{"id":4406,"date":"2020-04-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-27T12:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.voelkerrechtsblog.org\/articles\/staying-with-the-trouble\/"},"modified":"2020-12-09T12:09:17","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T11:09:17","slug":"staying-with-the-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/staying-with-the-trouble\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Staying with the trouble’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among the issues raised in the call for contributions<\/a> to the symposium on \u2018Climate Justice \u2013 International Law in an Age of Catastrophe<\/em>\u2019, we find the question whether \u2018international law as we know it [is] able at all to deliver solutions<\/em> to the climate crisis<\/em>, or [whether] is it part of the problem\u2019. \u2018In other words\u2019, the call for contributions proceeds, \u2018the question is whether the current crisis<\/em> can be solved<\/em> within our current legal and economic system \u2013 or whether we need more fundamental changes\u2019 (emphases added). In this blogpost, I want to unpack, situate and problematize some of the assumptions underlying these questions and signal other ways of thinking and acting in the Anthropocene, which I assume is what the symposium\u2019s editors refer to as the \u2018Age of Catastrophe<\/em>\u2019. Climate change, I will argue, is neither a \u2018crisis\u2019 nor a problem that can be \u2018solved\u2019. I want to qualify it, instead, as a condition or a \u2018configuration of existence\u2019 (Neyrat<\/a>, at 183) in which we \u2018become-with<\/a>\u2019 climate change and \u2018stay with the trouble<\/a>\u2019 it engenders. This relates to the complexity, unpredictability and uncontrollability of both the causes and the effects that living in a changing climate imply for human and more-than-human life forms. To embrace these concerns on an ontological level \u2013 as defining any form of being in the Anthropocene \u2013 implies moving beyond the modernist mindset of \u2018problem-solving\u2019 the environmental \u2018externalities\u2019 of Western ways of life. This requires a dismissal of cause-and-effect thinking that links the identification of \u2018problems\u2019 to particular \u2018solutions\u2019; the linear temporality that, based on past lessons, identifies current issues that ought to be solved for a better predicted future; and the anthropocentric interventionism where instrumental human reasoning is seen as capable of mastering a \u2018defiant Earth<\/a>\u2019 or unruly nature.<\/p>\n

Drawing on eco-philosophy and critical international relations theories, I explore alternative ways of envisaging and enacting climate justice in the Anthropocene. Inspired by theoretical and methodological proposals on speculative realism <\/a>and object-oriented ontology<\/a>, I conceive of climate change as a \u2018hyperobject<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 an entity, as coined by Morton, so massively distributed in space and time that it defies not only our understanding but also our control. Fundamentally, the analysis does not offer concrete legal solutions to the problem of climate change. It suggests, instead, a set of sensibilities \u2013 or ways of sensing and relating to climate change \u2013 that are productive to reenvisage legal approaches and political perspectives attuned to the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

Representations of climate justice in international law<\/strong><\/p>\n

In international law, human rights discourse and institutions are commonly employed to articulate concerns for climate justice. This framework<\/a> takes into account inter- and intra-generational considerations as well as historical responsibilities of states for greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. Yet, certain aspects of what climate change is and what it implies evade the human rights law register, which presents important limitations to enact<\/a> climate justice in terms of actors, space and time. First, the liberal victim\/state binary characteristic of human rights law posits the human victim as right holder and the state as duty bearer. Co-affected victims and co-responsible duty bearers fit uncomfortably in this deontic framework. Second, the fixed territorial coordinates that constrain the paradigm of state sovereignty under human rights law do not account for the trans-territorial and non-static implications that states and non-state actors\u2019 GHG emissions have on victims under the effective control of other states. Third, the backward-looking temporality of human rights litigation hampers forward-looking and deep time<\/a> thinking. Against this backdrop, calls for climate justice have also been raised by scholars advocating the adoption of a relational<\/a> \u2013 rather than dichotomous \u2013 approach to human\/nature interactions and interconnexions. Through a prism of \u2018coexistentialism<\/a>\u2019, this sensibility overturns the human exceptionalism of human rights law. Seen from a relational perspective, concerns for climate justice do not privilege human victims but enable politics of care in a materially embedded and horizontal fashion. This relational approach repositions the human in relationship to other life forms \u2013 human and non-human, material and non-material, animate and inanimate. With Tsing<\/a>, precarity thereby becomes an \u2018earthwide condition\u2019 (at 4), emphasizing the shared vulnerability of the entire living order. In contrast to the strict causality demanded by a human rights law-based approach to climate justice \u2013 a causality between climate-related harms and victims\u2019 rights and between the victims and the state of jurisdiction \u2013 relational sensibilities consider a much wider set of correlations of both a physical and empathic, direct and indirect, near and distant nature. In short, this ontology evokes a greater sensitivity<\/em> to the interdependent reality we live in. In a world that continuously rips us apart from each other, with unequal patterns of suffering and deferential vulnerabilities, climate justice cannot be addressed by only thinking about the \u2018self\u2019 \u2013 or one\u2019s own living conditions and interests framed as \u2018rights\u2019 \u2013 in light of the actions or omissions of one\u2019s state of nationality or residence. Instead, we should aspire to be sensitive, to viscerally sense<\/em> the distress caused by climate change, whether the harm directly or only indirectly impacts us as human being.<\/p>\n

Sensing climate change \u2013 speculating the unknown<\/strong><\/p>\n

The turn to sensing <\/em>is intricately related to the complexity<\/a> of climate change and the \u2018necessity of contingency<\/a>\u2019 it calls for, which concerns not only what we can or cannot know of the world and its future, but also the way in which people need to conceive of their own life in a rapidly changing climate. \u2018Hyperobjects<\/a>\u2019 like climate change can never entirely be deployed nor described, let along controlled. No legal regulation could ever capture the complexity of the ongoing event, but only mitigate identified causes and adapt to its partial effects, while still having to cope with the continuously emerging properties of the system. The ability to sense<\/em> climate change is thus always indirect and happens through the intermediary of its local manifestations. Indeed, \u2018[b]y definition it is almost impossible for changes in climate to be perceived through individual experience\u2019 (Bauer and Bhan<\/a>, at 19). As lawyers, this realization compels us to speculate <\/a><\/em>about climate change\u2019s causes and effects beyond immediate human representation and experience. This is an invitation to engage creatively and imaginatively with \u2018climate change\u2019 in order to sense<\/em> its emerging effects, even if we cannot directly or entirely relate to those. In line with Morton, a bewildering or \u2018dark\u2019 touch accompanies this \u2018ecological awareness<\/a>\u2019: the variety of temporal and spatial scales of climate change make us aware of how interdependent everything is, yet equally aware that we can never know everything that is happening, and that there is nowhere \u2018safe\u2019 to go to. As we are caught up in this \u2018mesh<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 which does by no means imply that \u2018we<\/a><\/em>\u2019 have all equally taken part in setting it up \u2013 there is no opting in or opting out, and no one can have a good conscience or clean hands. Fundamentally, however, a potentially liberating force transpires from this consciousness. As argued by Campbell et al.<\/a>, \u2018[r]ather than a negative, overwhelming challenge, it gives us what we call a bleak optimism<\/em>, characterized as organizing without hope [that we can return to the modern world that has ended], because climate change has<\/em> already happened\u2019 (at 739). In line with the turn to affirmative critique<\/a> \u2013 a new variant of critique that emphasizes affirmation as a critical tool with creative potential to incite emotional responses in everyday registers \u2013 the awareness of living in modernist ruins is embraced, rather than mourned, and triggers new and different ways of being, acting and doing (onto)politics<\/a> in the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

Legislating the unknowable \u2013 \u2018becoming-with\u2019 climate change<\/strong><\/p>\n

Applied to international law, this turn to sensing<\/em> implies an abandonment of modernist, managerial approaches to climate change, which employ ideals of strict causality, certainty and predictability in a \u2018unidirectional, progressive, controlled movement towards a coherent strategic target presumed desirable\u2019, as put by Head<\/a> (at 65). The complexity of climate change reduces the utility of practical reasoning and the capacity to make judgments based on past experiences or transpose lessons learned into a progressive, linear future. By defeating instrumental reasoning and ideals of scientific closure, the complexity of climate change questions the possibility of \u2018solving\u2019 it, which is far from implying that nothing should be done to cope with it. It implies, however, that international legal norms and practices should not solely be oriented towards a predicted future characterized by clearly defined normative objectives and policy outcomes. This instrumental \u2018planning mentality\u2019 is inherently self-defeating in a context where unpredictable effects of global warming, which exact causes defy our understanding, become characteristic features of our time. To \u2018become-with\u2019 climate change invites instead a (legal) sensibility attuned to the radical complexity and contingency of living in a warming world. Yet, one could argue that through open-ended, experimental and responsive practices attuned to the Anthropocene, it is the viability of legal systems all together that is put at risk. As stated by Ellis<\/a>, this viability relates to the capacity of legal orders \u2018to provide a certain degree of stability, predictability, and order in society, creating \u201cislands of predictability\u201d for actors seeking to project themselves [and their undertakings] into uncertain and highly contingent futures\u2019 (at 306). \u2018If these projections are to be taken as merely experimental\u2019, she continues, \u2018law\u2019s function could become impossible to achieve\u2019 (at 309). It therefore, she notes, seems to be precisely law\u2019s function that has to be rethought in what I have described as a process of \u2018becoming-with\u2019 climate change. To realign our legal imaginaries to unprecedented upheaval brought about by climate change and its (human) survival<\/a> implications, rather than securing the interests of international law\u2019s subjects according to present-day objectives, this function should be reoriented towards ensuring care<\/a><\/em> as an ethical and political obligation to consider the more-than-human world we inhabit. Life as we know it is<\/em> already over \u2013 what remains open is determining a form of coexistence unconstrained by present concepts, to rethink notions such as \u2018here v<\/em>ersus there<\/em>, person <\/em>versus thing<\/em>, individual <\/em>versus group, conscious <\/em>versus unconscious, sentient <\/em>versus nonsentient<\/em>, life <\/em>versus nonlife, part <\/em>versus whole <\/em>and even existence <\/em>versus nonexistence<\/em>\u2019 (Morton<\/a>, at 32).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Marie Petersmann<\/a> is Postdoctoral Research Fellow (FNS) at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development (Utrecht University).<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cite as: Marie Petersmann,\u00a0\u2018Staying with the trouble\u2019 \u2013 Sensing climate change in the anthropocene,\u00a0V\u00f6lkerrechtsblog<\/em>, 27 April 2020, doi: 10.17176\/20200427-164632-0<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among the issues raised in the call for contributions to the symposium on \u2018Climate Justice \u2013 International Law in an Age of Catastrophe\u2019, we find the question whether \u2018international law as we know it [is] able at all to deliver solutions to the climate crisis, or [whether] is it part of the problem\u2019. \u2018In other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6639],"tags":[],"authors":[5816],"article-categories":[3572],"doi":[5817],"class_list":["post-4406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","authors-marie-petersmann","article-categories-symposium","doi-10-17176-20200427-164632-0"],"acf":{"subline":"Sensing climate change in the Anthropocene"},"meta_box":{"doi":"10.17176\/20200427-164632-0"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4406"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=4406"},{"taxonomy":"article-categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-categories?post=4406"},{"taxonomy":"doi","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doi?post=4406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}