter the internalities. To listen is to enter that
spatiality, by which at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up (Nancy, 2007: 16).
Speaking, is imposing, colonizing and thus produces its externalities. Speech dictates.
Expansion of modernity is the expansion of speech: the dictatorship of the formative
interests of modo. Listening is the countervailing power.
Asignifying significations is metaphysical and political work on the social: social
work. Such a work is a process towards unachievable, pure immanence and the
unthought. It is the work of unbecoming into pure immanence. It is the social work of
de-subjectification and undoing consistencies (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 42). It is the
work towards ethico- aesthetic chaosmosis. The work of chaosmosis is probing into
modalities of alterities, understanding bifurcations beyond pre-established schemas. This
paper is an invitation to explore the processes that preceded the heterogenesis of the
modo of modernity. It is towards the work of de-ontologizing totalities: the pure work of
altering the telos (Guattari, 1995:108). The agonistic polity of altering the telos, I
propose, should be the social work of social sciences. Bereft of the capacity to asignify
the interests governing the social, the social sciences can hardly be scientific.

Notes:
1.
2.
3.
4.

5.

Event is that breaks with the prevailing discursive interests.

Counter event is a transitional break towards affirming the prevailing discursive interests. For
Foucault they are discontinuous systematicities (Foucault, 1981:69)
Manifold is heterogeneous yet interactive (Deleuze, 1994:203)
Etymologically, interest is inter + esse, which means force-field (inter) that transforms beings
(esse). Interesse is also, indemnification for damage due to the delay in the interval. Politically, it
implies claim over others and future (Knight 1932: 131)
Gaddamer: The history of ideas shows that not until the Enlightenment does the concept of
prejudice acquire the negative connotation familiar today. Actually "prejudice" means a judgment
that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined. In
German legal terminology a prejudice" is a provisional legal verdict before the final verdict is
reached (Gadamer, 2006: 273)

14

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