Feeling the Vibrations: On the Micropolitics of Climate Change

Published date01 December 2019
Date01 December 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719836195
Subject MatterArticles
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Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(6) 836 –863
Feeling the Vibrations:
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Climate Change
Stephanie Erev1
Abstract
Climate change is more than a discrete issue demanding political attention
and response. A changing climate permeates political life as material
processes of planetary change reverberate in our bodies, affecting
subterranean processes of attention and evoking bodily responses
at and below the register of awareness. By way of example, I explore
the register of bodily feeling to raise the possibility that proliferating
anomalies in atmospheric, oceanic, and seismic activities are entering into
subliminal experiences of time and confounding embodied expectations
of how the future is likely to flow from the past. The essay concludes
with a preliminary discussion of how micropolitical strategies to amplify
visceral experiences of climatic changes might valuably contribute to
larger programs for climate action.
Keywords
micropolitics, climate change, bodily feeling, perceptual abstraction, nihilism
Global warming . . . is always much farther along than it appears.
Elizabeth Kolbert1
1Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Corresponding Author:
Stephanie Erev, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
Email: erev@jhu.edu

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Feeling the Vibrations
As the planet warms, ecological communities worldwide are increasingly in
flux. Witness the purple emperor butterfly, for example, which has migrated
more than 125 miles in less than a decade.2 Or the wildflower seasons
extended by more than a month in some regions as flowers no longer bloom
all at once. This raises the question of how planetary warming is affecting
communities of human beings. Does climate change influence political
practice?3
My essay is premised on the idea that local climates—the temperatures,
rhythms, sounds, and other intensities of place—help to compose the quali-
ties of lived experience. On this view, climate change is more than a discrete
“issue” demanding political attention and response. A changing climate per-
meates political life as material processes of planetary change reverberate in
our bodies, affecting subterranean habits of attention and evoking bodily
responses at and below the register of consciousness. Such attention to mic-
ropolitics augments the literature’s predominant focus on what subjects think,
feel, and perceive about climate change with questions of how large-scale
planetary changes might be influencing processes of thought, feeling, and
perception on a more visceral register. By way of example, I concentrate on
the register of bodily feeling to raise the possibility that proliferating anoma-
lies in atmospheric, oceanic, and seismic activities are entering into sublimi-
nal experiences of time and confounding embodied expectations of how the
future is likely to flow from the past.
Although the meaning of both micropolitics and bodily feeling should
become clearer as the essay progresses, I will say a few words about them
here. By bodily feeling I do not mean the sense of touch—the coarseness of
sweater fibers chafing your skin or the cool, spongy wetness of a dog’s nose
brushing up against your hand.4 Bodily feelings are not so much conscious
feelings of or about something (the sweater, the dog’s nose) as they help to
compose an affective background of consciousness. Let me offer an example.
If you are a hearing person, your days are filled with sounds of various sorts.
Some of these sounds draw your focus while others hum distantly in the
background as sounds you can hear but which do not command your listening
attention. Yet there are other sorts of sounds you cannot hear, which neverthe-
less exert real effects on your being. “Infrasonic or subsonic energy,” explains
the artist Mark Bain, “is sound below the hearing threshold. Your experience
of it is physical, vibrational”; inaudible sonic vibrations do “strange things to
physiology and psychology,” Bain says, often registering as “a kind of anx-
ious feeling, anxiety, a heaviness.”5 To the extent such sounds are “heard,”
their call resounds in the body. For the conscious subject, the experience is

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Political Theory 47(6)
less aural than atmospheric; although inaudible sonic vibrations do not appear
directly to consciousness (i.e., as sounds), they imbue the objects that do
appear with affective intensity, consistency, and tone.
In the context of global warming, as Elizabeth Kolbert explains, any cli-
matic changes visible today are the result of “greenhouse gases emitted
decades ago.”6 “[W]hatever you can see,” Kolbert continues, “is the past of
climate change; the present is still invisible.”7 A number of observers have
interpreted the lagging perceptibility of global warming to be a partial expla-
nation for why so many people who profess belief in climate change never-
theless make few ostensible changes to their way of life, even as they possess
the means to do so. The lag is politically “important,” then, “in that agents
make decisions (including on natural resource management) based on indi-
vidual perceptions.”8 I believe a focus on the micropolitical register—on the
material, embodied processes through which higher-level conscious percep-
tions, identifications, and commitments are formed and reformed—can aid
contemporary efforts to imagine both how a changing climate makes itself
felt in cultural and political life and what means can be brought to bear in
response to it. For the microphysical effects of climate change are real, vis-
cerally felt portents in the present of larger-scale events to come.9
This raises the possibility that unusual bodily feelings and vague micro-
anxieties engendered by them are finding expression in forms of political
speech and action not widely associated with the politics of climate change.
Might such feelings be stoking white nationalists’ paranoid fixations on white
futurity, for example?10 Or fanning enthusiasms for border securitization
(“Build the wall!”)? Or helping to spark eruptions of praise for sexual vio-
lence, mounting assaults on reproductive freedom, and intensifying demands
for conformity to the cis-heteronormative status quo? Such questions seem to
me to warrant serious attention.11 In this essay, however, I focus on the pos-
sibility that positive micropolitical interventions can assist people formally
committed to climate action to combat what William E. Connolly calls “pas-
sive nihilism.”12 Passive nihilism, briefly, names the uncanny coexistence
within individuals and groups of “explicit admission” of the need for action
and “tacit evasion” of opportunities to take it.13 Connolly’s idea is that stub-
born, perhaps unconscious attachments to a world susceptible to mastery by
(certain) human beings defang more recent, cognitive beliefs in the dangers
of a rapidly warming planet. By intervening in activities on the visceral reg-
ister of being—where culturally informed attachments and “sensibilities trig-
ger the responses of those imbued with them even before they begin to think
about this or that event”—micropolitics can work against such uncanny
obstacles to a more robust response.14

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The notions of micropolitics and bodily feeling can appear counterintui-
tive if, like Hannah Arendt, you suppose the material domains of the body
and the earth obey strict laws of biological necessity and, as a result, threaten
to overwhelm human capacities for action. The value Arendt places on action,
and the real creativity she attributes to it, could potentially inspire climate
action today.15 But to draw a categorical relation of hyper-separation in this
way between matter-life (“nature”) on the one hand and freedom, creativity,
and meaning (“culture”) on the other seems to me to promote habitual inat-
tention to and perhaps quiet disdain for life’s own creative and destructive
powers. It seems also to forfeit a range of potentially valuable (micro)politi-
cal practices because of their association with the body.16 In a recent essay
Lida Maxwell responds to Arendt’s critique of love as a private, antipolitical
force by proposing a vision of love that can also be “world-disclosing” as it
“len[ds] a particular kind of significance to . . . human/nonhuman relation-
ships, language, things and settings,” “revealing them . . . as a ‘world’ that
may be(come) a site of collectively oriented speech and action.”17 I focus
here on the body as an indispensable site and process of sense-making with a
public dimension of its own. For “outside” ecological forces participate in
what is often assumed to be the most private domain of all—namely, that of
experience—in a process I call eco-poesis. One wager of my essay is that
understanding ecological forces as participants in aspects of our experience
may in turn foster greater attentiveness to climatic changes that are percep-
tible today as it promotes a sense that changes in climate are changes in
ourselves.
Of course, numerous people and peoples already feel this way. Whereas
many in European settler colonial societies tend to learn about climate change
through highly mediated fora such as cable news and social media, as Daniel R.
Wildcat of Muscogee (Creek) Nation...

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