Social acts and projections of change

Abstract

This lecture considers the question of the social from within the workings of the SARChI Chair in Social Change. Rather than accepting ‘the social’ as something that is given, it proposes that we problematize and ‘re: work’ the social as being a hybrid domain, as being spatially diverse and as being enacted. An argument for ‘social acts’, which are related to, but not the same as actors and actions is proposed as a means to read and understand the social and projections of social change in new ways. While social acts produce actors and need actors to be actualised, social acts themselves produce ruptures in the given, entail a remaining in the scene and they always involve others and the Other in altering projections of the social, of ‘other socials’, and of projections of change. In practice too, the enactment of the social and the material as integrally associative decentre the object, bringing it into view as one that is also socially enacted, requiring continuing effort, choreography, staging, repetition, but also rupture. To enact, then, is to realize a rupture in the given-ness of the social and to necessarily attend to the unexpected, unpredictable and unknown of the social and its equally enacted and re-worked projections of change