The fear of uselessness: From the normalization to the enjoyment of ecological destructiveness

Introduction

‘Drill, baby, drill!’ was the defiant battle cry with which the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, defended oil production against climate protection. Since she coined the slogan in 2008, it has been echoed by US Republicans, most notably Donald Trump. It expresses a particular form of ecological destructiveness that is characterized by not only accepting destruction, but explicitly enjoying it (Pohl and Swyngedouw, 2023). This political style has become a hallmark of right-wing populism, which has now elevated the protest against climate protection to the top ranks of its political priorities (Malm and Zetkin Collective, 2021). Support for such policies extends far beyond the small circle of those who would bear the costs of decarbonization. In high-income countries, for example, two-thirds of the costs would fall on the richest 10% and half on the richest 1% (Semieniuk et al., 2022). However, anti-environmental policies are also supported by people who hardly benefit from ecological devastation or who are themselves harmed by it. Arlie Hochschild (2016) even argues that ‘[t]he more at risk a person is to exposure to hazardous waste, […] the less likely a person was to be worried about it, and the more likely to be a conservative’ (245).

Thus, there seem to be widespread points of contact for the politics of devastation that go beyond the hard core of ‘fossil fascism’ (Malm and Zetkin Collective, 2021). There is much to suggest a normalization of ecological destructiveness across milieus. This is discussed most prominently in the discourse on overconsumption. While overconsumption is undoubtedly a reality, its criticism has become part of the normalization of destructiveness. The consumption-fixated ecological critique narrates modern society as one of disinhibited pleasure. The pleasure gained from constantly increasing consumer opportunities is weighed up against its ecological costs. Liberal self-techniques such as calculating one's carbon footprint are supposed to enable the subject to rationally weigh up the immediate pleasure of consumption against the long-term pleasure of sustainability. This narrative is not only based on the wishful thinking of consumer sovereignty, but also fulfils a legitimating function when it takes the modern subject as a rational utility maximizer. In contrast, this article draws on Frankfurt School critical theory to problematize the assumption of both rationality and disinhibited enjoyment. A central point of reference is the concept of the ‘introversion of sacrifice’, which is arguably the theoretical core of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In condensed form, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 43) summarize it as follows:

The antireason of totalitarian capitalism, whose technique of satisfying needs, in their objectified form determined by domination, makes the satisfaction of needs impossible and tends toward the extermination of humanity – this antireason appears prototypically in the hero who escapes the sacrifice by sacrificing himself. The history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice – in other words, the history of renunciation. All who renounce give away more of their life than is given back to them, more than the life they preserve.

Thus, for Horkheimer and Adorno the fulfilment of needs through the consumption of commodities is an impossibility from the outset. Instead, they emphasize renunciation as the core of the destructive dynamic, at the end of which the ‘extermination of humanity’ looms. This approach implies a radical change of perspective on the ecological crisis: a decentring – not a denial – of overconsumption in favour of a sensitivity to the sacrifices demanded by the production of all these consumer goods. The carbon footprint and other consumption-based approaches fail to consider these sacrifices, as they do not take into account the production of the goods and services whose ecological harmfulness they seek to criticise. In contrast, the explanation developed here for the normalization of ecological destructiveness focuses on the sacrifices demanded by commodity production. This concept encompasses the notion of enjoyment, though it does not align with the rationalist perspective that is central to consumer criticism. Rather, following psychoanalytic perspectives, the focus will be on the unconscious and irrational side of enjoyment. Jacque Lacan's concept of destructive enjoyment – jouissance – forms the link between the social normalization of ecological devastation and its emphatic politicization in right-wing populism. For the decisive difference between normalized and right-wing populist destructiveness is that the former accepts destructiveness with a ‘stomach-ache’ whereas the latter enjoys it.

When psychoanalytical perspectives are consulted here, they do not pertain to clinically oriented ego psychology. As Herbert Marcuse argued, the ‘obsolescence of the individual’ has made the ‘Freudian concept of man’ itself obsolete: ‘The evolution of contemporary society has replaced the Freudian model by a social atom whose mental structure no longer exhibits the qualities attributed by Freud to the psychoanalytic object.’ However, this does not invalidate the importance of a psychoanalytically grounded social critique: ‘on the contrary, the obsolescence of its object reveals the extent to which progress has been in reality regression. Psychoanalysis thus sheds new light on the politics of advanced industrial society’ (Marcuse, 1970: 44). This is not a question of sociologizing psychoanalysis nor of attributing social conflicts to mental pathologies. Instead, as Amy Allen (2020) emphasizes, psychoanalysis becomes an indispensable component of critical theory by making the unconscious and affective tangible as essential elements of social conflicts instead of relying on implicit rationalism.

With this theoretical background, the first section of this article explains what is meant by the normalization of ecological destructiveness. The second section argues that the widespread fear of economic uselessness is at the heart of this normalization. The next section explores how this fear is utilized by right-wing anti-climate protest by propagating a submission to the fossil fuel machinery that presents itself as rebellious. Continuing this argument, the fourth section analyses the role of destructive enjoyment in right-wing populism. An outlook discusses the possibility of overcoming the fear of uselessness. Although this is a primarily conceptual contribution, the arguments are illustrated with references to a case study of Swiss construction workers, consisting of 23 ‘comprehensive interviews’ (Kaufmann, 2011) on the topic of climate change. For information on the methodological approach, see Schaupp (2024c). ¹

The normalization of ecological destructiveness

The normalization of ecological destructiveness in contemporary societies is blatant. The reality of the ecological crisis is recognized across almost all social milieus. Its formerly dominant denial no longer plays a serious political role. Yet, despite this knowledge, the destructive course is being maintained. Ajay Chaudhary (2024), for example, describes a shift in climate policy away from climate mitigation and towards adaptation measures, which essentially consist of sacrificing entire populations and regions to the fossil fuel status quo. However, this is not a specifically ‘right-wing climate realism’, as Chaudhary argues. Rather, the normalization of devastation also includes a commitment to sustainability, which, however, does not stand in the way of increasing investment in fossil infrastructures almost everywhere. In the words of US President Joe Biden (2024): ‘On my watch, we’ve responsibly increased our oil production […] without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy. We’re America. We can do both.’ It such paradoxical thinking that makes it possible to ‘sustain the unsustainable’ (Blühdorn, 2007).

In this sense, the normalization of destructiveness can thus be interpreted as a form of ‘cynical reason’ or ‘enlightened false consciousness’: ‘Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered’ (Sloterdijk, 1987: 5). The decisive factor is that destructiveness can continue without any significant outrage. It has become the generally accepted normality. Decarbonization policies are experienced by many as an attack on this normality and trigger correspondingly energetic reactions.

Stephan Lessenich (2022) has identified the feeling of a threatened normality as the affective core of current right-wing mobilization: Crisis dynamics such as the pandemic and the financial crisis, but also social changes such as migration and the rise of feminism, lead to defensive reactions that are mobilized by right-wing populism. Cara Daggett (2018) also uses imaginary normalizations as an explanation for ‘petro-masculinity’: a distorted image of the Fordist era is declared to be normality, when cheap oil led to an explosion in productivity that promised social security and full employment. Against the backdrop of existential insecurity in the present, the myth of an era in which fully employed white men were the sole breadwinners in households in which their rule was unchallenged becomes attractive. Nostalgia for cheap oil, cheap cars and suburban home ownership converges with a longing for male domination. The ideal image of the ‘normal employment relationship’ of a male sole earner – which was never actually the norm – merges with further imaginings of normality; for example, with regard to patriarchal family and gender norms. The link is fossil normality.

The close connection between this fossil normality and other constructions of normality is evident in our interviews with Swiss construction workers. One interviewee explains the rise of the climate movement by saying that society as a whole has ‘become extreme in recent years’. As examples of the threat to normality, he argues that ‘drag queens are already being brought into primary schools to give sex education’ or that ‘people who feel disabled cut off their arms’. For him, climate activism is ‘just as extreme’ as these imaginatively painted threatening cultural scenarios. Opposition to climate protection is becoming a central part of the defence of a social normality that is generally perceived to be under threat.

However, the normalization of ecological destructiveness is by no means merely discursive. Instead, it is a feature of modern society's metabolism with nature itself. This metabolism is carried out through labour processes that transform material resources and energy. However, non-human nature exists neither as a resource nor as energy but must first be transformed into these forms. Strictly speaking, this also applies to the human part of production: we are not born as labour power but have to be continuously made useful. The relationship between the utilization of nature and labour is not limited to an analogy. Rather, the two forms are necessarily interdependent. The utilization of nature enables the intensified utilization of human labour, which in turn enables a more intensive utilization of nature.

A contemporary example of this phenomenon is reinforced concrete. The construction technique was patented in 1892 by François Hennebique in Paris. Reinforced concrete allowed construction companies to cut labour costs, because it largely erased the traditional craft occupation of the skilled bricklayer. Walls were now simply cast in mould. Moreover, sand could now be used as the basic material instead of expensive stones – production of concrete is the main reason why today sand is by far the most widely extracted resource on earth. As only sand from rivers and lakes can be used for construction, its sourcing and manufacture cause massive degradation of ecosystems. Even more importantly, concrete production is a major emitter of CO₂. If the cement industry were a country, its emissions would only be exceeded by China and the USA. Overall, concrete production accounts for around 8% of global CO₂ emissions. The expansive utilization of labour is thereby inherently connected to the expansive utilization of nature (Schaupp, 2024a).

Yet construction is not just a major polluter but itself a major victim of climate change. Currently, adverse weather delays 45% of construction projects globally. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of weather conditions causing these delays (Schuldt et al., 2021). More importantly, temperatures above 24–26°C are associated with reduced labour productivity. It is estimated that at 33–34°C, a worker operating at moderate intensity loses half of her or his capacity. And although construction accounted for only six% of the hours lost to heat stress in 1995, this figure is projected to rise to 19% by 2030. In North America, Western Europe, Northern and Southern Europe and the Arab states, the absolute majority of the productivity loss due to climate change will be attributable to the construction sector (International Labour Organization (ILO), 2019). This coincidence of ecologically destructive production methods and their productivity-reducing effects in one and the same sector makes the construction industry a particularly revealing empirical case for studying the dynamics of utilization.

In principle, the process of utilization is a necessary component of every society. In capitalist societies, however, it takes on an expansive form due to the dynamics of accumulation. This means that the utilization of human bodies and non-human nature is continuously expanded. Paradoxically, however, utilization undermines itself specifically because of its expansive character (Schaupp, 2024a). It is precisely the increase in productivity through fossil fuels that is causing large parts of nature and humanity to lose their economic usefulness. Climate change is expected to reduce global labour productivity by 18–25% (Dasgupta et al., 2021). Due to the coronavirus pandemic, global working hours were reduced by 8.8% in 2020, which corresponds to around 255 million full-time jobs (ILO, 2021).

In terms of the human body, expansive utilization is expressed above all in the continuous intensification of work. The destructiveness of this process is obvious: some surveys describe 76% of the global workforce as suffering from ‘burnout’ and over 80% of respondents reporting exhaustion (for a discussion of these and other surveys, see Chaudhary, 2024: 173–176). The latest instance of this dynamic is algorithmic management. In a self-assessment of the effectiveness of its tools, based on its own workplace tracking data, Microsoft boasts that ‘productivity signals across Microsoft 365 continue to climb’ (Microsoft, 2022). The report notes further that ‘48% of employees and 53% of managers report that they’re already burned out at work’ (Microsoft, 2022). In a nearly comical manner, Microsoft attempts to present these numbers as two separate trends in labour productivity, but the paradoxical relationship is obvious: work is intensified, productivity increases, people become exhausted and experience burnout – and productivity decreases.

To be considered useful, it does not suffice to have a job. Instead, performance is the central yardstick. As early as the 1950s, Marcuse (1955) in his engagement with Freud identified the principle of performance as the predominant historical form of the reality principle – that is, adaptation to social norms. Adorno noted in Minima Moralia, that the norm of performance is so deeply embedded in modern society that it extends from work into private life; the latter is ‘engulfed by a mysterious activity that bears all the features of commercial life without there being actually any business to transact’ (2005: 23). Productivity thus becomes an end in itself.

Retrospectively, it is clear that the modern ideals of performance and productivity were always linked to the use of fossil fuels. It was fossil energy that enabled the leaps in industrial productivity that became the core of capitalist development. Thermodynamics, the science behind steam engines, ensured that fossil energy and work also merged linguistically and culturally: ‘work’ became the physical unit of measurement for energy, and ‘energy’ became the universal metaphor for the evaluation and control of human work (for an extensive historical reconstruction, see Daggett, 2019). Consequently, fossil energy became a symbol of productivity and performance.

Thus, the normalization of ecological destructiveness has deep roots in the symbolic and material organization of social metabolism itself. On the one hand, fossil energy is the material basis of modern productivity growth. On the other hand, the fact that the ideal of performance has become the dominant form of the reality principle in modern capitalism leads to an affective attachment to precisely this fossil-fuelled productivity. Accordingly, right-wing populist mobilization can draw on widespread affective resources.

The new fear of uselessness

A crucial link between the right-wing and liberal versions of fossil normality is a fear that has become increasingly prevalent in modernity. Zygmunt Bauman argues that in modern societies, the central measure of a person's value is their economic usefulness. At the same time, however, the dynamics of capitalism are producing ever larger surplus populations. The prospect of one day belonging to these useless people becomes the primal fear of modernity:

The others do not need you; they can do as well, and better, without you. There is no self-evident reason for your being around and no obvious justification for your claim to the right to stay around. To be declared redundant means to have been disposed of because of being disposable – just like the empty and non-refundable plastic bottle or once-used syringe, an unattractive commodity with no buyers, or a substandard or stained product without use thrown off the assembly line by the quality inspectors. ‘Redundancy’ shares its semantic space with ‘rejects’, ‘wastrels’, ‘garbage’, ‘refuse’ – with waste. The destination of the unemployed, of the ‘reserve army of labour’, was to be called back into active service. The destination of waste is the waste-yard, the rubbish heap. (Bauman, 2004: 12)

In the context of a climate collapse, this fear escalates to a new level as the threat of uselessness is precipitated by two factors: the declining demand for labour and the deteriorating state of the environment itself. It is a fact that large parts of nature and humanity are losing their economic usefulness as a result of climate change. Resources and jobs are lost, people are displaced and remain permanently useless. Those who have become useless are marginalized in more or less violent ways. This is happening not only at the militarized external borders of the early industrialized economies, which are turning into mass graves, but also within them. For example, during the coronavirus pandemic, the deputy governor of Texas suggested that economic restrictions and, in particular, protective measures for the elderly should be lifted, as they were prepared to sacrifice themselves for ‘the economy’. Uselessness literally becomes a death sentence.

Bauman did not account for this ecological dimension of uselessness in his analysis. He attributed structural redundancy not to the material conditions of the social metabolism with nature, but to a ‘culture of waste’ that ascribes intrinsic value to nothing and no one. This ‘culture of waste’ proves to be a cipher for Bauman's theory of ‘liquid modernity’, characterized as it is by a feeling that nothing is permanent any longer: bonds to soil and tradition alike have dissolved. With this diagnosis, Bauman contributed to a sociological myth of a dematerialized society: ‘Nothing is truly necessary, nothing is irreplaceable. […] No step and no choice is once and for all, none is irrevocable’ (2004: 96).

Bauman's description may apply to social relations in flexible capitalism, but it ignores the material-ecological dimension of society. The climate crisis now compels us to recognize that modernity is by no means liquid, but rather that it is leaving deep scars on the planet. Ecosystems are irreplaceable, and their destruction usually does prove irrevocable. An ecologically sensitive concept of uselessness therefore becomes a key category for understanding the social conflicts arising from the ecological crisis.

Given the close connection between usefulness and fossil fuels described above, the fear of uselessness merges with a fear of decarbonization. In this sense, several of the construction workers we interviewed see decarbonization primarily as a threat to the principles of productivity and performance. As an argument against electromobility, they cite what they see as the absurd scenario of an ‘e-excavator’. This could ‘never deliver the performance of a normal excavator that runs on diesel’. Another even associates this with the fear that with electric vehicles ‘you can only work for three hours, and then what?’

Given that fossil fuels have become a symbol of productivity and performance – that is, the ideals according to which the modern subject is valued – the prospect of its abolition becomes threatening. Although the fuel is the object of desire here, the cause of the desire is the symbolic dimension of the fulfilment of the performance principle, materialized in the explosion of combustion. Decarbonization is thus perceived not only as a threat to concrete jobs, as the rationalist argument emphasizes, but as a threat to the principle of work itself. In the USA, the perception of environmentalism as a threat to work was long illustrated by a popular bumper sticker running: ‘Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?’ (White, 1996). This is also evident in our construction worker interviews; for example, when one interviewee surmises about the climate movement: ‘[They] are all those who have too much time.’ Another explains:

I think they are standing up for their interests. And their interests are: not working and having as much freedom as possible. Skipping their studies so that they can go to the demos on Friday, studying as long as they can so that they don’t have to work.

Strikingly, most respondents also report suffering strongly from the conditions of their work. The contradiction between suffering from and identifying with one's own utilization cannot be resolved into different subjective positions on the same problem. Instead, it is a contradiction that is inherent in the narratives of the individual interviewees. For example, the same interviewee who previously accused the climate movement of work shyness admits: ‘I would prefer – and I speak for 90 percent of people – not to work at all, so I would just pursue my hobbies for the same wage.’ Then he adds: ‘But it's not realistic, is it? I just think people have lost touch with reality.’

The acceptance of the necessity of work reflects the Freudian reality principle par excellence. Going beyond Freud, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002), building on their theory of the introversion of the sacrifice, identify this very reality principle as the basis of pathological projection: integration into the society of work requires the de-thematization of the sacrifices and renunciations made for it. As a result, one's own unrealizable desires are split off and projected onto an outside world in order to be fought against there. Climate activism thus triggers so much outrage precisely because it appears as a negation of all the sacrifices that had to be made for the world of work. It is therefore no coincidence that the increasingly frequently documented outbreaks of violence against climate activists are regularly accompanied by the call to ‘go to work!’ ²

The link between the fear of uselessness and the fear of the extinction of the fossil fire can already be found in the classic texts of the right. Ernst Jünger, one of the literary pioneers of German fascism, sums up the modern link between feeling useful and burning fossil fuels when he reports a panicked fear of uselessness that creeps over him where factory chimneys emit no smoke: ‘Everyone knows the feeling of emptiness that we often experience when the great machine is at rest on Sundays. It seems to us as if the masses that then flood through the streets, unoccupied, have lost their real meaning’ (2001: 159). The current right-wing populist narrative of a threat to fossil normality is based on this topos.

Rebellious submission to the machine

Despite its emphatic reference to the normality of the status quo, the anti-ecological protest is perceived as rebellious, as it is directed not only against the climate movement, but also against governments that have officially committed themselves to a policy of sustainability. In Germany, for example, the fossil reaction is afraid of state subsidies for heat pumps, which they see as the ‘final alienation from fire’, as the right-wing daily newspaper Welt headlined (Woeller, 2023). Such fears mobilized over 13,000 people to demonstrate against heat pumps in Erding, Bavaria, in June 2023. Although the main speakers, Prime Minister Markus Söder and Minister of Economic Affairs Hubert Aiwanger, were the highest representatives of the Bavarian government, they used the language of rebellion with slogans such as ‘reclaiming democracy’. This strategy of statist rebellion has previously been championed by Donald Trump.

Here, we can see clear resemblances to the patterns of authoritarian rebellion described by Erich Fromm. In the late 1920s, he and his team surveyed German workers for their political and psychological orientations in order to evaluate their stance on fascism. The study classified most respondents as ‘rebellious-authoritarian character types’ (Fromm, 2019). Fromm interpreted the widespread rebellious sentiment as authoritarian because it was directed against the perceived weakness of the Weimar Republic – that is, democratic politicians and representatives of a supposed ‘Jewish finance capital’, who were to be replaced by ‘true authorities’ (2019). Similarly, the fossil reaction today perceives the ‘green mainstream’ as a weak authority – not only because of its political style, but above all because the extinction of the fossil fire itself symbolizes weakness for them.

Labour plays an often-overlooked role in this form of authoritarianism. In particular, the miner has become the mythical ideal figure of almost all right-wing parties. In Germany, Alternative for Germany (AfD) politicians begin their speeches with a ‘greeting to the coal miners’, who have allegedly been betrayed by the government (Kumpfmüller, 2019). The depiction of a coal miner is also featured prominently in the party's iconography. This is probably an imitation of Trump's self-styled presentation. He likes to be photographed wearing a miner's helmet or a baseball cap with the slogan ‘Make Coal Great Again!’ – and has promised the restoration of jobs in this sector. One of his first presidential decrees lifted the ban on coal mining on state-owned land. The promises proved illusory and by the end of his first term there were in fact far fewer coal miners than at its start (Milman, 2020).

Widespread infatuation with coal miners can hardly be explained by the actual hope of saving the vanishingly small number of jobs in the industry. The reactionary fondness for them would appear to be paradoxical, because miners were once the group of workers best positioned to win the most significant concessions from capital given to their structural advantage in the production process (Mitchell, 2013). It was precisely this power that earned them the hatred of historical reactionaries, and the sympathy for proletarian emancipation has hardly grown in today's right. Rather, the fossil reaction's newfound affection for the coal miner can be explained precisely by the fact that the power of the miners has long since been broken. Today, the miner is actually a symbol of proletarian subjugation. This is not limited to the defeat of the large coal miners’ strikes in the 1980s. For the miner represents the subjugation of both external and internal nature: external nature is blasted open, polluted, whereas internal nature, the body of the worker, is subjected to destructive exploitation in life-threatening working conditions. It is exactly this aspect of subjugation that is at the heart of the love for fossil fuels in current and historical reaction. As Andreas Malm (2016) has shown, even beyond the mines themselves, the central function of coal was the industrial subjugation of workers.

Max Horkheimer (2004: 64) emphasized:

Domination of nature involves domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate nature in himself. Domination becomes ‘internalized’ for domination's sake.

It is precisely this aspect of subjugation that is at the heart of the love of fossil fuels in the current and historical reaction. Jünger (2001: 160) had already recognized this in 1925:

‘The machine will roll down anybody who opposes it. Its manifestation of steel will crush every protest, just like the protests of those luddites in the English industrial area against the first effects of steam power.’

In the interviews with the construction workers, the identification with one's own utilization is also explicitly directed against protest. For example, some of the interviewees take the suffering from work intensification and heat stress as a reason for union organization and resistance (Schaupp, 2024b). For others, however, it is precisely the unopposed endurance of such suffering that provides proof of their identity-forming masculinity. One worker who is active in a trade union describes this ‘toxic macho culture’ as the most important obstacle to organizing. In this sense, an important aspect of the normalization of destructiveness is the identification with one's own subjugation – a core component of reactionary ideals of masculinity (Theweleit, 1991). Fromm (1994) interpreted such sadomasochistic identification with one's own subjugation as an ‘escape from freedom’.

Enjoying destructiveness

With the global rise of the climate movement, counter-protests also began to grow. In the USA, they have developed their own protest practice, known as rolling coal. This involves modifying the engines of diesel vehicles so that they emit a black cloud of soot at the push of a button. In the USA, this practice has become established as a form of action against climate protests – or simply against women. This practice only becomes understandable as ecological violence against the backdrop of climate change. It is not only an attack on the people concerned, but above all the enjoyment of ecological destruction, which derives its provocative potential precisely from the awareness of climate breakdown (Daggett, 2018).

In Germany, anti-climate protests were organized in the ‘Fridays for Hubraum’ campaign, an association of car fans against the rise of the climate movement in 2019. Within a few days, their Facebook group reached over half a million members, who praised their tuned cars and gave free rein to sexualized fantasies of violence against female climate activists. As with rolling coal, an enjoyment of destructiveness is at the centre of the movement. The title of a sympathetic report on the group emphasizes that they are ‘more than performance-hungry car freaks’ (DPA, 2019). This ‘hunger for performance’ is a key to understanding the protest against climate protection.

We have already seen above how fossil energy has come to symbolize performance. However, the machines that run on this energy are more than just symbols. Rather, they implement the performance principle in place of the subject. This by no means only refers to the substitution of human labour, but also has an important affective dimension. For instance, the enthusiasm for the ‘performance’ of sports utility vehicle (SUV) engines goes far beyond their practical benefits. Only a vanishingly small minority of SUV drivers actually use their vehicles off-road. As a result, the design of the vehicles has also given up on creating the illusion of an off-road vehicle and instead only ‘pure performance’ is aestheticized. What makes these machines so attractive is therefore essentially that they perform for us. This also applies to work machines. The construction workers we interviewed repeatedly rave about the fact that the diesel-powered excavators they work with deliver performance that could never be equalled by their electric counterparts. Affectively, such diesel machines or SUVs seem to fulfil a similar function to the ‘canned laughter’ in TV shows. This laughter is by no means only there to suggest an entertainment value, even if the jokes are bad. Rather, it fulfils the liberating function of laughter for the viewers, allowing them to relax emotionally after a hard day's work, even though they are just staring motionlessly at a screen. Slavoj Žižek (2007: 22–39), following Lacan, speaks of ‘interpassivity’ in this context. In this sense, the powerful diesel machines enable an interpassive satisfaction of the hunger for performance: they not only expand our productivity, but also provide emotional gratification because they have performed for us.

With Lacan, this form of enjoyment can be broken down even further. He contrasts enjoyment or jouissance with the pleasure principle. For Lacan, entering the symbolic order is synonymous with the prohibition of enjoyment. For sociality to be possible, uninhibited enjoyment must be replaced by regulated desire. Thus, jouissance is destructive for the subject, which is why Lacan (2007) associates it with the death drive. However, it is precisely the prohibition of enjoyment that makes the forbidden particularly attractive. Therefore, even in its violation of the symbolic order, enjoyment remains bound to it. Lacan (1999: 3) brings this to the paradoxical formula: ‘Nothing forces someone to enjoy except the superego.’ Todd McGowan emphasizes that this conception of enjoyment is also helpful for understanding seemingly irrational politics:

If the aim of our political activity is to discover a way of organizing and distributing enjoyment, then actions that violate our self-interest lose their anomalous status and become the rule rather than the exception, since enjoyment occurs through the destruction rather than the advancement of our self-interest. We enjoy through forms of self-sacrifice, and in politics we enjoy the sacrifice of our own good. (2019: 206)

The enjoyment of fossil destructiveness also follows this pattern: it breaks through fossil normality by demonstratively celebrating its destructive dimensions. In this sense, the jouissance of fossil energy is always also about enjoying the destructive elements of expansive utilization. Not only is this enjoyment unable to satisfy the underlying needs, it also includes its own destruction. In her analysis of rolling coal, Daggett (2018) too emphasizes the connection between ecological destructiveness and symbolic self-destruction: the invocation of coal work also celebrates the destruction of workers’ bodies.

This motif is already present in historical fascism. The Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti, for example, called for subordinating life as a whole to ‘the all-dominant zeal of the motor’ (quoted in Malm and Zetkin Collective, 2021: 402). Jünger's admiration of fossil productivity is also combined with a peculiar enjoyment in the destruction of nature: ‘Everyone knows the intoxication that overwhelms modern man through the radiation of his work in hours and minutes in which the energy burns like a blazing flame over the giant cities’ (Jünger, 2001: 159) Similarly, Marinetti writes:

We have great centers which are aflame day and night, breathing their huge fires all over the open countryside. We have soaked with our sweat a whole forest of immense mill chimneys, whose capitals of stretching smoke hold up our sky, which wishes to be seen as nothing but a vast factory ceiling. (quoted in Malm and Zetkin Collective, 2021: 402)

Fromm interpreted Marinetti as a prime example of necrophilia, not in a sexual sense but in the sense of a political affect seeking death and destruction as an end in itself. He draws on Miguel de Unamuno, who first interpreted the motto of Spanish fascism ‘viva la muerte’ (long live death) as necrophilia in this sense. Fromm (1973: 330–358) emphasized the importance of technology, which for necrophilia is the emphatic other of life. Practices like rolling coal can be understood as necrophiliac in this sense.

The necrophiliac enjoyment of destructiveness is therefore what distinguishes the right-wing populist stance on climate collapse from fossil normality. The figureheads of right-wing populism outshine almost all of their supporters in their celebration of destructiveness. Donald Trump, whose various criminal offences have not harmed but boosted him, is probably the most prominent example. Xavier Milei's successful election campaign in Argentina is another example of the demonstrative enjoyment of destructiveness: his trademark was the chainsaw, which he used to stage the ritual destruction of the welfare state. However, the original moment of this form of staging is the slogan ‘Drill Baby, Drill!’, the response of the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, to climate change. These self-presentations come very close to what Walter Benjamin (1999: 541) described as a ‘destructive character’. He explains: ‘The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed’ (541). Destruction is therefore an end in itself and pursues no hidden goals: ‘The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. In contrast, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it’ (Benjamin, 1999: 542).

However, the concepts of necrophilia or destructive character should not lead to premature pathologization. Rather, the enjoyment of destruction is used strategically in right-wing populism when it tries to mobilize proletarian milieus by deliberately violating established norms. This begins with the breaking of aesthetic conventions; for example, through the bizarre hairstyles that have become the trademark of this type of politician. Above all, however, it is about the targeted provocation of moral norms, including in the area of sustainability. This is where the right-wing populists prove to be veritable sociologists: they are aware of the central position that morality and decency occupy in the subjectification of the liberal middle classes (see, for example, Liu, 2021) and deliberately provoke them – for example, with slogans such as ‘Drill baby, drill!’, the demand for more diesel cars on German roads or the claim that they eat almost exclusively meat. They then hope that liberal outrage will be articulated as loudly as possible. This enables them to build on proletarian experiences of devaluation based on the ideal of sustainability, which certainly fulfils a moral and aesthetic function of differentiation in the liberal middle classes compared to the proletarian lifestyle, which is devalued as both unhealthy and unsustainable. The figureheads of right-wing populism want to suggest that they are treated just as patronizingly by the ‘establishment’ as the lower classes, who are despised for their dirty mopeds or unhealthy fast food. This enables proletarian identification with millionaires whose policies make no offer to actually improve the situation of the lower classes. Adorno (1951) had already identified a similar strategy as a characteristic of classic fascist propaganda: the fascist leader must represent not only greatness, but also the ‘antisocial psychopath’ in order to serve as a ‘great little man’ for projection. Thus, the enjoyment of destructiveness reveals its strategic moment precisely in its apparent delusion.

Outlook

In view of the current political climate, we can see that the subjugation of external and internal nature is so completely intertwined that any restriction of this expansive utilization – be it in the form of a reduction in working hours or decarbonization – is itself perceived as an existential threat. This fear is taken up by the right-wing anti-climate protest and turned into something positive to be enjoyed.

Overcoming destructiveness therefore requires overcoming the fear of uselessness. However, since this fear is entirely justified against the background of the brutal social exclusion of uselessness, overcoming it cannot be another appeal to the individual to self-optimize. Instead, it is above all a social task. In objecting to a purely psychological interpretation of their study on the ‘authoritarian personality’, Adorno et al. (1948: 3) emphasized that the roots of the syndrome lie in the ‘general trend towards ever-increasing “integration” of the individual into the social totality and, economically, the increasing sacrifices that civilization demands of its supposed beneficiaries’. Understanding this integration is key for a critical psychoanalytical understanding of destructiveness as well. This allows us to identify the increasing normalization of destructiveness as a consequence of the increasing destructiveness of utilization: as utilization undermines itself, it needs to take ever more aggressive forms (think fracking or Adderall); those who contribute to this utilization in their everyday work must adapt to a progressively destructive totality. This means that the reason for the increasing prevalence of the ‘destructive character’ is not growing madness or ‘polarization’, but (over-)adaptation to the snowballing material destructiveness of utilization itself.

Expansive utilization can therefore not be overcome individually, but only socially. At present, however, the dominant social responses to the ecological crisis – ecological austerity and social-democratic eco-modernism – are above all efforts to adapt this expansive utilization to changing environmental conditions. A possible alternative is hinted at in one of the few positive passages in Adorno's work:

Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars. A mankind which no longer knows want will begin to have an inkling of the delusory, futile nature of all the arrangements hitherto made in order to escape want, which used wealth to reproduce want on a larger scale. Enjoyment itself would be affected, just as its present framework is inseparable from operating, planning, having one's way, subjugating. […] ‘being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfilment’, might take the place of process, act, satisfaction. (2005: 156)

This suggests a transformation of enjoyment which is coupled to overcoming expansive utilization. The destructiveness of the ‘present framework’ of enjoyment that Adorno is referring to here results precisely from its coupling to performance as an end in itself. Thus, in overconsumption, enjoyment does not become the other of expansive utilization, but rather its continuation. With Lacan, this form of enjoyment can be understood as an over-adaptation to the reality principle. Some of the construction workers we interviewed suggest a reduction of working hours as a concrete transformative policy that does justice to the inseparability of the utilization of work and nature:

Reducing working hours is the first thing I would do. […] Well, I now work nine hours, plus breaks, changing, travelling back and forth. Besides the fact that it sucks for me privately: you can simply burn a lot more CO₂ in nine hours on the construction site than in eight. That really adds up.

In fact, wage working time is a key economic factor influencing CO₂ emissions (Nässén and Larsson, 2015). In addition to direct savings at work and while travelling, shorter working hours would also have an indirect positive effect: people and families who have more free time use significantly less environmentally harmful technologies on average, both in the household and for transport (Kallis et al., 2013). However, the devastation has already progressed so far that ending expansive utilization cannot follow the hedonistic ideal of idleness, which is only the flipside of productivist ideology. Rather, the promise of overcoming expansive uselessness lies precisely in liberating the social capacities that are necessary for dealing with the ecological crisis – and achieving usefulness in a planetary sense.