A First Step Towards a Regional Risk Assessment

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015), 62.

Joan Didion, The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979), 11.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive” October 102, no. 88 (Spring 1999): 122.

Aby Warburg, “The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past,” trans. Matthew Rampley, Art in Translation 1, no. 2 (2009): 282.

W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (Penguin Books, 2004), 153.

Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 159. Speaking of Maurice Blanchot’s irony with respect to a categorical faith or trust (confiance) in language, Ann Smock writes in her introduction to The Writing of the Disaster that it is a defiance—distrust—“of language, situated in language, which finds within itself the terms of its own critique.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (University of Nebraska Press, 1995), vii.

My text was subsequently published in Swedish as part of the book Reform, a collaboration between publik (Copenhagen), Bergen Kunsthall, Konsthall C (Stockholm), and Antipyrene Publishing in Aarhus.

As Director General Helen Lindberg phrased it in the foreword to A First Step Towards a National Risk Assessment (MSB, 2011), 3.

In his 2018 budget blueprint, Trump has proposed a $600 million cut to the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA), even as the sixteen extreme weather events visited upon the United States in 2017 affected 47 million people and cost an estimated 300 billion dollars. See Ron Nixon, “Trump’s Leader for FEMA Wins Praise, But Proposed Budget Cuts Don’t,” New York Times, July 21, 2017 →.

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 44, 45.

William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New Directions Paperbook, 1963), 117. Ann Smock, again, in words that succinctly encapsulate the difficulty of putting down in words our possible future: “‘The writing of the disaster’ means not simply the process whereby something called the disaster is written—communicated, attested to, or prophesied. It also means the writing done by the disaster—by the disaster that ruins books and wrecks language. ‘The writing of the disaster’ means the writing that the disaster—which liquidates writing—is, just as ‘knowledge of the disaster’ means knowledge as disaster, and ‘the flight of thought’ the loss of thought, which thinking is.” Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, ix.

Williams, Paterson, 144.

My italics. This episode is recounted at the conclusion of episode six (“A is for Atom”) of Adam Curtis’s BBC series Pandora’s Box. For the full text of the interview, see →.

Williams, Paterson, 214.

See →.

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 2.

See →.

See →.

Line jotted down in my notebook during a talk by W. J. T. Mitchell.

See →.

All historical information on Stockholm is from Wikipedia and other carefully vetted online sources.

Williams, Paterson, 116.

Williams, Paterson, 117.

Gregor Peter Schmitz, “Europe to Ditch Climate Protection Goals,” Spiegel Online, January 15, 2014 →.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky (Vintage Books, 2007), 605.

Rebecca Smithers, “Almost half of the world's food thrown away, report finds,” The Guardian, January 10, 2013 →.

See → and → and →.

Damian Carrington and John Vidal, “IPCC climate report: the digested read,” The Guardian, September 27, 2013 →.

Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (MIT Press, 1991) 292.

John Broome, “The Ethics of Climate Change: Pay Now or Pay More Later?” Scientific American, June 2008 →.

See Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (University of Wesleyan Press, 1985), 262–72.

Williams, Paterson, 45.

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 3.

David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Jason W. Moore, “Ecological Crises and the Agrarian Question in World-Historical Perspective,” Monthly Review, November 1, 2008 →.

See →.

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 3, 4.

See →.

Williams, Paterson, 117.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J. T. Bolton (Routledge, 2008), 57.

Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, 132.

David Bromwich, “Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 113.) to a defense of the types of society that provide a place for beauty and guarded the survival of lovely things for their own sake, even if these were an outcome of aristocratic privilege or gross inequality. Burke opposed the revolution in France on the basis of aesthetics and a distaste for excess and vulgarity, a “disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve” being his “standard of a statesman.”[footnote Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, 266–67.

These models for culture workers’ response to climate change and societal instability were originally developed in my contribution to Art Workers: Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice, eds. Airi Triisberg, Erik Krikortz, and Minna Henriksson (2015), 199–229 →.

C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (Anchor Books, 1961), 247, 248.

This line appears in my notebook from the period of my Stockholm research.

Tolstoy, War and Peace, 605.