Visionary Pragmatism

As neoliberal capitalism destroys democracy, commonwealth, and planetary ecology, the need for radically rethinking and generating transformative responses to these catastrophes is greater than ever. Given that, Romand Coles presents an invigorating new mode of scholarship and political practice he calls "visionary pragmatism." Coles explores the profound interrelationships among everyday micropractices of grassroots politics and pedagogy, institutional transformation, and political protest through polyfocal lenses of political and social theory, neuroscience research, complex systems theory, and narratives of his cutting-edge action research. Visionary Pragmatism offers a theory of revolutionary cooptation that, in part, selectively employs practices and strategies of the dominant order to radically alter the coordinates of power and possibility. Underscoring the potential, vitality, and power of emerging democratic practices to change the world, Visionary Pragmatism's simultaneous theoretical rigor and grounding in actual political and ecological practices provokes and inspires new ways of cocreating knowledge and action in dark times.

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction: Theorizing from and Traveling toward a Radical Democratic Habitas  1 1. The Neuropolitical Habitus of Resonant Receptive Democracy  31 2. From Mega-circulatory Power to Polyface Flows  71 3. System Dynamics and a Radical Politics of Transformative Co-optation  115 4. Shock Democracy and Wormhole Hope in Catastrophic Times  161 Epilogue  193 Notes  197 Bibliography  211 Index  219