Giorgos Kallis, Angelos Varvarousis & Panos Petridis “Southern thought, islandness and real-existing degrowth in the Mediterranean”

Kallis, Giorgos; Varvarousis, Angelos; Petridis, Panos 2022. Southern thought, islandness and real-existing degrowth in the Mediterranean. World Development 157: 105957. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105957

We entertain the idea here that there is a seed in Mediterranean societies of alternative cultures – largely akin to ‘degrowth’ (Romano, 2012). This seed, called ‘Southern thought’, is a cultural imaginary centred around values of slowness, moderation and conviviality found in the Mediterranean but widespread in the world’s ‘Souths’ more generally (Cassano, 2012). 

In Ikaria we show how, over time, a spirit of alterity akin to degrowth emerged and was embodied in local economic practices and institutions. In Gavdos, we focus on how the remoteness of an insular location is mobilized to animate imaginaries and practices of a frugal, communal living.

In a recent collection, Demaria et al. (2019) investigate ‘geographies of degrowth’ – territorial experiences of voluntary and involuntary slowing down. They point to three types of relevant experiences: ‘nowtopian territories’, such as transition towns or eco-villages, with organized processes of voluntary downshifting; ‘insurgent’ territories, such as the Chiapas and other ‘temporary autonomous zones’ (Bey, 2003) that coalesce around resource conflict areas, where people organize to stop extraction and enclosures, developing their own alternatives along the way; and ‘liminal territories’ (Varvarousis, 2022), such as crisis-hit Argentina or Greece, where tentative and temporal solidarity experimentations develop in the ruins of failed growth economies. We can think of such experiences as ‘real-existing degrowth’ – imperfect and incomplete processes of resisting growth or adapting to its end through tentative alternatives. We call these approaches ‘real-existing’ in juxtaposition to the plethora of idealised, normative (‘utopian’) models put forward in some degrowth literature.

We are particularly concerned with one type of real-existing degrowth alternative not covered by Demaria et al, namely territories at geographical margins that, for one or another reason, remain in a tenuous state of what Latouche (2004) calls ‘a-development’, that is, neither modernised and ‘developed’ nor underdeveloped.

we focus instead on the concept of a ‘South within the North’ – pockets of (relative) a-development within the core geographies of capitalism. By a-development we do not mean a lack of capitalist development, but specifically a strong presence of, and co-existence with pre- or non-capitalist forms of economic and social organizing.

As Lawler (2016) notes, in the international press, one can find articles about longevity and living well on the Greek islands side by side with those celebrating policies of austerity that target precisely this ‘lazy’, ‘underdeveloped’ mode of living. Attributing alterity to an external fractal geography destroyed by an amorphous force of ‘modernization’ and ‘development’, Cassano, however, fails to distinguish the particular political economic-ecological processes through which difference is obliterated by capitalism. The work of geographer Eric Clark on ‘island gentrification’ is crucial in this respect.

A core contradiction emerges here. On the one hand, alternative projects of non-capitalist organization or degrowth stand against the tendency of capital for rent-seeking. On the other, these very projects of difference may create the cultural conditions for the re-valorization of an island environment (say by tourism attracted by an ‘alternative’, ‘un-developed’ feel) that subsequently attract capital. The role of tourism under capitalism in sucking difference out of difference has been widely documented (Urry, 2008).

In the long run, ‘real-existing degrowth’ came about as the locals inadvertently defended communalism against a capitalist model of development, resisting, and often impeding modernizing projects. Today locals joke about ‘Cuba, North Korea and Raches Ikaria’ being the last bastions of communism. Significantly, 60 to 70% of Ikariots consistently vote left of centre (70% in the 2019 national election compared to 40% nation-wide). KKE, the Greek Communist Party, whose members still revere the Soviet Union, dominates politics in Ikaria, and has done since the end of the military junta in 1974. At the same time that Ikaria attracted international attention as a longevity Blue Zone, ‘the red rock’ island was visited by the Wall Street Journal searching for answers as to why Greeks were turning to the radical left (Angelos, 2012). KKE has built an organic economic network supporting its members in Ikaria. It is not ‘anti-growth’ (I#5, 12), but anti-capitalist, and prioritises low-profit agriculture over tourism (I#23). Communists and leftists have put up obstacles to developmental projects that would face little opposition elsewhere. Ikaria’s leftism kept it also out of the (mostly right-wing until the 1980s) governments’ clientele networks of subsidies and spending, further curbing growth. The intention therefore was not degrowth, but the result was, as growth-based development was stopped in its rails. As we will show next though, this particular radical politics of Ikaria were made hegemonic through the development of a particular indigenous thought that valorised this communal, ‘anti-growth’ spirit – a thought that shares many commonalities with Cassano’s Southern thought.

Our thesis is that a particular historical-physical geography that nourished a communal spirit led to a communalist ethos, politics and thought, whose result was to keep the island out of processes of modernized development. Real-existing degrowth was an unintentional result, but one that can be explained. Such real-existing degrowth is now sustained, tentatively, through the reproduction, and renewal, of supporting beliefs, practices and institutions.

While our story of Ikaria emphasised the historical and contingent political processes that produced difference, in Gadvos myth and geographical remoteness come together in a vast repertoire of alternative socioeconomic and spiritual practices and imaginaries producing communities of real- existing degrowth.

Seen from the perspective of a unilinear model of development, Gavdos’s economic and social conditions are problematic. Seen from another perspective, these conditions are being turned into the raw material for new imaginaries and new ways of living life. In dominant talk, a place like Gavdos is labelled as underdeveloped or undeveloped – waiting to be developed. The lived experience of the islanders tells a different story. Islanders and islanders d’élection no longer see themselves through the eyes of others – as being backward. Like Ikariots, Gavdiots too have a new-found self-respect based on Southern values of simplicity, slowness, communality. We define this as real existing degrowth, not because of a mode of living that is low in energy or resource use (which it is), but because we understand degrowth as a positive transition towards seeing and living differently what might otherwise be feared as a catastrophe (lack of growth).

To be clear: we do not position the two islands as exemplars of degrowth. We regard them as springboards for thinking about such possibilities, more as living laboratories of Southern thought incorporating a different way of life. In thinking about degrowth, we argue here, one should look to enabling combinations of geography, human interaction, imaginaries and political expression able to revalue, protect and experiment with different ways of being and doing.

Aleksandra Wagner & Krzysztof C. Matuszek “Time for transition”

Wagner, Aleksandra; Matuszek, Krzysztof C. 2021. Time for transition – Temporal structures in energy governance in contemporary Poland. Futures. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2022.102959

The specific focus of this paper is not the rhetorical function of discursive representation of the future or covering the temporality of the energy sector in Poland in full, but demonstrating how temporal structures are produced in particular functional systems: the economy, politics and science, as well as the third sector (the ecological movement). The article also aims to demonstrate how time is relevant for reality perceived through these systems, without necessarily being relevant from the perspective of other systems. Another analytical category are decisions that, taken within these systems, can cause uncertainty related to their possible consequences. Those consequences are also temporally constructed, which, as we argue, allow the system to deal with uncertainty.

The “eyes” and “ears” of functional systems react extremely selectively to changes in the environment, before processing them into information using intra-systemic categories. In the ecological context, Luhmann calls these reactions “resonance” (in other contexts he uses the concept of irritation), to illustrate that the system can be vibrated or shaken up only within its own frequency. As a result, there is indeed no single natural environment, e.g. the one described by natural sciences, but each functional system constructs its own environment (Luhmann [1986] 1989: 15-21).

Time appears here as a crucial dimension. Each system, by generating appropriate structures (memory and expectations), constitutes its own eigen time (Eigenzeit), thereby adapting the speed of operations to internal circumstances and in this respect distancing itself from its surroundings (Luhmann, 1997: 83).

Luhmann’s main work on environmental issues is Ecological Communication, a book published in the year of the Chernobyl disaster. In it, the author questions how contemporary society produces and processes information on the natural environment. In other words, he tests the resonance capability (Resonanzfähigkeit) of specific functional systems regarding ecological problems (Luhmann [1986] 1989: 32, 76). For example, the economic system treats only those changes in the environment that can be translated into the language of prices and growth or falls therein as irritations. On the one hand, this restricts the resonance capability of the system significantly, while on the other, as it were, it enforces economic activity when the answer to a given problem (e.g. felling the rainforests for oil palm farming) can be expressed in the language of prices, e.g. in the form of more expensive ecological products or healthy food (Luhmann [1986] 1989: 53, 62).

In the chronological understanding, time measures movement. Measurement of time means that we can coordinate, synchronise and provide sequential order to many actions, which is especially significant in the context of division of labour and increasing specialisation. This understanding of time constitutes unity, and the continuity between the past, present and future is preserved. The future is nothing other than a sequence of dates that will occur after the present moment. Simplifying the issue somewhat, one can say that the future begins today. This point of view characterises scientific and technological thinking, for which the future is a series of anticipated presents (Luhmann, 1976).

Science reveals cause-and-effect links and calculates the probability (risk) of occurrence of specific events, in this sense “defuturising” the future by limiting the number of possible scenarios to one which is the most probable or most desired (Luhmann, 1976: 143-144).

The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, by contrast, rejects the naturalistic picture of the world, examining what is directly given to consciousness. Following this path, phenomenological sociology studies the world as it appears to people in a subjective manner. This is the reality of the pre- and non-scientific everyday, which is called the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) (Schütz & Luckmann,1979, 1984] 2003). From this point of view, the past and future are temporal horizons of the present. Luhmann, referring to Husserl, defines time as an interpretation of reality in terms of the difference between past and future (Luhmann, 1976: 134-141). The horizon is always something unattainable and impassable, something that shifts with every step and every thought. As a result, the future does not begin today – on the contrary, “the future cannot begin” (Luhmann, 1976), and in this sense it is something non-existent and fictional (Beck [1986] 2002: 44-46). This discontinuity between present and future appears in humans’ everyday experience, especially when they perceive the situation in which they find themselves to be complex and opaque.

Science is the social system that, via experts and social movements, provides rational arguments for energy transition. Ecological communication, however, if it is to shape public opinion effectively, must take into account the popular experience of time present in everyday interactions, which according to systems theory are one of the types of social systems, and which phenomenologists call the lifeworld. When speaking about future problems and threats, we situate them in an infinitely shifting temporal horizon.

“We introduce the concept of ‘temporal echo’, which illustrates how policies, strategies and ideas produced or introduced at one point in history, designed to serve one purpose, might unexpectedly re-appear later in a transformed way, or to serve different purposes” (Skjølsvold & Ryghaug, 2020, p. 8). Here we see the potentiality of not only the future, but also the past. Converted into actuality, they cause an increase in complexity which the system tries to reduce by assigning meaning to each reconfiguration. Luhmann (1976) notes that the present assures the integration of time and reality, while also defining a set of constraints for the integration of past and future.

It is not only the autonomy of other functional systems that makes political decisions difficult. The fact that resolutions – paradoxically speaking – always concern insoluble questions (cf. Luhmann 2011: 132, Andersen, 2012: 204) is also a factor. In general terms, a decision is a choice between alternative options and a reaction to – sometimes mutually exclusive – expectations (Luhmann 1984: 399-404).

Agency in systems theory is understood as attributed in communicative events. Most decisions to be taken in the energy system are characterised by a high level of uncertainty (Conejo et al., 2010). They are marked by technological, economic (Soroudi & Amraee, 2013), or social parameters.

we ask questions about:   Decisions – how are they observed from the perspective of various systems? How do systems cope with the uncertainty in which these decisions (which in the field of energy entail serious and long-term consequences) are taken? Time – in what way do the various systems construct the horizons of future and past, making them relevant to the present? How do they perceive the speed of internal time within their boundaries, what conceptions of time influence the observations of their environments and how do they thereby construct the temporality of energy transition?

We define the communication mechanisms as related to:

3.1. futurisation, understood as increasing the openness of a future by considering different options and scenarios (Luhmann, 1976) and operationalised as including

– future scenarios

– description of recognised uncertainties and possibility of unintended consequences

– speculations

– wishful thinking

– utopian thinking

3.2. defuturisation – understood as decreasing the openness of a future by

– defining priorities and choosing goals

– strategies

– forecasts

– risk assessments

– evaluations of the scenarios; choosing the best one (the most probable or desired)

All types of materials (strategic documents, press articles and interview transcriptions) were coded according to the corresponding codebooks in QDI Miner software and subjected to qualitative analysis focused on:

– the linguistic layer – words and phrases used to describe time (including figurative language)

– the semantic layer – identifying storylines, assumptions, ideas, symbols, the phenomenological or chronological understanding of time, and then identifying references to the future, past or present and relations between them, modality of time (what happened, what could have happened, what can happen); identifying the decision, including informing about it, explaining it, interpretation of the decision and its impossible consequences; identifying the systems’ perspective.

By setting a common observation of the future horizon, a step seems to be taken towards defuturising the future – adopting a target point is meant to encourage adoption of paths leading to it and construction of a sequence of decisions that are necessary for achieving the anticipated future. This is communicated by EU policy as a state of climate neutrality (European Green Deal 2019) and the various systems refer to this observed state (approving or contesting it).

The temporal horizon of 2050 is a distant horizon for the political system, whose rhythm is demarcated by the four-year term of the government. A focus on satisfying current needs therefore outweighs a long-term plan that would mean impinging on the structure of current interests.

A future-oriented economic system calculates risk of losses and profit, but takes past events and processes taking place at present as a reference point. According to Luhmann, this is not a stable foundation for anticipating future events and does not reduce future uncertainty. Nonetheless, plans and strategies serve to reduce contingency, because it is to them, and not only to reality as such, that economic decisions refer, as well as seeking justification in their coherence. The future constructed through the political system is observed as unclear and doubly contingent – in long-term energy investments, withdrawal of political support and changing decisions on energy policy means dramatically increased risk of loss.

What mechanisms have the systems developed for coping with these irritations? In our view, the answer can be found in the concept of “social immune mechanism” outlined by Luhmann, who referred to social movements (1995). In Andersen and Stenner’s (2020) interpretation, the conflicts and paradoxes generated by systemic structures are part of the immunological mechanisms of the system. They are meant not so much to protect the structures from change as to safeguard the systemic capacity for autopoiesis – and thus to prevent the consolidation of rigid models of operation inappropriate for the environment.

Law (institutionalising conflicts), democratic politics (institutionalising the conflict between government and opposition), and social movements (contesting the existing relations and demanding change), immunise the system, so to speak, which learns to deal with its own products. It uses them to exercise learning mechanisms, its flexibility and resilience. Social movements as peripheries of the political system thereby maintain it in a state of irritability and sensitivity to the environment. According to Blühdorn, “from the perspective of systemic self- reproduction, the internal simulation (.) of a supposedly external point of reference is fully sufficient (Blühdorn, 2006).

“The system does not immunize itself against the no, but with help of the no: it does not protect itself against changes, but with the help of changes against rigidifying into repeated, but not environmentally adequate, patterns of behaviour. The immune system does not protect structure, but autopoiesis, the system’s closed self-reproduction (Luhmann, 1995: 371-372; quoted in: Andersen & Stenner 2020).

In this context, however, “the problem of controlling autoimmunity” (Wolfe, 2017: 108) is key. One might therefore expect the political system to initiate the mechanism of controlling this discordance of temporality not so much to resolve it as to recognise it and incorporate it into the area of its action. Only then can it be subjected to control as an element of its own reality. The process of participation of stakeholders in the processes of energy governance, which has gained currency in recent years, could be such a mechanism. In the vision of transition followed by the European Union, widespread participation and dialogue with various types of stakeholders are becoming increasingly important (Schönwälder, 2020).

John Dupré “Life as process”

Dupré, John 2020. Life as process. Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 57(2): 96–113.

A process, at any rate, is something for which change is essential. There are many kinds of processes. Some, like erosion or inflation, require something else to which they happen – cliffs or economies. Others just happen. The “it” in the English expression “it is raining” does not refer to any thing that is raining. Here, however, I am concerned with processes that are individuals, and that persist over time. Paradigmatic here are the already mentioned eddies, or vortices. A striking instance is the Great Red Spot on the planet Jupiter. This has persisted for centuries, but its persistence is at every moment dependent on activity, in this case the very rapid winds that circulate around it. Unlike a thing, it cannot persist without change; if the winds ceased the Red Spot would no longer exist. (99)

A process ontology, as I conceive it, is one that asserts the primacy of change: everything is in flux, and the appearance of stable entities is ultimately illusory [Dupre and Nicholson, 2018]. So, recalling my earlier remark about Whitehead, an ontology that sees extended processes as built up out of unchanging parts is not, in this sense, a true process ontology. The challenge for a process ontology is to explain the appearance, ultimately the illusion, of stable things. (100)

The constancy of form that an organism exhibits is not something that continues by default, until something happens to disrupt it. It is something that is achieved by the organism’s metabolism constantly maintaining its form and resisting entropy by using this intake of energy from the environment; and organisms have to interact with their environments to ensure this intake of energy. The form is maintained by this constant flow of energy in a way parallel to, if vastly more complex than, that in which an eddy is maintained by the flow of water in a stream. It is the manifestation of a massively complex and exquisitely orchestrated set of processes. (101)

the notion of the organism as autonomous is a hopeless one. The spectrum of dependencies from essential endosymbionts through social division of labour to fortuitous ecological interaction demonstrates that for organisms to survive requires a multitude of interactions, some so fundamental to the way of life of the organism that there is no simple way of deciding whether they are mutualistic symbionts or parts of the same living being. The failure of autonomy, in short, makes it highly questionable whether the organism has clear, objective boundaries. (103)

Seen as a process, an organism is a stable pattern in an intricately orchestrated array of processes at many levels of organisation. Internally, these are chemical, metabolic processes within cells, and larger scale actions of, and interactions between, organs and other systems. Externally, there are interactions with a host of other organisms and abiotic features of the environment. Crucially, as has been stressed by recent accounts of niche construction, these interactions are bidirectional: organisms shape their environments in ways that promote the stability of the organism [Odling-Smee et al., 2003]. Equally crucially, the organism is part of a much longer process, the lineage. The lineage also persists through a host of interactions with living and non-living parts of the environment, and through the reproductive capacities of its constituent organisms. The lineage is stabilised by natural selection, and for many lineages including our own the maintenance within the lineage of a population of conspecifics is essential for the survival of the individual7. The flow of life is sustained by a hierarchy of organised and interconnected systems from the molecule to the lineage and the ecosystem. (103-104)

Living systems are hierarchies of processes at a range of spatial and temporal scales. Their persistence comes from this embedding and its explanation requires both the more traditional explanation in terms of parts familiar in reductionist science, but also the constraints imposed by their position in a larger whole. To take just one example almost at random, the animal heart depends on an intricate array of cells of various kinds and their chemically mediated interactions. But as we all know from constant exhortations to exercise more, it depends also on the behaviour of the whole in which it is embedded. Put less whimsically, a heart can only survive embedded in a body with the capacity via various other systems – respiratory, circulatory, etc. – to provide it with oxygen and other inputs needed to maintain its structure and   function. (104)

Whereas a substance ontology has intractable problems dealing even with the basic biological phenomenon of cell division – when does one cell become two? – in a process ontology we have merely a flow of life that can be divided into individuals to suit our purposes. (106)

As the twentieth century biologist and philosopher J.H. Woodger nicely expressed it, “physiologists who suppose themselves to be above metaphysics are only a very little above it – being up to the neck in it” [Woodger, 1929, p. 246]. Metaphysics can be ignored but not escaped. (106)

species, or more generally lineages, are not individual things, but individuaal processes [Dupre, 2017]. As we have seen, processes should not be assumed to have sharp boundaries, and the principle of inclusion in an individual process is not continuity of properties, notoriously difficult to distinguishin an evolving lineage, but the right kind of causal connection. (106)

The gene transmission theory of inheritance is a classically thingcentred story. How does one thing, the parent, influence the character of another thing, the offspring? By passing a large collection of little things, genes, to it. In a processual view we might rather start with the recognition of the lineage and the organism as part of a hierarchy of processes mutually stabilising one another, as indicated by the general view of living systems I sketched earlier. In this context it is easy to see that a much broader view of inheritance is needed. Social and cultural processes, behavioural imitation of parents by offspring and the vital shaping of the relevant environment by conspecifics in the process perhaps never better described than in Darwin’s (1881) treatise on earthworms, but more generally theorised today as niche construction, all function as means of passing traits from generation to generation. (107)

A process ontology should help to undermine the radical individualism that underlies a great deal of Western social and political thought for the last two centuries or so, and is expressed in scientific approaches such as neoclassical economics or, with a biological twist, evolutionary psychology [Dupre, 2001]. Happily, this insight undermines the conclusion of both these hyper- individualist scientific programmes, that humans are ultimately selfish and nasty. Given our place in a hierarchy of interconnected processes including many – from social groups and families to evolutionary lineages – of which we are merely contributing parts, there is no reason to suppose that cooperative behaviour is inherently problematic. This is not, of course, to deny that it is possible to provide social arrangements that will foster selfishness and nastiness. (110)

Martin Savransky “Ecological uncivilisation”

Savransky, Martin 2022. Ecological uncivilisation: Precarious world-making after progress. The Sociological Review Monographs 70(2): 367–384.

Inspired by the Dark Mountain Project’s (Kingsnorth & Hine, 2009) poetic experiment in ‘uncivilisation’, in this article I seek to activate our political imagination after progress by proposing ecological uncivilisation as a permanent experimentation with improbable forms of world-making and methodologies of life that are articulated thanks to the earth-wide precariousness that calls them into action and not in spite of them; that are envisaged thanks to ongoing histories of decolonisation and not despite them; that strive to live and die well but not always better. (371)

The problem, however, is that this a quintessentially modern story, the product of a political imagination kindled by those who invented the concept of ‘civilisation’ in eighteenth century imperial Europe not only as its own self-admiring description in the face of non-European, colonised others, but also as a political and moral judgement, ‘the criterion against which barbarity, or non-civilization, is judged and condemned’ (Starobinski, 1993, p. 31). Indeed, I suggest Li and Shapiro’s examination of the CCP’s ecological record should perhaps lead us to the inverse evaluation – that rather than a corruption of the ideal of an ecological civilisation, China’s recent environmental (geo)politics constitute its very embodiment. (376)

the coercive environmentalism of the CCP is well and truly civilising indeed: relocating and reshaping minoritarian modes of living through forced ecological migration and sedentarisation, imposing ‘standards’ of ecological civilisation through BRI developmental programmes, and extending the civilising will to uniformity to the Earth itself by means of geoengineering and monocultural afforestation, among others forms of civilisational operation. (377)

The imaginative call for ecological uncivilisation is not an appeal to primitivism, however. It is not a call for a ‘return’ to a pre-industrial or preagricultural condition where people supposedly lived in harmony with nature. For that too is the story of civilisation, the retrofitted backdrop against which ‘civilisation’ emerges as ‘human progress’. (378)

If a fragmentary cartography of social life beyond the pale might enable one to learn something about how to die as a civilisation in order to learn how to live, it is not because such experiments prescribe lessons on ‘the good life’ but precisely because they affirm its radical instability. As such, they make of the need for multiple and divergent, out-of-bounds experiments in nourishing new tastes for life beyond the civilised judgement of taste itself the lesson. Rather than lament a historical process of ‘cultural fragmentation’ and yearn for a cosmopolitan, civilised future ‘where the destructive conflicts between tribes, civilizations, and nations will have been overcome’ (Gare, 2017, p. 166), therefore, such experiments are active vectors of divergence, profusion and dispersal: shards of ecological uncivilisation where (im)possible forms of sociality are improvised on rugged terrain, against an imperial history of devastation brought about by earth-wide homogenisation – the ecological production of a world without others in the name of progress and civilisation (Crosby, 1986). Which is why precarious forms of world-making and uncivilised life guarantee nothing, and they authorise nothing. If they fail to lay the grounds for a new, global civilisation, it is only because experiments in precarious world-making espouse such a failure as their very political vocation (Savransky, 2021a). (382)

Mark Davis “The online anti-public sphere”

Davis, Mark 2021. The online anti-public sphere. European Journal of Cultural Studies 24(1): 143–159. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420902799

An important point of departure for what follows is earlier work on ‘anti-publics’ by McKenzie Wark (1997) and Bart Cammaerts (2007). Wark identifies the emergence of ‘anti publics’ such as US citizen militia groups in the 1990s as an important moment in the fracturing of democratic politics in the United States, which he argues can be understood as the product of a Habermasian ‘legitimation crisis’ whereby significant numbers of people had lost faith in democratic processes. The alienation of White working people, Wark (1997) argues, following Robert Reich, is linked to the emergence of an educated class working in ‘symbolic analysis’ whose fortunes are no longer connected to the local but to the global: ‘their interests lie in the cooperative management of international trade, not the welfare state’ (p. 182). Cammaerts (2007) cites neo-Nazi and fundamentalist movements and ‘negationism, (verbal) gay bashing, blatant racism, promotion of hatred, violence and other essentialisms’ (p. 87) as examples of anti-publics ‘going against the basic values of democratic culture’, which he argues ‘are often forgotten in analyses and accounts of counter-hegemonic communication’ (p. 74). Cammaerts (2007) draws on Gramsci’s work to argue that anti-publics are ‘counter-hegemonic’ (p. 73) insofar as they are not only detached from the dominant public sphere but actively oppose basic democratic norms and institutions. Here I build on Wark’s and Cammaert’s theories to show how their definition of anti-publics now applies across a broader array of counter-hegemonic online groups. (144-145)

Anti-public discourse, as I describe it here, positions itself against norms of publicity in three ways. First, it shows little interest in adherence to principles of argumentation, evidence, truthfulness, mutuality, reciprocity, good faith and inclusiveness, among other democratic ‘public sphere’ norms, that while never fully adhered to, nevertheless underpin democratic culture. Second, further to the first point, such discourse often sets itself in pointed counter-hegemonic opposition to democratic processes and institutions such as the state, the media and the academy, and their managerial ‘elites’, and actively seeks to disrupt democratic processes for its own purposes. Third, such discourse is often neglected or dismissed in discussions of participatory online media, and relegated to siloed discussions of such things as hate speech, cyber-racism or anti-climate science groups, among others, at the cost of developing a holistic understanding of anti-public discourse. (145)

anti-public discourse is routinely intermingled with everyday democratic speech. Indeed, anti-publics and the discourse they generate reflect everyday public discourse and openly advocate forms of racism, misogyny and science scepticism deeply encoded in and disavowed by Western liberal democratic politics. (145)

My argument is that while we tend to think of extreme and irrational online discourse as aberrant and alien to everyday democratic discourse, such discourse in fact is a precise reflection of an everyday democratic discourse that has itself become deeply inflected with reactionary and populist themes (Mudde, 2004, 2010; Müller, 2014). (146)

In summary, demos now finds itself under attack by the network. The concern that underpins this article is that Western publics are in effect being ‘groomed’ so that reactionary ideas formerly unacceptable in public debate to do with the presence and rights of Others and valence of expert knowledge, are becoming increasingly acceptable. These developments, in turn, force intellectuals to confront the question of what they really value. One possibility raised by what follows is that scholarly critiques of rationalism and liberalism have been outflanked and that fundamental democratic ideals must be fought for all over again, albeit in sophisticated new ways that do not recuperate unexamined enlightenment positivism or a lost liberalism past. (146)

First, the talk practised by the above groups selectively lacks rationality or recourse to evidence with respect to the particular issues that are the focus of the discourse. (150)

Second, such discourse is antagonistic and divisive. Its goal is not consensus but the amplification of difference. Such discourse is frequently a site of heightened affect and in particular rage. (150)

Third, such discourse is in general anti-elite. It targets a managerial class comprising conspiratorial scientists, ‘court historians’, ‘Hollywood and the media’, the ‘main stream media’ (‘MSM’), ‘elite Jewish supremacists’, the ‘liberal establishment’ and so on, who are ‘wedged into positions of power’ and deemed to have undue power over socio-political events. (150)

Fourth, such discourse is in general anti-statist. It opposes the imposition of the state on everyday affairs. This is articulated as a preference for individualist, libertarian approaches, a minimal state, or a desire for self-governing separateness. (151)

Fifth, anti-public discourse is in general anti-cosmopolitan. (151)

Sixth, rather than rationality, expertise or recognised facts such discourse in general takes recourse in the explanatory power of conspiracy theories. (152)

The insurgent impact of online anti-publics on democratic processes raises a further possibility, which is the collapse of the very idea of the public and the emergence of a post-normative democratic environment. I suggest this possibility because anti-public discourse across its various domains mounts an attack on the possibility of shared ideals and realities, common beliefs and rituals, collectivity and equality at odds with the emphasis on equality, mutuality, reciprocity and inclusion that Habermasian theorists of online publics regard as democratically constitutive (Dahlberg, 2001, 2007), and opens up instead an arena of militant intolerance with few possibilities for egalitarian or cosmopolitan reconciliations between multiple publics. (152)

Rather than ‘agonistic’, anti-public discourse is determinedly ‘antagonistic’. Lacking any semblance of the mutual respect that Mouffe argues is necessary for agonistics, its language is exclusionary, inegalitarian, authoritarian, and frequently rehearses (and on occasion has acted out with fatal consequences) violent attacks on members of targeted groups such as Jews, feminists, leftists, migrants, blacks, scientists and journalists. (153)

Anti-publics are not simply a reaction to democratic deficit; they are the knowing by-product of a new hegemony promoted by an opportunistic, programmatic, reactionary-conservative movement politics that, while diverse, has in common an opportunistic impulse to exploit for political gain the fallout from the very (neoliberal) economic transformation that libertarian branches of conservatism have sponsored. (154)

The anti-public sphere is not merely a domain of failed public discourse. Its existence adds charge to already open questions about the relationship between liberalism, capitalism, media and democracy, and the viability of public sphere ideals at a time of fractious populism and ideological warfare. It raises important questions such as: how to address the lack and loss felt by people left behind by cosmopolitan visions? In addressing this problem, it is no longer productive to understand the discursive formations discussed here as somehow an anti-modern, tribal, pre-cosmopolitan space of barbarians. ‘They’ are the very essence of the modern and indeed, of post-industrial cosmopolitanism: they are us. (156)

Sian Lazar “Anthropology and the politics of alterity”

Lazar, Sian 2022. Anthropology and the politics of alterity: A Latin American dialectic and its relevance for ontological anthropologies. Anthropological Theory 22(2): 131-153. https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211030196

The debate between Pacheco de Oliveira and Viveiros de Castro took place in the context of the Brazilian constitutional multiculturalism of the 1990s, which was in turn related to a continent-wide ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ within mainstream politics (Hale, 2005). A key figure of neoliberal multiculturalism was and still is the ‘indio permitido’ (permitted Indian). The term was originally coined by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui to describe the indigenous subject allowed onto the scene by dominant groups (Hale and Millaman, 2005). Such a subject could express political agency, but largely in cultural spaces, limited to those which did not challenge the core of the neoliberal project of economic governance. Neoliberal multiculturalism characterised much of the state-led responses to the flourishing of indigenous rights activism across the region in the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, this activism had a longer history that linked to the anti-colonial struggles of the 18th century and before. But, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the traditional Left in Latin America, there was a distinct emergence of a language of rights and culture in the politics of the region. This was linked to the rise of human rights talk globally. So, on the one hand, indigenous rights had become unquestionably important in national and international politics, but on the other, ‘indigenous culture’ was often appropriated by various government agents who in practice just repeated the old forms of domination (Hale and Millaman, 2005: 285). Official multiculturalism represented a shift in state policy from ethnocide to less obvious and longer term processes of ‘etnofagia’ in Patzi’s (1999) term, becoming a ‘concealing mechanism’ for new forms of colonialism (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012). (142-143)

Within anthropology, the debate between the two trends of political economy and cosmology continues today, but it is more than just academic, for it turns on deeply political questions about indigenous rights to territory and self-government. For the 1990s contact theorists and their successors in Brazil, the structuralist study of Amazonian peoples takes a perspective so internal to those societies that it ignores the situation of ‘interethnic contact’, which the contact theorists understood to be inherently one of structural domination (i.e. internal colonialism). That leads to the accusation that structuralists avoid and therefore deny historicity and politics, like the Andeanists critiqued by Orin Starn. Many anthropologists would of course deny this accusation, and Viveiros de Castro (1999) has countered that in Brazil at least the activism that results from a critique of internal colonialism almost always ends up as working for the state, rather like the early 20th century Mexican indigenismo of Manuel Gamio. Interethnic contact theorists become participants in the top-down multiculturalism of government institutions and their NGOs. Instead, he argued, anthropologists should focus on the politics of anthropology, keeping that conceptually separate from political activism as such, which is a different domain, one where anthropologists might also act, but separately from their academic action (see also Viveiros de Castro 2013). This stance has been carried into contemporary discussions of the politics of ontological anthropology. (143)

Marisol de la Cadena (2015) describes how Mariano and Nazario Turpo lived in Pacchanta, Andean Peru, with Ausangate, an earth being or mountain (in ‘our’ world), and mobilised politically on behalf of their ayllu, the community which incorporates both the people there (runakuna) and the related earth-beings (tirakuna). At one point, Nazario explains that he and his people object to a proposed open cast mining project because it will destroy Ausangate and he will become angry. Ultimately, Nazario and his community are advised to articulate their opposition to the mining through a more ‘conventional’ discourse of environmental responsibility and risk; but nonetheless, at various points in the process, they bring the earth-being into politics in a way that for de la Cadena (2010) shows the difference of worlds and constitutes an alternative cosmopolitics. Yet, it should be noted that an ontological argument against mining is not the only political language possible; one can make an anti-capitalist argument against the exploitation of the mountain without invoking the earth-being, and people do (de La Cadena, 2010; Li and Paredes Penafiel, 2019). Nonetheless, the politics described by de la Cadena are one example of how one might incorporate cosmopolitics into contemporary political debates through the acknowledgement of multiple worlds. (145)

The problem comes when this moves away from a consideration of political economy in a materialist sense into ‘the economy of anthropological enquiry itself’ in (mostly) European anthropological theorising. It should be evident by now why it is that the traditions of Latin American anthropology outlined above – combined with the contemporary situation of extractive capitalism – make this an inherently depoliticising move. The issue is not the presence or lack of political activism as such, but whether or not to bracket it out from ethnographic writing. As Alcida Ramos’s work from over 30 years ago shows, that point has been made for some time now (Ramos, 1990). (145)

I have shown that the tension between the two analytical traditions of political economy and cosmology has run through Latin American anthropology since its inception as a discipline and even before. This is unlikely to change dramatically in the near future, but there are several possible strategies in response. First, we can recognise the dialectic but not try to reach a synthesis between the two poles. Rather, the challenge would be to maintain both in tension. Second, we should place ontological anthropology in a more explicit dialogue with the more directly politically-engaged traditions of Latin American anthropology and social thought, especially the work on multiculturalism, indigenous politics and decolonisation (e.g. Hernandez Castillo, 2016; Jimeno, 2004; Ramos, 1990; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015). Third, we can follow the lead of those developing less totalising theoretical languages, ones that seek neither full assimilation (i.e. sameness) nor complete alterity but are instead more ch’ixi in Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2012, 2015) terms. Such an endeavour would privilege anthropologies of contingency, mixing, change and the simultaneous occupation of different positionalities and perspectives, while remaining attentive to differences of hierarchy and inequality. (148)