Speculative fabulation

The last session of my Summer School class was a blast. I spent the first half synthesizing themes from the past sessions and contextualizing the final reading, the "Camille Stories" at the end of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble. Lots of good stuff, a final fireworks display celebrating the contributions the humanities make to living into the Anthropocene (and what Haraway sees as its more hopeful successor, the "chthulucene")! But the real fun came next. I'd started the class with student groups proposing definitions of the humanities, and wanted to end it with their voices, too. 

The midterm paper had asked them to reflect on storytelling in the Anthropocene and the "Camille Stories" are a bravura work of storytelling Haraway calls "speculative fabulation." The "Camille Stories" emerged from the collaboration of three people at a weeklong seminar (at Cérisy), tasked with crafting a narration spéculative extending five generations into the future, and the result brought the concerns of all the participants together into a story whose "possible futures" reflect back to us "implausible but real nows" - possibilities we might not otherwise have seen. We had less time and bigger groups but I wanted them to work together one more time.

The prompt asked them to tell a story which starts in 75 years - a span I chose because it would be near, or just beyond, the ends of their lives. (This is a year with lots of centennial posturing in China so I abandoned the initial 100.) I didn't know what they would do - the prompt is pretty minimal, and thirty minutes not a lot of time - but they've worked together well over past sessions, and I'd been making much of the fact that our six groups always generated excitingly different, if consonant, projects. And they didn't disappoint.

Group 1 told of an Anthropocene Museum, built in a submerged state building. A variety of visitors respond in different ways - a bored child eager to return to its robot puppy, an architect nostalgic for the cultural spirit and connotation of the buildings of the past, unlike the functional structures which have replaced them. A middle aged man is briefly bothered and then comforts himself with the thought that surely his generation will escape a similar fate, while an older man, who had moved from a submerged country in the Pacific Ocean decades before worries that lessons haven't been learned. And one more: I'm a cyborg. My body is metal, but I have a human heart. How time flies, the once tall building is now just a ruin. My metallic body has no memory of these ruins. But why is my human heart beating so fast, it seems extremely sad. I'm not a fully human, but disasters still make me feel down.

Group 2 imagined that, by 75 years from now, 90% of the population will have lost their home town and, unless they can find another place to reside, are put by the authority into a deep sleep. They have consciousness, they are still alive, but they can only act in their dreams, where they are scientists developing new time and space technologies and spend their spare time in a VR (virtual reality) game. High-level decision makers are divided into two factions. The power faction advocates the continuation of high-tech industrial production for the purpose of capital. In industrial production, people living in real life are either laborers or managers. While industrial production is ostensibly about keeping the earth running with an artificial ecosystem self-cycling, it is actually about sacrificing a portion of the labor force to meet the needs of the frozen people, because the frozen people need energy replenishment in Cyberspace, in the VR scenario game. The leaders of this part of the labor force advocate revolution, eventually overthrowing oppression, gaining a voice, achieving communication with the frozen scientists, and seeking a solution for coexistence.

Group 3's protagonist was born on a garbage island, and, having seen most of the rest of the population die of thirst as water sources dry up, decides to pack up their bits of copper wiring and radioactive steel waste and leave the island for a better life. Suddenly, all the people who had fled stopped. They saw the scene across the sea bridge - fire and ruins. People's sanity began to collapse, and they began to run aimlessly. What exactly is the Anthropocene? Look at the world now and I just hate it. It starts with human beings and eventually feeds back to human beings. If, I mean, if we had controlled our desires earlier and taken more precautions, would we have seen a different human world?

I'll share the other three groups' stories with you tomorrow. All the stories are a little dystopian, as the topic demands! But they also surface "implausible but real nows," introduce us to imaginaries different from but consonant with those my American students might generate. A good number of the students have also availed themselves of the option to write a story as their final paper (many assuring me they've never written one before), so I look forward to even more!