Two cheers for collapse? On the uses and abuses of the societal collapse thesis for imagining Anthropocene futures

ABSTRACT

There is nothing new about predictions that climate change will cause serious social problems in the twenty-first century. However, in recent years, some tendencies in the environmental movement have made an even stronger assertion: the climate-induced collapse of industrial society is highly likely and may have positive consequences. This claim, which I term the collapse thesis, is associated with the deep adaptation movement in Britain and the collapsology movement in France. In this article, I analyse the work of key theorists associated with these movements to outline the core tenets of the societal collapse thesis. Responding to the criticisms directed against the idea of societal collapse, I partially defend the thesis by reading it as a form of science fiction. Following Darko Suvin’s notion of cognitive estrangement, it is argued that collapse encourages us to pinpoint the unstable ecological preconditions of everyday life and posit a new utopian world.

KEYWORDS:

• Collapse
• anthropocene
• collapsology
• deep adaptation
• science fiction
• cognitive estrangement

The idea that climate change has the potential to cause the collapse of society is now commonplace. This is clearest in the raft of climate fictions that have emerged in the last decade, which imagine worlds where runaway climate change has fundamentally altered social relations (Johns-Putra 2019). Whether due to the extreme droughts of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015) or the rising seas of Kassandra Montag’s After the Flood (2019), states cease to function, money becomes meaningless, and moral norms disintegrate. Accounts of climate-induced breakdown are not confined to the pages of fiction. Recent popular non-fiction books, like David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth (2019), predict serious social catastrophes should the ecological crisis remain unabated, while researchers are calling for greater attentiveness to the worst-case scenarios of the climate emergency (Kemp et al. 2022). Such pessimistic accounts of the remainder of the twenty-first century are increasingly influential in environmental politics. From social movements like Extinction Rebellion declaring that ‘this civilisation is finished’ (Read and Alexander 2019, p. 5, emphasis in original) to David Attenborough warning world leaders at the United Nations that people risk ‘the collapse of everything that gives us our security’ (UN News 2021), fears of societal breakdown are invoked to spur political action on the climate crisis (Cassegård and Thörn 2018, Skrimshire 2019).

In one sense, there is nothing new about predicting collapse. Apocalyptic visions have long accompanied the environmental movement (Buell 2010, McNeish 2017). The neo-Malthusian moment in the 1960s and 1970s crystallised this apocalyptic tendency, warning that population growth would critically undermine human sociality (Robertson 2012, Dryzek 2013, Dobson 2016). The rise of millenarian green groups like Earth First! In the 1980s and 1990s (Globus and Taylor 2011) and fears about peak oil around the turn of the millennium (Schnieder-Mayerson 2015) reinforced concerns about environmental collapse. The content of these earlier predictions of doom is different to the discourses about collapse that are currently in circulation. Warnings about population growth and oil reserves, while still present in the environmental movement, are no longer the primary concern and climate change is the central focus. However, in terms of the function of these accounts of collapse, there is a degree of continuity. As Carl Cassegård and Håkan Thörn (2018) note, ‘the environmental movement’s rallying cry has been that we must act before it is too late’ (p. 562).

Yet, in the last decade, an alternative mode of thinking about societal collapse has emerged in environmental politics. If, for many environmentalists, both past and present, collapse is preventable and undesirable, some theorists have begun to argue that collapse is highly likely and may have positive consequences. For proponents of the societal collapse thesis, it is probably too late. In all likelihood, humanity will not be able to divert or deflect breakdown. At the same time, utopia may follow on the coattails of ruin; in the aftermath of collapse, humanity can build a sustainable society. In fact, given the strong possibility of collapse, the most probable path to a better world may be through the catastrophic breakdown of current society. These claims are most strongly associated with two tendencies in the contemporary environmental movement: deep adaptation and collapsology. The most prominent texts associated with these tendencies, Jem Bendell’s article ‘Deep adaptation’ (2018) in the case of the former and Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens’s Comment tout peut s’effondrer (How Everything Can Collapse) (2015 [2020]) in the case of the latter, cohere around the claim that the breakdown of industrial civilisation is a very likely scenario and there is a need to align politics, society, culture, and spirituality with this new reality. These texts are accounts of Anthropocene futures that posit a movement from the breakdown of contemporary society to the realisation of a better world.

My first, and most straightforward, aim in this article is to introduce scholars to the distinctive mode of environmental political thought developed by theorists associated with the societal collapse thesis. Neither deep adaptation nor collapsology have received extensive scholarly attention in the Anglophone world (for some academic accounts that touch on these tendencies, see Moser 2019, Monios and Wilmsmeier 2021, Katz-Rosene and Swarc 2022). This is a shame, not least because both tendencies have a strong degree of popular appeal. Bendell’s ‘Deep adaptation’ paper has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, prompted media interest from venues like the New York Times, and influenced the Extinction Rebellion protest movement (on the reception of deep adaptation, see Bendell and Read 2021, Mann 2021). In the French context, collapsology has attracted substantial attention. It has provoked countless critiques and responses (for an overview, see Villalba 2021), received intense media coverage, including a docudrama television series titled L’Effondrement [Collapse] (2019) (see Gadeau 2019), and influenced mainstream politics, in part through the support of Yves Cochet (2019), who was Minister of Environment and Regional Planning in France between 2001 and 2002. Indeed, there is a relationship between the two movements, with collapsologists contributing to a recent collection on deep adaptation (Servigne et al. 2021a) and the founder of the deep adaptation movement penning the foreword to the English translation of Comment tout peut s’effondrer (Bendell 2020). In this article, I provide English readers with an analysis of the conceptual structure of the societal collapse thesis, working to identify its central claims and discern how it is distinguished from other tendencies in the environmental movement.

My second, and more significant, aim in this article is to reflect on the value and limits of the societal collapse thesis: What is the point – normatively, epistemologically, empirically, or politically – of declaring that collapse is highly likely and that it may deliver us to a more sustainable set of social relations? Of course, for many, the claims of the thesis are highly suspicious. Critics have suggested that the thesis overemphasises the seriousness of the environmental crisis, induces feelings of fatalism and hopelessness, and ignores the unequal effects of climate change on different people around the world. I accept these points; there are some versions of the thesis that are empirically false, politically unproductive, and normatively wrong. Yet, are there aspects of the societal collapse thesis that survive these critiques? Building on Darko Suvin’s (1979) account of science fiction, I argue that the thesis is most productively understood not as a prediction about the future or a political strategy for the present but as a form of cognitive estrangement. The imagination of collapse has value insofar that it fosters a particular way of looking at the world that allows those who adopt its perspective to, in a negative sense, pinpoint the unstable ecological preconditions for everyday life in Europe and North America and, in a positive sense, posit a utopian world that is radically other to the existing social order. I offer two cheers for collapse, reflecting on both its uses and abuses in the contemporary moment.

The article is structured as follows. The first section addresses preliminary questions of definition and method. The second section turns to the place of Anthropocene futures and climate apocalypse in the literature on environmental politics. In the next three sections, I discuss the core tenets of the societal collapse thesis, criticisms of it, and responses to these criticisms respectively. In the final section, I defend the thesis by reading it in terms of cognitive estrangement. By way of conclusion, I reflect on some possible limitations of understanding collapse as a form of science fiction.

Definition and method

Before moving to this argument, a few preliminary comments are needed. It is worth addressing why the term societal collapse thesis has been chosen. The term has a number of advantages. First, in foregrounding the fact that the thesis concerns the collapse of present society, it avoids the ambiguity of Bendell’s (2018) term deep adaptation. Second, unlike other names, like Mann’s (2021) doomerism, it highlights the utopian quality of images of breakdown. The societal appellation refers not only to the thing that is to collapse but also the thing that humanity will rebuild in the aftermath of the collapse. Third, it avoids loaded terms like survivalism (Charbonnier 2019, Katz-Rosene and Swarc 2022), with its association with the far right, or collapsology (Servigne and Stevens 2020), which suggests an exact scientific account, that prematurely define the politics or method associated with visions of societal breakdown. Finally, the term thesis leaves open the exact epistemological status of the collapse; it is a premise for thinking but there is no judgment about whether this claim has been, or even can be, proved.

A few words on my method are also necessary. I am interested in the political theory developed by intellectuals engaged in the deep adaptation and collapsology movements. As the ideas of Bendell, Servigne and Cochet are taken up by others, whether that be activists involved in Extinction Rebellion or participants in online forums dedicated to collapse, they are likely to be changed and developed. Given this, my discussion of deep adaptation and collapsology should not be mistaken for an account of these movements in their totality and, instead, it is focused on the most prominent theorists associated with the societal collapse thesis.

Temporality, apocalypse, and climate change

Before moving to an overview of articulations of, and responses to, deep adaptation and collapsology, it is first worth positioning the insights of this article in the context of broader work on environmental futures. Political theorists are increasingly interested in how temporal concepts are altered by their confrontation with the Anthropocene (for an overview, see Kelly 2019). In particular, scholars have highlighted the upsurge of environmental apocalyptic narratives, discussing the ways in which these catastrophic images relate to contemporary pessimism on climate change (McNeish 2017, Skrimshire 2019, Gergan et al. 2020, Mitchell and Chaudhury 2020). There is often scepticism about the value of these apocalyptic narratives for environmental politics. It is feared that they induce feelings of fatalism in the face of the climate crisis (Malm 2021; Swyngedouw 2010) and reinforce colonialism by privileging catastrophes in the Global North (Gergan et al. 2020, Mitchell and Chaudhury 2020).

As I explore below, these criticisms of apocalyptic narratives are justified; they are the primary reason why I can offer only two cheers for collapse. Nevertheless, they do not exhaust the potential of accounts of environmental apocalypse. The societal collapse thesis has the potential to augment critical theory, with its imaginative experiments in breakdown highlighting the problems of contemporary society and piquing speculative accounts of alternative orders. I resist the dismissal of catastrophic narratives and highlight their political value. Certainly, other scholars, following a long tradition of thinking utopia and apocalypse together in the Christian tradition (Jones 2022), have highlighted the value of catastrophic narratives in encouraging environmental activism (Globus and Taylor 2011, Skrimshire 2019). My account, however, is more specific. I do not defend apocalyptic narratives as such but, instead, particular articulations of catastrophic environmentalism. While some imaginaries of societal collapse are politically unproductive and normatively unjustifiable, especially those that claim to make exact predictions, apocalyptic narratives have value for environmental politics insofar that they pique the imagination, releasing repressed cognitive resources to articulate the world in new ways. The article thus demonstrates the value of catastrophic collapse for rekindling the imaginative dimensions of the environmental movement (Hammond 2021; Streeby 2018) and fostering a utopian impulse to overcome the degradations of the current social order (Garforth 2017, Arias-Maldonado 2020).

The societal collapse thesis

The aim of this section is to clarify the central claims of the societal collapse thesis. As the name suggests, collapse is at the core of the thesis. The concept of societal collapse does not refer to the idea that society as such will cease to exist, but instead that industrial society is doomed. Jem Bendell and Rupert Read (2021) concatenate collapse with the ‘uneven ending of industrial consumer modes of sustenance, shelter, health, security, pleasure, identity and meaning’ (p. 2, emphasis added). It is ‘thermo-industrial civilization’ based on ‘abundant and cheap fossil fuels’, the ‘exponential expansion’ of economic growth, and ‘complex systems which provide food, water and energy’, that is ‘on the verge of shutdown’ (Servigne and Stevens 2020, p. 178). The collapse will fundamentally disrupt the quotidian habits of people in Europe and North America; water will no longer flow from the tap, the lights will switch off, and supermarkets will have empty shelves.

Industrial society is vulnerable for several reasons. Most importantly, societal collapse is closely related to ‘runaway climate change’, which will result in famines, wars, and a host of other catastrophes (Bendell 2018, p. 6). The wild weather, scorched earth, and severe floods brought by climate change will put ‘massive stress on ecological and human systems’ (Bendell and Read 2021, p. 4). However, climate change is not the only relevant environmental factor, with the collapsologists also highlighting the exhaustion of fossil fuels, falling crop yields, and the collapse of fish stocks (Wosnitza 2018, Cochet 2019, Servigne and Stevens 2020). Moreover, industrial society is especially brittle. Collapse is enabled by ‘the ever more globalized, interconnected and locked-in structure of our civilization’, which makes it ‘highly vulnerable to the slightest internal or external disruption’ (Servigne and Stevens 2020, p. 88). People in the Global North are reliant on a complex network of social relations to meet their basic needs such that, if industrial consumer modes of sustenance were to fail, they would struggle to feed and shelter themselves.

The societal collapse thesis is supported by a teleological understanding of history. As Cochet (2019) notes: ‘Paradoxically, while the collapse is composed of events that are all of anthropogenic origin, humans […] can only marginally alter the fatal trajectory leading to it’ (p. 70).¹ There is no way of deflecting or avoiding the collapse of industrial society; breakdown is locked into the system and attempts at mitigation are largely pointless. Now, it should be stressed here that scholars associated with the thesis do not agree on the inevitability of collapse, hence my description of its proponents as believing that collapse is very likely. For some theorists, there is nothing that can stop the breakdown of the contemporary social order (Bendell 2019, Cochet 2019), while others are more circumspect, suggesting that collapse is merely the most probable outcome of the current situation (Servigne and Stevens 2020, Read 2021). Regardless of whether collapse is inevitable or probable, there is a broad consensus that the current trajectory is towards collapse; the latter will be very difficult to prevent and it must therefore be prepared for. A pressing political task is to face the collapse, rather than engaging in an ‘environmental Pollyanna-ism’ that represses the catastrophic consequences of the present (Read 2021, p. 241).

At first glance, proponents of the thesis appear to offer a pessimistic account of the remainder of the twenty-first century. Yet, collapse is not wholly negative. The end of industrial society will offer the opportunity for humanity to rebuild the social world in a simpler, more egalitarian, and more resilient fashion. The collapse will clear away many of the corruptions of the contemporary social order and provide space for a ‘rebirth’ of humanity in which people will ‘rediscover both the basic techniques of sustaining life and new forms of internal governance’ (Cochet 2019, p. 71). The utopian horizon of collapsology consists in small-scale communities in which a ‘culture of mutual aid’, as opposed to the present ‘culture of egoism’, is dominant (Servigne and Chapelle 2017, p. 206). This will be a totalising change, involving not only a shift in economic and governmental relations but also ‘a much richer spiritual, ethical, artistic and emotional life’, in which people feel a greater sense of connection with other humans and the natural world (Servigne et al. 2021b, p. 195). It would be wrong to say that the proponents of the societal collapse thesis regard breakdown itself as desirable; it will bring suffering and pain (Cochet 2019). However, given that collapse is likely to happen regardless of what is done in the present, they are willing to explore the positive consequences that might result from it. Such is the pessimism about the possibility of reform in the pre-collapse world, the thesis sees collapse as the most viable pathway to a sustainable planet.

There is nothing unique about the particular conceptual elements discussed above. The basic definition of collapse is informed by books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse (Diamond 2005), which is frequently invoked by theorists of climate-induced breakdown (Cochet 2019, p. 17, Duterme 2016, pp. 28–39, Servigne and Stevens 2020, pp. 140–143). Furthermore, the account of the causes of collapse is shaped by work on limits and boundaries (Dobson 2016), most famously The Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al. 1972), which is a key touchstone in contemporary debates on societal breakdown (Bendell and Read 2021, p. 10, Cochet 2019, p. 24, 32, Servigne and Stevens 2020, pp. 131–135). The idealisation of small-scale communities also recuperates a resonant theme in ecological thinking, with substantively similar utopian visions advanced in deep ecology, ecoanarchism, bioregionalism, and ecofeminism (Newell 2019). In this way, the societal collapse thesis chimes with some of the key debates in modern green political thought (Dryzek 2013).

What, then, is distinctive about the societal collapse thesis? Although the individual conceptual elements are familiar, the way in which they are arranged is distinctive. As Michael Freeden (1996) comments of political ideologies more generally, accounts of societal collapse are ‘combinations of political concepts organized in a particular way’ (p. 75). The general accounts of collapse of the type offered by Diamond, the concepts of limits and boundaries, and the vision of a small-scale ecologically sustainable community are all secondary concepts. They offer a means for proponents of the thesis to elaborate and concretise their central claims, or the assertions that the collapse of industrial society is highly likely and a desirable future can be achieved in the aftermath of this collapse. For instance, The Limits to Growth report effectively highlights the vulnerabilities of contemporary industrial society while the visions advanced by bioregionalists and ecoanarchists offer a useful means of representing the post-collapse utopia. However, these claims are refracted through and marked by the core ideas of the thesis. Consequently, proponents of the thesis declare that ecological limits have been surpassed and there is no turning back (Bendell 2018, Servigne and Stevens 2020) and that the realisation of small-scale sustainable communities is dependent on the catastrophic collapse of the contemporary social order (Cochet 2019).

The problems of societal collapse

One way to highlight the distinctiveness of the societal collapse thesis is by considering the criticisms directed against it. Certainly, opponents of the thesis sometimes suggest that its claims are partially justified; there are aspects of industrial society that are unsustainable. For example, eco-socialist Daniel Tanuro (2019a), despite his forthright rejection of societal collapse, notes that collapsologists are not wrong ‘to compare the current system to a vehicle speeding straight into the wall’ (p. 109). However, what distinguishes critics from supporters of the societal collapse thesis is their rejection of its core concepts, that collapse is highly likely and may bring positive consequences, even as they might share some of its secondary concepts, like the limits of industrial society or the value of small-scale sustainable communities. This is unsurprising. Almost all other tendencies in the environmental movement, from ecomodernists claiming that climate change can be addressed from within the coordinates of the existing political system (Shellenberger 2020) to eco-socialists declaring that a revolutionary transformation of the social order is required (Klein 2014), spurn the idea that it is too late to address climate change. The rejection of this claim informs empirical criticisms of the thesis. It is stressed by those who believe that action on the climate crisis is possible that Bendell’s ‘Deep adaptation’ paper departs from the mainstream scientific consensus on climate change and exaggerates the seriousness and rapidity of the ecological crisis (Nicholas et al. 2020, Mann 2021). Furthermore, it is also unclear whether it is possible to have firm knowledge about societal collapse. Predicting the worst-case scenarios associated with climate change involves confronting a range of ‘largely speculative “unknown unknowns”’ (Kemp et al. 2022, p. 2). The future is unpredictable and indeterminate; any attempt to impose a teleological narrative is illegitimate (Citton and Rasmi 2020, Thoreau and Zitouni 2018, Dupuy 2019, Larrère and Larrère 2020).

For its critics, the declaration that collapse is highly likely is also fatalistic, creating the sense that there is nothing to be done in the present to prevent the catastrophes on the horizon (Citton and Rasmi 2020; Nicholas et al. 2020). It renders political action on the climate crisis pointless. In declaring that ‘any comprehensive response [is] considered to generate illusions’, the thesis undermines other forms of green activism, whether reformist or revolutionary (Tanuro 2019b). This fatalism in the face of climate catastrophe is not only misleading, there are possibilities other than collapse, but also ethically suspect, absolving responsibility for the suffering caused by climate change. As Andreas Malm (2021) notes, any form of environmentalism that recognises that action can be taken now to prevent unnecessary suffering in the future is ‘infinitely preferable to the white man of the North who says, ‘We’re doomed – fall in peace” (p. 152).

Moreover, there is no guarantee that the breakdown will unfold in the manner imagined by proponents of the societal collapse thesis. The idea that collapse will be rapid and total, thus leaving a clean slate for the building of a new order, faces several problems. Yves Citton and Jacopo Rasmi (2020) suggest that, rather than collapse, a more appropriate term is Zerfall, a German word that refers to slow processes of crumbling and fragmentation. Once collapse is understood as a ‘process rather than a single event’, the utopian scenario posited by adherents of the thesis falters (Duterme 2016, p. 21). Present economic, political and cultural structures are unlikely to disappear overnight. Instead, as Jonathan Neale (2019) notes in his critique of deep adaptation, climate change will ‘come with the tanks on the streets and the military or the fascists taking power’; an increasingly repressive state may disrupt the new forms of communal life imagined by the thesis’s proponents. Indeed, for many peoples of the world, the collapse has already happened. There is a Eurocentrism to narratives of breakdown; the prosperous populations of North America and Western Europe are the privileged subjects of the thesis and its proponents ignore ‘the colonial collapses that have been going on for five hundred years’ (Ferdinand 2020, p. 161). If collapse is dispersed and processual, rather than totalising and sudden, then it is not simply something for the future; it can already be observed in the world.

Rethinking the societal collapse thesis

These counterarguments take aim at the heart of the societal collapse thesis, questioning the viability and persuasiveness of the ideational formation. In the face of these criticisms, is it possible to recuperate a convincing understanding of climate-induced societal collapse? Some theorists have answered the critics by offering revised versions of the thesis. However, for different reasons, none of these responses are entirely satisfactory. I consider three different revisions of the thesis in this section. First, Rupert Read (2021) suggests that it is still possible to prevent collapse; there are countertendencies, however weak, to societal breakdown. Nevertheless, Read still maintains that collapse has an important function. He posits the thesis as the ‘ultimate insurance policy’, a means of plotting an alternative way of living should all other solutions to the climate crisis fail (Read 2021, p. 244). Yet, this approach is still vulnerable to one of the lines of criticism mentioned above. Approaching collapse as an insurance policy, while addressing the questions of teleology and fatalism, retains the image of a swift and totalising breakdown. Read’s argument does not respond to the problems associated with collapse as a transition mechanism. Societal collapse can only act as an insurance policy if breakdown is likely to prepare the ground for a new and better society but it fails as one if this is not likely to happen. Any preparations made for the collapse in the contemporary moment might well be crushed by the residual forces of the old order (like the fascistic and militaristic elements highlighted by Neale above).

Second, Corinne Morel Darleux (2019) argues that the small-scale sustainable communities envisaged are an intrinsically worthy object of struggle, stating that ‘whether the collapse happens or not, we have everything to gain’ (p. 102). On the one hand, humanity can stave off collapse by adopting new forms of social organisation; with each step away from industrial society, we ‘limit the height of the fall’ (Wosnitza 2018, p. 53). On the other hand, even if collapse is not likely to occur, a better mode of existence can be created through a managed process of increasing resilience and reducing complexity. This approach has the advantage of answering the concerns above: it does not claim to know the future, is connected to concrete actions that can be taken in the pre-collapse present, and does not rely on a swift and totalising breakdown to pave the way to the new society. However, it answers these criticisms at a cost. Affirming the end of small-scale communities while largely abandoning commitment to the breakdown itself deprives the thesis of one of its core concepts. Once the centrality of breakdown is questioned, the boundaries between societal collapse and other currents of environmentalism become unclear.

Finally, Bruno Villalba (2021), taking inspiration from Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2013), argues that the societal collapse thesis is best understood as a form of ‘methodological pessimism’ (p. 115). For Dupuy (2013), methodological pessimism encourages us ‘to see catastrophe as our fate – only a fate that we may yet choose to avoid’ (p. 33, emphasis in original). In a similar fashion, the societal collapse thesis presents the catastrophic breakdown of current society as a certainty to provoke a reaction against it. Collapsology, paradoxically, asks us ‘to act before it is too late’ by declaring that ‘the “late” is already here’ (Villalba 2021, p. 116). As elaborated below, I have sympathy with the idea that the societal collapse thesis disturbs quotidian assumptions and thus ‘free[s] the creative imagination’ (Villalba 2021, p. 115). However, it is not clear that Dupuy’s methodological pessimism is the best way to describe the societal collapse thesis. As Dupuy (2019) himself notes in a critique of the collapsologists, while methodological pessimism attempts to ‘preserve hope’ by acting as a ‘deterrent’ against disaster, the societal collapse thesis preserves hope by imagining a utopian world after the collapse (see also Larrère and Larrère 2020). Methodological pessimism thus fails to capture the positive moment of the societal collapse thesis, or that it stimulates the imagination of a new social order coming after the breakdown.

Collapse as cognitive estrangement

Given the problems with these other attempts to save the thesis, is it possible to recuperate a viable understanding of societal collapse that successfully responds to the criticisms directed against it without relinquishing its key insights? In this section, I argue that this question can be addressed by considering the closeness between the societal collapse thesis and science fiction. As noted by other commentators, the latter is one of the key intertextual resources by which the former is articulated (Kyrou and Rumpala 2019, Engélibert 2019a). For instance, Cochet (2017) notes that the films No Blade of Grass (1970) and Le temps du loup [Time of the Wolf] (2003) teach us that, in the midst of collapse, ‘only love can save us’; a new communal ethic will be needed to build a better world in the ruins of the Anthropocene (p. 120). Similarly, Servigne and Stevens (2020) acknowledge that perceptions of the chaos on the horizon are shaped by ‘popular images drawn from cinema (who can fail to visualize Mel Gibson out in the desert, armed with a pump shotgun?)’ (p. 4) and note the relevance of postapocalyptic films like ‘Mad Max, The Day After Tomorrow or World War Z’ (p. 125). The thesis is difficult to understand outside of a horizon of expectation shaped by fictional texts concerned with catastrophe; the ‘future disasters’ envisaged have been subject to ‘repeated premediation’ in popular culture (Grusin 2004, p. 26). Bendell’s writings on deep adaptation and Servigne’s writings on collapsology, while nominally non-fictional and thus not straightforwardly a form of science fiction, evoke and are dependent on the images of the future associated with the genre.

In one sense, the resonance between the societal collapse thesis and science fiction is unsurprising. The value of science fiction for comprehending the Anthropocene is well-established (Heise 2016, Johns-Putra 2019). The Anthropocene involves two things that the genre of science fiction has long been concerned with: the possibility of alternative planets with different climatic conditions and the need for a temporal perspective that stretches far beyond the average human lifespan. Indeed, as Ursula Heise (2016) notes of texts like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007) and Bill McKibben’s Eaarth (2011), ‘science fiction motifs and structures keep cropping up in environmental nonfiction, books whose principal concern is to drive home the reality of current ecological crises’ (p. 216, emphasis in original). A similar claim can be made about images of societal collapse. The thesis closely resembles Suvin’s (1979) famous description of science fiction as a literature of ‘cognitive estrangement’ (p. 12). Science fiction estranges readers insofar that it introduces them to a world that is unfamiliar and unknown; something has changed to radically reorient society. A science fiction text must contain a novum, or a novel phenomenon that is ‘“totalizing” in the sense that it entails a change in the whole universe of the tale’ (Suvin 1979, p. 64). At the same time, the estrangement produced by science fiction is of a particular type. In contrast to fantasy, which includes magical phenomena impossible in the world, science fiction is concerned with futures that, however far-fetched, are theoretically possible. Its visions of otherness must be ‘cognitively validated within the narrative reality of the tale’; the author should explain how the unfamiliar world described has come into existence (Suvin 1979, p. 80).

The societal collapse thesis coheres with Suvin’s notion of cognitive estrangement. On the one hand, in declaring that industrial society will collapse in a rapid fashion and be replaced by a new utopian order based on alternative principles of life, it ‘estranges the empirical norm of the implied reader’ (Suvin 1979, p. 64). The thesis introduces a world where the quotidian expectations of current society no longer hold. In imagining the destruction of the world as it exists, whether by natural or human causes, the apocalyptic future ‘helps us deconstruct our present and imagine other possible worlds’ (Engélibert 2019b, p. 122). On the other hand, the novum associated with the thesis is justified by reference to a cognitive logic. The chaos of climate change combined with the fragility of industrial society are the preconditions for imagining collapse. The thesis’s proponents explain how societies could move from their present state to breakdown in the future.

Understanding the societal collapse thesis in terms of cognitive estrangement both changes and preserves its original insights. It changes the thesis because cognitive estrangement is neutral on the question of the likelihood of collapse taking place and its viability as a mechanism for achieving desirable social change. The value of societal collapse is found in its ‘analogical reference to the author’s present rather than in predictions’ (Suvin 1979, p. 78). As elaborated below, collapse offers a productive means for drawing out and accentuating the destructive elements of the contemporary moment with a view to imagining a new, more sustainable social order. However, cognitive estrangement also preserves the thesis. No attempt is made to dilute the image of societal collapse to make it more palatable. Instead, it is precisely the radical nature of the collapse that makes it an especially fruitful lens for introducing a feeling of ‘strange newness’ into the world (Suvin 1979, p. 4). The breakpoint between the collapse and its aftermath impels us to imagine ‘dropping everything, wiping the slate clean and starting over on a new basis’ (Servigne and Stevens 2020, p. 139). Cognitive estrangement thus asks: What happens to our perceptions of the present if we imagine the future in terms of a rapid breakdown of the current order and the realisation of a new world?

Reading societal collapse as a form of science fiction provides a way to maintain aspects of the core of the thesis while relinquishing some of the more unsustainable claims associated with it. Moreover, cognitive estrangement also demonstrates the positive value of imagining the Anthropocene in terms of breakdown and rebirth. To understand this claim, it is first worth reflecting on the functions of science fiction and, more specifically, utopian accounts of future worlds. As Tom Moylan (2020) notes, the method of utopia is defined by the ‘double move of negation and anticipation’ (p. 23). Utopia has a negative function because, with its imagination of a better world, it ‘casts a critical light on society as presently constituted’ (Elliott 1970, p. 22). Utopians hold a mirror up to our lives as they exist, with the failures of the current world evident via a contrast with the happiness of the alternative society. The utopian method also has the positive function of proposing desirable ways of living. These need not be blueprints, or exact plans for perfect societies in which all the details of the future world are outlined (Jacoby 2005). Instead, utopias provoke the imagination, offering a ‘mental exercise in lateral possibilities’, thus loosening the coordinates of the present and heightening awareness of other ways of being (Ruyer 1950, p. 9).

This movement between ‘a negative hermeneutics of suspicion (denunciation)’ and ‘a positive hermeneutics of recovery (annunciation)’ is evident in the visions of the future proposed by the societal collapse thesis (Moylan 2020, pp. 17–18). Negatively speaking, the thesis alters perceptions of the present. Via the detour through an image of a vanquished world in the future, the environmentally destructive tendencies in the contemporary moment are brought to the fore. The thesis ‘consists in decoding and reading differently (un-reading) the signs of prosperity that surround us’ (Citton and Rasmi 2020, p. 169). The gaze is directed towards the forces – ice in the arctic, resources under the ground, fertile soil, the stability of the Holocene, and so on – that underpin everyday life for people in Europe and North America but which, if destroyed, would make these forms of life impossible. As a result, the thesis draws forth the hidden ecological basis of mundane practices in the contemporary world, like turning on a tap and shopping at the supermarket. In Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen's (2021) words, an environmentally unsustainable mode of life has successfully hidden ‘the destruction in which it is rooted’ through the ‘externalization of material, social and ecological costs’ (p. 5). The thesis demonstrates the consequences of this mode of life; collapse shows that its destructiveness cannot be perpetually externalised. In imagining how the logic of industrial society, free from all possible countertendencies, might result in complete destruction, it reveals the repressed underside of the contemporary social order.

If the negative function of the societal collapse thesis is to disclose the inner destructiveness of industrial society, then the positive function is to demonstrate that there is nothing necessary about the latter. Servigne et al. (2021b) stress that societal breakdown functions to ‘open up possibilities’; human sociality can be otherwise to its present constitution (p. 71). The utopian world advanced probes those who engage with the thesis to imagine new forms of life beyond industrial society: ‘Collapse is not the end but the beginning of our future’ (Servigne and Stevens 2020, p. 182). The societal collapse thesis challenges us to imagine the profound changes required to fundamentally reorient society in an alternative, more sustainable direction. This is especially clear in Cochet’s (2019) account of the aftermath of collapse; the reader is given a vision of everyday life in an alternative society. Cochet paints a phenomenologically rich picture of a world where people rely on carthorses for travel, eat locally grown food, live in decentralised political communities, and produce their own heat, clothing, and shelter. Via Cochet’s detailed account, as Krishan Kumar (2003) comments more broadly of utopian fiction, we ‘experience […] through the description of the scenes and setting of everyday life, a “good day” in the new society’ (p. 70). By virtue of the conceit of collapse, the reader is transported to a world with distinct and disturbing assumptions.

Conclusion: the limits and possibilities of collapse

I have argued that the societal collapse thesis can be defended by understanding it as a mode of cognitive estrangement. Collapse, by spelling out the process of breakdown, focuses attention on the social and ecological conditions that underpin the present industrial order. Against the tendency to fetishise industrial society by rendering invisible the ecological conditions on which it depends, the thesis brings them to the fore and thus disrupts quotidian expectations. Or, as Cochet (2019) suggests: ‘The idea of collapse is a black hole that attracts to itself all past certainties, often transforming them into their opposite’ (p. 8). Moreover, the image of a liberated future stimulates a sense of alterity; the gaze is opened to the range of societal formations possible once the ideological hold of industrial civilisation has been loosened. The cognitive estrangement effected by the thesis provides a methodological approach by which to attune ourselves to the ecological failures of the present order and the alternative social relations needed to overcome it. As Marit Hammond (2021) argues more generally, collapse brings together ‘two vital dimensions of environmental politics: radical imagination and ideology critique’ (p. 285).

There are, however, some possible problems with approaching collapse in terms of science fiction. First, cognitive estrangement could be seen to imply that warnings about collapse should not be taken seriously. Some proponents of the societal collapse thesis might worry that, once apocalyptic images of climate-induced breakdown are approached not as a prediction but rather as an analogy, they will be ignored. In response, it is worth stressing that my argument does not imply that the thesis should be taken less seriously. Even if judgements about the likelihood of a movement from breakdown to utopia are suspended, the consequences of the cognitive estrangement produced by the thesis remain significant. Once it is adopted, the instabilities of the current social order are graphically revealed and alternative ways of living outside of industrial society become imaginable. So, we should take the thesis seriously, albeit in a different manner to that posited by many of its proponents.

Second, there may be a concern that cognitive estrangement makes the societal collapse thesis indistinguishable from other visions of environmental catastrophe. From the perspective of cognitive estrangement, how is the thesis distinct from the climate fiction, political discourse, and popular non-fiction discussed in the introduction, all of which posit a future breakdown? It should be stressed here that some form of cognitive estrangement is present in any account of climate-induced collapse; even those that do not present it as highly likely and as producing positive consequences still have the capacity to disturb everyday assumptions. However, there is a key difference between these other accounts of Anthropocene futures and the societal collapse thesis. What differentiates deep adaptation and collapsology is their emphasis on the utopian quality of the post-collapse society. The novum produced by the societal collapse thesis is particularly radical, involving both a negative and positive movement. Unlike other visions of collapse, it does not only imagine the catastrophic end of the old but also the construction of the new.

Third, as noted above, there have been many climate fiction novels published in the last decade. There is no shortage of explicitly science fictional texts concerned with Anthropocene futures. One might think that this provides a more productive resource for liberating the imagination than the quasi-science fictional experiments of the societal collapse thesis. In response, it is again worth stressing the utopian dimension of the thesis. For the most part, contemporary climate fiction, like Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Montag’s After the Flood, is dystopian rather than utopian (Johns-Putra 2019, Engélibert 2019b). While there are some recent green utopias, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), climate fiction generally focuses on future bad places. In this context, the societal collapse thesis has the potential to recharge the utopian energies of climate fiction. Opening a dialogue between science fiction and the societal collapse thesis enriches both, with the latter encouraging a greater engagement with the possibility of realising new and better worlds in the context of ecological disaster.

Recasting societal collapse in terms of cognitive estrangement does not resolve all the problems associated with the deep adaptation and collapsology movements. In particular, the societal collapse thesis, as presently constituted, relies on a thin understanding of the contemporary world as an industrial civilisation. Just as scholars have attempted to ‘socialize the Anthropocene’, there is a similar need to socialise collapse by bringing it into dialogue with structures of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and patriarchy (Clark and Szerszynski 2021, p. 49). Indeed, the narrow focus of the deep adaptation and collapsology movements partly reflects the fact that their key theorists are white men of the Global North. Moreover, the understanding of the thesis advanced here leaves open the question of the forms of political action needed in the face of climate catastrophe. While I have bracketed the fatalism of the original articulation of the thesis, I have not provided a prescription on how those cognitively estranged from the destructiveness of the present and hopeful for a new social order should act. However, both the desire for a more developed social theoretical account of the climate crisis and the elaboration of a strategy for the realisation of a sustainable world are enabled by cognitive estrangement. The former is encouraged by the negative moment of attending to the latent catastrophes of the present; the cognitive logic of collapse can be deepened and enriched, such that the thesis provides a more complex account of the movement from the present world to breakdown in the future. The latter is fostered by the positive moment of societal collapse; the utopian vision of otherness, in freeing the imagination, piques us to posit a range of possible paths from the degraded present to the liberated future. In both cases, tracing the resonance between the societal collapse thesis and the structure of science fiction is an important and productive first step.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All translations of quotations from texts cited in French in the references are my own.