Empedocles-European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication

Publisher:: —
ISSN:: 1757-1952
Category:: PHILOSOPHY
Impact factor:: 0.3

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Shades of Technocratic Solutionism: A discursive-material political ecology approach to the analysis of the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringslivis (“Sustainable business”)

2024-06-13

Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta, Nico Carpentier

This article analyzes the Swedish TV series Hållbart näringslivis to study hegemonic discursive formations over the meaning of the climate crisis. Combining new materialist approaches in discourse studies with a political ecology understanding of the socio-ecological entanglement, we propose the concept of technocratic solutionism to understand how the neoliberal green economy secures instrumentalist discourses on nature in the Swedish context. The discourse-theoretical analysis of nine HN episodes identifies four nodal points which articulate the technocratic solutionist discourse: capital’s leading role, Nordic exceptionalism, substitutionalism and long-termism. We argue that the climate crisis can be understood as a materiality that dislocates capitalist assemblages, which then, in response, deploy a techno-solutionism discourse to protect the core principles of economic growth and profitability while marginalizing potential radical alternatives.

The Film The Act of Killing:

2024-06-13

Chryssoula Mitsopoulou

In this article I discuss T. Wartenberg’s  claim that the film The Act of Killing , which has as protagonists and quasi co-authors perpetrators of the Indonesia massacre, ‘confirms’ and ‘supplements’ Arendt’s  ‘banality of evil’ thesis . I argue for a more moderate version of the first part of this claim and I expand upon the second. Thus, I suggest that the film gives us clues to articulate Arendt’s thesis with theories of alienation, hence also with Marxist theorizing. Central here is the idea that the deficient  sensibility, which, according to Wartenberg’s claim , supplements Arendt’s idea of ‘thoughtlessness’, is related to an alienating process within which cinema plays a prominent role. Thus, my argument revolves around the premise that in the film the question of mass evil doing is intertwined with positing its own medium as an object of reflection, revealing cinema as carrying a contradictory potential. The critical upholding of Arendt’s thesis that the film opens up also concerns the relationship of ‘banality’ to ideological motivation, a rather problematic issue in Arendt’s thesis.  My point here is that the film can support the idea that ‘banality’ does not necessarily exclude ideological zealotry.   