In Catastrophic Times

Front matter

In Catastrophic Times

Resisting the Coming Barbarism

Isabelle Stengers

Contents

Preface to the English Language Edition 7

Introduction 15

[1] Between Two Histories 17

Preface to the English Language Edition

It is 2015 and | find myself in a situation similar to the one | found myself in at the end of 2008, when | was sending the manuscript for this book to the publisher. Was it necessary to make the situation | was discussing “actual” in order to address readers for whom what mattered, what they were in the process of living through was, primarily, the financial crash and its consequences? Or was it necessary to resist the manner in which a history, which is first of all that of a capitalism freed from what had claimed to regulate it, imposes its own temporal horizons?

The necessity of resisting hasn’t changed. Governments continue to proclaim their good intentions but “realism” has triumphed. Every measure that would fetter the free dynamics of the market, that is to say, the unalienable right of multinational oil companies and financial speculators to transform every situation, whatever it may be, into a source of profit, will be condemned as “unrealistic.” A carbon market, the source of lucrative operations,

is perhaps OK, but certainly not the calling into question of extraction rights - we must keep the right to extract and therefore to burn up all the petrol and gas to which we can have access.

Thanks to the increasingly polluting (fracking) or dangerous (deep water) operations for the extraction of “non-conventional” energy sources, the idea of an energy shortage, forcing a transformation of modes of production and consumption, is now behind us. It seems that we have largely sufficient means to produce a degree of warming that would set off an uncontrollable disruption of

the climate (runaway climate change). That the earth may then become uninhabitable for species which, like our own, depend on relative climatic stability goes without saying. That it may even, like Venus, become a dead planet is a question to which we will never know the answer.

What | had not foreseen when I was writing In Catastrophic Times is that the great “mobilization of America,” which everyone in Europe was expecting, would not take place. How many times did we, at that time, hear the comparison with the US entrance into the Second World War. Timid old Europe was doing all it could, but when the Americans finally understood, when they mobilized, then....We could count on the rapid, radical transformation of its economy, with the fervent support of an entire population. As

is known, between 2007 and 2011 the percentage of Americans taking climate change seriously collapsed, dropping from 71%

to 44%. For all those who were expecting the announcement of more constraining commitments from Copenhagen, there was a rude and painful awakening. Today there is no need to assert, as | did at the time of writing /n Catastrophic Times, that capitalism— some representatives of which claimed held the solution (so-called green capitalism)—is fundamentally irresponsible. In fact, unregulated capitalism and its allies have refused the role that should have been theirs.’ It was the route of direct confrontation that was taken, with the determined negation of global warming. “Drill, baby, drill.”

Today, the grand campaign to deny the problem has run out

of breath a little, but the second phase is being prepared. New voices are making themselves heard, asserting that it is impossible to restrict emissions, which in the meantime have exploded. The only solution is geo-engineering, which will ensure that it is possible to continue to extract and burn, without the temperature rising...

Geo-engineering might only be a dream, or the nightmare of a sorcerer’s apprentice. But the radical uncertainty with regard to the catastrophes that it is likely to produce, to say nothing of its effectiveness, won't make the capitalist machine hesitate, because it is incapable of hesitating: it can’t do anything other

1 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014)

than define every situation as a source of profit. At the moment we are at the stage of fiction, but we know that soon this fiction will be proposed, and will try to impose itself, as the only “logical” solution, whether we like it or not. Logical because in effect it respects the demands of those who reject any calling into question of the right to irresponsibility that they have conquered, and confirms that the techno-industrial capitalist path is the only one that is viable. Moreover, it implies the prospect of a mobilization of public finance - but obviously extremely profitably in private hands - and here the example of the US war effort becomes relevant. This solution has an additional advantage, which is that if it should ever work, the war against global warming will never stop. Humanity in its entirety would be taken hostage, constrained

to serve masters who will present themselves as its saviors,

as those who are protecting it from an invincible enemy who must be kept permanently at a distance. In this way an “infernal alternative” will be fabricated at the planetary scale: either it’s us, your saviors, or it’s the end of the world.?

Today a new word has been created to characterize our situation: our epoch would be the epoch of the anthropocene. One need not be paranoid in order to ask oneself if the success of this word, as much in the media as in the academic world (in a few years the number of conferences and publications on the anthropocene has exploded), doesn’t signal a transition from the first phase—of denial—to the second phase—that of the new grand narrative

in which Man becomes conscious of the fact that his activities transform the earth at the global scale of geology, and that he must therefore take responsibility for the future of the planet.

Of course, many of those who have taken up this word are full of

2 Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The generic formula for the “infernal alternatives,” woven since the divorce between capitalism and the great tale of progress has become perceptible, is “you are envisaging resisting this quite unpalatable proposition, but we will show you that if you do the consequences will be worse.”

goodwill. But Man here is a troubling abstraction. The moment when this Man will be called on to mobilize in order to “save the planet,” with all the technoscientific resources that will be “unhappily necessary,” is not far off.

In Catastrophic Times is neither a book of prophecy nor a survival guide. There isn’t the slightest guarantee that we will be able to overcome the hold that capitalism has over us (and in this instance, what some have proposed calling “capitalocene,” and not anthropocene, will be a geological epoch that is extremely short). Nor do we know how, in the best of cases, we might live in the ruins that it will leave us: the window of opportunity in which, on paper, the measures to take were reasonably clear, is in the process of closing. It wasn’t necessary to be a prophet to write, as | have done, that we are more badly equipped than ever for putting to work the solutions defined as necessary. Those- most notably, scientists—who thought that it was enough to sound the alarm neglected the fact that political powers had just handed the rudder over to capitalism and had solemnly renounced any freedom of action.

We do, however, know one thing: even if it is a matter of the death of what we have called a civilization, there are many manners of dying, some being more ugly than others. | belong to a generation that will perhaps be the most hated in human memory, the generation that “knew” but did nothing or did too little (changing our lightbulbs, sorting our rubbish, riding bicycles...). But it is also a generation that will avoid the worst - we will already be dead. | would add that this is the generation that, thirty years ago, participated in, or impotently witnessed, the failure of the encounter between two movements that could, together, perhaps have created the political intelligence necessary to the development

of an efficacious culture of struggle? - those who denounced the ravaging of nature and those who combated the exploitation

3 This is not knowledge in hindsight. The missed encounter was lived as such. Some voices, like that of Félix Guattari, who, in his The Three Ecologies, trans.

of humans. In fact, the manner in which large environmental 11 movements have adhered to the promises of “green” capitalism

is enough to retroactively confirm the most somber of suspicions.

But the retroactive justification should not erase the memory of

a missed opportunity, of a blind division from which the capitalist sirens haven't failed to profit. Capitalism knows how to profit

from every opportunity.

What | was afraid of, at the time | wrote /n Catastrophic Times, was a form of denial on the part of those who saw clearly that the threat of climate change could be an argument mobilized against unproductive conflict as part of the necessary reconciliation between all those of goodwill. Faced with the danger of climate change, a “social peace” could be imposed, and a culpabilizing bureaucratic moralism installed. Hadn’t we already started to hear that even the unemployed should learn to reduce their carbon footprint? Today, the fable of a supposedly green capitalism, bringing new, sustainable employment, the agent of peaceful, consensual adaptation of the “systemic” constraints of the climate, is not quite dead. But denying the threat of climate change is no longer necessary in order to denounce this fable. What we are now living is the waking nightmare of a predatory capitalism to which States have handed, in all opacity, the control of the future, laying the burden of the quasi-moral injunction of paying off “their” debts on their own populations and attacking each other before the tribunal of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in reaction to the slightest measure aiming to limit the predation. In short, it is more and more blatantly obvious that the oligarchy of the super-rich has acquired the power to put the world in the service of its interests. Many ecological activists today have become as radically anticapitalist as the militants of the Marxist tradition.

lan Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone, 2000) called in vain for the transversality of struggles.

The old suspicions are tenacious, however, as is the attachment to conceptual grand narratives that are perfectly compatible with the mirage of the anthropocene (to wit this call to order from Alain Badiou, for whom ecology is the new opium of the people: “It must be clearly affirmed that humanity is an animal species that attempts to overcome its animality, a natural set that attempts to denaturalise itself."“) Whatever the case may be, it is a matter today of at least trying not to let old, reheated hatreds poison the new generation, the generation of activists who, on the ground, are confronting a State rationality that has become the servant pure and simple of the imperatives of growth and competition, and of all those who - often the same - are experimenting with the possibilities of manners of living and cooperating that have been destroyed in the name of progress.

This book was addressed and is still addressed to everyone who is struggling and experimenting today, to everyone who is a true contemporary of what | have dared to call “the intrusion of Gaia,” this “nature” that has left behind its traditional role and now has the power to question us all. Formulating this question in a mode that helps them to resist the poisons we have left for them, the grand narratives that have contributed to our blindness, is its only ambition.