Gnosis 13.2 by journalgnosis

GNOSIS

A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST

Volume XIII, Number 2 2014

Editorial Committee EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Eben Hensby MANAGING EDITOR Deanne Beraldo EDITOR Sarah Charrouf REVIEWERS Dennis Papadopoulos Jeff McQuiggan Mel Mikhail

Special thanks to the Graduate Philosophy Studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Association (GPSA): Adam Schipper Dennis Papadopoulos Eben Hensby Melissa Tradel Michael Peterson Sarah McLay

Vol 13, No 2 (2014) ISSN 1927-5277 Gnosis (Online)

Table of Contents Letter from the Editors Eben Hensby and Deanne Beraldo

The Spatial Dynamics of Political Subjectivity Sean M. Smith

The Crowd of the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 Siavash Rokni

Philosophy and Climate Change Maria Bernier

Dear Reader, We hope you are enjoying the ISSUU-based presentation for Gnosis 13.1, and now for our latest issue, 13.2. We are quite proud of it, and think it greatly enhances the reading experience. This is a quick note from the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor to give the reader a sense of the conference from which these papers arose. The Graduate Philosophy Students’ Association (GPSA) tired restlessly to put together a diverse and engaging conference from May 10-11, 2014 titled “Philosophy dans la Rue!: Activism and Philosophy in the 21st Century.” For two days at Concordia University in Montréal, philosophy students had the opportunity to share with and listen to speakers from other departments and other universities in a discussion of philosophy’s role in the public sphere. Gnosis and the GPSA decided to work closely together to make this issue possible. During the conference, a select group of reviewers took notes and reviewed the papers as they were presented. Afterwards, we met to discuss our impressions. The choice was nearly unanimous. We selected three papers from the eight student conference presentations. Issue 13.2 is the result of these decisions. Gnosis would like to thank the 2013-2014 GPSA Executive: Michael Peterson, Melissa Tradel, Sarah McLay, Adam Schipper, Dennis Papadopoulos, and Eben Hensby. Gnosis hopes you enjoy this issue. Eben Hensby Gnosis Editor-in-Chief November 6, 2014.

Deanne Beraldo Gnosis Managing Editor.

The Spatial Dynamics of Political Subjectivity Sean M. Smith

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of space and how it bears on political subjectivity. I will try to relate the interstitial notions of space developed by Michel De Certeau (1998) to the possibility of affirmative political change. My claim is that, as embodied political agents, there is a normative charge to even the minutest of details of our everyday embodied comportment. By learning to harness this momentum, I think that societies have the power to change themselves in radical ways.

Herman Melville’s Bartleby is a good character to begin to understand the political significance of embodied gestures in space. He exemplifies the logical limit on both individual action and inaction. Bartley fuses together the two in a way that frustrates our default interpretative categories for action. He does not sit silently in protest, nor does he actively oppose the powers that be in any traditional sense of 'oppose', he simply prefers not to do anything that he is asked to do, and in so preferring, he distances himself from the world in which he is embedded. Bartleby embodies an extreme limit on gesture, but it is an extreme that does not embrace either side of a valenced spectrum of positive or negative affect. We are all familiar with the self immolating monk or the indignant street protester. Bartleby is neither of these, though he ends up in the same place that most committed dissidents do; that is, jail. Bartleby's end-point is relevant because it demonstrates the practical limits of his gesture. His act cannot translate into an effective re-appropriation of public space. As Mark Kingwell says, “...public space is never interstitial, marginal, or leftover. It is contested, always and everywhere, because identity is a matter of finding out who we are in the crucible of perspectival reciprocity” (2009; 19). Bartleby is incapable of the kind of reciprocity necessary to realize the kind of change we arguably need today. For interstitial gestures to be effective, they must connect people to one another, they must be able to reckon with the politically real.

~ De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life is an intriguing attempt to think through this need for alternative forms of political action. For de Certeau, concrete actions in public space serve as a more effective mode of resistance than do traditional forms of political opposition, the

latter of these having been systematically co-opted by the ascendant power structures according to him. Thus, de Certeau proposes “...a way of using imposed systems [that] constitutes the resistance to the historical law of a state of affairs and its dogmatic legitimations” (18). De Certeau wants us to ‘make do’, and as such, he seems to be providing us with an embodied phenomenology of happy nihilism. The project of The Practice of Everyday Life is to provide an account of ‘ways of operating’ that both accept and tacitly subvert a given set of power relations. According to de Certeau “These ‘ways of operating’ constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production” (xiv). Such a need for conceiving practices in this way arises out of the fact that contemporary culture is filled with people who are both fed up and who have no ability to express themselves in a way that has not been anticipated and absorbed by the socio-political machinations of entrenched power structures. No single strategy 1 has been more effective on the part of existing entrenched power structures than the transactional reduction. The transactional reduction is the levelling off of subjectivity into a mode of being whereby one’s sense of value is predominantly accounted for in terms of money for goods of some kind. The transactional reduction has created a deep but latent sense of marginality in the form of a passive nihilistic tendency to at once indulge and give oneself over to the transactional reduction while retaining a kind of marginal and irreverent cynicism that both solidifies one’s entrenchment in and simultaneously rejects the activity of consumption. In de Certeau’s words: “Marginality is becoming universal. A marginal group has now become a silent majority” (xvii). Thus, de Certeau posits a new tactical logic of everyday manoeuvres: “Pursued to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline...” (xv). By learning to inhabit this anti-discipline, we can find new ways to makedo: In the technocratically constructed, written, and functionalized space in which the consumers move about, their trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space. Although they are composed with the vocabularies of established languages (those of television, newspapers, supermarkets, or museum sequences) and although they remain subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms (temporal modes of schedules, paradigmatic orders of spaces, etc.), the 1

I will parse de Certeau’s technical definition of this term in some detail in what follows.

trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the system in which they develop (xviii). In order to get clear about how these ways of making-do can be understood in contrast with more conventional forms of dissent or protest, De Certeau makes an important set of distinctions that I want to look at in some detail. The first distinction is between a strategy and a tactic. A strategy is “...the calculus of force-relationships which become possible when a subject of will and power...can be isolated from an environment. A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it...Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model” (De Certeau, xix). By contrast a tactic is: ...a calculus which cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a boarder-line distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansion, and secure independence with respect to circumstances (De Certeau, xix). In order to understand the structure of this distinction, we must spatialize it. To that end we must follow de Certeau in making a second (and deeply problematic) distinction between place and space. Strategy reifies a proper place. Movement of one kind or another constitutes a tactical space (55). So de Certeau is proposing that we need to learn how to use movement through space to create alternative forms of existence that offer us a denuded form of freedom within existing, socio-culturally reified places. Even though this tactical spatial re-appropriation is not ultimately disruptive to the hegemonic strategy of the transactional reduction, it still has a political upshot. According to de Certeau, “[t]he fragmentation of the social fabric today lends a political dimension to the problem of the subject.” He continues, “[t]hese ways of reappropriating the product-system, ways created by consumers, have as their goal a therapeutics for deteriorating social relations and make use of techniques of re-employment in which we can recognize the procedures of everyday practices” (xxiv). So what is on offer here is a form of therapy, whereby we can learn

to make-do with the structural failures of the societies in which we live without making any (perhaps ultimately futile) attempts to decisively change those structures. I think these are distinctions that constitute differences of degree rather than differences of kind. As such, I will argue that their degree of difference actually constitutes a powerful way of re-conceiving the political significance of making-do in a way that alleviates de Certeau’s account of its residue of happy nihilism.

~ At first blush, de Certeau’s picture might seem like a reasonable project, insofar as we adopt a sentiment along the lines of, at least it’s something. That is, such an approach is the best we can come up with given that all actual forms of political dissent have been co-opted by the powers that be. After all, look at all of the failed Bartleby’s. We need some way to cope with the monstrosities of the transactional reduction; not all of us are prepared to give up everything and go to live in the woods. Nevertheless, there is an almost sinister vein of partisanship lurking in the details of de Certeau’s account that is worthy of attention. Consider de Certeau’s lauding description of the resistance of North American indigenous populations to the invasion of the Spanish: ...even when they were subjected, indeed even when they accepted their subjection, the Indians often used the laws, practices, and representations that were imposed on them by force or by fascination to ends other than those of their conquerors; they made something else out of them, they subverted them from within – not by rejecting them or by transforming them (though that occurred as well), but by many different ways of using them in the service of rules, customs or convictions foreign to the colonization which they could not escape. They metaphorized the dominant order: they made it function in another register. They remained other within the system which they assimilated and which assimilated them externally. They diverted it without leaving it. Procedures of consumption maintained their difference in the very space that the occupier was organizing (32). There is something offensive in using indigenous North-Americans as a positive example of how these everyday tactics can work for us, now. I’m not sure that the multi-generational cultural rape and geographic displacement of an entire people is really the best example for how contemporary subjects, amidst the mechanisms of the transactional reduction, can learn to get some bounce in their step as they walk down the street. ‘Making do’ in this way seems a bit like bad faith when exemplified by the displacement

of indigenous cultures. It is precisely cases like the North American indigenous populations and the atrocities that they have suffered that demand we give our thinking about the transactional reduction and other related problems a deeper and more articulate shape. So far, I have been hard on de Certeau. Therefore, I would like to reiterate that I do see powerful potential in his work. I want to grow his project into something greater than de Certeau thought was possible. The issue, as I see it, is that that de Certeau does not fully appreciate the scope of his own project, thus he misses an essential point of connectivity between the strategy and the tactic, the place and the space. By rehabilitating these connections through the following genealogical analysis, my hope is that de Certeauâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s account can be bolstered into something far more substantial than the happy nihilism it appears to be when taken on its own terms.

~ In my view, de Certeauâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s account of place and its contrast with space is conceptually impoverished. By conceiving them in such strict isolation, he is able to endorse the claim that a strategy can only be overcome by a strategy. I disagree. By performing a genealogical analysis of our experience of space, I hope to be able to re-situate his view in a more positive light whereby his account of tactical movement can retain a potentially forceful political momentum that can alter the structure of strategically defined proper places. In summary, if the gestures of Bartleby are too individualistic and eccentric to be truly effective in creating substantial change, then de Certeau is too subliminal and accepting of the current order of things. How this might be so will become clear in what follows. 2 Immanuel Kantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s arguments in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' of the Critique of Pure Reason are of central importance to any genealogical analysis of space.

Two things are

important here. (I) Space pervades all forms of experience as a transcendental precondition for all acquaintance with things and persons outside of ourselves, i.e. distinct from our embodied subjectivity. (II) Our representation of space, or our acquaintance with it, such that (I) can be true, is intuitive. This means that we experience space in a way that is more direct, immediate, embedded and embodied than the way in which we use concepts to help us organize and categorize experience. On these two points, I think Kant was entirely correct. It is on the

I should say also, that my analysis of Kant, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty will be quick and possibly inadequate. I take their ideas on board only to the degree necessary to make my points about de Certeau.

question of how to appropriately describe the phenomenological structure of spatial experience where Kant is not quite as accurate and where the Phenomenological tradition proper becomes relevant to the discussion. In order to illustrate this point, we need to turn to Martin Heidegger’s account of the existential dimension of space. The main distinction that Heidegger dwells upon in Being and Time (1927/1996) is between the objectively present and the ready-to-hand. This is roughly a distinction between objects being merely present as substances with properties and things being procedurally available for manipulation within a contextual totality of relevance relations. Space on the Kantian picture (which is an objectively present picture) is a quantitative container in which objects appear and endure within a matrix that is structured according to the principles of Euclidean geometry. For Heidegger, by contrast, “[t]here is never a three-dimensional multiplicity of positions initially given which is then filled out with objectively present things” (SZ, 103). Rather, since Dasein has ‘always already’ discovered a world into which it is thrown, primordial spatiality discloses itself in terms of available equipment, which we understand primarily in terms of its use-value to us and to our projects. Thus, Heidegger’s move is to locate a form of procedural value in our most basic contact with the world. 3 Dasein’s being-in-the-world undergirds both de Certeau’s notion of space, which is constituted by movement, and place, the proper of any well-established strategic deployment of resources. Both space and place presume a basic orientation to the world in virtue of which purposive movement (in space) and proper rules of conduct (in places) are coherent to Dasein as an extension and specification of its being-in-the-world. Yet, there is a problem in Heidegger. He remains too object oriented, or better, techne oriented. His conception of space is that it is an enabling factor for our relationship to the useful tools that are ready-to-hand. His account of the structure of space itself remains underdeveloped as far as my argument requires. I therefore turn to Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation and embodiment of Heidegger’s existential categories to make the full force of my genealogical analysis more transparent in terms of my goals regarding de Certeau’s account.

Though of course we must be careful not to characterize this contact in terms of an isolated subject who encounters the world. Dasein is always already being-in-the-world.

Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty thinks that, “[b]eyond the physical or geometrical distance existing between me and all things, a lived distance links me to things that count and exist for me, and links them to each other. At each moment, this distance measures the ‘scope’ of my life” (PhP, 338). Merleau-Ponty’s key insight into the structure of our intuitions of space is that they possess a fundamental normative charge and that our being-in-space is dynamic. Or, spatial comportment demonstrates a plasticity in virtue of which norms are embodied. In the following quotation, Merleau-Ponty uses the example of an hallucination to describe the plasticity of spatial intuition: “What brings about the hallucination [for example]...is the contraction of lived space, the rooting of things in our body, the overwhelming proximity of the object...” (344). Space is something existential and it expands and contracts according to the resonance of our phenomenal bodies with a horizon of existential possibilities. These possibilities can be thought of as levels or horizons of objectivity; they are sub-spaces like a mythical space or a political space. All of these are embedded within a fundamental space, which is at once natural and existential. “Natural and primordial space is not geometrical space,” according to Merleau-Ponty, “[i]t is only indicated by the horizons of possible objectification, it only frees me from each particular milieu because it binds me to the world of nature or to the world in-itself that encompasses them all” (PhP, 347). So, the manner in which space becomes determinately structured according to the objectivity of phenomena it discloses is determined by how the meaning of such objects (of whatever kind) is ‘rooted in our bodies’. This means that our own embodied comportment in the existential world is constitutive in the objectification of spaces.

~ So, what does this genealogical analysis of spatial experience tell us about de Certeau’s project? Just as our perception of objects as quantifiable within a rigid Euclidean matrix is itself a stratification of a more plastic and primordial perception of the existential world, so also is the proper place of strategy merely a reified totality of tactically constituted spaces. The proper of a place becomes so in virtue of the rules of movement that define its boundaries to other such places. Yet those rules are the concretized traces of all sorts of movements whose aggregative force eventually solidified a norm that in turn came to bind all those who sought to inhabit that place. But the boundaries between such places only delimit a larger existential space that

contains them all, and this space possesses a primordial dynamism that responds (i.e. expands and contracts), according to the way in which we carry the world within our bodies. Tactics are merely strategies that have not yet managed to reify space into a proper place. We must learn to make the concrete of the proper place respond in a more fluid way to the tactics of our everyday motions. The oscillation of these tensions is the true public space. This is the idea that is not considered in de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life – that the subtle movements of everyday ‘getting around’ are in fact capable of aggregating into a significant political force that does not merely redirect the surplus energy of hegemonic strategy, but sublimates it into something that is potentially transformative. At the beginning of his essay “Masters of Chancery: The Gift of Public Space,” Mark Kingwell claims that public space is “[s]imultaneously everywhere and nowhere, it is political air” (3). Moving through public space in a tactical way charges the atmosphere of the city with political valence. By breathing it in and out with our bodies, the minutiae of bodily comportment become natal gestures of political normativity; every shift in focus, each step down the street is a nascent stride of protest or a tacit act of partisanship.

Works Cited Agamben, S. The Coming Community. Trans. by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2009. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Derrida, J. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Greenberg, Ken. “Public Space: Lost and Found.” In Rites of Way: The Politics and Poetics of Public Space. Eds. Kingwell, Mark and Patrick Turmel. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY, 1996. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009. Kant, I. The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. By Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Kingwell, Mark and Patrick Turmel, eds. Rites of Way: The Politics and Poetics of Public Space. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Kingwell, Mark. “Masters of Chancery” In Rites of Way: The Politics and Poetics of Public Space. Eds. Kingwell, Mark and Patrick Turmel. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. --- . Frank’s Motel: Horizontal and Vertical in the Big Other. Blurb (http://www.blurb.ca), 2013. Knappenberger, Brian We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. DVD, Luminant Media, 2012. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by Donald Landes. Oxon: Routledge, 1945/2012. Smith, S. “Kant’s Theory of Spatial Intuition Defended” in Noesis, forthcoming.

The Crowd of the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 Siavash Rokni

Abstract: This article aims to look at the concept of the protesting crowd and situate it within the two current social movement theories of New Social Movements and Resource Mobilization. The article first looks at theories on crowds to pinpoint the limitations of these theories in explaining the concept of protesting crowds. It then sets to define protesting crowds as a dispositive consisting of heterogeneous forces that come together in kairos, an opportune moment, in order to produce a collective discourse. The paper argues that protesting crowds distinguish themselves from other forms of crowds through a set of practices of the collective self that defines them as what they are in relation to other forms of crowds. Using an opportune moment to come together, protesting crowds produce themselves as an Event that disrupts the state of Being and brings with it new multiplicities. To demonstrate this thesis, the paper uses the example of the Green Movement in Iran to show how multiple forces were able to come together as a collective to present a collective discourse by using the election results as an opportune moment. The paper concludes that due to the advent of technology and globalization, many new forms of collective practices have been added to the collective practices of protesting crowds to the extent that it has led them to become part of a networked protesting crowd.

1. Introduction On June 13, 2009, Iran lived through an historic event after the release of the official results of the presidential election (Khosrokhavar, 2012). The event was the post-electoral uprising in many of the major cities of the country which was characterized by many slogans including: Where is my vote? (Fassihi, 2009; Khosrokhavar, 2012). On that day, just over 3 million peaceful protesters showed up in the streets of Tehran to protest the official claim about the results of the election whereby Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared a winner by a landslide majority (Wright, 2010). In the days that followed, these protests continued and intensified, giving birth to what is now known as the Green Movement. The name Green Movement came from a green fabric that was given by Mohammad Khatami to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, one of the reformist candidates in the election, at the beginning of his election campaign. Hence, the color green and the green fabric became the symbol of the movement that followed after the election for almost a year (Wright, 2010). The protests started peacefully and caught the regime off-guard through daily demonstration. On June 18, the supreme leader of the country denounced the claims of the Green Movement and declared

that it would not be tolerated. From then on, the security forces of the Iranian regime, including the plain-clothed militia, fought back the protests (Wright, 2010). While the Green Movement protests continued for almost a year, the recurrence of the crowds reduced due to the aggressive crackdown by government forces (Wright, 2010). The movement was stopped after the government put both of the main reformist incumbents, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, under house arrest (Offiler, 2013). While the protests were stopped, the movement that started from these protests led to a turning point in Iranian politics due to the scope and intensity of the movement as well as the manner through which it succeeded in having a global reach. What is fascinating about the Green Movement is the fact that there were two different spaces where protesters presented themselves. The first was the presence of crowds of people in the streets of major cities in Iran and around the world. The second was the presence of crowds on the Internet and especially social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The Iranians who took to the streets also took photos and videos and reported the events from the streets of Iran through different social media (Morozov, 2009). As well, those outside the country held daily protests in major cities around the world and helped those inside the country to propagate their messages internationally. Therefore, the movement was able to have a transnational reach online and on the ground due to the usage of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) as tools of mobilization and communication. In a sense, the physical crowds that presented themselves on the streets took their concern to the online world and communicated their message with other Iranians and non-Iranians directly through social media such as Twitter and Facebook to create a network of crowds that encompassed people from different parts of the world (Burns & Eltham, 2009; Papic & Noonan, 2011). This article takes a look at the concept of protesting crowds in the context of the 2009 Green Movement in Iran. It looks at the central problematic of what this concept means within the context of the two dominant social movement theories, the New Social Movements theory that was born in Europe by scholars such as Melucci and Touraine, and the Resource Mobilization theory from North America that was presented by McAdam and Zald. The article begins by reviewing literature on the study of crowds by looking at the major scholars who established crowd psychology in the beginning of the 20th century such as Le Bon, Tarde, and Freud. It then looks at other literature surrounding crowds and shows how there is a gap in the

understanding of crowds within social movements and particularly of the idea of protesting crowds. From this, the article proposes a theoretical framework that seeks to explain the concept of protesting crowds as a dispositive and as an event. The central hypothesis of the paper is that protesting crowds are a collection of multiple heterogeneous discourses (a dispositive) that produce themselves in an opportune moment (a kairos). This dispositive results from a collection of practices of the collective self which help this collective recognize itself as a protesting crowd. In order to construct the framework for this hypothesis, this paper will employ two theories. It first establishes the idea of dispositive by using the literature from Michel Foucault to examine protesting crowds. It also introduces the idea of practices of the self to elaborate how protesting crowds produce themselves as entities that have particular practices of collective self. It then looks at the presence of protesting crowds as an Event, in Alain Badiou’s sense. It uses this concept to explain how protesting crowds, and specifically the protesting crowds of the Green Movement in Iran, can be seen as an Event that breaks into the realm of Being and introduces new multiplicities to the status quo. Finally, this paper looks at the ramifications of the idea of protesting crowd in today’s globalized world by showing how modern crowd movements such as the Green Movement use technologies as a way to create themselves as a globalized network of crowds.

2. Understanding Crowds 2.1 Crowds: The Fear of an Abstraction The first wave of theoretical study on crowds was established at the end of the 19th century. Between the 18th and 19th centuries, due to many reasons including industrialization, the population of large cities in Europe increased rapidly. Gustave Le Bon, one of the founding fathers of crowd psychology, saw two principal factors in what he calls a “transformation” in European societies in the late 19th century: Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilisation are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions

of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries (Le Bon, 2001, p. 7). For Le Bon, the crowd is a product of this change in society and it essentially is a self-generated being (Rubio, 2010, p. 5) that contains “the fusion of individuals in one common sentiment and spirit” (Moscovici, 1985, p. 109). What separates a crowd from an everyday occurrence of thousands of people that walk on the streets is the fact that a crowd “forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds” (Le Bon, 2001, p. 13). Hence, the general character that separates crowds from the general population for Le Bon is that they have a mental unity or a collective mind (Le Bon, 2001, p. 13). Lastly, Le Bon believed that the intellectual faculty of an individual is lowered to that of the crowd when the individual is inside it (Moscovici, 1985, p. 109). Hence, the individual’s intelligent capacity does not really matter at the level of crowd since “the mental quality of the individuals composing a crowd must not be brought into consideration. This quality is without importance. From the moment that they form part of a crowd the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation” (Le Bon, 2001, p. 24). Under four general principal characteristics of crowds—hypnosis, contagion, suggestion, and leadership—that Le Bon introduced in his book La Psychologie de la foule, he presents a pessimistic view of crowds as entities that are emotional and irrational and are prone to easy manipulation. What this means is that a crowd takes over the psyche of any individual who is part of the crowd to the extent that the individual and its mental capacity is already taken over by what Le Bon called the “mind” of the crowd. Gabriel Tarde was another thinker in the field of crowd psychology who worked at around the same time as Gustave Le Bon. Tarde’s main argument revolved around the idea that in order to understand human interactions at any level, one must understand the laws of imitation and the ways human beings use imitation as a fundamental form of socialization. Hence, “social change requires penetration of inventions that diffuse through the process of imitation. People imitate beliefs and desires or motives transmitted from one individual to another” (Kinnunen, 1996, p. 431). For Tarde, just like any social process, crowds form because individuals imitate the acts of those around them. Tarde separated crowds into two categories: natural and artificial. Natural crowds are those which form organically with the sole result of growing larger. Their expression is formed in their self-expansion and growth within space. Artificial crowds, however, become interested in existence in time more than space in the sense that they absorb some form of

organization in order to be able to be more unified and have some form of longevity (Brighenti, 2010, p. 303). For Tarde, the natural crowd can be turned into an artificial crowd through some form of organization since crowds have the tendency to reconcile their natural state in order to be able to last in time (Brighenti, 2010, p. 304). Hence, Tarde sees natural crowds as something that need to be artificialized in order to be able to achieve a unifying goal. The way one can think about natural crowds is to see them as what Brighenti calls “anti-organization par excellence” (Brighenti, 2010, p. 304). In this sense, the crowd is born as unorganized entities that have the sole aim of growth. An example of this is the Stanley Cup riots in 2011 after the Vancouver Canucks lost the 7th match to the Boston Bruins (Lindsay, 2011). The riots are a great example of how the crowd was created organically and how its only goal was to expand geographically through the downtown of Vancouver. The crowd had no leaders nor any form of structure or organization. The aim of the Vancouver riot crowd was not really to last but to just expand. This is in opposition to artificial crowds which are those that “have absorbed some organizational features in order to last. They have traded space for time” (Brighenti, 2010, p. 303). For Tarde, one can observe organized crowds within “collective actions of strikers, in demonstrations, and in processions” (McPhail, 1991, p. 18). This is because this type of crowd has a goal and moves towards a form of stability instead of seeking to only expand in space. Another thinker of great influence in crowd psychology was Sigmund Freud. For him, crowds are basically a collection of individuals who abandon their ego for the collective ego of the crowd. Hence, individuals in a crowd can be easily manipulated by the leader of the crowd if the leader positions him or herself as the ego-ideal of the crowd (Freud, 1922, p. XI). For this reason, Freud greatly focused his attention on the leader. He was indeed greatly influenced by Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon in his ideas on crowds. However, for him, the importance is to understand the essence (ego) of the crowd in order to understand them and lead them. As one can see, there indeed was an inherent fear in the ideas that were proposed by Le Bon, Tarde, and later Freud about crowds. They saw crowds as irrational beings with the capacity to be easily manipulated. To this extent, they also saw an importance in controlling and managing crowds by leading them in different ways. As Brighenti remarks, interpreting the works of Gabriel Tarde, “an assembly or an association, a crowd or a sect, has no other idea than

the one that is blown into it, and this idea [...] may well diffuse from oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brain to the brains of allâ&#x20AC;? (Brighenti, 2010, p. 302). This was indeed the inherent fear of an abstraction that came to occupy the minds of these thinkers in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. What I mean by abstraction is the idea that these thinkers took the real crowds as a phenomenon and turned it into an abstract idea that is unpredictable and dangerous. This abstraction is due to the fear of crowds as large uncontrollable entities that are inherently irrational and violent. For this, Le Bon, Tarde, and Freud proposed their own solutions in controlling and managing them. 2.2 The Wisdom of Crowds There are other theories about crowds that come from different disciplines than that of psychology. In biology, for instance, there are studies on the behavior of insects, such as ants, that look at the changes in their movement when presented with different situations (Dussutour, FourcassiĂŠ, Helbing, & Deneubourg, 2004). Other studies have been done to understand the behavior of fish shoals in the ocean to better understand how these creatures behave when they move harmoniously together (Ward, Sumpter, Couzin, Hart, & Krause, 2008). All of these studies tend to try to make sense of the physical behaviors of a crowd in order to create mathematical models of how crowds of people may behave when they are assembled together in, for example, a traffic jam, a concert at a stadium, on the streets, and many other places. The Swarm Lab at the University of Berkeley is one of the main organizations that studies the modeling of crowds, be it animals or humans, in order to understand crowd behaviors in a scientific and positivist manner. The advent of the Internet has also given rise to new formulations of the idea of crowds. With the advent of crowdsourcing and online participatory platforms, a great number of theorists have come to express ideas on the nature of crowds. James Surowiecki (2005) posits, for instance, that crowds have a unique wisdom that surpasses the intelligence of individuals that create them. Each member of a crowd follows his or her own selfish individual interests since the crowd is an aggregate of egoistic individuals. This produces a collective wisdom that surpasses that of an individual. For Surowiecki, it is important that individuals in a crowd follow their interests without the awareness of the beliefs of others since the moment they have an understanding of the opinion of others in a crowd, the wisdom of the crowd starts to fail.

We can also see the same type of argumentation in the claims of Yochai Benkler (2006) in his famous book The Wealth of Networks where he makes a direct comparison with the argument of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Benkler argues that we live in an age of information economy where the use of social networks by individuals brings new forms of power relations into society whereby the autonomous practices of individuals have a great impact in creating new democratic systems that are auto-regulatory. The interesting thing about the arguments of Benkler and Surowiecki is that they both follow a rationale that is derived from a very politically charged discourse, namely that of neo-liberal economy. For both, the interaction of selfish individuals will result in auto-regulatory equilibrium. For Surowiecki, this equilibrium is a wisdom that surpasses the intelligence of an individual, while for Benkler, it is the new understanding of free market economy where networks give way to a self-regulated economy that was first imagined by the likes of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek.

3. Understanding Social Movements There are many gaps in the literature about understanding crowds. Crowds in social movements are not entities with no rationality that are accidentally generated. Nor are they entities consisting of egoistic individuals who are attending the crowd as a result of only selfish interests, since at the heart of a social movement there is an altruistic motive that goes beyond the interests of an individual. What is indeed missing in the study of crowds is a reflection on the place of crowds within todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s social movements. This is the reason why this paper is focusing solely on protesting crowds in the context of social movements since it aims to address this gap in the literature. Also, there are no theoretical frameworks that can explain the reason why a protesting crowd presents itself as such in the first place. Hence, this paper will commence the conversation on a theoretical framework that can explain the appearance of a protesting crowd by looking at the Green Movement in Iran as an example. Finally, while there is a focus on globalization and the usage of ICT by crowds from an economic perspective, the relation between globalized social movements and protesting crowds in the globalized world cannot really be tackled through this perspective. Hence, this paper will look at an alternative perspective that puts protesting crowds in globalized social movements by looking at them within the theoretical framework of networked crowds.

The theoretical framework for this paper is divided into two sections. The first will look at the main perspectives on social movements, while the second will look at an alternative theoretical framework for explaining protesting crowds. Currently, there are two dominant schools of thought that dominate the study of social movements: the New Social Movements school from Europe and the Resource Mobilization school from North America. This section of the paper explains these two perspectives briefly. 3.1 The New Social Movements School In the 1970’s, the New Social Movements school emerged in Europe in response to what was seen as the new forms of social movements that were no longer centered around economics and as, in particular, labor movements. These movements were focused instead on the identity of the actors that participated in the movements. Scholars such as Alberto Melucci (1978) and Alain Touraine (1978) took the task of understanding these new types of social movements, such as the LGBT movement (Neveu, 2011). For this school, the newness of the modern social movements is directly related to the identity of the actors who participate in the movements. Because of this, the structure of new social movements is more decentralized and has a strong expressive dimension (Neveu, 2011). This school was indeed a direct response to the limitations of classical Marxism in response to the types of movements that were emerging in the 1960’s and 1970’s (Buechler, 1995). Hence, the value of the new types of social movements passes beyond the purely classbased struggles in order to include other types of conflicts such as social, environmental, religious, and identity conflicts, to name a few. Alan Touraine, one of the founders of this school, proposes that today’s social movements follow three principles (Touraine, 1973). First, the identity principle (I) which means that the participants of the movement define themselves based on a unique identity (Boucher, 1990, p. 9). Then, we have the opposition principle (O) which defines the intention of the movement against a social adversary. Finally, there is the totality principle (T) which is the reference of the movement to the whole of society (Touraine, 1971). For Touraine, a complete and concrete social movement is one that “combine[s] all three elements in a coherent manner” (Touraine, 1971, p. 132). However, the conditions that make this possible make such movements rare since “[a] social movement is always out of balance: its different dimensions—I-T, I-O, O-T—never match perfectly” (Touraine, 1971, p. 133). What

Touraine means is that in a social movement, the three elements that create the movement may be there; however, some elements are present stronger than others. 3.2 The Resource Mobilization School Resource Mobilization theory was developed predominantly in North America by John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald. The perspective of Resource Mobilization is one that is centered around economics and resources. The theory starts from the basic assumption that “all political action is socially structured and that the resources available to activists are patterned accordingly” (Rootes, 1990, p. 7). According to this theory, a social movement is “a set of opinions and beliefs in a population which presents preferences for changing some elements of the social structure and/or reward distribution of a society” (McCarthy & Zald, 1977, p. 1217). Resource Mobilization looks at the ways social movements use resources around them in order to achieve their goal. The theory: concentrates on “the patterning of resources for action and of opportunities for and constraints upon successful action, emphasizes the problem of organization, and stresses the calculative rationality of movements” (Rootes, 1990, p. 7). The model is indeed very economically-centered in the sense that it looks at social movements as another form of resource management. There are other dimensions to the theory of Resource Mobilization that look at other types of resources such as political resources that need to be mobilized for a social movement to succeed (McAdam, McCarthy, & Zald, 1996).

4. Where is the Protesting Crowd within Social Movements? From the literature presented on crowds and social movement theories, one can deduce certain principles that are important for understanding protesting crowds. First, crowds in a protest are composed of multiple discourses that gather together in order to present a solidarity and search for a recognition of their collective discourse in opposition to a dominant discourse or discourses. Second, a protesting crowd not only positions itself in opposition to power, but also seeks to position its discourse in relation to the society as a whole. This means that a protesting crowd has all three elements of Touraine’s conception of a social movement as a potential within itself. On top of this, a protesting crowd has within itself a set of collective practices that identify it as a protesting crowd. The challenge at this moment is to define what a protesting crowd is and

what its position is within the theories of social movements. Here is the central thesis of this paper: A protesting crowd is a collection of multiple heterogeneous discourses (a dispositive) that produces itself in an opportune moment (a kairos). This dispositive results from a collection of practices of the collective self which help this collective recognize itself as a protesting crowd. In order to be able to argue this thesis, it is first necessary to define certain themes that are necessary to establish the language of this argument. Hence, the theoretical framework for this thesis defines four major concepts: dispositive, the self, kairos, and Event. 4.1 Foucault and the Dispositive Foucault has utilized the word dispositive frequently in many of his lectures and texts to evoke a specific interpretation. However, as many, such as Bussolini (2010) and Raffnsøe (2008), have argued, “The distinct French and Italian concepts of appareil/apparato and dispositif/dispositivo have frequently been rendered the same way as apparatus in English” (Bussolini, 2010). 1 For Foucault, the term dispositive can be understood in different contexts. In the military context, the word means a “collection of means and measures that is set in relation to a project or strategic goals” (Raffnsøe, 2008, p. 46). In the judicial context, the word refers to “the final part of a judgement that states the juridical consequences of a judgement in contrast to the narration of the real circumstances that the judgement is based upon” (Raffnsøe, 2008, p. 46). Dispositive, in a Foucauldian sense, refers to: “the way in which pieces and organs are placed within an apparatus: the mechanism itself” (Bonenfant & Farmer, 2012). Hence, dispositive is constructed of multiple elements (tangible and intangible) that come together to become a meaningful whole. It is “the nature of links that can exist between these heterogeneous elements” (Foucault, 1977, p. 299) that makes the dispositive possible. Hence, a dispositive can be defined as a collective of heterogeneous forces that find within themselves an equilibrium. These forces can constantly change and reposition themselves, and their relations with one

According to Bussolini, the term dispositive—which was also picked up and explored by Agamben and other Italian scholars—was translated as “structure” and “apparatus” in the translation of Foucault’s works in English. Hence, there is a misunderstanding of the term in the English literature on Foucault due to this choice of translation.

another are fluid due to this reason. A dispositive, for Foucault, can be explicit or implicit and it can be temporal or permanent since it includes “discourses, institutions, architectural designs, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative procedures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic statements. In short, what is explicit, and implicit” (Foucault, 1977, p. 299). Hence, a dispositive is Foucault’s overarching idea about how one needs to think about the power relations between multiple forces in order to understand the process of the construction of a self. A self, in essence, comes to being as a result of these power relations and as a result of a set of practices of the body that make the self. For us, a crowd is a collection of heterogeneous forces that finds itself in a coherence through a collection of collective discourses and practices through which it is able to identify itself as a crowd. Hence, there are two elements in play in a crowd. One is the nature of crowd as a dispositive, while the other is the practices of the collective that identifies the crowd as such. 4.2 Care of the Self and the Collective Self In one of his conferences in English in the early ‘80’s, Michel Foucault clarified the goal of his academic career at the beginning of his speech: [My goal] has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects (Foucault, 1982, p. 777). The importance of this quote is in the fact that in understanding the process of subjectification, Foucault was bound to understand the processes through which multiple powers and discourses interact with one another. In Discipline and Punish, he talks of the role of disciplinary practices such as normalized judgement in creating a normalized subject (Foucault, 1975). However, it is later in his works, for instance in the second book of The History of Sexuality titled Care of the Self, that he more explicitly tackles the concept of the self. In the book, Foucault speaks of the techniques used during the Hellenic era that allowed a subject to understand itself as a self, since the process of “mastering the self by the self and on the self does not really manifest itself until the Hellenistic and Roman period and particularly through Stoic philosophy” (Ouellet, 2009, p. 9). Hence, the understanding and the formation of the self comes with the usage of a set of techniques of the self that disciplines a subject. One of these techniques, for instance, is the

practice of self-writing (Bonenfant & Farmer, 2012) whereby the subject would be able to find its self through the practice of writing about it. For us, the protesting crowd is a collective self that has a collection of practices of the self that defines its existence as a collective self and as the self which it is. For instance, the use of slogans is an act that seeks recognition for the collective discourse of the crowd as a practice of its collective self. What is central in a protesting crowd is the set of collective practices that separates it from other types of crowds such as sport crowds or crowds in a marketplace. These practices make the protesting crowds recognize themselves as what they are. 4.3 Chronos vs. Kairos In Greek mythology, Caerus (Kairos) is the youngest son of Zeus and he represents the spirit of opportunity (Theoi Greek Mythology, n.d.). The concept of kairos is rooted in this mythology and it is used often in the tradition of rhetoric. In this tradition, kairos represents the principle of good timing and the use of the opportune moment. As Carolyn Miller states: “Kairos refers not to the specific responsiveness of discourse to situation but to the dynamic relationship between discourse and situation” (Miller, 1994, p. 83). Hence, kairos is a technique that considers the dynamic between discourse and situation whereby a rhetorician can use the situation to gain advantage in his argumentation. “Kairos tells us to look for the particular opportunity in a given moment, to find—or construct—an opening in the here and now, in order to achieve something there and then” (Miller, 1994, p. 83). Kairos is a concept that is in relation to Chronos, i.e., chronological time (Smith, 1969). Chronos is historic time in the way that it operates through a chronological logic. Kairos sees time as the moment of opportunity. The two concepts are not oppositional. They are just two different ways of looking at time. The concept of kairos is important for the comprehension of protesting crowds since it characterizes the nature of this unique dispositive as an event. The crowds do not follow a mere chronological logic of time since their understanding of time depends on finding the right or opportune time. For us, a protesting crowd uses an event as a turning point or an opportune moment for proposing its collective discourse through its collective presence and practices.

4.4 Event In the light of the idea of kairos, this paper also uses Alain Badiou’s work and his concept of Event to explain the protesting crowd of the Green Movement as an Event. In understanding Badiou’s notion of Event (l’évènement), one needs to understand his notion of Being (l’être). The most famous of Badiou’s works, Being and Event, is indeed a continuation of the philosophical thread that Martin Heidegger started in his famous book Being and Time. For Badiou, the theory of Being contains three theories within it: a theory of multiplicity, a theory of infinity, and a theory of void (Badiou, Introduction to BE & LoW, (2/10), 2008, 1min 30sec). From this, referring to Cantor and Plato, Badiou makes the argument that ontology is nothing but mathematics since they both share the same three sub-theories of multiplicity, infinity, and void (or zero) (Badiou, 2005, p. 23; Badiou, (2/10), 2008, 2min 6sec). Badiou argues that while Being contains multiplicities within itself, it is never the origin of new multiplicities. This is because the basic elements that create the framework of Being, the three theories of multiplicity, infinity, and void, cannot originate new multiplicities. What Badiou means by this is that new multiplicities enter the realm of Being through an Event. Badiou situates Event as something that is supplementary to Being or something that is in the state of Trans-Being (trans-être) since it is a form whereby its appearance and disappearance are not separable (Badiou, (3/10), 2008, 8min 35sec). What Badiou means is that an Event has no objective existence in and of itself since it “emerges along with the subject who recognizes it, or who nominates it as an event” (Dews, 2008). Indeed, Badiou argues that “the situation to-come [the Event] presents everything that the current situation presents, but in addition, it presents a truth. By consequence, it presents innumerable new multiples” (Badiou, 2005, p. 408). Hence, an Event is the source of new ideas and multiplicities in the field of Being.

5. The Green Movement The 2009 presidential election in June was indeed a turning point in the history of the country. After the defeat of the reformists in the 2005 election, many reformist groups and social groups (religious and non-religious) “mobilized together and presented two reformist candidates in order to change the socio-political state of the country that was created by Ahmadinejad”

(Safa, 2013). Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi were the two hopeful candidates from the reformist movements while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mohsen Rezai were representing the more conservative side of the political spectrum (Anṣārī, 2010). The presence of the two reformist candidates indeed created a momentum for the possibility of change in political, economic, as well as social policies that were implemented during Ahmadinejad’s presidency. As Harris (2012) argues, one of the important elements that added to the intensity of the 2009 election was the atmosphere of the country and specifically the city of Tehran during the election campaign. The presence of supporters of both conservative and reformist candidates created momentum in the few weeks before election day. Also, the candidate debates that were projected in many parks across the city attracted supporters of both sides of the spectrum in these public spaces: After each night’s televised debate, small and medium-sized groups, mostly young people, would congregate on Tehran’s main streets and square off in raucous yet civil debate. Chanted slogans were colloquially crafted and passed along via cellphone text message or by face-to-face contact (Harris, 2012, p. 440). This, in return, started the tensions between the supporters of both sides in the weeks before the election. It also allowed a limited freedom of expression in terms of the support for each candidate. On June 8, a pro-Mousavi human chain was formed along Tehran’s Valiasr street while a large rally by the supporters of Ahmadinejad was organized in the Mosalla-ye-Tehran mosque (Harris, 2012). As Harris observed, “it was the very act of attending these interaction rituals that gave rise to the collective solidarity and emotional effervescence that generated the perception of low participation costs” (Harris, 2012 p. 440). What Harris means by this is that the collective, and almost ritualistic, practices that created the hype before the election helped to create momentum whereby the participants of these practices saw participation in the election as a low-risk practice that may result in great change in their lives in a positive way. The voter turnout on the election day was 80-86% and the state declared Ahmadinejad a winner with 64% of the vote. The state was clearly expecting some sort of protest from the reformist side since it started arresting Mousavi and Karroubi strategists within the first two days of the elections (Harris, 2012). However, the presence of the crowd of almost 3 million people in Tehran was something that neither the government, nor the media and commentators outside of the country were expecting. Also, the usage of ICT such as cellphones and social media was

something that took the government off-guard. In the days that followed, the protests continued and the crackdown on protesters intensified. However, the protesting crowd was able to reach and mobilize many individuals and groups outside of the country in support of the movement. This, in turn, made the Green Movement a global movement and put international pressure on the government of Iran in response to their crackdown of the protest. The Green Movement was not able to succeed in many ways in their demands and was stopped after almost a year. However, the legacy of the movement put several seeds of change in the political dynamic of the country and to the eyes of many observers was the inspiration for the Arab Spring that started right after it (Kurzman, 2012). Many critics became pessimistic at the end of the movement and blamed many factors including the discourse of the movement (Harris, 2012), heavy reliance on the Internet and specifically Twitter (Morozov, 2009), and choice of alliance between different discourses (Hossein Ghazian in Zareh, 2010) as some reasons why the movement did not succeed. However, the fact remains that the post-election crowd movements became an important part of the country’s modern history. 5.1 Crowds as Dispositive The Green Movement, as many scholars have observed (Dabashi, 2011; Hashemi & Postel, 2010; Khosrokhavar, 2012; Safa, 2013), started as a kind of macro-movement that was able to put diverse social, economic, and political issues under its umbrella. As Safa (2013) explains, the Green Movement was able to “mobilize all the social movements (women’s movement, workers movement, ethnic minority movements and student movements) and present their democratic aspiration under one main protest movement” (Safa, 2013). As Safa states, there existed multiple movements in Iran before the Green Movement and each movement had their own identity and discourse. What happened during the Green Movement was the gathering of multiple social movements, including the reformist movement that started in 1997 with the election of president Mohammad Khatami, to find a collective discourse in the confines of a regime that made the appearance of any voice that challenged its legitimacy illegal. The Green Movement’s protesting crowd had the backing of multiple currents of politico-social forces that were already mobilized. What was very clear in the protests following the election results was the diversity of voices that came together to present a collective discourse. Going back to the definition of

dispositive presented by Foucault, one can look at a protesting crowd, such as the one in Iran the day after the election results, as a dispositive since it is composed of multiple heterogeneous elements/forces that came together to create a coherence amongst one another by presenting themselves as a collective discourse. With protesting crowds, subjects that have different identities and are from different backgrounds come together as different identities and discourses to challenge the multiple dispositives that are in place by power relations within the dominant power. Hence, a protesting crowd is a dispositive that questions the legitimacy of current dispositives and the power relations that are in place. One can think of a protesting crowd as a grassroots dispositive that carries with it multiple seeds of a social movement. 5.2 Kairos and Event in the Post-Election Protests Iran has had many social movements that commenced before the Green Movement, such as the 1 million signature campaign that aimed to establish equality in law between men and women and the Student Movement that helped the election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 (Safa, 2013). However, these movements did not achieve the same political significance in terms of directly threatening the Iranian government as did the Green Movement. What was significant about the Green Movement was the mere scale of crowds that came to the streets to protest the results of the election. Effectively, what happened was that the collective of people from different walks of life found an opportune moment to come together and show their collective force and solidarity. It must be added that the momentum that was created before the election with the televised debates and presence of supporters of each candidate in the streets allowed the public to effectuate practices of the collective self that is common amongst protesting crowds. Practices such as going in the streets together, chanting together, holding signs, and wearing the symbolic green fabric to show oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s support for the reformist candidates are just a few of the acts that were practiced before the elections. After the release of the results, a collective consensus, combined with practices that already created the momentum, led the crowds to see the results of the election as an opportune moment or a kairos to assemble as protesting crowds and present the common discourse of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Where is my vote?â&#x20AC;? At the same time, within many new multiplicities that the Green Movement introduced in the realm of Being in Iran, the ways that the Green Movement propagated its fundamental question and mobilized the movement with the usage of the Internet and social networks can be

seen as one such new multiplicity. The Green Movement was indeed able to create networks of protesting crowds internationally through its new usage of the ICT as tools of protest and propagation of its message as well as a way to recognize itself as a new form of protesting crowd, a globalized networked protesting crowd. As Kevin Harris (2012) has observed, “There is evidence that opposition leaders inside Iran utilized Internet networks to deliver communiqués to the population” (Harris, 2012, p. 444). The usage of ICT as new forms of communication and mobilization was indeed the new multiplicity that was introduced in the Green Movement. Moreover, the capacity to inspire networks of Iranians inside and outside of the country to join the movement in solidarity as networked crowds was another new multiplicity that was introduced in the realm of the social movements in Iran during the Green Movement. One can see that the Green Movement indeed has all the main elements of which Badiou speaks to be categorized as an Event. 5.3 Practices of the Collective Self One of the challenges of many theories on crowds has been the lack of a methodical analysis of separating different types of crowds from one another. Gabriel Tarde, for instance, speaks of two types—natural and artificial crowds—to create two different categories of organic or organized forms of crowds. However, this distinction does not really help in distinguishing between crowds. For instance, one cannot distinguish between a crowd in a busy street and a crowd in a stadium by using the categorization that Tarde has proposed. For this reason, this paper uses the theoretical framework of practices of the self by Michel Foucault as a way to show how a protesting crowd recognizes itself as such through practices that are specific to this collective self. Foucault argues that what makes a subject realize itself as a self is the collection of conscious and unconscious practices that the subject carries on in order to recognize itself as a self. In other words, the recognition of the self comes from certain practices that make one aware of the self in a more profound way. For instance, Foucault uses the example of the practice of self-writing or writing about oneself as a way to recognize one’s inner unconscious and realize one’s self (Bonenfant & Farmer, 2012). One can apply this idea to the protesting crowds by looking at the crowd as a collective self and the practices of this crowd as the practices that separate this type of collective from other types of crowds (for instance, a crowd in a football stadium). A protesting crowd usually gathers

itself in a public space such as a square (e.g., in the case of the Green Movement, this was the Freedom Square in the west side of Tehran); it marches in one direction on a busy street in order to show its capacity of blocking the daily affairs of the city; it uses symbols to aesthetically separate itself and recognize itself as a movement (the usage of the green cloth); and it creates slogans that reflect its demands to chant collectively. These are just some few examples of common bodily and discursive practices of a protesting crowd. All these practices help the crowd to recognize itself as part of a collective self. The slogan â&#x20AC;&#x153;Where is my vote?â&#x20AC;? that was used by the Green Movement protesting crowd was indeed an example of the practice of selfwriting in the sense that by posing this question aloud, the collective is also asking itself the same question. Hence, this question is not only directed to the dominant power in the form of verbalizing the collective discourse of the movement, but also inevitably directed to the crowd itself as a way of reflecting on the position of the collective as a self and the recognition of the collective by the collective practices. The protesting crowds of the Green Movement also added several new ways of practicing as crowds. For instance, the practice of recording the protests and posting them on YouTube or reporting the protests on Twitter were new practices that came from the re-utilization of technologies that were already being used in the country for purposes other than protest. In many ways, the protesting crowds became networked crowds through the exchange of information and ideas with the use of ICT. The creativity of the Green Movement protesting crowds was simply to adjust globalized everyday usage of ICT as practices of protest as well as ways to recognize the globalized protesting crowds. For instance, many protest events were promoted on Twitter and Facebook by the Mousavi and Karroubi campaign. Also, the fast and immediate network of people inside and outside of the country created protest movements in many major cities across the world including Toronto, New York, and London, to name a few. For instance, in Vancouver, the Iranian University students organized a human chain, a crowd practice that was used as a form of support during Mousaviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s election campaign, in support of the Green Movement (Jiwa, 2009). This shows the extent to which the Green Movement was able to have a global reach and create transnational practices of a collective self.

6. Crowd Networks and Globalization The aim of this article has been to situate the concept of protesting crowds in the current theories on social movements. The article established the problematic by looking at the main theories on crowds and identifying the limitations of these theories. It then took a look at two dominant perspectives on social movements in order to establish the place of protesting crowds within social movement theories. The central thesis was developed that looked at the protesting crowd as a dispositive consisting of multiple heterogeneous forces that come together in a kairos to produce a collective discourse. Protesting crowds establish themselves with many practices of a collective self that separates them from other types of crowds. In using the resources available to them, they also create new practices of the collective self, as new multiplicities enter the realm of Being and get established as tactics of protest. For demonstrating this thesis, this paper used the example of the Green Movement in Iran to show how multiple forces were able to come together as a collective to present a collective discourse as protesting crowds by using the results of the election as an opportune moment to voice their dissatisfaction with the dominant power at large. What is left is to look at how protesting crowds are situated within modern social movements today. The almost 3 million people that gathered in the streets of Tehran the day after the election were able to come together around a common cause. They consisted of multiple identities (minority groups, feminists, students, reformists, etc.), and they joined to show their dissatisfaction with the governing power. As Castells states, “social movements are most often triggered by emotions derived from some meaningful event that help the protesters to overcome fear and challenge the powers that be in spite of the danger inherent to their action” (Castells, 2013, p. 219). What can be added to Castells’s description is the conscious choice of individuals to choose a certain opportune moment to come together as a collective self. The meaningful event that Castells speaks of is not random. The meaning behind it is indeed a conscious collective choice. The protesting crowds in Iran consciously chose the post-election results as the opportune moment to introduce their collective discourse. The repression by the Iranian government had been ongoing for a very long time. However, the question of timing is what makes one stand back and pose the question of “why now?” For this, to reply ‘emotional trigger’ poses a limitation in really grasping a collective action. This is why the appearance of the

protesting crowd needs to be understood as an Event since it is because of the verbalization of the collective’s discourse at the right moment that a protesting crowd comes to existence. With this appearance, one sees the ways through which the crowd uses old as well as new forms of practices of its collective self to identify itself as a protesting crowd and mobilize itself in the realm of Being. To this end, protesting crowds produce new multiplicities in the realm of Being as a result of their appearance as an Event. A protesting crowd embodies within itself the characteristics of a social movement that is explored by both schools of thoughts on social movements. On one side, it consists of multiplicities of identities and identity movements that come together around a collective discourse. What needs to be added about protesting crowds is that they have the capacity to attract the support of multiple identity movements for the sake of creating stronger collective voices surrounding their common goal. On the other side, one can find the seeds of the mobilization of resources within protesting crowds by looking at the capacity of this type of protest to always re-appropriate the everyday tools around it to mobilize itself. For instance, the use of Twitter and Facebook as tools to communicate with other protesters about the next date and time of an event is a great example of the re-appropriation of tools as a resource for the mobilization of the protesting crowds. In the introduction of The Rise of Networked Society, Manuel Castells (2011) takes an interesting approach to globalization by looking at the impact of ICT on creating what he calls networked societies. Castells contends that “around the end of the second millennium of the common era a number of major social, technological, economic, and cultural transformations came together to give rise to a new form of society, the network society” (Castells, 2011, p. xvii). In looking at these changes, Castells finds the common trend is that the modern globalized world is a world that has become increasingly connected in different ways. This indeed changes the nature of the relations of human beings and societies with one another and the term networked societies is coined to explain some of these changes. In his latest book, Networks of Outrage and Hope (2013), Castells extends this idea to today’s social movements in the Internet age. Just like the political, social, and economic changes that he has observed in his previous works on networked societies, the social movements in today’s world now utilize the ICT as a way to create transnational movements that transcend national boundaries where they were started. In

the same way, the protesting crowds of the Green Movement were able to create a transnational voice through the use of ICT as a means of practices of collective self that recognized the collective as a networked protesting crowd. In Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement, Valentine Moghadam introduces the concept of transnational collective action in order to talk about the modern forms of social movements that are able to reach beyond the boundaries of nations by being transformed into transnational movements due to the effects of globalization on social movements. According to her, “the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of globalization […] create opportunities and engender grievances that have resulted in a range of forms of collective action on a transnational scale” (Moghadam, 2012, p. 204). Just like Castells, Moghadam looks at the impact of globalization on today’s social movements by seeking to recognize that the process of globalization has a profound impact on the meaning and nature of a social movement. In the same way, the nature of what protesting crowds was 30 years ago during the 1979 revolution has changed due to the new forms of collective practices that the process of globalization has made possible. In the context of the Green Movement, we saw that the old and new practices of the collective self have led this crowd to recognize itself as a local, national, and transnational collective movement. The elements that remain constant within these protesting crowds are the notions that these collectives are dispositives that use a kairos to come together around a common discourse. However, what differentiates protesting crowds of the Green Movement from that of the 1979 revolution, for instance, is the collection of bodily and discursive practices that make this collective recognize itself as a collective self. This include the use of tools and technologies available as resources of mobilization. For future research, in conclusion, it would be pertinent to look at the collective practices of networked crowds in the 21st century and seek to understand how such knowledge can be implemented within transnational social movements to spark new movements or help already established movements to understand their existence as protesting crowds and find ways to traverse beyond just crowds to transnational crowds and further transnational social movements.

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Philosophy and Climate Change Maria Bernier Abstract: Given robust scientific consensus regarding the dangers of climate change, there is a pressing need to drastically reduce worldwide carbon emissions. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are strongly driven by global population and affluence levels, however, neither is particularly tractable to policy. For this reason, the usual tool to constrain carbon emissions is an appeal to technology in order to break the link between human economic activity and carbon emissions. This strategy ignores the severity of climate change scenarios and the reality of current technological limitations, as well as the deep-seated worldview that has enabled our highcarbon society’s jeopardization of climate stability. While clear anthropocentric reasons already exist for the reduction of CO2 emissions, such arguments are not currently compelling decisive action to avert dangerous climate change. My position is that the doctrine of hierarchical opposition between humanity and nature is not only rationally flawed, but obstructs the possibility of culturally rethinking the relationship between human and nature – resulting in poor or absent response strategies to ecological problems such as climate change. I explore the connection between a reductive view of the natural world and current economic paradigms, suggesting avenues through which the elaboration of non-anthropocentric cultural narratives might provide the underpinning for new economic principles and a radical rethinking of the socioeconomic worldview that informs the dominant discourses, policies, institutional frameworks, and practices of modernity.

1. Introduction The following paper combines economic and philosophical reasoning to explore the potential for carbon emission reduction through the underwriting of new economic axioms. First, I attempt to establish that the deep emission cuts necessary to stabilize climate change require a world-changing project involving the economic and social transformation of modern high carbon culture. The second section identifies the socioeconomic transformation to take place. Finally, I outline two promising areas for philosophy to contribute to the carbon emission reduction project through the underwriting of new economic principles.

2. Why a “world-changing” project is necessary The Kaya Identity tells us that global anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are given by the product of four inputs: world population (P), global affluence (GDP/P), as well as the

technologically-determined carbon intensity of economic activity, composed of the energy intensity of economic activity (E/GDP) and the carbon intensity of that energy (C/E).

According to this identity, both population and affluence are significant drivers of CO2 emissions. However, neither has proved particularly tractable to policy. Increasing affluence is frequently equated with improved well-being itself, while advocating for limits to population growth is often seen as contravening basic human liberties—presenting ethical challenges and questions of justice for policymakers. For this reason, the usual tool to control carbon emissions has been an appeal to technology in order to break the link between human economic activity and carbon emissions—a strategy known as decoupling. Decoupling occurs when the carbon intensity per unit of economic output declines, thus breaking “the link between ‘environmental bads’ and ‘economic goods’.” 1 In a world with a growing population and increasing GDP per capita, net carbon emissions decline when the rate of technological improvement is greater than the rates of population and income increases combined. Decoupling is already occurring: the average carbon intensity per dollar of world GDP has declined every year since 1990. 2 Nonetheless, during this period, world population and GDP per capita rose such that net carbon emissions grew by 2% annually, leading to an almost 40% increase in total emissions. 3 Considerable evidence suggests that avoiding dangerous climate change and large scale human suffering means reducing global CO2 emissions to below four billion tonnes a year by

Environment at a Glance OECD Environmental Indicators (OECD Publishing, 2006) 149. CO2 Emissions (kg per PPP $ of GDP) (World Bank, 2014). 3 Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth (London: Earthscan, 2009) 78. 2

2050. 4 Despite strong environmental and social justice arguments for carbon emission reductions, as of 2010, annual global CO2 emissions were more in the order of 40 billion tonnes. 5

Meanwhile, the United Nations estimates that worldwide population will reach between 7.4 and 10.6 billion 7 by 2050, and the OECD predicts that global GDP will continue to grow between 4.1 and 3.1% annually. 8

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Climate Change 2007 (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007). 5 Jos G.J. Olivier, Greet Janssens-Maenhout, Marilena Muntean, and Jeroen A.H.W. Peters, Trends in Global CO2 Emissions: 2013 Report (The Hague: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 2013) 9. 6 Olivier 9. 7 World Population to 2300 (New York: United Nations, 2004) 5. 8 J. Chateau, C. Rebolledo, and R. Dellink, â&#x20AC;&#x153;An Economic Projection to 2050: The OECD "ENV-Linkages" Model Baseline,â&#x20AC;? OECD Environment Working Papers 41 (OECD Publishing, 2011) 22.

The implications for climate change are staggering: if the UNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mid-range population estimate is accurate, then to achieve the necessary emission reductions by 2050, the carbon intensity per dollar of GDP must improve by 7% each year. For this to hold, the average carbon

World Population to 2300 5. Chateau 22.

content of economic output would need to be no more than 36gCO2 per dollar of GDP; a 21-fold improvement on the current global average of 768gCO2 per dollar (see figure 2, scenario 1). 11 Notably, this is not a worst-case scenario. Furthermore, it obtains in a world that remains deeply unequal. If the UN’s higher-end population estimate is correct, then, in a world of nearly 11 billion people, with a worldwide level of affluence comparable to that of the developed world, carbon intensity must fall by over 11% each year. By 2050, the carbon content of each dollar must be less than 6gCO2. 12 The greenest energy technology currently employed – wind power – has total lifecycle carbon emissions of the order of 35gCO2 per dollar. 13 Supplying the world’s energy needs solely via wind-generated power would involve increasing current production 50 thousand times over by 2050, and doubling this again by 2100. What’s more, this effort only ensures climate stabilization in scenario one.

Carbon intensities of economic output (gCO2/$) 14

Jackson 80. Jackson 81. 13 Benjamin K. Sovacool, "Valuing the Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Nuclear Power: A Critical Survey," Energy Policy 36.8 (2008): 2950. 14 Jackson 81. 12

Evidently, a large-scale transition in global energy systems is required to ensure the sustainability of economic activity, for which technological improvement and decoupling will be indispensable. But the stringency of these scenarios exposes the fact that the deep emission cuts necessary to stabilize climate change cannot be realized without addressing the fundamental drivers of carbon emissions: the size of the global economy and its continued growth. For this reason, the easy compatibility between economic growth and climate change, espoused by the Stern Report and politicians the world-over, is an illusion.16 However, considerable consensus exists that under existing macroeconomic arrangements, the modern economy is dependent on continued growth for its functional stability; for example, continued growth is the only real answer to the unemployment 17 caused by technological improvements. The unfortunate end result is that â&#x20AC;&#x153;the combined effects of market forces and new

Sovacool 2950. Dieter Helm, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Climate-change policy: Why has so little been achieved?â&#x20AC;? Oxford Reviews of Economic Policy 24.20 (2008): 225. 17 While an analysis of the dependency of the modern economy on feedback loops created by positive growth escapes the scope of the current paper, for a good overview of how current economic arrangements incentivizes the growth of the economy as a whole, see David Schweickart, "Is Sustainable Capitalism an Oxymoron?" Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 8.2 (2009): 559-80. For a more in depth analysis, see Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: The next Industrial Revolution (London: Earthscan, 1999). 16

technologies are not able to overcome planetary boundaries on the scale necessary to avoid unsustainable pressure on the planet and much human suffering.” 18 Faced with the insufficiency of technological factors and the structural inability of the modern economy to avert dangerous climate change, the deep emission cuts necessary for stabilization leave current and future generations with a much more difficult, transformative world project, involving the economic and social rethinking of our high carbon cultures.

3. The transformative project Currently, modern economics, global politics and public discourse are dominated by norms established during an era of colonial, patriarchal assumptions that mankind is master of nature. 19 Western philosophy itself helped to create the tyranny of such a narrow worldview, and now bears some responsibility in dismantling it. Not only is the doctrine of the separation of humanity from nature rationally flawed, its persistence has created an impasse in culturally rethinking the basis of this relationship – resulting in poor or absent response strategies to a panoply of emerging ecological problems, especially climate change. Hierarchical opposition between the human and nonhuman is a western cultural conception dating back at least to Ancient Greece and Judeo-Christianity which “sees the essentially human as part of a radically separate order of reason, mind, or consciousness, set apart from the lower order that comprises the body, the woman, the animal, and the pre-human.” 20 According to this deep-seated dualism, the human is not just superior to, but different in kind from the nonhuman. The human essence belongs to the cogito; rather than the ecologically-embedded being, it is the higher, disembodied self of mind, reason, culture or spirit. Nature is reduced to the passive, nonconscious, uncreative physical material that exists merely as a resource for the higher human

People and the Planet (London: Royal Society, 2012) 82.

Ruth Irwin, "Introduction," Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities, Ed. Ruth Irwin (London: Continuum Intl Pub Group, 2010) 11. 20 Val Plumwood, "Nature in the Active Voice," Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities, Ed. Ruth Irwin (London: Continuum International, 2010) 38.

order – its value purely instrumental. Since consciousness belongs to human subjects, nonhuman forms become mere matter: objects devoid of agency, spirit and intelligence. 21 While clear anthropocentric reasons already exist for the reduction of CO2 emissions, such arguments have heretofore failed to compel decisive action on the climate change front – subsumed by a reductive ideology of the nonhuman world that has enabled Western culture to dominate, colonize and exploit the biosphere for centuries – ignoring human embeddedness in and dependency on nature for continued existence. If we must re-evaluate the dominant modern paradigm of economic growth and reverseengineer an economy for a sustainable future, then we must also work backwards from this envisioned solution in order to identify the cultural values and normative practices that underpin the economic principles and institutions of this future society. Philosophy can not only provide solutions to the ethical dilemmas of climate change policymakers, but has an even more vital role to play in helping our society to rethink its basic cultural narratives. As the field that endeavours “to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently,” 22 philosophy is uniquely placed to substantively change modern thinking and praxis with regards to nonhuman value and humankind’s relationship to nature. Important work in the discipline of environmental philosophy – encompassing political philosophy, ethics, history of philosophy, moral epistemology, metaphysics – is already contributing to an emerging paradigm that challenges traditional human-centred frameworks. Transforming the ethos of modern culture from the perspective of halting climate change will require further acceptance of the environment and climate as subjects of philosophical inquiry, as well as a re-conception of nature in more dynamic and agentic terms.

4. The role for philosophy in the “world-changing project” The core process of critique places philosophy in a singular position to fill the indispensable role of developing and articulating the non-anthropocentric worldviews needed for

Plumwood 38. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1990) 9.

the social and economic transformation of modern carbon culture. In this final section, I would like to briefly touch on two concrete possibilities for philosophical innovations to inform new economic principles that may contribute to the reduction of carbon emissions. Climate change is frequently referred to as â&#x20AC;&#x153;the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.â&#x20AC;? 23 Often involving negative externalities or underprovided public goods, a market failure is a situation where economic forces fail to efficiently allocate goods and services. In macroeconomics, the economy is traditionally conceived of as an isolated system â&#x20AC;&#x153;in which exchange value circulates between firms and households in a closed loop,â&#x20AC;? 24 with no exchanges of matter or energy with the systemâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s environment. Without any dependence on natural services, environmental problems such as climate change and carbon emissions cannot be modelled in the macroeconomy, let alone addressed in an efficient manner.

For example, the two-factor Cobb-Douglas production function specifies economic output (Y) as a function of labour (L) and capital (K) and â&#x20AC;&#x153;contains no explicit reference to environmental resources.â&#x20AC;? 26 Y â&#x2030;Ą Y (K, L) = đ?&#x203A;źđ?&#x203A;ź â&#x2C6;&#x2122; đ??žđ??ž đ?&#x203A;źđ?&#x203A;ź â&#x2C6;&#x2122; đ??żđ??ż(1â&#x2C6;&#x2019;đ?&#x2018;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x17D;)

The failure of macroeconomics to account for human dependency on natural systems and ecological limits, including the climate, can be seen as a direct corollary to the human-nature dualism previously outlined; economics is only symbolic of a modern worldview that alienates humanity from nature at its philosophical foundation. Human-centeredness involves a distancing 23

N.H. Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 3. 24 Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. (Boston: Beacon, 1996) 47. 25 Daly 47. 26 Jackson 210.

from and denigration of nature, resulting in the denial of human embodiment, animality, and inclusion in the natural order. 27 This impairs our understanding of our ecological identities and dependencies on the environment and the climate. The phenomenal reality of climate is much like Heidegger’s famous example of a tool in Being and Time: “As long as the tool is handy, it stays unnoticed.” 28 It is only as the tool breaks down that it enters into our awareness. The problem is that climate is more than a tool or discrete event; it is the condition of possibility for life itself. Thus, the first vital role for philosophy in contributing to carbon emission reductions is the elaboration of a new philosophical modality of relating between humanity and nature. 29 This paradigm shift opens the possibility of conceptualizing the macroeconomy as an “open subsystem of the finite natural ecosystem” 30, dependent on physical exchanges with the environment as a source of inputs and a sink for outputs. The introduction of these physical exchanges would allow an ecologically literate macroeconomics to emerge that can account for our dependency on natural systems, including the climate.

Plumwood 36. Martin Schönfeld, "Field, Being, Climate: Climate Philosophy and Cognitive Evolution," Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities. Ed. Ruth Irwin (London: Continuum International, 2010) 22. 29 Ruth Irwin, "Reflections on Modern Climate Change and Finitude," Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities. Ed. Ruth Irwin (London: Continuum International, 2010) 50. 30 Daly 48. 28

As an example, modelling these ecological factors could involve expanding the CobbDouglas production function with explicit reference to the carbon content of different types of energy sources (E) as well as the non-substitutability of environmental services. This would allow previously independent variables, such as investment (I) and renewable resources (R), to be modelled alongside each other and constrained by the finite biosphere: Y â&#x2030;Ą Y (K, E, L)

đ?&#x2018;&#x152;đ?&#x2018;&#x152; = đ?&#x203A;źđ?&#x203A;ź â&#x2C6;&#x2122; (đ?&#x203A;źđ?&#x203A;źđ?&#x203A;źđ?&#x203A;źđ?&#x153;&#x152;đ?&#x153;&#x152; + đ?&#x203A;˝đ?&#x203A;˝đ?&#x203A;˝đ?&#x203A;˝đ?&#x153;&#x152;đ?&#x153;&#x152; + đ?&#x203A;žđ?&#x203A;žđ??¸đ??¸đ?&#x153;&#x152;đ?&#x153;&#x152; )đ?&#x153;&#x152;đ?&#x153;&#x152; đ?&#x2018;&#x2026;đ?&#x2018;&#x2026; ) đ?&#x2018;&#x2026;đ?&#x2018;&#x2026;đ?&#x2018;Ąđ?&#x2018;Ą â&#x2030;Ą đ?&#x2018;&#x2026;đ?&#x2018;&#x2026;đ?&#x2018;Ąđ?&#x2018;Ą (đ?&#x2018;&#x2026;đ?&#x2018;&#x2026;đ?&#x2018;Ąđ?&#x2018;Ąâ&#x2C6;&#x2019;1 , đ??źđ??źđ?&#x2018;Ąđ?&#x2018;Ąâ&#x2C6;&#x2019;1

These functions are preliminary, and illustrate the need for further research on the foundations of various alternative scenarios to growth. Nevertheless, forays into the elaboration of such macroeconomic principles demonstrate the possibility for the endless reflexivity of economics to be opened to other considerations, making the goal of achieving economic stability within ecological limits begin to look more achievable. Nonetheless, there remains a need for â&#x20AC;&#x153;a robust, ecologically-literate macroeconomicsâ&#x20AC;? 33 which accounts for our dependency on natural

Daly 49. Jackson 210. 33 Jackson 123. 32

systems and which can model how common macroeconomic aggregates behave when subjected to ecological limits. Turning to the second role for philosophy, the presence of negative externalities in microeconomics arises when the welfare of an agent is harmed by the activities of another agent. As with the problem of climate change, the cost that the individual bears is not the same as the costs incurred to society as a whole. The Coase Theorem relates to the internalization of negative externalities in microeconomics. It emphasizes that an efficient use of resources can be achieved through bargaining as long as property rights are well defined. Although abstract, this makes intuitive sense. For example, suppose a wind turbine company is taken to court by local households because of the noise generated by the turbines â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a negative externality. The court decides whether the households have a right to quiet or whether the company has the right to operate. If the court grants rights to the households, but the turbines are worth more to the company than the quiet is worth to the households, then the company can compensate the households in exchange for letting them operate. Conversely, if the court rules in favour of the company, the households can compensate the company to relocate or shut down if they value the quiet more than the company values the local operation. Although the money changes hands in opposite directions, the outcome is the same in both cases; the presence of well-defined rights allows resources (in this scenario, quiet) to be allocated according to who values it most. Extending the discussion to climate change, we can see that the lack of clearly defined rights for environmental entities is a major impediment to achieving a socially optimal quantity of carbon emissions. If, for instance, monetary sanctions could be enforced for damage done to the Great Barrier Reef because of rising water temperature caused by climate change, this would go a long way towards curbing dangerous climate change. Considering that inanimate entities such as corporations, estates, municipalities and universities are possessors of legal and moral rights, conferring legal rights and guardianship on environmental entities is not such a farfetched idea. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more, the extension of rights to new entities seems unthinkable and absurd

until the very possession of such rights changes the way in which we regard and think of the moral and legal standing of these entities. 34 For this reason, the development of a legal system that recognizes the legal standing of natural objects relies crucially on a second field of contributions from philosophy regarding the ethical standing of nonhuman value. Establishing non-human-centred theories of value in the dominant cultural discourse requires recognizing that nonhuman organisms have interests that can be harmed by human actions. If this harm is to be considered morally and legally reprehensible, then we must cede the worldview that humans are the only loci of intrinsic value.

5. Conclusion To conclude, the stringency of various carbon emission stabilization scenarios shows that the business-as-usual decoupling approach will be insufficient to avert dangerous levels of climate change. Addressing the fundamental drivers of CO2 emissions entails a radical rethinking of the socioeconomic worldview that informs the dominant discourses, policies, institutional frameworks, and self-understanding of modernity. Through its process of critique and holding everything open to question, philosophy is uniquely placed to establish new cultural narratives with regards to humankindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship to nature and nonhuman value. New understandings in both these fields will be indispensable to the elaboration of new economic axioms in micro and macroeconomics.

Works Cited Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities. Ed. Ruth Irwin. London: Continuum International, 2010. Daly, Herman E. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure: Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage, 1990. 34

Christopher D. Stone, "Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects." Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 3.0 (2012).

Hawken, Paul, Amory B. Lovins, and Hunter Lovins. Natural Capitalism: The next Industrial Revolution. London: Earthscan, 1999. Helm, Dieter. "Climate-change Policy: Why Has so Little Been Achieved?" Oxford Review of Economic Policy 24.2 (2008): 211-38. IPCC. IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Climate Change 2007. Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. Irwin, Ruth, ed. Climate Change and Philosophy: Transformational Possibilities. London: Continuum International, 2010. Jackson, Tim. Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. London: Earthscan, 2009. Print. Olivier, Jos J.G., Greet Janssens-Maenhout, Marilena Muntean, and Jeroen A.H.W. Peters. Trends in Global CO2 Emissions: 2013 Report. The Hague: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, 2013. OECD. Environment at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators. OECD, 2013. People and the Planet. London: Royal Society, 2012. Sovacool, Benjamin K. "Valuing the Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Nuclear Power: A Critical Survey." Energy Policy 36.8 (2008): 2940-953. Stone, Christopher D. "Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects." Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 3.0 (2012): 4-55. World Development Indicators. CO2 Emissions (kg per PPP $ of GDP). World Bank, 2014. Data file retrieved from <http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD>. World Population to 2300. New York: United Nations, 2004.