Title: “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthropocene”
Author(s): Gerry Canavan
Date: 2021
… contemporary thought is undergoing a cosmic separation … the flattening power of contemporary universalism is predicated on temporal rather than spatial separation from the scale of human life: rather than the view of the Earth from the standpoint of deep space, ours is a view of the present from the standpoint of deep time. This is ultimately the view from a radically post-human (and anti-human) future in which the human race has entirely disappeared—a view, that is, from the standpoint of human extinction itself. … the energizing potentiality of SF’s “utopian impulse” might yet be recovered out of a world-historical system whose coordinates now seem just anti-utopian but out-and-out apocalyptic—an era in which the imminence of human extinction now seems a matter of scientific certainty, indeed, as an event which we have become so habituated towards that we imagine it as a catastrophe that has already happened.
the Anthropocene and all its attendant ecological crises … is the “proof” that we as a species are not in fact insignificant but are instead the most important superhistorical force currently existing on the planet. … the version of human superhistorical activity it foregrounds in almost exclusively a negative one: to the extent that human activity is visible in the fossil or stratigraphic records, it is through destructive anti-ecological acts of mass pollution and mass extinction.
… the Anthropocene … as a kind of neo-Romantic revival of the melancholic fascination with death, illness, and morbidity, ruin, and a vanishing natural world … like the Romantics’ use of the sublime, the assertion of the Anthropocene seeks to re-introject an appreciation for the sacredness of life into a world that seems to have entirely crushed such valuation. However, the shock of the sublime in the Anthropocene has a somewhat different affect than the one Romantic poetry activates: rather than seeing ourselves as divine, or necessary and organic part of a holistic tapestry of life, the recognition of the Anthropocene tends to figure the human as a cancerous deviation from a unifying natural order …
… “there is plenty of hope, infinite hope, but not for us.” We might recast this proverb [of Walter Benjamin’s] as an opportunity rather than a curse: there is hope for us, so long as we become something other than the “us” we are now. … What has been transformed is not human biology but human systems of social valuation.