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(2000) Social creativity, collective subjectivity and contemporary modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
By way of conclusion
critical theory at the turn of the twenty-first century
José Maurício Domingues
pp. 156-164
At the beginning of this book I proposed to analyze the emergence of human subjectivity and reflexivity in both the individual and the collective dimensions. From there we moved to an understanding of structuring and de-structuring mechanisms of social life, which are very much connected, insofar as memory and creativity are closely entwined in the generation of social permanence and change. I carried on then to argue for the role of collective subjectivity in evolutionary processes rather then discarding the latter for the former. All that came together in the last three chapters of the book. I focused on modernity in Brazil as a means to outline how modernity in general should be grasped, with its openings and impasses, and have tackled other, more specific aspects of modern social life, namely economic relationships and social policy, with respect to the crisis of modernity. By way of conclusion, I would like now to expand on modernity and the relation between abstraction and concreteness, disembeddings and re-embeddings which are key features of its development. On the other hand, we must stress the problems of inequalities and of class relations, which have by no means disappeared, regardless of pivotal changes having occurred.
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Domingues, J. (2000). By way of conclusion: critical theory at the turn of the twenty-first century, in Social creativity, collective subjectivity and contemporary modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 156-164.
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