Green Planets (38 page)

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.