Avoiding the hope of avoiding collapse: collapsology and non-hope as an emotional practice of conviction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen the rise of a ‘postapocalyptic environmentalism’, which sees environmental catastrophe as ongoing or inevitable and therefore rejects the hope of avoiding that catastrophe. So far, research on this form of environmentalism has pointed to the paradoxes and ambivalences involved in its rejection of hope, as well as to environmental activists’ difficulties translating non-hope into movement strategy. However, postapocalyptic environmentalists’ efforts of practicing non-hope have yet to be investigated. Drawing on interviews with participants in a Swedish online environmentalist network committed to ‘collapsology’, the present paper therefore investigates postapocalyptic environmentalist non-hope as an emotional practice of conviction. The paper approaches non-hope as a form of emotional deintegration, in which collapsologists seek to dehabituate the hope and optimism that inform the dominant emotive-cognitive frame of environmental politics in Western industrial societies. They do so by vigilantly maintaining feelings of certainty about the inevitability of civilizational collapse. More specifically, in rejecting hope, the interviewed participants articulate this non-hope as a form of conviction. However, the participants present this conviction as haunted by doubts, dissonances, and ambivalences, and therefore as needing vigilant maintenance efforts. Such efforts include what I call ‘impossibility work’. Implications for further research on postapocalyptic environmentalism and related movements are discussed.