Carbono em DeLanda (2019 [2006])

It is possible, however, to preserve the insight that a reified generality like ‘society as a whole’ can be replaced by a multiscaled social reality, as long as the part-to-whole relation is correctly conceptualized to accommodate all this complexity. First of all, although a whole emerges from the interactions among its parts, once it comes into existence it can affect those parts. As the philosopher Roy Bhaskar has argued, emergent wholes ‘are real because they are causal agents capable of acting back on the materials out of which they are formed’.[Nota de rodapé 12: Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (London: Verso, 1997), p. 114. While Bhaskar’s realism comes very close to Deleuze’s in some aspects it is incompatible with it because Bhaskar is a self-declared essentialist. As he writes: In general to classify a group of things together in science, to call them by the same name, presupposes that they possess a real essence or nature in common, though it does not presuppose that the real essence or nature is known . . . A chemist will classify diamonds, graphite and black carbon together because he believes that they possess a real essence in common, which may be identified as the atomic (or electronic) structure of carbon. (Ibid., p. 210)] In other words, to give a complete explanation of a social process taking place at a given scale, we need to elucidate not only micro–macro mechanisms, those behind the emergence of the whole, but also the macro–micro mechanisms through which a whole provides its component parts with constraints and resources, placing limitations on what they can do while enabling novel performances. [Nota de rodapé 13: Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, ‘Social mechanisms: an introductory essay’, in Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, (eds) Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 22–3. The authors propose three different types of mechanism: macro–micro, micro–micro and micro–macro. The first type would figure in explanations of the relations between a social situation involving large sociological phenomena (such as the distribution of income or power in a population) and individual social actors. The large-scale process may, for example, create different opportunities and risks for different actors, who must include these opportunities and risks as part of their reasons to act. The second type refers mainly to social–psychological mechanisms, that is, to the mental processes explaining the making of particular decisions (in the case of motives) or to the processes behind the formation of habits, the production of emotion or the acquisition of beliefs (in the case of reasons). Finally, the third type refers to mechanisms governing the interactions among individual actors which generate collective outcomes.] In the networks characterizing tightly knit communities, for example, a variety of resources become available to their members, from physical protection and help to emotional support and advice. But the same density of connections can also constrain members. News about broken promises, unpaid bets and other not-honoured commitments travels fast in those networks: a property that allows them to act as enforcement mechanisms for local norms. Similarly, many hierarchical organizations have access to large reservoirs of resources, which can be available to persons occupying certain formal positions in its authority structure. But the regulations defining the rights and obligations of these formal positions act as constraints on the behaviour of the incumbents. Because the capacities of a whole to constrain and enable may go unexercised, it would be more accurate to say that they afford their component parts opportunities and risks, such as the opportunity to use a [36] resource (an opportunity that may be missed) or the risk of violating a limit (a risk that may never be taken). (DeLanda 2019 [2006]:35-6)

DELANDA, Manuel. 2019 [2006]. A new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity. London: Bloomsbury Academic.