Global Limits
Growth and prosperity. That is probably the most concise way to summarize the predominant political ideology today, irrespective of any kind of political left/right ascriptions. Everything is supposed to grow constantly, first and foremost the economy, for then everything flourishes, including art. We have all earned a certain level of prosperity, or rather we all increasingly shoulder an ever-growing degree of individual responsibility for that prosperity. And if this desirable state of affairs ever begins to falter, the purported culprits are rapidly identified (refugees, “benefit scroungers” and others that are a drain on our resources).
Yet growth and prosperity, as largely valid ideologemes unquestioningly accepted by all, have long been confronted to a dramatic degree with their limitations. This concerns a much more fundamental level than the wealth (or poverty) of particular individual societies and states. It has for example been 45 years, in other words almost half a century, since publication of the famous Club of Rome study The Limits to Growth (1972). That study constitutes a striking wake-up call in the midst of the Western narrative of progress, with its impressive warnings about the looming depletion of natural commodities and the catastrophic impact of global environmental destruction coupled with simultaneous population increases and persistent growth in industrial output. By means of a scientifically substantiated analysis, it forced the general public to confront limits that had been paid scant attention in the previously predominant technocratic mindset—a development that ultimately also contributed to the gradual formation of ecological awareness and the foundation of political movements active in this field.
To sum up the current state of play, almost half a century later little or nothing has been learnt from those forecasts. Exploitation of natural commodities now also encompasses the rare earths so vital to the IT industry; demand for fossil fuels continues to boom. Plastic waste has penetrated the most far-flung corners of the Earth. In many cases, leading politicians ignore or even deny anthropogenic global warming, euphemistically referred to as climate change. Energy generation in many parts of the world still deploys standards that, to use a perhaps somewhat overstated formulation, are driving the earth towards certain death by overheating.
Limits of growth (and prosperity) appear on every front, even if many apologists of progress are reluctant to admit this. That creates catastrophic conditions for everyone’s future ecological wellbeing (with the corresponding consequences); the actual overall scope of this cannot however be fully appraised, despite growing public awareness of such concerns. That is reason enough for the Global Limits issue to turn its attention to current symptoms and manifestations of the increasingly pressing ecological imbalance: phenomena that have affected the world as a whole and have long been reflected in art and culture, although this reflection all too often goes no further than a seemingly helpless “desire to save nature” or a romanticized sense of connection with the Earth.
Timothy Morton, a pioneering thinker in the field of “ecology without nature” explains in an interview why a true ecological mindset worth its salt would be well-advised to abandon the notion of “nature” in the classical sense of the term. Morton's approach, rooted in a raft of disciplines, presumes a profound symbiotic connection between humans and the non-human, and therefore, as a political consequence, calls for solidarity that extends beyond our fellow humans to encompass the multiple bifurcations of the non-human realm. This type of “dark ecology” resonates in other contributions to this issue too, for example in Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova’s comments on the term “devastation.” Developing an analysis that runs counter to all orthodox considerations, they seek to think about the notion in terms of its inverse, in other words, considering the idea through the prism of a “becoming” that transcends all intentions or goal-orientation—imbuing tangible catastrophes such as nuclear accidents or oil spills with an even more dramatic dimension.
Vera Tollmann’s essay examines the ways in which our vision of the Earth has been persistently transformed as a consequence of space travel and information technology, spilling over into an ecological awareness that needs to be rendered more acute. Brian Holmes also takes an expanded, technologically mediated perspective as the point of departure for his essay. On the basis of “living watercourses” in the US Midwest. Holmes discusses the extent to which a kind of world-spanning “empathy machine” can be created from an artistic perspective. This kind of machinery, Holmes concludes, would need to utilize the latest technology to help produce a global eco-body that extends beyond the individual.
In an interview, Cultural Studies scholar McKenzie Wark explores the state of this body in the Anthropocene age from a social perspective and advocates an alternative form of realism. Finally, Suely Rolnik connects reflections on the eco-body with micropolitical insurgences, addressing the reasons why a macropolitical perspective that views the key protagonists as pre-determined subjective identities has now become inadequate in this context.
Read side by side, the contributions in this issue turn mutually illuminating spotlights on the limits of the global—understood as an assemblage with an ecological underpinning. The authors in this issue share a conviction that this “dark” sub-structure offers the sole viable vantage point for critical appraisal of the global imbalance that is growing more pronounced every day.
Translated by: Helen Ferguson