[ ] watch comma splices
[ ] revist how bricolage helped me in the reflection at the end
[ ] Make sure each section transitions from the last, use callbacks and mention how they relate
[ ] paraphrase long quotes
[ ] focus on key points for each section it.
“This is the key point you need to make in this section. Cli-fi fails for a number of reasons, but mostly because it’s hard to depict the disconnect between human timeframes and climactic timeframes. But your argument is that the most effective or important aspect to depict is the coming into consciousness of the character, the moment at which they realise the scale and complexity of the problem.”
[ ] don’t capitalise capitalist realism
[ ] Careful with phrasing: “That’s not really the argument. It’s more accurate to say that cli-fi writers have sought to depict this coming into knowledge in different ways, with varying degrees of success. You’re hoping to establish what success looks like, so you can replicate some of the strategies in your work.”
[ ] Focus on problem/soltuion matrix
Throughout the cyclical process of creative and critical work, the importance of a solid scientific foundation for creative work was frequently emphasised. As Nahrung (2020, p.39) says, a cli-fi novel must maintain enough data and evidence to convince the rational mind that it is coming from a reliable source. It was during this research that the connection between neoliberal capitalism and climate change emerged as a reoccurring theme. As an example of this, HSBC’s ‘Head of Responsible Banking,’ Stuart Kirk, illustrated out the neoliberal perspective in his speech Investors Need Not Worry About Climate Risk (2022). He explains how worrying about climate change ‘destroys wealth and progress,’ because it interferes with immediate opportunities for growth. He states that, ‘for coal, what happens in year seven is more or less irrelevant. So, the debate about what happens out here [points to 2050 on a global heating chart] from a financial risk perspective, is irrelevant. Don’t care,’ (10:02-11:33).
This neoliberal paradigm is even reported impacting current climate science. For example, Nafeez Ahmen for The Guardian (2014), argues that the IPCC reports were diluted under political pressure to protect fossil fuel interests. The National Centre for Climate Restoration also criticised the IPCC’s 2014 and 2018 reports, highlighting how they ignored the danger of climate ‘tipping points’ or ‘points of no return,’ and the eventual economic collapse due to the ‘climate driven refugee crises’ and ‘outright chaos,’ (Reese, 2020; Spratt, 2019). Philip Alston in his special report to the United Nations predicts, ‘climate apartheid… the rich escape overheating, hunger, and conflict… while the rest of the world is left to suffer,’ (Alston quoted in Reese, 2020, p.35). In addition to this, a substantial amount of the climate science I encountered during this research process emphasised the economic cost of the crisis, reinforcing the neoliberal paradigm (sources). The key point is to highlight that climate change is inextricably linked to economics, and the challenge is in how this relationship can be meaningfully explored in fiction.
To tackle this, the Marxist concept of ‘totality’ will be used in tandem with Mark Fisher’s (2009) concept of ‘capitalist realism.’ Marx's philosophy, the cornerstone of materialist critique, is rooted in the idea that humans must collaborate to transform nature into useful materials: ‘man and his labour on one side, Nature and its materials on the other,’ (chapter seven). As environmental historian Jason Moore explains in his 2015 monograph Capitalism and the Web of Life, capitalism’s success depends upon its ability to exploit nature, to turn the ‘work/energy of the biosphere into capital,’ (The Oikeios: Towards Environment-Making section). As Fisher (2009) says, ‘capital’s “need of a constantly expanding market,” it’s growth fetish,” means that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability,’ (Capitalism and The Real section, para. 6). Similarly, Naomi Klein (2014) argues that because climate change demands collective action and stricter regulation on markets, it will force a conclusion between 'the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market,' (Unthinkable Truths section). This relationship is reinforced by the similar challenges that climate change places on the novel, such as ecocritics observation of the novel’s focus on individualism over collectivism (see Writing Climate Fiction section).
According to Fisher, capitalist realism is ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative.’ This research builds upon Fisher’s observation that ‘one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the underlying realities that capitalism presents to us… Environmental catastrophe is one such real,’ (Capitalism and The Real section). In Marxist cultural analysis, these underlying realities are sometimes referred to as ‘totalities’ (Jay, 1984). Totality, as Lukács (1923) said, is ‘the unity of diverse elements,’ just like how rising sea temperatures, declining insect populations, rising CO2 levels and so on, make climate change. Along with this, capitalist realism ‘describes most accurately what might be considered the neoliberal totality,’ (McGuire, 2021, p. 16).
Due to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union however, many theorists rejected the idea of totality (Sim & Loon, 2014). Theodor Adorno in his 1966 monograph Negative Dialectics, ‘attempted to undermine the notion of totality, as well as the authority that goes with claiming to have grasped the internal workings of it,’ (Sim & Loon, 2014, p. 48). Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1984) argues that totality is dangerous when 'worked up into a “grand form” that subsumes all individual narratives within it.’ However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Derrida in Spectres of Marx (2006), reflects on the critical rejection of Marxist theories. Derrida argues that they must be built upon, ‘precisely because of the fall of communism,’ (Robinson et al., 2004, p. 155). Derrida refutes Marx’s deterministic view of history but admits that ‘there will be no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx,’ (p.14).
Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010) reflects Derrida’s sentiments. Morton (2010) argues that ‘the current global crisis requires that we wake up and smell the total coffee.’ Totality, to Morton (2010), does not have to prioritise ‘large things as opposed to small ones,’ but instead accept that large things are made of infinitely small things (Strange Strangers: The Politics and Poetics of Coexistence section, para. 6). Because of this, Morton concludes that to address the climate crisis, art must move beyond postmodernism, a belief shared by Plumwood (1994), (see ‘Writing Climate Fiction’ para 2). Derrida corroborates this, building upon Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) to assert that postmodernism is the result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and by the ‘themes of the end of history…’ (p.16). Reflecting on this, Shonkwiler and La Berge (2014) write:
what is lost with its [The Soviet Union’s] decomposition was a site, however fictitious, for the imagination of another world. That the imagined reality of that other world was, in retrospect, a fantasy only shows the necessity of using fantasy to imagine other alternatives. (p.6)
In my cli-fi novel, characters who develop an understanding of the connection between the economic paradigms and environmental destruction, could, as Fisher (2009) said, reveal that ‘the long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity for change.’ In attempting to write this novel, I turned to the work of ecocritics who have been exploring the intersections between ideology, literature and climate change since the 1970s (Upstone, 2017).