A negative dialectics of climate change destruction: Reflecting on climate futures with Adorno

Abstract

This paper offers a brief overview of the negative dialectical turn in Adorno's post-war writings when he began to give more serious attention to the type of ‘subjective possibilities’ generated by encounters with adversity. The analysis below explores the relevance of Adorno's work to current efforts to make sense of an increasingly felt contact with climate change harm. In particular, Adorno's insights on the paradoxical relationship that emerges between scenarios inspiring despair and hope for a better future. Rather than ignore contradiction and focus only on the possibilities and potentials that inhere in the good, Adorno's preference was to examine those that also emerge from a crisis ridden present. Similar to other Frankfurt School adherents, Adorno drew attention to an important distinction between inner and outer worlds and their critical mediation via the thinking process – the bridging of inner worlds of intuition, feeling, sense perception, the free flow of thought and imagination, and the outer world, episodes of violent destruction and ongoing change, noting how insights generated by the meeting of these worlds are never singular or straightforward in a positivist sense but are often marked by plurality, contradiction and transformation. The focus in this instance will be on how thinking about the climate present can also generate a thinking beyond to other possibilities (e.g. imaginaries of a future degrowth society). It will assess current moves to institutionalise new geo-engineering technologies to stabilise climate conditions and protect capitalism's growth imperative, noting how the contradictions inherent in such proposals can trigger a dialectical turn towards other futures and other relations with nature.