Tactical Delusion in an Age of Crisis

Climate

Think of the last conversation you had with friends or family, the most recent article you read online, or the latest report you saw in the media about the climate crisis. Perhaps you skimmed through social media posts from the “Youth Strike 4 Climate” or saw headlines declaring that we have 12 years to avoid a climate change catastrophe. Maybe you read that a lorry driver was pissed off because an Extinction Rebellion protest was holding up traffic, insisting that “nothing changes anyway. We’re fucked, none of this will work,” or that “semi-naked… protesters [interrupted] a Commons debate on Brexit,” singing “Nelly the Elephant” while demanding climate justice. Maybe you found the Op-Ed piece in The New York Times that proposed “a neat mental trick to understand the climate battle ahead [is to]… pretend it’s aliens,” followed by another article claiming that it’s “time to panic.” In Florida, iguanas are falling; in Australia, koalas are burning. 

In the UK and US, urgent calls-to-action have surged in media coverage of the climate crisis. Anxious rhetoric dominates the news and social media as we parse through facts and figures. Communication infrastructures decontextualise distributed information online. We scroll and scroll as narratives become exaggerated, false beliefs are perpetuated, and skepticisms are facilitated—inducing “climate anxieties” that impact our collective mental health and psychological well-being. 

Climate change is real, but there continues to be confusion and tension when the media reports about the crisis to the public, and consequently, how we communicate this type of information with each other. In Jacques Derrida’s introduction to Echographies of Television (1996), the philosopher warns, regarding interactions between the media and the public, “not [to] give way to an inflation of the simulacrum and neutralize every threat in what might be called the delusion of delusion, [or] the denial of the event.” For some, climate change is considered a spectacle—a disputable phenomenon—ignoring its violent ontological reality. And, online, delusions about climate change are normalized by skeptics, anti-science think tanks, corporations, and governments alike. 

In Florida, iguanas are falling. In Australia, koalas are burning.

In 2008, the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry documented a case about a 17-year old who stopped drinking water after developing a delusion that his own water consumption could lead (“within days”) to the deaths of “millions of people through an exhaustion of the water [supply].” The teen described “hearing his own voice [making] derogatory and command statements and [having] visions of apocalyptic events,” pointing to internet research as the basis of his rationale and behaviour. Overwhelmed with guilt, the teen developed a blanket delusion as both a reasonable solution and coping mechanism for the catastrophic potential of the climate crisis. Medical examiners soon diagnosed this previously unreported phenomenon as a “climate change delusion.”

There are two key factors which precipitated the teen’s delusion: (1) the temporal impulse to act with urgency, and (2) the Web used as an indisputable source of information. In the existing ecology of communication, I interpret the former as a function in the network dynamics of information, and the latter as a platform for accelerated distribution, which intensifies the emergence of delusion as an affective response. This analysis qualifies the concept of delusion as neither negative nor positive / right or wrong / true or false, but rather, a condition triggered by an affective interface with digital information, communication technology and the ontological reality of climate change. 

What exactly kind of crisis is this? 

As we thumb, tap and click through the screen, through a seemingly endless catalog of information, our agency is suspended in delusion, manifesting as a crisis in affect that fictionalizes the brutality of an ecological crisis. 

Affect

Affect, generated by inhabiting the dynamics of the network, unfolds into a crisis when manufactured delusions depoliticise the dimensions of climate change. In media, the production and distribution of information (as a relational process) fuels the formation of delusions and stifles the public’s total comprehension of the crisis. In addition, reporting on conditions of uncertainty, risk and urgency can cause worries and concerns, precipitating an affective response that, ultimately, impacts thoughts and influences behaviours. 

In a 2013 study on reporting risk and uncertainty, James Painter observed that “scientists, politicians and policymakers are increasingly using the concept and language of risk in a context of uncertainty”; this strategy, however, “can often slip into ‘disaster,’ ‘alarmist,’ or ‘catastrophe’ language”—narratives that might attract media attention but counteract improvements in public understanding and engagement—“[having] the effect of creating fear, despair and anxiety” instead.Similarly, in a 2017 Op-Ed in The Washington Post, Michael Mann and Susan Joy Hassol acknowledged a “dramatic rise in the prominence of climate doomism—commentary that portrays climate change not just as a threat that requires an urgent response but also as an essentially lost cause [and] a hopeless fight.” 

This type of rhetoric can be used as clickbait tactics, to cite one example, in order to increase web traffic and advertising revenue. But in the current ecology of communication, tactics like these expose a decentralised production of crisis rhetoric, in which information—either fact or opinion—operate as noise in the communication infrastructure, amplifying misconceptions, or worse, reconstructing the ontological reality of climate change itself.

In August 2018, after tropical storm Yagi hit the Philippines, news media outlets from different parts of the world published a social media story that went viral about a bride moving forward with their wedding ceremony in a flooded church. “For wetter or worse” and “love conquers all” as some stories described the couple’s defiance to wed ahead in spite of the conditions—the bride, winning the hearts of people worldwide. On The Guardian’s YouTube channel alone, the video recording of the bride, Jobel de los Angeles, has received more than 23,000 views (and counting). Scrolling through the comments, one will find a mix of scattered sentiments and statements: a glorification of the institution of marriage (one of whom argues that marriage is between a man and a woman), values of hope, love and commitment, and even a brief exchange about the Spanish inquisition and colonisation of the Philippines. Jobel’s marriage to her partner became a story of romance and overcoming an obstacle; a narrative of human defying nature.

There’s a certain fantasy to this online narrative that is naive to the reality of climate change in the country. One reality is that Yagi’s impact forced an evacuation of 54,000 people in Manila alone. While the Philippines is already vulnerable to extreme weather, the island nation is not exempt from the ongoing and projected impact of climate change-based disasters, including water scarcity, food shortages, increased poverty and death (among millions of people in many other countries in the Global South). 

The problem of network dynamics via platform technologies (YouTube, for example) is that users are now implicated in the turbulent logic of the system. Within the “delusion of delusion,” interests in sensationalism and priorities toward the “viral” or “influence” rearrange relational processes into practices of exclusion; in the participatory and social web, these convolutions reconfigure relationality as a form of calculus. The cultural theorist Franco “Bifo” Birardi argues that the “digitalization of linguistic and physical processes… has proceeded to insert mathematical functions into the living body of language and social exchange.” Computation, as a function of network dynamics in platform technologies, manifests communication as a quantitative exchange (views, likes, retweets, etc.) and monetises participation as a product of capital. 

Is this logic failing?

Climate change and how we communicate about the crisis bind agency in erratic logic. Rhetorics of anxiety and systems of failing logic can escalate (speed up), extend (prolong) or suspend (resist) the decision-making process toward action—accounts of (non-)behaviour that manifest into affective measures, such as climate despair and fatalism, eco-anxiety, environmental melancholia, and solastalgia. So, when opting to take action toward the crisis, there is almost always an intention to do something (anything) in order to slow down, counteract, or offset climate impact.

Yes, there is agency, but systemic protocols in communication misapprehend individual agency, adding up to a collective agency that instead favours the depoliticising of climate change. Within the current logic of the system, individuals become vulnerable to an institutional displacement of accountability (from corporations that practice green neoliberalism to brands that “greenwash,” from fossil fuel companies that continue to profit from extraction to governments that subsidise this destruction), coaxing widespread marginalisation, financialisation, and exclusion, externalised through communication. 

A critical recognition of communication technologies that fetishisise media logocentrism is essential. During an ongoing ecological crisis, in which everything is at stake—human, non-human—a political re-imagining is necessary to expose information that oppress, via platform technologies as a means for reclaiming agency. And if communication now functions in a stark degree of delusion during a crisis in affect, what better way out than through it?

During an ongoing ecological crisis, in which everything is at stake… a political re-imagining is necessary…

Tactical Delusion

Reconceptualising “delusion” opens an emergent space for tactical exploitation. In the case of the teen who stopped drinking water, his overconsumption of information online provoked an ecological imaginary in excess. Here, as new systems of thinking materialise, delusion becomes a tactic.

In a “climate emergency,” a tactical delusion is a practice of and commitment to, what cultural critic T.J. Demos calls, a “long environmentalism.” Through tactical delusions, we decentralize the concept of self until it becomes a deep immersion into difference. With tactical delusions, we exploit apathy, conformity and normative thinking for imagination without restraint. And among tactical delusions, “we” exploit human exceptionalism with intersectional thought for the possibility of radical ecological engagement. 

As part of an ongoing critical inquiry, I am interested in a queer approach to the decentralisation of the concept of self (Hermans, 1992) in the techno-ecological, in which the dominant logic of network dynamics and platform technologies converge with the ecological crisis. Through tactical delusions, what is a queer approach to techno-ecological encounters between human and nonhuman? Within the pressures of existing conditions, how can these concepts be adopted to re-imagine digital mediation and communication vis-a-vis technology and ecology?

In an analysis of performance and drag artist Vaginal Davis’s “terrorist drag” in “The White to be Angry,” the late queer theorist, José Esteban Muñoz, proposes a conscious repositioning of self as a resistance to the dichotomy of identification and counteridentification. As a queer person-of-color, Davis performs interrogative identities that challenge the oppressive discourse of white, heteronormative and masculine ideology in their performances (as “Clarence,” for example, an ultra-right-wing butch militiaman). For Muñoz, Davis’s drag is a reconnaissance that adopts an intersectional strategy (Crenshaw, 1989), critically acknowledging the “copresence of sexuality, race, class, gender, and other identity differentials as particular components that exist simultaneously with each other.” Muñoz celebrates the complexity of Davis’s “disidentification,” which requires an immersion of dominant cultures as a subversion—“to deny the self” first in order to find self within the dominant public sphere. 

Muñoz’s analysis contextualizes a queer sensibility when considering climate change-induced mania—tactical delusions that conjure uncommon-sensing as common sense. As a tactical delusion, I propose thought-queering as a mode of affective analysis during a crisis in affect: a practice of occupying a plurality of positions in order to intercept oppressive and repressive representations hidden in the information and concealed through the narrative, disassembling and reassembling them as utility instead. 

Thought-queering is intersectional, non-binary thinking—a piercing-through of borders for relational trans-embeddedness between self-with-other, human-with-more-than-human. It is a practice of living a multiplicitous difference with class, race, gender, sexuality and ability; for a collective ecological imaginary with human and nonhuman. Thought-queering is to pivot in critical techno-ecological thinking. And if the imposed dominant logic is failing, thought-queering, as a practice in emergent communication, exploits that failure as means for subversion.

Between 2011 and 2013, in a project titled Talk to Me, the Latvian art collective RIXC (Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits) explored human-plant communication based on the claim that if humans talked to plants, the plants would grow better. The collective developed a text-to-speech interface that was accessible online, which transcribed typed messages into an automated voice that spoke from a machine hovered over a plant. 

As an example of thought-queering, Talk to Me uses delusion as a tactic for emergent communication, enacting the decentralisation of self through computational utility. By establishing a network protocol for plant growth and interaction, the ecological imaginary enacted is a re-valuation of relational processes between human and more-than-human. Here, the complexity of emergence determines the capacity to relate in more-than-human worlds for trans-embeddedness and radical inclusion.

In an age of crisis, thought-queering, as a tactical delusion, adopts an ecological imaginary with little restraint. The practice recognises the dominance of existing communication infrastructures and its capacity to marginalise stealthily in our encounters with information. In an age of crisis, the boy who stopped drinking water served a tactical delusion, thought-queering his position as a sacrifice for the many and triggering an urgency toward the potential for drastic action.

The End

Now, think again about the last conversation you had with friends or family, the most recent article you read online, or the latest thing you saw in the media about the climate crisis—any crisis. How does it make you feel? And if the immediate urge towards action now seems misdirected, how would you re-imagine it?

Works Cited