Chapter 1: Anti-revolutionary imagination in the anthropocene
This chapter responds to cross-disciplinary scholarship that calls for more imagination and more stories in the anthropocene by tracking certain threads common to anthropocene storytelling, particularly the eschatological narratives that have flooded popular culture. It weaves together the story of a flood that took place at the Meadowhall shopping centre in 2019 with a reading of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire in order to build a critique of this idea of imagining our way out of the anthropocene.
Chapter 2: The preforming of the mall at the end of the world
This chapter presents the story of the mall at the end of the world; a story where a new kind of sustainability is achieved and a wealthy subset of humanity live underground despite the deaths of the rest of the species due to global ecological collapse. It weaves together the story of watching a presentation taking place at a shopping centre in 2013 with this pessimistic story of capitalism continuing infinitely into the future, and positions it within the context of accelerationist theory.
Chapter 3: The people-to-come of Capital and their memories of the present
This chapter imagines the stories of the people-to-come who live in the mall at the end of the world, sketching out a sense of how their thoughts, hopes, dreams, and desires might be replaced by those of Capital. It weaves together stories of Gaia, Medea and other mothers who have come to factor large in anthropocene imaginaries, with attempts to think and dream like a shopping centre in order to speculate about how the people-to-come might remember us.
Chapter 4: In the viscera of Capital: practical acceleration in the contemporary Business School
This chapter has a simple premise, if Business Schools are observably co-opting and seeking to profiteer off of the anthropocene, then what can a critical scholar possibly teach in order to bring about meaningful change or make any kind of difference. It weaves together stories about the father of the modern shopping centre, Victor Gruen, with nihilistic accelerationist speculation around different pedagogic strategies for making a difference in the anthropocene in order to speculate around the slow cancellation of the future.
Chapter 5: Living without Hope: Stories for the rising tide
This chapter examines the most common theme to stories in the anthropocene: hope. Even among the most bleak stories that seem to suggest that there is nothing that we can do, and global ecological collapse is coming regardless of our actions some glimpse of hope returns as the truest expression of the totalizing nature of capitalist capture. Through weaving together reflections on the art of Antony Gormley, the Shakespeare's Hamlet, becoming a Doomer, and the writings of Romanian-born philosopher, Emil Cioran, this chapter seeks to make a case for the virtue of a ambivalence in living in the anthropocene.
Postscript: So what are we supposed to do?
A short postscript that seeks to provoke the reader around the titular question that is likely to be the most common response to the depressive realism of this book.
