ABSTRACT
Current attitudes towards climate change are ruefully captured and skewered in the title of an ongoing solo performance series by California-based performance artist Heather Woodbury. Rifng on the title of a long-running, though recently canceled, daytime soap opera, Woodbury’s work is called “As the Globe Warms.” The title captures the disturbing way that one of the greatest catastrophes our species has ever faced is transmuted into yet another contentious and indecisive aspect of “the new normal,” a vaguely unsettling yet instantly normalized account of social and political reality, produced and sustained by the mass media. Acknowledging the looming crisis while also characterizing it as inevitable, this discourse turns climate change into yet another weapon in the arsenals of biopower, the exercise of the state’s control over the biological lives of its increasingly disempowered citizens. Like the programmatically endless “war on terror,” the idea of an unavoidable drift towards climatic extremes helps to normalize events like state-mandated evacuations, removal of populations, increased monitoring and surveillance of public spaces, and mass medical interventions-all unfolding in the name of “protection” and “caution.”
