ABSTRACT
Early in Ian McEwan’s novel Solar, Nobel Prize-winner Michael Beard is “the only scientist among a committed band of artists” traveling through the Arctic with the “Eighty Degrees North Seminar” (62). One evening, “not quite drunk,” Beard describes the wind turbine to be installed at his research center, aware that “He was among scientific illiterates and could have said anything” (McEwan 76). A woman artist makes “an impassioned statement of support” in response, declaring “that Beard was the only one here doing something ‘real,’ at which the whole room warmed to him and applauded loudly” (McEwan 76). The particular irony in this scene is that, as the novel progresses, we learn Beard is in fact a morally and intellectually bankrupt anti-hero who steals his junior colleague’s ideas for “‘artificial photosynthesis,’” seeking personal glory and money to fund his luxurious lifestyle (McEwan 155). While climate change is more a backdrop than a central event in the novel, the portrait of interdisciplinary dialogue at the Arctic seminar touches on plausible dynamics in these kinds of endeavors. Humanists and artists, insecure about our contribution to solving “real” problems, tend to fail at articulating why what we do is essential in thinking through climate change, and instead accept both the problems as defined by the natural sciences and the solutions-often technological, almost always within the status quo of neoliberal capitalism-that are proposed (see J. Foster). I open my course on climate change by stating that, while environmental studies
is usually described as a problem-solving discipline, this class is about not-solving the problem of climate change. Instead, we will be causing problems, asking questions, causing trouble-that is, redefining the problem itself rather than searching for solutions. On an affective level, what this means is that I hold students in the presence of the unbearable grief of climate change, and I resist their attempts to break out of this “unbearability” by turning to technological optimism or environmental education (J. Butler, Precarious Life 30). Students arrive on the first day in anguish about the magnitude of the climate crisis and their inability to do anything to change it as individuals. They are knowledgeable enough to realize that ‘reduce, recycle, reuse’ is a form of neoliberal, individualist consumer behavior (see Maniates). But unfortunately, few alternatives to this consumer model are offered within either academic or popular
discourse: when I ask students to think of collective, non-consumer actions they can take to confront climate change, they struggle. This struggle becomes a focal point we return to throughout the course, which serves as a laboratory for imagining collective responses that carve out what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “micro-utopias,” or temporary autonomous zones, within the status quo (31). The course opens a space where students articulate their desires for justice, solidarity, and social change, and begin to trust that desire can be a resource for social action.1 Through out the course we build a vocabulary to talk about these desires through a critical engagement with the concept of affect. The course culminates in an expressive project that engages with the question of aesthetics and politics through the mode of relational aesthetics. In the following pages I offer a notated syllabus with readings, assignment notes, and the narrative that binds the course together.
