What is Driving our Modern Social Imaginaries? Turning to Cultural and Environmental Sociology for Answers

 — working paper —

RICHARD WIDICK

Co-Director, International  Institute of Climate Action Theory

Visiting Scholar, Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies

Assistant Project Scientist, Department of Sociology

University of California, Santa Barbara

richard.widick@orfaleacenter.ucsb.edu

[Originally published in Perspectives: Newsletter of the ASA Theory Section, Vol. 31, Issue 2, November 2009 (http://www.asatheory.org/). Below I republish it with several glaring typographical errors corrected and certain ideas elaborated. Download the original here: [download id=”28″]]

                                     

Our world is on the brink of planetary ecological catastrophe–at least according to thinkers ranging from mainstream environmentalists like James Gustave Speth to leading eco-socialists like John Bellamy Foster to politicos like Al Gore and intellectuals like the Union of Concerned Scientists.[1]  But it didn’t take them to convince me. I read about it every day in the news and on the Web—an infinite stream of reports coming in from the field of effects of world-system expansion. Every ocean, lake, stream, forest, mountain, desert, specie and existing or potential human or animal habitat on earth is already seen as threatened or will likely be soon.  Against critics who dismiss this language of crisis as apocalyptic and millennial and thus irrational, Foster cites the Union of Concerned Scientists’ 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” signed by 1575 top-ranking members: “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at risk the future we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdom, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring.”[2]

Sixteen years after this anxious appeal no fundamental changes have registered, at least not changes of the magnitude that Foster suggests is necessary, namely that of an ecological revolution similar in size and scope to the so-called industrial and agricultural revolutions.[3] Perhaps just this year, in this election cycle, enough public and political attention has begun flowing into the possibilities of alternative fuels that we may just start hearing honest reports that a structural adjustment is underway. But the oil-driven rise of China, India, South America and across the global south puts a check on even this modicum of optimism; it signals rather the built-in momentum of global warming, collapsing fisheries, deforestation, and species decline.  It seems in other words to confirm the Union of Concerned Scientists worst fears.  The urban lifeworld is also in trouble, as Mike Davis plainly argues in his aptly titled Planet of Slums (2006).  In the final analysis, modern oil-driven industrial capitalism is structured for infinite growth by global market competition, and that makes it increasingly at odds with both planetary ecological sustainability and social justice, as does expansion of the chemical, nuclear, mining, forestry and corporate agricultural industries, in spite of their now nearly universal self-identification as advocates of sustainability.  The fatal collision of human beings and the natural world seems to be well underway and is likely irreversible within any relevant timeframe.[4]  In the 21^st century social theory will have to respond to this changing planet by seeking better explanations of what is driving these changes.

In this essay I outline what I have been able to accomplish in this direction by bringing Cultural and Environmental Sociology together.  Like Jason Kaufman, who mentioned his methodological “preference for well told stories” over merely empirical explanatory arguments at this years’ Culture Section mini-conference  at the ASA, and in league with John Bellamy Foster’s penchant for hard-nosed political economic examination of the ecological consequences of capitalism, I will end by proposing a few initiatives for envehicling the strengths of cultural and environmental sociology in well-told stories about the places being made by our modern social imaginaries. [5]

By way of harnessing the linguistic force of one of the best told and retold social scientific stories of all time, we could say that these days another spectre is haunting modernity.  Like the one Marx heralded in the Manifesto, the new spectre enters the public sphere with a vengeance—just like the spectre of alienated and exploited labor did in the 19^th century (in the guise of communism); it presents another angry face with another, expanded set of monstrous grievances. It represents a new collective subject forged by the fires of capitalist accumulation in general, just like labor did.  As labor exploitation was to socialism and communism in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries (and we know how they changed the world!), world system expansion is to environmentalism in the 21^st Century.  But the new environmentalism is built on and within the world that labor struggle helped build.  It does not eclipse labor but sublates it in the Hegelian sense (aufheben)—environmentalism overcomes that conflict by containing it; it dissolves it while preserving it in itself.  Because environmentalism without class will surely falter, its only hope is to imbibe and raise labor struggle to a higher level.[6]  Whatever we do, our central task must be to chip away at the artificial division between these two struggles.

A sober look at how the new environmentalism grows will bear this out. Notice for example how the new spectre is forced to borrow a face.  The advance guard of aggrieved parties do not and cannot speak for themselves, as workers were forced to and learned how to do.  Dying birds and suffocating waters do not self-organize and raise their own consciousness.  But people identify with species and with natural places. They take up the causes and produce the images and stories people need to recognize themselves in the new specter’s face.  On August 27, 2008, for example, I found two such images in the New York Times: “Arctic Sea Ice Drops to Second Lowest Level on Record” (Associated Press) and “World Bank Finds That Adjustment Places More in Steep Poverty” (Reuters).  In the first a senior scientist at The National Snow and Ice Data Center, Mark Serreze, speaks up for the ice and the species it supports, reporting that with Arctic sea ice down to 1.65 million square miles, there’s less white ice to reflect the sun and more dark water to absorb its heat: “”We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point,” he said, ”It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now.” A family of polar bears was spotted swimming north in the open sea heading for sea ice; they can sometimes make it one hundred miles, but this time the spotters knew it would be an impossible 400 mile swim.  In the second report we learn that the World Bank has adjusted its monetary measure of extreme poverty up from $1/day to $1.25/day, in order to reflect better price data.  Thus, not 1 billion but 1.4 billion world citizens are extremely impoverished.  Who will speak for them?

Images like these surface everyday in the global semiosphere, helping call up and sustain the new environmentalism as a movement public, and the Web and YouTube make the global semiosphere in which this public is possible more imagistic than ever.  By dint of such storied images peoples’ attentions are united as such, as collective consciousness, the disparate elements of which thus become capable of recognizing their common cause.  Such technologies transform public spheres, making it easier for what Mustafa Emirbayer and Mimi Sheller have called psychical working alliances to organize themselves in the name of species and places and ecologies that have for so long been the sink of externalized cost and stood namelessly by as their values were blasted into circulation.[7]  We should extend this idea to social movements in general and learn to describe them as psychical publics, and to subject them to the level of scrutiny that Habermas, Charles Taylor, Craig Calhoun and Michael Warner, among others, have prescribed for the public sphere in general.[8]   As Niklas Luhman said, what people know of the world they know through mass media.[9]  For this reason, mass media are and will increasingly become the medium of the planetary eco-public spectre that will, if we’re lucky, force capital to adapt to the changing planet.

Already we see the immensity of the task laid out.  To grasp the crisis we must deftly handle the market, the state, the public and mass media—the institutional engines of modernity, in other words, and do so with a supple and deep theory of the embodied subject while we’re at it, a social agent overflowing with life energy and interests and instincts and desire.  On top of everything we have to remember what psychoanalysis has taught us.  It looks like we need a total theory to proceed—or at least a concept of the totality that can help us describe the institutions we find running on the psychical energies and producing all of the values we encounter accumulating in modern everyday lifeworlds.

Values?  We must set aside old prejudices against the term and work against the political and methodological impulse to separate the moral from economic and aesthetic orders long enough to begin an inquiry into their origins.  Environment and labor; planetary ecology and the planetary poor and working folk (the Multitude, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have described it)—these are the two sources of value and therefore the two historic sinks for the costs that capital by definition must set aside in order to constitute itself as such, as capital, in order to grow and accumulate.[10]  As the sources of value—the energies—that are fueling the expansion of the modern world-system, social theory must better learn to investigate the processes by which they are transformed into capital, converted from the outside to the inside of the system.

The answer, I suggest, lies in the way we conceive of society as a system of relatively autonomous institutions, in which distinct institutions become engines of distinct processes of valuation, the performance and delivery of distinct and often contrary values, and where by value we must signify both use and exchange in the economic sense and interested attributions of the good in the conventional normative sense. This will take us back to the juridical origins of the institutional set-up that Jurgen Habermas spoke so clearly about in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.  Modern constitutions, he explained, set the public sphere up as a fourth estate, checking and balancing state power and relatively autonomous to forces of both market and political spheres, and modernity appears as the epoch defined by this uniquely powerful institutional dynamo.[11]  Here’s where we turn to cultural sociology.

Cultural sociology teaches us this—that we are never in the world directly, but rather we are always already in the world by way of being in institutions, for example the institutional set-up we call the modern social imaginary. As human beings we encounter objective forces of nature and society from our positions within these various overlapping and mutually constitutive institutional domains—into which we have been born and within which and through which we emerge as thinking things.

Language of course is the principle cultural institution through which we think and it should be the model on which we base our descriptions of every other institution. For example, we can apply the basic tenets of structural linguistics to our use of psychological terms in describing how power operates in the family as a conduit for collective representations to enter into and shape the developing organism’s psychical structure. The infant’s identification with its primary care givers is both visual and linguistic, but its conceptual meaning is very largely linguistic and is best described as such, in terms of the objective conditions and structures of language that the subject is invited and compelled to take up and use in the process creating a self-identity.  This institutional description applies for the entire modern social imaginary—in fact, I think it is what gives the term imaginary its currency among theorists today.  It stands in for depth psychological treatment of attitudes and desires.  It makes the material world of institutions into a dynamic and morally fueled engine of practice, rather than just an inert world of physical structures overlaid by mental forms variously conceived as beliefs, values, ideas or some other kind of mental stuff.

My point here is that the concept of modern social imaginaries combines the best cultural sociology of institutions with practice theory and allows us to talk about the production and reproduction of the powerfully unequal hierarchies that dominate our social worlds, without going over into the kind of sociologism that Bourdieu and Giddens and Ortner and Geertz, among so many others, have warned against for so long.

We have learned too much about this from Pierre Bourdieu to conveniently summarize, but if we must reduce his lesson to a slogan (as for example we can reduce Marx’s culturalism to his remark in the 18^th Brumaire—Men Make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing), we could say this: Habitus generates and empowers every field (of power), but only under the conditions of possibility offered for use by that very field (of power).  As individuals we internalize the social (field[s]) because, from the first to last instance, it is the condition of possibilities for our communicating and being social.  But it does not determine any action of ours in a concrete sense; rather, by failing to do so it constitutes people as subjects, as agents who are free to act, free to invoke the rules, free to say whatever they like on condition that they invoke the conventions of the field in the same way that speakers must invoke the conventions of vocabulary and grammar.

In this regard we cannot forget the introductory remarks of Emile Durkheim in The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press, 1966, 2-3), which should remain a principal guide for cultural sociologists: “The system of signs that I use to express my thought, the system of currency I employ to pay my debts, the instruments of credit I utilize in my commercial relations, the practices of my profession, etc., function independently of my use of them. And these statements can be repeated for each member of society. Here, then, are ways of acting, thinking and feeling that present the noteworthy property of existing outside the individual consciousness…. a category of facts with very distinctive characteristics; it consists of ways of acting, thinking and feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him. These ways of thinking cannot be confused with biological phenomena, since they consist of representations and of actions; nor with psychological phenomena, which exist only in the individual consciousness and through it.”  In other words, they are not just imaginary—they are the social imaginary.

The point here is that institutions are a form of material cultural production, and that means that they are each and all processes of valuation; they are the source of all values.  This sheds cultural light on the fabulous formulation of Marx: labor is the source of all value(s).  This remains a true statement, but it must be stressed that subjects are never just laboring on the world directly, but rather their labor is always mediated by institutions (you will recall Marx in the Grundrisse — “All production is the appropriation of nature by an individual in and through a specific form of society /my emphasis, and where we understand society in the cultural, sociological sense of a system of institutions).

In this way of thinking, the modern social imaginary is the institutional order of rights-based markets, publics, and polity through which and by means of which individual labors are objectified in the world as value.

I first confronted the challenge of describing cultural institutions and the reproduction of inequality during years of graduate training in cultural sociology.  My principal foil at the time was Pierre Bourdieu, whose grand theoretical synthesis I put to work as best I could in an urban ethnography of the options exchange in San Francisco.[12]  The question driving me was apropos the setting: how was self-identity produced and reproduced in this urban scene, at the heart of the capitalist system? And to what effect?  The question at base was a question of desire—how do people make their lives and realize their dreams at the center of world financial forces?  The answer of course was—they live under the cultural conditions of possibility of the organizational workplace, conceived as a field (of power).  Objective institutional orders of values and ideas envehicled in practices are what traders use to make their lives.  Cultural production and reproduction of masculine domination in this social world is allegorical of the logic of fields in general. The case of the options trading floor is emblematic.

What I learned from Bourdieu was invaluable—thinking dialectically is no easy task and Bourdieu is certainly a master.  But as I observed the professionalization of Bourdieu studies in America I became increasingly alienated—it seemed to me obvious that too many of the problems and debates in this subfield of cultural sociology were not passing the relevancy test: they did not rise to the challenge of facing the most serious social problems I was watching develop. It was also my privilege during these years to be teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, very near to what turned out to be one of the great and truly emblematic environmental movements of our time: the struggle to save California’s last remaining privately owned ancient redwood groves.

After publishing my MA on Bourdieu I committed myself to bringing cultural theory into dialog with environmental sociology and history in an empirical case study of this local struggle–the redwood timber wars in the Humboldt Bay region of Northern California would be my testing grounds for what I believe is a necessary fusion of the disciplines.

I present the extended single case historical and ethnographic study in Trouble in the Forest: California’s Redwood Timber Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Summer 2009).  It’s a long story—so here I can only give the briefest outline: When the global extraction corporation Maxxam leveraged the locally-owned, family controlled and widely respected Pacific Lumber of northern California for $900 million, using junk bonds floated on the Reagan deregulated financial markets during the hostile take-over frenzy of the mid-1980s, it brought a savage new round of globalization to the redwoods.  The new owner, Charles Hurwitz, immediately started liquidating his assets to cover the debt, spelling destruction for final one percent of the ancient redwoods–ninety-six percent of which had already been cut and three percent having already been preserved in parks.  Local citizens responded by forming up a network of forest defense social movement groups ranging from Sierra Club chapters, legal watchdogs, and timber harvest plan monitors to radical environmentalists organized in quasi-cell structures for direct-action civil disobedience.  For twenty years they prowled the bay redwood region’s public sphere, making labor and environmental conflict the defining characteristic of politics, with campaigns like Save Headwaters Forest, Redwood Summer, Earth First! & IWW Local #1, Julia Butterfly’s Luna tree-sit, and the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, which brought United Steel Workers and forest defenders together at the Battle in Seattle, 1999.

In late 1999 I moved to Humboldt for two years of participant observation and ethnographic research, living and working in Humboldt while engaging in the forest defense and the Seattle confrontations with the World Trade Organization.  Seeking a sense of the cultural engines of this long running conflict, and trying to fathom what it might mean for the 21st century–what does it tell us about culture and globalization in the age of environmental crisis and information revolution?–I immersed myself in the regional archives and struggled to build a theoretical framework broad enough for the story I wanted to tell.

That is when I turned to the culturalist concept of modern social imaginaries, with its powerful, institutional analysis of the nation’s rights-driven social machinery of imbricated markets, publics, and polities—an institutional set-up founded in the durable text of the Constitution and reinforced throughout founding speech.  But as I encountered it, this essentially liberal political economic perspective did not have all the conceptual tools I needed to describe and interpret the timber wars—I also needed environmental theory and finally psychoanalytic sociology in order to create the fullest and most dynamic description of the scene, and to tell the story in a way that I felt stayed most true to the passionate politics of my research subjects on all sides of the struggle and to my own experience (as a field researcher submitting myself to all the forces at work in this field of power).

Here’s how I posed the question: could I reconcile the concept of modern social imaginaries with the first and second internal contradictions of capitalism, as it has been specified by environmental theorists, namely James O’Connor and John Bellamy Foster?  First—begin with Taylor, who defines our various modern social imaginaries in terms of their principal institutional spheres—the markets, publics, and polity that are driven by rights discourse and which constitute our most dearly held patterns of everyday life.[13] Then acknowledge that planetary ecological crisis is forcing us to reevaluate the growing domination of the market in this arrangement.  We need some way to recognize and study how it is that markets achieve this domination.  It has to do with the structure of capitalism, and so we turn to critical (and political) economics.  This comes to us from everywhere, but let’s pay close attention to the first section of Marx’s Manifesto and to the developing scholarship of social ecologists, especially O’Connor, Foster, and Speth as representatives of the field.

The story of Maxxam in Humboldt and the ensuing timber wars exemplifies the method.  The story is emblematic of myriad places around the globe.  Here as elsewhere a local instanciation of the modern social imaginary is entering into its epoch of second contradictions, an epoch in which the success of capital in exercising great power over labor, in the service of accumulation, and is through that process producing increasing accumulations of externalized social costs of production, which in turn are raising costs of production for everyone in the region.  Everywhere the circumstances are similar to Humboldt: crises are striking at capital are not only from the demand side but from the supply side as well. We are faced with market gluts and food riots at a time when world food production has never been greater (suggesting that the ongoing cycle of demand or realization crises are still at the basis of world-system expansion); but think also of the dead zones in the seas, for example that which opens in the gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi river every spring, and consequently the generalized crisis of the oceans, in which the very success of the so-called green revolution in the global agricultural system is producing the external cost of eutrophication of vast sections of the ocean, extinguishing life over vast areas and thus raising the costs of fishing and sea food for everyone.

And in the growing resource wars, of which the fisheries are but a single example, the great capitalist powers are still coming into conflict in the colonial territories just as Marx understood they would—the structure of competition is still chasing capital (the bourgeoisie) all over the globe (in search of cheaper prices for labor and resources); for example in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan; Sudan; Georgia, etc.[14]

In summary—capital in general and the industrialing nations in particular are getting squeezed by environmental limits that show up as rising costs and environmental protests over diminishing qualities of life.

We should not be distracted or fooled by the (relative) absence or lack of mass ecological street protest.  The various wars are sucking up so much of the available psychical energy that would otherwise be flowing into these collective subjects.  When and if these wars ever subside we can expect a tide of attention to flow back into efforts at ecological stabilization.  But we must also recognize that our information society has given us a new form of social movement—the network form.  Instead of looking merely to the streets we have to see the flood of human attention being channeled through hyperspace networks into the collective subjects of emergent global civil society.

The coming 2012 US presidential elections are a perfect case in point: they are truly monopolizing on available psychical energies of political consciousness, drawing people to websites and political blogs and information streams that allow them to participate in stopping the war, for example, by voting for an anti-war candidate, or in stopping the assault on the Endangered Species Act, ANWR, The National Forests, etc.  The network society is more highly democratized and sociology has to integrate this new media dimension of public formation more deeply into its assumptions by putting media on the same footing as race class and gender; media are as constitutive of the fundamental inequalities, integrations, and conflicts that interest us as are the other great structures of social life.

This is part of what Charles Taylor means to do, I think, when he puts public spheres among the principal institutions of the modern social imaginary. Yes market accumulation begins to overpower the planet, but publics accumulate meaning-making possibilities in the same proportion, and the state, necessarily responsive to both through the electoral process, completes our integrated historical understanding what is driving our modern social imaginaries.  Environmental publics, for example, as they emerge in distinct places around local issues, as for example in the defense of Headwaters Grove from the Maxxam corporation in Humboldt.

Now let us return to the second contradiction again:  John Bellamy Foster explains how the first contradiction in capitalism squeezes profits and leads to a demand or realization crises that compel capital to reorganize in order to regain profitability, under pain of revolt by the exploited laboring classes.  Meanwhile, the second contradiction leads to ecological crisis as capital undermines its own conditions of production–that is, it eventually destroys “[1] the personal conditions of production associated with the reproduction of human labor power, [2] the external-natural conditions of production (forests, oil fields, water supplies, bird species, etc.) and [3] the general-communal conditions of production (i.e., the built environment, for example, cities, including their urban infrastructure)” to such an extent that it generates an underproduction of capital, a second type of crisis that squeezes capital from the supply side.

One problem, notes Foster, is that this second contradiction does not generate an automatic feedback mechanism forcing capitalism to adjust to the destruction of laboring communities and environments, as does the first contradiction, which forces rising wages and thus limits to inequality in the division of wealth. Says Foster, “There is no ecological counterpart to the business cycle.” Rather, he says, nothing prevents capital from profiting anew from such destruction, for example with new industries of ‘waste management.’ But new social movements like the forest defense can do some of this work on a local basis by making themselves into precisely the kinds of feedback mechanisms Foster says are necessary. Their ability to generate counter-publics that represent a political constituency for regulations can ease competitive pressures to degrade these conditions of production. Foster knows this but fears that capital can easily move from place to place and remain profitable—there is no feedback mechanism “for capitalism as a whole.”[15]

But I contend that the accumulation of places like Humboldt and the emergence of the so-called movement of movements in global civil society amount to a mechanism that is already shaping the reorganization of capitalism as a whole.

This is clearly not an optimistic diagnosis, as it shifts the burden of reorganization to political conditions outside the business cycle. The theory of second contradictions produces nothing so optimistic as the long held faith, in certain quarters, that the ongoing deformation of labor would spur revolt and destroy the inequality and demand crises generated by capital accumulation; but it does sensitize us to emergent ecological-political-economic conditions of opposition to neoliberal and corporate-led globalization.

So, this is one way that cultural and environmental sociology can be brought successfully together—by using the concept of modern social imaginaries to explain how the energies alienated from labor and nature accumulate to capital and drives the (social) imaginary(s); environmental theory targets the growth machine, exposing and analyzing the internal contradictions within the capitalist engines of perpetual growth that are promising destruction of human labor, the urban as well at wild or natural places in which it is nested (the urban and beyond),and nature.  This is how and where the twin specters emerge.

But where, again, do these two great common subjects promise to emerge and finally, ultimately, to merge?  In the public sphere, as a new public sphere, a new practice of public culture.  This is what I am learning to call emergent global civil society; it is a cultural space of power in which the psychical energies of the global multitude, the dangerous classes, the working classes and poor peoples and peoples otherwise aggrieved and the peoples that identify their own fates with the fate of the dying species and lakes and rivers and oceans, etc—these dangerous classes are, in other words, still being socialized.  We could say they are being (re)organized by the ongoing economic and ecological crises, called up into ever greater collectivities that we will have to start describing as psychical publics.  Self-identification of labor and environmental interests, in contradiction to unchecked capitalist accumulation, is already beginning to constitute a broader and more polyvocal but unified subject for regulatory check of the constant waste flow of the planetary body politic.

Social theory can and should, I believe, advance this development by putting its considerable energy and talent to the task.  I have tried to contribute to the effort with Trouble in the Forest, and I grateful that you have sat with me this long listened to me try even harder to carve out this future

One final note, in order to end on an upbeat: In order to achieve this fusion, cultural and environmental sociologists must come together on the Kantian psycholological grounds that Sigmund Freud understood quite well, the ground on which we base our understanding of every individual as a communicative organism: “In our science, as in others,” Freud wrote, “the problem is the same: behind the attributes (qualities) of the object under examination which are presented directly to our perception, we have to discover something else which is more independent of the particular receptive capacity of our sense organs and which approximates more closely to what may be supposed to be the real state of affairs. We have no hope of being able to reach the latter itself, since it is evident that everything new that we have inferred must nevertheless be translated back into the language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible to free ourselves…. Reality will remain ‘unknowable.’”[16]

Teresa Brennan, author of Globalization and its Terrors, made an impressive move in this direction with her 2003 book History After Lacan.  The foundational fantasy of subjectivity, she said, understood as the process of establishing the modern person’s ego as a primary identification of the subject as a sensual experience of unitary power, proceeds by way of its alienation from the (m)other.  But her lucid explanation of Jacques Lacan’s mirror argument pushes the argument: We have to understand that this other is the generalized other, certainly, but conceived not just as a mental or psychological other but the objective world itself—as living nature, she says; living nature is the other over and against which the modern individual, and by extension the collective subject(s) of modern life, perforce sets itself against in its foundational fantasy and therefore throughout its ascendance into a life of mastery.  Mastery over self, other, and nature are all driven by the same psychical energies and processes.  Just like the individual subject’s emergent ego pushes itself up and constitutes itself as such by separating from the mother, alternately tenderly loving her and aggressively seeking to dominate her in the psychical dance of ambivalence which marks one of Freud’s enduring contributions to psychology, so it is with collective modernity’s alternately loving and brutal ascendance to complete mastery over living nature.  Brennan has anchored this modern tendency within the very structure of the ego, locating a profound engine of human mastery in the spectacle of consumption and the careless destruction of living nature it simultaneously requires, reproduces, drives and ultimately masks.

Cultural and environmental sociologists alike must come to understand this collective ego as a shared morphological imaginary through which and by which the subject’s world will be synthesized into the subject’s experience.  This morphological imaginary is nothing less than the subject’s principal guide of action.  It is, in the final analysis, the source and prism of all those labor energies we discover directed at nature and blasting it into values that accumulate in the world-system of capital, as capital, and thus ultimately as that world-system itself; it is therefore also the source of those bodily oriented mental attentions that get channeled through psychical public sphere specters of labor and environmental grievance into increasingly direct contradistinction to unfettered accumulation; it is, in other words, precisely what is driving our modern social imaginaries into increasingly planetary formations of public culture.  At whatever difficulty, we will have to continue work on conceiving of emergent global civil society in these terms.

I think that if we tuned our historical and cultural methodologies to these environmental and labor energy channels we would find the same kind of public culture that I found accumulating in Humboldt County accumulating all over the world.  Stories of the oil wars of the Niger Delta, the rubber wars of the Amazon and the coal wars of Appalachia would be equally illustrative and provide a comparative angle on expanding world-system and emergent global civil society.

How does the ongoing human rights revolution tie these disparate scenes and histories together?  How do these variant, place-based instanciations of the modern social imaginary reflect the universal form and substrate of subjectivity that social psychology from Freud to Lacan and Brennan have done to so much to reveal?  How close will this line of research bring us to the great metanarratives that we were taught, for a while, to avoid in the last quarter of the 20^th century, but which the great 2009 economic crisis in world system capitalism seems to indicate might be in need of staging a comeback?  And how much of Polanyi, Marcuse, Adorno, Habermas and Benjamin will we find to have already been there when we finally arrive with our dog-eared copies of Marx and Freud?

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