Critical Climate Materialism

This essay introduces the concept of “residual reification” to renew and rethink critical theory in light of the conceptual and political challenges of the climate crisis. Critical theories show how reification engenders a “second nature” of social institutions. “Residual reification” stresses that the remnants of fossil capitalism—carbon emissions—create global heating and thus a catastrophic nature. The critique of residual reification calls for a new historical materialism: a critical climate materialism. Whereas reification theory assumes a hierarchical relationship between active human practice and passive matter, this essay emphasizes the waywardness and criticality of matter. This is not simply a turn to new materialist ontologies of lively matter, but rather an elucidation of how fossil capitalism changed the historical ontology of matter and labor by undermining the dualism between subjects and objects of work. The reification of work is intertwined with a wasteful residual reification, production with pollution. Residual reification implies that capital has irreversibly inserted itself into natural history. Therefore, it is not enough to abolish reifying social structures; it is also necessary to remediate residuals. This calls for a reparative critique that seeks to inform practices of ecological repair and to renew critical concepts like recognition, (re)appropriation, and freedom, which have lost traction on the ecologically impaired ground of the present.