The Banana Peel Project

The process of modernization, even as it exploits and torments us, brings our energies and imaginations to life, drives us to grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to strive to make it our own.

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982)

history is out of control
increasing fragmentation and complexity of modern society
radicalization of earlier forms
careering juggernaut, ecological catastrophe, liquefaction
modernity
danger, risk, and fluidity, nihilism or gloom
existential despair, postmodernism, critical theory…
what control might mean in a world that is (by all appearances)
so completely uncontrollable
our institutions must be fundamentally reimagined

deep contradictions and unprecedented potentials
positivist ideals are no longer privileged
Enlightenment thought
Post-modernity—we are beginning to hear its footsteps
representation and rationalization…disembedding…reflexivity
a social world that, for all its self-monitoring and self-consciousness,
cannot ever fully know itself

trust
faith in the reliability of symbolic systems
danger, threat, risk—cognitive and social constructs
contradictory discourses of the self
a new kind of society

The political breaks open and erupts
beyond formal hierarchies and responsibilities
a set of solutions
orderings must be created, forged and formed
demonopolized expertise, informal management, radical democratization
new syntheses—emotion and reason, art and artifice

redefinition of the meaning of order itself
fluidity, the permanent feature of modernity
gap between individuality as fate, individuality as self-assertion
emancipation, an entirely new meaning
into a tumultuous whirl of disorder
working within spaces of profound uncertainty
the world is now—and always has been—out of our control