New Materialism and the Eco-Marxist Challenge: Ontological Shadowboxing in the Environmental Humanities

Abstract

In recent years, the critical vocabulary of the environmental humanities has shifted. After a decade burgeoning with new materialist explorations of intra-active entanglements and nonhuman vitalities, scholars are today becoming increasingly interested in the environmental effects of capitalism, its ecological rifts, fossil economy, and omnipresent wastescapes. Driving this shift is a reinvigoration of eco-Marxist thinking, which not only offers new focus points but also launches philosophical polemics against the field’s longstanding turn to matter. Facing these polemics, scholars in the environmental humanities are currently facing a difficult choice: should we opt for an “old” or a “new” materialism? This essay argues that this confrontation between new materialism and eco-Marxism pivots not on ontological differences, as is often assumed, but on diverging attitudes toward critical methodologies. It claims specifically that many of the recent polemics practice a kind of philosophical shadowboxing that blurs a more fundamental disagreement about the role and status of “critique.” Staging an encounter between Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm (2018) and Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux (2020), the essay makes its case by demonstrating, first, how an attachment to critical methodologies drives eco-Marxists to polemicize against ontologies that, in fact, resemble their own. It then shows how new materialists advance such ontologies to supplement these critical methodologies with more affectively engaged modes of scholarship. By framing the debate in this way, the essay ultimately aims to push back against the methodological dogmatism of eco-Marxists who take critique to be the only legitimate mode of inquiry.

In recent years, the critical vocabulary of the environmental humanities has shifted. After a decade burgeoning with new materialist explorations of intra-active entanglements and nonhuman vitalities, scholars are today becoming increasingly interested in the environmental effects of capitalism, its ecological rifts, fossil economy, and omnipresent wastescapes.¹ Driving this shift is a reinvigoration of eco-Marxist thinking, which, judged by sheer quantity alone, has increased significantly in popularity within the past decade.² And yet, as these lines of thought move to the foreground, we are not only offered a new set of focus points but also confronted with a new set of intellectual challenges. At the very least, the eco-Marxist boom drags with it a string of polemics against the field’s longstanding turn to matter, conjuring up an array of fundamental philosophical dilemmas that urge us to pick a side:³ Does Deleuzian monism or Hegelian dialectics point the way forward? What qualifies as collective agency? Should we opt for an “old” or “new” materialism?

At first sight, this confrontation between new materialism and eco-Marxist theory looks like a rehash of well-known ontological disputes. When the movement of new materialism gathered momentum in the first decade of the new millennium, some new materialists not only pushed back against the textualism of various forms of social constructionism but also framed new materialism as an alternative to Marxist materialisms and their alleged determinism. With one hand, they dismissed social constructivism for rendering matter a blank page for social inscriptions; with the other, they rejected historical materialism for hypostasizing the economy as a material base and downgrading ideology, discourse, and semiotics as mere epiphenomena.⁴ By contrast, new materialism itself steered toward a middle course: a poststructuralist version of materialism that recognized the contingent and unpredictable entanglement of all sorts of material and cultural forces. Rather than relegating these forces to dichotomous poles in an ontological hierarchy, new materialists recast matter and discourse as mutually interdependent, or intra-active, as it were, constantly unfolding and coevolving in complex and multifaceted ways. No longer the driver of a historical teleology or a blank screen for cultural projections, materiality unfurled in “bio-social assemblages,” “material-semiotic fields,” “socio-material flesh,” “nature-cultures,” and so on.⁵

This new materialist departure from Marxist materialism, however, does not square well with contemporary eco-Marxist scholarship. Here, the model of base versus superstructure has been abandoned in favor of more relational frameworks, as scholars now quarrel about what kind of dialectic best articulates the relationship between nature and culture. Today, John Bellamy Foster argues for a dialectical recognition of “ecological rifts”; Jason W. More advocates a Marxist dialectic of “bundles”; and Andreas Malm claims that only so-called property dualism captures the “dialectics between nature and society.”⁶ While these scholars have loudly accused each other over the past couple of years for being either too dualist or too monist, they all converge in their commitment to dialectic models and in that sense ultimately recognize both the interdependency of nature and culture and the respective autonomy of these categories.⁷ As ontologies, their views acknowledge that nature is not wholly untouched by culture, while at the same time emphasizing nature as the hotbed of processes and activities that unfold beyond the realm of culture.

Phrased like this, though, these theories do not sound incompatible with the new materialist project. Even for a scholar like myself who has been quite involved in the advancement of new materialism, it is often difficult to tell them apart. After all, new materialism also committed itself to this balancing act of respecting the ontological status of nature without eradicating the significance of culture. And to be sure, if the teleological determinism of old Marxist materialism is abandoned, there are certainly a good number of similarities between eco-Marxist dialectics of nature and society and new materialist intra-actions of matter and discourse. In both cases, nature and culture are related, yet not conflated; they affect each other without determining one another. In that sense, even though the current theoretical confrontation is often framed as an ontological dilemma, it is not major ontological discrepancies that set new materialists and contemporary eco-Marxists apart.

But then, what does set them apart? Why does the advancement of eco-Marxist theory come with a string of philosophical polemics against new materialism if we’re only dealing with minor ontological revisioning? Why all this fuss about dialectics and intra-action if it is often hard to tell the difference? What’s really at stake in the present disputes?

In this essay, I want to argue that the current confrontation between new materialism and eco-Marxist theory pivots not on ontological differences but on diverging attitudes toward critical methodologies. I am claiming, in other words, that many of the recent contributions to these debates practice a kind of ontological shadowboxing that ultimately blurs a more fundamental disagreement about the role and status of critique. In what follows, I will make my case by demonstrating, first, how an attachment to critical methodologies pushes eco-Marxists to polemicize against ontologies that, in fact, resemble their own. I will then show how new materialists advance such ontologies with reference to the need to supplement these critical methodologies with more affectively engaged modes of scholarship. I will do both by setting up an encounter between two recent publications by leading scholars from each side of the aisle, namely, on the one hand, Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm (2018), a more than two-hundred-page critique of trendsetting scholars within and around the field of new materialism, and, on the other, Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux (2020), the follow-up to her influential Vibrant Matter (2010), which implicitly engages with intermediate debates about new materialism. By focusing on these two scholars as contrary poles in a larger dispute, I obviously risk reducing the diversity of both new materialist and eco-Marxist scholarship.⁸ Yet in doing so, I hope to gain a way of sharply delineating the diverging principles at stake in these debates, while remembering that Bennett and Malm only make up two instances in much more fuzzy and ambiguous fields. With these complexities in mind, the essay ultimately aims to push back against the methodological dogmatism of eco-Marxists who take critique to be the only legitimate mode of inquiry.

How to Dismiss (Your Own) Monism: Andreas Malm

Andreas Malm is often credited with suggesting the Capitalocene as a historical concept that underscores the planetary impact of capitalism in our contemporary era.⁹ But Malm is also the author of one of the most comprehensive critiques of new materialism to date. In The Progress of This Storm, he undertakes the task of summarizing and unpacking a string of eco-Marxist objections, all of which essentially dismiss new materialist ontologies as politically dubious. On closer inspection, however, the ontologies refuted nevertheless resemble those proposed by eco-Marxists themselves.

In this very vocal and direct critique, Malm argues that new materialist ontologies blur distinctions between nature and society in ways that are both conceptually and philosophically problematic. They do so, first and foremost, by robbing humans of their exclusive capacity to act by distributing agency to all sorts of beings, human as well as nonhuman. In their attempt to push back against the textualism of social constructivism, new materialists simply go too far in rendering matter rather than discourse the foundation of all actions, and consequently, Malm insists, they level out significant differences between human and nonhuman forms of existence. “Everything is a blur of hybrids,” the back cover tells us; yet in this warming world, “it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social.” For how are we to identify the roots of climate change if our theories cannot tell Anthropos from the rest of nature? After all, humans did this, not ants and trees.

As Malm lays out his own ontology, however, things get complicated. For new materialists, at least, he begins to sound more like a distant relative than a mortal enemy. Take Malm’s definition of nature, which seems to designate the very same phenomenon that new materialists refer to with their idea of nonhuman agency. Following Kate Soper, Malm takes nature as “the material structures and processes that are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product), and whose forces and causal powers are the necessary conditions of every human practice, and determine the possible forms it can take.”¹⁰ Nature, by this account, harnesses forces that are not controlled by humans but in fact condition human practices. Nature is beyond our reach, yet in many ways shapes us. It is characterized by powers that both transcend and transfuse humanity. While new materialists might describe this feature of natural forces in the rather different vocabulary of autonomy, autopoiesis, vitality, or, again, agency, they’re nevertheless aiming at a very similar dynamic.¹¹ In the end, both stress the ability of nonhuman forces to do stuff without the help of culture, and that this doing ultimately penetrates and regulates any human.

In that sense, Malm actually does recognize some degree of overlap between nature and culture, even as he argues for maintaining their respective distinctiveness. In fact, like most new materialists, he embeds these domains in the very same substance, confessing explicitly to a materialist monism of sorts. “The entwinement of social and natural relations,” he writes, “is made not only possible but inevitable, given that the two are continuous parts of the material world.”¹² According to Malm, however, this monism should not be conflated with the monism of new materialism, which, we’re told, differs significantly. In Malm’s account, new materialist monism implies a flat ontology that attributes the same properties to all entities and beings, whereas his own stance acknowledges the distinct features that distinguish humans from nonhumans. Conceptualizing these features as “emergent properties” that arise randomly through the history of evolution, Malm accounts for the particular qualities of humans (intentionality being his main example) without relapsing into metaphysical dichotomies. The name he provides for this account is “substance monist materialist property dualism.”¹³

However, while most new materialists scorn the vocabulary of dialectics and dualism, they nevertheless do acknowledge the differences that set humans and nonhumans apart. Thinkers like Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz, Stacy Alaimo, and, of course, Jane Bennett may spend most of their time highlighting similarities, stressing the more-than-human quality of human corporeality for instance,¹⁴ but none of these scholars takes human and nonhuman species to be one and the same thing. The point here is not to erase these differences altogether, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost emphasize in their oft-cited introduction to New Materialisms (2010), but to underscore that “the difference between humans and animals, or even between sentient and nonsentient matter, is a question of degree more than of kind.”¹⁵ And surprisingly, like Malm, several new materialists—Jane Bennett or Elizabeth Grosz, for instance—even explain the making of these differences in the very same terms of emergence and evolution.¹⁶

The Dogma of Critique

Now, this ontological similarity between Malm and his targets surely raises a lot of questions. If Malm’s ontology shares key features with those suggested by new materialists, why care so much about refuting the latter? What’s the actual driver of this polemic if not substantial disagreements about the relation between nature and society? These questions could obviously be approached by a lot of ways, but the main key to answering them, I believe, hides in the specific rhetoric that drives The Progress of This Storm.

Here a distinctive pattern arises. Malm’s favorite rhetorical move is to pick a provocative concept from the new materialist vocabulary and then extend its implications into absurdity. Known within the study of rhetoric as “reductio ad absurdum,” this move allows Malm to rebut new materialism by presenting its consequences as unacceptable. So new materialists think matter is alive? ”No one would ask CO₂ molecules to come down from the heavens or demand that the oil platforms scrap themselves and pay their victims.”¹⁷ So new materialists think that agency is distributed across human and nonhuman actants? “One can imagine how this line of reasoning could enter international climate negotiations. It was not us who initiated coal consumption or emitted the CO₂; it was the swarm of actants that caught us up in their whirlwind.”¹⁸ If new materialist vocabularies, Malm continues, “are to have any meaning in our case, we really are instructed to believe that deposits have agency as against those who excavate them, that coal and clouds have acted as outside powers, that non-human species were as much endeavoring to consume fossil fuels all along.”¹⁹

As these examples suggest, Malm’s argument builds largely on a rhetoric of ridicule. Look at all these silly new materialists! Their founding concepts are absurd! And yet, as much as experiences of absurdity can seem self-evident, what qualifies as absurd is not simply given. As Foucault reminds us, any delineation between meaningful and absurd propositions depends upon the norms of their specific epistemic contexts. What is attributed meaning, in other words, is altogether contingent on the criteria for meaning-making of the discursive regime in question.²⁰ By this line of thinking, the question, then, becomes not whether Malm is right or not, but what epistemic premises enable his ridicule. Or, put differently, what norms about academic scholarship render the new materialist vocabulary nonsensical?

Let’s return to the claim that new materialism would lead us to ask oil platforms to scrap themselves and pay their victims. Why is this funny? Well, it’s funny because of the absurdity of holding oil platforms accountable. New materialism, in other words, is ridiculed for its inability to place responsibility, and in other passages, Malm himself quite explicitly confirms this logic. At the very least, the notion of responsibility becomes particularly important as Malm advances his main argument. In the case of global warming, he writes, new materialism’s extension of agency ultimately inhibits us from pointing out the wrongdoings of humans.²¹ In fact, by bestowing nonhuman entities with the ability to act, new materialists even participate in a “whitewashing” of sorts.²² For how are we to critique those in power if human agency is distributed across human and nonhuman actants? “The only sensible thing to do now is to put a stop to the extension of agency,” Malm writes: “In this warming world, that honor belongs exclusively to those humans who extract, buy, sell and combust fossil fuels, and to those who uphold this circuit, and to those who have committed these acts over the past two centuries.”²³

To be sure, a lot could be said about these passages, but what interests me in this context is the consistent assumption that the aim of new materialism should be to hold people responsible. In Malm’s account, new materialists are expected to locate the social and historical drivers of global warming and condemn those who support these drivers.²⁴ When all is said and done, he writes, “it will all be a question of responsibility,”²⁵ and for that reason, “any theory for the warming condition” should not only struggle to stabilize the climate but do so “with the demolition of the fossil economy as the necessary first step.”²⁶

It is clear that phrases like these inscribe Malm in a larger trend in cultural theory to frame critique as the only legitimate mode of inquiry. By this logic, critique is not merely one of several optional approaches but a necessary component of any theory, as it were. Here, it all comes down to holding people responsible. At work in this line of thinking, as Rita Felski and others have noted, is a kind of methodological dogmatism that validates scholars who aim to demystify false beliefs and denounce societal arrangements, while simultaneously delegitimizing those who operate by other means as nonsensical or even politically dubious.²⁷ While dominant in a wide range of fields and disciplines, this dogmatism, however, is particularly salient in eco-Marxist critiques of new materialism. In addition to Malm, consider Carl Cassegård, who criticizes Bennett for “an uncritical” attitude that allegedly prohibits her from using macro-level concepts to critique capitalism.²⁸ Or take John B. Foster who scorns Bruno Latour’s “method of neutral monism” for not challenging “capital accumulation and unlimited economic growth.”²⁹ In such accounts, all roads lead to critiques of capital, and the cardinal sin is to refrain from joining the eco-Marxist project. It is hardly surprising, then, that the new materialist vocabulary comes across as absurd. Judged by the epistemic premises of critique alone, it certainly doesn’t make much sense to extend agency beyond the realm of culture. What good would it do to identify the acts of ants and trees, if the final aim is to critique and hold accountable? After all, nature doesn’t care if we debunk its doings.

Yet most new materialists do not extend agency with the primary aim of critiquing the acts of ants and trees. In fact, several key figures have explicitly distanced themselves from the traditional methodologies of critique. Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz, as diverse as these scholars may be, all frame new materialism as an opportunity to precisely move beyond “the usual critical gestures” and experiment with other routes than ”the well-worn path of critique.”³⁰ Malm’s ridicule, then, ultimately builds on false premises, or at least on a set of epistemic assumptions about the role and purpose of academic scholarship that is not shared by those he portrays. He takes critique to be the ultimate horizon of the new materialist project, even as many new materialists have moved beyond critique in its conventional forms. In The Progress of This Storm, then, new materialism looks absurd only because key premises are left out. Undoubtedly, this is the textbook definition of a straw man.

From Responsibility to Response-Ability: Jane Bennett

So far, I’ve argued that eco-Marxist polemics often disguise themselves as philosophical disputes about ontology, while actually advocating a methodological dogmatism that takes critique to be the only legitimate mode of analysis. I’ve also argued that in the case of Malm this maneuver manifests itself in a rhetoric of ridicule that frames new materialists as absurd by leaving out their alternatives to critique. Now, however, it’s time to explore what these alternatives are all about. What’s the methodological purpose of advancing materialist ontologies through the language of agency and vitality?

To underscore the obvious, new materialists do not aim to swap one methodological dogmatism with another. Unlike Malm, they generally do not see their academic practice as an apt lens for any theory on global warming regardless of specific research questions, cases, or contexts. By contrast, some even argue explicitly for a methodological pluralism, in which different types of intervention work side by side. Take Jane Bennett’s recent book Influx and Efflux (2020), which opens with an acknowledgment of the importance of critique in our current political climate.³¹ Yet this importance does not mean that other modes of intervention should be abandoned or fought off. Rather than putting all our eggs in one basket, she writes, we need a wide array of analytical and intellectual tools. Bennett’s own aim, accordingly, is not to “supplant” critique but to “supplement” critique.³²

New materialist ontologies are an integral part of that endeavor. By extending “agency” beyond the realm of culture, Bennett seeks not to make ants and trees vulnerable to critique, as Malm would have it, but to help us recognize, affectively and perceptively, our minuscule role in a much larger cosmos, hoping that we’ll act with less superciliousness and self-centeredness. By learning about the ability of nonhumans to act, the logic goes, we may develop alternative feelings about our environment. In that sense, Bennett’s project is to render our mode of perception less anthropocentric and, in doing so, enhance our ability to respond to the multitudes of life within and around us, human as well as nonhuman. Rather than placing “responsibility,” Bennett hopes to cultivate what Donna Haraway has dubbed “response-ability.”³³ We need to be able to respond to life-forms, things, and activities that have hitherto often been relegated to the background of our existence. If we do so, by this line of thinking, we’re not whitewashing but teaching ourselves to care more.

For scholars of critique, this endeavor to help us care more by modulating affective dispositions and perceptual habits can come across as inferior, unambitious, or simply not political enough. Without tackling this issue head-on, Malm, for instance, is quick to reject theories that commit the “pathetic fallacy.”³⁴ But for the new materialist, affective mobilization is crucial. Without affect, there’s nothing to drive societal change. We can be deeply convinced about what kind of society we prefer or what kinds of actions we approve, but if these convictions are not propelled by corporeal impulses, sentiments, and habits, they’re like a car without an engine (or battery, of course). Political norms about right and wrong, ethical ideas about good and bad, they all need incarnation to work. “If [an ethical code] is to be transformed into acts,” Bennett writes, “affects must be engaged, orchestrated, and libidinally bound to it—codes alone seem unable to propel their own enactment.”³⁵ This also explains why so many of us are hypocrites, acting in contrast to what we believe in. For new materialists, this is not an issue of false consciousness but an issue of inadequate affective response.

By advising us to speak about nonhumans as “lively,” “agential,” and even “intentional,” new materialists suggest a way of changing these patterns of response, hoping that such terminological anthropomorphizations seep down from the realm of reflection to the realm of corporal dispositions, inculcating a new set of response-abilities. The new materialist vocabulary, the logic goes, is particularly apt for this purpose because it diverges from established anthropocentric regimes of truth in which humans are perceived as alive and active and nonhumans, in contrast, as dead and passive. For that precise reason, though, this vocabulary can also come across as inaccessible, as some scholars have rightfully objected. Toril Moi, for instance, sarcastically describes Vicky Kirby’s writing as “willfully opaque,”³⁶ and Malm notes similarly that new materialist texts often resemble “poetry,” adding with evident skepticism: “a noble enterprise different from critical research.”³⁷ And yet, while the inaccessible style of some new materialists indeed is problematic, I don’t think we should be so quick to lament its poetic qualities. As I’ve argued elsewhere, new materialists often incorporate such stylistic features to precisely make their terminological innovations more accessible.³⁸ For these scholars, practices of fabulation, speculation, and storytelling appear to be attractive epistemological devices for changing affective and perceptual dispositions. It’s no coincidence that Influx and Efflux takes the poetry of Walt Whitman as its main source of inspiration.

Whitman’s poetry is key here because it allows Bennett to move beyond traditional academic writing by mixing philosophical discourse with affective imagery of post-anthropocentric ontologies. Without producing outright fiction, Bennett adopts and transforms Whitman’s many fictionalizing devices—anthropomorphizations, visions, metaphors, and so on—all of which depart from anthropocentric regimes of truth by inventing new ways of feeling and seeing the world. Bennett’s fascination with Whitman—and Franz Kafka and Henry D. Thoreau, for that matter—begins and ends with the endeavor to help us grasp her ontologies not only cognitively but also affectively. And, just to underscore the popularity of this move in new materialist scholarship, similar interest in fiction drives significant parts of Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures (2010), Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), Rebekah Sheldon’s The Child to Come (2016), and Astrida Neimanis’s Bodies of Water (2017).

To clarify, it’s not that the critical tradition does not also work by affective means. Even a figure like Malm, who stresses reflection as a means to counter emotional impulses, disavowing the pathetic fallacy, he too writes in ways that modulate the affective dispositions of his readers. To expose social injustices, to debunk false ideologies, to uncover the environmental consequences of the fossil economy surely has emotional effects, prompting a sense of indignation, urgency, and anger, which may, hopefully, propel some kind of action. In a certain sense, this is how cultural theory in general works. Malm may place responsibility in his academic writing, yet he has no juridical means to enforce his judgments. All he has is the potential to move people by affecting their worldviews, sentiments, and patterns of response. In contrast to Malm, new materialists strongly emphasize the importance of such affective modulations and allow this emphasis to open new venues for scholarly intervention. For if critical debunking works primarily by providing arguments and ideas that inculcate a sense of indignation and anger, then other kinds of theories may intervene by mobilizing other affective registers. Hence, new materialism’s fascination for care, concern, enchantment, and joy.³⁹

Some scholars may associate the latter affective register with a happy-go-lucky and hippie-like feel that can seem harmless. On closer inspection, however, there’s unquestionably a gendered aspect to such an association. At the very least, it’s a striking coincidence that the affective dimension offered here by primarily feminist new materialists is ignored completely by Malm, who, like many other eco-Marxists, happens to identify as male.⁴⁰ And yet, as much as the affective register of care, concern, and joy is often coded as feminine, this register is not necessarily less powerful than the affects triggered by critique. Each register fuels our engagements with the world and can accordingly, if mobilized correctly, stimulate us to pursue more sustainable ecologies. “If the political,” Bennett writes, “is acknowledged to include all the affects and energies—affirmative and negative—with the potential for societal transformation, then Influx and Efflux can qualify as (among other genres) a political work.”⁴¹ In that sense, the new materialist interest in ontology is driven also by a methodological aim: to reconfigure affective patterns of response and incite more positive engagements with the world.

Beyond Dogmatism

What I have tried to stress here, ultimately, is that eco-Marxists risk excluding a potentially significant supplement to critical methodologies if they fail to acknowledge such affective experiments as legitimate intellectual endeavors. As we have seen in the work of Malm, this is sometimes the case because of a deep-rooted methodological dogmatism that leads eco-Marxists to dismiss alternatives to critique as absurd or even politically dubious. In fact, it drives Malm to polemicize against the ontological foundation of these alternatives even though this foundation resembles his own.

To be clear, my point is not that these resemblances should lead all eco-Marxists and new materialists to join forces. As much as their respective positions may permit an ontological reconciliation, such a tenet could easily result in a one-size-fits-all methodology that would end up making us all do one and the same thing. Rather than methodological homogeneity, I believe we need methodological pluralism (not to be mistaken for methodological relativism). And so, I actually welcome eco-Marxism’s rise for widening the scope of possible modes of inquiry. At the same time, though, I also hope that its main advocates will drop the habit of disqualifying alternative perspectives simply because they operate on different epistemic premises. In the environmental humanities, as well as most other academic contexts, we do not need one Theory to rule them all. What we need is a broad array of tools and perspectives.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Marie Louise Krogh, Martin Karlsson Pedersen, Karl Emil Rosenbæk, Martin Rohr Gregersen, Mati Klitgård, Mads Ejsing, Valdemar Nielsen Pold, and Nicolai Skiveren for valuable feedback on various versions of my essay as well as Jacob Rosendahl, Søren Mau, and Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen for reading and discussing Malm’s and Moore’s work with me. I would also like to thank the sharp and lively audiences at “Capital, Climate, Crisis,” the 6th annual conference for the Danish Society for Marxist Studies, and “Ecofiction in the Capitalocene,” an annual workshop arranged by the Aesthetics of Empire research cluster at Linnaeus University, where I initially presented my critique of The Progress of This Storm. And finally, my funding: The writing of this essay was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (2102-00187B).

Notes

References