From Climate Model to Climate FictionKim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as Operative LiteratureRoss Shields

‘For Fredric Jameson’

I begin with the dedication of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) as a way of motivating the title of this essay, which will enquire into the operative function of climate fiction (and in particular climate/science fiction) with respect to the political discourse and practice surrounding climate change.11Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (New York: Orbit, 2020), dedication. This discourse and practice is not restricted to, but increasingly involves, a Marxist critique of capitalism, such as Fredric Jameson has sought to articulate in relation to literature, in the tradition of Sergei Tretyakov, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin.22On the question of whether climate fiction constitutes a literary genre, see Alison Sperling, ‘Climate Fictions: Introduction’, Paradoxa, 31 (2019), pp. 7–21 <https://paradoxa.com/no-30-climate-fictions-2020/> [accessed 4 August 2024]; and Derek Woods, ‘Genre at Earth Magnitude: A Theory of Climate Fiction’, New Literary History, 54.2 (2023), pp. 1143–67 <https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907162>. The Ministry for the Future, a cli/sci-fi novel written by an author versed in Jameson’s ideas, will thus serve as a case study for Beginning of page[p. 80] understanding how the environmental humanities have both inherited and modified the political stakes of critical literary theory.

Having studied under Jameson at UC San Diego in the 1970s, it is no great surprise that Robinson would make use of the Brechtian strategy of defamiliarization (Verfremdung), going so far as to end a chapter on the redistribution of wealth by breaking the literary fourth wall: ‘Arranging this situation is left as an exercise for the reader.’33Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, p. 41. For Jameson’s reading of Brecht, see Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), especially pp. 35–42. Note that, when I say that Robinson breaks the fourth wall, I am identifying the author of the book with his narrative persona, at least in some of the theoretical chapters. This is justified by the fact that sections of the theoretical chapters are repeated by Robinson in real-world interviews, and ultimately contributes to the book’s heteroglossic character. See note 30, below. And yet, despite its author’s politics and education, The Ministry for the Future cannot be said to promote an explicitly Marxist agenda. As a work of fiction narrating the next thirty-odd years of global warming, its ‘organizational usefulness’ is in no way restricted to its ‘value as propaganda’, and its overall political tendency is ambiguous to say the least.44Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, ed. by Michael Jennings and others, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004–06), ii.2: 1931–1934, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (2005), pp. 768–82 (p. 777). I will argue that the novel nevertheless exerts a clear set of operative functions, which manifest themselves in the relation between its ecological theme and the literary techniques with which that theme is presented.

Until recently, Marxist criticism has been distanced from ecological or environmental concerns on account of its purported ‘Prometheanism’ (that is, its uncritical embrace of technologies of environmental exploitation). However, a growing number of ecosocialist philosophers and critics, including John Bellamy Foster (Marx’s Ecology, 2000), Nancy Fraser (Cannibal Capitalism, 2021), and Kohei Saito (Marx in the Anthropocene, 2023), have made the convincing case that capital both disavows and hits against the intractable limits imposed by the natural world on economic growth.55John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet — and What We Can Do about It (London: Verso, 2022); Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933544>. See also Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015); and Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettesse, Half-Earth Socialism (New York: Verso, 2022). Drawing on Marx’s critique Beginning of page[p. 81] of industrial agriculture, these thinkers have pointed to a fundamental discrepancy — or ‘metabolic rift’ — between capital’s potentially infinite process of self-valorization and the finite conditions of its existence on Earth.66Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, pp. 23–28. The result of this discrepancy is literal disaster, albeit with unequally distributed consequences: global warming, widespread species extinction, and the increasingly futile attempt to ‘shift’ ecological burdens from the Global North to the Global South, and from present to future generations.77Ibid., pp. 29–34.

It is in response to these crises that scholars in the humanities have rallied around the banner of ecocriticism, which, in distinction from many twentieth-century literary-theoretical movements, wears its political tendency on its sleeves.88As Stephanie Foote and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen write in their introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities: ‘[I]f anything anchors the diversity of E[nvironmental]H[umanities] projects within its wider discipline of the Humanities, […] it is a commitment to the world-making power of narrative, and especially its commitment to how stories mediate different registers of power.’ Stephanie Foote and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Introduction: Climate Change/Changing Climates’, in The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Stephanie Foote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 1–10 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1017/​9781009039369.002>. See Hannes Bergthaller, ‘Cli-Fi and Petrofiction: Questioning Genre in the Anthropocene’, Amerikastudien/American Studies, 62.1 (2017), pp. 120–25 <https://amst.winter-verlag.de/article/AMST/2017/1/10> [accessed 4 August 2024]; Stephanie LeMenager, ‘Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre’, in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, ed. by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017), pp. 220–38 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.5325/​jj.22247044.15>; and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, ‘Climate-Change Fiction’, in American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010, ed. by Rachel Greenwald Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 309–21 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1017/​9781316569290.021>. To be sure, not all environmental humanists are Marxist or even Marxian.99See Timothy Clark, ‘Liberalism and Green Moralism’, in The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 102–10 <https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511976261>. Nevertheless, I would argue that the task of ecocriticism is clear enough: to develop and employ narrative and imaginative strategies that work against the efforts of capital to disguise or shift its negative impact on the globe. But how Beginning of page[p. 82] is this task to be realized? Can literature really ‘save the planet’ (a hyperbolic cliché often employed in discussions of cli-fi)?1010See David Holmes, ‘“Cli-Fi”: Could a Literary Genre Help Save the Planet?’, The Conversation, 20 February 2014 <https://theconversation.com/cli-fi-could-a-literary-genre-help-save-the-planet-23478> [accessed 3 January 2024]; J. K. Ullrich, ‘Climate Fiction: Can Books Save the Planet?’, The Atlantic, 14 August 2015 <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/climate-fiction-margaret-atwood-literature/400112/> [accessed January 3 2024]. How do literary models relate to scientific models of climate change? And what is their function with respect to extra-literary and non-representational forces?

As a way of approaching these questions, I propose to re-examine the early twentieth-century category of ‘operative literature’, a term coined by Tretyakov and developed in Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Author as Producer’.1111For a Jamesonian reading of operative literature, see Hunter Bivens, ‘Revisiting German Proletarian-Revolutionary Literature’, in Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives, ed. by John Lennon and Magnus Nilsson, 2 vols (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2017–20), ii, pp. 83–113 <https://doi.org/10.16993/bbf>. See Soo Hwan Kim, ‘Sergei Tretyakov Revisited: The Cases of Walter Benjamin and Hito Steyerl’, e-flux, 104 (2019) <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/104/298121/sergei-tretyakov-revisited-the-cases-of-walter-benjamin-and-hito-steyerl/> [accessed 3 January 2024]. My reading focuses on Benjamin’s use of Tretyakov’s concept, abstracting from Tretyakov’s argument, although I do return to Tretyakov in the penultimate section. There is an obvious sense in which the contemporary political situation differs from that of 1934, when Benjamin wrote his posthumously published piece, and it is not my intention to resume the question of political tendency and aesthetic autonomy as it played out in early twentieth-century Western-Marxist circles. Rather, it is my hope that the framework developed in Benjamin’s essay will be of use in defining the role of the contemporary (environmental) humanities with respect to a set of present-day political concerns — concerns that provide the concepts of ‘literary tendency’ and ‘formally progressive technique’ with a new meaning in relation to a new, albeit negative, telos; in other words, a progress and tendency determined by neither providence nor spirit nor dialectical materialism (although it has everything to do with the contradictions of capital).

My essay will unfold in five sections. In the first, I develop the concept of operative literature, focusing on its relevance for climate fiction and abstracting it from its Marxist origins. Sections two through Beginning of page[p. 83] four define three operative functions that The Ministry for the Future takes on with respect to the discourse and politics of global warming. A concluding section addresses the ecological content and form of Robinson’s novel as a whole, bringing it into relation to contemporary ecosocialist ideas, and making use of the Greimas square, a tool of semantic analysis and cognitive mapping that Jameson brings into proximity to his concept of ideology — a concept that also plays a no less prominent role in Robinson’s novel.

Climate Fiction as Operative Literature

In ‘The Author as Producer’, Benjamin takes up Tretyakov’s notion of operative literature by resuming what he calls the ‘unfruitful debate on the relationship between tendency and quality in literature’.1212Benjamin, ‘Author as Producer’, p. 769. Instead of asserting an antagonism or priority of one against the other, Benjamin divides the concept of tendency into two parts, one literary and one political. He argues that the political tendency of a novel (for example) necessarily includes its literary tendency, which in turn constitutes its literary quality, concluding that ‘[t]he correct political tendency of a work thus includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency’.1313Ibid. This formulation has two consequences. First, it implies that mere propaganda, that is, writing that is not ‘literarily correct’, also lacks a ‘correct political tendency’.1414Ibid. In Benjamin’s example, the New Objectivity movement (Neue Sachlichkeit) has, due to its lack of formal innovation, effected little more than the ‘transformation of the political struggle from a call-to-decision into an object of contemplative enjoyment, from a means of production into a consumer article’.1515Ibid., p. 776. The movement may take class struggle as its object, but does little or nothing to promote class struggle as an agenda.

The second consequence of Benjamin’s argument is the contrapositive of the first, namely, the insight that every work displaying a correct political tendency is also literarily correct, meaning that it involves a degree of ‘progressive literary technique’ that in turn Beginning of page[p. 84] constitutes its literary quality.1616Ibid., p. 770. Note that this does not imply that a work’s literary tendency entails its political tendency. Benjamin’s examples of progressive literary technique fall into two main categories. The first, drawn directly from Tretyakov, involves the democratization of the means of literary production, for example, when the Soviet press ‘revises even the distinction between author and reader’.1717Ibid., p. 772. In the age of Facebook, X (Twitter), and Mastodon, the question of whether the democratization of media necessarily supports democratic politics has become fraught, and it is not my intention to contribute to the already substantial body of work devoted to this topic.1818See, for example, the essays collected in Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, ed. by Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco (Leiden: Brill, 2015) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1163/​9789004291393>. But Benjamin illustrates a second type of progressive artistic technique that is more germane to the issue at hand, namely, the artistic technique of Brecht’s epic theatre, which routinely interrupts its own plot in a way that ‘compels the listener to adopt an attitude vis-à-vis the process’.1919Benjamin, ‘Author as Producer’, p. 778. By breaking off the contemplative enjoyment of the play’s plot, the public is estranged ‘in an enduring way, through thinking, from the conditions in which it lives’.2020Ibid., p. 779. This is a good thing.

There is an obvious sense in which Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future enacts a Brechtian gesture of estrangement. I have already mentioned the didactic essays that interrupt the novel’s plot, quite literally demanding the reader, like the author, ‘to think, to reflect on his position in the process of production’.2121Ibid. But I do not believe that Brechtian moments like this account for the full scope of The Ministry for the Future’s operative function. On the contrary, as Benjamin remarks on the music of Hanns Eisler, a correct artistic tendency involves the elimination of two antitheses: ‘first, between performers and listeners and, second, between technique and content’.2222Ibid., pp. 775–76, my emphasis. To speak of formal innovation in abstraction from content (whether that content is politically progressive or not) is therefore insufficient.Beginning of page[p. 85] Instead, progressive literary technique — if the term is to have any meaning for contemporary literary theory — will involve a necessary connection to its content, which, in the case of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work of climate fiction, involves three issues: first, that climate scenarios both determine and are determined by human behaviour; second, that global warming defies our all-too-human perception; and finally, that any attempt to act or speak on behalf of the environment risks enforcing an anthropocentric worldview that has been, at least historically, part of the problem.

I will now argue that these three questions of content, correlated with three formal techniques, yield three distinct operative functions. Following this, I will address the relation of these operative functions to the modalities of metabolic shift conceptualized by Saito, before considering their interdependency in Robinson’s novel as a whole.

Problem 1: Climate Models Are Not Weather Forecasts

The Ministry for the Future has a plot; one, moreover, that is both linear and coherent. Although this can hardly be considered a ‘progressive literary technique’ in its own right, it plays an important function with respect to the specific requirements of a work of climate/science fiction — namely, to flesh out a future that already exists in the projections of climate scientists. A distanced glance at the novel reveals 106 chapters distributed between the years 2025 and 2053. The plot begins in the wake of the UNFCCC COP29 (the twenty-ninth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), which has led to the creation of what has become known as the ‘Ministry for the Future’, a subsidiary body for the implementation of the Paris Agreement following the general failure of the world’s nations to hit their 2023 targets. The plot ends just after COP58, when a ‘turning point’ is reached and the ‘birth of a good Anthropocene’ is announced.2323Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, p. 475. But the road to this happy ending is anything but easy, involving a series of horrific climate disasters, a mounting sense of collective frustration, and the drastic measures taken by various groups in response thereto.Beginning of page[p. 86]

By sketching a possible future, beginning in the near present, Robinson’s novel fills in the abstract scenarios described by climate scientists with a copious amount of fictitious detail. In 2025 a heat wave kills twenty million people in India.2424Ibid., p. 24. The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover melts in 2032.2525Ibid., p. 147. The year 2034 yields Crash Day, when clouds of small drones bring down sixty passenger jets, murdering thousands of civilians.2626Ibid., p. 228. Some of these events are described through first-hand accounts, others through historical reports, but all are believable, and all force the reader to consider what our future has in store.

Keeping pace with this litany of dates is a second series, no less regular, and of greater importance for the novel’s pacing, namely, the progression of CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere. As shown in Figure 1, the numbers and facts strewn throughout Robinson’s novel trace an all-too-believable projection for greenhouse gas emissions over the next fifty years. In fact, the fictional numbers supplied by Robinson closely match — at least at first — the 450 Core climate projection published by the OECD in 2012, a real-world scenario in which the global concentration of greenhouse gases stabilizes at around 450 parts per million.2727OECD, ‘Concentration Pathways for the Four Outlook Scenarios Including All Climate Forcers, 2010–2100’, in OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: The Consequences of Inaction (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2012) <https://doi.org/10.1787/env_outlook-2012-graph38-en> [accessed 4 August 2024]. See Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 36, 56, 69, 75, 89, and especially 94. The 2036 data point assumes that the 463 ppm reading was taken approximately two years after crash day; the 2040 data point assumes that the American heat wave occurred in 2040. Note that, on the basis of this graph and the Mauna Kea measurement of 447 ppm mentioned in chapter 25, it is possible to date Mary’s kidnapping to 19 February 2030. Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, p. 90. But while the OECD scenario gradually levels off, the parts per million recorded in Robinson’s novel plunge from 475 to 451 after a combination of political unrest and extreme weather events finally leads to a change in global political consciousness.2828Ibid., p. 445. This draws attention to one of the most striking similarities between climate/science fiction and the science of climate change, namely, the necessity of predicting a future that is anything but fixed. The problem is not that the Beginning of page[p. 87] models used by climate scientists are uncertain; on the contrary, if things continue as they are now (as represented in the baseline of the OECD graph), there is little doubt about what will happen: greenhouse gases will continue to increase, the 2 °C goal will be crossed, the seas will continue to rise, species will continue to go extinct, extreme weather events will increase in frequency and strength, and so on.

The problem is that the predictions of climate scientists, if they are effective in modifying our behaviour, end up proving themselves wrong. A good model is one that invalidates the scenario it describes — this constitutes its performative, as opposed to merely representative, function.2929The performativity of climate models can be compared to illocutionary uses of language, as described in John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words [1962] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), lectures 8 and 9 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1093/​acprof:oso/​9780198245537.003.0008>. On the performativity of scientific models, see Donal Khosrowi, ‘Managing Performative Models’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 53.5 (2023), pp. 371–95 <https://doi.org/10.1177/00483931231172455>. I propose that the operative function of climate/science fiction Beginning of page[p. 88] can be understood in similar terms, insofar as its presentation of a hypothetical future works against the realization of that hypothesis.3030Woods makes a similar observation: ‘If the genre fulfills its goal by contributing to the equilibrium of the climate, then its verisimilitude will diminish.’ Woods, ‘Genre at Earth Magnitude’, p. 1144. Or as Robinson himself suggests in an interview from 2021: ‘as prophecy, SF is always wrong’. See James Bradley , ‘It’s Science over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope’, in Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene, ed. by Jonathan Strahan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), pp. 1–10 (p. 3) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.7551/​mitpress/​14384.003.0003>. Robinson continues, echoing his definition of ideology: ‘The impetus comes from ideology, from one’s invented imaginary relationship to the real situation. Here the discursive battle is paramount. The stories we tell each other will make the difference.’ Ibid. It is for this reason that the coherent linear plot of The Ministry for the Future, although it may amount to a literary regression with respect to comparable works like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) or even Robinson’s own The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), contributes to one of the novel’s principal operative functions. It concretizes and dramatizes climate models, showing that the future is both foreseeable, insofar as it follows the predictions of scientific scenarios, and subject to change, insofar as the possible future represented in those scenarios can be averted through transformations of behaviour, policy, and law, albeit at high costs.

The CO₂ curve drawn from the work of real-world climate scientists supplies Robinson’s novel with a rising action, climax, and falling action that recalls Gustav Freytag’s Aristotelian model of a tragic plot. However, unlike a traditional tragedy, which concludes with the recognition and submission to fate, it is precisely the fate modelled in the 450 Core scenario that is ultimately averted in the novel’s denouement, as a consequence of the collective response of the world’s agents. This further clarifies the operative function of the Brechtian moments that interrupt the plot, which encourage us, as readers, to reflect on the inevitability of our fate in much the same way that the characters portrayed in the novel reflect on the inevitability of their own.

Problem 2: Representing Global Warming

Global warming takes place on spatial and temporal scales that overwhelm our powers of comprehension. Timothy Morton has referred to it as a hyperobject: something that is too big for us to perceive, but Beginning of page[p. 89] with which we must nevertheless contend.3131Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 3. See also Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 62 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.7208/​chicago/​9780226323176.001.0001>. Hence, while it may be possible to gain an abstract understanding of climate change as the statistical object of climate science, the climate in itself remains imperceptible, presenting very different aspects depending on the local conditions in which it appears as weather. The question — and this is very much a narrative question — is how to connect local perspectives in a way that does justice to their plurality without losing sight of their global cause.

This problematic is addressed in one of The Ministry for the Future’s first didactic essays, which provides the following definition of ideology: ‘Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.’3232Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, p. 41. Although Robinson observes that the ‘common usage’ of the term tends to refer pejoratively to ‘what the other person has’, he immediately recognizes a more fundamental meaning, indeed, one that recalls the theory outlined in Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology, which is itself dedicated to Robinson (as Robinson’s novel is dedicated to Jameson):

But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can’t be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination.3333Ibid., p. 41. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), p. 240.

According to Robinson’s definition, ideologies are ‘imaginary’ in the Lacanian sense of the term: far from comprising mere epiphenomena (or, for that matter, materialist superstructure), they play a constitutive role in the development and function of objectivity. This is clear from Jameson’s definition of ideology in Postmodernism, which in turn stems from Louis Althusser’s Lacanian-Marxist definition as ‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions Beginning of page[p. 90] of existence’.3434Louis Althusser, ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), quoted in Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 51, emphasis in the original <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1215/​9780822378419>. See also Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 15. But while Robinson agrees with Jameson and Althusser that ideology is synonymous with ‘[w]orldview, philosophy, religion’, he goes a step further in asserting that science, too, is an ideology, albeit ‘the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus’.3535Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, p. 41.

Robinson’s recognition that science, qua ideology, is an ‘imaginary relationship to a real situation’ is in no way intended to promote a sceptical argument. On the contrary, his position agrees with theories of scientific modelling developed by recent philosophers, who argue that all models are ‘imaginary’ or ‘fictional’, in that they always involve a degree of distortion and/or abstraction with respect to their target systems.3636See Fiora Salis, ‘The New Fiction View of Models’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 72.3 (2021), pp. 717–42 <https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz015>; and Roman Frigg and James Nguyen, ‘The Fiction View of Models Reloaded’, The Monist, 99.3 (2016), pp. 225–42 <https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onw002>. Frigg and Nguyen are not concerned with the relation of scientific representation to the imaginative representations of narrative fiction. For an account that is, see Catherine Elgin, True Enough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.7551/​mitpress/​9780262036535.001.0001>. See also Adam Toon, Models as Make-Believe: Imagination, Fiction and Scientific Representation (London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2012) <https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292230>. But here again a distinction can be made. Unlike these authors, whose concerns are limited to the accurate description of scientific representation, Robinson takes up the questions of ideology and science from the unique perspective of an author of climate/science fiction. He is ultimately concerned not with science as such, but with the central role that science plays for a ‘most interesting project’, namely, ‘to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzy inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power.’3737Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, p. 41.Beginning of page[p. 91]

What could such a project be? Not any of the particular sciences, which, despite their success in bringing certain facts into sharp focus, are ill-suited for providing a clear picture of how those distinct sets of facts interrelate. Nor can it be science as such, which is said to be ‘central’ to this new ideology, not identical to it. I propose that Robinson’s project is the one that he sets himself, as a writer of climate/science fiction: to construct an imaginary relationship to the real situation of the warming planet that would have clarity and explanatory breadth, and power, in order to facilitate an understanding of what is too big for any individual to know in full. Not a fictional scientific model, in the sense defined above, but a science-fictional model that can assist us in coming to terms with the hyperobject of global warming. In confirmation of this interpretation, and continuing the above quotation, Robinson again breaks the novelistic fourth wall: ‘We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.’3838Ibid.

This brings me to the second formal characteristic of Robinson’s novel: namely, its fragmented narrative. Although the plot itself is linear and coherent, the narrative through which it unfolds is anything but, voiced by a diversity of actors in chapters that are distributed across the world, and that can be distinguished into five rough categories (see Figure 2). First there are the chapters dealing with personal narratives: we have Frank May, the ‘firangi’ survivor of the Indian heat wave, who seeks to cope with his PTSD by attempting to join the group of climate activists (some say climate terrorists) known as the ‘Children of Kali’; and then there is Mary Murphy, the head of the eponymous Ministry, whom Frank kidnaps and eventually befriends.3939One chapter, something of an exception, focuses on Mary’s second-in-command Badim Bahadur (although he is not actually named as such, and there is some uncertainty regarding this identification), who runs the Ministry’s ‘black wing’. A second category consists of group narratives, which tell the story of the Ministry, of a group of scientists working in the Antarctic, of climate refugees, activists, and many others. Most of these chapters are narrated in the first-person plural ‘we’, which is not always defined, but is generally understood to be locally situated and to change from chapter to chapter. The third category of chapters takes a global perspective, describing the events of the coming decades from Beginning of page[p. 92] the abstracting perspective of world history. These first three categories, which together comprise the novel’s plot, are supplemented by two additional categories that I will consider in more detail in the next two sections: the theoretical interruptions already mentioned, and the perspectives of non-human actors.

Although The Ministry for the Future may be the product of a single biographical author, it is strongly heteroglossic: a ‘hybrid construction’ that incorporates multiple perspectives into a fiction of multi-perspectivalism.4040Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422 (pp. 304–05). Keeping in mind that every text is to some extent co-authored, I would like to use this opportunity to thank my colleagues at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry for their comments, criticisms, and suggestions on drafts of the present essay, especially Alina-Sandra Cucu, Maria Dębińska, Julia Sánchez-Dorado, and Christoph Holzhey, to whom I owe the phrase ‘fiction of multi-perspectivalism’. Hence, by switching back and forth between Beginning of page[p. 93] individual, local, and global scales, and by incorporating both literary and theoretical genres, it yields a model — Robinson would say ‘ideology’ — of a phenomenon that exceeds any particular point of view.4141The novel presents, in other words, a planetary perspective opposed to the global narrative that the collective scale can alone supply. For the globe/planet distinction with regard to climate fiction, see Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1515/​9780823286805>. The global perspective, as informative as it may be, involves dry abstractions that both defy our imagination and overwhelm our sense of agency. The individual perspective, though it anchors the reader’s understanding in a concrete narrative, is blind to the structural conditions that shape it. The local perspective avoids some of the pitfalls of the other two, and it effectively combats the illusion that the ‘Anthropos’ of the Anthropocene can be taken as a monolithic whole.4242See Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), p. 121. It remains, however, irreducibly partial, and therefore inadequate to the situation in its fullest scope. By including multiple perspectives at various scales, Robinson does not so much supply the reader with a positive ideology, in the sense that he communicates a unitary worldview, philosophy, or religion, as he does present the construction of such an ideology as an ‘exercise for the reader’: to think the individual and collective activities portrayed in the novel in relation to each other.

It is fitting that Frank, who is arguably the closest thing that the novel has to a protagonist, mediates between the various levels sketched above: having suffered his own death, symbolically if not literally, during the Indian heat wave, he becomes a wanderer, travelling to Scotland, Kenya, Antarctica, India, and then Switzerland, where he abducts Mary on her way home from a Ministry social event.4343‘I did die, but for some reason my body lived on after my death. And here I am, still trying to do things.’ Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, pp. 101–02. Indeed, it is Frank who first formulates the problem of individual agency in relation to global problems, drawing inspiration from the microscopic milieu with respect to which his body takes on a planetary scale:

One person had one-eight-billionth of the power that humanity had. This assumed everyone had an equal amount of power, which wasn’t true, but it was serviceable for this kind of thinking.Beginning of page[p. 94] One-eight-billionth wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that work in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.4444Ibid., p. 65.

And while Frank can hardly be considered a hero, his questionable act of taking Mary hostage convinces her, as she in turn convinces the Ministry, of the necessity of pursuing more drastic measures, including the establishment of the clandestine ‘black wing’ that — she is informed to her chagrin — already exists. Ultimately, Frank’s agency is more akin to that of a virus than a poison: having himself become ‘sick’ during the deadly heat wave, his sense of desperate urgency infects others, starting with Mary, who reflects on her brief kidnapping in terms that recall his own trauma: ‘Words like fists to the face. Paper bullets of the brain. It was enough to make her heart hammer all over again. Her face burned with the memory.’4545Ibid., p. 107. Mary becomes conscious of the extent to which Frank has influenced her during a meeting with a group of Swiss officials: ‘She almost laughed as she heard herself doing a version of what Frank had done to her that night.’ Ibid., p. 316.

Problem 3: Decentring the Human(ities)

This figure of viral agency brings me to my third and final problem, which concerns the role of non-human actors in the environmental humanities. A related question makes up one of the novel’s central concerns; after all, it is the ministry’s appointed purpose to represent the ‘interests of generations to come. And the interests of those entities that can never speak for themselves, like animals and watersheds.’4646Ibid., p. 98. Ignoring, for the moment, the question of whether the intra-diegetic ministry succeeds, one can pose an analogous question to the novel, and, by extension, to the critical scholarship done under the banner of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities: How is it possible to represent the interests of those not yet born? Of non-human entities incapable of speech? Of non-living things not typically defined as agents?

Regarding the first question, at least, one can draw a lesson from Frank: having lived through his own death, he cannot help but adopt Beginning of page[p. 95] the perspective of the future. Not absolutely, in the time-travelling sense of some of Robinson’s other work, but relatively, in terms of the multiple temporalities that intersect in his person. Consider his first discussion with Mary, who is well aware of the scientific limits of her foresight: ‘“We can only model scenarios,” she said. “We track what has happened, and graph trajectories in things we can measure, and then we postulate that the things we can measure will either stay the same, or grow, or shrink.”’4747Ibid., p. 96. From Mary’s perspective — the global view of a politician versed in climate science — various scenarios are possible, many of which involve climate disasters, and a few that don’t, but all of which, as mere possibilities, have only a limited ability to inspire change in the present. By contrast, from Frank’s perspective the future is all too real: ‘There are about a hundred people walking this Earth, who if you judge from the angle of the future like you’re supposed to do, they are mass murderers.’4848Ibid., p. 99.

By relating Frank’s experience of the Indian heat wave in vivid detail, Robinson compels the reader, as Frank compels Mary, to judge from the angle of the future. But what about non-human and non-living agents? How is it possible to speak on behalf of things without committing the twin fallacies of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism? Jane Bennett, drawing on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, has argued that a dose of the former is helpful in resisting the latter: by adopting a self-consciously anthropomorphic view of things, attributing to them agency and interests, one can come to a better understanding of the assemblages of humans and non-human agents that condition our capacity to introduce change into the world, thereby resisting the anthropocentric tendency that attributes dominion over the Earth to ‘man’.4949Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 98–100 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1215/​9780822391623>. But this is not the position taken by Robinson’s novel, which at one point in a dialogue between unnamed characters — presumably members of the ministry — suggests that such a position would be short-sighted:Beginning of page[p. 96]

– Yes, but it’s an actor network. Some of the actors in an actor network aren’t human.

– Balderdash.

– What, you don’t believe in actor networks?

– There are actor networks, but it’s the actors with agency who can choose to do things differently.5050Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, p. 60.

In The Progress of This Storm, Andreas Malm has argued that intellectual currents like actor-network theory and new materialism culminate in a ‘determinism of the crudest variety’ that mitigates if not eliminates the culpability of the individuals and corporations that are responsible for climate change.5151Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (New York: Verso, 2017), p. 110. That the Ministry should adopt a similar critique makes a degree of sense, given that the culpability of individuals and corporations is precisely their concern. But what about the novel? If the intra-diegetic Ministry seeks to maintain the distinction between human society and nature that Latour and Bennett work so hard to trouble, then why does Robinson include not one but eight chapters that give voice to non-human actors?

Answering this question leads to the third and final literary tendency that I have chosen to analyse, namely, the attribution of voice to non-human agents. The majority of chapters, including all of those devoted to individual and collective narratives, are written in the third person. Supplementing these is a collection of approximately thirty chapters written in the first-person singular ‘we’, which describe the various responses to the warming planet by non-Ministry groups mentioned in the previous section. Indeed, much of the force of the ‘we’ chapters consists in Robinson’s use of the first-person pronoun, which decentres the novel’s plot away from the UN Ministry and towards the geopolitical periphery: from globe to planet. But ‘we’ is not yet ‘I’, and the first-person singular is, with a few exceptions, reserved for those chapters that adopt the perspectives of non-human agents.5252Chapter thirty-eight, though it is centred on non-human agents, uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ — but this is motivated by the assertion of the collective subjects’ affinity with humans: ‘we are all the great herd animals of Earth, among whom you should count yourselves.’ Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, p. 88. Other instances of the first person include dialogue in the various Ministry chapters, as well as occasional moments when a single voice emerges from the ‘we’ chapters, including an Angeleno’s description of an atmospheric river, Sibilla Schmidt’s report on Mary Murphy’s security, an unnamed sailor’s memoir of her time with the US Navy, an anecdote told by a farmer, and, most notably, a list of delegates from nations across the world introducing their efforts to reverse global warming. Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, pp. 275, 299, 381, 399, 425–28. Although one might expect that the use of the first person would anthropomorphize Beginning of page[p. 97] these agents, bringing them closer to human affairs and problematizing the distinction between humans and non-humans, a short survey reveals that the situation is considerably more complex:

• The first and shortest of the ‘I’ chapters, chapter two, follows upon the horrific description of the Indian heat wave with the paradoxical announcement: ‘I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive.’5353Ibid., pp. 12–13. As slowly becomes clear over the course of three short paragraphs, the subject of this chapter is the sun: although it is clearly represented as an agent — ‘I keep you alive’, ‘at my touch you burn’ — it is an agent that is both unaffected by our greenhouse gas emissions and supremely indifferent to its impact on the Earth.5454Ibid.
• The strangeness of non-human agents is reinforced by the chapters chronicling the adventures of a photon and a carbon atom, in chapters fifty-three and sixty-six respectively, which (who?) experience the world at a spatio-temporal scale that defies our human perception, referring, for example, to the journey from the sun to the Earth as ‘zipping off’, or to the emergence and disappearance of a new landmass with the flippant remark ‘they go away pretty fast’.5555Ibid., p. 327.
• Even social constructions like ‘the market’ and ‘history’, which are given voice in chapters forty-six and seventy-seven, are presented at a remove from human concerns through the use of natural metaphors: ‘I grew so large that I ate the world and all the blood in the world is mine’; ‘I am the tide running under the

  Beginning of page

  [p. 98] world that no one sees or feels.’5656Ibid., pp. 192, 385. Likewise, chapter forty-three, devoted to ‘code’ (and ‘blockchain’ — this was 2020 after all), insists that ‘[y]ou don’t know me, you don’t understand me’.5757Ibid., p. 177.
• The last chapter to adopt a non-human perspective is the most mysterious. Since it is important for my reading, I will quote it in full:

I am a thing. I am alive and I am dead. I am conscious and unconscious. Sentient but not. A multiplicity and a whole. A polity of some sextillions of citizens.

I spiral a god that is not a god, and I am not a god. I am not a mother, though I am many mothers. I keep you alive. I will kill you someday, or I won’t and something else will, and then, either way, I will take you in. Someday soon.

You know what I am. Now find me out.5858Ibid., p. 491.

If the subject of this chapter is not clear, one need only refer back to the prior definition of the sun as a ‘god and not a god’ to realize that it concerns the Earth, ‘spiralling’ the gigantic nuclear furnace in its four-dimensional movement through space-time. Unlike the other ‘things’ to which Robinson gives voice — sun, code, market, photon, carbon, history — the Earth includes humanity in a material sense: alongside a few sextillion microbes, slime moulds, fungi, plants, and animals, we humans are citizens in its polity. But while we may be included in the person of the Earth, we are also singled out and distanced by the use of the second person ‘you’, which ambiguously addresses either the reader or humanity as such. We know what the Earth is because we are a vital part of it, but it is precisely that relation of inclusion that we continually overlook and must therefore ‘find out’.

Each of the seven ‘I’ chapters is written in the form of a ‘What Am I?’ riddle, even if it is only the seventh and last that poses any real challenge. And while Robinson’s use of such riddles does not in itself qualify as a progressive literary technique, it takes on an operative function in the context of the distribution of personhood (both Beginning of page[p. 99] grammatical and otherwise) in the novel as a whole, which subverts the conventional gaze dynamics of human subject and non-human object. To better understand in what this function consists, it is useful to recall Jameson’s foreword to Andre Jolles’s Simple Forms, a work of literary analysis whose brilliance is marred by its author’s Nazi affiliation. Jameson, in his consideration of the politics of Jolles’s theory of verbal gestures, compares and contrasts the small form of the riddle with the estranging gesture of Brecht’s epic theatre:

Here Jolles offers an interesting parallel to Brechtian usage, where the gestus is a whole unity of situation and reaction captured as a unique act. But where, in Brecht, such a unity (ideological, political, even philosophical) is an act to be captured on stage by the enlightened play of actors trained in the Verfremdungseffekt — or ‘estrangement effect’ — in Jolles what results is a proto-literary form, which I would designate as narrative (despite its embodiments in such things as riddles and sayings).5959Fredric Jameson, foreword to Andre Jolles, Simple Forms, trans. by Peter J. Schwartz (London: Verso, 2017), pp. vii–xviii (p. x).

On the basis of Jameson’s reading of Jolles, it can be argued that The Ministry for the Future imbues the narrative form of the riddle with a Brechtian (or even Schklovskian) capacity to estrange. This is achieved by the uneasy combination of the most intimate narrative gesture — ‘I’ addressing ‘you’ — with a subject that is radically indifferent to our concerns as a species, but on which our existence as a species depends. To be sure, Robinson is quick to recognize the ‘material agency or effectivity of nonhuman […] things’.6060Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. ix. But he does so in a way that forecloses any possibility of identifying our concerns with theirs, framing our human relation to nature (qua thing) as one of intimate exteriority or ‘extimacy’.6161Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1988– ), vii: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. by Dennis Porter (1997), p. 139.

As Tretyakov observed in 1929: ‘Books such as The Forest, Bread, Coal, Iron, Flax, Cotton, Paper, The Locomotive, and The Factory have not been written. We need them, and it is only through the “biography Beginning of page[p. 100] of the thing” that they can be adequately realized.’6262Sergei Tretyakov, ‘The Biography of the Object’, October, 118 (2006), pp. 57–62 (p. 62), translation modified <https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.57>. Tretyakov’s ideas bear fruitful comparison to the writings of Francis Ponge. See Francis Ponge, Partisan of Things, trans. by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau (Berkeley, CA: Kenning Editions, 2016). To be sure, the things of Tretyakov’s hypothetical biographies have been selected for their role in the production process. By narrating their existence, the proletarian author decentres the bourgeois hero from their central role in the novel, which thereby attains an operative function with respect to the ends of class struggle. By contrast, Robinson’s novel gives voice to another kind of thing, narrating the lives of photons, carbon atoms, the market, the sun, and so forth, and with the aim of decentring the human subject towards a different, though related, end. Nevertheless, Tretyakov’s words still apply, mutatis mutandis:

Thus: not the individual person moving through a system of things, but the thing proceeding through the system of people — for literature this is the methodological device that seems to us more progressive than those of classical belles lettres.’6363Tretyakov, ‘The Biography of the Object’, translation modified, p. 62.

The effect, as Tretyakov writes, is that the novel’s human characters cease to imagine themselves as sovereign rulers of the things around them — as ‘promethean’ subjugators of nature by technology — but instead recognize their own activity as ‘conditioned by these things and influences’.6464Ibid., p. 60, translation modified.

Climate Fiction and Ecology

Climate fiction becomes disaster porn when it transforms its object — global warming — into an object of contemplative enjoyment. Over the course of this essay, I have considered three operative functions that, recalling Benjamin’s reflections on operative literature, raise The Ministry for the Future above this suspicion, and that together constitute its literary and political tendency. First, the linear plot of Robinson’s novel both concretizes and dramatizes climate models, which are thereby augmented in their capacity to impact our behaviour. Second, the novel’s fragmentary narrative compels us to construct a Beginning of page[p. 101] non-totalizing representation of global warming as a planetary phenomenon, thereby enabling us to ‘face Gaia’, as Latour might say.6565Latour, Facing Gaia. Finally, its use of first-person riddles challenges us to ‘find out’ our extimate relation to the planet, avoiding the pitfalls of both anthropocentric hierarchies (which place humans ‘above’ non-human actors) and flat ontologies (which risk mitigating the responsibilities of certain human actors). Together, these three functions constitute what Robinson might call the novel’s ideological force, which aims to reconfigure the reading subject in relation to the challenges of the coming decades. They also clarify the extent to which Robinson’s novel, as a work of climate/science fiction, can be considered a model in its own right, in the performative sense defined by Donal Khosrowi: ‘A model is performative if and only if it has the capacity to causally affect an aspect of the world that it is intended to represent.’6666Khosrowi, ‘Managing Performative Models’, p. 374.

Although I take the terms of my analysis from Benjamin — operative literature, literary and political tendency, progressive literary technique — I do not want to suggest that they should be understood in the classical sense of Western Marxism, which, at least in its general thrust, had a more positive concept of the ends of progress than I am able to envision. The end that I am able to envision is wholly negative, in the sense that it consists in avoiding the ongoing catastrophe of the status quo.6767I draw this formulation from Benjamin’s late writings, which reject the notion of progress assumed in his earlier ‘Author as Producer’: ‘The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.’ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 473. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that these three operative functions respond to the three ways in which capital works to ‘shift’ the environmental ‘rifts’ it has opened in the metabolic interaction between capitalist society and the rest of nature, as analysed by Kohei Saito. By tracing a fictional plot through a possible future, the novel counteracts the ‘temporal shift’ that invites us to ignore the long-term consequences of short-term economic gain.6868‘Since capital reflects the voice of current shareholders, but not that of future generations, the costs are shifted onto the latter. As a result, future generations suffer from consequences for which they are not responsible.’ Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, p. 33. By representing Beginning of page[p. 102] the effects of and responses to global warming from disparate perspectives across the planet, it works against the ‘spatial shift’ through which the ecological burden of climate change is displaced onto the Global South.6969‘By constantly shifting the ecological rifts and making them invisible to the capitalist centre, the current capitalist order of society appears attractive and comfortable for a wide range of social groups in the Global North. It thus facilitates a general social consensus, while its real costs are imposed upon other social groups in the Global South.’ Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, p. 33. By leading us to reflect critically on our extimate relation to nature, it resists the ‘technological shift’ that represents human ingenuity as capable of transcending the natural limits of capital accumulation.7070‘[M]etabolic shift creates externalities with the aid of new technologies. […] In other words, nature’s biological systems are not mere obstacles or barriers for capital but their degradation creates new sources of profit.’ Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, pp. 30–31.

Having begun this essay with Robinson’s dedication to Jameson, I conclude by applying Jameson’s favourite method of literary analysis to Robinson’s novel: namely, the Greimas square, a tool that is useful for both discerning and summarizing the semantic structure of a literary text (see Figure 3).7171For one of Jameson’s many Greimas squares, see Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 267. See Algirdas Julien Greimas, ‘The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints’, in Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. by Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 48–62. In the case of The Ministry for the Future, an initial pair of ‘contrary’ terms is provided by the plot and the narrative through which that plot is presented. These are then complemented by two ‘contradictory’ terms, in this case, the non-plot represented by a nature that is indifferent to our activities, and the non-narrative core of all climate fiction: the actually existing extra-diegetic world. By arranging these abstract terms in a square, it becomes possible to correlate the chapters of Robinson’s novel with the concrete moments at which those terms intersect, here represented by the corners of the outer diamond.

At the top we discover the individual and group narratives through which the novel’s plot is presented: these include all of the Frank and Mary chapters, along with the ‘we’ chapters and those focusing on the intra-diegetic Ministry. An abridged version of The Ministry for the Future, like those editions of Moby Dick that remove all of the tangents and digressions, would consist in this corner alone, and so lose any claim to Beginning of page[p. 104] possess a literary or political tendency. But this is not the case. Instead, the Greimas square reveals what one might call a model of the novel’s fictional ecology, in which the operative functions that I have analysed in isolation can be seen to depend on each other. Hence, the operative function of the novel’s plot depends on Robinson’s inclusion of a global perspective (left), which lends it a reference to real-world climate science. Likewise, the operative function of the novel’s fragmented narrative is sustained by Robinson’s inclusion of the various non-human actor chapters (right), which remind us that the sum of human perspectives can only add up to a partial representation of the problem at hand. These latter chapters, if isolated from the others, would comprise no more than a series of vaguely entertaining riddles: the small forms that Jolles is content to analyse, but that lack the estranging power of a Brechtian gesture. And the theory chapters (bottom), abstracted from the novel’s plot and narrative, would amount to just that: theory, another form of ideology, more or less effective in its political tendency, but beyond the purview of an essay on climate/science fiction.

Greimas squares facilitate ‘cognitive mapping’, or what Jameson defines as the ‘situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole’.7272Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 51. See Özgün Eylül İşcen, ‘Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism: The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 91–115 (pp. 101–03) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_05>. As such, they are intimately connected with the Althusserian definition of ideology that is taken up in both Jameson’s theory and Robinson’s novel: ‘the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’.7373See note 34. Given these definitions, but adding an ecocritical inflection to Jameson’s words, the above square can be characterized as my own situational representation of Robinson’s situational representation of that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality that exceeds society while including it, and that constitutes the real conditions of my own existence. But I leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.Beginning of page[p. 105]