Chapter 4 - Disaster Fiction, the Pedagogy of Catastrophe, and the Dominant Imaginary

Summary

Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation

for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation

has reached such a degree that it can experience its own

destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

—Walter Benjamin

Buena crisis: hacia un mundo postmaterialista (2009) by Jordi Pigem and La buena crisis (2010) by Alex Rovira are two of the many examples of recent Iberian texts that understand the ongoing crisis as an opportunity to challenge the cultural hegemony and to abandon the dominant imaginary. However, the notion of crisis is also co-opted by neoliberal reason as a business opportunity for those equipped with entrepreneurial adaptability and personal flexibility. A number of recent blog posts and op-eds with titles such as ‘Bendita crisis’ (Blessed crisis) and the like offer acritical celebrations of personal strength and private motivation as recipes for navigating the current crisis, leaving no room for a political or historical interpretation of its root causes.

Thinkers who openly criticize the neoliberal order of things disagree on whether financial crises and ecological catastrophes can serve as pedagogical opportunities. Naomi Klein, for instance, examines the mechanisms of ‘disaster capitalism’ that produce all sorts of crisis with profitable aftermaths for the capitalist elite, as well as new opportunities for appropriation through dispossession. Similarly, Rob Nixon's notion of ‘slow violence’ denounces the invisibility of the pervasive socioecological violence and massive environmental injustice unleashed by neoliberal global dynamics. Conversely, Serge Latouche—an intellectual at the center of the degrowth movement—has articulated on several occasions the potential usefulness of a non-naive ‘pedagogy of disaster’ for challenging the ‘blissful (and passive) optimism’ ingrained in the dominant imaginary. Along these same lines, Jean-Pierre Dupuy advocates an ‘enlightened doomsaying’ committed to actively countering ‘the invisibility of harm’ that is prevalent in capitalist modernity. Dupuy claims that the main danger for humanity lies in techno-scientific optimism, and that an enlightened doomsaying can disrupt such destructive optimism. Both positions are useful for viewing the neoliberal crisis in critical and fruitful ways. Unfortunately, the most popular recent cultural depictions of environmental catastrophe in post-2008 Spain are far from being pedagogical, as they perpetuate a neoliberal rationality oblivious to the harm it produces.