Embodying Climate Change

Abstract

This article looks to performing arts and performance studies for ways to grasp and make meaning from contemporary climate change, a phenomenon that influential ecological philosophers regard as highly resistant to human comprehension. Thinking through a lethal protest of climate inaction and a dance between human and fungal bodies, the author argues that these embodied acts enable a novel recognition of climate change's intimate presence and personal/political weight. These performance perspectives also indicate the radical ecological potential of slowing down and learning to recognize oneself in, and as, the surrounding world.

Notes

1 Resisting facile resolution of environmental matters is an approach that Donna Haraway (2016) has influentially advocated in Staying with the Trouble.

2 I recognize the usefulness of both phrases and so use both.

3 Recent revelations about ExxonMobil’s decades-long research into and knowledge of climate change clarify a particularly blatant demonstration of corporate hypocrisy and misinformation.

4 This is not to suggest that bodies are uncomplicated, directly knowable, universal entities. Judith Butler’s theorization of gender performativity suggests that physical bodies are always-already discursively mediated by non-’natural’ social constructions (for example, gender, sex, race.) Yet however deeply imbricated physical and social mattering might be, human bodies are a locus through which ‘reality’ has persistently sought and inferred – and bodily centred epistemologies are under-theorized in many contemporary environmental philosophical discussions.

5 The possibility of terraforming and populating planets other than Earth, a privilege being seriously discussed and marketed by Silicon Valley elites including Elon Musk, creates an imagined if not literal escape hatch for the very powerful and wealthy in confronting climate destruction. As of this writing, this possibility remains speculative if influential, and unmitigated climate change presents an ultimately indifferent threat to human life.

6 I encountered Espinosa and his work at Northwestern University’s 2018 Summer Institute of Performance Studies, an inspiring week devoted to ‘Political Climates/ Performance Ecologies’ and led by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera.