Re: <nettime> Democracy Net Zero

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

Hi Ryan, yes I take your point that calling Silent Spring 'fiction'
when maybe the word fable might have been more appropriate was a 
mistake.

I guess this usage followed without enough reflection on from work I
have been doing over the last few years around the idea of 'fiction
as method'
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/events/asif/.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fiction-method

This particularly applied to an exhibition I curated in 2017/18 called
'How Much of this is Fiction'. Which worked with artists whose work
used simulations or hoaxes to satirise or un-veil hidden political
realities.https://www.fact.co.uk/event/how-much-of-this-is-fiction

That said I was probably quite clumsy in the way I characterised
Carson's ground breaking work.

Best

David

On 2021-05-30 18:52, Ryan Griffis wrote:
> Thanks for this David!
>
> Minor point: "Silent Spring" is not a work of fiction in any sense of
> the word; the short first chapter "Fable for Tomorrow," is, as its
> title suggests, a fable (of a "town that does not actually exist").
> That chapter is obviously a literary device that establishes the
> stakes up front and in an accessible and compressed manner, but I
> wouldn't use it to classify the rest of the book as even "creative
> nonfiction." The book is otherwise a work of reportage, probably *the*
> model for popular contemporary climate/science journalists such as
> Elizabeth Kolbert who rely on a combination of first-person
> observations, interviews, and syntheses of scientific papers and
> policy documents.
> Unfortunately, it's still deeply relevant 50 years later...
>
> Take care all,
> Ryan
>
> "To get a comparative sense of where we currently stand its useful to
> contrast today?s environmental politics with the political impact of
> Rachel Carson?s ?Silent Spring? published in 1962. As is well known
> this
> was an account of an imaginary community afflicted by environmental
> calamity. Although a fiction the narrative drew on detailed evidence
> from events that had already actually happened in a number of separate
>
> incidents. Carson had simply and brilliantly drawn these threads
> together into a worst-case scenario."
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