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Utopian Projects and the Struggle for the “Good” Anthropocene

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Utopian Projects and the Struggle for the “Good” Anthropocene UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE The Utopian Call: Utopian Projects and the Struggle for the “Good” Anthropocene DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Comparative Literature by Nathaniel Murphy Dissertation Committee: Professor Susan C. Jarratt, Chair Professor Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan Professor Jonathan Alexander 2019 © 2019 Nathaniel Murphy DEDICATION To Tracy who has been with me every step of the way and whose presence has made every one of those steps utopian in the best possible sense of the word. And to Ryan, Michael, John, and Finn who kindly shared their father with this project over its lifetime. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments iv Curriculum Vitae v Abstract of the Dissertation vi Introduction: The Utopian Call and the “Good” Anthropocene 1 Part I: The Utopian Call Chapter 1: Traitors, Traders, and Monstrous Children: Becoming Utopian Subjects in the Xenogenesis Trilogy 34 Chapter 2: The Hardest Part is Leaving Earth Behind: Utopia and the Movement of History in the Mars Trilogy 93 Part II: Mother Projects Chapter 3: Cathedrals of Our Time: Institutionalizing the Utopian Call in “Mother Projects” 152 Chapter 4: The Call of the Commons: Utopia and Ecological Health 210 Conclusion: Using Visionary Anthropocene Literature 266 to Theorize the Tasks Ahead Works Cited 270 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my adviser and committee chair, Professor Susan Jarratt, for always encouraging me to explore my eclectic range of interests and then reigning me in to make sure that I never lost sight of the tasks at hand. In hindsight good fortune always feels like fate, and so I am pleased that fate paired us together at the beginning of my graduate career. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, Professor Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan and Professor Jonathan Alexander. So many of the ideas contained within this dissertation were born from conversations with Professors Jarratt, Radhakrishnan, and Alexander, and were molded by their comments and criticisms. I am truly humbled to know that the quality of my dissertation would be vastly diminished without the insights and guidance from each. In addition, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Byndia Baliga, who only ever made my life as a student easier and helped make graduate school manageable. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Nathaniel Murphy 2012 BA in Philosophy, California State University, Fullerton 2014 MA in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine 2019 PhD in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Utopian Call: Utopian Projects and the Struggle for the “Good” Anthropocene By Nathaniel Murphy Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine 2019 Professor Susan C. Jarratt, Chair Some of the principle questions that my dissertation addresses are: How can literature be used to think about broad social and political change? How can fiction be used to dramatize and illustrate different types of relationships between people and the nonhuman world? What role does fiction play in debates on the effects of climate change and what people should do about it? In order to address these questions, my dissertation develops a concept that I termed the “Utopian Call” as a way to theorize how utopian ideals can manifest in a society and compel people to work toward a coherent vision of society. In order to develop the concept of the Utopian Call, I analyze Ernst Bloch's concept of the “Not-Yet” from his Principle of Hope, as well as some further theoretical work on utopia by authors such as Ruth Levitas, Tom Moylan, and Darko Suvin. I also argue that the utopian aspects of literary texts as well as those of social and political movements function in a similar way to an ideology as put forth by Louis Althusser. I analyze how the Utopian Call manifests in select works of science fiction authors Octavia E. Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson, because both authors are exemplary for using some of the ill effects of the Anthropocene as the background for their stories as well as offering strategies in their texts for how to move forward towards a better Anthropocene. Some of the key concepts vi that I use in my analysis are the nature of human agency in the face of climatic and geologic change, the relationship between utopian visions and the movement of history, humanity versus posthumanity, John Holloway's critique of work and power, the relationship between education and utopian visions, and the role of the Commons in the twenty-first century and beyond. vii Introduction: The Utopian Call and the “Good” Anthropocene Enter the Anthropocene Naomi Klein famously said of climate change that “this changes everything.” She argues that, “we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate” (22). However, this does not seem like much of a choice, and not because the answer is obvious. It's simply not much of a choice because both are likely to happen over the course of the next few decades. Extreme (and disruptive) weather events will become even more of the norm and capitalism as we know it will come to an end, or at least evolve into something far different from the neoliberal world system of the past four decades or so. Economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck argues that capitalism is coming to an end because of “an already far advanced decline of the capacity of capitalism as an economic regime to underwrite a stable society.” However, Streeck's arguments are based on the internal contradictions of capital itself, which, contrary to Marxist orthodoxy, have yet to spell the demise of capitalism (but perhaps this time...). Streeck does seem correct in much of his analyses, but what is missing is the terribly important fact that the “internal” contradictions of capital are far less important to its “impending” demise than what is deemed “exterior” to capitalism, yet underlies its entire system: i.e. the world. Likewise, journalist Paul Mason argues that we are already entering a postcapitalist world, due in large part to automation reducing the need for work and advances in information technology. Similar to Streeck, Mason argues that the internal contradictions will bring about the end of capitalism, even if he does believe that they will be accelerated by “external shocks.” Yet, he seems to believe that the consequences of global climate change are problems to be solved in a postcapitalist economy and not something that will fundamentally shape whatever world system (or systems) emerge in the coming 1 decades. On the other hand, environmental historian Jason W. Moore argues that what the present crisis is exposing is not the internal contradictions of capitalism as such but capitalism's relationship to its outside. That is, what are being exposed are the contradictions associated with the “end of cheap nature,” which are comprised of what he calls the “four cheaps,” or things that are radically undervalued by capitalism: food, labor, energy, and raw materials (“End” 289). Basically, Moore argues that “historical capitalism has been able to resolve its recurrent crises because territorialist and capitalist agencies have been able to extend the zone of appropriation faster than the zone of exploitation” (“End” 291). But of course, territorial expansion can only extend so far on the surface of a globe before the majority of the territory has entered the “zone of exploitation,” which presents its own geopolitical problems, but the externalized costs of all that cheap energy that are driving anthropogenic climate change – and as the bill is coming due it is more and more obvious that all that energy in the form of fossil fuels was not so cheap after all. In “A Critical Review of Global Decarbonization Scenarios,” the authors note that, “a variety of recent studies conclude that avoiding extreme climate change outcomes may require near-total decarbonization of the world's energy system during this century, with 50-90% reduction in energy- related CO2 emissions required by 2050” (Loftus et al. 93, emphasis added). And where the economic costs of this conversion “are projected, they range from $350 billion to several trillion per year, based on a wide range of assumptions” (107, emphasis added). As they note, one of the assumptions shared by all of the scenarios analyzed was, “historically unprecedented improvements in energy intensity of the global economy” (108), and furthermore “these studies present comparatively little detail on strategies to decarbonize the industrial and transportation sectors” (109). If Moore is correct that capitalism relies on the exploitation of cheap energy, among other things such as the raw materials that would be needed to actually build this alternative energy infrastructure, then how can a capitalist world 2 economy possibly reach these benchmarks without its “internal contradictions” bringing it to its knees? The question above leads back to Klein's statement that “this changes everything,” and in this statement we must recognize that everything means everything. In 2000, chemist Paul J. Crutzen and marine scientist Eugene F. Stoermer proposed that the Earth has entered a new geologic age, and based on the “major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term 'anthropocene' for our current geologic epoch” (7). Whether or not the “Anthropocene” becomes the officially recognized term for a new geologic epoch, the term has certainly become nearly ubiquitous in the public sphere, with hundreds of academic and popular articles as well as books being published in the past two decades that make use of the term.
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