Have You Heard the Bad News? – On Ecocritical Ticks

Talks by ecocritics – humanities and social science scholars concerned with the ecological situation of their research ususually related to the climate crisis – often come with ticks. These are tells and twitches that reveal a possible dissonance between what they are saying and what they are feeling, thinking or what they know. One of the most common is to apologise for the lack of optimism contained in their talk. Like self-conscious missionaries knocking on your door, they apologise before asking, “Have you heard the bad news”? This is strange because many of us know that the facts of the case, practice, or the outcome of the analysis they are putting before us do not paint a rosy picture of what is to come. So why, in this somewhat self-effacing way, do they want us to know they are sorry about what they are presenting?

There could be some politeness and care in this gesture. Perhaps they recognise some social norm that holds that one should not unduly upset your hosts or interlocutors, and are apologising in advance for its inevitable violation. However, after repeatedly observing this tick bubble up, two related questions have occurred to me. Is it undue to cause upset in an ecocritical talk on the particularities of the crisis? And is the speaker’s care actually being directed to the audience, or is it the speaker’s fear of being misidentified with the cause of the problem that is taking the audience on a detour through an appearance of care? I raise these questions not to scold any particular speaker. Rather I do so to investigate the affective infrastructure of this practice and in so doing to ask further questions what the performative functions of these ticks make real? and what parts of reality they might be attempting to turn away from or form which they wish to create a distance? Were it this tick alone these questions might only be of academic interest or something for an individual to work on in a public speaking class. However, related to this tick is another. This one is harder to detect because it ostensibly makes more sense. This tick is the materially justifiable finger pointing at political leaders and oligarchs, who have the nominal agency to enforce the kind of legal, production and logistics changes that would mitigate the crisis and repeatedly elect not to.

Taken together, we have a gesture from ecocritical speakers that reads as, “I want to be absolved of making you upset, it wasn’t really me that did it though, it was that (more often than not) guy, and he’s not like us”. This makes a kind of sense sense. It is political and industrial leaders who have the capacity to do so, who refuse to act to address the well-evidenced severity of the threat that are most responsible for the present horrors unfolding around the globe, not least in terms of their increasing severity. But so what? If we know the news is bad and what must be done to fix it, and we know that those not fixing it have proven themselves to be immune to both information and shaming, why do we keep pointing this out while making it clear that we wish to absolved of responsibility for how bad it it is? With this little knot in mind, it is then worth considering what the implications of this disavowal and displacement manoeuvre are in how we address the crisis we are living through.

After many decades of ecocriticism, the discipline seems impotent when it comes to instigating meaningful change or inspiring the public to demand it, especially in the contemporary academy. Here, I don’t mean to say that the analytic tools of ecocriticism are impotent in themselves. The analysis of the Anthropocene has been a fruitful endeavour. But no matter how rich the theoretical dimension is, in the absence of the discursive space in which these ideas enter public life and chaotically influence the actions of society, they are stunted. The lack of this chaotic spread of influence means that, at best, such critical tools are reduced to being a common point of reference between a critical researcher and practitioners of a well-meaning and perhaps, albeit limited, do-gooding boutique eco-project. Again, this is not meant to disparage such work. Given the present unrelenting pace of the crisis, such projects will likely serve, at some point sooner than we’d like, to help society navigate through the unravelling that is to come. What I am calling attention to, however, is the structural dismantling of forums in which such theory can meet practice.

A sustainability festival that brings ecocritical scholars into conversation with activists and practitioners is all well and good, but in such spaces knowledge and experience move between the guardrails of accepted discourses and professional habituses. Such settings lack an openness to act and think through the ethics-aesthetic paradigm that Felix Guattari called “chaosmosis”. By this, he meant the transversal, or moving across media, disciplines and ways of being of problems, ideas, critiques and ways to address them. It’s only with this kind of intense cross-pollination that any kind of action to address the crisis will be generated. Ecocritical ticks both get in the way of this and are a product of a system designed to make such movement incredibly difficult.

One place where this restriction is most acutely felt in in the home of ecocriticism, academia. Over the last three decades, academia has become professionalised in accordance with a neoliberal logic. What this has meant is a fetishisation of representation as somehow more significant than material circumstances (a full unpacking of this will require much more space, so for now I will let Catherine Liu do it), a reluctance to be seen as inappropriately political rather than “scientific”, and a celebration of metrics that account poorly for the outputs those who work transversally or at the margins of intellectual pursuits. In this context, it makes sense for ecocritical scholars to repeatedly apologise for bearing bad news. It is not the actual audience before them to whom they are apologising; it is the neoliberal order that the speakers project onto those assembled in the auditorium.

With so many scholars moving through academia by way of precarious contracts, the prospect of their work being seen as unnecessarily upsetting is something that has to be mitigated. Good professional relationships must be maintained at all times, so being a downer has to be acknowledged and apologised for before it can even be justified by data and argument. Only then can such a “critical” scholar be tolerated. But when I am sitting there as part of the actual audience, which may or may not contain some who profess and practice values of neoliberal logic, these apologies come across as a distancing move, or worse, a trivialisation of both the crisis and the speaker own contribution to addressing it. The professional protectionism gets in the way, and the “sorry for the bad news” comes across as patronising.

There are many who argue that academic jargon is to blame for a lack of the kind of chaotic public engagement with theory in general, and ecocritical theory in particular, that I called for above. However, I would claim that this jargon problem only appears as a problem when the people trying to communicate through it project trepidation along with the ideas they are advancing. By which I mean, if you start with an apology about what you’re doing, I am going to find it hard to think you are using terms like “hyperobject” with any authority I should care about, and my willingness to engage will plummet.

What follows from this is that it makes the politics advanced, sincere and cogent as they may be, ring hollow. When a talk starts with a confused apology, to then goes on a decry the oil executives, tech oligarchs, and political opportunists profiting from making the earth uninhabitable, these political remarks often carry the initial confusion with them. We could formulate it like this: “I’m sorry this rich person is making the planet uninhabitable for personal profit”. Ok, but what is this sorry worth if we have to keep living here? Should we not be relentlessly trying to stop this rich person instead of listening to this talk, then?

These ticks perform an impotence that reminds me of the final line of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the similarly confused ecocritical film Don’t Look Up. As the planet is being ripped apart by an asteroid that he and his friends failed to generate the political will to avert, he remarks at the dinner table over coffee, using folksy resignation to keep his quivering terror and grief at bay, “The thing of it is, we really did have everything, didn’t we?” In a concrete sense, that is in terms of consumer goods and comfort for the middle class, this might be true enough. However, in terms of having had a meaningful relation to his community, society and democratic power, that is, an awareness of agency that would make it possible to act in service of survival and flourishing, they had nothing. Thus in the film, with the planet literally falling apart, this line reveals a deeper irony. If all that you “had”, which is to say those things through which one could project agency, was yours on condition of your powerlessness to prevent your own annihilation, in what sense were these things that you possessed at all? The agency of these characters was actually an imprisonment of desire circling the impasse of cruel optimism, all the while the process of their lives simply unfolded automatically. Indeed, the claim of having had everything seems impossible to believe (outside of some moralistic hectoring about materialism) as the shockwave rushes towards the dinner table. So, from our perspective, in the climate crisis, witnessing an apology for the bad news of a disaster someone else is supposedly causing, we may ask, perplexed, what is this impossible apology doing for our agency in this crisis?

The apology performs the first move in a kind of splitting between the good people who are upset by what is happening and those who profit from it and serves as a provisional disavowal of agency for the speaker. Here in the room, the speaker and the audience are the poor, put-upon, agency-less victims of what is being perpetrated by the rich and the powerful. The apology and the denunciation boil down to, we are good and they are bad. Yes, capital is responsible for the crisis befalling the planet, but in an ecocritical talk making sure the audience feels like they are good people battling evil would seem to be besides the point or at the very least redundant. We should not overemphasise the general complicity that most of us in the global north have with consumption pattens that perpetuate the crisis. Much of that way of life is merely the table stakes of being in a social position that is able to enter this academic and political discourse. It should not be this way but it is and there is not a serious plan to change this. So, the problem is not that unsustainable consumption is bad. The problem is that unsustainable consumption is possible. Not only possible but actively encouraged.

Such consumption is encouraged not only by the incentive structures of extractive capitalist realism but also by the very institutions many of these ecocritical talks take place. In the case of Denmark, academic research is required by law to promote economic growth, which, for the time being, means that, allowing for an amount of critique, in aggregate, research needs to encourage and facilitate unsustainable consumption. So, regardless of how critical any individual ecocritical scholar is, situated in an unsustainable system, the kind of splitting they offer through these ticks in these talks should be read as more symptomatic than analytic. This means we learn nothing about how to address the crisis from the apology in the room followed by a denouncment of those responsible at a distance. Instead, talk after ecocritical talk, we reproduce the most obfuscating manoeuvre that extractive capitalist realism has ever constructed; it makes personal moral failure the appear as the cause of a systemic problem, which then injects anxiety into the analysis that follows. This mechanism holds back any insinuation and spread of a desire for change lest it becomes too radical in its demands and threatens the established routes of desire in professional identity, even when radical demands are ostensibly stated in the talk.

What is needed is a practice of communication that can hold the ambivalence of the reality that no one in an ecocritical talk is just “good”, and that’s perfect. That means we can talk about the problem because holding that ambivalence means there is something we can do about it to as radical a degree as the problem demands. That means recognising our own weaknesses, the capture of our own desires in an unsustainable consumer society, as part of the analysis of how to chart a route through this impasse. And it also means disregarding the villainy of those profiting from the destruction of the planet. Our petty castigations, well deserved as they may be by those who would see us burn for a little bit of money, are a vanity we could do with without. Do we believe that our scolding will lead these people to redemption? No. So, instead, we must focus on making it impossible to get rich by destroying the world. This isn’t a situation that needs anyone’s apology. When the sea level rises, sorry will sound a lot like DiCaprio’s lament.

When it comes to the desire for clarity in academic discourse, too much attention is paid to jargon and not to how certain ticks originating in the anxiety of scholars trying to stay employed in a corrupt system cause them to deploy jargon in an unpleasantly defensive way. That is a defensiveness that gives up what agency the have to directly state the depth of the crisis, who is and what systems are responsible for preventing its mitigation, what can and should be done to force this mitigation to take place and how can we prepare ourselves for the world to come as it emerges. Broadly construed, these are the questions ecocriticism needs to concern itself with. There is nothing to apologise for out of shame, only repair work to be done and a system to overthrow.

There is no plan to prevent the collapse of extractive capitalist realism. What I mean by this term here is both the material infrastructure that underpins the economic system and the affective infrastructure that pours forth from this material that structures the desires many have for the “good life”. The proponents of extractive capitalist realism have shown no interest in substantively pursuing its continuance and nor should we who wish to see its demise. But this impending collapse promises nothing. As researchers like Adrianne Buller have shown, those with the most economic power in extractive capitalist realism are planning for how to retain their power as the collapse approaches. Something far more destructive may well arise from these ruins. And the only way to prevent that is to act with and through the intersubjective transversal desire to make something else happen.