String Figures of Response-ability and the Refusal to Respond in Clare Pollard’s The Weather

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses Clare Pollard’s The Weather (Royal Court, 2004) with a focus on how the play critiques the widespread failure to assume responsibility for both personal and collective wrongdoing as symptomatic of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. More specifically, the paper reads Pollard’s play through the prism of Donna Haraway’s conception of science fiction as a figure, denoting “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far” (2) in order to demonstrate that it does contain a utopian kernel in its uncovering of the (affective) strings that bind individuals to the logic of the society of consumers (Bauman) and in its final appeal to cut those strings, even though the play does not actually transcend the capitalist imaginary.