Last night Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and subject of a New Statesman profile last month, delivered a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on ecology. Not one to shy away from theorising on any subject, Žižek tackled the environment and the ideology surrounding the contemporary debate on the politics of climate change with characteristic panache. Speaking with almost nervous energy, he covered areas as diverse as animal documentaries, psychoanalysis under Hitler, the latest Bond movie and Hegel’s theory of nature.
Žižek warned of the dangers of “naturalising” nature, positing the natural world as some utopia to which we can return in balanced harmony. Nature, he says, is itself is not a balanced system, insofar as it is a set of contingent systems adapting to survive amidst various catastrophes and changing circumstances. That is not to say that we should disregard the dangers of climate change. On the contrary, despite the fact that the current global climate crisis has been caused by the structure of the particular economic system of one subset of one species, the crisis has the potential to affect the very basis of life on earth for the majority of species. Humans have become, for the first time, a geological force capable of changing the global temperatures that sustain life on Earth.
So what is to be done? We should not, Žižek thinks, set limits on development following the policy of “sustainable development,” often used as an excuse for business as usual. One of his concerns is the arbitrariness of the limits imposed by politicians and scientists alike. Žižek commented that we can no more set a quantifiable limit on safe climate change than we can quantify what constitutes holocaust denial.
Although the vast majority of scientists now agree that climate change poses a serious threat, the unknowns are too great to have a good degree of certainty as to the likely outcome. This is the difficulty for Žižek of free choice. Regardless of how predetermined our destinies are, we are condemned to live as if we are free. We have to choose, and yet the body of knowledge on which we draw is limited; the evidence available points to a range of catastrophic outcomes, but we cannot know for sure (until it is too late) which particular outcome will occur.
Given this, Žižek insists that we cannot look on the bright side of climate change for new opportunities to adapt. He argues that we must resist the normalisation of climate change, whereby what is first experienced as impossible and unthinkable becomes real and is accepted as part of every day life (for example, the re-emergence of the far right in mainstream politics, or the normalisation of torture in Guantanamo). In the case of the environment, damaging consequences of climate change have first been denied by governments and businesses, then accepted as part of business as usual.
Drawing on Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, an analysis of how governments and corporations have historically systematically exploited the trauma of nations or communities following man-made or natural catastrophes (the coup against Allende in Chile, the Iraq war, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina or the Indian Ocean Tsunami), Žižek warns that the international shock of global warming could present vast new opportunities for exploitation. Now there are discussions about the new opportunities opening up as a result of global warming, and not those we should be exploring, such as green energy production. Rather, oil extraction companies look upon the clearing away of Artic summer ice as a new dawn in drilling, as vast areas of oil-rich ocean floor are exposed for the first time.
Žižek argues that, whilst it is true that the climate crisis is a universal problem — one that affects all humanity regardless of social position or wealth, as well as the majority of all species — and so cannot be reduced simply to a crisis of capitalism, it would be a mistake to attempt to address the environmental issue independently of its cause, namely, the global capitalist economic framework. In this sense, ecology is not the solution, as this often puts aside political differences for the “greater good” of the environment. Instead, we should deal with the specific problem of global capitalism, thereby addressing the climate crisis.
In many ways, this resonates with Tim Jackson’s essay in the New Statesman Copenhagen supplement earlier this year — the economic system contains within it the seeds of its (and all of our) destruction: capitalist economies depend on economic growth, and economic growth is unsustainable in a finite ecological system.
So what of Žižek’s communist solution? John Gray is right to say in a recent review that Žižek overlooks the lack of public or political appetite for communism in his latest book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce where he (perhaps predictably) advocates his brand of Leninism as the answer to the current combination of encroaching corporatism, environmental catastrophe and financial collapse. And insofar as Žižek is an activist, he fails, as the activist must engage with actually existing conditions. However, as intellectual, Žižek fulfils his role; as he himself identifies, his task as an intellectual is not to answer questions, but to correct how they are formulated.
As such, Žižek offers great insight to the those on the left who may feel dismayed at the co-opting of the environmental agenda by diverse conservative political (and corporate) forces. Žižek rightly identifies the global economic capitalist framework as responsible for both the financial and the climate crises, and poses a choice: we can put aside political differences to attempt to tackle impending climatic doom (with the inevitable resurgence of capitalist crisis under business as usual), or we can face the driving force of the crisis head on.
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