Democracy as Oil
Mazen Labban [Review of Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.” The review first appeared in Antipodefoundation.org] As Something Animal “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” Wittgenstein (1958: p.223) remarks towards the end of the Philosophical Investigations. Lions have a “form of life” different from that of human beings, a form of life inaccessible to human beings, which makes their hypothetical language similarly inaccessible. What then is “form of life”? Wittgenstein himself does not elaborate, but students of Wittgenstein seem to agree that forms of life are constituted of patterns that give meaning to our experience of the world. Our form of life is the “groundless ground” upon which our activities rest and where the justification of what we do ends and must therefore be accepted as given (Wittgenstein 1958: §217 – see also p.226). Forms of life cannot be explained; neither can they explain anything: they are formal conditions lacking empirical content not causal laws and, unlike empirical regularities, they are not discoverable by experiment since any such attempt presupposes the form of life that would render the process of discovery intelligible. For the same reason, we cannot imagine other forms of life because any such contemplation would be made from within our form of life. Does that mean we are bound by our form of life as we are by natural laws? The vagueness of the notion opens it to such interpretation, but there are varying, and often conflicting, interpretations ranging from biological determinism to cultural relativism, some emphasizing the formal aspect of forms of life (patterns, regularities, etc.), others its lived dimension: life, activity, either in the biological sense (natural history of the species) or the cultural sense (diversity, institutions). Although the anthropological sense is prevalent in the current use of the term—interchanged often with expressions such as way of life, mode of life and lifestyle—the naturalistic interpretation which construes the human form of life as something typical of the species, of our biological constitution and natural propensities, persists. It permeates even interpretations that are not self-consciously biological or deterministic, and finds support in remarks by Wittgenstein about “the natural history of human beings” (1958: §25; §415). A form of life is, “as it were”, “something animal” (Wittgenstein 1969: §358-359). What does it mean, then, to speak of “forms of collective life” and “forms of democratic politics” created or made possible by abundant fossil fuels? How can forms of political life be created from the production and consumption of large amounts of hydrocarbons? Can such formulation provide the basis for a materialist theory of politics, or democracy more specifically, that gives the material processes and objects with which our everyday life is entwined a constitutive part in our social and political practices? What happens to the materialist conception of politics—and to political practice—when the physiochemical properties of matter become constitutive of political agency? This is what Tim Mitchell pursues in Carbon Democracy: a “socio-technical understanding” of democracy as a form of political life grounded in forms of carbon energy and, on this basis, to outline ways to overcome “obstacles to our shaping of collective futures” deriving from carbon democracy. Democratic politics and fossil fuels, Mitchell argues, are not simply related: democracy is “a form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple levels involve the processes of producing and using carbon energy” (p. 5). Mitchell recounts how the transition to an energy regime dependent on fossil fuels with the coal-fired industrialization of Europe laid the path towards “ways of living based on very high levels of energy consumption” in the industrialized countries. The transition, however, was never confined to the industrialized west: “the switch in one part of the world to modes of life that consumed energy at a geometric rate of growth required changes in ways of living in many other places” (p. 16), ranging from the dispossession of agricultural workers in places like India and Egypt and their subjugation to slavery and slave-like colonial systems, to the institution of forms of government intended to facilitate the control of oil reserves and flows of financial capital across the world. Carbon democracy is a planetary form of life whose development presupposes and depends on the production of different forms of political and economic life over time and space. At a deeper level, however, carbon democracy could also be read as a segment of the natural history of the human species. Like any form of life, democracy is “carbon-based” (p. 5). Carbon Democracy is about “democracy as oil”. Yet, “forms of energy” do not determine “modes of politics”, Mitchell warns towards the end of a meticulous argument to the contrary: “energy is a field of technical uncertainty rather than determinism” (p. 238). Mitchell construes this uncertainty, and the controversies that it produces, as the basis for political possibilities that begin by acknowledging that politics is neither determined by nature, as the Malthusians maintain, nor is politics free from natural constraints by the limitless potential of scientific progress, as the technologists maintain. Political possibilities begin by acknowledging that we find ourselves in the midst of socio-technical controversies, “disputes about the kind of technologies we want to live with, [that are] also disputes about the forms of social life, of socio-technical life, we would like to live” (p. 239). Participation of ordinary citizens in the construction of knowledge and in debates about nature, expertise and technology, is “the place where opportunities for democratization occur” (p. 241). For Mitchell, the antidote to the political and environmental ills of carbon democracy is the democratization of the debate about carbon, carbon democracy in another form. Carbon Democracy, the “socio-technical understanding of carbon democracy”, cannot imagine forms of political life beyond the limits of the form of political life it produces. The argument of Carbon Democracy is laid out in eight eloquent chapters, extensively researched and rich in empirical detail, and chockfull of stories that stand on their own as a fine specimen of historical sleuthing. A substantial part of the material is familiar to