Introduction

French sociologist and philosopher Didier Eribon writes in his autobiography Returning to Reims (2013: 46f.):

[A]ny sociology or any philosophy that begins by placing at the center of its project the ‘point of view of the actors’ and the ‘meaning they give to their actions’ runs the risk of simply reproducing a shorthand version of the mystified relation that social agents maintain with their own practices and desires, and consequently does nothing more than serve to perpetuate the world as it currently stands – an ideology of justification (for the established order). […] A theory’s power and interest lie precisely in the fact that it doesn’t consider it as sufficient simply to record the words that ‘actors’ say about their ‘actions,’ but that rather, it sets as a goal to allow both individuals and groups to see and to think differently about what they are and what they do, and then, perhaps, to change what they do and what they are. It is a matter of breaking with incorporated categories of perception and established frameworks of meaning, and thereby with the social inertia of which these categories and frameworks are the vectors; after such a break, the goal is to produce a new way of looking at the world and thereby to open up new political perspectives.

The passage is not only a fascinating testimony of how academics do not seem to “split their work from their lives,” as Mills (2000: 195) puts it, but it also contains a venomous attack against a whole tradition of sociological (and philosophical) research starting from Max Weber. Among the key methodological principles of phenomenological sociology, for example, is the idea that scientific constructs should be consistent with the constructs of common-sense experience of social reality. While the idea was introduced into sociology already by Weber (1978: 4), it is Alfred Schutz who has formulated it perhaps the most explicitly and systematically, signposted with the concept, the ‘postulate of adequacy’ (hereafter: postulate). Today, the postulate – as one of the three postulates that for Schutz constitute the most important methodological requirements for social scientific research – is widely acknowledged as the focal point of phenomenological sociology (e.g., Winter, 1966; Filmer et al., 1972; Zijderveld, 1972; McLain, 1981; Harrington, 2000).

Schutz (1962) asserts that there is an essential difference between the social sciences and the natural sciences, which was something that also Weber insisted on, trying to carve a methodological and conceptual space for sociology between the humanities and the natural sciences.Footnote 1 For Schutz, the structure of social scientific thought objects fundamentally differ from those formed by the natural sciences in that there is no meaning or relevance inherent in nature as such. The ‘observational field’ of the natural scientist and the data, facts, and events therein do not “‘mean’ anything to molecules, atoms, and electrons observed”. The social world studied by the social scientist, by contrast, has already been pre-experienced and pre-interpreted by the human beings living, thinking, and acting in it before the researcher enters the field to study it (Schutz, 1962: 5f.). Social scientific thought objects must therefore take notice of the common-sense constructs of the reality of daily life by which the actors perform their interpretations and make sense of the world. The very adequacy of social scientific constructs is warranted by the extent that they are consistent with the common-sense experience of the actors. Instead of only explaining the actions of actors by means of abstract theoretical constructs, Schutz’s postulate insists that social scientists should also try to understand and interpret those actions as they are understood and experienced by the actors themselves. To quote Schutz (1962: 44): “Each term in a scientific model of human action must be constructed in such a way that an act performed within the life-world by an individual actor in the way indicated by the typical constructs would be understandable for the actor himself as well as for his fellow-men [sic] in terms of common-sense interpretations of everyday life”. In other words, the postulate suggests that to be able to grasp the social reality in which the actors live, the claims, notions, and interpretations proposed by social scientists need to be “founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thought of man living his everyday life among his fellow-men [sic]” (Schutz, 1962: 6; see also 59).

Schutz is by no means alone in insisting that social scientists take seriously what actors have to say and how they explain and make sense of their actions to others and themselves. This is also what for example Bruno Latour’s famous slogan “follow the actors” (Latour, 2005: 68) demands of sociologists (see Latour, 1999: 19f.). For both Schutz and Latour, the thought objects constructed by sociologists should refer to and be consistent with the constructs employed by the actors studied. Further, both authors treat actors as “world making entities” (Latour, 1996a: 378), capable of constructing social reality through shared meanings and interpretations (Schutz, 1962, 1967) or of speaking for themselves and of building meaningful accounts of their actions and the world (Latour, 1988: 10).

Both Schutz’s and Latour’s claims of course beg the question that, if social scientific thought objects need to align with those constructed by the common-sense thinking of the actors studied, what, if anything, has social science to add to common sense? Schutz’s reply is: the “objective validity” and “strictly logical character” of its constructs (Schutz, 1962: 43). For him, social researchers need to reconcile the subjective meanings of the research subjects with scientific criteria of logical consistency, thus retaining a detached, objectifying stance (Harrington, 2000). He emphasises the critical, reflective nature of sociological interpretations and regards the thought objects of social scientists as “constructs of the second degree” (Schutz, 1962: 6; see also 255), not identical with those of the actors. While Schutz, too, undermines conventional sociological orthodoxy, Latour is even more unorthodox in his stance, radicalising Schutz, as it were. He provocatively suggests that the actors “are doing our sociology for us, and doing it better than we can; it’s not worth the trouble to do more” (Latour, 1996b: 10). For Latour, the social scientist has no epistemological privilege over the actors. Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) is “not a theory of action” (Latour, 1996a: 378), but merely an “empty frame for describing how any entity builds its world” (Latour, 1996a: 378) (it is precisely because of this that ANT also refuses to impose any a priori asymmetry between humans and nonhumans, for which it is best known). Instead of adding something ‘more’ to how actors build and explain the world, ANT does even less than provide adescriptive terminology of the actors’ accounts: in “a good ANT account” for Latour, “the concepts of the actors [are] allowed to be stronger than that of the analysts,” instead of the analyst being the one “who is doing all the talking” (Latour, 2005: 30). Eschewing any meta-language, Latour conceives ANT as an infra-language or infra-theory on a par with the frames of reference used by the actors. It replaces “the analyst’s restricted and limited vocabulary by the actors’ activity at world making” (Latour, 1993: 131).

In what follows, I will critically examine some of the implications of the adherence of social scientific concepts to common sense. My target is not so much Schutz’s work or postulate – in fact, I also build on and try to extend some of the more creative aspects of Schutz’s thought – as its strong interpretations or radicalisations, like the aforementioned maxim by Latour, which sets out to found sociological accounts upon those of the actors studied.Footnote 2 I try to make explicit why the admission of reducing science to sociality may even be harmful for the endeavour of sociological thought (see also Giddens, 1976; Bernstein, 1976). I focus on the unintended substantialist commitments of a sociology too closely in alignment with common-sense experiences and accounts, and on how such a sociology runs the risk of rendering social scientific thinking and concepts reactive and representational, trapped in the present and the actual. In my argument, I address the creative, utopian aspects of concepts over against the more or less non-creative take on concepts suggested by the methodological principle requiring of social scientific concepts that they should be consistent with common sense.

The article is structured as follows. First, I propose that a sociology or social science adhering too strictly to the just mentioned methodological requirement is prone to understand the social world in a narrow reified, substantialist manner, consisting primarily in fixed entities with variable properties. This is due to the substantialist tendency of common sense. Our habitual thinking and everyday experience in the West at least tend to conceive the world on the basis of identity and in terms of static things. After that, I discuss a possible counterargument to this view, namely that there is a phenomenological dimension to relations: not only are relations experienced as actors in a certain way, but they are also actively produced, framed, and maintained in and by stories. While this is true, the phenomenological dimension is not all there is to relations. Actors are not always aware of all the relations their own action relies on, and therefore I propose that we need to acknowledge a more constitutive relationality that is irreducible to relations as experienced by human subjects. In the third main section of the article, I argue that modelling sociology in accordance with the methodological requirement emphasising alignment with common sense easily makes it reactionary and conservative, rendering sociological concepts representational, not creative. Being trapped within the actual, the methodological requirement may be detrimental to any attempts to think anew. Against the methodological requirement imposed by the postulate, I suggest that besides examining what exists, our concepts should also move beyond our common-sense experience to create new potentials for thinking and action, and thus to stress their utopian aspect. I conclude by summing up the main points of the article and discuss why our own time which is laden with crises particularly calls for autopian relational thinking.

Implicit Substantialist Commitments

My main argument in this section is that a sociology or social scientific analysis adhering to the methodological principle requiring of sociological thought objects that they be consistent with the constructs employed by the actors studied is vulnerable to substantialist assumptions. This is because our spontaneous everyday common-sense experience of reality, at least in the Western world, tends to be substantialist (see also, e.g., Elias, 1978: 111f.; Whitehead, (1934), 2011: 10f.; Emirbayer, 2013: 210; Selg, 2018: 539f.). Our ways of speaking and thinking tend to be reifying insofar as we tend to perceive the world as consisting of relatively static and permanent, self-consistent entities, rather than of dynamic relations and processes. While common-sense thinking is not substantialist in an absolute sense and without exceptions, for many of us most of the time, the world nevertheless appears to be furnished with entities demarcated from each other by clear-cut boundaries: when we look around, we see distinct entities such as buildings, street signs, trees, embodied individual persons, cars, animals, books, and computers. Notwithstanding the changes that these entities go through and the activities they may be engaged in, we come to assign a more or less fixed identity to them, at least a minimalistic core that endures and persists. As Norbert Elias (1978: 111f.) notes, our languages are constructed in such a way that even movement and change seem to imply in the first instance an isolated object at rest, to which is added a verb that expresses the fact that the thing changes: we say “the river flows” and “the wind is blowing,” as if the river was somehow separate from its flowing and the wind from its blowing.

Interestingly, Schutz, too, makes an observation pointing at this direction, when he remarks that all interpretation of the everyday world “is based on a stock of previous experiences of it,” and that “[t]o this stock of knowledge at hand belongs our knowledge that the world we live in is a world of more or less well-circumscribed objects with more or less definite qualities, objects among which we move, which resist us and upon which we may act” (Schutz, 1962: 7; see also 208). In other words, as Schutz (1962: 8) writes on the following page: “in the natural attitude of daily life we are concerned merely with certain objects standing out over against the unquestioned field of pre-experienced other objects”. So, instead of just reproducing the substantialist common-sense knowledge, Schutz rather obtained distance to it by subjecting it to analysis. Thus, drawing from Schutz, one can argue that we are accustomed to perceiving the world in substantialist terms based on familiarity and pre-acquintanceship built by a stock of previous experiences. They are “just taken for granted until further notice,” but, and this is an important point, in principle they could be questioned “at any time,” Schutz (1962: 7) notes. The common-sense understanding of the everyday world is thus “the unquestioned but always questionable background within which inquiry starts and within which alone it can be carried out”; this is also one thing that philosophers as diverse as James, Bergson, Dewey, Husserl, and Whitehead find unison according to Schutz (1962: 57).Footnote 3

Insofar as the common-sense knowledge of the world forms the background only within which sociological inquiry can be carried out, sociology is therefore inevitably to some extent laden with many of the same problems as our reifying everyday ways of speaking and thinking. Importantly, this criticism does not hold for Schutz’s work as such but rather for the tradition of phenomenological or interpretative sociology making use of it. It applies only insofar as one regards his sociology cut off from its philosophical roots and from his investigations into the conditions of possibility for meaning, knowledge, understanding, assumptions, etc., as has typically been the case in the phenomenological or interpretative tradition. Not only is Schutz’s work helpful in elucidating how substantialist notions and views are based on familiarity and unquestioned natural attitude, but it is also critical of the common sense, pointing out how common-sense thinking is not clear and logically consistent, in the way conventional scientific thinking is expected to be. This is also the reason why he introduces the methodological requirement of “logical consistency” (Schutz, 1962: 43) in the first place.

A sociology adhering to how the actors studied make sense of their actions to others and themselves may work just fine when dealing with already stabilised matters such as individual persons, companies, social classes, and nations collectively acknowledged as stable ingredients of the social world. However, and here comes ‘the further notice’ announced by Schutz, it is unable to account for how things change and involve other entities in their make-up. Ultimately, in a world of self-contained entities, there simply is no life. As Alfred North Whitehead – an author who belongs to the interlocutors of Schutz, too – suggests, the idea of “the self-contained particle of matter, self-sufficient within its local habitation, is an abstraction” (Whitehead, (1934), 2011: 32), cut off from its relations and from the life-process.

An antidote to such substantialist assumptions is provided by relational thought. As it considers the world as consisting in “dynamic, unfolding relations” (Emirbayer, 1997: 281) instead of fixed entities with variable properties, as substantialism does, it is in a sense what comes after ‘the further notice’. For relational thinking, the river is its flowing and the wind its blowing. Recently, versions of what could be called processual-relational sociology stressing the fluid and dynamic character of relations and the social world have been proliferating (see, e.g., Emirbayer, 1997; Dépelteau, 2008, 2018; Abbott, 2016; Ruggieri, 2017, 2020; Selg, 2016a, b, 2018; Selg & Ventsel, 2020; Papilloud, 2018a; Klasche & Poupuu, 2023; Pyyhtinen, 2021).Footnote 4 For processual-relational sociology, entities are processual and relational all the way down. This processual-relational postulate – which ‘supplements’ Schutz’s in the Derridean (1988: 144f.) double sense of at once adding to and undermining it, “add[ing] only to replace”– means basically two things: first, entities are considered to be constituted by relations and, second, that those relations, just like the phenomena they constitute, are dynamic, unfolding processes. Viewed from a relational perspective, nothing exists solely in and by itself. We never encounter anything out of its specific circumstances. We do not get at what an entity is by stripping off its relations and detaching it from its environment, but to be is to be related: entities become what they are in and through relations, by affecting and being affected by others.

In this context, it should not be forgotten that Schutz (1966, 1967), too, famously stresses the importance of intersubjectivity. He thinks that actors interpret and give meaning not only to their own experiences and actions but also to those of others, and through their shared meanings and interpretations they come to construct social reality. However, while he emphasises that individuals understand and relate to each other’s experiences, Schutz’s discussion of intersubjectivity through other-understanding (fremdverstehen) does not yet quite account for the processual coming-into-being and relational constitution of things and persons. A relational perspective stresses how even our most personal gaits, ideas, desires, and beliefs come to be through relations. One can find an elaboration of this for example in the work of Georg Simmel, whose notion of Wechselwirkung Schutz (1967: 4) referred to,Footnote 5 or in that of Gabriel Tarde, who is another significant precursor of relational sociology alongside Simmel. The major contribution of Tarde (1903) was to offer a kind of inter-psychology exploring the affective processes and relations between minds. While his work has often been dismissed by sociologists for being merely psychological, for Tarde (1903) relations come first and the individual psyche only second. Instead of being endowed first with some primordial, self-subsistent interiority which would be closed-off from the outside world, human subjects gain a psychical interiority only through the relations that they have with the outside. The influences between minds may vary from willed to unwilled, from conscious to unconscious, and from active to passive, but the basic idea of the interior being produced in relation to the exterior remains the guiding assumption.Footnote 6

But are our spontaneous, everyday common-sense experience and habitual thinking really as substantialist as they have been depicted above? In the next section, I will complicate the picture a bit by highlighting the relational moments of common-sense thinking, yet I will also argue that the spontaneous relational common-sense ideas present a somewhat restricted and narrow understanding of relationality.

Experienced Relations vs. Constitutive Relationality

The accusation that the aforementioned methodological requirement leaves social scientific inquiry vulnerable to substantialist assumptions can immediately be met with an obvious counterargument: that common sense experience and everyday habitual thinking are not substantialist throughout. On the contrary, as Selg (2018: 539) has noted, we also have a spontaneous relational understanding of various phenomena; it is just that we rarely reflect on them in explicit relational terms. Schutz (1962: 7), too, notes that none of the circumscribed objects with definite qualities of which the world we live in consists of for everyday knowledge “is perceived as insulated,” but they appear in a horizon of anticipation of conformity with other, similar objects. It is thus only in relation to these other objects and past experiences that any object attains its meaning. Selg, for his part, mentions distance as one example of phenomena which we tend to understand in relational terms almost as if naturally. Instead of conceiving it as a thing, as a property which a certain entity ‘has,’ or as an action of an entity, we spontaneously understand distance as a relation between two entities: the distance between A and B is irreducible to either one of them; it is inconceivable as an entity of its own separate from A and B; and it is also ‘reciprocal’ in that “A’s distance from B is also B’s distance from A” (Selg, 2018: 540).

Not only does everyday common-sense thought involve relational ideas, but relationships also entail reflexivity. They are experienced by actors in a certain way, as anything from intimate and loving to empowering, equal, competitive, distant, unequal, conflictual, harmful, and toxic. Relationships are also actively produced, framed, and maintained in and by narratives and other linguistic accounts. They are ‘storied’ (White, 1992: 1996). Sometimes these stories fundamentally shape the relationships and are important for their subsistence. Seebach (2019) has for example examined how “intimate stories” or “love myths” jointly told by partners to each other are crucial in and for the weaving and maintenance of the love relationship. Couples create a story that “marks their path together”. Seebach also emphasises that couples are reflexive about their stories, making the story the fundamental material of rituals of enchantment and re-enchantment (Seebach, 2019: 185).

However, there is much more to relations than our experience of and stories about them. This is because relations do not always occur to the consciousness of the subject. It would even be utterly impossible for actors to be aware of all the things that one’s own action is contingent upon. My action is circumscribed and made possible by the efforts and achievements of several others whom I do not know or am not even aware of, as they may be so distant from me geographically or come from an entirely different time, for example. In fact, one could even say that the majority of people upon whom we rely in our most mundane activities are not visible to us the moment when we act, nor do we know them personally. And yet they are present, in a sense, when we act. Their presence is lent to them by mediators, which make it possible to “act at a distance” (Latour, 1987). Any given action, as Latour (2005: 166) suggests, is therefore “overflow[ing] with elements which are already in the situation coming from some other time, some other place, and generated by some other agency”. Therefore, as this overflowing is not fully recognised by the actors, by holding on to Latour’s demand that sociological studies should merely describe how the actors explain their actions and the world, one would not yet get at how their actions and the world are constituted.

One way to elaborate on a relational notion of action is to make use of the familiar conceptual distinctions that John Dewey and Arthur Bentley (1949) draw between ‘self-action,’ ‘inter-action,’ and ‘trans-action’. Self-actionalism refers to a perspective which conceives of entities – be they human agents or structures – as “acting under their own powers” (Dewey & Bentley, 1949: 108). Here, the actors “do all the acting in social life and account for its dynamism” (Emirbayer, 1997: 285). In contrast to self-actionalism, inter-actionalism emphasises that “relevant action takes place among the entities themselves” (Emirbayer, 1997: 285). Schutz’s notion of intersubjectivity could with some reservations be said to be inter-actional.Footnote 7 Yet, while inter-actionalism stresses the role of relations, what it has in common with self-actionalism is that it at least implicitly assumes entities to “remain fixed and unchanging throughout such interaction, each independent of the existence of the others, much like billiard balls or the particles in Newtonian mechanics” (Emirbayer, 1997: 285f.). The inter-actional perspective perceives individuals as self-contained, as it were, not constituted in and changed by their relations. This is also the reason why the aforementioned notion of ‘distance’ does not yet quite capture the dynamic, processual relations constitutive of entities (Selg, 2018: 540).

Finally, it is only trans-actionalism that can be argued to comprise a fully relational perspective on action. Unlike inter-actionalism, trans-actionalism does not attribute the related entities any identity or being outside the relations. For it, “the very terms or units involved in a transaction derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction” (Emirbayer, 1997: 287). Following Tsing (2015: 27), one could also express this by saying that “[w]e are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others”. The relational constitution of entities also means that nowhere do we hit upon the truly elementary, basic building blocks of social reality. All we have is relations and entities constituted in and through them. According to Dewey and Bentley, when sociological notions attune to the trans-actional view, “systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects and phases of action, without final attribution to ‘elements’ or other presumptively detachable or independent ‘entities,’ ‘essences,’ or ‘realities,’ and without isolation of presumptively detachable ‘relations’ from such detachable ‘elements’” (Dewey & Bentley, 1949: 108). An often-quoted passage from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals succeeds in capturing the idea even more lucidly than Dewey and Bentley’s account. According to Nietzsche: “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, working, becoming: ‘the doer’ is a mere appen[d]age to the action. The action is everything” (Nietzsche, 2003: 26).

To be sure, given that our – and by ‘our,’ I mean those of us living in the Western world – spontaneous, everyday views and perceptions of the world are substantialist, the immediate and obvious difficulty a processual-relational sociology faces is that it goes against common sense, and the same holds basically for any endeavour of criticising the methodological requirement to align sociological concepts with the everyday accounts of actors. This fact renders processual-relational thought ‘utopian,’ to some extent; it is so incompatible with our present ways of speaking and thinking that it is utterly difficult to find a place for it within the latter.Footnote 8 However, to avoid making sociological thinking damagingly restricted and unable to account for relationality, change, and process, it is crucial to derail and divert the direction of thought presented by common sense and be a bit utopian. I will discuss this utopian aspect of thinking and concepts in more detail in the next section.

Concepts as Creative

I will now leave the relational critique of substantialist assumptions more in the background and foreground the understanding of concepts that the methodological requirement discussed above entails or implies in order to critically engage with it. My main argument here is that the postulate ultimately renders social scientific thinking non-creative and to a damaging degree potentially restricts its capacity to imagine or think otherwise. By demanding of social scientific thought objects that they correspond to or are even founded on those of actors in reality, the methodological requirement implicitly subscribes to a representational model of thought that needs to be challenged, insofar as it thereby merely comes to reinforce common sense and habitual thinking rather than open new avenues for thinking, acting, and being. It is in “breaking with incorporated categories of perception and established frameworks of meaning” where a theory’s power lies, as Eribon stressed in the passage quoted in the beginning of this article.

Against the view of alignment or correspondence with the meanings that the actors themselves give to their actions as the criterion of the adequacy of social scientific concepts, I suggest that concepts are fundamentally not given but created. To make this move, it is necessary that we take a detour via philosophy and the work of Gilles Deleuze. This is not to conflate sociology with philosophy, but only to approach philosophical ideas as a theoretical resource or a reservoir of ideas that can be put to use also in sociology and ‘translated’ to sociology. In the book What is Philosophy? (1994) that Deleuze wrote together with Félix Guattari, the authors refute the idea of philosophy as contemplation, reflection, or communication. According to them, such characterisations fail to acknowledge philosophy’s distinctive function or specify what kind of activity philosophy is. For Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 11), philosophy is a point where concept and creation meet and intersect. The primary job of philosophy is to create concepts: “philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts […] The object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 5).

With and without Guattari, Deleuze has introduced numerous new concepts into philosophical discussions and debates, sometimes by creating neologisms, at other times by giving a new meaning to an old, existing term. These famously include for example the “rhizome,” “fold,” “lines,” “body without organs,” “machine,” “reterritorialisation,” “deterritorialisation,” “the actual and the virtual,” “plane of immanence,” “difference and repetition,” “exteriority,” “a life,” “conceptual persona,” as well as the concept of “concept” itself.

The creation of concepts is for Deleuze and Guattari geared towards opening new possibilities for thinking, toward giving a new event to things. As they write: “The task of philosophy when it creates concepts, entities, is always to extract an event from things and beings, to set up the new event from things and beings, always to give them a new event” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 33). Importantly, the idea of giving a new event to things suggests that the act of creating concepts is not exclusively a textual operation taking place at the level of writing, as in Derridean deconstruction (with one of its most famous statements saying: “there is no outside of the text [Il n’y a pas de hors-texte])” or in Richard Rorty’s work.Footnote 9 Rather, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the ultimate purpose of creating concepts is precisely to make interventions in the world.

The contrast of the idea of giving things a new event with the methodological requirement discussed in the previous sections could not be starker. While the principle of taking the actors’ accounts and views absolutely seriously demands of social scientific concepts that they should reflect what we experience, a sociology informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s take on concepts would treat concepts as means which enable us to move beyond what exists and beyond our (common-sense) experience. In the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari, one could say that for the methodological requirement social scientific concepts and constructs appear and operate on the plane of reference, as they have a logical character and are measured against the common-sense constructs of the actors studied. For a sociology inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, concepts populate the “plane of immanence”: is a field of possibility, “the horizon of events” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 36).

But what does it take to question the present reality and move beyond what exists? One answer can be found in the world of literature. In his novel Man Without Qualities (1965: 12), Robert Musil famously coins the idea of a sense of possibility:

But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifications for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise.

It is important to acknowledge that such a sense of possibility, the narrator of Musil’s novel stresses, does not belong only to the “hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydream, and the subjunctive mood” (Musil, 1965: 12). Schutz’s (1976: 135–158) analysis of Don Quixote’s fictitious space of chivalry in relation to common sense and science might help to clarify this. For Schutz, Cervantes’ novel poses the problem of multiple realities stated by William James and, what is noteworthy, Don Quixote’s private world of chivalry is “not a solipsistic one, but […] there are other minds within this reality,” sharing it with him (Schutz, 1976: 136). Analogous to this, one can argue that a sense of possibility does not belong to the interiority of the solus ipse but can be something intersubjectively shared. Interestingly, the work of Erik Olin Wright translates the idea of a sense of possibility – though without any explicit connection to Musil – to a sociological programme he calls a “a sociology of the possible” (Wright, 2011: 37). For Wright, the task of sociology is not “simply to describe and explain the social world as it is” (Wright, 2011: 37) but also rebuild “a sense of possibility for emancipatory social change by investigating the feasibility of radically different kinds of institutions and social relations” (Wright, 2010: 1; emphasis added). By attending to the possible, Wright’s work is also a good example of how sociological notions are not automatically and necessarily placed exclusively on the plane of reference but, like philosophical concepts for Deleuze and Guattari, they may also occupy the horizon of events and cultivate a sense of possibility, thereby expressing the creative potential of thinking. To be sure, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) themselves did not think highly of sociology and would readily situate sociology under the category of “science,” separate from philosophy. Yet sociological theory is far from being incompatible with Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy (for examples of the use of their ideas in sociology, see, e.g., Bogard, 1998; Høstaker, 2014; Lenco, 2018; Pyyhtinen, 2015; Lehtonen & Pyyhtinen, 2020), as I try to illustrate here.

Wright’s idea of the sense of possibility refers to the utopian dimension of social scientific thinking (this utopian aspect has also been addressed by some works in the interpretive tradition, too; see, e.g., Soeffner, 2019; Schnettler, 2004; Traue et al., 2019). In accordance with its well-known etymological roots in the Greek word outopos, where topos means ‘topos’ and the prefix ou- ‘not,’ utopia has typically come to designate a ‘no-place,’ a ‘no-where,’ that is, a world or a place that is dissociated from the real world and its state of affairs that prevail here and now. As Wright (2010: 5) puts it: “Utopias are fantasies, morally inspired designs for a humane world of peace and harmony unconstrained by realistic considerations of human psychology and social feasibility”. In opposition to this, Wright proposes what he calls “real utopias” (Wright, 2010), by which he means “viable, emancipatory alternatives to dominant institutions and social structures” (Wright, 2011: 37). Instead of trying to dissipate the tension between utopian dreams and practical realities, real utopias embrace that tension, “grounded [as they are] in the belief that what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our imagination, but is itself shaped by our visions” (Wright, 2010: 6). Before things can become actualised, they need to be imagined first; all major social transformations have begun with the renewal of the collective imagination. To accomplish a change and move beyond what exists in other words requires political imagination, the ability to rethink who we are and how we could live together (Cooper, 2014; Eskelinen, 2020; Salmenniemi & Ylöstalo, 2023).

So, if understood in this sense, the utopian dimension of sociological or social scientific concepts can never be disconnected from real struggles and engagements with prevailing practices, institutions, and structures. This may mean engaging with activists, for example. Thereby, utopian thinking is not necessarily irreconcilable with the actors’ viewpoints and experiences as such, but rather with a sociology that places the point of view of the actors at the centre. Such a sociology easily ends up reproducing and perpetuating the prevailing social reality instead of giving the actors tools to think differently about who they are and what they do, as Eribon notes in the lengthy excerpt quoted in the beginning of this article. While it is important not to explain away the subjective meanings that the actors give to their actions and the world around them, their accounts and views tend not to be logically consistent in the manner that social scientific thinking should be. For this reason, the methodological requirement of logical consistency stressed by Schutz (1962) is important.

The utopian aspect of concepts means that one questions the self-evident, given nature of existing reality for the benefit of a future. This idea is of disrupting how things are given, manifest in the present is expressed well by the science and technology studies (STS) motto ‘It could be otherwise’. The motto emphasises “the accomplished ontology of entities”: “entities are not given, but rather offer a reference point for temporary imputations or moral orders of accountability” (Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013: 332). Such a take on ontology is critical of the status quo, as it underscores how entities are not given, natural, inevitable, and unchangeable, but made, constructed, contingent, and historically variable. And the idea that things are not necessary in how they appear to us but enacted contingent on relations of power, implies that they can also be constructed otherwise. In other words, the critique of the world as it exists serves the endeavour to envision how things could be otherwise. By intervening, as Michelle Bastian suggests, “into habitual ways of both living and understanding the world,” the critical engagement with them “denaturalize[s] the commonsense feel of conventions” (Bastian, 2012: 37), and thereby it may also create possibilities for building the world differently – possibilities for renewing our practices, for affecting and rearranging existing social relations and institutions.

To go back to the methodological requirement demanding of social scientific concepts that they be consistent with the common-sense experience of the actors, whereas a social science or a sociology modelled too strictly in accordance with the methodological requirement remains too attached to the present and the actual, a sociology geared to creation is oriented toward the future and potentiality. Such a sociology engages with present practices and state of affairs to break with them, to provide “resistance to the present” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 108; italics in the original). It thus stresses potentiality – or what Deleuze (1991) calls the “virtual” – and the future.Footnote 10 While Wright’s sociology of the possible concerned with real utopias, too, has its focus in the future, there lies a crucial difference between Wright’s vision for real utopias and the Deleuzo-Guattarian-inspired take on concept creation. Wright’s sociology of the possible introduces normative elements to sociology, as one version of the world is envisioned as better than another; Wright is committed to “advancing the democratic egalitarian goals historically associated with the idea of socialism” (Wright, 2010: 1). A utopian sociology taking its inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari – amounting to a sociology of the virtual, not of the possible – does not entail envisioning any ideal future or render sociology normative. It merely refuses to accept what is, in actuality, without proposing an allegedly better alternative. It abstains from making such claims because it is aware of the fact that no suggested ‘alternative’ to the present practices, institutions, and structures being criticised can ever be neutral, as any such alternative in itself entails dangers and risks (of asymmetric power relations, for example). Therefore, the task of a sociology of the virtual, to draw from how Foucault (1994: 236) perceived critique, cannot be to prescribe “what needs to be done”; instead, it “should be an instrument for those who fight, for those who resist and refuse what is. […] It is a challenge directed to what is”. It is in the service of freedom.

Deleuze’s manner of understanding the utopian aspect of concepts comes close to Foucault’s notion of critical work. For Deleuze, philosophical concepts need to engage critically with the present and challenge the seemingly self-evident nature of things to “bring about more freedom” (Roffe, 2005: 294), “to release, to set free what lives” (Deleuze, 2002: 185; italics in the original). Were sociology to envisage and promote, in the manner of Wright, one world as better than another, it would not be likely to bring about more freedom but rather unintentionally even limit and inhibit it insofar as it produces a closed future instead of an open one. For a sociology of the virtual, however, the future remains open in that it is not given in the past, but it creates its own lines of actualisation. The emphasis is on creation and positive difference, not on limitation and resemblance. Its concepts act on and against the present “for the benefit of a time to come” (Roffe, 2005: 294). As Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 108) themselves put it: “The creation of concepts […] calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 108). That future form should in principle remain open instead of being tied or fixed to a particular image, vision, or political agenda, for that matter.

Conclusive Remarks

In this article, I have contested the type of sociology which places the point of view of the actors themselves at the centre and judges the adequacy of sociological concepts based on their consistency with the actors’ accounts and experiences. The main crux of my argument was twofold. First, I maintained that modelling sociology or social scientific research on such a methodological principle implicitly carries substantial assumptions into it, to the extent that our common-sense ways of thinking and speaking tend to be reifying, conceiving the world in terms of identity and static things. I also showed how Schutz, too, is aware of this tendency, as he suggests that the natural attitude of everyday life perceives the world as consisting of more or less circumscribed objects with relatively definite qualities.

Adhering to the common-sense substantialist assumptions results in a limiting and insufficient model of thought, unable to attend to and grasp the fluid and ever-changing nature of entities and the world. As an antidote to substantialism, I presented processual-relational thinking, which perceives entities as upshots of relational processes and thereby relational all the way down. To be sure, relationalism is ‘utopian’ vis-á-vis common sense in the sense that it seems to have no place in our spontaneous everyday experience and accounts of the world which are substantialist by nature. But relational thinking can be said to be utopian also in another, more active and positive, sense: instead of merely being incompatible with common sense, it may also be used to act on and against the present to open new ways of thinking, acting, and being. This manner of engaging with the present to provide resistance to it for the future was how Deleuze understands the utopian aspect of concepts, as I suggested above.

The utopian aspect of concepts was connected to the second point of my critical engagement with the methodological principle of taking the actors’ accounts absolutely seriously: that it potentially renders social scientific concepts non-creative, merely representing and reinforcing common sense. By so doing, it tends to “perpetuate the world as it currently stands,” as Eribon (2013: 46) expressed it in the powerful excerpt I quoted from Returning to Reims. Against this methodological principle (which I also called the “methodological requirement”), I argued for a view of concepts as active and creative instead of reactive and representational. If the task of concepts is not merely to describe, represent, and reproduce prevailing reality but to question what exists, they are oriented towards the future in that they make new lines of thinking possible and liberate the events of things, give then new events. Thereby concepts have two temporal loci – the present and the future – instead of being trapped within the present and the actual, which was what the methodological requirement tends to make of concepts.

Let me emphasise that my aim here has not been to simply refute phenomenological sociology and replace it with an allegedly ‘better’ approach (i.e., relational sociology). I have tried to supplement Schutz’s postulate in the aforementioned Derridean double sense of simultaneously adding to and undermining. And especially when advancing the thesis about the creation of concepts but also when diagnosing the substantialist tendencies of common-sense viewpoints, my goal has been to build on and extend some of the more ‘creative’ aspects of Schutz’s work. Nor have I attempted to entirely debunk and reject everyday common-sense thought constructs. The experiences and explanations of actors cannot be simply disregarded or explained away because they matter in and for the constitution of our common world. There is no way around the fact that the world studied by sociologists and social scientists is already interpreted and made sense of by human beings living and acting therein. Therefore, to some extent theory needs to “agree with experience,” as Schutz (1962: 57) references Whitehead. Above, I have only wanted to pinpoint some of the problems that sociology’s adherence to common-sense accounts of the actors is likely to lead to, while also trying to contest and disrupt the largely predominant substantialist modes of speaking and thinking.

While insisting on retaining this sense of modesty, I am nevertheless convinced that relational thinking provides us with “lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that help to unsettle, disrupt, and elude established forms and stagnating configurations. Today, there is even a certain urgency for thinking in utopian relational terms due to the severe socio-ecological crisis that humankind is facing. Here I obviously depart from Schutz’s postulate of the freedom from value judgments which he adopted from Weber (1949) and his emphasis on value freedom in the social sciences. Whereas Schutz and Weber insist on making a distinction between descriptive recording and explanation of social reality, on the one hand, and its moral or ethical evaluation, on the other, I side for example with posthuman feminist scholarship, which stresses the ethico-political relevance of scholarship and the duty to respond to harms. For posthuman feminist theories, thinking is a relational and affective practice, a way of not only relating to the world but also dealing with the current crises.Footnote 11 In this light, creating “new concepts and navigational tools” as Braidotti (2019: 69) puts it, “help us through the complexities of the present”. And to cope with the present and better deal with or even overcome the challenges of our times, it is necessary that we think across multispecies relations and attune to our entanglement with the more-than-human world. Whereas for Wright, the key moral purpose of an emancipatory sociology of the possible is “the creation of the conditions for human flourishing” (Wright, 2010: 10) and the exploration of the potentials and limitations of real utopias to understand how they could “facilitate human flourishing” (Wright, 2011: 38), such a view remains hopelessly anthropocentric. Human flourishing let alone the conditions of our survival are intimately and inextricably connected to and dependent on the more-than-human world. The socio-ecological crisis cannot be tackled sufficiently by resorting to “our species” supremacy and the violent rule of sovereign Anthropos’ that was the culprit of its creation in the first place (see Braidotti, 2019: 10, 122). “[S]urvival,” as Anna Tsing suggests, “always involves others”: “staying alive – for every species – requires liveable collaborations” (Tsing, 2015: 29, 28). Humans and other species inhabit “the world together in relations of interdependency” (Butler, 2020: 51), and this, in turn, necessitates a relational understanding of vulnerability, suggesting that “we are not altogether separable from the conditions that make our lives possible or impossible” (Butler, 2020: 45f.; see also Tsing, 2015). Because of this, we need to learn to think and act relationally, across differences and contesting the human/nonhuman and nature/culture binaries, as utopian as this may seem.