The late 2020s as the final act of modernity

In The Reflexive Imperative Margaret Archer tells an initially slightly counter-intuitive story about modernity in terms of an accumulating struggle from which ever fewer people are able to insulate themselves. Her arguments rests on an understanding of how social and cultural change was encountered and responded to by differently positioned groups. For some it cast them in a position of protecting what was slipping away. For others it created the challenge of creating something new after change was forced upon them. The different interests of groups, as well as the changing ways in which they interpret those interests, leads increasing numbers to act in pursuit of those (often mutually exclusive interests) with important conequences:

Firstly, that these initial manifestations of competitive contradictions spread to affect all social institutions – in state and civil society alike – where the actions of collective agents were a spur to acquire organisation and to articulate goals on the part of disgruntled primary agents, as I have analysed at length for education. Secondly, that this spelt increasing mobilisation of greater and greater sections of the population, though far from the majority.

Reflexive Imperative Pg 27

In other words the more groups organise themselves in pursuit of their interests, the more imperative it becomes for inactive groups to defend interests that might have until then only been latently recognised. There’s a spiral of mobilisation which happens patchily and unevenly but creates a long-term tendency to ever increasing collective activity. I think we can see the depoliticisation of late stage neoliberalism as a temporary interregnum in which countervailing forces engendered a new radicalisation but that, as Richard Hames puts it:

There was this period we talked about a lot of a very rapid atomisation from the late 60s through to the 90s and early 00s. My sense is that the internet has reversed some of that, people have stitched themselves back together in new kinds of ways. That has happened in a context where there hasn’t been much political organising on the ground, but there has been a lot of political ideas and people have attached themselves to them.

In essence social platforms offered a new infrastructure through which this tendency towards mobilisation could begin a spiral of acceleration. Archer wrote in 2012 that “Those who decline such personal involvement could remain temporarily untouched by these struggles and their associated situational logic of competition … for the time being” (pg 31). The psychic counterpart to this is what Zizek once described as the desire for “floating freely in my undisturbed balance”. It’s a fantasy of being insulated from struggle, being above the fray in an individually sovereign life which will remain undisturbed by social antagonism. That’s exactly what Covid briefly ruptured for everyone, to at least some degree.

It’s what now becomes decreasingly possible for anyone in late 2025 as the far-right rises globally. It makes me suddenly wonder if rather than seeing a social formation beyond modernity, we are instead seeing something more like the final act of the modern story. Which again brings me back to my morbid but necessary preoccupation with the explosion of antagonism which the coming crisis will inevitably bring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa0x3c42pXw

#antagonism #archer #capitalism #collectiveAgency #crisis #criticalRealism #economicCrash #modernity #reflexiveImperative

Murakami on the reflexive imperative as you age

From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, pg 37

I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance. I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself.

From pg 86:

So anyway, my muscles right now are really tight, and stretching doesn’t loosen them up. I’m peaking in terms of training, but even so they’re tighter than usual. Sometimes I have to hit my legs with a fist when they get tight to loosen them up. (Yes, it hurts.) My muscles can be as stubborn as— or more stubborn than—I am. They remember things and endure, and to some extent they improve. But they never compromise. They don’t give up. This is my body, with all its limits and quirks. Just as with my face, even if I don’t like it it’s the only one I get, so I’ve got to make do. As I’ve grown older, I’ve naturally come to terms with this. You open the fridge and can make a nice—actually even a pretty smart—meal with the leftovers. All that’s left is an apple, an onion, cheese, and eggs, but you don’t complain. You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.

From pg 153:

Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can’t pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you’d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have

#ageing #Murakami #reflexiveImperative #reflexivity #running

The Covid-19 pandemic as a social mechanism driving biographical change

This line from Lucy Easthope’s new book (pg 4) reminds me of the paper I never finished about Covid-19 as a reflexive imperative in Margaret Archer’s sense i.e. an event to which everyone has no choice but to respond, even if those responses might differ in dramatic ways:

The long, difficult years of the coronavirus pandemic and the global lockdown showed that disasters don’t just happen to other people. Every one of us experienced the pandemic differently and with different types of loss. But all of our lives were bent out of their normal shapes by something over which we had no control.

In this sense I think we need to see it as the immediate context for pretty much anything micro-social* we examine in our present circumstances. There’s a deeper sense of disruption she describes on pg 36 which was less evenly distributed through the population:

Most people will experience unwanted change or loss at some point int heir lives. Sometimes it will feel very surmountable, but at other times it will divide our lives into the time before and the time after. This can be true of events, but it can also be true of feelings and relationships. You can forget that help and allegiance and ways to get through are out there, that there is light in the dark.

*Macro-socially too, but in a different way.

#Covid19 #crisis #disaster #LucyEasthope #pandemic #postPandemicCivics #reflexiveImperative