Re: <nettime> Constitutioanl radicalism

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 10/13/2017 10:14 AM, mp wrote:

> Does anyone remember the days before "climate change" was "armed with
> peer-reviewed science" when reason, logic and empirical science was
> under severe scrutiny as myths and illusions associated with
> colonialism, racism and destruction of the human habitat?

Yeah, I personally remember it very well. The impulse of cheering things 
uncritically does not often hit me. Rather, I observe that times change, 
and that a strand of ecologically oriented science has emerged over the 
past thirty years which offers much more positive and liberatory 
perspectives than anything available from professional scientists thirty 
years ago. Sometimes I am puzzled why some people are so uncritical as 
not to have noticed this, and to still apply rote condemnations where 
they no longer fit. But on the other hand, there are still plenty of 
zone of science and technoscience that still merit exactly those 
critiques, and so I do understand it.

Basically I think that severe scrutiny you mention has born at least 
some fruit. Earth system science, or better, Gaian science, is very 
progressive stuff. One the other hand, there is a weakness to critique 
that only produces more critique, and more critique. "Has critique run 
out of steam?" asked Bruno Latour around ten years ago. It was a 
significant question.

No flame war implied, willing to talk about it more,

Brian
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