Representing the “invisible crime” of climate change in an age of post-truth

Abstract

This article builds on prior writing on the ophthalmological aspects of climate change to argue that in an age of climate change denial and “post-truth”—which Oxford Dictionaries defines as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”—developing a visual language of climate change becomes of paramount importance. This article suggests that while media representations of climate change may serve to reduce climate change to a stock set of visual clichés certain art may improve our visual acuity of climate change. Accordingly, this article looks at select examples of artwork on the causes and consequences of climate change and considers the capacity of such work to inspire personal and political action.

The Critical Foundations of Visual Criminology: The State, Crisis, and the Sensory

“…The problem, as Nixon (2011:10) writes in his account of the structural violence of resource extraction and toxic drift, is that there is a 'representational bias against slow violence' in favor of spectacular eruptions and sensation driven events. The challenges are 'acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects' (see also Brisman, 2018). It is often the case that many environmental hazards resulting from industrial processes are slow moving, long in the making and observable only using certain forms of sensor technology.…”

Cultural Criminology: The Time is Now

“…The meso level of 'shared meanings' is often an agora of claims and counter-claims, where discourses and ideas, problems and solutions, are bought and sold. Rolling 24 hour news (Greer and McLaughlin 2011), museum exhibitions (Thurston 2016), YouTube videos (Ilan 2012), social media posts (Yar 2012;Smiley 2015), programmed technologies (Wall 2016), reality TV (Presdee 2002), political debates (Schept 2015), criminal justice policies and practices (e.g., Wall and Linnemann 2014), contemporary art (Brisman 2018), notions of knowledge and appropriate research (Ferrell 2018), the nature of contemporary punishment (Brown 2009), youth justice (Petintseva 2018), history and geography (Fraser 2015), subculture (Snyder 2009(Snyder , 2017, websites (van Hellemont 2012), celebrity (Penfold-Mounce 2010), far-right organising (Castle and Parsons 2017) and maps (Kindynis, 2014)-all are sites of discourse, representation and performance that have been studied by cultural criminologists. These do not reflect a 'decorative' project à la Rojek and Turner (2001), but are testaments to the ways in which cultural criminologists have explored how meanings around crime and control are created and contested, enforced and challenged.…”

“…At the same time, criminal justice has been engineered to defend the aesthetics and practices of the consumer society (in all its destructiveness) and to suppress effective protest. Meanwhile, as climate change denial is succoured in right-wing thought, questions have been raised around the extent to which artistic expression might communicate climate truth against such assaults (Brisman 2018). Rather than focusing on particular breaches of environmental law, 'green cultural criminology' is more concerned with how environmental harms become the consequence of 'ordinary' behaviour (see similarities with the emerging perspective of Deviant Leisure (e.g., Raymen and Smith, this issue)).…”

“…The internet and digital technology's influence on everything from electoral politics to public discourse have rendered meaning and truth as key theatres of struggle in contemporary politics. In the starkly partisan politics in the United States today, consensus is in short supply, while even the most fundamental of facts seem to be contestable (Brisman, 2018). Digital technologies have lent considerable immediacy to the ways in which meanings around crime and crime control are debated online.…”

“…It is unlikely, however, that the scholars who developed the perspective (see Ferrell et al 2015) could have foreseen the extent of their own prescience. In a world of galloping climate change (that some leaders still deny vociferously in the face of strong scientific evidence), where would-be dictators dismiss criticism as 'fake news', (see Brisman 2018) and where the desire for radical change is dismissed as mere 'identity politics', a criminology attuned to the politics of meaning has never been more important. In a world where all manner of tribes across the political spectrum hold forth simplistic 'solutions' to ever more pressing and desperate economic, environmental, social and structural problems, there is a need for a criminology that is willing to eschew pre-determined meta-narratives and engage with the texture, complexities and contradictions of contemporary life.…”