Discourse

As academics, activists, and artists, the signatories of "Staying with the Breaks" and I are engaged in the urgent need to respond to anthropogenic climate change. We share similar intellectual formations and languages. Our engagement with critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy, history, and political struggle displays significant overlaps. In other words, their response to my essay does not demonstrate an intellectual or ideological disagreement. It is not a denial of my claims about climate change or a defense of entrepreneurial capitalism against my critique of it, nor is it a diatribe against me as a social justice warrior of postmodernism. What, then, is it?

My belief is that their response enacts what my essay addresses: the difficulty of praxis across political lines. I am speaking not just about the obvious chasms between Right and Left but also the lines that divide the contemporary Left. In my call for a solidarity that is not based on sameness but that attempts to "jump the breaks" between differences, I speak about the form of accumulative possessive individualism that undermines political collectivity and emancipation. I draw upon scholars such as Jodi Dean, Nancy Fraser, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Angela Davis, and Judith Butler, all of whom address the fractures that have vexed progressive politics for decades. Though I cite others, I write from a vulnerable and intimate first-person position because I do not believe that I am outside of the dominant ideologies that I seek to [End Page 176] address. I point my finger first and foremost at myself, acknowledging my limitations and biases and exposing my own anxieties about possessive individualism, generational misunderstandings, and the urgent need for a timely response to impending devastation.

Though I am disappointed by the ad hominem nature of "Staying with the Breaks," I appreciate what I have learned from it. The signatories are articulate writers, and I am grateful for the wording of their call for "a more militant universalism adequate to the challenge of confronting and transforming this world [that] might require the embrace of a heterogenous, uneven, and uncontainable form of collectivity that develops out of, not despite, difference." This is a cogent and more articulate way of stating what I tried to work through in the final section of my essay, in which I took the risk of imagining a solidarity across heterogeneity, difference, and disagreement.

What is at issue in our debate is the question of how politics is performed. A politics of solidarity is about creating a space in which individuals can be challenged and accepted at the same time. Practices of sociality and collegiality can start from a place of generosity and willingness to learn from each other. This allows for dialogue as well as dissensus. The signatories describe their commitment to building such political capacity through collective action and praxis. However, their response is based on critique as exclusion—in which people can be dismissed or shamed because of their supposed "uninterrogated whiteness" or fear of "contamination." The signatories are, in my reading of their personalized argument, closing themselves off from the challenges and discomfort that other people can pose. This does not constitute the goal of political action.

This response did not surprise me, since its mode of exclusionary critique was already apparent in the behaviour of the signatories as they participated in the five-week residency Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) 2017. BRiC, which has run nine consecutive years, aims to bring together a wide range of people across disciplines from different geographic locations and levels of experience and provides a subsidized situation in which participants can work with one another on the constitution of new ideas. As a coorganizer, I have a role in selecting participants from a large pool of qualified applicants, so I am always eager to get to work with the participants, whose stimulating proposals I admire and respect. The problems that ensued because of the 2017 group's actions cannot be discussed in a public forum, but suffice it to say that they had deep repercussions for the program and for the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. [End Page 177]

As I wrote in my essay, the theme of BRiC 2017 was "The Year 2067." We came up with this idea based on the fact that it was the 150th anniversary of Canada. What, we asked, would the world look like in fifty years, and what could we do to shape that? And what could we learn from looking back fifty years to 1967? The changes precipitated by that period's politics have not had the outcomes that may have been anticipated. Keynesianism is even more displaced. More inclusivity has not meant more distribution of wealth, and the rise of populism speaks to a culture of exclusion and lack of opportunity. Instead of Pierre Eliot Trudeau, we have Justin Trudeau. And then there's the climate.

That summer, as a group we did not seem to gain traction on discussions of the challenges of the future, though I understand from their response that some of the signatories worked together on reiterating the problems of the past and present. Since those conversations were not shared with the larger group, I cannot speak to the ideas that emerged.

Despite the signatories' assertion that I take a "brutal satisfaction" in the effects of human-induced climate change, I am if anything more alarmed than I was when I wrote the essay. In the almost two years since we were physically together in the smoke, the latest IPCC report has indicated that the time frame to act is twelve years. It is especially pressing for the most disadvantaged places in the world, which already face climate-related poverty. Our theme had asked what we could do to in order to better the world in fifty years. It seems that we do not even have twelve years. Climate change effects are already experienced more heavily by poor and mostly nonwhite populations. Political change is happening too slowly, with many setbacks for Indigenous peoples and their communities and nations and for activist ecological struggle in Canada as well as, for instance, in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States.

I am concerned that the field of environmental humanities is predominantly white and that its arguments can appear to ignore struggles against systemic discrimination and violence.¹ I am in complete agreement with the signatories when they acknowledge that the smoke "can only be understood with the long crisis of racial settler colonial capitalist extraction." In my essay, I did not include Indigenous recognition claims within my concern about the divisive character of identity-related movements, aware as I was of the contested territory on which the residency took place and in which I work. Indeed, I had in mind the words of Glen Coulthard in Red Skins, White Masks, where he argues that "insofar as Indigenous cultural claims always involve demands for a more equitable distribution of land, political power, and economic resources, the [End Page 178] left-materialist claim regarding the displacement of economic concerns by cultural ones is misplaced when applied to settler-colonial contexts."²

Attention to identity-related struggles can and should be thought in terms of generative material conditions that are inextricable from cultural claims. In fact, I believe that we need to cultivate an awareness of another systemic and structural formation of identity: energy identity. By this I mean the ways in which each of us is constituted as an energy subject, shaped by our different access to energy, our consumption of it, our territorial claim to it or protection of it, and our potential achieved from it. Energy subjectivity is inextricable from the ongoing realities of colonial dispossession.

I am a strong advocate for the work that we humanities scholars, artists, and activists do, dedicating years of our lives to critical thought that pushes at commonplace assumptions and unspoken ideologies. My worry is that we are not figuring out how to talk to each other and how to disseminate and represent these vital insights. Our internal arguments get lumped together, for instance, as a conspiracy theory by the alt-right, which sees all our different commitments and struggles as "cultural Marxism."³ Or, our work is ridiculed by a publishing hoax that attempts to expose what the hoaxers see as the prevalence of "grievance culture" in academia.⁴ I am disturbed by the fraught dynamics of the seminar or working group, which can be disrupted and rendered unsafe by one or two individuals who silence the other students by policing their comments or laying claim to certain language or articulations.

I share with the signatories a commitment to multiple forms of belonging in difference. What my essay and this response argue is that our critical frameworks and strategies, which offer so much potential for political and cultural work, can become sedimented and reified as they become de facto ways of responding and thinking. In "Jumping the Break," I discuss my experience of both the potential and the stuckness of critical debates in the humanities today and conjecture about possible strategies for a way out of this impasse. The "Staying with the Breaks" response expands upon and enriches that field of possible strategies while at the same time replicating the structural stuckness that I sought to address.