The Progress of This Storm. Andreas Malm
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Pokémon, including in New York and other cities threatened by rising seas? Rarely had the condition of digital life – a sphere without time or nature – invaded so much public space, even kicking off marches, stampedes, gatherings and other forms of collective pseudo-action for the joy of being in the world while not being there. In a dense, suitably bleak riff on Theodor Adorno titled ‘Media Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Environments and Digital Life’, Andrew McMurry stipulates that ‘the new media ecology roars in to fill the void left as old nature exits’. Lending new meaning to ‘sleepwalking’, the postmodern condition has sunk more deeply than ever into the mind in step with the warming. ‘The external world’, the one where that warming takes place, McMurry continues, ‘is now obscure, mostly irrelevant, and, when sensed at all, sensed remotely’: between it and us, digital media stand as impenetrable ‘veils’.31 Or, in the words of Kate Tempest: ‘Staring into the screen so / we don’t have to see the planet die.’32
But if the postmodern condition in its digital stage can wrap people up in mental clothing that protects them from contact with the biocide, it is locked in struggle with a formidable enemy. For the warming condition has a whole set of biogeochemical and physical laws on its side. They ensure that its incursions will become deeper and more frequent over time; by force of the nature of the process, climate change has an inbuilt tendency to worsen and swamp pretty much everything else. How many will play augmented reality games on a planet that is 6°C warmer? Moreover, denial, particularly in its suppressive and obsessive forms, is a negative confirmation. It suggests that the thing is there, everywhere, only just below the surface, a distressing presence in the collective subconscious – perhaps global warming is, to use another term of Jameson’s, a political unconscious that already pervades culture. Perhaps its intolerable implications are in themselves so many incentives to flee into something like augmented reality. Be that as it may – and we shall return to the phenomenon of denial – when climate change seeps into consciousness, it brings with it a realisation that more and worse is coming. Truly at the cutting edge, the warming condition is directed towards the future, like the woman on the cover of Climate Trauma. It will make itself felt. If postmodernity is a malaise of amnesia and displacement – as though time and nature had in fact disappeared – we might think of the warming condition as a realisation, in the dual sense of the term, of a more fundamental illness or wrongness in the world.
Three pathways are competing to be that realisation. 1.) Business as usual continues to run amok, the 1.5°C as well as the 2°C targets are missed, temperatures rise towards 3, 4, 6 degrees of warming within this century, and the material foundations for human civilisation crumble one after another. 2.) The fossil economy is knocked down, preferably within a few decades, warming slows down and then ceases, and civilisation proceeds apace. 3.) There is geoengineering. Intermediate and mixed paths are conceivable – particularly combinations of 2 and 3, or 1 and 3 – but the enormous forces unleashed into the earth system and the long postponement of genuine mitigation now rule out a smooth ride to renewed climate stability. The space for moderate outcomes and half-measures has receded. In the event that path 2 is pursued with maximum global determination and the worst scenarios safely averted, the transformations – technological, economic, political, surely also cultural – will have to be on such a scale as to seal the victory of climate over pretty much the rest of human life, at least for some time, until its destabilisation becomes a memory. Such is the logic of Naomi Klein’s theorem ‘this changes everything’, whatever course it takes.
Needless to say, global warming is only one facet of the biocide, but among the many ongoing processes of environmental crisis, it has a special inner propulsion and potential for generalised destruction. With its dependence on the past and future directionality, its temporal logic contradicts hyper-spatial postmodernity head on. It represents history and nature falling down on society; it clouds the horizon. A theory for the present should home in on it as an unfolding tendency and learn how to track this storm. It ought to probe the emerging condition and the basic parameters for acting within it: what, for a start, is this nature that is now returning? Does it still deserve that name? Is it not so mixed up with society as to disqualify the very notion? If it is indeed nature, how has it ended up in this terrifying shape? Who or what has whipped up this storm system – the forces of matter, or of humanity, or some agent fusing or straddling the two? By what route does history move into something once thought to be so timeless as the climate of the entire planet?
Great blender and trespasser, climate change sweeps back and forth between the two regions traditionally referred to as ‘nature’ and ‘society’. As it happens, contemporary theory is intensely preoccupied with precisely that escalating interpenetration and churns out books, articles, special issues, conferences, all sorts of scholarly conversations on some critical general questions: whatever is this thing called nature? How does it relate to society? Who are the genuinely powerful players in the drama that weaves the two together; how do humans attach to material objects; are technologies or relations running the show; what constitutes an ecological crisis; what can we ever know about any of all this? Here we find various forms of constructionism, actor-network theory, new materialism, posthumanism, the metabolic rift, capitalism as world-ecology and a host of other conceptual apparatuses, all trying to come to grips with the imbroglio between the social and the natural. Can any of them provide a map of the path the storm is taking? This essay sets out to scrutinise some of the theories circulating at the nature/society junction in the light of climate change.
Now, theory does not seem like the most exigent business in a rapidly warming world. There is that itching feeling that the only meaningful thing to do now is to let go of everything else and physically cut off fossil fuel combustion, deflate the tyres, block the runways, lay siege to the platforms, invade the mines. Indeed, the only salubrious thing about the election of Donald Trump is that it dispels the last lingering illusions that anything else than organised collective militant resistance has at least a fighting chance of pushing the world anywhere else than head first, at maximum speed, into cataclysmic climate change. All has already been said; now is the time for confrontation. This essay presents no arguments for restraining such impulses. It is, however, written in the belief that some theories can make the situation clearer while others might muddy it. Action remains best served by conceptual maps that mark out the colliding forces with some accuracy, not by blurry charts and foggy thinking, of which there is, as we shall see, no shortage. Theory can be part of the problem. If everything is up for re-evaluation in a warming world, this must apply to it as well: theory too is called to account, required to demonstrate its relevance and declare its contributions, even if some of its producers and consumers would never consider joining some direct action against fossil fuels.
The present essay does not invent this trial; as we shall see, the theories under scrutiny are moving towards agreement on the climate issue as their shared litmus test, the concrete question each must answer to prove its worth.33 Some more specific criteria could then be set up. An adequate theory should be able to grasp the problem as historical, as it has arisen through change over time – the birth and perpetual expansion of the fossil economy – and causes change over time on earth. It should make sense of the very act of digging up fossil fuels and setting them on fire. Even if the theory is formulated from within the capitalist heartlands, it should, not the least importantly, take heed of the circumstance that global warming makes early landfall in places where the modernisation process has not been completed. People who lack the most basic amenities, who cannot afford to take up residence inside any house of mirrors, who continue to subsist on the kind of nature that Jameson found blotted out from the American cities of the 1980s stand first in the firing line. Most of the bodies fished out from the rising seas belong to them.
A place like New York City can bounce back from a storm and switch on its screens again, but the warming condition is hard to shake off in the Philippines. Hence the much-reported results from a survey by the Pew Research Center in 2015: 79 percent of the inhabitants of Burkina Faso claimed to be ‘very concerned’ about climate change, compared to only 42 percent of the Japanese, who were far more afraid (72 percent) of the Islamic State.34 Burkina Faso is being wrecked by climate change in this moment, storms of dust and sand – known locally as ‘the red winds’ – burying what crops remain on land parched from ever more erratic rain.35 The pattern of greater