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Acknowledgement
Thanks to Michael Rothberg, Arielle Stambler, Stefano Bellin, and Jennifer Noji for convening the “Feeling Implicated” workshop, and to everyone there for generative conversations. Thanks to Stefano and Michael for careful editing, and the editorial and production team at Parallax for impeccable work. And so much gratitude to the people who have contributed to the many iterations of this thinking at talks, in conversation, and on social media, with particular appreciation for Stephan Bloch-Shulman, Alice MacLachlan, Ami Harbin, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Karen de Vries, Scout Calvert, and Chris Dixon.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See James Rowe, Steph Glanzmann, Jessica Demsey, and Zoe Yunker, “Fossil Futures.” Accessed December 31, 2022.
2 Kari Norgaard’s study of climate emotions compellingly shows the importance of moving away from the idea that what people need is simply more information about climate change, and there have been a number of noteworthy arguments for thinking more seriously about the feelings that attend climate change and climate change activism. See Barnett, Doan, Norgaard, Ray, and Wray for key examples.
3 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 1.
4 Ibid., 14.
5 I appreciate Nick Mitchell and Liz Kinnamon’s invitation to think about the idea of the charge of complicity as part of a roundtable discussion at the American Studies Association annual meeting, Chicago, November 2017.
6 Several recent reports document the relatively small number (20) of companies primarily responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, both privately and publicly owned (Griffin), the ways ‘Big Oil’ has shaped the public discussion of its responsibilities for climate change (see for example the Frontline documentary ‘The Power of Big Oil’ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/the-power-of-big-oil/), and the specific investment responsibilities of the world’s billionaires (see the Oxfam report ‘Carbon Billionaires, https://webassets.oxfamamerica.org/media/documents/bn-carbon-billlionaires-071122-en.pdf). Military emissions are likely significant, but underreported, contributors to climate change (Rajaeifar et al.; see also the Conflict and Environment Observatory report at https://ceobs.org/the-militarys-contribution-to-climate-change/). Even on the lifestyle front, rich people disproportionately spend money on climate-damaging things; see Oswald, Owen, and Steinberger, “Large Inequality.”
7 See Norgaard, Living in Denial. As an anonymous reviewer for this paper helpfully pointed out, there is a subsequent epistemic challenge – we may come to know quite a lot about a complex problem, such as global warming, without knowing how to solve it; there are two different objects of knowledge, with different criteria for success.
8 See Morrison, Parton, and Hine, “Increasing Belief but Issue Fatigue” and Pidgeon, “Public Understanding of, and Attitudes to, Climate Change,” 85–106.
9 Shotwell, Against Purity.
10 Norlock, “Perpetual Struggle,” 6.
11 Ibid., 13.
12 Walia, Border and Rule, 213.
13 Giraud, What Comes after Entanglement?, 2.
14 Larry May and Stacey Hoffman’s early collection of key texts, Collective Responsibility, illustrates the scope of this discussion, which of course has only become richer. I have benefitted from thinking with Margaret Gilbert, Sociality and Responsibility; Tracy Isaacs, Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts; Virginia Held, ‘Can a Random Collection of Individuals Be Responsible?’; Larry May, Sharing Responsibility; Joel Feinberg, ‘Collective Responsibility’, as well as from more recent work specifically on climate change and collective responsibility, which I discuss more below. Ami Harbin’s review of Isaacs’s Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts was especially helpful for thinking about the possibility of collective feelings.
15 A separate, equally interesting direction was suggested to me by Stefano Bellin, with reference to Martin Crowley’s book Accidental Agents. Crowley lays out an account of distributed agency, amplifying Werner Rammert’s earlier work, aiming to show the possibilities for collective agency amongst not only human agents but also including other actants in line with work from Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, and John Law.
16 A broader question implied here brings us back to what Larry May thinks of a social existentialism, with reference to Karl Jaspers’ work on guilt, and specifically metaphysical guilt; what forms of responsibility are we called to take up in virtue of our bare existence in the world? A corollary to this question asks whether we think of the world as fundamentally abundant and nourishing, or scarce and punishing. On this front I have benefited from James K. Rowe’s work on ontological abundance based on his readings of Georges Bataille and Robin Wall Kimmerer and others (forthcoming in the book Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital).
17 Tessman, Burdened Virtues, 5.
18 Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28.
19 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 97.
20 Ibid., 173.
21 Ibid., 180.
22 Ibid., 173.
23 Young, ‘Responsibility and Global Justice’, 125.
24 Minnich, The Evil of Banality, 92-93.
25 Ibid., 89.
26 Ibid., 96.
27 Ibid., 97.
28 Card, Confronting Evils, 16.
29 Minnich, The Evil of Banality, 161.
30 Spelman, Repair, 5-6.
31 Ibid., 13.
32 Kinsman, “The Politics of Revolution.”
33 Here I think of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Reconsidering Reparations, and its incisive argument for a multi-layer targeting of sources and sites of climate injustice aiming at ‘no less than the reordering of the globe’, 119.
34 Spelman, Repair, 134.
35 Ibid., 132.
36 Ibid., 134.
37 Although Spelman does not mention it, this idea of creative destruction has complex roots. Joseph Schumpeter popularised a conception of creative destruction as capitalism’s continual process of continually destroying the existing order to create it anew; David Harvey, in “Neo-Liberalism as Creative Destruction,” 152, has characterised this process as central to neoliberalism’s re-grind of existing sources of surplus value, a form of ongoing accumulation by dispossession typified by severe financial crises. Mikhail Bakunin famously ended his complex essay “The Reaction in Germany” (1842), with the note: ‘[t]he passion for destruction is a creative passion, too’. Without embarking on a too-nerdy engagement with the minutiae of old conversations between Marxists and anarchists, I want to acknowledge that this history of thinking about the destruction of existing social orders as a form of collective creativity informs my thinking here.
38 Gustav Landauer, quoted in Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, 411.
39 Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 15.
40 See Johnson, Too Late to Die Young.
41 Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 56.
42 Ibid., 58-59.
43 A subset of this vast literature brings another feminist philosopher I could well have discussed here, Margaret Urban Walker, into the conversation about moral repair and restoration as an ecological imperative (see Ben Almassi’s critique in “Ecological Restorations as Practices of Moral Repair,” as well as Eric Katz’s in “Replacement and Irreversibility.”
44 Clare, Brilliant Imperfection, 159.
45 Ibid., 159.
46 Kinsman, “The Politics of Revolution.”
47 Young, Responsibility for Justice, 105.
48 Ibid., 111.
49 Eddie Yuen, quoted in Camfield, Future on Fire, 4.
50 Camfield, Future on Fire, 5.
51 Ibid., 38.
52 Alook et al., The End of This World, 3.
53 Alook et al., The End of This World, 6.
54 Here I think of Chris Dixon’s important work on staying in struggle over the long haul “Cultivating a Long View.”
55 Alook et al., The End of This World, 156.
56 Dixon, Another Politics, 224-225.
57 Roy, “Confronting Empire.”
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Alexis Shotwell
Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding (Penn State University Press, 2011) and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Email: [email protected]