I’m a big fan of Swiss political advertisement. It shows the extent of what is, in principle, contestable by referendum.
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Bruno Latour claims modernity to be constituted by a dualism between society and nature, the human world values, beliefs, will and so on, opposed to the cold world of universal laws and facts. Disregarding the more complicated things that follow from such a stance, I will here briefly comment on a relatively straightforward matter, modernity’s view on time. According to Latour, the moderns align the two poles of this opposition with the past and the future, so that the passage of time always brings with it emancipation from past beliefs and a turn into more control and rationality. In the field of science, revolution in knowledge mean the removal of past errors and superstition to reveal the universal and necessary. Correspondingly in politics, progress towards modernity take steps that leave all archaic and irrational into history.
In Latour’s view, such a view of time today is harder and harder to maintain, as revolutions are loosing their ability to leave the past behind. They have become, as the term originally suggests, a circular return of more of the same old. Instead of a view of time that would be marked with “time of succession”, the overcoming all problems, we are constantly stuck with the issues of the past. Instead of temporal metaphors that suggest irreversible changes, it is punctual to speak with terms of space, that point to coexistence and cohabitance of the pressing troubles. Instead of the modern time we are to speak of a “time of simultaneity” (or more absurdly, a “time of space”).
In consequence, the different political stances can no longer be divided based on their position in relation to progress. Instead, each political position is defined in relation to all the separate issues that trouble the polity, without any guiding narrative that predetermine their configuration. With respective to GMOs, globalization, etc. it is increasingly hard to pinpoint what exactly the emancipatory or progressive project would be. “We are all reactionaries today.”
This is certainly a timely “ontostory”. It is however tempting to complicate it with respect to the political reaction to recent ecological problems. Firstly climate change is today arguably the single meta-referential issue in relation to which many of the other issues are ordered. No other thematic is untouched by the the climate crisis. Yet it reproduces the bland lack of alternatives characteristic to our age on another thematic domain: There is really only one politically correct stance, which is to acknowledge the gravity of global warming and the need for dire responses. Yet the issue is flexible and complex enough to allow to be aligned with almost every position on other issues. Climate change is claimed to simultaneously facilitate the development of nuclear power and hydroelectricity, market mechanisms and regulation, global development and re-localization. Today everyone can claim to be progressive.
Ecology is the issue of issues, but it also brings about a new temporality. Where modernity strived to cut the shackles of time, today we are running out of time. The necessary response to climate change have already been plotted out into the future: We need this amount of cuts in the next years, we need to stabilize before this decade, etc. In place of the time of succession, climate change creates the time of backcasting. Progress is not defined through settling with the past, but meeting the the requirements of a judging future. The path of development is already set, and at each point in time we face the risk of failing to follow. Instead of of the constant simultaneity of the time of space, there is a possibility for irreversible change, only in this case it can only be regressive. The arrow of time is reversed, and points its accusing head towards the present (see above the picture from Demos Helsinki).
Modernity was about breaking with tradition to establish mastery and control. Today, each moment is a test where clarity and command can be lost. The climate signposts set out the conditions for modernity. What follows from breaking them is “dangerous climate change”, meaning unpredictability, non-linearity or, in the terms of the IPCC, “climate surprise”.
(A passage I had to remove from my dissertation.)
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On one of my first days free from the university, I was still held captive by a book concerning revolutions, and since I was in Paris, I wanted to find some. The Carnavalet museum hosted a good collection of paintings and memorabilia of the city’s tumultuous past, even when the most precious pieces have been brought to the Louvre.
Since the museum presented information only in French, I had a great deal of trouble following the pulses of revolutions of the 19th century. The pictures were also of little help, since the representation of separate events barely differed from one another. There were heroic depictions of fighting on the streets blocked by barricades, the long preferred method of uprising. Both romantic portraits of the martyr leaders as well as depictions of the horrors of terror were displayed.
In the rooms covering the late nineteenth century the style of pictures changed abruptly. This was the time when Haussmann designed new boulevards for the city, creating new walkways that were broader and brighter than the city had seen before. The avenues were meant to be places where the newest fashion items could be acquired and spectacularly put on display. On another note, they were also wide enough to prohibit any blockade of barricades. With impressionistic strokes, the later paintings show the colourful life on these streets. They celebrate a formal equity achieved through the struggles of previous centuries: In principle, everyone was free to come to the boulevards and take part in the spectacle. At the same time they point to the real inequity, most evident in caricatures of the newspapers, that is created in the exclusion of such consumption.
Today the Haussmann boulevards are under a siege as vicious as the barricades, despite the defense of their increased width. In fact they are beleagured precisely because of it: They are filled with cars, transformed into major transport routes. Amidst all the traffic, anyone would be hard pressed to find spectacular display of city life.
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The wordless film states its position without unclarity. Scenes of the pristine earth are juxtaposed with brutal technical interventions. Yet for most of the picture’s length this opposition unwittingly disappears. With sufficient pace even human activities change into repeating patterns playing out predetermined laws. The metropolis beats like a metronome, accompanied by the daunting repetition of Glass’ brilliant score. The vision of humanity so presented leaves little to hope for, and as the Atlas rocket explodes in the last scene as a symbol for the inevitable destruction of promethean progress, indeed a container of ashes thrown from the sky, the viewer stands up to follow the crowd leaving the theatre to continue along the preset path.
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