The Capitalocene: – China Miéville and the Limits of Utopia

Each day we seem to do the same thing, repeat the same ill-founded gestures, tell ourselves it’ll get better, that the news can’t be that bad, that somewhere over the next horizon there’s a silver lining with our name on it. This is what Fredric Jameson after Ernst’s Bloch’s three-volume The Principle of Hope termed the ‘utopian impulse’:

[T]he lifework of Ernst Bloch is there to remind us that Utopia is a good deal more than the sum of its individual texts. Bloch posits a Utopian impulse governing  everything  future-oriented  in life and culture; and  encompassing everything  from games  to  patent medicines,  from myths  to  mass  entertain­ment,  from  iconography  to  technology,  rom  architecture  to  eros,  from tourism to  jokes  and the  unconscious.1

The Limits of Utopianism

Yet, as China Miéville in his The Limits of Utopia reminds us:  “We need utopias. That’s almost a given in activism. If an alternative to this world were inconceivable, how could we change it? … But utopia has its limits: utopia can be toxic. …What price hopelessness, indeed? But what price hope?” As he tells it:

Utopias are necessary. But not only are they insufficient: they can, in some iterations, be part of the ideology of the system, the bad totality that organises us, warms the skies, and condemns millions to peonage on garbage scree.  […] The utopia of togetherness is a lie. Environmental justice means acknowledging that there is no whole earth, no ‘we’, without a ‘them’. That we are not all in this together. […] Which means fighting the fact that fines for toxic spills in predominantly white areas are five times what they are in minority ones. It means not only providing livings for people who survive by sifting through rejectamenta in toxic dumps but squaring up against the imperialism of garbage that put them there, against trash neoliberalism by which poor countries compete to become repositories of filth. […] And it means standing directly against military power and violence.

Yes, indeed. Slavoj Zizek in his recent essay on Greece in the New Statesman said of such utopian limits: “The people of Greece are not being asked to swallow many bitter pills in exchange for a realistic plan of economic revival: they are asked to suffer so that others in the European Union can go on dreaming their dream undisturbed.” The point being that what seems appropriate for the financiers and the governments that have put Greece into economic servitude as the Utopia of Capitalocene, – a servitude to austerity that will stretch over the coming decades and generations, seems to think this enslavement is justified for the benefit of their own utopian dreams. As sort of dystopian nightmare of the Utopian Impulse these bureaucrats, bankers, marketers, governmental leaders, etc. believe this to be the enactment of EU salvational myth for the 21st Century.

Like Miéville in that same essay tells us everywhere the “stench and blare of poisoned cities, lugubrious underground bunkers, ash landscapes [seems to permeate the world, and]… Worseness is the bad conscience of betterness, dystopias rebukes integral to the utopian tradition. We hanker and warn, our best dreams and our worst standing together against our waking.”

Jameson continuing cites Wayne Hudson who tells us of Bloch: “The Principle of Hope Bloch provides an unprecedented survey of  human wish pictures and day dreams of  a better life.” (Jameson, p. 2). Yes, the future, a site of wish dreams and a better life. Yet, that’s always been a source of pain and issue concerning utopia, hasn’t it? It’s always remained ‘beyond us’ – over there, elsewhere… a sort of non-site of pure imaginative need, a site where we would like to live, but for some reason know that it is just that – out of reach, an impossible dream. So what happens is this great disconnect between now and then, the dream and the present, utopia and dystopia.

There is a difference between utopian impulse and utopian program in Jameson’s estimation. For Bloch the utopian impulse governs  everything  future-oriented  in life and culture; and  encompassing everything  from games  to  patent medicines,  from myths  to  mass  entertain­ment,  from  iconography  to  technology,  from  architecture  to  eros,  from tourism to  jokes  and the  unconscious. While the utopian program involves a commitment to closure:

Totality is  then  precisely  this  combination  of  closure  and  system,  in  the name of  autonomy  and  self-sufficiency  and  which  is  ultimately the source  of that  otherness  or  radical,  even  alien,  difference  already  mentioned above  and to  which  we  will  return  at  some  length.  Yet  it  is  precisely  this  category  of totality that presides over  the  forms of  Utopian realization:  the Utopian city, the Utopian revolution,  the Utopian commune  or village,  and 0f course  the Utopian text itself, in all its radical and unacceptable difference from the more lawful  and  aesthetically  satisfying  literary  genres. (Jameson, p. 5)

I’ve written of Georges Bataille whose battle was against just this notion of utopian programs as system and closure (here) would lead him and his ephebe, Nick Land to a base materialism of an pre-ontological and chaotic thermospasm cosmos, etc..  Bataille and Land both write against this notion of utopia is an idealism,  showing how its objectifying notion of the Idea as system, totality, and enclosure within an ‘space of textuality’, where the play of difference (poststructuralism)  traces the interminable black holes of rhetoric in politics and culture into their darkness outside the Real –  is the Great Fall into a spurious Ontology. Of course for Bataille this notion of utopia would not lead to emancipation, but to actual and real enslavement in idealisms of the Idea: the planned City, Nation, World, etc. A closed empire of the Mind within the folds of its own monstrous self-autonomous systems of difference: a labyrinth without outlet, where the Minotaur at the center is none other than the Void itself, the impossible and inhuman core of our own humanity. Instead we need a dynamic and open sense of possibilities in untopian thinking, rather than this closed off sphere of Ideas and idealism. I mean by Untopia the need for “unknowing” rather than knowing:

“I love the ignorance concerning the future,” wrote Nietzsche, and Bataille seconded him. For Bataille, any assurances concerning the future, either good or bad, were beside the point, even silly; instead, there was the play of chance, the affirmation of what has happened, what will happen. The left hand spends, in gay blindness as well as science, and the future is affirmed, in the night of non-knowledge.11

Yet, as Jameson shows Bloch’s interpretive principle is most effective when it reveals the operation  of  the  Utopian  impulse in unsuspected places, where it is concealed or repressed, and he seeks against Bataille  a systematic knowledge of these hidden and repressed elements. “But what becomes,  in that case, of delib­erate and fully self-conscious Utopian programs as such?” (Jameson, p. 3).

Susan Buck-Morass in her Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West would describe utopia turned totalitarian dream in the twentieth century as the construction of mass utopia in the East and West became part of a nightmare world of dystopian impulse rather than an egalitarian and emancipationist vision of life and beauty in harmony with nature. As the twentieth century closed, this dream was being left behind; the belief that industrial modernization can bring about the good society by overcoming material scarcity for all has been challenged by the disintegration of European socialism, capitalist restructuring, and ecological constraints. The larger social vision has given way to private dreams of material happiness and to political cynicism. Developing the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept, Susan Buck-Morss attempted to come to terms with mass dreamworlds at the moment of their passing. She showed how dreamworlds became dangerous when their energy was used by the structures of power as an instrument of force against the masses.

As she asks: “Is there cause to lament the passing of mass dreamworlds?”2 She’ll go on to describe them, saying, “They were compatible with terrifying assemblages of political and economic power: world war machines, machines of mass terror, violent forms of labor extraction. But it was the structures of power, not the democratic, utopian idea, that produced these nightmare forms.” (Buck-Morass, p. 276)

So ultimately Utopia is the mask of Idealism as Monstrous Form and System bound within the enclosures of the great prison house of experimental programs and impulses of terror: a totalitarian program for the algorithmic and computational remaking of humanity, and the impulse to follow the threads of every possibility to its logical end within a labyrinth of psychotic and solipsistic closure. Some say this is why it led to such utter extremes of disaster and catastrophe as the Gulag and Holocaust.

The Sixth Extinction Draws Nigh

In our own time the big catch word of future catastrophe looms over the wastelands of the utopian and dystopian impulse. As Derrick Jensen an extreme advocate for exit and the almost ludditean vison of terror against the machine civilization of death and culture we live in says: “The dominant culture— civilization— is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living being.”3 So here the utopian impulse has turned to utopian program and a mass appeal to take up arms against the threat of extinction.

Some warn us of what is already happening. The Sixth Extinction is well underway, that we humans are in partial to blame, that we are part of what is now termed the problem not the solution. We even have a new term for what our kind has done to impact the environment: The Anthropocene Age.  As one scientist tells it:

No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred. Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough… but now we are in the midst of a Sixth.4

As another author Fred Guterl states it “the success of Homo sapiens has created new and terrifying risks that didn’t exist a few decades ago. By our dominating presence on the planet, we are changing its geochemistry and its biology. We are upsetting climate systems— not just global average climate, but also an intricate network of regional weather systems— in ways we don’t fully understand. Ocean current cycles, monsoons, glaciers, and rain forests could each turn suddenly, or in tandem.”5

Yet, as Miéville will speak of much of this Green Movement as itself a part of the problem, not the solution either: what are sometimes called the Big Ten green groups – The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the National Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society, and others – refused the request to join the campaign. Because, they said, it was not an environmental, but a ‘community health’ issue. […]  The fallacies of Big Green. Start with heuristics like rural versus urban, nature versus the social, and in the face of oppressive power you easily become complicit, or worse, in environmental injustice, in racism. Such simplistic urbophobic utopianism can unite the most nostalgic conservative, seeking solace in a national park with the most extropian post-hippy touting an eco-start-up.

This sense of frustration is everywhere as both the far Left and far Right of the spectrum battle over the body of the earth. The one saying the Left is full of shit, the other that the Right is full of childish neo-reactionary blindness. Those such as Jim Hansen even as late as 2009 were warning that we only had four years left to act, etc., saying that The IPCC estimates that rising temperatures will melt ice and cause ocean water to heat up and increase in volume. This will produce a sea-level rise of between 18 and 59 centimetres. However, some predict a far faster rate of around one to two metres. Inundations of one or two metres would make the Nile Delta and Bangladesh uninhabitable, along with much of south-east England, Holland and the east coast of the United States. Warning that the world was now in “imminent peril”, he insisted, and nothing would quench his resolve in spreading the message. It is the debt he owes his grandchildren, after all.

Capitalocene

Of course back in 2014 Professor Ottmar Edenhofer who led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: “It doesn’t cost the world to save the planet.” And, as the Guardian reported in the same article, Kaisa Kosonen, at Greenpeace International, said: “Renewable energy is unstoppable. It’s becoming bigger, better and cheaper every day. Dirty energy industries are sure to put up a fight but it’s only a question of time before public pressure and economics dictate that they either change or go out of business.” In recent thought a catastrophe caused by climate change is seen as the biggest potential threat to the global economy in 2016, according to a survey of 750 experts conducted by the World Economic Forum. As the Guardian reported a failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation was seen as likely to have a bigger impact than the spread of weapons of mass destruction, water crises, mass involuntary migration and a severe energy price shock – the first time in the 11 years of the Global Risks report that the environment has been in first place.

But as Miéville satirizes this almost comical enactment of belated defense of the earth says: “Faced with the scale of what’s coming, there’s a common and baleful propriety, a self-shackling green politeness. ‘Anything’, the argument goes, ‘is better than nothing.’ Hence solutions to tempt business, and the pleading for ecologically-inflected economic rationality. Capitalism, we are told by Jonathan Porritt, an eminent British environmentalist, is the only game in town.” In this sense many on the Right fear the Green Movement as a utopian program to eliminate the capitalist utopia. As Brian Sussman in Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America one gets the sense of paranoia and total eclipse of the Right’s way of life, etc., in his own version of the environmental movement:

[S]ince the inception of the environmental movement, its leaders have been consumed with eliminating capitalism and ushering in a global era of socialism. Their call for being “green” goes far beyond demanding clean air, pure water, healthy forests, and alternative sources of energy. The leftists at the helm of the environmentalist hierarchy want to control the air, water, forests, and natural resources. Because I only touched on this research in Climategate, I felt it necessary to write another book that would provide the most comprehensive exposé of how the left’s green agenda is trashing American liberty.6

One commenter from the left reviewing Climategate and Eco-Tyranny, Sussman’s books lambasting the Green Movement and its political agenda, saying:  Mr. Sussman thinks there’s a cabal of heathenish hippy Climate Scientists, in league with godless, Marxist Politicians. And they’re meeting under cover of darkness in a secret forest, wearing green hooded cloaks, holding ancient rituals honoring the Pagan Gods of tree hugging and Anti-Industrialism. As they chant incantations and burn The Constitution, on a altar lit by black candles. All the while conspiring to spread, steaming turd, whopper lies, to the unbeknownst masses. In an effort to propagate alarmist-paranoia with the goal of creating mass hysteria…so extreme, that society collapses into a state of Mad Maxian style Anarchy. Only then, is the prophecy fulfilled and their sinister, Green Totalitarian World State, finally implemented…(insert maniacal laughter, and thunder clap for effect) Are you with me so far? That’s right, The Environmental Movement is really about Global Domination…”. (found on EnviroAction)

Yet, others like Stuart Brand in his Rethinking Green and Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto argues  that taking account of the emerging global forces of climate change, urbanization, and biotechnology forces us to rethink of some traditional environmental positions. The one that most people still don’t take into consideration is that power is shifting to the developing world, where 5 out of 6 people live, where the bulk of humanity is getting out of poverty by moving to cities and creating their own jobs and communities (slums, for now). The other is biotech engineering of crops as a needed rethink: to genetically engineered food crops, Brand noted that they are a tremendous success story in agriculture, with Green benefits such as no-till farming, lowered pesticide use, and more land freed up to be wild. The developing world is taking the lead with the technology, designing crops to deal with the specialized problems of tropical agriculture. Meanwhile the new field of synthetic biology is bringing a generation of Green biotech hackers into existence.

Yet, as Miéville points out much of this Green Capitalism is actually “environmentalism as dispossession, what the Indigenous Environmental Network calls Carbon Colonialism”. As he tells it “[f]orget any spurious human totality: there is a very real, dangerous, other modern totality in commanding place, one with which too much environmentalism has failed to wrestle. As Jason Moore puts it, ‘Wall Street is a way of organizing Nature.’” Going on to argue:

The very term ‘Anthropocene’, which gives with one hand, insisting on human drivers of ecological shift, misleads with its implied ‘We’. After all, whether in the deforestation of what’s now Britain, the extinction of the megafauna in North America, or any of countless other examples, Homo sapiens, anthropos, has always fed back into its –cene, the ecology of which it is constituent, changing the world. Nor was what altered to make these previously relatively local effects planetary and epochal, warranting a new geochronological term, the birth (as if, in too many accounts, by some miracle) of heavy industry, but a shift in the political economy by which it and we are organised, an accelerating cycle of profit and accumulation.  […] Which is why Moore, among others, insists that this epoch of potential catastrophe is not the ‘Anthropocene’, but the ‘Capitalocene’.

Conspiracy of the Anthropocene

Fredric Jameson brings out the motif that many have found problematic in the postmodern turn: the elimination of the Subject and subjectivity in favor of the achievement  of a radical impersonality in Utopia, the efface­ment  of the private  property  of  the  self  and  the  emergence  of  some new decentered and collective practice of social and individual relations…”(Jameson, p. 168). As he states it, it would “in the best  of  cases  scarcely  correspond  to  an  abolition of  subjectivity  but rather merely to a new form of  the latter, in which bourgeois individualism – another name for the  old humanist “centered subject” under attack by con­temporary theory – has been replaced by the “multiple subject positions” of  postmodernity and late  capitalism. Once again the notion of  the replication of the system becomes the final form of  conspiracy theory, and the concept of a Utopian transformation becomes an additional resource in the warehouse of late capitalism’s ruses and lures.” (Jameson, p. 168).

For Miéville we start with the non-totality of the ‘we’. From there not only can we see the task but we can return to our utopias, to better honor the best of them. So this sense of the impersonal collective as a hyperorganism, or what Timothy Morton terms ‘hyperobject’: the term hyperobjects to refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans, such as the biosphere or even the “or the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism,” etc.;  ultimately hyperobjects, then, are “hyper” in relation to some other entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans or not.7

Miéville will remark, saying that “Utopia, for one thing, has never been the preserve of those who cleave to liberation. Settlers and expropriators have for centuries asserted their good environmental sense against the laziness of feckless natives, in realizing the potential of land spuriously designated empty, of making so-called deserts so-called bloom. Ecotopia has justified settlement and empire since long before the UN’s REDD schemes. It has justified murder. […]There is a vision of the world as a garden, under threat. Choked with toxic growth. Gardening as war. And the task being one of ‘ruthlessly eliminating the weeds that would deprive the better plants of nutrition, the air, light, sun.’”

Post-Apocalyptic Utopia: The Elimination of Now

“Reactionary apologists for Big Pollute,” Miéville remarks, “routinely slander ecological activists as fascists. That doesn’t mean those committed to such activism should not be ruthless in ferreting out any real overlaps: very much the opposite.” And, that aspects of “eliminationist bad utopia can be found much more widely than in the self-conscious Far Right”. Nick Land as a neo-traditionalist in a recent essay Reactionary Horror explicates:

Reaction is articulated as an inversion of the progressive promise, dissociating ‘the good’ and ‘the future’. The tacit science fiction narrative that corresponds to projected social evolution is stripped of its optimism, and two alternative genres arise in its place. The first, as we have fleetingly noted, is mild and nostalgic, rebalancing the tension of time towards what has been lost, and tending to an increasingly dreamlike inhabitation of ancient glories. A conservative-traditionalist  mentality devotes itself to a mnemonic quest, preserving vestiges of virtue among the remnants of an eroded society, or — when preservation at last surrenders its grasp on actuality — turning to fantastic evocations, as the final redoubt of defiance. Tolkien exemplifies this tendency in its most systematic expression. The future is gently obliterated, as the good dies within it.

[…] The second reactionary alternative to the ruin of utopian futurism develops in the direction of horror. It does not hesitate in its voyage to the end of the river, even as smoke-shrouded omens thicken on the horizon. As the devastation deepens, its futurism is further accentuated.  Historical projection becomes the opportunity for an exploration of Hell. (The ‘neo-‘ of ‘neoreaction’ thus finds additional confirmation.)

[…] On this track, reactionary historical anticipation fuses with the genre of horror in its most intense possibility (and true vocation). Numerous consequences are quite rapidly evident. One special zone of significance concerns the insistent question of popularization, which is substantially resolved, almost from the start. The genre of reactionary populism is already tightly formulated, on the side of horror fiction, where things going to Hell is an established presupposition. Zombie Apocalypse is only the most prominent variant of a far more general cultural accommodation to impending disaster. ‘Survivalism’ is as much a genre convention as a socio-political expectation. (When, as VXXC points out on the blog, .22 ammunition functions as virtual currency, horror fiction has already installed itself as an operational dimension of social reality.)

[…] Reaction does not do dialectics, or converse with the Left (with which it has no community), yet historical fatality carries its message: Your hopes are our horror story. As the dream perishes, the nightmare strengthens, and even — hideously — invigorates.

For Miéville this is an ecological utopia of mass death. That we could also call an apocalypse. Apocalypse and utopia: the end of everything, and the horizon of hope. Far from antipodes, these two have always been inextricable. Sometimes, as in Lactantius, the imagined relationship is chronological, even of cause and effect. The one, the apocalypse, the end-times rending of the veil, paves the way for the other, the time beyond, the new beginning. […] We’re surrounded by a culture of ruination, dreams of falling cities, a peopleless world where animals explore. We know the clichés. Vines reclaim Wall Street as if it belongs to them, rather than the other way round; trash vastness, dunes of garbage; the remains of some great just-recognizable bridge now broken to jut, a portentous diving board, into the void.

The Global Empire of Ruins

One remembers DEREK WALCOTT, “Ruins of a Great House,” Collected Poems 1948– 1984:

A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone, Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake, Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed In memory now by every ulcerous crime. The world’s green age then was a rotting lime Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text. The rot remains with us, the men are gone. But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind That fans the blackening ember of the mind, My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne.

As Ann Laura Stoler’s in her Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination remarks, ruins indicates privileged sites of reflection— of pensive rumination. Portrayed as enchanted, desolate spaces, large-scale monumental structures abandoned and grown over, ruins provide a favored image of a vanished past, what is beyond repair and in decay, thrown into aesthetic relief by nature’s tangled growth. Such sites come easily to mind: Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, the Acropolis, the Roman Colosseum, icons of romantic loss and longing that inspired the melancholic prose of generations of European poets and historians who devotedly chronicled pilgrimages to them.8 Yet, while we begin thinking of planetary collapse and the ‘ruins of empire’ Stoler argues that we must work against this melancholic gaze and reposition our present perspectives to include the wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and refusal that imperial formations sustain. She goes on to say,

Nor is it the wistful gaze of imperial nostalgia to which we turn. Walter Benjamin provides the canonical text for thinking about ruins as “petrified life,” as traces that mark the fragility of power and the force of destruction. But we are as taken with ruins as sites that condense alternative senses of history, and with ruination as a ongoing corrosive process that weighs on the future. (Stoler, p. 9)

Yet, for her against tracking things in themselves, she seeks to follow the “trail of the psyche” the rejected fragments of lives that have been lost in time and space, the ghostly presences that hide in the absences of things haunting us like remembrances of utopian expectations and antinomies.

As Miéville will argue” a real-world interpenetration of apocalypse and utopia. Apocalypse for those thousands who drowned on their own lungs. And for the corporations, now reassured that the poor, unlike profit, were indeed dispensable? An everyday utopia. […] This is another of the limitations of utopia: we live in utopia; it just isn’t ours. […] So we live in apocalypse too.” Yet, he’ll also remind us that our fight is not just over ecological justice, that this “battle won’t always be over catastrophic climate change or land expropriation: in neoliberalism, even local struggles for fleeting moments of green municipal life are ultimately struggles against power”.

I’m reminded of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams Utopian vision in Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work:

Any movement that wishes to remain relevant and politically potent must grapple with such potentials and developments in our technological world. We must expand our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows. Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power, the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonising the economy, space travel, robot economies – all the traditional touchstones of science fiction – in order to prepare for a day beyond capitalism. Neoliberalism, as secure as it may seem today, contains no guarantee of future survival. Like every social system we have ever known, it will not last forever. Our task now is to invent what happens next.9

As I’ve written elsewhere on hyperstitional utopianism, “truth is science fiction”: here and here. Where Deleuze and Guattari once suggested that what we need is abstract machines: a language that connects the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.10 This sense of a wider collective endeavor that brings together the theoretic and the practical, imaginative and concrete elaborations of scientific, artistic, and performative struggles for a new world vision that can enable us to work together, to bridge the divides between Left and Right, face the insurmountable odds of the future which is already accelerating through us, shaping us, remaking us into monstrous and terrible things of beauty and terror. We need to face this monstrousness we are most of all rather than live in denial of its power over our lives.

We see in the many aspects of cultural theory the impending doom of inhumanist thought as we struggle for terms; posthumanism, transhumanism, inhumanism, etc., as if we knew that something both monstrous and unnamable were making us over into its image. Like children who will not believe the truth of what is right there in front of their eyes we gaze into the future disturbed by the visions we see in cinema, science fiction, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, YA-dystopian, etc., all pointing to a hard truth: we are becoming unmoored from our ancient heritage in culture and civilization, becoming other: a metamorphosis and mutation which we are all going through together. Will we survive this transition? Will we discover in ourselves the imaginative ‘poverty’ to enable us to see the invisible and impossible thing we are becoming? It is at this juncture of the invisible and impossible that Utopian thought exists – as impulse and program. Let us begin, there.

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1. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions Verso (April 17, 2007)
2. Buck-Morass, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. The MIT Press; Reprint edition (February 22, 2002)
3. Jensen, Derrick; Keith, Lierre; Mcbay, Aric (2011-01-04). Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet (Kindle Locations 60-62). Random House Inc Clients. Kindle Edition.
4. Kolbert, Elizabeth (2014-02-11). The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (pp. 2-3). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
5. Guterl, Fred (2012-05-22). The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It (p. 3). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
6. Sussman, Brian (2012-04-17). Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America (Kindle Locations 71-75). Midpoint Trade Books. Kindle Edition.
7. Morton, Timothy (2013-10-23). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Posthumanities) (Kindle Locations 106-111). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition
8. Ann Laura Stoler.  (2013-04-19). Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (p. 9). Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.
9. Nick Srnicek; Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Kindle Locations 3599-3604). Verso.
10. Gilles Deleuze & Feliz Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota, 1987)
11. Allan Stoekl. Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (Kindle Locations 2965-2967). Kindle Edition.