Mediating Radical Democratic Theory and Practice Through their Extremes: Coles' Visionary Pragmatism

The extraordinary importance of this exhilarating book lies in demonstrating that, at a time when electoral democracy seems thoroughly corrupt (requiring radical reform rather than cynical or despairing abandonment), extreme, high or abstract political theory can inspire and in turn be inspired by extreme, concrete grassroots political activism (the best, if not the only, vehicle for said electoral reform). The extraordinary strength of the demonstration springs from the fact that not only can theory and practice be related in these ways, as claimed in the book, but they also have been, as recounted in the book – in the Flagstaff, Arizona area, home to Northern Arizona University where Romand Coles taught and directed the Program for Community, Culture and Environment while writing the book. In it, presentation of theory is interlaced with accounts of how that theory actually worked out in practice at NAU and the Flagstaff environs, and how that practice might be further developed and expanded. Coles is fond of Adorno's tenet that "mediation takes place in and through the extremes, in the extremes themselves", and his own intermediation of extreme theory and extreme practice informs the book's title: his program is extremely pragmatic – involving such basics as growing food, organizing communities, educating school-children in the practice of direct democracy – and at the same time extremely visionary, relating these and other concrete practices to the global crisis of Anthropocene climate change and the systematic transformation of our way of life that is required in order to survive it.

The main theoretical ground for Coles' visionary pragmatism is complexity (or dynamic systems) theory, sourced primarily from the works of Prigogine & Stengers and Stuart Kauffman: the point of departure is the self-organizing plasticity of the environment, of social structures, of belief systems, of behaviors, and of the brain itself. (In this respect, Coles' perspective meshes nicely with the work of John Protevi, who also examines emergent order at a variety of different spatial and time-scales.) The main pragmatic thrust of his program, meanwhile, aligns with the works of Walter Benjamin, the later Foucault (on governmentality), J.-K. Gibson-Graham, Naomi Klein, Michael Pollan, Roberto Unger, Sheldon Wolin, and William Connolly.

In fact, Chapter One – devoted (as per its title) to the construction of a "neuropolitical habitus of resonant receptive democracy" – echoes and draws on two of Connolly's recent books: his mobilization of brain science in Neuropolitics (Minnesota, 2002), and his analysis of the "evangelical-capitalist resonance machine" in Christianity and Capitalism, American Style (Duke, 2008). Indeed, Coles can be understood to be constructing the positive, counter-resonance machine Connolly calls for in the latter. Coles does so by adapting and transforming Bourdieu's notion of habitus – the "coarticulation of our perceptions, dispositions, and improvisational capacities with daily practices through which our lives are integrated into larger institutions and systems of power" (35). Where Bourdieu suggests that habitus reproduces institutional power by limiting improvisation to a very structured and limited repertoire of practices, Coles argues that by increasing our improvisational skills through concerted training, we can vastly increase our repertoire, and generate "game-transformative" rather than merely reproductive practices (7–12 and passim). Citing David vs. Goliath, Lawrence of Arabia vs. the Turks, and Northern Arizona University vs. the prevailing culture of political conservatism in Arizona as examples, Coles both argues and shows that in game-transformative practices, "both commonsense conventions and basic institutional rules are altered, and the energies, sensibilities and modes of moving, imagining, thinking, and acting associated with such transformations become partially embodied in practices through which they acquire significant resilience and regenerative powers" (12). Such challenges to and revisions of common sense (dear to both Deleuze and Rancière) are the impetus for what Coles calls a radically democratic habitus of resonant receptivity (37, 49 and passim).

Resonant receptivity is crucial to this democratic habitus because of the precognitive role mirror neurons...