Den aktivistiske vrede

Abstract

2020 has brought an enormous amount of worldwide protest and social movements that has criticized and tried to change structural inequalities. The biggest issue of them all seems to be the ever growing climate crisis. Consequences are visible and potentially enormous. They will affect nature as well as human living conditions. While consensus about the need for action seems evident, no sufficient movement towards a radical de-escalation of carbon emissions, use of fossil fuels and so on, has been taken. The need for real change is clear, but how does real change emerge? This paper seeks to explore the emergence of collective agency from collective outrage. With a theoretical foundation in Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses it is stated that the general conceptualization of anger is affecting the subject’s activistic potential. The subject’s possibilities of changing this general conceptualization is explored with Archer’s morphogenetic theory. The paper examines how the emotion anger is generally represented and conceptualized in psychological literature. This conceptualization is primarily concluded to be an overextended reduction of anger that excludes the potential to initialize movements towards real societal change. Historically known social revolutions are introduced with the purpose of analyzing the role of anger in social movements of the past. The empirical and theoretical aspects of determinism, agency and anger are then combined in a reconceptualization of anger. Here, outrage defines a form of anger that is shared by a group of people, sparked by an appraisal of moral issues. Greta Thunberg’s practice of anger in the climate movement is then analyzed and discussed as an appraisal of the responsibility taken in the climate crisis. Thunberg’s practice is concluded to be suitable for real change, changing the ideology in the transnational ideological state apparatuses. Yet, the movement catalyzed by Thunberg is still in its activistic process of making real change in the global wielding of climate issues.

Bedømmelse: 12