Life after People
Science Faction and Ecological Futures
BRENT BELLAMY AND IMRE SZEMAN
In a May 9, 2012, New York Times article, James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading environmental critic, made a startling and blunt declaration about Canadian oil extraction and climate change: “If Canada proceeds [in the tar sands], and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.”1 In a flash, the stakes on Hansen’s now thirty-year-old warning about climate change and the necessity of action on the environment have been raised precipitously. The intent of his article is all too clear: to convince us of the fact that the time for human beings to modify their life activity in a manner that will significantly offset their impact on the planet’s environment is now, as we have reached the point when the continued development of a single oil field (however large it may be) will push us over the ecological edge. He summarizes his predictions about the dire long- and short-term effects of collective ecological neglect with a strident declaration: “If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.”
What strikes us about Hansen’s interventions in the politics of climate—both his 1981 Science article about the speed of global warming due to CO2 production and this most recent piece in the Times—is his propensity to project and to extrapolate.2 Ecological thinking here remains inseparable from some form of thinking about the future; indeed, ecology in general has become so closely linked to narratives of the future that to even draw attention to this link between the environment and what-is-yet-to-come can seem beside the point or even tautological. It is the presumed effect of this link that interests us here as much as the presence of the connection itself. Hansen’s gambit, a play at the heart of ecological writing, is that this form of extrapolative writing can spur action—that depicting a future wracked by devastating weather patterns, rising ocean levels, species loss, crop failure and soil erosion, and so on, would of necessity result in the required political intervention, whether on a governmental or grassroots level or as some combination of the two, at the scale required by a problem that encapsulates and affects the whole globe.
All manner of assumptions are built into this narrative demand for action, including a continuing faith and belief in the drama of Enlightenment maturity outlined by Kant (in which we get smarter and better as we trundle along through history), the presumed power of scientific inquiry to guide political decision making, and the possibility of narrative to generate change (a long-standing dream of writers across the political spectrum)—and a hope, too, that latent species survival impulses still persist in human beings and can be activated by appeals to reason. Recently, no less a figure than leading environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki has suggested that such appeals to action have all been for naught: “Quite frankly, as far as I’m concerned, I feel all the effort that I’ve been involved in has really failed. We’re going backward.”3 Is there another way of naming the ecological crisis of the future that could generate the outcome that we are so desperately in need of—one that might marry scientific insight with political action in a way that would prevent the eco-apocalyptic outcomes identified by Hansen and others? As a way of probing the importance of form for ecological politics, we want to focus here on the problematic insights raised by a book that represents the ecological future in a narrative mode distinct from prevalent ways of imagining the future as either more of the same or post-catastrophe: Alan Weisman’s best seller The World Without Us (2007). This form—what we call “science faction”—has become increasingly prominent over the past decade, appearing not only in book form but in documentaries such as National Geographic’s Aftermath, the History Channel’s Life after People, and the BBC show The Future Is Wild. Such quasi-scientific, quasi-science-fictional texts depict the world after the final collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human race, often at hyperbolic geologic time scales extending millions of years. In addition to identifying the nature and function of this form, we want to critically examine what it tells us about narrative and political limits at the present time, and to consider what the problems of science faction tell us about what we might need to do to overcome such limits.
THE WORLD WITHOUT US
Weisman’s book unfolds around a thought experiment: If humans were to suddenly vanish from Earth today, what would happen to the world in our absence? He tells the story of a world without people by springboarding from a particular ecological context and its associations to another context of damaged nature and another zone of analysis and exploration, and so on throughout the book.4 Weisman attempts to chart the complicated web of relations that characterize the ecological history of the present even as he struggles to simplify these relations by removing humanity from the picture. The pleasure of the text comes from its patient and thorough investigation of the extent of human impact on the planet through thought experiments that imagine how long it would take nature to recover from the various damages we have inflicted upon it. The World Without Us is simultaneously a primer in environmental studies and a text that—like so many texts about the environment—identifies the need for rapid changes in the mode of human activity on the planet.
The book opens in the Amazon among the Zápara people, a scene that crystallizes one of the major internal contradictions of The World Without Us: thinking nature as the other of humanity. Weisman connects the demand for rubber trees created by Henry Ford’s mass-production of automobiles with the decimation of the Zápara. The point is straightforward enough: by draining Earth of its resources, we have become our own worst enemies, a fact once felt only on the (post)colonial peripheries of the planet but now a feature of daily life all over the world. Recognizing the position of human beings within nature—as opposed to the outsider status that many critics imagine humans occupy with respect to the environment—Weisman asks whether it is “possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”5 He poses this type of unanswerable question with frequency, as a reminder that the book aims to produce change in human activity with the insights produced from its attempt to “narrate the unnarratable.”6 The only reason to think of a world without us is to use the knowledge generated through such a narrative experiment to reimagine a world with us.
Weisman narrates what might happen after our disappearance by looking for evidence at sites that have already been left behind, performing an archaeology of abandonment, loss, and forgotten space. For instance, in the chapter “What Falls Apart,” he traces out what happens in Varosha, Cypress, a newly built tourist city that was forced to close in 1974 because of the ongoing border dispute between Greece and Turkey. Just six years after the city of twenty thousand had shut down, Metin Münir, a Turkish journalist who visits Varosha, is struck not by the absence of life in the city but by “its vibrant presence.” Münir reflects: “With the humans who built Varosha gone, nature was recouping it…. Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks, germinated, and heaved aside entire slabs of cement. Streets now rippled with white cyclamen combs and their pretty, variegated leaves.”7 While these enclaves emerge, in most cases, as the result of a spatial contradiction between politics and economics, the nation-state and global capital, Weisman’s narrative strategy posits them as representative examples of a world devoid of humans by treating them as if they were outside humanity altogether—a telling lack of attention to or interest in the place of politics in shaping the environment.
If such enclaves highlight the speed with which nature is likely to make a return to spaces previously occupied by humans, Weisman shows that elsewhere on the planet evidence of humanity’s presence and environmental impact will persist for much longer. The North Pacific garbage gyre—an immense “trash vortex” in the Pacific Ocean now said to be as large as the United States—marks the accumulative effects of the use of plastic polymers, a human legacy not set to disappear from Earth for one million years. We would be remiss if we failed to mention New York City—ever the apocalyptic metonym for the destruction or decay of humanity and urbanism. Weisman projects that within thousands of years, “what’s left of New York City [will be] scraped clean by glaciers. Only some tunnels and other underground structures [will] remain.”8 Weisman’s project, dialing back and forth from the massified minutiae of polymers to the destruction of the great cities to the reclamation of farmland by fast-growing plant species, maps out an imagined ecological future that is at the same time intensely informed and constructed by the contradictions and impasses of the present.
SCIENCE FACTION
The World Without Us has been dubbed an “eco-thriller” and a “thought experiment” by critics, and as a “love letter” to the planet and to the human race in an interview given by Weisman.9 We prefer to read it, and other works in this strange new subgenre, in relation to science fiction, but argue that it could be better described as “a fiction of science fact,” or science faction. Science faction represents a landscape devoid of people, an emptiness that bizarrely and of necessity generates an immediate challenge to narrative logic (that is, that narrative can persist even in a world without either narrators or audience). It is perhaps this founding antagonism that is one of the reasons why these fictions take the form of a didactic teaching of fact, science, and environmental politics, adopting a documentary form dominated by its presumed immediate relation to the real. As in science documentary, the “fact” of the narrated developments tends to displace questions about narrator, addressee, or audience. And yet, the fiction of the yet-to-be facts of texts like the World Without Us place them outside of documentary and closer to the mode of typical science fictions.
Indeed, there are characteristically SF elements to the book. On the one hand, at times it imagines the evolution of humanlike intelligence all over again: “One hundred thousand years hence,” Weisman writes, “the intellectual development of whatever creature digs them up might be kicked abruptly to a higher evolutionary plane by the discovery of ready-made tools. Then again, lack of knowledge of how to duplicate them could be a demoralizing frustration—or an awe-arousing mystery that ignites religious consciousness.”10 On the other, it pictures the discovery of the post-human Earth by aliens who are then tested by the remaining objects of human civilization. Do they recognize us, in spite of our disappearance?
Supposing, however, that before such entropic vandalism occurs, the collection is discovered by visiting alien scientists who happen upon our now-quiet planet, bereft of voracious, but colorful, human life. Suppose they find the Rothamsted archive, its repository of more than 300,000 specimens still sealed in thick glass and tins. Clever enough to find their way to Earth, they would doubtless soon figure out that the graceful loops and symbols penned on the labels were a numbering system. Recognizing soil and preserved plant matter, they might realize that they had the equivalent of a time-lapse record of the final century-and-a-half of human history.11
In this sense, like SF, science faction encodes what appears to be a temporal displacement of contradictions from the present onto a narrative future in order to explore their full significance and consequences.
But the differences between the two genres are significant. Science faction makes an aesthetic-epistemological gambit toward solving or seeking the resolution of historical problems through its unusual, hybrid narrative form. In SF, this well-recognized process has been described by Darko Suvin as “cognitive estrangement.”12 Carl Freedman has rearticulated Suvin’s thesis about cognitive estrangement as a dialectic between the two elements, arguing that “the first term refers to the creation of an alternative fictional world that, by refusing to take our mundane environment for granted, implicitly or explicitly performs an estranging critical interrogation of the latter. But the critical character of the interrogation is guaranteed by the operation of cognition, which enables the SF text to account rationally for its imagined world and for the connections as well as the disconnections of the latter to our own empirical world.”13 The estrangement element of Weisman’s book is that humanity is simply gone. Weisman’s self-described aesthetic strategy was to dissipate the anxiety that typically attends ecological issues by killing off humans at the outset. He says, “You can take your time and really look at all this stuff, because we’re already out of the picture.”14 For a critic of SF like Suvin, this type of admission marks the book’s historical nature in a double sense: first, that Weisman’s science faction could only appear at a particular moment in history, and second, that from moment to moment its estrangement (the disappearance of humans) will have different meanings (think, for instance, of the difference between post–World War II and Cold War anxieties about the atomic bomb compared to ecological anxiety today).
For Freedman, the “cognition effect” can be produced whether or not a text adheres strictly to a set of scientifically or empirically determined facts, as long as it bears out the logic of its science-fictional propositions immanently, with internal consistency. The key distinction between science faction and SF is that the former suspends the need to secure this cognition effect by relying on a future that is the same as the present, in so far as it is shaped by known scientific principles and data. The cognitive element, the fact of science faction in the case of The World Without Us, is secured through the expert testimony of architects, maintenance workers, climate change experts, and many, varied scientific researchers. The sole site at which Weisman’s book mimics the operations of SF is thus in its absence of people. But rather than being a site at which the cognition effect can play out, generating a social or political allegory based on the believability of the world that the book has crafted, it is here that the genre of science faction instead produces one of its primary contradictions. The answer to the central question of the book can’t help but betray itself by making it clear that a world without us is still intensely bound up with us. And Weisman knows it; he says, “And yet there’s a kind of paradox there too, isn’t there? It’s supposed to be a world without us, but the book is filled with people, too.”15
The aim of science faction is to mobilize some of the formal and imaginative energies produced by the tensions and contradictions of its form—not quite science documentary, not quite SF—to generate the kinds of political outcomes longed for by those concerned about human impacts on the environment. However, science faction tends to make at least two connected, problematic assumptions that impede or block such a politics: first, that humanity can disappear without impacting or altering nature in some significant way, and second, that nature would flourish in the absence of humans. Taken together, even given the potential effects of the text’s formal inventiveness, these two assumptions render a deeply conservative message about ecology—the opposite of what Weisman and the form of science faction more generally intend. In the first case, positioning humans as in some deep way external to nature—as outside nature to such a degree that their disappearance produces no tangible effect of its own—reinforces existing views of the divide between humanity and nature that have made the latter a mere instrument of the former. In a very real sense, from this perspective the world is always already without us, which is why nature need only address the consequences of human activity and need not try to manage the sudden disappearance of its largest mammalian species and the most dominant predator in the ecosystem.
The second assumption is equally problematic. According to Weisman’s thought experiment, the elimination of humans from the picture can’t help but lead to a situation in which nature rapidly recovers from the impacts of human activity; even a million years is insignificant in geological time, and Weisman discovers that much of the recovery would take place in only a few hundred. The ability of nature to recover in the absence of humanity leads to two additional and equally problematic conclusions. First, the fact that nature can recover—and indeed, do so relatively quickly—undermines ecological narratives about the threat of human activity to the environment’s health and sustainability. And even if we were to concede that humans have made a significant impact on the planet, Weisman’s thought experiment suggests that nothing can be done. If the only way by which the environment can be ameliorated is by bringing about the end of humanity (or, at a minimum, producing a massive, unprecedented reduction of humans’ environmental footprint) then there is nothing that can be done by humanity, much less for humanity. It is perhaps because he recognizes these limits to the narrative form he employs that Weisman repeatedly invokes the need to “dream of a way for nature to prosper that doesn’t depend on our demise”16—a dream that SF might be able to outline for us through its rich allegories of the future consequences of present contradictions, but which science faction, in its reconfiguration of SF’s cognitive estrangement function, cannot.
Commenting on the fiction of E. L. Doctorow, Fredric Jameson writes: “If there is any realism left here, it is a ‘realism’ that is … of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.”17 Science faction exceeds the limits of this kind of realism, if falsely, by using the crutch of its scientific explanation as something like an extra-historical justification for the present as what is—a present that “doesn’t need any explanation,” historical or otherwise, because of the simple fact of its existence. To put this somewhat differently: the fact of science factions means that these texts cannot engage in an analysis of what is, after all, the most significant factor in thinking about the ecological future: politics—the messy reality of human social configurations and their deleterious impact on the environment that is at the heart of the problems that necessitate the production of science factions in the first place.
ECOLOGICAL THINKING IN THE INTERREGNUM
What can be done to push and prod us into addressing the ecological crisis that we have generated for ourselves—into, that is, taking up the political challenges that necessitate the narrative appeals of Hansen, Suzuki, Weisman, and other environmentalists? The capacity (or rather, incapacity) of collective social amelioration lies at the heart of the endeavor called critical theory, which has since its inauguration in the work of the Frankfurt School been nothing if not an elaboration of the characteristics of late modernity that have blocked or impeded political possibility. One of the founding limits of narratives like Weisman’s—above and beyond those already listed above—is that while they attend to consequences of the dark side of the Enlightenment, they remain enraptured by the capacities of reason and fact to generate collective action; they see environmental destruction as a misstep in a story of progress rather than as a necessary outcome of that self-same science that is so apt at diagnosing the problem if not generating any solution (other than the elimination of humanity tout court).
Lauren Berlant’s analysis of the affective dynamics of “cruel optimism” generates an explanation for the above impasse. The very way in which contemporary life is lived out points to the affective limits of science faction and, indeed, of other dominant modes of environmental narrative, in generating the change they so desire. For Berlant, contemporary narratives of future change open up the optimistic “possibility that the habits of a history might not be reproduced.”18 They do so, however, in a way that, instead of pushing toward a historical break, generates a desire for a “reanchoring in the symptom’s predictability.”19 Despite the fact that ordinary life constitutes a slow wearing out of the subject, the tendency is for contemporary subjects to “choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to,” instead of leaping into a new social mode that might well no longer wear them out, but whose precise form and nature is necessarily uncertain and unknown.20
Berlant intends “cruel optimism” to describe the form of contemporary politics in general. The suspension of politics and the reaffirmation of the inevitability of the present even in critiques of it are, however, especially powerful in narratives of environmental futures. Though there might initially seem to be little that is optimistic about tales of future environmental destruction premised on humanity continuing in its ways, the generation of the possibility of a new historical trajectory is optimistic in precisely the sense Berlant identifies. Even at the risk of collective destruction, in the case of such narratives the cruel “retreat to the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity” is understandable: the trauma of ecological crisis never arrives as a determinate event but remains a relatively abstract component of a quotidian reality in which (for example) even the most extreme meteorological events are read simply as evidence of the usual vagaries of weather in any given year.21 The optimism of science faction is of a different and even less effective sort. If the cruel optimism of typical environmental narratives generates a potential political opening that is then shoved aside because of the demands of our exuberant attachments to the mechanics of daily life, the optimism of Weisman’s science faction merely affirms the already given: The World Without Us suggests that, in the end, our impact will have been seen to be inconsequential and easily remedied, and that since the planet can recover in our absence, then our presence can’t have been as bad as we may have feared.
The limited operations of science faction within our protracted political interregnum are also highlighted in Slavoj Žižek’s attempts to unsettle the shape and character of dominant forms of ecological analysis. In The World Without Us, nature is the “good other” of humanity; in the wake of the latter’s disappearance, nature would gradually and smoothly reclaim cities and sites of human development with little impact or consequence. Žižek counters how science faction imagines the changing face of the planet, understanding humanity’s relation to ecological balance in a precisely opposite way: “The lesson to be fully endorsed is that of an environmental scientist who concluded that while we cannot be sure what the ultimate result of humanity’s interventions into the geosphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to abruptly cease its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take its balanced course, the result would be a total breakdown, an imaginable catastrophe.”22 For Weisman, the catastrophe is only speculative—either humanity avoids such a catastrophe via action, or the environment (and as a result humanity) suffers a fatal downfall (though neither scenario is spelled out or described in the book). Žižek’s assertion that the cessation of human activity would necessarily produce a catastrophe illustrates the inadequacy of any narrative that would separate humans from nature and write them out of the future. If it is our future inactivity (just as much as our current activity) that spells catastrophic doom, how can we argue that we are somehow separate from nature, that our lives are somehow not complexly knotted and entwined with the fate of the planet?23 For Žižek, the configurations of “nature” with which science faction and other environmental narratives operate have to be seen as an ideological crutch that manages a problem rather than resolves it. He writes: “With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer ‘natural,’ the reliable ‘dense’ background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.”24
Žižek characterizes this moment’s version of ecology as an ecology of fear—as a “fear of a catastrophe (human-made or natural) that may deeply perturb or even destroy human civilization; fear that pushes us to plan measures that would protect our safety.”25 Science faction is an example par excellence of such fear, generating a mode of pessimism about the present that has to be read as suspect about its true inclinations and desires. Citing Hans-Georg Gadamer, Žižek reads such forms of ecological pessimism as simulated: “‘The pessimist is disingenuous because he is trying to trick himself with his own grumbling. Precisely while acting the pessimist, he secretly hopes that everything will not turn out as bad as he fears.’ Doesn’t the same tension between the enunciated and the position of enunciation characterize today’s ecological pessimism: the more those who predict a catastrophe insist on it, the more they secretly hope the catastrophe will not occur.”26 In the secret heart of the pessimist, then, is an optimistic core, a small piece of hope that grows in intensity with the insistence on the inevitability of imminent destruction. This optimism is not that described by Berlant but, once again, a less political form of hope for the future, which projects, extrapolates, and predicts the dangers of ecological change, in order to affirm the desirability of keeping everything else—liberal, democratic capitalism—the same as ever.
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, R2.
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.