Romand Coles & Lia Haro — Trump-Shock, Resonant Violence and The New Fascism

Romand Coles (left), Professor at the Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University & Lia Haro (right), Research Fellow in Sociocultural Anthropology at Australian Catholic University.

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones? 

Since the U.S. election, daily surges of Trump-shock – awful disorienting blasts – have regularly defied our standard ways of making sense of political life. Something is happening here, indeed. But, each unpredictable wave throws our paradigms into disarray. We are perpetually swept into the wake of an event that scrambles the measures of consistency and inconsistency we desperately try to employ. Trusted weapons of analysis and resistance cannot find their aim fast enough to keep up with the whirlwind.

While the new regime bears important similarities to classic fascism--rapid intensifications of white supremacist nationalism, dismissive attacks on reason, autocratic leadership, deepening entwinements of state and capital, disenfranchisement, the attack on liberal and representative democratic institutions, and the increasingly open right-wing populist violence – this new fascism relies on distinctive dynamics that must be illuminated to move toward understanding – and ultimately transforming – our current condition. To this end, we offer the following theses as a modest, preliminary contribution to a theory of the emerging fascism:

1. Beyond the substantive elements of what is shocking about Trump himself, he is a hyper-intensification of shock politics as such.  Neoliberal shock politics, as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, functions by creating and capitalizing on crises that send shockwaves throughout the polity that disorganize, dismantle and subsequently reorganize lifeways, institutions, and spatio-temporal regularities. While previous shocks have typically had at least the illusion of a substantive character – financial meltdowns, fiscal crises, terrorist threats, natural disasters – Trump-shock manifests more in the very character of the waviness itself, the chaotic aggressively disjointed temporality, of 140 letter pulses, refusing accountability, disavowing predictability, with a serial blast-like character that disorients all who are geared toward ordinary political reasoning and conduct. 

The chaos of Trump-shock sends waves of distracting, disorganizing, and dispersing energy through the polity in ways that defract and overload the circuits of critical response to the emergence of an extreme right-wing political regime that will consistently enhance capitalist circulation and vilify difference beyond all bounds. As the regime moves steadily toward the extreme right (a climate change denier takes charge of the EPA, Goldman Sachs steps in to head the Treasury, a multi-billionaire moves to privatize education, and a rabid purveyor of white supremacist hate assumes control of strategy ‘to see what sticks’), minute by minute twitter flares and ‘protocol smashing’ phone calls repeatedly draw away energy and attention. By incessantly provoking frenetic scrambles to react to each appalling new event, Trump-shock disables proactive movement and oppositional initiative.

2. Most fundamentally, Trump unleashes an extreme sovereignty of perpetual disruption, confusion, and contradiction, rather than embodying a power that imposes and is bound to a single order or a coherent, consistent ideology (though his regime surely orders and ideologizes).

  

 We can understand this as a nominalist mode of shock sovereignty that operates through radically disordered ordering, which simultaneously exceeds order and transforms ordering itself. While efficient and formal causalities of state and leader are still highly operative, technologically intensified and diffused modes of resonant causality assume transfigure the fascist machine. 

Trump-shock admits of no otherness, not even of himself an eyeblink prior to the present. In that way, Trump exemplifies power as instantaneous event with no stable form. This perpetual hyperspeed exceptioning makes Agamben’s State of Exception seem quaintly stable. Trump-shock is like the sovereignty of William of Ockham’s God, manifested in the fact that he can be bound by no law he had made, even to the point of totally changing the past willy nilly.

    In the extremity of Hobbes’ explication, such sovereignty is epitomized in the fact that there can be no law prior to nor uttered by the sovereign to which the sovereign can be held accountable, because law can be none other than the sovereign’s interpretive event at each instant. Hobbes writes: “To him therefore there cannot be any knot in the law insoluble, either by finding out the ends to undo it by, or else by making what ends he will (as Alexander did with his sword in the Gordian knot) by the legislative power; which no other interpreter can do.” (Lev., XXVI) Trump displays this power in an endless series of chaotic tweets, spinning out myriad unpredictable, ephemeral, and contradictory stances. 

   Analysts and opponents, missing the performativity of this power and the power of this perfomativity, often scurry to measure the veracity of his missives according to traditional frameworks (law, ideologies, empirical facts) - or even their consistency with his own past statements. Thus, for example, when Trump claimed to The New York Times that “the law’s totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” pundits jumped to reference U.S. Code, presidential tradition and constitutional law to assess the correctness of the claim. We suggest that the substance of his claim adheres to the nominalist event - the energized sword that Hobbes describes. The affective energies and powers of this event, however, are not missed by those hungering to unleash themselves from all restraints of democratic norms and accountability.

3. The power of nominalist shock functions through a modulation of resonant violence that is ubiquitous and also unaccountable. 

The affective energies of this movement of will to power animate significant portions of the polity – particularly on the neo-fascist right. As Trump’s Twitter shocks surge directly into the pockets of over 17,000,000 followers, many are propelled into barrages of raging threats against those he vilifies--directly or indirectly. In this way, the violence of shock-sovereignty exceeds the formal channels of the state (themselves horrifying). For example, when Trump tweets condemnation of a union organizer in Indiana or a woman at a rally, hundreds of threatening communications (including murderous violence) to the targeted follow almost instantaneously. 

Picture by Johnny Silvercloud

Just as Trump-shocks come anytime and all the time – these expressions of resonant violence can emerge explosively from anywhere and everywhere. This unpredictable ubiquity is amplified by the intimate relationship between the Trump regime and neo-fascist right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News, which spontaneously launch their own call and response shock waves that vilify, threaten, and enact violence. Rather than being met with condemnation from the president-elect, they resonate with and are amplified by previous and coming 3 a.m. kindred tweets from Trump Tower. In turn, these frequently drive mainstream news cycles that perpetuate the resonance in more subtle and insidious ways. 

Operating according to resonant probabilities, these shock waves have a Teflon-like quality in relation to calls for accountability that follow logics of formal and efficient causality, for they come less from a single location and more from resonances among nominalist shocks that move too quickly in and out of being to be caught at rest.

4. This form of power both draws on and transforms what we conceive of as a neoliberal smart political energy grid that has been taking shape in recent decades. 

A smart energy grid is one that employs a variety of modes of (political) energy production, transmission, consumption, and blackout in highly flexible and responsive ways to maximize power. No longer relying on a few central nodes of power generation, they work with increasingly interactive forms of energy production to create even and usable flows of power across a wide area. Elemental to the neoliberal grid are mutually amplifying currents between overwhelming episodic energies of political economic shock, on the one hand, and myriad quotidian energies associated with radically inegalitarian circulations of goods, finance, capital, bodies, and media resonances. 

Each shock wave simultaneously summons new flows and resonances that maximize capitalist power and profit, energize vitriol, and enhance capacities for future shocks while shutting down impediments to capitalist metastasization. These amplificatory currents are immanently connected with affective currents of fear and rage that both energize and are energized by capitalist intensities - particularly in manifestations of xenophobia, white supremacy, and fundamentalisms that are hostile to reasoning and science. Trump draws on and proliferates these existing flows of power as well as intensities of shock. 

As shock politics moves from being episodic to becoming itself quotidian and accompanied by dispersed resonant violence, the neoliberal dynamics are at once amplified and rendered more unstable in ways that may ultimately short-circuit the grid itself with intensities and counter-energies it cannot handle. 

5. 

Efforts to parse truths, reveal contradictions, or selectively negotiate and collaborate with this mode of power are both 

blind to and disguise what it fundamentally is - a new fascism that exercises and enhances nominalist sovereignty 

through disordering ordering and hyper-prerogative power

. 

The Italian term fascismo referred to the fascio littori--a bundle of rods attached to a battle ax symbolizing strength through unity and the bolstered authority of the Roman civic magistrate. In the Twenty-First Century, the ax becomes the chaotically moving nominalist cyber-sword of shock plugged into the neoliberal power grid of circulations and affective resonances, such that even within government all that is solid melts in the air. In the first

weeks of the Trump administration, the nominalist cyber-sword has been quickly turned on the agencies and processes of American government. In this process, chaos is not only a means of dissolving the recalcitrance of other branches of government and agencies but also a principle of governance itself.

Consider the example of the so-called Muslim ban executive order, the “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” order issued January 27, 2017.

Preceding the release of the order, different members of the regime leaked multiple, contradictory versions—sowing seeds of speculation and confusion. Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway even claimed it may never be released. In rolling out the order, Trump did not consult department heads including the very relevant State Department nor did he vet the order with the Office of Legal Counsel. The Department of Homeland Security saw the text of the order only shortly before it was released. In the midst of all this interpretive confusion, the execution of the Order was left largely to the judgement of officers of Customs and Border Protection. What all this begins to show is the extent to which the Trump regime enables, deploys and tolerates a high degree of chaos and unpredictability as a mode of reinventing government. While such mayhem in an earlier moment would be an indication of weakness and disarray, the new fascism operates through disordering-ordering, which simultaneously exceeds order and transforms ordering itself. Nominalist sovereignty seeks to liquify government to the ever-changeable will of the sovereign. In the ceaseless exercise of prerogative power and its chaotic effects, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the state of exception almost seems quaint. Prerogative power doesn’t quite capture this phenomenon. Rather, it is a kind of hyper-prerogative power in which each communicative and ordering action intensifies and proliferates a whirlwind of contradictory and confusing qualities that endlessly call forth new exercises of prerogative. 

   Clearly, radical democratic politics must target the classical manifestations of fascism we noted at the outset. As we do so, a monumental challenge will be imagining how to resist and contest the unprecedented apparatus of surveillance, security, and militarized policing whose potentials have been constructed since 9-11, but whose uses are likely to take countless new and horrifying forms. 

    Yet, we believe all of this will hinge upon our capacities to counter the shock politics and resonant violence characteristic of the new fascism. This will require engaging in a double politics. On the one hand, we must escalate sustained modes of direct action carefully-targeted to short-circuit the worst aspects of the regime. On the other hand, we must develop a radical democratic politics that shocks in a different way, that overwhelms the unaccountable vitriol of Trump-shock with dramatic engagements and magnetic enactments of receptive solidarity. This will take great creativity among those who oppose Trump and neo-fascism. Stay tuned.

Naomi Klein: In The Eye of the Anthropocene

William E. Connolly
Author, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, Democratic Activism.

“The truth is that this is the hardest book I have ever written.” (Klein, p26)

Naomi Klein, in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), knows that climate change is an eerie thing. To engage it deeply is to rethink a set of engrained categories organized around subjects and objects, culture and nature, capitalism and communism, and the trajectory of time itself. So we often try not to think about it. On the other hand, discernible changes in arctic glacier flows, inedible fish, rising global temperatures, depleted coral reefs, floods in low lying islands and cities, ocean acidification, rapid species extinctions, and extreme weather events draw us back to the issue. So many people go back and forth.  To and fro.

 That was the yo yo logic Naomi Klein followed, too, until a few years ago.  Near the end of the book she reviews struggles she went through to conceive and bear a child.  After various medical strategies failed she talked with some naturalists. She then retreated from the rigors of air travel for a while, spent more time in western Canada away from a hectic Toronto life, hiked a lot, and altered her diet. A pregnancy followed that was carried to term, though she does not guarantee the life regime changes were the cause. Nonetheless, now she folds the outer ecology of life more intimately into its inner quality. She also thinks about the future facing her two year old son.   

Klein does not, at least on a charitable reading, tether attachment to the future to a universal, reproductive logic. Rather, this is the way her own attachments crystallized to make climate change THE topic to pursue. Numerous singles and couples build rich lives without children. We are nonetheless variously tethered to the future through the things we build, the houses we repair, the students we teach, the writing we undertake, the communities we support, the labor unions we sustain, the churches we attend, and the movements that vitalize us.  The dilemma is that the extractive system in which we participate is now based upon a future that is self-destructing. It rings increasingly hollow to many who carry out its role imperatives. The danger is that many respond to this bind with aggressive denial, insistent withdrawal, or even the back and forth logic that plagued Klein until recently. Klein’s project is to intensify our ties to a possible future at odds with the one the extractive culture is building. 

Advanced capitalism generates innumerable pressures, ambitions, compensatory  consumption desires, and temptations to delay, resist or deny pursuit of such critical attachments.  Cynicism, withdrawal, opportunism and aggressive denial are merely four of its temptations.  But Klein’s wager is that, once we connect the future trajectory actually underway to the climate induced shocks we increasingly face, the disparate social movements now in play may expand to transform our condition. You encounter a new event--a severe flood, a storm that floods the city, a fracking corporation rumbling into your neighborhood, an oil pipeline projected for your area, water bubbling up from storm pipes onto streets, a devastating hurricane that breaks through flimsy bulwarks built for another era. Now you become ready to rethink and connect. 

This is a critique of the way late capitalism assaults human ecology, and more besides. For, as she says, Soviet communism also spawned a huge extraction and emission machine before it collapsed, generating more per capita CO2 emissions than several capitalist states. And Mao Zedong insisted that "man must conquer nature". Moreover, some capitalist states---e.g., Germany, with its recent drive to renewable energy—secrete far lower CO2 emissions than others—e.g., the United States and China. Yes, the trajectory of climate change is entangled today above all with neoliberal capitalism. But it is also tied to compensatory modes of consumption not entirely reducible to that source, to specific religious traditions, and to a powerful drive since at least the time of Francis Bacon to treat nature as a deposit of resources for human mastery and exploitation. It is important neither to give short shrift to the primacy of neoliberal capitalism nor to ignore other forces with some degree of autonomy that contribute to this drive. 

In chapter One Klein argues that climate deniers are right about one thing: If the climate science is accepted and we respond adequately, radical changes must be made in the neoliberal organization of life. That truth, indeed, is a key source of denialism among many neoliberals, Fox talking heads, and corporate chiefs.  The deniers say that the changes proposed would subject the free market to extensive regulation, that taxes for the rich would soar, that the basic structure of consumption would change. They are correct on all counts. The thing they are wrong about is the repeated assertion that an impersonal organization of capitalist markets ensures impersonal rationality---each new meltdown disproves that assumption.  Klein could do a bit more to show how changes in the infrastructure and ethos of consumption are closely linked. For when you move from the state and corporate mandated infrastructure of hi-tech medical care, private health insurance, massive road construction for auto and truck travel, and a fossil fuel energy grid you can also move toward an infrastructure that is more ecological, inclusive and egalitarian.  Such changes, in turn, make it more possible for people to alter the ethos of consumption in which they participate, so that a positive spiral between ethos and infrastructure is set into motion.   

Early in the book Klein fastens our attention on the small island of Nauru in the South Pacific. It was a beautiful little gem before, first, guano hunters dug out its center, second, ocean acidification decimated sea life in the area, third, rising sea levels began to reduce its size from the outside, and, finally, it was deployed by Australia as an outpost for concentration camps to imprison boat refugees from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran and Pakistan seeking to escape war-torn areas.

Nauru has been destroyed from inside out and outside in. It is simultaneously a sad reality and a powerful metaphor: “the lesson Nauru has to teach us is not only about the dangers of fossil fuel emissions.  It is about the mentality that allows so many of us, and our ancestors, to believe that we could relate to the earth with such violence in the first place—to dig and drill out the substances we desired while thinking little of the trash left behind...This carelessness is at the core of an economic model some political scientists call extractivism… Extractivism is a nonreciprocal dominance based relationship with the earth, one purely of the taking.  It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continue. “ (p.169) Here, as at other junctures, Klein folds care for the future into detailed engagement with a specific situation. The power of this text, to my ear, thus exceeds that of her earlier work on capitalism, useful as that was. As she analyzes each situation we feel visceral dispositions within us begin to ripple.   

Klein offers excellent reasons why big, high-tech climate fixes are dangerous, even as she reports how (and why) large corporations, politicians, and moderate think-tanks favor such fixes. She also reviews how, in the 1980s and '90s, several leading environmental groups lost their way by becoming closely tied to the “market solutions” the corporate world was prepared to fund and entertain. Though she does not note it even a critic of neoliberal avoidism such as Paul Krugman is too closely linked to market solutions than to more radical changes in production and consumption priorities. This part of the book is effective stuff, if familiar to some degree in other books, such as Clive Hamilton’s Earthmasters. 

 The most compelling chapter to me is chapter 9. It is entitled “Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors”. Here Klein engages locals on the ground at numerous sites who pierce through old market schemes and advertising strategies as they mount protest movements. “Blockadia” is in fact a floating collection of movements popping up whenever open pit mines, fracking, or tar sands pipelines are in the works. These movements expose and contest the latest stage of extractive capitalism. As we roll through such movements in Greece, Nigeria, New Brunswick, Ithaca, Manchester, New South Wales, Inner Mongolia, Oregon, Alberta, Pennsylvania, and North Dakota, as we encounter urban and suburban protesters, indigenous activists, and academics exposing and contesting false promises, health hazards, refinery explosions, aquifer damage, river pollution and soaring C02 emissions, the sense of a burgeoning cross-territorial constellation begins to crystallize. Klein helps us to discern how a series of disparate movements could begin to merge into a larger constellation, how each provides ammunition, tactical insight, publicity, and moral support to the others.

  She also shows how academic research, exposing accidents, effects and dangers that states and extractive companies cover up, have become more active in some of the very areas now under attack. Research into toxic effects by geologists and others at Cornell provides a case in point. It was probably spurred by a fracking campaign close to home in central New York State. Here is Klein: “The various toxic threats these communities are up against seem to be awakening impulses that are universal, even primal—whether it is the fierce drive to protect children from harm, or a deep connection to the land that had previously been suppressed... Social media in particular has allowed geographically isolated communities to tell their stories to the world, and for those stories, in turn, to become part of a transnational narrative about resistance to a common ecological crisis.” (p.303) 

Klein could have talked about the “blowback”-- those ugly practices of "pacification" traditionally farmed out to colonies by imperial states and then brought back to control urban minorities at home. Here, blowback takes the form of destructive extractive practices previously hidden in places that elites, liberals, and innocent citizens could ignore. Blowback now means that the "center" and the "periphery" are merging as extractive industries move into previously protected territory.  

I hope it is clear how impressed I am with this study. That is not to say that the book is entirely sufficient to the huge task it sets itself. I will list a few things that might extend Klein's work, in the spirit of augmentation. 

First, to understand why the United States is an outlier among the older capitalist states, it is important to grasp how neoliberalism in this country has been bolstered by angry energy emanating from the right edge of evangelicalism.  The "tea party" is not a new thing, despite media suggestions. The “evangelical/capitalist resonance machine”, as I call it, has been active for at least four decades. Its two entangled constituencies—neoliberals and evangelicals—intensify the worst in each other. This constellation is thus not well understood by those who think the explanation of economic life must invoke economic factors alone. In this machine neoliberals demand market deregulation in pursuit of power, privilege and ideological hegemony. 

The right edge of the evangelical movement, on the other hand, is insulted by the very assertion that human economic activity could change something in (nonhuman) nature that God has created such as climate. And several of its leaders now invest the providential hand of God in the operation of capitalist markets. The two constituents together thus intensify opposition to exactly the things egalitarians and ecologists care about most. As I have written in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, evangelism and neoliberalism resonate together… [they] are bound by similar orientations to the future. One party discounts its responsibilities to the future of the earth to vindicate extreme economic entitlement now, while the other does so to prepare for the day of judgment against nonbelievers. These electrical charges resonate back and forth, generating a political machine much more potent than the aggregation of its parts. (48-9). What’s more, their combined strength in southern and western states gives  climate denialism impressive power in Congress. To overcome this reactionary resonance machine a pluralist assemblage of workers, professionals, farmers, minorities, nontheists and church/temple/mosque devotees of several types is needed. 

Second, Klein is correct in saying that an accumulation of role changes by individuals and groups cannot resolve the climate crisis.  Rapid changes in state supported renewable energy, the infrastructure of consumption, and the structure of taxation, etc. are needed, as she shows.  But the truth of this point may encourage her to underplay another. As people adopt new practices--buying used clothes and furniture from volunteer organizations, dropping the use of lawn pesticides, bringing new speakers to their church, trading bikes, buses or zip cars for cars, using trains whenever possible, supporting local pressure to reform garbage and waste collection, installing solar panels if they can afford to do so, writing and publicizing eco-centered blogs, joining community gardens in the city, teaching new courses, supporting eco-concerns in their labor unions, and so on endlessly--the cumulative result does not only improve things modestly. It connects participants as constituencies, and it works on the subterranean dispositions and inclinations of the experimenters themselves.  It prepares us to heed new climate events and to support larger pressures to restructure the economy.    

Third, while Klein digs into the details of how corporate practices impinge upon climate, she avoids exploration of the partially self-organizing processes of climate, ocean currents, species evolution, cross-species disease transmission, wetlands, and glacier flows themselves.  It is indispensable to join her work to studies doing exactly that, as for example Fred Pearce starts to do in With Speed and Violence. Then we will understand how melting glaciers become self-amplifying as the enlarged amount of open water absorbs more heat rather than reflecting it; we will grasp how the West Antarctic Shelf responds to human induced triggers with its own amplifiers that greatly exceed the effect of these triggers. We will deepen our insights into how triggers, amplifiers, and tipping points work and how they intersect with capitalist extraction, pollution and emissions.  “[The] dampening of destructive elements” in self-organizing systems, I have written, “requires self-reflective intervention by the human uses of that system. You can call the latter a self-conscious regulation of the system needed when its self-organization creates dangerous or exploitive results” (The Fragility of Things, 83). 

Photo by ANDREW C. REVKIN

We may also begin to work more actively on those nature/culture and subject/object dualities that helped to blind so many scholars to the Anthropocene until so late in the twentieth century.  If sociocentrism is the attempt to explain political economy through categories that give too much autonomy to social forces such as profit, or relations of production, or markets , or state practices, or preference schedules, or some combination of these, critical studies today must mix accounts of planetary, nonhuman systems with active self-organizing powers of their own into accounts of capitalism. And vice versa. To the extent climate change involves planetary forces with partial self-organizing capacities, sociocentrism in the human sciences and cultural internalism in the humanities must be revised significantly. That is one of the reasons I am drawn to the theme of the Anthropocene—the 200 year period when industrial emissions have helped to reshape climate. Supported by many geologists and climatologists, it explains both how climate, ocean currents, and glaciers periodically went through rather rapid changes before modern economies were founded and how today emission and pollution triggers emanating from neoliberal capitalism galvanize natural amplifiers that exceed the force of those triggers.  

Finally, the bracing account of diverse anti-extraction movements that Klein provides may encourage us to project a cross-country beacon that could draw them together. In the near future it is both urgently needed and perhaps possible to organize a cross-country general strike to place pressure on states, corporations, unions, churches, banks, universities, and localities from the inside and outside simultaneously, pressing all of them to take rapid action to reorganize the economies of extraction, production, consumption, and finance.  I have explored such a need and possibility in a couple of posts in The Contemporary Condition. (my Latour piece and the Obama Swarming piece). The idea may also grow organically out of the accumulated movements Klein supports. Such an action would speak to the planetary condition and urgency of today. 

Each of these points, I believe, is consonant with the spirit of Klein’s endeavor; none detracts from its analytical power or inspirational force. Indeed, This Changes Everything is an exemplary study, informing and illuminating us as it jostles the molecular habits that help to define us. Perhaps, then, it is appropriate to allow Klein the last word: "When I started this journey, most of the resistance movements standing in the way of the fossil fuel frenzy either did not exist or were a fraction of their current size. All were significantly more isolated from one another that they are today...Most of us had never heard of fracking... All of this has changed so rapidly as I have been writing that I have had to race to keep up… In these existing and nascent movements we now have clear glimpses of the kind of dedication and imagination demanded of everyone who is alive and breathing during climate change's 'decade zero'." (pp. 451-452)

The Zombie Syndrome

William E. Connolly 
Author, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, Democratic Activism. 
So, you go to college. Or send your kid to college. You get married and pledge to support each other in sickness and in health. You have a baby. You buy a house by the shore with a thirty year mortgage. You plan for retirement, sacrificing a portion of current income to do so. You invest in a well-rounded portfolio. You take a job, to climb the career ladder it makes available. You replace the roof on your house. You play basketball in college, hoping to become an NBA player or a coach. You write a new book with an eye-catching cover. 

  As you proceed lobbyists pursue legislation to make inattentive taxpayers support and subsidize financial speculation. A new consulting firm is launched. A neighborhood association allows only roof replacements designed to last a hundred years or more. A church or temple is built out of marble by parishioners. A military base is established in a foreign country. A highway system is upgraded. Fracking becomes widespread to increase the world’s oil supply. A pipeline is built to carry shale oil across a continent over an aquifer that provides water for a dry expanse of territory.

  These intertwined decisions, activities and projects are future oriented. Some are oriented to a future twenty years away; others are set on longer time lines. Planning for a future taken to be similar in structure to today. The dilemma of today, however, is that we build for a future widely sensed to be a chimera. How does such a dilemma hold? Oil and coal companies, the right edge of evangelicalism, high end investors, and Fox News help to secure it, all pushing projects that many know are unsustainable. Those are powerful sources. But the dilemma runs deeper.

  In the contemporary condition things combine to make many people into zombies taking revenge on a future they can neither avoid nor accept. Yes, zombies. The zombie, originating as a phenomenon during the horrors of Haitian slavery, is a dead being revived sufficiently to be relentless but not enough to be alive. Today, in popular guise, it is a being who was oppressed, who died and is now partially revived, who adheres to a single course of revenge, who acts as if it is drugged, and who can easily infect others with its malaise. Zombies move relentlessly in a haze.

  The zombies of today sense that we must change the pivots of a massive civilization of productivity but cannot find modes of action to do so. Sure, many geologists, climatologists, oceanographers and a few politicians issue warnings. A growing number of academics, churchgoers and everyday citizens also sound alarms and call for radical change, as demonstrated by the recent, huge climate marches in several cities around the world. But these voices are beaten down. Too many workers, parents, entrepreneurs, university presidents, churchgoers, voters, and economists stay on the same course. They are drugged, though not with the neurotoxin from pufferfish rumored to have been the drug distributed to Haitian zombies.

  The neurotoxin of today is a double bind. To step away from the crowd to act resolutely on several fronts about climate change is to risk careers, reputations and friendships; to refuse to do so is to make things worse for those who follow. That is the first bind. But we speak here of a Double Bind. The second bind is tough too: if you talk about the first bind much, or act to break it, you risk friendships, reputation, an upsurging career and comfort in the world. You become troublesome. This, then, is the Double Bind that forges a zombie syndrome during the age of the Anthropocene.
  At an adult dinner out a week ago, we talked briefly about the Obama agreement with China on climate change. I then dared to ask the relatives assembled whether the idea of the Anthropocene made sense to them. "Did you say Anthropussy"?, a husband and father of two school children asked. He elicited laughter. The conversation moved on. To have entertained the question would have been to receive a call to act resolutely as a parent entangled with the future of his children. Caught in a double bind the pressure is on to brush away the issue.
   Zombies of today are oppressed by the future they are constrained to build. 

   The zombie syndrome renders it difficult to pursue a new course, to say the least. It is simultaneously a serious syndrome, one that must be grasped sympathetically, and one we must struggle to break. To be sympathetic to it is to acknowledge how difficult and paradoxical it is to both push for a massive change of course and to participate in manifold aspects of daily life that advance the old course. To break the hypnosis of the zombie you must, for instance, face the charge of hypocrisy. So enervation and deferral set in. The old ideals of capitalism and communism--those contending promises for a future of abundance and mastery designed to secure the loyalties of stratified populations--have lost their credibility. But there is little else on the horizon to move, inspire, or inform us.

  We know, if we allow ourselves to think about it, that many low-lying areas will be flooded within a couple of decades and that the interior of most continents will become unbearably hot during the summer. We sense--if we can force ourselves to think--that these cataclysmic changes are apt to be accompanied by massive attempts at population migration trumped by the virulent drives of highly militarized states to secure their borders by any means possible. We imagine--if we extrapolate one step further--that the combination of rapid climate change, forced population migrations, and widely distributed nuclear arsenals could issue in a cataclysm.

  But the double bind squeezes such proto-thoughts as they struggle to gain a foothold. How could you pursue the future course we are on if you entertain such thoughts? So we plod along. Zombies walk into wildfires, driven by a trajectory in which they cannot invest. But is the very fact that many have become zombies also, perhaps, a sign of hope? It at least signifies a lived precarity now attached to old images of the future. Indeed, Pascal’s wager over whether God exists has now morphed into one over how long humanity will survive. So precarity and possibility jostle around together.

  Sure, there are also vampires, those among the corporate and financial aristocrats who suck blood from others while there is still time to do so. Vampires arise from dying aristocracies; zombies from those oppressed by the future the vampires help to promote. Zombies struggle so hard to make ends meet in the current regime that they lack the energy to interrogate its priorities, even if they have lost faith in them. An inertia of thought joined to a meltdown of action. It is never that timely to challenge a twisted imaginary of the future if you are caught in a double bind. Indeed, while Anthropocenic activists grow by the day, many of us also detect a zombie strain in ourselves. It is infectious. 

  How do you cure a civilizational double bind? I have not encountered anything in my brief review of zombie literature to answer that question. I continue to think that perhaps the key is to search for residual sources of liveliness and earthly attachments circulating below the threshold of zombiness. Since the double bind is replete with fissures and obscure openings, perhaps a series of electric shocks will bring zombies to life.

  If a revival occurs, another task will arise: to maintain the swarming strategies that both make a difference in themselves and insulate us from lapsing into the default state of the zombie. To fend off zombiness it is necessary to take a few hesitant steps at first, to adjust a few role practices, to make some pronouncements in public, to take a stand here and there. Pushing upon fissures and cracks in the double bind that manufactures the syndrome. Once a new liveliness is fomented, we can think what to do from there.

Toward an Eco-Egalitarian University

William E. Connolly
Johns Hopkins University
Neoliberal university presidents, corporate trustees, military research contracts, super-rich donors, the gang of five on the Supreme Court, hyper-professionalized administrators, the Republican Party, Fox News: the university faces a constellation of reactionary forces today. Such a neoliberal machine, with additions and subtractions depending on the target, has gone after organized labor, the news media, cities, racial minorities, the extant distribution of income and wealth, and now the university. The idea is to fold the university into an anti-intellectual agenda that disparages liberal arts research and teaching as it prepares students to forfeit critical skills and become cogs in a machine. There are forces within some universities that resist this machine. The recent rebellions at New York University, the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Texas are cases in point. These constituencies are to be celebrated, because the machine is primed to make us both discount their actions and forget them as soon as possible. Recently, for instance, nonacademic employees at Hopkins won an impressive wage settlement, but we have yet to hear the administration publicize or celebrate this sweet union victory.

There are also critical intellectuals in and around the academy who point out how neoliberal policies accentuate inequality, create horrible exclusions, foster disciplinary society, and create economies punctuated by periods of crash and burn. They also show how those who do not initiate such irrational policies are set up to become the victims after each crash. They see how neoliberalism has retained hegemony for over thirty years as states ignore the authority structure of firms, enact neoliberal policies, generate legislative vetoes of new ventures when neoliberals officially hold a legislative minority, and draw authority from the gang of five on the Supreme Court. There are many faculty and students prepared to resist the intrusions of the neoliberal machine into their colleges and universities, whenever the latter act as if the administration has a natural right to manage students and faculty and they have an obligation to obey blindly. We must thus celebrate those who have fought off coup attempts from the top, even winning sometimes. And we must laugh off attempts by reactionary faculty and administrators who pretend after each of victory that this or that change was in the cards all along, even without staff, faculty or student activism. Such propaganda is designed to deactivate senior faculty, demoralize students, and discourage younger faculty from joining the fray when the forces of anti-intellectualism, top-down rule, authoritarianism and vindictiveness intensify. Divide, demoralize, and depoliticize the rank and file to create maximum room for political rule from the top.

Resistance, then, is indispensable. But is it enough? Note that the neoliberal/corporate/administrative machine has a well worked out agenda to enact. Perhaps, then, we need to articulate a positive agenda too, one that links critical intellectualism to an eco-egalitarian organization of university life. One in which universities and colleges become vibrant centers that challenge the neoliberal machine by their very mode of organization. Today I focus on the economic organization of such a university.

Start with the adjunct world. The more adjunct faculty there are the fewer full time appointments are available to young scholars and the fewer faculty there are to be independent voices in the life of the school. The more the adjunct model threatens tenure the less willing some younger faculty members are to take risks in their research, teaching and college participation. The weaker tenure is the more powerful the neoliberal machine becomes. These are some of the reasons budget cutbacks have been used to create the world of the adjunct. So the university will gather together adjunct positions and create a smaller number of tenure track positions out of them, inviting existing adjunct faculty to become candidates and drawing upon the records they have already achieved in considering them for the new positions.

With respect to salary, all staff members in the university will receive a living wage, and their incomes and job security will grow as they continue to work. The faculty will initially be governed by a 2/2/1&1/2 model. The highest paid senior professor will make no more than two times the median salary of assistant professors; deans and provosts will make no more than two times the median salary of senior professors; and the president will make no more than 1 & ½ the median salary of deans. Perhaps this scale can and should be squeezed down even further. The key point is that with such a sliding scale a salary increase at any level will be marked by corollary increases at other levels. Equally important, a decrease at any level—to respond to a new budget crunch created by neoliberal adventurism and then passed down the line--will meet with corollary decreases everywhere else. After reducing the current proportion of administrators to faculty to an earlier ratio, any decrease in the size of the faculty will be matched by a corollary reduction in the size of the administration. As time goes by these differentials can be reduced further. The underlying idea, to paraphrase Rousseau, is that no one becomes so rich that they can buy another and no one so poor that they can be bought by another. Staff, faculty and administrators will all receive remuneration that enable them to participate effectively in the larger infrastructure of consumption. That means that the larger infrastructure of consumption, too, will need to be reconstructed.

Such policies mean that we are all in this together rather than encouraging a few to impose their imperial will upon the rest of us. Savings that accrue can be deployed to help students reduce the crushing debt they currently face, and the university will now be in a better ethical position to press the state for more support to reduce those pressures further. Deans and Presidents will feel more tied to the faculty than to high rollers outside it. They will come from the faculty and can return to it with dignity rather than having to forfeit a life of royalty. They are thus apt to feel more closely tied to intellectual life and to act with courage against the neoliberal machine when necessary. If they are forced to resign while fighting for academic principles they will return to the faculty as heroes, presenting living models of how to be academic intellectuals. All this will help to modify the ethos of performance and governance in the university, pulling it away from subordination to the neoliberal agenda and toward a critical education and student/faculty participation in governance.

Of course, some faculty and administrators will depart when such policies are established. That is okay. They will be replaced by faculty members and administrators who prize intellectual life and seek to work in a place in which the faculty has a major voice in university life. The arrival of new recruits will further amplify support for the new university.

The university will also become a model of eco-experimentation, as it divests both from using carbon based power and making carbon based investments. It will encourage faculty in the humanities, social sciences and sciences to purse eco-friendly research as it enacts several practical experiments itself. Again, all these things will require a shift in the internal governance of the school. In this way the university becomes a living model appropriate to the world of today and tomorrow, and some other institutions may even be encouraged to emulate it. We enact practices needed in the twenty first century.

 No president will be allowed to milk donors for huge donations to be used for that president’s “signature projects’ and new faculty appointments, unless those actions have first gone through the relevant departments and faculty assembly for review and acceptance. Such practices are based on the sound understanding that the most creative, educational and socially useful innovations do not come from the top. They flow up from intellectual ferment by faculty and students. The top down myth is merely a neoliberal strategy designed to centralize power. It has no basis in experience. The new practices will thus reflect the realization that the neoliberal model of university governance has been an abject failure. It has been installed not because of its success, but because of the constellation of power and privilege it expresses.

 There is much more to explore here. But perhaps we can close for now by posing an obvious question. Is not such a model of the university utopian? Yes it is. It is at odds with the existing hierarchy of power in a neoliberal society. But it is only utopian in that sense, not in the sense that the neoliberal project is utopian. The neoliberal model is utopian in that it can be imposed but has been proven to be top down, anti-intellectual, and at odds with teaching students to become critical citizens. That is, it is grounded in arbitrary power and privilege rather than speaking to the needs of university life and a democratic society. It is tethered to a boom and bust practice of economic life that repeatedly recoils back on low-income workers, urban areas, racial minorities, old people, schools, health, colleges, students, and universities, even though none of the latter have initiated these crashes. Presidents, administrators, trustees and faculty who still profess the neoliberal model should be ashamed of themselves.

Today the need is to move beyond the top-down utopia of the neoliberal academy as more faculty and students both become active inside the university and pursue alliances with workers, teachers, feminists, racial minorities, the unemployed, battle scarred and wounded soldiers, and other forces outside the university who have also been screwed over by the neoliberal agenda.

Does this mean, then, that we seek to politicize the university? No. That, my friends, happened a long time ago, though the neoliberal terms of politicization have not been publicized enough. Indeed, it is today considered insulting to the neoliberal machine to publicize this fact. It means that we must work hard to shift the terms of the politicized university.

Sometimes the thought of another possibility shakes up practical thinking, allowing it to fester and then to respond creatively to new threats, issues and opportunities as they arise. Make no doubt about it. The neoliberal machine has both eyes focused on the university today and we must have ours focused on the neoliberal machine.