Download The Climate Change Issue: Beyond the `True` or `Not True`

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).
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