Tag Archives: climate change

Papers and Ongoing Research

Notes from the cutting room floor

I never really appreciated how much of what I write would end up on the cutting room floor until recently. Paragraphs, pages, whole sections of papers, and even entire texts that I have neither the time nor the wisdom to get through the peer review process, all end up resigned to the recycling bin. I’ll occasionally remember these texts and wonder what happened to them. Here’s one such text that I wrote which explains the core themes of my book. It’s short and pithy and was supposed to be a guest post/article for a newspaper or similar. It never took off/I never heard back from the university press office (I can’t imagine why) so I’m giving it a home here.

There’s nothing wrong with our imagination. It just cannot offer an escape… 

The dust has settled after COP26 and perhaps the most interesting thing about this meeting of world leaders has been observing the reactions to it in various opinion pieces and articles. Headlines bear out a curious emotion of resigned disappointment amid a desperate search for a measured optimism: “A flop, but the climate justice movement is still growing”, “It could have been worse”, Cop26 could have gone further – but it still brought us closer to a 1.5C world.

The story that we seem to be telling is the same as it always has been, that we still have hope that things will get better. Humans, it seems, are a fundamentally hopefully species that are perhaps too enamoured with the myth of progress to imagine a reality where things are getting worse for us.

Questions of imagination sit at the heart of our response to the threat of global ecological collapse that we face. Literary luminaries like Amitav Ghosh and Ben Okri impress upon us how important it is that we try to imagine new futures, new ways out of the crisis, and commentators like George Monbiot frequently invoke the idea that our collective inaction in the face of a planet that is fast becoming unliveable for the human is a “failure of the imagination” The idea that our imagination is the key to unlocking a better response the challenges that we face now has become core to how we see the challenges that we face in the anthropocene.

But what exactly are the new solutions that we are hoping to imagine? A future where a heroic entrepreneur saves us from the potential horrors of ecological collapse with some new innovation in the area of carbon scrubbing or recycling? A future where we all “return to the land”, and set up quiet enclaves of local, communal, sustainable farming that facilitates vegan lifestyles? A future where we all flee the planet and live on Mars? The drive to imagine and create new futures, to keep dreaming of new worlds and ways of living in them, is such a potent and powerful part of what we might call the human experience that it is worth asking who or what benefits from us maintaining such a drive towards the continuous production of new imagined futures. Despite the fact that there is a litany of evidence that contemporary organizations cannot lead the fight against climate change we continue try to imagine a future where such organizations sidestep government inaction in order to really make a difference. Why?

Fredrick Jameson once commented in passing that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. In light of current events, it is necessary for us to revise this formulation and suggest that we all now joyously participate in the production of new imaginaries in order to create new markets, support new futures, and ensure the continuance of capitalism.

The idea that there is some kind of outside to capitalism is increasingly farcical. Every new innovation and imagined future is immediately captured and subordinated to market logics. It is not that there is something wrong with our imagination, it is that the very nature of capitalism involves the capture of any new offshoots or potentials. The best example is that veganism and “eco-friendly diets” are now big business. Yet another pointless consumer fad.

At this point, the truly unimaginable future seems to be one where capitalism continues indefinitely having shirked off the “drag” of the human. Imagine an underground bunker protecting a nuclear powered server farm that continues to make stock trades, long after all of an organization’s human workers are dead? This is the kind of future that capital is dreaming for us all.

Is sustainability possible? Of course it is, but there’s absolutely no reason for us to hope that the human will be involved.

If this is the case, at what point should we begin to regard the hope and optimism inherent in calls to imagine new futures as forms of “climate denialism”? The insistence that “it’ll all be OK”, at some point should be regarded evidence of a dangerous detachment from the social, political, and economic realities in which we find ourselves?

There may be no way out. Imagine that.

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Reflections

Three passages that I recalled while watching “Don’t Look Up”

I enjoy Adam McKay’s work. While I can’t say that I hold all of his many collaborations with Will Ferrell in the highest of esteem, The Big Short and Vice are hilarious and cutting portrayals of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the post-September 11th warmongering respectively. As such, I was always going to watch his newest film, Don’t Look Up. My interest in it was compounded by the fact that my Twitter timeline over the last few days has been absolutely brimming with tweets and retweets from various academics in the climate science or sustainability research space speaking up in support of the film under the hashtag: #DontLookUp, praising its satire of contemporary politics and its critique of our collective inaction around climate change.

Critical reception has been mixed, but I have to say that I enjoyed the film while watching it. It was filled with the call-back gags and black comedy that make McKay’s work entertaining. However, I went to bed thinking about three passages from three texts that have sat at the forefront of my mind in recent years. Reflecting on these led me to think differently about the film, its message (which going by McKay’s Twitter is that we need urgent action in order to solve the climate crisis), and how I was affected by it.

The first, from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:

“As Žižek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the ‘evil corporation’. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/Pixar’s Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We’re left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations – or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large – is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.”

Don’t Look Up performs our anti-capitalism for us. The film features Mark Rylance as “Sir Peter Isherwell” the CEO of BASH, a thinly veiled analogue for the CEO’s of Microsoft, Apple, Tesla and other large lucrative tech multinationals. In everything from his demeanour to his ultimate and predictable ineptitude, the film enjoins us to dislike Isherwell, to resent his power, wealth, and willingness to turn the potential death of the human race into a cash grab, mining the comet for minerals. Watching the film, we engage in our ceremonial “Two Minutes Hate” of these scapegoats and enrage ourselves at the inept politicians dragging their feet and failing to take meaningful action to prevent global ecological collapse because they are too busy capitulating to the whims of the wealthy. Netflix will happily sell us this anti-capitalist film in order to continue to be profitable. We interact with and participate in this mechanism of control as we post on social media about how relatable it is and someone at Netflix’s marketing department records our engagement figures to drive content options in the future. This is not, to borrow the phrase, a film using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house; it is simply the case that the demographic audience for anti-capitalist film has grown large enough for capitalism to recognize it as a lucrative demand block and begin catering to its desires.

It is in the affective catharsis of hating the idiots shown on screen in Don’t Look Up, that we need to find some suspicion. We already know that corporations contribute disproportionately to the climate crisis and that they can’t lead the fight against it, so whose interests are being served as we continue to consume this anti-capitalist message?

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The second, from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation:

“Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland […]: digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this “ideological” blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”

Satire finds its basis in exaggeration. Yet any exaggerated portrayal of current events is no longer possible because the lines between fiction and reality are obfuscated. The scene where the scientists finally get to meet the President and discuss the urgent crisis of an enormous mass of rock threatening to wipe out all life on Earth is funny when they are met with the response of an indifferent and dismissive decision to “sit tight and assess” precisely because it exists in stark contrast to dramas like The West Wing, where characters made larger than life by Aaron Sorkin’s verbose yet eloquent dialogue would respond to such a crisis by taking decisive action in order to reach a meaningful resolution (usually with one or more heartfelt soliloquies along the way). The fact that such scenes redouble and find themselves being performed or deliberately not performed in the course of everyday life, can only remind us of the fact that “the real” is no longer identifiable. None of us would know what decision making in the Oval Office is like, and indeed we could not know, because any decision making would inevitably be a kind of mediated performance from all parties.

The film’s relation to our current political “reality” can thus be analogized to that which Baudrillard sees between Disneyland and America. It is lauded as satire in order for us to continue to hope that reality is not quite like what it depicts. Yet the interplays between the satire and documentary make this praise one that should draw suspicion. Any affects that the film elicits, whether laughter or deep frustration, which our daily news does not, may well stem from a misrecognition of the fact that it is “the real” which hides that there is none.

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Lastly, from Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming’s Dead Man Working:

“The business discourse of ecology evokes a pseudo-criticality that numbs us even further, blinding us to the impending disaster of an unsustainable system (with mindless mantras such as ‘recycling will save us’). In other words, the disingenuous code of responsibility provides a practical medium for people to express their concerns, but in a manner that precisely consolidates their role as an obedient, productive worker. The sequence is clear. We are enlightened about the catastrophe around us, we embark on a employee-led social responsibility campaign such as jogging to raise money for a local homeless shelter. We are making a difference, but in reality nothing changes for the better. It is this feeling of ‘we tried’ that allows us to sustain what we know far too well is an unsustainable state of affairs.”

When Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Kate Dibiasky, is faced with death at the end of the film, her poignant reflection on her life is: “I’m grateful we tried”.

She and the other scientists resign themselves to their fate and sit down to a quiet dinner and continue with pained and deliberate small talk while waiting for the end of the world. In this regard, if anything, the film seems to me to be a critique of the environmentalism movement’s own self-image. The sane and rational scientists with logic and the weight of peer-reviewed evidence on their side still lie at the mercy of divisive politics and antagonism, apathy, corporate greed, the cult of the “hero” entrepreneur, and general ignorance. The utterly impotent and resigned “we tried”, thoroughly imbued with feelings of intellectual and moral superiority, can also be read as a fitting mockery: this is the best that you could do. With all of your knowledge and insight, all of your protest, all of your theorization, nothing is the best that you could do.

It is this self-satisfied feeling of “we tried” that we need to continuously meet with suspicion. I suspect that many of us will be waiting with a schadenfreude-laden “I told you so” when ecological collapse starts to have effects that are not possible to debate or ignore. Yet the precursors to this affect are also present every time we “do the right thing” and eat vegan meals, recycle, travel in a more sustainable way, buy local produce, and so on. Anytime that we feel like we’re trying our best,  we need to be wary that this affect is what allows an unsustainable system to continue.

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