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<p>Title: ‘The Pandemic’s Dark Cloud’ Author: Mel Hogan</p> |
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<p>“The Pandemic's Dark Cloud” was written in November 2020 as a reflection on the relationship between the pandemic and environmental media, with a focus on “the cloud” and its undergirding networked infrastructure. The central idea of this piece is to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all things – covid, care, community, nature, ewaste, racism, greed – in both the making and undoing of our modern communication systems.</p> |
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<p>This piece is intended as a provocation, so your thoughts and feelings are very welcomed!</p> |
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<p><em>Mél Hogan is the Director of the </em><a href="https://www.environmentalmedialab.com/"><em>Environmental Media Lab (EML)</em></a>* and <em><a href="https://www.melhogan.com/"><em>Associate Professor</em></a></em> at the University of Calgary, Canada. She is also an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Communication. Career highlights so far include keynoting the 2020 McLuhan lecture at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, and giving a plenary at transmediale 2020.<br /> |
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@mel_hogan / melhogan.com / mhogan@ucalgary.ca*</p> |
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<h1 id="the-pandemics-dark-cloud-by-mél-hogan">The Pandemic's Dark Cloud by Mél Hogan</h1> |
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<p>As the pandemic settled into consciousness across the globe, humans devolved. People in countries where the response to COVID-19 was most mismanaged started to snack a lot.<sup><a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a></sup> Pre-sliced packaged charcuterie. Ritz crackers. Oreo cookies. In their growing helplessness, people also sharply increased their consumption of alcohol, especially women in the US.<sup><a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a></sup> For some it was drugs. Those lucky enough to keep their job doubled down on work, staying at their stations or desks for longer hours – part avoidance and part stuckness into systems that could offer no other plan.</p> |
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<p>The dread by now is cumulative. Pick your pain: covid19, white supremacy, climate catastrophe. People are reaching new levels of “doomscrolling” on social media, playing online video games, and “binge-watching” Netflix as ways to pass the time, waiting on the virus to run its course, or for politicians to make a plan. As things shut down, Zoom quickly took over as the way to communicate at a safe social distance. Education quickly became clicking at screens. No more shopping in person meant ordering by way of interfaces. All of these screens more or less allowed things to continue, if not as normal, as a viable alternative in the meantime. It remains to be seen if this online world we’ve adopted so quickly is the new normal, and here to stay, or if it’ll reflect to us the inefficiencies of how we lived before and save us from ourselves. Or, maybe it will call into question the terrible inequities that are only made more evident by this pandemic.</p> |
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<p>By April, the news media were already reporting that lockdowns had meant cleaner air and clearer water.<sup><a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3"><sup>3</sup></a></sup> Satellite images showed less pollution over China and the US. Animals were found roaming freely in different parts of India.<sup><a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4"><sup>4</sup></a></sup> “Nature is healing” became a popular meme celebrating the lessening of human impact and nature’s recovery.<sup><a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5"><sup>5</sup></a></sup> But were the effects of lockdown, or quarantine, of humans being trapped in their homes, and of doing everything online, truly a more sustainable way of going about life? Had the turn to “the cloud” proven to be the weightless way forward? Social isolation and disinformation propagation problems aside, could the internet become a tool to inadvertently save the environment?</p> |
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<p>In thinking of the internet and the many devices connected to it, these account for approximately 2-4% of global greenhouse emissions, which only promise to double by 2025.<sup><a href="#fn6" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref6"><sup>6</sup></a></sup> Data centres and vast server farms (where data is stored and transmitted) draw more than 80% of their energy from fossil fuel power stations. Online video alone – porn, Netflix, YouTube, Zoom – generated 60% of the world’s total data flows before covid19 hit. A Google search uses as much energy as cooking an egg or boiling water in an electric kettle.<sup><a href="#fn7" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref7"><sup>7</sup></a></sup> Yearly emails for work (and not accounting for spam) have been calculated to be equal in terms of CO2 emissions to driving 320 kilometres.<sup><a href="#fn8" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref8"><sup>8</sup></a></sup> These numbers have likely gone up considerably since the pandemic.<sup><a href="#fn9" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref9"><sup>9</sup></a></sup> This way of living wasn’t sustainable then, and it certainly isn’t now.</p> |
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<p>There are search engines (eg. Ecosia<sup><a href="#fn10" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref10"><sup>10</sup></a></sup>) and add-ons (eg. Carbonalyser by The Shift Project,<sup><a href="#fn11" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref11"><sup>11</sup></a></sup> green-algorithms.org<sup><a href="#fn12" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref12"><sup>12</sup></a></sup>) that help measure user impacts on the environment, but these miss addressing the bigger questions – such as moving away from confronting personal use to the systemic, material, and ideological issues baked into the internet. Why is the internet like this? The question is more political than it is purely technological. It’s more emotional, even, than it is political. Because we’ve drifted so far away from understanding nature as inherent to human and non-human wellbeing alike, towards unrelenting and exploitative capitalism and extractivism, it means we now have these massively entangled systems that reinforce one another, generate profit for the very few, but in the end benefit nothing and nobody.<sup><a href="#fn13" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref13"><sup>13</sup></a></sup> These systems are harder to abolish or undo, so instead we turn to solutions that lessen their impacts, and we consider the rest inevitable – or worse, natural. We might, for example, shift data centers to cooler climates to save on cooling costs, we might develop more efficient software, we might offer carbon offsetting and plant trees, but none of these technofixes reach the heart of the our current predicament: our solutions and our problems originate from the same short-sighted, greed-driven, competitive, and market-driven agendas that caused this global deadly pandemic in the first place.</p> |
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<p>In 2020, we are generating 50 million tons worldwide of electronic waste, with an annual growth of 5%.<sup><a href="#fn14" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref14"><sup>14</sup></a></sup> This means that we produce e-waste at three times the rate that humans reproduce. Much e-waste is toxic and severely impacts land, water, plants, animals, and humans. This damage is permanent. At the other end of the supply chain, fields of wheat and corn have become lakes of toxic sludge to accommodate the rare earth mining industry.<sup><a href="#fn15" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref15"><sup>15</sup></a></sup> From Mongolia to China to the Congo, people labour in dangerous conditions, mining through the ore-laden mud to find rare minerals to power our devices. Elsewhere, people work endless shifts to assemble computers, phones, tablets. It should be no surprise then that the internet that connects this all is toxic too, evidenced by both the work of content moderators who filter the internet, and the shady tactics used by Big Tech to evade taxes to get filthy rich off the backs of this global human-powered machine. As Ron Deibert put it recently in his 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, “If we continue on this path of unbridled consumption and planned obsolescence, we are doomed.”<sup><a href="#fn16" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref16"><sup>16</sup></a></sup></p> |
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<p>So we can either become extinct from the repercussions of our centuries old destructive neoliberal colonial institutions, as the planet pushes back with more pandemics, storms, and violence, or we can get together and admit to our failures as colonisers. These failures tap into something profound, deeply broken, about what settlers have historically valued and continue to enact. We are living largely in the dark fantasies of ghosts – and these old, settler ideas haunt and break us. We can imagine better. We can make other decisions. We can tune our emotions to move from awareness to anxiety to action. We return public lands to Indigenous peoples. We defund police and dismantle white supremacy. We transform ourselves, and our communication systems will follow.</p> |
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<section class="footnotes"> |
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<ol> |
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<li id="fn1"><p><a href="https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/May/1/6-Snack-Sales-Soar-During-Pandemic_Marketing"><em>https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/May/1/6-Snack-Sales-Soar-During-Pandemic_Marketing</em></a> <a href="https://news.italianfood.net/2020/04/02/pre-sliced-packaged-charcuterie-partly-offsets-pandemic-blow/"><em>https://news.italianfood.net/2020/04/02/pre-sliced-packaged-charcuterie-partly-offsets-pandemic-blow/</em></a> <a href="https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/16078-the-snack-trends-predicted-to-persist-post-pandemic"><em>https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/16078-the-snack-trends-predicted-to-persist-post-pandemic</em></a><a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn2"><p><a href="https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/americans-are-handling-coronavirus-pandemic-by-binging-on-snacks/"><em>https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/americans-are-handling-coronavirus-pandemic-by-binging-on-snacks/</em></a> <a href="https://www.herworld.com/gallery/life/wellness/overeating-binge-eating-covid19-pandemic-work-home/"><em>https://www.herworld.com/gallery/life/wellness/overeating-binge-eating-covid19-pandemic-work-home/</em></a><a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn3"><p><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/coronavirus-shutdowns-have-unintended-climate-benefits-n1161921"><em>https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/coronavirus-shutdowns-have-unintended-climate-benefits-n1161921</em></a><a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn4"><p><a href="https://www.planetofstudents.com/blog/social-awareness/effects-of-lockdown-on-the-environment/"><em>https://www.planetofstudents.com/blog/social-awareness/effects-of-lockdown-on-the-environment/</em></a><a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn5"><p><a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-meme-nature-is-healing-we-are-the-virus"><em>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-meme-nature-is-healing-we-are-the-virus</em></a><a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn6"><p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think"><em>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think</em></a><a href="#fnref6" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn7"><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google"><em>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google</em></a><a href="#fnref7" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn8"><p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think"><em>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think</em></a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423"><em>https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423</em></a><a href="#fnref8" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn9"><p><a href="https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/"><em>https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/</em></a><a href="#fnref9" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn10"><p><a href="https://www.ecosia.org/"><em>https://www.ecosia.org/</em></a><a href="#fnref10" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn11"><p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/"><em>https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/</em></a><a href="#fnref11" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn12"><p><a href="http://www.green-algorithms.org/"><em>http://www.green-algorithms.org/</em></a><a href="#fnref12" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn13"><p><a href="https://landback.org/manifesto/"><em>https://landback.org/manifesto/</em></a><a href="#fnref13" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn14"><p><a href="https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189"><em>https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189</em></a><a href="#fnref14" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn15"><p><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html"><em>https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html</em></a><a href="#fnref15" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn16"><p><a href="https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert"><em>https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert</em></a><a href="#fnref16" class="footnote-back">↩</a></p></li> |
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<p>Title: Infrastructure mega corridors: a way out (or in) to the crisis? Author: Recommon.org</p> |
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<p><em>“Infrastructure mega corridors: a way out (or in) to the crisis?”</em></p> |
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<p><em>Translated from an original blogpost in Italian by Elena Gerebizza and Filippo Taglieri from Re:Common introducing their new report: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200814132820/https://www.recommon.org/la-grande-illusione/">“The great illusion. Special economic zones and infrastructure mega-corridors, the way to go?”</a></em></p> |
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<p>In the last few months our lives have changed dramatically. Many of us lost their jobs while many others continued working under extreme conditions. Inequality and social injustices have become increasingly visible features of the economic system and the society in which we live.</p> |
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<p>The pandemic might have impacted everyone’s life, but it has not affected everyone in the same way. Among the sectors that did not suffer, but rather benefited from the crisis, are online platforms such as Amazon and the likes. Those sectors have become the vehicles for the transfer from “real life” to a virtual dimension for our working, schooling, sporting and socialising. Fortunately, many have been questioning what the implications of all this would be; including what might happen to the data generated by our online lives; by whom and how is this data being treated; and what are the implications? This is a debate that we hope will remain open, since it concerns aspects that are not contingent to the health crisis, but are instead key factors in the reorganization of “the extractivist society”. A society that enables a few elites to extract more and more material and financial wealth from the territories and local communities that inhabit them, effectively expropriating them from the power to decide upon their own lives. </p> |
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<p>While most ongoing conversations center around the health crisis and the resulting recession, we want to bring attention to the systemic reorganization that is taking place as we speak. We are talking about a process that began before the pandemic, a new way of organizing large infrastructure according to the logics of mega-corridors, to reduce time and space, with the aim of continuously increasing profits on an increasing scale in the face of a slowdown in the growth of global trade. This process, which remains only partly visible, is highly energy-intensive and rooted in the fossil fuel economy, involving the construction of new high-speed railways for the transport of goods, port terminals, data centres and power stations, as well as new logistics centres covering hundreds of hectares. All this implies a radical and irreversible transformation of territories for the benefit of large private capital, where ports and production areas identified as “free trade”, or “Special Economic Zones” (SEZs), all become interconnected. </p> |
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<p>What are the manifestations in Italy and Europe of this global capital agenda? How will it change the social, economic and productive structure of our country and the continent? What impact will it have on the climate and the environment, two central areas where failures and systemic contradictions are already very visible? The question is partly rhetorical: it is difficult to imagine a “globalization 2.0” which will accelerate production, transport and consumption of goods at an unprecedented speed while at the same time profoundly reduce the systemic impact on the environment and climate, an impact that goes far beyond proposed calculations of direct and indirect emissions generated.</p> |
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<p>Will the major infrastructure mega-corridors plan be challenged in the post-pandemic economic crisis or will the current crisis be an excuse to accelerate it? Will its overall impact be properly assessed? This remains doubtful since harmful impacts of the global infrastructure agenda are so far considered as the least of their problems by investors and policy makers dazzled by forecasts and data about the production, logistics and global trade that is starting again. </p> |
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<p>How does this infrastructure masterplan meet the needs of the millions of people who are already paying the highest costs of a profit-driven model at all costs? How does it meet the needs of communities that will be removed from their lands to make way for new mega infrastructure? How will it make our societies more resilient to the great droughts, typhoons, and increasingly heavy rains? How will it counteract the increasing cementing of the most densely populated areas and how will it enable everyone to have a roof over their heads?</p> |
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<p>We believe that it is high time to open up to such far-reaching questions.</p> |
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<p>The original article and link to the report can be found <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200814132820/https://www.recommon.org/la-grande-illusione/"><span class="underline">here</span></a>.</p> |
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<p>Title: The Philosophy of Warnings Author: Santiago Zabala</p> |
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Published by: <br> Editing: <br> Design <br> Paper <br> Typeface <br> |
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Sponsors: <br> Thanks: <br> Other <br> |
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Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes <br> A Nourishing Network |
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AMRO 2020 |
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Santiago Zabala |
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The Philosophy of Warnings |
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Published in the <em>Institute of Arts and Ideas</em> |
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A Nourishing Network |
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The Philosophy of Warnings |
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This month an undergraduate student told me his parents were using the pandemic to persuade him to avoid philosophy as it could not prevent or solve real emergencies. I told him to let them know that we find ourselves in this global emergency because we haven’t thought philosophically <em>enough</em>. The increasingly narrow focus of experts this century has prevented us from addressing problems from a global perspective, which has always been the distinctive approach of philosophy. This is evident in the little consideration we give to warnings. Too often these are discarded as useless or insignificant—much like philosophy—when in fact they are vital. Though philosophers can’t solve an ongoing emergency—philosophy was never meant to solve anything—we can interpret their signs through a “philosophy of warnings.” Although this philosophy probably won’t change the views of my student’s parents, it might help us to reevaluate our political, environmental, and technological priorities for the future. |
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Like recent philosophies of plants or <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-philosophy-of-the-insect/9780231175791"><span class="underline">insects</span></a>, which emerged as a response to a global environmental crisis, a “philosophy of warnings” is also a reaction to a global emergency that requires philosophical elucidation. Although the ongoing pandemic has triggered this new stance it isn’t limited to this event. Nor is it completely new. Warnings have been a topic of philosophical investigation for centuries. The difference lies in the meaning these concepts have acquired now. Before philosophy we had prophets to tell us to be alert to the warnings of the Gods, but we secularized that office into that of the philosopher, who, as one among equals, advised to heed the signs; to use our imagination, because that is all we got. The current pandemic has shown how little prepared we were for a global emergency, even one whose coming has been <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/experts-warned-pandemic-decades-ago-why-not-ready-for-coronavirus/"><span class="underline">announced</span></a> for decades. But why haven’t we been able to take these warnings seriously? Before tackling this question, let’s recall how warnings have been addressed philosophically. |
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Examples of warning philosophy can be traced back to Greek mythology and Plato's <em>Apology</em>. Apollo provided Cassandra with the gift of prophecy even though she could not convince others of the validity of her predictions, and Socrates warned the Athenians—after he was sentenced to death—that their inequity and mendacity undermined the democracy they claimed to honor. Against Gaston Bachelard, who coined the term “Cassandra complex” to refer to the idea that events could be known in advance, Theodore Adorno warned that any claim to know the future should be avoided. It is probably in this spirit that Walter Benjamin warned we should pull the brake on the train of progress as it was stacking disaster upon disaster. In line with Hannah Arendt’s warnings of the reemergence of totalitarianism after the Second World War, Giorgio Agamben began his book on the current pandemic with “A Warning”: biosecurity will now serve governments to rule through a new form of tyranny called “technological-sanitary” despotism. |
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These examples illustrate the difference between warnings and predictions. Warnings are sustained by signs in the present that request our involvement, as Benjamin suggests. Predictions call out what will take place regardless of our actions, a future as the only continuation of the present, but warnings instead point toward what is to come and are meant involve us in a radical break, a discontinuity with the present signaled by alarming signs that we are asked to confront. The problem is not the involvement warnings request from us but rather whether we are willing to confront them at all. The volume of vital warnings that we ignore—climate change, social inequality, refugee crises—is alarming; it has become our greatest emergency. |
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Indifference towards warnings is rooted in the ongoing global return to order and realism in the twenty-first century. This return is not only political, as demonstrated by the various right-wing populist forces that have taken office around the world, but also cultural as the return of some contemporary <a href="https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/returning-order-through-realism"><span class="underline">intellectuals</span></a> to Eurocentric Cartesian realism demonstrates. The idea that we can still claim access to truth without being dependent upon interpretation presupposes that knowledge of objective facts is enough to guide our lives. Within this theoretical framework warnings are cast off as unfounded, contingent, and subjective, even though philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour continue to <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Down+to+Earth%3A+Politics+in+the+New+Climatic+Regime-p-9781509530564"><span class="underline">remind</span></a> us that no “attested knowledge can stand on its own.” The internet and, in particular, social media have intensified this realist view, further discrediting traditional vectors of legitimation (international agencies, major newspapers, or credentialed academics) and rendering any tweet by an anonymous blogger credible because it presents itself as transparent, direct, and genuine. “The quickness of social media, as Judith Butler <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times"><span class="underline">pointed out</span></a>, allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate.” |
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Our inability to take warnings seriously has devastating consequences, as recent months make clear. The central argument in favor of a philosophy of warnings is not whether what it warns of comes to pass but rather the pressure it exercises against those emergencies hidden and subsumed under the global call to order. This pressure demands that our political, environmental, and technological priorities be reconsidered, revealing the alarming signs of democratic backsliding, biodiversity loss, and commodification of our lives by surveillance capitalism. These warnings are also why we should oppose any demand to “return to normality,” which signals primarily a desire to ignore what caused this pandemic in the first place. A philosophy of warnings seeks to alter and interrupt the reality we’ve become accustomed to. |
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Although a philosophy of warnings will not prevent future emergencies, it will resist the ongoing silencing of emergencies under the guise of realism by challenging our framed global order and its realist advocates. This philosophy is not meant to rescue us <em>from</em> emergencies but rather rescue us <em>into</em> emergencies that we are trained to ignore. |
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<div class="bio"> |
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<a href="http://www.santiagozabala.com/"><span class="underline">Santiago Zabala</span></a> is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His most recent book is <em>Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts</em> (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). |
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Title: First thing |
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Date: 2020-11-13 16:46 |
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Category: Projections |
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First website page! |
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Title: The Philosophy of Warnings |
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Author: Santiago Zabala |
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Category: Articles |
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<p> Published by: <br> Editing: <br> Design <br> Paper <br> Typeface <br> |
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</p><p id="colophon_right"> Sponsors: <br> Thanks: <br> Other <br> |
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<div id="title_edition">Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes <br> A Nourishing Network</div> |
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<div id="amro">AMRO 2020</div> |
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<div id="author">Santiago Zabala</div> |
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<div id="title">The Philosophy of Warnings</div> |
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<div id="published">Published in the *Institute of Arts and Ideas* </div> |
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</div> |
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<header id="pageheader-issue">A Nourishing Network</header> |
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<header id="pageheader-theme">The Philosophy of Warnings</header> |
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<header id="pagefooter">)))))</header> |
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<div class="essay_content"> |
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<p>This month an undergraduate student told me his parents were using the |
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pandemic to persuade him to avoid philosophy as it could not prevent or |
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solve real emergencies. I told him to let them know that we find |
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ourselves in this global emergency because we haven't thought |
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philosophically *enough*. The increasingly narrow focus of experts this |
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century has prevented us from addressing problems from a global |
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perspective, which has always been the distinctive approach of |
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philosophy. This is evident in the little consideration we give to |
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warnings. Too often these are discarded as useless or |
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insignificant---much like philosophy---when in fact they are vital. |
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Though philosophers can't solve an ongoing emergency---philosophy was |
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never meant to solve anything---we can interpret their signs through a |
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"philosophy of warnings." Although this philosophy probably won't change |
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the views of my student's parents, it might help us to reevaluate our |
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political, environmental, and technological priorities for the future.</p> |
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|
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<p>Like recent philosophies of plants or |
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[[insects]{.underline}](http://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-philosophy-of-the-insect/9780231175791), |
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which emerged as a response to a global environmental crisis, a |
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"philosophy of warnings" is also a reaction to a global emergency that |
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requires philosophical elucidation. Although the ongoing pandemic has |
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triggered this new stance it isn't limited to this event. Nor is it |
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completely new. Warnings have been a topic of philosophical |
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investigation for centuries. The difference lies in the meaning these |
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concepts have acquired now. Before philosophy we had prophets to tell us |
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to be alert to the warnings of the Gods, but we secularized that office |
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into that of the philosopher, who, as one among equals, advised to heed |
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the signs; to use our imagination, because that is all we got. The |
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current pandemic has shown how little prepared we were for a global |
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emergency, even one whose coming has been |
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[[announced]{.underline}](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/experts-warned-pandemic-decades-ago-why-not-ready-for-coronavirus/) |
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for decades. But why haven't we been able to take these warnings |
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seriously? Before tackling this question, let's recall how warnings have |
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been addressed philosophically.</p> |
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|
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<p>Examples of warning philosophy can be traced back to Greek mythology and |
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Plato\'s *Apology*. Apollo provided Cassandra with the gift of prophecy |
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even though she could not convince others of the validity of her |
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predictions, and Socrates warned the Athenians---after he was sentenced |
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to death---that their inequity and mendacity undermined the democracy |
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they claimed to honor. Against Gaston Bachelard, who coined the term |
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"Cassandra complex" to refer to the idea that events could be known in |
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advance, Theodore Adorno warned that any claim to know the future should |
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be avoided. It is probably in this spirit that Walter Benjamin warned we |
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should pull the brake on the train of progress as it was stacking |
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disaster upon disaster. In line with Hannah Arendt's warnings of the |
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reemergence of totalitarianism after the Second World War, Giorgio |
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Agamben began his book on the current pandemic with "A Warning": |
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biosecurity will now serve governments to rule through a new form of |
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tyranny called "technological-sanitary" despotism.</p> |
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|
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<p>These examples illustrate the difference between warnings and |
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predictions. Warnings are sustained by signs in the present that request |
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our involvement, as Benjamin suggests. Predictions call out what will |
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take place regardless of our actions, a future as the only continuation |
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of the present, but warnings instead point toward what is to come and |
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are meant involve us in a radical break, a discontinuity with the |
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present signaled by alarming signs that we are asked to confront. The |
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problem is not the involvement warnings request from us but rather |
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whether we are willing to confront them at all. The volume of vital |
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warnings that we ignore---climate change, social inequality, refugee |
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crises---is alarming; it has become our greatest emergency.</p> |
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|
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<p>Indifference towards warnings is rooted in the ongoing global return to |
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order and realism in the twenty-first century. This return is not only |
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political, as demonstrated by the various right-wing populist forces |
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that have taken office around the world, but also cultural as the return |
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of some contemporary |
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[[intellectuals]{.underline}](https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/returning-order-through-realism) |
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to Eurocentric Cartesian realism demonstrates. The idea that we can |
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still claim access to truth without being dependent upon interpretation |
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presupposes that knowledge of objective facts is enough to guide our |
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lives. Within this theoretical framework warnings are cast off as |
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unfounded, contingent, and subjective, even though philosophers of |
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science such as Bruno Latour continue to |
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[[remind]{.underline}](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Down+to+Earth%3A+Politics+in+the+New+Climatic+Regime-p-9781509530564) |
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us that no "attested knowledge can stand on its own." The internet and, |
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in particular, social media have intensified this realist view, further |
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discrediting traditional vectors of legitimation (international |
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agencies, major newspapers, or credentialed academics) and rendering any |
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tweet by an anonymous blogger credible because it presents itself as |
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transparent, direct, and genuine. "The quickness of social media, as |
|||
Judith Butler [[pointed |
|||
out]{.underline}](https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times), |
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allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful |
|||
debate."</p> |
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|
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<p>Our inability to take warnings seriously has devastating consequences, |
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as recent months make clear. The central argument in favor of a |
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philosophy of warnings is not whether what it warns of comes to pass but |
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rather the pressure it exercises against those emergencies hidden and |
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subsumed under the global call to order. This pressure demands that our |
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political, environmental, and technological priorities be reconsidered, |
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revealing the alarming signs of democratic backsliding, biodiversity |
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loss, and commodification of our lives by surveillance capitalism. These |
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warnings are also why we should oppose any demand to "return to |
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normality," which signals primarily a desire to ignore what caused this |
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pandemic in the first place. A philosophy of warnings seeks to alter and |
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interrupt the reality we've become accustomed to.</p> |
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|
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<p>Although a philosophy of warnings will not prevent future emergencies, |
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it will resist the ongoing silencing of emergencies under the guise of |
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realism by challenging our framed global order and its realist |
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advocates. This philosophy is not meant to rescue us *from* emergencies |
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but rather rescue us *into* emergencies that we are trained to ignore.</p> |
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</div> |
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<div class="bio"> |
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[[Santiago Zabala]{.underline}](http://www.santiagozabala.com/) is ICREA |
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Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in |
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Barcelona. His most recent book is *Being at Large: Freedom in the Age |
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of Alternative Facts* (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020).</div> |
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