Andreas Malm - The Progress of This Storm

The two heads had already fused to one

and features from each flowed and blended into

one face where two were lost in one another

Each former likeness now was blotted out;

both, and neither one it seemed this picture

of deformity.

Dante, in the eighth circle of hell

Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1

The skys changing.

A roaring storm is coming.

A howling mist,

a growling downpour.

All the money men who close their eyes

and pretend

that this rumble

must be low planes.

Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos

NEVER IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT

Is there any time left in this world? In an essay published in New Left Review in 2015, Fredric Jameson restated his thirty-year-old diagnosis of postmodernity as the predominance of space over time.more than anything else, marks the onset of postmodernity: and here we are, still.

The diagnosis hinges on the eradication of nature. Jamesons argument runs something like this: in the modern era, vast fields of old nature remained spread out between the bustling new centres of factory and market. A short drive would take the modernist back to the rural village where she was born; ancient ways of life dotted every horizon, the modern mode speeding up within a landscape tied to the natural and immemorial. It was this contrast that made the modernists feel the movement of time from the old to the new, towards the future that so fundamentally structured their culture. Now the foil is gone. Peasants, lords, artisans, costermongers have vanished from sight and, along with them, nature has been triumphantly blotted out.

But towards this city a storm is on the move.

Lerners New York, however, is under siege. The novel begins with the approach of an unusually large cyclonic system and ends with the cataclysmic landfall of another. Houses up and down the coast had been obliterated, flooded, soon a neighborhood in Queens would burn. Emergency workers were fishing out the bodies of those who had drowned during the surge; who knew how many of the homeless had perished? A point of irrefutable reality pierces the narrative. It submerges the protagonist in a flow of very palpable time: he looks back on six years of these walks on a warming planet. When Union Square turns heavy with water in its gas phase, a tropical humidity that wasnt native to New York, an ominous medium, ordinary time is shut down, the air like defeated time itself falling from the sky. The protagonist sinks into obsession with temporality, as he ruminates over what he believes to be the source of all these storms: climate change.

Recent efforts in event attribution corroborate the belief. Every particular storm is the unique outcome of a chaotic mix of weather components, but global warming alters the baseline where these are Such man-made weather, however, is never made in the present.

Global warming is a result of actions in the past. Every molecule of CO2 above the pre-industrial level resides in the atmosphere because humans have burnt trees and other plants and, preponderantly, fossil fuels over the course of time. In the beginning, the carbon in coal, oil and natural gas was locked into the crust of the earth; then at some point, those reserves were located and exploited and the fuels delivered to fireplaces, whence the carbon was released as CO2. At any given moment, the excess of heat in the earth system is the sum of all those historical fires, of the cumulative emissions, the pulses of CO2 stacked on top of each other: the storm of climate change draws its force from countless acts of combustion over, to be exact, the past two centuries. We can never be in the heat of the moment, only in the heat of this ongoing past. Insofar as extreme weather is shaped by basal warming, it is the legacy of what people have done, the latest leakage from a malign capsule indeed, the air is heavy with time.

When Walter Benjamin roamed the cities of interwar Europe, he jotted down a signpost for further investigation: On the double meaning of the term temps in French: temps as in weather and time. This time, however, the weather presents anything but a reliable clock. It tends to upset schedules and routines by dint of the weight it carries from the past. The tempest has a twisted, multiplex temporality, as registered by Lerners protagonist, who compulsively reports days of unseasonable warmth when walking down October streets:

The unusual heat felt summery, but the light was distinctly autumnal, and the confusion of seasons was reflected in the clothing around them: some people were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, while others wore winter coats. It reminded him of a double exposed photograph or a matting effect in film: two temporalities collapsed into a single image.

Even more apposite might be his sensation of having travelled back in time, or of distinct times being overlaid, temporalities interleaved, for every impact of climate change is, by physical definition, a communication with a human past.