A negative dialectics of climate change destruction: Reflecting on climate futures with Adorno

Abstract

This paper offers a brief overview of the negative dialectical turn in Adorno's post-war writings when he began to give more serious attention to the type of ‘subjective possibilities’ generated by encounters with adversity. The analysis below explores the relevance of Adorno's work to current efforts to make sense of an increasingly felt contact with climate change harm. In particular, Adorno's insights on the paradoxical relationship that emerges between scenarios inspiring despair and hope for a better future. Rather than ignore contradiction and focus only on the possibilities and potentials that inhere in the good, Adorno's preference was to examine those that also emerge from a crisis ridden present. Similar to other Frankfurt School adherents, Adorno drew attention to an important distinction between inner and outer worlds and their critical mediation via the thinking process – the bridging of inner worlds of intuition, feeling, sense perception, the free flow of thought and imagination, and the outer world, episodes of violent destruction and ongoing change, noting how insights generated by the meeting of these worlds are never singular or straightforward in a positivist sense but are often marked by plurality, contradiction and transformation. The focus in this instance will be on how thinking about the climate present can also generate a thinking beyond to other possibilities (e.g. imaginaries of a future degrowth society). It will assess current moves to institutionalise new geo-engineering technologies to stabilise climate conditions and protect capitalism's growth imperative, noting how the contradictions inherent in such proposals can trigger a dialectical turn towards other futures and other relations with nature.

Introduction

The more we are confronted with evidence of the limitations of conventional ways of engaging with the challenges of climate change today, the more an empirical reality of failure seems to inspire an imagining of futures beyond catastrophe. When informed by the shortcomings of the prevailing world order, these imaginings create ‘new subjective possibilities’ as to how damaged life can become something more than what it currently is (Adorno, 2004: 298–299). Of critical importance here is the mediation process, or the journey towards thought freedom via negativism. That is, when inner worlds of thought, feeling, intuition, imagination become preoccupied with the social, political, economic and ecological challenges of our time, producing new insights on the relationship between freedom and domination, or that between despair and hope. For Adorno (1993), the ‘negative thought’ processes inspired by this mediation and the discovery of contradiction (between the idea of the good society and reality) are an essential forerunner to freedom. That is, freedom from the identifying concepts and suppressive logic of capitalism.

For Adorno (2004: 314), the motivation for such a ‘negative dialectics’ is materialist in its desire to address the degree of suffering capitalism imposes upon nature. To lend a voice to this suffering (Adorno, 2004: 17) is to think beyond the ordinariness of its violence and activate previously unscripted understandings of nature's value. In that, Adorno's negative dialectics is also conceptual in its desire to honour nature in its difference (non-identity) from what a restricted instrumental reasoning defines it as (an object of utility). ¹ To reach the non-identical, a negative dialectics is needed to expose how the unity traditionally imposed on nature is achieved through a systematic denial of its differences and diversity. Nature's non-identical is that which emerges beyond a priori categorisations of nature as responsive to human manipulation and control, now rendered increasingly unintelligible by the unpredictable dimensions of rapidly changing planetary conditions.

What were once largely imperceptible features of our everyday environment (e.g. the quality of air we breathe, the acidity of oceans, the flammability of woodlands) now gain greater perceptive relevance due to wider changes occurring in their character. The disclosure of difference in this instance may bring a series of new cognitive operations into play, including a sense of ‘disturbance’ in the relevance of traditional interpretive categories. Climate related disturbance experiences offer the thinking subject an empirical basis from which to reassess the ongoing validity of generally accepted truths (e.g. the capacities of science to control the risks posed by climate change and enable society, as we know it, to continue). Efforts to make identical what in truth runs counter is met with resistance when the division between instances of environmental contact and the concept proves too great to ignore (Adorno, 2004: 17). Moving back and forth negatively between instances of environmental destruction and concepts may help to dissociate thought from ‘the solidity’ of capitalist worldviews but it does not necessarily guarantee freedom from the same, especially when these experiences are met with ‘resignation, denial and failure’ (Adorno, 2004: 20). There is an essential ambivalence here at the heart of Adorno's understanding of the contribution of a negative dialectics to the realisation of better potentials, one characteristic of the Frankfurt School's more general scepticism of programmes aimed at realising some utopian future state. One has only to think of Benjamin's (1996: 340–1) emphasis on the role of ‘counter-rhythmic ruptures’ in shattering the dogma on a linear conception of historical time, or Marcuse's (1964) understanding of potential futures as indeterminate ‘historical projects’ to see the relevance of this ambivalence to a critical theory of society. ² Nonetheless, it is still possible to see in Adorno's negative dialectics a desire to understand how better possibilities are at least conceivable when the subject uses the power of thought to reach beyond a problematic present to better potentialities.

Similarly in relation to climate change, growing contact with rising temperatures, storm and wildfire destruction offer the thinking subject a series of perceptive cues as to how to assess the limits of certain accepted truths regarding the state of nature's wellbeing. Such cues point to ‘contradictions that cannot be settled for the sake of peace and quiet’ (Adorno, 2004: 142) especially when their insufficiencies become overwhelming (or ‘dissonant’, ibid: 5). In this moment, new insights may offer this subject a set of reasons why it is necessary to ‘think beyond’ the ecological present to other possibilities. There is, of course, no reason to assume that these cues will not be met with denial, especially as denial remains the most powerful force blinding society to the consequences of intensifying carbon production (Skillington, 2023). Its pervasiveness socially continues to shape a desire ‘not to know’ the gravity of the dangers we face, leading new episodes of ecological disaster to quickly ‘disappear’ from official channels of public communication (institutional habits of forgetting). Even so, ongoing failures at international climate change mitigation also continue to arouse disquiet, particularly amongst those most affected (e.g. the AOSIS, COP 28 2023), suggesting that responses to climate change are not as singular or reified as a domination thesis may imply. ³

Recognising the ongoing complexities of our historical condition, Adorno (1982) sought a method of critical inquiry that did not fall into the positivist trap of accounting for social reality in singular terms (e.g. presenting only evidence of domination or resistance as an ‘either/or’) but accommodates the possibility of contradiction. Such an approach proves particularly useful for understanding the current ecological situation when contradiction defies the practical and methodological relevance of positivism's ‘either/or’ only to highlight the greater relevance of ‘and’ as a dominant historical reality (Adorno, 1956, 1982: 87). For example, the need to account for the paradoxical relationship that can prevail between levels of despair and anxiety over the growing ferocity of global climate destruction and continuing hope for a more sustainable future. This is the essence of Adorno's project of a negative dialectics which highlights the productive relevance of confronting such contradiction rather than denying it. The discussion below assesses how encounters with ecological adversity can stimulate bi-directional thinking about our planetary predicament. That is, a thinking with the climate present, its adversities and contradictions, in ways that also generates a thinking beyond to other possibilities (e.g. imaginaries of a degrowth society). It will focus first on moves to introduce new geo-engineering technologies to sustain a growth model in the face of increasingly unstable climate conditions, noting how these efforts are reflective of capitalism's mimetic impulse (the adaptation of nature's cycles to mirror capitalist needs), before considering how the contradictions inherent in these developments also trigger a dialectical turn towards the possibility of other futures, as well as other relations with nature.

On the valorisation of nature as commodity: Geo-engineering ‘solutions’ to climate change

The quiet introduction of a series of geo-engineered ‘solutions’ to the effects of climate change across various world regions in recent years is astonishing in terms of the lack of attention given to the potential risks these developments pose to planetary health. More than a technology, geo-engineering is also ‘a materialised ideological response’ to the threats climate change has come to pose to the needs of capitalism. ⁴ Now that Plan A, calling for a strict delimitation of carbon production and global temperatures to below a 1.5 degrees threshold, has proven ‘grossly unsuccessful’ (Crutzen, 2006), attention turns to a consideration of prospects for implementing Plan B. In the case of the latter, geo-engineering solutions are promoted as a ‘viable defence mechanism’ against the effects of climate change entailing techniques such as the injection of aerosol particles into the stratosphere to block some fraction of sunlight and divert it back into space (SAI). A second technique is ‘cloud seeding’ where silver iodide and other chemicals are sprayed into clouds to encourage precipitation, causing more droplets to form and eventually fall as rain. Unlike Plan A, in the case of Plan B the imperatives of capitalism are carefully incorporated into the design and implementation of ‘solutions’ to deepening climate change threats. In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, millions have already been invested in cloud seeding programmes to combat water insecurity in the region. Similarly, in the US, government has established a $3.5 billion fund for schemes that promise to extract carbon dioxide from the air, as part of its wider project of ‘climate intervention’ (NOAA, 2021).

Ultimately, the deployment of large scale manipulations of the Earth's natural systems are in the interests of ensuring that any incompatibilities between the goals of capitalism (profit and economic growth) and rapidly rising temperatures or ocean acidification are resolved in ways that allow capitalist enterprise to continue unhindered (Gunderson et al., 2020). In this way, geo-engineering enables the continuation of capitalism's imperial project of accumulation (Harvey, 2003: 137), removing all but the last ‘hindrances’ in the way of a valorisation of nature as commodity. Capitalism has always relied upon a colonisation of some ‘outside’ or new frontier of expansion as the primary ‘historical method’ for prolonging its career (Luxemburg, 2003[1913]: 426). Today, this ‘outside’ is nature's elemental components (sunlight, temperature, rainfall, photosynthesis) and their conquest grants capitalism a whole new range of options for expanding its growth potential beyond nature's traditional limits. The energy of the sun, rainfall and natural light now come to be absorbed into capitalist systems of production in ways that enable the global drive for acceleration to continue. Nature's domination here is connected to capitalism's mimetic impulse (Adorno, 2005), the desire to mimic the powers of a nature whose imminent collapse is said to be avoided chiefly through the interventions of science. ⁵

However, mimicking the functions of nature through geo-engineering masks several disturbing truths. Invariably, these technologies will alter the regular cycles of nature. For instance, the intensity and pace at which plant life interacts with sunlight and triggers photosynthesis. But since these interventions are not in the interests of addressing the underlining drivers of climate change, their more likely effect is to further incentivise the exploitation and destruction of limited resources, adding to current rates of loss of biodiversity. Second, as the normalcy of these changes comes to be generalised across many policy areas, technological designs, practices and institutions, the likelihood is that society will eventually become locked into relations of dependency on these methods to artificially maintain liveable planetary conditions. In this way, a compulsive mimesis of nature's cycles turns planetary life into a space of imprisonment. The fact that the geo-engineered weather conditions of the future are expected to be serviced by privately-owned companies operating in a competitive market (e.g. ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Conoco Philips and Royal Dutch Shell have all funded or continue to support geo-engineering research projects, see Reynolds et al., 2018) creates yet another dimension of risk (e.g. price fixing, corruption, the imposition of additional financial burdens on developing states already disproportionately affected by climate change). McKinnon (2020) points to the danger of monopolistic arrangements emerging in the management and future administration of ‘geo-engineering weather services’. Also, the possibility of these services being used as a weapon of geo-political warfare or as sanctions against ‘rogue states’ (e.g. the withholding of temperature controlling mechanisms). Equally, the possibility of malfunction or ‘shock terminations’ occurring, causing temperatures to suddenly soar with fatal consequences (Ferraro et al., 2014). Finally, there is already an emerging body of evidence to suggest that strategic changes made to the climate system in the interests of helping one community can have detrimental consequences for others due to the interconnected nature of global weather and ocean systems (e.g. the contribution of practices of cloud seeding to the warming of oceans, the bleaching of coral reefs and higher rates of mortality amongst seabirds this year, see Voosen, 2023). Add to this the absence at present of any regulatory or legal framework capable of determining liability for the harms generated by these practices.

The fact that geo-engineered solutions to climate change appear rational to many, in spite of the multiple risks involved in their application and likely long-term effects, suggests a strong resistance to abandoning capitalism's growth imperative and with that, carbon intensive living. It also highlights the enduring influence of presentism – a being in, imagining and relating to the prevailing world order as a ‘historical necessity’ (Luxemburg, 2003 [1913]: 398; Skillington, 2019: 73) – and denial of any kind of imaginative alternative. Instead, the necessity of capitalism's ongoing expansion is rigorously defended while the urgency of addressing climate change via structural change (keeping fossil fuels in the ground, slowing rates of carbon production and rethinking the fundamentals of the economic system) is played down. ⁶ All other proposals that do not embrace the logic of growth are rejected (Feenberg, 2005: 87). SAI, CDR and other geo-engineering solutions offer capitalism a way of containing the immediate effects of a climate crisis it has centrally shaped without having to decelerate its ‘metabolic relations’ with planetary life (Marx, 1976: 637). Commitment to the ongoing development of geo-engineering, in effect, becomes a matter of protecting capitalism's identity principle (the growth society) and suppressing the discomfort caused by contradiction (Adorno, 2004: 142).

For critics, however, the discomfort of contradiction has become all too real. The ethical and practical irrationalities of a system that employs high risk technologies to control the elemental forces of nature (heat, light, rain) in the interests of allowing a growth project to continue are clear, especially for those forced to endure the worst effects of these interventions (e.g. the ‘cloud wars’ emerging between rival states in the Middle East amidst searing drought and heat). Reducing nature to a handmaiden of capitalist needs inevitably will fail when the tensions between rising temperatures and economic growth eventually come to a head and geo-engineered solutions no longer work. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these developments is the extent to which certain basic facts of planetary life are systematically denied and faith in the power of science to grant greater human independence from the rest of nature is renewed (Marcuse, 1964; Starosielski, 2021). For instance, a denial of the fact that our living is, essentially, a consequence of the living of others (i.e. plant life). Plant life represents the essential element of a life-supporting commons. In their breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen, plants are the primary agents of planetary world-making (photosynthesis) and world-giving (oxygen). Because we cannot survive in this world without the hospitalities of this nature, we are already in a relationship of dependency on it. To live responsibly with nature then is to respect this relation of dependency on a nature that has limits and vulnerabilities. Geo-engineering threatens this relationship of respect by interfering with processes of natural selection and adaptation.

The courage to think differently

In many respects, Adorno's insights on the power of a negative dialectics prove as relevant today as when first published in the 1960s. In particular, Adorno's continuation of the work of Hegel (1976) and a young Marx (1976) on the distinctly human capacity to reflect on one's historical situation and be receptive to moments when damaged life speaks meaningfully to us (developed further by Rosa, 2019 in more recent years). That is, moments when different hues may be gleaned from circumstances of despair by the ‘liberating influence’ of thought (see, also, Adorno, 2005; Adorno and Horkheimer, 1986: 246). In this moment, something more may be grasped beyond a sense of hopelessness with the human condition (Rosa, 2019). Adorno refers to this process as integral to a working through wrong life, similar to that triggered recently by the devastation caused by record temperatures and unprecedented wildfire destruction (e.g. in Hawaii, North-western Canada, Greece, Spain, Portugal and California in 2023). In these moments, consciousness of contradiction can be sharpened and greater clarity brought to bear on the truth of the present climate predicament. ⁷ More intense contact with ecological destruction makes the contradictions inherent in ongoing commitments to the fiction of unlimited growth more socially apparent. As these commitments are both ‘identical and not identical’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1986: 15) with what has been part of the blueprint of western institutional thinking for centuries, the potential for contradiction remains active. For instance, social imaginaries of degrowth have co-existed with those of growth for many years (e.g. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth, 1972) but have moved more to the fore of collective social thinking in recent times in response to intensifying climate risks and contradictory commitments to sustainable development goals. As an alternative model of framing and interacting with nature, degrowth presents itself as a potential medium through which new social futures might be conceived and brought into being. Its questioning of the sense, meaning and rational purpose of depleting the world's remaining natural resource reserves has helped to reorient debate on the steering capacities and guiding principles of contemporary democratic societies towards the possibility of a more responsible living amongst others. Even so, the current planetary condition, as one of extreme danger, requires development trajectories to be redefined in more fundamental ways than they have to date and in accordance with the limitations that will inevitably attend human existence in the near future (Lear, 2006: 121).

For degrowth movements, realising society's ‘better potentials’ under these conditions necessitates the institutionalisation of a social model of deceleration based on collective and genuinely community-based sustainable development programmes (support for the further development of eco-cooperatives, for instance, see Zelik, 2023). Unfortunately well-meaning concepts of sustainable development and responsibility have been subject to ‘identity thinking’, or efforts to make them identical with the needs of capitalism. The only appropriate form of resistance to this problematic project is to highlight how the lived reality of more and more communities does not correspond to this identity framing. In their efforts to think beyond the horizons of the identical, degrowth movements explore forms of social, economic and cultural living that accommodate the limits of a heating planet (Skillington, 2017: 171–199). In that, they initiate a thinking beyond the capitalist present in the hope of actualising the non-identical (degrowth) but not without demanding that hard choices be made (Jutten, 2019: 297). However, these choices may also be seen as necessary when the space needed to explore other possibilities (e.g. deceleration) is opened up by a felt contact with danger and the spectacular failures of environmental regulation (Skillington, 2015: 231). Adorno (2004: 138) understood the importance of a conscious knowing the worst scenarios we face, here conceived as the culmination of centuries of environmental destruction, colonial plunder, violence and expulsion, because this knowledge denaturalises the capitalist project and liberates thought from its captivity. In doing so, it also opens up the possibility of a thinking beyond to a future where these wrongs might be addressed in a more empathetic, caring and effective manner.

Conclusion

Lacking, as we do, a full understanding of the dangers we face, the goal of controlling/manipulating the effects of climate change no longer offer a great deal of reassurance even when we still hold to the idea of preserving a liveable world. In this context, the indeterminacy of our predicament produces a type of consciousness prone to despair but paradoxically, also hope, one that ‘could not even despair over the grey, did it not harbour the notion of a different colour’ (Adorno, 2004: 370/377–78). The possibility of something better, or ‘a different colour’ as Adorno refers to it here, is often inspired by unexpected ‘fugitive ethical experiences’ (Bernstein, 2001: 437). That is, interludes when the ‘non-negative’ living elements of our world (e.g. wonder at the majestic beauty or power of nature in all its varieties) offer glimpses at the possibility of something beyond despair and violence (Adorno quoting Benjamin, 2004: 371/378). The entanglement of these ethical experiences with radical destruction, however, means that, in themselves, they are not sufficient to underwrite a new ethical normative relationship with nature. The latter requires a more detailed reconstruction of the what, how, and why of destruction (informing the explanatory diagnostic function of critical theory). That is, a squaring up to our ecological predicament with an educated understanding of its limits and possibilities (the anticipatory-utopian function of critical theory). When ‘one has gone relentlessly to the furthest extreme [in terms of exposure to destruction and despair], there lies the only respect which is fitting: a respect for the possibility of the mind, despite everything, to raise itself however slightly above that which is’ (Adorno, [1965] 2001: 124–125).

Believing in the capacities of this mind to imagine a different world, however, can be dangerous, as Adorno warns, when it spills over into a naive belief in the possibility of realising a better future chiefly through experimental science. Having the courage to know the worst and reflect openly on our predicament generates a type of ‘educated hope’ (Jutten, 2019; Lear, 2006) in prospects for reaching achievable goals. Adorno's negative dialectics offers an exploration of how this might be reached, how difficult circumstances and painful truths might be addressed, not sidestepped (Adorno, 2001), and how the necessity of change might be acted upon.