Masters of Degrowth: Week 9.1 Living Degrowth - Homo decogitans: the Mediterranean dethinking subject

 What humanity could ever be the one that Socrates gathers around himself, a humanity that believes that everything is questionable and that people can argue, agree or disagree?

The Mediterranean is much more than a great place to take time off. Its unique history and geography, make it a great host for contrast, exploration and the simultaneous love for the unknown and its origins.

In times where growth and productivity are the single focus of our institutions and our individualized utilitarian system, the Mediterranean thought could add to degrowth thinking, much more than an economic and social critique of growth, but rather a deep questioning of its meaning and the communal purpose of life.

The Mediterranean is seen by western industrialized nations as a paradise and a sin, both admired and rejected, as it did not "catch up, yet" technologically or in terms of production with nations that succumb more 'successfully' to growth.

The Mediterranean is my homeland. I can only thank Franco Cassano to put it more elegant words what it means to live there, and what can we learn from it. Despite its contradictions and limitations, this place could potentially become an alternative to western hegemony, the ally of global southern though and justice, and a rich source for a degrowth that analyzes the meaning behind the unsustainable levels of depense in the North. I cannot feel prouder of coming from this little part of the planet, called 'PIG' not so long time ago.

Romano, O. 2015. Dépense. Chapter 17 in G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, G. Kallis (eds.)  Degrowth. A vocabulary for a new era. Routledge, London & N.Y., pp. 114-117. 

Energy consumption consists of two parts:

• The first is necessary for the conservation and the reproduction of life.
• The second is used for non-productive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, religion, games, spectacles, the arts, perverse sexual activity. All told, these activities – qualified as dépense – are ends in themselves.

Any society has an excess of energy, defined precisely as all that energy that is not needed for the mere reproduction of life.

In fact, mere biological sustenance can be achieved spending only a miniscule portion of the total amount of available energy. The basic problem relates to the residual energy that exceeds the share devoted to such servile use.

Excess energy is an “accursed share”: it forces human beings to question the meaning of life and their path in the world.

 Perpetually in pursuit of survival (which requires continuous growth), we are liberated from the state of paralysis when faced with the necessity of “being,” which arises from the emergence of excess energy. In other words, remaining animal frees us from the fatigue of becoming human. 

The individualized being is bound by the precarious nature of its existence and therefore obsessed with the problem of its survival. When isolated, it embraces a fundamentally servile position and reverts to the status of an animal, in which obtaining resources is central. 

Degrowth supporters do little more than transfer the servile position typical of the individualized subject to the general system; humanity’s complexity becomes subject to “the rule of needs,” supported by a utilitarian logic of survival.

The theory of degrowth risks to reanimate and give new momentum to the basic precept of economics, that is, the principle of scarcity. It risks mirroring the myth of growth by using the same imaginary from a reversed viewpoint, an imaginary that entails the employment of all the energy in circulation for the preservation of existence, this time round by means of “virtuous” lifestyles and efficient techniques.

Degrowth should instead focus its concern towards the collective construction of meaning in life and the restoration of political sovereignty.

Romano, O. 2019. Mediterraneanism. In A. Kothari, A. Salleh, A. Escobar, F. Demaria, A. Acosta (eds.), Pluriverse. A post-development dictionary. Tulika Books, New Delhi., pp. 237-240  

The Mediterranean is countless landscapes, a succession of seas, a series of civilizations stacked on each other. In the Mediterranean ancient realities sit side by side with ultra modernity.The multiplicities in the ways of living is a feature and a case for conviviality.

As nicely put in Ulysses, the desire to meet the Other in the Mediterranean is reconciled with the love for ones's homeland.

Despite its virtues, core principles of Mediterranism have been ineffective to build a real alternative to Western Modernity.

If the mediterranean is not catching up with the efficiency of the west, nor to the global technological exploson, it makes it a favourable place for delinking and more resilient local economies.

Cassano, F. 2012. Of Land and Sea. Chapter 2 in Souther Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean. Fordham University Press. 

There exists a structural homology between the geographic configuration of Greece (and in particular the relationship between land and sea) and its culture.

The maritime distances of the Aegean and the Mediterranean open the possibility of relationship and contact, even if they are savage and terrifying.

One finds the jealous safekeeping of one’s autonomy and the ease of conflict, but also, close to them like a body’s skin, the rejection of every fundamentalism.

Inside a polis, each citizen carries the foreign within, and unity is immediately more difficult, more complex; it requires a longer journey. Polytheism,tragedy, and philosophy do not disagree on this point: All three know the legitimacy of multiple points of view, the difficulty of their coexistence.

Without the sea, power quickly runs the risk of falling into the hands of a despot or of the philosophers; the opening in the horizon caused by the sea ensures, at the same time, that no knowledge can be condensed in one final thought, and no power can become fixed in the immobility of personal ownership.

The urban-civil fabric that emerges from Plato’s Dialogues reveals a mobile and curious society, used to travel and discussion, a horizontality of knowledge that welcomes everyone to the agon of discussion.

What humanity could ever be the one that Socrates gathers around himself, a humanity that believes that everything is questionable and that people can argue, agree or disagree?

What is extraordinary is that this discussion about the Athenians comes from an Athenian, that the circle of Greek knowledge is larger than philosophy, that it possesses the capacity to see even that which resists discursive reconstruction, though it contributed in a decisive way to its invention.

In Asia, the sea is without significance, and the Asiatic nations have in fact shut themselves off from it. In India, going to sea is positively forbidden by religion. In Europe, however, this maritime relationship is of vital importance, and it creates an enduring difference between the two continents.

The European state is truly European only in so far as it has links with the sea. The sea provides that wholly peculiar outlet which Asiatic life lacks, the outlet which enables life to step beyond itself. It is this which has invested European political life with the principle of individual freedom

Greeks are colonizers, they have always been. But they colonize the beaches: in Asia Minor, in Italy, in Marseille. They do not travel inland. They know that in losing sight of the sea, one loses the flickering of the seashore: one loses intelligence.

‘‘Throughout history the maritime countries have proven to be individualists and liberals, whereas

the continental countries, social and authoritarian, have a taste for hierarchical organizations.’

The peculiar conditions of the Mediterranean (reduced distances, temperate climate, ease of navigation) have made it a locus of crossings and competitive exchanges between peoples. The natural environment stimulates the spirit in a Hegelian way that becomes, in an extraordinary counterpoint, more and more independent from the natural environment.

But in this civilization, human beings live now surrounded by the unbounded growth of the ever more sophisticated prostheses they bring into existence; they lose their balance and are constantly busied and obsessed with their own productive imagination.

The same rhetoric of acceleration and speed, the ever more suffocating law of our age, is in the end an automatic tendency, ‘‘a form of minimal action, simple comfort.

The sea is only a principle of eradication: it represents diabolic temptation, the seducer that pushes us toward the fiercest bewilderment and toward the idolatry of technology.

After the whole sea has been conquered, humanity will assault air and space, dreaming of setting off on a cosmic trip by spaceship. Faced with this scenario, Schmitt pulls back horrified and wishes for humankind’s return to the womb of the earth after an era of perdition and confusion.

‘‘I believe that humanity, after the difficult night of atomic bombs and similar horrors, one day will wake up and thankfully recognize itself as the child of a firmly grounded earth.’’

Heidegger says something important about Germans, a deeply spiritual people inasmuch as it is deeply threatened: ‘‘We are caught in a pincers. Situated in a center, our nation incurs the severest pressure. It is the nation with the most neighbors and hence the most endangered. With all this, it is the most metaphysical of nations.’’

Goerz states: This city we live in is suffocated by the land. Look at a map. We are in the heart of Europe. Land on every side. Land, land. And the land suffocates man, numbs him, leads him into despair. These crises that periodically wrack Germany, aren’t they but the spasmodic movements of someone buried alive? The land surrounds this country, chokes it, renders it hysterical and crazy.

The cure against a boundless sea that destroys any rootedness, against a mandatory mobility that forces humanity into estrangement, cannot be the fetishism of one’s own roots, the ethnocentricity of one’s own sacred, a religion that is telluric and exclusionary.

Uprooting is celebrated like a virtue, as man’s willingness to engage in universal competitiveness. When competition exceeds moderation, it cuts off every safety and protection: The opposite of peasant idiocy is the broker’s, the unhappy science that believes that life is only a race and stock exchanges, the impersonal movement of capital that no pier can hold down, and the constant readiness to set sail where more is offered. The distancing of the coasts leads us to lose our moderation: We no longer conceive the sea as an interval between lands; instead, we worship the moment when we leave all behind and decide to live forever without safety nets.

That is when the superman who leaves the coasts becomes a pirate, a man who no longer belongs to any land, but only to the sea. This is Nietzsche’s greatness; these are the dangers of his setting sail. After the departure invoked by Nietzsche, one cannot go back because the homecoming, any homecoming, would be a defeat and a penance. Indeed, Nietzsche did not return, as an extraordinary homage to truth: He left the coasts and lost his way. As opposed to Heidegger, he did not take a risk through someone else; and for this reason he was able to prove an outcome and a truth: like Dante’s Ulysses he shows the greatness and ruin contained in the absence of a homecoming.

Greeks were also pirates among themselves. This difficult unity is the other face of Greek liberty, not something external to it. This ability to measure oneself with dis-cord, this constant belonging to more circles, this impossible integrity is precisely what turns the Greeks into the people of tragedy and philosophy!

Mediterranean man, instead, lives always between land and sea; he restrains one through the other; and, in his technological delay, in his vices, there is also a moderation that others have lost. The unbridled development of technology is not tied to the crossing of land and sea, but to the oceanic lack of moderation, the chasing of the sunset by the sun, the absolutization of the West.

Far from bridging (through time and development) distances, technology multiplies them, and, in its one-dimensional vocabulary, there do not exist words to name them. The distances between the shores with which we must confront ourselves today are quite different from those of techno-industrial small-time navigation; the duties we face are extraordinarily more challenging than to remain an inefficient and corrupted periphery of the West.

As long as we continue to believe that the inevitable running toward the West is the only possible motion of the day, and that the Mediterranean is a sea of the past, we will be focusing our eyes in the wrong direction, and the decay that surrounds us will never cease to grow

Class Notes

Individualiation pushes our animal nature and postpone the exploration of the meaning of life. The growth regime does not give space to depense, to the dramatization of our own dissipation. Growth society has no meaning, as it only focus on the reproduction of its system via increasing production and consumption.