The Fire Next Time?

John Buell
John Buell (jbuell@acadia.net) is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book, Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age, will be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in August.

As the financial crisis deepened in 2008, the world's economic gurus were caught off guard. Political leaders, academics, and the mainstream media had converged on a new consensus. The era of volatility in financial markets had ended. Free markets, sophisticated technologies, and computer models had given us a new world. Risk could be modeled and quantified and banks, always eager to pursue their own financial interests, could be counted on to continually refine risk models and converge on prices that would reflect real underlying value.

When Lehman Brothers failed, setting off the cascade of bankruptcies that brought the banking system to its knees, Alan Greenspan blamed a once in a hundred years storm. Though on one level Greenspan's remark seemed to be an admission of a major flaw in conventional wisdom, it is better seen as the claim that, however dire current events were, political leaders should not draw long- term policy conclusions from the crash. Recent events also suggest that policy elites prefer to return to business as usual and, more surprisingly, that they are going to get away with it a mere two years after the near collapse of the system.

It has become almost an article of faith, not only in the US but in most of the other G-20 nations, that fiscal profligacy caused the Great Recession, that the stimulus did not work, and that austerity is the only way to restore growth. Mark Blyth, professor of international political economy at Brown University, points to the irony in this state of affairs" "Investment houses that two years ago demanded costly bailouts from government now criticize those same governments for excessive debt." Yet as Blyth, as well as Paul Krugman, Mark Weisbrot, and Dean Baker, point out, many of the governments now blamed for fiscal excess (Greece being the exception) were in sound shape before the crisis. The collapse of the speculative bubble in housing took down highly leveraged banking systems. Government revenues declined and government expenditures for both bailouts and for automatic stabilizers like unemployment compensation rose. As for the failure of the stimulus package, Blyth reminds us that several Eastern European nations failed to adopt stimulus packages and have seen their economies endure extraordinary hardships. Latvian GDP fell 17% in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Austerity proponents base their case on several related notions. Austerity leaves business with less concern about future tax increases and thus willing to invest more. Government spending will no longer crowd out private investment. By historic standards, however, interest rates are already low. In addition, Baker points out that if business feared future tax increases, they would jump to invest and earn money now while taxes are low. Many major corporations are sitting on large piles of cash. They are reluctant to invest not because of fear of government policy but because demand is absent.

Despite sluggish domestic demand, US based multinational corporations have done well. They continually squeeze more productivity out of a diminished workforce and move operations to foreign markets that continue to expand. Nonetheless, there is a physical limit to what management can get out of workers, and inflation has become an increasing concern in the so- called emerging markets. International capitalism's business model may be fundamentally flawed.

The most likely scenario for the US economy is slow growth and persistently high unemployment. Nonetheless, one cannot rule out a more dire double dip. Such a scenario might be provoked if the major G-20 nations do manage substantial simultaneous reductions in government budgets and or if default by a core EU nation like Spain triggers a run on the Euro, thereby putting pressure on holders of its bonds. The breakup of the European Union, a concern of even such mainstream commentators as Nouriel Roubini and Martin Wolf, would have complex and especially hard to predict legal, political, and economic consequences.

Furthermore, as Blyth points out, the major economic powers have learned all too little from 2008. They continue to treat finance as a realm where risks can be modeled and quantified. Government at most only need to demand that derivatives be traded on open markets and to develop its own risk models to assess any possible future problems.

Financial markets, however, do not perform with the orderliness and predictability of billiard balls on a pool table. It is not surprising that the era of financial deregulation has been accompanied by increasingly frequent and ever more severe financial crises. Once in a hundred year storms in the financial markets are now occurring almost as often as the "historic" draughts and floods that have filled our weather casts for several years now. Failure to recognize and acknowledge both phenomena is as much rooted in confidence in linear, predictive models of social and natural science as in economic interests.

Blyth argues that

financial markets are social phenomena... economic performance is as much determined by market participants' beliefs as it is by fundamental indicators... prices can move on momentum whereby disequilibrating price movements compound one another, further driving market prices away from their true worth. Imagine... a case in which a number of creditors believe that a certain state is likely to become insolvent in the next few months. The state's creditors would demand... higher yield for holding the debt...Eventually the pressure from speculators would cause the state to run out of cash thereby creating the very situation that investors feared.but from which they would also profit through the short selling of bonds.

Government risk models might ironically compound such problems. If public authorities and private forecasters converge on a scenario, traders may embark all the more confidently on that path. This is the stuff of which immense bubbles are made. And major investment banks, often using cheap cash from the government, have once again embarked on risky and complex derivative trading. And when the next bubble bursts, governments asked to bail us out will be in far worse shape than last time.

credit: sadguysontradingfloors.tumblr.com

Blyth points out that complex systems need simple rules. Automobile traffic is a complex, nonlinear system, but one simple rule, that everyone drive on the right, prevents 90 percent of possible accidents. Blyth advocates countercyclical capital charges tied to growth in particular asset classes. He also argues that attempts to crush all volatility are futile. Allowing some banks to fail, wiping out stockholders and management while protecting only small depositors, is therapeutic. It exposes defects in the system and prevents larger turmoil. Allowing small forest fires often reduces the likelihood of major events.

Unfortunately neither of these proposals is likely to receive attention. The very sluggishness of the economy gives banks ammunition to argue that "now is not the time" to make it harder for banks to invest and make loans etc. And bank profits have been recycled to buy political leaders. Mainstream media remain in awe of finance capital as they are also increasingly funded by it. Much of the electorate still scapegoats ethnic minorities. Many also extrapolate from their own debt position to the conclusion that more deficit spending by government to stimulate job growth is dangerous. Krugman points out that investment banks and the wealthy in general hold much of their assets in bonds and benefit from deflation or at least low rates of inflation. This may be a dangerous game on their part. If debtors are squeezed to the point of default, how valuable will these bonds be?

In a more long- term sense, Krugman has pointed out that many of today's economists, whom he labels freshwater economists (based at such Midwestern powerhouses as the University of Chicago) have never even read Keynes. They practice a kind of "epistemological closure."

Economic crisis and intellectual and political stagnation are enfolded with each other. Politics, however, is as nonlinear and momentum driven as markets. New hopes, fears, and coalitions may yet help us extricate ourselves from the conventional wisdom that imperils us.

The Politics of The Event

William E. Connolly 
  Johns Hopkins University

The rebellions in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rapid rise of neoliberal capitalism in Eastern Europe, Tiannamen Square, the birth of gay rights movements in the United States and Europe, the formation of the evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine in the United States, the claim to a right of doctor assisted suicide in a world in which many thought the list of human rights was complete, the (nearly) world wide economic meltdown, the rebellion in Iran, the popular transformations in Tunisia and Egypt, the birth of a civil war in Libya, the eruption of protests in Wisconsin, the earthquake, Tsunami, nuclear crisis in Japan...

Each of these moments embodies the essential characteristics of an event: it happens rather rapidly; it throws regular institutions into turmoil, uncertainty or disarray; its antecedents often seem insufficient to explain the course of its expansion and amplifications; its settlement, when underway, is uncertain; it makes a real difference in the world, for good or ill. 

Each time an event unfolds or erupts hope and anxiety accompany it, in different ways and to different degrees during each event. And many initially outside its compass are rapidly moved to intervene, in attempts to support it, to redirect it, or to squelch it. An event starts out of apparent uncertainty and foments a wider band of uncertainties as it expands and morphs. Events emit contagious and infectious energies. Sometimes democracy or dictatorship hangs in the balance. Or the creation of a new right, faith or identity. Or the denial of one or more of those.

Events startle, provoke and energize; they can also disturb, defeat, alienate and sow resentments. They, therefore, form part of the very essence of politics. A secondary effect is how events often throw Intelligence experts, media representatives, political leaders in other places, and practitioners of the human sciences into intense bouts of self-doubt and self-scrutiny. “How come we did not anticipate this,?” ask the Intelligence agencies. “What were our leaders doing?,” say media talking heads. “And what about those of us in the media?” “How come we did not predict this?”, whisper political scientists to each other, before they catch themselves enough to recall that they only promise to predict hypothetical events under conditions in which the “variables” are strictly specified, not to explain actual events in the messy, ongoing actualities of triggering forces, contagious actions, complex and floating conflicts, obscure purposes, subterranean anxieties, and contending hopes. But why do so many remain committed to these protective maneuvers in the domains of the intelligence, the media, political leadership and the human sciences? Do they demand a world in which they can be in charge so much they are hesitant to sink into the messy reality of things underway?

At The Contemporary Condition we are magnetized by the politics of the event. We strive to dig into it, think with and against it, even sometimes to nudge it in this way or that while it is underway. We are mesmerized by its combination of uncertain origins, messy modes of self-amplification, and fateful possibilities. Sometimes an event fills us with hope, sometimes foreboding, sometimes with despair. But how should we grasp the very idea of an event? What about those of us located within departments of the human sciences, such as political science, economics, sociology, anthropology and geography? Each unexpected event, in fact, creates a flurry of discussion in the human sciences between those who think politics can be comprehended in classic categories of explanation and prediction, those who wish they could believe that but actually doubt it, those who adopt qualitative or interpretive approaches, and those, most recently, who think that attention to the event carries you into territory that is not entirely reducible to any of these dominant perspectives. These conversations go on between us and within us when a fateful event occurs. 

Are regular processes periodically punctuated by protean moments in which a degree of real uncertainty in this or that domain arises, accelerating fluctuations within a domain, or between two domains, until the event could really tip in one of two or more directions of real potentiality? Or is uncertainty “in principle” fully explicable by reference to limitations of available “data,” deficiencies in available techniques, a lack of information, or ethical limitations that disable hard scientists from “disaggregating” complex formations to discern how they have hold together. Like poor old Humpty Dumpty who was intact at one moment but too complicated to put back together after he fell. Do practitioners of predictive explanation promise to predict hypothetical futures when in fact they typically explain past events to defer this task indefinitely? Are you bored by rational choice theorists who continue to “retrodict” the origins of the civil war in America, implicitly feeding off the fact that the actual outcome is known in advance ?

Perhaps we periodically live into futures replete with elements of real turmoil and uncertainty. Even more, perhaps those same strategic moments sometimes secrete a degree of real creativity, for better or worse. Perhaps vague frustrations and volatile energies were in the air the day before Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself in Tunisia. Too intense to be ignored, too vague to be defined. Did that sad event, in turn, help to trigger something that would not have arisen a month earlier or a year later? Even more, were protean energies floating around before the event too vague to enable an “ideal observer” before the fact to predict what combustible processes would be set into motion by the event? Perhaps the rebellion in fact arose through a surprising condensation of vague, intense, collective energies. Maybe it then became contagious beyond anybody’s ability to predict before the event? Perhaps it became consolidated through processes of self-amplification and self-organization that both exceeded the triggering moments and contracted those vague intensities into something that did not preexist the event.

Are there sometimes protean moments in politics in which real creativity comes into play, propelling a new formation, regime, identity. movement, right, or meltdown into being, for good or ill? 

Many practitioners of the human sciences increasingly believe that proponents of classical practitioners of quantitative, predictive inquiry in those sciences simplify the world to make it clean enough for them to use their preset categories and demands. Maybe when they played in the mud as young boys their mothers called them in too soon to wash up. We even suspect that some established regimes of qualitative inquiry, while indispensable, rich and subtle, are too tied to the pursuit of a stable nation, a fixed locality, a stable tradition, or nostalgia for long, slow modes of temporality.

Perhaps it is timely today, then, to draw selective sustenance from work in complexity theory in neuroscience, biology, geology, and critical philosophy, as well as from minority movements in the human sciences themselves. Doing so to reconfigure our own practices and role definitions. Stuart Kauffman, the biologist and complexity theorist, provides a fine place to start. (See Reinventing the Sacred) Maybe it is timely to transfigure our own activities and selves so that we can come to terms in more supple ways with the politics of the event, and so we can pursue thoughtful responses to some uncertain situations as they are unfolding into the mystery of the future. We seek to participate in the human sciences while dropping the hubris of explanatory sufficiency in principle. To pursue such a trail we must supplement modes of efficient and probabilistic causality with an idea of emergent causality that requires us at key moments to follow real modes of creativity as they unfold to produce new outcomes. In between those events–because there are periods of relative regularity in several domains--we seek to show people why so many are driven to these hubristic images of the human sciences and to learn with others how to think and act creatively within the compass of the event while it is underway. (Connolly, A World of Becoming)

We expect the open systems which we study and in which we participate to go through periods of relative stability, only to be punctuated at key moments by surprising accelerations and accentuated instability. Such accelerations can be triggered when one open system is touched or battered by another with which it is imbricated, as when the effects of climate change, itself intensified by capitalism, sends pressures back to capitalism, and it in turn responds. There is an event in the making. Sometimes vague intensities not yet condensed into precise focal points, accumulate below the radar of effectivity and discernibility. Sometimes both things happen together, composing a dissonant connection with pluripotentiality.

When such moments of disequilibrium arrive, notions such as criticality, asymmetrical rhythm, vague intensities, vibration, condensation, resonance between systems, self-organization, amplification, emergent causality, and real creativity become particularly pertinent. Not merely as metaphors, but as operative in real processes during moments of phase transition. Admission of these notions into the human sciences, in turn, must be joined to a willingness to act sometimes into the future during unsettled circumstances. Instead of always waiting until the issue is settled in this or that way so that the established “tools” of hubristic science acquire some plausibility again. Yes, those latter tools do have limited applicability in between events, but lose it during the advent of the event.

Some colleagues in the human sciences scoff at such formulations, particularly after things have settled down in this or that domain. Economists take cover for a year or so after the latest meltdown, only to re-emerge with confidence when things settle down. Political scientists repeat the word “in principle” to each other until it infects their dream lives. Here are a few questions to both types: Do you scoff because of the real achievements of your model of explanation in settled and unsettled times, or to protect professionals from the responsibility to act during this or that moment of phase transition? Do you in fact believe that there are elements of real creativity in the plastic arts, in music, in literature, in philosophy? Have you yourself, indeed, not periodically had a new thought or idea come to you, as if from nowhere, when you were walking or going for a long, slow run? If so, is it not possible that the modes of real creativity in the activities noted above also find degrees of expression in politics, ethics, regime formations, and economic processes? If these latter things seem plausible, is it not likely that any interpretation of culture, agency, political movements, surprising eruptions and the like that attains plausibility will do so because it forges a valuable interface with relevant literary, philosophical, artistic and ethnographic work? For if there is an element of real creativity in politics and ethics, literary and artistic activities both make contributions to that element and need to be folded into the very lifeblood of the human sciences. How could these two domains remain compartmentalized now?

Okay, so what about natural events? The sciences of complexity in some zones of natural science, such as neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and geology, locate whispers of the same processes in natural events. Perhaps, as James, Whitehead, Bergson, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Stuart Kauffman, and Ilya Prigogine each thinks in his own way, there are also moments of criticality in species evolution, climate change, geological processes, ocean current shifts and so on that also contain elements of real uncertainty and real creativity. But that issue must await a future post. (As a preliminary see “The Fragility of Things” and “Hyperobjects")

Impossible demands for "proof" in the Giffords assassination attempt

John Protevi

Louisiana State University

Although it was an utterly predictable response, I was still disappointed at the re-emergence of one aspect of the “lone nut” response to the Giffords assassination attempt: the erection of an impossible standard of proof in linking the alleged shooter to violent rightwing rhetoric and imagery. As if you can’t talk about the relation between violent rhetoric and violent acts without showing some direct causation. 

But what can you expect from blog comment threads, I told myself. Fighting the misguided and the trolls might give you an insight into the median winger blog commenter, or at least those brave enough to take the fight to the sort of leftie-liberal blogs I frequent, but it’s not going to do much more than give you a break between serious reading and writing your own work. 

But then I read this post over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, and I realized that some social scientists, in trotting out that old show pony, the distinction between correlation and causality, might have a really impoverished view of “causality.” 

Here’s the post: 

January 10, 2011 | Charli Carpenter 

John Sides at the Monkey Cage weighs in with some social science on the relationship between militant metaphors in political speech and individuals’ willingness to engage in actual political violence against government officials. The findings he cites: an experimental study has shown there seems to be no effect on the overall population of exposure to “fighting words” in political ads, but there is an effect on people with aggressive tendencies. Moreover: 

This conditional relationship — between seeing violent ads and a predisposition to aggression — appears stronger among those under the age of 40 (vs. those older), men (vs. women), and Democrats (vs. Republicans).  

But his real point is that we should be cautious of inferring from this or any wider probabilistic data causation regarding a specific event: 

To prove that vitriol causes any particular act of violence, we cannot speak about “atmosphere.” We need to be able to demonstrate that vitriolic messages were actually heard and believed by the perpetrators of violence. That is a far harder thing to do. But absent such evidence, we are merely waving our hands at causation and preferring instead to treat the mere existence of vitriol and the mere existence of violence as implying some relationship between the two. 

I left the following response at LGM: 

So that’s it, a binary between “hand waving” and billiard ball causality? Somebody’s got a terribly impoverished view of “causality” here. I’d say it was an example of “physics envy” but contemporary physicists aren’t that crude. 

Let me give an analogy to a well-known biological principle, Schmalhausen’s Law, to show that we can make sense of the interchange of environment and population w/o meeting an impossible billiard ball causality standard. Schmalhausen showed that in species-typical environments, developmental robustness hides a lot of genetic variation. In other words, in normal environments you can get roughly the same results in a population with genetic variance. But put that population under environmental stress and the previously hidden genetic variation shows up in a greater range of phenotypes. This is not “hand-waving” but neither does it adhere to an impossible physics-envy billiard ball causality standard. 

The analogy here of course, is that today’s political rhetoric environment is so extreme that we can plausibly suppose that it will expose the psychological variation in the population that would otherwise remain unexpressed. 

This is not hand-waving, and it shouldn’t be dismissed because it doesn’t match some ridiculous standard of a direct cause-and-effect of one statement to one act.

I went over to New APPS and made a post of it, where I got this interesting response by Scalinger: 

In fairness to Sides, and in keeping with your example: an extreme environment can “expose” variation only if members of the population are actually affected by it (by its extremes, moreover). So it's not out of place to ask whether the assassin ever actually saw or heard violent messages. I don't see any physics envy in that.

My reply: 

Yes, that's fair to ask. The exposure to the rhetoric part is easy, given what we know even now. The shooter was described as "obsessed" with Giffords, he attended one of her rallies in 2007, she won her election by 3500 votes against a candidate whose campaign had all sorts of violent images. It's a vanishingly small probability that he wasn't exposed at some point to these sorts of things. 

Now as to Sides' second requirement, "belief," we're a lot closer to unilinear causality than I'm comfortable with. We have to prove that he had a representation with the content "Giffords must be eliminated" and that we can trace that representation to an event or series of events at time T1…Tn (the exposure to a particular message or set of messages)? So that this representation with that content (plus some other representation) are then the necessary and sufficient conditions for his action? That's not physics envy? 

OK, maybe he has a more sophisticated psychology than that, though it's hard to tell from his post. And it's certainly no good on my part to just chant "nonlinear dynamics" as a mantra so that anything goes in linking environment and shooter. 

But there has to be something along the lines of dispositions and thresholds that's better for thinking this case than the sort of linear belief-desire-action scheme he seems to be proposing (what Susan Hurley memorably mocked as part of the "classical sandwich" view: sensory input -- computation on representatons -- motor output). 

In this nonetheless heartfelt piece, Jon Stewart displays the same exclusive binary to which I object: either we can show a straight line causality or we can't make any sense out of a "complex ecosystem." So it's either a coherent ideological act (message – belief – action) or it's "senseless," it's "lunacy." But there are other forms of causation than straight line efficient causality, for example, the sort of environmental pressure causing increased phenotypic variance that Schmalhausen's Law describes. I hope we can say something analogous about the relation between the Giffords shooting and the extreme political rhetoric and images of Tucson Arizona without it being mere correlational "hand-waving." And actually I think Stewart's "toxic environment" trope is a good place to start.

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To wrap this up, it seems to me that this billiard-ball-causality view has a lot in common with the isolated libertarian subject. Libertarians, I think, have to deny corporate advertising effects on the formation of choices, since that’s their bedrock, the individual and a consistent preference set. So they will deny any cultural influences and the porous subject that goes along with that. So there’s the isolated hard-shell individual (the billiard ball), and the only thing that will influence it, short of literally banging into it with a real billiard ball, is direct gun-to-the-head government coercion. Hence their refrain in pushing the “taxation is theft” line: "men with guns will come to your house and make you pay taxes!" This impoverished view of causality seems to be what’s behind many demands for “proof” in the Giffords case.

The Smell of Democracy?

Kam Shapiro

Illinois State University

We have a sense of what democracy looks like. We might also have a sense of what it sounds like. Now, what does it smell like? Such a question has become less facetious than it once might have been. As readers of this blog know, a proliferation of scientific studies on “embodied cognition” have highlighted the sometimes subtle, sometimes crude ways that various sensations prime us to think and feel in particular ways, evoking memories and generating expectations about persons, objects and situations. Holding a cold beverage makes us less trusting of a stranger, looking at a waterfall or smelling a citrus aroma makes us more generous, what have you. As philosophers attuned to affective dimensions of thought have long argued, political judgments rest not only on ideological commitments, but also on multiple, interactive sensory framings. By implication, any struggle for collective self-determination must be waged not only over what we believe or desire, but how we are made to think and feel, that is, over the techniques of our ideas and sensibilities. What pass for political “ideologies,” of course, have always involved the full range of human senses (think drumming and incense, or mom, apple pie and Chevrolet). Today, likewise, multiple senses are the target of orchestrated campaigns on the part of political and commercial elites. Currently, some of their would-be advisors are cheerfully instrumentalizing the findings of the aforementioned sciences under the banner of “multisensory marketing.” 

On its own terms, multisensory, or ‘MM’ marketing aspires to a multivalent context management of commercial (or political) messages by utilizing not only text and sound, but also texture and scent. The engagement of multiple senses has become imperative, marketers argue, to compete for our attention, thoughts and desires in an increasingly saturated multimedia environment. This does not necessarily entail smell-o-vision or Odorama, though such techniques have their new, digital counterparts. As they understand, the synaesthetic character of thought ensures that words and images evoke imagined tastes, textures and odors. Generally, advertisers use these insights to prompt consumption and overwhelm second thoughts, or as they put it, “competing messages.” Admittedly, their programs can be laughable. One press release marketing the approach (summarized by a “futurist consultant” with a college background in English and Philosophy) enthuses: “Aging baby boomers could be a particularly ripe demographic for multisensory marketing. Not only do many boomers regard small indulgences as part of their routine self-care, but as boomers age they will require stronger sensory inputs.” Everyone, don your noise-cancelling headphones. Really, it may help preserve what’s left of your hearing. 

Multisensory techniques have already found their way into political campaigns. Most recently, the Times reported the use of a scented mailing by a New York Republican gubernatorial candidate that reinforced its negative message (“something really stinks in Albany”) with an odor of rotting garbage. For a case of political aromatics less gross – in both senses of the word - consider the 2007 South Korean presidential election, where the smell of victory took on a literal sense. As Reuters reported, “A team of supporters of presidential frontrunner Lee Myung-bak has been secretly spraying a perfume called "Great Korea" at his rallies. He will send volunteers to voting booths on December 19 to ensure the same scent is drifting through the air… ‘It will remind people of the identity of Lee Myung-bak. The concept of the perfume is hope, victory and passion,’ said Oh Chi-woo of the conservative Grand National Party's culture and arts team.” Far ahead in the polls approaching the election, Lee Myung-Bak won handily. Nobody attributed his victory to the campaign’s devious aromas, the effect of which was not tested in any case. In the New York case, it remains to be seen who will come out smelling clean. Nonetheless, these cases remind us once again that political and commercial elites are working hard to manage the multisensory cues that shape our perceptions and judgments. If citizens are to take responsibility for the latter, they will need to fight for power over the former. 

What does such a fight look, sound or smell like? For some hints, we might turn first to Walter Benjamin. In the early twentieth century, Benjamin witnessed the commercial and political education of the human sensorium by institutions and technologies such as shopping malls, radio and film. The results were not happy (he was a Jewish Marxist writing in Germany between the World Wars, the second of which he did not survive). 

Still, he argued that new technologies of cultural production not only shatter traditional cultural meanings but also have the potential to democratize them. For him, this meant that people might take an active role in deciding what meaning to give to words and images torn from traditional contexts and distributed across the globe. That is, they should become “producers” not only of material goods and services but also of meanings and perspectives. Benjamin therefore paid specific attention to techniques that reduce collective agency of this kind. In particular, he criticized the use of captions in photography and sound in film to control the cognitive and emotional context of reproducible images. In a letter to his friend Adorno, he declared the introduction of sound in film “reactionary.”

That was then. Imagine what he would have made of, say, a screening of Transformers in THX stereo. Remember those noise-cancelling headphones? Not that we should merely adopt a defensive posture. To contend with these olfactory and auditory incursions we cannot simply put our hands over our ears, or hold our noses. Certainly, there should be some regulations. U.S. election laws may even need to be updated to restrict olfactory electioneering. But the aim cannot be to prevent sensory priming altogether, as if one might stop the offending bias by sterilizing the political realm of tone, smell and color. In the absence of sensory cues, we do not become rational but disoriented and bored. 

That said, what is the smell of participatory democracy? Might we prime ourselves to adopt critical and creative perspectives, paradoxical as that may sound? Benjamin thought so. To this end, he promoted experiments with new media (film and radio in particular) to facilitate a reflexive and collaborative response to commercial and political messages. Some recent studies suggest certain kinds of stimuli might be of assistance in this regard. For example, certain colors (blue) may enhance creative insights. Studies with scent seem to have yielded less certain conclusions thus far. In any case, the point is not to replace public debate with aromatherapy but rather to bring insights concerning embodied cognition to bear as we criticize and experiment with the sensory methods already being employed by our would-be handlers. Before you vote, ask yourself where that smell is coming from.

Fragile

Timothy Morton
   U.C. Davis
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art.
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” 

***

  Art (verbal, visual, musical …), I think you will agree, comes from the future. That is, art contains hitherto unspeakable and unthought reserves of utopian energy. That's precisely why we keep studying it. No one reading exhausts the meanings of a story. Sure you read Jane Austen to find out about how men and women related in the past. But you also read her (go on, admit it) because she might be predictive of the future. I'm really rather disappointed with myself for having to repeat this hackneyed common knowledge, but there you go, it's my topic here. 

   Think about all those movies that were strangely predictive of 9/11. It was as if we were dreaming about it before it happened. Now back in the early 1970s the rock band Yes commissioned the painter Roger Dean to paint several of their album covers. One album, Fragile, depicts something like Earthrise: an Earth-like planet seen from space, a blue ball. Whole slices and chunks of this planet are separating from the main body.

   The Fragile cover was the first in a series that depicted a story not told in the lyrics, not until his solo album Olias of Sunhillow narrated it: a whole planet threatened with collapse, the flight to new worlds, galleons of refugees floating through space.

Cut to 2009–2010. Avatar dreamt the same imagery as Roger Dean. 

Then a chunk of Greenland broke off. The chunk, part of the Petermann glacier, is four times the size of Manhattan. Weirdly, it even looks like Manhattan.

NASA MODIS-Aqua satellite image 

Nature copies art, unfortunately 

   Another hyperobject to add to our collection. The momentum of the glacier is such that it can't be stopped (see my previous post on the difference between momentum and velocity). That means that if any oilrigs are in the way … you do the math.
     How strange that utopian prog rock and utopian eco-cinema visualized this moment before it happened. Like I say, poetry comes from the future. In a horrifying twist of Oscar Wilde's coy logic about nature imitating art, human “art” in its broadest sense (the sense that includes fossil fuels), may well have wrought this change in “nature.”
     My point stands even if global warming isn't directly responsible. We have built the frame in which such things loom into view. Our arts beam painful, unspeakable realities down from the future. Hopefully we can inspect and analyze them before they truly materialize. I wonder whether this argument will fly next time a humanist applies for funding …
     Here at the Contemporary Condition, William Connolly has a wonderful new post on fragility. The more we know, the more we realize how fragile we are and how fragile our world is. I've argued elsewhere that fragility is what it means to be an entity in this Universe.

Earth and Moon from MESSENGER

     What a good place to start rethinking ethics and politics. I don't for a second buy into the story, promoted both by deep greens and by the right, that Mother Earth will just brush us off and recover. Faith in an all-powerful deity is precisely a way to ignore hyperobjects. Some people commented on my previous post on hyperobjects, wondering whether God could be considered as one. No. It is precisely when we start to notice hyperobjects that the idea of some transcendental beyond, inhabited by an all-powerful being, starts to melt, and we humans break loose from our island of certainty to float on the ocean of science.
How arrogant of us to think that we had reached the end of history in 1989. And how brittle of us. Little did we want to know how this posturing was actually a symptom of our own fragility. The good news is that we are at the beginning of history, like an exhausted newborn, stunned and breathing heavily outside the womb of concepts such as Nature and Progress.