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Addressing climate change in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais demands collaboration across traditional bureaucratic divisions. While the team officially tasked with devising climate plans falls under the purview of the Secretary of the Environment, their efforts to reduce vulnerability to climate change and support those already suffering its effects have brought them into many uneasy alliances. These efforts ranged from acquiring funding or technical support from European partners with fundamentally different views of environmental projection, to securing logistical aid from Civil Defense which was a part of the Mineiro military cabinet, to encouraging cooperation from the major economic institutions primarily focused around mining and agriculture. Working with these different groups necessitated that climate analysts become adept at shifting their rhetorical framing from audience to audience, but this work carried great ethical and practical risk. Were the climate scientists acting cynically when they adopted rhetoric they did not fully believe? Were they being naïve in trusting partners who may not genuinely value climate justice? What kinds of self-reflection might assist climate analysts and STS scholars in our efforts to grapple with the moral complexities of climate governance? 

Image Source: Ricardo Moraes/Reuters, "Deadly dam burst in Brazil prompts calls for stricter mining regulations," The Guardian, 10, November 2015.

Wald, Jonathan. 2023. "Beyond Cynicism and Naïveté: Ethical Complexities of Climate Governance." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

I think Spivak's "Subaltern Studies Deconstructing Historiography" could offer two interventions:

(1) First, her notion of "cognitive failure" is helpful to understand how COVID-19 is unfolding. For her, it is not being able to grapple the object of analysis: “Unless the subject separates from itself to grasp the object, there is no cognition, indeed no thinking, no judgment.” She writes this statement to talk about the Marxist and anti-humanist tendency to abhor cognitive failure and see it as inducing paralysis. For Marx and Gramsci, for example, this has been a question of the proletariat class recognizing that they are excluded from the labor of their own bodies, through which their shared consciousness can arise.

For Spivak, however, through her critique of the Subaltern Studies collective,  there is no escape from cognitive failure. Just as it is okay that the collective will not be able to speak for the subaltern as much as there is value in it, it is alright to not be able to grapple. The COVID-19 moment is instructive of failures upon failures: failure of neoliberalism, of the nation-state, of parochial activism, of scholarly projects. It is a failure of not being able to do anything even though we have a shared consciousness of failure. It is a failure of being able to be a person, or even being mourned with dignity. Spivak, through her stubborn insistence on being able to build from failure and residues, says that our usual ways of performing scholarship, activism, and subalternity will not work. We have to be able to come together from a point of exhaustion and failure. 

(2) Second, Spivak opens up the question of how we construct oppression and exclusion in the archive, especially if the oppressed and excluded figure is not present. The way COVID-19 is unfolding builds upon histories of institutional and informational opaqueness. How do we read absences of the archive, or "against the grain", against institutional and informational opaqueness?

The training of and role for the (humanist?) intellectual in the world seems to be a relevant take-away point of discussion from postcolonial theory. I have been noticing a proliferation of thought pieces and various genres of writing by engaged scholars in this COVID-19 moment. While indeed there is lots to think and write about, the Late Industrial times we are in are also marked by a heavy saturation of information. Rather than feeling enlightening and motivated by the increased proliferation of opinions on COVID-19, I find it has the opposite effect. What other (new) forms of knowledge, processes for knowledge making, and ways of engaging in the world (not to mention education for critical consciousness) are needed in this moment? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find the value and strength of new research collectives like this one to be rich spaces from which to start thinking about this question.

Ahmed describes the importance of a "humanist education" that trains the “ethical reflex” to open one up to forms of consciousness fundamentally different from one’s own. He notes that such openness eventually requires one to “rebel” against one’s training itself (developing critical consciousness?).

Ahmed also writes about the relationship where the intellectual refuses to speak for the subaltern--where the intellectual enters into a relationship with something foreign to him about which he will absolutely refuse ever to produce authoritative knowledge. "The point of the relationship is, in fact, "to question the grounds of knowledge itself."

"If I`m driving and I don`t want this bottle in my car..throw it out the window.." (Wolfe line 30) - This shows how easy it is to litter and how there are many people who littler like this individual, disregarding the fact that they may be creating a bigger problem in the near future - lots and lots of trash.

"Residents need to do their part in the cleanup effort" ( Wolfe line 40). - This describes a possible solution the problem. If everyone resists littering and cleans up after themselves and do other things like recycle, the problem may persist but the amount of garbage may be less than the current amount.