Roy Scranton: Narrative in the Anthropocene is the Enemy

Narrative is the enemy. Narrative is a trick to seduce the mind into making sense of reality, a way of structuring the unknown that presumes we already know how things will end: two sides to any debate, the hero’s quest, the marriage plot, trauma and recovery, struggle and overcoming, triumph of the will, the journey, the road, there and back again. Narrative is how we reassure ourselves everything’s going to be ok.

Narrative is the preferred self-imprisonment of: gamblers, sexual predators, professional victims, malignant narcissists, the mainstream media, corporate drones, addicts, the perpetually disappointed, children, bourgeois elites, the benighted masses, the dwindling middle class, ethnonationalists, the hopeful, the innocent, the sinning, the damned. Narrative is the escape room of the soul.

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Narrative functions through erasure, misrepresentation, and deceit. Narrative reprocesses the raw experience of sensory data into socially sanctioned collective hallucination. We binge-watch to distract ourselves from the apocalyptic tedium of our day-to-day lives, which is enlivened only by flagrant acts of racialized police violence, the occasional mass shooting, political scandals, and the catastrophic upheavals promised by climate change. We read stories to confirm our sense of ourselves as engaged in real struggles, hoping real hopes, fighting real foes. Meanwhile the true enemy lurks within.

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Let us be clear about our situation. We live in the early stages of a global ecological collapse that will make much of the equatorial region and most seaboards unlivable, cause widespread famine and political conflict, generate mass human death and mass non-human extinction, and return human life to the abject submission to natural disaster which was its state prior to industrialization.

We face the probable collapse of civilization as we know it within decades and the possible extinction of the human species within centuries. The idea that human culture will persist into the future in any recognizable state is a conceit which no longer bears examining, for to even ask the question of what the future holds today is to face an abyss of suffering that defies all reasonable thought.

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Some say we need stories of hope. Some say we should tell the human story. Some say September’s climate strikes will kickstart a huge wave of action and renewed ambition all over the world. Some say we need a Green New Deal, total mobilization, a new sunrise, while others say we need a wall, America First, Make America Great Again. All these stories where we pretend to control the future.

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Wolverine dies in the end. No superhero is going to avert the catastrophe, inspire billions to revolt, or convince world leaders to pull us out of our death trip. Narrative is a layer of delusion wedged against reality.

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You: But that’s nihilism! We have to keep fighting! We can’t submit to despair!

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Me: But have you tried? You might consider this perspective: we’re precociously clever carbon-based apes living on a rock in space who, with the dumb vigor of nature, have overbred our environment. The universe is thought to be around 13.8 billion years old. The planet we live on is thought to be around 4.5 billion years old. The species of which you and I are members is around 200,000 years old. Civilization—meaning human life organized in cities—and writing, which evolved together, are around 6,000 years old.

Industrialized carbon-fueled society and the United States government, which also evolved together, are a little more than 200 years old. The internet as we know it, the “world wide web” of text-and-graphic “pages” accessible by “web browsers,” is 30 years old, as is the global campaign by scientists to alert world leaders to the dangers of climate change.

All the wonders with which we bedazzle ourselves are a snap in the long grind of ecological, geological, and cosmic time. None of this shit will last. Nothing you think matters matters. No one’s going to escape, no one’s going to upload their soul to the internet, Skynet’s not going to save us, there is no God, no alien invasion will force us to unify, Captain Marvel isn’t coming, Elon Musk isn’t going to invent an infinite battery and affordable carbon scrubbers, the right story isn’t going to inspire a global revolution, democracy will not win, we’re not going to solve inequality and injustice, we will not keep global temperature increases below 2°C above pre-industrial averages, your wayward and meaningless life will not be redeemed by art.

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Alas! what boots it with incessant care to tend the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade, since imposing travel restrictions “can actually hamper the fight” as nervous Republicans, from senior members of Congress to his own daughter replies 2 retweets 1 like direct message stop daydreaming and start packing for connecting service from LA pedophile conspiracies acting as a sort of propaganda of the counterrevolution, a fun-house reflection of the real threats to the social order, but the conspiracy is basically the same:

retweet the thankless Muse on Thursday to “send her back” chant for nature podcasts—loads of mind expanding stuff here featuring Amaryllis in the shade, in the middle of denouncing her as an anti-American leftist who’s spoken in “vicious, anti-Semitic screeds” when one of the most mysterious archaeological monuments in Russia—ruins of Por-Bajin palace in Tuva—was erected on an island in Lake Tere-Khol by 770 AD, allegedly for a Chinese wife of Uighur or Turk Kha Khan, who had never reached her summer 1 reply 11 retweets 22 likes direct message

Margaret that last infirmity of noble mind, to scorn delights and live laborious days; but the fair guerdon when we hope to find, as the crowd roared “send her back,” Mr. Trump paused and looked around silently for more than 10 seconds as the scene unfolded in front of him, doing nothing almost as though 17+ years of war nationalism pointed at the same vague enemy and talked about relentlessly in right-leaning media maybe prepared the audience to express vocally the hate they already had @BirdLife_News 2 hours ago more think this project is the bees knees, but comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears and slits the thin-spun midway through that race, in the context of a broader article on the humanities at community colleges & some exciting @MellonFdn programs to support #communityCollege transfer students—often deeply invested in “community and identity and storytelling”—seeking 4-year degrees—

severe storms are possible over SW UK, Wales, NE Turkey and Georgia! “Some large hail, torrential rainfall and severe wind no plant that grows on mortal soil, nor in the glistering foil like we did the ‘lock her up’ last time,” said @NatureNews 12 minutes ago.

The feat could improve our understanding of how the brain interprets and acts on what the eyes see—and perhaps even lead to the development of devices that would help visually-impaired people to see by those pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging Jove; as he pronounces lastly on each deed, the people familiar with the discussions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, without actionable insights, data is only data. More granularity as the new frontier of violence, discipline, brings into view the whole family. We are the world’s No. 1 in air compensation! #ExtinctionRebelion #ActOnClimate #ClimateChange

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Narrative seduces. Narrative misunderstands. Narrative confuses. Narrative lies. Narrative is the enemy. Narrative is inevitable, for without narrative, human existence is absurd, human experience a surging delirium. Apprehending existence as meaningless flow may be more empirically accurate, but it is also the most spiritually demanding: the saint’s path, the bodhisattva’s vow. Until we achieve nirvana, you and I remain trapped in dying, desiring bodies, and indeed only exist in and through them. We are born into the cage of narrative—a cage with only one escape.

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So here we are. Here I am, sitting at a computer, typing an essay I promised someone I would write. I have to make breakfast, take my daughter to daycare, do laundry, pack, take some boxes to the post office, and get ready for a two-week road trip across the country. Meditating on the meaningless teleological drift of human existence has its salubrious qualities: cultivating patience, nurturing compassion, detaching from egoistic clinging to self-destructive fantasies, helping to manage my attention so that I focus on what is in front of me instead of on the notions and emotions swirling through my brain.

These are some of the reasons why learning to die has been a cornerstone of philosophical thought from Plato and Vyasa to Heidegger and D.T. Suzuki. And perhaps if I had some straightforward, grounded occupation, such as chopping wood or carrying water, that would be enough. But somewhere along the line I made the mistake of giving myself to words and stories. Regrettably, I spent many years working very hard to be an intellectual (hiss!), a writer (boo!), even a poet (gag!).

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Moreover, while some of us might could find the fortitude within to settle into placid, compassionate satori, most of us are too tangled up in each other to take up the isolation of the lotus tree. Desire remains in effect, even if we know better. My daughter, for example, has awakened and wants to be held. I can hear her through our child surveillance monitor. I want to go to her and tell her “Good morning,” even as I know that each new morning brings us that much closer to catastrophe, collapse, and death.

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I have this day. And this day. And this. Nothing essential connects one moment to another except the fact that all things are entangled in the same continuous flow of space-time. You, reader, are me, a writer, and we both are dying coral, a wounded mooer, the great Pacific garbage patch, stardust.

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Narrative, of course, and more broadly language, has many uses, deception being only one of them. Narrative may be used to pose riddles, weave masks, interrupt, digress, perhaps make space for silence. Narrative may be deployed against itself in order to knock holes in the plasterboard of cheap belief, undermine our faith in reality, unground our prejudiced senses of justice and truth. Deceit may be folded into deceit which may be folded more deeply into deceit, grounded in the new and indubitably true fact of a story’s existence in the world. The poet creates. The maker makes.

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Just more junk filling up the fucking planet.

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Would it be possible to reduce these considerations to a handful of questions, if only as an exercise? 1) What can narrative do in the face of global ecological apocalypse? 2) Is it possible to use narrative to subvert and attenuate narrative desire?

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The answer to the first question seems at once straightforward and infinitely complex, obvious and unknowable. By and large, we might suppose that the best narrative can do is to help us accommodate ourselves to the hell we’ve created. Yet there remains a margin of agency wherein narrative could be seen as shaping our decisions in the future. On anything other than a purely individual level, of course, the question of how collective narrative emerges is too complex to allow for much certitude or hope.

Who would have thought the most popular narratives of the early 21st century would be fantasy stories about dragons, super-heroes, the return of fascism, and a socialist insurgency? As much as we might lay specific blame on Kevin Feige, for example, who can deny that it was millions of moviegoers who elevated Tony Stark’s story from mere cinema to myth?

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The answer to the second question seems just possible, if thankless: a crack in the wall, a blind struggle for freedom, in which success means misunderstanding, opacity, and detachment from collective life.

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Yet what other path is there? Run with the tweeters over the cliff? Instagram the latest flood? Binge-watch the next retro teen soap opera comforting us with the fantasy that our doom comes from another dimension, and not from the implacable, idiotic inertia of our own lives? Riddle me this: is there any way to remain plugged into a suicidal death cult while still retaining genuine autonomy?

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How does it end? This is the mystery we die to see revealed. What happens next? This is the question that torments us, that keeps us glued to the screen. Americans will put up with nearly any evil, so long as we’re being entertained.

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Narrative is the enemy. Narrative is a trick to seduce the mind into making sense of reality, a way of structuring the unknown that presumes we already know how things will end: two sides to any debate, the hero’s quest, the marriage plot, trauma and recovery, struggle and overcoming, triumph of the will, the journey, the road, there and back again. Narrative is the escape room of the soul. Yet without narrative, human existence is absurd, human experience a surging delirium. Thus for the partisan of human freedom in an age of totalitarian thought, there is only one forest passage to the demilitarized zone.

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One must become ironic, fantastic, opaque, deranged, mad as Bartleby. One must become the enemy within the enemy, the tangled and unstable thread within the thread, the viral insurgent recoding feedback into a null space of infinite regression. One must cease to exist in any meaningful sense. One must not resist, one must not react: one must interrupt the flow with infinitely slower flow, one must do less, one must be nothing less than less than nothing, pure and total negation, stopping time. One must simply refuse to go on.

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Roy Scranton’s novel, I Heart Oklahoma, is out from Soho Press.