Ends, means, beginnings: environmental technocracy, ecological deliberation or embodied disagreement

Technocratic attitudes suggest that decisions about environmental policy should be led by scientific experts. Such decisions, it is expected, will be more rational than any arrived at by a democratic mediation between the narrow, short-term interests and uninformed preferences of the general public. Within green political theory, deliberative democracy has emerged as the dominant repost to technocracy, offering an account of how democratic polities can deal with complex scientific and technological decisions through the emergence of communicative rationality. This article argues that neither appeals to expert knowledge, nor communicative rationality, are likely to deliver the optimal green outcomes that proponents suggest, but rather will cover up the inevitable disagreements over environmental policy making. Instead the article suggests that more ecologically-sensitive and democratic decision making about complex scientific and technological issues can emerge if we acknowledge the differently embodied perspectives of decision-makers – from scientists to citizens. This prioritises democratic means over green ends, yet incorporates the environment at the beginning of the decision-making process. The article aims to sketch out the theoretical and practical implications of such an embodied turn for responding to the anti-democratic tendencies of environmental technocracy.

Walter Benjamin and the Inhumanities: Towards a Pedagogical Anti-Nietzscheanism

The following discussion is intended as a critical intervention into recent debates about the “crisis of the humanities,” reading the symptomaticity of crisis in the medical sense of a turning point. It does so from the perspective of the work of Walter Benjamin, whose own transdisciplinary practice of thought has been characterized as a “philosophy directed against philosophy” and a “philosophizing beyond philosophy,” and stands as a model for the kind of intellectual and para-academic activity evoked here. Historically re-situating Benjamin’s famous allegory of the Angel of History from the twentieth-century context of the “crisis of culture” to the contemporary “crisis of education,” it attempts to reconstruct a dialectical understanding of pedagogization within Benjamin’s work, which is used to sketch out the contours of a critically reimagined pedagogy of the Inhumanities.

Withdrawing from Atmosphere: An Ontology of Air partitioning and Affective Engineering

The main objective of this text is to warn against atmospherics. However comfortable it might appear, an atmosphere is politically suspicious because it numbs a body into an affective embrace of stability and permanence. It becomes doubly suspicious because a body desires to be part of the atmosphere. For this reason, I rethink both affect and atmosphere ontologically rather than phenomenologically. I argue that an atmosphere is engineered by subsuming individual affects to what I call, following Sloterdijk, an atmospheric glasshouse. I suggest that this happens in four steps: a distinction between inside and outside through partitioning; inclusion of the outside inside; illusion of synthesis; and dissimulation. In order to do this, I begin with air as the elemental paradox of ontological continuum and rupture. I carry on with the passage from air to atmosphere while retaining the discourse around continuum and rupture. Finally, I indicate a way of rupturing the atmospheric continuum through the ontological movement of withdrawal from the atmosphere. The ultimate goal of the article is to sketch a problematic of atmospherics that puts together without synthesising an elemental ontology of continuum and rupture.

Withdrawing from atmosphere: An ontology of air partitioning and affective engineering

The main objective of this text is to warn against atmospherics. However comfortable it might appear, an atmosphere is politically suspicious because it numbs a body into an affective embrace of stability and permanence. It becomes doubly suspicious because a body desires to be part of the atmosphere. For this reason, I rethink both affect and atmosphere ontologically rather than phenomenologically. I argue that an atmosphere is engineered by subsuming individual affects to what I call, following Sloterdijk, an atmospheric glasshouse. I suggest that this happens in four steps: a distinction between inside and outside through partitioning; inclusion of the outside inside; illusion of synthesis; and dissimulation. In order to do this, I begin with air as the elemental paradox of ontological continuum and rupture. I carry on with the passage from air to atmosphere while retaining the discourse around continuum and rupture. Finally, I indicate a way of rupturing the atmospheric continuum through the ontological movement of withdrawal from the atmosphere. The ultimate goal of the article is to sketch a problematic of atmospherics that puts together without synthesising an elemental ontology of continuum and rupture.