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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The end of the world is a seemingly interminable topic D at least, of course, until it happens. Environmental catastrophe and planetary apocalypse are subjects of enduring fascination and, as ethnographic studies show, human cultures have approached them in very different ways. Indeed, in the face of the growing perception of the dire effects of global warming, some of these visions have been given a new lease on life. Information and analyses concerning the human causes and the catastrophic consequences of the planetary 'crisis' have been accumulating at an ever-increasing rate, mobilising popular opinion as well as academic reflection. In this book, philosopher Déborah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro offer a bold overview and interpretation of these current discourses on 'the end of the world', reading them as thought experiments on the decline of the West's anthropological adventure D that is, as attempts, though not necessarily intentional ones, at inventing a mythology that is adequate to the present. This work has important implications for the future development of ecological practices and it will appeal to a broad audience interested in contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and environmentalism.
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Seitenzahl: 336
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Foreword by Bruno Latour
Epigraph
Prefatory note
Notes
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments for quotations in text
1: What rough beast…
Metaphysics and mythophysics
Notes
2: …Its hour come round at last…
Gaia and anthropos
The end-of-the-world perspective
Notes
3: …Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
The world before us
The world after us
Notes
4: The outside without thought, or the death of the Other
A certain worldless people of the recent past
The thanatological argument
“Nobody will miss it”
Notes
5: Alone at last
Ceci n’est pas un monde
After the future: the end as beginning
The Great Indoors: Tarde's speculative speleology
Notes
6: A world of people
The end of transformations, or the first Anthropocene
Anthropomorphism
contra
anthropocentrism
The end of the world of the Indians
Notes
7: Humans and Terrans in the Gaia War
The impossible species
The end of the world as a fractal event
Notes
World on the brink
To believe in the world
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Dedication
To Irene, a Terran of the world to come
Copyright page
First published in Portuguese as Há mundo por vir? Ensaio sobre os medos e os fins, © Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2014 (revised edition 2015)
This English edition © Polity Press, 2017
Obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil / Fundação Biblioteca Nacional
This work was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Brazil / National Library Foundation
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0397-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0398-8 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Names: Danowski, Déborah, author. | Castro, Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de, author.
Title: The ends of the world / Déborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Other titles: Há mundo por vir? English
Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2016. | Translation of: Há mundo por vir? | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017844 (print) | LCCN 2016031811 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509503971 (hardback) | ISBN 1509503978 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781509503988 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509504008 (mobi) | ISBN 9781509504015 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: End of the world–Philosophy. | Metaphysics–Philosophy. | Fear–Philosophy. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural.
Classification: LCC BL503 .D3613 2016 (print) | LCC BL503 (ebook) | DDC 001.9–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017844
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Foreword by Bruno Latour
What Isabelle Stengers calls the intrusion of Gaia is something that makes us lose all our bearings. Yes, Gaia is an intruder in the sense that nothing had been prepared, thought, planned, predicted, instituted for life under its sign. Nothing, at least, during that historical period which we can no longer call modernity. There was Nature, to be sure, that cold, eternal, distant figure which could dictate its laws to all human actions – including economic law. But this deity strikes us today as too outdated, too naive in its anthropocentrism. In any case, it too was eventually secularized. How can we then become familiar with Gaia, the intruder? This is where the two authors of this essay in mythocosmology step in: an anthropologist with philosophical leanings, a philosopher with an ecological bent. And they do not start from the beginning, of course (as if one had to go from the Big Bang, via Lucy, Lascaux, and so on, to get to the ecological crisis), but from the only place from which it is possible to start, namely, the end. Not the end of times, like Saint John, but the suspension of the ways in which time used to pass. The essay sallies forth in an inventory-like manner, a guided tour across the cabinet of curiosities of present philosophical and literary monstrosities, some of them quite fashionable, others not as well known, but all of them symptomatic of the present state of alarm. It then moves on to anthropology, to those indigenous worlds that never needed to give themselves either a Nature or a Culture. The tone changes because the worlds change. Finally, it is necessary to go into politics. It is with politics and through it that the book draws to an end, evoking the febrile mobilization of all collectives that know that time is no longer on their side. And thus it all starts again – or will start, leaving behind much of what we had grown used to believing in. This book must be read the way one takes a cold shower. So we get used to it. So we prepare. Expecting the worst.
But if we, who are kings of nature, shall have no fear, who shall?
Clarice Lispector
Unlike us, white people are not afraid of being crushed by the falling sky. But one day they may fear that as much as we do!
Davi Kopenawa
Prefatory note
“Things are changing so fast that it is hard to keep track,” says Bruno Latour in a text that we cite right at the start of this book's second chapter. This applies perfectly to The Ends of the World. The book that now stands before the reader's eyes is the translation of the Portuguese edition, published in October 2014 by Cultura e Barbárie and Instituto Socioambiental, under the title Há Mundo Por Vir? Ensaio sobre os medos e os fins.1 Since then, the stubborn march of global warming, on the one hand, and the ever growing accumulation of discourses (in the broad sense) on the “end of the world” and the Anthropocene, as well as the cloud of themes that the latter term so conveniently and polemically summarizes, on the other hand, has been of such magnitude that any attempt to update the arguments formulated only a couple of years ago would be a nigh impossible task. Let us just recall a few important milestones that have since occurred, which would no doubt impact various passages of this book: the international colloquium, “The Thousand Names of Gaia: From the Anthropocene to the Age of the Earth” (Rio de Janeiro, September 2014), organized by the two authors of The Ends of the World, among others, and bringing together several fundamental thinkers working on its subject; the appearance of the papal encyclical Laudato Si’, which marked the Vatican's properly spectacular entrance in the debate; the apparition (we choose the word advisedly) of An Ecomodernist Manifesto, a document whose production was led by the Breakthrough Institute and which was undersigned by many a pro-capitalist celebrity, radicalizing even further the positions defended by that think tank which this book discusses; various texts engaging with Laudato Si’ as well as many others lambasting An Ecomodernist Manifesto, some of which were penned by authors also discussed in our book; the publication of Jason Moore's Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, which develops an exhaustive narrative of a historical materialist bent on the Anthropocene (rechristened “Capitalocene”); the veritable explosion of events, texts, and manifestos of the “accelerationist” current, which seems to have come of age somewhat – an impression reinforced by the way in which water has progressively been added to its originally thick Promethean wine; and, it goes without saying, the Paris Agreement, a document produced at the COP21 that took place in December 2015, a conference which, perhaps more than any of the other previous 20, managed to instill in environmentalists and scientists an equal combination of hope and disappointment, by dint of managing to produce a consensus among members regarding the need to limit the rise of global temperature to 2°C, 1.5°C if possible, all the while failing to name a single concrete measure that would render that target realistic, or at least likely – thus generating the bitter suspicion that a supposed inevitability of the “Plan B” of geo-engineering is the ghost that animates its machine.2
From a point of view that we could call dialogical rather than critical, however, the most important fact to produce a virtual modification of the context of reception of the present book was the publication of Bruno Latour's Face à Gaïa (2015). The latter is an extensively and intensively revamped version of Facing Gaia, the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion presented by the author in Edinburgh in 2013, and which have served as a sort of underlying narrative thread for The Ends of the World. Face à Gaïa was written taking into account, among several other texts, our own “L’Arrêt de Monde.” To incorporate Latour's book into ours would effectively entail writing a different book altogether. All we can therefore do is suggest that The Ends of the World be read alongside Face à Gaïa (forthcoming in English translation as Facing Gaia, Polity Press, 2017), so that readers can draw their own conclusions.
In short, if we have chosen to publish Há Mundo Por Vir? without taking into due account all these subsequent developments, it is because we strongly believe that the observations contained herein, the positions that are contested as well as defended, do not require any correction or elaboration that would modify this book's analyses or central theses.
Finally, we would like to add a couple of technical notes. Firstly: the symbol § indicates passages that are digressions from the main argument, but are intended to add depth of explanation to the text in the same way that an extended footnote world. Secondly: in the Gifford Lectures, Latour renders the French Terriens as “Earthlings” or, more frequently, as “Earthbound people,” playing on the adjective's multiple connotations: the people who are destined to the Earth, who are tied to the Earth, who are under the spell of the Earth…We have chosen the name “Terrans” to designate this demos, which, as shall be seen, Latour opposes to “Humans” and/or “Moderns,” taken as synonymous ways of referring to the same people, namely, “us”. Who these “Terrans” are is one of the central problems in our book.
Notes
1
Translator's note: a literal translation would be
Is There a World to Come? An Essay on Fears and Ends
.
2
We must not leave unmentioned two studies which appeared just as we finished this preface and which had a big impact on the public as well as on the scientific community: Richard E. Zeebe, Andy Ridgwell, and James C. Zachos (2016), and Hansen et al. (2016).
Acknowledgments
The first draft of this text was an oral presentation made on December 21, 2012 (the day of the end of the world according to a supposedly “Mayan” calendar), at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, at the behest of the Equipe de Recherche sur les Rationalités Philosophiques et les Savoirs [Philosophical Rationalities and Knowledges Research Team] (ERRAPHIS); and, a few weeks later, in a seminar in the Expérimentation Arts et Politiques [Experimentation in Art and Politics] (SPEAP) program at the Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in Paris. We thank Jean-Christophe Goddard and Bruno Latour respectively for the invitations, as well as those who attended the lectures for their welcome and comments. Jean-Christophe, Gwen-Elen, and Jeanne Goddard hosted us in Toulouse with a warmth that was nothing less than moving. Bruno Latour, old friend that he is, deserves special thanks for being not only our greatest motivator but also, as shall become obvious, our main interlocutor.
We would also like to thank our brave fellow Terran people of #ATOA, Alexandre Nodari, Flávia Cera, Marcos de Almeida Matos, and Rondinelly Gomes de Medeiros, who have been with us from the start, and most especially since the “anthropolemical” event terrAterra, which took place as part of the People's Summit parallel to the Rio+20 Climate Conference, in 2012; to Idelber Avelar, who first pointed us in the direction of Dipesh Chakrabarty's article, and for his ever generous support to the Terran cause; to Rodrigo Nunes, for several indications regarding speculative realism, accelerationism, and their surroundings; to Felipe Süssekind, Alyne de Castro Costa, Juliana Fausto, Marco Antônio Valentim, Cecilia Cavalieri, José Marcio Fragoso, André Vallias, and Moysés Pinto Neto, for their complicity and decisive support in more than one skirmish in the ongoing war of the worlds. We shall win.
The Ends of the World is an updated, expanded version of the essay “L’Arrêt de monde,” translated from Portuguese into French by Oiara Bonilla (whom we thank for her patience) and published in June 2014 in the book De l’Univers Clos au Monde Infini (Hache 2014). We are grateful to Émilie Hache, who invited us to contribute to that collection, for her kind decision to publish the text in its entirety and her valuable editorial suggestions (a gratitude we also extend to our friend Élie Kongs). It falls to Michael Houseman, finally, who dedicated a cold afternoon in 2013 to comment on one of the first oral versions of the text and who has, with Marika Moisseeff, hosted us so many times in the course of so many years with unconditional and infinitely graceful friendship, to close a list of acknowledgments that should have extended much farther.
Acknowledgments for quotations in text
p. ix: Lispector, Clarice (1999) Para Não Esquecer (Crônicas). Rio de Janeiro: Rocco.
Chapter 2, p. 1: Thom Yorke. From the song “Idiotheque” by Thomas Edward Yorke (author of lyrics), Philip James Selway, Edward John O’Brien, Colin Charles Greenwood, Jonathan Greenwood, Richard Guy and Paul Lansky, on the album Kid A (2000) by Radiohead. Warner/Chappell Music Ltd and Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Ltd.
Chapter 4, p. 1: Don Juan Matus, cited in Carlos Castañeda (1992) Tales of Power. New York: Washington Square Press (reissue edition 1992; original 1974).
Chapter 5, p. 1: T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, in T. S. Eliot (1991) Collected Poems 1909–1962. San Diego/New York/ London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted outside of the US by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
p. ix and chapter 7, p. 95: Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Conclusion, p. 1: From ‘What is Philosophy?’, by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
1What rough beast…
The end of the world is a seemingly interminable topic – at least, of course, until it happens. The ethnographic record documents a variety of ways in which human cultures have imagined the disarticulation of the spatio-temporal frameworks of history. Some of these imaginings have had a new lease of life since the 1990s, when scientific consensus became established regarding the ongoing changes in the planet's thermodynamic regime. Information on the (anthropic) causes and (catastrophic) consequences of the planetary “crisis” have accumulated at a speedy rate, mobilizing popular perception as well as academic reflection.
As the gravity and irreversibility of the present environmental and civilizational crisis become more and more evident,1 there has been a growing proliferation of new and old variations on a theme that we shall call, for the sake of a simplicity that this essay intends to complicate somewhat, “the end of the world.” There have been blockbusters of the fantasy genre,2 History Channel docufictions, scientific popularization books of varying complexity, videogames, art and music pieces, blogs of all shades across the ideological spectrum, academic journals and specialized networks, reports and pronouncements issued by world organizations of all kinds, unerringly frustrating global climate conferences (like the COPs), theology symposia and papal pronouncements, philosophical tracts, New Age and neo-pagan ceremonies, an exponentially rising number of political manifestos – in short, texts, contexts, vehicles, speakers, and audiences of all kinds. The presence of this theme in contemporary culture has increased as much and as rapidly as what it refers to – namely, the intensifying changes in the terrestrial macro-environment.
This veritable disphoric efflorescence goes against the grain of the “humanist” optimism that was predominant in the last three or four centuries of Western history. It is a harbinger, if not already a reflection, of something that seemed excluded from the horizon of history qua the saga of Spirit: the ruin of our global civilization as a consequence of its very hegemony. A fall that may drag with it a sizeable portion of human population, obviously beginning with the destitute masses that inhabit the ghettos and garbage dumps of the world system; but the nature of the oncoming catastrophe is such that it will hit us all in one way or another. Therefore, it is not only the dominant, Western, Christian, capitalist civilizational matrix, but the human species as a whole, and the very idea of a human species, that is being interpellated by this crisis. Above all (and for good reason), those peoples, cultures, and societies who are not responsible for said crisis, not to mention several thousand other lineages of living beings who are under threat of extinction or who have already disappeared from the face of the earth thanks to the environmental modifications brought about by “human” actions.3
Such a demographic and civilizational disaster is sometimes imagined as the result of a “global” event, a sudden extinction of all human or terrestrial life resulting from either an “act of God” (a lethal supervirus, a massive volcanic explosion, a collision with a celestial body, a giant solar storm), the cumulative effect of anthropic interventions on the Earth System4 (as in Roland Emmerich's 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow), or finally a good old-style nuclear war. On other occasions, the disaster tends to be more realistically depicted, in line with the successive scenarios proposed by the so-called climate sciences, as a process. A relentless, extremely intense, already ongoing, increasingly accelerating and in many respects irreversible process, a deterioration of the environmental conditions that presided over human life during the Holocene,5 in which droughts follow hurricanes and floods, human and animal pandemics follow colossal crop losses, and genocidal wars take place against the background of extinctions that affect whole genera, families, and even phyla. All of which would act back on each other in perverse feedback loops that would slowly but inexorably push our species, in a process of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) that appears to become less and less slow, toward a materially and politically sordid existence – what Isabelle Stengers (2015) has dubbed “the coming barbarism,” and which will be all the more barbaric if the dominant techno-economic system (which we could call, with a nod to Félix Guattari, Integrated World Capitalism) is allowed to continue its headlong flight forward from itself unchecked.
It is not only the natural sciences, and the mass culture feeding off them, which have been registering the world's drift. Even metaphysics, notoriously the most ethereal of philosophical fields, has begun to echo the generalized disquiet. The last years have seen, for example, the elaboration of new and sophisticated conceptual arguments that propose to “end the world” in their own way:6 be it to end the world conceived as being inescapably a world-for-man, so as to justify full epistemic access to a “world-without-us” which would articulate itself absolutely prior to the legislative intervention of the Understanding; be it to end the world-as-meaning, so as to determine Being as pure indifferent exteriority – as if the “real” world, in its radical contingency and purposelessness, had to be “realized” against Reason and Meaning.
It is true that many of these metaphysical ends-of-the-world have only an indirect motivational relationship to the physical event of planetary catastrophe; but that does not make them any less expressive of it, offering as they do an outlet for the vertiginous sensation of incompatibility – perhaps even incompossibility – between the human and the world. Few areas of contemporary imagination have failed to be affected by the violent re-entry of the Western noosphere into the Earth's atmosphere, in a veritable and unique process of “transdescendence.” We once believed ourselves destined to a vast sidereal ocean, now we find ourselves thrown back at the harbor whence we started . . .
Dystopias, then, proliferate; and a certain perplexed panic (pejoratively indicted as “catastrophism”), if not a sort of grim satisfaction (recently popularized under the name of “accelerationism”), seems to hover over the spirit of the times. The predictive value of punk's famous cry of “no future” is revitalized – if that is the right word – at the same time as previous anxieties return, comparable in scope and intensity to our present ones, such as those elicited by the nuclear arms race of the not-so-distant years of the Cold War. It is impossible not to remember Günther Anders’ (2007: 112–13) dry, somber conclusion in a capital text on humankind's “metaphysical metamorphosis” after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “The absence of future has already begun.”
This future-that-is-over is thus come once again, suggesting that it maybe never stopped having already begun. (In the Neolithic? In the Industrial Revolution? In the atomic era?) If the prospect of the climate crisis is less spectacular than that of the nuclear threat (which has never gone away, lest we forget), its ontology is more complex, both in what regards its connections to human agency and in its paradoxical chronotopics.7 Its advent bears the name of the species: “Anthropocene,” the designator proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer for what they see as the new geological epoch that came after the Holocene, which would have started with the Industrial Revolution and become intensified after World War II.
§ On the somewhat paradoxical relationship between the emergence of a “biospheric” consciousness, the perspective from outer space, the consolidation of climate change theory and the Cold War's arms race (Reagan's Star Wars program included), the reader will find the works of Joseph Masco (2010, 2012) and Peter Szendy (2011) of interest. In a recent TED talk, James Hansen (2012), speaking of the temporary energetic disequilibrium of the Earth System caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases (the difference between the amount of energy or heat that enters the system and the amount reflected back into space), suggested an eloquent equivalence between the heat of 0.58 W/m2 daily accumulated in the planet's “reservoirs” (the oceans, ice caps and soil) and the heat liberated by the explosion of four hundred thousand atomic bombs. On that topic, see also John Cook's excellent Skeptical Science blog, according to which our climate has accumulated an amount of heat equivalent to the explosion of four Hiroshima bombs per second, totaling 2,115,122,880 bombs from 1998 until the time of writing (to be precise, July 2, 2014, 2.45 p.m. Brazilian time, when we last consulted the <http://4hiroshimas.com> widget).8 (For an illustration of the strongly symbolic relation – the “prolonged hesitation between sound and sense,” as Valéry would say – between the names “Hiroshima” and “Katrina,” see AAP 2013.) In short, the old human project of continuously increasing the amount of per capita energy (Lévi-Strauss 1952: 32) at our disposal finally seems, since the acceleration of the processes through which this energy is obtained after the Industrial Revolution, to be coming up against a wall into which the species runs the risk of colliding in a most spectacular way.
Although others had apparently already proposed terms like “Anthroposphere,” “Anthrocene,” or “Anthropocene” in the last century (and even earlier), it is said that it was during a discussion at a meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) in Mexico City in 2000 that the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen first proposed the concept, publishing an article on the subject shortly afterwards (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), formalizing it two years later (Crutzen 2002). The proposal is still under consideration by the scientific community, and should be discussed at the next International Congress of Geology in August 2016. Crutzen has recently stated that he is inclined to suggest the twentieth century's nuclear tests as marking the diagnostic beginning (“golden spike”) of the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene, or whatever else one might want to call it,9 is an “epoch” in the geological sense of the word; but it points toward the end of epochality as such, insofar as our species is concerned. For it is certain that, although it began with us, it will end without us: the Anthropocene will only give way to a new geological epoch long after we have disappeared from the face of the Earth. Our present is the Anthropocene; this is our time. But this present time progressively reveals itself a present “without a view,” a passive present, the inert bearer of a geophysical karma which it is entirely beyond our reach to cancel, which makes the duty of its mitigation all the more urgent and demanding: “the revolution has already occurred…the events we have to cope with do not lie in the future, but largely in the past…[W]hatever we do now, the threat will remain with us for centuries, for millennia” (Latour 2013a: 109).
Metaphysics and mythophysics
This essay is an attempt to take present discourses on the end of the world seriously, grasping them as thought experiments about the downward turn of the Western anthropological adventure, that is, as efforts, though not necessarily intentional ones, to invent a mythology that is adequate to our times. The “end of the world” is one of those famous types of problems of which Kant used to say human reason cannot solve, but cannot help posing at the same time either; and it does so necessarily in the form of mythical fabulation or, as it is fashionable to say nowadays, of “narratives” that orient and motivate us. The semiotic regime of myth, perfectly indifferent to the empirical truth or falsity of its contents, comes into play whenever the relation between humans as such and their most general conditions of existence imposes itself as a problem for reason. And if it is true that all mythology could be described as a schematization of certain transcendental conditions in empirical terms – a validating retroprojection of certain sufficient reasons in terms of certain efficient causes – then the present impasse becomes all the more tragic, or ironic, given that such a problem of Reason has now been given the stamp of the Understanding: here is an essentially metaphysical problem, the end of the world, formulated in the rigorous terms of such supremely empirical sciences as climatology, geophysics, and biochemistry. Maybe, as Lévi-Strauss often remarked, science, which started out by separating itself from myth around three thousand years ago, will eventually encounter it once again at the end of one of those “double twists” which tie analytic to dialectical reason, the anagrammatic combinatory of the signifier to the historical vicissitudes of the signified.10
One word more on the notion of “myth.” An important, if contingent, stimulus to the present essay comes from a book of philosophy, Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude (2009), originally published in French in 2006. Alongside the writings of other contemporary thinkers associated with so-called “speculative realism,” Meillassoux's project seemed to us to renew, nolens volens, the ties between metaphysical speculation and the mythological (Kant would say “dogmatic”) matrix of all thought. After reading After Finitude (and later on Ray Brassier's 2007 Nihil Unbound, another influential work in the speculative realist movement), our impression was that the book inscribed itself in a series stretching, say, from Saint Anselm to Badiou, but also in a vast discursive universe that goes from the treasure trove of ideas accrued over millennia in the cosmological speculation of the world's indigenous peoples up until Lars Von Trier's (2011) Melancholia and Cormac McCarthy's (2006) The Road, by way of the long Western mythico-literary tradition on the theme of the pays gaste or “wasteland” (Weston 1920), and the persistent vitality of this “minor” genre which is science fiction.11 Jorge Luis Borges’ (2007) well-known quip on metaphysics being a branch of fantastic literature not only requires that the converse be true – fantastic literature and science fiction are the pop metaphysics (or the “mythophysics”) of our time – but it effectively anticipated the cross-pollination currently taking place between some experiments in the creative fringe of contemporary philosophy and the work of “popular” writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson, David Brin, or China Miéville.
Our goal is then to draw a preliminary balance sheet of some of the main variants of the “end of the world” theme, such as it presents itself today in the imaginary of world culture. But let us begin by briefly evoking the problem's so-called objective terms.
Notes
1
See, for instance, the latest reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which came to light in 2013–14 and can be found at <
http://www.ipcc.ch
>. As is well known, the IPCC's projections tend to figure among the most moderate among those circulating in the scientific community with regard to the speed and intensity of climate change.
2
On apocalyptic cinematography, the reader could do no better than consult Peter Szendy's (2015)
Apocalypse Cinema
, which comments on thirteen end-of-the-world films and includes instructive references to dozens of others. For an analysis of the proliferation of apocalyptic discourse in the curious cases of dystopian fantasies directed at a female adolescent public, see Craig (2012).
3
The question regarding the pertinence of the concepts of human species (“humankind”) and/or “humanity” as a way to frame the reflection and action of currently existing political collectivities in the face of environmental crisis (states, peoples, parties, social movements) will be taken up again in the conclusion of this essay.
4
The “Earth System” is a technical concept currently used by climatologists and other Earth scientists to refer to the geophysical cum macro-ecological parameters that characterize our planet.
5
Geological epoch of the Quaternary period that followed the Pleistocene at approximately 11,700 years before the year AD 2000 and continues into the present (until, that is, the “golden spike” marking the start of the Anthropocene has been agreed on – assuming it will be agreed on – by the geological community).
6
To end the world “in their own way,” that is, by demolishing the concepts of world elaborated by modern philosophy, from Kant to Derrida and beyond (see Gaston 2013).
7
“A nuclear war would have been a conscious decision on the part of the powers that be. Climate change is an unintended consequence of human actions and shows, only through scientific analysis, the effects of our actions as a species” (Chakrabarty 2009: 221).
8
See Cook (2013a, 2013b). A comment on one of these posts points out that John Lyman (University of Hawaii) had already employed the comparison to the Hiroshima bomb in relation to ocean temperature in interviews about a study published in
Nature
(see Lyman et al. 2010; Israel 2010).
9
In the conclusion we shall see some of the reasons for the dissensus surrounding this concept as a way of naming the time in which we live and the event that befalls us.
10
On the “double twist” as the formula of structuralist transformation par excellence, see Maranda (2001); Almeida (2008); Viveiros de Castro (2014).
11
Eduardo Sterzi has done some important research on the theme of the wasteland, from its European origins to contemporary Brazilian literature. See, for instance, Sterzi (2009).
2…Its hour come round at last…
We're not scaremongering
This is really happening
Thom Yorke
Gaia and anthropos
Recalling the ancient Chinese curse, we can say we live in interesting times. One of the most interesting aspects of our time, as has been observed time and again, is its acceleration; time is out of joint, and it is running faster. “Things are changing so fast that it is hard to keep track,” Bruno Latour (2013a: 126) remarked recently. He was referring to the state of scientific knowledge regarding the problem;1 but for some time now it has been time itself, as the dimension of the manifestation of change (time as “the number of motion,” as per Aristotle), that seems to be not only speeding up, but qualitatively changing all the time. Virtually everything that can be said about the climate crisis becomes, ipso facto, anachronistic, out of step; and everything that can be done about it is necessarily too little, too late. This metatemporal instability is conjoined with a sudden insufficiency of world – let us recall the argument about the five Earths it would take to extend the average US citizen's energy consumption level to humankind at large – which is producing in us something like an experience of the decomposition of time (the end) and space (the world), and the surprising downgrade of these two a priori conditions of sensibility to the status of forms conditioned by human action.2 This is one of the ways, and not the least important, in which it can be said that our world has ceased to be Kantian. Intriguingly enough, everything takes place as if, of the three great transcendental ideas identified by Kant – God, Soul, and World, respectively the objects of theology, psychology, and cosmology – we were now watching the downfall of the last. After God died somewhere between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Soul at some later point (its semi-empirical avatar, Man, having perhaps survived until the mid-twentieth century), the World had soldiered on as the last, wavering rampart of metaphysics (Gaston 2013: ix).
Human history has known several crises, but the so-called “global civilization,” the arrogant name we give to the worldwide expansion of capitalist economy based on fossil-fuel technologies, has never faced a global threat such as the ongoing one. We are not just talking about global warming and climate change. In September 2009, Nature published a special issue in which several scientists, coordinated by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, identified nine biophysical processes of the Earth System and sought to establish limits to these processes which, if crossed, would lead to environmental alterations that would be unbearable to several species, ours included: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, global freshwater use, biodiversity loss, interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, changes in land use, chemical pollution, and atmospheric aerosol loading. By way of conclusion, the authors warned that “[w]e do not have the luxury of concentrating our efforts on any one of them in isolation from the others. If one boundary is transgressed, then other boundaries are also under serious risk” (Rockström et al. 2009: 474). Except that, according to them, it may just be that we have already left the safety zone for three of these processes – biodiversity loss, human interference with the nitrogen cycle (the rate at which N2 is removed from the atmosphere and converted into reactive nitrogen for human use), and climate change – and we are very close to the limit of the other three – fresh water use, change in land use, and ocean acidification.3
One of the canaries in the coalmine of climate change is the melting of the Earth's main ice caps. The fourth report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued in 2007, estimated that Arctic sea ice could disappear by the end of the century. Yet the region's ice-melt record was broken in August 2012, and some scientists hazarded the prediction of an iceless summer in the Arctic in this decade. In 2013's fifth report, the executive summary of the findings of the IPCC's Working Group 1 classified as “probable” the total absence of sea ice in the Arctic in the months of September by the middle of the century. But the latest news items from the polar regions are yet posterior to the IPCC fifth report, and refer to the frightening speed at which monumental glaciers are melting in Greenland and the Antarctic, which modifies the spatial and temporal predictions regarding sea-level rise stated in that text. Paraphrasing the Communist Manifesto, all that is solid – beginning with the Earth's oldest ice – melts into the sea.4
