Lecture 12

From Credit Crunch to Climate Crunch - How the ecology is acknowledged to suffer from overconsumption, and the economy is uniformly said to suffer from underconsumption.

Guest lecturer: Daniel Berg

Content: This lecture places the political drive for more sustainability in the framework of the monetary system. Taking its starting point in the Anno nullo of 2008 it tries to untangle the logic behind the rise to prominence of the global economic crisis over the world wide concern the same year of how to avoid an ecological disaster this century.The Credit Crunch became a Climate Crunch.

In a fundamental way, we all choose economic growth over ecological survival. That was our desire, granted that the choice was made through muddy, quasi-democratic channels. Desire is a historic phenomena however, differing from period to period in time. What forces channeld our desire to preserve a credit based money system over other concerns?

The lecture locates an answer to this prioritization in how our different global languages are all structured, the structure of language obviously the bricks and mortar of any "Media Technology" students of this course so far has encountered. Basic semiotics teach that meaning is organized around "master signifiers" to which various fixed points of reference are bound, that through their centrality dominates all other discourses. These central clusterns of signs create a "hegemonic effect", constructing a common overarching interest for all users of the dominated discourses, even those concerning the global ecological system we all depend on for utter survival. These fixed points of reference are such as  "value", "growth" and "inflation". The master signifier is "$".

Walking through the recent monetary history we examine how the monetary system has evolved from Bretton Woods and Keynes to the Washington consensus, Freidmans monetarism and beyond, transforming the very structure of "money" in the process, and as a consequence also how we describe and produce "value". This history presents us with a disturbing new way of looking at fixed points of reference such as "technology", "efficiency" and "green growth". At the same time we gain a cognitive structure to link political and moral discourses on sustainability as a matter of "consumer choice" and "individual responsibility" to the economic structures that govern our energy use, directs our desires and constructs our subjects. The aim of the lecture is not to discourage the use of new technology, but to position it.

About: Daniel Berg is a PhD student in Economic History at Stockholm University. His thesis dwells on the transformations of desire during the emergence of massconsumption in Sweden around the period 1870-1925, more specifically the trade and regulation of drugs. As a teacher and lecturer his focus has been on the interdependencies of monetary structures (finanzialisation, capitalism) with the energy and material flows ("real" economy) through the ever longer commodity chains (objects of desire) during the industrial era. This has also been the main topic for his recurring articles as a journalist in monthly magazines such as Ordfront and Glänta, and for his lectures as secretary of ASPO Sverige.

Literature:

Hornborg, A., (1999) Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution, Journal of Material Culture, Vol 4 (2) page 143-162