The Progress of This Storm. Andreas Malm

      Contents

      Introduction: Theory for the Warming Condition

      1.On the Building of Nature: Against Constructionism

2.On Combined Development: Against Hybridism

       3.On What Matter Does: Against New Materialism

       4.On Unicorns and Baboons: For Climate Realism

       5.On the Perils of Property: Sketches for Tracking the Storm

       6.On the Use of Opposites: In Praise of Polarisation

       7.On Unruly Nature: An Experiment in Ecological Autonomism

       8.Conclusion: One Step Back, Two Steps Forwards

       Notes

       Acknowledgements

       Index

       The two heads had already fused to one

       and features from each flowed and blended into

       one face where two were lost in one another

      …

       Each former likeness now was blotted out;

       both, and neither one it seemed – this picture

      of deformity.

      Dante, in the eighth circle of hell

      Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.

      Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1

      The sky’s changing.

      A roaring storm is coming.

      A howling mist,

      a growling downpour.

      …

       All the money men who close their eyes

       and pretend

       that this rumble

      must be low planes.

      Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos

       Introduction: Theory for the Warming Condition

      NEVER IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT

      Is there any time left in this world? In an essay published in New Left Review in 2015, Fredric Jameson restated his thirty-year-old diagnosis of postmodernity as the ‘predominance of space over time’.¹ We continue to live on a stage where there is nothing but the present. Past and future alike have dissolved into a perpetual now, leaving us imprisoned in a moment without links backwards or forwards: only the dimension of space extends in all directions, across the seamless surface of a globalised world, in which everyone is connected to everyone else through uncountable threads – but time has ceased flowing. Or, as Jameson originally put it in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: ‘We now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism.’² This shift of dimensions, more than anything else, marks the onset of postmodernity: and here we are, still.

      The diagnosis hinges on the eradication of nature. Jameson’s argument runs something like this: in the modern era, vast fields of old nature remained spread out between the bustling new centres of factory and market. A short drive would take the modernist back to the rural village where she was born; ancient ways of life dotted every horizon, the modern mode speeding up within a landscape tied to the natural and immemorial. It was this contrast that made the modernists feel the movement of time – from the old to the new, towards the future – that so fundamentally structured their culture. Now the foil is gone. Peasants, lords, artisans, costermongers have vanished from sight and, along with them, ‘nature has been triumphantly blotted out’.³ In place of villages, there are suburbs; no matter how far the postmodernist drives, she will encounter inhabitants of the same cultural present, watching the same programmes or – to update the analysis – posting pictures on the same networks. The new is the only game in town, and by the same token it loses its meaning and lustre,