The science of hope? or a sociology of possibilty?

Mark Davis's article "Bauman's Compass" prompted a series of thoughts about how the sociology of hope could mount a more direct challenge to the classical certainty of the sciences of capitalism.

These thoughts have coalesced into the start of a "think piece" about recognising ambiguity and uncertainty as fundamental to reality rather than aberrations from the rational, natural norms. Perhaps made all the more relevant by Bernanke's assertion that the crisis of 2008 was not a failure of economic science but of economic management.

Capitalism, it could be argued, draws its strength and authority from a fundamentally classical view of reality. Everything is measurable and calculable – even risk. Uncertainties are ‘traded’ and ‘valued’ along with everything else.

Concentrations of economic and social/cultural capital (embodied in markets and brands) are assumed to have their own "gravity" which attracts or seduces us as consumers as inevitably and predictably as an apple falls from the tree.

The sciences of capitalism – economics, consumer research and even physics - are constantly trying to push back the boundaries of uncertainty and allow the creation of ever more powerful concentrations of capital of whatever form. We call this progress.

As consumers we apparently feel the pull of these structures because we our sense of reality is constructed on the basis of needs; characterised by brands and the media as mysterious (but "real") external forces which shape our sense of volition. These forces are structural in nature and as much as possible asserted as fundamental to our human reality.

Against this ‘reality’ are marshalled the sciences of socialism - not just in it political forms but many emerging fields of collective or collaborative action and community (such as www.zopa.com). However, the desire for competing on the same terms as capitalist science encourages such institutions to act from or portray a classical view of reality. Many institutions of socialism seem to want to attract "consumers" in much the same way as capitalist institutions – seducing with messaging much like moths to the flame. The needs may be expressed in different terms but the assumptions about forces (and increasingly the mechanisms) of attraction are seen as the same (and therefore competing for our attention).

In both contexts freedom and possibility are portrayed internally as the convenient delusions of the individual. Delusions that make them "feel" they have a choice (rather than simply making a decision between two or many pre-existing outcomes). Arguably liquid modernity forces sociology to construct a counter perspective of this view of reality. That our reality is "in reality" riddled with subjectivity, anthropocentricity and uncertainty – something which has been a more universal and constant part of human experience than even the concept of "liquid-modernity" allows.

(Certainly the concept of liquid modernity challenges the current structures of ‘certainty’ but liquidity may not be a new idea or experience in itself. You don't, for example, have to wonder too far through the classical Roman canon of poetry to find both the muses and expressions of liquidity in the works of Catullus and Horace for example.)

So how about turning the worldview on its head with a bit of relativity... (fundamentally a change of world view for science)?

What if the perceived "pull" of these classically defined structures is a function of the distortions they create in reality rather than some instantaneous attraction? They bend our volition towards their orbit by distorting the context in which we move as individuals. The attraction is not so much a function of some intrinsic ‘need’ or force which connects or binds us to consume but rather an effect of distortions in meaning and value.

So if at the macro level we can think of our world in terms of distortions of social and cultural fields, we can also, at the micro level, start thinking about our world in quantum rather than classical mechanistic terms (either as cells or components of a leviathan or classical machine) - from the body politic to quantum politics.

Just as the acceptance of uncertainty in QED produces the most accurate experimental predictions ever made – so the acceptance of uncertainty at the level of the individual may help frame a more useful theory and concept of praxis for the creation of ‘active utopias’. The inherent ambiguity and dualities of experience create the potential for freedom of a different form - freedom of choice between probable outcomes rather than decisions between defined choices.

These concentrations of power and capital (and now 'bailouts") become no more ‘real and permanent’ than the sum of individual probabilities which constructed them. The seeds of their destruction are not sown by large scale actions (or lack of macro regulation) but by the amplification of small scale, chaotic effects which are impossible (and ultimately unwarranted) to regulate or legislate against.

In this world the ‘experiment’ becomes less about ‘proving a theory’ and more about ‘seeing how it will turn out’ (And then improving the question or hypothesis that is driving the ‘science’). And we can draw 'hope' from two sources:

The Large Hadron Collider – an example of a global effort aimed at doing something to see how it turns out and which may only prove the need for a much bigger Really Large Hadron Collider... or create a black hole under Switzerland.

Zopa achieving 1% of the UK unsecured loans market with industry leading low levels of bad debt (0.7%) and steady returns (8%+) without the need for a bank's mediation. Aristotle’s "polis man" in action perhaps if at a very small scale (i.e. that of the Athenian Polis at the last count!)?