A Post-Capitalocene Climate Imaginary in John Lanchester’s The Wall

초록

Hegemonic understandings of climate change are often condensed into the term “Anthropocene,” but others challenge this view by proposing the “Capitalocene,” which posits the historically specific capitalist world-system as the primary driver of climate change. The Capitalocene urges us to consider humans not as a homogeneous aggregate, or anthropos, but as classed subjects embedded in regimes of capitalist exploitation and appropriation. It also conceives the capitalist world-system as a world-ecology by including nature as an active constituent of capitalist operations. This article reads British novelist John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) as a work that mobilizes post-Capitalocene climate imaginaries. The Wall, a work of realist cli-fi, invites readers to view the present world-system as the Capitalocene and to read the near-future world-system as an intensified capitalist world-ecology. Set in an era of rising seas and a massive defensive barrier built to hold back both ocean waters and the “Others” who traverse them, the novel functions as a site for examining three dynamics. First, it shows how capitalist world-ecological relations are forged “through the Wall,” a structure co-produced by human and nonhuman forces. Second, from a materialist perspective, it traces how intensified class structures generate cognitive crossings over the Wall in ways unintended by the system. Third, it imagines the sea where semiperipheral anti-Capitalocene consciousness takes shape as a post-Capitalocene space in which world-ecological operations are suspended. Though pessimistic about the prospects of capitalist world-ecology, The Wall maintains a realistic outlook: the world-system’s violence and fragility will refract it into a post-Capitalocene world.

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