Below are some thoughts-in-progress on how the cultural power of stories and images matters for climate politics.
(1) Picturing, narrating and dramatising climate change matters for:
• shaping the ‘climate of opinion’,
• influencing the ‘political climate’, and
• strengthening the climate movement
Picturing, narrating and dramatising climate change shapes how it is ‘seen’ and understood by the public, and within the climate movement. It influences the ‘political climate’, expanding or narrowing what is politically possible. Further, it provides focus, momentum and energy for the climate movement.
This makes the cultural power of stories, images and social drama central to what happens in climate politics. This form of power is important for:
- building political will to address climate change
- de-legitimising the fossil fuel industry
- building public support for change
- winning a ‘Climate Election’
- energising the climate movement
- creating a ‘climate of opinion’ and ‘political climate’ that is conducive to achieving the climate movement’s goals.
(2) Cultural power is one among a number of ‘arenas’ where political issues are ‘won or lost’
2.1: ‘Battles of images’, ‘battles of narratives’ and ‘theatrical contests’ are central to shaping climate politics.1
We ‘picture’ political conflicts. Our understanding of global and national events is shaped by the way narratives turn these events into stories with characters and a plot, and into a series of scenes where we are the ‘audience’—as well as the ‘actors’.
It matters whether an issue is visible, vivid, focussed, tangible and emotionally compelling. Political outcomes can hinge on who establishes the strongest images and narratives in the public imagination, and who uses political theatre most effectively to generate political support.
If the images, narratives and theatre that circulate in the ‘cultural dimension’ of politics were removed from the scene,
- there would be no image of Greta Thunberg holding her sign declaring a ‘Skolstrejk för Klimatet’: school strike for climate
- no story about the causes of extreme weather events like Australia’s 2019-2020 bushfires (and its Prime Minister’s absence on holiday in Hawaii as they raged),
- no story of the life of Nelson Mandela and its role in firing the anti-apartheid movement,
- no drama such as the Pacific Warriors’ blockade of Newcastle coal port,
- no imagery of the president of the Maldives holding an ‘underwater cabinet’ meeting.
In many ways, what happens in politics revolves around images and stories, and the ways in which political theatre enacts ‘stories that we can see’.
It makes sense to see cultural power as a form of power in its own right, standing alongside (e.g.) economic power, government power, legal power and “people power”.
2.2: Whose imagery, narrative and political theatre are the strongest?
The answer to this question provides important clues to who is in the best position to generate political momentum, build political will, and shape the political agenda most powerfully.
One way to assess political power is to assess the strength of the images, narratives and theatre used by different ‘sides’ in the debate.
Winning the ‘battle of images’ or having the stronger story means a gain in political power—at least in the ‘cultural dimension’ of power, which will then need to be complemented by other forms of power.
2.3: When politicians build power by spreading lies and fear, stories and images are often central to the process
For example, when politicians build or win power by inflaming the debate and stirring up fears of (e.g.) immigrants, terrorism, ‘death taxes’ foreigners, loss of ‘law and order’, a monstrous ‘great big new tax on everything’ and ‘$150 roast dinners’, or ‘stolen elections’…
This is not the same as spreading ‘misinformation’ which can be corrected by a a ‘fact check’.
The lies are often symbolically charged. Sometimes progressives reply with facts and statistics rather than powerful stories and images of their own.
2.4: The cultural power of stories and images shapes whether climate change campaigns are won or lost.
The way climate change is pictured, narrated and dramatised powerfully influences legitimacy, social license, political will and the public imagination.
The cultural ‘dimension’ of power includes examples such as:
- the stories and images of Greta Thunberg and other young people in the #Schoolstrike4climate movement
- the theatrical scenes which convey the unfolding drama of people-powered challenges to major fossil fuel projects (e.g. Ende Gelände in Germany, Stop Adani in Australia, the Tar Sands in Canada, Keystone XL in Canada and the USA).
- Tony Abbott’s alleged monstrous ‘great big new tax on everything’ in Australia
- the images of melting icebergs and carbon pollution in An Inconvenient Truth
Establishing stories and images like these in the public mind involves exerting power when it creates conditions where other forms of power can become effective.
2.5: Cultural power does not make a difference by itself—
however the same is true of any other form of power
Any political success requires several forms of power to work in conjunction. People power, for example, combines with other forms of power such as government lobbying and legal action.
Cultural power, sometimes dismissed as as ‘just symbolic’, is the same as any other form of power: it does not effect change by itself. Governments work to get the media on their side. Social movements mobilise people power, while also exerting legal and economic leverage.
In the same way, cultural power works in tandem with other forms of power to achieve an outcome.
Yet strength or weakness in the cultural dimension of power can make the difference between a political climate and a climate of opinion where success is within or out of reach. Cultural power can be essential for creating the political conditions where change becomes possible.
(3) Shifts in the ‘climate of opinion’ need to happen for many of the climate movement’s political goals to be achieved
Many of the climate movement’s political goals rely on a shift in the ‘climate of opinion’.
This may involve:
- shifts in public attitudes: while not “converting” everyone, building much broader and deeper support
- wider recognition of the problem and the need to address it
- climate change becoming more visible on the political agenda
Results include:
- public perceptions that the problem is urgent and needs to be prioritised
- building political will
- generating political momentum and energy for change
- movement mobilisation
- pressure on politicians
- the fossil fuel industry is stigmatised and its social license is withdrawn: the fossil fuel divestment movement illustrates what happens when enough people come to ‘see’ the issues in a new way.
Without the impact made by imagery, narrative and social drama, the conditions for achieving change may not come about at all.
A ‘shift in the climate of opinion’ can also be seen in terms of a shift in ‘the public imagination’.
3.1 ‘Capturing the public imagination’ is central to achieving the climate movement’s goals
Again and again, the climate movement has arguments on its side, but it faces a situation where its opponents have too strong a hold on the public imagination (or at least the imagination of large numbers of citizens).
The argument being made here is that the pathway between
(i) an initial vision of ending the fossil fuel industry and ensuring a safe climate and
(ii) eventually achieving this goal
involves winning ‘hearts and minds’, capturing the ‘public imagination’, shifting perceptions and de-legitimising the institutions and practices that perpetuate global warming.
This pathway goes through a process of changing the ‘climate of opinion’ and the ‘political climate’.
The established way in which fossil fuels are pictured, narrated and ‘imagined’ (e.g. as central to ‘life as we know it’ and to the global economy) is itself a significant political obstacle to achieving the climate movement’s objectives.
3.2 Cultural power creates conditions where other forms of power can become effective.
- In one scenario, cultural power can make the danger of climate change and the need to decarbonise the economy visible, focused, tangible and emotionally compelling.
- Alternatively, the need to address climate change can remain invisible, unfocused, intangible and emotionally flat—or it can simply be less compelling than other concerns.
Which of these two scenarios prevails is powerfully influenced by the political use of stories, imagery and political theatre, and how the cultural power they generate resonates with audiences (or fails to do so).
Shifts in public attitudes and a mobilised movement are not enough by themselves to effect political change. However, in many political situations that involve persuasion, shifts in the overall balance of forces that have been effected by cultural power have been necessary for broader change to occur.
(4) Conservatives have frequently shown greater skill in mobilising images, narratives and political theatre than progressives.
Neuroscientist, psychology professor and political commentator Drew Westen reflects on the contrasting approaches to political communication that have characterised debate in the US:
Democrats typically bombard voters with laundry lists of issues, facts, figures, and policy positions, while Republicans offer them emotionally compelling appeals, whether to their values, principles, or prejudices.
The Trump-Clinton contest in the 2016 US Presidential election provides an example.
‘I play to peoples’ fantasies’, Trump declared in The Art of the Deal. This is exactly what he did in his contest with Clinton, with his ‘Build the Wall’, ‘Make America Great Again’, ‘Drain the Swamp’, ‘Hillary’s emails’, ‘Mexican immigrants’, the ‘Muslim ban’, as well as ‘the people bec[oming] the rulers of this nation again’. His use of cultural power energised his base, and helped propel him into office.
Cultural power engages the public imagination (or in Trump’s words, ‘people’s fantasies’) about what is going on in politics, who can be trusted with their vote, and what they will do if they get elected.
Trump succeeded in making these appeals powerful and compelling for key audiences.
The same pattern is evident in Australia.
The spectre of Australia being swamped by boats from the North has warped Australian politics.2 Invoking the monstrous Great Big New Tax on Everything, Tony Abbott successfully waged his scare campaign against Australia’s carbon tax. Barnaby Joyce of the National Party added that there would be ‘a new tax on ironing, a new tax on watching television, a new tax on vacuuming. The Coalition used cultural power not just to demolish Australia’s price on carbon but also to build an overall political climate where supporters of action on climate change faced a huge uphill battle. Bernie Fraser, chairman of the Climate Change Authority from 2012-2015, described the ‘uncivilised’ nature of the climate debate, lamenting ‘the wild assertions blaming every lost job on the carbon tax … assertions not based on any objective consideration of the evidence’. The assertions may have been wild, but they were politically effective, and were often conveyed using images and narratives.
In Australia in 2019, conservatives turned the Stop Adani convoy-a convey of vehicles travelling from Hobart-to-Clermont-to-Canberra-to oppose the Adani coal mine into an image of Southern Greenies coming to ‘tell us in Central Queensland what to do’. The convoy had its own merits, however arguably its value for the climate movement was swamped by the skill of conservatives in turning its cultural power against the movement’s goals.
Further, the Australian fossil fuel industry consistently exerts power using advertising that is full of narratives and visual images about mining jobs and the place of mining in Australian life: see, for example, the Minerals Council of Australia’s Little Black Rock and Australian Mining. This is our story.
(5) The use of cultural power by the climate movement’s opponents’ needs to be challenged with cultural power in response.
Political debates can become charged by the combination of images and emotion.
At best, this can mean that images create a sense of the urgent need to deal with an important issue.
At worst, politics is inflamed when imagery is used to stir up people’s fears.
Challenging cultural power with facts and statistics means failing to ’fight fire with fire’.
If cultural power can define the issues in the public imagination and build political will and momentum, then it makes no sense to leave the cultural field to the climate movement’s opponents. This pattern was powerfully evident in Australian climate politics throughout the Rudd-Gilllard-Abbott era.
When cultural power used by advocates of the fossil fuel industry is met only with rational arguments, the cultural dimension of politics will be dominated by opponents of action on climate change. Their use of cultural power may or may not be outweighed in other domains by institutional, legal or ‘people’ power, but for the purposes of ‘winning hearts and minds’, ‘capturing the public imagination’ and defining the issues in the debate, cultural power used by the opponents of action on climate change needs a ‘cultural power answer’ in response.
The cultural power of school students striking to ensure their future is an example how imagery can bring the issues into focus and shift the debate.
(6) Images and the public imagination
6.1 Images hold a particular place in the ‘imag-ination’.
Imagination and perception involve ’seeing the world’, and seeing is a visual activity.
Visual language is built into everyday ways in which we talk about communication and awareness. Saying ‘I see’ is a way to convey ‘I understand’. We speak about an organisation’s vision. Our attitudes are our views. We portray a situation and imagine a solution. Showing something involves pointing it out, or making it clear. Politicians are concerned about the optics of a situation.3
The way climate change is ’imagined’ has been shaped by imagery of school strikers, bushfires, polar bears, melting icebergs, extreme weather events, collapsing ice shelves, flood, parched earth and smoke stacks. While images like these already figured in people’s thinking about climate change before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006, this film did much to create a visual sense of climate change in the public mind. Climate politics after An Inconvenient Truth was different to climate politics before it. The climate movement’s own projection of images such as school strikes makes an impact in a similar way.
6.2 Terms like ‘the public imagination’ or ‘re-imagining the issues’ offer some rich perspectives, adding to terms like ‘framing‘, discourse’, ‘representation’ and ‘public opinion’.
These terms convey much more than ‘the way we think about an issue’, pointing to the importance of narrative and imagery, and the emotionally-charged, creative and imaginative ways we relate to the world.
To speak of the public imagination as well as people’s ‘attitudes’ makes room for a view of politics which includes the role of imagery, the emotions that this imagery evokes, identity, identification, and political action.4
(7) The way we ‘picture’, narrate and ‘imagine’ the issues shapes every political situation and every political action.
We picture, narrate and imagine ’the problem’, its history, possible solutions, the pathways from problem to solution, what is politically achievable, the goals and motivations of political actors, and our own location within the whole story.
This applies whether the issue is Keystone XL, the Tar Sands, Adani, renewable energy, power prices, divestment, Brexit, immigration, or COVID-19.
Imagery is central to the political imagination, evoking themes such as damage to environmental icons such as the Great Barrier Reef, coal mining equipment, restoring a country to ‘greatness’, ‘ordinary people doing it tough’ or government regulation as interference-and-imposition.
Political narratives arrange these images into scenes and plots, conveying causation and turning political actors into characters. In this way, politics is frequently organised around stories, images and political theatre.
For better and for worse in different situations, powerful images become driving political forces.
For example, see
- discussion of Trump’s election
- Stuart Hall on Thatcher’s victory in the UK’s 1987 election
- climate politics in the Rudd-Gillard-Abbott era
- the ‘cultural dimension’ to Australia’s 2019 election
- Jonathan Freedland on the stories and images that drove Brexit
- Martin Kettle on the dreams and fantasies that Brexit has been based on
(8) The evidence that images and stories are fundamental to human cognition needs to be applied to the way we think about political change.
Empirical evidence that we ‘think in’ images, stories and metaphors as well as propositions provides one rationale for looking to cultural power in order to make ‘the facts’ compelling.
The way we think about politics involves both rationality and imagination. Speaking over two thousand years ago, Aristotle addressed the role of imagery in thinking, arguing that ‘the soul never thinks without an image’. Without using the language of ‘soul’, contemporary cognitive science offers similar insights:
- Neuroscientists Stephen Kosslyn (1999) and Daniel Reisberg (2013) present evidence about the centrality of imagery in cognition, drawing on experimental findings using techniques of neuroscience—Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). (While maintaining that imagery is central to cognition, Reisberg argues, ‘images are organized depictions, not neutral depictions… This seems to demand some degree of propositional encoding as part of the mental image’: p. 380).
- Kosslyn argues that imagery is ‘a basic form of cognition… [It] plays a critical role in many types of reasoning’ (1999: pp. 1, 404).
Further,
- Cognitive scientist George Lakoff and philosopher and writer on cognitive science Mark Johnson (2008) suggest that we ‘live by’ metaphor. They cite ‘converging results concerning the way metaphor lies at the heart of abstract thought and cultural expression’.
- They argue ‘the categories of our everyday thought are largely metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves [metaphor] … ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature’.
- Doris Graber (1996) presents findings indicating that the human brain is ‘far more adept at extracting information from audiovisual stimuli than from purely verbal information’ (p. 86).
- Andrew Szasz (1994) points to how much political communication relies on images rather than words.
- Michael Griffin (2001) writes that studies political communication, ‘where one might expect a keen interest in the role of visual images, focus overwhelmingly on rhetorical strategies, issue framing, and a concern for the tactical effect of linguistic symbols and slogans, and lack a sustained attention to the contributions of the visual’.
- Dan Schill (2012) argues that images ‘play a foundational role in the political communication process… Not only are we now campaigning largely by pictures— we are also governing by pictures, and these televised images create the political culture from which we debate candidates and policies’ (p. 133). He argues that images powerfully shape political attitudes and are the dominant mode of learning and gaining political information.
‘Vision’ and ‘seeing’ provide useful shorthand ways to refer to cognitive processes. However it is worth considering whether there is more to this than a ‘shortcut’: perhaps a more fundamental link between imagery and awareness is involved.
One implication of these findings and insights is that the way we see politics needs to be be brought into line with the way we see.
______
In relation to the role of narrative,
there is also a solid empirical base for seeing stories as fundamental to the way we understand the world (see László, 2008, Gerrig and Egidi, 2003). In a study of almost 1500 participants who were exposed to three policy narratives about climate change and a control list of facts, Jones (2010) found that narrative structure was central to shaping opinion about climate change, and the most important factor was the hero of the narrative.
Political change involves formulating political goals, developing a sense of the problem and possible solutions, summoning political will, making the case for change and prevailing in the debates held within party rooms and in public: at each point, images and stories are crucial. Bruner (1986) writes about cognitive psychology’s declaration that ‘the choice that guides action is as real as the action that ensues’, and the importance of intangible factors that a more narrowly ’scientific’ psychology had previously sidelined (pp. 94-5). Imagery and narrative powerfully shape these choices: this means that they belong in the map of political change and how it comes about.
(9) Political realism needs to recognise the power of stories and images.
Sometimes ‘political realism’ is not realistic enough. ‘Real power’ is often seen as consisting of ‘hard’ forms of power such as economic power, or parliamentary power, as well as the power of social movements.
Yet leaving cultural power out of the analysis overlooks the real impact of who is prevailing in the ’battle of stories’ and the ’battle of images’, and whose political theatre is most effective in engaging the public.
Emphasising ‘hard’ power while neglecting cultural power misses the real importance of the factor that propel as political will, the political energy that drives social movements, the place of climate change in the ‘climate of public opinion’, and the public imagination.
Whether the issue is climate change, refugees, Trump or Brexit, when conservatives have a greater hold on the public imagination, progressives will struggle to gain support.
Images, stories and political theatre give cultural power content and focus. The examples of Greta Thunberg and the Maldives Underwater Cabinet highlight how important they can be.
‘Democracy For Realists’
In 2016, the year that Trump came to power in the US, Achen and Bartels published Democracy For Realists.
They criticise the ‘folk theory of democracy’ that assumes that voters are driven by rational responses to the facts. Assessing data from the last century of US political history, they argue that what really happens is that political ‘loyalties, not the facts of political life and government policy are the primary drivers of political behaviour’ (p. 2). They maintain that views of the political world are driven by group identities: voters ‘typically make choices not on the basis of policy preferences or ideology, but on the basis of who they are… Group ties and social identities of the most important bases of political commitments and behaviour’ (2016: 319, 4). [ Writing at a time when Trump was still a Republican candidate vying for selection in the 2016 Republican primaries, Achen and Bartels warn of potential dangerous manifestations of group attachments: ‘When political events make particular identity salient or threatened, powerful psychological forces can be evoked, with effects that go well beyond the impact of the issues involved’ (267). ]
Bartels argues:
Most people are not making rational decisions based on the real-world impact [these decisions] will have on their life.
Achen states,
identity is fundamental. The old left argument is that it’s about class and that race and gender are side effects primarily of class issues. But class identification, working-class consciousness, and all of that framework, those are identities as well.
…identities are more fundamental, the principles come later rather than the other way around.
A step further
Aachen and Bartels’ argument can be taken a step further. Political realism also involves paying attention to the images and stories which give content to these identities, and around which they are organised.
Notes
1 Re “battles” – what are some alternatives to the metaphor of politics-as-war?
Clearly, politics always involves conflict, however when we persuade people as part of a political ‘campaign’, is this really ‘winning a battle’?
Reversing the position, if we are the audience and someone persuades us, is this a strategic or tactical “victory” that the person who’s trying to reach us has achieved? They might have “won us over”, but ‘politics as war” does not seem to fit.
It seems like there is something more going on in the process of persuasion, that ‘battle’ and ‘contest’ do not completely capture. Comments welcome.
2 For a perspective on his political success with ‘Stop the Boats’ see ‘Stop the boats? Stop the propaganda!’.
3 Further, as Mitchell (2013), observes, even the word ‘idea’ comes from the Greek word ‘to see’, and is frequently linked with the word for ‘the visible image’. The linkages between images, seeing, visualisation, perception and thinking are everywhere.
4 Reviewing literature developed across two decades of work on framing, Benford and Snow (2000), describe the relationship between framing and emotion as among ‘the more glaring unresolved issues’ in the field (p. 633). In Hot Movements, Cold Cognition, Ferree and Merrill (2004) comment, ‘The emphasis in recent social movement theories on frames, the purely cognitive element in political discourse, implicitly excludes the “hotter” concepts of emotion and values from analysis, even when studies of the active process of framing make clear that passionate feelings are often involved in talking about injustice’ (p. 251).