Merge branch 'master' of ssh://vvvvvvaria.org:12345/mb/AMRO-2020-publication
This commit is contained in:
commit
27c671238f
5
content/text.md
Normal file
5
content/text.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
|
||||
Title: First thing
|
||||
Date: 2020-11-13 16:46
|
||||
Category: Projections
|
||||
|
||||
First website page!
|
||||
134
content/zabala_warning.md
Normal file
134
content/zabala_warning.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
|
||||
Title: The Philosophy of Warnings
|
||||
Author: Santiago Zabala
|
||||
Category: Articles
|
||||
<div class="colophon">
|
||||
<p> Published by: <br> Editing: <br> Design <br> Paper <br> Typeface <br>
|
||||
</p><p id="colophon_right"> Sponsors: <br> Thanks: <br> Other <br>
|
||||
</p></div>
|
||||
<div class="first-page">
|
||||
<div id="title_edition">Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes <br> A Nourishing Network</div>
|
||||
<div id="amro">AMRO 2020</div>
|
||||
|
||||
<div id="author">Santiago Zabala</div>
|
||||
<div id="title">The Philosophy of Warnings</div>
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
<div id="published">Published in the *Institute of Arts and Ideas* </div>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
<header id="pageheader-issue">A Nourishing Network</header>
|
||||
<header id="pageheader-theme">The Philosophy of Warnings</header>
|
||||
<header id="pagefooter">)))))</header>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="essay_content">
|
||||
<p>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 *enough*. 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.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Like recent philosophies of plants or
|
||||
[[insects]{.underline}](http://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-philosophy-of-the-insect/9780231175791),
|
||||
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
|
||||
[[announced]{.underline}](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/experts-warned-pandemic-decades-ago-why-not-ready-for-coronavirus/)
|
||||
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.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Examples of warning philosophy can be traced back to Greek mythology and
|
||||
Plato\'s *Apology*. 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.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>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
|
||||
[[intellectuals]{.underline}](https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/returning-order-through-realism)
|
||||
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
|
||||
[[remind]{.underline}](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Down+to+Earth%3A+Politics+in+the+New+Climatic+Regime-p-9781509530564)
|
||||
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 [[pointed
|
||||
out]{.underline}](https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times),
|
||||
allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful
|
||||
debate."</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>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.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>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 *from* emergencies
|
||||
but rather rescue us *into* emergencies that we are trained to ignore.</p>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
<div class="bio">
|
||||
[[Santiago Zabala]{.underline}](http://www.santiagozabala.com/) is ICREA
|
||||
Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in
|
||||
Barcelona. His most recent book is *Being at Large: Freedom in the Age
|
||||
of Alternative Facts* (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020).</div>
|
||||
@ -30,17 +30,32 @@
|
||||
|
||||
@page{
|
||||
size:A4;
|
||||
margin-bottom: 2in;
|
||||
@bottom-center {
|
||||
content: counter(page);
|
||||
font-size: 16px;
|
||||
font-family: "White Rabbit";
|
||||
}
|
||||
@bottom-left {
|
||||
content: " ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )) \A ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( (( \A ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )) \A ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ((";
|
||||
font-size: 12px;
|
||||
white-space: pre-wrap;
|
||||
font-family: "Unifont";
|
||||
margin-bottom: 1in;
|
||||
line-height: 0.7;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
@page :first {
|
||||
@bottom-left {
|
||||
content: " ";
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
@page :left {
|
||||
margin-left: 0.2in;
|
||||
margin-right: 1.2in;
|
||||
margin-left: 1in;
|
||||
margin-right: 1in;
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
@top-left {
|
||||
@ -54,8 +69,8 @@
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
@page :right {
|
||||
margin-left: 1.2in;
|
||||
margin-right: 0.5in;
|
||||
margin-left: 1in;
|
||||
margin-right: 1in;
|
||||
|
||||
@top-right {
|
||||
content: element(pageheader-issue, first-except);
|
||||
@ -80,7 +95,9 @@
|
||||
font-family: 'White Rabbit';
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
#pagefooter {
|
||||
position: running(pagefooter);
|
||||
}
|
||||
/*First page*/
|
||||
|
||||
.first-page {
|
||||
@ -106,7 +123,7 @@
|
||||
font-size: 20px;
|
||||
font-family: 'White Rabbit';
|
||||
text-align: center;
|
||||
margin-top: 7in;
|
||||
margin-top: 6in;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
#title_edition {
|
||||
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue
Block a user