Staging the Speculative
2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/10418385-7200512
ISSN1938-8020
Autores Tópico(s)Flood Risk Assessment and Management
ResumoIn a chapter titled "Capital Sinks," Ashley Dawson, in his 2017 book Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, lays out a sobering vision of the present and future of urban planning and its responses to the effects of climate change. Surveying a range of recent proposals and projects in New York, Miami, and Jakarta, most of which lie somewhere between rhetorically well-couched half measures against city carbon consumption and startling instances of willful blindness to future sea level rise, Dawson's account makes painfully clear that the relative inaction or even disregard for the oncoming effects of present city plans is continuing to set the seeds for a catastrophic future. The titular "capital sinks" are the ongoing investments that financiers and city officials regularly sink into new seaside buildings, artificial islands, and other planned spaces likely to exacerbate the damage, death, and contamination that coastal flooding will almost certainly bring about. To draw out a particularly maddening instance of this sort of shortsightedness, Dawson considers Turkey Point, a nuclear power plant situated on a barrier island just south of Miami. Citing the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, Dawson considers likely scenarios for the site, on which there are currently plans to add further reactors. Pulling from the insights of local scientists, Dawson elucidates the near certainty that the site will "[spew] radioactive water into the surroundings" and, despite demanding constant cooling and maintenance, will eventually become "accessible only by boat," making responsible upkeep and management effectively impossible.1 If Fukushima came as a surprise, the endgame of catastrophic meltdown is being built into Turkey Point by local officials from the get-go.Given the comparable shortsightedness that plagues city planning initiatives across the world, it would be easy to fall into the sort of end times fatalism that often accompanies discussions of likely climate futures (and it is a credit to Dawson's book that he stops short of this, keeping in mind the vulnerable populations that will inevitably have to live through catastrophe). Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, New York 2140, dwells instead in the future that Dawson's discussion portends, with all its wreckage, toxicity, and coastal flooding. Intriguingly, moreover, without shying away from the likely outcomes of a growingly unhinged climate, Robinson maintains the sort of quiet utopianism that has characterized so much of his work. New York 2140 is a novel intimately aware of the projected dynamics of sea level rise, as well as the geopolitical and financial implications of the dramatic changes that sea level rise will bring on; yet it maintains an investment in the way people attempt to carve out contingent enclaves, imbued with radical possibility for social reorganization, in often harsh and unfamiliar terrain.As with the often short-lived communities of Robinson's Mars trilogy, the enclaves we see in New York 2140, ones that are built into the very instability of the areas of New York City most wracked by flooding, are necessarily threatened from their inception by the movements of natural, political, and economic processes. Contingently, though, they act as pockets for reimagining life, the social, and the pressure points through which large-scale political transformation can arise. What Robinson's novel offers, then, in relation to the futures that Dawson foresees, is a speculative fiction of utopian world building that not only does not shy away from the looming threats of climate change but incorporates them into the very worlding of micro-utopias themselves. In a sense Robinson positions speculative fiction as a present arena for preemptively intervening in a future that, as Dawson's portrait of current city planning suggests, it is increasingly unlikely we will escape. Yet this formulation marks an ambivalence that equally runs through the novel, betrayed in its narrative's movement toward crisis and in the novel's frequent efforts to sew threads of continuity back to the present of the postrecession 2010s. Is the present so settled that our only recourse now is to a thoroughly damaged future? What sort of utopianism is possible in the Anthropocene, and how does it stay responsible to those who have to live with and through future catastrophe? If these questions are only implicit in Robinson's seemingly ambivalent utopianism, they nonetheless underlie the narrative that Robinson lays out. Ultimately, Robinson's novel asks us to think alongside this ambivalent utopianism, amid the justifiably gloomy projections that Dawson and others offer, to take stock of questions over what intervening in the future has to do with crises of the present, and vice versa.As its title suggests, New York 2140 imagines life in New York City a bit more than a century in the future. The version of New York City that we see is at once familiar and distinct, geographically transformed by the catastrophic impacts of climate change though still an enduringly diverse cultural destination, teeming with life, as well as a powerful global node for financial speculation. Rising sea levels over the course of the twenty-first century resulted in two decadelong global flooding events, leaving the ground level of lower Manhattan (as well as portions of the outer boroughs) fully submerged under water, and the upper portion of midtown, right up to Central Park, in an especially unstable intertidal zone. New York's wealthy elite have largely colonized the still dry upper half of Manhattan or left for Denver, a new and often-derided hub of inland stability and thus financial power.A half century or so after the second major global flooding event, the world's coastal cities, New York included, have reached a stage of relative though tentative stability. In New York in particular, rebuilding efforts in the submerged lower end of Manhattan have revitalized the area, rendering it a new SuperVenice, with above-water walkways between buildings, as well as boating lanes, docks, and water-level public transit to replace ground transportation. Crucially, this newly revitalized part of New York was largely rebuilt and repopulated by dispossessed collectives, made up of those willing to take on a certain amount of discomfort and the instability that comes with living in a sunken city. So far, this SuperVenice in Lower Manhattan has remained relatively unnoticed and untouched by both state regulators and capital investors, allowing for the emergence of affordable, cooperative housing options, tied together through strong, responsive renters unions.The action of the novel centrally takes place in a massive housing co-op occupying the former MetLife building. Through a look at the life of nine temporary and permanent residents of the co-op, we are given a feel for the relatively autonomous, communitarian modes of life that have emerged throughout the occupied buildings of sunken lower Manhattan. Residents live, eat, and drink together, take part in democratic decisions about their home and its future, have built a makeshift farm and temporary housing options on the building's roof, and take in, when possible, those left in need by periodic disasters taking place across the rest of the city. A more anarchic fringe of the city's population lives rent free throughout the wholly untouched and slowly collapsing buildings and underground tunnels scattered throughout the intertidal zone between the southern end of Central Park and Forty-Seventh Street or so, tending underground bars, taking part in underground fighting tournaments, and holding on to remaining pieces of a broken city landscape, all the while knowing the ever-present risks at hand. What Robinson creates, in the wake of the horrific global devastation caused by massive climate change, is a portrait of an emergent postcapitalist utopia, made up of the scrappiest of New York City holdovers, trying to endure in the new interstices of global capitalism.And this is where the novel's central conflict comes in. Despite ongoing catastrophe, neoliberal capitalism has chugged along in the intervening years between 2017 and 2140. Within the novel, investors have grown increasingly hip to New York City's SuperVenice and see in it an opportunity to capitalize on what has come to be the city's trendiest locale. Cycles of investment, gentrification, and violent dispossession are still at the heart of the urban life that Robinson imagines. Especially callous members of the global financial elite have even discovered ways of leveraging the very instability of the intertidal zone itself, seeing imminent deadly collapse as a new spring from which to massively profit. With this threat, alongside a new wave of megastorms that we see on the horizon, lower and midtown Manhattan become a prime locus for potentially revolutionary class conflict, ignited in particular by a conflation of happy coincidences that bring a diverse group of MetLife tenants together.Robinson is one of the central writers in a speculative fiction movement that came to prominence throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Alongside Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Marge Piercy, and Octavia Butler, Robinson writes about future and alternative worlds that function as arenas for experimenting with radically different forms of social and political organization, and for challenging preconceived notions of race,2 gender, sexuality,3 capital, property,4 mental illness,5 governance, and the relationship between science and spirituality,6 among other things.7 Best known for his Mars trilogy, a long and detailed account of an imagined future in which humans, led first by a group of one hundred scientists, colonize and terraform Mars, Robinson has long explored the imbrication of technoscientific endeavors; climate, habitat, and human adaptability; and the fraught emergence of postcapitalist futures.8As noted by the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, in his extensive study of utopian science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future, Robinson's work tends to balance ambitious utopian impulses with a realist's pacing and eye for material minutiae.9 In considering the challenges of living on Mars and altering its planetary climate, Robinson's writing throughout the Mars trilogy dwells in detailed scientific passages spanning chemistry, astrophysics, geophysics, biology, and climate science, while incorporating both an impressive understanding of a range of legitimate scientific phenomena and a strong penchant for producing speculative or imaginary science couched in real enough sounding language as to meld cogently in with the rest. New York 2140 accomplishes something similar in its account of the planetary-scale changes effected by the melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets and the warming of oceans and atmosphere. Perhaps as impressive is Robinson's seeming competency in the language of financial speculation, giving an air of realism to the novel's wordy discussions of the economics of real estate investment.Moreover, a sweeping sense of political economy, its development over time, and how it is experienced at the level of the individual, notable across Robinson's work, is likewise on display here. As is often noted in reviews and writings on Robinson's work, he was an advisee of Jameson's while carrying out his PhD in English at the University of California, San Diego, on the work of the late twentieth-century sci-fi master Philip K. Dick. It is hard not to read into Robinson's works Jameson's Marxist political investments and the grandiosity of the social and political narratives that Jameson weaves into his own works of literary criticism.In New York 2140 in particular, Robinson's theoretical (as well as literary)10 influences are made clear. Before each chapter, Robinson includes one or several quotes by a wide range of thinkers, artists, writers, and poets, including Jameson himself. Quotes are drawn likewise from Donald MacKenzie, probably the foremost science and technology studies scholar of finance as well as nuclear disarmament;11 Maurizio Lazzarato, a key theorizer of post-Fordist labor;12 the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze;13 and Joshua Clover, the communist poet turned political theorist of riot and contemporary capital circulation.14 In drawing on this array of thinkers, Robinson provides a theoretical basis for making the images of seas flowing onto land, tides ebbing and waning across midtown Manhattan, and half-collapsed buildings on the verge of sinking under the water into the visual currents with which we perceive and understand invisible flows of speculative capital and massive investments, hedging for or against the unsustainability of damaged land and damaged real estate.One of the key formal elements that lends force to Robinson's project is the use of eight distinct narrative perspectives. Of these, seven follow characters who live in or around the MetLife building: taking on the stories of Mutt and Jeff, two programmers kidnapped as collateral in a larger conspiracy; Inspector Gen, a tired policewoman with close connections to the intertidal underground; Franklin, a scheming investment banker working on ways to profit off the instability of the intertidal zone; Vlade, the weathered and overworked, though full-hearted, building manager; Amelia, a reality TV star known for traveling around the world in a blimp and performing public acts of assisted animal migration; Charlotte, a radical immigration lawyer tapped for public office; and Stefan and Roberto, two long-orphaned water rat kids going on dangerous missions to find sunken treasure around the city, explicitly inspired by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.This array of perspectives allows Robinson to paint an expansive portrait of the various subcultures and problematics that have sprung up around the city. With Stefan and Roberto, we get a close look at the water rat culture that has pervaded Manhattan, as well as the lives of those trying to make do in collapsing housing in the midtown intertidal zone. Vlade, formerly involved in the rescue efforts that went on throughout the second decade-long wave of city flooding, bolsters this perspective with a firm sense of both the horrors and the excitement of exploration on and under the sea. Following Inspector Gen offers us access to the extreme underground cultures of the intertidal zone. In Charlotte we have a character with an acute stake in maintaining the collective power of the lower Manhattan renters unions, through whom we see their proceedings. We also get brief forays into the intersecting crises around housing and immigration that climate catastrophe has caused and that are woven into the geographic and political landscape of the novel. And with Franklin we get an insider's look at the speculative games played by financiers and real estate investors in their handling of investment instability, which become crucial to the novel's central plot. By juxtaposing these perspectives, Robinson dramatizes the clash between various approaches to and interests within the city.If the seven narratives, following characters embedded in the action of the novel, allow Robinson to portray New York City as a collection of interwoven worlds, the eighth narrative allows him to inject the sense of history that makes the particular moment we are witnessing in the novel into a momentous event within the much larger trajectory of the city, and of climate change and humanity's social and political responses more broadly. This last narrative voice is named "a citizen." An anonymous New York City historian, the citizen comments on the events of the 2140s as well as the 2008 recession, the late twenty-first-century flooding events alongside subsequent technocratic responses, annual weather patterns, and the erection of the MetLife building and a number of other New York City landmarks.Through the citizen most clearly, we get the sort of dual history that Robinson is trying to sketch: on the one hand, of a city of communitarian endurance, and the political and social outcasts who come together to make such endurance possible, and on the other, of a city that accumulates and displays hordes of wealth, in which, at the level of both state and capital, there is a cyclical tendency toward short-term investment at the expense of long-term stability and livability. Like the plot of the novel, this can at times feel ham-fisted and overwrought. But Robinson compellingly makes the present (as in the 2010s) and the near future into historical fodder, following an ongoing path into an as yet undecided future.The citizen claims, with regard to the newly emergent New York City communities, that in the aftermath of the second flooding event, "Lower Manhattan became a veritable hotbed of theory and practice, like it always used to say it was, but this time for real" (ny, 209). And in summing up the momentous events that unfold throughout the novel, the citizen states: "History happened. It does not stop happening. Seemingly frozen moments are transient, they break up like the spring ice, and then change occurs" (ny, 603). Once again, the melting ice sheets and rising seas act at both a literal level in the novel's story as crucial, unstable actors within a broader landscape of social and political upheaval, and as a kind of figurative model for the potentialities latent within any present moment, which when unleashed bring individual and collective actions into history. The citizen, then, and seemingly Robinson himself, adopts the Althusserian formulation of an aleatory materialism of the encounter of contingent forces,15 with climate change itself acting as one of the driving characters, alongside rioters, unions, legislators, and an assortment of individuals situated at the right moment and in the right place.16As suggested in the opening of this review, the themes and problems of the novel mirror especially closely the concerns of Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson's account of urban conflict and catastrophic climate change. Dawson, an urbanist and postcolonial specialist at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, examines, across his book, a range of policy decisions, urban planning initiatives, community organizing efforts, and future imaginaries that seek (or fail to seek) to deal with the impacts of climate change on urban life around the world. Like Robinson's novel, his book attempts to account for the ongoing problems and sudden catastrophes that future coastal cities face, explicitly arguing (as New York 2140 does implicitly) for cities as crucial sites for thinking through the sources and impacts of climate change, as well as the possibilities for managing the consequences of disaster and resisting the profit-seeking endeavors of those most responsible for climate change. And like Robinson, Dawson sees the city as an especially potent instance of conflicting interests and their resulting conflicts. Dawson explicitly casts climate change as a sort of battle for the future between, on the one side, neoliberal politicians of the global North and their insignificant half measures, as well as the real estate investors who have no concern beyond the ten- or twenty-year scope of their investments, and on the other, willfully overlooked, largely minority poor communities and the vast majority of city residents in the global South. Climate change is one, especially threatening, violent production in a long history of imperial capitalism and colonial violence. In response, Dawson calls for nothing short of immediate revolutionary action, while also sketching out models, based in particular on community responses to Hurricane Sandy, for collective rebuilding and recovery from the inevitable disasters of the future.In its own taking up of revolution as the telos of its trajectory, a heisty thriller quality comes to characterize the action of New York 2140 in a way that can at times feel forced. What starts as an array of perspectives, cluing readers to juxtaposed jobs, interests, and lifestyles that make up a larger sketch of 2140s New York City, takes a turn toward the assembling of a band of unlikely allies, each bringing their own idiosyncratic talents and knowledges in taking on a plot to nationalize the banks and bring down global capitalism, as nobody has been able to before. Even Franklin, driven by a nihilistic sense of adventure void of any politics, and perhaps also a desire to impress a woman who seems more concerned than he with the ethics of investment, joins in on the action. At moments while reading, I was reminded of Fast Five (dir. Justin Lin, 2011), cinema's best and most heisty thriller as well as its most potent exemplar of the problem of scaling in imaginative world building. Whether this turn in the novel feels like a good bit of rollicking fantasy or like the point when an otherwise compelling meditation on life in coastal cities in the wake of advanced climate change goes off the rails will depend on a reader's own generic taste and political allegiances. I found myself wishing that the novel spent more time in the underground dwellings of the intertidal zone—we get only a taste of the types of activities going on among the most extreme of the squatters, sewer rats, and anarchists, and it was enough to make me think a whole novel could have been woven out of a fuller slice-of-life portrayal of the goingson down there and what life can be almost fully out of view of bourgeois society.Compellingly, though, the shift from a portrayal of postcapitalist possibilities within the wreckage of late capitalism to a fantastical tale of revolution arguably stages tensions around what speculative fiction can and should be. Dawson, in Extreme Cities, repeats the often-told line on disaster-centric genre fiction, that whatever futures or alternative worlds are being presented, these stories are ultimately about political crises of the present.17 When one reads Robinson fast-forwarding past his slice-of-life depiction of cooperative living in the wake of disaster and toward a faster-paced account of riots and revolution, one senses a way in which his account of the future is intended to reflect back on crises of the present moment. Envisioning collapsing financial bubbles, instances of extreme weather, and riots of the dispossessed and disenfranchised, the novel can feel more like a commentary on the political crises of the last decade and the moral bankruptcy of inaction in the face of oncoming disaster than an attempt to faithfully account for social, political, and scientific changes to come. Even without the citizen-historian, moments in the novel are surely intended to call to mind Hurricane Sandy, Occupy Wall Street, and the 2008 financial crash, and to stoke the feeling that often violently competing interests are crashing against each other in a fight for an uncertain and destabilized future.Yet the very plausibility of the cooperative life that the first half of the novel imagines, and the relatability of that cooperative life being put in question by opposed forces, speaks to an alternate account of speculative fiction as a mode of generating possible futures. This sort of generative account of speculative fiction has long been of interest to feminist science studies scholars. Donna J. Haraway, in particular, has throughout her career been an ally of speculative fiction, as well as one of the strongest advocates for a reading of technoscience itself as a mode of crafting faithful, productive fictions.18 Much of her most recent book, Staying with the Trouble, gives itself over to a work of fiction, a project not entirely dissimilar to Robinson's own, of imagining a way for pockets of resisters to justly move forward through the calamities of the next few hundred years.Against this account of speculative fiction, Dawson suggests that the better part of dystopic and disaster-based speculation serves markedly reactionary ends, capturing latent white supremacist fears of racial minorities and immigrants through figures like the zombie and the animalistic monster. Haraway's move throughout her career, though, has always been to take the most potentially reactionary of inventions and see in them material for an ironic de-essentialization and co-optation in service of a future bent away from the one we are currently racing toward, as most acutely exemplified by her famous use of the cyborg. The speculative for Haraway, as well as for more recent feminist science studies scholars (Ruha Benjamin's Black to the Future project and other essays of hers offer apt examples),19 is precisely, then, another one of these often-reactionary tools to be subverted toward different sorts of futures than the ones available to both the pragmatically realist, and to the callously fascistic, imagination.In Extreme Cities Dawson is attentive to the role speculative investments have in generating the futures of urban city life. The previously cited chapter, "Capital Sinks," in particular delves into examples of capital investment in new buildings occupying precisely the sorts of seaside city locales that a responsible approach to city planning would pull away from. In one especially acute illustration of willful unconcern for the long-term impacts of these investments, the book quotes a University of Miami scientist as saying, "I get Wall Street people calling me all the time, asking if they can get eight or nine years out of a condo on Miami Beach."20 Not only are these locales, as Dawson suggests, doomed to catastrophic destruction, they are also often the best spots in cities for setting up the sorts of green spaces and soft barriers that could act as insulation for communities and buildings farther inland. Speculative investment in seaside property carves out futures that those making these investments are unwilling to take a stake in. And even in cases where speculation stakes a claim on the future, Dawson sees this as often functioning toward reactionary ends. One of the most eye-opening sections of Dawson's book, found in the chapter titled "Climate Apartheid," sketches what he calls a "genealogy of insecurity," pointing to the forecasts that politicians and political consultants from neoconservative and neoliberal camps alike have made for the coming century.21 As he argues, the figuring, in these forecasts, of the racialized poor of the global South as restless, threatening multitudes echoes the sort of zombie fiction that overtly absorbs and reprojects the racist, classist fears of predominantly white middle- and upper-class Americans.A subversion of speculation's potential toward these sorts of negative ends is the promise offered by the way Robinson spends time in his novel dwelling within life in the grips of climate change. Climate change, and all it entails, acts as a sort of cyborgian figure generated through the reactionary hold of capitalism, imbricating the human and the technoscientific. Robinson's novel offers a look at the underside of this cyborgian figure, where openings arise for new political and social imaginaries to emerge. Climate change is an unjust and destructive phenomenon, an arm of the global North's centuries-long colonization efforts, a site of ever-increasing race- and class-based stratification, and an ongoing source of investment potential for the already heinously wealthy. Capitalists have for years been generating the futures in which climate change wreaks the relentless havoc that we have already seen in various forms in the last decade. A reading of Robinson's book would take it as an argument for generating futures in which climate change is equally the site of what Dawson calls "disaster communism," namely, spontaneous, community-driven efforts toward solidarity and mutual aid, tied together to form resilient networks that can respond to climate-based devastation in the short and in the long term.22Perhaps the inclusion of a future historian marks for the novel a tension between taking the speculative aspect of speculative fiction as a means of commenting on the present and recent past and taking it as a means of positing future imaginaries for our collective use in organizing going forward. Through the citizen-historian, the events of the novel's 2140s are at once brought into a trajectory that runs through the events during and after 2008, and themselves made into a present acknowledged as laying a particular claim on an unknown future. This would reflect a version of what Jameson cites as the dialectical "ambivalences of the Utopian text," when he claims, "for the more surely a given Utopia asserts its radical difference from what currently is, to that very degree it becomes, not merely unrealizable but, what is worse, unimaginable."23 Robinson's text is far enough into a future that is far enough removed from our present as to imagine new pockets of postcapitalist possibility (as well as new pockets of hypercapitalist devastation), while at the same time seeking to maintain continuity with the problematics, impasses, and excitements at the heart of present (and past) New York City life.Another way of seeing this ambivalence that is in line with Robinson's other work is in the very instability of the imagined utopia itself. The utopias that Robinson imagines, as here, tend to be imminently threatened from the outset, pockets of space partially removed from the logics of global capitalism but only ever covered over by a fragile sort of shield. The stateless, moneyless utopian mini-cities, which emerge in the first stages of the colonization of Mars in the Mars trilogy, are only untouched as such insofar as earthbound nation-states and transnational corporations remain in a state of catching up. Likewise here, the network of cooperatives and other squatting options that have come to occupy Lower Manhattan are threatened from the get-go by the dual possibility of elite-driven capital investment and renewed climate catastrophe. The utopian in Robinson's work does not perform the sort of strictly demarcating before and after of the more apocalyptic approaches to oncoming disaster. Nor does it presume the kind of obfuscating binary that has wracked discussions of climate change, content on asking whether we still have time to avert it. Rather, it marks the contingent, ephemeral impulse to carve out minor utopias available in confrontations with and refusals of the sanctioned terms of the present.24As gestured to at the beginning of this review, perhaps the most effective way of reading Robinson's new novel might be as a kind of speculative companion piece to the sort of harsh realism that Dawson and others lend to the injustices being carved out in the present. Dawson's book offers a detailed assessment of how those with power in the present too often cater to ruling-class interests at the expense of necessary radical transformations and of the likely results for generations of urban dwellers to come. In other words, it fleshes out a history of our present and recent past that is similar to what Robinson's citizen-historian alludes to and places it within a trajectory that reaches the present of the novel. The justified bitterness and pessimism at the heart of Dawson's book moreover refuses apocalypticism, understanding that the violence of environmental destruction is and will continue to be an ongoing process, necessitating enduring projects of the type of just and responsible world building that Robinson's characters take part in. Whether looking forward, back, or both, it is the responsibility of present-day speculative fiction and futural imaginaries more broadly to centrally incorporate climate change and climate instability. New York 2140 succeeds in imagining a future in which sea level and coastal urban life is a central problematic. That the book, to use Haraway's turn of phrase, "stays with the trouble" of climate change, rather than eschewing it either via apocalypticism or clear-cut technological or political fixes, makes it a particularly insightful piece of utopianism, offering a way to understand climate change's exacerbation of the tensions surrounding and embedded within utopian fiction and its relationship to past and future.25
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