Abstract
Despite broad public awareness of climate change as a critical issue, we paradoxically observe public inertia as a social pattern, particularly in the wealthy-industrialised Global North. Critical scholarship commonly attributes this phenomenon, knowing-without-reaction, in the context of climate change to ideology, suggesting that the distorted image of reality produced and circulated by the capital-state nexus leads to the dearth of progressive political action at the public level. The proposed solution, correspondingly, often takes the form of ideology-critique. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, this paper offers an alternative diagnosis, positing that the phenomenon pertains more to the organisation of desire within capitalism and hence the capitalisation of subjectivity than to the alignment of interests between the capital-state nexus and the public through ideological manipulation. In response, the final section proposes the production of subjectivity (ourselves) anew as a potential remedy. Drawing on Guattari’s insights into art and politics, this section reflects on the lessons that we can draw from the techniques and practices of ‘minor art’ as a pathway to political subjectivisation in the context of climate change. In particular, the final part speculates transversally on two technologies of self-transformation in response to the question, ‘What is to be done?’: opening up through minor art and becoming-a-minor-artist.
Introduction
The established body of climate science has reached a consensus that ‘warming of the climate system is unequivocal’ (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2013: 2) and, with the increasing rate of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (United Nations Environment Programme (UN-EP), 2023), the planet is accelerating towards a catastrophe (Hansen, 2009; IPCC, 2018; Lovelock, 2009; New et al., 2011). Various environmental and climate movements (e.g. Earth First!, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, Just Stop Oil) engage in potent actions to compel governments and corporations to avoid the risk of ecological collapse. Notwithstanding how hope-inspiring these movements are, in terms of scale and public interest, they remain on the periphery of social life. Several scholars have highlighted that public passivity on climate change is pervasive (Browne, 2018; Hornsey and Fielding, 2020; Norgaard, 2011; Wittneben et al., 2012), with this passivity referring to the dearth of progressive political action, for example, participation in grassroots movements, environmental activism, public voting patterns, significant lifestyle changes. This is particularly the case in the wealthy-industrialised Global North, responsible for 92% of excess greenhouse emissions (Hickel, 2020), from whose citizens we would (and should) expect more accountability, responsibility and some form of subversive action. 1
There are various explanations for public inaction on climate change. One explanation is that there are people who are in ‘literal denial’ (Cohen, 2001), asserting that climate change is not or cannot be real, from whom we cannot expect any progressive political action. The sources of literal denial have been identified as distortions of climate science (Oreskes and Conway, 2010), religious beliefs (Morrison et al., 2015), group-based identity dynamics (Bliuc et al., 2015), and inner defence mechanisms (Rayner, 2012). While literal denial cannot be overlooked in explaining the public inertia, polls and research indicate that the vast majority of people in carbon-intensive nations do not fall into this category. 2 In other words, literal denial partially explains the phenomenon. In this regard, it is hard to disagree with Wittneben et al. (2012) that ‘we need to develop a better understanding of apathy and inertia in the face of the current [climate] crisis’ (p. 1431).
What interests me in this paper is not outright denial as such but rather what Wright et al. (2013) refer to as climate change ‘surreality’: the disconnect between knowing and acting or, put simply, knowing-without-reaction. Indeed, most people in the Global North state that climate change is a serious problem, but they show little intention to change its driving force or their lifestyles. 3 Norgaard’s (2011) significant work provides insight into this ‘double reality’ by drawing on Cohen’s (2001) other categories of denial. Norgaard (2011), in brief, argues that the capital-state nexus produces and circulates the idea that climate change is manageable (i.e. interpretive denial), which in turn shapes socio-cultural norms, influences the intensity of emotions, and fashions people’s beliefs, ultimately leading to knowing-without-reaction at the public level (i.e. implicatory denial).
At its core, critical management scholarship aligns with Norgaard’s perspective, interpreting the phenomenon through the notion of ideology. The argument here can be summarised as follows: knowing-without-reaction is structured by a set of ideas and solutions (e.g. eco-engineering, market-based interventions such as emission trading) promoted by the capital-state nexus and its allies, including the media, academia, think-tanks, and lobby groups (Banerjee, 2012; Nyberg and Wright, 2022; Petersen et al., 2019). Even though most people accept that climate change is a serious problem, they often refrain from engaging in progressive political action, for their beliefs, interests and deeds are deeply shaped by the ‘more capitalism is our saviour’ imaginary (Levy and Spicer, 2013). Accordingly, the remedy often takes the form of ideology-critique: exposing the irrationality, groundlessness, or outright falsity of the ideas and solutions promoted by the right-wing populist ruling class, with the aim of empowering the masses to recognise the reality of existing socio-material affairs (e.g. Böhm and Dabhi, 2009; Klein, 2014; McLaren and Markusson, 2020).
The introduction identified the problem addressed here as knowing-without-reaction in the context of climate change. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1983), the second section will propose an alternative diagnosis, arguing that the problem of knowing-without-reaction is more closely related to the organisation of desire within capitalism than to the alignment of interests between the capital-state nexus and the public through ideological manipulation. In particular, this section will discuss how capitalism immanently produces a specific form of subjectivity that spectates the collapse of nature in real-time while, paradoxically, expressing deep concern – an apt manifestation of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2009). In response, the final section will introduce the production of subjectivity (ourselves) anew as a potential antidote. Building on Guattari’s (1995) insights into art and politics, this section will consider a ‘minor-art’ practice (O’Sullivan, 2006) as a model for political subjectivisation. Specifically, in response to the question ‘What is to be done?’, it will speculate on two technologies of self-transformation: opening up through minor art and becoming a minor artist.
Beyond ideology: Reassessing knowing-with-reaction through capitalism’s organisation of desire
This section draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of ideology and their theory of desire and subjectivity to provide an alternative insight into knowing-without-reaction in the context of climate change. In orthodox Marxist thought, the notion of ideology refers to a camera obscura. Its function is to produce and circulate an inverted image of socio-material affairs, a misrepresentation of the world (Oh, 2022). For instance, the idea that carbon markets or techno-fix will effectively combat climate change can be seen as part of this ideological misrepresentation. By disseminating their illusionary ideas, separated from material reality, the ruling class convinces the masses that their seemingly different interests are, in fact, well aligned. For instance, carbon markets or techno-fix is an absolute win for all stakeholders. In this way, the reproduction of existing socio-economic relations is secured. In this context, the key political task becomes dropping down the ideological blinders (e.g. carbon markets or techno-fix cannot foster a more sustainable economy) and getting the masses to recognise their true interests (e.g. Böhm et al., 2012; Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011). The battle is then mostly fought at the level of interest.
Deleuze and Guattari’s discontent with the ideology-critique is rooted in the categorical distinction they draw between the preconscious investments made at the level of interest and the unconscious libidinal investments that are made according to the positions of desire (particularly see, Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 345). While the former is related to the set of ideas defining the patterns of cognition, that is, ideology, the latter is based on desiring-production operating at the level of unconsciousness. Drawing on Nietzsche’s understanding that consciousness and its preconceptions are epiphenomena of larger unconscious impulses, instincts, or drives, Deleuze and Guattari assign absolute priority to libidinal investments. Desire is primary, and ‘interest always comes after’ to justify or ‘rationalise’ a decision or an action ‘ex post facto’ (Holland, 1999: 102, my emphasis).
For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is primary insofar as there is an immanent connection between production and desire, and this is two-fold: production is in desire as desire is in production. Firstly, ‘desire is an active power’ (Smith, 2019: 129). Desire is production, whose product is real (material, not a fantasy): ‘there is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other . . . The social field is immediately invested by desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 37). Secondly, desire is not ‘an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered set-up’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 215). More precisely, the organisation of desire does not pass through the superstructure of ideology; rather, it is always already organised at the level of infrastructure within the material flows of the capitalist economy, shaping a particular form of subjectivity. 4
According to Deleuze and Guattari (1983), the economic infrastructure of capitalist society is knit by axioms, 5 not by codes such as narratives, traditions, customs, habits, stories as in pre-capitalist social formations. Capitalism functions as an axiomatic machine, generating quantitative relations between heterogeneous resource flows (e.g. raw materials, labour power, knowledge, sentiments, attention) and converting these conjunctions into commodities. Profit is generated as a differential surplus (value) from these diverse conjunctions. In this process, capitalism remains indifferent to the intrinsic qualities and characteristics of the elements it brings together. In other words, ‘which axiom’ to be mobilised hinges on a single criterion: whether the conjunction will generate profit.
Capitalism is thus a cynical machine, for ‘it is the quantities that are marked, no longer the persons themselves: your capital or your labour capacity, the rest is not important’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 251). In capitalism, the subject is seemingly ‘exposed to whatever existence he or she can get in exchange for his or her labour power’ (Read, 2008: 141). Thus, capitalism appears to liberate the flows of desire. However, as with other modes of production, human desire must be captured in capitalism to secure a mode of existence aligned with its priorities. For Deleuze and Guattari, money, in particular, plays a central role in the capture of people’s desire. In capitalism, firstly, money functions as the universal object of desire as it stands in for all other objects. Whether one seeks security, health or education, money becomes the primary mediating force through which these objects of desire can be possessed. Secondly, the intergalactic distance between money-as-capital and money-as-wage is effaced by the same object in capitalism, that is, money (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 230). The money in a wage worker’s pocket appears the same as the money, for example, invested by a hedge fund to generate profit. When these attributes of money converge, the acquisition of all desired objects appears to a subject as merely a matter of becoming a mini-capitalist – or, in Foucault’s (2008) terms, an entrepreneurial self.
In this context, we can refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s observation on the human condition in capitalist societies: ‘It is . . . the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety. The two taken together constitute humanism’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 225). 6 Capitalism creates a division between knowing and reaction, ideal and existence, mind and matter, private and common. This is a split within subjectivity between what one believes and what one does. One can hold their particular values, their piety about an issue in the private sphere, but that does not keep them from acting cynically in the marketplace, for ‘the desire of the most disadvantaged creature invests with all its strength, irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, in the capitalist social field as a whole’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 229).
Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire and production of subjectivity offers an alternative account of knowing-without-reaction in the context of climate change, suggesting that the phenomenon is not simply a product of ideological manipulation, that is, an expression of false consciousness. Instead, it lies much deeper: at the level of desire. Most people in the industrialised Global North hold strong beliefs about the urgency of the climate change crisis, but these beliefs are often overridden by the deeper libidinal investments nurtured by capital. More precisely, regardless of how pious people appear to be about climate change or, at a broader level, about the environmental ecology, their desires have already been captured and channelled by capital into, for example, the consumer economy, competition, title promotion, cost-benefit calculus, lifestyle enhancement, efficiency, productivity, expedience, self-interested goals, and so on – that is cynicism.
This perspective helps explain the paradox that, although 93% of Europeans view climate change as a ‘serious problem’, only about 17% consider the carbon footprint of their transportation and food choices (European UnionEuropean Commission (EU-EC), 2023: 23, 36). It also sheds light on why only 31% of Europeans support making salary sacrifices (i.e. paying more tax) to reduce their national economies’ reliance on fossil fuels (Duffy et al., 2022: 38). At the expense of provocation, it helps explain why I am interested in travelling by air from one continent to another to give a brief presentation on ‘system change, not climate change’. In addition, it suggests why ideas like green capitalism, eco-engineering, and market-based interventions circulate widely in public discourse, including academia and especially business and management scholarship (Nyberg and Wright, 2022), with minimal critical scrutiny. People gravitate towards these ideas and solutions (i.e. capitalist axioms) not simply because they are deceived, but because these ideas and solutions accommodate their established desires by offering ‘to change something so that nothing will really change’ (Žižek, 2021: 221).
Minor-art as a model for political subjectivisation
In the introduction, I identified the problem addressed in this paper as knowing-without-reaction in the context of climate change. In the second section, building on Deleuze and Guattari, I proposed a diagnosis for this problem, arguing that the phenomenon is rooted in the capitalisation of subjectivity through the capture of desire by capital. In this final section, I will speculate on a remedy by considering that the greatest challenge lies in the question of ‘resingularisation’ (of subjectivity), that is, ‘the production of human existence itself anew’ (Guattari, 2000: 34)
Guattari (1995) asserts that the production of subjectivity anew should be thought of as an aesthetic movement, and he offers artistic techniques and practices as a model for the process of political subjectivisation. He even goes further, arguing that art ‘offers us the most advanced model for resistance against capitalist subjectivity’ (Guattari, 1995: 90). This requires qualification. Guattari’s reference is not to institutionalised art, its works and processes, integrated into the dispositives of subjugation and control in contemporary capitalism (e.g. merchants, brokers, capitalist commissioners, legislators, hierarchisation). He acknowledges that, in capitalist societies, art often takes a reactionary form, operating as ‘a dispositive of the production of specific relationships with specific techniques, an economy and specific processes of subjugation which are linked to the full range of instruments at the disposal of the governance of norms’ (Lazzarato, 2008: 174). ‘There is a universe of valorisation’, Guattari writes, ‘including economic valorisation, capturing it [artwork] in a social field’ (Guattari, 1994 quoted in Lazzarato, 2008: 183). This is an institutional cutting-out, whereby art’s ‘creation comes to a dead halt’ (Guattari, 2009: 28).
Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm thus primarily concerns ‘seizing the creative potential [of art]’ (Guattari, 1995: 112) and mobilising it as ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988) towards the resingularisation of subjectivity. The creative and revolutionary potential of art lies in two key characteristics of what Guattari would call a ‘minor art’ (O’Sullivan, 2006), namely ‘producing a break with habitual formations and dominant signifying regimes’ and, concomitantly, ‘affirming of something new’ (O’Sullivan, 2006: 69). This is the function of a minor art: rupturing the present (dissent) and suturing the new (affirmation; Lazzarato, 2008). The rest of the paper will examine these two characteristics of minor art practice, rupturing and suturing and consider the lessons they may offer for the process of political subjectivisation in the context of climate change.
Rupturing the present: According to Lyotard (1991), a (minor) art does not merely produce an artwork; it produces an artwork that ‘harbours within it an excess, a rapture’ (1991: 93). This excess, setting a minor art apart from a major art, lies in its rupturing quality – its capacity to pull the participant or spectator out of mundane consciousness (O’Sullivan, 2001). For Guattari (and Deleuze), this constitutes the first key function of a minor art: to suspend the dominant regime of signification and representation (O’Sullivan, 2006). A minor art achieves this by foregrounding the registers of the intensive and affective, creating fissures within our ‘sensory unconsciousness’ (Williams, 2019: 204). It produces a ‘sensation that takes us beyond the lived experience of a phenomenological flesh’ (Zepke, 2009: 176). To put it concisely, a minor art provokes affective ruptures that disrupt habitual modes of subjectivity.
Suturing the new: For Guattari (and Deleuze), a minor art practice not only disrupts the present by resisting established norms and states of being but also has an affirmative function: it summons new possibilities and forms of life. A minor art achieves this by opening the spectator or participant up to the ‘world previously invisible [or unperceivable] to them but not a world non-existent’ (O’Sullivan, 2001: 133). This is ‘a world of becoming’ (O’Sullivan, 2001: 128). This informs the second, prophetic function of a minor art: ‘contributing to the invention of a people’ (Deleuze, 2005: 217), where ‘people’ are those of us in the here and now. A minor art’s second function, to summarise, lies in facilitating the transformation of our sense of ourselves – that is, self-overcoming (O’Sullivan, 2001).
The first lesson we might draw from a minor art practice towards reinventing ourselves is the need to create a break with the dominant regime and its accompanying significations, refrains and enslaving apparatuses. In other words, we should cultivate a rupture with our habitual selves by departing from ‘the existential Territories’ where we find ourselves fixed (Guattari, 1995). The second lesson is that we need to affirm and experiment with the new, which should not be separated from the first. This involves making pragmatic interventions in our own lives to ‘explore the conditions of becoming-other in any practice, where a new affect or perception in turn alters a feeling or perspective on something’ (Williams, 2019: 211). In the pervasive atmosphere of dullness and passivityGuattari (2000: 69) in the context of climate change, we may propose two tactical elements in response to the question, ‘what is to be done?’: opening up through minor art and becoming-a-minor-artist.
Opening ourselves through (minor) climate change art, actively engaging with its various forms either as a participant (i.e. participatory art) or spectator, might be one possible intervention in our lives (O’Sullivan, 2001, 2006). For Guattari, the interaction between art and its audience involves an existential transference, encouraging people to take responsibility for their unique experiences, leading them to form new connections and perspectives that reshape their understanding of themselves and their relationships with others (see Genosko’s (2009) excellent piece on art and subjective mutation in Guattari). Taplin (2014), an environmental artist and established scholar, explores climate change art projects, exhibitions, and installations such as Cape Farewell, Tipping Point, RETHINK (to which we can add Climate Symphony). She argues that these artworks unsettle the subjectivity within viewers by transforming the abstract realities of climate science into an immersive and sensory experience. At the same time, she affirms that these works of art ‘crystallise a different subjectivity within viewers’ by appealing directly to the affective and intensive register (Taplin, 2014: 510). In a similar vein, Juriatti (2021) explores four contemporary climate change art installations, affirming that by reaching viewers or/and participants through the modulations of temperature, sound, haptic feeling, and taste (i.e. extra-discursive register where the vectors of subjectivisation operate), they powerfully shape people’s relationship to themselves and nature.
To produce ourselves anew, we might consider, secondly, becoming minor artists, actively engaging in self-transforming practices that constitute an ‘art of living’ (à la Foucault). In his genealogy of subjectivity, Foucault (2005) analyses the role of various forms of askesis in the historical evolution of different subjectivities, defining askesis as ‘a work of self on the self, an elaboration of the self by the self, [formation and] transformation of the self by the self’ (p. 16). The practices of askesis may take on rigid, institutional forms, directed towards reinforcing mechanisms of political power, producing politically reactionary subjectivities maintaining the given order (e.g. ancient askesis of self-mastery to master demos). Yet, they may also assume anti-institutional forms, ‘breaking with the conventions, habits, and values of society’ (Foucault, 2011: 184), directed towards transforming the governmental apparatuses of political power, producing radical forms of subjectivities (e.g. Quaker askesis of bearing witness to create a culture of truth).
Drawing on Foucault’s genealogy of self, Munro (2014) underscores that, regardless of their form, the exercises of askesis in the relationship between power and self are central to the formation and transformation of one’s own subjectivity. He analyses particular forms of ethical askesis commonly found within contemporary progressive social movement organisations (i.e. bearing witness, direct action, asceticism, and the use of pleasure). He crucially argues that these forms of askesis, and the accompanying organisational practices embedded in such progressive movements, not only serve as ‘tactical points of reversibility’ to governmental structures of power at a molar level (Munro, 2014: 1142) but also facilitate the production of radical forms of subjectivity at a molecular level, which are often associated with ideals of living a ‘true life’ in common (Foucault, 2011; Munro, 2014). In other words, ‘changing the world also transforms the human who is working for this change’ (Stronzake, 2012: 118 quoted in Munro, 2014: 1139), or in Guattari’s words, ‘I am no longer as I was before. I am . . . carried beyond my familiar existential Territories’ (Guattari, 1995: 93).
Becoming a minor artist, in our context, might then be understood as a form of environmental askesis: a practice of self-transformation that ruptures and sutures new modes of perception, attachment and action in relation to climate change. This is not an askesis of solitary contemplation but one fundamentally tied to making ourselves disciplined to actively participate in collective assemblages of progressive environmental movements. It is since through the shared practices of disruption and reinvention enacted within these environmental movements that alternative futures can be imagined and lived. Becoming a minor artist, in this sense, is not an abstract aesthetic exercise but a concrete mode of political subjectivisation; one that reclaims askesis as a means of fostering an insurgent ecological ethos rooted in collective action, mutual care, and the continual reinvention of ways to resist, relate, and remake the world.
