Religion, culture and society in the 'information age'

Baudrillard (1983:4) notes that sociology depends upon a "positive and definitive hypothesis of the social," but considers three possibilities concerning the social that illuminate its non-existence or current dissolution, thereby marking the death of sociology as well as of the notion of the social. These three possibilities are as follows: first, that things have never functioned socially but "symbolically, magically, irrationally"; second, that the social is some sort of residue now becoming absorbed into the administrative machinery of society; and third, that the social might once have existed but has now vanished into the simulations, circuits and networks of the information age (Baudrillard 1983:68, 73, 83). Baudrillard's own position in relation to these three possibilities is not free of ambiguity, but it is generally accepted that the third position characteristically marks his "anti-sociology" (Bogard 2000:240). Within this anti-sociology, the social is displaced by a simulation of the social, since the real has given way to the hyper-real. Here, there is no ontological basis upon which to ground any notion of the real, or any form of knowledge about anything, since there is only radical, chaotic, meaningless contingency.

Such postmodern forms of philosophy have been incorporated into sociological analysis in various forms, and with varying degrees of acceptance of their relativistic logic. For example, Touraine's (1989, 1995) focus on social movements that render the idea of society meaningless, and Urry's (2000) manifesto for "sociology beyond societies," arise out of an engagement with postmodern philosophy. For Touraine (1989:15), the complex and changing fields of social relations that mark the present seriously compromise any notion of an overarching society, and, he argues, "the very idea of society should be eliminated" (Touraine 1989:11). Urry's (2000:1) "manifesto for sociology" also makes the claim that sociologists should abandon the concept of society. He argues that sociology should, instead, be focused on the analysis of "global networks and flows" which produce a "hollowing out of existing societies," producing overlapping, disjunctive orders across time and space in "a kind of hypertextual patterning" (Urry 2000:36).

For him, we now "inhabit an indeterminate, ambivalent and semiotic risk culture where the risks are in part generated by the declining powers of societies in the face of multiple 'inhuman' global flows and multiple networks" (Urry 2000:37). This focus on inhuman flows is, however, allied to a highly problematic view of agency. Indeed, Urry (2000:14) argues that "the concept of agency needs to be embodied," but simultaneously suggests that "there is no autonomous realm of human agency." Thus, he draws attention to the significance of the senses in relation to the emergence of distinctly modern forms of life and to the experience of contemporary post-societal flows and mobilities, but distinguishes this from the assertion of any specifically human society, reality, essence or powers in a world where inhuman objects constitute social relations through phenomena such as technologies, texts and machines (Urry 2000:14, 77; 2003:56). For Urry (2000:15-16), the idea of a human agency that produces a social reality is absurd: "the ordering of social life is presumed to be ... irreducible to human subjects."