[Xmca-l] Halfway Measures and Transitional Ones

[David Kellogg]

Two rather sobering sets of stats to ponder.

a) The "reopening" of the various states in the USA will probably mean that
by the end of the month the current 25,000 new cases and 750 deaths a day
will increase to around 200,000 new cases and 3,000 deaths daily--by the
end of this very month.

b) The "lockdown" has actually only shifted energy consumption from
factories to "working at home". All of the mesures only resulted in a 5.5%
reduction of greenhouse gases, and it doesn't appear to be
either sustainable or adequate (see point a] above). It has been estimated
that a sustainable reduction of about 7.5% every single year would be
necessary to keep us under the catastrophic tipping point of 1 and a half
degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

So what is the difference between halfway measure and genuinely
transitional ones? One obvious difference is that the former are designed
to avert a crisis, but the latter are designed to resolve it. The former
are likely to use terms like "mitigation" and "containment" while the
latter are going to prefer outcomes like "new normal".

As Mike has pointed out, the rhetoric of "wartime president" is not a
halfway measure: it is genuinely transitional one aimed at a new normal of
autocratic rule. The same thing is true of attempts to associate the virus
with a foreign invasion or a conspiracy at the Institute of Virology in
Wuhan. But this rhetoric does not even pretend to extend beyond US borders
or address climate change; even within US borders, it does not even purport
to propose a positive solution: it is merely a new normalization of 200,000
new cases and 3,000 deaths a day.

What would world-relevant and positive transitional measures look
like? First of all, they would have to lead to either the kind of
social-distancing between humans and nature that we see in Saudi Arabia
(this is the "eco-modernist" approach) or else the kind of rolling economic
catastrophe we see in Iran (this is the "anti-modernist" approach). Or
perhaps both directions at one and the same time? (One of the
many perplexing things about Vygotsky's pedology texts is that both kinds
of transitional measures seem to be underway in the early USSR at the same
time, with Stalin as the erratic "wartime president"!).

Secondly, positive transitional measures would have to involve reworking
language. We seem to be on the threshold of some major transition,
absolutely comparable to the industrial revolution (which Halliday called
the transition from farm to factory) or even the agricultural revolution
(the transitioni from forest to farm). Both of these major transitions were
not only reflected in but realized by shifts in language (e.g. the
mass/count distinction when we speak of resources; the human monopoly on
sentient verbs, the general passivity of the natural environment, and of
course the unmarked "good" quality of growth).

In Halliday's talk on language evolving, he speculated that after the
forest, the farm, and the factory, language might be said to be entering a
fourth phase--fantasy. He had in mind "virtual reality". That, I think, was
also a fantasy.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238/167607__;!!Mih3wA!ScwIlOXP7yTa2IEuFz-LEoCTw0pQsnJDDMawIzLNv5_CGQWTFvfo9Mzx-vxrYp8cbb8nCg$ 

New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
Works* *Volume
One: Foundations of Pedology*"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!ScwIlOXP7yTa2IEuFz-LEoCTw0pQsnJDDMawIzLNv5_CGQWTFvfo9Mzx-vxrYp_-WVMzgQ$ 
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