Techniques of Sensing and the Arts of the Anthropocene (original) (raw)
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1: Processing the Poetics of the Anthropocene
In the first Chapter Processing the Poetics of the Anthropocene I introduce the ecocritical discussion as a departure point for my own research into the wider environmental discussion in humanities. I have chosen this discussion, as it recognises one of the most pressing challenges in the current time of ecological crisis, which the eco-philosopher Freya Mathews has called “the re-negotiation of our relationship with reality” (Mathews 2010, p. 8). At the same time Greg Garrad recognises a “failed promise of authenticity” (Garrad 2004, p. 172) in the majority of the ecocritical writing of the beginning of the 21st Century. Here Garrad problematises how we meaningfully relate to our surroundings beyond the local and beyond something that is not directly accessible to us via our senses and how this is then dealt with in literature. Following Garrad’s observation of the “failed promise of authenticity” (Garrad 2004, p. 172) in the popular environmental, as well as ecocritical, discussion I take up his call for a conceptual shift from a poetics of authenticity to a poetics of responsibility. I further elaborate on Garrad’s poetics of responsibility by correlating it with theories by other ecocritical writers including Ursula Heise, George Monbiot and Timothy Morton. Here I focus on Morton’s theory of dark ecology, Heise’s concept of eco-cosmopolitan environmentalism and George Monbiot’s concept of rewilding. Combined these elaborations become the testing ground to examine whether contemporary media arts practice can contribute to the quest for such a poetics. I do so, by introducing to Bruno Latour’s post-global aesthetics (Latour 2013). This notion is of particularly significance to the development of my argument, because it criticises the mere visual representation of the globe as sphere. In addition I discuss environmental and spatial aesthetics of listening in current contemporary art and media theory. Here I will contrast the theoretical work of art historian Grant Kester, who stresses the creative role of listening in his concept of dialogical aesthetics, with the writings of media theorist John Durheim Peters. Peters sees the 20th Century as marked by a distortion of dialogue through contemporary media that connect us across time and space, and with the dead, animals and aliens. In order to knit together the different theoretical elaborations I focus on how they deal with the notion ambiguity. It becomes the red thread running through this chapter.
British and American Studies, 2022
In official geologic terms, our age is known as the Holocene, but, unofficially, the term Anthropocene is more and more frequently used to refer to the recent centuries and decades, in which the human impact on the planet, its climate and ecosystems, has had visible and irreversible effects. Ironically, the rise of rationalism, the triumph of science and the advances in technology have been responsible both for progress, improving living standards and enlightenment, and also for the confirmation of the destructive power of the human species. Reacting against the effects of industrialization and urbanization, the Romantic poets and artists were, in many ways, the first environmentalists. Their nostalgia for a preindustrial world, for the natural rhythms of life and work, their belief in the protection and love God offers all creatures, animals, and plants, all follow intuitively the principles much more recently outlined by eco-ethics. The book edited by Carmen Concilio and Daniela Fargione, academics at the University of Turin, Italy, in the Environmental Studies series of Lexington Books goes beyond the abstract purposes of literary criticism and theory, in a successful attempt to draw the readers' attention to important and urgent contemporary concerns. As philosopher and cultural critic Santiago Zabala argues in the Foreword, the relevance of this volume lies in its powerful evocation of an emergency which most of us do not confront directly. But the absence of urgency doesn't make silent emergencies any less serious. If in 2020 the pandemic grabbed us all, more or less symbolically, by the lapels, after it had been an ignored emergency for years, the same can be said about the environmental crisis humanity is facing at the beginning of the third millennium. At the same time, the value of this book consists in its capacity to demonstrate that, while science follows its own path, often inexorably, literatures and arts are more capable of raising public awareness, because of the emotional hold they have on the public. If scientists can barely make their warning reach our ears, written stories, poems, photographs and music will hopefully reach our hearts. In Santiago Zabala's words, "while science seeks to rescue us from emergencies by improving and preserving knowledge, the arts rescue us into emergencies, calling for our intervention, as this book does."
Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene
Environmental Ethics, 2018
In Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, editors Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino have assembled 19 essays and interventions by some of the most distinguished names in a now 'multisperspectival' (xi) research field, from Greta Gaard to Wendy Wheeler and Kate Rigby, all focused on finding 'more critical and imaginative tools to comprehend the Anthropocene' (13). The challenge faced by the collection's contributors is elegantly summarised by Richard Kerridge in his Foreword (xiii-xvii). 'Even as the Anthropocene challenges uscollective humanityto take greater and more exceptional responsibility,' he writes, 'it also admonishes us for past hubris, and relegates us to the category of stumbling, floundering creatures whose plans go awry because we understand too little: in other words, natural creatures, caught up in forces beyond our understanding' (xv). Not the least difficulty is, therefore, one of finding a narrative or narratives that might contain the multitudes denoted by Kerridge's reference to 'collective humanity'. In fact, and as Kerridge also points out, 'some of the contributors to the collection reject the term "Anthropocene"' precisely because it assumes a 'unitary Anthropos' (xvi). From a 'feminist, postcolonial or more broadly Environmental Justice perspective' (xvii), humans are not all equally responsible for 'environmental disasters' (xv), nor equally able to rise to the challenge those disasters present. Moreover, and as the material turn has underlined, humankind is entangled with the morethan-human in ways that emphasize the extent to which both 'are continuously engaged in the production and modification of the system and thus of each other' (xvi). If this inevitably suggests a 'rich array' of different perspectives, as Oppermann and Iovino point out in their own Introduction (1-22), those perspectives are nevertheless brought together by a strong and shared sense of the urgency of 'current ecological crises' (1) created by and 'within systems of massive exploitation of limited natural capital' (2). Arguably, the Environmental Humanities are united within a 'ethical-educational project of creating alliances between science, society, and cultural discourses' (3): '[t]he pivotal question here is: how will new modes of knowing and being, which the Environmental Humanities call for, enable environmentally just practices?' (2). Divided into four parts, the collection turns first to the challenge of 'Re-mapping the Humanities (23-112). In the opening chapter, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asks if 'word' and 'world' are really as passive as the term Anthropocene implies (25). Instead, he shifts the emphasis towards a 'posthuman environs' (the chapter title) built around 'eco-sonorous terms' (27) that highlight the way that matter inscribes humans, 'regardless of the epochs we declare' (25). In 'Environmental History between Institutionalization and Revolution', Marco Armiero engages with a different aspect of anthropocentrism, the '"human-centric" discipline' of history (45), and the tension between its (potentially revolutionary) transformation and its absorption into the mainstream (45), wryly concluding 'I would prefer to ignore the academic Winter Palace and Occupy reality!' (57). Next, Hubert Zapf explores the challenge of interdisciplinarity through a chapter on 'Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Transdisciplinary Knowledge of Literature', focusing on some of the ways in which literary knowledge might already offer forms of 'transdisciplinary GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM
Artistic Practices, Discursive Contexts and Environmental Humanities in the Age of the Anthropocene
The hypothesis of the Anthropocene signals human activity, particularly the social, political and economic sphere, as the new biogeophysical force whose impact allows the scientific community to speak about a new era in the geological timescale. The assertion of the abandonment of the Holocene implies not only access to a new physical, but also a cultural space that has not yet been experienced. However, while contributions from the field of natural sciences to the analysis of the phenomenon have been significant, literature generated from the Humanities and Social Sciences shows that much work remains to be done. In this current scenario where increased global connectivity operates as the ground for interconnected large-scale risks and shocks, we are compelled to take into account transversal thinking across different ideas, meanings and fields that can help understanding the social, the economic and the political relations at stake. Drawing from recent investigations from the field of Environmental Humanities, this paper explores the role of artistic, theoretical and curatorial practice in understanding, conforming and interrogating our position in the world under the conditions of the Anthropocene. It shall do this by focusing on the analysis of projects gathered in the group exhibition 7 MIL MILLONES (Contemporary Art Centre EACC Castelló, 2014) as a case study. We argue that experimental artistic practice – which emphasizes a new combination of aesthetics and ethics and the ecological and the social – can provide interesting models in helping societies adapt to this new territory. We finally suggest that the curatorial statement fails to address the complex critical potential of the gathered projects insofar as it constrains the theoretical context to a particular classical formulation
Sensing again and again the strange edges of the Anthropocene
introduction and bibliography, 2023
This Environmental Humanities thesis is emerging from attentiveness to the paradoxes that the Anthropocene posits as problems to be solved, tamed. It first questions the possibility of bounded, stable entities by drawing on the idea of becoming as conceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari. By attending to edges and bodies as shifting and possible, always on the verge of falling apart and renewing, this dissertation challenges the security, determinability that is required by practices of categorisation, ordering and control. Attending to entities as possible also highlights that they cannot strictly constitute an either/or, rather they are paradoxically and strangely both. The four chapters of this dissertation dwell in the paradoxes of touching the untouchable, measuring the unmeasurable, saying the unsaid, and seeing life where no ‘life’1 can be seen. By staying with the strangeness of these paradoxes, as opposed to trying to make sense of them by abstracting them into either/or categories, this dissertation unsettles the Anthropocene in its practice of constructing dualisms such as nature or culture, human or more-than-human. This dissertation is asking how learning to dwell in paradoxes without trying to fit them into either/or categories, taking them seriously in their strangeness, may offer a radical resistance to the Anthropocene?
Environmental Values, 2018
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Arts) is a practical response to the destructive relationship between human beings and the natural world, rooted in multispecies ecological awareness. The book is divided into two sections that offer different points of departure: ghosts and monsters work as adjacent, interweaving metaphorical schema that help us to expose pervasive assumptions and unhelpful narratives about how ecological systems work. The aim of this collection is to engage a broad span of readers-scholars, researchers, writers, artists and scientists-to stimulate and sustain conversations, and to offer tools and resources to those who hope to mitigate further damage and help clear a path forward. The Anthropocene, the context for this collection, is the geological epoch in which humans can literally move mountains and create volcanoes, to the extent that 'indelible strata' will continue to shape the face of the earth long after humans have gone. The Anthropocene is characterised by extreme and irreversible changes to the environment, resulting in an exponential scarcity of living beings and threats to most life systems on earth. In response to this precarity, the editors and contributors to Arts suggest that we must collectively observe and study the world around us to attune our coexistence more authentically to these ecologies, through increased knowledge about both the impacts of past actions and our embeddedness in multispecies webs. Readers are encouraged to notice the monstrous swarm of human and nonhuman entanglements, and also to read landscapes for ghostly vestiges of past destruction in today's debris. This collection foregrounds women as contributors and provides a space for feminist philosophy, queer readings, and a set of transhuman tools and perspectives that facilitate an interrogation of an uncertain and perilous climate. Arts advocates transdisciplinary collaboration, and is thus accessible to a non-academic audience. The authors do not assume comprehensive prior knowledge or expertise. They bring a wide range of backgrounds from across the environmental humanities and sciences including philosophy, anthropology, poetry, multispecies storytelling, feminist science studies, taxonomy, microbiology, nuclear physics, evolutionary biology and ecology. This 'nature writing' is ecologically informed and does not linger on a simplistic or nostalgic imagery of wilderness, a limitation of much environmental writing since the 1960s. Instead it tells of complex contemporary ecosystems that persist (and disappear) in the face of pollution, acidification, human industry and mass transport. Lesley Stern swoops from a birds-eye view of canyons, mesas and bulldozers down to microlandscapes of tomato plants growing through the cracks of concrete, into the bed of toxic tyres and
Ethics & the Environment
Taking into account intersecting trends in political, academic, and popular engagements with environmental issues, this paper concerns the development of environmental humanities as an academic field of inquiry, specifically in this new era many are calling the Anthropocene. After a brief outline of the environmental humanities as a field, we delimit four problems that currently frame our relation to the environment, namely: alienation and intangibility; the post-political situation; negative framing of environmental change; and compartmentalization of “the environment” from other spheres of concern. Addressing these problems, we argue, is not possible without environmental humanities. Given that this field is not entirely new, our second objective is to propose specific shifts in the environmental humanities that could address the aforementioned problems. These include attention to environmental imaginaries; rethinking the “green” field to include feminist genealogies; enhanced transdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity; and increasing “citizen humanities” efforts.
Artistic Practices in the Anthropocene
Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2024
This article reviews Western perspectives—in a fruitful dialogue with nonWestern perspectives—on the climate emergency and artistic experiences amid the ongoing debate about futures currently at stake in the climate crisis or climate emergency. Moving beyond the various ways of naming this crisis, we focus on how art can communicate, envision, and activate ways of inhabiting this problem, opening communities to an other-than-human coexistence and reconfiguring matters as we understand them in a geological, natural, or material sense. The analyses indicate that, instead of aiming at a singular solution, multiple exercises and imaginative and speculative avenues of narratives can tell different stories and envision alternative futures. If the climate crisis ignited in the Anthropocene is a shared crisis—both political and aesthetic—then art, inseparable from life and hence nature, holds a crucial role in nurturing care and the potency of imagining other possible worlds.
Ibraaz, 2016
The project Let's Talk About the Weather: Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis opens at the Sursock Museum in Beirut on 14 July 2016, curated by Nataša Petrešin Bachelez and Nora Razian, includes an exhibition with works by artists Claire Pentecost, Ursula Biemann, Sophia Al Maria, Marwa Arsanios, Nicholas Mangan, Marko Peljhan, and Jessika Khazrik amongst others; a series of publications; and a public programme. The project aims to re-catalyse debates around ecology and responsibility in a place that recently reappeared in the global media through the so-called 'garbage crises' and the ensuing protests that began in the summer of 2015. The exhibition takes up the term Anthropocene, which has occupied the conceptual and theoretical landscape of the contemporary art world and some scientific communities in the last three years. It is seen as a critical term through which to imagine a new epistemic system where non-Western, non-Modern, non-dualistic, and indigenous cosmologies can flourish and reshape thinking. Curious as to whether the term Anthropocene is a critical concept that both arises from and captures the very historical material conditions of the contemporary world, or whether it is another fleeting art theoretical fashion, Angela Harutyunyan and the curators discuss the conceptual premises and the curatorial strategies of Let's Talk About the Weather.
Who is to Interpret the Anthropocene? Nature and Culture in the Academy
La Deleuziana, 2016
It is somewhat ironic that just when scholars seem to be reaching an academic consensus critiquing the human exceptionalism of modern humanism, and to be replacing such an exceptionalism with a contextual and processual understanding of the human species, we are suddenly told that we are living in a new geological era named The Anthropocene. Just when we had begun to overthrow such anthropic tendencies in philosophy and the social sciences, we are faced with the undeniable presence of the human in the entire ecosystem , from deet-resistant mosquitoes to the ozone hole in the heavens. If humanism understood the role of the human as exceptional in the positive sense of enacting progressive transformation on the world as defined by the Enlightenment, the centrality of the human in the Anthropocene lies in a different and regressive transformation, not of the cultural world but of the geological earth, in what is an unprecedented ecological decline. Such a dissolution of the nature/culture divide is thus also a dissolution of the disciplinary divide between natural and human sciences, since moral issues can no longer be separated from biological concerns, and politics can no longer be separated from nature. To resolve the Anthropocene will thus require the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines addressing both scale and value, for though we must measure the ozone and the acidification of the oceans, we must also revise the ecological soundness of our political and economic practices and ideologies, establish a new understanding of the collective co-determination of human and other forms of life, and educate our species about its newfound responsibilities for both the human world and the nonhuman earth. Yet notwithstanding widespread recognition of the dissolution of the nature/culture divide that is intrinsic to Anthropocene discourse, there is considerable disagreement about when and how such a divide came about, and the role this divide plays as cause and/or effect of the Anthropocene. The scientific discourse claims that prior to the Anthropocene, human niche culture in the Holocene did not interfere in any significant way with natural processes, which were independent of human society. Actor-Network Theory and many social scientists claim on the other hand that the nature/culture divide has never existed, and that it was simply a short-lived invention of modernity to set an active subject against a passive world to be exploited. Yet other social scientists disagree with both of these positions, and claim that not only has the distinction between nature and culture always existed, but it continues to exist in the Anthropocene, requiring social scientific rather than scientific expertise in order to come to terms with its political and economic causes. For these scholars, the Anthropocene term is itself misleading for its universalizing of homo sapiens as responsible for the geological shift. What are we to make of these conflicting interpretations of the nature/culture divide, and how might they influence our understanding of the Anthropocene, and of possible responses to it? With such contradictory interpretations, the Anthropocene has come to represent the node in a theory debate with important consequences for understanding who we are and how to respond to the crisis and envision our future on the planet earth. This paper will seek to disentangle these different positions, and evaluate the solutions each position provides to ensure a future for life on the planet. If the scientific position reduces nature to a garden that must be managed by technology to allow for neoliberal lifestyles to continue and Actor-Network Theory reduces human agency to a material force no different from that of technological tools and thereby justifies a form of technological determinism where might makes right, the political positions either call for the demolition of capitalism and with it the nature/culture divide it created, or for the rehabilitation of the nature/culture divide that was destroyed by scientific determinism in order for a social critique of the Anthropocene to be possible at all. Though each position helps us to understand the stakes of the Anthropocene, none are able to develop a politics of nature that interprets the dissolution of the nature/culture divide in such a way as to imagine a polis shared by human and non-human actors. Instead of reducing such politics to a play of material forces or to the human management of the non-human world, such a shared polis requires a transversal ecology capable of rehabilitating solidarity and communication between human and non-human actors. The ecosophy developed by philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari will be proposed as just such a transversal solution, since it develops a mental, social and environmental ecology that is able to incorporate the perspectives of human and non-human subjects into a shared politics of nature.