The Bond of Fragmentation: On Marx, Hegel, And the Social Determination of the Material World (Report‪)‬

Discussions of the social impact of capitalism are often framed in terms of 'social fragmentation', which orients political responses toward compensatory strategies through which the state or civil society are enlisted to preserve and cultivate new forms of sociality. Such responses often evoke idealised or romantic visions of community, with ambivalent or negative implications for persons or groups who might be excluded from the ideal (Devadas & Mummery 2007; Fopp 2007). Even where this romantic response is barred (e.g. Habermas 1984, pp. 341-3; 1989, pp. 352-3), capitalism is generally conceptualised as a one-sided force that exerts a corrosive effect on social relations--an effect that must be checked by something external to capitalism itself. In this paper, I explore whether the category of 'social fragmentation' might be bound to a one-sided conception of capitalism that, from the outset, limits our understanding of the social resources available to us for opening spaces for the development of new forms of collective life. I argue that the category of 'social fragmentation' positions capitalism solely as a corrosive force, as a negation--as something that strips away social bonds. The formation of social bonds is then positioned as something that takes place in some other form of interaction, apart from the interactions constitutive of capitalism itself. I ask whether it might be possible to construct a less one-sided understanding of capitalism--whether there might be any sense in which we can grasp capitalism as generative of some particular kind of social bond, a bond with ambivalent potentials.