The Fear We Feel Everyday: Affective Temporalities in Fridays for Future

In the recent wave of climate change activism, the entanglement between affects and time is everywhere. Anger and outrage channel energy toward the present as the moment to act; exasperation, betrayal, and resentment build on feelings of injustice and grievances that accumulate over time, while impatience is rooted in a deep restlessness for the pace of political times overall. Different emotions are tied to different temporal speeds and rhythms that have their own political meaning; there is fear at times that are approaching too fast (the looming prospects of tipping points), and deep frustration at other times that are both too short and too slow (the short-termism and political delays of electoral democracy); there is sadness and nostalgia at times that are now out of reach (the future is already gone). As summarized by Sighard Neckel and Martina Hasenfratz (2021: 254, quoting Aldoff and Neckel 2019), “Just as the imaginary worlds . . . oscillate between catastrophe, crisis and normalization, so do the corresponding emotions, which constitute an important expressive element of future imaginations.”

Yet, despite the ubiquity of both affects and time in the discourses of climate activists, recent works have focused either on time and temporality (Garrad 2019; Citton and Rasmi 2020; Houdek and Phillips 2020; de Moor 2021; Kenis 2021; see also other contributions to this collection) or on affects and emotions (Stuart 2020; Knops 2021; Pickard 2021). Few have looked at both dimensions simultaneously, leaving the intersection between time and affectivity underexplored in this specific context.

In this article, I argue that focusing on affects and emotions is crucial to understand the political implications of the temporal landscapes drawn by climate activists in a way that complements existing discussions along the binary of politicization vs. depoliticization (Swyngedouw 2011, 2018). In the discourses of Fridays for Future (FFF) and Youth for Climate (YfC) activists,¹ time is not just emptied out or depoliticized by fear-laden apocalyptic narratives, and it is not just homogenized into a now-or-never moment. Though this depoliticization does take place, it is mirrored by an affective process of repoliticization. Politics and the political are indeed inherently affective, such that the political is made possible only by the presence of competing affects and emotions (Lordon 2016; Mouffe 2018; Slaby and von Scheve 2019). From this angle, the “outbursts of political discontent” and “boiling rancor”—found in recent climate movements, among others—also point to new forms of politicization (Swyngedouw 2018: xvi). Within this affective understanding of the political, I borrow the terminology of Sarah Ahmed (2004, 2014) who uses affects and emotions interchangeably, along a relational, performative ontology. Under this interpretation, emotions and affects are political partly because they involve subjects and objects on multiple temporal scales at once; emotions and affects bind individuals to collective imaginaries by moving subjects sideways as well as forward or backward, by bringing in the “absent presence” of historicity (Ahmed 2004: 120) and evoking multiple futures into being.

To document the political labor performed by affects and emotions, I discuss three aspects of the affective temporalities deployed by climate activists. I first discuss the affective politics of tipping points, focusing on the affects that bring the temporality of geological change together with the temporality of climate mobilization and the moments that “draw a line.” I discuss the role of indignation as affective tipping point that triggers societal change, and the role of fear and panic in shifting subjects from “sleep” into “wakefulness.” Second, I discuss the role played by affects and emotions in the re-orientation of time. I focus in particular on how certain painful emotions, especially anticipatory nostalgia and grief, perform the counterhegemonic function of challenging the “modern arrow of time” (Latour 1993, 2018; Bensaude-Vincent 2021). Third, I discuss how these emotions, together, contribute to the development of a terrestrial affective identity and invite us to consider how futures can be brought “down to Earth” (Latour 2018; Latour and Schultz 2022).

The Moment That Draws a Line: The Affective Politics of Tipping Points

In recent years, the language of tipping points has become a key discursive apparatus to describe climate futures, from a climate science and Earth system science point of view (Nuttall 2012; Lenton et al. 2019). Geologically speaking, tipping points mean irreversible bifurcations: large-scale disruptions and discontinuities (Lenton et al. 2019: 592) in existing geophysical conditions (e.g., global temperature and atmospheric conditions). Beyond their climate implications on the scale of geological times, tipping points also carry an important affective dimension. As well described by Mark Nuttall (2012: 97), “According to the narrative of the tipping point, we are not just heading towards the future, it is approaching us with increasing speed.” It suggests both a linear trajectory toward a point of no return and a sense of accumulation, of overflowing—of something threatening that can no longer be contained. Greta Thunberg (2019: 6) translates this into the affective image of the “nightmare scenario”:

Beyond the nightmare scenario, climate activists express multiple affective reactions to the looming prospects of these tipping points. There are desperation and cries in the repeated calls to “act now!” because “time is running out” and “we are out of slogans, so just do something!”; there is fear in the reminders that “once upon a time, there was humanity” or that “I am sure Dinosaurs thought they had time too.”² Beyond the broad protest slogans, what is striking in the reactions of climate activists is their perception of reaching their own affective tipping points, in a way that directly resonates with the logic underpinning geological tipping points: moments that produce shifts, change, and irreversible transformations.

This is what Frédéric Lordon (2016) refers to, in affective terms, as the “thresholds of indignation,” which trigger social tipping points and bifurcations across society, moments of boiling anger that increase individuals’ capacity to act and create opportunities for radical social change (Knops and Petit 2022) or, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009: 235) describe, “the ground zero from which movements of revolt and rebellion develop.” In the specific context of FFF, affective tipping points are expressed through indignation (Knops 2021)—as a moment when inaction on climate change is no longer containable. As expressed by the leaders of the YfC in the early days of the movement, it was “the indignation that grew around our own kitchen tables, . . . to follow the actions of Greta Thunberg, the inspirer of all climate strikers across Europe. Around these tables, we decided to do something: it's going bad for the climate, we are angry, and we want to express that” (YfC public status post on Youth for Climate's Facebook page, February 4, 2019). Beyond indignation, these affective tipping points also materialize in the affective transformation that shifts bodies and subjects from sleeplessness and denial into wakefulness and action, what Thunberg often refers to as the need to shift from “hope” to “panic . . . to act as if your house is on fire, because it is” (Thunberg 2019: 18).

Affective and geological tipping points are brought together fluidly in the temporal landscapes drawn by climate activists: in the face of geological tipping points, activists reach their own points of bifurcation in the sense of no longer tolerating political inaction on climate change and deciding to “act.” In turn, these individual tipping points aim at triggering broader, large-scale disruptions across society, similar to how climate tipping points fundamentally disrupt geological conditions. Felix, a Belgian YfC activist, expressed this entanglement, with fear, dread, and disgust, by evoking the looming prospects of climate tipping points and the new “shitty” situation that will result from it, and tying this to “alarm bells” (the awakening), the feeling that “you don't quite realize what's coming” (some are still sleeping) and the need to act now, collectively: “We have to start dealing with it.”

The entanglement between affective tipping points and timelines of geological transformation (evoked explicitly, through mentions of temperature thresholds or mass extinction, or more implicitly through mentions of “what's coming” or “the alarm bells”) has political implications. To understand this, existing work on the affective politics of anticipation provides an interesting avenue.

On the one hand, the anticipation tied to geological tipping points produces a “palpable effect of the speculative future on the present” (Adams et al. 2009: 247), which in turn has a tendency to homogenize how we think, feel, and address contemporary problems. It creates a depoliticizing situation where “the present is governed, at almost every scale, as if the future is what matters most” (248) and where, as a result, political projects are designed along the epistemology of anticipation, forecast, probabilities, and the optimization of possible futures. On the other hand, the anticipation tied to tipping points acts as a binder of a collective identity, as the affective state that is “lived and felt by those dwelling within this compressed and forecastable time, binding collectivities of nation, class or globe” (249). In the particular case of FFF, this affective collective identity can be found in the emergence of a generational consciousness bundled together by a sense of urgency and collective responsibility: “We are the last generation with an opportunity to do something!”⁴

More fundamentally, geological and affective tipping points have political implications at the ontological level. Both climate and affective tipping points evoke images of a world that is not fixed and tied by firm boundaries but, rather, a world made of many worlds that are experiencing different thresholds, tipping points, and bifurcations of all kinds and where being wide awake is key: “A world of movement and surprise that challenges people and requires them to be attentive at all times; a prerequisite for survival is awareness and acknowledgement of the reality of this shifting world of turning points and re-emergence” (Nuttall 2012: 102). In turn, by projecting a vision of radical transformative moments, tipping points open the necessary political space of rupture with existing trajectories, the moments that that signal this “is where we draw the line”⁵ and “change is coming, whether you like it or not” (Thunberg 2019: 13).

In short, some of the affects and emotions entangled in the temporal narratives of climate activists have a dual politicizing effect: a stimulating potential in triggering moments of political awakening, and in opening a political imaginary made of change, bifurcation, and new types of affective identities.

The Sky Has Its Limits: Contesting Modern Times

In thinking about time and emotions in the FFF movements, it is impossible not to consider the affective-temporal entanglement that is trapped in the figure of our future “children and grandchildren”—a recurring subject in the discourses of climate activists. Alongside the depoliticizing effects of evoking one's own children and grand-children—in particular for the way this individualizes and homogenizes the terms of the debate⁶—the emotions that underpin these figures also have a politicizing potential in their ability to challenge the “modern arrow of time” (Latour 1993, 2014, 2018).

During a protest action, one young activist waved a banner saying “I want to have children, but not on Mars!” while others chanted “Please allow our children to have snowball fights.” Others apologized preemptively, anticipating, with a sense of guilt, the moment when future generations will hold them to account: “Dear future generations, we are sorry”; “We won't be able to tell our children that we didn't know.”⁷ There is a multiplicity of emotions at play here. There is a particular type of fear tied to future conditions of uninhabitability, what Yves Citton and Jacopo Rasmi (2020: 17) describe as a state of being “terrified by our attachments to a planet that most of our behaviour is making uninhabitable.” There is also a sense of longing for worlds that hypothetical future children may never experience, ranging from the basic needs of clean air and water to the more lighthearted experience of snowball fights and fun. And there are also more complex emotions at hand, for example, anticipatory nostalgia and grief, which have distinctive political and temporal implications.

Anticipatory nostalgia, for example, is an affect that brings together multiple temporalities in an overlapping, circular way: it is rooted in an “imagined future that gives rise to missing what will be someday past, yet still present” (Batcho 2020: 2). It opens a political space where the future is critically examined against what has been done by previous generations and what may never become, if certain choices or decisions are not made today. A variation of this is well captured by Maxime, an eighteen-year-old YfC activist who expressed a range of anticipatory and retrospective feelings, both his own feelings toward “maybe starting family,” albeit in a world where the air quality would be too bad, and confessing his mother's retrospective guilt in bringing him into this world: “I have thought about it . . . ; of one day, maybe, starting a family . . . But what if the air quality worsens even more? . . . It's quite harsh, but even my Mum has already told me things, like, ‘I am sorry to have brought you into this world.’”⁸ Next to this, activists continuously express a sense of grief. This is evoked, amongst others, through images of death—“You will die of old age, we will die from climate change!”⁹—but also in the diffuse feelings of “loss of a future characterized by hope” (Head 2016: 2). From “stop stealing our future” to “future in danger” or “don't burn our future,”¹⁰ images of a dead future are plentiful. They signal both a sense of longing for a habitable future but also a sense of grief for certain futures that will never return. As Thunberg summarizes, “The future was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit and that you only live once. You lied to us. You gave us false hope” (Thunberg 2019: 35).

Together, the emotions expressed by climate activists vis-à-vis futures that are imagined as lost, stolen, or sold—be it their own or the futures of hypothetical future children—politicize time in a fundamental way. They challenge the injunction to remain permanently optimistic toward the future that has enabled modernity—and modern capitalism in particular—to sustain and reinvent itself over time. In particular, both grief and anticipatory nostalgia perform the counterhegemonic function of challenging the “modern arrow of time” (Latour 1993, 2014, 2018), made of upward trajectories and the indefectible enthusiasm for technological progress and economic growth.

This is particularly true for the grief expressed by climate activists. It is a distinctive type of grief that contrasts with well-documented forms of environmental grief for the physical loss of species, habitats and ecosystems—what Mike Hulme (2009, cited in Head 2016: 6) calls the “Lamenting of Eden,” which implies a desire to return “nature” to its “primitive” state. The grieving of lost futures that is expressed by climate activists does not lament Eden or demand to return to a past imagined as golden, stable, or pristine. It directly concerns the current direction of times and its physical impossibility, the fact that “there is no planet B!” Grief, in this regard, is distinctive from its close neighbor melancholia. While the latter traps subjects in the hope that a lost object may return in the future, the former allows us “to finally free ourselves from the lost object” (Neckel and Hasenfratz 2021: 263). From this perspective, the grief expressed by climate activists can be seen as a form of political emancipation and resistance: resisting and opposing the modern pressure “not to be a doom and gloom merchant” (Head 2016: 2), and attempting to free themselves from past worlds all together. This is well captured in some activists’ rejection of capitalism, perceived as part of the reason that our futures have been stolen; they see capitalism as “the main problem,” a historical cause of climate change, a “disease”—not something that should be kept alive but, rather, something we need “to tear ourselves from.”¹¹

Overall, the negative, more painful emotions expressed by climate activists, especially grief, may be seen as the starting point and condition of their counterhegemonic struggle (Gonzalez-Hidalgo and Zografos 2020); they offer a starting point to redirect the arrow of time, away from the horizon of “the sky is the limit” and toward the acceptance that this horizon is neither feasible nor desirable. As summarized by Lesley Head (2016: 7), grief becomes a key part of how to envisage alternative futures: “Not as something we can deal with and move on from, but rather something that we must acknowledge and hold if we are to enact any kind of effective climate politics.”

Bringing Futures Down to Earth

Beyond the politicizing effects of affects and emotions in triggering moments of political awakening and redirecting the modern arrow of time, the affective temporalities of climate activists also inform us on a broader dynamic of politicization, especially regarding new political conflicts in the age of climate change, in which activists are just one protagonist. Going back to an understanding of the political as inherently affective or, in the words of Glenn Albrecht (2020), as unfolding within a “war of emotions,” the affective temporalities expressed by climate activists signal the existence of a broader conflict: between those who imagine futures on Earth and others who project futures beyond its boundaries, be it through the maintenance of green-techno-capitalist projects or plans to move, literally, out in space. In particular, by pointing toward the earth under their feet, climate activists’ desires and feelings of belonging contribute to the emergence of a posthuman affective identity rooted in the recognition of being Earth-bound or, as Latour (2018) describes, being terrestrial.

This is illustrated, for example, in the variety of slogans and discursive constructions where climate activists express a sense of affective imitation and compassion toward Earth, sometimes explicitly positioning themselves as part and parcel of it: “I stand for what I stand on”; we are the “Earth Love Club”; “We are the climate”; “Like the sea-levels, we rise”; “We are nature defending itself”; “I have an Earth-ache”; or “Our planet = our future.”¹² These slogans indicate how activists imagine their futures—as tightly connected to the habitability of planet Earth—but also where they locate them, from a spatial and material point of view. In contrast to the dreams of “take-off” that have driven Western societies to develop beyond terrestrial boundaries (Sloterdijk 2003; Citton and Rasmi 2020), climate activists are dreaming of habitable land down here on Earth. Maybe they have understood that: “Going to Mars is not going towards the future—going to Mars is like heading to the past, a past before Life arrived, when planet Earth was simply dead” (Schultz 2021: 2).

To be sure, images of a dying planet—and the futures they bring into being—have often been seen as depoliticizing. Here, the argument goes that images of a homogeneous planet tend to reproduce a depoliticizing situation where Earth is disconnected from the troubled and conflicting histories tied to different groups of humans and nonhumans. Overall, the planetary perspective, partly inherited from recent climate sciences and invoked through the images of “our” planet, is said to gloss over the inequalities and historical forms of domination that riddle the history of humans as a species (Swyngedouw 2011; Kenis and Lievens 2015; Chakrabarty 2018). This is certainly the case, and the affective temporalities of climate activists contribute to this, too. However, the emotions and affects tied to images of a dying Earth or reminders that “there is no planet B!”—fear, grief, compassion, and indignation—also have a distinctive politicizing potential. They draw a line between competing affects and groups in society, between the humility of recognizing terrestrial attachments and interdependencies and the remaining delirious passions tied to the “sky is the limit” imaginary. Ultimately, when activists say that “there is no planet B” or that “I want to have children but not on Mars,” they are, in their own ways, contributing to the much-needed development of a collective desire to remain on Earth and find “new arts of living on a damaged planet” (Tsing et al. 2017). In particular, by expressing attachments to Earth, right here and now and as desired place for the future, they contribute to the emergence of a posthuman collective identity that is Earth-bound or terrestrial (Latour 2018): a collective affective state that includes all humans and nonhumans dwelling on Earth and that challenges both anthropocentric collective identities and emerging forms of tech-led transhumanism that continue to fuel the no-limit imaginary.

While climate activists provide only a tentative step in that direction, this still has implications for the rest of society and sheds a distinctive political light on their affective temporalities. Through their affective engagement with geological tipping points, their grieving for lost futures and imaginaries of futures that can only take place on Earth, activists invite us to further investigate the composition of this terrestrial affective identity. They encourage us to consider what kinds of emotions and affects will be needed to shift society's enthusiasm and passion for “the far and beyond” and redirect it toward Earth, in an inclusive, just, and emancipatory manner. In a context that is still dominated by affects of fear and fatigue in some parts of society (Latour and Schultz 2022: 41) and feelings of injustice in others, they invite us to reflect on what will be needed to trigger passionate engagement, across society, for questions of terrestrial interdependency and habitability in a finite world.

This research was carried out under the FNRS-FWO Excellence of Science funding (grant G0F0218N) and Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek–Vlaanderen (FWO) grant G062917N (2017–21). The author warmly thanks the coeditors and authors of this special issue for all their valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and all activists who agreed to take part in the research carried out during the years 2019–21. Their actions and energy are what inspired the reflections presented in this article.

Notes

References