Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis

A new perspective on life in the anthropocene

Gregers Andersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000710915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis argues that the popularity of the term "climate fiction" has paradoxically exhausted the term's descriptive power and that it has developed into a black box containing all kinds of fictions which depict climatic events and has consequently lost its true significance.

Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse as well as our apparent inability to avert it, we face geophysical changes of drastic proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the consequences. This book argues that this crisis of imagination can be partly relieved by climate fiction, which may help us comprehend the potential impact of the crisis we are facing. Strictly assigning "climate fiction" to fictions that incorporate the climatological paradigm of anthropogenic global warming into their plots, this book sets out to salvage the term's speculative quality. It argues that climate fiction should be regarded as no less than a vital supplement to climate science, because climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence within worlds not only deemed likely by science, but which are scientifically anticipated.

Focusing primarily on English and German language fictions, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis shows how Western climate fiction sketches various affective and cognitive relations to the world in its utilization of a small number of recurring imaginaries, or imagination forms.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies more generally.

1 Cultural hermeneutics

This short chapter will elaborate on the book’s analytic foundation and central terms. Specifically, it will facilitate a meeting between two epistemologies that as far as I know have not been combined before. This is a meeting between a hermeneutical philosophy, whose main reference point is text interpretation, and Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-object.¹ Latour’s description makes it possible to approach global warming as a scientific fact, a social connection and a discursive construction. Instead of ontologically reducing global warming to just one of these phenomena, we can with Latour simply say that global warming is “simultaneously real, discursive, and social” (1993, 64). We are, in other words, not taking anything away from the natural sciences. Anthropogenic global warming can, in relation to this characteristic, still be understood as a real object that can be made an item for various measurements and projections. However, as this object is simultaneously “narrated” and “historical”, it also resembles some of the objects that cultural studies are normally concerned with (ibid., 89).

The link to hermeneutical philosophy consists here in the tool of interpretation that I find useful for exploring the narratives partly comprising (the quasi-object) anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, this tool is so flexible that it can basically be applied to explore everything from the future scenarios that climate science projects to the more clearly defined fictions that are interpreted in this book. As previously emphasized I term this tool imagination form, as I understand an imagination form as a narrative template that guides the imagination in its world-makings. Indeed, one can think of an imagination form as a building structure which gives form to a variety of facades, but which underneath them remains the same. It would therefore not be entirely unjustified to conceive imagination forms as straitjackets that confine the imagination in its freedom. But it is equally important to note – as the variety of plots taken into consideration in the coming chapters will show – that these forms nevertheless enable the imagination to create a multitude of different worlds.

The overall aim of this study will therefore be to show how certain imagination forms reappear in Western climate fiction. That is how Western climate fiction relies on a repertoire of understandings that enables it to set forth a variety of worlds, in which anthropogenic global warming plays a crucial part. This description comes with the understanding that the imagination forms deployed in Western climate fiction are composed of other narrative templates that comprise their cultural heritage. In fact, this understanding – in conjunction with the descriptions given above – situates the concept of the imagination form within a philosophical context that does not take the act of imagination to be a completely free activity. Rather, the concept belongs to a realm of thought that takes this act to be grounded in preunderstanding. In this respect, hermeneutical philosophy adds something important to Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-object (simultaneously real, discursive, and social). This is that the narratives partly comprising this object must be understood in a cultural-historical context, since the imagination never starts from a clean slate, but is always based on already established understandings that structure it. To explore the link between the description of global warming as a quasi-object and hermeneutical philosophy, I will therefore now briefly turn to three of the most important thinkers of modern hermeneutics: Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur.

Hermeneutics and preunderstanding

Our starting point will be Being and Time, since Heidegger here impregnates hermeneutics with (what later Gadamer called) “an ontological orientation” (2004, 296). Before Heidegger, hermeneutics was mainly aimed at developing methods that would ensure correct understanding, i.e. that the interpretative act progressed in a manner that would lead it to the true (objective) meaning of a written text. However, in Being and Time Heidegger rebukes this idea by stressing how the human subject – or Dasein – is always integrated in a specific temporal and spatial context.² Basically this means that the understanding of Dasein is always premised by its “Being-in-the-world” (in-der-Welt-sein), since all humans have worlds that their understandings are integrated into and stand in relation to (78). This point is central to the concept of the imagination form that I outlined before, because it means that according to Heidegger human understanding never meets a world that is not already uncovered. Humans are, as understanding beings, already thrown (geworfen) into a world of meaning.³ Any interpretation of this world is therefore based on preunderstanding. Indeed, as Jürgen Habermas has highlighted, it is even possible to take this as evidence of the existence of certain socially and culturally transmitted “interpretative schemes” (Deutungsskemata) – a concept very similar to my concept of imagination forms (1971, 122).

Likewise, arguments for the existence of such schemes can be found in Gadamer’s writings, which philosophically build upon Heidegger’s ‘ontological orientation’ of hermeneutics. According to Gadamer, any understanding must be perceived as a synthesis. Whether it is the meeting between text and interpreter or the meeting between two individuals in a conversation, understanding always occurs in a meeting between two horizons. The term ‘horizon’ is here referring to the same aspect Heidegger sought to highlight in his references to Dasein as a Being-in-the-world, and which Edmund Husserl before him had highlighted with the term ‘lifeworld’. This is the aspect that any understanding is anchored in a specific temporal and spatial context, or as Gadamer writes:

Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of ‘situation’ by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of ‘horizon’. The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.

(2004, 301)⁴

An interpreter of text or conversation therefore also stands with her world’s limited horizon against the horizon of the text and conversation partner. According to Gadamer, it is these two horizons, or worlds, that must melt together in the act of interpretation. However, it is important to note that melting together does not imply the superimposition of one horizon upon the other. It is not the interpreter’s task to completely eradicate her own horizon under the other’s horizon, in the same way as it is not the interpreter’s task to force her horizon upon the fictive text or conversation partner’s discourse to the extent that the horizon embedded in it disappears. By being filtered through the understanding of a limited horizon that is open and sensitive towards the horizon of the text or discourse of the other, true understanding occurs.

This leads us to Ricoeur, for whom the relation between the interpreter’s and the text’s horizon, between preunderstanding and the “things themselves” (Sachen selbst) is also an important issue (Heidegger 2001, 49). However, Ricoeur’s position is that Heidegger and Gadamer have taken hermeneutical thinking to a dead end by placing it in opposition to the aim of objective knowledge that dominates in the natural sciences. He insists therefore on combining the foundation that preunderstanding creates for interpretation with a method he takes from structuralism. In fact, his solution to avoid the epistemological opposition between preunderstanding and the things themselves emphasized by Heidegger and Gadamer is to make structuralism and hermeneutics into two separate stages of the same interpretation process.

Specifically, this involves making the deduction of what French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss termed “a depth semantics” into the first phase of textual interpretation (Ricoeur 2008, 116).⁵ According to Ricoeur, this will ensure that the interpretation is adequately distanced from imposing preunderstandings, before the second phase of the interpretation process begins. Indeed, it is this second phase – constituting in combination with the first phase what Ricoeur calls a “hermeneutical arc” (arc herméneutique) – that I find especially relevant as an approach to climate fiction (ibid., 117). Hence, while the first phase of this arc consists in extracting the depth semantics of a text, the second phase consists in interpreting the kind of world that the text puts forward and what opportunities for Being-in-the-world it contains. Ricoeur writes:

[…] what must be interpreted in a text is a proposed world [proposition du monde] that I could inhabit and wherein I could project one of my ownmost possibilities. […] Through fiction and poetry, new possibilities of Being-in-the-world [d’être-au-monde] are opened up within everyday reality.

(Ibid., 83)

The full meaning of this cannot however be emphasized without a further reflection on the question: ‘What is a text?’, because in contrast to Gadamer, Ricoeur highlights a difference in interpreting fictive texts and trying to understand a counterpart in a conversation. As Ricoeur points out, the fictive text does not respond, like my counterpart does, when I ask about what it means. Moreover, the fictive text’s world is not my own, no matter how much it resembles it, since there are no ostensible references in the text to the world I am situated in. Instead the fictive text releases what Ricoeur calls “a second-order reference” by referring to a world that does not exist in reality (ibid., 82). This reference that Ricoeur also calls the “poetic reference” and the “productive reference” gives fiction in general and the fictive literary text in particular, the ability to shape reality (2008, 10; 1991, 135). Reality can, according to Ricoeur, be the result of the fictive text’s productive reference, in so far as the fictive text breeds behaviour models in a context that could be real and therefore makes it possible for the reader to apply these behaviour models in reality. In the fictive text, we have for the same reason, a “prefigured” understanding of action that through the text’s configuration of action can transfigure the reader’s actions (1984, 53).

However, Ricoeur’s description of the productive reference also leads us back to Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-object, as Ricoeur insists that it is not only within the arts that fiction inhabits the function of simultaneously describing and shaping reality. In the essay “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality” (1991) he states:

Nothing is more harmful for a sound recognition of the productive reference of the imagination than [the] dichotomy between the sciences and the arts. […] Our task, consequently, would be to extend the concept of fiction beyond language and the plastic arts, and to acknowledge the work of the analogies, models, and paradigms in the conceptual field of scientific knowledge.

(134–135)

And he continues:

Models […] in turn provide us with the most accurate account of what we have attempted to describe as productive reference. To the extent that models are not models of … i.e., still pictures of a previously given reality, but models for, … i.e., heuristic fictions for redescribing reality, the work of the model becomes in turn a model for construing in a meaningful way the concept of the productive reference of all fictions, including the so-called poetic fictions.

(Ibid., 135)

Literary fiction is, in other words, not the only medium where a description of a world marks the outline for a new world. Climate science also ‘worlds’ (i.e. creates worlds), when it keeps redescribing the future through revised models (based on huge amounts of empirical data). We can with Ricoeur therefore say that climate models are ‘heuristic fictions for redescribing reality’.⁶

Indeed, this description of climate models as ‘heuristic fictions for redescribing reality’ is consistent with Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-object that besides being real and social, is also narratively constructed. Thus, it further explains why, in the beginning of this chapter, I described the narratives partly comprising global warming as a research area calling for cultural studies. Or to be more exact: what modern hermeneutics affirms is not only that Latour is right in conceiving global warming as a quasi-object partly comprised of narratives; modern hermeneutics also affirms that the interpretation of the preunderstandings and world depictions that manifest in the imagination of this object needs not limit itself to a single medium (i.e. literary fiction). A number of cultural phenomena, climate-scientific models and social-scientific reports can in principle be the departure point of this type of interpretation.

In fact, I have called this chapter ‘Cultural Hermeneutics’ in order to name the territory for interpretation that has here appeared between Gadamer’s ‘universal hermeneutics’ and the ‘textual hermeneutics’ that Ricoeur – despite his remarks above – primarily unfolds. So while I agree with Ricoeur that there is a need for cultural studies to think ‘fiction beyond language and the plastic arts’ I also find his elaboration of hermeneutics to be too narrowly focused on texts. I would therefore like to suggest that a first step in ‘extending the concept of fiction’ should consist in applying some of the interpretative tools Ricoeur discovered more broadly on the various mediums in which the narratives partly comprising global warming appear.

Approaching climate fiction

With these remarks a cultural hermeneutical foundation has been given for the interpretation of the different forms of preunderstandings and world depictions that manifest in Western climate fiction. However, a more detailed account of how I will approach Western climate fiction in the rest of this book is still necessary. First of all, because I do not think Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc represents an ideal method for bringing forward the different forms of preunderstandings, worlds and relations to the world that climate fiction contains.⁷ The main difference between mine and Ricoeur’s approach consists here in how Ricoeur dedicated the first phase in this arc to depth semantics, whereas my first step will be to look for cultural-historical and philosophical commonalities in the Western climate fictions that utilize the same imagination form. I am in this regard indebted to Lévi-Strauss, to whom I owe the idea that the imagination forms are narrative templates created on layers of other narrative templates. Thus, this idea derives from Lévi-Strauss’s description of “bricolage” in The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage, 1962) (2004, 16–17). Here Lévi-Strauss sets out to demonstrate how the mythmaker saves the world picture of his culture by rearranging fragments of different myths every time this world picture is challenged or put in danger by new, unforeseen events. That is how “mythical thought […] builds up structures by fitting together […] remains of events, while science […] creates its means and results in the form of events” (ibid., 22).

It is this description of bricolage – or of how previously applied narrative fragments are repurposed to maintain a narrative that is fundamentally the same – that I find useful in relation to the imagination forms deployed in Western climate fiction. Hence these imagination forms seem also to have been created out of other narrative templates that comprise the foundation for their fictive utilization. I must therefore also situate myself in a different place than Lévi-Strauss, who uses the concept of bricolage to delineate a stark dichotomy between native cultures and the modern world. Thus,...