The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis by Treasa De Loughry

Author:Treasa De Loughry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030393250
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Part III: Cloud Atlas, Neo-Malthusianism, and Eco-Apocalypse

Neo-Malthusianism, Biopolitics, and Ecological Crisis

If a nuanced analysis of Ghostwritten’s ideological horizons reveals a core-based capitalist realism with a peripheralised invocation of Asia through developmental tropes, Cloud Atlas’ continuity with Ghostwritten is through the universalisation of capitalist tropes of “predacity” that depict ecological crisis as the natural outcome of innately competitive and consumptive societies. Cloud’s sociobiological narrative of violent human behaviours and anxieties about resource limits is read here as an ensemble of neoliberal symbolic structures and political horizons that naturalise forms of rapacious behaviour. However, the re-emergence of Malthusian and social Darwinist narratives in Cloud Atlas has a long lineage in Victorian to contemporary debates about human nature, and a common trope linking these discourses is the biopolitical function of crisis narratives in facilitating dispossession. These paradigms are bound up with how capitalism reproduces and sustains its accumulation process by reorganising the “world-ecology” through manufactured scarcity and the plunder of nature’s “free” resources, from woodlands to genomes.

Core to Cloud Atlas’ environmental crisis narrative is the threat of Malthusian overpopulation leading to resource depletion and environmental ruin. Ecocritic Greg Garrard states that Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) is the “most influential forerunner to the modern environmental apocalypse” (2004, p. 93) due to Malthus’ argument that nature has a “limit” that when exceeded by overpopulation leads to nightmarish boom and bust population cycles that alternately exhaust and replenish earth’s natural resources through famine, scarcity, and epidemics (Malthus 1798, p. 55). Malthus famously argued against both William Godwin’s argument for an equal and sustainable society and Adam Smith’s notion of the perfectibility of humankind (p. 4), and his pessimistic view of human nature as lazy and insatiable fed into nineteenth-century social Darwinist rhetoric which argued for coercive regulatory measures, and later twentieth-century punitive eugenicist policies against marginal (or “undesirable”) groups (Ross 1993, pp. 108–109). Cloud Atlas’ account of competitive and predacious human behaviours derives from a similar well of lurid sociobiological discourses, while ignoring the varying historical conditions that produce such tendencies.3

That strands of Malthusian inflected thought are still popular and influential, among them the 1990s neo-Malthusianism and “ecology of underdevelopment” (Watts 2001, p. 135) of Washington demagogues like Robert Kaplan and Jeffrey Sachs, is because accounts of epidemics, population growth, and resource scarcity call for strategies of biopolitical control and discipline. Unlike Malthus’ theories, rooted in then pervasive fears about the French Revolution, contemporary variants of neo-Malthusianism argue for regulatory action through debt bondage mechanisms, free trade agreements, and Structural Adjustment Programs to discipline dissatisfied peripheral states and ensure the production of cheap commodities. Contemporary narratives of overpopulation and depletion legitimise neoliberal technics of dispossession and accumulation, naturalising the exploitation of peripheral zones. As eco-Marxist Leerom Medovoi states, the trope of eco-catastrophe “facilitates some kind of regulatory transition between accumulation regimes” (2010, p. 136), with appeals to environmental limits a narrative means of ensuring that life is “assessed”, organised, and made “more productive” (p. 137).

Malthusian registers of ecological crisis are significant

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