Response 1: “A Problem of Solidarity” and Incommensurability

I want to begin this response by thanking the Utopian Studies editorial staff for working to make this critical forum possible, and my fellow forum contributors for trusting me with their brilliant work.In the conclusion to The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson memorably articulates what he calls the dialectic of utopia and ideology: “that all class consciousness—or in other words, all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes—is in its very nature utopian.”1 Reading over Hammer’s and Stewart’s essays, and reflecting on my own, I cannot help but acknowledge that dominant class consciousness, along with all the neoliberal, heteropatriarchal, and settler colonial lifestyles it condones and reproduces, has lapsed into full-blown crisis politics and disaster capitalism. For Jameson, questions of ideology and history resided in the domain of aesthetic form; but crisis partakes of form and style, as Michael Dango suggests.2 Form mobilizes style, and style reveals form. Crisis and its etymological partner, critique, urge action. Even in times of overwhelming environmental catastrophe, infrastructural collapse, fascism, and genocide—times we often feel frozen, petrified—crisis instills a feeling that we cannot not do something. It instills the passion to move, even if we are not sure where to move or how. Hammer’s “unruly alliance” and Stewart’s “angry planet” respond to this passion: that, to paraphrase Jameson, all crisis, including the most petrifying horrors of human extinction just as much as that of neoliberal barriers to collective organizing, is in its very nature utopian.Topically and thematically, Stewart’s Angry Planet shares much in common with my own writing and is exemplary of what I perceive to be a recent turn away from the new materialisms that have dominated the environmental humanities for some time now. Stewart characterizes this disenchantment as “a problem of solidarity,” a diagnosis with which I agree. Frameworks of entanglement, material assemblages, and flat ontologies that we derive from the Latourian camp may be successful in complicating the value structures that subjugate the nonhuman (or more-than-human) world; but in eagerly dismantling the humanist epistemologies that have long informed discourses of dominant science, new materialism often overlooks the very real and very persistent value structures within which marginalized communities continue to reside, even when its practitioners champion a leftist politics of care and repair. This “unevenness” is apparent across geographies, Stewart reminds us, in the infrastructures and damaged ecosystems of the settler colonial world.Where new materialism urges us (often with the best intentions) toward horizontality, a politics of environmental and social solidarity asks that we look up and down. The now unfashionable terminologies of First and Third Worlds, much like the more accepted Global North and South, are not soft-spoken about their hierarchical implications, whether in terms of numerical ordering or the orientation of our world maps. How to mobilize collective action across nations and continents riddled with environmental injustices and slow violences that simultaneously fatten the purses of a small percentage of humans? “Angry Planet is a project whose utopian impulses stall at precisely this question,” Stewart writes, although I would contend that the project reminds those of us in the environmental humanities and beyond of the need for a more strategic form of verticalized critique—that we comprehend how and why we can “see apartheid from space,” to borrow Gabrielle Hecht’s example.3 These are not flat histories but ones that demands vertical awareness, lest we diminish all history to experience. This is not to suggest that experience is insignificant; but insofar as experience comes to act as a supreme currency (as it its tendency in the era of content-creator capitalism) it immobilizes the politics of solidarity, an argument Anna Kornbluh also makes.4 When disparate experiences become commensurate—that is, exchangeable—they return political action to the purview of a capitalist logic. In their rejection of this logic, Max Liboiron insists on an “ethic of incommensurability” that guides obligations between human communities, as well as those between human and more-than-human communities.5 Such an ethic moves us away from liberal notions of experience and toward “a diversity of relationships where some relations matter more than others.”6Experience sustains and reifies the liberal self, privileging the bounds of personhood and the necessity of having shared in another’s sufferings over the utopian possibility of empathy across cultural and social divides. Against this narrow view of personhood, Hammer’s unruly alliance “offers a complex view of subjectivity and a vision for a politics of solidarity that can scale up to address ecological and economic issues.” It is no mere coincidence, I think, that Hammer’s argument adopts a rhetoric of mobility and moving. Rereading the phallus through the discourse of queer and trans psychoanalysis, they propose that “[w]hen the phallus begins to move with greater fluidity across a range of embodiments, gender identifications, and sexualities, it becomes a source of generative play—and political possibility.” As with the promiscuous rearrangement of female phallicism, solidarity across cultural, social, and ecological borders demands flirtation, intimacy, and experimentation. Hammer’s thesis reminds me of Dango’s promiscuous archives, “the affinities of seemingly dissimilar things.”7 Once again, we discover a configuration of crisis style, here employed by queer and trans artists: an aesthetics of recombination in which new possibilities emerge from unexpected alliances.Hammer’s “complex view of subjectivity” does not abandon personal experience entirely, but redefines its placement in “the private, twilight edges of imagination” rather than what we have come to understand as the well-lit essentialist core of liberal identity. The opportunity to explore a plurality of intimacies, and not strictly those defined by “normative masculinity,” opens utopian pathways simply by enabling conversations between otherwise isolated subjects. In reading Hammer’s essay, I am reminded of the heartbreaking stories of those denied transgender healthcare. The proper response to this particular crisis, it seems to me, is precisely the kind of nurturing, caregiving, unruly empathy for which Hammer argues: “To create lasting change,” they write, “those political, cultural, and familial systems that produce and are produced by masculine normativity need to be disrupted through unruly culture and its utopian possibilities.” The political, cultural, and familial systems that Hammer targets are the same ones that make difficult, if not impossible, the clarification of political goals between humans and their more-than-human kin. It is against such immobilization that Stewart brings forth her angry planet narratives of the late twentieth century, which not only envision solidarity across human communities regardless of shared or comparable experience, but “invoke a furious planetary body that [. . .] clearly articulates—in the movement of wildfires, earthquakes, flooding, and even urban decay—its own ideas for how human political and economic order should be managed in the interest of creating that ultimate iteration of utopian solidarity that might be expressed as a survivable relationship between people and planet.”The notion of such a survivable relationship calls to mind the specter of extinction, even as it places emphasis on the pursuit of collectivist politics. For me, it is helpful to think of Stewart’s decolonial planetary narratives in light of Audra Mitchell’s recent work on extinction and settler colonial conservation, in which the conditions of environmental management “produce and sustain genocidal relations on a global scale, which contribute toward the outcome of erasure for many lifeforms.”8 The capitalist world order reproduces extinction as a necessary feature: the extraction and consumption of environmental resources, indifferent to indigenous ecosystems. But neither is the planet itself a conscientious agent, which poses a challenge to the demands of solidarity, as Stewart reminds us. Now well into the twenty-first century, we can begin to ask how the emergence and development of Black Lives Matter, Land Back, Extinction Rebellion, and other social movements respond to this challenge—and what solidarity looks like in the shadow of rising fascist tides, from the American far right to the ongoing Palestinian genocide.I see in Hammer’s and Stewart’s writing a partnership with my concerns about extinction and utopia, even as I spent little time explicitly reflecting on radical collectives and leftist solidarity in the book itself. Although extinction is often popularly perceived as a transparently flat, apolitical event—an indiscriminate ontology—it is, as much as any other aspect of scientific thought, deeply constructed and narrativized. The proximity of extinction imagined by a settler-colonial culture tells us more about that culture’s mythic and triumphalist histories than it does about any real relationship it has to extinction. My curiosity about these histories led me to the works of Anthropocene fiction I examine in Writing Our Extinction, which can aid us in identifying, troubling, and even undermining such triumphalist accounts. It is not insignificant that Don DeLillo, upon adapting his novella Pafko at the Wall for inclusion as the prologue to his novel Underworld (1997), retitled the piece “The Triumph of Death.” In reimagining American exceptionalism after 1945, DeLillo gives his readers a different kind of history, a secret history, one in which “the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays but in the occasion it creates for new secrets.”9 The dazzle of imperial science and the threat of extinction in the shadow of the mushroom cloud is only part of the story for DeLillo. The other part includes the plots, struggles, deception, disinformation, and mobilizations of power that have built up the infrastructures of extraction. As a work of cultural production, Underworld can aid us in identifying and disrupting these secret histories, which act as barriers to collective and planetary solidarity, and narrating new utopian forms that accompany the ongoing ecological fallout of late-stage capitalism.It seems to me that angry planets, unruly alliances, and extinct utopias all involve parallel disruptions: of the settler colonial regime that subjugates Indigenous human and more-than-human ecologies, of the masculine normativity that subjugates trans and queer masculinities, and the vertical science that subjugates the resources and peoples of extraction zones. Moreover, these parallel disruptions strike at interrelated power structures; settler colonialism, masculine normativity, and vertical science feed into and reinforce each other. It has been a privilege and an enlightening opportunity to consider Writing Our Extinction in conversation with Angry Planet and Masculinity in Transition; and it is my hope that these projects, viewed together, circumscribe a utopianism that both empowers and exceeds their scholarly purview.