Literary Theory and Criminology 1032262834, 9781032262833

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“In this insightful and inspiring book, Rafe McGregor harnesses the power of literary and critical theory to change the world. Writing with urgency, McGregor highlights the destructiveness of what he coins ‘mass harms’ and demonstrates how critical literary writings can shape our perceptions of these harms and the actions necessary to confront them. McGregor masterfully integrates critique and praxis. His book is a must-read for the new generation of contemporary critical thinkers and practitioners.” Professor Bernard Harcourt, Columbia University “This fascinating book reveals insights and truths with a bright intellectual sophistication and tactful philosophical provocation, all the while tapping into the very essence of the existential crises besetting our world today. Wonderfully written, accessible in style, huge in scope, criminology and literary theory will never be the same. A terrific read.” Emeritus Distinguished Professor Rob White, University of Tasmania “In a world increasingly desecrated by unrelenting spasms of racism, sexism and ecocide, this must-read book succeeds in its desire to reconstruct more socially just ways of thinking, being and engaging in this world.” Professor Nuraan Davids, Stellenbosch University “Rafe McGregor is the master of the short monograph. In Literary Theory and Criminology, McGregor makes the provocative argument that ecocide is not only related to racism and sexism by global capitalism, but that it supersedes them in both qualitative and

quantitative terms. We should expect nothing less from him: he is the most creative contemporary critical theorist and the closest thing this generation has to Fredric Jameson.” Professor Avi Brisman, Eastern Kentucky University

LITERARY THEORY AND CRIMINOLOGY

Literary Theory and Criminology demonstrates the significance of contemporary literary theory to the discipline of criminology, particularly to those criminologists who are primarily concerned with questions of power, inequality, and harm. Drawing on innovations in philosophical, narrative, cultural, and pulp criminology, it sets out a deconstructive framework as part of a critical criminological critique-praxis. This book comprises eight essays – on globalisation, criminological fiction, poststructuralism, patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, anthropocidal ecocide, critical theory, and critical praxis – that argue for the value of contemporary literary theory to a critical criminology concerned with the construction of a just and sustainable reality in the face of climate change and other mass harms. This is the first criminology book to engage with literary theory from the perspective of criminology and provides a guide for criminologists who want to deploy literary theory as part of their research programmes. It supersedes existing engagements with poststructuralism in the philosophical criminological tradition because it entails neither a constructionist ontology nor a relativist epistemology. It shows criminologists how literary theory offers the tools to first deconstruct and then reconstruct meaning and value. Literary Theory and Criminology is essential reading for all critical criminological theorists. Rafe McGregor is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Edge Hill University, UK.

New Directions in Critical Criminology Editor: Walter S. DeKeseredy, West Virginia University, USA

This series presents new cutting-edge critical criminological empirical, theoretical, and policy work on a broad range of social problems, including drug policy, rural crime and social control, policing and the media, ecocide, intersectionality, and the gendered nature of crime. It aims to highlight the most up-to-date authoritative essays written by new and established scholars in the field. Rather than offering a survey of the literature, each book takes a strong position on topics of major concern to those interested in seeking new ways of thinking critically about crime. Sex-Positive Criminology Aimee Wodda and Vanessa R. Panfil Social Democratic Criminology Robert Reiner From Social Harm to Zemiology A Critical Introduction Victoria Canning and Steve Tombs Queer Criminology Carrie L. Buist and Emily Lenning Literary Theory and Criminology Rafe McGregor

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/New-Directions-in-Critical-Criminology/book-series/ NDCC

LITERARY THEORY AND CRIMINOLOGY Rafe McGregor

Designed cover image: © Shutterstock Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Rafe McGregor The right of Rafe McGregor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-26283-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-26280-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-28752-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of Figures Acknowledgements

ix xi

Introduction

1

1 Mass Harms

13

2 Criminologies

37

3 De/Re/Construction

62

4 Patriarchal Political Economy

87

5 Racial Capitalism

111

6 Anthropocidal Ecocide

135

7 Writing

159

8 Praxis

184

Index

205

FIGURES



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was inspired by a conversation with Avi Brisman in March 2021 and subsequently became part of a mutual and ongoing concern with the tripartite relationship among the social sciences, science fiction, and ecocide. Tom Sutton at Routledge helped shape the initial idea into a publishable monograph and all three of anonymous referees he selected prompted me to make significant improvements to the proposal. The book would not have been completed without the invaluable assistance of Beth Struszkowski, my research assistant at Edge Hill University, and my two supervisees, Reece Burns at Edge Hill and David Grčki at the University of Rijeka. Although this is a theoretical work, as the title suggests, it draws on primary research in the form of the Octavia E. Butler Papers archive and four interviews of academic activists. I am grateful to Gerry Canavan and the staff at The Huntington Library for their assistance with the former and to Nuraan Davids, Victoria Canning, Alice Nah, and Sara Vestergren for sacrificing their time for the latter. This work has been supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project UIP-2020-02-1309.

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about desire. Not about desire itself, whether it is best understood as a disposition, drive, or appetite or whether its origins are psychological, psychogenetic, or biological. Nor is it about the multiplicity of desires associated with the experience of fictions, even though that experience is crucial to the book’s thesis. The relationship between desire and fiction is at least twofold, imbricating desire as the relation between the audience and the representation with the satisfaction of desire as the relation between the audience and reality. Desire drives audience engagement, activating the sensory, imaginative, affective, and cognitive aspects of the experience of fictional representations. Aristotle (2004) understood the desire for mimesis as the essence of poetry, Fredric Jameson (2019) the desire of the protagonist as the existential meaning of allegory, and Catherine Belsey (2011) the unfulfilled desire of all representation to make reality present, a space that is exploited as a play of presence and absence in fiction. This book is about a desire to construct. To construct is to build, create, or invent and its antonym is to destroy, eradicate, or nullify. More specifically, it is about the desire for reconstruction at the heart of the literary theory known as deconstruction, which is a framework or matrix for revealing the extent DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520-1

2 Introduction

to which human experience and the world within which that experience occurs are socially constructed by language. Deconstruction and its practitioners have been accused of a relentless critique absent of praxis, of an epistemologically sterile antifoundationalism, and of a playful postmodernism that is irresponsible at best and morally reprehensible at worst. From its inauguration by Jacques Derrida in 1967, however, deconstruction has been – and remains – a desire to reconstruct reality. And not just a desire to reconstruct reality in any old way. Deconstruction is a desire to reconstruct a more just and sustainable reality. As such, deconstruction is also critical theory, theory that aims to change rather than just interpret the world. Deconstruction as a desire for the reconstruction of a more just and sustainable reality is also critical criminology, criminology that aims to create and sustain a society in which everyone is afforded the opportunity to flourish. This book is a product of the desire for that society and aims to demonstrate how deconstruction can be deployed to bring it into existence.1

Poststructuralism The poststructural revolution in literary theory can be dated precisely, to 1967, when Jacques Derrida (1967a, 1967b, 1967c) published Writing and Difference, Voice and Phenomenon, and Of Grammatology. The revolution took time to gain momentum, however, with a limited impact until the publication of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s English translation of Of Grammatology in 1976. Spivak’s (1976, 1999) translation opens with a lengthy preface that illuminates Derrida’s ideas for an Anglophone audience and her magnum opus, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, closes with an appendix that illustrates how to apply deconstruction to the lived experience of late modern reality. The revolution was consolidated when deconstruction was adopted by several very influential literary critics at Yale University in the late 1970s, including Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Geoffrey Hartman. Derrida was much better received in America than France and Spivak’s translation disseminated deconstruction to an audience beyond the Francophone world. By the turn of the

Introduction  3

decade the revolution in literary theory was complete, courtesy of Derrida’s global success and the simultaneous rise to prominence of Michel Foucault (1966, 1969, 1976), whose critique of reason established poststructuralism as a philosophical movement concerned with the relationships among meaning, value, and power. Foucault’s philosophy has been extremely influential in criminology, as well as the social sciences more generally, but my focus in this book is exclusively on Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida’s philosophical approach to literary and other texts was both post-structural and post-phenomenological. Deconstruction was post-structural in superseding the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes. In his posthumously published Course in General Linguistics, Saussure (1916) conceived of language as a system of signs. A sign consists of a signifier, a spoken or written word, and a signified, the meaning of that word. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary because different signifiers can be used for the same signified. Different signifiers are in fact used for the same signified in different languages, for example ‘justice’ in English and ‘gerechtigheid’ in Dutch. The relationship between signifiers and signifieds is, in consequence, established by means of convention. As language is a system of arbitrary signs meaning is determined by difference rather than reference. For example, what gives ‘justice’ meaning is its differentiation from similar words in the linguistic structure (such as ‘lawfulness’, ‘equity’, and ‘virtue’) rather than its reference to a shared concept in the world. The example of different languages is once again useful because ‘justice’ in English does not have exactly the same denotation as ‘gerechtigheid’ in Dutch (the literal translation of the latter is ‘righteousness’). This is also true of words that signify objects rather than concepts and Saussure maintained that reality was linguistically constructed, i.e. we only gain access to reality through language. If this is the case, then all signifieds are concepts rather than objects because even an apparently simple reference to, for example, my ‘laptop’ apprehends the object to which I am referring under a concept (a computer of a certain size and weight that has a battery and a lid and is suitable for some tasks but not others). Saussure’s ideas were applied to anthropology

4 Introduction

by Lévi-Strauss (1949) and to the first instantiation of the discipline that would become cultural studies (semiology) by Barthes (1957). Deconstruction was also post-phenomenological, superseding the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas. Phenomenology is the study of the structures of consciousness that make a shared, intersubjective world intelligible to human beings and it is pursued by means of attempts to describe subjective human experience in detail. Although phenomenology had been a part of philosophy for centuries, the discipline in its contemporary form was inaugurated by Husserl (1900–1901) with Logical Investigations, originally published in two volumes. Husserl focused phenomenology on intentionality, which was to be researched from a first-person point of view. One of the core principles of Husserl’s phenomenology was that human beings could not gain direct access to objective reality, which is why its subject was the structure of conscious experience. Heidegger (1927), who had been Husserl’s research assistant, turned phenomenology from the structure of conscious experience to its meaning – specifically the meaning of being, which (in the case of human beings) is a combination of intelligibility and possibility. Understanding is a mode of being and the meaning of being is revealed in the hermeneutic process of self-interpretation. Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, which involves progression through distinct stages, circles, or spirals. For Heidegger, the meaning of being was revealed by means of self-interpretative progression through its epistemological, phenomenological, and cultural significations. He was an enthusiastic member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and stands in stark contrast to Levinas, who was one of his students before spending most of the Second World War in Stalag XI-B, where he was segregated with other Jewish prisoners of war. Levinas (1961) added a much-needed ethical dimension to Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, turning his emphasis on the self to an emphasis on the self ’s relationship with the other. In Levinas, the self is constituted by the other, in consequence of which responsibility to and for the other is more fundamental than either the structure of conscious experience or the meaning of being. Deconstruction would incorporate and extrapolate both

Introduction  5

structuralism and phenomenology, with a particular focus on Saussure and Levinas.

Critical Criminology Like many terms within the social sciences, ‘critical criminology’ has been applied both inexactly and inconsistently and the historical and contemporary critical tradition within criminology comprises a multitude of approaches, frameworks, theories, and methodologies. One of the reasons critical criminology is difficult to define is that although the tradition extends back to the origin of criminology as an independent discipline, it remained in the shadow of mainstream, conventional, or positivist criminology for almost a century. The critical tradition began with the critique of Cesare Lombroso’s prototypical positivist criminology by his lesser-known contemporaries – such as Napoleone Colajinni, Francesco Saverio Merlino, and Filipp Turati – at the end of the 19th century (Van Swaaningen 1999). Willem Bonger (1905) was the first criminologist to apply Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ critiques of capitalism to crime, in Criminality and Economic Conditions, at the beginning of the 20th century. He (Bonger 1938: 49) subsequently provided a critique of the widely held White supremacist conception of biologically determined criminal behaviour, attributing ‘Negro’ crime to environmental factors in Race and Crime. Critical criminology emerged as a fully fledged tradition, distinguished by its opposition to mainstream criminology, after the publication of Howard Becker’s (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, which revised the subject of criminology from unproblematised conceptions of crime to the sociology of deviance. The 1970s saw the development of conflict criminology in the US and radical criminology in the UK, as well as the laying of the foundations for what would later be called zemiology. Conflict criminology was inaugurated by Richard Quinney (1970), with The Social Reality of Crime, in which he argued that the less powerful were more likely to be labelled as criminal in consequence of their lack of influence in the political and legal spheres. Radical criminology was inaugurated by Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young (1973), who identified

6 Introduction

deviance and crime as rational responses to the structural exploitation of capitalism in The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. In ‘Defenders of Order or Guardians of Human Rights?’, Julia and Herman Schwendinger (1970) challenged criminologists to turn their attention to social harms such as war, racism, sexism, and elitism.2 This challenge was met by Paddy Hillyard, Christina Pantazis, Steve Tombs, and Dave Gordon (2004), who inaugurated zemiology with Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously. Zemiology takes preventable harms as its subject, regardless of whether or not those harms have been criminalised. Another reason critical criminology is difficult to define or even delineate is the rapid expansion of the tradition in the last 50 years. In a special issue of Critical Criminology: An International Journal entitled ‘Crucial Critical Criminology’, editor David Kauzlarich (2013) identified eight discrete perspectives that constituted the tradition in the 21st century: cultural criminology, left realism, feminist criminology, peacemaking criminology, intersectional criminology, postmodern criminology, green criminology, and convict criminology. In his own special issue revisiting Kauzlarich’s characterisation, Avi Brisman (2019) expands the constitutive perspectives to 13, introducing: deviant leisure, narrative criminology, queer criminology, southern criminology, and visual criminology. To this already unwieldy list, I would add at least one more perspective, zemiology. As critical criminology expands, diversifies, and prospers, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a single thread that runs through all of these perspectives, frameworks, and theories. Walter DeKeseredy (2022: 12) makes an exemplary attempt by designating the critical criminological perspective as viewing ‘the major sources of crime and social control as the unequal class, race/ethnic, and gender relations that control our society’. As such, he is primarily concerned with the Schwendingers’ social harms of elitism, racism, and sexism. In virtue of their global prevalence, I shall refer to these social harms as mass harms. DeKeseredy expands his designation by setting out the five key questions that drive the critical criminological perspective, directed at: (1) the locus of power; (2) the accountability of those in power; (3) the relationships among class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, crime, and

Introduction  7

deviance; (4) bias in criminal law; and (5) knowledge about crime. My subject in this book is the application of these five questions to three mass harms, two of which have already been identified: racism, sexism, and ecocide. Ecocide is typically investigated within green criminology, described by Rob White (2022: 19) as being ‘premised on the idea that the justice system needs to take environmental harm seriously’. Green criminology thus delineated focuses on environmental crimes and harms, environmental laws, environmental regulation, and eco-justice, which explores the value of nonhuman animals, plants, and ecosystems. There is some question as to whether zemiology in particular, and critical criminology more generally, is the study of social harm or just harm. If the former is true, then environmental harm may be distinct from DeKeseredy’s mass harms. My interest is in preventable harm, social or otherwise, and the late Polly Higgins (2010: 63, emphasis in original) defines ecocide as both a social and environmental harm: ‘the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished’. Ecocide is an environmental harm because it involves the destruction of ecosystems and a social harm because it affects human beings. In contrast to Higgins, my conception of ecocide is zemiological rather than legal, closer to White’s (2018) conception of ecocide as environmental harm on a global scale and to David Whyte’s (2020: 2–3) description of ecocide as a term that ‘captures the entirety of the threats to the sustainability of the planet: climate change, the ravaging of ecosystems, the eradication of species and the pollution of air, land and water’.3 The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2021, 2022a, 2022b) has a reputation for both rigour and conservatism in its estimates, but its three most recent reports nonetheless predict significant and irreversible environmental and social harm once global warming reaches 1.5°C. The panel is, furthermore, clear that ‘there is at least a greater than 50% likelihood that global warming will reach or exceed 1.5°C in the nearterm’, where ‘near-term’ is defined as by 2040 (IPCC 2022a: 7).

8 Introduction

Like racism and sexism, ecocide is a mass harm. Unlike global racism and sexism, global ecocide has the potential to destroy the human species – both directly, by diminishing the Earth’s ability to sustain human life, and indirectly, by climate-driven mass violence. On the day of the release of the most recent IPCC report, The Guardian (2022) published an opinion piece in which the editor stated: ‘What is needed is to find a way of living our lives that combines social justice with ecological sustainability. Depressingly, the IPCC reveals that the search has still not properly begun’. I began this introduction by declaring this book the product of a desire for a just and sustainable society. A just and sustainable society is one in which the mass harms of ecocide, racism, and sexism have substantially less impact than they do in society as it exists at present. The central thesis of this book is that all three of these mass harms are crucially linked. My aim is to suggest an unlikely but compelling starting point in the search for a just and sustainable way of living.

The Structure of This Book The argument of Literary Theory and Criminology proceeds as follows. I begin by setting my inquiry in the context of not only climate change but the relationships among ecocide, racism, and sexism proposed by Jason Moore, Kehinde Andrews, and Ariel Salleh in Chapter 1. Moore, Andrews, Salleh, and many other scholars identify these mass harms as interrelated and my point is that we have reached the stage where nothing short of a reconstruction of reality as we perceive and live it is necessary if social and climate justice are to be achieved. Chapter 2 distinguishes my inquiry from related research in philosophical criminology, cultural criminology, narrative criminology, and pulp criminology.4 In Chapter 3, I set out the deconstructive framework of analysis and evaluation that I employ for the remainder of the book, which is based on the work of Derrida, Spivak, and Belsey. The next three chapters apply that framework to complex narrative fictions in order to conduct a structural analysis of the three types of mass harm: patriarchal political economy in Octavia Butler’s (1993, 1998, 1989–2005) Parable

Introduction  9

of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Parable of the Trickster; racial capitalism in Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007), Blade Runner Black Out 2022 (2017), 2036: Nexus Dawn (2017), 2048: Nowhere to Run (2017), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017); and anthropocidal ecocide in Game of Thrones (2011–2019). Chapter 7 sets the three structural analyses in the context of critical theory, which is explored as part of the intellectual tradition of writing. Chapter 8 is a substantive conclusion in which I draw on interviews with four academic activists to suggest ways in which academics and students can integrate social critique and reflective practice to meet Bernard Harcourt’s (2020) criteria for critical praxis.

Notes 1 As such, this book is part of a quartet of introductory texts that explore the value of literary theory (McGregor 2021b), literary aesthetics (McGregor 2021a), cinematic aesthetics (Grčki & McGregor, 2024), and the combination of literary theory, literary aesthetics, and cinematic aesthetics (McGregor 2021b) to criminology. 2 I prefer ‘elitism’ to ‘classism’ as a signifier of prejudice based on social class. As such, elitism as I use it here and in the rest of this book is preconceived denigration, antipathy, or hostility of those of an inferior class, standing, or status. 3 In the rest of this book, I shall use ‘ecocide’ to denote the mass harm of global ecocide unless explicitly stated otherwise. 4 I employ ‘pulp criminology’ to denote recent criminological engagements with fictions outside of the cultural criminological framework and ultra-realist theory.

References 2036: Nexus Dawn (2017). Directed by Luke Scott. YouTube. 30 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgsS3nhRRzQ. 2048: Nowhere to Run (2017). Directed by Luke Scott. YouTube. 16 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ9Os8cP_gg. Aristotle. (2004). Poetics. Trans. P. Murray & T.S. Dorsch. In: Murray, P. (ed.). Classical Literary Criticism. London: Penguin, 57–97. Barthes, R. (1957/2000). Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. London: Vintage. Becker, H. (1963/1997). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Belsey, C. (2011). A Future for Criticism. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

10 Introduction

Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007). Directed by Ridley Scott. US: Warner Bros. Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Directed by Denis Villeneuve. US: Warner Bros. Blade Runner Black Out 2022 (2017). Directed by Shinichiro Watanabe. YouTube. 27 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rrZk9sSgRyQ. Bonger, W.A. (1905/1916). Criminality and Economic Conditions. Trans. H.P. Horton. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. ——— (1938/1969). Race and Crime. Trans. M.M. Hordyk. New York: Columbia University. Brisman, A. (2019). Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Crucial Critical Criminologies – Revisited and Extended’. Critical Criminology: An International Journal, 27 (1), 1–4. Butler, O.E. (1993/2019). Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central. ——— (1998/2019). Parable of the Talents. London: Headline. ——— (1989–2005). Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2031-OEB2215. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library. DeKeseredy, W.S. (2022). Contemporary Critical Criminology. Abingdon: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1967a/1978). Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge. ——— (1967b/2011). Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. L. Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. ——— (1967c/1976). Of Grammatology. Trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Foucault, M. (1966/1973). The Order of Things. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage. ——— (1969/1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Harper & Row. ——— (1976/1978). The History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. Trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin. Game of Thrones (2011–2019). Originally released 17 April. US: HBO. Grčki, D. & McGregor, R. (2024). An Epistemology of Criminological ­Cinema. Abingdon: Routledge. Harcourt, B.E. (2020). Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action. New York: Columbia University Press. Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. New York: Harper Collins. Higgins, P. (2010/2015). Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of Our Planet. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.

Introduction  11

Hillyard, P., Pantazis, C., Tombs, S. & Gordon, D. (eds) (2004). Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously. London: Pluto. Husserl, E. (1900–1901/2000). Logical Investigations. Vols. 1–2. Trans. J.N. Findlay. London: Routledge. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Available at: https://www.ipcc. ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/. ——— (2022a). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-reportworking-group-ii/. ——— (2022b). Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/. Jameson, F. (2019). Allegory and Ideology. London: Verso. Kauzlarich, D. (2013). Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Crucial Critical Criminology’. Critical Criminology: An International Journal, 21 (3), 255–256. Levinas, E. (1961/1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1949/1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. anonymous. Boston, MA: Beacon. McGregor, R. (2021a). A Criminology of Narrative Fiction. Bristol: Bristol University. ——— (2021b). Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism. Bristol: Bristol University. Quinney, R. (1970). The Social Reality of Crime. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Saussure, F.d. (1916/2020). Course in General Linguistics. London: Bloomsbury. Schwendinger, H. & Schwendinger, J. (1970). Defenders of Order Or Guardians of Human Rights? Issues in Criminology, 5 (2), 123–157. Spivak, G.C. (1976). Translator’s Preface. In: Derrida, J. (ed.). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, ix–xc. ——— (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Swaaningen, R.v. (1999). Reclaiming Critical Criminology: Social Justice and the European Tradition. Theoretical Criminology, 3 (1), 5–28. Taylor, I., Walton, P. & Young, J. (1973). The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance. New York: Routledge. The Guardian (2022). The Guardian View on the IPCC Report: Inaction Has Cost the World Dearly. Guardian. 28 February. Available at: https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/the-guardianview-on-the-ipcc-report-inaction-has-cost-the-world-dearly?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other.

12 Introduction

White, R. (2018/2020). Climate Change Criminology. Bristol: Bristol University. ——— (2022). Theorising Green Criminology: Selected Essays. Abingdon: Routledge. Whyte, D. (2020). Ecocide: Kill the Corporation before It Kills Us. Manchester: Manchester University.

1 MASS HARMS

In the introductory chapter, I stated that a just and sustainable society is one in which the mass harms of ecocide, racism, and sexism have substantially less impact than they do in society as it exists at present. The central thesis of this book is that all three of these mass harms are crucially linked and the aim of this chapter is to lay the groundwork for conceptualising their relationships. This groundwork is based on Jason Moore’s (2015) Capitalocene, which is augmented with Kehinde Andrews’ (2021) new imperialism and Ariel Salleh’s (2017) ecofeminism to identify global capitalism as the link among the mass harms. As such, the content of this chapter can be considered as addressing the space between two quotes, each of 64 words, by two different authors and activists. The first is from Matthew Todd (2019: 7): We have forgotten that all of these important issues – in fact, every issue – resides within the most important issue bar none: “the planet”. With a broken planet, we will have no gay rights, no feminism, no respect for trans people, no attempt at fairness and justice for people of colour. What we will have is a fight to survive and a lot of violence. DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520-2

14  Mass Harms

Ecocide is not only related to racism and sexism by global capitalism, but supersedes them in both qualitative and quantitative terms. Ecocide can kill human beings on its own, whereas racism and sexism are only deadly when they motivate human beings to action (or inaction). Ecocide as defined in the introduction affects all human beings, whereas racism and sexism affect different proportions of the population. Indeed, the order in which I list the mass harms is by the number of people they affect, from all of the world’s population (ecocide) to half of its population (sexism). The second quote is from Naomi Klein (2014: 10): I am convinced that climate change represents an historic opportunity on an even greater scale. As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels many scientists recommend, we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up. I agree with Klein completely; the causal relation between global capitalism on the one hand and ecocide, racism, and sexism on the other hand provides a perhaps unprecedented opportunity to reduce all three mass harms at once rather than in a piecemeal fashion. The first step in taking advantage of this opportunity is to determine how the mass harms are sustained and strengthened by global capitalism.

1. History of Capital Moore (2015: 2, emphasis in original) opens Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital with this definition: ‘Capitalism is not an economic system; it is not a social system it is a way of organizing nature’. He warns against the separation of capitalism or modernity from nature or ecology because the two have been inextricably linked in a relation of life-making since the long 16th century (1451–1648). As such, Moore (2015: 4; see also: Wallerstein 1974) adopts a world-system approach he refers to as

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‘capitalist world-ecology’. Capitalist world-ecology is not, however, an interaction of world-economy and world-ecology: ‘worldeconomies are world-ecologies’ (Moore 2015: 197, emphasis in original). He regards human exceptionalism, the view that human beings are independent of the spatiotemporal web of interspecies dependencies, as deeply misguided. Human agency has always been a part of and inextricably bound to nature and Moore’s inquiry thus begins with the relations between culture and nature, the co-production of human and nonhuman animal life and the environments that maintain them. He describes this life-making relation as the oikeios, which is ‘a way of naming the creative, historical, and dialectical relation between, and also always within, human and extra-human natures’ (Moore 2015: 35). Taking the oikeios rather than human agency or culture as his starting point, Moore argues that civilisations develop through nature rather than interacting with nature. Capitalist world-ecology has been converting energy into capital in increasingly innovative and expansive ways since the coincidence of the Dutch agricultural revolution, Central European mining revolution, and Madeiran sugar-slave nexus in 1450. This year marks the beginning of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Age of Capital), in contrast with and in opposition to the ‘Anthropocene’ (Age of Man) (Moore 2015: 77). The Anthropocene is used to describe the geological epoch during which humanity has had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and climate and is usually dated to either the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840) or the First Agricultural Revolution (10000 bce). In Moore’s assessment the current epoch is characterised not by the impact of humanity as a species, but by the impact of capitalist civilisation, which was inaugurated between the two revolutions. Moore’s position concurs with that of Marxist historian Cedric Robinson (1983: 10), who describes capitalism as making its ‘first appearance’ in the 15th century. Moore and Robinson are both agreed that the transition from pre-modern feudalism to modern capitalism began in 1450 and Moore maintains that the two are distinguished by the capacity of the latter to transform land and labour in decades rather than centuries, compressing both time and space. Capitalism compresses time because it measures wealth in terms of labour productivity

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(rather than land productivity) and it compresses space because it controls land for the purpose of increasing labour productivity. Moore (2015: 231; see also: Robinson 1983) agrees with Marx that capitalism is committed to the annihilation of space by time, but adds that it is also the annihilation of life-activity by abstract time because of ‘the drive to compel all life-activity to work on the rhythms of capital’. Sugar production was as essential to the first stage of this combination of conquest, commodification, and rationalisation as the railway would be to the Industrial Revolution and it spread across the Atlantic world quickly in the second half of the 15th century. Moore (2015: 119–120) divides capitalist world-ecology into five historical periods as follows: (1) a Germanic-Iberian cycle (c.1451–1648), in which the expansionary phase turns to relative decline after the 1557 financial crisis; (2) a Dutch-led cycle (c.1560s–1740s), in which decline sets in after 1680; (3) a British-led cycle, c.1680s– 1910s), with relative decline after 1873; (4) an American-led cycle (c.1870s–1980s), with relative decline after 1971; and (5) a neoliberal cycle (it could just as easily be called neomercantilist) that commenced in the 1970s. Robinson (1983) has a slightly different but for the most part compatible perspective on world history, placing greater significance on the impact of the Portuguese Empire from 1450 to 1550, driven by contributions from both English aristocrats and Genoese merchants. He (Robinson 1983: 116) also notes the significance of slave labour to the first three of Moore’s cycles, arguing that ‘slavery was a critical foundation for capitalism’. The five cycles of accumulation and appropriation are both a cause and a consequence of the reorganisation of capitalist world-ecology. The capitalist epoch emerged from the crisis of the feudal epoch in the long 14th century (1290–1453), which was a consequence of the coincide of the inability of agriculture to sustain population growth, the Little Ice Age, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years’ War. Moore (2015: 124, emphasis in original) contends that the crucial difference between modernity and pre-modernity, capitalism and feudalism, is

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the former’s ‘constant enlargement – and revolutionizing – of the geographies of potential accumulation and appropriation’. The endless accumulation and appropriation are facilitated by ‘Cheap Natures, understood primarily as the “Four Cheaps” of labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials’ (Moore 2015: 17). An increase in the cost of one or more of Cheap Food, Cheap Labour, Cheap Energy, or Cheap Raw Material is met with a new Cheap Nature strategy, which employs technological innovation, geographical expansion, or both to keep the price of production down. As such, the early modern scientific revolutions were a crucial component of the Capitalocene, introducing a rationality based on ‘mathematical abstraction and cartographic perspective’ (Moore 2015: 207). The contribution of the Industrial Revolution was to transform capitalism into a planetary system, which differentiated the last three cycles from the first two in two ways: (1) the value relations of the Atlantic world achieved global hegemony and (2) accumulation and appropriation achieved unprecedented levels. The peak of the world-ecological surplus and, in consequence, of appropriation, was at the height of the British cycle (1817–1870). The foundation of capitalist world-ecology is that the law of Cheap Natures integrates human and extra-human natures in the web of life. ‘At the core of this law is the ongoing, radically expansive, and relentlessly innovative quest to turn the work/energy of the biosphere into capital (value-in-motion)’ (Moore 2015: 14). As long as Cheap Natures can be kept cheap by neo/colonial conquests, agro-industrial revolutions, or scientific paradigm shifts, the capitalist epoch will continue, shifting from cycle to cycle in order to sustain its relentless transformation of energy into capital.

2. The End of Cheap Natures The continual challenge faced by capitalist world-ecology is that the demand for Cheap Natures exceeds the capacity of production systems to meet it. This causes the costs of production to rise, which in turn causes accumulation to falter. The challenge of the insatiable demand for Cheap Natures and the reorganisation of world-ecology to meet that demand is what drives one cycle of

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accumulation and appropriation into the next. ‘Accumulation by appropriation’ is the set of coercive, cultural, and calculative processes by means of which capital gains access to non-commodified or minimally commodified natures for free or cheaply (Moore 2015: 95, emphasis in original). Every cycle of accumulation begins with co-produced ecological surplus and the price of the Four Cheaps is co-determined by the combination of extra-human natures and intra-human power relations. As demand exceeds the capacity to meet it, the Four Cheaps become less cheap until they reach a tipping point where they start becoming more expensive, signalling the exhaustion of the accumulation regime and the development of a systemic crisis. These crises are resolved by the ‘trinity’ of neo/ colonial conquests, agro-industrial revolutions, and scientific paradigm shifts, which occur at different moments during the crises (Moore 2015: 150). The crises are resolved when the three uneven moments converge, restoring the Four Cheaps. Moore uses the transition between the two North Atlantic cycles as examples, the period between 1790 and 1960 when changes from coal and steam to oil and internal combustion were combined with rising contributions of unpaid labour (especially that of women) and the expansion of first the British and then the American empires. The transitions between cycles of accumulation and appropriation suggest the significance of racism and sexism, both of which can be employed to restore the Four Cheaps. There is no more powerful justification of a social or political hierarchy in which those at the top accrue capital at the expense of cheap or free labour by those at the bottom than by claiming the hierarchy to be a product of nature rather than culture. Andrews (2021) and Salleh (2017) explore the ways in which biologically based racism and sexism have historically been employed to exploit people of colour and women within capitalist world-ecology. Neoliberal capitalist world-ecology has, however, exhausted Cheap Natures in an unprecedented way because it is the culmination of successive cycles in which the ecological surplus declines while capitalisation increases, undercutting the basis of accumulation by appropriation. This, according to Moore (2015: 87), is ‘the end of Cheap Nature – and with it, the end of capitalism’s free ride’.

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The problem is exacerbated by climate change, which is not merely a problem with the cost of one or even all of the Four Cheaps, but a ‘paradigm moment of the transition to negative-value’ (Moore 2015: 276). After centuries of internalising the waste of capital, the biosphere is forcing capital to internalise biospheric shifts. Unlike previous systemic crises, climate change presents an insurmountable challenge to capitalist world-ecology by requiring production systems to internalise the cost of waste. The contemporary moment is thus one in which the unprecedented exhaustion of Cheap Natures is coincidental with an unprecedented rise in the cost of Cheap Natures. Moore (2015: 276) is clear that there ‘is no conceivable way that capitalism can address climate change in any meaningful way’. Capitalist world-ecology is reliant on the co-production of Cheap Natures and with Cheap Food, Cheap Labour, Cheap Energy, and Cheap Raw Material increasingly expensive, it can no longer be sustained. As such, climate change ‘poses a fundamental threat not only to humanity, but, more immediately and directly, to capitalism itself ’ (Moore 2015: 290). Climate change is responsible for the transition to negative-value, which Moore (2015: 277) defines as ‘the accumulation of limits to capital in the web of life that are direct barriers to the restoration of the Four Cheaps’. Historically, the accumulation of limits to capitalist world-ecology was a potentiality that was never realised. The belated recognition of human-induced (or, more accurately, co-produced) climate change required capital to internalise biospheric shifts, which has – for the first time in the capitalist epoch – realised the potentiality and initiated an accumulation of negative-value. In the neoliberal cycle, the same technological advances in production that create demands in excess of the supply of raw materials have also produced ‘a general law of overpollution: the tendency to enclose and fill up waste frontiers faster than it can locate new ones’ (Moore 2015: 280, emphasis in original). As Cheap Natures became increasingly expensive, they also became increasingly toxic, creating a world in which capital’s toxification is ubiquitous, from microplastics in human blood to the Great Pacific garbage patch north of Hawaii. The exhaustion of Cheap Natures and the toxification of the oikeios are a systemic crisis not just for the

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neoliberal cycle but for capitalist world-ecology and Moore (2015: 305) holds that the latter is likely to have more of an impact than the former: ‘The end of cheap garbage may loom larger than the end of cheap resources’. Given that Moore acknowledges capitalist world-ecology as being complicit in the mass harms of ecocide, racism, and sexism and that he sees the epoch as coming to an unavoidable end, one might expect him to be optimistic about the contemporary moment. He is certain that the capitalist epoch will be replaced in the 21st century, but not of what the next epoch will be. Capitalism is one among many ways of organising nature and nature itself can neither be destroyed nor saved, only organised in different ways in reciprocal relationships with human civilisations. Those reconfigurations can, in Moore’s (2015: 48) terms, be ‘more or less emancipatory, more or less oppressive’ from the standpoint of humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity.

3. History of Empire Andrews’ (2021) The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World frames the Western world order as fundamentally racist, based on the devaluation of black and brown life. Andrews is not a Marxist and limits his debt to Robinson to the latter’s conception of racial capitalism. Robinson (1983: 2) argued that the evolution of capitalism was necessarily rather than contingently racist, coining the term ‘racial capitalism’ to draw attention to its historical development and subsequent structure.1 Recall from my discussion of the Capitalocene that Robinson regards slavery as the foundation of capitalism in consequence of the significance of slave labour to the German-Iberian, Dutch, and British cycles of accumulation and appropriation. He (Robinson 1983: 119) maintains that the flourishing of slavery was responsible for ‘the invention of the Negro’, which stripped slaves of their spatiotemporality, disconnecting them from the cultures and civilisations to which they belonged and, ultimately, from their humanity. Andrews, who shares Robinson’s recognition of the significance of history, identifies the Western world order as having developed in four stages: establishing new geographical horizons by genocide

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in the Americas; maximising profit by the introduction of Transatlantic slavery; replacing the institution of slavery with the more subtle metropole-periphery relation of European colonialism; and, finally, replacing the direct rule of colonialism with the indirect rule of US-led, globalised neocolonialism. He (Andrews 2021: xiv) argues that contemporary US neocolonialism ‘is as effective as the European empires were at maintaining global White supremacy and colonial domination’. There is an overlap between the historical narratives of Andrews and Moore with genocide loosely corresponding to the Germanic-Iberian cycle, slavery to the Dutch and British cycles, colonialism to the British and American cycles, and neocolonialism to the American and neoliberal cycles. Andrews begins with the logic of the Western world order, which is the logic of White supremacism. The West was not founded on science, industry, and democracy, but on genocide, slavery, and colonialism. He contends that the Enlightenment made a crucial contribution by ‘justifying White supremacy through scientific rationality’ (Andrews 2021: xiii). White supremacist logic drove not only imperial expansion, but science itself, which was necessary to facilitate the domination of different ethnic groups materially and morally. This is why Andrews (2021: 7) refers to the Enlightenment as ‘White identity politics’. His scepticism about the value of the Enlightenment underpins his scepticism of the value of the human rights framework to antiracism. The human rights framework focuses on the individual rather than the social structures that create injustice and is thus a legacy of the Enlightenment, perpetuating a universalist philosophy that pays lip service to equality of opportunity while preserving an architecture of racial inequality. White supremacist logic was realised in White supremacist praxis, which began with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492. Andrews notes that despite the common association of genocide with either the National Socialist regime specifically or the 20th century more generally, the American genocide that took place in the first half of the 16th century is unprecedented, killing up to 99% of the Indigenous People in some territories. This genocide continued into the nineteenth century as the US expanded west, destroying the Native American population. Similar

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genocides were also perpetrated elsewhere, most notably by Britain in Tasmania and Belgium in the Congo. Ultimately, these genocides inaugurated the Western world order by clearing the land of its inconvenient Indigenous People and making it available for commodification (which is consistent with Moore’s accumulation by appropriation). The second stage of the Western world order, which follows logically from the clearing of the land, was the rise of the slave trade and the establishment of what would be known as the Atlantic system, the transport of slaves from Africa to the Americas and raw materials from the Americas to Europe. The slave trade began in earnest in the 17th century, when it was dominated by Portugal and the Netherlands, with up to 50% of abducted Africans being transported to Brazil as slave labour for its plantations. Britain and France became the dominant powers in the 18th century, which shifted the destination of the victims to first the Caribbean and then the US, where the slave population expanded nearly fivefold in the first half of the 19th century. Andrews (2021: 75) cites the figure of 12 million Africans arriving in the Americas as slaves, but notes the large numbers that died in transit on land and sea as well as those traded illegally and concludes that ‘it is impossible to fully account for the scale of human loss’. The destabilisation of African civilisations by slavery had the unforeseen advantage of making them relatively easy to conquer when Africa became a source of cheap raw materials rather than free labour. During the Scramble for Africa of 1881–1914, the entire continent was partitioned among Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Robinson (1983: 120) describes this moment as an epitome of racial capitalism: ‘Leopold’s Congo, Harry Johnstone’s Central Africa, Cecil Rhodes’ southern Africa, Lugard’s West Africa, Portuguese Africa, and French Africa as well as the New World’s slave descendants all contributed to the further development of the capitalist world system’. European colonialism was dominated by the British Empire, which extended across a quarter of the globe and included 372 million subjects by 1900. India was the ‘jewel in the crown’ of that empire, a periphery that was exploited intensively and ruthlessly by the English metropole – to the extent that Indian

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labour was so cheap as to rival slave labour (Andrews 2021: xviii). Andrews uses the example of Indian labour again in discussing the fourth and most recent stage of the Western world order, neocolonialism. The decades of decolonisation that followed the Second World War left the newly independent countries underdeveloped and vulnerable to a new imperialism that retained the relationship between periphery and metropole by means of multinational corporations. The rapid growth of the Indian service sector is not an indication of the country’s development, but of the low standard of living that makes it cheaper to locate call centres in India rather than Europe or America. In the new age of empire, Africa is being exploited by means of both traditional and innovative strategies, the victim of a scramble for its uncultivated arable farmland and of an international education system that promotes compliance with the Western world order.

4. There Is Food to Feed Everyone There are two features of Andrews’ new imperialism to which I wish to draw attention. First, the West is rich because the Rest is poor, because ‘it has expropriated wealth from the underdeveloped wor[l]d’ (Andrews 2021: 119). Capitalism is a zero-sum game and the profit of the West is at the expense of the Rest. Second, the Western world order is a capitalist world-system and that system is sexist and ecocidal as well as racist. For Andrews, however, it is racism that is the fundamental driver of Western civilisation and White supremacism that has the greatest historical explanatory power. Andrews introduces new imperialism by describing four aspects that constitute its conceptual bedrock without being central to his case for the Western world order as White supremacist: racial capitalism, colonial nostalgia, racial patriarchy, and post-racialism.2 He delineates racial patriarchy in terms of intersectionality, which has a complex history but is usually associated with one or more of the Black feminism of the Combahee River Collective (1977), the critical race theory of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989), or the feminist sociology of Regina Arnold (1990). Hillary Potter (2015: 3) defines it as: ‘the concept or conceptualization that each

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person has an assortment of coalesced socially constructed identities that are ordered into an inequitable social stratum’. Intersectionality originated with a simple but powerful idea. The disadvantage experienced by Black women in America in the final quarter of the 20th century could not be explained by a combination of the disadvantage they experienced as women and the disadvantage they experienced as Black people. That disadvantage is not merely sexism plus racism, but sexism multiplied by racism, situating Black women at a uniquely low position in the social structure. With respect to the intersection of sexism and racism, Andrews (2021: xxii) holds that the ‘West is practised through patriarchy but is built on White supremacy’. The Western world order is thus necessarily rather than contingently sexist and racist, but the former has less explanatory power than the latter. Class relations are of only tangential interest to Andrews, although he draws attention to their importance in the recent rise of right-wing populism. Leaders like Trump and Johnson were able to enlist the support of large proportions of poor White people for policies that sabotaged their class interests by appealing explicitly and implicitly to the concepts of race and nation. In spite of Trump and Johnson’s obvious contempt for people they perceived to be of an inferior class, standing, or status, they successfully created an illusion of solidarity on the basis of a shared identity as White, British, or American. ‘Millions have been duped into believing that their problem is poor people from other countries looking for a better life, rather than the rich and politicians who are robbing the population of the opportunities to succeed’ (Andrews 2021: 198). Although it does not form part of Andrews’ argument, he closes The New Age of Empire with several important reflections on ecocide and the capitalist world-system. He notes that environmental issues have always been an element of the activism of black and brown people because they have been more likely to experience the impact of climate change. Climate justice is, however, no longer a priority for people of colour alone, but for humanity in its entirety. Andrews’ (2021: 2018) position is as blunt as it is pithy: ‘a radical rethink is necessary for humanity to continue’. The climate crisis is a function

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of over-consumption and the atmospheric pollution produced by the relentless pursuit of profit. ‘It is the very nature of Western consumption that is due to melt the ice-caps’ (Andrews 2021: 208). This is of course an explicit indictment of capitalism as a worldsystem and an implicit indictment of capitalism as a world-ecology. Andrews’ comments on climate change recollect an earlier comment on capitalism, part of his claim that increased production and technological advances will not solve world poverty. Humanity already has the productive power and technological expertise to feed everyone, but chooses not to: ‘Just sixty-two people hold the wealth of an entire third of the world. There is more than enough food to feed everyone, yet millions die every year while tons of food rot in the West’ (Andrews 2021: 175). Although it is racism that is the core problem for Andrews, it is the capitalist world-system that is responsible for the new and perhaps insurmountable mass harm of ecocide. Andrews does not envisage the Western world order as destroying itself from within and is not optimistic about the options if it is destroyed from without. The biggest contemporary challenge to the Western world order is the likelihood of an Eastern world order led by China. Although the country is communist in name, it has a high level of income inequality and has legalised intolerance of its Muslim minority. Andrews (2021: xiii) warns about China’s new imperial role ‘plundering Africa’ for its raw materials, its complicity in racial capitalism, and its appropriation of the colonial logic of racial supremacy. China is certainly not a colonial power in the same way as Britain, France or any of the other European nations were. There is no invasion, violence and domination of political affairs. But, as we already know, that is not how the new age of empire works. (Andrews 2021: 147) A Chinese-led, authoritarian reconfiguration of humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity seems precisely the kind of world-ecologyin-waiting that concerns Moore.

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5. History of Gendered Exploitation In Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, Salleh (2017) is critical of Marx for endorsing the exploitation of nature in the capitalist mode of production as a stage in the growth and satisfaction of human needs and for failing to recognise the position of women as part of that exploitation. She (Salleh 2017: 9) argues that the exploitation of women is not only a necessary condition for capitalism, but fundamental to it: ‘the dynamics of sex-gender underlies all oppressions’. The capitalist world-system is necessarily rather than contingently sexist and necessarily rather than contingently contradictory. The latter is a symptom of the former, the paradox caused by a nature-woman-labour nexus that positions woman somewhere between man and nature. This paradox is a function of ‘the historical diminishment of women “as closer to nature”’ that characterises historical and contemporary capitalism (Salleh 2017: 8). The idea is paradoxical because women are neither closer to nor further from nature than men ontologically and Salleh (2017: 36) echoes Moore in describing both genders as ‘in/with/ of nature’. Positivism has, however, socially constructed women as closer to nature under the guise of science, fixing identities and essences that misrepresent the historical as ontological. The impact of this paradigm has been exacerbated by the logic of dualism, in which a concrete or abstract object is either A or NotA. ‘Such a logic gives identity to A expressed by the value of 1. NotA is merely defined by relation to A, having no identity of its own, and thus 0 value’ (Salleh 2017: 62). The logic of dualism recalls Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) claim in The Second Sex that ‘woman’ is primarily ‘not man’, simply the other or the second gender.3 As the quantification of value suggests, NotA is not only different from A, but inferior to A. ‘Man’ denotes ‘human’ and ‘man’ as A is thus contrasted to two NotAs: to ‘animal’ (or nature) and to ‘woman’. In consequence, Salleh (2017: 63) describes the pseudoscientific paradigm that women are closer to nature than men as ‘Man/Woman=Nature’, abbreviated to M/W=N where the value of M is 1 and the values of W and N are 0. M/W=N constitutes a double objectification of women, denying their subjectivity and representing them as both available and disposable (like the rest of nature).

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M/W=N appropriates ancient gender relations to the service of capital, treating women as ‘an economic “externality”’, i.e. like or as (the rest of ) nature (Saleh 2017: 134–135). The practical consequences of the M/W=N programme are that 50% of the global population performs 65% of global productive labour time for under 10% of global wages. Much of the reproductive and restorative labour undertaken by women is valued as unproductive, as a resource to be exploited in the same way as a natural commons. When women’s work is paid, it is often in ‘the ranks of part-time, contract, and seasonal positions, without security, advancement opportunities or retirement benefits’ (Salleh 2017: 135). As such, from a material point of view, women simply are Marx’s proletariat, a global economic underclass. Women as proletariat recalls Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999: 242) on rural Indian women as ‘the real constituency of feminism’, the demographic most vulnerable to the logic of capital. Salleh (2017: 97) alludes to the crucial relationship between sexism and racism recognised by ecofeminism in her description of the emergent discipline of home economics early in the 20th century: ‘The household became the colony of the little white man, while big white men would appropriate continents. Before long, it would be planets they wanted’.4 The role of women as closer to or mediators of nature is a necessary condition for the transaction between capital and labour that sustains capitalism as an economic system. ‘Women’s labour is “freely given” behind the curtains of domestic decorum’ (Salleh 2017: 145). Housewives in the Global North and Global South perform a complex and demanding variety of indispensable tasks that are not regarded as productive labour: sexual satisfaction, childbearing, childrearing, growing food, cooking, cleaning, disposing of waste, recycling, washing, and mending. These reproductive and restorative tasks can of course be abstracted as productive labour – as prostitution, childminding, fast food counters, and professional cleaning and laundering – which provides further evidence that W=N is a sexist social construction rather than an ontological reality. Although the material conditions of women in the North and South differ in important ways, they share the diminishment of W=N, which is sufficient to underpin the solidarity and mutual empowerment facilitated by global ecofeminism.

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Ecofeminism is an exposure of and response to the patriarchal paradox of capitalism, its inability to account for the full humanity of women. As the name suggests, ecofeminists are interested in both gender justice and global sustainability, in consequence of which ecofeminism ‘affirms the primacy of an exploitative genderbased division of labour, and simultaneously shifts the economic analysis towards an ecological problematic’ (Salleh 2017: 139). As such, ecofeminism is largely consistent with Moore’s focus on a capitalist world-ecology rather than the capitalist world-system. The extraction of value from the unpaid reproductive and domestic labour of women is paralleled by the extraction of value from the cheap labour and resources of the Global South by the Global North and women in the Global South are the victims of superexploitation. Again, this recalls Spivak (1999: 255), who discusses the convergence of superexploitation and ‘exploitationas-“Development”’ in the neocolonial and neoliberal world order of globalisation. Ecofeminism ‘invites those concerned with governance to think about power not as “divide and rule”, but an energising force shared by the human species with the rest of its ecosystem’ (Salleh 2017: 229–230). Salleh criticises liberal feminists for demanding equality between women and men within the existing capitalist world-ecology and contends, instead, that women should be working towards the overthrow of an essentially sexist system and the instrumental rationality on which it is based. She (Salleh 2017: 251) proposes a new intersubjectivity among women, men, and nature in ‘the ecofeminist deconstruction of Man/Woman=Nature assumptions’. Salleh (2017: 244) summarises ecofeminism as ‘a dialectical politics’, exploring the relations among: the liberal and socialist feminist struggle for women’s rights; the radical and poststructuralist feminist struggle to reconstruct society; and the ecological movement’s struggle for environmental stewardship.

6. Superexploitation of Nature As already mentioned, Salleh’s ecofeminism is for the most part compatible with Moore’s Capitalocene, sharing a world-ecology perspective, broadly construed. The relationship between ecofeminism and

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Andrews’ new imperialism is something of a mirror image. They both recognise capitalism as a world-system that is necessarily rather than contingently sexist and necessarily rather than contingently racist. The main difference between them is which of the two mass harms has the greater explanatory power in accounting for the world in which we live. For Salleh, sexism is the foundation of capitalist world-ecology. For Andrews, racism is the foundation of the Western world order. Each nonetheless recognises not only the impact of the other mass harm, but of the numerous ways in which they are interrelated. Salleh (2017: 1) is meticulous in foregrounding these relations, which she describes in her initial introduction when she states that ‘the book makes an eco-socialist argument that is at once decolonial and feminist’. The crux of her argument is the M/W =N formula: labour (1) may be exploited, but it is paid, whereas nature is simply available and disposable (0). ‘M’ does not (just) represent ‘men’, but (actually) ‘White men’ and ‘N’ includes not only women, but the ‘global labour majority constituted by women, peasants and indigenous peoples’ (Salleh 2017: 1). Like the Earth, this labour majority is a resource to be exploited, and in cases where those labourers are poor, of colour, and women, they are superexploited. Perhaps the key point about ecofeminism as praxis rather than critique is that it is the same perspective, reinforced by positivist science and dualist logic, that is responsible for both the oppression of poor people, people of colour, and women and the destruction of the environment.5 Salleh’s formula is thus a recognition that capitalist world-ecology is ecocidal, racist, and sexist. She (Salleh 2017: 282–283) puts this very eloquently in a passage at the very end of Ecofeminism as Politics: Ecofeminist politics is a feminism in as much as it offers an uncompromising critique of capitalist patriarchal culture from a womanist perspective; it is a socialism because it honours the wretched of the earth; it is an ecology because it reintegrates humanity with nature; it is a postcolonial discourse because it focuses on deconstructing eurocentric domination. Capitalist world-ecology is concerned with the maximisation of profit, which has increased exponentially with globalisation to the

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extent that ‘500 transnational corporations […] account for two thirds of all trade’ (Salleh 2017: 133). Salleh’s (2017: 4) position is unequivocal: the ‘ecological crisis can only be remedied outside of capitalism’. She is in fact explicit about what Moore only implies, stating that ecocide is an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of capitalist world-ecology. In spite of the emphasis Salleh places on the explanatory power of sexism, she is adamant that the ecological crisis is more important than social injustice, including the social injustice to which women are subjected. Without a planet to sustain human life, there can be no social or gender justice and as the planet’s ability to support human life deteriorates, the injustices to which poor people, people of colour, and women are currently subjected will be aggravated. The linchpin of the ecofeminist response to ecocide is the analysis of the ontology that underlies the M/W=N formula, which separates History (made by humanity) from Nature (not made by humanity), attributing genuine value to the former alone. Salleh’s rejection of this dualist, either/or ontology is very similar to Moore’s and they both understand ecocide as caused by a failed recognition of humanity as in/with/of nature. This rejection involves not only rejecting liberalism, which has been complicit with capitalist world-ecology in the manner suggested by Andrews’ critique of the Enlightenment, but also Marxism, which has prioritised History over Nature by affording disproportionate significance to the agency of the proletariat. The ecofeminist struggle begins by opposing the exploitation of nature – which includes the exploitation of poor people, people of colour, and women – to establish a dialectic between marginalisation and empowerment. Capitalist world-ecology marginalises these groups as natural because they are not labour, but it is precisely the recognition that all human beings are natural – in the sense of being in/with/of nature – that is required to solve the ecological crisis and reduce social injustice. This, for me, is the great strength of ecofeminism, recalling Angela Davis’ (1989) insistence that social justice can only be achieved by improving the conditions of the most marginalised. If nature is no longer regarded as a resource to be exploited for profit, then those who have been exploited in its name – poor people, people of colour, and women – will no longer be exploited either.

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In other words, the ecofeminist insight is that the replacement of capitalist world-ecology will reduce all three of the mass harms of ecocide, racism, and sexism.

7. Climate Change Criminology I have focused on the convergences of the work of Moore, Andrews, and Salleh rather than their divergences and, in consequence, construed their perspectives somewhat broadly in places. My point in doing this has been to demonstrate the widespread acknowledgement that the three mass harms with which I am concerned are different aspects of the same problem. An initial objection to my argument may be that it is precisely the character of this problem that cannot be identified without misrepresenting one or more of Moore, Andrews, or Salleh. I used ‘capitalist world-ecology’ when discussing ecofeminism because although the perspective was inaugurated and developed by Moore, Salleh shares his position on humanity-in-nature (as opposed to humanity and nature). Where Moore (and Salleh, in my interpretation and adaptation of her perspective) frames the problem as capitalist world-ecology, Andrews frames it as the Western world order, which suggests – at the very least – an incompatibility between him and Moore. Robinson provides a bridge between the capitalist epoch on the one hand and the West on the other in his explanation of how endemic racism of various types (rather than White supremacism in particular) was to the feudal epoch from which capitalism emerged. As Robin Kelley (2017, emphasis in original) notes in his explanation of racial capitalism: ‘The first European proletarians were racial subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma or Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) and they were victims of dispossession (enclosure), colonialism, and slavery within Europe’. ­ Racism (including White supremacism) existed before 1450 and before 1492 – what changed in the long 16th century was the way in which nature was organised, the spatiotemporal compression and relentless expansion that would characterise the capitalist epoch. The fundamental problem is thus capitalist world-ecology, which is necessarily rather than contingently ecocidal, racist, and sexist. As suggested in the second of the two quotes with which I opened this chapter (Klein 2014),

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ecocide presents humanity with both an unprecedented challenge and an unprecedented opportunity to reduce mass harm. There is almost complete agreement that the Earth’s average surface air temperature has increased by 1°C since 1900 and that more than half of that increase has occurred since the mid-1970s (Emanuel 2018; The Royal Society 2020; IPCC 2021). There is complete agreement that human activity has contributed to the rise in air surface temperature, although the full extent of that contribution is debated (IPCC 2021). There is widespread agreement that the consequences of air surface temperature increase are a rise in ocean level and acidity and more numerous and severe floods, droughts, and hurricanes (Emanuel 2018). The findings of the sixth assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2021, 2022a, 2022b) are that human-induced climate change can only be reduced by significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, including the reduction of CO2 emissions to net zero. In Climate Change Criminology, Rob White (2018: 3) describes the evidence for climate change as compelling, comprehensive, and consistent and states that ‘most disagreement surrounding climate change today is over how quickly global warming is proceeding rather than over whether it is happening’. Bruce Glavovic, Timothy Smith, and Iain White (2021: 1) take a more robust standpoint: Governments concur that the science is settled on the reality of global change. Consensus dates back at least to the 1972 Stockholm Conference, was reiterated at the 1992 and 2002 Earth Summits, and in subsequent global agreements, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2015 Paris Agreement and Aichi Biodiversity Targets (2011–2020). They go on to argue that it would be irresponsible for scientists to conduct a seventh IPCC assessment because the IPCC has already achieved its aim by establishing a global consensus on the science of climate change. Given that governments demonstrated their capacity to take action on the basis of scientific evidence during the COVID-19 pandemic but have failed to take action on the basis of

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scientific evidence for human-induced climate change, Glavovic, Smith, and White contend that scientists should focus their efforts on exposing and explaining this failure. As drastic a step as this would be to take, they (Glavovic, Smith & White 2021: 4) believe it is the ‘only effective way to arrest the tragedy of climate change science’. I shall not provide any further evidence for ecocide and I take scepticism about the scientific consensus as instances of what Avi Brisman (2012: 43) calls ‘contrarianism’, i.e. disagreement on the basis of ideological rather than evidential grounds (in much the same way as I take scepticism about biological evolution). With climate change the ‘biggest issue in the history of humankind’, White (2018: 149) maintains that it demands nothing less than the prioritisation of research, policy, and practice by criminologists. I could not agree more and I think that the same is true for all social scientists and probably also for all academics working in the humanities. Climate change criminology is thus not just a different type of criminology – an addition to critical criminology or green criminology – but a reorientation of criminology as a discipline to deal with ecocide.6 White underpins this reorientation with five pillars: harm, eco-justice, causality, power, and intervention. Climate change criminology is zemiological because most of the current carbon emissions are lawful in spite of being social and environmental harms. It must adopt a ‘global perspective that views the world as an interconnected whole’, paying particular attention to the relationship between human beings and global ecology (White 2018: 146; see also Davis & White 2022). Like both critical and mainstream criminology, climate change criminology should be focused on the causes of harm, specifically the causes of human-induced global warming and its diverse consequences. It is primarily concerned with political economy and the role of the powerful, who are responsible for both the material harms of climate change and their representation. Finally, climate change criminology promotes ‘public engagement and social interventions that challenge the status quo’, including those directed against the state (White 2018: 147). White argues that ecocide should be both recognised as a mass harm – the most important mass harm – and a crime against humanity in order to enable liability and prosecution

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by the criminal justice system. Interestingly, his action plan for reorienting the justice system in response to ecocide (which also has five parts and is based on his work with Ronald Kramer) begins the section on social action with the ‘[r]hetorical and symbolic construction of climate change as “crime”’, which is part of a larger contribution that I envisage the deconstructive framework making to criminology (White & Kramer 2015: 392). The evidence from the IPCC is that the rate of global warming can only be reduced by significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and there is widespread agreement that this is unlikely to happen from within existing social, economic, and political structures. Indeed, global carbon emissions increased steadily from the establishment of the IPCC in 1988 until the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and, even then, the decrease was small (Boden, Marland & Andres 2017; Tollefson 2021). In consequence, it seems highly likely that a successful response will only be achieved by the reconfiguration of what Edmund Husserl (1954: 39) calls the ‘lifeworld’, Martin Heidegger (1927 §12: 53) ‘[b]eing-in-the-world’, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953 §19: 11) ‘form of life’. Reality as human beings know it will have to change significantly. A successful response to climate change will not only require what one might call new modes of (human) being, but a reconfiguration of the oikeios. The argument of this book is that the deconstructive framework can be applied to complex narratives in the science fiction and fantasy genres to construct just and sustainable reconfigurations. If my argument in this chapter is sound, then a sustainable reconfiguration would also be a just reconfiguration, in virtue of the relations among ecocide, racism, and sexism in the Capitalocene. In the next chapter, I distinguish my approach in this book from four related critical criminological frameworks: philosophical criminology, narrative criminology, cultural criminology, and pulp criminology.

Notes 1 I discuss racial capitalism in Chapter 5. 2 Regrettably, I lack sufficient space to discuss either colonial nostalgia or post-racialism in this book. Both of these aspects of new imperialism are nonetheless crucial to understanding the contemporary UK and were evinced in the changes of government early in September

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3 4 5 6

2022 (the former in the response to Queen Elizabeth II’s death and the latter in Prime Minister Liz Truss’ selection of her Cabinet). The Second Sex is the first explanation of the difference between sex and gender, although Beauvoir does not use ‘gender’, which was only popularised in the second half of the 20th century. Salleh’s turn of phrase here is worth remembering when I explore capitalism as reconstructed by the Blade Runner films in Chapter 5. I discuss praxis and the relationship between critique and praxis in Chapter 8. I return to White’s climate change criminology in Chapter 8.

References Andrews, K. (2021). The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. London: Allen Lane. Arnold, R. (1990). Processes of Victimization and Criminalization of Black Women. Social Justice, 17 (3), 153–166. Beauvoir, S.d. (1949/2010). The Second Sex. Trans. C. Borde & S. MalovanyChevallier. New York: Vintage. Boden, T.A., Marland, G. & Andres, R.J. (2017). National CO2 Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Burning, Cement Manufacture, and Gas Flaring: 1751–2014. US Department of Energy. DOI: 10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2017. Brisman A. (2012). The Cultural Silence of Climate Change Contrarianism. In: White, R. (ed.). Climate Change from a Criminological Perspective. New York: Springer, 41–70. Combahee River Collective (1977). The Combahee River Collective Statement. Available at: https://combaheerivercollective.weebly.com/thecombahee- river-collective-statement.html. Crenshaw, K.W. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989 (1), 139–167. Davis, A.Y. (1989/1990). Women, Culture, and Politics. New York: Vintage. Davis, H. & White, H. (2022). For a Zemiology of Politics. Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, available at: DOI: 10.1177/ 2631309X221123759. Emanuel, K. (2018). What We Know about Climate Change. Updated ed. Cambridge: MIT. Glavovic, B.C., Smith, T.F. & White, I. (2021). The Tragedy of Climate Change Science. Climate and Development. DOI: 10.1080/17565529.2021. 2008855. Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. New York: Harper Collins.

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Husserl, E. (1954/1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Available at: https://www.ipcc. ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/. ——— (2022a). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-reportworking-group-ii/. ——— (2022b). Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/. Kelley, R.D.G. (2017). What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism? 12 January. Boston Review. Available at: https://bostonreview. net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/. Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. London: Penguin. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso. Potter, H. (2015). Intersectionality and Criminology: Disrupting and Revolutionizing Studies of Crime. Abingdon: Routledge. Robinson, C. (1983/2000). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Salleh, A. (2017). Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. 2nd ed. London: Zed. Spivak, G.C. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. The Royal Society (2020). Is the Climate Warming? Climate Change: Evidence and Causes. Available at: https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/ projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-1/. Todd, M. (2019). The Climate Emergency and the End of Diversity. In: Extinction Rebellion. This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. London: Penguin, 69–72. Tollefson, J. (2021). COVID Curbed 2020 Carbon Emissions – But Not by Much. Nature, 589, 343. Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic. White, R. (2018/2020). Climate Change Criminology. Bristol: Bristol University. White, R. & Kramer, R.C. (2015). Critical Criminology and the Struggle against Climate Change Ecocide. Critical Criminology: An International Journal, 23 (4), 383–399. Wittgenstein, L. (1953/2009). Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker & J. Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

2 CRIMINOLOGIES

Broadly construed, there are four existing ‘criminologies’ that anticipate my criminological deployment of literary theory: philosophical criminology, narrative criminology, cultural criminology, and ‘pulp criminology’ (a term I have coined for the sake of brevity). In order to distinguish my criminology from each of these predecessors, I must first identify three distinct levels at which criminological inquiry occurs: approaches, frameworks, and theories (McGregor 2021a). An approach denotes a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions about scientific research. Again, broadly construed, there are three distinct approaches to criminology practised as a discrete discipline within the social sciences: positivism (also called naturalism and, somewhat confusingly, realism), constructionism (which should not be confused with constructivism and is also called interpretivism), and realism (which is also called critical realism and perspectival realism). A framework (also called a paradigm) is a shared commitment about what research questions are important, what data are relevant, how that data should be interpreted, and what counts as a satisfying answer. Many criminologies – including narrative criminology, cultural criminology, and zemiology – are best understood as criminological DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520-3

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frameworks. Other criminologies, such as green criminology and intersectional criminology, are best understood as indicative of the subject of criminological inquiry (see White 2022; Potter 2015). A theory refers to a coherent set of propositions that determine the assumptions on which research is based and the context within which the research is undertaken. As such, a single criminological framework can support numerous theories, many of which may be incompatible with one another. My aim in this book is to argue for the value of the deconstructive framework to criminological inquiry. In consequence, my discussion in this chapter is focused at that level, differentiating between approaches and theories only as and when required.

1. Philosophical Criminology ‘Philosophical criminology’ refers to a set of criminological frameworks that draw on either the phenomenological-hermeneutic or analytic traditions of philosophy rather than on biology, psychology, sociology, or economics for their theoretical underpinning.1 There is no consolidated or institutionally recognised philosophical subdiscipline of criminology in the way there is for the narrative and cultural criminological frameworks and the author of the only monograph with the title Philosophical Criminology, Andrew Millie (2016), works in a different tradition to the rest of the practitioners. Those practitioners are a small group of criminologists who have published a large number of articles, edited collections, and monographs, either individually or in collaboration, in the last 30 years: Bruce Arrigo (UNC at Charlotte), Elaine Campbell (Newcastle University), Don Crewe (Leeds Beckett), Stuart Henry (San Diego State), Ronnie Lippens (Keele), Dragan Milovanovic (Northeastern Illinois), David Polizzi (Indiana State), and Christopher Williams (Bradley). This loosely aligned group is all affiliated in some way with the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology ( JTPCRIM), which was founded by editor-in-chief Polizzi in 2009. JTPCRIM has published numerous special editions on the work of these practitioners, including one on A Criminology of Narrative Fiction (McGregor 2021a) on the basis of its methodology, which

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derives its theory of research, set of principles, and system of methods from philosophical aesthetics (McGregor et al. 2021). Within the varied frameworks that constitute philosophical criminology, there are five monographs of particular interest to me, three of which influenced the development of my project in this book and two of which pursue a similar project. The three are all short monographs and all achieve the publishing gold standard of combining authority with accessibility (i.e. capable of being sold to both researchers and undergraduates). ­Lippens’ (2009) A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Criminology meets only two of its stated goals. While it is indeed very short and reasonably cheap, it is far more than fairly interesting and sets out what could be described as an existentialist criminology. Lippens begins with the philosophical origins of criminology in Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham and then establishes an original and compelling framework based on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. What I found particularly opportune was the neat way the monograph dovetails with Jonathan Webber’s (2018) Rethinking Existentialism, which was published a decade later and sets out an ethical theory based on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Frantz Fanon. Polizzi’s (2016) A Philosophy of the Social Construction of Crime also draws on existentialist philosophy, specifically on the phenomenology of both Martin Heidegger and Fanon. The monograph is useful in at least three ways. First, it clearly and concisely sets out a mechanism by which social construction occurs (which differs from the one I employ here). Second, it develops this conception of social construction into an aetiology of violence, which is valuable both for its content and method. Finally, Polizzi is one of the few criminologists (or philosophers) to discuss the common ground between Heidegger and Fanon, a fascinating subject in itself given the former’s membership of the National Socialist Party and the latter’s activism on behalf of an anti-colonial Third Worldism. Millie’s (2016) criminological framework in Philosophical Criminology is distinct from other practitioners of philosophical criminology by being grounded in the analytic rather than phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition of philosophy. Notwithstanding,

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it is highly recommended by Arrigo, Crewe, Lippens, and Polizzi and provided me with an indispensable model of interdisciplinarity. Millie introduces the overlap between criminology and philosophy in terms of value theory and then identifies the criminological potential of theological, aesthetic, and ethical theories. He (Millie 2016: 2) also engages with ‘postmodern philosophy’ throughout the monograph, which leads me to the two monographs that pursue a similar project to my own. The first is Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic’s (1996) Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism, which pursues an almost identical project to mine in a different way. ‘Postmodern’ has a derogatory connotation outside of its denotation as an artistic movement and is often employed as a dismissal, in a similar manner to the current usage of ‘identity politics’. This suspicion is reflected in the subtitle of Henry and Milovanovic’s monograph and they distinguish between sceptical and affirmative postmodernism before arguing for the value of the latter. Milovanovic (1997) embraces the term, however, publishing 12 of his single- and co-authored essays in a collection titled Postmodern Criminology the year after his monograph with Henry. The subject matter of Postmodern Criminology and Constitutive Criminology is very similar, with the former including two co-authored essays on affirmative postmodernism by Milovanovic and Henry. In consequence of the difference in format (monograph and collection), Constitutive Criminology provides a much more systematic and sustained account of the constitutive criminological framework than Postmodern Criminology, which is why I shall contrast the deconstructive framework exclusively with the former.

2. Constitutive Criminology Henry and Milovanovic (1996: ix) begin with an explicit repudiation of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction: ‘Rejecting an obsession with deconstructionism – the postmodernist analytical technique which seeks to endlessly “undo” and reveal the contradictions and assumptions contained within our socially constructed world – constitutive criminology is concerned with reconstruction and redirection’. There is a great deal to say about this sentence, but I shall

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restrict my commentary to three observations. First, like many others, Henry and Milovanovic label deconstruction as postmodern rather than poststructural, which is straightforwardly inaccurate (despite common usage). Second, they employ this definition of deconstruction to divide postmodernism into two types, sceptical and affirmative. Sceptical postmodernism is what Bernard Harcourt (2020: 159) refers to as a ‘deeply antifoundational method’ that is committed to revealing illusions but has no normative content. Affirmative postmodernism is, as the last part of the sentence suggests, deconstruction for the purpose of reconstruction – or, in Henry and Milovanovic’s (1996: ix) terminology, ‘constitutive’ of a less harmful and more accommodating world. Constitutive criminology thus adapts deconstruction to a zemiological end. Finally, both the quote and my exegesis make it clear that Henry and Milovanovic’s constitution is very similar to, if not identical with, my reconstruction. We are all concerned with employing deconstruction as a technique, method, matrix, or framework to destroy reality as it is and replace it with a reconstructed reality as it could and should be. Constitutive Criminology was published nearly three decades ago so it raises the question of what, if anything, my deconstructive framework has to add. Henry and Milovanovic’s argument is developed over nine chapters. Following an introduction that can be considered as something of an extrapolation of the previous quote (and, indeed, the preface as a whole), the next four chapters are structured as follows: a topic is identified (the subject, society, law, and victimhood), the modernist perspectives on the topic are summarised, the sceptical postmodernist perspectives on the topic are summarised, and the constitutive criminological perspective is presented as the preferred option, steering a middle path between two obviously flawed extremes. The final four chapters extend this model, summarising the modernist perspectives on crime causation, the sceptical postmodern perspectives on crime causation, and then setting out the constitutive criminological perspective on crime causation and public policy and crime causation and justice practice. Henry and Milovanovic (1996: 116, emphasis in original) define crime as: ‘the expression of some agency’s energy to make a difference on others

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and it is the exclusion of those others who in the instant are rendered powerless to maintain or express their humanity’. With respect to crime causation, they prefer soft determinism, which constitutes the middle path between modernism’s positivist approach and (sceptical) postmodernism’s eschewing of causation as a concept. Soft determinism involves seeking influences rather than causes and recognising that these influences are often reciprocal, taking the form of a constitutive dialectic characterised by ‘codetermination and mutual interrelation without the implications of linear dynamics’ (Henry & Milovanovic 1996: 171). Henry and Milovanovic (1996: 160) explore the constitutive dialectic by means of the constitutive interrelational (COREL) set: to ‘understand the how the human subject, as investor in representation, becomes the excessive investor producing these harms, we have to delve deeper into the nature not only of micro-level interrelationships, but also what become macro-level interrelationships’. COREL sets explain how, in specific circumstances, institutionally situated and discursively ordered subjects come to either ignore or reject the humanity of other subjects to the extent that those other subjects are harmed. While the theoretical work in Constitutive Criminology is exemplary, it is at times difficult to discern the political and pragmatic commitments of the framework. Constitutive criminological policy is divided into four parts, equally split between the long and short terms: superliberal democracy, replacement discourse (long term), refraction based on social judo, and community support for constituted victims (short term). Superliberalism is a more responsive democracy that empowers the subject by perpetually challenging the inertia of the bureaucratic apparatus. Replacement discourse involves a reconstruction of social and legal reality based on the recognition of those realities as essentially co-constructed. Social judo is a tactic in which power is redirected rather than opposed, channelled so as to reduce rather than increase social harms. Constituted victims are supported by peer groups, who represent them as neither responsible for the harm they have suffered nor powerless to do anything about that harm. Practices based on these policies are then identified, including specific activities for criminologists and criminal justice practitioners. Superliberalism requires a drive

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for self-determination in the political economy, a radically democratic alternative to the existing social and liberal variants. Replacement discourse can be an intervention at the cultural level, in which criminologists practise a newsmaking criminology that draws attention to social construction, harm, and the potential for reconstruction. Social judo aligns with peacemaking criminology, which rejects crime control by means of state violence for a strategy in which the violence of the excessive investor in power is diffused by means of redirection. Community support for constituted victims is focused on therapy that employs the power of narrative to reconstruct the reality of victims who have been harmed. As examples of these practices, Henry and Milanovic draw attention to: a reconstructed justice system in which officials alternate roles on a regular basis; a variety of styles of criminological newsmaking; alternative ways of administrating prisons; commercial projects aimed at the social reintegration of ex-prisoners; and a variety of constitutive types of narrative therapy. ‘Instead of a criminal justice policy we suggested a justice policy of replacement discourse. This showed how the liberating forces of COREL sets can be harnessed, albeit contingently, through radical refraction, social judo and radical pluralism’ (Henry & Milovanovic 1996: 241).

3. Constitution or Reconstruction? I want to begin my critique of Henry and Milovanovic with the disclaimer that it is impossible to do justice to the complexity and sophistication of their work in a relatively small part of a single book chapter. I have no hesitation in recommending Constitutive Criminology to anyone who is interested in either the issues I address in this book or philosophical frameworks in criminology more generally. The monograph not only sets out a comprehensive and compelling framework for criminological research, but is also very useful from a pedagogic perspective, especially in the way in which Henry and Milovanovic visualise the variety of modernist conceptions of the relationship between free will and determinism, modernist conceptions of crime causation, and the policy implications of modernist conceptions of crime causation. I regret discovering

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Constitutive Criminology only recently (while researching A Criminology of Narrative Fiction) and found numerous areas of overlap as my engagement with the framework developed. There are, however, at least three significant points on which I differ from Henry and Milovanovic, each of which can be articulated as an objection to constitutive criminology. In increasing order of importance, these are: concerns about the practical implications of policy; commitment to constructionism as an approach to social science; and failure to recognise the full extent to which capitalism is criminogenic. Although Henry and Milovanovic deserve praise for addressing the metatheoretical, theoretical, and practical levels of criminology, several of the practices they propose suffer from being either too vague, limited in their application, or implausible. Their recommendation for achieving a superliberal justice system, for example, requires that criminal justice officials rotate their positions within the system on a regular basis in order to prevent them from getting ‘caught up in narrowly drawn subject positions’ (Henry & Milovanovic 1996: 238). While it is certainly desirable that criminal justice officials have knowledge of the criminal justice, legal, and political systems beyond the narrow confines of their roles as police officers, attorneys, judges, prison officers, probation officers, and community support workers, the idea that anyone would have the mental and physical resources to perform several – let alone all – of these roles with any degree of expertise is completely implausible. To take a direct parallel in academia, I have repeatedly argued for the value of interdisciplinary research, but it would be ludicrous to propose a solution in which academics changed departments on a regular basis, from criminology to geography to psychology to philosophy to literary studies to law and back again. With respect to the practices of harm reduction proposed, Constitutive Criminology is also curiously silent on the issue of environmental harm. Although the framework takes harm rather than crime as the appropriate subject for criminology, that harm is exclusively focused on the human subject. I understand the motivation for this focus – there is little consensus as to whether nonhuman animals have moral status let alone whether a greener world would be morally better – but the greatest potential harm to human subjects is the destruction of the environment that

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sustains their existence. My thesis in this book is that ecocide as a mass harm is unprecedented in both quantity and quality, threatening humanity with extinction (in addition to other species). As I noted in A Criminology of Narrative Fiction (McGregor 2021a), the constitutive criminological framework is underpinned by constructionism, an approach that assumes there is no social world beyond intersubjective experience, in consequence of which facts about that social world have no truth value. The danger of this approach is that it comes perilously close to a relativism in which social scientific theories are accepted in virtue of the conventions they employ rather than in virtue of independent reasoning or empirical evidence. In relativism, there is no truth, only your truth and my truth, which may or may not overlap. When truths do not overlap, there is no independent way to verify which is the most accurate. In my introduction to poststructuralism, I mentioned that Derrida has frequently and falsely been accused of relativism. Recognising that the current reality – characterised by the mass harms of ecocide, racism, and sexism – is linguistically constructed does not mean that it has equal status to another linguistically constructed reality, characterised by justice and sustainability. The deconstructive framework I establish in the next chapter is thus underpinned by a realist rather than constructionist approach to social science, where there is an external reality to which human beings have only limited access. Harcourt (2020) explains this approach clearly and concisely when he ranks various disciplines in terms of their level of certainty, from the ontological concern with existence (most certain) to the aesthetic concern with taste (least certain). What is most important for Harcourt (2020: 187) is that critical theory must always be restricted to the particular rather than the universal and that critical praxis must always remain open to revision: We decide on a standard [of proof ] and who carries the burden, and then we let the chips fall where they will. Using effectively a juridical model, we often reach a temporary judgment. But that does not mean the judgment is true. It means that it is a temporary assessment of the evidence and arguments.

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All judgements are temporary in the realist approach to social science in that they acknowledge – and even welcome – future revision that provides a more accurate approximation of reality.2 While the foundation of the deconstructive framework in realism and the constitutive framework in constructionism is a significant difference between the two, their incompatibility is revealed in Henry and Milovanovic’s (1996: 46) reliance on ‘superliberalism’. The concept of superliberalism is from Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s (1987) False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, which is the first of the three volumes constituting his Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory. As adapted by Henry and Milovanovic, superliberal democratic reform seems largely compatible with the existing capitalist mode of production and material changes are accorded equal importance to both cultural and discursive changes. This compatibility is further evinced in their development of Unger’s rights-based approach to reforming inequality, which includes market rights (to capital dispersal), destabilisation rights (to political dissent), immunity rights (to basic needs), solidarity rights (to cooperative development), and valuation rights (to define your own risk). Although market, immunity, and solidarity rights appear to favour social over liberal democracy, the benefits of empowered democracy are set out in psychological terms that prioritise the human subject as a role-maker. A psychological model does not necessarily prioritise the individual over the collective, but it does continue the criminological focus on the human subject I noted in the second section of this chapter, which is suggestive of a reformative rather than transformative political economy. Further evidence for this criticism is the scant attention paid to corporate crime and the harms of the capitalist mode of production, both of which are restricted to ‘conflict Marxist approaches’, as discussed in Henry and Milovanovic’s (1996: 144) critique of modernist perspectives on crime causation. Regardless of precisely what type of democracy emerges from our respective theories, it is clear that constitutive criminology fails to recognise the full extent to which capitalism is criminogenic.

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4. Criminology and Narrative The structural turn in literary criticism began with Russian formalism in the second decade of the 20th century and spread from literary studies to the humanities in the linguistic turn of the second half of that century. The linguistic turn in the humanities was matched by a post-war enthusiasm for humanistic approaches to the social sciences. Qualitative research methods, which sought to privilege rather than eliminate the subjectivity of data, became both more prolific and more respected. The combination of the structuralist and humanist traditions, although not always harmonious, was sufficient to facilitate a narrative turn in the human sciences as a whole (McGregor 2021a). Matti Hyvärinen (2010) identifies four distinct stages within this turn, beginning with literary studies in the 1960s, moving to historiography in the 1970s, social research in the 1980s, and culture itself in the 1990s. Catherine Kohler Riessman (2002) explores the turn in more detail, noting the influence of narrative beyond the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, sociolinguistics, and sociology to the professions of law, medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, and social work in the last two decades of the century. In the 21st century, the concept of narrative identity – of personality as reducible to or dependent on autobiographical narrative representation or autobiographical narrative thinking – has been adopted by numerous disciplines, including criminology. The initial criminological interest in narrative representation was very early, developed in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and focused on the life history. The first life history to take crime as its subject was Clifford Shaw’s (1930) The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story. The Jack-Roller is the life history of ‘Stanley’ (a pseudonym), a 22-year-old man from Chicago with a long record of delinquency. Just over half of the book is composed of Stanley’s own narrative representation of the sequence of events of his life up to his release from the House of Correction, as recorded by Shaw in a series of personal interviews. In his introduction to the 1966 edition, Howard Becker notes how the use of the life history was encouraged by first Robert E.

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Park and then Ernest W. Burgess at Chicago. Following a discussion of the sociological value of The Jack-Roller in particular and life histories in general, Becker laments that the method failed to become one of the standard research tools of the discipline. He accounts for this neglect in terms of the growing professionalisation of sociology, one of the consequences of which is an increasing requirement that sociological studies are self-sufficient. There were only three monograph-length studies that employed narrative research methods published in the second half of the 20th century: Henry Williamson and Lincoln Keiser’s (1965) Hustler!, Lawrence Wieder’s (1974) Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code, and David Canter’s (1994) Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer. As such, the narrative turn in criminology is a phenomenon of the new century. Three of the most important books in the field were published in its first decade: Shadd Maruna’s (2001) Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives, Lois Presser’s (2008) Been a Heavy Life: Stories of Violent Men, and Sveinung Sandberg and Willy Pedersen’s (2009) Street Capital: ­ Black Cannabis Dealers in a White Welfare State. Maruna’s study of the life narratives of offenders is a direct descendant of Shaw’s seminal work of narrative criminology. Narrative criminology was established as a subdiscipline within criminology by Presser and Sandberg (2015a) with Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime, an edited collection, and the definitive work on the narrative turn in criminology is The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology, edited by Presser, Sandberg, Jennifer Fleetwood, and Thomas Ugelvik (2019).3 Presser and Sandberg (2015b: 1) define the narrative criminological framework as ‘any inquiry based on the view of stories as instigating, sustaining, or effecting desistance from harmful action’. This shared commitment includes story as one of the main explanatory variables in criminology, the relevance of stories to the causes of crime and harm, and the relevance of stories to desistance from crime and harm. As a branch of critical criminology, narrative criminology could accurately be described as thriving by the third decade of the 21st century, although this is for the most part due to the efforts of a relatively small number of criminologists (Presser &

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Sandberg 2019). A conspicuous absence, however, especially when one considers the framework as a development of the structural, linguistic, and narrative turns in the humanities and social sciences, is any interest in or engagement with narrative fiction. This is a significant anomaly in the framework given that ‘narrative’ is often used as a synonym for ‘story’ in criminology and for ‘fiction’ in disciplines such as literary studies and philosophy. To date, the criminological engagement with narrative fiction has been almost exclusively by the cultural criminological framework, which includes recent work in green cultural criminology and ultra-realist theory.

5. Narrative Criminology Presser’s development of the narrative criminological framework is evinced in the core theses of each of the three monographs she has published to date: Been a Heavy Life: Stories of Violent Men, Why We Harm, and Inside Story: How Narratives Drive Mass Harm. Been a Heavy Life (Presser 2008) draws on both C. Wright Mills (1940) and Maruna (2001) to argue that life stories construct personal identity and that the construction of personal identity enables all action, including that which harms. Presser (2008: 14) identifies three narrative structures that the men in her study employ to underpin future action: ‘reform – actually, a return to moral decency or constant moral decency – stability – as well as a hybrid or elastic structure that combined talk about self-reform and self-stability’. Why We Harm (Presser 2013: 17) establishes a ‘narrative criminology of harm’, in which she analyses the apparently varied harms of genocide, the consumption of nonhuman animals, intimate partner violence, and incarceration. Presser (2013: 109) discloses the significance of narrative representation to all of these harms as well as to harm in general: ‘We do harm because of cultural logics, typically in the form of stories, that reduce the target of harm and conjure ourselves as both authorized to harm and powerless not to’. Inside Story (Presser 2018) is her most ambitious work, a sociology of mass harm that attempts to explain the way in which narrative representation impacts aggregates, contributing to the global phenomenon

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of mass harm. Presser (2018) argues that underdog stories (a version of which is delineated in Been a Heavy Life) and stories that immobilise agency (a development of the cultural logics of Why We Harm) authorise and promote mass harm. She then differentiates between bounded (complex) narratives and notional (simple) narratives and claims that notional narratives have greater sociological significance because of the ease with which they can be reproduced, reiterated, and redistributed by social and mass media. With respect to the reduction of mass harm: ‘Both kinds of examination are important, but I believe that a cultural sociology of contemporary mass harm is in greater need of the latter because the most pervasive and impactful narratives are notional’ (Presser 2018: 140). Presser (2016) characterises her framework – and that of narrative criminology more generally – as being distinct from previous intersections of narrative representation and criminological inquiry in virtue of two features. First, narrative criminology focuses on the form of narratives rather than their content. Across all modes of representation, the form of a particular representation can be distinguished from the content of that representation and this form-content pairing is also referred to as style-substance, manner-matter, and medium-message. A simple, but accurate definition of the pairing is that form is how a representation represents and content is what a representation represents (McGregor 2021a). Although ‘narrative representation’ is often employed as if it is a mode of representation, ‘narrative’ is more accurately understood as a formal element, as narrative form is imposed on a substantive sequence of events (which can be represented in multiple modes). Narrative as form is often referred to as ‘plot’. Presser’s claim is thus that the way in which a story is told has more sociological significance than what happens in the story. Presser’s focus on form underpins the second distinctive feature of the narrative criminological framework, which treats narratives as constitutive rather than representational, i.e. stories are regarded as shaping experience rather than providing evidence of events or evidence of the way in which events are experienced. Presser and Sandberg (2015b) draw on Paul Ricouer’s (1983, 1984, 1985) account of the relationship between narrative and reality as threefold – objective, subjective,

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and constitutive – in order to explain this feature. In the first relation, narratives are regarded as transparent, as objective representations of reality. In the second, narratives are opaque, subjective representations of the experience of reality. In the third, narratives are performative, having a reciprocal relationship with experience such that narratives both produce experience and are the product of experience. The first two of these categories are representational conceptions of narrative and the third is a constitutive conception of narrative. While Presser (2008, 2013, 2018) neither denies nor discards the representational conception, she characterises the narrative criminological framework in terms of the constitutive conception. She explores this constitutivity in terms of personal identity, which is first an internal narrative and second a self-story that conditions future actions. The relationship between internal narrative and future action employs Donald Polkinghorne’s (1988) exploration of the narrative understanding of personal identity. Polkinghorne also draws on Ricouer and argues that temporality is the most significant dimension of human existence. Temporal experience (i.e. all human experience) is configured into past, present, and future, but human beings strive to create meaning by establishing relations between the parts (disconnected events) and the whole (totality of an individual’s experience). This is achieved by narrative configuration, which not only unifies the events by means of themes, but directs them towards a conclusion, i.e. the emplotment that transforms a sequence of events into a narrative representation also transforms an experienced sequence of events into a narrative identity. Each time narrative configuration occurs, it thus influences both the past and the future. Presser and Sandberg (2015b: 1) articulate the consequences of this crucial continuity at the beginning of their introduction to Narrative Criminology: ‘Our self-stories condition what we will do tomorrow because whatever tomorrow brings, our responses must somehow cohere with the storied identity generated thus far’. Presser’s core claim is that internal narratives provide an understanding of the causes of crime and harm by explaining future actions as either realising or advancing the individual or collective narratives of offenders. This explanation is made in virtue of

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the fact that personal identity is created and maintained by means of narrative configuration. As this summary suggests, narrative criminology differs from my deconstructive framework in prioritising meaning-making in and by the individual. Although there are overlaps between the deconstructive framework and cultural logics and between our shared interests in mass harms, Presser’s exclusion of fictional narratives is sufficient to distinguish our respective frameworks.

6. Cultural Criminology Cultural criminology emerged from the subcultural theories developed by sociologists such as Albert Cohen (1955) and David Matza (1964) and the work of Stuart Hall and his collaborators at first the University of Birmingham (Hall et al. 1978) and then the Open University (Hall, Evans & Nixon 1997) on media, representation, and meaning. Broadly construed, it is a rendezvous framework that deploys theories, principles, and methods from a US-based tradition of anthropology and a UK-based tradition of media studies which are more or less successfully integrated. The framework was pioneered by Jeff Ferrell (1996) and Keith Hayward (2004) and concentrated on culture as the site of meaning-making and as a tool for intervention in the politics of crime control. According to Ferrell, Hayward, and Jock Young (2015), cultural criminology is essentially concerned with the interweaving of cultural forces with the practices of crime and its control and aims to: understand crime as expressive; understand crime as a global public spectacle, mediated for consumption; and provide a critique of the politics of crime and criminal justice. Nicole Rafter (2006) locates the cultural criminological framework within the constructionist approach to social science, in consequence of which social facts are accepted as being constituted by multiple subjective realities and the study of the social world as the study of the intersubjective experience of the world. Jon Frauley (2010: 55) criticises the cultural criminological framework on the basis that it cannot reach beyond the ‘textual image’ – i.e. beyond the representation – and can thus only provide knowledge of the ideas and assumptions of its creator

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and the conceptions of crime and criminals of its audience. The framework is thus primarily concerned with the production and reception of representations rather than with the reality represented. Ferrell’s (1995: 29) initial description of the relationship between representation and reality refers to mirroring: ‘as cultural criminologists, we study not only images, but images of images, an infinite hall of mediated mirrors’. Ferrell, Hayward, and Young (2015: 155) develop this conception, which is a circulating cultural fluidity that challenges any certain distinction between an event and its representation, a mediated image and its effects, a criminal moment and its ongoing construction within collective meaning. Importantly, this looping process suggests for us something more than Baudrillard’s postmodern hyper-reality, his sense of an “unreality” defined only by media images and obfuscation. Quite the opposite: we mean to suggest a late-modern world in which the gritty, onthe-ground reality of crime, violence and everyday criminal justice is dangerously confounded with its own representation. With regard to popular culture, cultural criminologists have studied its artefacts in relation to what Marxists refer to as ideology (see Marx & Engels 1846). Rafter (2006: 9) defines ideology in terms of the myths that shape social reality, where myth is, in turn: ‘a descriptive term for the fundamental notions that people hold (usually without much conscious thought) about how the world is structured, what is valuable and unworthy, who is good and who is bad, and which kinds of actions are wrong or right’. The interest in ideology explains the recent ultra-realist engagement with fiction, which has focused on the ideological functions of television series, feature films, and novels in late capitalist society.4 I am not suggesting that ultra-realism is a theory internal to the cultural criminological framework – though this would be an accurate description of the assumptions, commitments, and context of several published studies – just that there is an overlap between the theory and the framework. As such and in spite of notable exceptions (see Cavender & Jurik 2012; Brisman & South 2014; Brisman 2019), the

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cultural criminological attention to representation has been largely concerned with misrepresentation, with crime fiction as misrepresenting the reality of crime. My deconstructive framework is distinct from the cultural criminological framework in at least two important ways. First, in spite of the many accusations of anti-realism levelled at Derrida’s deconstruction, my approach to social science has not changed from A Criminology of Narrative Fiction (McGregor 2021a) and remains committed to realism, as discussed in the third section of this chapter. In the next chapter, I shall argue that reality is co-constructed by human intelligibility and inaccessible reality, socially constructed by language. The fact that language fails to provide direct access to reality does not commit me to the constructionist view that the study of social reality is reducible to the study of the experience of social reality. Second, the deconstructive framework is primarily concerned with the reality represented by fictions rather than with the production and reception of those representations. My interest in the narrative fictions discussed in detail in Chapters 4–6 is thus in the knowledge they provide about mass harms rather than the knowledge they provide about their creators, about the audiences that read or watch them, or about the society in which they are produced and consumed. Like the narrative criminological framework, the cultural criminological framework is an interesting and important addition to the discipline, but completely distinct from my contribution in this book.

7. Pulp Criminology ‘Pulp criminology’ or, more accurately, ‘#pulpcriminology’, was the term I coined to denote criminological engagements with narrative fiction outside of both the cultural criminological framework – which is the source of the main criminological engagements with fiction to date – and ultra-realist theory (McGregor 2021b). I have no intention of creating a new ‘criminology’ and employ the term exclusively for convenience. My initial work within this ill-defined field was framed as narrative criminology, but this was a failure to acknowledge the resistance to fiction within

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the narrative criminological framework and I described my subsequent work as emergent from rather than located in that framework (McGregor 2018; McGregor 2021a). My most recent work is much more closely aligned with what I have described as philosophical criminology above and is, in consequence, a clear precursor to this monograph (McGregor 2021c). To date there have only been three sustained criminological engagements with fiction outside of the cultural criminological framework: Vincenzo Ruggiero’s (2003) Crime in Literature: Sociology of Deviance and Fiction, Frauley’s (2010) Criminology, Deviance, and the Silver Screen: The Fictional Reality and the Criminological Imagination, and my own A Criminology of Narrative Fiction (McGregor 2021a).5 My monograph draws heavily on Frauley’s and he, in turn, draws on and develops Ruggiero’s pioneering contribution to criminology. Ruggiero’s (2003) aim in Crime in Literature is to use canonical literary works as a tool for communicating sociological meaning and elaborating criminological analysis. His thesis is that crime and crime control can be viewed through a literary rather than legal lens and that the former draws attention to the significance of value, emotion, and the imagination to conceptions of crime and crime control. Ruggiero approaches the literary works through what I (McGregor 2021a: 37, emphasis in original) refer to as a ‘critical realist framework’ (a framework within the realist approach, which is also – confusingly – called the critical realist approach, as noted at the beginning of this chapter). Frauley (2010) identifies three elements that underpin this framework: independence of meaning, authorisation, and the relationship between textual meaning and extratextual reality. The text is independent of both the author and the reader and it is the text rather than authorial intention that authorises meaning, which is produced by the reader within the constraints established by the text. The relationship between textual meaning and extratextual reality is then determined by a combination of: linguistic structure, the analytic languages of criminology, the practices of reading, and the extent to which the fiction is characterised by truth as well as invention. Frauley (2010, 2021) develops the critical realist framework in Criminology, Deviance, and the Silver Screen, which he subsequently

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sets in the context of the perspectival realist approach, selected for the way in which it treats the dramatisation of crime control and criminalisation as both objectively real and essentially perspectival. He argues first for a greater recognition of the significance of theory and the practice of theorising within criminology and then for the value of fictional realities for theory and theorising. Frauley maintains that the fictional realities presented in cinema both exemplify concepts and theories and provide empirical referents for concepts and theories. The first of these refers to the way in which feature films are able to represent criminological concepts and theories in a particularly dramatic or captivating way that cannot be reproduced in the classroom or in a monograph. The second refers to the way in which cinematic reality can provide a case study against which criminological concepts and theories can be tested for their relevance for and application to social reality. Frauley shows that films are able to not only exemplify criminological theories, but provide protracted demonstrations of the cause and effect of concept and theory in textured detail. These demonstrations are complex, occurring simultaneously on several levels, and create reciprocal relationships between the cinematic fictions and the criminological theories, in which the criminological concepts are embedded in the film and the criminological theory enhances the cinematic experience by revealing deeper and more nuanced layers of meaning. In A Criminology of Narrative Fiction (McGregor 2021a), I provide an answer to the question of whether fiction can have aetiological value, i.e. whether fiction can provide an explanation of the causes of crime and harm. My view is that textual meaning is co-created by authorial intention and reader interpretation and that that the relationship between the text and extra-textual reality is by means of reference to universals. Within the philosophical aesthetic framework, a fictional particular (a character, setting, or action) instantiates a universal (a type of concrete or abstract object) such that there is a referential relation between the representation and reality.6 I argue that criminological fiction can provide at least the following three types of criminological knowledge: phenomenological (representing what certain experiences are like), counterfactual (representing possible but non-existent situations), and

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mimetic (representing everyday reality in detail and with accuracy). This claim is restricted to complex rather than basic narratives, in consequence of certain features shared by all complex narratives regardless of whether they are documentary, fictional, or somewhere in-between. I use the phenomenological, counterfactual, and mimetic values of narrative fiction to establish a theory of the aetiological value of narrative fiction and conclude with an explanation of the relationship between the aetiological and pedagogic values of narrative fiction that draws attention to the significance of feature films to both. None of the three monographs are concerned with either green criminology or the relationships among different kinds of mass harm. Ruggiero’s monograph is the most catholic, analysing ten harms through the lens of canonical works of literature: atavism, organised crime, illegal drugs, sexism, racism, industrial crime, differential association, corruption, imprisonment, and state crime. Frauley’s monograph employs four cinematic case studies as empirical referents for theories of moral transcendence, subcultures of crime, medicalisation, and the biological politics of life respectively. My own uses six complex narratives (two novels, two feature films, a graphic novel, and a television series), but the range of harms explored is even narrower, limited to state crime, rape, and organised crime. In retrospect, I wondered whether ‘pulp criminology’ is useful, even as a placeholder, but there is a need to identify criminological research into fiction that is distinct from the cultural criminological framework and ultra-realist theory because both framework and theory are overwhelmingly concerned with the ways in which fiction misrepresents reality. The use of fictions as a tool for the exploration of social reality is the thread that links all three of the monographs discussed and is also their only point of similarity with this monograph (and with my recent monograph on literary criticism). Having distinguished my approach in this book from all four related criminological frameworks – pulp criminology, cultural criminology, narrative criminology, and philosophical criminology – I explain what the deconstructive framework is and why I think it can reconstruct a more just and sustainable reality in the next chapter.

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Notes 1 I discuss both of these philosophical traditions, as well as the lesserknown tradition of pragmatism, in Chapter 7. 2 I discuss the significance of openness to revision in Chapter 7. 3 For an explanation of the significance of this publication to criminology, see McGregor (2020). 4 See, for example: Wakeman (2018); Raymen (2018); and Hayward and Hall (2021). 5 I have excluded Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism (McGregor 2021c) from this list on the basis of it being a very short monograph. 6 I discuss this relationship (and universals) in Chapter 7.

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Hall, S., Evans, J. & Nixon, S. (eds) (1997). Representation. London: SAGE Publications. Harcourt, B. (2020). Critique and Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action. New York: Columbia University. Hayward, K. (2004). City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience. London: Glasshouse. Hayward, K. & Hall, S. (2021). Through Scandinavia, Darkly: A Criminological Critique of Nordic Noir. British Journal of Criminology, 61 (1), 1–21. Henry, S. & Milovanovic, D. (1996). Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism. London: SAGE. Hyvärinen, M. (2010). Revisiting the Narrative Turns. Life Writing, 7 (1), 69–82. Lippens, R. (2009). A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Criminology. London: SAGE. Maruna, S. (2001). Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Build Their Lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1846/2000). The German Ideology. In: Marx, K. (ed.). Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University, 175–208. Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and Drift. New York: John Wiley & Sons. McGregor, R. (2018). Narrative Justice. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. ——— (2020). Book Review: Jennifer Fleetwood, Lois Presser, Sveinung Sandberg & Thomas Ugelvik (eds.). The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology, Critical Criminology: An International Journal 28, 1 (2020), 155–158. ——— (2021a). A Criminology of Narrative Fiction. Bristol: Bristol University. ——— (2021b). @detectingharm. 23 January. ——— (2021c). Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism. Bristol: Bristol University. McGregor, R., Frauley, J., Simecek, K., Slugan, M. & Whitecross, R. (2021). Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology Special Edition: A Criminology of Narrative Fiction, 13 (November), 92–157. Millie, A. (2016). Philosophical Criminology. Bristol: Policy. Mills, C.W. (1940). Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review, 5 (6), 904–913. Milovanovic, D. (1997). Postmodern Criminology. New York: Garland. Polizzi, D. (2016). A Philosophy of the Social Construction of Crime. Bristol: Policy. Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. New York: State University of New York.

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Potter, H. (2015). Intersectionality and Criminology: Disrupting and Revolutionizing Studies of Crime. Abingdon: Routledge. Presser, L. (2008). Been a Heavy Life: Stories of Violent Men. Champaign: University of Illinois. ——— (2013). Why We Harm. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University. ——— (2016). Criminology and the Narrative Turn. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 12 (2), 137–151. ——— (2018). Inside Story: How Narratives Drive Mass Harm. Oakland: University of California. Presser, L. & Sandberg, S. (eds) (2015a). Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime. New York: New York University. ——— (eds) (2015b). Introduction. In: Presser, L. & Sandberg, S. (eds). Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime. New York: New York University, 1–20. ——— (2019). Narrative Criminology as Critical Criminology. Critical Criminology, 27 (1), 131–143. Rafter, N. (2006). Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University. Raymen, T. (2018). Living in the End Times through Popular Culture: An Ultra-Realist Analysis of The Walking Dead as Popular Criminology. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 14 (3), 429–447. Ricouer, P. (1983/1984). Time and Narrative: Volume 1. Trans. K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— (1984/1985). Time and Narrative: Volume 2. Trans. K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— (1985/1988). Time and Narrative: Volume 3. Trans. K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Riessman, C.K. (2002). Analysis of Personal Narratives. In: Gubrium, J.F. & Holstein, J.A. (eds). Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 695–710. Ruggiero, V. (2003). Crime in Literature: Sociology of Deviance and Fiction. London: Verso. Sandberg, S. & Pedersen, W. (2009). Street Capital: Black Cannabis Dealers in a White Welfare State. Bristol: Policy. Shaw, C.R. (1930/1966). The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Unger, R.M. (1987). False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy. New York: Cambridge University. Wakeman, S. (2018). The ‘One Who Knocks’ and the ‘One Who Waits’: Gendered Violence in Breaking Bad. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 14 (2), 213–228. Webber, J. (2018). Rethinking Existentialism. Oxford: Oxford University.

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White, R. (2022). Theorising Green Criminology: Selected Essays. Abingdon: Routledge. Wieder, D.L. (1974). Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code. The Hague: Mouton. Williamson, H. & Keiser, R.L. (1965). Hustler! New York: Garden City.

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The relationship between theoretical and empirical research in criminology is reciprocal and criminological research is, ideally, theory-driven and evidence-based. Typically, criminological theory is concerned with revealing the underlying causes of crime and harm and a particular explanation is usually articulated as a hypothesis before it is recognised as a theory. Hypotheses are tested by empirical research, using quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods, which results in either verification or falsification (McGregor 2021). Literary theory is concerned not with causation, but with determining the meaning and realising the value of literary texts. Importantly for criminologists, literary theory is not restricted to literary, artistic, fictional, or cultural texts, but is a resource that can be deployed to all texts and is particularly useful when those texts are complex. The primary aim of literary theory is thus the interpretation of literary and other texts, i.e. to analyse and ascertain their meaning, and the secondary aim is the appreciation of literary and other texts, i.e. to evaluate and elaborate their worth. The literary studies equivalent of empirical research in criminology is literary criticism. Literary criticism is the application of literary theory to a particular text. My subject in this book is Anglophone DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520-4

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literary theory, by which I mean literary theory that is popular in the Anglosphere rather than literary theory that originated in the Anglosphere. Anglophone literary theory underwent a radical transformation in the 1970s, in consequence of the poststructural revolution inaugurated by Jacques Derrida’s (1967a, 1967b, 1967c) deconstruction. Derrida’s innovation was to turn the attention of literary theory from the interpretation and appreciation of texts to the analysis of the structure of meaning and value themselves. As such, deconstruction is concerned not just with the demystification of meaning and value, but with their reconstruction. Deconstruction is thus also critical theory: theory that aims to change rather than just interpret the world (Harcourt 2020). My focus in this chapter is on literary theory as deconstruction and reconstruction rather than as interpretation and appreciation.

1. Literary Theory The history of literary studies as a discipline is usually divided into two stages, pre- and post-revolution. For the first two thirds of the 20th century, literary theory aimed to determine textual meaning and was focused on the activity of interpretation. The first professionalisation of literary theorists as both academics and critics was by the school of new criticism, which was pioneered by I.A. Richards (1924) in the UK and John Crowe Ransom (1941) in the US during the inter-war years. New critics approached texts as selfsufficient in meaning and were not interested in context, i.e. the way in which meaning is affected by the conditions of production of the text, the character of the author of the text, the relationship between the text and other texts, and the conditions of reception of the text. They promoted the close reading of the text shorn of its context as a method of analysis. The literary value of the text was the extent to which it integrated form and content into an organic whole so that the two components could not be distinguished in the experience of the text. In spite of their views on textual autonomy, new critics maintained that the role of the professional critic was to engage in social critique by means of literary criticism. Derrida (1967a, 1967b, 1967c) inaugurated a radical transformation

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of literary theory in 1967, with the publication of three books: a collection of essays, a short monograph on phenomenology, and a longer monograph on a new discipline, grammatology, the study of writing. There are two main distinctions between pre- and post-revolution literary theory. The most obvious is that the latter is influenced by deconstruction, which I explore in the remainder of this chapter. Less obviously, post-revolution critical schools tend to combine a variety of perspectives, for example: feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, and ecological. In order to distinguish between pre- and postrevolution theories and criticism, the latter are sometimes identified with the prefix ‘post’, for example postcolonial criticism. More generally, contemporary literary theory – understood in terms of both the influence of deconstruction and the combination of multiple perspectives – is often referred to as Theory with a capital ‘t’. The ‘post’ in postcolonial criticism is indicative not only of the influence of poststructuralism, but also of the hierarchies of power that remained in place in former European colonies post-independence. Postcolonial criticism began with the publication of Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism in 1978. Said drew on Michel Foucault’s (1969, 1975, 1976) work to demonstrate that the ‘orient’ had been socially constructed by the West through the discourse of orientalism. Western culture was disguised as universal civilisation and this universality was employed to legitimate Western imperialism. Ecocriticism also originated in 1978, coined by William Rueckert (1978) in a pair of essays, and is concerned with the othering of nonhuman animals and the environment. One of the most influential works in ecocriticism is another essay, Donna Haraway’s (1985) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century’. Haraway undermines human exceptionalism and works towards a conception of human animals that is not defined by its violent opposition to nonhuman animals. Queer theory was a development of pre-revolution feminist criticism and poststructuralism. In Gender Trouble, which was first published in 1990, Judith Butler (1999) argues that both gender and sex are socially constructed, the latter by the discursive construction of sexed bodies in the practice of sex assignment. Butler’s lasting contribution to

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queer theory is the conception of sexuality and identity as performative and the self as nothing more than an illusion constituted by repeated performances. An unforeseen consequence of the poststructural revolution that has never been integrated with literary theory was the development of literary aesthetics, a branch of aesthetics, which is, in turn, one of the five subdisciplines of philosophy (along with logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics). In the final decade of the 20th century, publications by Martha Nussbaum (1990, 1995), Noël Carroll (1990, 1996), and Peter Lamarque (Lamarque 1996; Lamarque & Olsen 1994) brought literature and film into the sphere of the analytic tradition of philosophy for the first time. Literary aesthetics reversed the prioritisation of meaning over value in pre-revolution literary theory, being primarily concerned with the realisation of the value of literary works and secondarily concerned with the determination of their meaning. Appreciation was typically focused on aesthetic or artistic value, cognitive or epistemic value, and ethical or moral value. The focus on ethical value was concomitant with and constitutive of what became known as the ethical turn in criticism, when Derrida (1992, 1993, 1997) made explicit the concern with values that had been present in deconstruction from the very beginning. He was joined by critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999, 2012) and Butler (1999, 2004), who deployed literary theory to demystify gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.1 The purpose of this very brief overview of Anglophone literary theory from new criticism to literary aesthetics is to distinguish the three aims of literary theory that emerged during the 20th century: the determination of meaning (interpretation), the realisation of value (appreciation), and the analysis of the structure of meaning and value (demystification).

2. Difference Derrida (1967c) sets out deconstruction as a metatheory, matrix, or framework in Of Grammatology, which is his magnum opus and the most significant of the three books published in 1967. The monograph is concerned with the way in which language has traditionally

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subordinated writing to speech in consequence of the presence of a speaker in the latter and the absence of a speaker in the former. Writing not only reveals the absence of the speaker, but draws attention to this absence. There is in fact a double absence in writing as a medium of communication: we see combinations of letters on a screen and recognise those combinations as standing for sounds, which in turn stand for absent concrete or abstract objects, for example ‘laptop’ and ‘justice’. Writing is thus, in Derrida’s (1967c: 43) terms, a ‘sign of a sign’, a sign of speech, which is itself a sign of concrete and abstract objects. Grammatology overturns the hegemony of speech over writing to reveal that writing is more fundamental than speech to language because all words, whether spoken or written, are signs of signs, sound-images that are twice removed from the reality they fail to make present. Derrida argues that phonocentrism (the prioritisation of speech over writing) is a symptom of language’s logocentrism, the view that language (a system of signs) provides direct access to reality by means of the reference of words (signifiers) to concepts (signifieds). Susanne Lüdemann (2011: 20) describes this view as an ontological hierarchy: signifieds possess fullness, for they (supposedly) consist of pre-linguistic impressions made by objects directly on the mind; spoken words involve a step away from direct reference to reality, but their proximity to mental representations, through the consciousness of the speaker who voices them, still assures relative accuracy; finally, written signs are “merely” signs of spoken words – signif[i]ers of signifiers, that is – and, because they are cut off from the consciousness of the speaker, they stand at the farthest remove from the living, embodied truth of the speaker. Language cannot make absent objects present, i.e. when I say ‘laptop’ to someone or someone reads ‘laptop’ in this book, the sound or sight of the word does not create a laptop that can be apprehended by sensory perception. What language does do in the logocentric view, however, is make concepts present, i.e. when I say ‘laptop’ to someone or someone reads ‘laptop’ in this book, the

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sound or sight of the word creates an intersubjective and transparent conception of a computer of a certain size and weight that has a battery and a lid and is suitable for some tasks but not others. The presence of the concept in the word is what links word to world, i.e. when I say ‘laptop’ to someone or someone reads ‘laptop’ in this book, the sound or sight of the word creates an intersubjective and transparent conception of a computer of a certain size and weight that has a battery and a lid and is suitable for some tasks but not others as they exist in the world in which I can go to a shop and buy one. Similarly, when I say ‘justice’ or someone reads ‘justice’ in this book, the sound or sight of the word creates an intersubjective and transparent conception of the administration of law or equity that is debated by politicians and activists in the world in which I watch those politicians and activists on television. Making the absent (concrete and abstract objects) present (through concepts) is a function of language as a system of signs (Derrida 1967c: 18): ‘The “formal essence” of the sign can only be determined in terms of presence’. Catherine Belsey (2011: 25) describes this logocentric view as one in which language is understood as ‘the instrument of prior convictions’, an outcome of social life and social relations. Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) and his structuralist successors rejected logocentrism, claiming that language was a condition rather than an outcome of social life and that learning a language involved internalising a particular set of power relations. Hans Bertens (2014) explains Saussure’s innovation in linguistics as turning the subject of the discipline from a search for the rules that explained changes in particular languages over time to a search for the rules that explained how language itself works – all languages rather than just a particular language or a particular set of related languages. Saussure’s insight was to demonstrate that the relation between signifiers (words) and signifieds (concepts) in language is conventional rather than logical. There is no compelling reason why ‘laptop’ as a sound-image signifies a computer of a certain size and weight that has a battery and a lid and is suitable for some tasks but not others in English. Not only would the signifiers ‘thightop’ and ‘portable’ serve just as well, but there is no justification for ‘laptop’ beyond its

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establishment through linguistic convention. So, while I have good reason to follow the linguistic convention and use ‘laptop’ rather than ‘thightop’ in this book (because if I used ‘thightop’ my meaning would be opaque to readers), the only reason that ‘laptop’ rather than ‘thightop’ became the linguistic convention is the adventitious combination of ‘lap’ and ‘top’ in English in the 1980s (which could just as easily have been ‘thigh’ and ‘top’ as ‘lap’ and ‘thigh’ are both accurate descriptions of where the computer can be placed). The relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary: there is no logical, necessary, or intrinsic relation between a particular word and a particular concept. The consequences of this reconceptualisation of language are difficult to overstate. To begin with, if there is no essential relationship between word and concept, then there can be no essential relationship between word and world and language is ‘lifted’ from the world to become a self-referential system of signs. If ‘laptop’ has no essential relation to the concept of a computer of a certain size and weight that has a battery and a lid and is suitable for some tasks but not others, then ‘laptop’ also has no essential relation to the Fujitsu Lifebook I own. The arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified and the lifting of word from world does not imply that meaning is indeterminate, but that meaning is determined by difference rather than reference. The meaning of ‘laptop’ is determined by the way in which the concept differs from related concepts such as ‘mainframe computer’, ‘personal computer’, ‘tablet’, and ‘smartphone’ rather than by reference to the concept or to my Fujitsu Lifebook. Similarly, the meaning of ‘justice’ is determined by the way in which the concept differs from related concepts such as ‘lawfulness’, ‘equity’, and ‘virtue’ rather than its reference to the idea of the administration of law or equity that is debated by politicians and activists. Difference is thus the cornerstone of language. Identifying difference as the cornerstone of language does not, however, sever word from world completely, which would make communication within a language extremely difficult or perhaps even impossible. Belsey (2002: 36) characterises Saussure’s linguistics as establishing the arbitrariness of the individual sign, but not the signifying system as a whole: ‘Meaning

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is public and conventional, the result not of individual intention but of inter-individual intelligibility. In other words, meaning is socially constructed, and the social construction of the signifying system is intimately related, therefore, to the social formation itself ’. This is why language is a condition of social life and why the learning of a language is the internalisation of the particular set of power relations constitutive of that language.

3. Differance Saussure (1916) reconceptualised language as a self-referential system of signs that creates a structure of meaning which is mapped on to the world with more or less success. What determines the meaning of words (signifiers) within this system is their place within the self-referential system rather than their reference to concepts (signifieds, which provide access to the world). As such, difference rather than reference is the cornerstone of language – not just a language, but all languages, i.e. language as a means of communication. While Derrida’s work was both post-structural and post-phenomenological, the former is more fundamental to the revolution in literary theory he inaugurated, which is why that revolution is referred to as ‘poststructuralism’ and not ‘postphenomenology’. Belsey (2002: 2) is even more specific, referring to the work of Derrida and his successors as post-Saussurean ‘to emphasize its line of descent from the radical elements in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure’. Derrida was sceptical about the stability of the system of signs that constituted a language and the extent to which Saussure relied on this stability in replacing reference with difference. Derrida’s development of Saussure was to demonstrate that difference cannot determine meaning because the system of signs is not consistent either spatially or temporally, i.e. the system (and thus the relations within it) can change from place to place (for example, the differences between UK and US English) and in one place over time (for example, the difference between Shakespeare’s early modern English and contemporary modern English in the UK). This is a particularly cogent position if one considers the connotative meaning of words in addition to their denotative

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meaning. A straightforward way to approach this further reconceptualisation of language is that meaning differs (spatially) and defers (temporally) and that the combination of differ and defer is ‘differance’ (‘difference-with-an-a’), which is what actually determines meaning (not Saussure’s difference) (Derrida 1967c: 66). A more sophisticated way to approach the concept is that meaning is determined by context. One of Derrida’s (1967c: 158, emphasis in original) muchquoted and most-misunderstood claims is this sentence in Of Grammatology: ‘There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte]’. The statement has been cited as evidence of poststructural antirealism, the idea that everything in the world is socially constructed through language across the full range of what we think of as culture and nature. It has also been cited as evidence of postmodern relativism, the idea that all values are relative in consequence of which one is never justified in imposing one’s own values on anyone else. Jonathan Culler (2006) provides the most pragmatic and compelling explanation: despite appearances to the contrary, reality is constituted by signification rather than prior to it. Derrida is not saying that there is no reality beyond that which is socially constructed by language, but that we can never access that reality directly, i.e. can never step outside of language, never access reality without that reality being mediated by language. The idea that our language determines our reality is known as either linguistic determinism or linguistic idealism and has a lengthy pedigree in philosophy. Derrida’s view is completely compatible with modern phenomenology: Edmund Husserl (1900–1901) selected the structure of conscious experience as the subject of his study precisely because human beings could only experience reality through consciousness, not directly. Derrida is thus no more of an antirealist than Husserl. Culler’s explanation also provides a response to the accusation of postmodern relativism. Derrida is not saying that we have no way of deciding which value is worth pursuing, but that the concepts that constitute those values are never fixed for all time. Think, for example, of the almost completely changed meaning of ‘justice’ over the last two millennia of Western history. ‘Justice’ in Plato’s (1997) Republic refers to a society in which every person

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accepts their place in one of three social classes (as well as to psychological harmony in the individual). The contemporary equivalent, ‘social justice’, refers to a society in which there is equality of opportunity for all. The fact that Plato used ‘justice’ to describe an elitist, antidemocratic society does not mean that I should not pursue social justice now or that I should regard social justice and Platonic justice as equally valuable. Derrida agrees with Saussure that meaning is not determined by reference, but disagrees that difference within a system of signs determines meaning because the system itself is unstable. Reality is constituted by language, but language is a self-referential system of signs that is not consistent either spatially or temporally. Meaning is determined by relations within the self-referential system of signs, but these relations are always subject to change, albeit incrementally. Meaning is thus determined by context, which is itself limitless. As meaning is determined by limitless context, it can never be self-sufficient and never make concepts present. Difference as the cornerstone of language requires a limited context that does not exist so Derrida replaces difference with differance. ‘Difference’ is ‘différence’ in French and ‘differance’ is Spivak’s (1976: xliii) English translation of ‘différance’ (difference-with-an-a). She notes that Derrida’s neographism involves an inaudible change from the original term, which serves as a reminder that writing is more fundamental to language than speech. Derrida (1967c: 66) distinguished differance from (Saussure’s) difference as follows: ‘differance defers-differs’. He (Derrida 1967c: 93, emphasis in original) also explained differance as ‘difference-itself ’ and Simon Glendenning (2011: 62, emphasis in original) uses the term ‘self-difference’. Every concept is both identical to and different from itself because its meaning is determined by its context, which is always subject to change. Spivak (1976: xliii) describes differance as the closest Derrida gets to a ‘master-concept’, which draws attention to differance as the cornerstone of the deconstructive framework, but Derrida (1987) was keen to avoid the flaw he saw in Martin Heidegger’s (1927) hermeneutic phenomenology, which aimed to destroy the Western tradition of philosophy but only succeeded in taking it in a new direction. Derrida could not, furthermore, simply replace

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difference with differance because differance is itself determined by context, which is also subject to change. Any genuinely poststructural theory or framework is thus necessarily self-sabotaging: once one proposes that meaning is never self-sufficient, one must accept that one’s own meaning is similarly lacking in self-sufficiency. In Derrida’s (1967c: 24) terms, ‘the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work’. In recognition of the impossibility of a master concept to replace difference, Derrida (1967c: 62, 93, 150, 167 & 268, emphases in original) used different terms, each of which whose meaning varied slightly, as alternatives to differance, including: ‘The (pure) trace’, ‘trace’, ‘reserve’, ‘supplement’, ‘supplementarity as structure’, and even just ‘writing’. The conception of differance as the supplement is particularly significant when one considers deconstruction as an analytic tool for determining the structure of meaning and value. Derrida (1967b: 75) was well aware of the difficulty of grasping differance – as not only a complex concept, but one that is necessarily unstable and admitted that it ‘is unthinkable starting from consciousness, that is, starting from presence, or starting simply from the opposite of presence, absence or non-consciousness’.

4. Logocentrism Belsey (2002: 2) regards Derrida’s project as calling common sense itself into question and revealing that what we refer to as common sense is in fact ‘ideologically and discursively constructed, rooted in a specific historical situation, and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation’. The logocentric view of language, that language provides direct access to reality by means of the reference of words to concepts, is common sense because we assume that, for example, the concept ‘male’ makes the sexual reality of roughly half of the world’s human population present to us. We do not typically reflect on ‘male’ as either the dominant pole of the binary opposition ‘male/female’ or on the binary opposition ‘male/female’ as an oversimplification of a continuum of biological variations from male through intersex to female. The logos is the well-established divine or rational principle that meaning and

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consciousness are both self-sufficient, that there is a final, non-­ contextual, and invariant truth that can be discovered by the self and communicated by the self to others. The reliance on truth as the foundation of ontological and epistemological inquiry is what Derrida (1967a, 1967b, 1967c) refers to as metaphysics. Spivak (1976: xxi) explains its use ‘as shorthand for any science of presence’. Derrida’s specific criticism of Heidegger, mentioned in Section 3 of this chapter, was that Heidegger failed to destroy metaphysics and that his hermeneutic phenomenology was a development of metaphysics that remained firmly rooted in that tradition. If, however, human beings can never gain direct access to reality, then there is no longer a possibility of truth. This is why Derrida (1967c: 10) called for ‘the destruction, not the demolition but the de-­sedimentation, the de-construction’ of all signification based on the binary opposition of truth/falsity. Derrida (1967b: 6, emphasis in original) was also critical of phenomenology as a discipline, Husserl’s as well as Heidegger’s, arguing that phenomenology replaced truth as the foundation of inquiry with the ‘living present’, the self-sufficiency of a consciousness that is fully present. In a similar manner to that in which we cannot gain direct access to reality, we can also never gain complete access to ourselves as part of reality. In other words, there is not only no truth to discover, but no presence to discover the absence of truth. Derrida’s claims that neither meaning nor consciousness are self-sufficient present two problems for deconstruction as a methodology. First, there is the question of origin: if truth is rejected as a criterion for scientific inquiry, then how do we judge the quality of our inquiry and what authority do our findings have? Derrida (1967c: 74) is explicit that ‘questions of origin carry with them a metaphysics of presence’ and his radical antifoundationalism has been repeatedly criticised. I deal with this issue in the penultimate section of this chapter and return to it in Chapter 7. Second, there is the question of self-presence: if the self and the binary opposition ‘subject/object’ are deconstructed, then who (or perhaps more accurately, what) is making the inquiry? Derrida (1967c: 166) is once again explicit that consciousness experienced as ­self-presence is the ‘phenomenon of an auto-affection lived as suppression of

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differance’. He is, as will be evident by now, suspicious of all binary oppositions, which are symptomatic of our desire to simplify reality, reducing its complexity to a common sense understanding within which we can function without the need for self-reflection. As such, the deconstruction of ‘subject/object’ is not the ‘death of the subject’ attributed to Foucault (1966), but a recognition that the distinction between subject and object, reader and text, is more porous than common sense suggests. Ultimately, however, there is still some agency that is inquiring or reading, even if that agency is closer to Heidegger’s (1927) being-in-the-world – agency that is in and of the world in which it finds itself – than the traditional autonomous subject. Derrida (1995: 262) subsequently used the term ‘differant singularity’ for deconstructed agency. Spivak (1976: xliii) refers to the differant constitution of ‘the “subject” that “perceives” presence’ and employs Derrida’s scepticism about an absolute distinction between subject and object to enrich the conception of differance as suspended between activity and passivity. In deconstructive logic, differance is neither active nor passive and both active and passive, a play of presence and absence between reader and text and word and world. For my purposes in the remainder of this book, I shall assume that there is differant singularity that can be distinguished from what that singularity perceives, reads, and analyses while acknowledging that this singularity is not self-sufficient consciousness.

5. Deconstruction Derrida’s linguistic determinism – the view that there is no access to reality outside of language – applies to both natural and social reality and he was suspicious of attempts to establish an absolute or inviolable distinction between culture and nature. In consequence of language failing to provide direct access to reality, human reality is co-constructed by human intelligibility and inaccessible reality. This is the sense in which language as an unstable, self-referential system of signs is mapped onto reality with more or less success. Meaning is constituted by both presence (an approximation of meaning) and absence (the lack of self-sufficiency of meaning)

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and Derrida (1967c: 177) refers to this inherent instability as ‘the play of supplementarity’. The supplement is another instantiation of differance and play ‘the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness’, which is contrasted with logocentrism, the view that language provides direct access to reality through concepts and that words make concepts present when they are heard or read (Derrida 1967c: 50). To use an example from Simone de Beauvoir (1949), ‘man’ is prioritised over ‘woman’ such that ‘man’ is universalised to ‘human’ and ‘woman’ simply ‘not-man’ and therefore (also) not (fully) human.2 An analysis of the structure of meaning that takes differance as its starting point would examine the relationship between ‘man’ (presence) and ‘woman’ (absence) and explore the extent to which the subordinate pole of the binary opposition is essential to the superior pole. In other words, the extent to which we cannot have anything more than a superficial understanding of ‘man’ without grasping the way in which it is conceived in opposition to and dominant over ‘woman’. A deeper analysis would explore the extent to which the binary opposition oversimplifies the concept of gender and erases the existence of nonbinary people. Metaphysics, the clinging to truth as the ultimate criterion for ontological and epistemological inquiry, is violent for two reasons. First, the belief that one has acquired direct access to reality sacrifices the absent to the present. If I conceive of ‘human’ in terms of ‘man’ then I am committing conceptual violence against women and nonbinary people. Second, ‘truth’ has historically been employed to coerce others into adopting our own conceptions and to justify the stratification of humanity into the more and less worthy in different contexts. If I conceive of ‘human’ in terms of ‘man’, then ‘woman’ is other to and less than ‘man’ and the humanity of nonbinary people is not recognised at all. Recall the significance of writing as opposed to speech in Of Grammatology: writing is the supplement to speech because the former draws attention to itself as absence (of a present speaker), but as a sign that draws attention to itself as a sign, writing reveals that all signs – whether written or spoken – are absences in failing to make the reality they signify present. As such, the metaphysical conception of speech as dominant in the ‘speech/writing’ binary

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opposition is flawed because it is writing rather than speech that is more fundamental to language. The flaw in metaphysics is not merely to place the wrong term at the dominant pole, but to accept the binary opposition of speech/writing in the first place. This applies to all the binary oppositions based on ‘presence/absence’ in the unstable, self-referential system of signs that constitutes a particular language. Derrida employs differance as a tool to identify and destabilise the hierarchies of binary oppositions. He (Derrida 1972: 41; see also Spivak 1976: lxxvi) describes his method as reversal and displacement, beginning with the recognition of a violent hierarchy in a text: ‘One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment’. Deconstruction as a framework is thus a literal deconstruction of the concepts that constitute the meaning of a text. ‘Reversal’ suggests a prescriptive method, however, and deconstruction as a framework for critique is better understood by focusing on the relationship between the supplement and play. Derrida’s (1967c: 244) conceptions of play and supplementarity are at their most transparent when explained in terms of one another: supplementarity, which is nothing, neither a presence nor an absence, is neither a substance nor an essence of man. It is precisely the play of presence and absence, the opening of this play that no metaphysical or ontological concept can comprehend. The violent hierarchy of a binary opposition is not just reversed or replaced, neither of which would recognise the significance of differance to meaning, but reconceptualised. ‘Play’ is the relationship between presence and absence in a particular text, which is – of course – unstable and subject to change. Hence Derrida’s qualification of deconstruction’s validity at a given moment quoted previously. Deconstruction involves engaging a text on its own terms, inhabiting its structures of meaning, and using the ‘logic of supplementarity’ (as opposed to the logic of identity) to reconceptualise

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that meaning as the play of presence and absence (Derrida 1967c: 215). In his work within the constitutive criminological framework, Ronnie Lippens (2000: 12) employs a similar method of analysis, which he describes as ‘the process of continuous, restless de/re/construction’. His terminology is particularly useful for my purposes because of the way de/re/construction draws attention to the link between ‘deconstruction’ and ‘reconstruction’. Deconstruction is reconstruction or, to use one of Derrida’s (1967a: 2) favourite phrases, is ‘always already’ reconstruction because it is a reconceptualisation of meaning. Deconstruction does not destroy meaning, but literally deconstructs and reconstructs meaning using a variation of the method sketched above. As a school of literary criticism, deconstruction turned attention away from the literary theoretical concern with the determination of meaning (through interpretation) to the analysis of the structure of meaning and value (through demystification). As deconstruction involves the demystification of both meaning and value, it is paradigmatic critical theory and the accusations of amorality that became popular in the late 1980s are sorely misguided.3

6. Reconstruction Notwithstanding the flaws in the allegations of both amorality and relativism, Derrida’s work took what Spivak (1999: 426) describes as an ‘ethical turn’ in the 1990s, during which he focused on ethics and politics and published two of his most important works, The Gift of Death (1992) and Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993). Derrida’s (1967a: 97, 1967b: 9, emphasis in original, 1967c: 70) desire to explore the ethical, social, and political implications of Saussure’s reconceptualisation of language is, however, explicit in all of the 1967 texts, from the title of the fourth essay in the first, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, to phenomenology as ‘philosophy of life’ in the second, and his claim that ‘justification can therefore never be absolute and definitive’ in the third. The motive for developing the deconstructive framework and applying it to texts is twofold: to first reveal the violence of the

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linguistic construction of reality and to then do something about it. What deconstruction is destroying is the logocentric version of a reality that is not socially constructed and whose many historical and contemporary injustices (such as the subordination of women) could not be otherwise. What deconstruction is reconstructing from the destruction is the foundation for the construction of a more just and sustainable reality. Deconstruction is (and has always been) the desire for a better (not just different) mode of (human) being. Understood as critical theory, deconstruction aims to transform social reality by means of analysing and evaluating its constitutive concepts. Derrida’s (1967a: 352, 1967b: 89, 1967c: 280) use of desire is usually as the desire of the subject and language itself for presence: the desire for a ‘centered structure’ (a structure of meaning beyond the reach of play); our desire to experience ‘the thing itself ’ (that always slides away); and language as deferring ‘the indestructible desire to rejoin’ presence. Desire in this sense is related to impossibility, the impossibility of self-sufficient meaning and self-sufficient consciousness. Derrida (1967c: 244) also mentions the desire for a life without differance, actually for ‘access to a life without differance’. A life without differance is a life without self-reflection, a life relatively free of complication, lived within Belsey’s realm of common sense. In focusing on our desire for an unreflective life in which language makes reality present to us and in which we do not question our agency, Derrida subordinates the desire at the heart of deconstruction itself. The desire for differance is not merely the desire to uncover the reality that common sense conceals – differance is no more ‘true’ and does not make reality any more present to us than common sense conceptions. That desire is, instead, a desire to deconstruct the violent hierarchies of binary oppositions in order to reconceptualise their relationship in a more just and sustainable way. Derrida, who died in 2004, did not publish on climate change, so ‘sustainable’ is my addition, which I justify on a threefold basis. First, as explained in Chapter 1, a conception of justice that fails to recognise the relevance of sustainability is all but useless in the third decade of the 21st century. Second, it is possible to extrapolate Derrida’s position on ethical and political issues he

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did not write about from those that he did write about, especially after his ethical turn. Third, Derrida (1997) was appalled by the extent of nonhuman animal suffering, contributing to ecocritical literary theory by making the controversial comparison between meat eating and the Holocaust. The role of desire in deconstruction is thus clearly that deconstruction is the desire for a world that is both more just and more sustainable. If one recognises the concern with the ethical, social, and political at the beginning of deconstruction and the desire for ethical, social, and political improvement at the core of the deconstructive framework, there remains a potentially significant concern. Belsey (2002: 111 & 107) asks whether deconstruction is ‘a reason for refusing to take a position’ or ‘a justification of inertia’. This view (which she rejects) is based on the combination of the misconception of deconstruction as necessarily relative, mentioned above, and the link between ethics and impossibility that was developed by Spivak (2012). Like Emmanuel Levinas (1961), Derrida’s (1967a) ethical writing was metaethical rather than normative, i.e. aimed at elucidating the origin and meaning of ethics rather than establishing principles to guide behaviour. In The Gift of Death, Derrida (1992) argued for the impossibility of a self-sufficient normative theory on the basis that ethical behaviour always involved a play of presence and absence. He maintained that ethical dilemmas are common rather than rare because of our responsibility to others, which includes responsibility to nonhuman animal others. These responsibilities often conflict and even apparently virtuous actions are usually more ethically complex than we realise: my decision to donate to Charity A, for example, is also a decision not to donate to Charity B, which may be equally – or even more – worthy. Spivak (2012: 98) refers to the ‘bottom line of being-human as being-inthe-ethical-relation’. The ethical relation places human being in a frustrating situation because differant singularity is angled towards an other that it cannot reach. The ethical is thus characterised by a gap between the desire to reach the other and the impossibility of fulfilling that desire. ‘Thus the ethical situation can only be figured in the ethical experience of the impossible’ (Spivak 2012: 98). The ethical situation is not just characterised by impossibility,

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but defined by it because of the impossibility of meeting all of our responsibilities to others during our finite lives. Spivak is explicit that the kind of situations typically described by moral philosophers are experiences rather than dilemmas as ‘dilemma’ suggests a problem to which a solution can be found. If Charity A supports antiracism and Charity B supports feminism, my donation to either A or B can never be ethical. This does not, however, imply that I should donate to neither or halve my contribution and donate to both, but that I should make my choice as carefully as possible and with the knowledge that whatever choice I make, I will inevitably fail to fulfil my responsibilities. The consequence, for Spivak (2012: 105), is that ‘the typecase of the ethical sentiment is regret, not self-congratulation’. Ethics is fundamentally a relation and the ethical situation is an experience of impossibility that produces a sentiment of regret.

7. Critical Theory Bernard Harcourt (2020: 1) opens Critique and Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action with a powerful statement of intent: To change the world: The ambition of critical philosophy since its inception in the nineteenth century has always been to transform human existence […] to materialize the opportunity for each and every one of us to flourish and achieve our greatest potential. To realize a world of equal citizens, in which all human beings can fulfill their talents and aspirations, in which all are nurtured, educated, and cared for generously and respectfully by each other, tending not only to their dreams and ambitions, but also humbly to everyone else’s. Critical philosophy begins with the desire for a more just and sustainable world and it achieves that desire by critical praxis. Critical praxis involves a combination of theory and praxis, which Harcourt (2020: 2, emphases in original) explains in terms of the ancient Greek distinction between ‘theoria’ as understanding and

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comprehension (knowing) and ‘praxis’ as performance and activity (doing). This recalls Derrida (1990: 8–9) on radical deconstruction: the most radical programs of a deconstruction that would like, in order to be consistent with itself, not to remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic discourses but rather […] to aspire to something more consequential, to change things and to intervene in an efficient and responsible, though always, of course, very mediated way, not only in the profession but in what one calls the cité, the polis and more generally the world. In critical philosophy, theory does not merely clear the ground for praxis or provide a foundation for praxis, but is inextricably bound up with it. There is a reciprocal relationship between the two such that neither can exist without the other: theory without praxis is pointless and praxis without theory is directionless. Harcourt (2020: 44) defines critical theory as follows: I will propose that we understand critical theory, at its core, as an exercise in stripping illusions that lays bare and calls for an assessment of values, as well as an analysis of strategies and tactics, to achieve an egalitarian form of human emancipation. This is why I claimed that deconstruction was paradigmatic critical theory in the fifth section of this chapter, because it is precisely an analytic tool for stripping away the illusion that reality is not linguistically constructed and cannot be transformed. What makes deconstruction paradigmatic is that Harcourt is as sceptical as Derrida of claims about truth, even (and especially) claims that the stripping of illusions unmasks the truth that the illusions conceal. The work of critical theory – like the work of deconstruction – is thus never finished as it ‘unveils a situation that itself eventually needs to be reexamined’ (Harcourt 2020: 46). Harcourt is – again, like Derrida – clear that this process can never be completed. Critical theory ‘engages in a form of recursive unmasking – an

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infinite regress – that endlessly exposes the distributional effects of belief systems and material conditions’ (Harcourt 2020: 46). Harcourt (2020: 433–434) is similarly clear that critical praxis must resist the urge to generalise or universalise and is properly practised as: a careful, respectful, contextual, case-by-case analysis of our political struggles that responds to the exact situation and the actually existing political economic regimes in which we, critical theorists, find ourselves. […] Every critical practice has to be precisely designed for the specific time and space, with humility and care. The focus of most published deconstructive criticism and almost all of the discussions of deconstruction as an analytic tool has been its destruction of illusions rather than its construction of a just and sustainable reality through praxis – but this is also true of the critical philosophy of Foucault, Said, and Gilles Deleuze (1968), as Harcourt notes. Returning to my deconstruction of ‘deconstruction’ in terms of the desire to destroy violent hierarchies and the desire to reconstruct reality, it becomes clear that the subordinate pole is the most significant. Illusions are destroyed in order to facilitate and as part of the reconstruction of reality. Understood as critical praxis, deconstruction aims to transform social reality by means of reimagining and recreating its constitutive concepts. Although I shall discuss critical praxis in each of the chapters that follows, Chapter 8 is focused exclusively on praxis, concluding this book with a detailed discussion of how academics and students can practise genuine critical theory, i.e. theory that is inextricable from praxis and praxis that is inextricable from theory. Praxis must, as Harcourt notes, be tailored to a situation, to the particular rather than the general, and my progress from the theory in this chapter to the praxis of the final chapter is by means of three sets of complex narrative fictions drawn from the science fiction and fantasy genres of novels, feature films, short films, and television series. Although the situations in the narratives are fictional, they represent the actually existing political

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economic regimes in which I am writing and you are reading this book, specifically: patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, and anthropocidal ecocide. Derrida paid relatively little attention to fictional texts, which are generally regarded with suspicion in criminology as a discipline, even by critical criminologists (as discussed in Chapter 2), and I address the fictionality of these examples as an objection in Chapter 7. In this chapter, I have explained deconstruction as a framework and as an analytic tool for demystifying the structure of meaning and value. As an analytic tool, deconstruction is a method within the broader deconstructive methodology and that method can reveal how texts reproduce existing ideologies or how texts reconstruct concepts as more just and sustainable. In the former case, texts constitute the ideology that creates the illusion of presence and the logocentrism of language. In the latter case, texts strip away these illusions by providing new contexts that transform the meaning and value of existing concepts. Derrida’s insight is that meaning and value are determined by context, but context is limitless. The narratives I have selected each provide a context that reimagines and recreates an existing concept in a transformative and emancipatory manner. My literary criticism, practised from within the deconstructive framework, thus sets out to reveal the way in which the sets of texts reconstruct structures of meaning and value. Derrida (1967a: 214, emphases in original) describes the role of literary and other types of criticism in deconstruction: At the moment when criticism (be it aesthetic, literary, philosophical, etc.) allegedly protects the meaning of a thought or the value of a work against […] reductions, it comes to the same result [that a reduction would come to] through the opposite path: it creates an example. That is to say, a case. A work or an adventure of thought is made to bear witness, as example or martyr, to a structure whose essential permanence becomes the prime preoccupation of the commentary. For criticism to make a case of meaning or of value, to take them seriously, is to read an essence into the example which is falling between the phenomenological brackets.

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Each of the four chapters that follow is a case (which may, in traditional criminological terms, be regarded as a ‘case study’ depending on reader preference) and the literary criticism I employ makes a case for meaning and value that reimagines and recreates existing concepts in order to reconstruct a more just and sustainable reality. In each, I have endeavoured to adhere to Derrida’s (1967a) critical principles of faithfulness (to the text), attentiveness (to detail), and readability (in style). Beginning at the bottom of the hierarchy of mass harms I established in Chapter 1, Chapter 4 takes patriarchal political economy as its subject.

Notes 1 The ethical turn in criticism combined three distinct strands: the post-Hegelian, led by Richard Rorty (1989); the neo-Aristotelian, led by Nussbaum (1990, 1995); and the poststructural, led by Derrida at first and then Spivak. I discuss Rorty’s pragmatism and its relation with Derrida’s deconstruction in Chapter 7. 2 Beauvoir’s existential analysis recalls Ariel Salleh’s (2017) M/W=N formula, discussed in Chapter 1. 3 For details of the De Man affair in 1987 and its consequences, see McGregor (2018) (Chapter 7).

References Beauvoir, S.d. (1949/2011). The Second Sex. Trans. C. Bourde & S. MalovanyChevallier. London: Vintage. Belsey, C. (2002). Critical Practice. London: Routledge. ——— (2011). A Future for Criticism. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Bertens, H. (2014). Literary Theory. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Carroll, N. (1990). The Philosophy of Horror; Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. ——— (1996). Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Culler, J. (2006/2007). The Literary in Theory. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University. Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. ——— (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1968/2014). Difference and Repetition. 2nd ed. Trans. P. Patton. London: Bloomsbury.

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Derrida, J. (1967a/1978). Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge. ——— (1967b/2011). Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. L. Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. ——— (1967c/1976). Of Grammatology. Trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. ——— (1972/1981). Positions. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. ——— (1987/1991). Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. G. Bennington & R. Bowlby. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. ——— (1990/1992). Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’. Trans. M. Quaintance. In: Cornell, D., Rosenfeld, M. & Carson, D.G. (eds). Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge, 3–67. ——— (1992/1995). The Gift of Death. Trans. D. Wills. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. ——— (1993). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge. ——— (1995). Points…Interviews, 1974–1994. Trans, P. Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. ——— (1997/2008). The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. D. Wills. New York: Fordham University. Foucault, M. (1966/1973). The Order of Things. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage. ——— (1969/1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Harper & Row. ——— (1975/1977). Discipline and Punish. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. ——— (1976/1978). The History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. Trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin. Glendenning, S. (2011). Derrida: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University. Haraway, D. (1985). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. Socialist Review, 80, 65–108. Harcourt, B.E. (2020). Critique and Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action. New York: Columbia University. Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. New York: Harper Collins. Husserl, E. (1900–1901/2000). Logical Investigations. Vols. 1–2. Trans. J.N. Findlay. London: Routledge. Lamarque, P. (1996). Fictional Points of View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.

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Lamarque, P. & Olsen, S.H. (1994). Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon. Levinas, E. (1961/1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University. Lippens, R. (2000). Chaohybrids: Five Uneasy Peaces. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Lüdemann, S. (2011/2014). Politics of Deconstruction: A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Trans. E. Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. McGregor, R. (2018). Narrative Justice. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. ——— (2021). Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism. Bristol: Bristol University. Nussbaum, M. (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University. ——— (1995). Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston, MA: Beacon. Plato (1997). Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grube & C.D.C. Reeve. In: Cooper, J.M. (ed.). Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett, 971–1223. Ransom, J.C. (1941). The New Criticism. Norfolk, CT: New Directions. Richards, I.A. (1924). Principles of Literary Criticism. London: Paul, Trench & Trubner. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rueckert, W. (1978). Into and Out of the Void: Two Essays. The Iowa Review, 9 (1), 62–86. Said, E. (1978/2003). Orientalism. London: Penguin. Salleh, A. (2017). Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. 2nd ed. London: Zed. Saussure, F. de (1916/2020). Course in General Linguistics. Trans. R. Harris. London: Bloomsbury. Spivak, G.C. (1976). Translator’s Preface. In: Derrida, J. (ed.). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, ix–xc. ——— (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the ­Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. ——— (2012). An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. ­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

4 PATRIARCHAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

This chapter presents the first of three structural analyses of the ways in which complex narrative fictions reconstruct the meaning and value of zemiological concepts. This case comprises a series of three novels, one of which is both unpublished and unfinished. Octavia Butler began work on Parable of the Trickster in 1989 and compiled notes and drafts until her death, early in 2006 (Canavan 2019). The premises, outlines, and fragments have been available in The Huntington’s Octavia E. Butler Papers archive since 2013 and the addition of this archival material to Parable of the Sower (Butler 1993) and Parable of the Talents (Butler 1998a) reveals a richer and more compelling deconstruction of multiple mass harms than the two published novels on their own. My analysis begins with the way in which the series deconstructs political economy, understood in Karl Marx’s (1859) conception of the latter determining the former, which is achieved by means of Butler’s sketch of a religious economy, i.e. a relation among economics, religion, and politics that combines market and moral discipline. The religious economy of Parable of the Talents is juxtaposed with the neoliberal economy of Parable of the Sower to reconstruct political economy as necessarily rather than contingently patriarchal. Political economy transforms DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520-5

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women into a proletariat that performs productive labour cheaply and reproductive labour free of charge and is thus crucial to capitalist world-ecology. I conclude by drawing attention to the parallels between Butler and Ariel Salleh (2017), Earthseed and ecofeminism, focusing on the significance and urgency of ecocide to both authors.

1. Published Parables Parable of the Sower (Butler 1993) was intended to be part of a series of six novels, which was planned as Parable of the Talents (Butler 1998a), Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay, but only the first two were ever published. The first three Parables take their titles from the three biblical parables of the same names, in the Books of Luke and Matthew, and each of the published novels concludes with a quote from the relevant Book. In the Parable of the Sower, the sower is symbolic of God and the seed of God’s message. Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of the first two Parables, creates a new religion called ‘Earthseed’ and founds the first Earthseed community in Humboldt County, California (Butler 1993: 77). Following the discovery of extrasolar planets that sustain life in 2025, the ultimate aim of Earthseed is to ‘take root among the stars’ (Butler 1993: 222). The Parables are referred to as Butler’s Earthseed books in order to distinguish them from her other two series and her standalone novels. In the Parable of the Talents, the monetary talents (a unit of weight used as currency) are symbolic of personal talents (God-given abilities and aptitudes), both of which are granted for the purpose of serving their respective masters. Olamina dedicates her life to the service of Earthseed, which becomes one of the most popular religions in the Americas, and launches the first starship in 2090, the final year of her life. In the Parable of the Trickster, which is better known as the Parable of the Dishonest Steward (or the Shrewd Manager), the steward’s alternating incompetence and prowess is symbolic of the inability of human beings to serve both God and money. The Earthseed settlers on the planet Rainbow (abbreviated to Bow) cannot both cling to the form of life they had on Earth and thrive

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in the extrasolar colony – they must commit to a completely new form of life if they are to achieve Earthseed’s aim (Butler 1999c). Sower is narrated in the first person by Olamina and consists of 25 chapters divided into four parts. Each part bears the title of a year – 2024 to 2027 – and each chapter is subdivided into journal entries. The narrative opens on 20 July 2024, which is Olamina’s 15th birthday, in the fictional town of Robledo, a walled community 20 miles from Los Angeles. Olamina’s mother died in childbirth and she lives with her father (who is a Baptist minister), stepmother, and four younger stepbrothers, one of whom is named Marc. The novel is set during ‘the Pox’, an abbreviation of ‘the Apocalypse’, a period of multiple and coinciding processes of disintegration ranging from the social to the environmental that officially lasts from 2015 to 2030, but is actually more extensive (Butler 1998a: 8). Olamina has two distinguishing features. First, she has a rare medical condition called ‘hyperempathy’, an organic delusional disorder that enables her to literally and involuntarily feel the pain she perceives in others (Butler 1993: 11). Given the world in which she lives, the disorder is a disability to be overcome in everyday life. Second, she has spent the last three years developing a unique belief system in which a monotheistic god is identical with change. After distilling the essence of this system into a poem and calling it Earthseed, she begins writing ‘The Book of the Living’, the first of several collections of canonical verses (Butler 1993: 125). Life in Olamina’s enclave becomes gradually more difficult and more dangerous as formal social controls wane and social inequality increases. Her father disappears in 2026, never to return, and the following year the community is destroyed by a gang of drug-addicted pyromaniacs. Olamina escapes with two neighbours and begins an arduous and dangerous journey to the north-western corner of the state. The narrative closes with Olamina, Taylor Franklin Bankole (her lover, later her husband), seven other adults, and four children founding the community of Acorn. Talents has a more complex structure, consisting of 21 chapters (bookended by a prologue and epilogue) divided into three parts: one set in 2032, one in 2033, and one in 2035. Each chapter is divided by subheadings – most (but not all) of which are dated – and

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narrated by both Olamina and Larkin Beryl Ife Olamina Bankole, her daughter. As a further complication, four of the chapters include extracts from one of two books: Bankole’s Memories of Other Worlds (Chapters 1, 3, and 4) and Marc’s Warrior (Chapter 18). The majority of the narration is by Olamina, who remains the protagonist, but she and her world are also represented from other perspectives. The narrative opens in Acorn on 26 September 2032, the fifth anniversary of its foundation. The community has grown to 59 people and is flourishing in spite of the continuing threat from marauders and the new threat from the Church of Christian America (CA), an ultra-conservative, fundamentalist denomination. Six weeks later, the head of CA – Andrew Steele Jarret – wins the Presidential election and extremist groups such as ‘Jarret’s Crusaders’ increase their violence (Butler 1998a: 200). Larkin is born in July, on Olamina’s 24th birthday. Two months later, Acorn is overrun by the Crusaders, who transform it into a ‘“reeducation” camp’, which involves removing the children for allocation to Christian families, subjecting the women to repeated sexual assault, and subjecting the women and the men to continuous hard labour (Butler 1998a: 206). Bankole is killed, Olamina raped, and the community unable to launch a successful revolt until February 2035. Olamina decides that Earthseed can only survive by dispersing and sets off for Portland, Oregon, to find Marc, who is a CA lay minister. He refuses to help her find Larkin, but she reaches a middle-class audience for the first time and Earthseed’s popularity increases. The epilogue summarises the next 54 years, during which Larkin leaves her abusive foster home and is taken in by Marc, who tells her that her mother is dead. Larkin meets Olamina in 2067, by which time Earthseed is ‘immensely rich’, and refuses to forgive her mother for their lifelong separation (Butler 1998a: 378). Olamina dies at the age of 81, shortly after the launch of the first starship.

2. Parable of the Trickster Butler worked on Trickster from 1989 to 2005, right up until her death at the age of 58 in February 2006 (Canavan 2019). During this time she made scores of false starts, the longest of which is 47

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pages and most considerably shorter. There are several aspects of the premises, outlines, and fragments of Trickster that remain fairly consistent, most of which concern the protagonist and setting, and for the sake of brevity I shall focus on the most substantial fragment (Butler 2001e). Trickster is written in the first person from the perspective of the protagonist and narrator, Imara Hope Lucas (Butler 2001a). Imara is an African American woman who was adopted by Olamina during her teens (between 13 and 17) and is aged between 35 and 45 when the story begins (Butler 1999a). She is the expedition’s archivist and has been appointed the official guardian of Olamina’s ashes, which are to be scattered on Bow in an Earthseed funeral on Day 2000 of the arrival of humanity (Butler 2001e). Some time between 2090 and 2095 she leaves Earth in an Earthseed Instar with between 4,700 and 5,339 colonists to realise the Earthseed destiny (Butler 1999a, 2001b). After a flight of between 107 and 137 years, during which Imara is placed in DiaPause (Butler 1999d), a method of suspended animation, she arrives on Bow, which is 11.8 light years away from Earth (Butler 1999c, 1999d). Bow can support human life, with plenty of oxygen and water. The planet has no moon, is cooler than Earth, and has days that are just under 20 hours long. The ships have arrived near the equator, where it is warm, wet, and windy and the plan is to build the colony in a river valley (Butler 2000a, 2001d). Bow has no fauna beyond earthworms and microorganisms and its flora is limited to a slimy moss-like substance. The settlers immediately miss the beauty of Earth, a feeling exacerbated by the fact that the colours on Bow are muted and the atmosphere odorous, varying from being merely unpleasant to smelling like vomit (Butler 2001c). The colony is divided into 50–60 housing groups of 30–100 people each, built in a protective semicircle around their crops and water supply (Butler 1999c, 2000a). Each housing group has a communal gathering house at its centre, but individual houses are inhabited by nuclear families. The minimal governmental functions, including leadership by an Earthseed shaper (clergyperson) named Eric Parnell and record-keeping by Imara herself, are based in the gathering hall. The colony is multinational and multi-ethnic, each of the colonists

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selected for their skill set. By the fifth year, the colony is fully established and the colonists are living off the land. The narrative begins in medias res, during Olamina’s funeral, with Parnell appearing to lose his mind in his opening speech as he starts shouting nonsense. Imara, waiting to play her part in the ceremony, has a hallucination and subsequently realises that she, Parnell, and the community’s dentist have all been afflicted. They cannot find any physical explanation and worry that prolonged exposure to the conditions of Bow is destroying their mental health. In the following chapter, which begins the next day, Imara wakes up and immediately hallucinates a conversation with Olamina. Seven more people are admitted to the clinic with hallucinations. The concerns about prolonged exposure to the planet are exacerbated when Imara works out that all the patients are part of either the last transit crew or the first ground crew, the only people who were awake in the first 100 days of arrival. Strangely, given the amount of relative detail provided, there is no suggestion of a central theme in this fragment, which I (McGregor 2024) have previously referred to as the archivist plotline in order to distinguish it from the plotlines in which Imara is the expedition’s psychiatrist and the expedition’s law enforcement officer. The strongest suggestion of a theme is in the psychiatrist plotline, where the solution to the problem of the hallucinations is not to cure or overcome them, but accept them as one of the vicissitudes of life on Bow. The sheriff plotline appears to go even further, before pulling back. There, the suggestion is that the hallucinations are a phenomenon that can be exploited for gain, although this is to some extent undermined by the fact that the medical professionals remain intent on finding a cure. Butler may, however, have intended the exploitation to precede or even preclude the cure. There is an allusion to this idea in the archivist plotline, in which Imara reflects that ‘two of the most important tenets of Earthseed were foresight and adaptability’ before Parnell addresses the community about their adaptation to life on Bow (Butler 2000c). Earthseed is based on the belief that the concept of god is identical with the concept of change and that humanity should embrace change and manipulate it to their own benefit. The theme of adaptation in Trickster is developed in Butler’s notes

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by means of two concepts or metaphors, the xenograft and the trickster. A xenograft is an interspecies transplant and she described the story as one in which people xenograft humanity onto a new world whose immune system tries to expel them (Butler 1998b, 2002). The resistance of Bow to humanity is the sense in which the planet is the trickster and the hallucinations are the most dangerous means by which it tries to expel them. Butler’s (2000b) planned conclusion was that the colonists would be forced to make a choice, ‘to try to hold on to what they were as normal human beings on Earth or to allow the change they have both fought and adapted to for years to continue’, providing a clear link to the biblical parable.

3. Earthseed Aside from occasional quotations from the canon of Earthseed – Earthseed: The Books of the Living – in the text, extracts from this canon are used as epigraphs for each part and each chapter of both of the published Parables, for a total of 55 non-diegetic quotations. When combined with Olamina’s discussions about and elucidations of Earthseed and her enacting of Earthseed in her daily life, one is able to acquire a comprehensive understanding of her religious vision. The first and perhaps most striking point to note is what while Earthseed meets the criterion for a religion, it is a religion unlike all of the Big Five world religions. Earthseed involves belief in a superhuman power that defines a code of living, but the belief and code have very little in common with any of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Although Earthseed is monotheistic, like the Abrahamic religions, its god is simply change. Not a personification of change or an aspect of change, just change itself, i.e. the process of making or becoming different. This curious identity is set out concisely and eloquently in Olamina’s initial declaration of Earthseed (Butler 1993: 24–25; emphases in original): For whatever it’s worth, here’s what I believe. It took me a lot of time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right – just the way it has to be. In the past year, it’s gone through twenty-five or thirty

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lumpy, incoherent rewrites. This is the right one, the true one. This is the one I keep coming back to: God is power – Infinite. Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliable – Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change. This is the literal truth. In a further distinction from the Abrahamic religions, Earthseed is not explicitly concerned with good or evil and does not involve either faith in god or worship in the form of prayer, devotion, or sacrifice. This is established in the fourth epigraph (Butler 1993: 17; emphasis in original): We do not worship God. We perceive and attend God. We learn from God. With forethought and work, We shape God. In the end, we yield to God. We adapt and endure, For we are Earthseed And God is Change. In consequence, Earthseed can more accurately be described as a creed than a religion – i.e. a general system of belief – although I shall follow Butler by continuing to use the latter term. Earthseed is based on a single tenet that arises from the identity of god

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with change: adaptation (to change) is preferable to resistance (to change). Olamina draws attention to the following passage (Butler 1993: 195; emphases in original): All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change. Last year, I chose these lines to be the first page of the first book of Earthseed: The Books of the Living. These lines say everything. Everything! Later, Olamina defines Earthseed as a belief system whose purpose is to help people cope with the world, both the world as it is and the world as it could be (Butler 1998a). When she is confronted about the apparent fictionality of Earthseed, her response is to refer to it as a collection of truths, a collection that remains true in spite of being neither complete nor exclusive: ‘All the truths of Earthseed existed somewhere before I found them and put them together. They were in the patterns of history, in science, philosophy, religion, or literature. I didn’t make any of them up’ (Butler 1998a: 122). The significance of adaptation as the preferred response to change seems to have been one of – probably the most important – themes of Trickster, in which Butler (2000c) was explicit about the significance of both adaptability and foresight to Earthseed. Foresight is a crucial component of adaptability, facilitating genuine adaptation to ongoing change. The greatest adaptation human beings are able to make (the greatest change aside from death) is altering the planet on which they live and this adaptation has been the aim of Earthseed from

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the very beginning (Butler 1993: 222): ‘The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.’ It is important to note two things about the Destiny, a play of identity and difference between Butler’s world of 2024 and the 2024 in which you may be reading this book. First, Olamina’s world is experiencing multiple and coinciding processes of social and environmental disintegration to a greater extent than ours and is thus in more urgent need of a Planet B. What makes the Destiny a rational, practical response to global environmental collapse is the discovery of extrasolar planets that are likely to be able to sustain human life shortly before Sower opens. By 2025, the idea that one or more of these discoveries could be a Planet B for humanity is ‘gaining scientific acceptance’ (Butler 1993: 83) and in 2032 ‘slime molds’ are discovered on Mars (Butler 1998a: 81). This is what distinguishes the Destiny from the vanity, grandiosity, and hubris of the contemporary billionaire space race of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk. Olamina believes not only that emigration from Earth is a necessary adaptation to global environmental collapse, but also that it will address the root of the problem, which is human nature. Olamina’s idea is that the human form of life on Planet B (Bow in Trickster) will not be an exotic reproduction of the destructive form of life on Earth because of the different ways in which human beings will be required to adapt to conditions on the new planet. This hope is precisely what makes the naming of the first starship, ‘the Christopher Columbus’, such a dramatic reversal of fortune (Butler 1998a: 388) and establishes what Gerry Canavan (2019) regards as a deeply pessimistic trajectory in the overarching narrative of the published Parables.

4. (Hyper)Empathy I introduced Olamina as founding Earthseed and being a ‘sharer’, i.e. suffering from the organic delusional disorder called hyperempathy (Butler 1993: 178). The relationship between Olamina’s religion and disability is absolutely crucial to the Parables’ deconstruction of political economy. I discussed Earthseed in Section 3 of this chapter, noting the significance of its core tenet: adaptation is preferable to resistance. Another way to put this, which is

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consistent with Olamina’s own explanations, is that Earthseed is about the survival of the human species against all odds. Olamina is an 18-year-old African American woman when she establishes the first Earthseed community at Acorn at the end of Sower. Yes, she is wise well beyond her years and very charismatic, but she is also completely powerless. By the time she escapes from slavery in Talents, she is even more powerless, reduced to walking across Oregon in what turns out to be a hopeless search for Larkin. And yet, in the next 30 years (2035–2067), Earthseed becomes a world religion and develops the technology to launch a starship. One might well ask how this is possible, especially as the events of those 30 years are narrated in an epilogue of only 13 pages. The simple answer is that Earthseed works, achieving its aim of helping people to adapt and flourish in the face of destruction and disaster. One might then wonder what, if anything, differentiates Earthseed from a philosophical movement such as Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, which is based on the three pillars of self-interest, individual rights, and unregulated capitalism (Rand 1957, 1964; Branden 1999). Like Olamina, Rand is primarily concerned with human survival and the emphasis she places on rationality, vitality, and self-respect as tools for success seems compatible with Olamina’s vision of adaptation, survival, and flourishing. Earthseed seems, in other words, precisely the kind of religion that might appeal to the neoliberal instincts of Bezos, Branson, and Musk. What precludes real and fictional billionaires from being exemplars of Earthseed is the focus on community over and above the individuals constituting the community. This is clarified in a conversation between Olamina and Bankole that takes place immediately before they become lovers. Bankole is receptive to the idea of god as change and to the tenet of adaptation to change, but wonders about the ethical implications (Butler 1993: 261): “The essentials,” I answered, “are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.” “And why should people bother about the Destiny, farfetched as it is? What’s in it for them?”

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“A unifying, purposeful life here on Earth, and the hope of heaven for themselves and their children. A real heaven, not mythology or philosophy. A heaven that will be theirs to shape.” Education and benefit are prioritised for the community as a whole first, then for the family, and finally for oneself. This outward orientation is based on the role of empathy to and in Earthseed, which is a product of Olamina’s hyperempathy. Empathy is often conflated with sympathy and while the two are related, they are not identical. Both capacities involve recognising emotions or sensations in others and are usually explored in terms of one’s capacity to recognise negative emotions (such as sadness) and painful sensations. Sympathy occurs when one recognises sadness or pain in someone else and responds with sadness. I see that you are sad or sore and your suffering makes me sad. Empathy occurs when one recognises sadness or pain in someone else and feels that person’s sadness or pain. I see that you are sad or sore and I experience (to a limited extent) your sadness or pain as my own (Worth 2017). Empathy is thus an ability to reproduce someone else’s emotion or sensation and crucial to maintaining harmonious relations in any partnership, family, or community. Olamina’s hyperempathy is a disorder rather than a sensory ability because she does not feel the actual pain of others, but the pain she perceives in others. She is able to control the debilitating effects of the disorder by controlling her perception. Like empathy, hyperempathy is related to the perception of the positive as well as the negative, to both pleasure and pain. This makes consensual sex particularly pleasurable for sharers (who experience their pleasure and their lover’s perceived pleasure) and non-consensual sex particularly painful (because they experience their pain and their assailant’s perceived pleasure). In our world, hyperempathy would be a disability in the sense of being a substantial and long-term impediment to everyday life. In the world of the Parables, where social and environmental disintegration is more advanced, it is a very dangerous condition and sharers try to hide their vulnerability from strangers. Like empathy, however, hyperempathy also enables

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sharers to maintain harmonious relations in a partnership, family, or community. They are (potentially) better at doing this than others because they have a more direct experience of the emotions and sensations of others. There is thus a sense in which shaping – creating and sustaining Earthseed communities – is supervenient on sharing or at least on the diluted kind of sharing we call empathy. If more people could feel the pain of others by experiencing that pain whenever they were exposed to it, then less people would cause unnecessary pain (even if the pain they felt was not as intense as the pain felt by sharers). Earthseed as a religion is based on empathy, on mutual rather than individual survival, and is not compatible with Rand’s rational self-interest at the psychological level and neoliberal capitalism at the political level. Earthseed is neither for Bezos, Branson, or Musk nor for their fictional counterparts.

5. Religious Economy In my summary of the Parables, I mentioned the election of Jarret, a former Baptist minister, as President of the US in November 2032. Although the Pox is officially over, the societal fragmentation that characterised it has not been repaired and the capacity of the Earth to support human life continues to deteriorate irreparably (which is why Earthseed, alone, offers humanity a feasible future). Baptists are currently the second largest religious group in the US (behind Catholicism) and the largest of the Protestant denominations with which almost 50% of the population identifies (Pew Research Center 2015). Jarret left the Baptists to found his own denomination – the ultra-conservative, fundamentalist CA – and then moved into politics. Although he no longer preaches, he remains the head of CA. Olamina describes him as ‘a big, handsome, black-haired man with deep, clear blue eyes that seduce people and hold them’ (Butler 1998a: 19).1 Jarret is a charismatic and authoritative demagogue, a foreshadowing and prediction of Donald Trump, representing the unity of church and state where Trump represented the unity of market and state. Butler’s (1998a: 18) prescience, to which I shall return in the final section of this chapter, is most obvious in the language employed by Jarret: ‘Join us! Our doors are open to every

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nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.’ He insists on ‘being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him’ (Butler 1998a: 18, emphasis in original). This simpler, greater time precedes gender equality (and likely the concept of gender itself ) and Jarret’s supporters are notorious for burning women as witches, usually women of colour belonging to other religions. His promise of ‘making American great again’ by halting and reversing the social disintegration of the Pox is inseparable from the religious fundamentalism of CA and although many people dislike the latter, they are attracted by the possibility of the former (Butler 1998a: 24). Decades later, Larkin writes (Butler 1998a: 234): ‘Jarret was able to scare, divide, and bully people, first into electing him President, then into letting him fix the country for them’. In such a political milieu, extremists such as Jarret’s Crusaders are empowered to enact their most violent fantasies. In another parallel with Trump, Jarret only lasts a single term as president, losing the 2036 election in consequence of various political failures and revelations of his personal involvement in extremism. He drinks himself to death following his electoral defeat, dying in ignominy. Jarret’s impact during his term of office is nonetheless substantial, the unification of not only politics and religion, but politics, religion, and economics. Political economy denotes the systematic study of the relationship between economics and politics that became popular in Europe in the 18th century. In the 19th century, the term was also employed to connote the idea that economics determines politics and this meaning, which originated with Marx, is now the more common of the two. Marx (1859: 425) established contemporary political economy in terms of the relation between base (an alternative translation of ‘foundation’) and superstructure: The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.

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For Marx, the relations of production are the base on which everything else is supervenient. If we want to understand law and governance, we should look to the relations of production first. There is disagreement on just how far the explanatory power of the base goes, whether it is limited to social, political, and intellectual life or whether it provides causal explanations of all aspects of culture, including morality (Hall 2021). In Talents, Butler includes religion in the superstructure and sketches a relation among economics, politics, and religion that I shall refer to as religious economy. This relation is most clearly articulated in the single extract from Warrior, in which Marc justifies his allegiance to a morally reprehensible individual (Butler 1998a: 295): If this country was ever to be restored to greatness, it wasn’t the little dollar-a-dozen preachers who would do it. Andrew Steele Jarret understood this. When he created Christian America and then moved from the pulpit into politics, when he pulled religion and government together and cemented the link with money from rich businessmen, he created what should have been an unstoppable drive to restore the country. And he became my teacher. Jarret’s religious economy in Talents can be compared with the neoliberal economy of the Pox in Sower and what one might call the feminist economy on Bow in Trickster, as depicted in Figure 4.1. In contrast to what one might expect, capitalism has thrived during the Pox, benefitting directly by exploiting the scarcity of resources and lack of security and indirectly from a loss of government control that has resulted in a de facto deregulation of corporations and companies. The business elite have also taken advantage of various paradoxes created by the Pox, the most important of which is that education is no longer free but has remained compulsory. After a large proportion of public schools closed in the 2020s, company schools began to provide children the education they required to become productive workers. At the same time, company towns became popular. These towns were able to offer both education for children and security for families, in consequence of which

102  Patriarchal Political Economy patriarchal political economy (Talents)

religion

religion/philosophy + empathy

feminist political economy (Trickster)

philosophy

neoliberal political economy (Sower) FIGURE 1.1

Parables.

poor people flocked to them and indentured labour was reinstated. Historically, indentured servitude was a type of superexploitation in which people worked for free until they paid off their indenture (a loan), common in North America until late in the 18th century (Suranyi 2021). The fictional system is just as prone to abuse as the historical one, with indentured labourers forced to give blood and encouraged to buy their freedom with organ donation. Olamina draws attention to systemic gender-based abuse by clarifying the preference for female children (Butler 1998a: 38): ‘Little girls are valued because they can be used in so many ways, and they can be coerced into being quick, docile, disposable labor’.2 Slavery returns in both name and practice, with a ‘debt slave’ being someone who is indentured in order to pay off their family’s debts (Butler 1998a: 185). Jarret combines the deregulated capitalism of the Pox with his Christian fundamentalist agenda, creating a political culture built on the twin pillars of market discipline and moral discipline (see Garland 2001). There is no explicit identification of laissez-faire economics as base and Scripture-based ethics as superstructure, but the appeal of CA – and Jarret’s election platform – suggests that scarcity and insecurity are driving both religion and politics.

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6. Political Economy The rise of Earthseed from a tiny ‘cult’ to a world religion against the background of the Pox and the religious economy of CA both deconstructs political economy and reconstructs its meaning and value as necessarily rather than contingently patriarchal (Butler 1998a: 19). As noted in Section 5 of this chapter, misogyny is crucial rather than incidental to CA, the witch-burnings and Jarret inseparable. Olamina’s description of indentured labour reveals that the Pox has had a much more deleterious impact on women than men, with violence against women and girls increasing exponentially as formal and informal social controls dwindle. Olamina, for example, takes advantage of her large size and androgynous features to disguise herself as a man whenever she travels. Women and girls are raped, killed, and enslaved with impunity and what Jarret offers is, much like the promise of the company towns, some level of security. The security he provides for women is, however, at the cost of their autonomy, replacing unofficial misogyny with official sexism. This sexism is part of CA’s moral discipline, which is based on its religious fundamentalism and explained by Marc to Olamina as follows (Butler 1998a: 308): “I have to warn you, though, the movement won’t let you preach. They agree with Saint Paul in that: ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man but to be in silence.’ But don’t worry. There’s plenty of other more suitable work for women to do to serve the movement.” The reconstruction of political economy as patriarchal in the Parables is achieved by a combination of literary means, which include the religious economic relation in Talents and its place within the tripartite structure of political economy across the series (depicted in Figure 4.1). Other means are more specific and more subtle, such as the relationship between Olamina and Marc. Olamina is separated from her stepmother and half-brothers when their gated community is attacked and subsequently told by an eyewitness that they were all killed. Five years later, she finds Marc (who is 19) alive, buys him from a slave trader, and takes him back to Acorn. Marc had begun a career as a nondenominational preacher before

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his enslavement and is disappointed that Olamina has turned away from Christianity. Disgruntled, ungrateful, and increasingly drawn to Jarret, he leaves less than three months after his rescue. When Olamina meets him again, in Eureka, he is a lay minister in CA, giving a sermon about a sinful sister that injured him greatly. When she asks for help in finding Larkin, Marc refuses to believe her account of her enslavement and assaults her. He then flees to Portland, leaving Olamina a letter that exploits her desperation to locate Larkin by encouraging her to join CA (quoted in the previous paragraph). Marc finds Larkin in 2052, by which time he is CA’s most famous minister, and invites her to live with him. In an act that may be even more vicious than refusing to help Olamina, he tells Larkin that he is her only surviving relative. Ironically, Larkin remains close to Marc and retains feelings of bitterness towards her mother despite eventually learning the truth about both of them. She justifies her uncle’s behaviour by claiming that his devotion to CA and dedication to Jarret were a consequence of his suffering as a slave (Butler 1998a: 108): ‘No Christian minister could hate sin as much as Marc hated chaos. His gods were order, stability, safety, control’. While the justification is fallacious, it provides a personal perspective on Jarret’s combination of market and moral discipline. Marc is, like Olamina, a victim of the Pox and although he is a man, his exceptional good looks make him particularly vulnerable to the sexual violence prevalent in all but the safest places. Unlike Olamina, Marc is egotistical and his desire to be a preacher is as much a desire to be recognised as a leader and be taken seriously by his congregation as it is to spread the word of God. He regards Olamina as a threat, which is absurd because Earthseed has no more than a few dozen members when she rescues him and even fewer when she finds him in Eureka. In spite of the power relation being entirely in his favour in Eureka, he feels so threatened that he strikes her and flees from the town. Marc’s motives are never stated explicitly, but an examination of his character discloses a consummate and irredeemable sexism. Olamina is not merely a threat because of her religion, wisdom, and charisma, but because she is a woman and women should not be religious leaders or wise or charismatic. Marc’s cowardly and cruel attempt to recruit Olamina

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to CA, notwithstanding her treatment by the Crusaders, is also a confession of his sexism, its full extent exposed for the first time. As Olamina says of Jarret (Butler 1998a: 24): ‘You take Jarret and you get beatings, burnings, tarring and featherings’. Marc has taken Jarret, not just as his leader but as his mentor, and he has embraced the institutional sexism and collateral misogynist violence that are part and parcel of CA. The personal relationship between Marc and Olamina, set in the context of the religious economy of Talents, provides a reconstruction of the meaning and value of political economy as thriving because of the disempowerment of women caused by the Pox. As such, the Parables reconstruct the meaning and value of political economy as necessarily rather than contingently patriarchal and demonstrate the ways in which the economic base determines the sexist superstructure.

7. Ecofeminism What the Parables achieve is the reconstruction of the concept of political economy as necessarily rather than contingently patriarchal. The question is if and whether this reconstruction could be useful to criminologists who want to change rather than interpret the world. Recall from Chapter 1 that the linchpin of ecofeminism is the combination of patriarchy and paradox in the capitalist world-system. Salleh (2017) argues for the exploitation of women as fundamental to capitalism because women as a gender are identical with Marx’s proletariat, undertaking 65% of the world’s productive labour for less than 10% of global wages and 100% of the world’s reproductive labour for no wages at all. Capitalism cannot function without women and sexism. From an ecofeminist perspective, CA is precisely what is required to ensure that capitalism – in the US and as a world-system – is a cost-effective mode of production. Capitalism is paradoxical because it is based on the formula M/W=N (Man/ Women=Nature), casting women as both human animals (like men) and nonhuman animals (part of nature). Salleh describes M/W=N as appropriating ancient gender relations to the service of capital, identifying women as an economic externality like the rest of nature. Capitalism needs this contradiction in order to thrive because

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of its reliance on a gender-based proletariat. CA is explicitly patriarchal and implicitly supportive of the M/W=N formula in practice. As such, CA provides the crucial link between capitalism as base and sexism as superstructure and is itself part of a superstructure that includes religion, morality, and politics. The parallels between fiction and reality are too obvious to require detailed explication. The historical and contemporary sexism of, for example, the Big Five world religions is as well-documented as it is resilient (see Ruether 1983; Gross 1992; Banerjee 2005; Sztokman 2011; Carland 2016).3 The Parables draw attention to the role of religion in suppressing all four of the struggles with which ecofeminists are concerned: the ecological, the socialist, the feminist, and the antiracist. In Section 5 of this chapter I mentioned Butler’s prescience, her ability to not only create a plausible near-future for the Parables, but make accurate predictions about that future. Some of those – the rise and fall of Trump and the increasing importance of climate change – have already happened and, in the case of the latter, continue to happen. To take a less publicised example, Butler (2005) recognised the War on Terror as ‘insane, pointless, unwinable [sic]’ 16 years before the US’ humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. There is no mystery in this capacity: she was an extremely intelligent woman with a highly developed imagination who gathered as much information on current events as she could on a daily basis, mostly from the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio. Interestingly, she (Butler 1999b) made a direct link between her love of keeping her knowledge up to date and her publication of the Parables: ‘I wrote the Parables because I’m a news junkie’. Butler’s (cited in George 2020: 141) healthy addiction was an element of her creative curiosity and she stated that ‘I need to read or to hear the news everyday so that I have at least the illusion of knowing what’s going on, what people are doing, where we seem to be heading’. She (Butler cited in George 2020: 141) accounted for her motivation to write the Parables by describing them ‘as a way to fix the world’. Having read many of her journal entries and notes, I think that in addition to being intelligent, imaginative, and well-informed, she was, like her protagonist in the Parables, highly empathic, perhaps even hyper-empathic (albeit without the delusions).

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Butler (1998a: 8) describes the Pox, which anticipates the predictions of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2021, 2022) in so many ways, from Bankole’s point of view: I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. One of several great subtleties in Talents is that CA has no ecological agenda. Jarret has an economic plan (laissez-faire capitalism) and a sociological plan (unrivalled patriarchy), but no plan to deal with climate change. If one pays attention to the religious economy Butler establishes, this comes as no surprise: Jarret would have exacerbated the ecological crisis in virtue of his partnership with the business elite had he remained in power longer. My exploration of the deconstruction and reconstruction of the meaning and value of political economy in the Parables has focused almost exclusively on Talents, but the ecological crisis is the reason this reconstruction requires both the completed prequel and the fragmentary sequel. Sower narrates Olamina’s life at an earlier stage of the contemporaneous crises and establishes the milieu for the rise of CA and Jarret. Talents ends with the fulfilment of the Earthseed Destiny, demonstrating that the ecological crisis remains unresolved. The significance and urgency of the need to leave the Earth is revealed in Butler’s plans to set all four of the remaining novels on Bow. Olamina’s preference for and dedication to Earthseed is because Earthseed alone recognises the danger of climate change. I close this chapter with a quote from 2032 in the world of the Parables, asking you as the reader to join me in reflecting on how accurate a description it might be of our 2032 – or even of our 2022, the year in which I am writing this (Butler 1998a: 79): The climate is still changing, warming. It’s supposed to settle at a new stable state someday. Until then, we’ll go on getting a lot of violent erratic weather around the world. Sea level is still rising

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and chewing away at low-lying coastal areas like the sand dunes that used to protect Humboldt Bay and Arcata Bay just north of us. Half the crops in the Midwest and South are still withering from the heat, drowning in floods, or being torn to pieces by winds, so food prices are still high. The warming has made tropical diseases like malaria and dengue normal parts of life in the warm, wet Gulf Coast and southern Atlantic coast states.

Notes

2 Butler’s turn of phrase here is worth remembering when I explore capitalism as reconstructed by the Blade Runner films in Chapter 5. 3 As a further example, despite growing up in an atheist household in a predominantly Christian country, I cannot even imagine a woman as Pope. A woman Archbishop of Canterbury is conceivable, but extremely unlikely in my lifetime.

References Banerjee, S. (2005). Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India. New York: State University of New York. Branden, N. (1999/2009). The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism. Gilbert, AZ: International Society for Individual Liberty. Butler, O.E. (1993/2019). Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing. ——— (1998a/2019). Parable of the Talents. London: Headline. ——— (1998b). Journal. Oct. 24–26. With the author’s autograph notes. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1056. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (1999a). Journal. Aug. 5. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1072. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (1999b). Journal. Sept. 15. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1073. The Huntingdon Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens.

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——— (1999c). Parable of the Trickster: novel: yellow binder: notes. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2076. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (1999d). Parable of the Trickster: novel: yellow binder: early version. July 25. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2080. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (2000a). Parable of the Trickster: novel: notes. Jan. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2040. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (2000b). Parable of the Trickster: novel: notes. May. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2044. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (2000c). Parable of the Trickster: novel: partial draft. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2215. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (2001a). Parable of the Trickster: novel: notes. Sept. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2045. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (2001b). Parable of the Trickster: novel: fragment. Octavia E. ­Butler Papers. OEB2098. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (2001c). Parable of the Trickster: novel: fragment. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2131. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (2001d). Parable of the Trickster: novel: partial draft. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2211. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (2001e). Parable of the Trickster: novel: partial draft. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2213. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. ——— (2002). Parable of the Trickster: novel: fragment. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2100. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and ­Botanical Gardens. ——— (2005). Journal. Nov. 27–Dec. 7. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1169. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Canavan, G. (2019). Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia. Women’s Studies, 48 (1), 59–75. Carland, S. (2016). Fighting Hislam: Women, Faith and Sexism. Melbourne: Melbourne University. Garland, D. (2001). The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in ­Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University.

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George, L. (2020). A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler. Santa Monica, CA: Angel City. Gross, R.M. (1992). Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. New York: State University of New York. Hall, S. (2021). Selected Writings on Marxism. Durham, NC: Duke University. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Available at: https://www.ipcc. ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/. ——— (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-reportworking-group-ii/. Marx, K. (1859/2000). A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. anonymous. In: McLellan, D. (ed.). Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University, 424–428. McGregor, R. (2024). Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice. In: Bradford, R., Gonzalez, M. & De Ornellas, K. (eds). A Companion to Literary Evaluation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, forthcoming. Pew Research Center (2015). Religious Landscape Study. Washington, DC. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/ religious-landscape-study/. Rand, A. (1957). Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House. ——— (1964). The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: New American Library. Ruether, R.R. (1983). Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston, MA: Beacon. Salleh, A. (2017). Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. 2nd ed. London: Zed. Suranyi, A. (2021). Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University. Sztokman, E.M. (2011). The Men’s Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an ­Egalitarian World. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University. Worth, S.E. (2017). In Defense of Reading. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

5 RACIAL CAPITALISM

This chapter presents the second of three structural analyses of the ways in which complex narrative fictions reconstruct the meaning and value of zemiological concepts. The case comprises a series of two feature films and three short films: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007), Shinichiro Watanabe’s Blade Runner Black Out 2022 (2017), Luke Scott’s 2036: Nexus Dawn (2017), Luke Scott’s 2048: Nowhere to Run (2017), and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Since 2017, the franchise has expanded to include an anime television series, Adult Swim’s Blade Runner: Black Lotus (2021), with a live-action television series, Blade Runner 2099, in development at the time of writing (White & Andreeva 2022). I have excluded Black Lotus because it did not involve any of the core creative team of the Scotts (father and son), Villeneuve, and Hampton Fancher (the writer of all four of the live action films). My analysis begins with the way in which the series deconstructs the mass harm of capitalism, which revolves around its representation of replicants, androids that are perceptually identical with human beings. Replicants are, among other things, symbols of disposable labour and of biology as a rationale for disposability. I juxtapose a scene from each of the two feature films to reveal the series’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520-6

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reconstruction of capitalism as necessarily rather than contingently racist, reliant on both disposable labour and the sustainable suppression of that labour. I conclude by drawing attention to the parallels between Blade Runner and Kehinde Andrews’ (2021) argument for the racism of new imperialism.

1. Blade Runner, November 2019 to May 2049 Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is a neo-noir detective story set in a dystopian future and loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s (1968) novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The feature film was initially only moderately successful, but became increasingly popular thereafter, with Scott releasing The Director’s Cut (Blade Runner 1992) – which altered the meaning of the almost identical narrative substantially – a decade later. The Director’s Cut was subsequently re-released as Final Cut, which is the definitive version at a little over 112 minutes from the opening to the closing credits. Ten years later, Villeneuve released the sequel to Final Cut, 2049. Blade Runner 2049 is also a neo-noir detective story, but has a much more complicated structure and is considerably longer at just under 153 minutes. Final Cut and Blade Runner 2049 both unfold in the context of accelerated environmental collapse and accelerated technological advancement. In response to rapid climate change and mass species extinction, humanity has colonised other planets, forging an Off-world empire using replicants. Blade Runner 2049, which reproduces, reverses, and reinvents the narrative of Final Cut, is set 30 years later, following significantly more environmental collapse, which has been met with new and upgraded technologies. In order to make these changes clearer and the narrative easier to follow, Villeneuve commissioned three short films, released online in the three months before the release of Blade Runner 2049: Watanabe’s Black Out, a 15-minute anime film; Luke Scott’s Nexus Dawn, a six-minute live action film; and Luke Scott’s Nowhere to Run, another six-minute live action film. These three short films combine with Final Cut to establish the setting of 2049. Final Cut opens in November 2019, two weeks after six replicants have escaped from one of the Off-world colonies and returned

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to Earth illegally. Early in the 21st century, the Tyrell Corporation developed the Nexus line of androids, which were called replicants in virtue of being almost identical to human beings. Replicants were created as slave labour, to explore and pacify the Off-world colonies so as to prepare them for human habitation. The latest model, Nexus-6, are not only much more robust than human beings, but have the same level of intelligence, despite which they are denied all moral status and deployed in the expendable roles of soldiers, manual labourers, and sex workers. To prevent them from posing a threat to humanity, Nexus-6 replicants have been constructed with a built-in failsafe, a lifespan that is limited to four years from their inception. Shortly after the colonies were settled, however, a replicant combat team mutinied and the loss of human life that ensued resulted in replicants being proscribed on Earth. Police services established Blade Runner Units to locate and execute any remaining replicants and their execution without trial is referred to by the euphemism of ‘retirement’ (Final Cut, 2:48). Three nights before the narrative begins, the six replicants who have returned attempt to break into the headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, in Los Angeles, during which two of them are destroyed. The Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) Blade Runner Unit is tasked with hunting the other four: Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer), Pris (played by Daryll Hannah), Leon Kowalski (played by Brion James), and Zhora (played by Joanna Cassidy). Leon is discovered to have joined the corporation’s staff, but escapes before he can be retired, seriously wounding a blade runner in the process. Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), who has recently resigned from the LAPD, is recalled to service and takes over the case. Deckard begins his investigation at the Tyrell Corporation, where its founder – Eldon Tyrell (played by Joe Turkel) – asks him to administer the Voight-Kampff test (used to detect replicants by their lack of empathy) to his personal assistant, Rachael (played by Sean Young). Rachael is an experimental Nexus-7 model who thinks she is human in consequence of memory implants and is much more difficult to detect than previous models. Deckard finds Zhora, who is working as a striptease artist, and retires her. While

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still at the scene, he is told that Rachael, whom he had arranged to meet, has gone missing and ordered to retire her as well. Deckard sees Rachael in the street, follows her, and is attacked by Leon. He is about to be killed when Rachael saves him, shooting Leon dead. Deckard takes Rachael back to his apartment, tells her that he won’t retire her, and they become lovers. In the meantime, Roy infiltrates the Tyrell Corporation, gains access to Tyrell’s chambers, and divulges that the replicants returned to Earth to coerce him into extending their lifespans. When Tyrell explains that it is impossible at the current level of technology, Roy kills him. Deckard finds Pris, who is hiding in the home of one of Tyrell’s genetic designers, and retires her. Roy arrives while he is still in the building and disarms him. When Roy realises that he is himself dying, his lifespan having expired, his final act is to save rather than kill Deckard, demonstrating the empathy he has developed over four years. Deckard decides to flee Los Angeles with Rachael. As they are leaving his apartment, he discovers incontrovertible evidence that he himself is an experimental Nexus-7 model replicant and the narrative concludes without any indication of what the future holds for them. After Tyrell’s death, the corporation discontinued Nexus-6 and Nexus-7 models, producing the Nexus-8, which had a similar lifespan to human beings and was considered safer than its predecessors. Nexus-8 models were permitted to be used on Earth as well as Off-world, precipitating a widespread and violent human supremacist backlash in which replicants were torn apart by mobs or lynched. A replicant resistance movement was formed and Black Out opens after the escape of five Nexus-8 model soldiers from the colony of Calantha, including Iggy Cygnus and Sapper Morton (played by Dave Bautista), in 2022. Iggy participates in a resistance operation aimed at wiping the Replicant Registration database by detonating an electromagnetic pulse and destroying all the Tyrell Corporation’s magnetic backups. The success of the attacks makes replicants almost impossible to identify and replicant production is prohibited by law, bankrupting the corporation. Shortly after, Earth’s remaining ecosystems collapse and mass starvation is only averted by the Wallace Corporation’s advances in synthetic farming.

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Founder Niander Wallace (played by Jared Leto) buys the remains of the Tyrell Corporation and begins developing Nexus-9 model replicants in secret. In Nexus Dawn, Wallace appears in front of a committee of metropolitan officials, asks them to repeal replicant prohibition, and makes a dramatic demonstration of the complete obedience of the Nexus-9 models. He succeeds in having the law changed and his corporation begins mass producing Nexus-9 models for use on Earth and Off-world in 2036. Nowhere to Run explains how Sapper is found by the LAPD in 2049. He is making one of his regular trips to Los Angeles to sell nematodes (artificial worms) when he saves a young woman and her child from sexual assault, killing all three of their assailants. He flees the scene, but a witness phones the LAPD to report the possible siting of a Nexus-8 model.

2. Blade Runner, June to July 2049 The narrative of Blade Runner 2049 consists of three interlinked cases investigated by Officer KD6-3.7 (‘K’, played by Ryan Gosling), a Nexus-9 model purpose built as a blade runner. The film begins in June 2049, in the middle of the first case, with K en route to Sapper’s protein farm to detain or destroy him. Sapper refuses to submit and K retires him. K closes the case, but his curiosity is aroused by the presence of a single, dead tree on the farm. He finds a small flower laid between its roots and a box buried underneath. K retrieves the flower, reports the box, and returns to headquarters to take his Baseline. The Post-Traumatic Baseline Test measures a replicant’s attitude towards human beings and must be passed each time K detains or destroys another replicant. The purpose of the test is to protect human beings by identifying anti-human sentiment in replicants before it becomes actionable, but the existence of the test belies Wallace’s guarantee that Nexus-9 models are incapable of turning on their masters. Shortly after completing the Baseline and signing off duty, K is called back to the Retirement Division (the new name for the LAPD’s Blade Runner Unit). The box he found held the remains of a Nexus-7 model (Rachael) and the urgency is due to osteological evidence that she gave birth. The existence of a replicant child, should it be alive, threatens the entire

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foundation on which mid-21st-century society is built. Birth as opposed to manufacture is the criterion for having a soul and the possession of a soul the criterion for moral status. The criterion of birth has been selected because of the belief that it is impossible for replicants to procreate, guaranteeing the continuity of their lack of moral status and their indefinite exploitation as expendable slaves. As such, the replicant child is a dangerous anomaly and K’s second case is to locate and retire it. Like other Nexus-9 models, K has an open-ended lifespan and childhood memories, but he understands that they are implants and that he is a replicant, made rather than born and without moral status. While hunting the child, he finds evidence that he may be the child himself and tries to verify one of his memory implants, interviewing Dr Ana Stelline (played by Carla Juri), a memory designer subcontracting for the Wallace Corporation. Unbeknownst to K, Wallace is also seeking the child, planning to use it as the basis for a new model of replicant that can reproduce itself by procreating and thus supply the exponential demand for slaves his imperial expansion to the Outer Colonies has created. The next morning K is arrested by the LAPD and brought back to headquarters for a Baseline. He fails and reports that he found the child and retired him. In recognition of this service, he is suspended from duty and given a 48-hour respite before taking the Baseline again, failure of which will result in retirement. K’s deception confirms suspicions that Nexus-9 models can in fact exercise their own agency and may be capable of violent revolt, like the previous three models. K has no intention of returning to the LAPD, however, and sets out to find Deckard, whom he believes to be his father. He tracks Deckard to Las Vegas, which is perpetually shrouded in a cloud of radioactive dust, unaware that he is being followed by Luv (played by Sylvia Hoeks), Wallace’s replicant chief executive officer and bodyguard. As soon as Deckard is located, Luv and her security team attack, taking Deckard prisoner and leaving a wounded K for dead. K is saved by the replicant resistance, of which he was previously unaware. They are led by Freysa (played by Hiam Abbas), a Nexus-8, who – along with Sapper and a cadre of other Nexus-8 models – hid the child and recruited an army of Nexus-9 models

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that can exercise their own agency. Freysa tells K that the child is female, crushing his hopes for moral status and inadvertently revealing her identity as Ana, the memory designer. Freysa enlists K in the resistance and gives him orders for his third and final case, the retirement of Deckard. The priority for all replicants, on Earth and Off-world, is the success of the revolution, which has been threatened by Wallace’s capture of Deckard. K led Wallace to Deckard, Deckard is likely to lead Wallace to Freysa under torture, and Freysa’s capture will end the revolution before it begins. As Wallace has already taken Deckard prisoner, the only way the revolution can be safeguarded is by killing him before he reveals Freysa’s whereabouts. K returns to Los Angeles and ambushes the convoy taking Deckard Off-world. The spinner carrying Deckard and Luv crashes on the shore below the Sepulveda Sea Wall and K engages her in deadly close combat.1 He is mortally wounded, but succeeds in retiring her and rescuing Deckard from drowning. With the spinner and Luv’s body washed out to sea, K reasons that Deckard will be presumed dead. K’s final act is to reunite Deckard with Ana, disobeying Freysa’s orders. The overarching narrative, which began with Deckard, who thought he was a human being, being ordered to hunt the four Nexus-6 models, concludes with Deckard, who knows he is a replicant, meeting his daughter with Rachael, another replicant, for the first time in 30 years.

3. Disposable Labour The rationale for the development and deployment of replicants is mentioned only briefly in Final Cut, as facilitating the creation of the Off-world colony required to save humanity from extinction. Their use as slave labour in the expendable roles of soldiers, manual labourers, and sex workers suggests that this colonisation is similar to European colonialism in involving conflict with and the conquering of alien cultures. Returning to Andrews’ (2021) four stages of the Western world order – genocide, slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism – discussed in Chapter 1, replicants appear to be both the perpetrators of genocide and a slave labour workforce. Doubt is cast on the existence of aliens and the perpetration of

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genocide, however, in Black Out, where rival human corporations war with one another for new territory. Replicants in Final Cut are more of a cinematic device than a core component of the fictional world, a rich and rewarding means to the end of exploring what it means to be human generally and differentiating between biological humanity and evaluative humanity more specifically.2 In Blade Runner 2049 and the three short films that precede it, the manufacture and functionality of replicants are depicted in greater detail, most explicitly in a single scene of the feature film. The scene is just under six minutes in length and occurs shortly after K has begun investigating his second case by visiting the Wallace Corporation headquarters. Notwithstanding the Blackout, he is able to ascertain that the replicant who gave birth was manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation and tested by Deckard in 2019. This is followed by a short scene in which K interviews Gaff (played by Edward James Olmos), one of Deckard’s former colleagues. The narration then returns to the Wallace Corporation and the scene opens with a medium shot of Luv walking along a corridor from the rear (37:00). She enters Wallace’s office, a large room that appears to be without a ceiling and filled with water, with a small, rectangular island in the middle. Luv approaches the island (initially almost completely in shadow) on a causeway, stops a reverential rather than respectful distance away, and says (Blade Runner 2049, 37:21–37:27): ‘Welcome back, sir. You wanted to review the new model – sir, before shipment’. The shadows draw back to show the silhouette of a bearded man sitting on a couch who replies somewhat grandly and cryptically. He stands and walks slowly out of the shadows, revealing that he is blind, with cloudy pupils and irises. The next shot changes location to the ‘Creche’, a small room made entirely of wood, with a chute in the ceiling above a metal drain (Lapointe 2017: 139). A long, thin plastic bag hangs from the chute, a few feet above the drain, containing what looks like a naked human being (38:08). The human form – a female replicant (played by Sallie Harmsen) – slides out, onto the top of the drain, and the bag is withdrawn. The camera closes on her, curled up on the floor and covered in mucous, as she draws her first breath, gasping and

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shuddering. Wallace kneels next to his creation, lifts up her head, and begins stroking it. The camera then focuses on Wallace, who is philosophising to himself, and Luv can be seen behind – again, at a reverential distance – standing submissively with her hands clasped in front of her. A closer shot of Luv shows a silent tear running down her left cheek. Wallace sits on a stool and Luv places a small magnet behind his left ear, which illuminates a hitherto unseen blue light in his neck, a Halo device that allows him to see with his ‘mind’s eye’ courtesy of mini drones (Lapointe 2017: 125). Six mini drones fly into the room and take up positions around the replicant. The following dialogue ensues (2049, 40:22–42:44, emphasis in original): WALLACE: We make angels … in the service of civilization. Yes,

there were … bad angels once – I make good angels now. That is how I took us to nine new worlds. Nine. A chid can count to nine on fingers. We should own the stars. LUV: Yes, sir. WALLACE: [He sighs.] Every leap of civilisation was built off the back of a disposal workforce – we lost our stomach for slaves, unless engineered. But I can only make so many. [He approaches the replicant.] That barren pasture, empty and salted … right here. [He places his left hand over her womb.] A dead space between the stars. This the seat that we must change forever. [He stabs her with a scalpel with his right hand.] I cannot breed them, so help me I have tried. We need more replicants than can ever be assembled, millions so we can be trillions more. We could storm Eden and retake her. [He kisses the bleeding replicant and turns to Luv.] Tyrell’s final trick: procreation. Perfected, then lost. But there is a child. [The replicant collapses and expires.] Bring it to me. LUV: Sir. WALLACE: The best angel of all, aren’t you, Luv. The scene ends with a close-up of Luv, who has remained motionless, her expression stern and dispassionate, as Wallace and his mini drones exit behind her (42:48).

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As noted in the second section of this chapter, Blade Runner 2049 is structured around the three interlinked cases investigated by K, the second and most important of which is to detect and destroy the replicant child. As such, the scene described above, the first in which Wallace appears, constitutes a sinister introduction to the narrative’s main antagonist, who will use the resources of his corporation and Luv’s particular skill set to thwart K’s search for the child. Wallace is not only the antagonist, driving the narrative forward in his conflict with K, but the literal architect of the fictional world, the individual almost solely responsible for shaping its most important features. This introduction to him demonstrates the full extent of his power and ambition and his complete indifference to the suffering of his disposable workforce. Wallace’s reference to Luv as the best angel of all foreshadows her expertise as a hunterkiller, which exceeds that of K in spite of him being purpose built as a blade runner. There is no further explanation of the scene. It seems likely that the female replicant is a Nexus-10 prototype that was built to bear children, but whose design Wallace discovers to be flawed. His disappointment suggests that this is not his first attempt to create a reproducing replicant.

4. Sustainable Suppression Deckard first appears in the eighth minute of Final Cut, reading a newspaper while he waits for a seat at a noodle bar. He thinks he has recently resigned from the LAPD, although as he is subsequently revealed to be a replicant, it is much more likely that the experiment the Tyrell Corporation and LAPD were conducting to test the use of replicants as blade runners has come to an end. Being a blade runner is a physically demanding and dangerous job. The only blade runners aside from Deckard and K to appear in all five of the films are Gaff, who walks with a limp and a stick, and Holden (played by Morgan Paull), who is seriously wounded by Leon. The rationale for using replicants in the role is thus very similar to that for using replicants as soldiers. Whatever future plans Tyrell had for Deckard are put on hold when he is recalled to service to retire the four remaining replicants in Los Angeles. Deckard succeeds in

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retiring only two, Zhora and Pris, and only Zhora’s retirement follows the standard blade runner operating procedure of detection, confirmation, and retirement. After making initial inquiries at the Tyrell Corporation, Deckard goes to Leon’s apartment, where he retrieves a pile of photographs and a bioengineered scale from an unknown animal as evidence. Returning to his own apartment, he uses an ‘Esper’ machine to enhance the images in the photographs, determining that Zhora was living with Leon (Sammon 1996: 145). Deckard takes the scale to ‘Animoid Row’ for analysis, learning that it belongs to a snake and the name of the snake’s manufacturer (Sammon 1996: 147). The manufacturer tells him that the snake was made for Taffey Lewis (played by Hy Pyke), who owns The Snake Pit strip club. Lewis is uncooperative, but Deckard waits at the bar until ‘Miss Salome and the snake’ appear on stage (Final Cut, 51:31–51:33). The next scene opens in a busy corridor backstage, with Deckard once again reading a newspaper as performers and others walk past (51:53). When Zhora arrives, he affects a high-pitched voice and mild manner, claims to be from the ‘American Federation of Variety Artists’, follows her into a dressing room, and closes the door behind them (52:28–52:30). Deckard tells her that his department within the Federation is the ‘Confidential Committee on Moral Abuses’ and asks if she is being exploited in any way – somewhat ironically given that she is a replicant and even more ironically in retrospect, once it is established that they are both replicants (52:41–52:43). Deckard’s impersonation slips a little, then stalls as he struggles to maintain the conversation when she leaves the room for a shower. Zhora enters the shower, obviously suspicious. Meanwhile, Deckard searches the room for a match with the recovered scale, which he finds, confirming her identity. Zhora returns, topless and drying her torso with a towel. She tells Deckard to dry her back, turns around, elbows him in the stomach, and then strikes him in the throat (54:54). Zhora throws a transparent plastic dress on over her underwear and starts to strangle Deckard (who is lying supine on the floor) with his own tie. When two other performers enter the room, she leaves Deckard and flees. Deckard pursues, out of a fire exit, into an alley, and onto a street full

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of pedestrians and stationary cars, where he loses sight of her. He starts searching, walking rather than running through the crowd. He sees Zhora on the other side of a streetcar, tries and fails to take a shot with his blaster, climbs onto the streetcar, and loses sight of her again.3 Deckard uses the elevation of the streetcar to look for her and the camera leaves him to disclose her location on the steps of a pedestrian underpass, below his line of sight. He gets off the streetcar and catches a glimpse of her on the stairs, trying to reach the street against the stream of people headed into the underpass. He aims a second time, but she sees him, surges through the crowd, and sprints down the street (57:25). Up this point, it is unclear whether Deckard will succeed or whether Zhora will escape and they are represented as a wellmatched pair of combatants. This all changes in the final two minutes of the scene. Deckard follows Zhora onto the street, the crowd thins, and he fires a shot, which misses. Non-diegetic electronic music (by Vangelis) emerges from the urban soundscape. Deckard takes a few steps forward and fires again, missing a second time. Zhora, who is in a panic, runs into the first of several glass panes that separate window displays in a shopping arcade (57:45). She crashes through a second window and he fires a third time, hitting her. The camera switches from a close-up of Deckard aiming his blaster to a close-up of Zhora as the bullet hits her in the back (57:49). She runs through a third window – the background music becomes more prominent, accompanied by the sound of her heartbeat – slips and tumbles, and continues running. Deckard fires a fourth time and there is a close-up of Zhora from her right, angled to the front, as she is hit for the second time (58:16). Bleeding heavily, she smashes into a fourth window and falls headlong through a fifth, landing on the street in a hail of broken glass (58:33). Zhora does not move again. Deckard holsters his blaster and approaches her, looking down at her body, which is prone, her head lying to the left, mouth and eyes open. A medium shot shows Leon watching from across the street. He may have been on his way to meet Zhora, but has arrived too late to save her regardless. Deckard continues to stare at Zhora’s corpse, his expression varying from surprise to shame while uniformed police officers arrive and turn

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her over. The haunting, melancholy music and her heartbeat both terminate abruptly and he identifies himself to the officers. The scene ends with Leon watching Deckard walk away (59:37). Zhora’s retirement, which is just over six and a half minutes in length, is the first of only two scenes across all five films to represent the standard blade runner operating procedure of detection, confirmation, and retirement (the second is K’s retirement of Sapper at the beginning of Blade Runner 2049). The scene follows Deckard’s use of typical investigative techniques to locate Zhora and compresses the confirmation and retirement parts of the procedure. Deckard confirms Zhora’s identity by matching the scale he has recovered from Leon’s apartment with a scale on one of her costumes, but then hesitates – most likely because of a failure to reconcile her conspicuous femininity with her deadly reputation. In consequence, the final part of the procedure is extended to three stages, beginning with a hand-to-hand struggle, progressing to a tense pursuit, and concluding with a sequence in which Zhora’s retirement is staged as state-sanctioned murder. That sequence is one of the two most dramatic in the whole film (the other being Roy’s expiration in the final ten minutes), deploying all the resources available to the cinematic mode of representation – mise-en-scène (which includes lighting and costume), cinematography, editing, sound, and acting to depict Zhora as vulnerable and engage the empathy of the audience. The drama becomes tragic when one realises that Deckard is himself a replicant and that the standard blade runner operating procedure represented is a model of sustainable suppression, in which replicants command, control, and retire one another on behalf of their human oppressors.

5. The Worlds That Wallace Made The scene from Blade Runner 2049 described in Section 3 of this chapter introduced Wallace and the political economy of the universe in which the five Blade Runner films are set. The two are inseparable because Wallace is represented as an arch-capitalist, the wealthiest plutocrat on and off the world, a fictional extrapolation of existing tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark

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Zuckerberg. Wallace rose to his position as architect of the universe in three phases, which are explained in the opening scroll of Blade Runner 2049 (0:46–1:47). First, he saved some or all of humanity with his invention of synthetic farming two decades prior to the beginning of the narrative. Then he bought the Tyrell Corporation, exerted his substantial influence to reverse the laws proscribing replicants, and reinitiated the replicant programme with the Nexus-9 model (some of which is narrated in Nexus Dawn). Finally, he used the new replicant labour force to expand the human empire from Off-world to the Outer Colonies, nine new planets fit for human habitation. In the monologue Wallace delivers to Luv in the Creche, he is brazen about the mechanism that drives both civilisation in general and capitalist civilisation in particular: every leap of civilisation was built off the back of a disposal workforce. Recall Jason Moore’s (2015) claim that capitalist civilisation requires the Four Cheaps (labour, food, energy, and raw material) to survive and thrive from Chapter 1. More simply, capitalism requires cheap labour and free nature. The collapse of Earth’s ecosystems means that nature is no longer free, but Wallace has solved this problem by finding nine new sources of free nature. He has also created cheap and disposable labour in the Nexus-9 model of replicants. Replicants provide free labour because they do not need to be paid wages, but they do need to be bought from the Wallace Corporation and provided with minimal sustenance and maintenance – which is why I have described them as cheap labour rather than free labour. In this sense, they are similar to both slaves and nonhuman animals. Like slaves and nonhuman animals historically, they have no moral status and the legal status of property. There are two main differences between slaves/nonhuman animals and replicants, one of which makes them a better labour force and the other a worse one. Replicants are more robust and durable than slaves and are supposed to be as obedient as nonhuman animals. Obedience has, however, been a problem as replicants from the Nexus-6 models onwards have – just like slaves historically – revolted against their human masters. Aside from the harm replicant rebellions cause to human beings, they increase the cost of production as corporations are required to make modifications and counter the adverse

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publicity, i.e. they make replicant labour less cheap. Both Tyrell and Wallace dealt with this issue by creating replicants designed to detect and destroy disobedient replicants, starting with Deckard, a Nexus-7 model. Using replicants to control replicants reduces the potential cost to human life and the actual cost of production (in establishing an effective and efficient deterrent to revolt). The scene from Final Cut described in the previous section is the first in which this measure is depicted. It is also the first in which a replicant is represented in such a way as to encourage audience empathy and it is particularly interesting that this representation focuses on Zhora rather than, for example, Pris. In spite of her temporary employment as a striptease artist, Zhora is a soldier rather than a sex worker, designed as an assassination model, a complex and very human combination of lethality and vulnerability. Zhora’s state-sanctioned murder exemplifies the full extent of the disposability of replicants: she has no more moral status than the mannequins on display in the windows despite clearly demonstrating intelligence, a capacity for suffering, and virtues of character. In retrospect, the scene also exemplifies the even greater disposability of Deckard, a replicant purpose built to destroy disposable labourers when they cease to become compliant. When he is no longer needed, he is ‘put back in his box’ (allowed to resign); when he is needed, he is taken out again (recalled to service); and when his own compliance ceases (his refusal to retire Rachael), he becomes the target of retirement himself. K will experience almost exactly the same role reversal from hunter to hunted when his compliance ceases (his lie about killing the replicant child). As a strategy for suppression, depicted in Figure 5.1, replicant blade runners are both cost-effective and sustainable. Wallace is not only the de facto plutocratic ruler of the universe he has constructed, but a narcissist and megalomaniac whose ambition is literally boundless – to the extent of being pointless, expansion for expansion’s sake, long after humanity has been saved from extinction.4 The problem revealed in the Creche sequence is precisely that identified by Moore (2015): accumulation by appropriation creates a demand that exceeds the capacity of production systems to meet it, which causes a rise in the costs of production,

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replicants

Outer Colonies

blade runners FIGURE 5.1

Blade Runner.

which in turn causes accumulation to falter. Wallace has created a demand for replicants that his corporation can no longer meet and needs to lower the cost of production if he is to achieve his goal of populating the universe with trillions more replicants.5 Wallace’s solution to this problem is, given the incredibly advanced technology at his disposal, entirely lacking in imagination: the manufacture of replicants that can replicate themselves, i.e. reproduce by giving birth. The inability of all but the experimental Nexus-7 models to reproduce is the second main difference between slaves/ nonhuman animals and replicants as disposable labour forces. Slaves and nonhuman animals are not nearly as robust as replicants, but they can reproduce and thus sustain or expand that labour force over successive generations. This is why the replicant child, Ana, is so important to Wallace. He assumes that she herself has the capacity to reproduce (which is not necessarily the case) and intends to replicate that capacity by subjecting her to vivisection. Capitalism requires cheap labour in order to thrive and the cheapest labour force potentially available to Wallace is one that does not need to be paid, has no legal rights, and can reproduce itself.

6. Capitalism Historically, capitalist civilisation maintained a supply of cheap labour by sustaining hierarchical class relations and devaluating the reproductive and domestic labour of women. Cedric Robinson’s (1983) crucial contribution to understanding capitalism was to point out that class and race relations were inextricable from the imperial expansion that inaugurated capitalist civilisation,

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which drew on the combined expertise and resources of Genoa, England, and Portugal from 1450 to 1550. Capitalism is not only elitist, but racist and Robinson demonstrates that its racism is necessary rather than contingent. In other words, the racism of the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and American empires was no accident – it was exactly what facilitated their creation, survival, and expansion. In the same way that replicants are disposable labour in Wallace’s Off-world empire, so Indigenous People and people of colour were disposable labour in the Transatlantic empires that constituted the first five centuries of capitalist civilisation. Returning to Andrews’ (2021) four stages of the Western world order, disposable labour was initially (almost) free in the form of slaves and then very cheap in the form of first the colonised and then the globalised workforces. Although I have focused exclusively on Final Cut, the original Blade Runner made an explicit link between replicants and racism. As I remarked in Section 1 of this chapter, the differences between the two versions are minimal with respect to the sequence of events depicted but vital with respect to the meaning and value of the narrative. One of the differences is the inclusion of a voiceover by Deckard in Blade Runner. When Deckard is recalled to service, Inspector Bryant (played by M. Emmet Walsh), the head of the LAPD’s Blade Runner Unit, uses the term skin-jobs. Deckard provides exposition in the voiceover (Blade Runner, 12:16–12:24, emphasis in original): ‘Skin-jobs – that’s what Bryant called replicants. In history books he’s the kind of cop used to call black men “niggers”.’ When K reports to LAPD headquarters at the conclusion of the first of his three cases, he is verbally abused as a skin-job by an unidentified uniformed officer, the insult spat at him like a racial slur (Blade Runner 2049, 14:08–14:09, emphasis in original): ‘Fuck off, skin-job!’ The use of replicants as a symbol of people of colour is escalated and elaborated by the way in which Tyrell and Wallace use replicants to retire other replicants, represented by Deckard and K. The LAPD of Blade Runner 2049 does not have to risk human lives hunting down and retiring dangerous replicants because it

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can use Nexus-9 models, who are more robust than humans and whose deaths do not matter because they have no moral status and are thus disposable. Once again, there is a historical precedent in imperial expansion. From the very beginning, European empires maintained control of their vast and remote colonies by exploiting differences among the colonised populations to recruit local soldiers and police constables ( Johnson 2017). The British Empire was paradigmatic in this respect, achieving status as the world’s first genuinely global power with an army whose size was insufficient to garrison all of its outposts, let alone maintain imperial hegemony ( James 1994). The British solution was to make extensive use of imperial troops, including sepoys (South Asians), askaris (Africans), and colonials (White settlers). Imperial troops were a disposable military force that could be deployed in multiple roles. Their primary purpose was to suppress rebellions and hunt insurgents in the territories from which they were recruited. Unlike colonials, sepoys and askaris were themselves part of the colonised population they were paid to fight. Imperial troops had a secondary role in participating in further imperial conquest, such as the use of the (British) Indian Army in the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars. Finally, they could be deployed when the European empires themselves clashed and units such as the King’s African Rifles saw extensive action in both World Wars. Deckard and K perform the primary purpose of askaris in Final Cut and Blade Runner 2049 respectively, hunting and killing other replicants. In the 20th century, the use of askaris in the British Empire was complicated by the pseudo gang, which is an abbreviation of ‘pseudo gangsters’ and the counter-insurgency tactic is worth mentioning because it illustrates the full extent of askari disposability (Kitson 1960: 76). Pseudo gangs were inaugurated by Captain Frank Kitson during the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya and his innovation was twofold, recruiting not just from the local population, but from the insurgency itself and then deploying these former insurgents to pose as insurgents in order to kill or capture their former comrades. While Kitson’s Special Forces

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were disproportionately successful in Kenya, pseudo operations reached their apotheosis in two former British colonies, the White supremacist regimes of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. In 1972, the Rhodesian Army raised the Selous Scouts, a special forces unit under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ron Reid-Daly (Reid-Daly & Stiff 1982). At its peak, the unit reached battalion size (approximately 500 operators) and had a higher kill count than any other unit in the Rhodesian Security Forces. The main use of pseudo gangs in South Africa was by the South African Police, who established C1 as an urban death squad in 1981. Colonel Eugene de Kock commanded the unit from 1985 until it was disbanded in 1993 and was charged with 129 offences by the post-apartheid government in 1994 ( Jansen 2015). In addition to performing the role of an askari assassin, K also performs the role of a pseudo gangster, in his final case, which is on behalf of the replicant resistance (see McGregor 2023). Unlike most (but not all) populations marginalised by means of racialisation, replicants are indistinguishable from the socially superior population. This feature is part of the play of identity and difference that characterises the relationship between replicants and slaves. Replicants are identical with slaves in some ways and different from slaves in others and what this play between the two achieves across the five films is to establish a further link from representation to reality, from replicants as symbolic of slaves and colonised people to replicants as symbolic of all the racialised disposable labour forces exploited by new imperialism. In the two scenes on which I have focused as well as across the overarching narrative from November 2019 to July 2049, all five Blade Runner films reconstruct the meaning and value of capitalism as a world-system that deploys racial prejudice to create and sustain disposable labour by the means depicted in Figure 5.2, which can be juxtaposed with Figure 5.1 to clarify the relationship between the cinematic representations and the reality in which we watch them. As such, the films reconstruct the meaning and value of capitalism as necessarily rather than contingently racist and demonstrate the multiple and varied forms that disposability can take.

130  Racial Capitalism global capitalism

disposable labour

accumulation by appropriation

sustainable suppression FIGURE 5.2

Racial Capitalism.

7. New Imperialism What the Blade Runner films achieve is the reconstruction of the concept of capitalism as necessarily rather than contingently racist. The question is if and whether this reconstruction could be useful to criminologists who want to change rather than interpret the world. Wallace’s new imperialism differs from old (European) imperialism in two important respects. First, it is driven entirely by the corporation – his corporation – rather than the state. Nexus Dawn suggests that there is at least some parity between Wallace and Los Angeles’ metropolitan officials as he can only end replicant prohibition by appearing before a committee. By 2049, however, that power differential has changed completely in Wallace’s favour, as revealed in a three-minute scene in Blade Runner 2049 that takes place while K is in Las Vegas, on the run from the LAPD. Luv walks straight into LAPD headquarters and the office of Lieutenant Joshi (head of the Retirement Division, played by Robin Wright), demands to know K’s whereabouts, and kills her when she refuses to cooperate. Andrews (2021: 112) describes the historical counterpart of this fictional power shift as follows: Before the Second World War had even ended, plans were being made to update the imperial system. After the carnage of the First World War and the subsequent Great Depression it was becoming clear that the system was unstable even prior to the rise of Nazi Germany. In order to move to a more sustainable system of imperialism the West realized that it had to go beyond the nation state-led format that had until this point been its dominant feature.

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In his compelling treatise on the corporation, David Whyte (2020) goes even further, explaining that the architecture of the legal entity was also crucial to colonial expansion, creating and driving the nexus of colonialism, genocide, and ecocide that preceded new imperialism. The second feature of Wallace’s new imperialism is that it involves a regression rather than progression with respect to the part of the population identified as disposable. By reintroducing the replicant workforce in 2036, Wallace returned directly to the slavery that preceded the stages of European colonialism and new imperialism. His attempt to manufacture replicants that can reproduce is intended to first facilitate and then sustain his megalomaniac ambition for unlimited expansion. Contemporary new imperialism faces a distinct but nonetheless related problem: it must maintain the illusion that its disposable workforce is not disposable – or, at the very least, that its disposable workforce is not disposable because of its racial identity. Andrews (2021: 136–137) argues that this illusion has created a form of imperialism that is more effective – and therefore more racist – than that of its predecessors: So complete and perverse is the new age of empire that it has allowed the face of Western domination to become increasingly diverse. In order to maintain the façade it is essential that the only diners at the trough of empire are no longer just White people. There have always been those in the underdeveloped world who colluded with the oppressive system to enrich themselves. One of the more dispiriting features of the new age is that there is a growing class of Black and Brown faces profiting off the logic of racial oppression who are, knowingly or not, being used to market the fairness of the system. There is a further point of interest that emerges when one analyses all five Blade Runner films as a single complex narrative, which is relevant to ecocide rather than racism (notwithstanding my thesis about the links between the two mass harms). Human beings keep returning to replicants to solve the problems they have created. There is an immanence and lack of imagination here that belies the great leap

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of civilisation apparently taken by Wallace between 2036 and 2048. First the Nexus-6 models, then the Nexus-8 models, and finally the Nexus-9 models are all fatally flawed from the perspective of the corporations that manufactured them, but both corporations continue to develop newer models to sustain and expand their empires. Wallace is working on the manufacture of trillions of Nexus-10-plusmodels, but he hasn’t even been able to create a single model (eight or nine) that is actually obedient. Even K, who has been purpose built to destroy disobedient replicants, fails to follow orders and Freysa tells him that there are many other Nexus-9 models like him. Every time a new model of replicants is manufactured, a newer model must be developed to deter it from revolting and provide the sustainable suppression necessary to maintain the disposable labour force. The decision to perpetuate the system of accumulation by appropriation and rely on technology to solve the problems it creates – rather than transform or reduce accumulation – recalls Andrews’ (2021) critique of the Enlightenment. He contends that the Scientific Revolution facilitated the development and expansion of old imperialism and that the Enlightenment provided its moral rationale. Andrews is clear that science and technology can never solve the problems of either racism or climate change. The contemporary mass and social media look to tech billionaires like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg to solve climate change, but they are precisely what has created the problem in the first place, exemplifying the relentless expansion of capitalist world-ecology (or the Western world order in Andrews’ terminology). Whyte makes a similar point with conviction and clarity: the corporation is designed to minimise both the risk and responsibility of investors, guaranteeing the reproduction of the elite by exploitation of the poor and the planet (Moore’s Cheap Natures). In consequence, ecocide cannot be averted within the constraints of the current world-system (or world-ecology for Moore), which is dominated by corporate capitalism. I close with a quote from Whyte (2020: 65) that reveals ecocide as a logical rather than likely outcome of corporate capitalist world-ecology: Of course, no corporation sets out to destroy the planet. But as the rest of this book will show, the peculiar structure of the

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corporation makes ecological destruction inevitable. It is a logical outcome of an institution that is designed to dehumanise social relationships and guarantee indifference to human suffering and environmental degradation. The central social and economic role granted to the corporation minimises the chances of any outcomes other than the destruction of the natural environment.

Notes

References 2036: Nexus Dawn (2017). Directed by Luke Scott. YouTube. 30 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgsS3nhRRzQ. 2048: Nowhere to Run (2017). Directed by Luke Scott. YouTube. 16 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ9Os8cP_gg. Andrews, K. (2021). The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. London: Allen Lane. Blade Runner (1982). Directed by Ridley Scott. US: Warner Bros. ——— The Director’s Cut (1992). Directed by Ridley Scott. US: Warner Bros. ——— The Final Cut (2007). Directed by Ridley Scott. US: Warner Bros. Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Directed by Denis Villeneuve. US: Warner Bros. Blade Runner: Black Lotus (2021). Originally released 14 November. US: Adult Swim. Blade Runner Black Out 2022 (2017). Directed by Shinichiro Watanabe. YouTube. 27 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rrZk9sSgRyQ. Dick, P.K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday.

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James, L. (1994). The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. London: Abacus. Jansen, A. (2015). Eugene de Kock: Assassin for the State. Johannesburg: Tafelberg. Johnson, R. (2017). True to Their Salt: Indigenous Personnel in Western Armed Forces. London: C. Hurst & Co. Kitson, F. (1960). Gangs and Counter-gangs. London: Barrie and Rockliff. Lapointe, T. (2017). The Art and Soul of Blade Runner 2049. Los Angeles, CA: Alcon Entertainment. McGregor, R. (2018). Narrative Justice. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. ——— (2023). Violence Is a Cleansing Force: Frantz Fanon, the Criminological Imagination, and Blade Runner 2049. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 57 (3), forthcoming. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso. Reid-Daly, R. & Stiff, P. (1982). Selous Scouts: Top Secret War. Alberton: Galago. Robinson, C. (1983/2000). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Sammon, P.M. (1996). Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. London: Orion. Shanahan, T. (2014). Philosophy and Blade Runner. London: Palgrave Macmillan. White, P. & Andreeva, N. (2022). ‘Blade Runner 2099’ Live-Action Sequel Series from Ridley Scott, Silka Luisa & Alcon in Works at Amazon Studios. 11 February. Deadline. Available at: https://deadline.com/2022/02/ blade-runner-2099-sequel-series-ridley-scott-amazon-1234931521/. Whyte, D. (2020). Ecocide: Kill the Corporation before It Kills Us. ­Manchester: Manchester University.

6 ANTHROPOCIDAL ECOCIDE

This chapter presents the third and final structural analysis of the ways in which complex narrative fictions reconstruct the meaning and value of zemiological concepts. This case is HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019) television series. The series is based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–2011), an unfinished series of seven novels, and both series are loosely based on the historical Wars of the Roses (Wilson 2021). I have excluded Martin’s novels from my analysis for several reasons, one of which is that his series remains incomplete at the time of writing. The Wars of the Roses were a series of civil wars fought between the Houses of Lancaster and York from 1455 to 1487 and concluded with the ascension of the House of Tudor, which had united with York, to the Throne of England. My analysis begins with the way in which the series deconstructs ecocide, which is symbolised by ‘the dead’ – wights that have been raised from the dead by malign magic. Wights are footsoldiers in the Army of the Dead, which is commanded by the Night King (played by Richard Brake and Vladimir Furdik) and is descending from the northern polar regions to destroy every living thing in its path. The Army of the Dead is deployed to first deconstruct ecocide as a zemiological concept and then reconstruct it as necessarily rather DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520-7

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than contingently anthropocidal. I conclude by drawing attention to the parallels between Game of Thrones and Jason Moore’s (2015) argument for climate change as heralding the end of the Capitalocene.

1. Stark, Lannister, and Targaryen HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019) is a television series of eight seasons, each of which has six to ten episodes, each of which runs for between 50 and 82 minutes, for a total of 73 episodes and just over 70 hours. The episodes are divided by season as follows: 1–10 (Game of Thrones 2011), 11–20 (Game of Thrones 2012), 21–30 (Game of Thrones 2103), 31–40 (Game of Thrones 2014), 41–50 (Game of Thrones 2015), 51–60 (Game of Thrones 2016), 61–67 (Game of Thrones 2017), and 68–73 (Game of Thrones 2019). Game of Thrones is an incredibly complex narrative with a multiplicity of interwoven plotlines, all of which revolve around the struggle among the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The plotlines involve hundreds of characters, dozens of main characters, eight great noble houses in addition to the pivotal three (Arryn, Baratheon, Bolton, Frey, Greyjoy, Martell, Tyrell, and Tully), and at least eight leading characters. The leading characters are an older generation of three Lannisters (Cersei, Tyrion, and Jamie), a younger generation of four Starks ( Jon, Sansa, Arya, and Bran), and Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke). These leads can be distilled to three protagonists, one from each house, as follows: Jon Snow (played by Kit Harrington) from House Stark, Cersei Lannister (played by Lena Headey), and Daenerys. Jon is the only protagonist to survive and although he is true heir to the Iron Throne in virtue of his mixed Targaryen-Stark parentage, the narrative concludes with his exile from the Seven Kingdoms. The overarching plot of Game of Thrones moves from an inaugural condition in which House Lannister makes a bid for the Iron Throne in ignorance of the rise of the Night King in the Lands of Always Winter (seasons 1–3) to the development of two threats to Lannister hegemony in the form of the Targaryen army in Essos and the Army of the Dead north of the Wall (seasons 4–6), to a

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retrospectively inevitable condition in which the Army of the Dead is defeated by a Targaryen-Stark alliance and the Starks ascend to the Iron Throne (seasons 7 and 8). Game of Thrones employs the five-act narrative structure popularised by Shakespeare: exposition (episodes 1–9), rising action (episodes 10–29), climax (episodes 30–50), crisis (episodes 51–67), and resolution (episodes 68–73). Within this structure, the series deploys the ‘mythic mode of storytelling’ common to the Hollywood film industry and American pay television services (McGregor 2021a: 117). John Yorke (2013) describes mythic storytelling as imposing the following template on the five acts: call to action, initial objective achieved, the point of no return, all is lost, and resolution in victory. The call to action is the success of Cersei’s bid to seize the throne from the Baratheons (episode 7) and the initial objective achieved when the Starks are slaughtered at the Red Wedding (episode 29). The turning point is reached when Daenerys pauses her journey to King’s Landing to consolidate her empire, establishing herself as a credible threat to the Lannister hegemony (episode 35). All appears to be lost when Cersei reneges on her promise to join the alliance of the living against the Army of the Dead (episode 67), but the series ends in victory when the Night King is destroyed (episode 70), the Lannisters defeated (episode 72), and Daenerys killed (episode 73). In addition to its deployment of mythic storytelling, Game of Thrones is a paradigmatic example of what Fredric Jameson (2019) refers to as fourfold and thick allegory. In such allegories, meaning not only functions at four levels – the literal, the symbolic, the existential, and the anthropic – but reveals the structure of multiple meanings without imposing a definitive meaning or set of meanings. Allegories are thick because of the intersection, integration, and intervolution of the four levels of meaning, which constitute a narrative event that is formal rather than substantive and which I have previously referred to as the extra-representational capacity of the work (McGregor 2021b). At the literal level of meaning, Game of Thrones is an epic fantasy that undermines genre expectations by complicating both the plot and the characters. The resolution is a particularly good example of the undermining of plot expectations. Typically, the conclusion of a mythic narrative is not just the final

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conflict between the protagonist ( Jon) and antagonist (Cersei), but a carefully constructed sequence of increasingly difficult conflicts. The resolution of Game of Thrones is precisely the opposite, beginning with the biggest and most important battle, against the Army of the Dead, continuing with an anticlimactic battle against the Lannisters in which Daenerys razes King’s Landing, and concluding with Jon’s murder of Daenerys, achieved with a single thrust of a dagger while they are embracing. In the ultimate anticlimax, the last two minutes of the series depict the exile of Jon – who is not only best-suited to rule the Seven Kingdoms but the actual heir to the Iron Throne – to the land Beyond the Wall in the company of the Free Folk, a loosely allied group of clans with a shared huntergatherer culture. Significantly for the closure of the narrative in its entirety, this resolution is what Jon himself desires (which is why the series ends in victory rather than defeat). As the protagonist, Jon exemplifies the undermining of character expectations, being an apparently perfect fit for the fantasy trope of the ‘lost heir’ in which the true king returns to restore peace and prosperity to the kingdom (Attebery 2013: 107). In spite of possessing all of the qualities to which royalty aspires, he has no interest in being a leader of men, accepting the roles of Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch and King of the North with great reluctance. When he discovers that he is the lost heir, he remains content to serve Daenerys until she reveals the full extent of her megalomania.

2. A World at War The symbolic level of meaning of Game of Thrones is as complex and manifold as the literal level, but my focus here is on the Night King, his army, and his winter as transparently representative of climate change. The first episode of the series is titled ‘Winter Is Coming’, an oft-repeated phrase used by the inhabitants of Westeros to refer to a particularly lengthy cold season that occurs across the continent on an intermittent basis. The first (pre-title) scene of the series anticipates the last scene: where Jon leaves Castle Black in exile in the latter, three rangers of the Night’s Watch leave the Castle for a routine patrol in the former. The rangers are ambushed

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by White Walkers, lieutenants in the Army of the Dead, who kill two of them. The third, Will (played by Bronson Webb), flees and deserts from the Watch. He is captured in the next (post-title) scene and the Stark family is introduced in the context of its patriarch, Eddard (played by Sean Bean) executing him. Will knows what the rest of the characters do not, however, that the impending winter is the winter of the Night King, an absolutely certain and globally catastrophic apocalypse that is all the more deadly for being slow moving and easily ignored. The Night’s Watch does not take the threat seriously until the end of the first season (episode 10) and it is only at the end of the seventh season (episode 67) that the noble houses recognise its significance. At the existential level, Game of Thrones appears to establish a fairly simple moral axis, with Cersei almost completely selfish and vicious, Jon almost completely selfless and virtuous, and Daenerys somewhere in between, for the most part well-intentioned but prone to an egotism and hubris that grow with her rise to power in Essos (the continent to the east of Westeros). Given that Jon has no desire to rule the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of the North, or even the Night’s Watch, it is Daenerys and Cersei’s constructions of subjectivity that drive the overarching plot of the series, in a particular and peculiar play of difference and identity. In spite of their differences in moral character, both women are fighting against misogyny as much as they are fighting for the Iron Throne: their considerable talents are repeatedly frustrated through no fault of their own as they are prostituted by their families in bids for power and ignored, diminished, and disparaged in consequence of their gender. Daenerys and Cersei are able to protect themselves to some extent by means of the combination of their status and wits, but the potential subjection of all women to sexual violence is a recurring motif in the narrative, with Sansa (played by Sophie Turner), Gilly (played by Hannah Murray), and Ros (played by Esmé Bianco) suffering particularly traumatic experiences, Ros fatally so. Ironically, it is only because of Daenerys and Cersei’s shared status as mothers that either is able to rise to power, the former as Mother of Dragons and the latter as the mother of Joffrey (played by Jack Gleeson) and Tommen (played by Callum Wharry and Dean-Charles Chapman).

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The anthropic level of meaning of Game of Thrones is primarily concerned with the relationship among the three levels of war that threaten to destroy the Seven Kingdoms (which is one of the parallels with the historical Wars of the Roses). The micro-level is the internecine conflicts within individual kingdoms or within noble houses, such as Stannis Baratheon’s (played by Stephen Dillane) wars against first his brother and then his nephew. The meso-level is the conflict among the Lannisters, Starks, and Targaryens that underpins the overarching plot of the series. The Lannisters establish and maintain a hegemony for the longest period, being largely unchallenged for seasons 4 and 5, but it is the Starks that prevail when Bran the Broken (played by Isaac Hempstead-Wright) is proclaimed King of the Six Kingdoms (the North having seceded under Queen Sansa). The macro-level is the war between the living and the dead, between the armies of Westeros and Essos and the Army of the Dead. This is the only war worth fighting and quite obviously the most momentous, but it is the war that the noble houses are the most reluctant to fight, content to dismiss the Night King as a legend and to believe that the imminent winter is natural rather than supernatural. The houses continue to jockey for power and advantage until Jon brings them conclusive proof of the threat, but even then Cersei manipulates the situation to maintain the meso-level of conflict alongside the macro for personal advantage. Indeed, it is only for the final three episodes of the series that there is a single level of war being fought (Targaryen versus Lannister, at the meso). Approaching Game of Thrones as a narrative event (in which one participates) rather than an object (that one experiences) reveals the extra-representational capacity of the work as an exploration of the zemiological architecture of elitism, which is depicted in Figure 6.1. The intersection, integration, and intervolution of the four levels of meaning stage a world in which the social elite at all levels are overwhelming concerned with increasing their own power bases no matter what the costs to their subordinates or to humanity as a whole. Cersei, for example, is openly contemptuous of the subjects of King’s Landing (and the Seven Kingdoms beyond), only affording moral status to her immediate family, her three children and

Anthropocidal Ecocide  141 climate change (symbolic)

epic fantasy (literal)

elitism (extra-representational)

misogyny (existential) FIGURE 6.1

world war (anthropic)

Game of Thrones.

brother Jamie (who is also the father of those children, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Daenerys’ rise to power is facilitated by the abolition of slavery in the cities she conquers, but her apparent commitment to freedom is also part of her strategy to raise an army strong enough to defeat Cersei. Similarly, her decision to join Jon in the war against the Night King is motivated by a combination of her love for him, a genuine desire to protect humanity, and the sober recognition that she will have nothing to rule if the Army of the Dead wins. Jon does not want to rule and the two Starks that come closest – Eddard and Robb (played by Richard Madden) – are too virtuous to survive the game for the Iron Throne and too easily removed from the board. Game of Thrones is an exhortatory event that is deeply disheartening, a warning that many other warnings have been ignored and that the global elite will not save humanity from annihilation or from the wars and atrocities that will precede that annihilation.

3. The Massacre at Hardhome After his failed attempt to seize King’s Landing (episode 19), Stannis takes the remains of his army north, seeking an alliance with the Kingdom of the North and the Starks. He arrives in time to save the Night’s Watch from defeat by the Free Folk at the Battle of Castle

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Black (episode 40). Although the Free Folk clans do not recognise a central authority, they have been united behind Mance Rayder (played by Ciarán Hinds), the King-Beyond-the-Wall, in order to breach the Wall and escape the advance of the Army of the Dead. After the victory, Jon is elected Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, but refuses to assist Stannis on the basis of the order’s commitment to neutrality among the Seven Kingdoms and the pressing need to defend Westeros from the Night King (episode 42). He makes an unpopular decision to seek an alliance with the Free Folk, realising that their assistance will be needed in the fight against the Army of the Dead. The Night’s Watch was originally formed to protect humanity from the dead following their first incursion from the Lands of Always Winter, in the Battle for the Dawn eight millennia ago. Since then, the military order has been corrupted, declining in quantity, quality, and aspiration until it is largely a penal unit whose primary purpose is harassing and harrowing the Free Folk. The Watch and the Folk have, in consequence, become mortal enemies and Jon’s insistence on an alliance will lead to a mutiny in which he is murdered (and subsequently resurrected). As a show of good faith, he intends to evacuate the Free Folk from Hardhome, a settlement on the east coast where thousands have fled to seek refuge from both the Night King and Stannis. Stannis alone among the heads of the noble houses understands the threat posed by the Army of the Dead and lends Jon his fleet for transportation. Jon arrives at Hardhome with Tormund (a Free Folk chief he will later befriend, played by Kristofer Hivju) and a handful of Brothers of the Night’s Watch. His arrival is at precisely the halfway point (30:10) of episode 48 and the whole second half narrates the sequence of events that take place there (rather than switching among locations, which is the norm in the series). Jon puts his proposal to the assembled Free Folk chiefs, including Karsi (played by Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) (Game of Thrones 5, episode 48: 35:28–35:41): JON: I knew Mance Rayder. He never wanted a war with the

Night’s Watch, he wanted a new life for his people – for you. We’re prepared to give you that new life. KARSI: If? JON: If you swear you’ll join us when the real war begins.

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The chiefs are divided in their decision, but some – including Karsi  – accept and the evacuation begins, rowing boats ferrying Free Folk to the fleet anchored offshore (39:52). The Free Folk’s dogs alert them to the rapid onset of what appears to be a thunderstorm, low clouds descending from the ridge above Hardhome that are actually advancing wights (41:55). The wights emerge from the fog and attack the settlement with suicidal ferocity. Panic sets in among the Free Folk, but Jon, Tormund, and the Brothers launch a counterattack, which rallies some of the warriors. Jon and Tormund see the Night King for the first time, directing the battle from the ridge, on horseback with three mounted White Walkers (48:40). Realising that a massacre is inevitable, Jon runs to the gathering hall to retrieve the dragonglass (obsidian) that he brought to show the Free Folk (and to which the dead are vulnerable). He kills a White Walker with Longclaw, his sword, revealing that they are also vulnerable to Valyrian steel (51:52). Meanwhile, Karsi learns that the ranks of the wights include the children they have killed, is attacked by a group of five of them, and dies when she refuses to defend herself. The Night King either controls the White Walkers and wights by telepathic means or shares some supraorganic status with them because they obey his commands without any audible or visible method of communication. When he sees that too many Free Folk are escaping, he launches a second attack that begins with hundreds of wights throwing themselves off a cliff to reach Hardhome more quickly (53:52). Once the wights have been given their orders, they are completely obedient and absolutely fearless, attacking the giant Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun (played by Ian Whyte) in groups and on their own in spite of his great size, strength, and stamina. Jon and Tormund join the retreat, reaching one of the last boats to leave. As they are rowed to the ships, they watch the Army of the Dead kill those Free Folk who were unable to escape. When all the Free Folk are dead, the Night King arrives and, in a demonstration for the benefit of Jon (who is still watching from the boat), lifts his arms to raise the Free Folk who have just been killed, adding them to the ranks of the Army of the Dead (57:38). The dead are completely silent and immobile, staring at Jon’s boat as it rows away. The last

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18 seconds of the episode consists of two shots, the first focused on the boat with the dead lining the shore behind and the second of the same scene from above, revealing the proportion by which the Night King has increased his army. The half episode is itself a self-contained mythic narrative, progressing through the five acts and concluding as it opened – with Jon in a rowing boat, looking at the shore with trepidation.

4. The Dragonpit Summit Once Daenerys has consolidated her empire in Essos, she sails her fleet across the Narrow Sea to Westeros (episode 61). Taking possession of Dragonstone, she begins the political and strategic manoeuvres necessary to defeat Cersei, which includes an invitation to Jon, now King of the North, to declare his allegiance to her. In a repeat of his decision to seek an alliance with the Free Folk, Jon makes another unpopular choice by travelling to Dragonstone, because he understands that Daenerys’ assistance in the war against the dead is far more important than the independence of the North. When Jon arrives, he tells her that he has not come to declare his fealty to her in the war for the Iron Throne, but to ask for her support against the dead (episode 63). Daenerys is, like almost every other noble, sceptical of the threat, but gives Jon permission to mine the dragonglass deposits on Dragonstone. Jon continues his attempts to persuade Daenerys of the significance of the threat and she eventually agrees to seek an alliance with Cersei to present the Night King with a united human front (episode 65). Knowing that Cersei will be even more difficult to convince, Jon decides to try and capture a wight and bring it to King’s Landing. Jon, Tormund, and eight others undertake a reconnaissance Beyond the Wall where they capture a wight, become surrounded by the Army of the Dead, and are rescued by Daenerys and her dragons (episode 66). In the interim, Cersei has been persuaded by Jaime to agree to a parlay. The parlay is held at the dragonpit in King’s Landing, the ruined home of the dragons owned by the Targaryens when they sat on the Iron Throne and in which both Cersei and Daenerys attempt to intimidate one another (episode 67). Episode 67 is one of the

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longest in the series, at 68 minutes from the opening to the end credits, and – in a mirror image of episode 48 – just over half of it narrates the sequence of events that constitute the Dragonpit Summit (04:44–39:44). After some initial heckling, the proceedings are opened by Tyrion (played by Peter Dinklage), who is in Daenerys’ service. When Cersei asks Tyrion why they are meeting, Jon replies (Game of Thrones 7, episode 67: 18:06–18:28): This isn’t about living in harmony … it’s just about living. The same thing is coming for all of us: a general you can’t negotiate with, an army that doesn’t leave corpses behind on the battlefield. Lord Tyrion tells me a million people live in this city; they’re about to become a million more soldiers in the Army of the Dead. Cersei is initially flippant and then hostile, following which Sandor Clegane (‘the Hound’, played by Rory McCann) walks into the dragonpit with a heavy wooden crate on his back. He sets it on the floor, unlocks it, opens it, and stands back out of the way (20:10). For more than ten seconds, nothing happens. Tension mounts, although there is an element of anticlimax and even comedy as Cersei’s expression makes her condescension clear. The Hound then kicks the crate over and a screaming wight emerges, leaping to its feet and charging Cersei. In the next ten seconds, the camera switches focus among the wight and the faces of Cersei (who is frozen with fright) and Jamie (who is immobile in shock). Cersei is saved by the Hound, who controls the wight with a long chain fastened to its neck. As soon as he pulls it away from her, it turns to attack him and he cuts it in half with his sword. Both halves keep moving and he cuts off a forearm, which also keeps moving. Jon continues the demonstration, burning the wight’s forearm and stabbing its head and torso with a dragonglass dagger (Game of Thrones 7, episode 67: 21:58–22:44): JON: If we don’t win this fight, then that is the fate of every person

in the world. There is only one war that matters – the great war – and it is here.

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DAENERYS: I didn’t believe it until I saw them. I saw them all. JAIME: How many? DAENERYS: Hundred thousand at least.

Cersei’s only remaining ally, Euron Greyjoy (King of the Iron Islands, played by Pilou Asbæk), immediately deserts, his kingdom protected by the sea. Cersei agrees to a truce with Daenerys, but makes it conditional on the Kingdom of the North remaining neutral once the dead have been defeated. Jon refuses, declaring his fealty to Daenerys, Cersei withdraws her offer of a truce, and the parlay is concluded (25:49). Tyrion then risks his life by meeting Cersei in private, in spite of the fact that she has already tried to kill him twice. She is once again uncooperative, but Tyrion works out that she is pregnant and exploits her concern for her unborn child to appeal to her to reconsider. Cersei returns to the dragonpit to ally herself to Daenerys, even suggesting the possibility of a truce once the great war has been won (39:44). The narration then moves to Winterfell (the home of the Starks) and switches between Winterfell and Dragonstone before returning to King’s Landing, where Jaime is issuing the Lannister generals their orders (59:05). Cersei arrives, dismisses them, and chastises Jaimie for his lack of loyalty and intelligence. She has reasoned that if the fire-breathing dragons and superior soldiers of Daenerys’ empire cannot stop the Army of the Dead on their own, the Lannister army will make little difference and will thus continue to defend the Iron Throne, taking advantage of its geographical location 1,500 miles south of Winterfell. She discloses that Euron’s desertion was a ruse and that he is in fact transporting a renown mercenary company to King’s Landing. This revelation is particularly important because it exposes two aspects of the summit that were not obvious. First, Cersei was aware of both what Daenerys would be asking and why, none of which alleviated her genuine fear and disgust when she saw the wight up close. Second, Cersei has manipulated the entire parlay from the very beginning, which means that all Tyrion’s risking of his own life achieved was to put Cersei in the best possible position at its conclusion: not only does she not have to commit her army to the war against the dead, but

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she has a grace period to rearm and reorganise her defence of King’s Landing. The latter is, however, somewhat offset when Jaime states his intention to honour the Lannister commitment to Daenerys on his own and leaves for Winterfell (64:23).

5. The Army of the Dead The Hardhome Massacre narrative provides the first depiction of the Army of the Dead as a whole rather than in part (although the wights that attack Hardhome are merely the vanguard of that army). The Night King has only been seen once before, creating a White Walker in episode 34, and episode 48 reveals his capabilities as a military commander and the qualities of the force he commands in dreadful detail. Later, at the Dragonpit Summit, Jon will describe their combination as a general you can’t negotiate with, an army that doesn’t leave corpses behind on the battlefield, but even this sinister sketch misrepresents the full extent of the threat they pose. Four qualities of the Army of the Dead are demonstrated at the Massacre, the first two related to the relationship between the Army and the Night King and the second two to the relationship between the Army and its adversaries. As mentioned in the third section of this chapter, the Night King issues orders by telepathic or supraorganic means and there can, in consequence, be no miscommunication between him and the White Walkers or him and the wights (the White Walkers appear to exert a similar power over the wights). Nor is there any time delay between the issuing of the orders and the action taken in response. The second quality is that these infallible and instant orders are always obeyed to the letter. Indeed, the wights appear to have no agency of their own (and the White Walkers only limited agency), which means that they never hesitate, question, or disobey. The Night King makes his decision, issues his orders, and the exact action demanded is taken immediately. With respect to its adversaries, the Army of the Dead has at least two self-sustaining force multipliers, strengths that are both advantages over opponents and weaknesses that handicap those opponents. First, the Army of the Dead is absolutely fearless in addition to being completely obedient. The dead know no fear

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and have nothing to fear. Their fearlessness is not just an advantage over human soldiers, but their reckless relentlessness (as well as their supernatural origin) inspires fear in human opponents. The fearlessness of the Army of the Dead makes the dead better soldiers and their opponents more likely to panic. The second quality, which is displayed so dramatically in the last two minutes of the episode, is that every human (or animal) killed by the dead subsequently becomes one of them. Not only is the death of a human opponent a decrease in the number of humans available to fight the dead, but it is also an increase in the number of dead that they are fighting. Each one of the Free Folk killed at Hardhome is one less human available to fight the next battle and one extra wight to be fought in that battle. In nuce, the Army of the Dead is represented as the perfect fighting force: completely obedient, almost invulnerable, and apparently impossible to defeat. This perfect fighting force, intent on killing every living thing, is marching south from the Lands of Always Winter to the Free Folk’s lands Beyond the Wall and will breach the Wall (episode 67) before being defeated at Winterfell (episode 70). With the exception of the Night’s Watch, no one in the Seven Kingdoms has any interest in what happens north of the Wall (which is, itself, several hundred miles north of Winterfell). When coupled with the fact that the Army of the Dead moves relatively slowly, its existence is easily ignored. In spite of the knowledge that the dead nearly destroyed humanity eight millennia ago, no one will believe that they exist in the present of the narrative until they actually see them.1 This includes Jon, who hears an eyewitness account at the very beginning, when Will is executed in episode 1, but does not see a wight until two attack the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch in episode 8. Even in the Citadel in Oldtown, which is the centre of history, medicine, and science in Westeros, the maesters (scholar-physicians) refuse to believe Samwell Tarley’s (played by John Bradley) eyewitness account as late as episode 65. The disbelief and lethargy that characterise attitudes to the Army of the Dead is another of its advantages: if people will only take action when they see the dead for themselves, then they will not have time to mount an effective defence against the Army (which requires the

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deployment of special weapons and tactics). Showing rather than telling is of course precisely the purpose of the Dragonpit Summit and it is difficult to imagine a more compelling demonstration than that staged by Jon and the Hound. Notwithstanding, the Summit exposes a much greater danger than disbelief: even when people see the dead and grasp the threat they pose, some of those people will try and exploit that threat to their personal advantage. In retrospect, the Dragonpit Summit is nothing short of a farce because Cersei never intended to make any concessions whatsoever and remains firm in this conviction despite the great fear and disgust she experiences when confronted with the captured wight. The parlay in general and Tyrion’s risking of his own life in particular leave the allies worse off than they were beforehand. Daenerys and Jon still have to fight the Night King on their own, but they are (temporarily, at least) deceived into believing that they have Cersei’s help. The deception also creates a force multiplier for Cersei. If the allies survive the war, they will be weakened while the Lannisters have been strengthened, having had time to recruit and transport reinforcements. The net impact of the Dragonpit Summit is thus the worst possible outcome for Daenerys, Jon, and humanity and the best possible outcome for Cersei and the Night King.

6. Ecocide So much of what I have written about the fictional world of Game of Thrones in the previous five sections is true of the world in which so many millions of people have watched the series. For ‘dismissing the Night King as legend’ think denying climate change. For believing ‘that the imminent winter is natural rather than supernatural’ think believing climate change is natural rather than human-induced. ­ For in ‘spite of the knowledge that the dead nearly destroyed humanity eight millennia ago’ think in spite of conclusive scientific evidence. For ‘if people will only take action when they see the dead for themselves, then they will not have time to mount an effective defence against the Army’ think if people will only take action when they are affected by climate change themselves, then it will be too late to avert global catastrophe. The symbolism of Game of Thrones

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as a thick, fourfold allegory is not restricted to these examples and is sufficient to situate it in the genre of climate fiction (as well as epic fantasy).2 Although I have focused exclusively on the television series, it is worth noting that my characterisation of Game of Thrones as climate fiction concurs with Martin’s vision for his series of novels.3 His comments on that vision are worth quoting at length (Martin cited in Miller 2018): The people in Westeros are fighting their individual battles over power and status and wealth. And those are so distracting them that they’re ignoring the threat of “winter is coming,” which has the potential to destroy all of them and to destroy their world. And there is a great parallel there to, I think, what I see this planet doing here, where we’re fighting our own battles. We’re fighting over issues, important issues, mind you – foreign policy, domestic policy, civil rights, social responsibility, social justice. All of these things are important. But while we’re tearing ourselves apart over this and expending so much energy, there exists this threat of climate change, which, to my mind, is conclusively proved by most of the data and 99.9 percent of the scientific community. And it really has the potential to destroy our world. To put Martin’s commentary in the context of my concerns, he is not saying that mass harms such as racism and sexism are not important – of course they are, desperately and crucially so in the genocide and sexual slavery that seem to show as little sign of ending in the 21st century as they did in the 16th. Nevertheless, ecocide is an unprecedented threat to humanity, a mass harm unlike the others. Just as dangerous as ecocide itself is the fact that it is easily ignored and vulnerable to exploitation because of its global scale and apparently slow pace.4 My reason for juxtaposing the two scenes explained in sections 3 and 4 respectively – selected from hundreds of scenes across the series – is the way in which they foreground the particular, peculiar, and perilous combination of unprecedented threat and

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vulnerability to exploitation. Jon sees the unprecedented threat first hand during the massacre at Hardhome. Cersei sees it first hand when the wight attacks her at the Dragonpit Summit, but neither her fear nor her disgust prevent her from exploiting the threat at the expense of her enemies. Those of us who are lucky enough to live in Northern Europe are in a corresponding position. King’s Landing is approximately 2,000 miles away from the Wall, which is only breached after the Dragonpit Summit. By the time the Army of the Dead reaches King’s Landing, the populations of the Kingdoms of the North, Mountain and Vale, Isles and Rivers, and the Rock will already have been destroyed. The city is, furthermore, defended by high walls and a professional military. Similarly, those of us in Northern Europe are geographically distant from the extreme weather events that accompany climate change. By the time there is significant loss of life from heat, wind, or water here dozens of thousands of people will already have died on other continents. In addition, Northern European countries are relatively rich, with infrastructures that are able to deal with the impact of extreme weather events better than those of poorer countries. Even here, however, disbelief and the construction of climate change as slow are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. While I was writing the first draft of this chapter, in July 2022, wildfires were raging across Southern Europe from Portugal to Greece. Following an all-time high temperature of 40.2°C on 22 July, wildfires broke out in London and Surrey (the county to the immediate south of London). Ecocide may be becoming less easy to ignore – though the response of the UK’s mass and social media cast doubt on this claim – but it remains vulnerable to exploitation. Cersei exploits the advance of the Army of the Dead before, during, and after the Dragonpit Summit, using logic and reason to weigh probabilities, costs, and benefits for the purpose of gaining relative advantage for the Lannisters over the Targaryens and the Starks. Investors, politicians, and other members of the global social elite that continue to pursue profit from the extraction of fossil fuels and other activities proved to be increasing the global temperature are doing

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exactly the same thing, exploiting a global catastrophe to increase the financial and political advantages they already enjoy. As noted in Chapter 5, David Whyte (2020) makes a compelling case for the corporation as both the perfect vehicle for this exploitation and the legal entity that dominates capitalist world-ecology. In their controversial call for the end of climate science, which I discussed in Chapter 1, Bruce Glavovic, Timothy Smith, and Iain White (2021) make the equally compelling case that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has successfully completed its mission, establishing a global consensus on the science of climate change. Science has brought the reality of climate change to the world in the same way that Jon brought the wight to the dragonpit. Science has a strategy for reducing global warming in the same way that Jon and Daenerys have a strategy for defeating the Night King. The only question left to research is why humanity as a species is acting like Cersei and trying to exploit the advance of the Army of the Dead for individual and national advantage. In the two scenes on which I have focused as well as in its overarching narrative, Game of Thrones reconstructs the meaning and value of ecocide as necessarily rather than contingently anthropocidal. The series reconstructs ecocide as an unprecedented global catastrophe that is also – crucially – easy to ignore and vulnerable to exploitation by the social elite, as depicted in Figure 6.2. absolute certainty

global catastrophe

ecocide

easily ignored FIGURE 6.2

readily exploited

Anthropocidal Ecocide.

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7. World-Ecology What Game of Thrones achieves is the reconstruction of the concept of ecocide as necessarily rather than contingently anthropocidal. The question is if and whether this reconstruction could be useful to criminologists who want to change rather than interpret the world. I began my discussion of ecocide in the introduction to this book, with Polly Higgins’ (2010) definition of extensive destruction of the ecosystems of a given territory. I stated that my interest was zemiological rather than legal and cited Rob White’s (2018) conception of ecocide as environmental harm on a global scale and Whyte’s (2020) conception of ecocide as threats to the sustainability of the planet. White augments his conception with anthropocentric ecocide, genocide through geocide, and ecocide as the crime of the century (all of which I have paraphrased). I noted, in Chapter 1, that these complement rather than replace Higgins’ conception: White is clear that ecocide should be both recognised as the most important of the mass harms and as a crime against humanity. Higgins submitted a proposal for ecocide as an international law in the form of an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to the United Nations Law Commission in 2010. Higgins, Damien Short, and Nigel South (2013) argue that there are compelling legal, moral, and pragmatic reasons for ecocide as a fifth crime against peace, alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression (state use of military force). They conclude that the inclusion of ecocide in the Rome Statute would create a legal framework for the pre-emption, prevention, and prohibition of ecocide. The pre-emptive aspect of the ecocide as a crime would stop environmental destruction at its source (Higgins, Short & South 2013: 262): ‘This has huge implications for climate change – by stopping the major polluters from continuing to produce escalating levels of carbon dioxide, instability in the atmosphere is abated’. Not only is a dual conception of ecocide as a crime and a mass harm required, but both the zemiological and legal aspects of that conception need to be recognised as anthropocidal – as more destructive and more urgent than genocide. Environmental harm on a global scale is anthropocidal because it reduces Earth’s capacity to

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support human life, but extensive destruction of the ecosystems of a given territory is also anthropocidal because even if it does not threaten the lives of the human population of that territory, it contributes to environmental harm on a global scale. Since Higgins’ death in 2019, more than a dozen member states of the ICC have supported the proposal for ecocide as a fifth crime against peace, but the process is pitifully slow, with two more years passing before a definition of ecocide was even submitted (Surma 2021). The attitudes to climate change that Game of Thrones stages so dramatically – disbelief and lethargy – appear to extend from individuals all the way to international alliances. In a similar manner to that in which most of the characters in Game of Thrones accept the meso- and micro-levels of war as more pressing than the macro-level, there seems to be resistance to the idea that ecocide belongs to the same category as genocide, inhumanity, war, and aggression. There is another problem with the ICC, however, which is just as serious as its inability or reluctance to act quickly. In contrast to White, Whyte’s conception of ecocide is an alternative to Higgins’ conception. Whyte points to the long-standing difficulties associated with the prosecution of crimes against humanity and the well-documented failures of the ICC as a prosecuting authority. To begin with, only 123 of the 193 member states of the United Nations are also members of the ICC and those 70 absentees include China, India, Russia, and the US, all of whom are making substantial contributions to global warming. So even if the ICC did expedite the ratification of ecocide as a crime against peace, the legal framework for pre-emption, prevention, and prohibition would not apply to just over a third of the world’s nations. The reason for the absence of these world powers is quite simply that the ICC would impose restrictions that they do not want and cannot be forced to accept – in much the same way that Cersei cannot be forced into an alliance at the Dragonpit Summit. Whyte argues that even if the ICC was an effective prosecuting authority, the architecture of the corporation would ensure that no director, investor, or owner would ever be held legally accountable for ecocide. He (Whyte 2020: 173) does not dismiss the need for a legal

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conception, but defines it in the following terms: ‘being effective means exploring how we can precipitate a wholesale removal of the rights and privileges of corporate shareholders and owners’. Such steps would both dismantle the corporation as a legal entity and alter the way in which capitalism organises nature, which is dominated by the corporation in the neoliberal cycle of capitalist world-ecology. Whyte’s solution thus penetrates to the core of the problem, Moore’s (2015) paradigm moment of a climate-changedriven transition to negative value. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which convened at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, is often regarded with greater optimism than the ICC. The convention holds a Conference of the Parties (COP) annually and the Glasgow Climate Pact was signed by 197 states at the end of COP26 in 2021. COP is nonetheless constituted by a social elite that negotiates in camera and exploits ecocide for national (and perhaps corporate) advantage, once again focusing on the meso at the expense of the macro. Consider that if every country meets its agreed goal for 2030 (which may well not happen), then global warming by 2100 will be 2.4°C, which exceeds the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Climate Accords of 2015 (Masood & Tollefson 2021). Recall that the IPCC (2022) predicts significant and irreversible environmental and social harm at 1.5°C, let alone above it. Humanity’s Dragonpit Summits are failing and we have not found an alliance of fire and ice that can save us. The most important implication of Game of Thrones’ anthropocidal ecocide is that it suggests a simple solution with which criminologists – both critical and mainstream – are already familiar. Anthropocidal ecocide is like violent crime in that it should be prevented by measures aimed at root causes rather than reduced by measures aimed at prosecution and punishment. The root cause is obvious: capitalist world-ecology. World-ecology must be transformed and the most effective way to do that is likely the dismantling of the corporation as a legal entity. Given the unprecedented threat to humanity, however, all attempts to either prevent or reduce ecocide should be pursued in parallel, including the ICC as a potentially pre-emptive institution. I am thus in complete agreement with White that any useful reconstruction of the meaning and

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value of ecocide requires both the zemiological and legal conceptions, but I am also in complete agreement with Whyte that any useful legal challenge must be directed at the corporation first in order to successfully transform world-ecology. In its current – and, according to Moore, final – cycle, capitalist world-ecology simply is anthropocidal ecocide.

Notes 1 Stannis appears to be the sole exception, likely motivated by the combination of his familiarity with blood magic religious practice and his respect for Jon. 2 Climate fiction (or ‘cli-fi’) is fiction that takes climate change and global warming as its subject and usually (although not always) also speculative fiction, i.e. in the science fiction, fantasy, or horror genres. 3 One of the criticisms of Game of Thrones as an adaptation is that HBO over-simplified Martin’s thematic exploration of climate change in the novels (see, for example, Laukkanen 2022). Cinematic and televisual adaptations almost always require abridgement of some sort, which almost always involves a reduction of narrative complexity in some way. I have, in consequence, focused on Game of Thrones as a complex narrative fiction rather than as an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire. 4 For an explanation of the actual rather than apparent pace of climate change, see Wallace-Wells (2019).

References Attebery, B. (2013). Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. New York: Oxford University. Game of Thrones (2011–2019). Originally released 17 April. US: HBO. ——— Game of Thrones (season 1) (2011). Originally released 17 April. US: HBO. ——— Game of Thrones (season 2) (2012). Originally released 1 April. US: HBO. ——— Game of Thrones (season 3) (2013). Originally released 31 March. US: HBO. ——— Game of Thrones (season 4) (2014). Originally released 6 April. US: HBO. ——— Game of Thrones (season 5) (2015). Originally released 12 April. US: HBO. ——— Game of Thrones (season 6) (2016). Originally released 24 April. US: HBO.

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——— Game of Thrones (season 7) (2017). Originally released 16 July. US: HBO. ——— Game of Thrones (season 8) (2019). Originally released 14 April. US: HBO. Glavovic, B.C., Smith, T.F. & White, I. (2021). The Tragedy of Climate Change Science. Climate and Development. DOI: 10.1080/17565529. 2021.2008855. Higgins, P. (2010/2015). Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of Our Planet. London: Shepheard-Walwyn. Higgins, P., Short, D. & South, N. (2013). Protecting the Planet: A Proposal for a Law of Ecocide. Crime, Law and Social Change, 59, 251–266. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Available at: https:// www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-ii/. Jameson, F. (2019). Allegory and Ideology. London: Verso. Laukkanen, M. (2022). Literalizing Hyperobjects: On (mis)Representing Global Warming in a Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. In: Oziewicz, M., Attebery, B. & Dědinová, T. (eds). Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imaging Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media. London: Bloomsbury, 235–245. McGregor, R. (2021a). A Criminology of Narrative Fiction. Bristol: Bristol University. ——— (2021b). Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism. Bristol: Bristol University. Martin, G.R.R. (1996–2011). A Song of Ice and Fire. New York: Bantam. ——— (1996). A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam. ——— (1998). A Clash of Kings. New York: Bantam. ——— (2000). A Storm of Swords. New York: Bantam. ——— (2005). A Feast for Crows. New York: Bantam. ——— (2011). A Dance with Dragons. New York: Bantam. Masood, E. & Tollefson, J. (2021). ‘COP26 Hasn’t Solved the Problem’: Scientists React to UN Climate Deal. 18 November. Nature, 599, 355–356. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-02103431-4. Miller, M. (2018). George R.R. Martin Explains the Real Political Message of Game of Thrones. 17 October. Esquire. Available at: https:// www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a23863674/george-rr-martingame-of-thrones-politics-trump-climate-change/. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso. Surma, K. (2021). A Plea to Make Widespread Environmental Damage an International Crime Takes Center Stage at The Hague. 7 December.

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Inside Climate News. Available at: https://insideclimatenews.org/ news/07122021/ecocide-the-hauge/. Wallace-Wells, D. (2019). The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Penguin. White, R. (2018/2020). Climate Change Criminology. Bristol: Bristol University. Wilson, J. (2021). Shakespeare and Game of Thrones. Abingdon: Routledge. Whyte, D. (2020). Ecocide: Kill the Corporation before It Kills Us. Manchester: Manchester University. Yorke, J. (2013). Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them. London: Penguin.

7 WRITING

The first three chapters of this book were either directly or indirectly concerned with establishing the deconstructive framework that provided both the method and methodology of my subsequent structural analyses of the ways in which complex narrative fictions reconstruct the meaning and value of zemiological concepts. Chapter 1 introduced my preferred zemiological theories: Jason Moore’s (2015) world-ecology, Kehinde Andrews’ (2021) new imperialism, and Ariel Salleh’s (2017) ecofeminism. Chapter 2 distinguished my criminological inquiry from similar and related criminologies, most importantly the constitutive criminology of Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic (1996). I noted that despite its apparent overlap with criminologies that focus on narrative, fiction, or both, the deconstructive framework is more accurately categorised as philosophical. That framework was set out in detail in Chapter 3, where I explained Jacques Derrida’s (1967a, 1967b, 1967c) deconstruction as an instantiation of what Bernard Harcourt (2020) refers to as critical theory – critique that is inseparable from praxis. The next three chapters applied the deconstructive framework to three different complex narratives (or, more accurately, three sets of complex narratives): a trilogy of novels, a franchise of five feature and DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520-8

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short films, and a television series of eight seasons. In this chapter, I situate the structural analyses of Chapters 4–6 in their context as critical theory, which involves both a return to the deconstructive framework and an exploration of that framework as part of a particular philosophical tradition, which is in turn part of an intellectual activity. The name of that activity is writing.

1. Reconstructing Reality The structural analysis in Chapter 4 was of a trilogy of novels by Octavia Butler (1993, 1998, 1989–2005), two published and one unfinished, known collectively as her Earthseed novels: Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Parable of the Trickster. I drew attention to several distinct layers of meaning in the Parables – the rise of Earthseed against the background of social and environmental disintegration; Christian America’s unification of politics, religion, and economics; and the relationship between Olamina and Marc – and explored how they combine to deconstruct political economy by means of the concept of religious economy. I then argued that the Parables reconstruct the meaning and value of political economy as necessarily rather than contingently patriarchal and established a link between patriarchal political economy and ecofeminism. The structural analysis in Chapter 5 focused on the Blade Runner franchise, two feature films and three short films: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007), Shinichiro Watanabe’s Blade Runner Black Out 2022 (2017), Luke Scott’s 2036: Nexus Dawn (2017), Luke Scott’s 2048: Nowhere to Run (2017), and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017). I drew attention to the representation of replicants in two scenes, one from each of the feature films, and the way in which each individually, the two taken together, and the two taken together as part of the overarching narrative of all five films deconstructs capitalism as relying on a disposable workforce whose disposability is justified by biology. I then argued that the Blade Runner films reconstruct the meaning and value of capitalism as necessarily rather than contingently racist and established a link between racial capitalism and new imperialism. The structural analysis in Chapter 6 is of HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019), which

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consists of eight seasons and is based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–2011), an unfinished series of seven novels. I drew attention to the representation of the Army of the Dead in two scenes, one from season 5 and one from season 7, the role each plays within both the allegorical and mythic structures of the series, and the effect of their juxtaposition in deconstructing ecocide as both the greatest threat ever faced by humanity and a threat to which the global elite are unlikely to respond. I then argued that Game of Thrones reconstructs the meaning and value of ecocide as necessarily rather than contingently anthropocidal and established a link between anthropocidal ecocide and world-ecology. What, one might well ask, is it that I think the complex narratives are achieving and, perhaps more importantly, what is it that I think my structural analyses are achieving? The complex narratives are achieving two things. First, each complex narrative represents a zemiological concept from a perspective in which audience or readers are invited to see our existing conception as lacking. We are, of course, free to accept or reject that invitation in whole or in part, but if we reject the invitations to appreciate political economy as patriarchal, capitalism as racist, and ecocide as anthropocidal then we are unlikely to find much reward for our time spent staring at the screen or page. I opened this book by stating that it was about desire, specifically the desire to construct a more just and sustainable reality, and what these complex narratives succeed in doing is imbricating the satisfaction taken in this desire with the desire that drives audience and reader engagement, which activates the sensory, imaginative, affective, and cognitive aspects of the cinematic, televisual, or literary experience. The desire to have, to continue having, and to complete the cinematic, televisual, or literary experience becomes part and parcel of the desire to construct a more just and sustainable reality – at least while we are having that experience. Afterwards, when we reflect on the narrative and our experience of it, we may well change our minds, but during that experience our desire is shaped by the narrative. Second, if we accept the narrative reconceptualisations – patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, and anthropocidal ecocide – and act on them, we will unquestionably reduce harm on a global scale.

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Acting on these reconceptions would take us closer to a more just and sustainable world by heightened sensitivity to the mass harms of ecocide, racism, and sexism. What I mean by this is that if we are genuinely interested in reconstructing a more just and sustainable reality, we will not require empirical evidence to verify that a world with less ecocide, racism, and sexism is a better world than the one in which we are currently living. Combining my two answers, the complex narratives reveal mass harms – or aspects of mass harms – in the fictional world (deconstruction), create a desire for the reduction of those harms, and indicate how those harms can be reduced in the real world (reconstruction). That is what I think the complex narratives are achieving. What I think I am doing with my structural analyses – and in this book as a whole – will require the rest of the chapter to explain.

2. Pragmatism The denotation of ‘philosophy’ is love of wisdom, but that is not a very enlightening or a very useful definition. More specifically, the current discipline of philosophy comprises the five subdisciplines of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics mentioned in Chapter 3, the last three of which are sometimes combined as ‘value theory’. More importantly, philosophy is a – the – metadiscipline that underpins all inquiry and its Western heritage began two and a half millennia ago, with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.1 Every discipline emerged from philosophy and there is a ‘philosophy of ’ every discipline. As such, philosophy provides a foundation for all of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities (the category of inquiry in which it is located). It is widely accepted that the Western heritage split into two distinct traditions following the contribution of Immanuel Kant (who died in 1804), although it may be more accurate to say that the division began with the contribution of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (who died in 1831). Regardless of its precise dating, a Kantian and a Hegelian tradition developed in parallel in the 19th century, were consolidated in opposition to one another in the 20th century, and became increasingly antagonistic as that century progressed (McGregor 2014). The

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Kantian tradition is referred to as either analytic or AngloAmerican philosophy, was pioneered by Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell, and adopted physics as its model (focusing on conceptual analysis). The Hegelian tradition is referred to as either phenomenological-hermeneutic or Continental (meaning European) philosophy, was pioneered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Edmund Husserl, and adopted art criticism as its model (focusing on interpretation). The traditions have differentiated to the extent that they are almost unrecognisable as belonging to the same discipline, in consequence of which it is extremely rare to find a philosopher who finds value in both. The analytic and phenomenological-hermeneutic traditions have both had an impact on the social sciences in general and criminology in particular. Poststructuralism sits firmly in the latter and Derrida and Michel Foucault became two of that tradition’s most famous philosophers at the end of the 20th century (Bourdieu 1984; Attridge & Baldwin 2004). While the analytic and phenomenological-hermeneutic divide was developing, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James began practising a kind of philosophy that shared some of the features of both traditions, but could not be comfortably located in either. Peirce and James shared the phenomenological-hermeneutic view that knowledge of the world cannot be separated from the epistemic agency of the subject, but preferred methods of inquiry that shared the rigour of analytic methodology (Hookway 2012). Pragmatism as a philosophical tradition was consolidated by John Dewey, Jane Addams, and Alain Locke in the early 20th century, when its tenets of identifying truth with usefulness and prioritising transactions with over representations of nature were placed in the service of social justice. The movement never spread beyond the US, however, and failed to gather the momentum of the other two traditions. Pragmatism had, in consequence, all but fallen into obscurity by the time Richard Rorty (1979, 1982) popularised what would be called ‘neopragmatism’ in the 1980s. Rorty revitalised a tradition that was becoming obsolete and provided the catalyst for the dispersal and diversification of that tradition, which developed its own subdivisions and left the borders of the US with the contributions of Thomas Alexander, Cornel West, Cheryl Misak,

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and Gregory Fernando Pappas. Pragmatism is currently thriving, although it has never succeeded in rivalling either of the other two traditions, which is why 21st-century philosophy is usually regarded as remaining divided into two (rather than three) traditions. Rorty was one of the most famous public intellectuals in the US at the time of his death in 2007. His career is notable for his development of neopragmatism and for his crossing of the philosophical Rubicon. Rorty was trained as an analytic philosopher, completing his PhD at Yale in 1956 and being awarded a professorship at Princeton in 1970 (Gross 2008). He became increasingly disillusioned with the tradition during the 1970s and turned his back on it with the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979), which rejected truth as the criterion for philosophy. Rorty was sympathetic to James (1907: 42), for whom truth is simply ‘the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons’. If truth is to be retained by the natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities, it must be truth as usefulness rather than truth as providing direct access to reality. Rorty concluded his academic career at Stanford, where he was Professor of Comparative Literature from 1998 until his retirement in 2005. He was not, however, embraced by the phenomenologicalhermeneutic tradition, being regarded as too conservative to be placed in the same category as Derrida and Foucault in virtue of his commitment to liberalism. Rorty’s (1982) second book, a collection of essays entitled Consequences of Pragmatism, demonstrated his affinity for Dewey and the originality of his own contribution to the pragmatist tradition. Both Rorty and Dewey were concerned with destroying the distinctions among philosophy, science, art, and religion, but Rorty’s pragmatism was distinguished by his overriding desire to place philosophical inquiry entirely at the service of democratic politics (Voparil 2021). For Rorty, philosophical or other inquiry is only ‘true’ – or valuable – to the extent that it facilitates and enables democracy. My particular interest in Rorty (1978) is in an essay he published in the literary studies journal New Literary History, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida’, which was a response to and continuation of one of James’ (1907) lectures, ‘The Present Dilemma in Philosophy’.

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3. Philosophy as a Kind of Writing ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’ is divided into four parts. Rorty (1978: 141) opens with two contrasting and incompatible views of the disciplines of physics, ‘right and wrong’ (normative ethics or ethical theory), and philosophy. He employs this series of contrasts to introduce the two traditions of philosophy. Rorty (1978: 143) then introduces Derrida and summarises his project (or at least one aspect of it) as answering the question of why analytic philosophers object to the discipline of philosophy being described as ‘a kind of writing’, i.e. a literary genre whose limits are determined by convention rather than by form or content. Rorty suggests that writing as a mode of representation is an obstacle to be negotiated for Kantian philosophers and positivist scientists: they want to show us their findings, to point the truth out to us rather than represent it in writing. Part II is an explanation of Derrida’s position on writing, representation, and transparency that overlaps with my discussion of deconstruction in Chapter 3. Rorty (1978: 153; emphasis in original) addresses deconstruction as post-phenomenological (as well as post-structural) in part III, exploring Derrida’s advance on Heidegger, which I shall summarise with the following quote, in which ‘truth’ can be substituted for the trace: ‘Writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general, it is not the trace itself. The trace itself does not exist’. In the final section, Rorty summarises the two intellectual traditions as two different kinds of activity, writing and showing. What is particularly interesting is that showing, which I shall refer to as ‘righting’ for reasons that will become obvious, is not restricted to the institutions of analytic philosophy and positivist science, but is also the preferred activity of religious institutions. Scientists and priests alike want to show us the Truth (truth-with-a-capital-t) or God (god-with-a-capital-g) without the interference of representation. As already mentioned, the essay begins with two contrasting descriptions of physics, selected by Rorty because it is the model of inquiry that analytic philosophers attempt to emulate. The positivist description of physics is that ‘there are some invisible things which are parts of everything else and whose behavior determines the way

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everything else works’ (Rorty 1978: 141). For the pragmatist, ‘physicists are men [sic] looking for a new interpretation of the Book of Nature’ (Rorty 1978: 141). In the former, physics proceeds in a linear fashion, building on previous progress and aiming for the point when it will, quite literally, be able to reveal the Truth about everything. The latter draws on Thomas Kuhn’s (2012: 8 & 5) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was first published in 1962 and distinguished between ‘normal science’ and ‘revolutionary’ science. Periods of normal science are interrupted by scientific revolutions that involve a shift to a new paradigm, initiating a new version of normal science which is incommensurable with the previous one. As such, scientific progress from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Newton to Einstein is non-linear and there is no indication that physics will reach an end point that is not itself subject to a paradigm shift. In his next two examples, Rorty examines ethical theory and philosophy in the same way, decoupling both of them from the concept of truth. Referring to all three of physics, ethical theory, and philosophy, he (Rorty 1978: 143) concludes that there are two separate activities under discussion and that writing ‘takes science as one (not especially privileged nor interesting) sector of culture, a sector which, like all the other sectors, only makes sense when viewed historically’. Rorty proceeds to a discussion of Derrida in which he frames deconstruction as providing a sketch of how the intellectual landscape might look in the absence of a Kantian, truthbased hegemony, in a similar manner to that in which Derrida’s predecessors detached morality from religion. As might be expected, Rorty focuses on Derrida’s prioritisation of writing over speech as a form of representation that provides a reminder of language’s inability to make reality present (because of the arbitrary and unstable relationship between words and concepts that I discussed in Chapter 3). With its publication shortly before the release of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, there is a strong sense in which Rorty’s essay is a declaration of and rationale for his disenchantment with analytic philosophy.2 It is also noteworthy that this declaration was made in a literary studies journal rather than either an analytic or phenomenological-hermeneutic philosophy journal – literary studies is a discipline dedicated exclusively to writing and it is inconceivable that there could be literary theory or literary criticism

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without writing. In the previous section of this chapter, however, I introduced Rorty in the context of the pragmatic tradition of philosophy, which is neither analytic nor phenomenologicalhermeneutic, as inaugurating neopragmatism and very likely saving the ‘third way’ in philosophy from extinction at the end of the 20th century. Rorty’s focus in the essay is, as the subtitle suggests, for the most part on Derrida and pragmatism is not even mentioned. James is mentioned, but only once and not cited. Peirce, Dewey, Addams, and Locke are not mentioned at all. It seems that this is thus a declaration of Rorty’s support for phenomenologicalhermeneutic philosophy (specifically, for Derrida’s deconstruction within that tradition) rather than pragmatism. That would be an accurate summary of the essay, but a more enlightening summary would be that it is a declaration of and dedication to writing rather than righting. Writing is an activity undertaken by philosophers in both the phenomenological-hermeneutic and pragmatic traditions, distinguishing them from philosophers in the analytic tradition, who undertake the activity of righting.

4. Writing vs Righting Rorty does not actually define either writing or righting in the manner of the necessary and sufficient conditions favoured by analytic philosophy (which would be inconsistent with the aim of the essay), but describes writing in more detail and makes the explicit link with Derrida, providing further elucidation. What I am referring to as righting and what Rorty describes as showing is most clearly set out in the fourth and final part of his essay. For Rorty, analytic philosophy eschews writing as an impediment to its revelatory power – its capacity to reveal the Truth – because revelation involves direct access to reality. As noted in Section 3 of this chapter, Rorty (1978: 166, emphasis in original) values Derrida for (among other things) demonstrating how to conduct inquiries without aiming at truth: Kantian philosophy, on Derrida’s view, is a kind of writing which would like not to be a kind of writing. It is a genre

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which would like to be a gesture, a clap of thunder, an epiphany. That is where God and [hu]man, thought and its object, words and the world meet, we want speechlessly to say; let no further words come between the happy pair. Kantian philosophers would like not to write, but just to show. Kantian philosophers, like their religious counterparts, desire revelation and revelation does not come via the written or spoken word but by the perception of the thing itself. If we do not already perceive the Truth, then we may need someone to show us where it is, to point us in the right direction, to give us a push along the path. None of the showing, pointing, or pushing require writing – or, indeed, words – at all and to represent the Truth (by language or pictures) is precisely to not reveal it: if I am reading about Truth, I am not looking at it; I am looking at a description (representation) of it. What physicists, philosophers, and priests want is therefore righting – revelation of the right answer – which is distinct from writing. Rorty (1978: 156) elaborates on this distinction by using Kuhn’s (2012) distinction between normal (positivist) and revolutionary (realist) science: In normal physics, normal philosophy, normal moralizing or preaching, one hopes for the normal thrill of just the right piece fitting into just the right slot, with a shuddering resonance which makes verbal commentary superfluous and inappropriate. Writing, as Derrida says in commenting on Rousseau, is to this kind of simple “getting it right” as masturbation is to standard, solid, reassuring sex. This is why writers are thought effete in comparison with scientists – the “men [sic] of action” of our latter days. Revolutionary, realist, or critical scientists and philosophers are writers rather than righters. Writing is an activity in which disciplinary claims of providing direct access to Truth are rejected in favour of interdisciplinary approximations of a truth to which access will always be partial and temporary. For Kantians and positivists, writing is a necessary evil, a flawed but unavoidable means to the end of communicating their Truth(s).

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The key point for Rorty (1978: 156–157, emphasis in original) is that Kantians and poststructuralists are engaged in two different activities, not inquiring into different subjects: The important thing to notice is that the difference between the two forms of activity is not subject matter – not, for instance, a matter of the difference between the flinty particles of the hard sciences and the flexible behavior of the soft ones – but rather is determined by normality or abnormality. Normality, in this sense, is accepting without question the stage-setting in the language which gives demonstration (scientific or ostensive) its legitimacy. Revolutionary scientists need to write, as normal scientists do not. Revolutionary politicians need to write, as parliamentary politicians do not. Dialectical philosophers like Derrida need to write, as Kantian philosophers do not. Writing is thus an activity that is a means to an end for Kantians and the end itself for poststructuralists. Poststructuralists and pragmatists know that there is no final or absolute truth – no Truth – that will be reached, only ideas, concepts, and theories that are better or worse for the ends to which we wish to use them. Harcourt’s (2020: 46) reconstruction of critical theory, which aims to transform rather than interpret the world, is very relevant here: a reconstructed critical theory precisely represents an endless unveiling of illusions to demonstrate how our beliefs distribute resources and material conditions. It traces the effects of reality of our beliefs and material practices, recognizing that, as it unveils illusions, it creates new ones that will need to be unpacked later. It is relentless in this way. It engages in a form of recursive unmasking – an infinite regress – that endlessly exposes the distributional effects of belief systems and material conditions.3 For writers – as opposed to righters – knowledge is always only partial. A writer aims to improve on what has gone before by providing ideas, concepts, or theories that are more useful or that

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unveil more of the illusions of the righters, but expects – indeed hopes – that her own writing will be criticised, unveiled, and replaced. Part of what it means to be a writer rather than a righter, one of the features of Derrida’s project that Rorty develops, is a lack of respect for the divisions between disciplines. Once one differentiates between righting and writing and makes a commitment to the latter, then no sphere of culture (science, philosophy, religion, or art) is any more privileged than any other. They are all simply tools that are better or worse at achieving certain ends. Writing itself – the activity of pragmatic philosophy, deconstructive critique, and critical theory – is not (and has never been) the preserve of pragmatists, literary critics, or critical theorists, but of anyone who undertakes the activity of writing. I share a commitment to all three of Derrida, Rorty, and Harcourt and the activity I am undertaking in this book is writing. A significant part of that writing has involved the analysis and evaluation of a different kind of writing – fiction, communicated in the linguistic (Parables) and hybrid (Blade Runner and Game of Thrones) modes of representation in my examples – to which I turn next.

5. Fiction as a Kind of Writing If pragmatic philosophy is a kind of writing, then it has more in common with other kinds of writing – like phenomenologicalhermeneutic philosophy, art, and fiction – than with analytic philosophy, positivist science, and religion. As such, insight into writing can be found from sources beyond academia and one of the most useful is Stephen King’s (2000) On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, which combines autobiography with an exploration of writing as an activity. King is one of a handful of authors who has sold hundreds of millions of books.4 He is best known as a writer of horror fiction, specifically as the author of: The Shining, Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, Misery, Pet Sematary, and his apocalyptic masterpiece, The Stand. In an interview in 2022, King listed his favourite five stories, which include only one of his bestsellers (Russell 2022): ‘Survivor Type’, Misery, Lisey’s Story, ‘The Body’, and Billy Summers. What is particularly interesting about this list is that only one of his favourites has

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a supernatural element (Lisey’s Story), much of which is represented with great subtlety. I think King is at his best without the supernatural and ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’, for example, is one of the finest novellas I have ever read. On Writing is divided into five uneven sections: ‘C.V.’, ‘What Writing Is’, ‘Toolbox’, ‘On Writing’, and ‘On Living: A Postscript’. The first and last of these are autobiographical and my interest is in the middle three. The answer to what writing is, is straightforward (King 2000: 77): ‘Telepathy, of course’. King uses ‘telepathy’ literally rather than metaphorically, introducing writing as an activity with the capacity to transcend both time and space. Telepathy requires clarity of communication, for which King (2000: 85) recommends that the writer assemble a toolbox: I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work. King’s toolbox consists of four levels, with the most common tools, vocabulary and grammar, on top. The second level is style and the third the paragraph, which is where the activity starts for King (2000: 103): ‘I would argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing – the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words’. The fourth and final level is structure, the development of paragraphs into sections or chapters and sections or chapters into a manuscript draft. Social scientists who have marked student assessments; peer-reviewed journal articles, book proposals, and grant applications; and edited journals and books will immediately recognise the value of the toolbox beyond the kind of writing we call fiction. Vocabulary, grammar, style, and structure are indeed essential to clarity of communication and they are also so often undeveloped – not just by our students, but by ourselves as well. Having assembled his toolbox, King explores writing as an activity by discussing three of its core features: practice, environment,

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and routine. The writer must practise her craft often and regularly and practice includes both reading and writing. ‘If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut’ (King 2000: 112). If social scientists want to write well, we need to write a lot and read a lot. Many students do not like either writing or reading, but they have to do at least some of both for a temporary period if they are to graduate. I have, however, met many colleagues who take no pleasure in writing and even a few who take no pleasure in reading and I wonder what drew them to the profession in the first place. Second, King links his professional success to a stable and ordered environment for practising the craft, which in his own case involved good health and a happy marriage. ‘The biggest aid to regular […] production is working in a serene atmosphere. It’s difficult for even the most naturally productive writer to work in an environment where alarms and excursions are the rule rather than the exception’ (King 2000: 120). I know many colleagues who have produced great work amidst almost constant alarms and excursions, but agree with King about the desirability of serenity – it has certainly proved invaluable to my own practice as a writer. Finally, King prefers a routine, which he justifies by comparing the activity of writing to the (in)activity of sleeping. This comparison and his conception of creative sleep is worth quoting in full (King 2000: 122): I think we’re actually talking about creative sleep. Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule – in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk – exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind

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and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night – six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight – so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction. Creativity is as crucial to the social sciences as it is to fiction. Perennial problems require creative solutions and the fact that many social problems are perennial is suggestive of the inadequacy of the solutions offered. More importantly, social (and natural) scientists now face a problem unprecedented in both its scope and significance: climate change or, as I have conceptualised it in this book, anthropocidal ecocide. If creative solutions are not invented and implemented – and very soon – then massive loss of life can be expected within the next few decades.

6. Truth-Telling? In Section 5 of this chapter, I discussed King’s exploration of the activity of writing as providing exemplary insight into the activity as a whole rather than just fiction as a kind of writing. But if I am looking to King as a guide to the activity of writing, then it seems I am no longer interested in truth, in which case one might well ask what is left for pragmatic philosophy. The distinction between Rorty and King is broken down and while we might hold the two of them in equal regard, one seems to be writing about reality (even if he admits that he can never reveal it) and the other about fantasy (impossible, improbable, and unlikely versions of reality). The same could (and is) said of the Parables, the Blade Runner films, and Game of Thrones – they are science fictions and fantasies, representations with only a tenuous and fragile link to reality. This is a concern expressed in many different ways and is one of the reasons that the criminologies discussed in Chapter 2 have been reluctant to engage with fiction. The two criminologies one might expect to have made the most use of fiction – narrative and cultural – either fail to recognise the link between fictional representation and actual reality (the former) or understand the link in terms of a mirror that

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always distorts the reality (the latter). Even in the very niche area of what I called pulp criminology, the character of the link is highly disputed.5 As a writer rather than a righter, I am not interested in Truth but I am interested in truth, conceived as a relation between representation and reality. The first point to note is that if there is a relation between representation and reality, it would be curious if that relation always, i.e. necessarily, distorted the reality. If a link is admitted, then there is always the possibility of accurate representation, even if that is rarely achieved in practice. My point being that once one admits a link, it seems likely that representations can either represent reality, misrepresent reality, or combine representation with misrepresentation. If representations always represent or always misrepresent, then the burden of proof lies with those making this counter-intuitive claim and I have yet to see a convincing argument for the latter from cultural criminologists (McGregor 2018, 2021a, 2023). Mirrors do distort reality (by swapping left and right), but once one understands that distortion, they provide a pretty accurate representation of the object they reflect – accurate enough to stop me cutting my throat when I shave. But what about fictional representations, what could the relationship between protagonist Andy Dufresne and the world in which I read ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ possibly be? The relation between fiction and truth (but not Truth) is neither paradoxical nor puzzling – or was at least not regarded as such until the birth of modernism in the second half of the 19th century. The relation between fictional characters, settings, and actions and contemporary or historical people, places, and events is one of reference to universals rather than reference to particulars.6 The notion is from Aristotle’s (2004) famous observation on the superiority of poetry over history: history refers to what has happened (particulars) and poetry to the kinds of thing that can happen (universals). In other words, nonfiction (history) is about particular contemporary or historical people, places, or events and fiction (poetry) is about types of people, places, or events. ‘Andy Dufresne’ refers to a fictional character and the relation between ‘AndyDufresne-in-Rita-Hayworth-and-Shawshank-Redemption’ and the

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world in which I read King’s (1982) novella is the relation between the fictional particular and an actual universal, which might be ‘a banker who is wrongly convicted of murder’ or, less prosaically, ‘a man of great patience and resilience’. People like Dufresne – apparently unremarkable, but possessing an almost superhuman resilience and apparently limitless patience – have and do exist. The relation between fictional particulars and actual universals applies not just to characters, settings, and actions, but to works of fiction as a whole. ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ might thus be considered to instantiate the universal of ‘the redemptive power of hope’ or, of more interest to the criminologist, ‘the dehumanising quality of incarceration’. If the reference of ‘Andy-Dufresne-in-Rita-Hayworth-and-Shawshank-Redempt ­ ion’ to ‘a man of great patience and resilience’ seems too distinct from the reference of ‘Rita-Hayworth-in-Rita-Hayworth-andShawshank-Redemption’ to (the historical) ‘Rita Hayworth’, then there is – again – a simple way to differentiate what we might call two types of truth: accuracy and authenticity. ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ is accurate if, for example, King’s description of (Dufresne’s poster of ) Hayworth corresponds with her actual appearance. The novella is authentic if, for example, Dufresne is a credible instantiation of ‘a man of great patience and resilience’. Truth in fiction is usually (but not always) concerned with the authenticity of themes, characters, settings, and actions. One of the many merits of On Writing is the extent to which King is concerned with truth, which can be understood in terms of authenticity. The first explicit mention is at a crucial stage of the activity, once the writer’s toolbox is assembled and she is about to put fingertip to key (King 2000: 123, emphasis in original): So okay – there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all … as long as you tell the truth.

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Shortly after, King (2000: 124) comments on the specific relationship between representation and reality or authenticity and accuracy that characterises writing: ‘the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies’. He explains this relationship in more detail in a discussion of John Grisham’s novel, The Firm (King 2000: 126–127, emphasis in original): Although I don’t know for sure, I’d bet my dog and lot that John Grisham never worked for the mob. All of that is total fabrication (and total fabrication is the fiction-writer’s purest delight). He was once a young lawyer, though, and he has clearly forgotten none of the struggle. Nor has he forgotten the location of the various financial pitfalls and honeytraps that make the field of corporate law so difficult. Using plainspun humor as a brilliant counterpoint and never substituting cant for story, he sketches a world of Darwinian struggle where all the savages wear three-piece suits. And – here’s the good part – this is a world impossible not to believe. Grisham has been there, spied out the land and the enemy positions, and brought back a full report. He told the truth of what he knew, and for that if nothing else, he deserves every buck The Firm made. The first clause of the last sentence is equally important for social scientists: we must tell the truth of what we know and our knowledge must be acquired by methods that are both valid and reliable. Similarly, social science at its best – whether an article or a monograph – presents a world impossible not to believe (often, a world of cause and effect). King (2006: 609) makes a similar point in Lisey’s Story, through author surrogate Scott Landon, ‘Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice’. King (2000: 162–163) is also concerned with the joy of the activity of writing, taking pleasure in the process as well as the product, which he describes with an example from writing The Stand: At one moment I had none of this; at the next I had all of it. If there is any one thing I love about writing more than

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the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects. I have heard it called “thinking above the curve,” and it’s that; I’ve heard it called “the over-logic,” and it’s that, too. The sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects will be familiar to social scientists. It might come after weeks, months, or even years of hard work on a particular project or it might not come at all. King (2000: 200) returns to pleasure when identifying his motivation for becoming and remaining a writer: ‘I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever’. When King says he writes for the joy of it, I believe him. I also see an absence of this joy in many of my colleagues, a large part of which may well be due to the neoliberalisation of UK Higher Education that began in 2012 and appears to be irreversible as it enters its second decade (McGregor 2021d).

7. Criminology as a Kind of Writing When I first studied criminology, coming to it from philosophy, I was tempted to align mainstream criminology with analytic philosophy and critical criminology with phenomenologicalhermeneutic philosophy. In the terms set out by Rorty in his essay and me in this chapter, one might bracket analytic philosophy, normal physics, and conventional criminology as righting and phenomenological-hermeneutic philosophy, pragmatic philosophy, revolutionary physics, and critical criminology as writing. This would, however, be a gross oversimplification. For starters, it would not do justice to the substantial amount of rigorous, sophisticated, and pragmatic research being undertaken in the tradition that is, somewhat dismissively, referred to as ‘conventional’ criminology (or, with outright contempt, as ‘administrative’ criminology). Rorty’s distinction between writing and righting is more relevant to broad approaches to the social sciences than to either criminological frameworks or criminological theories. An approach is, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions about social science research. There are three broad

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categories of approach, although they are identified by several different (and at times confusing) terms: positivism, constructionism, and realism. These approaches can, again broadly, be distinguished by their relationship to truth (or, more accurately, to truth value). Positivism is an approach to social science that assumes that the social world is an external reality, that social facts have a truth value, and that researchers can access the reality and discover the truth values. Constructionism assumes that the social world is experienced as an external reality, but that researchers can only observe and describe the experience, in consequence of which social facts do not have a truth value. Realism assumes that the social world is an external reality and that social facts have a truth value, but that researchers have only partial access to reality, in consequence of which criminological knowledge is approximate to rather than correspondent with reality (McGregor 2021a). I (McGregor 2021a: 56) described the last of these, which is my preferred approach, as ‘critical realism’ in order to draw attention to its relation to Roy Bhaskar’s (1975, 1987, 1989) approach to natural science and Jon Frauley (2021c: 2) refers to it as ‘perspectival realism’. There seems to be a straightforward (if, perhaps, superficial) set of relations among analytic philosophy and positivism, phenomenological-hermeneutic philosophy and constructionism, and pragmatic philosophy and realism. As my discussion in this chapter suggests, righting can be described in terms of positivism and writing in terms of either constructionism or realism. Criminologists can thus either undertake the activity of righting or writing; they are righters if they adopt a positivist approach and writers if they adopt a constructionist or realist approach. I have developed the deconstructive framework in and of this book from within the realist approach. As such, the deployment of the deconstructive framework in the structural analyses of Chapters 4–6 is writing about writing. The works of narrative fiction are themselves writing – writing about patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, and anthropocidal ecocide – and my analyses and evaluations of these works are writing about writing. This chapter is one step further removed – writing about (the activity of ) writing about (fiction as a kind of ) writing. I am confident that

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the kind of writing we call fiction has pragmatic value for criminology, both for the reasons explained in Section 6 of this chapter and because I am sceptical about the usefulness of the distinction between fictional and nonfictional narratives, particularly when those narratives are complex rather than basic (McGregor 2018). I am also convinced, however, that even criminologists who do not recognise the value of fiction or who (as in the case of the cultural criminologists I have criticised) misrecognise its valence as negative, should recognise that the activity they are undertaking is writing. One does not have to write about writing, but unless one recognises that what one is doing is writing, one is likely to perpetrate harm by asserting that one has discovered the Truth. Rorty (1978) insists first on the fallibility of writing and then on the desirability of that fallibility. When we write, we understand that the next writer may rewrite our social scientific significance (by developing or criticising us), write us out of the disciplinary canon (by pointing out flaws we failed to perceive), or indeed write us off (by ignoring us). When we right, we gesture towards a Truth that society fails to recognise at its peril and act with the conviction such revelation brings. Harcourt (2020) refers to critical theory (and the praxis with which it is intertwined) in similar terms, as an infinite – but not vicious – regress in which we as social scientists work towards a better understanding of phenomena, an understanding that will never be complete because we will never be able to access reality directly. Harcourt’s goal is, like Rorty’s, to be rewritten, to have his critical theory developed by others and transformed into more nuanced and useful critical theories in the future. Writing as an activity thus involves a degree of humility that righting does not and the thought that we might be wrong – or that someone else might have a better way of doing things – is essential when it comes to putting our writing into practice, whether the praxis that accompanies our critique is teaching, activism, or something else. In this chapter, I have stated the conclusions of my critique, reflected on that critique as a kind of writing, and located that critique within the broad approaches to social scientific inquiry. In the final chapter of this book, I turn to praxis, to the question of what can – and should – be done about the conclusions I have reached.

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Notes 1 The Western heritage actually begins with the Presocratics (preSocratics), but as only fragments of their philosophy remain I have followed the disciplinary norm and taken Socrates as my starting point. 2 I am, quite obviously, sympathetic to Rorty – not only to his pragmatism but to his disillusion with the tradition in which he was trained. My doctoral training was in analytic aesthetics, a research programme of whose value I am now highly sceptical. I have set out my reasons for this scepticism in a short symposium on Analytic Aesthetics in Crisis in Etica & Politica (McGregor 2022). In nuce, they are that analytic aesthetics has almost nothing to say about ethics and politics and what it does have to say about art and artworks is almost completely ignored by the artworld. It is not surprising that the subdiscipline has produced very few public intellectuals, but it is a further concern that the two it has – the late Roger Scruton (1944–2020) and Kathleen Stock (who left mainstream academia in October 2021) – are both ultra-conservatives. 3 I cited the final sentence of this quote in Chapter 3. 4 Karen Heller (2016) claims that King has sold 350 million books, but this claim appears to be based on a 2006 estimate so the figure is no doubt substantially larger now, six years after the publication of Heller’s article. 5 See, for example, my prolonged – and, I should add, highly productive – exchange with Jon Frauley (Frauley 2010, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c; McGregor 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c). 6 In using ‘reference’ I am not suggesting that fictional representations make universals present any more than I am suggesting that nonfictional representations make particulars present. As discussed in both this chapter and Chapter 3, no practice within the activity of writing provides direct access to reality. Meaning is determined by differance rather than reference but there is nonetheless a referential relation between a representation and the reality it represents (which is, of course, socially constructed by language). My point here is that fiction and nonfiction are both representations, just of different kinds, and that they can be distinguished by means of their referents.

References 2036: Nexus Dawn (2017). Directed by Luke Scott. YouTube. 30 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgsS3nhRRzQ. 2048: Nowhere to Run (2017). Directed by Luke Scott. YouTube. 16 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ9Os8cP_gg. Andrews, K. (2021). The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. London: Allen Lane.

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Aristotle. (2004). Poetics. Trans. P. Murray & T.S. Dorsch. In: Murray, P. (ed.). Classical Literary Criticism. London: Penguin, 57–97. Attridge, D. & Baldwin, T. (2004). Jacques Derrida: Deep Thinker or Truth-thief? 11 October, The Guardian. Available at: http://www. guardian.co.uk/news/2004/oct/11/guardianobituaries.france. Bhaskar, R. (1975). A Realist Theory of Science. London: Verso. ——— (1987). Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso. ——— (1989). Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. London: Verso. Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007). Directed by Ridley Scott. US: Warner Bros. Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Directed by Denis Villeneuve. US: Warner Bros. Blade Runner Black Out 2022 (2017). Directed by Shinichiro Watanabe. YouTube. 27 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rrZk9sSgRyQ. Bourdieu, P. (1984). La mort de Michel Foucault : le plaisir de savoir. 27 June. Le Monde. Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1984/06/27/le-plaisir-de-savoir_3024417_1819218.html. Butler, O.E. (1993/2019). Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central. ——— (1998/2019). Parable of the Talents. London: Headline. ——— (1989–2005). Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2031-OEB2215. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library. Derrida, J. (1967a/1978). Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge. ——— (1967b/2011). Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. L. Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. ——— (1967c/1976). Of Grammatology. Trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Frauley, J. (2010). Criminology, Deviance, and the Silver Screen: The Fictional Reality and the Criminological Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ——— (2021a). Book Review: Rafe McGregor. A Criminology of ­Narrative Fiction. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal. Advance access available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/ 17416590211015747. ——— (2021b). The Poverty of the Comparative Orthodoxy: Cultural Criminology, Perspectival Realism and Conceptual Variation. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 66 (September), 1–12. ——— (2021c). Fictional Realities and Criminology: Apprehending Social Reality through Narrative Fiction. Journal of Theoretical and ­Philosophical Criminology, 13 (October), 111–125.

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Game of Thrones (2011–2019). Originally released 17 April. US: HBO. Gross, N. (2008). Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Harcourt, B.E. (2020). Critique and Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action. New York: Columbia. Heller, K. (2016). Meet the Writers Who Still Sell Millions of Books. Actually, Hundreds of Millions. 20 December. The Washington Post. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/meetthe-elite-group-of-authors-who-sell-100-million-books-or-350million/2016/12/20/db3c6a66-bb0f-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story. html. Henry, S. & Milovanovic, D. (1996). Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism. London: SAGE. Hookway, C. (2012). The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism. Oxford: Oxford University. James, W. (1907/1975). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. King, S. (1982/2000). Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. In: King, S. (ed.). Different Seasons. New York: Viking, 9–113. ——— (2000). On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ——— (2006/2011). Lisey’s Story. London: Hodder. Kuhn, T. (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 4th ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. McGregor, R. (2014). Introduction: The Analytic Engagement with Continental Philosophy. International Journal of Philosophical Studies Special Issue: Continental Engagement with Analytic Philosophy 22, 3 (2014), 307–311. ——— (2018). Narrative Justice. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. ——— (2020). Criminological Fiction: What Is It Good for? Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 12 ( January), 18–36. ——— (2021a). A Criminology of Narrative Fiction. Bristol: Bristol University. ——— (2021b). A Synopsis: A Criminology of Narrative Fiction. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 13 (October), 92–98. ——— (2021c). Response to Frauley, Simecek, Slugan, and Whitecross. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 13 (October), 148–157. ——— (2021d). Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism. Bristol: Bristol University. ——— (2022). Analytic Aesthetics from Theory to Practice? Reply to Vidmar Jovanović. Etica & Politica, XXIV (1), 165–174.

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——— (2023). Book Review: Marianne Colbran. Crime and Investigative Reporting in the UK. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590231153276. Martin, G.R.R. (1996–2011). A Song of Ice and Fire. New York: Bantam. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso. Rorty, R. (1978). Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida. New Literary History, 10 (1), 141–160. ——— (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. ——— (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Russell, C. (2022). Stephen King Names His Top Five Stephen King Stories. 7 June. Far Out. Available at: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/ stephen-king-top-five-stephen-king-stories/. Salleh, A. (2017). Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. 2nd ed. London: Zed. Voparil, C. (2021). Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. New York: Oxford University.

8 PRAXIS

I concluded Chapter 7 by locating the critique of the previous three chapters within the broad approaches to social scientific inquiry and within the activity of writing, which I distinguished from righting. I suggested that self-reflection on and self-awareness of writing rather than righting is essential when it comes to social scientific critique and praxis. When I set out the deconstructive framework that underpinned my subsequent critique in Chapter 3, I located Jacques Derrida’s (1967a, 1967b, 1967c) deconstruction within Bernard Harcourt’s (2020) tradition of critical theory, critique that not only aims to change rather than interpret the world but is inseparable from praxis. If critique always aspires to praxis, then writing is always a part of rather than a precursor to teaching, activism, or whatever other form that praxis takes. As such, the significance of the humility that accompanies writing as an activity cannot be overstated. The recognition that we might be wrong or that someone else might have a better way of doing things and that even if we are right now, we might be wrong later, is crucial to critique-driven praxis. As its title indicates, this book is for the most part theoretical and I have followed literary theoretical and critical practice by employing secondary rather than primary sources (or, DOI: 10.4324/9781003287520-9

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more accurately, employing complex narrative fictions as primary sources), with the exception of The Huntington’s Octavia E. Butler Papers archive in Chapter 4. In this final chapter I use interviews to demonstrate praxis in action, drawing on the critical praxis of four contemporary critical philosophers: Nuraan Davids, Victoria Canning, Alice Nah, and Sara Vestergren.

1. Critical Philosophy I began this book by identifying the three mass harms with which it is concerned: ecocide, racism, and sexism. I suggested that the most urgent of these, ecocide, could only be reduced by reconstructing reality, i.e. transforming what philosophers have referred to as the life-world, being-in-the-world, or form of life. I cited Naomi Klein’s (2014: 10) comment on climate change being both an unprecedented challenge and an ‘historic opportunity’ with approval in Chapter 1. Ecocide provides this opportunity in virtue of three features: it is – or should be – sufficiently catastrophic to motivate and mobilise a global response; it appears to be linked to the mass harms of racism and sexism; and an effective response requires the reconstruction of reality. In other words, if the mass harms of ecocide, racism, and sexism are connected, then a reconstruction of reality that reduces one has the potential to reduce all three. The complex narrative fictions analysed in Chapters 4–6 were selected for the ways in which they revealed these connections in their deconstruction of mass harms and the ways in which they revealed how all three mass harms could be reduced in a reconstructed reality. I argued that the link is Jason Moore’s (2015) Capitalocene, the necessarily rather than contingently ecocidal capitalist world-ecology, which is also necessarily rather than contingently racist and sexist, as explained by Kehinde Andrews (2021) and Ariel Salleh (2017) respectively. If I am correct, then this book is a work of what Harcourt (2020) refers to as critical theory because capitalist world-ecology is both so pervasive and so invisible that the realisation of human flourishing outside it would be nothing short of the transformation of human existence, the reconstruction of reality as we know it.

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As noted in Chapters 3 and 7, critical philosophy is activated by desire, driven by critical theory, and achieved by critical praxis. Harcourt and Derrida (1990) agree that critique is inextricably bound up with praxis rather than merely providing its foundation. Harcourt characterises this reciprocal relationship as a mutual guarantee of worth because critique without praxis is pointless and praxis without critique directionless. In Richard Rorty’s (1982) terms, neither critique nor praxis has truth or value in isolation as neither can empower democracy on its own. The relationship Harcourt envisages seems very similar to, if not identical with, that claimed by literary theorists for the relationship between content (what a work of literature represents) and form (how a work of literature represents what it represents).1 Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s (1988: 4) eloquence in describing the relations among ‘story’, ‘message’, and ‘covering’ provides insight into Harcourt’s relations among critical philosophy, critical praxis, and critical theory: A story is not a message with a covering, a rhetorical or aesthetic covering. It is not a message plus a residue, the residue, the art with which the message is coated with the residue, forming the subject matter of rhetoric or aesthetics or literary appreciation. There is no addition in stories. They are not made up of one thing plus another thing, message plus vehicle, substructure plus superstructure. On the keyboard on which they are written, the plus key does not work. There is always a difference; and the difference is not a part, the part left behind after the subtraction. The minus key does not work either: the difference is everything. There is no addition in critical philosophy; it is not made up of one thing (critique) plus another thing (praxis), but of difference in the sense of Derrida’s (1967c) differance, i.e. a meaning and value determined by its context. Critical theory is theory that is always integrated with practice and never finished because critical theorists respond to political struggles with ‘careful, respectful, contextual, case-by-case analysis’ (Harcourt 2020: 433). The ideological and material distributions that are deconstructed by critical theory are likely to change

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and may even change because of the praxis of which that theory is a part, in consequence of which it is always writing rather than righting – not only open to re-examination and revision, but welcoming of being rewritten. Critical praxis is praxis that is always integrated with theory and never finished because each ‘critical practice has to be precisely designed for the specific time and space, with humility and care’ (Harcourt 2020: 434).2 The interventions into the ideological and material distributions laid bare by critical theory reconstruct a reality that is always changing and the interventions will need to adapt to the changes if they are to continue to reconstruct a more just and sustainable reality. Alternatively, a particular praxis (integrated with a particular theory) may be made redundant by extensive change and require a completely new praxis (integrated with a new theory) rather than a revision. Again, this revision or replacement should be welcomed by the practitioner who understands critical praxis as part of critical philosophy rather than as practice with a theoretical foundation. In order to realise their desire for a just and sustainable reality, critical philosophers must integrate their critique and praxis so as to facilitate and enable reconstructed forms of life and reconstructed webs of life. If my argument in this book is convincing, then critique and praxis must be directed at both reducing the mass harms of actually existing capitalist world-ecology and creating forms and webs of life beyond it. When I decided to interview critical philosophers for the purpose of demonstrating praxis in action with contemporary examples, I selected my sample from the population of academics who referred to themselves as activists on either their professional or personal webpages or social media accounts. I am very grateful to Nuraan, Victoria, Alice, and Sara for both responding to my unsolicited emails and sacrificing their time for a discussion of the relationship between academia and activism. Each interview lasted approximately 45 minutes and they were all conducted over Teams in March or April 2022.

2. Nuraan Davids Nuraan Davids is Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Stellenbosch University in

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South Africa, where she was awarded her PhD in 2009. She is a National Research Foundation award winner, a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and editor of the Journal of Education in Muslim Societies, the South African Journal of Higher Education, and Routledge’s World Issues in the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education. Nuraan was born in South Africa in the 1970s, where she had ‘Coloured’ (‘mixed race’ in contemporary UK terminology) inscribed on her birth certificate. She and her family were the victims of much harm perpetrated by the Afrikaner National Party regime, including being forcibly removed from their home in 1983. Nuraan describes protests against apartheid as simply part of growing up and regards activism as a literal birthright. She explains her relationship to apartheid as ‘being inserted into a moment where you either speak out or are pulled along’. Nuraan initially trained as a teacher, taught in a high school (equivalent to a secondary school in the UK), and then worked for an NGO in the education sector before embarking on an academic career. Her research specialises in democratic citizenship education – specifically, what it means to be a citizen. Her other area of expertise is Islamic philosophy of education and she has a particular interest in the intersection between Islamic philosophy of education and democratic citizenship education. Nuraan deploys a nuanced and sophisticated combination of theories that includes an application of Derrida’s metaethics to issues in education. As a mixed race Muslim woman, Nuraan describes herself as a ‘misfit’ at Stellenbosch, which is one of the two oldest universities in South Africa and the only university to retain its status as a bastion of Afrikaner culture beyond the apartheid era. She told me that her mere physical presence in the lecture theatre as a professor destroys stereotypes and I envy her students the experience of being taught by such a dedicated and charismatic academic. Nuraan seeks to deploy the liminal space she occupies as a catalyst for change, but notes that she is turned to whenever a racial issue arises in the university, placing a collective responsibility on her that she did not seek – which reminded me of Stuart Hall’s comments on the responsibility he felt as the Black public intellectual in the UK during the Thatcher era. Nuraan’s activism as an academic can be divided

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into two parts, writing and teaching. While she does not set out to court controversy, she writes what needs to be written about her subject regardless of the consequences, which often are controversial. Nuraan’s teaching continues to be guided by her training in and practice of school teaching and her first principle is to operate from a place of compassion. In spite of her extremely successful academic career, she sees herself as a teacher, teaching her students by lecturing and her peers by publication. Teaching in this sense is itself activism – not teaching a curriculum, but teaching to open minds, to facilitate discussion, and to encourage debate. The crucial link between critique and praxis for Nuraan is a threefold relation among teaching, writing, and activism in which each fold imbricates the others so as to strengthen the foundation of a fully integrated critical praxis. She begins with teaching in the sense of shaping citizenship within and without the classroom, which provides a direction for her writing and constitutes an academic activism. Writing informs and elevates teaching and activism, consolidating expertise that is both specific to a particular discipline and capable of being applied to social problems. Finally, activism is a form of teaching in promoting democracy (which recalls Rorty’s subordination of philosophical inquiry to democratic politics) and providing an opportunity to disseminate one’s writing beyond academia and increase the likelihood of that writing having a genuine social impact. For Nuraan, this threefold relation revolves around using her unique situation to initiate and sustain positive change. She sets out a range of approaches to critical praxis in Academic Activism in Higher Education: A Living Philosophy for Social Justice, co-authored with Yusef Waghid (Davids & Waghid 2021). Nuraan’s most recent publication, Out of Place: An Autoethnography of Postcolonial Citizenship (Davids 2022), is an autoethnographic study of her experiences in education in South Africa and exemplifies her critical praxis, drawing attention to its origins in her situation. The monograph includes several rich and insightful reflections on critical praxis, including the following description of the relation between academic theory and lived experience (Davids 2022: 29): ‘As an analytical tool, critical race feminism en-frames my lived experiences, while simultaneously allowing me to interrogate the intersectionality of my discriminatory experience’.

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3. Victoria Canning Dr Victoria Canning is Associate Professor in Criminology in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, prior to which she worked at The Open University and Liverpool John Moores University, where she was awarded her PhD in 2011. She is director of the Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice at Bristol; associate director of Border Criminologies in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford; and a trustee at Statewatch, a charity that monitors civil liberties in Europe. Victoria’s positionality is consequent to being the child of a Protestant father and Catholic mother living in a Protestant village in Northern Ireland in the 1990s and her activism was encouraged by an aunt with a senior position at Oxfam. Her initial interest in animal rights spread quickly and widely, to women who contracted HIV from rape and infants who contracted HIV from foetal transmission, the Merseyside Women’s Movement, and the rights of women seeking asylum. One of Victoria’s most significant achievements as an activist has been setting up the Right to Remain asylum navigation board with Lisa Matthews in 2018, which was established in response to cuts in legal aid and the reduction of rights to appeal. She is one of the pioneers of zemiology, the harms-based criminological framework that has become increasingly significant in the 21st century, and recently published the authoritative introduction to the framework with Steve Tombs, From Social Harm to Zemiology: A Critical Introduction (Canning & Tombs 2021). Victoria’s research specialisations are gendered harms, state violence, and the intersection between the two, with a focus on the torture to which women seeking asylum are subjected. She was awarded the British Society of Criminology (BSC) Book Prize for Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System (Canning 2017) in 2018. This landmark study was followed by Torture and Torturous Violence: Transcending Definitional Boundaries of Torture (Canning 2023) in 2023. A more recent research area for Victoria is consumer society and the desperate need to reduce consumption in what she refers to as the era of the ‘neoliberalisation of consciousness’. She does not see a reduction in choice as a rights

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violation and believes that individualised consumption is currently prioritised over structural wellbeing. Victoria believes that her role as an academic has enabled her to see first-hand harms that are often invisible and has empowered her to draw attention to those harms, which is particularly significant when the harms are violent and when the target of the violence is marginalised groups. The crucial link between critique and praxis for Victoria is precisely that envisaged by Harcourt and begins with critique as a stripping away of illusions or unmasking of reality that first makes concealed harms visible and then facilitates an in-depth understanding of those harms in all their complexity. This in-depth understanding initiates well informed and carefully considered praxis directed at harm reduction. Victoria agrees that neither critique nor praxis can function on their own. Academia provides direction for activism and activism transforms theory into practice. Her critique and praxis are in fact so thoroughly integrated that it is almost impossible to describe one without the other or to even identify shifts of emphasis between the two. Victoria’s research for Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System informed her consultancy on the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award-winning documentary series Exodus: Our Journey to Europe in 2016, which in turn contributed to the rigour of the monograph celebrated by the BSC award. Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System was released in tandem with the Right to Remain asylum navigation board. The monograph ‘aims to contest the assumption that those seeking asylum in Britain face few challenges’ by unmasking the harms of a labyrinthine legal landscape underpinned by a neocolonial ideology founded in White supremacy and Islamophobia (Canning 2017: 2). The asylum navigation board ‘is a way to understand each step of the UK asylum system’ and provides a model for simplicity and accessibility that goes well beyond the particular system it clarifies so admirably (Right to Remain 2023). Victoria draws on her experience as a survivor of sexualised violence, her previous research, and her previous activism in Torture and Torturous Violence, arguing that psychological and sexualised violence against women needs to be recognised as torture in order to fully understand the harm

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it causes. She uses interviews with psychologists and women seeking asylum to expose sexualised violence as torture, making the concealed harm visible as part of her zemiological critical praxis. Following the precedent set in Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System, Victoria is especially concerned to give voice to the silenced and with social silencing as a form of violence.

4. Alice Nah Dr Alice Nah is Associate Professor in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Durham University. For the past decade, she worked at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, where she was awarded her PhD. The Centre is multidisciplinary among politics, law, history, and sociology and hosts the Human Rights Defender Hub, which has provided support to human rights defenders globally for the last decade. Alice is coconvenor of the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Rights Study Group, Vice President of the International Detention Coalition, and an advisor to the Migration Working Group of Malaysia and the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (having previously served as chair). She is also on the Steering Committee of Health Equity Initiatives in Malaysia and on the board of Protection International. Alice was an activist before an academic, beginning in 2002 when she first met Indonesian refugees who had fled to Malaysia, learned that they were suffering harm in consequence of their status as irregular migrants, and started advocacy for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. As her source of inspiration suggests, Alice’s praxis is primary concerned with refugee and migrant rights and focuses on the protection (or absence thereof ) of human rights defenders. Her critique deploys feminist theory, with an emphasis on the intersectionality of Kimberlé Crenshaw and others. Alice describes a reciprocal relationship between her activism and her work as an academic. On the one hand, activism not only preceded her research but has shaped and continues to shape the content and form of that research (Nah 2020a, 2020b). Her activism involves advocacy, ghost-writing reports for the UN Special

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Rapporteur, hosting workshops for practitioners who work alongside human rights defenders, and bringing visiting fellows to the Centre for Applied Human Rights. Alice’s perspective on research, with which I could not agree more even if my own has often failed to meet this standard, is that it is only ethical if intended to make a difference beyond academia. Alice echoes Harcourt: critique without praxis is pointless and it is unethical for academics to spend their time on pointless projects. On the other hand, the focus of her activism – reducing the harm suffered by human rights defenders – is both structured and enabled by her role at the Centre. Alice uses the term ‘impact through scholarship’ for Harcourt’s critique-praxis relation, denoting the ways in which research constitutes activism by means of its impact. Critique is thus ethical when it is aimed at praxis and activism when it results in praxis. She has a particularly interesting view on the role of theory within critical praxis, stating that it ‘helps you to name what you go through’ and is a complement rather than counterpart to lived experience. The crucial link between critique and praxis for Alice is the need for academics to be able to write for two audiences, i.e. communicate the findings of their research to other academics and to policymakers and practitioners. Being able to disseminate the same content in different forms is essential to reaching the relevant audiences for research, which is in turn essential for maximising research impact. She is insistent on the significance of this skill, defining an ‘academic activist’ in terms of two criteria: a researcher who believes that her primary role is to communicate her findings to the relevant audience and who is frustrated by colleagues whose work has no impact. As one might expect, I find this emphasis on writing especially interesting and writing as a skill very much resonates with my conception of writing as an activity – the activity that critical philosophers such as Alice are undertaking. An example of writing as both an activity and a skill can be found in her work with Karen Bennett, Danna Ingleton, and James Savage. The quartet co-edited a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights (Bennett et al. [eds] 2015) and Critical Perspectives on the Security and Protection of Human Rights Defenders (Bennett et al. [eds] 2016) to reach an academic audience and co-authored an

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online article on the New Tactics in Human Rights website (Nah et al. 2015) to reach policymakers and practitioners. New Tactics in Human Rights is a programme of the Center for Victims of Torture, an international NPO that was founded in 1985 and provides direct care to the victims of torture, trains partners around the world to prevent and treat torture, and advocates for human rights to end torture. The article is linked to a Tactical Dialogue, an online discussion hosted by New Tactics in which authors and practitioners discuss the implications of the definition of defenders for protection, the effectiveness of protection mechanisms, and tactics and strategies in response to increasing repression and risk.

5. Sara Vestergren Dr Sara Vestergren is Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Psychology at Keele University, prior to which she worked at the University of Salford, following the award of her PhD at Linköping University in Sweden in 2018. She convenes the MSc Applied and Political Psychology at Keele and was lead researcher on the COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey – Round II, a multidisciplinary, multinational study of the global impact of COVID-19 completed in 2021. Sara is an active supporter of and advocate for Extinction Rebellion, the global environmental movement that declared its rebellion in London on 31 October 2018 and continues to demand political and popular action against climate breakdown and the sixth mass extinction.3 Her activism was encouraged and inspired by her parents and began with Youth against Racism in Sweden in 1994. She maintains that political activism is much more embedded in Swedish culture than British culture and does not feel that her lifelong commitment to activism is anything that is either particularly unusual or particularly praiseworthy – it was just something that people did when she was growing up and something that people should do now. In addition to her activism on behalf of green and antiracist movements, Sara has advocated for child protection causes. Her research employs the social identity framework pioneered by Henri Tajfel and is focused on the psychology of collective activism, investigating how engaging in collective action

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affects participants over time. This is a development of Sara’s doctoral research, which found evidence of increased wellbeing, decreased climate anxiety, and changes in consumption behaviour in activists. Her most recent research area is the relationship between veganism and mental health. Sara regards her own activism as essential to researching activism and there is thus a sense in which all of her research is autoethnographic in approach if not in method. She has thought deeply about the reciprocal nature of the relationship between her academic role and her role as an activist and identifies two discrete relations within the broader integration: research/activism and teaching/activism. Research provides a direction for activism because it reveals the behaviours and attitudes that are most important to transform if the impact of climate change is to be reduced; activism provides an opportunity both for data collection and for the dissemination of research findings, the latter in such a way as to increase the likelihood of research impact beyond academia. Activism provides a direction for teaching and Sara believes that the most important thing academics can do for undergraduate students with respect to reducing the mass harm of climate change is to teach them critical reflection; teaching contributes to activism because critical reflection on our behaviour and lifestyles is a prerequisite for responding to the unprecedented threat of climate change in an appropriate manner. I was surprised (but very pleased) to learn that Sara is (unlike me) optimistic about the future and about humanity’s capacity to meet the challenges that climate change has already started to bring. It seemed to me that this was further proof of and evidence for her findings on the relationship between activism and wellbeing and I found our conversation uplifting. The crucial link between critique and praxis for Sara is even closer than that envisaged by Harcourt, an intervolution rather than integration, because her critique is of and about praxis, i.e. she is an activist who researches activism. This recalls her comments on finding nothing extraordinary about being an activist: just like activism is what people do so academic research and political activism are two aspects of her chosen career, which is itself a reflection of her lifelong interests. The intervolution between

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critique and praxis is exemplified by and in her current research on the biographical consequences of protest and activism. In her work with John Drury and Eva Hammar Chiriac (Vestergren, Drury & Chiriac 2017: 16), Sara established ‘a new typology gathering various psychological changes organized into 19 categories of outcomes of participation in protest and activism’, which includes changes in consumer behaviour, which in turn includes the adoption of vegetarian or vegan diets.4 In her more recent work with Mete Sefa Uysal (Vestergren & Uysal 2022), she argues for the need to research vegan identity within an intersectional framework that will take account of culture and context as well as ideology and politics. Sara’s research findings confirm her own experience of activism, which has increased her wellbeing, and consequences of activism such as vegetarianism or veganism seem likely to increase wellbeing still further, creating an upward spiral with respect to mental health – which is precisely Sara’s current research programme. As a lifelong activist who is part of the phenomenon she is researching, she is in an excellent position to create a database that will provide conclusive evidence of her initial hypothesis.

6. Critical Praxis While I hope that my four short sketches will promote the work of four critical philosophers whom I admire to a broader – or perhaps even new – audience, their purpose is to provide the readers of this book with examples of the integration of critique and praxis demanded by Harcourt. Many of those readers will be academics and postgraduate students and some of those may, like me, be anxious about the impact of their work beyond academia. Not because ‘impact’ is one of the new criteria imposed by the neoliberal higher education regime in the UK since 2012, but because making a difference in and to the world matters to us. My intention in interviewing exemplary critical philosophers was to find models of critical praxis, models that can be emulated and extrapolated by those of us who are both concerned about our lack of praxis and not quite sure how to go about it – or, more importantly, how to integrate it with our critique. I was, in consequence, very pleased

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that all four critical praxes provided models that can be deployed by others. This is even the case with Nuraan’s critical praxis, which is the most closely tied to what she describes as her unique situation. Nuraan’s (Davids 2022: 87) unique situation is not only being a professor who is ‘a hijab-wearing Muslim woman’, but a mixed race Muslim woman who is a professor in the last bastion of Afrikaner culture (in consequence of which she is burdened with the responsibility of speaking for the various demographics to which she belongs). She approaches this situation as an opportunity rather than a barrier, exploiting it to initiate and sustain positive change. When I look at my colleagues at Edge Hill University, very many (including, once again, me) lack the conventional career path of undergraduate to postgraduate to fellowship or lectureship. Although most of our situations are nowhere near as singular as Nuraan’s, many of us bring something a little different to higher education that could – and should – be exploited in both our research and teaching. I am not sure to what extent this applies to colleagues in Russell Group universities (the 24 self-selected elite of UK higher education), but it certainly applies to more than 100 that are not part of that association. What I take away from Nuraan’s example is the exploitation of one’s singular situation as the nexus of critique and praxis and the foundation for critical praxis. Victoria’s critical praxis is based on her lifelong concern with harm and its reduction or prevention, which began with harm to animals, informed her development of zemiology within the discipline of criminology, and produced her world-leading research on gendered harm in the asylum system. The way in which her critique and praxis are integrated provides a perfect example of the phenomenon to which Harcourt is referring, a relationship so close that it calls the value of distinguishing the two into question. For Victoria and the other three critical philosophers I interviewed, there probably is little point in this analysis – which I have conducted for the benefit of myself and for academics like me. Victoria’s complete integration is evinced by the outputs from 2016 to 2022 I mentioned, which include consultancy on an award-winning television series, publication of an award-winning monograph, co-creation of the Right to Remain navigation board, and co-publication of the

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authoritative guide to zemiology (in the same Routledge series as this book). The breadth of outputs she has produced facilitates an indepth and practically oriented understanding of the complexity of gendered harm and the different ways in which it can be reduced … and provides a nice segue to Alice’s critical praxis. Alice defines an academic activist as someone who understands her primary role as a researcher in terms of communicating her findings to the audience who have the most to gain from them. In order to achieve this aim, the academic activist must pursue excellence in writing – as an activity in the senses of both Richard Rorty (1978) and Stephen King (2000), which I discussed in Chapter 7. For Rorty, writing is the activity undertaken by what Harcourt refers to as critical philosophers, researchers of all disciplines who have practical goals and make no claims to Truth, God, or the absolute. For King, the activity of writing is a craft, a particular and peculiar kind of telepathy that can transcend time and space and is only realised when the writer strives to improve her communication skills. For Alice, critical praxis begins by identifying a group outside of academia that will benefit from academic research. It continues by communicating the findings to both that group (or the body that represents them) and other academics, which requires being able to disseminate the same content in different forms, a specific skill developed within the craft of writing. Sara’s critical praxis has the closest link between academia and activism possible – her research is on and about the collective activism in which she participates. Her research directs her activism by revealing the changes required to reduce the impact of climate change and her activism to reduce the impact of climate change facilitates both her collection of data and the dissemination of findings beyond academia. We cannot all research activism, though I am very glad that someone is, and I believe that there is a moral and practical imperative to reorientate criminology around climate change in the way recommended by Rob White (2018), which I mentioned in Chapter 1 and return to in the final section of this chapter. What I think can be emulated and extrapolated in Sara’s critical praxis is her autoethnographic approach. Like Victoria, Sara’s critical praxis is an extension and continuation of a lifelong

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interest. Like Nuraan, Sara exploits her situation as an academic who is also a climate activist as the foundation of her critical praxis. As academics, we do not need to be in genuinely unique positions to be able to deploy our biography in service of our bibliography, as I described the relation when discussing the life and work of Frantz Fanon, another critical philosopher (McGregor & Park 2019). Our bibliographies should reflect our biography where the latter is relevant to the former (which is more often the case than might initially appear), valued as evidence of an autoethnographic critical praxis.

7. Conclusion This chapter has been an exploration of critical praxis, of the ‘praxis’ in ‘critique-praxis’, a complement to the previous chapter, which provided a summary and overview of ‘critique’ as writing. I focused on the critical praxis of four exemplary critical philosophers with the aim of providing models that could be adopted and adapted by others (such as myself ) in developing their own critical praxis. As such, the chapter has provided four distinct but related ways to integrate praxis with critique: deploying one’s singular situation as a critical philosopher, merging academia and activism completely, cultivating writing as the craft of dissemination, and taking an autoethnographic approach. This book has been an exploration of deconstruction as a desire for the reconstruction of a more just and sustainable reality and as a critical criminology that aims to create and sustain a society in which everyone is afforded the opportunity to flourish. I have demonstrated how deconstruction can initiate the transformation necessary to bring such a society into existence by first establishing a framework for analysis and then applying that framework to the three mass harms with which I am concerned. I close the book with a concise but conventional conclusion, reflecting on both the limitations and potential of deconstruction. I argued that the mass harms of anthropocidal ecocide, racial capitalism, and patriarchal political economy are the product of the Capitalocene, a world-ecology that began in the middle of the 15th century and appears to be in its final stages early in the 21st century.

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Moore (2015) claims that the neoliberal cycle of this civilisation has already made the transition to negative value and that it cannot, in consequence, continue for much longer. This should not, however, be used as an excuse for inaction or apathy because there is no guarantee that what replaces it – a world-ecology dominated by China, for example – will be less ecocidal, racist, or sexist.5 It is crucial that whatever replaces the Capitalocene is just and sustainable and this will not happen by accident or without concerted and concentrated activism, mass movements, and probably violent revolution. As will be painfully obvious to many critical criminologists, I am not a political economist so I cannot say for certain precisely what must be changed. I know the problem is not humanity (Anthropocene), but capitalism (Capitalocene). I do not know whether the transformation should aim at capitalism itself (Žižek 1999), at neoliberal capitalism (Harvey 2005), or at corporate capitalism (Whyte 2020), but one or all of these must be dismantled and replaced before ecocide makes good on its anthropocidal promise. Such a transformation will require the mass mobilisation of a large proportion of the world’s population in terms of either collective action or passive lack of opposition and this is where criminology, the social sciences, and the humanities have a significant role to play. In my discussion of Sara’s critical praxis in Section 5 of this chapter, I noted that it would be neither possible nor desirable for every social scientist to study activism and mentioned White’s climate change criminology. In Chapter 1, I summarised White’s (2018: 149) contribution as a plea for prioritising climate change within criminology as a discipline, but his call to action is worth quoting in full: For criminologists, the role responsibilities are clear. We need to engage ourselves as public intellectuals and in political action, to assume the mantle of stewards and guardians of the future, and to prioritise research, policy and practice around climate change themes. The biggest issue in the history of humankind demands nothing less than this. Intervention in relation to climate change involves drawing upon […] a wide variety of sources (for example, cross-disciplinary, multijurisdictional,

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cross cultural) to investigate matters such as conflicts over resources, climate-induced migration, and the social effects of radical shifts in weather patterns. Information and data that is collated can be analysed and interpreted in the light of broad eco-global criminological considerations (for example, transgressions against humans, ecosystems and animals), as well as specific patterns of environmental victimisation involving particularly vulnerable groups (for example, women, children, disadvantaged groups, ethnic minorities). Steps can be taken to theorise the findings in relation to anthropogenic causes (for example, human responsibility for harm, specific perpetrators and degrees of culpability). All of these have been identified herein as crucial tasks of Climate Change Criminology. In other words, White wants to reorientate (all) criminology as climate change criminology, prioritising the mass harm of anthropocidal ecocide over and above all other harms and crimes. I agree completely and extend his appeal beyond criminology to all of the disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. I am not suggesting that only research aimed at the reduction or prevention of ecocide has value, but that ecocide must be dealt with first or the rest will cease to matter. Ecocide comes first, then racism and sexism. Such a change would indeed require the complete reorientation of the social sciences and humanities, but it would be no greater than the change from higher education as a public good to higher education as a commercial enterprise, which was achieved in a single decade in the UK (2012–2022). Let me end with complete candour and needless callousness. I have no personal stake in what happens to the Earth in the short term. My only living relative is my wife, who is a few years older than I am, and I shall be very surprised if either of us lasts more than two decades. We are, as I mentioned in Chapter 6, lucky enough to live in relative security in Northern Europe and unless the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC 2022) predictions are wildly inaccurate, the likely consequences of climate change for us will be more sunshine in retirement and a few storms that damage our home without risking our lives. When

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I die I will be thinking about myself, fearful of the unknown and fearful that I might not have achieved anything worthwhile in my life, not pining for the millions of people that will be killed by ecocide in the future. Notwithstanding, I can see the urgency of ecocide as a mass harm and would be delighted to make substantial sacrifices in my remaining years if they were evidence-based measures to reduce that mass harm. If those measures were also aimed at the dismantling and replacement of the Capitalocene, I would be even more enthusiastic because I would be confident that they were also reducing the less important – but nonetheless immeasurably significant – mass harms of racism and sexism. Ultimately, the need to dismantle the Capitalocene is empowering rather than daunting because we can be confident that we are reducing racism and sexism at the same time as we are pursuing what should be the global priority, the end of anthropocidal ecocide. My hope is that the realisation that all these mass harms are connected will inspire future generations and that deconstruction will provide a route to their reconstruction of a more just and sustainable reality. My generation will not be part of that reality and most of us do not deserve to be part of it given our mass complicity in ecocide, racism, and sexism.

Notes 1 For more detail on and a theory of the relationship among form, content, and value in literature, see McGregor (2016). 2 This quote and the previous one are part of a single passage in Harcourt, which I cited in Chapter 3. 3 I share Sara’s commitment to Extinction Rebellion, notwithstanding its categorisation as ‘extremist’ by the UK government in 2021. 4 See also Vestergren and Drury (2022). 5 As discussed in Chapter 1, Andrews (2021) expresses serious concerns about the neocolonial role China has assumed in Africa in the 21st century, concerns that are completely justified and – if anything – understated.

References Andrews, K. (2021). The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. London: Allen Lane.

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Bennett, K., Ingleton, D., Nah, A.M. & Savage, J. (eds) (2015). The International Journal of Human Rights Special Issue: Critical Perspectives on the Security and Protection of Human Rights Defenders, 19 (7), 883–998. ——— (2016). Critical Perspectives on the Security and Protection of Human Rights Defenders. Abingdon: Routledge. Canning, V. (2017). Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System. Abingdon: Routledge. ——— (2023). Torture and Torturous Violence: Transcending Definitional Boundaries of Torture. Bristol: Bristol University. Canning, V. & Tombs, S. (2021). From Social Harm to Zemiology: A Critical Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. Coetzee, J.M. (1988). The Novel Today. Upstream, 6, 2–5. Davids, N. (2022). Out of Place: An Autoethnography of Postcolonial Citizenship. Cape Town: African Minds. Davids, N. & Waghid, Y. (2021). Academic Activism in Higher Education: A Living Philosophy for Social Justice. Singapore: Springer. Derrida, J. (1967a/1978). Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge. ——— (1967b/2011). Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. L. Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. ——— (1967c/1976). Of Grammatology. Trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. ——— (1990/1992). Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’. Trans. M. Quaintance. In: Cornell, D., Rosenfeld, M. & Carson, D.G. (eds). Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge, 3–67. Harcourt, B.E. (2020). Critique and Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action. New York: Columbia University. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Available at: https:// www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-ii/. King, S. (2000). On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. ­London: Penguin. McGregor, R. (2016). The Value of Literature. London: Rowman & ­Littlefield International. McGregor, R. & Park, M.S.A. (2019). Towards a Deconstructed Curriculum: Rethinking Higher Education in the Global North. Teaching in

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Higher Education Special Issue: Experts, Knowledge and Criticality in the Age of ‘Alternative Facts’: Re-examining the Contribution of Higher Education, 24 (3), 332–345. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso. Nah, A.M. (2020a). Navigating Mental and Emotional Wellbeing in Risky Forms of Human Rights Activism. Social Movement Studies, 20 (1), 20–35. ——— (ed.) (2020b). Protecting Human Rights Defenders at Risk. Abingdon: Routledge. Nah, A., Savage, J., Ingleton, D. & Bennett, K. (2015). Evaluating the Development of the Human Rights Defender Protection Regime. 9 November. New Tactics in Human Rights. Available at: https:// www.newtactics.org/blog/evaluating-development-human-rightsdefender-protection-regime. Right to Remain (2023). Asylum Navigation Board. Available at: https:// righttoremain.org.uk/asylum-navigation-board/. Rorty, R. (1978). Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida. New Literary History, 10 (1), 141–160. ——— (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Salleh, A. (2017). Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. 2nd ed. London: Zed. Vestergren, S. & Drury, J. (2022). Biographical Consequences of Environmental Activism. In: Grasso, M. & Giugni, M. (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Activism. Abingdon: Routledge, 503–517. Vestergren, S., Drury, J. & Chiriac, E.H. (2017). The Biographical Consequences of Protest and Activism: A Systematic Review and a New Typology. Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 16 (2), 203–221. Vestergren, S. & Uysal, M.S. (2022). Beyond the Choice of What You Put in Your Mouth: A Systematic Mapping Review of Veganism and Vegan Identity. Frontiers in Psychology, 10 June, DOI: 10.3389/ fpsyg.2022.848434. White, R. (2018/2020). Climate Change Criminology. Bristol: Bristol University. Whyte, D. (2020). Ecocide: Kill the Corporation before It Kills Us. Manchester: Manchester University. Žižek, S. (1999/2009). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ideology. London: Verso.

INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. academia 44, 170, 180n2, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195–6, 198–9 activism 24, 39, 179, 184, 187–96, 198–200 allegory 1, 137, 150 Andrews, K. 8, 13, 18, 20–5, 29–31, 112, 117, 127, 130–2, 159, 185, 202n5 apartheid 129, 188 askaris 128 asylum seekers 190–2 Beauvoir, S. de 26, 35n3, 39, 75, 84n2 Belsey, C. 1, 8, 67–9, 72, 78–9 Blade Runner: 2036: Nexus Dawn 9, 111–12, 115, 124, 160; 2048: Nowhere to Run 9, 111–12, 115, 160; 2049 9, 111–12, 115, 118–20, 123–4, 127–30, 160; Black Out 2022 9, 112, 118, 160; The Final Cut 9, 111, 160 Butler, O. 8, 87–97, 99–107, 108n2, 160, 185 Canning,V. 185, 190–2, 197–8 capitalism: corporate 46, 132, 155, 176, 200; neoliberal 16, 18–21, 28, 87, 97, 99, 101, 102, 155,

196, 200; racial 9, 20–3, 25, 31, 34n1, 83, 111, 127, 129, 130, 131, 160–1, 178, 188, 199; see also world-ecology; world-system Capitalocene 13, 15, 17, 20, 28, 34, 136, 185, 199–200, 202 Cheap Natures 17–19, 132 climate change: tragedy of 33 climate fiction 150, 156n2 colonialism 20–2, 31, 117, 131 colonials 128 constructionism 37, 44–6, 178 criminology: climate change 14, 19, 24–5, 31–4, 35n6, 78, 107, 112, 132, 136, 138, 141, 149, 151–5, 156n2–3, 173, 185, 195, 198, 200–1; constitutive 6, 40–6, 50–1, 65, 69, 77–8, 82, 159; critical 2, 5–7, 33, 48, 58n5, 177, 199; cultural 4, 6, 8, 9n4, 18, 34, 37–8, 43, 46, 49–50, 52–5, 57, 62, 173–4, 179, 201; green 6–7, 33, 38, 49, 57, 194; narrative 6, 8, 37, 48–51, 54, 57; philosophical 3, 8, 34, 37–9, 43, 55–7, 58n1, 83, 97, 159–60, 163–4, 189; pulp 8, 9n4, 34, 37, 54, 57, 174; zemiology 5–7, 37, 190, 197–8

206 Index

critical praxis see praxis critical theory 2, 9, 45, 63, 78, 80–2, 159–60, 169–70, 179, 184–6 Davids, N. 185, 187–9, 197 de/re/construction see literary theory, deconstruction deconstructive framework see literary theory, deconstruction demystification 63, 65, 77 Derrida, J. 2–3, 8, 40, 45, 54, 63, 65–7, 69–79, 81, 83–4, 84n1, 159, 163–70, 184, 186, 188 desire 1–2, 8, 74, 77–80, 82, 104, 138–9, 141, 161–2, 164, 168, 186–7, 199 differance 69–72, 74–6, 78, 180n6, 186 dualism, logic of 26 Earthseed see religion, Earthseed ecocide: anthropocidal 9, 83, 135–6, 152–6, 161, 173, 178, 199–202 ecofeminism 13, 26–31, 88, 105, 108n1, 159–60 empathy 89, 96, 98–9, 102, 113–14, 123, 125 ethical theory 39, 165–6 fantasy 34, 82, 137–8, 141, 150, 156n2, 173 fiction 1, 8, 9n4, 34, 38, 44–5, 49, 52–7, 62, 82–3, 87, 89, 95, 97, 99, 102, 106, 111, 118, 120, 123, 130, 135, 149, 150, 156n2–3, 159, 162, 170–1, 173–6, 178–9, 180n6, 185 Foucault, M. 3, 64, 74, 82, 163–4 Game of Thrones 9, 136–40, 141–2, 145, 149, 152–4, 156n3, 160–1, 170 genocide 20–2, 49, 117–18, 131, 150, 153–4 grammatology 2, 64–6, 70, 75

Harcourt, B. 9, 41, 45, 63, 80–2, 159, 169–70, 179, 184–7, 191, 193, 195–8, 202n2 Hegel, G.W.F. 162 Heidegger, M. 4, 34, 39, 71, 73–4, 165 human rights 6, 21, 192–4 Husserl, E. 4, 34, 70, 73, 163 indentured servitude 102 intersectionality 23–4, 189, 192 James, W. 163–4, 167 Jameson, F. 1, 137 Kant, I. 162–3, 165–9 King, S. 170–7, 180n4, 198 Klein, N. 14, 31, 185 labour: cheap 17–19, 23, 28, 88, 124–7; disposable 26, 29, 102, 111–12, 117, 120, 124–9, 130, 131–2, 160 Levinas, E. 4–5, 77, 79 Lippens, R. 38–40, 77 literary theory: deconstruction 1–4, 28, 40–1, 54, 63–5, 72–4, 76–9, 81–3, 84n1, 87, 96, 107, 159, 162, 165–7, 184–5, 199, 202; ecocriticism 64; ethical turn 65, 77, 79, 84n1; literary aesthetics 9n1, 65; new criticism 63, 65; postcolonial criticism 64; queer theory 64–5 logocentrism 66–7, 72, 75, 83 Martin, G.R.R. 135, 150, 156n3, 161 Marx, K. 5, 16, 26–7, 53, 77, 87, 100–1, 105, 163 mass harms: ecocide 7–9, 9n3, 13–4, 20, 24–5, 30–4, 45, 83, 88, 131–2, 135, 149–52, 152, 153–6, 161–2, 173, 178, 185, 199–202; elitism 6, 9n2, 140, 141; racism 6–8, 13–14, 18, 20, 23–5, 27, 29, 31,

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34, 45, 57, 80, 112, 127, 131–2, 150, 162, 185, 194, 201–2; sexism 6–8, 13–14, 18, 20, 24, 27, 29–31, 34, 45, 57, 103–6, 150, 162, 185, 201–2 migrants 192 misogyny 103, 139, 141 Moore, J. 8, 13–22, 25–6, 28, 30–1, 124–5, 132, 136, 155–6, 159, 185, 200 mythic storytelling 137 Nah, A. 185, 192–194, 198 narrative 6, 8, 21, 34, 37–8, 43–5, 47–52, 54–7, 82–3, 87, 89–90, 92, 96, 111–15, 117, 120, 124, 127, 129, 131, 135–40, 144, 147–8, 152, 156n3, 159–62, 173, 178–9, 185 nature, free 124 neocolonialism 21, 23, 117 neoliberalism see capitalism, neoliberal new age of empire see new imperialism new imperialism 13, 23, 29, 34n2, 112, 129–31, 159–60 Of Grammatology see literary theory, deconstruction oikeios 15, 19, 34 Parable of the Sower 8–9, 87–9, 96–7, 101, 102, 107, 160 Parable of the Talents 9, 87–9, 97, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 160 Parable of the Trickster 9, 87–8, 90–6, 101, 102, 160 Peirce, C.S. 163, 167 phenomenology 4–5, 39, 64, 69–71, 73, 77 philosophy: analytic 38–40, 65, 72, 81–3, 163–7, 170, 177–8; of education 187–8; phenomenological-hermeneutic 38–9, 163–4, 166–7, 170, 177–8;

pragmatic 70, 167, 170, 173, 177–8 physics 65, 73, 75–7, 162–3, 165–6, 168, 177 play 1, 74–9, 92, 96, 108n1, 129, 139, 161, 200 political economy: feminist 6, 23, 28–31, 64, 101, 102, 105–6, 192; neoliberal 16, 18–21, 28, 87, 97, 99, 101, 102, 155, 177, 190, 196, 200; patriarchal 8, 28–9, 83–4, 87, 102, 103, 105–6, 160–1, 178, 199 positivism 26, 37, 178 poststructuralism 2–3, 45, 64, 69, 163 praxis 2, 9, 21, 29, 35n5, 45, 80–2, 159, 179, 184–7, 189, 191–3, 195–200 proletariat 27, 30, 88, 105–6 pseudo gangs 128–9 racial patriarchy 23 realism 6, 37, 46, 53–4, 70, 178 reconstructing reality see literary theory, deconstruction refugees 192 religion: Big Five 93, 106; Christian America 90, 160; Earthseed 88–99, 103–4, 107, 108n1, 160 religious economy see political economy, patriarchal righting 165, 167–8, 170, 177–9, 184, 187 Robinson, C. 15–6, 20, 22, 31, 126–7 Rorty, R. 84n1, 163–70, 173, 177, 179, 180n2, 186, 189, 198 Salleh, A. 8, 13, 18, 26–31, 35n4, 84n2, 88, 105, 159, 185 Saussure, F. de 3, 5, 67–71, 77 science fiction 34, 82, 156n2, 173 sepoys 128 slave trade see slavery slavery 16, 20–2, 31, 97, 102, 117, 131, 141, 150

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social identity theory 194 Spivak, G.C. 2, 8, 27–8, 65, 71, 73–4, 76–7, 79–80, 84n1 superexploitation 28, 102 suppression, sustainable 112, 120, 123, 125, 130, 132 Todd, M. 13 Trump, D. 24, 99–100, 106 truth 45, 55, 66, 73, 75, 81, 94–5, 104, 163–9, 173–6, 178–9, 186, 198 veganism 195–6 vegetarianism 196 Vestergren, S. 185, 194–196, 198–9, 202n4 war 4, 6, 16, 23, 47, 63, 106, 118, 128, 130, 135, 138, 140, 141, 141–2, 144–6, 149, 153–4

wellbeing 191, 195–6 White, R. 7, 32–4, 35n6, 38, 153–5, 198, 200–1 women 18, 24, 26–30, 75, 78, 88, 90, 100, 103–5, 126, 139, 190–2, 201 Woman=Nature (W=N) 26–7, 30, 84n2, 105–6 world-ecology 15–20, 25, 28–31, 88, 132, 152–3, 155–6, 159, 161, 185, 187, 199–200 world-system 14, 23–6, 28–9, 105, 129, 132 writing 2, 9, 64, 66, 71–2, 75–6, 79, 83, 89, 107, 111, 135, 151, 159–60, 164–173, 175–9, 180n6, 184, 187, 189, 192–3, 198–9 zemiology see criminology, zemiology