Wrestling With “Statement-ese” and Ends

“We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question of ‘ends.’ This need not mean acquiescence to the logics of either economic utilitarianism or partisan fealty that have already proved so damaging to 21st-century institutions. But avoiding the question will not solve the problem. If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production, then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work—in part to advance the Enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’ and in part to defend themselves from public and political mischaracterization.”

The authors of The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences draw inspiration for their intertwining of “end” and “ends” from the Enlightenment, whose “thinkers combined practical and utopian definitions of ends as they called for new modes and institutions of knowledge production, understanding ends as large-scale goals that must, at the same time, be achievable.”

“We are living in a transition. The transition we’re living in is perhaps one in a 400-year transformation. A transformation in our world view. As much as the Newtonian Enlightenment structured a world view in divisibility, in perspective, in classification theory, so we’re living in a new world of inter-being, entanglement and inter-relationships, and it’s changing how we exist in the world. And in that context, climate change is a symptom of the failure of an old worldview. Now, we often talk about this transition from a perspective of technologies. But … this is not just a transition of technologies but actually a deeper transformation of how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive our relationships with the world. And in that form, it’s a transformation of how we organize the world around us. It’s a transformation in our institutions, our theories of property, our theories of ownership, and even beyond.”

Humanity is currently at war with the Earth’s ecological systems and with the basis of life for future generations. Climate breakdown is just one of many symptoms of a structural failure “at the level of how we perceive ourselves and how level of how we perceive ourselves in relationship to the world.” An equitable and regenerative response entails shifting from a primary focus on the growth of industrial production of material goods to the growth of intangible goods, like care, knowledge and creativity. Our material economy, food and energy systems must transform to new models that are circular and biomass-driven. Fundamentally, humanity needs to shift from a paradigm based on dominion to one rooted in care; from separation and objectification to entanglement and inter-being; from exclusive ownership to common stewardship.

The philosophy of “techno-optimism,” outlined in a manifesto by billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen, espouses blind faith that humanity’s problems will be solved through technology and market capitalism. But it fails to take into account the ethical and social consequences of technology. In reality, market-driven approaches to global poverty and healthcare have resulted in unequal distribution of resources and negative results, ultimately challenging the notion that techno-capitalism will lead to abundance and human progress. Though not formally stated, the article can be read as a critique of capitalism itself.

“In this particular philosophy, ‘growth’ and ‘technology’ have magical problem-solving capabilities, and if we pursue them relentlessly, we will eliminate the need to ask any deeper questions (such as ‘growth toward what?’ or ‘technology that does what?’ or, crucially, how the benefits are allocated, i.e. ‘growth and tech for whom?’). The ‘optimism’ in ‘techno-optimism’ is the idea that we can be confident that the future will be a certain way without having to do much work ourselves to make sure it is that way. The cult-like chanting of the god-word ‘technology’ is typically an attempt to evade the political (i.e., ethical) work of deciding how to justly allocate harms and benefits.”

U.S. President Joseph Biden’s recent affirmation that “American leadership is what holds the world together” is self-deluding, though U.S. power has been a central force in world politics for over a century, and speculating about a post-American world is a futile exercise. U.S. leaders are primarily addressing their own citizens and using this rhetoric to counter the image of the country as a chaotic and disruptive force.

“This idea, that there is a ‘place’ in the world, which is that of ‘America as the organizer,’ and that without America occupying that place and doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in U.S. policy circles. As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to ‘hold it together.’ America itself is hardly in one piece.”

The Israel-Hamas conflict has provoked an abundance of statements: from individuals, brands, and even colleges and universities, an increasingly common situation in the social-media age. Sam Adler-Bell discusses the phenomenon, how the impulse to weigh in gained speed with the Black Lives Matter movement, and how the language has seeped into private individuals’ communications. The interview was inspired by this essay by Adler-Bell in New York magazine.

“There’s a strange way in which this statement fixation, in which statement-ese…I think it’s a product of a feeling of helplessness or a condition of helplessness, but that it also encourages helplessness. It demobilizes people. I think that sometimes the backward-looking statement-ese makes people feel that it’s already all over. It’s already all done. There’s nothing that we can do, there’s nothing we can change. Just as a democratic matter, that shouldn’t be the case.”

Mexicy City’s antimonumentos corridor is one of the ways in which memory activists seek to mark significant events of violence and state neglect, and expressly confront both the government and society by voicing public demands for justice, accountability, and non-repetition, in a context of more than 110,000 enforced disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the start of the “war on drug cartels” in 2006. These counter monuments, placed by anonymous, self-funded groups of activists and families of victims of different forms of violence, exemplify a protest against a specific regime of temporality.

“The antimonumentos challenge the temporality of the state’s focus on closure by bringing together past events, present demands and future possibilities through the placing of these colorful, prominent sculptures on Mexico City’s streets. The antis serve as continuous reminders of violence and impunity, but also create public spaces that bring people together in relation to the events they mark, and others that have occurred—before and after. In this sense, they create a ‘particular form of protest’ that is not limited to a single event or demand, and that is renewed in the everyday through their disruptive presence in public space. The counter monuments are ephemeral, and yet they generate strong ripple effects in their appeals to continued participation and appropriation. As such, they are a direct response to traditional monumentality, which is materially ‘permanent’ and static; long-lasting and dead at the same time.”

The interwar writings of classic International Relations writers E.H. Carr, Karl Polanyi and David Mitrany “offer acute insights about the future prospects for world order in a period of tumultuous change, when established norms, social conventions, political relations, and economic dynamics were all facing upheaval.” Addressing the economic disparities within the rich world, focusing on state intervention to support growth and citizen well-being, and enhancing democratic engagement are key to resolving current geopolitical issues.

“The key insight we can take from the work of Carr and his compatriots is that the near-term future of world order continues to rest primarily on how the rich world organizes its political economy. This means that solutions to the so-called crisis in world order need to come first and foremost from the global North rather than its purported ‘challengers’ in the global South. It also suggests the future is perhaps a bit more open-ended than often portrayed. The past may be a foreign country, as the famous saying goes, but it is not yet entirely unrecognizable.”