Climate science denial is serious. It facilitates political procrastination and brings us ever closer to a world beset by growing food insecurity, heatwaves, floods, storms, fires and extensive losses to biodiversity. Numerous studies have unmasked the private agendas and corporate links behind organized denial, yet the question of how deniers find traction with democratic publics has received comparatively little attention. Empirical surveys demonstrate a connection between people who are susceptible to the contrarian voices of denial and those inclined towards right-wing authoritarianism. In this essay, I bring Adorno’s mid-20th-century studies of right-wing authoritarian tendencies in American democracy to bear upon climate science denial. Adorno directs us away from a sole focus on how deniers manufacture doubt so as to give the impression that the science is not settled. He examines the ways that agitators not only spread misinformation but also foster emotional connections with people who seem to want to be conned. I locate organized denial within a strain of cultural life that Adorno describes as unserious. In late 1940s America, Adorno discerned a new shape of political subjectivity, which has become highly resonant today: a formally free individual who takes pleasure in lies that sound like truth.
Theories of a new phase of earth history, the Anthropocene, position human world-making activity as a bio-geological force. Social interventions into earth systems have been extensive and malignant, altering the earth’s surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling. To adapt and respond to emerging planetary dangers requires the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines. In this paper, I argue that a coalition of the arts and sciences might draw upon György Márkus’s extensive studies of the topography of ‘high’ culture. I reconstruct Márkus’s conceptual map of the arts and sciences as regions of ‘high’ cultural activity, each with their own criteria of value yet subject to an integral unity and shared ambition. Both regions of ‘high’ culture aim to create original works of significance for an engaged public. I then examine the implications of Márkus’s claim that the classical vocation of robust, public-oriented culture has run aground. The field of problems that this paper traverses are not the ecological crises of the Anthropocene per se. I attend rather to Márkus’s account of the neoliberal erosion of cultural infrastructure where democratic publics might engage with such problems.
In 2018, on the second anniversary of György (George) Márkus's death, his ex-students from Sydney held a commemorative symposium. The occasion was to honour the ongoing legacy and contemporaneity of a philosopher and teacher who had so profoundly shaped those taught by him in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. The breadth, diversity, scholarly detail and critical impulse of the papers collected in this volume testify to the continuing influence of the 'Márkus effect'.Márkus's oeuvre exemplifies the best potentials of critical social theory. As he puts it, this is a tradition committed to 'the general idea that one has to find in contemporary reality itself -and not some system of atemporal norms and values -the foundation of the principles of its own critique and the potential of its transcending' (Márkus, 2011: 600). His meticulous examinations of philosophical works in the continental tradition were ever prepared to pierce the smooth surface of a text, expose its fissures, tarry with ambiguity, and even leave questions unresolved once the labour of analysis had brought the work to a breaking point from which it could express opposed powers of social reality, and shed light on the perplexities of the present moment.In this memorial number of Thesis Eleven, doctoral students supervised by George over more than four decades pay tribute to his scholarship, generosity, and unflinching critical style. We train our attentions on George's own body of work, from a debate with Jürgen Habermas, and treatments of Aristotle and Adorno, to Márkus's original theory of cultural modernity. As Paul Jones notes, 'it was Márkus who taught me the significance of immanent critique so I'm hopeful he'd appreciate the irony, as well as the homage'. We examine the pertinence of Márkus's main areas of interest to the present and bring his insights to bear on contemporary questions concerning cultural production, the constitution of justice, how critical theory may reckon with right-wing demagogy and respond to an unfolding environmental crisis.There are two exceptions to this grouping of students. First, the short opening of the Symposium by Márkus's youngest son Andras, Special Counsel to the Attorney-General's Department, Australian Government Solicitor, who spoke about his sense of moral responsibility to maintain and preserve the relevance of his father's work. Secondly, a paper by Janos Kis, who was previously a student of Márkus in the 1960s and later a colleague.While Professor Janos Kis refers to Márkus as an older brother, Honorary Professor Paul Redding (Philosophy, University of Sydney) conjures a much more intimidating intellectual power in Márkus. Students in Sydney experienced a trial by fire when they
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