In
setting out the agenda for this conference, Yannis Stavrakakis calls for a
critical and postcolonial reflection on the Greek crisis. He asks us to think
about the current politics of debt and austerity within the historical
force-fields of “Heterodox Modernity”: “A global crisis provides the
opportunity for the enforcement of one more project of ‘modernizing’ Greek
culture under circumstances of a quasi-state of emergency.” The terms
constellated in this formulation point me to the emerging crisis within
modernity itself.
My thesis
here is that modernity exists but cannot be sustained. It stands exposed today
as untenable and unviable – indeed, terminally so. Why? For all the good old
reasons set out by critical theory long ago, but also, now, for some new ones. Today,
biospheric or ecological meltdown and mass extinction announce the end of
modernity. Our challenge now is to rescue ourselves from it: we need an exit
from the logic it imposes, not a fix that would prologue it.
Given the
stakes, which I clarify below, this challenge should be at the very center of
political discourse and debate. It should be included now in every serious
discussion about the so-called sovereign debt crisis, or art, or the
postcolonial. Instead, we continue to leave it out. For many reasons, we’re
avoiding this challenge. It’s too huge, too unthinkably catastrophic, too
difficult and uncomfortable on so many levels. But avoidance and disavowal won’t
make the biospheric crisis go away. It will impose itself now as the absolute
material limit of modernity – the real constraining objectivity that will shape
all politics, all possible futures.
Limits
of a Master Logic.
Modernity. What is that, what are we talking about? Is it a process, a logic,
an object, a program, an ideology? All of the above: modernity is a global
social process that, unfolding, transforms the world. But it’s not a random
process; it has as logic. Modernity cannot be separated from the processes of
valorization and capital accumulation. Indeed, the history of modernity is the
history of capital: from the so-called primitive accumulation of the colonial
era to the new enclosures and postcolonial debtors’ prisons of our time. Modernity
develops and takes hold unevenly, the pain and the benefits of capital fall differentially,
domination is asymmetrical. In this postcolonial sense, we speak of multiple or
heterodox modernities.
The
global social process is the sum of many divergent logics, many tendencies and
counter-tendencies, many modes and forms and flows. But there is hierarchy in
this force-field: the postmodernist thesis of the death of master logics and
narratives does not hold up. The logic of accumulation continues to dominate, integrate
and order all rival logics and does so in the most impersonal and indifferent
way. Capital, profits, economies must grow, must be made to grow, at whatever
cost: this is what we’re living through, the austerity-immiseration program
that is devastating Greece and so many other places today is the enforcement of
a master logic.
The accumulation
process is a viciously expanding circle: Marx called it an “automatic subject” –
an “animated monster.” It’s not reducible to the greed of bankers or financiers;
the current banking and finance system is just a symptom of the master logic.
And the pressures of this logic long ago overwhelmed the political process of
so-called democracy. Since 1945, technocratic governance has become the norm. In
the spectacle of what some call post-politics, politicians provide the faces
and personalities, but the important decisions are increasingly made by
technocrats - the managers and directors of economies, corporations and
war-machines. No need to elaborate here, we’re in the grips of this.
From a biospheric
perspective, the relentless imperative of growth and acceleration is precisely
the problem. The ecological limits of capital have been recognized and probed
by a growing group of theorists and writers, including James O’Connor, Midnight
Notes, Iain Boal and Retort, Eddie Yuan and Joel Kovel, to name a few. Even
some global elites of capital have been worried about the inevitable Limits
to Growth, as the
study commissioned by the Club of Rome had put it in 1972. These limits are now
arriving, and scientists warn us that a real hell is brewing. But it doesn’t
seem to matter. Public attention, ever pulled and prodded, remains unfocused
and confused, while time after time, the political process fails to confront
and address this crisis – as the debacles of the Copenhagen Summit on Climate
Change and more recently the Rio+20 Summit clearly show.
Two new
disarticulations seem to be at work here: the growing gap between science and
policymaking and an opening fissure between technocrats charged with planning
and risk assessment and politicians bound to short-term election cycles. Rationally,
the technocrats should address what is clearly a threat. But the conflicts
between risk assessment and the pressures of quarterly earnings reports is
already reflected in the divergent positions of the insurance industry and
energy sector regarding global warming. But if the technocrats have been unable
to bridge these fissures, the main reason is because the master logic strictly
forbids it. Aside from the psychological factors that support inaction, we are
paralyzed before the biospheric meltdown because acknowledging it calls into
question the master logic itself. The solutions cannot be found within the
given paradigm of growth and accumulation. The hard numbers, some of which I’ll
review shortly, show that “green capitalism” and techno-fixes are rosy delusions.
