Concetti socio-materiali e critica sociale

The development of ICT has important consequences on social experience and on the processes of subjectivation. These changes have contributed to undermining some assumptions of sociological theory, such as the status of subject and object of knowledge, the concepts of actor, action and the social, the conditions of possibility of social criticism. The paper reconstructs some of the main logic of transformation of these assumptions, moving from a discussion of L. Gallino’s theses on the relationship between subjectivity, socio-technical change of the web, changes in the elaboration of knowledge and new forms of social criticism. It shows how the epistemic shift generated by these changes leads to an anti-essentialist critique of sociological categories. In this line some critical potentialities of the Actor-Network Theory concepts, of the Goffmanian category of frame and of the infra-empirical perspective proposed by the socio-analysis are shown.