* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Download The Climate Change Issue: Beyond the `True` or `Not True`
Global warming controversy wikipedia , lookup
Global warming wikipedia , lookup
Climate change feedback wikipedia , lookup
Michael E. Mann wikipedia , lookup
Climatic Research Unit email controversy wikipedia , lookup
Fred Singer wikipedia , lookup
Effects of global warming on human health wikipedia , lookup
General circulation model wikipedia , lookup
ExxonMobil climate change controversy wikipedia , lookup
Heaven and Earth (book) wikipedia , lookup
Climate resilience wikipedia , lookup
Climate sensitivity wikipedia , lookup
Economics of global warming wikipedia , lookup
Soon and Baliunas controversy wikipedia , lookup
Climate change adaptation wikipedia , lookup
Climate engineering wikipedia , lookup
Climate change denial wikipedia , lookup
Politics of global warming wikipedia , lookup
Solar radiation management wikipedia , lookup
Climatic Research Unit documents wikipedia , lookup
Climate change and agriculture wikipedia , lookup
Climate change in Tuvalu wikipedia , lookup
Climate governance wikipedia , lookup
Citizens' Climate Lobby wikipedia , lookup
Climate change in the United States wikipedia , lookup
Attribution of recent climate change wikipedia , lookup
Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme wikipedia , lookup
Effects of global warming on Australia wikipedia , lookup
Effects of global warming on humans wikipedia , lookup
Media coverage of global warming wikipedia , lookup
Climate change and poverty wikipedia , lookup
Public opinion on global warming wikipedia , lookup
Scientific opinion on climate change wikipedia , lookup
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report wikipedia , lookup
Climate change, industry and society wikipedia , lookup
Surveys of scientists' views on climate change wikipedia , lookup
The Climate Change Issue: Beyond the ‘True’ or ‘Not True’1 Ingrid M. Hoofd This paper argues that the acceleration of the humanist aporia has currently found its apex in climate change activism, which is in many ways the hypermodern enactment of traditional environmentalism. It claims that climate science and activism inhabits an insightful deconstruction – that is, it illustrates the contradiction that is internal to humanism – because its assumption is that certain human activity is the culprit of our ecological crisis, while it simultaneously calls upon similar human action and debate to avert this crisis. This paradox shows that our era of technological acceleration still affirms an arrogant image of the human subject-agent in its very attempt at critiquing human mastery of ‘nature.’ The paper will in turn argue that this paradoxical logic generates a simulation of climate change in the media. This simulation is certainly profoundly ‘real,’ but is also the one symptom and metaphor for our era of acceleration and the reality of its fundamental economic instability. The apocalyptic narrative of climate change therefore grounds this paper’s critique of climate change activism, but also opens up the factuality of climate change for the conception of alternative futures – precisely what such activism seeks but apparently fails to do. This failure is not so much a failure of activity, but is due to the fact that much environmental activism and debate fails to deepen its critique vis-à-vis the dramatically raised stakes under acceleration. In other words, the current division of the debate into ‘for’ or ‘against’ the truth or reality of climate change serves to silence more intricate analyses of the fundamental problems facing humanity today. Keywords Technology, acceleration, environmentalism, simulation, truth, humanism, arrogance, representation, neoliberalism, productivism ***** ‘Everything that invokes Nature invokes the domination of Nature.’ Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (56). This paper argues that the current division within the scientific and popular debate into ‘for’ or ‘against’ the truth or reality of anthropogenic climate change silences more comprehensive analyses of the problems facing humanity today. It suggests that climate change activism, as well as the scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change, in their opposition to climate change denialism, are the paroxysmal outgrowths of what the paper identifies as the techno-capitalist acceleration of the humanist aporia. The paper also argues that as an outflow of the humanist fantasy of the mastery of nature through technological and economic production, climate science and activism are in many ways the hypermodern or simulated enactments of earlier 1990s environmentalist activism. This is due to the fact that this enactment runs through the ambiguous reproduction and recuperation of an idealized ‘nature,’ which conceptualization itself is already a product of the capitalist-humanist social order. The division between the truth and falsehood of anthropogenic climate change is then a false opposition in that it remains complicit in the humanist and productivist techno-scientific ordering of the world in which the human is supposedly the central actor or producer. What is more, the incessant jumbling over one another of this debate in the media is a simulation of climate politics insofar this debate itself becomes an ingredient for economic acceleration. This also means that this paper and its delivery constitute an instant of this economy’s deconstruction in climate change science and activism, because this paper is compelled to take the side of the veracity of climate change so as to point to the limits of this productivist-humanist economy, while simultaneously being fully implicated in this economy. Since the current activism and debate on the environment fails to deepen its critique sufficiently in light of the exponentially raised stakes under economic techno-acceleration, a more radical critique of the climate conundrum must also generate an alternative reading of climate change as a quintessentially politicotechnological apparition. Note though that calling climate change an ‘apparition’ does not imply that the occurrence of climate change is simply false. Rather, I suggest that the accusations hurled at those who are even modestly sceptical of climate change by immediately branding such sceptics as immoral right-wing capitalists, are missing a central point: namely that many such sceptics are fellow travellers in the larger critique of modern science and technology that climate activists just as much seek to mount. Since at issue is then the truth of science and its method of empiricist validation through modern technologies, a more radical analysis should reconsider the very division between reality and representation, if only because technological acceleration has made the representation of science (in the media, for instance) into the dominant reality. This complication of the division between reality and representation hence suggests that if climate change exists, then climate change is actually a simulation that dissimulates or obscures another more urgent catastrophe or problem. This in turn might mean that popular climate change activism and thought is implicated in its mobilization for the productivist neoliberal order due to the present-day enmeshment of simulation and acceleration by way of modern technologies. Paradoxically then, this paper must start from the premise that the occurrence of anthropogenic climate change is true, as this would be the responsible and productive position; but it also acknowledges that responsibilities are always constituted in historical and socio-economical imperatives like the humanistic and economistic ones. To overlay the duty of humanism to critique its own duty with the way responsible climate science and activism finds its limitations in the truth-value of the scientific and activist climate change model is then crucial in terms of understanding how a truly radical alternative may emerge from the ambiguous ethics of accelerated humanism. This paper’s performance of this moral imperative hence points to the sheer force of neoliberal globalization; or, one could say that the humanist argument in climate activism that criticizes the inherent limitations of accelerated capitalistic expansion’s non-sustainability directly constitutes this paper’s fundamental ‘ecological’ limitation and argumentative logic. This paper will then mobilize this aporia of contemporary climate activism, which we find accelerated today into the simulation of its veracity, by analysing some exemplary debates around the preservation of ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ in traditional environmentalism. Environmentalism, which took off in terms of a wider scientific and public concern with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, provides a good starting point in order to discern which paradoxical tropes and calls for action inform ‘green’ political engagement in general. In its incessant compulsion to cover over its own internal contradictions namely, environmentalism has mutated into climate change activism due to the latter’s heavy indebtedness to scientific and technological attempts at modelling ‘reality’ and making predictions. This analysis agrees with Ulrich Beck’s thesis on risk society in World at Risk, although it does not see the cosmopolitan impetus that arises from risk’s global spread as necessarily positive in terms of political mobilisation. The problem is namely that climate change as a techno-political apparition which is ‘more real than reality itself’ emerges out of the ambiguous representation of ‘nature’ that marked environmentalism, and is as such implicated in the acceleration and magnification of risk through its global political mobilisation. It is in turn out of this ambiguous status of ‘nature’ that the utter force of technological reproduction and acceleration brings about the in-discernability of reality and representation. Under the new conditions of acceleration then, the artificial split between image and truth that has made possible modern science and philosophy since the onset of humanism finally implodes onto itself. Analyses of the relationship between environmentalism and the media should therefore likewise go beyond common descriptions in the social sciences of how the media influence popular opinion around climate change, although such analyses are certainly not without merit. Rather, these analyses should also consider how the illusion of the neutral or transparent communication and representation of ‘nature’ in early environmentalist texts allows for the possibility of climate science’s truth-claims about ‘nature,’ even if such technological acceleration engenders increasing doubt and confusion regarding the truth of climate change and its causes, as well as to the appropriate moral response. In order to elucidate the exemplary status of environmentalist critiques and affirmations of nature in terms of my argument on climate science and activism, I will at this juncture briefly touch on what I see as Jean Baudrillard’s cardinal point throughout his oeuvre. Baudrillard argues in The Mirror of Production as well as in much of his later work that signs become objects for consumption, and that political or conceptual opposition merely sustains the general exploitation of (false) differences for economic growth. What Baudrillard aims at is that the conceptual split of the sign in classical semiotics into signifier and signified constitutes not a universal truth about the generation of meaning, but marks a historically specific moment in a stage of capitalism which Baudrillard designates as ‘productivist.’ What this means is that the difference between nature and culture, or the opposition between the truth and denial of anthropogenic climate change, are themselves markers as well as ingredients of the neoliberal technocratic order. As Baudrillard aptly notes: ‘in the mirror of the economic, Nature looks at us with the eyes of necessity:’ both the ‘sham’ necessity of human production and of salvation (by and of nature) are essentially capitalist simulations (58). The concept of the signified emerges alongside the capitalist model of exchange value as a supposed derivative of use value, but use value in the form of so-called ‘real’ desires, just like the signified or the referent, is simply conjured up as an ‘alibi,’ says Baudrillard in ‘For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign’ (78), for a capitalism that justifies itself by relying on the assumption that those desires for an ‘unspoiled nature’ are indeed ‘natural.’ Humanism therefore once more appears in activisms that seek the salvation of ‘nature’ as the grounding ideology of accelerated capitalism by virtue of the unquestionable status of the productive human as the agent ‘extracting’ value from ‘nature.’ But this anthropocentrism at the heart of capitalism is exactly also the problem of anthropogenic environmental pollution. It is for this reason that Baudrillard exclaims in The Mirror of Production that ‘the entire rationality of the system of political economy … gravitates … around the concept of Nature’ (53). We can see this ambiguity around ‘nature’ clearly in the paradoxes of even those environmentalist texts that feel rightly uncomfortable with a straightforward affirmation of ‘nature.’ All of them, like also this paper, seem compelled by that sheer force of neoliberal acceleration to reproduce the ideal of the humanist-activist subject even if that very subject is also designated as the problem underlying ecological disaster. One of the key texts that began to critique ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ as a construction is William Cronon’s ‘The Trouble with Wilderness.’ Cronon argues rather convincingly that the romantic call for the preservation of ‘wilderness’ is rife with racism and sexism. This racism and sexism shows itself in the highly prevalent idea in environmentalism of nature as ‘feminine’ and ‘primitive,’ thus showing that the notion of nature ‘serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of environmentalism rest’ (14, 10). Modern environmentalism then exhibits for Cronon a form of anthropocentric arrogance because it assumes that humanity has the power to destroy as well as rescue wilderness. Nonetheless, Cronon suggests at the end of his piece that the idea of the ‘wild’ and of ‘nature’ has some merit since it also exactly signifies that which is beyond human control, and he uses this potential of them being ‘outside’ in order to reinstate the environmentalist endeavour (19). I argue that it is the indeterminability of whether the ‘wild’ or ‘nature’ is inside or outside culture that allows Cronon to make an appeal to a ‘real’ wilderness which in turn salvages the scientific and humanist quest of our or its emancipation. But this split between complicit and real wilderness in Cronon’s piece is eventually a false distinction, which difference becomes implicated in accelerated technological reproduction by remobilising the human political agent and his capitalist relation to ‘nature.’ It is by virtue of the ambiguity of the status of the term that Cronon can enact the humanist ‘trick’ of giving environmentalism its politics back, thereby remaining faithful to the activist duty and its complicities in the productivist order. The moral impetus that informs Cronon’s critique allows for a political re-enablement that dissimulates the humanist aporia and its complicity in a non-sustainable economy. Perhaps a mere constructionist critique of environmentalism does not go far enough to unsettle the general logic of humanist-productivism as such activism as well as its critique run headlong into their own ecological and linguistic limits. Other texts by early prominent environmental scholars, like Kate Soper’s fittingly titled ‘Nature/“nature”,’ and Kevin DeLuca’s ‘A Wilderness Environmentalism Manifesto,’ enact the same curious logic, albeit in different ways. DeLuca’s text is particularly interesting because it displays the aporetic madness that underlies the environmentalist project – and I certainly do not mean to say that this madness makes this project illegitimate. Rather, this madness marks the constant and accelerated shuttling between ecological hope and despair under the intensified politics of humanism. Referencing the Greek philosopher Protagoras, DeLuca claims that environmentalism should be done as a ‘wilderness environmentalism, wherein wilderness is the measure of all things,’ rather than humans as the measure of all things (40). But since ‘wilderness,’ as I outlined earlier, is a product of a productivist ‘culture,’ there is in the final analysis no ground for an ethics based on ‘bare nature.’ This means that DeLuca can only make a moral argument by virtue of the humanist-centred ethics that inspired also the environmentalism that he seeks to critique. His earlier points about preserving forests no matter the human interests in them – like the interests of forest-dwelling tribes – indeed appear as immoral or irresponsible towards such people. DeLuca therefore is forced to makes a case that environmentalism is (and should be) beneficial to humanity at large, and he does this by arguing that ‘caring for wilderness is caring for people’ (43). The enactment of his humanist responsibility therefore makes him go full circle to where he started, away from the ‘mad’ yet logical claim that the priority should no longer be caring for people. DeLuca’s narrative mirrors the deconstruction that inhabits the paroxysm typical of the accelerated global order. His re-enunciation of the humanist trope makes this circular logic consistent with an increasingly global conception of humanity due to its universalizing gesture, while this global sphere being increasingly unstable. It is out of the accelerated simulation of this tension that I suggest recent climate change activism emerges. Finally, Kate Soper’s article on the distinction between the ‘mere’ construction and representation of nature, and the ‘real’ nature that environmentalism requires in order to justify its activism, is exemplary in terms of how its argument relates to the formal enunciation and to the mode of production of that argument. The way in which the solution is the problem – namely how the anthropocentric argument that ground the salvation or romanticization of ‘nature’ is itself the anthropogenic problem of climate change – shows up in Soper’s text in the way it ultimately keeps the spirit of environmentalism going. The point at which Soper discerns between ‘nature’ as an image ‘tainted’ by anthropocentric politics and ‘adequately’ represented nature (30) worth fighting for marks exactly the point at which this opposition enters the realm of capital circulation. This entrance into circulation happens by virtue of the energy-consuming typesetting, printing, and dissemination of the book in which her chapter sits, but also by virtue of the assumption of a distinction between representations closer to and further away from the ‘reality’ that informs her argument. I suggest that her desire for finding a language closer to ‘real nature’ – one that revives the environmentalist duty – is borne out of the demand for an ‘alibi’ for humanist activism. Or rather, the analysis of ‘nature’ as social construction demands a politics around ‘real nature’ to be mounted in order to cover over the abyss left by acceleration. This slippage of ‘nature’ between sign and object in her piece results in a curious sensation of activist vertigo; ‘nature’ becomes indeed that sign at which the anthropocentric logic of humanism starts to crumble. Soper’s piece hence unwittingly demonstrates the aporia of humanism – its auto-immunity or deconstruction – by showing that the postmodern critique of the term ‘nature’ in environmentalism follows from an ecological demand regarding its limitations. I am also calling the sensation one gets by reading Soper’s piece a feeling of ‘activist vertigo’ because it feels like a terrified suspension of the self-evidence of environmentalism, as if one – to use a metaphor from nature – stares down an enormous overhang into a ravine. This terror is perhaps the draw towards emptiness or death which activists and academics find inappropriate feelings under the neoliberal demand for human productivity. The fear of ‘not doing’ hence generates a stronger fear for death in late-capitalist cultures, even if dying itself is increasingly relegated to specialist settings, and even if it was perhaps initially the fear of death that gave rise to the humanist discourses of emancipation and (Christian) salvation. ‘Nature’ becomes in this outlook the ultimate object for technological mastery, but equally the ultimate source of revenge and destruction as it channels such mastery back to the human subject, who then becomes its target – or so it appears to us. What really happens is a pervasive re-distribution of death and dying at the hands of the neoliberal machine, in which the elites emerge as the winners in terms of what one calls ‘lifeexpectancy’ – a fittingly statisticist and managerial expression of which the linguistic ambiguity of ‘nature’ only is symptomatic. The ambiguous appearance and circularity of lethality indeed return in contemporary climate activism, in which for instance the obsession with carbon emissions gets precedence over rescuing peoples threatened by rising sea levels. The acceleration of the humanist aporia returns in environmentalism as the misconception of nature and wilderness as outside of social institutions, as well as a call to ‘go back to nature.’ This exaltation of ‘nature’ leads quite logically to the simulation of pristine ‘wild’ peoples as a new object of a globalizing nostalgia – a desire to become native or go back to nature. The emergence in the media of and nostalgic longing for unspoiled nature, as the illusion of stable origin and identity, is hence complicit in the productivist order. In many ways, the climate change model reworks certain Christian traits present in humanism, as an updated narrative of ‘our fall from paradise’ engenders a sense of guilt and self-flagellation, which under conditions of acceleration forces an arrogant techno-optimism that spurs ecological activity and represses despair. Simultaneously, the fact that environmentalism claims that assaults on nature are an assault on humanity also complicates the distinction between the social (the human) and the natural. This makes possible my argument that terms like ‘wilderness’ and ‘nature’ somehow gesture towards deconstruction by virtue of the un-decidability of their status either inside or outside the social, or of either true or false. This renders unstable the distinction between subject-agent and object-in-nature, as ‘humanity’ becomes both source and target of action and thought while the natural object seems to take its revenge. The ‘truth’ of climate change and its activism appeal to our basic experience as citizen-consumers under the era of technological and economic acceleration as well as co-construct that experience as a global one, as Beck also suggests. But it also shows that attempts to model or act on nature’s or the globe’s destruction obscures once more the moment at which the humanist-productivist order actually shows itself to be illegitimate. The problem of the environment and their technical solutions then generate a sensation of a humanity ‘running towards its own death,’ which may very well be an accurate estimation – or at least, that is what this paper responsibly affirms. Notes 1 Parts of this paper have appeared previously in Ingrid M. Hoofd, Ambiguities of Activism: Alter-Globalism and the Imperatives of Speed, London/New York: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies (2012). Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. ‘For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign.’ Jean Baudrillard: selected writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001: 60-100. Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975. Beck, Ulrich. World at Risk. Transl. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Cronon, William. ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.’ Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: Norton and Co, 1995: 69-90. DeLuca, Kevin. ‘A Wilderness Environmentalism Manifesto: Contesting the Infinite Self-Absorption of Humans.’ Environmental Justice and Environmentalism. The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. Ed. Ronald Sandler and Phaedra Pezzullo. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007: 27-56. Soper, Kate. ‘Nature/“nature”.’ Ed. George Robertson et.al. FutureNatural. Nature, science, culture. London: Routledge, 1996: 22-34.