Without End: An Interim Ecology of Forms: Lyric architecture and dreaming provision

In this talk I will raise the possibility of what Bernadette Mayer calls ‘adjectival futures’ within the proliferating architectures of lyric. Encompassing the sense of ‘beyond’ or ‘above measure’, hyper works as a prefix which situates critique itself within the realms of an iterative, lyric mode whose work of dream, address and proposition reframes the literature of crisis within accretive, revealing and processual modes of embodied thought.

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In Working Group II's contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report published earlier this year, there is a telling political and temporal reorientation that occurs. Politically, there is an increased focus on an expansive account of "climate justice" which is meant to plot any account of climate change and action along axes of distribution, governance, and recognition. Far from imagining the planet or humanity as an en masse entity, the IPCC foregrounds the asymmetries and granularities of both human and nonhuman worlds. Temporally, the future planning scenarios of the document (a staple since the First Assessment Report) now include accounting for risk "introduced by human responses to climate change." This element of recursive risk allows for a temporal multipolarity to enter the IPCC's planning documents and signal the possibilities of different worlds. These different worlds are not linear or exclusive, but rather simultaneous and symbiotic. While the outcomes are all still fairly bleak, the Sixth Assessment Report offers an account of our current climate crisis that is both differential and responsive to the situated needs and local ecologies of human and nonhuman worlds, while also moving forwards and backwards in time to think beyond our current impact of impending apocalypse.

We start with this lengthy diatribe on the IPCC report as it signals how a gap has emerged between the literary and scientific imaginaries of climate crisis. As a policy document, the IPCC is able to capture potential pathways in response to problems of "adaptation, vulnerability, exposure, resilience, equity and justice, and transformation." These slow moving targets, however, often elude literary and critical forms. While literature has been instrumental in mapping out disaster, crisis, and apocalypse, a focus on ending has created something of an impasse, an articulation of acute crisis that may be masking a fear of something more chronic. What would a novel of "adaptation" look like? What creative forms can represent "exposure"? What is the critical mode of "transformation"? How, in other words, can we as critics and writers move beyond finality to think about the ongoingness of climate crisis?

These questions backbone this roundtable as we seek to move beyond the choice of apocalypse or business-as-usual and explore new forms of ecology for futures both near and far. Our roundtable asks two interrelated questions: what sort of literary modes move beyond the end of the world and what critical forms can we use to read them? This roundtable is intended to be speculative and tentative, moving away from finality and surety and into an extended exploration of the messiness of the present.