(Technical University of Dresden)
‘What About Your Carbon Footprint?’ Appellative Greenwashing and the Rhetorics of Individual Complicity
By analysing exemplary Twitter posts by major oil producing companies, this chapter studies the phenomenon of ‘appellative greenwashing,’ a rhetorical strategy to deflect responsibility awayfrom perpetrators and highlight individual complicity in climate change. I identify two subtypes of this rhetorical phenomenon: ‘self-deflective’ or ‘by-proxy greenwashing’ and ‘greenwashing through false levelling.’ What pertains to both is that the ‘speaker’ position themselves as advocates for the environmentalist cause by eclipsing their own pivotal role in pollution or linguistically reducing their role to that of an individual and calling on the individual consumer to act. This chapter also analyses how carbon footprint calculators can support this rhetoric by shifting the focus away from the perpetrator and towards the individual, who is not rendered ‘culpably ignorant’ but hyper-aware of their own complicity in environmental harm.
Conflicting Desires: Complicity with and Resistance against Imperialism in Rebecca Kuang’s Babel (2022)
R.F. Kuang’s 2022 speculative fiction novel Babel, or the Necessity of Violence recounts the story of Robin Swift, a boy born in Canton at the beginning of the 19th century, half-British and half-Chinese, who was conceived and brought up for the sole purpose of becoming a student at the renowned Oxford Royal Institute of Translation, generally referred to as ‚Babel‘. At Babel, Robin Swift finds himself at the very heart of imperial power and wealth, and feels increasingly torn between simultaneously despising and desiring the system of oppression he inhabits.
Babel and its main protagonist Robin offer an intriguing perspective on the effacement of a complex network of complicities, parallel forms of oppression and participation in harm, which enable the establishment and continuation of the British Empire, of which Babel is the literal centre. However, I argue that Babel can be read not only as a critique of 19th-century British imperialism, but also works as an allegory of our contemporary, globalised capitalism. The novel only exemplifies and takes to the extreme the underlying forces necessary for the establishment of any network of harmful complicities, the prerequisite being a lack of empathy, resulting in a lack of solidarity with and among disadvantaged groups. Shared vulnerability is effaced through discourses of ‘othering’ on the one hand, and what Lauren Berlant calls ‚cruel optimism‘ on the other, and can only be rediscovered through the acceptance of ‘responsibility’ (Docherty) and the formation of new anti-complicit bonds.