friedman - comment on searle's social ontology

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Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

http://ant.sagepub.comVol 6(1): 70–80

10.1177/1463499606061736

Comment on Searle’s‘Social ontology’The reality of the imaginary and the cunningof the non-intentional

Jonathan FriedmanEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France and LundUniversity, Sweden

AbstractThis discussion of Searle’s article attempts to come to grips with a number of issuesthat the latter has made so important for the social sciences. First, regarding the issueof objectivity/subjectivity, it is argued that there are natural properties of reality thatare unaltered by observation, but that what is constructed as a phenomenon is alwayspartly the result of human interpretation. The same is argued to be true of socialphenomena, which cannot be reduced to human constitution first because theybecome institutional realities and second because they contain properties that areexternal to acts of human construction. The characterization of the social as institutedvia language, especially the language of linked propositions, is taken up in relation toother approaches to social reality, arguing that Castoriadis’ social imaginary, as well asa certain interpretation of Marx’s fetishism, argues for the dominance of suchconstructions in the creation of social worlds. Within the intentional world suchphenomena account for the way in which social life can be seen in part as thematerialization of the imaginary, the latter being non-symbolic in the sense that it isnot a representation of an already existing reality or referent but the immediateconstitution of the real. On the other hand, a crucial aspect of such worlds that Searledoes not address is the non-intentional systemic properties of the social, for examplein the form of business cycles, politico-economic declines and expansions, and otherproperties of social reality that are not deducible from intentional organization. Theyare not a mere spin-off but crucial elements of social systems.

Key Wordsfetish • functionalism • imaginary • linguistic determinism • logic • non-intentional

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

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 makinguse of the important notion that language is not merely descriptive but also performa-tive. Searle has gone even further, of course, and in recent work attempted to developan 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 conceptualapparatus, especially in a period when such analytical discipline has been largelyabandoned within the field.

Searle takes up a number of classical issues in the social sciences and applies a certainvariety of analytical philosophy to their deconstruction. These issues can be groupedunder the notion of the constructed nature of social reality. As his article begins withresults of his well-known book The Construction of Social Reality (Searle, 1995), it is bestto follow his argument here, perhaps, to deconstruct further.

The first issue concerns objectivity, or the independent existence of the world. ForSearle the issue is how human beings create a social order which he asserts ‘only existsbecause we think it exists’ (Searle, 1995: 2). He does not mean by this that the socialworld 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 continueswith 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 beobserver dependent while the phenomena or objects of natural science are observer inde-pendent. Now this very old epistemological distinction is surely more complicated andneeds refinement.

Natural phenomena may very well be independent of the observer, but once observedand interpreted by human agents they become something different. At least this was theproblem of Kant and the foundation of Boasian anthropology as well as Gestalt psychol-ogy. 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 weattribute to nature become part of nature for us. Now of course if one accepts theprinciple of falsification, the very possibility of scientific development admits and evenstresses that our models of the world are by and large incorrect, implying that we doindeed confront a noumenal reality at least in negative terms. This has led to numerousand 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-dependentactivity, that is, the construction of Kant’s ‘phenomena’, the world for us. Even theHeisenberg principle poses certain problems for this approach. No, the natural scienceassumption of natural laws or properties of reality independent of our observation is ourown construction, one that I, for one, accept, but not because it is ‘intuitively obviousto the most casual observer’, but because we have so constructed it.

Social phenomena likewise can be understood as observer independent. The latter areof course constructed by our own species, although not necessarily by the observer in

FRIEDMAN Comment on Searle’s ‘Social ontology’

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question. It might be said that intentionality and consciousness are involved in theconstitution of such phenomena, but it is not clear why that should make such phenom-ena observer dependent, not unless the same person is both observer and constructor ofa particular reality. Business cycles, for example, are in part the result of intentionalconstructions of institutions, but they are also observer independent insofar as observa-tion as such has no effect upon them.

And Searle of course comes to this himself in stating that ‘social institutional facts canbe epistemically objective even though human attitudes are part of their mode of exist-ence’ (Searle, 1995: 5). But why is this so and in what sense? To my mind it is simplybecause states, clans, to say nothing of business cycles, or at least their effects, are record-able 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 thebiological world is constituted by chemical reactions and molecular structures. What isthe problem here? It has to do with the old distinction between the human and thenatural sciences (Brentano). A domestic animal embodies characteristics of its relationsto humans. It has been appropriated to human ends and needs to be socialized into aparticular configuration of responses and actions. It also embodies its relations to otheranimals and it has, of course, a repertoire said to be biologically stable or even geneti-cally 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 moneyand other objective realities of social life are, as Durkheim said, ‘social facts’ even if theyare in part constituted of subjective elements such as intentionality. This is in fact a trivialproblem that may indeed hamper anthropological thinking, but is it really so? Observa-tion of anything external to our own bodies can be understood in observer-independentterms, even the products of our own activities, even our activities, as long as otherobservers can do the same. Intentionality is in this view perfectly objective. In otherwords the subjective is objective from the point of view of the investigator. Have we thusreturned to the starting point of sociology?

LOGICAL STRUCTURES OF SOCIETYThe 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 ofthe word logic to refer to the internal properties of different social domains and eventhe relations among them (e.g. Augé, Godelier). The word means something similarto structure, a set of systemically organized relations, vague enough to be applied tovery different kinds of domains. But this notion is the same one as has been appliedto natural phenomena, as in The Logic of Living Systems (Jacob, 1974), which is veryclose 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. ‘Humansocieties have a logical structure, because human attitudes are constitutive of the socialreality in question and those attitudes have propositional contents with logicalrelations’ (Searle, 1995: 5).

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This is reminiscent of a certain mentalism suggesting as it does that the structures ofsocieties are propositional schemes ordered by logical argument. However appealing, itseems rather far from any reality that I am familiar with. While there are certainly propo-sitional chains linked by logic in most social domains, there are other properties of thesocial that are just as systemic but not propositional in nature. What we refer to as non-intentional rationality dominates much of social life at the macro level, and it might beargued that at the individual level unconscious structures of desire organized intopersonal projects are certainly not organized in propositional terms. So this is not, in myview, a good place to launch an investigation of the structures of social life. One mightagree with Searle’s suggestion (Searle, 1995: 6) that the great variety of human life formscan be reduced to a small number of logics, but it is not likely that such logics can beunderstood in terms of propositional orders. Was it not Einstein who suggested some-thing of the contrary, that the reason we can ultimately understand the workings ofnature is that our minds are organized according to the same natural properties. Thiswould also be closer to Searle’s own striving after a unity of the natural and the social.

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONAL REALITYThe 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 structureit 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 under-lying structures of Lévi-Strauss which refer to the domains of kinship or myth, but moregeneral aspects of social life.

Collective intentionality is simply the intentionality combined with a ‘we’, as in weintend to do X. Collective intentionality is the psychological basis of all social realityand, says Searle, ‘I define a social fact as any fact involving collective intentionality oftwo or more human or animal agents’ (Searle, 1995: 7). Note here that the social factfor Durkheim is a constraint, independent of the subject who experiences it as anexternal force. There is a hint of reductionism here in which the social is the individualwrit 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 headingof ‘social movement’ with more ordinary collective structures. In the classical and oftenoverlooked work of Alberoni (1982), a social movement is distinguished from aggregatebehaviour, as in a football riot, by the fact that it contains a core project to which arelinked subjects who have decided to offer themselves to that project by substituting thelatter for their own individual projects. This in turn creates a collective intentionality.While there is certainly a substrate of shared values, identifications and even institution-alized projects (in the form of nationality, constitutions and so on), a society is not theequivalent of a movement because the actions of the collective are usually the actions ofan elite that is accepted by most if not all members of the collective without necessarilybeing engaged in intending what the elite intends. This is all the more so in complexsocieties 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


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intentionality. The latter concept erases real history as well, by assuming that institutionsare simply created on the spot.

The assignment of function can be understood as the intentional definition of auniverse of use or practice. Here Searle’s argument is excellent, not least his critique offunctionalism – ‘functions are causes that serve a purpose’ – which is reminiscent of anolder critique of ecological functionalism (Sahlins, Murphy, Friedman) and of courseLévi-Strauss’ metaphorical critique of Radcliffe-Brown – ‘the function of the stomach isto digest food.’ This can be summarized in more general terms as, ‘the function of X isto do what it does.’ But functions in human societies are not dependent on physicalcharacteristics. They consist of categories whose content is semantic. Money’s physicalstructure is not equivalent to its social function. The existence of such non-physical categories or ‘assigned functions’ reflects the discussion in the social sciences onthe form of existence of the social. We live in imaginary instituted worlds according toCastoriadis. The social is indeed constructed.

What is specific about the imaginary is that it is not symbolic, that is, there are neithersignifieds nor referents. The basic structures of reality are made up of symbols ‘that standfor themselves’ (Wagner, 1986). This is also a basic tenet in Marx’s discussion of fetishismand of capital as a ‘Realabstraktion’, the concretized realization of imaginary (in this caseabstract) constructs. It is interesting in this respect to consider economic theories of valueas attempts to supply a referent for money, for example as a concrete medium of theexpression of price, or the representation of sum total of value or even production in asociety, thus transforming the imaginary into the symbolic.

When assignment of function becomes the assignment of status function then we areat the point of producing institutional reality. And institutional reality is not simply aquestion of relative positions but is also a definition of deontic powers, bundles ofauthority, rights, obligations and so on. These deontic powers are the basis of the socialas an organism independent of individual subjects since they ‘make possible desire-independent reasons for action’ which is the specific form of human socialization. Thisfinal ingredient is the clinching element in the construction of human society. Searle’sreality is his own society, and while he claims to argue in general terms, anthropologistsought to have something to say here. The existence of deontic powers attributed to socialpositions is clearly a variable in the literature. This is an important aspect of the workof the non-anthropologist Castoriadis and also of Augé, who refers to the former insuggesting that society organized in terms of abstract categories is a historical phenom-enon related to the development of the state (see also the excellent and largely ignoredessay of Gauchet, 1977). But it is also a central aspect of classical works of sociol-ogy (Tönnies, Durkheim). In Searle’s work, as well as those referred to here, the insti-tutional order’s basic characteristic is its separation from its individual members, itsexistence as an abstract network of categories.

Now the entire process of institutionalization depends on the representationalproperty of language, that which distinguishes us from animals according to Searle, thatwhich affords us double perception of objects and actions and simultaneously of theirmeaning. This is again a theme that is already commonly discussed in anthropology andother social sciences, although much less of late. Sahlins has made it the cornerstone ofhis argument in some of his later works, where he, for example, distinguishes betweenhappenings and events, the latter being happenings that are appropriated into the


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cultural order, given meaning and often institutionalized. All this is to state that thesocial world is a world of meaning-as-intention. It is important that Searle makes thispoint since it is indeed often overlooked or even ignored, but it is, at least among anthro-pologists with whom I work, an accepted truth that the material and the cultural areaspects of the same reality rather than separate realms. But we note here that it is animportant subject of discussion in anthropology. An article I once wrote in my Marxistyouth criticizing the materialist-reductionist interpretation of fetishism (Friedman,1974) was rejected by the Marxist journal La pensée on the grounds that it was too ideal-istic. I had suggested that the social world was a fetishized world, equivalent in manyways to Castoriadis’ imaginary institution, not the product of the material conditionsover which it reigned, but which it appropriated and organized, and which it simul-taneously misrepresented leading ultimately to its demise, only to be replaced by newfetishized worlds.

NON-INTENTIONAL SYSTEMIC REALITIESThere is an entire area to which we have referred in part which is totally absent fromSearle’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. Frommy 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 inpractice, but they are systemic and they have crucial effects. The logic of such largersystemic processes, from the various cycles, economic, hegemonic, even cultural as thelatter are related to expanding and contracting systems, cannot be understood interms of a universal human propensity for propositional logic. They are emergentproperties of interaction over time. Time is of course an important component in suchan analysis. This is important when one considers the problem of having to define allinstitutional arrangements as if they were decided upon in a meeting. ‘Time is nature’sway of keeping everything from happening at once’ (Woody Allen). The systemicprocesses within which all our institutional meddling occurs are serious phenomena.They are surely observer independent in the most complete sense that our intentionshave little to do with them, not unless we can muster collective intentions to do some-thing else.

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


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holders and so on, but it does not have to be a physical object’ (p. 22). But this is preciselythe issue that was referred to earlier. Social relations are the manifestation, the realiza-tion 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 suchas currency. This I would suggest is in the very nature of the imaginary constitution ofthe social. It is, interestingly enough, the clue to one of Marx’s key insights into theworkings of capitalism in particular but also to social life in general. In volume III ofCapital he discusses at great length the nature of what he calls fictitious capital. On thebasis of this discussion one can, I suggest, conclude that money is precisely a fetish thatdoes not represent something material but is simply a free-floating signifier, a signifierof property, of the value of everything else on the market, not because it is defined as anequivalent of such things, but because in Weber’s sense it is simply abstract wealth: aconcrete form of value that is exchangeable for everything else, not by definition but bythe history of the practice of commercial exchange. The fact that this abstract wealthexists as currency or as digital money does not change its basic nature even if it changesits specific capacity to move in the world. Searle arrives at a similar conclusion in hisreply to Smith (Searle and Smith, 2003), in which he posits what Smith calls ‘free-standing Y terms’, terms that have no physical concomitants.

I find the direction of Searle’s argument admirable but I must also acknowledge thatthis line of reasoning has occurred before although in different circumstances. If thecorporation 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 separatespersons from positions in creating an order based on the latter. This is the notion ofgesellschaft, a social world based on social facts, imaginary constructed institutions andso on. Searle arrives at a perspective that I can only agree with, but a position that, asfar as I can see, is already well established.

That the study of institutions is a complex development of speech-act theory becomesclear in his return to the question of deontic powers in the last pages of the article. Thedeontic is clearly an acceptable way of describing the fusion of powers and categoricallydefined statuses. Searle’s ‘lawyers, doctors, ski instructors’ are products of this perspec-tive. But the argument returns to Searle’s speech-act theory. Declarations of fact aredistinguished from assertive declarations. So and so has been found ‘guilty as charged’because the charges have been demonstrated (according to pre-specified criteria). Thisis an interesting exploration of the powers invested in categories and their concomitantassociations with rights and obligations. He returns to Rosaldo’s critique that amongspecific populations such speech acts do not exist. His argument is abstract and heemphasizes that his speech acts are properties of language in general and not of specificcultural situations. But what are these general properties of language? What is beingassumed of speech acts in this philosophy? If I define things do they become such? If Icall you a hamburger are you then a hamburger? What is accepted and why? Theproblem with speech acts is that they are totally dependent on a non-linguistic contextof acceptance and the latter context does not obey the laws of language.

THE SLIPPERY ISSUE OF LINGUISTIC DETERMINISMLanguage is surely constitutive but it is not constituting. It is the stuff of reality but notits organizing principle. This is a major error in all forms of both linguistic and, more


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generally, cultural determinism. The question must be posed: Where do the categoriescome from? It changes the entire perspective. This does not imply some form ofmaterialist reductionism. Categories do not emerge from practice or from technology orecology. They are already always present in human reality, but as all reality is historicallyspecific, the issue of where things come from is always a question of historical transform-ation, assuming that the present is not identical with the past. The very idea that insti-tutions carry a deontology is an expression of the problem. The deontology cannot bededuced from the categories involved. They are, on the contrary, part of the way thelatter 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 thathas to be taken into account from the start.

Now in Searle’s major publications it is often quite clear that he, as a naturalist orrealist, would not claim any such determinism. On the contrary, it would seem thatintentionality precedes speech acts, and the context in which such acts and their insti-tutional derivatives are produced are crucial for their understanding. But this is not tomy mind made clear enough. If the illocutionary force of a command is entirely depen-dent on the social context in which it occurs, one must ask whether or not the properaccount of speech acts lies outside of the acts themselves and in the relations withinwhich they occur. While in books like The Construction of Social Reality he stresses theway in which constructions pile up on one another in interactive fashion, X counts asY in context C . . . Y counts as Z in context D and so on, which enables us to work ourway up to an extensive network of increasingly encompassing categorical relations, thisdoes not give us an insight into the nature of social process as such, except as the latterare expressive of such process. Searle is, rather, interested in establishing a series of propo-sitions concerning the nature of social reality. His approach to the latter is primarily oneof 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 rulesof social institutions are not established as a set of instructions to be applied to theorganization of behaviour. They are instead themselves embedded in larger socialcontexts and are the result of the historical transformation of such contexts.

2. This implies that the constitutive rules of institutional arrangements are abstrac-tions from the form that they have in phenomenal reality. They are abstract descriptionsrather than descriptions of the way in which institutions are actually constituted. Thiscan be generalized to all statements of this type in the realm of culture. Social life isconstituted of culture but not by culture. Even language is arguably understandable insuch terms. It is via socialization that the rules of language are transferred to new gener-ations, but this transfer is a social relation in which authority is crucial which enableserrors to be negatively sanctioned, in a situation where children need to accept author-ity in order to learn the rules. This apparent cultural or linguistic determinism is in facta relation of social authority. It is not culture imposing itself on subjects, but subjectstaking on rules in a power relation that sanctions the transfer. Sometimes this is calleddiscipline. Performatives only work because those involved as senders and receivers ofsuch language are disposed to accept their conditions of operation. I go shopping foryou, open the door, vote in a context of individual acceptance of a state of affairs that


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is saturated by all kinds of pressures, reciprocity being of paramount importance. I acceptcommands because I have the right to give them. The deontic here is by definitionrelational. For example, when a member of a Kachin chiefdom accepts the power of thechief it is because it is ‘institutionalized’ in such a way that it makes sense to the indi-vidual subject. It is legitimate because the chief is by definition higher in the continuumof kinship relations to the gods, because he is a social elder and therefore able to bringprosperity and fertility to me as to the community as a whole. The constitution of thisrelation is dependent upon the constitution of the cosmology on which it rests andwhich in its turn is a product of a history of ‘hierarchization’ within which such hier-archy is possible but not necessarily manifest. It is because certain men become identi-fied with the ancestors that this is possible, and this becoming is part of a process ofsocial reproduction in which the accumulation of prestige and therefore rank isparamount.

This is strikingly clear in statements to the effect that deontic properties are attributedto 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 ofroyal power. Powers are not merely attributed and then exist, they emerge in quite adifferent way which cannot be separated from historical interactions. Searle’s mode ofdescription often gives the impression that power is delegated by collective intentional-ity rather than emerging as a historical process within such collectivities. I doubt thatSearle 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 Xcounts for Y in context C to one in which Y can be ‘free standing’ and where the focusshifts to the operational capacity of X to do A (this issue). Money can be seen in suchterms, or rather what money represents, which is wealth, which is quantifiable, andrealizable in different forms, from cash to credit cards, to Internet operations. If cash isa direct representation of wealth, credit cards are operations upon that wealth. Butwealth is nothing physical as such except in the form of cash or perhaps gold bars. Onemight argue that wealth is a free-standing category, represented in various media ofexchange and/or transfer. Now Searle suggests that it is not the physical properties ofmoney that determine its power but its collective acceptance. This is of course true, butit is also a mere abstract description and not an explanation. The only explanation ofthe power of money can be sought in its historical emergence, in the position that it hasattained. Money is a medium of exchange and an expression of wealth. In fact it is as amedium 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 differentexpressions of wealth – paper, once upon a time gold, computerized accounts – are infact substitutes for monetary wealth which is still the only measure, that is to say, moneyof account. The fact that one can buy commodities with cards is an act of substitutionwhich has become institutionalized since we must note there was, of course, a time whencards were not generally accepted. It might all be dealt with in Searle’s terms but he seemsto have been in a hurry to bypass this particular issue.

4. Similarly other fictive entities such as corporations are also described in terms ofthis 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 onwhich it is grounded. We might add God to the list, a free-standing construct or, better,


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institution, with no referent in principle. God stands for himself. He just is. Durkheimtried to reduce the imaginary God to a symbolic God by turning him into a represen-tation of society, just as economics has attempted to turn imaginary money into symbolicmoney 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 reinterpretSearle’s discussion in terms that, for me at least, are closer to the particular approach forwhich I have argued. Money (especially as capital) and corporations, and most of theinstitutions of society, are constructions that can be understood as imaginary. They havea semantic content that defines a specific set of relations between abstract categoriesrather than actual people. There is no operation of the form X counts as Y in conditionC that can account for their existence because, except in special cases of plannedorganizations, no such operation has ever occurred. Institutional life is an outcome ofpartial decisions and differential strategies and their confrontation over time. On theother hand, it is certainly the case, and here one must agree with Searle, that suchimaginary constructions realized as institutions are essential to the understanding ofsocial life.

6. The understanding of the role of the imaginary in social life is the understandingthat the real is the imaginary manifested, realized in actual social relations with physicalcoordinates. The difference between the game Monopoly and real life is the level ofreality to which the game is applied. Now of course the real economy cannot simplyreplicate the properties of the game because it contains a great many different proper-ties that can be ignored in the game. What is important here is the ontological differencebetween 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. Theargument that I proffered at that time was that fetishized constructs were the dominantoperators in the capitalist world, but that the basic characteristic of such constructs, apartfrom the fact that they organize the basic structures of social reproduction, is that theirinternal properties do not correspond to their actual material effects in social reality; inother words, that they exist in a relation of incompatibility to reality and thus ultimatelyto their own conditions of long-term reproduction. Thus the accumulation of capitalcan be understood emically as an entirely monetary phenomenon in which other formsof wealth production are merely appendages of the basic strategy of turning money intomore money, or, to be precise, materialized buying power into more buying power. Asan organizing strategy embedded in a more complex reality, the former calculates realityin 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 macrophenomenon, there is an enormous divergence between the expansion of monetarywealth 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 alsomisrepresents the properties of that process because it measures very different things.Here again it is necessary to take into account the systemic non-intentional propertiesof the world in which we live.

Searle’s work raises important questions for anthropology as for the social sciences ingeneral. I have tried in this perusal to push certain arguments, to question certain propo-sitions, but all as a response to the important probing that Searle has forced upon us.


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ReferencesAlberoni, 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.) JohnSearle, pp. 1–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wagner, Roy (1986) Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Chicago, IL: University ofChicago 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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friedman - comment on searle's social ontology

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