Here are my thoughts on the US election, and on the challenges it presents us, in four parts.
1. The informational catastrophe, and the sadness of it
For all the reasons to be dismayed about these elections, there’s one that saddens me most. It’s that all the people (me among them) who’ve given their professional lives to elucidating and communicating the state of the world — the climate and ecological crises, the pressures these crises will put on human and nonhuman populations, and the things we should do now to mitigate the coming suffering — have failed to communicate these things to the majority of our compatriots. (See the comments to this post here for an inkling of that.)
This is an informational failure, maybe even an informational disaster. That makes it potentially a societal disaster, since any society that doesn’t base its decisions on real information about its environment will not survive for very long. Authoritarian, elite-driven societies can succeed for a little while if the elites who decide things work from a genuine understanding of environmental realities. Ultimately, they tend to fail because elites become more interested in maintaining their own status, so the polities fall apart and the masses abandon them (with more or less bloodshed; cf. the Roman empire, the Classic Mayan city-states, or any number of others).
The big question around these back-to-back hurricanes in the southeast U.S. is not why they are happening (that’s easy enough to answer), but why so many people find it easier to believe they were artificially generated by the U.S. government, the “deep state,” FEMA, industry, or some euphemistic “they” (and we know who “they” are) for some nefarious purpose, such as harming Republicans before the election, seizing people’s land to access lithium deposits, testing out their space lasers, falsely convincing us that climate change is real, and so on — than it is to believe in the science of anthropogenic climate change.
Conspiracy theories have flourished in the last few weeks, and they follow in the grooves of longerstanding theories about chemtrails, geoengineering, the deep state, the climate change “hoax,” and so on (see here, here, here, here, and in my earlier series of posts for some background on this).
The question, then, is why some people fall for theories that are so much less congruent with known facts than the more obvious, empirically parsimonious answer — that climate change is real and getting worse, and that scientists have known and demonstrated that for years. But this isn’t just about knowledge versus ignorance. It reflects a deep failure of trust in public institutions.
What are the causes of that failure? In the U.S. (and in what we could call “Greater America,” which like a “long twentieth [or any] century,” is the world beyond the U.S. that is most influenced by U.S. media discourses), I would suggest that there are three main causes, all of them quite real.
The field I’ve worked in for the last few decades, which has come to be known as the Environmental Humanities (capitalized or not), is one that requires keeping up with ongoing scholarship not only in the humanities, but also in the social sciences and the biological and earth sciences. From my reading of the field, I think it’s fair to say that it contains a loose consensus on global ecology, climate change, human activities, and the future. That consensus could be summarized as follows.
The situation: Science may always be contested, full of internal debates, and never final, but the science on climate and global ecology is by now robust and well established. It confirms that human industrial activities have led to ecological and climate destabilization of sufficient intensity that coming years and decades are likely to feature more and more extreme weather events, more and more migration emergencies, and more and more boundary conflicts and resource wars. Each of those is already happening today, and the lack of concerted action on climate change is making them all the more probable tomorrow.
I’ve let things slide a bit on this blog as I’ve been transitioning into my new role as J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Please stay tuned; the blog will become more active again soon.
Meanwhile, here is an interview the Global Humanities department carried out with me a little while ago, in which I address Woodsworth’s somewhat contentious legacy, as well as my plans and goals for the position. Click here for the full interview.
This article was modified on July 11 to clarify a few points (mainly in the third paragraph) about multipolarity and media.
The potential re-election of Donald Trump; the fact that Marine Le Pen’s (and Jordan Bardella’s) National Rally took the greatest number of votes in France’s parliamentary elections; the ongoing leadership of conservative populists like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Georgia Meloni in Italy, Narendra Modi in India, and even more authoritarian figures like Vladimir Putin, whose popularity in Russia continues unabated by his war on Ukraine — these things tend to shock, surprise, and dismay many of us who are committed to liberal-democratic or social-democratic values. But they really should not be so surprising.
By the same token, Joe Biden’s failure, at last Thursday’s debate, to communicate an alternative to Trump-style authoritarian populism, an alternative that should be obvious but that isn’t, is not just his own failure. It’s a broadly institutional failure of western leadership, and also not exactly a surprise. Let me explain.
This is a slightly evolved out-take from my recent Vermont Humanities talk, which can be viewed here.
Netflix’s 3 Body Problemwas remarkably entertaining, I thought, but the whole San-Ti plot line is built around a basic ecological fallacy. Let me explain. (And I’m referring here to the Netflix series, not necessarily to the novel by Cixin Liu, which I have not read, though I’ve been told by those who’ve read it that it largely holds for that as well.)
The Three-Body Problem is about humanity’s encounter with an alien race, the San-Ti or Trisolarans, who have emerged in a star system that is a three-body system. A three-body system is a classic example of an unpredictable stochastic system: it’s one in which three similar bodies — suns, in this case — exert gravitational pulls on each other that are only stable for limited periods and whose stability cannot be predicted. The mathematics for predicting it is too complex and our, earthly, mathematicians (like the Trisolarans’) have never been able to crack it. (There’s some debate over that, but let’s leave it aside.)
This alien race has developed the means to rapidly dehydrate themselves at the onset of an unstable period and go into a state of suspended animation until the next stable system arises, with presumably enough of them remaining in an underground shelter to monitor things during the intervening chaos. The planet goes from frozen states to hothouse states at will. In this it’s something of a metaphor for Earth, which has also gone from cool to warm periods, but not quite as dramatically as this, and far more slowly. But with the current Anthropocene event, there’s a looming instability that will at least affect our capacity to survive.
What’s wrong with this picture is that the kind of highly technological, space-faring, and 11-dimensional science wielding civilization shown in the series could hardly develop under such circumstances.
This blog has been a bit quiet as I transition to my new position as Woodsworth Chair in Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University. I’ll be sharing more about that soon. In the meantime, I can share links to a few recent talks.
Last year’s Free Cultural Spaces symposium “Towards the Symbiocene,” held in Amsterdam’s Club Paradiso and at the “free cultural space” of Ruigoord, Netherlands, has just made available some symposium highlights on YouTube. My talk, “Eco-Trauma & Beyond: Ways of Becoming Earthbound,” can be watched here or below (first video). The talk was a part of a series featuring Glenn Albrecht, philosopher and theorist of the Symbiocene (“era of mutually beneficial relationships between humans and everything else”), critical political geographer Erik Swyngedouw, and philosopher Lisa Doeland, and we shared a panel moderated by Indira van ‘t Klooster, which you can also watch below (second video).
Here’s “Eco-Trauma & Beyond: Ways of Becoming Earthbound”:
I’m part of a roundtable discussion on ecomaterialist theory that’s just been published by the New Review of Film and Television Studies. It’s with film and media studies scholars Seán Cubitt (of Melbourne University), Elena Past (Wayne State University), and Hunter Vaughan (University of Cambridge), and curated by Ludo de Roo (Macquarie University).
Among other topics, the roundtable delves into what counts as media today, why media studies should inherently be “eco-,” different styles of materialism, the “elemental” in “elemental media,” and the origins of the two journals that distinguish the ecomedia field, the open-access Media+Environment and the Journal of Environmental Media.
The study of so-called “near-death experiences” is fascinating, as it is one of those areas that remain most mysterious to science, yet which empirical evidence suggests is very consequential to those who undergo it.
By now we’ve all likely heard of the countless reports of people journeying through tunnels toward sources of light, being greeted by dead relatives or benevolent deities, and experiencing emotions by which they have been able to deeply reframe their lives upon “re-entry” into their post-near-death lives. What’s less well known are the cases in which someone has been “clinically dead” for a period of hours — more than six hours, in some instances — and who has “come back” to describe experiences like the above.
Blasdel divides the various schools of thought among near-death researchers into three, and while the three categories strike me as overgeneralized (e.g., I don’t think it’s accurate to say that all parapsychologists believe mind and brain are separate), it’s a helpful mapping. The three are the “spiritualists,” “some of them evangelical Christians, who were convinced that near-death experiences were genuine sojourns in the land of the dead and divine”; the “parapsychologists,” the largest faction, whose scientific study pursues “phenomena that seemed to undermine the scientific orthodoxy that the mind could not exist independently of the brain”; and the “physicalists,” the “smallest contingent,” who are “committed to a strictly biological account of near-death experiences.”
By the end, Blasdel favors the physicalists, for whom mind and body require each other and cannot function apart from each other. My own leaning favors this view as well, even if I’m fascinated by the experiences that play center stage for the spiritualists, and by the creative theorizing of the parapsychologists. The physicalist understanding fits best with the process-relational ontology I’ve been developing (and with Spinozism, panpsychism, and other forms of relational “new materialism”). This (and the others) are forms of mind-body non-dualism, or what’s sometimes called dual-aspect monism: they see “mind” and “body” — and therefore also “mind” and “brain” — as two sides of the same phenomenon, the first experienced from the “inside” and the second observed from the “outside.” (Not all the perspectives are as clear on this inside/outside dynamic as is Whiteheadian process-relationalism, which sees the inside and outside as co-determining and present in all things, i.e., all relational events.)
Viewed from this perspective, near-death experiences and their accompanying brain activities appear to be the experience of the brain going into a kind of “hyperdrive” (as neurologist Jimo Borjigin calls it). This raises two important questions: (1) Why do reported near-death experiences seem so coherent and meaningful (as opposed to being something akin to the hypnagogic state that precedes sleep, which our mind experiences as a kind of randomizing release from narrative coherence)? (2) And what evolutionary benefit do these experiences bring? Why did we evolve to have these experiences?
The recent International Union of Geological Sciences decision to reject the proposed “Anthropocene epoch” might seem confusing. Here’s a piece of draft material from my forthcoming book-in-progress, The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds, that attempts to bring the situation up to date. Comments welcome! Please note that the references to signs, signatures, and indexicality come from the book’s (processual-) semiotic approach to understanding images; if they seem abstruse, the first half of the book explains them clearly.
While it had some forerunners, the concept of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch was first proposed by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and limnologist Eugene Stoermer in the year 2000. Within a few years, geologists were taking the concept as a serious proposal to mark a new epoch in the history of planet Earth, an epoch brought about by human activities.
For geologists, an epoch is not just any time period; it is part of a nested set of delineations: from smallest to largest and most encompassing, these are known as ages, epochs, periods, eras, and eons. Each is a geochronological unit, that is, a unit of time as marked by Earth history (geology) and determined through the practice of chronostratigraphy, or the reading and writing (-graphy) of layers of rock (strata) marking time (chronos). The entirety is based on the long verified observation that the remnants of the earth’s surface lay themselves down in horizontal layers, with the more recent laid on top of the less recent. The smaller chronostratographic units denote smaller levels of change over time; these combine to make up the larger ones, which denote larger changes.
The geologic time scale provides a kind of chronostratigraphic “address” for anything in the geologic record. We who live today are said to find ourselves “in” the Holocene or—if it should come to be accepted—the Anthropocene epoch, which are respectively the second and potentially third epochs of the third period (Quaternary) of the third era (Cenozoic) of the fourth eon (Phanerozoic) since the formation of the Earth. The Holocene, which began about 11,700 years ago, is roughly the thirty-eighth epoch in Earth’s history.
To say that we are in it, however, or in the Anthropocene, is to presume that we, or someone, could step out of time and see ourselves inside it. We cannot: we are at the leading edge (one of an infinity of leading edges) of a set of dynamic processes that unfolds not with the flatness of a unrolling roll of paper, but with noticeable folds, twists, and lumps. Whether today’s present will one day appear smooth or lumpy, or even form a dramatic twist in the geochronological fabric, cannot possibly be known until that present has become past. It will take additional layering on top of it—further epochs or ages at the very least—to see what it will look like once it is lain down. Geology is, after all (at least in its stratigraphic form), a reading of the past in the rockscape of the present.* Its ability to read the present is constrained by the fact that the present is not yet past. Its layering can only be predicted or, perhaps, divined.
Not nearly as much has been done with the writings of Alfred North Whitehead. If we take his three key late-period books of metaphysics — Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas, and Modes of Thought — we find, to my knowledge, only a handful of albums named after them: free saxophonist Evan Parker’s Process and Reality, the collaboration of the same title by Richard Pinhas, Tatsuya Yoshida, and Merzbow/Masami Akita (which I wrote about here), Steve Bicknell’s EP Modes of Thought, and an album by Anu BlonDee that may or may not be titled after the latter book as well (with track titles like “Mahjong Tea” and “It Ain’t Ova,” I’m not convinced). There’s nothing named after Adventures of Ideas, which could be because it, like most of Whitehead’s books, wasn’t particularly adventurously named. Process and Reality remains his most compelling title (and still awaits a beer named after it, which Difference and Repetitionhas long had).
If there’s any generalization we can make about music inspired by either Deleuze or Whitehead, it’s that their work appeals especially to electronic musicians (all the Mille Plateaux folks, Bicknell, maybe BlonDee), free jazzers (Evan Parker), and those populating the experimental terrain between the two genres (Pinhas and his collaborators). (My own efforts — tracks like this one and a few others, rather than full albums — are in a more minimalist vein, but the inspiration has generally been free-jazzy.)
It’s a bit surprising to me that no well-known 20th century composer shows any clear and documented influence from Whitehead’s philosophy. You’d think, for instance, that Schoenbergian twelve-tonalism would have been influenced by Whitehead’s earlier or middle period writings on science and relativity.
