Climate Realism

The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene

Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, Lynn Badia, Jeff Diamanti, Marija Cetinić

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429766527
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change.

In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate.

This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate's capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.

Section 1

The climate of representation

1

Ecological postures for a climate realism

Amanda Boetzkes

The ways we imagine and respond to ecological crisis are centrally bound to acts of representation that condition perception. In turn, the honing of vision plays an integral role in shaping the course of ecological knowledge. This aesthetic activity is occurring at a time when scientific knowledge of climate change is hotly contested by corporations, governments, and the general population alike. A constellation of ontological and epistemological demands is putting the “objective knowledge” of the life sciences through its paces. Thus, a heterogeneous climate realism is emerging alongside the ideology of climate change skepticism.

In many respects, the disputes over knowledge-claims about climate change produce a delusional condition. The tension between a popular environmental knowledge and the inhibition of political action produces a cultural spasm, in Félix Guattari’s terms: a painful and compulsive mobilization of nervous energies that are both symptomatic of an intensified, excitable discourse and an exploitation of those energies for the preservation of the social body. The question thus becomes: how do we disengage from this refrain of continually “reading signs” of climate change without being discredited as illiterate?

I will argue that contemporary art provides an alternative ground to experience and make claims about the realism of climate change and its impact. I will chart a trajectory that begins with an originary form of ecological denial, the political cover-up, common in the late decades of the twentieth century when governments tested chemicals in depressed cities across North America and then denied the physical effects of their slow violence. This overt denial became an integral facet of the more recent and culturally distributed forms of denial that accompany climate change–related catastrophes. Importantly, I will chart this course through the lens of conceptual artists. Thus, my ambition is not merely to provide an environmental history, but also to show how artists present ecological crisis through alternative sensibilities that attempt to ease the spasmic refrain patterning the battle over the truth about the climate condition, and resolve it into a re-syntonization of bodies, knowledge, and exchange. I consider how art accomplishes this through propositions of moods and modalities that open the possibilities for navigating the new terrain of climate realism. I will examine four postures: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; Tony Oursler’s video installation, Kepone (1993); Doug Aitken’s Electric Earth (1999); and Mary Mattingly’s Wearable Homes (2004-ongoing).

Ecological postures for a climate realism

If there is a realism to be thought through the terms of climate, it is not one that is solely defined by scientific data, nor by a hard political line. Rather, it is one that must be considered in connection with disbelief. The realism of climate is particular and exemplary; it is a form shaped through the oversights and responsiveness, skepticism, and speculative inquiry that it generates. Climate raises a constellation of ontological and epistemological demands that challenge the ground of objective knowledge of the life sciences while at the same time triggering regressive contestations of the value of knowledge and questioning. Thus, while climate has a shared history with ecology, it cannot be reduced to ecology per se. The drive for a purely instrumental worldview divests the discourse of climate of its hold on critical inquiry of the external world. What a dilemma: one cannot be skeptical without being conservative (i.e., a climate change denier) and one cannot be realistic without being lofty and fantastical, if not paranoid! Climate demands new coordinates of interpretation.

In this chapter, I will link climate realism to acts of representation that express ecological perspective, political scenes, and aesthetic atmosphere. But I will show how these are geared toward a specific climate realism. I do so by running through four postures that I discuss in relation to the ecologist Rachel Carson, installation artist Tony Oursler, video artist Doug Aitkin, and conceptual artist Mary Mattingly. When I speak of postures, I am referring to the etymology of this term, meaning an artificial mental position. These postures enable the transection of a systemic perspective, an aesthetic sensibility, and a critical voice in order to gain purchase of climate from its emergent terms of reality. The four postures are a starting point which give contour to climate realism and its possibilities: (1) a strange stillness, (2) psychogenic spasm, (3) dancity, and (4) reflexive carapace. I suggest that it is through the performative gestures of these mental positions toward climate that realism can be thought and figured.

To suggest that climate realism has form and contour is to implicate its presentness and availability to interpretation. But crucially, the interpretation of climate’s realism is not of the order of either scientific or political inquiry; it requires an alternative basis for questioning. In his essay, “Various Ways of Questioning About the Thing,” Martin Heidegger writes that even to ask the question, “What is a thing?” invokes a modality of thinking and interpreting. He writes,

The answer to the question “What is a thing?” is … not a proposition but a transformed basic position, or better still and more cautiously, the initial transformation of the hitherto existing position toward things, a change of questioning and evaluation, of seeing and deciding; in short, of the being-there (Da-sein) in the midst of what is (inmitten des Seienden). To determine the changing basic position within the relation to what is, that is the task of an entire historical period.

(1967, 50)

Following Heidegger’s provocation, I suggest that to probe the question, “What is a climate realism?” is to explore the basic positions that are nested within and emerging from the co-extant discourses of climate and realism as this is being defined in the age of ecology. These basic positions, I suggest, stem from our embeddedness in global ecosystems and the critical reckoning with that embeddedness. That is to say, ecological postures are the transformed basic positions that undertake a questioning, evaluating, perceiving, and acting-toward climate.

Posture 1: a strange stillness (Rachel Carson)

The consciousness of climate stems from ecology insofar as it has developed out of the latter’s understanding of its knowledge base as intertwined with systemic crisis. Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 book Silent Spring exemplifies this incipient crisis at the origin of ecology. She opens the book with a chapter called “A Fable for Tomorrow,” in which she vividly describes an idyllic American town that succumbs to an “invisible curse” which rips through the environment, eliminating life in its wake. Animals, adults, and children fall ill; the vegetation browns and withers; the insects disappear; and there is no bird song. Instead of the plenitude of life, there was “a strange stillness.” The spring is silent because a chemical contamination (DDT) has invaded all life right through to its cellular structure, preventing reproduction and system renewal. Carson ends the devastating scene commenting, “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves” ([1962] 2002, 3).

A perspective of the systemic totality of the town is born of the realization of its contamination. This perspective is produced through its eventful temporal mode: the ecosystem becomes visible at exactly the point that its regenerative organization has been compromised. The value of life is posited belatedly and felt aesthetically as that vitality which has always already slipped through our hands before we even knew what it was. The temporality of belated awareness of the conditions that have overtaken the ecosystem has reached a new scale with the framing of global warming as a climatic event revealing a slowly emerging history. Climate crisis has no focal cause, but rather is the cumulative effect of a slow and insidious progression of industrial history which has already initiated positive feedback loops in global environment patterns. The discourse of climate thus shares with ecology the entangled domain of scientific inquiry, aesthetic sensibility, and political governance. But the appearance of climate as crisis means the scattering of the assumed foundations in realism that these discrete disciplines once held. The concept of climate, like ecology, requires a reconsideration of their intimate co-implication with such crises. Moreover, where the logic of crisis as the scene of innovative thinking will strike many as capitalist in nature, we might think of ecology as the domain in which crisis turns on itself to effect a retroactive process of valuation. Retroactive valuation can only take place, however, by acknowledging and enacting its immanence and realism. By the same token, realism can only be confirmed by accepting the retroactive movement of valuation. Carson’s posture demonstrates that only by turning an ear to the strange stillness can one become attuned to the sensory wealth of ecology. How, then, does this movement of acknowledgment, attunement, and retroactive valuation happen in relation to climate crisis, in and through its atmosphere of political oversight and aesthetic revealing? And how does it overcome skepticism and other forms of denial?

Posture 2: psychogenic spasm (Tony Oursler)

The ecopsychoanalyst, Joseph Dodds, considers the defense mechanisms against guilt, blame, and responsibility for ecological crisis (2011, 41). He makes an analogy between our responses to climate change and Freud’s “borrowed kettle” joke from Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious: a man is told he should replace a pot he has borrowed and returned damaged. He refuses, claiming (1) When I gave it back it was fine, (2) The hole was there when you gave it to me, and (3) I never borrowed it in the first place! In a similar vein, when confronted with overwhelming evidence about climate change and its causes, we can see similar responses at play. First, outright denial: “There’s nothing wrong with the climate!” Either it is a conspiracy designed to take away freedom or stop economic growth, or the evidence simply is not conclusive. Second, “There was a hole in the planet when you gave it to me”; the patterns of climate change are natural or it was caused by other people (e.g., India or China)—either way, it is not “my” fault. This is an unconscious displacement of guilt. Finally, “There is nothing we can do about it”; why try? Here, there is an acceptance of the reality, but a depressive paralysis with regards to reparative action.

For Dodds, these behavioral reaction formations are an integral part of more complex positive feedback loops that expedite global warming, such as tropical forest fires, the thaw of tundra permafrost, and accelerated melt of polar ice. The phenomena caused by global warming also intensify the problem because they result in further warming and CO₂ emissions. In other words, defense behaviors are ecological responses in and of themselves, and they aggregate with other phenomena to exacerbate environmental crisis. This interpretation gives a more radical understanding of the unconscious as fully imbricated in the patterns of earthly systems, whether in their balance or their chaotic breakdown. Dodds’ theorization of the behavioral defenses against climate crisis rests on the thought that the crisis itself is not subject to a totalizing suppression, but rather is proactively defended against and is therefore incorporated into cultural life through forms of discursive, ideological, and bodily reactivity. Human defense behaviors are supple, and therefore may point directly to an earthly condition, but because of the discrepancy between the lived human world and the scale of objective ecological realities, they are nevertheless exacerbated by the cognitive dissonance produced in trying to reconcile the two. The defense itself may present as a highly ambivalent bodily condition by which an individual incorporates and suppresses the symptoms of environmental crisis.

This oscillation, on the split between acknowledgment and denial of climate crisis, has roots in the history of environmental contamination dating back to the mid-twentieth century, when chemical spills and political cover-ups sprouted up across North America. This time in environmental history is at stake in the early works of American artist Tony Oursler. His video Kepone (1993) charts the case of a chemical disaster in the town of Hopewell, Virginia, which was the site of the construction of a factory that produced a deadly pesticide by that name (Figure 1.1). Kepone follows from a number of artworks in this time period in which Oursler carried out his concerns with trash and toxic waste as a questioning of the fabric of the mediated image. That is, he grappled with how to imbue the image with a sense of toxicity that would procure the affects of contamination.

Figure 1.1Tony Oursler, Kepone, 1993, video installation. ©Tony Oursler. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.

The chemical kepone (chlordecone) was developed in 1951 by the Allied Chemical Corporation. In 1961, US Food and Drug Administration already knew that it was a toxic compound, and had issued warnings that it needed to be handled with care (Holst and Encyclopedia Virginia staff, 2014). However, when the chemical plant was opened in Hopewell in 1966 by a company called Life Science (started by two Allied employees), it seemed there was absolutely no knowledge of kepone’s toxicity on the part of management, laborers, or the citizens of Hopewell. Between 1966 and 1975, Life Science dumped its runoff directly into the James River (which was the source of one of the town’s main industries—fish and shellfish). Employees suffered the effects of contamination, including brain and liver damage, neurological spasm (uncontrollable shivering and shaking), slurred speech, loss of memory, and erratic eye movement. Employees were never explicitly told that kepone could harm them, so they never wore work gloves and at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Section 1 The climate of representation
• Section 2 The subject of climate
• Section 3 Realism and the critique of climate, or climate and the critique of realism
• Index