Social Theory

(Human) Symbiosis

" Symbiosis describes a co-enhancement rather than any type of give and take, mutualistic or otherwise. An ant and a tree are not ‘exchanging’ things. Any such collaboration is simply one of the possible results that a ‘chance encounter’ between species can have (see Douglas, 2010: 46). Their behaviors just happen to benefit someone else (c.f. Sennett, 2012: 72-86). For the same reason, a symbiosis in human terms can be imagined as a contingent relation constituted by practices of freedom.

...Symbiosis materializes the possibility of a model of value that is not ‘overly unified’ (Lambek, 2008: 134). It is a way of appreciating from a macro-perspective the kind of value that is intrinsically contingent and local, that is, produced by what can be considered as acts, not of either (self-interested) ‘choice’ or (collective) ‘obligation’, but of ‘judgment’, in the sense of personally meaningful intervention (Lambek, 2008: 136-138). " (Palacios 2021 pp. 125, 129)

"The volunteer" archetype

" ‘The volunteer’ has long been perceived, at least within academia, as a somewhat naïve subject. Like ‘the philanthropist’ and ‘the humanitarian’, it is an archetype of social intervention that has been historically associated with an apolitical paradigm (see e.g. Brauman 2004; Monforte 2020). In this figurative sense, ‘the volunteer’ can be defined as the individual who freely decides to participate in a form of unwaged or barely remunerated labour whose social meaningfulness is self-evident and publicly recognized within the bounds of a certain moral community. As such, this is an agent with a peculiar use of freedom, for her willingness to act is reliant upon a widely shared and almost binding assumption about ‘what needs to be done’ in relation to a certain problem in society. Freedom in this case is still the expression of an autonomous decision, but of one that leads the self to commit to a project, vision or initiative whose strategic value has already been decided. One way of apprehending this kind of decision is by calling it altruistic, to the extent that it is an effort at dedicating one’s heart and mind to what has been somehow established as the other’s needs.

Another way, however, can be to say that it is a practice of intervening in society through which individuals actively use their freedom – or what Foucault would call their latent ‘ontological’ capacity to react in their own way, be skeptical of how certain things are and influence the social world (1997, 284–93) – only to then quickly foreclose it. It is an archetype that becomes applicable every time someone voluntarily decides to substitute moral duty for ethical freedom, however that duty is defined. " (Palacios 2022, pp. 221-222)

Moral exposure

" Ever since the beginnings of commercial society, market enthusiasts have attempted to justify the social relevance of homo economicus through arguments of ‘mercantile virtue’ ...The historical development of ambivalent hybrids [such as corporate social responsibility, venture philanthropy, brand aid, ethical consumption, fair trade, social microcredit, social entrepreneurship, nonprofit internships and volunteer tourism] poses the opposite problem.

...an expansive humanitarian industry is encouraging citizens to engage in moral endeavours despite the obvious ambiguities and latent skepticism that surround its marketized style of intervention. The kind of ‘public sign’ that these citizens come to embody through such ambivalent combinations as leisure-and-work, exchange-and-charity or competition-and-altruism is one that is intrinsically open to critical questioning. If they can be said to share something about their public persona is that they are all morally exposed. " (Palacios 2021, p. 119)

Strategic holism (constructing 'the social')

" From an angle of ‘ethics’, the social can be conceptualized as a field composed of collaborative practices. Such practices are thought to automatically form through their enactment a circuit of collaboration, even if the element that makes these practices inherently collaborative may be theorized in many different ways – as a capacity for empathy, sense of community, virtue of civicness, sentiment of belonging or even, as Adam Smith argued, self-discipline in exchange (2004: 73-4). Conversely, from an angle of ‘strategics’, the social can be seen as a field that is composed of or, rather, by collaborative interventions, by practices whose collaborative potential cannot be defined in a generic way but which are rather valuable for the way they can have as their ultimate, not instant, effect a collaborative result. In this case, the effectivity of the social is thought in terms, not of the ‘ethical’ quality or condition that can make any individual practice collaborative, but in terms of the ‘strategic’ relation that may exist between certain practices and a not-immediately-evident circuit of collaboration.

...one can associate a strategic holism, beyond classical liberalism, with those projects of social critique that have emerged from Marx or from more recently influential authors like Polanyi or Habermas. It appears in the nineteenth-century idea that a non-alienated proletariat would spontaneously form a communist sociality, as much as in the twentieth-century ones that a nation devoid of economicism would lead to an embedded welfarism (see Robotham, 2009) or that a communicative humanity without the interference from technical systems would develop a critical civil society (see Fine, 1997: 11-3). While obtaining their critical impetus from the very premise that civil society is socially constructed, these projects are organized by the ethics-based notion that certain practices – of political autonomy, non-market behavior, open communication – can be collaborative and have social value in themselves, which in strategic terms means that their spontaneous summation, if respected and left alone, is thought to lead to an immediately desirable ‘whole’. " (Palacios 2018, p. 80 ,89)

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