Pragmatics of Resistance: tipping points & system change
For the past two years, I’ve studied tipping points and collapse in physical and societal processes as part of my PhD research into ecological governance. In this piece, I want to share what I’ve learnt as it applies to climate activism and the search for effective theories of change. I’ll show how the science of tipping points is cause for optimism, as it describes system change not as an incremental process where all the elements in a system shift before the whole thing moves. Rather, tipping points show how change happens when very small, but highly particular thresholds within a system are exceeded, causing the entire system to ‘tip’, i.e. either collapse or shift. The argument I’ll unfold is that anyone in the ecology of activist practices, be they moderate or radical, might benefit from pursuing a pragmatics of resistance that focuses on tipping points.
In short, such a pragmatics entails 1) targeting specific and concretely defined systems that need to change, 2) identifying potential thresholds of their stability, and 3) pushing towards those thresholds with focussed intensity. The main take-away I offer is that, in deciding how to spend our scarce time and energy against opponents with near-limitless resources, we should choose a laser-like focus on disrupting critical elements, over applying broad pressure to a diffuse system.
This world is far from average
During my research, I was surprised to find that tipping points are everywhere. Most people probably associate tipping points with financial market crashes. Indeed, these are a good example of a tipping point in modern economies, where psychological panic causes a negative feedback loop of eroding trust in future profit. As we’ve all witnessed, such ‘herding’ behaviour can tank financial systems in a matter of days, requiring incredible amounts of money to avoid total collapse.
Next to these social tipping points, another type of tipping points have entered public awareness in recent years. These are planetary tipping points, or tipping elements. Timothy Lenton, one of the leading scientists developing the concept, defines a tipping point as: “a tiny perturbation [that] can qualitatively alter the state or development of a system” (2008). Nine of these planetary tipping points have been defined in the earth system that might, or indeed are, causing our climate to rapidly shift gears. They include melting ice, dieback of large ecosystems and shifting water circulation patterns.
What’s more, and most surprising to me, is that tipping points are the basis of biochemical processes that enable life. This insight revolves around the way living entities harness the dissipative quality of heat, which allows them to capture energy in ways that are predictable, and thus able to support the survival of complex systems. In these processes, a shift is observed from simple molecules in complex mechanisms (inorganic processes), to simple mechanisms involving complex molecules (proteins, nucleic acids, etc.). These complex molecules are very specific and have the particular capacity to ‘capture’ chemical tipping points so that they ‘tip’ in one way and not another, conserving energy in feedbacks that allow living systems to sustain themselves in chaotic environments.
These short examples illustrate how we live in a world that is largely structured — in terms of psychological, physical and biological systems — by tipping points. This is surprising, because we are used to looking at the world in terms of linear, predictable processes. Tipping points help us to recognise that these systems are in fact, to a far larger degree than we’re generally aware of, so-called ‘far-from-equilibirium’ systems; systems in states of precarious but dynamic balance.
For better or for worse, complex, balanced systems have boundary conditions, or tipping points, and these conditions shape many of the interactions that govern our lives. Think about our body temperature, that thin bandwidth at which we can do all the crazy stuff humans and other mammals are capable of, but outside of which our systems quickly collapse; or about all the the complex and interlocking systems that depend on the surprisingly stable temperature ranges that the planet has known for the past 10.000 years. In short, interlocking tipping points play a decisive role in our existence, from molecular up to planetary scales.
To tip or not to tip
Not only are tipping points fascinating from a scientific perspective, they are (exactly because of their importance in physical and living systems) also a basis for pragmatic action. Tipping points are minute threshold values, which, once activated, destabilise large systems. What’s important to notice is how large systems usually develop along linear, deterministic paths — that is, so long as their dynamic equilibrium is maintained. At the same time, they are defined by their boundaries, or bifurcation points. Cross these points, and everything suddenly shifts.
This way of looking at systems, as broadly stable with sharp breaking points, provides us with a powerful framework to think through theories of change. It allows us to perceive systems as resilient, which means when they’re disrupted they tend to revert to their stable state. Push an entire system a bit, and it will probably return to the centre of its bandwidth. Think of the sharp rebound of fossil production after the first waves of Covid slowed down carbon outputs. Acknowledging the resilience of systems allows us to avoid starry-eyed hopefulness that change will happen. On average, it won’t. At the same time, we can recognise that systems are complex patternings, and that disrupting certain feedback loops can cause runaway effects that fundamentally disrupt those patterns. Push a particular aspect of a system intensely, and the whole thing might topple.
This allows us to analyse and define where and how to focus pressure if we seek to change particular systems (such as our political economies and consumption societies), while recognising others that should urgently be stabilised (such as our climate and biosphere). It also means we cannot take a moral position towards such disturbances in general — tipping points are neither good nor bad per-se. How we judge the effects of tipping points depends entirely on the systems they affect, as well as our position relative to those systems. Moreover, there is a difference between systems that collapse and those that shift. Physical systems, like the climate, shift to new stable states after tipping, even though these shifts might take thousands of years, and potentially arrive at states of a ‘snowball’ or a ‘hothouse’ earth. On the other hand, living systems often perish when they exceed certain thresholds, or lose complexity in the process of adapting to changing environments, destroying millennia of evolutionary entanglements.
So much as to say: tipping points bring a pragmatic perspective to system change. They force us to recognise how our world is composed of specific and interlocking systems. This helps us avoid the modern habit of a ‘total vision’. Fiercely criticised by eco-feminists and decolonial thinkers, ‘total visions’ presume to describe the world in terms of ‘the system’, which is usually opposed to ‘the individual’ as an abstraction. Tipping points help us to recognise many particular and nested systems, each of them an open-ended collection of many agents, including people and the more-than-human world as well as institutions, infrastructures and whatever categories you might care to add. This suggests a pragmatics exactly because systems aren’t defined by some essential, unchanging characteristic, but in terms of material boundary conditions that are both extremely hard to predict, and only properly knowable once you’ve triggered them. This means that although we are mere mortals with partial perspectives on the world, the other side of that coin is that we are part of the systems we seek to change, and thus able to push and pull at them until we discover what ‘makes them tip’. It is this critical, creative and material exploration that I define as a pragmatics of resistance.
Tact, tactile, tactics
So what does this concretely mean for climate and environmental action? Let me start by stating the obvious: a lot of activists already make implicit or explicit use of these pragmatics. It’s not my intention or pretension to offer a highly original interpretation with this piece. Rather, I’m trying to support, increase confidence in, and call for a certain mode of strategic and tactical perspective among climate activists.
That said, the science of complex systems and tipping points is rich and might offer various insights. From my side, I’d like to highlight two strategic conclusions. The first is that achieving tipping points is not an exact science; it’s experimental. You only know you’ve breached that thin barrier once you’ve crossed it; the tipping might happen fast or be delayed; and the system, in shifting, might prove to be very similar or quite different compared to your estimations. Therefore, hitting tipping points is pragmatic in the sense of being tactical; it requires tactile, tangible engagements as well as a sense of tact in judging when to keep on pushing for a tipping point, and when to change gears and target another part of the system. Second, given that our world is a rich tangle of systems, hitting a tipping point in one system might trigger further tipping points in adjacent systems, in what scientists call a cascade. In the case of earth systems, the potential for cascading tipping points is a legitimate source of existential dread, as one self-reinforcing mechanism (like the albedo effect in melting ice) might trigger further self-reinforcing mechanisms (like widespread forest fires turning carbon sinks into emissions sources). Yet for climate activists seeking system change, cascading tipping points provide an avenue for thinking about how large-scale change emerges from small-scale actions. To my mind, tipping points underscore how a diversity of sustained, high energy, tactical interventions optimise our chances for toppling the deadly systems that are dragging our world into ever darker futures.
Having shown the potential for system change through tactical means, let me conclude with a brief description of tactical steps according to the example of the fossil fuel industry. As I outlined in the introduction, pragmatic resistance following a logic of tipping points involves three tactical steps in organising disruptive actions:
1) agreeing on concrete and specific system that needs to change, recognising that its dimensions should be somehow proportional to the size and energy of the group that engages it;
The fossil industry has shown itself to be a hugely resilient beast; however, the sector is heavily subsidised by national governments, policies that have low public support. Focussing demands on governments specifically on the system of fossil subsidies increases chances of success, and jeopardises the bottom line and therefore shareholder value of the industry.
2) identifying potential thresholds to the stability of a system, recognising the need to be able to translate these thresholds into concrete targets that can be addressed with specific demands and actions;
Corporate capture of national politics is one of the key power structures that make fossil industry so resilient; directly targeting the lobbyists that leverage this power might be a viable strategy to target a potential tipping point, splitting elite interests between those that seek to pursue a renewables strategy, and those that seek to maintain the status-quo of fossil interests, thereby destabilising the industry.
3) pushing those thresholds with focussed intensity; the key insight from tipping points is that sustained, focussed disruption on a specific point can cause a large structure to change radically;
The specific targeting of pension funds to divest from fossil fuels, as part of the larger financial system supporting the fossil industry, has already seen its fair share of success, with continued pressure showing the potential for knock-on effect from one fund to the next, as well as increasing potential cascade effects both on the social licence and shareholder value of fossil assets.
To wrap up, this way of looking at system change and planning tactics can be applied to many systems and theories of change. Take the 3,5% mobilisation goal of XR, which is definitely an example of a tipping point logic. In these pandemic times, achieving such a goal seems far off. But what smaller systems might we define where a similar logic could apply? Perhaps getting a small percentage of employees of system-critical organisations to rebel (in media, local governments, you name it) would cause similar tipping effects, which cascade into the larger goal of 3,5% mobilisation.
Channelling our love and rage into pragmatic resistance, our next disruptive action just might be the one that topples the system. Let’s roll the dice and see!
Read more on tipping points and my research in this piece on collapse:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362234268_Collapse_Entry_for_More_Posthuman_Glossary_Edited_by_Rosi_Braidotti_Emily_Jones_Goda_Klumbyte_London_Bloomsbury_2022
