Narratives of Rupture (Catastrophe/Utopia/Singularity): Everything is changing but now is not the time to change things
Catastrophe is a narrative that is structured around rupture: Before/After. Catastrophe is an overturning, an upending of previous meaning and order. To make climate change comprehensible, we resort to catastrophe at quarter-speed, a slow catastrophe, wreaking slow violence. In this thinking, we stretch the moment of upheaval wide enough so that we can place ourselves inside it. We understand ourselves to be living in the rupture, the interregnum. Inside the rupture, we are set adrift from the Before, the world as we knew it, our old values and meanings severed at the entrance to our catastrophic present. We are similarly adrift from the After, unable to make out the contours of what will be left in the aftermath, what shape the new disposition might take. This is a uniquely ambiguous position: powerless in one way, vulnerable to any direction or solution – any port in a storm. Alternatively, it might be a space of possibility, and the chance to make something new.
This same narrative structure marks utopia. For utopia to be thought, there must first be a rupture, to break the future from the past, and make space for the new disposition to be described, free of the entanglements of the past, of History. In Thomas More’s Utopia, King Utopus begins this tradition of thought by impossibly cleaving an island from the mainland: “Utopus […] designed to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite round them.” (More, np). This foundational act of separation is also the foundational act of utopian thought, the placing of the present into a rupture, a no-place and no-time, much like catastrophe (see also Jameson, 2005). Once that is accomplished, then the utopian project can gain its purchase: “Utopus, that conquered it […] brought the rude and uncivilised inhabitants into such a good government, and to that measure of politeness, that they now far excel all the rest of mankind.” (More, np.). The utopia is accomplished in the rupture, in the no-place and no-time, through unknown agencies: a fantasy whose realisation cannot be narrated from existing history or politics. This returns us to ambiguity, as utopia promises in its achievement eternal peace, which is to say the end of History, the end of Politics, or paralysis, stasis, and the end of possibility.
With a narrative of catastrophe, the past is wiped away by the rupture, replaced by rubble. With a utopian narrative, the past is wiped away to be replaced by some alternative lasting order. Both sever us from history and politics in any meaningful sense. Both insist on the ending of the present as meaningful continuation of the past. It is no accident that the dominant contemporary response to the climate crisis is the framing of rupture and the promise of techno-utopian narratives, emerging with particular intensity from Silicon Valley. The success of these narratives is dependent upon the way they intersect with and mobilize dominant discourses of power. The rupture of catastrophism is key here, as is the utopian promise of an Eden achieved through faith in technological progress.
Silicon Valley think tank RethinkX claim that technological progress is guaranteed by “the reality of fast-paced, technology-adoption S-curves” (Seba & Tubbs 2019: 3). As one flattens out, the narrative goes, another disruptive technology emerges, creating a never-ending chain of S-curves. In a world of no stable meanings, this progress is a welcome guarantee. S-curves are, however, a historically contingent narrative structure, rather than a reality. Their roots—the “general idea of exponential accelerating change” (Broderick 2012: 21)—go back to a science fiction author, Robert A. Heinlein, who in 1952 projected what he called the “curve of human achievement” to “go on indefinitely with increasing steepness” (quoted in Broderick 2021: 21). That the statement of this belief would emerge simultaneous with the Great Acceleration is no accident. From here the idea develops until popularized most famously by Vernor Vinge, who proposed that exponentially accelerating science and technology would produce a Singularity; “a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules” (Vinge, np.). The narrative of the Singularity and the desires and values it harnesses are far older than its current digital flavour. It is at bottom a utopian narrative, about the desire to be freed from the burdens of history and necessity and from frustrations and restrictions on agency: a narrative of liberation from mediation, of carving the island from the mainland.
In our contemporary climate-catastrophic situation, it is no accident that solar power is the poster child for our salvation. Commentators from across the political spectrum, from neoliberal financial advisors and think-tanks (Bloomberg NEF, 2018; Sivaram, 2018) to centre-left enthusiasts (Brown, 2015; Scheer, 2004) to full solar communists (Schwartzman, 2013), are bullish about the promise of solar. This broad base of enthusiasm points to how solar power brings with it not just a viable source of energy, but a sense of utopian possibility too. Simultaneously, a poetics of weightlessness and light, of being sheer surface without depth or footprint, has come to dominate popular, corporate, and even activist representations of solar technologies. This widespread uptake is due to solar’s narrative and aesthetic affordance as an interrupting surface, acting to break the purchase of history upon the present, and excusing imaginaries of the future from the need to engage with the past – a perfect technology for utopian and catastrophic thinking alike.
The poetics of solar perform an ontological and political assertion in an aesthetic register. Photovoltaic solar (PV), from ubiquitous panels to experimental paint, is the apotheosis of solar as surface. Fully distributable and extendable, it carries the promise of coating every facet of our energy-dependent technological society, sealing off buildings and infrastructure from the troubled networks of fossil fuel extraction, distribution, and consumption, and interrupting the present’s dependence upon them. Whatever it touches, it appears to liberate from the problems inherent in a relationship to depth and history and the difficulties of the metabolic rift of fossil-fuel consumption driving up the inexorable carbon counter of parts per million. In doing so it facilitates a narrative in which the present can continue without radical change – without addressing the inequities of our history – requiring merely a lick of (PV) paint to transform it into the figure of a shiny clean future. In imaginaries ranging from Ian McEwan’s realist novel Solar (2018) through neoliberal futures (e.g., Sivaram, 2018) to the radical speculative solarpunk canon (Williams, 2019) solar takes the form of sheer interrupting surface, with the narrative affordance of negating history and offering a fresh start, of redemption from the past, no matter how undeserved. The following is typical of the solarpunk genre’s utopian hope:
we is some fresh starts, yes.
We does soar over sighing tragedy,
the heaving high tide of Mama Dlo short of breath,
and laugh, cheer the wind on as we float.
We is some rebels, yes.
(O’Brian, 2017)
The rebellion here, like the agency and change in all these narratives that ride on a wave of interrupting solar, threatens to be skin deep, possible only by neglecting History and Politics – by making a ‘fresh start’. Solar as fresh start – hand-in-hand with a series of other trumpeted technologies from carbon scrubbers (literally cleaning history) to New Food (techno-foods dislocated from soil or season) – provides techno-utopian imaginaries with the sense of a narrative rupture they need to function. One more thing they say, one more push, one more invention, and then we will be past this catastrophe, out the other side to utopia, to rest.
But there will be no rest. These technological promises of a rupture with the past and the beginning of a gleaming future provide the means to facilitate a more profound continuation, from fossil capital to solar capital, or whatever name we give it. Under the shiny new assemblages promised, even if they are achieved, nothing will have fundamentally changed without engagement with the past, and with the present as shaped by that past. Narratives of rupture, whether catastrophic or utopian, serve one key purpose. They keep us tied to the basic structures of the present moment, and rob us of agency to uproot them. The specificity of catastrophe-as-rupture is that by claiming we are in an in-between period, it both suggests that the basic structures are shifting already and that we must fall back on what we have and know simply in order to survive. No infinite possibility here: instead ‘everything is changing’ and ‘now is not the time to change things.’ One rupture is met by another: by promising a rupture that will fix everything – some new technology or other – techno-utopianism also suggests at the same time that ‘everything will change’ and that ‘we are already doing the right thing to bring about that change’. Both reject any possibility of engaging with History and Politics, instead they suggest that all we need to do is hold on, push a little further, keep going a little longer, and we will reach some state of rest or at least reset. But this is not the case, it is only a narrative trick, to maintain a sense of breathless movement while remaining unable to consider action that might tackle the problems we face at a more fundamental political level.
Bibliography
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