Spontaneity and structure

Marx and the avant-garde figures we have just considered were not wrong to see radical fluidity as a distinguishing feature of modernity. The dizzying pace of change that confronts twenty-first century people in so many realms fits the formula “all that is solid melts into air” very well. But what fuels the accelerating speed with which even newly created practices and expectations are left behind or cast aside is not any overall weakening in the structures within which individuals and groups act – markets, states, webs of communication – but on the contrary their increasing strength and power. We might expect that larger and denser structures would impose a slower rhythm and inhibit the spontaneous actions of the individuals who act within them, and so they do sometimes. But structure and spontaneity may also coexist in a more positive relationship, each feeding off the other. The accounts I have given at various earlier moments point to some reasons why this is so, by providing particular instances of a phenomenon that it is now time to describe in general terms, since it helps to clarify and highlight some central elements of the picture I have been seeking to elaborate here.

As networks of means expand and thicken, they furnish those who have access to them with new resources, opening up opportunities to pursue individual goals and aims for which only various kinds of inherited assets provided sufficient support before. One reason these possibilities can arise is that the networks through which they develop are networks of means, that they link people together by way of tools and implements which are themselves vehicles of action. Their thickening extends opportunities to act in ways that have an impact beyond some immediate context to people from a wider range of geographical and social locations. The replacement of inherited resources with ones to which people gain access through distant and mediated connections has taken place in many regions of modern existence, stretching from the economy and politics to culture and morality. Recalling some of the specific instances of this general phenomenon now will allow us both to bring together and flesh out some central points of this book, and to suggest ways in which the lines of historical evolution we have sought to trace have continued into the present.