Forthcoming in: Haarstad, H., Grandin, J., Kjærås, K. (Eds.

) Haste: The Slow Politics of

“The Apocalypse is Disappointing”: Traversing the

Erik Swyngedouw

End Times?

We are living in strange times. Not only has the COVID19-pandemic wreaked havoc with the

normalised conditions of everyday live, but also foregrounded the indelible link between

ecological processes, socio-economic dynamics and political configurations. More

importantly perhaps, and despite the alleged break the COVID19 pandemic exerted on

environmental indicators as a result of the parallel economic slowdown, the overall global

socio-environmental parameters are continuing their incessant southward march, albeit not

everywhere at the same rate and not affecting everyone in the same way.

This is particularly well illustrated by the continuously worsening climate conditions.

With the exception of the short-lived ‘COVID’- effect, greenhouse gases continue their

inexorably rise, more or less in line with economic growth, rendering any attempt to keep

global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius a distant pipe dream. The talking-shop of

the Glaswegian COP-26 has not done much to assuage this diagnostic. Despite years of

concerted international climate meetings, proliferating climate activism and scientific

consensus, worryingly little has been achieved in term of rolling back the alleged pending

climate catastrophe. What seems to be really at stake is to sustain, by all means possible, the
prevalent socio-ecological order and to make sure that the existing (capitalist) socio-

ecological configurations can continue for a while longer, rather than deflect the trajectory of

the world’s socio-climatic future. This is truly ‘sustainability on speed’, bringing to the fore

indeed the real meaning of ‘sustainability’, i.e. to change a few things here and there to make

sure that nothing of importance really has to change.

In this contribution, I shall consider the apparent deadlock signalled by the current

climate condition, namely the extraordinary dissonance that prevails between the

consensually established and agreed facts of climate change and the need for immediate and

urgent action on the one hand, and the plainly disastrously failing attempts to deflect the

trajectory of the climate future on the other. This paradox will be explored with an eye

towards identifying modes of thinking and forms of political acting that might cut through

this infernal impasse.

In particular, I shall insist that the presumption that the climate condition presents a

common global humanitarian cause that could deflect humanity’s future in a catastrophic

direction is only a thin phantasmagorical veil draped over our libidinal attachment to

sustaining the existing unsustainable situation. It is what Ingolfur Blühdorn (2011, 2013) calls

the politics of sustaining unsustainability. This attachment drives our desire for an

immunological prophylactic against the excesses of climate change -- a process that produces

a combined and uneven socio-ecological collapse -- so that some lives can continue to be

lived in some places while others are relegated to the margins where ‘bare life’ prevails

(Swyngedouw & Ernstson, 2018). It is this infernal logic that permits keeping some souls

‘green’ while whitewashing death elsewhere, a logic that Achille Mbembe (2019) aptly terms

Necropolitics. The latter refers to an infernal process whereby the mobilisation of political

and or social power shapes how some people may live and others must die or, in other words,

how socio-ecological sustainability in one place is bought at the expense of socio-ecological

‘Anthropocene’ (The Age of Men) with the more evocative term of ‘Thanatocene’ (The Age

of Death).

Traversing Socio-Ecological Fantasies

In what follows, we shall focus on two fantasies that sustain the stubborn believe of many

environmental activists, scientists, and policy makers that a calamitous climate future can still

be averted without a major transformation of the socio-ecological structure of society now.

Or in other words, it is a fantasy whereby the presumed prophylactic qualities of a

combination of carbon-capturing and carbon-saving technological adjustments, energy

transitions, and an adaptive managerial-institutional machinery suffice to make sure that life

as we know it can continue a while longer.

However, encircling the Real of climate change more effectively implies, among

others, the transformation and re-symbolisation of the imaginary upon which the need for and

urgency of environmental action is legitimized and sustained. An anamorphic gaze that looks

in a slanty way at the fantasies that underlie the impulse to engage with climate change might

offer a glimpse of the Real of the situation and disclose the structure of the imaginaries that

drive the current impotent climate actions. The hegemonic and symptomatic base upon which

the legitimacy of the environmental discourse and practice of both mainstream and more

activist climate movements is predicated rests, I contend, upon repressed traumas, a series of

unacknowledged and silenced truths. Opening up different political-ecological trajectories

requires transgressing the fantasies that conceal these traumas. We shall explore and illustrate

this through examining the fantasies that support the climate change narrative.

Indeed, the consensual concern with climate change is predicated upon underlying

fantasies that animate much of the dominant, but impotent, climate action. The first one
revolves around the imaginary that it is not too late yet to avert disaster, that the catastrophe

is still to come in some not too distant a future. Although the clock is ticking, so the argument

goes, it is not too late yet to deflect the history of the future. I shall insist that this fantasy of a

projected dystopian future needs to be transgressed and reversed. The catastrophe has already

happened, it is too late already. It is within the contours of the present-day combined and

uneven socio-ecological catastrophe and ruination that social action and political intervention

need to be situated (Pohl, 2021).

Second, there is the widespread view that the assumedly pending climate catastrophe

needs to be averted in the name of saving a generic and abstract ‘Humanity’. While the

climate condition does seem to invoke a sense of a ‘global humanitarian cause’, it is precisely

the absence of a real global humanity that produces the climate catastrophe. The challenge,

therefore, is to produce a future humanity in the world. While it is precisely the non-existence

of ‘Humanity’ that produced the present socio-ecological barbarism, the only hope indeed is

to embark on a political process to produce ‘Humanity’. This would open the way to a

different and more equitable socio-ecological future. This requires re-orienting desire and its

object-cause from an obsessive concern with greenhouse gases and other socio-ecological

objects that only seemingly stand in the way of producing a ‘good’ world to articulating

desire around a political fantasy of the necessity to produce a common, inclusive, and

ecologically sensible world.

The Apocalypse is Disappointing

The climate emergency is articulated around the insistent construction of a scientifically

robust promise of a dystopian, quasi-catastrophic, socio-ecological future if no urgent and

appropriate action is taken. This real catastrophic imaginary of an unliveable future,

horizon that needs to be avoided or averted. In other words, decisive action is required today

in order to deflect the unfolding of this anticipated (and very real) cataclysmic climate future.

This argument sustains the view that it is not too late yet, that the forecasted future

can still be avoided if appropriate techno-managerial interventions are implemented. The

perverse revelling in the jouissance of a potential failure foretold is paralleled by an

unquenchable fascination for the dystopia-to-come: images of scorched lands, disintegrating

icebergs, fleeing people, hungry faces, or an unliveable environment exert an irresistible pull

– the projected dystopian future functions here as anti-desiring machine, an end that will

never come but that is continuously re-invented and re-imagined, and nurtures a perverse lure

of and fascination for a possible eschatological destiny .

This pull of a catastrophe-to-come re-enforces at the same time our libidinal

attachment to the present status quo, not only as a normalised condition, but one that needs to

be preserved, cherished, and ‘sustained’. The preservation of the present socio-ecological

arrangements, which can be achieved with ‘proper’ techno-institutional change is not only

considered as the horizon of the possible, but also of the desirable. This is a radically

reactionary and literally conservative position. The repeatedly announced end-of-times

deluge solidifies even more our attachment to a reactionary desire to sustain the present. In

doing so, such phantasmagorical imaginary covers up the trauma of the already existing

combined and uneven socio-ecological collapse, and disavows the Real of the present socio-

ecological predicament many already find themselves in.

Indeed, many people around the world already live in the socio-ecological

apocalypse, demonstrated by the large numbers of climate refugees and mounting socio-

ecological problems in the poorest parts of the world or, rather, experienced by the poorest
part of the world’s population (Bettini, 2013; Parenti, 2011). The apocalypse has already

happened for them; it is their Real of the present. The fear of the consequences of climate

change in one place is paralleled by deepening and already really existing socio-ecological

disintegration elsewhere. The promise of a catastrophe-to-come is one around which middle-

class and elite desires (for a ‘better’ climate) and fears of collapse circulate. While the elites

nurture an apocalyptic dystopia that can nonetheless be avoided (for them), the majority of

the world already lives “within the collapse of civilization” (The-Invisible-Committee, 2009).

The apocalypse is indeed a combined and uneven one, both in time and across space

(Williams, 2011). More importantly, the combined and uneven collapse implies that the costs

and consequences of attempts to postpone the climate disaster for some people and places is

increasingly decanted onto the poorest parts of the world’s population.

Consider for example, how the very quest for ‘sustainability’ in one place is

predicated upon the production of unsustainability elsewhere, and the speeding-up of

‘sustainability’ in some place accelerates socio-ecological disintegration and

‘unsustainability’ elsewhere. For example, the Nordic European countries systematically

score very high on a range of ‘sustainability’ hit parades. Norway, in particular, stands out as

the top of the chart. The extraordinary technological and institutional advances that secure a

socio-ecologically sensible life and society is ‘bought’ at an extraordinary environmental cost

elsewhere. The liberation of oil and gas from its sequestration in the Nordic oil and gas fields

upon which the economic basis for this success is built, quickly transforms in the release of

even more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Or consider the rapid expansion of electrical

vehicles and associated smart IT infrastructure, narrated as part of the foundation to nurture

energy transition and ‘sustainable’ urban environments. Their expansion is fundamentally

predicated upon deepening and widening the post-colonial extractivist ecologies upon which

the Global North’s success has historically been founded (and that produced the lineaments
of the current socio-ecological catastrophe). Lithium, Cobalt and a series of other ‘rare

earths’ (like Columbine-Tantalite) are feverishly mined in the (semi-)arid zones of Chile or in

the disintegrating socio-ecological mining enclaves of Central Africa, thereby producing both

extraordinary socio-ecological conflict and environmental degradation. This combined and

uneven ‘(unsustainability’) circuit intensifies indeed the Thanatopolitics upon which

‘sustainability on speed’ is produced in the immunological e-pads of the world’s resilient

enclaves, leaving the immunized in an illusionary capsular splendid isolation (Kaika, 2017).

I would argue that sustaining and nurturing catastrophic imageries are an integral and

vital part of the new cultural politics of capitalism for which the management of fear is a

central leitmotiv and provides part of the cultural support for a process of environmental-

populist post-politicization (Swyngedouw, 2018). At the symbolic level, apocalyptic

imaginaries are extraordinarily powerful in disavowing or foreclosing social conflict and

antagonisms. Or in other words, the presentation of climate change as a global and universal

humanitarian cause produces a thoroughly depoliticized imaginary, one that does not revolve

around choosing one trajectory over another, or that identifies clear adversaries in a political

process; it is one that is not articulated with specific political programs or socio-ecological

projects or transformations. It is a powerful antidote to symbolising a future-to-desire, to the

making of the socially inclusive and ecologically sensible world many environmental

activists claim they wish to inhabit, but for which no name can be imagined, or a strategy

devised.

Transgressing this fantasy cuts through this trauma. To begin with, the revelatory

promise of the apocalyptic narrative as well as the redemptive, but impotent, insistence on the

key importance of behavioural and techno-managerial, more eco-sensitive, change has to be

fully rejected. In the face of the dystopian imaginaries mobilized to assure that the apocalypse

will NOT happen at some time in the future (if the right techno-managerial adaptive or
mitigating actions are taken), the only reasonable response is “Don’t worry (eco-modernizers,

Green New Deal pundits, Greta Thunberg, COP-meeting participants, many environmental

activists, ...), you are really right, the environmental catastrophe will not happen, it has

already happened. It is too late, IT IS ALREADY HERE in the actual present conditions of

planetary life.”

Many (but by no means all) already live in the post-apocalyptic interstices of life,

whereby the fusion of environmental degradation and social disintegration renders life

“bare”. The fact that the socio-environmental imbroglio has already passed the point of no

return for many people and places on earth has to be fully asserted. The socio-environmental

ruin is already here for many. It is not some distant dystopian promised future mobilized to

trigger response today. Water conflicts, struggles for food, environmental refugees, the

extreme social triaging inflicted by the COVID19 pandemic, the infernal logical of

extractivist socio-ecologies, etc… testify to the socio-ecological predicament that

choreographs everyday life for the majority of the world’s population, many of whom are

living in urbanized environments. It is already too late; it has always already been too late for

them. They experience the consequences of the Necropolitics that animate the contemporary

immune-biopolitical environmental state (Ernstson & Swyngedouw, 2017).

There is no Arcadian place, time, or environment to return to, no benign global socio-

ecological past or an ideal climate that needs to be reconstructed, sustained, or stabilized. It is

only within the realization of the apocalyptic reality of the ruinous now that a new politics

might emerge. It is from within the ecological wreckage of the present that a new imaginary

of the possible might arise. Directing the environmental gaze to the perspective of those who

are already barely surviving within the collapse of the socio-ecological conditions opens up a

wide range of new ways of grappling with socio-ecological realities and reveals a vast terrain

of different political and socio-technical interventions other than the presently dominant ones.
More importantly, it shifts the gaze to those who are already suffering from socio-ecological

disintegration NOW. Surrendering our libidinal attachment to the enjoyment of future failure

on the one hand and to the injunction to enjoy our neoliberal consumerism and identitarian,

but often well-meaning, inscriptions in the present on the other, just deflects desire away

from embracing the necessity of constructing a different world in the world (Swyngedouw,

2021).

The Empty Core of ‘Humanity’

The second fantasy around which the consensual climate discourse is constructed revolves

around insisting on the immanent danger climate change poses to the future of Humanity.

Humanity in this context is not just understood as the sum total of humans living on planet

Earth but rather as human civilization, characterised by a range of shared and common

beliefs, ethics, and principles (such as liberty, solidarity, social relationality, pluralist

inclusion, human rights, principled equality, and civic rights). As Maurice Blanchot already

argued in the early 1960s (in the context of the then perceived possibility of nuclear

apocalypse), this view is predicated upon the fantasy that ‘Humanity’ (in the civilizing sense)

actually exists, that there is a global and human civilization, that human history has

demonstrated the making of a common ‘Humanity’. And it is precisely this fantasy that

underpins the view that ‘Humanity’ requires or deserves salvation against the threat of a

potentially devastating or de-humanising future environmental condition.

However, the Real of the human presence on Earth of course exposes the empty core

of ‘Humanity’ (Blanchot, 1971). There is no reality of the presence of a common Humanity.

The multiple tensions and conflicts, the unspeakable and recurrent violence inflected by some

humans on other humans, and the deepening uneven power geometries between humans,
testify to this ‘emptiness’. This does not abstract away from the many examples that

occasionally demonstrate the possibility of a deep Humanity shared by some humans in some

places.

On the contrary, these examples demonstrate its potentiality. Nonetheless, most of

human history, and culminating in the serial massacres of the 20 th century, testifies to the

non-existence of Humanity (in an Earthly sense) and to the continuing barbarism that

characterize many human interactions, despite successive, often heroic, and occasionally

locally successful attempts to produce collectively a common sense and practice of humanity.

‘Humanity’ indeed does not exist (yet), it may never do.

It is precisely this absence or emptiness that is denied or disavowed in much of the

climate argument; it is a repressed trauma, namely the disavowed knowledge that there is no

such thing as ‘Humanity’ despite the assertions and avowed desire to be deeply ‘human’. The

continuous objective and subjective violence inflicted by some humans onto other humans

(consider, for example, the genocide committed by the European Union on refugees

drowning in the Mediterranean Sea or reduced to ‘bare life’ in North African concentration

camps funded by European taxpayers, the class war waged by a global financialised

bourgeoisie, or the infernal consequences of serial socio-ecological exclusion) demonstrate

the radical antagonisms and conflicts that cut through the human collective and signal that a

common ‘Humanity’ does not exist. It may indeed never do unless a sustained political

fidelity to the possibility, if not necessity, of its making is inaugurated and sustained in a

determined political program.

The disavowal in the climate discourse of the barbarism that characterizes human

collective life is a classic form of traumatic repression. In fact, it is precisely the conflicts and

struggles that cut through Humanity that produce the conditions for accelerating negative
environmental change. According to Blanchot (1971), the fundamental challenge we are

faced with, therefore, is the choice between an apocalyptic future that speeds ahead precisely

because of the absence of ‘Humanity’ on the one hand or the actual construction of a global

earthly ‘Humanity’ now that, in turn, would deflect the course of the future in a different and

more benign direction on the other. What is at stake, therefore, is not to assure the future of a

really non-existing humanity as we know it, but first and foremost the creation of a humanity.

As Alenka Zupančič insists:

Blanchot isn’t saying that the destruction of the world would be insignificant because

there is no real (communal) world yet; he is not, that is, cynically saying, “Let it all go

to hell, the world such as it is is not worth the trouble anyway!” On the contrary,

Blanchot is suggesting that, now that we have at least an abstract idea of the world

(humanity) as a whole, it is worth the trouble more than ever. (Zupančič, 2018, p.19)

Transgressing these fantasies, I contend, opens up enabling trajectories for the construction of

a different socio-ecological present in the future. This requires staring in the face the Real of

the situation, and to inaugurate a new temporality and spatiality articulated around a

democratizing re-politization of the current socio-ecological state of affairs.

“The People Do Not Exist”: Foregrounding Axiomatic Equality

Indeed, a significant post-truth imaginary seeps into the dominant climate discourse, a

phantasmagoria of an abstract and virtual, but nonetheless threatened, global humanity. In

doing so, the Real of class and other antagonisms that cut through the semblance of humanity

is considered irrelevant or at least subordinate. This fetishistic disavowal or foreclosure of the

antagonisms that form the matrix of the social assures that nothing will really change.

Traversing the present fantasies of a just and sustainable climate transition through techno-
managerial and (neo)liberal individualist consumerist adjustments requires recognizing the

trauma of the non-existence of humanity and that it is precisely this non-existence, i.e. the

class and other conflicting axes that cut through humanity, that has already caused the climate

catastrophe.

Traversing this fantasy is predicated upon reversing the dominant argument:

recognizing that is already too late – the apocalypse has already happened – and the only

possible thing left to do is to engage in a process of constructing a real ‘Humanity’, of

producing a human world in the world. As The Invisible Committee put it:

It’s useless to wait – for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or

a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is

here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this

reality that we must choose sides. (The-Invisible-Committee, 2009, p.138)

The latter necessitates foregrounding radical politicization. Or in other words, if we really

want to take the ecological condition seriously, we have to displace the question of ecology

onto the terrain of agonistic politicization, animated by a sustained fidelity to what Alain

Badiou calls a passion for the real possibility and necessity of an egalitarian common world.

It is through such political project that a common and enabling climate might be constituted.

First and foremost, we have to insist that indeed there is no alternative.

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