Action, Technology, and the Homogenisation of Place: Why Climate Change is Antithetical to Political Action

AbstractAccording to Hannah Arendt, the concept of 'political action' is a fundamental component of the human condition because it encapsulates how the uniqueness of each human being intersects to create unpredictable political initiatives and effects. Recently, despite being one of the most daunting political challenges ever faced by humanity, there has been a noted collective action failure, or inaction, concerning the global threat of anthropogenic climate change. Why? This article seeks to explain this political inaction in a new way: by examining the metaphysical role that technology plays in disclosing the climate as a thinkable and global object. After applying the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the complex mathematical general circulation models (GCMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this article details how the metaphysics underlying GCMs manifests the perceivable world by 'enframing' it, or by implicitly representing subjects, objects, and Nature itself, as a predictable, calculable, and orderable relation of static forces. When this metaphysical and mathematical uniformity constructs the climate as a calculable object that is globalised through the IPCC, it is ultimately found to be contradictory to the distinctness and unpredictability necessary for distinct human action to occur. Paradoxically, therefore, political action is argued to be metaphysically antithetical to the technologically enframed science, politics, and discourse, of global climate change itself. The importance of distinct and plural human places, when filtered through GCMs, becomes subsumed by the climate as a homogenous, calculative, and politically inactive, global object.Keywords: climate changepolitical actionHeideggerArendtIPCCenframing AcknowledgementsFor helpful comments and suggestions, I thank the editors and the anonymous peer-reviewers of Globalizations, Kathryn Emmons, Benjamin Martill, Aaron McKeil, Iver B. Neumann, Andreas Aagaard Nohr, and Vicky Squire. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual International Studies Association (ISA) Convention in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (2014), and the British International Studies Association Post-Graduate Network Conference (BISA PGN) in Dublin, Ireland (2014). I am indebted to the participants of these conferences for their helpful feedback on much rougher drafts. All errors remaining in the article remain the author's alone.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.FundingFunding from the LSE gratefully supported this research.Additional informationNotes on contributorsScott HamiltonScott Hamilton is a Ph.D. Candidate in the International Relations Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London, UK. His research lies at the intersection of International Relations and Political Philosophy; the politics of climate change and climate science and epistemology; the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault; and governmentality studies. He is also an Editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Volume 44.

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