From scenario-planning workshops to blockbuster sci-fi, epic tales about climate change proliferate even as its symptoms steadily become a feature of everyday life. As these attempts to appeal to our innate storytelling drive falter, what is needed is not new or better stories, but a wholesale reevaluation of our narrative technologies.
Text by Chiara Di Leone
It is difficult if not impossible to write about narrative critically. The very technology being critiqued is the only one available to articulate what’s wrong with it. Sure enough, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, but the inverse is also true – too often the master’s tools won’t fix the master’s house either.
The abundance of narratives about climate change is a case in point. The biggest authority on the issue, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), regularly writes story-like reports that rehearse the culmination of decades of environmental degradation into either catastrophic tipping points or utopian green capitalist pastures. Similarly, the literary genre of climate fiction renders imaginary worlds where catastrophic climate changes finally build up to some apocalyptic event. Once a week, Bloomberg Green conveniently summarises climate news in a newsletter. Most recently, after the release of the sixth IPCC report in August 2021, it sent out a column condensing the IPCC emission scenarios into five digestible takeaways because “no one wants to sift through that much scientific jargon”. It offers instead to “do that for you”.
When it comes to making sense of phenomena that happen at a planetary scale, it is unclear how hyper-simplified versions of reality that compete for the viewer, user or reader’s attention, disdain or empathy make it any more possible to act upon these changes. It is hard to shake away the suspicion that stories will not help humanity get out of a mess that is, interestingly enough, much more complex than both the punitive, corporate-responsibility-infused Bloomberg Green columns and dystopian tomes of cli-fi make it look.
The hottest summer ever (summer after summer), “unprecedented” concentration of CO² levels, biodiversity losses, wildfires, and the feedback loops that speed them all up recursively, can all be – and have been – subjects of narration. With a locked-in 1.5°C temperature increase and a dependency on fossil fuels that seems impossible to curb, the cracks in these climate narratives are coming wide open. The human need for heroes and villains, climax and suspense, rewards and punishments now clashes with the more-than-human reality of chemical processes happening just outside the cognitive comfort zone of the story.
When talking about climate technology, one may think of solar-radiation management, ocean fertilisation, cloud seeding, carbon sequestration and the like. But the way that we articulate the climate problem is, in and of itself, a technology as strong, if not stronger, than its high-tech brick-and-mortar counterparts. In her essay “A Rant about ‘Technology’”, Ursula K. Le Guin reclaims the softer qualities of “low-tech” and defines technology as the way society “copes with physical reality”. If technology is the active human interface with the material world, then stories and, more generally, sense-making are also climate technologies in their own right.
Storytelling is just one of many technologies through which humans understand the planet, but one towards which the planet is utterly indifferent. To be sure, the planet is not indifferent towards other sense-making tools, including climate sciences: models to interface with the material world are crucial to shape it in a way that is instrumental to our survival and collective thriving. However, defaulting to the relics of an all-too-human technology such as storytelling is a form of cognitive laziness whose unpacking and perhaps even demise is more urgent than ever. As Hannes Bergthaller writes in “Climate Change and Un-narratability”: “Narration always involves the projection of human preferences and values onto a world that, in and of itself, is indifferent to them, that is not story-like and therefore, in a very basic sense, un-narratable.”
Many have built their careers on trying to narrativise the planet and its atmosphere with the aim of overcoming its intrinsic un-narratability. Climate change, these careerists have said, is not story-like because of its “slow violence”: nothing ever happens, there is no tragedy, no peak-calamity. Instead, glaciers melt slowly, while CO² concentration increases fast enough for sensors to detect, but not enough for our lungs to register a meaningful change. It is a gradual process, meaning its fatal impact is not always visible. It is incremental, dispersed across time and space, and therefore often not perceived as a type of violence.
The proposed solution against slow violence has been to simulate these largely – and luckily – unexperienced phenomena in narrative form (which can, instead, render violence very effectively through its eventual culmination in catastrophic events, in black on white, on one page or tome, or even more straightforwardly on a screen). Hence, scenario-planning workshops simulating all sorts of indulgently utopian and dystopian futures triumphed at climate conferences. Plotting and writing books, making art, and scripts about tragedies that we were yet to experience would have certainly stirred us in the right direction. Aren’t that what stories are for, after all? To put virtuous and non-virtuous behaviours side by side in order to establish rewards and punishment mechanisms for conforming or transgressing certain moral codes? The idea of anticipating many of the sufferings we might have been about to experience on page or on screen, so that we avoid actually experiencing them, learning from mistakes before having made them, was not such a bad idea – at least in principle. But nonsense and lack of linear narrative are registered as problems only by our cognition, not by the planetary ecosystems that we are part of.
As the simulations ran – together with the imagination – the calamities came unattended. Until a little more than a year ago, the urge to create a narrative-drive and get everyone to care about potential catastrophes or to experience them so that it could all be story-like and digestible was palpable. Yet the tragedies came knocking at the door despite the abundance of cinematic and artistic outputs made about them – including, but not limited to, institutional spectacles at climate conferences.
In summer 2021 we learned the phrase “heat dome”. Extreme weather events are now happening in Germany, not only in Bangladesh. “This last year has proven that climate change is no longer a distant threat,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “We can no longer assume that citizens of more affluent and secure countries like Canada, Germany, Japan and the United States will be able to ride out the worst excesses of a rapidly destabilizing climate.” Mind you, natural disasters as a direct result of climate change have been around for much longer, but they have been way too far from Western academic campuses for any established scientific committee to unanimously declare that link “obvious”, despite the fact that extreme weather attribution working groups have been connecting the dots since much, much earlier.
Following the latest IPCC reports and scientific consensus, there finally seem to be clear actors doing clearly bad things and, one hopes, eventually paying for the consequences. Mainstream media outlets have caught up with both climate-fiction and climate science by celebrating the triumph of causality: seemingly overwhelming, nonsensical events such as the environment getting less hospitable to human life can now be fitted into a linear succession of causes (anthropogenic interventions) and effects (warming climate). Bloomberg Green journalist Akshat Rathi opens his August column with the words: “Scientists just made history by declaring, definitively and in unison, that climate change is caused by people.” If we were to jump ahead a few years, what we might say looking back at this tick would be, “It all was bad, but it all made sense.”
As it should be clear by now, the fact that climate change phenomena map onto the structure of the story – which could be summarised as causality, linearity, and catastrophic events – is not something that is terribly useful to our survival.
Stories are formulaic, predictable, and just very old. In his 1965 essay, “Cybernetics and Ghosts”, Italo Calvino (way ahead of GPT-3) wrote about stories as technologies of permutation that are so repeatable as to be, one day, completely automatable. When storytelling evolved – symbiotically with the cognition of the early humans gathering in tribes – the extreme poverty of ideas about the world then available to them was matched by this detailed (and seemingly) all-embracing technology. Stories emerged as a flawed but flexible stand-in for interfacing with actual knowledge of worldly phenomena, not necessarily as a means of acquiring such knowledge – but the confusion is one that is proving hard to articulate, let alone overcome.
Calvino also published a collection of 200 Italian folktales in 1965. He begun the project in 1954, influenced by Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, but after travelling across the entire peninsula to gather and codify local tales, he discovered that they differ only marginally across regions. There is always a good and a bad character being glorified or punished for their actions, like in the “Money Can Do Everything” tale from Genoa, or magic forces saving the virtuous characters in need, as in the “Serpent King” from Calabria. If the geographical focus of Calvino’s project makes it seem like a cultural bias is at play, works like World Tales by India-born author Idries Shah – a collection of “basic” stories with global scope – show that such narrative devices are tools shared by all humankind.
Today, just as the richness of ideas and knowledge about the world continues to grow, the narrative code stays primordially the same. The cognitive shackles of the narrative drive are both hard to recognise and to break from – but that does not mean we should not try.
Throughout the history of literature, frustrations around storytelling have often bubbled up because its appeasing, subjective, and linear nature has long been counterproductive to achieving political and larger than individual ambitions. For instance, in The Biography of the Object (1929), Soviet playwright Sergey Tretiakov writes about the need to “run a human along the narrative conveyer belt like an object”, rather than using the device of the hero, who he found was getting in the way of socialism. “In the classical novel that is based upon the individual hero’s biography, the relative scale of the characters is largely reminiscent of Egyptian wall paintings,” he wrote. “The colossal pharaoh is on the throne at the centre; near him, in a slightly smaller size, is his wife; still smaller are the ministers and army commanders; and finally, in faceless heaps of copper coins, is the entire varied mass of the population: the servants, the soldiers, the slaves. The hero is what holds the novel’s universe together. The whole world is perceived through him. The whole world is, furthermore, essentially just a collection of details that belong to him.” And: “In order to determine the power of this idealism in the novel, you have only to consider the weight within it of the objective world (the world of things and processes) relative to the weight of the subjective world (the world of emotions and experiences).” For Tretiakov, the straitjacket of the novel was far too subjective and human-centred to convey the materialism needed to articulate and practice socialism.
Today, similarly, the excessive weight placed on experience can be seen in the narratives around planetary catastrophes and doomsday scenarios: the psychological aspects of catastrophe are too seductive to give way to more alienating forms of understanding the world where, crucially, the subjective experience of the character is necessarily secondary to the material reality of the world they live in. In the psychological plot described by Tretiakov, events follow one another in a “fatalist” teleology. He proposed The Biography of the Object as an antidote to that, a literature organised around the act: “Thus: not the individual person moving through a system of objects, but the object 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.”
Tretiakov was fighting different monsters than we are now (it would be hard to find someone being angry at “belles lettres” today), but we can still learn from his critiques of the novel today and see some of its outdated streaks in the idealist and moralising character of climate narratives. Seeing humans as objects just like any other, scrolling on a conveyor belt, might be a useful technique to begin the dismantling of contemporary psychodrama tropes. The first step to getting out of a trap, after all, is to recognise you are in it – and this requires a certain degree of distance from our own experience, alienation, if you will.
If we were to experiment with this kind of alienation, it might allow us to see man in his full worth: a powerful biped who was able to shape the planet accidentally and semi-intentionally in ways that might cause his own demise. Considering humans as objects should not be mistaken for taking agency away from them by picturing them as impotent and miniscule, but rather as a means to see humanity from outside the immediacy of human experience. In doing so, we might learn to acknowledge both our power and our danger to planetary (eco) systems and, therefore, to ourselves.
Umberto Eco also wrote extensively about narratives, and specifically, about the necessity of alienation as a fundamental goal of meaningful literature. He was concerned with rendering and articulating alienation artistically (in writing, speaking, music and science). In his book The Open Work (1962), he wrote about the hardwired technologies of storytelling, asking how it might be possible to get out of a “language that has already done so much speaking”. His idea of “form as social commitment” revealed the ways in which the process of writing applies a descriptive model to an objective reality. In other words, form as social commitment consists of building a literary, aesthetic and discursive world on top of the reality and objectivity of the planet in ways that break with past traditions. In this way, attempts to articulate the world differently are directed towards changing the material world itself through a more recursive understanding of it.
The artist, for Eco, stands outside of established communication paradigms and does not conform to existing models of knowledge. Rather, he creates new ones in order to express what is impossible to say with the tools at hand. In its most ambitious form, literature would express our relationship to the object of our knowledge, and our concern with the form we have given the world, or the form we have failed to give it, and would try to provide our imagination with schemes without which we might not be able to understand a large part of our technical and scientific activity. In the multitude of the schemes available to us, the story is, once again, just one of many.
One way to do this is to acknowledge that the world – that is, the mental images about the material reality of the planet we are inhabiting as objects on a conveyor belt – can only be built as modified nature, as man-made work. The planet itself extends independently of human intentions, as if it evolved according to its own laws. “This world that we have created can now turn us into its tools,” Eco wrote, “but it can also provide us with elements necessary to establish the parameters for a new human standard of measurement.” By doing this, he proposes to see literature as a meter, an instrument, an “open work”, that gives the parameters of the world but lets the viewer, user or reader navigate it in ways that are as binding as they are freeing.
To this, Calvino would have probably countered Eco’s proposal for the reframing of narrative outside of the human experience by stating that there is no way the author can escape what is human. His practical and literal articulation of his thought was to anthropomorphise non-human characters while using established structures of literature. But Calvino was at least knowledgeable about his human-cognitive shortcomings, with his work both accommodating and at the same time dislodging these limitations in a gracious way. For instance, in his Cosmicomics collection, the anthropomorphism of the characters is so explicit, infantile, and absurd (think of the “humble shell” narrating the origins of life) that it serves the purpose of dislodging the human – moving by means of ridicule from the pharaonic throne of protagonist in the hero’s journey to mere passenger. This ridicule is achieved through “trying too hard”, offering a caricature of humanity, rather than an inevitability of humanity.
Using anthropomorphism strategically, literature can embrace the parts of the human that are useful to articulating the complexity of planetary conditions by exaggerating the importance of and embarrassing the figure of the human – all at once. This can be achieved by letting the world speak for itself – in other words, by stopping at world building and leaving the straitjacket of the story at the door. The forms of this storyless literary world are what may allow humans to act subser - viently to their own survival and thriving, not according to outdated moral compasses hardwired in dominant narrative forms, such as the film, the hero’s journey, the novel, the moralising article, the financial solution, the guilt trap, the emission-scenario report.
After all, a literature that tries to express, in its openness and indeterminacy, the vertiginous and hypothetical universe perceived by the scientific imagination is still concerned with mankind, since it tries to define a universe that has assumed its present configuration thanks to a human process of modelling reality. The apparently contradictory sense-making approaches of anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism and alienation do not then exclude each other, but are strategies that should be used in tandem to grapple with a reality riddled with the very same contradictions.
We urgently need new literary technologies to match the complexity and richness of our scientific knowledge about the planet. These are the ones that transcend the comfort of narratives, not by creating more of them, but by inventing a new form of literature altogether. These new tools need to be recursive and programmable, like the feedback loops they are trying to model, scientifically rigorous and ambiguously open at once. The seeds of these literatures and literacies already exist; they are in statistical analysis, weather prediction, cognitive sciences, cybernetics remnants, poetry, astronomy, forest ecosystems and climate simulations.
There are many new non-stories, worlds, and models looming across the horizon, but none of them will be accessed until we are brave enough to let go of the comfort of making sense. ◉