Maybe if we just don't talk about the climate it'll go away.

David Livingstone's Empire of Climate and Jacques Ranciere for some reason

Hello.

This is a sort-of edited version of an essay of which I’ve written a dozen versions over the last year. I wish this were an exaggeration. This version best encapsulates something which I was reaching at but never quite attained: the weird fiction you end up with when trying to write certain versions of historiography.

For David Livingstone, arguments about the climate’s role in historical change frequently lapse into “reductionist fictions”. It’s impossible for humans to reason well about the climate’s role in history. “Might have” soon becomes “must have”. Granting the environment any explanatory power, he argues, invariably leads to the exclusion of any other cause. This “environmental determinism” has long underwritten both imperial domination and racial essentialism. Removing human agency from the historical picture, moreover, risks political paralysis in the face of the Anthropocene. How, then, do we talk about the climate in history without making these errors once again now the climate is again intruding into history? The Empire of Climate is fixated with this problem. Livingstone’s solution is to focus on “dialogues with the past”; to carefully examine the causal chains that led past thinkers to err so that we can spot such faulty reasoning in our contemporaries’ work. Such a method, he contends, ensures we keep human responsibility and political choice at the centre of our politics.

This essay argues that Livingstone’s approach fails, but that it fails in an interesting way; that The Empire of Climate is more akin to a realist novel than intellectual history or political order. I use Jacques Ranciere’s work to argue that the dialogues with the past on which Livingstone grounds human freedom are a form of fictional rationality. Rather than splitting time between men who create history by active choice and the masses without history like in classic realist fiction however, Livingstone banishes the climate to bring humans as a whole into historical time. As Amitav Ghosh points out, such techniques are wholly unsuited to the Anthropocene. The polite gradualist worlds conjured by the fillers of day-to-day drawing room discussions were developed precisely to calm and order the unexpected events of climate and narrative. This was, in turn, bound up with the development of a gradualist geology that lingered up until the late 20^th century and which hampered our understanding of our effect on the climate. Literary realism, on which Livingstone hopes to preserve human agency in the Anthropocene, is therefore wholly incapable of representing the new climatic regime.

David Livingstone’s The Empire of Climate begins by lamenting the resurgence of climate as a historical explanation. Explaining that although he derived the “name for his conceptual territory” from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), a “common resort to the elemental power of climate’s agency” has only intensified across culture high and low. Worse, it “continues to extend its influence” thanks to the “prevailing concerns over the consequences of rapid climate change.” Such an influence has already been disastrous:

The impact of Montesquieu’s zonal geo-philosophy was both deep and lasting. […]. Moreover, realpolitik of the most practical kind flowed from the zonal mentalité, not least in debates about the naturalisation of slavery and the problems of colonial labo[u]r and wealth generation in tropical empires.

Of course, determinism did not start nor end with Montesquieu. Livingstone proposes four broad approaches to “naturalistic theories of economy and culture” that highlight its pernicious effects across literary genre, academic disciplines, and popular science. There is something imperial about the way not just humans think about the role of the climate on human society but in how climate troublingly appears to obviously shape us. For it is not content to remain within the borders of nation or genre. Its claims to sovereignty are total and totalising in a manner that appears to legitimate what Livingstone describes as imperial “realpolitik” of the harshest kind. Treating the climate as a possible historical agent is intrinsically dangerous.

Human flourishing in the Anthropocene therefore depends on interrupting these climatic explanations of history. Indeed, Livingstone sees his project in explicitly political terms. In the final few pages, he expresses a hope that his work:

has provided the historical resources to reconceptualise how we might profitably think and speak and behave in a time of climate cataclysm. My hope is that the narrative I have provided may serve a similar purpose by affording some conversation partners from the past for thinking over, talking about, and acting in our own climatically distressing times. These dialogues with the past may sometimes be encouraging; sometimes intriguing, more frequently disquieting. Some will reveal how the human spirit has been diminished from time to time, hopeful hints of a better way may be glimpsed. Taken in the round, though, the history of climatic determinism with its aura of fatalism and fanaticism reveals just how crippling a force it can be on human agency, equality, and empowerment.

The broader political implications of how we think about the climate then are profound. Climate is both greedy and malevolent; the more territory it claims by way of explanatory power, the worse the effects. The very presence saps our freedom. If we believe that climate is the first cause, then we risk repeating the “zonal mentalité’s “realpolitik”. At the same time, such “climatic determinism” suffocates the possibility of fighting climate change at all; if our societies are shaped by climate, where is the room for human agency over that climate? As Livingstone plainly states, the arrival of climate on the historical stage has always carried “an aura of fatalism and fanaticism.” This poses a vital danger to “human agency, equality, and empowerment.” Livingstone, however, believes he has offered us the “historical resources” to preserve these qualities. By engaging in “dialogues with the past” – that is, by critiquing how climate has been used – we can learn “a new way to “think, speak, and act”.

Livingstone, then, makes emancipation dependent on revealing how, despite appearances, climate is not a useful historical explanation. This can be seen in his explicit rejection of determinist accounts of determinism, since “The explanatory powers attributed to climate, of course, come in various shapes and sizes”:

Sometimes it is the direct influence of climate on human bodies or historical events that advocates have in mind. Sometimes climate’s influence is believed to be indirect, modulated by or operating through a range of other agents. On some occasions, the causal chain is short and immediate; on others, it is long and circuitous. Sometimes, climatic explanations are monocausal; sometimes they operate in conjunction with other mechanisms.

[…]

All this cautions against seeking terminological exactitude in dealing with a suite of concepts that are related more by family resemblance than analytical specificity. In my view, it is a mistake to impose conceptual clarity on ideas that display historical opacity. Rather than operating with a stipulative definition or seeking philosophical precision, we should be better advised to work empirically and endeavour to map the different shapes and forms “climatic determinism” has assumed. (10).

“Climatic determinism” therefore appears to be any appeal to any environmental or material conditions in human history. It is not merely faulty reasoning or the odd weak chain, whether “short and immediate” or “long and circuitous”. Nor is it just an exclusive monocausality, since “sometimes [it] operate[s] in conjunction with other mechanisms.” Such wooliness, he contends, points to the problem of finding “philosophical precision” when it comes to determinism and the need to inspect the “causal chain” for weak links. Yet the refusal to be pinned down, coupled with the repeated invocation of climate’s deleterious agency in his definitions, suggests that the common element in climatic determinism is, in fact, any mention of the climate in historical explanation. In turn, historical agency and causation is enshrined as a uniquely human activity, one that is legible and subject to reason.

In The Edges of Fiction, Jacques Ranciere argues that historical argument is bound up with dramatic form. Aristotle distinguished History from Poetry by the latter’s “surfeit of rationality”:

Poetry, by which he means the construction of dramatic or epic fictions, is ‘more philosophical’ than history, because the latter says only how things happen, one after the other, in their particularity, whereas poetic fiction says how things can happen in general. Events do not occur in it at random. They occur as the necessary or verisimilar consequences of a chain of causes and effects. Such a chain can be shown to produce the most general determinations of human existence – the fact of knowing happiness or misfortune, and of going from one to the other.

These chains are not “defined by rigour alone”, but by the “reversal […] in the universe of expectations.” Happiness to misery, ignorance to knowledge, and the unexpected to the expected. Aristotle’s “structural matrix” moreover, continues to shape how contemporary society produces knowledge about itself. It structures the “great theories of society and history, as well as in the short-sighted, day-to-day oracular science of politicians, experts, journalists, or essayists” (2). Historical argument, of the type Livingstone hopes to engage in, must be understood as inextricable from the literary, philosophical, and dramatic logical form from which it originated. When we engage in “oracular science” and talk about “great theories of society” we engage in the construction of a world that is more rational than the world it seeks to represent.

This form, moreover, is an explicit rejection of determinist explanations of history. As Ranciere points out, fictional rationality was marked by a shift away from the divine as historical or literary historical explanation. Causal chains are:

no longer a fatality imposed by a divine power. It is inherent to the order of human action and to the relation it entertains with knowledge. Fictional reason carried out exactly this revolution: the tragic hero’s misfortune is no longer a condition to be endured but instead the consequence of an error – of some error or other in the conduct of one’s action and no longer a transgression of the divine order. And this misfortune occurs through a specific mode of causality.

Fictional rationality then is the exploration of the way in which historical, political, and dramatic events are driven by human choices, errors, acts, and judgements. Writing a history of the environment only makes sense in terms of human action in that environment. Similarly, when we read intellectual history or critiques and reviews of other historical work, where the historian attempts to show how the other historian’s work has failed in its logic, it focuses on an Aristotelian schema of reversal. Even, Ranciere points out, as Marxism and sociology attempted to wrestle with the appearances of the masses on history’s stage, they did so by inverting this matrix, rather than abolishing it as he claims modernist literature went on to do. This happens, then, because the intellectual framework by which we make sense of the world is through this human dramaturgy. To write a history of climate, say, that suborns humans to impersonal forces, would be to return to the prelapsarian matter of “transgression[s] of the divine order”.

This model of human agency however is restricted to a mere handful of people. As Ranciere explains, classical fictional rationality – the logic of which drove the novel until the late 19^th century – implies a distinction between the hero “who acted and expected something to come from [his] action” and the masses “subject to anarchy, to the empirical real’s absence of cause.” (3-4). In other words, it was restricted to an elite who were able to make errors that mattered:

To undergo this tragic adversity, which is due not to vice but to an error, one must be able to commit errors and therefore to put forward grand designs, the means for realising which may draw one into error. The poetic rationality of necessary or verisimilar linkages applies to those men who are referred to as being active because they live in the time of ends: those ends that the action puts forward but also that end in itself constituted by the privileged form of inaction called leisure. (129)

In order to act, actions have to matter; and for actions to matter, one already has to be within reach of the levers of power by being freed from subsistence. This, Ranciere points out, depends on a strictly ordered society in which there are those who matter by virtue of their station and those who do not, since they are born to a life of the repetitive production which sustains this elite. To talk of history (or poetic history) is to talk about something that can only happen to a few members of a scant class.

David Livingstone therefore argues that human agency is dependent on employing fictional rationality to write poetry (history) rather than history (chronicle). Discussing the surfeit of environmental data produced in recent decades, Livingstone cautions against confusing “causation” with “correlation”:

The very presence of rich data on climate over millennia has the potential to seduce many into giving them a controlling explanatory role that favours causation over correlation, assertion over argument, declaration over documentation. There is nothing necessary about this pitfall, of course, but it does carry a cautionary warning about the lure of epistemic zealotry.

The danger of “rich data on climate” then is that it risks seducing historians into the belief that they are dealing with scientific or platonic truths. This is not the historians’ task, and the belief that researchers can find objective causal explanations for history is accordingly “epistemic zealotry.” Livingstone therefore distinguishes between fictional rationality “argument” and chronicle “assertion”. It is the former that he accordingly places as central to healthy political order, and as we might imagine the surfeit of apparently obvious environmental data proves useful for proving that verisimilitude and truth are not necessarily or straightforwardly bound up.

The reified epistemic and social structure of fictional rationality however seems a poor foundation against reactionary politics. “Fictional knowledge”, as Ranciere argued:

is itself deployed only by ignoring – by treating as negligible - the mass of beings and situations belonging to the repetitive universe of material things and events that happen simply one after the other, without creating expectations or forcing errors, and thus without ever going through the reversals of fortune that give the universe of fictional actions its rationality. (4)

Livingstone therefore asserts that proper social and historical research works according to fictional rationality. We look at the aims of individual researchers, see how they were misled by the climate’s verisimilitude, and fell to chronicle-like ignorance. Anything else is deterministic, which in turn constrains human political agency. Yet the very foundation of political agency is intrinsically exclusive: something Livingstone tacitly acknowledges when he ignores “treat[s] as negligible – the mass of beings and situations” that have not participated in this active time. This leads us to the paradoxical situation where human flourishing can only triumph over authoritarianism by ordering the world into those whose actions matter and those who do not.

In this sense then, the production of knowledge about the external world is secondary to the form in which it is produced. Political order is safeguarded by commentary, glosses, and re-reading. Montesquieu, Sydenham, Hume, Huntington, inter alia become tragic heroes, whose errors show the impossibility of attempting to act upon the world. This, again, points to another paradox: the means by which we are to ensure our freedom is that of a close reading that negates the possibility of action itself.

Part of Livingstone’s way out of this is to reassign this distinction between causation and repetition. We can see this in his attitude to the surfeit of environmental data, which we touched on above:

Over the past few decades, research on dendrochronology, volcanic ash traces, ice sheet sediments, pollen analysis, lacustrine deposits, and the like has mushroomed, generating vast quantities of proxy data about past climactic environments and the changes they have undergone over extended periods of time. Records such as these have encouraged historians to post new questions about the dynamics of historical explanation and together with access to a wider range of archival materials, have prompted many to read history more exclusively through the prism of climatology. Of course, large climate-related data sets have huge significance for the historian’s craft. Rich information of this kind can illuminate some of the silences and uncertainties in the archives and address old issues in new ways. Big data’s promises seem endless. 6

Livingstone distinguishes between volume and quality; just because we have more environmental data, he argues, it does not follow that it constitutes a new objective position from which to reason. This mistake would be an example of “epistemic zealotry”, his mention of which comes on the following page. It also suggests that Livingstone moves the distinction between men who live in the times of ends and the masses to rational humans and insensible nature. This, then, allows him to plausibly claim that fictional rationality allows us to foreground agency. It also, of course, comes at a price: firstly in distinguishing between human/animal on rational and literate grounds we risk repeating the old bigotries in new ways. The second issue is that it makes any representation of natural causation impossible. I suspect the latter is a benefit; Livingstone has dealt with the problem of climate causing history by redefining the terms, even if by history’s rules it is internally consistent.

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that the realist novel sought to obscure “the unheard of and the unlikely.” “Before the birth of the modern novel, where-ever stories were told, fiction”:

proceed[ed] by linking together moments and scenes that are in some way distinctive or different: these are, of course, nothing other than instances of exception.

Novels too proceed in this fashion, but what is distinctive about the form is precisely the concealment of those exceptional moments that serve as the motor of narrative. This is achieved through the insertion of what Franco Moretti, the literary theorist, calls “fillers”. According to Moretti, “fillers function very much like the good manners so important in [Jane] Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the ‘narrativity’ of life under control – to give a regularity, a ‘style’ to existence”. It is through this mechanism that worlds are conjured up, through everyday details, which function “as the opposite of narrative.” (16-7)

The problem of fictional rationality in the realist novel could therefore be said, according to Moretti and Ghosh, to be “dealt with” through suppression and dissimulation. Fiction depends on exception, which splits the social world and risks the revelation of the instability and hierarchy of a Georgian world in which politeness and improvement were, theoretically at least, open to all. How, then, to write novels? By pushing as much of the exceptional as possible off-stage. In its place we find fillers: polite conversation which serves to obscure the states of exception on which 18^th and 19^th century fiction depended.

These fillers, Ghosh continues, formed part of a wider Weberian demystification in the 19^th century. In this sense, the exceptional moments that had pointed to a natural Aristotelian order in which a scant few acted were transformed through a kind of magnification into so exceptional as to be impossible.

Why should the rhetoric of the everyday appear at exactly the time when a regime of statistics, ruled by ideas of probability and improbability, was beginning to give new shapes to society? Why did fillers suddenly become so important? Moretti’s answer is “Because they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life. Fillers turn the novel into a ‘calm passion’ … they are part of what Weber called the ‘rationalisation’ of modern life: a process that begins in the economy and in the administration, but eventually pervades the sphere of free time, private life, entertainment, feelings…. Or in other words: fillers are an attempt at rationalising the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all. (19)

Ranciere’s argument that the crisis of mimesis in the realist novel caused the abolition of the distinction isn’t contradicted here. Rather, Ghosh argues that the bourgeois did not let the crisis go to waste: the rise of the bourgeois over the old aristocracy was entangled with, and naturalised by, an awkward attempt to dislodge the temporal hierarchy without entirely superseding it. Exceptional moments were not impossible, but improbable; and even if they did occur, there was no reason why they would occur to you, reader or character. These fillers, then, served to stuff novels full with the everyday statistical discourse that underpinned a merchants’ claim to authority. A world in which polite discussion, austere addition, social calls inter alia had no need for tragic heroes.

We can, therefore, read The Empire of Climate like one of Ghosh’s unreal realist novels. Exceptional moments, whether tornadoes or Hegelian world-spirit will still happen, of course; but they can be minimised by bringing the reader’s attention to how well it has stuff:

It could not, of course, be otherwise: if novels were not built upon a scaffolding of exceptional moments, writers would be faced with the Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety. But the modern novel, unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events continues to be essential to its functioning. It is this that makes a certain kind of narrative a recognizably modern novel.

Here, then, is the irony of the “realist” novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real. (23)

By drawing the researcher’s attention to how well a claim fulfils the tenets of fictional rationality and then inviting them to respond in turn, the reader is enmeshed in a cloud of fillers that successfully obscure the researcher and reader from attributing causality to nature. This, of course, has to be obscured if it is to be successful; hence his reluctance to sketch out a full map of the territory “reproduce the world in its entirety” and instead claim gestures, brushstrokes, pathways, and places to avoid. Environmental determinism, Livingstone insists, is insidious. Humans seem incapable of using any non-human explanations in a way that avoids horror. The Empire of Climate’s solution is to construct a realist lifeworld on which liberal politics can be founded. But it is also one that shows that while geology might have learned to leave its gradualism behind, environmental historians are still beholden to the literary world.

It almost goes without saying that the realist novel is therefore incapable of representing the Anthropocene. “It is certainly no coincidence”, Ghosh continues, “that the word uncanny has begun to be used, with ever greater frequency, in relation to climate change.” Such a word seems the only way to represent the presence of non-human agency:

No other word comes close to expressing the strangeness of what is unfolding around us. For these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognise something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-human interlocutors.

Yet now our gaze seems to be turning again’ the uncanny and improbable events that are beating at our doors seem to have stirred a sense of recognition, an awareness that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who shared elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctively our own; the capacities of will, thought, and consciousness. (30-1).

Hence the “renewed attention to panpsychism and the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead” along with “object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, the new animism, and so on?”. Note how Ghosh repeats “recognition” twice here to argue that the historical agency of the non-human intrudes into our consciousness. The language of Greek drama is no accident. The recognition (anagnorisis) of non-human historical agency risks the return to something “we had turned away from”, a peripeteia that risks a loss of modernity. If the world of the novel and the monograph is ordered and ordering, there will always be a gap between that order and the world that refuses to conform. Uncanniness, then, is the way in which action that is outside of those chains is made to conform to it. It will rise in proportion to Livingstone’s success.