Ideological enablers of fossil extractivism

­The climate emergency has an ideological as well as a physical history; the physical history tells us about how the climate emergency came into existence. The ideological history tells us about the ideas that enabled the conditions that permitted this to happen. This paper considers the ideological history of the climate emergency in terms of what Marx, in The German Ideology, described as the ‘means of mental production’—the capacity of the propertied capitalist class to control the flow of ideas by virtue of their class control over the physical means of production.[1] It argues, that these are necessary, firstly, to protect the violence and injustice inherent to the extractivist world order from the threat of accountability, necessitating the disabling of even bourgeois political freedom in this, its terminal crisis phase, and secondly, to uphold a social order under which a constant state of class war is necessary to secure the free and cheap inputs necessary to maintain the system of private accumulation.[2]

In considering the ideological origins of the climate emergency, we can conceive of the means of mental production in terms of extractivist ideology underlying nominally varied belief systems that, on the one hand, ideologically enables the commodification of all life in service to the process of capital accumulation, and, on the other, naturalises and normalising the extractive class hierarchies through which fossil capital is accumulated.[3] In light of the fact that this project appears to operate in terms of historical fait accomplis—that is, making colonial conquests in pursuit of extractivist ends, and then looking to rationalise them after the fact—the paper to follow interrogates fossil extractivist ideology for teleological features arising from a desire to construct apologia based on who that ideology benefits (as opposed to ideas and worldviews based on impartial principle or demonstrable evidence).

It argues that the construction of an exclusionary Self vs. Other binary logic to victim-blame those in the way as ‘heathens’ and ‘savages’ during the colonial period in particular offered a means, not only of constructing scapegoats for colonial violence, but also of establishing the double standards so necessary to the teleology of fossil extractivism—expressed in terms of a ‘Civilising mission,’[4] ‘natural rights’ ideology,[5] and, as the project evolved, of a classist naturalism[6] that reduced it to the level of passive object and commodity. It explores the teleological character of extractivist ideology as a rationalisation after the fact of conquest as a practise of performative make-believe—at which point fossil extractivism is incorporated into the fossil extractive economy as both the means of mental production, and as teleological, circular constitutive elements of the fossil-dependent extractivist world economy itself.[7] The means of fossil mental production gives rise, not simply to a closed, ideological bubble, but the kind of parallel reality outside of all its own suppressed history called psychosis when it manifests individually.

In light of the orgy of colonial violence used to build extractivist world natures through European colonialism on the one hand, and Othering the victims as ‘savages’ on the other, this paper considers this performative mechanism within extractivist ideology in terms of its value in providing negative self-definition, in opposition to the reviled Other. This, it argues, has a specific purpose in avoiding the lived values of extractivist institutions and their underlying class relations—in avoiding its own history, in other words.[8] Instead, we find the mentality that the planet is an infinite resource and infinite garbage dump, that workers, women, peoples of the Global South, the flora and fauna and the planet itself are only objects valuable only for exploitation, and that the only crime for consequences is getting caught.[9] As long as the victims of extractivism ‘had it coming,’ no one need ask whether the lived values of extractivist hierarchies are consistent with those alleged in their speech. The prior assumptions and thought experiments that inform this mentality are performatively embedded in the social relations of which they are a part, despite having no empirical foundation.[10]

This paper argues that this is consistent with an extractivist economy based on the commodity relation, where a performative relation, expressed in the form of money, takes on a life of its own in the form of the commodity fetish—‘money makes the world go round.’[11] This is a particular issue with fossil extractivism insofar as the commodification of nature is a characteristic feature of its existence, and one on which it depends for its survival by virtue of its dependence on free and cheap inputs.[12] Insofar as the commodity relation, along with the commodity fetish to which it gives rise, as the demonstrable basis for an ideological echo chamber in which anything failing to fit the capital-reductionist, ‘money makes the world go round’ narrative (such as the actual historical origins of the ecological emergency) can be swept under the rug (until it can’t)—especially where the consequences of trying to make an infinite-growth fossil economy work on a finite planet become impossible to ignore.

Insofar as the fossil economy is legitimated through cultish commodity fetish and performative echo chamber constructed through self-serving double standards, established in turn by the Othering of an endless parade of what H.L. Mencken called ‘imaginary hobgoblins,’ this paper explores the extent to which the co-opting and persecutory facets of fossil extractivist ideology constitute a standover racket model of bourgeois politics—one that exacts resources, free care labour and surplus value as tribute for the protection of the world it controls from the endless parade of hobgoblins, and finally from itself.[13]

Firstly however, this paper begins by examining the nature of ideology within class-divided societies, as a means of legitimating the class power of elites (who are themselves extremely class conscious) and as a mode of organising perception in favour of established power, and to the detriment of anyone presumptuous enough to contradict power or subject it to criticism. It considers the nature of ideological thought as opposed to empirical thought, the demonstrated purposes of ideological thought as measured in the actions, attitudes, behaviours and policies they have sought to rationalise historically in particular, and their merits in light of their consequences, before moving on to a more specific examination of how ideology manifests in the current period, and within the context of an extractivist world economy encumbered with the unforeseen consequences its own pathological rapacity.

The means of fossil mental production

Though seemingly heretical for many who find dealing with the power relationships attached to class too distasteful for respectable discourse, the ideological dominance of ruling classes throughout history is a demonstrable fact—if not intuitively true in light of the joke about the Golden Rule of Politics (those with the gold make the rules).[14] In recent decades, critical research into the dynamics of the corporate media, corporate propaganda and corporate dark money demonstrate the reality of the Golden Rule reflected in elite information and thought management and social control.[15] As Herman and Chomsky demonstrate, concentration of media ownership by large conglomerates precipitates the ‘manufacture of consent,’ as corporate media outlets affect reality while affecting the pretence of reflecting it as they articulate the values and priorities of their billionaire owners and controllers.[16]

These developments within late capitalism evidence the observation from Marx to the effect that, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.[17]

In the context of the ecological crisis, this means the belief systems and unacknowledged prior assumptions associated with the historical conditions behind the ecological emergency. In gaining some appreciable measure at the outside of what this might entail, we might refer to Galbraith, who observes that it is ‘the nature of privileged position that it develops its own political justification and often the economic and social doctrine that serves it best.’

No one likes to believe that his or her personal well-being is in conflict with the greater public need. To invent a plausible or, if necessary, a moderately implausible ideology in defence of self-interest is thus a natural course. A corps of willing and talented craftsmen is available for the task. And such ideology gains greatly in force as those who are favoured increase in number.[18]

To the effect that self-interest comes into conflict with the greater public need, as in the case of an ecological emergency, so too then does the implausibility of the ruling ideology. As the implausibility becomes harder and harder to hide, so too then must the increasing forms of pressure put on public discourse by the privileged and their agents to conform to the ever more implausible political justification for the privileged position. The more implausible the orthodox position defending the extractivist status quo, the more pressure must be brought to bear for ideological conformity, the more critical thinking must be gaslit and otherwise neutralised. In historical terms, the need for an ideology of the privileged has been particularly necessary, as Bastiat observed, when ‘plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.’[19]

For Bastiat to be able to say this with a straight face, without considering its implications for European colonialism in the New World, Asia and Africa, is testament to the limitations of one of the forerunners of right-wing libertarianism. The question of a legal system that authorizes plunder and a moral code that glorifies plunder where it might apply to European colonialism in the New World, Asia and Africa remains a thorny point for an ideology that, on the one hand, freely conflates individual freedom and class privilege and, on the other, has, from the early stages of European colonialism, assumed a propertied European male as universal political subject—effectively relegating everyone else within the reach of capitalist social relations to second class citizens, or unpersons.[20]

As the rough kernel of this new extractivist ideological paradigm, this predatory mentality was enabled by a Society vs Nature binary that, on the one hand, conflated the interests of society as a whole with the vested class interests of propertied elites. On the other, it placed ‘society’ (i.e. the ruling class, the propertied few, the moneyed aristocracy) ahead of ‘nature’, thus denatured and commodified, and, along with workers, women, the flora and fauna, reduced to objects valued only for exploitability for profit.[21] This Society vs. Nature binary laid the ontological foundation for ‘Othering,’ or the ideological construction of exclusionary, ideological binaries between Self and Other—in this case, the propertied European male as universal subject Self, and the targets for subjugation and exploitation Other, who all, as per the Just-World fallacy, needed to be made to feel that they got what was coming to them.

The firm establishment of the ‘Other’ under the extractivist paradigm, Klein argues, softens the ground for the kinds of ongoing transgressions associated with European colonialism historically: ‘violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion.’[22] The whole point of Othering, she adds, is that ‘the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction.’ What does the question of Othering have to do with the climate emergency, Klein asks? ‘Perhaps everything.’

We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools–of ranking the relative value of humans–are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.[23]

This Othering process would unfold in manifold ways, as expansionist European colonialists sought to victim-blame all who were not propertied European males for being preyed on, and to exploit any difference amongst humans as a means of dividing and conquering the vassals with token privileges inside class hierarchy.[24] As a feature of Civilising Mission discourse, Othering was ideal to the purposes of European colonialists and extractivists insfoar as those in their way could be blamed for existing. In giving some practical sense of the utility of Othering in victim-blaming those targeted by extractivist predation on multiple fronts, Federici argues that a comparison of the hostility visited on the ‘Indian savages’ during the Conquest, and that visited on women approximating the witch stereotype during the European Witch Hunts, was nether an exaggeration or casual, but that, ‘in both cases, literary and cultural denigration was at the service of a project of expropriation.’

The demonisation of the American indigenous people served to justify their enslavement and the plunder of their resources. In Europe, the attack waged on women justified the appropriation of their labour and the criminalisation of their control over reproduction. Always, the price of resistance was extermination. None of the tactics deployed against European women and colonial subjects would have succeeded if they had not been sustained by a campaign of terror.[25]

Such evils could be inflicted because, as Voltaire pointed out, ‘those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities’—the first absurdities in this instance being the Society vs Nature, and the Self vs. Other, ideological binaries. The cascading absurdities and insanities ratcheted up exponentially as Society came to associated with the vested class interests of the European extractivist class and its propertied European male as universal subject, and the Self associated with this deeply politicised, jaundiced and toxic interpretation of universality.[26]

The politicised, jaundiced and toxic creation of unpersons had clear purposes then where the spread of European colonialism was concerned, and with it the creation of an extractivist world order from whence a climate emergency could emerge. Tilly observes that, in the early modern period, when extractivist international law was being built atop European colonialism, ‘rulers resembled racketeers: at a price, they offered protection against evils that they themselves would otherwise inflict, or at least allow to be inflicted.’[27] The protection came with a price: the propertied European male as universal subject and European notions of ‘civilisation’ imposed on global ‘civilised discourse’ as a circular fait accompli, the prior assumption in the legitimacy of colonial domination and predation inbuilt thereby into the DNA of extractivism—the ideology of the global fossil economy protection racket saving the world from the Other, which for the greater part meant itself.

Tilly speaks in particular to the colonial plunder perpetrated on much of the rest of the world—a collective crime against humanity so great in its brutality, sadism and sheer horror that it hides in plain sight behind the History of the Victors. The Great Dying of an estimated 55-60 million people during the European colonisation of the Americas stands out as a paradigm example, perpetrated on the basis of a ‘Civilising Mission’ discourse rooted in a benevolent paternalism that recast the work of conquest as a religious (and later, after the Enlightenment, rational) quest to protect and defend the cause of civilisation from backward savages and godless heathens.[28] The devastation in the Americans was so great that it caused the ‘Orbis Spike’ in the climate of Northern Europe, driving the continent into a climate event known as the Little Ice Age as 60 million people stopped burning fires and trampling undergrowth that could suck up carbon and cool the atmosphere.[29] Someone needed protection, but it wasn’t Europeans.

The emergence of performative Fossil Othering

The Great Dying as a consequence of ‘Civilising Mission’ discourse, demonstrates something of the historical role of Othering as a key feature of colonialist and imperialist discourse, as the means of fossil mental production geared towards the construction ideologically of an exclusionary, self-vs-other binary for purposes of demonising, scapegoating, and otherwise of the ‘moderately implausible ideologies’ that eventually become the History of the Victors. In challenging such politically-charged, statist propaganda, Edward Saïd pioneered Othering Studies in the 1970s with his eponymous work on Orientalism; in addition to interrogating the Othering associated with colonialism, this seminal work also laid the foundation for further investigation into the relationship between Othering and fossil extractivist capitalism, whose endless growth paradigm, characteristic Society vs. Nature binary teleology, and systemic dependence on Cheap Natures created ideal conditions for the emergence of the climate emergency.[30] This relationship was expressed, as we have seen, in ‘civilising mission’ discourse that sought to explain colonial predation as saving the people who got in the way from themselves and their own wild and unruly natures.

Such reified naturalistic fallacies conflate the fossil economy, imposed historically through colonial violence and major crimes against humanity, with nature and ‘natural law’; false consciousness echo chambers reinforced these fallacies, underwritten by the mentality that the truth of an idea is determined by the number of people who believe it.[31] As ever, just like physics, ‘capital makes the world go round.’ The class power to assert beliefs in contempt of empirical reality and causality is, in this way, normalised by the hegemonic structural dominance of the fossil capitalist class as a whole.[32] The means and outcome of these conditions was a performative ideological bubble where the prior assumptions and thought experiments of the dominant extractivist ideology are embedded in the social relations of which they are a part, despite having no empirical foundation. Othering of critics as deviants and wreckers spares the bubble criticism or awareness of the crimes on which the extractivist power structure has been built.[33]

As Saïd notes, the Orientalist representations of populations targeted for conquest and plunder was part of this project of social control insofar as it amounted to self-talk for extractivist hierarchies built historically on colonial violence on the one hand, and Othering and blaming of the victims as ‘savages’ and ‘heathens’ on the other. To the extent that these features of fossil extractivism have historically provided the perpetrators of the conditions behind global warming with insulation from the consequences of their actions, Orientalism stands as a demonstrated example of echo chambers of ideological make-believe, where the truth of ideas is determined according to those who the benefit, truth is upheld through the power of dominant groups to enforce ideological orthodoxy and hegemony, and those in the way, or who try to hold those responsible to account, are associated with a commodified world-ecology in being considered part of a wild and unruly nature requiring domesticating and controlling.[34]

Insofar as this follows, Orientalism constituted a retreat from reality into a ‘performative’ bubble or echo chamber—one in which the snowballing effects of ‘metabolic rift,’ as the driving force of the ecological crisis, would pass unnoticed as extraneous to the accumulation of fossil capital. If the bubble didn’t had to notice it was cooking the engine while the going was good for the bubble, it wasn’t a problem.[35] These performative features of the modernist extractivist paradigm, typified by Orientalist discourse and so embedded in the capitalist social relations with which they are associated as ideas as to be constitutive of them, are evident throughout the world. They appear in finance capitalism, in money, and in the commodity fetish—money being the magical, sacred and divinely-inspired idol that allegedly makes the world go around (while also being the root of all evil).

In the 1980s, the Black-Scholes-Merton options-exchange model—its architects later recipients of a Nobel Prize in Economics—was implemented on Wall St—making ‘option theory . . . embedded in artefacts that play essential roles in the operation of options exchanges.‘ Practical implementations of the Black-Scholes-Merton model did not simply reflect options exchanges, they affected them, becoming constituent parts of options calculations in an options exchange.[36] Use of the Black-Scholes-Merton model, in other words, ‘brought about a state of affairs of which it was a good empirical description.’[37] This was soon associated with ‘Barnesean’ performativity for the eponymous scholar who recounts ‘I have conceived of a society as a distribution of self-referring knowledge substantially confirmed by the practise it sustains.’[38]

A simple but also perfectly illustrative example of this is money, currency, otherwise unremarkable objects whose value does not derive from their physical properties alone (or at all), but rather

because it is believed to be a medium of exchange and store of value, and that belief is validated by the practises it informs. Our shared belief that the pieces of paper we call ‘dollar bills’ are money leads us to treat these pieces of paper in ways that make them constitute money.[39]

As the commodity par excellence, currency is a magical fetish that becomes the basis for a performative cocoon of extractivist ideology as mindlessly conformist in its fetishising as it is ignorant of non-Victor history on the one hand, and easy abandonment of conscience to the seductive and hyponotising effects of concentrated wealth and power on the other.[40] Marx’s critique of the commodity-form builds on this simple observation to draw out what is in effect a systemic critique of fossil capitalist social relations as a reified, naturalised fetish built atop currency, which is again itself a commodity.[41] Capitalism then is, in a very real sense, built on love of shiny. The commodity form, Marx argued, along with ‘the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears,’ were and are profoundly performative insofar as both ‘have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this’—and as a result was eventually surprised and most inconvenienced by its own unintended ecological consequences.

It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.[42]

As in the case of organised religion, fossil economics makes up its own reality as it goes along because it likes the performative space where the strongest and most mercenary survive and prosper—especially where it can use its power to enforce ideological orthodoxy and conformity.[43] Within the performative psychosis, the commodity lives as a fetish—something that appears to have a life of its own. Money makes the world go round. So too then are the commodity relations of the fossil economy. The ‘derivative nature’ of the shared closed space of this gilded psychosis lives as an ahistorical nature even as fossil capitalism depletes, exhausts and depleted and destroys the commodified nature on which it preys, locust-style.[44] The derivatives bubble on Wall St is a bubble in more ways than one, fossil extractivist ideology reflecting the mediated logic of the commodity fetish most clearly and distressingly in its ever-deepening terminal crisis.[45]

Outside of this space, metabolic rift presents as a key driver of the ecological emergency. This arises out of the infinite-growth economy, which, in addition to assuming infinite Earths to fulfill its rapacious hunger for the free and cheap lunches on which endless accumulation of capital depends, implies the endless commodification of nature—as something, that is, whose only value resides in its exploitability for profit as a source of free and cheap natures.[46] The natural fallacy and the naturalising of transnational extractivism on top of performative psychosis is the atrocity-preceding absurdity of the illusion of the growth-based fossil economy and the class-based social relations of fossil capitalism as living things; the pretences of capital to life and autonomy are only the inversion of lived social relations to misrepresent them as its own attributes, purposefully ‘mistaking the word for the thing’ (see below) through virtue signalling of alleged values in conspiracist ideological gaslighting unevidenced in actions as everyone targeted by extractivist predation must be made to understood that they had it coming.[47]

The fetishising of the fossil economy as a living thing under threat from an endless procession of imaginary hobgoblins, and requiring a protection racket legitimated by moderately implausible ideologies is further suggested by positive reification built on the back of the ‘Society vs. Nature’ binary, representing fossil capitalism as variously natural, inevitable, divinely-ordained, enlightened rationalism and the best for everyone, as per Lockean ‘improvement of wasteland’ discourse (improving it back to wasteland).[48] In the same way, as we have seen, the ‘civilising mission’ discourses to which it gives rise conflate ‘society’ ideologically with ‘fossil capitalist class privilege,’ completing the exercise in brainwashing on top of toxic religious guilting and shaming of fallibility.’[49] This mentality is normalised in turn through the echo chamber conditions of fossil capitalist world hegemony, normalised and naturalised in Genesis—to be accepted as the word of God by those relieved of the freedom to err and their independence of mind along with it.[50]

Performative fossil simulacra

Performative make-believe must have a script that mimicks the natural world it objectifies, commodifies and rapaciously exploits. This script manifests as ‘highly stylised’ fossil simulacra,’ ‘not merely a style of representation but a language, indeed a means of creation’—the latter a particular requirement of a performative ideology that styles itself cause and solution of the same problems. The performative script of fossil extractivism also ensures that it remains a self-fulfilling prophecy by reverses the democratic burden of proof on power to justify itself to the individual though the unspoken prior assumption that fossil extractivists own the world.[51] These supremacist leanings extend fossil capitalist enclosure to historical memory insofar as the history of the Victors erases its bloody crimes against humanity from the origins of the world extractive economy.

The reversal of the democratic burden of proof allows performative fossil simulacra, then, to exist outside of history, where care and wage labour, not capital, demonstrably makes the world go round.[52] A perfect example appears in business studies research speaking of ‘entrepreneurial ecologies’ or ‘entrepreneurial ecosystems’ which, appearing in the midst of a Covid-19 pandemic, only problematises the latter, as an issue the condition of any kind of ecology, apparently as an inconvenience to the accumulation of capital.[53] Indeed, some even talk in terms of a ‘metaphorical black swan event, that is, a surprising, unpredictable event of great significance and severe consequences that dramatically changes the political and economic environment’ as a potential business opportunity.[54] Entrepreneurial networks are not ecosystems, and the idea that a network that extracts from life is comparable to an ecosystem that maintains it is laughable, the hegemony on which fossil extractivism rests ensures that the academy is well enough colonised, well enough cut of from history, and its fundamental value system well enough internalised, that this garbage passes peer review.

Some explanation as to how this comes to pass might be found in the long cultural conditioning of ‘civilising mission’ discourse, and its characteristic ‘shadow other’ or ‘putatively static savage society’ as a static Othered reference point for negative juxtaposition of the ‘civilised identity’ of the propertied European male as universal subject. Performative scripts of fossil simulacra arrive on ready-primed territory where the history of the Victors sets limits to historical memory, individual and collective identity and the bounds of Respectable™ discourse. Within Victor history and its ahistorical natures, the values of the Self are asserted outside of historical nature, in opposition to the ‘shadow fossil Other’ serving as a static reference point in legitimation of the imperial ‘civilised identity’ of the fossil Self.[55]

While a part of human life and nature, historical memory remains a quite definitive threat to fossil capital insofar as it fails to serve the prerogatives of fossil accumulation by recalling the origins of the ecological emergency in the origins of the extractivist world-economy.[56] It must be suppressed in the virtue-signalling performance of the Civilising Mission on the basis of which the extractivist script was developed. Instead, in the world of make-believe outside of the history that involves long-term consequences for extractivist paradigms,

progress is the central character, so critical to settler mythology that it drives a deep-seated need to continually perform the fabled journey from savage to civilised over and over again; settler subjects playing out fantasies of the colonial encounter as theatre.[57]

In the speech acts associated with the performative expression of fossil ideology, the ‘colonial encounter as theatre’ takes the form of ritualized performance that enacts acceptable interpretations of the violence on which colonial domination and exploitation depend for the public legitimation of systems of cruelty, confirming as ‘natural’ and ‘common sense’ the ‘densest concentration of ideology’ around ‘transformations in capitalist work relations that are anything but natural.’[58] The performative features of fossil extractive ideology enable then perpetuity within fossil capitalism, as endless reconfiguration of Othering discourses provides new variants on fossil ideology to suit evolving systemic contingencies associated with maintaining the extractivist protection racket. If people are inflexible in paying tribute in obedience, conformity and surplus value, the state managers operating the fossil commodity ‘spectacle from the point of privileged invisibility’ can always turn to ‘manipulating information channels in order to scare people into thinking there is a crisis coming which they can avoid only by changing.’[59]

In the North American context, the perpetual reconfiguration of fossil Othering discourse, expressed as performative simulacra feeding the extractivist protection racket with an endless series of menacing, but imaginary, hobgoblins, was embodied in a tradition of Othering discourses deployed against First Nations peoples,[60] African-Americans,[61] and other non-white groups,[62] women,[63] the poor and the working classes[64]—just about everyone, in other words, who wasn’t part of the propertied European male ingroup established through colonial crimes against humanity as the universal subject of international law.[65] Without necessarily being cognizant of it, all featured in of ’a single spectacle from the point of privileged invisibility’—in this case, the privileging of propertied male whiteness. It would eventually transpire that this privilege could be demonstrated to be a form of property with monetary value itself, like land and slaves.[66]

Since ‘every system of cruelty requires its own theatre,’ the ‘civilising mission’ based on fossil Othering rooted in deviance production becomes the basis for ‘cruelty theatre’ in which the process of scapegoating is combined with negative tribal identity formation through the ritualised performance of fossil ideological speech acts.[67] As a feature of ‘bourgeois modernity,’ cruelty theatre will always conjure security threats by virtue of the fact that ‘security’ is a fundamental feature of fossil capitalist extractivism; fossil Othering has what Foucault describes as an ‘economic utility’ insofar as it is dependent on the spectre of the Other to construct a self-interested discourse of ‘societal defence,’ which in conflating the defence of society from external threats and the defence of class privilege, is also a mechanism for the defence of fossil capital.[68]

This necessarily incorporates sectors of the working class granted the token racial privileging of their whiteness in return for loyalty, for whom the persecution of the fossil Other as cruelty theatre. With themselves as the primary ‘marks,’ though typically unaware of the fact, active participation in cruelty theatre

acts as a perverse legitimation of inexpressible fear and anguish . . . What is taking place is only secondarily an expression of prejudice. It is first and foremost a therapeutic psychodrama in which the emotional release of the protagonists takes precedence over what is actually being said. It is an expression of their pain and powerlessness confronted by the decay and dereliction, not only of their familiar environment, but of their own lives too—an expression for which our society provides no outlet. Certainly it is something more complex and deep-rooted than what the metropolitan liberal evasively and easily dismisses as prejudice.[69]

Therapeutic psychodrama is the tale told the through performative extractivism, with a fossil simulacra script Othering extractivist targets and naturalising and normalising fossil capitalist hierarchy. In times of crisis, this psychodrama mobilises the sectors of subject classes granted token privileges in defence of the fossil capitalist status quo, on the basis of the pretence that these token privileges reflect a real community of class interests between fossil extractivists and the white working class.[70] Centuries of cultural priming makes for a ready-primed constituency for the ecofascist temper tantrum of fossil fuel conglomerates and their dark money-sponsored think-tanks at the wheels falling off the fossil capitalist bandwagon.[71]

Extractivist identity politics predicated on negative tribal identity formation through the ritualised performance of fossil ideological speech acts and fossil Othering is a ‘key component’ of performative fossil simulacra, insofar as it establishes a suitably performative, collectively narcissistic ingroup of the Elect for the ‘if you think for yourself, the terrorists win’-style panic-driven scapegoating discourses of extractivist-friendly conspiracism.[72] Since its lived values are abundantly evident historical fait accomplis of violence like the Great Dying, ‘highly stylised’ fossil simulacra’ must uphold an evolving disjuncture between abstract and lived values to keep its standover racket business model in business. Thus ‘history as scripture’ and fossil imperialist self-talk, is written and re-written by the fossil Victors as a perpetual success story of civilisation, progress and growth, even as the world plunges into ecocide.

Performative Speech Acts

The ‘highly stylised simulacra’ of Orientalism and extractivist Othering extends historically from Napoleon’s imperial project in Egypt to the counterterrorist discourse surrounding the resource wars changing and mutating ‘civilising mission’ discourse of fossil imperialism.[73] As a continuity indicative of the organised, wilful forgetting of extractivist imperialism and its ahistorical natures, these performative discourses of Othering and negative tribal formation are consistent with enclosure of memory, the colonisation of subjectivity, and the biopolitical production of collectively narcissistic ingroups based on the various privileging of fossil extractivist subjects for diving and conquering the vassals. Placing this performative fossil simulacra back in historical context demands accounting for socially-contextualised ‘action as it is modified by thought’—the relationship between fossil ideology in the abstract, in other words, and the practical process of Othering.

Fortunately, Cambridge School historiography provides for this in considering historical ideas in terms of the ‘speech acts’ of their articulation—the process of this articulation as much a critical part of the periods of history in which they appeared, then, as the historical milieus with which they sought to engage.[74] For Skinner, understanding the history of ideas demanded ‘a grasp of the point of the action for the agent who performed it,’ and so consideration of the role of the historical actor in the articulation of ideas.[75] Pocock concurred, arguing for the primacy of underlying social relations as reflected in exploring ‘what modes of criticising or defending the legitimacy of political behaviour were in existence, to what symbols or principles they referred, and what language and by what forms of argument they sought to achieve their purposes.[76]

The connection to Cambridge School emphasis on social and historical context is immediate and apparent in its emphasis on speech acts, though by no means the end of the issue. ‘History,’ Dunn added, was surely ‘about the world and not about propositions,’ the historicity of the latter consisting of the fact that they were not ‘merely propositions, logical structures; they are also statements’—historical actors having said or written them, and so appearing as part of the story itself ‘as speakers.’[77] Since the historical actor was located in the performance of an idea, it was necessary to grasp not only ‘antecedent causal conditions of the action taking place,’ but also ‘a grasp of the point of the action for the agent who performed it’—or in other words, a motive or an intention as ‘itself a cause, in the sense that it is an antecedent to and contingently connected with the resulting action.’[78]

To the extent that they reflected motives or intentions for actors operating in a specific context, speech acts were potentially not merely descriptions of social conditions, but constitutive of them—such as saying ‘I do’ when getting married. In this case, it was the speech itself as an act that constituted the event, a fact that could extend from benign circumstances, such as a marriage, to others that were far less so, such as in generating the requisite ecological conditions for the onset of a climate emergency. It was only once speakers themselves were included in history, once ‘thinking and talking are considered seriously as social activities,’ that the full import of the intellectual discussions that were to become articles of history could be properly understood.[79]

For Skinner, the situational role of the historical agent as a producer of ‘speech acts’ was key to understanding the nature of the ideas they articulated, especially if the meanings of the words they used were politicised, loaded, contested or otherwise subject to change over time.[80] In light of the potentially highly subjective role of the speech actor in articulating ideas, the potential for historiographical errors to arise was profound if the ideas articulated were taken to be universal or timeless, ‘history as scripture,’ rather than products of their age and of the subjective viewpoints of the historical actors articulating them. In a situation where the speech acts were given to articulating alleged universalisms based on the global hegemony of a propertied European male as political subject, and global extractivist order as a normal and natural a phenomenon as the rising and setting of the sun, the potential problems arising out of this mentality are not hard to figure.

In the case of the history of fossil Othering, and the discursive nature of the constructions of the Other to which Saïd alludes, this is significant for discourses where ‘civilisation vs. barbarian’ binaries dominate—the potential error, in Skinner’s words, being to take ‘the word for the thing.’[81] This issue arises as a facet of sociological studies of ‘deviance production,’ as the driving force of Othering discourses and ideological construction of the Other in the context of the manufacture of moral panics. In this context, scholarly studies of moral panics account for ‘taking the word for the thing’ in recognition of the fact that received interpretations of ‘deviance’ depend on who has the power to define the meaning of the word and impose their definition on popular discourse, rather than on the characteristics of anyone so labelled.[82]

Deviance production as a sociological facet of speech acts within intellectual historiography points directly at the engine driving the disjuncture between stated and lived values of the kind noted above—the temporal and spatial disjuncture between articles of historically documented actions and policies, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fossil Othering-driven simulacra through which these historical actions and policies were represented as something else on the basis of fossil Othering rooted in a ‘civilisation vs. barbarism’ binary. In dealing with ‘effects, not causes,’ deviance production consists not of a fact, but a social relation—that between deviance and those who produce it, or better yet the Other and those who construct fossil Othering discourses as a ‘systemic discipline of accumulation’ that functions to absolve themselves of responsibility for harms perpetrated in the process.[83]

Since it is ideology that produces deviance in the concept of the Other—a relation between the producer of deviance, in other words, and those to whom the label of Other is applied—‘social control leads to deviance, not the other way around.’[84] Another way of describing ‘mistaking the word for the thing’ was conflating object and relation; as an element of Othering speech acts, this would form the basis of the kind of ideological self-talk that functioned to mask harmful consequences from their perpetrators. As a methodological issue of speech acts, the conflation of object and relation in the process of ‘mistaking the word for the thing’ begs the extent to which Othering discourses produce the conditions which are then used to justify, in a generally circular manner, their own existence—especially if the fact that social control does lead to ‘deviance’ implies hegemonic ideological control and the power to impose subjective interpretations of the Other on popular political discourse.

Skinner speaks directly to this crucial issue in commenting that ‘the social context, it is said, helps to cause the formation and change of ideas, but the ideas in turn help to cause the formation and change of the social context.’[85] This being the case, he argued, there could be ‘no history of the idea to be written, but only a history necessarily focused on the various agents who used the idea, and on their varying situations and intentions in using it’—not least if the idea was one produced in the context of a speech act whose own purpose was to construct deviance through Othering for the purpose of social control and the discursive establishment of ‘a systemic discipline of accumulation.’[86] In being so embedded in their historical milieu as constitute them, in the manner associated with the concept of performativity, Othering speech acts created their own reality, making up their own discursive reality as they went along to suit the purposes of a ‘systemic discipline of accumulation.’

To the extent that speech acts rooted in deviance production do act on their circumstances, such as to constitute them in causing ‘the formation and change of the social context,’ the active role of speech acts as performative constituents of their historical milieus also helps to begin to account for changing and evolving temporal, spatial and geographical contexts of fossil Othering. It also reflects the role of normative vocabularies in sustaining these changing and evolving temporal, spatial and geographical contexts—in other words, ‘all the occasions and activities in which a given agent might have used the relevant form of words,’ and ‘what sort of society the given author was writing for and trying to persuade’ along with the ‘historical conditions which produced the texts themselves.’[87] Bourdieu (1991, 8-9) offers a useful example of this in the allegory of the naming of a vessel; not everyone can smash a champagne bottle against its bow and recite the necessary words. The ship-namer is authorised to do so, and their authority is respected because of the social relations that underpin the process. The conditions for a performative speech act exists because an institution exists to underwrite the social relations that provide for it.

Institutions, then, also underwrite discursive forms of fossil Othering, rooted in deviance production as its engine; because of the institutions of class power that underwrite them, fossil Otherings are respected as active, performative speech acts, with normative vocabularies rooted in ‘civilisation vs. barbarianism’ and ‘society vs. nature’ binaries. They are not however recognised as performative speech acts, and for this reason remain normalised and naturalised, and are not recognised as part of a pattern. Lacking such a recognition, historical treatments of any one manifestation of a performative speech act of fossil Othering must tend then to performatively perpetuate their prior assumptions, tending more to repeat than coming to terms with and transcending history. This becomes only truer if normative vocabularies rooted in deviance production and fossil othering are so deeply normalised, naturalised and embedded in their historical contexts as to constitute them. Without recognition of their character as speech acts, the speech acts associated with the articulation of fossil ideology would become speech acts of historical recollection of fossil ideology. They would be, in effect, Churchill’s ‘history written by the victors,’ the ‘history as scripture’ of the Cambridge School—arguably a defining characteristic of Orientalist discourse.

As the history of Orientalism as an institutionally-enabled fossil ideological simulacra mimicking historical scholarship tends to indicate, significant issues arise out of employment of normative vocabularies rooted in deviance production, fossil Othering and the ‘civilisation vs. barbarianism’ binary, performatively embedding speech acts within social relations with a view to imposing a ‘systematic discipline of accumulation.’ The role of normative vocabularies as active agents in the production through speech acts of deviance aids in the conflation of vested interests and the common good, and the social imposition of elite values as societal norms; on this count; Skinner argues that paradigms of normative vocabulary tend be politically loaded insofar as they name virtues and vices according to a priori assumptions—commending or condemning according to the subjective value systems of those articulating them. In so doing, normative stereotypes rooted in exclusionary, Self. vs Other binaries ‘perform evaluative as well as descriptive functions in natural languages . . . They are basically used to describe actions and the motives for which they are performed.’[88]

This performative aspect of ‘speech acts,’ as a practical, heuristic factor in the history of ideas, is again crucial to the intellectual history of fossil ideology insofar as the speech act itself creates its own justification and rationale in invoking its own prior assumptions. To state the issue as plainly as possible: in this instance, the rationale for fossil ideology itself are the practical acts of colonial violence and historical crimes against humanity by which the a priori assumptions and value systems of fossil Othering were first imposed on social discourse, rather than the internal cohesiveness or grounding in empirical demonstrable, causal reality of the idea itself. Fossil ideology not only constitutes reality performatively, it judges that having done so is moral, honourable, decent, worthy, noble and just. The root rationale of fossil Othering, is the ‘violence of abstraction’ and the practical violence that upholds it in historical contexts of which the relationship between Orientalism and European colonialism is emblematic.[89]

Building on his analysis of the violence of abstraction embodied in speech acts that are both performative and evaluative, Skinner notes the work of J.L. Austin, who describes a distinction between ‘constatives’, or descriptive language, and ‘performatives’—the difference, in practical terms, between the truism that ‘the sky is blue’ and the deeply subjective arguments such as ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win,’ or alternatively, ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win.’[90] This is of particular significance to speech acts, Austin argues, insofar as the conflation of the one with the other gave rise to what he describes as a ‘descriptive fallacy,’ whereby a priori ‘performatives’ were used as a posteroiri ‘constatives’ and attributed the same level of dignity.

Beliefs, in other words, are accorded the same respect as demonstrable facts, object is conflated with relation, ‘the word is mistaken for the thing’—ideologies invoking this ‘descriptive fallacy’ creating their own reality and then attempting to force a fit with the rest of the world. The pretence of the performative, Austin argued, was that it was a ‘constituitive’ or descriptive statement, when it was actually performative, and would thus be inclined to reaction to challenges to its performativity as though it reflects reality and not what the historical actors invoking the descriptive fallacy preferred to be true.[91] In the attachment to the a priori presuppositions of the descriptive fallacy, we find motivation for the Othering impulses driving Orientalist ideological discourse and the scapegoating impulses driving the production of deviance as the basis for fossil Othering.

Pocock demonstrates cognizance of these issues, arguing that an evident difference exists between ‘the intellectual content of a piece of thinking, and the role it was designed to play, or actually did play, in influencing political action.’[92] Where an idea was an article of Othering, a performative speech act manifest as, for example, conspiracist ideology, the intellectual content of the idea and its practical role it played could be poles apart, causes and cures of the same alleged external threat that ‘virtue-signalled’ one set of values in the abstract, while applying the exact opposite set of values in practise. Skinner concurred, noting the potentially performative nature of speech acts in pointing out that ‘the social context, it is said, helps to cause the formation and change of ideas, but the ideas in turn help to cause the formation and change of the social context.’[93] The corroborating contribution of Austin on the question tends to confirm that performative fossil Othering does not only change the social context—it constitutes it. To the extent that fossil Othering does so while articulating one set of values and applying another, it constructs a narrative that must defy and deny reality as a matter of the survival of the ‘politico-moral legitimacy’ of fossil ideology, and the fossil economy along with it.

In the Orientalist creation of the Other, the performative descriptive fallacy took advantage of the colonial ‘hegemonism of possessing minorities’ to lay blame for the consequences of ‘the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories’ on the victims, on the basis of their inferiority alleged in the prior assumptions of ‘civilisation vs. barbarianism’ binary supremacisms.[94] Austin’s performative ‘descriptive fallacy’ is impossible to miss in Balfour’s Othering speech act quoted above; Orientals have never been capable of self-government according to our self-serving understanding of their history, therefore it is right and proper that they should be dominated such that the settler colonial power might accumulate—even if the process inadvertently triggers a climate emergency later on.

In victimising its target through Othering, Balfour’s Orientalist narrative embeds itself in the conditions it describes and creates its own rationalisation; the Orientals are incapable of self-government, so the Orientalists must control them.[95] The lineage of this mentality, as the foundation for fossil Othering in changing and evolving temporal, spatial and geographical contexts, is reflected in the Napoleonic-era Institute d’Egypte and its Orientalist texts, such as the Description de l’Egypte, and in the ideologies of British and Spanish imperialism. We can trace their spatial expansion through the evolution of European colonialism in general, itself a reflection of expanding frontiers of appropriation and accumulation, and through specific events like the Louisiana Purchase, which grafted the fruits of Napoleonic Orientalism onto an incipient North American variety.[96]

In both cases, while the forms might have changed and evolved, the underlying, ‘highly-stylised simulacra . . . not merely a style of representation but a language, indeed a means of creation’—with all that involves in terms of the performative production of deviance, the ‘descriptive fallacy’ and normative vocabulary associated with fossil Othering—remains the same. So too does the temporal and spatial disjuncture between historically documented facts of the fossil economy and the fossil Othering-driven simulacra through which those associated with them represented them as something else; here we find temporal and spatial frames for exploring the relationship between fossil ideology in the abstract and the practical process of Othering, without which the perpetrators of the fossil extractivist protection racket must go to historical jail.

Conclusion

Through its Othering and performative features, fossil extractivist ideology provides ‘politico-moral justification’ for the ecologically unsustainable social relations underlying the growth-based extractivist economy, the historical root cause of anthropogenic global warming and the climate emergency. Fossil Othering, rooted in exclusionary, ‘civilisation vs. barbarianism’ binaries, forms the basis for a ‘systemic discipline of accumulation’ to these ends, of which Orientalism is the archetype. Othering provides for negative tribal formation based around the propertied European male as universal subject and a hegemonic discourse with a ’single spectacle from the point of privileged invisibility’ the unspoken prior assumption ensuring that thought and historical memory is properly controlled and managed in the interests of fossil capital.[97]

Meanwhile, the performative fetish, articulated in articles of common nonsense like ‘money makes the world go round,’ helps keep the extractive economy outside of history, and well out of reach of culpability for the innumerable historical bills now well overdue.[98] The reified nature of extractivist discourse, exemplified by its Orientalist birthing, places the extractive economy above history and on a par with nature as universal and inevitable—the discourses that stem from the archetype tantamount to simulacra driven by fossil Othering. Such reified naturalistic fallacies conflate the performative features of fossil economics with nature and ‘natural law’; false consciousness echo chambers reinforced these fallacies, underwritten by the mentality that the truth of an idea is determined by the number of people who believe it. The class power to assert beliefs in contempt of empirical reality and causality is, in this way, normalised by the hegemonic structural dominance of the fossil capitalist class as a whole.

This paper has argued that these features of fossil extractivism have historically provided the perpetrators of the conditions behind global warming with insulation from the consequences of their actions, negative identity formation through Othering and performative make-believe forming the basis for insulated echo chambers for European colonialist elites, the principle beneficiaries of the world system of extractivist capitalism built on centuries of colonialism. Within this hegemonic echo chamber, truth is defined as that which serves fossil extractivism and capital accumulation, and those in the way, or who try to hold those responsible to account, are associated with a commodified world-ecology in being considered part of a wild and unruly nature requiring domesticating and controlling. Performativity enables perpetuity within fossil capitalism as the reconfiguration and reassertion of Othering discourses provides new variants on fossil ideology to suit evolving systemic contingencies, old wine constantly appears in new bottles; if you think for yourself, the communists win, or if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win.[99]

‘Othering’ and performativity are critical features of fossil extractivist discourse in legitimating unjust and unsustainable socio-ecological conditions established historically through colonial conquest and plunder, and hiding, or at least minimising, the social and ecological harms associated with them. The colonial mindset behind absurdities necessary to justify plunder and the atrocities necessary to perpetrate it, weaponised psychological projection by conflating challenges to privilege with attacks on freedom, while conflating class and social hierarchies with the natural order of things, and ideologically gaslighting the rest of society into conformity with the claim that class hierarchies are the last line of defence against chaos.

Outside of the performative bubble, on the other hand, it remains the beneficiaries of an unsustainable socio-ecological status quo, the addicts of the black gold and worshippers of the almighty dollar, who are responsible for the unsustainable ideologies and modalities behind the climate emergency—the endless growth paradigm, a self-serving, collectively narcissistic Society vs. Nature binary, and systemic addiction to Cheap Natures. In the face of Gramsci’s interregnum between the dying world and the future that can’t be born, the only kind of growth that offers any hope for the future arguably involves learning to think and act in ways where values other than self-interest are inbuilt into actions, where means are made consistent with outcomes so that lived values are consistent with speech values, and, in so doing, rising above the thinking that created the problem in the first place.

By Ben Debney

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