Green Planets (39 page)

One of the implicit political claims of those who would imagine a world
without people is that there is no necessity of addressing the fourth antagonism of contemporary capitalism that Žižek describes: the population explosion of global slum dwellers.
²⁷
Žižek observes that today “the needy people in society are no longer the workers.”
²⁸
Science faction depicts the discontented negatively, representing the absence of the worker in the world as a perverse solution to global slums and the ever-increasing surplus armies of the global South, armies that are blamed (by developed countries) for many of the environmental problems detailed by Weisman. Ironically, science faction's dream of a world without people, a perfect nature able to move unhindered by a human presence on Earth, is only fully realized through the fictional genocide of indigent and slum populations: they are truly the only humans wiped from the face of the earth, while the so-called “symbolic class” is retained to describe the events of the supposedly peopleless world. The problem of (the lack of) narrator and audience that we described earlier reappears here in another guise, in the contrast between the
presence
of the talking heads and interviewees and the perverse
absence
of global slums and the unemployed—a problematic intimately related to the very ecological questions Weisman and others had set out to address. Once again, here, we detect through the absence of one of the major contradictions of global capitalism—massive, epidemic unemployment and underemployment—a lack of any consideration of the political in the unfolding of the future narratives of science faction. Indeed, one has to conclude that this absence of the political, which emerges in the celebration of the cleanliness of expertise in contradistinction to the filth, problems, and drama of human social life, is necessarily constitutive of the genre as a whole: the latter is wiped away so that the former can do its work.
²⁹

There is a desperate need to produce a response to environmental change. The difficulties in doing so have little to do with our understanding of or our belief in human impacts on the environment and much more to do with the broader limits of political discourse at the present moment. Generating new forms of narrative that might unsettle or undo these limits is essential. Rather than opening possibilities, Mark Jendrysik has suggested that those texts we have described here as science factions are anti-utopian, since the consequence of texts such as Weisman's is that they “reject the possibility of human action to perfect or save the ecosphere.”
³⁰
But perhaps even more problematic, however, is the manner in which these texts position themselves
as
utopian
through their affirmation of the desirability and inevitability of a political present even as they draw attention to the problems of the environmental future—a utopia in the
mode not of novel political possibilities but of Francis Fukuyama's infamous end of history. The challenges posed to ecological writing by thinkers such as Berlant and Žižek demand a far more powerful narrative intervention than thinking of a life after people; they demand a negative, rather than an affirmative or positive, utopian impulse. Such an approach to the impasse would necessarily take more than the strictly ecological into its scope, accounting for the social relations of capital (labor, underemployment, and unemployment) as well as the petroculture that fuels such relations. Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently written of the inseparability of fossil fuels from the Enlightenment project as a whole, noting that, “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive.”
³¹
What remains certain is that ecological narratives that fail to make such direct connections between the dreams and nightmares of the Enlightenment do little more than comfort us with the belief that we can change everything without having to change anything.
The
World Without Us
and texts like it provide good fodder for
NPR
interviews and dinner-table speculations about the future-to-come, but do nothing to solve the political problem of how to make this future different from the present.

Notes

1
. James Hansen, “Game Over for the Climate,”
New York Times
, May 9, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html?src=me&ref=general
.

2
. See J. Hansen, D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell, “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” Science 213 (1981): 957–66.

3
. David Suzuki in Guy Dixon, “The Bottom Line? He Has Some Regrets,”
Globe and Mail,
June 30, 2010, R
₂
.

4
. One such image that begins
chapter 2
is that of nature clearing houses “off the face of the Earth.” This wouldn't seem noteworthy if it wasn't oddly prescient of the housing crisis in the United States—an instance where we could see Weisman's world without us in the cleared out, emptied homes of the racialized and gendered victims of housing foreclosures who bore the brunt of the financial recession. With this in mind, Weisman's words take on a cruel irony: “If you're a homeowner, you already knew it was only a matter of time for yours, but you've resisted admitting it, even as erosion callously attacked, starting with your savings. Back when they told you what your house would cost, nobody mentioned what you'd also be paying so that nature wouldn't repossess it long before the bank.” Alan Weisman,
The World Without Us
(New York: Picador, 2007), 17.

5
. Ibid., 6.

6
. See Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu, “Ecology and Ideology: An Introduction,”
Polygraph
22 (2010): 21. Canavan, Klarr, and Vu indicate that both aesthetic directions one could take in order to solve this puzzle—that of defaulting to a “higher omniscience” or to “project our consciousness into non-human entities”—are “equally implausible.” They are discussing the television documentary series
Life after People
, but the characterization of a “post-human
non
-perspective” applies here as well.

7
. Weisman,
World Without Us
, 119.

8
. Alan Weisman, “Interview: Alan Weisman,”
Tricycle
17, no. 2, with Clark Strand (2007): 62.

9
. Ibid., 60, 67.

10
. Weisman,
World Without Us
, 21,

11
. Ibid., 196.

12
. See Darko Suvin,
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: Poetics of a Genre
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

13
. Carl Freedman,
Critical Theory and Science Fiction
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 16–17.

14
. Weisman, “Interview,” 61.

15
. Clark Stand responds, “True. The biologists and physicists and environmentalists and artists you interviewed are all right there on nearly every page of the book, speaking in their own voices about what would happen if we suddenly disappeared. In that respect, it's a very densely populated book.” Weisman continues, “The whole book is really a way of getting people to imagine, first of all, how amazing the world would be without us, and second, how we might add ourselves back into this equation. We could still be a part of it. But then, there are a lot of things that we should do now in order to make sure that happens.” Weisman, “Interview,” 63.

16
. Weisman,
World Without Us
, 6.

17
. Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 24.

18
. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,”
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
17, no. 3 (2006): 31.

19
. Ibid.

20
. Ibid., 23.

21
. Ibid.

22
. Slavoj Žižek, “Nature and Its Discontents,”
SubStance
37, no. 3 (2008): 56.

23
. Ibid., 50.

24
. Ibid., 50.

25
. Ibid., 53.

26
. Ibid.

27
. “Although their population is composed of marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants and ex-peasants, they are not simply a redundant surplus: they are incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways, many of them working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security coverage. (The main source of their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in
the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) They are the true ‘symptom' of slogans like ‘Development,' ‘Modernization,' and ‘World Market': not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary product of the innermost logic of global capitalism.” Ibid., 40.

28
. Ibid., 37.

29
. See Jasper Bernes, “The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor,” in
Communization and Its Discontents
, ed. Benjamin Noys (New York: Minor Compositions, 2011), 157–72. Bernes takes up the questions that motivates Žižek's piece, arguing for political response to the increasing tendency of capital to generate groups and people who appear outside of the system but remain deeply a part of its operations: “Examining capitalism in this way, as a process of production that contains moments both inside and outside of the workplace, allows us to expand our notion of antagonistic agents, to expand our notion of the proletariat—so that it includes the unemployed, students, unwaged house workers and prisoners.” Bernes, “Double Barricade,” 164. See also Aaron Benanav and
Endnotes
, “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,”
Endnotes
2 (June 27, 2012),
http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/1
, where Benanav, with
Endnotes
, makes a cogent argument for a reconsideration of Marx's general law of capital accumulation (that increasing amounts of surplus capital always and of necessity generate growing populations of surplus labor beyond the amount required by capital to keep employment rates and wages low) in light of the current historical conjuncture. For a discussion of unemployment, see also Fredric Jameson, “Political Conclusions,” in
Representing Capital
(London: Verso, 2011), 139–51.

30
. Mark S. Jendrysik, “Back to the Garden: New Visions of Posthuman Futures,”
Utopian Studies
22, no. 1 (2011): 36.

31
. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,”
Critical Inquiry
35 (Winter 2009): 208.

12

Pandora's Box

Avatar,
Ecology, Thought

TIMOTHY MORTON

The movie
Avatar
was so successful because it speaks, and fails to speak, about issues related to ecology, environment, and world, some of the most pressing issues of our age.
¹
And yet, despite the surface-level anticapitalist and anticolonialist appearance of
Avatar
, the picture is more complex.
Avatar
acknowledges the philosophical and political dilemma we face around ecological thought while failing to resolve it. This dilemma is precisely to do with
thought
and
thinking
at the very moment at which humans have begun to deposit a thin layer of carbon in Earth's crust, thus opening the intersection of human history and geological time now known as the Anthropocene. In this essay, I shall argue that
Avatar
performs a kind of chiasmic figure-of-eight: on the one hand, it gives us a sense of being-in-a-world that I argue is strictly untenable in an era of ecological emergency; on the other hand,
Avatar
dissolves this very sense of “being-in”—taking with one hand what it gives with the other. What the Kantian revolution in philosophy opened was, to use a pun that I shall use perhaps too often here, a Pandora's box that allowed both for the ultimate expression thus far of human nihilism and instrumental reason and for the very ecological awareness that brings this nihilism not so much to an end but to its logical conclusion: reason as both poison and cure, as homeopathic medicine. In so doing, I show that
Avatar
is not the total assault on modernity it seems to be but holds out, rather, the possibility of a
logical conclusion
to modernity.

Environmental philosophy often claims to be Heideggerian, but what does this mean? It usually amounts to asserting, without much substantiation, that humans are embedded in a
world
. A careful reading of Heidegger, however, demonstrates that this view could not be less Heideggerian. On the contrary, as I shall argue in this essay, the fully Heideggerian view is the feeling that the world has suddenly disappeared. This feeling is highly congruent with contemporary developments in the cultural imaginary of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene
is that geological period defined by the deposition of a fine layer of carbon in Earth's crust as a result of human activity, starting around 1790. What is called the
Great Acceleration
logarithmically sped up the processes of the Anthropocene when the Gadget (Trinity test), Little Boy (Hiroshima), and Fat Boy (Nagasaki) began to deposit radioactive materials in Earth's crust in 1945. The precision with which geology measures this date (against the incomprehensible vastness of geological time) is itself a symptom of the profound disorientation of habitual views of
world
. These views depend for their coherence on a stable enough contrast between a foreground and a background—but in an era of global warming, no such contrast is available to us.

This chapter shall therefore argue that the notion of “planetary awareness,” then, far from being a utopian upgrade of normative embeddedness ideology, is instead an uncanny realization of coexistence with a plenum of ungraspable hyperobjects—entities such as
climate
and
evolution
that can be computed but that cannot directly be seen or touched (unlike
weather
or
this rabbit
, respectively)—and nonhuman beings. Moreover, the sense of being “in” a world itself is, in Heideggerian terms, a covering over of the very being that it endeavors to assert. The anthem of the current era, instead, is “We
Aren't
the World.” As we shall see,
Avatar
dramatizes this perilous ambiguity. On one hand, its stunningly immersive graphics and sentimental suction make us feel as if we are practically enveloped by its world. On the other hand, the disorientating scales and strange luminous aesthetics of the Pandoran forest and its inhabitants promise something much more disturbing, and, I shall argue, much more ecological.