Beyond Dualism: Cultivating the Quality without a Name
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person's story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive (Alexander 1979, ix-x).
The vision of Metabolic Sociology is to bring into sociology — and, ultimately, into societies — what the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander (1979) called “the quality without a name.” This means confronting a problem at the foundation of the discipline itself. Sociology has been built on a series of dualisms — male/female, people of color/white, upper/lower class, high culture/popular or sub-culture, East/West — that trace back to modernity, a concept that only makes sense in opposition to “tradition.” The same dualism runs through the division between theory and practice in science. These dualisms are so deeply embedded in the discipline that it has become almost impossible to study society without invoking one or more of them.
Metabolic Sociology treats these dualisms as more than analytic tools for naming and resisting the real relations of power that oppress us. They are also a worldview — one that our efforts to resist can end up reproducing. Our aim is not simply to de-center the subject, nor to adopt post-structuralist theories that describe alternative worldviews. It is to mediate the unstable, ambivalent, complex space in between, through everyday practice — which alone can infuse rigid social structures and extractive political-economic systems with what Alexander described as “the quality without a name.”
This aim resonates with what the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) calls transformative change for a just and sustainable world. Central to this is a vision of culture not as the possession of any single ethnic-linguistic group, nation, or even humanity alone, but as part of what the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment calls cultural ecosystem services — the “intangible and non-material benefits that people enjoy from ecosystems” (McElwee et al., 2019, 1): a sense of place, inspiration, and knowledge that arise from the ongoing interaction of humans and non-humans in a shared environment that makes life on earth possible.
Metabolic Sociology envisions a future in which biocultural diversity thrives as each person becomes shutai — not a fixed identity, but an active participant capable of perceiving and transforming, rather than merely enduring, the structures around them. It is through this becoming that everyday, creative, and historical practice can infuse those structures with “the quality without a name.”
From Biographical History to Socio-Ecological World-Making
To realize this vision, the mission of Metabolic Sociology is to build a sociology that recognizes every person — including the social scientist — as irreducibly situated: shaped by a particular time, place, body, and history that cannot be abstracted away. To be human is to never quite coincide with the structures and systems one inhabits — never fully at rest within them — and it is precisely this gap that is not only the source of creativity but also the seed of a just and sustainable world.
Metabolic Sociology takes this condition as its starting point for a self-reflexive inquiry, and it proceeds by putting physically-engaged practice at the center of its discipline: walking through a place, discovering its history, getting to know the people who live and work there, and learning how their activities shape — and are shaped by — their environment. The practice helps each person arrive at a kind of knowing no book, lecture, or article could offer. That knowing is unique to whoever undertakes it, constituted within an ever-deepening relationship with one’s environment.
Sociological knowledge, in this view, is never abstract or impersonal: it carries the biographical histories of shutai, each one an ongoing struggle to release tensions, discover workarounds, and adapt to — and with — one’s environment. This biographical and historical connection to the environment matters: without it, the environment becomes a dead object, severed from human and non-human lives, relationships, subsistence, health, and memory.
It is for this reason that Metabolic Sociology treats physically-engaged, everyday practice as central — not only to understanding people and their relationships to human and non-human others, but to actively building and improving them. My website and the pedagogical resources I have built or plan to build alongside it — syllabi, a story-map, a forthcoming book, and an app — are examples of this practice: reflexive engagement with the environment, and the knowledge that grows out of it. This knowledge does not simply describe the world — it guides the ongoing exchange between biographical history and the environments that shape us and that we, in turn, shape: one walk, one story, one project at a time. This is how Metabolic Sociology works toward transformative change.