Individual environmental action masks the absence of a collective agent able to act

Evidence

Isn’t recycling a classic case of: “We assume responsibility for the systemic tendencies of capitalism”? It’s not really our fault that there is an environmental catastrophe. The thing it is nobody’s fault, you can say, in a genuine sense, but that is the problem — because there is no agent capable of acting. There’s no agent at the moment that’s capable of taking responsibility for a problem on the scale of the environmental catastrophe that we’re facing. Instead, it’s contracted out to us as individuals as if we could do anything about it by simply putting plastic in the right bin. That won’t solve the environmental catastrophe that we’re up against. The only thing that can solve it is the production of an agent capable of acting. But of course nothing like that has ever existed throughout human history until now — which doesn’t mean it can’t exist, but that we’re in very new territory. That appeal to individual responsibility, as if aggregating up enough individual responsibility will substitute the need for this kind of agent. That’s one of the pernicious dimensions of the culture behind recycling. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2112

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for a piece on why ‘personal responsibility’ framing of environmental action is politically pernicious — recycling as ritual displacement of absent collective agency.
• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s broader critique of ‘responsibilization’ under neoliberalism, and contemporary degrowth debates.