What comes after a ‘dress rehearsal’?

Virgilio A. Rivas, Ph.D.

Introduction

At the outset, allow me to ask a single atypical

question - atypical in that it is not dependent on the
customary purpose of recognizing what is valuable
and useless to ask.
In this context, you will be my judge if I ask how
ethics, and by implication, our aesthetic sensibility,
fared in light of our recent pandemic experience.
Both (ethics and aesthetics) cannot be dissociated
from our experience of the kind of politics that
overdetermined our ethical and personal
confrontation with a microbial threat and the moral
dilemmas that came with avoiding infection and
attaining herd immunity.
As it is, the function of the political is to resolve
the dilemmas of ethics in terms of demographic scale.
Still, the attribution of the political in the elevation of
ethics to a broader concern does not foreclose ethics;
rather, it foregrounds the character of the political.
The political is a heuristic concept (call it a
material-semiotic device to make things work)
designed to unravel the clotted layers of human and
social intentions across various domains of social

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existence. The purpose is to identify the hidden
determining principle behind the micro (ethical)
expressions of autonomy and scalar phenomena that
are best understood as free will inhibitors (such as
economic and natural forces at play). In short, politics
is a legitimate mediator between ethics and scalar
entities, the latter almost hyperobject-like as
impersonal as political systems. But what mediates the
two, no matter how compelling politics can be
through its social authority, will always fall back on
the people’s responses to existential threats.
Peoples are the bearers and producers of ‘ethos’
that shapes an ethical or moral climate before the
political can expand its functional iteration into
something greater than themselves, such as a law,
statute, governmental policy, etc. When these meta-
ethical translations come short of expectation, such as
a comprehensive response to the pandemic, often the
blame falls on the ethical bearers themselves. Echoing
Jacques Ranciere’s distribution of the sensible,1 this
implies a calculated allocation of ethical and moral
sensibilities forming a social dispositif that we must
play out in terms of our place in the body polity. And
arguing from the position of Foucault,2 a social
dispositif is a modular determination of social life in
terms of how we play socially indexical forms of
language games. These, in turn, legitimate or
delegitimate the persons that assume identities on our

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behalf and the roles they take on. More than anything,
this exposes the prosthetic or artificial nature of so-
called personalities that take us outside mere
beingness, beyond thrownness and Dasein-ness (in
light of Heidegger), whereby we become socially
purposive.
Incidentally, the pandemic has shown us how a
social contract should get our ducks in a row, in a
manner of speaking, more than we could conceive
and broadly flesh out vis-à-vis the dispositif of power
relations before the advent of Covid-19. Bruno
Latour, a well-respected sociologist in the field of
Science Technology Studies (STS) who died last year,
described the pandemic as the ‘dress rehearsal’ of the
worst yet to come – a runaway climate change.3
Put differently, the climate crisis and the global
health predicament ignited by the pandemic are
brought about by political systems built on the
backbone of the idea of a people as an aggregate of
docile bodies. Again echoing Foucault, these bodies
are conceived as performing indexical and practical
tasks out of rule-based aprioris of governmental and
corporate models of individual and collective
existence. On top of this, the idea of a people in the
sense we mentioned conveys a political philosophy
that tells us that people’s ethos is ‘always’ suspect,
unreliable on the get-go and must be taken with a

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grain of salt. The pandemic worsened the situation
even more.
In the years ahead, we won’t be surprised that the
same governmental blueprint will turn a blind eye to
human lives as variable quanta of what I would like to
call an extinction propagation model based on a
‘business as usual’ economic apriori. Recent studies
confirm that this model is instrumental to
multispecies extinction4 lowering our chances of
enduring a crucible of climate catastrophe for decades
to come. All these can be taken for granted in the
name of managing the climate cost that all sorts of
ecological risks can incur in a profit-driven economy.
We have grown familiar with this economic
model whose most profane but rule-based
metaphysics rests on the business-like structure of
extinction. It is based on a formidable tenet that
commands an appealing rhetoric. Even the best
minds of our generation find it unproblematic: ‘It is
easy to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism.’
At this point, let me proceed to the second part
of my talk.

Aesthesis and the re-enchantment of the world

When people are deprived of social goods to develop

the ethos that sustains social coherence on a more

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fundamental level, a sense of commonality may
present itself as a kind of providential fallback. In the
Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant called it sensus
communis.5
This pre-synthetic or pre-reflective sense of
being-with-others mobilizes an internal sense of
aesthesis or the pre-actual dimension of human
existence. We can refer to this dimension of being as
the entire physiological and chemical constellation of
perceptions, affectations, sensibility and intuitions.
Or, if you like to quote the young Friedrich
Schelling, who borrowed this principle from Baruch
Spinoza, simply a ‘sensibility that understands’ or a
‘thinking intuition.’6 In recent studies in the analytical
tradition of the philosophy of mind, the same
formulation is extended to the Sartrean notion of pre-
reflective consciousness. This aspect of Sartre’s
philosophy of mind requires no ego nor the I to
understand reality as a unified whole.7 Partly, this
analytic twist embracing a continental philosopher
like Sartre is a purposive move. It is a reappropriation
of Humean empiricism, the favorite thinker of most
analytic philosophers, and a subtle criticism of Kant’s
unity of apperception that conventional analytic
philosophy rejects as much as it declines to enter, in
the fashion of the sceptic, the dark corners of qualia.

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 Instead, analytic philosophers are more
accustomed to designate the Kantian sensus communis
as a ‘logical alien.’8
The pre-actualization of this state of being in the
realm of aesthesis, such as a logically alien thought,
emerges when one confronts life in its basic value-
form when an external event, such as a life-
threatening condition, disrupts the social bond
between individual consciousness and established
social intuitions. These social intuitions once enabled
her to apprehend reality out of the many layers that
filter its feedback mechanisms. Recall the function of
the social dispositif we discussed, which places this
understanding within the context of social
immediacy, destroying the more prudent nuancing of
intuition.
Three years ago, this almost quantum-like
dimension of aesthesis was tested by the pandemic,
which manifests in the ethical or moral tensions that
Covid-19 brought to bear on us in real life, which, in
turn, brought political systems to the test of
governance.
At this point, aesthesis undergoes a twofold
modulation into ethical and political tensions. When
bodies are threatened with infection, the polity in
which these bodies are assembled (hence ‘body polity’
in the language of politics) communicates, reacts,

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hopes, and fears as if as a single organism at risk of
metastases into a point of no recovery.
In prehistoric times, climate change forced
modern human ancestors to take comfort in aesthesis,
the communal engine of co-belongingness, through
art generation like cave paintings.9 Outside the caves
lay a disenchanted world burdened by extreme
ecological challenges – the reason they sought refuge
in these natural hollows. In the early 21st century, the
Covid-19 virus and another imminent climate
emergency caused by unregulated economic progress
altered the organology of the planet by the meaning-
value of the existential threat they carry that most of
us were forced to reflect upon, tucked away inside our
homes. I refer to this organology, a term I borrow from
Bernard Stiegler,10 as that in which the organism is
forced to live with pandemics and ecological collapse.
These examples of seeking refuge in the aesthetic
dimension of existence, however, do not show the
promise of redemption from an existential crisis
which differs on the individual level for which others
would make themselves believe, as popularized by
Heidegger in his last interview, ‘only a god can save
us’.
Instead, they show how the promise of re-
enchanting the world is based on an internal
understanding of the dimension of the pre-actual that
precedes historical experience. Historical experience,

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or what Dipesh Chakrabarty would associate with the
guilt of ‘historicism,’11 is one of life’s modern
organology in which the possibility of knowledge and
experience is already set in advance – nowadays, by
capital, data, and consumer goods. Imagine its
implications in light of today’s algorithmic gateways
to individual choices via artificial intelligence that
leave people incapable of self-transcendence to
engage large-scale systems and epistemic regimes and
negotiate their futures.
Even so, a deeper understanding of aesthesis,
which precedes the formation of our ethical and
political sensibility, and binds us as a social species, is
not a recipe for redemption from a metaphysical
dilemma. It is rather a call to educationally reawaken
our capacity to look through the values of existential
threats when life loses a secure structure of meaning;
when people are forced to live under the new normal
with the constant threat of another outbreak, as
global health authorities continue to warn us. This can
be compounded by insufficient care infrastructures,
which refer to the whole gamut of social goods that
can empower people not only in terms of their
material needs but also to critically engage in the
affairs of civil society.
From a bioethical standpoint, global health
problems reflect the failure of a socio-economic
system to provide social goods, including those that

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equip people with truth values which enable them to
demand political accountability. This capacity to
demand that social powers account for their actions
reflects the core dimension of aesthesis, our sense of
care for others based on relationality, responsibility,
and co-creation essential in sustaining the hope for a
better future.
Care is such a utopian imaginary, which,
incidentally, feminism has been the first to champion
against the dominant male-structured systems of
modern life to the detriment of the multispecies
backbone of planetary existence.
Multispecies is another utopian imaginary which
challenges the dominant anthropocentric latitude of
epistemic regimes responsible for the bulk of our
planetary crises since the era of Western colonialism
in terms of the mass destruction of multispecies life
and habitats and first peoples outside of Europe.
In the advent of post-colonialism, this extinction-
enabling paradigm to accelerate nature’s metabolic
rift,12 as Karl Marx argued, in terms of the destruction
of matter for economic purposes (in the form of
irresponsible mineral extraction), is sustained by a
new set of players across the spectrum of geopolitical
modernities, adding to the list of Greenhouse gas-
producing economies – such as China, India, Brazil,
and Russia. Combine all these geopolitical events into
a tectonic chain of historical causalities, and you get

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the singularity of planetary crisis erupting after the
end of the Cold War – climate change.
In this light, reawakening our ethical and political
sensibility to the fundamental sense of care is a
planetary health issue that demands multispecies
attention and mindfulness. But this reawakening will
always fall back on the aesthesis of our experience of
the world that influences our values in real life and the
meanings we share as vulnerable beings.
From here, let me draw my conclusion.

Conclusion

Now that the pandemic has quieted down, this is the

time for governance to attend to this dimension of
human existence, mostly to prepare for the immediate
climate emergency of the next decade. The decade
ahead is certain to generate complicated ethical, moral
and political challenges more than our present
cognitive tools and mindfulness ecologies can
anticipate at present. This can be done at the outset
by wholly committing public education, the foremost
social institution of care that prepares the young
generation to take on mature responsibilities, to
address the planetary threat to species survivability.
In this respect, we need to secure education from
the biopolitical normalization of peoples as
unthinking bodies of ‘historical’ knowledge and

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governance (recall Chakrabarty); or of being hostage
to the economic purpose of learning a profession, of
production and performance quotas and metrics on
the part of the teaching force as care providers. This
economic ideology threatens to generate a runaway
condition inimical to life as we enter a new planetary
threshold.
Despite all this, our educational authorities are
not eager to speak of this danger (the danger of
species collapse) that public education can
fundamentally address – time for them to admit and
talk about this danger publicly. I can think of a
combinatory resolution in this respect.
One is by committing general education curricula
to navigate this fraught possibility. Concurrent to this
curricular intervention is the fleshing out of a
sustainable people-oriented way of adapting to
survival challenges, while demanding climate justice
by addressing socio-economic inequalities across
geographical scales; lastly, by rechanneling species-
based energy consumption to a balanced geosystem
which requires drastic reforms in the organology of
our consumption habits.
Undoubtedly, these habits are held hostage by
corporate investments in object and drive satisfaction
across different organologies of desire. All these, in
turn, exhaust planetary resources.

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 This way, and in conclusion, public education can
transform into a critical component, if not the most
significant leverage, of climate advocacy in re-
orienting aesthesis to the semantics and praxeology of
the ethics of planetary and multispecies care.
Notes
1
Ranciere, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,
trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2006).
2
See Bailey, Patrick L.J. ‘The policy dispositif: historical formation and
method,’ in Journal of Education Policy 28.6 (2013): 807-827.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2013.782512.
3
Latour Bruno, ‘Is this a dress rehearsal?, in Critical Inquiry
2020;47(52):S25–7.
4
Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P., Barnosky, A., Garcia, A., Pringle, R., and T.
Palmer, ‘Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: entering
the Sixth Mass Extinction,’ in Science Advances 1,2015; 5: e1400253.
5
Kant, I. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
Company, Inc., 2010, 162.
6
See Graham Bounds and Jon Cogburn, ‘Identitätsphilosophie and the
Sensibility that Understands,’ in Comparative and Continental Philosophy 8,
3(2016):255-270, and Benedict Spinoza, The Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader,
The Ethics and Other Works, trans. by Edwin Curley (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994),142; II/124.
7
Kathleen Wider, The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and the
Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1997).
8
Sofia Miguens (ed.), The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics (Cambridge
and London: Harvard University Press, 2020).
9
Marchant, J. ‘A journey to the Oldest Cave Paintings in the world.’
Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/
journey-oldest-cave-paintings-world-180957685/ (19 June 2021, date
last accessed).
10
Stiegler, B. (2020a),‘Elements for a General Organology’, in Derrida
Today, 13 (1): 72–94.
11
Chakrabarty, D. ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses,’ in Critical Inquiry
35, 2009; 2: 197-222.

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12
See John Bellamy Foster, ‘Marx and Rift in the Universal Metabolism
of Nature,’ in Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine.
https://monthlyreview.org/2013/12/01/marx-rift-universal-
metabolism-nature/

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