Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that climate change made present through the consumption of technoscientific expertise begets its own post-political absence: consensual agreement about the scientific 'fact' of climate change negates alternative ways of talking about it, rendering it absent from social life.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in central Colorado, USA, this paper interrogates the seeming contradiction between the presence of climate change in the community, discernible in informants' knowledge of and concern about climate change when interviewed individually, and the absence of climate-change talk in everyday social life observed through participant observation. This paper posits that climate change slips between presence and absence because of how it is situated within the community as a post-political (Swyngedouw 2010) discourse of technoscientific expertise. Climate change is made to feel present in the lives of residents not through first-hand experiences of climactic changes but through the consumption of technoscientific expertise and findings. When asked to discuss climate change, informants cite 'experts' and adhere to a discourse of technoscientific expertise. Making climate change present in this way renders it absent from the social life of the community. Conversations about climate change are reduced to echoing scientific findings, and convinced and concerned residents, unable to productively talk about climate change amongst themselves, turn to silence. This presence begetting absence is a consequence of technoscientific expertise functioning as a Foucaultian discourse within the post-political, in which consensual agreement about the scientific 'fact' of climate change negates the potential for alternative ways of talking and thus thinking about it, effectively rendering it absent from social life. Attention to how climate change is made absent, although as yet largely absent from the anthropological literature, requires just as serious attention as the ways in which it becomes present.