Degrowth Before the Letter

The economic, social, and political movement called degrowth received some attention here at the blog last year, once in a post of my own, and once in a guest post, written at my request by someone more expert in the topic, Luis Iñake Prádanos. Born in a village in Spain and internationally educated, Dr. Prádanos now teaches Spanish literature and cultural studies at Miami University in Ohio. His book, Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain was published last fall by Liverpool University Press.

I met Iñake Prádanos in 2017 at a NEH summer seminar in Seattle called City/Nature: Urban Environmental Humanities. He introduced me to degrowth over numerous conversations that summer. Back home I talked so much about him and his ideas around the dinner table that my daughter grew uneasy: “This guy is like your guru or something.” Fourteen-year-old girls are wary by nature of their parents’ enthusiasms, but there was something to what she said. Whenever he spoke, I did tend to fall into a kind of rapture.

My daughter, however, didn’t need to be alarmed. When we hear ideas that are deeply familiar to us and with which we’re sympathetic–when we hear them perhaps for the first time, perhaps in a new way–rapture is not an unnatural reaction. I think it’s what Henry Adams meant when he said he was a Darwinist before the letter. I think it’s what people mean by the term “self-evident.”

Degrowth challenges, analyzes, and historicizes growth as the dogma upon which our economy is based. That dogma calls for a significant portion of the surplus it produces to be invested in further production. This has led to a dramatic increase in economic metabolism, a mostly post-WW II phenomenon often called “the Great Acceleration.” Chart this out (in population growth, energy and water use, ocean acidification, carbon dioxide particles, etc.) and what you see, starting around 1950 more or less, is a series of runaway curves. How do we solve the social and environmental problems caused by this metabolic acceleration? The common sense answer is of course “more growth.”

I’d spent years exploring Gregory Bateson’s double bind paradox as a central dynamic, a kind of theme, used over and over in various midcentury iterations, across disciplines and realms of expression. Double bind can generate a feedback loop wherein common-sense solutions lead to a progressive symptomatic acceleration, what the systems theorists called runaway. I was prepared, therefore, to hear about degrowth because its analysis sounded like another version of double bind.

Double bind described an impossible dilemma, an inescapable, ever-oscillating paradox. It appealed to me as a way to see a problem in its most intractable form. Because by definition, double bind defeats entrenched solutions, it may force a radical, transformative response. Again, degrowth matches up. As a response to the entrenched dogma that it describes, degrowth ignores disciplinary barriers. It brings new research fields–environmental economics, political ecology–to bear. It calls for and locates movements toward a transformed, postgrowth world.

The summer institute in Seattle was my introduction not only to the literature of degrowth, but to that of the Environmental Humanities, in general. Reading in EH from a background in IH is a little like traveling through unfamiliar terrain. Certain particulars have stood out to me that I wasn’t able right away to put words to. I’ll take a stab at it here with three observations from the first chapters of Prádanos’s new book.

1. Centrality vs. mere relevance. In his first chapter, Prádanos addresses how the neoliberal crisis in Spain is causing scholars and cultural critics to question “the dominant imaginary of economic growth” and “to rethink their disciplines.” While some, he writes, “are discussing relevant issues like multiculturalism, neoliberal biopolitics, socioeconomic degradation, digital culture, and urban processes, the most interesting critical responses reckon with all these factors holistically and relate them to the root of the crisis: the cultural logic of a socially and environmentally unsustainable growth imaginary.”

Clearly, Prádanos favors those scholars who reckon holistically. This approach attunes them more closely to “the root of the crisis.” It isn’t that the work of the other scholars is insignificant or wrong-headed. Their work is, however, merely “relevant.” That made me wonder about IH. Are the concerns and discussions of Intellectual History central or merely relevant? Perhaps there are disciplinary conventions–the study of the past, for instance–that restrict IH to mere relevance. EH, it seems to me, has an advantage here. It can analyze and contextualize historical artifacts if it chooses, without being too concerned about charges of, say, presentism or of trying to construct a usable past.

2. Human/non-human difference. If EH has a bit more freedom to move, it isn’t entirely because it’s less restricted by its materials and practices. Part of it, too, has to do with where it places its analytical wedge. IH, in the shadow of Social History, is focused on differences between humans and humans: race, gender, class. EH, and in particular, eco-criticism, is concerned with these differences, too, but not primarily and not exclusively. In ecocriticism, “alterity is always also defined by the nonhuman other,” Prádanos writes, quoting another EH scholar, Ursula K. Heise. The implication here also speaks to the centrality/relevance question: Without getting our analytical crowbar down into this particular alterity, we won’t get the purchase required to crack and leverage the hegemonic bedrock.

I call it bedrock because it’s heavy, massive, and real, because it’s embedded, institutionalized, fossilized by habit and custom. Ultimately, though, it’s immaterial–a complex of symbols, significations, meanings, and ideas. EH employs the term, “imaginary,” after Jacques Lacan and Cornelius Castoriadis, and while I’m sure the term’s philosophical underpinnings are important, I wonder if we really lose all that much in our efforts to advance an ecological agenda when other terms are used: worldview, paradigm, or even episteme. The point is that ideas become embedded in the material world and take power, become force. EH insists on this. No vestiges of positivism remain. That’s my impression, anyway. There’s no ambiguity about or tiptoeing around …

3. The causal power of ideas. It is the dominant cultural imaginary, “the growth machine,” that “generates these social [and environmental] problems,” Prádanos writes. That imaginary needs to be questioned, criticized, disrupted, and undone so that a new imaginary, “a new common sense” can “emerge: a postgrowth, decolonial, ecofeminist, posthumanist, and postcapitalist imaginary.”

As for who it’s up to to do these things, Prádanos couldn’t be more straightforward: “It is the job of the environmental humanities.” He doesn’t mean EH alone, of course. Help would surely be welcome from any quarter, disciplinary or otherwise. But there doesn’t seem to be much ambiguity, either, about the purpose of scholarship and criticism.