Is climate change best expressed as tragedy? Farce? Horror? Dystopia? The secondary literature on ‘cli-fi’ (climate fiction) has an optometrist’s stack of lenses for thinking through the crisis: Freud’s and Heidegger’s two different ‘uncannies’, Bruno Latour’s ‘quasi-objects’, Timothy Morton’s ‘hyperobjects’, Emily Apter’s ‘planetary dysphoria’, not to mention the slew of replacements for the ‘Anthropocene’. Collapse thinking has been deeply informed by each of these, but might it need its own genre?
The Tragedy of the Worker by The Salvage Collective suggests tragedy. Although the book is in large part about climate change, this is not a tragedy of nature (which the authors might think would border on idealism). Nor is it the ‘Tragedy of the Commons.’ That’s the formation, proposed by Garrett Hardin, of the idea that a group of people would necessarily lay waste to a collective resource without the imposition of private ownership. It’s a startlingly reactionary formulation whose most famous expression justified the exact destruction of the democratic collective ownership of the commons that it wrongly assumed was impossible. The tragedy The Salvage Collective is interested in is the tragedy of the worker who it was once claimed would become the bourgeoisie's gravedigger discovering that the grave they were digging is located in the ashen sky of a broken planet.
But perhaps 'tragedy' is too ennobling for collapse? Too dignifying of what is, in truth, a messier and more billowing and more avoidable and just worse predicament than 'tragedy' suggests? What’s more, even if there is no ‘tragedy of nature’ per se, collapse stretches well beyond the human. Not just into the natural systems whose deepening rifts signal breakdown for them as well as us, but also into the object-filled domains of everyday life. Both collapse’s effects and causes leak into the suburbs, into the edge-of-town warehouses, into the global arbitrage of legal regimes that spells obliteration. We might even say that collapse is made of these objects, in so far as it is the endless profusion of stuff (and its control over us) which dooms us all, unevenly, to drowning. This is not a problem with its dark roots in us as individuals. There is no fundamental tragic character flaw here. Indeed, there are barely any characters beyond the faceless process in which we seemingly cannot help but partake.
Telling the story of collapse through climate change, and telling the story of climate change through the accumulation of a world of things, and telling the story of the accumulation of a world of things through the presence of a malevolent force we are powerless to halt, is not the storytelling style of tragedy as much as horror. The familiar objects of the lifeworld, as well as the power of the storms and heatwaves they trigger, are rendered ‘uncanny’. Common objects come to indicate the return of a long-repressed desire, not individualised as in Freud’s version of that slippery idea but instantiated in a global system of accumulation, powered by a seemingly alien will.
As Stephen King wrote, true terror is “when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute.” The location is all. Not the icy stripped woods, not the impassable desert, nor the inhuman depths of space, but the double interiors of suburban life - both the home and the map of the home in your head, each safely bounded from the sprawling world beyond. Climate systems breakdown in much of the Global North is, for the moment, this kind of horror, in which all the quotidian objects of everyday life are slowly revealed as their own demonic replacements, intimately tied to intractable cascades of destruction and wastage across the globe. It is the horror of a sticky relay between the grand spaces of the outdoors and the most basic objects of life at home. Marx wrote that capital comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. Now idle consumer pleasures sweep in with an arid desert wind and turn to ash in the mouth.
The intense worry and feeling of shame I felt as a 9-year-old when I first heard the familiar butterfly/storm cliché of popularised chaos theory - the worry that even my most innocent actions could somehow lead to the deaths of those I loved - suddenly seems to not have been a childish mistake after all.
This sense of horror is a ‘conceptual feeling’ not dissimilar from what Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova might mean by their attempts to ‘dehumanize’ anguish. How does such a notion relate to ‘tragedy’? They write, interpolating Nietzsche: “The elusive character of anguish lies in the fact that it is not quite a proper tragedy. While anguish can certainly relate to tragedy, it is not a representational means to help deal with the ‘paralyzing vision of the intolerable.’ Anguish is not a representational aid or cover. ‘Proper tragedy’ is out there, at the horizon, but anguish arises when it is not fully arrived at, at least not yet, not definitely, or is draining away.”
Why might anguish appear distinctly today, where before it could be ennobled in the properly tragic? “The different quality of anguish today is due to the confusing kinds of production of life and operations of power […] in the lack of causation and representation, in the absence of someone to be made accountable for it.” Is anguish what collapse is like?
Perhaps we could pair it with something?
Fuller and Goriunova offer ‘devastation’, a concept in which the sheer plentitude of ‘the actual’ damages the ‘virtual’, the real and yet non-actual space of what could be. Some examples: burning oil spurts, abundant and free from the sea floor, devastate the ocean. They bring forth something absolutely novel — a sea on fire — at the expense of the obliteration of everything else that could become. A crisis of overproduction of sugar is dumped in human bodies (a consequence of Nixon-era deal with farmers politically impossible to renege on), triggering an obesity epidemic and all its cascading health effects. And, most directly for us here, the sheer plentitude of modern productivity, the unprecedented abundance of ways of living that our planetary petrochemical inheritance has afforded us, accidentally leads to a crisis of unsolvable global proportions.
‘Devastation’ differs from ‘horror’ because it starts not from the affect of heavy unplaceable anxiety which eventually finds its object, if not the reason behind that object (like horror), but because it starts from the ardently-to-be-wished position of the ‘beautiful soul’, who sees only “the gorgeously ever-differentiating oneness of it all”. It is a corruption within the position we might wish for ourselves, facing collapse: that of the stoic, peering down with detachment at the seemingly trivial cycle of civilisational forming and collapse. Devastation adds another twist to the supposed retreat into superior indifference. What are we to do with its “lively devastating vitalism”? With its “becoming of obliteration”? Can anything be done with devastation? Is there an agent for whom they are a tool?
To me, at least, it is an open quandary.
There are other genres of collapse, already to hand. Although Fuller and Goriunova argue that their concept of “anguish is not a representational aid or cover” for horror, such covers undoubtedly do exist. The most politically important of them is conspiracy theory.
In conspiracy theories, as in horror, the exceptional and the mundane are intermixed. Inanimate objects come freakishly alive to the intentions of distant spectral Others. However, unlike the obscure logic of the ‘irresolvability’ that Fuller and Goriunova suggest as a mode of thought more applicable for our contemporary moment, conspiracy theories first strain reality through a falsified double-slit experiment: on the other side of a conspiracy theory, everything still comes out arranged into the two camps of the good and the bad.
Conspiracy theories are not themselves dystopian narratives, although they entail them. They are tales of the moment before dystopia arrives. They are real-time odes to the struggle that forms the prehistory to the future dystopian society. Alternatively, they are glorious prehistory to the finally achieved utopia. With horror they share spooky action at a distance; unlike horror, they incorporate moments at which everything is decisively decided one way or the other.
It is these final showdowns that neither climate change nor collapse will ever afford us. No single moment of absolute victory or defeat will ever arrive. There may well be moments of sudden relief as graced the pandemic - the well-established efficacy of vaccines, or the final arrival of a strong and committed global agreement to phase out fossil fuels - but the complexity of the problem ensures that these will always be followed by the agonisingly slow process of rolling out of infrastructure and inevitable setbacks.
Even the possible future moment at which the total amount of greenhouse gases flowing into the atmosphere is finally overtaken by the planet’s capacity to draw it back down will not be such a moment. The radiative forcing effect of greenhouse gases can last for decades, if not centuries. The long winding paths of robust trophic cascades in ecosystems restored to health may never be known to have been conclusively restored. Indeed, return is not within the temporal repertoire of nature. The catastrophic acidification of the oceans will not be reversed in our lifetimes; those species lost already in the sixth mass extinction event will never return. It is these ecological cascades - the obstreperous reality of nature as something beyond our command - that prohibit conspiracy’s moments of completion and finality. This imagery puts us closer to Jairus Grove in his resplendently titled Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World, where he calls for attentiveness to the true unredeemable horror of our history and present, one that undergoes an apocalypse without finality.
But conspiracy thinking is also inadmissible for a reason that it simultaneously lessens the utility of many other genres of thought. Its simple moral lessons are useless. The proposed solutions to climate change, each of them absolutely necessary, do not sort the moral landscape into its goodies and baddies but only deepen its manifold complicities and complications. Rarely appreciated is the sheer moral fraughtness of all available solutions: the short-term increase in temperature that a reduction in pollution would trigger as the radiative forcing effects of aerosols suspended in the atmosphere are suddenly reduced; the blasted landscapes of mining sacrifice zones necessary to acquire the rare earth minerals for the green energy transition; the growth serum made from ground-up cow embryos required for artificial meat; the geopolitical complexity of potentially ‘dual-use’ hydroelectric power (both as energy infrastructure and as a bargaining chip against rival countries further downriver); each scuppers any narrative of easy redemption.
More abstractly, but no less importantly, the almost conspiratorial idea of a ‘natural balance’ to which we might one day return has itself been intimately bound up with the centuries-long colonial projects through which our era found much of its world-changing power. The most bombastic climate change narratives suggest not just a return of that nature that the ontology of the moderns had repressed but a morally cleansing force. Humans have overstepped some profound ecological law: they must be put back into their place. The ancient power of such ideas is unmistakable: Judgement (capital J) wielded against humanity by some vengeful power. Remember the viral couplet “The earth is healing; we are the virus” from the early pandemic? As befits our modern condition, this time it is not God who is angry, but Nature itself. But Nature needs its avatars. Who will think themselves the embodiment of such a cleansing force?
This article has circled a terrifying inheritance. It is now time to be more direct. The genre of the manifesto, as Louis Althusser wrote, calls forth an agency which will accomplish the essential task the manifesto outlines. We are living in a time of manifestos of terror, whose pinnacle is the manifesto of the mass shooter. The pieces of these manifestos have already been laid out above: scorn for the capacity of people to manage themselves absent authoritarian oversight, conspiracism that sacrifices reality for the conventionally morally compelling, and lastly, an agency that brutally asserts that it can take on the whole of the force of Nature in a single decisive and vicious act. As I wrote before, there is nevertheless a need for some kind of expression of agency — whether or not it can produce the decisive moment it proclaims for itself.
The bleeding through of post-apocalyptic, dystopian, horrific, tragic, or conspiracy theory genres into our collective understanding of climate change raises and changes the stakes of what we do. As I have written before, “one of the central struggles of the twenty-first century will be to articulate a political aesthetics of disaster.” When I first wrote that, I meant it specifically in terms of countering a far-right view of the disaster. Now I think that it will necessary for establishing almost any political project at all, including those utopian ones I am most interested in.
Despite all the above, this newsletter wagers that utopia remains an essential genre for thinking through collapse. What would be a utopia in collapse, or, if we are not capable of claiming something like the social transformation that entails, what could we make of ourselves, such that we could experience something like utopianism amid disaster? And could whatever that turned out to be resist its trivialisations as numbness, religious superiority, or smug quietism?
Those are questions for a future newsletter.
"Collapse thinking has been deeply informed by each of these, but might it need its own genre?"
From politics to literary criticism.
Salvage?
“an overdesigned manual in nihilist navel gazing”
“Coffee table architectural favela porn.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20150813235811/http://salvage.zone/about/
Oblivious to your own decadence.