Ten years ago, Rob Nixon introduced the idea of “slow violence,” and his idea has since become influential among scholars from a range of disciplines. He wrote that our notion of violence is too “immediate in time” and too “explosive and spectacular.”1 He advocates for us to disrupt dominant assumptions about violence and to confront the way we think about unfolding disasters—to engage violence that is “incremental and accretive.”2 He says in interviews that this invisible phenomenon represents nothing less than an “inter-generational theft of the conditions of life itself.”3
But his book also contains a simple intervention and a practical call to action—a craft lesson—for writers, filmmakers, and digital activists.4 He asks, “How can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving . . . ? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment?”5 Implied in the question is a distinction. Sometimes our activism succeeds by emotionally bringing to life threats that remain imperceptible to the senses, by humanizing the unapparent.6 However, sometimes our activism fails by reinforcing the status quo—the “avalanches, volcanos, and tsunamis” conception of violence which has the “visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power” that slow violence cannot match and which encourages us go on believing that slow violence isn’t quite real or doesn’t quite count.7
We can think of them as the artful narrative, which is empathetic, vulnerable, and sober, versus the regressive narrative, which is ephemeral, pandering, and driven by spectacle. The regressive narrative is the more prevalent of the two in our everyday media environment because it is easier to compose, easier to bear, and we might even have a psychological addiction to it.
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Consider, for example, how in June 2010, less than two months after the Deepwater Horizon blowout, before the well was even capped, the CEO of BP complained to the media that he’d like the spill coverage to die down because he wanted “his life back.”8 Also consider how the BP corporation stated on the four-year anniversary of the blowout—without dismissing the shock or the multibillion-dollar enormity of the catastrophe—that they had made significant progress in doling out restitution, that they were completing active cleanup, and the Gulf was returning to its baseline condition.9 It was a “mission accomplished” moment.
However, according to a 2019 report from the National Wildlife Federation, the Gulf of Mexico never recovered, never returned to normal. The report outlined that 32 percent of all gulls in the northern Gulf died as a direct consequence of the spill, and their numbers never rebounded. Data from 2018 showed that 55 percent of dolphins in previously oil-affected areas were still diseased. Eight billion oysters died in the spill, and none remains well established in the northern Gulf of Mexico without ongoing human intervention.10 According to a University of South Florida study released in advance of the ten-year anniversary of the spill, more than 2,500 fish across more than ninety species from 359 different Gulf locations were sampled from 2011 to as late as 2018, and toxic hydrocarbons from crude oil were found in every single fish sampled.11 Additionally, a University of Miami study from 2019 found that the footprint of the spill was actually 30 percent larger than was known at the time of the cleanup.12
Now imagine you were feeling moved to speak out against the ongoing horror of the BP spill. It would be difficult and time-consuming to gather up all the threads of these different, incremental disruptions. In contrast, it would be easy to post a link with a single, gruesome picture to social media of the flaming oil rig, of the underwater geyser, of a satellite image of the oil slick, or of a pelican doused in crude.
It would feel good immediately and for a moment, but it would reinforce the simplified, temporally narrow conception of what that frightening event was. It would emphasize the surface meaning only. It would be, in a hidden way, reassuring, because we knew the horror was over, and it happened more than a decade ago. Consider how depressing it is to think that the BP oil spill, in some ways, is still happening. Consider how depressing it is to think that there was another Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, and in 2014, and in 2016, and in 2017. Consider that the lesser-known Taylor oil spill has been happening in the Gulf of Mexico uninterrupted since 2004.
Bracketing traumatic events narrowly in time (just as with any “mission accomplished” language) relegates any lingering, subtle effects to the realm of the inconsequential. Antiscience governments, media, and industry all have an interest in calling our attention to violence that occurs in dramatic spasms. They all have an interest in encouraging us to believe that the spasm is the only violence that exists, and that the violence ceases when the spasm no longer holds our interest. This is how they reassure us that they have the situation under control.
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As a memoirist, I felt called by Rob Nixon, and his distinction between effective narratives and regressive narratives bears heavily on my work. I was molested when I was young, and it has had a subtle, accretive effect on my health. I have sleep disruptions. I have flashbacks. I’ve had disordered eating. I’ve had relationship problems. I’ve had sexual disruptions. I’ve had depression. I have phobias.
I write autobiographically about it, but I am vulnerable to writing my own regressive narrative at every turn. It sounds like, “I’m fine now because that trauma was just a brief, awful episode a very long time ago.” It sounds like self-pandering. This is how I reassure myself that I have my situation under control.
Nixon draws a parallel between the way perpetrators of ecocide—the resource extractors, the colonizers—dismiss our harmfulness and the way domestic abusers gaslight their victims.13 It’s a way of lying that becomes second nature to us as members of the wealthy Global North, and we do it communally, so it takes vigilant, conscious awareness and discipline to unlearn it, especially since we live in a media ecosystem that reassures and delights us continuously with the regressive narrative.
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We see the regressive narrative in our media ecosystem as the listicle. As the Taboola ad. As the disgruntled Facebook post. As the hit piece. The dunk. The takedown. Consider how easy it would be to watch the documentary Blackfish (2013) and crow to everyone on Instagram about how angry it made you. Now consider how hard it would be to find a stretch of coast without any digital or human distractions and contemplate the sea. Instagram is not conducive to alerting everyone, “I did a lot of thinking today, and I still don’t know the answers.” Outrage, health experts repeatedly observe, is habitual and self-reinforcing—in a word, addictive.14
So the regressive narrative is a grainy picture of a whale being hauled up by a whaling ship that leads people to cry for outlawing whaling.
The regressive narrative sums up the entire Vietnam War with a picture of Major General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing Nguyễn Văn Lém the streets of Saigon.15
The regressive narrative is an Italian man in redface crying a single tear by the side of a littered highway.16
The regressive narrative is an abortion activist holding up a poster-size image of an evacuated fetus.
The regressive narrative is filmmaker Michael Moore humiliating the actor Charlton Heston in advocacy of gun rights regulation.17
The regressive narrative is a pandemic described in terms of the staggering number of dead18 but also in the staggering number of vaccinated persons.19
The regressive narrative tries to make the description of the harm just as stunning as the harm itself. It’s the infliction of pain and fear as a substitute for communicating one’s pain. The regressive narrative consents to a form of discourse that it can’t win. The regressive narrative is punishment that doesn’t work—except as a numbing agent. But the distinction between the artful eco-activist narrative and the regressive narrative has higher stakes than good versus bad activism. The artful narrative is a method of liberation, and the regressive narrative is a doom obsession—it is a “slow violence” of the self and of one’s time and energy.
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Another cultural theorist, Byung-Chul Han, explores how our low tolerance for sober contemplation—our propensity for doom—can be leveraged against us, as if we are all strung-out addicts, to bend us gently to the whims of state and society. Our hopelessness, our numbness, our cynicism, and our fatigue all make us complacent. In Han’s book The Burnout Society, the whim of state and society is for us to have a productive, can-do attitude and leverage ourselves into vigilant, self-regulating drones, incapable of sustained self-reflection. He writes, “We owe the cultural achievements of humanity—which include philosophy—to deep, contemplative attention. . . . Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyper-attention.”20
Rob Nixon shares this concern with Han. In lectures, he has stated,
The present feels more abbreviated than it used to, at least for the privileged classes who live surrounded by technological time-savers which, ironically, often leave us feeling time poor. Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our rapidly eroding attentions to the slow erosions of environment justice. If under neoliberalism the gulf between the enclaved rich and the outcast poor is widening, ours is also an era of enclaved time where speed has become a self-justifying propulsive ethic and a kind of ethic of speed that renders so called “uneventful violence” a weak claimant on our time.21
Nixon quoted former Microsoft executive Linda Stone as saying, “We live in a state of continuous partial attention.”22
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As a writer, I try to undertake contemplation and meditation with the same commitment as regular exercise, but it’s hard because I like my iPhone too. I like the news media. I like social media. I like feeling informed but also put out and self-righteous. I take inspiration from my grandfather’s oil paintings and pastel drawings, which I keep around the apartment as family heirlooms. I look at them every day. I engage a different gaze with these analog objects than the hungry, frenetic gaze that is commanded by a digital screen. His self-portraits tell his life story in the aggregate. There’s anger and defiance in his tone palate and in his poses and especially in his eyes when he’s young, then pain and despondence, then, later in his life, warmth and acceptance.
It’s interesting to me, in a Rob Nixonian kind of way, that these artworks might, one day, outlive the worst consequences of the violence my grandfather (an alcoholic and drug addict) inflicted on others. I think it’s interesting that the pain that fueled his creative life was inflicted upon him by his father (a domestic abuser) and that the origin of his father’s pain probably could be traced back through generations of violent men.
My grandfather was not as contrite as he might have been late in life, and for some of my uncles, he was never entirely redeemed. He never lost his grandiose narcissism. The regressive narrative that lives in my family with regard to my grandfather is that he “used to be an alcoholic” and that he “used to be a different person” and that we’re all “much happier and healthier now.” This is how my family reassures itself that they have their situation under control. I think the more interesting narrative is how he stayed clean and sober for forty-odd years by looking at his reflection with a workman-like commitment and making a record of what he saw, and he made a long-term commitment to understanding the perpetrator in the mirror.
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In the wake of the environmental movement of the 1970s, a different Nixon, Richard Nixon, formed the EPA in 1970 and commissioned a giant photo project called DOCUMERICA—thousands of photographs of how polluted the country was at that bounded moment in time. It was the “before” picture for the nation’s makeover. The pictures lack context. Some of them are rather sentimental: a billowing smokestack,23 a single dead fish in a creek.24 In 1973, Nixon said this on Capitol Hill: “I can report to Congress that we are well on our way to winning the war with environmental degradation, well on our way to making peace with nature.”25 It’s hard to know whether to be shocked by the naivete or offended by the crass opportunism.
Rachel Carson is generally credited with helping precipitate the environmental movement of the 1970s by writing about DDT in Silent Spring in 1962, but she never commissioned a nationwide public service announcement or even specifically called for DDT’s ban. Instead she patiently explained in four hundred pages what DDT does to human and animal bodies and to populations over time.26
Rob Nixon’s champions—people like Rachel Carson and Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Ken Saro-Wiwa and Indra Sinha—are people who have devoted their lives to creating literary objects that hold a mirror to our behavior. Perhaps activists and audiences from the analog age didn’t have the fractured attention spans we do, didn’t have the temptation of doom scrolling. Sometimes it feels like Nixon’s question shouldn’t simply be how to illuminate slow violence. The question should be: Do we know what slow violence feels like? Do we know when it’s self-inflicted? How would we know if we had taken up the mantel of these regressive interests to poison ourselves, slowly, invisibly, and accretively? In our age of self-obsession, to be an activist, we might have to become auto-activists.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Florida State University’s Dr. Barry Faulk for helping with this essay and Haley Babcock for her loving support.
Notes
Rob Nixon, “Rob Nixon” [interview], 26:55.