TheSyllabus

Those two books form a kind of diptych. They both try to reflect on the aesthetic and cultural aspects of fossil capitalism, establishing a dialogue with the work of authors such as Andreas Malm. And they do so by playing on the double dimensionality of both aesthetics and culture.

Strictly speaking, aesthetics refers to the theorization and experience of art in a given sphere of modern life, which for the sake of simplicity we could connect with the institution of the museum. As for culture, its most limited sense refers to the cultural field of artistic, literary, and musical production. It’s interesting to investigate how the development of industrial modernity has interacted with these two narrower dimensions, but the analysis can’t stop here. 

From the point of view of emancipatory political projects, it is more important to study how industrial modernity has affected the broader dimensions of both aesthetics and culture. In this broader sense, aesthetics would refer not only to our perception of works of art but also to the sensorial relationship we maintain with reality as a whole. Concerning culture, this broader sense would exceed the cultural sphere to encompass a whole series of discourses and imaginaries that shape our social experience.

Malm's insightful contribution is to offer a socio-political interpretation of the origin of fossil modernity and its impact on aspects of the ecological crisis like climate change. He suggests that the recourse to coal in the paleo-technical phase of industrial modernity was not due to its lower cost or greater energy efficiency, but rather because of factors associated with increased productivity and the concentration and politicization of the working masses in the cities – a process that reconciled the intensive exploitation of the labor force with social conquests like the ten-hour workday.

I believe this reading should be complemented by the role played by images and imaginaries during fossil modernity. These have served to normalize a perception of the universe that naturalizes the relationship between fossil fuel use, technological development, and discourses of progress. This perception configures a sort of cultural unconscious strongly rooted in the collective worldviews of the last two centuries, from which eco-modernism currently feeds. So, the main objective of the two books is to complement the narratives of fossil capitalism by examining how art and visual culture, as well as cultural discourses, have contributed to normalizing these worldviews.

An important influence on my approach is the work of Alf Hornborg. Hornborg argues that our conception of technology invisibilizes its relationship with the unequal exchange of materials and energy on a global level. The sleek design of our contemporary technological devices (cell phones and laptops, but also wind turbines) encourages this abstraction. They obscure the provenance of the minerals of which they are composed, as well as the working conditions that facilitate their extraction in the countries of the South. Although this extractivist dynamic precedes industrial modernity, it intensifies along with it.

Both Cultura fósil and ​​Estética fósil attempt to surface what has tended to remain hidden within the history of the images and imaginaries of industrial modernity. They move, so to speak, in that dialectic between the visible and the invisible. They also connect that dialectic back to the contrast between the diaphanousness and transparency of aesthetic and cultural spaces for contemplation (like museums, or the greenhouses of world fairs) and the dirt and opacity of the fossil factory, metaphorically associated with the Hell of work in 19th-century imaginaries.

I believe there is a danger in taking this critique – which Hornborg raises as “technological fetishism" – to the extreme. We must be wary of the possibility of falling into technophobic positions, a risk that I perceive in some opinions about the current deployment of renewable energies. While this process of energy transition needs to be examined and discussed at various scales and social spaces, given its complexity and potentially negative effects, I am not against implementing technological innovations to combat global warming. 

But I also believe that technology cannot be at the core of debates and narratives about a just ecosocial transition. Many discourses, like those that exalt geoengineering or ecomodernism, do overemphasize technology at the expense of social structures. I disagree with this technocratic approach, which in Cultura fósil I trace back to the imaginaries of Russian biocosmism, which are fascinating as they are delirious. 

For the biocosmists, the possibility of technically altering the planet's climate, as well as of conquering the universe by implanting human life throughout the cosmos, was presented in clear continuity with the colonial matrix of modernity and with the energy utopias that had emerged in the 19th century through the triad composed of thermodynamic science, fossil fuels, and the technological developments associated with the steam engine. This blind faith in technoscience – which, for the biocosmists, contained the promise of resurrecting all past generations – has come to jeopardize the existence of every generation to come, at least since the invention of the nuclear bomb.

Science fiction often presents us with apocalyptic horizons that leave us without tools for imagining alternative futures. So, what captivated me about Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future is its ability to visualize the complexities of an ecosocial transition towards a future that is not necessarily utopian, but is nevertheless hopeful. This is separate from its debatable aspects, like the importance it assigns to geoengineering, or its excessive confidence in the possible role of supranational institutions like the one that gives the novel its title. Robinson’s political imagination integrates advances and setbacks, frictions and limits; its scale ranges from global institutions to the level of environmental activism, including terrorist actions. All of this lends a vivid force to the process of socioecological transformation he describes. 

The novel also recovers a strategic imagination – the ability to imagine how to get from our present to a hypothetical future – that used to be found more readily in 19th-century utopias. It reminds me of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, which imagined the transition to socialism in England by highlighting the advances, setbacks, and resistances that are present in any revolutionary process. In my opinion, it is a perspective that is not only absent in many works of science fiction inclined towards more apocalyptic projections, but it is also one that has been lost in emancipatory political practice. It is essential to recover that strategic imagination, which has tended to be diluted in the post-1989 context. In Cultura fósil, I make the provocative claim that ecological ethics has very good reason to forget the 20th century. But political ecology has just as much reason to critically recover it.

As I said, the development of the fossil economy should not be separated from the images and imaginaries associated with it. Cultural studies originated in the ’50s and ’60s precisely through this vein of thought. Writers like Raymond Williams tried to show how industrial modernity generated a series of imaginaries of resistance, from Romanticism to an understanding of art and pop culture as central shapers of workers’ organizations (and especially unions). This is to say, although desires and affects do not emerge solely as emanations from transformations in the economic base of a society, neither can they be separated from it. Emancipatory culture and aesthetics – from political pamphlets and grassroots leaflets to their interactions with the culture industry – involve the production of values and affects that generate communal bonds and the self-perception of class belonging. These are what Williams called “structures of feeling." 

In Cultura fósil, I also explore the tensions between various aesthetic and cultural narratives as they manifest in different emancipatory projects, like the Soviet Revolution or the New Deal. For example, I have been particularly interested in how such projects responded to the expectations generated by what Lewis Mumford called the “neotechnical age" of electricity, as well as how photographic projects like the Farm Security Administration or the Worker-Photography Movement understood images as the production of political affects of various kinds. In the films of Pare Lorentz and Joris Ivens, the New Deal's commitment to hydroelectric energy as a publicly managed alternative to the private interests of fossil corporations adopted a narrative form that can be inspiring when thinking about hegemony in an aesthetic and cultural key – especially in a moment whose ecological exigencies demand an energy transition far more urgent than the 1930s. The book reflects on the inseparable link that industrial modernity has woven between energy imaginaries and hegemonic (and counter-hegemonic) projects. I would go so far as to say that it is not possible to think of the two separately.

Today, after the “end of grand narratives,” it seems impossible to project into the future the way the aesthetic artifacts of the New Deal and Soviet productivism did. But I think we must recover that temporal dimension of emancipatory politics, without ignoring what you say about the reproduction of colonial and extractivist relations with the Global South. This contradiction in North–South relations was already present, by the way, in the energy policies of the New Deal. 

But, at the risk of being polemical, I believe that ecosocial contradictions have historically been part of any project of political transformation. The work of critique is to try to ameliorate them. Transformation, contradiction, and critique should be perceived as complementary – not exclusive – powers of emancipatory political processes. Otherwise, I fear we can only feed the paralysis of political imagination and action.

I don't think that the Green New Deal only needs new aesthetic forms and cultural imaginaries. Rather, what I am suggesting is that any political project that claims to be hegemonic requires them. There is, in that sense, an ongoing struggle to define the imaginaries and narratives that accompany the Green New Deal. These may abound in productivist, developmentalist, and growth ideologies; or they may incorporate decolonial elements and critiques of extractivism. The final outcome is still in play. Both worldviews will probably enter into permanent tension, and not only in the countries of the Global North. 

Of course, my wish is that this dialectic lean towards post-capitalism and post-growth. But I think it is necessary to seriously consider where we are starting from, and to understand all the difficulties (social, cultural, economic, political, technological, logistical) that the transition will face in different contexts and at the global level.

In this sense, when it comes to implementing the ecosocial transition in a practical way, it will be essential not to overlook the dimension of national politics – something that has traditionally been uncomfortable for left-wing internationalism. I think that some degrowth discourses make the political mistake of projecting a sense of guilt onto the populations of the North just because they belong to nations that owe an ecological debt to the South. This is especially clumsy when phenomena like energy poverty are spreading in these countries of the center. We must be capable of combating this inequality in access to basic goods without falling into moralism, and without giving up on rebuilding international ties of solidarity. In any case, the possibility of a just ecosocial transition at the global level fundamentally hinges on the countries of the periphery deploying sovereign projects that put a stop to the unequal exchanges that have accompanied the history of colonial and industrial modernity. 

On the other hand, there are strictly material and logistical aspects to the ecosocial transition that cannot be ignored. For example, even if the transition to renewable energies is accompanied by a reduction in our energy consumption, it is likely that in the short term we will see an increase in CO2 emissions linked to the construction of necessary infrastructures – even if we accept that this just ecological transition will confront the issues of dependency and colonialism.

This also applies to the link you mention between fossil infrastructures and the cultural world. Undoubtedly, we must approach the dynamics of cultural institutions from a degrowth and post-fossilist perspective. That’s why I underline the correlation between the proliferation of museums and biennials after World War II and the expansion of cultural tourism enabled by the relative popularization of aviation. Today, in a country like Spain, there is an almost direct correspondence between contemporary art museums and the network of airports and highways.

But with cultural infrastructures it is the same as with any other: it is much easier to deploy them than it is to dismantle them without causing social harm, and in a way that preserves and enhances the best elements of their public function. The iconoclastic passion of the radical left should not be recast by the critique of fossil culture: we must imagine what to do with existing cultural institutions, from museums to universities, rather than promote their destruction on the basis of the relationship they have maintained and still maintain with fossil infrastructures.

There are several aspects to consider. In the first place, we can recover some artistic notions that help establish a new sensorial relationship with the climate. Then, there is the more ambitious idea of promoting a climate culture of the people. 

To the first point, one artist I’ve written about is Hans Haacke, whose works in the 1960s and 1970s sought to sensitize the viewer to the relationship between the environment of exhibition spaces and the political climate. Haacke was highly critical of the economic interests behind certain art institutions, like those that linked the Guggenheim Museum's Board of Trustees with the real estate speculation that drove immigrants out of some New York neighborhoods. 

Another more recent example is a film by The Otolith Group, an Afrofuturist collective that seeks to challenge the aseptic objectivity of data and graphs depicting climate change by introducing black bodies and voices. They thus translate into images what racial ecology theories say about colonial-industrial modernity being situated at the intersection of the exploitation of fossil fuels, plantation slavery, and global warming. The film seeks to generate a more sensitive connection with climate change, in contrast to the paralysis often produced by objective data.

Such works are stimulating, but they by no means solve the much larger task of promoting a popular climate culture that is integrated into our lives as a structure of feeling. To that end, my sense is that the doomsday discourses about the ecological crisis are actually masking a profound lack of faith in people's capacity to drive the necessary transformations. It is as if the collapse of political imagination – Fredric Jameson's famous dictum that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism – had preceded the ecosocial collapse that is looming on the horizon. It would seem that the alienation driven by hyper-consumption and cultural neoliberalism has annulled any possibility of politicizing contemporary discontent.

I consider this to be a mistake. We must reevaluate the role that images and imaginaries can play in politicizing and organizing that discontent, which is so palpable in today's society and on which the rhetoric of the far right is operating. In that sense, the phrase you quote from the text I co-wrote with Emilio Santiago Muíño and César Rendueles points to the fact that political organization and the cultural production of common affects are two aspects that mutually feed each other, giving rise to the hope of possible horizons that neoliberal subjectivity and catastrophist discourses rob us of. Just as Raymond Williams pointed out that trade unions were the main cultural contribution of the workers' movement to the history of industrial modernity, we need to think about what organizational forms are available today to respond to the challenges of the climate crisis in times of the collapse of the neoliberal paradigm.

With right-wing climate populism, I believe its climate denialism is rooted in our political impotence rather than in our distrust of science. At the social level, it is possible to observe the spreading feeling that, given the impossibility of denying the effects of global warming on our lives, what is being questioned is our ability to tackle the structural dynamics that have produced it. In my opinion, this is what causes faith in progress – which had given way to technological solutionism, the belief that “they will invent something" to curb the ecological crisis – to become guilty fatalism: “We have crossed the line, this is irreversible, and all that’s left is to watch the world burn."

This point of view projects an exit that collapsist discourses are unwilling to channel in an emancipatory direction. In fact, they often feed a similar disposition by not offering any other credible ways out, not even one that aspires to build social consensus. It is not a question of equating the denialism of the New Right with the collapsism of the Left. I simply point out that the latter does not always square up to the task of thinking politically and culturally about the ecosocial transition – a shortcoming that, by the way, several degrowth voices in the international sphere have been calling out. Fortunately, some close colleagues are beginning to reverse this trend. For me, the discussion on the ecosocial transition should not orbit around the dichotomy between the collapsist pessimism of scientism and the optimism of the technocratic versions of the Green New Deal, but around questions such as the role of the state, the critique of colonialism, and the formation of political subjects.   

What’s more, a popular climate culture should insist that, in fact, far-right climate denialism is not about a mass hedonism that is unconcerned about its ecological impacts; it is rather a subterfuge to deepen in an ecological key the secessionism of the elites that neoliberalism already promoted. In European ecofascist discourses, this climate secessionism intermingles with border racism, which perceives in the migratory masses a neo-Mathusian threat to the stability of societies and the sustainability of ecosystems, as securitarian imaginaries seek to emotionally equip the privileged subjects in the face of the uncertainty to come.

We can see this in the German far-right campaign “No SUV is illegal," which takes a stand against the environmentalist critiques of SUVs for their high energy consumption and emissions. The SUV allows a segment of the motorized population to bunker in this kind of touristic tank. The SUV subordinates the car as a utopian emblem of mass society to make it a sign of a culture of differences, in which an eventual climate class war seems inevitable. 

The AfD slogan posed a kind of neo-fascist détournement of "No immigrant is illegal," which was a motto of the alter-globalization movement. It is as if the secessionism of the elites were reframing the fossil imagery of fascism in a new racist key, where the threat is no longer represented by Jews, but by Muslim immigrants and the Great Replacement theory. But the SUV is still also the symbol of how the climate preparedness of the Western white upper-middle classes has become a space of self-confinement, which is presented as a dubious means to fulfill human happiness all while severing more and more people’s access to welfare.

Then, if we look at the United States, we realize that we realize that some of the voices that warned about peak oil early on are now more aligned with a perspective of survivalism. This current, translated into a focus on human survival, tends to be adopted in many cases by white, heterosexual males who even stockpile assets in preparation for a supposedly imminent collapse. 

Therefore, I think there is an important approach to be explored from ecofeminist perspectives. It is essential to note how these visions of “imminent collapse" are sometimes intertwined with a renewed fascist fervor, linked to certain ideals of masculinity and a clearly defined racial identity, as is evident with political figures like Donald Trump. We could say that we are facing an epochal bifurcation: on the one hand, masculinities that feel threatened and seek individual solutions, like the survivalist mindset; and on the other, those that lean towards mass political options of a reactionary nature. And this tendency is not unique or specific to the US.

If we approach them from critical angles, we immediately realize that the subjective terrain for another type of imaginary of the good life is indeed immense. But we would be seriously mistaken if we were to assume that this activation must come from cultural directions alone. In my opinion, the possibility of giving birth to a popular climate culture instead depends on combining the emergence of self-organizing forms of the most underprivileged classes – along the lines of what I pointed out in relation to Williams' structure of feeling – with public policies that make social reproduction possible in an ecologically integrated way. 

The ecosocialist culture must be linked to needs rather than to wants, understanding that both spheres (not only the second one) shape our social affects. Tackling energy poverty is one need; so is being able to freely access culture. The difference between needs and wants is that not responding to the latter generates frustration; not responding to the former generates harm.

Mark Fisher argued that there is no more valuable cultural policy than a good housing law or a reduction in the working day, which frees us to devote our time to something other than securing the basic aspects of existence. I would argue that a popular climate culture must also demand that real estate speculation be curbed, so that land can be devoted to other uses – such as placing renewable energy facilities on peri-urban land or developing networks of publicly managed orchards.

Despite all of their contradictions, the Green New Deal’s most ambitious proposals have advanced more along these lines than any of the avenues that are more seductive for cultural ecological theory, such as the Gaia hypothesis or the new materialisms. The criticism to make of left-wing climate populism lies in the difficulties it encounters in permeating the various strata of the most disadvantaged populations, insofar as it is usually a political agency constructed from above, organized around more or less contingent conjunctures like elections (although I do not underestimate their importance). This last aspect is what I feel we must compensate for most urgently, by promoting a more porous popular climate culture, extended over time and with a broader social base, which contributes to the formation of more consistent habits and organizations. A complicated task, but in my opinion unavoidable.

It's not about belittling the specificity of physics or engineering when addressing the history of energy over the past centuries; instead I seek to complement them. Energy, in addition to being a physical quantity, has an important cultural dimension. Our perception and understanding of how energy is embedded in our lives are influenced by discourses and images that have shaped its social meaning.

In that sense, I have suggested a possible symmetry between energy and ideology. Energy becomes even more crucial to the extent that, as with ideological devices, it goes unnoticed in everyday life. We assume that energy will always be at our disposal, that it is constant and omnipresent. However, this imaginary is the result of historical processes. The assumption of energy superabundance is linked to a productivist ideology of progress that we should question, as it is based on the false premise of an infinite availability of resources.