Climate responsibility belongs to impersonal structure, not any individual subject

Evidence

The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there – it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility. … This problem is addressed from another angle in a paper by Campbell Jones entitled ‘The Subject Supposed To Recycle’. 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. … Now, when the appeal to individual ethical responsibility has never been more clamorous – in her book Frames Of War, Judith Butler uses the term ‘responsibi-lization’ to refer to this phenomenon – it is necessary to wager instead on structure at its most totalizing. Instead of saying that everyone – i.e. every one – 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. The cause of eco-catastrophe is an impersonal structure which, even though it is capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject capable of exercising responsibility. The required subject – a collective subject - does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed. Yet the appeal to ethical immediacy that has been in place in British political culture since at least 1985 – when the consensual sentimentality of Live Aid replaced the antagonism of the Miners Strike – permanently defers the emergence of such a subject. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 138

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the trust research’s insight that responsibility without a capable collective subject is structurally unresolvable — and connects to the sacrifice article’s themes of collective versus individual burden. — connects to: Individual-responsibility climate appeals let impersonal structure escape accountability — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139; Climate catastrophe demands constructing a collective subject that does not yet exist — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139; Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 139 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces Butler’s ‘responsibilization’ and Jones’s ‘subject supposed to recycle’ as tools for parsing who bears moral weight.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that saying ‘you have no one to blame, structure is the culprit’ is truer than individualized guilt — and that this paradoxically demands constructing a collective subject that doesn’t yet exist — is the chapter’s dense core.
• SEED: Direct essay seed on climate guilt: how ‘do your bit’ permanently defers the collective subject that alone could act.

Related

• Individual-responsibility climate appeals let impersonal structure escape accountability (similarity 0.94)
• Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability (similarity 0.90)
• Climate catastrophe demands constructing a collective subject that does not yet exist (similarity 0.81)
• When everyone shares responsibility, no one personally feels responsible (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Ethical appeals to individual responsibility let impersonal structures evade accountability #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 139
• Climate catastrophe demands constructing a collective subject that does not yet exist #responds-to (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 139
• Capital as cause-that-is-not-a-subject escapes all accountability structures #exemplifies (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 145
• When everyone shares responsibility, no one personally feels responsible #exemplifies (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 429
• Constructive reparations for climate harm follow from acknowledging its layered distributive causes #qualifies (0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 315
• Slow, distributed environmental harms escape moral accountability because causation is invisible #qualifies (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2707
• Slow, diffuse causal chains obscure personal responsibility for environmental harm #qualifies (0.75)