A Geographer’s Response to Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Verso Books, 2021)
War, Directional Cosmography, and Myth
I share a disciplinary title (“associate professor of geography”) in common with Andreas Malm so I could not help but pay special attention to his big splash of a book last fall.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline, promoted and circulated as something simultaneously prestigious and subversive, isn’t just some low-impact manifesto pamphlet one finds gathering dust in the back of a shoestring anarchist bookstore. The book is a component, however small, of high society. If there’s something wrong with the intellectual trendlines indicated in this book, the trendlines are in a position to do real damage, and thus merit a response.
Now, I do not think many who are hung up (or who are supposing themselves to be hung up) on this peculiar abstraction and god-term of the age, “the climate,” really do have the saboteurlike fantasies implied by Malm’s title. Many of these people have kids and mortgages; they have wealth tied up in the stock market. At the same time, there’s also a degree to which Malm is, authentically, their proper vanguardist figure: he is expressing in the most extreme terms the logical direction which an epochal idee-fixe leads in (even as, separate from this vanguardist articulation, this idee-fixe generally fits comfortably, non-disruptively, even profitably into professional life).
So, yes, Malm himself is an authentic figure, I think—but at the same time, the packaging, framing, and titling of his book resonate as something less than authentic. “How to,” sure. But it’s not like he’s explaining the logistics of such sabotages, as in a historical-geographically minded account of the logistics of sabotage and bomb-smuggling. Health Is In You! this isn’t. Malm means “how to” reconcile oneself to the idea of sabotage intellectually. Therefore the issue of intellectual consistency here becomes all the more important.
Now, there was a book last decade that argued that one of the consequences of any top-down perception of a specter of infrastructural sabotages is eventual elite-driven spatial reconfiguration of those infrastructural systems. That book was about transportation systems. In the case of Malm’s fuel pipelines, what would this “reconfiguration thesis” imply? Maybe it would mean the spatial repositioning of oil infrastructure underground, where it’s harder to access. Or if not underground, then how about…overseas? Like—to China? To Orwell’s Eastasia? We’re dancing closer to the most glaring problem with Malm’s work here, but let’s not dive into this theme quite yet. Suffice to say that since How to Blow Up a Pipeline is not in fact a logistical manual about how to blow up a pipeline, nor a historical-geographical analysis of that theme, but is instead a treatise attempting to develop the idea of sabotage at a register of intellectual reconcilement, therefore an impulse towards consistency, towards comprehensiveness and integrity of vision, ought to have been primary in the composition of the work.
What happens instead is that Malm, without meaning to, backs his way into a kind of vague, unfocused warmongering energy. And look: if war must come (but must it?), I’d much prefer it be over some scrap of a Pacific island for its position along the world sealanes, where a realpolitik truce could be very conceivable, rather than this Manichaean, truce-avoidant jihad convinced that what’s at stake is the future existence of all life in the cosmos.
What do I mean by “warmongering energy”? One detects it through a gathering together of fragments. The fall of Slobodan Milosevic is mentioned (page 38), celebrated, as proof that positive change can happen—though the US bombs are not mentioned here. Later (page 70), the success of the “Iraqi resistance” in bombing pipelines is mentioned, celebrated, as proof of something positive as well. Does Malm know that the US, with the same air force it used to topple Milosevic, engaged in this “resistance” tactic during Gulf War I: i.e. blowing up Saddam’s pipelines?
As Donald Rumsfeld said, there are unknown knowns, and there are known knowns. I don’t know what Malm knows. But I know what everybody knows, which is that the US military would be, and has been, damn good at blowing up pipelines.
Chinalessness
In this light, it is, I think, significant and not mere accident that China, and East Asia more generally, are omitted from How to Blow Up a Pipeline. They’re not present as potential saboteurs, nor as potential targets. Total erasure from the historical process’s unfolding state-of-play. It was in a way genuinely delightful, while reading the book, to realize that I wasn’t even going to get an armwavey disclaimer paragraph or footnote (like “Granted, China exists, but I am not dealing with it here because…” and then something about Trump)—that is, to realize that, during the entire composition and editing process for this book, everybody (author, editors, friendly draft readers) actually forgot that the world’s most important source of carbon emissions exists. And, I’m glad they forgot. They produced a more authentic book, a more authentic expression of the neuroses of the age, as a result of their meticulous avoidance.
Now, go back a decade and we discover that at that time Malm wasn’t suffering from this blind spot. See his 2012 article “China as Chimney”—which was published a few years later as a chapter in the book Fossil Capital. Here we see a capacity for evenhandedness in global thinking. Marxist geographers used to like China well enough to mention it. China is the focus of a third of David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005). But it’s vanished from view in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, reflecting a shift in zeitgeist. The same year as Pipeline’s publication, Malm co-authored (with something called the Zetkin Collective) a book called White Skin Black Fuel: The Dangers of Fossil Fascism. On page 268 of that book, it’s acknowledged—by Malm, or by “the collective,” or at any rate by someone—that, yes there’s an awfully big CO2 spike in China. This is blamed on the US and the UK for “savoring” (very restauranty word choice) goods from China. On pages 331, and 412, the authors dismiss discussion of Chinese carbon emissions as something only “nationalists” would want to mention, and imply that a focus on Western culpability is preferable. Again, a more conventional Marxist approach—still recognizable in Malm’s 2012 “China as Chimney” article—would prefer a pivot away from scapegoating the local entity and towards critiquing the global totality. But Malm and his peers, writing in the wake of Trump, seem to be pushing not for a pivot from scapegoat-seeking to global-scaled critique, but rather for replacing one scapegoat with another. At the racial register which is increasingly prevalent in these new “radical works”, there seems to be a push for a repainting of the Girardian scapegoat from brown to white.
Well, they seem to be pushing for that, for a scapegoat switcheroo—and maybe at one level they are. But then, maybe there is also another way of interpreting the absence of discussion of Chinese pipelines in How to Blow up a Pipeline or of Chinese oil consumption in White Skin Black Fuel. Maybe, as alluded to above, Malm does know how good the US military would be at blowing up pipelines and knows they did it in Iraq and knows there’s an awful lot of pipelines in China. Maybe he can’t quite bring himself to name the thing that all these conceptual roads he’s helping engineer point in the direction of…
One can wind up starting World War 3 without meaning to. And it can happen because it was never really this weird abstraction, “the climate”, which was at the innermost core of the idee-fixe of the age.
Cardinal Directions
Now, Malm is certainly not the only geographer, of roughly my cohort, who engages in this maneuver of developing an apparently “global” theme without acknowledging the existence of East Asia, of “the East”—as if an entire cardinal direction has fallen from the compass. A book of collected essays, edited by Reese Jones called Open Borders (University of Georgia Press, 2019), which puts itself forward as a book about why it would be good for the world to have open borders, is also persistently evasive of the region. China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc. do not come up in Open Borders and the book is not really an argument about why those countries should open up their borders.
“North vs. South” is the moral/directional framing here, with “West” sometimes standing in for “North” but “East” never standing in for “South.” North/West should open its borders to South is the basic, but unstated, idea. The resulting directional cosmography is interesting and looks to me like something which Yi-Fu Tuan could have analyzed in the pages of Topophilia: in the section about different cultures’ senses of the cardinal directions and of the mythic-symbolic-moral importance of these directions. In that book (pages 166-167), Tuan says that the layout of the Forbidden City in Beijing appeals to a cyclical conception of time. The eastern gate is spring, the south (through which the emperor entered) the high summer, the west the autumn, the north the winter. Tuan points out how this cosmography had appeal and meaning for both aristocracy and farmer—though maybe not for other classes (craftsmen and especially traders) whose daily activities would lead to a more geographically pragmatic conception of space and more linear conception of time. Some cultures, Tuan points out, assign symbolic meanings to four directions (N-E-S-W) and some to only two (N-S or E-W).
Three (North with West, against South) is unusual.
Climate, Klima, Myth
There is a case to be made, an etymological or philological case, that the preoccupation with “climate” is after all a North-South latitudinal preoccupation. Perhaps for Malm what “climate” really means is not “average global temperature”, but rather what it meant for the ancient Greeks: klima, or slope, or zone along a slope, or in the geographic sense a zone along a sloping meridian and between two lines of latitude. Climate in this sense really is North vs. South—“climate change” an anxiety about a switching of the latitudes and all which that might socially entail. This framing, North vs South, explains the exclusion of East but not the inclusion of West.
If the reader will allow some further orbital eccentricity here: what I believe is happening, and more completely explains the omission of “East” and clinging to “West,” at least at a symbolic register, is a dilemma of mythmaking. Malm and similar figures are trying to form a new myth for a new kind of culture, but they have not successfully transitioned to thinking in mythmaking terms. Mythmaking is the telos of their entire project, and these hangups like “climate”, “pipelines,” “capitalism,” “white” and so forth are paint from which they hope to articulate that myth. Not that there’s anything wrong the urge to mythologize! A new mythos might be just what our era needs. But, to use the conceptual devices of Oswald Spengler, Malm and others are too much stuck inside of the “winter” thinking-forms of the culture they’re trying to move past, and thus cannot get to that new, springlike mythos that they desire.
We can put the problem in more direct terms, which do not rely on this appeal to the Spenglerian philosophy of history. For whom, exactly, is Malm’s myth of a Chinaless Capitalocene? Not for anyone in China, certainly. Nobody likes to be erased from their own myth. Nor does it have any potential meaning for Europe’s relative newcomers; nor for anyone who, while technically a descendant of the “old Europe” is looking to meet the present century on its own terms. No, it is in fact a backwards-looking, or “looped” myth, attempting to re-stage old events, old dramas (in particular the anticolonial movements) which the present, senile culture has passed through already.
Interestingly, Malm can certainly recognize a Spenglerian winter-stage philosophy—i.e. a philosophy which expresses the core feelings and intuitions of a culture on its last legs—when that winter philosophy is not his own. He dismisses the Buddhist or Stoicist attitude of what he calls climate fatalists. These are both philosophies Spengler identified with cultural winter: Buddhism as the final expression of the winter of ancient Indian civilization, and Stoicism as the expression of the winter of ancient Graeco-Roman civilization. It’s all at the bottom of this cool chart from Spengler’s The Decline of the West. We see Buddhism and Stoicism as wintry “Final World-Sentiments” for their respective cultures. And for the winter of Malm’s (our) culture? “Ethical socialism”—an interesting term in that, whatever it is, it’s apparently something narrower than socialism.
So, when Pipelines expresses springlike revulsion against winterlike “fatalism,” this maneuver is interesting but also requires closer philosophical and metaphysical engagement than Malm is able to provide. If he could provide it, I think he would begin to see many unsettling similarities, or Spenglerian analogies, between the “ethical socialism” he keeps looping back through, and these other kinds of “final world-sentiments.”
At a cosmographic register, the inability to move on to spring, the impulse to cling to winter forms, is reflected in the oddness of the three-part directional compass with its absense of “East.”
I am not opposed to the idea of cultivating a new mythos more propertly befitting a planetary civilization in the third millennium. But there are other mythic frameworks available to us than those organized around the figure of the scapegoat. What exactly a better, more planetarily galvanizing mythos would have us doing with the pipelines, whether of North, South, East or West, I do not know.
Pipelines and War
Putting these mythological questions aside: it seems to me that all talk of sabotaging pipelines is the equivalent of talk of war. Malm’s book came out just months before the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War, and I wonder if he currently considers that conflict and its surrounding geopolitical ramifications to be a type of “sabotaging” of the Nord Stream pipelines, both existing and proposed, which had linked Russia to Germany. What has that pipeline sabotage done to the climate—in the sense of average global temperature or in any other sense? Germany is returning to burning coal at an intensive scale because its geopolitical commitments prevent it from importing Russian gas while Russia is occupying eastern Ukraine. Should this outcome be treated as a test-run signalling that “blowing up a pipeline” translates into intensification of burning of coal?
As has been widely noted, Germany could have avoided this outcome had it embraced the French approach to energy policy—that is, had Germany expanded its nuclear energy production rather than opting to phase out nuclear for eventual replacement by wind and solar. Malm himself, like many in the millennial green far-left, is not necessarily opposed to nuclear power. But it’s noteworthy that nuclear energy (or fusion for that matter) does not come up as a topic in Pipelines; nor were millennial green-leftists in the last decade particularly focused on the task of protesting efforts to take nuclear offline, let alone on developing manifesto-theories of how to “Blow Up” the machinery of the antinuclear movement.
In all, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is the manifesto of a confused movement. Confused about energy, geopolitics—about its philosophy and cosmography of the world. Has the “climate” idee-fixe gotten us anywhere? Imagine, for a moment, that during the past 20 years the political enegy that got scooped up by the climate movement instead had gone not towards a weird abstraction but rather towards demands for hard physical goods such as nuclear energy and rail, and that this was done in a way that the weird abstraction, “climate,” was never mentioned? Imagine the nuclear wing made their case based entirely on energy sovereignty (as I understand it, this was the original French rationale), never climate; and the transit wing made their case based entirely on the framing of transportation convenience (i.e. the rationale for every subway and rail system which actually exists), never climate? Would we have less or more of these goods—i.e. nuclear and rail—than we have today?
Interesting background on Malm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yshYpg11Z-Q