Category: conference papers (page 2 of 3)

The Anthropocene is a spatial behemoth, a cognitive leviathan. I want to start with an example that highlights a problem with the Anthropocene as a genre perhaps, but certainly as concept that deeply impacts the ways we can think about the future of the planet and human life activity. In the summer of 2012, Russ George, of Plakos Inc., and a First Nations village on Haida Gwaii dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of British Columbia in order to encourage algae growth. George Dvorsky of i09.com says, “recent satellite images are now confirming [the iron sulphate’s] effects—an artificial plankton bloom that’s 10,000 square kilometers (3,861 square miles) in size. The intention of the project is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the bottom of the ocean.” The decision was made unilaterally by George and First Nations on Haida Gwaii; Environment Canada and the UN are both investigating this rogue geo-engineering project. In The Huffington Post, Stephanie Pappas writes about the implications for large scale adoption of the technique: “Even widespread fertilization of the oceans would result in about 0.5 to 1 gigaton of carbon being shuttled out of the atmosphere annually…That’s about a third to a quarter of the carbon added to the atmosphere each year from man-made and other sources.” Here, the realization that we are fully within the Anthropocene offers those interested a license to act and to take the responsibility for the well being of the planet into their own hands. In the case of this example, George convinced the Haida to contribute over one million dollars to the project.

Just across the Hecate Strait from Haida Gwaii the possible connections between ecological and racial politics becomes further complicated, where struggles have been raging between oil companies and First Nations over the Douglas Channel Energy Partnership.[1]Though not often treated this way by corporate interests, environmental action, in both examples, becomes a First Nations issue, in light of the tenuous status of treaty negotiation in B.C. The acceleration of action, in the case of the carbon trap, and the blockage of action, in the case of the pipeline, are two courses that take the ecological impasse we now know as the Anthropocene as their grounds for justification. Stopping the pipeline and creating new ways to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising are both gambits that address the global climate crisis: each is based on slowing the oncoming catastrophe and mitigating the effects of our carbon dependency.[2]What I hope to show with this overdetermined example of ecological activity is just how severely the Anthropocene underdetermines the dense crossover of ecological, economic, racial, and political lines.

In what follows I elaborate the Anthropocene as a genre of writing alongside other kinds of environmental writing in order to emphasize what I think we all will agree is fundamental shortcoming of the term’s explanatory and political usefulness. Libby Robin has already begun to elaborate how the ways we imagine and write the global state of things can intervene in our understanding of the present. In “The Eco-Humanities as Literature: A New Genre?” she concludes, neatly, that the extent to which this may be effective “will depend on our capacity to write Nature as a subject and to understand the Human as a physical force in the Earth’s ecosystems” (302).[3]Robin’s claim may be correct, but our capacity to “write nature as subject” is severely altered in the wake of the Anthropocene. As Robin suggests, ecology is a “useful tool for writing about ‘place in time’ (human scale and sensibilities of place) because it takes context into account, including evolutionary history and local environment” (291). Robin’s piece turns to Australian environmental writing to articulate her argument, demonstrating the activity of shuttling from what she calls “global frameworks” and “global scale” to the particularity of the local. I hope to show the ways the Anthropocene makes this kind of conceptual shuttling difficult. I consider the Anthropocene as one symptom, among many, of a global energy dependency premised on the goal of limitless growth and accumulation. I will begin with the ways the authors of the Anthropocene frame the future, before discussing Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capitaltrilogy (2004, 2005, 2007) as texts that engage the epistemic, ecological, and political interregnum of the Anthropocene where the force of humanity has lead itself: not to The World Without Us, but to the world as us.

The Anthropocene and Futurity

A number of researchers in the sciences have declared that we have entered a new geological age characterized by the impact of the fervor of human life activity on the planet since the invention of the coal-powered steam engine. This announcement sounds the depth of research and thought in the humanities through different means than in the sciences or for engineering, and I intend to read discussions surrounding the Anthropocene in terms of the period they construct and the futures they both describe and imply. In their 2007 piece, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill propose three historical stages to the development of the Anthropocene: the industrial era (ca. 1800-1945), the great acceleration (ca. 1945-present), and the latest, something they term “Stewards of the Earth System? (ca. 2015–?)” (618). Here, the shift from thinking the global through human impact moves ever so quickly from the conditional, ‘if humans are the greatest geological force on the planet, we would need to respond by…’, to the imperative, ‘human beings are the greatest geological force: act now,’ which frames the opening example of Haida Gwaii in a new light—not as a criminal act but as an act of stewardship. In the article, this shift opens on to three possible trajectories for the future: business as usual, mitigation, and geo-engineering.

Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill describe business as usual based on several assumptions. First, adopting an anti-apocalyptic stance, they suggest that “global change will not be severe or rapid enough to cause major disruptions to the global economic system or to other important aspects of societies, such as human health” (619). One need only think of the latest super storm, hurricane Sandy and now the polar vortex, and the on-going municipal, state, and federal government efforts to repair and rebuild to recognize problems with the business as usual model.[4]Second, they assume, “the existing market-oriented economic system can deal autonomously with any adaptations that are required” (619), displaying wonderfully what would be registered only a matter of months after the publication of their article by a financial, and not an ecological, crisis. Third, they suggest that “resources required to mitigate global change proactively would be better spent on more pressing human needs” (619). The assumption that seems to be undergirding Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill’s assessment, is that the political, ecological future will look strikingly like the present. To their credit, it seems most pertinent to read this model as a straw man argument, making this version of the future a rhetorical device with an ecological agenda designed to move readers beyond this first vision of the future to the following two, dialing up the political stakes in the process.

If the business as usual response shrugs off the possibility of catastrophe, mitigation tries to completely reverse it. Mitigation, for Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill, aims to “allow the Earth System to function in a pre-Anthropocene way” through vastly improved technology and management, wise use of Earth’s resources, control of human and domestic animal population, and overall careful use and restoration of the natural environment” (619). Acknowledging the impacts humans have had on the bios in this form however naively requires a faith in science and scientific progress. This fits what Imre Szeman describes in his article “System Failure” as “techno-utopianism” where scientific or technocratic solutions sweep in at the final hour to resolve the looming threats to the Earth and human and animal life (812). But, as Szeman points out, the problem with such a faith in science is that this type of resolution has no history.[5]Here, the tension between a lurking catastrophism and the generative potential of imagining what is to come animates this second future in Antropocene as a genre of reactionary extrapolation. That we could return to a pre-Anthropocene age simply through sage managerial practices seems beyond the scope of possibility for current systems of governance. For evidence of this one need only remember the difficulties the Kyoto Protocol has faced over the past fifteen years, leaving Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeil’s third option, seemingly, as their best.

Geo-engineering also runs along the lines of Szeman’s techno-utopianism. This version of the future assumes that since humans have already affected the Earth to the degree and extent that they do, we should take full responsibility and engage in purposeful, planned endeavours to reshape the planet in the form of humanity’s desire. Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill are careful to elaborate the dangers of geo-engineering, suggesting that the fix would require massive coordination and cooperation on a global scale—something possible only in Sezeman’s fourth possible future: the planned economy. In other words, the problem ceases to be entirely ecological and becomes political, meeting up with discourses of modernization and industrialization, uneven development, and problems in global consensus. This moment of transformation also marks a structural limit to the term Anthropocene: it tends to elide economic or geographic difference and homogenize humanity into one agent that acts on and against the planet, rather than thinking the dense complex of relations that subtly and deeply impact the Earth over a number of operations and repetitions. The concept of the Anthropocene leaps to totality both in ecological terms—from the locale of Haida Gwaii to geology writ-large—and in governmental terms—from the overdetermined struggle of one group to the entire human population—leaving behind the capacity to accurately frame the ecological impasse and offer reasoned solutions.

The Anthropocene and Genre

Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007) works through expert testimony to explore the ways that Earth might recuperate in the wake of humanity.[6]Weisman’s thought experiment removes humanity, and its future actions, from the ecological equation so that we might better be able to understand and respond to its effects. Especially when the problems are vaster than human reckoning, Wiseman diligently narrates them. For instance, in his chapter on plastics, the pacific garbage gyre, and futurity Weisman points out that “plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them” (116).[7]Weisman’s book remarkably engages in what Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu, have described as an attempt to “narrate the unnarratable” (21) to move beyond both science fiction and other ecological writing in order to frame the ecological impasse. Like discourses of the Anthropocene, Weisman’s book reveals that the problems we are only beginning to name in the present have been a long time in the making—plastics being a prime example. The World Without Us plays a formal trick that writing on the Anthropocene doesn’t—it declares humanity’s incalculable effects on the planet not by shouting about our geological force, but by appearing to subtract us from the equation.

Whether or not describing a world without us is possible, the era of our deep impact on the planet is already over a century old, in the words of Kim Stanley Robinson, “our inadvertent terraforming of Earth [has] already begun by accident” (179). Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy (2004, 2005, 2007) fills in the specificity and dynamism missing from the discussions of the Anthropocene above. Rather than focus on crisis and impasse through a science-fictional displacement onto an estranged future space and time, the trilogy unfolds in the present after omniscient narration describes the increasingly rapid melting of the polar ice and the resulting uptick in weather volatility. In other words, Science in the Capital quickens the pace and effects of global warming to test various scenarios and human responses. Like Weisman’s thought experiment, Robinson presses fast forward on the gamut of possibilities: catastrophe, mitigation, and geo-engineering.

Unlike discussions surrounding the Anthropocene, Robinson’s climate change trilogy doesn’t foreground one ideological agenda over another; instead, it provides us with what Mathias Nilges has described as “a matrix of conflicting positions” (81). Nilges assessment is that it is this mode of realism that makes the trilogy so effective at mapping and working through the political, economic, and ecological contradiction. He writes, “reading Science in the Capital means to dissolve what we conceive of as paralyzing impasses (politically as well as formally) and show them…as the multipositional processes they are” (83).[8]Robinson, it seems, already addresses what Eddie Yuen, in “The Politics of Failure Have Failed” suggests—that the epistemic emergence of the Anthropocene could bring with it a shuffling of political positions: “of course, political categories never neatly fall into categories of left and right—in fact there are often a range of bizarre combinations, and there is a strong likelihood of “morbid symptoms” in the interregnum between the Holocene and the Anthropocene” (39). Robinson’s main intervention, on K. Daniel Cho’s account, moves beyond the politics of the Anthropocene, which by and large seek to create a future as some idealized version of the present, to “explore the possibility of ecological disaster creating the preconditions for the wholesale transformation of capitalist society” (24). Rather than seeking to contain or downplay these “morbid symptoms,” Robinson writes their tension, their conflicts, and their somewhat unsatisfactory solutions, presenting a much more complex and nuanced characterization of life on Earth in the massive wake of humanity’s impact.

Concluding Notes

The Anthropocene is as much a problem of representation as it is an ecological one. In the Anthropocene we see the politics and limits to thinking in broad strokes. But the short-circuit, for me, isn’t about trying to think too big, it’s a problem of taking an easy path to thinking that bigger picture. Totalities are complex, nuanced, and shape relations in indirect ways. The project of thinking an ecological totality that takes into account the impact of one species on all of the others measured through the visible signs that species leaves on the face of the planet is a good place to start. The difficulty lies in developing the thought, in weighing it against other discourses and problematics, from uneven development to the politics of geo-engineering, and, even more so, in meaningfully bridging that thought to action.

Three tangled threads simultaneously inform and complicate discussions of the Anthropocene: enlightenment ideas of progress, a description or theory of the world as a totality, and an agreement about the ethics and politics of human impact on the Earth. These threads weave into descriptions of the Anthropocene and spool outwards again as scientists, engineers, ecologists, and social scientists alike think through what it means for our collective future. However, the intensive impact of human life activity on the planet is not just a fiction; rather, the ways this activity is described are fully narrative in scope and tend to draw on fiction in order to give shape to imaginative or notional encounters with the diverse effects of this life activity. All of this brings us back to history. The Anthropocene, if we accept its periodization in The Philosophical Transcripts and elsewhere, began in the enlightenment and has unfolded through the industrial innovations of the 19^th century, the great wars of the 20^th, and, in the face of ecological catastrophe, stands revealed at the dawn of the 21^st. What this means for politics is up for debate. I have tried to show some of the limits to the forms of thinking the future implied by and addressed to the Anthropocene, as well as highlighting Weisman and Robinson’s as alternative ways to approach representing or formalizing the Anthropocene.

By way of a concluding thought, in “Après Nous, Le Deluge” Canavan takes the right approach emphasizing a collective failure and that collective solutions are needed: “Three months after Hurricane Sandy, eight years after Hurricane Katrina, 25 years after James Hansen testified before Congress, 40 years after the development of a scientific consensus around global warming in the 1970s, 70 years after climate models in the 1950s first began to point to the problem, 107 years after Svante Arrhenius first modeled the greenhouse effect in 1896, we still sit and wait to see what happens.” Whether or not we agree with the actions taken off the coast of Haida Gwaii, deep in the Anthropocene, the future of the world it seems is still, and perhaps problematically so, up to us.

Works Cited

“Is Global Warming Behind the Polar Vortex.” Rutgers Today. 30 Jan. 2014 Web. 27 Feb. 2014.

Bahrani, Ramin. “Plastic Bag.” FutureStates.TV, 7 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

Canavan, Gerry, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu. “Ecology & Ideology: An Introduction.” Polygraph 22 (2010): 1-32.

Canavan, Gerry. “Après Nous, le Déluge.” The New Inquiry, 14 Jan. 2013. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

Cho, K. Daniel. “‘When a Chance Came for Everything to Change’: Messianism and Wilderness in Kim Stanely Robinson’s Abrupt Climate Change Trilogy.” Criticism 53.1 (Winter 2011): 23-51.

Dvorsky, George. “A Massive and Illegal Geoengineering Project has been Detected Off Canada’s West Coast.” I09.com 16 Oct. 2012. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

Nilges, Mathias. “Marxism and Form Now.” Mediations24.2 (Spring 2009): 66-89.

Pappas, Stephanie. “Iron Dumping In The Pacific Ocean Stirs Controversy Over Geoengineering.” Huffington Post 19 Oct. 2012. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

Rose, Deborah Ed. “The Ecological Humanities.” The Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009): 87-187.

Robin, Libby. “The Eco-Humanities as Literature: A New Genre?” Australian Literary Studies 23.3 (2008): 290-304.

Robinson, Kim Stanley, Imre Szeman, and Maria Whiteman. “Future Politics: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.” In Science Fiction Studies 31 (2004): 177-187.

Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment36.8 (2007):614-621.

Steffen, Will, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Cultural and Historical Perspectives.” The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011): 842-867.

Szeman, Imre. “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (Fall 2007): 805-823.

Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: Picador, 2007.

This is the text of a conference paper I delivered at the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies in Waterloo, Ontario January 18th, 2014. I would like to thank the organizers of the conference and my co-panelists Imre Szeman and Adam Carlson.

Because capitalism is compelled to be revolutionary in order to subsist, it is not beyond attempting to facilitate by itself the dissolution of oil geoculture even as it is enamoured of the massive surpluses that accrue from scarcity and oligopoly. Thus, while one must acknowledge the emergence of peak-oil speculative fiction like Kunstler’s World Made By Hand…it too is not beyond the prospect of a missed encounter when one considers how contemporary oil companies are attempting to reinvent themselves as the key to a green future.

 — Peter Hitchcock, “Oil in an American Imaginary”

 

The promise of the future underwrites and legitimizes the bad faith of the present. What makes speculating about energy futures productive is that it highlights all the more powerfully the political fantasies in which literature currently indulges.

 — Imre Szeman, “Literature and Energy Futures”

There are a lot of ways of referring to American-style suburbia, but these days I favor the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. You can say that because it’s clear that we are not going to be able to run it in a very few years ahead as the nation’s oil supply gets more restricted and we have to face the disappointing reality that so-called alternative energy will not come close to offsetting our oil losses. Suburbia therefore represents a living arrangement with no future. (82)

There’s grievances and vendettas all around at every level. Poor against whatever rich are left. Black against white. English-speaking against the Spanish. More than one bunch on the Jews. You name it, there’s a fight on. Groups in flight everywhere, ourselves among them. I haven’t seen black folks or Spanish in Union Grove so far. You got any, sir? (149)

Some black families lived in that hollow down by the Wayland Union Mill, the old factory village. There was a fellow named Archie Basiltree who worked in the Aubuchon hardware store when we first came. The store is gone and so is Archie. Another black man worked on the county road crew. (149)

A) There is a difficulty to writing about oil due to its “slipperiness,” and “the ways in which it tends to trip fiction into incoherence” (141); and

B) “The territory of oil is bafflingly multilingual, for example, while the novel, with its conventions of naturalistic dialogue, is most at home within monolingual speech communities (within nation states, in other words).” (142)

I gave this paper at MLG-ICS 2013 in Columbus, Ohio. It is a development of my earlier post on Immobility, but here frames some of the problems of that text within the larger problematics of the genre question: post-apocalyptic fiction or science fiction?

The science-fictional world is not only one different in time or place from our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference makes.

—Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction

Much as the historical novel fascinated the attention of Georg Lukács, science fiction has attracted the attention of Marxist critics for its attentiveness to history and historical movement. What then to make of post-apocalyptic fiction, that rapidly growing set of texts written by genre writers and literary authors alike, authors writing, at times, in the mode of science fiction and the older realism of which Lukács was enamoured? Little has been written specifically engaging post-apocalyptic fiction. James Berger and Evan Calder Williams have separately grappled with the implications of post-apocalyptic film; while, Teresa Heffernan has engaged the shifting valences of apocalyptic culture in the wake of postmodern theory. All three read post-apocalyptic cultural forms as a sign of the waning of the explanatory power of the apocalypse as a narrative that guides and structures meaning today or at least as a sign that its role has changed. I see post-apocalyptic fiction continuing the work of positing a telos to strive towards, but it seems to me that the end point posited by many works in this genre emphasize a reproduction of the present state of things over and above the type of radical break one could anticipate from either science fiction or an apocalyptic event. Indeed, post-apocalyptic fiction seems to arrive at an epistemological limit – things could be different from the present – but instead of crossing it, instead of extrapolating a radically different future, it imagines the continuation of the present ad infinitum.

In order to elaborate this mode, I’d like to make a distinction between the way science fiction figures the present as a historical moment subject to change, and the tendency of U.S. post-apocalyptic fiction to frame the contemporary as a perpetual present. I read the way post-apocalyptic fiction repeatedly dramatizes this limit in relation to critical discussions of science fiction, contrasting the form that enacts the future without difference to the form for thinking the future asdifference. In developing this comparison, I move first to what Mark Bould has dubbed the “Suvin Event” (19); that is, Darko Suvin’s introduction of cognitive estrangement to discussions of the poetics of science fiction. I finish by reading Brian Evenson’s Immobility (2012) through Suvin’s poetics of estrangement to distinguish the inner logics of post-apocalyptic fiction from science fiction and to insist on the need for a constant and rigorous engagement with those novels that represent the stasis of life after the end and the theories of science fiction that insist on and demand that we think of the future.

Science fiction is, and has been, deeply indebted to the social contexts and historical moment from its own present, which it estranges in its extrapolations of the future. The way science fiction generates its extrapolations remains inseparable from its narrative operations as described by Suvin’s still-contested contribution to science fiction studies: cognitive estrangement. Cognitive estrangement describes the displacement of contemporary ideological and material commitments and presuppositions onto a fictional world which appears different from our own in a process that then necessarily allows us to perceive those elements with fresh eyes. So, science fiction is always already, on Suvin’s account, about the present. Within the estranged space-time, the cognitive mode of science fiction plays out a logical narrative, so that technological advancements and characters’ actions and relations develop and operate in rational accordance with the spatio-temporal conceit of the fiction. Cognitive estrangement works on both a formal level and the level of content, as it enables science fiction to warn, diagnose, proscribe, and act as “a mapping of possible alternatives” (12). Suvin argues that a common method for accustoming a reader to a new space and time was to “have the hero or heroine define it for the reader by growing into it” (79). The mediation of the protagonist, then, allows the reader to slowly come to terms with the estranging situation.

While science fiction remains punctuated by moments of radical difference, I argue, the apocalyptic event of post-apocalyptic fiction tends to resonate as a difference that makes no difference. Translating Suvin’s reading of science fiction characters, the narrative strategy of having characters grow into the world stands out as a hallmark of post-apocalyptic fiction as well. But, rather than emphasizing difference and extrapolation, post-apocalyptic fiction tends depict a return to the all too familiar. The movement from apocalypse to reproduction describes the impasse that lies at the heart of post-apocalyptic narrative form. The apocalyptic event is an alibi, a dead letter, a formal placeholder preventing radical difference, keeping any real event at bay. If this is the case, then the estrangement of post-apocalyptic fiction doesn’t herald the advent of some new content or reveal any alternatives to the present, but exists purely in a formal capacity as accumulated formal sediment from earlier moments of science fiction, a generic residue of previous nows that continues to radiate meaning by structuring post-apocalyptic narratives. Which brings us to my question: what is at stake in a form that seems best read as science fiction, but under closer scrutiny is so in name only?

Evenson’s Immobilityoffers a glimpse of the operations and politics of post-apocalyptic fiction. The world of Evenson’s novel, full of complexities that are never fully revealed, is focalized through the central character, who wakes from a stasis-like deep freeze at the novel’s start. The starting point of the novel’s meditation on immobility is that of the paraplegic protagonist, who cannot use his legs and is told he needs to receive a drug-cocktail shot to his spine every twenty-four hours in order to slow its deterioration and stave off his encroaching death. The novel follows this disabled amnesiac across a torn and hostile post-nuclear landscape as he is carried by two special clones, a.k.a. “mules,” designed to heft a burden for several days before deteriorating beyond use. While the novel is named for the character’s own paralysis, it also flags the way communities in the novel seem to be trapped between extinction and reproduction.

The novel thinks several ways out of stasis that form both an itinerary of the novel’s narrative movement and a set of future possibilities. In terms of its narrative form, Immobilitycan be described as the movement through a set of estranging episodes, each linked by the focalizing character’s journey from one to the next: 1. Survival; 2. Long Term Solutions; 3. Extinction; 4. Difference; and, 5. Reproduction. In what follows, I move through each of these scenes, which at the same time promise different alternatives for the protagonist. Through each of these spaces, the novel presents a world where one can never be sure what will survive and return, indeed one bit of advice often repeated is “Always remove the head” (232). In this way, the novel provides instructions for how to read it through its estranging prose and makes its relation to cognitive estrangement central in measuring it against the operations of science fiction.

The first estranging situation, survival, blends familiarity with unease as it establishes the movement of both the protagonist and the plot. The novel opens with the main character waking to confusion – he eventually remembers his name is Joseph Horkai. We know that he has been in deep freeze storage, has been tasked with a mission for his “community,” and is unlike any of the people within this community. One benefit of this difference is his ability to withstand the hostile, post-apocalyptic environment outside. Horkai remains uncertain about his identity, whereabouts, history, and whether he can or should trust anyone. He writes a note to himself to make sense of his situation. It should be noted that his first reaction to the others around him is violent and hostile, but he is pacified and before he can learn any more about his past or his identity, he is tasked with retrieving a stolen item, “seeds,” from a place called Granite Mountain. Since he cannot walk, he is carried by the aforementioned mules.

The next scene, long-term solutions, hinges on a long term solution. Horkai discovers that the others who are holding the stolen item are just like him; this has the effect of intensifying the level of estrangement just at the moment when Horkai and the reader begin to understand more of the world around him. The reason he was selected for the mission becomes slightly less opaque – these others can withstand the outside, look like him, and greet him as a companion. Under Granite Mountain, there are a number of others frozen in storage, and Mahonri, the one who greets him, explains that the procedure of leaving one sentinel out while the remaining beings sleep allows them to guard a number of preserved seeds. In other words, the freezing extends their lives and their stewardship hopefully long enough to witness a return of flora and, with it, humanity. For a moment, here, the future seems uncertain: Horkai could attempt to retrieve the stolen item from the deep freeze or stay along with Mahonri and help them in their temporal bid to restart the experiment of life on Earth. Ultimately, and violently, Horkai maintains fidelity to his “community,” brutally killing Mahonri in his sleep and escaping with the stolen seeds. But, he doesn’t take the grisly advice to “remove the head,” Mahonri revives and gives chase. One narrative possibility for the future, staying with those like him, gives way to another, flight through the wracked countryside, and Horkai finds himself moving on to a third configuration of estrangement and another possible future.

The novel accounts for each situation from within a new set of uncertainties, which act as a rewiring of the novel’s estrangement that sends jolts back to the start of the novel. Horkai escapes, the mules expire, and he tries to drag himself the rest of the way home. Much of this interstitial section is narrated in fragments filtered through Horkai’s delirium. During this scenario, he is visited by at least one group and one individual: the first take some of his precious treasure and the second rescues him and nurses him back to health. Between both encounters we learn about the stakes of Horkai’s mission – the stolen container holds not seeds but frozen fertilized human eggs. Horkai has in his hands the potentiality of an ambivalent future; here the novel deepens its debt to a science fictional setting and operations, and clearly reveals its investment in questions of futurity and reproduction. Horkai, a distinctly different entity, though not singularly so, holds the reproduction of a particular community in his hands. The significance of his power over the future connects to the previous situation, where Mahonri planned to use the fertilized eggs in the distant future. The novel has been working through both different spaces and different futures simultaneously: the community needs the eggs now; while, Mahonri needs them should the planet become hospitable once more. Both possibilities mark the novel’s concern with limits to the future and how integral reproduction – sexual, social, and, as we shall see, ideological – is to maintaining a particular shape of the present.

The narrative regains coherence once Horkai is safe and we enter the next scene, extinction. He learns that he is not paralyzed after all from his saviour, Rykte; the injections he received from the community were responsible for his immobility in the first place. The tension in this section escalates when members of Horkai’s community find them and beg him to return. He now faces a variant of stasis: extinction; that is, to follow Rykte and let the humans die. Again, he decides to return, but not without wondering: “Is Rykte right…is it better for humanity to die out?” (227). The novel’s insistence seems to be that though many alternatives confront the protagonist, in the form of contrasting versions of the future, he cannot veer from his path. Here the post-apocalyptic drive towards a difference that makes no difference at all accelerates as Horkai’s leaves Rykte bound for the community.

The fourth scene, difference, marks the closest that post-apocalyptic fiction comes to science fiction in Evenson’s novel and is also the clearest point of their divergence. On his way back to the community, Horkai is sidetracked by a strange building he remembers from a moment of delirium. What he discovers marks both the most opaque moment in the novel, a moment the novel itself cannot seem to resolve, and the closest Horkai comes to deviating from his path and breaking the cycle of stasis:

He moved carefully forward, rifle ready. The body was relatively recent, not the desiccated corpses he’d seen while travelling with the mules. It was naked. A stake had been hammered into its chest. It was extremely pale and hairless, just like him. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman; the facial features were ambiguous and the hips could have belonged to a boyish girl or an effeminate man. It had what looked like the beginnings of breasts, but the body itself was chubby and the nipples looked more like those of a man than a woman. Between the legs was no sex, neither male nor female, but instead a strange gelatinous casing that seemed to have been extruded from the flesh itself. He bent to have a closer look, but couldn’t figure their purpose. He was just reaching out to touch them when the creature opened one eye. (231)

The moment of the strangest occurrence is followed immediately by the moment Horkai’s decision to return to the community is the sharpest. Horkai thinks, “Back to the original purpose . . . focus Horkai” (232). Here stands the strongest example of how the novel tends to shrink away from difference, to yearn for more of the same, and to reject an as yet unknowable future, which places it squarely outside the progressive, even radical, tendencies of SF.

Given Horkai’s decision to turn away from the most radically unknowable difference in the novel, the twist at the end is almost unsurprising: Horkai completes his mission and is forcibly sequestered back into the deep freeze. A short fifth section, and reproduction may not be quite the right name for it, concludes the novel, ending with the line: “Ah, he thought, just before the sudden inrush of extreme cold. I’ve been in storage. They must just be waking me up” (253). At this moment in the novel, a comment of Fredric Jameson’s refreshes itself, “a narrative must have an ending, even if it is ingeniously organized around the structural repression of ending as such” (283). While the overt lesson of the novel’s closure seems to be one about political attachment and faith, its true lesson, about aesthetic-epistemological limits to imagining the future, arrives as the cycle apparently starts over again in the image what came before.

Horkai’s return to the community measures the depth of collective belonging as the ending of Immobility insists on the reproduction of a certain set of relations. The takeaway of this approach to post-apocalyptic fiction is that the genre seems to be about arriving at epistemological limits in a positive sense; it thinks of the future based upon the present as more of the same. Indeed this is part of the takeaway for science fiction, too, which always has a penchant for allowing us to think the present as history. But, as I have been arguing here, post-apocalyptic fiction is not science fiction, though it may seem to operate like it. Post-apocalyptic fiction preoccupies itself with managing and containing difference. A rephrasing of Freedman’s statement, that science fiction is a genre that thinks the difference that difference makes, could be that “post-apocalyptic fiction is about the difference that makes no difference at all.” Thus, I would suggest that what Evenson’s novel so wonderfully captures is not only the universal stuck-ness and stasis of our contemporary, global condition, but the immobility that lies at the heart of the post-apocalyptic genre itself. That Horkai is a character apart marks the hidden class relations at the heart of the novel and, simultaneously, a dialectical reversal of its title: Horkai is not immobile; he is precisely the most mobile character in the novel and as such is able to witness and engage in the most situations and offer the fullest account of what is happening in the world. Horkai marks the novel’s collective sub-text as a deeply classed, often masculine, and (hetero)normative desire for the future to resemble the present along either the lines of the reproduction of the community.

Thinking of post-apocalyptic fiction as a genre distinct from science fiction does offer an additional moment of clarity with which to understand Horkai’s encounter with unassimilable difference.Immobility treats the present as history caught in stasis, marking a reversal of the narrative intent framed by apocalyptic revelation – from the break and rupture issues not a new situation, but a return of what came before. Unlike science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction doesn’t map possible alternatives; it only seems to hold open the space for such mapping to take place. This openness is especially clear in Horkai’s strange encounter: one only knows that there is a path not taken, and not what content would fill that particular future. A generous reading of the novel would see this as the trace of what could be a future outside of stasis – a radically feminist, queer future. Immobility symptomatically suggests that a better future exists and,crucially, that seeing a path to that future, recognizing it, or knowing it, will absolutely not bring it about. This is the central problem of the text – how is it that we can encounter the very limit of our own thought and capacities and miss the chance to act? When Horkai encounters the alien being there is no level of cognitive estrangement present that can frame it reasonably within his or our own understanding, and instead we get an attempt to place the figure within the physical embodied realm of reproduction. Rather than push the limits of thought and action, Horkai returns to the familiar, dramatizing a contemporary epistemic and ontological problem. Post-apocalyptic fiction, in short, replaces science fiction’s tendency for cognitive estrangement with an estrangement of social and sexual reproduction that forms both the ultimate description and limit of its problematic.

It is less useful to gawk at the “ungraspable” numinous essence of the frontier than it is to analyze how the West has been symbolized, and to consider the historical, ethical, and ideological ramifications of such symbolizations.
— David M. Higgins

To move into and across “empty” spaces…is to occupy and claim those spaces.

— Carl Abbott

The representation of the frontier in David Brin’s The Postman (1985) and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) not only allows for a critique of the “old” ideological strength of frontier imaginaries, but also opens up questions of the “new” return of these imaginaries during the end of the cold war at the height of the entrenchment of neolibrialism in the United States. The Postman and Blood Meridian operate on both old and new registers at once: each novel’s historical register can be seen largely through the imaginary of the frontier and the historical moment known as the 1980s. In these novels, the frontier is the mediating factor for a history in what once was a push into the space of west is now a push of deregulation and the free market (with their own hidden or obscured spatial attachments). These novels, in markedly different ways, recast the question of the frontier, presenting an opportunity for a political reading that traces the various “old” forms of violence within these novels through frontier history back to their source in a global economy now become neoliberal. This is not to say The Postman and Blood Meridian represent the frontier or their own period in precisely same way; for the former, the strategy remains largely embedded within a narrative frame that reveals how the development of relationships, in this case those of the liberal subject, works by displacing them onto an imagined future. There, the social relations giving way to a shrinking of the state and free market ideology are restaged in the displaced environment of the post-catastrophe west. While in the latter, the narrative strategy is one of disclosure: a de-romanticization of the frontier myth through a fictional situation which plays out the violent dispossession and murder of all parties opposing or merely in the way of Glanton’s gang. Blood Meridian simultaneously rewrites a history of the frontier as it generates a spatial mapping and details a process of accumulation in the west.

The Postman follows Gordon Krantz, mounting a liberal political-philosophical development as character development: from a Lockean state of nature, through to the birth of the liberal subject, and then on to the development of a social contract. The first state is short lived: as Krantz is robbed by some bandits but finds personal safety inside of an abandoned, hidden postvan. Here he muses on his situation, “Post-Chaos America had no tradition but survival. In his travels, Gordon had found that some isolated communities welcomed him in the same way minstrels had been kindly received far and wide in medieval days. In others, wild varieties of paranoia reigned. Even in those rare cases where he had found friendliness, where decent people seemed willing to welcome a stranger, Gordon had always, before long, moved on. Always, he found himself beginning to dream again of wheels turning and things flying in the sky” (33). This passage captures the first stage of the novel, and it also displays Brin’s layered narrative style where we can read Krantz’s observations as if they were his own through the mediation of a narrator. Krantz is always “finding” things are a certain way, which works against the frontier fantasy of starting anew.

Unlike The Postman, where the opening sharply displays the fantasy at the heart of some apocalypse survival stories, it is the ending of Blood Meridian to which I turn for an interpretive opening onto its gruesome exegesis. This passage comes at the end of the entire work, recalling the movement of Glanton and his gang, the bizarre archival activities of Judge Holden, and the horrible end faced by the kid; that is to say, it remains a critical tool for glancing into the registers of the text. I quote at length:

You can watch the whole movie here. * – Originally presented at a panel of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association “Realism and Utopia in Cold War Cinema” on 27 May 2012

The uprising is set in the future, and it follows a successful socialist revolution. At a moment of deepening crisis, when progressive movements are confronted by a cacophony of claims that we have reached the end of history, of ideology, of utopia, [Born in Flames] is significant in its juxtaposition of the shortcomings of traditional left politics with the ongoing dream of a better future.

—Peter Fitting

 

I don’t want to tell a story. I have no story to tell. I have problems to figure out. 

—Lizzie Borden

Two questions that we can answer rather quickly about the film are the where, we are in the socialist democracy of the U.S.A.; and the when, ten years after a peaceful revolution. True to its form, the film opens with a celebratory voice-over detailing the victories of the socialist state followed with a series of scenes in which poverty and destitution sublate the speaker’s jubilation. A program accompanying the film explains this sublation: “The Social Democratic Party that the women had supported had not fulfilled its promises. The women in the film are not anti-socialist. In fact, they see themselves as the true socialists, whose hopes for an egalitarian society have been destroyed” (qtd. in Friedberg 37). It is the repeated and continuing process of sublation that marks both the film’s importance to a history of feminist cinema, described by Teresa de Lauretis (155), and the continuation of a Marxist-feminist project of abolishing gender, as much as abolishing capitalist social relations, articulated by Maya Andrea Gonzalez (223).

The set of historical conditions that gave rise to Born in Flames do not limit, but extend, its political import to the present. Similarly, de Lauretis is not surprised by the emergence of the film at this point in history—“a time when severe social regression and economic pressures (the so-called ‘feminization of poverty’) belie the self-complacency of a liberal feminism enjoying its modest allotment of institutional legitimating” (166). She argues that the success of a swash of commercial “woman’s films” at the time was won at the price of “reducing the contradictory complexity…of concepts such as sexual difference, the personal is political, and feminism itself” (166). It is crucial to note that Born in Flames arrives on the scene after two successive moments of feminist film culture: one of “affirmative action in behalf of women as social subjects” and the other of negativity in the form of “radical critique of patriarchy and bourgeois culture” (154). For de Lauretis, this echo resounds through conversations surrounding feminism and cinema in the mid-to-late 70s, where one side called for “immediate documentation” and “positive images of women” the other side “insisted on rigorous formal work on the medium—or better,” suggests de Lauretis, an understanding of “the cinematic apparatus” as a “social technology” (155).