The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism PDF
Preview The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism
The FragiliTy oF Things The FragiliTy oF Things self- organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, and democratic activism William e. Connolly Duke university Press :: Durham anD LonDon :: 2013 © 2013 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ♾ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Connolly, William E. The fragility of things : self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, and democratic activism / William E. Connolly. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5570-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-5584-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Neoliberalism. 2. Economic policy. 3. Social policy. I. Title. JC574.C654 2013 320.51′3—dc23 2013018960 :: prelude 1755 • 1 ChaPter 1 Steps toward an Ecology of Late Capitalism • 20 :: first interlude Melancholia and Us • 43 ChaPter 2 Hayek, Neoliberalism, Freedom • 52 :: second interlude Modes of Self- Organization • 81 ChaPter 3 Shock Therapy, Dramatization, and Practical Wisdom • 98 ConTenTs :: third interlude Fullness and Vitality • 140 ChaPter 4 Process Philosophy and Planetary Politics • 149 :: postlude Role Experimentation and Democratic Activism • 179 acknowledgments • 197 notes • 201 bibliography • 225 index • 233 prelude :: 1755 It happened on a beautiful morning in November. It was All Saints Day in Lisbon; the faithful were gathered in churches across the city. The ground heaved. A minute later a more powerful and longer shock arrived, rum- bling, tossing, and shaking the city in waves. By the third shock most of the structures in the city had been destroyed, including the palace and churches. Thousands of people were dead. Lisbon, a jewel of Europe and home to immense riches of gold and diamonds secured through colonial exploitation, lay in ruins. A short time later a huge tsunami poured into the city, just when thousands of survivors had run to the harbor and river shore to escape the devastation. Thousands more were killed. And then a massive fire roared through the city, started mostly by timbers in church ceilings falling onto candles designed to honor God on this special day. It took thousands more victims with it, in the most agonizing way. One cap- tain, observing the events before the fire and from a distance in the harbor, described the events this way: Almost all the palaces and large churches were rent down. Or part fallen, and scarce one house of this vast city is left habitable. Every body that were not crushed to death ran out in large places, and those near the river ran down to save themselves by boats, or any other floating conve- niency, running, crying, and calling to the ships for assistance; but whilst the multitude were gathered near the river side, the water rose to such a height that it overcome and overflow’d the lower part of the city, which so terrified the miserable and already dismayed inhabitants, who ran to and fro with dreadful cries, which we heard plainly on board, it made them believe the dissolution of the world was at hand; every one falling on his knees, and intreating the almighty for his assistance.1 There was no science of tectonic plates available to those who survived or heard about this catastrophic event. They did not know that Lisbon, on the edge of the ocean, sat close to the conjunction of two large plates. There was no knowledge of how such plates rub together as they move slowly, setting up the probability of a future huge quake and tsunami. Indeed the science of tectonic plates did not advance very far until the 1930s. Yet it is doubtful how much difference such knowledge would have made to the populace, given what we know about the behavior of populations today in California, Chile, Haiti, and Japan. The interpretations and actions that followed this searing shock were different from those that later accompanied the Kobe quake, the Haitian disaster, the Japanese tsunami, and recurrent events along the San Andreas fault, though a listener might hear some similar chords. John Wesley, the renowned Protestant theologian in England, publicized the event eagerly as the punishment God imposed on carriers of a derelict Catholicism and a city wallowing in ill- gotten opulence. Many Jesuits treated the event as a dark harbinger of the Final Judgment, which would, they said, occur on the same date the next year. The local prime minister, a man soon to be named Lord Pombal, had the leading Jesuit propagator of this view im- prisoned, tortured, and eventually hanged. Pombal himself favored a natu- ralistic reading, though he had little idea what that would involve. He was hell- bent on rebuilding the city with structures that could withstand future 2 PreLuDe quakes and in convincing the king, who had taken flight with his entourage, to live there again. The king did eventually return, but he insisted on setting up a royal village of tents where his palace had been, and he lived in those tents for the rest of his life. He had lost trust in stone structures. Many be- lievers were disturbed that God could have allowed so many people to die who were honoring Him in church at that very moment, particularly when a bevy of criminals had escaped as they fled a damaged prison after the first shock and the prostitution district was largely spared. The quake, estimated today to have been between 8.5 and 9.0 on the Richter scale, was felt in northern Europe and northern Africa, the latter being hit hard by a tsunami. The aftershocks lasted months. The cultural aftershocks lasted a century, involving controversies between the Vatican, Protestant leaders, and new devotees of the Enlightenment. The debate was less securely contained by the Church than previous debates had been; each party found something in the shock of this massive suffering that called upon it to either modify its previous thinking or to intensify it to protect its creed from a disturbance that had shaken it. Kant himself wrote an early essay on it, and his later philosophy of the sublime is touched by the shock of this event.2 Voltaire, a leading figure of the burgeoning Enlightenment who had faced exile from and imprisonment in France for his unorthodox views, dramatized the quake in a way that assaulted, first, Catholic and Protes- tant theologies and, second, the philosophy of Leibniz that, as he saw it at least, comprehends all evils in this world as necessities serving a higher purpose. The event had provided a jolt to the earlier cosmic optimism he himself had felt. Voltaire’s poem “On the Lisbon Disaster,” written shortly after the event, expresses revulsion against both of these interpretations. Theologi- cal readings of the event as an instance of divine punishment aroused his indignation: Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh: “God is avenged; the wage of sin is death?” What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived That lie bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast? Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid? PreLuDe 3
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