Friedman - Comment On Searle's Social Ontology

Anthropological Theory Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) http://ant.sagepub.com Vol 6(1): 70–80 10.1177/1463499606061736

Comment on Searle’s ‘Social ontology’ The reality of the imaginary and the cunning of the non-intentional Jonathan Friedman Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France and Lund University, Sweden

Abstract This discussion of Searle’s article attempts to come to grips with a number of issues that the latter has made so important for the social sciences. First, regarding the issue of objectivity/subjectivity, it is argued that there are natural properties of reality that are unaltered by observation, but that what is constructed as a phenomenon is always partly the result of human interpretation. The same is argued to be true of social phenomena, which cannot be reduced to human constitution first because they become institutional realities and second because they contain properties that are external to acts of human construction. The characterization of the social as instituted via language, especially the language of linked propositions, is taken up in relation to other approaches to social reality, arguing that Castoriadis’ social imaginary, as well as a certain interpretation of Marx’s fetishism, argues for the dominance of such constructions in the creation of social worlds. Within the intentional world such phenomena account for the way in which social life can be seen in part as the materialization of the imaginary, the latter being non-symbolic in the sense that it is not a representation of an already existing reality or referent but the immediate constitution of the real. On the other hand, a crucial aspect of such worlds that Searle does not address is the non-intentional systemic properties of the social, for example in the form of business cycles, politico-economic declines and expansions, and other properties of social reality that are not deducible from intentional organization. They are not a mere spin-off but crucial elements of social systems. Key Words fetish • functionalism • imaginary • linguistic determinism • logic • non-intentional

For many years the philosophy of Searle, as a continuation of that of Austin, contributed to extending the subject into the issues of the nature of social life. Anthropologists as 70

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different as Maurice Bloch and Roy Rappaport have over the years referred to this work. Rappaport made it the cornerstone of a theory of the ritual origins of society by making use of the important notion that language is not merely descriptive but also performative. Searle has gone even further, of course, and in recent work attempted to develop an account of the nature of social reality from a very general philosophical perspective. This is important in itself since it must force us to think clearly about our conceptual apparatus, especially in a period when such analytical discipline has been largely abandoned within the field. Searle takes up a number of classical issues in the social sciences and applies a certain variety of analytical philosophy to their deconstruction. These issues can be grouped under the notion of the constructed nature of social reality. As his article begins with results of his well-known book The Construction of Social Reality (Searle, 1995), it is best to follow his argument here, perhaps, to deconstruct further. The first issue concerns objectivity, or the independent existence of the world. For Searle the issue is how human beings create a social order which he asserts ‘only exists because we think it exists’ (Searle, 1995: 2). He does not mean by this that the social world is merely subjective, since social events do occur whether or not we accept them, but that their existence is in some way based on collective recognition. He continues with two basic distinctions: Observer-independent phenomena which do not depend on us for their existence. Observer-relative features of reality which do depend upon us for their existence. Thus social realities like citizenship, the map of a country and so on are all said to be observer dependent while the phenomena or objects of natural science are observer independent. Now this very old epistemological distinction is surely more complicated and needs refinement. Natural phenomena may very well be independent of the observer, but once observed and interpreted by human agents they become something different. At least this was the problem of Kant and the foundation of Boasian anthropology as well as Gestalt psychology. The so-called ‘noumena’ or things in themselves have no existence as such for us. They are always instead part of our world of ‘phenomena’, and the properties that we attribute to nature become part of nature for us. Now of course if one accepts the principle of falsification, the very possibility of scientific development admits and even stresses that our models of the world are by and large incorrect, implying that we do indeed confront a noumenal reality at least in negative terms. This has led to numerous and important issues in the philosophy of science that have not necessarily been resolved. In any case the very construction of observer independence is an observer-dependent activity, that is, the construction of Kant’s ‘phenomena’, the world for us. Even the Heisenberg principle poses certain problems for this approach. No, the natural science assumption of natural laws or properties of reality independent of our observation is our own construction, one that I, for one, accept, but not because it is ‘intuitively obvious to the most casual observer’, but because we have so constructed it. Social phenomena likewise can be understood as observer independent. The latter are of course constructed by our own species, although not necessarily by the observer in 71

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question. It might be said that intentionality and consciousness are involved in the constitution of such phenomena, but it is not clear why that should make such phenomena observer dependent, not unless the same person is both observer and constructor of a particular reality. Business cycles, for example, are in part the result of intentional constructions of institutions, but they are also observer independent insofar as observation as such has no effect upon them. And Searle of course comes to this himself in stating that ‘social institutional facts can be epistemically objective even though human attitudes are part of their mode of existence’ (Searle, 1995: 5). But why is this so and in what sense? To my mind it is simply because states, clans, to say nothing of business cycles, or at least their effects, are recordable independently of any particular observer. That is, they are not observer dependent. The fact that the human world is constituted by humans is equivalent to saying that the biological world is constituted by chemical reactions and molecular structures. What is the problem here? It has to do with the old distinction between the human and the natural sciences (Brentano). A domestic animal embodies characteristics of its relations to humans. It has been appropriated to human ends and needs to be socialized into a particular configuration of responses and actions. It also embodies its relations to other animals and it has, of course, a repertoire said to be biologically stable or even genetically programmed, containing those properties which exist prior to human intervention. A domestic horse is exactly that, a horse that has been domesticated. It is both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ and observer independent. Searle modifies or even supersedes his first distinction of observer independence/ dependence by introducing a second set of distinctions, a double set: ontological/ epistemological versus objectivity/subjectivity. His argument seems to be that money and other objective realities of social life are, as Durkheim said, ‘social facts’ even if they are in part constituted of subjective elements such as intentionality. This is in fact a trivial problem that may indeed hamper anthropological thinking, but is it really so? Observation of anything external to our own bodies can be understood in observer-independent terms, even the products of our own activities, even our activities, as long as other observers can do the same. Intentionality is in this view perfectly objective. In other words the subjective is objective from the point of view of the investigator. Have we thus returned to the starting point of sociology? LOGICAL STRUCTURES OF SOCIETY

The issue of social logics has occupied social anthropology for quite a few years. Following the structuralist era in France, there was in the 1980s an increasing use of the word logic to refer to the internal properties of different social domains and even the relations among them (e.g. Augé, Godelier). The word means something similar to structure, a set of systemically organized relations, vague enough to be applied to very different kinds of domains. But this notion is the same one as has been applied to natural phenomena, as in The Logic of Living Systems (Jacob, 1974), which is very close to Searle’s own approach to the hierarchy of levels of reality. Searle seems, however, to mean something quite specific with his own use of the word logic. ‘Human societies have a logical structure, because human attitudes are constitutive of the social reality in question and those attitudes have propositional contents with logical relations’ (Searle, 1995: 5). 72

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This is reminiscent of a certain mentalism suggesting as it does that the structures of societies are propositional schemes ordered by logical argument. However appealing, it seems rather far from any reality that I am familiar with. While there are certainly propositional chains linked by logic in most social domains, there are other properties of the social that are just as systemic but not propositional in nature. What we refer to as nonintentional rationality dominates much of social life at the macro level, and it might be argued that at the individual level unconscious structures of desire organized into personal projects are certainly not organized in propositional terms. So this is not, in my view, a good place to launch an investigation of the structures of social life. One might agree with Searle’s suggestion (Searle, 1995: 6) that the great variety of human life forms can be reduced to a small number of logics, but it is not likely that such logics can be understood in terms of propositional orders. Was it not Einstein who suggested something of the contrary, that the reason we can ultimately understand the workings of nature is that our minds are organized according to the same natural properties. This would also be closer to Searle’s own striving after a unity of the natural and the social. SOCIAL INSTITUTIONAL REALITY

The social has a basic structure according to Searle; it consists of two elements. First, constructs of the form X counts as Y in context C and, second, collective intentionality, the assignment of function, and constitutive rules to Y. Now if this is a basic structure it is difficult to see its relation to the great variety of human life forms referred to earlier. It is rather some kind of abstraction from an assumed variation. These are not the underlying structures of Lévi-Strauss which refer to the domains of kinship or myth, but more general aspects of social life. Collective intentionality is simply the intentionality combined with a ‘we’, as in we intend to do X. Collective intentionality is the psychological basis of all social reality and, says Searle, ‘I define a social fact as any fact involving collective intentionality of two or more human or animal agents’ (Searle, 1995: 7). Note here that the social fact for Durkheim is a constraint, independent of the subject who experiences it as an external force. There is a hint of reductionism here in which the social is the individual writ large, where collective intentionality is the mere magnification of the individual. Where is the locus of intentionality in all of this? Is this solved with the addition of the ‘institutional fact’ involving money, governments and so on? This is an important issue. Collective intentionality as it is used here confuses what usually comes under the heading of ‘social movement’ with more ordinary collective structures. In the classical and often overlooked work of Alberoni (1982), a social movement is distinguished from aggregate behaviour, as in a football riot, by the fact that it contains a core project to which are linked subjects who have decided to offer themselves to that project by substituting the latter for their own individual projects. This in turn creates a collective intentionality. While there is certainly a substrate of shared values, identifications and even institutionalized projects (in the form of nationality, constitutions and so on), a society is not the equivalent of a movement because the actions of the collective are usually the actions of an elite that is accepted by most if not all members of the collective without necessarily being engaged in intending what the elite intends. This is all the more so in complex societies with multiple projects, strategies, class relations, ethnic identities and the like. Durkheim’s social fact as constraint seems more accurate than any form of collective 73

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intentionality. The latter concept erases real history as well, by assuming that institutions are simply created on the spot. The assignment of function can be understood as the intentional definition of a universe of use or practice. Here Searle’s argument is excellent, not least his critique of functionalism – ‘functions are causes that serve a purpose’ – which is reminiscent of an older critique of ecological functionalism (Sahlins, Murphy, Friedman) and of course Lévi-Strauss’ metaphorical critique of Radcliffe-Brown – ‘the function of the stomach is to digest food.’ This can be summarized in more general terms as, ‘the function of X is to do what it does.’ But functions in human societies are not dependent on physical characteristics. They consist of categories whose content is semantic. Money’s physical structure is not equivalent to its social function. The existence of such nonphysical categories or ‘assigned functions’ reflects the discussion in the social sciences on the form of existence of the social. We live in imaginary instituted worlds according to Castoriadis. The social is indeed constructed. What is specific about the imaginary is that it is not symbolic, that is, there are neither signifieds nor referents. The basic structures of reality are made up of symbols ‘that stand for themselves’ (Wagner, 1986). This is also a basic tenet in Marx’s discussion of fetishism and of capital as a ‘Realabstraktion’, the concretized realization of imaginary (in this case abstract) constructs. It is interesting in this respect to consider economic theories of value as attempts to supply a referent for money, for example as a concrete medium of the expression of price, or the representation of sum total of value or even production in a society, thus transforming the imaginary into the symbolic. When assignment of function becomes the assignment of status function then we are at the point of producing institutional reality. And institutional reality is not simply a question of relative positions but is also a definition of deontic powers, bundles of authority, rights, obligations and so on. These deontic powers are the basis of the social as an organism independent of individual subjects since they ‘make possible desireindependent reasons for action’ which is the specific form of human socialization. This final ingredient is the clinching element in the construction of human society. Searle’s reality is his own society, and while he claims to argue in general terms, anthropologists ought to have something to say here. The existence of deontic powers attributed to social positions is clearly a variable in the literature. This is an important aspect of the work of the non-anthropologist Castoriadis and also of Augé, who refers to the former in suggesting that society organized in terms of abstract categories is a historical phenomenon related to the development of the state (see also the excellent and largely ignored essay of Gauchet, 1977). But it is also a central aspect of classical works of sociology (Tönnies, Durkheim). In Searle’s work, as well as those referred to here, the institutional order’s basic characteristic is its separation from its individual members, its existence as an abstract network of categories. Now the entire process of institutionalization depends on the representational property of language, that which distinguishes us from animals according to Searle, that which affords us double perception of objects and actions and simultaneously of their meaning. This is again a theme that is already commonly discussed in anthropology and other social sciences, although much less of late. Sahlins has made it the cornerstone of his argument in some of his later works, where he, for example, distinguishes between happenings and events, the latter being happenings that are appropriated into the 74

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cultural order, given meaning and often institutionalized. All this is to state that the social world is a world of meaning-as-intention. It is important that Searle makes this point since it is indeed often overlooked or even ignored, but it is, at least among anthropologists with whom I work, an accepted truth that the material and the cultural are aspects of the same reality rather than separate realms. But we note here that it is an important subject of discussion in anthropology. An article I once wrote in my Marxist youth criticizing the materialist-reductionist interpretation of fetishism (Friedman, 1974) was rejected by the Marxist journal La pensée on the grounds that it was too idealistic. I had suggested that the social world was a fetishized world, equivalent in many ways to Castoriadis’ imaginary institution, not the product of the material conditions over which it reigned, but which it appropriated and organized, and which it simultaneously misrepresented leading ultimately to its demise, only to be replaced by new fetishized worlds. NON-INTENTIONAL SYSTEMIC REALITIES

There is an entire area to which we have referred in part which is totally absent from Searle’s discussion, mainly because it doesn’t match his model, nor perhaps his interests. This is what might be referred to as the non-intentional properties of social life. From my perspective such properties are both systemic and pervasive in social life and history. I referred earlier to business cycles as a case in point. The latter are not institutions in practice, but they are systemic and they have crucial effects. The logic of such larger systemic processes, from the various cycles, economic, hegemonic, even cultural as the latter are related to expanding and contracting systems, cannot be understood in terms of a universal human propensity for propositional logic. They are emergent properties of interaction over time. Time is of course an important component in such an analysis. This is important when one considers the problem of having to define all institutional arrangements as if they were decided upon in a meeting. ‘Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once’ (Woody Allen). The systemic processes within which all our institutional meddling occurs are serious phenomena. They are surely observer independent in the most complete sense that our intentions have little to do with them, not unless we can muster collective intentions to do something else. FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS

In the latter part of the article Searle suggests some new developments in relation to his earlier work. His approach is very much pegged to language, or rather to classification by means of language. Citing De Soto, he argues that people who own land in many poor countries have no formal title to the land and are thus squatters. They cannot be taxed but neither can they use their land as capital. Now in a sense this is a truism, but one that is complicated by the text. The occupation and use of land is not of course a sign of property. Property is entirely a question of title. Now if people are squatters they must be living on someone else’s land. They are simply not the owners. Searle confuses this simple relation by assuming that there is some kind of real property that is not symbolically recognized because of the lack of deeds. He continues with the example of the formation of a corporation which does not involve any concrete object but merely a statement of certain relations to a ‘mailing address and a list of officers and stock 75

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holders and so on, but it does not have to be a physical object’ (p. 22). But this is precisely the issue that was referred to earlier. Social relations are the manifestation, the realization in action, with or without specific material objects, of the imaginary. And money, discussed again, is now understood as being without a necessary material referent such as currency. This I would suggest is in the very nature of the imaginary constitution of the social. It is, interestingly enough, the clue to one of Marx’s key insights into the workings of capitalism in particular but also to social life in general. In volume III of Capital he discusses at great length the nature of what he calls fictitious capital. On the basis of this discussion one can, I suggest, conclude that money is precisely a fetish that does not represent something material but is simply a free-floating signifier, a signifier of property, of the value of everything else on the market, not because it is defined as an equivalent of such things, but because in Weber’s sense it is simply abstract wealth: a concrete form of value that is exchangeable for everything else, not by definition but by the history of the practice of commercial exchange. The fact that this abstract wealth exists as currency or as digital money does not change its basic nature even if it changes its specific capacity to move in the world. Searle arrives at a similar conclusion in his reply to Smith (Searle and Smith, 2003), in which he posits what Smith calls ‘freestanding Y terms’, terms that have no physical concomitants. I find the direction of Searle’s argument admirable but I must also acknowledge that this line of reasoning has occurred before although in different circumstances. If the corporation is a fictitious person, then so are a great many of our institutional relations. The actual persons involved are not the same as the corporation. Our society separates persons from positions in creating an order based on the latter. This is the notion of gesellschaft, a social world based on social facts, imaginary constructed institutions and so on. Searle arrives at a perspective that I can only agree with, but a position that, as far as I can see, is already well established. That the study of institutions is a complex development of speech-act theory becomes clear in his return to the question of deontic powers in the last pages of the article. The deontic is clearly an acceptable way of describing the fusion of powers and categorically defined statuses. Searle’s ‘lawyers, doctors, ski instructors’ are products of this perspective. But the argument returns to Searle’s speech-act theory. Declarations of fact are distinguished from assertive declarations. So and so has been found ‘guilty as charged’ because the charges have been demonstrated (according to pre-specified criteria). This is an interesting exploration of the powers invested in categories and their concomitant associations with rights and obligations. He returns to Rosaldo’s critique that among specific populations such speech acts do not exist. His argument is abstract and he emphasizes that his speech acts are properties of language in general and not of specific cultural situations. But what are these general properties of language? What is being assumed of speech acts in this philosophy? If I define things do they become such? If I call you a hamburger are you then a hamburger? What is accepted and why? The problem with speech acts is that they are totally dependent on a non-linguistic context of acceptance and the latter context does not obey the laws of language. THE SLIPPERY ISSUE OF LINGUISTIC DETERMINISM

Language is surely constitutive but it is not constituting. It is the stuff of reality but not its organizing principle. This is a major error in all forms of both linguistic and, more 76

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generally, cultural determinism. The question must be posed: Where do the categories come from? It changes the entire perspective. This does not imply some form of materialist reductionism. Categories do not emerge from practice or from technology or ecology. They are already always present in human reality, but as all reality is historically specific, the issue of where things come from is always a question of historical transformation, assuming that the present is not identical with the past. The very idea that institutions carry a deontology is an expression of the problem. The deontology cannot be deduced from the categories involved. They are, on the contrary, part of the way the latter are defined in relation to the social context. This needs to be worked out, of course, but the lack of a deductive relation implies that there is an extra-linguistic context that has to be taken into account from the start. Now in Searle’s major publications it is often quite clear that he, as a naturalist or realist, would not claim any such determinism. On the contrary, it would seem that intentionality precedes speech acts, and the context in which such acts and their institutional derivatives are produced are crucial for their understanding. But this is not to my mind made clear enough. If the illocutionary force of a command is entirely dependent on the social context in which it occurs, one must ask whether or not the proper account of speech acts lies outside of the acts themselves and in the relations within which they occur. While in books like The Construction of Social Reality he stresses the way in which constructions pile up on one another in interactive fashion, X counts as Y in context C . . . Y counts as Z in context D and so on, which enables us to work our way up to an extensive network of increasingly encompassing categorical relations, this does not give us an insight into the nature of social process as such, except as the latter are expressive of such process. Searle is, rather, interested in establishing a series of propositions concerning the nature of social reality. His approach to the latter is primarily one of identification or definition. But then again, he is a philosopher. To concentrate the argument: 1. To say that there are constitutive rules of institutions is not a description of the way the latter are actually produced. The rules of chess are truly constitutive, but the rules of social institutions are not established as a set of instructions to be applied to the organization of behaviour. They are instead themselves embedded in larger social contexts and are the result of the historical transformation of such contexts. 2. This implies that the constitutive rules of institutional arrangements are abstractions from the form that they have in phenomenal reality. They are abstract descriptions rather than descriptions of the way in which institutions are actually constituted. This can be generalized to all statements of this type in the realm of culture. Social life is constituted of culture but not by culture. Even language is arguably understandable in such terms. It is via socialization that the rules of language are transferred to new generations, but this transfer is a social relation in which authority is crucial which enables errors to be negatively sanctioned, in a situation where children need to accept authority in order to learn the rules. This apparent cultural or linguistic determinism is in fact a relation of social authority. It is not culture imposing itself on subjects, but subjects taking on rules in a power relation that sanctions the transfer. Sometimes this is called discipline. Performatives only work because those involved as senders and receivers of such language are disposed to accept their conditions of operation. I go shopping for you, open the door, vote in a context of individual acceptance of a state of affairs that 77

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is saturated by all kinds of pressures, reciprocity being of paramount importance. I accept commands because I have the right to give them. The deontic here is by definition relational. For example, when a member of a Kachin chiefdom accepts the power of the chief it is because it is ‘institutionalized’ in such a way that it makes sense to the individual subject. It is legitimate because the chief is by definition higher in the continuum of kinship relations to the gods, because he is a social elder and therefore able to bring prosperity and fertility to me as to the community as a whole. The constitution of this relation is dependent upon the constitution of the cosmology on which it rests and which in its turn is a product of a history of ‘hierarchization’ within which such hierarchy is possible but not necessarily manifest. It is because certain men become identified with the ancestors that this is possible, and this becoming is part of a process of social reproduction in which the accumulation of prestige and therefore rank is paramount. This is strikingly clear in statements to the effect that deontic properties are attributed to particular categorical positions in society. In social reality this is not usually the case. The deontic properties of kingship have changed very much as part of the history of royal power. Powers are not merely attributed and then exist, they emerge in quite a different way which cannot be separated from historical interactions. Searle’s mode of description often gives the impression that power is delegated by collective intentionality rather than emerging as a historical process within such collectivities. I doubt that Searle would disagree here, but there is a drawback to the form of the presentation. 3. Money is an interesting example in this regard. Searle moves from a model of X counts for Y in context C to one in which Y can be ‘free standing’ and where the focus shifts to the operational capacity of X to do A (this issue). Money can be seen in such terms, or rather what money represents, which is wealth, which is quantifiable, and realizable in different forms, from cash to credit cards, to Internet operations. If cash is a direct representation of wealth, credit cards are operations upon that wealth. But wealth is nothing physical as such except in the form of cash or perhaps gold bars. One might argue that wealth is a free-standing category, represented in various media of exchange and/or transfer. Now Searle suggests that it is not the physical properties of money that determine its power but its collective acceptance. This is of course true, but it is also a mere abstract description and not an explanation. The only explanation of the power of money can be sought in its historical emergence, in the position that it has attained. Money is a medium of exchange and an expression of wealth. In fact it is as a medium of exchange that it is an expression of wealth. But ‘expression’ is the wrong term, since it is also an objectification of wealth, a concretization of value. The different expressions of wealth – paper, once upon a time gold, computerized accounts – are in fact substitutes for monetary wealth which is still the only measure, that is to say, money of account. The fact that one can buy commodities with cards is an act of substitution which has become institutionalized since we must note there was, of course, a time when cards were not generally accepted. It might all be dealt with in Searle’s terms but he seems to have been in a hurry to bypass this particular issue. 4. Similarly other fictive entities such as corporations are also described in terms of this free-standing quality, even if they do imply some form of materialization in offices, bank accounts and so forth. There is no object to which the corporation refers or on which it is grounded. We might add God to the list, a free-standing construct or, better, 78

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institution, with no referent in principle. God stands for himself. He just is. Durkheim tried to reduce the imaginary God to a symbolic God by turning him into a representation of society, just as economics has attempted to turn imaginary money into symbolic money representing the value of production for which it is exchanged. 5. If I return now to the question of the imaginary I think it is possible to reinterpret Searle’s discussion in terms that, for me at least, are closer to the particular approach for which I have argued. Money (especially as capital) and corporations, and most of the institutions of society, are constructions that can be understood as imaginary. They have a semantic content that defines a specific set of relations between abstract categories rather than actual people. There is no operation of the form X counts as Y in condition C that can account for their existence because, except in special cases of planned organizations, no such operation has ever occurred. Institutional life is an outcome of partial decisions and differential strategies and their confrontation over time. On the other hand, it is certainly the case, and here one must agree with Searle, that such imaginary constructions realized as institutions are essential to the understanding of social life. 6. The understanding of the role of the imaginary in social life is the understanding that the real is the imaginary manifested, realized in actual social relations with physical coordinates. The difference between the game Monopoly and real life is the level of reality to which the game is applied. Now of course the real economy cannot simply replicate the properties of the game because it contains a great many different properties that can be ignored in the game. What is important here is the ontological difference between game and reality. 7. This understanding of social reality opens up the old debate, referred to earlier, concerning fetishism (Friedman, 1974) which I thought had long been forgotten. The argument that I proffered at that time was that fetishized constructs were the dominant operators in the capitalist world, but that the basic characteristic of such constructs, apart from the fact that they organize the basic structures of social reproduction, is that their internal properties do not correspond to their actual material effects in social reality; in other words, that they exist in a relation of incompatibility to reality and thus ultimately to their own conditions of long-term reproduction. Thus the accumulation of capital can be understood emically as an entirely monetary phenomenon in which other forms of wealth production are merely appendages of the basic strategy of turning money into more money, or, to be precise, materialized buying power into more buying power. As an organizing strategy embedded in a more complex reality, the former calculates reality in specific terms that do not necessarily correspond to actual properties of that reality, for example in calculating the energy cost of replacement of productive assets. As a macro phenomenon, there is an enormous divergence between the expansion of monetary wealth and the expansion of real wealth defined in terms of total reproductive capacity. Thus while the accumulation of money capital dominates the economic process it also misrepresents the properties of that process because it measures very different things. Here again it is necessary to take into account the systemic non-intentional properties of the world in which we live. Searle’s work raises important questions for anthropology as for the social sciences in general. I have tried in this perusal to push certain arguments, to question certain propositions, but all as a response to the important probing that Searle has forced upon us. 79

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References

Alberoni, Francesco (1982) Movement and Institution. New York: Columbia University Press. Friedman, Jonathan (1974) ‘The Place of Fetishism and the Problem of Materialist Interpretations’, Critique of Anthropology 1(1): 26–62. Gauchet, Marcel (1977) ‘La dette du sens et les racines de l’État’, in Marcel Gauchet (ed.) Libre: politique, anthropologie, philosophie, Vol. 2, pp. 5–43. Paris: Payot. Jacob, François (1974) The Logic of Living Systems: A History of Heredity (trans. Betty E. Spillmann). London: Allen Lane. Searle, John R. (1995) The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press. Searle, John R. and Barry Smith (2003) ‘An Illuminating Exchange: The Construction of Social Reality. An Exchange’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology 62(1): 285. Smith, Barry (2003) ‘From Speech Act to Social Reality’, in Barry Smith (ed.) John Searle, pp. 1–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagner, Roy (1986) Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press JONATHAN FRIEDMAN is Directeur d’études, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Professor of Social Anthropology at Lund University, Sweden. He has written extensively on issues of global systems, globalization, Marxist anthropology, culture and identity. He has done research on Southeast Asia and the Pacific (Hawaii), Africa and Europe. Among his publications are Cultural Identity and Global Process (1994, Sage), Consumption and Identity (edited 1994, Harwood), System, Structure and Contradiction in the Evolution of ‘Asiatic’ Social Formations (1998, 2nd edition, Altamira), Globalization, the State and Violence (2002, Altamira), World System History: The Science of Long Term Change, with R. Denemark, B. Gills and G. Modelski (2000, Routledge), and Hegemonic Declines, Present and Past, edited with C. Chase-Dunn (2005, Paradigm Publishers). Address: EHESS (GTMS), 54 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, and Lund University, Box 114, 221 00 Lund, Sweden. [email: [email protected]]

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