Response 3: Reframing the Anthropocene

Thomas Whitmarsh’s Writing Our Extinction and Anne Stewart’s Angry Planet engage the utopian within the literary to offer new temporal and material framings that resist ecopessimism and its reinforcement of the neoliberal status quo. I cannot imagine a more consequential topic for utopian studies, or for cultural theory more broadly, as both Whitmarsh and Stewart connect the conceptualization and representation of the Anthropocene to questions of identity, solidarity, and social justice. Whitmarsh maps the vertical topologies of post-1960s fiction, which are in dialogue with the technological developments of the post–World War II area (e.g., the space race and atomic testing), to make the case that worst-case scenarios drain the will toward action and change. Whitmarsh compels his readers instead toward “regenerative social imagination,” which could have broad application and utility across a number of contexts. For one, he proposes through Roy Scranton’s “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” that there is critical value in “sitting with the prospect of extinction,” which involves a refusal to accept what he calls the “merciless technocracies of extractive capitalism.”1 Discomfort with the intolerable present is something to be maintained and nurtured, or else the “spectacle of extinction” that enables capitalism will continue to cast systemic change as impossible.Extinction’s value for utopian thought must take a different form, he argues, namely that of science fiction, which can historicize the present, and intuit within the present the possibilities for action and change. While the present is obviously already determined, the future in science fiction is still open to possibility—that is, our extinction becomes, as yet, an “untold story.” Thus, the question of extinction as a utopian imaginary becomes a question of temporality. Novels like Don DeLillo’s Underworld assist in this reframing of extinction by compelling readers to “wrestle with the weird temporality of discovering our extinction somehow already inscribed within the earth” (Whitmarsh). Again, the question of the willingness to be unsettled and to use this discomfort as a resource rather than cause for inertia seems to be the desired result of this engagement with Anthropocene fiction.The aspect of Whitmarsh’s analysis in his roundtable essay that connects most powerfully to my own Masculinity in Transition and to Stewart’s Angry Planet, is his assessment of how writers of color take a long view because of their ongoing dispossession throughout the various episodes of extractive capitalism. This suggests that the ways extinction is imagined is racially determined, something that remains close at hand in works like Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad (2016). I was curious how this analysis might be extended to take in the whiteness—and normative masculinity—of DeLillo’s Underworld, for example, and to address the question of whether all critique of Anthropocene fiction must account for race, gender, and class. Furthermore, Whitmarsh offers how social media, popular culture, as well as the scholars he accuses of intellectual malaise foreclose utopian critique by reproducing imagery of environmental apocalypse.2Popular depictions of nuclear and mass extinction (The Day After immediately came to mind) produce “endgame scenarios” of heroic resistance, and I add that they typically cast an attractive white, male hero, suggesting a gendered and racialized limitation of the current framing of human extinction—and the solutions thereof. This aspect of how extinction and damage are represented compelled me to ask if there is both a gendered and racialized aspect to catastrophizing about “the future” in general. For example, in my own field, when the eradication of trans people through legislative attacks and violence is envisioned as a catastrophe “on the horizon,” is this not already the reality for trans and queer people of color? Is the need to “wrestle” with our extinction as “already inscribed within the earth” itself a sign of a privileged subject position?In Angry Planet, Stewart suggests this is so. In a genre she names “angry planet fiction,” the earth itself becomes an unruly subject, delivering messages via destructive episodes, such as crumbling coastlines resulting in freeway car crashes. These are stories convey how “the radical reconfiguration of the material conditions produced by the legacies of settler and extractive colonialism on the North American continent,” must begin with the land (Stewart). She places US authors like Octavia Butler and Héctor Tobar, alongside decolonial theorists including Gloria Anzaldúa, George Manuel, and Sylvia Wynter, who perceive coloniality (and its regimes of gender, sex, and race) and nonhuman exploitation as inextricably linked. Indeed, the dispossessed populations and the physical environment have been subjected to the same degrading processes.Furthermore, she cites some new materialists’ failure to take seriously these non-Eurocentric ontologies as a problem of solidarity. The difficulties of solidarity are at the center of Angry Planet, and through historian Gregory Claeys, she links these difficulties to the social justice core of progressive utopian thought. However, for Stewart, such solidarity must begin with the non-human world as the “pathway to decolonization and away from environmental ruin” (Stewart). The problem that arises is how human solidarity and alignment with the nonhuman can occur simultaneously, for “if the angry planet presents itself as an ally to the dispossessed in this fiction, it is more difficult for the earth’s angry people to find allyship with each other” (Stewart). The stumbling block is the tension between the collective and the individual, for it’s difficult—if not impossible—for those not already part of a collective to shed their neoliberal individualism, so much so that for Jameson, utopia becomes “the spectacle of a First World gated community surrounded by a world of starving enemies.”3 The ability to survive is increasingly dictated by one’s ability to protect their property from the “crumbling coastlines.” However, this should not lead us to pessimism, particularly if, as in Writing Our Extinction, the dystopian—the discomforting present— is seen as the neoliberal order itself, including the increasing insulated environs of the gated community.I was struck by the idea that instead of envisioning the nonhuman world as depressed and damaged, this fiction conjures rage—“a furious planetary body.” The characters in these works listen to the language of environmental catastrophe—the “motion of the angry planet”—as a resource for the formation of both interethnic and interspecies solidarities. Stewart laments, however, that these coalitions are never fully realized. I wondered if this doesn’t describe decolonial struggle in general—the imperfections of the feminist, trans, and/or queer collective, for example—and the ways utopia is worked toward continually without the promise of ultimate success, and often in the face of failure. The Queer Art of Failure, by Jack Halberstam, for example, sees possibility within failure (the failure to conform to any expectation of relationality, for one) as a condition of queer life and queer critique. When I speak in my book about “unruly alliances,” it was with the full awareness of how scholar-activists like bell hooks, Angela Davis, Patricia Collins, and Gloria Anzaldúa, have had to live with, and learn from, failure, particularly the failure of white academia to taken them seriously. Are the “deeply imbricated ideological priorities of possessive individualism and absolute state power” really “winning” over the motion of the angry planet, or is this simply another iteration of the struggle, which is never won but is passed on to the next generation, and then the next? Is there a different way to read this failure as not necessarily an “impasse to the decolonial imperative, and to utopian possibility,” but instead the necessary friction and even collapse that imagining the impossible has always required? The willingness to live with discomfort, with incompleteness, and yes, with failure, seems to connect both to my concept of unruly alliance, which I view as a temporary, often utilitarian, and crisis-informed solidarity across identity categories, as well as to the reframing of the Anthropocene in Writing Our Extinction and Angry Planet.