The Catachronism of Climate Change

Abstract

This essay analyzes how climate change criticism revises nuclear criticism. While nuclear criticism is deployed to ward off nuclear apocalypticism, climate change criticism comes into being at a moment when scientists interpret past and present actions as leading to an irreversible outcome. The concept of the Anthropocene shifts criticism’s focus from being a social science of interactive life to becoming a natural science of species death. As a form of catachronism, the Anthropocene reimagines the history of the past and the present by reference to an unrealized future proclaimed as inevitable. A post-Kantian conflict of the faculties is under way, including a philosophical shift from nuclear texts to Anthropocene objects. This essay declares that the shift from texts to objects and from interactionism to objectivism is solipsistic and unproductive. Instead of obsessing about objects, climate change criticism can delineate the forms of agency that might exist even after apocalypse.

Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction

“…Moreover, if new scholarship should take into account such non-human traces of the past, it should also consider that climate change imaginaries frequently foreground the topic of future 'memories' that may postdate human existence upon this planet, warping the usual direction of memory research through this 'catachronism'. 33 As Paul Saint-Amour has recently argued in a study of total war discourse, the fear of civilisational collapse forces us to analyse anxious anticipations of future annihilation as well as memories of past and ongoing calamities. 34 Thus, we suggest, the Anthropocene also changes everything for memory studies.…”

Fashion, Sustainability, and the Anthropocene

“…The concept of the Anthropocene is consonant with utopianism, as the "Anthropocene reimagines the history of the past and the present by reference to an unrealized future." 55 Optimists foresee the unfolding Anthropocene as enabling new and improved societies. For example, Erle Ellis somewhat controversially asserts that "we must not see the Anthropocene as a crisis, but as the beginning of a new geological epoch ripe with human-directed opportunity" and therefore utopian promise.…”

Climate change in literature and literary studies: From cli‐fi, climate change theater and ecopoetry to ecocriticism and climate change criticism

“…While climate change criticism shows no signs of abatement, it must be pointed out that it has, in turn, generated its own criticism. Gaston queries the idea that the Anthropocene is a profound challenge to representation and cautions against what he calls ‘green deconstruction.’ Aravamudan reads critical climate change as catachronistic, that is, as applying a future event to present criticism, and, in doing so, compares it unfavorably with the mid‐20th‐century movement he calls nuclear criticism, that is, the literary theories that surrounded the cold war in the nuclear age . For Aravamudan, because nuclear criticism was interested in texts rather than objects, it was able to imagine an agency after the apocalypse, which climate change criticism is not yet able to do.…”