The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change

T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, Subhankar Banerjee, T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, Subhankar Banerjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000342260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown?

Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change.

This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

PART I

Extractivism

Extractivism identifies a political economy premised on the withdrawal of value without corresponding deposit: resources are removed from the Earth, profits from labor, and commodifiable data from plants, bodies, and information systems.¹ Returned to their place is waste, toxicity, disease, exhaustion, and death. Comprising a fundamental logic of advanced global capitalism that is now evident worldwide, extractivism has long been recognized as a fundamental form of colonialism as well: “[E]xtracting is stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment,” notes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. “That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the indigenous.”²

When the word “extraction” is used, what often first comes to mind is oil drilling, coal and mineral mining, hydroelectric power dams, logging, industrial fishing, and so on. Those activities linked to fossil fuels, or what Andreas Malm terms “fossil capital,” most obviously relate to anthropogenic climate transformation, wherein prehistoric resources are drawn from deep underground and, through their processing and burning at the surface, their fumes are released into the atmosphere, reflecting a sort of reverse geological process.³ But all comprise the voracious and expansive “extractive zone” wherein mining for fossil fuel energy, metals, and minerals supports modern industrial production, its energy systems and infrastructure, leaving rivers, forests, lands, and seas in varying states of waste.⁴ Extraction also extends to secondary registers. Big Ag’s chemical-based, monocrop farming, in systematically withdrawing value from the soil in the form of minerals, represents another mode of mining; similarly, the privatization of water for consumer products exemplifies the appropriation of resources away from what many call the commons. Extraction also entails labor, in the form of unpaid (often female) domestic toil, volunteerism, wage-based work, and low- or unpaid convict labor, corresponding to the exploitation of surplus value in the form of profits. In the art world, this is detectable not only in the prevalence of literal uncompensated labor (e.g., the notorious gallery internship, research or logistical assistance carried out by workers that provides behind-the-scenes labor that materializes only invisibly in the final exhibitable or sellable artwork), but also in the extractive appropriation of gestures, emotions, and related interpersonal skills, comprising the informal labor of the communications industry and service economy more widely. Many artists and activists in this volume are keenly aware of the omnipresent danger of instrumentalization and have developed savvy, built-in tactics to resist it in their work. This is especially so for Indigenous and female artists, artists of color, and artists from the Global South who are disproportionately subjected to cultural extraction.

Extraction increasingly includes digital appropriation, relating to social media and surveillance-based data mining, IT processing, and algorithmic capture, expanding the extractive zone to the techno- and info-spheres.⁵ The growing information industry (think Amazon, Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Alibaba) that collects and commodifies Big Data relies on the enormous cybernetic accumulation of preferences, identities, consumer habits, political tendencies, social networks, and images that are variously mobilized by the security, medical, marketing, publicity, and consumer industries. As media ecology researchers point out, the energy basis of digital extraction relies heavily on fossil fuels, but is also increasingly located in renewables, with materials provided by green capitalism in the form of rare earth mining (lithium for solar panels and electric-car batteries), leading to new versions of extractive violence (as with the 2019 rightwing “lithium coup” in Bolivia). Digital extraction can constitute “data colonialism” when information—for instance, facial recognition data gathered in Syria or Nigeria—is sold to security industries in the European Union and the US.⁶ Data mining (what some call “biopiracy”) corresponds to the collection of biogenetic materials and DNA samples—from plants, animals, insects, and human bodies—by the pharmaceutical, medical, military, and security industries, which often target the politically disenfranchised (Indigenous, migrant, undocumented, and minoritarian) and the lands of underdeveloped countries as test subjects and resource sites.⁷

As such, extraction forms an enormous web of primary resource mining and secondary juridico-political appropriations, cybernetic technologies, and data infrastructures. “Today, enormous technical and legal complexities are needed to execute what are ultimately elementary extractions,” Saskia Sassen writes:

It is, to cite a few cases, the enclosure by financial firms of a country’s resources and citizens’ taxes, the repositioning of expanding stretches of the world as sites for extraction of resources, and the re-gearing of government budgets in liberal democracies away from social and workers’ needs.⁸

We cannot speak about extraction without also addressing consumption (or, more appropriately, wasteful overconsumption). For extraction and consumption are two sides of the same coin. The smooth functioning of these twin processes, beyond the technical and legal complexities, requires significant military support from nation-states (often executed through corporate contracts)—to control key extractive zones as well as ensure the safe transport of materials to markets of consumption often thousands of miles away. It is thus not surprising that the US military represents the single largest consumer of fossil fuels and, with its many private sub-contractors, works all over the world to maintain extractive flows that largely benefit its associated financial elites. More than three decades ago, Ramachandra Guha identified overconsumption and growing militarization as the “two fundamental ecological problems facing the globe.”⁹ That reality has not changed; indeed, it has only worsened.

At its broadest, extractivism designates a calculus of accumulation by dispossession.¹⁰ Its political economy functions as a mode of necropolitics: the governance of the dead and dying, including the transformation of habitats into sacrifice zones; the relegation of populations to the warn-out, used-up, and debilitated; the conversion of life-worlds into “cheap nature” and thus eventual death-worlds.¹¹ As extraction represents the violent transformation of life into capitalist commodities, its profit-seeking entails a mutating, strategic political ontology, categorizing and hierarchizing matters of life and nonlife into shifting, differential values, legislating legal and illegal practices: “industrial capital depends on and, along with states, vigorously polices the separations between forms of existence so that certain kinds of existents can be subjected to different kinds of extractions,” writes Elizabeth Povinelli in her analysis of the “geontologies,” or Earth beings and their political taxonomy, of late liberalism:

Thus even as activists and academics level the relation between animal life and among objects (including human subjects), states pass legislation both protecting the rights of businesses and corporations to use animals and lands and criminalizing tactics of ecological and environmental activism.¹²

Those opposed to extractivism ...