by
Jacobin
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[...] the Right may be onto something when it describes global warming as a Bolshevik plot: curbing climate change requires a fundamental rethinking of our economic system and the role of the state in orchestrating it. Conservatives grasp at a visceral level just how vast the implications of the ecological crisis really are. For them, rejecting climate change is a perfectly rational political position.
We shouldn’t think for a moment that popular GOP denialism is set in stone. The Right’s fundamental mission is to preserve capitalist class power — if we let them, they’ll find a way to use climate policy to do that.
But as Adorno put it, “In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.” This aesthetic aversion to ambitious technologies and Promethean modernity communicates precisely the wrong message about what must be done to address new environmental dangers and improve people’s lives.
What is profitable is not always useful, and what is useful is not always profitable. Worse still, many things that undermine human flourishing or even threaten our existence remain profitable, and, without regulatory intervention, companies will continue to produce them.
This — the market’s profit motive, not growth or industrial civilization — caused our climate calamity and the larger biocrisis.
How will a carbon price build a network of electric-vehicle, fast-charging stations? Tesla only builds them in cherry-picked areas where it can rely on profits. Like a private bus company or an internet provider, Elon Musk won’t provide a service where that doesn’t make money. The market leaves the public sector to fill the gap.
Formalism was essentially the application of linguistics to the study of literature [...] content was merely the 'motivation' of form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise. Don Quixote is not 'about' the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique. Animal Farm for the Formalists would not be an allegory of Stalinism; on the contrary, Stalinism would simply provide a useful opportunity for the construction of an allegory. [...]
The Formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more or less arbitrary assemblages of 'devices', and only later came to see these devices as interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual system. 'Devices' included sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative techniques, in fact the whole stock of formal literary elements; and what all of these elements had in common was their 'estranging' or 'defamiliarizing' effect. [...]
[...] The idea that there is a single 'normal' language, a common currency shared equally by all members of society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status and so on. which can by no means be neatly unified into a single homogeneous linguistic community. [...] Even the most 'prosaic' text of the fifteenth century may sound 'poetic' to us today because of its archaism. If we were to stumble across an isolated scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we could not tell whether it was 'poetry' or not merely by inspecting it, since we might have no access to that society's 'ordinary' discourses; [...] We would not be able to tell just by looking at it that it was not a piece of 'realist' literature, without much more information about the way it actually functioned as a piece of writing within the society in question.
[...] There is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever. Any bit of writing may be read 'non-programmatically', if that is what reading a text as literature means, just as any writing may be read 'poetically'. If I pore over the railway timetable not to discover a train connection but to stimulate in myself general reflections on the speed and complexity of modern existence, then I might be said to be reading it as literature. [...] 'Literature' is in this sense a purely formal, empty sort of definition. [...]
[...] All literary works, in other words, are 'rewritten', if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a 're-writing'. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair.
[...] Statements of facts are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on. [...]
as an example, he contrasts so-called descriptive statements like "this cathedral was built in 1612" with value judgements like "this cathedral is magnificent" only to say that the difference between the two is a matter of degree