P 92-003

RE-DISCOVERING FRICTION:

ALL THAT IS SOLID DOES NOT MELT IN AIR Helga Nowotny

November 1992

Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung Reichpietschufer 50, D-1000 Berlin 30

M odernism has ceased to be fashionable some time ago. Currently, a split occurs in Europe, with the Eastern part relapsing into pre-modernism and the W est flirting with post-modernism and its inherent fragmentations. The social sciences are challenged to respond to a confusing New W orld Disorder. It is against such an impressionistic background o f fluidity, chaos and change that the re-discovery o f a concept like friction has to be situated. It is a concept borrow ed from physics, with all the risks o f rem aining at a "merely m etaphorical" level inherent in such transfers between disciplines. The paper discusses the conditions under which such borrowings take place. It then analyzes the janus-faced concept o f friction as both stabilizing and distabilizing force in society and the implications of such a concept for the social sciences. W hile the m odem era tended to m inim ize friction, the rise o f post-m odernity celebrated friction as dissipative force. The concluding part urges to move beyond post­

modernism, which includes to learn how to live with friction.

1. From modernism to post-modernism*)**)

M odernism has ceased to be fashionable some time ago. To live a life o f paradox and contradiction, to be m oved at once by a will to change - to transform both themselves and their world - and to be horrified at the same time by the prospect o f disorientation and o f life falling apart, as Marshall Berman put it, has ceased to be a meaningful way o f how contemporary men and women experience the by no means less dram atic changes around them selves and in themselves today. Yet, a curious split o f consciousness seems to occur: in one part o f Europe, a kind of pre-modernism seems to emerge, characterized by the re-appearance o f primordial ties of real or imagined ethnicity and mutually exclusive belongingness, ready to deny to others what each group claims for itself. In another part o f Europe, the supposedly post-m odern turn is undergoing equally troubling, though far less painful, convolutions to reach a m ore encompassing stage o f integration, this time primarily in the name o f a greater economic unity to which other form s o f unification m ight follow. Large parts on the map o f a suddenly re ­ arranged and enlargened Europe are actively engaged in de-constructing space and time as occupied and octroyed so far by the central powers that no longer exists, while the other half is deconstructing space and time as part of a welcomed process o f internationalization and further technological modernization. In the Eastern part, territorial boundaries and neighborhoods are violently rejected and resisted in the name of ficticious or real historical events. The past and m em ories o f it, pregnant with meanings which m ilitate from their inception against compromising solutions, has become unfrozen after decades o f centralized terror, big and small.

Ironically, in the territories o f the former Soviet Union, with the dissolution of every rule except that o f bureaucratic inertia and the non-rule o f those acting outside o f law, one o f the sole identities to cling to are the ethnic identifications that were assigned to the Em pire’s subjects in view o f facilitating their deliberate re-allocation to territories other than the ones they initially lived in. Now, w ith the form er nightmare having come to an end, a pletora o f revengeful nationalisms has spread, claiming territorial rights for minorities where majorities can no longer be clearly defined. Yet, the will to change is limited to one’s own ethnic group and limited to numerous minorities living amid other minorities and making up majorities, while a new horror o f disorientation and disintegration spreads. Modernism has apparently become involuted into pre-m odem attachem ents in the name of prim ordial ties in which it continues its work o f dissolution.

) To be published in: Nordal Äkerman (ed.). On Friction, forthcoming.

) A preliminary version o f this paper was presented as a lecture, "Uber die Wiederentdeckung der Reibung”, held at the WZB in Berlin, June 26th, 1992. The author wishes to thank Wolfgang van den Daele as moderator and all those who actively participated in the lively discussion for articulating their scepticism.

In the other part o f Europe, the affluent, pacified, highly-industrialized W est, modernism has also ceased to be meaningful. It has moved into a stage of transformation which, for lack o f a better term, is commonly referred to as post-modernism. Here, it is not so much space, defined as territory, and time, defined as history o f those who occupy it or raise claims to territorial occupation, that provide the coordinates fo r regression o r progression. R ather, the deconstruction o f space and time proceeds in line with the expansion and compression o f space- time as enabled and effected by the means o f modem, or rather post-modem, technology and econom ic com petitiveness. Territorial claims as the prim ordial mode o f attachem ent and identitiy-giving recede in significance wherever and when satellite connections are available, remote sensing in operation and infra-red detection a distinct possibility. W hat is being divided and shared are markets and the purchase pow er that makes them attractive, and not territoral divisions in which mostly decaying and out-dated industries are located. The deconstruction of space and time in the W est is turned outward, as well as inward, it aims for control through speed and networking, m arket shares and deregulated competitiveness on an international as well as national and local level. In a lateral as well as in a vertical fashion global interconnections and local accessability are to be attained. All those who can afford it are to be integrated or are induced to striving for integration. Modernism, as the will to change and the horror induced by the unforseeable results that change may bring, defined by Berman as the voice that is "ironic and contradictory", resonating at once "with self-delight and self-doubt", that "denounces modem life in the name o f values that modernity itself has created, hoping - often against hope- that the m odernities o f tom orrow... will heal the wounds that w reck the m odem m en and women o f today" has been surpassed here as well (Berman, 1982). It has been replaced by the so-called post-modem condition, a curious blend o f the m odem self having become dissolved into a fragmentary mode o f existence, where self-doubt has extended to the core o f the self, erasing any self-delight. The hope has vanished and so has the belief into the future, any future.

Instead o f an affirmative vision, futility o f it all has spread - with pockets o f hedonistic survivors striving to cling on to their post-m odern existence, em bedded into collectively unsurpassed affluence and the deeper anxieties that come with it.

W hat we are witnessing today is indeed a dramatic stage o f transition, not only to market economies where there were command economies before. The social sciences in particular are challenged to observe, analyze and interpret. They are challenged to respond to the unprecedented experiences that are historically novel while these changes occur under the eyes o f the observer. W hat is denied to them is the benefit o f hindsight. For once, and in this they ressemble their predecessors wim essing the profound turbulence o f 19th century modernism, they cannot claim the benefit o f hindsight, the scholarly security and distance that comes with time having lapsed.They are continuously confronted with the new. The scholarly vantage point

o f historical distance is shrinking, while the temptation to compete with journalistic accounts written from one day to the next, has perhaps never been so great. Before 1989 at least, the general contours o f the societal changes appeared reasonable clear. M odernity had surpassed itself and was being dissolved into a m ultitude o f post-m odern epiphenomena. W hile some would claim that in the process modernity with its enlightenment roots had also been defeated and progress o f any kind becomes im possible, others would m ore cautiously point to modernism still existing side by side with its post-modem mutants and variants. The contours of the m ajor shifts are agreed upon, while the interpretation naturally differs. W hat has been shed, is the belief into progress, an unending vision o f human betterment that had been intimately linked with the unfolding instrumental effectiveness o f scientific and technological knowledge.

W hat has been lost is any central perspective that can claim superior knowledge o r command control: in its stead, a multitude o f particularistic perspectives claim rights to both. Behind such shifts in beliefs are other, m ore substantial changes which extend to the foundational transactions o f the m odem welfare state’s arrangem ents. The State itself, as a pow erful centralized actor, has come under attack from within, it is encountering its own limits o f action and outreach. It is challenged also outside its own boundaries to meet increasing demands of internationalization and cross-boundary, diffusely lateral interlinking o f m ultiple networks, private and public alike. The production system has dramatically lost its centralized and hierarchical features. Not only is it no longer possible to plan and centralize the many functions a modem, or rather post-modem enterprise has to ascertain. The industrial process has moved from working w ith bulk material to m aterial designed to serve certain specified functions, possessing pre-designed and desired characteristics. Slowly, but surely, the control o f waste is moving from an inefficient out-put control to a somewhat more efficient in-put control. Mass production, while still making up a sizeable proportion o f all production processes and products, is becoming complemented by production according to design. The process o f post- fordist industrial transform ation, as it is called, in which the logic o f standarized mass production and mass consumption, based on the mass worker (both in the sense o f working in mass production, i.e. on the assembly line and on bulk material) is giving w ay to various forms of flexibilization and de-routinization. The manifacturing system is increasingly built around so called non-m aterial inputs and specialized technical and professional services (Esping- Andersson, 1992). Flexibility, rather than centralized control, has become the key word for management styles, along with new fashionable buzz words in praise o f unpredictability and adaptation to unforseen circumstances. Chaos is not only a mathematical theory, but has become a cherished belief system for management - a positive form o f adaptation to w hat cannot be controlled, a seemingly self-explanatory world-view that by providing the necessary minimum dose o f certainty still attached to a scientific world-view promises to alliviate anxieties stemming from a rapidly changing environment.

The altered relationship between State and the Economy, their relative position in absolute and relational terms, cannot but affect the life styles o f citizens. Ordinary men and women in their roles as producers and consumers, as voters and environmentally conscious habitants o f Planet Earth, are confronted with equally altered life styles from which they they are told they can choose, while the previous regularity and predictability o f their working life career, class-bound as it was, gives way to new and much more erratic patterns marking many more interruptions on the road from youth to retirement. While the fordist industrial order was built around a very particular gendered division o f labour, centered around the m ale-bread w inner’s full-tim e industrial wage employment, the post-fordist, post-industrial stratification system m ay see a convergence o f female and male life-cycle profiles, characterized by a spill-over o f the hitherto more precarious, temporary employment arrangements o f women to their male counterparts (Esping-Andersson, 1992; Schuller, 1988) And while the clear-cut stratification profiles o f the fordist-industrial stratification system with its relatively straight forward and preditable chances for upward and downward social mobility is giving way to another hierarchy, the dimensions have multiplied, and its occupancy certainly has become more transitory and volatile (Reich,

1991).

2. On the borrowing of metaphors: transfers between the two cultures

It is against such an impressionistic background o f fluidity and change from one central to multiple perspectives, all rooted in their own uncertainties and in radically altered subjective experiences, and against the rapid loss o f meaning o f older social science concepts, such as social class, that the re-discovery o f a concept like friction has to be evaluated. It is a concept that - in a self-applicable way - intrinsically stems itself against the tide o f flexible post- modernity, in which we are made to believe that everything becomes fiction, self-reference, signifier and ephem erality, where immateriality reigns supreme and homelessness, chance, fictious capital and eclecticism are sufficient to replace public housing, purpose, production capital and authority (for the complete list of replacements o f opposed tendencies, see Harvey, 1990:440-1). Without posing any moral or philosophical preconditions, interaction is a concept that is central to the natural world and to social life. In the macroscopic world frictionless interaction is a rare exception. Nowhere in the universe, neither in the cosmos, nor in our own social world, can anything happen without interaction and often interaction entailing friction. In many cases self-organization owes its existence also to interaction and friction. There can hardly be a social world, however anomic it may appear, without interaction and friction. Interaction occurs even the break-down o f social relations, be it in the climax o f physical violence directed against other human beings - war - or in the seeming indifference to the suffering o f others, as when the poor and hom eless, the starving and the m arginalized, are left to their own

helplessness. Ties persist that bind those who are antagonistic and indifferent to the objects o f their antagonism and indifference. The effects o f frictions can be far-reaching, hysteresis is at

•work also in the social context. M oreover, no post-modern fluidity and ephem erality, no dematerialized work o f social deconstruction can deny that there is still something recalcitrantly material in our relations to the world, and something recalcitrantly social even in the apparent dissolution o f social ties.

To introduce a concept like friction into the discourse of the social sciences is likely to meet with resistance and scepticism. To speak about friction in a context other than physics, as the present volume deliberately does, entails not only the crossing o f disciplinary boundaries, but goes against a still deeply-rooted scientific dualism that separates the world o f nature and o f technical artefacts from the world of humans, social relationships and meanings. The separation between the two m ajor scientific cultures persists in multiple guises. It knows prohibitions and tabus. It finds expression in a deeply-seated scepticism against transfers and warns against taking over natural science approaches into the social realm.

W hat is at stake is not only the jealous guarding o f disciplinary fences and professional power- bases. There is the shadow o f a long history between the two cultures, memories about the debate on determinism and the possible degrees o f freedom for the purposeful shaping o f the world through human action that still hang over the cognitive landscape. The long and twisted road o f institutionalization o f the social sciences has often been accompanied by strategies of deliberate imitation o f what was seen to be the secret o f the success o f the natural sciences: an adherence to the "scientific method", a penchant for quantification and formalization as an alleged safeguard against "ideology" and a striving for what was believed to be a greater degree o f "objectivitiy" to be attained by scrupulously abstaining from too much involvement. On the other hand, each o f these arguments could and were in fact countered by those who maintained the distinctiveness o f the social sciences and humanities. They argued in turn that methods uniquely appropriate for their objects o f study had to be found, that no science offered an escape from its social embedding and societal imprinting and hence that no science was able to escape completely the taint o f "ideology". The social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, were shown to oscillate repeatedly in their history between the two opposite poles o f attraction:

the natural science ideal on one side with the fascination exerted through the discovery o f statistical regularities and the search for structural invariants, and literature on the other side, embodying the seduction o f the narrative and the interpretation o f society as discourse system (Lepenies, 1985). Depending upon the swing o f the pendulum , the distance between the respective pole would vary. Undoubtedly, the social sciences (for reasons that must remain undiscussed here) at present lean m ore towards "the m anifacture o f words", towards the

"reading" o f society as a narrative. The fluidity o f the post-modern condition does not lend itself well to an em pirically m inded belief in "facts", even if they are granted to be socially constructed.

Yet, there are still other, experimentially induced obstacles litigating against the transfer of metaphors from the natural sciences. In a strict sense transfers can take place as one o f two possibilities: one is the transfer by analogy, by using m etaphors to stim ulate analogous reasoning or developping mental models or images through analogy. The other form o f transfer is much rarer, amounting to a transfer between two different fields o f knowledge in the strict sense. In such a case it has to be demonstrated how identical mechanisms are at w ork . In our case only the first form o f transfer is intended. But even without claims that isomorphisms or identical mechanisms can be found in the social world corresponding to the natural world, the transfer of metaphors from the natural sciences to the social sciences is fraught with difficulties.

Partly as result o f the by now discredited transfer o f the evolutionary paradigm and its subsequent use and political misuse, especially in the different variants o f Social Darwinism, the relationship between the social sciences and biology has rem ained a tense one ever since.

Sociobiology is viewed with suspicion by most social scientists. Reviewing the literature on the Human Genome research recently, Richard Lewontin found ample confirmation for the fear that the dream o f mapping the "code o f codes" might lead to a renewed genetic determ inism as an explanation o f all social and individual variation, even if - it could be argued - the genetic code constitutes only a boundary condition for biological processes o f life itself. A medical model o f all human variation, Lewontin maintains, makes for a medical model o f normality, including social norm ality, and dictates a therapeutic or pre-em ptive attack on deviance (Lewontin, 1992:34). So deep-rooted is the basis o f the fear to get swept aside by w hat m ight become a new model o f biological determinism, that developments in the other sciences are followed only by a small group o f social scientists whose job it is to do so: those engaged in social studies o f science and technology. For the vast majority o f social scientists, developments in the natural and life sciences remain outside their interest and self-restricting competence. They may, as Barbara Adam has shown with respect to the relationship between the concept o f physical time and social time, go on cheerfully without being aware that their notion o f physical time is still based upon concepts borrowed from an outdated and obsolete model o f Newtonian physics (Adam, 1990). W orse still, as Philip M irowski in a scathing and w ell-founded critique o f classical and neo-classical economics recently argued, treating economics as social physics and physics as nature’s economics by literally copying equations from thermodynamics has led to serious blunders in the formalization o f a number o f areas. Thus, neoclassical economics finds itself today in the trap o f the "ironies o f physics envy" from which to escape will not prove easy (Mirowski, 1989).

Borrowing metaphors from the natural sciences has hence rem ained a risky enterprise for the social sciences. Taken too literally, it might lead into such traps as just mentioned and practised

"only" on the metaphorical level might lead nowhere, except into the ups and downs o f fads and fashions. Yet, the fateful, if not fatal, attraction persists. The social sciences cannot help

"borrowing", just as the natural sciences and their practioners cannot escape society’s cultural grasp onto their way o f thinking and expressing themselves in language. But w hat are the legitimate rules for transfers o f any kind? How to assess the heuristic fruitfulness, not only of analogies, but o f taking them one or two steps further by em bedding them into proper theorizing?

In his by now classical study o f W eimar physics, Paul Forman addressed the question why and how the newly created quantum mechanics as it emerged in 1925 - 1926 in a scientific milieu whose center lay in Germany and Austria was influenced by the general culture surrounding it.

In particular, Form an was interested in probing how and why some o f the main proponents of the new theory were induced to make public statements and allegations that diverged markedly from what the theory itself warranted. This was especially the case for the concepts o f causality, individuality and intuitive evidentiality or "Anschaulichkeit". In all three cases, quantum mechanics was misused by its main exponents, as Forman claims, to make sweeping epistemic statements that in no way were supported by the theory itself and partly even were in outright contradiction to it. Forman concludes that it was due to the intense pressure o f the cultural milieu reigning at the tim e, an anti-intellectual streak o f rom anticism that celebrated "life" as an unanalyzed experience anti-thetical to science, a culturally w idespread antipathy toward causality, a clinging to the traditional values o f individuality and a popular yearning for

"Anschaulichkeit" that led to clearing the theory of the stigma o f being "unanschaulich", causal and anti-individualistic (Forman, 1971). In his analysis and conclusions, Forman still remains entirely on the conservative scientific side. His analysis is not about the physicist’s practice in their laboratories, nor about their theories as descriptions o f reality. It is meant only as a meta- meta statement, a statement about the physicists’ statements about their description o f reality (Forman, 1980). Physicists do not borrow, one m ight conclude, they m erely m ight get

"pressured". Yet, as other examples have also shown, the cultural expectations may be so strong that they can come to override correct results.

Subsequent social studies o f science and technology have gone much further in deconstructing scientific knowledge claims. They are not seen primarily any longer as descriptions o f "reality"

but as deeply im plicated by their in-built sociality. Scientific knowledge, and not only meta statements about it, is susceptible to cultural, political and economic influences and as a social construct contingent upon human action and its structuration. Yet, while going some way in

dismantling scientific knowledge claims that partake o f a superior cognitive status and access to an "objective" reality, the current streaks o f various kinds o f constructivism also raise new questions. One o f them, o f direct interest to those who take a new look at a concept like friction, has to do with the coincidence o f world views and new scientific theories, o f diffuse encounters o f an even more diffuse "Zeitgeist" and the emergence o f new scientific paradigm s or paradigmatic shifts. Even if one remains within a social constructivist framework, the precise nature o f the constructions, their timing, social acceptance and inherent robustness still escapes us. In W eimar Germany, according to Forman, physicists were swept away to meet implicit and explicit expectations o f their general cultural milieu, be it to forestall criticisms, be it to increase the probability of acceptance o f their new theory. Looking across the expert divide, one would also expect the general public or certain "cultural milieus" to be actively on the look-out for scientific confirm ations, guidance and a modicum degree o f certainty that com es with a scientific-based, cultural world view. But such general cultural and scientific accomodation is hardly sufficient to explain why at certain times co-evolutionary processes, rooted in very different fields o f experience and societal practice, seemingly converge to enable coherence where previously none existed. For a long time linearity as a way o f seeing the natural world and treating it in m athem atical symbols was considered sufficient. Linearity also implied stability. The discovery of the importance o f non-linearity, partly due to the mathematics dealing with it lagging behind, came much later. It opened up a new world, inherently instable due to feed-backs and chaos lurking everywhere.(Krohn & Küppers, 1989). Friction with the pow er to damp instabilities could therefore no longer be treated only as nuisance, to be avoided or minimized. Its re-discovery, so to speak, was bound to happen. Once the paradigm atic shift initiated by chaos theory and theories of self-organization had taken hold of the scientific and lay im agination alike, com plexity abounded everyw here and so did non-linearity, critical fluctuations, discontinuities and variants o f chaos ranging from chaotic oscillations to stable chaos found among asteroids in the solar system. The obsession with regularity and order ceased to be o f primary interest when new excitement waited for those willing to confront the dynamics of non-linear systems. And what would be more non-linear than a social system?

But let us return to the m ore focussed question o f when transfers o f m etaphors from one scientific field o f inquiry to another are likely to take place. One answer may simply be that borrowing is especially attractive whenever we are short of answers, when we are in intellectual or "real world" trouble. Active borrowing is not evenly spread, neither across disciplines, nor over time. The motives may vary from imitation to routine, from creative searches for analogies to fashionable trendiness. Yet, two observations stand out. One relates to the fact that in each period one scientific discipline or group o f disciplines is generally seen to take the lead in intellectual and/or methodological advance. It is thus tempting for others, that see themselves as

being less at the forefront of knowledge, to turn towards the more successful scientific fields in search for new orientations. The likelihood that the transfer is actually carried out and accepted is all the greater, the more a kind o f successful "coupling" with other, already present strands of theorizing or application can be expected. The virtually instantaneous em bracem ent o f D arw inistic evolutionary theory by the social sciences before and around the turn towards the 19th century is a case in point. O f course, the theory was adapted in highly selective ways to fit in not only with already existing theoretical strands, but with a much broader political and cultural outlook. This is what also happened to the W eimar physicists. The second observation relates to the fact that active borrowing tends to culminate in times when old concepts are felt to be increasingly adequate to cope with a dramtically changed reality. Borrowing, and be it only on the level o f analogies, tends to increase when a scientific community is faced with entirely new phenomena for which it has no fitting concepts as yet. When US economists in the last two decades o f the 19th century were confronted with the partial replacement o f the previous "cut­

throat com petition" among firms and the resulting im pact o f w hat was called the "new competition", namely the formation o f trusts or "combinations" by a few large firms (believed to lead to lower prices and greater efficiency) they had to rethink older concepts o f competition as regulator o f the economy and as selector m echanism for the fit and unfit. The theoretical answers that were given showed great diversity and there was also great diversity in the nature o f evidence, but practically all the borrowing took place from the evolutionary models o f the time (Morgan, 1992).

3. The janus-faced concept of friction

It fits the persistant inferiority com plex o f the social sciences that the dram atic changes surrounding the downfall o f the communistic regimes in Eastern Europe were taken as yet another instance in which the social sciences had proven uncapable o f predicting the event.

Rather than greeting the unpredictable as a new phenomenon, as constantly happens in the natural sciences, social scientists reproached themselves almost unanimously for their lack o f foresight. And yet, 1989 was precisely that: an unforeseen and unforseeable event, the sudden eruption o f a much more gradual build-up o f severe economic and political deficiencies o f a regim e that had made believe it was immune to them. That the immediate triggering events occurred, as always, in a historically unique configuration, in this case with a leadership that avoided outright repression, in no way detracts from the graduality and "hiddeness" o f the processes leading to the downfall. It was the year in which friction can be said to have re­

appeared in the social world as an all present force on the political scene precisely at the moment when the bi-polar world with its dynam ic equilibrium o f terrifying arms ceased to exist.

Although it was not realized at the time, the vision o f a post-modern world society, o f an electronic global village, separate from and segregated from other, partly pre-m odem variants (other than the less industrialized third world countries) came to an abrupt end. Rather, a new and highly explosive mixture o f modem, pre- and post-m odem elements cam e to the fore, threatening to impede the dream of a smooth transition to an age of continuing dematerialization where the "symbolic analysts" envisaged by Robert Reich, would reign supreme. The countries o f Eastern Europe, including those o f the former Soviet Union, were too close in geographical proxim ity and too much tied through historical links to the W est to be treated with the same mental and political distance that third world countries receive. At the time o f writing, only a few hundred kilom eters from here, the capital o f B osnia-H ercegow ina, Sarajew o, is under continuous armed attack and thousands o f refugees are pouring into the neighbouring Western countries. M igratory waves from the East are triggering highly antagonistic and simplistic responses o f xenophobia in the Western Europe. Instead o f the hoped for rapid W esternization o f Eastern Europe in terms of a twin development of market economy and democratization, there are signs o f retrograde developments taking place in the W est in response to an increase in friction between different levels o f modernization and post-modernization. In the US the effect has not been one linked to geographical proximity, but is o f a different kind. The immense difficulties associated with the conversion o f the enormous military-industrial complex, are a telling point in case o f what happens once the enemy that mobilized it, no longer exists.

It is o f great importance to realize that friction in its social meaning as well as in its physical (since physics after all is employed for human ends) is a janus-faced concept. I t acts to dissipate energy which can stabilize or disstabilize the interaction.!^ non-linear systems instabilities may occur which open up new pathways o f developm ent. Friction as a coupling m echnism is bounding these instabilities at finite amplitudes. (Küppers, forthcoming)) In social life, friction is implied in every form of interaction, yet too much friction may mean antagonism and violence that entails high costs. A world without friction would be one o f complete inertia, without change. One o f the few social scientists who dealt with the topic, Karl M annheim, raised the question what a society in which the elder generation would not pass away, would look like.

Friction is a dissipator in the sense that it sweeps away capital accumulated in the social world:

these may be econom ic fortunes, empires and the pow er accum ulated by a few, or, as a biological constant in social life, senescence, i.e. the older generation having to make room for the young. To regulate friction in such a way that it acts to match energy with what it is to be used for in social life while incurring only gradual losses, rather than sudden and high ones and yet without preventing change and innovation to occur, m ight be considered as one o f the

hallmarks of the civilizing process. Friction in its janus-facedness therefore can be considered to

unfolding its potential in accordance with specific circumstances. Friction prevents that the system goes com pletely beserk if that system becomes instable - as all non-linear systems inevitably do. In the play between the instability inherent in non-linear systems friction functions as a regulator. It enables the emergence o f the new whenever instability reaches a point which no longer can be compensated with old means, while acting as stabilizer in preventing the system to fall apart completely.

To realize this janus-facedness in full has far reaching implications for the social sciences and their approach to the social world. As children of the enlightenment that they are, the nascent social sciences have accompanied and carried the process of modernization a long way. As I have shown elsewhere, the discovery that human intervention towards shaping societal processes was possible, took some time after initially treating "the market" and its disruptive consequences in analogy to a natural law - something that could be observed and studied, but not interfered with. The em ergence o f the m odem , secularized nation-state and the firm installment o f capitalism in the wake o f massive industrialization were extremely powerful forces in shaping W estern societies. The social sciences soon became intimately linked with these developments, especially from the latter part o f the 19th onwards.They provided not only searching interpretations for the deeply disturbing experiences their contem poraries went through, but also offered advice and "solutions" for the social ills which accom panied the processes of industrialization and urbanization. They were passionately engaged in pressing for reforms and new kinds o f collective schemes which after many conflicts began to take shape in form o f the nascent welfare states. For the administrative build-up, monitoring, expansion and readjustments of the new administrative and political arrangements o f collective health care and education, social security and transfer payments, the social sciences provided expert scientific knowledge, career prospects and laid the basis for gradual professionalization (Nowotny, 1991). Moreover, the emergence o f expert regimes affected the basic stance and outlooks with which people handled their day-to-day interaction and experience: it led to what de Swaan calls protoprofessionalization, to ways in which patients, clients, schoolchildren but also the public at large "learned" in a simplified and censored version professional expert knowlegde which was transmitted to them in a continuous formative and informative practice (de Swaan, 1988). It was but a way to prepare them for modernization.

These and other interconnections between the formation and expansion o f the m odem nation states, social science knowledge and the growth of expert regimes were accompanied by other pressures towards growing interdependence. Standardization was one o f the means how previously uncoupled, ideosyncratic, independently set norms o r standards had to become

harm onized and standarized in order to permit the build-up o f large technological systems.

Railroad and electrification necessitated the establishment o f large-scale infrastructures, large scale coordination and synchronization. Technological systems grew with standardization that went far beyond the unification o f purely technical standards encompassing social behaviour and practices, the dom estication and integration o f the hinterland, and the setting up o f synchronization and coordination mechanisms, such as the world time zones. All these familiar processes working towards standardization and unification, towards order and regularity, predictability and punctuality, assume new significance when re-assessed under the aspect of friction. The build-up of the welfare state can be re-interpreted as a unique and grandiose attempt to minimize friction, a belated and im perfect attempt to counter the painfully de-stabilizing experiences o f early industrialization and modernization which, indeed, was lived by many contemporaries as a deeply disrupting and disintegrative experience that touched the roots of their social identities and material existence. The overall emphasis o f almost an entire century upon establishing and maintaining order, regularity and standardization o f technology and adm inistration has im peratively pervaded all dim ensions o f society. O f course, this was a concept o f order, allegedldy derived from nature to legitimate political rule. D erived from a thoroughly mechanistic worldview o f nature, it owed nothing as yet to the concept o f self­

organization as understood today. The question o f political order was a predom inant one, not only for social theory, but for all o f political practice. It was at the basis o f the build-up of state bureaucracies and the establishment o f an impersonal rule o f law. It formed the basis for the m ore repressive practices through which the dom inant elites attempted to thw art o f real or perceived threats from the majority o f people living within the territorial boundaries o f the nation-state who were yet to become integrated as citizen, with specified democratic rights and duties, as workers endowed also with social rights and as mass-consumers o f the increasing num ber and variety o f goods and services a growing and m odernizing econom y would eventually provide. Regulation and order were the great societal schemes aspired through such means as teaching hygiene to the poor and "domesticating" them at the same time, through instituting obligatory education for all children in preparation of a more predictable, imposed and orderly work-life whose requirements for values such as regularity, punctuality and "proper working habits" had to be taught early. These processes o f instilling the right attitudes and behaviour in workers and citizens w ent hand in hand with the requirem ents o f m assive industrialization. As many historians o f technology have shown, the regularity, predictability and orderliness o f the machine was extended to the labour process and it acted as powerful metaphor for society at large. The minimization o f friction in the orderly running o f the machine within the nation state that by then had become a tighdy coupled political and economic system became the underlying, but extremely powerful image that governed the life o f men and women as workers and citizens alike. The social costs o f setting up and running this machinery were

high, as social historians know. On the other hand, destructive energies o f enorm ous proportions were unleashed in the terrible wars among nation states, with the international system still forming a comparatively fragile, only loosely coupled system to this very day.

The influence o f the m achine was not lim ited to the workplace. Yaron Ezrahi has shown convincingly how the rhetoric o f the machine and its role as political metaphor has permeated the entire m odem liberal-democratic tradition. Science and technology appear to have prepared the ground for "objectifying" political actions as forms o f technical public action. The notion that the technicalization o f action renders the conduct o f actors objectively visible and accountable has encouraged the belief that instrumental accountability - accountability in terms o f adequate technical perform ance - can replace, or at least com plem ent, m oral discipline (Ezrahi, 1990:144). Visibility, efficiency, reliability - energy channelled into the directions indiciated by the planners - included attempts made to minimize friction and gain control over it. W hat held the machine together were the growing interdependencies o f those who served it and were served by it, with friction threatening to reduce its efficiency. All desirable properties o f the

"political machinery" and the meliorist public policies that were associated with it especially in the United States, started from the assumption that the perform ance o f the machine could be subject to continuous public improvement. Friction therefore had to be eliminated or at least greatly reduced as standing in the way o f any progressivistic policy.

O f course, there were important exceptions to the success in minimizing friction. Even if most nation states, at least in the industrialized W estern world, succeeded within limits to build up internal order, a relatively sm oothly functioning o f the public political sphere, o f state bureaucracies and equivalent organizations, even if they suceeded in integration the masses by extending voting rights to them and by integrating them into the work force, the minimization of friction between states rem ained a much m ore arduous and fragile task. To this day, in a rem arkably tragic sense human history remains a history o f war. The "civilizing process"

repeatedly suffered severe break-downs and returns to barbaric conditions, to the horrors this century is replete with. Wars between states and also within states are still ravaging today. The build-up o f international relations and multiple layered ties cutting across borders, although having undoubtedly progressed in scope and range o f preventive and containing mechanisms, remains extremely precarious in view o f the mass diffusion and dramatically increased efficiency of technically sophisticated weapons. It is as though a huge potential o f friction as a massive trigger o f dissipative energies had been implanted into the state construction itself, being regarded at the ultimate, but most efficient response in governing relationships between states.

But, at least seen from a W estern perspective, ethno-, euro- or techno-centric as it is, such breakdowns and regressions mostly appear as regrettable aberrations, as terrible legacies o f the

past that have to be seen as being balanced by equally remarkable successes in building up economic prosperity and well-being for the majority o f their citizens. At least the "golden three decades" in the post-w ar period in Europe, that culminated in an unprecedented growth and expansion of the welfare state, can present themselves as a successful experiment in - what in analogy to the scientific speciality concerned with minimizing friction in engineering, namely tribology - could be called "social tribology": having found successful socio-technical means to ease social friction. In a way, the modernization process, that was begun a century or more earlier, reached its culmination. The evolution of modernity implied what Norbert Elias had called the establishment o f an ever tighter grid o f societal coordination and the lenghtening of mutual chains o f interdependencies. It entailed the establishment o f m ultiple tight coupling mechanisms for which , it turned out, a high price was to be paid in the end. Given a sufficient amount o f friction, the instability inherent in any complex non-linear system - and every social system belongs into this category - would prevent the system to fall apart completely. Friction forestalls complete destruction. But as we have seen, friction was sought to be minimized within the state at least, while it was allowed to erupt times and again between states in the form of war.

W hile the process o f modernization burst into existence with so many painful experiences and the turbulence so eloquently evoked by Marshall Berman and others, leading to "all that is solid melt(ing) in air", as Karl Marx saw it, modernization, at least provisionally and in one part of the world, converged with other processes that led to a remarkable, if relative, stable internal societal order. It covers an era that can be taken as example for friction within these societies have become efficiently minimized. Friction can be seen at work in its function as a stabilizer. In order to avoid friction, social consensus increases. Scientific and technological advances played an im portant role in this process, both in furthering standardization (not to speak of

"rationalization") and in symbolizing the hopes that scientific and technological progress would eventually transform into social progress. Reallocation and redistribution o f wealth, even if it did not occur right away, would become possible tomorrow, since ever more wealth would be available. Such was at least the widely shared assumption that helped to sustain for a long time the belief into progress.

4. Friction as dissipative force: the rise of post-modernity

It is difficult to say precisely when this period came to an end, and when the climax of what was then interpreted as modernization began to shade into its post-modern fuzziness. Among the more visible turning points, that are usually easier to identify in retrospect, were the oil crisis

and the incipient awareness o f environmental problems to come. Other important changes were under way. The modem - or rather post-modem - information and communication technologies, based upon the successful expansion and application of quantum mechanics in microelectronics and other fields o f great technological potential, brought with them different forms o f social organization. They expanded in forms o f interconnected networks and not, as before, in basically hierarchical forms o f organization. The power o f computers enabled them to "talk to each other" and to sort out how messages would be packed and these packages best routed w ithout passing through the social hierarchical control system every time. In industrial manufacturing, the fordistic type o f production process began to be complemented by a "post- fordistic" type, incorporating elem ents o f far greater flexibility, decentralization and non- hierarchical control. Dem aterialization, although grossly exaggerated in the scope already attained, began to fuel the imagination o f all those who saw a shift from material production to sym bolic production, from goods to services, from the grosser forms o f existence to a know ledge-based form. Undoubtedly, the ongoing m iniaturization attained especially in microelectronics and the ability to control and manipulate atoms on the microscopic level o f matter, as it became feasible in nanotechnology, helped to induce views o f an ongoing "de- m aterialization".Y et, with the shift from the macroscopic level to the m icroscopic, from hierarchies to heterarchies, from one central and highly visible command post to a multitude o f diffuse, but highly interlinked netw ork-com ponents, apparently w orking in decentralized fashion, the degrees o f freedom changed accordingly. From a few degrees o f freedom on the macroscopic level, many degrees o f freedom on the microscopic level resulted. And, in a co- evolutionary societal process friction, which hitherto had m anifested itself mainly on the macroscopic level o f society as a social force that had its analogy in mechanics, began to exert itself also on the microscopic level.

O ther certainties, until then apparently solid, began to fade with the first serious signs o f the erosion o f the welfare state. Science and technology, up to now celebrated as the harbingers of technological and economic progress, o f ever-increasing harnessing o f the pow er o f nature, began to be view ed with increasing scepticism when it became apparent that not only unequivocal blessings were the result o f continuing scientific and technological advances, but that many technologies were also associated with increasing risks. Expansion and the human m astery over and exploitation o f nature would not go on indefinitely. The limits to growth became a metaphor that pitted those who still believed into linear extrapolation and exponential growth against those who argued for "alternative" paths o f developm ent that entailed novel attitudes o f restraint, modesty and even abstention. There were others w ho based their

preditions upon the belief into cyclical developments. Whether these were conceptualized and

societies, the economy, wars, or other pheneomena were believed to be passing, the basic idea was a sequence o f growth, saturation and decline, followed by yet another ascension o f the curve. In any case, the spell o f a world conceived to progress in more o r less linear and progressive fashion, thriving upon scientific and technological advances that in turn fuelled economic growth and wealth, had been broken.

Environmental threats on a global, and not just local scale, began to appear. Not everything that scientific and technological research at the frontier o f knowledge declared to be feasible, would be acceptable by society. Large scale risks, invisible in nature and tendentially global and hence socially indiscrim inating, became a source not only o f diffuse anxieties, but o f politically articulate demands for public participation in deciding which kind o f future society men and women were striving for. The political use o f the m etaphor o f the machine, so much in tune with the rhetoric o f smooth efficiency and instrumentalization of political action, rapidly fell into disrepute. The machine, especially large scale technology came to be seen as the villain, an "icon of social excess", as Ezrahi puts it, and no longer o f discipline and equilibrium. With it went the progressive erosion o f the influence of the social sciences on both the ideological and intellectual conceptions o f society as a causally discernible and manipulative mechanistic system. Society came to be im agined in terms o f narrative about persons, feelings and values, rather than in terms o f causal processes, mechanisms and mechanistic forces. W ith it went a declining faith into the feasibility not only o f monumental engineering in late-twentieth democracies, but a declining trust into the value o f knowledge and rationality in our culture, a tendency to discredit large-scale schemes o f social improvement generally. The result is the deinstrumentalization of political action leading, in Ezrahi's words, from "statecraft" to "stagecraft" (Ezrahi, 1990:242 - 246).

It is precisely amid such wide-spread tendencies towards ffagmentated pluralism, the resurgence of fundamentalism and, depending upon one’s view, o f new social rationalities or irrationalities, amid the loss o f previous faith and the relapse into widespread feelings o f futility that the re­

discovery o f the concept o f friction assumes relevance. W hile friction in the past decades functioned primarily as stabilizer, as effective control mechanisms o f social tension and conflicts permitting more or less deliberate policies that worked as either brakes or accelerators in co- evolutional synchronicity with a polity and society that aspired to the smooth efficiency, instrumentality and quantitative economic output o f the machine, it is only recendy that the other side o f the janus-faced concept begins to show itself. It is friction as a dissipative force, friction can be seen at w ork in its potentially destructive and yet at the same time constructive and creative capacity. Friction, instead o f functioning m ainly as a stabilizer, appears now as indispensible for any kind o f structure to arise and to transform itself. In the well-known Benard

experiment, for instance, friction is at work when a fluid is heated up and when spontaneously formed, "self- organizing" patterns begin to emerge. In many cases, friction is the force which takes a system through various states o f order by destructing previous ones and leading to the creation o f new ones. Its dissipative characteristics are responsible for the loss o f energy and its conversion into more "disorderly" states, which in turn, in the process o f "self-organization"

may generate new forms o f "order out of noise". Friction, as it appears on the microscopic level between atoms displaying its self-organizing effects, lends itself as an apt metaphor for guidance through present-day changes through focussing upon the self-organizing capacity o f societies.

Friction on the macroscopic level draws attention through its dissipative capacity to analogies with social forms o f dissipation o f energy, notably through wars. In employing the concept of friction there is a refusal to accept the loose descriptions o f deconstructivism or o f descriptions o f new societal patterns as everything being "interwoven" with everything else by throwing open the inherent instability o f social systems. It opens possibilities for new theorizing in a deliberate non-linear system mode. Instabilities make for change, but how, when and in what m agnitude is partly regulated through friction. The trap o f mere "imitation" o f the natural sciences can be avoided, provided that theorizing succeeds in remaining empirically open and sufficiently flexible in combining general features o f non-linear systems dynam ics with the empirical particulars o f social systems. Friction does not necessarily eliminate the concept of social actor and o f agency, as much o f systems theory applied to social systems does, for it remains essentially the force that ties together two or more bodies that are in contact with each other - be they fluids, or human agents. Moreover, it entails a dynamical dimension, for friction is tied to changes in speed (be they acceleration or deceleration) and vice versa, thus opening a range o f tantalizing questions about this important temporal aspect in society.

5. Beyond post-modernism: living with friction

Pierre Boulez, the great composer, conductor and teacher o f contemporary music, is reported to having said: "any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity o f dodecaphonic language is useless. For his entire work brings him up short o f the needs o f his time". Maybe the lessons that can be drawn from coming to terms with the janus-faced concept o f friction are similar: any social scientist who has not experienced the necessity o f friction has failed to understand the exegencies o f his or her time. These are exegencies that can no longer be conceptualized in the form o f either or. The evolution of societies can no longer be cast into multi-staged models following an essentially linear path of development with a supposedly more developed, more complex, and usually "superior" stage following the previous one m arks the sequence o f developm ent. M odernization may have shaded into post-modernity, but this is no end stage either. A new plurality o f cultures and

histories o f people around the globe are waiting acknowledgement o f both, the similarities they share with others and the right to differences that may set them apart. Evolutionary pathways of societies show many bifurcations, periods o f stagnation and break-downs rather than the smooth and continuously progressive stages that the modernization model presupposed. Global environmental concerns emphasize the urgency o f the present human condition. Nature under severe stress in com bination with massive human intervention has generated conditions of genuine uncertainty, where nature's resilience at any moment might give way to collapse. A new readiness to accept decentralization and fragmented pluralism as principles o f forms o f social organization cannot completely neglect the preconditions that guide the search for reaching common agreements. W ithout a generally accepted frame for agreements and contracts to follow, without, as Dürkheim already knew, setting the pre-contractual elements for contracts, even a de-centralized organization is unlikely to function. Scepticism against any grand scheme, theory or unifying world-view should not degenerate into cynicism or into a nihilism that denies the validity o f any stand taken. The apparent random fluctuations, that can be observed in such diverse phenomena as meterology, wheat prices or W all Street share trading, should not be taken to m ean that order has completely disappeared from social life. Quite to the contrary, as the theory o f self-organization insists, out o f disorder emerges order and new phenomena o f internal coherence appear as the constructive elements o f a new world to be constructed: "such self-determined internal coherences and their natural drift, when observed under contingencies o f interactions, will appear as the making o f sense, novelty, and unpredictability, in brief, as

"laying down" o f a world" (Varela, 1984:30). Naturally, like any construction, this one also knows its own forms o f constraints.

To "experience the necessity of dodecaphonic language" in the context o f social life has indeed been rare and hardly formed part o f the professional training or biography o f m ost social scientists today. And yet, at the core of the social sciences phenomena like social change and innovation have always been central. The form er has largely been interpreted as integral part of the process o f modernization, reluctantly and regrettably accepted at times, celebrated at others, while the latter has tended to become associated mainly with technology which, for a long time, was seen as coming into existence in a way external to society. But now, the "dodecaphony" of social life is here for all to hear. Far from being without rules, it follows its own, it is not cacophony. Like friction, it is tied to speed and rhythm. Turbulence is likely to arise when, like in a flow o f water, with more energy coming into the system, competing rhythm s arise, when each new frequency being introduced becomes incompatible with the proceeding one.

That the process o f modernization has been closely accompanied by a general increase o f speed with which processes unfold, activities are undertaken, information, people and goods are

transported and processed, has been observed time and again. Acceleration in the scientific- technological domain is contrasted with the much slower rate o f change taking place among institutions or people’s readiness to "adapt". Intuitively, social scientists have rem arked upon differences in speed that characterized either separate sub-systems and spheres o f society, producing various kinds o f "lags", or upon the im pact o f differential speed with which modernization took place among different social groups or strata, or across generations. Yet rarely so far, have these differentials in speed and rates o f change been associated with friction or the other way round. Nevertheless, this is the case and thus would permit the opening up of new visions and pathways to fresh analysis and insight. Examples waiting to be studied range from the transition to market economies in Eastern Europe, where speed and sequencing o f the various m easures and steps in the transformation process certainly are some o f the m ost important variables for success or failure, to the highly unpredictable nature o f many nature- and hum an-induced environm ental phenom ena under stress. The time and timing o f responses delimits the possibilities o f human intervention, yet in order to intervene at all, it is important to know when.

This brings us to a second lesson to be learned from including friction into the social science universe and discourse. Friction does not preclude intervention, it only sets limits to what purposeful action and policy can achieve. To know and study these limits and the conditions under which they occur, implies the potential improvement o f policies. When, to cite but one well-known example, epidemiologists began to study the cyclical nature o f epidemics under the aspect o f non-linearity, they found to their surprise that perturbations, like program m es of inocculation, initially could lead to huge oscillations. While any health official or politician who would look at the data would conclude that the programme had failed, May and others were able to show that while in the long-term the trend was downward, in the short-term surprising peaks occurred (May, 1987).

In her comprehensive survey o f the influence of natural science theories on contemporary social science, Renate Mayntz comes to the conclusion that it is often the proselytizing efforts on the part of natural sciences who attempt to generalize their area-specific insights to provide a key to the solution o f much more comprehensive problems that is at the origin o f transfers. Social scientists are receptive, because o f the evident fact that social phenom ena are always irreversible, path dependent and non-linear. W hat attracts them in particular, e.g in the paradigm o f self-organization, is however the unintentional nature o f the processes that allow them to em phasize the autonom ous forces o f structuration and the unplanned nature o f em ergent phenom ena.They are attracted by physical theories o f nonlinear dynamics, as Casti argues, because they look for suitable conceptual instruments to understand the radical discontinuities

that the world around them exhibits in order to counter them (Casti, 1982). M ayntz provides a sober assessment o f the fruitfulness o f transfer o f methods, concepts and theories from the natural sciences. The latter, she concludes, practically does not occur. All transfer efforts either remain at the level o f verbal analogies - where they fail to carry new information, add nothing to substantive knowledge and hence limit themselves to a purely semantic innovation - or they are cases o f an indirect, m ediated theory transfer that proceeds through generalization and respecification. In the latter case, all depends on the social science m eaning o f an already generalized analytical paradigm and how it is being respecified. Only then can the transfer stimulate a new way o f viewing the social phenomena which, guided by some rather abstract notions, may then trigger a process o f social science theory building. She concludes that in a number o f cases such stimulating and fruitful impulses for social theorizing have been received, especially when the social science problems have already been relatively well-structured. But generally speaking, social scientists have not been compelled to ask entirely new questions (Mayntz, 1992).

Why should it be different for friction?

The tentative answer I would venture lies in the epistemology of the social sciences having been tightly bound up with the process o f modernization and the tutelage o f the nation state. Social friction and the conflicts that went with it were perceived as forces that were to be minimized and that gradually were mastered to the extent that relative stabilization and internal pacification were the result under the constraints described above. The present situation no longer allows for such extrapolations from the past. Epistemologies are known to change in accordance with the overall cultural and social contexts in which their objects o f study are situated. "Epistemic drifts", as Aant Elzinga called it, occur. The present situation calls for, facilitates and has already engendered such a change in epistemic outlook. If there is indeed a convergence or better, co­

evolution taking place between scientific theories and societal development, societies are likely to change the role assigned to friction and their perception o f it. As a concept originating in the natural sciences it will seep into general and social science discourse and increase the readiness to explore disorderly phenomena in their own right and not merely as deviation from an ideal order. Discontinuities, as other social phenomena as well, become socially real when they are believed to be so. N on-govem ability, in comparison with previous experience, becomes an issue when the nation state is being re-dimensioned everywhere, while the market, although grossly over-rated, extends into ever new fields. Among the many unexpected and unpredicted repercussions recent events in Eastern Europe had both in the countries immediately involved as well as upon W estern Europe, the re-discovery o f friction m ight well be one o f the more remarkable and lasting effects. Civil wars and conflicts over territories in the name o f ethnic,

national and linguistic identities do not only show the inherent instabilities o f the present situation, where even the "falling apart" o f a previous nation cannot be achieved without terrible costs, but raise general questions under which conditions coupling m echanism s that link together independent dynamics function reasonable well and may give rise to self-organization.

Friction is one o f these mechanisms. In a similar way the global nature o f the ecological crisis supports the concept o f friction. Sustainable developm ent will never be reached through planning or through a world authority, but only by groping through many levels o f action and by m otivating millions o f human actors. N ature’s processes and human intervention have an enormous friction potential - but it need not draw us into endless turbulence.

Innovation o f any kind, although Schumpeter meant by it entrepreneurial activity, is indeed part o f a process o f "creative destruction". There is no reason either to condemn it nor to celebrate, as the social sciences often have done in the past. Attempting to take yet another moral stand will not get us very far. Nor should we fall into the other trap, as happened often before, and believe that solutions will be forthcoming by subjecting social systems to the rigour with which physical system s can be treated. To include friction into our ways o f seeing, theorizing and com m unicating about the world, entails first o f all the acknowledgement o f its destructive- creative potential. In the inherently instable systems o f which we are a living part both in the social and in the natural world, friction leads us through various states o f order in an ongoing processes o f transformation, while preventing complete destructiveness. To work with friction offers an epistem ic shift and fresh insights based upon it. Provided the concept o f friction remains empirically open and rooted in specific fields o f inquiry, it is sufficiently rich to lead to new questions in the social sciences that have a practical interest built into them in addition to the theoretical one. Perhaps most important o f all, friction offers a perspective to go beyond post- modernity in trying to make sense of the dodecaphonic (or whatever the number) voices around us. Not everything must, nor will it end, in the deconstruction o f sense, texts and the world at large. W orking with friction entails also the readiness to encounter surprises and to meet the unpredictable in what is, hopefully, a prepared way. There is a lot to be said for experiencing friction - as a pre-scientific im m ersion into a w idespread collective experience - in its destructive-creative potential in order to try to understand it better. Learning how to live with friction, while seeing its janus-face in a holographic perspective and not forgetting the potential it holds out for controlling and utilizing it, may after all be what is needed to guide us through post-modernity.