Page 173 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

166 J. DEAN

the new, active and collective figure of ‘Blockadia’. As is well-known,
Blockadia designates organized political struggles against fracking, drilling,
pipelines, gas storage and other projects that extend the fossil fuel infras-
tructure when it should in fact be dismantled. With this definition, Klein
breaks with the anthropocenic displacement of political action.
If fascination with climate change’s anthropocenic knot of catastrophe,
condemnation and paralysis lures the Left into the loop of capitalist
enjoyment, an anamorphic gaze can help dislodge us. ‘Anamorphosis’
designates an image or object that seems distorted when we look at it head
on, but that appears clearly from another perspective. A famous example is
Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors, in which a skull in the
painting appears as such only when seen from two diagonal angles; viewed
directly, it’s a nearly indistinguishable streak. Lacan emphasizes that
anamorphosis demonstrates how the space of vision isn’t reducible to
mapped space but includes the point from which we see. Space can be
distorted, depending on how we look at it. Apprehending what is signifi-
cant, then, may require ‘escaping the fascination of the picture’ by
adopting another perspective—a partial or partisan perspective, the per-
spective of a part. From this partisan perspective, the whole will not appear
as a whole. It will appear with a hole. The perspective from which the hole
appears is that of the subject, which is to say of the gap opened up by the
shift to a partisan perspective.
When we try to grasp climate change directly, we end up confused and
entrapped in distortions that fuel the reciprocal fantasies of planetary scale
geoengineering and post-civilizational neo-primitivism. The immensity of
the calamity of the changing climate—with attendant desertification, ocean
acidification, and species loss—seemingly forces us into seeing all or
nothing. If we don’t grasp the issue in its enormity, we miss it entirely. In
this vein, some theorists insist that the Anthropocene urgently requires us
to develop a new ontology, new concepts, new verbs and entirely new ways
of thinking. Yet I have my doubts; geologic time’s exceeding of human
time makes it indifferent even to a philosophy that includes the nonhuman.
If there is a need, it is a human need implicated in politics and desire, that is
to say, in power and its generation and deployment.
The demand for entirely new ways of thinking comes from those who
accept as well as those who reject capitalism, science and technology. ‘Big
thinkers’ in industry and economics join speculative realists and new
materialists in encouraging innovation and disruption. Similarly, the
emphasis on new forms of interdisciplinarity, on breaking down divisions