Emancipatory catastrophism from an East Asian perspective: Feedback from the dialogue organizer

The dialogue with Ulrich Beck published in this issue of Current Sociology was born out of the international workshop held in Seoul in July 2014 on the topic of ‘Emancipatory catastrophism: What does it mean to climate change and risk society?’ Beck came to Seoul with members of his ERC project – Cosmo-Climate – and delivered public speeches and led the workshop for three days. The participants were diverse including those from Europe, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea. The workshop continued as a complex series of discourses, first organized by Seoul National University, then by Seoul City University and, finally, by Seoul Institute and Seoul City Hall. Debates were keenly centered on the new concepts proposed by Beck, namely emancipatory catastrophism and metamorphosis, and thus were stimulating and provocative. Eleven institutions from seven countries represented by the participants signed an MOU (memorandum of understanding) to form the ‘Europe–Asia Research Network’ (EARN) in order to promote the common interests in climate change, risk society and risk governance. Furthermore, in the final forum held at Seoul City Hall with the mayor of Seoul, the ‘Megacity Think Tank Alliance’ was officially announced independent of EARN and started to launch a campaign toward Safe City in Asia. Through these various experiences, the participants felt a warm sense of attachment to each other and inspiration out of which the idea of this dialogue came to channel their shared energy into a new thought experiment.

Beck referred to emancipatory catastrophism in his keynote address at the Potsdam workshop on climate change in November 2013 (Beck, 2014). The workshop was meant to be a brainstorming discussion for his research team. Thus, emancipatory catastrophism was not the main theme, yet this concept turned my attention from a negative to a positive outlook in line with critical theory. Beck himself referred to Bloch’s concept of hope. We discussed a lot about how the term ‘cosmopolitan’ differs from ‘global’ or ‘transnational,’ and explored where the energy might come from for emancipatory catastrophism. The Chinese concept of ‘Tianxia Gongsheng’ (literally translated, ‘living together peacefully under the heaven’) was introduced in this context, and an agreement was reached to hold the next workshop at Seoul in July 2014.

When I met Beck in Munich in May 2014, I suggested he deliver a public lecture with an explicit focus on emancipatory catastrophism. He was well informed on the Sewol ferry disaster, which happened in April 2014 in Korea and left hundreds of high school students buried at sea while the whole nation watched via live television broadcasts. The people were deeply shocked to realize how thoroughly ‘organized irresponsibility’ had penetrated their government organizations and other public institutions whose raison d’être should have been to save the lives of their citizens in danger.

This was why Beck’s lecture at the Press Center in downtown Seoul on 8 July 2014 received such hot public attention. Many people were interested in Beck’s use of the concept of emancipatory catastrophism as a searchlight for contemporary transformation of the world. However, he mainly focused on climate change while introducing the concept of Verwandlung, which is roughly translated from the German as ‘metamorphosis,’ as a key to understanding what he means by emancipatory catastrophism. Thus, in a sense, debate was overloaded by these two highly abstract theoretical concepts. How are these two concepts related to each other? Can the term emancipatory be linked well to metamorphosis when the two terms originated from very different traditions?

Neither his public lecture nor the discussion that followed provided a good answer, yet Beck confirmed that he continues critical theory while rejecting the traditional concepts of revolution, social class and materialism. He challenged many assumptions taken for granted in social science with no clear-cut alternative at hand. As he said, ‘we can identify the process, but are unable to fully define the world. We don’t know what term is appropriate’ (Beck, 2015, 77). Nevertheless, he believed that the concept of metamorphosis, if fully developed, would help us fill the gap.

On the other hand, Beck made a decisive attempt to move into the action-theoretical arena by addressing Hurricane Katrina, which swept the coast of Louisiana, USA in August 2005. He suggested three conceptual lenses: sacred (unwritten) norms of human survival, anthropological shock and social catharsis. We may formulate an empirical proposition from this: ‘the more deeply shocked by a disaster destroying the norm of human survival and justice, the greater energy for cosmopolitan sympathy and solidarity’. In this way, Beck defends ‘an empirical analysis of the normative horizon of the self-critical world risk society’ which differs from all normative approaches in terms of conviction and value judgment (Beck, 2015, 83).

Beck’s Seoul lecture revealed his journey from the West-bound hegemonic conceptions towards a different cosmopolitan worldview. This was so particularly when he talked about a compass for the 21st century. For instance, he did not want to see the transformation of the world from the western vantage point of modernity which had prioritized nation-state, international politics and many epistemic categories as well. Instead, he was searching for another worldview, no longer embedded ‘in paradigms of North and South, neoliberal notions of the “West” and the “rest”, but [which] simultaneously includes the excluded global others so far in unknown trans-border relationships.’ In this regard, it should be remembered that the paradigm of nation-state was suddenly imposed on the evolving world in early modern Europe and spread widely and rapidly, giving rise to hegemonic states in terms of wealth, military, science, technology and ideology. Consequently, we became so familiar with the assumption formulated along these lines, but Beck was looking for perspectives other than this familiar one.

Perhaps I am so keenly inclined to this post-Eurocentic aspect of Beck because I am an Asian, but this reading brought me back to my observation at Potsdam. I may be thinking too far into the future, but I feel that Beck’s imagination has come (unknowingly, though) a bit closer to Tianxia (all under the heaven) and Tianxia Gongsheng as a Chinese worldview from ancient times. ¹ It offers a rich imagination of the universe broader and higher than nation-state and empire. Not only human relations but also ecological interdependencies are built into this worldview. Furthermore, Beck’s interpretation of metamorphosis also leads me to the Chinese way of understanding change in terms of the propensity of things characterized by the reciprocal interaction between ying and yang in multiple movements, as is well illustrated in Yi Jing.

As a whole, Beck’s Seoul lecture turned out to be significant as an attempt at a dialogue in its genuine sense (Han, 2015). In fact, Beck proposed a dialogue with East Asia in his lecture at Nagoya, Japan in November 2010. ² He criticized the long-standing Eurocentric assumptions of the social sciences and emphasized the need for a cosmopolitan turn. Treating western modernity as one of many historical trajectories, Beck expected East Asia to be able to ‘correct and redefine the self-understanding of European modernity’ by looking at Europe ‘from a non-European perspective, that is, with Asian eyes’ (Beck, 2010: 16). In Seoul, then, Beck seemed to have moved in this direction further by suggesting the concept of metamorphosis as a way of doing research in need of such dialogue.

So far so good. But it must be acknowledged that difficulties and ambiguities were also unavoidable because neither a clear-cut research methodology nor case study of metamorphosis was available. There was a shared feeling that the spirit of the Seoul workshop might give rise to a new paradigm of thinking later on, but the need for experimental testing was also felt strongly. However, we did not know what to do. Only when I was relaxing a bit at Yokohama after the Seoul workshop did it suddenly come to my mind that it was the right time to pursue a dialogue in a journal and conduct a thought experiment for this. There seemed to be so many interesting issues available for dialogue, particularly for case study. Beck had already referred to the metamorphosis of generation, social movements and international relations. Thus, I met Beck again at Yokohama and he welcomed the idea. Some participants who also came to Yokohama to join the 2014 World Congress of Sociology expressed a willingness to join in. Thus, I formulated a proposal and gave it to the editor of Current Sociology, who kindly accepted it.

In response to the initial letter of invitation to participate in this dialogue, 17 colleagues sent me their abstracts by the end of July. The feedback was quick and hot. The article guidelines and the criteria of evaluation were sent to the authors to make it clear that the focus of dialogue must be on the two key concepts of emancipatory catastrophism and metamorphosis. The purpose of the dialogue was to test the relevance of Beck’s proposal in Seoul. In this sense, priority could be given to case study, but conceptual and methodological discussion was also encouraged.

Twelve dialogue articles were solicited by the end of August. Since I had initiated this dialogue and all the engaged colleagues wanted to join in, I found myself in the position of selecting five pieces out of the many articles that qualified by applying the said criteria of evaluation. Some articles were indeed excellent in dealing with salient aspects of cosmopolitan change and could have nicely fitted the purpose of the dialogue if their focus had been explicitly on the two key theoretical concepts. In particular, the articles by Sun-Jin Yun, Julia Guivant, Chan-Sook Hong and Line Marie Thorsen were considered worthy candidates for case study but were not chosen because the full description of the way in which the problems investigated were produced as a metamorphosis was less coherent than the two case studies shown in this publication. For these reasons, five dialogue articles were finally selected and the authors were required to go through revision according to the critical remarks supplied to them.

The most clear-cut and perhaps successful case study was presented by Young-Hee Shim, who interpreted metamorphosis and emancipatory catastrophism as an interlocking double process led by push and pull factors of transformation. She then applied this conceptual innovation to transnational marriage in Korea and showed how the process of transformation yielded emancipatory effects out of catastrophe. This article was chosen because it demonstrated clearly how one can investigate the process of metamorphosis of transformation by utilizing the available sociological scheme, methodology and data collection.

The article by Ana María Vara examines the changing pattern of politics in South America by focusing on the struggle over the use of lithium as a key component of electric cars. Though it is conceptually less sharp than the former case study, this study explores successfully how one can benefit from Beck’s new concepts for a macro-historical investigation of the colonial trajectories as well as the emerging new horizon of equality. This article was chosen as another model of case study which grasps the historical dynamics of transformation from the perspective of metamorphosis and emancipatory catastrophism.

Three other articles chosen are of different kinds. First, the article by Zhifei Mao concisely grasps three characteristics of metamorphosis and explores under which conditions different frames of disaster meet together to form a dialogical risk community. Her contribution lies in exploring the possibility of comparative study. For this, she examined the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as a transportation disaster and the financial market crashes which followed it. Her question is: why are different frames of disaster linked to each other to form a dialogical risk community in some instances, whereas it is not in other instances? No definitive answer was given, yet the article was chosen because it shows a significant thought experiment aimed at testing the conditions for the empirical relevance of Beck’s concept of catharsis.

Second, the article by Shinichiro Asayama presents a critical debate. He acknowledges the insights of geoengineering since it offers a technical solution to climate change in the case that all the measures designed and recommended to reduce greenhouse gas emission fail. In this sense, he keeps a balance between the emancipatory and apocalyptic outlooks of catastrophe. Since a technological version of emancipation as a response to climate change is conceivable, it is important where to place geoengineering in the two contradictory outlooks of catastrophe. Asayama is not clear-cut in this regard, yet this article was chosen because it facilities a critical debate. One can ask if the position of emancipatory catastrophism can indeed strengthen democracy and renewal of modernity, whereas the other position is likely to reinforce technocratic rule.

Finally, the article by Anders Blok shows a good methodological reasoning. The concept of a middle-range approach to cosmopolitan study reminds us of Robert K Merton. However, the proposed methodology is more about how to present a cosmopolitan research study than how to investigate the transformation of the world as such. Cosmopolitan research of metamorphosis aims to incorporate the excluded others by practically engaging itself in an open-ended dialogue. As Blok puts it, the cosmopolitan research acts ‘as an intellectual space of “inter-crossings”.’ In this sense, it differs from the conventional paradigm of scientific methodology. This article was chosen since it clarifies an important methodological condition of cosmopolitan research.

Having so introduced the various contributions to the dialogue, I want to go back to Beck’s Seoul lecture to assess where this dialogue stands. Beck opened up new questions by combining the concepts of emancipatory catastrophism and metamorphosis. First, we can ask whether capitalist globalization today comes close to a catastrophe or not. If it does, is it likely to move in the direction of emancipation, or apocalypse? What kinds of projects might be conceivable in each direction? Second, how can we study the dynamics of catastrophe? Should we take methodological nationalism for granted or break away from it by radically reformulating basic assumptions of social science as Beck argues? Third, metamorphosis sensitizes attention to the intermingled flows of the reciprocal relationship between intended and unintended consequences in historical change. How can we grasp these dynamics? What kind of methodology is available? Fourth, Beck even claims that the concept of metamorphosis ‘enables a completely new view of the world. In fact, it enables the understanding of the DNA of the world in that the interlocked double process can be imaged as a sociological equivalent to the double helix.’ Can we indeed share this great ambition?

The dialogue shown in this issue of Current Sociology is no more that an initial step of forward-looking collaboration. It is hoped that this dialogue will invite further attempts to test the concepts of emancipatory catastrophism and metamorphosis. It would be highly stimulating and encouraging to bring East Asia, particularly China, into dialogue with western sociology in general and Beck’s new theoretical concepts in particular. In view of the reality of accumulating global risks today, Beck’s Seoul proposal is appealing to East Asia where risk perception is serious, perhaps more serious than any other place in the world, while strong normative traditions are still alive against this tendency, calling for a new paradigm of civilization.