Manipulation and the Social Destruction of Humanity: Vocabularies of Motive and Social Control

Abstract

This article argues that rapid social change inherent in a capitalist mode of production deprives the mass of people of a harmony of habitus, culture formation and meaningful sociation. Such rapid social change, coupled with elite management of relative deprivation on the macro-level, produces confusion in vocabularies of motive on a micro-level, fracturing consciousness and thereby inhibiting collective action. In order to ensure meaningful collective action that leads to structural change, we need to develop a common language of the oppressed, an alternative to the globalized language that represents bourgeoisie hegemony and its situational interpretations. Such a language will involve a congruence of vocabularies of motive (linked to similar societal situations), unveiling the similarity of the social situation of the oppressed on a global level. The development of such a language is the task of critical sociologists.

Keywords:

• language
• vocabularies
• capitalism

Notes on Contributor

Muhammed Asadi is a visiting assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lahore University of Management Sciences. He recently completed his PhD in Sociology from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA. For his dissertation, he extended C. Wright Mills's (1956) Power Elite explanation, internationally, linking the economy, military and the state in explaining development and stratification outcomes of nation states, as a revision of Wallerstein's World Systems Analysis. His dissertation and published works also look at the articulation of gender and race based stratification as well as micro identity processes and their link to structural stratification.

Notes

¹The media of mass communication as surrogate parent and life-long “socializer” and formal education and training. When Mills talks about manipulation of the “field of objects” he was specifically talking, much like Mead, as a Marxist and not a Weberian, i.e., “it is not the consciousness of men/women that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx 1859). In fact, the Weberian position shouldn't even be considered sociological; rather it is mystical since in its view language (and consciousness) is something that is assumed to be “in” the individual and not “in” the social situation to begin with, and something that alters the social situation. Even when vocabularies of motive are manipulated through the cultural apparatus, they must be linked to preexisting societal situations to produce social action, they don't “create” societal situations and they don't cause social action out of nothing.

²Even home ownership is lacking among the top 5% of US society so when homes are taken out of the calculation of net worth, the net worth of the top 5% actually goes up, per Edward N. Wolff's data, revealing to us that the elite “lease” their homes and don't actually own them.

³Bourdieu (1977, 82), habitus harmony implies cultural power and is based on history and memory.

⁴Given this link of vocabularies of motive to societal structure, we can, in terms of methodology of research, link both (speech and structure) given delimited social situations (like war) and social positions. This was the methodology that I used in my paper (Asadi 2012). In terms of methodology, vocabularies of motive have implications on how face to face interviews are conducted as well, since the subject enters a different societal situation in the presence of the interviewer, as Mills explained, “. . . most researchers on the verbal level merely ask abstract questions of individuals, but if we can tentatively delimit the situation in which certain motives may be verbalized, we can use that delimitation in the construction of situational questions” (Mills 1940, 904n3).