Critical Times, Cosmopolitan Justice and the Responsiveness Rhetoric

Introduction

Warfare and conflicts break out with exceptional frequency. Pandemics give to metaphors of “living in viral times” a literal twist. Values once thought to be bedrock are constantly put to the test. Environmental destruction, terrorism and globally disseminated pernicious ideas increase despondency about the future. Such realities to which the whole world must respond are typically placed side by side by theorists across disciplines as proof of why our times are turbulent and challenging. Times of turmoil, times of crisis, times of disaster, times of upheaval, times of shipwreck and uncertain, precarious, dark, difficult and testing times are only some of the metaphors that specify and qualify the era that contains these crises. Philosophers and scholars in the humanities and social sciences discuss the so determined era, provide a critique of the present and deploy recommendations for a better future.

Almost 15 years ago, it was clearly stated that we lived then “a turning point in the modern history which was built Conceptual Paper on ideas of development, growth and material progress [1] (P. 68). This was because “perhaps in no other period of the recent human history such a coincidence of crisis took place”. The difficult situation in critical times was illustrated with a string of exceptional circumstances at all levels: “environment, energy, economy, raw materials exhaustion, food, social inequity, population growth, governance [1] (P. 68). Today, the prediction that the related crises would aggravate in the future (P. 68) has come true. Meanwhile, new crises have been added to the sequence: pandemics, resurgence of totalitarian ideologies, technologies of unpredictable effects, multiplication of wars and increased threats of nuclear disaster. What remains operative in theory then as now is that “business-as-usual is not an option” and that we “need to re-think our lifestyle” (P. 68), our priorities and responsibilities.

Apart from the recommendation to “re-think”, what remains also operative is the framing of theoretical ventures and publications through references, usually brief, to critical times and contexts of acute emergencies or unprecedented crises. Also popular are “‘end of’ themes and theses” (e.g., “end of history”, “the end of Reason”, etc.). In related works, crises are still mentioned side by side: new diseases; wars; environmental disaster; nuclear threat; pernicious ideologies; terrorism, etc. Dissociated, as if there were no common causalities beneath them, these crises are then presented as sources of uncertainty, an uncertainty that itself constitutes one more epochal crisis. As one source put it, the aggravation of problems in late modernity is not only shown by “the magnitude of material or biological crises” but also by “a crisis in our ability to cope with uncertainty both in science and morality” [2] (P. 13).

I suggest the use of the term responsiveness rhetoric for the just described recent tendency to embed scholarly endeavours in a language of answerability to epochal crises and ills. The responsiveness idiom is fraught with medical (acute, critical, viral, pathological, remedies, diagnoses, etc.) and temporal metaphors (age of uncertainty, times of catastrophe, years of upheaval, etc.). This rhetoric involves diagnostics of the present as exceptional times and therapeutics for a better future. Elsewhere, in forthcoming work, I explore the rhetorical overuse of the “age of uncertainty” cliché and some main reactions to the challenge of uncertainty that range from regressive responses that dream of good old times; to adaptive responses that urge us to accept that our world is uncertain; to responses of control that aspire to manage or even eradicate incertitude; and to emancipatory responses that proclaim uncertainty a source of hope and transformation. In the present article, I begin with an overview of the “critical and uncertain times” rhetoric that prepares the ground for my critique in later sections. Then, I present (a) some affordances and (b) problems of the responsiveness rhetoric, and (c) I discuss the recommendation to “re-think” that is often guided by social or democratic justice sensibilities to the neglect of normative tasks that pertain to cosmopolitan justice.

Responding to our Times

“The end of the twentieth century” has been especially “propitious for an understanding of the irremediable uncertainty of human history” and of the openness and unpredictability of the future [3] (P. 7). It is no wonder, then, that, ever since, the rhetoric of uncertain times has become unprecedentedly popular. It is now a very common shortcut for times diagnostics. However, social understandings and philosophical handlings of uncertainties that come from confronted or predicted crises are not new [4] (P. 383). Ancient and traditional pre-modern societies felt anxiety over the experienced vagaries of life or over what the future held in store. This anxiety was affected by how each major historical period treated diverse temporalities. Cyclical outlooks on temporality encouraged the idea that the past qualifies the future and what might be expected from it [5] (P. 104). In medieval times, the general idea was that “fate or providence would oversee the unfolding of events” [4] (P. 388). Yet, in early modernity, this “could no longer provide sufficient assurance”. With the advent of early capitalism, the challenge of a future that was no longer considered predetermined was especially disconcerting for “those whose goods might be at stake in trading situations” [4] (P. 388). Reactively responding to this challenge, early moderns found in a radical break from the past the escape route (more accurately, the ostrich policy) from the importance of history. “The self-understanding of moderns as the inhabitants of a new age” was defined by this temporal rupture that drove “the modern aspiration to free the creative energies of human beings from a temporal order in which the future is captive to the past” [5] (P. 124). Emblematic of this tendency was Thomas Hobbes’ “explicit intention of bringing about a break with the past” [5] (P. 105). The break with the belief of previous centuries “in a repetitive or progressive future” [3] (P. 7) was radicalized in the twentieth century. The discovery of the unpredictability of the future was “accompanied by another, retroactive and correlative one, according to which human history has been and remains an unknown adventure” [3] (P. 7).

The responsiveness rhetoric strengthens the impression that, in critical times, a primarily epistemic issue such as uncertainty becomes a political predicament. This rhetoric nourishes a politics of uncertainty that comprises various ways of addressing incertitude and unpredictability [6] (P. 83). As one more challenge in critical times, uncertainty is subjected to diverse politicizations that, in turn, require critical investigations. Investigated from a social- psychological perspective uncertainty in critical situations is typically understood as a factor that “tends to destabilize cooperation”, makes people abhor radical change and renders them more susceptible to regressive worldviews or dependent on standardized solutions [7] (P. 6). Ethnographic research and other empirical studies investigating how people respond to crises and uncertainties abound and provide important insights into how such situations are experienced [8] (P. 4). Investigated from a policy perspective uncertainty emerges as a risk factor to be managed or eliminated or as an opportunity to be seized. Such is, for example, the understanding of the policy makers who aspire to control crises and uncertainties. A similar understanding emerges from studying international corporations that “see uncertainty as blind-eye volatility for capitalist growth” or managers and experts who expediently instrumentalize concepts like crises, instability and uncertainty [6] (P. 80). The politics of uncertainty is also investigated vis-à-vis power dynamics. Some theoretical perspectives helpfully explore uncertainty as a tool of power that shapes current politics [8] (P. 5-6). From an emancipatory policy perspective, a better understanding (and politics) of uncertainty involves an enrichment and diversification of responses to various uncertainties-possible such responses are management, control or coping with uncertainties [6] (P. 79). All these endeavours to investigate how uncertainty is understood or handled have merits. However, missing is a self-reflective, meta-theoretical engagement with the responsiveness rhetoric as such. Within most discourses that utilize the “uncertain times” parlance, uncertainty becomes homogenized and singularized (i.e., used in the singular) as a supposed equalizer. The critical current situation is depicted as a heterochrony, an altered lived time where the given context dramatically changes and presents us with the crucial challenge of uncertainty. Against such one-sided depictions, let us recall that crises and uncertainty (in fact, a whole set of diverse uncertainties) are not the exclusive feature of our times. Other times have been more uncertain for some peoples, groups or individuals concerning some crises and adversities. The degree of uncertainty, which people experience it, about what, and in what sense compel important nuances of our temporal self-understandings. Rhetorical generalities about our era enforce the false impression that the times are unprecedentedly, uniformly and objectively critical and uncertain.

Uncertainty is generally evoked as a state of mind. It has, to my knowledge, not been investigated, for example, as a political emotion that itself constitutes one response, or motivates responses, to crises. As an affective, experiential, individual and collective response to crises, uncertainty would complicate the generalities operating when we use it as the epistemic issue of not being sure about something. Moreover, uncertainty occasionally characterizes the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) more than the times per se. This is especially the case when global publics are led, through global rhetoric, to assuming, with conviction and certainty, that the times are uniformly uncertain. The danger in this objectivism is to reify what counts as a crisis that produces uncertainties. The opposite danger lurks in undue emphases on uncertainty as a mere subjectivist matter of the Zeitgeist. That is, as part of the general rhetoric of answerability to temporality, uncertainty may be psychologised and dematerialized. By these terms I mean that uncertainty is reduced to a mere psychological state or an epistemic predicate of our times. This obscures that uncertainty is, especially for some people, a material, lived-out reality or an unliveable reality. To adapt Scoones and Stirling [8] (P. 4), uncertainties “have material origins and effects”. They reflect how crises produce opportunities for some and feared lived experiences for others, depending on one’s situatedness.

It is important, then, to consider a more complex interplay of subjective and objective aspects of uncertainty.

The responsiveness rhetoric often muddles precisely this interplay. The global situation of crises is, I claim, subjectively and objectively uncertain; however, it is so in many and rich ways that resist the banalization that occurs when the global rhetoric of critical and uncertain times puts a full stop to temporal analyses too quickly and sloganeers such metaphors. The global situation is subjectively uncertain not only because different subjects experience different uncertainties differently. The situation is subjectively uncertain also because, regardless of specific crises, the postmodern subject suffers the epistemic-psychological blow of the era on human confidence. Postmodernity has, from the early eighties onwards, been considered a situation in which, as Jürgen Habermas [9] (P. 222) has put it, “revolutionary self-confidence and theoretical self-certainty are gone”. Postmodernity is characterized by “a new order of economic and social structures”, namely, the spread of the so- called “flexible capitalism” that profoundly and continuously transforms the globe [3] (P. 2). It is associated with a series of emerging phenomena, one of which is the dissemination “of systemic uncertainty and consequential unexpected action” [3] (P. 2). The postmodern subject continuously experiences the effects of the current, and growing, lack of faith in well- tested ways of making sense of the world. Living in uncertain times conveys the current and growing lack of trust not only in time-honored world interpretations but also in prospects for transforming future societies and keeping disaster at bay.

However, the global situation is also objectively uncertain due to the growing risk of nuclear wars and further ecological disasters, up to extinction. Nuclear disaster has objectively been a threat for decades, but now, with the recent escalation of military conflicts, it stands out as an imminent peril. Its concomitant uncertainty is at first sight an objective equalizer since extinction threatens all human beings. Still, even this becomes a hollow generality when we overlook that, as Glenn Rikowski pertinently remarks in an interview, “the ‘total crisis of humanity’ will not be total” if plans for “attaining sustainable life in giant domes for the rich” materialize [10] (P. 178). “The rich will be fine” if global warming “may gradually lead to a spawning of these domes” or if “the ‘doming’ of entire cities” leads to “some sort of capitalism surviving in these giant constructions. Malthusian ‘population shrinkage’ (gruesome death) for billions outside these exclusive domes is viewed as collateral amidst the survival of the shittest” [10] (P. 178).

Living in uncertain times involves the disconcerting, indeed disheartening, realization of failure to transform society and neutralize the possibility of disaster. Let us not forget that the etymology of disaster introduces a semantic doubleness: disaster is not just a catastrophe, it is also a bad omen, a gloomy foreboding (from the Greek dys=bad and astēr, star) [11]. Ominously, catastrophe, which in its Greek origin signifies not just disaster but also radical turn, has, in our age, been limited to denoting cataclysmic effects, rather than drastic change and transformation (ibid). The inauspicious record of humanity, given the failures of previous revolutionary struggles for change, generates a despondent abdication that may eventually increase the possibility of destruction. Therefore, on the issue of the status of the nuclear and climatological crises (namely, whether these are real or just feared threats), subjective and objective aspects of uncertainty are interconnected and coterminous.

Taking some meta-theoretical distance from existing theories of crises and uncertainty to extrapolate how these theories operate, we notice reconstructive and deconstructive standpoints: reconstructive standpoints emphasize the need to respond to crises and uncertainties through building appropriate mindsets; deconstructive standpoints emphasize the need to undo hegemonic constructions of desired certainty and policed uncertainty. Yet, neither the reconstructive nor the deconstructive standpoints adequately problematize the politics of the responsiveness rhetoric and its “critical and uncertain times” metaphors. Most endeavours to respond to the call of the responsiveness rhetoric and address crises and unpredictability bypass the politics of the uncertainty rhetoric and the global sloganeering of “critical times”, “age of uncertainty”, “years of upheaval”, and other such tropes. The rhetoric that summons scholars to articulate ethical and political philosophies responsive to, and thus dependent on, contemporary crises and uncertainties does not get thematised. In other words, the responsiveness rhetoric has received no critical response. The speech act of “difficult, critical or uncertain times” is constantly used with no further exploration of its effects. Some such effects may be counterproductive, as Andreas Kalyvas [12] has pertinently shown concerning another, though similar, matter, the “crisis- of-democracy thesis” (more on this later).

In its most progressive, transformative and worthwhile version, the responsiveness rhetoric sustains a pattern of thought that comprises diagnosing a crisis or a series of crises that render our temporality adverse and uncertain; and prescribing a remedial action that involves a verb the act of which becomes qualified and normativized by the “de-” or “re-” prefix (for example, de-colonize, de-construct, re-think, re-imagine, etc.).1 My aim is to bring up some quandaries of this pattern and its rhetorical, politically suspect overemphasis on general characterizations of our times, without underestimating the importance of responding to crises. Before doing so, I discuss next some political merits of the responsiveness rhetoric that makes theories and research answerable to the world of uncertainty.

1 For reasons of space and focus, I will not discuss the “de-”, but only the “re”, prefixed verbs in this article.

Political Merits of the “Uncertain Times” Rhetoric

Some merits of the responsiveness rhetoric that involves crises and uncertainty are revealed by meta- theoretical attention to its affirmative, actual or possible, political operations. A most obvious merit is that, instead of promoting armchair philosophy and a detached, supra- temporal stance toward the contemporary world, scholars who adopt this rhetoric consider the various global crises and situate them within the “here and now”. The translation of this contextualization into the “uncertain times” rhetoric may be interpreted as a politically valuable sensitivity to new realities. It reflects responsiveness to new givens and determination to make political discomfort and diagnoses of crises relevant to “tempora” and “mores”. This was noticeable, for example, in Theodor Adorno’s philosophy of the present. Adorno [13] applauded the realism that acknowledged that the most radical and fruitfully critical estrangement from reality first presupposes one’s developing the sharpest sense of reality [13]. For instance, Michael Hogue’s [14] American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World provides a sharp critique of those past ideologies of expansion, colonial policies and neoliberal mentalities that have set on course major environmental, economic and political crises. This critique prepares the ground for the recommendation to re- imagine the relationship of the world and the human.

The interplay of sharp diagnostic revocations of the present and expectant invocations of radical change pays heed to the dissatisfaction with reality that, as Alain Badiou has emphasized, is intrinsic to philosophical thought. The “discontent of thinking in its confrontation with the world as it is” is constitutive of philosophy [15] (P. 29). Unlike the unhappy consciousness of much 19th century romantic thought that produced political despondency [16], the philosophical dissatisfaction with reality may mobilize collective action. It may encourage a utopianism that, despite its own risks, has the advantage of not construing the world as the best possible or as unchangeable. In being aporetic, philosophy helps one raise questions about things that the social world treats as either already resolved or as insoluble. As a specific manifestation of philosophy, a critical- theoretical outlook on the world requires also to couple the normative language of social change with diagnoses of the times (Zeitdiagnosen) that accurately describe the current reality [17] (P. 11). Thus, one merit of the rhetoric that involves predications of the epochal as uncertain times is that it mirrors the philosophical dissatisfaction with the world as it is, namely, the dissatisfaction that underpins requests for drastic social and global change. This, of course, on the condition that the rhetoric is not utilized to advance responsiveness qua full adaptation to the world of uncertainty; when it is subjected to such purposes it only reproduces the “there is no alternative” conservative attitude towards the present.

A concomitant positive political operation of the uncertain times rhetoric is that it may familiarize global publics with the possible value of uncertainty, contra blanket incriminations of uncertainty that one encounters in current politics of securitization and control. Uncertainty may stave off hubristic over-confidence in modernised progress and become an incentive for more nuanced self-understandings of (post-)modernity. The following that Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling notice about uncertainty may also hold for the uncertainty rhetoric: uncertainty may interrogate “the linear assumption that a universalized science creates technologies for singular progress, suggesting instead a more diverse, plural vision, implicating multiple modernities” [8] (P. 7). In my view, when advancing an understanding of uncertainty as a challenge “to a control-oriented technocratic order of globalising modernity” (P. 7), the uncertainty rhetoric becomes politically fruitful. However, this requires also the following conditions: the uncertainty rhetoric is no mere cliché; it is not usurped by functionalist accounts of society that make it serve social adaptation rationales or neoliberal ideologies that use uncertainty as an excuse for imposing dubious policies; and it does not lead to analyses that remain blind to old or new injustices.

A related and additional possible merit of the uncertain times rhetoric is that it may implicitly encourage a conception of truth not as a mere epistemic matter, but also as a passion for discerning the ethico-political weight of human deeds. Responding to uncertainty presupposes that there can be accurate accounts of crises beneath uncertainties and of the causalities and liabilities that have led to such crises. It presupposes that one may grasp facts and theorize the effects of actions for which individuals, groups and peoples may be responsible. This implied conception of truth combines epistemic warrant with evidence-supported claims to justice. It thus becomes an important political instrument for keeping away subjectivist or relativist assumptions about the supposed impossibility of proving through argument how some crises have been produced and wrongs have been inflicted or suffered. This is especially crucial when dominant, tout court endorsements of the Zeitgeist as one of post-truth entail paralysing side-effects, such as unreflective relativism, political inactivity and apathetic refrain from defending the rights of a wronged party. Contra post-truth assumptions, references to uncertain times and diagnoses of related ills logically presuppose (even if they fail to unpack) that realities of uncertainty created or endured constitute objective states, the corroborated detection of which should be compelling and binding for out thought. It should limit the arbitrariness of thought or the apolitical shrugging of one’s shoulders.

The responsiveness to critical and uncertain times, when it is a thoughtful commitment rather than a hollow rhetoric, may heighten one’s awareness that a yardstick for the desirability of uncertainty politics is one’s being in touch with reality and obtaining some certainty (certainly not an absolute one) about what some realities entail concerning human agency. Likewise, in a complex dialectic of certainty and uncertainty, the uncertainty rhetoric may rely on an implicit acknowledgement that the dominant Zeitgeist exerts control over one’s perception of an epoch and its realities. Thus, some incongruence of hegemonic worldviews and the actual world situation may come to the fore more clearly when people employ the uncertainty rhetoric to embed their reconstructive and deconstructive efforts in a context of acute diagnostics of crises. The dialectics of diagnostics of world pathologies in uncertain times and therapeutics for a better future may make one’s views be felt as answerable to the world outside, not in shallow versions of a managerial sense of accountability, but in a politically desirable sense of Socratic logon didonai (reason-giving). It is to this that I would adapt Rainer Forst’s idea of a right to justification. The “human person as an autonomous agent” possesses a right to justification, namely, “a right to be recognized as a subject who can demand acceptable reasons for any action that claims to be morally justified and for any social or political structure or law that claims to be binding” [18] (P. 78). If the person has such a right, this entails a concomitant public, institutional, and intellectual obligation to offer justification, namely, a logon didonai accountability and responsiveness to truly challenging and searching questions about the world of crises.

Finally, the acknowledgement that crises produce or increase uncertainty and thus invite a handling of it may mobilize a more profound understanding of the Zeitgeist. For, all handlings reflect practices, actions and the social imaginaries beneath them that are characteristic of our critical times. Our understandings of uncertainty “serve to guide our lives and politics [8] (P. 5). Diverse politics of crisis and uncertainty operate when “which questions can be asked and what answers can be received [19] (P. 4) becomes a matter of exerted power. As Luciano Floridi puts it, those who control the questions shape the answers and those who shape the answers control the world [19] (P. 4). Engaging with crises and uncertainty may sensitize us to such power politics. So, even if thinkers fail to go meta-theoretical, some at least engage with the times and give informative accounts: of crises that make the era uncertain; and of the politics of this uncertainty. They single out a turning point where incertitude becomes a marker of the era and intensifies feelings of Angst and Unbehagen. By thus elaborating on some of the politics of uncertainty, such thinkers may resist arbitrary conclusions or modish ways of canvassing contemporary challenges. Specifically, they may critique the negative, conservative operations of the uncertainty that becomes an excuse for inaction or political abdication. Still, we must not lose sight of the fact that even this merit may lead to undesirable consequences. In the name of actionable knowledge and mitigative action concerning various uncertainties as new challenges, decision-makers may legitimize unprecedented and unjustifiable measures [20]. The dispersed rhetoric of uncertain times may prepare global public opinion to accept measures that would have otherwise been deemed unacceptable. Therefore, the pros of the uncertainty rhetoric that I have registered in this section can easily turn into cons and attest to its normative ambiguity.

What’s Wrong with the “Uncertain Times” Rhetoric

Having indicated some merits of the responsiveness rhetoric, let us turn to what’s wrong with it. Typically, in discourses where the uncertain/critical times metaphor operates as a generality, missing are nuances and complexities. Sometimes, missing is even any clarification of what this uncertainty is about. In most writings that use this metaphor without exploring the politics of the uncertain and critical times rhetoric little is also said about the main terms, crisis and uncertainty. Unsurprisingly, however, one’s utilizing such rhetoric ensures more academic visibility, research topicality and trendiness. Thus the “times of uncertainty” metaphor becomes one of those sesame words that open opportunities and enhance inter alia possibilities of obtaining funding. It becomes the sloganeered placeholder for what would have otherwise been analysed as the historically produced current socio-political context. The metaphor is not accompanied with any comparative analysis of our times and past ones. Equally little is said concerning how the intellectual’s suggestions would assist in the creation of a less uncertain world. Yet, even in discourses that pertinently politicize uncertainty, the meta-theoretical engagement with the “times of uncertainty” rhetoric is still missing. As argued earlier, turning something into a cliché or slogan has the evident political shortcoming of banalization or trivialization. However, there are even worse possible politics of the uncertain times rhetoric than mere triteness. I indicate some such worse politics of conservative uses of the responsiveness rhetoric elsewhere, in forthcoming work, so, let me here sum up the said critique: the responsiveness rhetoric may be employed not to propel radical change but rather to impel normative tasks that reflect functionalist or neoliberal conceptions of institutional changes with conservative, adaptive and socializing intentions and effects. The wide use of this metaphor may contribute to a social climate that favours an ethic of control. This singles out crises on criteria of securitization and politicizes the uncertain times metaphor in un-cosmopolitan ways to increase surveillance mechanisms or aggressive state intervention at the expense of more irenic, historically informed and fair handlings of challenging realities. When predicating the times as uncertain, we miss how this speech act gets usurped to advance conservative politics against transformative agendas.

However, even when the use of the uncertain times metaphor is for more radical and transformative political purposes, the risk of ironing out nuances of uncertainty and complex interconnections of crises is not diminished. The overuse or the superficial use of this rhetoric may obscure that past generations have also experienced uncertainty even if of different kinds and in relation to different aspects of existence. The past that modernity has striven to repress is still drastically operative and spectrally present [21] in efforts to overcome crises and plan a more carefree future. Many current crises have their roots in less crisis-defined pasts whose effects still affect the present. For example, colonialism is still productive of dead-ends in the places that suffered it. All this may be overlooked even by progressive theoretical uses of the “uncertainty” metaphor, so long as meta-theoretical caution, complexity and caveats are missing.

Let me illustrate such risks with Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont’s use of responsiveness rhetoric. They write, “we live in critical times. There is a widely shared sense of unease about the future”. For them, the related challenge is double. “On the one hand, we face global crises”. They mention “an overtaxed environment, a volatile global economy, mass migrations, new forms of war and terrorism”. On the other hand, “there is also a crisis of confidence in the capacity for political action to address such global problems [22] (P. 13). Still, these givens remain too general and undifferentiated. Metonymies of crises such as “terrorism” or “migration” obscure: causes of terrorism (among them state terrorism that passes as irenic operation) along with complexities surrounding what counts as terrorism [23]; and causes of migration (among them, interventions of powerful states that have, in the name of democratization or of western security, created an unliveable havoc in the places that the intervention was supposed to reform) [24]. I notice and critique then that, like most similar writings,2 Deutscher and Lafont’s aforementioned statement attaches the uncertainty rhetoric to crises that are posited serially. Crises are registered as things related with one another only by their having undesirable effects. The detected crises seem to share only the status of a sequence, not of

2 There are some notable exceptions to this general tendency to miss the interconnectivity and complex causality of crises. Such an exception is Nancy Fraser’s recent book (2022) where she discusses crises as a conse- quence of the devouring force of capitalism. In her words: “Cannibal capital- ism, then, is the system to which we owe the present crisis. Truth be told, it’s a rare type of crisis, in which multiple bouts of gluttony have converged” (Fraser, 2022, xv).

a consequence of deeper and complex structural faults of modern societies. Terrorism, climate change, pandemics, migration and economic or democratic recession appear almost everywhere disconnected from one another. Their interconnectivity is thus missed along with their complex causalities rooted in history and in ongoing deficits in, or betrayals of, a stereoscopic, multi-faceted justice (e.g., cosmopolitan, ecological, etc.).

Missing such intricate intersections of current crises makes the plea for transformation nominal, an empty letter, a vacuous rhetorical flourish. Furthermore, there is not much about vulnerability-differentials and power-differentials (who is more affected or which beings are truly threatened by the crises and uncertainty of the times, why and how). Nor are there efforts to answer the questions about how such differentials constitute political challenges and why most academics and intellectuals do not take them up. I will not answer these questions either, not least to avoid a short, article-length answer to issues that require well-developed and long answers. I am hinting at these questions only to indicate why some meta-theoretical work on the patten of the responsiveness rhetoric may be needed in philosophy, political theory, cultural studies and other disciplines that host the related temporal rhetoric of diagnosing ills of the times and promising therapy.

Occasionally, the uncertain times rhetoric enforces the impression that all we need is to respond to crises merely ethically rather than also politically. Worse, crises are tackled either from within an already established ethic of control or from within the standard ethical frameworks (e.g., utilitarianism, deontology, etc.) that a philosophy typically focused on normal circumstances (Papastephanou [23]) has historically developed. For example, most theorists refrain from rethinking the prescriptions on offer through an ethic for disaster [25] specifically designed to deal with pernicious eventualities and the uncertainties that these cause or entail. They do not consider whether a different ethics may be required, out of the ordinary, beyond the standard or canonical ethical frameworks. Naomi Zack [25] puts forward such a critique concerning how the established ethical frameworks have not provided an ethic for disaster, focused as they are on tackling exceptional circumstances and times of disaster in abstraction, only from the so-called “lifeboat ethics” imaginary perspective.

However, whilst Zack’s meta-theoretical standpoint is ethical, I suggest that a more appropriate one can and should also be political. After all, if it is true that probably we live today one of the most unethical periods of human history since in the western societies even the ethics of the interpersonal relationships are fading away [1] (P. 81), then, ethics may not suffice on its own to direct drastic change so long as all other priorities (social, political) remain unchanged. It is hardly credible “that ethics (at individual, corporative, national and global scales) might be the driver of change that will shape a future and better world (P. 81) in societies that prioritize success and antagonism. “It seems difficult to believe that an economy focused on competitiveness and profit may integrate ethical and socially concerned dimensions”. Arguably, “greening the business seems possible; humanizing it and turning it more socially sustainable, does not” (P. 81). In my view, this proves the need to acknowledge the political complexities that otherwise commendable pleas to respond to critical and uncertain times often leave under-theorized. Detections of crises sometimes reduce them to moral challenges and bypass the structural and systemic causalities that produce them. Such discourses thus depoliticize crises by reducing them to moral psychology and group- or individual-related pathologies. Worse, they sometimes give the impression that, instead of dealing with the crises as such, we must just deal with the most psychological of their effects, namely, uncertainty-which is yet another dematerialization of crises that the responsiveness rhetoric produces.

Works which uncritically rely on “uncertain times” metaphors often complement them with medical metaphors that evoke a moralist notion of “health” [26]. Crises, pathologies and diagnoses reflect a medical language that seeks to cure society from “unhealthy” “others”, exalts one concept as the “cure” and idealizes the skilled groups of experts that can render the world “healthier”. Epistocratic views that favour groups of experts and élites of “wise” knowers as better positioned to rule than the body- politic become increasingly influential. The risk is that a responsiveness rhetoric that moralistically individualizes crises as produced by the “unhealthy” elements in society may encourage the overtaking of democracy by epistocracy to oligarchic effect. New social polarizations, hierarchies and even totalitarian tendencies may thus be normalized. When hollow, the responsiveness rhetoric eases the passage from the responsibility politics to the responsibilization politics that blames the individual for deficits that are deep down socio-political. The rhetoric in question often privileges individualistic remedies to crises such as private initiative and miraculous action of charismatic and heroic leaders. In this vein, the crises and “uncertain times” metaphors, and their medical undertones, chime with the “ship of state” metaphor. This metaphor, turned famous by Plato, has been marked by an astonishing resilience from antiquity to the present; when associated with it, the “times of uncertainty” metaphor is transmuted into the more becoming nautical metaphor of “times of shipwreck” threatening the ship, exposing it to the risk of being storm-tossed [27]. The typical assumption is that the ship is fundamentally soundly built. That it enters dangerous, turbulent or uncharted waters individualizes responsibility by entailing that great skill is needed to reach a calm harbour. It is thus overlooked that if the ship is not that soundly built-indeed, if the waters only seem choppy largely because of unacknowledged structural design faults of the ship itself – then the metaphor becomes not merely a comfort blanket but an untruth, a lie even. The skilling perspective [28] is emphasized in all these metaphors (uncertain times, diagnostics/therapeutics and ship-of-state): the responsibility for avoiding or controlling disaster is associated with élites, leaders, technocrats and experts. This moralist individualization of responsibility glosses over: political, historical and structural causalities of crises that produce uncertainties; and the need for radical structural change.

Related negative effects of the increased and clichéd popularity of the responsiveness rhetoric match those of the crisis-of-democracy thesis that Andreas Kalyvas astutely detects. Just as the crisis-of-democracy thesis exonerates “the post-democratic order and the absolution of its 40 years or so of undisputed hegemonic neoliberal reign” [11] (P. 386), the uncertain times metaphor also constructs its own idealized periodization. To adapt to the responsiveness rhetoric Kalyvas’ comment on the crisis-of-democracy thesis, the critical and uncertain times metaphor implicitly exalts “the pre-crisis period as a superior epoch” [11] (P. 386) and a golden age of certainty. It operates, in my view, as if the past, which is ruptured from the present and the future and typically cast aside when causalities of uncertainties are bypassed, now becomes the higher universal norm. It is implied that what preceded our uncertain times was a legitimate order; the present is measured against it and deemed “abnormal, deficient, exceptional, and regressive”. Any uncertainty becomes “an anomaly and a deviation; a temporary disease diverting from the norm, the political pathology that afflicts and disrupts an otherwise just constitutional order” (P. 386).3The embellished and idealized past gets re-coded “as a universal era of progress, prosperity, and peace, an era defined by human rights and cosmopolitan law”. This order is viewed as coming under attack by the usual suspects of causing uncertainty, those who personalize the glaring challenges that the world of today faces, for example, the “irresponsible, opportunistic, and dangerous populist leaders in an unholy alliance with ungrateful and greedy lower classes” (P. 386).

Moreover, ironically, the uncertain times rhetoric, which seemingly emphasizes crises and challenges, seriously underestimates current political challenges. For example, by pointing up populism as a glaring challenge, the rhetoric, to adapt Kalyvas again, deflects attention from the fact that the

3 Here again I am extracting Kalyvas’ statements from their “democracy- in-crisis” context and adapt them to the uncertainty topic.

radicalization of the right is the main feature of the present conjuncture. It disguises this radicalization by relativizing and banalizing it [11] (P. 387). It downplays the historical significance of the global sway of conservative politics by singling out only its more extreme version, namely, far right populism. The problem which alarms contemporary liberals is populism, a category that is said to afflict “both the right and the left”. Hence, the uncertainty is presented as a product of “a generic populist temptation”; “the more concrete political plans and societal projects of a general radicalization of the right on the rise, characterized by elements of a process of fascisization of state and society” [11] (P. 387) are not considered productive of uncertainties and crises. Oligarchic usurpations of democracy do not alarm the users of the standardized responsiveness rhetoric.

Therefore, the “liberal-bourgeois conception of crisis, now so popular in scholarly studies and the popular press” [11] (P. 387), presupposes that the crisis is a “dysfunctional and regressive moment that ruptures the otherwise harmonious functioning of the democratic constitutional state”. It is construed as “an exceptional moment, both historically and normatively, that will eventually pass when equilibrium and normality are re-established” (P. 387) [11]. The challenges are typified as effected by the “uncultivated” masses. Self- indulgently, the liberal-bourgeois decision-making élites and the scholars who either condone or sleepwalk through liberal liabilities entertain only certainties about who are to be blamed for the times of uncertainty; these are always the benevolent capitalist’s and wet liberal’s “unhealthy” “others”.

At first sight, a way out of this self-indulgent automatism may be a drastic rethinking of our confidence in our habitual ways of responding to uncertain times. We may need “a way of perceiving that is not constrained by remembrance but is expanded through imaginative possibilities” [29] (P. 394). Rethinking invites us to suspend consolidated, habitual responses to current challenges. To push this to further implications: possibly, the implicit modernist break with the past may turn into a blessing in disguise if viewed from an appropriate perspective, that is, if it becomes an incentive to avoid the overreliance on past knowledge that may block one’s thinking more deeply about crises. This takes me to the crypto-normativity4 of “re-” operations beneath the popular recommendations to rethink, re-visit, re-establish, re-formulate, re-structure, etc., that typically accompany the uncertain times rhetoric [30].

4 The prescription is covert, thus crypto-normative, because the prefix “re”- carries a positive normative connotation that has not been challenged by critics of prescriptivism or normativism [33].

The Standard Recommendations of the Responsiveness Rhetoric

The “insecure times” rhetoric urges us to respond to new givens by acts of “rethinking”. The “re-” enjoys a tacit consensus across theoretical divisions, perhaps more so in post-modernist theoretical contexts. In times of crises and uncertainties, much should be re-imagined, re-vitalized, re- claimed, re-negotiated, re-considered, re-constructed, re- fashioned and, more frequently, re-thought. For example, “the ongoing work of rethinking democratic spaces should attend to the ways they structure democratic hope as a guiding principle of collective actions” [31] (P. 183). Marie Paxton’s [32] book Agonistic Democracy: Rethinking Political Institutions in Pluralist Times directs rethinking to the aim of a more inclusive, engaging and virtuous democracy through the strengthening of democratic institutions and deliberative democratic innovations. Hogue [13] also emphasizes democratic institutions and the act of re-imagining how to approximate a democratic ethos. Likewise, it is thought that “rethinking the structure and orientation of sites of politics” serves the capacity of democracy “to imagine possible futures” [24] (P. 196). The constellation of democracy, hope and rethinking/re-imagining in uncertain times becomes part and parcel of most recommendations for a better future: “democratic hope constitutes a key feature of designing and rethinking democratic spaces” [24] (P. 201). Despite their value, these recommendations have their own problems. The various valorized “re-” verbs are used by many theorists as the cure to current pathologies, and this is no good sign, as we may extrapolate from the previous section’s critique of the synergy of temporal, nautical and medical metaphors. More importantly, the assumption that our “re-” actions will not reflect all the shortcomings of our thought that have so far led us to losing sight of injustices, crises and uncertainties that our countries have created for other people is facile, to say the least. What are the indications that current theory, with all its commitment to rethinking or to revaluing uncertainty as source of hope, truly realizes what uncertainties and hopelessness the Palestinians or the Kurds experience in conditions of global denial of their rights to self-determination? Likewise, the Chagossian right of return [33], an issue of inflicted injustice, never comes up in contemporary transformative politics of democracy and rethinking. So long as global problems the solution of which is not a matter of democratic politics within-state (e.g., within U.S. territory) do not preoccupy democratic theory, focused as the theory is on inclusion or within-state equality and justice, the generic suggestion to “re-think” and “re-imagine” remains a mere rhetorical gesture. What is thus overlooked is that cosmopolitan justice is not reducible to democratic justice. Assumptions to the opposite perpetuate the injustices that remain invisible by western theorists because they occur far away from the theorists’ “democratic” state, implicate it and have their roots in a past that escapes the eye that is focused on contemporary crises and uncertainties.

Consider in this light even recommendations such as Hogue’s, which otherwise acknowledge the colonial past and its effects on the planet. Though Hogue theorizes past liabilities of global significance, he nevertheless resorts to democratic theory rather than cosmopolitan justice without considering that planetary issues may require much more radical political change than that of the internal affairs in within-state democratic space. He claims that, rather than “answering creatural insecurity with the quest for certainty”, we must be courageous enough “to build uncertainty into our ways of knowing” [13] (P. 169) and habitual acting. This echoes the broader plea to cultivate “the ability to cope with uncertainty” [2] (P. 15) or increase our open-mindedness through it, and invites the question: what uncertainty? Just any? Even that of people who are bombed with weapons distributed by the theorists’ democratic governments to aggressors so long as these are the country’s allies (e.g., consider Turkey bombing northern Syria or Israel’s operations in Gaza)?

Hogue suggests that we embrace the shared experience of vulnerability “as the precondition of more empathic, emancipatory, and equitable democratic practices” and of more “resilient democratic communities” [13] (P. 169). He avows that vulnerability, though in principle common, depends for its individual manifestations on one’s positioning, power and inequality. However, this is not explored along lines of international relations that invite a more multi-faceted justice beyond the democratic within- territory one. Thus, the remedy remains the democratic ethos, and the normative options that are further indicated include an aestheticizing passage from justice to beauty and the solidarity that may emerge out of ethical and aesthetic visions [13] (P. 180-185); yet without explaining how this aestheticist rethinking promotes (or not) the human rights and claims to justice of wronged people whose survival is uncertain due to the politics that the “democratic” state pursues as a global player. That within the uncertain times rhetoric the normativized “re-” verbs may be premised on normatively exalted notions such democracy, beauty, inclusion, decoloniality, etc., does not safeguard the (crypto-) normative weight (see Papastephanou 2021) bestowed on the “re-” vocabulary. The recommendation to “re-think”, so popular and broadly embraced nowadays, rarely leads to considering what makes one able to perceive injustices and why some injustices are totally neglected. The “re-” creates the expectation of a more apposite analytics of reality that destabilizes the consolidated modality of thought to produce the aufgehoben (that which is dialectically overcome yet surviving through a novel structure). However, the “re-” ends up being a facile rhetorical escape route from the thought about crises. Instead of producing a radical change, the “re- ” may strengthen capitalist self-recuperative mechanisms [34].

The rhetoric which, in the exceptionality of our circumstances, dictates re-direction lets the “in contemporary societies”, or “the times that we live in”, set the confines within which a rethinking is deployed. The preposition “in” of this rhetoric affirms the contemporary world as the ultimate framing of the operations and content of rethinking. A consequence is that the rethinking of politics through an exalted notion (democracy, beauty, etc.) that enhances or sanitizes existing political modalities in contemporary societies acquires a normative ambiguity: it may reflect some valuable sensitivity and responsiveness to new givens in a globalized world; but it may also reflect the tendency to overlook whatever remains invisible in our social media/public debates. Thus, it may not upset our ordered and convenient perceptions of ethics and politics. It does not acknowledge ethico-political debts to whatever has not passed through the filter of globalized academia or globally synchronized public opinion. Therefore, regardless of the dispersed uncertainty rhetoric, too much still relies on unchallenged certainties. That the “re-” acts are located “in contemporary societies” or in times of uncertainty, crises, etc., raises further issues for the answerability to the world of today: can a rethinking be desirable, worthwhile (or whatever other normative term applies here), if it only focuses on “uncertain times”? The rethinking “of the contemporary world” may be deeply problematic if it is tailored to fit in this world and in the societies that derive their legitimacy of interest from their being contemporary. The emphasis on the contemporary and on the current (also evident in the unprecedented social currency of the uncertain times rhetoric) aspires to solve the problems that the capitalist hegemonic Zeitgeist perceives as dangers. Limited as this prism is, and neglectful of the past, it cannot interrogate the self-congratulatory, complacent certainties of this Zeitgeist and the normalcy that is attributed to whatever unjust reality does not present a danger for the privileged and the vocal of the world of today. When political thought focuses only on conspicuous crises [20] it fails inter alia to do discursive justice to more marginal voices that express discontent with unjust realities. In other words, all the key elements of the responsiveness rhetoric pattern require meta-theoretical attention and caution instead of unreserved endorsement and uncritical exaltation.

Conclusion

In most uses of the uncertain times metaphor that emphasize the present and its crises as the appropriate setting for political thought, uncertainty is not nuanced.

It is employed either affirmatively as a source of hope or dismissively as a pernicious political affect. In the same polarizing vein, epistemic and political nuances of (un) certainty on grounds of who experiences it and why are missing. Theorists also assume that the flow of daily life had previously been smoother without differentiating for whom and in what respect. However, I have not suggested that the characterization of the era as “critical” or “uncertain” is wide off the mark. Quite the contrary; let me remind the reader that, as I mentioned earlier, complicating, meta-theoretically, the crisis and uncertainty rhetoric does not amount to disputing that some uncertainties are typical of this era. Some challenges may be unique to, or more crucial for, our times; or we may notice an unusual synergy of crises, as it happens when the plot of a drama thickens. Consider Nancy Fraser’s statement about crises of cannibal capitalism:

What we face, thanks to decades of financialization, is not ‘only’ a crisis of rampaging inequality and low- waged precarious work; nor ‘merely’ one of care or social reproduction; nor ‘just’ a crisis of migration and racialized violence. Neither is it ‘simply’ an ecological crisis in which a heating planet disgorges lethal plagues, nor ‘only’ a political crisis featuring hollowed-out infrastructure; ramped-up militarism, and a proliferation of strongmen. Oh no, it’s something worse: a general crisis of the entire societal order in which all those calamities converge, exacerbating one another and threatening to swallow us whole [35] (P. 15) [36].

I have argued that being critical of the crisis and uncertainty rhetoric (thus, philosophy going meta-critical and self-reflective) may enable better insight into the excess and complex interconnectivity of crises. However, a self-reflective study which would explore the operations of the responsiveness rhetoric and its pros and cons, instead of just following and enacting it, is still neglected. I have addressed precisely this neglect. I have suggested, therefore, that the complex politics of the responsiveness rhetoric should be explored. It is important to indicate the normative ambiguities of its metaphors and the unintended consequences: what may start off as a pertinent insight may end up being consumed, indeed, devoured in the cannibal capitalist manner that Fraser pertinently chastises, by the very metaphor that it uncritically uses. Even when one’s responsiveness involves a more radically critical normativity such as that of transformative politics, it is still beneficial meta-theoretically to examine unintended consequences. Such consequences are: the sloganeered use of rethinking that effects psychic discharge and a self-indulgent sense of progressiveness; and the perpetuation of the invisibility of injustices, especially those which involve not only democratic but also cosmopolitan deficits. Turning self-reflectively toward our use of popular temporal metaphors and standardized patterns may enhance our caution concerning their ambiguous political operations.