Terraforming Modernism

Terraforming Modernism adopts the term terraforming from a largely science fiction canon, typically used to describe the imagined refashioning of extraterrestrial planets to make them more like Earth and more hospitable to human life. Ecocritics, techno-optimists, and others, however, have employed the term to discuss the transformation of nature on Earth; in these conversations, usually situated in the discourse of the Anthropocene, terraforming is invoked as the cause and/or cure of the world’s current ecological crisis. But an ambiguity in the word is neglected: terraforming indeed signifies earth-shaping, alterations to nature, through which humans impose their will upon an object; conversely, earth-shaping also suggests the Earth as an impersonal subject, a polymorphous nature always in the process of generating and altering its forms.These meanings are joined to develop a theory of modernism’s deep entanglement with nature, examining the way in which certain modernists view modernity and its artifice as part of nature. While modernists see their art as adding to and reconfiguring nature’s forms—i.e. terraforming—they do not see this production as opposed to nature or separate from its own processes. This account of modernism and modernity runs counter to many of the narratives currently existing that view these agents as deliberately self-fashioning an artifice intended to be anti-nature. Nature itself is in fact often presented as “modern,” as a principle of change and flux. Throughout, the double meaning of terraform is invoked to talk about the reciprocal relationship of modernism forming nature and nature forming modernism. The consequent picture of nature has significant implications within ecostudies: complicating, for example, theories that suggest that the rupture between nature and culture is the primary grounds for the violence humans inflict upon the nonhuman other; challenging the anthropocentrism within the discourse of the Anthropocene by always situating the human in a larger nonhuman or inhuman environment; and fighting the essentialism that sometimes comes through the backdoor in ecological scholarship, staunchly insisting instead on a polymorphous, historical, and mutative nature.