David H. Slater & Patricia G. Steinhoff (eds.) Alternative Politics in Contemporary Japan: New Directions in Social Movements, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2024
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Questões Ecológicas em Perspectiva Interdisciplinar, Vol. 2; Nuno Pereira Castanheira & Jair Tauchen & Agemir Bavaresco & Draiton Gonzaga de Souza (eds.); Porto Alegre: Editora Fundação Fênix., 2022
In the Anthropocene humans are said to wield more power than ever over the rest of nature, but at... more In the Anthropocene humans are said to wield more power than ever over the rest of nature, but at the same time they feel helpless in the face of forces which they themselves have created. This chapter deals with the question of why the forms that structure our relationship to nature appear so resistant to change and how these forms can be criticized and resisted. I start by turning to the question of reification, which is central to my discussion since it helps us understand why the social forms of capitalism appear resistant to change. While on the one hand defending a Lukácian concept of reification against Honneth’s attempt to reformulate it, on the other hand I point to the need to interpret Lukács’ concept of reification so as to make it applicable not only to society but also to nature. Secondly, I ask how a de-reification of nature is possible. Within critical theory, efforts to answer this question have repeatedly run up against the so-called “Lukács problem”: if dialectics is needed to overcome reification but is limited to the social realm of human praxis, as Lukács appeared to claim, how can it be used to de-reify nature? Thirdly, I argue that Adorno’s idea of constellations points to a solution to this problem. In Adorno, however, the link between constellations and praxis is unclear. Before concluding the chapter, I therefore turn to recent examples of environmental activism to illustrate that link.
Toward a Critical Theory of Nature Critical Theory and the Critique of Society Series In a time m... more Toward a Critical Theory of Nature Critical Theory and the Critique of Society Series In a time marked by crises and the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism, Critical Theory and the Critique of Society intends to renew the critical theory of capitalist society exemplified by the Frankfurt School and critical Marxism's critiques of social domination, authoritarianism, and social regression by expounding the development of such a notion of critical theory, from its founding thinkers, through its subterranean and parallel strands of development, to its contemporary formulations.
Runaway climate change, the increasing exhaustion of natural resources and the relentless destruc... more Runaway climate change, the increasing exhaustion of natural resources and the relentless destruction of natural habitats are but a few examples of the catastrophes unfolding today. The fear and anxiety inspired by the notion of the Anthropocene, the age in which humankind is said to affect the earth in the manner of a geological force, can only be understood when viewed from the point of the reification that gives society the appearance of a second nature, described by Georg Lukács as a realm of lawlike and objective regularities seemingly beyond human control. 1 What may appear as a tremendous increase in human power over nature inspires fear precisely because humankind, under the shadow of reification, has turned into its own murderous double, a lethal force threatening humankind itself along with the rest of nature with extinction. This demonstrates the need for a critical theory of nature, understood as a theoretical approach for criticizing the reified social forms that regulate our interaction with nature. Rather than offering a scientific theory of nature or society along positivist lines, the aim of a critical theory of nature is an immanent critique of the dominant categories used for structuring the relations to nature with the aim of de-reifying them, i.e. to show them to be historical creations rather than referring to timeless essences. A model of this procedure was Marx's own critique of political economy. Rather than providing a new, improved version of bourgeois economics, his aim in Capital was to critically scrutinize its assumptions, showing how it hides or obscures its origins in class conflict. While the critical theory of nature can broadly be understood as a theoretical tradition working with the legacy of the nature conceptualizations in the Frankfurt School and the roots of these conceptualizations in Marx, Lukács and other thinkers, in this article I will stress Theodor W. Adorno's development of this critique into negative dialectics a crucial step towards a critique adequate to the condition of the Anthropocene. 2 To bring out the strength and usefulness of this approach in a clear and economical fashion, I will delimit myself to a particular problem, which has often been argued to constitute an Achilles' heel for Western Marxism, including the Frankfurt School, when it comes to theorizing nature, namely its relation to natural science. The eco-Marxist John Bellamy Foster has referred to this as the 'Lukács problem' since it comes forward in acute form in the writings of Lukács, but he also sees it as characteristic of the Frankfurt School. 3 In his view, the latter failed to come to terms with natural science because of its socio-historical conception of dialectics that cannot be applied to nature. Its conception of dialectics, he claims, was a legacy of the rejection of Engels's objectivistic dialectics of nature and led critical theory to turn in an idealist direction and to hand over the study of nature to positivism, something that in turn has prevented it from contributing anything of value in the debate on ecology and environmental destruction. 4 Steven Vogel similarly claims that Western Marxism, including the Frankfurt School, always vacillated in regard to natural science, sometimes criticizing it but more often accepting it as unobjectionable when limited to the sphere of nature. Its failure to explain how a knowledge of nature could be obtained that might substitute for natural science, he
In Freeter Activism: Social Movements, Trauma, and the Public Sphere in Contemporary Japan, Carl ... more In Freeter Activism: Social Movements, Trauma, and the Public Sphere in Contemporary Japan, Carl Cassegard offers an account of social movements among young Japanese from the late 1980s until today. Discussing anti-war mobilizations, freeter unions, artists in the homeless movement, campus protest, anti-nuclear protest and activists engaged in support for social withdrawers, he shows that freeter activism developed hand in hand with experiments in using alternative spaces outside the mainstream public sphere and a struggle with the traumatic legacy of the defeat of earlier protest movements. Despite the relative absence of open protest during the 1990s, Cassegard shows that this was an important preparatory period in which the foundation was laid of today’s protest movements.
Postapokalyptische Ökologie: Hoffnung und Gerechtigkeit im Katastrophenzeitalter neu denke, 2024
Draft of: Cassegård, Carl & Thörn, Håkan (2024) “Postapokalyptische Ökologie: Hoffnung und Gerech... more Draft of: Cassegård, Carl & Thörn, Håkan (2024) “Postapokalyptische Ökologie: Hoffnung und Gerechtigkeit im Katastrophenzeitalter neu denken”, pp. 47-63, in Werner Friedrichs (ed.) Politische Bildung und Zukunft. Wie Herausforderungen im Anthropozän denken? Wiesbaden: Springer. ISBN978-3-658-45210-0.
Her research currently focuses on environmental movements and climate change, transboundary gover... more Her research currently focuses on environmental movements and climate change, transboundary governance and water management, and stakeholder involvement in spatial planning. She is co-author of Transboundary Risk Governance (Earthscan, 2010) and has published in journals such as Environment & Planning A, Science, Technology and Human Values and Environmental Politics.
Toward a resonant society An interview with Hartmut Rosa in this interview, the internationally r... more Toward a resonant society An interview with Hartmut Rosa in this interview, the internationally renowned German sociologist Hartmut Rosa engages in a conversation about resonance, critical theory, politics, and sociology. As in the interview with Eva Illouz in this special issue, Rosa discusses populist politics and emotions, but he frames this discussion through his concept of resonance and its implications for politics and democracy. The interview was made in connection with a public lecture Rosa held in Gothenburg in March 2023, titled In search of the prime mover: Can there be a valid conception of social energy? Questions were asked by Carl Cassegård and Karl Malmqvist, both sociologists from Gothenburg University, who introduce Rosa's work below, and Christian Ståhl, journal editor and sociologist from Linköping University. Hartmut Rosa, professor of sociology at the University of Jena, is known above all for two works:
Idag står det bortom allt tvivel att en socialism för vår tid måste vara en ekologisk socialism. ... more Idag står det bortom allt tvivel att en socialism för vår tid måste vara en ekologisk socialism. Men vad menas med ekosocialism och hur bör en ekosocialistisk strategi se ut?
Hope has long been seen as essential to motivate social movement activism. However, as seen in th... more Hope has long been seen as essential to motivate social movement activism. However, as seen in the transition movement and collapsology networks, a ‘postapocalyptic’ environmentalism that views catastrophe as ongoing or unavoidable is gaining ground, reflecting an increasing awareness that environmental catastrophes are already here or have become inevitable. If hope can no longer mean hope in averting catastrophe, what role does hope play and what form does it take? Can there be activism without hope? Based on interviews with participants in the transition movement and collapsology networks in Sweden, I propose a typology of forms of postapocalyptic activism. In the first (‘campaigning’), hope is accompanied by confrontational action. In the second (‘mourning’), loss of hope brings about a withdrawal from such action. A third form (‘building’) shows how new hope is generated through non-confrontational action, while a fourth form (‘doing the right thing’) is represented by confrontational action resting on other motivations than hope. [published open access]
For a long time after the end of large-scale student unrest in the 1970s Japan stood out by a com... more For a long time after the end of large-scale student unrest in the 1970s Japan stood out by a comparatively low level of protest. Yet spectacular waves of mass-protest returned with the anti-nuke mobilizations following the 2011 Fukushima meltdown and other ‘post-2011’ movements. In this paper I develop an analytical framework inspired by the multi-level perspective in transition studies to illuminate two questions: how can the relatively low level of protest in Japan before 2011 – in particular the so called ‘ice age’ of protest from the 1970s to the early 2000s – be explained, and what enabled the recovery of protest afterwards, starting in the early 2000s and leading up to the post-2011 protest cycle? I point to the crucial role played on the one hand by niches in the form of social movement spaces in fostering oppositional discourses and on the other hand by landscape changes that destabilized the established politico-cultural regime. A crucial role was played by the creative work of freeter activists in social movement spaces during the 1990s who reinvented activism in response to stigmatization of open protest after the collective trauma of the perceived defeat of the New Left in the 1970s. This creative work was a precondition for the rise of protest movements in the early 2000s which in turn prepared the way for the post-2011 protest wave.
Sociologiska institutionen, Göteborgs universitet Play and Empowerment-The Role of Alternative Sp... more Sociologiska institutionen, Göteborgs universitet Play and Empowerment-The Role of Alternative Spaces in Social Movements The article examines the role played by alternative space in social movements and argues that it plays a crucial role in counteracting feelings of powerlessness and facilitating the empowerment of subaltern groups. Alternative space is defined-using Benjamin's notions of shock, nature and history-as constituted by forms of interaction in which society is made to appear as history. To facilitate empowerment, alternative space must, firstly, provide a place for subaltern groups in which they are no longer subordinated; secondly, instill hope that social change is possible and encourage such change; and, thirdly, expand or consolidate alternative space itself. These tasks can easily enter into conflict with each other, since they sometimes appear to require alternative space to adopt more "abstract" forms of interaction in which aspects of the social situation are bracketed and sometimes more "concrete" ones in which such aspects are again given attention. In order to study how movements may relate to this difficulty, the article looks at three contemporary Japanese social movements with NAM, New Start / New Start Kansai and the General Freeter Union as central organizations. Only the third successfully combines the three tasks, in large measure through its skillful use of the play-element .
David H. Slater & Patricia G. Steinhoff (eds.) Alternative Politics in Contemporary Japan: New Directions in Social Movements, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2024
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Questões Ecológicas em Perspectiva Interdisciplinar, Vol. 2; Nuno Pereira Castanheira & Jair Tauchen & Agemir Bavaresco & Draiton Gonzaga de Souza (eds.); Porto Alegre: Editora Fundação Fênix., 2022
In the Anthropocene humans are said to wield more power than ever over the rest of nature, but at... more In the Anthropocene humans are said to wield more power than ever over the rest of nature, but at the same time they feel helpless in the face of forces which they themselves have created. This chapter deals with the question of why the forms that structure our relationship to nature appear so resistant to change and how these forms can be criticized and resisted. I start by turning to the question of reification, which is central to my discussion since it helps us understand why the social forms of capitalism appear resistant to change. While on the one hand defending a Lukácian concept of reification against Honneth’s attempt to reformulate it, on the other hand I point to the need to interpret Lukács’ concept of reification so as to make it applicable not only to society but also to nature. Secondly, I ask how a de-reification of nature is possible. Within critical theory, efforts to answer this question have repeatedly run up against the so-called “Lukács problem”: if dialectics is needed to overcome reification but is limited to the social realm of human praxis, as Lukács appeared to claim, how can it be used to de-reify nature? Thirdly, I argue that Adorno’s idea of constellations points to a solution to this problem. In Adorno, however, the link between constellations and praxis is unclear. Before concluding the chapter, I therefore turn to recent examples of environmental activism to illustrate that link.
Toward a Critical Theory of Nature Critical Theory and the Critique of Society Series In a time m... more Toward a Critical Theory of Nature Critical Theory and the Critique of Society Series In a time marked by crises and the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism, Critical Theory and the Critique of Society intends to renew the critical theory of capitalist society exemplified by the Frankfurt School and critical Marxism's critiques of social domination, authoritarianism, and social regression by expounding the development of such a notion of critical theory, from its founding thinkers, through its subterranean and parallel strands of development, to its contemporary formulations.
Runaway climate change, the increasing exhaustion of natural resources and the relentless destruc... more Runaway climate change, the increasing exhaustion of natural resources and the relentless destruction of natural habitats are but a few examples of the catastrophes unfolding today. The fear and anxiety inspired by the notion of the Anthropocene, the age in which humankind is said to affect the earth in the manner of a geological force, can only be understood when viewed from the point of the reification that gives society the appearance of a second nature, described by Georg Lukács as a realm of lawlike and objective regularities seemingly beyond human control. 1 What may appear as a tremendous increase in human power over nature inspires fear precisely because humankind, under the shadow of reification, has turned into its own murderous double, a lethal force threatening humankind itself along with the rest of nature with extinction. This demonstrates the need for a critical theory of nature, understood as a theoretical approach for criticizing the reified social forms that regulate our interaction with nature. Rather than offering a scientific theory of nature or society along positivist lines, the aim of a critical theory of nature is an immanent critique of the dominant categories used for structuring the relations to nature with the aim of de-reifying them, i.e. to show them to be historical creations rather than referring to timeless essences. A model of this procedure was Marx's own critique of political economy. Rather than providing a new, improved version of bourgeois economics, his aim in Capital was to critically scrutinize its assumptions, showing how it hides or obscures its origins in class conflict. While the critical theory of nature can broadly be understood as a theoretical tradition working with the legacy of the nature conceptualizations in the Frankfurt School and the roots of these conceptualizations in Marx, Lukács and other thinkers, in this article I will stress Theodor W. Adorno's development of this critique into negative dialectics a crucial step towards a critique adequate to the condition of the Anthropocene. 2 To bring out the strength and usefulness of this approach in a clear and economical fashion, I will delimit myself to a particular problem, which has often been argued to constitute an Achilles' heel for Western Marxism, including the Frankfurt School, when it comes to theorizing nature, namely its relation to natural science. The eco-Marxist John Bellamy Foster has referred to this as the 'Lukács problem' since it comes forward in acute form in the writings of Lukács, but he also sees it as characteristic of the Frankfurt School. 3 In his view, the latter failed to come to terms with natural science because of its socio-historical conception of dialectics that cannot be applied to nature. Its conception of dialectics, he claims, was a legacy of the rejection of Engels's objectivistic dialectics of nature and led critical theory to turn in an idealist direction and to hand over the study of nature to positivism, something that in turn has prevented it from contributing anything of value in the debate on ecology and environmental destruction. 4 Steven Vogel similarly claims that Western Marxism, including the Frankfurt School, always vacillated in regard to natural science, sometimes criticizing it but more often accepting it as unobjectionable when limited to the sphere of nature. Its failure to explain how a knowledge of nature could be obtained that might substitute for natural science, he
In Freeter Activism: Social Movements, Trauma, and the Public Sphere in Contemporary Japan, Carl ... more In Freeter Activism: Social Movements, Trauma, and the Public Sphere in Contemporary Japan, Carl Cassegard offers an account of social movements among young Japanese from the late 1980s until today. Discussing anti-war mobilizations, freeter unions, artists in the homeless movement, campus protest, anti-nuclear protest and activists engaged in support for social withdrawers, he shows that freeter activism developed hand in hand with experiments in using alternative spaces outside the mainstream public sphere and a struggle with the traumatic legacy of the defeat of earlier protest movements. Despite the relative absence of open protest during the 1990s, Cassegard shows that this was an important preparatory period in which the foundation was laid of today’s protest movements.
Postapokalyptische Ökologie: Hoffnung und Gerechtigkeit im Katastrophenzeitalter neu denke, 2024
Draft of: Cassegård, Carl & Thörn, Håkan (2024) “Postapokalyptische Ökologie: Hoffnung und Gerech... more Draft of: Cassegård, Carl & Thörn, Håkan (2024) “Postapokalyptische Ökologie: Hoffnung und Gerechtigkeit im Katastrophenzeitalter neu denken”, pp. 47-63, in Werner Friedrichs (ed.) Politische Bildung und Zukunft. Wie Herausforderungen im Anthropozän denken? Wiesbaden: Springer. ISBN978-3-658-45210-0.
Her research currently focuses on environmental movements and climate change, transboundary gover... more Her research currently focuses on environmental movements and climate change, transboundary governance and water management, and stakeholder involvement in spatial planning. She is co-author of Transboundary Risk Governance (Earthscan, 2010) and has published in journals such as Environment & Planning A, Science, Technology and Human Values and Environmental Politics.
Toward a resonant society An interview with Hartmut Rosa in this interview, the internationally r... more Toward a resonant society An interview with Hartmut Rosa in this interview, the internationally renowned German sociologist Hartmut Rosa engages in a conversation about resonance, critical theory, politics, and sociology. As in the interview with Eva Illouz in this special issue, Rosa discusses populist politics and emotions, but he frames this discussion through his concept of resonance and its implications for politics and democracy. The interview was made in connection with a public lecture Rosa held in Gothenburg in March 2023, titled In search of the prime mover: Can there be a valid conception of social energy? Questions were asked by Carl Cassegård and Karl Malmqvist, both sociologists from Gothenburg University, who introduce Rosa's work below, and Christian Ståhl, journal editor and sociologist from Linköping University. Hartmut Rosa, professor of sociology at the University of Jena, is known above all for two works:
Idag står det bortom allt tvivel att en socialism för vår tid måste vara en ekologisk socialism. ... more Idag står det bortom allt tvivel att en socialism för vår tid måste vara en ekologisk socialism. Men vad menas med ekosocialism och hur bör en ekosocialistisk strategi se ut?
Hope has long been seen as essential to motivate social movement activism. However, as seen in th... more Hope has long been seen as essential to motivate social movement activism. However, as seen in the transition movement and collapsology networks, a ‘postapocalyptic’ environmentalism that views catastrophe as ongoing or unavoidable is gaining ground, reflecting an increasing awareness that environmental catastrophes are already here or have become inevitable. If hope can no longer mean hope in averting catastrophe, what role does hope play and what form does it take? Can there be activism without hope? Based on interviews with participants in the transition movement and collapsology networks in Sweden, I propose a typology of forms of postapocalyptic activism. In the first (‘campaigning’), hope is accompanied by confrontational action. In the second (‘mourning’), loss of hope brings about a withdrawal from such action. A third form (‘building’) shows how new hope is generated through non-confrontational action, while a fourth form (‘doing the right thing’) is represented by confrontational action resting on other motivations than hope. [published open access]
For a long time after the end of large-scale student unrest in the 1970s Japan stood out by a com... more For a long time after the end of large-scale student unrest in the 1970s Japan stood out by a comparatively low level of protest. Yet spectacular waves of mass-protest returned with the anti-nuke mobilizations following the 2011 Fukushima meltdown and other ‘post-2011’ movements. In this paper I develop an analytical framework inspired by the multi-level perspective in transition studies to illuminate two questions: how can the relatively low level of protest in Japan before 2011 – in particular the so called ‘ice age’ of protest from the 1970s to the early 2000s – be explained, and what enabled the recovery of protest afterwards, starting in the early 2000s and leading up to the post-2011 protest cycle? I point to the crucial role played on the one hand by niches in the form of social movement spaces in fostering oppositional discourses and on the other hand by landscape changes that destabilized the established politico-cultural regime. A crucial role was played by the creative work of freeter activists in social movement spaces during the 1990s who reinvented activism in response to stigmatization of open protest after the collective trauma of the perceived defeat of the New Left in the 1970s. This creative work was a precondition for the rise of protest movements in the early 2000s which in turn prepared the way for the post-2011 protest wave.
Sociologiska institutionen, Göteborgs universitet Play and Empowerment-The Role of Alternative Sp... more Sociologiska institutionen, Göteborgs universitet Play and Empowerment-The Role of Alternative Spaces in Social Movements The article examines the role played by alternative space in social movements and argues that it plays a crucial role in counteracting feelings of powerlessness and facilitating the empowerment of subaltern groups. Alternative space is defined-using Benjamin's notions of shock, nature and history-as constituted by forms of interaction in which society is made to appear as history. To facilitate empowerment, alternative space must, firstly, provide a place for subaltern groups in which they are no longer subordinated; secondly, instill hope that social change is possible and encourage such change; and, thirdly, expand or consolidate alternative space itself. These tasks can easily enter into conflict with each other, since they sometimes appear to require alternative space to adopt more "abstract" forms of interaction in which aspects of the social situation are bracketed and sometimes more "concrete" ones in which such aspects are again given attention. In order to study how movements may relate to this difficulty, the article looks at three contemporary Japanese social movements with NAM, New Start / New Start Kansai and the General Freeter Union as central organizations. Only the third successfully combines the three tasks, in large measure through its skillful use of the play-element .
This is a paper on the transformation of campus activism in Japan since the 1990’s. Japan’s so-ca... more This is a paper on the transformation of campus activism in Japan since the 1990’s. Japan’s so-called freeter movements (movements of young men and women lacking regular employment) are often said to have emerged as young people shifted their base of activism from campuses to the “street”. However, campuses have continued to play a role in activism. Although the radical student organisations of the New Left have waned, new movements are forming among students and precarious university employees in response to neoliberalization trends in society and the precarization of their conditions. This transformation has gone hand in hand with a shift of action repertoire towards forms of direct action such as squatting, sitins, hunger strikes, and opening “cafés”. In this paper I focus on the development of campus protest in Kyoto from the mid-1990s until today to shed light on the following questions: How have campus-based activists responded to the neoliberalization of Japanese universities...
Flykten fran det Firflutna Om BahistorHe~eten~kap1Iga r i k t n i n g a r och bilden av det t r e... more Flykten fran det Firflutna Om BahistorHe~eten~kap1Iga r i k t n i n g a r och bilden av det t r e d j e riket I BRD fi&a slutet av 60-talet %i31 &S,erfiiei-eningen
Mattias Martinsson & Anders Johansson (eds.) Efter …, 2003
SwePub titelinformation: Det moderna som natur: Om chockens upplösning i Murakami Harukis författ... more SwePub titelinformation: Det moderna som natur: Om chockens upplösning i Murakami Harukis författarskap.
This paper traces the emergence and development of the idea of “exit” as a form of resistance or ... more This paper traces the emergence and development of the idea of “exit” as a form of resistance or challenge to the system in the writings of Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin. I show that the rhetoric of exit as resistance grows out of the climate of political disillusion in the aftermath of the political activism of the 60s as a strategy for finding a potential for popular resistance. With Karatani’s attempt to create a social movement, NAM (the New Associationist Movement), the rhetoric shifts from emphasizing a defense of withdrawal from the “public” in order to elude control, towards emphasizing exit as an offensive weapon to be used actively by social movements in confronting the system. Today the idea of exit remains an important influence among activists and intellectuals associated with social movements. At the same time, there is a dilemma, which stems from its paradoxical attempt to mobilize political disillusionment and withdrawal from public involvement into a politica...
Flykten fran det Firflutna Om BahistorHe~eten~kap1Iga r i k t n i n g a r och bilden av det t r e... more Flykten fran det Firflutna Om BahistorHe~eten~kap1Iga r i k t n i n g a r och bilden av det t r e d j e riket I BRD fi&a slutet av 60-talet %i31 &S,erfiiei-eningen
The environmental movement has stood out compared to other movements through its future-oriented ... more The environmental movement has stood out compared to other movements through its future-oriented pessimism: dreams of a better or utopian future have been less important as a mobilizing tool than fear of future catastrophes. Apocalyptic images of future catastrophes still dominate much of environmentalist discourse. Melting polar caps, draughts, hurricanes, floods, and growing chaos are regularly invoked by activists as well as establishment figures. This apocalyptic discourse has, however, also been challenged—not only by a future-oriented optimism gaining ground among established environmental organizations, but also by the rise of what we call a postapocalyptic environmentalism based on the experience of irreversible or unavoidable loss. This discourse, often referring to the Global South, where communities are destroyed and populations displaced because of environmental destruction, is neither nourished by a strong sense of hope, nor of a future disaster, but a sense that the catastrophe is already ongoing. Taking our point of departure in the ''environmentalist classics'' by Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, we delineate the contours of apocalyptic discourses in environmentalism and discuss how disillusionment with the institutions of climate governance has fed into increasing criticism of the apocalyptic imagery. We then turn to exploring the notion of postapocalyptic politics by focusing on how postapocalyptic narratives—including the utopias they bring into play, their relation to time–space, and how they construct collective identity—are deployed in political mobilizations. We focus on two cases of climate activism—the Dark Mountain project and the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature—and argue that mobilizations based on accepting loss are possible through what we call the paradox of hope and the paradox of justice.
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Books by Carl Cassegard
Papers by Carl Cassegard