Introduction

It’s a cliché to begin a chapter with ‘as I write this paragraph’, but at the tail-end (supposedly) of the COVID-19 pandemic, with tensions rising between China and the United States over Taiwan, with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Australia having had its wettest year on record due to a record third La Niña event, and even with Sriracha production under threat due to extended drought in the Western United States… this selection of unprecedented things suggest that I am writing this paragraph in interesting times. That observation is significant for me because Slavoj Žižek tells of a supposed Chinese proverb, explaining that “if you really hate someone, the curse you address them with is ‘may you live in interesting times!’” (Žižek, 2012). I don’t believe that I have been cursed, but these material crises—these monsters that stalk our times—present challenges for thinking theoretically. Žižek is one thinker much suited to ‘interesting times’.

I first encountered Slavoj Žižek at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas when he gave a talk titled “Let us be realists and demand the impossible: communism”.Footnote 1 Over the course of an hour, Žižek roamed the theoretical landscape, tracing the way ideology structures our lives, drawing on everyday matters from Kinder Surprise to Starbucks. Žižek is entertaining. He is as comfortable ruminating on his philosophical inspirations—Hegelian dialectical materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis—as he is criticising pop culture. Žižek argues that pop culture reveals much about the ideology that underpins contemporary capitalist society, which is why he spends so much time exploring it. Pop culture, like a binge on Netflix, is a mask that obscures and mystifies cultural-political tensions. But Žižek suggests that the masks themselves reveal more than they obscure: the form and content of these masks, the pleasure we take in them, speak to an unconscious social texture. How do we access this deeper layer of understanding? By taking the time to think and to challenge our taken-for-granted logics.

In an interview, Žižek noted that the Chinese proverb about interesting times is likely to be a Western projection: everyone he has spoken to in China says that they have only ever heard it attributed to them by Europeans (Žižek, 2013, p. 16). Žižek’s work is compelling because of the way he challenges us to think about problems differently. He invites us to include into our understanding of a structure—such as capitalism—the contradictions and resistances that we see as outside of it. In doing so, Žižek proposes that we shift our understanding of contradiction ‘from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of a notion…to see distortions as integral parts of a system’ (Žižek, 2011b). Such thinking can help break through conceptual walls because it reveals the habits, assumptions, and ideologies that govern the way we discuss political issues in our world. This chapter seeks to use Žižek’s theorising as a lens for exploring two cultural moments in the climate change debate. After first introducing elements of Žižek’s theoretical approach, this chapter takes the Netflix film Don’t Look Up as an instance of a consumerist ‘response’ to climate change. It then turns to the school strike movement—an activist project undertaken by students around the world demanding action on climate change. This chapter poses the question: what are the social logics crystallised in this moment? And perhaps more importantly, how can we use Žižek to re-articulate these problems? Working with Žižek’s theory in this way leads us to a hopeful conclusion: that there are other possibilities for dealing with the troubles of our ‘interesting’ times.

Fantasies, Masks, and Hegemony

Before I turn to the case of climate change, it is necessary to trace some of the core concepts that underpin Žižek’s work. Fantasy plays a central role in the theoretical thinking of Žižek. Rooted in the work of Jacques Lacan, Žižek’s notion of fantasy refers to a structuring logic that helps us to organise our worlds and to accommodate for a ‘lack’ (Žižek, 2008). Žižek draws on Lacan’s triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real: three registers of existence that structure our subjectivity and identity. The imaginary refers to an early sense of identification: a kind of fictional wholeness where we identify with parental figures before we are inducted into the culture of language. The symbolic refers to the order of language itself: a pre-existing ‘big Other’ of meaning that structures the way we come to understand the world. In our move into the symbolic order, our imaginary identifications are lost, giving rise to the sense of ‘lack’ which is the root cause of desire. Filling in the void of this lack, we construct complex stories to make the world cohere, which is understood in Lacanian terms as fantasy. The order of the Real refers to the material substrate of reality over which the fantasy of the symbolic order is laid. However, because language is always an approximation of the Real—it can never fully describe, it is always a representation—a kernel of unrepresentable excess exists, around which desire circulates. This excess is known as the objet petit a (the small object a), something that speaks to ‘the in-eliminable gap between discourse and the social reality is purports to capture’ (Clarke, 2012). In the discourse of the political, fantasy takes the form of hegemony: the dominant ideological form that orders our social world. In the world today, the dominant ideology is neoliberal capitalism: the form of capitalism that sees the logic of the market reach into social relations (Brown, 2005), positioning us all as consumers.

In order for these hegemonic ideologies to operate effectively, power must mask itself—to ‘depoliticise’ the political (Clarke, 2012). The example Žižek often gives is the demand made by capitalism—consume and obey—despite our perceived freedom. Consider the way we are repositioned as consumers, subjectified as such: on public transport in New South Wales, we are no longer ‘passengers’ but ‘customers’. Welfare services run by Australian governments now refer to ‘customers’ not ‘clients’ or ‘citizens’. And yet, as my housemate recently noted to me, holders of American Express cards are referred to as ‘members’. The ideological power of neoliberal capitalism rests in the way it transforms social relations: it must be disguised so that in places where it most obviously exists—the credit economy, for example—it is masked as membership in a club, and places where its logic might be challenged—public services provided by government—are rearticulated through consumerist language.

If this language sounds inflammatory and anti-capitalist, it is because Žižek’s project is explicitly couched in such terms. The challenge with supposedly ‘inflammatory’ critical theoretical language is that those of us who engage in critique seem either utopian or curmudgeonly, and it is difficult to move beyond this ‘negative’ frame. Critical theories should not be content just to describe the world as it is, but ought to outline the way that it should be, a project Zembylas (2020) calls ‘affirmative critique’. The reach of the capitalist imaginary, and its fortified contemporary model of neoliberalism, is necessarily a focus of much critical work today. Žižek is concerned with the way the logic of the market, of competition, of ‘economy’ is “progressively imposing itself as a hegemonic ideology” (Žižek, 2012, p. 34). We should also be aware of the way the domain of education is being reshaped to suit the neoliberal agenda. Žižek references the Bologna Process in the European Union, which sought to repurpose higher education for increased economic productivity—a trend that has echoes in Australian education policy over recent decades:

The reduction of higher education to the task of producing socially useful knowledge is the paradigmatic form of the ‘private use of reason’ in today’s global capitalism. (Žižek, 2012, p. 33)

‘Practical’ university research and schooling that prepares students for the workforce in and of themselves are not bad things, of course. It is sensible that universities turn their attention to the problems of society and that students are given the opportunity and skills necessary for life in a capitalist society. However, there is a social cost associated with this kind of instrumental, utilitarian approach: the logic that this economic fantasy sustains undermines other, democratic purposes for education (Clarke, 2012). Žižek’s point is salient: “what disappears here is the true task of thinking: not only to offer solutions to problems posed by ‘society’ (state and capital), but to reflect on the very form of these ‘problems’, to reformulate them, to discern a problem in the very way we perceive a problem” (Žižek, 2012, p. 33). If the basic idea that we can take from Žižek—or any critical theorist, really—is that the way we see the problem is part of the problem, then perhaps the best thing is to try and articulate these problems in a different way. Theories give us lenses through which we can look at the world, and in doing so they help us to see our problems differently. But they also give us training in imagining differently. For Žižek, the ‘mask’ is often only hiding the truth that there is more truth in the mask itself than in the thing that it is masking. The form the mask takes, following from Freud’s interpretation of dreams, is indicative of a repressed or hidden ‘truth’. Applied to a structuring fantasy like neoliberalism, such a perspective allows us to re-articulate the components that comprise ideological hegemony (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). In the spirit of re-articulation, let us turn to the significant long-term problem of our time: climate change.

Climate Change and School Strikes

In the 2021 Netflix film Don’t Look Up, Jennifer Lawrence plays a PhD student who has discovered a comet heading towards the earth. As she and her doctoral supervisor, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, warn the world of impending doom, she becomes frustrated by the lack of concern shown by those in power—notably Cate Blanchett’s sunny breakfast show host and Meryl Streep’s president, who cares only about re-election and good relations with powerful industrialists. The film is an allegory about climate change: the title ‘don’t look up’ references people choosing to look away from the comet, even when it is right in their faces.

But what about those groups who are looking up, who are fully aware of the approaching comet and are shouting wildly about it? Lawrence and DiCaprio’s exasperated scientists spend much of the film fighting so the public understands the threat of the comet, yet they are continually trapped within the circuit of consumerism. DiCaprio becomes a celebrity ‘good-looking scientist’, appearing on breakfast television and eventually having an affair with Blanchett’s host. Most of the supporting characters in the film refuse to change their lifestyles—everyone is seeking fame or money. An interesting running gag punctuates the movie, capturing this hyper-neoliberal society. Early in the film, while Lawrence and DiCaprio wait to meet the President, a three-star general asks if anybody would like some snacks. He returns with a bag of chips and a bottle of water for Lawrence, telling her that they cost $10. Later, Lawrence walks into the kitchen from which the snacks came and discovers that they were free, setting off a spiral throughout the film as she questions what could have motivated the General to charge her for these snacks. Did the General just want some extra cash? Lawrence muses: “He knew eventually I’d find out the snacks were free, so it was just, like, a power play?”

While Don’t Look Up is an obvious allegory (ironically hosted on a consumerist platform like Netflix), the symbolic function of this general charging for the snacks is twofold. First, and most obviously, he represents a degraded society where even those in positions of great responsibility are compelled to hustle on the side. But a second, paradoxical reading of this general—an authority figure who ought to know better—reveals something about our own response to climate change: aren’t our leaders acting as though the snacks are free? That there can be a relatively painless transition to a zero-carbon economy or that we can continue with minimal changes to our rapacious consumption of energy? The notion that the global order as it currently exists can be sustained without disruptive change is an example of fantasy, a product of the symbolic order meant to mask the unsettling truth. In fact, Žižek would argue that this fantasy exists precisely to mask the intrusion of the traumatic Real of climate change: a physical process that is a product of the very system it now threatens. This is why passionate young activists, to whom this chapter now turns, are probably musing like Lawrence’s character: “they know eventually we’ll find out the snacks are not free, so why aren’t they acting to stop climate change? Is it just a power play?”

Climate change looms as humanity’s most significant long-term challenge. Naomi Klein has argued that the economic transformation required is of a scale not seen since the abolition of slavery in the southern states of America (Klein, 2014). Governments are under pressure to enact targets and policies designed to constrain carbon emissions and cap rising temperatures. Even with these targets, we seem to be headed towards irreversible change, and the question now is the degree of change with which we are comfortable. Of course, it is not ‘we’, a generation of adults with the power to vote and make decisions, who need to be comfortable—except in a moral sense—because ‘we’ will not have to live with the consequences. And this is the basis of this school strike movement in Australia, known as Fridays for Future in Europe. Sparked in 2018 by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the movement involves students absenting themselves from school—going on strike—to protest the lack of significant action from governments. The school strike movement built pace globally, and throughout 2019, until schools were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, many strikes took place around Australia.

Australian media representations of the strikes were mixed, with Mayes and Hartup (2021) noting four dominant characterisations of participants: ignorant zealots, anxious pawns, rebellious truants, and extraordinary heroes. Students were criticised by then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, for being out of class (Ward, 2019). In my research, I spoke with teachers who expressed their frustration at being unable to join their students on the strikes. They saw these activist practices as ‘teachable moments’ and as deeply connected with their own ethical understanding of teacher professionalism. But they were prohibited from attending the strikes by government policy, reflecting a bureaucratic concern about media representations associated with teachers’ presence at a political rally. Paradoxically, many of their counterparts in private schools, often attended by conservative-voting families, were allowed to join their students at the strikes, ensuring that students were safe, and the experience was an educative one. Despite the varying media narratives generated around the school strikes, students themselves were clear about their purpose. Student Varsha Yajman explained to the Sydney Morning Herald: “there’s no point having a good education without a good future to use it in” (Ward, 2019).

Why is this a problem worthy of re-articulation? These students are showing collective action—a form of social life that we see less of today. The school strikes represent a generation of students who seek to politicise the terrain of the commons. They recognise a problem that demands not just individual action, but one which requires the full resources of the global community. There are examples of new forms of participatory and collaborative action that have arisen from the school strikes. For example, White et al. (2022) write about their group collaboration: two student school strikers and two environmental education academics engaging in ‘research for education’. In that paper, they bring students into the research and publishing process as equal partners, re-articulating the research enterprise from one that seeks to understand or explain, to one that gives agency, power, and leadership to students. They call for a ‘re-imagining of education’ by ‘daring to think differently’ (White et al., 2022, p. 36). That call to think differently is significant, because it is exactly this process that allows us to re-articulate those social problems. It calls to attention the fundamental contradictions in the neoliberal fantasy sustained by the symbolic order—the fantasy which masks the Real: the problem of climate change. To put it in Žižek’s terms, it is necessary to discern how the way we understand and frame these problems—the questions we ask and the solutions we propose—might be a part of the problem itself.

Re-articulating the Problem: Which Climate Is in Crisis?

The challenge is not simply that we are burning fossil fuels. The challenge is also that the very form of our social life depends on unsustainable consumption: we are atomised individuals, we want our nice things but cannot conceive of the cost. Wendy Brown (2005) notes the way neoliberalism—in its various guises—comes to focus its attention on the individual as a consumer. This is the way people come to be ‘governed’ under neoliberalism. We are constituted as neoliberal subjects, an ideological fantasy that is rendered into reality by this dominant discourse (Foucault, 1982). Žižek can help us to think through an inherent contradiction in this state of affairs: how can it be that vast problems of the commons might be solved through acts of individual responsibility? When we are invited to consider our personal carbon footprint, to buy an offset when we take a flight, to eat less meat, or god forbid to buy a Tesla, we are still operating within the domain of consumption that fuels unsustainable production. Even when we watch Don’t Look Up on Netflix, we are still acting in the role of consumer! Perhaps more significantly, even if we are to change our consumer habits, these small practices won’t compensate for the emissions generated by vast heavy industry around the world. The problem cannot be solved by individuals. As Žižek argues, “the only way to break out of this deadlock is to propose and fight for a positive universal project shared by all participants” (Žižek, 2012, p. 39). Universalism is a recurring theme for Žižek, particularly when writing about these social struggles. And universalism is a central message that emerges from the school strike movement: these students are advocating to preserve a good future for all of humanity. Žižek argues:

The key to actual freedom rather resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, in which the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform but a change in the ‘apolitical’ social relations of production – which means revolutionary class struggle, not democratic elections or other political measures in the narrow sense of the term. (Žižek, 2012, p. 37)

Perhaps I put more faith in democracy than Žižek does, but it is not my view that revolutionary class struggle is the only escape from political deadlock. There are particular class struggles that inflect the debate, such as state capture by companies that make their money from fossil fuels, but the economic and social tide is turning on those organisations. Similarly, the issue here is not one of extending democracy further or by ensuring one side of politics (progressive left) emerges as dominant over the other (conservative/reactionary right). Rather it is to ensure the universal problem of climate change is recognised by all sides as a struggle. The problem—today refracted through the lens of ‘ideology’ despite not being ideological—is a common one and should be elevated beyond the plane of democratic antagonism.

But there is also a tension here: our pedagogical structures do not lend themselves to this form of resistance. The act of teaching—in an industrial model, as Ken Robinson might have said—is also bound up in the logic of a system that gave rise to the crisis. Rather than simply turning the school strikes into a ‘teachable moment’ for students, perhaps the real opportunity is for the school strikes to become a teachable moment for ourselves. The strikes are effective in bringing this conversation into public focus, but are they effective at encouraging leaders to act? Leaders argue that the transition to net zero emissions must be gradual so as not to cause great economic harm. But what greater harm is there than the degradation of the climate? How do we break the climate deadlock of scientists and ‘progressives’ advocating for change that will involve a cost borne more aggressively by the working class? Here again we can learn from the students: by recognising that the issues cut across generational and class divides, that the changes required are not just matters of physics and engineering, but also involve social and economic adjustment. Finkel (2021) has argued that—for Australia—a shift to electrification for as many industries and modes of transport as possible, with solar, wind, and—in the interim—coal and gas simply requires public investment and patience. Achieving political consensus for such vast changes requires the emergence of what Žižek calls a new ‘we’: the universal subject of the human species (Žižek, 2011a, p. 332). However, argues Žižek, the struggle here is not only to resolve the problem facing the Earth’s ecology, but first to resolve the deadlock of ever-expanding economic growth as a dominant hegemonic paradigm.

Transforming the political relations surrounding climate change may also go some way to addressing the ‘impossibility’ of significant reform. As Žižek explains:

Today, impossible and possible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into an excess. On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are told)…on the other hand, [our era has] accepted the constraints of reality (read: the capitalist socioeconomic reality) with all its impossibilities. You cannot engage in large collective acts…Political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity. (Žižek, 2012, p. 35)

Returning to the example of Don’t Look Up, Meryl Streep’s US President explains that deflecting the comet just is not possible while there is still the opportunity to make money by mining it. She genuflects to the burlesqued caricature of an industrialist—a kind of hybrid Elon Musk-Jeff Bezos figure—who explains how much value, in the form of jobs and energy, can be created if we simply allow the comet to get dangerously close to the Earth. However, earlier in the film, the President exclaims that it is impossible to say with 100% certainty that the comet will hit the Earth (the public will be too alarmed, let’s just say 70%) and that electoral realities prevent her from taking early and swift action to protect the planet.

This allegory rings true because we have seen these arguments rehearsed by political leaders time and again. The risks of economic damage, of energy insecurity, and of course, losing elections, mean that taking bold action is impossible. And yet when COVID-19 threatened the global economy, hundreds of billions of dollars was invested by governments to develop an effective vaccine in under two years. Clearly, we have the technical capability and the capital to solve global problems, but these solutions are ‘impossible’ until they prevent an immediate threat to the ongoing capitalist system. The radical intervention by governments in response to COVID-19 shows that another world is possible, even if we did not take that particular crisis as an opportunity to ‘walk through the portal’ to that world ‘without our baggage’ (Roy, 2020). We know that we can offer new possibilities, argues Žižek: “something is wrong with the world where it is possible to become immortal but impossible to spend a little bit more for education” (Žižek, 2012, p. 35).

Conclusion

Tracing the contours of political struggles today, Žižek quotes Gramsci: “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to come forth. Now is the time of monsters” (p. 43). The time of monsters is a liminal political zone, caught between one world and the next. This gives rise to difficult spectres, for instance, that we might not be able to transition from coal-fired energy to renewables without a transitional fuel like gas (Finkel, 2021). The industrial needs of our advanced global economy are complex, and as such give rise to contradictions, unexpected paradoxes, and difficult compromises. But amidst these spectres, there are also possibilities for hope: the notion of ‘learning from young people’ (Verlie & Flynn, 2022), for example, and learning to reappraise the baggage and habits of the old world. While the immediate problem of carbon dioxide pollution heating the atmosphere is one—perhaps the—brutal monster of our time, the school strike movement it inspired suggests another: the problem of our common social life. Thinking like Žižek and re-articulating the phenomenon, we recognise that there is something revealed in the ‘mask’ of the climate change debate:

Communism is today not the name of a solution, but the name of a problem: the problem of commons in all its dimensions.…Whatever the solution, it will have to solve this problem. (Žižek, 2012, p. 44)

Our social life itself has been undermined by neoliberalism. We are atomised, and our creative capacity to respond to problems suffers for it. The transformation demanded by climate change is not just one of economy and energy, it is also social.

I think the most basic and the most powerful theoretical insight I have taken from Žižek is precisely that the way we perceive a problem is often part of the problem. He argues that we need to slow down, to recognise the value of intellectual work that—at first—may seem to have ‘no practical use’ (Žižek, 2012, p. 33). Sometimes we must resist the temptation to rush to action, even if the problems we face are urgent. The case may be that those problems are misrepresentations of the real problems, the problems of commons, the universal struggles in education and society that would allow us to properly imagine a better world. Fighting monsters is never easy, and in some instances—as in great narratives—perhaps the monster is not what we thought it was: perhaps the monsters are waypoints to the new world, creatures that sharpen our theoretical tools as we plunge onwards into the uncertainty of the new. Crucially, this demands that we who do ‘knowledge work’ or who are animated by the task of critique press back on the instrumentalization of education—what Žižek calls ‘the private use of reason’ (Žižek, 2013). Education—in schools, in universities, at school strikes—should be a process that brings forth new possibilities for hope. We should therefore heed Žižek’s call to do theory: don’t just act, think!