I was initially extremely sceptical of Tony Lawson’s concept of eudaimonic bubbles, particularly in so far as that an intellectual community could be conceived of as taking on a quasi-bounded quality in the manner he’s suggesting:
That answer I defend or explore involves the creation of wider-community-specific flourishing-facilitating contingently protected sub-communities that I refer to as eudaimonic bubbles.
As the metaphor suggests I mean relatively advantageous, if often precarious, conditions in which sub-communities can insulate themselves, relatively speaking, from specific sets of dehumanising or oppressive features characteristic of the wider community within which they are located.
Clearly all sub-communities share much of the social structure of wider embedding communities. But in some cases a sub-community or bubble may emerge that is successfully oriented to achieving a specific set of goals that are perceived as essential to, or highly consistent with, human flourishing, that are difficult and usually impossible to achieve consistently in the wider community.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-49469-2_11
I understand the point to be that a bubble emerges where a group can do something valuable together which they can’t (consistently) do in their wider milieu. But I just found the metaphor of the bubble utterly opaque as a way of describing something which is, by definition, a matter of the relational structure of the group. It makes it difficult to answer the questions which Tony raises in the same chapter, because ‘bubbleness’ as an exterior quality which suddenly comes into being implies a binary logic, as opposed to the relational logic involved in approaching this from Archer and Donati’s perspective:
If despite everything eudaimonic bubbles of relatively localised, if usually precarious and often temporary, flourishing keep appearing, my question is what governs their emergence and relative survival. Are there conditions common to successful cases? And given the wider project to which I am contributing, how, if at all, do processes of morphogenesis contribute? My suspicion is that there is no systematic answer, and that much depends on context.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-49469-2_11
But as a normative concept this has grown on me a lot. It captures the idea that what Stafford Beer once described to his daughter as ‘finding and holding onto one’s own cosmic slice’, can be a collective undertaking. Even if the bubbleness invoked by Tony is an imaginary entity, in this case postulated about an intellectual community which is literally formed around him and his work, it’s still a powerful notion normatively. It could be used to convey a collective aspiration, potentially a slightly defensive one (do we need bubbles if the world beyond isn’t so hostile to flourishing?) but valuable nonetheless.
Mark Carrigan 