#doomer literature

[the-apology-girl]

"I want to tear your skin apart, dissolve into you, like we are one madness."

— HILST, Hilda. From "Do Desejo"

[jeanclamence]

In the midst of endless, seemingly ineradicable self-loathing and misanthropy, I opened my eyes to find myself laying lifeless in slender arms, under the liberating surveillance of a warm gaze.

[dougielombax]

Doomscrolling Denethor.

Alright, hand over the Palantir!

[astertimberwolf]

I am kept awake

By all the things that could have been

By all the things that have never been

And will never be

A dreamer

Scared of their own dreams

For they have turned into nightmares

Of mental illness, abuse and disease

Forever lost

Devoid of any meaning

Heart empty, marred, charred

Frozen in time, no longer living

In a world of revolving doors

Bound to aimlessly wander

Expression neutral, or somber

Meaningless. Ever harder

(I am) Tired. End (me). (and my) Non-existing.

[cremainsinmorningrays]

I genuinely need people on the internet to stop stating that ongoing problems resulting from systemic issues are the result of people subject to systemic issues

[headspace-hotel]

Just spent a couple hours digging into this book. I'm not even sure what has worse environmental impacts, the paper the book is made of or the opinions printed within.

Is "post-colonial" literary theory a joke? It's distressing that a book printed in 2021 by a reputable academic press can be so painfully Eurocentric, and I mean PAINFULLY. The philosophical and literary frameworks drawn upon in most chapters are like what some British guy in 1802 would come up with. In most of the chapters, every framework, terminology, and example is inseparably fused to Latin, Greek, and/or Christian philosophers, myths and texts, even down to the specific turns of phrase. You would think only Europeans had history or ideas until the 20th century.

Don't get me wrong, non-european and even specifically anti-colonial sources are used, and I don't think all the writers are white people, but...that's what's so weird and off-putting about it, most of the book as a whole utterly fails to absorb anything from non-European and in particular anti-colonial points of view. The chapters will quote those points of view but not incorporate them or really give their ideas the time of day, just go right back to acting like Plato and Aristotle and Romantic poets are the gold standard for defining what it means to be human.

In brief, the book is trying to examine how literature can shed light on the climate crisis, which is funny because it completely fails to demonstrate that literature is good or helpful for the climate crisis. Like that is for sure one major issue with it, it shows that people *have* written stuff about climate change, but it sure doesn't convince you that this stuff is good.

Most of the works quoted are rather doomerist, and a lot of the narrative works specifically are apocalypse tales where most of Earth's population dies. The most coherent function the authors can propose that literature fulfills is to essentially help people understand how bad things are. One of the essays even argues that poetry and other creative work that simply appreciates nature is basically outdated, because:

“One could no longer imagine wandering lonely as a cloud, because clouds now jostle in our imaginations with an awareness of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other atmospheric pollutants” (Mandy Bloomfield, pg. 72)

Skill issue, Mandy.

The menace of doomerism in fiction and poetry is addressed, by Byron Caminero-Santangelo, on page 127 when he references,

the literary non-fiction of a growing number of authors who explicitly assert, some might even say embrace, the equation between fatalistic apocalyptic narrative and enlightenment…they are authoritative in their rejection of any hope and in their representation of mitigatory action as the cliched moving of deckchairs on a sinking ship

He quotes an essay “Elegy for a country’s seasons” by Zadie Smith, who says: “The fatalists have the luxury of focusing on an eschatological apocalyptic narrative and on the nostalgia of elegy, as well as of escape from uncertainty and responsibility to act." Which is spot-on and accurate, but these observations aren't recognized as a menace to positive action, nor is the parallel to Christian thought that eagerly looks forward to Earth's destruction as a cathartic release from its pain made fully explicit and analyzed. Most of the creative works referenced and quoted in the book ARE this exact type of fatalistic, elegiac performance of mourning.

I basically quit reading after Chapter 11, "Animals," by Eileen Crist, which begins:

The humanization of the world began unfolding when agricultural humans separated themselves from wild nature, and started to tame landscapes, subjugate and domesticate animals and plants, treat wild animals as enemies of flocks and fields, engineer freshwater ecologies, and open their psyches to the meme of the ‘the human’ as world conquerer, ruler and owner.

This is what I'm talking about when I say it's dripping Eurocentrism; these ideas are NOT universal, and it's adding nothing to the world to write them because they fall perfectly in line with what the European colonizing culture already believes, complete with the lingering ghost of a reference to the Fall of Man and banishment from the Garden of Eden. It keeps going:

“Over time, the new human elaborated a view of the animal that ruptured from the totemic, shamanic and relational past.”

Okay so now she's introducing the idea of progression from shamanic nature-worshipping religions of our primitive past...hmm I'm sure this isn't going anywhere bad

“While humanity has largely rejected the colonizing project with respect to fellow humans, the occupation of non-human nature constitutes civilization’s last bastion of ‘normal’ colonialism. A new humanity is bound sooner or later to recognize and overthrow a colonialism of ‘nature,’ embracing a universal norm of interspecies justice.” (pg. 206) 

OKAY????

Not only denying that colonialism still exists, but also saying that humans' relationship with nature constitutes colonialism??

Embracing limitations means scaling down the human presence on demographic and economic fronts…(pg.207)

ope, there's the "we have to reduce the human population"

Embracing limitations further mandates pulling back from vast expanses of the natural world, thus letting the lavishness of wild (free) nature rule Earth again” (pg. 207) 

aaaaaaand there's the "we have to remove humans from wild nature so it can be freeeeeee"

don't get me wrong like I am a random white person with no particular expertise in anti-colonialist thought but I think this is an easy one. I'm pretty sure if your view of nature is that colonialism involving subjugating humans doesn't exist any more and actually humans existing in and altering nature is the real colonialism so we should remove humans from vast tracts of earth, your opinion is just bad.

Anyways y'all know I have an axe to grind against doomerism so it was probably obvious where this was going but good grief.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Trump picking a writer as VP?

I haven't read Vance's book, so I don't know if he's a good writer, but I've heard it's a reasonably effective memoir, written mostly before he had this level of political ambition.

I just read his personal essay about his conversion to Catholicism today. I am cautious around writing that proclaims its humility and thereby forces me to search for its will to power; this is why I proclaim my will to power and allow you, but only if you want, to discover my humility, my debility, my "male vulnerability." Other than that, the essay is most moving and persuasive where it refutes the simplistic materialism of the likes of analytic philosophers and Sam Harris, and where he details his real spiritual experiences (I believe him). His critique of the left's superficially compassionate but actually cruel attitude toward the poor ("like sympathy for a zoo animal") is also exactly right. But I find it overly solemn, anxious, barely concealing the abandonment of his natal Protestantism for its plebeian or peasant quality—no less part of his desire for acceptance by an elite than was his earlier atheism. I was raised in plebeian or peasant Catholicism myself, on the other hand, which has nothing at all to do with the authorities he cites, like René Girard and St. Augustine. I look slightly askance on adult converts drawn in by the theology and morality. It has always seemed to me that the point of Catholicism—and I mean this much more religiously and much less blasphemously than it sounds—is the architecture and the incense, the barely sublimated sex and the eros of death. But I also love, as an outsider, the reckless, almost doom-seeking individualism of certain strains of Protestantism, some of them laundered as atheism. Since these seem to me to be the point of America, I am wary of overly intellectual Catholics and social democrats, their philosophies literally reeking of the over-crowded warrens of 19th-century Europe, moralistically tut-tutting about it. His second long quotation from Augustine gives me a chill, not in a good way. "[I]n his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him," our theologian jeers. Yes, Bishop, that's the American dream. Why not be a climate-doomer de-growther flinging soup in a museum with an attitude like that? The solution to poverty is abundance.

Possibly more significant for practical purposes, however, is Vance's tie to the literary-philosophical network around the Silicon Valley dissidents: Yarvin, BAP, and their associated publications and social media presences. (This is a good time to revisit James Pogue's Vanity Fair piece on the new right from 2022.) As Walter Kirn observed yesterday, that makes this election different from the last two. The last two were organized around the force of Trump's personality as he tried to hold together a fraying and fracturing Republican coalition of "provincial capital" (the proverbial boat dealer), the (mostly but not entirely) white working class, and the old Reagan Republican business constituencies of defense and energy, even as finance defected to the Democrats, while entertainment, academia, and intelligence pursued total war against their almost undefended reactionary enemy. The belligerent entrance of Musk and Andreessen into this election on Trump's side as representatives of big tech, with Vance as the political figurehead of big tech's literary and philosophical vanguard wing, makes it a much more even and generally significant contest: a true class war between incumbent and emergent elites. Literature has played no small part in this class war, as so many now widely-read writers and thinkers, love them or hate them, have resigned from the old left-liberal consensus. I don't mean to sound excessively neutral on the subject, but I belong to neither of the contending classes, and neither is at all democratic. I'm still not totally sure how the emergent elites' values are connected to a downbeat puritanical Augustinian Catholicism either, but since it seems to have everything to do with the aforesaid René Girard, we are still in the realm of literary theory if not literature.

In any case, the service of literature to any political faction or project should be the taming of its worser tendencies and the opening of its members to dialogue, irony, sympathy, and fresh perspectives. I will be told this is too idealistic.

[askgothamshitty]

Is gender abolition possible? Like at least in the sense that biological sex (chromosomes, penis, vagina, all that) exclusively is the only thing that is relevant in identity. Because everytime I see a terf talk about it, it sounds less like an actual course of action with goals and milestones and more like a fictional hypothetical utopia where trans people don't exist.

The way terfs outline it seems more surrounded by its hostility to the existence of trans people rather than something that would benefit all of society.

Idk, maybe I'm just a doomer but the concept of gender feels so much more significantly larger than us and i feel like we're going no where by harassing trans people (the people who are the most vulnerable and affected by this) and not addressing the people who are truly in power and who control it the most (cishet men)

You are right about your observations of the TERF framework of gender abolition. It is reactionary, idealist, and transphobic.

In their view, sex and gender are separate, with the former representing some “real” biological reality and the latter representing some “fake” cultural concept. They believe sex provides the real truth about manhood and womanhood, and that trans people have deluded us all into being preoccupied with gender. In their ideal post-gender world (which they never elaborate on how we get there), trans people would not exist, only cis people would. Everyone’s manhood or womanhood would be determined at birth by the observation of external genitalia. They believe this regime with liberate women, despite all of the actual radical feminist literature that identifies it as the same age-old system patriarchy has used (Dworkin talks about this in Woman Hating).

This is partly how they try to frame their ideology as revolutionary and feminist, instead of hateful and reactionary like every other right-winger. It gives them an excuse to paint trans existence as regressive and therefore the enemy.

Fortunately, their framework of gender abolition isn’t the only one that exists. There are and have been many feminist and queer activists who understand the social construction of sex and use that to develop an actually revolutionary theory of gender abolition. Check out this article by Jules Gleeson to learn about the history of this strain: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jules-joanne-gleeson-the-call-for-gender-abolition-from-materialist-lesbianism-to-gay-communism

[xunzilla]

Here's one for the 'post-doomer literature' files. Don't worry about which literature :-)

[judeesill]

i get the fear of some women becoming reactionaries but honestly when it comes to radblr it's mostly girls/women who are sick of liberal feminism and are looking for an alternative that actually prioritises women and criticises issues like gender, porn, prostitution etc imo. im not sure if radical feminism is the right term but i don't think most there's many conservative reactionaries on radblr (in contrast on twitter you'll find a whole lot of people who are exactly that: anti trans reactionaries calling themselves GC). also take into account that the term “radical feminist” was sort of assigned on any woman who questioned liberal feminism since it's in the terf acromym so it sort of...stuck. and radfem ended up being embraced by any feminist who was done with libfem rhetoric without necessarily having a concept of radical feminism history and literature

i actually agree 100%, thanks for bringing in some of the nuance i left out! i think you're pretty much spot-on about the difference between twitter and tumblr radfems but i stand by the idea that there's still a reactionary element to radblr. Not so much in the right-wing, capital-C-conservative, republican tradwife way you find more on Twitter, but in the sense of, like, a belief system based on defensiveness/resistance to change/opposing the percieved excesses of liberalism (Make Feminism Great Again), rather than a positive political vision for a world where women are free -- if that makes sense? I see this in the pettiness and the pessimism and the us-vs-them doomerism that is very present on tumblr, even if we are a little more clear-eyed about the organized right.

but yes, soooo much of this dynamic stems from, as you pointed out, the fact that people just started calling women they isagreed with Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, which had less to do with even the lesbian/cultural radical feminist leanings of the early gender critical feminists and more to do with the fact that misogynists look at any ol Mean Scary Dykes Doing Man Hating Extremism and call it radical feminism. and yeah, it's hard to blame us for that! but i think this community has grown and dare i say matured to the point that it's time to exercise our right to ideological self determination. lol

[the-apology-girl]

"In the ruins of my dreams, hope lies like a wounded bird, waiting for a chance to fly."

— PRADO, Adélia. From "Poemas de Adélia Prado"

[archangeldyke-all]

Helloooo quick q!

Do you read books? If so do you have any recommendations? Specifically sapphic or just…good books 🤷🏽‍♀️. You seem like you would have good taste in that sort of thing!

Thank you ☺️

i do!!! unfortunately, when it comes to fiction books i'm pretty boring, i mostly enjoy contemporary american literature-- so mostly the stuff on all the required reading lists in high school 😭 so like, toni morrison, james baldwin-- for chistmas i splurged and bought myself most of kurt vonnegut's collection 'cause he's my favorite hehehehe... OOH i also re-read the hunger games books last summer for the first time since i was a middle schooler and holy fuck. i cannot believe how good those books still are now that i'm grown hahah

non-fiction is my real jam!! i'm not sure if you want my obscure non-fiction recommendations, because mostly i just buy books based on what i'm interested in at the moment. my best friend got me sinead o'connor's memoirs after she passed which i really enjoyed. and my favorite non-fiction book is braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer!! a fantastic read if you're bogged down by climate-doomer-ism, interested in the spirituality behind the land back movement, or just need a pick me up about life in general. it will make you cry-- but tears of hope haha.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

White Jewish people really having a fun time right now discoursing about what is and is not definitionally genocide as if genocide knocks politely on the door and asks permission to begin instead of ramping up slowly over years of cultural violence and eradication efforts until one day the rhetorical threshhold for physical violence gets passed and blood pours through the streets.

Anyway if you want one of the more conservatively stated yet internationally recognized definitions of genocide, here's what the UN has to say:

Definition

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

I'm not interested in having a debate with any fucking one about whether or not the trans community is currently among those in the US experiencing what meets the criteria for genocide in the US because as a matter of course the US is arguably in the midst of efforts to enact a genocide against a LOT of communities at any given moment and the trans community is just one of them. My fellow white jews can sit down and shut the actual fuck up with their "trans people weren't targetted during the Holocaust so stop comparing the two" oppression olympics bullshit.

Just because you're so enraptured by the sancity and holiness of your white skin that you're sure our Jewish genocide is too holy to be discussed in the same breath as any other doesn't mean you're not reinforcing the very systems of white supremacy and violence that will happily murder us next when you try to shut down conversations about the interconnectedness of these experiences. It was literally a month ago that my feed was full of people confidently shouting about how the nazis burned trans literature. You fucking know better.

I'm so tired of this constant need to tear each other apart for daring to suggest that our genocides are genuinely interconnected. They are. Plain and simple. No matter who they are committed against. A genocide against any community reinforces the rhetoric of genocide against communities like our Jewish ones and we should be more inclined to give a damn that some members of our Jewish faith agree with that genocidal rhetoric that reinforces our own genocidal unsafety than with the fact that the other communities suffering rightly point out the connections.

If it seems like everyone is quick to say the big G word right now that's probably because global fascism is rising at unprescidented rates, and fascists seek genocidal outcomes with the kind of tunnel-vision few could ever dream of experiencing. That doesn't mean we deny people the truth of the language. It means we start working together to resist an unprecedented scale of genocidal intent. Never again means for anyone, not just the Jews and if you're truly looking at the world right now and thinking that we're NOT at risk for genocidal outcomes unless we actively resist fascist waves, you're a fucking fool.

It's not doomerism to say that, it's realism. Doomerism says genocidal fascism is inevitable and we should give up. It's not! In fact it's quite easy to resist! But we DO actually have to do so actively, consistently, and across all fronts.

So why the FUCK are you people looking our comrades in arms in the eyes and telling them to get off the field??

[catsconflictscopicsandchamomile]

Ok I’ve seen some doomerism post-election that has clearly lost touch with all reality but this is next-level. If you’re thinking this way:

1) breathe.

2) go get some sunlight and maybe talk to a human being offline and/or not about Trump

3) step away from the go bags and emergency plans, because I guarantee you that whatever you are packing and planning in that state of mind isn’t actually going to be what you need if/when you need it. He doesn’t come into office until January. You can do this tomorrow or next week, once you’ve taken care of yourself. You can’t prepare for anything if you’re spiraling this badly.

4) breathe.

5) there will be history books. I know this because there have been kingdoms, and dictatorships, and empires where accurate literature was outlawed. They all fell eventually, and we know about them because someone somewhere wrote them down.

6) Even if you or I or we don’t survive this, if there are people still left in the world this history will be told and remembered. If there aren’t people left in the world, our stories will still be visible on pages and in photos, even if there’s nobody to remember. The concept of recorded information is not going to disappear. Our records will outlast us in the end.

7) if you are so worried about there being no histories, no truth, no stories left from those who are impacted, then I want you to pick up a notebook or piece of paper or napkin, or open a word document if you know a place (like a public library or school) that offers free printing services. Write now, write later, write what’s happening, copy and paste screenshots from social media, and hell copy/paste whole news articles, and print them. Write in class, write at work if you can, write before bed and when you wake up. This is how stories survive when they’re illegal. Take your pages and notebooks and printouts and put them in something watertight and secure, that you can carry with you, or give them to a trusted person with a house and bury them in old clothes, or make a time capsule. If you are afraid of the history of this time disappearing, it is in your power to change that.

8) or don’t. You don’t have to do it now, or this week, or this month. It’s something you can do, not something you have to do. Do it if it makes you feel better. Do it if it makes you worry less. Do it if it makes you feel powerful. You can also write or draw about things utterly irrelevant. It’s still your voice. Otherwise? Rest, be kind to yourself now.

9) breathe.

[tomorrowmustburn]

apocalypse

In our age of climate change, I have a deep sense of apocalypse. I don’t think I’m alone in this, but it’s too heavy a topic to really have a broad handle on, since you can’t just ask people and it’s a hard topic to google. Regular statistics seem more geared toward figuring out what people think will happen to the economy, and if god forbid I search about whether people’s outlooks have become more optimistic or pessimistic, those results are glutted with literature on optimism or pessimism, which are apparently heavily SEO-targeted terms.

The perspectives on the topic I most despise are the flavors of denial: Techno-salvationism as well as climate doomerism, and that ineffable glassy-eyed ignoring of a topic which just seems a bit impolite on the face of it. It’s that familiar sense of loathing which I can only muster when I see things in others which I despise in myself. But while all these kinds of denial are or have been close to me, my poison is a bit different.

As I understand it, the truth, in the broadest of strokes is quite simple: It’s already bad, and it’s going to get worse, far worse than governing institutions will acknowledge, billions of livelihoods are on the line, but just how bad it’s going to get is not just unpredictable but very much contingent on the current moment. The moral thing, I used to think, should be to throw myself into climate activism with everything I can give and then some. I still think this, but there’s a couple of things stopping me. I don’t think I could do it, I don’t believe I would accomplish much even if I somewhere know that extraordinarily dedicated people can have massive political impact, but more than anything, I feel like, if I started to learn more about it than I already know, and I would start to feel worse rather than better. I’m working on another, less navel-gazy, more analytical/academic piece about the role of corporations in climate change and general ecological decline, and pretty quickly I started to think about writing it as “going to the bad place”, because writing it means genuinely confronting many deeply pessimistic things I believe, and thinking them through to some truly unpleasant conclusions (I have come to believe that capitalism presents a greater threat than climate change to human civilization).

However, at least this particular piece isn’t really about unpicking those reservations. The fact of the matter is that, whether I get off my ass and organized or not, I have to wrestle and deal with the tangible possibility of genuine civilizational collapse in or close to my lifetime, and the absolute certainty of decay, crumbling, and upheaval. Morally, the case is clear: No matter what, every single inch matters, is worth fighting for, because every fraction of a fraction of a degree less warming will save so many livelihoods, their magnitude escapes conceptualization. This is true, and it is important. It is an iron incantation; everything possible must be attempted, relentlessly, for generations. What this relentless imperative avoids purposefully – it is meant to be an antidote to doomerism first, I think – is lingering on the immensity of what is already lost, what and what will already be lost that we know, and the losses we have not yet realized are already inevitable. This is denial, too, in a way, the kind of denial needed to keep moving in a crisis: Grieve when there is time to grieve. I don’t know if I’m doing it justice, mind you. I’m not a messaging specialist, or analyst, or anything.

Maybe it works, is what I’m saying. Maybe it animates an important number of people to do important things. But I feel trapped in the middle. I’m not good enough at denial to push these things away, nor do I want to, but I’m not animated by the morally righteous memory of the necessity for action either. In my mind sticks the image of a flagellant monk, who cries out for the world to repent (I’m not religious, but I used to be). Liberating truth, liberating acknowledgement. My sense of apocalypse is heavy, but I do my best to face it and feel it fully, to do so feels honest. Pain is one of the many certainties of life, and sometimes all that’s needed is to feel it entirely. But what stunts me is my inability to share it, it’s living in a world that it grates against. My family is car people, all institutions I know seem blind or cowardly, and where climate’s awful realities go acknowledged, they seem more or less necessarily accompanied by fatalism or frenzied call to action, or perhaps sublimated into gallows’ humor.

I don’t think the world will end, properly, but I know the world as I know it can’t go on for much longer. Perhaps this makes me an optimist, and I have overlooked the gravity of one climate tipping point or another, or am failing to appreciate the threat of the ongoing mass extinction. But already I live with my sense of apocalypse which no one seems to share, or wish to acknowledge sharing. But maybe, if we were less alone, our world wouldn’t be ending.