The postnormal society: On trials of co-existence in everyday environments

In countries like the United Kingdom, social life is today marked by endemic disruption. We live in postnormal times: the infrastructures underpinning everyday life, from affordable housing to green spaces, can no longer be taken for granted, and disturbance, lack and uncertainty have become background conditions of everyday life. In this essay, I argue that these changing circumstances not only affect daily life, but transform conditions for public knowledge. Disruptions of the taken-for-granted can no longer be expected to trigger a process of learning and problem-solving. Instead, they are increasingly met with denial. To make sense of this situation, I draw on classic work in the sociology of knowledge, Ideology and Utopia (1936) by Karl Mannheim. I argue that today's struggles between ideology and utopia unfold on the level of infrastructure, turning everyday environments such as roads into sites of latent conflict. I discuss examples of such environmental conflicts in the UK and propose they can be understood as “trials of co-existence." Here, the introduction of new technological systems - such as autonomous vehicles - into everyday settings puts at stake the conditions of existence of other beings belonging to the setting, such as pedestrians or trees. The proliferation of such trials suggests that postnormality is not only marked by changing conditions of social existence - endemic disruption - but by distinctive struggles over co-existence, or interdependence. To conclude, I reflect on what such struggles can teach us about the political challenges facing our technology-intensive, ecologically challenged societies.