Here on the blog in the coming weeks, I’m excited to report, we’re running a roundtable on Keith Makoto Woodhouse’s The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism, which received SUSIH’s award for best book of intellectual history in 2019. That’s going to be a real treat. Among the topics Woodhouse raises in the book is the conflict between the cases for radicalism and for reform.
Some version of that conflict plays out today, as everyone wonders what life will be like on the other side of the pandemic. Some are asking when we’ll get back to normal; some speculate about how “the new normal” will be; others claim that normal was the problem to begin with, and that what we want is something wholly different.
In my last post I used the phrase, “the literature of transformation,” which seemed warranted when I thought about my reading these past two years. But I picked up the phrase from an article by someone whose reading in this literature has been much more thorough and systematic than my own. That article, titled, “Degrowth: A metamorphosis in being,” by Pasi Heikkurinen, of the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, was published last year in Environmental Planning E: Nature and Space.
Heikkurinen points out that, in much of the literature of transformation, there is a “lack of rigor” regarding the concept itself, and, quoting another researcher, that “analytical clarity is often superseded by visionary and strategic orientations” (529). Transformation as a concept is under-analyzed and undertheorized, and Heikkurinen sets out to help rectify that situation. The degrowth community has an active research agenda. They’re turning over all the stones.
Monarch Butterfly emerges from chrysalis (found in backyard on 10/17/14). Photo by Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren.
One thing that his analysis argues is that transformation can be looked at in two ways: ontically and ontologically. Ontic transformation occurs in “the social and political realm.” Ontological transformation concerns “the realm of being.” If I understand his distinction, the conflict between reform and radicalism has to do with transformation perhaps wholly in the ontic realm. The socio-political is organized to transform matter, energy, and life to human purposes. Radicals and reformers mostly agree that this organization itself requires transformation but disagree on how much transformation is required and how it is to be carried out.
Analysis of transformation in the ontological realm uncovers in humans a “will to transform.” To transform the world–to make it a better place–is “an unequivocally stated value axiom,” Heikkurinen writes. It’s the “main objective of responsible human activity.” The words improved, developed, and responsible signify value, but the will to transform as an expression of ethics is almost beside the point. Humans have “an inherent drive” to “endlessly craft and reorder the world.” Whether aimed at selfless improvement or self-interested greed, “constant transformation is needed, and stillness is not an option” (535).
In 1967, in London, the atmosphere of the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation was heavy with the conflict between radicalism and reform. Urgency for intervention was at a fever pitch and militancy felt ascendant. This conflict overshadowed the original intent of the gathering, which had been conceived a year earlier by a group of phenomenologists associated with the radical psychologist R. D. Laing. Because the anthropologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson was one of Laing’s mentors, Bateson was the Congress’s first headliner. Bateson later refined his lecture and published it under the title, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature.” By fixating on data that led them in a line toward the achievement of purpose, human beings were “blinded” to their own “systemic nature,” the loop structures in which they were embedded.[1]
Grasping the tenor of the moment, Bateson offered a path beyond the radicalism/reform face-off. His words were meant to move his audience–to put it in Heikkurinen’s terms–from an ontic to an ontological orientation. Today we call that orientation “ecological.” Some call it the systems view.
As a systems theorist, Bateson also had a lot of say about logical typing, and following that thread, I want to see the relationship between the ontic and the ontological as a member/class relationship. Every intervention in the ontic realm has thermodynamic, ontic realm consequences–an increase in entropy. But no intervention in the ontic realm can affect the ontological realm. In cybernetic terms, no change in the temperature of the house can change the thermostat’s threshold setting.
This class/member relation is likely why we face what Heikkurinen calls the “transformation paradox,” and what Bateson referred to as a double bind. Conditions increasingly trigger the drive for transformation. But efforts we make in the ontic realm do not affect who we are ontologically. Rather, they further produce the conditions that made the need for transformation urgent to begin with. Another way to articulate the dilemma is to say that transformation at the ontological realm can’t be imagined in ontic realm terms.
Heikkurinen turns for an alternative to a form of “Heideggerian mindfulness” called “releasement.” Heidegger had borrowed the term from Meister Eckhart. Releasement is a way of being that lets go of the will to transform, that lets go and “waits.” It is “calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worthy questioning” (540-41). This thinking had come during a time, according to Hannah Arendt, when Heidegger was trying to come to terms with his involvement in the Nazi movement (536-37). With this detail, one must pause to acknowledge that any talk of existential transformation as a solution to social crisis can be reasonably viewed as fundamentally reactionary. Michael E. Zimmerman takes up this issue in Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (1994), a book Heikkurinen draws on for his piece.
Having noted those matters, I’ll move on to sum up. Because every transformation pays a thermodynamic price in increased entropy–even those transformations meant to reduce matter-energetic throughput–“a proper response to the call for transformations would involve following the example of releasers, who allow being to unfold without constant anthropogenic intervention.” Thus the releasers are a symbol of hope. They are “already living the metamorphosis” (539).
Who are the releasers? This is the question reading Heikkurinen’s article made me ask.
Works of fiction may be my only vista into imagining who the releasers might be. It’s been months since I saw the movie, Shoplifters, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palm D’or-winning film of 2018, but I keep thinking about it. It’s the story of a multi-generational, make-shift family living in some forgotten corner of the urban landscape. They survive on the minuscule, unreliable salary of one parent and what they can pilfer from local shops or scavenge from their surroundings. Like another fairly recent film, The Florida Project (2017), and last year’s celebrated Parasite, Shoplifters focuses on economic inequality, on families struggling with poverty, though through a different lens.
The economic inequality depicted in these two films is a technical matter: Material resources and education have been unfairly distributed. In the world of abundance we have built, some have been left behind. The families in these films live outside the abundance but they continue to live inside the imaginary, and this shapes their efforts to intervene and better their conditions. In Parasite, for instance, members encourage the marshaling of “vigor.” Vigorous intervention is the key to transforming change.
A still image from Hirokazo Kore-eda’s 2018 film, Shoplifters.
Although there are tragic lapses, the family in Shoplifters seems to exist mostly outside this capitalist imaginary. Their concerns are about the relations between them, their appreciation of each other and of life. Manners are mild, interventions are minimal. The most prominent quality surrounding them is love and care. Does the film merely romanticize poverty? Does my reading of the film romanticize poverty? That could be. But I think Kore-eda means for his audience to take in the love and care his characters exhibit without sanctifying them. When I tried to imagine what Heidegger might mean by “a calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worth questioning,” I thought of the characters in this film.
Releasement, according to the Heidegger quotes Heikkurinen uses, involve not doing, not intervening, but “waiting.” Releasement, Heidegger tells us, can’t be rushed; it can’t be made to happen. Rather, one waits for the call. That call might come as the collapse of civilization, which, Heikkurinen points out “has already shown itself to many.” Ah, now the article becomes uneasy-making. Some people get angry, reading things like this, and for good reason.
Many within the degrowth community themselves might bristle at this line of analysis, especially during the current environment, in which the shrinking of national GDPs is accompanied by widespread suffering and fear. Prominent degrowth voices, such as Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel, have taken pains to point out that virus-driven shrinkage, made worse by weak national safety nets, is not, as some assume, degrowth in practice. Degrowth is planned; it’s directed–what we are going through now isn’t. “Those who liken this economic crisis to degrowth are being deliberately obtuse,” Hickel wrote in an April tweet. “It’s like comparing a car wreck to carefully tapping the brakes. They’re not just dissimilar, they are opposites.”
Yet in a column last month in the New York Times, Hugh Roberts reiterates that solutions are not technical. That they are not only or primarily technical might be a better way to say it. Or that change must not occur only or primarily in the ontic realm. With all this in mind, I thought about the passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s classic about another community living outside the capitalist imaginary. It’s the part where the title comes from. The inhabitants of The Muck, like the family in Shoplifters, have also rejected the will to transform and instead take part in low matter-energetic activities the point of which is human interaction and joy. Of course, they live in neglected areas, and when the greater systems breakdown, they suffer in higher ratios than others do. It’s a hushed moment that this mysterious, disturbing passage describes. They are in their shanties waiting for the hurricane that will flood them out, uproot them, and kill some of them. They sit in the night in stillness and wait. “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
_________
[1] Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 440.
10 Thoughts on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
I really appreciate your ongoing discussion of the concept of degrowth. It’s a philosophy I’ve tried to adopt, dare I say actualize, in my personal life.
I wonder if you could unpack this sentence for me. “With this detail, one must pause to acknowledge that any talk of existential transformation as a solution to social crisis can be reasonably viewed as fundamentally reactionary.”
By “existential transformation” should I being reading “personal” transformation? Are you saying that individual epiphanal change is not the solution to social crisis? Do you mean reactionary in a political sense, or perhaps in a momentary, hyper-emotionalized response without planning or design? I’m trying to look at this from a contemporary perspective while trying to remove Heidegger and all that might mean from the conversation. Thanks.
Regarding your interest in degrowth, Paul, I saw a tweet this morning from Jason Hickel: “There were 3,200 academic articles published on degrowth in 2019 (up from less than 100 in 2000, and 600 in 2010), with contributions from economics to philosophy, anthropology to ecology. Fascinating to watch this idea catch fire.”
As for your question, by “existential” I meant, to use the terms Heikkurinen uses in this article, “ontological” or “in the realm of being.” I see between this ontological/ontic distinction, the distinction drawn between those who argue for inner change–for some sort of soul-work or religious conversion–and those who argue for “real” change at the level of institutions, governments, regimes. To put spiritual or non-material matters ahead of purely political ones can be criticized as quietist, lacking in “nerve,” counter-revolutionary, or reactionary, depending on the starkness of the division. In the play, *Marat/Sade,* de Sade is reactionary from Marat’s point of view.
In the introduction to Contesting the Earth, Michael Zimmerman frames that book as a continuation of an earlier book, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity. The Nietzsche- and Heidegger-influenced postmodern theorists, such as Derrida and Foucault, “do not always seem to appreciate the extent to which adopting Heidegger’s blanket critique of modernity can lead to dangerous political positions,” Zimmerman writes. Some anti-modernisms have a “reactionary potential,” especially if their rejection of modernity also rejects modernity’s “positive emancipatory goals” (5-6).
You asked, “Are you saying individual epiphanal change is not the solution to social crisis?” No, I’m not making a claim on that score one way or another. My predilection is to be sympathetic to arguments about change “in the realm of being.” Others have little patience with those sorts of arguments, and I wanted to acknowledge that that impatience is justified. Thanks for the question. I hope this helps clarify.
Thanks for answering my questions, and yes clarity in some areas and a profusion of questions in others. But that’s what good blog post does, right? Looking forward to the roundtable.
Read all of this pretty quickly. The post is very thoughtful, as with everything Anthony writes, so I feel guilty about the haste.
That said, I think the ontic/ontological distinction, or institutional vs personal change, is a key question.
I’m not sure right now how to sort it out, but one historical point of reference (that I have a feeling I’ve probably mentioned before) in the U.S. context is Charles Reich’s _The Greening of Anerica_. Probably it’s a little unfair in a way to mention this because it came out so long ago, but it did put a case for personal change first, with institutional change coming after. However, Reich was so enthralled by aspects of the ’60s youth counterculture that he made some rather absurd-sounding (to many ears) claims about how changes in lifestyle and behavior and “consciousness” would lead to profound and lasting societal transformation. Things didn’t work out that way, and I wonder whether that book, or more broadly the counterculture in general and its failure to lead to a deep and society-wide revolution, set back the “personal transformation first” argument in terms of its attractiveness. By contrast, the civil rights movement, which was more focused on institutional change, led to more easily identifiable and lasting results.
I tend to think the causal arrows between personal and institutional change are not always clear, but my inclination is to think that, esp in a large and rather conflicted society of more than 300 million people, if basic change comes it will be first at the level of institutions and structures, with widespread personal change, assuming it occurs, coming after.
As always, thanks so much for writing on this stuff; I flat don’t see it anywhere, and I think it’s really important, so you’re opening a door for me.
But if it doesn’t seem too crass or beside the point, I’d like to talk a bit about what worries me about how, if your discussions are representative at all, this conversation seems to be going on. About one half through this post I got to the point where I no longer could follow the particular vocabulary of what seems like a pretty small, academic world. I mean if I sat down and really spent time with every sentence and looked up all the terms, ok I could get it. But on medium-speed read, I came away with a lot of question marks.
Now maybe I’m just dense, which is fair. But I am a trained academic and, there are other discourses equally obtuse to others which I can comprehend easily. So I know if this stuff is challenging for me, most lay people will be lost pretty immediately.
And that worries me. Like, a lot. Because at the end of the day, isn’t the whole idea of de-growth OH MY GOD PEOPLE WE’RE ALL GUNNA DIE WE CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE! I mean, that’s the point, right? That sustainable life on earth can’t do capitalism for much longer. And if that’s the case, don’t we want to at least try to make that point as accessible as possible? Isn’t this an emergency? And if so, why are we using language to discuss it that is only comprehendible to those with PhDs and super nerds or the atypically self-educated?
Does this concern make any sense? I’m really unsure of what I think of my own intervention here but, thought to go for it. And to be clear, my thoughts don’t relate to your writing in particular; you are just reflecting what the literature works with. So I’m talking about that literature more broadly. Is there a Degrowth for Dummies I can get a hold of out there? lol I’m not too proud to admit I need it.
Robin, I’m glad you chose to go for it though your comment stopped me cold. I thought I *was* writing to be easily understood, and so this dose of intention-reception dissonance is humbling.
I’m a layperson on the topic of degrowth. I’ve read several books and numerous articles. (This Heikkurinen article is the first that calls on technical philosophical terms and mentions Heidegger.) Looking back, I’ve posted about degrowth maybe a half dozen times, and that includes a guest post from someone more expert, Luis Pradanos [https://s-usih.org/2018/03/degrowth-igniting-a-political-imagination-of-joy-guest-post-by-luis-i-pradanos/], who I asked to introduce the subject to an audience who might not have heard of it. A degrowth website [https://www.degrowth.info/en/what-is-degrowth-texts/] includes an introductory reading list with downloadable essays.
The best “degrowth for dummies,” or at least the kind of thing I think you’re asking for, is probably Kate Raworth’s *Doughnut Economics.* Raworth does not call herself degrowth–she says she’s “agnostic” about growth–but her book, written for a general reader, is a re-think of economics from the ground up, and is based on the same recognition about growth that degrowth and other postgrowth movements are based. Raworth also acknowledges the importance and influence of systems thinking.
I suspect, and Louis’s comment lends support to this, that what bogged you down was the systems theory vocabulary. Logical typing, thermodynamics, entropy, double bind, etc. Bringing a little something of what I know to the table, rather than merely summarizing whatever I’m reading, makes writing a blog post more fun and helps me move forward with my project of understanding systems thinking from a history of ideas perspective. (In this case it may have done more harm than good.) The go-to book on the systems view is *The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision* by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi (Cambridge UP, 2014). Everyone needs to read this book. It should be our Bible going forward.
The introduction to the recent *The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in Seventies America* by Daniel Belgrade really brings home the degree to which systems thinking already pervades the way we think and puts its many different threads clearly in place. For an accessible(!) narrative/history of ideas about the early years of systems thinking before it was called systems thinking, via the career of Gregory Bateson’s double bind concept, I can’t neglect to mention my own book–*Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness.* In case you’d like to understand where I’m coming from.
As for the OH GOD WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE literature of crisis environmentalism–that’s a slightly different topic and a much bigger pool. I would recommend *This Changes Everything* by Naomi Klein, which is bracing but not soul-killing, and constructive.
I would share up to a point some of Robin Marie’s concern, inasmuch as the post does draw on a discourse that may be opaque to someone who, for instance, hasn’t thought about entropy or encountered the term for a while (raises hand). I think the language and concepts are probably quite familiar to those who know some of the environmentalist (or radical environmentalist) and degrowth literature and/or are familiar with cybernetics and systems theory, but these are specialized discourses, though I think the ideas have leaked into the broader culture to an extent.
Btw I’m not sure I agree with the statement in the post that change in the ontic realm can’t produce change in the ontological realm. I doubt that ontological change can easily be produced by coercion (see e.g. the failure, or more like the disaster, of, say, Mao’s Cultural Revolution). But if by some means we got to some kind of planned (“tapping the brakes”) degrowth or steady state economy, however unlikely that might be, over time I would think that personal attitudes about life, about consumption, about energy use etc. would change. Again this is a chicken-and-egg question in terms of the causal arrows.
I am very leery frankly, though I haven’t seen The Shoplifters film, of anything that could even plausibly be accused of romanticizing poverty. Extremely poor people are not miserable 24/7, as e.g. Michael Harrington observed many years ago in the travelogue parts of _The Vast Majority_ when he reported seeing what seemed to him to be joyful moments among people living on the streets of India’s cities. But by and large being poor is not fun. Now maybe the characters in The Shoplifters do step outside the capitalist imaginary and achieve “releasement.” But I think if you’re putting your hopes for change on this type of releasement, you might be waiting longer than the planet can tolerate. It is, I think, just not in the cards to tell the large numbers of people who have only recently escaped from grinding poverty in China (and to a lesser but still substantial extent in India) that they have to give up some of the possessions they have only recently started to enjoy. A technological fix for climate change, however ideologically and politically unattractive because it doesn’t challenge the bases of capitalism and the fetish for growth, would seem at this point more feasible if the alternative requires large numbers to step outside the capitalist “imaginary.” Or so, at the moment at any rate, I’d suggest. The economic effects of the pandemic are likely to make all of this more difficult, unfortunately, even if the downturn in energy consumption has short-term environmental benefits.
Louis, these are all valid points and worth pondering. Regarding *The Greening of America,* I read it as a significant historical document and an example, to draw again on the quote above, of “analytical clarity” being “superseded by visionary and strategic orientations.” Like a lot of things I ought to revisit it.
The language used in the posting is difficult, despite the care brought to defining what terms like “ontic” and “ontological” might mean in this specific context. Heideggerian language is supposed to resist easy understanding because everyday language just loops you back into contemporary everyday experience. The point of “degrowth” is to imagine radically different ways of being in the world, which requires getting pushed past all the resistances into a truly moment of release from what we take to be common sense. Getting to that point is mostly unpleasant, but once there temporary release from gravity can be exhilarating,
Over the last two months, we’ve had an unexpected and probably for most people undesirable experiment in “degrowth.” Of course not what the theorists and activists propose or imagine, so a truly unfair test of the ideas. Reading your piece and then some of the references, I began to wonder what would be the historical conditions that would allow, or more realistically, compel such a radical change in expectations and practices. What power centers would find these changes advantageous and push for a transformation as dramatic, violent, and unexpectable as the Christianization of the Mediterranean world or the European invention of and invasions across the globe? When we turn to questions of deep social transformation, utopian triggers dissolve into the wants and needs of people and institutions to sustain, replicate, reproduce. The Christian world as it actually formed had little in common with the Gospels, nor was the so-called modern world much like what More, Campanella, or Francis Bacon imagined it could be.
I’ve been appreciating, Anthony, the degrowth series (the planned and unplanned aspects). As Robin noted, I think you’re opening doors for many of us. So I also am grateful for your reply to her “degrowth for dummies” inquiry. … I love this discussion on Heikkurinen, transformation, revolution, and reform. I hadn’t given much thought to the ontic-ontological distinction before reading this. Also, thanks for alerting me to *Shoplifters*. Somehow I’d missed that film. – TL