bordarretazos

“One might think of this as a pre-condition for a certain kind of science. The object of study has to be delimited in time and space, to be bracketed off from the world. This stable object of study then has to yield regularities to be considered an object of knowledge at all. The «freak storm» can’t then appear, as it is outside the starting parameters.

In a startling move, Ghosh links this habit of thought to the categories of setting and period in the novel. The novel too exists because of discontinuities. Setting and period define a stable object. Setting as metonym for the nation; period as metonym for history. A certain kind of science and a certain kind of fiction exist because of this carving out of a miniature stable world. One might almost say then that all modern fiction is science fiction.

(…)

The bourgeois novel generally draws a sharp distinction between the human and the nonhuman, and concerns itself with actions, motivations and inner lives of its humans. Not only are the setting and period discontinuous with the world (although sometimes a metonym for it), the actions of the humans are discontinuous with other agents. “But the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities…” (62) Ghosh sees this as a problem, as he sees understanding climate change as a problem of understanding continuities. But he wants to see the human as continuous with the nonhuman while playing a bit less attention to the inhuman, to collective labor and its instruments. The emphasis on the continuous is also a bit one sided, given that climate change results from a metabolic rift, a discontinuity, in the way imperial and commodified systems of production function.”

McKensie Wark, aquí: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3356-on-the-obsolescence-of-the-bourgeois-novel-in-the-anthropocene