Abstract
History is humankind trying to get a grip. Obviously not easy. But it could go better if you would pay a little more attention to certain details, like for instance your planet. (Robinson, 2017: 145) So look, the problem is capitalism. We’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws. That’s what capitalism is, a set of stupid laws. (Robinson, 2017: 5)
Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, published over the period 2004–2007, has the feel of a parallel history of the past decade. He sketches a world in which the ‘good guys’ suddenly find themselves in charge and take seriously the challenge of climate change. In this narrative Phil Chase, the most environmentally aware senator in the United States, becomes US President and gives Science (in the form of the US National Science Foundation) a central place in political decision making, while enthusiastically embracing a true internationalist agenda. In contrast to much of Climate-Fiction, the trilogy does not indulge in the aesthetics of disaster/catastrophe (although there are some memorable scenes of the great Washington flood and freeze). Robinson has an interest in catastrophe-as-event (the subtitles of the first two books are The Forecast is Catastrophic and Catastrophe is in the Air), but the real ‘catastrophe’, he seems to suggest, is actually the system we have created. Now is the ‘moment of the storm’ (Robinson, 2009: 4):
The system cries: it’s not me! As if it could be anything else, given that human beings are doing it, and capitalism is the way human beings now organize themselves … The system claims … ‘I’m the cure!’ And on it goes, and pretty soon we’re left with a devastated world. (Robinson, 2007: 377)
Robinson (2005) has a go at the logic of neo-classical economics which seems to ensnare us all, coming up with some memorable phrases such as ‘Economics is incorrigible. They call it the dismal science but actually it’s the happy religion’ (p. 89), and ‘Free market economics is a plan – it plans to give over all decisions to the blind hand of the market. But the blind hand never picks up the check. And, you know – it’s blind …’ (Robinson, 2007: 509). The serious point Robinson (2004) is trying to make is that our current socio-economic set-up simply cannot provide mechanisms for dealing effectively with the challenges of climate chaos: ‘If the Earth were to suffer a catastrophic extinction event over the next ten years … American business would continue to focus on its quarterly profit and loss’ (p. 109). Furthermore, the plethora of information and sheer amount of organizations involved in dealing with climate change has in itself become a source of paralysis Robinson (2005) proffers,
So much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from ‘desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored’ to ‘minor problems robustly dealt with’. It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation. (p. 94)
This brings Robinson to the crux of our organizational predicament which he repeats over and over again throughout the novels (e.g. Robinson, 2005: 137, 253, 2007: 105): ‘This is the real problem: we know but we can’t act’! He also describes this as ‘a kind of vertigo in time, a loss of balance in one’s sense of movement into the future’ (Robinson, 2007: 343). A character in the novel thus wonders whether we have ‘lost touch with reality, gone mad as a collective’ (Robinson, 2005: 32; also 2007: 216). Monbiot (2013) echoed this imaginative deadlock when commenting on the release of the IPPC’s latest report: ‘This is a catastrophe we are capable of foreseeing but incapable of imagining. It’s a catastrophe we are singularly ill-equipped to prevent’. It is precisely on this re-awakening of our imagination that Robinson pins our hope for survival without giving it any actual content. What could we do, he wonders, if we weren’t trapped in our current institutions and imaginaries?
I think for a while we forgot what was possible. Our way of life damaged our ability to imagine anything different. Maybe we are rarely good at imagining that things could be different. Maybe that’s what we mean when we talk about the Enlightenment. For a while there we understood that the ultimate source of power is the imagination … We are going to have to imagine our way out of this one. (Robinson, 2007: 507, 509)
Robinson wonders throughout these books what futures are still possible given the conditions of the present, but ultimately fails to come up with an answer. Every time protagonists want to make a change they quickly discover that any given feature entertains a multitude of unexpected yet constitutive links with all the other features in the system. All that is ‘achievable’ are some spectacular but probably futile geo-engineering projects, like sinking millions of tons of salt to restart the Gulfstream. Toward the end of the final novel the ‘climate catastrophe’ almost entirely disappears from the narrative and the individual protagonists find some personal resolutions and happiness in a strange temporary and fragile return to ‘normality’. Yet, this imaginative failure of the trilogy – that is, a change in individual features of our current reality that could make a real difference – perhaps provided Robinson with the motivation to write his latest novel.
In New York 2140, Robinson presents us with the consequences of our imaginative failure. The picture he paints (and which is beautifully rendered on the front cover of the book) reminds us of Blanchot’s (1995) famous reflection: ‘The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact’. By 2140, New York has had to face a 50-foot rise in sea level; yet despite being half-drowned it is still a functioning megalopolis: ‘Lower Manhattan lies flooded below them like a super-Venice, majestic, watery, superb. Their town (p. 6)’. This is a world where Capitalism has successfully adapted to the challenges of climate change, but also one of an accelerated immiserating of vast swathes of the population (only an American perspective is offered):
Am I saying that the floods … were actually good for capitalism? Yes, I am. (p. 118) All people needed to do to deal with it was to buckle down in their traces and accept the idea of austerity, meaning more poverty for the poor, and accept a police state with lots of free speech and freaky lifestyles velvet-gloving the iron fist, and hey presto! On we go with the show! Humans are so tough. (p. 141)
While the Science in the City trilogy from the noughties was about the relation of politics and science with climate change, Robinson’s latest offering is very much about financial capitalism and its societal effects in a climate changed world, and this time round he is determined to sketch out new lines of flight. As he put it in a recent interview (Robinson and Billings, 2017), ‘Extreme climate change is being caused in part by capitalist economics, so we have to change the latter to be able to deal with the former. New York 2140 will tell the story of the first steps we might take in that direction’. The book is divided into eight parts and most of the titles read like an ironic take on an economics primer: ‘The tyranny of sunk costs’; ‘expert overconfidence’; ‘liquidity trap’; ‘expensive or priceless?’; ‘escalation of commitment’, ‘the comedy of the commons’. Each of these parts is subdivided into chapters which see the story developing from the perspective of one of the protagonists. In a clever textual move, Robinson also introduces a character called ‘a/the citizen’ who exists in a metafictional relationship with the rest of the text and which allows him to weave a thinly fictionalized socio-political analysis throughout all eight parts (often harking back to the events and (in)actions of 2008). At times, the drowned city of New York seems only a stage set, albeit a spectacular one, to provide an analysis of late capitalism and explore alternative financial ideas. But this is perfectly fine for this reviewer. Robinson explicitly acknowledges, in the book itself and in subsequent promotional interviews (e.g. Robinson and Billings, 2017), the influence of scholars who are very active in the Critical Finance Studies (CFS) community and who will be well known to a significant part of the readership of Organization: Dick Bryan, Robert Meister, and the late Randy Martin. There is something deeply satisfying about theoretical ideas developed in our wider academic community being put to work by an accomplished novelist in an intricate plot that tries to conceive of our socio-economic totality in new ways, allowing ‘a small-scale model to be constructed on which the fundamental tendencies and the lines of flight can more clearly be read’ (Jameson, 2005: 14). The ‘revolution’, if we can call it that, takes up the latter half of part seven and most of part eight. Of course it is difficult to do justice to the concatenation of events that take up the last 100 pages of the novel within the confines of this review, but a few glimpses might tempt potential readers to explore for themselves this alternative future when and where people suddenly effect their solidarity as a political force – ‘We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real’ (p. 527):
Strategic defaulting. Class-action suits. Mass rallies. Staying home from work. Staying out of private transport systems. Refusing consumer consumption beyond the necessities. Withdrawing deposits. Denouncing all forms of rent-seeking. Ignoring mass media. Withholding scheduled payments. Fiscal noncompliance. Loud public complaining …. So in the summer of 2142 people started doing all these things. The actors were many, as there was no cohesion or agreement on either means or ends … There was a powerful sense of some underwater current in the global civilization now pulling it out into an unknown sea. History was happening. When that happens you can feel it. (pp. 531–532)
In a way, New York 2140 can be conceived of as a positive response to Ghosh’s (2016) accusation that ‘climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction that it does even in the public arena’ (p. 7). The climate crisis is therefore also a fundamental crisis of the imagination, Ghosh goes on to suggest in his rather dark book. Robinson’s great achievement is the seamless weaving together of theories and concepts put forward in the very pages of this journal (including recent work on non-human actors) into an imaginative plot that offers a genuine affirmative alternative future history, while not being so naïve as to guarantee the permanence of this open future, ‘because people are crazy and history never ends’ (p. 604). It is therefore only appropriate to have Robinson have the last word in a paragraph where the narrator looks back, somewhat nostalgically, to the events of 2042:
It’s always more than what you see, bigger than what you know. That said, people in this era did do it. Individuals make history, but it’s also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time … History happened. It does not stop happening. Seemingly frozen moments are transient, they break up like the spring ice, and then change occurs. So: individuals, groups, civilization, and the planet itself all did these things, in actor networks of all kinds. (p. 604)