Fields, Worlds and Figurations: Using Elias to Revisit Depth Conceptual Imagery and Emancipatory Critique

Abstract

We centrally explore the significance of conceptual imagery, particularly ideas of ‘depth’ and its relationship to ideals of critique, emancipatory action, and conceptions of social structure and action. We consider how depth imagery is invoked in critiques of sociological thinkers understood to employ ‘flat’ social ontologies. We develop a three-way comparison between Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘field,’ Howard Becker’s ‘world,’ and Norbert Elias’s ‘figuration’ to argue that not only is the ‘flatness’ charge unwarranted in the case of Becker’s and Elias’s ontologies, but the axioms upon which it is made are static, substantialist, and reductively mechanistic. Drawing on the work of Elias, we consider the merits of alternative more dynamically oriented conceptual imagery, reflecting upon its implications for how we might revisit the ‘politics’ of figurational sociology and understandings of emancipatory critique more generally.