Page 174 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

13 THE ANAMORPHIC POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE 167

within the sciences and between the sciences and the humanities isn’t
radical, but a move that has been pursued in other contexts. Modern
environmentalism, as Ursula Heise observes, tried to ‘drive home to sci-
entists, politicians, and the population at large the urgency of developing a
holistic understanding of ecological connectedness’.
The Macy Conferences that generated cybernetics and the efforts of the
Rand Corporation and the Department of Defense to develop more flex-
ible, soft and networked forms of welfare, as well as contemporary
biotechnology, geotechnology and biomimicry, all echo the same impulse
to interlink and merge.
The philosopher Frédéric Neyrat (2015) has subjected the ‘goosphere’
that results from this erasure of spacing to a scathing critique, implicating it
in the intensification of global fears and anxieties: when everything is
connected, everything is dangerous. Neyrat thus advocates an ecology of
separation: the production of a ‘distance within the interior of the
socio-political situation’ is the ‘condition of possibility of real creative
response to economic or ecological crisis’.
Approaching climate change anamorphically puts such an ecology of
separation to work. We look for and produce gaps. Rather than trapped by
our fascination with an (always illusory) anthropocenic whole, we cut
across and through, finding and creating openings. We gain possibilities for
collective action and strategic engagement.
Just as it inscribes a gap within the supposition of ecological connect-
edness, the anamorphic gaze likewise breaks with the spatial model jux-
taposing the ‘molar’ and the ‘molecular’ popular with some readers of
Deleuze and Guattari. Instead of valorizing one pole over the other (and
the valued pole is nearly always the molecular, especially insofar as
molecular is mapped onto the popular and the dispossessed rather than,
say, the malignant and the self-absorbed), the idea of an anamorphic
perspective on climate change rejects the pre-given and static scale of molar
and molecular to attend to the perspective that reveals a hole, gap, or limit
constitutive of desire and the subject of politics.
Here are some examples of approaching climate change from the side.
In Tropics of Chaos, Christian Parenti (2011) emphasizes the ‘catastrophic
convergence’ of poverty, violence and climate change. He draws out the
uneven and unequal impacts of planetary warming on areas already
devastated by capitalism, racism, colonialism and militarism. From this
angle, policies aimed at redressing and reducing economic inequality can
be seen as necessary for adapting to a changing climate. In a similar vein