THE  FUTURE EXISTS

A COLLECTION OF ANTHROPOCENE NARRATIVES     CURATED   BY EMERSON JUDD

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought

seclusion and angels exist;

widows and elk exist; every

detail exists; memory, memory’s light;

afterglow exists; oaks, elms,

junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;

eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar

exist, and the future, the future

• from Inger Christensen’s “alphabet” ^[1]

Inger Christensen’s “alphabet” is a long poem detailing the experience of existing in and alongside life’s abundances while also being confronted with environmental devastation. It draws its form both from the structure of human civilization and the natural world: as its title suggests, each section of the poem focuses on a particular letter of the human-manufactured Latin alphabet, and the number of lines in each section corresponds to the Fibonacci sequence, the “golden ratio” we observe in the number of petals on a flower, the spiral growth patterns of shells. A hybrid product of human meaning-making via language, nonhuman forms of life, and our shared and unshared ways of thinking, Christensen’s poem is a formidable space for considering the collective present moment located in the Anthropocene, and the future beyond.

The section of Christensen’s poem I quote here catalogues a list of concepts, both material and abstract, that all nonetheless indisputably exist in the world as we experience it. The section ends abruptly, however, with the future, invoking the idea without an affirming statement of existence. And indeed, questioning the idea of the future is a worthwhile endeavor. The future exists, but only in our ways of thinking. That being said, while it is invisible and always just out of reach, the future has a clear bearing on our behavior in the present: we plan ahead, consider the range of consequences for our actions, and hope for favorable outcomes.

We often conceptualize an action taken in the present as a cause and the future as that choice’s effect. In this way, we live out time as a linear story, full of causal relationships that give events their meaning. We look back at history for stories that have already been written for proof and insight on the relationships and laws that seem to guide human nature and society. When we interpret time and its changes this way, however, as following a natural pattern heavy with meaning, events start to feel inevitable, as if the choice that was made was the only one possible because of our fixed identity as human beings.

In this curation, I draw on various theorists and novelists to explore the idea that our holding on to one interpretation of the same story gives us a definition for ourselves and a world rich with sense and logic, but it also constricts our notions of an expansive future. Like a choose-your-own-adventure story, the future can be conceptualized not as a single linear narrative but as a series of possibilities. Furthermore, we can widen the range of choices we see as possible courses of action by reinterpreting the seemingly fixed facts of history. The retelling of old stories allows us to escape notions of inevitability, make visible the latent structures and contexts governing the scope of our imaginations, and dare to pursue actions that change rather than preserve these structures of fixation.

The future exists in our ways of thinking. We can change our thinking, and change the story we are telling together.

THE HUMAN AS STORY & STRUCTURE

I.

“So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. (“What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman's lack of loyalty to civilization," Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.”

• From Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”^[2]

This passage comes from Ursula K. Le Guin’s article “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” It could be argued that science fiction such as the kind Le Guin was known for is an escape from reality and the present moment, a look into far distant worlds or a prediction taken to the extreme of apocalyptic futures. I definitely used to think this way, and there’s nothing wrong with any of these claims, but reading stories by authors like Ursula Le Guin have an uncanny way of drawing me more deeply into our present moment.

In the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin says, “All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is a metaphor...The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.”^[3] Metaphor is useful because it draws a comparison between two things while also maintaining difference, and it is often through that difference that we learn. By observing and describing the world we live in through metaphor, we recognize our world, but also through the differences see new possibilities for what it could be. We become able to change the story we have been told about the world, the story that has become the world, the one that has taught us to accept police, prisons, environmental exploitation, and human inequality as natural conditions of existence. There is so much about the world that I have and probably still do take for granted until a book, or a person, or a set of circumstances suggested that it never had to be this way and could still be made otherwise. I want to hold on to this mindset of using fiction as a means of questioning the conditions of the world.

In this quote and throughout the piece, Le Guin challenges a narrative that has defined humanity itself, and I think reckoning with the Anthropocene necessitates a similar challenging of what makes us human, which humans are held responsible for our conditions, and which ones suffer most from them. Le Guin has me thinking about what rethinking the narrative of humanity can do for us. She retells a story of our past that makes us reconsider what our natural tendencies as humans can and ought to be. I don’t know if this is always possible, as it’s important to acknowledge the truth of the profound violence present in our history, but it’s important to go beyond that and realize that they were not inevitable, natural or equally representative of every human who has lived. When looking to the future, I’d like to imagine new stories of what humans have the potential to be.

II.

“Domination, domestication, and love are deeply entangled.”

• From Anna Tsing’s “Unruly Edges”^[4]

I’m choosing to add this first line from Anna Tsing’s essay “Unruly Edges” to my backpack this week because the relation of these concepts struck me deeply, both in terms of Le Guin’s novel and the world at large. According to Tsing, our social constructions as well as many aspects of what we see as human nature are based on the intimacies we share between human beings and with the natural world. Tsing finds it useful to describe human nature not as a static condition but as an “interspecies relationship,” suggesting that we can learn about ourselves as humans by observing nature, and vice versa. If our identities as people are largely made up of our relationships with other beings, it begs the question of what kind of relationships are we cultivating and how are they affecting us? This is where I thought it was interesting and also unsettling to place domination and love in proximity with each other, and I think I get a similar mixture of feelings when considering the various relationships between the humans and Athsheans in the novel.

One area where we get a lot of insight into both the humans and Athsheans is when Le Guin describes the way both parties interpret physical touch. While “touch was a main channel of communication among the forest people,” Le Guin says that humans often saw touch as a binary between love and violence, seeing “nothing between the formal handshake and the sexual caress” (111)^[5]. I don’t think the fact that humans see less nuance in their possible physical relationships and their affinity for violence is a coincidence. In fact, considering the way the men on New Tahiti treat women, the distinction between “love” and violence is nonexistent, as both are seen as areas in which one must dominate over another. Davidson says that “the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man” (96). He recognizes that his identity is contingent on his relationship with others, and decides that those relationships must be hierarchical so that he can position himself on top of others.

Before encountering humans, Athsheans don’t seem to have these same dynamics between individuals or social structures. Unlike the humans’ choice to centralize power in the (appropriately named) Central station, Athshean societies are governed in small, dispersed groups that seldom communicate except through dreams. The men and women fulfill their individual, nonhierarchical roles with mutual respect for the other, they live in peaceful symbiosis with the forest, and, of course, they do not kill one another until they meet a human.

III.

“Humans are, then, a biomutationally evolved, hybrid species—storytellers who now storytellingly invent themselves as being purely biological...Our contemporary moment thus demands a normalized origin narrative of survival-through-ever-increasing- processes-of- consumption-and-accumulation. This is reinforced by the epistemological elaboration of a story line—here we should be mindful of the disciplinary discourses of natural scarcity, the bell curve, and so forth, together with the ‘planet of slums’ reality that is before us—which is nevertheless made to appear, in commonsense terms, as being naturally determined. This common-sense naturalized story is cast as the only possible realization of the way the world must be, and ‘is.’”

• From Sylvia Wynter’s “An Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?”^[6]

Similar to Le Guin’s Carrier Backpack theory of fiction, Wynter provides commentary on the idea that the stories we tell about ourselves determine what we believe is possible, what we will act on to make real. Wynter suggests that the dominant story we tell about ourselves is the notion that we are purely biological creatures, hiding (or at least misconstruing) the importance of our identity as hybrid storytelling creatures behind the very stories we tell. The stable definitions we give ourselves and the world act as boundaries or walls on our imaginations, as “traps laid down by our present system of knowledge.”

Wynter takes issue with the idea of a biocentric human species and its homogenizing universality when simultaneously, human inequality and difference has been the basis of unjust systems we ourselves have constructed.

It’s interesting to consider how looking at human interactions with the nonhuman world, rather than further entrenching us in the society/nature divide and homogenizing both parties at the species level, actually encourages us to find nuance and particularity in both. Tsing’s essay detailing interspecies relationships argues against the idea of a single human nature. Eduardo Kohn’s book How Forests Think, which I spent a lot of time with in the spring, uses examples of humans interacting with nature to complicate the distinctions between human and nonhuman by expanding the idea of symbolic, a term usually reserved for human language, to include the nonhuman world.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m trying to articulate here, other than that we have to try to examine the world around us in such a way that the invisible structures we use to make sense of ourselves and reality become a little more visible. so that we can expand them to include wider possibilities for what constitutes a self and what that self deserves.

IV.

“A critical part of environmental politics is what philosopher Charles Taylor calls an ethics of articulacy--the work of saying what we mean, finding words for what we see and feel. There is no way around this kind of work, so we might as well get better at it.”

• From Jedediah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, 266^[7]

I wanted to pull some quotes from Purdy’s After Nature this week for the way they made me consider the human and the beyond-human. This quote about the ethics of articulacy and a lot of this chapter goes great with the Sylvia Wynter piece on the syllabus. I’m really intrigued by the idea of how we can learn to think past the very structures that limit our thinking--language is certainly a big one for us. And yet there is such a power in finding the right words to articulate or frame a problem--one that can make all the difference in how we choose to approach that problem with solutions. It’s for sure part of what Wynter means when she talks about how we must become conscious of our hybrid storytelling nature in the Anthropocene, otherwise we fall into the trap of what she calls the biocentric human, and what Purdy describes as the split between animism and humanism.

Purdy discusses the merits and limitations of each worldview in depth, but in short animism encourages us to concentrate on what we share with the rest of nature while humanism encourages us to focus on what distinguishes us from nature (and thus what binds us together as human beings). (Interestingly, this process of both recognizing similarities and failing to notice differences reminds me a lot of how Kohn describes signs/symbols working in nature). Both are essential because animism decenters humanity to discourage the exploitation of nature and humanism develops the morals and reasoning that encourage human equality. Though both necessary, they are deeply interconnected and implicated with the other: the centering of humanity that animism combats parallels the historical centering of white men within humanity. To borrow another feature of Kohn’s reasoning, that of emergent properties, human thought and morality is distinct from nature but also built from it, and thus inseparable from the rest of the world. Purdy puts it well once again when he says:

“To be fully human, we need the parts of us that are not uniquely human. They, too, are part of the identities, insights, and attachments that we bring to the table of our artificial and common worlds.”^[8] 

FUTURE NARRATIVES

I.

“In other words: our narrative processing of the past (selection of ‘relevant’ events and their relating) has created not only meaning (which cannot be had without a suggestion of causality, because the wholly contingent is not experienced as meaningful), but it has also created the semblance of necessity – narrative necessity, because it is exclusively produced by narrative, and therefore by virtue of narrative.”

• From Christoph Bode’s Future Narratives: Theory, Poetics, and Media-Historical Moment, 69^[9]

In our conversation in class regarding Spec Ops as a future narrative and what it could teach us about storytelling in general, I read through some sections of Christoph Bode’s Future Narratives: Theory, Poetics, and Media-Historical Moment that seemed related to my questions surrounding stories and what they do to our imagined futures and, by extension, what actually comes to pass into the everlasting present moment. A lot of my classmates mentioned feeling a sense of inevitability in the game despite our “agency,” a sentiment that reminded me of Sylvia Wynter’s idea of invisible structures present in our storytelling (such as the persistent trope of combatting natural scarcity with economic growth) which we must become aware of in order to see possibilities beyond them. Despite our ability to impact the future, it seems like we were guided by ideas we had about first-person shooter games to fulfill our own narrative expectations.

Early on in his book, Bode discusses how stories are essential to our sense of meaning and perception of time. Meaning, he says, is created through relationships, and narratives are simply the relating of two or more events through language. When we link two events to one another, we gain a sense of linear time because one event typically follows another temporally, and also a sense of cause and effect: to make meaning from two events placed next to each other, we assume they have some sort of causal relationship. And through that assumption that the first event caused the second, the second event begins to feel inevitable.

In narratives written in the past tense, in which the events described have already supposedly occurred, Bode says our meaning-making minds process them as necessary and natural. In present-tense narratives, in which the reader is constantly engaged in the present moment of the characters, our meaning-driven expectations for the future are constantly adjusted as events unfold, and it is only at the end of the narrative that we are able to decide what events fit together and what their relationships mean: more power in the process of meaning-making is conferred to the reader. However, in future narratives, the future is described as fundamentally multiple and uncertain. They complicate our ideas of agency, causality, fate, and randomness.

If we read the Anthropocene as a future narrative rather than a past one where dystopia seems inevitable, we remain open to possibility and change. As we discussed with Spec Ops, there’s a lot more to future narratives than increasing our sense of choice and agency, not only because of events that truly are outside of our control but also because of the structures like human nature and specieshood we’ve built that guide our expectations of what choices are possible. I think it’s worth considering what our narrative expectations are for the Anthropocene, and if our expectations guide our collective behavior so as to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

II.

“The individual details chronicled by the journals might tell stories of heroism or cowardice, of good decisions and bad decisions, but ultimately they spoke to a kind of inevitability. No one had as yet plumbed the depths of intent or purpose in a way that had obstructed that intent or purpose...our superiors seemed to fear any radical reimagining of this situation so much that they had continued to send in knowledge-strapped expeditions as if this was the only option.” 

• From Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, 158-9^[10]

We decided to make Annihilation an optional reading for the course, but I’m really glad I decided to read it sort of on a whim. The dozens of expeditions the Southern Reach organized, the careful selection and conditioning of volunteers, and most of all the power they held over the memories and feelings of the participants all made me think back to Spec Ops and choose-your-own-adventure stories. The novel helped me compare these kinds of narratives with scientific methods of investigation. As the story progresses, the members of the expedition are revealed to be less objective observers with Area X as their focus of study than the subjects of an experiment themselves, with the unseen leaders of the Southern Reach crafting controlled and manipulated variables within the participants in areas like gender, group size, technology access, geographical intel, and recording techniques. Most importantly, the context each expedition is rigorously trained to focus on is fixed, always centered around the lighthouse, even as the narrator, the biologist, realizes that the status of Area X is rapidly changing, growing.

It is for this reason that despite the seeming variations in each expedition’s choices and outcomes, the biologist feels such a strong sense of inevitability. The organizers of the expeditions frame the conditions and purpose of investigating Area X so meticulously, guiding the participants’ thoughts towards a mindset of human/nature separation: towards a single human-made structure against the backdrop of a pristine wilderness. Perhaps the Southern Reach believes this makes them safer from the “Crawler” and its methods of reckoning with human self-consciousness by making us recognize ourselves in nature. To them this identification with the other is a threat, a colonization of the mind. To the biologist, it becomes a reimagining of death as a process more akin to change, an increased unity with one’s environment.

I hear so often in my more science-based classes that asking new questions is often more important than finding answers. Our capacity for discovery, possibility, and change is guided by the questions we know how to ask, or the way we set up an experiment. By becoming conscious of the context, or experiment, in which we are operating, we can begin asking new questions.

IMAGINED/ALTERNATIVE FUTURES

After being complicit in a colonizer’s account of land in Heart of Darkness, I felt compelled to leave that voice behind in favor of an Indigenous woman’s perspective that I read for another class, from the article “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and scholar:                                         

“To me, this is what coming into wisdom within a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe epistemology looks like – it takes place in the context of family, community and relations. It lacks overt coercion and authority, values so normalized within mainstream western pedagogy that they are rarely ever critiqued. The land, aki, is both context and process.”^[11]

The focus of Simpson’s article is the essential role land plays in Indigenous education, and it struck me how completely antithetical this idea is to many of Conrad’s European characters in the novel. I think the imperialists, far from their familiar background of Europe, are uncomfortable with the way that their identities are shown to be contingent on their surroundings, their context. It’s why so many of them resent Kurtz, who eschews the traditional European methods of extracting ivory and chooses to stay deep within the forest. Not that Kurtz embodies Simpson’s model of land as pedagogy--Kurtz still relies deeply on coercion and authority. But unlike characters like the manager, who remains beholden only to Europe despite his physical immersion in Africa, Kurtz seems to embrace the fact that while he is changing the environment around him, the environment is changing him as well, even his physical appearance, which Conrad describes in terms of ivory on several occasions. As shown in Heart of Darkness, Western thought is still so attached to ideas of a nature/human duality and stable individual selves, but according to Simpson, virtually all of Nishnaabeg teachings and culture come from the relationships people have with the surroundings, animals, and people around them. Relationality is the basis of their cultural identity.

I also want to retain my focus on working to create better futures through imagining them. Simpson describes how many Nishnaabeg stories take place on land they are supposed to be on with characters who embody Nishnaabeg values and relations, stories in which settler colonial ideas of ownership and reeducation fail to disrupt their way of life, stories in which “nothing violent happens.” These stories, which, Simpson emphasizes, do not take place in pre-colonial times but instead are set outside the constraints of linear time and space altogether, do not merely serve as entertainment or fiction in its narrowest sense. They are, in fact:

“...propelling us to rebel against the permanence of settler colonial reality and not just ‘dream alternative realities’ but to create them, on the ground in the physical world, in spite of being occupied. If we accept colonial permanence, then our rebellion can only take place within settler colonial thought and reality; we become too willing to sacrifice the context that creates and produces cultural workers”^[12]

Simpson talks warmly about people she knows both personally and from stories who have put their bodies on the line by continuing to physically occupy their land against the Canadian government’s wishes. Because Nishnaabeg people see land as “both context and process” for their cultural and intellectual identity, no academic institution’s repository of knowledge can replace the intelligence granted by physical connection to the land. Preservation of Nishnaabeg identity depends on stories that make alternate realities imaginable and people with the will to create those realities in the physical world.

THE PRESENT EXISTS

“One kind [of futurism] seems to imagine that only if things work do they matter...There is a fine line between acknowledging the extent and seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference...Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence.”

• From Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 4.^[13] 

To close this future exploration, I wanted to spend time pondering the use of considering the future, and also its dangers. Futurism can take us away from the present moment in which we possess choice. It can cause us to view events to come as prewritten. Hope and despair, both future-oriented emotions, can distract or dishearten us from striving towards the work of creating a better, more habitable world.

However, I believe there is a sort of futurism that can draw us more deeply into the present. If we are able to conceive of the future as unfixed and malleable, perhaps we will be able to perceive and reimagine the scope of our agency in the present, which, as Haraway says, is the only moment full of matter and beings who we can choose to care for and live well with.