SYNDESIS

Human labour and social infrastructures in contemporary capitalism 

It does not suffice to change the world. We do that anyway. And to a large extent that happens even without our involvement. In addition we have to interpret this change. Precisely in order to change it. So that the world does not change without us. And ultimately into a world without us.   
Anders G., Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2, 1980. 

In ancient Greek, the noun σύνδεσις (syndesis) means link, connection, the element which ties together and therefore connects and binds. This, both in the literal sense, for instance the fusion between two chemical substances, and in the figurative sense, meaning coordination or the ability to keep together. For example, Plato uses the verb συνδέω when he speaks of keeping the city together by seeking the common good. 

We have chosen this term because it effectively represents the direction in which we intend to move with our editorial project, which is to focus on the ways in which social connectivity has been historically configured. Our aim is to promote research, investigations and reflections on capitalism, broadly conceived of as an institutionalized social order, in the context of which what needs to be highlighted is the constant interaction and contradiction between the economy and the heterogeneous dimensions (both material and immaterial) of social reproduction. 

This editorial project has taken shape through a sociological research workshop having the concept of infrastructure as its common denominator. Infrastructures, in the literal sense, play a decisive role in the forms of life of contemporary capitalism: they bind together, connect, constrain and make possible the coordinated organization of the social field. Characterized by specific material, technical and organizational properties, they feed and distribute enormous flows of goods, people, data, images and so on. They are necessary sociotechnical tools of our forms of life. At the same time, due to their pervasive extension and the systemic synchronization, our forms of everyday life are deeply framed by infrastructures’ logics and codes. 

Thus, infrastructures are both means we use to do things and devices making something of us, of our social life. They are man-made and man-making sociotechnical systems. They combine elements of visibility (roads, pipelines, railways) and of invisibility, as they incorporate (and exclude) enormous amounts of knowledge and judgements, in the form of codes, standards, algorithms, etc. These aspects are inseparable from the social processes which have given form to infrastructures, making them work and transforming them, as well as from the symbolic and representational systems which give them sense, or from the coordinates, based in time and space, which make them social facts. This in an overall circular process whereby infrastructures are objects and actors of change at the same time. In other words, we may say that it is the whole social life which is based on infrastructures, as they are both material objects and relational logics ensuring, in different historical forms, the framework of connectivity that society needs.  

In this sense, SYNDESIS is characterized more by the perspective it adopts than by the specific object or phenomenon inquired in each of its instances. The project focuses on (interactions, contradictions of) material and symbolic dimensions of such objects and phenomena. Since both infrastructures of material life and infrastructures of experience are historically determinate, they will be analyzed through different perspectives, languages, research techniques, developing a constant conversation among different disciplines and vocabularies. Through the very days in which this project was taking shape, the forms of life we were accustomed to were deeply affected by an event: the Covid-19 outbreak. This pandemic is not a sudden event. On the contrary, it is the symptom (one of the many) of an epistemologically wrong, socially unfair and self-destructive model of development in the world-ecology. This situation has made even more evident the need for a radical (in its etymological sense: going to the root) change of the social organization, of the infrastructures framing this organization and of the relationship between human and non-human nature. The scenario of great uncertainty in which our lives have nowadays been dramatically relocated, the human costs the pandemic it has entailed and will entail and the search for a deep collective rethinking of our societies cannot but be reflected in our scientific and cultural activities. This editorial project, however limited its effects may be, intends to be (also) a way of partaking in this collective process of transformation. 

SYNDESIS is a project of the International Centre for Documentation and Sociological Studies on Labour Problems (CIDOSPEL) of the Department of Sociology and Business Law of the University of Bologna.