Been meaning to post here about Brazilian democratic theorist Roberto Unger's work for years, and just clicked onto his new publications page, finding a real treasure trove of stuff. The forthcoming book, The Self Unbound, Unger describes as the truest expression of his philosophy yet (you can download [doc file] the full manuscript).
My interest from a Play Ethic perspective is that Unger grapples with the implications of a player's mentality (that subjective feeling of empowerment and transformation). What kind of social order could support and sustain such an explosive, restless identity? How could we collectively construct a 'state of play' around such a dynamic lifestyle and mindset?
(Though he doesn't use my ludic terms, he does talk about the 'divinisation of humanity', echoing my much used Whole Earth phrase, 'we are as gods and we might as well get good at it'.).
In the passage below (I've bolded the relevant parts), Unger makes a crucial point that I've grappled with in the book, and elsewhere: the lack of historical examples of social welfare structures that might support a players', rather than just a workers', society. In the absence of institutions that strike the right balance between care and play, "individuals must make up, by the manner in which they relate self-possession to connection, for what politics and law have not yet provided as the furniture of social life."
(BTW, many thanks to Neil Scott, whose stimulating conversation in Tinderbox this morning sparked this post, and augers well for his forthcoming hard-copy publication The Mind's Construction Quarterly, currently a blog).
THE SELF AWAKENED: PRAGMATISM UNBOUND
Roberto Mangabeira Unger (download full manuscript)
pp 200-201We do not need to await the transformation of society and of culture to begin our emancipation. We can begin right now. In every area of action and thought, and so long as we do not suffer the extremities of deprivation and infirmity, the question on our lips will be: What should we do next? The most ambitious forms of programmatic thinking and of reconstructive action simply extend the scope of this questioning and broaden the range of our answers.
What allows us to ask at every turn the question -- what should we do next? -- is the marriage of the imagination with an existential attitude: a hopeful and patient availability to novelty and to experience. What enables us to sustain this attitude is in turn the combination of growing confidence in the exercise of our own powers -- security and capability -- with love -- the love of the world and the love of people.
The commitment to a zone of fundamental protections and endowments, established by rights withdrawn from the agenda of short-term politics is simply the most important political expression of a more general truth. As the love of the parent for the child, assuring it of an unconditional place in the world, encourages the child to run risks for the sake of self-construction, so these capability-enhancing rights help the individual to lower his defenses and to look for the new. Taking these rights partly out of politics, by surrounding them with rules and doctrines, that make them relatively harder to change in the short-run may have a paradoxical result. It may broaden the scope of politics, and increase its intensity.
However, the aim must be to define these immunities and endowments in a manner that imposes the least possible rigidity of the surrounding social space. A caste system equating the security of the individual with the inviolability of detailed and distinct forms of group life represents an extreme of confusion of individual safety and identity with social rigidity. What we should desire is the opposite extreme, of disassociation. Of such an opposite we have no available example: the existing forms of economic, social, and political organization, including the traditional modern law of property and contract, stand at varying intermediate points along this imaginary spectrum. So here, as everywhere, individuals must make up, by the manner in which they relate self-possession to connection, for what politics and law have not yet provided as the furniture of social life.
Amazing, startling, but frustratingly utopian thoughts. How would we "dissociate" and "partly take out of [short-term] politics" a set of "capability-enhancing rights", a "zone of fundamental protections, immunities and endowments, established by rights"? What is the "social furniture" that could match "the manner by which we relate self-possession to connection" as individuals?
My only source at the moment is to look at the rise of peer-to-peer networks in many areas of life, which one of my regular contacts Micheal Bauwens is exhaustively mapping. Meanwhile, another contact, James Crabtree, tries to tie Unger's vision down to the exigencies of electoral politcs in Europe and the UK, in this interview (download doc).
