In other words, Calhoun perceives a tension between the capacity of
tertiary relationships to enhance and regenerate primary ones and their
tendency to replace them altogether.Constitutive abstraction
A position known as ‘constitutive abstraction’ has been advanced for
many years by an Australian group associated with the journal Arena
who have developed a social theory which looks at social relations as an
intersection of ‘levels of integration’. It is an account which has emerged
largely in isolation from other approaches to ‘levels’ theory but is one
which nevertheless contains invaluable points of innovation.
The Arenathesis takes up the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who poses
the question in his Intellectual and Manual Labour (1979): can there be
abstraction other than by thought? By this, Sohn-Rethel suggests that
abstraction is not merely a property of the mind, but can occur in social
relationships also. When it does so, these relationships are no less ‘real’
than less abstracted ones; however, they do possess distinctive features.
The constitutive abstraction argument shares the departure point of
Thompson that most human culture has been framed by face-to-face rela-
tionships and only recently have we seen the emergence of new forms of
social relations. The newer forms are shaped by the rise of postmodern
technoscience of all kinds, not just communication. Postmodern techno-
science differs from the science of the Enlightenment or modernity in that
it is seen to reconstitute the natural and social worlds rather than simply
harness such worlds in the name of progress. Thus, IVF fundamentally
intervenes in the process of human reproduction, to the point of making
many of its qualities redundant. Nuclear power, in sub-atomically
rivalling processes which occur on the sun, makes possible the 24-hour
society, in a different way than did coal.
The main agents of these changes are the intellectually related group-
ings. The results of their practice of reconstituting the world creates
settings of ‘new nature’ which abstract all persons into an orbit of inter-
change and exchange that can be seen to be derived from intellectuals and
their practices.
In this view, therefore, print, the dominant medium of intellectuals, is
seen as a precursor to modern technologically extended forms of commu-
nication. The newer forms of communication bring about practices which
abstract the individual from more embodied forms of social relations and
de-link those individuals from the kinds of roles that they once had, giving
them the appearance of autonomy.
As Sharp (1985) suggests:The first point to make about this sort of practice is that in order to be
engaged in it the person must be abstracted from the settings which make158 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 158