ABSTRACT
We are entangled in Crises of Ecologies: global warming and climate change (IPCC 2013), mass extinction (Barnosky et al. 2011; Ceballos et al. 2015) and planetary degradation (Rockstrom et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2011b). These crises are folded into, enfold and unfold from capitalism (Braidotti 2013; Guattari 2000; Hardt & Negri 2000). Capitalism exhibits a hyper-complex, devastating, anti-productive, eco-logic (Aryal & Massumi 2012; Guattari 2000, p. 44) – an eco-logic in that it traverses multiple existential registers, contracting subjective, social and environmental vitality1. We know that we are all implicated in potentially inerasable and overwhelming planetary transformations (Guattari 2000; Steffen et al. 2011b; Steffen et al. 2011a). We fear that our reliance upon science, technology, commercial ingenuity or political vision may not be enough to keep us from the worst of what may come. And, to some, there appear to be few bearable ways through or out (Collings 2014; Kolbert 2014; Rockstrom et al. 2009). In these terrifying circumstances it must seem something akin to madness to ask what literary practice might do to help (Collings 2014; Phillips 2003), and yet hasn’t literature always expressed resistance and brought us to Life (Chambers 1991; Deleuze 1997)?
