Turn to Relations

Abstract

This chapter discusses the challenge presented by relational thought to familiar and common sociological categories. In particular, it argues for a specific kind of relational approach that it calls rhizomatic and explicates the ways in which it revises the prevailing — still dominantly substantialist — sociological imagination. Rhizomatic sociology conceptualizes the relational field in terms of ‘lines’ and associations of various kinds. What is more, it places emphasis on constant modulation, multiplicities and the connectivity of heterogeneous entities, be they organic or non-organic, human or non-human. The chapter also explores how the establishing of connections is always accompanied by exclusion and disconnection and touches on the issue of how entities are irreducible to their actual relations and yet they are constituted by relations.