Are you a pervert or just hysterical? A review of The unbearable lightness of climate populism by Swyngedouw, Erik

'Fetishistic disavowal refers to living through an ideological fantasy that structures the practices of social life in a manner that we can both know the truth of the situation yet act in a different way, without losing subjective or social consistency or coherence. With respect to climate change, this refers not to climate denial, but rather to the repression, disavowal, or foreclosure of the Real mechanisms that produce the climate crisis, namely what David Harvey (2019) calls the ‘mad dance of accumulation’, driven by the expanded circulation of capital and choreographed by class dynamics and other socioecological conflicts and struggles that animate this process, and their displacement around a fetishized ‘thing’ (greenhouse gases) that becomes the quilting point around which both fear and hope revolves and discourse and action crystallizes. As such, ecology operates as ‘the new opium for the masses’ (Žižek 2008b). ' Swyngedouw 2022:4

The political ecologist Erik Swyngedouw has provided a Lacanian-Marxist critique of most climate change activism. I think there is a danger (always) of hyperbole and simplification in such critiques. Lacan can also be difficult to grasp, I am certainly no expert, there are those who might contest Lacan's legacy for climate change politics. Nonetheless I think Swyngedouw 's paper, published in Environmental Politics is interesting. 

(Erik Swyngedouw (2022): The unbearable lightness of climate populism, Environmental Politics, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2022.2090636 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2022.2090636)

Lacan was a French psycho-analyst, his work was Freudian but indebted to the emerging structural linguistics of the 1960s. He has strongly influenced a range of social theorists including Althusser, Foucault and more recently Žižek.

Again I am no expert but I suspect that the notion that there is a lack or absence with which we structure our personalities is an important insight. I think this is derived from Hegel as much as from Freud.

To put things simply, we may have political commitments, which rather than being based on real 'empirical' facts are based on strong emotional attachments. This isn't to call anyone out, we all have personalities, our personalities are based on lack, to anchor ourselves we have strong emotional investments in particular symbols. By the way, this is my vulgar reading, little to do with Erik's reading.

By climate populism Swyngedouw means mainstream climate campaigning. Given the crisis unfolding we demand action from governments to save us from climate apocalypse.

Swyngedouw contrast this with climate denial a la Trump, and also with a more anti-capitalist approach.

I tend to favour an anti-capitalist approach because capitalism tends to generate climate change and other ecological ills. Nonetheless I am not going to bin mainstream campaigning because we need swift action on climate, as well as looking to dig out the more fundamental under lying causes.

OK, are we perverts or hysterics?  I think both terms are loaded and pejorative. Nigel Farage is a climate pervert (?) and Roger Hallam is hysterical about climate change (?), not sure that clinical terminology is accepted though as anything other than insult. By the way, perhaps there is no 'normal' and no real 'pathological' in Lacan's approach (so incidentally I am rather hazy as to the purpose of analysis in his work?).

The gendered and insulting term 'hysterical' also demands to be addressed. Perhaps challenging the whole Freudian edifice as a patriarchal project?

Anyway sticking with Lacan for the moment, the perverts are in denial about climate change. Essentially climate change policies threaten their enjoyment, so must be resisted.

The hysterics demand action from a master. The discourse of the master, involves appealing to an authority. The authority is blamed, seen as inadequate in its response. However while the hysteric screams at the master and is frustrated,  the hysteric enjoys their symptoms of frustration. Failure to be heard gives the satisfaction of justified anger. The resistance to the Master, the appeals to the master, the conflict with the master, all reinforce the master, in this case as they fail to adequately deal with the climate crisis (think Biden).

The alternative to the discourse of the master is to recognise that the master must not be addressed or even replaced (the work say of a Green Party) but the conditions necessary for a master must be removed.

The idea of the symptom is key to both perverts and hysterics. The symptom is an alien intrusion into an otherwise harmonious system. 'Migrants' and 'carbon dioxide' are such intrusions. For the pervert, migrants are the enemy; for the climate populist, carbon dioxide is the enemy. Remove the symptom and what is natural can be restored. Thus reactionary and 'progressive' populism (is the whole paper sub-tweeting Laclau and Mouffe?)

For Swyngedouw the real contradictions of an unjust system must be addressed, this involves the recognition that the climate crisis is already with us, there is not a homogenous human species and technological fixes are inadequate:

'If we really want to take the ecological condition seriously, we have to displace the question of ecology from a populist frame onto the terrain of agonistic politicization, animated by a sustained fidelity to what Alain Badiou calls a passion for the real possibility and necessity of an egalitarian common world. It is through such political project that a common and enabling climate might be constituted.' (Swyngedouw 2022: 17)

I tend to agree, but don't we know this already? (Once stripped of some of the technical language we might note its capitalism innit!) How do we proceed strategically and tactically? Making change without transforming the system is also going to be necessary because, yes, the climate crisis is here.

A great paper, but academics risk standing as analysts or even masters. Lacan too had great insights but was no revolutionary. I love the insights of Lacan and Badiou (who is also referenced by Swyngedouw) but they provide insights/hints and we need to go far further, far faster.

So Swyngedouw reminds us of a starting point we knew already, well, many of us knew already. How do we intervene to ultimately remove capitalism? Over a century of Marxist praxis hasn't provided an entirely transparent answer, although Marx via Lenin to my mind is a start to any adequate strategy. How do we build the base, serve people, heal the world and intervene practically (and not just in the realm of high theory informed by French masters?)