Theories of global warming and their implications for education: reflections on Andreas Malm’s ‘The progress of this storm’

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Notes

1 Posthumanism is, to say the least, a floating signifier. At one extreme, it signifies a conclusion that human extinction is inevitable. More generally, we find arguments for a less anthropocentric view of the world and that downplay the differences between human and the rest of reality. More diluted usages appear to mean little more than situated or somatic, or simply a more respectful attitude to nature.

2 This one-sided view of history is often justified by an early text by Marx, the polemic against Proudhon known as ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’, in which we find the sentence: ‘The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalism’. Malm opposes this one-sidedness, pointing out that capitalist relations were established well before the introduction of steam power. He holds that Marx generally has a more dialectical view of the relations between forces and relations of production, and that technological determinism as a current in Marxism is a reductionist distortion.

3 Delanda (2016) discusses many different forms of assemblage, though overemphasising the singularity of each occurrence at the expense of structural regularities and natural laws.

4 This is of course also true of some non-humans.

5 Hornborg (2017) offers the following clarification:

Rather than thinking of ‘nature’ as a certain kind of physical things or spaces uncontaminated by humans, I regard it as an analytical category encompassing all those aspects of socioecological processes that derive from forces and regularities that do not require explanations referring to the symbolic capacities of human beings  …  ‘Nature’ would thus include, for instance, thermodynamics, gravity, and photosynthesis, but only the non-symbolic aspects of agriculture, markets, or consumption. (p. 99)

6 Close-to-practice explanations of pedagogical practices are, not surprisingly, rare in the literature; attempted explanations of posthuman pedagogies tend to conclude with unsolved or unsolvable questions rather than answers (e.g., Snaza, 2013; Snaza et al., 2014; Wallin, 2017).

7 Kipnis (2015) generously suggests the problem could be easier in a language with a middle voice between active and passive.

8 See Kamran Nayeri’s (2016) critique of Moore for a more detailed argument.

9 The role of real-life Indigenous people in countering climate change can be found in an inspirational report from Canada (Champ & Robidoux, 2021) which describes collaboration between First Nation peoples, trade unionists and climate activists to prevent the construction of shale gas pipelines.