How does climate change come to be an objective referent, a singular thing that can be pointed to, worked at, manipulated, transformed, feared, cele-brated, or personified? Understanding how people think and talk about the climate and climate change as a figure or form emerged from the many conversations I had with people about how and when it is possible to talk about the climate, and cuts to the heart of what I am trying to grapple with in terms of describing and characterizing its phenomenological presence.
Let me tell an anecdote that might explain why this is a problem.
One afternoon in a bar on the university campus, I had a long conversa-tion with Marc, a climate activist, about the resources available for think-ing and talkthink-ing about climate change. He asked me whether anthropology might have any pointers for how better to articulate and describe what climate is and how it is socially experienced. We started to reflect on how many people seemed to be looking around for new ways of talking and thinking about climate change and articulating what it was in a new or different language. Some, for example, were wondering whether other cul-tural understandings of the environment might be useful. A retired local authority employee who was now very engaged in activist projects in the city had mentioned to me the Buen Vivir movement in Bolivia as a poten-tial way of thinking about the environment in more relational, less
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mistic terms — perhaps the climate needed to be thought of as an ecosys-tem or an agent, not an object or a barrier to growth. In the council one of the senior officers had told me of a writer who had experience of work-ing in the Amazon with people who thought differently from Westerners about environmental relations and wondered what we might learn from them. This senior officer talked often of the power of stories and of affect, and of the potential of material objects to carry meaning and to move people. What, he wondered, were the objects that could carry climate’s meaning? Once he said to me that he was thinking of sending a postcard to his team of the sun setting over the sea with a caption saying something like “the Arctic in the year 2020.” He wondered if this juxtaposition of im-age and text might engender in people a capacity to feel and engim-age with climate change. As Marc and I discussed these alternative understandings of the climate, our conversation moved on to the eschatology of climate change — and whether it was maybe just a contemporary, modern West-ern myth of the end of times, equivalent to any other end- of- times myth that has been discussed in anthropology before.
The anthropological corpus is replete with end- time stories. I told Marc about an undergraduate course I had taken in the 1999 that looked at tech-nological dystopianism and the y2k bug through the lens of an anthropo-logical analysis of millenarianism. And so we wondered, in our conversa-tion, whether one of the ways we could talk about the climate was as a kind of eschatological myth — the contemporary manifestation of an all- too- human capacity to imagine and fear the future as the end time. But as we talked, our discussion kept drawing back to the climate’s material intransigence, its numerical capacity to unsettle narrative and myth, its awkward or inconvenient reappearance, that meant it didn’t feel appro-priate to describe it as simply a manifestation of a cultural perspective or a worldview. Like other anthropologists who have been concerned with how to raise the status of indigenous practice from cultural representation to ontology, we too found ourselves grappling with the question of how to hold in view the climate’s ontological reality while also attending to its imaginary dimensions — to capture the ontological specificity of climate change as a thing we could think and relate to.
At the same time, we talked about how climate change’s facticity, its materiality, was nonetheless crafted. Science studies has done much to show us that scientific knowledge is constructed, made, and shaped, rather as a potter crafts a pot. As we saw in chapter 1, climate change is made into a thing through what we might call a figurative process, a process of giving
How the Climate Takes Shape · 65 a body to measured traces that scientists find themselves obliged to ad-dress (Stengers 2010, 51 – 52). At the same time, climate is different from a potter’s pot and from a scientific fact. It cannot be touched and held like a pot or an assay. It cannot be picked up and smashed on the floor or tested in isolated conditions. Nonetheless, to speak of climate change is an act of recognition that it does have pattern, a coherence, a body; indeed, it is a body that is so powerful that it has the capacity to transform or even por-tend the end of human civilization. So what, we wondered, is the nature of this body that climate has?
Having thought more about this since my conversation with Marc, it seems to me that the process of giving climate change a body is twofold.
The first is descriptive — the visualizations that track and trace the rela-tional qualities that make it what it is. But the second, and this is crucial, is constitutive. That is, as the models are crafted, the findings of science com-municated, the databases backed up, and the conferences flown to, those who work to describe climate change are also in it, creating an imaginary that adds up to climate change in ways that can never be directly tracked from micro to macro. It is the doubleness of the body of the climate that the concept of the figure helps to conjure.
As Donna Haraway has explored in much of her work, a figuration is neither the thing nor the representation of that thing but a process of bodying into being whereby some- “thing” can appear (see Haraway 1991, 2003). Andrew Barry also captures this well when he writes how in Isabelle Stengers’s book Cosmopolitics “the physical scientist is conceived of as a
‘manipulator’ or constructivist who neither represents nor ‘shapes’ mate-rial reality . . . but transforms reality in order to render energy into a calcu-lable and comparable form” (2015, 119). It is in this sense that I find it helpful to talk of climate not as an environmental process or a cultural imaginary but as a figure, a body, a form that is made between the climate, the mod-els that represent it, and the political responses that it provokes — a figure that is both in us and outside us; a figure in which the question of indi-vidual agency collapses into systemic relations. Thinking like a climate is a collapse of the gap between the mediations of climate models and the materialities they serve to describe. It is a demand to engage the world in terms of relational signs rather than ontological realities and symbolic representations, and to look at how different kinds of signs and represen-tations interact, emerge, and enfold one another.
One key benefit in this way of understanding the climate is that it allows us to trace climate change out from scientific models into other settings,
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objects, entities, practices. It allows us to attend empirically to the appear-ances of climate change in places where we might not have expected to find it — in documents and strategies, office blocks and homes — and to note the absence of climate change in places where we might otherwise have thought it would be — from the innocuous heat of a summer’s day to the image of a green and sustainable vision for future urban living. In doing so, it allows us to trace climate change in new ways into the realm of the social, observing how, through numbering practices and modeling techniques, climate becomes part of culture in ways that open up our un-derstanding of the nature of the cultural challenge of confronting climate change and the future it portends.