How Not to Learn From Catastrophe

Narrating Catastrophe

Historically, secularized narratives of catastrophes gained salience among urban elites in the west during the eighteenth century. ⁵ Theology and providence increasingly gave way to naturalist and social explanations. Rousseau’s famous critique of Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake is emblematic of this transition. ⁶ So are Daniel Defoe’s reflections on the plague that afflicted southern France in 1720–1721, where he alluded to notions of shared responsibility for the plague, thus paying attention to the role of human action in it, although he carefully distinguished the part played by Providence from that of humans, as he duly noted it in his Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well as for Soul and Body (1722). ⁷ Accordingly, from the eighteenth century on, two main political responses to catastrophe emerged, both of which crystallized in the aftermaths of the eighteenth-century Lisbon and Lima earthquakes, as well as during the plague in London in 1655, as recorded by Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): on the one hand, an enlightened despotism of autocratic elites that is best exemplified by the figure of the Marquês de Pombal in Portugal, an enlightened autocrat if there ever was one; on the other, the surge of moral economies in which bonds of solidarity were forged by the ephemeral experience of common vulnerability that the disasters had so painfully brought about. ⁸ The latter, however, proved to be short-lived, whereas the former has had many afterlives and it has continued to live on under different guises: the expert, the scientist, the philosopher, the public officer, becoming its most prominent examples. Mutatis mutandis, this pattern of response has continued unabated in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. Yet in these responses there is a distinctive dimension that bears on the ways in which catastrophes impinge on political life, one that is intrinsically connected to the ways in which catastrophes are narrated nowadays, the temporality these narratives betray, and their role in the advent of distinctive forms of catastrophization.

Contemporary narratives of catastrophe at once exhibit and perform a particular temporality: often, a catastrophe becomes emblematized as belonging to the past, as a memory to learn from, in order to avoid a future catastrophe. Herein lies the rhetorical strategy that contemporary narratives of catastrophe share with the discourse of human rights that became hegemonic in the aftermath of the cold war: both sport a tendency to appeal to evils past in order to normalize the present, thus creating a rhetorical and temporal gulf between, say, past catastrophes and the catastrophic (and catastrophizing) present, whose catastrophic nature is thus rendered invisible, in the name of averting a future catastrophe. ⁹ Still, narratives of catastrophe not only describe the catastrophe in question but also narrate it and thus tacitly place political subjects as participants from whose standpoint the catastrophe in question is narrated. In literary terms, description tends to connote the position of an external observer that describes a phenomenon; narrative, in contrast, conjures the experience of the participant who has a stake in the phenomenon in question. ¹⁰ Hence, the political valences of narratives of catastrophe today, which encompass the citizen as a labile participant who, however powerless, is invited to tacitly authorize those in power to respond to the catastrophic menace described, and to render the response legitimate, as part of the depoliticized politics that characterize the present.

Yet despite the strong connotation of discontinuity, catastrophes are never ex nihilo, however surprising and shocking their unfolding might prove to be in the eyes of contemporaries. When catastrophes occur they always extend to a before and an after: the before is what feeds into the advent of catastrophes, the dynamics of political power, cultural beliefs, and economic imperatives that mediate the propelling of these events; and the after is the unraveling of their effects, an unraveling that has an element of boundlessness yet it is always mediated, and sometimes significantly structured, by the before that precedes it. ¹¹ And how that before is remembered and re-represented—in sum, how it is narrated–further mediates the ways in which present-day catastrophes are presented, addressed, or mishandled. As both concept and narrative trope, catastrophe invokes ideas of renewal and destruction, even of utopia. But narratives are not plenipotentiary over the events narrated; nor are catastrophes infinitely malleable or inescapably indeterminate. The dialectical mediation of continuity and discontinuity, history and event, in which many a historical sedimentation remains, is at work and thoroughly mediates any catastrophe that is part of a historical process. ¹²

Critical reckonings with the before and after, in their temporal and spatial differentiations, provide the historical limits and empirical controls that significantly structure the narratives

choices that can plausibly be offered about any given catastrophe. ¹³ From a political perspective, the question then is whether or not a narrative of catastrophe accurately captures the ordering of structures and events it seeks to apprehend. This also bears on how effectively a political theory can conceptualize catastrophes. While in logical or philosophical constructions it is enough to elegantly pursue the immanent logic of one’s argument apodictically, in any political theory that claims to have a critical and political import there is the imperative to mediate the theoretical with the political world and the historical processes mediating it, as well as to ponder the adequacy of one’s theoretical commitments with the world one is interpreting. The latter demands, among other things, that the critic systematically ponders the adequacy of her interpretation of a historically constituted political world, as well as that of her theory vis-à-vis the political world or phenomena in question. For a political theory of catastrophe the central political question of who is deploying a narrative of catastrophe in the name of what or whom and to what political end.

Catastrophes are, accordingly, often narrated in reference to “axial” years or events. These events then become signifiers for caesuras, or so-called watersheds, that are recast as turning points, or breaks, that reset the historical continuum by disjointing the past from the present and redirecting the future in a new direction. Axial events simultaneously become starting points and fixed points of reference that reorganize historical thinking and political action with corollary forms of fidelity and partisanship. Fredric Jameson’s recent formulation of the dialectic of partisanship and event, and how it unfolds in historical narratives, neatly captures an important aspect of this process. It is worth invoking it to shed light on how narratives of catastrophe work and how these contribute to the catastrophization of political life. Partisanship to “an axial-event,” Jameson writes, “governs our historical sympathies and divides the historical cast of characters up into heroes and villains.” ¹⁴ Of course, these forms of partisanship need not revert to moralizing discourse and can be framed in strictly political terms. Regardless, narratives that uncritically pivot on axial years-events impair the ability to cognitively map the continuities and discontinuities mediating the axial-event in question. In the case of catastrophes, a narrative that occludes the advent of a catastrophe tends to dehistoricize and depoliticize it. These narratives could also impair the citizen’s ability to re-cognize catastrophes and the politically constituted scenes of power in which these unfold, thus reverting to the forms of discursive catastrophization. ¹⁵

The Catastrophization of Political Life

What does it mean to speak of the catastrophization of political life? Adi Ophir’s work is the obvious point of departure to elucidate this phenomenon, however far one wanders from the conceptual terms of his seminal contribution. ¹⁶ Without too much simplification, one can summarize Ophir’s account of the politics of catastrophization as follows: it rests on a two-tier concept of catastrophization that emphasizes two dimensions, the subjective “cognitive bias,” diagnosed by cognitive psychologists as the anxious distorting of a reality, and the objective dimension that signals the actual existence of a catastrophic condition. This account relies on a conceptual distinction between catastrophe as a “large-scale” disaster, “an event in the strong sense of the term,” and catastrophization understood “as a process in which natural and man-made forces and factors work together to create devastating effects on a large population” (“catastrophization is a process in which catastrophe is imminent,” as he puts it). It is on the basis of these conceptual parameters that Ophir delineates two kinds of catastrophization at work in states of emergency: on the one hand, “catastrophic suspension,” by which he denotes the intensification of “security related apparatus” by strong states, with the collusion of humanitarians, in managing the threshold of catastrophe/catastrophization; and, on the other hand, “nongovernmental catastrophization,” where weak states fail and humanitarians establish ad hoc collaborations with “local authorities of all kind.” ¹⁷

There are a series of important corollaries to these main conceptual signposts. One corollary is clear enough: catastrophization could at once be an object of concern and a process. Another is how Ophir distinguishes two planes of catastrophization—the objective and the discursive. He then identifies three modalities of the latter: discursive catastrophization as legitimization, mitigation, and suspension. ¹⁸ These conceptual layers conform a constellation by means of which Ophir maps the forms of catastrophization at work in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. ¹⁹ In the occupation, the State manages the threshold of violence and catastrophization, secures its legitimacy, while nominally securing control over Palestinians by keeping them “at the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe.” ²⁰

Ophir’s account has many advantages, not least of which is the way it allows for a powerful mapping of catastrophic situations. It is also conceptually rich: here, catastrophization figures as a noun, adjective, and verb; namely, as a concept denoting an objective reality and a discursive process. (It could also be deployed as a narrative category.) On the basis of this theorization, albeit this is not a road he takes, this account of catastrophization can be recast dialectically: catastrophization is, at once, a cause and an effect, a vanishing mediator, as it were, of the dialectic of order and irruption that is intrinsic to catastrophe as a concept. ²¹ For processes of catastrophization quite often trigger or mediate the advent of a catastrophe, are constitutive of the actual catastrophe, or conform its aftermaths. And yet, just as often, these mediations vanished from narrative accounts of catastrophes. Georg Lukács foreshadowed an aspect of this dialectic when he suggestively pointed out that “‘sudden’ catastrophes are actually long in preparation” and how these “do not stand in exclusive contrast to an apparently peaceful flow but are the outcome of a complicated uneven evolution.” ²² In a way, Ophir’s original contribution could be seen as analytically and critically making good on the promise of this insight. But Lukács emphasized another dimension, that of representation: “A crisis appears as a ‘catastrophe’ which ‘suddenly’ interrupts the ‘normal’ flow of the economy. By analogy, every revolution is considered catastrophic and abnormal.” ²³ Accordingly, the political valences of normalcy and catastrophe—order and irruption—are to a large extent ideologically and discursively constituted. And so are the aftermaths of the catastrophe, and how the nature of the break it supposedly brings about is narrated.

These insights bear on any dialectical conceptualization of catastrophe in its different modalities, and in its spatial and temporal differentiations. Yet there is an aspect of “discursive catastrophization,” a political effect of it, as it were, that remains outside Ophir’s rich conceptualization but is of fundamental importance to dialectically recast the intersections between catastrophe and catastrophization. This could be called the catastrophization of political life. By following Ophir in deploying this term from cognitive psychology, which signals a “cognitive bias”—according to the Oxford English Dictionary, catastrophizing signifies a distressing psychic condition that misrecognizes a given situation, blows it out of proportion, and perceives it to be increasing over time to the extent of it becoming ultimately unmanageable, thus presenting situations as worse than they are—the effects of the shadowy presence of catastrophe in political life can be critically delineated as a modality of preemptive legitimization. Hence, the expression “catastrophization of political life” carries at the very least a dual meaning: it connotes an increasing awareness of vulnerability to forms of power, the pervasiveness of superfluous suffering and destruction, and the need to be politically alert to these, in order to mitigate or avert catastrophes, but it also denotes the ways in which the rhetoric of catastrophe, its menacing shadows, is deployed to depoliticize populations, as well as to legitimize catastrophic situations that are already under way. This, in order to establish a threshold in which state power is not only exercised but regularized, and normalized, in fundamentally antidemocratic ways.

Herein, the focus will be on the second connotation. For it is in this connotation that the dialectic of the upside of down is at work—namely, the ways in which every loss is presented as an opportunity for renewal, often in tandem with civilizational and market imperatives—as cheerfully suggested by political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon. ²⁴ This dialectic has the effect of authorizing the expansion of unaccountable power, while selectively recognizing catastrophes to achieve this end. The upside of down is how a catastrophe, say, a hurricane or earthquake, creates possibilities for the renewal of the prevalent order of power, capitalism as a mode of production, and its political and cultural determinations.

Cast in this way, the urge to catastrophize has a depoliticizing effect. Sometimes the expectation of the “big” catastrophe, an event whose arrival is sometimes presented as beyond our control, not out of sober awareness of unpredictability but by means of bombastic catastrophization, casts a long shadow over the routinized and everyday catastrophes that actually occur. Slavoj Žižek has provided an important contrast: “the big, spectacular catastrophic event, the abrupt irruption from some other world, and the dreary persistence of a hopeless condition, the blighted existence that goes on indefinitely, life as one long emergency.” ²⁵ Better still, the abrupt break with the present that is associated with the big catastrophe overshadows the ways in which that present is a normalized catastrophic condition that questions the periodization that posits a catastrophe as an undetermined punctual-event, a break between what precedes and follows it. One of the ideological effects that the catastrophization of political life brings about is thus to at best misrecognize, and at worst render invisible, the catastrophic nature of capitalism, and its catastrophic and catastrophizing core. Nowadays, the devising of solutions to prevent certain catastrophes, such as economic and environmental collapse, consist of piecemeal adjustments, oftentimes at the level of consumption, thus divorcing these strategies from any analysis of how the structural imperatives of, say, capitalism, along with its debris, mediate the advent and effects of the catastrophe in question.

This insight is relevant for the dialectic of Catastrophe and catastrophe—two modalities of catastrophe that share the moment of large-scale destruction, but do so at different temporalities. While Catastrophes are Events, catastrophes are non-events. And catastrophization, pace Ophir, is not synonymous of catastrophe. ²⁶ Catastrophization is conceptually different from these modalities of catastrophe in terms of the scale and sheer unity or coherence of the dreary process (catastrophe) or event (Catastrophe), even if in its discursive and objective forms it thoroughly mediates them. Not only the catastrophization of political life has a strong depoliticizing effect, it also frequently mediates the aforementioned dialectic of Catastrophe and catastrophe. Sometimes the expectation of the Catastrophe, an event whose imminent arrival is presented as beyond our control, invites the normalization and moralization of otherwise violent exercises of power. It could also lead to political neutralizations, and other forms of liberal-capitalist pacification, including the legitimation of the neutralization of the entire political field. By portending a caesura between present and past, and privileging the visibility of the catastrophic Event, the invocation of past Catastrophes tends to occlude the more routine, normalized catastrophes. Similarly, the catastrophic and catastrophizing aspects of the present, and the ways in which it actually mediates and structures the vulnerability to future catastrophes—which, as explained above, is the other aspect of the catastrophization of political life—could be rendered invisible by the expectation of the Catastrophe. Contemporary discussions of this dialectic have a tripartite structure that is ultimately irreducible to any of its parts: the prevention of Catastrophe renders invisible catastrophes and processes of catastrophization; the memory of Catastrophe is deployed to normalize the present and occlude how crises, catastrophes and Catastrophes are sometimes mutually mediated; and yet, once critically historicized, a Catastrophe can either become the crystallization of ongoing crises or catastrophes, or loom as a specter that becomes the mirror of catastrophes, or of processes of catastrophization. All in all, what is crucial is to discern, through temporal and spatial differentiations, how Catastrophes either render visible or conceal catastrophes, objective processes of catastrophization, and crises, by way of the discursive catastrophization of political life.

Still, a question lingers: how does one conceptualize catastrophe dialectically? A first step consists of parsing out its different connotations, and how it intersects with crisis, a coupling that mediates contemporary discourse. Catastrophe and crisis, to be sure, overlap in their respective conceptual, historical, and political determinations. Yet there are important, fundamental distinctions between the two concepts and the objective processes these denote. In its modern acceptation, “crisis” carries a strong temporal dimension that conjures ideas about the “pressure of time” and the need for swift action in the face of alarming, potentially calamitous situations. Along these lines, the concept of “crisis” is associated with a unique transition, a phase in history, thus evoking a sense of change and immanence as part of a prolonged transitional phase that at once suggests change and continuity; transformations that nevertheless do not alter the fundamental structure of the system or order in question. “Crisis” often signifies a structural malfunction in a continual process; at other times it is understood as an indeterminate chain of events that nonetheless could lead to a catastrophic finale, a decisive turning point whose advent creates situations of momentous consequences for which decisive and equally momentous action is demanded. ²⁷ The term catastrophe, however, implies notions of dramatic and destructive “overturning,” a “sudden turn,” an “overthrowing,” and the violent and swift “subversion of the order or system of things.” ²⁸ As such, it has become central in narratives of violence about the past century and its unprecedented nature, which is often periodized by reference to an age of catastrophes. ²⁹ Catastrophic events thus become visible markers for change. Meanwhile, catastrophes can trigger or ephemerally represent—that is, make either intelligible or visible—a crisis at a different level, say, the crisis of legitimacy of a particular regime, which, in turn, can lead to another catastrophic situation. Unlike crises, however, catastrophes are always destructive, even when cast as nonevents. While a crisis can mediate the destructiveness of a catastrophe, it, in of itself, need not be destructive.

Yet conceptualizing the catastrophization of political life raises other political questions. Insofar as it casts the present as the moment after Catastrophe, it mediates and consolidates a post-political public discourse, what thinkers from Wang Hui to Sheldon S. Wolin have referred to as “depoliticized politics” or an age of “post-democracy” that is flooded with catastrophic imagery and pleas for averting future catastrophes whose political nature is often disavowed; likewise, it authorizes the vacuous instrumentalization of human rights and genocide that rely on a rather conceited account of human suffering from the perspective of would-be saviors. The catastrophization of political life instills a sense of fidelity to the State and its imperatives of security and power, which, in addition to contributing to the assertion of the State’s power and its domestic legitimacy, further pushes the threshold of legitimate power and violence in increasingly anti-democratic ways with catastrophizing effects on the quality of political life.

Learning from Catastrophe?

The admonition to the French is a subtle instantiation of discursive catastrophization that tacitly operates within the dialectic of the upside of down, which has become a master trope in many narratives of Europe’s phoenix-like reemergence from the catastrophic history of the twentieth century—a dialectic that figures prominently in Habermas’s writings of the past twenty years. Europe’s “second chance” consists in leading the way for the emergence of a cosmopolitan order, the post-national constellation that since the nineties Habermas has consistently conjured. ³⁰ It is thus worth interrogating the specific narrative of catastrophe that informs Habermas, how it is built in the architecture of his theory, its theoretical significance and import. For an engagement with his reflections provides an opportunity to probe the ways in which a narrative of catastrophe reverts into discursive catastrophization and how in the name of past catastrophes, objective processes of catastrophization are either rendered invisible or authorized.

Habermas’s critical theory relies on a narrative of learning from catastrophes that identifies 1945 as a turning point that splits the historical continuum. On the basis of this narrative of catastrophe, the architecture of his critical theory not only disavows any robust form of collective action that could transform the mainstay of political life, but also occludes and tacitly normalizes catastrophic forms of power and its violent imperatives, which remain outside the purview of the rather limited sense of political agency that his critical theory avows. There are, of course, other mediations and traditions at work in constituting his theoretical and political choices. Yet these are received and incorporated within the architecture of a theory that is anchored on a series of normative and philosophical-political commitments that are overdetermined by the experience of German catastrophe and liberation. ³¹ Here 1945 becomes an axial year, as the indelible imprint of this existentially experienced catastrophe powerfully bears on the architecture of his political theory and the penchant for the apodictic in his neo-Kantian metatheoretical choices. The reckoning emblematized by 1945 instilled in him a theoretical and political disposition towards the liberal-democratic legacy of the Allied liberators, which became central for his subsequent theorization of democracy. Whilst he was momentarily radicalized by his encounter with Marxism and the Frankfurt school, with The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) standing as its noble monument, the onset of the sixties gave Habermas pause, as the militancy and anti-imperialism of the student movement threatened to challenge the order bequeathed in 1945. Following ’68, his liberal-democratic skepticism about collective emancipation became more deep seated in the architecture of his critical theory. ³² With the ending of the cold war, learning from an age of catastrophe (encompassing economic depression, war, and fascism) became the central leitmotif.

Yet despite asserting that Auschwitz is “the completely unspeakable breach in civilization,” and the prominent place accorded to its memory in his political writings and interventions, Auschwitz is not explicitly thematized in the form and content of Habermas’s critical theory. ³³ Indeed, one is hard pressed to find an elucidation of catastrophe as a concept in his writings. ³⁴ But under the detached, cold surface of Habermas’s philosophical prose lurk the shadows of the European age of catastrophe, at once informing his political interventions and theoretical writings. Their centrality has been systematically unearthed in Martin Beck Matuštík’s formidable intellectual portrait. ³⁵ The atrocities of the Third Reich, along with the liberation of Germany at the hands of the Allies, have been at the forefront of Habermas’s thinking, at least since the 1950s, and have informed his political interventions, ranging from his reactions to the student movement in the late sixties to the Historians Debate (Historikerstreit) of the eighties and the subsequent debates on German unification, humanitarian wars, and the post-national constellation. ³⁶ As Matuštík’s intellectual portrait has shown in spellbinding detail, both the most courageous and the least attractive features of Habermas’s political interventions can be traced back to the lessons learned in 1945: on one side, his admirable retort to the counterrevolutionary reaction during the German Autumn of 1977, his interventions against German neo-conservatism and the Historians Debate; on the other, his acquiescence with NATO after 1989—Desert Storm and Kosovo—and the idealization of the historical and political trajectory of the American architects of the Federal Republic and of the EU.

Whereas the experience of catastrophe and the need to learn from it emerged as an explicit vector in Habermas’s critical theory during the eighties and nineties, the centrality of learning from history has long been a pervasive idea in his work. It is present, early on, in his recasting of historical materialism and the legacy of critical theory, and it relies on his philosophy of history. ³⁷ The memory of catastrophe is thus not only crucial for Habermas’s political choices. It has also informed his philosophical commitments. Of course, this is not to say that Habermas’s political and metacritical writings always move on a par. Rather, the point is to emphasize the ways in which the historical experience of 1945 became a political and existential axial-year that mediates not only his political thought but also his theoretical cast of mind. ³⁸ Philosophically, Habermas’s variation of neo-Kantianism is best understood as a way to find, in the realm of the quasi-transcendental, apodictic principles to avert the forms of decisionism and nihilism that he casts as creating the conditions for a relapse into a new age of catastrophes. Habermas, to be sure, has consistently qualified his transcendental as “quasi.” Yet the important point here is that, like Kant, however mediated by agency and history, his account ultimately seeks to find apodictic validity for the quasi-transcendental structure of his philosophy. ³⁹ For the most part, Habermas establishes points of contact between his philosophical commitments with historical experience only to identify anticipatory trends, not challenges, to theoretical constructions that are ultimately conceived independent of it, even if the impetus to do so is thoroughly historical and informed by a particular political experience.

Politically, Habermas’s self-professed orientation to the West after 1945 has entailed the normalization of the Federal Republic and, subsequently, Berlin Republic, and a post-democratic conception of “deliberative democracy.” That this conception of democracy is post-democratic could be clearly seen in his disavowals of any “direct intervention” in the self-steering mechanisms of capitalist markets and administration. Already in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, he explicitly argued that encroachments on the lifeworld must not be challenged by direct action aiming at restructuring the mainstay of the political economy. Rather, these need to be rebuffed by indirect impulses from the lifeworld, once its sensors have detected variations in the encroachments of the self-steering mechanisms of money and administration. ⁴⁰ It remains unclear how exactly the lifeworld—the stuff of “civil society,” say, voluntary associations, families, and social movements, the realm of communicative reason and popular legitimacy—can substantively and effectively perform these duties of boundary-keeper when any participatory sense of decentralized shared power, sine qua non of meaningful collective action and shared fate, is debarred in advance. What is clear, however, is how in the content of these formulations, and in the chosen terms to couch them—here the technocratic jargon of sensors and, later on, that of sluices, stadiums, and peripheries—Habermas is unambiguous about the limited role of the lifeworld in organizing collective life. Herein, popular sovereignty is emptied of any substantive meaning and rendered incapable of mustering any collective will to directly intervene in the structuring of these self-steering systems, even if collective life depends on them. Rather, it could only sensitize these systems from afar, without undue interventions.

Habermas, to be sure, has clearly stated that the conditions “worthy of human beings” are defined as “an acceptable balance between money, power, and solidarity.” ⁴¹ But the displacements in subsequent formulations tell the tale: from the earlier assertion about the possibility of the life-world “prevailing” over these self-steering mechanisms to reframing their relation as that of “an acceptable balance” to later on recasting it as merely “holding its own.” Displacements that, as Perry Anderson has shown, emblematize the declension of the democratic content of his “discourse theory of democracy.” ⁴² Rather than enacting political vectors to interrogate current forms of power, the net effect of this balancing act, which ultimately merely means holding one’s own, is to render invisible their catastrophizing nature and disavowing any meaningful form of collective action in the name of a catastrophic past. Disavowals that mediate a rather thin conception of democracy, as a host of scholars have scrupulously demonstrated. ⁴³

Just how thin is this idea of democracy is clearly seen in Habermas’s political-theoretical summa, Between Facts and Norms, where he contrasts the liberal conception of democratic will-formation, whose main function is “legitimating the exercise of political power,” with the more vigorous republican emphasis on “constituting society.” He further asserts that “discourse theory” brings an alternative to this contrast—a synthesis in which “the procedures and communicative presuppositions of democratic opinion- and will-formation” become the “sluices of the discursive rationalization of the decisions of an administration bound by law and statute.” Habermas then anti-climatically writes: “The public opinion that is worked up via democratic procedures into communicative power cannot ‘rule’ of itself but can only point the use of administrative power in specific directions.” ⁴⁴ It is along these lines that Habermas expresses his commitment “to tame the capitalist system,” a laudable left-liberal goal. But his theory cannot muster the political energy—indeed, it explicitly inhibits it—to even timidly tame capitalism, let alone “‘restructure’ it socially and ecologically,” as he, at his boldest moments, still claims. ⁴⁵ Rather than an active citizenry, what we have is an episodic actor whose appearance in the political arena is the exception and not the rule. According to Habermas, a citizenry becomes active in times of crises. And yet, how a strong sense of political identity, which, in of itself, is only the effect of political experience gained through significant share in power, could be maintained in conditions of normalized depoliticization that have a catastrophic effect on political life, thus keeping citizens at the “periphery” of political power, is nowhere satisfactorily addressed in his political theory. Politics thus become the arena in which others act and citizens nod at a distance. Citizens thus norm the facts by mass, communicative approbation, not by radical politicization, let alone mobilization, aiming at reorganizing the mainstay of political life. Here is Habermas’s construction: “a crisis consciousness in the periphery” may elicit an endogenous mobilization that “can be successful, because the endogenous mobilization of the public sphere activates an otherwise latent dependency built into the internal structure of every public sphere, a dependency also present in the normative self-understanding of the mass media: the players in the arena owe their influence to the approval of those in the galley.” ⁴⁶ At his most hopeful, Habermas seems to find solace in the insight that normative surpluses can be effective. But an endogenous citizen that needs no political tending—that is, without the nurturing and forms of political literacy and skill that can only be instilled by active experience of shared power—is, historically speaking, no more credible than one of the cornerstones of his theory: the mythical co-originality of democracy and the rule of law. ⁴⁷ Habermas’s discourse theory of democracy fittingly depoliticizes democratic practices and makes them amenable to a post-political condition, thus rendering democracy and the lifeworld powerless to confront the predicaments of power the theory is supposed to denounce in order to fulfill its critical vocation. The language of post-democracy, so belatedly encountered by Habermas, is a more fitting description of his political theory than that of radical democracy. ⁴⁸

Unsurprisingly, the philosophical rejection of collective subjectivity has not traveled well to the political field, where the democratic deficit of these consensual, “subjectless” constructions is discernable at all levels. These limitations have become hardened with the onset of the current financial crisis. ⁴⁹ For one thing becomes clear: while Habermas offers a plea for a supranational solution to social welfare, he debars any attempt at a domestic restructuring of the political economy beyond capitalism and the drawing of enmity lines that it entails, let alone a vigorous sense of democracy to rein in capital. Or as he has put it, “The notion that politics can ‘catch up’ with markets by ‘growing up in their wake’ is, of course, not meant to evoke the image of a struggle for power between political and economic actors.” ⁵⁰ For deliberative democracy precisely disavows the “modicum of real sovereignty” that is a condition of possibility for “popular efforts,” and the political forms, including the nation-state, which, as Jameson has pointedly argued, “remains the only concrete terrain and framework for political struggle.” ⁵¹ And even though rhetorical space is made for some level of “institutional fantasy,” nowhere does the theory reflect on the political powerlessness involved when the domestic level—in which the pews where citizen-spectators sit are closer to the arena, to use his metaphor—in turn becomes a distant pew in the post-national constellation. ⁵² Instead, to avoid “alarmist feelings of enlightened helplessness,” he casts the post-national constellation and the EU as harboring the possibilities to redress some of these questions. The key to make up for democratic deficits and powerlessness at home would be found in Brussels when a “lagging political integration” finally catches up with its economic counterpart, and a sense of solidarity is built on the basis of a common history that, if properly fostered, could yield “a common political culture.” ⁵³ That way, national governments could potentially “recover in Brussels” some of the power that they have lost with the onset of globalization. ⁵⁴ Yet it remains equally unclear whether an extension of “civic solidarity” could threaten, let alone undermine, the insulation of markets from democratic accountability that historically has been constitutive of the EU. But acknowledging the elitist nature of this quasi-polity, as Habermas has recently done, in no way justifies the “substantialization” of ideas of the people, or the nation. ⁵⁵

1945, an Axial Year

In Habermas’s critical theory, 1945 thus emerges as an axial year, and the simultaneous destruction and liberation of Germany by the Allies as an axial event. ⁵⁶ And it is out of this axial year-event that Habermas’s stout advocacy for an orientation to the West emerges. With admirable candor, he has asserted that 1945 was “an eye-opening juncture” that entailed nothing less than the decisive defeat of fascism. ⁵⁷ In Habermas’s account, the normative import of this juncture gained institutional expression under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. One of the most important legacies of Adenauer’s foreign policy was how “it tied the republic to the west”; Adenauer’s act is thus seen as “a way of breaking with the wrong continuities in our political culture.” ⁵⁸ As Perry Anderson has accurately put it, politically, this orientation to the west has entailed a “tacit identification” with “the Anglo-phone Allies who were the architects of the Federal Republic.” ⁵⁹

But this orientation has an existential significance, too. Habermas’s ambivalence about tradition, from which he has also derived his accounts of post-traditional and post-conventional identity is grounded in these events. ⁶⁰ History is thus cast as carrying a negative import: it “may at best be a critical teacher who tells us how we ought not to do things.” ⁶¹ History’s lessons are negative enough, and not meant to inaugurate a new social order with a substantive commitment to democracy and a robust sense of justice and emancipation, but to avoid the recurrence of the Nazi catastrophe and thus provide theoretical and institutional bulwarks against it. Indeed, the kind of historical representation that Habermas endorses is one conducive to a constitutional patriotism anchored on past lessons. ⁶²

How important is 1945 becomes clearer in The Postnational Constellation where in response to the zeitgeist of the nineties and its emphasis on catastrophe as the century drew to an end Habermas lays out the centrality of three dates that conform the relevant periodization of his account of the twentieth century: 1914, 1945, and 1989. Out of the three, 1945 becomes an axial year-event that separated the age of catastrophes from the rest of the century. Politically, 1945 allegorizes anti-Fascism: “the defeat of fascism” constitutes “the very event that not only divides [the] century chronologically, but also constitutes an economic, political and above all a normative watershed.” ⁶³ 1945 represented nothing less than the decisive defeat of counterrevolution in Germany.

Habermas’s narrative of 1945 is certainly correct in seeing the outcome of the European civil war as the final defeat of the counterrevolution in core Europe. ⁶⁴ Even so, these historical narratives are partial, if not entirely inaccurate. Even if it is accurate to say that the furies of the Old Regime were soundly defeated in 1945, not only Franco and Salazar outlived this periodization but during the cold war forms of counterrevolution persisted, largely sponsored by the United States. ⁶⁵ Likewise, Nazism was finally defeated with the titanic, catastrophic effort of the great patriotic war at the heart of the USSR, and anti-Fascism was equally constituted by an Eastern variant. ⁶⁶ But to let any of this to bear on the narrative would complicate the story Habermas tells around 1945. ⁶⁷ Instead, a selective account of 1945, and the orientation to the West that it at once marks and emblematizes, has led to a form of partisanship that has significantly misrecognized the forms of power crystallized in the post-1991 world order. Indeed, anchored on this partial account of 1945, Habermas’s reflections and political interventions betray an anticipatory logic that during the nineties led him to support and defend Desert Storm and NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, and thus collude with the powers of the day to actualize his cosmopolitan ideal. For Desert Storm, however compromised by U.S. interests and political calculations, represented an important step in the emergence of a new world order after the cold war in which the United States could “temporarily” assume the “role of police force to the United Nations.” ⁶⁸ Philosophical embellishments of Realpolitik, to be sure, that have baffled even admirers of his accomplishments. In Matuštík’s severe but entirely legitimate critique: “His fear of student street activism and revolutionary aspirations in the 1960s and his panic over their purported Left Fascism both pale in contrast to the thousand of dead Iraqis and thousands of dead inhabitants in the former Yugoslavia.” ⁶⁹ Habermas’s anticipatory logic even led him to a form of decisionism, something that is fully evident in his tortuous justification of NATO’s bombing of Kosovo. ⁷⁰ Here, as Anderson has acutely shown, Habermas’s attempt to refute Carl Schmitt proves to be a striking instantiation of the core of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. ⁷¹ For the west “understood this intervention as an ‘anticipation’ of an effective cosmopolitan law, that is, as a step in the path from classical international law to what Kant envisioned as a ‘cosmopolitan condition’ that would grant citizens legal protection even against their own criminal governments.” ⁷² This is a clear instance of the least attractive aspect of Habermas’s Kantian quest of silver linings in the present: identifying his version of “accommodating trends” in what are otherwise catastrophic acts of war led by the United States, which is cast in the role of “draft horse” to bring about a new world order. ⁷³ Yet a different, genuinely critical reckoning with this situation would speak against any normative justification for the inauguration of a humanitarian nomos in which the North-Atlantic west legitimates its world order in the name of averting catastrophes. ⁷⁴

The foregoing limitations are more clearly discernable in his most explicit statements on the constitutionalization of international law. ⁷⁵ In these writings, the EU figures largely in positive valences. Habermas has offered three overlapping yet analytically distinct rationales for his defense of the EU: as a response to the age of catastrophes, which in The Inclusion of the Other he framed as follows: “The challenge posed by the unprecedented catastrophes of the twentieth century has given new impetus to Kant’s idea [of perpetual peace]”; as a bulwark and compensation against neoliberal globalization, the lesson derived from “the catastrophic experience of the period between the two world wars”; and as a limited but crucial anticipatory trend harbingering a truly cosmopolitan, post-national world order that is yet to come. ⁷⁶ The EU represents an important step in a long march towards a post-national constellation, one that is normatively nourished by a cosmopolitan solidarity and anchored on the idea of a supranational politics consisting in governance without government, “a cosmopolitan community of states and world citizens” understood as “a politically constituted world society” embodying universal human rights. ⁷⁷ And yet, that the actually existing EU is also an empire in its own right, a deputy empire of the United States in the new global order that has emerged in the twenty-first century, is a possibility that Habermas never ponders, even though the role he casts for it tacitly fits that geopolitical description. ⁷⁸ Not only is the EU ever more distant from his “Kantian hope for a future global domestic politics,” but it is sustained by a post-national ideal that systematically undermines the even simpler hope of a robust domestic politics, not to speak of the ability for small non-European collectivities to create the necessary bulwarks to render even a minimalist sense of political self-determination meaningful. ⁷⁹ These concerns are hardly incidental to Habermas’s theorization: the forms of transnational capital that create the conditions for the post-national constellation that he champions are systematically entwined with the fate of the global South, something that his functionalist account of capitalism fails to accurately register. ⁸⁰

If this is the way the EU is understood, what about the hegemonic power of the day, the United States? That the United States is cast in the role of the draft horse of the post-national constellation is not surprising. For this country more than any other plays an important role in Habermas’s axial year-event. Indeed, when it comes to the United States, the binding grip of his orientation to the West clouds Habermas’s assessments: while highly critical of the squandering of precious normative credibility during the Bush era, Habermas’s view of this polity has jettisoned the imperial and counterrevolutionary record of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consequently, he has had very little to say about the imperialist Gilded age, the counterrevolutionary role of the United States during the Cold War, and its imperial record in Central American and the Caribbean, let alone its empire of bases; all of which is amply recorded in scholarly accounts that debunk the myth of American imperialism as an aberration of the Bush administration. ⁸¹ Instead, in The Divided West Habermas confidently writes: “For half a century, the United States could be counted on as the peacemaker for progress in this cosmopolitan path.” ⁸² It is as if the United States had not colluded with repressive regimes all over the world during this particular period, including the support of the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, arguably the most genocidal regime of the second half of the twentieth century, as part of its counterrevolutionary vocation—not to dwell on the by now historical blockade of Cuba, the coups against Allende and Mossadegh, interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, or the earlier record of its imperial ventures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Still, the message is not only that the United States is “historically speaking an improbable superpower,” since it not only is “the oldest democracy in the world” but it has historically been the harbinger of universalism: “it has embraced the spirit of eighteenth century universalism more than any other nation.” ⁸³

Habermas thus misrecognizes transatlantic power relations in the current world order, a postmodern version of the old Concert of Powers that seeks the protection and preservation of a global capitalism in whose networks of finance, markets, currency, and foreign exchange, all of today’s great powers are embedded, and on which their self-sustaining growth, or its prospects, depends.

Habermas’s orientation to the west, an upshot of his learning from catastrophes, misrecognizes these forms of power, the catastrophizing predicament these inaugurate, and is unable to properly conceptualize the global structures of power and violence that are constitutive of the present. ⁸⁴ Omissions and distortions of this nature pivot on Habermas’s axial year-event, 1945, and the historical-political narrative nourishing his reflections, including heroes and villains, built upon it. Ultimately, Habermas’s critical theory fails to grasp the nature of the contemporary world order, while it provides a measure of solace for a Europe that can look through the back mirror to an age of catastrophes that is over, but one that provides a continuing normative reservoir for norming the present. It depoliticizes in the name of catastrophe and misrecognizes catastrophes and ongoing processes of catastrophization.

Politicizing Catastrophe

What, then, does it mean to reconceive the idea of “learning from catastrophe” in a way that avoids the theoretical and political pitfalls of Habermas’s rendition? Habermas’s example makes clear how a narrative of catastrophe ends up reverting to a form of discursive catastrophization, that of political life, and authorizes the catastrophizing actions of humanitarian wars, thus normalizing objective modalities of catastrophization. These normalizations lead to fundamental misrecognitions of present-day forms of power, while creating the mirage of living after catastrophe, in post-catastrophic times whose catastrophizing and often catastrophic nature remains untheorized. How to revert these fortunes? An important step in averting the catastrophization of political life is to politicize contemporary narratives of catastrophe: a politicization that attends to the dialectic of continuities and discontinuities at work in the emergence of catastrophes, and how vectors of power intersect in their emergence and aftermaths; another step, equally dialectical, is to reclaim critical accounts of history that soberly dispense with idealizations of the present. All of which suggests the need to rethink the intersection of catastrophes, crisis, the politics of catastrophization, and the catastrophization of political life, while rendering visible the catastrophic nature of contemporary predicaments of power in their different modalities and determinations. All in all, what is at stake is re-cognizing catastrophe in history—that is, the historical nature of catastrophes—and offering a historically differentiated recasting of the dialectic of partisanship, axial-year, and event, in order to more effectively conceptualize how catastrophes mediate political life.

How does one best understand the dialectic of destruction and creation at the heart of the concept “catastrophe” beyond the redemptive articulations found in its liberal-capitalist modality? How is this dialectic critically arrested, or recast? Writing at a moment of danger when the Wehrmacht had yet to taste defeat and the shadows of catastrophe were befalling Europe, Walter Benjamin understood this dialectic and soberly confronted the coexistence of catastrophes alongside the expectation of Catastrophe. Indeed, one of Benjamin’s seminal contributions to a political theory of catastrophe is found in the ways in which he captured the unfolding of dreary catastrophes: “That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.” ⁸⁵ Critically mapping the different iterations of this dialectic affords the possibility of soberly apprehending current predicaments of power. If Habermas provides an instantiation of how not to learn from catastrophe, following Benjamin one may say that the critical task of learning from catastrophes consists in soberly and rigorously re-cognizing narratives of catastrophe, and re-cognizing the catastrophization of political life, by avowing the politicization of catastrophe, which, again, entails asking the questions of to what end is a catastrophe invoked, who is deploying it, and in the name of whom.

Politicizing catastrophe thus requires thinking about the conceptual history of catastrophe, its political usages across the political spectrum, and how it is marshaled in a dialectic of avowal and disavowal to authorize specific forms of power. Overall, it involves thinking about catastrophes politically in order to arrest the depoliticizing effect of the catastrophization of political life that further contributes to the cancellation of collective agency and forestalls democratic alternatives and possibilities; a neutralization that in of itself constitutes an objective catastrophizing process insofar as it erodes the possibilities for a genuinely democratic life. That is, re-cognizing what mediates the advent of a catastrophe and its aftermaths, and casting its violence historically and politically, in order to avoid the naturalizations and moralizations that pervade many a narrative of catastrophe today: from the naturalization and moralization of poverty in the aftermath of earthquakes, famines, and hurricanes to the sanctification and moral instrumentalization of genocide under the depoliticizing banner of “never again” in which the dialectic of partisanship and event is frequently cast ahistorically and uncritically. ⁸⁶ In this spirit, the politicization of catastrophe could herald a break with the catastrophic history of the present insofar as it critically attends the other meanings of catastrophization—that is, alertness to catastrophic conditions of superfluous suffering and destruction, as well as acting politically to eradicate them—without reverting to its discursive variant with its legitimization of the status quo, catastrophes and catastrophizations. A politicization of catastrophes is an attempt to think about how the mainstay of political life mediates the advent of Catastrophes and how catastrophes mediate, and thus help to propel Catastrophes. It thus invites more critical mappings of the different narrative iterations of the dialectic of partisanship and event, affording the possibility of soberly apprehending current predicaments of power in order to secure a fighting chance for the possibility of an emancipated future beyond the current iterations of the catastrophization of political life.