Rewriting Article 6

Rhys Williams and Darin Barney

A prospectus contributed to the “Mont Pèlerin Rewrite” project of the HKW Shape of a Practice event. It refers to the emissions-trading market established by the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement establishes “a mechanism” to which transformative potential is attributed. Article 6.5 refers to “Emissions reductions resulting from the mechanism,” while Article 6.6 suggests “activities under the mechanism” will have a redistributive effect in favour of “developing country Parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.” Article 6.7 stipulates that there will be “rules, modalities and procedures for the mechanism.”

What is at stake in a response to climate change and climate injustice that delegates agency and responsibility to a mechanism? Among the definitions of mechanism set out by the OED are “a process by which something takes place or is brought about,” “a contrivance in the plot of a literary work” and “the doctrine that all natural phenomena, including life and thought, can be explained with reference to mechanical or chemical processes.”

Process, plot device and doctrine: all of these are at work in the Article 6 mechanism. Relatedly, there are long and diverse traditions of thinking critically about the material, aesthetic, cultural and political dimensions of machines, mechanisms and instruments, and contemporary currents in science and technology studies and posthumanist philosophy have rendered it uncontroversial to approach things such as these as active, agential and consequential. Our question is why, and with what effect, did the conservative authors and proponents of the Paris Agreement install a mechanism at the heart of their response to climate danger and its injustices.

Mechanisms are highly political things whose primary function is to depoliticize. The mechanism proposed by Article 6 attempts this in two ways.

First, it seeks to abstract action from the historical, contemporary and future material, social and political conditions and relations that saturate climate. Under the agreement, responsibility for climate change and the transformative potential it carries are invested in and contained by the mechanism.

Second, by submitting climate change action to automation, the mechanism seeks to eliminate the contingency that otherwise marks climate change as a field of political possibility and responsibility. As Jacques Derrida once observed, “If the whole political project would be the reassuring object, or the logical or theoretical consequence, of assured knowledge (euphoric, without paradox, without aporia, free of contradiction, without undecidabilities to decide), that would be a machine that runs without us, without responsibility, without decision, at bottom without ethics, nor law, nor politics.”

The mechanism “established” by Article 6 is a reassuring object, a machine that runs without us: free-standing, weightless, automatic, an instrument that offers relief from history, from social relations, and from political responsibility. It is a technology of transformation that transforms nothing - a machine that, once set in motion, promises to bring about a greener future automatically. It is akin to a Novum, the narrative device in science fiction whereby something arrives that changes everything. Its role is to bring about a plausible means of hegemonic transformation that is capable of enrolling suitable actors from the present into its narrative. In doing so, however, it does not produce a future in which it will no longer be required. Instead, it automatically reproduces itself and a future in which it will and must exist. In this sense, the mechanism is “an engine, not a camera,” as Donald Mackenzie has described financial models. Its purpose, from the point of view of the market-led status quo, is to reproduce the present by holding out a promised future in which the problems of the present are resolved simply by its own continued operation.

What if collective responses to climate change took the form of infrastructure, instead of mechanism? It is certainly the case that many of the qualities attributed above to mechanism can be and have been similarly invested in infrastructure. Moreover, there are multiple histories and contemporary cases in which large-scale infrastructure projects animated by transformative ambitions have been the instruments of imperialist, colonialist, nationalist and capitalist violence, exploitation and environmental devastation. For these reasons, inquiry into the possibility and implications of infrastructure as a substitute for mechanism in climate imaginaries should proceed tentatively and carefully.

We think replacing mechanism with infrastructure merits consideration for two reasons.

First, contemporary critical studies of infrastructure have demonstrated that, despite the ideological work sometimes done in its name, infrastructure cannot be removed from history, politics, social and ecological relations, location and the temporality of contingency, potential, and uncertainty. Indeed, infrastructure is an irreducible medium of all these things, so to invest climate action in and with infrastructure is to reckon with them in their variety and complexity and to resist their erasure by mechanism.  

Second, recent work by feminist, Indigenous, Global South and posthumanist thinkers has specifically explored the role of infrastructure in collective experiences of failure, glitch, duress, precarity, vulnerability and exposure. Here, infrastructure is both a vector of, and response to, these conditions. In the latter case, infrastructure is necessarily relational, situated and ecological, and is implicated in collective practices of maintenance, repair, planning, provisioning and care. These material, infrastructural practices are anything but automatic: they require ongoing attention, action, relationship and responsibility, both between humans and between humans and non-humans. They cannot run without us. Thus, as both a cause of and response to climate change and climate injustice, infrastructure is a material form of exactly the sort of political responsibility that mechanisms are designed to evade.

Text by Rhys Williams and Darin Barney

Image by Darin Barney