Hegel, Waszek and Adorno: What rose? What cross?

The Preface to the Philosophy of Right contains three famous lines: about the identity of the rational and the actual, about the "rose in the cross of the present", and about Minerva’s owl flying at dusk. All are enigmatic and have been subject to numerous interpretations.

Here I will turn my attention to the rose in the cross of the present. The passage reads as follows:

What lies between reason as self-conscious spirit and reason as present actuality, what separates the former from the latter and prevents it from finding satisfaction in it, is the fetter of some abstraction or other which has not been liberated into [the form of] the concept. To recognize the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to delight in the present – this rational insight is the reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants to those who have received the inner call to comprehend, to preserve their subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial. (Hegel 1991:23)

This is a remarkable passage. It contains several clues as to what Hegel means by reconciliation. Apart from the statement about preserving "subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial, there is also the helpful hint that reconciliation means overcoming an "abstraction" that prevents spirit from recognizing itself in the "present actuality". Above all, there is the enigmatic line about reconciliation implying an ability to recognize "the rose in the cross of the present". What does this mean?


The temple of the Rose Cross, 1618

The image evoked by this phrase is rich. The pairing of the rose and the cross appears to have been inspired by the Rosicrucians. The conventional interpretation tells us that the rose is wisdom and the cross suffering. The image of the cross also suggests a link to the Christian tradition according to which redemption is gained through the suffering and death of God, the most negative and absurd event possible from the point of view of a believer. Even when shed of its religious connotations, this imagery suggests that Hegel is putting reason to a tremendously difficult task, namely to find meaning in a suffering so absurd that it seems to disrupt the very idea of meaning. This is supported by Hegel's own hand-written lecture notes: "The present appears to reflection, and especially to self-conceit, as a cross (indeed, of necessity) - and philosophy teaches [us] to recognize the rose - i.e. reason - in this cross" (quoted in Hegel 1991:391 fn27). Added to this is the strong claim that such a reconciliation will enable us to actually delight in the suffering of the present. As if to underline this element of delight, Hegel tells us: "Here is the rose, dance here!" - his own alternative translation of "Hic Rhodus, hic salta" ("Here is Rhodes, jump here"), which is made possible by the fact that rhodus can mean either Rhodes or rose in Latin, while salta can mean either jump or dance.

So the meaning of the "rose in the cross" would be that comprehending the rationality of the seemingly negative will enable us to delight in the present? Fine so far, but the riddle is still not entirely resolved. The crucial question still remains as to how more specifically we are to think of the role of the negative on the road to this reconciliation. Aren't there two ways of interpreting this role? On the one hand, the negative can be conceived of as a stepping-stone, as a suffering that drives spirit or mind onwards in its development and which is then, retrospectively, made meaningful as a necessary moment in this development and thus redeemed as something "positive". To clarify how this works, we can think of how the experience of a crippling, traumatic loss can make a person more considerate of others and less selfish. It is easy to image such a person saying that "the loss made me a better man". We can also think of how the horrors of the world war symbolized by "Auschwitz" or "Hiroshima"  generated a widespread commitment that such horrors must never again be repeated and in that sense became constitutive of the widespread pacifism and aversion to racism characteristic of the postwar order.

On the other hand, the negative can also be thought of as an endpoint, as a kind of non plus ultra which spirit must accept as it is rather than try to overcome. Once we experience the present as a "cross", our task would then not be to think our way out of suffering or escape it by "changing the world", as Marx urged us to do, but to find peace in this very present itself, and to delight in it despite the suffering. The death of a loved one, for example, is not something we can possible overcome. The only way to reconcile ourselves to it is by recognizing the pain as incurable, as a loss that will mark us for the rest of our lives.

Norbert Waszek clearly prefers the latter reading. Linking the passage about "the rose in the cross" to the passage about "the tremendous power of the negative" in the Preface to the Phenomenology, he claims that the meaning of the former is that reason must “tarry with the negative” rather than try to overcome it. Here is the relevant passage from the Phenomenology:

... this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure "I". Death... is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength... But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject. (Hegel 1998:19)

The linkage between the two passages is underpinned by the word "death" which - as Walter Kaufmann (1977:51 n29) points out - probably alludes to crucifixion and resurrection. Based on this linkage, Waszek claims that Hegel’s image of the rose signifies “a qualified ‘Yes’ to reality... but the qualification contains nothing less than all evil and suffering” - a fact that Waszek believes betrays a “congeniality with Meister Eckhart” (Waszek 1988:5). Waszek goes on to criticize both "rationalist humanism" and "revolutionary Marxism" for being unable to "drink the cup that Hegel drinks of". While the rationalist philanthropists will squirm and the Marxists refer to their utopia, “only Hegel did not falter”. This is also why he believes that Hegel's rose in the cross of the present remains "the ultimate challenge" in today's world in which “optimistic rationalism could not withstand the disasters of this century” and “Marxism betrayed the youth the followed it so eagerly” (ibid. 5f).

Waszek's interpretation is impressive. There is an undeniable appeal in this image of Hegel as a thinker preaching that our only way to come to terms with suffering and regain ourselves is through a form of self-sacrifice, through the power of "looking the negative in the face" and willingly risking one's entire being in the process of letting oneself be reshaped by the experience of evil and suffering.

But at the same time there is something wrong with this interpretation. To bring the problem into view, we can recall that Hegel in the passage about the "rose in the cross" describes reconciliation as a "reconciliation with actuality". Actuality, as any reader of Hegel knows, has a very specific meaning. Hegel is quite explicit that "actuality" is not to be confused with the messy empirical reality in which he happen to live and suffer. This is what renders his famous statement that "what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational" understandable. It is far from being an arrogant assertion that the empirical world we're living in is wholly rational. The actual is not everything that empirically exists, but only that which exists in conformity with reason. As he puts it in the Philosophy of Right, “nothing is actual except the Idea” (Hegel 1991:20) (for more about what Hegel means by the Idea, see this post).

This means that when Hegel speaks of the "cross of the present", this present must be understood not as our present empirical reality but as actuality, i.e. the Idea as realized today. To recognize oneself in the Idea does not necessarily imply any acceptance of all the suffering we are experiencing. On the contrary, it may very well mean that we reject the present reality of suffering in the name of the Idea. This is where a crack opens up in the argument where the Marxists and even the "rational humanists" criticized by Waszek can walk back in. From a Hegelian standpoint, it is quite possible to recognize the rose in the cross in the present and still strive to change empirial reality.

Let us return to the passage about the "tremendous power of the negative". While Waszek stresses the importance of finding wisdom not in overcoming suffering but in reconciling oneself to it, the passage can also be given a quite different reading. Tarrying doesn't mean staying for ever. It is precisely by tarrying with the negative that thought can move ahead. The negative is the "energy of thought" that spurs it onwards, determining the development of its concepts. To return to the example of the postwar order, it is by thoroughly recognizing the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima - rather than averting one's eyes to them, pretending that a simple return to the prewar is possible - that a new postwar "subject" can be forged that will "never again" commit such crimes.

What we end up with here is thus the very opposite of a "reconciliation with suffering". The point of tarrying with the negative is not to surrender to an ugly reality of genocide and mass bombings, but to let oneself be reshaped by the horror of that reality so that one will become like a new person, committed to changing that reality.

Not surprisingly, this latter interpretation is preferred in critical theory. Commenting on Hegel's passage on the "tremendous power of the negative", Adorno stresses the crucial role of the negative as an impetus of criticism that allows thinking to break out of the given and liberate itself from the "bad positivity" of the merely existing.

In the Preface to Phenomenology [Hegel] still characterized thought, the arch-enemy of that positivity, as the negative principle. The road to this is the simplest of reflections: what does not think, what surrenders to visibility, is inclined toward the badly positive… (Adorno 1973:38)

We can note here how diametrically opposed Waszek's and Adorno's interpretations are. The former reads Hegel as a mysticist affimer of suffering while the latter turns him into a critic of the status quo. While Adorno reads the "tremendous force of the negative" as a motor of criticism, Waszek turns it into a disempowerment of such criticism by reading criticism as a sign of weakness, an inability to stand suffering and to drink "the cup that Hegel drinks from".

So whose interpretation is right? Answering that question is not easy. As I've already argued, I believe that the interpretation of the "cross" as real empirical suffering cannot be sustained. Such an interpretation would require us to identify actuality with the empirically existing, a move which in turn would force us back to the old reading of Hegel as an arrogant conservative who really believed that everything empirically existing was rational. If we want to avoid that, we must concede that the suffering symbolized by the cross cannot simply be identical with all the suffering we experience in empirical reality. On the other hand, we cannot overlook the many passages - in Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history for instance - where Hegel is clearly preoccupied with real empirical suffering. Are we dealing then with an inconsistency in his system, a crack or an ambiguity that testifies to the impossibility of his project?

As far as I can see, there is only one interpretation that solves the riddle, namely to view the negative as the real, empirical suffering that accompanies the realization of the Idea. The prime example of such suffering offered by Hegel is the revolutionary terror of the French Revolution. It is well known that he criticized this revolution for its attempt at realizing abstract freedom which made it descend into a "fury of destruction" (Hegel 1991:38). Despite this, he kept affirming it as a necessary moment in the march of reason. In the Phenomenology he celebrated it as a "break of day that, like lightning, all at once reveals the edifice of the new world", and he reportedly continued to toast for it his entire life (Harris 1993:26). Considering how central this revolution was to Hegel and how often he returned to it in his writings, one might consider it to be his main model of negativity - and thus, indirectly, also for the "cross". As Losurdo points out, in his youth Hegel even used the "actual as rational" formula about it which later reappears in the Philosophy of Right (Losurdo 2004:32-28). At the very least this example shows us that his words about tarrying with the negative in no way implies political quietism or accepting the status quo. Rather, it means affirming a historical moment out of which a new order is born.

If this interpretation of negativity is correct then finding the "rose in the cross" is not possible in regard to all situations, but only in regard to certain historical moments when empirical reality moves closer to the Idea. This seems to be a decisive difference between Hegel and the religious attitude of constantly being able to detect holiness in everything in the manner of Meister Eckhart.

This means that Adorno is almost certainly more right that Waszek in regard to how "the tremendous power of the negative" should be interpreted. Before ending, however, I should also say something about the differences between Hegel and Adorno. In a sense, Adorno can be said to insist precisely on the empirical suffering neglected by Hegel. This includes all those shocks, disasters and setbacks of history that never contribute to the overall meaning of human history. Hegel pays no attention to such ruptures, probably because they seem irrelevant in regard to the development of Spirit. To him, the negative always remains contained within what can retrospectively be appropriated in thought by Spirit. The negative is affirmed, but only to the extent that Spirit is able to discover itself in the negative. Adorno, by contrast, holds on to all those moments when there is no rose to be found in the cross of the present. Neither Hegel nor Waszek dares to drink from that cup.

The tremendous power of the negative

References

Adorno, T. W. (1973) Negative Dialectics, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Harris, H. S. (1993) "Hegel's Intellectual Development to 1807”, pp 25-51, in Frederick C. Beiser (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed. Allen W. Wood, tr. H. B. Nisbet), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1998) Phenomenology of Spirit (tr. A. V. Miller), New Dehli: Shri Jainendra Press.

Kaufmann, Walter (1977) Hegel: Texts and Commentary, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Losurdo, Domenico (2004) Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns, Durham: Duke University Press.

Waszek, Norbert (1988) The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of ’Civil Society’, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Hegel and Fine: Sublation means concretion

One of the passages in Robert Fine's Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (2001) contains a beautiful definition of sublation:

'Sublation' (Aufhebung) is the name Hegel gives to the movement from the simple and abstract to the complex and concrete…. The relation between the simpler forms and the more complex is not merely one of progression, as if the state is a ‘higher form of right’ than individual personality; still less is it one of transcendence, as if the emergence of the state somehow makes individual personality redundant; nor is it one of reconciliation, as if the state resolves the conflicts and contradictions that previously tore civil society apart. The use of the term ‘sublation’ indicates a relation between preservation and transcendence in which both sides are kept in mind: it indicates that the contradictions present within the simpler forms of right are preserved as well as transcended in the more complex. (Fine 2001:33)

As the references to state and civil society indicate, this passage occurs as part of Fine's discussion of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This is a work where Fine's definition works perfectly, the entire work describing a movement from the most simple and abstract forms of right towards the complex, concrete forms of right embodied in the modern family, civil society and the state.

As is well known, what Hegel means by the concrete is not closeness to empirical facts as opposed to conceptual constructions (a “chair” is thus not more concrete than “furniture” since all concepts taken in isolation are equally abstract). Instead concretion is what you gain when you add determinations to a concept, capturing more and more of its aspects until you arrive at what Hegel calls the Idea, the concept in its full concretion. Abstract is simple and isolated while concrete is complex and embedded in determinations. To get a sense for what Hegel is doing, compare with Marx’ Capital. Here Marx works out his central concepts such as "commodity", "labour" and so on by gradually illuminating their mutual relations in the course of the exposition. The result is a concrete model of capitalism that captures something essential about our present society without corresponding exactly to empirical reality. In Hegelian terms, one might say that he presents the Idea of capitalist society.

Fine's definition helps us come to terms with the well-known riddle of how the sublated contradictions can simultaneously be preserved and transcended. Such a simultaneity is hard to fathom if seen as a logical operation, but begins to seem almost natural and self-evident if we change perspective and view sublation simply as a movement of thought towards a more concrete and complex grasp of our object. Almost all objects are complex in the sense that they are determined in multiple ways that at first sight appear contradictory; yet at the same time all these determinations of course coexist in sustaining the object. The fact that a person is a loving father may, for instance, be "negated" by duties related to his occupation that prevent him from spending much time at home - yet both parenthood and occupation form part of what determines him as a concrete person. Such a person may well be plagued by pangs of conscience, but in many cases he will also have developed a modus vivendi that helps him manage his life and to secure a measure of understanding from family members, colleagues and friends. In this way, the demands of parenthood and occupation can be seen as things that are not just negative but also productive or constitutive. They produce our "Idea" of this person and the way he manages his life.

I'm also attracted to Fine's definition since it suggests that dialectics as a whole can be viewed as a movement of thought that unfolds by adding concretion. Dialectics is what happens to thought as it closes in on the idea from an abstract starting point, each moment of "negativity" implying added concretion. There's a simple - almost seductive - beauty to this idea, which helps us discard many connotations of the term "dialectics" which are not very helpful in grasping the Philosophy of Right. Thus dialectics has been viewed as a logic through which thought arrives at new findings, as a principle of historical development, and also as a way of justifying the present social order as rational.

Using Fine's definition it becomes clear that dialectics cannot be a deduction or logical derivation, nor a description of a historical development. Hegel himself confirms this in the Philosophy of Right, where he is explicit about the fact that dialectics cannot produce anything like a new conclusion or finding. The initial abstract concept is never abandoned, but merely enriched. The endpoint is not new, but is already given in the form of the modern political order. The latter is already historically present and merely needs to be comprehended.

The Idea… is initially no more than an abstract concept. But this initial abstract concept is never abandoned. On the contrary, it merely becomes continually richer in itself, so that the last determination is also the richest… One cannot therefore say that the concept arrives at anything new... What we obtain in this way… is a series of thoughts and another series of existent shapes, in which it may happen that the temporal sequence of their actual appearance is to some extent different from the conceptual sequence. Thus, we cannot say, for example, that property existed before the family, although property is nevertheless dealt with first. (Hegel 1991:61)

Again and again, Hegel stresses that his only task is to comprehend the present. Philosophy is thus simply “its own time comprehended in thoughts” (ibid. 21). The truth concerning right, ethics and the state is already here, he writes, but it needs to be comprehended (ibid. 11). Similarly, to return to our example of the conflict-torn father, there is clearly no logical necessity leading from parenthood to occuption; nor is there anything that says that there is only one way to deal with the contradiction. All we can say is that all these moments were necessary in order for this person to become what he is. The only necessity we can discern is retrospective.

Fine's definition thus helps us get a clearer grasp of the "necessity" that ties the Hegelian whole together. As mentioned, this can neither be logical necessity in a strict sense, nor a historical causal necessity. Nevertheless, it does make sense to speak of a certain form of necessity to any movement of thought that earnestly tries to comprehend "its own time". Seyla Benhabib remarks in one of her articles that Kant uses the word "necessity" in a way that appears strange to us today because he lived in a time before people were aware of any difference between the natural and the human or social sciences (Benhabib 1988). The same could be said for Hegel. Today, many of us would probably say that human or social phenomena need to be grasped through methods that involve some form of hermeutical procedure or interpretation. Hegelian dialectics too seems to conform to this hermeneutical model in the sense that it retrospectively tries to understand "our times". Thus it is "necessary" to pay attention to civil society to understand the modern, rational state. To use our example of the father, the contradiction of work and parenthood was "necessary" to make him the person he is.

If dialectics is disconnected from logical or causal necessity, then it also becomes more historically open-ended. It simply closes in on whatever happens to be actual, endeavouring to comprehend it as concretely as possible, but without ever saying that this is the way things must be or that they can't change in the future. This also means that dialectics cannot really be used to justify the present order. This may seem surprising since Hegel has so often been charged with glorifying the Prussian society of his time. But if dialectics simply consists in grasping the actual state of the idea concretely, then it is bound to do so in regard to any present, regardless of how good or bad it is. An example of the consequences of this interpretation comes when Fine discusses Hegel's views about the modern political system of representation and the many exclusions and limitations that accompanied this system.

It was not Hegel’s opinion that women ought to be excluded, nor that the democratic element ought to be supervised by state officials… This is just the way things are in certain forms of representative government once we view it stripped of its mystique. This is the reality of representation in the modern state. (Fine 2001:64f)

He was not an apologist for this order, Fine argues, since he merely let his dialectic move towards a goal that was given by history, namely the Idea as it was manifested in the society of his times. The dialectic is stripped of all connotations of deduction or justification. It simply approaches the concrete, ending up in “the way things are”.

One might object to my interpretation that if the endpoint of dialectics is the present state of an Idea that merely needs to be grasped in a more concrete fashion, then dialectics is no method at all. Isn't it just be a technique of presentation, whereby the reader is guided from an abstract starting point towards a fuller and more concrete comprehension of that complex Idea? But this is not necessarily so, at least not if we take Hegel on his word when he says that the Idea hasn't yet been fully comprehended. There are almost more determinations to add. Dialectics can be seen as the means whereby we move closer to this comprehension without ever achieving it fully. It would then be more than a matter of exposition. In dialectics, thought strives towards an Idea that preexists it objectively but whose full concretion still eludes it.

A second objection. This interpretation might make sense when applied to the Philosophy of Right or Capital. In both of these works, the dialectic is a matter of tracing relations between concepts and thus gradually achieving a fuller and more concrete picture. Neither is it really concerned with depicting historical development. But how does this interpretation fare when applied to Hegel's other works - such as those that clearly work with a historical or developmental dialectic, like the Phenomenology or the lectures on the philosophy of world history? A similar problem can be discerned in Marxist thought, where dialectics is used not merely to explain the workings of capitalism but also the course of history. In view of this objection, one would probably have to recognize that the interpretation I'm offering here mainly works for one kind of dialectic - the kind referred to by Taylor as "ontological" as opposed to the other "historical" form of the dialectic (Taylor 1979, Ch I:8).

A third objection also deals with change, but from another angle. If dialectics is wholly disconnected from justification, simply closing in on whatever stage of its development the idea happens to have arrived at, can Hegel then never criticize what is, the Idea as concretely unfolded? Does he have to accept the exclusion of women from political representation, for example? The kind of criticism that he does seem to allow for is highly limited - namely either a criticism of concepts for still being too abstract or a criticism of reality for failing to live up its Idea. In any case, in Hegel the Idea in itself seems immune against criticism, no matter defective it might appear. To use his own simile, it is the "cross" in which reason must find the rose.

The interpretation of dialectics I have presented here is attractive but it also has some problematic implications. I will come back to them later, in a few entries which I promise to post soon. The first of them will deal with the rose in the cross.


References

Benhabib, Seyla (1988) “Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Arendt’s Thought”, Political Theory 16(1):29-51.

Fine, Robert (2001) Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt, London: Routledge.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed. Allen W. Wood, tr. H. B. Nisbet), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Charles (1979) Hegel and Modern Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Karatani: On Yanagita Kunio and nomadism

Last year I read two new books in which Karatani Kôjin follows up on his ideas in The Structure of World History. One of them is Yûdôron - Yanagita Kunio to yamabito (Nomadism - Yanagita Kunio and the mountain people), the other is Teikoku no kôzô (The structure of empire). I'd like to make some remarks about the former here, postponing a discussion of the latter to some other day.

In Yûdôron Karatani presents an interesting and provocative reading of the folklorist Yanagita Kunio. A common criticism against Yanagita in recent decades has been that although he showed interest in marginal populations like the "mountain people" (yamabito) or various itinerant groups (hyôhakumin) when he was young, he turned his back to them in his mature writings, where he instead focused on establishing a nationalistically flavoured “one-nation ethnology” (ikkoku minzokugaku) centred on the image of settled, rice-cultivating jômin (abiding or permanent people). According to Karatani, it was no coincidence that such criticism started to be aired in the 1970s and 1980s, when the global turn of Japanese capitalism encouraged the spread of postmodernism, and ideas such as Deleuze & Guattari's "nomadology" and criticism of Japanese "closure" were in tune with the deterritorializing movement of Japanese global capital (Karatani 2014:9f, 39). 

Yanagita Kunio

Karatani defends Yanagita by pointing out that he was a person who went against and resisted the prevailing mood of the times – unlike his latter day postmodernist critics. The 1930s, the period when Yanagita started to focus on the jômin, was another period of Japanese expansion when nomadism was in vogue. Imperialism was bolstered by an ideology of breaking out of the constrained space of the Japanese islands, of new open horizons opening up in Manchuria, and by the celebration of "nomadic" rônin in films and literature.

By pointing this out, Karatani attempts to establish Yanagita’s credentials as a person who remained true to the radical political ideals of his earlier period, but who deliberately stopped voicing them - at least in a certain form - when he realized that they might be recuperated by the prevailing ideologies. As Japan turned towards imperialist expansion, ideologies like the “philosophy of world history” became dominant. This "philosophy" attempted to read a world-historical meaning into Japan's war with the Western powers and Western modernity. It was propagated by the Kyoto School, a philosophical school which is sometimes viewed as a forerunner of postmodernism and which regained popularity in Japan along with postmodernism. People dissatisfied with such ideologies, Karatani states, found rescue in Yanagita’s work and even today he remains a crucial resource for people dissatisfied with global capitalism (ibid. 31).

Shiiba village

Why did Yanagita start to focus on the "mountain people" to begin with? Not because of influence from romantic literature or any romantic fascination with supernatural, as some commentators like Ôtsuka Eiji have suggested. Instead, Karatani claims that Yanagita’s thought cannot be separated from the economy in the old sense of saving the people from starvation (as expressed in the term keisei saimin, "ordering the world and saving the people"which is the origin of the modern Japanese word for economy). What he strove for was a policy of collective self-help (kyôdô jijo) by farmers independent of the state (ibid. 58). 

Swidden (yakihata) is still practiced in Shiiba Village

                                                                             
During his travels as a bureaucrat and agricultural scholar, he was shocked by his visit to Shiiba Village, a mountain village on Kyushu whose inhabitants were living on swidden and boar-hunting. What he saw there was the idea of collective self-help in practice, and this awakened his interest in "mountain peoples" (ibid. 67f). Although the settled agriculturalists on the plains viewed these mountain dwellers as uncanny and primitive, Karatani follows James Scott’s work on “Zomia” in describing them as peoples who have made a voluntary choice to live a stateless life. Taking their refuge in the mountains they constructed egalitarian societies, living a mobile life of swidden and hunting, out of reach of the rice-cultivating "paddy kingdom" in the valleys with its centralized power and hierarchies. Yanagita himself referred to this lifestyle as socialism. Karatani claims that Yanagita never abandoned his interest in these mountain people, even though he stopped writing about them (ibid. 71f, 80, 88).

Two kinds of nomadism

To Karatani, it's important to distinguish between two kinds of nomadism. According to him, what Yanagita rejected in the 30’s when he turned to his “one-nation ethnology" was neither nomadism (yûdôsei) per se nor the socialist mutual help utopia of the society of hunters and gatherers he had seen in Shiiba Village, but only the nomadism of pastoralists (yûbokumin).

Before the nomadism of the pastoralists, there existed another kind, that of hunters and gatherers. Here a gift economy existed which was different from that described by Marcel Mauss. To Mauss there were no “pure gifts” - all gifts had to be returned according to a principle of mutuality. Karatani follows Marshall Sahlins in arguing that among hunters and gatherers gift giving was based on sharing or pooling rather than strict reciprocal exchange. Itinerant peoples share things since accumulating wealth is meaningless for them. Only when settled communities come into being does a form of mutual exchange based on strict reciprocity arise. Importantly, however, the idea of pooling or sharing continues to be important within communities even after settlement. While relations between communities take the form of mutual exchange, relations within communities are shaped according to the norm of sharing (ibid. 179). The continued importance of the ideal of sharing can be seen in the fact that it acts as a normative force that helps obstruct great inequalities even when accumulation of wealth and power become possible. Historically, this ideal of egalitarian sharing - which Karatani refers to a mode of exchange A (see Figure 1) - offers a possibility for checking the rise of the state and capital. For more on what Karatani means by modes of exchange, see my earlier post here.

Figure 1: Karatani's four modes of exchange

The nomadism of hunters and gatherers shouldn’t be confused with that of the pastoralists, who already live within a division of labour with settled agricultural communities and whose lifestyles are eminently compatible with state power as well as capitalism. As warriors (Deleuze & Guattari's nomadic war machine), the pastoralists created states and empires (mode of exchange B), and as itinerant merchants and artisans, they contributed to to the rise of capitalism (mode of exchange C).

Pastoral nomads move between communities, and by commodities or war they penetrate, invade and rule the interior of the communities. In terms of mode of exchange, the nomadism of pastoral nomads is not guided by that of A, but of B and C. (ibid. 189f)

Karatani points out that even Scott’s Zomian hill peoples take part in various exchanges with the "paddy kingdoms" of the plains, so they too differ from the primordial bands of hunters and gatherers. Deleuze & Guattari’s “nomadology” was modelled on the image of pastoral nomads, but such nomads cannot offer a principle for overcoming state and capital. Instead they "call" both state and capital into being, as modes of exchange suited to their own movement between settled communities. In order to find a key for overcoming state and capital, one needs to turn to the nomadism of the hunters and gatherers (ibid. 190ff).

Karatani's criticism of Yoshimoto and Amino

Among the most interesting pars of the book is where Karatani criticizes other leading intellectuals like Yoshimoto Takaaki and Amino Yoshihiko.

Yoshimoto Takaaki is criticized for merely being interested in the cultural aspects of Yanagita’s work. Yoshimoto’s work Kyôdôgensôron (A theory of communal illusion) was one of the works that popularized Yanagita in the 60's, but the way it treats Yanagita is typical of the tendency to read him as a mere researcher of folk beliefs and culture. Karatani remarks that Yoshimoto here follows the general trend among postwar Marxist critics, who tended to focus on culture, ideology or hegemony in response to the failure of revolution and the defeat of Marxism by fascism in previous decades. According to Karatani, what Yoshimoto called "communal illusion" was simply another word for the ideological superstructure. To Karatani, however, Yanagita's work can’t be separated from agricultural policy, i.e. from the economic “base”(ibid. 30-33). 

Amino Yoshihiko

Karatani's critique of Amino Yoshihiko is more respectful but also more thoroughgoing. With the vogue of interest in outcasts, indigenous people and minorities in the 70s and 80s, Amino - who until then had been isolated among Japanese historians - started to become widely read. Although Amino's writings on “non-agricultural peoples” in Japanese history looked like readymade for a critique of Yanagita, Amino never himself engaged in such a critique. Instead, his  target was the Kôzaha school of Marxism to which he had belonged in his youth. Unlike Yoshimoto, Amino never turned to focus solely on culture or the ideological superstructure. Instead he expanded the idea of the economic base to include not only modes of production but also what Karatani calls “modes of exchange”. As against the Kôzaha Marxists, who viewed feudalism as structured around the axis landlord-peasant, Amino emphasized a wider domain of circulation structured by the activities of non-agricultural peoples such as outcasts, artistic performers, traders, artisans, fishermen and religious specialists (ibid. 35f). By paying attention to these various groups, Amino showed that medieval Japanese society was structured by far more complex relations of authority and subordination as well as ideas about freedom than those characteristic of the landlord-peasant relation. He also showed that all of these relations had to be taken into account in order to understand the strength of the so-called emperor system in Japan.

Karatani argues that while Amino’s critique is valid against Kôzaha Marxism, it is not applicable to Yanagita (ibid. 37f). Karatani then delivers his basic criticism of Amino. Although it might look as if he and Amino have much in common - such as the focus on modes of exchange, the interest in exploring new ideas of the public suited to rootless, nomadic populations, and the question of how such ideas are linked freedom - he criticizes Amino for having mixed up two kinds of nomadism.

Firstly, there were the nomadic, non-agricultural strata Amino studied – artists and artisans – but as his own research bears out, these strata in fact functioned as a support for the emperor system and for many of the hierarchies structuring Japanese society. Capitalist merchants as well as warriors developed out of the non-agricultural stratum of artisans and performers of which they were originally part. While Amino starts out searching for ways to criticize the power of that system, he thus ends up painting a positive picture of the forces that support it.

Against the settled agriculturalists, Amino valorized the "non-agricultural peoples", i.e. itinerant artists. In them he tried to discern the key for overcoming the emperor system state. […]. However, although this type of nomads may negate setttledness and the hierarchies it brings with it, it should be noted that they at the same time directly link up with the state. In similar vein, nomadic pastoralists rejected settled society while forming a state ruling over the settled peoples. The emperor system state cannot be resisted by taking recourse to this type of nomadism, which is furthermore also unable to offer resistance to capital. (ibid. 40)

In Karatani's view, itinerant artists, traders and artisans are like pastoral nomads: by moving between settled communities, they nourish capitalist trade and "call" the imperial state into being as a power that transcends and integrates the local communities. 

Secondly, however, there are the mountain people Yanagita wrote about or the primitive bands of hunters and gatherers, where true equality and statelessness could be found. "Mountain peoples or nomadic hunters and gatherers may appears to resemble itinerant groups like artisans and performers, but are crucially different. Without paying attention to two varieties of nomadism [...] the predicament we find ourselves in today also cannot be understood" (ibid. 38).

Sanka, itinerant people of old Japan

 
Critical remarks

In my view, there are four points where Karatani's arguments fail to convince. 

Firstly, although his reinterpretation of Yanagita is interesting, I really cannot see that it explains Yanagita's move to focus on the jômin in the 30s. If Yanagita had really been pursuing a new form in which to realize his old dream of nomadism, then why would he focus on settled jômin which he himself portrayed as a mainspring of the settled, agricultural people and which he, as Karatani points out, believed “included the emperor” (ibid. 24)? Karatani’s rather feeble justification is that Yanagita at the same time turned to investigate individual religious beliefs which supposedly he thought were linked to the jômin, but this explanation still fails to clarify how a freedom associated with a "good" form of nomadism - that of hunters and gatherers - could be expressed in the figure of the jômin who where no nomads at all. To be sure, Karatani sees the "nation" as one way in which the ideal of egalitarian sharing can live on, but at least in this work Karatani fails do discuss the problems of the nation properly. What needs to be pointed out for the argument to advance in the direction Karatani wants to take it is that the nation too is nothing but a corrupt manifestation of the old ideal and that the nation as an ideology is just as complicit in supporting state and capitalism as the ideology of nomadism. This critique of the nation figures very prominently in other works by Karatani, but in this book it is for some reason almost wholly absent. The result is that Yanagita and his turn to a "one-nation ethnology" based on the jômin are left curiously uncriticized. The drawback of this for Karatani is that such a critique is exactly what would have been needed for his own argument to proceed properly. After all, what he wishes to show is that we mustn't rest satisfied with the egalitarian sharing of hunters and gatherers being resurrected in mode of exchange A (the nation), but proceed to the realization of mode of exchange D (the elusive "X" that resurrects all it on a higher plane beyond capital, state and nation). As he writes elsewhere, mode of exchange D is the only way to escape the present system, which is a "triad" or "borromean ring" in which nation, state and capital (mode of exchange A, B and C) mutually support and stabilize each other.

Shiiba Village

Secondly, the criticism of Amino seems unfair. To begin with, it seems strange to criticize Amino for the alleged emperor-worship of his non-agricultural “nomads” and to reject him in favor of Yanagita when, as Karatani makes clear, Yanagita himself also took part in this worship by including the emperor in the jômin. What I would like to hold on to in Amino’s portrayal of the various itinerant peoples of the Japanese archipelago is that they, in various ways, embodied remnants of an older idea of freedom which he referred to in his writings as muen. Amino is explicit about the fact that muen was never more than partly realized in medieval Japan. It is best understood from a Blochian perspective, as a radical but elusive Utopian truth-content which is always mixed up with ideological elements in its historical manifestations. Amino thus never denied the presence of hierarchies in the various communities and groups he studied, nor the fact that the energies of muen were often recuperated by the forces supporting the emperor-system or capitalism. If that is so, is his standpoint really so different from Karatani’s? Karatani's own idea of freedom is the elusive “X” (mode of exchange D, which resurrects mode of exchange A on a higher plane). As he himself points out, this "X" is hardly ever present in real history except as a transcendental utopian semblance, e.g. in world religions or the "imperial principle" used by empires to legitimate their rule. Considering Karatani's own celebratory account of the utopian aspects of "empire" in Teikoku no kôzô, it seems unfair to accuse Amino of having discerned similar utopian aspects of the medieval emperor-system. Why not be generous enough to recognize the presence of such a utopian semblance also in what Amino called muen? To be sure, Karatani claims that the nomadism of the type Amino discusses “is not a genuine recovery of the nomadism that existed before settlement” (ibid. 192), but what are his grounds for that claim? I fail to see why it would be impossible to see the ideal of muen as a reflection of the same Utopian promise that Karatani associates with the free and egalitarian sharing among hunters and gatherers. In fact, in a recent text (Karatani 2014b), Karatani discerns an agreement between his and Amino’s projects. Here he admits that what Amino called gen-muen (primordial muen) is similar to what Karatani himself wants to capture with his discussion about primordial nomads and yamabito, namely a form of model for communism.

Thirdly, I am skeptical against Karatani’s attempt to draw a water-tight line of demarcation between two types of nomads – those that affirm the state and those that reject it. Were the mountain peoples that he contrasts to the itinerant artists discussed by Amino really independent of the state? As Karatani points out, Scott acknowledges that a lot of trade and interaction took place between the Zomian hill tribes and the paddy kingdoms, and I wonder if something similar didn't also hold true of the Japanese mountain peoples (yamabito). Amino and other historians have documented how outcast groups (yama no min) similar to the mountain peoples were directly tied to the emperor or to temples, e.g. the Yasedôji living in the mountains north-east of Kyoto that were employed by the emperor as palanquin carriers and who were both despised and symbolically integrated into the state edifice as holy at the same time (e.g. Amino 2001:132). Is it really possible to uphold a strict line of demarcation between the yama no min and the yamabito? Even if hunters and gatherers existing before the state of course lacked such ties to the emperor, is it appropriate to let such hunters and gatherers be represented by the yamabito?

Yasedôji

Finally, what is the way to genuinely resurrect the primordial freedom of hunters and gatherers in the form of mode of exchange D? Here Karatani disappoints. He writes almost nothing about it, except that “it doesn’t exist in reality” (sore wa gen ni sonzai suru mono de ha nai) but is nevertheless compulsively repeated in history as a striving and that it was originally expressed in the guise of universal religion (Karatani 2014:193). Apart from his speculation about how the bands of hunters and gatherers must have lived in primordial times, no historical examples are given. What hope does Karatani possibly see in them today, after the rise of the state and the capitalist market which has driven them out of history? Karatani is driven to this extraordinarily weak position by his insistence that mode of exchange D must be free from all entanglement with state and capital. But rather than insisting on an impossible purity lacking in historical substance which can only be speculated to have existed in primordial times before settlement, isn't it better to accept the dialectical entanglement of myth and truth, ideology and truth content, and work with that towards the purity, even though we may never be able to grasp it or realize it fully?

Yet to Karatani it appears that anything that is not a real solution must be rejected. He is not content with a mere Utopian Vor-Schein or promise of happiness. The elusive X he is searching for must be able to function as a mode of exchange, as a way of actually structuring the interaction holding together a society. Even though Karatani's position is weak, this insistence must be respected. Once he pursued the solution in NAM (the New Associationist Movement), which existed 2000-2003 and which was his attempt to start up a social movement against state, capital and nation. At that time, he clearly believed he had found the winning formula in the "associationist" organization of NAM, which he thought would be able to operate according to other modes of exchange that those of state, capital or nation. After the failure of NAM, he has been forced to rely on what appears to be an almost desperate hope that the mode of exchange D will one day be resurrected and realized. 

Even today, however, there are some phenomena that give substance to his hope. In 2011, he participated in the post-Fukushima street demonstrations against nuclear power. In a talk with Matsumoto Hajime, one of the arrangers, he praised Matsumoto's group - a gathering of young people often referred to as the Amateur Riot (Shirôto no ran) - as a resurrection of the primordial bands of hunters and gatherers. 

It's interesting that you engaged in circle activities around homelessness at the university. If we enlarge the picture, the earliest stage of humanity was the society of nomadic hunters and gatherers. Since they didn't settle down, they were like homeless people. They wandered around in groups. So they were like a demonstration. They were equal, sharing all food with each other. At that time, what anthropologists call reciprocity didn't yet exist. Since they were on the move, they had no use of prey and other possessions so they gave them away. Looking at what you have been doing from your very first activities like homelessness, I get the feeling that you are resurrecting this nomadic tradition. (Karatani & Matsumoto 2012:118)

Later in the talk, he also praises the group's attempts to set up their own small alternative economy that helps them survive without support from the state or companies. It's almost as if he sees them as a fulfillment of the dream he once pursued in NAM. 

 

Amateur Riot - presentday nomads?

References 

Amino, Yoshihiko (2001 [1974]) Môko shûrai, Tokyo: Shôgakukan.

Karatani, Kôjin (2014) Yūdōron – Yanagita Kunio to yamabito, Tokyo: Bungei shunju.

Karatani (2014) “Amino Yoshihiko no komyunizumu”, Gendai shisô, Vol. 42-19 (Feb): 8-11

Karatani, Kôjin & Matsumoto, Hajime (2012) “Seikatsu to ittaika shita demo wa tezuyoi”, pp 116-129, in Genpatsu to demo, soshite minshushugi, Tokyo: Chikuma shobō.

Towards a post-apocalyptic environmentalism?

Just some thoughts on what looks like an interesting development in environmentalist discourse. For a long time the environmental movement has talked about the catastrophe in the future tense. Its rallying cry has been that we must act before it's too late. Even when protests have been directed at ongoing examples of environmental destruction, the tendency has usually been to stress the fundamental threat against nature and human life in general that will follow if business goes on as usual. As Thörn points out, the environmental movement stands out compared to most other movements through its "future-oriented pessimism": Utopia is less important as a mobilizing tool than the coming catastrophe or collapse (Thörn 1997: 322, 372).

Apocalyptic imagery is still regularly invoked in environmentalist discourse, not only by activists and NGOs but also by establishment figures (think Al Gore). Indeed, so often have we heard about melting polar caps, coming water shortages, hurricanes, floods and growing chaos that we are increasingly starting to see all this as part of an establishment discourse. Instead of being oppositional and system-critical, invoking the apocalypse increasingly seems to be part of a standard jargon, the comme-il-faut of respectable discourse. Or as Timothy Luke puts it: “Climate change now appears to be a collectively acted, globally produced, and continuously staged new disaster movie without a single director, but with billions of producers following simple scripts” (Luke 2015:291).

However, recently I've come across quite a few voices offering a different perspective.


Apocalyptic imagery and depoliticization

Let me start with the geographer Erik Swyngedouw, who believes that apocalyptic imagery has become part and parcel of a post-political framing of the climate. Rather than radicalizing or politicizing the climate issue, it coexists with depoliticization. "At the symbolic level, apocalyptic imaginaries are extraordinarily powerful in disavowing or displacing social conflict and antagonisms”, he points out (Swyngedouw 2010:219). The environmental movement itself is not innocent of this depoliticization. Along with its endorsement of the organs of global governance (the UNFCCC process, the Kyoto Protocol etc), it has become integrated as a stakeholder in the negotiations, abandoning contestation and replacing politics with management.

Swyngedouw further argues that in response to the apocalyptic establishment discourse, one ought to point out that to many people the apocalypse is already here, especially in the global south. To him, it is this insight that is mobilizing. People today increasingly protest not only out of fear for the future, but also out of anger at an already ongoing catastrophe and to demand justice.

In the face of the cataclysmic imaginaries mobilized to assure that the apocalypse will NOT happen (if the right techno-managerial actions are taken), the only reasonable response is "Don’t worry (Al Gore, Prince Charles, many environmental activists...), you are really right, the environmental apocalypse WILL not only happen, it has already happened, IT IS ALREADY HERE". (ibid. 2013:15)

Bringing this message home also means to redirect the struggle, which has to become an anti-capitalist struggle as well. It is simply not true that "if the ship goes down, the first-class passengers drown too". As on Titanic, many of the first-class passengers will find themselves a lifeboat. "The apocalypse is combined and uneven. And it is within this reality that political choices have to be made and sides taken” (ibid. 17).

Next, let me turn to the political scientist Chris Methmann. Like Swyngedouw, he observes that the evidence is mounting that alarmist reports invoking future catastrophes are insufficient to move politicians to take the necessary steps to curb the environmental destruction. Despite the apocalyptic imagery, environmentalist discourse rarely results in exceptional or extraordinary measures.

Why then does this apocalyptic discourse fail to produce extraordinary measures? Following Foucault, Methmann asks what is served by this seeming failure. Taking the CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) as an example, he argues that:

... the failure of CDM serves carbon governmentality to enfold its actual function. It brings about a way of governing the earth’s carbon cycle which purports to save the climate but in fact protects business as usual from climate protection. The failure of the CDM is the success of a depoliticization of climate change politics. (Methmann 2013:71)

He adds that “understanding the failure of the CDM as a success in depoliticization may enhance our understanding of the poor performance of present-day climate governance” (ibid. 86). Rather than destabilizing the hegemonic order, the apocalyptic imagery helps integrating environmentalist discourses into that very order without changing the basic structures of the world economy (for this more general argument, see also ibid. 2010). 

 

According to Methmann, then, the apocalyptic rhetoric is highly successful - if not in reducing emissions then in deflecting criticism of the system. This feat is achieved by constructing a "universal threat on a planetary scale" and invoking "humanity as a collective victim" while leaving the enemy unspecified. Meanwhile the discourse articulates climate change as "overstraining the capacity of political actors, and thus as ruling out exceptional measures" (Methmann & Rothe 2012:324, 329).

 

Both Swyngedouw and Methmann offer a critical perspective on the conventional environmental message about the coming catastrophe. That even established actors use an apocalyptic rhetoric does nothing to show that the climate summits are not depoliticized. On the contrary, as both Swyngedouw and Methmann show, this rhetoric is symbiotically connected to depoliticization.

Combined and uneven apocalypse

 

The picture offered by Swyngedouw and Methmann of a world in which apocalyptic destruction is allowed to play itself out unperturbed by an official "green" discourse which has become system-functional gives us glimpses into what could be called a post-apocalyptic sensibility. In literary theory, the "post-apocalypse" is already a well-established notion. James Berger, for instance, writes as follows:

Modernity is often said to be preoccupied by a sense of crisis, viewing it as imminent, perhaps even longing for, some conclusive catastrophe. This sense of crisis has not disappeared, but in the late twentieth century it exists together with another sense, that the conclusive catastrophe has already occurred, the crisis is over (perhaps we are not aware of exactly when it transpired), and the ceaseless activity of our time - the new with its procession of almost indistinguishable disasters - is only a complex form of stasis. (Berger 1999:xiii)

By a post-apocalyptic sensibility I mean a sensibility that becomes dominant when people start to experience themselves as powerless to prevent a loss which they once feared, when no-one hopes any longer that the ship mentioned by Swyngedouw can be saved. When that happens the loss is no longer experienced as a shock that needs to be averted or mastered, but is rather internalized as an inescapable fact which must be taken as the point of departure for all future political action, including attempts to salvage what can still be saved and demanding redress and settling wrongs. 

 

The third voice I would like to introduce here illuminates this stance. It is that of Evan Calder Williams, author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (2011).  The title is a pun on Trotsky's notion of combined and uneven development. Here is the key sentence:

The world is already apocalyptic. Just not all at the same time. To be overcome: the notion of apocalypse as eventual, the ground-clearing revelatory trauma that immediately founds a new nomos of the earth. In its place: combined and uneven apocalypse. (Williams 2011: 149)

The book is an exploration of “the apocalyptic fantasies of late capitalism” as revealed in film and literature. It also provides a useful way to expand on the arguments on environmentalist discourse made by Swyngedouw and Methmann. It does so through its much more thorough exploration of the idea that the apocalypse is already occurring, the "conviction… that disaster is not just around the corner but that the corner has already been turned" (ibid. 4). 

 

Williams stresses that the post-apocalypse is not a simple reflection of actual and future destruction. It is not an "image of that-to-be" but rather "a perspectival stance to be taken up now" (ibid. 157). "We become post-apocalyptic", he writes, "when we accept the present as rubbish" (ibid. 9). 

Central to his argument is the distinction between catastrophe and apocalypse. The catastrophe is "end without revelation" (ibid. 4f), the sad, meaningless destruction we all dread even as we see it all around ourselves. What then is apocalypse? A central trope in the book that clarifies this is that of salvagepunk. This is a vision of the world as broken and dead, "a world of stealing from the ruins, robbing the graves, and making do" (ibid. 70). In this world "the cataclysmic catastrophe… has already happened" and the work is to "uncover the revelations that never showed themselves: they are buried in all the rubble" (ibid. 11). 

 

The salvaging activity Williams evokes here is reminiscent of that of Benjamin, who advocated a "tactile" getting used to the dream-world of capitalism as a first step in order to dispel it (Benjamin 1977a:167). This was a strategy, not of subjecting the dream to an external critique, but of groping one’s way inside it in search of the dialectics of awakening at work within it. Just as for the Jews “every second was a small gate through which Messiah might enter” (ibid 1977b:261), so for Benjamin every piece of rags or refuse was a potential “dialectical image” which might trigger the sudden flash of recognition, the involuntary memory, which would help dispel the nightmare.

 

The revelations that Williams hopes to salvage, however, do not  bring about a clarification “allowing you to know fully where good and evil stand” as in the Judeo-Christian model. To him, “apocalypse is not the clarification itself but a wound of the present that exposes the unseen… from which after-work can begin to dig out all the failed starts, possible histories” (Williams 2011:6). This unseen is no ineffable mystic matter, but that which remains unseen within capitalism, all that escapes the logic of surplus-value – “everything that is worth a damn yet which does not produce value” (ibid. 8).

 

He affirms the political potential of this attitude, which he describes as a lens that helps bring out the weak possibilities for counteracting the ongoing catastrophe: “until we think of ourselves as the post-apocalyptic agents of this system’s ongoing apocalypse, we cannot counter this bleak trendline toward catastrophe” (ibid. 13).

 

Williams stands out by his attempt to theorize the post-apocalypse in the light of the "combined and uneven" way capitalism is wreaking havoc with the earth. That the crisis is over doesn't mean that all is peace. On the contrary, life in the rubbles is seldom peaceful. One way to bring this out is through another of the book's tropes, that of the zombie - the emblem in popular culture for “the terminal crisis that never ends or resolves” and the projection of the fear for the hungering masses and anxieties about overpopulation (ibid. 11). Passing through a variety of incarnations - from the mindless laborer to the mindless consumer and back - he ends with evoking another, that of the accuser:

We start here with the bloodied, one-eyed glare of the accusing, raised up to get beaten down again, the endless cycle of not being allowed to die and being blamed for the fact. Not the campy schlock of the mass moaning ‘brains…’ but the quiet rage and planning of the group in formation. Bourgeois, you have understood nothing. (ibid. 75)

 

Five varieties of contemporary post-apocalyptic environmentalism

 

With differing emphasis the texts mentioned above suggest that what needs to be put in focus is the ongoing "uneven" catastrophe (Swyngedouw, Williams) rather than the future catastrophe evoked by an apocalyptic rhetoric which deflects attention from socio-economic inequality and depoliticizes the climate issue (Swyngedouw, Methmann). Taken together they form part of a common discourse, which is suited to an environmentalist movement driven more by outrage at catastrophes that are already happening than by fear of future catastrophes. 

 

This discourse is admittedly fragmentary and its contours hazy. Yet it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that it has assumed somewhat clearer form in recent years. The widespread disappointment generated by the failed negotiations at the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen 2009 may have been one factor behind the growing skepticism regarding mainstream established environmentalism, the institutions of global climate governance, and the discourses associated with them.

 

Meanwhile, almost all well-known waves of protest that have infused fresh anti-institutional energy in the environmental movement in recent years seem to be nourished by already ongoing rather than future catastrophes. Let me mention five examples:

 

(1) The wave of environmental activism referred to as "blockadia" by Naomi Klein. “Blockadia is not a specific location on a map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines” (Klein 2014:294f). The wave of youth activism associated with names and labels like 350.org, Power Shift and the Keystone XL pipeline to a considerable extent seems driven not by fear for the future so much as concern at what is being destroyed here and now, in specific locales and in a way that victimizes specific groups, in order to put new technologies of extraction to use. As Klein points out these technologies all depend on the creation of clearly identifiable sacrifice zones – “places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed, for the supposed greater good of economic progress”. These places are often “bound up with notions of racial superiority, because in order to have sacrifice zones, you need to have people and cultures who count so little that they are considered deserving of sacrifice” (ibid. 169f).

 

(2) The struggles of indigenous peoples for whom the attempt to defend their autonomy and the rights of mother nature are a prolongation of their resistance against colonialism. Let me quote Arundhati Roy here: "If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them" (Roy 2010). For an example, take the Rights of Nature Tribunals, which were introduced an event I attended last year at the Cumbre de los pueblos in Peru, at the time of the COP20 in Lima. These are tribunals set up by activists, treating cases such as polluted water, oil spills, hydroelectric dams that will flood communities and cause major displacement, murdered anti-mining activists, "man-made earthquakes" caused by fracking, the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, the oil extraction in Yasuni in Ecuador, and attempts to commodify nature such as REDD+. It's impossible for me to do justice to the eloquence of the people presenting these cases. Suffice it to say that a message that was repeated, in various forms, by all speakers was this: we are suffering. Not in the future, but right now, already. Clearly what bothered them was not so much the threat of a catastrophe to come so much as the exploitation already going on, of nature as well as of the people living at the sites of extraction. 

 

(3) In the Japanese post-Fukushima anti-nuke movement, the catastrophe is certainly less perceived as a future possibility than as one that has already occurred. The disaster actualized a host of latent problems, not all of them environmental in a narrow sense. The impact on individuals, communities and economies was traumatic. Controversy engulfed reconstruction efforts, not least in regard to corruption and the involvement of organized crime in recruiting day laborers for the sanitation efforts. Fear of discrimination (similar to the discrimination of people who suffered radiation in Hiroshima or Nagasaki) also resurfaced. Mirroring the diverse array of issues, the anti-nuke movement is also heterogeneous. As one of its most sizable and visible contingents, it contains a "democracy movement" in which the role of freeter activists, many with a background in the precarity movement, has been central. Enraged in particular by the power of the nuclear establishment (the so-called "nuclear village") and more generally by the way power is exercised in Japan, many of these activists see the high-handed state as the prime enemy, rather than the threat to the environment per se. Also visible as distinct and forceful currents in the anti-nuke movement is a movement to support the destroyed Tōhoku communities through volunteerism and consumer initiatives, and a "zero becquerel" movement conducting radiation measurements in food, schoolyards and playgrounds. What fuels all these protests and activities is above all outrage at a catastrophe that has already occurred. To the extent that the future figures into the motivations it is in the form of fear of a repetition and anger at the persistence and survival of a deadly system in which the catastrophe may be repeated.

 

(4) In cultural movements like Dark Mountain, the catastrophe's arrival is accepted as inevitable. Even if it is still regarded as a future event, the basic stance expressed in documents such as the 2009 Uncivilisation manifesto is that since we can't stop it we'd better accept it and prepare ourselves. This too seems to be a stance that partakes of the post-apocalyptic sensibility, as one of its possible inflections or modifications. The founders of Dark Mountain are quite explicit that what motivated them to start the movement was disappointment in established environmentalism - the fact that none of its campaigns were succeeding and that environmentalists were not being honest with themselves. Instead of fearing the coming climate change with its attendant decline, depletion, chaos and hardships, they embrace it:

Together we are able to say it loud and clear: we are not going to 'save the planet'. The planet is not ours to save. The planet is not dying; but our civilisation might be, and neither green technology nor ethical shopping is going to prevent a serious crash. Curiously enough, accepting this reality brings about not despair, as some have suggested, but a great sense of hope. Once we stop pretending that the impossible can happen, we are released to think seriously about the future. This is what the Dark Mountain project is doing next. (Kingsnorth 2010)

Like in Williams, here too one seems to find a belief in salvage, that it is precisely by accepting the catastrophe that hope and possibilities for real action can be gained.

 

(5) In addition, the increasing weight given to adaptation and loss-and-damage at the expense of mitigation in the UNFCCC process can be seen as a weak reflex of the wider shift towards mobilization happening less because of the wish to prevent future catastrophe and more because of ongoing catastrophes or catastrophes regarded as inevitable. "Mitigation" in the UNFCCC parlance stands for emission reductions done to limit global warming, "adaptation" for efforts to adapt to the coming warming by limiting one's vulnerability, and "loss-and-damage" for efforts to compensate for the damage that will occur or that has already occurred.

 

 

The genealogy of post-apocalyptic environmentalism

 

If something like a post-apocalyptic environmentalist discourse is gaining sharper contours today, what is the genealogy of this discourse? It seems to me that there are at least two important sources. One is the shift towards a posttraumatic or postapocalyptic sensibility in film, literature and popular culture which I mentioned above (see Berger 1999, Cassegard 2007). The paradigmatic references here are probably cyberpunk and films like Blade Runner in the US and anime like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and AKIRA in Japan. This cultural current per se, however, is hardly a politicizing discourse. Being more linked to melancholia, sorrow, grief, and a vague longing for recovery and consolation, it is far from obvious how such a discourse plays in with movement activism.

 

Another and more politically energizing root of post-apocalyptic environmentalism can be found in early attempts, often by Marxist critics, of bringing back the issues of class and inequality into environmentalism. An early example is Cindi Katz, who in 1995 lambasted environmental apocalypticism for being "politically disabling", for disregarding inequalities of class and gender, and for focusing only on Malthusian solutions such as “limiting population and technology rather than attacking the social sources or resource inequality” (Katz 1995:276).

 

This argument is further developed in Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, a book written jointly by Sasha Lilley, Eddie Yuen, David McNally and James Davis. In this book, they offer a whole battery of arguments against what they call "catastrophism", the idea that society is headed for a collapse from which a new, better society will be born. As for capitalism, they deny that crises must presage its end. Indeed, capitalism lives of crises which fuel the system and open up new rounds of capital accumulation (Lilley et al 2012:6). They also criticize the idea, embraced by catastrophists, that the rhetoric of disaster will awaken the masses from their slumber. Instead, catastrophe can often be paralyzing rather than mobilizing. The environmental movement  misses that fear can hinder rather than help preventing the disaster (ibid. 2, 16). Instead of "the cold porridge of climate catastrophe”, they argue that the Left needs a spirit of joyful rebellion, such as expressed in the slogan "caviar for all" (ibid. 39, 43). Furthermore, they criticize the “we” or “everybody” so often invoked by catastrophism for erasing meaningful class and geographic differences - "Beware of plutocrats speaking of Spaceship Earth” (ibid. 26).

 

The message in Catastrophism isn’t post-apocalyptic by itself. The book's message is above all that we should refrain from apocalyptic rhetoric because it is counter-productive and politically incapacitating, not that the apocalypse is already here or that it must be the starting point of struggle, protest or salvage work. However, there are passages where the book does come close to Swyngedouw or Williams, as when Eddie Yuen writes: “The question is no longer whether there will be environmental catastrophes, but for whom. To paraphrase William Gibson, ‘the catastrophe is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed’” (ibid. 130 n2).

 

                                                             *

 

The rhetoric of the coming catastrophe has been a major mobilizing force behind the environmental movement for a long time. While apocalyptic imagery still dominates much of environmentalism, my interest here has been drawn to those voices that see the apocalypse as something that is already occurring and to those forms of activism that are fuelled less by the risk of a future catastrophe than by the experience of catastrophes that are already here.

 

If these voices and forms of activism are indicative of a larger shift in the environmental movement, then we may need to rethink several assumptions about the latter. For instance, the prominent role of natural scientists in the environmental movement may be changing. If the apocalypse is already here, movements may no longer need to rely so much on the authority of science as before and can be grounded more in the lived experience of people. Furthermore, since the apocalypse is indeed socially and geographically uneven, issues such as justice and inequality may well become permanent features of environmentalist discourse.  

 

Lastly, might we not also expect "recovery" to become a major goal of much environmental activism, along with older goals such as preserving nature or limiting damage? To me this seems like a development that is both likely and reasonable. By "recovery" I mean forms of activism that take as their point of departure a damage already done. When a nuclear reactor has suffered a meltdown, your home is destroyed by a hurricane, or your children develop cancer because of fracking, then mere preservation becomes a senseless goal. Post-apocalypse doesn't mean that it won't get any worse. It may certainly grow worse. But while preventing that, people must also redress wrongs, help victims and do what they can in the ruins.

 





Motoda Hisaharu, Ginza

 

References

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Benjamin, Walter (1977b) “Über den Begriff der Geschichte”, pp 251-261, in Illuminationen, Ausgewählte Schriften 1, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Berger, James (1999) After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cassegard, Carl (2007) Shock and Naturalization in Contemporary Japanese Literature, Folkestone: Global Oriental.

Katz, Cindi (1995) “Under the Falling Sky: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and the Production of Nature”, pp 276-282, in Antonion Callari et al (eds.) Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order, New York: The Guilford Press.

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