Analyze

While I found the article illuminating (I did not read the book), I am frustrated by, what I found, to be the hegemonic visions of political theory and climate change. Is there no space for feminist epistemological stances when imagining future forms of governance? Even their presentation of Climate X--what seemed to me like a quest for a unifying theory of opposition that is neither realistic nor reflects the how resistence movements however stuttering they may be are also a source of possibility and hope.

I wonder about global corporations and how they might relate to the described US-UN-Western-Elite Climate Leviathan verus Behemoth on the Capitalist side. They already operate beyond nation-state territorial scope. Just from where I'm situated, I've heard a lot of people praising tech companies in the US for being the first to call for work-from-home. Facebook's Data for Good COVID mapping that Tim sent around also looks like a start of a global panopticon that already has the capacity to be monitoring a huge number of people's travel and symptoms, beyond state divisions, in fact explicitly in part because Facebook does not trust state data, and it does not need buy-in at a UN kind of event. People are already consenting in degrees to have Facebook "collect" and aggregate their data for the fun, validation, convenience, etc. of being on social media. As the Western Elite governments go to Behemoth, are the corporations of those elite places the ones to carry on the idea of Leviathan? 

This article also brought to mind a haunting story that I first heard from a fancy robotics professor of a "Noah's Ark" for Elon Musk. I haven't quite figured out how that fits yet with the chart of possibilites offered in the article.

I second Prerna's frustration about citation and writing like one is the first person to think of something. 

I admire Mann and Wainwright for taking on the impossible task of coming up with a political theory for climate justice. Their strength lies in how they inadvertently reveal the stubbornness of Leviathan, or liberal democracy. But I must question when abstractions turn into reifications. Like any political theory, it would of course rouse passions and frustrations, so here are mine.

(1)  The political theory of the state that Mann and Wainwright build on follows the tradition(s) of Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, and Walter Benjamin. If we are to limit ourselves in these traditions, there is a still a lot of space to talk about them that Mann and Wainwright keep open. I am intrigued by the phrases "a world without sovereignty is no world at all", and "democracy undoes the very possibility of rule", which reveal how stubborn our political imaginations are. In the construction of these phrases, a world without sovereignty and democracy is not recognizably a world. I think they are quite right here. I hope to explore in my own project the tensions they point out, that this moment reinforces in such a monstrous way: "Leviathan, whether in the Old Testament or in even oldermyths, was never a captive of its conjurer’s will, and remains at large today, prowling between nature and the supernatural, sovereign and subject." (1)

(2) The most obvious critique I have is their lack of imagination for where learning can come from. Their four climate scenarios assume a bipolar world of Asia and United States. Take for example, this quote: "In contrast to sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, for example, only in Asia—and only with some revolutionary leadership from China—do we find the combination of factors that make climate Mao realizable: massive and marginalized peasantries and proletariats, historical experience and ideology, existing state capacity, and skyrocketing carbon emissions." (10)

The phrase in contrast leaves Africa and Latin America as places without coordinational capacity. We have to remember that the Haitian Revolution  happened in the Caribbean in 1791, a successful proleteriat revolution against a colonial state which had degraded both ecology and humanity. Admittedly the challenges are different in scale and scope today, but we have to be careful about the biases we reveal when we abstract. 

(3) So, where can learning come from? As I write in my annotation on the T-STS COVID project: "The question of political organizing and mobilizing in times of crisis therefore needs to build on movements and organizing that have resulted out of long histories of exclusion. How does movement-building look like to those who have learned to organize in a state that was to them mostly oppressive and withdrawn? Corinna Mullin and Azadeh Shahshahani (2020) reflect on what a transnational perspective on movement-building and organizing looks like. Their excellent article points to early Black radical internationalism and organizations, indigenous internationalism, the international peasant and ecological movement of Via Campesina, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Black for Palestine and The Red Nation movements, for example. In short, we have much to learn from responses by ongoing anti-imperialist movements during COVID-19 which have called for cancellation of neocolonial debt, land repatriation, reconfiguration of gig and hustle economies, just to give a few examples." Where else can we find examples to build on?

(4) So, the world that I live in is not polar, nor is it confined to territorial nation-states. Does it still make sense to speak of the US as representative of liberal democracy? And does liberal democracy mean rule without terror? Mann and Wainwright contrast "Euro-American liberal hegemony" to the "necessity of a just terror" that climate Mao asserts (9). Further, they distinguish the mechanisms of "neoliberal contagion" from global climate change, as if the two operate on separate floating spheres (3). However, as Inderpal Grewal argues in Saving the Security State (2017) and Jasbir Puar argues in The Right to Maim (2017), the security state cannot be separated from the transnational parastatal humanitarian complex that has emerged to address global climate change, among other things. These parastatal organizations work within the contradictions of neoliberalism: benefiting from withdrawing of the state and the increased capacity of the state to surveil (as the COVID19 pandemic sadly shows too) and make citizens which see themselves as exceptional liberals if they participate in that complex. They maintain the US empire and benefit from it. Is there space to talk about present-day imperial projects in political theory about climate activism?

(5) I wished they would have cited and learned from other people who have been saying these things for a long time. Is my wish for them to "talk about everything"? No, my wish for them is to stop speaking as if they are the first ones to speak about this. A footnote would have sufficed. And that is my frustration. 

"Leviathan, whether in the Old Testament or in even oldermyths, was never a captive of its conjurer’s will, and remains at large today, prowling between nature and the supernatural, sovereign and subject." (1) [I like this quote because it displays what I think is fundamental about how we think about governance: mapping nature/supernatural onto sovereign and subject. Do different mapping exist?]

"Yet far more than the neoliberal contagion of financial crisis and market disorders, it is global climate change that has produced the conditions in which “the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” is being solicited at a scale and scope hitherto unimaginable." (3) [In what ways do Mann and Wainwright view neoliberal contagion as different from global climate change?]

"Do we have a theory for revolution in the name of climate justice? Do we have a theory of how capitalist nation-states are transforming as a consequence of planetary change?" (3) [They argue that the answer to both is negative, necessitating a political theory]

"We posit that two variables will shape the coming political-economic order. The first is whether the prevailing economic formation will continue to be capitalist or not... The second is whether a coherent planetary sovereign will emerge or not. The question here is whether sovereignty will be reconstituted for the purposes of planetary management" [This is their argument: linking sovereignty to planetary management. The planetary sovereign would not inly act at the scale of Earth's atmosphere, but for the sake of life on it.]

"Our central thesis is that the future of the world will be defined by Leviathan, Behemoth, Mao, and X, and the conflicts between them... To say the least, the continuing hegemony of existing capitalist liberal democracy cannot be safely assumed." (5) 

"Climate Mao is marked by the emergence of a non-capitalist Leviathanic domestic authority along Maoist lines" [what does "domestic authority" mean here?]

 "In contrast to sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, for example, only in Asia—and only with some revolutionary leadership from China—do we find the combination of factors that make climate Mao realizable: massive and marginalized peasantries and proletariats, historical experience and ideology, existing state capacity, and skyrocketing carbon emissions." [positioning Africa and Latin America as places of lack, from where learning cannot take place. They mention the Cochabamba revolution but I do not get why they think it cannot be a model?] (10)

"The contrast with religion provides an important way to conceptualize the challenge presented by climate Leviathan, since X could be seen as an irreligious movement in place of a religious structure. Climate X is worldly and structurally open: a movement of the community of the excluded that affirms climate justice and popular freedoms against capital and planetary sovereignty" (17)

"For Hegel, the monarch or the sovereign is "political consciousness in the flesh"... for Schmitt, it is constituted in the act of decision.. the political cannot pre-exist sovereignty. A world without sovereignty is no world at all" (18) 

"Hegel and Schmitt are right—democracy undoes the very possibility of rule. For them, of course, this is democracy’s great failure; for Marx, and for climate X, however, it is its great promise." (18)

"The politics Benjamin impugns here—faith in progress; confidence in mass basis; servile integration into apparatus—are precisely those of our three opponents in the struggle ahead: Leviathan’s ethos is the faith in progress; Mao’s is confidence in the masses; Behemoth is the integration into the security apparatus of terror" (19) [summary of what each of three scenarios stand for]

The aspirations of the Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 project are similar to those of Climate Leviathan: to understand the range of political possibilities -- what could be called styles of governance -- that are emerging as COVID-19 unfolds.  We are reaching for what could be called COVID-X: 

P1: "While there is much justifiable attention to the ecological implications of global climate change, the political implications are just as important for human well- being and social justice. We posit a basic framework by which to understand the range of political possibilities, in light of the response of global elites to climate warming and the challenges it poses to hegemonic institutional and conceptual modes of governance and accumulation. The framework also suggests some possible means through which these responses might be thwarted, and political stakes in that construction of a new hegemony—which, to avoid suggesting we know or can yet determine the form it will take, we call “climate X”."

Mann and Wainwright give us four choices -- four hegemonic formations, each defined by “a mode of appropriation and distribution through which that hegemony is exercised: a capitalist climate Leviathan; an anti-capitalist, state-centered climate Mao; a reactionary capitalist Behemoth; and anti-capitalist, anti-sovereign climate X. They go on to say:  “Our central thesis is that the future of the world will be defined by Leviathan, Behemoth, Mao, and X, and the conflicts between them."  

What do cultural analysts bring to this? What if Mann and Wainwright’s hegemonic  formulations were thought of more extensively and discursively -- as the “problem-spaces” that David Scott draws out in Conscripts of Modernity (2004). Scott describes problem-spaces as the discuruvie context of articulation -- what sets up argument and stages intervention:

A problem-space, in other words, is an ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs. That is to say, what defines this discursive context are not only the particular problems that get posed as problems as such (the problem of ‘‘race,’’ say), but the particular questions that seem worth asking and the kinds of answers that seem worth having. (4)

Also see David Scott’s discussion of problem spaces in an exchange with Stuart Hall. 

Now, a “problem-space” (and obviously I’m severely compressing here) is first of all a conjunctural space, a historically constituted discursive space. This discursive conjuncture is defined by a complex of questions and answers—or better, a complex of statements, propositions, resolutions and arguments offered in answer to largely implicit questions or problems. Or to put this another way, these statements and so on are moves in a field or space of argument, and to understand them requires reconstructing that space of problems that elicited them…. I have wanted it to help us determine not only what the questions were that an author in a particular problem-space was responding to, but whether these questions continue in our new conjuncture to be questions worth responding to.

This, then, suggests how we could think in terms of the (four) narrative alternatives that Hayden White maps out in Metahistory, and about the thought-styles (Fleck) and modes of evidence through which different hegemonies consolidate.   This, in part, is what our “COVID-watch” would focus on.  

This way of reading would not only leverage cultural analysis but also makes education a critical arena of action - in a manner that doesn’t necessarily recuperarte the modernist subject.  Education --  and “the university “ -- is where we learn to question ways “the problem” is formulated, thus staging and legimating particular modes of response.  Security can be rendered in many different ways, for example. 

The positioning that you have to choose, and that Bono gets to choose, between livable working conditions and wages vs HIV treatment - forecloses possibility of HIV treatment AND acceptable working conditions. 

Forecloses critique of the industries’ unethical work conditions - because they are “proven” by inspectors to have good working conditions, and the bodies of the HIV worker-patients who are treated are proof of the goodness of the corps

Worker resistance is foreclosed because they know they depend on this “ethical” reputation to even have industry in their country, which is needed for survival because of past extractions and present oppressive global trade conditions

Bind that the workers are in - they have to perform the ethicalness and pretend their working conditions are ok when inspected because they know that their job (and the whole country’s export industry) depends on this performance of ethicalness and goodness of the factory

Performed Inspections provide proof, as do their HIV-treated bodies

Bono - celebrities promoting - people and at the stores purchasing/consuming branded RED products - blatantly baking “ethical” into the branding of consumer goods. 

Obscure bad working conditions with success of HIV treatment

ALAFA - while genuinely caring about workers’ health, they have made a decision on their behalf that this HIV treatment is what matters, and their working conditions don’t matter; same for Bono of U2 as an example celebrity here.

Fails on the worker’s understanding of responsibility to care for the sick -  violation of moral order because factory makes you sick 

Rejects and sidesteps responsibility for horrible working conditions (exposure and unlivable wages, no maternity leave, insecure) - focus instead on the HIV, for which they claim they have no responsibility, the HIV was already there, so they are responsible for treating those who are their current factory workers, giving them drugs and treatments that help them to be productive bodies, give them trainings that responsibilize them for getting the disease

The ethical is something you can enforce with these performed audits

The ethical is something consumers buy that’s branded and ethically produced - the ethical production is “no sweat” and also made by people whose suffering the profits can go to help

Celebrities and emotional and political sovereignty: “The vague network of forces for which Bono acts as spokesperson decides that HIV treatment is more important, and by extension, that labor violations, work rights, poverty, occupational health risks are less urgent forms of social suffering” -p474

ALAFA, a PPP organization, also makes this decision for the workers

ILO as well, as the inspectors