This work brings together theory and practice in fruitful and evocative ways. Romand Coles argues for, and outlines practices that cultivate, an ethos he terms “receptive generosity.” He identifies this as integral to the cultivation of “game-transformative practices” that advance radical forms of democracy (p. 12). While Visionary Pragmatism ranges widely across literatures and ideas, at its core are theoretical reflections upon Coles’s experience creating and facilitating an ambitious set of student-led “Action Research Teams” (ARTs) at Northern Arizona University (NAU). These ARTs paired undergraduate and graduate students with K-12 students in pedagogical projects that pursued a diversity of goals, ranging from the creation of community gardens to campaigns for better playground equipment to addressing the struggles of undocumented immigrants. Yet this is not a “how-to” manual; it is more of a “why-to” book that provides palpable evidence for the varied ways in which these democratic experiments nourished his theoretical vision and hope. It is a distinctive mode of theorizing that others rarely pursue, and the book provides encouragement for those who seek to do so.
It is no accident that ARTs projects might remind some readers of Saul Alinsky-style community organizing. Yet Coles’s theorizing also draws eclectically upon the neuroscience of mirror neurons, the complex autocatalytic systems theory of Stuart Kaufmann, the “polyface” farming practices of Joel Salatin, and a democratic reinterpretation of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Central to it all is Coles’s conviction that democratic sensibilities are not fostered by mere talk or deliberation, but through the interaction of “bodies, places, and things” (p. 50). While tying thinking and perception to corporeal relations has led others to conclude that freedom is impossible, Coles makes a clear case that it instead orients us toward a new terrain of power and struggle and allows us to identify new possibilities for receptivity, reflection, and engagement (p. 36).
There are three substantive chapters, each of which develops one element of the author’s theoretical argument. The first chapter follows William Connolly and others in exploring the insights of neuroscience for political theorizing, focusing on the role of mirror neurons—operating beneath the level of conscious awareness—in enabling receptivity between people and opening opportunities for mutually reinforcing, affective resonance. Coles finds this receptive resonance among participants in his ARTs projects, and argues that it can create a bottom-up, democratic counter to what Connolly terms the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine” (p.39).
The second chapter again contrasts a top-down and bottom-up approach. In it, Coles counterposes the circulatory power of massive flows of food, energy, and other materials through the global economy (Michael Pollan’s account in The Omnivore’s Dilemma [2006] of “rivers of corn” as an industrialized component of wildly divergent foodstuff in modern societies is paradigmatic, here) to emergent, materialist, alternatives. The latter build new circulatory flows—via decentralized energy systems, farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture, and food policy councils, for example—while cultivating different affective desires.
Chapter 3 navigates between grand, dichotomous narratives of reform versus revolution by sketching opportunities for “co-opting” dominant systems of ideology and power to advance radically democratic alternatives, drawing upon Kaufmann’s account of autocatalytic systems as a “heuristic” for this strategy.
Finally, in his concluding chapter, Coles builds on these strategic insights and rethinkings to argue for a form of democratic movement building that regards the “shock” politics of protests, marches, and shutdowns as an “alternating current” that provides a necessary complement to the more quotidian politics and movements that were privileged earlier in the analysis. In this way, he seeks to advance a vision of hope that relies upon seeing the resonances of activism and ideas across—and through—long periods. While the shock can provoke visionary alternatives, the everyday requires a pragmatic response, and together they offer the possibility for the “visionary pragmatism” that he pursues in the book.
This is a deeply personal work. As a reader, I came away with a clear sense of—and respect for—Coles’s struggle to orient his own life and career in a way that is consistent with his convictions about what political theory can be, and with the need to ground his theorizing in forms of activism and everyday life that will both nourish and inform it. He embeds his call for receptive generosity, and account of the possibilities for poetic experience in the everyday, deeply within writing characterized by its openness, enthusiasm, and sincerity.
The author makes his case well that this sort of receptive generosity can be a starting point for the cultivation of democratic movements for change and that attention to the vast material flows of matter and energy in contemporary society is key. His explicit desire to burrow between the antinomy of reform and revolution is equally compelling. That said, and despite this latter aim, there are important points where his analysis reifies a prevailing monolithic power that thereby seems to reinforce such antinomies.
Consider, for example, Coles’s discussion of Connolly’s evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, in which “resonance refers both to amplificatory affinities of affect, bodily comportment, and spiritual sensibility among multiple sectors and to the resonant audiovisual technologies that fold them together and proliferate their presence” (pp. 38–39; emphasis in the original). Connolly and Coles imagine the components of this machine all resonating along the same wavelength, making intensification—rather than cacophony—the result. In the face of such a “machine,” Coles strives to envision a new, countermachine that might rise to comparable proportions. But what if we set aside this imaginary of discrete, clashing machines? In this case, it might become easier to notice some of the existing affects, sensibilities, and technologies that do not readily reinforce one another, making the machine metaphor less apt. In this case, we might conclude that amplification of some of these strands, and receptivity to them, does not require a new, countermachine, but that there are possibilities always already present “to reimagine resonance in radically receptive democratic terms” (p. 39).
Similarly, Coles argues that his ARTs experience at NAU offers a model of “how these dynamics might powerfully interface—in trickster ways—with the dynamics of a neoliberalizing university” (p. 149). He frames the strategy as co-optation: They “sought to co-opt some neoliberal dynamics into radical democratic dynamics,” by framing ARTs as means, for example, to boost student retention, engagement, and graduation rates (p. 150). Here again, he seems to reinforce the dichotomy he aims to challenge. Rather than the language of co-optation, it seems more insightful to note that neoliberal and radical democratic projects might converge upon goals such as student retention and engagement. ARTs might then leverage this point of convergence to foster a new vision of democratic engagement. It might do so precisely because student retention and engagement is not simply a neoliberal agenda that must be co-opted.
This, it seems to me, is essential to what Coles rightly terms game-transformative practices, but at points like these I found it easy to lose sight of this powerful thread of his argument. Nonetheless, if such strategies are to succeed, they might do so precisely because of the attentiveness and receptive resonances that Coles cultivates in this thought—and action—provoking book.
