we need to think about the spaces where engagement will happen: engagement that drives widespread reflection on who we are as a society and who we want to be, and leave the question of social models rather open. How do we seed these spaces? How do we scale them? The question of where these spaces are is more important than what they will produce.
Prem, how good to hear from you. I wish you well for the upcoming year.
Concerning emergence, alas, it was the great idea of the 1990s and early 2000s, which a large number of networked political movements took as their "principle of hope" (to quote Ernst Bloch). The keyword of that whole period, for social movements, was "self-organization," which we hoped would revitalize democracy by overcoming the structural devices of social control. But strategic moves by large-scale actors proved to be enough to dissipate emergent attempts to spark social reflection. This became devastatingly clear at the moment of the global street protests against the impending Iraq invasion in 2003, which were just brushed aside by the American state. Later in 2005, during the self-organized protests against the G8 in Geneagles, Scotland, a terrorist attack in the London underground focused all media attention and made the protest movements simply vanish from public awareness. Emergence had been "pre-empted," to use another of the keywords from that time.
Nowadays I continue to find the theories of emergence valuable, as a better description of how innovation takes place within and alongside complex organizations. But it seems that emergent phenomena can be analyzed statistically, and once their composition and properties are more or less known, large-scale actors (state or corporate) can reshape the conditions of emergence in order to reassert social control. It is precisely because I lived through this experience that I have returned to asking questions about the state and civil society. It seems clear that major changes of course require the alignment of institutional priorities and the coordinated exercise of both coercion and incentivization. Emergent phenomena remain marginal, even insignificant, without access to the modernist techniques of social steering. And so the great innovative question, "How to dissolve state power?" has been set aside, in favor of the dauntingly traditional one: "How to take state power?"
The current thread takes the US conditions as an example, but there could be many others and everyone is free to chip in on the basis of their local or regional situation. The whole world is at a turning point, due to the consolidation of oligarchical control over the global political economy and the contradictory need to replace fossil fuels, which have been the literal power-source of capitalism over the last two centuries. Practically everywhere in the developed world one sees the influence of a popular nostalgia for twentieth-century industrial prosperity, with all its attendant hierarchies and oppressions - a nostalgia instrumentalized by neo-authoritarian political forces. These forces have been startlingly effective over the last few years, but people are now mobilizing against them.
The theory of emergence can help one to spot new social phenomena in statu nascendi, and in that sense, your focus on where reflection and engagement begin to happen is quite valuable. I agree, asking where social innovation happens, and attending to exactly what is heppening there, is a necessary starting point. However, emergence on its own appears useless as a principle of hope. And so is any return to the strategies and organizational forms of the 1930s. New social and ecological ideals are effectively emerging. This discussion is about identifying them, and simultaneously, looking ahead to find ways of implementing them in reality. Concepts such as "vision" and "model" - or for that matter, "strategy" - may appear constrictive by comparison to the molecular ferment of emergent behavior, but if you want to see any implementation at scale, they remain crucial. How to share a vision? How to embody a model? How to carry out a strategy? I think the future hangs in the balance of those questions.
best, Brian