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ABSTRACT
In this paper, I take up the theme of Spinoza's ars vivendi in relation to its temporality; duration as the very rhythm of life. In the face of an intensifying climate crisis, our experience of the rhythm of life in the everyday and its implications for the deep time of climate futures seem increasingly out of joint. Building on Morfino's argument of the necessary relationship between ontology and history, I explore the connections between the rhythm of life and our (Western) comprehension of the climate crisis. This framing provides insights into a fatal confusion. This confusion is fueled by the chrono-topography of the modern capitalist city, its intensification of a perceived separation of daily life from bioenergetic processes; and it is amplified in object-oriented ontology, which, in its treatment of climate as a hyperobject, both accepts and reifies a split between ontology and history. I argue, in contrast, that to think of the world as multi-relational and multi-temporal provides us with tools to assess the politics of the multitude in relation to the climate crisis, to better comprehend the complexity of the conjuncture and the schematization of divergent climate futures, and to fashion a responsive and response-able ars vivendi.
Notes on contributor
Susan Ruddick is a human geographer who works at the intersections between geography and philosophy. She publishes in a range of trans-disciplinary, geographic and philosophical journals on questions of urbanization, affect, non-dialectical thought and human–nature relations. Recent works include a translation of Pierre Macherey's Hegel ou Spinoza (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and “Governed as It Were by Chance: Monstrous Infinitude and the Problem of Nature in the Work of Spinoza” (Philosophy Today, 2016).
Notes
1 Morfino, Plural Temporality, 172.
2 See Steffan et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System”.
3 Ibid., 8253.
4 Gatens, “Frankenstein, Spinoza and exemplarity”, 741.
5 See McGregor, “Mino-Mnaamodzawin”.
6 See Cochrane, “Climate Change, Buen Vivir”.
7 Morfino, Plural Temporality, 10.
8 Spinoza, Ethics, Part 2, Proposition 44, Corollary (E2P44C). References follow the standard abbreviations for Spinoza's Ethics: E for the Ethics, Arabic numerals for the five parts, P for Proposition followed by the proposition number. S for Scholium, D for Definition, L for Lemma, C for Corollary.
9 Scruton in Baugh, “Time, Duration”, 212, fn3.
10 Hampshire, Spinoza, 174, 195; in Baugh “Time, Duration”, 212, fn3.
11 See Alexander, Spinoza.
12 See Harootunian, Marx after Marx.
13 Smith, “Preface: The Multitude and the Moving Train”, in Morfino, Plural Temporality, vii.
14 I am thinking here, for instance, of Spinoza’s argument in E1Appen., “that nature has no fixed goal and that all final causes are but figments of the human imagination”. This argument inspired a challenge to the variant of Marxism which posited the necessary, possibly inescapable, nature of transition from one mode of production to another. This teleological framing had rendered certain modes as “past” (feudal, subsistence) in spite of Marx's hesitations on this point in both the Grundrisse and Ethnological Notebooks, and it plotted within the capitalist mode a specific arc on the road to communism (from mercantile capitalism through Fordism) which has only recently been challenged by scholars such as Paulo Virno in The Grammar of the Multitude.
15 Negri, Subversive Spinoza; Negri, Insurgencies; Hardt and Negri, Multitude.
16 Morfino, Plural Temporalities, 16.
17 In EI2D7 Spinoza argues,
By individual things [res singulares] I mean things that are finite and have a determinate existence. If several individual things concur in one act in such a way as to be all together the simultaneous cause of one effect, I consider them all, in that respect, as one individual.
18 Spinoza, E1Appen., 240–1.
19 Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, 153.
20 See Hall, “The Problem”.
21 Harootunian, Marx after Marx, 11.
22 Morfino, Plural Temporalities, 15–16.
23 Chakrabarty, “The Climate”. While Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses” have come under (perhaps justifiable) heavy criticism for his generalization of “all of humanities’” contributions to climate change, one cannot disagree with his more specific statements about the environmental degradation wrought by the Soviet Union in the years preceding its collapse.
24 See Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline”.
25 See Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity.
26 See Thrift and May, Timespace.
27 See Adam, Timescapes.
28 See Virilio, “The Overexposed City”.
29 See Harvey, Consciousness.
30 See Kern, The Culture of Time and Space.
31 See Berman, All That is Solid.
32 See Simmel, “The Metropolis”.
33 See Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis; Edensor, Geographies of Rhythm.
34 Hardy, Tess, 29.
35 Adam, Timescapes, 14.
36 Harvey, Consciousness, 10–3.
37 Harootunian, Marx after Marx, 74.
38 Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 13.
39 Morton, Hyperobjects, 1.
40 Morton states: “All humans, I shall argue, are now aware that they have entered a new phase of history in which nonhumans are no longer excluded or merely decorative features of their social, psychic, and philosophical space. From the most vulnerable Pacific Islander to the most hardened eliminative materialist, everyone must reckon with the power of rising waves and ultraviolet light. This phase is characterized by a traumatic loss of coordinates, ‘the end of the world’”; Morton, Hyperobjects, 22.
41 See Bucki-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason.
42 Ansaldi, Spinoza et le Baroque, 30.
43 Ibid., 38.
44 Spinoza, E2D7.
45 Spinoza, Complete Works, “Letter 12” and “Letter 32”.
46 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 217.
47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 266.
48 See Bateson, Mind and Nature.
49 See McKibben, Worried?; Bastian, “Fatally Confused”.
50 See Bird-Rose, “Multi-Species”; Van Dooren, Flightways.
51 Morfino, Plural Temporality.
52 McKibben, “Worried?”, 7.
53 Gould, Time's Arrow, 73.
54 Ibid., 73–80.
55 Ibid.; Huggett, Natural History.
56 Gould, Time's Arrow.
57 See Lovelock, Gaia.
58 Huggett, Natural History, 155.
59 See Yu et al., “The Fertilizing Role”.
60 See Roman et al., “Whales”.
61 See Clark, Inhuman Nature.
62 Wainwright and Mann, Climate Leviathan, ch. 8, “Climate X”, 3382.
63 See Collings, Stolen Future.
64 Rose, “Multispecies”, 131.
65 Morfino, Plural Temporality, 173.
66 Spivak, A Critique, 69, fn 86.