WE Lecture 2
English - literature and the social world: lecture 2
Transcript
I was going to interrupt students on Thursday afternoon, boys would say, boys would say.
My name is Dr. Ness Pildon. I am at the Centre for Irish Studies and I study new weights.
Have you already been modern arts culture studies?
So apologies, you have made it twice a week for the next few weeks.
For those of you that haven't yet, my background is in Irish literature.
But in most of your years, I do a lot of work in environmental writing and culture geography.
And I'm taking at issues around the climate and psychological challenges, let's say, that we have in our century and how Irish writers and other writers internationally are often engaging with that.
So looking at the connection between literature, culture, and social worlds, which is the theme of your lecture, and the environment is promised in each of these.
So you've been having for 34 weeks and hopefully you enjoy this bit of journey.
I do a lot of multimedia stuff, So we'll be watching a clip from a movie today.
We'll be listening to Exception, Taylor Swift at some point as well.
We'll also be reading, I know very happy cases. We all agree with Gilius. And we will also be looking out some digital born poetry from Greenland, from the translations of the music's poets down to the Marshall Islands in the Indian Pacific, and also looking at other islands based in the Bollywood Greenland as well as the Marshall Islands.
So we'll be kind of moving into that hallway, voice the musicals of Ireland, going up to Greenland, going down Pacific, and pulling all the way back again, and looking at how different artists and writers are engaging with all these teams throughout.
So today's kind of just setting up some of these ideas and concepts that we'll be looking at for the next four weeks.
My office hours to ask me anything, AMA, is Monday through to four and Wednesday 10 to 11.
So conference three on the story road and just download the international office if you want to pop in, or send me an email if you have any questions.
I've got everything up on hand this afternoon as well, but if there are any other questions you have, I love students pop in and knocking on the door coming in for a cup of tea or if you want to stop me with a no-bogging with a high-high rate.
So today we're going to look at the kind of debates around climate discourse, how people talk about issues around climate change, etc.
And we're going to look in particular at a movie. Has anyone seen this movie so far? Some people? I like to get lots of hands. Okay, great, great. So the film came out in 2021, And I think probably a lot of people saw it because we were all going to lock it in on COVID during that time and everyone updated or shared their next Netflix subscriptions.
And so it got a lot of attention and a lot of traction at the time as well.
It was also, it also had come out just a couple of years after Brett Convert really kind of foregrounded a lot of the issues as a young teenager in Sweden.
And the Fridays for Future movement had really taken off.
And it was really kind of hitting a high point in 2019 when of course COVID struck.
And then a lot of that kind of attention died away for a very good reason because of the global pandemic.
So this movie came on board and it kind of ignited I suppose the conversation around the climate and our planet and our future and it takes as a parody the idea that there's a big event is going to happen on the planet.
The scientists are saying, this is going to happen.
You need to do something now, otherwise we're all going to die.
And everybody else starts laughing and go, yeah, what are we doing with this?
And we'll say, well, maybe we can make money out of it.
Maybe we can do this, we can do that. But they're not really looking at what the problem is.
Hey, that's what it's kind of taken as a metaphor for the environmental and economic crisis.
So we're just going to look at the clip of the movie for those of you who haven't seen it yet.
Hopefully the audio will work so great for you. Hold it up a little bit. I need to hold that. This is not real. This is not real. This is not real. This isn't happening. It... Tell me this isn't really happening. I hear there's... Something you don't like to look so. We discovered a very large comet. Oh, I figured. It's headed directly towards Earth. This comet is what we call a planet killer. At this exact moment, I say we sit tight and assess.
Sit tight and assess? Sit tight and assess. The sit tight part comes first and you got digested.
That's the assessment period. This is the worst news of the history of humanity.
He just blew us off. What are we gonna do? We have to release the information until we just leak it.
Our guests today have made a pretty big discovery in space.
How big is this thing? Oh, I can destroy my ex-wife's house. Did that last for a while? There's a 100% chance that we're all going to die.
Hey, hey, hey. Well, let Hans and Astronomer go back anytime. But the healing lady, Hans. That's so much. We're gonna get the kids out there. I want to hear another. It's real and it's coming. Oh dear. Jesus Christ, you're gonna just call me. It's coming. It's $30 trillion worth of material. What if trillions of dollars matter for all gonna die?
Oh, no, what a rich, that would be terrible. Oh, my God. You guys discovered a comet? I have a tattoo on the shitting star on my back. Oh, that's, that's terrific. Oh. No. This could be complete disaster. This is already a disaster. I'm gonna go from life to be so long and die. Now. Get a roll! You're gonna take me out of the way! There it is! Get me coming! Come on! It's way! What's wrong? Can you see it? I can't! I better look back! I did have the FBI put that bag over your head. They don't do that, the CIA does, but I made them do it.
You know, I have a feeling. It's a good feeling, because that is what I did, and it was very funny and cool.
Came out was that in one way, there was a lot of tension.
And in another way, people say, yeah, let's move on to the next big movie.
So there's this other sense of irony that was building into the response to how it was.
But the film is set up as a political satire and a black comedy.
It is kind of funny, a story and a movie. And America tends to make a lot of these disaster-type movies as well as a genre.
But a black comedy exploring the future events surrounding the days before a plan of killer, an asteroid, and it's hurtful to find Earth, and we won't tell you what happened to me and the truth even if it happened to me or me.
So it's in the genre of honey with disaster movies.
So those who are familiar with these kinds of films, You kind of get the usual types, the usual kind of cock twists, and then of course the usual disaster where they'd be averted at the end or with something else happening in the front.
But what they're doing is they're using parody, satire, and black comedy to explore the different political, social, and cultural responses to facts and to science.
And it looks at how people in general, people like you and me, will face on or maybe want to ignore something that we're hearing about but it might be too difficult or awkward or we still want to hear about it more and how people actually respond to that or don't respond to something else which is the majority of the views in the movie as well.
The film is also seen as an allegory for the contemporary response in relation to biodiversity loss.
So we often talk about climate change as one element, but the world provides versed loss to the parts.
That's a separate element in the movie as well. But it really is opening up questions about language and discourse, and so how we speak the current language we use, the kind of, if you want to take a note, the vocabulary that's used as well, very distinctive kinds of words and vocabulary and I love that.
And it also brings up finally a question about the tactics that are used.
Is it effective to scare people into action? Psychologists would say no, it's not. You've got to turn people off, they're going to go away in the direction, it's protective, prime and instinct.
We don't want to go ahead long into something we know is for the harmless, we go and kind of turn and look the other way.
But on the other hand, we need to be aware of the facts and aware of the science so that we can do something positive and that we can change direction.
Unless we have the facts, we don't know what we're working with.
So it's kind of cautioned between those two aspects of the work.
So one of the questions, I suppose, that the film asks us to consider, which is really important, particularly for kind of scientists, is why won't people look up?
So this is the message for the movie. The scientists say, just look up in the sky, you can see with your own eyes there is a good or a comish pertinent towards us and they're like, no, what's the start?
Like, no, no, it's actually gonna come right at us, but people will be reviews and then they'll be to look up.
They don't want to see the science. So it's setting up that question, Why do we find it difficult to look up or to face something that's very difficult in a different way?
And one of the reasons is, there's a couple of reasons.
One is that in the film the comic is treated as a hyper object.
It's treated as something that's not related to our lives, it's something that's out there, and so we can't really understand it.
There's no point in even trying to understand it.
So a hyper-object has been written about by the philosopher Timothy Wharton, And he says that a hyper-object is something that's too big to fully comprehend, is hard to imagine, it's difficult to explain, it's tricky to communicate to a non-specialist audience.
So those are really tough not to practice. So he just gives examples, evolution, trying to explain exactly why evolution is.
How do you define it, define more, do you see it become eight, and then become the wonderful human beings out there today?
Relativity, how one of the great signals of the universe, we're still trying to figure that one out.
The internet, how does that, Can you get your head around the dark web?
What is that? What's the name? And of course, language. The big one. How to understand or be able to even think about it.
These are all what he calls hyper-objects. We have an idea of them. It's really hard to really understand them fully in terms of building.
Other authors were going to look at it in particular with cows and you can't look at them without a moment.
And this has kind of changed the hyper-objects. It can outscale politics. So it can kind of jump over political and social norms.
So it outscales us all. And that's another difficulty. We can't do the grass-pearlish because it's just too damn big.
Shepard Barty talks about after the same time, but it's such a big, massive time.
We can only think about our world and our human time.
And even then, it's only our own personal human biographies that we could begin to match about our case in the world.
So that's what we need to focus on, too. And so some people argue that other responses are needed, cultural and social responses to help us connect with and understand what all of this big question is in a way.
But also, from a psychological point of view, The Australian Association of Psychologists have written a lot about this.
They talk about climate anxiety and climate frustration with generations being in these questions.
It's very simply that we don't like to think about the end of the world.
We don't like to think about the end of the species.
We don't like to think about the end of what human beings might be.
So it's a very natural instinct for us to learn all of these kinds of questions.
But then the wonderful climate scientist, Jane, is Catherine Hayhoe, and I'm going to play a clip from her now, which will be more.
And she says that we have to start, the most important thing about all of this is to start with hope and with shared values.
And it's like that, that you're always creating a space that we can do something better.
We can create an alternative planet that's a better future for all.
And we just need to figure out a way to do it. And the way she says, if we need to start, it's that we have been coming.
And often that isn't about talking about the science, It's talking about what matters to people and the end of the day.
Okay, I started to notice a few years ago that I was getting the same two questions.
I get in the gap. What gives you hope? And how do I talk about this issue? So I want to book about it. Because these are the big questions. If we don't think there's any hope, then why are we even talking about this thing?
And if we can't talk about it, it's the people who we care most about, who can we talk to?
It turns out it really isn't that hard. If we begin by connecting over something that we already have in common rather than something we disagree on, something that we share, something that we love, a place that we both are from, an organization we're both part of, a hobby we both enjoy, a faith we have in common, We connect the dots to how climate change is affecting that thing that we both care about.
But don't stop there. We have to offer positive, constructive solutions that each one of us can engage in.
Because if though climate change requires system-wide change, a system is made up of individuals.
And the number one thing holding us back is that we don't think we can make a difference.
But the reality is we can. The only way that the world has ever changed before is when individual people decide that it had to.
So that's what my book is all about too. So that's... I can't turn the page in. I would highly recommend your book. It's great. And so she's working from a very different angle.
So it's not the scary and the scary and the kind of tactics in the doom and gloom, and you're doom scrolling, and you're all screwed, and that's the end of the world.
She's saying, nope, that's a very narrow, negative way of looking at it.
There are other ways we can look at it and there are other ways that we need to start mobilising people to talk about it and it's all about language, it's all about bookable categories, it's all about all of these things that we're looking at but starting with the ideas of shared values and what is important to you for what is important to your friend or your person.
So one person who took this very personally, and as you may know, is Gretchen Plungark, who started her school strike for Kima Tat, which is the climate strike, her school strike in 2018.
And it started out as an individual protest where she wanted to sit outside the Swedish Parliament and to force the Swedish government to do more on climate change in particular.
It grew into a global youth movement for Friday's future where students then started to go out en masse around the world and it even got way here in London.
Our own environment secretary has school students going out and college students as well in 2018 and 2019, like a concept full of it.
And in particular, her use of language is really interesting, and how she directs her language, in particular towards international leaders, those that have the powers to change in terms of their lack of action in these areas.
She famously was invited to address the UN climate change conference in 2018.
And then she went to the US to return to the UN climate action summit where she delivers an outbreak of how dare these speech.
And she's putting it off to the older generations.
She says, how dare you destroy my future and how dare you destroy what could be a wonderful planet that we have.
And we have to act now and for this as well. So I'm going to look today just a couple of excerpts from her very short book and it's available online or also to purchase as well too.
No, it's too small to be quick. And what she's told me about the book is really what Catherine Hayhoe was talking about.
Is that sometimes I think it's just system change is just too big, it's just too much for anyone person to do, but as Catherine said, it is always made up of people and individuals, and social change has always come about when people decided, no, we can make it better, it needs to be better, and I need to do something about it.
So whether it was slavery being repealed, whether it was emancipation for women to get a vote, or in Ireland more recent times, the marriage referendum and the repeal of the referendum as well.
And not people started talking about their lives and wanting Ireland to change, to move to the social reality of where they're in Ireland at that time.
So this is a famous speech that she's given in Stockholm and that she published in on Facebook in 2019.
And she talks about the reaction to her herself, as well, and from how people also reacted to her.
But she says, recently I've seen many rumors circulating about me, an enormous amount of hate.
And she talks about hate speech and the trolling that she was directed at her.
This is no surprise to me. I know that since most people are not aware of the full meaning of the climate crisis, which has understand us as it's never been treated as a crisis, a school strike for the climate would seem very strange to people in general, so that we make something clear about my school strike.
And then she talks then about her own personality and who she is as a young woman living in Sweden.
And then she talks about the reasons I do this that she had.
Some people mock me for my diagnosis, but Asperger's is not a disease, it's a gift.
People also say that since I have Asperger and she uses the best around the Asperger's, I couldn't possibly have put myself in this position.
But that's exactly why I do this, because if I had been in normal and social and social, I would have organized myself in an organization or started an organization by myself.
But since I'm not good at socializing, I do this by myself.
So despite the same issue I doubted into myself, I chose to have a new university in a very particular way.
And I was so frustrated that nothing would be about the climate crisis, and I felt like I have to do something, anything.
So here she's starting with her own present biography and explaining the reasons for why she did what she did, why it's her on her own and she's not in a group.
And she didn't feel comfortable at that time being in a group.
And also then making connections about being a young person in Sweden and a young person in Europe and a young person in the planet.
And that's what other people connected me. It would have shared a sense of values and that shared sense of concern as well.
And as she continues, there are some people who say that I almost simplify things.
For example, when I say that the climate crisis is a black and white issue, we need to stop the emission of greenhouse gases, and I want you to panic.
But I always say it's because of the truth. Yes, the plan of crisis is the most complex issue we've ever faced, and it's going to take everything from our heart to stop it.
But the solution is black and white, we need to stop the emission of greenhouse gases.
And here she talks about her ability to see things quite clearly, where maybe other neurotypical people might see things in maybe more nuanced ways or more fuzzy ways, where she can cut straight to the chase and call it kind of a watch-lease in terms of how she sees it as that.
But she continues, either we go on as a civilization or we don't.
There are no great areas where it comes to survival.
And it's always really interesting about when you read her speeches, and she writes all her own speeches in English, is that the language and the clarity that she brings to the hyper-object.
So in a way, her diagnosis is a bit that she's able to translate a really complex idea that a lot of people didn't want to look at, but she managed to mobilize a huge proportion of the globe in 2010 and 2019 around this idea, probably in the young school around Sweden to be calling a global name all over the world.
And what she's also highlighting as well is how language or words or discourse can be used both to highlight or convey an idea, but it can also hide.
It can also subvert and it can also disguise. And that's what we see in the movie. The language can be, can cloak over something. You can put a PR machine on it and set it to something else, whereas in reality it's likely exactly that it exists anyway.
So the other article we're going to look at in four weeks is this one called Learning to think as a part and it's something that may appear under the sand.
So it was written by an Australian called Kenneth Kittout and he argued in again this year 2018, so it was written after Paris signed agreement in 2015 where the world leaders agreed we need to keep the world at 4.5 degrees above the industrial levels of heating.
If we get to two, it's going to get very tricky. If it goes to three, it's going to be extremely tricky.
And if it goes four, it's over. It will be one in high school. And So he says, we need to start thinking differently about our place in the world.
And we need to start thinking like humans. We need to start to learn how to think like a planet.
And it's a very simple kind of incitement. To start thinking about us at the moment, and about who we are, and what we've done, and where we might go to, what we need to start thinking like a planet.
What does a planet need? What does a planet want? What might a planet look like? So we're kind of setting it up as kind of a cult experiment that we need to learn how to take plant to plant.
And he introduces the idea of the Anthropocene, which is the new age of the humans, where humans for the first time have become a geological force of change.
For the first time, an animal and a planet has been a change in the course of the future of the planet that animates us.
And he says, there has never been another set of states able to force so many of its planetary cohabitants into an unequal contest for habitat and personal environment resources as to trigger a safe and planetary existence as pattern.
And I never have been a savior species capable of disrupting the life deport systems of the climate.
We said our place in the Earth is part of this precious web of life.
If you want to take a note, we come up with that phrase, the web of life comes up time and again, And it's something for any of you interested in ecology, it's basically how we're all interconnected.
We're all interconnected in the world of life. It's kind of traditionally from Darwin's time, we would have seen humans at the apex of the pyramid.
We'd have been all like the different animals below us and then there would be the plant life and the fish life in the mineral world and then the plant.
But the human is at the top of the planet. In this configuration, as we configured, we're all equally part of this planetary ecosystem, and humans are only a small part of the river of life.
So we need to de-center ourselves, take ourselves out of the middle, and put ourselves into a whole other river of life and where you can understand how to think about the world.
I mean, there's also what we need to do, this thought experiment, is think about what it means to be human in the 21st century and beyond.
And it's really trying to think about beyond the 21st century.
What's going to happen after 2100? What would the next century bring? What would that look like? And then he says, we need to become talent centered rather than human centered.
And he goes on to talk a little bit more about that when we look at it.
So we're going to explore some of that next week. It's a very short article, but we're going to take a segment from us over the next four weeks.
Yeah. OK. Any questions, Sarah? OK. So one item that I want to throw in here, what you think about, which is why you guys are art students, the degree it is, is a culture and art that are important.
And the way we think about the world, the way we ask questions about the world, the way we critique and question things about the world is really important.
And Macau says in here, he said, culture is a really important tool to help us with this big question of how to deal with the climate crisis as well.
And he said, culture is the civilization's shared way of making sense of the murders, of what's real, what's noble, what has value.
It conditions their way of being, seeing, doing, and imagining.
It targets what we consider appropriate action in and on the world.
So if the science isn't going to, We get the science bit, but it's not going to help us act and do something, but maybe the cultural part will, and maybe our culture is the lever that might help people want to say protect their local environment, protect their local village, or their local town, maybe from coast to erosion, or protect the woodlands that they have nearby, or the corn crate, or their island, or whatever.
As Swedish scholar he says, Stephen Hartman has written, the great and far-bent, the particular, in the early 20th century, was not primarily ecological crisis.
Those replications are far reaching with ecological systems.
Rather, it is the crisis of culture. So what they're saying there is the contemporary crisis has to be at the moment.
It's not actually a crisis of science because we know what science is telling us, but the crisis really is that we need to act and it's about cultural systems and the ways of society acting if what we need to start thinking about to tell you a bit differently.
And of course, culture in a very broad sense of what culture is is what we're talking about here.
It's not something in the museum, it's not something in the something, times, art section.
It's something that we inhabit. It's the culture of living in Galway. It's the culture of having to crack. It's the culture of what it means to walk to college or get on your bike or get in a car and drive to or from your lectures on a day.
And so culture is a very broad sense of culture and society in this sense.
And what you can see is that something that's cultural or seen as having an impact on people's everyday lives can actually infuse you and have them understanding of their interests in the climate crisis.
So these are two graphs that show an interest on Google search engines for climate crisis and climate emergency.
And the two big spikes you can see in the line are the first one searched after Al Gore's movie in The Compliment of Truth was filmed in 2006.
So, it's spiked after that because it's a popular book, it's about to be realized, this is something you need to think about, talk about.
But it dips down, it's not really that important, so you can see that.
And suddenly, they're 2018, it starts going off, and it goes up in 2019.
It dips down again with COVID, comes back up again in 2022.
And of course that is mirroring here, 2018. The incline is directly related to greater COVID.
And that's directly related to her school's drive and her family.
So you can see people who are trends. And this is a really interesting cultural interpreter of what people are searching for on their phones and what they're actually concerned or interested about as well.
Again, another way of looking at discourse and language or what that's telling us about society as well too.
So for all of my lectures, we'll be talking about all of these different issues.
We'll always want to end with netted slides on the outside.
So there's always going to be something positive that we're going to look at.
And I want to give you just a snapshot of current things that are happening in a very positive way.
So I want you to be knowing that good things are happening.
A lot of really important work is happening. We don't hear about it on the news because the last individual only wants us to look at the doom scroll and stuff.
But there's a lot of really important, big, big shifts and big changes and what happened in recent times.
This year is the first year that renewables are now out creating fossil fuels and next year we'll be at the start at the end of global emissions going up and start getting it going down.
So we're in a really exciting time for the climate movement in lots of ways.
I'm going to need to remember that, actually, because it's easy to get caught up with all of the noise that Sanford is going to.
So this is a new one that the UN came up with in 2022.
It's a climate plan for an early warning system for communities, whether it can be climate issues with storms or typhoons.
And they're working along with data monitoring and those communities and encouraging other kinds of systems and science to come together with all of that into the staff.
So I'm going to finish up with that. What I'm doing is I'll put the slides up on Canvas for you.
Next week, the readings are all ready. The work was really long and I'm going to put the course up to you.
So how far are we going? So how poor we get?
English - Literature and the Social World: Lecture 2
Instructor Introduction: Dr. Ness Pildon from the Centre for Irish Studies, focusing on environmental writing and cultural geography.
Course Structure:
Classes held twice a week for the upcoming weeks.
Focus on the connection between literature, culture, social worlds, and environmental issues.
Multimedia Element:
Clips from movies, listening to songs (e.g., Taylor Swift), and discussions of digital-born poetry.
Exploration of various cultures including Greenland, the Marshall Islands, and Irish writers.
Film Discussion:
Analyzing a recent film that sparked conversations about climate issues.
Film as a parody/critique of societal inaction regarding climate disaster warnings.
Inspired by events such as the Fridays for Future movement and the rise of climate activism.
Climate Discourse:
How the film uses humor and satire to address serious topics.
Examines societal reactions to climate science and warnings about impending disasters.
Connection between environmental concerns and economic motivations in societal responses.
Language and Discourse:
Importance of vocabulary used to discuss climate change; language can either clarify or obscure issues.
Discussion of psychological effects of climate change discourse (e.g., climate anxiety).
Hyper-Objects:
Introduced by philosopher Timothy Morton—things too complex to understand fully, e.g., climate change, the internet, evolution.
Challenges in comprehension lead to a disconnect in climate action.
Youth Activism:
Highlighting Greta Thunberg's individual activism leading to a global movement (Fridays for Future).
Discussion of the impact and language used to address leaders at climate summits.
Cultural Response to Climate Crisis:
Understanding of humanity's role within the ecosystem; rejecting anthropocentrism for a more interconnected view of life.
Cultural lens as a potential avenue for driving climate action—art and culture help in framing the discourse.
Positive Developments:
Renewables outpacing fossil fuels; opportunities for societal shifts towards sustainable practices.
UN initiatives for community resilience against climate-related disasters, including early warning systems.
Conclusion:
Emphasis on ongoing positive efforts in combating climate issues despite prevalent negativity in mainstream discussions.
Encouragement to remain hopeful and proactive in environmental efforts.
Reading materials and resources will be provided for continued learning.