Relocating “Slow Violence” within the Discourse of Anthropocene in John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up

Abstract

On May 10, 2024, The Times of India reported that Venezuela was the first country to lose all its glaciers due to climate change. Now, the question arises: Whom should we hold accountable for that? The obvious answer is the Anthropos, who are responsible for the Anthropocene to which the earth’s geology, ecosystem, and climate are subjected. The discourse of Anthropocene questions the idea of a singular Anthropocene as, according to Claire Colebrook, there is no singular Anthropocene, but there are many. It also questions who/what affects and who/what is affected. The “biopolitics” of the Anthropocene is interlinked to violence. This violence exercises exclusionary politics and results in the gradual degradation of the environment that affects not only humans but every other entity on the earth and leads towards a precarious survival, which, according to Elizabeth Povinelli, is the “anthropology of ordinary suffering”. Rob Nixon introduced the phrase “slow violence”, which includes environmental degradation, long-term pollution and climate change. Taking the cue from Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”, this paper aims to relocate it within the discourse of the Anthropocene in John Brunner’s dystopian novel The Sheep Look Up (1972). The novel takes place in an unspecified year in the near future when human activities have resulted in the wholesale destruction of the environment. Therefore, this paper aims to use Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” along with John Galtung’s “structural violence”, Michel Foucault’s “making live and letting die”, and Georgio Agamben’s “bare life” to show how human activities guided by economic greed, power, anthropocentric worldview, and global capitalism results in the ecological and climatological destruction. It will also try to show how the dystopian narrative can significantly shape ecological consciousness.