WEATHER SPECTRE from magic to geoengineering RITA SÜVEGES exhibition of
TÓTalJOY Prize 2023
The TÓTalJOY Prize was founded in 2021 by the Museum of Fine Arts –Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI) with the generous support of the artist Endre Tót. The prize derives its name from the artist’s conceptual program centred on the notion of joy, which was launched in the 1970s. His early joy pieces and the actions of the TÓTalJOY series are considered among the most important works of Eastern European conceptual art.
The TÓTalJOY Prize, with a monetary value totalling 10,000 euros, aims to provide financial and institutional support to contemporary artists whose practice is research oriented. In response to the second announcement of the call in January 2023, 38 artistic research-based project proposals were submitted. The jury of nine, composed of Hungarian and international members, selected Rita Süveges’s concept and research plan as the winning project proposal of the year.
WEATHER SPECTRE
from magic to geoengineering exhibition of Rita
Süveges
Hungarian National Gallery
FOCUS Room
4 October 2024 –17 November 2024
Curator: Brigitta Ádi
“All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.” (John von Neumann)
Throughout history, humans have sought, by various means, to influence the weather in a favourable way. In the past, they turned to magic, witchcraft, or folk practices to ward off hail or drought. In the new worldview of modernity, the conquest of nature was the priority, giving rise to the scientific era of weather modification. Invented in the mid-twentieth century, radar finally conquered the mysterious
kingdom of the clouds. Yet the changeability of the weather continues to undermine the reliability of forecasting, even though today’s weather forecasters and researchers have access to the most advanced technologies when analysing the data.
Measuring, predicting, and controlling – this is how capitalism seeks to manage nature. But we cannot even be sure of the accuracy of forecasts: indeed, the weather reports often let us down. Despite all endeavours and promises, even localised weather conditions remain outside our control. Attempts are made to induce artificial rain, prevent hail damage (in Hungary too), and dispel the fog, but the globally applied weathermodification technologies are usually ineffective. Moreover, when intervening in the complex atmospheric systems, do we know what we do not know about it and the systems interacting with it?
Today, the local reality of recurring weather phenomena has been superseded by the threat of climate change. Weather and climate are in fact mutually exclusive notions: weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given place and time, while climate is the recurrence of weather conditions over a lengthier period of time. Can the lessons learnt in the struggle against weather be scaled up to the global processes currently affecting the planet?
Defined by the Royal Society (UK) as “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change”, geoengineering pushes the boundaries of natural science, giving rise to a host of international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational dilemmas. The consequences of climate manipulation are unforeseeable. The unanticipated negative effects may have to be dealt with by communities living on the other side of the planet or even by future generations. Accordingly, those who promote techno-optimism and geoengineering as solutions to the climate crisis have rightly come under fire from critics.
In her exhibition Weather Spectre, Rita Süveges explores the lessons of previous endeavours to modify the weather and climate. If we were to choose an optical characteristic to represent geoengineering, it might well be translucency, as the phenomenon is spreading before our very eyes. The artist’s installation evokes the immaterial aesthetics of technological development, metallically glittering and invariably vanishing. Elevating our imagination to the level of the clouds, it gives flashes of insights into weather magic, the critiques of techno-optimism and the high stakes of geoengineering, doing so in red-glowing apparitions.
From Magic to Geoengineering
glossary for the history of weather modification
magic spells
There were many folk practices to ward off storms and hail showers. These included threatening the clouds in certain ways: for instance, by cracking a whip, firing a shot, throwing a knife, or swinging an axe. The objective was to disperse the storm clouds. “Magic rituals can be interpreted as illusory working tools used by humans to ostensibly dominate nature. The belief in domination infused them with strength and stimulated their activities.” (Antal Simon)
witchcraft
In her analysis of the Hungarian witch trials of the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, the anthropologist Éva Pócs mapped out the local folklore of weather magic. She came to the surprising conclusion that 80% of the defendants in the trials were women. Among the accused was Mrs Borbála Leibitzer Christoph Varga, who was alleged to have stopped the rain by drawing water from nine puddles three times at dawn, boiling it with seven kinds of grass, turning it over in a stream three times, and raising it three times to the sky. In contrast, the weather wizards who sold their weather modification techniques as a service were mostly men.
bell ringing
“Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango.” (I call the living, mourn the dead, shatter the lightning.) Christian churches took storm demons very seriously, fighting against them by ringing the church bells. Many bell ringers were thus struck by lightning. In 1750, Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, responded by banning the ringing of bells to prevent storms. Many bells still bear the above inscription.
Scientific Revolution
We shall be “the lords and possessors of nature”, wrote Descartes. In the wake of the scientific revolution, people’s approach to nature was irreversibly transformed. Respect for the ancient texts was replaced by the philosophy of mechanism and the methods of modern science. Proponents of the new mechanical and
chemical philosophy were insistent that all atmospheric phenomena could be traced to the processes giving rise to them and could be explained by the natural laws of physics. New instruments - thermometers, barometers, hydrometers, and calibrated rain gauges - were developed for the observation and quantification of the atmospheric elements. The new practices and approaches soon meant that no atmospheric process could remain unrecorded. A culture of measurement emerged, linked to the new science of planetary meteorology.
after the battles Plutarch wrote: “And it is said that extraordinary rains generally dash down after great battles, whether it is that some divine power drenches and hallows the ground with purifying waters from Heaven, or that the blood and putrefying matter send up a moist and heavy vapour which condenses the air ...” This phenomenon gave rise to much speculation, leading inventive fortune hunters in the late nineteenth century to bring on the rain by recreating the noise of battle.
hail cannon
The Austrian viticulturalist and mayor Albert Stieger presented his hail cannon to the world in 1896. The hail cannon was equipped with a cone-shaped funnel made of steel, and it was charged with a quarter pound of gunpowder. The contraption resembled a vertical megaphone, emitting a beeping sound that was said to set the air in motion, using sound waves to break up the ice. Several venture capitalists invested in the technology, conducting pseudo-scientific advertising campaigns to popularise the cannon. Yet there was never any proof that the shock waves created by the sound of the cannon could affect the inner structure of a thunder cloud. After a few decades, the cannons disappeared from the landscape. Yet several of them remain in use even today, despite the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) having stated that the technique has no physical basis and is completely ineffective. A hail cannon is on display at the Georgikon Farm History Museum in Keszthely.
inventors During the interwar years, the Patent Office and the Meteorological Service received a large number of submissions concerning protection from hail and rain. In 1923, Gyula Frisz, a farmer from Vasvár, proposed to cover the Danube with lenses, thereby inducing artificial rain by means of the cooled layers of air above the river. However, the Meteorological Service soon proved the idea’s impracticality, noting that the technology would have to be spread over an area 400 metres in width and 115 kilometres in length, in order to induce rainfall on an area the size of Esztergom.
Not without sarcasm, the newspaper Mai Nap reported in 1938 that “... a little rainfall costs 200,000 pengős and a major rainstorm 1 million pengős”. The newspaper was referring to a proposal made by Henrik Görög, a private company official, and Aladár Rovó, the retired chief engineer of Hungarian State Railways, requiring the torching of a square kilometre of petrol to make it rain.
artificial rain
By 1933, the Soviet Union had already established a major rainmaking research facility in Leningrad (today’s Saint Petersburg). After World War II, the United States followed suit, in cooperation with General Electric.
In 1946, Vincent Schaeffer and Irving Langmuir discovered that using dry ice particles, rainfall could be induced from supercooled clouds. In 1950, twenty countries around the world were already experimenting with artificial rain, and experiments aimed at manipulating the weather became a central aspect of Cold War technological competition.
silver iodide
Research by the physicistchemist Bernard Vonnegut showed that ice formation could be promoted using various substances other than dry ice. The key factor was that the substance should have a very similar structure to ice and be insoluble in
water. Examples included lead iodide and silver iodide. Acting as artificial nuclei, silver iodide molecules are able to “trap” water droplets in the cloud, causing them to crystallise.
radar Radar was initially used by airborne military units in World War II to search for potential enemy targets. It was discovered by accident that radar could also be employed to gather important cloud data. The advent of weather and precipitation radar revolutionised atmospheric physics, as new and accurate knowledge of the inner structures of clouds could be gleaned. Since then, radar has been in use by national meteorological services, university research institutes, and the weather departments of television stations.
von Neumann
The influential polymath John von Neumann envisaged supercomputers that would control the weather: “All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.”
arms and military industry
Throughout history, weather has been a key factor in the outcome of battles and wars, and the military has contributed greatly to the development of weather science and forecasting services, providing research expeditions with logistical support and direction, and overseeing major (sometimes even national) meteorological services. Until the latter third of the twentieth century, most large-scale weather modification interventions were run by the military.
weather warfare
Ede (Edward) Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb”, declared, at the height of the Cold War threat, that “conflict over weather control [would] likely cause the ‘last war on Earth’”.
Operation Popeye
Between 1966 and 1972, the U.S. Air Force secretly conducted Operation Popeye above the dense jungles of North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The objective was to create artificial rain to hinder the enemy’s advance along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a vital transport and logistics corridor to South Vietnam.
Chernobyl
The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 released a large quantity of radioactive material into the atmosphere. After the disaster, highly radioactive rain clouds formed over Chernobyl. The prevailing winds were expected to carry the polluted airmass towards Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but the anticipated precipitation never reached that distance. Instead, intense downpours occurred in Belarus, which lies between Chernobyl and Moscow. The testimony given by Major Alexei Grushin on the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster confirmed the accounts of eyewitnesses who saw rain-making (cloud-seeding) aeroplanes in the sky over Belarus. Grushin received a medal for his role in the secret rain-making operations.
ENMOD
ENMOD Convention 1978. UN Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Procedures. “Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to engage in military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting, or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party. ... the term ‘environmental modification techniques’ refers to any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.”
Stalin’s plan for the transformation of nature
“Regarding human work aimed at transforming nature, what is crucial are the conditions of production and society and whether the work is planned or unplanned. Another major factor is who benefits from this thousand-year struggle and work against the elemental forces of wild nature: individuals, narrow groups, or tens and hundreds of millions of workers? … Endless deserts will be replaced by flourishing plantations.” (Imre Karczag, A természet átalakításának kérdései [Issues of the transformation of nature]).
hail resistance in Baranya
On 9 May 1949, Mátyás Rákosi asked the Hungarian Meteorological Service (OMSZ) for an expert opinion on artificial rain, having been informed about the discovery of supposedly inexhaustible reserves of carbonic acid in the village of Mihályi. At the time, carbonic acid was thought to have a cloud nucleating potential. A working group was established to launch the experiments, resulting in OMSZ conducting atmospheric measurements. From the mid-1960s, senior staff at OMSZ began lobbying the authorities for the introduction of Soviet hail damage prevention technology. With state funding, experiments were made using OBLAKO rocket missiles in Baranya County (spring 1976 to early 1979). OMSZ delivered the ice-forming material into the parts of thunderstorm clouds with a high water content. By 1984, the protected areas had been doubled, and the hail prevention system functioned smoothly until the fall of communism in 1989. At that time, both Hungary’s agricultural land and the State Insurance Company were privatised. Since agricultural enterprises were no longer obliged to pay insurance fees, which had previously financed the operation of the costly system, the hail prevention program was abandoned.
NEFELA
In 1991, the Southern Hungarian Hail Prevention Association (NEFELA) began operating a hail damage mitigation system in South Transdanubia in order to minimise the damage caused by hailstorms.
The hail damage prevention system is based on 141 ground generators, which vaporise silver iodide into the air. The system is named after the cloud goddess in ancient Greek mythology.
Jéger
In 2018, the NEFELA system was expanded to the entire country under the auspices of the Hungarian Chamber of Agriculture. Currently, the National Hail Damage Mitigation System (the Jéger system) comprises 986 (219 automatic and 767 manual) ground generators, in which silver-iodide acetone solution is fumigated, being atomised at a temperature of 800–900 degrees Celsius. One litre of the solution is released into the air per hour, reaching the clouds with the rising air layers. The system operates every year between 1 May and 30 September, thus helping to protect agricultural production and the built environment.
silver bullet In folklore, the silver bullet is the sole effective weapon against supernatural beings (including witches and werewolves). In the scientific and technological context, it is a metaphor for a simple solution to a multifaceted problem.
geoengineering
Geoengineering is the term used to describe scientific and technological interventions aimed at changing or stabilising the Earth’s climate. Most of these technologies remain scientific speculation, but governments are increasingly open to the potential of geoengineering as a means of addressing the climate crisis – particularly in view of the failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There are two main areas: 1) Carbon capture and storage (CCS): The aim is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through afforestation and carbon sequestration as well as by increasing the carbon absorption capacity of the oceans. The roots of CCS lie in carbon dioxide-enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR), which has been conducted in North America since the 1960s, primarily with a view to
Prometheus
maximising oil recovery rather than offsetting emissions. 2) Solar radiation modification (SRM): This method aims to diminish the amount of incoming sunlight, by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere or using reflective materials. It is modelled on the atmospheric effects of a volcanic eruption or the reflective properties of atmospheric particulates caused by environmental pollution.
There are multiple criticisms of geoengineering: in technological terms, it is impossible to conduct a sufficiently comprehensive experiment or modelling of planetary processes. Consequently, the potential longterm impact on the global climate and on ecosystems cannot be known with certainty. Further, it raises grave ethical dilemmas about who should decide on interventions and who bears the consequences. Geopolitical tensions might arise if some countries unilaterally go ahead with interventions. The positive and negative effects of geoengineering projects could be unevenly distributed around the world, leading to injustices, especially for more vulnerable and poorer communities. The promise of a technological solution to the symptoms of climate change undermines humanity’s motivation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, thereby possibly exacerbating the problems in the long run.
Prometheus, the ancient Greek titan, stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, thus becoming a symbol for technological and industrial development. Prometheanism can be viewed as a kind of environmental strategy, which is not necessarily an environmentalist one. It perceives the Earth as a resource, whose utility is primarily determined by human needs and interests, with any environmental problems being overcome by human innovation. Prometheanism and its supporters seek ecological modernisation, with a focus on sustainable development and the green transition. Technological progress, efficient organisation and intelligent solutions are symbolic of the green economy, which is capitalist, technocratic and progressive.
Literature
Buck, H. J. After Geoengineering. Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration. London: Verso, 2019.
Changnon, S. A., and J. L. Ivens. “History Repeated: The Forgotten Hail Cannons of Europe.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 62, no. 3 (1981): 368–75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26221593. Last accessed: 28 July 2024.
Fleming, J. Fixing the Sky. The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Columbia Studies in International and Global History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Fraser, N. Cannibal Capitalism. London: Verso, 2022.
Galántai, Z. “Mi, a környezetmódosító állatok: a geomérnökség múltja és jövője” [We, the environment-modifying animals: the past and future of geoengineering]. Magyar Tudomány no. 12 (2012): 1488–98. http://epa. niif.hu/00600/00691/00108/pdf/EPA00691_mtud_2012_12_14881498.pdf. Last accessed: 12 September 2023.
Hajdú, Z. “A szocialista természetátalakítás kérdései Magyarországon, 1948–1956” [Issues of socialist nature transformation in Hungary]. In Táj, környezet és társadalom. Ünnepi tanulmányok Keveiné Bárány Ilona professzor asszony tiszteletére. Edited by A. Kiss, G. Mezősi, and Z. Sümeghy, 245–58. Szeged: SZTE Éghajlattani és Tájföldrajzi, Természetföldrajzi és
Geoinformatikai Tanszék, 2006.
Horváth, G., R. Süveges, and A. Zilahi, eds. Extrodæsia. Enciklopédia egy emberközpontúságot meghaladó világhoz [Extrodæsia Encyclopedia for a post-anthropocentric world]. Budapest: Typotex, 2019.
Kovács G. “A technokratikus társadalom víziói a második világháború utáni évtizedek kultúrkritikájában” [Visions of a technocratic society in the cultural critiques of the post-World War II decades]. Liget no. 12 (2008). http://www.liget.org/cikk.php?cikk_id=48. Last accessed: 24 April 2023.
Moore, J. W. and R. Patel. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018.
Moore, J. W. “Az olcsó természet vége, avagy rájöttem, hogy nem kell félteni ‘a’ természetet, meg is lehet szeretni a kapitalizmus válságát” [The end of cheap nature, or I realised that one does not have to fear for nature and that the crisis of capitalism may be a good thing]. Fordulat no. 25 (2019): 17–52.
Oldfield, J. D., and M. Poberezhskaya. “Soviet and Russian Perspectives on Geoengineering and Climate Management”. WIREs Climate Change 14, no. 4, e829. https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.829. Last accessed: 27 January 2024.
Országos Meteorológiai Szolgálat: A korábbi magyarországi jégelhárítási rendszer tapasztalatai [National Meteorological Service. The operation of the former hail prevention system in Hungary].
HUSRB/1002/213/017, project “Hailnet”, 2012.
Pócs, É. “Esővarázslás és időjárásvarázslók a kora újkori forrásokban” [Rain spells and weather wizards in early modern sources]. In Nagy Ilona et al., Folyamatok és fordulópontok. Tanulmányok Andrásfalvy Bertalan tiszteletére, 443–85. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2003.
Pócs, É. Magyar néphit Közép- és Kelet-Európa határán [Hungarian folklore on the border of Central and Eastern Europe]. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2006.
Pócs, É. Népi vallás és mágia Közép-Kelet Európában. Válogatott tanulmányok II [Folk religion and magic in Central and Eastern Europe. Selected studies II]. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2018.
Simon, A., and T. Tänczer, eds. Fejezetek a magyar meteorológia történetéből 1871–1995 [Episodes from the history of Hungarian meteorology 1871–1995]. Budapest: Országos Meteorológiai Szolgálat, 1995.
Vajna, T. “Pánikra semmi ok, a jégelhárító talajgenerátorok nem űzik el az esőt” [There is no reason to panic, the anti-hail ground generators do not repel rain]. Qubit, 2023. https://qubit.hu/2023/07/27/panikra-semmi-ok-a-jegelharitotalajgeneratorok-nem-uzik-el-az-esot (utolsó letöltés: 27 January 2024.).
Wirth, E., J. Zakócs, and J. Földvári. Jégesők, jégkárok, védekezés, biztosítás [Hailstorms, hail damage, protection, insurance]. Budapest: Mezőgazdasági Könyvkiadó Vállalat, 1985.
Zách, A. Ágyúk és harangok a vihar ellen? [Cannon firing and bell tolling against storms]. Élet és Tudomány 4, no. 31 (1949): 129–31.
For a New Climate Imaginary: Capitalism, Nature and the Promise of Planetary Democratization
Rita Süveges’s interview with Jason W. Moore
historian Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, and co-organizer of the World Ecology Research Network, takes a different approach. In an hour-long interview, we asked him about the climate and how capitalism — the ideology and socio-economic system that permeates every corner of our lives — has, over several centuries, contributed to the development and deepening of environmental and social crises. Through his seemingly cacophonous writings and statements, Moore helps navigate the labyrinth of the current multiple crises, over which the threat of environmental catastrophe looms like a storm cloud.
The interview also touches on topics such as the most dangerous word in the language, what the strategy of fearmongering about overpopulation is concealing, and where environmental movements might find a way out of their dormancy (spoiler: in systemic critique). We also boldly asked what we should place our hopes in and whether it’s wise to put all our bets on the Promethean fire of technology.
In the search for solutions to the climate crisis, discussions about carbon emissions and the reform of industry are prominent. Media coverage is often dominated by seemingly dry topics such as the electrification of transportation, the adoption of renewable energy sources, or the futuristic promises of geoengineering innovations. However, environmental
In addition to artistic intuition and practical experience, research-based art is based on the results of various disciplines, a kind of radical synthesis of which is provided by the theoretical work of Jason W. Moore, which gave the occasion for this discussion. An excerpt from the interview is published in the booklet accompanying the Weather Spectre exhibition, and it will be made fully available online according to our plans.
Rita Süveges: My first question is about the notion of nature. My interest in the ecological and climate crisis, which has manifested in my artistic practice over the last ten years, has come a long way. Now I focus on how society manages nature through the technologies and knowledge production embedded in capitalism. Your work has tremendously helped me understand these topics. However, my fascination with nature began from a rather aesthetic perspective. It was a long road to get here. I posed the question, what does it mean that we enframe nature and enclose its picture in human spaces? I was interested in the rift between the experience of nature’s complexity and its aesthetic construction in images. To paraphrase your words, this made “Nature external, space flat and time linear”1. So what is this notion of nature that we are talking about here and what are its consequences to the beings on Earth beyond being merely a theoretical question.
Jason W. Moore: Raymond Williams called nature the most complicated word in the language.2 I would say it’s also the most dangerous, not just in English, but in all the Western languages. Nature should always be understood in the uppercase. Capital “N” Nature is an ideological project, a geocultural project. It’s one dimension of an imperialist “software” that initially took shape after 1492.3 Its purpose? To manage the web of life, including the lives and labor of human beings, in the interests of profit maximization.
Nature, in this sense, is particularly dangerous. It confuses us, because we’re taught that Nature means something innocent, intrinsically good and pure: soils and streams and forests and all that. We share with our friends how good it feels to “get back to Nature”, to go for a walk in the woods, to camp, to hunt and fish and birdwatch. These are all wonderful. But they are not about
1 Jason W. Moore: “The End of Cheap Nature. Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about ‘The’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future Global Conflict and Cooperation, eds. Christian Suter and Christopher K Chase-Dunn (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2014), 286.
2 Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Id., Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980).
3 Explorer Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) is known for his 1492 “discovery” of the “new world” of the Americas on board his ship Santa Maria.
Nature; they’re about reconnection and recreation: efforts to achieve some relief from the alienation of modern life. Nature, in contrast, is an ideological pillar of class rule and the civilizing project. It’s still largely invisible. This is how ideologies work. They render crucial elements of reality invisible: imperialism becomes “development”; class becomes racial inequality; capital accumulation becomes “growth”. The function is to define reality in non-class terms – or by reducing class to something like “income inequality” or “consumption”. We can see this this clearly with Nature. Indeed, Nature precedes all these illusions. Despite the obvious history of Nature’s interweaving with imperial and civilizing projects over the past five centuries, even many leftists treat Nature as a value-neutral and innocent description of the world around us.
My argument is that Nature is anything but innocent. It is anything but valueneutral. Nature is one of the most dangerous ideas because it is not merely a ruling idea, as Marx and Engels observed in The German Ideology.4 It’s also a folk concept, an ideology of everyday life. Folk concepts are ideas we carry in everyday life; often unexamined, they intimately shape worldviews. They mostly connect with Nature in a modern sense, even those who invoke “tradition”: the Nation, the Family, Gender, even the Economy. Nature permeates our language, our rhetoric, and shapes our minds to assume that there is one zone of reality called Nature and another zone of reality called Society. (Society is the ideological antonym of Nature, crucial to the binaries that define capitalism as a mode of thought.) Now, Nature/Society dualism is misleading as a matter of material history, but very real as a set of ideological claims pregnant with extraordinary material implications. Not just in everyday life, but at the commanding heights of world power, people make decisions based on these ruling abstractions: Society and Nature. Who gets to count as “civilized” – and who is defined as savage, uncivilized, irrational –is fundamental to modern world history. Every history of imperialism and colonialism, no matter how big or how small, has set in motion these dualisms of Civilized and Savage. It’s the political rhetoric of the great powers whenever they confront challengers of any sort. This is how the Spanish viewed the indigenous; how the British viewed the Irish; how the Germans viewed Slavic and other eastern European peoples. How many times have they told us, in different historical epochs, that the Arabs, the Asians, the Slavs, the Africans “don’t value human life the same as we do”?
Frank Herbert, the author of the science fiction masterpiece Dune, wrote: “Fear is the mind-killer”.5 We could add Nature to that list. The greatest underlying source of today’s geoculture of fear is Nature. We see this with the new climate
4 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 1846.
5 “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.” Frank Herbert, Dune (Ace, 1990).
consensus and its “climate emergency” rhetoric. We saw it with the emergency politics of the pandemic. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t something ecological in play; it means that Nature animates a geoculture of fear that pacifies the population and enables the expansion of the biosecurity state. We should debate this honestly.
Nature is the mind-killer. Nature makes people dumb. Marx recognized this from the very beginning. From his earliest writing, he based historical materialism on a radical critique of Man versus Nature. He makes the point again and again. In the Manifesto,6 he and Engels denounce thinking based on “man in general”. They understood how this abstraction, Man, was not descriptive; like the Anthropocene, it pretends to describe the totality of human beings. But they understood that “man in general” – Man – was a “ruling idea”. So too with Nature.
For Marx, this was no small thing. He was the era’s most significant critic of Thomas Malthus.7 Many readers will associate Malthus with “overpopulation”. That was part of it. But the core of Malthus’s thinking was somewhat different, and more expansive. Malthus’s Essays (1798 and 18038) justified the extraordinary inequality of late eighteenth-century England through “natural law”. He was responding to an unprecedented wave of popular revolt, from the French Revolution to Ireland to the English countryside. Malthus was an ideologist of Nature to defend empire and class inequality. Marx understood those political implications immediately. Since Malthus, there have been several “Malthusian moments” – like eugenics9 in the late nineteenth century and the rise of mass environmentalism after 1968.10 Today’s Anthropocene11 is an outgrowth of this most recent Malthusian
6 The Communist Manifesto (1848, London) is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for wide consumption the historical materialist idea that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”.
7 Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an English economist and demographer best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without strict limits on reproduction.
8 An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798 by Thomas Malthus. The book warned of the population increasing in geometric progression (so as to double every 25 years) while food production increased in an arithmetic progression, which would leave a difference resulting in the want of food and famine, unless birth rates decreased.
9 Francis Galton, who invented eugenics in 1883, defined it as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally”.
10 The influential book, The Population Bomb is published, written by Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, it warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Also in 1968, Earthrise, labelled as the most influential environmental photograph, is taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 space mission.
11 “Anthropocene Epoch, unofficial interval of geologic time, ... characterized as the time in which the collective activities of human beings (Homo sapiens) began to substantially alter Earth’s surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling. A growing group of scientists argue that the Anthropocene Epoch should follow the Holocene Epoch (11,700 years
moment. Each episode redefined contentious politics around democracy and popular power into a supposedly “eternal” conflict between Man and Nature. That conflict must be managed with less democracy and more technocratic power. Jørgen Randers, of Limits to Growth12 fame, says this explicitly in a 2012 Club of Rome report.13 This is what environmentalists mean when they talk about “saving the planet”. Unfortunately, many leftists, even many leading ecosocialists, have embraced the idea that history can be understood through Man and Nature: the eternal conflict, we are told, can only be managed and mediated sustainably through Good Science and austerity.
R. S.: You mentioned the Anthropocene and my next question is concerning this. In recent years, there was a lot of discourse about the Anthropocene, even not just in academic circles but in mainstream media. And now the Anthropocene Working Group14 has reached a conclusion to start this new geological age with the beginning of the nuclear era. There was another strong competitor for this marker which was the industrial revolution and the extensive use of fossil fuels. But both of these ideas suggest that we are somehow, humanity somehow decided to use a bad technology which we manage badly and now we have to live with the consequences. And also if we look at the future, then we can see a lot of ideas going around about technological solutions for the climate crisis, for management of planetary processes. For example, carbon capture storage or, increasing the reflexivity of clouds or fertilizing oceans for algae growth to turn it into a more efficient carbon sink. There are several serious technological ideas and innovations coming up.
ago to the present) and begin in the year 1950. The name Anthropocene is derived from Greek and means the ‘recent age of man’.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
12 The Limits to Growth is a 1972 report of the Club of Rome that discussed the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with finite supply of resources.
13 Jorgen Randers, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, A Report to the Club of Rome Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Limits to Growth.
14 The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to the study of the Anthropocene as a geological time unit. It was established in 2009 as part of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS).
“Nature should always be understood in the uppercase. Capital “N” Nature is an ideological project, a geocultural project. ... Not just in everyday life, but at the commanding heights of world power, people make decisions based on these ruling abstractions: Society and Nature. Who gets to count as „civilized” – and who is defined as savage, uncivilized, irrational – is fundamental to modern world history. Every history of imperialism and colonialism, no matter how big or how small, has set in motion these dualisms of Civilized and Savage.”
This somehow suggests that the climate and ecological crisis is a failure of technologies. What is your take on this?
J. W. M.: We can start with the Anthropocene. This is the most influential environmentalist idea of our times. It’s also – pardon the repetition! – a very dangerous idea. It’s an anti-democratic idea. As I’ve mentioned, the Anthropocene argument is neo-Malthusian: everything comes down to carrying capacity, technology, and overpopulation. That last, overpopulation, is now concealed by its functional equivalent: overconsumption. But it’s the same argument. The Anthropocene – the “age of Man” – is therefore not an innocent description, and it’s more than an argument. The Anthropocene is a commitment to a specific form of political rule: planetary management. It’s technocratic and technologically oriented in its procedures but effectively an argument for oligarchic rule by a tiny minority, what I’m calling the Point One Percent. From the standpoint of the Anthropocene, the popular classes are to be pacified and managed.
The technologies implicated in the Anthropocene as practical politics fit comfortably in that approach to democracy. They are technologies of planetary surveillance, solar radiation management, and others that serve the rich and powerful. Democracy is usually regarded as a lost cause.
There’s also an ideological moment to planetary management and its technological solutionism. It’s eminently self-affirming for the advocates of the Anthropocene to claim that more technology and more technocratic rule will solve the problem. Planetary elites have made this kind of argument since the 1970s. Of course technology as an abstraction is very, very close to Nature. It tends to have similar mind-altering consequences.
The Anthropocene fuses the ruling ideas of Technology and Nature. Paul Crutzen published a famous statement to this effect in Nature, back in 2002,15 This clarifies the Anthropocene’s neo-Malthusianism. Crutzen’s two major drivers are population and technology. Others would substitute “overconsumption”, which is simply overpopulation with a human face. But overconsumption is not a leftwing idea; it’s a neoclassical idea covered up with professional class lifestyle politics. For one thing, “the consumer” is a product of monopoly capitalism, as John Kenneth Galbraith16 and Paul
15 P. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415, no. 23 (2002).
16 In his books, The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967) economist John Kenneth Galbraith sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post–World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector, lacking social and physical infrastructure, and perpetuating income disparities. Galbraith
Baran17 observed in the 1960s. The consumer is a social product of capital. Facebook’s “product” is you. For another, the prime mover of biospheric tipping points is not consumption and not growth. These are fetishes. The prime mover is the endless accumulation of capital, backed by imperial force.
As a cultural formation, the Anthropocene is very influential among the cadres of the Point One Percent. … This is crucial because American environmentalism has been so central to the “Environmentalism of the Rich”, to borrow Joan Martinez-Alier’s apt phrase.18 As I’ve discussed recently, in essays like “The Fear and the Fix”,19 this Environmentalism didn’t “fail” to halt or slow the “environmental crisis”; it did exactly what it was supposed to do. The Anthropocene is just one of the latest expressions of this Environmentalism of the Rich: greenwashing capitalism by sustaining the PMC illusion that capitalism’s systematic replacement of healthy environments with sick environments could be halted, or at least slowed.
R. S.: You have talked about a technocratic utopia and that there are no new frontiers. But the top 0,1% is promising us that they will find new frontiers for example in space, through space mining, etc. I’m closely following a corporation which is somewhat of a geoengineering company, and they started with a seemingly innocent project of distilling vodka out of captured CO2. Of course, it’s very inefficient, it merely has negative emissions. It already felt like a marketing stunt, but now they evolved into cooperating with the U.S. Department of Defense in producing and experimenting with sustainable aviation fuel. There is this future wish that their production will get efficient if it can be placed into space. So there are these kinds of promises that we already have certain fixing technologies, those just need to be
argued that advertising and the sales promotion activities of firms artificially create consumer demands, thus, in the affluent society, ever-increasing levels of production (and consumption) do not increase welfare.
17 In their work Monopoly Capital (1966) Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy propose Marxist theories of advertising, consumption and mass culture as crucial components of the capitalist system.
18 Joan Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (Cheltenham–Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2003).
19 Jason W. Moore, “The Fear and the Fix: Environmentalism Serves the Powerful,” The Baffler, 15 May 2024, last accessed: 29 August 2024.
scaled up. We somehow need to decouple20 them from the materialities of the planet then they will become sustainable and solve all our problems. Is there a way out of this maze? What do you think about the possibilities of new frontiers?
J. W. M.: You put your finger on it exactly. The frontier fantasies of the billionaire class are just that – fantasies. Musk21 and Bezos22 offer public relations arguments to capitalize on the extra-planetary surveillance and communications revolution. Musk doesn’t believe we’re going to Mars – or maybe he does – but that’s not a serious proposition. He does understand, at some level, that the transition to political accumulation means big profits for surveillance and the politically-enforced transitions to electric vehicles – which essentially rob Peter to pay Paul in biospheric terms, generating massive pollution in the name of decarbonization. (EVs spew particulates at very high rates, and battery production is among the most toxic activities around.) The satellite infrastructure provides critical elements of the green austerity program I’ve highlighted, enabling the real-time mapping of every square meter of planetary space, down to offices and bedrooms, for their “carbon footprint”. (That’s an oil company idea, by the way.)23 It also enables the projection of military force onto “troublesome” areas of the planet, making possible targeted missile and drone attacks for instance, as we’ve seen over the past two decades. The satellite infrastructure kills two birds with one stone, facilitating a green austerity program backed by what William I. Robinson calls a “global police state”.
20 The main idea of An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015) is decoupling human development and well-being from environmental impacts, that can be driven by both technological and demographic trends — by improving resource productivity such that humans would need less nature to meet their needs. Rather than placing restrictions on human activities, farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement need to be intensified, and the population decline welcomed.
21 Elon Reeve Musk (1971), one of the wealthiest people on the planet, is a businessman and investor known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc, etc.
22 Jeffrey Preston Bezos (1964) is an American business magnate best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. He is the second wealthiest person in the world, his aerospace company, Blue Origin offers space tourism.
23 The concept of carbon footprint was born as part of the ecological footprint, as one indicator of our impact on the Earth. It is a calculated value or index that makes it possible to compare the total amount of greenhouse gases that an activity, product, company or country adds to the atmosphere. But the idea gained popularity in 2004 when oil and gas company BP launched an advertising campaign asking people on the street what their personal carbon footprint was through a calculator to assess normal daily life activities – going to work, buying food, and traveling.
In brief, the tech revolution will not save us. It won’t even save capitalism. Yes, “cheap information” has been crucial to capital accumulation, especially since the 1970s. However, its chief accomplishment is different from the other Cheap Natures. Its accomplishment has been, as we’ve just seen, to facilitate the hyper-centralization of late monopoly capitalism. Amazon is a spectacular instance of this hyper-monopoly tendency, using its infrastructure to squeeze fat profits out of workers (as consumers) and small businesses. …
R. S.: If we can not even have green capitalism, then what do you think we should fight for?
J. W. M.: In a word? Democracy. Not of course the liberal democracy of the imperialist West, which was always – to quote Michael Parenti – a “democracy for the few”.24 Whatever space existed for democracy was actively suppressed in the West during the 1970s. Most of us know the story of American-led democracy suppression in the Third World during the Cold War – the horrific regime change operations in Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, Chile, Brazil, and countless other countries. Few of us know about the “soft coups” in the West during this period. Perhaps best known, but unappreciated today, was the collusion of the British military and intelligence services with the American Empire and the International Monetary Fund to force the leftwing Wilson government towards neoliberal austerity – a story John Medhurst tells in That Option No Longer Exists.25 In the U.S. since 9/11, “democracy” has been reduced to pure theater, as state-of-emergency rule has been regularly reauthorized, and the surveillance and internal security apparatus has massively expanded. That’s crucial, because the climate establishment has taken to announcing a “climate emergency” that argues for greater technocratic rule – and less democracy. In the U.S., fundamental civil liberties have never been so compromised.
I think Naomi Klein got it right in This Changes Everything.26 The climate crisis is a crisis of oligarchic rule that must be addressed with more, not less, democracy. But if that’s to mean anything, such democratization must go far beyond the ballot box. It must be localized wherever possible, but without the fetish of Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.27 We also can take seriously
24 Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974).
25 John Medhurst, That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974–76 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014).
26 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
27 E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful; Economics as If People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
“The Anthropocene – the “age of Man” – is therefore not an innocent description, and it’s more than an argument. The Anthropocene is a commitment to a specific form of political rule: planetary management. It’s technocratic and technologically oriented in its procedures but effectively an argument for oligarchic rule by a tiny minority, what I’m calling the Point One Percent. ... There’s also an ideological moment to planetary management and its technological solutionism. It’s eminently self-affirming for the advocates of the Anthropocene to claim that more technology and more technocratic rule will solve the problem.”
the possibilities for democratization of economic life: again sometimes smallscale, at other times reckoning with the imperatives of large-scale coordination. Large-scale electric grids and water systems demand different democratic forms from a neighborhood school, clinic, or childcare cooperative. We might consider how the information-communications infrastructure might allow the popular forces to expand and elaborate the cybernetic coordinations glimpsed during Allende’s28 socialist experiment in Chile. That’s an important example, because price signals alone cannot be relied upon for coordination in a democratic system; markets can and should exist, but as marketplaces – the very phenomena systemically destroyed by capitalist markets.
I call this socialism. Others will call it something else. That’s okay, so long as we agree on the principle of democratization. There are and will be – and should be – substantive differences in our discussions about how to carry forward this democratization. At a minimum, however, it must be resolutely antiimperialist and anti-war. This is in my view the beating heart of the capitalogenic climate crisis29: the drive towards all-out war and the threat of nuclear war. Environmentalists never mention this, but the so-called Anthropocene coincides with the American Empire’s most aggressive era of warmaking. According to the Tufts University Military Interventions Project,30 one-third of American military interventions abroad have occurred since 1999. As during the Cold War, such interventions aimed to secure a good business environment. That’s always meant the systematic attack on democratic rule across the Third World. Eminent scholars talk about the Anthropocene’s “Great Acceleration”31 without this reality. Acknowledging it is central to any democracy moment that pursues socio-ecological health over profits. The history is crystal clear on this point: any political project that seeks to limit the power and profits of Big Capital will be met with “soft power”32 destabilization and, as needed, military intervention. This uncomfortable reality is, effectively, unspeakable in today’s political climate. If we want climate justice in a democratic sense, that means the democratization of lifemaking relations. Marx talks about cooperation as a democratic productive
28 Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens (1908–1973) was a Chilean socialist politician who served as the 28th president of Chile from 1970 until his death in 1973.
29 Jason W. Moore used the term capitalogen to clarify that the current ecological crisis is not simply a natural phenomenon or a problem caused by general human activity, but is brought about by the capitalist system of production and the processes of capital accumulation. (Translator’s note.)
30 The new Military Intervention Project (MIP) is a comprehensive dataset of all US military interventions since the country’s founding. According to MIP, the US has undertaken almost 400 military interventions since 1776, with half of these operations undertaken between 1950 and 2019. Over 25% of them have occurred in the post-Cold War period.
31 The complex set of human-driven global, social, technological, and environmental changes intensifying dramatically since 1950 has been identified as the “Great Acceleration”.
32 The political concept of soft power refers to the forms of behaviour, instruments and policies of social, political and state power that influence the behaviour of the other party through value-based attraction, encouraging them to accept the other party’s goals voluntarily and without coercion. (Translator’s note.)
force. That always struck me as a very sound principle. There is no way to pursue a democratic road to climate justice without democratizing social wealth now held in private hands. There’s no way the planetary superclass will accept such democratization without a fight. I don’t pretend to know what comes next; only to understand that the climate crisis is a capitalogenic crisis organized by oligarchies heavily insulated from popular power. They are not going to walk away from wealth and power. Democratization will not come easily.
R. S.: You touched on many, many interdisciplinary ideas from geopolitics to sociology, to history, to geology, to everything is included in this piece of work. As my field is art, I must ask you, do you think artists can have any role in the discourse?
J
. W. M.: As an artist who is willing to take risks, who is willing to speak to politics, you are less disciplined – or more precisely, less willing to accept the disciplines of the status quo. That’s risky, but necessary. Authoritarians are always mindful of how dangerous artists can be, but it works differently from wider intelligentsia in which they’re embedded. Most intellectuals are disciplined by the universities and academic disciplines. Those disciplines, by the way, aren’t about anything intellectual; they are about regulating the labor market under the sign of expertise, of Good Science. This is essential for universities to fulfill their social function under capitalism: to produce professional workers who are knowledgeable enough to perform necessary work and obedient and passive enough that they don’t raise difficult questions. For scholars, the universities and disciplines do their best to keep out dangerous ideas and dangerous intellectuals. There are always a few dissidents, but these have become fewer and fewer even as the university system has grown exponentially.
Perhaps there are more dissidents among artists across the spectrum of “creative” work. The arts license that creative impulse that must escape the limits of the egoic, rational mind – the Cartesian mind. To be sure, the arts are also disciplined – by the universities and especially the wealthy benefactors. But to be an artist is to commit to an undisciplined intellectual and creative life that recognizes the essential fluidity and permeability of accepted norms. Even the language I use here is much, much too limited. While many scholars are intellectual but at all creative – Paul Baran calls them “intellect workers”33 – there’s no such thing as a creative act that’s not profoundly intellectual.
33 Paul A. Baran, “The Commitment Of The Intellectual,” Review of African Political Economy 12, no. 32 (April 1985).
The responsibility of the artist, then, is to take those leaps of intuition that defy the Cartesian mind. This is dangerous to the system because no civilization has celebrated the egoic, rational mind more than capitalism. Every creative person knows its limits, understands in some way that we are connected to webs of life and consciousness that transcend body and species. We all feel this when we read a poem, or watch a movie, or hear a song that feels pure, magical, truthful.
In the academic world especially, one’s love of truth, one’s curiosity, one’s interest in taking those intuitive leaps – these are discouraged. That’s not a design error. It’s how the system was designed, to favor what I call academic alienated labor. This alienates the intellectual from the spiritual, intuitive connections with webs of life that include, for lack of a better term, a collective unconsciousness.
If the climate crisis is as serious as many of us believe it to be, we’ll need all the fearlessly creative and undisciplined imagination we can get. For this reason, I am always on the side of the artist – and every intellectual who embraces this undisciplined path in service to planetary democratization.
“If the climate crisis is as serious as many of us believe it to be, we’ll need all the fearlessly creative and undisciplined imagination we can get.
For this reason, I am always on the side of the artist – and every intellectual who embraces this undisciplined path in service to planetary democratization.”
From Magic to Geoengineering
Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest
4 October – 17 November 2024
Artist: Rita SÜVEGES
Curator: Brigitta ÁDI
Exhibition manager: Ágnes PABLÉNYI
Exhibition design: Rita SÜVEGES
Translation: Ármin TILLMANN, Andrew GANE
Copy editors: Judit BORUS, Noémi BÖRÖCZKI
Art handlers: Zsolt BERTA, Vilmos BROZSEK, Ákos FÜLÖP, Pál GYENES, Boldizsár HIDASI P., Ádám KISS, Benedek KOVÁCS, Attila MACSKA, Norbert MENYHÁRT, Zoltán MORÓ, Kinga SZABÓ
Communication: Blanka BÁN, Gábor BELLÁK, Szonja BESZTERCSÉNYI-NAGY, Éva KOVÁCS, Laura KUND, Léna MIKLÓS, Franciska Eszter TÓTH
Visitors service: Diána ACHA, Eszter KUCSERA, Ágnes RUZSITS
Technical team: Gábor ÁGOSTON, István GÓDOR, Sándor NAGYPÁL, László SZUTOR
Cooperation partner: MUSEUM FACTORY
For their help in the realisation of this exhibition we owe special thanks to: Endre TÓT, founder and supporter of the TÓTalJOY Prize
Zita DÁVID, Dávid FEHÉR, Emese KÜRTI , Jason W. MOORE, Anna ZILAHI
and the staff of the Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History and Hungarian National Gallery, who contributed with their advice and help.
The exhibition was realized as the winning project of the second TÓTalJOY Prize.
