Ordenanza Municipal de fomento a la cultura y sus distintas manifestaciones.

Neoliberalism as a means to explain changes in how contemporary activism is viewed and enacted is certainly not unique to McMichael’s writings. Indeed, discussion of neoliberalism in a wide range of academic contexts is dominated by a consideration of it as a world-historical phenomenon which shapes not only global economic systems but the way we think and act. Despite the fairly straightforward definition of neoliberalism provided by Harvey (2005: 64) as an economic programme promoting ‘strong individual private property rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade’, discussion in the academy has focused on what Julie Guthman calls neoliberalism’s ‘indeterminacy’, and its status as a hegemonic force that naturally moves to limit options for insurgency (2008: 1181). Moreover, neoliberalism is also increasingly seen as an economic and cultural phenomenon which is not predisposed to acknowledge its own limitations. As McMichael’s comments above suggest, ‘neoliberal capitalism’ is increasingly understood as the driving force behind a vast array of contemporary environmental and social crises. In short, the discourse on neoliberalism offers a lens through which to understand the forces which produce social and environmental contradictions at the same time that it pushes down on, limits and undermines opportunities for political agency.

Returning to the sociological literature, discussion of the effect of neoliberalism on activism takes two major and connected forms. Firstly, the naturalisation of markets as means of realising public and private goods. ‘The hegemony of neoliberalism’, James McCarthy and Scott Prudham (2004: 276) tell us, ‘is made

most evident by the ways in which profoundly political and ideological projects have successfully masqueraded as a set of objective, natural, and technocratic truisms’. For McCarthy and Prudham (276) the main challenge to such a predicament comes from activism, which is able to give the lie to such disguises, ‘exposing the political negotiations and myriad contradictions, tensions, and failures of neoliberalizations’. While compelling, however, this assertion only confronts us once more with the problem – which ESMs repeatedly encounter – of effectively identifying destructive practices which have been strenuously and systematically normalised. As a number of other theorists point out, though early iterations of neoliberalism were seen by those who opposed them to be characterised by a conspicuous and callous withdrawal of state support – as typified by the austerity policies of Reagan and Thatcher governments – the 1990s, suggests Adalberto Aguirre, et al. (2006: 2), marked the advent of a ‘“roll-

out” neoliberalism’ comprising the construction of new institutions ‘designed to embed the neoliberal project more deeply in civil society’. The result of this has not only been the development of a neoliberalism difficult to identify and contest, but also the ruling out of other options for conceiving agency and activism. As demonstrated in the RA advertisement which opened this chapter, options which don’t fit a conception of consumer and market driven behaviours can easily end up appearing either foolish, disconnected from reality, or dangerously extreme. ‘For activist projects’, claims Guthman (2008: 1180), ‘neoliberalization limits the conceivable because it limits the arguable, the fundable, the organizable, the scale of effective action, and compels activists to focus on putting out fires’.

The second key theme in academic approaches to neoliberalism is its capacity to enclose activist impulses within its own project. As Guthman (2008: 1172) puts it,

certain forms of activism ‘seem to produce and reproduce neoliberal forms and spaces of governance, at the same time they oppose neoliberalism writ large’. A number of other academics have echoed these fears, suggesting that groups now ‘revolve around axes the very essences of which have been neoliberalized’ (Peck & Tickell 2002: 400) or that ‘many environmentalists have adopted elements of neoliberal ideology and discourse’ such as ‘“Free-market” environmentalism’ via a ‘vast tide of corporate green-wash’ (McCarthy & Prudham 2004: 279). For Liz Bondi and Nina Laurie (2005: 399), such a trend has been made possible due ‘to the “fit” between the terms of [neoliberal] economic theory and liberal democracy’: because neoliberalism defines subjects as ‘self-governing individuals who exercise economic and political choices’ such an identification allows neoliberalism to ‘(mis)recognise such features of subjectivity as consistent with its own framework’. If neoliberalism ‘recognises’ political resistance as the performance of neoliberal subjectivity, numerous theorists fear, there is no way of resisting neoliberalism itself. ‘In other words’, claims Bondi and Laurie (2005: 399), ‘there is no uncontaminated form of, or space for, political resistance’ only that which serves to reproduce incumbent power structures.

Despite, as one theorist suggests, it being ‘difficult to imagine a future in which there is neither reason nor will to protest’ (Rootes 2003: 256) the sheer ‘will to protest’ does not immunise ESMs against deflection and strategic error. As this extended overview was meant to demonstrate, sites of resistance, while channelling deep and apparently timeless impulses of resistance, are simultaneously places where political justifications, representations, and outcomes are extremely vulnerable to manipulation or error. Whether representing the stories of individual activists, the characteristics and success of movements as a

whole, or the machinations and counter-actions of those systematically opposed to such groups, environmental activism does not lend itself to simple portrayal (even while, as ‘Follow the Frog’ (RA 2012) suggests, there are those who would have us believe that all we have to do is buy the right products). Such complexity is precisely why such features have dominated not only the attention of social scientists and political theorists, but also begun to be registered in contemporary fiction and film.

In the readings of two novels, T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000) and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), I offer a more situated account of the tensions within contemporary environmentalism that previously I have only been able to describe in abstract. As with the previous chapter my theoretical framework will be Jameson’s ‘political unconscious’. It is used here once more as a means of traversing the different levels at which activism can be understood: from the personal or micro-sociological level, the social relations by which individuals understand their role within groups, to the widest horizon of all – the environmental (and dialectically ‘produced’) history of the planet. These three horizons will gesture towards, respectively, the micro-sociology of the ‘activist identity’, the social movement theory appraisal of activism and the discourses of terror, and, finally, neoliberal studies as a lens to explain these contradictions (or at least their exacerbation) within the current mode of production. Only by moving through these levels can activism – in its fictive representations or otherwise – be understood as an activity which depends at once on individuals and their dialectical relationship with groups and the mode of production within (and against) which they operate.

2.1: Readings

If defining activism in the context of sociological study is complicated by the sheer variety of qualifying criteria – not to mention the vast ‘range or menu of acceptable reasons for engaging in an action’ (Pichardo, et al. 1998: 203) – this is no less true

in the literary depictions. In recent decades sociologists have begun to demonstrate an increasing readiness to engage in the discourses and disciplines of cultural studies as a means of expanding their own research capacities (Sims 2009: 322; also Bearman & Stove 2000; White 2000; Mohr 2000). In an article on network theory and social movements, John Mohr (2000: 62) suggests that ‘the network scholars who are making the move toward culture are by and large doing so out of a frustration with the limitations of an oversimplified model of social structure’. Much like the members of the Frankfurt School fifty years before them, cultural contexts are being viewed more readily by sociologists as complex, privileged sites of social representation and reproduction which can help to elucidate phenomena left unexplained by purely quantitative analyses. My decision to turn to literature to address these issues is based on a similar understanding of literary works as offering effective means to explore complex social phenomena, to, in short, ‘unmask […] cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts’ (Jameson 1981: 20).

The authors I focus on in this chapter have both noted the usefulness of their work in exploring complex political issues. Though Boyle (2000b) is at pains to say ‘I am an environmentalist and I believe in it’, he is also outwardly drawn to environmentalism because of its internal contradictions. For ‘on the other hand’, he

tells us, ‘environmentalism is very elitist. I write these books to sort out my own feelings and also as a corrective to my own behavior’. His writing, he claims, does not ‘have a message’ or a way of ‘supplying answers’ but instead is a means ‘to see how [he] feel[s]’ about issues which have live implications. In interviews, Jonathan Franzen (2010a) similarly claims to ‘avoid overt advocacy with [his] writing’, and points to the exploratory function of literature. Though (as we have seen) some criticisms have been levelled at novelists for failing to provide positive engagements with issues like climate change (Macfarlane 2005; Garrard 2013), such views offer a very particular, and, I would add, limited remit for how political issues can be engaged through literature. Though Boyle is quick to say that his work doesn’t have a ‘message’ and Franzen is only incidentally concerned that ‘people become aware of an issue’ (as a ‘byproduct’), there is still an important ‘message’ delivery at work in their writing; that is, one which inheres in literature’s capacity to channel the discursive forces at play in political contexts. Representations of environmental activism are – at least from Boyle’s and Franzen’s perspective – politically productive precisely because they resist discursive closure. Rather than simply championing environmentalism, they demonstrate hidden tensions within social movements and the sense that (for better or for worse) change is not only possible, but inevitable. In highlighting the unsustainability of our current mode of production, ESMs are – despite being plagued by misrepresentation, internal contradiction, and error – vital to the future of the planet. Indeed, a critical study of the cultural representation of social movements promises valuable insight, as Subhabrata Banerjee’s also argues (2008: 1560), into ‘how social problems are articulated, along with the contradictions, forms of resistance’, as well as the tensions between social movements and mainstream political and economic agendas.