disregarding individuals

I'm reading Duncan J. Watts' marvelous book Six Degrees (the book that's impacted me the most in the last decade, vitally important to anyone studying the interaction of social forces of any sort, just buy the damn thing already) as a palate refresher after the DeLanda (which, prose-wise, is like eating a full French meal...good but real work to get through). Watts is great, but there's still areas to expand:

in real world social networks, individuals possess social identities. By belonging to certain groups and playing certain roles, individuals acquire characteristics that make them more or less likely to interact with one another. Social identity, in other words, drives the creation of social networks. (116)

Okay, fine, nothing to argue about here. However, when he discusses social networks, it's always in terms of "affiliation networks [which] always consist of two types of nodes--let us call them actors and groups (119). And he goes on to do many insightful, clever, and remarkable things with the formation of these groups. Amongst the most refreshing is Watts' willingness to look beyond competition, coercion, human agency, and all that, instead focusing on how some patterns inevitably emerge unbidden.

There are marvelous ramifications here, and I will get to them. However, my thoughts at this point are on how I can use all of this. Yes, individuals are major players in groups. Yes, people join groups due to affiliations. But what about the cause of that affiliation?

Example: We can study how people's membership in, say, heavy metal changes based on the changing nature of heavy metal. We can study how heavy metal changes based on the number/growwth of/interactions between its members. But what happens if we just want to look at heavy metal as an entity unto itself? What happens when we move up in scale, away from the level of human group members?

One thing DeLanda was quite clear on is that you can successfully move up in levels of assemblage and still use the same theoretical constructs, the same language, the same tools. Yes, a town market is an assemblage of individual vendors. But it is itself part of a larger assemblage, a regional market....which is part of a national market. When you're dealing with a larger scale economy, you don't necessarily have to consider the person in charge of it as a driving entity.

However, DeLanda seems tied to the fact that someone will necessarily be in charge. Yes, the personality of the CEO of Proctor & Gamble might or might not be a major driving force in that company's status...but the corporate structure, the hierarchical positions themselves still are in charge in his schema.

I want to get away from that level of agency, and I think that Watts will allow me to do that. On the other hand, DeLanda allows me to get away from the level of individual actors that Watts seems to like.

Popular Culture is an assemblage...but it is an assemblage of things that are more forces than structures. Heavy metal might have had a certain tie to the music industrial structure and to television broadcasting (would we have had 80s metal if not for MTV?), true, but more than that, it is a cultural force unto itself, and it drives the metal culture rather than being driven by it. It interacts with other cultural forces, such as other musics/subcultures, the culture industry, political forces, and so forth. If we really want to understand culture, we have to look at the interaction of forces, and we have to be able to, while not abandoning them entirely, look beyond traditional politics, economics, structure, and agency.