I’ve found James Meadway’s account of how instability and volatility have become necessary features of the environment immensely thought provoking, particularly with regards to how this troubles the mainstream categories of economic analysis:
The difficulty we face, collectively, is that natural disorder of the kind presented by covid is only likely to get worse as the stable environment shifts away from us, in both directions: upsetting both the rhythms of production and disrupting the conditions under which social reproduction can occur. There is a lesser order of this problem in the Western economies: economic models, and economic policy, developed for a world in which the environment itself was taken as read are no longer fit for a world in which that assumption does not apply. The kind of permanent instability and volatility of the background conditions on which human economic activity depends do not feature in standard models of, for example, the macroeconomy; and for the period of time that economics has existed as a field of human knowledge, this has been a reasonable assumption to make. Costs and conditions of production would be stable over time, subject only to the fundamental forces of either declining marginal productivity, or increasing returns to knowledge.
https://jamesmeadway.substack.com/p/material-roots-the-end-of-hegemony?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
We can ask similar questions of social analysis more broadly. It’s not enough to simply recognise the empirical fact of recurrent shocks because latent homeostatic assumptions can be found across a range of sociological frameworks, problematics and concepts e.g. how does the problem of social order look once we concede this point?
Even within digital education as a much narrower and applied field of inquiry, we can see the implications of this. To think sociologically about educational technology is to think contextually about it, which entails recognising how “permanent instability and volatility” are now features of that context. This means that narrowly instrumental studies of whether a technology ‘works’ become even more limited because they fail to account for (a) the impermanence of contextual conditions of being assumed (b) the capacity of interventions to in fact contribute to that impermanence through their climatic externalities.
Meadway makes a very plausible argument about the macro-social instability which are seeing emerge, which I’d much rather put it in a systems vocabulary: the capacity to self-stabilise is breaking down at all levels of the global system at precisely the point where we face conditions which require it more than ever:
The consequences of this shift the locus of collective human agency, from the nation-state and the system of nation-states, towards something more chaotic and uncontrolled, is suggests the opening of a period of profound disorder in human affairs. What Charles Tilly called the “master process” of the modern era, “the creation of a system of national states and the formation of a worldwide capitalist system”,[xv] is significantly challenged: neither the nation-state, as guarantor of domestic security, nor the world-system, as guarantor of external harmony, are likely to function as we have become used to. Fundamental elements of the global economy, including the formation of a hegemonic “world money”[xvi] as an organising point for the formation of global markets, are presently being thrown into substantial question by a combination of war, supply shocks, and a shift in the balance of economic power eastwards
The vague project I’m stumbling towards labelled ‘dying world’ on this blog wants to explore what this means in existential terms because of the role futurity tends to play in meaning. But far from being phenomenological forth on a sea of real events, I think this matters intensely because how this plays out as individual psychodrama is the foundation on which collective responses will be made or broken.
Mark Carrigan 