Slavoj Žižek writes an article riffing on the book by Kohei Saito, (Karl Marx's Ecosocialism, 2017) to make a point about biological-robotics as ecosystem tools, but also makes some points useful for discussing environmentalism. (Note that this doesn’t endorse his comments identifying Trump as a “centrist liberal”, best left for a different diary.)
For Slavoj Žižek “What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.”
What is the meaning of radical denaturalization of nature. It doesn’t mean that we don’t value our relationship to nature or our position as its ecological stewards. We instead should take more seriously the need for direct activism in making revolutionary and global structural change to end the climate crisis. Decentering scientific culture is conjoined with the critique of its political economy.
The formation of new land creates new political problems unlike the remarcation of existing land, it’s no different than adding gold to the monetary system now that fiat money rules. So many want to re-naturalize a financial system that has long been denaturalized, by lobbying for a return to the gold standard. That “naturalization” is only a tactical profit motive, however nostalgic for certain “Gold Bug” capitalists, but popular depending on how much of your less diversified wealth is held in metals. New capital instruments (bitcoin) and methodologies (MMT) have emerged much like the human-hybridizing of nature itself.
Yet the “preservation” aspect of conservation ideology, often reified in aspects of deep ecology serves reactionary purposes as the need increases to reverse the current climate crisis. Preservation that would impede remediating the crisis must be balanced against the need for scientific solutions that serve specific radical political—economic objectives. Neither eco-fascist whining nor neoliberal commodity markets will help us consume our way out of the crisis. Micro-robot labor still is about extraction of value.
New concepts of the Anthropocene have framed the climate crisis since it is about “whether the Anthropocene will be formally accepted into the Geological Time Scale.[19] because of the influence of human behavior on Earth's ecology.
A democratic Anthropocene is under attack by a variety of political movements, largely traditionalist, others cynically psychotic in its sadopopulism.
There are rifts and riffs as a “unconscious socialist tendency” because Marx allowed that he might be a hippie, however like a 19th Century utopian socialist, the material realities obviated such dreamlands. The metabolic rift, that "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism", that “rupture in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature emanating from capitalist production and the growing division between town and country” is obvious. No amount of gentrification, suburban sprawl, or exurban growth will ameliorate it.
Jedediah Purdy’s sense of the Anthropocene makes the difference between the neoliberal and the democratic structures necessary.
The Anthropocene adds nature to the list of things we can no longer regard as natural. Ultimately, as I shall argue, it makes nature a political question. In this respect, the Anthropocene marks the last of three great revolutions of denaturalization: the denaturalization of politics, of economics, and now of nature itself. First came the insight that politics was not an outgrowth of organic hierarchy or divine ordination but instead an artifice—an architecture of power planned only by human beings. Second was the recognition that economic order does not arise from providential design, natural rights to property and contract, or a grammar of cooperation inherent, like language, in the human mind. Instead it, too, is formed by artificial assignments of claims on good and useful things and by artificial means of cooperation—from contracts to credit to corporations. Both politics and the economy remain subject to persistent re-naturalization campaigns, whether from religious fundamentalists in politics or from market fundamentalists in economics. But in both politics and economics, the balance of intellectual forces has shifted to artificiality.
[...]
Even wilderness, once the very definition of naturalness, is now a statutory category in U.S. public-lands law. Designated lands are managed intensively to preserve their “wilderness characteristics,” which is not to say they look anything like what might have been in 1491, let alone before human contact. Climate change is the emblematic crisis of the Anthropocene condition, turning the world’s weather into a joint human-natural creation: there is no returning to an undisrupted pattern of weather and climate.
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In this neoliberal Anthropocene, free contract within a global market launders inequality through voluntariness. It conflates the hard questions of how to use the world’s resources with the general economic questions of how to allocate scarce and valued resources, and it offers answers through the dispersed choices of the market. In its “progressive” form, it incorporates “prices” for “ecological goods and services” and therefore ensures, for instance, that carbon emissions have an economic cost to the emitter and wetlands a value to the owner who preserves them.
But even the progressive managerial model maintains two powerful constraints. First, it accepts vast inequality as its starting point, which it mainly does not question. Second, because its key mechanism is individual choice within the economic frame, it elides the political choice among possible economic architectures. Because each economic order is, in turn, a blueprint for a world that human activity will help to create, this elision of political choice means that the neoliberal Anthropocene is the death of possible worlds.
Tomorrow’s Democratic Anthropocene
The alternative, a democratic Anthropocene, can be forecast only in fragments. To reflect on it is, in part, to reflect on its nonexistence. Indeed, though the need for a democratic Anthropocene is increasingly urgent, it may be impossible to achieve because there is no political agent, community, or even movement on the scale of humanity’s world-making decisions.
There are some fanciful notions, even if the Capitalocene (sic) serves to make a point for science as having a relative autonomy not so different than T.S. Kuhn’s community of knowledge. We may have issues with an assertion that science might be memory-free in its hegemony — it’s still about structures.
DEBATES
WHERE IS THE RIFT? MARX, LACAN, CAPITALISM, AND ECOLOGY
Slavoj ŽižekThis apparently abstract point has crucial consequences for how we deal with our ecological predicament. Kohei Saito sees the root of the ecological crisis in the rift between the material metabolism of our lifeprocess and the autonomous logic of the reproduction of capital, which poses a threat to this metabolism. In the course of the book, Saito admits there are previous rifts:
“despite the appearance of long-term sustainable production in precapitalist societies there was always a certain tension between nature and humans. Capitalism alone does not create the problem of desertification ex nihilo, /…/ it transforms and deepens the transhistorical contradiction by radically reorganizing the universal metabolism of nature from the perspective of capital’s valorization.”(250)[ii]But the overall scheme remains one of linear progress in alienation. That’s why Marx was also in his late years more and more interested in an “unconscious socialist tendency” in the persisting remainders of pre-capitalist forms of communal life and speculated that these remainders could directly pass into a post-capitalist society. (For example, in his famous letter to Vera Zasulich, Marx plays with the idea that, maybe, Russian village communes could function as places of resistance against capital and establish socialism without going through capitalism.) Pre-capitalist forms maintain the more of intimate ties of the human with the earth. Along these lines, the title of the first chapter of Saito’s book –“Alienation of Nature as the Emergence of the Modern”(25) – clearly locates the “rift” in capitalist modernity: “After the historical dissolution of the original unity between humans and the earth, the production can only relate to the conditions of production as an alien property.”(26)
[...]The ultimate ground of this rift is that, in capitalism, the labor process does not serve our needs; its goal is to expand the reproduction of capital itself, irrespective of the damage it does to our environment. Products count only insofar as they are valorized, and consequences for the environment literally do not count. The actual metabolism of our life process is thus subordinated to the artificial “life” of the reproduction of capital.
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In capitalism, the rift under discussion here gets more radical not just in the sense that the metabolic process between humans and nature is subordinated to the valorization of capital itself. What made the rift explode was the intimate link between capitalism and modern science: capitalist technology, which triggered radical changes in rational environs, cannot be imagined without science, which is why some ecologists have already proposed to change the term for the new epoch we are entering from Anthropocene to Capitalocene. Apparatuses based on science enable humans not only to get to know the real, which is outside the scope of their experiential reality (like quantum waves); they also enable us to construct new “unnatural (inhuman) objects which cannot but appear to our experience as freaks of nature (gadgets, genetically modified organisms, cyborgs, etc.). The power of human culture is not only to build an autonomous symbolic universe beyond what we experience as nature, but to produce new “unnatural” natural objects which materialize human knowledge. We not only “symbolize nature”; we, as it were, denaturalize it from within.
It is this dimension of truth that eludes science: in the same way that my jealousy is “untrue even if its suspicions are conformed by objective knowledge, in the same way that our fear of refugees is false with regard to the subjective position of enunciation it implies even if some facts can conform it, modern science is “untrue” insofar as it is blind to the way it is integrated into the circulation of capital, to its link to technology and its capitalist use, i.e., to what in old Marxist terms was called the “social mediation” of its activity. It is important to bear in mind that this “social mediation” is not an empirical fact external to the scientific procedure; it is, rather, a kind of transcendental a priori which structures the scientific procedure from within. So, it is not only that scientists “don’t care” about the eventual misuse of their work (if this were the case, more “socially conscious” scientists would be enough). Instead, this “not-caring” is inscribed into its structure, coloring the very “desire” that motivates scientific activity which is what Lacan aims at with his claim that science doesn’t have memory. How so?
In the conditions of developed capitalism, a strict division prevails between those who do the labor (the workers) and those who plan and coordinate it. The latter are on the side of capital: their job is to maximize capital’s valorization, and when science is used to enhance productivity, it is also constrained to the task of facilitating the process of capital’s valorization. Science is, thus, firmly entrenched on the side of the capital: it is the ultimate figure of knowledge, which is taken away from laborers and appropriated by capital and its executors. Scientists who work are also paid, but their work is not at the same level as laborers’ work: they, as it were, work for the other (opposite) side and are, in some sense, the strike-breakers of the production process… This, of course, doesn’t mean that modern natural science is inexorably on the side of the capital: today, science is needed more than ever in any resistance against capitalism. The point is just that science itself is not enough to do this job, since it “has no memory,” since it ignores the dimension of truth.
So, we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.
Kohei Saito, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism, New York: Monthly Review Press 2017.
[ii] An exemplary case of a rift in premodern societies is provided by Island: it was fully forested when Norwegians arrived there in 8 century, and soon afterwards it was totally deforested.
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