“It cannot be doubted that the prevailing forms of humanity’s societal constitution presently threaten humanity’s own survival, as well as that of countless—indeed, millions—of other terrestrial and marine species. This problematic is seen clearly through reflection on the phenomenon of capital-induced climate catastrophe, which is only the most alarming manifestation of the multifaceted environmental crisis currently being prosecuted by global capitalism…. The present historical juncture, then, is largely a negative one; social redemption—liberation, revolution—is glaringly absent, and we all suffer this lack—some, of course, far more than others. Rather than reside within a lifeworld based, as we should like, on affirmative forms of inter-relating, we confront a world ‘radiant with calamity’ (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer). And yet, despite the very real threat of ascendant barbarism, the future course of world history ‘is not absolutely conclusive,’ as Adorno remarks in his Negative Dialectics, however highly alienating and destructive its present direction. Against these bleak prospects, it would seem that transformative social change—revolution—is the end toward which we must focus our efforts. As I develop these thoughts in Imperiled Life, and particularly in its concluding chapter, ‘For an Ecological Anarcho-Communism,’ it would seem that only by means of the natality promised by the prospect of the abolition of prevailing hegemony—through subversion, insurrection, general strike—that a ‘happy end’ (Bloch) can be secured for future generations, the presently oppressed, youth, and non-human nature.”
Many thanks to my comrade Ben for filming and uploading the video.
Below can be found the audio recording of my comments on Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe during a presentation I gave at Red Emma’s Bookstore and Coffeehouse (Baltimore, Maryland) in July 2012. The file has recently been released by the Baltimore Indypendent Reader for consideration in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
Many thanks to Gabby for the introduction. The presentation lasts about 55 minutes; I have excised the question-and-answer portion, as the questions are difficult to hear.
Picking up Imperiled Life by Javier Sethness-Castro, I felt the urgency of the work immediately. Illustrated with profound, gorgeous art by the fabulous Just Seeds Collective, the work mobilizes through an active discourse between theory and science. Measuring the weight of 20th Century Continental and Post-Colonial theory by its accuracy in predicting the ecological crisis of today, Sethness-Castro looks to the classic works of the Frankfurt School to show the way forward for anticapitalist revolution.
If you wanted to find a book that honestly and faithfully lays out the disaster of climate change, this is the book to turn to. Refusing to establish borders between thought and action, Imperiled Life illustrates the integrity of critical theory, developed along the imperative that the Holocaust not be reproduced. “The radical violence, alienation, and destructiveness overseen and directed by prevailing power,” says Sethness-Castro, “is but the continuation of long-standing social trends that have gone on for millennia—totalitarianism grew out of imperialism and gapitalism, while hierarchy has been sustained by patriarchy and religion.” Through Sethness-Castro’s book, we can point to the reasons: Climate change is not some fluke scientific problem that we can figure out through technical, instrumental solutions. Climate change is related to the historic repression of political activists, the third world, and marginalized peoples.
But for Sethness-Castro, the motto remains: Don’t Mourn, Organize! “It is now imaginable,” says Sethness-Castro, “that inclusive, egalitarian antisystemic movements will develop in core societies, hand in hand with resistance movements the world over, from striking Chinese industrial workers to Arab antistatist protesters, revolutionary Kurds, Indian Marxists, indigenous peoples, and the victims of global militarism everywhere.” Any climate activist should take one look at this revolutionary assemblage and throw their fist in the air.
Solidarity on this broad of a scale is virtually unprecedented throughout the history of the struggle against colonialism. Thus, Sethness-Castro’s short book is more than a kind of accusation against the state form; it is also a call to action, not only of mass mobilizing, general striking praxis, but of love, friendship, and respect. “Radical exclusion would be overthrown,” he states, “with human multiplicity and plurality seen as traits to be cherished and celebrated rather than suppressed.” In this sense, we return to Sethness-Castro’s drawing upon the Frankfurt School as the inaugurator of Critical Theory, which helped to usher in women’s studies, post-colonial studies, black studies, latino studies, gender studies, and so on. Although the “identity politics” of such multitudinous, hermetic disciplines has been attacked in recent years by revolutionists seeking a simplicity of class analysis over a discursive polyphony of unconventional research, Sethness-Castro stands defiantly and firmly in defense of such diversity.
Generally, the problem with “multiculturalism” and “diversity” in academia lies in the usage of these words to undermine the intention of genuine scholarship with capitalist homogenization. In Imperiled Life, however, we find dignity, not hollow “diversity”, a bursting apart of institutional frames through what Chua called “polyversity” in 1982. The implications of this form of research tends to suggest further methodological expansion into set theory, differentials and combinatorics, and so on. Catherine Malabou has discovered fascinating principles of neuro-plasticity that suggest a sort of transversal potentiality of recovery, which could break through to establish revolutionary (anti)paradigms, while Bracha Ettinger has brought psychoanalysis to new levels of differentiation and combinatorics, considering a “matrixial borderspace” between subjects and objects. Of course, Alain Badiou is also particularly fascinating in his studies of “The Event” through a kind of existential set theory.
But how do we literally go about “changing the world”? In geographical terms Sethness-Castro points out a contradiction in David Harvey’s theories, pointing to an optimistic chance of a “neutralization” of the military industrial complex through massive non-violent civil disobedience. However, Sethness-Castro also indicates that, in ignoring the postcolonial theorist and psychoanalyst, Franz Fanon, many contemporary theorists have exposed a lack of understanding of revolutionary tactics. What Imperiled Life calls for, in the end, is a social revolution, a revolution of the people to transform the institutions of society. In this sense, one gets the same feeling reading Sethness-Castro as with the Rebel Worker in the 1960s, and the contemporary lectures of Penelope Rosemont.
These are some ideas for the next routes that organizers can take to set Sethness-Castro’s brief, but thorough, exposition of the relationship between capital and ecology. In the meantime, those thinking philosophically about the reasons for climate change and the redemptive potential, if it exists at all, that can be derived from it, this book will come as a handy guide. It is a spontaneous and ecstatic read, which can be returned to for details, and has an important place on your bookshelf.
Richard Estes, host of the “Speaking in Tongues” radio show (which is dedicated to the investigation of “Social commentary and interviews with people directly involved in struggles related to anti-imperialism, civil rights, the environment and the workplace, with an emphasis upon anti-authoritarian practice”) broadcast by the KDVS 90.3 FM community-independent radio station of Davis, California, was kind enough to invite me to speak on his show regarding Imperiled Life this past Friday, 14 September. Below is the audio recording of that conversation.
Samsara (Sanskrit for “suffering”), the sequel to the 1992 film event Baraka (“blessing”), has long been awaited, its treatment of various world-phenomena imagined and fantasized about. Having had the privilege to see the film, I can say that in some ways it is a blessing, following in part from Baraka, and it surely does depict suffering, human and non-human, in a number of forms. It is unclear, though, how interested the filmmakers are in aiding in the struggle to attempt to overcome the vast suffering and destruction caused and upheld by presently dominant hegemony: this follows from the work’s status as a mass money-making scheme—a racket. Of course, Samsara is not only a racket.
Like Baraka, Samsara is stunning in its portrayal of various manifestations of the natural and social beauty of Earth. Worthy of experience in this sense are the timescapes of arid climes set to the music of Armenian duduk player Djivan Gasparyan, or the depiction of Buddhist monks creating art at the opening of the film, signaled by a trumpet blast, presumably in Nepal or Tibet.
Beyond illustrating some of the positive and beautiful aspects of life and human society, Fricke in Samsara definitely also recognizes the social exclusion and structural violence of existing capitalist society: the film shows African cities and extensive “slums” in the Philippines, following similar coverage in Baraka of the favelas of Brazil and homeless people everywhere. Fricke also includes a few shots of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, he spends considerable time depicting the highly mechanized and hierarchical industrial-production regimes ruled by automation that are responsible for mass human alienation: a stand-in for this entire system could well be Fricke’s close-ups of bionic Asian human look-alikes, which are very close to their models in appearance but without the power of speech. Samsara is further testament to the inanity and absurdity of the totality of capitalist production: an extended sequence depicts the alarming assembly and production of weapons, armaments, bullets. Fricke then shows different males of color bearing small arms—different than in Baraka, in this film he omits treatment of imperial war-machines (bomber-jets, etc.), instead going here for historically colonized peoples who are shown as engaging in armed struggle without that positionality being situated within the violence of the reign of capital.
In the parts depicting African cities (Lagos, perhaps?), Fricke concentrates on the enormity of electronic waste exported to these materially impoverished communities—a capitalist trade-practice similar to the exchange of hazardous/nuclear waste, imperial war, and the arms trade. Samsara includes a sequence on impoverished peoples wading through landfills for objects to find and sell, in the struggle to ensure their social reproduction as well as that of those to whom they are attached. In Baraka a similar scene depicts South Asian females doing similarly, in a strong repudiation of capitalism:
One wonders (I wonder) how Ron Fricke and co. compensate the impoverished peoples they portray in these films. Beyond this, I ask precisely what Fricke is doing depicting a ritual performed in a Filipino prisoner whereby the imprisoned engage in elaborate dance for the pleasure of their overseers? Does Fricke mean to be critical of this practice, and/or the prison and the carceral system at large? As is evident to those who have seen Baraka,Samsara too carries a high risk of colonialism.
In keeeping with these considerations, the film’s introductory sequence closes with a fetishistic panning of the sarcophagus of one of the Egyptian pharoahs (Tutankhamun?), rising from the inferior tip of his phallic beard to take in and revel the youth’s facial beauty—or at least, its representation by the artists who adorned the pharoanic funeral-mask. In general terms, there is in Fricke’s film a special focus on pyramidal, inegalitarian structures, whether architectural and physical or more abstractly social: prominent in terms of the former are the Giza pyramids, Dubai, Gothic churches, the Vatican, Bagan temples, the Blue Mosque (Istanbul), and Mecca’s al-Ka’aba.
The film generally has an Asiatic focus, and unfortunately seems entirely to lack recordings from Mexico and Mesoamerica, and depicts little from the two continents of Abya Yala. In the segments from China, scores of children are shown practicing Shao lin kung fu, following the commands of an off-screen master, while compatriot workers separately are depicted as engaging in similar martial-exercise activities in preparation for labor in the factory. Near the film’s beginning, adults in Ma’asai bands are seen to be living convivially, proud of the infants of the newly born generations they share with the camera. The framing of these various others by Fricke is very particular: for example, there is no acknowledgment made in Samsara of the dire environmental conditions suffered in recent memory by the Ma’asai and the Turkana of northern Kenya—drought, desertification, death—for which imperial societies can be said to be responsible due to climate change. Similarly uncritical, Fricke’s take on religion in the film is not in any sense one suggestive of the desire to break with religiosity; Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism are instead taken as an integral aspects of human development over the millennia, seminal contributors to the historical expression of beauty.
Against these mindless suggestions, those who oppose patriarchy can for example hold the processions in Mecca critically, noting for one the total exclusion of females from the areas adjoining the Ka’aba, just as the children trained in kung fu can exercise their skills in defense of their lives and that of humanity and the chance for revolution.
One remarkable part of Samsara is an extended sequence near the film’s end regarding the brutalization of non-human animals—chickens, cows, pigs—that are slaughtered for human consumption. Fricke includes harrowing scenes of decapitated pigs being carried down an assembly line for further processing; he shows the sadness of a sow giving of her body to her newborn piglets—behavior that normally would aid in their survival and flourishing, were they not imprisoned later to have their lives destroyed to satisfy brutish human tastes. The scene by which this disturbing act opens shows the saddening harvest of chickens from their overcrowded pen, as operated by a machine which efficiently and coldly sucks one bird at a time into a tube destined for some off-screen location in the slaughterhouse. Indeed, this very scene, like the sequence taken as a whole, follows from Fricke’s similar depiction in Baraka of the methodical, systematic burning-off of the beaks of chicks destined to cohabitate in industrial-agricultural conditions, until they were to be slaughtered—their beaks forcibly being removed so as to prevent the overcrowded chicken population from killing each other in a craze, and so averting “capital losses.”
Close in time to the animal-slaughter sequence, Fricke in Samsara also shares a segment of film on the industrial production of white-skinned, female-bodied sex models, with their immense breasts and putatively arousing face makeup. No connection is made by Fricke as to who the buyers of such commodities might be—whether Euro-American, Asian, and so on—but, juxtaposed with the scenes of the brutality of animal slaughter, the inclusion of this treatment of patriarchy could well be taken as a strong indictment on Fricke’s part of social relations which promote objectification—commodification, but more than this: domination, in general. It is to be hoped that viewers will consider adopting and advancing vegetarianism and anarcha-feminism after watching Samsara, however divergent this may be from the filmmakers’ likely goals.
Unlike Baraka, Fricke’s new film does not dedicate much of the film’s reel to the depiction of imperialist-capitalist societies—other than flybys of the financial district of downtown Los Angeles that seem more celebratory than critical. While Fricke does not show viewers some of the many destructive realities that arrangements like Los Angeles demand in the present—Iraq is entirely absent from Samsara—we ourselves can conceive of the vast scope of world-alienation these entail, recalling a myriad of images and moments not depicted by Fricke: the 2010 BP Gulf oil spill; the devastation of the Niger Delta; the degradation of the Amazon rainforest (shown in Baraka); the destruction prosecuted by U.S. imperialism since 1992, particularly in the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq; the fate of the Arctic sea ice; the dying oceans.
Samsara is not the environmentalist Home (2010), nor is it Werner Herzog’s haunting Lessons of Darkness (1992); it is not much of a profound investigation or consideration of the phenomenon of catastrophe, a perennial and central feature of late capitalism—as our present world shows. An art-work which comes to mind that can serve as Samsara‘sfoil of sorts is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The World for World is Forest (1972), a novel which depicts the life of the Athshean humanoids who reside on an entirely forested planet that is progressively destroyed, its residents enslaved and murdered, following attempted colonization of Athshe (simultaneously “forest” and “world” in the tongue of its indigenous peoples) by humans from Earth. This brutalization comes to an end only with the generalized rebellion of the Athsheans against the infrastructure of systematic oppression—an image which the contemplation of history also suggests to us, as in France in 1789, Saint Domingue/Haiti in 1790, France again in 1871, Russia 1905 and 1917 (February), Spain in 1936, and so on. The various insurrectional attempts made by the colonized and formerly colonized peoples of the South of course also belongs to this tradition—this doing-other and -against in relation to capitalism and domination.
Clearly, Samsara and its developers have limitations; they are not revolutionaries, nor do I think the film can be considered revolutionary art. As already noted, it is at least in part—if not largely—the work of a racket, one that unsurprisingly does not focus its lens on some of potential means by which we can conceive of liberation from the ills it does consider—insurrection, mass-general strike, blockade of capital, agitation, revolt, revolution. The importance of the film in my opinion can be found in its celebration of beauty on the one hand and its examination of the mass-collective nature of human society on the other. This latter consideration in particular is critical for the present, as mass-action by the subordinated—the constituents of existing society—could against conformity and passivity be activated toward the end of intervening and resolving many of the serious problems illuminated by Samsara, as well as the numerous others we can think of using experience, knowledge, and mind.
Below can be found an audio recording of the radio interview I held with Chris Burnett on his show Indymedia on Air (KPFK 90.7, Los Angeles) on Monday 11 June regarding my newly released book Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe. Enjoy!
World-renowned NASA physicist James Hansen, author of Storms of My Grandchildren (2009)and numerous critical climatological reports, gives a TED address regarding the dire problem of climate change. Recommendable comments, despite Hansen’s racist-reformist insistence that his suggested fee-and-dividend model be accessible only to legal residents of the U.S.
“I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man [sic]. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever.” — Fanon
Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan’s Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression examines the contributions of black Martiniquan medical doctor and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) to the study of psychology, with a particular emphasis on the radical critique Fanon’s work and life has made as regards established psychology’s relationship with subjects other than privileged Euro-Americans. Typical of mainstream psychology for Bulhan is Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, a South African psychologist who would go on to become Minister of Native Affairs, leader of the Nationalist Party, and later Prime Minister of the Apartheid regime. These brutal tendencies are counterposed by Bulhan to those advanced by Fanon, who in contrast is said to have evinced a “relentless commitent to the cause of justice and liberty on behalf of the oppressed and the colonized” by means of his published works—principal among them The Wretched of the Earth, A Dying Colonialism, and Toward the African Revolution—and his radical-humanist clinical work in Martinique and subsequently in Algeria. Bulhan’s book is thus in part an exploration and denunciation of the “historical complicity of Euro-American psychology in global oppression” but crucially also a celebration of the emancipatory potentialities of humanist psychology.
Bulhan begins by noting the glaring tendency among many practitioners of psychology to overlook the basic fact that so many humans suffer material deprivation and hence go without the basic necessities for life. “It is by no means insignificant,” he writes, “that about 800 million of the world’s population, nearly one-fifth of humanity, is so impoverished as to constitute a global ‘underclass,’ characterized by malnutrition, disasese, and illiteracy, living in squalor.” That so few associated with psychology have concerned themselves with this social devastation is for Bulhan alarming—as it should be for us, for these numbers have only worsened in the past 27 years. From this introductory point, Bulhan goes on to question the extent to which psychology as hegemonically practiced can be said to be universal regarding the human condition, suggesting instead that much of it is “Euro- and class-specific.” Bulhan criticizes mainstream psychology for having been born and developed largely within a white, middle-class male social milieu; he calls into question the tendency of many psychologists to generalize their experiences within this social environment to all of humanity, given self-evidently that this milieu is but “one instance in a universe of diverse human realities.” He writes that this structural reality gives rise to an “imperialism in psychology,” one that effectively excludes “the poor, the dispossessed, the culturally different.” Mirroring critiques made by German critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, Bulhan notes that modern psychology functions to emphasize social control and adjustment of individuals to extant social conditions rather than social change aimed at overturning the very institutions that perpetuate human alienation, madness, and oppression: colonialism, racism, capitalism, and the State, to name a few examples. Mainstream psychology can thus at best serve as little more than a “bandaging operation” to contain the unassimilated.
Channelling Fanon, Bulhan dedicates part of his work to specifically criticizing some of the more prominent fathers of psychology. Sigmund Freud’s findings are in this sense questioned as having emerged from a very particular set of social conditions, those of a sexually repressive Victorian Europe marked by the ascendancy of the social institutions of patriarchy, the nuclear family, and capitalism; Bulhan denounces Freud as an apologist for these, the Freudian critique of sexual repression notwithstanding. Freud is moreover shown to have been dismissive of Europeans emanating from the working classes as well as non-European peoples in general, whom he claimed exercised a “primitive psychology.” Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious is demonstrated as having been influential for Fanon’s own work, but Bulhan takes Jung to task for his expressed views on the purported “racial infection” of Americans of European descent by African-Americans and Native Americans—this in an article that Fanon seems to have overlooked. Bulhan also shows how Fanon considered Alfred Adler’s lack of emphasis on socio-environmental conditions in the development of neurosis and character disorder rather wanting, this despite Adler’s youthful adherence to a socialist politics—hence his affinity in this sense with Fanon. Bulhan claims all three figures to have investigated the psyches of individuals residing within very specific social conditions, those of affluent core societies (and within these societies, bourgeois subjects seem to have been over-represented as cases for investigation). These patients are very far from those who “had not been shaken by the violent ruptures of colonialism”; they are not the ones who would delve into madness as a refuge from racism, as Fanon would observe in his work. In marked contrast to the perspectives and conclusions advanced by Freud, Jung, and Adler, Fanon insisted that human alienation originates in socioeconomic factors on the one hand as well as the internalization of inequity and violent social relations on the other. It would follow that any serious resolution of madness would have to confront these toward the end of dismantling them.
In later chapters of the book, Bulhan examines Fanon’s career as a health professional and practitioner of psychiatry, starting with his early medical work in French-controlled Martinique, a society beset by poverty, poor nutritional outcomes, dysfunctional sanitation systems, and inadequate public health practices. From the outset of his career, Fanon roundly criticized the failures of medical doctors to unequivocably denounce racism and social injustice and work against these realities. In his position as chef de service of the psychiatric Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria beginning in 1953—a position that Bulhan rightly notes as having reflected the man’s “radical humanism”—Fanon introduced a set of humane reforms to hospital practices through his banning of straitjackets and chains for patients and his introduction of group-therapy sessions, regular outings, a soccer team, and a newspaper for inmates to express their views. While shocking to much of the hospital staff, these measures on Fanon’s part followed from his rejection of prevailing ideas governing psychiatric practice, for he felt that prolonged incarceration (“second internment”) would merely reinforce sado-masochistic outcomes. Fanon also significantly desegregated the staff of Blida-Joinville and prohibited discrimination based on race. As a medical researcher, moreover, Fanon publicly expressed his opposition to the purported “North African Syndrome” with which many colonial doctors would dismissively diagnose their patients—the syndrome referring to the supposed Algerian and Arab tendency to be lazy and to lie, and hence not to be worthy of proper medical evaluation. Fanon targeted his scholarly efforts particularly at imperialist socio-diagnostical approaches that held Arabs to be genetically inferior and mentally deficient; one of the more egregious such examples was that of A. Porot, head of the Algiers School of Psychology, who claimed that “The Algerian does not have a cerebral cortex […] he is under the dominance of the diencephalon, as one would expect to find in any inferior vertebrae.” Anticipating Edward W. Said’s criticisms of Orientalism, Fanon intuitively understood the function of such approaches, which was to justify colonial rule over the colonized.
Examining the course of Fanon’s life and work, Bulhan comes to consider the question of what the therapist is to do in light of the existence of a social environment that radically undermines human well-being. Part of Fanon’s response to this challenge was his attempt to rescue some of the approaches taken by Algerians themselves to madness; beyond the practical improvements to be had from this move, this celebration of indigenous approaches constituted in Fanon’s eyes part of the struggle for the recovery of dignity denied Arabs by colonial rule. Beyond this, however, Fanon in time came to support and materially assist the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in its efforts to overthrow French rule in Algeria, resigning from his post at Blida and taking considerable risks to his own person to do so. As Bulhan puts it, “Fanon’s critical inquiry into psychiatry [in time] merged with the highest and most practical critique of domination—namely, the popular struggle for liberation.” This step marked the denouement of Fanon’s criticisms of existing psychological approaches, reflecting his Marxist belief that therapy should aim at restoring freedom to patients in question and the society in which they find themselves. The real context for socio-therapy in this sense is the revolutionary transformation of prevailing social relations—the destruction of the realities that perpetuate impoverishment, subjugation, and attendant alienation (“tears to be wiped away”), in favor of the chance for the development of liberatory possibilities (“men and women, children to be adorned with smiles”).
