• Caocao [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    In posing the question, 'who is the subject supposed to recycle?' Jones denaturalizes an imperative that is now so taken for granted that resisting it seems senseless, never mind unethical. Everyone is supposed to recycle; no-one, whatever their political persuasion, ought to resist this injunction. The demand that we recycle is precisely posited as a pre- or post-ideological imperative; in other words, it is positioned in precisely the space where ideology always does its work. But the subject supposed to recycle, Jones argued, presupposed the structure not supposed to recycle: in making recycling the responsibility of 'everyone', structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by itself receding into invisibility... Instead of saying that everyone is responsible for climate change, we all have to do our bit, it would be better to say that no-one is, and that's the very problem.

    -Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism