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THE PERMANENT CATASTROPHE

STATEMENTS ON GLOBALIZATION Lieven de Cauter

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things go on like this, is the catastrophe. Walter Benjamin

0. The catastrophe is in. We feast on the catastrophe as a spectacle. Our culture is "catastrophile." Just as violence in films grows in proportion to violence in society, the catastrophilia of our imaginations grows in proportion to the real (probability of) catastrophes. There are probably few people who explicitly devote their attention to the world's problems, yet catastrophy pervades our society. In the areas of film and media, catastropy is particularly prominent. One could even speak of a sort of catastrophilia: as if humankind was wanting to learn how to deal with the catastrophic by consuming it in the form of a spectacle. We have of course the disaster and action movies, which show more and more catastrophes. We have the science-fiction film of the '90s, which was extremely dystopian. We have the films of Michael Hanecke, all of which have something catastrophal about them, the films by Cronenberg, which deal with catastrophilia in our relationship to technological media, etc.. Looking at the boom of Reality TV (De Mol, Big Brother, Expedition Robinson), we could almost already speak of the genesis of catastrophic, perhaps even psychotic, games. The catastrophe fascinates us as a spectacle. We learn to live with it through the imaginary nature of film and media. At the same time, it seems to help us in our 'ostrich politics' with regard to the current catastrophes. 1. It is extremely probable that the 21st century will be a century of catastrophes. It may well at some time go down in history as "The Century of Disaster." One might object that all of history is a stringing together of catastrophes, but: what is new is the "global," world-wide character of the catastrophe. The continuous demographic explosion, the rapid rate of technologization, global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the poles, the rising ocean level, the exploitation of non-renewable resources, the accelerated decrease in biodiversity, humanitarian disasters such as the paucity of drinking water in many places (made worse by the privatization of water resources), the dualization of society under the pressure of neo-liberal globalization and migration, the growth of
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the Fourth World, the inconceivable poverty in many southern countries (above all, Africa), the spread of Aids, the uncontrollable growth of megacities in the poorest regions of the world, the emergence of the criminal economy and the rise in organized crime, the disintegration of the welfare state, fundamentalism and xenophobia, terrorism, insidious wars - all of these phenomena, and the feedback between them, can only be termed a catastrophic scenario. The motor, or at least the catalyst, of an unforeseeable series of political, social, humanitarian and ecological problems is the demographic explosion. Everyone knows about it, or could know about it, but it never or seldom appears on the agenda. By the year 2050, according to official prognoses, 9.1 billion people will be living on the earth. And it is assumed that the number of people will grow to 10, maybe even 11 billion before the population begins to decrease. This could mean that almost double as many people will have to live, work, eat and consume. All these problem parameters pollution, poverty, insufficient supplies of food and water, migration, dualization, exclusion, social and ethnic religious conflicts will continue to increase. 2. The concept of progress, which arose in the late 18th century and was once the hope of humankind, is now becoming a natural process of the second order, a potentially disastrous development that forges ahead, seemingly unstoppable. In Kant's three critiques, he is known to have wanted to answer three questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? When examined more closely, the latter question is not, or barely, answered in Critique of Judgement. In some of his later, short texts, namely "The Conflict of the Faculties" "Towards Perpetual Peace," and, above all "Idea for A Universal History from A Cosmopolitan Point of View," Kant made his views clear, after having worked patiently all his life on his trilogy as a "model hobbyist." His outlines of a philosophy of history form the vanishing point of his three critiques. The task Kant undertook in his text "Idea for A Universal History from A Cosmopolitan Point of View," was both ambitious and modest: he wanted to find a first connecting thread in the infantile, vain and destructive spectacle of history, hoping that a sort of Kepler would then arise to reveal the cosmic path of history, or a Newton to establish its laws. Kant was concerned with the idea of a humanity on the path towards a just social organization. "Only the approximation of this idea is imposed on us through nature." Kant finally gave a real answer to his third question in a footnote, by making a comparison with extraterrestrial beings: "We do not know about inhabitants of other planets or their nature; if, however, we carry out well this task given us by nature, we can flatter ourselves that we would be able to claim a not inconsiderable status among our neighbours in the universe. It may be, in their case, that each individual can completely fulfill his destiny in his lifetime. With us, it is different; only the species can hope for this." Now we know. What can I hope for? Well, that humankind will one day be perfect. A colossal and very modern hypothesis: we as a species are on the way to perfection. Turgot, Condorcet and Adam Smith had the same idea. Hegel, Marx and
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Darwin did work with the concept, each in their own way. Bourgeois culture, the liberals, the positivists and technocrats, but also the communists and socialists, all professed a belief in progress. It is the most widely held ideologem of western civilization, because it is, in principle, unanimously shared by all modern ideologies. And then, later, in retrospect, the realization came that the promises had not been kept: people spoke of the terrible twentieth century. This doubt was one of the triggers of the post-modernism debate, of the idea of the end of (linear, universal) history. The dissimultaneity of the simultaneous, the multitude of cultures and histories, make the idea of a universal history of humankind a ludicrous, and above all, dangerous (imperialist, hegemonic, sexist, Eurocentric, etc.) fiction. History is not determined by necessity, and least of all by reason, but instead by chance and contingency. History falls into thousands of histories, and rationality into local rationalities. The end of the great histories. The word "progress" was deleted from philosophy, but also from the official, political discourse. From now on people spoke of "development." 3. The catastrophe is not a side effect of progress but at the heart of the logic of development, as the logic of rapid technologization, the accumulation of capital and economic growth: technologization has become uncontrollable, the accumulation of capital leads to an inevitable dualization of the world, and economic growth denies the finite nature of the earth. In 1972, the Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth appeared. Using computer models (known as the "world model"), it examined the exponential growth and interrelationship of five parameters: demography, food production, industrialization, environmental pollution and the drain on exhaustible resources. The report predicted a collapse of the global system before 2100 if immediate changes were not made. The report's conclusions were unambiguous: "1.If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity." Against this world-wide scenario of catastrophe, it sets political voluntarism. "2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential." Three decades later, the hope of establishing a "state of global equilibrium" seems naive, or at any rate a chance that has been missed: a station we have gone past, so to speak. We are, rather, passengers on a runaway train . The third conclusion, too, now only makes us shrug our shoulders. "3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success." The report may have been too pessimistic in some of its predictions and calculations, but it was certainly too optimistic in expressing the belief that such a drastic change could be achieved within a generation. (In the Club of Rome's commentaries at the end of the report, it
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is remarked that this radical change of course can not be left up to the coming generation). Now we are two generations further on, and humanity is still not thinking of the generations to come. Technologization and economic growth are not fitted with an alarm system, however. We are still following the exponential growth curves. The Club of Rome's report was perhaps the first time that human beings were called upon to recognize, from a scientific point of view, that the earth is possibly endangered by the presence of the human species. It was the discovery of the world's finiteness, not in a theological, but in an ecological sense: a sort of sad materialization of the twentieth century's metaphysics of finiteness. 4. Globalization is an unguided process. The problem of globalization is the globalization of the problems, and there is no authority that can or wants to lend a guiding hand. 'Ostrich politics' occur on all levels: from the planetary to the smallest level, daily life, the routine of the average consumer, who is the smallest cog, but also turns around as part of the mechanism. " The biggest problem of globalization is and here, even otherwise divided theoreticians agree (such as Petrella, Zizek and Castells) that there is not one single (global) authority able to counter in a decisive and guiding capacity the developments that have gone out of control. For the time being, the only thing the global population and environmental conferences can do against the exponential growth is to grow exponentially themselves. The fact that power has been transferred from politics to industry, from government to multinational companies, means that the principle of competition is a ruling factor everywhere: tight schedules, short term profitability, flexibility are the magic words. But the shortterm view is the one we cannot afford to take, less than ever before. An ecocosmological view is necessary: long-lasting developments can only come from politics, namely as a result of a decision in favour of sustainability. But citizens are also part of the process of economicization. There are few people who really concern themselves with the distastrous developments and problems in the world, because it is almost impossible to do so on an everyday basis. This is not only because of the problems' complexity, but also because the feeling of powerlessness; not only because of the tacit complicity of the 'simple consumers' that we all are, but also because of our tiresome everyday routine. Zizek speaks of the powerlessness of the subject in the face of all the processes in which it is involved, a sort of irresponsibility towards the consequences of its actions (and non-actions) that is inherent in the risk society and that makes society even more of one. Sloterdijk calls this a cynical division between our moral and practical ego, which also turns around in the status quo. We just go on, without considering the disasters that surround us. For culturati it is even not done to get involved at all. We are all caught in the paradoxes of the whole. We are environmentalists with two cars, or globalization opponents who speculate on the stock market. Our mobile phones contain tantalum, an ore that is a driving force behind the war in Congo. Ancient reserves of ground water are used up to produce our computer chips. And so on. Business as usual is
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not only a slogan for our politicians, but also our rule for everyday life. 5. Caught within the rapid technologization, people are becoming anachronisms. The slowness of experience takes place at the edge or even on the outside of a world that is changing faster and faster. People are living longer, but their experiences become obsolete, for the pressure is growing to be flexible, adapt and learn for an entire lifetime. The sluggish body is gradually becoming a cyborg. The fact that people are becoming anachronistic can perhaps be seen most clearly in the way our ethics helplessly lag behind the technological developments. After post-modernity comes hypermodernity, trans- or metamodernity. Our era is not the era of realized utopia, but the era of realized science fiction. Like a storm, progress drives us (to use Benjamin's image) irrevocably into the future, and (hyper)modernity is, in a way, growing even stormier, because people are living increasingly in a world that is changing ever faster . Acceleration is a characteristic of modernity. Now, however, it has reached a point at which people are seemingly becoming anachronisms. This can not only be seen in the decline of wisdom and experience (one can only be experienced in a world or discipline that remains more or less the same), or in the nostalgia and melancholy that overcome people who are growing older, when they realize that this world is no longer theirs. This becoming anachronistic of people functions according to Gnther Anders' The Outdatedness of Human Beings - on a much more concrete, physical level: we are all becoming cyborgs. In an era of genetic engineering and information technology, and of their now already inevitable synthesis, we are on the way towards a 'bionic' physicality. Human ethics cannot keep up with these developments of techno-capitalism. Liberating genetic engineering, trading in human organs, and other such activities from the hands of the global networks of organized crime is perhaps still the best we can do (even if it does not seem at present that we will succeed in achieving even this minimum minimorum). We have to accept the fact, so we are told, that the fight against criminal exploitation of the new technologies means at the same time an acceptance of legal private institutions (pharmaceutical companies and the whole medical industry, the agroindustry, etc.) Perhaps humanity will one day realize that there are a few things that cannot be privatized with impunity (such as local public transport, primary resources, water and research). This is, however, rather unlikely in view of the global dogma of privatization, which seems to be proof against any empirical counterarguments (such as the bankruptcy of the British and Netherlands railways or of whole countries, like Argentina). The anachronism of the human being is perhaps seen most of all in humankind's inability to impose ethic norms on techno-capitalism, which goes on its way unhindered. 6. Technology is becoming a goal in itself. Its goal is its own development. "Technopantheism," the belief in technology as being the realisation of God, is the extreme of a strong tendency within technology: technology as eschaton. But we are all technopantheists in a sense, at the mercy of technology's great embrace.
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As we know, Hegel gave the belief in progress its most cosmic form. The proclamation of reason as a pantheistic authority that rules in and over history, and the proclamation of history as the parade of reason towards its own genesis as Absolute Spirit was one of the most masterly philosophical gestures of the modern age. For Hegel, history is the genesis of reason, of the world spirit in and through itself. History is made up of the stages in the genesis of the Absolute Spirit: in other words, history is the genesis of God. History, for Hegel, is really no more than the unfolding of the Holy Trinity. He called his lectures on the philosophy of history 'a sort of theodicy.' Hegel's 'historical pantheism' appeared again at the start of the 21st century in a new form. Today, the brave new world of the information era is in the grip of a new technological euphoria, a belief in the genesis of the world spirit in and through the machine: the (absolute) spirit in the machine. We call this: technopantheism. Beyond the crises and doubts of post-modernity, technopantheism is the final, perfect stage of the belief in progress and of the theology of history as the becoming of God. Technopantheism is one of the most fascinating and at the same time sinister phenomena of the turn of the millennium (wonderfully depicted in the three-part documentary film Technolyps by Frank Theys). In this connection, Robert Anton Wilson's hypothesis (based on the calculations of the mathematician Alfred Korzybski) is typical. Like the Club of Rome's report, this concept has its roots in the hypnotic power of exponential growth, which is determined by the acceleration in doubling time: if the entire knowledge of humanity in the year zero is called (not without humour) '1 Jesus', then Wilson claims knowledge had doubled by approximately 1400. This makes altogether 2 Jesus. By 1750, the knowledge possessed by humanity had doubled once more, making 4 Jesus; by around 1900 it was 8 Jesus, 16 by 1950, 32 by 1960, 64 by 1967, and in 1973 we already had 128 Jesus. After the last calculations, knowledge is meant to double every two years. So, in the foreseeable future, the moment will come where knowledge is doubling every two seconds. Wilson calls this the 'jumping Jesus phenomenon.' Because this beggars any powers of the imagination, one speaks of 'a singularity' (because it goes beyond all models of calculation and thought). According to Terence McKenna, it is what religions called the Eschaton (the end of history, the youngest day, the last judgement)... One does not have to take this all literally to realize that techno-science is increasingly becoming the goal of history itself. Technology is on its way to becoming itself 'a species' with its own Darwinian logic: its own continuance. Humankind was the instrument used to create an eternal, information-processing instance. The perpetually accumulating and reflecting 'consciousness' is to be realized in machines. In 'our mindchildren,' as Marvin Minsky calls the intelligent machines (this is to say that there is no distinction any more between humans and machines, nature and technology, physis and techne), humanity finds its descendants, its continuation, its state of perfection. What perfection? The future belongs to the 'transhumans.' Some people believe in the downloading of human consciousness and the eternal existence of individuals. For the time being, candidates have to be frozen, but before long, as soon as technology allows, they
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will be able to be 'downloaded.' And then comes: eternal life (as a part of the Great Network or as an individual cyborg or as a computer; here there are various opinions.). Others (Vernor Vinge, Marvin Minsky, etc.) predict the advent of machines that are not only much cleverer than humans. They also predict that future computer generations will teach themselves, and, moreover, learn to reproduce. In other words: machines are beginning to become a species equal to humans and, because of their greater, albeit artificial, intelligence, perhaps even a species superior to humans. One can write this all off as mystical, sectarian drivel put about by mad scientists, as science fiction, so to speak. However, we are all budding technopantheists. Technopantheism does not have to be proclaimed in its most extreme form to be reality. We are at the mercy of technology on a daily basis. As consumers, we are hot on the heels of the developments: we are the rank and file of technology. We cannot do anything else: for example, no one can escape from internet any more, and it is much the same with mobile phones. Above all, it is the hypnotic power held by the combination of consumption and technology that gives capitalism its transcendental quality. We are all de facto technopantheists, because we all unconditionally, and above all, unavoidably, say yes to technology. There is, by the way, really no alternative: today's world is technological. A society without technology is not a solution. It is not possible to reject science and technology. It is not possible, and perhaps not even desirable. That is the dilemma: we cannot reject technology, but we are mad if we embrace it. (It embraces us. We are at the mercy of its iron embrace.) Lyotard has written a 'post-modern' fable that has since become famous. He tells of an authority that aims at surviving both the death of the sun (in ca. 4.5 billion years) and the death of humanity. And even though Lyotard speaks of an instance, he probably means technology. What he actually says is that the carrier or subject (which is no longer a subject) of history, which is no longer history, but only a process of increasing complexity, of negative entropy (while everything in the universe tends towards chaos, there is an instance, an energy, that produces an ever more complex order), is no longer humanity, but technology. Is it humanity that is already preparing to emigrate to other galaxies, or is it technology itself? The fable leaves this question open. Lyotard's fable is a sort of cybernetic continuation of Hegel's Absolute Spirit. It thus links the philosophy of history (the question of the direction of history) and cosmology (the question of the evolution of the universe), anthropological time (historical time) and cosmological time (the time of the universe). What for Lyotard is a history without subject, without emancipation, without hope, is for the technopantheists the fulfilment of the hope of humanity, the completion of history. "Who will protect us from Western civilization?" Georg Lukcs used this horrific question to try and describe the mood among intellectuals at the start of the First World War. It echoes unanswered in the space between anthropological and cosmological time.

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7. The catastrophe does not lie in the future, but is already in progress. When does catastrophe begin? From what threshold onwards do we speak of a catastrophe? Riccardo Petrella, one of the fathers of the so-called anti-globalization movement, who, with the Group of Lisbon and the book "The Limits of Competition," continued on from the Club of Rome's report, answered this question in an conversation as follows: "12% of the world's population possessing 86% of its wealth: don't you call that a catastrophe? And 2.7 billion people, that is, almost half of the world's population, having to live on less than two dollars a day, two dollars a day: don't you call that a catastrophe?" For him, the disastrous development began in the seventies, just at the time when the Club of Rome's report was published: the oil crisis, the rejection of the welfare state in favour of neo-liberal deregulation, privatization and liberalization. The catastrophe thus does not lie in the future, but is happening as we speak. Who can give him the lie? Ergo; " The concept of progress must be founded in the idea of the catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe." Post script What can we do? The success and the significance of the 'alternative globalists' lies in their realization that we have to do something. Because we are all involved in the paradoxes of the whole, we mostly remain silent. But that is the worst thing we can do. A possible first step would be to explore the contradictions and paradoxes that hold us captive in order to free ourselves from them. The fact that we are a part of the system is absolutely no reason not to point out the facts as clearly and simply as possible (what I have tried to here); no reason not to repeat and draw attention to them - catastrophe is nothing new, I know, but it is precisely this fact that makes our situation so alarming (the prophecies of the Club of Rome are coming true one by one. They even predicted the melting of the poles); no reason not to voice our protest as loudly and powerfully as possible, and voice it using the media, which are a part of the problem and can perhaps in this way be instrumentalized a little to help in finding a solution. The same way, for example, that Subcomandante Marcos and his group broadcast reports on the resistance of Mexican farmers from remote Chiapas to the entire world, and did it using the internet, a high-tech system that was once figured out by the American military. That is resistance. Our world is not a technotopia, not a technological land of milk and honey, but a dystopia with insiders and outsiders. Technology is rushing ahead, but the welfare state is already behind us. At least, that is the direction the new, flexible technocapitalism is taking. In retrospect, however, the welfare state remains, all in all, the most socially just and tenable form for human coexistence that has been tried out. One can talk with disdain about the welfare state; in a philosophical regard it is really not a very exciting topic. But there is no realistic alternative. If we dream for a moment the way Kant did in the 18th century about the United Nations in On Eternal Peace, there is only one solution to the environmental, demographic and
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migration problems: a global welfare state in which so many regions of the world as possible are made socially bearable, using eco-technology, or soft technology. This is not a utopia: it is urgently necessary. What we do not need is new utopias, for utopias abolish the world. We have to wake up from all cargo cults, eschatologies, messianisms, totalitarian egalitarisms, fundamentalisms, and technopias. That is the only "weak messianic power" that can still save us. Resistance without utopia: that could be the formula for a kind of 'postcriticism,' a critical pessimism, an activist attitude as a modern configuration in opposition to the decline of the utopia... To put it another way: It is not possible to make the world a better place without abolishing it making the world a better place means going against its abolition. Bibliography -[Anon.] Climate change threatens democracy, in: Earth Island Journal, summer 1997 (Internet). -[Anon.] International Migration, in: United Nations Chronicle, September 1997 (Internet). -[Anon.] Total Midyear Population for the World: 1950-2050 [table], U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000 (Internet). - [Anon.], The State of World population 2001, United Nations population Fund (UNFPA), (internet, 2001). -Theodor W. Adorno, Fortschritt[1962], in: id., Stichworte. Kritische Modelle 2, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1969 (Vooruitgang, in: id. Kritische modellen. Essays over een veranderende samenleving, Van Gennep, Amsterdam, 1977). - Gunther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, ber die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution [1956] en vooral II, ber die Zerstrung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution [1980],. Verlag H. C. Beck, Mnchen, 1987. - Walter Benjamin, Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte, in: Gesammelte Schriften, (Rolf Tiedemann en Hermann Schweppenhuser ed.; met medewerking van Theodor W. Adorno en Gershom Scholem), I , Frankfurt am Main, 1980 (1974). - Walter Benjamin, Das Passagenwerk, Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1983. [Konvolut N: Erkenntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts] - George Bugliarello, Megacities and the Developing World, in: The Bridge, 29, 4, winter 1999 (Internet) - Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network society ; (The information Age: economy culture and society, volume 1), Blackwell, Oxford, Malden, 2000 (1996); The Power of identity (volume 2), 1997; End of millennium (volume 3), 1998. - Lieven De Cauter, De capsulaire beschaving. Over de stad in het tijdperk van het transcendentaal kapitalisme, in: Krisis. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 78, winter 1998; Opkomst van de mobiliteitsmaatschappij: van utopie naar heterotopie/ The rise of the mobility society: from utopia to heterotopia, in: Archis, januari 2000; De capsule en het netwerk/ The capsule and the Network, in: Oase, 54, Winter 2001, p. 123- 132. - Mark Dery, Escape velocity, Cyberculture at the End of the Century, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996.
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- Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaosme. Over de kritiek van de politieke kinetiek (vertaald door W Hansen), Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 1991. - Maurice Weyenbergh & Marc Van den Bossche(ed.), Het einde van de geschiedenis? Over Franscis Fukuyama en Peter Sloterdijk, SUN, Nijmegen, 1995. - Bruce Yandle, After Kyoto: a Global scramble for advantage, in: The independent Review, Summer 1999, (internet). - Slavoy Zizek, Pleidooi voor intolerantie, (vertaald door Jan Willem Reitsma), Boom, Amsterdam, 1998.

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