Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

Why, even when faced by overwhelming evidence of the already ongoing climate catastrophe, the sustainable business and sustainable business research field is unable to make any meaningful changes to the environmental conditions? Further, why degrowth is overlooked as an obvious option? Desperate times call for desperate acts, for which I turn to 1960’s radical avant-gardist Guy Debord. I argue that sustainable businesses inability to move away from the Dominant Social Paradigm is due to an innate feature of marketing and characteristic of capitalism: the spectacle. The sustainability spectacle is a product created by the culture industry, as well as an approach to climate mitigation. In the former case, sustainability spectacle is manifested as an endless stream of sustainable advertising, images, appearances and meanings. It is not important to be sustainable, it is important to appear sustainable. In the case of the latter, it is not just images that are being shared: these images have become the relationships themselves. Much like Marx theorized that subject and object have changed places, in sustainability spectacle (business) sustainability has become the subject, while humans have become the objects, mere bystanders. Hence, any act in this spectacle becomes the spectacle itself. In the paper, I show how the spectacle operates by analysing at the movie Don’t look up. I juxtapose the movie with some current sustainable advertising to further highlight the point I’m making. Finally, I also explore the opportunity to escape the spectacle. Debord would say that there is something ‘real’ behind the sustainability spectacle. There are the material conditions which can be altered. I argue that degrowth is a potential way to challenge the spectacle, as it can act as an “detournement” against it. However, the danger always looms that degrowth in itself will become co-opted and spectacularized.

Info

Day: 2023-08-30
Start time: 17:15
Duration: 00:15
Room: ZV-KC-1
Type: Paper Presentation
Theme: Hegemonic worldviews and degrowth horizon

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