Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
Our human relationship to nature defines our economic life. As Marx articulated in the 1844 manuscripts, labor involves an engagement with nature in order to fulfill human ends, the working up of nature as an “inorganic body.” Consequently, the world of work and that of the environment are really two aspects of our relationship to nature, and the shift in academic interest from economy to ecology as the burning issue of the day does not represent any real change in perspective. On a fundamental level, economy is ecology and vice versa. Thus, the issue of climate change is primarily one about the energy structure of our economy. If that structure before the Industrial Revolution boiled down to the way in which we were cutting down our forests, today the issue is how fossil fuels are leading to climate change. The other global natural disaster of our day, the coronavirus, has arisen as a consequence, first, of our treatment of wild animals as food and, second, of economic globalization, whose movements have established the pathways for the rapid spread of viruses.
The problem has been, though, that this intimate connection between economy and ecology has been overlooked, not least by Marx, in favor of a perspective that sees nature not as its own actor but simply as inert raw material for our human purposes, as if our economic decisions had no effect on our relationship to nature. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment argued that our exploitative approach to nature had established a similar type of relationship between humans, and they therefore tried to imagine alternative ways of relating to nature in order to escape from reification. Such an escape is today a matter not just of improving the social order but of realizing that nature never was and never can be simply a set of things, inorganic material for our desires. The discussion of the Anthropocene reflects this shift in our perspective on the relationship between the environment and the economy, and the project of the essays in this issue is to come up with new models for this relationship.
Andrew Reszitnyk argues against the attempt to shift attention away from economic issues in the move toward environmental ones. For him, the concept of the Anthropocene orients our thinking toward a future without human life and thus turns our attention away from human problems of repression and inequality. The result is a complicity with neoliberal and capitalist structures that exacerbate ecological problems and a turn toward existential and ontological questions that divert us from economics, ethics, and politics. Dipesh Chakrabarty, for instance, has abandoned discussions of human injustice and oppression in order to focus on the relationship between the inhuman and the human. The Marxist focus on emancipation promotes climate catastrophe for Chakrabarty because it would imply an even greater expansion of our exploitation of the natural world. Reszitnyk argues in response that the focus on climate change too often turns away from the economic and political issues that lie at the heart of the problem. Timothy Morton, for example, develops a kind of non-anthropocentric thinking in which all objects, human and nonhuman, have equal value and everything is interconnected in a way that avoids a hierarchy of being. Because there is no hierarchy, there also cannot be any value distinctions, and the result of the focus on ontology is in this case a turn away from current political issues. Because humanity as a whole becomes the culprit, there is no way to assign specific responsibility, and the possibility of critique is taken away, along with the ability to imagine new forms of relationship. In replacing the concept of a hierarchical world with that of a “mesh” of equivalent entities, Morton justifies a neoliberal hyperindividualism in which “everything is treated as a universe unto itself” and “history is erased.”
The answer here would not be to return to a strict focus on human issues but to reflect on the ways in which we must revise our understanding of the human relationship to nature in order to provide new approaches to both ecology and economy. Sean Winkler’s essay describes the interconnections between the two in the development of modern science. As he lays out, Soviet Marxism can provide us with new insights in this regard by focusing on the way in which all theoretical knowledge arises out of practical problems in the confrontation with nature. Boris Hessen, a Soviet philosopher of science, argued that Isaac Newton’s theories of motion were not pure science but developed as solutions to practical problems in the world of work, namely, the need to develop techniques for understanding mechanical motion for lifting and drainage in mines, construction, and canal building; for predicting ballistics for artillery; and for understanding celestial mechanics and tides for navigation. Newton’s theories were consequently developed as solutions to these very practical problems, and his mechanistic approach to nature was a natural outcome of the increasing use of machines in seventeenth-century Europe. But if pure theoretical knowledge only develops through an engagement with practical problems, the inner workings of nature, i.e., the things in themselves, also never exist except as projections from things as they exist for us. Pure things in themselves would be without relationship and therefore without determination, meaning that they would be effectively nothing. But if our knowledge of things can only arise as knowledge of things that exist for us, then this theoretical knowledge only arises as an accompaniment to the practical knowledge of things as they come to exist for our purposes. Consequently, the laws of nature and human purposes develop in dialectical relationship to one another. Theoretical knowledge arises as part of a process in which things become purposive for us, thereby becoming objects of knowledge at all. At the same time, human purposes, though they seem to come from outside of the world, actually arise through the interaction with the objective world. The history of thought is a history of the relationship between humans and nature, “the point where purposive human activity is articulated through the laws of nature and vice versa.” The idea of purely theoretical knowledge is a form of ideology that results from the social and class division of intellectual from physical labor.
With the waning of mechanistic processes in our economic life, our relationship to nature has entered a new era in which the fundamental questions now relate to dynamic rather than mechanistic processes, and these problems call for new conceptualizations of scientific knowledge. In order to imagine alternative ways of structuring the relationship between humans and nature, Pamela Carralero lays out the possibilities for a new kind of scientific method that is not focused on the domination of nature and its reduction to unity but rather attempts to establish relationships between the known and the unknowable, the human and the nonhuman. Focusing on Michel Serres’s ideas on the ways in which analogy and modeling are crucial to the movement of scientific knowledge, Carralero argues that climate science depends upon modeling in order to develop not certainties but different translations of the inaccessible into representational forms. The modeling process stands at the boundary between the inaccessible and the accessible. The task is to translate the former into the latter in a process that recognizes the ways in which human culture interacts with both living forms and earth systems in order to create a totality of movement. This movement does not have the character of a predictable system but of a shifting historical development in the relationship between humans and nature.
Pursuing a similar line of thought, Aaron Grinter argues that metaphor lies at the root of creativity and innovation in science. The primacy of metaphor in science derives from the way in which models are crucial for establishing the basic understandings of the world within which a scientific theory can function and lead to specific knowledge. These models can open up new areas of inquiry as well as new perspectives on the world, but if they are considered as representations of reality rather than as metaphors, such models can prevent innovative thinking. Thus, the mechanistic view of science derived from Newtonian physics is itself a metaphor that has reinforced a mode of science that seeks to control nature rather than establish alternative forms of relationship between humans and nature. In order to be able to confront issues of climate change and ecology that are not subject to manipulation of a machinic mechanism, a new set of models for imagining science must be developed that is no longer bound up with the goal of mastering nature. Instead, new models can no longer focus on the manipulability of nature but must accept the complexity and dynamic development of nature.
The next set of essays focuses on the forms of alienation and mechanization that continue to shape our world. Since the mechanization of the world leads to a mechanization of human relationships, Ross Etherton explores this process in his interpretation of Ernst Jünger’s Sturm as an example of a replacement of organic rhythms in warfare with the mechanized movements of the machine gun. The machine gun becomes a protagonist in the story, in which machinic bursts dominate the text by subordinating human interactions to the explosive interruptions that destroy the possibility of human-centered interactions. Consequently, the key figure in the story for Etherton is Horn, a new type of soldier-worker, whose effectiveness consists in a kind of technical specialization rather than romantic heroism. As opposed to readings that emphasize the communal character of the soldiers’ experience, Etherton treats the story as a part of Jünger’s establishment of the worker type, whose character traits have been reduced to a standardized subordination to mechanical processes.
Such transformations in our relationship to the object world bring along changes in our relationship to our own inner nature, and Joseph Weiss argues that the figures of the gambler and the prostitute illuminate the patterns of our present condition of neoliberalism. Because the Internet and social media are now virtually inseparable from our economic interactions and our innermost affective existences, the logic of the totally administered world has progressed to the point where nothing can now escape the logic of the market, and we live in “the total casino, the total bordello.” Because of social networking and porn culture, our desire is now perpetually on display and surreptitiously managed by the data algorithms of technology firms. Inner desires can no longer be separated from external presentations, and economic activity becomes a kind of perpetual gamble.
The natural response to this administered totality of affect is to try and find an escape. Dharmender S. Dhillon argues that the music of John Coltrane can be understood as an attempt to present the utopian in moments of dissonance that erupt into a regularized continuum of harmonious form. Citing the aesthetic theories of Nietzsche and Adorno, Dhillon describes the utopian in music as a Dionysian dissonance rather than part of an Apollonian regularity because dissonance creates the possibility of something new that would break up a routinized world. Coltrane’s music participates in this project to the extent that the dissonant moments contrast with a progression of predictable harmony. Those Dionysian moments do not depict utopia directly but only through the contrast with a harmony that has become illusory.
Finally, Arthur Bradley discusses our relationship to our own natural mortality in laying out a genealogy of terrorism in which its roots lie in the French Revolution and Hegelian attempts to theorize freedom as an engagement with death. Alexandre Kojève develops a terrorist notion of freedom by interpreting the life and death struggle in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic as an attempt to establish the subject’s freedom by overcoming the fear of death. Freedom is linked to recognition, and the subject achieves recognition by embracing the risk of death, both for itself and for others. This linking of freedom with death becomes a dominant figure for thinkers in France. On the one hand, Emmanuel Lévinas rejects the link between death and freedom, while Maurice Blanchot emphasizes that the embrace of death ends up draining it of all meaning. On the other hand, Slavoj Žižek develops Kojève’s linking of freedom with death by “seeking to recuperate a virtual emancipatory core of revolutionary terror . . . from the historical failures of twentieth-century state terror.” The key examples of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Communist China, and the Iranian Revolution indicate, however, that the triumph of revolutionary terror tends to lead to state terror.
In our section on the critical theory of the contemporary, our editors reflect on the rise of populism in the United States and the United Kingdom. Adrian Pabst surveys the post-Brexit political landscape in the United Kingdom and finds little comfort in the political possibilities now on offer, with the Tories combining free-market solutions with nationalist and authoritarian social and cultural policies. As an alternative, he hopes for a post-liberal renewal that creates mutual recognition and a sense of community. The key task for the future would be to reduce exclusion and estrangement by developing policies that foster social virtue and affirm the common good. Focusing on the United States, Jay Gupta considers the fascist potential of Trump’s politics and locates it not in the direct use of violence but in the way that Trump uses spectacle to represent the people to themselves. Gupta sees a crisis in language and perception in which spectacle is replacing fact-based political discourse. In contrast to Gupta’s critique of populism, Tim Luke explores how American populism offers alternatives to elitist management in the guise, for instance, of the gun sanctuary movement. Rather than reading this movement as a managed proto-fascist spectacle, Luke sees it as part of a broad-based attempt to create a renewed civic life that could become an alternative to a technocratically managed democracy.
The issue concludes with Andrew M. Wender’s review of Catherine Keller’s Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement, which describes a negative theological vision that emphasizes unknowability and thus a possible approach to nature and the human that moves beyond the goals of knowing and controlling.
