As I said in my last post, I find Badiou’s political philosophy to be among the most satisfying (Ranciere’s would be another). It recognizes the rarity of politics or that not everything is political, refuses the mastery of philosophy, proceeds from an egalitarian maxim, and bases its politics on an affirmation rather than critique. The question that must be posed, however, is what happens to our conception of the political when ecology becomes a site of the political. With ecology, however, we get a fundamental mutation in our understanding of the political. Since the beginning, politics– at least as conceived by the tradition of Western philosophy –has been an affair of humans. To be “cosmopolitical” was simply to be someone that recognized all different human cultures. We see this at work in Badiou’s thought as well:
…political sequences are singularities: they do not trace a destiny, nor do they construct a monumental history. Philosophy, however, can distinguish a common feature among them. This feature is that from the people they engage these orientations require nothing but their strict generic humanity. In their principle of action, these orientations take no account of the particularity of interests. They induce a representation of the capacity of the collective which refers its agents to the strictest equality. (Infinite Thought, 70)
He continues,
What does ‘equality’ signify here? Equality means that a political actor is represented under the sole sign of his or her specifically human capacity. Interest is not a specifically human capacity. All living beings protect their interests as imperative for survival. The capacity which is specifically human is that of thought, and thought is nothing other than that by which the path of truth seizes and traverses the human animal. (71)
The political here is carefully restricted to humans, a point that can be clearly seen everywhere in Badiou’s work. This is a point that Badiou himself recognizes. As he recently remarked,
In ecology we can find a new form of the question of change. Maybe it is the idea that we must create something like a modern tradition. You must understand the point clearly: the modern tradition is a tradition by the fact that we preserve the repetition of nature in some sense. […] This is why ecology is not directly inside the classical revolutionary vision. Ecology is something different because it is a traditional revolution. It is a revolution of the tradition itself. Ecology aims to create a new tradition. It does not aim to create a new form of pure progress or of pure becoming. You know it is a very complex and interesting question, this relationship between the sort of will for a new tradition and the revolutionary tradition. So we can say that ecology is the attempt to create a revolution of the revolutionary tradition, it is the attempt to invent a new tradition. (Courtesy of Duane Rousselle, Badiou, Chapter 1– The Subject of Change).
What we see here is a faltering of Badiou’s categories or conception of the political. With ecology as a site of the political, the egalitarian declaration no longer quite works. We can, presumably, retain the categories of “subject”, “event”, and “truth-procedure” as political operators and dimensions, but the axiom of equality becomes more difficult. Please note, that the issue here is not one of criticizing Badiou, but of trying to determine how politics is to be thought today. What does ecology call for us to think in the domain of politics and philosophy? This truly is a revolutionary transformation that is entirely new from the standpoint of the history of political thought and that will require us to rethink all political categories.
If ecology proves so difficult to think politically, then this is because it requires us to take account of ozone holes, coral reefs, garbage heaps, and all the rest. We can no longer restrict ourselves to questions of just arrangements between humans. The question of just social relations remains, but now we’ve opened on to an entirely different universe of actants that must be thought as well. Such is the question of the shift from politics to, for lack of a better word, genuine “cosmopolitics”. Cosmopolitics would not be a multiculturalism, but would be a “multi-speciesism”. This is what ecology enjoins us to ask.
I do not intend to answer these questions here, but only to pose them. From Badiou I want to retain the rarity of politics, the theory of events, the notion of a subject as that being that is convoked by an event (or in Guattari’s and Sartre’s terminology, a collective), and his understanding of truth-procedures. From his politics I want to retain the egalitarian axiom. But as soon as politics shifts to cosmopolitics, the egalitarian axiom encounters limits and we require a new set of axioms for relating to the nonhuman. The question lies in determining just what those axioms might be. We might wish to retain the axiom of equality and say that all organisms should be treated equally, but as Cary Wolfe pointed out to me last week, this 1) lands us back into the worst biopolitics of eugenics, and 2) creates an entire mess once we begin raising questions of inter-species relations between nonhuman species. If, for example, a virus is bringing about the extinction of a particular type of organism, equality would seem to demand that we promote both the virus and the organism nearing extinction. How do we decide?
This is what I know: politics must become cosmpolitical, which is to say, ecological. I also know that politics must be radically egalitarian and anarchic, eschewing hierarchy, the avant-gard, exclusion, and parties. This is what I don’t know: How to pose the question of what it means for politics to become ecological or cosmopolitical, what a truth-procedure looks like for a cosmopolitics, and what sorts of axioms it might rest upon. Hopefully this is a little step along the way and others will have some interesting insights– that don’t involve talking about Stengers and Latour, as these are questions of real politics, not scholarly footnotes –to contribute to thinking these things.
Larval Subjects . 
December 22, 2012 at 3:59 am
Hi Levi — that’s the million dollar question! It might be worth revisiting totemism — not in the spiritual sense of the term but as a political-ecological structure the truth procedures of which may not be exhausted. The efficacy of totemism has been described as preventive of overharvesting, but I think it was probably much more generative than that, especially when combined with exogamy. If different human groups, let’s call them armchair environmentalists, each agreed not to harm one species (plant or animal), and they all chose a species from their own locale that was not already chosen by another group, the assembled behavior would trigger results that were neither entropic nor predictable. These groups would also be doing this on purpose, so their differences would be part of the game so to speak: the animal-centrisms adopted by the humans would become a submodel of the larger ecology, without for all that having a master signifier. There are some obvious weaknesses to this idea, but on the face of it, it seems to satisfy the conditions of being both political and ecological.
December 22, 2012 at 8:10 am
I’ve thought a little bit about this problem of equality amongst all beings and the sorts of logical absurdities it leads to when applied to all species and entities that exist. The best compromise I have encountered is that one must also understand all entities as existing within a larger system. This system cannot be fully understood or conceived which is why humans cannot successfully manage it but instead must respect it and to respect it is to allow entities to unfold in their being. That is, one must let the dog flourish in his dogness and deer in their deerness and wolf in her wolfness by not towards the subjugation of all reality. The specialness of the human is our ability to affect things in a globally significant way that makes our own natural tendency (that all animals have) towards reproduction and growth more dangerous than other animals as we no longer have any predators to keep us in check. The deer, the wolf, and the plants all have an important relationship in that the deer in eating plants stimulate their growth and provide nourishment in their waste but too many deer means the plants are consumed to the nub and so the population of the deer is controlled by the wolf and so on and so forth. The interests of any one entity is checked by other entities to prevent the total subjugation of things to the tendencies of one entity except for the human. The leap in this era of climate change is how can the human check themselves, contrary to biology and evolution. Anyway, my point is that total formal equality amongst all entities leads to the privileging of the individual entity over the species and this produces problems such as the vegetarian wolf or the starving deer. The solution is to think in interlocking collectives that balance one another. The question for me is, once you start thinking only in collectives, is the collective then just subjugating the individual actant such that your being is meaningless except as a function of a collective and would this then lead once more to a politics of hierarchy and totalization. In other words, is terrorism the logical conclusion once the individual submits to a collective as primary?
December 23, 2012 at 7:25 am
I have an additional question to pose along these lines, and hope you can forgive the somewhat expository nature of this comment. It’s intended more as a parallel exploration of the issues you raise than as anything else, and highlights what I think is most salient when it comes to the intersection of politics, political philosophy, and ecology.
Has politics always been the affair of humans? I think that we could take Ranciere’s Disagreement as an invitation to think otherwise. Political philosophy, with Plato and especially Aristotle, began in the West by positing the human as the political animal because it possessed logos, which could be distinguished from (apolitical) noise. I find it difficult to forget that this was political philosophy for slave-owners, and a conceptual distinction which was used to justify the subordination of slaves, women, and the poor. I think we should follow Ranciere in seeing politics as always that which undoes this (political philosophy).
As best I understand it, politics is the moment when some reversal of power relations within a given police order becomes possible through a demonstration of equality. It is democratic because it rests on the power of “anyone at all.” Whatever arkhe supports the current configuration of power relations is made contingent. I think it could be said that politics “realizes” this contingency in the sense of making it real. When he talks about axioms, I think Ranciere means them in the critical sense as “conditions of possibility” rather than as deductive principles.
Perhaps an egalitarian ecology begins to emerge when the non-human’s “noise” is realized as speech (or, begins to count – maybe we need to trouble the idea of speech as “that which counts”). If changed atmospheric conditions from global warming end up wiping out humanity, this is certainly a reversal of power relations, and a demonstration that our supposed mastery over nature was really contingent after all. Logos could end up being an evolutionary dead-end. On the other hand, if humans place themselves beside and within nature and non-human “noise,” this reversal may not take such a violent form.
December 24, 2012 at 3:32 pm
“Hopefully this is a little step along the way and others will have some interesting insights– that don’t involve talking about Stengers and Latour, as these are questions of real politics, not scholarly footnotes –to contribute to thinking these things.” … you what? This makes me want to scream Stengers all the more. :P
Anyhow, cosmopolitics is not multispeciesism it is multi-entity-ism. It is always an unfinished project. If there is an axiom – it is that of the being open to the strange stranger, of hearing the thing (the subaltern?) ‘speak’, of meeting the universe half-way. The only equality of hetereogeneous entities in the cosmos is at an ontological level and in this sense, we are perpetually at the risk of committing ontological injustice to other beings – for example by denying them their reality. If we limit ourselves to the human sphere like Badiou and Ranciere we have an easy task because we can use the notion that humans are our special objects of focus to counterpose the a priori definition of all humans as equal with their unequal treatment in society, such that when there is a rupture in the social order, and the ‘truth’ of equality is demonstrated, we can say: “that was an event! that was politics”.
Cosmopolitics, on the other hand, if we are to extend it to all living things, now means something different. Climate change is a case in point. The climate is speaking. It is letting us know that we are not its masters. This is cosmopolitics at work. Climate is not even entirely distinct from we humans. On the one hand we are certainly co-producers of it – but we are most certainly not masters of it… or Nature (which no longer exists)… as we once thought we were. Neither can it be reduced to us.
A cosmopolitical truth procedure would be the kind that is capable of dealing with this situation. Of dealing with a reality (half of our own making) that is in a position to dominate us if we fail to reorient ourselves with respect to us. The point here, is that it HAS spoken. WE (humans) are the ones who are about to be destroyed by this thing that is in a very significant way our own creation. Cosmopolitics is, through climate change, brought into stark relief. It is now about striking a particular kind of bargain with the cosmos, which means factoring in all entities, merely in order to sustain our own existence.
While it may be useful to recognise, defend and celebrate the equality of all entities on one level, it is equally important to recognise, defend and celebrate their differences and uniqueness on another. In this regard a cosmopolitical truth process is as much a matter of our (human) responsibility for recognising our own place in the cosmos as it is one of worrying about all the myriad entities that we encounter along the way.
Even for Badiou, political events are occasional, fleeting and impermanent irruptions of equality involving only particular groups of humans – not the whole of humanity. Similarly, there is no ‘attainment’ of cosmopolitical harmony, only the periodic irruption of an event that asserts the relative equality of a very particular configuration of heterogeneous entities, and not the entire cosmos. Even for humans then, a truth procedure, the occurrence of politics, is geographically and temporally bounded, even if it constitutes a great achievement that will be remembered and may inspire other future events of similar kind.
The cosmopolitical event takes place when there is a two way ‘dialogue’ between heterogeneous entities that produces a mutual transformation of both (this is the cosmopolitical event) and that is, thereby, productive of a new ordering of relations that – however precariously or fleetingly – ends an injustice.
Is the eradication of smallpox or HIV an injustice? Perhaps! Is it a worthy goal? I certainly think so! After all, we can barely think HIV outside of a matrix of structures of oppression and exploitation, historical and contemporary. But we will never successfully address HIV unless we are able to learn its language, unless countless people are able to live with it (rather than simply die from it), extract it from the stigma that impeded medical advances for so many years… The famous struggles related to HIV through the 90s, for example, were certainly cosmopolitical in nature, while also being political. Indeed, the human and the non-human could barely be disassociated though dominant forces attempted to sub-humanise sufferers – throwing not only the humans but also the virus they hosted into the dark and perpetrating a double injustice: a refusal to recognise the strange stranger; to hold open a safe space for that human-virus assemblage to be heard, to be known and, thereby, to allow this suffering hybrid to become part of a cosmopolitical truth procedure. Maybe I am waffling but this is what came out.
December 24, 2012 at 8:53 pm
Great comment, Andre. All I meant by my comment about Stengers and Latour was let’s avoid reterritorializing a discussion of a problem and a question on to a discussion of figures. They’ve certainly made important contributions here, but I think there’s quite a bit more to be worked out.
December 28, 2012 at 8:17 am
Reblogged this on perplexed.