Politics of the Highly Improbable: Anticipation, Catastrophe, Security
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy POLITICS OF THE HIGHLY IMPROBABLE: ANTICIPATION, CATASTROPHE, SECURITY A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Garnet Kindervater IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Raymond D. Duvall & Joan C. Tronto [May 2018] © Garnet Kindervater, 2018 Acknowledgments A dissertation is, in the end, neither conclusion nor summation. As a piece of writing it signifies the finale to a period of study, offering a testament of one’s knowledge, but also an opening to another stage that, if carried about properly, only continues the work that one has engaged for many years already. Despite that this document represents years of thought and research, however broad its topic or deep its claims, it does not summarize an intellectual decade of a life any more than an intense conversation might. It cannot represent such breadth because as wide as its interest it only presents an infinitesimally small fraction of what was learned in that time, debated passionately, and thus meagerly illustrates only fragments of what was thought and said, let alone what had transpired. Yet it does express a life – or at least a period, a phase, or a moment of one’s life – in which other things ceded the foreground and the issues represented below took precedence. Such it the paradox of writing: One must limit with a certain degree of what can only be understood as intellectual violence what could be said in favor of what can be said. I say this because during this period of writing I sacrificed the least, and those that I love sacrificed the most – at least insofar as our interactions went. The irony is that without their support this dissertation could never have been written. In that sense a dissertation could be thought a supreme act of selfishness. One might more sympathetically call the reliance upon others a pathetic dependence, and it certainly is a form of that, but it is also a form of power – in which, together in common, a product can come to fruition by way of imparting not the abstract ideas of love and support or care, but also the empowerment to endure. Spinoza refers to this in the spirit of true friendship, wherein the pursuit of truth allows interconnection and strength as friends persist in their differences.1 I knew this long before encountering Spinoza because I am the son and grandson of teachers whose lives were dedicated to human flourishing. Their careers – if one can call the work of a teacher by such a trivializing and mitigating word – operated outside of the parameters of delivering knowledge, but rested instead upon the belief that education – and especially so of the disabled and marginalized – meant empowerment. For them the idea that one person can affect another in order to learn to navigate the world more fluently was the noblest work that could be undertaken. Education isn’t in this sense a 1 Spinoza, Ethics, Part IV, Proposition 37, Scholium 1. i form of transmitting useful knowledge, or rendering a person more fit to be configured into the labor force, but a sense of mentorship, of subtle guidance, and enacting of a specific kind of love that grants another a fuller orientation to the world. I came to the seeds of this dissertation on the final day of a seminar taught by Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo organized under the themes of catastrophe, memory and the Enlightenment. After reading broadly in political theory, philosophy, history, literature, and cultural studies we had circumnavigated the organizing concepts without reading directly much in the way of confronting any of these ideas in the most concerted sense. In the final moments, consternated, I blurted: “I still don’t think I even know what a catastrophe is.” Professor Vázquez-Arroyo simply nodded, and it should be noted, very calmly and kindly, asked what I thought. I replied: “It cannot be anything but a signature of cost – it’s the worst cost. It shows us what people think would be the most devastating to lose.” To be honest, I had literally no idea what I meant by that. But as many things productive, the statement caused me to revisit it and ask myself what I might have meant – trying to retroactively impart meaning to a more or less meaningless, though hopeful, stab in the dark. Building out from this nonsense grew a project seeking to determine, in the absence of knowledge about the worst of what might come, how human beings organize themselves with the hope to survive. In so doing, I argue below that in the particularities of that pursuit one can detect the expression of how a society thinks collectively, what it thinks about when it thinks about its survival, and how in that very process it could be inferred what a political society cares about. If, in hopes to survive, a political society has come to fear most the abstract idea of a “coming catastrophe,” then what its members attend to, in a way, demonstrate what it fears losing most – in this sense, a catastrophe (in the imaginative, future-oriented sense) is a “signature of cost.” Professor Vázquez-Arroyo was very helpful in the early formation of my ideas, he introduced me to the newest literature, much of what is referred to here (though only a fraction of its total scope), and his own writing preoccupies a significant portion of the dissertation’s core chapter on what I provisionally adopt following some of that literature as “catastrophism.” We have not spoken in a long time, but he deserves thanks for helping to foster me and this project at its earliest stages. I came to the University of Minnesota with full knowledge in mind that it would take approximately a decade of my life. In retrospect it gave me these years – to put it as a loss would be backward at best. Among graduate schools, I had several excellent options, but the notion of working across disciplines with Bruce Braun, Cesare Casarino, and Bud Duvall drew my interest more than any other place. Despite its frigid weather, I imagined it to be a place of avant-garde ideas that might help me transform into the thinker that I imagined myself possibly capable of becoming. Each of these three people have shaped me indelibly, though in different ways. Bruce, in his constant questioning of “what’s at stake,” brought me from abstract ontological concepts to political practice and sturdier considerations of empirical reality and its problems. Cesare taught me that philosophy could be read – and lived – as a form of art, as literature, which is to say both radically and creatively transformative and poetic. And Bud led me to question my deepest views about the world – those implicit ideas that we take for granted sometimes – ii as expressive of ideology, subjectivity, and political structure; to remain ruthlessly critical, not just of as Marx once put it, “of the existing order,” but also of my own innate presumptions. Together they formed a critical triad, underlying my advancement, and demonstrated by example what it means to be an intellectual of the highest order. For whatever depth I carry as a scholarly person, it is due to their uncompromising example. Midway through my graduate career Joan Tronto joined our faculty, and joined Bud as my advisor. Joan in my opinion is a towering intellectual, someone who represents the highest standards of the pursuit of knowledge, but also demonstrates her mastery over the history of political ideas with poise and – unsurprisingly for those who know her writing – care. Each of these thinkers and teachers taught me as much by example as they did through their pedagogical labor. I am forever changed for having spent this time with them, and forever humbled by their accomplishment. I am grateful to have had many friends foster me, teach me, hear me, house and feed me, and care for me. They have shaped me: Morgan Adamson, Cecelia Aldorando, Marshall Altier, Josh Anderson, Laurent Aubouy, Tim August, JoAnna Benjamin, Margot Benjamin, Michael Benjamin, Pauline Benjamin, Luke Bergman, Danny Bessner, Mary Anne Betsch, Ivan Bialostosky, Sema Binay, Azer Binet, Kenny Blumenfeld, Dudley Bonsal, Kai Bosworth, Jordan Bowman, Ahna Brutlag, Asli Calkivik, Tom Cannavino, Laura Cesafsky, Charmaine Chua, Nathan Clough, Brooke Coe, Beth Coggeshall, Randall Cohn, John Conley, Nicholas Crane, Ron Criswell, Adam Dahl, Kira Dalk, Anne-Marie D’Aoust, Thomas Dodson, Kurt Domini, Marin Domini, Ross Edward, Treva Ellison, Quinn Fallon, Foley, David Forrest, Vanessa Freije, Jack Gieseking, Caleb Golz, Jeremy Gordon, Kristie Green, David Grondin, Kevin Grove, Terry Haas, Matt Hadley, Christian Haines, Kate Hall, Jonathan Havercroft, Matt Hindman, Chase Hobbs-Morgan, Mark Hoffman, Elyse Hradecky, Elizabeth Johnson, Ben Jones, Isaac Kamola, Jason Kanter, Scot Kaplan, Denis Kennedy, Nicholas Kiersey, Ervin Kosta, Serena Laws, Jessi Lehman, Bill Lindeke, Jason Lipinski, Tish Lopez, Lydia Lunning, Jason MacLeod, Sally Maher, Pete Maiers, Grant Marlier, Ed McGee, Dan Mesnard, David Milliken, Matt Millitello, Laura Mintz, Joelle Moufarrej, Zein Murib, Bryan Murphy, Eli Myerhoff, Bryan Nakayama, Govind Nayak, Sara Holiday Nelson, Tony Norris, Heather O’Leary, Dan Park, Krista Paradiso, Michael Paradiso- Michau, Dinesh Paudel, Aly Pennucci, Luke Perez, Quynh Pham, Djordje Popovic, Dave Porinchu, Carina Powers, Jason Quicksall, Ricardo Rebolledo, Eric Richtmyer, Rory Rowan, Rhamey Said, Carol Santalucia, Nicholas Santalucia, Jade Schiff, Sonja Schillings, Diane Schless, Dana Schowalter, Lesley Snyder, Kyle Steinke, Matt Stoddard, Chris Stone, Ben Stork, Paige Sweet, David Temin, John Troyer, Chester Turner, Sergio Valverde, Wanda Vrasti, Christy Wampole, Lea Wells, Lauren Wilcox, Chuck Wolfe, Ismail Yaylaci, Erica Young, Bryan Yurgelis, Ian Zuckerman.