immanence

I’m working up a conference idea around the following set of thoughts, which are still very much in the process of being formulated. Comments welcome.

The present conjuncture

For those who study such things, social and cultural theory — sometimes simply called “Theory” with a capital T — has done wonders for helping us understand the twentieth century, and perhaps the turn of the twenty-first. The category includes a variety of schools of thought ranging from neo-Marxist world-systems analysis, psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School critical theory (with its integration of the latter two), and European existential phenomenology, to French structuralism (Levi-Straussian anthropological studies, Barthesian studies of popular mythology) and poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, et al.), British cultural studies (the Birmingham School), the postcolonial/decolonial analyses of scholars from the Global South (Said, Fanon, et al), and the many shades of American cultural studies, gender studies, and the like. Theory’s various recent “turns” — toward affect, materiality and the nonhuman, ontology, and others — have made for a consistently interesting landscape of ideas and debates, with loose consensuses emerging but rival perspectives never quite going away.

What “Theory” has to offer for understanding the present, however, is not entirely clear to me, and it’s partly because the present is already different from what it was just a few years ago. In the last theory course I taught (Advanced Environmental Humanities), I thought it was enough to include Achille Mbembe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Christina Sharpe, and an array of other BIPOC scholars to capture the pandemic and George Floyd “moments.” Today, just three years later, I feel that extension needs itself to be extended, to make room for a world that’s become noticeably different.

Specifically, I see at least four trends of recent years that have yet to be critically assessed in a sufficiently integrated way.

(1) Climate change: Long studied by scientists and analyzed by ecocritics and other environmental humanists, climate change has taken on a widely recognized urgency, even as its political contours have become more sharply contested. It is accompanied by pressures on global energy politics, with oil and coal increasingly being replaced by a rush for “transition fuels” along with the minerals undergirding “renewable energy” (lithium, nickel, cadmium, cobalt, manganese, et al.); equally real pressures on land and water resources, as the polar regions become open to intensive exploitation; and increasing weather disasters pressuring people and other organisms to physically move to more hospitable places.

(2) Authoritarian drift: The dramatic rise of right-wing populism, “illiberalism,” and “democratic backsliding,” represented by (initially) elected politicians like Putin (in power since 2000), Erdoğan (since 2003), Netanyahu (since 2009), Orbán (since 2010), Modi (since 2014), Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni, Fico, and candidates like Le Pen, Farage, and Canada’s Poilievre, has put into question not only the forward momentum of liberalism, with its emphatic combination of civil rights and economic “freedoms,” but the forward movement of democracy more generally. In the univocity of their messaging — which tends toward the conspiratorial, anti-“globalist,” anti-elitist, and anti-climate science — and in the growing connections between them, these politicians represent a wave that has fractured the unity of “the West” and created new potentials for alliances between previous enemies (e.g., between Putin and various right-wing governments in the West) and for conflicts between long-established allies. What their rise portends for human and civil rights — women’s rights, gay rights, equality across racial categories, et al. — and for democratic checks and balances, “rule of law,” and public-interest regulatory institutions — is yet to be fully grasped.

(3) The digital frontier: The emergence of digital technologies toward an absolute centrality in national as well as global communication regimes has created a new generation of hugely influential oligarchs (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Andreessen, Durov, Huateng, Yiming, Huang, et al.); constantly evolving informational tools, from social media to artificial intelligence; and powerful new forms of social control, based in surveillance and newly insidious ways of influencing public opinion. The new tech oligarchy has pressured traditional media (many of them in free fall) as well as academic and other professional institutions of knowledge production and communication. The national scale of governance has proved ineffective at regulating the tech industries, even as it is under increasing attack by the oligarchs themselves (like Musk).

(4) Disorderly ‘multipolarization‘: Finally, the post cold war period, in which the US-led West appeared so triumphant as to herald what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history,” has proven to be a mirage. The 2008 economic crisis weakened western economies at the same time as China and other BRICS countries have reasserted not only new-found economic strengths, but also neo-imperial characteristics (as with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or Putin’s war on Ukraine and military adventurism in Africa and Syria). Whether this will lead to a new “cold war,” if not a hot war, between the USA (with its Western allies) and China (with its Eastern and Southern allies), as some have predicted, remains to be seen. More likely, it will continue as an unstable, increasingly multipolar “disorder” of one kind or another, with fractious alliances of convenience competing over resources, borders, digital/informational space, and even outer space.

How well are all of these elements addressed by existing social and cultural theory?

The first three are actually readily interpretable within existing models of cultural and political change. Climate change can be seen as the looming mega-crisis of capitalism — some would say its final crisis, but it’s not at all clear that the crisis cannot be overcome by an ostensible “greening,” i.e., a shift to new technologies that are no less extractive than the old ones. Digital mediatization is capitalism’s latest frontier, with regulatory apparatuses ill-equipped to moderate its dramatic accumulative impulses. And illiberal politics can be seen as representing the “fascist backsliding” of liberalism, the two — liberalism and fascism — making up two competing ends of a spectrum of capital-harboring politics.

The fourth trend, however, is too frequently read as a reassertion of the cold war division between a liberal West and an ostensibly socialist East. The problem here is not just that the East (the USSR and China) was never truly socialist; it created its own class structures and offered up a kind of “trickle down socialism” that remained in service of state-capitalist goals. It is also that the new rivalries are torn from within. For instance, with their radically different cultural and environmental agendas, Trumpism and “Bidenism” can hardly be described as the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of an indistinguishable “duopoly.” And the relations among tech oligarchs (like Elon Musk), global conservative politics, and the scramble for resources — from newly opened up fossil fuel reserves to “new” draws like lithium, cobalt, et al. — remains unpredictable.

More importantly, all of the players — from nation-states (more or less) like the US, EU, Russia, China, India, and Iran, to tech companies and transnational nongovernmental movements (like the global climate justice movement, at one end, and radical Islamist and other religious movements at another) — are competing on a terrain that is capitalist, resourcist, and extractivist at its material core. Alliances and rivalries are no longer certain or predictable between these various players. Perhaps as importantly, the militarization of many of their relations is not only being reasserted — with the passing of arms agreements and nuclear weapons containment protocols — but are also being “hybridized” through new forms of informational and digital warfare.

What about culture?

All that aside, Theory’s strength has long been in understanding culture in relation to the political and economic. Where, then, is culture in all of this?

It’s clear that “culture wars” — the critiques of feminism, gay and trans rights, anti-racism, the ostensible “attack on the traditional family” or traditional religion, and so on — are playing a hugely significant role in the reassertion of authoritarian conservatism. Elon Musk’s new power can hardly be understood apart from his willingness to use that power in the service of “anti-wokism” — i.e., a return to the deregulatory pseudo-“meritocracy” of rich white men and their heirs. The moves to “reborderize” and create security regimes to control and police migration, represent efforts to “keep out” those who don’t look, talk, or worship “like us.” These dovetail with efforts to re-establish national polities on identitarian principles — Modi’s Hindu India, Putin’s white Christian Russia, et al., all solidly grounded in centuries-old forms of racism and/or religious “civilizationism.”

But all of it points to something larger that is rarely addressed directly, and certainly not by right-wing political operatives or policy makers. This is the underlying sense that the world is becoming increasingly volatile, shifting, and “placeless” — that we live, in fact, in a time when mass displacement is becoming the new norm.

Climate-destabilizing capitalism has been naturally “dislocatory” and “migratogenic” on many levels. It has been that in the past, at least for the national and global elites who have traveled freely, appropriated distant resources, deposited their wealth in offshore havens, and enjoyed the world as their oyster. Those are the “pull” factors that have attracted the would-be wealthy to capitalist globalism. Today they are joined increasingly by “push” factors — rising sea levels, intensifying hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods, expanding wildfire seasons, and conflicts resulting from all of these — that affect a growing global precariat, who are at risk of becoming refugees displaced by climate change, by violent conflict, or by some combination of the two. In some sense or other, that precariat potentially includes all of us, whether we consciously recognize it or not. So there is a psychodynamic element here — a denial, underpinned by unconscious recognition — that is increasingly being explored by psychologists (with ecopsychologists having led the way).

And that dislocatory movement is joined by the many nonhumans who are also being forced to move, with changing climatic zones, into less hospitable environments. That this is all happening against the background of what John Clark calls the Necrocene, or the sixth planetary extinction crisis, is at least worth mentioning, even if most people are unaware of that more geological-scale crisis.

As the world becomes more circulatory, dislocatory, and “migratogenic,” efforts intensify to control its circulations, to securitize its borders, and to channel or remove the unwanted from “our” shores, our “home turf.” The cultural and psychological dimension of this, and the fear that underpins it, is what makes populist messages of making America — or Russia, Europe, Hungary, or India — “great again” so resonant. More carefully reasoned, science-based arguments hardly stand a chance against the predatory political entrepreneurs of the right who stoke these fears, and the unreasonable promises of retreat to the past, into political wildfires. (Doug Saunders’ piece in last week’s Globe and Mail was excellent on this.)

A new Frankfurt School for a hybrid [war] world

The Frankfurt School’s great contribution, in the middle decades of the last century, was to bring an excitingly transdisciplinary mix of theoretical tools — political-economic, psychoanalytical, and cultural — to understanding the last conflagration of fascism (Hitlerism) and its continual repercussions on the post-war world.

Today, we need something like a new (and more global) Frankfurt School that would synthesize the political-economic, psychoanalytical, and cultural dimensions of the current conjuncture. This conjuncture unites the crisis of fossil-fuel capitalism in the face of climate change, the gold rush of new tech frontiers (digitization, artificial intelligence, surveillance capital, and securitization/reborderization) and the new class of uber-wealth that rises upon them, the parallel emergence of a hyper-precariat for whom the promise and peril of movement is all that’s left, and the feeling of being on the precipice of a world torn asunder by dislocatory forces.

For the precarious many who have taken flight, the promise of movement comes as the only hope. This then confronts the securitized, borderized fear among the still “placed,” a fear of those who might move here to take up residence amidst us. The desire to hoard and wall off what we have from those others who might arrive is eminently exploitable by astute political actors in the deregulatory, post-Westphalian conditions of an unstable “hybrid world.”

Perhaps, at least as a place-marker, we could for now call the present conjuncture a “hybrid [war] world,” where “war” is an implied connective feature of a world that has gone hybrid on multiple levels.

Hybridity evokes both positives and negatives. There is the hybridity of warfare — conflict that blurs war with peace, combatants with civilians, and militarism with economic policy, disinformation, and digital subterfuge. There is hybridity seen as a threat (to conservatives eager to preserve the “essences” of nationality, race, gender, or whatever else, but also to old-school humanists), and hybridity raised as a promise (Haraway’s cyborg, the various posthumanisms and geontological animisms, the potential coalescence of technology and earthliness). There is the hybridity of the post cold war world, in which nation-states begin to implode, enemies come from outside and from within, and threats as well as potential alliances emerge across a terrain that has become more global than ever. And there is the hybridity of the “Anthropocene”/”end-Holocene” extinction event, which brings us back to the “original hybridity” of a turbulent and unpredictable planet, or at the very least to a not-fully defined moment between recognizable regimes (climate regimes, political-economic regimes).

As things get more clear, the “hybrid [war] world” will get other names. (Terms like “Anthropocene” and “Capitalocene” are of course too big and blunt for capturing this nascent new world disorder. “Late capitalism” and “late modernity” never meant much of anything, except perhaps a hope, “postmodernity” even less so, and adding “terminal” to the mix raises too many questions.) But I think we are beyond the old Cold War frame, and need to start making sense of the world in this elusive, much more muddied, and very present conjuncture.