Speculative Nature Writing: Feeling for the Future

过去十年，环境话语从关注“减轻气候变化影响”转向“转型适应”理念（Feola 2014）。针对未能遏制排放和实现目标的情况，转型适应认为增量变革现在还不够（Lonsdale 等，2015）。更深层次、更全面的变革已成为必要的社会战略和/或不可避免的资源稀缺和过度依赖不可持续做法的反应。这种转变会是什么样子，我们才刚刚开始了解。如此大规模地打破现有的行为结构既是激进想象力的壮举，也是雄心勃勃的实施的壮举。这个项目旨在与这种激进的想象力合作——乌托邦、反乌托邦，或者更有可能的是，两者纠缠在一起，如玛格丽特·阿特伍德所说的“乌托邦”（Atwood 2011）。它将探讨与环境有关的文学作品如何帮助读者面对我们与风景、野生动物和气候的关系发生根本性变化的必要性和不可避免性。文学可能涉及变革性适应的潜力，它需要对未来的批判性定位，超越我们在许多“气候小说”及其相关批评中看到的对灾难的狭隘关注。詹姆森一直批评此类作品对当代焦虑的重复阐述，表明他未能真正想象出激进的“差异”的未来（2007）。对于詹姆森来说，打破当代条件的僵局最显着的方式是通过形式创新，因为作者会触及目前可能无法言喻的事物。该项目承诺在这样的形式水平上开展工作。该项目将有关未来气候和生物多样性情景的科学研究和与自然写作惯例（包括某些科学研究的惯例）有关的文学批评研究结合在一起，承诺以干预主导思维模式的方式进行形式实验，并开始阐明可能的未来。它旨在将当前关于自然写作的争论从回顾性和症状性批评中转移出来，转而提出批判性和创造性的共同努力如何有助于产生具有前瞻性的新鲜和令人不安的写作。其核心是试图通过在看似混乱和抽象不确定的未来中提供情感立足点来应对必要且不可避免的变化。来自世界各地的气候科学（IPCC 报告 2018）和生物多样性研究（IPBES 报告 2019）提供了有关地球系统崩溃、野生动物灭绝以及当前危机政治反应不足的令人深感不安的信息。但问题的相互关联（“邪恶”）复杂性和数据的庞大规模可能会产生令人麻木的不足感。当人们试图将部分和本地化的机构与如此抽象的高级数据联系起来时，蒂莫西·克拉克（Timothy Clark）所说的“规模混乱”正在发挥作用。野生动物保护主义者休·沃里克在最近的一次公共活动中被问到一个问题，这就是这一困境的缩影：“为了帮助刺猬，我应该在花园里做一件事是什么？” - 他回答说：“打倒资本主义。”思辨自然写作具有独特的叙事模式，可以为读者提供对尚不存在的特定景观或“生活世界”的不可思议的基础和具体的“漫游”。但它将利用这种流行的非小说类型的熟悉惯例和模式进行有趣和创新的实验，以记录目前难以理解的可能性，令人不安、激发和扩展道德想象力。

The last ten years have seen a shift in environmental discourse from a focus on 'mitigation of the effects of climate change' to the idea of 'transformational adaptation' (Feola 2014). Responding to a failure to curb emissions and meet targets, transformational adaptation argues that incremental change is now insufficient (Lonsdale et al., 2015). A deeper and more holistic change has become both necessary as a societal strategy and/or inevitable as a reaction to scarcity of resources and overreliance on unsustainable practices. What this transformation will look like, we are only beginning to understand. Breaking with present structures of behaviour on such a grand scale should be both a feat of radical imagination and ambitious implementation. This project aims to work with this radical imagination - utopian, dystopian or, more likely, both tangled together, 'ustopian' as Margaret Atwood has it (Atwood 2011). It will look at ways in which literary writing concerned with the environment can help its readers to confront both the need for, and the inevitability of, radical change in our relationship with landscape, wildlife and climate.Where literature might engage with the potential for transformative adaptation, it requires a critical orientation towards the future that goes beyond the narrow focus on catastrophe that we have seen in much 'cli fi' and its associated criticism. Jameson has been critical of such work's repetitive articulation of contemporary anxieties, suggesting a failure to really imagine a future of radical 'Difference' (2007). For Jameson, a break with the impasse of contemporary conditions happens most prominently through formal innovation as authors reach towards that which may be unsayable in the present. This project promises to work at just such a level of form.Bringing together scientific research on future climate and biodiversity scenarios and literary critical research concerned with nature writing conventions (including the conventions of some of this scientific research), the project promises to experiment with form in ways that intervene in dominant modes of thinking and begin to articulate possible futures. It aims to shift current debates about nature writing away from retrospective and symptomatic critiques and asks instead how critical and creative work together might help to produce fresh and unsettling writing with a prospective orientation. At its heart, there is an attempt to confront necessary and inevitable change by providing affective footholds in a future that seems chaotically and abstractly uncertain. Climate science (IPCC Report 2018) and biodiversity research (IPBES Report 2019) from around the world offer profoundly disturbing information about earth-system breakdown, wildlife extinction and the inadequacy of the current political response to the crisis. But the interconnected ('wicked') complexity of the problem and the sheer scale of the data can produce paralysing feelings of inadequacy. There is what Timothy Clark has called a 'derangement of scale' at work here as one tries to connect a partial and localised agency to such abstract, high-level data. Epitomising this predicament, wildlife conservationist Hugh Warwick was asked a question at a recent public event - 'What is the one thing I should do in my garden to help hedgehogs?' - to which he replied: 'Bring down capitalism.' Speculative nature writing is uniquely equipped as a narrative model that can offer its reader an uncannily grounded and embodied 'walk-through' of a particular landscape or 'life-world' that does not yet exist. But it will use playful and innovative experiments with the familiar conventions and modes of this popular non-fiction genre to register possibilities it is difficult to apprehend in the present, unnerving and provoking and stretching the moral imagination.