Temporalities in the Capitalocene
wn / 2021
From Essays
It is not easy to pinpoint the exact beginning of a new epoch, or any epoch, in fact. Epochs are categorized by their geological conditions and stratigraphy. Geologists age-date rock deposits, analyze minerals, study fossils, tree rings, glaciers, as well as other proxies to estimate the general climate conditions of ages. Then, based on patterns, they assume similarities and give us the epochs. Some of which the Earth had frozen over while others inhabited a superabundance of flourishing life. Therefore it is not lightly that modern circles within the environmental humanities deem the next epoch Anthropocene. Or the layer of Human. It becomes calculable upon considering the consequences of our presence, especially industriously: we have wiped out millions of species, harvested our forests, poisoned our rivers, and intensified the heat of our atmosphere astronomically. Our greatest threat is global warming; Huber writes of Alfred Crosby who proposed the atmosphere as inhabiting “fossilized sunshine” (Huber, p. 8). We have initiated millions of years of solar energy in just two hundred (p. 8). As the publication Salvage puts it, we have created an asteroid strike in the blink of an eye (n.p).
The disruption of deep time cycles by capitalist endeavours has resulted in major existentialism. The climate crisis represents a new challenge, calling for critical action on every front and requiring unprecedented coordination. Much of the communication on this topic elicits a poignant awareness of damage, risk and consequence imposed by society. The paradox I aim to exploit is that this perilous vulnerability (to quote Timothy Morton) was brought upon us by initiatives of progress and innovation. My aim in this paper is to assess different components of risk communication and display how the Capitalocene affects temporalities. In many ways our perceptions are distorted because of short-sighted and narrowly exclusive value attainment; ecological and environmental interaction are left to suffer.
Inflection Points
One of the biggest concerns of climate change catastrophe is the question of when. We must know how long we can sustain current patterns before the feedback becomes unbearable. Donna Haraway asks, when is the inflection point? (2016, p. 100). At what point do these actions today promise extinction tomorrow? In her book Staying with the Trouble, she argues it is when places of refuge are gone (p. 100). The refugia, she writes, existed in abundance during the Holocene. The outrage concerning the name Anthropocene stems from this pointing towards humankind for destroying these places of refuge. The Anthropocene is very much a fall from grace as it is a fall from safety.
We can think of refuge most clearly in terms of physical spaces: the degradation of habitats and ecosystems have displaced and destroyed millions of species. For example, one of the most significant issues concerning sea levels is the displacement of millions of people from Bangladesh if the ocean rises another metre. The inflection point here is one metre of sea-level rise. If it is reached, an immense portion of land is gone and therefore uninhabitable. Of course, with climate change, there is no single inflection or tipping point. Although it has been established in global agreements that the target for safety is to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius (above pre-industrial levels), climate change represents a series of inflection points that wait on varying and unstable predicaments. This also means risks are felt sooner and more severely to different beings. The IPCC captures this reality in SPM 2.3: “Climate change will amplify existing risks and create new risks for natural and human systems. Risks are unevenly distributed and are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development” (AR5, 2014). Communicating risks and discussing relations with time are core faculties for environmental communicators.
The rise of Anthropocene, and other moniker offspring such as the Chtulucene, Capitalocene, or Proletarocene, into the global lexicon, represent an awakening, a meta-narrative of our presence and damages. If the ‘inflection point’ is the recognition of these terms, the ‘refuge’ we lose is ignorance inhabited by the past. We have been dejected from environmental ‘innocence.’ Martin Heideigger wrote that thinking has an environmental presence of its own (Morton, 2010, p. 27). As our thinking is increasingly tormented by visions of disaster, we become homeless wanderers, bereft of normality. In other words, we can no longer hide from the risks industry has imposed. Our risk communication should focus on mitigating this philosophical crisis.
Re-Modernization
In his work Re-Modernization, Latour recognizes the equal and opposite reactions to progress, namely, the risks and dangers of innovation and expedition. If the philosophy of modernity is to invent or make new, re-modernity invents and makes new with a reflexive conscience (Latour, 2003, p. 36). Reflexive in that we have seen past innovation and we now feel the “intractable” repercussions with acute awareness and gravity. Re-modernization grasps the rival paradox that is modernity’s progress who pushes forward, simultaneously dragging along dead skeletons and detonators.
Today we build with a special conscience of risk, and it is for good reason. Paul Virilio writes in Caution that disaster runs parallel with invention, turning to the example that inventing the ship simultaneously invents the shipwreck (2007, p. 10). Indeed, powerful technology imposes equally powerful malfunctions. Events like Hiroshima or Chernobyl make it difficult to think of nuclear energy without thinking of nuclear disaster. What results is not only a frightened society but one which is stuck hyper-realizing. Society’s hyper-realization of risk only amplifies the problem. Take for example again the shipwreck. “This time we will design it right,” says the engineer, and subsequently, the design comes out better, sleeker, safer, and so on. Nonetheless, this ship is sinkable. It always will be. The engineers have only recycled the pattern which temporarily alleviates the risk of the shipwreck. It is for this reason Bruno Latour announces “we have never been modern” (2003, p. 38). This statement suggests one difficulty of dealing with the climate crisis: a solution requires less of what we call progress, and more of what we call regression. I mean that, in order to evade danger we must unravel some of the values of that which modernity depends upon.
Risk Communication
Here it is beneficial to draw summaries from Sabine Roeser and her work on risk communication. Risk communication includes discussion of how communicators can effectively inform the public of danger without causing panic, fear or despair. Roeser’s work takes an emotional lens, and articulates the stasis derived by fearful frames presented in the media. She writes that we scroll over a “flood of human misery” and, “we rush over the headings of the newspapers that contain horrible messages, often with no feeling” (p. 1038). These motions explain trends in anxiety, dissatisfaction, and in the increased pre occupational awareness with the future and safety. It may as well explain our so-far inability to adjust economies towards becoming renewable and ecologically beneficial. How can we reposition our industrial mistakes so as not to stratify progress towards the same harmful direction? One thing environmental salvation for ourselves and future generations does not call for is nihilism.
Roeser’s simple answer to this problem is to install hope within our messages (p. 1038). She writes that our lack of feeling “generally changes when we are eyewitness to a scene where somebody is mistreated, humiliated, or beaten” (p. 1038). With climate change, it is very difficult to witness feedback. One problem is that climate change is literally invisible (Moser, 2010, p.33). Effects of greenhouse gases are distributed in ways in which consequences are delayed and often distant from the source of original emission (p. 35). We might more prominently frame a story that exhibits environmental degradation happening in the present, or at least those stories in which consequences of the past are experienced visibly by people alive today. Jonathan Oosterman in Making Climate Action Meaningful contends that this requires making room for communicators to speak “their own truth” and meet people where they are at (2016, p. 132). Environmental communicators then need to frame messages so that these “somebodys” being mistreated are kin with audiences. Effective risk communication relies on translatable, emotional stimulus to gather soluble movement.
These suggestions require a discussion on temporality in risk communication. The obvious notion to state is that stories are more understandable and desirable when they are contemporarily relevant. However, the temporality of climate change is phantom. The dangers and risks are innumerable, and the severity of the pending catastrophe is only vaguely measurable. Climate change needs to be understood in terms of the now, centred more in sensory receptors than hypothetical datasets. It is for this reason we need to begin examining climate change as something symbiotic, something actually closer to our daily lives and being, not merely a threatening loom in the distance.
In a talk, Timothy Morton said that the whole is not bigger than the sum of its parts. This ontological sentiment is important to think about. The whole, is climate change, and climate change, cannot easily be mitigated by direct action. In other words, thinking of climate change as one concept is unproductive to risk communication, and it is parallel to thinking of human extinction; each dissuades individual efficacy. What if we instead presented the parts of climate change rather than the whole? For the sum of the parts is always greater: more in number and more real than the whole. Climate change requires a myriad revolution in energy, economy and health. In his work Internal Problems, David Hall enlisted Hulme’s opinion that “the idea of climate change will – and should – mobilise a variety of ethical, political, theological, technological and epistemological movements as well as new practices in art, activism and adaptation (2019, p. 28). Here we begin to see how making kin embodies into the world.
Showing stories of people suffering from environmental problems now will provide that emotional meeting ground Roeser, Oosterman, and others have discussed. The 2019 Netflix film There’s Something in the Water for example highlights three Black and Indigenous communities within Nova Scotia that suffer from environmental pollution. Landfills and effluent drainage sources are placed strategically in these poor, racial communities, but why? Environmental racism can arise as active and deliberate, or, on the other hand, something deployed to minimize cost and risk. The proponents know that Black or Indigenous communities are less-equipped to fight back, this works in turn: they may be less-equipped because they are Black and Indigenous. Here we can see a hydra-headed relationship between environmental devastation, structural racism, and capitalist accumulation. Environmental risk communication efforts must not ignore this reality.
Capitalocene
Anthropocene as the forthcoming epoch label is rejected by many thinkers. How can humans be responsible for desertification, mass extinction? The whole narrative of anthros presents examples in which humans were able to live harmoniously alongside, within (or as) natural environments. The argument against Anthropocene argues for exempting the species as whole from climate change. It is not what humans are, it is rather what we have been doing that initiated this “biological extinction” (Salvage, n.p). Davis et al write that the Anthropocene is clearly not the product of “human nature,” or humanity as a whole, but rather interrelated historical processes set in motion by a small minority (2018, p. 4). This is supported by Yusoff who calls Anthropocene falsely universal (2018, p. 22).
The nomenclature Capitalocene was brought forward by ecological sociologists Jason W. Moore and Andreas Malm. They wanted to show that the Capitalocene is important because, unlike the Anthropocene, it realizes humankind’s obsession with value. It also relieves the species of their position as violator. It is important to note that not every human is a capitalist— and in fact, only a handful of people throughout civil history (in remarkably white and male homogeneity) have earned the social title. Accumulate! That is the slogan resounding as an echo after each and every instance of environmental destruction.
It becomes clear when we think of the common person. The common person who let’s say, lives and works, consumes and produces, is not very responsible for climate change. This may be an obvious notion but let’s conceptualize the common person as all of the common persons. Each is deeply entangled within a network of risks and factors (Latour, 2003, p. 36). Latour writes eating a steak for example, begins at the restaurant and ends in a lab testing for mad cow-disease, not to mention visiting farms, unions, bureaucracies, hospitals and universities along the way (p. 36). Latour’s actor-network theory helps show how a truly ethical life is near impossible. Also exemplified are the risks associated with innovation when schematized at a grand scale.
The editorial at Salvage Collective calls this irony the tragedy of the worker. Turning to Marx and Engels lines from the Communist Manifesto: “The tragedy of the worker is that, as long as she works for capitalism, she must be her own grave-digger. Capital never extracts energy from the earth, but it makes a taxing withdrawal from the worker’s body” (n.p). The worker, the human, is merely the medium of which capital utilizes. Thence forward, Capitalocene encompasses a more realistic pseudonym for the death driving Earthforce.
Scott Schwartz reminds those notions of risk are the very matter of which capitalism is made up. He writes “the performance of capitalism relies on the capacity of quantified metrics to produce probabilistic renderings of the future” (p. 74). Financialization in capitalism looks for ways in which capital will grow, as well as securing ways to minimize loss. This is played out through notions like interest, insurance, and security investment (p. 74). Schwartz argues that vulnerability and risk become measurable and quantifiable within capitalism, in fact, they are a giant driver of the economic system. This renders misconceptions of value in society. Schwartz writes “In this process, vulnerability became not something one experiences, but rather a contingency that can be securitized against by purchasing insurance products or stockpiling nuclear warheads” (p. 77).
Marx wrote that the first requirement of capitalism was “the dissolution of the relationship to the Earth.” To conceive this image one only has to visualize the amount of space capitalism actually takes up on the planet. From the mega city infrastructures to the industrial emissions protruding everyday, capitalism is by all means a physical force. There is less natural environment now, the spaces of which we could coexist ecologically have shrunk. Sol and Wals and others have dedicated much thought to communicating ways in which this dissolution can be revitalized. They suggest hybrid learning environments in which children can learn and connect with natural environments, strengthening ecological “mindfulness” (2015, p. 203). Anna Tsing urges a similar idea stating that learning about ecology strictly through science is wrong (2018, p. 239). Mediating the natural environment in creative ways may help revitalize an understanding of resource depletion and sustainability.
Temporalities and the Capitalocene
Before other economists of the 19th century, Marx was able to see the major environmental problem of capitalism: the imbalance between resource accumulation and resource replenishment. His ideas began with soil, which was brought from colonized countries to England and was cyclically exhausted due to unnatural demand in agriculture (Foster, 1999, p. 384). Marx recognized the vast differences in agriculture and capitalism. Agriculture is a slow, delicate process of which crops are produced based on soil fertility and weather patterns. Meanwhile, capitalist society depends on fluctuations in market prices, a system oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits (Foster, p. 384). This subversion of temporal priority displays a distinct divide between nature and culture.
Things can appear “unnatural” when a temporal rift is opened up and perceivable to the human eye. As mentioned in the beginning of this paper, global warming is a kind of “fossilized sunshine” (Salvage, n.p.) We energize our industries; our vehicles, buildings, and machines with fossil fuels. The rates at which these fossil fuels are spent, versus the rates at which they are geologically processed, are amazingly different. Millions of years versus a few months. This is the phenomenon of our energy systems with oil and natural gases. Similarly, forests are harvested in deep time equivalent of seconds compared to the length of the growth cycle. When cycles are disrupted this way, when we see the city filled with pollution or the forest now bare of biology, we deem it “unnatural” despite it all happening naturally. What feels unnatural to humankind is the power we exercise over temporal processes of this kind. It has never been so easy to reverse, disrupt or wipe out a million-year process, and further, expending this derived value often before the fiscal year ends.
“Capitalism, like certain bacteria, like the death-drive, is immortal” (Salvage, n.p). Its aims not only strive for, but require endless growth. Infinite growth from finite resources, that is. Subscribing to this kind of system subordinates the value of time to monetary value and wealth accumulation. Capital is a tool capable of growing itself over time (Schwartz, p. 75). Grebowicz's work encompasses this breakdown of time. Not only is time delegated frequently to work and labor, it breaks down into a pattern conceptualized by what Jonathan Crary calls 24/7. Capitalism promotes the endless stream, in that, there are no circumstances that can not be recorded or archived digitally (Grebowicz, 2014, p.6). The Internet is the perfect Capitalocene child. Grebowicz argues this goes against human rhythm (2014, p. 5). Capitalism voyeuristically embeds itself into the worker’s body and social life.
Taken from Guy Debord and his theory of the Spectacle, Grebowicz writes that the goods capitalism provides are also weapons for constant reinforcement of the condition of alienation. Alienation is central to Marx’s economic theories on commodities. iPhones for example are highly capable, connective, and personal devices. They connect us together and link us to this stream of the 24/7. Grebowicz's argument makes clear the distortion these devices erupt within our conceptions of time, alienating us from our peers. Moments are less important, why get together when we could message? This idea of technologies that mediate reality to us shows up in Grebowicz work. She provides an in-depth example of James Balog’s glacial time lapse experiment. In his captures, glacial ice retreat is shown, which is normally otherwise invisible to the eye. The shocking footage shows again a slow process of nature which has been sped up, both literally and through time-lapse footage. Both Balog and Grebowicz use “non-time” to show a real feedback of climate change, the result is both nostalgia and estrangement.
The American poet Jim Harrison once wrote: “I have closely noted that people who watch a great deal of TV never again seem able to adjust to the actual pace of life. The speed of the passing images becomes the speed they aspire to and they seem to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else.” With the Capitalocene and Internet offering a 24/7 experience, perceptions of natural temporality, that is temporalities accustomed to growth, season change, orbital rotation are subjected to distortion. Internet technologies represent amalgams of deep time cycles disrupted: manufactured with rare minerals like silicon and capitalized in tragically unequal assembly lines. This is a primary risk within re-modernity that should be communicated thoroughly.
Earlier in this paper I mentioned a solution in regression. The solution to the consumption problem is clearly not more consumption. Statistics show that roughly 30% of the world’s food is wasted, and yet 1 in 7 people go to bed hungry each night. When I call for regression I do not mean that we should go back to primitive activities in which we lived more closely with the land. Regression is the return to a former undeveloped state, and part of the answer to risk society is looking at the crossroads. In Making Kin Donna Haraway mentions author Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory:
“Rather than the heroic story being told yet again… I want to rethink evolution in a much smaller vein. The tiny hollowed out negative spaces, the shell which can hold some water that can be shared, the neckbag that can carry the baby...the kind of sociality that comes from communities making their lives together, not utopian and not absent of conflict.”
The carrier bag theory hypothesizes that the spear was not the first tool used by humans, but rather, it was the carrier bag. The item available for space is much different than the spear. The spear accumulates, the bag holds and shares what is already present. Through this poetic speculation Haraway shows how stories might be rethought not to change the course of history, but to add simply another dimension.
Considering the temporality of both deep time and the Capitalocene presents room for adjustment in our markets and economies. We must add dimensions to what we do, what we eat and how we live. It is extremely beneficial to picture our climate change as that which affects our own community, our sociality. In the realm of technology which is often exciting and useful we might invest towards those technologies which recalibrate our temporal alignments. Technology that strengthens mindfulness, encourages ecological exploration, technology that connects us, that helps us recognize our dependence on “the most humble of creatures'' (Salvage, n.p). Communication technologies already serve as wonderful carrier bags. The existential threat posed in the introduction, the paradox that humiliates progress with risk and destruction might be reciprocated. That problems are indeed progressions of their own. That risk and accident do in fact make-better eventually. We can see how the shipwreck invents a better ship. If we pose the environmental crisis as the Capitalocene’s invention we must then strategize and prepare for the inverse; the environmental renaissance which awaits realization.
Works Cited
Foster, J. B. (1999). Marx's theory of metabolic rift : Classical foundations for environmental sociology. The American Journal of Sociology, 105(2), 366–405. https://doi.org/10.1086/210315
Grebowicz, M. (2014). Glacial Time and Lonely Crowds: The Social Effects of Climate Change as Internet Spectacle. Environmental Humanities, 5(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615388
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble : making kin in the Chthulucene / Donna J. Haraway. Duke University Press.
Huber, M. (2015). Theorizing Energy Geographies. Geography Compass, 9(6), 327–338. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12214
Kawall, J. (2017). History of Environmental Ethics. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 13-22.
Latour, B. (2003). Is Re-modernization Occurring - And If So, How to Prove It? Theory, Culture & Society, 20(2), 35–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276403020002002
Morton, T. (2010). The ecological thought / Timothy Morton. Harvard University Press.
Moser, S. (2010). Communicating climate change: history, challenges, process and future directions. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Climate Change, 1(1), 31–53. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.11
Oosterman, Jonathan. (2016). Making climate action meaningful: Communication practices in the New Zealand climate movement. New Zealand Sociology, 31(5), 131–157.
Roeser, S. (2012). Risk Communication, Public Engagement, and Climate Change: A Role for Emotions. Risk Analysis, 32(6), 1033–1040. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2012.01812.x
Salvage Editorial Collective. (2020). The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene. Salvage https://salvage.zone/editorials/the-tragedy-of-the-worker-towards-the-proletarocene/
Schwartz, S. (2019). Measuring Vulnerability and Deferring Responsibility: Quantifying the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(4), 73–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418820961
Sol, J., & Wals, A. (2014). Strengthening ecological mindfulness through hybrid learning in vital coalitions. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 10(1), 203–214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-014-9586-z
Tsing, A. (2018). “A multispecies ontological turn?” The World Multiple: The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds. (Eds.) Keiichi Omura, Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka, Atsuro Morita. London: Routledge. 233-245.
Virilio, P. (2007). Caution and Disaster. Original accident / Paul Virilio ; translated by Rose Julie. Polity.
Yusoff, K. (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 13-28; 33-56.