A cultural policy of the multitude in the time of climate change; with an understanding that the multitude has no policy

Herbst, Marc Allen. 2019. A cultural policy of the multitude in the time of climate change; with an understanding that the multitude has no policy. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

The changing climate will globally force drastic changes in how people live. Globally,
governance supports its own interests while the multitude everywhere bear the burdens
that rest between such interests and climate vacillation. That the multitude is composed of
those who everywhere precede and exceed governance, who are necessary to its
constitution but don’t necessarily need it, suggests that the multitude tautologically selfgoverns
somehow through concepts. These concepts are things that have managerial and
governmental faces in whose creation the multitude participates but may or may not like.
This cultural study understands that by relating to each other and the earth through
general capacities of sociality, humanity solidifies cultural ways of being human, and that
these cultural ways are governing creations. This study thinks through the ways that
culture, beside or beyond formal governance, can best support multitudinous human
relations towards general livability in the time of climate change. The Barcelona-based
Plataforma De Afectados Por La Hipoteca (PAH), an autonomous movement fighting for
housing rights, serves as a means to model how social relations reorganize governance in
the multitude’s interest. Virno’s refinement of Marx’s theory of general intellect, and the
even more general sociality suggested by Spinoza, describe the immediate social
capacities demonstrated by the PAH. This study also works through the UK-based
climate poetry journal, the Dark Mountain Project, to grasp issues attendant to climate
and governance and cultural work. Culture is discussed anthropologically and art
historically – critically discussing Hegel’s conceptions of universal qualities in relation to
feminist, post-colonial and autonomist Marxist theories, thereby suggesting ways for
cultural workers to think through cultural forms and ways that support multitudinous
being in variable relation to governance and the changing climate.

Item Type:

Thesis (Doctoral)

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00026372

Keywords:

Climate change, ecology, critical theory, political theory, cultural thought

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Centre for Cultural Studies (1998-2017)

Date:

30 April 2019

Item ID:

26372

Date Deposited:

30 May 2019 13:21

Last Modified:

07 Sep 2022 17:14

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/26372

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