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From here to eternity? In the second instalment of a two-part essay, Geoff Sharp explores how the technosciences are contributing to an illusion of social continuity by creating unprecedented discontinuity.

Article Excerpt
After working on the draft of this article, which follows on from its first half 'From Here to Eternity' (Arena Magazine, April-May issue, no. 88), I happened to read an account of how, for Jewish survivors, the searing recollection of the Holocaust had re-emerged with a new intensity in the closing years of their lives (Fiona Harari in The Weekend Australian, 31 March 2007). In the aftermath of their personal survival, the only way for them to return to a 'normal' life had been to push from the foreground of memory, to repress, the fate of so many of their contemporaries. They did so by way of resuming the conventional routines of everyday life.

As these now elderly people retired, had time on their hands and faced the prospect of their own mortality, it was as if what had been repressed returned with renewed intensity.

While the overall life of society is by no means a simple accumulation of the different individual lives of its members, repression is one of the meeting grounds of personal and collectively shared experience. It would be far more difficult for individuals to 'forget' the horrific memories which might pervade their everyday sense of wellbeing unless an active process of denial was at work within the common culture. Does a similar process of turning away, to resume the habitual rhythms of everyday life, come into play when we face disruptive future prospects?

The lethargic response to the evidence of the likely effects of climate change certainly seems to suggest that it does. Nevertheless it is critically important to remember that this is a collective response. It is propped up by the settled institutional arrangements and cultural assumptions within which we both carry on in the present and anticipate the future. By and large individual repression of both past and future threats occurs within that collective framework. In every social world it becomes significant when tensions and structured conflicts emerge to break through the denial of the traumatic which 'normality' imposes. One such line of tension now marks the difference between the scientific and specialist workers who study climate change and the majority of their contemporaries. As they report its implications for the biological conditions of life, in a different register to everyday experience, it is inevitable that they should stand somewhat apart. The governments and peoples who receive the results of their investigations carry on a more down-to-earth, a less abstracted, mode of existence. They have few resources for independently verifying what they are told. They see the sun rise but they need Galileo to convince them that, within a more abstracted way of knowing, the turning earth presents the phenomenon of the rising sun.

Take for instance the recent declaration of a crisis in the waterflows in the Murray-Darling basin. Is this a result of drought, knowledge of which is accessible to country people relying on direct experiences and memory? Or must understanding depend on scientific analysis? That is of data drawn from deep drilling which, for instance, taps into cosmic cycles far removed from direct experience but made accessible by scientific apparatus which radically extends the power of the unaided senses.

Democracy, such as we have, presumes the prominence of the first type of experience, but that primacy is slipping away. Ask yourself, how do you know the difference between drought and climate change or, even more difficult, a mixture of both processes? The problem is obvious. Increasingly the majority of citizens have no effective way of assessing the new evidence. They are vulnerable to the politics of theatre and beat-up as any genuinely democratic determination of policy recedes before a more elitist management of consent.

The relation of these two modes of experience marks the unprecedented discontinuity which I outlined in the first half of this essay (Arena Magazine no. 88). Four hundred years ago, as the scientific revolution gathered pace, Galileo's heresy was still only a pointer towards the present. He and his compelling illustration of the validity of the Copernican theory of the universe were readily put down. But that response is by no means as readily available to the powers of the contemporary world.

Discontinuity

As noted in the first half of this essay the discontinuity associated with proliferating technosciences is comprehensive. The technosciences have reconstituted the natural world in unprecedented ways. This process of reconstitution is not confined to the natural world, however. It works in conjunction with the emergence of a different social world as well. It has transformed the mode of production, reworked the economy, and reconstituted the forms of interchange which frame everyday life.

It is crucially important to recognise that the way the technosciences have done so contributes to an illusion. Far from the unprecedented discontinuity which they introduce being readily apparent, it presents itself as continuity: as an improvement of the circumstances of an earlier generation. In the short run this reconstituted world is experienced as a liberation; it feeds into the freedom so central to the neo-liberal mantra, while far more slowly the recognition dawns that to radically reconstitute what it means to be human is also to lose the heritage which is inseparable from that meaning.

For the present the most obvious sign of discontinuity is climate change. Obviously denial and incapacity to appreciate its significance are still widespread. But, paradoxically, the effect of that denial is that it also limits the chance to understand that the recognition of climate change can be a step towards a wider understanding. Within such an understanding, climate change becomes symptomatic: one aspect of an unsustainable way of living.

The discontinuity we are facing now has many facets. Climate change is certainly the most obvious among them but not necessarily the most basic in any causal sense. Added to habitability, including the availability of water, the purity of air and even the way our bodies are constituted, there is the more immediately pressing social question. In their fusion with capital, the technosciences have introduced a radical discontinuity in the social forms within which we carry on our lives in common. As I pointed out in the earlier half of this essay it is exactly the unprecedented character of this potential for change, along with its comprehensive scale, and especially the way it hides its own social dynamic, which makes it so difficult to adequately imagine or to spell out the steps of a response.

Indeed denial, or at least scepticism, in the face of climate change is a typical first response to the evidence of discontinuity, as we have seen so clearly in the case of Prime Minister John Howard. Both for Howard and Rudd...

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