The world is unhinged. As many people see it, this is true in both senses of the word: the world is out of joint and it has gone mad. We are wandering aimlessly and confused, arguing for this and against that. But a statement on which most people can agree, beyond all antagonisms and across all continents, is: ‘I don’t understand the world any more’.
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.
The frame that Beck used to try to comprehend what he saw unfolding is that of metamorphosis:
Change brings a characteristic future of modernity into focus, namely permanent transformation, while basic concepts and the certainties that support them remain constant. Metamorphosis, by contrast, destabilizes these certainties of modern society. It shifts the focus to ‘being in the world’ and ‘seeing the world’, to events and processes which are unintended, which generally go unnoticed, which prevail beyond the domains of politics and democracy as side effects of radical technical and economic modernization. They trigger a fundamental shock, a sea change which explodes the anthropological constants of our previous existence and understanding of the world. Metamorphosis in this sense means simply that what was unthinkable yesterday is real and possible today.
What Beck captures is a world marked by feedback loops and reflexivity, amplification and acceleration, all combining to let loose forces and processes we can only be dimly aware of. This is a non-linear environment - to think of war in the Ukraine in terms of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, or to regard globalisation as ‘forward / backwards’ and ‘more / less’ - is to profoundly misunderstand where we find ourselves. Moreover, our collective experiences of the last few years have offered ample reminders of the limits of our capacities to comprehend what is unfolding, with unintended consequences of our actions scattering like cluster bombs.
Metamorphosis maps out similar territory to polycrisis, but with a different emphasis, pointing to the challenge of change outpacing comprehension, reality exceeding imagination:
It is a mode of changing the nature of human existence. It signifies the age of side effects. It challenges our way of being in the world, thinking about the world, and imagining and doing politics.
Beck’s framing holds within it a residual hope that these changes could force something better. In the same way that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’, Beck looks to what might be starting to take shape. Yet to stick with formulations from the physical realm, perhaps a more appropriate - albeit troubling - way of thinking about what is unfolding might instead be a socio-political manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics: entropy.
Societal entropy is the world of Gramsci’s interregnum, the empire of twilight, an interstitial space lacking the certitude of the old or the potential of the new. This is what René Magritte gestured towards in a lecture in 1938:
It still holds up, this world, for better or worse; but aren’t the signs of its future ruin already visible in the night sky?
Beck readily admitted that we are ‘at a loss for words in the face of the reality which is overrunning us’. His attempts to grapple with the world he was seeing take shape were powerfully suggestive but inevitably incomplete. While I tend to use the imagery of sketching for these notes, a more appropriate image might be that of cutting one’s way through a tropical jungle, trying to carve out a path forward in dense, unforgiving terrain. In such conditions, movement can only be slow and hard fought, and it is difficult to know if one is even heading in the right direction. Still, one must keep on hacking away.