Abstract
The science of climate change has long had to negotiate the tension between the demand for hard numerical data and the need for imagining radically different futures. In recent years, the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’—that is, of a new geological epoch brought about by the cumulative effects of humans on the Earth’s geochemical cycles—has opened up fruitful space for theoretical exploration of this kind. The present paper focuses on literary manifestations of this anthropocenic imagination, both in the form of recent climate fiction (‘cli fi’) and its genealogical precursors. Drawing in particular on novels by Arno Schmidt, J.G. Ballard, and Erwin Uhrmann—all of whom discuss how human subjectivity is altered under conditions of transformative environmental change—I argue that our collective response to the hyperobjectual relations of the Anthropocene is best described as a state of ‘anthropocenic hyperarousal’.
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Notes
- 1.
On this point, see (Purdy 2015, p. 2).
- 2.
For an account of the ‘structural identity thesis’, see (Hempel 1965, pp. 366–376).
- 3.
The same, of course, holds for cli-fi that deliberately misrepresents the science of climate change, as in Michael Crichton’s 2004 novel State of Fear, which has been various described as an instance of ‘epistemic corruption’ (Gardiner 2013, p. 457) and ‘a piece of “climate-sceptic” agitprop’ (Gelfert 2013, p. 206).
- 4.
In this regard, too, there is a parallel here with contemporary climate fiction, notably Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain (2004), one of whose protagonists, Charlie (an assistant to an environmentalist politician who runs for the highest office), at one point reflects on the fate of yet another climate change bill that is being watered down in Congress: “People had lived cocooned in oil for a few generations, but beyond that the world remained the same, waiting for them to re-emerge into it” (pp. 10–11). The same could be said about the addiction to nuclear technology in Schmidt’s The Egghead Republic.
- 5.
The idea of a ‘merging’ of different time scales is also taken up in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010): “‘That’s what I feel here,’ he said. ‘Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time. Our lives receding into the long past. That’s what’s out there. The Pleistocene desert, the rule of extinction.’” (p. 72)
- 6.
For a classic argument to this effect, see (Marcuse 1964).
- 7.
Whereas it is generally acknowledged that The Drowned World bears traces of Jungian psychology with its emphasis on human archetypes, broadly Marcusean ideas are explored in several of Ballard’s other novels; see (Francis 2011) for a survey.
- 8.
It is worth noting that the idea of a future (environmentally induced) descent into a feral past recurs also in recent climate fiction. In Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below (2005), Frank, one of the lead scientists, decides to abandon his home amidst hostile weather events and builds a tree house in the wilderness of a nearby nature park. By living in nature, he begins to marvel at the reawakening of his animal instincts: “How had he done that? No warning, instant reaction, how had there been time? In thousandths of a second his body had sensed the absence of ground, stiffened the appropriate muscles by the appropriate amount, and launched into an improvised solution.” (p. 95) Unlike Ballard’s protagonist, however, Robinson’s feral scientist does not fully abandon the trappings of civilization.
- 9.
There exists also an obvious parallel—very clearly alluded to by the protagonist’s name—with the Austrian children's literature classic Die Höhlenkinder (“The Cave Children”, 1918–20), by Alois Theodor Sonnleitner, in which two seventeenth-century children are left behind in an isolated mountain valley, where they must discover for themselves the ways of prehistoric man in order to survive.
- 10.
All translations are my own.
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Gelfert, A. (2020). We Are the End of the World: Stories of Anthropocenic Hyperarousal. In: Beck, B., Kühler, M. (eds) Technology, Anthropology, and Dimensions of Responsibility. Techno:Phil – Aktuelle Herausforderungen der Technikphilosophie , vol 1. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04896-7_7
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