Preface Late in March of this year I attended a lecture by Professor Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where she presented a collaborative project, the Feral Atlas, an online repository of stories about the Anthropocene and how humans and nonhumans together make

01/19 worlds at scale. In her introductory remarks, she spoke of the demand often put forward by humanist colleagues to tell hopeful stories about the Anthropocene rather than view it as an undifferentiated destructive force slowly approaching a zero hour, a reckoning that will come too late. đđđđđđđđđđIn her talk, Tsing spoke of the Anthropocene Michael Baers as “patchy,” with development arising in specific places and through specific human interventions, producing unforeseen ancillary A First Step effects (a conceptual framework that also structures her recent book, The Mushroom at the Towards a End of the World, an anthropological study of the international trade in matsutake mushrooms, a Regional Risk delicacy in Japan, that grows in “disturbed” forests). Tsing takes “patch” from “patch dynamics,” a term first coined by scientists in the Assessment 1940s to describe the interactive structure and dynamics of plants occupying discrete ecosystems, since used by ecologists when referring to the mosaic of heterogeneous, interactive sub-ecosystems found within specific biotopes. In Tsing’s usage, “patch” embraces both plant and human interactions resulting from capitalist disruption of natural habitats and modes of production: monoculture cotton farming (with the plantation as a model for industrialization) that transformed the boll weevil from minor nuisance to a major pest throughout North and Central America; or global trade, as in the recent introduction of the parasitic water mold Phytophthora from Germany to the Western United States, where it has killed off natural woodlands. The Anthropocene is “patchy” because capitalism directs the long- distance destruction of specific locales; because disturbed landscapes disrupted in the process of capitalist wealth accumulation make humans and nonhumans into resources for investment across scales; because supply chains snake from one capitalist patch to another, necessitating “acts of translation across varied social and political spaces.” She terms this process

e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m “salvage accumulation,” where differing environmental and labor standards are effaced in the process of turning goods into computer- managed inventory, the cornerstone of accounting.1 đđđđđđđđđđ“Patch” may be a useful term to establish a distance from monolithic conceptions of the Anthropocene and capitalism alike (and to refrain from the “crippling assumption” of

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Illustration by Rutger Sjogrim used in the original publication of “A First Step Towards a Regional Risk Assessment,” Antipyrene Publishing, 2015.

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT progress as a single hegemonic current). Yet it is through the scrim of eschatological thinking. But deficient in modeling that other feature of the this does not prevent the contrary response – to Anthropocene: climate change. It may be seek out hopeful stories about the Anthropocene unnecessary to repeat the scientific consensus – from evading conceptual bias. As much as I that a mean temperature increase above 2 understand the wish for hopeful stories Tsing degrees centigrade will lead to unpredictable ascribes to her humanist colleagues as, in some disruptions to the environment – adding a sense, a corrective to the terrifying onslaught of further degree of complexity into an already 03/19 the daily news cycle, there is an element of stochastic world – but the question of how to denial in it; a denial as well of that other strand avoid the most disastrous effects of climate of the Western humanist tradition exemplified by change explicitly involves scalar considerations Aby Warburg, who sought with his Mnemosyne that pose the specific and the local against the Atlas to bring to light an encrypted historical far-reaching and endemic. Thus, absorbed as I memory of trauma in the persistence of gestural was by Tsing’s stories of the ways in which global motifs transferred from classical antiquity to commerce and industrial agriculture remake Renaissance painting, fashioning a model of the ecosystems, another part of my mind had cycled mnemonic where even the most limpid back to a question prompted by her introductory depictions of beauty become colored by death remarks: What is this imperative put forward by and disaster, and, per Benjamin Buchloh, “in humanists to tell hopeful stories? which Western European humanist thought đđđđđđđđđđ“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” would once more, perhaps for the last time, Joan Didion, a writer not known for an excess of recognize its origins and trace its latent optimism, wrote long ago: continuities into the present.”3 “The tendency to reproduce the language of gesture in clear We look for the sermon in the suicide, for outline,” wrote Warburg in his introduction to the the social or moral lesson in the murder of Mnemosyne Atlas, “which only seemed to be five. We interpret what we see, select the purely a matter of artistic appearance, led, by its most workable of the multiple choices. We own inner logic, bursting out of its chains, to a live entirely, especially if we are writers, by formal language that was suited to the the imposition of a narrative line upon submerged, tragic, stoic fatalism of antiquity.”4 disparate images, by the “ideas” with which Warburg’s Atlas suggests human resilience and we have learned to freeze the shifting cultural continuity do not function in spite of phantasmagoria which is our actual social upheaval but because of it. For all the experience.2 other dangers climate change presents to human and nonhuman life forms, it also threatens this Thinking of the news stories that had caught my repository of past disasters codified in cultural attention over the course of the past year, this artifacts. was certainly the case. The wildfires in California đđđđđđđđđđA conundrum appears: the threat presented and the landslides that followed; the series of by the future is also a threat to past recollections catastrophic hurricanes visiting disaster on of danger and disaster, to the sum total of human cities ringing the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean experience. Perhaps it is possible, I thought islands; the mass bleaching events across while sitting in the packed lecture hall of HKW, to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef; baleen whales extend this idea outside the gestural realm of slowly starving to death, their bodies tricked into pictoriality. Perhaps a preoccupation with satiation by an overabundance of micro-plastics disaster, regardless of scale, is a way of suspended in the sea; reports of unprecedented preserving memory against the depredations of and accelerating shrinkage of Arctic winter sea those forms of forgetting that secure history for ice; and a single video, widely distributed across its victors – to brush history against the grain, to the internet, of a starving polar bear loping borrow Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation. across the Arctic tundra, perhaps only hours Perhaps this preservation begins by salvaging from death – these had melded together in a what Sebald called “the recurrent resurgence of narrative arc producing a singular vision of images which cannot be banished from the ecological collapse, to which my response was, e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m memory, and which remain effective as agencies invariably, melancholic paralysis or terror. of an almost pathological hypermnesia in a past Whether things will end badly or well, the fact otherwise emptied of content.”5 Disaster is that things will end already imposes a narrative infrequently a blameless event. It is the concern line, separating a before from an after, or an of certain cultural producers to return disaster to inside from an outside. human cupidity, indifference, malice đđđđđđđđđđTsing’s work appears to offer a corrective to aforethought, petty self-interest, and so on, as this prevailing habit – or at least my own part of this project of brushing history against prevailing habit – of viewing climate change the grain. Could pessimism be considered a

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT hopeful form of resistance rather than an ironic the point of absurdity. Resistance without means of consigning hopefulness to the any confidence that it will be effective, immobility of despair? resistance quand même, out of a principle đđđđđđđđđđAmongst the disjointed notes penned during of solidarity with victims and as a Tsing’s lecture, I had written down this phrase: deliberate affront to those who simply let “to grieve and hope at the same time.” Perhaps the stream of history sweep them along, is we need to cultivate a notion of resistance the essence of Améry’s philosophy.”6 I have indifferent to futility or foreclosure, I thought, 04/19 tried to keep these words present in my including our resistance to those forms of mind and to act in accordance with them, economic exploitation addressed in Professor even though I am often discouraged, Tsing’s intellectual project that pay no heed to especially when confronting a topic as the different unique, particular, non-scalable difficult and depressing as the ways of doing or being threatened by globalized Anthropocene. The thought that we are not capitalism: to make and do and resist in the face only confronting the profound and ongoing of the near impossibility to alter a disastrous destruction of the natural world but the historical trajectory. As I wrote in an unsolicited possible obliteration of an existential e-mail I would later send Professor Tsing: horizon of possibilities is a thought I wrestle with. How can I make art, an Your talk reminded me of the example of activity presupposing human culture as Jean Améry, how he speaks about the something enduring through time, despite importance of resistance, and its ethical periodic disasters, when that challenge as well. As W.G. Sebald, a writer presupposition has been so radically not prone to an overabundance of destabilized? optimism, writes: “One of the impressive aspects of Améry’s stance as a writer is With this e-mail, I attached the text you are that although he knew the real limits of the about to read (with minimal revisions), developed power to resist as few others did, he during a residency at the International maintains the validity of resistance even to Programme for Visual and Applied Artists

Battle of Brunkenberg, artist unknown.

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT (IASPIS) in Stockholm in the winter of 2013–14, react to climate change once they face it as a when the discourse on climate change was present catastrophe and not some distant, relatively marginal in artistic circles. 7 It takes its statistical uncertainty? Will the result be a title from a 2012 position paper drafted by the general state of inanition and withdrawal, or will Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency – written at something of Améry’s “resistance even to the the behest of the EU in an effort to “gain more point of absurdity” galvanize creators to action, knowledge on cross-border risks and just as the horrors of World War I inspired the dependencies among Member States.”8 My text 05/19 Zurich and Berlin Dadaists in their efforts to is a peculiar composite – part science fiction upend polite society? Admittedly, this question is scenario set in a notional Stockholm in the year only briefly addressed outright in the text that 2040 (an ironic play on a city-boosting follows, although it remains omnipresent on a publication from 2007, Vision 2030, that set out to methodological level, a kind of gravitational force position Stockholm as the future capital of orienting the direction of my thinking. Scandinavia), part work of citation, and part oral đđđđđđđđđđI would like my piece to be read as pre- history, extracting from interviews conducted apocalyptic epic poetry, conceived somewhere during my IASPIS residency with a between scavenging and parasitism, gleaning heterogeneous group of Stockholm-based dialectical images from our modern and activists and researchers. postmodern detritus. It is an embodied form of đđđđđđđđđđMy original text was motivated by concerns “writing the disaster,” a notion emblematized in similar to those expressed in my e-mail to some lines from book three of William Carlos Professor Tsing, as well as an intuition felt at the Williams’s epic poem Paterson, quoted time that the only way to deal with my free- extensively in what follows: “Papers / floating anxiety about climate change was to (consumed) scattered to the winds. Black / The face my fears head on – thus, to ask: What ink burned white, metal white. So be it.”11 It can happens to knowledge when it becomes also be a guide of sorts for negotiating the two knowledge of the disaster? Its composition was forces, stochastic complexity and invariant also driven by a curiosity regarding how climate regularity, that are the two poles around which change remediation and disaster preparedness our comprehension of the contemporary world was being approached in a specific national oscillates. context such as Sweden, a country that has long đđđđđđđđđđThis narrative about Stockholm’s historical prided itself (sometimes to an irritating degree) past and future is also intended to function on being eminently sensible. Whatever its blind synechdocically, standing in for the uncertain, spots, the Swedish approach stands in stark patchy heterogeneity of the future metropolis. It contrast to the willful ignorance of the current cannot stand for all the environmental American administration, which has abrogated challenges different cities or countries will face, federal responsibility for climate change by and it was never my intention that it do so. leaving policy on disaster remediation, resiliency, Suffice it to say that it was a first step in an and risk abatement up to individual states and exercise of imagining. Other steps necessarily private actors.9 In contrast, the policy paper must follow. authored by the Swedish Civil Contingencies đđđđđđđđđđ – Michael Baers, April 2018 Agency reviews a comprehensive list of “Identified Risks,” including not only extreme 0. weather events, but cyber and terrorist attacks, civil unrest, and general societal instability, The past above, the future below suggesting possible responses and strategies for and the present pouring down:12 risk abatement. Not included in this list, however, were the possibility of an influx of During the first days of the crisis at Chernobyl climate refugees, the collapse of international nuclear power station, Valeri Alexeyevich trade, or, less easily calculated, widespread Legasov, deputy director of the Atomic Power social anomie. Institute, at great personal risk, flew by đđđđđđđđđđEdmund Husserl writes in his Cartesian helicopter over the site to better appraise the

Meditations that there is “a horizon of the past, e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m situation, passing repeatedly through the as a potentiality of recollection that can be radioactive cloud billowing from the wrecked fuel awakened; and to every recollection there reactor. Legasov’s ceaseless efforts during the belongs a horizon, the continuous intervening disaster transformed him into a national hero, intentionality of possible recollections … up to but behind the optimistic veneer he maintained the actual Now of perception.”10 Behind the other while on site, Legasov was deeply disturbed. He intentions motivating my research lay this final had realized the disaster was a sign of deeper question: When deprived of a stable collective systemic problems – in the education of horizon of possibility, how will cultural producers engineers, and in the Soviets’ general attitude to

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT technology. Some months after the accident, yellowish cast, and dogs and birds become Legasov gave an interview to a Moscow paper in skittish, people know a storm approaches and which he was quoted as follows: think: Will this be the one? The one that upends everything, inundates everything, overwhelms the It’s easy to think or imagine that the enemy civil authority’s ability to cope and the individual is the nuclear reactor. But the enemy isn’t citizen’s capacity not to give in to despair? technology. I have come to the paradoxical đđđđđđđđđđEverything happens more quickly now. The

conclusion that technology must be 06/19 psychic insulation from natural shocks provided protected from man. In the past, in the time by humanity’s technological armature no longer that included the older actors, the time taken for granted, one feels the weather acutely, ended with Gagarin’s flight into space, the as an inimical force from which there is no technology was created by people who protection. Nobody is sure when disaster will stood on the shoulders of Tolstoy and strike, but now it is perceived, in ways difficult to Dostoevsky. They were educated in this express, as an inundation threatening the interior period of the great humanitarian ideas, in of the self, an invasion of weather into the core of this period of a beautiful and correct moral being. sense. They had a clear political idea of the new society they were trying to create; one a secret world, that would be the most advanced in the a sphere, a snake with its tail in world. its mouth rolls backward into the past14

But already in the generations that succeeded them, there were engineers who Karin Bradley (assistant professor of stood on their shoulders and saw only the urbanism, Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, technical side of things. But if someone is Stockholm): If you’re supposed to picture a educated only in technical ideas, they future that is desirable, it becomes, of cannot create anything new, anything for course, very personal, and maybe also which they are responsible. The operators forces one to ask what will happen to of the reactor that night considered they existing social problems? When you were doing everything well and correctly, imagine a future, are you ignoring all and they were breaking the rules for the society’s structural problems? It’s sake of doing it even better. But they had important to train yourself in thinking lost sight of the purpose, what they were alternative futures, because we don’t do doing it for.13 that so much. We are taught that we cannot remake the future. Legasov would play a leading role in the committee formed to address the Chernobyl Stockholm 2040: disaster’s long-term consequences. Later, he đđđđđđđđđđSweden has not suffered greatly from testified in Vienna before the International climate change. As predicted in a government Atomic Energy Agency, although on that occasion white paper published in 2007 entitled “Sweden he did not share his distress over the secretive Facing Climate Change – threats and nature of the Soviet Union’s nuclear power opportunities,” Sweden has indeed benefited protocols. Two years to the day after the from longer summers and a corresponding accident, he committed suicide. increase in arable land and lumber yields.15 Also, as predicted, coastal erosion, flash floods, and 1. storm surges, algae blooms on Sweden’s lakes Stockholm 2040: and rivers, and the restricting of the reindeer đđđđđđđđđđWhen the storm surges come from the east, population to the very north of the country have and the Nacka levee sing its metallic song under all come to pass. On the other hand, no one could the wind’s ministrations, an atmosphere of have predicted the total collapse of the Baltic Sea anxiety sweeps over the city, over the glittering e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m ecosystem, which by 2030 had turned into a vast city center – Södermalm, Norrmalm, Östermalm, acidic sink where jellyfish are the predominant and Gamla Stan – and the outlying suburbs, their life form. skyscrapers rocking in the wind, a wind that cuts đđđđđđđđđđDespite the surrounding upheaval, Sweden through you as if you hardly exist. People read the has become an industrial force, a leader in weather for omens, just as in the age of Classical renewable energy technology, biotech, digital Greece oracular priestesses crooned over surveillance and encryption, and weapons sacrificial doves, divining signs of the future in manufacturing. A tenuous stability has turned strings of entrails. When the sky takes on a Stockholm into a new center of international

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT Illustration byđRutger Sjogrim.

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT finance, data storage, and international vacuum created by this withdrawal, self- diplomacy. The most significant change, however, governance has become the rule. is that which has occurred in the collective psyche of Sweden’s population. Owen Gaffney (director of communications, International Geosphere-Biosphere 2. Program): After the IPCC (the If disaster means being separated from the star Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

(if it means the decline which characterizes 08/19 Change) produced their 2007 report, one of disorientation when the link is cut with fortune the big gaps identified was in the way it from on high), then it indicates a fall beneath handled future scenarios, and some disastrous necessity.16 problems with how they did it in the past.17 đđđđđđđđđđStockholm 2040: They sent out a challenge to the scientific đđđđđđđđđđOn sunny days one is dazzled by sunbeams community to improve those scenarios, to reflecting off solar panels mounted on fifty work out what would be more policy thousand rooftops. To the east of the city, a ring of relevant and more practical for the giant locks fitted with innovative fuel-efficient scientists … For a whole load of reasons, reverse-osmosis filters stretch across the the scenarios that were created made it archipelago, protecting the integrity of the Lake difficult for a lot of scientists from different Mälaren water supply. Weather and social disciplines to work logically on them to instability have become a twinned threat. The produce useful results. waterfront has been heavily fortified against storm surges, and the city center transformed into a series of gated enclaves where bands of So the IPCC asked the IGBP and the World privately contracted security agents patrol the Climate Research Program to coordinate a fortifications separating the city center from the new initiative. We created a series of four outlying areas. Control centers monitor the banks scenarios, called the “Representative of CCTV cameras that survey the streets with Concentration Pathways” – RCPs.18 And in blank, sardonic eyes from atop metal traffic our work, we tried to model some different standards. emission scenarios. What would the đđđđđđđđđđStockholm’s most privileged citizenry have climate look like in the future? We had a gradually adapted to these changes, becoming high-emissions future – business as usual accustomed to the retinal scans required for – two medium-emissions futures, and one entry to the center zone and the constant very low-emissions future that, in fact, construction work necessary to keep municipal involves taking carbon dioxide out of the services functional under the pressure of severe atmosphere somehow. And this low- winds and storms; just as they became emission future is the scenario we need to accustomed to periodic shortages in essential get on if we want to reach the two-degree goods, power failures, the omnipresent threat of target. So when the latest report came out social turmoil lurking just beyond the carefully last September, it had these new RCP’s in circumscribed boundaries of daily life. But them. Since those emissions scenarios despite the sensation of something having came out, the IPCC was able to use them to become tenuous and provisional in the sphere of show what the impact would be on the the everyday, the streets are still crowded with global climate over the next hundred years. shoppers patronizing cafes and restaurants, clothing boutiques and retail outlets selling computer gadgetry and the latest in personal One of the worrying things about the security hardware. Something of social life scenarios is that the higher emissions continues, unaffected by the vagaries of social scenarios were deemed by the scientists transformations, but something has also and the policy makers who created them to changed, made brutal and strange in the face of be the maximum; we would not be able to contingent circumstance. go higher than that. Since they were

đđđđđđđđđđIn the suburbs, too, life carries on, e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m developed – four or five years ago now – provisionally. Kitchen gardens have sprung up on the world is actually charting above them every rooftop, in the courtyards, the median strips year by year. We are actually going above along sidewalks and roadways. Goats are kept in what was said to be the highest possible the courtyards of apartment blocks or forage in scenario. That’s deeply concerning for the the outlying strips of forested area. But people scientific community … that there’s no ask: Where is the state? Self-organized militias political change and in fact emissions are augment a feeble police presence, municipal growing, not reducing. services are scant and irregular, and in the

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT To read what was never written.19 true. It depends on how you calculate.

Isadora Wronksi (nuclear coordinator, Powershift Europe, Greenpeace): The This is how the reporting system is. It’s not European Union was doing their 2050 only Sweden; it’s the whole UN system that scenario.20 They had decided that we need needs to be changed. emission cuts in the frame between 80–95

percent reductions to 2050, and then they 09/19 started a process to look into what kind of 3. scenarios can we look at in order to achieve those emission reductions. So they looked Tor Lindstrand (architect, assistant into five different scenarios and one professor, Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan): If reference scenario. And also Sweden was there will be bigger shifts in catastrophe, looking into doing a 2050 scenario for itself, what will happen eventually is that the city so we wanted to feed into that process and will fortify itself. First there’s a surge and show that a 100 percent removal system is then there’s a cleansing movement. possible. You can’t say it’s impossible just because you don’t want to calculate it. One of the oldest documented fires to ravage central Stockholm occurred on April 14, 1297. Conflagrations then erupted in 1330, 1344, 1407, Karin Bradley: Every fourth year Stockholm 1411, 1419, 1445, 1458, and 1495. The cause of a has a large survey of what they call 1407 fire was said to be lightning strikes. “environmental behavior.” They have sixty Sources claim it caused sixteen hundred different questions about what you do in deaths.21 terms of being related to the environment. đđđđđđđđđđ Beautiful thing And these questions deal with lots of – the whole city doomed! And details about exactly what material you the flames towering22 recycle, how you get to work, whether you đđđđđđđđđđAfter 1501, no wooden houses were allowed buy ecological products, whether you buy within the city walls. In 1552, the ban against fire fair-trade products, how much time you hazards was tightened – wooden houses in the spend in nature, etc. But there are no town center were demolished and replaced with questions about your overall consumption stone structures. However, flammable wooden level – no questions about air travel, which buildings remained in all the yards. is strange. If you’re looking at ecological đđđđđđđđđđIn 1555, a fire started by burning pitch at footprints, that is a big thing. And nothing the new fort along the shore on Stadsholmen’s about the size of housing – how large your west side destroyed all the houses from the house is. It’s rather what kind of heating Great Gråmunkegränd to Kornhamnstorg, just you have in your house. All of these factors outside the city wall. Citizens had to run clear to that are actually the biggest part of an the east side of Stadsholmen to collect water. ecological footprint – size of housing, đđđđđđđđđđ Ah! consumption, and air travel – are not even rotten beams tum- looked at. I think if you have a bling, consumption-based perspective, then that an old bottle also leads you to look particularly at high- mauled23 income groups, because there’s a statistical link between income and Aaron Malthais (postdoctoral fellow, emissions or resource use. You can see that University of Stockholm): Politically, we’re in the national statistics: higher income not really very good at dealing with these correlates with more consumption, more slow-onset, long-term problems. When we transportation, more everything. think about the nature of the problem of climate change, people often describe it as

e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m a “super-wicked problem.” This is a And if you consider the rise in terms of technical term in political economy and consumption levels, imported goods, and economics. They’re basically talking about flying, then we have increased the amount the incentives that actors face, and that of emissions in the last ten years. In the there’s a combination of incentives … official politics we say we have “decoupled” Climate change has this characteristic that our economy, we have both had economic you need to make large cuts in greenhouse growth and less greenhouse gas emissions. emissions now to have a positive effect But, I mean, we haven’t. That’s simply not quite far into the future. And once you’re

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Ol. Magni, Eldsvådor, c.đ1500s. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT having large climate effects, at that point you’re not able to improve your situation by Karin Bradley: Sweden has a lot of making large cuts in emissions. So any time non–fossil fuel energy sources – water and you make large cuts in emissions, those our three nuclear power plants. What we benefits largely land in the future, and don’t think of when considering nuclear that’s just a basic structural problem in energy is that it’s dependent on imports of dealing with this kind of environmental uranium. And to expand solar energy, you

threat. 11/19 need silicon, and rare earth metals for wind power and wind power shields. So a lot of the green technologies are reliant on scarce Karin Bradley: Stockholm claims that it has resources that at some point will become decreased its greenhouse gas emissions. unavailable. For instance, rare earth metals Basically, the official story is that we are on are found in China and they’re restricting a very good track, we have solved all their exports because they need it environmental problems, the world should themselves. look at us; we’re well on the way to being fossil-fuel free, which is not true at all. There is some kind of idea about being the Now we’re thinking that basically we could best in the class – general equality, most keep the same kind of lifestyle but replace things, somehow. And if you listen to most the energy sources and the materials.24 I of the politicians, they say, “Yeah, Sweden’s think we need to think about reduction, too. really a forerunner in terms of environment. Now it’s about helping others, and this clean development mechanism.” We want But I think it’s very unclear what to do to make investment in green technology in about this. Because then you come into other countries, but don’t see that we very difficult questions, since our whole actually overconsume resources. economic growth is very much reliant on increasing consumption, and if you look at where the new jobs are created, a lot of 4. them are within retail. So, to get people to Stockholm 2040: consume is important for the whole đđđđđđđđđđAir traffic from the Arlanda, Nyköping, and economy but also for jobs in the retail Bromma airports is a fraction of what it once was. sector. Some would argue that, okay, we One no longer hears the familiar roar of jet can have a more service-based economy. turbines passing overhead, commercial jet traffic But even though we have a lot of service having been outlawed in 2035. The hybrid jobs, material-goods consumption has solar/hydrogen fuel cell gliders that have gone up as well. It’s not that easy to have replaced the outmoded jet fleets remain an economy based only on services. prohibitively expensive, restricting air travel to all but the very affluent. In any case, there are fewer There are two sides to each man’s life: his reasons to travel and fewer places to travel to, personal life, which is the more free the more the population of continental Europe having been abstract its interests, and his elemental reduced by a third due to famines following a swarmlike life, where man inevitably fulfills the series of catastrophic crop failures. The EU still laws prescribed for him.25 nominally exists, although the mobility promised by the Eurozone and the Schengen agreement Isadora Wronski: Throwing away thirty have turned out to be a temporary aberration to percent of all food, that’s not very resource the normative urge of states to control their effective.26 Taking up huge amounts of land borders. Greece, Spain, and Portugal left the Euro in Brazil, planting soya beans, feeding them in 2019. The Schengen agreement was modified, to European cows, and then throwing away reinstating border controls not long after, an the milk or meat … We need to take an even attempt to control northerly waves of migration e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m bigger systems perspective. In the end the from a beleaguered southern Europe and beyond approach that is needed is internalizing the … costs, that you have a product pay also for đđđđđđđđđđAs the weather becomes increasingly the emissions it’s producing, because in the unpredictable, regional conflicts multiply, usually end the society and the taxpayer will have stemming from disputes over shared natural to pay for the harm those emissions will resources, or the expropriation of resources from cause. Then you will see a completely adjacent territories. No industrial production is different price for that item than if its cost entirely free from the ethical taint of warfare. had been determined only by production

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT costs … We need to see the actual the favelas’ complex social structure continue, as production cost. they have become essential to Sweden’s industrial and agricultural sectors, an important reservoir of surplus labor. After the contraction of 5. mainland China’s industrial output following Stockholm 2040: widespread ecological failure and a series of đđđđđđđđđđIn 2045, military patrols guard the southern catastrophic famines (African states having long borders of Belgium, Germany, and Poland, 12/19 ago expropriated China’s agribusiness colonies), partially financed by the Scandinavian countries, domestic industrial output has, for the first time who have come to view Western and Central in generations, assumed a prominent role in the Europe as a first line of defense against Swedish economy. Emergency orders, drawn up migration. Despite these attempts, fortress long ago and continuously extended, allow laws Scandinavia could never be more than a dream. governing industrial labor to be habitually Immigrants still attempt the passage across the suspended on account of “extraordinary Baltic Sea in converted fishing trawlers run by circumstances.” Extraordinary conditions have gangs of coyotes operating along the Baltic coast, become the norm. This has led to the resumption hoping to join the throngs crowded into of labor conditions not seen in Scandinavia since shantytowns on the outskirts of Stockholm’s the nineteenth century. suburbs.27 Here one can find representatives đđđđđđđđđđPeriodically, labor agitation sweeps through from nearly every country on the planet. And the shantytowns – sit-down strikes and walkouts, whereas in the world of 2014, the distinction demonstrations where shamans cast spells to between developed and underdeveloped worlds defeat the industrialists and mullahs oversee hit- was a function of geography, today one finds the and-run attacks against the city-center defenses. latest technological innovations alongside This has led to a protracted cat-and-mouse game practices going back millennia: electric cars between émigré labor organizers, their allies on share the streets with rickshaws and donkey the Swedish left, and the intelligence forces of carts; inner-city apartments come equipped with the combines who effectively control domestic computer systems monitoring every aspect of the industrial production and maintain their own domestic environment while a few kilometers private police force. away, clothes are washed by hand in scavenged plastic tubs. Karin Bradley: As the current welfare đđđđđđđđđđThese new shantytowns nourish a system is constructed, if Sweden were to burgeoning informal economy retaining accommodate really large shares of climate something of the appearance of a global bazaar. refugees, you would need to reform the Population groups have reconstituted themselves economic and welfare system. There are in miniature, configuring the favelas as an those who argue that the welfare system archipelago of tiny ethnic islands – Gambians will be put under so much stress that at next to Tamils, Bangladeshis abutting Mongolian some point there won’t be a welfare tribesmen. Different peoples bring with them system, which is not that strange. their traditional foods, religious practices, and modes of social organization. In kitchen gardens are grown fruits, vegetables, and medicinal plants I think of course for many people who come that fifty years ago could never have grown in as immigrants or refugees to Sweden, Sweden’s mild summer weather, and people trade either they must flee or they seek a better and barter fresh produce and scavenged goods, life. But the reason for that is often while tradesmen like electricians and plumbers because they can’t find a good enough life (many of whom trained as engineers and where they live … It’s not that people dream architects in their native countries) occupy a about the goods so much necessarily. privileged place in the social hierarchy. đđđđđđđđđđA profusion of religious practices flourish and intermingle in a syncretistic orgy of And of course there are also these heterodoxy. Ecstatic Christian millenarians join in e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m scenarios that maybe the Gulf Stream will prayer with Central Asian shamans, West African change its course, which could then make voodoo practitioners, Sufi dervishes. In Gamla Sweden very, very cold, a less desirable Stan it is rumored that in the favelas magic is place even for native Swedes.28 practiced as commonly as personal hygiene, a fact confirmed by a team of anthropologists hired by the city of Stockholm, some of whom fell victim 6. to mysterious ailments in the course of their The past haunts the present; but the latter research. But despite the risk, efforts to infiltrate denies it with good reason. For on the surface

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT Illustration byđRutger Sjogrim.

05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT nothing remains the same.29 less, and we could consume more low- đđđđđđđđđđFrom 1397 to 1523, Danish and Swedish carbon types of natural goods and use less forces battled for control of Sweden. Possessing fossil fuel. We could invest less in buildings Stockholm was crucial to this enterprise and and roads and more in new energy sources, various Swedish/Danish factions regularly and so on. We could try to make this besieged the city. In 1471, Sten Sture the Elder transition in a way that would not really defeated Christian I of Denmark at the Battle of affect our welfare that much.

Brunkeberg, losing the city twenty-six years later 14/19 to Hans of Denmark. Sture managed to seize power again in 1501, and a lengthy Danish Now, that raises this question: Is it blockade ensued. legitimate to borrow from the future to đđđđđđđđđđIn January 1520, Hans’s son, Christian II, finance not imposing this environmental backed by a mercenary army of French, German, problem on them? Some people say: well, and Scottish soldiers, again besieged the city, yes, it’s not only legitimate but that’s the felling the regent Sten Sture the Younger, who way it should work, because the future is was unceremoniously dragged from his horse going to be richer than us. So it’s a kind of and pierced through the chest by a lance as he cost-benefit analysis. (They have this lay squirming on the ice of Lake Mälaren. assumption that they’re going to be richer đđđđđđđđđđHastily gathered in Uppsala, leaders of the than us!) And some people say, well, it’s not Swedish nobility quickly agreed to capitulate, really the best, it’s kind of like extortion, provided amnesty was granted Christian’s but given that we’re having such a hard time political opponents. getting political action now, maybe this is đđđđđđđđđđMeanwhile, Sture’s widow Dame Kristina really a good strategy. It’s a way to do Gyllenstierna had regrouped the remnants of her something. It’s not the nicest thing, but on army, defeated by the Danes at the Battle of the whole, it’s a good second-best option. Uppsala, behind Stockholm’s city walls. The Danish forces, camping outside the city gates, waited for the Danish fleet’s return. In May, And my reaction to this idea: I just doubt we Stockholm finally was encircled from land and can borrow from the future in that way. sea. For four months Dame Kristina’s forces rebuffed the Danes, until in the fall, Christian, In this sense, the past devours the future.31 wearying of the protracted siege, delivered a proposal offering advantageous terms in Aaron Malthais: So, the worry is that no exchange for the city’s surrender, swearing all generation has a strong enough self- acts against him would be forgotten. interest to cut emissions, because they’re Gyllenstierna herself was enticed with the offer not able to alter the climate change they’ll of a large fiefdom. experience over their lifetimes to a very đđđđđđđđđđAfter a document agreeing to these terms significant degree. And the worry is that if, had been drafted and signed, Stockholm’s mayor let us say, this generation – the decision- handed Christian the keys to the city and his makers, the adult taxpayers – doesn’t forces marched through the city gates as the invest heavily in mitigation, then our assembled citizenry watched in silence. He then children and their children will come and sailed back to Denmark. think, “Wow, this is really terrible, they didn’t have our interests in their political Aaron Malthais: Something people are decisions” … and so forth. But they will be talking about now concerns a philosopher faced with the same kind of decision we named John Broome, who is one of the lead have, that we didn’t invest because it authors at the IPCC. He has this idea – it’s wasn’t going to make a large difference to not part of his IPCC work – where he says, our lives. And when they’re sitting there “Well, basically we’re creating an with a bunch of climate impacts, they’ll externality when we pollute the have to deal with them, of course, but

atmosphere, and that creates costs on e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m they’ll be faced with the same question: future generations and this current “Do we invest heavily in mitigation and generation takes the benefits.” His idea is cutting greenhouse gas emissions, or we do we could borrow from the future to finance invest in adapting to these climate reducing emissions today.30 And there are problems we’re facing now? Because the various proposals about how you could do investments we’ll make in mitigation, that’s that, various ways of taking on national not going to help us that much it’s going to debt, but especially changing behavior. We mostly help people in the future.” could work less so we would also pollute

05.11.18 / 18:50:27 EDT On November 4 1520, pro-unionist archbishop effects have no conception of national Gustavus Trolle (whose fortress at Stäket had boundaries. Whatever Stockholm does to mitigate previously been besieged by Sture the Younger’s new climate risks, the possibility remains that troops) crowned Christian II of Denmark king these measures will be insufficient. inside Stockholm’s Storkyrkan. đđđđđđđđđđChristian’s celebratory banquet lasted three Karin Bradley: I’ve been thinking a lot about days. On the evening of the third day, he urbanization, because the mainstream summoned a group of Swedish leaders to a 15/19 discourse is that Stockholm will continue to private conference at the palace. It lasted grow, while smaller towns in the through the night and into the next day. That countryside are losing people and that will evening, as the invited guests suffered through just continue, like it’s a natural law. I’m not another meal, Danish soldiers entered the great sure of this, because as David Harvey has hall of the royal palace, removing several noble shown, urbanization and capitalism and guests. Several hours later, more guests were led economic growth are different sides of the away. The following day, a council headed by same coin.34 If you had a serious economic Trolle began charging the Danish king’s political crisis, you might also see a de-urbanization enemies with heresy. By noon, the anti-unionist process beginning. Some researchers like bishops of Skara and Strängnäs were being led Richard Heinberg argue that everything out to the Stortorget, where a raised platform today is reliant on cheap fossil fuels.35 In had been erected. The executions continued addition to relying on fossil fuel, industrial throughout the day: chief executioner Jörgen agriculture relies on phosphorus as well. I Homuth counted eighty-two killings in all. don’t know if we’ve seen peak phosphorus đđđđđđđđđđWhen Gustav Vasa conquered the city three or are close to it, but when the price of years later, he noted that every second building phosphorus rises, so will fertilizers. Large- in Stockholm was abandoned. scale agriculture will not be as profitable as before. He argues that within fifty to (so close are we to ruin every hundred years we’ll see a process of day!)32 ruralization, actually. People will have to live closer to the land … You’ll need more manpower in food production. Aaron Malthais: And so you can see how each generation gets stuck in this motivational problem, and so the real worry I think, in fact, there’s something risky in is that we’ll be perpetually in this situation losing all these skills and knowledge about of delay that is, of course, bad for humanity how to produce food. And not only food but as a whole, but for each generation makes basic crafts – knitting, doing practical sense in terms of their own time things. It’s very important to keep it alive perspective. somehow, even though we’ll not necessarily be self-sufficient. Now I think these skills are being forgotten and it’s gone quite fast 7. really. It’s a difficult process to reverse The disaster is related to forgetfulness – once its begun. forgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated – the immemorial, perhaps. To remember forgetfully: 8. again: the outside.33 The disaster: stress upon minutiae, sovereignty đđđđđđđđđđStockholm 2040: of the accidental. This causes us to acknowledge đđđđđđđđđđThe changes to the environment have above that forgetfulness is not negative or that the all affected distinctions between inside and negative does not come after affirmation outside, interiority and exteriority, the (affirmation negated), but exists in relation to the endogenous and exogenous – between the most ancient, to what would seem to come from natural world and the impulses of the central e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m furthest back in time immemorial without ever nervous system; between Stockholm and its having been given.36 surrounding zones; between Sweden, its regional đđđđđđđđđđStockholm 2040: neighbors, and the world at large. It is not that đđđđđđđđđđLong ago, the Swedish Civil Contingencies distance had been abridged, but that the Agency released a document on risk assessment magnitude of catastrophe has created its own which contained chapters on the following collapse, as if the wind itself could transport the subjects: floods, landslides, storms, earthquakes residue of distant events directly into the city. and volcanic eruptions, solar storms, heat waves, This is how it feels. Weather and its ancillary forest fires, vermin infestation (pests), infectious

05.11.18 / 18:50:27 EDT disease outbreaks, resistant bacteria and was suspended, or they lit huge bonfires in resistance to antivirals, disruptions in the supply hopes of driving off the bad air. of medicines, risks associated with nuclear and radioactive materials, risks associated with The night was made day by the flames, chemicals, dam failures, disruptions to food and flames drinking water supply, extensive fires in buildings On which he fed – grubbing the page and tunnels, disruption in electronic (the burning page) communications, disruptions in energy supplies, 16/19 like a worm for enlightenment38 disruptions in payment systems, oil spills, disruption of transport and major transport emergencies, terrorism, cyber-attacks, risk of 9. societal instability and civil unrest.37 This list is The “climate change sublime,” a contemporary now updated on a routine basis and new chapters manifestation of eighteenth-century philosopher are added according to circumstance. and politician Edmund Burke’s Enlightenment- đđđđđđđđđđAs a meditative practice, people have been era cross-referencing of aesthetic experience known to browse through the report on their with physiological affect: digital readers, trying to imagine in the mind’s eye the different scenarios. Again: the outside. The passion caused by the great and đđđđđđđđđđIn 1710, refugees from Livonia and Estonia sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and fleeing the Great Northern War brought a astonishment is that state of the soul, in ferocious strain of plague to Central Sweden. By which all its motions are suspended, with June it had arrived in Stockholm, most probably some degree of horror. In this case the mind via a ship from Pärnu. The Collegium Medicum is so entirely filled with its object, that it denied there was a plague outbreak for another cannot entertain any other.39 two months, despite buboes being visible on the bodies of victims from both ship and town. Stockholm 2040: đđđđđđđđđđThe plague continued for a year, primarily đđđđđđđđđđSomething is out of kilter. The seasons still affecting women and children in the poorer pass, one after the other, but those old enough to quarters outside the Old Town. “They died by the remember what weather was once like, despite hundreds, both day and night, and all were its stochastic variations, react to an thrown in ditches and covered with earth,” wrote unidentifiable haze in the air, or an exceptionally a Stockholm merchant. “As soon as those hot summer day with horror, as another proof of ditches were filled, more were dug. So many died nature knocked irreversibly askew. Horror, terror, that all believed it was the end of the world. And panic. Some people react by deadening their I, Magnus Brandel Norling, buried my five awareness of the experience of the external children with my own hands.” Another Stockholm world, keeping to controlled environments, chronicler wrote: “The condition of the people focused on screens. Others develop a was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the hypersensitivity to external stimuli so that every thousands daily, and died unattended and abnormal occurrence – birds singing too loud, without help. Many died in the open street; birds entirely still; a gust of wind, a sudden, others, dying in their houses, made it known by violent rainstorm; an unexplained clamor, an the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated unnatural calm – is taken as a harbinger of the churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the coming disaster. multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the đđđđđđđđđđIn his Outline of a Theory of the Emotions, hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ship’s Jean-Paul Sartre differentiated between horror, hold and covered with a little earth.” which occasions feelings of revulsion, a đđđđđđđđđđFrom Stockholm, the plague began to contraction inward, and terror, which on the spread in late summer to other places in other hand is characterized by a feeling of radical Uppland. The court was hurriedly evacuated to exteriorization, of being “invaded” by the Sala, the riksrådet to Arboga a month later. From external world – a sudden collapse of distance Uppland, it spread southward with equally between inside and outside. This distinction was devastating effect. People cast about for a e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m first made by the Romantic-era writer Ann cause: Was it the foul mists, or did domestic Radcliffe, who characterized horror as an animals transmit the disease? Orders were unambiguous reaction to atrocity, while promulgated forbidding peasants and burghers connecting terror to “obscurity” or indeterminacy from keeping livestock inside the towns, and an in our reaction to potentially horrible events that abundance of stray pigs that thrived on the expand the soul and awaken the faculties – an garbage discarded in the streets were killed. indeterminacy leading to the sublime. Burke had People fled to the surrounding countryside, and written earlier: in the towns, trade in linen and woolen goods

05.11.18 / 18:50:27 EDT With regard to such things as affect by the and Kungliga Akademien för de fria konsterna, associated idea of danger, there can be no operate with a reduced faculty and a greater doubt but that they produce terror, and act emphasis on applied arts and design. After by some modification of that passion; and graduation, Swedish artists are confronted with that terror, when sufficiently violent, raises degrees of financial instability not seen since the the emotions of the body just mentioned, Great Depression, but according to the can as little be doubted. But if the sublime sociologists who have studied the matter, the

is built on terror, or some passion like it, 17/19 level of psychological resiliency within the artistic which has pain for its object; it is previously community echoes that of the broader proper to enquire how any species of population. As in every era, some artists remain delight can be derived from a cause so sequestered in their ateliers, some give up art apparently contrary to it.40 altogether for reasons of economic necessity or psychological despair, and some seek patronage Herein lies the sublime’s ambivalence: awe and from the government or from tech, aesthetic appreciation are prompted by the very environmental-remediation, and risk- thing that terrifies, as if Freud’s repetition management companies. Others have joined the compulsion could be displaced onto aesthetics. exodus from the city to alternative communities Something of this is apparent in the futurists’ in the countryside – who eke out a living from the aesthetic appreciation of World War I’s soil, and by resuscitating handicrafts and local depravities – the smoke and noise, the blinding folk traditions – or by uniting in small scavenger speed of munitions, and the white light of collectives to occupy vacant buildings in the city explosions. Something of this is apparent in our center, living off the refuse of the affluent. Others morbid fascination with the visible evidence of have adapted the communication skills learned in the climate’s unravelling. art school to labor and environmental activism in đđđđđđđđđđBurke has come down to the twenty-first the suburbs and shantytowns – the latest century as a conservative philosopher, a incarnation in a long tradition of radical negation, traditionalist – a vocal opponent of the French practicing art as a strategy of withdrawal. Yet Revolution who, by the time he wrote Reflections others have chosen a middle path, continuing to on the Revolution in France, had transferred what operate within the “official” art system while was once a nonmoral analysis of aesthetic joining secret clandestine societies that make categories (because, as David Bromwich writes, common cause with radical groups to undermine “they were planted in us, we could not imagine the prevailing “technocratic inclination” keeping human life without them, and to call them good the city’s surface normalcy in place.42 or bad would be superfluous”).41 His response to đđđđđđđđđđTwenty-five years earlier, a Berlin-based revolution comes down to us in our horror when researcher had written, “In confronting our the beautiful things of the past are threatened possible futures, whether for artists or the with ruination, no matter their iniquitous origin. broader society, there is a negotiation I His appreciation of the sublime comes down to continually find myself making between an us in our awestruck reaction to glaciers calving anticipated and a hoped-for outcome. The enormous icebergs, despite the awareness such problem is this: on the one hand, no one who events lead directly to sea-level rise. really thinks about it would advance chaos and social disintegration as a desirable future. On the 10. other hand, there are so many patently Stockholm 2040: unsustainable aspects of present-day society đđđđđđđđđđAnd what of Stockholm’s artistic community that I find myself resistant to positing its – the theorists, curators, and artists, with their continuation as desirable.” Having forsaken an training in aesthetic sensitization – how will they image of the “good life” as a possible telos for react to the climate change sublime? Will artistic projects, most of Stockholm’s artists in Stockholm’s artists and culture workers respond the year 2040 find themselves in an ambivalent to environmental and societal pressures with negotiation between utopianism and bricolage, radical engagement, retreat into solipsistic scavenging in the debris of the present moment to fantasies of denial, or, in the face of an abiding e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m construct a vision of a future anterior, wondering existential uncertainty, lose faith in the artistic all along whether their efforts will suffice. project altogether? These are predicaments both practical and philosophical in nature. Stockholm’s 11. art scene persists at a greatly reduced scale, and Those of us who have not lived through war or in the face of the diminished social currency of known hardship suppose something vaguely cultural heritage. A smattering of public and resembling the present will continue indefinitely. private galleries remain in Stockholm’s center Trained by cinema and television, we cannot zone, while the city’s two art schools, Konstfack imagine a world where disaster – whether

05.11.18 / 18:50:27 EDT natural or man-made (here including the realm of not going to stop there. The thing is, they politics as a category of the catastrophic) – do only looked to 2100; sea-level rise is going not follow a narrative arc but follow one after the to continue past that. And if emissions other, without resolution, like an occupying army continue, we get into hitting danger zones, who first harass then ultimately exhaust a potentially destabilizing elements of the civilian population. We cannot imagine this world earth’s system, creating feedback loops for, at least those of us in the West (although that accelerate the change. many elsewhere know all too well the 18/19 predicament of being caught up in endless conflict and its attendant miseries), have not These are the big worries. Policy-makers lived through such protracted periods of chaos, say, well, we need to know what’s going to the sort of degradation described by C. V. happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years Wedgwood in her history of the Thirty Years War: – that’s what’s relevant to policy-makers. But the scientists are saying, what’s In ten years of war, more than half the relevant to humanity is this huge long-term empire had borne the actual occupation or shift that the human race is going to have passage of troops, the immediate disaster to face, including policy-makers. Policy- leaving a train of evils behind – disease makers will minimize economic losses if among the cattle, famine for man and they deal with climate change now. But beast, the ineradicable germs of plague. there’s a huge disconnect. Four bad harvests in succession between 1625 and 1628 added their burden to the We are failing in our effort to imagine, much less tale of German misery. Plague took terrific construct, a viable future world. toll of the hungry people and wiped out đđđđđđđđđđIf we were to withdraw our faith in endless whole encampments of wretched refugees. technological fixes, perhaps we might then … In Tyrol in 1628 they ground bean stalks surrender ourselves to the necessary dimension for bread, in Nassau in 1630 acorns and of myth in our efforts to imagine a world that has roots … The harvest of 1627 on the banks of not yet come into being. This might be our last the Havel had promised well, but retreating tool in confronting the future. Danes and pursuing imperialists destroyed đđđđđđđđđđ× it.43

If something like a climate change sublime exists, it would be a crystallization of the terrifying capacity of nature to overwhelm human subjectivity. đđđđđđđđđđHistory as the ruin of nature could not be given meaning.44 đđđđđđđđđđWhat sort of person will the future deliver? What sorts of stories will be told, what coalescence of forces will push people into conflict or cause them to align in pursuit of a common project? To read what was never written is to divine a future anterior. Without risking the dark alterity of difference, we cannot imagine a world shaped according to a better set of principles than those currently in play – principles in line with Legasov’s “beautiful and correct moral sense.” Instead we are living history as a phenomenon in which a multitude of persons are driven “to fulfill the will of isolated and weak men and be brought to that by a e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m countless number of complex, diverse causes.”45

Owen Gaffney: One of the problems with the international assessments on climate change, for example, if we carry on business as usual, sea level might be forty- eight centimeters to eighty-five centimeters higher than presently. But it’s

05.11.18 / 18:50:27 EDT đđđđđđ1 đđđđđđ11 Gregor Peter Schmitz, “Europe Disaster, 3, 4. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The William Carlos Williams, to Ditch Climate Protection Mushroom at the End of the Paterson (New Directions Goals,” Spiegel Online, January đđđđđđ37 World: On the Possibility of Life in Paperbook, 1963), 117. Ann 15, 2014 See Capitalist Ruins (Princeton Smock, again, in words that http://www.spiegel.de/intern https://www.preventionweb.ne University Press, 2015), 62. succinctly encapsulate the ational/europe/european-comm t/organizations/4466/view. difficulty of putting down in ission-move-away-from-climat đđđđđđ2 words our possible future: “‘The e-protection-goals-a-943664. đđđđđđ38 Joan Didion, The White Album writing of the disaster’ means html. Williams, Paterson, 117. (Simon & Schuster, 1979), 11. not simply the process whereby something called the disaster is đđđđđđ25 đđđđđđ39

đđđđđđ3 written – communicated, 19/19 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, attested to, or prophesied. It trans. Richard Pevear and Enquiry into the Sublime and the “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The also means the writing done by Larissa Volkhonsky (Vintage Beautiful, ed. J. T. Bolton Anomic Archive” October 102, no. the disaster – by the disaster Books, 2007), 605. (Routledge, 2008), 57. 88 (Spring 1999): 122. that ruins books and wrecks language. ‘The writing of the đđđđđđ26 đđđđđđ40 đđđđđđ4 disaster’ means the writing that Rebecca Smithers, “Almost half Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Aby Warburg, “The Absorption of the disaster – which liquidates of the world's food thrown away, into the Sublime and the the Expressive Values of the writing – is, just as ‘knowledge report finds,” The Guardian, Beautiful, 132. Past,” trans. Matthew Rampley, of the disaster’ means January 10, 2013 Art in Translation 1, no. 2 (2009): knowledge as disaster, and ‘the http://www.theguardian.com/e đđđđđđ41 282. flight of thought’ the loss of nvironment/2013/jan/10/half- David Bromwich, “Edmund thought, which thinking is.” world-food-waste. Burke, Reflections on the đđđđđđ5 Blanchot, The Writing of the Revolution in France,” in A W. G. Sebald, On the Natural Disaster, ix. đđđđđđ27 Companion to Romanticism, ed. History of Destruction, trans. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki Duncan Wu (Blackwell Anthea Bell (Penguin Books, đđđđđđ12 /Environmental_migrant and Publishers, 1998), 113.) to a 2004), 153. Williams, Paterson, 144. http://climatemigration.org. defense of the types of society uk/report-summary-climate-re that provide a place for beauty đđđđđđ6 đđđđđđ13 fugees-legal-and-policy-resp and guarded the survival of Sebald, On the Natural History of My italics. This episode is onses-to-environmentally-ind lovely things for their own sake, Destruction, 159. Speaking of recounted at the conclusion of uced-migration/ and even if these were an outcome of Maurice Blanchot’s irony with episode six (“A is for Atom”) of http://www.unric.org/en/late st- aristocratic privilege or gross respect to a categorical faith or Adam Curtis’s BBC series un-buzz/28883-the-invisib le- inequality. Burke opposed the trust (confiance) in language, Pandora’s Box. For the full text climate-refugees. revolution in France on the basis Ann Smock writes in her of the interview, see of aesthetics and a distaste for introduction to The Writing of the https://archive.org/stream/D đđđđđđ28 excess and vulgarity, a Disaster that it is a defiance – TIC_ADA350993/DTIC_ADA350993 Damian Carrington and John “disposition to preserve, and an distrust – “of language, situated _djvu.txt. Vidal, “IPCC climate report: the ability to improve” being his in language, which finds within digested read,” The Guardian, “standard of a itself the terms of its own đđđđđđ14 September 27, 2013 statesman.”[footnote Burke, A critique.” Maurice Blanchot, The Williams, Paterson, 214. http://www.theguardian.com/e Philosophical Enquiry into the Writing of the Disaster, trans. nvironment/2013/sep/27/ipcc- Sublime and the Beautiful, Ann Smock (University of đđđđđđ15 climate-report-digested-read . 266–67. Nebraska Press, 1995), vii. See http://www.government.se/sb/ đđđđđđ29 đđđđđđ42 đđđđđđ7 d/574/a/96002. Susan Buck-Morss, The These models for culture My text was subsequently Dialectics of Seeing (MIT Press, workers’ response to climate published in Swedish as part of đđđđđđ16 1991) 292. change and societal instability the book Reform, a collaboration Blanchot, The Writing of the were originally developed in my between publik (Copenhagen), Disaster, 2. đđđđđđ30 contribution to Art Workers: Bergen Kunsthall, Konsthall C John Broome, “The Ethics of Material Conditions and Labour (Stockholm), and Antipyrene đđđđđđ17 Climate Change: Pay Now or Pay Struggles in Contemporary Art Publishing in Aarhus. See More Later?” Scientific Practice, eds. Airi Triisberg, Erik http://www.ipcc.ch/publicati American, June 2008 Krikortz, and Minna Henriksson đđđđđđ8 ons_and_data/publications_ip http://www.scientificamerica (2015), 199–229 http://www.art- As Director General Helen cc_fourth_assessment_report_ n.com/article/the-ethics-of- workers.org/d Lindberg phrased it in the synthesis_report.htm. climate-change/. ownload/ArtWorkers.pdf. foreword to A First Step Towards a National Risk Assessment đđđđđđ18 đđđđđđ31 đđđđđđ43 (MSB, 2011), 3. See See Norman O. Brown, Life C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years http://www.igbp.net/news/fea Against Death (University of War (Anchor Books, 1961), 247, đđđđđđ9 tures/features/oneplanetfour Wesleyan Press, 1985), 262–72. 248. In his 2018 budget blueprint, futures.5.1b8ae20512db692f2a Trump has proposed a $600 680002917.html. đđđđđđ32 đđđđđđ44 million cut to the budget of the Williams, Paterson, 45. This line appears in my notebook Federal Emergency Management đđđđđđ19 from the period of my Stockholm Association (FEMA), even as the Line jotted down in my notebook đđđđđđ33 research. sixteen extreme weather events during a talk by W. J. T. Mitchell. Blanchot, The Writing of the visited upon the United States in Disaster, 3. đđđđđđ45 2017 affected 47 million people đđđđđđ20 Tolstoy, War and Peace, 605. and cost an estimated 300 See đđđđđđ34 billion dollars. See Ron Nixon, https://ec.europa.eu/energy/ David Harvey, The New “Trump’s Leader for FEMA Wins en/topics/energy-strategy-an d- Imperialism (Oxford University Praise, But Proposed Budget energy-union/2050-energy-s Press, 2003). See also Jason W. Cuts Don’t,” New York Times, July trategy. Moore, “Ecological Crises and 21, 2017 the Agrarian Question in World-

https://www.nytimes.com/2017 đđđđđđ21 e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 1 — m y 2 0 8 đ M i c h B s A F i r s t S e p T o w a d R g n l k m Historical Perspective,” Monthly /07/21/us/politics/trumps-le All historical information on Review, November 1, 2008 ader-for-fema-wins-praise-bu t- Stockholm is from Wikipedia and http://monthlyreview.org/200 proposed-budget-cuts-dont. other carefully vetted online 8/11/01/ecological-crises-an d- html. sources. the-agrarian-question-in-w orld-historical-perspective. đđđđđđ10 đđđđđđ22 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Williams, Paterson, 116. đđđđđđ35 Meditations: An Introduction to See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki Phenomenology, trans. Dorion đđđđđđ23 /Richard_Heinberg. Cairns (Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), Williams, Paterson, 117. 44, 45. đđđđđđ36 đđđđđđ24 Blanchot, The Writing of the

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