The Future and Its Enemies: In Defense of Political Hope 9780804782210

Citation preview

praise for The Future and Its Enemies “Thanks to its clear analyses and its multiple avenues of inquiry, this essay points the way to a new democratic lucidity.” ­—Pierre Rosanvallon, Libération “The future no longer holds meaning for societies in thrall to the present. And in this present devoid of meaning, we have as much trouble accepting the legacy of the past as we do envisaging collective action that would take us beyond ourselves. We’re obsessed by the here and now and incapable of making plans that would engage us and the future of society as a whole. Without a vision of what is yet to come, and without the will to endow it with meaning, we are reduced to the insignificance of our moment, that of a present ignorant of both its past and future.” ­­—Dominque Schnapper, EHESS “In this fascinating inquiry into how our image of the future has changed and into the consequences of this modification for democracy, Innerarity explores the challenges of post-heroic politics and the prospect for reclaiming hope as part of transformative politics. The Future and Its ­Enemies enriches our democratic imagination with new vistas.” —Alessandro Ferrara, University of Rome “As we have increasingly accelerated our transformation of the present, the future has slowly disappeared. Daniel Innerarity ferrets out this future. Against those who define themselves as postmodern, he discovers a world of hope and of controlled transformations. After so many ideologies and somber philosophies that forbid us any future, Daniel Innerarity allows us, and even imposes upon us, an optimism that is also our freedom.” ­—Alain Touraine, EHESS

Cultural Memory in the Present Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

The Future and Its Enemies In Defense of Political Hope

Daniel Innerarity

Translated by Sandra Kingery

stanford university press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation ©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. The Future and Its Enemies was originally published in Spanish under the title El futuro y sus enemigos © Daniel Innerarity, 2009. © Ediciones Paidós, 2009. Avda. Diagonal 662–664, Barcelona 08034 (Spain). This work has been published with a subsidy from the Directorate General of Books, Archives and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Innerarity, Daniel, 1959- author. [Futuro y sus enemigos. English] The future and its enemies : in defense of political hope / Daniel Innerarity ; translated by Sandra Kingery. pages cm--(Cultural memory in the present) Translation of: El futuro y sus enemigos / Daniel Innerarity. Barcelona : Paidós, 2009. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8047-7556-4 (cloth : alk. paper)--ISBN 978-0-8047-7557-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Political science--Philosophy. 2. Future, The--Political aspects. 3. Social prediction. I. Kingery, Sandra, 1964- translator. II. Title. III. Series: Cultural memory in the present. JA71.I55513 2012 2012007611 320.01--dc23 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

To my brother Pablo, who hopes no longer, who now simply awaits our arrival

Contents

Introduction: The Future Taken Seriously

1

1. The Future of Democratic Societies: A Theory of Intergenerational Justice

7

2. The Temporal Landscape of Contemporary Society: A Theory of Acceleration

23

3. How Do We Know the Future? A Theory of Future Studies

34

4. How Is the Future Decided? A Theory of Decision

49

5. Who Is in Charge of the Future? A Theory of Responsibility

64

6. Chronopolitics: A Theory of Social Rhythm

77

7. Politics in a Post-Heroic Society: A Theory of Political Contingency

90

8. The Political Construction of Collective Hope

108

Bibliography

127

Introduction The Future Taken Seriously

Humans are unique in the realm of living beings in knowing there is a future. If people experience worry and hope, it is because they realize the future exists, that it can be better or worse, and that the outcome depends to some extent on them. But having this knowledge does not imply that they know what to do with it. People often repress their awareness of the future because thinking about it distorts the comfort of the now, which tends to be more powerful than the future because it is present and because it is certain. The future, on the other hand, must be imagined in advance and, for that very reason, is always uncertain. Getting along with the future is not an easy task, nor is it one in which instinct prevents us from blunders. That is why we so often have a poor relationship with the future and are either more fearful than we need to be or allow ourselves to hope against all evidence; we worry excessively or not enough; we fail to predict the future or to shape it as much as we are able. Something similar happens to societies. They too need to develop the capacity to see beyond the present moment, and their ability to do so varies as well. Much of our discomfort and our limited collective rationality stems from the fact that democratic societies do not enjoy a good working relationship with the future. In the first place, this is because the whole political system and the culture in general are devoted to the immediate present and because our relationship with the collective future is not based on hope and planning, but on precaution and improvisation. The future became a part of our agenda in the 1970s, but less as a possibility to be shaped than as a problematic reality: limits to growth and dismal environmental

   Introduction developments demanded attention, risk factors were weighed, the whole idea of progress was found to be in crisis. People tend to respond skeptically when they are pushed to achieve difficult, distant goals, and politicians make the expedient choice of allowing their constituents to take the lead in these matters. We react in numerous ways that place the future in social jeopardy, and we end up performing a true act of temporal expropriation against coming generations. It is obvious that we are no longer in the era of triumphant modernity that disciplined the future through technological innovations, the methodical investigation of nature, and the codification of laws and bureau­cratically organized institutions. At present, the techniques that were designed by modern societies to manage the future seem useless. It is not that the future used to be better, as Karl Valentin noted ironically, but it was certainly clearer. There are many factors explaining why the old certainties regarding the future have been lost. The experience of accelerated change creates discomfort, but greater discomfort stems from knowing that that very acceleration makes our capacity to meaningfully shape the future even more problematic. Our relationship with the future is now more complex, less naïve. A risk society needs other means of prediction to stop the future from slipping irremediably from our hands. The goal of this book is to contribute to a new theory of the most salient aspects of social time: how does society relate to its future, and how does it predict, determine, and configure it? From there, we will draw a series of conclusions that will help us reassess how we conceive of and carry out political action. Evaluating the use that societies make of the future is key to developing a critical theory of society. All social theory today should be a theory of time, particularly of the way we employ the future, because our current political crisis corresponds to a crisis of the future and its growing indecipherability. The transformation that democratic societies require will come hand in hand with a willingness to consider the future as their most interesting sphere of influence. This will be true if we establish appropriate methods of freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the short term and open ourselves toward the more ambitious horizon of the long term. That was the task Max Weber assigned to politics: it must manage and take responsibility for the future. Doing so requires us to incorporate ways of thinking that allow for a reasonable consideration of the long term, beyond simple projections or implausible scenarios.

The Future Taken Seriously    Ultimately, our current challenge is nothing less than a restructuring of time in an age of globalization. The principal task for democratic political systems is to reach an agreement among past legacies, present priorities, and the challenges of the future. It is no coincidence that the crisis of democracy is taking place at a time when its ability to carry out this rapprochement is more uncertain. Time, devoid of all organizational criteria, parades past us, and we take our place within it with cynical opportunism or gloomy acceptance, compensating our lack of effectiveness with superficial uprisings, replacing hope with the useless evocation of that which is completely other. Contemporary societies must work with time because, in order to secure their own survival and well-being, they must increasingly include the future in their calculations. But designs for the future are scarce. The future has poor advocates in the present, and it suffers from chronic weakness. The problem with our democracies is that our political antagonisms are bound to the present. We live at the expense of the future; our relationship to it is completely irresponsible. The logic of the short term and of “just in time” is revealed through very diverse phenomena: we see the hegemony of financial market strategies being imposed on other areas of the economy; we see the pressure exerted by media deadlines and the political system’s troubling inability to challenge these time frames; we see the sensationalism that prioritizes spectacular or catastrophic events over the measured support of long-term developments; we find the instantaneist conception of democracy manifest in the fact that political decisions are tied to electoral time frames. The logic of the urgent undermines our relationship with time, which is always dependent on the present moment. This is the context in which we inscribe our societies’ lack of collective ambition, the exhaustion of desire, our widespread fear, our retreat on the question of individual interests, and our lack of perspective. One could say that process has triumphed over planning and that we favor an outlook that is post- (postmodern, post-expressionist . . . ) rather than pro- (pro­ active, project-oriented . . . ). Anticipatory behaviors seem to favor prevention and precaution rather than planning and preparation. That temporal shortsighted­ness is affecting our ability to represent the future. It is not that urgency stands in the way of elaborating long-term plans, but our absence of plans subjugates us to the tyranny of the present. Contemporary activity and the endless adaptation to change that is required of us are

   Introduction e­ xperienced through a prism of survival, not of hope. Since, as it is said, the “grand narratives” have died out, their place has been filled by a defense of “acquired rights.” The opening that was meant to accommodate the visualization of the future has been overrun by concern about our current moment. When one does not prepare for the future, the political system is reduced to managing the present. Who then should be exposed as enemies of the future? It is worth noting that the future’s enemies must first be uncovered among those who would seem to be its most fervent supporters. They are found anywhere the future is trivialized and amid those who promote unproductive accelerations with no concern for the costs of modernization. Attacks on the future are launched from the most diverse trenches, and counterattacks come from unsuspected authorities. A good deal of the rhetoric of innovation, for example, constitutes a trivialization of the future when it is not inserted into a meaningful social context. The future is discussed pervasively, with an extensive range of meanings, including instances where what is being referenced is actually the precise opposite of future: attempts are made to invoke the future as a clear and insistent force to which we must yield. The fact is that if there is true future, we should be confronting something unknown and surprising, but this does not seem to be the case with a certain rhetoric of innovation that makes use of the language of necessity. This expansionistic use of the term “future” derives from the fact that the technical and commercial meanings of the word have taken over. There is the sense that future planning is only realized nowadays through technological promises or forecasts of economic growth. If modernist utopias regarded the future fundamentally in terms of social innovation, our current rhetoric about the future seems to have restricted it to the areas of technological innovation or expansive marketplaces. The future is frequently associated with acceleration. Seen thus, a late arrival on the merry-go-round of competition implies an immediate lack of future. The psychological and social complexity of human time has been enormously simplified in this way. It is immediately apparent that this point of view confronts us with a choice between acceleration and deceleration, considerably reducing our true options. Acceleration does not constitute a “catching-up” to the future but is, instead, one of its principal enemies. In addition to the choice between acceleration and decelera-

The Future Taken Seriously    tion, there is the choice between true and false motion, which suggests that sometimes an increase in speed can be a sign of confusion, while reflection may lay the groundwork for more profound change. The future must also always be distinguished from its mere appearance. Only in that way can we explain, for example, the paradox that highly destructive technologies can be presented as bearers of the future, while environmentally friendly strategies, which serve to assure the future, may appear to be conservative in nature. This explains the widespread sensation that the acceleration of social time is not truly significant since it merely constitutes a false mobility. It is simply forward motion that conceals an incapacity to confront needed reforms and to shape our collective future. For that reason, confronting false motion is one of our most important critical tasks. The future’s worst enemies also include those who insist on neutralizing its open and unpredictable nature at all costs. The best cognitive and practical strategies in recent years have been specifically articulated in models that respect the opaque and inaccessible nature of the future. Concepts such as resilience, risk, emergency, or governance have been suggested in response to the failure of deterministic planning, but the goal of finding an intelligent and responsible way of managing the future has not been renounced. It is a question of rethinking the future as a place of liberty, a hypothesis, or a promise, not as a decisive reality. The best evidence we have of this is the fact that the past is full of futures that were never realized. We need only examine the futurology that was practiced at any time in the past to confirm that the majority of its predictions and promises were ­unsuccessful. The fact that reality disappoints us in this way is what makes it susceptible to human configuring. From this perspective, the future’s current enemies would not be the people who try to stop us from advancing toward a particular future that dogmatic progressivism helps us envision clearly. Instead, the enemies of the future are the people who conceive of it without taking its complexity seriously, those who handle it thoughtlessly (either because they view it as a mere continuation or because they mortgage it recklessly), those who plan it without respecting its opaqueness, but also those who comfortably accept the supposed natural progression of things. If that is true, then we should reformulate the political antagonism that has, since the beginning of the modern era, been fixed into a right-left duality defined on the basis of the perceived progress of history.

   Introduction ­

Progressives and conservatives exist along the entire length of the political spectrum, and reactionaries on both ends often form coalitions to defend themselves against the unknown. Moreover, champions of the right and left sometimes compromise in order to embrace the future without excessive concern about eliminating its least manageable aspects. What is ideologically crucial at the present time is not whether one defines oneself in terms of progress or status quo, but in terms of the contrast between movement toward the future and movement that is not going anywhere. The future is no longer forged by a struggle against those who defend the past, but against those who appear to be on one’s side and who defend the future, but do so poorly. Nowadays, progressivism is found wherever processes are put into effect to shape the unknown future and whenever uncertainty is managed responsibly. There are, however, new disparities that give way to ideological divides that go beyond the labels currently in use; these are not the comfortable distinctions of traditional parliamentary topography or the geostrategic labels of the cold war. They serve only to perpetuate current models of government and its critics. The following pages defend a politics of optimism and hope at a time when confidence in the malleability of the future has been undermined. They were written in opposition to the belief that the world is beyond understanding or configuration. What we need is a political system that makes the future its fundamental task, determined to keep actions from becoming insignificant reactions and plans from degenerating into utopian idealism. •   •   •

This book stems from a course that Eric Marquer offered me the opportunity to teach at the University of the Sorbonne (Paris I) during the 2007–2008 academic year. I also owe a great deal to my colleague Serge Champeau and to Frédéric Joly, from Éditions Climats-Flammarion. Their kindnesses far exceed the simple conventions of reciprocity.

1 The Future of Democratic Societies A Theory of Intergenerational Justice

Human beings must establish a working relationship with the future in order to carry out projects that go beyond the present moment. The same is true for societies, which must be able to interact intelligently with the future if they wish to articulate collective criteria such as forecasting and predictions or group emotions such as hope and fear, desire and expectations, in a reasonable manner. The struggles confronting society when it tries to think about its purpose and collective promise make it abundantly clear that we do not take good care of the future. This is especially true of the less immediate, less accessible future, that is to say, the future in the strictest sense. But if there is a justification for politics that distinguishes it from simple management, it is that politics attempts to govern the less visible but no less real future where that which is most important is at play. The decisive question is whether our democracies are capable of predicting future possibilities in a context of great uncertainty, whether they are positioned to carry out projects and constrict social time, to communicate across generations, acting in the “shadow of the future” (Axelrod 1984, 124) with legitimacy and responsibility. The difficulty of establishing an effective relationship with the future is one of the reasons for the current triumph of banality and our mediasaturated democracies’ persistent distraction by the short term. It could be that a reintegration of the future into political activity will bring about a pioneering transformation of democratic life.

   The Future of Democratic Societies

The Tyranny of the Present One of the consequences of the oft-proclaimed crisis of the idea of progress is that the future becomes problematic and the present is rendered absolute. We find ourselves in a regime of historicity where the present is lord and master. This is the tyranny of the present, in other words, the tyranny of the current legislature, of the short term, consumerism, our generation, proximity, etc. This is the economy that privileges the financial sector, profits over investments, cost reductions over company cohesion. We practice an imperialism that is no longer related to space but to time, an imperialism of the present that colonizes everything. There is a colonization of the future that consists of living at its expense and an imperialism of the present that absorbs the future and feeds off it parasitically. Bertman (1998) calls it “the power of the now,” the present that is not invested in any other dimension of time. This present replaces the long term with the short term, duration with immediacy, permanence with transience, memory with sensation, vision with impulse. The future’s loss of relevance and the intensification of the present are correlative phenomena. We demand from the present that which we are not prepared to await from the future. The “society of instant gratification” (Schulze 1992) imposes a short-term perspective. This “presentism” is made visible in all aspects of culture, including politics, which races after the immediacy of the polls, making use of a just-in-time logic taken from consumerism, publicity, and the media. There exists a reasonable suspicion that democratic political systems are systematically and problematically fixated on the present. What are the reasons for this autistic focus? When summarized, we see that the causes are structural and derive from the acceleration of social time, electoral periodization, the reign of public opinion research, the behavior of the electorate, demographic tendencies, and organized pressure from interest groups. From the outset, all democratic societies have structural difficulties when it comes to taking the future into account because the acceleration of social time challenges their ability to perceive and predict it. Any increase in velocity is accompanied by a proportional decrease in the scope of vision. Acceleration produces the seductive feeling of getting closer to the future while in fact eliminating it as a strategically malleable dimen-

A Theory of Intergenerational Justice    sion. To the extent that acceleration tends to eliminate wait time and opportunities for thinking and reflecting, long-term strategies are rendered impossible. Thought and transformative action are based on the certainty that our actions can shape the future. That being said, with the establishment of global instantaneity and simultaneity, this type of future is displaced by a rapid present understood as a focal point exclusively dedicated to gratification and self-interest. This is one of the reasons for the dissociation between two futures: the one we should bear in mind and the one that we actually factor into our considerations. While the repercussions of our actions reach even very distant futures, our perspective and activities continue to be reduced to the scope of operations in the present. Another reason for this reduction in the scope of our attention stems from the fact that the units of time in representative democracies are structured by electoral cycles. The rules that confer power on governments do so for a fixed period of time. Democratic competitions that determine winners and losers are generally held every four years. This elemental rhythm tends to make political strategists focus on the goal of achieving or holding onto power and thus limits the political playing field by insisting that problems be dealt with according to the legislature’s temporal time frame. Problems are managed in such a way that they improve—or at least do not decrease—the likelihood of governing in the next legislative session. Problems that do not adapt to these circumstances are postponed or confronted only when there is no other alternative. This attitude reduces public interest to the scale of voters’ interests and narrows political power to the realm of the electors. Public interest is not merely the concrete will of the voters, but also an intertemporal reality, the only justification for long-term planning. It is comprised of measures that are not meant to resolve but to shape, treaties or structural agreements, large-scale projects in areas such as education, infrastructure, pension plans, energy policies, government reform, etc. In order to properly attend to these types of issues, a different configuration of political willpower is required along with a new temporal register that will complement electoral rhythms. We can observe other causes for the tyranny of the present in the very nature of public opinion research and electoral behavior. Human beings (and voters, of course) have the tendency to disregard the future when weighing options. Issues affecting the here and now are considered ­important, yet

   The Future of Democratic Societies that importance is mitigated the further we get from the immediate present. It is not completely irrational to disregard the future when we consider our double uncertainty about it: the future is unfamiliar, and our continued ­existence in it is uncertain. Voters tend to discount the future twice over: first, because it is the future and is therefore not present; and second, because (and to the extent that) it belongs to other people. This double disregard inexorably prevails. Democratic elections are a competition for approval by those who vote in the present, not by those who may do so in the future, although those unrepresented voters may be the ones most affected. That being said, if democratic institutions have any purpose, it is precisely to expand the range of our considerations by introducing some type of reference to the absent future. Democratic institutions must highlight the fact that, given the intense temporal interconnectedness that characterizes a dynamic society, our calculations do not even gauge the present accurately when they disregard the future. Just as globalization has abolished the self-sufficiency of space, it has also deabsolutized the self-sufficiency of time. There are also demographic causes for the tyranny of the present. The number of senior citizen voters is continually on the rise; in coming decades, this group will wield a dominant voice in the electorate. As ­voters, senior citizens tend to focus on the size and security of their pensions. Their orientation toward the future does not lead to an awareness of responsibility that would encourage them to privilege other peoples’ rights over the demands of the present. One last reason for our focus on the present stems from the very configuration of democratic space and the pressures exerted by interested parties. There are no strict rules of legitimacy that limit participation in democratic processes to the electorate and the elected. Democratic spaces are open to any social force that is strong enough to assert itself; in other words, they are particularly open to interests that are organized and capable of generating conflict. The fact is that contemporary democracies are especially vulnerable to pressure groups. Habitual political practice, which focuses on accommodating the interests of particular clients instead of addressing large social reforms, tends to make its decisions based on immediate pressures. There are no political lobbies to articulate the interests of those who are absent, including, of course, the interests of the future.

A Theory of Intergenerational Justice    Is the current situation inevitable or are there signs that our presentfocused model of politics is running its course? It is true that there is now increased sensitivity toward the problems of the future and toward intergenerational justice. One clear indication of this shift is the spectacular staying power of the notion of “sustainability.” In some sense, the force field of pluralistic societies has been modified by this new sensitivity that has burst onto the scene and has already given rise to new groups that are fighting for a desirable future. Even so, the political system continues to insist on solutions that unburden the present and overburden the future. We can see evidence of this in budgetary policy, social policy, and environmental policy. In budgetary policy, there is still a tendency to finance a large portion of our expenses not through taxes but through debt. To counteract this tendency, there have been attempts at balancing our budgets, such as the rules of stability that were accepted by the member states of the European Union when the euro was adopted as a unified currency. There has been a clear change of mentality, but this does not mean that the democratic nations are prepared to develop a politics of responsibility toward the future in the area of budgetary policy. In the field of social policy, we still struggle to apply guidelines for social justice when weighing goals and expectations regarding the pensions of those who are currently retired or about to retire against the need to assure the future of the general pension system; in other words, against the rights of those who will retire tomorrow and even of those who cannot yet vote. Environmental policy provides the clearest indication that the political system has become more sensitive to the future. But upon examination, we find that environmental policy decisions are adopted when and to the extent that threats and dangers surface. Committing to these types of policy decisions is more difficult when sacrifices are required in the present to avoid consequences that will only become visible in the future. In view of all that, it makes sense to wonder whether democracy in its present form is capable of developing sufficient consciousness of the future to avoid situations that are dangerous but still distant. Long-term thought and action, carried out with “adequate forecasting into the future” (Birnbacher 1988), seems to contradict the short-term objectives of individual consumers or governability as determined by the ups and downs of opinion polls and the tactics of the immediate short term.

   The Future of Democratic Societies The logical consequence of the tyranny of the present is that the future remains untended; no one is paying attention to it. The “urgency of deadlines” (Luhmann) renders us incapable of contemplating the nonimmediate horizon because we must address the powerful weight of that which needs to be resolved today. The distant future is no longer relevant to politics and social action, not only because of our disregard for planning procedures or the totalitarian corruption of those procedures, but because we are blinded by the urgency of more acute problems. That which is too present impedes the perception of latent or anticipatable realities that can often be more real than that which is currently dominating the political arena. In other words, is it logical to pay so much attention to present threats that we stop perceiving future risks? Should we afford ourselves the luxury of sacrificing long-term plans on the altar of the short term? What is more real, climate change or this summer’s heat wave? Are we truly prepared to allow present possibilities to destroy future expectations?

The Coalition of the Living Our fixation on the present leads us toward a more uncomfortable question: do we have more rights than our descendants? Is it fair to create a “temporal preference for those who are currently living”? Would this not be a temporal version of the privilege that some people want to establish in space, a type of time-based colonialism? In both cases, a complicity of “us” is established at the expense of a third party: if the third party in spatial exclusivism was the outsider, in temporal imperialism, it is the next generation that pays the price for our preference. This is precisely what happens when the temporal horizon is narrowed: a sort of “coalition of the living” tends to form that constitutes a true dominion of the present generation over future generations. The surprise that Kant felt when he observed how previous generations work so arduously on behalf of later ones has now been reversed. The opposite seems to hold true today: by making present time absolute, we make future generations work involuntarily in our favor. The theme of generational conflict has a long history, and I am going to mention only one historical precedent that may serve as a counter­ point to the current situation. Revolutionary ideals supported the prin-

A Theory of Intergenerational Justice    ciple of “generational self-determination” that could be wielded against the dead. Condorcet, Jefferson, and Paine, for example, wrote glorious pages in which they refuted the idea that one generation had the right to condition the lives of subsequent generations. The codification of civil rights around 1800 set in motion an enormous debate about the rights of inheritance and the transfer of property. This was one part of a larger battle against the power of tradition. The first half of the nineteenth century produced a series of narratives questioning the tradition of trusteeships and the rights of the first-born (Hoffmann, Arnim, Balzac, Stifter). The concern about a lack of generational balance focused on the influence that previous generations wielded over the current generation, the privilege of the dead versus the freedom of the living (Parnes, Vedder, and Willer 2008). Today it could be that we, the currently living, are the ones who are exercising an influence over the future that is analogous to what the revolutionaries were trying to prevent. What was then a continuation of tradition is now simply theft from the future. The externalization of present-day effects on a future that does not concern us becomes organized irresponsibility (Beck 2002). We enjoy a type of impunity in the temporal zone of the future where we can recklessly deplete other people’s time or expropriate other people’s future. We are “squatters” on future turf. We are performing what Alexander Kluge has called “the assault of the present on the rest of time.” The more we live for our present, the less capable we will be of under­standing and respecting the “nows” of other people. When the consequences of actions are extended through space until they affect people on the other side of the world and through time until they condition the future of people near and far, then a good many ideas and practices require profound revision. Both spatial and temporal interconnectedness should be taken into thoughtful consideration: anything that implicitly conditions the future should be made transparent and the object of democratic processes. A broadening of our temporal horizon is one of our most basic moral and political imperatives. In summary, this means we can no longer think of the future as the garbage collector of the present, as an “unloading zone” (Koselleck), a place where unresolved problems are sent so as to free the present of them. But the realization that the destiny of various generations is as intermingled as the spaces of globalization calls into question our ­occupation

   The Future of Democratic Societies of the future. If responsibility for the future has turned into an acute problem, it is because there has been an increase in the number of future scenarios we must keep in mind during present-day decision-making and planning sessions. This is a result of the lengthening of the causal chains that connect us in space and time. The processes of modernization create, among other things, growing reciprocal dependencies in space. On the temporal side of things, as we shall see in a moment, this leads to an expansion of the chronological dimensions of the future. In fact, our actions have so much influence over the future that “we have a moral obligation, as we are making our daily decisions, to consider the well-being of those who are going to be affected but are not consulted. This obligation is imposed upon us involuntarily owing to the incredible scope of the power we exercise daily over our surroundings, but that unintentionally brings about changes at a distance” (Jonas 1992, 128). These facts have set in motion a whole new set of reflections about intergenerational justice (Gosseries 2004). Discriminations with respect to age or generational condition (where one generation makes impositions upon another or lives at the other generation’s expense) pose specific challenges to the course of justice. Most of the political decisions we adopt have an impact on future generations. For example, social service issues (health care, pensions, population shifts, unemployment insurance) need a broad temporal framework and a cognitive focus on possible future scenarios. Is it morally defensible to transfer nuclear waste, a polluted environment, considerable public debt, or an unsustainable pension system to future generations? We must weigh issues of justice when examining the things that are conveyed from one generation to another. These transfers include legacies and memories, but also expectations and possibilities that are handed over to future generations, in terms of physical, environmental, human, technological, and ­institutional capital. We should shift from property that is “private,” generational, and grounded in time to an intergenerational collectivization of time, especially future time. Generational interdependence demands a new type of social contract. In accordance with the new realities of spatial and temporal interconnectedness, it no longer makes sense to understand the social contract in an exclusivist sense. In other words, it cannot be limited to one specific community or to those who are currently alive. The model of social

A Theory of Intergenerational Justice    contract that only regulates obligations between contemporaries must be expanded to include future subjects with whom we find ourselves in complete asymmetry. Questions of intergenerational justice are not resolved with a logic of reciprocity, but with an ethics of transmission. The fact that the common good is transgenerational and universal relativizes the present and poses a limit to contractual ethics founded on the basis of mere reciprocity. There is a basic inequality between the present and the future that does not exist among contemporaries. If we only consider the meaning our actions have on our present-day interests, we will not be capable of understanding the ways we influence the future and the extent to which those repercussions require us to provide a political and ethical response. If we mine the consequences of this interdependency, we will have to consider what Hans Jonas (1984) has called a nonreciprocal concept of responsibility toward the future. Care, consideration, concern, and responsibility extend beyond the realm of our closest connections. Preuss has given this imperative a Kantian formulation: “Do not limit the freedom of future generations beyond what you would be willing to accept from previous generations” (1979, 227). The question of our responsibility toward future generations should be at the heart of what could be called “an ethics of the future.” The first reflection imposed upon us by this new conception of the world is a decision about who we should consider our “neighbor.” In other words, we make the shift from a responsibility toward “close relations” (Paul Ricoeur) to the responsibility for “more distant objects” (Nietzsche). We must understand that “neighbor” does not mean only those who are closest in space or time. Our horizon of reference must be expanded in such a way that intergenerational justice is not limited to simple transfers between contiguous generations. The principle of responsibility is oriented specifically toward the distant future. It stems from the consciousness that we have been entrusted with something fragile: life, the planet, the polis. The very notion of humanity is at stake within the depths of these queries about future generations. Still, how can all of this be calculated? Generational justice, understood as the principle of representing the interests of future generations, is one of our most frequently discussed political concepts. All the models of overlapping generations or of generational accounting have a strong hypo-

   The Future of Democratic Societies thetical dimension. Generational predictions must be legitimized individually because no one wields the limitless power of representing the entire future or of rightfully speaking in the future’s name. The controversial character of these predictions is also aggravated by the fact that the empirical desires of the supposed beneficiaries cannot be guaranteed, since there are no valid elections or opinion polls to reflect the views of future beings. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche was referring to when he claimed that human society is a “venture . . . not a covenant” (2003, 164). The aforementioned revolutionary principle of generational self-­ determination demands respect for future desires as a logical consequence of our uncertainty about the future. History is a scenario of liberty for all nations and for all generations; this is why our decisions should be open to ratification and reversal. We cannot be certain what those who come later will want, and for that reason, we must arbitrate procedures to afford the future the freedom to make its own choices. In this context, Jefferson even questioned whether all laws would need to be passed anew according to the cycle of generations. In a letter from 1813, he states that we can consider every generation a separate nation with the right to make binding decisions but lacking the power to force upcoming generations to abide by them, just as we cannot force inhabitants of other countries to do so; contracts die with the people who signed them (1984, 1280). The modern-day ethical philosopher Peter Singer seems to defend a similar position when he wonders, for example, whether our descendants will appreciate the wilderness or whether they might not be “happier sitting in air-conditioned shopping malls, playing computer games more sophisticated than any we can imagine” (2000, 92). Both are, in my judgment, abstract approaches, since they do not take into sufficient account the overlap and interaction between generations or the impossibility of strictly separating them. Although it is clear that there should be clauses and procedures for revision, any question about justice between generations must also take into account the fact that the generations interact, that history is not a succession of discontinuities. There are connections between generations, such as the transfer of memory or the legitimacy of shaping the collective future, without which the very idea of a society would be incomprehensible. One characteristic distinguishes the approaches taken by Jefferson and Singer: in the age of revolutions, the generational preference in favor

A Theory of Intergenerational Justice    of the present was directed against the past. To the extent that a model of progress was in force, it did not, on principle, enter into contradiction with the shaping of the future. Our generational preference is no longer nourished by any rupture with the past. Instead, it is affirmed from a position of postmodern skepticism that has not established a plan or managed to legitimize the control that we do, in fact, exercise over the future. It is not so much a question of freeing future generations as the need to legitimize the way we inevitably shape the future. We need to configure what is to come in accordance with guidelines for justice that go beyond our current interests. We cannot allow ourselves the comfort of using respect for the future’s decisions as our only guideline for action, because there are many decisions we must make in order to afford coming generations any freedom of choice. The paradox of intergenerational respect could be formulated in this way: we must make certain decisions now so that other people are afforded the freedom to choose later.

A Politics of the Future The most pressing matter for contemporary democracies is not to accelerate social processes but to recuperate the future. The future must once again be granted a privileged space on democratic societies’ agendas. It should attain political weight. Without references to the future, many activities that are specifically human—such as any issue requiring prediction or the assumption of an ability to forecast future scenarios—would be impossible. We also fail to act with due responsibility if we do not examine the future that our decisions can be presumed to either allow or preclude through a lens of justice. In order to do so, the first thing we must revise is modern ­societies’ traditional encoding of the future as a period that can safely be ignored. We should put an end to the existing tendency to disconnect the present from the future and scrutinize any mortgaging of the future. This will require historical perspective, the questioning of temporal relationships, a new process of legitimation, a sense of interdependence, and an appreciation for the continuity and emergence of issues. This extension of our temporal horizon contains two fundamental challenges: the introduction of longer time frames and the consideration of the rights of future generations.

   The Future of Democratic Societies The demarcation of some type of responsibility toward the future is a task for which politics is fundamental. The problem resides in the fact that the future is politically weak, since it does not have powerful advocates in the present, and we must depend on institutions to afford it the weight it does have. Contemporary societies have an enormous capacity for producing futures, that is, to restrict or facilitate them. In contrast, knowledge about those futures is quite limited. The potential scope of societies’ actions and the effects of their decisions are difficult to predict. Since the future cannot be known, responsibility does not generally factor in. But the fact that it is hard to know the true repercussions of our actions in the future does not excuse us from attempting to contemplate those effects from a broader temporal perspective. Assuming responsibility toward the future means considering the consequences of one’s decisions or lack thereof. The rhythms that govern any organization are by nature anticipatory of the future. The process of civilization leads to a greater interconnectedness between the present and the future. It is a challenge to contemplate actions in the context of interactions and interdependencies. We must also consider side effects, both the most immediate ones and those that are distant in space and time. This new contextualization would encourage us to be more thoughtful about the principle of responsibility. When political decisions have implications extending over large periods of time, it is then appropriate to talk about “a politics of posterity” (Adam and Groves 2007, 115). Politics not only projects current interests into the future, but it should also be in a position to articulate the demands that the future places on the present, demands that are derived from the fact that the future is affected by the present’s decisions and acts of omission. Responsible behavior toward the future could be defined as behavior that prioritizes the present’s responsibility toward the future over the future’s responsibility toward the present. A first requirement of our responsibility toward the future consists of thinking beyond the short term. Taking the future seriously demands at the outset an introduction of the long term into strategic considerations and political decisions. The complexity of contemporary societies requires us to multiply the number of future scenarios we must keep in mind for current decision making and planning. This is a consequence of the lengthening of the causal chains that connect us through space and time. Modernization encourages, among other things, a greater number of reciprocal

A Theory of Intergenerational Justice    relationships in space and, in the temporal aspect of the matter, an increase in the future’s chronological range. We live in such a dynamic society that, without any effort of the imagination, the future could escape our grasp during the hustle and bustle of daily activities. This elevated complexity pushes us toward a “presentism” that is devoid of perspective (Hartog 2003). The routine practices of institutions, which are largely determined by the demands of the global economy, and the revision of those practices without any thought for the future hinder the correction of unwanted anomalies and the utilization of shared opportunities. Until now, technological innovations have allowed us to survive with concepts, values, and institutions that are not capable of confronting the real problems or challenging the new era of intransparency. We are all secretly aware that our current difficulties demand more wide-ranging perspectives. The fact is that “instantaneous-ism” impedes our ability to make coherent choices. When our perspective is temporally narrow, we run the risk of subjugating ourselves to the “tyranny of small decisions” (Kahn 1933). In other words, we keep making decision after decision that end up leading to a situation we would not have chosen in the beginning. This can be seen by anyone who has examined how, for example, a traffic jam is formed. Each consumer, through his or her own private consumption, may be collaborating in the destruction of the environment, and each voter may contribute to the destruction of the public space. This outcome is not only undesirable, it also makes it impossible to fulfill the individual voter’s needs. If voters were able to predict that result and override or at least moderate their immediate self-interests, they would act differently. The future is not the mere accumulation of endless present moments, in the same way as the public good does not arise from the mere accumulation of small decisions. (Similarly, music is not an assortment of contiguous sounds, and sentences are not understood as soon as each word is grasped.) The future is a construction that must be predicted with a certain degree of coherence. When decisions are adopted with a view to the short term, without keeping negative externalities and long-term implications in mind, when decision-making cycles are too short, then people’s thought processes are necessarily short-sighted. In order to compensate this responsibility deficit, there is a movement to develop demo-

   The Future of Democratic Societies cratic procedures to introduce considerations of medium- and long-term consequences (e.g., white papers, comparative evaluations of educational materials and techniques, control of publicity and transparency, monitoring agencies, superlegislative compromises, etc.). These and other instruments serve to encourage a sense of responsibility that looks beyond the immediate short term. Certain aspects of the common good can be guaranteed only by articulating immediate steps in addition to long-term measures. This is the case with questions of the environment, peace, institutional stability, general sustainability, etc. Managing these issues requires changes at an individual, collective, and institutional level to incorporate a broader temporal perspective into our considerations and practices. This is not meant to disparage the short term and impose a single temporality for all political problems but to remind us that every type of problem has an appropriate time frame (Serge Champeau). Just as there is a dictatorship of the short term, there are also historical examples of the imposition of the long term, as was the case with central-planning dictatorships. There are problems, as well, that force us to leave our final goal somewhat indeterminate, thus allowing intermediate objectives to help define final objectives. It is a question of finding the correct temporal register for each problem and articulating both the short and long term in a manner that suits the nature of what one wants to accomplish. Complex matters cannot be resolved by imposing a single temporal register. To accomplish that, we need to employ a different conceptual basis when we are thinking about the future’s configuration and our relationship to it. Traditionally, the focus of politics has been space and objects. Its sphere of influence extended over a territory, its resources, and the distribution of its goods. It was responsible for things that could be measured and counted: territories, people, institutions, budgets, materials, and prices. Currently, with debates about climate change, nuclear energy, genetic engineering, and the management of financial risks, the future has forced its way into the politics of the present. This means that political decisions now extend beyond the classic framework of spatial and material questions. The model institutions that designed the future of the constitutional democracies no longer command attention in this debate. This includes scientific determinism as well as economics, which tends to see the future as just another resource. It also includes the legal system that, seeing justice as the

A Theory of Intergenerational Justice    end result of a contract between contemporaries, does not have any means of anticipating the rights of those who come later. In fact, none of these systems is currently equipped with procedures to under­stand and regulate a temporal environment in which the future plays a decisive role. The present’s ability to shape the future contrasts with its limited ability to shape it in a positive way. The future has become a problem in contemporary societies, perhaps our greatest problem, but it may also give us the means to begin political reform. Our greatest challenge consists of once again thinking about and truly articulating the relationship between action, knowledge, and responsibility. We need to proceed to a relegitimation of our interventions in the future, our conditions of future production, and new social scenarios of greater complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence. This repoliticizing of the future is helped along by an awareness of its unpredictable and mostly indeterminate character, but also by an awareness that the future is structured by present action. This combination of uncertainty and responsibility renders it eminently political; in other words, it is subject to processes of collective deliberation and legitimation. In any case, it is not a question of predicting the future, which is increasingly difficult, if such a presumption were ever warranted. What we must do is convert the future into a category of reflection, including it, as well as its entire weight of uncertainty and contingency, within the framework of our thoughts and actions. It seems clear that in late-modern socie­ ties the future cannot be understood as a linear prolongation of the present. Contemporary actions and their consequences penetrate the future and shape it in ways that are not easily predictable. The political system is charged with the task of assessing the elongated shadow of the present in the future and pursuing the corresponding political legitimation. The future must be managed according to processes that involve great institutional innovation. In the prehistory of future studies that is represented in Genesis, chapter 41, we are told about the consequences of the interpretation of dreams. In this case, the knowledge and power of one man allows a village to triumph over its predetermined future. Today it is no longer a question of having a prophet interpret the pharaoh’s dreams, but of having socie­ ties learn to shape their collective future responsibly and democratically. Modern societies, which no longer acquire their knowledge of the future

   The Future of Democratic Societies through the interpretation of dreams and no longer act vicariously through a person who wields both vision and power, must acquire this knowledge collectively through the corresponding processes of investigation and collective deliberation. As open societies, they are condemned to collective learning. They cannot expect others to resolve their problems nor that change will take place if they themselves do not act.

2 The Temporal Landscape of Contemporary Society A Theory of Acceleration

The sense of living at a time of particular acceleration is a shared experience that is made manifest in very diverse aspects of our individual and collective lives. The new technologies of instantaneity favor a culture of absolute presentness with no temporal profundity. The basis for this relationship with time is found in the alliance established between the financial markets’ goal of immediate gain and the instantaneousness of the media. We live in a time that is fascinated by velocity and overwhelmed by its own acceleration, but it now seems likely that our society has reached a stage where acceleration has passed a critical juncture, becoming something new. The sequentiality and linearity with which we perceive reality has been broken, making us abandon all efforts to respond to social problems in a coherent fashion. This experience of acceleration is what led Hamlet to lament that “time is out of joint.” It is not that we are in a critical time period, but that time itself is in crisis. The incredible acceleration of time and history seems to have collapsed all our categories for the understanding of social change, as well as our ability to configure those changes responsibly. It may be that art is the medium that has best expressed this experience and its aporias. Think, for example, of the aesthetics of ­velocity as revealed through musical tempos. New prescriptions for speed were introduced in nineteenth-century compositional techniques, sometimes to an absurd degree. The clearest example may be found in the score to Schumann’s Piano Sonata no. 2 in G Minor; it begins with the words “as fast as possible,” followed shortly thereafter by the exhortation “faster.”

   The Temporal Landscape of Contemporary Society The ability of efficiency studies to harness motion through the use of conveyor belts is parodied by Charlie Chaplin with his portrayal of the eating machine that allowed the worker to be fed without interrupting his work, in other words, without wasting time. The postmodern version of this experience is voiced by a character in a Woody Allen film: “I’m going to kill myself. I should go to Paris and jump off the Eiffel tower. I’ll be dead. You know, in fact, if I get the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier. Or wait a minute. With the time change, I could be alive for six hours in New York but dead three hours in Paris. I could get things done, and I could also be dead.” This is, without a doubt, a complex phenomenon that cannot be understood without understanding its dual nature. We must analyze the dialectical relationship between acceleration and stagnation, the simplification of our relationship with time resulting from the generalization of a sense of urgency, and the strategies employed to challenge not acceleration so much as false mobility.

Acceleration and Paralysis Based on our own subjective experience, we are used to thinking of time as a natural dimension of existence, without being fully conscious of its historicity, without, in other words, considering the range of experiences with time. Different historical moments and processes have their own perceptions of time. Ever since Rousseau cited the “social whirlwind” in Émile, the idea of universal acceleration has been at the core of the way we encounter time. What exactly do we mean when we talk about acceleration? We could define the semantic field of acceleration in three aspects (Rosa 2005, 124 ff.). Technological acceleration. This deals with the movement of people, goods, and information, as well as the speed of production and the transformation of matter into energy and services. These accelerations have an objective side that can be measured as a function of the time invested, whether it is time needed to move through space or to carry out a particular process. Acceleration of social change. This is the rate at which the patterns of action and the orientations of a society are modified. Koselleck (1985) defined stability as the correlation between the space of experience and the horizon of expectations where experience provides clues as to the pres-

A Theory of Acceleration    ent and future, and we can learn from our experiences because we have a certain minimum degree of confidence in our expectations. The fact that modern societies can be considered accelerated from the point of view of social change means that the stability of our references is diminished and the present is compressed. Increased innovation makes the present contract (Lübbe 1994; Harvey 1990, 240; Nassehi 1993, 342). Acceleration means experiences become outdated more quickly. Acceleration of the pace of life. This is a consequence of our lack of temporal resources. The number of things we want to do surpasses technology’s ability to increase acceleration. This is translated into a subjective feeling of a lack of time, the fear of missing out on something, or the need for continuous adaptation, without knowing just what we need to adapt to. It is not an objective fact, but the result of a lack of balance. When we talk about acceleration, we tend to place the blame on speedy technology. Trains travel more quickly, calculators are faster, fashions change more frequently. But velocity is fundamentally subjective; more than anything, it is related to the fact that we want to do more things, and we leap from one to another with greater frequency. The fact that we live more rapidly is not something we can blame on our machines. There is no objective velocity, a universal measure of acceleration. Things seem more accelerated in relation to a speed to which we are accustomed. Streetcars used to be considered the paradigm of accelerated time, and it was claimed they would cause scientifically demonstrated consequences to our health. Now we see streetcars as a nostalgic symbol of a slower age. Something similar is currently taking place with jazz, which we consider music for relaxation, but when it began, it expressed big-city America’s new inquietude. In the same way, the bureaucracy that Max Weber considered an accelerator now appears slow and inflexible. Acceleration is always a relative concept. That being said, describing our society from the point of view of acceleration alone constitutes a simplification that does not bear society’s dual nature in mind. From the outset, it is important to note that, in spite of civilization’s acceleratory character, we still have contrary movement: the revitalization of modern civilization is occurring alongside other, irrelevant surges that have no direct bearing on society’s evolution. The one does not contradict the other; they are complementary. Our culture is sufficiently fragmented that movements splinter and diversify. The acceleration of history goes hand in hand with the decrease in its laminar flow,

   The Temporal Landscape of Contemporary Society or rather, in the homogeneity of its movement. The rapidity of forward movement is varied. Whirlpools are formed in which particular elements stop or spin rather than move forward, and things that need some stability develop further. Just as acceleration is part of our social dynamic, so too are blockages, reactions, stagnation, and the resistance to change. Those who criticize standardized time often grant it too much power. Just as there was a simultaneous experience of boredom and industrial acceleration at the end of the nineteenth century, the current era is characterized by the fact that nothing remains the same, but nothing that is essential changes either. This is a time when too much is going on, but at the same time we live with endless repetitions, rituals, and routines. Hence our suspicion that behind the dynamics of permanent acceleration lies a paradoxical stagnation of history in which nothing truly new emerges. This experience is referenced by concepts such as “the exhaustion of utopian energies” (Habermas 1985), “the end of history” (Fukuyama 1992), “cultural crystallization” (Gehlen 1978), or “the utopia of the zero-option” (Offe 1986). As Baudrillard (2005) noted, postmodernism describes precisely the end of an era that does not correspond to a new beginning, in which there is no longer any meaningful connection between past, present, and future. Those who declare the end of history are diagnosing nothing less than the end of the temporalized history of modernity. In other words, it is the end of an experience of time in which historical and personal development seemed equally directed and controllable, obedient to the rules of sequential logic. Making use once again of the classification scheme developed by Hartmut Rosa, we could establish the following categories of deceleration (2005, 138ff.): Natural limits to speed. It is difficult to talk about absolute limits to acceleration. With all our innovations regarding speed, our perception and way of behaving around it has also shifted. What used to seem pathological has quickly become a new normality. Acceleration oases. Social or cultural niches that are partially or totally removed from general acceleration. Social dynamics are not absolute, nor do social subsystems obey a universal order of acceleration. Deceleration as a dysfunctional side effect. These are pathological types of deceleration, such as traffic jams, psychological depressions, economic crises, or desynchronizations.

A Theory of Acceleration    Intentional decelerations. Antimodern or alternative forms of slowness, such as the defense of laziness—the most famous are those by ­Lafargue (1999) and Russell (1935)—the defense of serenity, and the resistance to haste, such as the slow food movement or aesthetic idleness. These movements do not have to challenge the entire social dynamic; they can even be functional and simply offset acceleration, which would be difficult to sustain without them.

The Culture of Urgency In addition to the fact that the connection between the processes of acceleration and its resistances is more complex than certain analyses would have us believe, it is clear that our era has promoted a general culture of urgency. To understand this cultural urgency, we must take a look at the way this particular configuration of hegemonic world time, fashioned out of simultaneity, immediacy, and urgency, plays out against the dominant background of certain economic and communicative realities. With planetary simultaneity achieved by the speed of circulation and the reduction in costs of transmission, the exchange of information, money, goods, and people or of ideas and illnesses across great distances is not new. What is new is the speed and the lack of resistance with which these processes develop. The expansion of space and the acceleration of time are two fundamental characteristics of today’s world. We could summarize things in this way: space expands while time accelerates. And also: time tends to destroy space. From this point of view, globalization is a spatial-temporal system that is characterized spatially by the replacement of fixed structures with movements of flow that are in perpetual motion. Temporally, it is characterized by the simultaneity of a hegemonic present. As Paul Virilio (1999) notes, that which has been globalized is the present, in other words, so-called real time, immediacy, ubiquity, instantaneity. The new configuration of the economy is decisively important in these processes. We have, on the one hand, the volatility of financial markets that exist in an extremely brief temporal framework. Economic actors attempt to shorten the turnaround time for client demand by reducing product life cycles or by planned obsolescence. At the same time, the way in which the financial markets function has now spread to companies. The shareholder’s point of view has come to achieve precedence over the

   The Temporal Landscape of Contemporary Society ­ anager’s: companies are forced to pursue short-term outcomes and to m postpone measures that would allow for future growth, such as investments that would improve productivity or the quality of service. We have moved from the management of stocks, which corresponded to the industrial age, to survival in a just-in-time economy with its economic flows. Urgency is also connected to the emotionalism of modern societies. Among other consequences of collective time, the hegemony of the emotional tends to legitimize immediate action and to fail to consider other alternatives that are inscribed in a less immediate register. The media, which has become a great generator of immediacy, is closely associated with this phenomenon. The tendency toward democracy by opinion polls is a similar issue, giving precedence to current opinion over proportional representation or projects that are sustained over time. All of this has affected human character in ways Richard Sennet (1998) has analyzed exhaustively. Our relationship with time has become deregulated. This can be seen both in the enormous difficulty we have with projecting ourselves toward the future and in our preoccupation with the urgency of the present. When we make plans, our focus is on increasing yield and efficiency, not on visions for the future or possible outcomes. We are unable to resist the power of the deadline, but deadlines have undermined our values, and the things that are urgent have taken the place of the things that are important. We are controlled by the tyranny of the tasks we need to complete. We are incapable of pursuing long-term objectives or developing choices and plans. In this context, the importance afforded proximity does have a positive side, but it also reveals a loss of that sense of temporal distance that prizes the ability to wait and plan ahead. Among the anthropological effects of this immediacy without perspective, the difficulty of accepting an outcome other than what was expected is worth emphasizing. Tocqueville warned that “as soon as [people] have lost the habit of placing their chief hopes upon remote events, they naturally seek to gratify without delay their smallest desire” (2007, 94). We have settled on a model of activity that is unfamiliar with stable objectives and linearly constructed action plans. Because of this, we produce a social dynamic of urgency in which everything can be required immediately and any delay feels especially irritating. People are dominated by the desire for immediate satisfaction, intolerant of frustration, and incapable of getting involved in the smallest project or making an ongoing com-

A Theory of Acceleration    mitment. They demand everything now, leap from one desire to the next with chronic impatience, prefer intensity to duration, and require of the present what they should expect from the future. In this way, ­Walter Benjamin’s analysis seems justified: modern society is suffering from a progressive loss of experience stemming from people’s inability to transform a plurality of impressions into a genuine experience (1974, 612). Our era offers us a series of sensations that are noncumulative, discontinuous, and shock infused. By letting ourselves be absorbed by the urgency of the present, we limit our temporal energy to that which is most immediate. The more we give ourselves over to present urgency, the less we value the idea of planning and the logic of the long term. Everything revolves around a local, ­autarkic, selfreferential, and restless present (Laïdi 2000, 7). A type of time compression or an abbreviation of the present has transpired that is experienced on different levels and at different registers. The omnipresence of the short term is seen in channel-surfing, fast food, newsflashes, video and sound clips, T.V. ads, surfing the Web, but also in therapy and entertainment options or in twenty-four-hour emergency services. This time contraction imposes its own style of management. Values such as flexibility or adaptation, while clearly very important, become absolute principles that determine major decisions. A dictatorship of real-time, live processes has become entrenched in organizations, politics, and our society as a whole. It is the reign of efficiency and of the instant, the short term, satisfaction, urgency, speed, immediacy, lightness, and flexibility. The technical conditions for the acceleration of social velocity affect the temporal nature of politics in three ways: by reducing the political system’s ability to capture and interpret information, by moving some governmental functions beyond state strictures, and by transforming public action into public reaction. Public servants do not act but react (Laïdi 2000, 233). There is uncertainty, but since action must be taken at all costs, politicians resort to short-range actions that are destined to tackle immediate pressures, such as protests or elections. Action, an immediate response, is overvalued as an antidote against uncertainty. Since politicians are constantly “putting out fires,” they are unable to formulate long-term objectives. They systematically opt for the short term against the long term, abandoning the idea that it is their specific responsibility to arbitrate between the two.

   The Temporal Landscape of Contemporary Society Urgency, that degree zero of temporal distance, has lost its standing as an exceptional temporality and is now considered normal. False urgencies multiply and exert additional pressure for immediate action. Instantaneous reactivity weighs on institutions, organizations, and the workplace. In the competitive universe, immediate answers constitute an unconditional rule of survival. Urgency has stopped being exceptional and imposes itself as the temporal modality of general action. But we all know that by making urgency universal, we are destroying the very idea of urgency. Alarms are only effective if they are rare, not if they become commonplace. To understand how the urgent is destroyed, we need only understand the reason for the frequent collapse of emergency services. The concept of urgency is not objective but rather a sense of anxiety caused by an uncertain future; many people who resort to hospital emergency rooms and overwhelm those facilities could receive perfectly good treatment through the use of ordinary services. Emergency services are, in principle, an exceptionality that only makes sense when no other solution is possible. The generalized use of emergency services reveals the ineffectiveness of or lack of confidence in ordinary procedures and institutions. It only makes sense to label one thing urgent if a nonurgent state also exists. When everything is urgent, when the use of emergency procedures is generalized, there is no longer a temporal normality to make sense of the urgent, which is an exception to the norm. The state of permanent urgency weakens organizations and is fertile terrain for the unleashing of larger crises, as can be seen with the example of hospitals, stock market catastrophes, or the weakening of politics in the face of immediate pressures. It falls to us to offset the necessary velocity of the world with spaces for deliberation, reflection, and temporal normality. The configuration of the future depends on the stability and predictability of the social setting. The instability of the context and conditions of any decision that follows from social acceleration forces individuals, organizations, and institutions to permanently revise expectations, reinterpret experiences, and reestablish operations of synchronization and coordination. Modern societies need to balance stability and revitalization: for acceleration to be beneficial, we need general stability to provide the security and predictability that make certain dynamics possible. A slowness of the rules of the game facilitates the development of other dynamics; there is no social innovation without institutional stability.

A Theory of Acceleration   

Against False Mobility If it is true, as we have seen, that the general acceleration we are supposedly now experiencing has a correlative and ambivalent counterpoint of deceleration and if the generalization of urgency is destroying the very concept of urgency, often with paralyzing consequences, then we must deduce that our analysis of temporality needs to conclude with a belief in the existence of a false mobility as well. We could conclude that progress killed finality and that dynamism is what survived. In the last analysis, societies combine their resistance to change with a superficial nervousness. The utopia of progress has been transformed into a utopia of computing and technology, into disorderly movement, frenetic “neophilism,” anomic agitation, and a dissipation of energy. Only one empty acceleration remains—the total mobilization discussed by Sloterdijk (1987), based on Ernst Jünger’s concept that Taguieff (2002) calls bougisme—a blind “endless increase” in technology or economic/financial globalization, a social sphere that is unstable and neurotic. The routinization of progress decrees that acceleration is imperative in all fields. Paul Valéry (1948) calls this “a regime of very rapid substitutions.” It is a type of activism that is translated into an unsettled exasperation, a flight forward, a pursuit of the “always something more” of technology, or the economy of an ahistorical global present (Adam 1998). This type of temporality squares very well with our economic system, based on ideas of growth and development, an increase in production, market expansion, and technological innovation. As we have seen, this fatalization of time is translated into the demand for increasing acceleration, mobility, velocity, and flexibility. We see it every day in the language of the new “highly mobile transnational elites” (Lasch) who goad us to “get moving,” accelerate our very movements, consume more, communicate faster, and exchange goods in the most profitable manner. A semantic shift has taken place that would explain many ideological displacements from the left toward the right: where there was progress and revolution, there is now movement and competition. The adjective “revolutionary” forms part of the overlapping vocabulary of fashion, management, publicity, and media-savvy postpolitics. The ghost of the permanent revolution is now parading around as a neoliberal caricature. But deep down, the current political imagination has an understated prescriptive rhetoric that is conceptually very poor: the rhetoric of

   The Temporal Landscape of Contemporary Society a­ daptation to the supposed progress of the world, the imperative for motion alongside anything that is in motion, without argument or question or protest. The paradox would then be that exactly at the time of greatest acceleration, societies can fall victim to destiny or immobility, which was precisely what the processes of modernization were supposed to overcome (Offe 1986, 116). This suggests that Fredric Jameson’s (1998) assertion of the collapse of the change/stagnation antinomy is correct. In many areas of life, socie­ ties, and the world in general, movement may be superficial and, beneath the surface, there may be radical paralysis or mere pseudomovement. Paul ­Virilio (1999) has formulated this idea with his conception of sudden paralysis or unproductive acceleration, an agitation without real consequences, although not free from grave effects on human beings and the cohesion of societies. Ultimately, it is an idea that corresponds with the personal experience that suggests that the greatest agitation is perfectly compatible with temporal immobility; it is possible to be paralyzed within movement, to not be doing anything as fast as possible, to be moving without going anywhere, even to be a very hard-working slacker. Acceleration does not suffice to create actual movement, just as transgression is not necessarily creative nor is change always innovative. In this situation, the most liberating solutions do not originate in deceleration or in the flight forward, but in the battle against false mobility. Of course, compensatory slowness, so celebrated in many self-help books about time management, may be a reasonable strategy. I would like to emphasize, however, that saving time is a fundamental anthropological mandate and that, in reality, decelerations are part of a general strategy of acceleration that we could call accelerative decelerations. “Slowly but surely” is not an attempt to waste time but to save it. At an individual level and within organizations, these cunning arguments serve to avoid the wasting of time caused by dysfunctional accelerations. Sometimes, waiting periods can also be employed to solve isolated problems that impede normal activity. The demand for deceleration, as a general principle, is not very real­ istic or attractive when we consider the political, economic, social, and cultural circumstances in which we live. It makes no sense to desire slower calculators, longer lines, or transportation plagued by delays. The central question consists of determining, for every activity and at every moment,

A Theory of Acceleration    exactly what will save us time, which will sometimes imply a deceleration and at other times, the complete opposite. But it may also be achieved by other means, such as reflection or forethought, or by fighting false mobility. My proposal would, therefore, be an argument in favor of saving time, but rather than doing so by increasing acceleration heedlessly, we should make an effort to fight false mobility in a methodical manner. ­Ultimately, we can save time through strategic reflection, placing the instant into a broader temporal framework or protecting that which is truly urgent. Schumpeter had a relevant observation: noting that cars with brakes travel more quickly precisely because they have them, he warned that an attempt to eliminate all barriers against acceleration (the unleashing of the “total market”) would lead to the exact opposite: an economic deceleration in the form of a recession or depression (2003, 89). It is not a question of fighting against time or forgetting about it, but getting it “on our side” (Benjamin 1974, 1199). A good deal of this task is summarized by the advice to “reintroduce the depths of the time for maturing, reflection, and mediation into the space where the shock of the immediate and the urgent too often forces us to react impulsively” (­Cournut 1991, 73). It may well be that, in this way, organizations and society in general will learn to influence accelerated processes. This can only be achieved by gaining an upper hand against an abstract, unifying application of time by employing a type of time management that makes intelligent use of its diverse modalities.

3 How Do We Know the Future? A Theory of Future Studies

The urge to foresee the future is a constant in the history of humanity. Human beings, for different reasons and in different ways, have always attempted to discern what is going to occur. In traditional societies, oracles and prophesies performed a function that has been transformed, in modern times, into planning and future studies. Early modern societies tried to domesticate irrational predictions into a methodical knowledge of the future. But if we have learned anything, it is that this fascination with prediction does not make the future more accessible. The future resists us continuously and to an increasing degree. This resistance arises from structural causes that are related to the very nature of our society. The aporia of a dynamic society is that knowledge of the future is as necessary as it is impossible. On the one hand, this type of foresight is much more vital in a dynamic society, in which those who only tune in to current events do not even comprehend current events. Imagination now occupies much of the space that used to belong to observation. For that reason, it is clear that all of us, individuals and institutions, must strengthen our capacity for predictions and the study of the future. But at the same time, the future has never seemed as enigmatic as it does right now. None of our instruments for foreseeing the future seem sophisticated enough to understand the complexity of a world that is, at this point, beyond comprehension, opaque, dedicated to innovation, and complicated by webs of interdependency. In this context, if we want to strengthen our capacity to shape the future, it is vital that we not delude ourselves about

A Theory of Future Studies    our ability to predict it or about its implacable uncertainty. Any political effort is forced into a peculiar attempt to manage this ignorance about what awaits us. That is the only way politics will discover its true ability to intercede in social processes.

From Divination to Knowledge The desire to foresee the future has resulted in diverse methodologies at different points in history. If one had to summarize the types of mechanisms to which that enterprise has been entrusted, it might be said that ancient societies attempted a divination of a future they viewed as a preexisting reality; early modern societies aspired to produce scientific knowledge of the future and strove to plan for it methodically, thereby linking it to human freedom; while in the present we are more conscious of the future’s uncertainty, which has tempered our aspirations to control it. We have shifted from a conception of the future as something completely other to its domestication in the early modern period, and we have concluded, in the present day, with a recognition of the future’s lack of transparency. Human beings, cultures, and institutions have always equipped themselves with procedures to assure predictability to the greatest possible degree. It is one of humankind’s most rudimentary goals, and it can be achieved in various ways, although only within the limits posed by that ele­ment of innovation and unpredictability that thwarts any strategy to shelter ourselves entirely from surprise. It is possible to achieve a predictable future by transforming cycles into circles and continuing along the original path. This is the basic plan of attack in traditional societies that attempt to neutralize the unpredictability of the future by trying to conceive of it as a simple continuation of the present. But the unpredictable always prevails, leaving a void requiring new procedures for self-preservation. An ancient society cannot conceive of the future as anything but a destiny that is already written but is simply unknown to us. This is the contrivance behind all the mechanisms that were entrusted with the possibility of discovering the secrets of destiny and making contact with a realm that extended beyond the present: prophecies, divinations, predictions, oracles, and visionaries were nothing but privileged sources of knowledge. They all perceived of the future as a preexisting reality; in other words, it was not

   How Do We Know the Future? future in the sense we understand it, as a space open to an expression of our freedom. For the ancients, the future already existed, and our efforts had to focus on the privilege of divining, discovering, and expressing it. The attempt to intervene in the future could only be understood as an attempt to change a preexisting destiny. Modern societies rebel against that type of fatality in two ways: we deny the idea that the future is an already existing reality, and we reject the fate of an inevitable destiny against which we cannot intervene. Modernity is a vindication of the future as a future, in other words, as something humanly malleable, unpredictable, and indeterminate, an area of potentiality, an empty space waiting to be colonized, designed, and configured by our desire. We do not explore the future in order to describe an inevitable destiny, but to achieve some goal (Schüll 2006, 55). The future is a conjecture about what is possible, not the knowledge of something that is necessarily going to happen. This mentality leads to modern inquiries about the future in its diverse forms, from future studies to scientific predictions, economic forecasting, or political planning. In no case is it an attempt to foresee the future or to dictate to it. Rather, it is an attempt to afford the future a future: to construct a representation of the most desirable future through the observation of all possible futures (Bindé 1997, 34). Just as with open space, the open future is an environment subject to design, planning, management, and regulation. There are experts in this, but they are not the prophets of yore who would predict what was going to take place. Instead, they specialize in observing the present in order to produce the desired future. From that beginning, things have become ever more complex. The newly modern world was a world of parts and wholes that operated along linear chains of causes and effects in an atmosphere of mechanistic simplicity. In this vision of the world, perspective was a powerful metaphor to discern not only physical reality but also social and organizational processes. Nowadays, we no longer understand the future as a necessary evolution, but as a complex chain of events with varied significance that we can only foresee by questioning what is probable and possible. It is a question of understanding the dilemmas that arise from our enormous capacity to determine the future, a capacity that is not accompanied by a corresponding ability to realize the potential results of our actions. Unlike the classic

A Theory of Future Studies    mode of thought that supported a spirit of planning, we find our knowledge does not extend as far as our actions. Since modern and especially present-day societies reject the idea of the new as the repositioning of the old and instead view the new as something innovative and radically unknown, any opening toward the future inevitably implies uncertainty. The future would not be the future if we knew what it would bring. For that reason, the future has become an arena for the projection of hopes and fears of all kinds, a true battleground. This is why the social sciences are filled with references to the future, ranging from positive and hopeful to negative and fearful. These visions are not easy to manage, but they reveal the basic structure of our projections.

The Need for and Limits to Future Studies Any reflection on the necessity and possibility for future studies should begin with the fact that accelerated changes in social, economic, political, and cultural arenas have created a time of growing complexity for us. This situation has a direct effect on our knowledge of the future. The stable social structures enjoyed by previous societies allowed them to predict the future without the fear of being too far off the mark since the future was seen as a continuation of the traditional. But in the present day, past experiences are less and less useful as predictors of future events. If we can be certain of anything, it is that our expectations will be confirmed to a much lesser degree (Nassehi 1993, 376). An innovative society is, inevitably, a society of disappointments. In other words, it is a society of failed forecasts, nearsighted in regards to its own future. The future is now more uncertain than ever. When things are changing very quickly, present-day facts become less relevant to decision making; that is why an imaginative effort is needed to interpret the signs of any given moment in time. We are, so to speak, condemned to making an effort to get to know the future. Given the need to predict the future and the difficulty of doing so by merely observing reality or resorting to simple common sense, we have no choice but to attempt to overcome these drawbacks with some special approach. This is the reason for future studies, whose origin lies not in the knowledge of, but in the structural ignorance of, the future, which we try to compensate by scientific means. The development of future studies after the 1960s can

   How Do We Know the Future? be explained by the need to find a scientific means to confront the loss of social certainty about the future. The abundant supply of predictions that anyone can consult and use for planning purposes does not mean that we finally have at our disposal a future that was hidden from other civilizations. The opposite is in fact true: our increasing uncertainty about the world in which we will live ten or fifty years from now requires a compensatory effort to recuperate some confidence in our predictions through the artificial methodology of science. In the past it was less difficult to find a connection with the future, and for that reason the need to refine our means of prediction was less pressing. Government officials who make use of scientific reports today have at their disposal not only something that all previous administrations lacked, but also something that no previous administration needed. Our attempt to employ scientific processes to achieve some level of control over reality functions like a prosthetic limb. Indeed, no institution that attempts to predict the future is in a position to reproduce the guiding stability that was previously assured by living traditions, when the need for future studies was unfelt. Future studies is the attempt to reestablish insofar as possible the ability to calculate the effects of our actions through the artificial methods of science. We can celebrate our predictive abilities as true progress, but we should not forget that our glee is comparable to that experienced by a nearsighted person who has donned a pair of glasses. The reasons that make future studies inevitable also form the backdrop of its enormous limitations. In a society that pursues innovation, rewards creativity, and favors individualization; in a dynamic world that is differentiated from traditional societies because its structures are not meant to last nor are its behaviors especially predictable; stability and structural security are reduced. The difficulty of achieving competence regarding the future is the price we must pay for the advancement of knowledge and socio­economic growth. In a quickly changing society, our predictive abilities are reduced as the difficulty of applying our categories for understanding extremely complex processes increases. Among the things we do not now know, one of the most obvious stems from the unpredictability of the results of our decisions. Many social changes resist rational control, planning, organizing, or forecasting. Hazardous and unexpected consequences as well as risks

A Theory of Future Studies    that are difficult to measure now play a more decisive role than they did in what we call industrial societies. Nevertheless, our reduction in certainty about the future should not be seen as a stepping-stone to despair, as if ignorance always led to the worst possible outcome. Rather, civilization’s increasing vitality simply means that our ability to predict the type of life we and those who come after us are going to have is notably diminished. As we have already seen, the certainty that past generations had about the future sprang from the fact that in the past it was much more likely that the future would in essence be very similar to the present. In relation to our present, all previous presents enjoyed the extraordinary cultural advantage of being able to claim things about their future with much more exactitude than we can. It is not excessive to talk about a collective inability to foresee the future: the inaccuracy of predictions has increased. No civilization has known as little about the future as ours does. Paradoxically, the exactitude and validity of predictions are not improved by an increase in knowledge; they are reduced. Although we have never before possessed so many facts about the world and about ourselves, the future has become ever less transparent. From this perspective, it is understandable that the Weberian characterization of social actions as rationalization processes currently has a euphemistic or ambiguous tone: rationality is not necessarily accompanied by security, stability, foresight, and control.

What Do We Know When We Know the Future? Future studies comprises the knowledge of possible, desirable, or probable futures, as well as options for shaping these futures (Kreibich 2000, 9). It could be defined as the attempt to know, identify, and assess social tendencies. But this does not go far enough; its epistemological status still remains in question. In other words, we must determine what it is that we know when we know the future. Since the future constitutes a paradoxical reality, the attempt to know it is also paradoxical. If some novelty or emergency suddenly bursts into reality, we cannot know it or predict it. What prior experience would allow us to say that we are confronting an entirely new experience? Without a means of comparison, novelty escapes us; if there is a means of comparison, the novelty cannot be that new. Something that is entirely new would be unrecognizable because we would

   How Do We Know the Future? not be able to identify it based on any of our existing categories. If the new could be predicted, then it would no longer be the future; it would only be a repetition of what preceded it. In other words, it would be some type of continuation of the present. Our knowledge of the future will always be trapped in this dilemma. Future studies is not possible for something that is completely new nor for something completely old. It is a question of knowing that which is relatively new, to the extent that the new consists of having a known entity placed in a novel context and reassessed. One must distinguish between the expected future that arrives ceteris paribus—and which is, therefore, predictable based on previous experiences—and radical innovations that transcend the horizon opened by other experiences and do not comply with expectations. Future studies is inseparable from a pattern in which three elements converge: identification of the new, observation of the present, and an orientation toward action. Knowledge of the future presupposes, in the first place, an ability to identify that which is new. Classic futurology followed the logic of continuous development, which posits that when there are similar conditions, that which occurred in the past will take place again in the future. This is a weak conception of the new, understood as a mere extrapolation of that which already exists. That which is new in the emphatic sense of the word is incomprehensible if we insist on situating events in logical sequence, because conditions constantly arise that interrupt the causal chains. To be more specific, the conditions for a ceteris paribus type of argument will not arise because the assumption that nothing unexpected will occur is based on the faulty belief that when people are faced with social, technical, or ecological challenges, they will only resort to solutions that have already been invented. This contradicts the reality of our history, which includes both continuity and innovation in equal measure. In complex environments, the task of predicting the future should be relatively interpretive. Its mission, in other words, is to imagine the unknown. Complex perspectives require nonlinear reasoning; intertwined processes and interdependencies should be understood in a thoughtful, autopoietic, nonsequential, evolving manner, not by viewing causality as something linear and based on the past. When processes take a long time and the effects cannot be easily and unquestionably linked to a cause, in-

A Theory of Future Studies    visible dimensions tend to be negated and placed outside the conceptual frame of reference. The mechanical perspective is unable to account for processes that are distant in space and time. This is a real problem, given that a significant number of the products of science—chemical, nuclear, genetic, and nanotechnological—are characterized by processes occurring over large distances, both spatially and temporally; given their extensive latency period; and given that the effects cannot be conclusively linked to their causes. Logical and causal models only explain what could be called weak innovation. This would be knowledge about the future understood as a past time projected forward, turning foresight into the “anticipatory hindsight” of which Alfred Schütz spoke (1972). The only things that can be predicted in this way are those that can be expected based on something typical, events that can be derived based on experiences that have become part of our consciousness. If Schütz was right, then that which is new could only arise as an extension of the past. A thing that had never taken place could not be foreseen, and imagination would be nothing more than a reproduction of that which is experienced and known. The deductive model presumes that events that have occurred in the past can recur in the future, that particulars are subject to known rules, and that a known order applies to new cases. But if this is the case, we do not experience anything truly new. Deductions are tautological. When one makes deductions, it is nothing but an interpretation of what is taking place as a repetition of that which is already known and proven. For innovation in the strict sense of the term, one must resort to abduction: starting with a group of apparently unrelated phenomena, a new rule is posited that logically connects each factor in such a way that they can all be understood as an expression of that rule. Only in this way can society learn something new about itself. That is why abductive conclusions, as Peirce (1976) has said, have the nature of conjectures or bets. The explanations offered by predictions are plausible rather than causal. They are not in the realm of logical demonstration, but of probability. The second element of all future studies is the observation of the present. All discoveries of the future begin with a cognitive approximation toward reality. The true difficulty in predicting the future stems from how little we know about the present. Ultimately, the present is the basis for all prediction, and our shortsightedness about the future is a result of a

   How Do We Know the Future? poverty of perception about the present: a lack of interest and curiosity, stereotyped attitudes, rudimentary exploration. How else can one explain the paradox that future studies always ends up turning to the diagnosis of the present? The paradox of the future stems from the fact that with this term we designate a place in time that necessarily escapes our grasp. To the extent that it becomes reality, to the extent we know it or make something out of it, it is no longer future, but present. Talking about a theory of the future has an element of the contradictory to it, unless we clarify that we are actually talking about a political theory of the present. The future refers to the present in that the present contains lines of force that we can, hypothetically, follow in order to foresee what is probable. It also allows us, from a practical point of view, to prepare, shape, avoid, or favor that which we see in our present as a possible future. Both from the epistemological as well as the practical point of view, when we speak of the future we are always referring to a concrete dimension of the present. The future, strictly speaking, does not exist; the future is always the future of “something,” and its evolution can be glimpsed through parallelisms, regularities, and influences. The future is only knowable and projectable to the extent it is past or present, in other words, where it is least future. The question is whether we can know something about tomorrow starting with what we know today. In other words, can we move from the diagnostic to the prognostic? The main task of future studies is not to extrapolate tendencies but to unfurl spaces of possibility. In short, there is  no divination of the future because only the present can be known. It  is a question of detecting new realities as soon as they begin to develop. This is what Igor Ansoff (1976), the discoverer of so-called “weak signals,” called “early warnings.” Interpretative methods would be used to handle our lack of knowledge, which we only manage to express weakly or with little clarity. Future studies is fundamentally an instrument for diagnosing a society’s present time. Its task is to regulate instruments in order to perceive real opportunities, those latent futures that are hidden in the webs of interdependencies that unfold with the processes we put into place. Even if we can never predict the future of humanity with precision, this work will always be important in order to ascertain the true possibilities of developing avenues for institutional configurations of the desirable future.

A Theory of Future Studies    The third characteristic of future studies is its tendency to employ practical knowledge. At its core, the goal of future studies is to guide actions in accordance with our ideas about which future is desirable. Prognostication is the continuation of the diagnosis of the future, and intervention is its operative consequence. The current task of future studies is not primarily to know the future, but to reflect and advise us so we can choose between a range of options and preferences with full awareness of potential side effects. The most interesting predictions are those that tell us something about processes that are in some way directly malleable or to which one can at least react passively and develop anticipatory postures. All predictions entail some degree of gambling, which is an element that cannot be fully formulated or explained in scientific terms. This is why the future can always be put to an ideological use: the goal of prognosticating, especially in the fields of economics and politics, is not to describe the future, but to control a specific behavior through an appeal to the future. The future functions as an authority that cannot be contradicted, since no one is going to fight the inevitable. Futurologists and other people who study trends frequently announce their predictions in precautionary tones. These predictions have the same purpose as oracles: the crucial factor is not whether they are right, but whether they legitimize certain decisions. Predictions have a normative character: they are used to dissuade or to mobilize, sometimes even through an implicit warning of sanction. An investigation of trends can put the future at one’s service, manipulating it, the way ideologies always have. Attending precisely to this practical matter, the intervention in, rather than reflection of, reality, Merton (1948) discussed self-fulfilling and self-destroying prophecies. Prophecies end up destroying themselves when people act in specific ways precisely because of what was prophesied. These predictions depend on a context that ends up being modified because of the very prediction that was made, thus precluding the fulfillment of the prediction. One of the most well-known examples of a prediction that self-destructed was the report from the Club of Rome in 1972. The predicted consequences did not come to pass, partially because of the political and economic modifications that the publication of the book engendered. Is this prediction and others with similar results a good prediction or not? From the point of view of scientific objectivity, they were not good predictions because what they foretold did not come to pass. But

   How Do We Know the Future? from the point of view of the progress they triggered, we could say they were good predictions. They benefited from being made to fail. The fact that the semantic range of the word “good” contains a double usage—it is a synonym of “correct” and also of “positive,” in the sense of the social transformations that are produced—reminds us that future studies should be very clear about which of the two meanings it prefers to achieve. Is it preferable to offer predictions that are fulfilled or to make a prediction that leads to desirable social developments? As a discipline with practical applications, the most appropriate purpose of future studies would clearly be to have a corresponding intervention prove its pessimistic predictions wrong and make its optimistic predictions fall short.

Uncertain Futures The goal of an investigation into the future is to decisively diminish uncertainties about what is to come, but we are more and more conscious that this task has its limits. Deterministic assumptions are inappropriate for such an investigation because the future continues to be unpredictable until it becomes a present or past reality. The future as such is something that is unavailable to us on principle. The prediction of something new must necessarily fail. Given that we do not know which future will eventually be present, we cannot absolutely guarantee that any particular thing will have no future. In fact, this is one of the most irritating experiences for people in modern times: encountering challenges we considered conquered, the reemergence of things supposedly relegated to the past, the persistence of reactionary political views, the presence of outmoded approaches, or the simple continuity of certain traditions. But there are also structural reasons why this opacity of the future is more acute in contemporary society. Our knowledge of the future is inversely proportional to society’s rate of progress and innovation. The fact that we live in societies filled with intense social change and surrounded by processes of innovation on all fronts makes the prediction of collective futures by scientific means a very precarious matter. In very dynamic settings, even the most repetitive action (doing the same thing under similar circumstances) does not assure the predictability of the results, even if only because no process is ever repeated in the same way. Uncertainties are endemic to complex systems.

A Theory of Future Studies    Because of that, the progress of civilization necessarily implies a reduction in certainty. Dynamic civilizations are civilizations with a strange and uncertain but imminent future. An “abbreviation of the present” has taken place (Lübbe 1994), ensuring that the present is short-lived and the future is ever closer. In addition to the dynamics of civilization, this future that we are no longer able to distinguish is approaching the present. Since the unknown is getting temporally closer, we are losing the feeling of security that is only obtained when one moves among things that are known and reliable. The fact that we live in an opaque temporal landscape is the root of many of our fears. We have to accept a diminished sense of certainty about the world in which we will live and with the discomfort generated by not knowing what awaits us. One of the principal reasons that predicting the future is complicated is its unusualness, which makes extrapolation obsolete. The future can no longer be imagined as a continuation of the present, or as a rupture in historical continuity that is visible in the present. This type of catastrophism is inscribed within the confines of continuity. For the same reasons that the future is no longer a mere continuation of the present, neither can it be understood as that which would result from a total negation of the present. Theories about the political crisis can no longer make use of such grandiloquent categories as revolution, decadence, or contradiction. If The Communist Manifesto or The Decline of the West have become obsolete, it has more to do with their conception of historical temporality than with their concrete observations or the values to which they lay claim. All-­ inclusive concepts seem unable to make sense of the course of history. The end result, which we could call a “mismatch,” is hard to pin to a unique problem or a mechanical explanation. For this reason, analyses need to be ample enough to allow for the coexistence of the positive in the negative, the rational in the irrational. They need to make room for theories that are partial solutions to problems that are themselves also partial. There is much evidence to suggest we have moved from the age of political revolutions to the age of technical and cultural transformations, which are less traumatic and ostentatious, but perhaps more decisive. The role of the revolution is now occupied by multiple trends, which need to be channeled and interpreted. This is a very different task than that carried out by classic revolutionary hermeneutics. The interpretation of the signs of the times is a subtle and prosaic task, which must be approached

   How Do We Know the Future? less with enthusiasm than with good sense and caution. The world’s new scale requires predictions that are modest and prepared to be corrected. We are confronting the chaos of regional times, with turbulences that produce inter­twined evolutions. It is no longer possible to function within the primitive model of one homogeneous historic time. Faced with the future’s particular opaqueness and the loss of the explanatory force of known causalities, the response that future studies has at its disposal is not an exact means of reckoning but a more or less reasonable management of doubt. Scholars of future studies increasingly recognize the uncertainty of this type of knowledge, and they express it by saying that ­future studies must necessarily combine possible, probable, and preferred futures (Bell 2003). It is no longer so much a question of predicting what is going to happen as establishing procedures to manage ignorance. It is not surprising that our lack of knowledge occupies an important place in current discussions about the politics of risk. The consciousness of risk has once again located our temporal horizon within a context of indeterminacy and openness. To the extent to which the future always carries a degree of risk, we inevitably end up confronting an aporia: we need to calculate the incalculable. If that were not the case, the future would be something different, namely, destiny or mere chance. By making decisions, modern societies specifically transform the future as destiny or as chance into a future as risk. Social doubts and uncertainties increase in proportion to our attempts at innovation and growth, which must be balanced with a corresponding spike in our concern about the future. The future has been transformed into a contingent sphere for human beings, implying not only opportunities, but also obligations and responsibilities. The trustworthiness of our knowledge of the future is enormously reduced when “the future will no longer be a mere continuation of the present but a direct consequence of it” (Peccei 1982, 10). Future studies stops being an exact science and becomes an accumulation of knowledge, a configuration of plans, and an exercise in responsibility. Modern societies find themselves overwhelmed in their attempt to know and legitimize the future in agreement with a model of exact prediction. When new uncertainties arise, when even expert knowledge is revealed to be inaccurate and controversial, then knowledge itself becomes one of the goals of politics. From that point on, there needs to be a political decision about the knowledge resources that should be generated and

A Theory of Future Studies    the degree of uncertainty and ignorance that is acceptable regarding certain decisions. Innovation is of primordial importance in advanced societies, which are uniquely obligated to continue acquiring knowledge and cannot simply submit to established forms of learning.

Adapting or Shaping? Our uncertainty regarding the future is the reason behind some of our rejections of the efforts of future studies and of the intentional shaping of the future. The semantics of progress that drove the processes of modernization has been replaced by the rhetoric of necessity and its concepts of competence or modernization. There are those who have transformed the Hegelian principle of “the knowledge of necessity” into “the acceptance of trends.” Programs, reforms, and strategies have surrendered to a logic of adaptation. If there are no predictions, political action is reduced to managing emergencies, when there is no longer time to maneuver. As Talleyrand stated, “when it is urgent it is already too late” (2001, 13). Politics is given over to a process of “muddling through,” where the short term holds court and provisional solutions replace outsized plans for shaping the future in such a way that the same problems continue to make an appearance in the political agenda. In that way, politics loses its position as a shaping agent and becomes a reactive player or repairer of damages. It is not, in that sense, strange that there is a phenomenon of indifference that reflects, not so much a decline in civic obligations as a certain degree of rationality among the voters who express, with their disinterest, the loss of real meaning in politics over the course of history. The current political crisis is not a crisis associated with moments of rupture and decision making, but with the fact that there is nothing to decide. Social dynamics have been liberated from the possibilities of intentional influence, thus making politics somewhat irrelevant. The current political renewal is restructuring cognitive predictions for the future and the means of shaping the future under existing levels of complexity. There will be no better future if we cannot form an image of it. When one is interested in real modifications, the first step is a good analysis of the present, which will afford an idea of possible futures based on the things that are considered desirable.

   How Do We Know the Future? It is not merely a question of accurately observing an environment to which we simply need to adapt. We must also explore all the possibilities of predicting and shaping it. Any talk about managing the future nowadays, when a lack of ideas is disguised as intelligent improvisation, opens one up to the accusation of favoring state-controlled planning. Current collective evidence addresses the logic of competition, market dynamics, and the contingency of evolution. But this apparently deregulated world demands planning and foresight to an extent heretofore unknown. It is true that the traditional idea of the sovereign state is currently very weak, but that does not mean that societies should renounce their desire to shape themselves. The reality is that the shaping of the future must now be carried out with greater thoughtfulness and awareness of our limitations, in a coordinated and flexible manner, more through regulation than direct intervention. There are methods of confronting the complexity of the future for which the contrast between markets and hierarchies is not useful, because both require systems of cooperation and an array of actors. The sovereignty that is thus lost is recovered in the form of initiative and intervention. Elaborating a systematic plan does not necessarily mean having a deterministic idea of the future. The fact that absolute control over society has been lost does not mean that the possibilities of working toward a desirable future have vanished, but that this aspiration should now be carried out differently. In fact, the new way of going about it may be even more democratic and efficient than the old, supposedly sovereign plans. Hannah Arendt (1958) expressed a great truth when she noted that human beings with a systematic plan are superior to those who lack a purpose and are not bound by any promise. But projects are only possible in an environment considered open and, at least partially, indeterminate. This presupposes an optimistic vision of social reality and our ability to combat the destiny that is now presented under diverse disguises: as an uncritical acceptance of what exists, as a reactive passivity that is only put in motion when there is an emergency, or as a declaration that another world is possible and that, if we want to achieve it, we need only apply traditional procedures.

4 How Is the Future Decided? A Theory of Decision

Political systems have always been designed with the expectation that they will produce binding decisions. This expectation seems to have disappeared from our conceptual horizon, which is populated by terms that allude to the irrelevance of our decisions, like globalization, risks, or side effects. Things do not seem any more promising for concrete political practice: when we discuss symbolic politics, various levels of government, or post-sovereignty, we are indicating that the time of big decisions has passed and that the practice of politics now involves modest decisions with uncertain results. Everything in our current situation seems to conspire not just against the possibility of making correct decisions, but against the possibility of making any type of decision at all. The question before us is no longer how to protect ourselves from bad decisions but knowing whether, from the current situation of extreme contingency, it is still possible to make any political decision at all. Is there a sphere of political rationality that does not abandon us to arbitrariness or evolutionary chance? The subject of this chapter—the relationship between the future and decision making—presumes that, in spite of all the limitations we must accept, the future can still be decided and that, even in the age of globalization, political decisions weigh true options and alternatives.

   How Is the Future Decided?

The Decision Society Modernity could be characterized as an age when decisions have acquired a special importance. There are now more activities that require a decision. Many situations that were resolved through tradition or routine in premodern societies now require a decision from a social agent. In the modern world, the range of decision making, of that which can or must be decided, is growing, while destiny’s domain shrinks. Posttraditional societies force us to decide who we are and how we prefer to act, matters that were simply predetermined in other types of societies. In this sense, one can call modern society a “decision society” (Reese-Schäfer 2000, 274; Schimank 2005). Just as Sartre talked about people being condemned to freedom, it is also fair to say that people and societies are forced to make decisions in more and more realms, such as identity politics, body image, religion, sexuality, social connections, etc. We now live in a “multioption society” (Gross 1994) with a wide range of choices, and people are afforded an ever-­expanding number of alternatives. Modern society “alienates” in a peculiar fashion. There are an ever-growing number of options for an ever-growing number of people, which implies a greater need for decision making. “There has never before been, in the consciousness of the relevant actors or in the issues themselves, so much to decide” (Greven 1999, 61). Beck formulated this reality in a dramatic manner: “Human beings have lost something essential: the nondecision. Fundamental contingency creates an obligation to decide. From now on, the nondecision is only possible as a decision” (2000, 46). Even those decisions that are presented as if they were not truly decisions— as if they were inevitable, simple adaptations to the historical time period, or mere acquiescence in the face of scientific evidence—are precisely that: decisions that attempt to gain favor by concealing what they are. But what exactly is a decision and how is it distinguished from other types of activities? Decisions are those activities that do not suppress the gamut of alternatives in the way routine, traditional, or emotional activities previously did. In fact, decisions do just the opposite: they probe and ponder choice conscientiously. Decisions “thematize their own contingency” (Luhmann 1978, 338) and “convert uncertainties into risks” (Schon 1967, 25). Any uncertainty about the course of action we should take creates an increased risk of poor decision making.

A Theory of Decision    All our ambivalence surrounding decision making stems from this situation. Schelsky (1961) formulated it by saying that modern societies defatalize reality and, in that way, create numerous problems of activity. Theories about the individualization of the person in contemporary society are almost always presented with dramatic flair; it is suggested that the individual is burdened with excessive decisions and thus ends up overwhelmed by panic or some other form of irrational behavior. A society of amplified choices can, then, also be considered an encumbered society. A plurality of choices can paralyze decision making. When this occurs, options are not viewed optimistically as vital opportunities, but as “bad openings” (Klapp 1978), such as insecurity, ambivalence, and disorientation. This negative aspect of the decision society, which is the protagonist of some critical analyses of current culture, applies equally at the level of organizations and government. The person with the largest degree of ­decision-making responsibility often characterizes it as an excessive burden and regrets having to make decisions more frequently and less rationally, with a lack of data, time, or understanding on the part of those affected. It could even be said that having fewer options is sometimes better than having more if we calculate the costs and corresponding responsibilities that accompany decision making. The onerous aspect of the freedom of decision making entails not only a quantitative aspect, related to the fact that people continue to need to make more and more decisions; the expectation that they will make their decisions rationally is also on the rise. People must make an increasing number of decisions that are increasingly rational. Expecting rational decisions in a modern society is an excessive demand. We continue to have more things to decide, and we have to do so in more complex situations. The inevitability of decisions contrasts with the complex settings in which they have to be adopted and the reality of their multi-intentional outcomes. But the “decision society” is not merely an encumbered society. An increase in options is not merely a burden; it can also be experienced as an opportunity for autonomy and innovation as long as we manage to correctly demarcate the things we have the power to decide and the manner in which we should do so. The fact that decisions are central to our society, that there are now more things to be decided, does not mean that our dominion over the world has increased proportionally. A democratic society is one in which

   How Is the Future Decided? the range of what needs to be decided has expanded, but these decisions are not sovereign decisions. Rather, they are exercised in a framework in which those who act politically depend on many other people’s actions in turn. Social arrangements are not intentionally moldable through sovereign political decisions; in social processes, there is always the intervention of what we could call inescapable destinies, both old and new. Modern society has in principle been optimistic regarding its ability to determine its own reality, even when this optimism has been frequently contradicted in various ways. One need not think only of extravagant planning: even the most modest projects of governance must confront resistance. In addition to political actors not achieving what they intended, the risk of producing undesired and unexpected side effects rears its head over and over again. In any case, the typically modern connection between politics and the future engenders the mundane hope that people can modify the social world, that it is not an immutable destiny. When social structures—their construction, maintenance, transformation, or destruction—are not only the result of interactions but can also be shaped intentionally, then rational decisions acquire an extraordinary level of social importance. Some decisions have limited ramifications while others have the power to shape or influence coming events. A single configuring decision can determine the playing field for other actions and decisions; it establishes its structural premises in the future. Decisions of this nature determine what can or cannot be decided in the future. Here, the idea of configuration suggests that every decision, but some more than others, has related effects that go beyond the isolated situation. Configuration does not mean that the future is completely determined but that some possible spaces are opened and others are made more difficult in certain relevant aspects. Choice is a selection between alternative actions. That is why when we have a true choice—unlike an action that is spontaneous or routine, satisfied with tradition, an action that represses alternatives or simply does not consider them—we must weigh the full range of options. None of these actions has the future as its primary consideration. Emotional action is subjugated to the present; it breathes the here and now of indignation, envy, or compassion. Traditional or routine actions are limited to repeating that which has always been done or that which has already been approved. But true decisions always reference the future. By means of de-

A Theory of Decision    cision, agents always break, to a greater or lesser degree, with the past and the present; they are freed from their trajectory and establish something genuinely new in the world. A world in which our every action took the form of a decision would be a world without any certainty regarding our expectations. No matter if people acted with the greatest possible rationality, their interactions would be hopelessly complex, and even more randomness would be engendered. In a situation like that, rational decisions would be impossible. In the most complex and random world, no one would be able to propose a realistic ending or weigh the effectiveness of various modes of attack. For that reason, we should not regret the fact that human beings do not decide everything; this offers true relief. In every well-organized society, there is give and take between innovative decisions and institutional stability. Not every decision leads to a critical breaking point, but neither are there democratic societies where innovation is deemed impossible as a matter of course. Every society and every historical time period balances in its own way the relationship between routine and decision, between the institution and its breaking points. It is true that institutions have a liberating function regarding decisions. They do, as Gehlen would say, “limit behavior” and open a space for reflection and subjectivity (1957, 104). There are many reasons to carry out the “praise of routine” that is at the heart of all institutions (Luhmann 1964), but institutions do not stop being a network of decisions established on the basis of precedent that make future decisions possible.

Dimensions of Complexity The problem confronting social actors is that they need to adopt their decisions in accordance with appropriate criteria of rationality, but this demand conflicts with the growing complexity in which those decisions must be made. One cannot act rationally without accepting reality’s complexity. The problem with certain conceptions of politics, legal decisions, or scientific approaches is that they make use of a model of decision making that does not measure up to this complexity. In fact, they ignore it or remain unaware of it. The first requirement of a rational decision is, for that reason, to grasp the complexity of the world. This complexity can be broken into three dimensions: social, cognitive, and temporal, and these

   How Is the Future Decided? results, in turn, lead to a complicated web of interdependencies, incomplete information, and a lack of time. Social dimension. The social dimension of complexity proceeds from social interdependencies, in other words, from the fact that each decision interacts with other decisions. A social actor is not a closed, isolated unit. Every actor confronts others who react with their own actions and decisions, sometimes making a preemptive move. This affords many advantages as well as numerous complications. The complexity of interdependence is often revealed in the form of conflicts or, at a minimum, uncertainty about expectations. Since what I achieve with my decision depends on how other people react, the uncertainty surrounding my decision increases to the extent I am unsure what other people will do. Interdependence produces diverse groupings that can be organized into the following types: negotiation, influence, and observation. From explicit interaction to mere juxtaposition, from conflict to cooperation, interdependence gives way to a great variety of environments that should be adequately identified by anyone who is going to make a decision while surrounded by these groups. As if that were not enough, we are not only referring to personal or institutional actors, but to the complexity that results from the existence and interaction of diverse ways of thinking that occur in a differentiated society. Decisions are complicated by desynchronization in the languages of each social subsystem. At the same time, complexity based on interdependence increases as the contexts of operations extend onto a global level. These contexts are no longer limited to national or local spaces, and decisions cannot be carried out without considering the influence they exert and the influences to which they are subjected beyond their immediate domain. This interdependence of actors is at the source of current global complexities and requires specific tools that are still under development. Cognitive dimension. From the cognitive point of view, complexity is experienced as having incomplete or scarce information. This is not simply a quantitative question since it is frequently the case—and this is a typically modern phenomenon—that informational disorientation is due to excess. Incomplete information can at times mean ambiguity or contradictory knowledge and can even arise or be aggravated by the addition of more information (Zahariadis 1998, 74; Böschen, Schneider, and Lerf 2004). In that case, what one needs is the knowledge to determine which pieces of

A Theory of Decision    information are correct and relevant as well as their degree of importance regarding the matter at hand. Complexity occurs when the information that is needed overwhelms the actor’s ability to retrieve it so the decision has to be made on the basis of incomplete or uncertain information (March and Simon 1958, 139). What is the issue? What is at stake? What depends on what? The fewer answers one has to these questions, the more complicated the world becomes for the decision maker. Although this complexity is in fact an attribute of the human condition, there are some specifically modern causes that explain its growth in contemporary society. In functionally differentiated societies, there is a genuine explosion in the quantity of existing information because of the multiplicity of situations and possibilities in the diverse systemic horizons of meaning. In these societies, there is an increasing gap between the knowledge that is available in principle and the ever more difficult elaboration of that knowledge on the part of those who have to make decisions. Functional differentiation does not in any way resolve the problem of excessive information during decision making; in fact, it complicates it. In the first place, this is because the amount of available information in any given system is never reduced; in fact, specialization only serves to increase it. Furthermore, the information that is relevant for each system is often not contained within that system but exceeds the system’s limits and must be retrieved outside of it. Any strategy meant to confront our lack of information ends up significantly reducing relevant information, highlighting fundamental information, or ignoring details and interconnections in order to elaborate an appropriate “cognitive map” (Axelrod 1976). Information does not consist of objective data points about the world, but data elaborated by the respective actor. This capacity for elaboration proves it is worthwhile, right from the start, by its capacity for search and recall and its combinatory ability, that is, its ability to sensibly connect and make available all the information obtained (March 1994, 10). Limitations on the ability to gather information do not imply an equivalency between an incompleteness that is accidental or the product of neglect and another that is deliberate and intended (Lindblom 1979, 519). Selectivity in the elaboration of information cannot be avoided, but it can be structured in a logical manner. Any information manager must keep in mind that certain blind spots and distortions occur during information gathering: exponential

   How Is the Future Decided? developments tend to be considered linearly and, for that reason, undervalued; risks that are serious but unlikely tend to be underestimated; information processing tends to be dominated by the short term; and we have a tendency to overestimate our own worth. On the other hand, analogous errors are made regarding groups and organizations: individuals who participate in a decision do not correct each other and may even end up inter­actively reinforcing their tendencies toward error. “Groupthink” (Janis 1972) is a well-known phenomenon in which the risks of certain decisions are trivialized. Temporal dimension. From a temporal perspective, complexity manifests as a lack of time that is closely related to the two previous factors. The time shortage is evidenced by the fact that we cannot endlessly increase information nor can we eliminate our gaps in information for any given decision (Luhmann 2000b, 176). If we had unlimited time, then the world would not be complex. The ultimate cause for the complexity of decisions needs to be specifically attributed to our temporal shortage. In practice, this scarcity means that people have to decide too many problems in a short period of time or even simultaneously. It is impossible for any single decision to be studied with a requisite sense of calm (Zahariadis 1998, 76). The time shortage is also evidenced in the urgency of problems. There are situations of dynamic complexity in which the options at hand will not wait for a decision to be made. From a formal perspective, the lack of time can be exemplified by deadlines. It may seem that deadlines resolve the problems of decision making to the extent that, once the time is up, we can stop worrying about them, but this is only useful for problems for which a deadline signals improvement. When the problem in question is progressing, an expired deadline does not represent any type of solution. As we saw in the case of complexity due to interdependence and informational shortcomings, the scarcity of time is also conditioned by society’s functional differentiation. Social systems configure their own temporal horizons, and there are many decisions for which interdependencies, such as certain demands for synchronization, should be kept in mind. In this way, “time chasms” are produced between different social systems (Wiesenthal 2005, 158). Systems erect deadlines between themselves, and functional differentiations—which could initially seem like a time-saving division of labor—thereby make the lack of time more acute.

A Theory of Decision    The lack of time also has consequences for social dialogue, upon which it nonetheless imposes some limits. Time shortages hamper the resolution of conflicts through discussion because discussion does not substitute life, and there is no life without shortages. When we appeal to dialogue for the resolution of conflicts, we must not forget that dialogue does not preempt decisions. Social conflict, which is tied to shortages, does not enjoy an unlimited amount of time for reaching agreement, which forces decisions to be made without unanimity. Another problem that the lack of time poses to decision making is that reliable predictions simply cannot be made about future developments. The future is too unpredictable to foresee all the possible consequences of a decision, thus our only choice is to expect unpredictable and undesired effects. Short-term decisions are adopted that soon demand new decisions. Consequently, our lack of time leads to restricted rationality in the decision-making process.

The Typology of Decisions Not all decisions are cut from the same cloth nor are they adopted within similar levels of complexity. We can classify, in broad terms, three types of decisions: the planning that pertains to situations of maximum rationality, the incrementalism that characterizes decisions of medium ­rationality, and the improvisation that accompanies findings of minimal ­rationality in highly complex situations. Planning. A maximally reasonable decision would take the form of a plan that includes the following components: diagnosis of the problem, the elaboration of criteria, a search for alternatives, the assessment and choice of alternatives, implementation, and evaluation. In order for a decision to be perfect, it would have to fulfill each of these steps, rationally resolving the problems arising from different types of complexity; it would have to consider all the perspectives of all the implicated and possibly affected actors, and it would have to elucidate all relevant information for as long as necessary. A rationally justified decision must be capable of examining situations from the point of view of their possible contingency. It should question information that is considered immutable, redefine problems, examine alternative decisions, and “treat goals as hypotheses” (Cohen and

   How Is the Future Decided? March 1974, 226). When we have to make a decision, we sometimes need to escape the institutionalized blinders inherent in any system and seek other sources of information. For this purpose, we need a holistic vision and a broad perspective that is not limited to the narrow focus of the particular situation. This illuminates aspects of reality that have not received sufficient attention and allows for the generation of new ideas. The innovation and creativity of decisions depends greatly upon this capacity. Another way to improve the informational basis of a decision is to encourage the participation of those who can contribute diverse perspectives to the decision (Quinn 1980, 21). This participation should represent the greatest possible range of interests affected by a decision and thus widen the criteria taken into account. The logic behind participation is that, when the complexity is high, no single actor can grasp all possible implications, and participation can help reduce complexity. But the opposite is also true, depending on how the process of participation is articulated. The dilemma consists of the fact that no plan can be successful without participation, but participation can also stall the decision instead of facilitating it. The best decisions involve careful predictions of the future, affording people the greatest amount of information possible. The elaboration of early warning systems forms part of this predictive effort. These systems attempt to take advantage of the possibilities of confronting problems as soon as possible, rather than accounting for them only once they have achieved proportions that are extensive or dramatic. This means an active, not purely reactive, style (Mayntz and Scharpf 1973, 7). For that, it is necessary to have an early warning system that probes problems and is capable of reading the first, barely perceptible signs of what is coming. It is a question of paying attention to the beginnings, to Ansoff’s “weak signals” (1976). It is clear that our level of rationality is in no way on a par with these demands and that such a limitation should not be attributed to our idleness nor bemoaned as misfortune. It simply represents our human condition. But the model of a maximally reasonable decision allows us to inventory the map of decisions and examine the resources possible in our concrete situation. Incrementalism. The modality of decisions befitting medium-level rationality has been referred to as the science of getting by or muddling

A Theory of Decision    through (Lindblom 1959). This is not heroic, it may even be suspect, but it applies to the majority of decisions that are of medium complexity. The complexity of situations in which decisions need to be made does not generally allow for perfect rationality, but it does allow for some rational management. Collingridge describes this as a method of trial and error, the only way that decisions can be made in a “hostile, turbulent world” (1992, 9). The rule is not to maximize but to satisfy (Wiesenthal 2005, 37). Satisfaction means relinquishing the ideal and the superlative, but not renouncing a certain degree of rationality in the decision. Incrementalism does not demand an exhaustive search of every possible alternative for a given problem. “In the face of ignorance, the most rational decisions are those which leave open the largest range of future options” (Marris and Rein 1967, 257). It would, in short, be an attempt to minimize the pre­ determination of the future, leaving it as open as possible. One very common way of reducing the complexity of decisions consists of breaking the problem into simpler parts. This calls to mind Popper’s piecemeal engineering (1957) and the colloquial expression: “let’s take it step by step.” People who follow an incrementalist strategy do not create a long-term plan that needs to be followed at any cost; instead, they practice “a policy of small steps” (Bailey and O’Connor 1975). When people need to make a decision, they dedicate themselves to specific aspects of the problem that match their experience and strategic criteria, rather than trying to confront it in its entirety. We often have to experiment on a smaller scale before adopting a complete and overarching decision. In this way, each of the partial problems can be handled with greater rationality. Given that no one is able to confront problems in all their profundity, the final integration of all the compartmentalized sections and their corresponding partial decisions ends up producing a general decision with limited rationality. In any case, it is important not to introduce changes in too many areas at the same time (Collingridge 1992, 4). As is the case in all limited strategies, the risk here is that we might overlook the interdependence of problems, treating them as if they were isolated from other matters, when that is not the way things tend to work. Almost all incrementalist solutions practice sequentiality; in other words, they work toward problem resolution step by step. The attempt to find the definitive solution to a problem through a single, bold decision

   How Is the Future Decided? that would require a great deal of information and consensus tends to be incompatible with our shortage of time. Instead, we should make an effort to move step by step from an unsatisfactory situation toward a situation that could be considered an improvement. This type of focus is endorsed by the principle “first things first,” coinciding with Keynes’s motto that we are all dead in the long run. This is an effective approach for many problems that can only be addressed gradually. That being said, the ultimate reason for sequentiality is that it makes reversibility possible (Scott 1998, 345). Every partial decision could end up being in error, but given that it only represents a small modification on the previous situation—in other words, since there is no radical break with the status quo ante—it is possible to correct its negative effects if necessary (Quinn 1980, 20). One dimension of the social aspect of incrementalism consists of simplifying the processes of negotiation and agreement, reducing them to a question of bargaining and not arguing. In other words, rather than insisting on changing positions, they are left intact and a simple balance of interests is proposed (March and Simon 1958, 129). Instead of getting involved in a complicated process of altering interests or shaping a common will, it is much simpler to accept the opinions and interests of the participants as something fixed in order to try to reach a compromise. This has been called “partisan mutual adjustment” (Lindblom 1965; Collingridge 1992). It is necessary to regulate the relationship between existing forces so that every person can focus on his or her own interests without attempting to modify everyone else’s plans. These approaches, to the extent that they place more of an emphasis on balance than on transformation, have the potentiality and the limitation of obstructing changes that involve some degree of risk. Incrementalism is, in this sense, conservative, and it adapts to society’s existing power relationships without resistance or a desire for transformation. Most of incrementalism’s limitations come from its tendency to wait for problems to arise. Incrementalism does not advise actively probing for future problems that are still latent in our decisions, but allows the problems to appear and then reacts to them. Problems are only confronted when they can no longer be avoided. Dealing with problems consecutively and reactively implies that problems will advance as far as possible, until they can go no further. Problems are managed, not solved in the strictest sense (Kirsch 1994, 10). Luhmann addressed this issue as the “transformation of

A Theory of Decision    problems into other problems” (2000b, 322). In this way, the politics of small steps can become a way of “exporting” the costs of making a decision into the future. We are capable of making certain decisions today only because we defer the costs to future decisions (Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit 1999, 15). For that reason, if there is no consideration of third-party interests or the long term, incrementalism tends toward short-termism and specialization. Actors refuse to actively shape their own situation and influence the problems that will appear. Decision-making processes are not even set in motion by warnings since warnings always refer to future events and the future is outside of the realm of consideration. This does not necessarily imply that the actors are self-centered; sometimes the complexity of situations does not allow any other response. But it is important to also be aware that incremental actions increase the risk that a partial decision will lead to an unsatisfactory general result. It is not clear that the sum of partial solutions leads to a good overall solution (Brauchlin and Heese 1995, 45). Improvisation. Typically, situations of elevated complexity are partially or completely beyond the comprehension of the people involved. The most rational course of action when the act of planning or even mediumlevel incrementalism is impossible might be a certain degree of improvisation such as waiting for things to improve, adapting to the circumstances, being flexible, or some indiscriminate combination of responses. Improvisation is behavior that proceeds without plans, without calculation, without determining goals and selecting means, without weighing eventual side effects. These rational decision-making activities are, for the actors, an attempt to stay in the game, which is what political conflict often consists of, even though its representatives play up and aspire to the idea of making sovereign decisions. In conditions of extreme complexity, deciding not to decide may be a rational decision. This is why waiting, for example, may make sense. Not all problems become more difficult to resolve as more time passes; exactly the opposite may hold true for some. Determining when we are faced with one situation or the other is an intelligent discernment that characterizes this type of subincremental rationality. For many problems the degree of difficulty does not vary over time; others may be simplified, resolved, or may even disappear as time goes by; and sometimes the tools for problem

   How Is the Future Decided? solving may improve with the passing of time. Waiting for objective conditions to improve without doing anything and, in the meantime, intervening in order to improve subjective conditions may be a reasonable form of planning. It sometimes makes sense, for example, to postpone working on a problem until achieving an acceptable level of agreement among the people with whom there is currently a conflictive relationship. It makes sense to be patient or to do what is possible to improve conditions when dealing with a problem that cannot get worse. In these cases, one abandons any hope of micromanaging and aspires merely to create conditions that will allow one to make the correct decision at the opportune time (­Jurczyk and Rerrich 1993, 41), or to simply gain time for further observation (Leifer 1991, 66). There is a joke about a man who lost the key to his house and started looking for it under the nearest streetlight. When asked why he was looking in that spot, he said he did not think the key was there, but at least he could see clearly. People tend to adopt measures that are familiar to them and with which they have been successful even when they know the problem in question requires a different type of response. They think, and they are not always mistaken, that what worked in one situation can also work in the next. This attitude is in keeping with the reflex of reverting to the toolbox even before examining the nature of the problem. Some generic instruments carry the advantage of familiarity and may afford us fortuitous results; at times it is rational to apply them to a new situation, although it is not very ambitious reasoning. This is the case, for example, when we associate actions with results because of their temporal and spatial proximity. As March says, assuming that causes will be located close to effects is not a foolish assumption; it is quite often the way things work (1994, 85). When we maintain our ignorance of a problem’s wide range of causal interdependencies, the totality of relevant information is reduced to a manageable level. Minimalist solutions of this sort are the product of symbolic politics (Edelman 1964), which latches onto an apparent solution and otherwise leaves things as they are. It may even consider manufacturing problems for a preexisting solution. Such decisions often promise a quick adaptation while merely supporting a course that is already occurring naturally. In all of these scenarios, the real problems remain unsolved. •   •   •

A Theory of Decision    The type of rationality that can be expected of decisions depends on the complexity of the situation. When there is minimal complexity, it is possible to develop strategies with more foresight through the use of planning techniques. Medium-level complexity employs incrementalism. A high level of complexity means that the actor must be satisfied with simply remaining in the game in order to have opportunities for deciding in a more rational fashion in the future. In any case, it is important to correctly identify the degree of complexity of the situation in which we find ourselves (a task for which the self-deceptions of both hope and indolence tend to be of little use) and to adopt the best decision within the limits afforded by the situation. In all instances, actors are admonished, to the extent possible, not to limit their vision to immediate decisions if they want to achieve their goals and avoid unleashing undesired effects. Sooner or later, they will need to question whether they are on the right path rather than just wondering whether they should continue on the path once chosen. The standardization of decisions gives us security about what to expect, but on the other hand, that very security blocks our ability for collective learning. A simplification of solutions reduces our ability to process problems.

5 Who Is in Charge of the Future? A Theory of Responsibility

The current state of the principle of responsibility is a reaction to the growing uncertainty that characterizes modern societies. The reiteration that the world is a hodgepodge of ungovernable dynamics seems to demand a new conception of responsibility. Its new description needs to match current social complexities and be open to probable future scenarios that, while they are distant from the immediate present, are inscribed in current tensions. The future can and should be protected and sheltered. We must take charge of it; this is a true testing ground for the exercise of responsibility.

An Out of Control World? We tend to demand responsibility for decisions that affect an unknown future, even in those cases where the interdependence of causal links is difficult to grasp. Scandals, epidemics, financial crises, global warming, the aging of the population, and the like generate a desire to identify causes and culprits, to demand forethought and caution. This mandate contrasts with the fragmentation and tendency toward anonymity of our public space. Inertia is rampant in contemporary society, which not only hinders the expansion of the common good in the long run, but systematically encourages us to stop striving for it. The idea of an interconnected world, which has served as a truism to describe the reality of globalization, implies in principle a world of ­limited—

A Theory of Responsibility    when not scattered or blatantly lacking—responsibility over which no one can establish control and no one is in charge. Interconnectedness means, on the one hand, balance and mutual restraint, but it also alludes to contamination, domino effects, and the intensification of disasters, as seen recently with subprime mortgages, in which a limited problem was transformed into a major crisis throughout the real estate market, the stock market, and even the interbank market. The interconnected world also constitutes a “runaway world,” as Giddens (1999) discussed when describing the less pleasing aspects of globalization. In the concrete case of the recent financial crisis, irresponsibility originated as a lack of foresight. Our warning and risk prevention systems worked very poorly, and the authorities had a poor understanding of the seriousness of the crisis. This lack of foresight reveals less of a moral or political failing than a serious cognitive deficit. It is hard to understand why the logical conclusions did not prevail in the face of a history dense with speculative bubbles that had disastrous consequences. While the crisis of “the new economy” is very recent, we still have not assimilated the lesson that, just prior to it, a very promising new economic era was being heralded. When financial euphoria is widespread, the hypothesis of a crisis seems distant and incapable of provoking the reactions that prudence would advise. The first anthropological explanation for this oversight is that the prophets of bad news are never welcome. But there is also an ideological explanation, in that the defenders of the efficient-market hypothesis have long celebrated the “wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki 2005) and proclaimed that the market is never wrong. This has discouraged the creation of regulatory instruments. Whether we suffer from a lack of financial memory, as some people have claimed, or from blindness before the disaster, it is clear that we are very bad at foreseeing catastrophic developments despite our wealth of sophisticated mathematical tools. Perhaps a precise road map of risks would have allowed the prediction of their irrational concatenation during the most recent crisis. Some of the risks were spread throughout the marketplace in a way that could hardly be measured by financial institutions and that derailed any estimation of their future impact. When the temporal horizon is elongated and only the most immediate interest is kept in mind, it is very difficult to avoid a catastrophic evolutionary process. There is a great imbalance between current and future interests, since the latter

   Who Is in Charge of the Future? are hypothetical and virtual. Only when a crisis has become fully present can the forces capable of tackling it take action. From an informational point of view as well as the perspective of control, the mechanisms of self-­ regulation have proven to be insufficient. This reveals that we still do not know how to detect, manage, and communicate global risks. The financial crisis is, in the end, a crisis of responsibility, and the procedure that best represents it has been the spread of financial products such as securitization, meaning the conversion of a loan into a financial asset to sell to investors. These types of financial derivatives fulfilled people’s desire to shift potential risks into an infinitely distant future. They were, in other words, seen as a way to accept risks without assuming the consequences, a technique we could call “risks without risks.” Securitization acted as a global mechanism for irresponsibility that both spread and disguised risks, making markets opaque. Like other financial products, this one made it possible for the risks in loan operations to be drained or neutralized, transferring the burden toward markets of a speculative nature. The opacity of these markets hindered control and allowed for excessive risks through opaque securities with risks no one was able to evaluate. In this way, a global financial marketplace has been established in which a company’s minority shareholders are able to apply pressure to obtain ever higher rates of return. The unreality of economic exchanges has revealed that financial globalization is much more fragile than commercial globalization. None of this would have happened if there had not been a simultaneous abdication of responsibility on the part of governments, central banks, and global financial institutions in their role as crisis predictors, in their function as educators of the citizenry, and in their capacity to regulate financial markets. Economic and financial managers made the mistake of trusting entirely in the self-regulatory capacity of the financial markets, and they accepted the irresponsibility of the credit markets, subject to the same model of behavior used in the stock markets. The ensuing bailouts may have been inevitable, but they will not help promote responsible behaviors. The economic actors who benefited from the bailouts can continue to assume excessive risks without suffering the consequences because of the fear that their failure could trigger a series of catastrophes throughout the rest of the economy. The crisis obliges us to construct a new model of financial responsibility, something that will be implemented more through control and

A Theory of Responsibility    super­vision than through regulatory norms. Our leaders should understand that it falls to them to make key economic and financial actors assume their responsibilities: the responsibility of lenders to limit securitization, meaning they must reduce the opacity of the market risk of derivatives so debts are not treated as speculative instruments; the responsibility of shareholders to restrict voting rights to those who make a stable commitment to the company and thus empower it to implement true strategic planning; the responsibility of governments, which should come to an agreement on a system of stable parities, thus avoiding the violent currency oscillations that disconcert economic actors; the responsibility of the producers and consumers of raw materials, who should make ­mediumand long-term commitments to specific quantities and prices; and the responsibility of the central banks that, without sacrificing their necessary independence, should be capable of performing the tasks of financial management while also weighing all the large, decisive parameters that affect various aspects of the economy, such as production, employment, prices, debt, balanced budgets, and balance of trade. But we cannot lose sight of the context in which these compromises must be achieved. It is clear that contemporary society is characterized by a series of dynamics that obey their own logic and cannot be completely contained or regulated. This whole set of processes, ranging from social differentiation to globalization, creates situations in which the consequences of our actions greatly surpass our capacity for planning and control. In this increasingly dense network of dependencies, our obligations lose visibility and clarity. Social processes do not permit centralized control, and governmental institutions confront a series of limitations when attempting to manage practical matters that are arranged according to their own schedule and goals. Financial crises are an example of how difficult it is to ascribe collective damages to identifiable causes or people and to act with moral standards in the midst of economic processes. At the same time, an increasingly interdependent world also expands the number of consequences stemming from actions that are only minimally attributable. These and other circumstances justify a description of “organized irresponsibility” (Beck 1988, 100) for our societies, although it might be more accurate to emphasize their lack of organization, their inability to organize responsibility, given that some of these dynamics clearly contradict many of our rights and responsibilities. The weakening of the sense of

   Who Is in Charge of the Future? r­ esponsibility is not an outcome that can be blamed solely on politicians or on public apathy. Rather, it results from the mixture of institutional weakness and fatalism that characterizes our democratic commitments. There has been a change in the conditions under which political responsibility used to be understood and practiced. The problem resides in how to represent that responsibility at a time when we have lost evidence of the connection between my individual behavior (as a lender, consumer, shareholder, voter, or client) and global results. The vision of this new relationship between individual and community issues will only be achieved if we develop a concept of responsibility that does justice to current social complexities and corresponds to our reasonable expectations of attaining a world that is governable and for which we take responsibility.

Responsibility and Complexity The question of responsibility in the world today is situated between two alternating extremes: the call for global ethics, from which it seems we might expect the solution to all the world’s problems, and the diagnosis of organized irresponsibility, which would stem from systemic processes and their lack of foresight regarding the general consequences of their actions. The first, the totalization of the discourse of responsibility, is not only a contradiction but also counterproductive because it dilutes the concept of responsibility, eliminating its capacity to differentiate and downgrading it to the category of a mere instrument for indignation. On the other hand, if the diagnosis of organized irresponsibility were true, the reality of our world, unrestricted and ungovernable, would make subjectivity devolve into a plurality of modes of conduct. Faced with this sterile dualism, our current challenge consists of concretizing responsibility, which means not only limiting it but also broadening it, into an expanded temporal dimension that is mindful of the new circumstances in which human actions are carried out. The question is how to formulate a concept of responsibility that is reduced neither to legalized minutiae nor to an ethereal moral realm. Appeals to responsibility rise from a desire to personify our discontent, while the focus on assigning guilt compensates for a lack of meaning. Public discourse employs a moralizing tone in an attempt to personalize opaque problems of responsibility. But faced with ecological, economic,

A Theory of Responsibility    and technological risks, responsibility requires a framework beyond a mere call to personal responsibility. When trying to confront synergistic, accumulative damages such as ecological destruction, climate change, social anomie, or financial crises, it will be increasingly difficult to find the “guilty” or “responsible” party using the instrumentation of individual accusation. The traditional concept of responsibility is not sufficiently complex when addressing the structures of a differentiated society. Before leveling prescriptive accusations at concrete actors or suggesting absolute causality, we need to analyze complex processes that encompass actions and decisions that cannot be assigned to a single individual. We must avoid both the causal reductionism of responsibility, which is exhausted in the regulation of direct damages, and the unlimited expansion of the principle of responsibility, which is neither necessary nor legitimate. In fact, the personalization of responsibility has a contrary effect because it designates a type of individual causality that cannot be clearly identified within complex processes. Since no one can take responsibility under this system, every­thing remains in a limbo of irresponsibility. Nothing is more conducive to irresponsibility than an unworkable concept of responsibility. The idea of responsibility will do no good until we are able to conceive of it in the context of a complex world that limits it and demands a reasonable degree of specificity but that also broadens it, expanding the temporal horizon of our actions to an extent previously unexpected, especially in regard to the future. Only in this way will we be able to manage responsibility in a political manner, converting it into a function of government, instead of letting it remain nothing more than a moral appeal. The rejection of easy solutions does not imply a refutation of the notion of responsibility; it may lead instead to a more thoughtful consideration of the issue. Responsibility is a concept that replaces the classic system of obligations and finger-pointing that is typical of manageable spaces. In complex situations, this system loses a good deal of its ability to provide guidance. The concept of responsibility is especially appropriate when we are addressing complex situations, which are typical of contemporary societies, with all their corresponding risks and uncertainties. The conditions under which moral and legal responsibilities have been established are linear and causal. They depend on personal premises and hierarchical arrangements and presuppose cognitive predictability and prescriptive certainty, neither of which occurs in the context of complex

   Who Is in Charge of the Future? social systems. We need to create a concept of responsibility that is applicable to the complexities of the world today. With the rollout of science and technology, with increasing possibilities of intervention regarding the nature and globalization of the economy, the horizon of human responsibility has experienced a growth that requires new instruments to consider and configure it. In view of the difficulties modern societies have in governing, Niklas Luhmann proposed replacing the category of complexity with a “logic of complexity” (2000a, 126) that obeys its own functional laws and cannot be adequately understood with conventional concepts. What comprises this complexity? A complex society presupposes a reality full of constrictions and interdependencies produced by the differentiation and connection of synergetic effects. We could say our world is a world of side effects. Ever since at least Hegel, we know our actions can lead to results that differ from what we are attempting to achieve, but we know we are still obligated to take those results into account (2008, 50ff. ). Our actions can have unintended consequences whenever they leave the sphere of mere intention and enter the world of concrete realization. This trajectory from general to particular teaches us that we must consider the things that escape our subjective knowledge but that are within the bounds of the objectively possible. We must include within our planning horizons possibilities that remain outside the scope of our intentions. This set of circumstances affects our concept of responsibility from the outset because taking control of a complex network of risk processes brings us to the edge of our cognitive limitations. This cognitive distress is met by another more practical difficulty. With the growing differentiation of social subsystems, the possibility of influencing them by traditional means of control and faultfinding is diminished. It is ever more complicated to follow causal clues and determine the source of damages. In systematic processes that do not entail a network of linear causal relationships, blame can only be assigned in a hypothetical manner. Systemic responsibility takes as a point of departure the systemic risks that arise from the interaction of operative sequences corresponding to decisions that are rational on an individual level but that can, in their entirety, lead to unpredictable and undesirable consequences. Most social processes are not actions but, more precisely, processes that do not follow the desires and intentions of particular individuals but respond instead to the dynamism of autonomous

A Theory of Responsibility    systems in accordance with their own logic. Cognitive doubt and normative uncertainty have thus become attributes of contemporary society. In this situation, the principle of responsibility, when it refers to blame based on a clear determination of causalities, is scarcely effective. Instead, faultfinding should be expanded to chains of events that, according to traditional criteria, cannot be causally blamed on anyone. We need procedures for assigning blame that do not depend on the intentions of the actors but on the consequences conditioned by their actions. When competencies and obligations must be adjudicated in situations where there are no personal actors nor causal consequences, we need to expand and re­formulate traditional categories, including the concept of responsibility. The principle of responsibility encompasses more than that for which we are culpable. Accountability must include more than intentional, predictable, and knowable consequences; it should extend to unintended, unpredictable, and unfamiliar effects that cannot readily be blamed on the actors, but for which the actors themselves should be expected to assume responsibility when reasonable. This idea of responsibility for uncertain consequences compensates for the government’s failure to regulate responsibility and for the lack of legal sanctions, which never go beyond established objective norms. The mandate that our decisions include the uncertainty of complex processes originates in a comprehensive conception of responsibility that is not reduced to guilty obligations or established prescriptions, that is not limited to the fulfillment of moral demands or legal imperatives, that is not exhausted by the routine of completing tasks and functions. Additionally, we need to expand our conception of responsibility to include omissions and unintended consequences if they are such that we should be aware of them and if they require foresight. Of course, the allocation of responsibility is extremely difficult when we are dealing with cumulative and nonlinear dynamics. We are responsible for omissions when and to the extent that their consequences are predictable and avoidable. The growing depth of our relationships and the intensification of complexity make us less able to know the future consequences our interventions will have on the social network or the legal measures and moral criteria that need to be applied to the innovations of technology, to ecological changes, and to economic crises. Given that the management of complex, opaque systems cannot be learned, since we lack explicit rules that would

   Who Is in Charge of the Future? replace the breaks, frictions, and emergencies of dynamic processes with normative criteria, the limits of blame must be expanded beyond our current horizon of knowledge and experience. We need to convert that which is outside our area of responsibility into an object of focused attention. We must, then, expand upon the model of responsibility that is limited to personal blame and causal relationships to make it include the collective dimension, prediction, contingency, and contextualism. This would mean looking for a constructivist model of responsibility, an amplified concept of responsibility for an era of systemic interrelatedness (Lenk 1992, 7). The whole problem of thinking about responsibility can be summed up in the question of how to apply this concept, which is traditionally applied to people and to systemic processes. Systemic responsibility means shifting from the traditional responsibility of controlling trivial activities to responsibility for designing complex processes in which self-organizational and heterarchical interactions are present. In fact, current theories of political responsibility are fundamentally concerned with the problems of government in advanced processes of self-organization. Instead of the traditional idea of responsibility as an all-encompassing provision, a procedural and regulatory conception of responsibility has been introduced. This movement toward infrastructural responsibility reveals a radical evolution in politics, which no longer intervenes in society through autonomous legislation but instead attempts to coordinate interests through contextual government (Willke 1997; Innerarity 2010). The government’s responsibility would consist of providing infrastructure, managing collective risks, reducing uncertainty, and creating collective confidence through supervisory procedures and by allowing a cooperative construction of the common good. These objectives are pursued by trying to reduce uncontrollable risks through regulation, agreements, and the exchange of knowledge. We have become accustomed to thinking we are able to control complex technological and economic processes, structure society with pacifist moralism, and plan our personal existence according to rational criteria. These ideals continue to make sense, but their realization now depends on our ability to pursue them without sacrificing the complexity and duality of what we want to govern. The manner in which we should predict future risks is not prescribed, but the need to regulate, predict, and correct is emphatically demanded by the world’s current configuration.

A Theory of Responsibility    A renewed concept of responsibility could contribute to defatalizing the process of modernization in such a way that we perceive it as a civilizing process of our own making rather than a realm of uncontrollable power, where we view ourselves as confronting events that might remain outside of our control while still being subject to partial regulation. Even in the age of aftershocks, we are not condemned to the choice between total responsibility and total irresponsibility. Instead, the task before us is that of determining through democratic, legitimizing procedures how we want our responsibility to be politically construed.

Responsibility for the Future The idea of responsibility is predominantly focused on the past; we must account for what we have or have not done, but we tend not to believe in our responsibility in relation to the future, which is always an uncertain mix of possibilities. Legally reduced, the concept of responsibility constitutes an effective means of sanctioning past actions, but its ability to shape the future is limited. Therefore, we must go beyond a concept of responsibility limited to past duties and the ex post and expand the orientation of responsibility toward the future. We need to move from retrospective causal responsibility to anticipatory responsibility, a responsibility of foresight, prevention, and future configuration. In order to do so, we must modify the temporal and normative grounding that has traditionally defined responsibility. It is a question of emphasizing a positive outlook that does not deplete its energies in trying to avoid damages or in sanctioning rule-breaking, but instead strives to improve our situation and foresees the consequences of our actions (Birnbacher 1995, 145). Reference to the future is inherent to all categories of responsibility, but this is especially true for politics because it not only governs that which exists but also penetrates future space, using ­future studies to manage risks or envisage possible failures before they appear. What role can responsibility possibly have in relation to the future? Our notion of responsibility is linked to the idea of intentional action, in other words, actions that are not predetermined by external conditions. The degree of responsibility is a function of the degree of determination and configurability of future events. That is why the demand for responsibility only makes sense if future events are not completely unscripted (if every­thing were equally possible, there could be no anticipation of the

   Who Is in Charge of the Future? f­ uture) nor completely decided (when everything is predetermined, no intervention is possible). We must respond not only to what is taking place during a discernible time period, but also, under certain circumstances and in accordance with criteria that will need to be established, to what can take place in a distant future. The limits of responsibility are broader than the limits of our immediate capabilities. Of course, we can only talk about responsibility for matters that are within our control, but the effects of our actions can vary greatly depending on whether we act one way or another. Moreover, effects that are produced in the future independently of our intentions can be examined to determine our responsibility if it was within our power to make them possible or at least not to make them impossible. In addition to our immediate actions, there are myriad possibilities for affecting the future impact of our actions. This is an area of responsibility that deserves to be explored, especially in a complex society: that of facilitating, hindering, or determining future actions. Politics consists precisely in strengthening our collective capacity for foresight and the shaping of the future. Another area of responsibility where chance would seem to reign is the way we manage those eventualities that do not originate with us. There exists a responsibility related to catastrophes, for example, when these have been directly or indirectly provoked by human action. But even when we have no responsibility for causing an event, it is possible to establish responsibility for the way in which a catastrophe is managed. When faced with the inevitable, we are responsible for the way we prepare or manage that which happens without our consent. Chance and contingencies diminish demands, but they in no way protect us from the question of responsibility. Uncertainty about future consequences and an increase in hard-tocontrol processes are attributes of complex societies for which no one is responsible. These processes are not mythical events that arose from some unfathomable power; rather, they are social practices in which diverse actors take part. Even when there is little possibility for direct intervention, a series of commitments and procedures can be implemented to encourage planning for a desirable society. In this sense, Luhmann is correct in his belief that the principle of responsibility offers contemporary societies a good way to regulate their dealings with uncertainty (Luhmann 2000a, 43). The coordination of responsibility demands a certain degree of visibility. “We must at least have an agency that symbolizes the goal of taking

A Theory of Responsibility    responsibility for everything, a type of systemic responsibility” (Mayntz 2004, 72). It is a responsibility that, without revoking that which corresponds to people, is not simply the sum of individual responsibilities but has its own moral, legal, and political standing. The conflicts of systemic responsibility are not resolved, except to a small extent, through the interested parties’ self-regulation. When future risks resulting from unpredictable synergies are at play, it is not morally or cognitively necessary to attribute the responsibility of the consequences strictly to individual actors. For systemically produced emergencies, we need to have a combination of both institutionalized regulation and individual self-regulation. There are some decisions about the future, regarding ecology, energy, and technology, for which the functional, autonomous subsystems of a differentiated society cannot take responsibility. Also in play is something along the lines of “representative responsibility,” the responsibility of the person who is charged with representation (Wolf 1993). Here, we can observe an ideal function of public policy, which is charged with affirming values and giving substance to public aspirations, affording direction to social movements, maintaining an image of a good life in common, making the group’s vision comprehensible, organizing compatibility, and making responsibilities as visible as possible. The dilemma of politics consists of how to govern processes that are not directly governable. That is the goal of the strategies used to promote social responsibility such as legal guarantees, economic incentives, preventative measures, or regulations. Complex systems have to be conceived in such a way that there is room for responsible decision making, but at the same time, they must be open to binding guidelines and to forms of external coordination. From the point of view of responsibility, the best system is resistant to crises and combines procedural self-government with the ability to learn. Systems are not driven to act responsibly through immediate government interventions, but by combining thoughtful observation and adaptive behavior. It is ultimately a question of reducing the risk of uncontrolled dynamics. Toward this end, it is very important to produce social capital in the form of shared knowledge, structures of cooperation, mediation, and informality. Naturally, when developing a social organization of responsibility, it is essential to move from external supervision to self-control. Government controls must be replaced as much as possible by the voluntary self-­

   Who Is in Charge of the Future? discipline of social agents. But we need to avoid letting this translate to a reduction in responsibility, barring those measures that have to do with side effects and social dynamics. If social actors feel relieved of the need to reflect on the scope of their actions, they could find themselves relaxing to a dangerous degree. We have moved from a responsibility that could be called executive to an infrastructural or guarantor responsibility. The responsible parties, which could include the government, do not need to be the ones to perform the actions leading to goals for which only they are responsible. We should not allow this activity transfer to constitute a shirking of responsibility. By definition, responsibility cannot be delegated, although actions can be. The responsible party is required to claim responsibility for the results of delegated actions, observing their completion through control mechanisms and preventative measures. The choice to delegate to private actors or to social subsystems is only justified as a means of fulfilling one’s specific obligations to the collective interest. The fact that the government can or should delegate the exercise of certain functions to the marketplace or to private actors does not mean it should abdicate its responsibilities, even if it is only the responsibility by which it adequately guarantees society’s self-organization, as is the case with the regulation of the marketplace. The government can reduce its actions if it is thus able to optimize them. The government’s withdrawal from certain areas is only justified in order to best fulfill its responsibility toward shaping the future. In any case, the political system will not be able to meet its responsibilities if it does not manage the thoughtful introduction of the future into its decisions. Nothing else can take its place when it comes to improving the practical knowledge within its grasp in order to apply future studies in confronting the challenges of the future, rather than limiting itself to an improvised management of crises.

6 Chronopolitics A Theory of Social Rhythm

Whatever our preferred definition of globalization, there is always a reference to the compression of the space we live in and the implications this intensification has on the awareness of belonging to a single world, be it the global marketplace for economic actors, the universal order for philosophers, or the global order for policy makers (Robertson 1992). This compression of space leads to a unified global time that, rather than creating an automatic, welcome sense of synchronicity, is instead the scene of a new battle of the ages. The global era of the marketplace has come into conflict with the political era of democratic governments, the strategic era of businesses, and the psychological era of the individual. The global scope of abstract time has situated time at the center of political interests because it explains a good number of the conflicts that exist in a desynchronized world. The speed of social processes is a threat to democratic societies. That is why politics must be understood as a government of time, as “chronopolitics”; politics no longer merely controls spaces, natural resources, or work, but must also manage time. It must influence the temporal conditions of human existence, achieve as much balance as possible between the velocities of diverse social systems, and configure democratic rhythms. A critical theory of collective time can also help redefine the democratic ideal of self-government, which has been encroached upon by depoliticizing forces.

   Chronopolitics

Time Wars In 1752, the British government decided to adopt the continent’s Gregorian calendar and declared that the day after September 2nd would be September 14th. When workers heard the news, large protests broke out because they were afraid they would lose their salary from the intervening days. At a gathering before Parliament, they shouted “give us our eleven days” (Whitrow 1988, 3). This demand may not have made sense, but it reflected the feeling that the control of time is power. Nowadays, we would not know exactly where to protest against the injustices that are committed in the name of time control, but determining who makes decisions about time continues to be the central critical question. In an attempt to clarify who has power, control, decision-making ability, or influence, we can reformulate the question in this way: Who regulates time frames and rhythms? Who determines the speed of social processes? How is that achieved? These questions also allow an analysis not only of the power relationship between traditional actors and institutions, but of the tensions between distinct social spheres, such as the economy or politics. A critical theory of society should ask itself: Who can place other people, societies, or social subsystems under time constraints? The relevance of these questions can be understood if we recall the different ways traditional and modern societies configure time. Although it is clearly not accurate to say that power was not wielded in traditional societies, the structure of those societies was based on the temporalities of nature and religion. In a modern society, on the other hand, there is no longer a natural, spontaneous, and objective coordination of time. At the beginning of modernity, new “time generators” (Rinderspacher 1988, 14) such as the economy, communications, technology, or work were created, imposing a rhythm on society and signifying a standardization and homogenization of time inside each of these systems. In modern societies, time is more closely linked to power; the connection is more specific, because time is no longer controlled by natural cycles or divine intervention. At the same time, differentiated industrial societies were not only characterized by their great organizational capacity, but by a strong demand for synchronization. That is why time has become the quintessential topic of modernity. It also reveals why the organization of time reflects a society’s power structures. Nowadays, our conflicts are, fundamentally, time wars (Rifkin 1987; Virilio 2001). One could advance the hypothesis that since territory has

A Theory of Social Rhythm    lost meaning, the center of human conflicts has shifted from space to time. Sexual discrimination, conflicts of interest, social exclusions, subtle forms of power are articulated through a dominion over time rather than a possession of space. At present, the emphasis is no longer on conquering exotic countries, but on controlling other people’s temporal resources. Regulations concerning space are replaced by the control of time; chronopolitics ends up being more important than geostrategy. Today, the mechanisms of exclusion are less occupations of territory than appropriations of other people’s time, in the form of acceleration, impatience, or delays. This is the new axis of social conflict: the imposition of time. Although we may not be very conscious of it, we no longer have as many battles to appropriate certain spaces, mark borders, and secure locations. Instead, our conflicts focus on taking time away from other people, controlling the temporal hegemony of time. Borders are created with speed, not with settlements; they are transgressed through acceleration, not displacement. Foucault (1977) showed that modern social discipline owes its strength to the establishment and interiorization of certain temporal structures. Modern civilization produces a particular confrontation between a unified, coercive public time and the free plurality of individual times. There is nothing strange about the fact that political revolutions have always been fought to determine the calendar. Social relationships exercise multiple temporal coercions; social time itself seems to be an instrument of power and control, a creator of dependencies and aristocratic speeds. Inequalities take on a temporal form: whatever is most advanced, the vanguard, is the best; evil is defined as an obstacle, historical backwardness, or slowness; power is equivalent to the capacity for movement. In general in our accelerated culture, where an authentic tyranny of the swift is in force, whoever is fastest is most powerful. The asymmetry that characterizes all forms of power is also found in the concept of time: the imposition and pursuit of deadlines and rhythms is an expression of the diverse possibilities of the use of one’s own and other people’s time. In this way, we predetermine what is important or urgent, as well as our priorities and the distribution of scarce temporal resources. Time’s diverse configurations or activities provoke specific conflicts. Daily activities such as waiting, delaying, changing pace, advancing, accelerating, etc., often constitute the nucleus of social confrontation. The regulation of rhythms, duration, speed, sequencing, and the synchroniza-

   Chronopolitics tion of events and activities is related to power, a series of decisions with conflicting interests at stake. Time affects economic competitiveness and plays a fundamental role in military tactics; global conflicts can be interpreted as a consequence of the imposition of unified time frames. “The compression of time that takes place in the new global simultaneity also carries within it a compression of cultures, ethnic groups, and social identities, with all the corresponding possibilities of conflict” (Nowotny 1996, 96). From the domestic to the global, temporal asymmetries allow us to explain many of the hegemonies and conflicts of the contemporary world. If this hypothesis is correct, we would have to reformulate our idea of exclusion, which we tend to express with metaphors that are more spatial than temporal. The new outsiders are not those who live far away, but those who live in another time period. The margins are not a territorial space but a temporal category. When time management is an important requirement, when one lives in a society in which one must arrive on time, synchronize with other people, predict, make decisions at the appropriate moment, etc., time becomes a locus of social opportunities. Being excluded means not being allowed to coordinate one’s time with a public time in which vital opportunities, such as power, employment, or recognition, are negotiated. A marginalized person is not on the spatial periphery, but is literally living in another time. Thus the mechanisms of exclusion are, fundamentally, procedures of discriminatory acceleration, among which the processes that create social rhythms are worth emphasizing. Edward P. Thompson (1996), in his noteworthy study on industrial capitalism, showed how the implementation of new forms of capitalist exploitation at the beginning of the eighteenth century progressed through a reorganization of people’s corporal and social rhythms. This perspective now seems even more relevant as we attempt to explain the presence of domination in a fluid world where power does not seem to be anywhere, but where it is, in fact, increasingly imposed upon rhythmic concerns (Young and Schuller 1988; Michon 2005, 2007). Among these imperious rhythms, the acceleration of the financial economy and the temporality of the means of communication stand out. These rhythms determine wealth and poverty, celebrity and ruin; they confer opportunities on the people who move in their particular synchronicity and establish what is urgent and worthwhile; their memory determines what should be heeded and what ignored.

A Theory of Social Rhythm   

Heterochrony: A Desynchronized World Time has been profoundly pluralized in modern societies. Given the cultural shifts that have taken place, some traditions that were connected to persistent life circumstances have lost validity in their dealings with time. Our way of managing time is now more liberated than ever from the burden of tradition. That is why the heterogeneity of observable times has increased. The plurality of our temporal architecture has never been greater than it is now, within our particular “polychrony” (Delmas-Marty 2009, 133). Never have so many heterogeneities coexisted in such a thick spatial and temporal network. Koselleck’s (1985) idea of a “contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous” can be verified in the reality of scattered times that characterize our society. People’s subjective experiences can be profoundly diverse. Simmel described modern freedom as freedom in the face of life’s collective rhythm; individualization would consist of the specific possibility of rhythmic irregularities. This pluralization of subjective time implies a different valuation, a loss of the unity of measure. A structurally or institutionally imposed velocity could be excessive for some people, while others might consider it excessively slow (1992, 228). One has only to contrast the time experienced by young people and by the elderly; the difference is perceived, for example, in their contrasting experience of work time, the different assessment each makes about the length of contracts, and the way in which stability and precariousness are experienced. Also profound is the pluralism of the times that characterize social groups, distinct cultures, or diverse activities. Halbwachs (1947) addresses this when he suggests that societies have as many collective times as separate groups, and there is no unified time that is imposed on all of them. Every group and every activity moves within its own time frame. No society renounces a certain harmonization of these times, but as Gurvitch noted, that unification is controversial precisely because the criteria of harmonization are also diverse. The effort of arriving at that social cohesion and at a relative interconnectedness between social times leads to a new type of disparity: the disparity between social forms from which a new hierarchy is constructed in order to unify social times [ . . . ]. There is, for example, not only discord between family time, school time, factory time, labor union time, office time, etc., but also dissonance between the

   Chronopolitics ways in which different times are harmonized, regardless of whether it is a patriarchal or a feudal society, the ancient city-state, collectivist or capitalist societies. This creates even more examples of social time [Gurvitch 1969, 325].

The coexistence of different times is not always peaceful and rewarding. We have more and more examples of temporal desynchronizations that result in a not insignificant number of conflicts. In temporal conflicts, there is a clash between different criteria for structuring time. The world advances at different speeds, resulting in continual fissures between different dynamics. These disparities or fault lines receive diverse names: discrepancies, gaps, divergences, breach, shock, fragmentation, etc. They all emphasize that temporal realities are distinct, incompatible, even antagonistic and that some of them have a strong inclination to impose themselves on others. Some heterochronies are revealed through the conflicts between individuals and groups (young people’s time versus old people’s time, the lack of equilibrium between generations, inequality in general) or a lack of synchronicity between diverse social systems (technological advances versus the slowness of the law, the time of consumption versus the time of resources, media time versus scientific time). Social subsystems have also developed their own logic from the temporal point of view, and their dynamics, acceleration, rhythm, and speed are largely independent: the time of fashion does not coincide with the time of religion, nor does technological time coincide with legal time, nor economic with political time, nor the time of the ecosystem with the time of consumption. One significant problem we need to confront is how to mark a rhythm for these times, avoiding both the risks of desynchronization and the imposition of a standardized time. Political desynchronization stands out among these systemic desynchronizations, contrasting with other social systems that, like economics or the means of communication, seem to drag politics toward an alien logic. In politics, the contradiction between efficient time and the time of debate and legal action is especially intense. Science, technology, and the economy outpace their corresponding political and legal oversight. This desynchronization frequently causes the political system to adopt anachronistic decisions, and the leisurely speed of politics is thus sometimes corrected by adjudication. The judicial system tends to be able to resolve certain cases more quickly than the political system, but this recourse leads to an erosion of the space belonging to politics (Rosanvallon 2008).

A Theory of Social Rhythm    These desynchronizations are proof that progress is not achieved in a united front, that progress in science and technology, for example, does not correspond to social progress. The rather deterministic assumption that economic and political development necessarily go hand in hand has been dispelled. Take the example of the unification of Europe, which was entrusted to the unifying force of the economy; its limitations are more obvious today than when the Common Market was founded. We can also observe the apparent inconsistency of countries like China that simultaneously maintain a capitalist economy and a nondemocratic political system. We have abundant evidence that advanced technology does not imply cultural and political modernity. The Internet, for example, can create negative political fallout, and modern technological capabilities can be employed to further the goals of international terrorists. In addition to time conflicts stemming from the lack of synchronization of different systems, temporal contrasts and malfunctions also occur within each system. One example can be found in the way financial economics tends to prevail over other areas of the economy. The peak and crisis of the new economy clarified the divergence between the rapidity of the financial markets and real investments. The lack of temporal synchronicity in our lives causes severe dysfunctionality. Social disintegration is a result of growing temporal desynchronization, the destruction of the environment is due to the overburdening of natural cycles of regeneration, and the loss of personal autonomy stems from a social acceleration that impedes people’s ability to form coherent opinions (Rosa 2005, 110). The large-scale lack of synchronicity that characterizes the world today materializes in the contrast between global time and local time, between global synchronizations (related to finance, communications, the Internet) and global desynchronizations (inequalities, tensions and disputes, Third World peoples, fundamentalisms, etc.). The freedom of movement that some people enjoy is contemporaneous with the physical constraints to which other people are condemned. The world today is better described by an image of cyberspace coinciding with the Stone Age than by speaking of “glocality” as if that were a universally achieved synthesis. This imbalance is readily apparent and explains the background forces operating in global spheres: migratory movements, a lack of legal cohesion, distinct responsibilities regarding the environment, the hegemonic power that resists

   Chronopolitics involvement in the realities of post-autonomous synchronization, etc. The weakness of the institutions of world governance makes it enormously difficult to synchronize a world that is increasingly out of control. Desynchronization is also related to uneven global unification (which makes us all present, but does not unify completely) and to the multiculturalism of our societies, in which different groups with distinct identities appear. In both cases, there is either a unification of time without a unity of place (the instantaneousness of communications and of financial markets) or a unity of place without a unification of time (multiculturalism). The tension between forces that unify but do not differentiate and forces of difference that lack the capacity or will to unify, between a time without place and a place without time, will continue to concern us until we can formulate modes of thinking that allow synchronizations that are not impositions. Extending as it does throughout the world, this issue is clearly a complex task. The greater the diversity of human activities, the more differentiated the temporal structures and the greater the need for agreement and synchronization. A “temporalization of complexity” occurs due to the demands for synchronization and coordination at the time of decision making (Luhmann 1991, 124). The course of modern civilization has only added to the encroaching of our time vis-à-vis diverse forms of communication and the coordination of different people. This leads to a series of temporal imbalances that demand coordination by institutional mechanisms able to determine priorities and feasible compromises. Temporal harmony cannot be taken for granted; it must be configured according to social and political principles through a clear process of deliberation that may not always be peaceful and in which power relationships will be on the line. The humanization of social conflicts and the construction of human coexistence are dependent on the regulation of time. Those who govern should ask themselves if things are organized in such a way that temporal discriminations are eliminated. The new vigilance is, more than anything, an observation about the flow of materials and the measurement of the time differences that must be harmonized in some way. The act of governance means allowing temporal coordination between many people, systems, societies, and cultures that inhabit multiple times. From the civilizing point of view, it would be an attempt, as Mireille DelmasMarty (2009) has suggested, to give order to that which is plural without

A Theory of Social Rhythm    reducing it to that which is identical, to recognize pluralism without renouncing the law of the land, to unify without imposing fusion, to not limit our understanding of the modernization of societies to our own experience, to promote unification without believing it to be synonymous with Westernism.

Democratic Time The collective nature of the time in which we live demands special synchronizations in order to regulate compatibility, cooperation, and competition. The role of politics is precisely to assure the cultural unity of time in the face of tendencies toward social disintegration, while simultaneously respecting the profound social pluralism that is also expressed as temporal pluralism. The objectives of a “politics of time” would be “identifying how different institutional orders work to different clockspeeds and imply different rhythms of social interaction” (Pels 2003, 209). Or to say it with Barthes (2002), it would mean promoting democratic eurhythmics by finding a rhythm balanced between idiorrhythm and totalitarian synchronization. Modern democracy is a complex game of balances within the realm of speed and leisureliness. Political pluralism is also reflected as temporal pluralism: the slow time of the constitution, the medium time of legislatures, the fleeting time of public opinion, etc. Politics moves among extremes of maximum slowness and frenetic speed; it straddles the risk of anachronism to which rigid political systems expose themselves and, at the other extreme, instability when changes are carried out without an intelligible framework clarifying procedures and duration. That being said, how can politics strategize power over time? Is it possible to balance economic, technoscientific, and media accelerations politically and socially? Is it possible to carry out these tasks when the efficiency of the government as the regulator of time in a delineated space is weakened? Democratic politics are greatly exposed to the dangers of desynchronization in the face of accelerated social and economic developments. The principal desynchronization between social systems is due to the disconnect between levels of economic, scientific, and technical innovation and our capacity for sorting them politically by integrating them into a logical social totality. In heterogeneous and pluralist societies, the assessment of processes, the determination of priorities, and the task of synchroniza-

   Chronopolitics tion can be carried out only through discursive negotiation. The decision-­ making process must be democratically organized to correct the radically disparate levels of influence wielded by the various interests at play. The modern political project that attempted a democratic organization of society was supported by temporal assumptions that originally seemed obvious but now appear questionable (Rosa 2005, 392). The first set of assumptions included the unity of historic time, the difference between past and future, and the idea of progress, which articulated the political battle between the two poles represented by conservatives and progressives. Secondly, the temporal structure of representation presumed the compatibility of political time (in other words, the time of deliberation and decision) and the rhythm, speed, and sequence of social evolution. The assumption was that the political system would have time to organize the process of shaping the political will, which is prepared to react quickly in the face of the necessities that arise from every social sphere, articulating collective interests in programs, laws, and executive decisions. Those two assumptions appear anachronistic nowadays. Current “reactionaries” do not correspond to the temporal axis that links past and future through the idea of progress; they do not attempt to conserve anything valuable from the past or to balance social dynamics. Instead, they destroy the future with an acceleration that desynchronizes and excludes, specifically in the name of the future. Their goal, for reasons we will address in the following chapter, is to depoliticize. If the distinction between left and right still makes any sense, we now find ourselves with “progressives,” in an inverse of the classical-modern pattern, who support deceleration because they are in favor of controlling the economy politically, protecting the environment and special local areas, and democratic deliberation. “Conservatives,” on the other hand, push for acceleration at the expense of the truly political since they are, for example, in favor of the rapid introduction of new technologies, the elimination of barriers for the circulation of global flows, the power of the market, and accelerated decision making (Rosa 2005, 416). The democratic self-determination of society requires cultural, structural, and institutional assumptions that social acceleration seems to erode. The processes of acceleration, which sprang from utopian desire, were made autonomous at the expense of the hopes of political progress. It has now become clear that the acceleration of the processes of social,

A Theory of Social Rhythm    economic, and technological change depoliticizes to the extent that the synchronization of processes and systems is made more difficult, overburdening the political system’s deliberative capacity, social integration, and generational balance. One of our greatest problems derives precisely from the contrast between the speed of social changes and the slowness of politics. Governments are simply too slow in the face of the speed of global transactions. Neither education, politics, nor the law can withstand the pace of the globalized world. Their institutions progressively lose the capacity to organize the processes of technical and social acceleration. Governance becomes problematic. Confronting the complexity of decision making and the media pressure for instantaneousness, political institutions find their sphere of influence reduced, in the best case scenario, to the reparation of the damages generated by the economic and technological system. The political system is faced with a serious dilemma. On the one hand, it must adapt to the accelerated developments of science and technology in order to integrate their innovations into the social system, but on the other hand, it is in no condition to keep pace with the velocity of the knowledge produced. While technology follows an enormously accelerated course, the speed of political processes is limited by their procedures. This is why the state, which arose as a revitalizing force in modern society, seems to be a force for social deceleration today. Administrations and bureaucracy present themselves as paradigms of slowness, inefficiency, and inflexibility. All the processes of debureaucratization or decentralization are motivated by this pressure to accelerate the decisions of public administrations. This desperate search for efficiency also explains the displacement of decision-making procedures from the area of democratic politics to other more agile, but less representative and democratic scenarios. Examples would include the rise in expert commissions, which are better equipped for the imperatives of speed than parliaments are; the difficulties the legislative branch has in effectively controlling the executive branch because of their differing levels of agility; the fact that civil society is selfregulated (economic deregulation) and politically controversial topics are displaced toward organisms with greater decision-making capabilities (the judicialization of politics). At the international level, decisions are shifted toward groups of experts or to interest groups that may lack democratic legitimacy, but are much more agile than governmental summits.

   Chronopolitics Even if there is good justification for correcting the political system’s slowness, this raises the question of whether the end result is a strengthening or distortion of the political system’s capacity for intervention. Politics always has an element of “idleness,” a time of free discussion and deliberation that conflicts with the demands of decision making but cannot be eliminated without placing the legitimacy and rationality of political decisions at risk. The dynamics of acceleration constitute a threat against politics to the extent that acceleration represents a loss of a society’s capacity for political self-regulation. There is a contradiction in the fact that democratic life presupposes self-government and yet we are aware that dominant time frames do not allow for self-regulation. There is real pressure to convert politics into a true anachronism, to remove political structure from the world: the most powerful conditions related to the determination of time are not democratically controlled or controllable. Because of this, some people announce “the end of politics”; others, as a response to the “ungovernability” of complex societies, recommend a “deregulation” that actually represents capitulation in the face of the imperatives of the economic movement. For this reason, our great challenge consists of defending temporal attributes—as well as the corresponding procedures for deliberation, reflection, and negotiation—in the democratic formation of a political will to counteract the imperialism of technoeconomic demands and the agitation of media time. How then do we gain the capacity for political intervention on social processes? Without insisting on formulas that have shown themselves to be inefficient or renouncing the ideal of democratic self-government and thereby abandoning the configuration of the future to “societal drift” (Lauer 1981, 31), a possible solution consists of compensating the slowness of politics with future predictions. In order to configure collective life, one needs a certain degree of stability that makes social processes comprehensible and, to some extent, controllable. Achieving stability would allow us to formulate preferences and goals beyond the present moment. Planning must entail a system of thoughtful learning that modifies the conditions and methods of its anticipatory behavior. As individuals, we do not have complete temporal dominion because our time is composed of horizons, structures, and rhythms that are to a large extent socially configured; but owing to its chaotic and accelerated

A Theory of Social Rhythm    nature, society does not govern its own time either. A good deal of our dissatisfaction related to globalization can be attributed to time demands that are imposed on us, both as individuals and societies, as destinations over which we have no recourse. The question is whether, despite the complexity of the contemporary world, a society can employ political action to configure its collective time, thus lending meaning to it and addressing the problems that arise from uneven accelerations.

7 Politics in a Post-Heroic Society A Theory of Political Contingency

The first rule for understanding a society is to examine whether its rhetoric coincides with reality. It seems we are in the midst of a crossfire consisting of heroic affirmations, calls to order, security measures, exaggerations about our situation, tension, concerns that society is in decline, and even declarations of axes of evil, whose accusers automatically assume the responsibility for good. There is no shortage of heroes, victims, martyrs, or the guilty in political discourse, and the lines of battle are organized with startling simplicity between friends and enemies or, in a less bellicose but equally explicit version, into us versus them. All that being said, does this truly represent reality? Are we currently living in a time of epic proportions? Do we think about and experience politics as if we were engaged in a heroic battle? To interpret this situation correctly, we need to ask ourselves if, in fact, the rhetoric has a practical translation that would make sense when facing something more dramatic than mere speech. The truth is that the current political landscape was not caused by a state of emergency but by a present reality that is less agitated than the level of discourse implies, a present that may be mediocre and perhaps discouraging, but is by no means controlled by heroes nor decided by victories and failures. I believe that, in spite of what these stagy, melodramatic confrontations seem to suggest, politics has entered fully into a post-heroic landscape in which there is more agreement and fewer options than are readily apparent. There are so many limitations on political action that the figure of the hero in all its diverse forms (the expert, the exclusive leader, the one

A Theory of Political Contingency    who knows, decides, assumes responsibility, unifies or polarizes, etc.) has been or should be abolished as soon as possible. This may not please some people; it may disconcert or provoke insecurity in others. Regardless, we need to accept this diminution of the heroic as a source of legitimacy or mobilization. In the same vein, it is increasingly senseless to buy into the inverse form of heroism that is found in the complaints or diagnoses of crisis that attempt to make the case that politics without heroism is a passing fad and not, as I suggest, a stable backdrop, a settled reality that requires a revision of our idea of political normality. Our supposed political crisis is nothing more than a crisis of the modern apotheosis of ideological certainties, and their guarantee is now more provisional than ever. I believe it falls to us today to develop a new willingness to consider and implement a more responsible and democratic political system, devoid of heroism. It may be that the sense of ideological confrontation that held sway back when our current political arrangements were first formed is not the norm. Perhaps the current lack of heroism, our distrust of politics, the difficulties of governance constitute the new normality, beyond which there is nothing but nostalgia. We must dismiss definitive disagreements, the search for absolute consensus, rigid contrasts between us and them. We need projects that are not predetermined, unquestionable, or sheltered from criticism, projects that do not provide absolute certainty or complete protection. For this reason, we need an in-depth reconsideration of the way we conceive of politics. If the classic theory of politics was concerned with order, stability, integration, and planning, today it is more important to consider differences, dynamic processes, and the improbable. Our political processes must learn to accommodate a future that can no longer be predicted or planned. The future is now fundamentally uncertain, but we must, nevertheless, anticipate it.

A World without Heroics We live in a world without heroics or, at least, a world in which heroic tales have lost plausibility and the ability to mobilize. In practice, this means that politics has become horizontalized; in other words, it has come to occupy an arena that is human, excessively human, without sublimity, without verticality, where nothing is absolutely protected from criticism,

   Politics in a Post-Heroic Society from the erosion of time, and from increasing social complexity. Metaphysical projections of heroic politics in its purest form have lost their irrefutability. We still have the hypostatization of the political subject, collective assumptions, right-left duality, a friend-enemy dichotomy, expectations for participation, a desire for consensus, concerns about certainty, a longing for control, but they have lost the standing they had when they were assumed without question. We can choose to define ourselves in a particular way or attempt to carry out one activity or another, but we should not act in a manner that is absolute, as if we were dealing with unquestionable realities or goals. Lately, political action has been linked to the idea of “disenchantment.” Ever since religions stopped trying to negotiate legitimacy, there are no longer plausible substitutes for the gaps that have developed in the political system. In its current form, politics cannot help but disappoint those who expect it to offer assured knowledge, a path to social consensus, and a means to achieving hierarchical control over society. What we have instead is (a) limited knowledge, not blessed by expert authority, but debatable, provisional, and plural; (b) a greater awareness, from the point of view of communications and political confrontation, of the superlative nature of political pluralism as expressed through organized dissent; and (c) a limitation of the likelihood of political leadership over society, which can be seen in the national government’s forfeiture of centrality. Our loss of heroes means losing a model of social order stemming from the application of an assured knowledge, oriented toward social consensus, and presided over by a unifying government. Limited knowledge. Any plan of action meant for a complex society must be conscious, first of all, that it departs, not from knowledge that is assured, but knowledge that is fragile and of limited certainty. All social actors, even those who do not choose to admit it, must act under conditions of an especially intense uncertainty. Since the beginning of modernity, societies have pinned a good deal of hope on the construction of a social order based on knowledge and understood as something verifiable and secure. But this is no longer our reality. In today’s political system, the postmodern crisis of universal knowledge and the fragmentation of social systems are especially visible. It is no longer possible to justify decisions based on the existence of expert, certain, indisputable, and collectively binding knowledge. In politics, recognition of the expert or the

A Theory of Political Contingency    authority does not go unchallenged. Almost all political observers believe they are competent to judge political decisions; this is, in part, a result of the system’s democratic makeup. The authority of any argument based on epistemology is necessarily limited and is discussed using the logic of other systems. Controversies that arise between politics, the economy, and the legal system; the imbalance between globalization and ecology; or the tensions between competitiveness and social cohesion reveal that the use of language employed in different arenas is not always commensurate. In this situation, the classic link between knowledge and power, with its idea of correct politics, leads to nothing other than heroic hypertrophy. Today’s society is pluralistic regarding the inevitably partial knowledge it possesses, which renders illusory its goal of basing its cohesion on definitive and nonpolemical knowledge. The historic peculiarity of the democratic system stems precisely from the fact that it is meant to give opposing answers to a set of open questions (Dubiel 1994, 112). We are not faced with the need to re-ideologize politics, but rather to configure projects and decisions by accepting that the knowledge we possess is limited and fallible. If the goal of closed ideologies used to be absolute certainty, our challenge now is to establish post-ideological structures that are simultaneously normative and conscious of their own contingency. It is possible to have conviction without proof, although this logically requires the development of other means of assessment. Democratic pluralism demands that we abandon positivist knowledge in favor of thoughtful nonknowledge and the normalization of political disagreement. What we know is always accompanied by enormous ignorance. That is why we cannot renounce the epistemological advantages of institutionalized disagreement. The unknown nature of the future suggests we should not exclude any perspective out of hand. It no longer makes sense to confer the urgency of a supreme truth on our own aspirations while discrediting our competitor’s aspirations as false or immoral. Political confrontations generally take place within the realm of the probable, where we try to make our own convictions plausible. A repoliticization of politics immediately points toward the recognition of the constructive nature of political differences. Greater awareness. In a post-heroic landscape, illusory communications and confrontations must be defused, accepting that the political system is an orchestration of consensus and dissent, since both are part of democratic normality. It is important for us to see disagreement as a nor-

   Politics in a Post-Heroic Society mal part of the process, while active hostility should be regarded primarily as political exhibition or a tactic employed by special interest groups. It is imperative to learn how to decode political discourse, which is often vehement and expressed within a language of resistance. It is produced in such a way so as to give the impression of difference, sometimes in an attempt to conceal similarities. When political apathy comes from a sense of outrage caused by confrontation, this reveals a lack of political awareness, that perhaps we expected something from politics that it cannot supply. We should, in reality, be concerned about the opposite situation: a lack of true alternatives, without which the political system cannot guarantee continued innovation. Continuous consensus would be disastrous for democracy and would imply the end of confrontation and alternatives, which means the end of politics. The defeat of heroism invites us to change the way we understand integrated societies. The function of post-heroic politics is the civilized management of disagreements regarding the concerns and conceptions of public interest. Dissent does not preclude consensus, but dissent is the rule and consensus the exception. As Lyotard would say, consensus is a horizon and, as such, it is never reached. That unattainability constitutes its structural tension, the force that propels political communication, which always desires unity and only produces difference. “The only consensus likely to stand a chance of success is the acceptance of the heterogeneity of dissent” (Bauman 2005, 306). In multicontextual societies that are not coordinated in a centralist or hierarchical manner, it is no longer possible to make politics responsible for obtaining a general consensus that overcomes ideological and systemic distinctions. “The operation of a complex system does not require the suspension of its contradictions but their continuous elaboration. We can, for example, study the way they transition into other contradictions” (Willke 1993, 99). This is why fundamental agreements tend to be procedural: the normativity of laws has been replaced by the performativity of procedures. The ultimate justification for dissent is found in political pluralism, which is a thoughtful or “second order” pluralism, a pluralism that no longer defines itself as a lesser evil against the desirable backdrop of consensus, but claims validity from the realization that our conceptions of the world are, in part, unfathomable. In the face of the prejudice that suggests that any difference of opinion is negative or suspicious, democracy responds

A Theory of Political Contingency    by insisting that society comprises legitimate differences that are not ultimately resolvable. There is no moral code in which values stop colliding with each other, in which the individuals’ values are combined in such a way that a consensual order arises. “The world’s diversity of perspectives should seem normal. We should replace the demand for unity with the opportunity to understand one another” (Luhmann 1993, 263). Politics is not a guarantee of unity but a champion of difference. A democratic society renounces emphatic unity, legitimizes discrepancies among its members, and abandons the hope of political unanimity. Limited leadership. The field of political management or leadership is uniquely situated at the end of the heroic era. Its limitations are experienced in a particularly intense manner with the awareness that we will always be forced to make a choice between evils, that it is impossible to make everyone happy, that governance entails certain difficulties. But this is where a new way of governing must be conceived. In the face of a politics obsessed by order and in spite of all the expectations for control and security that were created at the beginning of the modern era, we must recognize that social order is not one of the political system’s intentional fringe benefits, but the result of a social evolution that is simultaneously autonomous and politically configured. The order to which the political configuration of society aspires can no longer be thought of as anything but a dynamic expression of order and disorder (Innerarity 2006). This transformation of political leadership is most visible in the weakening of the government as an autonomous actor. The government is no longer a hero that can make autonomous decisions because it is overly dependent on shared knowledge, on our capacity for shared decisions, and on shared financial resources. In contemporary societies, politics no longer has the final authority, given the diminished resources that stem from growing interdependence. “It is not possible to save the State in its traditional form as society’s hero. As a heroic form of history, it has aged; as a guarantor of the common good, it is overwhelmed; as a social benefactor, it lacks resources; and as the center of government, it no longer finds itself facing a periphery, but rather an army of other centers” (Willke 1997, 347). The post-heroic government no longer benefits from a society that would fall into anarchy or chaos without a government. Conceiving of the government as the culmination of a hierarchical structure seems rather odd in a society that has stopped using hierarchy as the principal organizer of its complexity.

   Politics in a Post-Heroic Society

The Age of Distrust The greatest consensus regarding politics is that it is no longer what it once was: a respected activity enjoying authority and prestige, a generator of collective enthusiasm and confidence. We have moved from the celebration of politics to generalized indifference, when not profound scorn. Polls reveal a growing disillusionment that some people interpret—mistakenly, in my opinion—as a complete lack of interest, but we need to analyze this in more detail. We are not faced with the death of politics, but we are in the midst of a transformation that means we must comprehend and practice politics in a new way. We have entered into the age of distrust (Rosanvallon 2008) where there are no longer positive political mobilizations; instead we have a proliferation of “protest” votes. We do not vote for things as much as against them. Our vote is used to block inopportune people and ideas, to impede access, to thwart. Our ability to nullify is incomparably greater than our ability to configure. Society is more easily united around indignation than around hope. Politicians understand this dynamic, and for this reason, prefer to emphasize their opponent’s vices rather than their own virtues. This tendency explains why the whole political system ends up awash in negativity. That being said, it is important not to misinterpret this distrust. We should not allocate it to outdated categories or relate current disappointments to the antiparliamentarism that dramatically weakened democratic governments at the beginning of the twentieth century. We are not on the verge of a democratic crisis, but entering a new era of democratic stability. The disappointment people feel is in no way subversive; it is perfectly compatible with a respect for the democratic order. It is a mistake to think this feeling is anything other than fully democratic. We should also not forget that distrust (toward absolute power) is central to the very foundation of our political institutions. Democracy has always been construed as a system of limited and revocable trust. Is it not true that what we generally bemoan as depoliticization simply does not correspond to the type of political leadership to which we were previously accustomed, that is, an emphatic, hierarchical style of leadership that tends not to be ultrademocratic? The current state of distrust stems from the logical transformation of a society that is no longer heroic and whose political system has been

A Theory of Political Contingency    stripped of its previous theatrical quality. Distrust is not the same as indifference; it is a “weak” disappointment that produces more distance than destruction (Lipovetsky 2006, 62). It is one thing for democracy not to foster too much enthusiasm and another for this disappointment to mean indifference to our form of political life. Even if we dislike our newspapers or political parties, for example, that does not mean we would let them be suppressed. The demystification of politics does not mean that we do not care about anything; it simply means that our fondness for our political system is not awash in passion or enthusiasm. It is not true that people have lost all interest in politics; we live in a society in which we feel a greater sense of political competence. We are now better educated and feel capable of passing judgment on public affairs, thus we are less tolerant of having that ability appropriated. One of the ways in which society expresses an opinion about politics is precisely through the intensity of its participation or interest. If we respect political pluralism in all its manifestations, why not accept that there is also plurality regarding degrees of participation and public commitment? Why should everyone have to be equally involved in political issues? And who determines the desired level of commitment? When citizens express a greater or lesser interest in politics, this is a sign that requires political interpretation. A lack of interest is a respectable way of stating an opinion or making a decision and not necessarily a dearth of political commitment. It is important not to err on this point if we want to understand the society in which we live. We are not facing a time of depoliticization, but a time of the demystification of politics. A society that is interdependent and heterarchical tends to detotalize politics. What some people hastily interpret as a lack of interest stems from the fact that we live in a society where the public space cannot absorb all the dimensions of subjectivity. Although it may be true that politics now only mobilizes passions in a superficial fashion, that does not mean that our demands on politics have disappeared. Just the opposite. The same people who are absolutely uninterested in politics do not stop expecting to reap the benefits of the political system, and they are no less vigilant in seeking the fulfillment of their demands. But their expectations are no longer inscribed in the heroic framework of a totalizing politics. For that reason, we can see that distrust is not the opposite of legitimacy, but a subtle means of managing legitimacy. A lack of interest can be

   Politics in a Post-Heroic Society a completely practical response (Luhmann 1993, 191). Some even believe that a certain amount of political apathy is a good sign. Democracies can withstand a high degree of disinterest; in fact, the sudden interest of people who are generally apathetic about politics tends to indicate that something is not working as it should. A certain amount of boredom is part and parcel of democratic normality, and excitement about politics does not always bode well. Disappointment often stems from exaggerated expectations. The chronic lack of recognition affecting politics is related to the fact that its decisions may disappoint the expectations it spurs. Political action is currently limited to such a narrow playing field that it can lead only to unsatisfactory compromises. We credit politics with a competence that is diametrically opposed to the complexity of society. Politics thus straddles a divide between an increased confidence in its own competence and a diminished capacity for resolving social problems. There is no use hoping that politics can achieve the definitive solution to all problems or the salvation of our souls. We should expect something much more modest but no less decisive than what other very respectable professions afford us: politics should provide an outlet for our deepest social conflicts so that, to the extent possible, we can begin to resolve them without making matters worse in the process. Politics is a civilizing activity that serves to channel social conflicts in a reasonable way, but it is not a means to achieve complete social harmony or absolute consensus, nor to give meaning to life or to guarantee complete freedom and an appropriate use of that freedom. In the transition from a heroic society to one that no longer fits that description, we must produce a new political culture that teaches an appreciation for politics while training us not to require of it that which it cannot guarantee. The disillusionment resulting from the defeat of unrealistic or poorly formulated ideals is, as Bernard Crick warned, one of the most common pitfalls of politics, and we need to prepare ourselves for it through a well-managed sense of confidence.

Reasons for Indifference We disapprove of raising objections to citizen participation or limiting the import of social movements or showing any reservations that could curtail the extent of their engagement. Our support of these mea-

A Theory of Political Contingency    sures might suggest that we hope to restrain autonomous society or the free movement of social activities; a simultaneous defense of politics and representative democracy would transform us from suspect to admitted culprit. It is politically correct to call for participation, to believe that society is better than its representatives, and to praise social movements. Why, then, does the simple act of considering these issues make one immediately culpable of democratic elitism? Perhaps it is due to the fact that it has become commonplace to think that politics is so toxic that any change must necessarily be an improvement. Much has been said about the way contemporary societies transfer sacredness from established religions to political projects. This picture could be completed by noting that, after the transfer of sacredness from religion to politics, we have reached an era where it is the nonconventional forms of politics, what we could call “alter-politics,” that are consecrated. It is surprising to see this evolution of social expectations; we trust that alternative forms of politics will help us achieve that which we have stopped expecting from conventional politics, reactivating pure energies that, it seems, remained intact in the domain of depoliticized society. We could call this civil society, active citizenship, social movements, or “counterdemocracy,” to use the term coined by Pierre Rosanvallon. In my opinion, those who expect the same things from nonpolitics as they previously expected from politics reveal that they have not grasped the transformations that have taken place in society. We live in a society that could be called post-heroic, where heroic appeals and the mindsets of resistance have lesser repercussions. If politics is no longer what it once was, neither is nonpolitics. Alternative political activities (participation, protests, social movements, etc.) no longer offer us the heroism that has faded from institutional politics. “Alter-heroism” is a nostalgic refuge for those disappointed by politics in its current form, but like all forms of nostalgia, it is a remnant of the past. If we want to understand and act within a society that is no longer organized around heroism, that no longer comprehends that term, we have no choice but to revise our idea of normality and political exceptionalism. My defense of representative democracy is not black and white nor is it blind to the crisis in our political culture. Of course there are forms and means of expression and even types of political action beyond those that are institutional. There are many ways to engage in politics, including buy-

   Politics in a Post-Heroic Society ing, protesting, going to court, or simply through indifference or apathy. In addition to the type of politics we could call “official,” there is a whole sublayer of processes that condition institutional realities. Among other benefits, the tensions that result from this coexistence help ensure that the political system is enriched, corrected, or more forward-looking. We cannot depend solely on the skill sets of professional politicians to achieve political progress. A good deal of the progress that has already been accomplished by politics was triggered by external forces: it is probably true, for example, that most social advances as well as our environmental awareness were not dreamed up by politicians; these results were achieved because of very concrete social pressures. The political system requires a certain degree of social energy as well as resources it does not independently possess to perform its tasks. These requirements sometimes inconvenience or even subvert the established order but inevitably influence its exercise of power. The social movements and initiatives that appear at the heart or the margins of all established democracies are useful for certain indispensable tasks, such as preventing the removal of international conflicts from public view. These are matters that should not be left in diplomatic darkness or outside of the processes of public discussion. Social movements can draw attention to that which is being excluded, and they can employ political critiques to reveal the more uncomfortable aspects of reality. They also help revise our political agenda by introducing new subjects and different priorities. In this way, social movements highlight the issues that institutional power should address. For those reasons alone, and in keeping with Voltaire’s words of wisdom, if social movements did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. That is why advanced democracies have developed a whole range of conceptual thought patterns and a rich practical experience that permits citizen expression, informational and communicative systems, deliberative spaces, and participatory initiatives, which are all procedures that attempt to take advantage of the opportunities made possible by new technologies. When we have a good instrument, it is important to understand what it can and cannot do, in order to properly utilize its strengths and not undermine them by assuming they are transferrable to other areas for which our instrument is not as suitable. What are the limitations in the concrete case of citizen mobilization? To begin with, most social movements are part of the dynamic that is not as effective at coming together

A Theory of Political Contingency    in favor of projects as against them. They tend to be protest or resistance movements, and that is precisely the role they take: they protest or resist. This can be a laudable endeavor at times, but it has no bearing on the creation of a plan of action. These social initiatives are generally part of our growing tendency, which may be a result of the so-called ideological crises, to address single issues: a particular genre of victim, the peace movement, women’s rights, environmentalism, or even narrower coalitions such as hunters or drivers. Their strength depends upon their very specificity, but their narrow focus also reveals an obvious weakness because all organized social action ultimately requires a coherence that these casual groupings lack. We should not forget that the world of social movements is as plural as society itself and that social initiatives can be expected to provide one thing and its opposite, advances and retreats, right-leaning and left-leaning movements. Many who invoke society’s participation are thinking only of those who suit their needs, but society, naturally enough, affords participants with a wide range of perspectives. There are those on both sides of the political spectrum who hope to step outside of the framework of representative democracy: the meaning that the social movements of the 1960s hold in left-wing imagery is matched by the neoliberals’ demands for civil society in the 1990s. This concurrence should at least give us pause. Social movements, if they expect to be effective, need to recognize their own limitations and the extent of their reach and must not betray their specific nature. Things that work in one situation do not work in every situation, and there is no better way to ruin something useful than by attempting to use it for everything. It is counterproductive, for example, to try to make a political party, a soccer club, or a residents’ association also act as a family or to try to make a social movement be the salvation of the political system. Social movements—any citizen participation that is nonconventional or outside the scope of the political parties—have an important function that could be destroyed if we try to use them as a replacement for representative democracy. Representative democracy is in need of a lot of improvements, but we still have no better alternative. In the depths of the enthusiasm for nonconventional forms of social action, I believe there is an attempt to flee from political realities, in other words, an effort to circumvent collective action and compromise, the dream for a society where the limitations of our political situation are permanently overcome.

   Politics in a Post-Heroic Society The best guarantee of our freedom is found precisely in those situations that do not stir great passions or make excessive promises. It presides in the balance of contrary positions and in the tension between representation and participation. With the exception of political representation, there is no political activity that is coherent, stable, well-defined, effective, and responsible. It may well be difficult to find these qualities within our current political parties and institutional practices, but it is even more challenging outside of them. For that reason, if our political parties did not already exist, they would need to be invented. This does not negate the fact that they would be well advised to incorporate the restorative energies that social movements churn up.

The Regime of Contingency There are various types of futures, from the most unknown to the most familiar, the compliant and the opaque. Among these, the future that is referenced by politics is the uncertain future, the most provisional one. In other words, politics refers to the future that is least necessary and hardest to predict because it is surrounded by a great deal of uncertainty and instability (Innerarity 2010, 19ff.). Contingency inevitably obscures politics because doubts about what is possible pervade the entire present. This political contingency is fundamentally connected to the way decisions have to be made and to the future that is configured through those decisions, with all the attendant risks and unpredictability that are brought about. In the first place, one must keep in mind that the complexity and contingency of the political system produces an immense need for decision making. Society lives its future under “the risk of deciding” (Luhmann 1998b, 71). Every decision, like every nondecision, entails certain dangers, and the only thing any alternative accomplishes is a different weighing of pros and cons. The political system deals with risks, and assessing those risks necessarily leads to dissent. Political decisions are inevitably uncertain; they rest on contingencies, in other words, on not knowing. “There are decisions where the question under consideration is in principle un­decidable (not merely undecided). Otherwise, the decision would already be made and would only have to be ‘detected’” (Luhmann 1995, 308). However, this element of decisionism must be understood in the context of a post-heroic society, which is very different from anti­

A Theory of Political Contingency    democratic decisionism. We are not faced with the excessive voluntaryism of classic decisionism (in which leadership was exercised in a tendentiously authoritarian manner), but with a post-heroic decisionism (understood as collective deliberation to combat uncertainty in a democratizing manner). The process of delving deeper into democracy currently means learning to live in a context of risk and uncertainty. By defusing the element of indeterminacy that characterizes all contingency, systems reveal the “moment of possibility” engendered by all contingencies (Makropoulos 1998, 73). Politics is a site of both opportunity and danger, at the same time and for the same reasons (Bauman 2005, 320). The political system should learn to reflect and make use of its contingencies as opportunities for legitimation. Contingency is a risk, but it also affords many opportunities, as well as resources and information. If we understand politics as a way of regulating social risks, then we will not think of uncertainty as a lack of direction, but as a permanent need for reorientation. The political culture of contingency demands different measures in the face of fear and uncertainty. If insecurity inevitably accompanies freedom, it is also the price that pluralist democracies have to pay to keep the future open. That is why Beck was able to say that the ability to handle insecurity consciously is “an essential cultural qualification” (2004, 76). It is logical that the rejection of ideological heroism provokes insecurity in our pluralist democracies. They cannot provide the security that is only within the reach (and only for a limited time) of systems that are structured hierarchically, excluding other possibilities. The nostalgia for recognized limits, order, and contexts is an anthropological constant, an instinctive reaction in the face of complexity and contingency. There is a type of protective leadership that makes use of that feeling of insecurity and attempts to manage it by offering protections it cannot guarantee. Security-based heroism has turned fear into a new form of general resolve. But in a post-heroic context, political actors should learn to encourage confidence by renouncing excessive expectations and heroic appeals for security. If they could admit their own contingency and ignorance, these political actors might be able to create medium-term political confidence. The great challenge in politics today is precisely to reflect on our insecurity, a process that will not necessarily translate into fulfilled expectations but, in the best of cases, into an increased confidence that will help reduce insecurity.

   Politics in a Post-Heroic Society All of that demands a radical change in the way we understand politics, which should move from a normative to a cognitive style, that is, from an ideological perspective to a willingness to learn. The end result of recognizing contingency is not a lack of conviction but the free expression of what we do and do not know and a lessening insistence on the importance of currently available knowledge. In this way, a space for new knowledge is made available. The goal is to transform contingency’s latent blindness into a transparent consciousness of contingency. This is not achieved with predetermined models, but with structures of thought capable of identifying problems, avoiding redundancy, and suggesting alternatives. One clear consequence of all of this is that political confrontation must be understood in another way. Political aggravations, like disorder in any system, can be seen as a learning opportunity. Politics should be viewed as a space celebrating the provisional, the experimental, and recognized discord. When understood in this way, politics offers a configurable space for the resolution of problems through the continued focus on differences and an acceptance of contingency in its operations. Instead of assuming a role of supposed superiority that disqualifies one’s political adversaries, the objective of post-heroic politics would be to develop a willingness to learn, to be self-critical, and to explore new possibilities. Rorty (1989) claims the new post-heroic citizenry consists of those who are simultaneously committed and aware of the contingency of their commitment. Knowing that there are no “solutions” in the strict sense for problems that are truly political in nature does not mean that all opinions are equal or that it is not worth fighting for the opinions we consider most suitable, but it stops us from sliding into moral condemnation of people whose points of view are different from our own. The idea of removing political confrontations from the moral realm, although it may seem paradoxical, leads to greater political responsibility. Reverting to ideology and ethics was the perfect pretext in the time of hero­ism, but the fact that political decisions cannot be justified in an absolute manner through irrefutable principles implies that we need to be able to answer for them with standards that are purely political. No amount of rhetorical maneuvering can disguise the fact that no single policy is correct in and of itself. Thus there is room for legitimate disagreement, and it cannot be concluded that someone is morally in the wrong for not agreeing with the triumphant majority.

A Theory of Political Contingency    The best definitions of democracy highlight, in various ways, that it is a political system that, unlike totalitarianism, accepts and upholds uncertainty as its methodology. Claude Lefort (1979) articulated this concept when he said that democracy is a game of possibilities where we still have everything left to learn. Democracy is “the institutionalized form of communicating with uncertainty” (Dubiel 1994). Its provisional nature, reversibility, and openness make it the post-heroic order par excellence because it institutionalizes the indeterminate future.

Beyond Power and Helplessness A post-heroic society needs a political system that goes beyond the emphatic alternative between power and helplessness. The echo of heroic times—when control was understood as absolute control, a domineering attitude, admitting no discussion and no respect for social complexities— reverberates in ideologically voluntaryist discourse as well as in neoliberal defeatism. But there is political life in limited power and in well-­managed helplessness. The failure of politics, which some people celebrate and ­others lament, cannot be historically proven or empirically measured. At times, politics is discredited based on a standard of unassailable competence, as if social problems were condemned to either being solved by politics alone or being abandoned to their fate. In order for politics to recuperate its ability to shape policy, it must struggle against the voluntaryist temptation to see itself as the universal solution to all of society’s problems. One of the political system’s worst enemies is the misconception that it must control everything, conflating the idea of a generalist government with a government of the whole. Renouncing this maximalist approach would permit a redefinition of the political in order to dispel the notion of its being a failed hero. Just as the denationalization or reformulation of the role of the government does not necessarily mean depoliticization, the belief that politics should impose limits on itself is not the same as the concept of “small government” or a restricted vision of the public sphere in the interest of civil society. Decisions about the purpose and ideal location of limitations are political decisions and not the result of scientifically established solutions or ethical requirements. That is why the promise of heroic political control over society is obsolete. How should we act in the face of that loss of security? Are we left

   Politics in a Post-Heroic Society with no choice but to succumb to the operative closure of functional systems, abandoning ourselves to destiny and arbitrariness? Renouncing the semantics of crisis, loss, and decadence does not mean renouncing a political configuration of society. Rather, it means giving democracy a new chance to provide stable, provisional control over the evolution of our societies. The recognition of its limitations does not give politics an excuse to stand idly by and surrender to an incomprehensible and uncontrollable process of evolution. The political system is capable of creating processes that make the advent of desirable patterns possible. Although these new patterns cannot be intentionally produced, politics can engender a culture that increases the likelihood of a desired future. While politics has never before been as limited in its range of activities, it has also never been as decisive as it is currently. But all of this requires a different way of envisioning power. We need to find ways to make politics more interactive and cooperative, rather than understanding it in connection to hierarchy and control. Even though power is omnipresent, imposed power is a primitive, suboptimal means of managing conflicts. The political system’s traditional focus on naked power is trapped in the old, heroic conception of politics. Nowadays, the possibilities of political configuration are shifting in other directions: influence, diplomacy, understanding, deliberation, political processes. When the regulating system is also and at the same time a regulated system, the idea of unilateral control becomes obsolete. This can be seen in Bateson’s (2002) metaphor of the thermostat where, in the end, it is not clear who is controlling whom. The form of power that best reduces complexity consists of not needing to impose. We should instead make use of methods of mutual conditioning that reject unilateralism or threats. A post-heroic theory of politics does not imply a helpless political system. Power and decision making still exist, but these properties no longer correspond to concrete people or collective actors. If the role of power is to regulate contingency, then the wielder of power is no longer a heroic subject who should, personally or institutionally, be in charge of making decisions, but instead forms part of a general process that balances agreement and disagreement. If politics cannot be justified by its planning abilities or by its capacity to use the evidence of available knowledge to build consensus, what can it still offer us? It will be socially relevant and will survive as an agent

A Theory of Political Contingency    of social configuration to the extent to which it develops a special capacity for learning and observing. But then, as Niklas Luhmann warned, politics should understand its relationship with society to be a learning, not a teaching, relationship (1998a, 22). The purpose of politics is to allow society to reflect upon itself as a whole and to learn to manage its uncertain collective future. Nothing more and nothing less.

8 The Political Construction of Collective Hope

We need to maintain a good relationship with the future because it plays a very important role in our personal and collective lives. The future seems like the simplest thing in the world: we will eventually get to know it regardless of what we do; if you want to meet the future, you need only wait a little, and it will be there. However, it is a complex, unpredictable, and unknown space full of extravagant threats and promises, capable of unsettling or enticing us. Anyone who mistreats it ends up paying very dearly. Nothing is more inevitable and, at the same time, easier to suppress. If there is anything besides physical space that deserves to be cultivated and civilized, it is time, specifically future time, which is never occupied by armies and colonists but by desire and expectations. The key to this occupation is hope, a virtue that defines the energy with which people face the battle to win the future. Among other peculiarities of that strange combat, we should mention the singular fact that it revolves around events that have yet to take place, but the battle begins in the present, where we already anticipate coming events. Human beings and their societies always live at the expense of what is awaiting them, positively or negatively. They enjoy in the present what they will have in the future; they fear things that do not yet exist; they are controlled by promises; they lose confidence or get excited, confront future risks, fear what may come to pass. Each of these events embodies a very human process of creating something out of that form of unreality that is the future.

The Political Construction of Collective Hope    If we examine our current relationship with the future, the relationship western democracies maintain with the future, we would, in my opinion, have to come to the conclusion that, in spite of all our speechifying about novelty and our posturing about excitement, the beginning of the twenty-first century currently stands as the epitome of a radical lack of trust. In The Possessed, Dostoevsky refers to “the hope of the human race,” but this is simply not applicable to us. Our most deep-seated feelings seem to impel us to hope for almost nothing. The ubiquity of the principle of precaution suggests that we do not have a friendly relationship with the future, the appearance of any novelty is always accompanied by a shadow of fear, and we instinctively situate anything new on the border of the monstrous. Advances in technology almost automatically bring about their own mirror image. Our fear of the future would explain our summary rejection of science and technology: for many years now, the collective mental image has suggested that the fundamental purpose of chemistry is to poison, of science to destroy, of communications to deceive, of pedagogy to manipulate, and that people are healthy as long as they do not go to the doctor. In our imagination, innovation is associated with instability, destruction, perplexity, and control; prevention has triumphed over risk in our laws, in science, and at war. There are abundant examples of cultural pessimism that intersect with technophobia (on the left or right), environmentalism, and basic anticapitalism. At the same time, we lack large systems that transmit collective hope, utopias capable of making us dream, or goals that set common forces in motion. Perhaps that is the root cause of our obsession with memory and our agitation regarding the past. Society is mobilized less by projects for the future than by agitation about the past. There is a type of political action that corresponds to this lack of perspective; once it becomes clear that citizens are more concerned about risks than opportunities, they choose not to rouse the critics who mobilize forcefully around distant horizons or ambitious reforms. Now is not the time for big promises; the most effective means of mobilizing people is by making use of the negative energies of indignation, exaggeration, and victimization. We do not have a hopeful outlook, but neither is our relationship with the future defined by that true, dramatic feeling of desperation that arises in the face of catastrophe or inevitable decline. We suffer what could be called a state of “minor desperation”; there are no negative certainties

   The Political Construction of Collective Hope about an inevitable future, but a lack of disaster does not suffice to project a future that is truly hopeful. We now live in “societies of limited hope” (Stykow and Bieber 2004). There is no sense in addressing hope or despair if one cannot count on the long term, if that perspective is not present in some sense. When that perspective is lacking, we succumb to a type of despair that consists of limiting our field of vision to immediate gratification. The postmodern era does not have an epic or tragic relationship with the future; we are simply confined to the space that exists between weak hope and soft despair. Within that reduced space, there is barely any room for the future, strictly speaking. The future is absent when there is no conception of progress, ignored when the tyranny of the present reigns. The future has been privatized within the new design of utopian aspirations; it is nothing other than a future contrived by the rhetoric of innovation. The question I want to pose is how we can construct political hope following disillusionment, the destruction of naïveté, or the disappearance of our old idea of progress. In the words of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1990), how do we make “hope and history rhyme” again? I am going to examine this question by considering, first of all, how we should think about the future on the heels of the crisis of the idea of progress and whether there truly is cause for pessimism. The whole issue revolves around the question of whether politics can configure the future of our societies or whether it should simply commit itself to cataloging collective hopelessness. Only then will we know whether, in spite of everything, we are in any position to maintain reasonable hope.

The Future after Progress It is very common to listen to a characterization of time according to which we are at the end of something that has been irretrievably lost or that should be restored, something we need to shore up or finish off. We have taken our leave of so many things that hardly anything remains: we have seen the end, it seems, of history, ideologies, authority, the family, politics itself. This “endism” is the new ideological common ground that gives a slightly apocalyptic tinge to our ideological landscape. Heading the list of things that are no longer what they once were, we find the conception of a progress that is linear, necessary, irreversible, and continuous, based on the certainty that nothing is insurmountable and that

The Political Construction of Collective Hope    nothing withstands the desire for transformation. The weakening of this modern idea of progress constitutes one of the fundamental descriptors of our time. The idea of progress, which nurtured and organized the political imagination over the course of the last two centuries, has lost its principal attributes and is now nothing more than a meaningless word that is trotted out in political and economic speeches because it has a nice ring to it. What type of future will our society produce now that the idea of progress has been gutted? Our progressive heritage has essentially destroyed our faith in automatic progress and our belief that all types of progress were harmoniously linked, which ensured a convergence between scientific or technological advances and ethical or political progress. We still get some partial movement toward progress, but there is no longer the type of general unification that used to offer a historical picture of intelligibility and articulated governability. Progress has been diffracted or possibly shattered. We have proof of this transformation in the peculiar disjunction between the progressive camp on the left and modernizing conservatism. There are no longer all-out progressives or full-fledged conservatives, and our confidence in progress is slipshod, sectorialized, without any aspirations for universality. The historical alliance between the defenders of progress and the supporters of social justice is falling apart. The progressives are becoming pessimistic; they are suspicious of innovative forces stemming from the economy or globalization. The conservatives have become the firmest proponents of unchecked modernization. Some claim that the idea of progress has slowly shifted from the left to the right, transformed into a generalized desire for modernization, which functions as a euphemism for the outdated concept of progress that is now in decline alongside other expressions, such as acceleration, advancement, movement, adaptation, reform, etc. The word “modernization” is a euphemistic and semantically impoverished form of the old idea of “progress.” It more than fulfills the conditions demanded of a term we choose to keep at the ready: it mobilizes people in a generic way, it clarifies without making an excessive commitment, it can be used in any context, and it frees the user from providing a burdensome justification. Although it is worn out, the idea of progress, like any other, enjoys a mythical dimension; it has survived its projected demise through a rhetoric that is explained by the human desire for collective illusions. Although it is not particularly effective, the appeal to

   The Political Construction of Collective Hope ­ rogress nurtures illusions, offers a degree of the intelligibility of social rep ality, and justifies more than a few decisions. But we all know it is more a manner of speaking than a belief that truly embodies the significant influence with which it was endowed by the early modern era. In the end, all the recommendations proposed for the sake of planning and order lack credibility and have been abandoned. Society no longer has a future that can be considered unquestionable in the present. Instead, we get the impression that any appeal to the future has become particularly suspicious or at least controversial. What political consequences arise from the crisis in the idea of progress? Politics is no longer moved by projects that arouse collective hope or by particularly promising predictions for the future. It is not a coincidence that political disillusionment coincides with a time when the future has become problematic. Jacques Rancière addressed this issue when he said that the end of politics is the end of the promise (1998, 23): it is not a question of the limitations of a specific activity or of difficulties in the workplace, but of the end of a certain use of time, the use of promise in a radical sense (in other words, beyond the electoral process). Both time and politics have been secularized; we have let go of our dreams of power as a means to freedom and a promise of happiness. We have entered a homogeneous time, a temporality that lacks the burden of the future, but also lacks the future’s air of emancipation. The disillusionment with politics that characterizes the world in which we live affects the authority that, in other not very distant times, was entrusted with the task of granting human societies control over their destiny. There is currently a profound pessimism about people’s ability to control anything, especially through politics. This new fatalism reflects a loss of the political hope that was fueled by the liberal and socialist utopias, heirs to the great progressive storylines of the Enlightenment. This loss of anticipatory energy is revealed in the fact that our democracies lack utopian projects, missions, conceptions of justice, global perspectives. The great visionaries have been replaced by politicians who administer the present’s inevitable constrictions. This reduction in hope is most clearly revealed in the fact that politics is more readily mobilized by rejection than by projection, more by distrust than by approval. This is what Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) has called “the age of negative politics,” in which those who resist do not do so in the manner of previous non-

The Political Construction of Collective Hope    conformists or dissidents. Their stance nowadays does not designate any desired goal, any program of action. Current protestors simply express a disorganized preference for holding off on determining the future at the present time. The crisis of the idea of progress and its agitated aftermath forces us to relearn how to live in time. We will probably need to learn to get by within a time that has multiplied and become more unpredictable, a time of lesser expectations—in the political realm as well—which does not mean renouncing a better future, a future shaped by politics. The question, then, is whether there is a future without progress, in other words, a future that is not inscribed in the macrodesign of the necessary progress of history, a future that is not preordained. Is it possible to conceive of progress in any other way, conferring another meaning on modernity’s previous under­standing of this idea? In the first place, it is worth clarifying that the so-called “end of history” is the disappearance of history conceived of as a linear fiction that is headed toward a determined finality, but it is not the end of collective hope. We must consider and practice a type of hope that is independent of the old progressive plan, that shifts from the realm of necessity and automatism to the realm of liberty and free will. It is a question of deautomatizing progress by recognizing its multiplicity and ambiguity. This incredulity about larger stories is partially due to the fact that our conception of the future has become less mechanistic and naïve. I maintain that after the dissipation of the idea of progress, we have the opportunity to make better plans for the future and to cultivate a better established sense of hope. A crisis in one particular conception of progress does not necessarily mean a crisis of progress per se. It is most likely true that possibilities are being developed in such a way that exactly the opposite occurs: once the security guaranteed by the ideological control of progress disappears, a more surprising or original future than we tend to imagine can emerge, a future that is more fortuitous, accidental, unpredictable, even risky and dangerous. This indeterminacy would allow for new human leadership rather than fulfilling the image of the inescapable future that provided reasons to comply or excuses for passivity. We have lost our comforting dreams of a certain type of hope based on the belief in automatic progress, but this also frees us from dogmatic claims to legitimacy and constrictions imposed in its name. It frees us from the manipulation of the future.

   The Political Construction of Collective Hope To start off, we would need to move from a future understood as something we are guaranteed to a future understood as something open, fragile, and largely dependent on our freedom. In other words, we need to see the future as one of our responsibilities. Our traditional belief in the forward-marching nature of history led to paternalism and moralism. Ours was a familiar and expected future that released people from the difficult duty of making choices and the resulting personal responsibility. Things moved forward without us; all we had to do was keep up with the times. If, on the other hand, we choose to take responsibility for the future, it could once again bring about a tension in human existence that was previously trivialized by the faith in automatic progress. It would now be a question of changing from the fictitious necessity of progress to the will for progress, the modest commitment of making progress on some specific issue in a well-defined field. In that way, the notion of progress loses its ability to disguise itself; it ends up being observable and assessable. Just as we no longer think about history in a singular fashion and now pluralize it into “histories,” there is currently an attempt to pluralize progress that considers sectorial, provisional, and contingent improvements. In this way, we could expand the prospects of democratic societies, replacing the merely consoling version of progress with the will and responsibility to act in the midst of multiple possibilities. We need to have projects that are elaborated from the starting point of an imagined desirable future, even if that future can no longer be projected with mechanical inevitability and must necessarily be unpredictable and controversial. A post-progressivist perspective could make its appearance as we let go of the belief in a future that is defined by the rational nature of causal connections or the magical nature of destiny. No longer inevitable, history would stop representing a unique universal history, with a midpoint and end point (Marquard 1999). The notion of progress would lose the unity and uniqueness that would turn it into an ideological instrument, but neither its ability to mobilize nor its capacity for giving meaning to any attempts at improving society would disappear. Let us suppose that the great narratives that used to construct and organize our experience have indeed disappeared. It may be that new opportunities will be hatched in that undeveloped space. How can we describe this place? It is the space of politics, the art of converting limitations into opportunities.

The Political Construction of Collective Hope   

Escaping Pessimism One of the characters from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso has given us a maxim that is probably the paradigm of all excuses: whatever one is /other people are to blame. This conviction does not clarify anything, but it provides a good deal of relief; its purpose is to reconfirm us as opposed to them. It explains in simple terms the tension between the global and the local, and it provides the basic outline for the relationship between rightand left-wing forces. We can be certain that this approach encourages continued political confrontation when our entire view is filled with rhetoric designed to show that other people are worse than we are. This approach reveals very little confidence in our own project, ideas, and convictions. This is, with few exceptions, how the current antagonism between the right and the left functions. That is why the many outstanding analyses about the problems of the New Right fail to mention the weaknesses of the left. What if we inverted the maxim spouted by Goethe’s character and considered the ways in which the left is to blame for the right’s successes? This type of analysis tends to be more productive because it would not have to buy into the prejudicial assumption that if our competitors are bad, then our ideas must necessarily be right. I believe that one of the main difficulties faced by the left in many countries of the world is that it limits itself to being the anti-right, which—although it may seem otherwise— has nothing to do with offering a true alternative. It has been said that the left has trouble mobilizing its electorate, and some believe that success would flow, not by reviving collective hope, but by fanning the flames of concern so that voters would be forced to support the left, however reluctantly, as the lesser evil. To summarize, the right nowadays is optimistic and the left pessimistic. It may be the case that political enmity is currently articulated more as an emotional disposition than an ideological position. The truth of the matter is that emotions and ideas are more closely related than we tend to assume. If we look at things this way, we will perceive the ideological displacement that is taking place. Traditionally, the difference between progressives and conservatives corresponded with pessimism and optimism, both anthropologically and socially. While progressivism formed a part of a historic movement toward betterment, conservatism, as Ernst Bloch suggested, has always been prepared to accept the inevitability of a certain

   The Political Construction of Collective Hope amount of injustice or suffering. But to a large extent, this is no longer the case. The general mood of the right, whose best representative is Nicolas Sarkozy, is the complete opposite of resignation: decisive and active, ­complex-free, trusting in the future, and firmly resolved not to let anyone else take control of the vanguard. This attitude is making things difficult for a left that, even when it has good reasons to object, cannot seem to rally when the time comes for proposing something better. Whether defending the causes of marginalized peoples or becoming the advocate of pluralism, the left does not do so in order to construct an alternative conception of power; this is evidenced by the guilty conscience of those who realize they are merely preaching to the choir. The left is, fundamentally, melancholic and critical. It sees the contemporary world as a machine that needs to be stopped, not as a source of opportunities and instruments susceptible to being placed at the service of its own values: justice and equality. Socialism is now perceived as the means to redress the inequalities of a liberal society. Its sole legitimacy stems from its goal of fixing things that were destroyed by the right or protecting things from the right’s threats. It attempts to preserve that which is at risk of being destroyed but does not offer any alternative structure. Its restorative mentality is constructed at the expense of innovative and predictive thought. For this reason, it does not offer a coherent interpretation of the world that awaits us because that world is seen only as a potential threat. This suspicion of the future is basically the end result of perceiving the market and globalization as the principal agents of economic chaos and social inequalities and failing to note the possibilities that they encompass and that could be exploited. It is not enough to simply marshal good feelings and continuously invoke ethical values; it is also important to understand social change and recognize the ways in which the values one holds can be achieved under new circumstances. The left’s primary difficulty in positioning itself as a promising alternative comes from its “heroism in the face of the market” (Grunberg and Laïdi 2007, 9) that prevents it from understanding the market’s true nature and causes it to view the marketplace as nothing more than a ­fomenter of inequality, an antisocial reality. For much of the left, economic reasoning is a type of social conspiracy. They believe that social benefits are always in conflict with economic considerations. The ritual condemnation of neoliberalism and global commercialization stems from an intellectual tradition

The Political Construction of Collective Hope    that sets social interests against economic interests and tends to privilege determinism and existing structures over the opportunities offered by social change. From this starting point, it is difficult to comprehend that competition, rather than public or private monopolies, is one of the left’s true values, especially when government monopolies have stopped guaranteeing the provision of a common good in economically efficient and socially advantageous terms. Indeed, some government monopolies falsify the rules of the game. At this point, we are perfectly aware that both the marketplace and the government produce certain inequalities, but government inequalities are met with extraordinary indulgence by many. There are times, for example, when we must balance the value of guaranteeing employment at any cost with the price this protection represents for the people who are thus prevented from entering the workforce. This creates a new inequality. Masked as a defense of social progress, critiques of contemporary society can in fact be conservative and inequitable, which explains why the left is currently closely identified with maintaining the status quo. This conservative attitude could be redefined in terms of political innovation, modifying procedures in order to achieve the same objectives: it is a question of putting the marketplace at the service of the public good and the fight against inequalities. Nostalgia paralyzes and does not help us understand the new terms under which an old battle is being waged. It is not accurate that an era of solidarity has been supplanted by a burst of individualism, yet we must learn to express solidarity more formally. If we want to address social problems more effectively, we must replace the mechanical tendency to automatically intensify state interventions with more flexible forms of collaboration between the government and the marketplace, making use of indirect forms of government and promoting a culture that encourages the evaluation of public policies. The other reason the left currently projects a pessimistic attitude is its wholly negative assessment of globalization. This worldview prevents it from understanding the positive effects globalization can have on the redistribution of wealth, the emergence of new actors, or the change in the rules of the game in power relationships. When it insists on deregulations related to globalization, the left runs the risk of appearing to protect the privileged few while rejecting everyone else’s possibilities for development. It is true that the forces at work in the world have never been so powerful

   The Political Construction of Collective Hope but also so promising for so many people. Or are we meant to believe that there is not a hopeful correspondence between the process of globalization and the emergence of a multipolar world? For that reason, the left of the twenty-first century must be careful to distinguish itself from alter-globalization. This does not mean that there are no serious problems in need of solution or that the left should abandon its critical stance. But it must not yield to the litany of protests over our loss of influence on the general course of the world. Instead of proclaiming that “another world is possible,” it would better serve the left to imagine other ways of conceiving of and acting in this world. The idea that nothing can be done in the face of globalization is an excuse for political laziness. What the left cannot do is choose to act as if nothing had changed. The left will not be free from the grip of pessimism until it makes an effort to take advantage of the possibilities generated by globalization and tries to guide social change in a more just and egalitarian direction.

The Political Configuration of the Future Politics is the attempt to civilize the future (Willke 2002, 208), to reject the colonization of the future by a determinant past, to impede its ideological monopoly or its abandonment to simple administrative inertia. The goal of politics is to shape a common backdrop of meaning in which individual expectations are linked with collective progress. For some time now, politics has been hard-pressed to configure that future, as its resolve to constitute, renew, and transform the social order has flagged. Three factors, in my opinion, contribute to the political system’s loss of relevance: the privatization of personal fulfillment; the barriers stemming from other areas of public life such as the economy, law, or communications that prefer to see politics as superfluous; and in a correlative fashion, the weakness of politics itself when it comes to generating social change. The polls say that young people are imbued with “individual optimism and collective pessimism.” They are interested in the “public good” but not “collective action.” They tend to think of the future as an exclusively individual matter, not the responsibility of politics. We are seeing evidence of what Claus Offe has called the “privatization of utopias” (2004, 37): the future is privatized, pluralized, and fragmented. We consider happiness something private, no longer associating it with collective projects

The Political Construction of Collective Hope    or seeing it as something made possible by a social context. We find the public space irrelevant to our happiness; it merely supports private affairs, but does not allow an expansion of them. Our destiny seems to be of the save yourself if you can variety as we are surrounded by impersonal forces that stem from globalization, bureaucracy, and technology in a society without politics, without collective hope, incapable of imagining and promoting an alternative common future. The only thing we expect from politics is the protection of our own projects of personal development. Devoid of the power for social transformation, politics is subordinated to society, understood as an amalgamation of private individuals, consumers, stockholders, and clients whose only relationship with politics is their occasional appearance in voting booths, at protest marches, or in public opinion research data. At the same time, politics is besieged by other types of human activity that shrink the scope of its operations. Politics disappears in the face of the influence of the media and the economy, the markets and the courts. Politics is too weak to withstand the rule of cash flow and media power. The space for politics is lost within the new reality of globalization and in confrontation with the specific demands raised by the processes of individualization. These are forces that are attempting to turn politics into something we can do without. While the world is unified along economic and communicative fronts, we have not yet achieved the political objectives of multilateralism or global governance. The agility and synchronization of the markets contrasts with the political illiteracy of global society. Our principal challenge is how to react before the new hallmarks of the future, which are no longer tradition, law and order, or subjugation, but rather a type of leveling agitation that forces us to adapt to an unstoppable planetary shift. Because, if it were true that politics is now over, what would that mean for us? It would mean the end of the limited control that human societies achieve over the future when we decide collective matters among ourselves, without entrusting them to the knowledge of experts, the fury of fanatics, or administrative bureaucracy. But the principle threat against politics stems from its own weakness, which prevents the type of future that allows for political action in the transforming, reforming, or establishing of alternatives. Profound social reform, understood as the result of planning processes carried out by effective, conscientious actors, is improbable in present-day societies. “In rapid and

   The Political Construction of Collective Hope dynamic systems, which have extremely short-lived present tenses, one cannot and perhaps should not want to significantly change the conditions of future action” (Luhmann 1989, 8). The belief that social complexity cannot be politically modified has prevailed. This pessimism affects even the very idea of government and planning (Braun 1995, 612), which is increasingly obsolete and infused with a sense of “muddling through” or, in the best of cases, intelligent improvisation. We have moved from the euphoria of planning to the pessimism of governance. In contrast with “government,” what we have is actually “evolution without a plan,” “social self-regulation,” “a self-referential closure of social subsystems,” the reign of “side effects,” and even “ungovernability.” The government is in a state of transformation from its previous incarnation as a power center to a coordinating institution that must turn its attention to “managing social interdependencies” (Mayntz 2001, 23). Decisions and initiatives have been replaced by interactivity. In any case, patterns and dynamics end up being more important than people’s intentions. There is, however, one positive aspect to the crisis of governability: it can be understood as an opportunity to transform politics along lines that are more democratic and respectful of civil society’s leading role. The political system’s ability to configure is not realized in spite of its limitations but because of them. We could say that the resistance that societies and objects have against being governed constitutes a source of learning for politics and a guarantee against irrefutable leadership. Our previous faith in the omnipotent nature of politics was probably as illusory as our current belief that it is powerless or irrelevant. The fact is that authoritarian management is not the only way of acting upon society. Politics must pursue an alternative method of intervention that is no longer hierarchical and domineering, but horizontally inclined, meaning it can successfully engage social, economic, and cultural agents. Since politics is a configuration of the future, it wages an unusual battle against destiny, against the seemingly unassailable world of facts. Politics attempts to transform fate into responsibility. One of the parts of our democratic tradition that is most deserving of protection is precisely the rejection of destiny. Living without destiny is manifested in a will to discover, comprehend, and transform. The future depends more on our decisions and commitments than was understood by those who devised the modern idea of progress as an irresistible force to which we

The Political Construction of Collective Hope    could confidently relinquish control, or by the cynics when they view the present as inevitable. The future does not need to be guessed, but imagined and constructed. The big question, therefore, is not what awaits us, but what we are going to do; how we will replace our oversized ideological excuses with concrete projects. Let us suppose that we in effect no longer possess any of the overarching stories that used to construct and order our experience. This could be more liberating than limiting, given that those narratives also entailed a degree of fatalist thinking. Perhaps a new possibility will be inaugurated in that vacant space. Politics cannot completely eliminate destiny since it is impossible to imagine a world without limits. But the very idea of politics offers a different vision of personal and collective destiny. Politics is a small rebellion against the preconceived notion that everything is already determined and immutable. Politics is a unique combination of vision and passion, perspective and determination. It does not make us stop perceiving reality as it is, but at the same time, we are able to project ourselves beyond that which simply exists. It is an awareness of limits as well as the determination to get beyond them. Politics without vision is lost in the daily hustle and bustle, and we end up on a path to a place we did not really want to go. But if it is lacking in passion, politics cannot tackle the ill-fated resistance presupposed by reality; instead, it simply adjusts to the way things are without arriving at the place it meant to go. We may find that within a few years the content and style of politics will be unrecognizably different from today. But the need for politics will not disappear. In fact, politics has never been as necessary, given the magnitude of the problems that await us and require collective action. If we cannot resolve these problems through politics, we will be unable to resolve them at all.

A Reasonable Hope I have the impression that political problems do not arise from rashly yielding to realism or from renouncing utopia, as people tend to say, but from something previous. The origin of the weakness of politics is its acceptance of a territorial division where reality and efficiency are managed by the right wing, while the left is free to enjoy the monopoly of unreality,

   The Political Construction of Collective Hope where it is able to move about unchallenged amidst values, utopias, and dreams. In this way, there are those who are afforded reality without hope and others, hope without reality. This comfortable demarcation of territory is at the heart of the general political crisis: once we accept the divide between the principle of pleasure and the principle of reality, between objectivity and possibilities, the right wing can dedicate itself to heedless modernization, without worrying that the left will trouble it with its generic, confused utopianism. The right can allow itself the luxury of having some difficulties with values while the left continues its struggle with reality. This division barely interests voters, who would almost certainly prefer to be able to make a different type of choice. Understood in this way, political realism in this day and age confirms our powerlessness when we attempt to configure social space. What if, deep down, politics were nothing more than a discussion about our understanding of the meaning of “reality”? Because reality is not simply that which is real, nor can we reduce it to that which is currently possible. Reality also encompasses possibilities and provisional impossibilities, indeterminism and other alternatives. The reality of human life, the reality of all of society, is a combination of possibilities and impossibilities that are partially open and partially closed to action. As Sartre affirmed in his diaries, every present has a future that it illuminates and with which it disappears. The fact that everything is possible in another shape does not mean that everything is possible, but it is also true that “realists” tend to have a very narrow conception of reality, lacking awareness of other lateral possibilities. Perhaps the fundamental political question is not so much about ideals and imagery as about our conception of what is real. Tocqueville taught us that utopianism and empiricism are inseparable ways of leaving reality intact. Utopianism does not accelerate its movement except in an illusory way: the return to reality is eventually imposed. Empiricism does not halt reality except in an equally illusory manner; in the end, society’s internal drive prevails. In both cases, reality is abandoned to its fate. So if that is the way things are, the best that can be done in the face of a conservative conception of politics is to tackle it in the sphere of reality, to argue against the right’s conception of reality. That would be the only way to avoid repeating the left’s perennial error of playing in a field where the right has a decided advantage. The right should be confronted not with fantasy but with a different description of reality, a superior de-

The Political Construction of Collective Hope    scription of reality. The battle will not be won through a generic appeal to another world but through the struggle to describe reality in another way. The left will never be persuasive if it seems to be quarreling with reality itself; it scores points when it is capable of convincing us that the description of reality wielded by the right is faulty. It would be catastrophic to give up for lost the definition of the playing field, accepting one of the two proffered choices: competing in the struggle to manage current reality better or fighting from a position of innocuous moralism. Faced with the official administrators of realism, we must defend the idea that politics is not simple management or simple adaptation, but configuration, a proposed framework for action, foresight into the future. It has to do with the new and unusual, dimensions that do not appear in other professions that, while effective in their areas, are distanced from the concerns provoked by excessive uncertainty. The types of activities that make up political action do not operate solely with simple rules of experience, with the comfortably accumulated teachings of the well-known. People who are able to perceive the opportunity offered by uncertainty will see how the erosion of some traditional concepts once again makes politics possible as a force of innovation and transformation. It is urgent to redefine the meaning and objectives of political action from the starting point that through politics we know, or rather discover, aspects of reality and possibilities for action that cannot be perceived when we remain within routine practices and preconceived debates. We would not be human without our capacity for “futurizing,” projecting ourselves toward the future and anticipating it in terms of imagination, expectations, planning, and determination. The uneasiness that makes us hope, desire, and fear is what allows us to relate to the future in all its diverse forms. If it is not trained, this anticipation works destructively: it atrophies, turns us into fanatics, into people who are unnecessarily fearful or excessively credulous. Our relationship with the future must be cultivated, just as we cultivate other human capabilities. Although we do not tend to express it as such and no academic curriculum would label it in this way, one of the principal objectives of all education, and the task of institutions and our socialization in general, is to shape within each of us a proper relationship with the future, one that can also be preached in society as a whole. Some societies have an unhealthy relationship with their own future, while others deal with the future in a reasonable and beneficial manner.

   The Political Construction of Collective Hope Hope—which is the human feeling or emotion that regulates our relationship with the future—is neither a consoling illusion nor stubborn resistance in the face of the learning that ensues from well-utilized disappointment. Reasonable hope is distinguished from the bland optimism that nurtures illusion while simultaneously closing itself off from the knowledge of reality. The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, while the knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuing need for hope [ . . . ]. Improvidence, a blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best, furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t [Lasch 1991, 81].

To say it with Edgar Morin (1988): “Abandoning a grand illusion can give rise to the birth of a great project.” For that reason, hope is radically misunderstood when it is compared to knowledge. Rorty, the ironist philosopher, does just that when he maintains that political renewal cannot be implemented based on a description of the facts. For renewal to be possible, he tells us, you need to describe your country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become; loyalty must be offered up to your dream country rather than to the one in which you awake every morning (1998, 101). I believe, on the contrary, that this opposition is deadly and that it perpetuates the idea that successfully knowing or describing reality is paralyzing, while the entire transformative impulse would be concentrated in desire that, the less realistic it is, the greater its ability to mobilize. If that were the case, the only person who could have any hope would be one who is ignorant of the tragic nature of history and the harshness of reality. The only thing that would save us from desperation would be the flight toward action, and anyone who was optimistic would either be ignorant or deliberately suspending the principle of reality in order to escape despair. But as Adorno (1977) pointed out in his defense of good theory against the impatience of praxis, activism does not cure us from “the foolish wisdom of resignation.” Hope cannot create expectancy without knowledge. If we have the right to continue hoping, it is thanks to the conviction that the ideals of truth and justice are of some use in explaining reality, that they have some viability in this world, and that the logic of objects can coincide, at least in part, with the logic of values. A cynic is someone who has replaced hope with knowledge, while a dreamer is some-

The Political Construction of Collective Hope    one who replaces knowledge with hope. If there is any reason to continue hoping in spite of everything, it is because we are not condemned to the choice between naïveté and resignation. Let us avoid the disastrous impasse between hope with no experience and disillusionment with no goals, as if we had no choice but to opt between being blind to limitations or repressing our best desires. Hope teaches us to be cautious with our expectations. A chronic lack of confidence in the political system has less to do with the capabilities of institutions than with the excessiveness of our expectations. Although politics has been stripped of the halo of heroic deeds, the messianic visions of social projects that motivate action have been transformed into emphatic disappointments or apocalyptic approaches. In that dejection, there is a latent, disappointed hope with which we have not yet learned how to coexist. For that reason, politics must learn to manage disappointment post-­heroically and understand it as a space of open possibilities. Inevitable disappointments create new demands and new disagreements that give social evolution a boost. That is why I defend a brand of skepticism that carries a tinge of optimism within it; it offers few certainties but many possibilities. In that sense, one could reference a democratic hope (Westbrook 2005) that is neither naïve nor excessively trusting. It would be sufficiently experienced with disappointment so as to avoid excessive faith in promises, while its accumulation of experience would not prevent it from striving for the stars.

Bibliography

Adam, Barbara. 1998. Timescapes of Modernity. New York: Routledge. Adam, Barbara, and Chris Groves. 2007. Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, ­Ethics. Leiden: Brill. Adorno, T. W. 1977. “Resignation.” In Schriften. Vol. 10, no. 2, 794–99. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Ansoff, Igor. 1976. “Managing Surprise and Discontinuity: Strategic Response to Weak Signals.” Zeitschrift für betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung 28, 129–52. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Axelrod, Robert, ed. 1976. Structure of Decision: The Cognitive Maps of Political Elites. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Bailey, John J., and Robert J. O’Connor. 1975. “Operationalizing Incrementalism: Measuring the Muddles.” Public Administration Review 29, 60–66. Barthes, Roland. 2002. Comment vivre ensemble: Cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1976–1977). Paris: Seuil. Bateson, Gregory. 2002. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Hampton Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. À l’ombre du millénaire ou le suspens de l’an 2000. Paris: Sens & Tonga. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2005. Moderne und Ambivalenz: Das Ende der Eindeutigkeit. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Beck, Ulrich. 1988. Gegengifte: Die organisierte Unverantwortlichkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2000. “Die postnationale Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde.” In Was wird aus der Demokratie? edited by Thomas Assheuer and Werner Perder, 35–50. Opladen: Leske-Budrich. ———. 2002. Gegengifte: Die organisierte Unverantwortlichkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

   Bibliography ———. 2004. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Edited by Scott Lash and Brian Wynne. Translated by Mark Ritter. London: Sage. Bell, Wendell. 2003. Foundations of Futures Studies: History, Purposes and Knowledge. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Benjamin, Walter. 1974. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 2, no. 3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bertman, Stephen. 1998. Hyperculture: The Human Cost of Speed. Westport, CT: Praeger. Bindé, Jérôme. 1997. “L’éthique du future.” Futuribles 226, 19–41. Birnbacher, Dieter. 1988. Verantwortung für zukünftige Generationen. Stuttgart: Reclam. ———. 1995. “Grenzen der Verantwortung.” In Verantwortung. Prinzip oder Problem? edited by Kurt Bayertz, 143–83. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Böschen, Stefan, Michael Schneider, and Anton Lerf, eds. 2004. Handeln trotz Nichtwissen: Vom Umgang mit Chaos und Risiko in Politik, Industrie und Wissen­schaft. Frankfurt: Campus. Brauchlin, Emil, and Robert Heese. 1995. Problemlösungs- und Entscheidungsmethodik. Berna: Haupt. Braun, Dietmar. 1995. “Steuerungstheorien.” In Lexikon der Politik I. Politische Theorien, edited by Dieter Coleen and Reiner-Olaf Schulze, 611–18. Munich: Beck. Cohen, Michael, and James G. March. 1974. Leadership and Ambiguity: The American College President. Boston: Harvard University Press. Collingridge, David. 1992. The Management of Scale: Big Organisations, Big Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Cournut, Jean. 1991. L’ordinaire de la passion. Paris: PUF. Delmas-Marty, Mireille. 2009. Ordering Pluralism: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Transnational Legal World. Translated by Naomi Norberg. Portland, OR: Hart. Dubiel, Helmut. 1994. Ungewissheit und Politik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Edelman, Murray. 1964. The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Gehlen, Arnold. 1957. Die Seele im technische Zeitalter: Sozialpsychologische Probleme in der industriellen Gesellschaft. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. ———. 1978. Einblicke. Frankfurt: Klostermann.

Bibliography     Giddens, Anthony. 1999. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books. Gosseries, Axel. 2004. Penser la justice entre les générations. Paris: Aubier. Greven, M. T. 1999. Die politische Gesellschaft: Kontingenz und Dezision als Probleme des Regierens und der Demokratie. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Gross, Peter. 1994. Die Multioptionsgesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Grunberg, Gérard, and Zaki Laïdi. 2007. Sortir du pessimism social: Essai sur l’ identité de la gauche. Paris: Hachette. Gurvitch, Georges. 1969. La vocation actuelle de la sociologie. Vol. 2. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. “Die Krise des Wohlfahrtsstaates und die Erschöpfung utopischer Energien.” In Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1947. Critique de l’anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hartog, François. 2003. Régimes d´historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Seuil. Harvey, David. 1990. The Conditions of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Heaney, Seamus. 1990. The Cure at Troy. London: Faber & Faber. Hegel, Georg W. F. 2008. Philosophy of Right. Translated by S. W. Dyde. New York: Cosimo. Innerarity, Daniel. 2006. “Pensar el orden y el desorden: Una poética de la excepción.” Convivium 19, 165–78. ———. 2010. The Transformation of Politics: Governing in the Age of Complex Societies. Translated by Stephen Williams and Serge Champeau. New York: Peter Lang. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983/1998. New York: Verso. Janis, Irving Lester. 1972. Victims of Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jefferson, Thomas. 1984. Writings. Edited by Merrill D. Peterson. New York: ­Library of America. Jonas, Hans. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992. Philosophische Untersuchungen und metaphysische Vermutungen. Frankfurt: Inser. Jurczyk, Karin, and Maria Rerrich. 1993. Die Arbeit des Alltags. Friburgo: Lambertus. Kahn, A. E. 1933. “The Tyranny of Small Decisions: Market Failures, Imperfections, and the Limits of Economics.” Kylos 19, 23–47.

   Bibliography Kirsch, Werner. 1994. Die Handhabung von Entscheidungsproblemen. Munich: Kirsch. Klapp, Orrin E. 1978. Opening and Closing: Strategies of Information Adaptation in Society. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kreibich, Rolf. 2000. “Herausforderungen und Aufgaben für die Zukunftsfor­ schung in Europa.” In Zukunftsforschung in Europa, edited by Karlheinz Steinmüller, Rolf Kreibich, and Christof Zöpel, 9–35. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Lafargue, Paul. 1999. Le droit à la paresse. Paris: Allia. Laïdi, Zaki. 2000. Le sacre du présent. Paris: Flammarion. Lasch, Christopher. 1991. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: Norton. Lauer, Robert. 1981. Temporal Man: The Meaning and Uses of Social Time. New York: Praeger. Lefort, Claude. 1979. Eléments d’une critique de la burocratie. Paris: Gallimard. Leifer, Eric. 1991. Actors as Observers: A Theory of Skill in Social Relationships. New York: Garland. Lenk, Hans. 1992. Zwischen Wissenschaft und Ethik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lindblom, Charles E. 1959. “The Science of ‘Muddling Through.’” Public Administration Review 19, 79–88. ———. 1965. The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision-Making through Mutual Adjustment. New York: Free Press. ———. 1979. “Still Muddling, Not Yet Through.” Public Administration Review 39, 517–26. Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2006. La société de déception. Paris: Textuel. Lübbe, Hermann. 1994. Im Zug der Zeit: Verkürzter Aufenhalt in der Gegenwart. Berlin: Springer. Luhmann, Niklas. 1964. Politische Plannung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 1978. Soziologische Aufklärung. Vol. 3. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 1983. “Anspruchsinflation im Krankenheitssystem: Eine Stellungnahme aus gesellschaftstheoretische Sicht.” In Die Anspruchsspirale: Schicksal oder Systemdefekt? edited by Philipp Herder-Dorneich and Alexander Schuller, 28–49. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ———. 1989. “Politische Steuerung: Ein Diskussionsbeitrag.” Politische Vierteljahresschrift 30, no. 1, 4–9. ———. 1991. Soziologische Aufklärung. Vol. 2. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 1993. Legitimation durch Verfahren. Frankfurt: Luchterhand. ———. 1995. Das Recht der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Bibliography     ———. 1996. “Die Zukunf kann nicht beginnen: Temporalstrukturen der mo­ dernen Gesellschaft.” In Vor der Jahrtausendwende: Berichte zur Lage der Zukunft. Vol. 1, edited by Peter Sloterdijk, 119–50. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1998a. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1998b. Observations on Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000a. Die Politik der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2000b. Organisation und Entscheidung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Makropoulos, Michael. 1998. “Modernität als Kontingenzkultur.” In Kontingenz, edited by Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard, 55–79. Munich: Fink. March, James G. 1994. A Primer on Decision Making. How Decisions Happen. New York: Free Press. March, James G., and Herbert A. Simon. 1958. Organizations. New York: Wiley. Marquard, Odo. 1999. “Historia universal e historia multiversal.” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 591, 89–101. Marris, Peter, and Martin Rein. 1967. Dilemmas of Social Reform: Poverty and Community Action in the United States. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Mayntz, Renate. 2001. “Zur Selektivitat der steuerungstheoretischen Perspek­tive.” In Politische Steuerung in Theorie und Praxis, edited by Hans Peter Burth and Axel Görlitz, 17–27. Baden-Baden: Nomos. ———. 2004. “Governance in modernen Staat.” In Governance: Regieren in komp­ lexen Regelsystemen, edited by Arthur Benz. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Mayntz, Renate, and Fritz W. Scharpf. 1973. Planungsorganisation. Munich: Piper. Merton, Robert K. 1948. “The Self-fulfilling Prophecy. Antioch Review 8, 193–210. Michon, Pascal. 2005. Rythmes, pouvoir, mondialisation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 2007. Les rythmes du politique: Democratie et capitalisme mondialisé. ­Paris: Les prairies ordinaires. Morin, Edgar. 1988. “Le grand dessein.” Le Monde, September 22. Nassehi, Armin. 1993. Die Zeit der Gesellschaft: Auf dem Weg zu einer soziologischen Theorie der Zeit. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Thomas Wayne. New York: Algora. Nowotny, Helga. 1996. “Wer bestimmt die Zeit? Zeitkonflikte in der technologischen Gesellschaft zwischen industrialisierter und individualisierter Zeit.” In Was ist der Zeit? Zeit und Verantwortung in Wissenschaft, Technik und Religion, edited by Kurt Weis, 81–99. Munich: DTV. Offe, Claus. 1986. “Die Utopie der Null-Option. Modernität und Modernisierung als politische Gütekriterien.” In Die Moderne: Kontinuität und Zäsuren, edited by Johannes Berger, 97–116. Göttingen: Otto Swarz & Co.

   Bibliography ———. 2004. “Nach dem ‘Ende der Utopie’: Zivilgesellschaft als Forschrittsidee? Zum Metamorphosen des utopischen Denkens.” In Die Unruhe der Kultur: Potentiale des Utopischen, edited by Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, and Annelie Ramsbrock, 27–38. Weilerwist: Velbrück. Parnes, Ohad, Ulrike Vedder, and Stefan Willer. 2008. Das Konzept der Generation: Eine Wissenschafts- und Kulturgeschichte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Peccei, Aurelio. 1982. One Hundred Pages for the Future: Reflections of the President of the Club of Rome. London: Futura. Peirce, Charles S. 1976. Semiotische Schriften. Vol. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Pels, Dick. 2003. “Unhastening Science: Temporal Demarcations in the ‘Social Triangle.’” European Journal of Social Theory 6, 209–31. Popper, Karl. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. Boston: Beacon Press. Preuss, Ulrich K. 1979. “Politische Ordnungskonzepte für die Massengesellschaft.” In Stichworte zur Geistigen Situation der Zeit, edited by Jürgen Habermas, 340– 77. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Quinn, James Brian. 1980. Strategies for Change: Logical Incrementalism. Homewood, IL: Irwin. Rancière, Jacques. 1998. Aux bords du politique. Paris: Gallimard. Reese-Schäfer, Walter. 2000. Politische Theorie heute: Neuere Tendenzen und Entwicklungen. Munich-Vienna: Oldenbourg. Rifkin, Jeremy. 1987. Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. New York: Henry Holt. Rinderspacher, Jürgen P. 1988. “Wege der Verzeitlichung.” In Arbeitszeit, Betriebszeit, Freizeit, edited by Dietrich Henckel, 23–66. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization. London: Sage. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosa, Hartmut. 2005. Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2008. Counter-democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1935. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays. New York: W. W. Norton. Schelsky, Helmut. 1961. Der Mensch in der wissenschaftlichen Zivilisation. Colonia: Westdeutscher Verlag. Schimank, Uwe. 2005. Die Entscheidungsgesellschaft: Komplexität und Rationalität der Moderne. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Schon, Donald. 1967. Technology and Change. New York: Pergamon Press.

Bibliography     Schüll, Elmar. 2006. Zur Wissenschaftlichkeit von Zukunftsforschung. Tönning: Der Andere Verlag. Schulz, Walter. 1992. Subjektivität im nachmetaphysischen Zeitalter. Pfullingen: Neske. Schulze, Gerhard. 1992. Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart. Frankfurt: Campus. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 2003. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Taylor and Francis e-library. Schütz, Alfred. 1972. “Tiresias oder unser Wissen von zukünftigen Ereignissen.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze. Vol. 2, Studien zur soziologischen Theorie, 259–78. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sennet, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: Norton. Simmel, Georg. 1992. “Die Bedeutung des Geldes für das Tempo des Lebens.” In Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Singer, Peter. 1999. Practical Ethics. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. Writings on an Ethical Life. New York: Harper Collins. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemäische Abrüstung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Stykow, Petra, and Jürgen Bieber. 2004. Gesellschaft mit beschränter Hoffnung: Reformfähigkeit und die Möglichkeit rationaler Politik. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Sunstein, Cass R., and Edna Ullmann-Margalit. 1999. “Second-Order Decisions.” Ethics 110, 5–31. Surowiecki, James. 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books. Taguieff, Pierre-André. 2002. Résister au bougisme. Paris: Mille et une nuits. Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, quoted in Hugues de Jouvenel. 2001. “The Nature of the Future.” In The Keys to the Twenty-First Century, edited by Jérôme Bindé, 12–13. New York: Unesco. Thompson, Edward P. 1996. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2007. Democracy in America. Vol. 2. Unabridged. Translated by Henry Reeves. Stilwell, KS: Digireads. Valéry, Paul. 1948. “Remarks on Progress.” In Reflections on the World Today. Translated by Francis Scarfe. New York: Pantheon.

   Bibliography Virilio, Paul. 2001. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Edited and translated by John Armitage. London: Sage. Virilio, Paul, Philippe Petit, and Sylvère Lotringer. 1999. Politics of the Very Worst: An Interview by Philippe Petit. New York: Semiotexte. Westbrook, Robert B. 2005. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. New York: Cornell University Press. Whitrow, Gerald James. 1988. Time in History: The Evolution of Our General Awareness of Time and Temporal Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiesenthal, Helmut. 2005. Gesellschaftssteuerung und gesellschaftliche Selbststeue­ rung. FernUniversität in Hagen: Kurs. Willke, Helmut. 1983. Entzauberung des Staates: Überlegungen zu einer gesellschaftlichen Steuerungstheorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 1993. Systemtheorie entwickelter Gesellschaften. Weinheim-­Munich: Juventa. ———. 1997. Supervision des Staates. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. ———. 2002. Dystopia: Studien zur Krisis des Wissens in der modernen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Wolf, Jean-Claude. 1993. Utilitarismus: Pragmatismus und kollektive Verantwortung. Freiburg: Universitätsverlag. Young, Michael, and Tom Schuller. 1988. The Rhythms of Society. New York: Routledge. Zahariadis, Nikolaos. 1998. “Ambiguity, Time, and Multiple Streams.” In Theories of the Policy Process, edited by Paul Sabatier, 73–93. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Cultural Memory in the Present

Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture François-David Sebbah, Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition Erik Peterson, Theological Tractates, edited by Michael J. Hollerich Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, Second Edition: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson Yasco Horsman, Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo Jacques Derrida, Parages, edited by John P. Leavey Henri Atlan, Sparks of Randomness, Volume 1: Spermatic Knowledge Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution Djelal Kadir, Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory Jeffrey Mehlman, Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life Jacob Rogozinski, The Ego and the Flesh: An Introduction to Egoanalysis Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonialization, Politics Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture, edited by Charlotte Fonrobert and Amir Engel Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form

Lambert Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology Freddie Rokem, Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community Vilashini Cooppan, Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing Josef Früchtl, The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner, eds., Re-Figuring Hayden White Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith, eds., The Rhetoric of Sincerity Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson Alexandre Lefebvre, The Image of the Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas Marcel Detienne, Comparing the Incomparable François Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1959-2005 Richard Baxstrom, Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia Jennifer L. Culbert, Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present Esther Peeren, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond

Eyal Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature Sara Guyer, Romanticism After Auschwitz Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life Bella Brodzki, Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory Rodolphe Gasché, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory Michael G. Levine, The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding German Change in Berlin and Beyond Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories James Siegel, Naming the Witch J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul: On Justice

Richard Rorty and Eduardo Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity Beate Rössler, ed., Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity Dorothea von Mücke, The Rise of the Fantastic Tale Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction Herlinde Pauer-Studer, ed., Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given That: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Thought Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-1998, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: The Latin American “Boom” in the Neoliberal Marketplace Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Cultural Instruments, Mutualities, and the Fictive Imagination Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Re-Describing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. and introd. William Rasch Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays

Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity Gil Anidjar, “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in ArabJewish Letters Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark: (One of Hegel’s bon mots) Jean-François Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe Hubert Damisch, Skyline: The Narcissistic City Isabel Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers Richard Rand, ed., Futures: Of Jacques Derrida William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine Kaja Silverman, World Spectators Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation: Expanded Edition Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans in the Epoch of Emancipation Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan Samuel C. Wheeler III, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity Rodolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition

Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin J. Hillis Miller / Manuel Asensi, Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion