Commandeering Potential

Abstract

Commandeering Potential Daniel A. Barber (bio) Hijacking Sustainability. Adrian Parr. The MIT Press. http://mitpress.mit.edu. 209 pages; cloth, $24.95. Adrian Parr's Hijacking Sustainability contributes to a group of recent publications intending to assess the increasing popularity of environmentalism. Does this popularization empower the movement or dilute it, this scholarship asks? In dialogue with Bill McKibben's Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010) and Heather Rodgers's Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution (2010), Parr explores the terms by which "sustainability culture," as she calls it, has become enmeshed in capitalist and consumerist excess. Parr's is the most theoretically sophisticated of this recent wave of environmentalist critique, and she provides a valuable interpretation of sustainability through the frameworks of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Parr is doing important work by advancing the discourse in this regard, as phenomena as disparate as the rebranding of BP and the evolution of gated communities are investigated for both their theoretical significance and their emplacement within struggles for new possibilities of living in a sustainable future. Parr moves the rubric of sustainability away from a special-interest group of "environmentalists" to a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between economies and ecologies. She broadens the premise of "sustainable design and theory" to encompass "a system of knowledge that shapes subjectivities," indicating that "it creates new ways of feeling, thinking, and intuiting life by charting the powers of art and science together." However, as the book's title indicates, Parr's premise is that such shaping is being hijacked as "the power of sustainability culture is appropriated by the mechanisms of State and corporate culture" to serve their own ends. The two-part structure of the book allows for in-depth analysis of this hijacking–the first part, "The Popularization of Sustainability Culture," presents a series of case studies to describe how "culture can promote a sense of dignity and care for the environment in ways that institutions, bureaucracies, and governments cannot." Each chapter is mainly concerned with a critical description of a given "hijacking" practice, with a few pages at the end describing the transformative role a new cultural approach can play. Parr identifies such counter-tendencies in art, design, and other collective strategies. The second part, "Challenges to Sustainability Culture," explores some of the central problems through which this sustainability culture is being tested. The first part is the strongest. Parr's detailed narratives of various hijackings make for compelling storytelling and are rich in detail. In the context of the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, readers now might find the discussion of BP most relevant. Parr debunks the environmental claims of the company's transformation from "British Petroleum" to "Beyond Petroleum" through a thorough analysis of the contradictions contained in the rubric of "socially responsible investment." The most engaging chapter, however, is on Hollywood, where Parr reveals a green celebrity culture that relies on the tropes of image-making developed in Finis Dunaway's recent Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (2005). The careful calibration of such public relations efforts obfuscates, Parr argues, the environmental impact of the movie industry—from the large-scale manufacturing and distribution systems to the daily reality of idling trailers and excessive catering. Parr then performs an analysis of the cover of the 2006 "green issue" of Vanity Fair, where Knut—the polar bear once used in a global Coca-Cola advertising campaign—had been photoshopped into an image of Leonardo DiCaprio on site in front of an Icelandic glacier. In Parr's intricate recounting, the plight of the polar bear and legislation to protect it are placed in the context of "the affective power of the bear cub and the commodity value of DiCaprio." Parr's point is that while celebrity activism capitalizes on energies of star power "and puts them to good use in the service of collective life," such energies are still enmeshed in the production of illusions. The image of sustainable activism is not necessarily related to relevant policy or economic shifts, but still holds promise in...