The Iron Bars Get Closer: Anormative Regulatory Coercion

Violence’ is polysemic denoting ‘compulsion’ ‘abuse’, ‘punishment’, ‘duress’, ‘force’, and ‘manipulation’ inter alia. These denotations are not interchangeable and often co-exist. I will discuss ‘coercion’ as the use of power to enforce compliance; accentuating techniques whose intensification is employed to get other agents to do or to refrain from certain actions. Such anormative regulation increases significantly with the intensification of social morphogenesis – unbound from countervailing forms of morphostasis. Circa 1980, Bureaucratic regulation predominates over normatively based legislative control as the law cannot run fast enough to keep up with simultaneous social transformations. Increasingly legal provisions lag behind innovative malfeasance as morphogenetic variety stimulates more variety, outdistancing juridical control. In turn, there is a severance from past legal concern with legitimacy without any new preoccupation with social legitimation. An 8 point Ideal Type encapsulates the regulatory quest for social coordination and unconcern with cooperation and re-distribution. Administrative regulation highlights the ‘moral disconnect’ (Porpora) between norms and values in the context of low social solidarity, multiculturalism and the muting of normative differences through political correctness. Political centrism promotes it; political populism contests it. This regulatory boom results because the generative mechanism fuelling intensive morphogenesis becomes systematically skewed towards market competition, intrinsically producing winners and losers, and augmenting the gap between them. The potential for the same mechanism to diffuse win-win contexts promotive of an integrative Commons is overshadowed by the digital proponents of the situational logic of competition having made common cause with the political and corporate promoters of anormative social regulation.