Complexity, Knowledge Politics and the Remaking of Class: Response to Levins

Abstract

The ascendancy of sciences capable of grappling with complexity is undoubtedly to be welcomed, not least in this moment of profound and overlapping systemic problems. Yet the emergence of sciences with a more sophisticated epistemology alone offers no reassurance that such knowledge will then primarily, or better, serve emancipatory and/or critical purposes. Rather, such knowledge must be treated as neither good nor bad per se, but dangerous. From this perspective, the paper explores the knowledge politics of the present conjuncture, the context for this rise of the complexity sciences. It discerns a new politics of security and “preparedness” that could well serve to construct a new dominant paradigm of complexity sciences that, to the contrary, serves primarily to construct a new “scientific” legitimacy for the egregious inequalities of the age of neoliberalism-in-crisis.

Keywords:

• complexity
• neoliberalism
• preparedness
• liberalism 2.0
• class

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Dean Curran and Fabio Introini for helpful discussions and comments on previous drafts of this paper and to Chen Shuoying for inviting this reply. All errors are, of course, my own.

Notes on Contributor

David Tyfield is a Reader in environmental innovation and sociology at Lancaster University, UK and director of the International Research & Innovation Centre for the Environment (I-RICE), Guangzhou, China. He specializes in the cultural political economy of research and innovation, especially regarding issues of environmental innovation and the commercialization of science, with a focus on China. He is the author of The Economics of Science: A Critical Realist Introduction (in 2 volumes; Routledge, 2012).

Notes

¹For example, Levins (2014, 222) himself notes the importance of moves beyond the dualism of thinking vs. feeling.

²This is an issue I am currently researching, specifically regarding “low carbon” innovation in China and its class and power conditions and effects as part of the European Research Council (ERC) Project on “Methodological Cosmopolitanism: In the Laboratory of Climate Change” led by Professor Ulrich Beck [grant number ERC-2012-AdG-323719_Cosmo-Climate].