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.
Mark Carrigan 