Politcs Books

“Keiller finds extinction looming everywhere – species dying off at a far faster rate than scientists had thought possible only a few years ago. The emphasis on extinction means that the concerns of Robinson in Ruins rhyme with the preoccupations that have emerged in speculative realist philosophy, which has focused on the spaces prior to, beyond and after human life. In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Brassier and Tim Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the sublime which was the former subject of a certain kind of landscape art. But where the older sublime concentrated on local natural phenomenon such as the ocean or volcanic eruptions which could overwhelm and destroy the individual organism or whole cities, speculative realism contemplates the extinction, not only of the human world, but of life and indeed matter itself. The prospect of ecological catastrophe means that disjunction between the lived time of human experience and longer durations is now not just a question of metaphysical contemplation, but a matter of urgent political concern, as one of Robinson’s touchstones, Fredric Jameson, noted. ‘[A]s organisms of a particular life span,’ Jameson writes in his essay ‘Actually Existing Marxism’,

we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future.

Amongst its requiem for neoliberal England, Robinson in Ruins gives us some intimations of those imperceptible tremors and inconceivable futures.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures