Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook
TEXT:
The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and realignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the interface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomorphic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemopolitical mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. Isabelle Stengers is professor of philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She is trained as a chemist and philosopher, and has authored and co-authored many books on the philosophy of science. In 1993 she received the grand price for philosophy from the Académie Francaise. Her last book published in English is Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism Isabelle Stengers Translated by Andrew Goffey OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Published by Open Humanities Press in collaboration with meson press 2015 Freely available online at http://dx.medra.org/10.14619/016 http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ in-catastrophic-times First published in French: Au temps des catastrophes. Résister à la barbarie qui vient © Editions LA DÉCOUVERTE, Paris, France, 2009 This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. ISBN (Print) 978-1-78542-009-2 ISBN (PDF): 978-1-78542-010-8 ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-78542-022-1 DOI: 10.14619/016 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. This book was published in collaboration with meson press, Hybrid Publishing Lab, Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Funded by the EU major project Innovation Incubator Lüneburg Contents Preface to the English Language Edition 7 Introduction 15 [ 1 ] Between Two Histories 17 [ 2 ] The Epoch Has Changed 27 [ 3 ] The GMO Event 35 [ 4 ] The Intrusion of Gaia 43 [ 5 ] Capitalism 51 [ 6 ] Not Paying Attention! 61 [ 7 ] A Story of Three Thieves 69 [ 8 ] Enclosures 79 [ 9 ] Common Causes 87 [ 1 0 ] It Could Be Dangerous! 97 [ 1 1 ] A Threat of Regression? 107 [ 1 2 ] Stupidity 117 [ 1 3 ] Learning 127 [ 1 4 ] Operators 135 [ 1 5 ] Artifices 143 [ 1 6 ] Honoring 151 Preface to the English Language Edition It is 2015 and I find myself in a situation similar to the one I found myself in at the end of 2008, when I was sending the manuscript for this book to the publisher. Was it necessary to make the situation I was discussing “actual” in order to address readers for whom what mattered, what they were in the process of living through was, primarily, the financial crash and its consequences? Or was it necessary to resist the manner in which a history, which is first of all that of a capitalism freed from what had claimed to regulate it, imposes its own temporal horizons? The necessity of resisting hasn’t changed. Governments continue to proclaim their good intentions but “realism” has triumphed. Every measure that would fetter the free dynamics of the market, that is to say, the unalienable right of multinational oil companies and financial speculators to transform every situation, whatever it may be, into a source of profit, will be condemned as “unrealistic.” A carbon market, the source of lucrative operations, is perhaps OK, but certainly not the calling into question of extraction rights – we must keep the right to extract and therefore to burn up all the petrol and gas to which we can have access. Thanks to the increasingly polluting (fracking) or dangerous (deep water) operations for the extraction of “non-conventional” energy sources, the idea of an energy shortage, forcing a transformation of modes of production and consumption, is now behind us. It seems that we have largely sufficient means to produce a degree of warming that would set off an uncontrollable disruption of the climate (runaway climate change). That the earth may then become uninhabitable for species which, like our own, depend on relative climatic stability goes without saying. That it may even, like Venus, become a dead planet is a question to which we will never know the answer. 8 What I had not foreseen when I was writing In Catastrophic Times is that the great “mobilization of America,” which everyone in Europe was expecting, would not take place. How many times did we, at that time, hear the comparison with the US entrance into the Second World War. Timid old Europe was doing all it could, but when the Americans finally understood, when they mobilized, then….We could count on the rapid, radical transformation of its economy, with the fervent support of an entire population. As is known, between 2007 and 2011 the percentage of Americans taking climate change seriously collapsed, dropping from 71% to 44%. For all those who were expecting the announcement of more constraining commitments from Copenhagen, there was a rude and painful awakening. Today there is no need to assert, as I did at the time of writing In Catastrophic Times, that capitalism— some representatives of which claimed held the solution (socalled green capitalism)—is fundamentally irresponsible. In fact, unregulated capitalism and its allies have refused the role that should have been theirs.1 It was the route of direct confrontation that was taken, with the determined negation of global warming. “Drill, baby, drill.” Today, the grand campaign to deny the problem has run out of breath a little, but the second phase is being prepared. New voices are making themselves heard, asserting that it is impossible to restrict emissions, which in the meantime have exploded. The only solution is geo-engineering, which will ensure that it is possible to continue to extract and burn, without the temperature rising…. Geo-engineering might only be a dream, or the nightmare of a sorcerer’s apprentice. But the radical uncertainty with regard to the catastrophes that it is likely to produce, to say nothing of its effectiveness, won’t make the capitalist machine hesitate, because it is incapable of hesitating: it can’t do anything other 1 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014) than define every situation as a source of profit. At the moment 9 we are at the stage of fiction, but we know that soon this fiction will be proposed, and will try to impose itself, as the only “logical” solution, whether we like it or not. Logical because in effect it respects the demands of those who reject any calling into question of the right to irresponsibility that they have conquered, and confirms that the techno-industrial capitalist path is the only one that is viable. Moreover, it implies the prospect of a mobilization of public finance – but obviously extremely profitably in private hands – and here the example of the US war effort becomes relevant. This solution has an additional advantage, which is that if it should ever work, the war against global warming will never stop. Humanity in its entirety would be taken hostage, constrained to serve masters who will present themselves as its saviors, as those who are protecting it from an invincible enemy who must be kept permanently at a distance. In this way an “infernal alternative” will be fabricated at the planetary scale: either it’s us, your saviors, or it’s the end of the world.2 Today a new word has been created to characterize our situation: our epoch would be the epoch of the anthropocene. One need not be paranoid in order to ask oneself if the success of this word, as much in the media as in the academic world (in a few years the number of conferences and publications on the anthropocene has exploded), doesn’t signal a transition from the first phase—of denial—to the second phase—that of the new grand narrative in which Man becomes conscious of the fact that his activities transform the earth at the global scale of geology, and that he must therefore take responsibility for the future of the planet. Of course, many of those who have taken up this word are full of 2 Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The generic formula for the “infernal alternatives,” woven since the divorce between capitalism and the great tale of progress has become perceptible, is “you are envisaging resisting this quite unpalatable proposition, but we will show you that if you do the consequences will be worse.” 10 goodwill. But Man here is a troubling abstraction. The moment when this Man will be called on to mobilize in order to “save the planet,” with all the technoscientific resources that will be “unhappily necessary,” is not far off. In Catastrophic Times is neither a book of prophecy nor a survival guide. There isn’t the slightest guarantee that we will be able to overcome the hold that capitalism has over us (and in this instance, what some have proposed calling ”capitalocene,” and not anthropocene, will be a geological epoch that is extremely short). Nor do we know how, in the best of cases, we might live in the ruins that it will leave us: the window of opportunity in which, on paper, the measures to take were reasonably clear, is in the process of closing. It wasn’t necessary to be a prophet to write, as I have done, that we are more badly equipped than ever for putting to work the solutions defined as necessary. Those– most notably, scientists—who thought that it was enough to sound the alarm neglected the fact that political powers had just handed the rudder over to capitalism and had solemnly renounced any freedom of action. We do, however, know one thing: even if it is a matter of the death of what we have called a civilization, there are many manners of dying, some being more ugly than others. I belong to a generation that will perhaps be the most hated in human memory, the generation that “knew” but did nothing or did too little (changing our lightbulbs, sorting our rubbish, riding bicycles…). But it is also a generation that will avoid the worst – we will already be dead. I would add that this is the generation that, thirty years ago, participated in, or impotently witnessed, the failure of the encounter between two movements that could, together, perhaps have created the political intelligence necessary to the development of an efficacious culture of struggle3 – those who denounced the ravaging of nature and those who combated the exploitation 3 This is not knowledge in hindsight. The missed encounter was lived as such. Some voices, like that of Félix Guattari, who, in his The Three Ecologies, trans. of humans. In fact, the manner in which large environmental 11 movements have adhered to the promises of “green” capitalism is enough to retroactively confirm the most somber of suspicions. But the retroactive justification should not erase the memory of a missed opportunity, of a blind division from which the capitalist sirens haven’t failed to profit. Capitalism knows how to profit from every opportunity. What I was afraid of, at the time I wrote In Catastrophic Times, was a form of denial on the part of those who saw clearly that the threat of climate change could be an argument mobilized against unproductive conflict as part of the necessary reconciliation between all those of goodwill. Faced with the danger of climate change, a “social peace” could be imposed, and a culpabilizing bureaucratic moralism installed. Hadn’t we already started to hear that even the unemployed should learn to reduce their carbon footprint? Today, the fable of a supposedly green capitalism, bringing new, sustainable employment, the agent of peaceful, consensual adaptation of the “systemic” constraints of the climate, is not quite dead. But denying the threat of climate change is no longer necessary in order to denounce this fable. What we are now living is the waking nightmare of a predatory capitalism to which States have handed, in all opacity, the control of the future, laying the burden of the quasi-moral injunction of paying off “their” debts on their own populations and attacking each other before the tribunal of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in reaction to the slightest measure aiming to limit the predation. In short, it is more and more blatantly obvious that the oligarchy of the super-rich has acquired the power to put the world in the service of its interests. Many ecological activists today have become as radically anticapitalist as the militants of the Marxist tradition. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone, 2000) called in vain for the transversality of struggles. 12 The old suspicions are tenacious, however, as is the attachment to conceptual grand narratives that are perfectly compatible with the mirage of the anthropocene (to wit this call to order from Alain Badiou, for whom ecology is the new opium of the people: “It must be clearly affirmed that humanity is an animal species that attempts to overcome its animality, a natural set that attempts to denaturalise itself.”4) Whatever the case may be, it is a matter today of at least trying not to let old, reheated hatreds poison the new generation, the generation of activists who, on the ground, are confronting a State rationality that has become the servant pure and simple of the imperatives of growth and competition, and of all those who – often the same – are experimenting with the possibilities of manners of living and cooperating that have been destroyed in the name of progress. This book was addressed and is still addressed to everyone who is struggling and experimenting today, to everyone who is a true contemporary of what I have dared to call “the intrusion of Gaia,” this “nature” that has left behind its traditional role and now has the power to question us all. Formulating this question in a mode that helps them to resist the poisons we have left for them, the grand narratives that have contributed to our blindness, is its only ambition. 4 Le Grand Soir, “L’hypothèse communiste,” interview with Alain Badiou by Pierre Gaultier, August 2009. http://www.legrandsoir.info/L-hypothese-communiste-interview-d-Alain-Badiou-par-Pierre.html. Introduction It is not a question here of demonstrating that the decades to come will be crucial, nor of describing what could happen. What I am attempting instead is of the order of an “intervention,” something that we experience during a debate when a participant speaks and presents the situation a little differently, creating a short freezing of time. Subsequently, of course, the debate starts again as if nothing had happened, but some amongst those who were listening will later make it known that they were touched. That is what happened during a debate on Belgian television about global warming, when I suggested that we were “exceptionally ill-equipped to deal with what is in the process of happening.” The discovery that such a remark could function as an intervention is the point of departure of this essay. Intervening demands a certain brevity, because it is not a question of convincing but rather of passing “to whom it may concern” what makes you think, feel, and imagine. But it is also a fairly demanding test, a trajectory where it is easy to slip up, and so which it is important not to try alone. That is why I must give thanks to those who have read this text at one or other stage of its elaboration, and whose criticisms, suggestions, and indeed (above all, even) misunderstandings have guided me and forced me to clarify what I was writing; that is to say, to better understand what this essay demanded. Thanks first of all to Philippe Pignarre who said “you can” to me from the stage of the first draft, to Didier Demorcy who ceaselessly awakened me to the demands of what I was undertaking, and also to Daniel Tanuro who gave me decisive impetus at a moment when I was seeking the right angle from which to approach my question. Thanks also to Emilie Hache, Olivier Hofman, and Maud Kristen. Thanks to the members of the Groupe d’études constructivistes, and in particular to Didier Debaise, Daniel de Beer, Marion 16 Jacot-Descombes, David Jamar, Ladislas Kroitor, Jonathan Philippe, Maria Puig della Bellacasa, and Benedikte Zitouni. Being able to count on the generosity of these researchers, their straight talking, and their practicing of an open and demanding collective intelligence, is a real privilege. Thanks finally to Bruno Latour whose demanding objections are part of a process that for more than twenty years has testified that agreements between sometimes diverging paths are created thanks to, and not in spite of, divergence. [1] Between two Histories We live in strange times, a little as if we were suspended between two histories, both of which speak of a world become “global.” One of them is familiar to us. It has the rhythm of news from the front in the great worldwide competition and has economic growth for its arrow of time. It has the clarity of evidence with regard to what it requires and promotes, but it is marked by a remarkable confusion as to its consequences. The other, by contrast, could be called distinct with regard to what is in the process of happening, but it is obscure with regard to what it requires, the response to give to what is in the process of happening. Clarity does not signify tranquility. At the moment when I began to write this text, the subprime crisis was already shaking the banking world and we were learning about the nonnegligible role played by financial speculation in the brutal price increases of basic foodstuffs. At the moment when I was putting the final touches to this text (mid-October 2008), the financial meltdown was underway, panic on the stock markets had been unleashed, and States, who to that point had been kept out of the court of the powerful, were suddenly called on to try to reestablish 18 order and to save the banks. I do not know what the situation will be when this book reaches its readers. What I do know is that, amplified by the crisis, more and more numerous voices could be heard, explaining with great clarity its mechanisms, the fundamental instability of the arrangements of finance, and the intrinsic danger of what investors had put their trust in. Sure, the explanation comes afterwards and it doesn’t allow for prediction. But for the moment, all are unanimous: it will be necessary to regulate, to monitor, indeed to outlaw, certain financial products! The era of financial capitalism, this predator freed from every constraint by the ultraliberalism of the Thatcher-Reagan years, would supposedly have come to an end, the banks having to learn their “real” business again, that of servicing industrial capitalism. Perhaps an era has come to an end, but only as an episode belonging as such to what I have called the first clear and confused “history.” I don’t believe that I am kidding myself in thinking that if the calm has returned when this book reaches its readers, the primordial challenge will be to “relaunch economic growth.” Tomorrow, like yesterday, we will be called on to accept the sacrifices required by the mobilization of everyone for this growth, and to recognize the imperious necessity of reforms “because the world has changed.” The message addressed to all will thus remain unchanged: “We have no choice, we must grit our teeth, accept that times are hard and mobilize for the economic growth outside of which there is no conceivable solution. If ‘we’ do not do so, others will take advantage of our lack of courage and confidence.” In other words, it may be that the relations between protagonists will have been modified, but it will always be the same clear and confused history. The order-words are clear, but the points of view on the link between these order-words that mobilize and the solutions to the problems that are accumulating—growing social inequality, pollution, poisoning by pesticides, exhaustion of raw materials, ground water depletion, etc.—couldn’t be more confused. That is why In Catastrophic Times, written for the most part before 19 the catastrophic financial collapse, has not had to be rewritten. Its point of departure is different. This is because to call into question the capacity of what today is called development to respond to the problems I have cited is to push at an open door. The idea that this type of development, which has growth as its motor, could repair what it has itself contributed to creating is not dead but has lost all obviousness. The intrinsically unsustainable character of this development, which some had announced decades ago, has henceforth become common knowledge; this in turn has created the distinct sense that another history has begun. What we know now is that if we grit our teeth and continue to have confidence in economic growth, we are going, as one says, straight to the wall. This doesn’t signify in the slightest a rupture between the two histories. What they have in common is the necessity of resisting what is leading us straight to the wall. In particular, nothing of what I will write should make us forget the indispensable character of big, popular mobilizations (let us think of the WTO protests in Seattle), which are peerless for awakening the capacities to resist and to put pressure on those who demand our confidence. What makes me write this book doesn’t deny this urgency, but responds to the felt necessity of trying to listen to that which insists, obscurely. Certainly there are many things to demand already from the protagonists who are today defining what is possible and what isn’t. Whilst struggling against those who are making the evidences of the first history reign, however, it is a matter of learning to inhabit what henceforth we know, of learning what that which is in the process of happening to us obliges us to. If the, by now common, knowledge that we are heading straight to the wall demands to be inhabited, it is perhaps because its common character doesn’t translate the success of a general ”becoming consciously aware.” It therefore doesn’t benefit from the words, partial knowledges, imaginative creations, or multiple 20 convergences that would have had such a success as their fruit, which would have empowered the voices of those who had previously been denounced as bringers of bad news, partisans of a ”return to the cave.” As in the financial crash, which gave the proof that the financial world was vulnerable in its entirety, it is the “facts” that have spoken, not ideas that have triumphed. Over the last few years one has had to cede to the evidence: what was lived as a rather abstract possibility, the global climatic disorder, has well and truly begun. This (appropriately named) “inconvenient truth” has henceforth imposed itself. The controversy amongst scientists is over, which doesn’t signify that the detractors have disappeared but that one is only interested in them as special cases, to be interpreted by their acquaintance with the oil lobby or for their psychosocial particularities (in France, for example, that of being a member of the Academy of Science), which makes them fractious with regard to what disturbs. Henceforth we “know” and certain observable effects are already forcing climatologists to correct their models, making the most pessimistic of predictions produced by the simulations become increasingly probable. In short, in this new era, we are no longer only dealing with a nature to be “protected” from the damage caused by humans, but also with a nature capable of threatening our modes of thinking and of living for good. This new situation doesn’t signify that the other questions (pollution, inequalities, etc.) move to the background. Instead they find themselves correlated, in a double mode. On the one hand, as I have already underlined, all call into question the perspective of growth, identified with progress, which nonetheless continues to impose itself as the only conceivable horizon. On the other hand, none can be envisaged independently of the others any longer, because each now includes global warming as one of its components. It is indeed a form of globalization that it is a matter of, with the multiple entanglements of the threats to come. One knows that new messages are already reaching the unfor- 21 tunate consumer, who was supposed to have confidence in economic growth but who is now equally invited to measure his or her ecological footprint, that is to say, to recognize the irresponsible and selfish character of his or her mode of consumption. One hears it asserted that it will be necessary to “change our way of life.” There is an appeal to goodwill at all levels but the disarray of politicians is almost palpable. How is one to maintain the imperative of “freeing economic growth,” of “winning” in the grand economic competition, while the future will define this type of growth as irresponsible, even criminal? Despite this disarray, it is always the very clear logic of what I have called the first history that prevails and continues to accumulate victims. The recent victims of the financial crisis, certainly, but also, and above all, the “ordinary” victims, sacrificed on the altar of growth to the service of which our lives are dedicated. Amongst these victims, there are those who are distant but there are others who are closer. One thinks of those who have drowned in the Mediterranean, who preferred a probable death to the life that they would lead in their country, “behind in the race for growth,” and of those who, having arrived amongst us are pursued as “sans-papiers” (illegal immigrants). But it isn’t only a matter of “others.” Mobilization for growth hits “our” workers, submitted to intolerable imperatives of productivity, like the unemployed, targeted by policies of activation and motivation, called on to prove that they are spending their time looking for work, even forced to accept any type of “job.” In my country, the hunting season against the unemployed has been declared open. Public enemy number one is the “cheat,” who has succeeded in fabricating a life in the interstices. That this life might be active, producing joy, cooperation, or solidarity, matters very little, or must even be denounced. The unemployed person who is neither ashamed nor desperate must seek to pass unnoticed because they set a bad example, that of demobilization and desertion. Economic war, this war whose victims have no right to be honored 22 but are called on to find every means of returning to the front, requires all of us. This quasi-stupefying contrast—between what we know and what mobilizes us—had to be recalled so as to dare to put the future that is being prepared under the sign of barbarism. Not the barbarism which, for the Athenians, characterized peoples defined as uncivilized, but that which, produced by the history of which we have been so proud, was named in 1915 by Rosa Luxemburg in a text that she wrote in prison: “Millions of proletarians of all tongues fall upon the field of dishonor, of fratricide, lacerating themselves while the song of the slave is on their lips.”1 Luxemburg, a Marxist, affirmed that our future had as its horizon an alternative: “socialism or barbarism.” Nearly a century later, we haven’t learned very much regarding socialism. On the other hand, we already know the sad refrain that will serve as a song on the lips of those who will survive in a world of shame, fratricide, and self-mutilation. This will be: “Unhappily, we have to, we have no choice.” We have already heard this refrain so many times, most notably with regard to the sans-papiers. It signals that what had, to that point, been defined as intolerable, quasi-unthinkable, is in the process of creeping into habits. And we haven’t seen anything yet. It is not for nothing that the catastrophe in New Orleans was such a big shock. What is being announced is nothing other than the possibility of a New Orleans on a global scale— wind power and solar panels for the rich, who will perhaps be able to continue to use their cars thanks to biofuels, but as for the others… This book is addressed to all of us who are living in suspense. Amongst us there are those who know that they ought to “do something” but are paralyzed by the disproportionate gap 1 Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet (Zürich, 1916) https://www.marxists. org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm. between what they are capable of and what is needed. Or they 23 are tempted to think that it is too late, that there is no longer anything to be done, or even prefer to believe that everything will end up sorting itself out, even if they can’t imagine how. But there are also those who struggle, who never gave in to the evidence of the first history, and for whom this history, productive of exploitation, of the war of social inequalities that grow unceasingly, already defines barbarism. It is above all not a matter of making the case to them that the coming barbarism is “different,” as if Hurricane Katrina was itself a prefiguring of it, and as if their struggles were as a consequence “outmoded.” Quite the contrary! If there was barbarism in New Orleans, it was indeed in the response that was made to Katrina: the poor abandoned whilst the rich found shelter. And this response says nothing of the abstraction that some call human selfishness, but rather of that against which they are struggling, of that which, after having promised us progress, demands that we accept the ineluctable character of the sacrifices imposed by global economic competition—growth or death. If I dare to write nevertheless that they too are “in suspense,” it is because what Katrina can figure as a precursor of seems to me to require a type of engagement that, they had judged, it was (strategically) possible to do without. Nothing is more difficult than to accept the necessity of complicating a struggle that is already so uncertain, grappling with an adversary able to profit from any weakness, from any naïve goodwill. I will try to make people feel that it would nevertheless be disastrous to refuse this necessity. In writing this book I am situating myself amongst those who want to be the inheritors of a history of struggles undertaken against the perpetual state of war that capitalism makes rule. It is the question of how to inherit this history today that makes me write. If we are in suspense, some are already engaged in experiments that try to make the possibility of a future that isn’t barbaric, now. Those who have chosen to desert, to flee this “dirty” economic 24 war, but who, in “fleeing, seek a weapon,” as Deleuze said.2 And seeking, here, means, in the first place, creating, creating a life “after economic growth,” a life that explores connections with new powers of acting, feeling, imagining, and thinking. Those who are doing this have already chosen to modify their manner of living–effectively but also politically: they do not live in the name of a guilty concern for their “carbon footprint” but experiment with what betraying the role of confident consumer that is assigned to us signifies. That is to say, what it signifies to enter into a struggle against what fabricates this assignation and to learn concretely to reinvent modes of production and of cooperation that escape from the evidences of economic growth and competition. It is to them that this book is dedicated, and more precisely to the possible that they are trying to make exist. It will not for all that be a matter of making myself into their spokesperson, of describing what they are attempting in their place. They are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, because far from executing a “return to the cave” as some have accused them, they are expert in the use of websites and networks. They have no need of me, but they do need others—like me—to work, with their own means, at creating the sense of what is happening to us. One should not expect from this book an answer to the question “What is to be done?” because this expectation will be deceived. My trade is words, and words have a power. They can imprison in doctrinal squabbles or aim at the power of order-words—that is why I fear the word degrowth with its threatening arithmetic rationality—but they can also make one think, produce new connections, shake up habits. That is why I honor the invention of the names “Objectors to Growth/Economic Objectors.”3 Words don’t 2 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (London: Athlone, 1987). The reference is to George Jackson. 3 “Objecteurs de croissance” after “objecteurs de conscience”: a more longwinded translation that would make the point would be to call them “conscientious objectors to economic growth.” —Trans. have the power to answer the question that multiple and entan- 25 gled threats of what I have called the “second history,” on which we are embarked despite ourselves, raises. But they can—and that is what this book will attempt—contribute to formulating this question in a mode that forces us to think about what the possibility of a future that is not barbaric requires. [2] The Epoch Has Changed In the proper sense this book is what one can call an essay. It is well and truly a matter of trying to think, starting from what is in the first place an observation: “the epoch has changed”; that is to say of giving this observation the power to make us think, feel, imagine, and act. But such an attempt is formidable in that the same observation can serve as an argument to prevent us from thinking, and to anesthetize us. In effect, as the space of the effective choices that give a sense to ideas such as politics or democracy has shrunk, those who I will from now on call “our guardians” have had as their task making the population understand that the world has changed. And thus that “reform” today is a pressing obligation. Now, in their case, to reform means to deny what had made people hope, struggle, and create. It means “let’s stop dreaming, one must face the facts.” For example, they will say to us let’s stop dreaming that political measures can respond to the lightning increase in inequality. Faced with pauperization, one will have to content oneself with measures that are more of the order of public or even private charity. Because it cannot be a question of going back on the 28 evidence that has succeeded in imposing itself over the course of the last thirty years: one cannot interfere with the “laws of the market,” nor with the profits of industry. It is thus a matter of learning to adapt, with the sad sigh that kills politics as much as democracy: “sorry, but we have to.” “We have to” is the leitmotif that Philippe Pignarre and I, in Capitalist Sorcery,1 associated with the hold that capitalism has today more than ever, despite the disappearance of any credible reference to progress. Our primary preoccupation was how one is to address capitalism starting from the necessity of resisting this hold. Here I am tackling the same problem, from a complementary point of view. If it is no longer a matter here of echoing the resistance of the antiglobalization – that is to say also, anticapitalist – movement, this is evidently not because it has lost its importance, but because it too is henceforth confronted with a future whose threats have, in a few years, taken a terribly concrete turn. Those who, starry-eyed, put their confidence in the market, in its capacity to triumph over what they can no longer deny but that they call “challenges,” have lost all credibility, but evidently that is not enough to give the future the chance not to be barbaric. And the disturbing truth here – when those who are struggling for another world are concerned – is that it is now a matter of learning to become capable of making it exist. That is what the change of epoch consists of, for us all. To try to think starting from this “fact,” that is to say, from that which has, brutally, become commonly evident, is to avoid taking it as an argument (“the epoch has changed, so…”). It is a matter of taking it as a question, and a question that is posed, not in general, but here and now, at a moment when the grand theme of progress has already stopped being convincing. Thus the demonstrations that capitalism gives us an illusion of freedom, that the choices that it allows us are only forced choices, have become 1 Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011). quasi-redundant. One has henceforth to believe in the market to 29 continue to adhere to the fable of the freedom given to each to choose his or her life. It is a matter then of thinking at a moment when the role – that was previously judged crucial – of illusions and false beliefs has lost its importance, without the power of the false choices that are offered to us having been undermined – quite the contrary. The epoch has changed: fifty years ago, when the grand perspectives on technico-scientific innovation were synonymous with progress, it would have been quasi-inconceivable not to turn with confidence to the scientists and technologists, not to expect from them the solution to problems that concern the development they have been so proud to be the motor of. But here too – even if it is less evident – confidence has also been profoundly shaken. It is not in the least bit ensured that the sciences, such as we know them at least, are equipped to respond to the threats of the future. Rather, with what is called the “knowledge economy,”2 it is relatively assured that the answers that the scientists will not fail to propose will not allow us to avoid barbarism. As for States, we know that with a great outburst of enthusiastic resignation, they have given up all of the means that would have allowed them to grasp their responsibilities and have given the globalized free market control of the future of the planet. Even if – it is henceforth the order of the day – they claim to have understood the need to regulate it so as to avoid excesses. That is why I call them our guardians, those who are responsible for us.3 They 2 I will come back to this question. I restrict myself here to signaling that what here resembles an empty order-word, for use in grand reports bearing on the challenges of the epoch (“our economy is now a knowledge economy…”) in fact designates a strong reorientation of public research policy, making partnerships with industry a crucial condition for the financing of research. This amounts to giving industry the power to direct research and to dictate the criteria for its success (most notably by acquiring patents). 3 As English doesn’t use the term “responsible” as a noun, “nos responsables” here has been rendered as “our guardians.” –Trans. 30 are not responsible for the future – it would be to give them too much credit to ask them to give an account on this subject. It is for us that they are responsible, for our acceptance of the harsh reality, for our motivation, for our understanding that it would be in vain for us to meddle with the questions that concern us. If the epoch has changed, one can thus begin by affirming that we are as badly prepared as possible to produce the type of response that, we feel, the situation requires of us. It is not a matter of an observation of impotence, but rather of a point of departure. If there is nothing much to expect on the part of our guardians, those whose concern and responsibility is that we behave in conformity with the virtues of (good) governance, perhaps more interesting is what they have the task of preventing and that they dread. They dread the moment when the rudder will be lost, when people will obstinately pose them questions that they cannot answer, when they will feel that the old refrains no longer work, that people judge them on their answers, that what they thought was stable is slipping away. Our guardians are predictable enough. If by chance one of them read the lines above and noticed the direction in which I am heading, he will already have shrugged his shoulders: he knows what people are or are not capable of. He knows that the moment that I am evoking, when the rudder goes, will produce nothing other than an unleashing of selfishness, the triumph of demagoguery. I am nothing but an irresponsible elitist who wants to ignore harsh sociological realities. I don’t know what can be understood by “harsh.” I know that amongst experimental scientists – where I learned to think – one wouldn’t dare to talk in such terms before the corresponding statement “it is thus and not otherwise” had been submitted to multiple tests. Where are the tests here? Where are the active propositions that render it possible and desirable to do differently, that is to say, together for and, above all, with one another? Where are the concrete and collectively negotiated choices? Where are the stories populating imaginations, sharing 31 learning and successes? Where, in schools, are the modes of working together that would create a taste for the demands of cooperation and the experience of the strength of a collective that works to succeed “all together” against the evaluation that separates and judges? It is necessary to recall all that, that is to say, the manner in which we have been formed, activated, captured, emptied out, not so as to complain about it, but so as to avoid the impotent sigh that would conclude “we can do nothing about it, we are all guilty of being passive” – which is also to say “we must await the hopefully timely measures which, decided elsewhere, will force us to undergo the necessary changes.” The sentiment of impotence threatens every one of us but it is maintained by those who present themselves in the name of “hard reality” and say to us “what would you do in our place?” To call those who govern us our guardians is to affirm that we are not in their place, and that that isn’t by chance. And it is also to prevent them, and their allies, from keeping on repeating, with the greatest impunity, what I have called the first history, that of a generalized competition, of a war of all against all, wherein everyone, individual, enterprise, nation, region of the world, has to accept the sacrifices necessary to have the right to survive (to the detriment of their competitors), and obeys the only system “proven to work.” Of all the claims to proof that we have been given, that is the most obscene and the most imbecilic. And yet it keeps coming back, again and again, like a refrain, and it asks us to pretend to believe that things will end up sorting themselves out, that, in the place of our guardians, we would do the same thing, and that our own task is limited to insulating our houses, changing our lightbulbs, etc., but also to continue buying cars because growth has to be supported. There isn’t anything to discuss here, anything to argue about – that would be to lend this claim some dignity, and to dignify it would be to nourish it. Better instead to renew the virtues of laughter, rudeness, and satire. 32 Those who I am calling our guardians will protest that to refuse to put oneself in their place, to refuse to argue, to refuse politely to discuss the virtues of the market and its very likely limits, is to refuse debate, that is to say, rational communication, that is, when all is said and done, democracy! Worst, it is to risk panic, the mother of irrationality, opening up the possibility of every kind of demagoguery. Isn’t their first role, for the difficult times ahead, to maintain confidence so as to avoid this panic? It is in the name of this sacred task that in the past, officials famously stopped the radioactive dust issuing from Chernobyl at the French borders. But this kind of heroic gesture has since multiplied, to the extent that the unavoidable imperative of having to continue as if nothing was wrong has imposed itself, with no other option than to call on the population to grit their teeth and not lose confidence. In other words, our guardians are responsible for the management of what one might call a cold panic, a panic that is signaled by the fact that openly contradictory messages are accepted: “keep consuming, economic growth depends on it” but “think about your carbon footprint”; “you have to realize that our lifestyles will have to change” but “don’t forget that we are engaged in a competition on which our prosperity depends.” And this panic is also shared by our guardians. Somewhere they hope that a miracle might save us – which also signifies that only a miracle could save us. It might be a miracle that comes from technology, which would spare us the looming trial, or the miracle of a massive conversion, after some enormous catastrophe. Whilst waiting, they give their blessing to exhortations that aim to make people feel guilty and propose that everyone thinks about doing their own bit, on their own scale – on condition, of course, that only a small minority of us give up driving or become vegetarian, because otherwise that would be quite a blow to economic growth. I won’t go so far as to feel sorry for those who have taken upon themselves the charge of having us behave, but I am convinced that if we succeeded in addressing them in the mode of compas- 33 sion and not denunciation – as if they were indeed effectively “responsible” for the situation – that address could have a certain efficacy. In any case that is one of the bets of this essay. And the word “essay” finds its full meaning here. It really is a matter of essaying, in the pragmatic sense of the term, in the sense that the essay defines what would make it a success. As it happens, if, by speaking of our guardians I have permitted myself to confuse that which, in a democracy, should be distinguished – public officials and politicians – this is not so as to defend a far-reaching conceptual thesis on the definition of the relationship between the State and democratic politics, but to characterize a situation of linguistic confusion that is characteristic of and established under the name of governance. The success of this operation of characterization will be nothing other than what one of those responsible will detest the most – that one refuses to put oneself in their position but that one pities them for being there instead. Make no mistake: when I come to talk about capitalism and the State in a few pages’ time, it won’t be a question of definitions that would claim to bring to light the real nature of these protagonists better than previous ones either. I am not amongst those who are searching for a position that allows a permanent “truth” behind which what is now commonly perceived in the mode of a “change of epoch” is to be unveiled. I am trying instead to contribute to the question that opens up when such a change becomes perceptible: “to what does it oblige us?” In this regard I will offer neither a demonstration nor a guarantee, whether founded on history or concepts. I will try to think hand to hand with the question, without giving to the present, in which the pertinence of the responses are at risk, the power to judge the past. But also without giving authoritative power to the responses provided to other questions in the past. And so essaying this first proposition – addressing ourselves to our guardians in the mode of compassion – doesn’t signify that the truth about public powers has at last been unveiled. It is a 34 matter of attempting to characterize them in a way that notes that this is where we are, without making this into a destiny, as if the truth of the past was to lead us here, or a scandal, as if they had betrayed their mandate (the idea of such a mandate still supposes the evidence of progress), or even an accident on the way, as if such a route could be defined without any reference to progress. My approach to the situation that puts “us” into suspense today corresponds to the difference between unveiling and characterizing. To unveil would be to have one’s heart set on passing from perplexity to the knowledge that, beyond appearances, judges. On the other hand, to characterize, that is to say, to pose the question of “characters,” is to envisage this situation in a pragmatic way: at one and the same time to start out from what we think can be known but without giving to this knowledge the power of a definition. It is what the writer of fiction does when she asks herself what her protagonists are likely to do in the situation she has created. To characterize is to go back to the past starting from the present that poses the question, not so as to deduce this present from the past but so as to give the present its thickness: so as to question the protagonists of a situation from the point of view of what they may become capable of, the manner in which they are likely to respond to this situation. The “we” that this essay has intervene is the we who pose questions of this kind today, who know that the situation is critical but don’t know which protagonist’s cause to take up. [3] The GMO Event To address those who can be characterized as our guardians today, in the mode of compassion, doesn’t mean any kind of sympathy at all, far from it. Rather it is a question of the distance to take, of the determined refusal to share their mode of perception, to allow ourselves to be taken as witnesses for their good intentions. There is nothing much to expect from them, in the sense that there is no point in going in for the torments of disappointment and indignation. But nor is there any point, and this is perhaps more difficult, in engaging in head-on opposition, armed with the evidence of a situation that is confrontational and intelligible only on the basis of this conflict. It’s not that the conflict is pointless or “old hat,” it is its link with the production of intelligibility that is in question, which threatens to give answers before having learned to formulate questions, of offering certainties before having had the experience of perplexity. I want to give thanks here to something that has allowed me, amongst others, to live through a learning experience that was crucial for me and without which this essay would not have been written. I’m talking here about the “GMO event,” because for me, 36 as for many others, what happened in Europe with the resistance to GMO (genetically modified organisms) marks a before and an after. Not the before and after of a victory. That isn’t the case: genetically modified and patented organisms have well and truly invaded the Americas and Asia and, even if they are less frequently associated with their initial claim – responding to the challenge of world hunger – with the production of biomass fuels they found an amazing alternative promise. What made for an event in this epoch that is ours, suspended between two histories, what enabled the European movement of resistance to GMO, to make the possibility of acting rather than undergoing felt, was the discrepancy that was created between the position of those who were in the process of producing more and more concrete, more and more significant knowledges, and the knowledge of those responsible for public order. It may be because of this discrepancy that they were incapable of reconciling opinion with what for them was merely a new agricultural mode of production that illustrated how fruitful the relationship between science and innovation was. Even the scientific establishment, in general always ready to lay claim to the benefits of an industrial innovation and to shift responsibility for their failings onto others, was shaken up. For example, February 12, 1997 was a terrible moment for French science: the Prime Minister Alain Juppé repudiated the Commission for Biomolecular Engineering by refusing, against their advice, to authorize the launch of three varieties of genetically modified corn. The Commission had a clear conscience. With regard to colza (rapeseed/canola), it certainly restricted itself at first to the “intrinsic” danger of the plant as a product of genetic modification, but gradually started to admit that a flow of genes that induce resistance to herbicides was going to be brought about and could pose a problem. A ban was unimaginable for the Commission but it envisaged possibly setting up a biomonitoring apparatus (in other words, this signified that commercial development would also be an experimental stage, aimed at “better understanding the risk”). But corn didn’t pose such problems 37 because it doesn’t have parent plants in Europe! The French government had thus done the unforgivable, it had betrayed Science, given way to irrational fears, taken a position in an affair that wasn’t its concern, but that of experts. In fact, the politicians had understood that the situation was out of their control: the scientists were openly divided, public research called seriously into question, militant actions had begun and, in the wake of the so-called mad cow crisis, trust in scientific expertise was at its lowest ebb. But what the politicians hadn’t foreseen is that more than ten years later they still wouldn’t have succeeded in “calming this down.” To their great dismay, and whilst they are subject to enormous pressure on the part of WTO, the United States, industry and its lobbyists, including scientists, European national governments and the European Commission (EC) have not so far succeeded in normalizing the situation. What should have happened without any commotion and without friction would most definitely not. Worse, and this is where the event is situated for me, the arguments that our guardians were counting on provoked not only responses but above all new connections, producing a genuine dynamic of learning between groups that had hitherto been distinct. It is important to be able to say “I have learned” from others and give thanks to them. Thus what originally engaged me personally was the ignorant arrogance with which scientists announced a response to the question of world hunger that was “finally scientific.” I was also convinced, on the basis of the nuclear precedent, that only the public calling into question of a technology of this kind could produce a knowledge that would be somewhat reliable – in any case more reliable than that of experts who are most frequently in the service of the “feasibility” of an innovation that for them is part of the inevitable (“you can’t stop progress!”) As it happens I was really quite naïve, because 38 what I didn’t know was that what the experts were working with was nothing less than reports prepared by the industry itself, reports that are usually remarkably slim, thanks, we later learned, to sleights of hand testifying to the connivance between industrial consortia and the US administration. And I also did not know that the majority of requests for additional information would come up against “industrial secrecy.” Another point of naïvety was my not knowing that the overwhelming majority of the famous experimental fields, the destruction of which was denounced as irrational, a refusal that science might study the consequences of cultivating GMO crops in an open milieu, were not pursuing this goal in the slightest. It was a matter of agronomic tests prescribed for the approval and thus commercialization of seeds. Another discovery was that for the biologists, it was obvious that “GMO insecticides” would greatly facilitate the appearance of resistant insects, also that Monsanto was organizing a veritable private militia and was encouraging informing on anyone who could be suspected of farming with seeds that it owned, etc. But the repercussions of the event exceed the case of GMOs alone, leading to the question of what agriculture has become in the hands of seed industries, the seed lines that they select in relation to costly and polluting fertilizers and pesticides, with the resulting double eradication of often more robust traditional seeds and small farmers. And leading also to a veritable “object lesson” bearing on what is on the horizon today with the knowledge economy, to wit the direct piloting of entire sectors of publicly funded research by the private sector. Not only is the primary interest of genetic modification at the end of the day about the appropriation of agriculture through patenting, but it is research itself, in biotechnology and elsewhere, which is henceforth determined by patents, and not just by the possibility of a patent to be had, but by existing patents, which void more and more paths of research of any economic interest. Is it any surprise then, that a heavy and ferocious law of silence weighs on researchers, who are required to stick to the slogan “science at 39 the service of everyone,” against what they know to be the case? If the business of GMO crops was an event it is therefore because there was an effective apprenticeship, producing questions that made both scientific experts and State officials stutter, that sometimes even made politicians think, as if a world of problems that they had never posed was becoming visible to them. What is proper to every event is that it brings the future that will inherit from it into communication with a past narrated differently. At the outset, after having announced the amazing novelty of their creations, the promoters of GMO crops protested that they were in continuity with agricultural practices regarding the matter of seed selection. Today it is this very continuity that is the object of stories that are new or which have hitherto been considered “reactionary,” stories that resonate together and open the event up to yet more connections, most notably with those who are learning to renew practices of production that modernization had condemned (the slow food movement, permaculture, networks for the rehabilitation and exchange of traditional seeds, etc.). Of course, the cry of our guardians has been about “the growth of irrationality,” “the fear of change,” “ignorance and superstition.” But this cry and the noble task that follows from it, that of “reconciling the public with ‘its’ science,” have had little effect. Moreover, the question of the “public” has itself been put in crisis. What do “the people” think? How do they “perceive” a situation? Traditionally, opinion polls responded to this question: one addresses a “representative sample of people” and asks them point-blank about questions that do not necessarily interest them. The business of GMO crops was an occasion when citizen juries demonstrated their capacity to ask good questions, which made the experts stutter – if and only if the apparatus that brings them together effectively allows it. Similarly, some sociologists brought participants in one study into public perceptions together in such a way that the participants felt respected as thinking beings. And the questions and objections that they 40 generated collectively were at the same time both pertinent and very worrying for those who are responsible for us. Thus, besides the question of knowing who would profit from this innovation for which everyone is asked to accept the risks, they posed the question of the tracking of the risks, the famous bio-monitoring that we have been promised: with what resources? How many researchers? Who will pay? Over what period of time? What will happen if things go wrong? Etc. In fact, the apparently perfectly reasonable demands of these citizens sketch out a landscape that doesn’t have much to do with that claimed by the “innovation economy” on which it seems our future depends. For an industrialist they signify having to launch an innovation in a milieu that is actively preoccupied with consequences, that is entitled to detect them, that can set conditions – start small, for example, develop slowly so that one can retrace one’s steps – which demands that the promoter of the innovation finances the tracking but doesn’t organize it, that insists on all consequences being deployed, on no order-word or promise being taken at face value. A simple contrast: today Monsanto in fact profits directly from the proliferation of “superweeds” that have developed resistance to its herbicide, Round Up. These superweeds require more than ten or twenty times the usual dose of this product, a product that does not have the innocuousness originally claimed. Lie first, then say it is too late, cover everything with a morality of the inevitable, “you can’t stop progress”: that is what the freedom to innovate demands. Today, citizen conferences have become an officially promoted symbol for the participation of the public in innovation, but what has been promoted has also been domesticated. Most of these conferences are organized in such a manner that the participants are guided into giving “constructive” advice, accepting the limits of the questions posed, collaborating just like experts in the production of the label “acceptable”: a new type of rating for innovations. The domestication has been all the easier for the fact that apparatuses which induce submission and goodwill – thinking where and when you are told to think – are easier to 41 put in place than those that induce a capacity to ask worrying questions. The fact of knowing that people can become capable of asking such questions, however, is part of the GMO event. Rather than moaning about this other fact, that it has already “recuperated,” it belongs to political struggle to invent the manner in which to make what has thus been learned count. The GMO event has not been brought to an end. It brought to active, ongoing existence all those whose activation made this event, those who have populated a scene where they weren’t expected, where the distribution and the tenor of roles had been arranged in a mode that presupposed their absence. Would biofuels, presented as a miracle solution as much to global warming as to rising fuel prices, have been discredited so quickly without them? Pity the poor EC, which had already promoted this “solution,” to the great satisfaction of agricultural industrialists! One must not go so fast, however. Certainly the GMO event constitutes an exemplary case for the bringing into politics of what was supposed to transcend it: progress resulting from the irresistible advances in science and technology. But it only partially responds to the question of the future. In effect, and contrary to what was the case with GMO, it will not just be a question of refusal. The responsibilities with regard to the accumulation of damages and threats are evident. They do not refer in the first place to those I called our guardians, but to what has defined Earth as a resource to be exploited with impunity. We are not in a court of justice, however, where someone whose responsibility has been established must also answer for what he has done, from whom reparation will be sought. W