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.
Addressing
the biospheric crisis would require a passage to a different social logic, one
not based on ceaseless growth and the domination of nature. We need to rethink
our "common sense" assumptions about quality of life and standards of living.
But this rethinking must go beyond the menu of lifestyle choices on offer in the
given consumerism – or, better, the given modernity. We need to work out new
enjoyments, grounded in transformed experiences of time and place, and in
transformed relations and ways of producing. Collective self-rescue entails
changing our values, habits and material relations on a global scale. But the
immense investments in the given social process, enforced by war machines,
block any such transformation. Besides, haven’t all attempts so far to organize
such a passage as an oppositional project failed, or at least been defeated? And
yet, that, and nothing less, is what is required.
Whatever
hope can be found in this impasse derives from the survival imperative.
Biospheric meltdown will eventually teach even the most stubborn of us that
capitalist modernity has become a terminal race to bottom. Can we stop racing?
Adorno
and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is the now classic analysis of
how reason, a product of the drive for self-preservation, tends to recoil into
a logic of self-repression and social domination. But now there is a new twist
to the dialectic. The same drive for self-preservation now becomes a point of
counter-pressure that pushes us to find a new social logic. There are no
guarantees, of course, but this challenge could potentially bring us together,
against the real force of everything that normally tears us apart.
The
biospheric crisis, like modernity, falls on us differentially. To begin with,
the Global South will suffer the most. The wealthy North, by accident of
geography and inherited privilege of past crimes, will manage to muddle
through. But only to begin with. In time, this maelstrom threatens to pull us
all in and under. To grasp this and take it seriously realigns and reorients
everything. To be sure, one response to this will be a cynical instrumentalization
under the rubric of the politics of fear. New states of emergency and a new
official war on terror will certainly be declared at some point. We will have
to resist and contain the kinds of bad catastrophism Eddie Yuan and Iain Boal
have discussed, even as we engage with the actual catastrophe.
But we
clearly have an urgent common stake in global self-rescue. On that basis, just
possibly, humanity, which until now has been merely an unrealized cosmopolitan promise,
might yet emerge. There is at least an opening here to the good universal, to
the shared aspiration to be free of terror and domination. And non-dominating
relations to nature would also open up new prospects of ecologically-inflected
enjoyments, beyond the pressures of capitalist time. The poet Gary Snyder
points to these enjoyments that come with slowing down and taking the time to
find out how to inhabit our places; gently, he suggests that we “learn the
birdsongs and wildflowers.” We should not assume too quickly that every exit
from the logic of growth and consumerism dooms us to an impoverishment of life.
Weaning us off our current addictions, the needed shifts would bring different
enrichments and foster different values and qualities. Unhappily, we don’t have
unlimited time to find the keys to this passage or exit.
Phantasms
of Progress. On
the level of ideology, modernity has been animated by the myths of
enlightenment and automatic progress. The more knowledge and science grow, the
better off we are and the closer we approach some vanishing point of total
knowledge and ethical perfection. We know it didn’t happen that way. Under the
pressures of self-preservation, we developed magic, then myth, then reason,
science and technology. These gave us increasing power of mastery over nature,
but also became the tools and weapons of societies based on domination and
state terror.
Step by
step, every gain in the domination of nature was turned into a new means for
the domination of man by man. This is the dialectic of enlightenment: reason in
the service of domination recoils into unreason and distorts the yearning for
freedom into actual unfreedom. The division of manual and intellectual labor,
in which art and culture is implicated to this day, gives rise to class
societies of incredible complexity and, eventually, global scale. Under the
regimes of accumulation, certain directions of development tend to win out over
others, absorbing and pulling the others into alignment.
Adorno
saw two dominant tendencies in late capitalism: what he called “integration”
and “administration.” Both turn out to be genocidal. Integration denotes the
tightening net of social control and the increasing elimination of difference
under the reign of identity-thinking. Integration produces forms of
subjectivity that deeply internalize the master logic. Administration refers to
the expanding powers of bureaucratic concentration and managerial direction –
what in the context of today’s struggles against austerity we call technocracy.
Under a
globalizing social process empowering expansive states and corporations tending
toward “total” administration and integration, the process of subject formation
is increasingly hijacked. Critical, autonomous subjectivity is increasingly blocked
and restricted. Under these conditions accommodation is the subjective
imperative: toe the line or risk social banishment or worse. Freedom is the
freedom to obey and conform or starve on the streets.
The
systems of social control become very sophisticated, from culture industry to
spectacle. “Commanded enjoyments” are on offer, at least for some: the
corrupting phantasms of identity, lifestyle, consumerism and virtuality, as
discussed by Yannis Stavrakakis and others. We have learned that the housing
bubble and associated derivatives markets floated the illusion that consumerist
standards of living could be sustained, even as neo-liberal economics imposed a
general precarization of labor and widened the global gap between rich and poor
to levels not seen since the nineteenth century. The consumer debt crisis
expanded into the sovereign debt crisis, but the ever-hoped for “recovery”
confirms our deep shared investment in a system reaching its limits. The wish,
that our lifestyles are sustainable, dies hard. We all share, more or less, a
stubborn resistance to change that willfully disavows the evidence. In any
case, for those who rebel against this menu, there is enforcement. Coercion and
violence are applied continuously: probably never in history have we been so tracked
and surveilled and made the objects of continuous, official terror.
Permanent
war and emergency have specific origins in the last century. Auschwitz and
Hiroshima are leaps in state terror that signal the end of the myth of
progress. They are the proof that modernity itself is genocidal. Auschwitz –
and yes, that place name must resonate in very specific ways, here in
Thessaloniki – points to a potential for industrialized mass murder lurking
irreducibly in the tendencies of integration and administration: a political
program is rigorously pursued by combining the standard processes of industrial
production with official bureaucratic planning and accounting. Which group or
community is attacked is important of course, but is not the essential point.
Any group can be targeted. Once demonstrated, this is a potential any state can
actualize with the powers at its disposal.
Hiroshima
actualized a different potential: the terminally genocidal power of weapons
systems produced under the merger of science and war machine. Since 1945, this
terror has operated on us continuously, even when only deployed as threat. The
rise of the vast national security-surveillance state and the administered
politics of fear that goes with it, unfolds from the tendency of weapons
technologies to overwhelm politics. Together, Auschwitz and Hiroshima gas and
bomb the myths of progress and enlightenment. To grasp the implications of
these demonstrated potentials is to understand that that they threaten all of
us, without exception. There are no more safe places. After 1945, the future
itself is in doubt.
Only
psychological repression and disavowal of this global trauma, supported by the
manufactured optimism of consumerism, can avoid confronting the new reality. And
yet avoidance has prevailed. We have not succeeded in understanding,
confronting, controlling and eliminating these powers of terror. In fact, they
have continued to grow and proliferate – from robotics and drone warfare to
nano- and biological weapons of mass destruction.
The
biospheric meltdown, driven by spiraling growth and production, would appear to
be the real endgame of modernity. Now, the imperative of social self-preservation comes into
conflict with the instinct for bodily and species survival. Now, evidently, we
transform the social logic or allow it to terminate us. Adorno, inflecting
Benjamin, set out three entwined relations of domination: the domination of
nature, external and internal, and the domination of man by man. All three – the
violent plunder of nature outside us, the self-repression of our bodies and
psychic processes, and our dominating relations to each other – all are the
sites of a struggle not just for liberation but now also for survival. The
difficult condensation of these relations is behind Adorno’s quip that “Nature
does not yet exist.”
We would
also, of course, have to register the other qualifications that critical theory
has outlined. We need an approach to the biosphere that both is critical and
gives scope for feeling and experience. It won’t help to wrap and obscure
nature in all kinds of New Age pseudo-mysticism. “Nature” and “the human” are
both dynamic, historical constructions rather than static, eternal essences.
They are inseparable non-identicals: neither makes any sense except in relation
to the other. More, nature and the human mediate, mutually condition and change
each other. However, this cannot change the fact that humans have animal bodies
that are part of nature and its ecological systems. We cannot escape our
dependence on the ecological base. The biosphere remains the inescapable
necessary condition for human presence on earth. Or, to express this in
Foucault’s idiom: all possibilities for “biopolitics” are bound to and limited
by the fate of the biosphere. Strictly speaking, all biopolitics should link up
explicitly with the challenge of rescuing the ecological commons.
We can
know and experience nature and the biosphere in many forms, on many levels.
Because the knowledge of nature that science produces has been so powerful,
modernity has valued it more highly than other forms. But science, too, is a
social fact, with origins in history and subject to historical development.
Modernity grants science a relative autonomy, but this has not protected it
from the compromising and distorting pressures of the master logic. Undeniably,
modernist science has tended to merge with capital and war machine.
Corporations and the state fund expensive scientific research, and control over
funding has inevitably shaped the setting of research agendas and led to
development in certain directions rather than others.
Keeping
in mind this critique of modernist science, we can note that the gap that has
opened between science and policymakers over the biospheric crisis, above all
regarding global warming, is a major disruption of these tendencies toward
merger with capital and the state. It favors a reassertion of scientific
autonomy that should be welcomed. Indeed we might hope the insubordination of
climate scientists becomes a more robust correction within a comfortably
servile post-Hiroshima scientific establishment. That said, we should not
forget that scientists are not critical theorists: they are not routinely
trained to critically analyze the social process and their own place within it.
We can expect that the biospheric crisis will push many of them to grow beyond
this disciplinary limitation.
 |
| The very last Rabb's tree frog, in a zoo in Atlanta, 2011 |
Meltdown
and Mass Extinction. This
has all been terribly theoretical and abstract. Let me try now to make it more
concrete. We are all aware of global warming and the scenarios predicted:
melting ice caps, rising sea levels, droughts, plagues, rogue storms and
massive displacements. Two degrees Celsius is the number widely held to be the
threshold of acceptable, “manageable” warming, and this number was even
acknowledged by politicians in Copenhagen. Many scientists think this number is
too much. James Hansen calls it “a prescription for long-term disaster.”
In a
recent article for Rolling Stone (2 August 2012) ominously titled “Global Warming’s
Terrifying New Math,” Bill McKibben reviews the numbers from new climate
simulation models and energy sector reports. We have already raised the planet’s
temperature by 0.8 degrees, almost halfway to target. Scientists calculate that
we can release a maximum of 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere by mid-century and still have a reasonable chance of holding warming
to two degrees. At the current rate, as one researcher puts it, “we will blow
through our 565-gigaton allowance in sixteen years.”
McKibben
points out, however, that the proven coal, oil and gas reserves of the world’s
largest corporations and states – reserves that are already on the account
books, planned for and in-line to be extracted and burned up – is 2,795
gigatons – more than five times the allowance. The worth of those reserves is
estimates to be $27 trillion. Under the current logic, there is no chance that
$20 trillion of value is going to be left in the ground. Forget about two
degrees.
We tend
to think that warming and climate change are the big problem, but these are but
aspects of the biospheric crisis. Pollution, ocean acidification, habitat
destruction and loss of biodiversity are also game-changing ecological factors.
It is the combination of all these processes, each intensifying the effects of
the others, that is crashing the planet and leading to what a growing number of
biologists call a mass extinction event.
Paleontologists
have
identified five major extinction events in the earth’s history. The
largest
of these, the so-called “Great Dying,” was the Permian-Triassic event of
250
million years ago. At that time 90% of all marine species and 70% of all
land
species went extinct. The last mass extinction was the
Cretaceous-Tertiary
event that killed off the dinosaurs. That one took place 65 million
years ago. Scientists warn us that a sixth mass extinction event is now
unfolding, and unlike the
others, we ourselves have initiated this one. We are disappearing
species at a
shocking rate: 100 to 1000 times the background rate, or the rate before
humans
arrived on the scene, as legible in the fossil record. This is roughly
three
species every hour. The eminent scientist E.O. Wilson predicts that the
rate of
species loss could reach 10,000 times the background rate within the
next two
decades. A monoculture world of reduced biodiversity and collapsing
ecologies
is not just an aesthetic and emotional impoverishment of quality of
life, it is
a survival risk for us as well. No one can say how far a mass extinction
will
go.
Moreover,
our response to the extinction of other species is the true ethical test and
measure of our relation to the non-human. In 1975, the philosopher and
bio-ethicist Peter Singer published his now classic critique of what he called “speciesism,”
the bias humans have for valuing the interests of their own species above all
others. Singer pointed out that such a bias is no more ethically defensible
than racism or sexism. The treatment of the animals we industrially raise and
slaughter for our food is a well-known – and ongoing – scandal. The ecological
sciences, of course, teach us that consideration of any species outside its
context of relations with other species is very problematic.
Derrida
and others have further unsettled the common sense assumptions and prejudices
here: on one hand, the borders separating us from the non-human are unclear,
unstable and do not hold up; on the other, our relation to the non-human is a
form of our relation to radical difference or otherness. The ethical and
political stakes of the latter relation are enormous. If we give ourselves
permission, by means of whatever rationalizations, to do whatever we like to
non-humans, then the way is clear to reduce groups of people to non- or
sub-human status, in order to do what we want to them. This moment, in which a
targeted group is pushed outside the category of humanity, is a recurrent one
in the history of genocide, and should give us pause in this context.
In the
present crisis in Greece, we are justly worried about the treatment of
immigrants and the rapid rise of the neo-fascist Chrysi Avgi, or Golden Dawn. Just consider,
then, what is likely to happen when millions of new ecological refugees are
cast adrift by global warming and climate change, and the imperatives of rapid
adaptation begin to pull us through the eye of the needle. The biospheric
meltdown is going to constrain politics in very specific ways. The longer we
wait to address it, the more likely all moderate and humane options will be
squeezed out. If we do nothing and allow the worst-case scenarios to
materialize and develop, then the political choices we will face will be very repugnant
ones.
Beyond
Disavowal and Helplessness. Marx had already given us an early, but very important
analysis of the human-nature relation. We cannot think of this relation as
simply the way we as individuals feel or think about nature. The subjective
emotional and affective aspects are important, but the relation operates on a
more material, objective and impersonal level than that. The true structure of
this relation is found in the way we organize what Marx called the “metabolic
interaction with nature”: in other words, how we produce the things that
satisfy our basic needs, namely food and shelter. In that primary production is
encoded the true facts of our treatment of the biosphere, and everything else,
including art and culture, is built on that basis. And indeed, the way we
produce the most basic things we need is the problem, from an ecological or
biospheric view. A quick look at the global food production system will
illuminate the whole ecological problematic and confront us with the scale of
the crisis.
A recent
study in Scientific American (November 2011) analyzed the current food system in light
of the challenges facing it. Here’s how this article begins: “Right now about
one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. The world’s farmers grow enough
food to feed them, but it is not properly distributed and, even if it were,
many cannot afford it because prices are escalating.” There are 7 billion
people alive now, and 1 in 7 – a billion people – are literally starving. By
2050 there will be 9 to 10 billion people alive and the demand for food is
expected to double.
Industrio-chemical
agriculture – the so-called Green Revolution – has always justified itself by
high yields compared to subsistence and traditional farming. But we now know
those yields are unsustainable, since they come at extremely high ecological
cost. The real justification of the Green Revolution has been the profits
produced by this mode of food production. The postcolonial truths are inescapable
here: all over the world, over and over again, the new enclosures are driving small
farmers and peasants off their land and turning people who were able to grow
their own food sustainably into wage laborers dependent on imported food that
they cannot afford.
The unsustainablities
are also well-known. The cash crops of industrial monoculture are drenched in
chemical fertilizers and combat-grade toxins. Most of it runs right into
streams, rivers and eventually the sea, producing algae blooms and dead zones.
Despite the fertilizers, the soil is more depleted with each crop, because the
pesticides kill off the good insects along with the pests and the cycles of
soil fertility are broken. 80-90% of all human water consumption is directed to
farm irrigation, sucking up aquifers and reservoirs and running many streams
dry. Much of the water is sprayed on fields, and much of that is immediately
lost to evaporation.
But it is
shocking to learn that industrial agriculture is also the largest single source
of greenhouse gas emissions – more than other commodity production, more than
global shipping and transportation, more than the military-industrial complex
or the energy sector. And it’s not just the tractors, pumps and machinery
involved: most of the emissions come from tropical deforestation, methane
produced by livestock animals and rice paddies, and nitrous oxide released by
over-fertilized fields.
The
scientists’ recommendations include more organic farming and an end to
deforestation, more efficient use of resources, a dietary shift away from meat
and the reduction of food waste. This is all wonderful advice, but of course
Jonathan Foley and his panel of experts has bracketed the problem of capital
and the logic of accumulation – this crucial obstacle to change is, no
surprise, outside the purview of their study. But the overview at least helps
us to see how the productive processes articulate modernity’s real, material
relation to nature. To change this – to change the way we live – we need to
change the way we produce. It is a question of liberating ourselves from a master logic.
What to
do? We need to start grappling seriously with these problems among ourselves.
How? We probably need to begin, most of us, by looking inside and unlocking
some of the blockages that have been preventing us from focusing on the
violence and damage being wrought on the biosphere. Critical theorist and
psychotherapist Shierry Weber Nicholsen has argued that we all share a love and
concern for nature, based on early experiences of intimacy, astonishment and
joy; if we avoid too much awareness about what is being done to the biosphere
that sustains us, that is because this awareness is deeply traumatic and
triggers unconscious defensive responses. Maybe we first need to find the courage
to acknowledge to ourselves our own capacities for emotion in this regard, and
probably we only begin to do this as we risk sharing our concerns and responses
with others. This may involve a surprising recovery of some forgotten bonds and
attachments of childhood. Unconsciously, we know how much has already been
destroyed and lost; it is for the sake of what remains and can be saved that we
need to express and share our grief and distress about it. Rendered productive
and politicized, mourning opens a passage to rescue.
What is
certain is that we cannot wait for the technocrats and politicians to solve the
biospheric crisis for us. We need to begin living it as the urgency it is,
working it into all our discussions and reflections and shaping it into a daily
ethics and practice. On that basis, we build our commons, make alliances, and
choose our struggles. If we are artists, our concern will guide our practice:
there are many models and precedents, and many still to be invented. Responding to
the biospheric meltdown is also going to require coordinated state action – the
scales involved make this unavoidable. And yet, largely for the reasons
sketched, policymakers are paralyzed and politicians don’t dare confront any of
this. So we will have to find the forms of struggle, resistance and invention
that move us beyond this impasse.
Meanwhile,
“lines of flight” are an available “other means” to begin helpfully addressing
this crisis at the level of everyday life. The needed ethico-politics, to
repeat, must go beyond green lifestyle choices. I don’t want to denigrate conservation
efforts and so-called responsible consumerism, but we all understand these
micro-efforts do not confront or undo the master logic. Stronger lines of
flight are already emerging. Since I sketched the problem with modernist food
production, I want to end by mentioning a promising alternative.
Permaculture,
a form of organic gardening and farming that also fosters biodiversity and
remediates ecological damage, offers a much more robust line of flight. Cooperating
with, rather than fighting against the ecological principles of natural
succession and symbiotic relations, permaculture fosters the growing of edible
forests that, when mature, will require no extra water or fertilizer and less
labor than conventional forms of cultivation. An integrated movement for safe
and sustainable food production, permaculture is a practical subtraction from the profit-driven
industrial food system. It can be practiced on any scale, collectively as well
as by individuals and families. The more organized and collective, obviously,
the better. Permaculture indicates how it is possible to change our mode of
production in ways oriented to a non-dominating relation to nature and man. It
also offers a radically different basis for autonomy that is highly relevant to
debates about sovereignty in Greece and elsewhere today. Something similar is
needed all along the line.
This is a
very quick and cursory treatment, I know. But I’m convinced it’s necessary to
keep the biospheric crisis in the discussion, and that critical theory supports
and demands our concern about it. Certainly, any serious discussion of
modernity has to take it into account. Acknowledging the emotions and
understanding the challenge and stakes, we can begin to move on to the
possibilities for rescue.
This
essay began as a talk at the conference “Art and Politics at the Limit:
Claiming a Heterodox Modernity,” in Thessaloniki, Greece, in September 2012, in
the context of the exhibition Action Field Kodra.
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