Reinterpreting the Anthropocene: Towards an Ecocentric Worldview (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Anthropocene: A Literary Stimulus for a Global 21st Century
2019
The fundamental aim of this essay is to explore the phenomenon known as that of the Anthropocene, concisely the period of time in which human activity has had an impact on the planet. With an understanding of this period and its effects on literature and human society, it will be interesting to note how this moves in correlation with those changes connected to the event and their influences upon one another. For example, does the existence and legitimisation of the Anthropocene era act as a stimulus for literature, and does therefore the power of literature influence in turn the development of the climate and human in/action? These phases of human history can certainly help comprehend the growing canon of ‘World Literature’ and what this means in an interconnected, global 21st century.
The Anthropocene (and) (in) the Humanities: Possibilities for Literary Studies
This paper aims to briefly discuss the concept of the Anthropocene within the geological sciences, and to consider, more broadly, some of the theoretical unfolding of the term within the humanities. Towards its conclusion, the paper presents the demands the Anthropocene makes, as a geological Epoch (in which the human becomes a geophysical force, capable of changing the Earth’s biophysical systems), of literary studies as a possible field for theoretical articulations that may add to the debates on this historical moment in which climate change, forced dislocations, the mass extinction of several species, and other urgent matters come to the fore.
Posthumanism in Literature and Ecocriticism
Introduction to the first volume (4.1/2016) of the double issue of Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism on "Past the Human: Narrative Ontologies and Ontological Stories", guest-edited by Serenella Iovino, Roberto Marchesini and Eleonora Adorni. 4.1. features articles by Serpil Oppermann, Heather Sullivan, Margarita Carretero González, Deborah Amberson & Elena Past, Diana Villanueva Romero.
Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis
1995
Reflection on the postmodern condition and reflection on the environmental crisis have much in common. They both involve efforts to understand the culture of modern civilization and how it has come to its present state. Most of those attempting to understand the postmodern condition, like those attempting to understand the roots of the environmental crisis, see Western civilization as oppressive, and are striving to create new or resurrect old ways of experiencing, thinking and living. It is arguable that the postmodern condition, associated as it is with a loss of faith in modernity, progress and enlightenment rationality, reflects people's awareness that it is just these cultural forms which are propelling humanity to self-destruction. Proponents of postmodernist politics occasionally endorse ecological resistance along with feminist activism as a new form of politics. But the fragmentation of experience, disorientation and loss of overarching perspectives and grand narratives associated with postmodernity are threats to the efforts of environmentalists who are struggling to develop and proselytise a global perspective on environmental destruction. Clearly postmodernism and environmentalism are of great significance to each other. Yet very little effort has been made to relate the discourse on postmodernity with the discouse on the environmental crisis. The failure to relate these two discourses exemplifies the disjunction between the 'two cultures', literature and science. Reflection on the postmodern condition revolves around the study of literature and popular culture, despite the part that architectural theory and reflections on recent developments in science have played in popularizing the term 'postmodernism.' Reflection on the environmental crisis, on the other hand, has revolved around reflections on science, technology and occasionally economics. Books on postmodernism are found in bookshops on shelves devoted to the theory of literature, while books on the environment tend to be found along with books on science. Postmodernism is discussed in journals of art, literature and the media, while environmental problems are discussed mainly in journals of popular science. In this work I will show that to properly address either the issues raised by the postmodernist condition or the environmental crisis, this disjunction will have to be overcome. Once analyses of postmodernity and modernity are conjoined with analyses of the roots of the global environmental crisis, it will become clear that what we are facing is a unique historical event. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx argued that '... only rarely and under quite special conditions is a society able to adopt a critical attitude towards itself.' The situation we are in is one of those quite special conditions in which not merely a society but the whole of modern civilization is being forced to adopt a critical attitude towards itself, a critical attitude even more profound than the critique by Marx of capitalism in the nineteenth century. The course this essay will take is to first characterize the postmodern condition, then to examine the philosophical ideas associated with it. After showing the nature of the conflict between both conservative and radical proponents and opponents of postmodern culture, these ideas will be evaluated in terms of how they illuminate the way in which environmental problems are being generated and how such problems might be surmounted. It will be argued that while the poststructuralists, the thinkers most closlely aligned with postmodernism, have highlighted many of the root causes of oppression in the modern world, when measured against the environmental crisis they are totally inadequate as guides for political action or for how to live. Both revisionists of mainstream culture and Marxists are more adequate to this task. Nevertheless, the poststructuralists have revealed what kind of cultural politics to avoid if the causes of the environmental crisis are not to be reproduced by efforts to overcome it. This analysis will reveal what is required to address the the environmental crisis: a 'postmodern' cosmology. To this end, proposals for a postmodern science will be examined, and it will be shown how the reconception of humanity and of its place in nature though such a science can effect the required cultural transformation. The essay will conclude by showing how a new ethics, political philosophy and economics can be, and are being built upon this cosmology, and how they are able provide the foundations for an effective environmental movement.
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.
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.
Literature and Development on the Occasion of the Anthropocene
Gragoatá, 2022
The article aims to analyze Antonio Candido's Literatura e subdesenvolvimento (1970) out of the reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). In his book, Chakrabarty seeks to understand the motivations of mid-20th century anticolonial leaders in their fight for local development. His analysis, according to our reading, consists of a way of bringing the Anthropocene and its problematics close to postcolonial criticism and indicating the limits of Third World desires for modernization in times of climate change. Literatura e subdesenvolvimento, in this sense, reveals the ambitions of one of the most important Brazilian cultural critics. By claiming literary, political, and economic dependence, Antonio Candido expresses the modernizing aspirations of an entire generation. Our aim is to bring out the modernizing project that the text insinuates with the aid of postcolonial theory and to question its methods in the face of the Anthropocene.
Posthumanism or Ecohumanism? Environmental Studies in the Anthropocene
Journal of Ecohumanism, 2022
The paper discusses two of the currently most influential discourses in the environmental humanities, posthumanism and the Anthropocene, in the light of the concept of ‘ecohumanism’ suggested by the title of the present new journal. This concept resonates with the approach of a cultural ecology in literary studies and the environmental humanities, which takes an in-between stance between a radically ecocentric posthumanism and a narrowly anthropocentric humanism. The paper addresses four different domains in which such an ecologically redefined humanism can productively respond to some of the paradoxes and unresolved questions in current environmental studies: (1) the ambiguous role of science and the search for a valid basis of scholarly truth-claims; (2) the question of the subject, and of personal vs. impersonal agency; (3) the role of the archive and of the cultural past in Anthropocene thought and writing; and (4) the relation of the human and the non-human, and of the future o...