RUDN journal of Sociology (Dec 2020)
Metamorphization of society: The factor of ‘side effects’ and globalization of nothing
Abstract
Today physical, biological and social worlds develop increasingly quicker and in a more complex way that includes the phenomena of metamorphoses. Traditionally, they were considered as determined mainly by external factors, i.e. the forces of nature. Contemporary metamorphoses seem to become of a complex man-made nature. Compared to traditional metamorphoses with rigid and predictable results, contemporary metamorphoses of societies can produce both negative and positive consequences, which proves the non-linear dynamic picture of the world. There is also a traumatic tendency - when something is metamorphosed into nothing. Due to digitalization, nothing becomes more complex and pure from cultural and humane characteristics, thus, revealing new expressions of the death of the social: humans are metamorphosed into digital beings. Metamorphization of society can produce common goods as a side effect of the bad. The author argues that the formal-rational, pragmatic transformations of society and nature, like the scientific and technological innovations of mercantile type, deform and dehumanize life-worlds. The global traumatization in the form of liquid catastrophes permanently changes the living and non-living nature, structure of soil, water and air, desocializes human relations, facilitates transformations of something into nothing, people into non-people, places into non-places, things into non-things. However, people as reflexive actors can turn metamorphoses into things-for-man. To start this process, it is necessary to change the pragmatic monodisciplinary principles of science by the interdisciplinarity ones to ensure a humanistic turn in science and technologies.
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