Reflections on EISA 2015—Day 4

As the EISA 2015 conference ebbed towards its conclusion, I am happy to say that the level of interest did not.

Saturday commenced, for me, with a session on ‘Securing the Atmospheric: On Shifting, Melting, Rising and Geo-Engineered Boundaries,’ chaired by Lukas Pauer of RMIT University.

The first presentation was my old friend Marijn Nieuwenhuis from whom I have heard about half a dozen papers in the last eighteen months, including one earlier in the week. (Once I’ve finished scribbling these posts I have to get on with an essay that I’m due to write for a collection Marijn is putting together—tick-tock, tick-tock…) He spoke about the need for re-engaging elemental concepts, particularly reconnecting with a geopolitics of the air before moving on to the subject of law, particularly the principle from property law: Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos (whoever's is the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to hell) Paralleling the work of his Warwick colleague Stuart Elden, he talked about “territory’s volumetric cone” and the inherent absurdity in geometric-legal partitions of space that are constantly undone by the forceful dynamics of the pluri-elemental Earth.

I must admit that the conceptual vocabulary of elements leaves me a little cold, although I am gradually warming to it. I find it difficult to extract the classical elements from a sense of purity and essence. If all we encounter is mixture and if air is unthinkable without combustion, oxidation, photosynthesis (to name but a few processes), then what sense does it make to speak of ‘the elements’ in this older sense? I think there is a strong case for looking at how these concepts are embedded in our (European) languages and seeing how this structures our thought. I am sceptical as to whether it makes sense to appropriate them positively as useful concepts in their own right. That said, the use to which Marijn is putting these concepts is an interesting one. I am just left wondering whether elementalism is, on the whole, a plausible avenue for creative thought (but I may be alone in this).

The second paper came from Elizabeth Reed Yarina, ‘Post-Island Futures: Mobility and Territory for Tuvalu’s Sinking Atolls.’ This was certainly the most visually impressive presentation that I’ve seen in a long time, as you might expect from an architecture student at MIT (see this paper of hers for another example).

Finally, Janelle Knox-Hayes presented the work of her collaborator Alyssa Maraj Grahame on ‘Resources of Recovery: Connecting Crisis and Arctic Economic Governance’—a fascinating tour through the recent political economy of Iceland in all its multi-faceted complexity, touching on the incredibly fast recovery from its recent financial and political crises, its heated (if you’ll pardon…) national debates over its geothermal engineering projects and its tendencies towards protectionism against building an export economy.

For the last two sessions of the conference, I joined the section organised by Delf Rothe and David Chandler. The penultimate of these: ‘Environmental Terror: Complex climate change, disasters and resilience.’

First up was Harshavardhan Bhat, another architect who talked about ‘Open hegemony: In anticipation of forgetting architecture.’ This was followed by three German scholars whose papers chimed together, as I heard them, rather well.

Maximilian Mayer in ‘Reducing the complexity of climate change? A comparison of diverging co-productions of planetary order’ spoke about the epistemic technologies—infrastructural and conceptual—that render climatic complexity an actionable object of knowledge. He also mentioned the various political contestations and contradictions surrounding such technologies, particularly around Green politics in Germany; for example, environmental activists resisting the construction of wind turbines for the sake of birds. Delf Rothe in ‘Seeing like a satellite: Of plants, carbon and other securitizing actors’ (great title) spoke about the emergence of these same sorts of technologies from Cold War geopolitics before moving on to discuss planetary emergency, the commercialisation of remote sensing and more besides. Finally, Stefanie Wodrig in ‘Science and emotions as a response to complexity: First evidence from anti-fracking protests in Northern Germany,’ talked about fearful reactions against technologies such as fracking and how these emotions enter into matters of scientific knowledge, the production of expertise and, ultimately, governance.

One crucial thread that was, for me, connecting at least the final three presentations and perhaps all of them was the question of modernisation, something that has been back on the agenda recently. What was in Europe in the 1990s called ecological modernisation theory has been given a brash, slick new makeover for the US market in the form of ecomodernism (on this connection see for example). The principal target of the ecomodernists has been the traditional, allegedly techno-sceptic wing of environmentalism. Against this, the ecomods advise ramping up technological innovation, lassoing capitalism via intelligent state regulation and getting out of the ecological and demographical crises by producing enough wealth that family sizes dwindle and production is concentrated onto industrially intensified portions of the earth. More technology, more capitalism—less environmentalism. Regardless of the pitfalls of this thinking, an echo of this resonated in these papers, even if negatively: the question of modernisation, its varieties and its alternatives.

The simplistic critique often levelled at Greens that lumps anyone who doubts the power of technology to liberate humanity from any- and everything into the same category as anarcho-primitivists is silly. But it is not always without some evidential basis. Very well, so wind turbines will harm birds—but then where, what, when, how? There is no technology without downsides—there must be decision, a cutting off, a cutting out.

I cannot resist quoting Alfred North Whitehead at this point:

“In a museum the crystals are kept under glass cases; in zoological gardens the animals are fed. Having regard to the universality of reactions with environment, the distinction is not quite absolute. It cannot, however, be ignored. The crystals are not agencies requiring the destruction of elaborate societies derived from the environment; a living society is such an agency. The societies which it destroys are its food. This food is destroyed by dissolving it into somewhat simpler social elements. It has been robbed of something. Thus, all societies require interplay with their environment; and in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery. The living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.”

And this all got me to thinking about Germany in particular. There is no country in Europe that has based its economy so heavily on engineering and technology—and few in the world (even a scandal of the magnitude of that consuming Volkswagen is unlikely to shake this). Certainly from a British perspective, where finance capitalism has been politically dominant for decades now, this is particularly striking. Likewise, there can be few countries in the world who are so manifestly proud—this is how it is projected abroad at least—of their economic productivity. This work ethic self-righteousness plays a large part in setting the political agenda for the whole of Europe, as was demonstrated so starkly during the the ‘negotiations’ with Greece this summer. The German Ordoliberal ideal of balanced budgets and fiscal austerity rests upon the material basis of a technologically sophisticated, export-based economy, something that is not easily replicated.

And yet the general consensus is that the German attitude towards technology is, and has perhaps always been, markedly sceptical (although see this for another view). Germans are understood to be among the most hostile in the world with regard to nuclear power, fracking, geoengineering and so on. The roots of this undoubtedly run deep—the whole early-to-mid-twentieth-century thing springs to mind (Heidegger!)—but the entire history of romanticism long before that, also.

I should add that I know very little about political economy and even less about German political discourse. My impressions are very much made from afar. However, the point I am trying to make is this: Germany seems to embody in a particularly pronounced form a contradiction broadly evident right across the Euro-American world (and perhaps beyond), a contradiction that the likes of the ecomods capitalise on. I have little sympathy with their politics—their strategy is consistent: demonise those to their left, build bridges to those to their right—but they are asking some of the necessary questions.

So, having said all of that, the last (but by no means least) panel of the EISA 2015 conference that I attended followed right on from this one and was chaired by Delf Rothe. ‘Critique in an Age of Complexity’: this is how my conference was concluded.

The four papers presented were: ‘Resisting Resilience?’ by Chris Zebrowski; ‘Warring in the Mind: Ideology, Truth and the Neuromarketing of Hope’ by Claes Richard Wrangel; ‘Assemblages and the Positives of the New Materialism’ by Jonathan Joseph and Robert Carter (only the former of whom was present); ‘Complexity and “critical government”: Kantian legacies, critical disjunctures’ by Regan Burles.

Chris, drawing on his recent book The Value of Resilience: Securing life in the twenty-first century, talked about hybridity as immanent critique and how resilience depreciates the non-adaptive. Claes, drawing on a broader research project on hope, discussed the neuroscientific conception of the mind as an adaptive system and how this, quite peculiarly, leads to new forms of politically questionable subjectivism. Jonathan levelled a scornful critique at ‘new materialism,’ particularly taking exception to the alleged levelling of human and non-human agencies in the ‘flat ontology’ of actor-network theory. He mentioned that the concept of assemblage might have some value as a tool for diagnosing neoliberalism but that was about the best that could be said of it from his critical realist point of view. Finally, Regan drew more from the Kantian legacy. To be honest, by this point my brain was fried and I can’t really remember what he said—but it was good!

On the new materialism point, Delf, as discussant, commented that perhaps Jonathan and Robert would be better off aiming their critique at one particular author rather than the group as a whole since this term ‘new materialism’ masks a lot of important differences (a point that I have made previously). From my point of view, Jonathan’s critique was nothing new and mostly relied upon only half thought through reductiones ad absurdum—however, having not read the full paper perhaps I should hold my tongue/fingers.

The question that stuck in my mind at the end of this session was the relative obscurity of ‘critique’ as a term that is constantly used within academic discourse but is used in a variety of different ways. From the strict Kantian sense of interrogating transcendental conditions of possibility to the more deconstructionist sense of ‘problematising’ and ‘destabilising,’ there are clear commonalities and shades and degrees in-between but critique remains, to my mind, a concept that is used almost invariably without any qualification and clarification and, perhaps it’s just me, but I am often left wondering what precisely it is supposed to mean—not that it is meaningless but that it is rather fetishised. I did raise this question in the final Q&A but was left none the wiser.

And so concludeth the conference.

Determinism, environment and geopolitics: an interdisciplinary conversation (now with words and pictures)

[As the year speeds onwards at a frankly alarming rate, the RGS-IBG conference for 2015 is now only a week away. For my part, I'm organising a round-table discussion session on the subject of geographical determinism. My introductory remarks and slides follow.]

Determinism, environment and geopolitics: an interdisciplinary conversation

RGS-IBG, University of Exeter, Friday 4th September 2015.

[If these images appear very low quality, click on them to see a higher resolution version.]

Introduction

As David Livingstone put it in the conclusion to his 2010 BBC radio series The Empire of Climate: “Climate determinism is the alter ego of climate change.” Seldom have the two been separable. So it is today.

Herodotus and Hippocrates; Bodin and Montesquieu; Gilpin and Buckle; Semple and Mackinder; Huntington and Haushofer; Diamond and Kaplan – the lineage of deterministic thinking is long and will be familiar to historians of geographical thought.

Long, familiar and, as the likes of Mike Hulme have recently argued, renascent. Hulme finds determinism alive and well in what he calls the “transfer of predictive authority” effected by institutions such as the IPCC that define human futures in terms of climatic calculations.

“If not quite the inexorable geometric calculus of Malthus,” he writes, “it nevertheless offers a future written in the unyielding language of mathematics and computer code.”

To paraphrase the post-punk band Mission of Burma, how might we escape this certain fate?

Plan

This session consists of four open, conversational roundtables, with four excellent, expert chairs!

It is motivated by the conviction, first of all, that these issues are of pressing contemporary importance but also, secondly, that while many scholars, within geography and elsewhere, are working on such matters, they are doing so rather disconnectedly. This session attempts to initiate a more cohesive conversation.

1: Representation and Determinism

In his 2012 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, the travel writer-cum-geostrategist Robert Kaplan caused something of a stir amongst geographers by reintroducing the principal tropes of late-nineteenth century geopolitics to popular discourse.

“The only enduring thing is a people’s position on the map,” he writes. “With the political ground shifting rapidly under one’s feet, the map, though not determinative, is the beginning of discerning a historical logic about what might come next.”

While disavowing determinism per se, he wholeheartedly embraces “partial,” “hesitant” and “probabilistic” determinisms, approvingly attributing these varieties to Herodotus, Halford Mackinder and Raymond Aron, respectively. One is reminded of Mackinder’s famous line: “Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls.” Human possibility is present but it is radically attenuated by ‘The Map.’

Reading texts like this, it can seem as though we have scarcely budged since the era when speculator-futurists like William Gilpin were mapping out the climatic regions deemed, from the eye of Apollo as Denis Cosgrove had it, hospitable to civilisation.

Against this, I do not doubt, all too familiar geo-ocular sensibility, we are very lucky to be able to pose Gwilym Eades, armed with his new book Maps and Memes: Redrawing Culture, Place, and Identity in Indigenous Communities. It is also worth mentioning his 2011 article in Progress in Human Geography, titled Determining environmental determinism. This short piece, written in response to a forum published two issues previously, confronted both the determinisms and the anti-determinisms then under discussion.

Gwilym, usefully I think, both challenges geographers’ preconceptions of their own openness to other points of view and, at the same time, draws attention to the many epistemic determinisms that we can all wittingly or unwittingly entertain.

2: Possibilism and Historical Geography

But what of our response to determinism? What of the alternatives?

Possibilism is a term attributed to the historian Lucien Febvre [though it has a prehistory in French radical politics]. He, in turn, ascribed it to the geographical works of Paul Vidal de la Blache and his followers. In contrast to the likes of Friedrich Ratzel in Germany and Ellen Churchill Semple, who interpreted Ratzel for an Anglophone audience, the ‘French School,’ it was claimed, eschewed determinism and adopted an ethos of possibility.

Although largely forgotten today, possibilism was a common talking-point of geographers throughout the middle decades of the twentieth-century. Much more recently, it has been taken up by Simon Dalby, who has called for: “A reworked notion of possibilism, one shaped by the much more comprehensive understandings of both earth system science on one hand and political ecology with its focus on lived environments on the other […].”

I, for one, can concur. However, in order to rebuild possibilism, I think that it’s necessary to understand what possibilism has meant in the past, in rather different geopolitical and geo-ontological circumstances – and this is not at all clear.

Is possibilism, as Gordon Lewthwaite had it in 1966, a matter of erring on one side of a “continuum” that has free-will at one end and determination at the other? Is it, as Vincent Berdoulay wrote in 1976, a form of neo-Kantian philosophy? Perhaps the most interesting interpretation for me, particularly if noted in relation to Kaplan’s embracing of Aron’s ‘probabilistic determinism,’ is Fred Lukermann’s argument in 1965 that the possibilists were really heirs of Antoine Augustin Cournot. Contrary to the likes of Pierre-Simon Laplace, Cournot argued that it was not human ignorance that necessitated probabilistic calculation; rather, reality itself was indeterminate – and geographies were, therefore, to quote Lukermann, “explanatorily describable only by a calculus of probabilities.”

In short, possibilism demonstrates, I think, that ‘interdisciplinarity’ must mean not only putting critical geopolitics into conversation with physical, environmental and climatic sciences but, also, with the history of ideas.

And speaking of calculation…

3: Calculation and Environmental Science

For many years now, the critical thinker has been an ally of the indeterminate. This relationship was more or less straightforward. To critique was to open up, to destabilise; the oppressive was the closing down, the narrowing, the determining; liberation was to be found in the embrace of radical potentiality, in the incalculable.

I do not wish to suggest that we should undo this legacy; however, this relationship can no longer be so straightforward. To have so much as a conversation about ‘the Anthropocene,’ ‘the climate’ or even, simply, the future, today necessitates, at the very least, some discursive absorption of the progressive produce of calculative rationality.

How can we resist “transfer[s] of predictive authority,” in Hulme’s words, while not, at the same time, becoming ‘Merchants of Doubt’? How can we integrate the biological, climatological, geographical and environmental sciences in a more cohesive way, eschewing, as Gwilym advises, any complacency with regard to geography’s interdisciplinary achievements? How do we engage with probabilistic thinking without reproducing the kinds of conservative politics promoted by the likes of Kaplan and Aron? How are we to grapple with a world that is, after Cournot, unpredictable in itself?

When to calculate and how? This is a question that Lauren Rickard’s work on scenario planning may well help us to answer. In her 2010 paper Governing the future under climate change: contested visions of climate change adaptation, Lauren writes that scenarios represent “a momentous epistemic and epistemological shift”. Ridding us of the “idea of a singular most likely [or, we might add: most probable] future,” scenario exercises, at least in some of their iterations, facilitate co-produced climatic futures in a way that pluralises and democratises the process of envisagement.

“In scenario approaches,” she continues, “the future is refracted by uncertainty into multiple possibilities.”

And so, finally…!

4: Complexity and Potentiality

Rethinking the role of geographic and climatic knowledge in relation to Anthropocenic political pressures is plainly a vast task – one that brings into question some of our most fundamental concepts: earth, world, environment, history, time…

There is no avoiding it: the spaghetti junction of interdisciplinarity to be constructed on and around a reformed environmental geopolitics must include a well-paved road to philosophy.

We might look, then, to works such as Jason Dittmer’s 2014 article Geopolitical Assemblages and Complexity. Drawing on the works of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Manual DeLanda, among others, Jason attempts to articulate “a materialism without determinism” – a materialist ontology for geopolitics that sidesteps the dualistic bifurcations of modernism.

Complexity theory, he writes, “enables us to incorporate the environment and materiality into geopolitical analyses of change without lapsing into any of the determinism that plagues early geopolitical thought.” Following, in fact, in the footsteps of Cournot, this ontology refuses any mechanistic or reductive model of causality – everything is observed to depend on everything else and every explanation is, therefore, necessarily a simplification of a more complex and dynamic reality.

But we could, I think, gainfully go back further than Cournot, to another crucial figure in the history of probability: Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz famously argued that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Crucial to his Théodicée was the concept of ‘compossibility’: a possible world is composed of beings that are compossible.

Setting aside the excesses of Leibniz’s peerless optimism, we can turn his concept to our purposes. To state it most plainly indeed: the present composition of carboniferous civilisation is incompossible with the Earth.

What we need, then, is not the possibilism of fin de siècle French idealism, as Vincent Berdoulay identified it. Rather, we need a possibilism, or a compossibilism, that can assume indefinite multiplicities of open possibilities but that is also pressingly and incessantly aware of the unavoidable facticity of vast, inhuman forces utterly beyond our ken and control.

A possibilism fit for the Anthropocene.

Discussion

'Determinism, environment and geopolitics: an interdisciplinary conversation' — RGS-IBG 2015, Exeter

I'm pleased to announce that my proposed session for the RGS-IBG 2015 Conference on 'Geographies of the Anthropocene' has been accepted. The conference will be held on 1st – 4th September at the University of Exeter.

It differs a little from the original CfP; however, I'm very pleased with how it's turned out. The abstract is as follows:

“There are no necessities, but everywhere possibilities; and man, as master of the possibilities, is the judge of their use. This, by the reversal which it involves, puts man in the first place [au premier plan] – man, and no longer the earth, nor the influence of climate, nor the determinant conditions of localities.” — Lucien Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History ([1922], p.236)

Issues of environmental determinism and possibilism have structured human geographical debates since at least the 1920s. However, in recent decades these concepts have become more a matter for disciplinary textbooks than intellectual debate. This session is motivated by the conviction that, given the challenges of the Anthropocene, this must change. Febvre’s response to determinism, now nearly a century old, is plainly inadequate. ‘Man’ can no longer be considered either ‘judge’ or ‘master.’ The ‘influence of climate’ will not be washed away by 1920s-style humanism. And yet, for all human geography’s theoretical riches, the alternative is not obvious. 

Our challenges are vast, complex and ineluctably interdisciplinary. Bearing this in mind, this experimental session consists of four diverse, open and conversational roundtables on interrelated but distinct themes:

• Determinism and representation (chair: Gwilym Eades)

• Possibilism and historical geography (chair: Simon Dalby)

• Calculation and environmental science (chair: Lauren Rickards) 

• Complexity and potentiality (chair: Jason Dittmer)

These roundtables will debate their respective matters of concern individually before presenting their findings to the group. The session has two major goals: first, to collectively sketch ‘the state of the art’ of environmental geopolitics with regard to these issues; and, second, to discern the major contours of agreement and disagreement between the interested parties. We will not pretend to produce any definitive conclusions but, rather, attempt to more broadly outline the problematical terrain that requires further collective exploration. 

This session is, of course, open to all; however, we would particularly welcome participants from physical geography and the environmental sciences.

Interrogating 'complexity'

A really interesting post on Deterritorial Investigations on the limitations of complexity theory, cybernetics, etc. for critical social and cultural thinking.

I think this is a really important point.  Complexity, etc. has been such a privileged resource for 'critical' thought for so very long that it's quite strange that the concept has received so little critical interrogation from within.  It amazes me that people hardly ever draw a connection between the Deleuzian complexity aesthetic and that of Friedrich Hayek.  For both, writing around the same time, the allure is the same: spontaneous self-organisation does away with the need for any centralised decision making process, i.e. the State (which is something of a bogeyman in both their vocabularies).  Now, that isn't to make a lazy 'Deleuze is a neoliberal' comment, I don't believe that for a second.  But the whole spontaneously organising communism thing has always struck me as a neoliberal fantasy.