With this note, I would like to thank and welcome new readers, and provide an update on what I am exploring through this Substack. By training, I am a scholar of politics and international relations, and hold positions at universities in Australia and Japan, the former my country of origin, the latter my country of residence.
As we struggle to make sense of our ‘unnamable present’, one logical direction to turn is backwards. Historical analogs are sought out, comparisons are offered, and sooner or later, a reference is inevitably made to the Nazis. Certainly, historical reflection is a vital part of comprehending and acting in the world, but the manner in which it can work as a guide is less straightforward than what is often hoped.
Listening to a major podcast on one of the most important questions of our time, I was struck by a judgement made by the guest, who spoke of policy being used to encourage people to make ‘right choices’. The specific issue and platform are less important than the more general mentality it encapsulated.
I’ve largely avoided writing directly about the war in the Ukraine. My note from the start of March still conveys much of my thinking on it, with the relevance of the Clausewitzian Trinity only becoming more pronounced. The interplay of these three factors - (1) passion and violence, (2) chance and probability, (3) rationality and policy - continue to shape the conflict in powerful and unexpected ways.
Part of what I have been suggesting about polycrisis is the difficulty in making sense of it. Given this, I am trying a slightly different format for this note, it is consciously fragmentary, presented as a series of somewhat connected thoughts, observations and provocations about the current moment.
These are the opening words from The Metamorphosis of the World , the last work by German sociologist Ulrich Beck. He would have likely written this in 2014, a year that has become more significant in retrospect, when Russia clearly announced its intentions towards Ukraine and most failed to listen. With all the shocks and dislocations of the intervening years, his words only resonate more strongly now.
This is a line from The Dark Knight , in which Selina Kyle (Catwoman) offers a stark warning to her dancing partner Bruce Wayne (Batman). Around 2016, I started incorporating it into a course I was teaching on the post-Cold War liberal international order. In pointing to some of the underlying tensions and imbalances in the structure of our world, I was trying to encourage my students to think about what a breaking point might look like.
Trying to think of one word that might capture this uneven year, I am yet to fully settle on the right one, but ‘disruption’ feels more appropriate than most alternatives. As with so many things, disruption can have fractal properties. Pandemic waves continue to ebb and flow, albeit increasingly pushed to the side or back of our minds;
After an unscheduled pause, the ‘Imperfect World’ series resumes with the final edition of what hopefully will be the first season. One of the aims of this project has been to share the process of thinking through, and thinking with, others. Reflecting this, for this episode I had a follow up conversation with PC, who I spoke with at the start of process.
In this episode I speak with Andrew Pickering, a leading historian of science, known for his sociological studies of scientific practices and knowledge production in books such as Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics and The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science . In the context of this project, I became interested in Pickering’s work as a result of his more recent book, The Cybernetic
In this episode, I speak with Elke Schwarz, a scholar based at Queen Mary University of London, working on the political and ethical implications of digital technologies and autonomous systems. Recently, she has been returning to the insights of Günther Anders, another 20th century thinker who foreshadowed the dangers that come with untethered technological development.