I read Gerry Canavan, Jennifer Cooke and Caroline Edwards in conversation with Paul March-Russell about Science fiction, COVID, and the imaginary. An interesting concept that came up was the idea Jennifer Cooke described, that “the future has completely collapsed”, and she then later made a connected notion that “we are atomised into individual households”. These ideas made me think of the concept of spacetime, which I would describe as the merger of spatial and temporal fields to understand perspectives and experiences. Spacetime is a complex term, and this article by Adam Mann explains it in its basic form but succinctly. While no scientist myself, I find the concept that things can appear bigger or smaller when travelling at different speeds (and vice-versa) incredibly powerful. COVID, for me, has achieved what Paul March-Russell describes: it is rapid and slow. We can see this beyond what he says in how it effects some areas more than others, or some areas at different speeds to others. I have certainly felt that COVID has been rapid, in how much it has changed my life, but a slowness in how long it has lasted. This also reminds me why I do not like thinking of COVID and the climate crisis as separate crises, it is clear that they are inherent linked in causation and how they intra-act with our lives. Wanting to explore these ideas in terms of spatial thinking and psychogeography, I also read ‘The Timeliness of Place: Response to the Presidential Address’ by Lawrence Buell. He uses the wonderful word “emplacement”, literally a structure on or in which something is placed. Thinking about his writing and spacetime, I would like to suggest that in the Anthropocene, humans and animals are “dis-emplaced”, because their spacetime is collapsed in different ways. I believe this term has meaning in that we should not only consider humans and animals as displaced from where they come from, but forcibly pushed/pulled to another place as a form of collapse. This idea links to how Buell talks about how modern places are shaped by diasporas who visit them (18), this could be considered a dis-emplacement by capitalism being forced into developed areas, and their lived experiences from across the globe have collapsed onto a city. He also talks about rolling back the clock (Buell 19) to restore places that have been damaged, and this seems like a distorting spacetime, where the future and the past are collapsed into an uncanny present. Finally, he mentions Marc Augé’s idea of “supermodernity” (Buell 21), and “non-places” as the “real measure of our time”. I would think of Athabasca Oil sands now as a non-place, while also similarly thinking of spaces I feel safe during COVID as non-places too, in that their expanse-ness (I am avoiding expansive as to me it means it has to be a large space, whereas COVID has made me feel expanses in small spaces, like my room) makes me feel safe from COVID, in a new mix of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. I would love to explore Augé’s ideas further in relation to this course further. It will be interesting to see where the concepts of spacetime, dis-emplacement and expanse-ness can take me.
Texts:
Spacetime: https://www.livescience.com/space-time.html"Apocalypse Now: Covid-19 and the SF Imaginary." Foundation, vol. 49, no. 136, 2020, pp. 84-99. ProQuest, https://uoelibrary.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/apocalypse-now-covid-19-sf-imaginary/docview/2432561472/se-2?accountid=10792.
Buell, Lawrence. “The Timeliness of Place: Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 1, 2006, pp. 17–22. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40068345. Accessed 19 Apr. 2021.