Keeping it (Un)real

October 26th, 2007

Views: 804

Posted by ChrisG at 12:57 pm

So is it Al-Qaeda or global warming that’s behind the fires in California? Fox News, for reasons unknown, chose to focus on speculation regarding the former. The problem with focusing on the latter, whether in this particular case or more generally, is the way it induces a spectacular treatment of the relationship between human societies and their ecologies, one which produces consensus about the nature of the problem whilst at the same time preventing any understanding of the conditions within which it arises.

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, ch. 1, sect. 3

What’s unique about global warming as a spectacle, however, is that it serves as a means of social reproduction precisely because it because it implies that the apocalypse may already have happened without us noticing: ‘ethical living’, as we are reminded ceaselessly by countless media outlets looking for traces of a readily commodifiable Zeitgeist, is a key consensus-point for what remains of collective conscience under neo-liberalism. Ethical life, consumed without remainder by the regulation of individualist conscience, becomes a matter of calculation (of carbon footprints), wise consumption, and the creation of new markets in nebulous commodities (offsetting). Devotion to cleansing one’s conscience by participating in novel forms of market exchange is practically mandated by the other pole of the ethical universe of climate change, the sheer enormity of the threat it represents. Here, the limit represented by the catastrophe is not like what Barbara Adam describes as the ‘end in the present’ (Time and Social Theory, 1994) embodied by nuclear weapons. Nuclear destruction is the historically-novel promise of the sudden end of all life contained as a potential here and now. It is the bang to the ‘whimper’ of global warming, the apocalypse that we didn’t notice, and which is playing itself out through our mundane efforts to continue our lives by working and consuming. It is these efforts that constitute the only arena of moral action: they are to be fine-tuned, through the application of tools derived from welfare economics.

In the face of the image of the apocalypse we didn’t notice, the debased moral idealism of beautiful souls appears the only form of activity that can offer some vestige of ethical integrity, at the price of restricting the possibilities for action to finding different ways to continue working and consuming. It is in this way, by the by, that technological innovation appears to be a form of morally exemplary behaviour: the possibility of some technical magic bullet solution for excess carbon emissions provides us with the spectacle of entrepreneurial heroes who embody both the only values we recognise as valid and the capability to champion them in ways we non-takers of risks cannot. What we are denied by the morality of ‘ethical living’, by the image of global catastrophe that both justifies and undermines it, and by the technological determinism that buttresses our capacity to go on believing in it, is faith in the future. The image of a heating planet gives us only the sense of already participating in the end.

By representing the relationship between humans and their ecology primarily by means of an idealised, free-floating catastrophe, we lose what is always lost under the weightless weight of the spectacular – namely, the material and historical nature of this relationship, and with it, hope. If my imagination becomes dominated by a need to retreat from the world, and to busy myself with accumulating ornaments for my conscience, I am threatened with the loss any capacity to recognise and intervene within the processes that intimately shape the environment I inhabit. Once this disappears, then hope evaporates too.

This is why the analysis of the 1993 California fires offered by Mike Davis (via another beautifully illustrated Bouphonia post) is so important. It represents an attempt to free us from other idealised sources of misdirection that have been offered as explanations for the disaster: the malevolent firebug (of which Fox’s Al-Qaedoid arsonists are the latest)

In the early 20th century, this cruel-hearted and selfish man (Frederick Rindge’s description) was portrayed as an Indian, sheepherder or, most frequently, a tramp. During a World War I, the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) were believed to be lurking behind every burning bush in California. A decade later, major wildfires — like the 1930 Decker Canyon blaze — were usually blamed on itinerant farm workers, especially the Okies. A year after Pearl Harbor, on the other hand, FBI agents and National Guardsmen were combing Las Flores Canyon for clues to the identity of Axis saboteurs responsible for the 1942 Malibu fire. Reflecting popular preoccupations during the Eisenhower era, the Los Angeles Times added new profundity to its reportage of the 1956 Malibu fire by linking arson to sexual perversion. According to a psychologist consulted by the paper, arsonists set fires at night in order to see women run out of their homes in a state of undress.

and an inherently dangerous Nature:

Thus, Representative Ken Calvert (R-Riverside), supported by the powerful Riverside Building Industry Association and the Farm Bureau, proposed a radical revision of the Endangered Species Act to protect property rights. At stake were 77,000 acres of federally protected habitat that developers had long coveted. Likewise along the Laguna coast, pro-growth forces were orchestrating a hue and cry against the gnatcatcher. This small, almost extinct bird was depicted as an arsonist through a bizarre syllogism that equated any undeveloped landscape or protected habitat with a fire hazard ipso facto.

This returns us to the specificity of the disaster, rooted in the interrelationships between the ecological systems of Southern California and its political/economic history. As an analysis, it demonstrates again that to have any hope of understanding what is meant by sustainability, both conceptually and practically, as a source of hope, it is a close engagement with the ecologies we are embedded in that is the key.