Who’s afraid of the ecological apocalypse? Climate change and the production of the ethical subject
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148116687534 |
| Date | 01 May 2017 |
| Author | Madeleine Fagan |
| Published date | 01 May 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148116687534
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2017, Vol. 19(2) 225 –244
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148116687534
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Who’s afraid of the ecological
apocalypse? Climate change
and the production of the
ethical subject
Madeleine Fagan
Abstract
Contemporary representations of environmental futures often feature apocalyptic scenarios,
particularly in film and popular culture. However, these dire warnings have seemingly been
ineffective at motivating action on climate change. In response, there has been a call for specifically
ethical engagement to provide an alternative means of motivation. This article offers an analysis
of the effects of ecological apocalypse narratives on the (re)production of the ethical subject of
climate change. The article illustrates the intertextual production of the ethics and apocalypse
discourses in order to argue that rather than providing an alternative, the ethical motivation
approach in fact (re)produces the assumptions and effects of apocalyptic narratives in a way that
sediments a non-relational logic of the ethical subject, in both spatial and temporal terms. Such
a logic makes responsive ethical or political engagement with ecological futures very difficult and
limits possibilities for thinking progressively about climate change.
Keywords
apocalypse, climate change, ethics, film, future, popular culture, subjectivity, temporality
Introduction
Contemporary representations of environmental futures often feature disastrous, apoca-
lyptic and catastrophic scenarios, particularly in film and popular culture.1 One site in
which this representation is prominent is in the climate change debate, where such narra-
tives in relation to the environment can be found not only in popular culture but also in
governmental statements (Brown, 2009; Huhne, 2011; King, 2004; Obama, 2010; Stern,
2006) and academic literature produced by Politics and International Relations (IR;
Caney, 2010; Dobson, 1999; Gardiner, 2009; Garvey, 2013; Hiskes, 2005; Page, 2007).
While disastrous scenarios are of course not new in the construction of political and
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
Corresponding author:
Madeleine Fagan, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick,
Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: m.fagan@warwick.ac.uk
687534BPI0010.1177/1369148116687534The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsFagan
research-article2016
Article
226 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(2)
ethical possibilities, the climate change debate has arguably occasioned an intensification
of such scenarios and an increased interlacing of them into political and ethical narra-
tives—to the extent that Mike Hulme (2006) argues that recent years have seen the birth
of a ‘new environmental phenomenon’ of ‘catastrophic climate change’. However, despite
the ubiquity of such dire warnings, they seem to have motivated relatively little action by
citizens on climate matters (Hulme, 2009).
One response to this perceived inertia, among activists, politicians and liberal politi-
cal theorists, is to turn to ethics to provide a motivational ‘push’, which obligates
engagement with what might otherwise be thought of as temporally and spatially dis-
tant consequences of climate change, and which proposes the means and method of
such engagement (Caney, 2006; Jamieson, 2001; Skrimshire, 2010). The field of ethics
is seen by some as offering the potential for a progressive, alternative response to the
threat of apocalyptic ecological futures (Hulme, 2009: 354). However, this article
sounds a note of caution relating to the production of ethics informed by, or in response
to, the ecological apocalypse narrative. Rather than approaching apocalyptic narratives
as scenarios which have failed to generate action or motivation, the analysis here seeks
to argue that they are in fact very successful in articulating a series of commonsensical
assumptions, which are then reproduced in the ethical debate. It is not only that, as
Hulme (2009: 357) argues, ‘climate myths’ reveal truths about the human condition but
that the shared assumptions about the subject found in the ethical debate also (re)pro-
duce such truths.
While the depoliticising effects of apocalyptic narratives have been the subject of sub-
stantial debate in a range of contexts pertaining to Politics and IR, including Aradau and
Van Munster (2011); Baldwin (2012); De Goede and Randalls (2009); and Methmann and
Rothe (2012), the implications of such narratives for the production of ethical claims in
relation to climate change has received far less attention. The literature which engages
explicitly with questions of ethics and climate change does not address the effects of the
assumptions found in apocalyptic scenarios in framing or limiting treatment of this ques-
tion (Caney, 2006; Dobson, 1999; Gardiner, 2009; Garvey, 2008; Page, 2007). What
remains unexamined in existing approaches to the effects of apocalyptic imaginaries is
the way that the language of apocalypse frames thinking about the ethics of climate
change in fundamental ways through disseminating forceful, but otherwise unacknowl-
edged, assumptions about the future, human relationships, human nature, political com-
munity and the relationship between humans and the environment.
Informed by the recent turn in Politics and IR towards an engagement with the aes-
thetic and cultural as powerful sites for the establishment and (re)production of claims
about and practices of ethics in world politics (Bleiker, 2001; Brassett, 2009; Croft, 2006;
Grayson, 2012; Weldes, 2003), the article analyses the (re)production of the ethical sub-
ject in ecological apocalypse narratives across seemingly divergent sites. The analysis
draws from a range of cultural, academic and ‘elite’ narratives of the problem of climate
change,2 with a focus on the United Kingdom and the United States,3 and reads these
alongside calls for ethical motivation to interrogate the cultural production of climate eth-
ics. These two discourses are read intertextually in order to illuminate their points of
convergence and to identify the shared assumptions on which they rest. In so doing, the
article contributes both a cultural and an ecological perspective to a body of post-founda-
tional critical work in politics and IR that seeks to interrogate the production of ethics and
the ethical subject (Bulley, 2009; Edkins, 2000; Jabri, 1998; Pin-Fat, 2009; Zehfuss,
2010).
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