administering biodiversity

‘Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct. The cause: human activities.’

- Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

The problem, again: The interconnected ecosystems that make up the biosphere are all dependent on the capture, conversion and distribution of the sun’s energy through the planetary cycling of carbon. The biosphere has proved to be fairly resilient. Within the constraining parameters of life on earth, however, changes in climate can have enormous consequences. Interventions, human or non-human, that impact ecosystems and the carbon cycle can result in irreversible losses of biodiversity and trigger abrupt and uncontrollable climate changes. The contemporary form of human society – the global social process we know as capitalist modernity – has initiated both a new mass extinction event and global warming. As a result, tens of thousands of life forms will be ‘disappeared’ and millions of people will lose, directly or indirectly, their lives, health or homes through famine, drought, illness and war. These processes are already unfolding. The urgent question is: how far will they go?

Put differently, the problem is the dominant social process and the difficulty in changing it. The social process, organized to maximize capital accumulation and channeled through a rivalrous interstate system, compels all individuals to compete for places in a national economy and compels all states to promote and defend one national economy against all others. Growth, measured in Gross Domestic Product, is a given. By this logic, capital and biosphere are caught in a relation of antagonism, setting up endless and dreary struggles between the claims of jobs and environment, profits and endangered species, consumption and biodiversity. Through this optic, climate change and mass extinction are simply matters of national security and risk assessment. It is taken for granted that science and technology will enable human adaptation to ecological degradation and the weather. The national security-surveillance state is oriented toward enforcing the current social logic, not changing it. The state’s concern is: who can dominate in the new climate scenario? Or in other words: what must be changed, in order to keep in place the current regime of accumulation and logic of domination? Seen from below, however, the problem is how to change that very logic.

Global governance, to use the current buzz word, is the interstate process tasked with administering the parameters for growth and accumulation, mediating conflicts and managing emerging threats and volatilities. Nominally democratic, governance draws on international law, negotiated and interpreted by states bilaterally, as well as through the UN and a vast array of supplementary multilateral forums and agencies, with inputs by NGOs and, sometimes, the popular pressure of social movements.

States abide by the fabled rule of law, except when they don’t. The weak accept what they must, as Thucydides put it, and the strong do what they can get away with. The rule of laws is the rule plus the exceptions, which makes for unraveling legitimacy. If it would be too reductive to say that capital simply and directly does what it wants, then it would also be too naïve not to see that capital dominates the process and that corporate and national powers generally achieve their aims either by the mediations of party and law or, that failing, by flexible mixes of corruption, coercion and war. As we know all too well, this systemic essence of domination actively corrupts and undermines democratic forms and impulses. Shaped since 1945 by the allied imperatives of capital, bureaucracy and weapons systems, so-called governance is by and large technocracy. As limits loom and contradictions intensify – as they have in the still-unfolding financial meltdown and as they are doing far more powerfully in the biospheric meltdown – the tendency is to favor security options and a de facto permanent state of emergency.

This is the context within which we need to reflect on the technocratic ‘science-policy interface’ where, presumably, the ‘from above’ responses to climate change and mass extinction are being generated. More than twenty years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established under the auspices of the United Nations, in order to provide governments with scientific assessments and advice on the causes and risks of climate change. The publications of this body have been the most authoritative articulations we have of the scientific consensus regarding global warming. Because the conclusions of the IPCC are disturbing to a model of global development dependent on the immensely profitable extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, a new industry of warming denial has emerged to smear scientists and sow public confusion. The climate scientists, painted by the Right as political radicals, are mostly good technocrats who have merely gathered and relayed the findings of their peers. Many scientists are being politicized, however, by the cynicism of the public attacks launched against them. This disjunction on the ‘interface’ may yet become a political factor. In the meantime, the repressed has returned as postcolonial reality: at high-profile summits in Copenhagen (2009), Cancun (2010) and Durban (2011), policy has bogged down in disputes between governments representing ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ economies. Rebellions stirring in the Global South are being contained, but at the cost of no effective agreements being reached or measures taken. In Washington and other Northern metropoles, dominant politicians have simply brushed off the counsel of science as inexpedient.

In April 2012, governments from 90 countries established the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Intended to provide authoritative scientific assessments about biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, this body is meant to be analogous to the IPCC. Its first plenary is planned for January 2013, in Bonn.

The IPBES will inform, but remain independent from, the UN process initiated by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The eleventh Convention of Parties (COP 11) to the CBD has just finished meeting in Hyderabad, India. (The quote at the top is from CBD head Ahmed Djoghlaf’s opening statement.) While everyone agrees that a mass extinction event is a deplorable thing, the usual North-South fissures reopened when the discussion turned to financing conservation efforts. As with warming, so with extinction: the Northern beneficiaries of accomplished ‘development’ will not take responsibility for the history of conquest, plunder and containment that underwrites their power and privileges – and who is going to force them to? Nature is great, so long as someone else has to pay for it.

A decade ago, Edward O. Wilson estimated that spending $30 billion per year on a robust coordinated conservation effort could cut the extinction rate by half. (See my review of Wilson’s The Future of Lifebelow, in the biosphere thread.) He argued that this ‘one-thousandth of world domestic product’ is ‘the best bargain humanity has ever been offered.’ In the run-up to COP 11, researchers writing in the journal Science revised Wilson’s figures: establishing and maintaining the reserves needed to save the world’s threatened species will now cost more like $80 billion per year. Meanwhile, with each passing hour the world becomes three more species poorer, and degrading ecologies edge that much closer to tipping points of collapse.

The shared technocratic assumption here is that growth (or more bluntly, capital) and the biosphere can be reconciled, and that an acceptable balance can be struck, under the unchanged sign of accumulation, between ‘lifting the world out of poverty’ and conserving nature. Critical theory, of course, rejects this as a false reconciliation and calls for a new social logic beyond that of domination and perennial misery. Short of that leap, however, we should push the vectors of conservation as far as they can go.

Among the responses to the crisis and the political impasses surrounding it, is the still-emerging field of ‘ecological accounting’. The idea here is to put values on all the ecological costs and benefits that are conventionally left off the books, from the untallied costs of pollution and species loss to the freely-used benefits of ‘ecosystem services’(the ES in the IPBES), such as clean air and natural pollinators. The sum of these estimates brings into view – and potentially into business plans, accumulation strategies and security budgets – the true carbon footprints of specific industrial processes, products and policies. Such a re-conceptualization amounts to a radical redefinition of growth and, possibly, a new economic paradigm. Limited to ‘carbon trading schemes’ and similar shell games, such an approach will remain easily corruptible. But if it takes hold more robustly and becomes generalized, then it may go differently. It seems very doubtful that current patterns of production and consumption can be justified under such criteria, rigorously applied. Whether ‘ecological accounting’ is radical enough to open an ‘immanent’ path out of the logic of capitalist accumulation remains to be seen, but is very much worth thinking about.

The following editorial from this week’s Economic & Political Weekly (Mumbai) reflects lucidly on COP 11 - with the requisite skepticism for the ideology of growth. In the South, too, governance is rife with antagonism.

GR

Read the review of Wilson’s The Future of Life.

 

Editorial: Words not Deeds. The government's commitment to conserving biodiversity remains hollow.

Economic & Political Weekly, vol. XLVII, no. 44, 3 November 2012

The recently concluded 11th Conference of the Parties (COP11) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Hyderabad reminded us that not everyone is convinced that economic growth and biodiversity conservation are compatible. Although all governments, including ours, make the right noises at such conferences, reiterating their commitment to the environment and biological diversity, their policies suggest otherwise. The CBD has been around for two decades. It came into force on 29 December 1993, 90 days after the 30th country had ratified it. Yet over this period, it is evident that the sense of urgency that resulted in this important convention being formulated has not translated into the kind of actions that could have slowed down the rapid decline in biodiversity worldwide and in particular in biodiversity-rich nations like India. In the last two decades, one-third of all species of plant and animal life have become extinct in the world. Many more are on the endangered list as the juggernaut of environmentally unsustainable developmental policies proceeds to destroy precious ecosystem resources.

In poorer countries, and even those like India that are on a rapid growth path, the people most dependent on a natural resource base are also the poorest and most likely to be in the path of projects that destroy biodiversity. Mining is only one of the dozens of examples. In the last decade in India, close to one lakh hectares of forestland have been excavated for mines and more such land is being surveyed for mining. There is not a hint in official policy that the need to conserve ecosystems is as important as extracting minerals. The importance of the former has been recognised only when people dependent on these natural resources have fought to save them. A similar example is the fate of India’s coastline that is progressively being destroyed by scores of power stations, ports, jetties, tourist facilities, etc, that have been sanctioned. The consequent destruction of breeding grounds of the vast varieties of aquatic resources, taking place at an alarming pace according to recent surveys, is putting the livelihoods of fishing communities across the country at risk while at the same time destroying aquatic biodiversity.

Traditionally, farmers have been the conservators of scores of seed varieties. Their age-old methods of conservation are today under threat as agro companies aggressively push seed varieties, many of them genetically modified (GM), that promise bigger profits and more resilient crops. But as the virtual epidemic of suicides amongst farmers in many parts of India has shown, the promise of profits has been illusory and has led not just to debilitating indebtedness but also to the loss of precious diversity in seeds. In this context, the recommendation of the Technical Expert Committee, constituted by the Supreme Court in response to a petition asking for a ban on GM crops, is significant. It has recommended a 10-year blanket ban on field trials of GM crops, particularly in areas where India is the centre of origin of the seed variety. Predictably, industry has criticised this recommendation, considering it short-sighted. In fact, it might prove to be just the kind of far-sighted step that is needed to halt the worrying destruction of indigenous seed varieties.

In his speech at COP11, which India chairs for the following two years until the next COP is held in South Korea, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made all the right gestures including kicking off the fund for biodiversity conservation with a pledge of $50 million, a very small part of the estimated $8 billion needed to fund research and projects in the countries that are econo­mically poor but rich in terms of biodiversity. Yet the government’s recent policies expose the hollowness of much of what he said. For instance, in the last decades many significant environmental laws have been enacted, including the Bio­logical Diversity Act 2002. The law envisaged local communities maintaining bio­diversity registers so that they could intervene if development plans endangered these resources. The formulation of the Act itself, following extensive consultation, offered an important model of consultative law-making. Yet, even a law like this has not been implemented with any seriousness and many states have failed to involve local communities. In fact, the very people who are most vested in preserving bio­diversity are today being forcibly displaced in the name of economic development.

The real proof of commitment to the concept of conserving biological diversity will come if the economic growth model that a country adopts incorporates conservation strategies as an integral part of its developmental plans. This necessarily means trade-offs. But because environmental concerns involve issues that will affect future generations and cannot be measured in terms of short-term gains, policymakers have to embrace the vision of a future that incorporates such diversity. Unfortunately, the belief that somehow economic growth can offset all other losses, including those of ecosystem services, remains deeply embedded in the corridors of policymaking. As a result, the only time conservation of biodiversity is given a shoe-in is when those affected by its loss, the natural resource dependent communities, organise and make themselves heard.

which terror trumps?

State terror: terminal powers of enforcement.

Auschwitz: objective demonstration of a new state power, administrative-industrial genocide.

Hiroshima: objective demonstration of another new state power, the Weapon of Mass Destruction that self-justifies the merger of science and war machine.

Political necessity of the new regime of exception: an absolute enemy, someone, somewhere, preferably a dark bearded face, an imago to be targeted with trembling and enjoyment, the terminating focus of all displacements in the politics of fear.

This is how the capitalist process reproduces and enforces its own conditions today. And new techno-powers now emerging may also prove qualitative: killer drones and terminator robotics combining with god’s eye satellite and internet surveillance.

Through the chains of mediation – administration, integration, culture industry, spectacle, biopower, “war on terror” – state terror points back to the valorization-accumulation process driving our commodity world, the master logic of capitalist modernity.

But now a new factor points more immediately to the same master logic: collapsing ecologies, degradation and depletion, species extinction and climate change.

In the form of looming planetary meltdown, the capital accumulation process itself becomes directly genocidal.

The more the economies grow, the warmer it gets perforce, sentencing more to misery and death, bringing us all closer to critical tipping point. But in a capitalist world, economies that don’t grow also mean unemployment, misery and death: neo-imperialist war machine.

The alternative to this viciously self-terminating “progress”: global reorganization, collective passage to non-domination, a sustainable social logic.

Formerly, in Marxist vision, this passage was the leap to freedom. Today, the urgency with which it begins to bear down makes it appear rather on the side of constraint: the rational self-constraint now demanded by the same instinct for self-preservation that long ago reversed into its irrational opposite.

Benjamin: revolution as the emergency brake on a runaway train.

The actual problem we face: how to organize the reorganization in a non-catastrophic way.

Eros, the liberation of nature, passes through the passage to classless society, but does not end there.

Ecological meltdown begins by impacting us differently but must end by imposing humanity on us indifferently. Could this constraining imperative then bypass the class struggle, realizing its aims more directly?

Maybe, but not likely, so long as the entrenched regime of class relations retrenches and enforces, as it now is doing.

Which terror trumps? Monstrous question for politicized erotics.

missed tooth?

It’s too easy, White warns us, to simply dismiss Hirst, through an annihilating critique that fails to confront the real fascination operating in his art.

Point taken. And White’s discussion of the antagonisms staged in For the Love of God is strong and convincing. To make these antagonisms visible and available to reflection already pierces its glittering halo, without failing to give the devil his due.

My reservation: today the link between capital and death is even deeper than White registers. Capital has become in actual fact what it always was potentially: a techno-genocidal automaton busily destroying the very conditions of life. Or rather, and more horribly, compelling each of us to contribute to this process, and thus surrender, every day of our lives.

What speaks mutely in many of Hirst’s works is a coldness, an absence of life and warmth – the coldness of an objective process we have for decades been helpless to restrain or change.

There was a moment in postwar culture when this coldness was mirrored effectively as a critical artist means. That was the bite of dissonant modernism. But compared to Hirst, even Beckett’s stare is a warm and compassionate protest.

There is no protest to Hirst’s coldness. It mirrors, but without a trace of that passion or compassion that leads us back to each other in urgency. This lack of heart, this absent clenched fist of humane outrage at our present impotence, is the missed encounter at the heart of Hirst’s work. It marks not just Hirst’s failings as an individual artist, but the crystallized failure of a whole historical moment.

Needing heart, needing warmth, as well as honesty and truth, from anything that would call itself art, now more than ever, what shall we say to or about skulls that leave us “blinking, dazzled, and bemused” but not warmed or more human?

Speaking of Hirst, should we not ask this, as well?

“The yawning jaws, the wreathed lips, the enormous teeth, the bulging eyes, composed a striking death’s-head....The mule, in his opinion, had died of old age. He had bought it, two years before, on its way to the slaughterhouse. So he could not complain. After the transaction the owner of the mule predicted that it would drop down dead at the first ploughing. But Lambert was a connoisseur of mules. In the case of mules, it is the eye that counts, the rest is unimportant. So he looked the mule full in the eye, at the gates of the slaughterhouse, and saw that it could still be made to serve. And the mule returned his gaze, in the yard of the slaughterhouse....I thought I might screw six months out of him, said Lambert, and I screwed two years.”

Beckett, Malone Dies, 1952/56.

(Photo: Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990)

refracting terror

“Somewhere in the heap, a wild equine eye, always open.”

Beckett, The Unnamable, 1953/58

As the wars went on, missiles and phosphorous pounding down on civilians across the Global South, computer animator Lena Gieseke mapped the space of Picasso’s great protest of the terror wreaked on Guernica.

Not unproblematic, her technical “exploration.” The last thing we need is another cartoon trivializing what weapons keep doing to bodies. (Nor does Picasso escape this old problem of the enjoyment factor intrinsic to aesthetic semblance, at work in all images, even painful representations of the worst.) 

But her risky estrangement convinces – and the more so by not reassuring. She fingers the questions raised, without pretending to fix the relation between her “three-dimensional reproduction” and Picasso’s painting. The haunting result disturbs on many levels, even as it activates the image shards of horror all of us are forced to carry in our heads.

allegory and automaton

The opening thesis of Benjamin’s celebrated last essay controversially poses a strategic alliance between “historical materialism” and theology.

Benjamin describes an elaborate eighteenth-century stage machine, the basis of a popular traveling show. This chess-playing automaton reduces to four elements: chessboard, “system of mirrors,” “puppet in Turkish attire” and “hunchbacked dwarf.”

Under Benjamin’s interpretative labor, each element generates a second, allegorical meaning, and the apparatus takes on philosophical status. The chessboard becomes the field of class struggle. The mirrors stand for the system of illusion that obscures what really takes place. The Turk becomes “’historical materialism’,” and the dwarf personifies theology.

Systematic deception makes it appear that “historical materialism” assists the exploited in their struggle. What actually happens in Benjamin’s allegorical image is that theology, concealing itself, gives its services to the exploited by manipulating the machinery of illusion and pulling the strings of “historical materialism.” This hidden, guiding infiltration of theology supplies the winning combination.

Benjamin’s quotation marks signal that something is fishy with historical materialism, or what goes by that name. A critique of pseudo-materialism will unfold in subsequent theses: Benjamin will distinguish a fraudulent “historical materialism” in the working class parties from one truly animated by Marx’s solidarity with the exploited and oppressed.

But keeping now to Benjamin’s formulations in the first thesis, we could pose some complicating questions:

In the allegory, the dwarf of theology is the only visible locus of autonomous agency. Benjamin encourages us to infer two more: the antagonists of class struggle, labor and capital. But strictly speaking, neither has substantial presence or determinate agency in the image. Both are merely implied by the relation between a present agonic field, the chessboard, and the identity of the puppet, “’historical materialism’.”

The distribution of agency appears to open up a problematic that exceeds the configured elements of the allegory itself.

The eighteenth-century stage machine, called the Chess Automaton or Turk (Schachtürke in German), is, to use I.A. Richards’ terms, the vehicle of the allegory. The philosophical counterpart is the tenor.

Let’s play along with Benjamin and immerse in this image. In the historical vehicle, the touring stage show performed for a paying public of amazed and suspicious spectators, one of whom must step from the crowd to become the Turk’s opponent.

Such an opponent – clearly an autonomous agent vis-à-vis the Turk-Automaton – is entailed by the set-up: the show makes no sense otherwise.

If we then infer, as we must, such an opponent for the tenor as well, then we have the collective subject-position of capital in the class struggle – or in a longer vantage, the exploiter-oppressor, whatever the mode of production. (Or, to take its actual appearance-form as Benjamin was writing, Nazism.) But then where do the exploited sit? They cannot be identical with “historical materialism.” At most, this last merely claims to represent the interests of the exploited. And fraudulently at that, for the puppet is actually part of the machinery of deception.

The exploited and oppressed seem to be excluded from any active agency in the game – not at all what we would expect!

Perhaps Benjamin wants to say that the system of deception denies the exploited their potential historical agency and that the infiltration of “historical materialism” by theology creates an opening to agency. But in that case, the allegory would hardly represent a corrected concept of history, since now the theological dwarf is standing in for the exploited – a substitution rather than empowerment or self-empowerment.

A real problem emerges around the agency-subjectivity of the exploited and the status of the deceptive apparatus itself. What really is Benjamin asking us to imagine and consider?

Edgar Allen Poe saw the real machine in action in Richmond. In his short story, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (1936), he attempts to establish the necessity of a hidden human agent. “It is quite certain,” he writes, “that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else. Indeed this matter is susceptible of a mathematical demonstration a priori. The only question then is of the manner in which human agency is brought to bear.”

Indeed, what is an automaton? A machine that expends inputs of energy in a pre-programmed way, like a wound-up clock? Or a code, a string of ones and zeros, like the chess software you may have on your laptop?

The question points, quickly enough, to the problem of freedom that constitutes the concept of history.

In volume one of Capital, Marx shows how labor-time systematically stolen in commodity production is the source of all surplus value. Value (Wert), socially-necessary labor-time, emerges from the unfolding logic of exchange itself, as it transforms production into commodity production; labor-power takes the form of the value-producing commodity. Surplus value is extracted from the production-exchange process to the degree that wages are kept below the value that labor produces. Capital emerges as a new factor as value passes through the forms of money and commodities in exchange, adding to itself with each full circuit.

Capital, then, is “the valorization of value” in a boundless, self-renewing spiral movement: “self-valorizing value” (sich verwertende Wert, chapter four). Capital, Marx writes with legible astonishment, is “the dominant subject” of a self-moving, self-driving, constantly expanding process. It is an “automatic subject” (ein automatisches Subjekt), an “animated, inspirited monster” (ein beseeltes Ungeheuer).

If there is an automaton that dominates history, it is this expansive master logic of capital accumulation, which exerts itself as a constant force of compulsion acting relentlessly on direct producers and capitalists alike.

This logic, the very essence of our global social process, operates “behind the backs” of individuals. History is a blind process, in that it has never yet been consciously directed by human reason; it is rather the effect of that reason separating itself from the will and interests of individuals and asserting itself above and against them.

Reified, this process is experienced by these same individuals as unchangeable second nature, as the real objective power of things and facts that have taken possession of the autonomy promised to human beings.

So far there has been no global human subject, no human agency over the force of blindly operating and endured historical processes.

The exploited and oppressed, as those who have suffered most from this given even as their labor is its absolute condition, are the ever-present potential rupture in a history of continuous, accumulating toil, defeat and oppression.

The possibility that the exploited in struggle will gather their collective potentials and overthrow this logic of domination, Benjamin will reiterate again and again, is the possibility that human agency will emerge for the first time – free human agency in the global sense that alone would constitute a universal history of liberation, of progress in emancipation.

Possibly, then, this is what the tenor of the allegory shows us, by pointing to the need for a critique of pseudo-materialism and to a theological concept of redemption that, for Benjamin, will turn out to include intrinsically the secular concept of revolutionary praxis. This praxis would reflect the true and self-rescuing dialectic of matter and spirit.

This strategic concept of history, on the side of the exploited, is at least suggestively conveyed in the opening allegory – although, unless I’m mistaken, the image generates more questions than it can clearly answer. Answers will come in the subsequent theses, however.

And, needless to say, the problems of agency and praxis within and against a hostile, overpowering automatic process are the ones we actually still face.

(photo: Marc Wathieu) 

dreaming naked

The antagonism of eros and thanatos is the substance of our species-being, our embeddedness in nature. This was Marcuse’s thesis, the basis of his last aesthetics.

He was pointing to: the irreversibility of time, mortality, transience and inescapable loss, the irreducible misfits of encountering singularities, sexual difference, wounds of love.

These he noted, assert their power “within, but also against the class struggle.”

Is it so? Let’s say it is. What follows?

Drives and needs are structured in a tense configuration of primary processes. This organic constellation - the material basis of subjectivity and therefore also the autonomy of individuals – is not invariable human nature but rather the open point of intersection between nature and the human. Open, that is, to re-constellation, tensions persisting.

Classless society, were it ever attained - or even that stronger reconciliation of a changed, non-dominating relation to nature - would not eliminate all possible collision of drives and needs, the tragic matter of spirit.

But it would, wouldn’t it, eliminate the socially imposed dimension of antagonism: the structural extraction of social surplus value, the master logic of domination?

Art might persist, probably it would – but as something different. A generalized common good, rather than privileged professional property: the end of “art.”

Conceivably, in classless society art could become radically and without reserve what it sometimes is brokenly even now: a continual expression of the dilemmas of liberated happiness - but also the living memory of loss and the appalling misery of prehistory.

Eros: the promise and possibility of a radical reorganization of needs and drives, the taming of death instincts by life, the liberation of the nature in humanity and humanity in nature...

In any case this, and nothing less, would be, wouldn’t it, the radical throw, the revolutionary leap to real reconciliation (aka “freedom”)?

shudders of freedom?

On that point, do Marcuse and Kristeva meet up and party?

Is it otherwise in Adorno, for whom reconciliation would also be liberation from unconsciously endured “natural history” (Marx’s prehistory of naturalized class society)?

Cyclical nature as ecological base and physical rock bottom is the model of archaic fate as blind compulsion, as wheel, vicious circle.

The expanding circuits of capital (M-C...P...C'-M') reproduce, in the second nature of commodified social reality, the spell of wheels that spin but cannot be changed: “the ever new production of the always-the-same,” with its naturalized shadow of misery and unfreedom – actually, so far, permanence in catastrophe, perennial disaster.

Freedom would be the real social reduction of all fraudulent necessity, the conscious openings in the mutual conditioning and reciprocal mediation of nature and history.

This would include the dissipation of blind fate and remnant myth in nature as such – in its “laws” and processes, including enigmas of speciation.

The supercession of nature as spell, as chaining helixes of ideology holding back human possibility. But also, at the same time, the liberation of nature from domination.

Radical ground and overlook on global climate change? Passage to classless production, generalized autonomy and zero-growth economies as firewall against planetary eco-meltdown?

In truth the problem of problems, the liberation from master logics as such, the puzzle of social code beyond DNA...

As it is, science belongs to capital. Techno-power, mediated by antagonism, serves and asserts the power of blind global process over nature and individuals alike – “the progress from slingshot to atom bomb.”

Could be otherwise, but no solution here that is not radically social...

political eros?

Rhythms of Resistance/Action Samba Band Berlin: saving grace of northern demos in grim clime and harried streets...

Radical music or music for radicals? Or both at once: concrete appearance-form of politicized reach, of eroticized radical culture?

executive toothpaste

The merger of emergency executive and war machine within the US state is evidently bigger than Obama.

Tone shifts aside, he and his cabinet have drawn back from draw down.

With only minor, token exceptions and despite the complaints of Republicans, the Obama executive has maintained, reinforced and even continued to expand the apparatus, positions and prerogatives put in place by Bush.

Substantially, the war on terror continues. The politics of fear are played in a pleasingly different key, but one year on the logic of homeland security persists where it matters.

Emergency expansions of executive power, once established, are incredibly difficult to roll back. We would need to imagine the conditions for a transition to democracy in the US analogous to post-dictatorship periods in Spain, Chile or Greece. Leonard Cohen, but where is the struggle?

Carte blanche executive violation of standing treaties, secret presidential programs and expenditures, covert acts of war, normalized assassination and “extraordinary renditions,” suspension of habeas corpus and torture by proxy (all evidently in practice under Obama): whether granted by special authorization of Congress or simply unopposed and unprosecuted, such abuses of law clearly liquidate the Constitution.

They effectively reconstitute a new relation between the branches of government – something only Constitutional amendment could do legally. Checks and balances to constrain arbitrary power have been drastically enfeebled.

Q: So why do Congress and Supreme Court endorse the new regime by a mix of approval, silence and inaction? Why do they not “jealously guard” their own designated powers? Where, the trumpeted instinct for "liberty"?

Why, for example, is Kucinich all alone in crying foul (if that mild aside be a cry).

Is it safer in the dark? Is the new militaristic regime too “popular”? Is the populace asleep, apathetic, distracted, too confused and depressed?

Is it the sum of all these, converging with and reinforcing concentrated economic power - the "nexus of profit and secrecy"?

Given the conditions of winning Congressional elections and reelections, is it preferable to feign blindness and hand over powers at the slightest invocation of security shibboleths?
If so, in what ways? Who gains what, by what process?

And the Court, what is the Court after Bush v. Gore? A degraded reflector of the corporate-partisan force field at any given moment - a belated, arbitrary dialectic between presidential power of nomination and nine mortal lifelines.

A very partial, very unsatisfying hint at the weight and momentum of processes, once the changed facts in the state have taken hold:

“It is often too late for the toothpaste to be put back into the tube.”
Garry Wills, Bomb Power, 2010

on scurvy music

from On Stupidity in Music, an Imaginary Dialogue (1958)
by Hanns Eisler

If I think of the stupidity in music I am of the opinion that the desperate do find consolation.

But isn't consolation the real aim of art, especially of music?

Concerning consolation, I can tell you something from the secret documents of the Austro-Hungarian state police in the year 1805 in Vienna, which says: "In times like the present, when manifold sufferings affect the character of the people, the police must pay more regard than ever to popular distractions. The most dangerous hours are in the evening. How can these hours be better and more harmlessly spent than by listening to music?"

But Eisler, 1805 was the year Beethoven composed his Third Symphony, the Eroica. Did the police chiefs want the Viennese to listen to this revolutionary music?

You overestimate the intelligence of the state police in 1805.

Is bad music always stupid?

No. Dangerous things are unfortunately mostly not stupid. But now I'll contradict myself and give you something "in praise of bad music." Here's what Proust wrote in Les plaisirs et les jours: "Pour out your curses on bad music, but not your contempt!"