Page 172 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

13 THE ANAMORPHIC POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE 165

human, these products and conditions of capitalism’s own continuity can
be dismissed as not mattering, as immaterial. Organized political move-
ment appears somehow outmoded, its enduring necessity dispersed into
individuated ethico-spiritual orientations on a cosmos integrated over eons.
This left anthropocenic enjoyment of destruction, punishment and
knowing circulates in the same loop as capitalist enjoyment of expenditure,
accumulation and waste, an enjoyment furthered by fossil fuels, but not
reducible to them. Left anthropocenic enjoyment thrives on the disaster
that capitalist enjoyment produces. In this circuit, captivation in enjoyment
fuels the exploitation, expropriation and extraction driving the capitalist
system: more, more, more; endless circulation, dispossession, destruction
and accumulation; ceaseless, limitless death. Incapacitated by magnitude,
boggled by scale, the Left gets off on moralism, complexity and disaster—
even as the politics of a capitalist class determined to profit from catas-
trophe continues.
The circulation of left anthropocenic enjoyment through capitalist
currents manifests in a diminished capacity for imagining human subjec-
tivity. Even as things, objects, actants and the nonhuman engage in a wide
array of lively pursuits, the anthropocenic perspective seems to confine
humans to three roles: observers, victims and survivors. Observers are the
scientists, their own depression and loss now itself a subgenre of climate
writing. Scientists measure and track, but can’t do anything about the
unfolding catastrophe—action is for others. Observers also appear as the
rest of us as moral audience, enjoined to awareness of human-nonhuman
entanglements and the agency of microbes. In this vein, our awareness
matters not just as an opportunity for spiritual development but also
because multiple instances of individuated moral and aesthetic appreciation
of fragility and the limits of human agency could potentially converge,
seemingly without division and struggle. When the scale is anthropocenic,
the details of political organization fall away in favor of the plurality of
self-organizing systems. The second role, victims, points to islanders and
refugees, those left with nothing but their own mobility. They are, again,
shorn of political subjectivity, dwarfed by myriad other extinctions, and
reduced to so much lively matter. The third role is as survivors. Survivors
are the heroes of popular culture’s dystopic futures, the exceptional and
strong concentrations of singular capacity that continue the frontiers-
manship and entrepreneurial individualism that the US uses to deny col-
lective responsibility for inequality. I should add here that Klein’s most
significant contribution with This Changes Everything is her provision of