Abstract
How do we imagine a transition from the Capitalocene, our current era of fossil fuel capital induced climate breakdown, to a more ecologically sustainable and a more just society? What forces, institutions, agents and their interactions constitute this social imaginary of transition? How does contemporary political climate (or climatic politics) shape our perceptions of desirable and/or possible courses of transition? Employing the notion of “social imaginary” - describing the dimension of the social world through which our shared collective life is represented, and which underlies various institutions into a coherent-yet-contradictory social whole – I analyse how the imaginary of social transition is constituted in the works American science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson and Swedish social theorist Andreas Malm. The notion of social imaginary allows to analyse works from different areas – in this case, science-fiction literature and social theory - as different representations or variations of shared imaginary. How do contemporary social contradictions shape this imaginary? Focusing on K. S. Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future (2020) and Andreas Malm provocative book How to Blow-up a Pipeline (2021), I observe how a new and disturbing element intrudes in our social imaginary of transition, namely eco-terrorism. Without idealising it, both authors approach it as inevitably arising from contemporary contradictions and attempt to deal with it constructively in their accounts of green transition. Eco-terrorism therefore functions as a social symptom of the times, and I ask how it shapes the social imaginary represented in the works of the two authors.
Presenters
Egidijus MardosasPostdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, Vilnius University, Lithuania
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Literary Landscapes: Forms of Knowledge in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Capitalocene, Social Imaginary, Eco-Terrorism, Transition
