Climate change is often described as a spectacular failure of communication: a failure to persuasively convey scientific findings to policy-makers and a failure to engage the public on the issue. Rewriting is a practice that aims to break this spell, starting with collective acts of interpretation, translation, and remediating historical documents. It works toward the goal of multivocality by multiplying the translations and reimaginings of the texts it engages with. And it resists the depoliticizing tendencies of contemporary modes of governance by reconceiving communication as a process that reasserts publics, instead of functioning as a mere transfer of information.

The Mont Pelerin Rewrite3.1.1 is an ongoing project that examines the logics that are stalling the action on climate change by engaging with the text of the Paris Agreement through the practice of rewriting. It collates different efforts at intervening into neoliberal modes of governance taking up operational texts, protocols, scripts, and algorithms. We started with annotating the existing text of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement through a collective reading of the document. This included (re)defining the terms contained within the agreement and situating them within a history of their use. The practice of annotation makes public the negotiation of meaning between the collective writers and multiple readers of the text, and it provides an opportunity for an intervention, for remetaphorizing or reclaiming terms that have been operationalized in particular ways within the grammar of neoliberal governance.

The strategic ambiguity of many of the terms in the Paris Agreement, such as “sustainable development,” “mitigation,” and “holistic solutions,” is necessary for mediating between the diverse agendas of the negotiating parties. The text is intended to be interpretable in multiple, potentially contrary, ways, to enable all parties to sign off on it. This ambiguity also provides the potential to unsettle the operations of the text. However, in order for such unsettling to become part of a social imaginary, it needs to do its own “communicating”: it needs to be a public address and requires the engagement or creation of a public.

This text, therefore, calls attention to the fact that “communicating” is never objective and neutral but rather always a political process of meaning-making that involves negotiations between many actors, framing, persuasion, interpretation, and affirmation. This process is rooted in the possibility of common understanding—and in the impossibility of “fixing” and stabilizing meaning.

In thinking about what it might mean to rewrite and reimagine the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Mont Pelerin Rewrite project not only looked at the document but sought to unearth its underlying logic. We collectively tried to create a genealogy for the language and ideas in the document and to produce alternative concepts and languages to those forwarded by the Conference of the Parties in negotiating the agreement.

We sought to produce an anarchive of this text, starting with economic philosopher Friedrich Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize Lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge,”3.1.2 one of the central documents and sources of contemporary neoliberal thinking and governance. A hallmark of neoliberal governance is a state that governs for and through the market—by designing markets that enclose ever more spheres of human and earthly existence and by creating conditions that guide and enhance the actions of individuals for the success of the market. This vision of the market is grounded on a central premise: the limits of human knowledge and our incapacity to fully represent the world in all its complexity.

The fundamental premise in neoliberal thought is that humans are subjective and limited in their cognitive ability. In large networked systems, only markets can pool the many decisions of many actors. They reallocate both risks and realities by being the processors of information that allow decision-making at scale. Since neoliberal markets—including carbon markets—are premised on their ability to manage risk, it becomes incumbent to ask what risk and contingency are. To that end, we have put together a pathway that engages this topic.

Technosphere Magazine’s “Risk Equipment” dossier3.1.3 collects case studies on how to deal with contingency. Many of the cases portray the abstractly perplexing and materially violent effects of markets, the financialization of nature, and the processes designed to counter these effects. HIstorian Orit Halpern speaks of “architectures of pleasurable destruction,” which move us away from encountering the other beings that are suffering to make this pleasant space of capital possible. Nature is managed in accordance with logistical protocols, in particular through computational mediums such as high-frequency trading and risk-assessment algorithms, which—by learning and relearning the parameters of supposedly resilient ecosystems—intervene and reorganize the very fabric of time and space that undergirds our contemporary lived ecologies.

Algorithms, media theorist Luciana Parisi argues in her contribution to Technosphere’s “Human” dossier,3.1.4 introduce a repetitive and habitual time that replaces representational governance and the experience of participation with self-regulating patterning of codes. Designed to automate financial, ecological, social, and political processes, they syncopate markets with the computational logics of compression and optimization that machine-learning systems introduce. If managed algorithmically, nature is governed in accordance with the economic imaginations of computer programmers and engineers.

We believe that a rewrite needs to engage with these imaginaries to propose different ones. “Computers are themselves encoders of culture,” critical studies scholar Tara McPherson writes in her text on the intertwining of race and UNIX.3.1.5 Mid-twentieth-century operating systems and contemporary machine-learning algorithms bear the common senses of the sociocultural milieus they were developed in—they are a key feat. Humanities academic Kara Keeling therefore considers these operating systems to be of a larger order—they are a key feature of contemporary neo-liberal governance, but they also provide hinge points to intervene in computational protocols of governance and sociocultural milieus. An alternative, queer operating system3.1.6 might “facilitate and support imaginative, unexpected, and ethical relations between and among living beings and the environment.”

Conversations about risk, information, and digital media situate but do not necessarily provide alternative models of collectivity. The Mont Pelerin Rewrite project aims to record and generate such alternative imaginaries of governance and coexistence, and it specifically focuses on the ways in which some imaginaries are empowered and elevated while others are dismissed as naïve or irrational fantasies. One of the examples of escaping the delegitimizing processes of dominant grammars is the rewrite of the Bolivian constitution by the anarcha-feminist collective Mujeres Creando.3.1.7 Drafted in a large kitchen, “while we peeled potatoes and the children helped us prepare the peas,” the text is a “poetic raging collaboration,” as cultural studies scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris notes in her book “The Extractive Zone” (2017). It is not a critique but rather a collection of propositions that conjures up an imaginary of another society. It was drafted in response to an official process of constitutional rewriting that made the Bolivian constitution more inclusive and representative, initiated by trade union organizer Evo Morales. Mujeres Creando’s rewrite gives voice to those still excluded from participating in the official process (“indigenous women, whores, and lesbians”), and, more importantly, it also models a transformation of the political machinery of constitution-making. Describing daily lives of people as politics, as a prefigurative practice of creating an “impossible country” each day, offers an alternative to gesturing toward expanding who is represented without actually transforming the structure of politics. Mujeres Creando’s document renders the collective’s specific configuration of participatory democracy on its own terms, without being subordinate to the dominant legal and political structures. “We do not claim the status of law because the contents of this document are greater than the law,” they conclude. “Therefore, this constitution exists as an expression of the impossible country that thousands of women create each day.”

The Feminist Judgments3.1.8 project adapts a different strategy: a group of feminist legal scholars rewrites judgments on women’s rights cases from a feminist perspective. The project uses legal language to shape a view of what the law should be. Laws might be the most recognizable as “operational texts,” but our project aims to shift attention to how less recognizable scripts, protocols, and algorithms are languages that regulate how people relate to each other and to their environments. They speak to processes, rather than to finite outcomes. In this spirit, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York declared protocols,3.1.9 and the question of what protocols we want and need for remaking the world, to be their focal theme for the period of 2020–22.

Whether it is preparing a legal defense or a meal together, it is ultimately the collective lived experience that can constitute alternative processes. It is from these that alternative protocols and rewrites can emerge, and it is these collective experiences and ways of making common that can empower a social imaginary. Many of the projects presented through the Anthropocene Curriculum provide examples of such practices of broadly conceived reordering—from retelling histories to enable “reckoning with our own blindness and erasures,” to remaking the rules and protocols of local social organization. “‘Planting a Seed Is a Revolutionary Act’: A Blues Epistemology for the Anthropocene?,”3.1.10 by science and technology scholar Jason Ludwig, is based on his visit to Natchez, Mississippi, and describes efforts of local activists to uncover and circulate Black histories of racialized and environmental injustices and the “blues epistemology” they gave birth to: an intellectual tradition of forms of survival, critique, and resistance, unwritten but present in the minds and places of the region. “From Emergency to Emergence”3.1.11 is a collection by media and cultural scholar John Kim that documents practices of mutual aid, solidarity, and municipalism as embodied forms and platforms of social and political response to environmental and economic crises. Finally, in discussions of risk equipment, governance protocols, and operational documents, lived experiences of climate change might be getting lost, so we should remind ourselves to find ground in a perspective that centers environmental concerns. In his lecture “Nature and the Writing of History,”3.1.12 historian Prasannan Parthasarathi does just that as he discusses an approach to (re)writing history that centers “nature” as a perspective for making sense of history as a whole.

Rewriting history, to reimagine the future, is the central concern of our own key contribution that accompanies this pathway. “Rewriting Climate Politics” is a text that explains why we need to engage with the central imaginaries of neoliberalism and climate politics through legal documents and their protocols so that we can reimagine our relationship with nature and our used-to ways of living on this planet. We hope that it will spark an interest in the practice of rewriting and attempts at assembling around the central operational texts of our present.