This interview relates to the research and findings of the recent article published in Environmental Politics: ‘Navigating desires beyond growth: the critical role of fantasy in degrowth’s environmental politics and prefigurative ethics’.
Congratulations on your recent article! Tell us – what is the most important point you would like people to take from this research?
Many thanks for the kind words! It is great to be published in Environmental Politics.
Our key argument is that desire and fantasy can sustain critical environmental political projects like the degrowth movement. We think of desire as structured by fantasy, a concept we borrow and adapt from Lacanian psychoanalysis to describe the way we become emotionally invested in facts and ideas about the world, and in normative values and principles. We believe that fantasy is relevant and important to the study of politics because it can help scholars critically examine the role that desire and passion play in the formation, sustenance and dissolution of political projects.
In our research we found that ideas centred on care for people and nature appear to be a common reference point among supporters of the degrowth movement, which we view as a critical – but somewhat marginal – environmental political project. We also found that degrowth supporters display strong emotional reactions involving guilt, rage, sadness and concern in response to ideas and circumstances that involve some form of harm to people and nature. In our article we argue that fantasy allows us to make sense of those emotions, including the way they are ‘processed’ by members of the degrowth movement, because fantasy comprises elements that orient the degrowth desires and, in so doing, open up a window into the psychic dimension of the movement. Key elements of fantasy include: existential assumptions about the world; ideals that embody hopes and aspirations; and obstacles to those ideals, including villains, as well as heroic figures that help overcome associated challenges.
Based on our research, we argue that fantasy can help us better grasp the psychic dimension sustaining degrowth’s environmental politics in three respects:
- First, we show how fantasy affectively fortifies its members’ efforts to dismantle the structures they deem problematic, like economic growth, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.
- Second, we show how, in questioning simple narratives of heroes versus villains, members orient the movement towards a distributed form of political agency that is open to more complex, multi-level, strategic and organisational arrangements.
- Finally, and relatedly, we show how the type of relation members establish with fantasy enables them to navigate their psychic landscape in a way that both acknowledges their own affective investments in political ideals and affirms their openness to other ways of organising the world. This is what we call prefigurative ethics.
Your article centres the role of emotion in the degrowth movement, what’s the motivation behind this approach? What does it help you show?
First, a clarification: although we do foreground emotional aspects, we would say that our article centres on the more general role psychic processes play in structuring the desires of degrowth supporters, and the implications this carries for the environmental politics of degrowth.
A way to make sense of psychic processes is by identifying affective responses, including the way members of the degrowth movement navigate them through fantasmatically-structured emotions. Here we make an important distinction between contents of a fantasy – the specificities of the existential assumptions, ideals, heroes and obstacles / villains – and the mode of fantasmatic engagement – ideological or ethical – which we claim have important implications for the way we think about political struggles. In the case of degrowth, the fantasy we name ‘the fantasy of mutual dependence and care’ orients members of the movement to identify structural obstacles (e.g., economic growth, capitalism, patriarchy) that block the achievement of their ideals, thereby also shaping the emotions experienced in the struggle.
Therefore, the degrowth movement directs its affectively-charged political actions against those structural obstacles, aiming to realise their ideals centred on care for people and nature. But the mode in which members of the movement relate to the fantasy of mutual dependence and care is also important in determining the character and longevity of the movement’s political struggle. This is important, because directing their actions towards structural obstacles is what makes degrowth a critical environmental political project: it seeks to dismantle oppressive structures and move towards societies based on emancipatory human-nature relations.
Overall, we suggest that our findings both contrast with, and complement, existing environmental politics literature that addresses the role desire plays in political projects, which tends to adopt a more ‘macro-level’ focus on the policies and national and international organisations that put forward specific visions of how humans (should) relate to nature. Our research instead focuses on the ‘micro-level’ – the members of the degrowth movement – and the ‘meso-level’ – the organisations they belong to. This allows us to gain access to the psychic processes informing degrowth members’ outlook and practices, and in this way understand how such processes sustain their environmental political actions through fantasmatically-shaped emotional investments.
You pick out guilt, rage, sadness and concern as emotional expressions relevant to your analysis of the degrowth movements. How do your findings relate to other studies that examine the role emotions and anxiety play in understanding of people’s responses to environmental crises?
In many ways, our findings resonate with what other scholars such as Paul Hoggett and Mary Randall have found, namely, that there needs to be an outlet for emotions as well as appropriate organisational cultures that allow activists in environmental movements to process those emotions. For us, anxiety arises from subjects’ greater exposure to what we term ‘the radical contingency of social relations’, i.e. the awareness subjects have about the fundamental instability of social relations (including human-nature relations).
Members of the degrowth movement we interviewed appeared not only more exposed to anxiety but also more adept at managing this anxiety. They experience anxiety not simply because they realise that the emancipatory orders they envision as necessary to ecological survival do not exist yet at a macro-level scale, but also because there is a deep appreciation that no particular order is guaranteed. Anxiety about the contingency of social relations can therefore be processed emotionally in a variety of different ways, leading activists to abandon their movement, or to further motivate their political struggle in one or another way, sustaining the movement’s efforts to dissolve oppressive hegemonic orders like capitalism and economic growth and bring about emancipatory human-nature relations.
In some sense, then, we understand anxiety as the engine of guilt, rage, sadness and concern, emotions whose character is shaped through the ‘filter’ of the fantasy of mutual dependence and care. For example, when members of the degrowth movement feel guilty about their consumption and travel habits, they are directing some aggression towards themselves because they understand their own actions as contrary to their envisioned social order of mutual dependence and care between people and ecosystems. Something similar occurs with rage, where aggression is directed outside the self at others deemed responsible from blocking the realisation of degrowth’s ideals. In other words, anxiety gets coded through this particular fantasy as guilt, rage, sadness and concern, shaping the character and intensity of the degrowth struggle.
Distinguishing between political and ethical significance is interesting, how did this help your analysis?
When we talk about the political significance of fantasy, we are referring to the way fantasy plays a role in shaping the forms of political agency that the degrowth movement can take, and the role it plays in fortifying its struggle against the structural obstacles of economic growth, capitalism, colonialism and the patriarchy. In contrast, when we discuss fantasy’s ethical significance, we refer to the way members of the degrowth movement navigate their affective landscape in relation to radical contingency and the anxiety this provokes.
What has been particularly interesting is precisely how members of the degrowth movement appear to enact a form of prefigurative ethics that facilitates the confrontation and negotiation of contingency and to keep in play the affective tensions they experience, rather than attempting to repress or flee from them. In our view, prefigurative ethics allows members of the degrowth movement to deal with affective tensions in a way that sustains the movement over time, channelling their affective energy towards the political actions of degrowth. These actions range from grassroots organising to developing complex policy proposals for a society based on degrowth principles. Relatedly, prefigurative ethics diminishes the risk of abandoning the movement through affective overinvestment in a simplified or homogeneous picture of the world, instead opening up space for members of the degrowth movement to embrace forms of pluralism and complexity in their political struggle for socio-ecological justice.
Finally, are you writing anything else about degrowth? What’s next for your collaboration?
Joshua is writing other articles related to degrowth and ideas about the future, and how the affective investment in these ideas can help (or hinder) the envisioned socio-ecological transformation. Meanwhile, Jason is affiliated with the Environmental Governance Post-Coronavirus Crisis project which also draws on, and develops, kindred ideas associated with a Critical Fantasy Studies perspective. So, both of us are working on topics related to environmental politics. Both of us have some initial ideas of where we could go from here as it relates to our degrowth article, mainly about the origins and ‘lines of transmission’ of fantasies across different levels and scales, and how these relate to the movement and its sustenance. But these are very early ideas, and we have to finish our other projects first. Hopefully, we will have some updates in the coming years!
Bios:
Joshua Hurtado Hurtado is a doctoral researcher in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences programme at the University of Helsinki, studying the strategic, political and ideological dimensions of degrowth. His background is in International Relations (at Tecnológico de Monterrey and the University of Essex) and in Futures Studies (at the University of Turku). Parallel to his doctoral research, he also conducts interdisciplinary research in the Death Studies field.
Jason Glynos teaches social and political theory at the Department of Government, University of Essex, where he is co-director of the Centre for Ideology and Discourse Analysis (cIDA) and Essex Chair of the DeSiRe network (Democracy, Signification and Representation). Through collaborative research projects he explores ways post-structuralist discourse theory and psychoanalysis can generate critical perspectives on topics related to alternative community economies, valuation practices, discourses about populism and democracy, and social science research methodology.
