RICHARD SEYMOUR
Richard Seymour is a Northern Irish Marxist thinker and writer exploring the intersection of ideology, sociology and technology. He has published seven books, including Against Austerity (2014), Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (2016) and The Twittering Machine (2019). His latest, The Disenchanted Earth (2022), is published by Indigo Press. He spoke to TANK about ecological sadness, structures of meaning and how scientific processes might inform an eco-socialist future.
Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait by Marta Corada
Nell Whittaker How did the book come together, and why did you write it now?
Richard Seymour I’ve been writing about climate change for a few years, having been faintly aware that there was an issue, but not having enough emotional investment to start thinking seriously about it. Around 2015 or 2016, it started to sink in in a deeply mournful way. I describe one particular experience in the introductory essay: a winter afternoon – Christmas Day, actually – that should have been frosty, maybe even snowy, but was warm and balmy and a bit sticky. And it suddenly occurred to me that I had been reading headlines that we were seeing unprecedentedly warm winters, volatile climates, and perturbations of the polar winds and so on, and I was just struck with a deep sadness. In the book, I refer to the “icicle stab of grief”: it’s the sudden awareness that things around you, un-commodifiable and unquantifiable riches, will disappear and nothing you are used to will exist in the future. In David Attenborough’s recent documentary about the plague year 2020, he describes some of the immediate effects of people staying indoors and not travelling so much. In parts of India people could suddenly see, from 200 miles away, the Himalayas, whereas previously the sky was too blotted out with hazy fog pollution. Then, one particular response to the climate crisis being mooted is solar-radiation management where you spray aerosols into the sky and block out sunlight, which will make the sky white, and I was thinking how utterly dystopian that is. It would be tempting to think there was something deeply sentimental about this – why are you bothering about the colour of the sky when we’ve got to save lives? – but the reality is that we are destroying aspects of our environment that are profoundly culturally resonant. So I started, in 2015, to research as an amateur, and I dug up everything I could find about oceanography, palaeontology, evolutionary theory. Suddenly, the mere fact of life and its contingent emergence became really important. At the core of the book is an essay about the Arctic called “Ultima Thule”, which is my favourite because I’ve developed, for profound emotional or unconscious reasons I can’t explain, an attachment to the idea of the Arctic; this is poignant given that at this point the Arctic will probably no longer exist sometime in this century. It just struck me that this form of life – because it’s vibrant with life, despite its so-called “white Mars” quality – had existed for the entirety of the existence of human beings. In terms of the planet’s history, it’s a dot, but human beings have always existed with the Arctic and Antarctica, these frozen poles. And for it to be ripped away by our own activities coming back at us like an asteroid made me want to try and rethink it and to delve into its deep, planetary history, as well as its cultural history and what it means to us.
NW You say that “theory that resists biochemistry, oceanography and palaeontology tends to undercut the necessary sensibilities”. What is the relationship between scientific understanding and “structures of feeling”?
RS The science has gotten away from us because it’s become vast, complex and difficult to follow. I insist on this being a work of passion and there’s bound to be stuff in there that I’ve got badly wrong, but the basic effort is to work mostly with secondary literature to try to put it in a language that resonates emotionally, that taps into the unconscious investments that we have in our environment. I refer to Christopher Bollas and his work on the ways in which we encounter the world as a series of evocative objects, which we invest with relationships and emotions. That’s the reason why it can become a deeply melancholic experience to lose environments that had previously represented so much for us. Renée Lertzman’s work deals with residents of Wisconsin exposed to pollution, asking them to describe their relationship to these places, and most of them have stories of important relationships, adolescent romances or whatever, that were formed around these environments and times of enjoyment, pleasure – bliss, even. We use the term “apathy” to describe our relationships to the natural world and therefore to scientific understandings – “most people don’t care; they’re too wrapped up in their consumerist obsessions” – but I think it’s an emotional stalemate. We know that there’s a problem coming, but we have not been given the means to do anything about it. In a sane world we would be having emergency town-hall meetings every week, everywhere, to dialogue, to discuss, to say, what the hell are we going to do about this? We would make decisions collectively, which would affect production, consumption, transport, all of that stuff, yet it’s not in our control, and you’ve got also life crowding in on you – having to maintain a job, pay off debts, the constant shocks of bills that you didn’t expect and relationships that you have to maintain – and then someone says, “Now you’ve got to save the planet by using better light bulbs and shopping more efficiently.” Even if you do that, you know damn well that it’s not going to make any difference, but also, who has the time? So there’s a sense in which people feel detached from and disempowered by the knowledge that matters.
NW Which is what you describe as “disavowal” in the book.
RS The psychoanalytic category of disavowal is where you know, but you act as if you don’t know; that’s more or less how we have to live with climate change all the time. We’re constantly doing things like buying fruit that has been flown in from parts of the world where it’s in season and therefore has a carbon footprint. I am eating death; I eat food that causes extinction. Extinction is what there is to eat. I don’t focus on it all the time because it would be unbearable, but when I think about it, I feel incredibly guilty. But my guilt isn’t useful, and nobody’s guilt would be useful at this point. The fossil-fuel industry and the whole denialist industry started out by deploying the concept of guilt, rather than allowing people to have a sense of the structures that are causing pollution, climate change, ocean acidification, the destruction of the species, the sixth mass extinction. They put out advertising like, “individuals are lazy; they’re greedy; they throw rubbish all over the place”, and more recently, “every individual has a carbon footprint”. The critical theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say that the rulers, whoever they are, wherever they’re in power, always have a strategy of debt that secures obedience: if you’re constantly struggling to pay off debts, you’re less likely to cause trouble; you’re less likely to strike at your job or risk being arrested on a protest if you’ve got your mortgage or student loans to pay off. We’ve become an indebted society as part of the whole speculation economy, and it has this subsidiary effect of making people feel stalemated, like they can’t do anything.
NW You write about what might come next, specifically with regards to the different shapes that eco-fascism might fall into, “a mobilised political constituency that is ready or even morally energised for quite a lot of death”. How has that idea been impacted by the mass death that we’ve been living through, due to the pandemic?
RS It’s curious, isn’t it, because when we think of the new right, we tend to give them the label of authoritarianism, and I don’t deny that that’s an important part of what they do. But if they’re just authoritarians, why have they been so libertarian about the pandemic? Why was Trump first of all ambivalent about lockdowns and then a freedom fighter on the side of the militias? And why did the Johnson administration delay restrictions at every point until the last minute? Why was Bolsonaro a refusenik who went out in the crowd shaking hands, knowingly spreading? He said early on in the pandemic, “Look, I’m sorry; people are going to die.” The idea is that enjoyment of life is bound up with a certain amount of death. Their apparent acceptance and mastery of death and tragedy is a lie, because ultimately it revolves around pushing the consequences onto other people who are demonised and othered; they want a very policed society, even though they align themselves with a kind of pseudo-libertarianism. That does mean that they’re creating constituencies that are prepared for quite a lot of death – provided, of course, that they will be more protected because they are a superior caste of humanity. Climate denialism becomes climate affirmation: if we get warmer climates that’s not such a big deal, because if some poor islands in the Pacific or around the equator get submerged, what’s the big loss? There’s a kind of eugenic disposition and then that fuses with the survivalism of the very rich: they’re building their Xanadus that are going to be resistant to climate change. It’s not going to work, but nationalism and bordering – and the racist violence that comes with that – is a way of democratising that Xanadu impulse. It’s a way of saying, you can be protected, too.
NW It makes me think of a quote by the late scholar Lauren Berlant: “‘Fantasy’ is not a thin wish but a logic that names a value.” What is the logic of utopia and the role of desire in political thinking?
RS It depends on what your basic understanding of desire is. I cleave to psychoanalysis, so I tend to think of desire as always desire for something else. I think we need to think of utopia not as a determinant end condition, and this is where Marx is right: he refused to write blueprints for utopia, saying it would be an act of hubris. It would also be an attempt to legislate for future generations what they get to work out for themselves. But we can keep the utopian imagination alive. This is why I ask questions; it’s about whetting the imagination. We need to be good at doing specifics; for example, if we want to implement a Green New Deal, we need to be very clever about how it’s designed. The rare metals that we need to construct solar panels are extracted in a way that is deeply exploitative and environmentally damaging. We need intelligent mediations between the short term and where we hope to end up in the long range. The long-term vision has to be not too specific, and it has to be about the “what if” question. If we can at least have in the back of our minds the question of “what if”, then we’re going to be less impressed by the apparent permanence of the present. Maybe I can wrap up that answer with reference to Thoreau and the transcendentalists, which was an interesting kind of multi-racial creed of progress in the 19th century. We tend to forget about this, but it was anti-slavery; it was abolitionist; it was radically democratic; it was against the subjugation of women; it was against the mistreatment of children in schools; against anything that was about training children or punishing them or making them into servants. And it started with the idea that there is in every atom of being and therefore every living being and every person, some part of divinity. You don’t have to be a spiritualist or religious to see how that is politically explosive, but more importantly, it is constantly pointing one towards transcendence of the immediate material situation, which always feels compulsory. You walk down the streets, these buildings, these houses, they look like they’re going to be here forever and they’re not. Yet we, as a civilisation are like a penguin rookery on the side of a volcano waiting for it to explode. We should always keep in our minds the difference between the eternal and the temporal: we should keep open a transcendent imagination. And that’s the term I think I would prefer to use instead of utopian, which has become somewhat compromised. ◉