For our turbulent times Luigi Pellizzoni has written a guide or a rough map for our dynamically changing worlds, social and natural. While we are ‘fluxed’ in this time of what might be called the highpoint of the neoliberal death cult, where death, slow or otherwise (human and nonhuman) is the price of ‘neoliberal biopolitics’, ‘economic growth’, ‘globalisation’ and the stabilisation of capitalism as a regime of truth, nature and life. In Nature, Neoliberalism, and New Materialisms: Riding the Ungovernable, we confront neoliberalism’s dreams of planetary scale geo-engineering down to the micro-level of DNA-qua-resource via biotechnology, and thus neoliberalism has rendered the entire world, all life, as resource as the planet itself is transformed into a giant, integrated factory floor.
Capitalist modernity having overcome, for example with globalisation, time and space, has under neoliberalism now turned its attention to managing the planet and all life. However, Nature, Neoliberalism, and New Materialisms is not an elegy, though it rightly touches upon what has been lost and is being lost, but is a ‘wake up’ call rather than an invitation to a wake. The planetary management of all life under the neoliberalisation of nature, people and places, also opens up emancipatory possibilities. As the creature that nature did not specialise, humanity by virtue, and by its labouring and creative capacities, can view and reinhabit the earth as a whole as ‘home’. After all, even capitalism does not merely ‘dominate’ nature but ‘produces’ it, and this suggests new natures, more sustainable, and just and life-supporting are possible. Pellizzoni’s emancipatory promise rests on recognising the potential and necessity, but also the limits of, a politics founded on a ‘critical ontology of the present’, but one informed by a Foucauldian awareness of the always provisional ‘stabilising’ of any and all ontological efforts. But is also quintessentially within the Critical Theory/Frankfurt school tradition in being open-ended about possible post-capitalist futures based on ‘impure reason’ and emancipatory objective of knowledge production. In this, the book is hopeful rather than optimistic. Unlike either naïve and status quo maintaining techno-optimism or dogmatic Marxism, both of which trade on a guarantee of success, Pellizzoni instead offers hope. A hope for more sustainable and just futures that requires agency (including taking inspiration from non-western indigenous ontologies of distributed agency between humans and nonhumans) in a way optimism does not, but also fully recognises hope’s ‘shadow’. Namely that hope, if it to be genuine, must allow the possibility of failure, otherwise it is not hope.
If ‘In wildness lies the salvation of the world’, Pellizzoni suggests emancipation rests in recognising unpredictability, uncertainty, flux and flows, and remembering the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas ‘That it is better for a blind horse that it is slow’. And that progress can also be found in the acknowledgement of limits, lacks, flaws and vulnerabilities that are constitutive of the human condition, and not merely in transcending or ignoring limits. Pellizzoni eloquently teases out the philosophical and ontological questions we need to consider when reflecting on the ‘human condition’ in our present turbulent, rambunctious and unruly world. We are part of an apart from nature, and not just like animals, we are animals, and therefore both subject to and limited by the biophysical realities that govern all life.
Ethically Pellizzoni, following Steve Vogel to a great extent, rightly in my view rejects calls for a deep ecological connection or submersion of the human and the nonhuman, but, recognising our labouring natures, and also that life predates on life, proposes what might be termed an ‘ethic of use’ to respectfully and sustainably govern human-nature relations and entanglements. That is, what is needed is respect towards nature, not reverence. And this is respect in another direction. It respects that just as humanity can be viewed as ‘nature rendered self-conscious’ (and also the only species, as far we know that blushes, or needs to), history is humanity intersecting into infinity and temporary and contingently stabilising it. Pellizzoni directs our attention to what might be called our ‘storied residence’ on this planet, and stresses the foundational importance of acknowledging that we cannot know ‘nature’ or ‘human’ in themselves (Hegel’s ‘Ding an sich’/the thing in itself), but only as they reveal themselves to us or we interpret them, given the types of limited creatures we are.
Uncertainty, indeterminacy, unpredictability, are all ineliminable features of the world, and Pellizzoni highlights the limits of modernist epistemological-ontological control strategies, such as anti-fragility, risk management and the entrepreneurial-neoliberal celebration of the creative possibilities of action in the face of uncertainty. Such ‘brave’ and ‘bold’ narratives remind one of the character, Littlefinger in the Games of Thrones series who notes: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again — the fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm, or the gods, or love ... illusions. Only the ladder is real, the climb is all there is”. And yet Pellizzoni’s book both illustrates the philosophical as well as practical flaws in such acts of foolhardiness, and in some ways points backwards to how the ancients responded to these ineliminable realities, in their focus on cultivating virtues, dispositions of character, alongside prefigurative experiments in new ways of thinking and living, that could inform what the best course of action or inaction might be in the face of unknowability.
Continuing this theme, one might say that Pellizzoni’s book critically skewers naïve and dangerous (and completely empirically unproven) ‘techno-fixes’ for the planetary crisis. His book both carefully analyses the ‘Achilles lance’ myth that structures such thinking, namely that like the Greek hero’s lance than could heal the wound it inflicts, neoliberal techno-economic growth that is causing the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction of life, can somehow also be the solution. As if any accommodation between human and nonhuman must be mediated through capital accumulation, as if capital and life were indistinguishable. It is at this point, such confident, ‘pragmatic’ and performativily ‘scientifically robust’ strategies pass over into dangerous, if attractive, mythic thinking and ‘fairy tales of growth’ as Greta Thunberg has bravely noted, here remembering Foucault’s observation that such growth is neoliberalism’s ‘one true social policy’ . Acting somewhat like the child in the Andersen fable, Pellizzoni has declared the Emperor and Empire of neoliberalism has no clothes. And for that we should all be grateful.
John Barry, Queens University Belfast
