A still image from Hirokazo Kore-eda’s 2018 film, Shoplifters.

Playing out today, as everyone wonders what life will be like on the other side of the pandemic, is some version of the perennial conflict between radicalism and reform. Some are asking when we’ll get back to normal; some speculate about how “the new normal” will be; others claim that normal was the problem to begin with, and that what we want is something wholly different.

In my last post I used the phrase, “the literature of transformation,” which seemed warranted when I thought about my reading these past two years. But I picked up the phrase from an article by someone whose reading in this literature has been much more thorough and systematic than my own. That article, titled, “Degrowth: A metamorphosis in being,” by Pasi Heikkurinen, of the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, was published last year in Environmental Planning E: Nature and Space. 

Heikkurinen points out that, in much of the literature of transformation, there is a “lack of rigor” regarding the concept itself, and, quoting another researcher, that “analytical clarity is often superseded by visionary and strategic orientations” (529). Transformation as a concept is under-analyzed and undertheorized, and Heikkurinen sets out to help rectify that situation. The degrowth community has an active research agenda. They’re turning over all the stones.

Monarch Butterfly emerges from chrysalis (found in backyard on 10/17/14). Photo by Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren.

One thing that his analysis argues is that transformation can be looked at in two ways: ontically and ontologically. Ontic transformation occurs in “the social and political realm.” Ontological transformation concerns “the realm of being.” If I understand his distinction, the conflict between reform and radicalism has to do with transformation perhaps wholly in the ontic realm. The socio-political is organized to transform matter, energy, and life to human purposes. Radicals and reformers mostly agree that this organization itself requires transformation but disagree on how much transformation is required and how it is to be carried out.

Analysis of transformation in the ontological realm uncovers in humans a “will to transform.” To transform the world–to make it a better place–is “an unequivocally stated value axiom,” Heikkurinen writes. It’s the “main objective of responsible human activity.” The words improved, developed, and responsible signify value, but the will to transform as an expression of ethics is almost beside the point. Humans have “an inherent drive” to “endlessly craft and reorder the world.” Whether aimed at selfless improvement or self-interested greed, “constant transformation is needed, and stillness is not an option” (535).

In 1967, in London, the atmosphere of the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation was heavy with the conflict between radicalism and reform. Urgency for intervention was at a fever pitch and militancy felt ascendant. This conflict overshadowed the original intent of the gathering, which had been conceived a year earlier by a group of phenomenologists associated with the radical psychologist R. D. Laing. Because the anthropologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson was one of Laing’s mentors, Bateson was the Congress’s first headliner. Bateson later refined his lecture and published it under the title, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature.” By fixating on data that led them in a line toward the achievement of purpose, human beings were “blinded” to their own “systemic nature,” the loop structures in which they were embedded.[1]

Grasping the tenor of the moment, Bateson offered a path beyond the radicalism/reform face-off. His words were meant to move his audience–to put it in Heikkurinen’s terms–from an ontic to an ontological orientation. Today we call that orientation “ecological.” Some call it the systems view.

As a systems theorist, Bateson also had a lot of say about logical typing, and following that thread, I want to see the relationship between the ontic and the ontological as a member/class relationship. Every intervention in the ontic realm has thermodynamic, ontic realm consequences–an increase in entropy. But no intervention in the ontic realm can affect the ontological realm. In cybernetic terms, no change in the temperature of the house can change the thermostat’s threshold setting.

This class/member relation is likely why we face what Heikkurinen calls the “transformation paradox,” and what Bateson referred to as a double bind. Conditions increasingly trigger the drive for transformation. But efforts we make in the ontic realm do not affect who we are ontologically. Rather, they further produce the conditions that made the need for transformation urgent to begin with. Another way to articulate the dilemma is to say that transformation at the ontological realm can’t be imagined in ontic realm terms.

Heikkurinen turns for an alternative to a form of “Heideggerian mindfulness” called “releasement.” Heidegger had borrowed the term from Meister Eckhart. Releasement is a way of being that lets go of the will to transform, that lets go and “waits.” It is “calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worthy questioning” (540-41). This thinking had come during a time, according to Hannah Arendt, when Heidegger was trying to come to terms with his involvement in the Nazi movement (536-37). With this detail, one must pause to acknowledge that any talk of existential transformation as a solution to social crisis can be reasonably viewed as fundamentally reactionary. Michael E. Zimmerman takes up this issue in Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (1994), a book Heikkurinen draws on for his piece.

Having noted those matters, I’ll move on to sum up. Because every transformation pays a thermodynamic price in increased entropy–even those transformations meant to reduce matter-energetic throughput–“a proper response to the call for transformations would involve following the example of releasers, who allow being to unfold without constant anthropogenic intervention.” Thus the releasers are a symbol of hope. They are “already living the metamorphosis” (539).

Who are the releasers? This is the question reading Heikkurinen’s article made me ask.

Works of fiction may be my only vista into imagining who the releasers might be. It’s been months since I saw the movie, Shoplifters, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palm D’or-winning film of 2018, but I keep thinking about it. It’s the story of a multi-generational, make-shift family living in some forgotten corner of the urban landscape. They survive on the minuscule, unreliable salary of one parent and what they can pilfer from local shops or scavenge from their surroundings. Like another fairly recent film, The Florida Project (2017), and last year’s celebrated Parasite, Shoplifters focuses on economic inequality, on families struggling with poverty, though through a different lens.

The economic inequality depicted in The Florida Project and Paraside is a technical matter: Material resources and education have been unfairly distributed. In the world of abundance we have built, some have been left behind. The families in these films live outside the abundance but they continue to live inside the imaginary, and this shapes their efforts to intervene and better their conditions. In Parasite, for instance, members encourage the marshaling of “vigor.” Vigorous intervention is the key to transforming change.

Although there are tragic lapses, the family in Shoplifters seems to exist mostly outside this capitalist imaginary. Their concerns are about the relations between them, their appreciation of each other and of life. Manners are mild, interventions are minimal. The most prominent quality surrounding them is love and care. Does the film merely romanticize poverty? Does my reading of the film romanticize poverty? That could be. But I think Kore-eda means for his audience to take in the love and care his characters exhibit without sanctifying them. When I tried to imagine what Heidegger might mean by “a calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worth questioning,” I thought of the characters in this film.

Releasement, according to the Heidegger quotes Heikkurinen uses, involve not doing, not intervening, but “waiting.”  Releasement, Heidegger tells us, can’t be rushed; it can’t be made to happen. Rather, one waits for the call. That call might come as the collapse of civilization, which, Heikkurinen points out “has already shown itself to many.” Ah, now the article becomes uneasy-making. Some people get angry, reading things like this, and for good reason.

Many within the degrowth community themselves might bristle at this line of analysis, especially during the current environment, in which the shrinking of national GDPs is accompanied by widespread suffering and fear. Prominent degrowth voices, such as Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel, have taken pains to point out that virus-driven shrinkage, made worse by weak national safety nets, is not, as some assume, degrowth in practice. Degrowth is planned; it’s directed–what we are going through now isn’t. “Those who liken this economic crisis to degrowth are being deliberately obtuse,” Hickel wrote in an April tweet. “It’s like comparing a car wreck to carefully tapping the brakes. They’re not just dissimilar, they are opposites.”

Yet in a column last month in the New York Times, Hugh Roberts reiterates that solutions are not technical. That they are not only or primarily technical might be a better way to say it. Or that change must not occur only or primarily in the ontic realm. With all this in mind, I thought about the passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s classic about another community living outside the capitalist imaginary. It’s the part where the title comes from. The inhabitants of The Muck, like the family in Shoplifters, have also rejected the will to transform and instead take part in low matter-energetic activities the point of which is human interaction and joy. Of course, they live in neglected areas, and when the greater systems breakdown, they suffer in higher ratios than others do. It’s a hushed moment that this mysterious, disturbing passage describes. They are in their shanties waiting for the hurricane that will flood them out, uproot them, and kill some of them. They sit in the night in stillness and wait. “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

A version of this essay appears on the Society for US Intellectual History Blog.

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[1] Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 440.

How long will we live like this before we have trouble remembering how things used to be?[1] When that happens maybe we’ll know we’re living through systemic change.

Obama said we’re the change we’ve been waiting for. Lately, many are suggesting that the pandemic has brought an opportunity for change if we can master the moment. When old ways seem to be falling apart and the future is uncertain, hope is found in the notion that we have some say in what’s comes next.

And it begins with saying, doesn’t it? With articulating what we value and what kind of society we want. Can we take pause, find some silence, and imagine the kind of society we aspire to—imagine it and put it into words?

This is what Jedidiah Purdy does in his 2019 book, This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth. He describes a place where everyone has “a share of the world, dignity in their work or in the condition that keeps them from working, the respect of officials and the law, the expectation that they can walk without fear or shame in any public place, [and] confidence that they will get care when they are sick or hurt.” Purdy expands upon these familiar ideals, associated in this country with the concept of freedom, with insights derived from the ecological imagination. In his commonwealth, “no one gets their living by degrading someone else, nor by degrading the health of the land or the larger living world.” “Deep equality” is balanced with “deep reciprocity” so that the freedom afforded “would not be freedom from dependence on others, or from responsibility for them.”[2]

In this “world-renewing, ecological commonwealth”—a phrase Purdy uses in the last pages of his book, “the flourishing of everyone and everything would sustain the flourishing of each person.” He aims for a fine balance between the individual and the collective.[3]

I say, yes, by all means, but how do we get there? What stands in our way?

We’re in conflict, we’re divided. That’s the main thing. Purdy’s focus is on the land—“the thing we share which holds us apart.”[4] The fights over Bears Ears National Monument and over coal mining in the Appalachians are particular demonstrations of this conflict. But in a broader sense, the conflict is between the way we answer the sort of questions Purdy asks and answers in his book. What is the meaning of land, of wealth? How do we value life?

For a couple of years now, I’ve been reading about systemic transformation. I’ve read many calls for it and a few theories about how it comes about. I’ve had to navigate through a lot of vocabulary that seems to mean the same thing: worldviews, mindsets, paradigms, imaginaries. I’ve needed to confront the problem of how these immaterial complexes of word and image take shape in the material world. Purdy lays it out pretty plainly. “I teach law,” he writes,

which always leaves me thinking that words and material power, narrative and force, have the closest of relations. No story or picture of the world matters much if it floats too far from what people do with one another’s bodies and with soil and weapons and other tools; but also and by the same token, no material change in power will go forward without ideas and images that give it shape and a horizon to aim for.[5]

Words and material power, narrative and force. The experience of systemic change, which we appear to be going through presently, is about the friction between narratives, between imaginaries, the urgent concerns of which are not, as Purdy puts it, “tractable” in each other’s term.[6]

The fearsome obstacle standing in the way of the world-renewing, ecological narrative is the dominant narrative that it challenges, the dominant imaginary which it criticizes and to which it offers an alternative. The obstacle is fearsome because the dominant narrative has the built world behind it, to embody it, to give it force.

While sheltering in place, my family and I streamed the recent movie, Knives Out. It’s a contemporary Agatha Christie-like who-done-it. A renowned detective is required to solve a murder set in a house with many rooms and many eccentric suspects. At about the film’s midpoint, the detective makes a speech that riffs on the title of Gravity’s Rainbow. Solving a mystery is for him is as simple as that of determining a rocket’s trajectory. He observes “the facts without biases of head or heart,” calculates the “arc’s path,” strolls “leisurely to the terminus,” and waits for the truth to land at his feet.

This is his method. It’s as reliable as a “machine.”

The scene pokes fun at the mechanistic worldview, its scientific method, its faith that the world can be perceived just as it is, without bias of the head or heart. This Land is Our Land contains a critique of a similar faith. Any “theory of value” was inherently totalitarian, the neoliberal economists believed. Better to leave the question of value to the market. The market was neutral, merely a multitude of persons and their rational choices. The market was the world as it is.

“But there is a deep mistake here,” Purdy writes. By trying to avoid a theory of value–and any claim on “freedom and equality” it would inevitably entail—they wound up with a “totalitarian system of value” after all, one “imposed through the mechanics of price.” This mechanics now tells “the value of our own lives, and the value of life itself, of the living world.”[7]

Blame has long been cast on ‘economic man’ and his so-called rationality. What’s interests me is the reflexive dynamic described here, the way our ideas about the world become our world’s conditions. In an unfinished 1966 essay, systems theorist Gregory Bateson identified several theories of value—he called them “justifications”— for scientific work. One justification was that science was useful and led to progress; another was that it was simply the objective pursuit of truth. His point was that these justifications, whether sound or unsound, reflected back on the justifiers, shaped their society and what they expected of it, shaped the way they saw themselves.

Bateson was talking about relations between words and material power, narrative, and force. He’d struck a similar note in an essay a few years earlier. “There is much connection certainly between scientific truth, on the one hand, and beauty and morality on the other: that if a man entertain false opinions regarding his own nature, he will be led thereby to courses of action which will be in some profound sense immoral or ugly.”[8]

What Bateson meant by “false opinion,” Purdy means by “deep mistake.” There is no perception without a shaping narrative, without a theory of value. There is no evading the claims that come from being embedded in the web of life. The point of friction between the competing narratives is that one recognizes and the other evades a moral claim.

Resistance to this evasion is widespread, amorphous, ever-present, many-streamed. But evasion is the “common sense of our times,” and that sense has shaped our institutions, our habitats, our cityscapes, our systems of transport and communication, our filtered atmospheres, our cultivated soils. Purdy cites a measurement of this built world—the global “technosphere”—at thirty trillion tons. Every movement we make (especially those of us most complicit) is mobilized within and by that world.[9]

People have used the word sin to describe this predicament. In one or two affecting passages, Purdy acknowledges this. “In some sense, everything we do is a choice,” he writes, “but in another sense, we do not choose the terrible ecological terms in which these choices have their costs.” We’re caught up in our “technological exoskeleton,” no matter how differently we may want or think.[10]

Does this dilemma change in a time when it is precisely the built world that feels so much in flux? Purdy was writing a year ago, a time which, I must say, is growing a little fuzzy in my memory. What he wrote then, he’d probably write again: “What we lack is the faith that understanding can help us.” I think he’s talking about understanding, most of all, the relations between narrative and force. “If the problem is the world we have built, then it is in our power to build another.” [11]

This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth comes in at 150 pages. It can be read in a single, quarantined day.

A version of this essay appeared in The Society for US Intellectual History blog

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[1] This question was inspired by an April 4 tweet by writer and filmmaker Nora Bateson: “This crisis that has revealed the fragility of the institutions has the possibility of cracking the perceptions that uphold the existing system. Only when the perception changes will there be a longing to live differently. Do you still crave the normalcy of 6 weeks ago?”

[2] Purdy, Jedidiah. This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth, (Princeton UP, 2019), xii-xiii.

[3] Ibid., 148, xiii.

[4] Ibid., x.

[5] Ibid., 3.

[6] Ibid., 143.

[7] Ibid., 142-145.

[8] Chaney, Anthony. Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness, (UNC Press, 2017), 128, 131.

[9] Purdy, 143-144, 21-22.

[10] Ibid., 144.

[11] Ibid., 149.

In a terrific essay in The Nation, Yale historian Greg Grandin weaves current controversy over the New York Times’ 1619 Project into pointed restatements of his argument in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, his 2019 book recently published in paperback.

Historians who’ve criticized the 1619 Project point to unsubstantiated claims and an over-reading of the role of slavery and anti-slavery activism in the construction of American political freedom, especially during the Revolutionary period. Grandin writes largely in support of the 1619 Project and without directly disputing the specific criticisms. Yet he also implies, in agreement with critics, that the Project’s argument is too narrow.

Slavery alone didn’t deliver the material prosperity upon which American political freedom was founded, and the concept of enslavement alone didn’t define for white Americans what freedom was. In Grandin’s view, the genocidal destruction of indigenous Americans and the dispossession of their lands through continuous western expansion prepared the ground for slavery.  With expansion and dispossession, slavery expanded; the two worked in lockstep. Both constitute “the country’s founding paradox: the promise of political freedom and the reality of racial subjugation” (138).

The procedure Grandin describes is not unfamiliar. Settlers invaded Indian land, triggering hostilities; federal troops were then sent to vindicate the settlers’ freedom to invade. “This dynamic,” he writes, “in which danger caused by the United States going over the line pulled the U.S. over the land, was repeated over and over” (66-67). It was during the Jacksonian era, however–the period of Indian Removal and the Second Middle Passage–when the expansion-slavery nexus crystalized and generated a lasting politics. Grandin calls it the Jacksonian political coalition: “minimal state, the racialization of any welfare-providing bureaucracies, the sanctity of property rights, individualism, and a definition of freedom as freedom from restraint” (106).

After its defeat in the Civil War, this politics rose again at the turn of the century, when the concept of the border was extended to Cuba, Latin America, and the Philippines. Military actions overseas allowed the sons of the rebels to be reconciled, to fight again for a racialized freedom from restraint gussied up in high political ideals. As with Indian Removal, these aggressions planted seeds of hatred, guilt, and trauma that came to harvest domestically as racist extremism, only to be vented again, in the next expeditionary adventure. The process was sustained by the dual meaning of the frontier myth: it was, on the one hand, a space of ideological revitalization, and on the other, a space where freedom from restraint could be carried out in its purest form: in a practice of racialized brutality.

Americans were inevitably forced to face limits when their adventures failed, but such periods of confrontation were typically short-lived. After the sobering disaster of Vietnam, for example, Americans again sought escape in Reagan’s restoration of “weightlessness, limitlessness, and deathlessness” as national virtues (217). Again the pattern repeated itself. “Conflicts that seemed irresolvable in the here and now,” Grandin writes in his The Nation essay, were perceived to be “resolvable in the there and then: there beyond the line of settlement.” Grandin describes this dynamic as a “great evasion.”

It’s all over now, though, he contends. The meaning of Trump’s border wall is that “expansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy the interests, reconcile [or evade] the contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger.” The myth of limitless expansion has ended, extremism has turned inward, and conflict, with no other outlet, is left to “whip around the homeland” (7-8).

There are a few kinks in the argument that I’ve yet to work out. “Make America Great Again” was designed as a general repudiation of Obama but also an explicit repudiation of Obama’s realism concerning the Unites States’ place in the world. In Grandin’s construction, the end of the myth is the end of American Exceptionalism, and if he is correct in regard to the meaning of the wall, there has been no greater anti-exceptionalist than Trump. Yet Trump continues to speak the language of limitlessness. Perhaps it’s that this language has dropped all pretense of political idealism. Entitlement and strong-arm tactics no longer require any gussying up. What we’re seeing now, across many fronts, is a resurgence of the Jackson coalition, supported by widespread denial and evasion.

Grandin describes the contradiction/evasion dynamic in numerous ways in his essay and in his book. It’s an attempt to “square the circle” (35, 237), “a devil’s bargain.” It’s a “violent cycle,” an “addictive cycle” that “simultaneously hastened and stemmed crisis” (67, 83). The dynamic worked as “both a valve and a throttle, with each conflict simultaneously venting the hatreds produced by the last while creating the conditions for the next” (98). To someone who wrote a book about Gregory Bateson’s double bind concept and the rise of the systems view, these descriptions resonated.

For a contradiction to become a double bind, for a double bind to become pathological, the silencing of information is necessary. Certain things must not be recognized or said. Certain realities must be evaded. The result is that common-sense efforts to solve the problems at hand serve rather to reinforce the problematic conditions. Grandin’s summing up of what he sees as US History’s central dynamic has the sound of a double bind: “Expansion became the answer to every question, the solution to all problems, especially those caused by expansion” (30).

Even more resonant was how the pattern Grandin describes mirrors that described by the postgrowth/degrowth movements I’ve written about several times here and elsewhere. Growth’s imperative transcends both planned and free-market economics. It transcends both Keynesian and supply-side methods of stimulation. According to the growth paradigm, without constant growth, goods will become scarce, and society will become ungovernable on principles of equity and justice. The health of the body politic is viable only as the body metabolic accelerates.

As with Grandin’s expansion dynamic, the venting of social ills is part of the growth equation. As growth undermines social and ecological foundation, growth becomes the answer to every question, the solution to all problems, especially those caused by growth. Whether territorial or metabolic, the relations described here are not linear but recursive. These are loops that reinforce themselves.

In other instances, Grandin’s reasoning displays the influence of the ecological imagination, an imagination steeped in, if not synonymous with, the systems view. In one passage Grandin is discussing the cultural meaning of borders, emphasizing how they are imposed upon space by power. Borders, he writes,

represent the absurdity of human efforts to force the concrete to conform to the abstract … But they also announce the panic of power, something that overcomes a political state similar to the way dread comes over an individual with the realization that their psyche isn’t theirs to control alone, that it is formed in reaction to others.

Bateson described this “panic” as akin to the feeling that you have when the car you’re driving gives way to the ice on the road, and the technologies of brakes, steering, and gas pedal suddenly fail to cohere. The point is that Grandin’s passage is premised on a certain framing of the human condition: because we exist inside the living world and are dependent upon it, intentions and results do not necessarily align, and we suffer, psychologically and socially, as a result. The logic of the passage relies, too, on qualitative resemblances. Individual systems are “like” social systems, the former nested within the latter but operating in formally similar ways.

In another passage, Grandin contemplates his theme: the historical centrality of expansion. “What kind of republic was the United States of America,” he asks,

that its national border didn’t just move occasionally, in response to episodic war or diplomacy, but constitutively as a quality of its being? What, exactly, lay on the other side of that moving border? And what happens to a nation when that line stops moving? These questions didn’t haunt the United States. They animated it, giving life to its history as an exceptional nation. (31)

Explicit in these sentences is that ideas give life to history. Implicit in them is the notion that ideas and matter are knitted together.

Describing the subjective experience of subduing and removing tribal people–in this case, the “recalcitrant” Seminoles in Florida–Grandin quotes from an anonymous artillery officer writing in a Charleston newspaper in 1838:

He and his fellow soldiers had driven [the Seminoles] “into the swamps and unwholesome places of their country,” where they clung “with the last efforts of despair to their beloved homes.” He reminded readers that “equilibrium” is a moral as well as a physical concept and that “retribution will inevitably follow dereliction.” (60)  

A moral as well as a physical concept. These words flash on the essence of the ecological imagination. It isn’t merely that “everything is connected to everything else,” in Barry Commoner’s iconic phrase. It’s also that everything immaterial is connected to everything material, that the moral is connected to the physical, and that our prevailing imaginaries, our politics and our sciences, are blind to or reject those relations. This evasion is necessary for all justifications for limitless expansion, whether metabolic or territorial.

In both his book and essay, Grandin gives a prominent role to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Vietnam speech of April 1967. It was a speech few wanted King to make, a speech for which he was widely condemned, but one he insisted on making anyway—the opposite of evasion. In this speech, King saw the US involvement in Vietnam as a consequence and instance of the nation’s inability to conquer its “giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.”

It may be said that liberals and the left have still not recovered from that speech, or anyway from what its times represented: the enervation and fragmentation of the politics that had contained the old Jackson coalition. The Roosevelt coalition, the Liberal Consensus–call it what you will–had been more rational, more humane, more democratic, more inclusive. But it had neither broken with the founding idea that, as Grandin puts it, “expansion was necessary to achieve social progress” (205), nor had it ceased to function according to the double-binding contradictions of that idea.

A new ecological coalition, if one is possible for a society with habits so deeply sunk, will need to be based on that insight.

A version of this essay appears at the Society for US Intellectual History blog

“Ford v. Ferrari,” now playing in cinemas, is about a maverick team of car designers and drivers who have been commanded by the Ford Corporation to build a car that will win at Le Mans. In one scene, corporate head Henry Ford II is unexpectedly taken for his first ride in the GT40, the car his crew is piloting. The car takes off, and Ford is rocketed up and down an airport runway, his face frozen in terror.  This is about the time a newbie soils himself, a seasoned observer remarks.

When the car finally screams to a halt, Ford bursts into a fit of weeping. At first he seems unmanned—‘crying like a little girl,’ to quote a familiar gibe. But then we learn the real reason for his tears. If only granddad could see this, he says. The implication is that jetting a human body 200 miles per hour over a patch of cement was what his legendary namesake was really after all along. To push a limit, to break a record, to go faster. The sacralization of speed (and masculinity) is a move the film makes over and over. Whether automobile or airplane or rocket ship, the petroleum-fueled combustion engine is the machine men have made to surpass limitation.

What’s the old riddle about Mount Everest? “Because it’s there.” For as long as I can remember, this ‘breaking of a limit for its own sake’ has been lifted up and celebrated as the quintessential mark of human distinction

How have we come to think about limits this way? How has the idea of limits shaped our economics, our politics, and our relationship with the living world around us? These are precisely the questions Giorgos Kallis asks in Limits, his new book from Stanford Briefs.

A prominent advocate for degrowth, Kallis is a prolific writer of articles and books that deliver careful research and argument in no-nonsense persuasive prose. (One of his sidelines are essays on how to be a productive academic.) Born in Athens, educated transnationally, Kallis is an environmental scientist working in the field of political ecology and a professor at the Autonomous University in Barcelona. Limits, however, is a straight-ahead history of ideas. It’s based on a reading of a classic text, Thomas Robert Malthus’s 1798 essay on population and food supply. The subtitle of Kallis’s short book is Why Malthus was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care.

The argument is a little difficult to put succinctly because it runs so counter to the way Malthus has been commonly understood. Malthus, the prophet of scarcity, said that human population would always outrun the amount of available food. Malthusian pessimism signifies a kind of regressive blindness to the human capacity to surpass limits, to innovate, and to discover new sources of fuel, both for our bodies and for our machines. This popular understanding of Malthus comes from a mis- or half-reading, Kallis finds.

Kallis stresses the political motivation behind the essay. In 1798, Malthus was writing expressly to refute those who were challenging the new capitalist order and calling for redistribution. Because we’d never have enough to feed the poor out of current stock, he countered, continuous exertion was necessary to stay ahead of the geometric ratio. So, yes, Malthus did raise the prospect of a limit to human reproduction, but it was only to remove the prospect of a limit to economic growth. Malthus’s genius was “that he managed to make scarcity compatible with growth, limits with no limits,” Kallis writes. His essay was “the first rejection of redistribution and welfare in the name of growth of free markets” (29, 21).

So Malthus was wrong, Kallis argues, but not for the reasons popularly understood. He was wrong, first, to assume that the human species was incapable of regulating its own reproduction. Second, Malthus was wrong to assume that the Earth was capable of sustaining the ever-increasing demand on its resources that was necessary. This should matter to environmentalists because environmentalists have largely accepted Malthus’s model of inevitable scarcity. They have taken upon themselves the mantle of Malthusian pessimism. When they argue that we are confronting nature’s limits, they re-inscribe Malthus’s growth calculus and reduce their own case “to a sterile scientific dispute … of how growth can be sustained and for how long.” Environmental policies become bleak schemes to stave off, for as long as possible, the day of reckoning (48).

But thresholds need not ever be passed, Kallis claims. Limits don’t exist out there in nature. They exist in our own intentions, how we define the good life, and most of all, in our politics. Those concerned about economic, social, and environmental justice shouldn’t be trying to figure out how to make growth more efficient and sustainable. Rather, they should abandon growth as a goal altogether and work to institute a “non-fatalistic politics of [self-imposed] limits” (62). Malthus taught that sharing will do no good because there would never be enough for everyone. Kallis argues that we will only have enough when we limit ourselves to our fair share. The problem isn’t natural. It’s social and political.

I’m one who’d only dipped into Malthus’s essay and had received its common meaning without question. Kallis’s reading isn’t an in-depth engagement with the original text—the book is less than 150 pages, after all—and it likely fits his degrowth agenda a bit too cleanly. But a reconsideration of Malthus, like recent ones of Adam Smith, is a welcome part of the assault, across many fronts, on the neoliberal order.

In the second half of Limits, Kallis touches on his own biography, which is something I’d not seen in his writing before. He was close to his mother, an Athens activist, and her death, when he was a young scholar, hit him hard. Among her possessions, he found the book she’d long kept by her bedside. Its author was the Greek political theorist Cornelius Castoriadis. His mother’s favorite theorist would have a great influence on his own intellectual journey. We see something of this in the second half of the book, a discussion of the relationship between self-restraint and freedom, which comes partly from Castoriadis and his understanding of the culture of ancient Greece.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of Castoriadis readily available to the American reader. I found a copy of A Society Adrift, a compilation of late interviews and writings, which Kallis cites a good deal in Limits. I felt some due diligence was required in regard to Castoriadis’s concept of “the social imaginary.” It’s a term I’ve used a lot in the last couple of years, having picked it up from my reading in the environmental humanities, without really grasping its provenance. The term seems a lot like the terms worldview, or mindset, or paradigm, or episteme, which is to say, it aids in articulating the relationship between our immaterial ideas, our immaterial descriptions of those ideas, and the material world we come to live in as a result.

Castorious develops his explanation of the social imaginary with dense intricacy; this concept and his thinking in general shows the influence of systems theory. The systems theorist Dana Meadows confronts the matter and sums it up quite simply: “A society that talks incessantly about ‘productivity’ but that hardly understands, much less uses, the word ‘resilience’ is going to become productive and not resilient. A society that doesn’t understand or use the term ‘carrying capacity’ will exceed its carrying capacity” (174). Kallis would probably see some re-inscription of Malthus in Meadows’ thought, but they share a foundation in the importance of frames, rules, and goals in contemplating how to work toward change in a destructive system spinning out of control.

Anyway, here’s a tip: don’t go see Ford v. Ferrari if you’ve been reading Meadows, Kallis, or Cornelius Castoriadis. Or at least, if you do, don’t expect to enjoy it. As I watched, Castoriadis’s various descriptions of the “capitalist imaginary” were fresh in my mind. History had seen conquerors who thirsted for power before, Castoriadis explains. “But with capitalism, for the first time, this tendency toward the unlimited extension of might, or of mastery, encountered the appropriate, adequate instruments: ‘rational’ instruments'” (62). Henry Ford II is buckled into one of those rational instruments. He experiences this expansion of mastery in real time, as it were.

The thing about imaginaries is that they can be challenged; they can be replaced. That’s the theory, anyway, and the basis of Kallis’s political project. He relies on what Castoriadis calls “autonomy,” the capacity to continually critique both the imaginaries that dominate our perception as well as those we put up, experimentally, as alternatives. “We can have less suffering instead of destruction,” Kallis writes, “to the extent that we can institute mechanisms that help us reflect on our wants and prudently manage those that are excessive. At the level of the individual, this is the mission of psychoanalysis; at the level of the collective, Castoriadis argued, this is the role of democracy” (93).

Today, with democracy on the ropes and growth in throughput still the barely-questioned measure of all economic success, one can’t help but ask if imagining a steady-state economics of sharing isn’t too flatly utopian. It is, I suppose, if one’s thinking is shaped by Malthus’s model of scarcity. It is if one’s politics is shaped by fear of apocalyptic collapse. And it is if one’s definition of the good life is shaped by a devotion to ever-increasing, ever-accelerating production, consumption, and speed.

A version of this essay appears at the Society for US History Blog.

WORKS CITED

Castoriadis, Cornelius, Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Vernay. A Society Adrift Interviews and Debates, 1974-1997. 2010.Bottom of Form

Kallis, Giorgos. Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. 2019.

Meadows, Donella H., and Diana Wright. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. 2015.

Photo by Plismo.

“Air can hurt you, too,” David Byrne sang on a record released forty years ago this month. The song was called “Air,” the album, Fear of Music, and the name of the band was Talking Heads. If one is to believe random internet commentary–claims often attributed to memory of some Byrne interview or another–this was not a song about air pollution.

No argument here. I would point out, however, that this song was made within a decade or so of the rise of modern environmentalism in the US, which was acutely attuned to the imagery of air that could hurt you–to photos of billowing industrial smokestacks and thick smog hovering over cities such as Los Angeles and New York. It was also a song recorded within weeks of the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania when one the facility’s reactors suffered a near-meltdown, and radioactive gases were vented into the atmosphere.

Good songs resist being reduced to prosaic readings. “Air” isn’t about air pollution. But it is a song that draws on the ecological imagination, the shift in the way many perceive the nature of reality and their relations with their surroundings. It is a song that partakes of historical context and events in which the ecological imagination took shape. And it is a song that speaks to the fear and dread that is, to my mind, one of the under-explored and under-theorized aspects of that imagination.

In her book Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia UP, 2018), Natasha Zaretsky provides a case study in what I’ll call, for this post, environmental fear. The consciousness of our interdependence with the living world, our interconnectedness and our embeddedness in nonhuman life processes, is often associated with a commitment to universalism. When the Apollo photos, such as “Earthrise,” were published, people saw that they shared the same “lonely planet,” that we were all one, etc. But in the local response to the accident at Three Mile Island, Zaretsky reveals another aspect of the ecological imagination. To put it bluntly, the response was tribal. Trust, already weakened, broke down. In the end, universalist perspectives were rejected for the sort of resentment-based nationalism that we’re so familiar with today.

“What is happening to my skin?” Byrne sings. “Where is the protection that I needed?” The ecological imagination emphasizes the permeability of boundaries, not least skin boundaries. The fact that radiation poisoning was invisible and its effects gradual, for example, made it an especially insidious kind of bodily threat. The Three Mile Island community perceived itself, Zaretsky argues, as the heartland, as the true body of America. That body had been invaded. Sixties progressives had celebrated the body as a site of liberation and pleasure, but in the reaction to Three Mile Island, “conservatives folded the body into a discourse of decline and betrayal, creating a body politics of their own” (98). Zaretsky calls this “biotic nationalism.”

Some bodies were more vulnerable than others. Mothers, pregnant women, and children were the first advised to evacuate. In abstract terms, they represented what was most in peril–a society’s ability to reproduce itself. The symbols adopted by the movement came to reflect this. Biotic nationalism was “shot through with ecologically derived images of the vulnerable bodies of mothers, babies, and fetuses” (13). Meanwhile, within conservative politics more broadly, the rights of the unborn were likewise moving to the center of concern. Writing recently in Politico, Dartmouth’s Randall Balmer has stressed the role race played in this political restructuring. Having lost the moral high ground in the contest over segregation, social conservatives and evangelicals sought to reclaim it on the issue of abortion. In Radiation Nation, Zaretsky provides an ecological inflection to this more familiar story.

Zaretsky’s book tells us something about environmental fear politically. On this blog, I’ve written about Sarah J. Ray’s research into student distress over the climate crisis. All this helps. Still, I want to cast a wider net.

At first, “Air can hurt you, too,” seems a neurotic claim. It fits the twitchy, hyper-literal persona David Byrne had established with the group’s first two records. The song is less a warning about air than it is a warning about fear. Its underlying message–its wider inference in the Byrne program–is to push past fear and to embrace life’s wonderful messiness. The theme would become more direct in subsequent records. But the song’s conceit only works if the claims made about air are perceived as paranoid, which they aren’t, by any means. Air can hurt us. Millions die from dirty air every year around the globe, most especially in the global south, where our fossil-fuel-based economics tends to shunt its externalities. Would the song make sense at all in a place where people don surgical masks to go out of doors? These considerations push the song even further away from an environmentalist reading. Or we might put it this way: “Air” functions in a space of relative privilege.

But air isn’t supposed to hurt any of us, is it? In a 1966 letter to the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson remarked on how human bodies had evolved according to this supposition. Unlike whales and dolphins, whose blowholes were figured according to the premise–the truth, one might say–that air was only intermittently available, human bodies were formed according to the premise that air was healthful, abundant, and available at all times, right there in front of our faces. “Modern environments” were challenging that “built-in” truth, Bateson noted. This challenge was a cause of “disturbance” in “an epoch … more deeply disturbed than any other in the history of man.”

The social disturbances of the Sixties are well-known. Bateson’s point was to urge Laing to perceive physiological, psychological, social, and environmental disturbance as formally similar phenomena. At the very least, he hoped that a kind of humility might arise from this perception—humility as to human options for dealing with disturbance. His position was that the default option was the source of a good deal of the disturbance. The default option was the drive for mastery, the epistemology of control.

“Control kills, connection heals, come home or die.” This is the written message left by the militant environmentalists in Richard Powers’ 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory, whenever they stage an action. The militancy isn’t Batesonian. The written message is.

Oh, where am I going with this? There’s a thread here I’m unable to grasp between my fingers. Past truths are no longer applicable, yet we still have emotional stakes in them, and in some cases, those stakes are built-in. The species of denial are manifold and respect no particular politics. They trap us into repetitive behaviors that only speed us toward the next “accident.” I began with the idea of environmental fear being under-explored, under-theorized. Bateson’s thought offers ways to think about living systems when trust deteriorates and people are afraid.

A version of this essay also appears in The Society for US Intellectual History Blog.

I suppose if one only stuck a toe into the literature of climate change, into its factual evidence, its numbers, into its long-form meditations and its day-to-day reportage, one might still be able to manage some deflection. One might still be able to push what it has to say into a corner to be visited only now and then. Put in a half of foot, however, and compartmentalization becomes almost impossible. We face a moral crisis of shattering proportions.

Here’s what some environmental activists are arguing about these days: Is societal collapse inevitable, and therefore, is our time best spent in moral and practical preparation for that collapse; or are we capable of some great transformation at the most fundamental levels–transformation of our myths and metaphors, of the way we think and the way we live? It sobers one to the bone just to grasp that this question isn’t being raised in some dystopian novel or film, one step away from nightmare, in an aesthetic practice of venting and processing. It’s being raised in the terms of a rational debate.

Earlier this year, Jeremy Lent, the author of The Patterning Instinct who I’ve mentioned several times at this blog, took issue with Jem Bendell, the writer of “Deep Adaptation: A map for navigating the climate tragedy,” a concept paper published last year that has since been downloaded many tens of thousands of times. In this paper Bendell argued that the resilience of our current systems cannot be assumed and that their breakdown is already unfolding and inevitable. He created a forum to explore what changes, personal and collective, “might help us prepare for–and live with–a climate-induced collapse of our societies.” Lent found much common ground with Bendell but pushed back on the notion of inevitability. That sort of hopelessness would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, Lent argued.

My purpose here is to call attention to their exchange. My summary sentences don’t do it justice, and it drew notice and comment in other online locales. There are several ways to follow it, but this was my path:

“Hope and Vision in the Face of Collapse — The 4th R of Deep Adaptation” — a January summary by Bendell of his initial paper with an extended discussion of his concepts of “reconciliation” and “radical hope.”

“The Love in Deep Adaptation — A Philosophy for the Forum” — a March post by Bendell and Katie Carr that makes clear that Deep Adaptation is not a call for going off-grid with a stockpile of weapons.

“What Will You Say to Your Grandchildren?” — Lent’s April essay pushes back against Deep Adaptation and poses, instead, Deep Transformation.

“Responding to Green Positivity Critiques of Deep Adaptation” — Bendell answers Lent the next day. This post includes all of Lent’s post with responses interspersed between passages.

“Our Actions Create the Future: A Response to Jem Bendell” — Lent follows up to Bendell’s response and includes a selected bibliography on civilizational collapse.

(Here is a link to Bendell’s complete Deep Adaptation paper, which I have not yet read in full.)

It’s best to read the exchange for oneself, but I’ll offer an observation. I was struck how much Lent and Bendell share in common in terms of fundamental orientation. Both have a “systems view of life,” to use Fritjof Capra’a and Pier Luigi Luisi’s phrase. This is explicit in Lent’s work. The Patterning Instinct begins with a preface by Capra, and one of its themes is the “remarkable correspondence” between what the West called Neo-Confucianism in Song-era China and “modern findings in systems and complexity science.” These findings emphasize “how self-organized systems are fractally embedded within one another” and “the intrinsic interdependency of all living systems” (252, 371).

I’m less familiar with Bendell’s thinking, but claims he makes in the posts above align with the systems view. We suffer from the “delusion” of separateness, he writes. We haven’t regarded “rivers, soils, forests and fields as part of ourselves.” This “othering” of nature, of a piece with the othering of people, has justified “exploitation, discrimination, hostility, violence, and rampant consumption.” Elsewhere he writes that “wisdom traditions” and “contemporary physics” tell us that “we are co-creating our reality with others, the material and ineffable dimensions in ways that we can never fully comprehend.” These are basics of the systems view. Lent wouldn’t disagree.

It is on this last point, however–the point about the co-creation of reality–that Lent intervenes. Maybe we can’t fully comprehend the ways in which we co-create our “material and ineffable dimensions,” but we do know that these dimensions are intrinsically coupled. “Human society itself,” Lent writes in his second response to Bendell,

is really two tightly interconnected, co-existing complex systems: a tangible system and a cognitive system. The tangible system refers to everything that can be seen and touched: a society’s technology, its physical infrastructure, and its agriculture, to name just some components. The cognitive system refers to what can’t be touched but exists in the culture: a society’s myths, core metaphors, hierarchy of values, and worldview.

The dynamic interaction of these two systems create feedback loops that “can profoundly affect each other and, consequently, the direction of society.” The attitude we take to the current crisis matters, in other words. Thinking in terms of collapse reinforces the possibility of collapse. Thinking in terms of transformation reinforces that possibility, in turn. “The only real path toward future flourishing,” Lent writes, “is one that transforms the basis of our civilization, from the current one that is extractive and wealth-based, to one that is life-affirming, based on the core principles that sustain living systems coexisting stably in natural ecologies.” Already moving in that direction are “innumerable pioneering organizations around the world.” They need our support, our membership, not our dismissal.

Why do they differ on this point? Is it that Bendell’s systems thinking is less thoroughgoing than Lent’s, or is it an understandable distrust, on Bendell’s part, that even a touch of the utopian is escapist? It may boil down to how one characterizes denial. “Green positivity,” as Bendell calls it, is in denial of the inevitability of collapse. Bendell, Lent charges, denies the possibility of a great transformation.

“What will you tell your grandchildren?” Lent asks in the title of his first post countering Bendell. He evokes the question German children asked their parents and grandparents about how and whether they took a stand against Hitler. When our grandchildren ask us about the climate crisis, Lent asks, will we be able to look them in the eyes? Bendell replies,

I will never look my grandchildren in the eyes because I decided not to have children. Many people are choosing to make this very difficult decision. One reason is that having a child in the West is the greatest contribution to carbon emissions that you could make. Another reason is the realization of the world they will have to live and die within.

I’m leaving Bendell the last word here, not necessarily because I favor his position, but because I want to recognize the skin he has in the game.

A version of this essay was published at the Society for US Intellectual History Blog.

A colleague of mine with a large fan base recently tweeted that his reason for getting a PhD was a love for writing and teaching. People will confess to almost anything on social media, even their worst afflictions. I, for one, sympathized. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder how a slight adjustment to this combination of loves might have led to an entirely different and more appealing life-path.

If one loved biking and teaching, for instance, one could lead bike tours in some historically rich city, like New Orleans. This is on my mind because I recently went on a half-day bike tour of New Orleans with my family, and we were taught quite a lot by our knowledgeable guide, John.

For instance: The French settled first near what is now called Bayou St. John. Soon they came to realize that the water, the air, and the mosquitoes were less of a problem a few miles away, where the Indians just happened to be living. That was where we were standing right now, John explained, the highest ground in the city of New Orleans, beside Saint Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. Yeah, John said, they forced the Indians off the prime real estate and just took it for themselves. Sad story, but there you go. With dismissing phrases and gestures like these, John seemed to suggest that there was a lot we could talk about that we weren’t going to talk about.

“We won’t be talking about slavery,” he added.

The comment struck me, and I understood it in several ways. Sometimes the light will dim in the eyes of my students in the US History survey, as if to say, “He’s going to talk about slavery again, kill me now.” All I can say is, I know, I know. The topic can bring you down.

This semester I’m teaching an upper level African American history course for undergraduates, and I’ve about had it with the topic myself. Trying to cover all my bases for a class on Nat Turner, I finally got around to watching “The Birth of a Nation,” the recent film by Nate Parker. In one early passage, Nat’s master is renting him out to preach obedience to the slaves on neighboring plantations. Here the film punches hard, depicting the cruel squalor and indignity whites forced on blacks in order to profit off them, their flesh and their lifeblood. “I’ve had enough,” I remember thinking.

John’s customers were folks on vacation. They weren’t looking for a heavy ordeal.

I read an article once by a guide who gave tours at a southern plantation, who had to deal regularly with a hostile contingent eager to argue whether slavery was as bad as everyone wanted you to think. “We won’t be talking about slavery,” made sense from this angle, too. John would want to nip that kind of controversy in the bud. He wouldn’t want to get into it with some idiot with an ax to grind. His job was to keep things upbeat and move us along.

John was a ropey, tall man, forty-ish, weathered, very slim, some cool tats, a notable haircut. Later I asked my kids what they remembered about him. My daughter described his earrings and polished nails. My son remembered his zip-up leather jacket and how quickly he spoke. Both liked him. I liked him, too, but also took a professional interest. We would bike for a while, and then he’d gather us somewhere and deliver a blast of information. Sometimes you have to talk fast when you’re on a schedule and trying to fit it all in. His talks were like my lectures, not delivered each time word-for-word but very well-practiced, all the same. He would state a point, a concept, fill in some detail, give an example or two, and then come back and restate the point. He was doing what I try to do, to usher a few bits of information through my students’ brains, from the short- to the long-term memory.

And doing a good job of it, too. There were a number of things I learned on the tour that I’m not likely to forget. The difference between a balcony, a gallery, and a veranda. The technology of an above ground tomb. The sixty years of French rule, the forty years of Spanish, before the Americans took charge. Grasping this rough chronology gave me a new appreciation of the city’s history. Something took root in that single century, something particular, that continues to bear fruit to this day.

In preparation for our trip, I had re-watched “Gumbo,” the first episode of Ken Burns’ documentary series, Jazz. Wynton Marsalis is one of the great voices in that series, articulating much about the music and the city that gave it birth. “Jazz music celebrates life, human life, the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the profundity of it–and it deals with it.”

I remembered this quote as we wheeled down the boulevards that serve as the borders between neighborhoods—“neutral ground,” John told us. It reminded me of David Simon’s HBO series, Tremé, about post-Katrina New Orleans. Simon’s argument in that series can be boiled down to the following: look what we almost lost; look what we’re still in danger of losing.

One of the members of our party, a Californian traveling with her husband, had Katrina on her mind. “Was this part flooded?” she would ask as we crossed from one neighborhood to another. John would answer without elaboration. Finally he said, with a touch of exasperation, “We’ve been here three hundred years—that was just one storm.” Katrina played such a role in one President’s political fortunes, and perhaps in the election of his successor, I wondered if the topic wasn’t another racially-charged minefield that required steering around.

And yet I began to notice that we weren’t always on neutral ground. Andrew Jackson may have won the battle of New Orleans, John admitted, but otherwise was “not a good guy.” Slavery would get a mention after all, as would the Trail of Tears. In the cemetery we visited, among the somber, rough and crooked tombs slowly baking their contents into ash was a castle-shaped mausoleum, built of polished stone, with wooden doors and stained-glass windows, and outfitted with climate-control. Our affable guide didn’t hide his disapproval. All it lacked, he suggested, was a disco ball.

Other remarks were dropped here and there, some choice commentary, let’s say, to go along with the facts. Interpretation wasn’t totally absent. It was just that things were carefully managed as to restrict it to a single source. In this, too, I recognized a kinsman. I have my captive audience. I like to deliver my point of view. And I tend to manage, at least most of the time, to avoid controversy or disagreement. But I’m not going to explore the matter further. Let’s keep things upbeat and move along.

A version of this essay appears at the Society for US Intellectual History blog. 

The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon at a distance of about 29,000 kilometres (18,000 mi). It shows Africa, Antarctica, and the Arabian Peninsula. Image credit: NASA.

The story, perhaps a legend, goes something like this: a handful of photographs of the earth in space, supplied by the Apollo missions during the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, clarified for humankind the wholeness and lonely fragility of our planet. In an instant, all wars became civil wars, all fights fights between family, and the necessity of caring for our shared environment a shattering revelation.

Ritual re-tellings came last December in news articles commemorating the fifty-year anniversary of “Earthrise,” taken by the astronauts on Apollo 8.  The photo provided “a unifying expression of vulnerability,” said the story in The Washington Post. The photo became the environmental movement’s icon, the story in The New York Times reported, “a gift of perspective at the end of a dark year.” As iconic as “Earthrise” is “The Blue Marble,” taken by Apollo 17 in 1972, which has been called “the most environmental photograph ever taken.”

This view of the rising Earth was captured by Apollo 8 astronauts on December 24, 1968 as they came from behind the Moon after the fourth nearside orbit. The photo is displayed here in its original orientation, though it is more commonly viewed with the lunar surface at the bottom of the photo. Image credit: NASA.

The story is often accompanied by some version of this flourish: Isn’t it ironic that these very images that made us newly reverent for the environment came from the space program, which the environmentalists of the time had disparaged? The unspoken message being, of course, good thing we didn’t listen to them! What I’m suggesting here is what if these photos–“Earthrise,” “The Blue Marble,” and their like, as exquisite as they are–didn’t mark change but continuity? What if what is celebrated as new perspective was actually the stubborn persistence of the old?

These questions are among several I took from viewing “Inside,” a recent lecture by Bruno Latour, available on Youtube. An October 2018 article in The New York Times Magazine alerted me to it, a piece by Ava Kofman about Latour, about his new book, Down To Earth, and about our particular post-truth moment. Latour attributes much of that moment to the fact that we find ourselves disoriented in time and space, due largely to a misleading cosmology. Images of the earth in space are only the most prominent example of an insistence on perceiving ourselves from outside the world. It is as if we’d actually lived Plato’s myth and exited the cave into an ether of pristine abstraction and objectivity. This perception of our home as a globe in space has paralleled our striving for universals in political life and the globalization of the economy.

As an alternative, Latour invites his audience to join him back inside “caveland,” where it’s dark, wet, complex, and confusing. The lecture is a collaboration with some artists and designers whose projected 3-D images surround Latour on the stage as he speaks, sometimes obscuring him completely. Watching and listening, I was reminded of the outdoor installations I saw last year at the AURORA exhibit in downtown Dallas, which I wrote about here on the blog. Latour and his collaborators, like the AURORA artists, seem to begin from the premise that we require radical reorientation to bring perception and experience into sync.

The cave image works as commentary on Western thought, but a cave, enclosed and underground, obscured more by an absence of light than by apparent complexity, isn’t really what Latour offers as an alternative to the image of the globe. Rather, he describes our home as a “critical zone,” a thin layer of sun-energized life atop the compressed remnants of the past. The critical zone consists of “nothing but the activity of the living.” It’s sensitive, fragile, far from equilibrium, and hard to know. Most of all, though, it’s relatively small and thin—”tiny, tiny, tiny,” “a varnish, really”—yet containing “everything we care for, everything we have ever encountered.”

The Apollo photos do capture something of this in the earth’s surface glow, a vibrancy indicating organization and life. Seeing this from outside, however, extracts us from it, Latour argues. We can’t represent home and be in it simultaneously. The critical zone is an attempt to overcome this paradox. By inverting the globe, flattening and refolding it “like a tart,” he and his collaborators place us inside a kind of whirlpool, a vortex of processes in the sunshine, some of those processes close and moving quickly, others moving more slowly and thus harder to detect. The systems theorist Gregory Bateson would likely have smiled on this conception of complexly interrelated circuits running transforms of meaning in varying spans of time.

Link: http://ga.geidai.ac.jp/en/indepth/bruno2018en/

On Christmas Day, 1968, the day after “Earthrise” was first published, poet and writer Archibald MacLeish offered an appreciation which was published on the front page of the Times. His brief column may indeed be the source of the “Earthrise” legend, or in any case, it’s first telling. “Men’s conception of themselves and each other has always depended on their notion of the earth,” he begins. He then employs a history of thought that, while not uncontested, is still in use today. First there was “the medieval notion,” which placed men at the center of the universe. Later there was “the nuclear notion,” which removed them from that center and made them “helpless victims in a senseless farce.” But now, with this photograph, we’d seen earth for the first time “from the depths of space,” “whole and beautiful and round and small.” Perhaps now a new notion of the earth, and of ourselves, was possible, and we could see ourselves “together, brothers on that that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.” Senselessness, might be exchanged for solidarity, presumably, and “man may at last become himself.”

Although shorn of patriarchal language and modernist despair, Latour’s scheme is formally similar. Instead of “medieval” and “nuclear,” Latour uses the terms “local” and “global.” Whereas MacLeish presents a linear march forward, one notion replacing the one before, Latour recognizes the local and the global as concurrent modes. The West’s current political situation is such that the universals of the global have been discredited and so are being abandoned for the walled-off assurances of the local. Meanwhile the denial of the climate crisis, a crucial intellectual component to this movement, allows the new localists to blame the failures of the global on those outside the walls. Latour’s critical zone is an attempt to “triangulate” the local and global in a different way–a way that faces climate deterioration full on.

The strength of the critical zone as a representation, as Latour himself admits, is that it foregrounds “processes and transformation.” That seems right. As a scholar trained in intellectual history exploring the environmental humanities, I’ve written numerous sentences over the years about the need to reorganize perception, to provide a new account of reality, a new imaginary, etc. So I applaud and admire the efforts of Latour and his collaborators to do just that.

This is especially impressive because I also often wonder, can this actually happen? Can epistemology be rebuilt from the ground up? Can we provide an answer to our current disorientation–an alternative notion, to use MacLeish’s word–that isn’t so strange as to disorient ourselves all the more? At times I wonder if it hasn’t already happened, and that the many attempts at articulation are merely part of the vast apparatus of habit catching up to minds and hearts. Annoying questions! The jury is still out. The jury’s always out–it’s almost never in, come to think of it, living inside the critical zone.

A version of this post appears at the Society for US Intellectual History blog.

The Lavender Pit, Bisbee Arizona, 2018.

Driving into Bisbee, Arizona, last month, the first thing we saw was the old quarry. Coming in from the east, just before reaching Old Bisbee, you could pull into a lot, park, and peer through a chain-link fence into the enormous, red pit below. Earth-moving machines had raked and scalloped its walls. At the bottom was a pool of worrisome liquid, thick and red as–well, I’m not just being dramatic—it really looked like blood.

Bisbee was founded in 1880, a boom town near the border, where copper was mined. Like Butte, Montana, Bisbee is representative of industrial practice in the West in the decades after the Civil War. As the historian T. H. Watkins says in Stephen Ives’ documentary series, The West, “The mining industry, probably more than any other single industry, was designed specifically to get into the West, find what resources it had, dig them out, leave a wreck behind, get out, and move on someplace else.”

Not all had moved on. The mine closed in 1975, and Bisbee has survived as a small, remote high desert town. The historic district seems to have resurrected itself as an artist colony and bohemian enclave, with make-do homes up the mountain side, vintage hotels, funky shops, galleries, and sites of tourism. It’s no ghost town, but it does seem to have a fascination with the ghosts of its past. Some of these ghosts may be the disappeared, the 1200 striking miners of 1917—mostly Mexican and Eastern European–who were gathered at gunpoint, packed into cattle cars, hauled off into the desert, and abandoned. Last year’s film, Bisbee ’17, part documentary, part reenactment, tells this story.

I thought about Bisbee, and the Watkins quote, when a week or so later, I watched the Coen brothers’ new film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The Scruggs story is only the first of six separate narratives, taken from an imagined book of Western tales. The segment that made me think of Bisbee was the one with Tom Waits, called “All Gold Canyon.” It begins with scenes of an idyllic canyon glade, glowing in the sun, where flora and fauna go about their days in perfect homeostasis. Balance is disturbed by the arrival of an old prospector, played by Waits. He pauses in the stream to do a little panning and discovers a few specks of gold. Intrigued, he conducts a series of experiments, digging holes, panning the dirt, eyeing the specks, calculating. With slow deliberation, he is systematically determining the best spot to dig in earnest. Soon the glade has a pock-marked patch, as if diseased.

Tom Waits as the prospector in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Much environmental philosophy stresses the need to be in relations with the world outside us, rather than to see it as dead matter to exploit as we wish. The old prospector does speak to “Mr. Pocket,” the vein of gold he is hunting, as if it were a living intelligence. I’m going to find you, Mr. Pocket. Sooner or later, I’ll track you down. The trust he places in his science proves sound. Eventually, he locates Mr. Pocket and reacts with a burst of maniacal laughter.

The idea of a lone prospector, talking to himself amidst the vastness of the American West, serves myth more than it does history. According to Ives’ The West, the westerners of the second half of the nineteenth century and after “were rugged individualists chiefly in their dreams. In real life they were likely to draw paychecks for digging in corporate mines, plowing corporate fields, or chasing corporate cattle.” This myth continues to support Western libertarianism, which tends to ignore the massive corporate and federal expenditures that have made collective living there viable.

Not that miners themselves aren’t rugged, tough individuals. Industrial mining requires brute strength and quick wits. It isn’t at all abstract. The point is to extract the ore; you can see it, you can weigh it, and you’re paid accordingly. One can appreciate how a miner would take pride in the job and be hesitant to give it up for paper pushing or the service industry.

These are the impressions I gathered, anyway, from the ancient miner who gave the Queen Copper Mine Tour in Bisbee. Leading us into the tunnels on rail cars, he told of how he’d gone into the mine right out of high school and stayed on through the years to its closing. Although he talked some about the history of the mind before his time and supplied some historical information, he didn’t mention the 1917 incident. Rather, he seemed to most want us to know what good money he’d made when he worked there, a base salary with a bonus tied to production. If I understood him correctly, he was pulling down well over a thousand a week, and that was in 1960s money.

He acknowledged the many dangers involved in the work but mostly to joke about it. Danger is best met with good humor. This stoicism in the face of hardship and death—long celebrated in Western myth –is one of the threads that ties the six stories of Buster Scruggs together. At times this stoicism is cheerful to the point of absurdity. Characters find themselves in dire straits: the savages are attacking, there’s a noose around your neck, a faster gun appears on the far end of Main Street. When conditions are boiled down to first principles, these heroes don’t flinch. Not only do they not flinch, they seem to lack the very capacity to flinch.

How do these myths function? On one level, the heroes are celebrated. On another, the principles are reinforced. Nature is red in tooth and claw; only the strong survive. If we didn’t manfully accept that fundamental reality, if we hid behind feminine sentimentality or “a pretense of humanitarianism,” as Theodore Roosevelt argued in his speech, “The Strenuous Life,” we might as well “leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation.” Myths about the fundamental nature of reality have been used to justify all manner of deeds and behaviors.

To get to Bisbee, we made the long drive to El Paso and then west along the border on I-10. The highway was abundant with border patrol vehicles. We passed through check points, saw officers operating sensors on poles. We saw the tent city outside Tornillo. The president was on the radio, arguing for his border wall, and threatening to shut down the government. It isn’t that he’s against immigration. He’s in favor of “merit” immigration, he explained. If you don’t have something valuable to trade, we have nothing for you, in other words.

It’s a policy that regards humanitarianism as a pretense, either to gain political advantage or to protect the weak from the brute fact that deep down, we’re all predators seeking the upper hand.

I thought about this policy of merit immigration when I watched another of the Western stories from the Coen brothers’ movie. This one, titled “Meal Ticket,” features an orator, a young man without arms and legs, whose impresario/handler takes him from town to town in a carny wagon. The orator specializes in Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Gettysburg Address, and the Cain and Abel story from the Bible. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Or is my brother a resource, from whom, through sharp dealing, I might extract a measure of gold? The films of the Coen brothers are often described as ironic, darkly comic, and misanthropic. Now critical seems a more apt word.

A version of this essay appears at The Society for US Intellectual History Blog.

A few Saturdays ago, just after sunset, a sizable chunk of downtown Dallas was converted into a giant public outdoor art event. It was a biennial exhibition of installations combining light, sound, and video that goes by the name AURORA. Maybe the noise and anguish of the midterms had inhaled my attention, but it almost got by me. Then I happened to catch one of the curators being interviewed on the radio the day before. Her description of the exhibition’s theme intrigued me.

“Whether dystopian or utopian, sci-fi or retro-futuristic,” I later read in the program, the artists were aiming “to open a dialogue about how we collectively envision our Future Worlds.”

During the past few years, I’ve devoted a good deal of time to readings in environmental thought, mainly that of academics, scholars, and public intellectuals. At times I feel a kind of sameness setting in. Arguments tend to stall before a similar set of conundrums. A transformation of values is called for to readdress “our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.”[1] Yet our means for doing this seem of necessity to be based on old metaphors, faulty narratives, and obsolete modes of perception.

This was why the theme “Future Worlds” intrigued me. When it came to envisioning a radically different future, were the artists doing any better than all those writers of discursive prose?

We caught the streetcar downtown the next evening.

The first two installations we saw set the terms of the exhibition and offered answers to some of my questions. “Melting Memories,” by Refik Anadol, was a projection of light against a back wall of the city hall building. The image was of an enormous, shallow box, set on its side, so that viewers would look directly into it. Inside was a continually morphing topography of fluid, foamy sand. What governed its constant movement? Anadol had gathered “data on the neural mechanisms of cognitive control” from a machine that “measures brain wave activity” and somehow rendered it into an algorithm.[2] This wasn’t a record of something that had happened in the past. This was something that seemed to be happening in the moment. To be frank, it looked alive.

“Melting Memories” by Refik Anadol. Photo: https://www.facebook.com/dallasaurora/

Coming around city hall to the vast public plaza out front, we literally stepped into the second installation. It was another projection, this time not against a wall but across a rectangular portion of the plaza itself. This piece, called “Digital Icons,” was described as “a giant light carpet” made of many-colored icons, familiar from “the early days of the computer era.” These icons appeared and disappeared around our feet, creating new patterns as we walked across them, responding differently to each of our individual steps.

“Digital Icons” by Miguel Chevalier. Photo by Cole Chaney.

The patterns moved around our feet; the people moved within the rectangle. Outside the rectangle, crowds were moving, too–across the plaza, the green spaces, the sidewalks and streets, gathering at and moving away from the glowing obelisks that marked each installation. If you could claim a perch that was distant enough to take it all in, the shapes you saw would be constantly moving, like the glowing sand in the sandbox, which was based on brain waves, on thought.

I paused to take stock. What did these shapes have in common? Open-ended motion. Unpredictability. Asymmetry–they were absorbing but not conventionally beautiful. A number of films had come to mind. One from long ago, the famous Koyaanisqatsi, disrupted commonplace perspectives by playing with film speed and other visual devices. The more recent Mother! combined fable with a similar acceleration of narrative time. In Annihilation, also recent, an alien presence breaks down barriers between organs, organisms, and species. All the hard divisions we’ve come to depend on are compromised. A scientist’s journey to investigate becomes one not of conquering an enemy but of overcoming repugnance at what she finds.

In each of these examples, technology is used to appropriate a natural dynamic in order to make visible something formerly unseen. The most direct of AURORA’s installations was one by Fabian Knecht, called “Freisetzung (Release).” Again the city hall building was used, this time the roof, from which a dense white smoke was somehow being emitted. The smoke billowed “freely for some time before dissipating.” As it did so, it changed continually “in terms of orientation and color to the given atmospheric conditions.” Again, all the characteristics I’ve described were on display: the unpredictability, the asymmetry, the ability to mesmerize and soothe. I could have stared at the smoke for quite a long time, as around a campfire I’ve stared for hours at flames.

Freisetzung (Release) by Fabian Knectht. Photo by bPaperlytete.

The program had used the term “dystopian,” but so far, these installations were all heart. They imagined futures that we could be a part of, if we could overcome resistance, expand our notions of what’s beautiful and what’s lovable, like the scientist in Annihilation does. Where was the unassailable threat and dread we typically feel when thinking about technology, climate change, and contemplating the future?

Kristin Lucas’s “Sick Waves,” the only piece that explicitly mentioned climate change, fed the interpretation I was moving toward. This was a light projection, too, but otherwise unlike the other pieces I’ve described. A series of concentric circles were programmed to place the viewer inside the formation of an ocean wave: to build, to spin, to crash, and then to start all over again. Of course, no real wave is so uniformly repeatable. None have that kind of perfectly balanced precision. These waves were sick, like the present we’re trying to imagine ourselves out of.

“Sick Waves” by Kristin Lucas. For more information on this artist, http://ow.ly/FKuz50jhKu1

Later that week, I was back to reading discursive prose. In a section of his 2017 book, Out of the Wreckage, environmentalist-journalist George Monbiot challenges the notion that an individual’s political principles are arrived at by rational means. This may be important to historians and other writers of discursive prose, we who prize rational argument and who are understandably wary of those who don’t. Yet people don’t put their political selves together rationally, Monbiot argues. They look to the community around them, and they try to belong. This isn’t necessarily a negative. “If we perceive ourselves to belong to a community in which people work together, to improve their lives, and then neighborhood, to enjoy each other’s company and help each other, that perception is likely to shape our political self-image.” Such an image could take the quality of a contagion.

I wondered about the verbs Monbiot uses in this sentence: feel, believe, say, belong; work, improve, enjoy. I tried to imagine these actions and the thread between them as shape in movement. Aesthetic experience has a way of re-wiring the brain.

This essay also appears at the Society for US Intellectual History Blog

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[1] The phrase is physicist David Bohm’s, quoted in Best and Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (New York: Guilford Press, 1997), 215.

[2] Unattributed quotations come from the exhibition’s program, found at the event website: https://dallasaurora.com/