It is a central faith of the historical profession that history matters, and that how we tell it has political and ethical import. The Mont Pelerin Rewrite is a project emerging out of this simple idea that history matters, and that rewriting it is critical to reimagining the future.

This project enters the space between historical accounting and future imagining by way of taking up one of the central documents of the Paris Climate Agreement: Article 6.11The full text of the Paris Agreement is available on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change website at https://unfccc.int/files/meetings/paris_nov_2015/application/pdf/paris_agreement_english_.pdf This is the article that outlines carbon trading and most clearly stipulates a global consensus on the market as a mode of distributing and mitigating climate change risks. To reconsider the contours of this document demands engaging with histories of neoliberalism, as well as critically and reflexively imagining alternative modes of and language for climate governance.

Central questions that preoccupy us are: How are the relationships between state, market, natural environments, and citizens understood? And how does this understanding create or foreclose certain types of political and ethical agency? These imaginaries are a way of reading and rereading the governance system as it is, often involving reading against the grain of prevailing accounts. In representing it, mediating it, and communicating it in a certain way, the governance system is defined and made accessible in that one particular way, while other potential readings are foreclosed. What might it mean, then, to create multiple versions? How, we ask, might we rewrite this imaginary by documenting its many versions?

Consequently, we ran iterations of the Rewrite project with numerous groups of students, within the context of courses on the subject of the Anthropocene. Students were asked to develop alternative glossaries and work collectively to propose new concepts or texts for Article 6 and the Paris Agreement. Some fragments from these rewrites are presented here. As with all histories of literary and constitutional interpretation, the Rewrite generates a partial and cumulative archive that makes changes in increments and whose processes are never fully visible.

What are we undoing or rewriting?

The language of Article 6 is full of terms that demand investigation: Ambition. Mitigation. Finance. Public and private. Adaptation. This discourse already pulls us into an imaginary world where Darwinian forces are at work, and only through the adaptive strategies of finance capital may we survive. The neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek famously once argued:

The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all.22Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review, vol. 35, no. 4 (September 1945): p. 526.

Speaking in one of the inaugural papers of neoliberalism and at the foundation of the Mont Pèlerin Society, Hayek articulated an idea that has now become standard: mainly that markets do not match supply and demand; rather, they make decisions. Markets process information. Since none of us know the future, none of us even know the present; only markets can coordinate our limited fields of perception to make the best decisions. By dedication, then, the contemporary climate-management regime turns to markets to deal with the known unknown of the specific risks of climate change and rising levels of CO², implicitly assuming markets will reallocate carbon production in the most optimal manner for all (and that “all” is clearly not everyone on Earth).

There is, however, an irony at the heart of the neoliberal project, one that we wished to interrogate. The market is always grounded in collectivities, but can such collectivities be organized not only in the interest of markets? We sought another way to view the long-running neoliberal problematic: primarily that markets need to bring together different viewpoints and perspectives but also disavow any possibility of planning or ensuring that difference is actually represented. The fantasy is that markets synchronize differences—across partial “limited” perspectives—to give us better decisions. But if everyone is the same and there is no new information, then, by the very dictates of the information theory that Hayek later developed, the market will have no value in it: it will be all falsity. So markets need differences, but also to defer or deny this need.

This opens some questions about how to think and act in the face of such unreasonable rationalities. Since neoliberalism assumes our partial perspectives, our relations to others, and the syncopation of differences into systems, does such thinking offer any possibilities at all? Exactly one year ago, anthropologist Christopher Kelty suggested just this type of possibility. He wrote a piece on pandemic participation, stating that the COVID-19 pandemic is maybe the largest example of participation that the world has ever seen. While different regimes have tried to cope with it in different ways, participation in attempts at governing the virus is obviously not a choice. The pandemic, therefore, has illustrated the idea that participation is prior to democracy, and that we are often forced to participate against our choosing. What, then, do we make of this imperative of—often violent—inclusion? What if participating in and through procedures, protocols, and scripts that we do not subscribe to appears to be the only opportunity to be represented and heard?

Participation in contemporary Western societies is often organized around, and seemingly reduced to, participating in markets. That is, our stance toward markets and market policies unduly restricts the domain of the political, and thus our opportunities to participate. Kelty writes:

What we participate in will become our government, whether that participation is intentional or unintentional. … The idea that forms of participation—states, governments, corporations, markets, churches—have an eternal existence that takes different forms in different times and places is a simple but very tenacious academic mistake. It is only what people do that makes up the things we call governments, markets, churches. And what we do is participate—whether enthusiastically as willing collaborators, or as unwitting or unwilling users.33Christopher Kelty, “Pandemic Participation: Christopher M. Kelty on Isolation and Participation in a Public Health Crisis,” The Chicago Blog, University of Chicago Press, May 28, 2020: https://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2020/05/28/pandemic-participation-christopher-m-kelty-on-isolation-and-participation-in-a-public-health-crisis.html. Emphasis in the original.

Participation in climate governance is not a choice either. We all participate materially in the planetary carbon cycle, by virtue of being a part of industrial society and by, after all, being carbon-based life forms. Mapping the concept of carbon markets on the carbon cycle means that carbon markets present a fantasy of potentially enclosing the entirety of Earth in systems of economic accounting. The planetary energy and material flows rendered as market exchanges appear susceptible to market forces, as well as to incentives and desires that can be artificially designed. In order for people to make up the market, individuals have to think and act in specific ways in relation to new ways of knowing carbon: they have to be “carbon conscious” or possess a particular kind of carbon ethic. They also have to understand themselves as market actors whose political dimension is melded to and expressed by acting in the economic sphere. Because we are all implicated as users of carbon, we are also designated as participants in the process of repair of the carbon cycle as a market process. Climate governance as carbon management purports to be a radically decentralized process, yet a process that can be directed, modulating all its users’ behavior toward specific ends.

Carbon markets have served as an example for observing and analyzing the changing nature of political contestation. They exemplify the shift, as described by Kelty, of “participation” changing from democratic involvement to unwitting usership. Concepts such as market anti-politics and market technopolitics aim to delineate the mechanics of depoliticization associated with markets that happens through transferring decision-making to the market, which purportedly “knows best,” while the actual politics are obscured within the seemingly technical decisions made through market design and through the “subpolitical” practices of scientific and accounting bodies.

While many other projects conducted in the framework of HKW’s The Shape of a Practice program resorted to experiencing participation through various sensory regimes, in the Mont Pelerin Rewrite project we opted for experiencing the bleak language and technicalities of current climate politics and for learning to populate what currently figures as pure procedure through the experiences that our colleagues opened up for us during that program.

Our main goal in the Mont Pelerin Rewrite was precisely to make us all question the logistics of how we have come to combine representative plural democracy with market participation and to assume markets are the best deciders of our collective futures. So, a central question we faced is: Is there any way to undo the terms of neoliberalism through its own logics? Furthermore, can this internal opposition between collectivity and the disavowal of collective organization be used against the dominance of market imaginaries?

In taking on the mode of rewriting, we have drawn on existing practices that contest dominant paradigms and that have opened new discursive terrains of resistance. Feminist and queer projects, since these movements’ emergence, have been involved in rewriting history and reimagining the future. Multispecies studies has similarly developed new ways of thinking about how to ethically and politically engage difference, not only between humans, or even between living organisms, but also between collectives such as entire species and ecosystems. Such analytic approaches locate the trouble with corrective work in the notion of fixity itself: attempts to “correct” universalizing systems and structures cannot account for historical contingency, nor for what they themselves produce. We learned to shift away from “correcting” to “critical reading and locating fissures and ruptures,” and from producing “a single corrective” to producing “a plurality of visions that remain in flux.” Part of our rewriting is finding where logics fold, where governance can be disrupted, and where democracy might be redefined and reimagined away from the neoliberal financial market.

The forms of rewriting

This brings us to the problem of the form a rewrite takes. A rewrite demands you stay within the frame or the structure you have been given. It is an acquiescence in order to recognize history, and to the Marxist dictum that we make history in conditions not of our choosing. We must rewrite Article 6, and in doing so recognize that we must contend with the forms of governance, the nature of the law, and the neoliberal and other histories embedded within this document.

One might ask, therefore: Why not simply dispense with such documents? Would it not serve the cause of equity and diversity more purposefully if we did so? There are two answers. The first is pragmatic and the second imaginative. In the pragmatic answer, these institutions already exist and have many adherents, so, then, they must be addressed and contested, if only as a matter of political expediency.

The imaginative response bridges to the broader issue of education and the demos, and, in fact, the purpose of this pedagogy project between the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. To what and to whom do we address ourselves? To what publics? And what do we wish to retain and reimagine from the histories of democracy? To desire a constitution is to desire to produce a public, and, subsequently, a demos. It returns us to our earlier statements concerning collectivity and participation. We adhere to and are invested in reworking legislative and regulatory documents because they present new arenas through which people may come to be seen by power and to act politically. These sites of the demos must be made, and reimagined, to radically oppose forms of exclusion and violent inclusion that characterize the history of Western nationalism, racism, and colonialism.

Of course, laws, or commandments, are also operational—they introduce scripts, procedures, and protocols and might therefore avoid or even destroy the demos. Rewriting involves reading and writing between the lines; it demands engaging with the atomic elements and central terms of a text as well as with its structure and format; and it reintroduces bits of information that were deleted and omitted. Most significantly, however, rewriting means gathering around a document, annotating it, debating its meanings, extracting its imaginaries, and generating a new document to reimagine the world that it operates.

One might imagine a technocratic system to abandon political spaces for universal, technological fixes to the problems of climate change (e.g., geoengineering). This might be the power of neoliberalism—the one we seek to defer and contest through collective if small efforts at reimagining legal and constitutional relations between ourselves and the planet.

If the original Article 6 is considered to not be inclusive and to deny the humanity of most humans on this Earth, as well as the lives of other creatures, is this rewrite not part of a broader effort to produce new publics through pedagogy, education, and collective exchange? And to address more broadly the inclusivity and exclusivity of operational documents?

Returning to Hayek, the force of the Mont Pèlerin Society was the force of ideas and narratives. Part of rewriting is recognizing the force of these ideas and forcing them open, expanding their possibilities and futures in plural. Hayek himself was a complex figure, who aspired to human freedoms and recognized difference:

From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.44Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960, p. 150.

Without defense of Hayek or neoliberalism, the Mont Pelerin Rewrite seeks to find those moments not only without but within the epistemology of neoliberalism—the places where its coherence cracks and the recognition of difference enters. Unlike Hayek, and possibly others who have called for “new” constitutions like the sociologist Bruno Latour, we would not say that the law is at odds with materiality, but rather that the two are mutually constituted, and therefore we need a law that recognizes that there are different forms of subjectivity and collectivity. A law, or an article, that actually is about history, situation, and situatedness. A form of law that recognizes that to make all equal means to create the infrastructures where many forms of life can flourish. We are still seeking that law, but we feel that the small act of attempting to rewrite and to educate others to do so is a process that might yet result in other constitutions for a different world.