Society and space

The following text is offered by Jess McLean as a supplement to her forthcoming Environment and Planning D: Society and Space article, The contingency of change in the Anthropocene: More-than-real renegotiation of power relations in climate change institutional transformation in Australia. In the piece, which is currently free to access in the online first section of the journal webpage, McLean analyses the creation of a crowdfunded climate change institution in Australia – the Climate Council – as an instance of everyday activism in the Anthropocene, and partly a function of the more-than-real.

Can the desire to do something in digital spaces, like social media, produce social changes that are effective, and can the Anthropocene concept accommodate these? I explore these two questions in my Environment and Planning D: Society and Space article, “The contingency of change in the Anthropocene: More-than-real renegotiation of power relations in climate change institutional transformation in Australia”.

The Anthropocene, the era geologists are stating we are in as a result of humanity’s environmental impacts, is a contested notion. There is dispute over how we should definition this era and whether it is even a useful idea. However, Cook et al (2015) argue that ‘More important than the issue of its definition are the moral, cultural, and political challenges that the Anthropocene is amplifying.’ (Cook et al, 2015: 231). In the Society and Space article, I traced some of the challenges amplified by the Anthropocene, including how we respond to our understanding of our environmental responsibilities and whether we can do anything substantive in the digital realm about climate change.

We sometimes still talk about how digital spaces are not real, that they are functions of the virtual (Kinsley, 2014). The acronym IRL captures this as we say to Facebook friends or Twitter associates – this would be different in real life. And in some ways it would be different if we were face-to-face, or side-by-side, but that fact doesn’t make digital spaces any less real. If anything, their excessive power – both corrosive and generative – forge them as more-than-real. And just as risky.

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In the article ‘Contradiction, intervention and the low carbon transition’, which appears in issue 3 of the 2015 volume of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and is currently free to access, Vanesa Castán Broto follows Kojève’s reading of contradiction in Hegel’s oeuvre to present an analysis of contradictions in urban low carbon transitions as engines of change. The text below is offered by the author as a supplement to the piece.

Introduction

I fell in love with the idea of contradiction when I stumbled upon Alexandre Kojéve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel at the University College London Library on a cold autumn afternoon. The material sensations of holding the book have preserved this moment in my memory: the lovingly-made hard cover with its fabric coming out; the dusty smell that starts with the passing of the page and settles down slowly until you pass it again; the remnants of the many hands that have gone through these pages, underlining some passages without giving any thought to what future readers will think of it. I can feel the contents of the book grabbing me from the inside, moving me towards a debate around the notion of contradiction and the possibility of change.

Embracing contradiction may be the only avenue for progressive climate change action. This is the central argument that I present in the paper ‘Contradiction, intervention and the low carbon transition’, recently published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. The ideas in this paper emerged from a sense of frustration with current debates about the governance of climate change. I had long observed that ‘contradiction’ was frequently invoked in discussions of climate change governance, but rarely defined. I was sitting at a meeting discussing urban sustainability transitions, when a colleague referred to ‘contradiction’ to explain away the paradoxical nature of climate change governance in certain exemplary European city. This upset me. Like in other occasions, invoking contradiction was a means to end the discussion, rather than to open it up. Reviewing the literature on climate change governance, I struggled to find a coherent means to make sense of what contradictions were and why they mattered.

Until I found, pretty much by chance, Kojéve’s book on Hegel. I read it first out of a sense of curiosity, mostly because there is a part of me which yearns to open dusty covers of books. However, once I read this book, I found myself drawn into its ideas in a manner that I never felt before, not even reading Hegel’s own Phenomenology of the Spirit. Kojéve established a bridge between Hegel’s and my own thinking, and in doing so, it revolutionized everything I ever held sacred about contradictions and the possibility of progressive action in the context of global environmental governance.

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