Chapter 1: Cultural Hermeneutics

• The meeting between hermeneutical philosophy (whose main reference point is text interpretation), and Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-object.
  • Hermeneutical philosophy: "the term hermeneutics refers to the interpretation of a given text, speech or symbolic expression (such as art)... The modern hermeneutics have sought to change to way in which the past (in particular the classical works of Western art, science and philosophy) has traditionally been understood." (Oxford Bibliographies.com) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/
• Because Climate change is simultaneously 'narrated' and 'historical', it resembles some of the objects that the cultural studies are normally cocerned with (ibid., p.89)
  • Latour describes climate change as a scientific fact, a social connection, and a discursive construction, instead of just one of these things, or a scientific point of study.

"It's simultaneously real, discursive, and social" (Latour, 1993, p64)

Hermeneutics and Preunderstanding

• Heidegger
• Gadamer
• Richoeur

Approaching Climate Fiction

• Anderson's first step will be to look for cultural-historical and philosophical commonalities in Western Climate Fiction

• ‘Interpretation' will be considered. Because if we take understanding to be fundational to the human experience, it is important to see how characters in climate fiction 'interpret' the world

• Reflection 1 - (29, Nov 2020)

• What is Hermeneutical Philosophy?

• What are the texts that show an implied social collapse due to climate change?

• What are the texts that show social collapse due to climate change?

Chapter Two: The Social Collapse

<aside> 🤼 How does global warming influence the relationship between humans?

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Chapter Three: The Judgement

<aside> 🤼 How does global warming influence humanity's relationship with the non-human world?

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• Abtib-Andreas Guha's The Planet Strikes Back (1993) — One of the oldest climate fictions
  • Guha's title encapsulates how an 'revengeful earth' is presented in climate fiction
• More broadly, it represents how the destruction caused by global warming marks a defining 'crossing' of a boundary. This boundary represents the 'acceptable coexistance' that humanity had with nature.
  • The result of the violence caused by climate change means that the world judges humanity back and returns with violence
• This narrative arc is simliar to many western forms of storytelling, particularly christian, where a vengeful God causes havok upon the earth for the sins of humanity (see Noah's Ark). However, what makes these narratives difference is that it is the world itself that is vengeful.
• The judgement in Cultural History
• The Judgement in Climate Fiction

Serres, Latour and The Imagination Form

• Michel Serres' The Natural Contract

  • An early advocate that the human treatment of the world can only be seen as violence and that this violence may 'return to condemn us all together... to automatic extinction' in the shape of global warming.
  • Serres believes that a natural contact must suppliement a new 'social contract' as now the non-human world is (metaphorically speaking) beginning to voice itself via catastrphic phenomena such as the tornados, droughts, forest fires. Through global warming, the non-human world is speaking to us

• Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern & Politics of Nature

  • Wheras Descartes and his modern successors objectified the non-human world into silence, we are according to Latour now witnessing a non-human world communicate with humanity through threats of throwing humanitiy's living conditions into decay.

  By seeking to reorient man's exploitation of man towards an exploitation of nature by man, capitalism magnified both beyond measure. The repressed returns, and with a vengeace: the multitudes that were supposed to be saved from death fall back into poverty by the hundreds of millions; nature, over which we were supposed to gain absolute mastery, dominates us in an equally global fashion, and threatens us all. it is a strange dialectic that turns the slave into man's owner and master, and that suddenly informs us that we have invented ecocides as well as large scale famine.

• In comparison, Serres believes we need to re-establish the balance between the cartisian divide, Latour does not believe the divide exists at all. Latour tries to prove this by stating that nothing that can happen in (society) can not influence (nature), they are and always will be interlinked