Renewing Humanism Against the Anthropocene: Towards a Theory of the Hysterical Sublime (original) (raw)
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The posthuman summons up a complex of both tangible challenges for humanity and a potential shift to a larger, more comprehensive historical perspective on humankind. In this article we will first examine the posthuman in relation to the macro-historical framework of the Anthropocene. Adopting key notions from complexity theory, we argue that the earlier counter-figures of environmental catastrophe (Anthropocene entropy) and corporeal enhancement (transhuman negentropy) should be juxtaposed and blended. Furthermore, we argue for the relevance of a comprehensive aesthetical perspective in a discussion of posthuman challenges. Whereas popular visual culture and many novels illustrate posthuman dilemmas (e.g. the superhero's oscillation between superhuman and human) in a respect for humanist naturalist norms, avant-garde art performs a posthuman alienation of the earlier negentropic centres of art, a problematization of the human body and mind, that is structurally equivalent to the environmental modification of negentropic rise taking place in the Anthropocene. In a spatial sprawl from immaterial information to material immersion, the autonomous human body and mind, the double apex of organic negentropy, are thus undermined through a dialectics of entropy and order, from abstraction's indeterminacy to Surrealism's fragmentation of the body and its interlacing with inorganic things.
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.
More-than-humanizing the Anthropocene
The Trumpeter, 2017
The concept 'human' has to be more-than-humanized, a project Abram initiated but left incomplete in his study of language. Doing so is a powerful antidote to some of the more anthropocentric consequences of Anthropocenic thinking. Crucial to this project is uncovering the ways in which human agency is permeated by and circulates within vast causal relationships. Shifting from ecologically destructive patterns suggests completing this phenomenological project by uncovering the sense that the 'human' is in no simple sense, 'steering this vessel.' Not even the pervasive and perpetual arrogance about our own powers is incontrovertibly 'our own.' Humility and awe before these wild and undomesticatable processes cycling through us and carrying us in their currents can correct hubristic assumptions about our power for good or evil, and thereby also perhaps these destructive patterns.
The artist Kim Keever has mastered a technique that captures a new class of images: the Anthropocene Sublime. This version of the Sublime encompasses the emotions of the original definition, including awe and fear, but within the context of the ongoing environmental degradation of our planet. Devoid of postmodern ironic distance, this new version of the sublime is an example of meta-modernity.
Posthumanism and the Anthropocene
Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, 2022
Similar to posthumanist theory, the concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch dissolves traditional distinctions between nature and culture. In its original formulation by the Earth system sciences, however, the concept treats the anthropos to whom the ongoing transformation of the Earth system is attributed as a black box. This essay argues that neither the Earth system sciences nor traditional humanist or established posthumanist understandings of the human are in themselves sufficient to render a full account of this anthropos; doing so requires assembling knowledge of human and natural history from across a range of disciplines. James C. Scott’s concept of the domus complex as site of early state-making and Peter K. Haff’s concept of the technosphere are discussed as providing possible templates for such a narrative of humanity in the Anthropocene. Both describe humans as entrained within larger-scale systems whose dynamic they are unable to control, thus raising the question of the scope within which autonomous human agency can be exercised.
2016
This article accounts for an environmental standpoint to be part of the post-human approach by accessing the post-human as a post-humanism, a post-anthropocentrism and a post-dual-ism. The main goal of this paper is to call for a post-anthropocentric turn by emphasizing the fact that the Anthropocene and the actual ecological collapse are only the symptoms; it is time to address the causes, which have been detected in the anthropocentric worldview based on an autonomous conception of the human as a self-defying agent. An urgent answer to this scenario lays in philosophy, and specifically, in a theoretical and pragmatical post-anthropo-centric shift in the current perception of the human. This article reflects on the ideal, but also uneasy, practices of letting go of anthropocentric privileges. Such changes can only result by fully acknowledging the human species in relation to the environment. The Anthropocene shall thus be addressed, together with sustainable forms of producing (less), recycling and co-existing with other species, with a socio-political and cultural shift: a passage from human-ism to post-humanism, here underlined in its specific meaning of post-anthropocentrism. The methodology of this article develops as an assemblage of theoretical thinking, creative writing and artistic image analysis.
Revista Opinião Filosófica
The discourse of the ‘Anthropocene’ has quickly become pervasive, cross-cutting different fields of knowledge. However, it is also a deeply contested category. In the critical light shed by political ecology, we reflect on the conceptual blindspots that mark its narrative, identifying it as a symptom of a broader impasse of the neoliberal governmentality of nature and of the ecological crisis today. On the one hand, the Anthropocene narrative proposes a post-humanist vision, which potentially de-centres anthropocentrism. On the other hand, this same vision becomes an alibi for ever deeper and less reflective interventions of human beings on the biosphere, in particular through technoscientific developments. This paradox responds to a specific need for capitalist valorization of ‘Nature’ and, at the same time, does not seem capable to elaborate solutions to the ecological crisis as a whole. However, if the Anthropocene becomes visible only in the present historical contingency and du...
Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 2021
In this article, the authors discuss selected examples of post-anthropocentric art, which—as they show—is associated with human sensitivity, care, empathy, and the capacity for compassion. Czakon and Michna present artistic creations that serve as examples of art that respond efficiently and quickly to the pressing problems of the contemporary world. This post-anthropocentric art, as they call it, critically reacts to major ecological and social problems of today. For this purpose, in the first and second part of the essay, they briefly characterize the basic differences between traditional, anthropocentric art and contemporary post-anthropocentric art, which has been broadly investigated in, among others, the framework of feminist philosophy and women’s studies. Czakon and Michna focus on such fundamental aesthetics concepts as fine arts and the canon thereof, aesthetic pleasure, and the artist of genius, as well as the categories of beauty and the sublime and the ideal of contempl...