Kate Soper - Post-Growth Living - For an Alternative Hedonism

Post-Growth Living

Post-Growth Living

For an Alternative
Hedonism

Kate Soper

First published by Verso 2020
Kate Soper 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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In the writing of the book, I have drawn on material included in a number of articles and chapters from my earlier publications, and am grateful in particular to: Edinburgh University Press for permission to use material from The Humanism in Posthumanism, Comparative Critical Studies, 9 (3) pp. 36578, 2012, DOI 10.3366/ccs.2012.0069.

The Next System Project in America for permission to use material from A New Hedonism: a Post-Consumerism Vision, article posted 22 November 2017 at thenextsystem.org.

Sage Publishing for permission to use material from Re-thinking the good life: the citizenship dimension of consumer disaffection with consumerism, in Journal of Consumer Culture, no. 7, 2, July, pp. 20529, 2007, Sage Publishing. DOI 10.1177/1469540507077681.

Informa UK Ltd, on behalf of Taylor and Francis Books division for licence to re-use material from Kate Soper and Maria Emmelin, Reconceptualising Prosperity: Some Reflections on the impact of Globalization on Health and Welfare and Kate Soper, The Interaction of Policy and Experience: An alternative hedonist optic, in M. Koch and O. Mont, eds, Sustainability and the Political Economy of Welfare, pp. 4458 and pp. 186200.

Palgrave Macmillan for permission to use material from Alternative Hedonism and the Citizen-Consumer, in K. Soper and F. Trentmann, eds, Citizenship and Consumption, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 191205; and from Kate Soper, Introduction in K. Soper, M. H. Ryle and L. Thomas, eds, The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 121.

I am also grateful for the kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland, to reproduce The Bronx Seabirds from Derek Mahons New York Time, New Selected Poems (2016).

Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-887-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-888-0 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-889-7 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Contents

The thinking that has gone into this book goes back a long way. The origins of this thinking derive in part from my early interests in the philosophy of human need and welfare, and the encouragement given me by postgraduate tutors at Sussex University, namely John Mepham and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. The evolution of my argument on consumption and environmental politics, and specifically around alternative hedonism, has owed much since then to discussions with fellow philosophers at London Metropolitan University and my research colleagues in the Institute for the Study of European Transformations. From 20042006, the project I undertook on Alternative Hedonism, the Theory and Politics of Consumption was in receipt of an ESRC/AHRB funded research grant in the Cultures of Consumption programme. I am grateful for that support and to my co-researcher on the project, Lyn Thomas, for the media study she contributed and for the intellectual support and friendship she has given me throughout. I would also like to thank Frank Trentmann, the Director of the Programme, for his helpful input and advice, and his editorial collaboration.

I should mention here, too, the stimulus provided by discussions resulting from invitations to guest teach or provide papers for conferences at the universities of Amsterdam, Bilgi Instanbul, Copenhagen, Corvinus Budapest, Colorado School of Mines, Hamburg, the National University of Ireland at Galway and Cork, Linkping, Mnster, Palack Olomouc, Oslo, Tallinn, Trinity College (Dublin), Stockholm, Uppsala and Utrecht. In Britain I am grateful to the following universities and colleges: Bath Spa, Birkbeck, Brighton, Goldsmiths, East London, Edinburgh, Essex, Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Newport, Queen Mary, Roehampton, SOAS, Strathclyde and Warwick, and Camberwell College of Arts, Plymouth Art College (at Dartington Hall), the Sustainable Development Commission at DEFRA, the Serpentine Gallery, the Wellcome Institute and the Whitechapel Gallery. Special thanks here should go to Andreas Malm for his initial interest in my work and for inviting me to be a guest lecturer at the LUCID Research Centre at Lund University in Sweden in 2011. Thus began a valued relationship with Lund University and especially with the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, where I was a Visiting Research Fellow attached to the project on Sustainable Welfare during 20142015. I am grateful in particular to its director at the time, Sune Sunesson, and to Max Koch and Oksana Mont, the project coordinators, my co-author Maria Emmelin, and all those involved in this research. I also thank the current director, Ann-Katrin Bcklund, for her continuing interest.

My thanks also go to Rosie Warren at Verso, for first persuading me back into writing on alternative hedonism, and to John Merrick, my editor, for his enthusiasm and very able guidance on the book. My daughter, Maddy Ryle, has offered some excellent advice and additions at certain points, and my six-year old grandson, Caspar Roa-Ryle, has been mildly ironic about the need for its production, but overall quite tolerant of it. If there is one person I have to thank above all for guiding me in its writing, it is Martin Ryle, who has, as usual, shown himself to be a marvellous editor, and endlessly diligent in teasing out the confusions of my arguments, cutting out undue flights of rhetoric, and improving my more inept expressions. This has been all the more heroic of him, given how familiar he had already become, over years of talking and co-writing on the central topics of the book, with almost everything I have to say in it.

Rodmell, November 2019

This book is primarily concerned with the pattern of consumption in affluent societies, the potential for its transformation, and the leverage that such change might exert in building a more egalitarian and sustainable global order. It argues that environmental crisis cannot be resolved by purely technical means, but will require richer societies substantially to change their way of living, working and consuming. Green technologies and interventions (renewable energy, rewilding, reforestation and so on) will prove essential tools for ecological renewal, but only if they go together with a cultural revolution in thinking about prosperity, and the abandonment of growth-driven consumerism.

Not all, but many environmentalists would agree with this. A more distinctive feature of my argument is its alternative hedonism: its resistance to viewing the needed changes in consumption as a form of sacrifice and loss of pleasure. I present them, on the contrary, as offering an opportunity to advance beyond a mode of life that is not just environmentally disastrous but also in many respects unpleasurable, self-denying and too puritanically fixated on work and money-making, at the expense of the enjoyment that comes with having more time, doing more things for oneself, travelling more slowly and consuming less stuff. The call to consume less is often presented as undesirable and authoritarian. Yet, the market itself has become an authoritarian force commanding people to sacrifice or marginalise everything that is not commercially viable; condemning them to long hours of often very boring work to provide stuff that often isnt really needed; the developed nations would be better off focusing on the formation of a much needed alternative model of progress, and breaking with current ways of thinking about prosperity and well-being.