In his Processual Sociology Andrew Abbott reflects on the forms of historicality through which the past lingers on in the present in which the future is taking root*: corporeal historicality (bodies, buildings, infrastructure), memorial historicality (individuals and collective memories), recorded historicality (analogue and digital records) and substantive historicality (the continuity of a particular cohort). In linking these forms of historicality to the human experience of sequentiality, he draws attention to how morally contested this has been within modernity:
Indeed, through much of modernity runs the theme that not only is habitutation universal, but that habit is bad, and indeed that the past in general is to be rejected and transcended. That is, the obverse of our focus on habit is the idea of progress.
Processual Thinking, Pg 28
This ties to what I recently wrote about as the moral economy of automaticity. It also fits with Mike Savage’s conception of modernist temporal ontology: which involves “differentiating complex modern societies (which they research) compared to “traditional” ones (which historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and so forth can analyze)” and implies a view that “that modern dynamic societies break from an older, stable, and fixed society”. It’s a moral vision articulated with varying degrees of explicitness: the dead weight of the past is something which we must break from in order to make a better future.
I’m interested in how digitalisation intercedes in what Abbott describes as memorial historicality, as well as what this means for our broader imaginary of social change. He notes that social media is changing the degree to which “social entities produce many more records than do individuals, who conduct much of their social business within their minds or viva voce with others” (pg 26) but fails to recognise how this expanding machinery of individual record keeping is driven by the incentives of platformised capitalism. These are social records more than individual ones, at least in the sense of unequal access to the outcomes of datafication. The political economy entailed by, say, credit scoring rapidly expands to become a ubiquitous feature of the lifeworld, with implications for who can understand what about how the past lingers on in the present and shapes the future.
What does this mean for the modernist temporal ontology? If memorial and recorded historicality are increasingly captured by the machinery of platform capitalism, would this change Abbott’s view that the historicality of individuals is increasingly outweighing the historicality of structures? His point is that extended lifespans and intensified change mean that “the enduring mass of biological individuals is one of the largest ‘social’ forces that exist” and is becoming more so with time (pg 15). But it seems to me that platform capitalism, or rather more specifically what Seymour calls ‘the social industries’ as a subset of it, acts parasitically upon Abbott’s substantive historicality. As that grows, so too do the social industries and with weird and destructive second-order effects on memorial and historical continuity e.g. the collapsing half-life of words, the internet never forgetting and yet continually forgetting.
*To paraphrase a Bauman quote which just popped into my mind.
Mark Carrigan 