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May 13, 2008
I have just come across Telos online. Amazing. Things are changing for the better. Gee, am I going to have some fun digging around in the archives to see what has been happening in the last decade or so.
In the Introduction to the 2007 issue entitled Nature and Terror Russell Berman says:
Classical figures of thought endure. A long-standing image of the health of nature contrasts the bucolic landscape with the corruption of the city, where violence abounds. The only security is a natural way of life, far from the brutal metropolis— until nature turns out to be a threat, and we succumb to the uncontrollable fear named for that destructive god: panic. The state of nature is the homeland of violence, its only law the law of the jungle, as we scurry back to the city to find security—until it morphs into the security state. Critical Theory described this dynamic as a sometimes too narrow narrative of domination: the human mastery of nature, in the interest of self-preservation, turns into the mastery of humanity by an encompassing machinery of control. This is an old story, but it comes to us anew in this political season, in which nature and terror—the anxieties about the environment and fear of terrorism, as well as the reaction to it—haunt us, in public and in private.
Well I've accepted that old story about instrumental reason and modernity.However, we no longer face the threatening and brutal imperatives of an untamed nature with nothing but the capacity for cunning. Instead, we have created a liberal capitalist society that we experience as driven by an alien force beyond human control. In advanced capitalism, the abstract principle of exchange comes to determine all spheres of human experience—including the production of subjects—and instrumental reason is treated as “natural,” even as it acts against the interests of human self-development.
How does it stand up in a world of climate change? Climate change is held to be the major issue of our time, A common ecological argument is that if humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half century, then the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable. The problem with this, as Eileen Crist points out is that:
Identifying climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. he race is on for figuring out what technologies, or portfolio thereof, will solve “the problem.” Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind turbines, using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use, developing carbon-sequestering technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect he sun’s rays, the narrow character of such proposals is evident: confront he problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically phasing them out, superseding them, capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects.
This encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical realm. If if greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and innovations, the root cause of the ecological
crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of production, trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption would go unchallenged.
Crist argues that Industrial-consumer civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the entire planet. But questioning this civilization is by
and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest for a global-warming techno-fix.
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