Neganthropic architecture(s)

Abstract

The chapter examines American author Renee Gladman’s experimental science fiction, associated with New Narrative, the movement of innovative writing that emerged in San Francisco in the 1970s, as a vehicle that interrogates the genre’s critical potential to address entropic disintegration of the Anthropocene epoch. I contend that Gladman’s body of work enacts a poietic-philosophical re-investigation of the role that science fiction writing can play in inventing alternatives to exhausted anthropocentric narratives. Gladman’s avant-garde writing is contrasted with Quentin Meillassoux’s radical speculative materialist theorisation of the so-called extro-science fiction genre to show Gladman’s generative use of speculation as both critical of the Anthropocene and committed to figuring social change. I further draw on Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technics, focusing on techno-scientifically induced disorientation, the relationship between writing and citizenship, and the concept of Neganthropocene, to explain how Gladman’s speculative fiction reinvents fictional architectures eroded by entropy through the regenerative impulse of poiesis along the neganthropic, i.e. anti-entropic, communal, activist, artistic, and poetic lines resonant with Stiegler’s philosophical reflection.