The release of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York (US 2008; UK 2009) has brought the word “synecdoche” to a new, wider audience. So under-used is the term that the press pack contains a page-long pronunciation and definition brief (as gothamist.com reports here). Reviews, struggling to explain the film itself, have also struggled with defining the term (The Sun has an unsuccessful stab here; the OED clears things up here). I say that the word is “under-used” as we live in synecdochic times, and a more liberal use of the term might help us to identify and analyse that circumstance.
Synecdoches beset attempts to describe and convey the calamity of anthropogenic climate change. The capacity to create fundamental changes in human behaviour is weakened by this reliance on the part-for-the-whole. The melting arctic becomes a fight for the polar bear (described as the “poster boy” of climate change by Saffron O-Neill). The plastic bag becomes the symbol of our disrespect for our natural environment, diverting human energy towards a relatively easy-to-fix problem, and away from greater challenges (George Monbiot elaborates here). Climate change synecdoches stand in for, rather than truly calling attention to, wider environmental problems with more complex solutions. Solve the polar bear problem, or the plastic bag problem, and we can comfort ourselves that steps have been taken, but the underlying issues remain unchanged. This is a great challenge for those seeking to draw attention to environmental issues – how do we use the strategies of advertising to make memorable statements using evocative symbols, without allowing synecdochic thinking to occur, where the solution attempts to address the part and not the whole for which it stands?
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