Bronislaw Szerszynski

Cultures of cosmopolitanism

This paper is concerned with whether a culture of cosmopolitanism is currently emerging out of massively wide-ranging global processes. The authors develop certain theoretical components of such a culture they consider ongoing research concerned with belongingness to different geographical entities including the world as a whole, and they present their own empirical research findings. From their media research they show that there is something that could be called a banal globalism. From focus group research they show that there is a wide awareness of the global but they this is combined in complex ways with notions of the local and grounded and from media interviews they demonstrate that there is a reflexive awareness of a cultures of the cosmopolitan. On the basis of their data from the UK, they conclude that a publicly screened cosmopolitan culture is emergent and likely to orehestrate much of social and political life in future decades.

Changing Climates: Introduction

OCIAL THEORY is faced by a new spectre haunting the ‘globe’ – thechanging of the world’s climate. Such changes are now thought to bebeyond doubt and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPCC), very likely the product of human practices (IPCC, 2007).These practices have generated raised levels of ‘greenhouse gases’ in theatmosphere, which seem to be leading to increased temperatures, which willin turn transform future forms of human life around the world. Even attemptstomonitorand‘mitigate’climatechangearelikelytoinvolvedramaticchangesin social organization: the creation of a global assemblage of internationalagreements, carbon atoms, markets, technologies, weather events and socialpractices.Thereseemsnodoubt:the21stcenturyissettobeonewhereissuesofclimate,resourcesandenergyareparamount.Theworldofcultureandvirtu-ality has met its match; the material world apparently does matter and can‘bite back’. The economies and societies of whole continents may well havetransformedconditionsoflife.Andthehigh-carbonworld initiatedinthe20thcentury could turn out to be a mere passing moment in the long-term pattern-ing of human history. It is not so much post-modernism that we should bedebating but the conditions of possibility of ‘post-carbonism’.There are three broad positions or discourses within the climatechange literature.

Reading and writing the weather:climate technics and the moment of responsibility

In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narrative I develop a rather different account of the current ecopolitical moment. I first argue that an understanding of anthropogenic climate change must be grounded in a biosemiotic analysis of the evolving metabolism between society and nature, one that is alert to the way that metabolism involves a folded relation between inside and outside, and that recognizes the constant deferral of biosemiotic meaning in ecological systems. I then use a deconstructive reading of climate technics to problematize the distinction between the diagnosis and solution of climate change, and expose modern scientific practices of reading the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of weather’s technological writability. Exploring the notion that previous transformations of the metabolic regime of society have always involved transformations of notions of the human, I conclude by sketching out a different way of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the ‘opening’ of climate change, that problematizes the idea of the human as the end of nature, and that thereby implies a more radical version of climate responsibility.

The post-ecologist condition : irony as symptom and cure

Abstract Resources for an authentic response to the ‘post-ecologist condition’ as described by Ingolfur Blühdorn can be found in a cultural modernism which emphasises the contradictory nature of the human condition and whose master trope is irony. The concept of irony can help us both diagnose and respond to the crisis in public meaning which helps sustain unsustainable behaviour. Forms of dispositional irony, in which private and public meaning are disconnected from each other, are symptomatic of the post-ecologist condition; in response, forms of communicative irony are used by environmental movements to expose such dispositions and strategies. However, such tactics can only serve as partial and limited responses to the problem of unsustainability, unless they are embedded within and shaped by a generalised ironic stance towards the world and oneself. The contribution concludes by sketching elements of an environmentalism informed by this ironic ‘world relation’.

Why solar radiation management geoengineering and democracy won’t mix

In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging ‘social constitution’ of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: that the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institutions; that SRM will act at the planetary level and necessitate autocratic governance; that the motivations for SRM will always be plural and unstable; and that SRM will become conditioned by economic forces. Keywords: solar radiation management, geoengineering, governance, politics, democracy, social constitution of technology

Public engagement on solar radiation management and why it needs to happen now

There have been a number of calls for public engagement in geoengineering in recent years. However, there has been limited discussion of why the public should have a say or what the public can be expected to contribute to geoengineering discussions. We explore how public engagement can contribute to the research, development, and governance of one branch of geoengineering, solar radiation management (SRM), in three key ways: 1. by fulfilling ethical requirements for the inclusion of affected parties in democratic decision making processes; 2. by contributing to improved dialogue and trust between scientists and the public; and 3. by ensuring that decisions about SRM research and possible deployment are informed by a broad set of societal interests, values, and framings. Finally, we argue that, despite the nascent state of many SRM technologies, the time is right for the public to participate in engagement processes.

Mapping the landscape of climate engineering

In the absence of a governance framework for climate engineering technologies such as solar radiation management (SRM), the practices of scientific research and intellectual property acquisition can de facto shape the development of the field. It is therefore important to make visible emerging patterns of research and patenting, which we suggest can effectively be done using bibliometric methods. We explore the challenges in defining the boundary of climate engineering, and set out the research strategy taken in this study. A dataset of 825 scientific publications on climate engineering between 1971 and 2013 was identified, including 193 on SRM; these are analysed in terms of trends, institutions, authors and funders. For our patent dataset, we identified 143 first filings directly or indirectly related to climate engineering technologies—of which 28 were related to SRM technologies—linked to 910 family members. We analyse the main patterns discerned in patent trends, applicants and inventors. We compare our own findings with those of an earlier bibliometric study of climate engineering, and show how our method is consistent with the need for transparency and repeatability, and the need to adjust the method as the field develops. We conclude that bibliometric monitoring techniques can play an important role in the anticipatory governance of climate engineering.

Wild times and domesticated times: the temporalities of environmental lifestyles and politics

In this paper, I explore how environmental movements and lifestyles, like all forms of human action, produce their own characteristic kinds of time. During this exploration, I introduce a number of concepts which I suggest are useful in understanding these temporalities—chronological and kairological time; linear and cyclic time; segmentation and plot; orientation and synchronisation. Whereas the environment as described by the natural sciences is one dominated by chronological, linear time, human time is also kairological, suffused with meaning and intention. The varieties of human action also produce their own distinctive temporalities—some linear, some cyclic, some oriented to external goals, some self-sufficient. The logic of kairological time also requires that we understand individual events and actions as ‘figures’ against a temporal ‘ground’—one that is characteristically organised into an overarching narrative, or broken up into distinctive time segments. Furthermore, human experience is not just situated in time, but orients itself within time—it faces ‘backwards’ into the past, ‘forwards’ into the future, or commits itself to the present. Finally, lived time is also sometimes synchronised with other times—with that of proximate or distant others, or with historical narratives of progress or decline.

Growing the Social: Alternative Agrofood Networks and Social Sustainability in the Urban Ethical Foodscape

Abstract Agrofood practices have been an obvious domain in which to implement sustainability. Yet, despite the fact that food carries a dense set of social meanings and functions, sustainability’s social dimension has been relatively neglected in studies of sustainable food initiatives. In this article, we draw on research carried out for the European project “Facilitating Alternative Agro-food Networks” (FAAN), and describe various ways in which alternative agrofood networks in the city of Manchester manifest aspects of social sustainability and the “moral economy,” including relations of solidarity and justice with proximate and distant others, concern for land and for the global environment, social inclusion of the disadvantaged, and the reskilling of everyday life. However, we also argue for a different way of conceiving social sustainability, which involves not simply adding another “pillar” to the dominating dyad of the economic and the environmental, but subjecting the whole notion of sustainability to a sociomaterial turn—one that questions the ontological separation of economy, environment, and society. We show how this approach involves conceiving the urban “ethical foodscape” as a “moral taskscape” in which people dwell and move, interacting with soil, food, and each other through situated practices involving skill and judgment.

The varieties of ecological piety.

The idea of natures sacrality, contrasting starkly with industrial modernitys overwhelmingly instrumental valuation of non-human nature, visibly inform philosophical positions such as deep ecology and Gaia theory. But at a more unspoken level they can also be seen as suffusing a wider societal sensibility, evident not least in popular values regarding nature. But, granted that many people would ascribe such a value to nature, how are such beliefs embodied in their lives? An attention to the theological or cosmological level can only take us so far in understanding the dynamics of culture; we need also to attend to questions of practice, ritual, community and relationship, for it is through such elements that more abstract ideas about humanitys place in the universe are given both support and expression. It is in this spirit of inquiry that this paper proceeds, arguing that religious forms of action and corporateness characteristic of monastic, sectarian, churchly, and folk religiosity have shaped the way that contemporary environmental values are embodied in the practices and experience of everyday life.