On Everyday Apocalypticism

February 1st, 2007

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Posted by ChrisG at 12:30 pm

This is excellent:

The future designated by the “unless”, the future hoped for by the Western environmentalists and NGO workers of the 80s and 90s, cannot now come to pass. It “has already ended, and we are persisting in its degrading memory” – how many of the narcissistic disorders of our culture can be attributed to this awareness?

It’s no doubt true that this sense of the future is one that has been silently troubling industrialised societies for some decades. One of Ulrich Beck’s theses about the ‘risk society’ that he, Giddens and others had theorised in the mid-80s to early 90s was that a key aspect of the neo-liberal mode of production was ‘institutionalised irresponsibility’ in relation to the future. This in turn was probably inspired by Hans Jonas’ proposition towards the end of the 70s that the industrial use of technology put us in a new relationship with future generations, mediated by its exploitation of nature. Put simply, we had for the first time in human history the opportunity to ensure that there was ‘no future’ at all for any mode of being we might consider human.

Implicit in Jonas’ thesis is the idea that the reserve of natural value appropriated by Capital ‘free of charge’ (that is, without requiring the expenditure of labour in order to make it usable), nature stands in for future generations here in the present. The ceaseless consumption of non-renewable resources and destruction of species & habitats embodies a disconnection from our own futures, and a basic irresponsibility towards human potential which is embodied in our relationship with nature.

Implicit in Beck’s thesis is the idea that the emptying and wholesale exploitation of the future is a structural feature of capital. It is this that generates the sense of having participated in an apocalypse which one failed to notice. Capital does not just extract surplus value from the ongoing present by subjecting it to the repetitive cycles of production, but also extracts it from the living futures of potential embodied in nature. Capitalist production pulls futures into the present and uses them up, but in order to do this it vampirises the past becomings from out of which the world has congealed. The consumption of fossil fuels which have taken millions of years to reach their present state is one example, and the production of new technologies (such as genetic engineering) which utilise the evolved potential of natural forms to trigger, in one moment of transplantation (Virilio) a new living future of evolution which is uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

To extract value, capital must collapse, twist and turn inside out evolved temporal relationships – if the ‘exploitation of nature’ has a core meaning, this is probably it. The production of novelty and extraction of value from nature (and social labour) cannot happen without this form of increasingly reductive and invasive intervention. And the more reductive and invasive, the more this process implies within it the production of unpredictable consequences with long-term latency – e.g. the generation of nuclear waste or the evolutionary fates of transgenic organisms. The condition K-Punk describes in another excellent post as the backdrop of Children of Men is also a normalised function of industrial production:

What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate.

The modern world rests on a slow churn of unfolding catastrophes (nuclear power, industrial synthetic chemicals, GM, nanotech), whose first waves are generally deflected by capitalism’s capacity for offloading externalities at the margins. But the aftershocks reach us, and trouble our certainties. And a growing wave of anger around the way globalisation intensifies this process is now undeniable, around about the same time as the main quakes themselves are beginning to reach us. The impossible quest to assign responsibility for the accumulation of PCBs or the degradation of soil fertility is an attempt to domesticate this sense of vast, slowly unfurling disaster within the public realm of legality. What is lacking is a way to acknowledge and work through these ‘narcissistic disorders’ of industrial production and consumption without remaining at this level – which would necessitate the quest for a genuinely future-oriented ethics, such as Jonas (and Guattari in Chaosmosis) demanded.

What might this mean? A first point to consider is perhaps the one made by K-Punk apropos T. S. Eliot:

The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot’s claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past.

The possibility of reconnecting with a future of human potential is the ground of responsibility – and this entails a sense that the future is the place where some of the things we care about will continue living and evolving (to care about tradition is to actively ensure that it will survive to be contested as tradition).