Formatting Human Agency

by Pieter Vermeulen

You may find a German translation of this article here: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/348

In a 2019 report, the global sustainable development consultancy ARUP offers four plausible scenarios for what the world will look like in 2050. These scenarios, the report explains, are “intended to develop a vocabulary and framework to help us envision different plausible futures” (68). As is typical of the genre, the consultancy report is a hybrid of textual and visual constituents. Pictures, infographics, and drawings share the page with vignettes that tell the stories of what it might mean to inhabit one of these scenarios in 2050. Might mean: the stories are plausible, not real (yet), and the world they illustrate might or might not come into existence by 2050. Strategic consulting here shades into the domain of fiction, of literature—of forms of discourse constrained by criteria of plausibility rather than factuality.

Recent work in literary studies has begun to explore how contemporary literature has developed strategies to encode uncertainty—to design forms of speculative rather than mimetic world-building, to develop a kind of upscaled planetary realism, or to juxtapose different ontologies in order to salvage a role for human agency. Reading consultancy reports reveals that the challenge to incorporate uncertainty and find a place for human action is shared between literary and nonliterary forms.

Novelist Hari Kunzru has recently identified the emergent genre of the apocalyptic systems thriller—a kind of deeply researched disaster fiction that functions as a form of scenario planning for near future global crises (Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is paradigmatic here). This genre competently and exhaustively lays out the systemic forces that determine planetary life, while it remains committed to the possibility of human agency meaningfully intervening in the future of life of Earth. In his response to Kunzru, international affairs scholar Henry Farrell has noted that the kind of scholarly books he himself tends to write faces exactly the same challenges as the writers of apocalyptic systems thrillers do: that of striking a balance between vast systemic forces (climate change, market power, financialization, geopolitical drift, …) on the one hand and human agency on the other.

Returning these insights to the ARUP report, it is striking to see that it leaves the question of human agency largely unaddressed. While it imagines different timelines to the possible futures it imagines (“2033: Black market sand at an all-time high”; “2037: Indonesia goes circular”), it rarely identifies the specific actors that would help bring those worlds into existence. Instead, the report relies on a rhetorical mobilization of an unspecified (and presumed to be universal) “we,” most spectacularly and breathlessly in ARUP’s Director of Global Foresight, Research and Innovation’s foreword, which ends with a cascade of first-person pronouns: “To help us understand and plan for our communal future, sometimes we must push ourselves to imagine the possible. To think outside of our daily lives, and envision the world as it could be, should be, might be, what we hope it will be and what we hope it won’t be. Although future pathways are not clear, we can, and must, move forward with both aspiration and intent. These scenarios should help us to consider how we craft the parameters of that intent.”

Criticism of the notion of the Anthropocene has not ceased to point out that the anthropos, the version of human life, that it centers is a false generalization that obliterates vast differences between different groups of humans. It has time and again argued that the notion of the Anthropocene, by declining to specify different constituencies, surreptitiously puts forward a normative account of human life (both negatively and positively: condemning the forces that got us in this mess, and upholding those that are supposed to get us out if it). The quotation above illustrates how assumptions of agency coincide with encrypted normativity, as it compounds the vagueness of the first person plural with shifting modalities—“could,” “should,” “might,” “we can, and must,” “should,” … The drift of these terms illustrates a lack of direction that is characteristic of many Anthropocene discourses.

The most striking feature of the report is an illustration on page 8:

This matrix brings together the four scenarios the rest of the report elaborates. This diagram is, like every diagram, not neutral. The four-square matrix organizes the four scenarios around two axes: planetary health and societal condition. I have become fascinated by such 2×2 speculative matrices, which not only abound in consultancy reports, but also in online self-help discourses, policy reports, and more recently also in political and critical theory. These matrices seem to have a particular rhetorical force: they present the future as open (there are still several options, nothing is lost), but not too open (there are exactly four—our brains can handle that); they seem to present these four options as equally valid or likely, yet the choice of the axes, the labels (who would ever go for “Extinction Express?”), and even the color code (blue is never bad) nudge the audience toward a normative account of the future (in this case, to the sustainable future of what it calls the Post Anthropocene); they do not specify the viability of human agency, but by presenting the future as a matter of choice between four options, they at least smuggle in a form of agency; also, their resemblance to scientific graphs evokes a kind of empirical grounding that is far from obvious in such imaginings of the future.

How precisely do such speculative matrices operate? How do they encode uncertainty, agency, and normativity in ways that do not force their authors (or their audience) to spell out their convictions—or their lack of conviction? And what does it mean that such matrices have now also become a part of critical discourse? These and other questions have so far gone unaddressed, but their answers might tell us something important about the affordances and limits of Anthropocene storytelling.

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