Keeping Up with the Klimate

“That’s enough, thanks,” is arguably a radical sentiment. Only by the perpetual creation of novel needs and desires can economic growth be sustained.
—L. M. Sacasas, “Ill with Want” (2021)

IN EARLY 2024, Astra House published the English translation (by Brian Bergstrom) of Kōhei Saitō’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto; a few months later, the fifth season of The Kardashians (2022– ) premiered on Hulu. Sara Sowell, a filmmaker based in Milwaukee, brings these two seemingly disparate subjects into dialogue in her experimental short Color Negative (2023), which premiered at the Brooklyn Film Festival in May 2023. Color Negative, a nearly six-minute 16 mm film, details the ecological impact of the Kardashian-Jenner family’s waste. Through the film’s content and materiality, Sowell critiques the environmental devastation wreaked by these celebrity entrepreneurs’ fast-fashion and jet-setting lifestyles.

Color Negative begins with a series of intertitles on a monochromatic screen (all in sleek, text-message-style lowercase): “kylie jenner is known for taking 17 minute flights, responsible for 1 ton of co2 emissions,” and “kourtney kardashian is now the sustainability ambassador of boohoo, a fast-fashion brand. 92 million tonnes of textile waste is produced every year.”

The words flicker, as smudges from the remnants of the black remjet layer obfuscate the text. Sowell then cuts to news articles on the Kardashian-Jenners’ environmental waste filmed off a computer monitor. By juxtaposing new digital technologies (social media) with old (analog film), she offers new ways of seeing these 21st-century celebrities—namely, as ubiquitous archetypes of capitalist consumption.

To foreground the tensions between fast fashion and slow art practices, Sowell shoots on celluloid, and thus “recycles” the Kardashians’ images from their Hulu show, echoing the practices of structural filmmaker Paul Sharits, whom Sowell’s film describes as “the great recycler.” Color Negative is a polemic and visual pleasure, grappling with the history of capitalism as a cinematic attraction. After all, one of the very first actualities pictured workers leaving the Lumière factory in 1895. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to the mechanization not only of labor but also of entertainment, and to the subsequent representational intertwining of work and play. From Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) to Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), the doldrums of labor continue to cinematically captivate us.

Accelerating work perpetuates the modes of production, which in turn accelerate environmental collapse. “The richest 10 percent of the planet’s population makes up more than half of total worldwide emissions,” Saitō writes. “We are all complicit in the Imperial Mode of Living.” But Sowell suggests that some are more complicit than others. Drawing upon Marx, Saitō argues that we must also eradicate mass production and mass consumption to combat global warming—a clarion call that would endanger the business empire the Kardashians have built under the guise of “hard work.”

Sowell’s argument is not as dogmatic as Saitō’s: in order to rephotograph the show, Sowell streams it, entertained by—and engaged with—the very art object she critiques. Yet, though their approaches differ, Saitō and Sowell utilize writers and mediums of the 19th and 20th centuries in order to analyze our current moment.

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Margaret Thatcher often claimed that “there is no alternative” to free market thinking, but Saitō makes a compelling, if idealistic, argument against capitalism and imagines a more equitable, utopian alternative. Intended for a climate change audience (that might have been more revelatory in the 1970s before the rise of neoliberalism), Slow Down presents a twofold goal: to advocate for degrowth and to illuminate how “only an unprecedented form of Marxist analysis can answer the demands of the era of environmental crisis known as the Anthropocene.” Slow Down is not a how-to manual—there is no step-by-step rubric for how we overhaul our current political and economic models. Those looking for policy suggestions will be disappointed, and those suspicious of claims to return to a communal farming society can rest easy. Instead, Slow Down offers “an unprecedented form of Marxist analysis,” constructed from the philosopher’s previously unpublished works that have never been made public, to showcase how Marx’s “vision of communism became something different from both productivism and ecosocialism. What Marx achieved […] was a vision of degrowth communism.”

Thus, instead of supporting “the techno-optimism of the Green New Deal” (which calls for reforms within a capitalistic framework)—as he explained on LARB Radio Hour—Saitō uses Marx’s writings to advocate for slowing down in toto. Degrowth is the only solution to the accelerated destruction of our planet wrought by capitalism’s relentless production model, something the COVID-19 pandemic threw into stark relief. Saitō is certainly not the first to tackle the intersection of capitalism and climate change—prominent examples include Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). Saitō’s newest book deviates from Klein’s by utilizing Marx’s archival resources, including his “Research Notes” (foundational to a new publication project underway called MEGA: Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe), which offers new interpretations of Capital. The result is a richly researched, deftly wrought manifesto, albeit one that can at times be a bit bellicose in its certainty that degrowth communism is the only solution for radical change and, ultimately, world “freedom.”

The acuity of Saitō’s argument lies in his defense of degrowth as the only viable option to combat climate change, as opposed to decoupling, though I remain unconvinced of the feasibility of such a project. While decoupling relies on technological innovation to “sever the link between economic growth and increases in environmental burden,” degrowth relies on a worldwide collective effort to cease production in the Global North as we know it. For those uncertain where we might start, Saitō notes that the rich can take immediate action. “The fact is,” he writes, “if the world’s richest 10 percent were to lower the amount of [carbon] emissions they produce to that of the average European, overall emissions would decrease by a full third.” He elaborates: “What needs to be reduced is the number of SUVs and the amount of beef and fast fashion being consumed,” even as figures like the Kardashians extol and profit from this lifestyle. But while Saitō’s argument for degrowth communism is strong, evidence for how it might be implemented on a global level is not. Perhaps, then, Slow Down is best enjoyed as inspirational reading, rather than an achievable plan.

Such shortcomings of viability are due to the largely historical nature of Saitō’s project. Slow Down’s main objective is to reclaim Marx’s relevance for a modern audience and underscore his “ecological critiques of capitalism,” which occurred later in his life, after he had moved away from both a productivism and Eurocentrism position to one of degrowth. The limit of capitalism, in Saitō’s interpretation of Marx, is that it “displaces its contradictions elsewhere and thus renders them invisible” until the point of collapse. Building on these historical materials, Saitō thus argues that time and energy should be invested into a just distribution of resources and local communities where shorter working hours, workers’ co-ops, and reduced carbon emissions are normalized, as opposed to the contemporary rise of “green” commodities that virtue signal collective solidarity rather than enact it.

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Virtue signaling is common currency amongst celebrity entrepreneurs, including, but not restricted to, the Kardashians. In particular, sisters Kim and Kourtney Kardashian have affirmed Gabrielle Moss’s fear that self-care is “poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.” Companies like Poosh reinscribe self-care and slowing down as highly individualized and profitable. But if we’re to follow the model put forth in Slow Down, the dichotomy between collective solidarity and individual gain must be challenged. Self-care is currently premised on capitalistic value, whereas collective growth self-care embraces use value instead. If care for the commons is the only way through our current climate crisis, we must redefine self-care as synonymous with collective care, dropping the hyphenate indefinitely.

The problem with Saitō’s premise is the matter of who would agree to such an anti-capitalist overhaul. Certainly not the woman who once said, “I have the best advice for women in business: get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” (While I may be easily convinced by Saitō’s argument as someone who makes $20,000 a year teaching college students, Kim, an archetypal girlboss in the Instagram age, would not share my sentiments.) “Last year, I made a commitment to myself that I was gonna slow down,” Kim says in the season five premiere of The Kardashians. “[But] I was fucking lying to myself ’cause I’ve never been busier […] and being busy and working is my happy place.” The mononymic family commodifies not just products but themselves too. Yet Kim’s narrative foregrounds the self, the singular, just as self-care foregrounds self-optimization. In the episode “This Is Going to Be Really Hot Tea,” Kim describes her daily life as a single mom of four. But what her narrative elides is her capital and the entire apparatus at work to support her business and life. The same way 21st-century self-care companies promote slowing down for self-improvement, Kim promotes a narrative that only illuminates her own achievements rather than the community of helpers who allow for her to work at such accelerated speed. The Kardashians define the modern self—and woman—as a relentless workhorse. Capitalism, coupled with feminism, becomes a brand, a spectacle, a sight.

Color Negative is, among other things, a critique of the Kardashian body as commodity, evidenced through Sowell developing and projecting the camera negative. By shooting and developing on color negative film stock (hence the title of the film), Sowell inverts the represented colors so that the Kardashians are spectral masses, white and vacuous. At the level of both content and form, Color Negative doubles as a feminist intervention into the long, male-dominated legacy of structural filmmaking by reappropriating the Kardashians, turning them into a field of vision instead of utilizing the signature flicker or static shots specific to this heretofore masculine, avant-garde mode.

Sowell’s critique of capitalism is not necessarily a Marxist one, but it is a material one. She developed Color Negative in her bathtub using a C41 color chemistry, typical for developing still 35 mm color film. While Sowell acknowledged that this is “not exactly the ‘standard’ process,” she clarified in an email that “it was important to [her] to hand-develop this piece because ECN-2 chemistry isn’t necessarily a consumer product (used in labs).” The choice to shoot the Kardashians on 16 mm film is an argument for the artistry of hand-processed film over the immediacy of digital technologies, and 16 mm film historically evokes avant-garde or oppositional film histories that are often anti-narrative. Whereas narrative storytelling assumes a future—an ongoingness after the three-act structure concludes on-screen—anti-narrative and structural film makes space for the possibility that there is no future, further evidenced by Sowell’s decision to project negatives, which deteriorate with each subsequent screening. The film is not archival: it has a life to expend.

Kim Knowles writes in Experimental Film & Photochemical Practices (2020) that “whilst film has been celebrated for its innate ability to explore and communicate with the natural world in radical new ways, it remains an industrial art form that […] relies heavily on a whole range of substances that are harmful to the environment.” Though Color Negative divests from the pervasiveness of accelerated image making, by being screened on 16 mm film and thus only viewable to live audiences, Sowell still implicates her own chemical usage, production, and (minimal) waste. No one is left unscathed under any model of mechanical production, much in the spirit of Saitō’s book. But if, as Jenny Odell argues in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), “the ultimate goal of ‘doing nothing’ is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm,” Sowell has done that twofold, in both her anachronistic materials and her mode of exhibition.

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I first saw Color Negative at Company Brewing for the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival in 2023. As filmmaker Ben Balcom projected the camera original, the tape splices repeatedly jammed the projector, requiring Balcom to start and stop the film over and over again. As Balcom wrestled with the capricious celluloid in the brewery’s darkroom, the antiquated apparatus appeared inefficient and janky. This particular viewing experience, mirroring Sowell’s critique of the Kardashians’ fast fashion, underscored the benefits of taking one’s time and slowing down. Balcom’s persistence in attending to the projector demonstrated the value in not moving forward at all costs. He stopped the accelerationist cycle in order to protect the print. When the film finally ran smoothly, the audience erupted in applause.

Later, in the Q and A, Sowell joked that Color Negative was a performance piece played by Ben Balcom. The projector mistake made visible what is typically invisible labor; such a moment of collective assistance and active engagement reflects Saitō’s sentiment that “human labor was once united at the level of conception and execution,” thus delaying instant gratification, and that Sowell’s slow artistic practice and exhibition (i.e., economic degrowth) are worth the wait. And, as Saitō would add, since the world’s “complete subsumption by capital has robbed us of our skills and self-sufficiency,” there is a collective benefit in returning to artistic, social, and political practices that prioritize patience, rather than promptitude.

As I write this, universities across the United States are having tuition-paying students, peacefully protesting on their campuses, arrested in an attempt to assuage donors. Jared Kushner is praising Gaza’s “very valuable […] waterfront property.” In each of these instances, investments proceed without delay. Money is not the only motive perpetuating the war on Gaza, but the opportunity to make more—and quickly—is one reason so many institutions refuse to divest from the Israeli government at this time.

To place our trust in neoliberal governance or institutions is anathema to our survival as a species. We know this to be true. Nonetheless, many persist, indulging in the illusory dream of capitalism rather than facing its devastating reality. Saitō notes that “we need to move beyond policy change and toward changing the social system as a whole if we want our efforts to be adequate in the age of climate crisis.” For the US government, and certain European governments, there is no support for a ceasefire.

It is true that “capitalism will forever find ways to displace the negative effects of its workings onto the periphery it creates.” Despite—or perhaps because of—this perpetual displacement, those of us not on the periphery can pay to feel good, whether through a Poosh gummy or by binging reality TV. The apparatus of wellness culture assuages consumers’ guilt by promoting individual improvement against a collective global cost.

Admittedly, I watch The Kardashians after particularly punishing workdays. Production begets further consumption, and I am no exception. An ex once told me that I’m never so happy as when watching Kourtney and Kim catfighting. In the spirit of Saitō’s project, let’s call my habit one of “accelerated capitalism”: constantly consuming the next episode of an endless, iterative show. These prepackaged franchises provide a pleasure constructed to remain insatiable and unending. If I cannot wait for season five of The Kardashians, there are 20 seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007–21) to stream instead. We know social media monetizes our attention, but reality TV does too, profiting those whose images we consume while emitting CO2 with each hour logged. The International Energy Agency claims that “the relatively low climate impact of streaming video today is thanks to rapid improvements in the energy efficiency of data centres, networks and devices”; the agency also warns, however, that “slowing efficiency gains […] raise increasing concerns about the overall environmental impacts of the sector over the coming decades.”

Will I stop watching? I don’t think so. But I am capable of L. M. Sacasas’s adage: “That’s enough, thanks.” I don’t need pleasure in perpetuity. Or, perhaps more precisely, my proclivity for pleasure aligns with the intransigence of Sowell’s film. I just need “3.5 percent” to join me, as Saitō writes; political scientist Erica Chenoweth calculates that 3.5 is “the percentage of a population that must rise up sincerely and nonviolently to bring about a major change to society.” For the naysayers, 3.5 couch change within the realm of possibility. Therefore, perhaps one small step forward is to reframe our understanding of pleasure as something that individually costs nothing but reaps communal gains. What my ex failed to witness is that I’m actually happiest when choosing “the path of self-limitation” offline, fully present instead to my local environs and community, a community that is equally alert and present to me.

I’d like to believe that 3.5 percent can change their mode of production and consumption and thereby return their attention to the commons, a process Sowell’s film enacts through its mode of exhibition. Sowell’s film plays with the tenets of Saitō’s manifesto without subscribing to a fixed ideology or definition of entertainment, which is only one of its many pleasures. Sowell knows the climate crisis has tipped past “the point of no return,” but she’s going to enjoy the bad actors anyway. That her film generates its own destruction is part of the point. In her project, there is always already a limit to pleasure—and to the film’s, and our lives. But regardless of my own belief systems (or Saitō’s), we are still a long way off from attaining Slow Down’s aspirations and closer, instead, to the contradictory impulses of Color Negative: critique in tandem with consumption.