I cite

Critical Theory and Climate Change 1

In June 2020, I was supposed to be on the faculty of the Critical Theory Summer School at the Birkbeck Humanities Center in London. Because of the global coronavirus pandemic, this, like everything else, was cancelled. As a way to give myself some structure, I've thought to start posting some of the reading and thinking that I was planning to do for that course. At this point, I don't know whether this will happen with any consistency, but I thought I'd try.

The intuition behind my course is the sense that there are claims regarding the newness of climate change, especially with regard to (1) the challenge climate change presents for critical thought and (2) the ways to address this challenge. In these posts/lectures, I will consider some of these more closely. At the outset, I am skeptical regarding the claim for newness as well as of the response to the perceived newness, as will become clear. Nevertheless, I hope to draw out aspects of these texts that are still helpful (in other words, to engage in sympathetic readings, although, who knows, they are just as likely to be symptomatic readings; what they might be symptoms of I cannot say).

I have three provisional wagers that I hope to explore in these posts/lectures:

1. Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment presents advance versions of some of the arguments most prevalent in climate change writing in the humanities;
2. This resemblance, foreshadowing, or prefiguration is a clue to the assumptions that give climate change writing in the humanities their basic shape, namely assumptions regarding the limits of reason and politics.
3. These assumptions are driven by an anti-communism that prevents them from escaping the confines of capitalism.

Introduction (commentary on xi -xvii of the Introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum Press edition, 1982)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is a critical rejection of the conceits or premises of European modernity. The basic argument regarding the self-destructiveness of Enlightenment, not only Enlightenment's limits --enabling impediments -- but the dangerous effects of these limits/impediments, repeats Rousseau from "The Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" -- the more we know, the less we know. Although Horkheimer and Adorno don't refer to Rousseau directly, they appear to gesture to this text when they write "The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress" (xiv). "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" is a story of the fall into civilization, of how a free being becomes neurotic and enfeebled by its dependence on the opinions of others. For Horkheimer and Adorno, we pay a price for scientific achievements -- more questions, confrontations with the limits of our knowledge, and a decline in other dimensions of understanding -- just as Rousseau's "civilized man" loses the capacities of so-called natural man. The limits of Enlightenment re-embed us in myth, in an irrationality that, the more we try to escape, the more deeply entraps us, again just as Rousseau's civilized man is ultimately fearful and enslaved. Enlightenment's push for freedom produces an all the greater unfreedom.

To illustrate the point regarding how knowledge turns into its opposite we can point to confidence in scientific methods of inquiry. Measurement, data gathering, model generation, predictions, etc have been accompanied by a loss of confidence in (denigration of) other forms of knowledge and theorization:  interpretation/hermeneutics, critique, imagination, "women's ways of knowing," rich description, folk knowledges, etc. In political science we see this in the bizarre positivism that insists on all sorts of "rigorous" methods to prove common sense or tell us that common sense is wrong (as with a claim  that class inequality has a damaging impact on democracy). A more contemporary example might be Big Data and algorithms. In 2008, Chris Anderson argued that theory was dead, over. Big data enables the discovery of correlations -- knowing why things correlate doesn't really matter if we know that things correlate. "With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." Models, theories, and interpretations are no longer necessary. Understanding is old school, outmoded.

Where Horkheimer and Adorno go further than Rousseau is with their explanation of why Enlightenment turns into its opposite. Their answer concerns the social forms that sustain thought, that enable scientific production. The problem is in the institutions that make thought possible. This element of their argument comes from Hegel. Recall how in The Philosophy of Right Hegel emphasizes the institutions of civil society and the state that are necessary for the idea of freedom to realize itself in the world. Freedom depends on the institutions and practices that transmit and secure it. Horkheimer and Adorno write:

"Just as the Enlightenment expresses the actual movement of civil society as a whole in the aspect of its idea as embodied in individuals and institutions, so truth it not merely the rational consciousness but equally the form that consciousness assumes in actual life" (xiv).

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the form consciousness assumes is a form of unfreedom -- conformity, fear of deviation. This form is a product of social institutions and the habits and mindset they produce.

"The dutiful child of modern civilization is possessed by a fear of departing from the facts which, in the very act of perception, the dominant conventions of science, commerce, and politics -- cliche-like -- have already molded; his anxiety is none other than the fear of social deviation" (xiv).

Language becomes debased. Any ideas or expressions that don't conform to the dominant mentality are condemned. We see both elements in critiques of theoretical jargon. On the one hand, jargon can be so cliched as to be a prison, absolutely incapable of expressing anything original, complexity and obscuring attempting to mask the fact that actually nothing new is being said. On the other hand, the critique of jargon is anti-intellectual, reinforces a generalized attempt to rule out complex thought, and operates to police and marginalize theoretical work. So here the critique of jargon affirms the dominant mentality and rules out critical thinking. Both hands are true at the same time.

Before too quickly acceding to Horkheimer and Adorno here, it's important to situate their argument in the broader set of criticisms of mass society circulating mid-century. At the same time that the social welfare state, emerging as a result of the post-war labor-capital compromise, was beginning to secure social benefits for ever wider portions of the population, its institutions came under fire for generating conformism and stifling individual creativity. There is something to be said about the critique of commodity culture. After all, rather than promoting individual consumption, post-war economies in the west (particularly the US) could have invested more in the development of social consumption as had been done in the thirties. But Horkheimer and Adorno don't take their argument in this direction. Instead, they level it at the loss of individual freedom and creativity, offering a version of the argument Hannah Arendt would make ten years later in The Human Condition.

"On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice; on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population. The individual is wholly devalued in relation to the economic powers, which at the same time press the control of society over nature to hitherto unsuspected heights. Even though the individual disappears before the apparatus which we serves, that apparatus provides for him as never before. In an unjust state of life, the impotence and pliability of the masses growth with the quantitative increase in commodities allowed them. The materially respectable and socially deplorable rise in the living standard of of the lower classes is reflected in the simulated extension of the spirit. Its true concern is the negation of reification; it cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind" (xiv -xv).

My ungenerous read here is that Horkheimer and Adorno are simply elitists and it makes no sense that they have somehow been viewed as theorists on the left. The victim in their sad story is the individual who disappears because of the rise in the overall standard of living. Notice: they don't make a class argument that says that increases in capitalist productivity immiserate the workers such that immense plenty is accompanied by immense deprivation. They don't present an "unjust state of life" in terms of racism, imperialism, sexism or other kinds of inequality prevalent at mid-century. Neither do they blame private property and the pursuit of profit for functioning as barriers to the greater justice expanded productivity enables. It's hard to know what to make of the idea that the rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is deplorable. This is a critique of technocracy and the administered society, that is, a critique of the possibility of using public institutions for the public good. It is one whose basic categories render it unable to distinguish between capitalist consumerism/mass democracy, soviet socialism, and fascism.

For Horkheimer and Adorno what lurks behind the administered society of mass culture and mass consumption is fascism: "progress becomes regression" (xv). That Germany did not pursue rigorous de-nazification after the war is true, but it's not their point. That the US brought over all sorts of Nazi scientists and assimilated them into US life is also not their point. Their point is more abstract, a point about the entanglement of rationality and social actuality. The rational is manifest in the social practices and institutions that produce it. Enlightenment ultimately means/leads to self-destruction: the destruction of the self, as a free and rational self, in positivism (scientism, technocracy), bureaucratic conformism, and mass culture.

America's obsession with rooting out communism is making a comeback

from the Guardian:

t was a scene straight out of the 1950s, but the year was 2017. Travis Allen, a Republican from southern California, took to the floor of the state assembly on 8 May to denounce communism. “To allow subversives and avowed communists to now work for the state of California,” he railed, “is a direct insult to the people of California who pay for that government.”

Allen was speaking out against a move to remove language from the California code that that bars members of the Communist party from holding government jobs in the state.

Anti-communist language remains on the books in several states, and in California, at least, it’s not going anywhere. After facing backlash from Republicans, veterans and the Vietnamese American community, the bill’s sponsor, the Democratic assemblyman Rob Bonta, announced last week that he would not move forward with the bill.

...

Lest there be any misunderstanding: members of the Communist party are currently allowed to hold government jobs in every American state. Such laws were passed around the country during the so-called red scare of the 20th century, but they have long since been ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court.

Communist party members may still be barred from US citizenship

From: the Guardian

The applicant cannot become a citizen if they are a member of the Communist party or have been within the past 10 years, have advocated communism’s establishment in the US, have published or circulated “subversive” materials advocating communism, or are affiliated with any groups that do so.

The restriction stems from the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act (also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act) which collected and reorganized immigration law. It has been amended since its original passing, but Section 313, which bans members of the Communist party, remains.

the political problem of "and"

Hito Steyerl:

So what are the prospects for the articulation of a protest movement based on the model of an "and" - as though inclusion at any cost were its primary goal? In relation to what is the political concatenation organized? Why actually? Which goals and criteria have to be formulated - even if they might not be so popular? And does there not have to be a much more radical critique of the articulation of ideology using pictures and sounds? Does not a conventional form mean a mimetic clinging to the conditions that are to be critiqued, a populist form of blind faith in the power of the addition of arbitrary desires? Is it not therefore sometimes better to break the chains, than to network everyone with everyone else at all costs?

Lenin: Capitalism and Female Labor (1913)

Lenin:

All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the “masters”. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are identical in this respect. It is only the form of exploitation that changes; the exploitation itself remains. An exhibition of the work of “women exploited at home” has opened in Paris, the “capital of the world”, and the centre of civilisation. Each exhibit has a little tag showing how much the woman working at home receives for making it, and how much she can make per day and per hour on this basis. And what do we find? Not on a single article can a woman working at home earn more than 1.25 francs, i.e., 50 kopeks, whereas the earnings on the vast majority of jobs are very much smaller. Take lampshades. The pay is 4 kopeks per dozen. Or paper bags: 15 kopeks per thousand, with earnings at six kopeks an hour. Here are little toys with ribbons, etc.: 2.5 kopeks an hour. Artificial flowers: two or three kopeks an hour. Ladies’ and gentlemen’s underwear: from two to six kopeks an hour. And so on, without end. Our workers’ associations and trade unions, too, ought to organise an “exhibition” of this kind. It will not yield the colossal profits brought in by the exhibitions, of the bourgeoisie. A display of proletarian women’s poverty and indigence will bring a different benefit: it will help wage-slaves, both men and women, to understand their condition, look back over their “life”, ponder the conditions for emancipation from this perpetual yoke of want, poverty, prostitution and every kind of outrage against the have-nots.

Response to Luke Mergner

Public Seminar deleted my response to Luke Mergner's review of Crowds and Party. 

The review is critical -- so critical that the author doesn't even get the title right. Nor does he get the title right of one of my other books that he mentions.

Here is my response (fortunately, a Facebook friend was able to recover it):

Hi Luke, thanks for the thoughtful review. My 2009 book is called Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

As you know, definitions are not always useful since most of our concepts have histories. The concept of the crowd that I use comes primarily from LeBon (a temporary collective being) and is expanded via Canetti (especially with respect to the egalitarian discharge). Crowds don't have to be spontaneous; they can be organized and produced. I talk about mobs on pp. 7-8, and refer briefly to some of that literature. As I note, the 19th century opens up the discussion of whether a crowd is a mob or the people. This is a political question, a matter of struggle and debate. This struggle is always necessarily situated -- what is opened up, what is possible? Some commentators always mistrust the people, always render the crowd as a mob. Others find possibility.

I don't deconstruct the idea of individual interests because I am more interested in rejecting the individual form altogether. You write: "Dean wants to argue that intelligible interests can be attributed to collectives" -- that description doesn't ring true to me since I don't use the language of interests. Instead, with respect to the crowd I use Canetti to speak of the discharge as the moment of equality that gives the crowd its substance.

You say I don't give concrete historical examples of the party -- but chapter 3 discusses Lenin's account of the party and chapter 5 talks about experiences of members of the British and US communist parties.

Where you really misunderstand (or misrepresent) what I'm doing is when you say that "the party form, like the crowd, provides a mechanism for the individual to find meaning and reinterpret their identity." This isn't accurate because the first two chapters of the book dismantle the individual form. Even the quote from me that you use to support your point doesn't work because in the quoted passage I refer to communists in the plural. My point involves the way that the Party is a site of collective belonging that works back on the collectivity. There is no rediscovery of individuality -- the long section on Kristin Ross should make that clear. At any rate, my point is not that "its the ability to subsume individuals into a collective" that links crowd and party; it's that the party is the form that organizes fidelity to the egalitarian discharge of the crowd. By organizing this fidelity, it can hold open the gap opened up by the disruptive crowd event (and of course not all crowd events are disruptive).

Also, notice: it is not just participation in a crowd event that disrupts the interpellation of the subject as an individual. Rather (as chapter 1 argues), it is already the case that commanded individualism is over-burdening the fragile individual form. The extremes of contemporary capitalism are too much for individuals to bear (as I explain via the account of the changes in the individual form). So there are material reasons for the dissolution of this form today that should be understood not as pathologies (ala Turkle) but as indications of real contradictions.

I'm not sure what's at stake in your claim that I engage few contemporary authors other than predictably European ones. I'm tempted to think that you read in a different archive and I didn't refer to the people you like to read. But, the first chapter talks about a number of contemporary sociologists, I talk about Sherry Turkle, Kristin Ross, Judith Butler, John Holloway, Hardt and Negri, Eugene Holland and, yes, Althusser, Dolar, Zizek, Badiou.

You say I don't mention political science or any of the literature on parties - -there is an extensive discussion of Michels and notes to political scientists' commentary on Michels. You have a general dismissal that says looking at the literature on representation, democracy, and parties would benefit my scholarship. But you don't say how or in what way in would change my argument. It's interesting to note that by misstating the title of my 2009 book, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, you actually omit reference to a book where I do engage work in democratic theory. Again, I'm left thinking that basically you are just signaling that your archive is different from mine.

You mention that I reject identity politics. You don't mention my argument -- which is that identity today is fully saturated. It can't ground a politics. The claim for or attribution of an identity tells us nothing about a person's -- or a group's -- politics. (I'll add here that my first book was Solidarity of Strangers: feminism after identity politics, 1996). I emphasize as well that "the wide array of politicized issues and identities enables a communism that, more fully than ever before, can take the side of the oppressed, indeed, that can make the multiple struggles of the oppressed into a side."

It seems to me that you have one criticism: Dean rejects individuality. Yes, I do.

And then you end with an anti-communist gesture -- one that you link to recantations part of the history of anti-communism. But of course that does not sum or capture communism or anti-communism, so it strikes me as an odd kind of ideological signal.

 

 

 

Badiou and the communist horizon

So you’re continuing to look to communism as a horizon?

Yes, not only do I keep this horizon open but I think it is very important to do so. For if there is no strategic idea then movements undergoing setbacks or recuperation risk having devastating subjective effects. There you risk demobilisation, the thought that ‘well I was young then, I threw myself into this adventure and it didn’t work’. Our thinking has to be that while there are strategic setbacks we will maintain our course despite the sinuosities of History. History does not march in a straight line but in a very tortuous way, and we should not imagine any royal road leading to emancipation. There are reverses, negatives, and that is why we need to have a compass come what may. If we have no compass we end up old and disheartened.

From here

David Harvey interview

original in Roar

So, looking at examples from southern Europe—solidarity networks in Greece, self-organization in Spain or Turkey—these seem to be very crucial for building social movements around everyday life and basic needs these days. Do you see this as a promising approach?

I think it is very promising, but there is a clear self-limitation in it, which is a problem for me. The self-limitation is the reluctance to take power at some point. Bookchin, in his last book, says that the problem with the anarchists is their denial of the significance of power and their inability to take it. Bookchin doesn’t go this far, but I think it is the refusal to see the state as a possible partner to radical transformation.

There is a tendency to regard the state as being the enemy, the 100 percent enemy. And there are plenty of examples of repressive states out of public control where this is the case. No question: the capitalist state has to be fought, but without dominating state power and without taking it on you quickly get into the story of what happened for example in 1936 and 1937 in Barcelona and then all over Spain. By refusing to take the state at a moment where they had the power to do it, the revolutionaries in Spain allowed the state to fall back into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the Stalinist wing of the Communist movement—and the state got reorganized and smashed the resistance.

That might be true for the Spanish state in the 1930s, but if we look at the contemporary neoliberal state and the retreat of the welfare state, what is left of the state to be conquered, to be seized?

To begin with, the left is not very good at answering the question of how we build massive infrastructures. How will the left build the Brooklyn bridge, for example? Any society relies on big infrastructures, infrastructures for a whole city—like the water supply, electricity and so on. I think that there is a big reluctance among the left to recognize that therefore we need some different forms of organization.

There are wings of the state apparatus, even of the neoliberal state apparatus, which are therefore terribly important—the center of disease control, for example. How do we respond to global epidemics such as Ebola and the like? You can’t do it in the anarchist way of DIY-organization. There are many instances where you need some state-like forms of infrastructure. We can’t confront the problem of global warming through decentralized forms of confrontations and activities alone.

One example that is often mentioned, despite its many problems, is the Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbon in refrigerators to limit the depletion of the ozone layer. It was successfully enforced in the 1990s but it needed some kind of organization that is very different to the one coming out of assembly-based politics.

Transcript from interview discussing Crowds and Party

Excerpts from my interview on This Is Hell talking about Crowds and Party:

CM: You were saying that the left denies its own collectivity. Is that only in the US? Is that unique to the US culture of the left?

JD: That’s a really important question, and I’m not sure. Traveling in Europe, I see two different things. On the one hand I see a broad left discussion that is, in part, mediated through social media and is pretty generational—people in their twenties and thirties or younger—and that there’s a general feeling about the problem of collectivity, the problem of building something with cohesion, and a temptation to just emphasize multiplicity. You see this everywhere. Everybody worries about this, as far as what I’ve seen.

On the other hand, there are countries whose political culture has embraced parties much more, and fights politically through parties. Like Greece, for example—and we’ve seen the ups and downs with Syriza over the last two years. And Spain also. Because they have a parliamentary system where small parties can actually get in the mix and have a political effect—in ways that our two-party system excludes—the European context allows for more enthusiasm for the party as a form for politics.

But there’s still a lot of disagreement on the far left about whether or not the party form is useful, and shouldn’t we in fact retreat and have multiple actions and artistic events—you know, the whole alter-globalization framework. That’s still alive in a lot of places.

“I think holding on to the word ‘communism’ is useful, not only because our enemies are worried about communism, but also because it helps make socialists seem really, really mainstream. We don’t want socialism to seem like something that only happens in Sweden. We want it to seem like that’s what we should have at a bare minimum.”

CM: You mentioned the structure of the US electoral system doesn’t allow for a political party to necessarily be the solution for a group like Occupy. Is that one of the reasons that activists dismiss the party structure as something that could help move their agenda forward?

JD: We can think about the Black Panther Party as a neat example in the US context: A party which was operating not primarily to win elections but to galvanize social power. That’s an interesting way of thinking about what else parties can do in the US.

Or we can think about parties in terms of local elections. Socialist Alternative has been doing really neat work all over the country, organizing around local elections with people running as socialist candidates not within a mainstream party. I think that even as we come up against the limits of a two-party system, we can also begin to think better about local and regional elections.

The left really likes that old saw: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” And then it rejects parties—even though political parties are, historically, forms that do that, that actually scale, that operate on multiple levels as organizations.

"There's a special place in hell for criminals who launch hedge funds"

Holly Wood in the Village Voice -- best millennial writing on Bernie:

There seems to be no shortage of bizarrely sexist assumptions as to why I, a Millennial feminist, am not voting for Hillary Clinton. But speaking as a Millennial feminist, let me assure you: None of them is accurate. Granted, the span of my political biography is only as long as it took Howard Dean to go from human rights crusader to insurance lobbyist. But the reason for my political disaffection is plain: I've spent my entire Millennial life watching the Democratic Party claw its way up the ass of corporate America. There's no persuading me that the Democratic establishment — from where it sits now — has the capacity to represent me, or my values.

And I'm not alone. According to a 2013 poll by Harvard's Kennedy School, three out of five of my peers now believe politicians prioritize private gain over the public good. When young people open opensecrets.org to gauge just how cheaply our futures trade these days, are we being cynical, or just realistic?

If Millennials are coming out in droves to support Bernie Sanders, it's not because we are tripping balls on Geritol. No, Sanders's clever strategy of shouting the exact same thing for 40 years simply strikes a chord among the growing number of us who now agree: Washington is bought. And every time Goldman Sachs buys another million-dollar slice of the next American presidency, we can't help but drop the needle onto Bernie's broken record:

The economy is rigged.

Democracy is corrupted.

The billionaires are on the warpath.

Sanders has split the party with hits like these, a catchy stream of pessimistic populism. Behind this arthritic Pied Piper, the youth rally, brandishing red-lettered signs reading "MONEYLENDERS OUT." If you ask them, they'll tell you there's a special place in Hell for war criminals who launch hedge funds.

...

f anything concerns me at this pivotal moment, it's not the revolutionary tremors of the youth. Given the Great American Trash Fire we have inherited, this rebellion strikes me as exceedingly reasonable. Pick a crisis, America: Child poverty? Inexcusable. Medical debt? Immoral. For-profit prison? Medieval. Climate change? Apocalyptic. The Middle East is our Vietnam. Flint, the canary in our coal mine. Tamir Rice, our martyred saint. This place is a mess. We're due for a hard rain.

If I am alarmed, it is by the profound languor of the comfortable. What fresh hell must we find ourselves in before those who've appointed themselves to lead our thoughts admit that we are in flames? As I see it, to counsel realism when the reality is fucked is to counsel an adherence to fuckery. Under conditions as distressing as these, acquiescence is absurd. When your nation gets classified as a Class D structure fire, I believe the only wise course is to lose your shit.

The reason Wall Street is dropping zillions of quarters into Hillary's Super PAC-Man machine isn't because it wants change — it's because Wall Street sees revenue in her promises of keeping things much the same. Under Hillary, our prisons will continue to punish for profit. Our schools will continue to be sold off to private contractors. And despite 87 percent of Democrats standing behind universal health care, Hillary insists it will "never, ever come to pass." Not from her, I guess, since she's taken over $13 million from the health care industry.

We really can't, America, says Hillary. Nope. Not ever. We are a powerful nation, kids, but one run by the Great Market God. Leave your moral gag reflex at the door. Close that pesky Overton window, won't you? And be a doll and bolt those tables to the floor. You'll love the moneylenders, dear. I do. Hell, my daughter married one!