The situation of reclamation – a review of: "Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science" by Isabelle Stengers

A review that I wrote of Isabelle Stengers' recently translated Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science has just gone up at the Society & Space open site. Very nice it looks, too.

The great thing about the S&S platform is that it allows for more extensive engagements with the works in question than is allowed by the usual print journal book review. Accordingly, I do not just summarise Stengers' text but try to clarify its major claims and then extend them in new directions.

I begin from a prominent, if rather poor, review that the book received in the Times Higher Education in December. I then try to explicate the most crucial proposals that Stengers makes and conclude by suggesting what a 'slow' geography might look like, thinking about possible connections with 'accelerationism,' the works of the late Ursula Le Guin and, then, the Situationist International.

In short, this is probably Stengers' most condensed and accessible account of her philosophy of science to date, as well as being an important addition to her thought in its own right. I would recommend it.

Against (eco-)austerities, left and right

Reading this Ecomodernist Manifesto, I am reminded of the Accelerationist Manifesto. These tracts have little to nothing in common politically (besides a general commitment to a renewed modernism); however, they do to some extent have a common target: eco-austerity (or, traditional left-wing environmentalism).

I am tempted to draw a link between austerity on the right (as we find once again now in our regrettable General Election here in the UK, with both major parties competitively swingeing state budgets like there's no tomorrow) and left austerity or eco-austerity—in other words, the belief that foreseeably convergent environmental and economic crises require a radical reduction in the material expectations of both the already wealthy (in global terms) and the would-be wealthy (i.e. 'developed' and 'developing' countries).

Austerity in its neoliberal form is not going away any time soon. It has become engrained in British political discourse (and not only here) to such an extent that it seems almost incontestable—we are arguing only over rates, degrees and timetables.

I have profound reservations about neo-modernism in both its centre-right, third-way, neoliberal version (ecomodernist) and in its self-consciously radical left, techno-vanguardist version (accelerationist); however, their shared resistance to the austerity project that is traditional left environmentalism is to be commended.

There are deep problems with both sets of solutions but they are asking some of the right questions.

Furthermore, I wonder if one of the key political fissures in the coming years will be precisely this sense of a project of austerity—which, as I have suggested, does not exist only on the right. The distinguishing feature of rightwing austerity is that it is only the poor that are expected tighten their belts to assuage their hunger pains (and, of course, that this project concerns only the economic in ignorance of the ecological). The rich are the aristocracy who can splurge their hard-earned ill-gotten gains as they please—the more frivolously the better, it seems. The poor lap up their crumbs and must never forget to say 'thankyou.'

I do not believe that the distinction between left and right is any less vital now than it ever was. However, it is not the only political shibboleth/sorting hat that matters. If the left is to maintain (and further) the strength of this distinction in the years to come, years in which ecological politics will become ever more indistinguishably suffused into the general political fabric, it has to address its own austerity hangups.

In the long-term, there will be no countering neoliberal austerity without overcoming eco-austerity.

Steve Fuller on 'Dark Ecology'

At the slowlorisblog there's an interesting guest post from Steve Fuller. It's a good read but I have a quibble with one of his comments:

To understand OOO and dark ecology (I take the latter as a specific extension of the former), one needs to understand the intuitive appeal of actor-network theory, which is that you’re better placed to understand the full range of agency in the world if you yourself are not an agent, but simply a mouthpiece for agency.

I really like the essay but that's false. There are plenty of human actors and agents in ANT. The central tenet of ANT is that every node in a chain of translations transforms what it carries, conducts, transmits. Therefore, humans can't be written off as mouthpieces; or, equally, even mouthpieces translate what they mouth.

The problem with ANT is that it's a method that got out of hand; that it got exploded into being a complete philosophy of everything. Somewhere Latour remarks that ANT is a combination of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Greimas' semiotics. OOO ignores the former and only takes up the latter. So, OOO eradicates what remnants of phenomenology there was remaining in ANT. It's essentially a dumbing down and, simultaneously, a massive overextension that arbitrarily excludes the ethno-sociological heart of the matter (which is very much there, and beating, if you look closely).

To understand Prof. Fuller's take on this one needs to understand that he's been waging war on ANT, etc. for decades and his readings are always uncharitable—sometimes productively so but, for my tastes, he's a way off the mark.

More constructively: I think the principle intellectual-political product of this 'dark ecology' would be the whole 'accelerationism' thing. This explicitly grows out of Nick Land's sophomore-entrancing shtick and is very zeitgeisty at the moment. Moreover, it explicitly sets itself up as a radical political project rather than just an intellectual one.

The oddity of accelerationism

Steven Shaviro has a really interesting piece on his blog on accelerationism.

I'm alternately puzzled and appalled by the whole accelerationist thing.  I'd like to think that it's the death throes of something old rather than the birth pangs of something new but I'm not sure.  Despite its sexy, fashionable, fast talking conceptual garb there's something oddly outdated about.  It seems to presuppose a very pre-Gaian kind of Nature (this is ironic since the people pushing these ideas often justify themselves in relation to the anthropocene, etc.) that is quite untenable in our contemporary ecological situation.

It comes down to this: can we accelerate capitalism to the point that it breaks down, mutates and becomes something else before Gaia boils us to death?  I can't imagine how.  We may have already passed the point of no return in that regard.

The only way out of this for the accelerationists would seem to be to assume that either late-late capitalism or that-which-follows-capitalism would be sufficiently technologically advanced that it could engineer the climate and master Gaia.

In other words, the accelerationists must have precisely the same long term goals as the most idealistic, technophilic neoliberals.  I can only imagine that there are some twenty-something CEOs in Silicon Valley reading this stuff and thinking to themselves 'yes! that's exactly it!'  It's a young man's discourse with some seriously old school presuppositions.

It's quite possible that I'm being ignorant and unfairly simplifying in all of this but that's my impression.