Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity 9780367683382, 9781032065397, 9781003136989

Citation preview

Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene concept draws attention to the various forms of entanglement of social, political, ecological, biological and geological processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The ensuing complexity and ambiguity create manifold challenges to widely established theories, methodologies, epistemologies and ontologies. The contributions to this volume engage with conceptual issues of scale in the Anthropocene with a focus on mediated representation and narrative. They are centered around the themes of scale and time, scale and the nonhuman and scale and space. The volume presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, geography, political sciences, history and literary, cultural and media studies. Together, they contribute to current debates on the (re-)imagining of forms of human responsibility that meet the challenges created by humanity entering an age of scalar complexity. Gabriele Dürbeck is Professor of Literature and Culture Studies at the University of Vechta. Philip Hüpkes is research assistant at the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

135 Homemaking for the Apocalypse Domesticating Horror in Atomic Age Literature & Media Jill E. Anderson 136 Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities Antenor Firmin, Western Intellectual Tradition, and Black Atlantic Tradition Edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Paul C. Mocombe 137 T. S. Eliot and the Mother Matthew Geary 138 Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film Beyond East and West Edited by Sharmani Patricia Gabriel and Bernard Wilson 139 Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity Edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes 140 Figures of the Migrant The Roles of Literature and the Arts in Representing Migration Edited by Siobhan Brownlie and Rédouane Abouddahab 141 Commodifying Violence in Literature and on Screen The Colombian Condition Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Interdisciplinary-Perspectives-on-Literature/book-series/ RIPL

Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity Edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 3, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 3 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www​.routledge​.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 9780367683382 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032065397 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003136989 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of figure Notes on Contributors

The Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity: Introduction

vii ix 1

GABRIELE DÜRBECK AND PHILIP HÜPKES

SECTION I

Scale and Time

21

1 Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity

23

DEREK WOODS

2 Time Travel as a Tool for Promoting Trans-scalar Thinking

39

AXEL GOODBODY

3 Time Depth: Jean Epstein, Michel Serres and Operational Model Time

55

CHRISTOPH ROSOL

SECTION II

Scale and the Nonhuman

73

4 Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes: Interscalar Practices for a Volatile Planet

75

NIGEL CLARK AND BRONISLAW SZERSZYNSKI

5 Plant Scale and the Anthropocene HEATHER I. SULLIVAN

94

vi Contents   6 Anthropomorphism and Alterity

110

BERNHARD MALKMUS

  7 “We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure”: Arendtian Ethics and the Narration of Scale in the Anthropocene

127

ADELINE JOHNS-PUTRA

  8 Sound and Silence: Punk and the Anthropocene

143

JOHN PARHAM

SECTION III

Scale and Space

159

  9 On Being the Right Size: Scale, Democracy and the Anthropocene

161

AYŞEM MERT AND DOUGALD HINE

10 Cosmos vs. Anthropocene: Multi-scalar Praxis for Socio-environmental Justice with Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy

177

KATHRIN BARTHA

11 Google Gaia: Feedback Loops for Action with Global Forest Watch

193

LYNDA OLMAN AND BIRGIT SCHNEIDER

12 Art, Irony and Scaling the Anthropocene

212

J HENRY FAIR IN CONVERSATION WITH GABRIELE DÜRBECK AND PHILIP HÜPKES

13 Afterword: On Scale and Deep History in the Anthropocene

225

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

Index

233

Figures

  3.1 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:01:21) (© La Cinémathèque française) 56   3.2 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:02:28) (© La Cinémathèque française) 56   3.3 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:02:32) (© La Cinémathèque française) 57   3.4 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:09:54) (© La Cinémathèque française) 57   3.5 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:14:29) (© La Cinémathèque française) 58   3.6 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:19:14) (© La Cinémathèque française) 59   3.7 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:21:27) (© La Cinémathèque française) 60 11.1 “Green Marble,” NASA 2013. Source: NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) 195 11.2 Screen-capture of Global Forest Watch, Landing Page of the World Map. Source: Screenshot of the Website of GlobalForestWatch197 11.3 Ebstorfer World Map, ca. 1300, Germany. Source: Creative Commons 199 11.4 Illustration of Spherical View (left) versus Global View (right) of Environment and Climate (adapted from Ingold 1993). Source: Remake of the scheme in Ingold, Tim. 1993. “Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism.” In Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, edited by Kay Milton. London: Routledge, 31–42201



viii List of Figures 12.1 Wetlands with Heavy Algae Growth Adjacent to Hog Factory Farm, 2008. Source: © J Henry Fair (https://www​. jhenryfair​.com​/growth) (3301-134) 12.2 Chris Puddy, Pilot and J Henry Fair, 2016. Source: © J Henry Fair 12.3 Aerators Agitating Waste from the Manufacture of Pulp for Facial Tissues, 2005. Source: © J Henry Fair (http://www​. jhenryfair​.com​/tissue) 12.4 Bauxite Waste at Aluminum Refinery, 2007. Source: © J Henry Fair 12.5 Large Impoundment of Bauxite Waste, with Aluminum Refinery and Mississippi River, 2007. Source: © J Henry Fair 12.6 Galaxy Road: Excavator Tracks in Bauxite Waste at Aluminum Refinery, 2007. Source: © J Henry Fair (https:// www​.jhenryfair​.com​/aluminum) 12.7 The Last Stand: Mountaintop Removal Coal Mine at Night, 2005, © J Henry Fair (https://www​.jhenryfair​.com​/mtr) 12.8 Waste Liquid at Brown Coal Mine, 2018. Source: © J Henry Fair (https://www​.jhenryfair​.com​/hornbeam, https://www​.jhenryfair​.com​/hambach) 12.9 Freighter Enters Malamocco Channel with the Doors of Mose Project, Prior to Installation, in the Foreground, Venice in the background, 2018. Source: © J Henry Fair (https://www​.jhenryfair​.com​/mose) (4436-300)

213 214

216 217 218

219 221

223

223

Notes on Contributors

Kathrin Bartha is a doctoral researcher at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) and Goethe University (Frankfurt, Germany). Her PhD thesis (conceived as a Joint-PhD project between the two universities) explored the role of the arts and humanities—and especially of literature—in the context of the current environmental crisis and has the title: “Unsettling the Anthropocene: Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature.” Her main areas of research are environmental humanities, postcolonial and transcultural literatures, inter-generational justice, feminism and gothic studies. Dipesh Chakrabarty teaches history and South Asian studies at the University of Chicago. His publications include Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000/2008) and The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021 forthcoming). Nigel Clark is Professor of Human Geography at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011) and (with Bronislaw Szerszynski) Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences (2020). He co-edited (with Kathryn Yusoff) a 2017 Theory, Culture & Society special issue on “Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene” and (with David Higgins and Tess Somervell) a 2020 special issue of humanities on “Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate Change.” Current interests include pyrogeographies of the explosion, planetary reason and decolonization and the paleogeography of care and compassion. Gabriele Dürbeck is Professor of Literature and Culture Studies at the University of Vechta. She has widely published on German literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, travel literature and postcolonial studies. Her current research focuses on environmental humanities and narratives of the Anthropocene in science and literature. She is co-editor of Ecocriticism. Eine Einführung (Böhlau, 2015); Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture (Lexington, 2017);

x Notes on Contributors Representation of the Anthropocene in Literature and Media (Peter Lang, 2019); Anthropocenic Turn. The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age (Routledge, 2020); Nature Writing in der deutschsprachigen Literatur von Goethe bis zur Gegenwart (Springer, 2020); and Anthropozän-Literatur. Poetiken-Genres-Lektüren (Metzler, 2021). J Henry Fair is an American photographer and environmental activist. Known for his “chillingly beautiful” (Audubon Magazine) environmental aerial photos, Fair has called attention to environmental and political problems in different regions of the world. Fair is the winner of the 2019 “Environmental Photographer of the Year” and the 2012 “Earth Through A Lens” Award. In 2020, Fair was featured as one of the 12 most influential nature and conservation photographers of our time in the newly released book Human Nature. The book received critical acclaim in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Among the three solo photo books Mr. Fair has published, he is best known for his “Industrial Scars” series, about which, Roberta Smith, chief art critic of The New York Times said “The vivid color photographs of J Henry Fair lead an uneasy double life as potent records of environmental pollution and as ersatz evocations of abstract painting … information and form work together, to devastating effect.” Fair’s work is widely published: from The New York Times, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, TIME and New York to Die Zeit, The Guardian, Le Figaro and Art. He has been featured on European Television networks like Arte and TTT and American programs like CBC, Today and Marketplace, television and radio, respectively. Since 2011, Fair has had numerous touring exhibits in major galleries and museums across the United States, Europe and Asia. Recent career highlights include solo exhibitions in the Natural History Museum of Berlin, The German Environment Ministry in Dessau, Umbria World Foto Festival in Italy, Xposure Photo Festival in the United Arab Emirates, Arts House in Singapore, Gerald Peters Gallery and Mass Moca and the SFO Museum in San Francisco. His selected works can be found in the permanent collection in the History Museum of Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Museum of Oil in Riyadh Saudi Arabia and The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, to name a few. Mr. J Henry Fair was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and holds a degree in journalism from Fordham University. He is currently based in New York City and Berlin. Axel Goodbody is Emeritus Professor of German and European Culture at the University of Bath, UK, and Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Research Centre for Environmental Humanities. He studied

Notes on Contributors  xi German and French at Trinity College, Dublin, and taught English as Lektor at the University of Kiel, where he gained his PhD with a thesis on romantic and twentieth-century nature poetry in Germany. His subsequent research has been in environmental literature, ecocritical theory and environmental discourse. Recent publications include the co-edited volume, Cli-Fi: A Companion, a special number of Resilience on “Stories of Energy,” and the coauthored book, Climate Change Scepticism. He was a founding member of EASLCE and its first president from 2004 to 2006. He is Associate Editor of the journal Ecozon@ since 2010, and co-editor of the Brill/Rodopi book series, Nature, Culture and Literature. Current interests are garden writing in the Anthropocene and climate change fiction. Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and teacher. He has been responsible for founding organizations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. Philip Hüpkes is Research Assistant at the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. From 2017 until 2019, he was employed as a research assistant in the research project “Narratives of the Anthropocene in Science and Literature: Themes, Structures, Poetics” at the University of Vechta, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). His research interest lies in issues of scale and the context of media ecology and aesthetics, as well as in philosophies of perception and process ontology. Recent publications include: (as co-editor, together with Gabriele Dürbeck) The Anthropocenic Turn: The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age (Routledge 2020); “Der Anthropos als Skalenproblem” (Der Anthropos im Anthropozän: Die Wiederkehr des Menschen im Moment seiner vermeintlich endgültigen Verabschiedung, de Gruyter, 2020); “Anthropocenic Earth Mediality: On Scaling and Deep Time in the Anthropocene” (Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene, Cambridge Scholars, 2019). Adeline Johns-Putra is Professor of Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She is the author of Heroes and Housewives: Women’s Epic Poetry and Domestic Ideology in the Romantic Age (2001), The History of the Epic (2006) and Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel (2019). Her edited books include Process: Landscape and Text with Catherine Brace (2013), Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text, and Culture with John Parham and Louise Squire (2017), Cli-Fi: A Companion with Axel Goodbody (2018) and Climate and Literature (2019). She is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate with Kelly Sultzbach and writing The Cambridge Introduction to Climate and Literature. She was the president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK and Ireland, from 2011 to 2015.

xii Notes on Contributors Bernhard Malkmus, Professor of German Studies at Newcastle University, has a particular interest in the history and philosophy of biology and ecology and their aesthetic rendition in poetry, narrative literature and the visual arts. His work reflects on the ways humans have imagined and envisaged their relation to nature, their role in the history of life and their position in the web of life throughout modernity. He has published widely on twentieth-century and contemporary literature as well as the relation between ethics and aesthetics. He edited, with Heather Sullivan, a special issue of New German Critique entitled “The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities” and is currently working on a book-length essay on living in an anthropomorphic world as well as on the cultural history of the lynx. Ayşem Mert is Associate Professor at the Political Science Department of Stockholm University and a member of Shadow Places and Earth System Governance Networks. She uses post-structuralism, discourse theory and critical approaches to study discourses of democracy and environment in the Anthropocene, public–private cooperation in sustainability governance and the post-Corona world order. She is the editor of Earth System Governance Working Papers and the author of Environmental Governance through Partnerships: A Discourse Theoretical Study (Edward Elgar). Lynda C. Olman is a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She studies the rhetoric of science—particularly the public reception of visual arguments and of the ethos or public role of the scientist. She is currently working on a volume on non-Western and decolonial rhetorics of science. Her monograph Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy (Lynda Walsh, Oxford UP, 2013) traces a dominant strand in the ethos of the late modern science advisers back to its historical roots in religious rhetoric. John Parham is Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Worcester (UK). He has authored or edited five books that include Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination (2010), Green Media and Popular Culture (2016) and (with Louise Westling) A Global History of Literature and the Environment (2017). He has also recently edited the (forthcoming) Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene and is co-editor of the Routledge journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. John has published extensively on “Victorian ecology,” contemporary literature and green popular culture. The latter encompasses essays on anime, “digital cli-fi,” documentary and further work on punk including published articles on British and Australian punk and about the “punk poet” John Cooper Clarke. He is currently working on a project that examines cultural imaginings and representations of photosynthesis.

Notes on Contributors  xiii Christoph Rosol is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) and a research associate at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). At the MPIWG he leads the umbrella project “Knowledge in and of the Anthropocene” which brings together interdisciplinary research on the epistemic and technological practices that together constitute potent drivers for the ongoing transition into a new geological epoch. At the HKW he has been conceptualizing and curating main parts of the “Anthropocene Project” (2013–2014) and the subsequent project “Technosphere” (2015–2019). Being a liaison between both the institutions, Rosol is co-leading the international network project “Anthropocene Curriculum” (anthropocene​-curriculum​ .​ org). His own research deals with the deep-rooted history and the technical as well as epistemic foundations of the climate and Earth system sciences. Birgit Schneider is a media and visual studies scholar with a strong interest in environmental humanities. She is professor for knowledge cultures and media environments at Potsdam University, Institute for Arts and Media, European media studies. Her research focus is on technical and scientific images with a strong focus on questions of media aesthetics, techné, ecology, maps, diagrams and textility from the seventeenth century till the present. Her current research focuses on the visual communication of climate since 1800 and a genealogy of climate change visualization in between science, aesthetics and politics. She is the editor of the volumes The Technical Image (Cambridge 2015) and Image Politics of Climate Change (Bielefeld 2014) and the German monographs Textiles Prozessieren (Berlin, 2007) and Klimabilder (Berlin 2018). Heather I. Sullivan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and is Vice President of the Goethe Society of North America. She has published widely on ecocriticism and Goethe studies, including the co-edited volumes German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene and The Early History of Embodied Cognition from 1740-1920, guest co-edited special volumes on environmental humanities in New German Critique, Colloquia Germanica and Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment and is the author of The Intercontextuality of Self and Nature in Ludwig Tieck’s Early Works. Sullivan serves as the Chair the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment’s Grants Committee and is also the 2016 recipient of Trinity University’s highest award, the Z.T. Scott Outstanding Teaching and Advising Fellowship and the Goethe Society of North America’s 2016 outstanding essay award. Bronislaw Szerszynski is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. He is author of Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005) and coauthor with

xiv Notes on Contributors Nigel Clark of Planetary Social Thought (2020). He is also co-editor of Risk, Environment and Modernity (1996), Re-Ordering Nature (2003), Nature Performed (2003) and Technofutures (2015). His research seeks to situate social life in the longer perspective of planetary history, drawing on the social and natural sciences, arts and humanities. As well as academic publications, his outputs also include performances, art– science exhibitions and events and experimental participatory workshops. Derek Woods is Assistant Professor of media studies in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. He is writing a book about “ecotechnology” in the context of ecological sciences and science fiction. His articles look at topics such as the philosophy and aesthetics of scale, biopolitics and modern Anglophone literature. He recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. His future work will (1) continue to address questions of scale and (2) be devoted to (the mediation of) fungi and lichens.

The Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity Introduction Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes

By defining humans as protagonists of global environmental change, the concept of the Anthropocene draws attention to the necessity of developing more responsible forms of interaction with the planet. The idea that humans can operate as “stewards of the Earth system” (Crutzen and Steffen 2003, 256) presupposes an understanding of the scales at which anthropocenic processes occur. These scales, however, are often represented in a highly abstract form and few shared or even popular imaginations have been established. Issues of “scale” and “scaling” have long been acknowledged and widely discussed in the fields of biology, ecology, architecture (human) geography, engineering and mathematics. In contrast to such disciplinary approaches to scale, the Anthropocene concept transcends discipline-specific conceptions and theories. It emphasizes the entanglement of social, political, ecological, biological and geological processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The ensuing complexity and ambiguity create manifold challenges to widely established epistemological and ontological, methodological and theoretical assumptions. An important aspect is the ubiquity of mediation as a characteristic of the Anthropocene, i.e. the Anthropocene is accessible only through technological means, narrative and mediated representational forms. We ask how and to what extent different forms of mediation can help to develop a sense of ethical responsibility that is adequate to the complexity of the Anthropocene situation. All contributors to this volume are interested in narrative and representational forms of scale. This volume explores the proposition that understanding anthropocenic conceptions of “scale” can help strengthen not only scientific and philosophical but also social engagement with the role of humans in the Anthropocene. The central aim is to investigate issues of scale in the Anthropocene from the perspectives of social and political sciences, history, literature, cultural and media studies, with a shared emphasis on the divergent understandings of the role of narrative. In this way, the volume presents an interdisciplinary dialogue with the aim to (re-)imagine forms of human responsibility suitable to the challenges created by humanity’s entering of an age of scalar complexity.1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-101

2  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes

Scale and Mediation Developing a form of responsibility directed not exclusively toward the well-being of humanity and other living beings, but first and foremost toward the stabilization of the earth system, has been a motive linked to the Anthropocene concept from the very beginning. Already in their pioneering article, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) state that “[a]n exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management” (7). Crutzen and Steffen (2003) consider the rapid advances in interdisciplinary research and in our understanding of human– environment systems as a necessary condition for responsible human stewardship. However, the big challenge here, according to Crutzen (2002, 94), is that this requires “appropriate human behavior at all scales” (emphasis added). When Steffen et al. (2015, 94) argue that “[p]lanetary stewardship has yet to emerge,” then, we argue, such a call for “appropriate behavior at all scales” is complicated by the difficulty to comprehend how processes and systems change depending on the scale(s) at which they occur. The importance of scale has been widely acknowledged and the scale question, according to some commentators, “now begins every conversation in the humanities” (LeMenager 2009, 25; see Estok 2018, 38). Even beyond the academic field, Astrida Neimanis et al. (2015) argue, scale has become “one of the stumbling blocks […] many citizens alike face in thinking through the environment” (2015, 73). The growing popularity of the Anthropocene concept has undoubtedly served as a “key impetus” for this “recent intensification of discussions on scale” (Clarke and Wittenberg 2017, 8). From its very beginning, this concept has been deeply intertwined with scalar premises. The Anthropocene concept posits that Anthropos has become a “major geological force” (Steffen et al. 2007, 618). It builds on scientifically validated observations of the accumulated impact of human activity at the temporal, spatial and organizational scales of earth system processes. The notion of Anthropos has been widely and controversially debated; most of all for its neo-Promethean and undifferentiated account of humanity (e.g. Yusoff 2013, 783) and for its implicit marginalization of the manifold other (nonhuman) agents of planetary change (e.g. Haraway 2015, 159). Yet the conception of Anthropos in earth system science does not build on the premise of a strict epistemological separation between humans and earth. It therefore not only provokes the aforementioned forms of criticism, but also invites non-anthropocentric interpretations of the Anthropocene (e.g. Latour 2013). The scientific focus on the calculable and measurable effects of anthropogenic activities suggests that the Anthropocene can first and foremost be characterized by its all-encompassing macro-scale perspective on human– environment interactions. As Serpil Opperman (2018, 2) puts it, the Anthropocene appears like “a story of scale that stretches from the deepest

Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity  3 lithic recesses of the Earth to its unsheltered atmospheric expanses.” This story implies a “dominant visual apparatus of the Anthropocene” (Alaimo 2016, 146) that has been problematized for instantiating an epistemological point of view “from nowhere.” This view marginalizes particularity for the benefit of a detached and abstract overview of broader forms of systemic interdependencies, and for a visual epistemology that supports the cybernetic idea of the environment as a controllable entity (cf. Toepfer 2018, 73–75; see also Hui 2017). While such a perspective might appear “mockingly useless” with regard to “daily” issues of “politics, ethics or specific interpretations of history, culture, literature or other areas” (Clark 2015, 71), it is in fact a necessity when analyzing the manifold effects of anthropogenic activity or of the accumulated mass of technological matter, which Peter Haff has called the “technosphere” (cf. Haff 2014, see also Klingan and Rosol 2019). In this view, it is specifically at the rather large scales of observation and analysis, which earth system scientists apply, that the ontological dualisms between nature and culture, humans and earth begin to dissolve into more entangled forms of relationship (cf. Hüpkes and Dürbeck 2021a). In other words, the “posthuman convergence” (Braidotti 2019, 128) between nature and culture has a “characteristic scale” at which it manifests and, as a result, can be most suitably analyzed (on the concept of “characteristic scale” in ecological discourse, cf., for example, Wu and Li 2006). This systemic perspective on processes of environmental change brings into view the challenge of understanding the feedback loops and interdependencies of various geological, biochemical, social and technological processes that emerge at multiple, interrelated scales. Most importantly, the (problematic) conceptualization of Anthropos as a species-level subject could be read as a plea ultimately directed toward human individuals to become aware of their role in—and responsibility for—planetary-scale effects of anthropogenic activity. Here, the challenge lies in the fact that complex systemic behavior cannot be described or thought of in terms of linear causality. While research on climate change, biodiversity loss and many other anthropocenic processes obviously grants increased epistemic access to spatio-temporally complex processes, this expanding knowledge stands in stark contrast with the unavailability of emergent systemic behavior and multi-scalar patterns to immediate phenomenal experience. Historian and postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009, 220) pointed toward this problem when arguing that, while our role within the Anthropocene is comprehensible at the level of intellect, there “could be no phenomenology of us as a species.” Chakrabarty’s (2012) argument is that human individuals cannot experience themselves as a species or as a geological force. Thus, the Anthropocene concept implies a scalar incommensurability for human imagination and perception. Chakrabarty (2015, 2018) locates this problem in particular in the gap between the time scales of (human) historical and geological time. Similarly, Timothy Morton, referring to Kant,

4  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes states that the “gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open,” in the sense that this gap cannot be located “anywhere in my given, phenomenal, experiential, or indeed scientific space” (Morton 2013, 12). Here, Morton refers to the idea that environmental processes such as climate change (which he refers to as “hyperobjects”) are not phenomenologically or perceptually traceable—they “can indeed be thought and computed, but not directly seen or touched” (11). The existence of anthropocenic processes is intrinsically linked to their computation, simulation and visualization as scientific objects through the operation of media technologies (Hüpkes and Dürbeck 2021a).2 However, the assumption of a gap between phenomenon and thing, or between sensory and instrumental forms of experience, suggests a clear distinction between a general commensurability of the scale of human perception and an incommensurability of the scale of the Anthropocene. The trope of perceptual incommensurability is deeply entrenched with the history of media technologies and instruments, such as the telescope and the microscope, whose invention has always been driven by a “fascination with size” (Bonner 2006). As we have argued elsewhere (Hüpkes and Dürbeck 2021b),3 the very distinction between a commensurable and an incommensurable level of experience is itself an effect of media technological operations. Media are by no means neutral mediators between an external reality and a sensory experience; and mediation, in this sense, is not reducible to the purpose of simply making accessible something which is ontologically given but cannot be directly accessed by a sensory experience. Technical media format and reconstitute what appears to be empirically given or phenomenologically accessible. Technological mediation, in this respect, does not necessarily draw on a priori existing scales which are distinguishable by their degree of commensurability, but constitutes scales, and potentially also the assumption of a “gap” between them, in the first place. In this regard, we assume that the very idea of a gap between sensory and mediated forms of experience needs to be addressed critically in the context of the Anthropocene concept. One of the most crucial challenges of the Anthropocene is that the relationship between what we can immediately witness with our senses and what has to be computed for us to be sensible cannot anymore be thought of (if it ever were) in terms of a clear ontological distinction. In other words, the gap between the perspective of an intelligible environment we can make sense of and the perspective of a highly complex, somewhat “holistic” system of multi-scale interdependencies needs to be critically interrogated. The idea of the human as geophysical force destabilizes the dichotomies between knowledge and being, subject and object, observer and observed, experience and event and cause and effect. Processes such as climate change can only be described as complex entanglements that do not exclusively affect human actors and actions, but include them as substantial particularities. At the same time, these processes remain inexplicable when conceived in terms of linear causality. Timothy Clark (2015, 103)

Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity  5 argues that the Anthropocene is itself an “emergent scale effect,” meaning that “at a certain, indeterminate threshold, numerous human actions, insignificant in themselves […] come together to form a new, imponderable physical event.”4 With the Anthropocene concept, this gap has come to matter beyond the realm of science and requires entirely different modes of thinking in terms of scale. Chakrabarty (2012, 14), for instance, states that we need to think the human disjunctively over different, incompatible scales of space and time at once. Similarly, Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg (2017, 8) suggest thinking “about human scale as simultaneously expanded and disembodied.” And Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller (2020, 142) argue that in order to understand the Anthropocene, one has to begin with describing its inherent “scale effects.” Scale can either be understood as a relationship of relative size or as a relationship between vertical levels. In both cases, a scale always already presumes the existence of at least another scale to which it relates or to which it can be compared. It matters how we think of this relative size relationship in terms of the extrapolation of scales. For instance, in Jonathan Swift’s famous novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), one witnesses that “scale” can be used as a tool for the (intellectual, aesthetic) appropriation of the “micro” and the “macro.” Swift’s account of dwarves and giants as small and very large versions of the human presumes an average human measure to which the micro and the macro are adjusted. This operation suggests a linear continuity between different size levels and creates an effect of anthropomorphization.5 Thinking about how to think of scales adequately has also been a key issue within the field of human geography at least since Peter Taylor’s (1982) differentiation between the three spatial scales of the global, the nation and the urban. Various human geographers, among them scholars such as Neil Smith, Erik Swyngedouw and Neil Brenner, have engaged with and discussed the question of whether scales are actually ontologically given or epistemologically conceptualized: “scale is typically seen in one of two ways: either as a real, material thing which actually exists and is the result of political struggle and/or social processes, or as a way of framing our understanding of the world” (Herod 2008, 218). The concept of scale thus oscillates between “‘thingified’ and ‘conceptual’ approaches” (Jones et al. 2011, 404), between scale as “mental device” and as “material social products” (Herod 2008, 219). While the materialist perspective tends to conceptually “stabilize” scales as socially constructed yet ontologically fixed entities, it is the epistemological point of view which allows us to conceive of scales as contingent ways of framing space and time and, as a result, of space and time as dimensions that could be approached by different, potentially nonscalar concepts. The most prominent argument in this regard has been made by Marston et al. (2005). They argue for a “human geography without scale”—a human geography which is conceptually based on a “flat ontology” and thus relies on thinkers such as Deleuze, Simondon, Latour and

6  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes DeLanda. This critical rejection of the concept of scale draws, among various reasons, on a problematization of the assumption that scales rely on a “transcendent predetermination,” for instance, in the sense of a nested vertical hierarchy of the local and the global (422). Similarly, the Anthropocene concept does also at least imply fantasies of “precision-nested” scales (Tsing 2012, cf. also her study on the “nonscalability” of the Matsutake mushroom, 2015). We mean this in the sense that the attribution of the causation of an entire geological epoch to the human species suggests that every human being on earth, as part of the human species, is also a small part of the large-scale subject that has brought about the Anthropocene, so that vice versa of this would also not be more than merely the sum of its parts. As a result, understanding the scale of each part would lead to an understanding of the whole, and vice versa. The way in which scale is imagined in such a line of thought could be termed a “smooth continuum” (Woods 2017b, 205), a “zoom effect” (Latour 2017) or “mono-scalar patterns” (Horton 2017, 35). Derek Woods (2014, 133) has raised the question of whether the concept of the human is actually scalable. Woods hereby problematizes the assumption that the concept of the human can be translated into a much vaster temporal and spatial frame without changing the concept of the human entirely and to the point of its unmaking. Here, Anthropos herself/himself constitutes a problem of scale (cf. Hüpkes 2020). This problem of “scale invariance,” and the opposed idea of variation that occurs depending on scale (see Woods 2014), has been an issue for the sciences at least since Galileo. In his Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638), Galileo informed his readers about “the impossibility of increasing the size of structures to vast dimensions either in art or in nature.” Size has a predominant influence on the composition of nearly any object, entity, system or organism. Changes in size therefore cannot be conceived of as secondary effects of changes in form, as biologist John Tyler Bonner (2006) has argued, but changes in size rather determine the way in which systems, objects and organisms function. As a consequence, this implies that our theories, concepts and categories might only conceive an entity at a certain scale, but cannot be randomly and infinitely applied if this entity changes its size and scope. This also applies to our understanding of “responsibility.” Thinking about a form of responsibility adequate to the challenges of the Anthropocene can become problematic if the relation of different scales is principally considered only in terms of commensurability and invariance between scales. Reminiscent of the words of Jonathan Swift (2003) that “nothing is great or little except by comparison,” one might add in this context that there are complex systems whose emergent behavior cannot be reduced to the system’s behavior at other scales. “Patterns change with scale” (Wu 2004, 125; cf. also Chave and Levin 2004, 29), meaning that, first, it matters on which scale a system is observed or analyzed, and that, second, the behavior at one

Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity  7 particular scale can be literally incomparable to the behavior at another. Likewise, responsibility cannot simply be upscaled from the level of the individual human being to the level of species. However, the Anthropocene concept conveys that phenomena such as climate change or biodiversity loss are intrinsically linked to individual or collective human activities. As a result, it appears plausible that one common way in which the complexity of scalar issues is mediated in debates on, and representations, of the Anthropocene, is still the method of comparison. It serves as a means of producing commensurability between scales. Similar to Gulliver’s Travels, comparison is applied at various occasions within the Anthropocene discourse in order to articulate and affirm the scale of human impact. For instance, David Archer (2008, 6) writes that “[m]ankind is becoming a force in climate comparable to the orbital variations that drive the glacial cycles.” Gaia Vince (2014, 3) asserts that “we’ve become a phenomenal global force and there is no sign of a slowdown,” so that “the scale and speed of our planetary impact” appears unprecedented and without comparison. Or in the short film Welcome to the Anthropocene (2012) by Félix Pharand-Deschênes and Owen Gaffney, the off-commentary remarks that “[w]e move more sediment and rock annually than all natural processes” (00:01:25; our emphasis). Precisely because the Anthropocene poses problems of scale invariance, linear causality and scalability, it also invites us to take a critical position. A more “post-anthropocentric” approach toward the Anthropocene could, for example, suggest that it might not be sufficient to think of the planetaryscale impact of anthropogenic activity simply as an extension of human activity, nor to conceive of the human signature discernible in future strata as distinctly human, i.e. simply as a prosthesis of current humanity. The Anthropocene challenges us to think, conceptualize and narrate “scale” in a way that allows us to imagine and comprehend the potentialities of the becoming-extinct, the becoming-signature, the becoming-geologic and also the becoming-responsible of Anthropos not simply as continuation and affirmation of already existing assumptions and concepts of the human, nor as a quantitative expansion of the human, but as something that is qualitatively different.6 Various humanities scholars have therefore approached this issue by developing notions of scale which acknowledge it as relative not exclusively in terms of commensurability, but in terms of the incommensurability of insurmountable differences and semi-predictable emergences occurring on the variegated scales. Some of them are also explicitly or implicitly linked to questions of mediation. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2010), for instance, has called for the development of “multiple-track narratives,” which incorporate the geophysical agency of Anthropos “into our telling of the human story” (§6) without marginalizing the scale at which humans are concerned with issues of justice. Claire Colebrook (2017, 83) has remarked that narratives always generate “a moral decision regarding scale,” making it necessary

8  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes to find narratives suitable to the scale of the Anthropocene. She suggests that the scale of our narrations needs to shift from human generations and history to species history and deep time, and that we need to learn to deal with the “problem of intersecting scales” (1). Donna Haraway (2015) has argued that the question of naming the recent epoch “Anthropocene” (as opposed to Technocene, Eurocene, etc.) is itself already a decision for a particular narrative of scale. Timothy Clark (2012, 2015) has argued that the Anthropocene, as a symptom of a “crisis of scale,” provokes a “derangement of linguistic and intellectual proportion” (Clark 2012, 150) within modes of talking and thinking about the environment. Hereby Clark proposes a transfer of such “derangements of scale” into reading practices by embedding texts “in multiple and even contradictory frames at the same time.” And last but not least, Bruno Latour (2017) has criticized the visual reproduction of linear modes of scaling operated by zoom-effects. Many more scholars have engaged with the issue of scale in an Anthropocene context. The point we want to make with this short list of examples is that mediation itself has become a challenge in light of the scalar complexity of the Anthropocene. Hence, we do not simply need narrative or visual forms of mediation to reduce this complexity, i.e. to translate formerly incommensurable events into a human-scaled format. But we need to address the relationship between mediation—in the case of this volume, in particular of narrative—and scale in a way that acknowledges both concepts as reciprocal constituents. Addressing not only scales through mediating practices, but the vice versa, mediation through scale is meant to question conventional assumptions on the potentials and also boundaries of how narratives work.

Time, the Nonhuman and Space Against the backdrop of the “scalar complexity” articulated through manifold vast and multi-scale processes of earth systemic transformations, the question of “responsibility,” originally a matter of concern for social, cultural and political actors, begins to intersect with the more-than-scientific challenge of having to think in terms of scale. To increase knowledge and reflexivity about “scale” becomes a shared concern, but one that requires particular forms of mediation between the scales at which scholars of different fields measure and observe our environment, our concepts and ideas of and feelings about responsibility. that the contributions to this volume explore how different forms of mediation, and narratives and representations in particular, can help us develop a sense of responsibility more suitable to this complex situation. Vice versa, the scalar complexity of the Anthropocene may also radically challenge our ideas and concepts of “narrative” and “representation,” and of mediation in general. This volume aims to improve our understanding of the challenges posed by the amplification of scalar complexities expressed by the Anthropocene

Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity  9 concept. It aspires to find a set of possible answers to one of the central, most difficult questions posed in the Anthropocene debate: How can humans act responsibly in the face of planetary crises if their ideas of responsibility and of other key concepts of the cultural, social and political domain are themselves delimited in terms of scale, i.e. determined by a restricted access to spatially and temporally complex phenomena? As the Anthropocene debate clearly indicates, “scale” as well as “responsibility” and “mediation” are not reducible to objects of knowledge of one particular discipline. An interdisciplinary approach, covering an assembly of different disciplinary engagements, has the potential to show how concepts of mediation change depending on the—discipline-specific—observational and analytical scales applied. How do notions of “scale” transform with regard to differences in the attempts at mediating (i.e. narrating or representing) them? How could a plurality of possible entanglements between scale and mediation eventually lead to a number of innovative conceptions of responsibility? The approach of this volume is based on the idea that different methodologies, theories and disciplinary frameworks might lead to different reasons to deal with scale, as well as to different results regarding the conceptualization of responsibility. At the same time, the shared discursive and thematic background of the Anthropocene can lead to insights into more encompassing assumptions and evidence on scale and the ways to mediate questions of scale. Assembling an array of disciplinary approaches from the fields of literary studies, history of science, sociology, philosophy, media studies and political science that all focus on the interdisciplinary topic of the Anthropocene, the volume aims to explore the broad scope of issues related to the “scale-Anthropocene” nexus. The contributions emphasize responsibility in narratives and representations and allow the reader to trace patterns, similarities and shared matters of concern between the differing fields. The chapters of this book provide a multidisciplinary set of perspectives on the narratives of scale in the Anthropocene. The volume has three thematic parts, which correspond to the domains of “time,” “space” and the “nonhuman.” The idea behind this structure is to facilitate the recognition of the manifold possible interconnections between the chapters. A more pigeonholing approach could have insisted on the differentiation between critical reflections on existing concepts of scale and modes of thinking scale differently, or between particular functions or strategies of scale, e.g. commensurability and incommensurability, variance and invariance and linearity and complexity. However, we have experienced that such functions or approaches cannot be easily separated as they tend to overlap across various chapters. At a first glance, this argument could also be made regarding the domains of time, the nonhuman and space. But a closer examination shows that each contribution indeed focuses on one of these three domains.

10  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes

Section I: Scale and Time The contributions to the first part of the book—“Scale and Time”— emphasize the temporal questions in debates surrounding the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene concept suggests a convergence of human history and “deep time” (McPhee 1981). Many scholars assume that humanity has, in a relatively short period of time, caused a “rupture” in the functioning of earth (sub-)systems whose effects will continue over hundreds of thousands of years (cf. Hamilton 2016). Furthermore, geologists assume that the effects of anthropogenic activity will be “discernible as a geological strata readable well after man ceases to be” (Colebrook 2014, 10). This brings into view the necessity to extend the concept of responsibility far beyond the scale of the average human lifespan and to a “deep future” (Chakrabarty 2016, 380). The overlapping and entangling of human experiential timescales on the one hand and deep temporalities on the other require the mediation of conceptions of temporal scale which allow us to think of responsibility as something different from a mere conceptual “prosthesis” of the present. Writing from a media studies perspective, Derek Woods opens the first section with the chapter “Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity.” Based on an analysis of Michael Madsen’s documentary Into Eternity: A Film for the Future, which tells the story of Onkalo, a nuclear waste facility in Finland, Woods outlines a scale-critical theory of deep time which allows him to question the dualism between geological and historical time. Reading different conceptions of scale, which range from Timothy Clark’s notions of “scale framing” and “scalar deconstruction” to Stephen Jay Goulds “proper scale,” through the lens of Madsen’s film, he develops the concept of “geomedia” as a contribution to his larger project of a “scale critique for the Anthropocene.” The chapter identifies a particular manifestation of geomedia in the film—Plutonium 239. The half-life of this radioactive waste product does not only determine the architectural and archival qualities of the Onkalo facility (it needs to last for at least 100,000 years), but it also functions as geomedia in the sense that it emanates the documentary’s specific form. Contradicting the idea that geological timescales are generally unimaginable, Woods concludes that “mid-length” durations like Plutonium 239’s half-life are in fact imaginable. The following chapter “Time Travel as a Tool for Promoting Trans-scalar Thinking” by Axel Goodbody, a German studies and ecocriticism scholar, analyzes the narrative function of time travel as a means of linking the timescales of human life and of geophysical change. Taking the need to cultivate a trans-scalar environmental imaginary as a starting point, he considers time travel in its ludic, playful ways as a potentially powerful device for training readers’ awareness of temporal scales in the Anthropocene. Focusing on the role of the science-fiction genre in climate change novels, Goodbody examines four German novels which narrate time travel back in earlier centuries and forward in the future: Franz Friedrich’s Die Meisen auf Uusimaa singen

Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity  11 nicht mehr (On Uusimaa the Tits No Longer Sing, 2014), Jostein Gaarder’s 2084—Noras Welt (The World According to Anna, 2015), Carl Amery’s Die Wallfahrer (The Pilgrims, 1986), and Wolfgang Jeschke’s Das CusanusSpiel (The Cusanus Game, 2013). Time travel is a literary form that not only offers an essential perspective on the survival of mankind, but also fosters trans-scalar thinking. In his contribution “Time Depth: Jean Epstein, Michel Serres and Operational Model Time,” historian of science and media scholar Christoph Rosol focuses on the function of climate and Earth system computer models as machines for “collapsing” and “thickening” time by means of numerical simulation. Instead of serving merely as instruments and tools for the manipulation of time, Rosol argues that simulations operate mimetically to the flow and instability of the biogeophysical systems whose temporality they compress. Turning toward a scene of Jean Epstein’s film Le Tempestaire (1947) that shows mythical and modern practices of weather control, Rosol examines ways of seeing correspondence and continuity between a cinema that manipulates time and the model time of computer simulations. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres, he analyzes interconnected times and hybrid temporalities of “time depth,” arguing that the treatment of instability and fluidity, considered as a form of scientific thought, is itself unstable and time-transgressive and can sharpen our sensibility in times of rapid changes in the geosphere and anthroposphere.

Section II: Scale and the Nonhuman Scale can be a method for the appropriation and anthropomorphization of spatial and temporal configurations beyond the scope of human experience. However, as a side effect, scales can also bring into view new unknowns, new forms of unassimilable otherness, even the otherness of the very subject who uses scale as a tool, in the sense that this subject can become a part of the phenomenon it seeks to scale up or down (cf. Zylinska 2014). Largescale human interferences with the environment include a broad spectrum of uncertainty, or “unknown unknowns” (Horn and Bergthaller 2020, 24). A difference in terms of the scale at which an entity, a system or a component is observed may also then lead to forms of alterity which challenge observations that appear unchangeable at another scale. In the “official” account of the Anthropocene narrative,7 an earth systemic scale of observation may allow us to conceive of humans as the main driver of global change. But what happens if we change the scale of observation and acknowledge at the same time that changes in scale can lead to unforeseeable and nonlinear emergences and qualitative differences? Zach Horton claims that the Anthropocene is not so much about the discovery (and conquest) of new scales, but about a process of self-alienation: “it marks humanity’s confrontation with itself as a trans-scalar entity” and therefore entails the “shock of Western thought confronting its own limits” (Horton 2017, 35). Furthermore, Derek Woods

12  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes has argued that scientific evidence on “scale variance” makes it necessary to rethink the central role of Anthropos in the Anthropocene discourse. Instead of humanity, he argues, “terraforming assemblages” are the main “protagonist” of the Anthropocene (Woods 2014, 134). Switching to the scale of microbiological systems, Donna Haraway (2015, 160) suggests that bacteria have always been the “greatest terraformers (and reformers) of all,” and Jane Bennett (2009, 95) emphasizes the “small agency” of worms as a condition for the emergence of human culture, and hence, also of the Anthropocene. The recognition of such forms of alterity, and their constitutive role in the Anthropocene, serves as a thematic framework for the chapters in this section. Scholar of human geography Nigel Clark and sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski open the second section with their chapter “Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes: Interscalar Practices for a Volatile Planet.” As a starting point, they engage with the widespread critical assumption that Anthropocene science, with its macro-scale systemic focus on the planet as a whole, instigates a god trick which marginalizes the everyday “lived” experience of individual and social life. Against this assertion, Clark and Szerszynski introduce the concept of “planetary multiplicity” to suggest that the earth systemic scale of Anthropocene science has contributed to an understanding of the earth as an inherently processual and self-differentiating entity whose potentialities of becoming-different not only materialized in recent earth system transformations, but have also triggered material responses, for which they coin the companion term “earthly multitudes.” As they show, there are various ways in which human collectives have been responding to the multiplicity of earth’s becoming by means of “earthoriented practices.” Focusing in particular on the practices of weaving and plaiting fibers into string, ropes and textiles, and of transforming matter using chambered high heat, Clark and Szerszynski argue that the relation between planet and social life cannot be conceived in terms of a nested scalar hierarchy, but rather as being folded into each other by means of what they call, in reference to Gabriele Hecht, “interscalar vehicles.” Heather Sullivan, scholar of modern languages and literatures, explores plant–human relationships in her chapter “Plant Scale and the Anthropocene.” From a critical plant studies perspective, she coins the term “florosphere” to describe “the systems of water, air, weather, and life created and altered by plants from the depths of the oceans to the atmosphere’s gasses.” Drawing on Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book about indigenous knowledge on plants, their language and our collaborative, reciprocal relationship with them as a “co-species,” Sullivan first turns to Goethe’s notion of a “plant ocean” and to the scene of the burned Linden trees in Faust. This is contrasted with a reading of Sue Burke’s Semiosis (2018), an American debut science-fiction novel on an alien-thriving plantworld with elements of horror when people realize they have to cooperate with the agentic, even aggressive plants in order to survive. Building on

Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity  13 these examples, Sullivan develops a critical perspective on conceptions of plant life as a merely passive background of culture and highlights the scale of plant life as challenging human perception and shows how plants and their agency constitute the very condition of human life and culture. The chapter on “Anthropomorphism and Alterity” by Bernhard Malkmus, scholar of German literature and intellectual history, concentrates on the importance of alterity in reflections of the Anthropocene. He starts with a reading of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia which shows the discrepancy of anthropomorphic scales and an impending absolute reality as a radical alterity. Arguing against theories of flat ontology and monism, Malkmus argues for a concept of ecology as a “triangulation between the natural spheres, human agency, and the dynamics of the technosphere.” He draws a line from Kant’s theory of the sublime to Nietzsche’s “tragic sublime” to conceptualize an idea of radical alterity that acknowledges the autonomy of the nonhuman realm as inappropriable. To understand the human condition in the Anthropocene, Malkmus discusses Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the danger of world-alienation and Earth-alienation, Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory and Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance. They all recognize the radical otherness of a life agency beyond reason and are skeptical toward the modern phantasma of anthropomorphizing and engineering the world on a planetary scale. In her chapter “‘We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure’: Arendtian Ethics and the Narration of Scale in the Anthropocene,” English literature scholar Adeline Johns-Putra calls for a new literary ethics. Following Timothy Clark and Amitav Ghosh, she explores the spatial and temporal disjuncts and derangements of the Anthropocene which lead to a cognitive dissonance between different entangled species as an ethical dilemma. While the Anthropocene seems to ask for a new scalar awareness, it also requires an ethical response from precisely that species. Johns-Putra takes ideas from political theorist Hannah Arendt as a starting point for the development of an alternative ethical model for fiction in the Anthropocene. She analyzes how Arendt’s “thinking without a banister” operates in terms of intellectual reflection on, and reconciliation with, a rich, complex and scale-shifting world and shows that the reader actively participates in seemingly disjointed scales. Finally, Johns-Putra turns to the Chinese sciencefiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin to enact an experience of Arendtian thinking. The chapter “Sound and Silence: Punk and the Anthropocene” by John Parham, scholar of environmental humanities, turns to the aesthetic role of music and noise, exemplified through the genre of punk. Starting with the question of what the Anthropocene feels like, Parham draws on Anahid Nersessian’s “calamity form” to explore how sound’s relays of affect constitute an Anthropocene aesthetic. In contrast to conventional narrative forms which seem ill-equipped to articulate the scalar complexities of the Anthropocene, Parham sheds light on the affective agency of punk’s noise

14  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes in combination with the sound of silence that is “linked to an alternative, ecocentric reality” (Johns-Putra 2018, 35). Analyzing Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Spellbound” and The Ruts’ “Babylon’s Burning” as examples of punk’s first and second wave, Parham argues, drawing on Greil Marcus’ notion of punk as “negation not nihilism,” that noise and the disruptive aesthetics of repetition in the lyrics can trigger a sensory response to scalar derangements and ecological crises and articulate an unsettling anxiety in an epoch of unleashed consumerism and capitalism.

Section III: Scale and Space The evidence of the global-scale impact of anthropogenic activities favors a basically all-encompassing, earth system perspective covering the entirety of spatial scales at which such impact occurs. The idea of a totalizing overview as the culminating point of—and solution to—the complexities of the Anthropocene has both epistemological and ontological implications. On the one hand, in the sense of an “ideal” epistemic perspective that contains and subsumes all other scales; on the other, as a totalization of anthropogenic transformation. This section draws on the idea that the concept of the Anthropocene implies problematic spatial configurations and models (e.g. the model of the globe or the model of a dichotomous local-global relationship). At the level of epistemology, they tend to authorize what Donna Haraway (1988, 581) has called a “god trick.” At the level of ontology, they imply the idea of a scale-continuous anthropomorphability of the environment (a zoom-effect which obscures disjunctive scales). Rethinking “responsibility” without falling into such traps can benefit from finding different modes of thinking spatial scale (and scale derangements) through a critical investigation and re-examination of existing theories, concepts and models of spatial scale. The chapter “On Being the Right Size: Scale, Democracy and the Anthropocene” by political scientist Ayşem Mert and social entrepreneur Dougald Hine investigates the Anthropocene as an opportunity to rethink democratic imaginaries. Considering the planetary scale and urgency of the ecological crisis, they ask how democracy would look like if we scale it up to the level of the planetary for the purpose of governance by separating it from preconceived notions of democracy scales. The first part introduces different reflections on claims about the “right size” of the government matching the scale of humanity’s transformative power over nature in the twentieth century. The following part distinguishes a “positivist” and “deconstructivist” frame of the Anthropocene: the former proposes swift, large-scale managerialist and eco-modernistic solutions and might be ultimately counterproductive; the latter one favors to slow down and deconstruct certain traditions in order to find coordinated, relational action and democratic engagement at individual, nation-state and global level through a “nested polycentrism.” In the end, Mert and Hine propose multi-layered participatory, institutionally

Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity  15 and ecologically reflexive principles to be adaptable under the swiftly changing circumstances of the Anthropocene. In her chapter “Cosmos vs. Anthropocene: Multi-scalar Praxis for Socioenvironmental Justice with Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy (2017),” literary scholar Kathrin Bartha explores the emergence of a “literary cosmology.” First, she develops an understanding of cosmology deriving from the ancient Greek to describe the universe as a unified system of beauty and order which arises out of chaos. Contrasting it with the Anthropocene as a planetary ecosystem of increasing environmental instability and uncertainty, Bartha attempts to develop a new sense of cosmology challenging the “decline-narrative” of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Adrienne Maree Brown’s environmental activist book Emergent Strategy (2017) that takes up Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction the Parable series (1993; 1998), she conceives of a cosmology as a narrative of wholeness and interdependency that puts forward a more complex, multi-scalar and embodied understanding of “nature.” Bartha also emphasizes the practical outcome of Brown’s manifesto for change and its ability to reflect on the intersections of arts, humanities and activism. In a different sense of cosmology, Lynda Olman, scholar of the rhetoric of science, and Birgit Schneider, media and visual studies scholar, turn to earth and climate visualization. Their chapter “Google Gaia: Feedback Loops for Action with Global Forest Watch” (GFW) draws on visualizations used on this GFW platform. Following David Turner (2018, 12), they understand cosmology as a “gaian biosphere” and examine “Google Gaia” as a green marble cosmogram that features Earth as a living organism. Olman and Schneider concentrate on the aesthetic and technical role of the spatial zoom-effect by scrutinizing the political implications of the “zoom” tool from the perspective of media studies. The GFW platform can be used as a test case for geopolitical claims on forests which, by installing a feedback system, aims at changing human–environment interactions by monitoring precisely these interactions with local communities. Although Olman and Schneider conceive the dominant globalized, neoliberal, technocratic top-down logic of the platform as a “cosmological imperialism,” they also see potential for a bottom-up logic with spherical cosmographic narratives moving from inside out to facilitate situated ground data and local actions for a more sustainable forest management. The volume’s last chapter “Art, Irony and Scaling the Anthropocene,” is an interview with photographer and activist J Henry Fair, conducted by Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes. The interview focuses on the role and relevance of scale in Fair’s aerial photographs of anthropogenically transformed, polluted or contaminated landscapes. Fair’s perspective displays “collapsing scales,” i.e. he deliberately dissolves the visible difference between distance and proximity and takes closer looks at the represented landscapes to make them more compelling. Fair shows the importance of science-based knowledge for environmental art and how “beautiful images

16  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes of horrible things” may trigger attention, reflection and hopefully a more responsible handling of scarce resources. The afterword by historian and postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty, “On Scale and Deep History in the Anthropocene,” addresses the question of how the Anthropocene challenges our ways of thinking about scales and scaling. Focusing on a passage from David Archer’s The Long Thaw—a book that deals with very large geological scales and the challenge of translating them to a temporal scale that humans can cope with—Chakrabarty brings into view the necessity to acknowledge the “ontic-ontological” dimension of scaling. While many social scientists have termed all-toofixed and static notions of scale as “ontological,” and instead addressed them as effects of social, institutional and political causes and practices, Chakrabarty argues that the human relationship toward the Anthropocene has in fact an “evolutionary-ontological” dimension. Our “everyday decisions and dispositions,” and thus our ways of making sense to the world and our capacity to scale, are deeply entrenched with human evolution— deep history “works through our everyday existence.” Chakrabarty’s argument leads to an important conclusion: addressing “scale” in the context of the Anthropocene should engage with our capacity of “interscaling,” i.e. our “affective-dispositional” efforts at prioritizing what appears relevant at a human-temporal scale and at geological durations. Focusing in different ways on the relationship(s) between scale, mediation/narrative and responsibility, all chapters make an important contribution to the overall debate on “scale” and “scaling,” a debate which has gained significant relevance in the disciplines of ecology and human geography and is now beginning to play an important role in cultural, literary and media studies as well. In this respect, this volume seeks to find a way to address a conceptual challenge: theoretical and methodological approaches toward scale and scaling are always discipline- and context-specific. The ways in which, for example, human geographers deal with the social and political conditions of spatial scales differ considerably from ecological scaling operations; therefore, for good reasons there is no such thing as a universal theory of scale. The Anthropocene, however, brings into view the necessity to come to terms with various kinds of scale: the issue of the global/local dichotomy usually approached by human geographers, the multi-scale dynamics and feedback between earth subsystems and components; the scales at which environmental issues are scientifically visualized and rendered intelligible; scales of measurement and scales of observation; geochronological and planetary-spatial scales; horizontal and vertical species-scale and the scale of the individual. Finding ways to act responsibly not only for the benefit of humanity’s own well-being, but toward an entire earth system which can no longer be conceived as a mere backdrop of human enquiry, all these different kinds of scale matter. The interdisciplinary approach taken in this volume is not about dissolving disciplinary boundaries, but about connecting heterogeneous ways of addressing

Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity  17 the question of how mediations of scale can affect the way we understand essential ethical, social and cultural conceptions of human action in a time of amplified environmental complexity and change at vast temporal and spatial scales.

Acknowledgments This introduction draws on results from the research project “Narratives of Scale in Science and Literature,” which has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number DU 320/8-1. We very much thank Peter H. Feindt (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Susan Kassouf (New York) and Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta) for reading earlier versions of this introduction. We also thank editorial assistant Mitchell Manners and editor Jennifer Abbott (both Routledge) for their helpful advice and overall assistance in the production of this volume.

Notes 1 The volume draws on the contributions to the three-day interdisciplinary and international conference “Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity” (September 11–13, 2019). The conference took place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, one of the most prominent and important institutional nodal points of the Anthropocene debate. 2 On the manifold interrelations between media technology and earth’s materiality, see Parikka 2015; on the particular example of climate change, see Schneider and Nocke (2014, 12). 3 For a critical investigation of the idea of incommensurability with regard to climate change, cf. Coen (2016, 308). 4 See also Morton’s coinage of the term “strange loop” (Morton 2016, 7); furthermore, McKenzie Wark’s (2015, 219) term of an “infrastructural unconscious.” 5 On the problem of the average human measure, see also Derek Wood’s discussion of Ray and Charles Eames’ 1968 short film The Powers of Ten (Woods 2017a). 6 On the relationship between the qualitative dimension of quantitative differences against the backdrop of a critique of reductionism, see Anderson (1972). 7 See the critique of this narrative by Bonneuil’s and Fressoz, which they call a “story of awakening” (2017, 55).

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. 2016. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Anderson, P. W. 1972. “More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science.” Science 177 (4047): 393–396. Archer, David. 2008. The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

18  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes Bonner, John Tyler. 2006. Why Size Matters. From Bacteria to Blue Whales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2017. The Shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, History, and Us. 2nd ed. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. “Zoe/Geo/Techno-Materialismus.” In Technosphäre, edited by Katrin Klingan and Christoph Rosol, 122–144. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2: 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2010. “Brute Force.” Eurozine. https://www​.eurozine​.com. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2012. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History 45, no. 1: 1–18. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2015. “The Anthropocene and the Convergence of Histories.” In The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, edited by Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne, 44–56. London and New York: Routledge. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2016. “Humanities in the Anthropocene. The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable.” New Literary History 47, no. 2–3: 377–397. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2018. “Anthropocene Time.” (The Seventh History and Theory Lecture) History and Theory 57, no. 1: 5–32. Chave, Jérôme, and Simon Levin. 2004. “Scale and Scaling in Ecological and Economic Systems.” In The Economics of Non-Convex Ecosystems, edited by Partha Dasgupta and Karl-Göran Mäler, 29–59. Springer: Dordrecht. Clark, Timothy. 2012. “Scale.” In Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, edited by Tom Cohen, 148–166. London: Open Humanities Press. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Clarke, Michael Tavel, and David Wittenberg. 2017. “Introduction.” In Scale in Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Tavel Clarke, and David Wittenberg, 1–32. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Coen Deborah, R. 2016. “Big is a Thing of the Past: Climate Change and Methodology in the History of Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, no. 2: 305–321. Colebrook, Claire. 2014. Death of the Posthuman Vol. 1. Essays on Extinction. London: Open Humanities Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2017. “We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene: The Anthropocene Counterfactual.” In Anthropocene Feminism, edited by Richard Grusin, 1–20. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Crutzen, Paul J. 2002. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415: 23. Crutzen, Paul J., and Will Steffen. 2003. “How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era? An Editorial Comment.” Climatic Change 61: 251–257. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “Anthropocene.” IGBP Newsletter 41: 17–18. Estok, Simon C. 2018. “Hollow Ecology and Anthropocene Scales of Measurement.” Mosaic, An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 51, no. 3: 37–52. Galilei, Galileo. [1638] 2010. Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Haff, Peter K. 2014. “Humans and Technology in the Anthropocene: Six Rules.” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 2: 126–136. Hamilton, Clive. 2016. “The Anthropocene as Rupture.” The Anthropocene Review 3, no. 2: 93–106.

Anthropocene as an Age of Scalar Complexity  19 Haraway, Donna J. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3: 575–599. Haraway, Donna J. 2015. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6: 159–165. Herod, Andrew. 2008. “Scale: The Local and the Global.” Key Concepts in Geography, edited by Nicholas Clifford, Sarah Holloway, Stephen P. Rice, and Gill Valentine, 217–235. Los Angeles et al.: Sage. Horn, Eva, and Hannes Bergthaller. 2020. The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities. London and New York: Routledge. Horton, Zach. 2017. “Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene.” In Scale in Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Tavel Clarke, and David Wittenberg, 35–60. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hüpkes, Philip. 2020. “Der Anthropos als Skalenproblem.“ In Der Anthropos im Anthropozän. Die Wiederkehr des Menschen im Moment seiner vermeintlich endgültigen Verabschiedung, edited by Hannes Bajohr, 115–130. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hüpkes, Philip, and Gabriele Dürbeck. 2021a. “Aesthetics in a Changing World – Reflecting the Anthropocene Condition Through the Works of Jason deCaires Taylor and Robert Smithson.” Environmental Humanities 13, no. 2 (forthcoming). Hüpkes, Philip, and Gabriele Dürbeck. 2021b. “The Technical Non-Reproduceability of the Earth System: Scale, Biosphere 2 and T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts.” The Anthropocene Review, Special Issue: “The Role of Nature in the Anthropocene: Defining and Reacting to a New Geological Epoch,” edited by Philipp Höfele, Lore Hühn, and Oliver Müller (under review). Hui, Yuk. 2017. “On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation Between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene.” Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology 21, no. 2–3: 319–341. Johns-Putra, Adeline. 2018. “The Rest Is Silence: Postmodern and Postcolonial Possibilities in Climate Change Fiction.” Studies in the Novel 50, no. 1: 26–42. Jones III, John Paul, Sallie A. Marston, and Keith Woodward. 2011. “Scales and Networks.” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography, edited by John A. Agnew, and James S. Duncan, 404–414. New York: Blackwell Publishing. Klingan, Katrin, and Christoph Rosol (eds.). 2019. Technosphäre. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Latour, Bruno. 2013. Facing Gaia: Six Lectures of the Political Theology of Nature. Edinburgh: Gifford Lectures, https://www​.giffordlectures​.org/. Latour, Bruno. 2017. “Anti-Zoom.” In Scale in Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg, 93–101. London: Palgrave Macmillan. LeMenager, Stephanie. 2009. “Infrastructure Again, and Always.” Energy Humanities 6, no. 3: 25–29. Marston, Sallie A., John Paul Jones, and Keith Woodward. 2005. “Human Geography without Scale.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 4: 416–432. McPhee, John. 1981. Basin and Range. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

20  Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes Morton, Timothy. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Neimanis, Astrida, Cecilia Åsberg, and Johan Hedrén. 2015. “Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities: Toward Critical Posthumanities for the Anthropocene.” Ethics & the Environment 20, no. 1: 67–97. Opperman, Serpil. 2018. “The Scale of the Anthropocene: Material Ecocritical Reflections.” Mosaic, An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 51, no. 3: 1–17. Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schneider, Birgit, and Thomas Nocke. 2014. “Image Politics of Climate Change: Introduction.” In Image Politics of Climate Change: Visualizations, Imaginations, Documentations, edited by Birgit Schneider and Thomas Nocke, 9–26. Bielefeld: Transcript. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no. 8: 614–621. Steffen, Will, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig. 2015. “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1: 81–98. Swift, Jonathan. 2003 [1726]. Gulliver’s Travels. London: Penguin Classics. Taylor, Peter J. 1982. “A Materialist Framework for Political Geography.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 7, no. 1: 15–34. Toepfer, Georg. 2018. “From Anthropocene to Mediocene? On the Use and Abuse of Stratifying the Earth’s Crust by Mapping Time into Space.” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 9, no. 1: 73–84. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2012. “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales.” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3: 505–524. Turner, David. 2018. The Green Marble: Earth System Science and Global Sustainability. New York: Columbia University Press. Vince, Gaia. 2014. Adventures in the Anthropocene. A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. Wark, McKenzie. 2015. Molecular Red. Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso. Woods, Derek. 2014. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” Minnesota Review 83: 133–144. Woods, Derek. 2017a. “Epistemic Things in Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten.” In Scale in Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg, 61–92. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Woods, Derek. 2017b. “Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter.” In The New Politics of Materialism. History, Philosophy, Science, edited by Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito, 200–224. London and New York: Routledge. Wu, Jianguo. 2004. “Effects of Changing Scale on Landscape Pattern Analysis: Scaling Relations.” Landscape Ecology 19, no. 2: 125–138. Wu, Jianguo, and Harbin Li. 2006. “Concepts of Scale and Scaling.” Scaling and Uncertainty Analysis in Ecology, edited by Jianguo Wu, Bruce K Jones, Harbin Li, and Orie L. Louck. 3–15. Springer, Dordrecht. Yusoff, Kathrin. 2013. “Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning. Part D: Society and Space 31, no. 5: 779–795. Zylinska, Joanna. 2014. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. London: Open Humanities Press.

Section I

Scale and Time



1

Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity Derek Woods

I first saw Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity. A Film for the Future (2010) in a small church in Houston, Texas. Some years before, the church had been repurposed as a movie theatre—a profanation made easier by Houston’s status as the biggest city in the world without zoning laws. Given that Madsen’s film is about nuclear waste, this setting felt significant. The small audience sat in a sacred space made secular, in a city best known for ostensibly secular dreams of unlimited energy and life in space. But Into Eternity also takes us in the other direction, from the secular back to the sacred. The question arises whether sites for the storage of plutonium will become sacred places themselves, worshipped out of fear, or simply tended like a shrine to a peripheral god. This is one suggestion in Madsen’s narrative, which draws an analogy between Onkalo, a disposal site in Finland, and the Egyptian pyramids. Or perhaps, like the Houston church, Onkalo will someday be repurposed or reimagined, its waste treated as a resource for unknown goals. Like the proverbial cathedral projects that once required long-term, transgenerational labor, the storage of nuclear waste comes up against temporalities of care and responsibility more often associated with religion than with politics, engineering or energy. Plutonium evokes what Francis Ferguson called “the nuclear sublime” (Ferguson 1984). The hyperobject (Morton 2013) at the center of the film threatens to make its secular eschatology postsecular, as technocrats imagine how an object that depends on our fear and care will pass into a future so distant it seems to wait on the far side of “our” species’ existential horizon.1 There is also an unmistakable theological resonance in the word plutonium itself, named for the Roman god of the underworld and evoking Milton’s “darkness visible” (1821, 5).2 For future social beings, perhaps these will be the starting points of sermons at the nuclear cathedral, which would compete for followers with the church of black holes, the church of death of the sun and the church of the entropic end of the universe. Each calls for its own existential comportment to deep time and extinction. If aspects of geology and cosmology make more sense in a repurposed church than a university, Into Eternity seems to show why. The documentary DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-1

24  Derek Woods brings opposed forces of spirituality and scientific education together, where they mingle in a single narrative like scholars of religion, critical theorists and engineers at the same ill-fated party. In fact, Madsen’s interviews cover just this mixture of what Daniel Adleman calls occupational “lifeworlds” (2020, 236). Indeed, what makes Madsen’s film so curious is that its topic, the Onkalo Spent Fuel Repository on the Baltic coast of Finland, is at once pragmatic and mystical. Since the danger of nuclear waste lasts for at least 100,000 years, Onkalo must do the same.3 This “deep geological repository” will encase the waste products of nuclear power in containers, in a system of tunnels deep in stable bedrock. After that, the tunnels will be filled with spent nuclear fuel, including “long-lived” plutonium, over the course of about 100 years. The site will then be buried, and at this scale it is already difficult to say by whom. The society that buries it is supposed to maintain the knowledge of where Onkalo is and what it contains—again for at least 100,000 years. This timeframe embeds very speculative questions in an actual, practical design, which leads to fascinating performances as Madsen interviews a series of professionals involved in the project. As a viewer, you see engineers and managers who are unaccustomed to performing philosophical speculation for a wide audience do just that. They discuss how the world above their repository might change over the millennia. They offer both a source of accidental comedy and a good introduction to the ways philosophical concepts (the posthuman, for example) are lived in daily life. They show the truth of Williams James’ (1968, 36) notion that everyone has “their own peculiar sense of a certain total character of the universe,” a quotidian and practical cosmology. As of 2020, Onkalo is nearly complete. Its construction firm Posiva states that the “final disposal” of waste is set to begin this decade (“General Time Schedule for Final Disposal”); after a century of disposal in rows of tunnels in ancient bedrock, the entire facility will be backfilled and sealed by the 2120s. With these dates added to the chosen timeline of Onkalo’s containment and the half-life of plutonium in particular, the temporal framework of the documentary is complete.4 Into Eternity’s interest lies in this temporality. Questions of nuclear energy and waste are central to the politics of global warming, as authors have shown.5 Here, I emphasize the aspects of the film that correspond to a more geological (inorganic, deeptemporal) conception of the Anthropocene than that of Earth system science and much environmental criticism.6 My chapter looks at narrative form and the temporality of nuclear waste to advance a concept of geomedia. Geomedia names how the duration of plutonium forms a system with the mediation—narrative and visual—of the Onkalo project.7 For ecopolitics, the lesson of Madsen’s documentary is that we should think in terms of determinate durations rather than overwhelming, uncertain and unimaginable “deep time.” Arbitrary as they seem, timeframes such as 100,000 years could be a good scale-critical

Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity  25 alternative to the tendency to vacillate between atemporal sustainability and apocalyptic narrative closure.

Narrative and the Half-life of Plutonium Into Eternity is not an accurate title, though no one would expect much success for the movie “Into an Incredibly Precise 100,000 Year Duration Determined by the Half-Life of Plutonium.” Yet what makes Into Eternity so interesting from the perspective of media and narrative theory is what this elaborate title captures: not the vague evocation of deep future time, but a specific “mid-length” duration. In other words, Into Eternity puts viewers in an ambivalent position. The theological, eschatological and cosmological echoes of the title contrast with the incredibly specific timeline of the documentary. The engineers of Onkalo chose a number, 100,000, that extends a bit beyond the time it takes for the longest “lived” radioactive waste, an isotope of plutonium, to undergo the vast majority of its radioactive decay. The half-life of Pu239 is 24,110 years, half-life being the period it takes for one half of a substance to decay through radiation. But this does not mean that the “full life” of this isotope of plutonium is 48,220 years. Radioactive decay is nonlinear. The total amount remaining after one half-life will again halve, leaving one quarter of the amount we had at year zero. So after roughly 100,000 years, only 1/16 of the radioactive waste will remain. As time goes on, the process will asymptotically approach zero radiation. A hundred thousand years might seem like an eternity, no different from our perspective than “millions of years,” “billions of years,” “vast” or “deep” scales of time or any other word we might use to suggest indefinite lengths that are nevertheless most definitely long from the perspective of a human life. What makes Madsen’s documentary so valuable, however, is how it ties plutonium’s “concrete duration” to narratives and performances recorded in the medium of digital video. This duration is precisely not eternal, a reference to neither mathematical infinity nor indefinite deep time, but one of the very best-defined durations known to physics. As Stephen Jay Gould shows in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), since the eighteenth-century origins of geology we have seen a range of images akin to Walter Benjamin’s famous clock, the last two seconds of which ­represent all of human history (1968, 263). Such images and extended metaphors try to make geological time in some sense “imaginable,” to at least convey to readers a sense of the ratio between the times of experience and the times of the Earth, or between the timelines assumed by premodern myth and those revealed by increasingly precise scientific practices. Deep time is also a unique problem for fiction and non-fiction narration. From the perspective of a weathered narratological distinction, deep time means that the chance to balance “fabula” and “syuzhet,” the narrated events and the time manipulations of the narrative itself, is deranged beyond repair. As

26  Derek Woods Ursula Heise (2019) puts it, such “anisochrony” means that, “for narratives that engage with the Anthropocene,” “one of the major problems is the discrepancy between geological or evolutionary time spans to be narrated […] and the limited length of the average novel” (284). The starting point for my concept of geomedia is how plutonium, via the architecture of Onkalo, seems to emanate the film’s narrative form. The concept shares something in common with Thomas Patrick Pringle’s discussion of photography and nuclear weapons testing in “Photographed by the Earth.” US military researchers working in the South Pacific placed photographic plates in dark enclosed spaces. Following the detonations, they found that “an exposure had formed in the absence of visible light— as though the earthly matter itself was reaching out and participating in photographic processes with a determined non-human agency” (Pringle 2014). As Pringle continues, “nuclear weaponry as a large-scale media form relies on considering light as an energetic materiality.” This approach to the photographic traces of nuclear violence is an example of the varied work that scholars have begun to do under the heading of elemental media and elemental ecocriticism.8 The “elements” are not always so literal. They are not always numbers of the periodic table. But this theoretical frame does entail a differentiating approach to new materialist media theory. This approach grounds claims in the properties of distinct elements (premodern or modern) rather than general concepts of matter and energy. Pringle joins other environmental media scholars in arguing that technologies of communication, art and memory such as photography in some sense channel and purify preexisting properties of nature: often media are extensions of nature more than extensions of the human.9 If this can also be said about the relation between plutonium and Madsen’s documentary, however, it would have to be said in a different way, not via an indexical interpretation of a relationship that can only provisionally be characterized as the emanation of a hyperobject. This radio-aesthetics is apt when applied to nuclear photograms, but it falls short of explaining Madsen’s documentary. Into Eternity shows no indexical (which is to say, directly causal) relationship between nuclear waste and its multimedia narrative. Plutonium leaves no chemical reactions in film nor scanning patterns in the light receptors of digital cameras. For Jussi Parikka, Karen Barad and other contributors to new materialist media theory, there are causal (but not always indexical) relations among matter, meaning and mediation. Often, the causality in question is reciprocal. Each category shapes the other in a dance of relation all the way down. For Parikka (2012, 98), there is a “continuum” between the material and the symbolic whereby “thing power,” “process power,” and “the activity of matter” is what constitutes “medianatures,” which “participate in an assemblage of information technologies” at different levels of scale and/or abstraction. As Karen Barad (2017) would remind us in an essay on nuclear weapons, against any separation between categories such as matter, bodies

Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity  27 and meaning, these levels are not different (as Parikka’s “continuum” acknowledges) but generated as “spacetimematterings” through the “intraaction” of matter (111): “material–discursive phenomena are constituted through each other, each in specifically entangled ways” (117). Even if half-“life” is only a metaphor, it does evoke the notion that matter is more than passive things influenced only by external forces. Time can be immanent to material processes in radically different ways for different elements and isotopes. For Henri Bergson, an influence on contemporary new materialism, time is not a succession of moments along a line but memory immanent to material and vital process: for our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present, no prolonging of the past into the actual, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. (Bergson 1998, 4) Of course, Bergson often used duration to talk about mental time consciousness. But he also refers it to physical processes, including the famous example of a dissolving sugar cube that “unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own,” and “coincides […] with a certain portion of my own duration” (9–10). The dissolving sugar cube is a process with its own time shaped by entropy. Accordingly, we do not need anything more vital or active than thermodynamics and particle physics to conceptualize plutonium’s half-life as duration. In this sense, physics might need no vitalist supplement from Bergson, but his concept of duration clarifies the kind of time at stake in Into Eternity and specifies the kind of material “agency” that I am trying to rethink through the concept of geomedia. Reading Into Eternity as geomedia means that this duration and no other, the ~100,000-year timeframe determined by plutonium’s half-life, is what asymmetrically constrains the dynamics of medium and form that compose a narrative about how Onkalo looms into the distant future. Neither indexicality nor Barad’s causal reciprocity work in this context. While physics media made the early understanding of plutonium possible (Seaborg 1946), they are historically distant and separate from the context of Madsen’s narrative. So any interpretation of the relation between plutonium’s duration and the film should privilege not the reciprocal constitution of matter and meaning but rather how the duration of nuclear waste, especially the most long-lived waste, constrains and constitutes its mediation. Plutonium’s duration is central to how this deep-time narrative incorporates the problem of “anisochrony.”

Duration and Geomedia Several times in the film, Madsen lights a match in a dark space and lets it burn down while he speaks directly into the camera. This mise-en-scene of

28  Derek Woods darkness evokes the subsurface space of Onkalo itself. The match, as it burns down, measures time thermodynamically. Madsen speaks only for the time it takes the match to burn down to his fingers. In two ways, this performance is self-referential. On the one hand, the match scenes show us the source of the voice-over narrative. In the language of theatre, these scenes break the fourth wall. In the language of narrative theory, they are cases of metalepsis in which the extradiegetic voice becomes diegetic. As Bruce Clarke (2014, 77–111) reminds us, all such cases can be read as instances of the recursivity of communication, where a text thematizes its own status as a medium. On the other hand, these scenes are recursions of scale rather than medium because the act of burning a match is a microcosm of the whole narrative’s more difficult task. That is, the match’s flame stands for radioactive decay and Madsen’s voice stands for the film’s multiplicity of narrative and visual techniques. If the burning match is the time of the fabula and Madsen’s speech is the time of syuzhet, then there is no anisochrony. The gap between fabula and syuzhet is sealed. But in the narrative of Into Eternity as a whole, the gap opens to daunting proportions. As Ann Kaplan (2016) notes in her book on climate trauma and Anthropocene film, the flame symbolizes “human misuse of another kind of ‘fire’” (122). Into Eternity’s two thermodynamic durations occupy opposite poles in the temporality of human energy use: a thermotime that can unfold in the time of human consciousness and one that undeniably exceeds any form of experience we know. The match scenes tell you how to read the film. From the outset, they jump-start the hermeneutic circle. They invite viewers to understand Into Eternity through the relationship between the time taken by Madsen’s film and the time potential energy takes to dissipate into its environment. Madsen often tells the future story of Onkalo through rhetorical questions in the second-person. He addresses a “you,” a fictional future human that may not, as Kaplan argues, “be ‘human’ in any ways we now know” (120). This viewer is the subject who might have answers to questions such as “does your way of life also depend on unlimited energy?” (Madsen 2010, 00:15:24). After informing us that “Onkalo must last 100,000 years” (00:03:25) and claiming that it might be one of the only things left of our civilization, Madsen asks “if you sometime far into the future find this, what will it tell you about us?” (00:03:51). Such questions posit an intriguing subject of the post-Anthropocene. They make the narrative’s self-reflection into a reading of the documentary itself as a geomedium. Like Onkalo’s nuclear waste, Into Eternity becomes a deep-time object/text that might be re-discovered by future beings. The final third of Madsen’s documentary details attempts to create a message that would last long enough to reach future readers while remaining intelligible to them. As one interviewee reminds us, the Neanderthals who walked the Earth until about 40,000 years ago were very different from us. It goes without saying that “it is difficult to explain to these people something with nuclear waste” (Madsen 2010, 00:59:53). Accordingly, “we

Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity  29 cannot assume that people or creatures in the future will really understand very much” (00:59:56). Madsen goes on to ask the interviewee if these future “people,” assuming our species’ genetic line has not gone extinct, might not have very different senses, so that we cannot even assume that they will be able to see, much less read, the signs meant to warn them away from Onkalo. He agrees that “senses, appearances, needs, knowledge— everything goes away, there is not one true statement that will then survive” (Madsen 2010, 1:00:10). So much of the interest of Into Eternity stems not just from the thought of what the distant future might be like for people (or creatures), but from the tension between that thought and the knowledge that time will inevitably mean a metamorphosis of the animal that now calls itself human into a different kind of being. Onkalo’s engineers have designed it in such a way that “no knowledge is necessary for the future” (Madsen 2010, 00:39:20) of the project; they are “trying to do Onkalo as independent of human nature as possible” (1:00:54). But their plans to communicate with future social creatures gravitate toward anthropological universals: an image of a “landscape of thorns,” for example, might signify danger better than warnings written in all of today’s living languages. As Kaplan notes, “there’s even a suggestion of including Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream as universally terrifying” (Kaplan 2016, 124). Right or wrong, such ideas come up against the countervailing claim that humans will have radically changed by the time the engineer’s responsibility for time expires. The Onkalo designers’ effort to manage uncertainty about the future by recourse to the essentially human runs aground on the beach of temporal posthumanism. Madsen’s interlocutor’s reference to Neanderthals brings this temporal contingency of the human to the fore with a precision lacking in, say, Nietzsche’s satire of human self-regard against the background of a geological time that was, in 1873, much more newly deep: Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. (Nietzsche 1990, 79) The human form dissolves against the background of eternity. If we read them as geological sands of time, then the grains of Foucault’s famous

30  Derek Woods posthuman beach are all the less durable as a medium for human self-imaging. But the temporalities of Into Eternity are far more determinate than any cosmic eternity that negates, in the future perfect, from a deep future perspective, the human knowledge and history that will have vanished into “numberless twinkling solar systems.” Nietzsche’s passage evokes myth and fable, opening with “once upon a time.” He begins the brief narrative from a god’s eye view, then interrupts it by pointing out the inadequacy of the fable, but then continues with eternity and nothingness. Even if the narrative is inadequate, Nietzsche’s narrator can occupy a cosmic position outside the constraints of time. Madsen’s title suits this passage better than the documentary. The passage is deep time at its most “unimaginable,” “unthinkable,” “overwhelming,” “incommensurable” and so on down the list of words that often evoke the sublime character of deep time and planetary scale in the discourse of the Anthropocene. But the difference between Nietzsche’s narrative voice in the passage and Madsen’s in the documentary is significant. The difference flows, once again, from the duration of plutonium. The temporal constraint it imposes on the syuzhet is substantial. References that reach backward in time (Neanderthals, pyramids) are also devices of temporal framing within the realm of thousands of years and thus both within roughly the same degree of magnitude. Plutonium has already set the pattern that these other timeframes follow as they become narrative devices in Into Eternity. This way of manipulating time in narrative shows more contrast than similarity with Nietzsche’s fable, despite the fact that both are, on the surface, concerned with deep time. Madsen’s secondperson narration holds at bay the tempting fantasy of floating above geological time to watch it unfold. Rather than critiquing god’s eye views in favor of situated knowledge, I want to describe the curious fate of the narrator of Into Eternity and show in what precise sense “it” becomes posthuman. Second-person narrative is peculiar. It involves the audience in the unfolding of the narrative itself. A virtual audience becomes part of narrative focalization. But Madsen’s audience is not a real group of people located in a real place and time like the audience of a play. The “you” of his second-person narrative never speaks to the twenty-first-century viewer alone. Viewing the film, you might begin by thinking of yourself as the subject Madsen addresses. But it becomes clear that the real audience is the subject with knowledge of what society (and Onkalo) is like in 100,000 years. This narrative technique divides the subject through a kind of temporal self-estrangement. Far from any superintelligence or cyborg, the posthuman subject is just this unmarked virtual audience that emerges from the present viewer like Athena from the head of Zeus. When we consider this audience in light of the self-referential quality of the second-person narrative and its relation with the duration of plutonium, the narrative seems to return to itself and find itself missing.

Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity  31 The problem of communicating with the future is not only whom to address and how to address them but the archive’s own survival as a material infrastructure. Madsen’s interviewees discuss the possibility of carving their multi-lingual and ideographic messages onto a stone “message kiosk” (00:43:27), for example, because stone is the medium that will last longest without maintenance. As a surface marker of subsurface danger, the engineer’s intention for the kiosk would be to warn all comers of the site’s true risk. If the nuclear waste itself is a “material archive of the nuclear age that will outlast the human species as we know it today,” as Gabriele Schwab (2020, 202) argues in a discussion of Into Eternity, this waste’s “final disposal” also requires a symbolic archive inscribed in very durable material if Onkalo is to continue to function—a memory trace meant to keep it closed and remembered only as that which needs to be forgotten. But the kiosk is not the repository’s only symbolic supplement. State legislation stipulates that information about what Onkalo is, how it was built and what it contains “has to be deposited in a permanent manner” (Madsen 2010, 00:54:31)—even if, as one engineer puts it in an interview, “‘permanent’ is too strong a word to be used here” (00:54:47). After closure, responsibility to pass information into the future shifts to the Finnish state. That is, while there may be “no requirement of making it comprehensible for all future generations to understand” (00:55:43), the assumption is that “future society” will “maintain the information and update the language,” as Madsen puts it, “for you to understand” (00:56:19). This means that “the archives have the same requirements as our interim storages, requirements we cannot guarantee” (00:56:38). Onkalo involves a strange kind of supplementarity by which Finnish society needs the archive to “remember to forget” (1:02:48): when an archive that extends beyond the site becomes necessary for this deep-time technology to serve its “passive” function, this dependence of the material archive on the symbolic one deeply complicates the problem of closure and passivity. Without maintaining closure, the project will have failed. On the one hand, if it needs to be remembered it can never be completely isolated. On the other hand, erasing Onkalo could be even more difficult than remembering it. By now our concept of geomedia includes the material archive’s own duration, the relation between dissipating plutonium and Madsen’s narrative, the plan for a geological marker for the future, and Onkalo’s off-site archive to be maintained indefinitely by the state. More and more, geomedia refers to an assemblage gathered around the nuclear site. Indeed, the film adds itself to this assemblage. Into Eternity as geomedia is a text that would last as long as Onkalo—long enough to address a reader who could know if the project has been a failure or a success. To return to Madsen’s match and the idea of nuclear photography as an emanation of nonhuman matter, there is more to say about how narrative couples with the concrete duration of plutonium. The documentary

32  Derek Woods narrative does not emanate from the nuclear waste itself. There is a kind of causal relation between the waste and the narrative, but this relation is neither indexical nor representational. An alternative is to say that the film is indeed the effect of an indirect, “negative” relation with plutonium, a “waste” element here understood as a hyperobject in Morton’s familiar sense of things that vastly outscale humans in space and/or time. But we should not conclude from all this that aesthetics is causal, at least not in the sense that there is any direct determination, reciprocal or otherwise, between plutonium’s object-time and the documentary’s own narrative “anisochrony.” Terms like “indirect” and “negative” entail a separation between the former and the latter that allows for many degrees of freedom about how filmic narrative can respond. The response will always be a process of self-reference, where “self” means a text and a tradition of documentary filmmaking. In this model, now far removed from the indexicality with which we began this new materialist theory of Madsen’s film, we have still arrived at a place where the duration of plutonium shapes narrative form almost as thoroughly as it sculpts Onkalo’s industrial stonework.

Scale Critique and Deep Time: For a Politics of Fixed Durations The concept of geomedia can contribute a temporal approach to what I have called “scale critique” (2014). For Timothy Clark (2018), the force of scale critique or “scalar deconstruction” is directed at “false norms and assumptions of scale invariance”: the assumptions of scale inherent in given ways of thinking that grant them a spurious coherence—whether this is how certain conceptions of space, of what presents itself to us, are conditioned by a certain time scale, or conversely, how conceptions of unfolding events or processes […] achieve coherence and noncontradiction only through kinds of unacknowledged scale framing. (94) Geological time is often seen as a “scale” that casts doubt on spurious anthropocentric timeframes, but scale critique can also apply to ideas of deep time. For the same reason that Into Eternity is an ironic title, the very concept of deep time has a way of mystifying the implications of the different durations and temporalities known to science. Not all deep time is equally deep. Nor is it necessarily a sublime duration that you might as well give up trying to conceptualize in any theoretically or politically useful way. Nor is geological time always more uncertain than evolutionary or historical time. Failing to differentiate kinds of deep time is another version of zoom-like scale invariance, one that quickly leads to ahistorical concepts of the future. What if “mid-length” durations such as Onkalo’s 100,000 year design are

Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity  33 more thinkable than we know? Isn’t the history of geology a history of deep time becoming, by degrees, more differentiated and tractable to thought, if not to imagination? You don’t have to look far for statements about the unimaginable nature of geological time. John McPhee coined the term deep time in Basin and Range (1981), where he is quick to say that “numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years—fifty thousand, fifty million—will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination to the point of paralysis” (20). Or consider Gould, one of the most famous science writers on geological time: for him, the “almost incomprehensible immensity” of deep time is “so alien that we can really only comprehend it as metaphor” (2–3). Of course, such statements are common in Anthropocene discourse as well. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) made clear that global warming requires us to bring together conceptual frames that are “in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and the critique of capital” (213). Writing about literature’s failure to “represent” deep time, Benjamin Morgan (2017) argues that “narrative strategies of perspectival shifting and temporal rescaling too readily compensate for the real impossibility of non-anthropocentrically dwelling with scales of deep time” (145). Both Chakrabarty and Heringman (2015) have argued that deep time often falls out of view precisely because the Anthropocene requires us to think on “two vastly different scales” (Chakrabarty 2018, 6). Drawing nearer to our central text, commentators on Into Eternity are unified around the unimaginable, radically uncertain nature of the fabula. For Schwab, “the half-life of radioactive materials is so long that it by far surpasses the scale of human imagination and comprehension” (2020, 205). Even more, the engineers and managers at work on Onkalo suffer from “the radical heat of uncertainty” (205). Finally, in both Into Eternity and Peter Galison and Rob Moss’ documentary Containment, the engineers of so-called final disposal describe the temporality of nuclear waste as unimaginable or beyond social imagination. Pointing to the failure of both comprehension and imagination is understandable in the face of deep time. My reading of Into Eternity suggests that this problem can be posed in a different way. Deep time does not always present the limits to thought that critics assume, nor is it opposed in binary fashion to a “human” or “historical” temporality. We know that this kind of opposition is heuristic, and no one would argue that historical time is singular. But it is wrong to assume that longer time scales are the only ones that defy imagination, as should be clear for anyone who has tried to imagine what it was like to live in a different historical period, or twenty years in the future. I don’t deny that it is easier to conceive of possible scenarios for human societies in a few decades than in thousands or millions of years. But you don’t need dozens of examples to see that the historical-time/deep-time binary quickly breaks down, so that certain very long timeframes are

34  Derek Woods easier to understand than certain very short ones, depending on how the phenomenon in question generates duration and complexity. In other words, temporal limits of knowledge are real, but they do not always appear predictably once the time scale gets long enough. Differential speeds, rates of change and degrees of freedom in social, biological, ecological and geological processes alike mean that time should not be understood relative to an absolute measure, whether the measure is a Newtonian universal time or the solar time of years or the radiological time of carbon-14 dating and atomic clocks. Perhaps there is no “time” in general apart from how these material durations generate time. As often evoked, the concept of deep time hides the multiplicity of duration. References to large numbers replace concepts such as half-life, concepts that show how time depends on specific physical processes. The best reading of Madsen’s film is not one that cautions us about the mystical unknowability of deep time but one that turns up a new scale-critical view. Into Eternity makes a mid-length duration thinkable and deconstructs the opposition between historical and geological time. While Madsen’s own voice-over says that “100,000 years is beyond our understanding and imagination” because “our history is so short in comparison,” some of Onkalo’s designers tell a different story. Of course future society is deeply uncertain, but these designers “are forerunners in this field,” “dealing with very very long timeframes.” What they “really want to prove […] is that you can isolate the waste from human beings and other life, organisms, for 100,000 years.” They have applied geology to understand how the waste’s future environment binds time. As one engineer puts it, “we have come to the conclusion that the bedrock, the Finnish bedrock, 1.8 billion years old, is the medium that we can predict far to the future, at least 100,000 years ahead.” This use of “medium” suggests that Onkalo’s designers have come to see the bedrock itself as a kind of technology for observing the future: as a mediation between the differential speeds of the subsurface and the socio-ecological surface and as a means of designing in synchrony with plutonium’s duration. The film is most striking not because it shows up wounded narcissism in the face of the radically uncertain, unimaginable future, but because certain trajectories of that distant future are indeed predictable and imaginable. Into Eternity suggests a way of anchoring a geological narrative to an extraordinarily precise material duration and a way of understanding temporality that is anything but arbitrary. By emphasizing nuclear waste and the geotechnology the Finnish designers have constructed to contain it, the film offers a concrete problematic.10 This problematic, in turn, gives us a context in which to say something normative about narrative “anisochrony.” That is, it gives us a context in which the fit between narrative form and material duration can be better or worse. This is what sets the film apart in a time when it is too easy to think that the uncertain, apocalyptic, or dangerous future retroactively cancels the value of what we do in the present.

Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity  35 Environmental discourse has the tendency to vacillate between sustainability and apocalypse as two outcomes of the present, whether this takes the form of vague references to a politics for future generations or the endless procession of headlines that say we have only ten years to act before “our” time is up. These outcomes seem like opposites, but they share something that makes them more closely aligned with each other than with their true opposite. Sustainability imagines a society not unlike the present continuing indefinitely into the mists of future time. The figure of the child, representing future generations, makes this point clear when reproduction is imagined as a continuous chain stretching into the future, with no question of an end point to the genetic lineage. On the other hand, apocalypse characteristically imagines narrative closure, an end to the society of the present from the paradoxical point of view of an observer like Mary Shelley’s “last man” (1826), the human who sees the unobservable extinction of all human observers. Apocalyptic time is the end of time for us. But the child and the last man are no longer opposed if you consider that both sustainability and apocalypse are atemporal and ahistorical concepts of the future. For those of us who see time and history as essential considerations for understanding where we find ourselves, existentially and politically, in the Anthropocene, this atemporality is a problem. Some articulations of deep time make it worse. One way to escape this impasse is to think and practice with seemingly arbitrary mid-length durations like the 100,000 years of Into Eternity. Such fixed durations may be far more useful politically than the ideal of sustainability. There are many other possible transductions of duration, media and narrative, ones that have nothing to do with the nuclear. For now, Madsen’s documentary can be a Virgilian tour guide for the struggle to make long future timeframes signify in ecopolitics.

Acknowledgment My sincere thanks to Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hupkes for an invitation to present this work in Berlin and to Philip for suggestions about my discussion of new materialism. Thanks also to Lakshmi Padmanaban and Thomas Pringle for conversations that shaped this chapter.

Notes 1 For an account of how extinction fears have led to an uneven renewal of existential thought, see Schuster and Woods (forthcoming). 2 See Pinkus (forthcoming) on environmental narrative theory and the subsurface. 3 As Vincent Lapenti shows in this detailed study of Onkalo (2020), the design temporalities are more complex than this. Madsen simplifies by staying with the number 100,000 years, and I simplify by following him. But the time scales are all on the order of tens of thousands of years. 4 Madsen’s film is part of an informal trilogy. For more on how Into Eternity fits into the arc of his entire project, see Madsen, Ghosh and Sarkar (2020).

36  Derek Woods 5 Two very different authors agree on this broad point. See Brand (2009) and Masco (2021). Brent Ryan Bellamy (2014) reads the documentary through the political economy of energy. 6 As Noah Heringman argues (2015, 56), deep time is not always as present in conversations about the “Anthropocene” as the geological meaning of the term might suggest. Nor does it always need to be. 7 Social scientists have used the term geomedia for locative technologies like GPS and Google Maps. See Lapenta (2011). 8 See Starosielski (2019), Cohen and Duckert (2015) and Peters (2015). 9 See Parikka (2015). 10 “Geotechnology” in this sense is a technical object integrated with its geological environment (here the “Finnish” bedrock) and designed to last for thousands or millions of years. Another contemporary example is the Clock of the Long Now. See Brand (2000). I separate geotechnology from “ecotechnology,” the topic of my work in progress book What Is Ecotechnology? A famous example of ecotechnology from the same US cultural context is Biosphere 2 in Arizona, which contains a “whole,” 1.3-hectare ecosystem under glass.

References Adleman, Daniel. 2020. “Conduits of the Faculties: Rhetoric, Ecology, Media (and the Wends of Pedagogy).” In Crossing Borders: Essays in Honour of Ian Angus, edited by Samir Gandesha and Peyman Vahabzadeh, 224–245. Winnipeg: ARP. Barad, Karen. 2017. “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. 103–117. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bellamy, Brent Ryan. 2014. “Into Eternity: On Our Waste Containment and Energy Futures.” Paradoxa 26: 145–158. Benjamin, Walter. [1955] 1968. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken. Bergson, Henri. [1907] 1998. Creative Evolution. Mineola, NY: Dover. Brand, Stewart. 2000. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books. Brand, Stewart. 2009. Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering are Necessary. New York: Viking Penguin. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (Winter): 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2018. “Anthropocene Time.” History and Theory 57.1 (March): 5–32. Clark, Timothy. 2018. “Scale as a Force of Deconstruction.” In Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, edited by Mattias Frisch, Philip Lynes, and David Wood. New York: Fordham University Press. Clarke, Bruce. 2014. Neocybernetics and Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Lowell Duckert, eds. 2015. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity  37 Ferguson, Francis. 1984. “The Nuclear Sublime.” diacritics 14.2 (Summer): 4–10. Galison, Peter, and Rob Moss, dir. Containment. 2015. Amazon. “General Time Schedule for Final Disposal.” Posiva, https​:/​/po​​siva.​​fi​/en​​/fina​​l​_dis​​ posal​​/gene​​ral​_t​​ime​_s​​chedu​​le​_fo​​r​_f​in​​al​_di​​sposa​​l. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1987. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heise, Ursula K. 2019. “Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene.” English Literary History 86: 275–304. Heringman, Noah. 2015. “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene.” Representations 129, no. 1 (Winter): 56–85. James, William. [1907] 1968. Pragmatism; and Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth. New York: Meridian. Kaplan, Ann. 2016. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lapenta, Francesco. 2011. “Geomedia: on Location-Based Media, the Changing Status of Collective Image Production and the Emergence of Social Navigation Systems.” Visual Studies, 26.1: 14–24. Lapenti, Vincent. 2020. Deep Time Reckoning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Madsen, Michael, dir. Into Eternity, 2010; Copenhagen, Denmark: Atmo Media Network. DVD. Madsen, Michael, Bishnupriya Ghosh, and Bhaskar Sarkar. 2020. “Into the Beyond: A Conversation with Michael Madsen.” In The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, edited by Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar. 207–215. New York: Routledge. Masco, Joseph. 2021. The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes of Radioactive Worldmaking. Durham: Duke University Press. McPhee, John. 1981. Basin and Range. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Milton, John. [1667] 1821. Paradise Lost. London: John Bumpus, Holborn Bars. Morgan, Benjamin. 2017. “Scale as Form: Thomas Hardy’s Rocks and Stars.” In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Time, edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor. 132–149. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1873] 1990. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, translated by Daniel Breazeale. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2012. “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 9.1: 95–100. Parikka, Jussi. 2015. Geology of the Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peters, John Durham. The Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pinkus, Karen. Subsurface, Narrative, Climate Change (forthcoming). Pringle, Thomas Patrick. 2014. “Photographed by the Earth: War and Media in Light of Nuclear Events.” NECSUS, Autumn. https​:/​/ne​​csus-​​ejms.​​org​/p​​hotog​​ raphe​​d​-ear​​th​-wa​​r​-med​​ia​-li​​ght​-n​​​uclea​​r​-eve​​nts. Seaborg, David. Declassified 1946. “Plutonium and Other Transuranic Elements.” Oakridge, TN: United States Atomic Energy Commission. https​:/​/bo​​oks​.g​​oogle​​.ca​/

38  Derek Woods b​​ooks?​​id​=O-​​ZGqeA​​BPoYC​​&dq​=gl​​enn​%2​​0seab​​org​%2​​0plut​​onium​​%20ha​​lf​-li​​ fe​&pg​=PP3​#v​=onepage​&q​=gle​​nn​%20​​seabo​​rg​%20​​​pluto​​nium%​​20hal​​f​-lif​​e​& f​=false. Schuster, Joshua, and Derek Woods. Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). Schwab, Gabriele. 2020. Radioactive Ghosts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Starosielski, Nicole. 2019. “The Elements of Media Studies.” Media + Environment 1.1. https://doi​.org​/10​.1525​/001c​.10780. Woods, Derek. 2014. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” The Minnesota Review 83: 133–142.

2

Time Travel as a Tool for Promoting Trans-scalar Thinking Axel Goodbody

Cultivating a Trans-scalar Imaginary Over the last ten years, there has been a growing interest in how the different scales on which environmental changes and everyday decision-making play out are represented in literature and film, and in the role that fiction might play in the educative process of training the public in trans-scalar thinking (Heise 2008; Clark 2012, 2015, and 2019; Ghosh 2016; Slovic 2016; Tavel Clarke and Wittenberg 2017; Mertens and Craps 2018, Horton 2019; Johns-Putra 2019). Novels typically seek to bring about reader immersion in a fictional world through affect and identification: they critique negative attitudes through villains and promote desirable behavior with heroes. The individual human scale is indispensable. This makes it difficult for them to do justice to the incomparably greater spatial and temporal scale of environmental change in the Anthropocene: the invisibility of global warming is reproduced and compounded. The problem is exacerbated by scale discrepancy: the fact that actions which may be environmentally neutral or even beneficial on the individual and local scale can turn out to be immensely damaging when practiced by millions all over the world for long periods of time. Can literature and film make the collective, cumulative human impact on the global environment real for readers and viewers? And have they a role to play in leading the public to think across the disparate scales of the local and global, individual and collective, immediate and long term? These related challenges have led the writers of popular genre fiction, and Hollywood filmmakers, to opt for implausible tipping-point scenarios, engage in almost comic telescoping of the time taken for climatic change to unfold, and construct plots in which the protagonists travel ceaselessly around the world in an effort to relate the punctual and local experience of individuals to deep time and the planetary. There are, however, alternative ways in which literature can bring climate change home to readers, expose to critical scrutiny the discrepancies between the individual, social and planetary scales and build scalar literacy. Ursula Heise was one of the first to reflect on the ability of certain techniques to address the problem. Collages DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-2

40  Axel Goodbody juxtaposing narratives on different geographical and temporal scales, allegory as a way of depicting different scales simultaneously and narratives foregrounding the agency of the nonhuman, which crosses the scales of the individual and the species, are literary strategies which she presents as potential solutions in her book Sense of Place, Sense of Planet (2008). Timothy Clark is less interested in identifying successful examples of the use of such literary and artistic techniques than in reading and rereading texts from the perspectives of different scales—and in the limits of human perception and imagination, rooted as they are in the scale of our bodies, and how these translate into representations in novels, films and works of art. However, he too seems to endorse the value of work operating on multiple scales, disrupting our mundane sense of place and time, revealing disjunctions between the scale of our day-to-day existence and that of climate change, and exposing our implication in destructive practices (Clark 2015). In a recent article, Mahlu Mertens and Stef Craps have examined and assessed the temporal schemes of three novels seeking to portray deep geological time and the far future in ways that relate to human experience of the here and now. Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay (2010) narrates a fictional future history of California’s Central Valley in a collage of texts from newspaper articles, history books, interviews, diaries and maps of the area, in chronologically ordered chapters covering a time span from ad 2021 to ad 16,000. Pendell draws attention to differences in scale by juxtaposing the life cycles of humans, communities and entire societies with the gradual process of global warming. But, Mertens and Craps argue, the novel does not depict the individuals one can identify with and fails to engage the reader emotionally. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) interleaves allegorical narratives about climate change which are set 65 million years ago, in the eighteenth century, and in our near future. The pairs of characters in her three narratives have almost identical names: doubles of each other, they represent humanity. Winterson’s Doppelgänger technique makes it possible to emotionally connect with the story and the characters and, at the same time, to grasp the long-term implications of the actions of humankind as a whole. The most interesting work from the point of view of scale which Mertens and Craps discuss is, however, Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here (2014). McGuire illustrates what happens, has happened or will or could happen in the corner of a room, from 3 billion years ago up to ad 22,175. He foregrounds the interdependencies and connections between the different times by leaping back and forth through time and superimposing panels onto one another to split time into multiple layers. Moments from different years are braided together by means of semantic, thematic, chromatic and iconic similarities. The Berlin writer Franz Friedrich interweaves narratives of environmental destruction and recuperation involving different spatial and temporal scales in a less dramatic but comparable way in his novel Die Meisen auf Uusimaa singen nicht mehr (On Uusimaa the Tits No Longer Sing, 2014).

Time Travel and Trans-scalar Thinking  41 His juxtaposition of the near future with a mythical deep time exemplifies a poetic strategy which ticks several of the boxes of cultivating trans-scalar thinking. Narrative strands which are initially seemingly unrelated are juxtaposed, linked by themes and images and finally drawn together in a utopian ending. The novel focuses on the Siberian Tits on the (fictional) Finnish island of Uusimaa, whose sudden silence alarms ecologists and attracts the attention of conspiracy theorists and millenarians. There is widespread anxiety that the birds may be the first casualties of a hitherto undetected environmental catastrophe and wild speculation as to the causes of the loss of their song: electrosmog from mobile phone masts is cited by people who see them as harbingers of an apocalyptic future, as well as chemical and nuclear contamination. Others argue that the birds are depressed and no longer feel like singing: this introduces a fairytale element to the narrative. Associated with a mythical Nordic past through references to the Edda, the Kalevala and Sami folk songs and tales, Uusimaa prior to its contamination is presented as an idealized sphere of attunement to nature and harmonious inhabitation. It is simultaneously localized and deterritorialized, temporally situated and timeless: the short timescale of individual human life is confronted with the mid-term timescale of chemical pollution, the long-term one of nuclear halflife and the timelessness of myth and the nonhuman. Through its suggestive overlaying of disparate narrative elements, On Uusimaa the Tits No Longer Sing unsettles our everyday, humanly framed conception of time, prompting us to consider the philosophical and ethical questions which different forms of contemporary human impact on the environment raise. In this respect the novel seeks to meet the challenge of cultivating scalar imagination which Deborah Coen discusses in her article “Big Is a Thing of the Past: Climate Change and Methodology in the History of Ideas”: The challenge […] in the age of climate change is to cultivate a scalar imagination consistent with the lessons of recent environmental science. It has become our responsibility to think big and small at once: to imagine the consequences of our decisions in the here and now and as part of the accumulated impact of the human species in the course of its residence on earth. (Coen 2016, 311) Coen defines “scaling” as “the work of mediating between different systems of measurement, formal or informal, designed to apply to different slices of the phenomenal world […] in order to arrive at a common standard of proportionality” (312). At certain historical junctures, she argues, “scaling may require an imaginative leap, in order to recalibrate the imagination to encompass phenomena that were previously unimaginably large or small” (ibid.). This recalibration is not an exclusively cognitive process. Since it involves developing new ways of seeing the world and new modes

42  Axel Goodbody of representation, it is also a matter of aesthetics. And since it requires us to revise our judgments of the relative significance of things and say goodbye to some things we have become attached to, it is an affective process as well. Aesthetics and affect play a central role in literature, film and art: these cultural media consequently perform a potentially crucial function in equipping society to appreciate and respond adequately to climate change. Adeline Johns-Putra (2019) has further explored the implications for literature of the “acute and dizzying” (252) switches between human and geological perspectives demanded of us in the Anthropocene. She develops a conception of literary realism encapsulating the relation of singular and universal scales to one another which is based on Walter Benjamin’s description of the historical materialist’s thought process as a matter of not merely holding together the scales of the individual and the political epoch, but also recognizing the individual’s place within the epoch. For Benjamin, such recognition was best communicated in “images,” that is, placeholders for what we cannot fully know, configurations of thought involving a moment of stasis, but also of tension and suspense, since they are temporary and precede cognition. The shock of the image’s “arrest” of time generates “a jolt of meta-experiential awareness” (Johns-Putra 2019, 252). Benjamin writes: It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together flash-like with the Now to form a constellation. (Quoted from Benjamin’s Arcades Project [pp. 462–463] by Johns-Putra, 259) Johns-Putra suggests that Benjamin’s notion of the image as an intuitive crystallization of multi-scalar events and experiences may be a productive model for environmental literature. Whereas she goes on to explore the possibility of a literary “Anthropocene realism” responding to species history and generating scale awareness, in the following I examine the seemingly trivial science-fiction motif of time travel, arguing that it can serve as a literary technique instantiating the “flash-like” coming together of past and present in the Benjaminian image. Like formal fragmentation, the montage of narratives on different timescales, allegory and symbol, time travel can serve as a methodological thought procedure jolting readers into apprehending the linked histories of the human and nonhuman in the Anthropocene. So far, most of the works considered in discussions of scale have been taken from American and British writing. However, fostering trans-scalar thinking is a global concern. I have therefore chosen to discuss a Norwegian novel (briefly), and two German ones in greater detail. But first, a word about science fiction as a genre of environmental writing and the forms and functions of time travel in it.

Time Travel and Trans-scalar Thinking  43

Science Fiction and Time Travel In The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh wrote that the Anthropocene resists the techniques that are most closely identified with the novel: its essence consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel—forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space. (63) Premodern forms of narrative (myth, epic, and fairy tale) were less constrained, being capable of ranging over large spaces and time intervals, and including a wide variety of human as well as nonhuman agents. But in the Anthropocene the literary imagination became radically centered on the human (66). In her review of the book, Ursula Heise (2018) has pointed out there is in fact a modern genre which is not handicapped by these conventions of the mainstream novel, namely, science fiction. Enthusiastically embracing nonhuman agents from aliens to robots, sci-fi has never limited itself in spatial or temporal scale: its narratives take readers hundreds, thousands and even billions of years into the future. Sci-fi has been at the forefront of climate change narrative since Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1987). Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi and Claire Vaye Watkins are among the leading North American authors who have adopted (and adapted) elements of the genre in their cautionary tales of planetary devastation and self-destruction through unbridled consumption and incautious technology.1 Heise therefore concludes that sci-fi has become the default genre for narrative engagement with climate change, and one from which journalists, climate scientists and activists borrow their themes and narrative strategies. While sci-fi typically maps individuals’ actions onto a vast scale of space and time by imagining life on far-flung galaxies and in distant futures, a subset of novels uses time travel to relate the present to the future or the past. It is a great literary convenience to be able to move a narrative viewpoint backwards or forwards in time, and writers have always used devices to do so, dreams being the usual method (e.g. in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol). Alternatives include extended sleep (in Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle), drugs, supernatural agents (fairy magic, angels, spirits), cryonic preservation and other forms of suspended animation. H.G. Wells was the first to introduce a machine for traveling in time. In his classic tale, The Time Machine, he used time travel to survey the kinds of far future and end of the world prophesied by contemporary science, while also, with his Eloi and Morlocks, showing the class-bound society of 1895 in a new light. Wells’ protagonist encounters a future Earth of sweltering heat, which, though he speculates it may be because the sun

44  Axel Goodbody has become hotter, or the earth is nearer the sun (Wells 1898, Kindle loc. 591), or may equally be a result of civilization’s “industrial system” (loc. 833). Wells invented the time machine at a point when geological time, so vastly extended since Thomas Hutton’s discoveries in the 1780s and Charles Lyell’s systematic presentation of the evidence that it was necessary to think of the Earth’s history in terms of millions of years (Principles of Geology, 1830), had disrupted the earlier sense of historical time, in which the world had been plausibly considered to be a mere 6,000 years old (Archbishop Ussher), and dwarfed the scale of human history by that of Earth time. Wells’ novel laid down the rules of time travel and anticipated its use in Anthropocene fiction to warn readers to mend their ways. Time travel has served in a raft of subsequent narratives to explore questions of the consequences of our actions for the future. Jostein Gaarder’s young adult novel, The World According to Anna (original Norwegian title: Anna. En fabel om klodens klima og miljø, 2013), is not a particularly sophisticated work, but it may serve as an initial example of the use of time travel as a fictional mechanism to bridge the gap between the timescales of the individual and the planet. “Time,” Gaarder tells the reader, can be seen from many perspectives: firstly, the perspective of the individual, then that of the family, then that of culture and written culture, and then what we call geological time. […] Ultimately, we live on the axis of cosmic time. We live in a universe which is around 13.7 billion years old. But these periods of time are, in reality, not as distant from each other as they might seem at first sight. (Gaarder 2015, 89) He renders the normally imperceptible phenomenon of climate change imaginable and real to readers not merely by describing warming, species extinction and climate refugees in a climate-changed future, but also by linking these with the reader’s present through time travel. This takes the form of psychic communication between an individual in the present (Anna) and her double in the future (Nova). At the same time, it is depicted as the result of old-fashioned magic. Anna is a 15-year-old obsessed with climate change, who has alarmingly real dreams of life 70 years into the future, in which her granddaughter Nova accuses her of complicity in allowing global warming to happen. “I want the world that you had at my age. […] Because you owe me that!” Nova demands (41). “Perhaps we can shout back through time and tell the people who lived before us to show a bit of consideration?” she pleads (43). The aged Anna has a mysterious ruby ring with the power to fulfill a single wish. She says to Nova that she will use it to return to the world when Anna was 16, but Nova must promise to look after it: when they meet again in 70 years’ time, it will be Nova who is called to account. The world is thus given another chance. Anna/Nova grows up to

Time Travel and Trans-scalar Thinking  45 be an internationally celebrated icon catalyzing action on carbon emissions (anticipating the Greta Thunberg effect). With its blend of environmental facts and psychological realism with fantasy, The World According to Anna may meet the needs and expectations of young readers, but is a less than persuasive intellectual solution to the problem of reconciling different temporal scales. However, time travel also appears in more complex adult novels seeking to trigger imagination of the climate-changed future, relate it to the present and thereby facilitate social change. In the following, I will first show how, in Die Wallfahrer (The Pilgrims), Carl Amery, who had introduced sci-fi to German environmental writing with the 1970s’ post-apocalyptic teenage novel Der Untergang der Stadt Passau (The Fall of the City of Passau, 1975), presents a sequence of narratives set in different centuries that depict efforts to save the world which are prompted by religious, political and environmental doomsday visions. Time slips between these narratives and the present indicating connections between past, present and future, and a final instance of travel to a far distant future suggests that human actions must ultimately be judged by their contribution to human flourishing and planetary well-being. Finally, I examine The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke, one of Germany’s leading sci-fi authors, in whose work time travel features repeatedly. In a climate-changed Europe of the mid-twenty-first century, ravaged by nuclear catastrophe and war, Jeschke’s protagonists travel back 500 years to collect plants which have become extinct. Jeschke plays with a familiar question in science fiction: Can traveling to the past be used to change history? But time travel also serves to relate present actions to the historical past and the distant future and provides an impetus for readers to think across timescales, as required of us in the Anthropocene.

Carl Amery, The Pilgrims When the Bavarian writer, political essayist and environmental activist Carl Amery published The Pilgrims (Die Wallfahrer, 1986), it was hailed as his magnum opus, but reviewers were puzzled by its narrative structure and the time travel episodes. Amery had, however, already introduced time travel in an alternative history novel, An den Feuern der Leyermark (The Campfires of the Leyermark, 1979). He has commented in an interview: It had a schizophrenic reception: On the one hand there were the establishment mainstream critics, who didn’t understand the book. Ironically, they cost me readers by saying I was too esoteric. On the other hand, I satisfied quite a respectable readership in the science fiction community, people looking for good SF, time machine problems and so on. […] I enjoy writing anachronistically, breaking through time barriers. This is the structure of Die Wallfahrer too, probably my most important novel. It was on my part from the outset an attempt, at least

46  Axel Goodbody unconsciously, to develop a literary form appropriate to the perspective essential for the survival of humankind. It is for others to say whether I have been successful or not. (Amery 2002, 19) The Pilgrims draws together Amery’s long-standing environmental concern with the other main subjects of his writing—critical examination of Catholic tradition, denunciation of contemporary materialism and individualism and love of his native Bavaria and its history—infusing them with his characteristic delight in irony, humor and imagination. The novel consists of four main narratives and further short ones, depicting literal and metaphorical pilgrimages by holy men, campaigners for social reform and political activists. A seventeenth-century hermit journeys northward from Innsbruck, crosses the Alps and braves the dangers of the Thirty Years’ War to reach the town of Tuntenhausen in Upper Bavaria, which remains a center of pilgrimage to this day; a group of citizens from nearby Wasserburg travel there in the eighteenth century to perform a mystery play calling on the people to mend their ways; a pious local landowner strives to combat secular liberalism and the decline in public morals in the nineteenth century, by promoting a Catholic revival combined with agrarian politics; and a misguided count distantly related to him assassinates Kurt Eisner, the charismatic leader of the Socialist Revolution that overthrew the monarchy in Bavaria in November 1918, because he sees Eisner as a Jewish outsider bent on undermining Bavarian identity and values. The narratives, which are united by their geographical focus on Tuntenhausen, are inspired by historical documents—in particular the records of Tuntenhausen pilgrimages and associated miracles, the text of the eighteenth-century mystery play Die Sündflut (The Flood),2 a nineteenthcentury Catholic program for agrarian reform, and the writings of Eisner and his assassin, Count Anton Arco-Valley. The first two narratives are also written in the language of the period in question, which makes for slow but fascinating reading. (The fourth is written as a film script, providing details of the interior and exterior settings together with dialogue between the characters.) The novel is thus based on historical research, but the author engages readers emotionally by freely imagining the psychology of his subjects and the details of their lives. Paths and pilgrimages are key motifs in this novel, but time is also a central theme. It examines human striving to live rightly sub specie aeternitatis, relativizing our everyday sense of time by placing it in the context of theological, anthropological and biological time: time on earth before the day of judgment, the hour of nuclear Armageddon and environmental doomsday. Amery introduces the four main narratives in the first chapter and devotes subsequent chapters to each in turn. He links them thematically through veneration of the Blessed Virgin as the patron saint of Bavaria and through figures of girls with learning disabilities, who have

Time Travel and Trans-scalar Thinking  47 the power of second sight. In the penultimate chapter, Amery presents four other, briefer stories, under the heading “Paths of Modernity.” The first of these depicts a supremely crass distortion of the Catholic ethos in the Third Reich: a nursing sister is malignantly instructed to encourage a girl with learning difficulties to board the bus in which she will be gassed in the Nazis’ euthanasia program by presenting it as a form of pilgrimage. The other three narratives are increasingly vehement attacks on the development of Catholic politics in Bavaria after the Second World War, and what Amery sees as the sell-out of social justice and the environment to big business, big science and big politics. In the final chapter, Amery rounds off the four main narratives. The historical narrative strands in The Pilgrims are entangled through episodes in which characters slip, for a moment or a longer period, from their time into the present (i.e. Bavaria in the 1980s). In a foreword, he describes this procedure as affording “views across through crumbling time walls” and argues that the pattern of lines and intersections which it provides can help us “interpret the end of the world” (Amery 1986, 9)3: it prompts readers to consider human responsibilities and actions traditionally judged according to the Christian principles of worshipping God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself in the context of a new moral code defined by the temporality of human life on earth. In the first time slip, the hermit Gropp stumbles across a tarred road in the Alps. He flees it as a work of the devil, with its ugly shape and color, the wasteland bordering it, the strange stench of distant vehicles and their noise which resembles a thousand howling wolves. Later, he has to circumvent a vast hole in the ground, the site of a city destroyed by an atom bomb in an imagined future, in which the remains of humans are encased in glass, like flies in amber. He senses that all life has been extinguished here in a conflict of global proportions (81–84). In the second narrative strand, two female members of the group of actors, caught on the roadside in a storm, are picked up by a couple of lads in a car and taken to a local disco for the evening. Amery’s depiction of the behavior of 1980s youth through the eyes of young women from two centuries before (who are taken for “Trachtler,” i.e. performers in traditional costume) is highly amusing, and his detailed description of the Xenon pinball machine in the disco venue as a “philosophical-mathematical-poetic theatre” worthy of Bavarian and Austrian Baroque (135–137) is a tour de force. The next day, the whole company of actors experiences a further time slip: passing the town of Lampferding, they find themselves in front of the fence surrounding a twentieth-century military base. (An anti-aircraft missile base was stationed in Lampferding between 1977 and 2002, as a part of the NATO Integrated Air and Missile Defense network.) In the third narrative, Count Innozenz Maria is mysteriously transported into the 1980s when he is on his way to Tuntenhausen to pray for guidance. This momentary time slip is repeated, and he soon finds himself in the future

48  Axel Goodbody for longer periods, in which he finds a twentieth-century natural cure for the digestive problems he has been suffering from (which arise from his suppression of the body). The cure leads to marital infidelity, to him joining a dubious occultist Marian cult in Munich and eventually to him abandoning wife and family in a futile attempt to defend the political autonomy of the Vatican against Garibaldi’s unification of Italy. Amery’s fourth protagonist, the “Eisner murderer,” is equally motivated by a desire to save the world from corruption and destruction, but the path he takes leads him even further away from the principles of care for the poor and creation. Count Marco comes too late to recognize how much his opposition to modernity and materialism has in common with the charismatic socialist leader’s ideals and falls, like the conservative monarchist milieu he represents, into the hands of the Nazis. In the final chapter of The Pilgrims, the eighteenthcentury actors decide to perform their play in Lampferding rather than press on to Tuntenhausen. The ranks of their pilgrim audience are swelled by twentieth-century demonstrators against the building of a new motorway and nuclear power station. The performance (and the action in the novel) culminates in a fantasia celebrating a reconciliation of faith and reason, in which exuberant Baroque opera meets Disney spectacle. This consciously artificial, make-believe utopian ending serves to relate the different scales of time and space referenced in the principal narratives in the novel. Amery’s lightness of touch belies a serious intention to encourage his readers to think of human agency on multiple scales at once—prompting them to “commensurate” the seemingly incommensurable (see Coen 307–308) and to develop a corresponding evaluative framework for their actions. Amery uses time travel to relate the past to a present characterized by consumption and moral degeneration and to a future of global destruction, guiding readers to view the actions of individuals from the perspective of whether they contribute to or avert humanity’s looming self-annihilation. Wolfgang Jeschke, who has been hailed as the “grand master” of German science fiction, has explored further possibilities of time travel as a literary technique promoting trans-scalar thinking.

Wolfgang Jeschke, The Cusanus Game Time and timescales play a key role in The Cusanus Game, or An Occidental Kaleidoscope (2013).4 The action is set in the mid-twenty-first century: Jeschke’s novel postulates a form of time travel which enables trained operatives to return to the past on a mission to save the world. The central figure, Domenica Ligrina, is charged with collecting roots and seeds from plants in the Cologne Basin which have since died out. But she oversteps the mark when she is imprisoned as a witch and faces being burned at the stake. Writing letters to Cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus, begging him to intervene on her behalf, she reveals knowledge of the future and attempts to persuade him to change history by establishing an independent

Time Travel and Trans-scalar Thinking  49 Scientific Academy under the auspices of the church. This jeopardizes her mission, because only minor alterations in history are permitted under the laws of time travel. The Cusanus Game is an ambitious work, embracing elements of science thriller, historical novel and dystopian fiction. It is indebted to a series of older time travel narratives and includes nods to H.G. Wells, Jorge Luis Borges, Frank Herbert, Walter Miller, Olaf Stapledon and Jack Finney. In epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter, Jeschke quotes from the writing of philosophers, cosmologists and quantum physicists. The most important of these is the fifteenth-century German theologian, philosopher and astronomer, Nicolaus Cusanus (“Nicholas of Kues,” named after his birthplace on the river Moselle), who was rediscovered in the twentieth century as a precursor of the Renaissance humanists. Cusanus was a mathematician and a supporter of the scientific method, whose thinking led him to oppose witch hunts and champion religious tolerance. The time is 2052. Europe is under dual threat from climate change and the fallout from a nuclear accident. Desertification is creeping northward in Italy: Rome has become the frontier of civilization. Its descent into barbarity as watercourses dry up and the sand dunes encroach on the city recalls the collapse of the Roman Empire, with streams of climate refugees playing the role of the Visigoth hordes in the Dark Ages. Meanwhile, a catastrophic accident in a nuclear power station on the river Moselle in 2028 has caused tens of thousands of birth deformities, crippled the German economy and left large areas of Central Europe contaminated. Against this background, a secret Catholic organization is trying to “restore God’s creation,” by sending individuals back in time to collect genetically undamaged flora, so it can be used to re-naturalize areas which are either devoid of plant life since the nuclear disaster or choked by invasive, genetically mutated species. Jeschke presents two different forms of time travel, one technical and the other psychic. In the first, precise reconstruction of a historical scene (in virtual reality) is necessary for time transportation. The traveler surfs into the past and back again on time solitons. (A soliton is a type of wave encountered in quantum mechanics, which is exceptionally stable, maintaining its shape and velocity over large distances.) Complex mathematical equations play a role in harnessing these forces. However, Jeschke avoids having to explain the actual mechanics of the “time machine” by writing that the operators are themselves ultimately ignorant as to how it works—its use is a gift from members of a more advanced future humanity, who have traveled back to the present. This leads to the inclusion of a subsidiary narrative strand which plays a key role in the denouement, but detracts from the novel’s coherence as a fictional thought experiment. We are introduced to a mysterious master time traveler known as “the angel,” who resides in a far distant future and travels in time to change the course of human history for the better. The novel leaves it unclear at this point (cf. Jeschke 2008, 459) whether human beings from the future are responsible for these initiatives to preserve the

50  Axel Goodbody planet’s future or they are the product of an automatic repair program of the multiverse working constantly toward its optimization. In Jeschke’s second variant of time travel, certain individuals, of whom Domenica is one, possess the gift of being able to make mental contact with their other selves in alternative universes. She can participate in the experiences of these doubles without needing the elaborate apparatus of simulated reality and scientific calculations, in the flashbacks and flashforwards of dreams and hallucinations. As in the time loops of computer games and films such as Groundhog Day and Run Lola Run, Domenica possesses the ability to learn from the mistakes of her alter egos. Small things can be changed by time travelers: individual acts of extreme violence, historical disasters, etc. can be circumvented. But the so-called “constitutive” historical events cannot be altered, otherwise reality would shift to a parallel universe, and our future would no longer be connected with it. Underlying the novel is the question of whether things would have developed in better ways if Nicolaus Cusanus had been able to spread his enlightened views and prevent his contemporaries from hunting witches and persecuting Jews in misguided compensation for fears prompted by political and religious changes. Jeschke’s answer, in a chapter outlining an alternative history of Europe since Christopher Columbus, is that things would not necessarily have turned out better. The story of Domenica and Cusanus has several different endings. In a parallel universe she may have triggered with the information which she has conveyed to him in her letters, that the industrial revolution arrives a century earlier—but so do nuclear technology, environmental pollution and climate change. The Catholic Church promotes science rather than hindering it, but while the outcome may seem preferable for Europeans in the short to medium term, in the long term it does not benefit humanity or the planet. Jeschke does not address the question of scale in conceptual terms, but like Amery’s novel, The Cusanus Game superimposes reference systems, calling implicitly on readers to think together relations which pertain at the different scales of individuals’ lives and human civilization, the here and now, radioactive half-life, climate change and Earth history.

Conclusion The Pilgrims ends with two short depictions of the end of the world. The first is a modern version of the orthodox Christian day of judgment: a young man (a professional musician) arrives at the church in Tuntenhausen, parks his car, unfolds angel wings, ascends above the church and sounds the last trump. This was, Amery notes in a comment, his intended conclusion. However, he finds it dissatisfying and decides to follow it with an alternative, “heretical” ending. This second conclusion is situated 50 million years into the future. Environmental apocalypse has taken the place of theology: step by step, nature has very slowly recovered from the almost total destruction

Time Travel and Trans-scalar Thinking  51 through which humans rendered themselves extinct. The landscape where Tuntenhausen stood is now populated by new species of plants and animals. The nineteenth-century count has been transported into this distant future, as an equivalent of purgatory, so as to learn that the dilemmas which plagued him are only a tiny part of the great weave of life on the planet. The aspirations and achievements of humans are not necessarily meaningless, but, he is told by Gaia, as a species, humans were an evolutionary mistake. Individuals’ actions must logically be judged against the background of our collective unbalancing of the composition of the atmosphere, climate change and our decimation of biodiversity (Amery 1986, 394). Amery’s first conclusion is dissatisfying because it presumed actions would be judged on the human scale. The second revisits them from the scale of the planet. Leaving both side by side captures the necessity of not simply replacing one scale by the other, but being aware of the tension between them—in Coen’s words, “avoid[ing] losing sight of relations at one scale when we zero in on another” (2016, 318). Like Amery, Jeschke uses time travel to situate contemporary environmental damage and the challenges of the Anthropocene in historical perspective. But he also goes beyond this. In the final chapter of The Cusanus Game, he compares the master time traveler and Domenica, who has had a series of visions of a barren, lifeless future earth, with the body’s chemical messenger substances: they will perform a vital function in the multiverse by maintaining links between its different parts, conveying information and resources and detecting and removing disturbances in the organism. Ugly encapsulations of violence and death, malignant nodes of chance, carelessness and indifference can be unraveled, dissolved and pre-empted through cautious probing, gentle smoothing and subtle alterations of the past (700). This notion of the work of time travelers can be interpreted as an image for the reader awareness which the author is seeking to enhance of the impact of human actions on different scales simultaneously. While the silence of the Uusimaa tits in Franz Friedrich’s novel can be conceived as a Benjaminian image, arresting time and shocking the reader through its crystallization of processes operating on different scales, characters traveling between different times serve Amery and Jeschke as a way of working against our tendency to discount the future—to treat it as a state of things that might or might not arise, and probably never will. Time travelers move between different times rather than timescales, but they exercise readers in thinking about the deep past and distant future, the relationship of the present with them and how the nature of individual issues and situations alters according to the scale at which they are considered. Time travel is a literary fiction symbolizing the power of imagination to bridge the gap between the scales of human life and geophysical change. Traveling in time is not real—or only in the form of mental time travel, in which individuals project themselves backward in time to re-live past experiences and forward to pre-live future ones. In Time Travel: A History, James Gleick comments scathingly: “I doubt that any phenomenon, real

52  Axel Goodbody or imagined, has inspired more perplexing, convoluted, and ultimately futile philosophical analysis than time travel has” (Gleick 2016, 221). But he notes equally that time travel “forces its way into philosophy,” raising questions of identity and determination vs. free will, and “infects modern physics” (23)—for instance, with the notion of the “multiverse.” Time travel tales have always tended to combine serious themes— typically, change, loss and grief—with playfulness. Time travel is a playful fiction which serves, like the different time settings in parallel narratives, telepathic links between different generations and other multi-temporal structures of classics of environmental fiction including The Sea and Summer, A Friend of the Earth, The Book of Dave and The Bone Clocks, to foster trans-scalar thinking. Amery was conscious that his use of time travel as an attempt to “develop a literary form appropriate to the perspective essential for the survival of humankind” (Amery 2002, 19) relies on the willingness of readers to suspend disbelief. But then he held that imagination is a crucial element of environmental thinking. The doubling of his conclusion and its ironic tone suggest, like the operatic apotheosis of reason and faith with which he ends the main narrative (thereby alleviating the unremitting bleakness of the political scenario presented in the previous chapter), that provocation is intended rather than immobilizing pessimism. Jeschke similarly refers to time travel in various playful ways in his novel. Before Domenica undertakes her journeys to the past, she describes her mother as “living in the last century” because of her refusal to use a smartphone, remarking tongue in cheek: “You’d need a time machine to keep in touch with her” (Jeschke 2008, 20). Time travel is a potentially powerful way of training readers in awareness of temporal scale in the Anthropocene, precisely because it is a ludic one.

Notes 1 See, for instance, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy (2004– 2007); Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013); Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) and The Water Knife (2015); and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015). 2 Mystery plays enjoyed great popularity across Europe in the Middle Ages, but died out in most parts in the sixteenth century, when their long rambling texts and elaborate mechanical devices portraying angels and devils went out of fashion. Their many satirical secular elements meant they were also disapproved of by the church. However, they continued to be performed (and written) in the south of Bavaria: the Oberammergau passion play survives to this day as an internationally famous example of community theatre. 3 The translations from Amery’s novel here and in the following are mine. 4 The German original was first published as a hardback in 2005, with a paperback edition following in 2008. The book appeared in American translation in 2013. However, the translation was not available to me. Page references in the following are therefore to the 2008 German edition: the translations are mine.

Time Travel and Trans-scalar Thinking  53

Works Cited Amery, Carl. 1986. Die Wallfahrer. Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag. Amery, Carl. 2002. “Lianas Across the Jungle: An Interview with Carl Amery.” In The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions, Realities, edited by Axel Goodbody. Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 13–29. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press. Clark, Timothy. 2012. “Derangements of Scale.” In Telemorphosis, Vol. 1 Scale, edited by Tom Cohen and Henry Sussman. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 148–66. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London et al.: Bloomsbury Academic. Clark, Timothy. 2019. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coen, Deborah R. 2016. “Big is a Thing of the Past: Climate Change and Methodology in the History of Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 77, no. 2 (April), 305–21. Friedrich, Franz. 2014. Die Meisen von Uusimaa singen nicht mehr. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. Gaarder, Jostein. 2013. Anna. En fabel om klodens klima og miljø. Oslo: Aschehoug. Gaarder, Jostein. 2015. The World According to Anna. Translated by Don Bartlett. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Gleick, James. 2016. Time Travel: A History. New York: Pantheon. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heise, Ursula K. 2018. “Climate Stories: Review of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement.” boundary2. February 19, 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bou​​ndary​​2​.org​​/ 2018​​/02​/u​​rsula​​-k​-he​​ise​-c​​limat​​e​-sto​​ries-​​revie​​w​-of-​​amita​​v​-gho​​shs​-t​​​he​-gr​​eat​-d​​ erang​​ement​/. Horton, Zach. 2019. “The Trans-Scalar Challenge of Ecology.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 26, no. 1 (Winter): 5–26. Jeschke, Wolfgang. 2013. The Cusanus Game, or An Occidental Kaleidoscope. Translated by Ross Benjamin. New York: Tor Books. Jeschke, Wolfgang. 2008. Das Cusanus-Spiel oder ein abendländisches Kaleidoskop. Munich: Droemer Knaur. Johns-Putra, Adeline. 2019. “Climate and History in the Anthropocene: Realist Narrative and the Framing of Time.” In Climate and Literature (Cambridge Critical Concepts), edited by Adeline Johns-Putra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 246–62. Mertens, Mahlu, and Stef Craps. 2018. “Contemporary Fiction vs. the Challenge of Imagining the Timescale of Climate Change.” In Studies in the Novel 50, no. 1 (Special Issue: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction, edited by Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw, 134–53. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

54  Axel Goodbody Slovic, Scott. 2016. “Rescaling Geo-Loyalty: Considering Expressions of TransScalar Thinking.” In Sense of Place: Transatlantic Perspectives, edited by Axel Goodbody and Carmen Flys Junquera. Alcalá: University of Alcalá, 37–51. Tavel Clarke, Michael, and Wittenberg, David (eds.). 2017. Scale in Literature and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wells, H.G. 1898. The Time Machine. Kindle. Project Gutenberg, 2004.

3

Time Depth Jean Epstein, Michel Serres and Operational Model Time Christoph Rosol

A hissing silence. While the sound cannot find its signal-to-noise ratio between monophonic interferences and crackling static, we can see arrested images of low tide. A motionless landscape, ossified bushes, still images of humans. A coastal Holocene landscape, set in Brittany (Figure 3.1). Then, perceptible movement. Wrinkles appear in the sea, and life-giving micro-amplitudes emerge out of the grey continuum of the Breton blackand-white still life. The bushes are now shaking slightly. A first recognizable sound lands: a weak wave breaks upon the beach. A breeze—nonhuman— pushes a wooden door open, as if it were a superhuman will. Mortal eyes watch this gap in the wall opening, spellbound. Two women, one old, one young, sit and knit and spin and remain silent (Figure 3.2). The door, though, is not speechless. As an instrument, it lends an indicative language to the wind. It opens up to let a breath of air level the information divide between the inside and the outside, thus associating the nonhumanity of the wind—a medium by itself—with the humanity of the mortal eyes. The young woman, being in love and thereby receptive to the invocation of the wind, immediately understands: “It’s a sign,” she says. “A bad sign” (0:02:48) (Figure 3.3). A faint breeze widens the angle of a door, thus indicating an omen. Something may or may not come. An announcement, not a prophecy. “No sign, it’s just the wind” (0:04:12), her fiancé reassures her, before setting out to sea to fish for sardines. “The wind frightens me,” she answers. Yet the wind immediately takes this whisper away, abducts the confession from the young man’s comprehension. As announced by the wind and its indicating instrument, the door, the breeze turns into a storm. After an anxious night, in which the young woman’s song is cut against the roar of the churning sea, the old woman tells the young one about the ancient “Tempestaires,” the “Tempest Masters” or storm healers, “who knew how to control a storm and make it obey them.” “They would make the sea calm down,” she explains. “But these are old stories, you shouldn’t believe them anymore, no” (0:11:20) (Figure 3.4). Instead of disbelieving, the young woman sets off in search of a Tempestaire. Only an intervention in the earthly events can soothe her anxiety. DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-3

56  Christoph Rosol

Figure 3.1 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:01:21) (© La Cinémathèque française).

Figure 3.2 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:02:28) (© La Cinémathèque française).

Time Depth 

57

Figure 3.3 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:02:32) (© La Cinémathèque française).

Figure 3.4 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:09:54) (© La Cinémathèque française).

58  Christoph Rosol

Figure 3.5 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:14:29) (© La Cinémathèque française).

At first, the heroine turns to those who have delegated their knowledge to the apparatuses. An endless string of choppy Morse code sounds as she enters a lighthouse, the situation room monitoring the storm. Airily, a technician points at the large metal cabinet behind him (which he does not operate, but cleans and looks after, “services”). “A healer?” he muses. “There’s the radio, it doesn’t heal but it relieves the navigator” (0:14:08). Thus, we learn that the five electron tubes, glowing in a chamber visible at the heart of the cabinet, are a wireless (Figure 3.5). Disappointed, she turns to another technician. And indeed, this one knows where the old Tempestaire lives, saying that he could probably be elicited to give “a good weather forecast” (0:14:19) with a bottle of liquor. This old man, Père Floc’h, can be seen in the next shot, as he, too, is cleaning, but this time a garden, apparently forking the wind out of the scrub. Having finished his work, he closes the door to his house, a half door that can regulate the exchange between the inside and the outside in a staggered manner. When the young woman hurries to him, the Tempestaire, however, is not keen to talk and refuses at first. Only her beseeching eyes soften him. Again, a tall cabinet, this time an artfully decorated wooden one, from which the storm healer pulls out a glass orb (Figure 3.6). Time-lapsed clouds, cut, Tempestaire, cut, clouds, cut, Tempestaire. The storm tamer begins his work and the film editor starts his own. Inside the

Time Depth 

59

Figure 3.6 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:19:14) (© La Cinémathèque française).

glass ball, the roaring surf is televised, and then superimposed with a long shot of the roaring sea coast. Four times in hard cuts, including missing half seconds, the image of the electronic tube cabinet from the lighthouse pops up in between. While the Tempestaire blows on the orb like a bony Zephyr, the filmed surf rewinds backward. Sea and rock separate, spray becomes wave. Finally, the storm calms down, the crystal ball shatters on the floor. Instantaneously, the fiancé appears at the open door, his dry scarf hanging limply. Last scene: the two humans of the future walking between sea, sky and land (Figure 3.7). The hard-cut arrangement of the Tempestaire blowing into his glass orb, the wireless and the roaring sea exemplifies a primeval scene. It realizes a visual handover between mythical and modern practices of weather control, between human agency, electronic futurities and geological vastness, and it does all that in the very historical moment when electronics and computeraided simulation set out to become the dominant epistemic form in which natural and geophysical phenomena are transcoded. The visual interlacing of the three protagonists—the storm, the stormhealer and the wireless—celebrates a generous productivity of both myth and modern technology, and, by extension, the near-mythical powers of time manipulating cinema that neatly captures the hybrid temporalities in which humans are situated in dealing with the natural world, right in a moment when the world becomes otherwise.

60  Christoph Rosol

Figure 3.7 Jean Epstein, Le Tempestaire (0:21:27) (© La Cinémathèque française).

Finis terrae, exorgium maris Jean Epstein shot Le Tempestaire1 (1947) in the winter months of 1946/47 on the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the Atlantic coast of Brittany—Finis Terræ, as the region has been called since Roman times. Ever since his film of the same name, Finis Terrae (1928), Epstein sought to fulfill his programmatic quest for new “approaches to truth” (Epstein 1981). In crossfading the “abundance of the real” of the harsh Breton coast with the educing powers of the “intelligent machine” of the cinematograph, he found an aesthetic technique through which “the fantastic should be unveiled rather than manufactured” (Schneider 2012, 196f.; Epstein 1946). Toward the end of this 20-year-long, and biographically terminal, “maritime period” of Epstein’s work, the winter storm captured in Le Tempestaire provides the mise-en-scène for a lost world at the very margins of a continent devastated by machine warfare. “In the original script,” notes the filmmaker James June Schneider, Père Floc’h “collapses and dies from exhaustion” (Schneider 2012, 204). Still, what is the end of the land, finis terræ, is only the beginning of the sea. About 3,000 nautical miles further west, at the other end of the Atlantic, an electron tube apparatus was being projected during the same winter months of 1946/47, a device which was supposed to deliver not only “a good weather forecast,” but also to realize the Tempestaire’s work itself.

Time Depth 

61

In Princeton, New Jersey, the television pioneer Vladimir Kosma Zworykin and the much younger mathematician and theoretical physicist John von Neumann were pondering on a comprehensive scheme of electronically guided weather control. Zworykin, the famous developer of the iconoscope tube and vice president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), had already circulated a short proposal among a few scientifically like-minded colleagues in the Princeton and Washington area in late 1945. In this proposal, he laid out his vision for global weather control, “a goal,” he stated, that should be “recognized as eventually possible by all foresighted men” (Zworykin 1945). Zworykin suggested that rainfall could be triggered by shockwaves, or clouds seeded with ice or dust. Longer-term climatic improvements, in turn, could be achieved by large-scale changes in vegetation and alterations to deserts, mountains and glaciers. He also proposed geoengineering techniques such as the extensive use of flamethrowers, igniting spilled oil on the sea’s surface or detonating atomic bombs to affect local heat balances and thereby divert ocean currents or hurricanes.2 In essence, Zworykin’s argument was that of an electronics engineer. He proclaimed that relatively small amounts of selective energy input (like atomic bombs) might discharge or control far greater amounts of energy (hurricanes), thus triggering a phenomenon either to develop or to reverse. The analogy here can be seen in the design of the triode valve: much as the control grid attenuates the electron current, so the controlled detonation of nuclear bombs would attenuate the nascent upflow of water and energy from the sea. Formulated to the extreme, Zworykin’s conceptual model arranges the whole tropical Atlantic into a kind of super cathode ray tube, promising an interventionist laboratory that would divert all hurricanes between cathode Africa and anode America in a controlled fashion. However, treatment must follow diagnosis. Zworykin’s megalomaniac scenarios for weather and climate control required an essential precondition: a precise and, if possible, globally scaled prediction of the generation and further evolution of weather phenomena by electronic computing devices. Here, his fellow Princetonian, John von Neumann came into play. Since the spring of 1945 von Neumann had been trying to drum up support for constructing an experimental computer at his own institution, the Institute for Advanced Study. Von Neumann shared Zworykin’s enthusiasm, but rejected his idea of a statistical approach to weather prediction. Instead, he advocated the use of brute computational force to tackle the challenge of solving the thermo- and hydrodynamic equations governing the evolution of weather systems (cf. Rosol 2017). Thus, in the winter of 1946/47, the younger man commissioned the older one to develop storage tubes for an electronic computer meant to integrate the thermo- and hydrodynamic equations representing atmospheric motion, i.e. the wind. In this very moment, numerical weather forecasting and electronics merged in a somewhat phantasmagoric scenery of weather

62  Christoph Rosol control. Zworykin’s original pamphlet represents a rather peculiar and hypertrophic point of departure for a phenomenal historical trajectory that leads from postwar America to today’s climate and Earth system modeling. In this datable and locatable “marriage” of predictive meteorology, modern computer design and cybernetics, the modern simulation sciences were formed, and with them a scientific practice which today constitutes the material and epistemic core of knowledge production in the vast majority of the natural, engineering and even social sciences. While, at the western end of old Europe, the final exercise of a magical technique of weather control was being staged on film, a physicalmathematical technique of calculating and managing the weather was being worked on at the eastern end of the New World. That doesn’t necessarily mean that one indigenous technique died and a technoscientific discipline took over, as a romanticized or pessimistic interpretation of Epstein’s film would assert. Instead, positions and powers in the order of the symbolic world were reordered, cut against each other and reformatted. Although the electron tubes of the lighthouse are merely part of a wireless sending and receiving ships’ messages, their offsprings will soon become the electronic valves which also switch between two states by opening up or closing electric circuits. Just like doors, in the language of the film. “In its nature,” says Jacques Lacan just a few years after the physicalmathematical techniques had joined forces with cybernetics and then swashed back to France, “the door belongs to the symbolic order, [as] it opens up either on to the real or the imaginary, we don't know quite which […] [it is] the symbol par excellence” (Lacan 1988, 302). The two wooden doors showcased in Epstein’s film that regulated, leveled and mixed the inside with the outside in staggered ways are merely transcended by the realization of “cybernetised doors”3: digital electronic gates, or flip-flops that carry out a logical chain of feedbacks, in which openings trigger closings and closings trigger openings. This “passing into the realm of realisation of cybernetics” (ibid.) has indeed unhinged the door as such: In a space where inside and outside are thus folded, wired, and coupled into each other as feedback loops, doors as cultural techniques have lost their moorings […] [and] no one knows anymore whether a door opens to the imaginary or to the real. (Siegert 2015, 205) However, what has been passed on is their indication and exemplification of the symbolic world, which is, again with Lacan, “the world of the machine” (Lacan 1988, 47). For the Polish emigrant Epstein, the opening door was “a sign” unveiled by the “truthfulness” of the cinematic camera, truthful with regard to the storm and the natural elements. For the Russian emigrant Zworykin and the Austro-Hungarian emigrant von Neumann, the

Time Depth 

63

truthfulness of the “sign” would be a matter of signal fidelity in the computing machine that calculates that very same storm.

Operative time Long before it has become dependent on the inside-and-outside indiscriminate performance of logical gates in a computer, science has had to use epistemic doors. Simulations and other cultural techniques of the exemplary that help opening up either to the imaginary or to the real represent, in fact, ubiquitous functional principles of doing science ever since its beginnings (Serres 2002–2003). Making an experiment, even a physical one, means formatting aspects of an unreducible real world into a world of the symbolic. In other words: epistemological order is generated by means of instantiating and empowering certain technical media. Only these make it possible to differentiate, exclude, enclose, (re-)couple, calculate and argue. Conducting a virtual experiment, i.e. a computer simulation, makes no difference. This is particularly the case in what can be regarded as simulation’s archetype: numerical weather forecasts, born in the years of 1946/47, and now, after growing in complexity to first climate and then Earth system models, became the most instrumental epistemic formations for comprehending but also narrating the very Anthropocene scaling that is the subject of this book. Simulation is a universal technique, most powerfully employed in studying the evolution of dynamical systems, no matter whether these represent population dynamics, chemical reactions or weather systems. What is special about simulation in geophysical disciplines such as meteorology, climate science, hydrology and sedimentology is that they function by establishing and balancing specific concepts of instability: nonlinear dynamics, emergence, chaos, complexity. The radically empirical undertaking of the geosciences can only succeed in a context-related, local, “case by case,” or “point by point” way; i.e. it is always only applicable to a certain temporally and locally defined problem. Space and time variables have to be set and constrained, e.g. by the initial atmospheric conditions for the hourly prediction of weather systems, be they located west of Brittany or east of the Bahamas; in the boundary conditions set for modeling Earth system sensitivity on the basis of specific emission scenarios in the twenty-first century; or in the reconstruction of the climate of the entire Holocene. In that sense, time is made operative; it is the time of the model, or model time. Interestingly, the climate and Earth system sciences can do all this with astonishing heuristic sufficiency, while simultaneously placing a high value on efficiency, i.e. on computing time, choice of model, etc. A combination of technical media, practices, operations and concepts stabilizes the knowledge of the unstable by quantifying and comprehending it in its respective specificity, locality, and—more than anything else—its particular temporality, while keeping themselves highly flexible and adaptable to the

64  Christoph Rosol complex system they are attempting to represent. The matters of the “geo” are always in flux and, hence, so is its science. Putting it provocatively, one might say that climate and Earth system simulation does mimesis on what Bronislaw Szerszynski has called the “living memory” of the fluid itself, “a memory of energy, stored in motion and intensivity, that has to be continually maintained in action or it almost literally evaporates” (Szerszynski 2019, 229). In that sense, model time is operative because climate time is operative. Michel Serres’ communication theory offers an approach to how this mimetic function of simulation sciences can be made productive for the humanities. Throughout his work Serres not only continuously made attempts to translate the sciences of the physical (the lighthouse in Epstein’s film) into the language of anthropology and literature, of myths and legends, of experience and suffering (Epstein’s filming of the lighthouse) (Serres 1995). He also considers both these domains of knowledge to be isomorphic, by attributing them principles of communication: mediations, transmissions, interferences and the founding of relationships. If one assumes, as Serres did, that agency in nature and culture takes place on the basis of the exchange of information, the translation difficulties between their respective sciences become less of a problem. Another angle on this subject is given by Serres’ topological theory of history: his figuration of a folded time in which distant events, theories or practices can appear very near, while those nearby can become quite distant. In the manner of a folded, crumpled handkerchief, in which points on the surface that are woven far apart from one another can suddenly also adjoin each other, Serres’ model folds historical time, so that the linear spacings of a smooth, metric space-time of a history of knowledge turns into a dynamic, contextual and swirling network of relationships (Bennett and Connolly 2012). In the more than two millennia old didactic poem De rerum natura by Lucretius, for example, Serres sees a modern climatological physics at work, a physics in the sense of a qualitative thinking of the form of inclination, the small deviation within the laminar flow of matter, that addresses turbulence and chaos in essentially the same manner as is done today (Serres 2000). Such folding of historical time, however, is not just a matter of historiography for Serres, but it is in accordance with something much more fundamental, namely, the ontological basis for both geophysical and living systems, or what he has termed “Biogea”: a single, circular entity that combines Earth and life (Serres 2012). “All times converge in [a] temporary knot” (Serres 1982, 75), he writes, an entanglement characterized by the eternal homeorhetic flow of natural systems, i.e. dynamical (fluid) systems that remain stable through their flux, returning to an inherent trajectory, even when their (solid) surroundings change, like “a river that flows and yet remains stable in the continual collapse of its banks and the irreversible erosion of the mountains around it. One always swims in the same river, one never sits down on the same bank” (ibid.).

Time Depth 

65

As we turn our gaze onto the unfolding of the Anthropocene today, a similar figuration appears, although on a slightly different and rather perplexing level than historical time. Within the operative model-data bind of current climate modeling we realize that a geohistoric event like the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a notable carbon anomaly which took place 55 million years ago, marks the closest geological analogue to our current climatic transition (McInerney and Wing 2011; Gingerich 2019). Suddenly, because it affects our present, something like an abrupt climate transition that took place 55 million years ago comes frighteningly close, while the all too familiar world of late modernity, say 55 years ago, with its still somewhat stationary climate in which generic history was able to unfold, may very soon seem very far away. Or, as the charismatic geologist and climatologist Richard B. Alley noted, when comparing the PETM with the Anthropocene: “things get out of place and out of time, as it were” (Alley 2009). It literally depends on today’s decisions on how far we catapult the climatic boundary conditions of the planet back behind the (astronomically driven) climate changes of the Quaternary and into CO2-rich periods of Earth’s history. While we have already left the unassailable Holocene domain and the warm periods of the last few interglacial periods—or to be more precise: the relatively stable glacial–interglacial limit cycle of the past 2.5 million years—our view will even have to go far beyond the middle Pliocene about 3–4 million years (Ma) ago, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was at about the current level and a corresponding 2–3°C higher global temperature prevailed. We would even have to go back behind the climate optimum of the Miocene before 17 Ma, whose global temperatures of 4–5°C we will probably reach in the next 100 years if emissions go on unabated, a level which translates into a sea level rise of 10–60 meters in the longer term. Indeed, if rapid decarbonization is not achieved, if strategies and technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are not available in time and no climate engineering Zworykin–Zephyr Tempestaire can do its healing and taming, we will see internal biogeophysical feedback processes in the Earth system coming into play as tipping-point cascades will be touched off rather sooner than later. If that is the case, the climate system will be set on a pathway in which it will once again reach, in the far future, the record highs of the last 40–50 Ma during the Eocene: a Hothouse Earth (Zeebe and Zachos 2013, Burke et al. 2018, Steffen et al. 2018). Like in a geological time-lapse, today’s politics are contracting and short-cutting millions of years of the past and thousands of years of the future into a single, uniform frame of reference. The geological axiom, since Charles Lyell, that “the present is the key to the past” is exchanged with the paleoclimatological maxim that “the past is key to the imminent future” (cf. Rosol 2017a). How do we know about all of these temporal contractions? The answer, of course, is simulation science: the baroque architectures of climate and Earth system models and the necessary computing capacities to run virtual

66  Christoph Rosol experiments with them. However, in order to just comprehend such a figure of topological climate time, we do not need to invoke the simulation of ancient climate events—although I would speak in favor of the epistemic powers of such hindcasts. We can also resort to a medium more generic to, certainly, the mid-twentieth century, and thereby a moment in history concurrent to the momentous take-off of the Anthropocene itself (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). When Jean Epstein’s cinema orchestrates the breaking of waves with its condensation, acceleration, deceleration or reverse of black-andwhite images and experimental sounds, an entire “logic of variable time” (Epstein 2012, cf. Epstein 1946, 88) reveals itself, a logic of time axis manipulations and temporal interferences. The cinematographic apparatus according to Epstein is a “time-thinking machine” that realizes “a form of thinking by the rules of analysis and synthesis that, without [it], humans would have been incapable of implementing” (Epstein 1946, 18). As evidenced by Le Tempestaire, Epstein understood cinematography as the one authorized to salvage the heterochronous ontology of meteorological, mythical and technical time. Serres, who joined the École Navale near Brest in 1949, and thus took over the Breton outpost of ontological media philosophy precisely when Epstein left, endorses this view but goes even beyond. “Let us suppose a camera has been filming the west coast of Brittany, with its indentations and islands, for millions of years and we could unwind this film in a few minutes,” he evokes in his book Northwest Passage, “then we would see a flame […] the edge of the sun” (Serres 1990, 51–52, transl. by the author). Where the land ends and the sea begins is a function of geological time. Still, Serres’ paleographic time-lapse is itself only evocative through the possibility of the contractions and unfoldings that the thinking machine of the cinematograph provides. Even prior to having become calculable in the operational model time of computer simulations, the flaming coastline of Earth time has entered the symbolic world through the imaginary of a flickering canvas. Serres’ and Epstein’s evocations and manipulations of plural time regimes— from the fleeting time of marine spray to the human time of a breeze to the deep time of geology—are what can be called “time depth”: the saturatedness4 of the world with multiple temporalities that interfere with each other and that are constructed and thus uncovered by technical media. Time depth as both topic and formal treatment of an empirical reality is not restricted to cinematography or computer simulation as such. Literature, for instance, has not only long been concerned with temporal scalings as a subject but also experimented, on a formal level, with narratological techniques of restructuring, interlocking and cutting different temporalities and causalities. These textual “simulation” strategies now become essential tools in the challenge to find “poetic and narrative forms which are adequate to the problems of latency, entanglement and scale that the Anthropocene confronts us with” (Horn 2020, 169). The point here, however, is that computer simulations

Time Depth 

67

not aesthetically adopt but operationalize temporal experiments in order to understand the natural (and increasingly social) processes which define the Anthropocene in the first place. Moreover, they reveal elements of the many interconnected and convoluted times in the geosphere and the anthroposphere through these operationalizations: a storm evolving over days and passing through overnight, multi-decadal ice sheet dynamics and latencies spanning multiple centuries in ocean circulation patterns, sudden ecosystem collapse and likewise sudden collapse of economies, the geological times of natural carbon sequestration and the industrial times of artificial carbon sequestration, the quick return, within decades, to climate states of previous geological epochs, etc. While such a clash of temporalities may indeed be rendered comprehensible through language and narrative form, technical media and their micro-temporal mobilization and manipulation of macro-temporal time axes bind them back, “by the rules of analysis and synthesis,” to the non-fictional space of the Anthropocene as such. There is not simply one time, but a plurality of times which depend on certain media: deep time, narrative time, micro time, or, as one might say, the respective innate times [Eigenzeiten] of media and their corresponding time objects […] media environments that make it possible to collectivize heterochronous time objects. […] Appropriate models for the Anthropocene Earth […] therefore have to link spatial and temporal scales and make them relate to each other. (Balke et al. 2018, 7f. transl. by author) As its most eminent and powerful media environment, Earth system models couple and synchronize the temporal horizons of atmospheric, geological, biogeochemical, hydrological and increasingly sociotechnical processes through fractal codes and the innate times of microprocessors. Not as a clash, but as a composite of scales. Human time, however, seems indeed smashed in between these multiple temporalities, oscillating between the “anaesthetic fields ‘above’ and ‘below’ the human dimension”: “If deep time is the time dimension that exceeds the capacity of human consciousness, then micro time is the time dimension of electronic circuits that (permanently) undermine human perception” (ibid, 6, transl. by author). So we have to finally ask ourselves: Is time depth only a feature of the meteorological and geological, revealed by the operative agency of the camera and the Earth system model? Is the time of the human really that precarious and scarce as it seems? Michel Serres: We are always swimming in this same river. Its peaks and shores crumble, the rocks erode, the humus mixes with the alluvial torrent but not a single liquid molecule has gone missing in Garonne since the beginning

68  Christoph Rosol of the world. The hard, the solid, it doesn’t last; only soft water lasts. Under the sun, from April to October, this fluid evaporates, running everywhere in wandering clouds, but with the rumbling thunderstorm, here are the same snows, the same rains and the same waves, returned. We are always swimming in this same water that—statistically—turns, whose round clock indicates less the temporal than the eternal. Nothing could be more stable in memory and history than the processual turbulence that eddies in this vortex, like in my body— that middle-knot of Garonne—and like that divine wind, they say, blew upon the primal waters, in a cyclone. In my body and across the world, Garonne circulates. My time goes and life passes, this eddy remains.5 (Serres 2012, 26) Again, what Serres performs here is to elaborate the epistemological isomorphism between the systems-thinking of the physical sciences and the anthropology of myths and legends, experience and suffering. From the perspective of the hydrological cycle, the molecules and geological epochs, the human body is less a part of a temporally truncated culture than an eternal immersion in the constant flow of “Biogea.” “Rocks are not nouns but verbs—visible evidence of processes,” is a saying among geologists (Bjornerud 2018, 8).6 Here, Serres verbalizes something more comprehensive, not just a natural process detached from humans, but a dynamical model of human-Earth-flow itself, and to which this chapter adds: a model made visible and construable, in the first place, through technical media. This particular power of media was not left unnoticed by contemporaries of the old Epstein and the young Serres. Jacques Lacan was one point in case, as we have seen. Another one was philosopher Max Bense, who wrote about cybernetics as a paradigmatic meta-technology. Technology has hitherto been essentially a phenomenon of the surface of the inhabited and habitable sphere: what is now emerging before our eyes is deep technology; we experience its penetration into the fine structures of the world, into the immaterial components […]. The cybernetic expansion of modern technology thus means its expansion under the skin of the world. (Bense 1998, 436, transl. by author) In Epsteins montage of the Tempestaire’s glass orb, televising a raging sea, and the glowing electron tubes, a mediatic handshake-as-handover is at play that invites technologies’ expansion to get under the skin of the world and join the populated space of knowledge, myths and science. What is the end of a storm tamer’s life and his magical practice is only the beginning of a new-born generation of other symbol-manipulating practices, indigenous and global, soothing and frightening at the same time.

Time Depth 

69

Conclusion Le Tempestaire is not one of Epstein’s “nature films,” i.e. the neorealistic ethnocinematographies that defined his early films in the Breton series. It does not capture a locally colored myth of rugged people on barren coasts. It does not capture a winter storm. Instead the wind is, like in a pantheist drama, a divine protagonist who, while blowing “upon the primal waters, in a cyclone,” spells and announces, frightens and agitates and thereby levels thermo- and hydrodynamic information. Moreover, the film is the cinematographic blurring or liquefaction of a fractal coastline between sea, land, human and time. While the foaming emulsion of air and water successfully gnaws at the geological stubbornness of the rocks, both technological modernity and phantasmagorical myth swirl together in the time-manipulated noise of the Breton long shot. “Finistère” writes Michel Serres in his Biogea, “a community of islanders allied with the west wind, whose dominating voice had taught more about itself to them than to anyone else. … Oh, do I remember lighthouses”, he chants, even though their “trade was dying, replaced by electronics” (Serres 2012, 95f). Epstein’s films and Serres’ writings both think and realize the geological fluidum in a radical way that finds its sensual counterpart in the terrifying and delightful play of the elements in Finis Terræ, the end and origin of the world, where old stories die and get reborn as deep technologies. To argue at epistemic eye level with the Earth system sciences therefore means acknowledging the eternal circulation of the physical and biogeochemical materiality of our existence, revealing itself (again) in the existential conditions wrought forward by the dawn of the Anthropocene. Not to place humans in an unpolitical eternity, but, quite to the contrary, to acknowledge the monstrosity of the human-made epoch and to help understand what the new terrain of political action (or non-action) is. A storm is coming, the signs are bad. Where land is now, the sea will be soon: a geological time-lapse and, thus, a world in flames happening on human timescales and visible to human eyes. “My hope rests on the present evolution of knowledge,” writes Serres in Biogea. “Complex, global, and connected, the life and earth sciences require communication, interferences, translations, distributions, and transitions […]. Under penalty of collective extinction, let us, like Empedocles, see the necessity to unite wisdom and knowledge” (Serres 2012, 75f). Appropriating Serres’ topological method, Empedocles here could be substituted for Epstein: the legendary founder of the doctrine of the four elements air, fire, earth and water for the ethnographic filmmaker uniting the legend of the sage and his mastery of the elements with the technical knowledge of just these elements. Empedocles died by throwing himself into Mount Etna, returning himself to the elements, wanting “to think like the mountain” (ibid, 79.) as Serres insists; Epstein, in 1926—two decades and one world war before filming Le Tempestaire—stands on the edge of the still active, still “living” volcano and takes the viewpoint of Mount Etna to reflect on the animism of the cinematograph, and how objects take on airs. Only 2,500 years of human history separate them superficially.

70  Christoph Rosol

Notes 1 I am grateful to Marie Bendl for introducing me to this film. 2 A splendidly illustrated feature story about Zworykin and his climate and weather engineering proposals appeared in a popular magazine a few years later (Winter 1948). It is unsettling to note that this idea has not been abandoned today, as evidenced by a pretty-much 1940s era-minded “foresighted man” who, when hurricane Dorian formed in the Mid-Atlantic, reportedly asked: “Can’t we just nuke it?” (Swan and Talev 2019). 3 Lacan 1988, 302: “If there are machines which calculate all by themselves, add, do sums, do all the marvellous things which man had until then thought to be peculiar to his thinking, it is because the fairy electricity, as we say, enables us to establish circuits, circuits which open and close, which interrupt themselves or restore themselves, as a function of the existence of cybernetised doors.” 4 “Saturated time” could be understood similar to mathematical model theory, where a “saturated model” denotes a model that realizes, within a mathematical structure, as many complete “types,” i.e. existing or possible elements, with certain properties that are consistent with each other. 5 The Garonne is a river in the Aquitaine region of southwest France. In his childhood Serres helped out his father, a bargeman dredging sand from the Garonne. In a metapoetic twist, the repeated return of Serres’ writings to the topic of the stability of ideas through time—from Hermes (1977) to Biogée (2010)—is a performance of his own historiographical concept. 6 The term “timefulness” is employed by Bjornerud in the sense of “a clear-eyed view of our place in Time, both the past that came long before us and the future that will elapse without us” (17) and thereby in oppositon to the timelessness of current human actions and politics. As such, the term of “time depth” is related but not exhausted by “timefulness.”

Works Cited Alley, Richard B. 2009. The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History. Bjerknes Lecture, AGU Fall Meeting, Dec 14–18, San Francisco, https://youtu​.be​/RffPSrRpq​_g. Balke, Friedrich, Bernhard Siegert and Joseph Vogel. 2018. “Editorial.” In Mikrozeit und Tiefenzeit (Archiv für Mediengeschichte 18, 2018), 5–8. Bennett, Jane and William Connolly. 2012. “The Crumpled Handkerchief.” In Time and History in Deleuze and Serres, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. London: Continuum, 347–372. Bense, Max. 1998. “Kybernetik oder Die Metatechnik einer Maschine.” In Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 429–446. Bjornerud, Marcia. 2018. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Burke, Kevin D., John W. Williams, Mark A. Chandler, Alan M. Haywood, Daniel J. Lunt, and Bette L. Otto-Bliesner. 2018. “Pliocene and Eocene Provide Best Analogs for Near-Future Climates.” PNAS 115, no. 52: 13288–13293. Epstein, Jean. 1981 [1928]. “‘Les approches de la verité.’ Photo-ciné (15 November-15 December), transl. by Tom Milne as ‘Approaches to Truth’.” Afterimage, 10: 35–36. ———. 2014 [1946]. L’Intelligence d’une machine. Paris: Ed. Jacques Melot. Translation by Christophe Wall-Romana as The Intelligence of a Machine. Minneapolis: Univocal.

Time Depth 

71

———. Le Tempestaire. 1947. Filmagazine and France Illustration, France (© La Cinémathèque française). ———. 2012. “Logique de temps variable.” In Alcool et cinéma (unpublished in Epstein’s lifetime). Translation by Thao Nguyen as “Logic of Variable Time,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays. Edited by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 400–404. Gingerich, Philip D. 2019. “Temporal Scaling of Carbon Emission and Accumulation Rates: Modern Anthropogenic Emissions Compared to Estimates of PETM Onset Accumulation.” Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology 34, no. 3: 329–335. Horn, Eva. 2020. “Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene.” In: The Anthropocenic Turn. The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age, edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes. London: Routledge, 159–172. Lacan, Jacques. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955. Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McInerney, Francesca A. and Scott L. Wing. 2011. “The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum: A Perturbation of Carbon Cycle, Climate, and Biosphere with Implications for the Future.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 39: 489–516. Rosol, Christoph. 2017. “Which Design for a Weather Predictor? Speculating on the Future of Electronic Forecasting in Post‐War America.” In Cultures of Prediction in Atmospheric and Climate Science. Epistemic and Cultural Shifts in Computer-based Modelling and Simulation, edited by Matthias Heymann, Gabriele Gramelsberger, and Martin Mahony. London: Routledge, 68–84. ———. 2017a. “Data, Models and Earth History in Deep Convolution: Paleoclimate Simulations and Their Epistemological Unrest.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 40, no. 2: 120–139. Schneider, James. 2012. “Cinema Seen from the Seas: Epstein and the Oceanic.” In Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, edited by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 195–205. Serres, Michel. 1982. “The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics.” In Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, edited by Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 71–83. ———. 1990. Hermes V: Die Nordwest-Passage. Translated by Michael Bischof. Berlin: Merve. ———. 1995. Angels. A Modern Myth. Translated by Francis Cowper. Paris, New York: Flammarion. ———. 2000. The Birth of Physics. Translated by Jack Hawkes, edited by David Webb. Manchester: Clinamen Press. ———. 2002–2003. “La simulation, technique nouvelle, ancienne tradition.” Clefs CEA (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique) 47 (winter): 2–5. ———. 2012. Biogea. Translated by Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Siegert, Bernhard. 2015. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham University Press.

72  Christoph Rosol Steffen, Will, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes et al. 2018. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” PNAS 115, no. 33: 8252–8259. Swan, Jonathan and Margaret Talev. Aug 25, 2019. “Scoop: Trump Suggested Nuking Hurricanes to Stop Them from Hitting U.S.” Axios, https​:/​/ww​​w​.axi​​ os​.co​​m​/tru​​mp​-nu​​clear​​-bomb​​s​-hur​​rican​​es​-97​​231f3​​8​-239​​4​-412​​0​-a3f​​​a​-8c9​​cf0e3​​ f51c.​​html. Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2019. “How the Earth Remembers and Forgets.” In Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life, edited by Adam Bobbette and Amy Donovan. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 219–236. Winter, William. 1948. “We Can Control the Weather!”, Mechanix Illustrated, January Issue: 68–71, 154. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Colin N. Waters, Colin Summerhayes, Alexander P. Wolfe, Anthony D. Barnosky, Alejandro Cearreta, Paul Crutzen, et al. 2017. “The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of Evidence and Interim Recommendations.” Anthropocene 19: 55–60. Zeebe, Richard E. and James C. Zachos. 2013. “Long-Term Legacy of Massive Carbon Input to the Earth System: Anthropocene Versus Eocene.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London series. Part A 371, no. 2001. Zworykin, Vladimir K. October 1945. “Outline of Weather Proposal.” Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Harry Wexler Papers, Box 18.

Section II

Scale and the Nonhuman



4

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes Interscalar Practices for a Volatile Planet Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski

Scalar Incitements of the Anthropocene In the not-too-distant future, contemporary natural science tells us that it’s increasingly likely that anthropogenic impacts on global climate will nudge that system over a threshold and into rapid, self-reinforcing change. It’s only a slight rhetorical exaggeration to say that the day may come when one last boiling of a kettle, a blast of bovine flatulence or a pump of the piston in a family sedan will trigger a chain of effects that will change the world forever. Like the proverbial backbreaking straw, the impact of this minuscule input will amplify as it resounds through tangled feedback loops, eventually pushing the Earth system into a new trajectory. Such are the scalar challenges spotlighted by the abrupt climate change thesis and extended to other aspects of the Earth system by the Anthropocene hypothesis. It hardly needs repeating that social scientists and humanities scholars have been troubled by these provocations. While acknowledging the magnitude of environmental threats, many social thinkers have not taken kindly to what they see as natural science directives to think on the planetary scale, to embrace geological time and to conceive of our species as geophysical agents. Recoiling from what they construe as Anthropocene science’s prematurely unified perspective on humankind and the cosmos, critical commentators have been quick to focus attention back on workaday worlds where diverse collectives of humans tangle with each other and with sundry more-than-human actors. But does Anthropocene science really purvey an overarching and singular vision that wrenches us away from everyday life? Or might the scalar dimensions of climatology and the Anthropocene bring something insightful and productive to social thinking? And what if some of those scalar provocations were already there, rumbling away, in the ordinary lives and the mundane practices that critical social thinkers would have us keep so firmly in our sights? In this chapter we propose that over recent decades the Earth and life sciences, by identifying ways in which the tight coupling of its constitutive physical systems enables the Earth to self-organize into new operating DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-4

76  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski states, have been moving toward a concept of “planetary multiplicity.” By encouraging us to conceive of our planet as inherently multiple and selfdifferentiating across a range of scales, the natural sciences can help us think generatively about the range of ways that social actors collectively engage with the variability of the Earth. This brings us to our companion concept of “earthly multitudes”—our term for the ways that human collectivities organize their everyday material practices in response to the challenges and opportunities arising from the Earth’s inherent multiplicity. In subsequent sections we develop the coupled concepts of earthly multitudes and planetary multiplicity through two examples: working with organic fibers and using high heat to transform inorganic matter. These rather commonplace collective activities not only enhance the capacity of human collectives to live through environmental volatility; they are also ways in which skilled actors have slowly acquired their own biological and geological agency by tapping into the power and potentiality of the Earth itself. In other words, it is through such Earth-oriented practices that human agents have scaled down terrestrial and cosmic forces to a level at which they could be more effectively manipulated. More than a matter of simply downsizing the processes in question, we suggest that such maneuvers hinge upon operations of enfolding and enclosure that at once preserve vital qualities of what is being “captured” and enable qualitatively novel mixtures, structures and behaviors to be brought forth. As they are taken up and proliferated, such procedures can also scale up the novelty and the difference teased out by human agents—to the point where they can impact back upon Earth processes. And as we will see, the techniques or practices in question are profoundly storied. They are allied with time-honored traditions of storytelling, and this association has much to do with questions of how to be responsive and responsible when engaging with the ongoing dynamism of the Earth. To clarify why we think it’s important to work through rather against key developments in Earth and life science, it’s worth looking more closely at the reception of the scalar provocations of the Anthropocene in critical social thought. Social science responses to the Anthropocene have tended to follow the contours of earlier problematizations of scale that arose in the context of globalization. Thrashed out in lively debates over several decades, critical thinkers at once fashioned novel understandings of globality as a distinctive scale of social interaction and questioned the idea that the global had any determinative status for explaining more localized social relations.1 Disagreements persisted, but out of these discussions emerged nuanced and reflexive understandings of the fluidity of scalar configurations, along with an enhanced sensitivity to the way that power relations shape both the choices we make about which scales to prioritize and the projects through which these priorities are set to work (Swyngedouw 2004; Carr and Lempert 2016). As anthropologist Gabrielle Hecht (2018, 114) reflects, “[s]cale is messy because it is both a category of analysis and a

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes  77 category of practice.” It is this interchange between scale as thinking and as doing, between scalar imaginaries and scalar politics, Hecht stresses, that makes the narration of scale so important—summoning our attention to the metaphors, devices and storylines through which scale is articulated (ibid., 112–114). If interscalar relations get complicated in socially globalized worlds, they get positively “deranged” when climatic or Earth-system change enters the equation (Clark 2012; Ghosh 2016). But not so deranged as to baffle or silence social thought: alert to any unreflexive privileging of the global, many critical social thinkers felt themselves well positioned to cut emergent scientific narratives of the Anthropocene down to size. While much of the Anthropocene thesis fell short of the analytic standards of contemporary social thought, what especially attracted censure, as we noted above, were those aspects of geoscientific accounts that appeared to bypass “local,” “lived” or “everyday” social worlds. In the words of political scientist Eva Lövbrand and colleagues, Anthropocene narratives “run the risk of producing an empty view of humanity that tells us little about the lived experiences, fears, vulnerabilities, ideas and motivations of real people, in real places” (2015, 216). In all their breathless urgency, Anthropocene storylines may indeed have been insufficiently discriminating in diagnosing human agency. But is it possible to theorize at the scale of the Earth or of deep geohistory without falling into the trap of the “god trick” of omniscient, decontextualized vision (Haraway 1988, 581–582)? In this regard, it’s worth recalling that when feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway made her case for “situated knowledge,” she was not seeking to preclude any particular scale of inquiry. Far from ruling out the quest for “an earthwide network of connections,” what Haraway argued was that this was an exacting ambition rather than a starting assumption (ibid., 580). However, when social thinkers concerned with local-global entanglements do their own version of situating knowledge, they tend to take it as given that collective human actors—however much they may be joined by more-than-human accomplices—are always present. In short, it is generally assumed that there is no narrating of the scalar configurations of global social life that does not, at some vital juncture, pass through the lived experience of “real people, in real places.” But this is emphatically not the case when we are speaking of the majority of forces and processes that have shaped the Earth over its long history. For while these phenomena may require human technics or mediation for their disclosure to us—planetary “latecomers” that we are—over the long term they have no need of our assistance to perform their world-making or -unmaking operations (see Latour 2004). Under planetary conditions, just as how big things are or how far apart makes a difference, so too does how evidence is marshaled, how stories are composed and how voices acquire volume and tenor. So we need to ask:

78  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski Did the Anthropocene thesis descend upon us from on high, fully formed and feigning omniscience? Or might the composition of Anthropocene narratives, to some degree, have already met Haraway’s request to recognize its own partiality or fulfilled fellow science studies scholar Bruno Latour’s requirement “for the progressive composition of the good common world” (2004, 101)? It seems to us that Anthropocene geoscience—like that of other geological time units—depends upon the meticulous collation of evidence from across the Earth and has been consistently candid about the partiality of that record. “The starting point,” reflects Anthropocene Working Group chair Jan Zalasiewicz, “has traditionally been fragments” (2016, 115). We have already staked our claim that Anthropocene science is as much about multiplicity in the Earth system as it is about unity or wholeness. So, like Hecht, we view the pronouncements of Anthropocene science less as a totalizing move and more as an invitation or overture. As she puts it: for many of the Anthropocene’s most prominent proponents, the term offers a way of signaling human responsibility, not of asserting control. They use the Anthropocene to acknowledge—not deny—the importance of politics, to invite a broad conversation about our earthly condition, to make friends rather than foes. (Hecht 2018, 111) However amicable, this conversation can and should be unsettling—on both sides. If geoscientists are to be coaxed into heightened attunement to social difference and the forces that sustain it, so too must critical social thought be encouraged to venture beyond the orbit of the always already socialized. As it is with any scalar assertion, where we choose to “situate” and what counts as “context” are far from innocent—which is to say that gestures of solidarity with “real people” are also acts of disciplining and boundary maintenance. For, as philosopher Timothy Morton observes: “contextualism tends to want to prevent the explosion of scales; it wants to restrict things to a certain scale or narrow range of scales” (Morton 2018, 110). Hecht’s opportune term for the figures, devices and tactics by which we seek ways out of such constraints is “interscalar vehicles.” As she observes in an extended case study that moves between the embodied experience of uranium extraction in French colonial Africa and the deep time of radioactive decay, the Anthropocene itself is one such vehicle: a mediator between scales that is at once practical and conceptual, analytical and political. Just as fossils facilitate the paleontologist’s bridging between our world and an overwhelmingly inhuman planetary past, so too for Hecht is the Anthropocene concept a promising hinge or articulation for moving between scales familiar—and sometimes painful—to human actors and the vastness of geological time and space.

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes  79 In the following sections, we take the challenges and opportunities of planetary multiplicity as an impetus for traversing scales and consider earthly multitudes as collective embodiments of interscalar practices and interventions. In the process of negotiating the dynamism of our planet, we suggest, earthly multitudes at once imbue the stuff of the world with stories and lend matter to venerable traditions of storytelling.

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes Far from imposing a preordained unity on the figure of the Earth, we insist, Anthropocene science envisions a planet whose very systemic integration bestows tendencies for change and reorganization “at nearly all spatial and temporal scales” (Steffen et al. 2004, 295). It is this interplay of interconnectedness and becoming otherwise that we express in shorthand as planetary multiplicity. As Zalasiewicz explains: “the Earth seems to be less one planet, rather a number of different Earths that have succeeded each other in time, each with very different chemical, physical and biological states” (cited in Hamilton 2015, 6), a cosmological vision that resonates with philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s affirmation of “the fluctuating, self-differentiating structure of the universe itself” (2008, 19). Whether it is manifest in philosophical or more empirical registers, the idea of a planetary body with an immanent capacity for self-organizing into novel configurations has been some time in the making. Even before social thinkers took up the challenge of local-global entanglement, natural scientists were already teasing out the dynamic interconnections between the Earth’s many subcomponents. By the early 1970s, new ways of understanding the dynamics of Earth and life processes had effected a shift away from traditions of gradualism prevalent since the nineteenth century and instituted a new appreciation of rapid, nonlinear system change (Brooke 2014, 25–36). One of the tributaries of this turn was complexity studies, a field that proved useful in helping make sense of sudden shifts in the operating state or “regime” of ecological systems. Eventually, such insights were scaled up to the planetary level. In this light, far from materializing readymade at the turn of the millennium, the Anthropocene thesis—with its defining collaboration between older-school geologists and the newer field of Earth-system science— inherited several decades of “revolutionary” developments in the scientific vision of our planet. A far-from-equilibrium planet that periodically veers into cascading, self-amplifying change is indeed one that contains, in Haraway’s terms, “unsettling possibilities” (1988, 593). In itself, abrupt climate change and analogous Earth-system regime shifts are frightening prospects that can deeply affect those who see and feel their danger. And with the additional recognition that human action is a likely trigger for imminent planetary reorganization comes an even more terrible responsibility.

80  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski Today, when natural scientists have thrown themselves exhaustively into “the game of contesting public truth” (Haraway 1988, 578), it’s hard to believe that they were once admonished for lack of engagement. Viewing the Anthropocene as an interscalar vehicle helps us to appreciate why scientists seek to bridge between human and inhuman scales. We can also see this mediating work as a means by which scientific researchers negotiate their own “‘in-between’ spaces”—how the Anthropocene thesis might serve as a kind of emotional management device that helps them steer between the analytic demands of doing “hard” science and their own escalating anguish and grief (Head and Harada 2017, 36). In our own scoping of this fraught terrain, we use the notion of planetary multiplicity to do further bridging work between currents of philosophical or social thought and the “post-gradualist” turn in natural science (Clark and Szerszynski 2021). Just as scientific theorists of complexity tend to think in terms of nested systems opening one onto the other without limit, so too did social theorist Georges Bataille (1988), writing in the 1940s, imagine all human systems of knowledge and practice opening out into still more encompassing systems, all the way to the cosmos. In this way, explains Stuart Kendall (2013, 27), “[e]very other system is a system within a system, stacked upon and feeding off some other system.” As Bataille stressed, the ultimate underpinning of human life by a vast, turbulent universe was at once an incitement to develop new practical or expressive capacities and the source of inescapable vulnerability. Other theorists have also helped us think of planetary multiplicity. For philosopher Gilles Deleuze, drawing on both mathematics and philosophies of life, multiplicity refers to the immanent generation of difference or novelty—especially through enfolding. It’s worth noting that “multiplicity” itself derives from the Latin plicare, to fold or twist, and in turn from ProtoIndo-European root plek- to plait and hence from pel- to fold. Writing with Félix Guattari, Deleuze proposed that the most generative transformations in the world tend to arise not from linear evolution but out of the enfolding or involution of an outside—distinguished by its scale, composition or origin—so that it forms a new kind of interior (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 238, 46–47). Resonating with Bataille, Deleuze extends this infolding–outfolding logic beyond living systems to matter–energy in general and “finally (to) the Whole of the universe” (1988, 77). Where Deleuze and Guattari converse most productively with the scalar maneuvers of Anthropocene science is in their exploration of how different layers of existence—which they refer to as “strata,” in a not strictly geological sense—come into articulation with one another. Their version of an interscalar vehicle is what they variously term a rhizome or an assemblage: a conjunctive structure that meshes together two or more previously unrelated lineages to create an entirely new kind of functionality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10). And when a novel assemblage brings the contents of previously distinct strata into a new working relationship, the outcome

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes  81 is always unpredictable (ibid., 503). So while such hinging together of different layers or categories of matter may be essential to the ongoing selfdifferentiation of the material world, it is also inescapably risky. Drawing in part on Deleuze–Guattari and Bataille, our own “vehicle” for maneuvering between planetary multiplicity and the realms of everyday human life is the concept of earthly multitudes. Earthy multitudes are collectives of human actors who engage with the available stuff of the world, both to respond to the threats of a volatile planet and to take advantage of the matter–energy that planetary self-differentiation makes available. We use the concept of earthly multitudes not so much as a way of identifying bounded and quantifiable groups, but as a take on the question of what it means to be human, one that focuses attention on the wealth of strategies and practices through which our species interfaces with its complex, selforganizing planetary home. A further inspiration is political thinkers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of “the multitude” (2000). Whereas Hardt and Negri’s multitude (singular) refers to a power-in-common that derives predominantly from active participation in contemporary culture and communication industries, our multitudes (plural) encompass collectives and their practices that take shape through material engagements with a dynamic Earth— anywhere or anytime. Unlike Hardt and Negri’s version, however, our earthly multitudes are too diverse to unite under a shared political project, and neither are they necessarily beneficent or progressive in their orientation to each other and to the planet itself. For while there are many shared ways of responding to the challenges of an uncertain Earth that are generative and generous, there are also many examples of collective Earth-oriented strategies that are unjust and ultimately destructive. To summarize thus far, our earthly multitudes act as hinges between the world of situated, everyday practices and a wider cosmos that inevitably exceeds the reach and control of social beings. By enfolding or implicating human difference in an inherently self-differentiating planet, we not only draw attention to the great diversity of ways in which social practitioners have engaged with earthly variance, but also seek to open up speculative questions about how we might yet join forces with a planet undergoing further changes. This sense that there are at once time-tested ways of negotiating with the Earth and the scope to think or do things otherwise draws us into the question of how we narrate social interchange with a dynamic cosmos. For storytelling is at once a medium of conveying venerable truths and a means of playing variations upon inherited themes. Here we take inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller.” Not only does Benjamin identify strong storytelling traditions in two groups that we would identify as earthly multitudes—sailors and tillers of the soil (Benjamin 1968, 84–85)—he explicitly connects the cadence or tempo of traditional narrative forms with the deep temporal movements of the Earth. “One must imagine the transformation of epic forms occurring

82  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski in rhythms comparable to those of the change that has come over the earth’s surface in the course of thousands of centuries,” he wrote (ibid., 88). Indeed, we would add, there are cases where long-term inhabitants of particular regions have quite literally demonstrated abilities to pass on stories over thousands of years. In the case of Australian Aboriginal people, recounts Indigenous studies scholar Marcia Langton, “[t]here are stories that tell of the rising of the oceans around 7000 years ago, erupting volcanoes 20000 years ago, and the very different climate and landscapes of the long distant past” (Langton 2018, 67). The message we take from Benjamin is that storytelling is constitutively interscalar, a means of mediating between individuals and communities and between communities and the cosmos. We can also look at this logic from the other direction and consider how the changes that our planet has undergone and the new kinds of organization it has given rise to have provided the conditions of possibility for a being who is capable of telling stories. Over the hundreds of thousands of years in which hunting was close to the heart of human life, animal trackers learned to read their environment as a collection of signs that told stories—including speculative stories that hypothesized what an animal might yet do (Liebenberg 1990, 29). Earlier still, we come to the evolution of human bipedalism, which freed up the hands and raised the face—enabling gestures of mime that evolutionary psychologist Glen McBride (2014) identifies as the prelinguistic origins of hominin storytelling. And yet further back, we arrive at the process of cephalization—the concentration of sensory equipment toward the “front” end of organisms that were capable of self-propelled mobility, which is the condition of possibility of the animal body moving through space, and encountering other animals and objects (Szerszynski 2016). In this way, the deepest origins of a propensity to tell stories can be linked to emergent bodily capacities to negotiate time and space, which are in turn deeply enmeshed in the transformations undergone by a dynamic planet—or what we describe as the challenges and opportunities opened up by planetary multiplicity. Having gestured abysmally “backward,” we now advance our own narrative in the direction of the present. Following cues from Benjamin about the intimate relationship between the artisanal shaping of matter–energy and the intent of storytellers to “fashion the raw material of experience” (Benjamin 1968, 108), we tease out the interscalar dimensions of earth-oriented collective practice through two consequential examples of earthly multitudes.

Earth-oriented Practices as Interscalar Vehicles The Anthropocene Working Group has focused on those anthropogenic activities whose impacts show up as sharply defined transitions in both the lithic strata and the Earth system—currently located temporally in the decade after the Second World War (Zalasiewicz 2016). But we are inclined to

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes  83 heed the counsel of archaeologist Matt Edgeworth and his coauthors who caution that this approach detracts attention from the more patchy and gradual way that our species acquired and manifested its various Earthaltering agencies over many millennia (Edgeworth et al. 2019). The two examples of earthly multitudes we develop—artisans working respectively with tangled fiber and chambered high heat—belong to this longer perspective, and it is to Edgeworth and colleagues’ apt formulation of “Earthoriented investigators” that our own notion of Earth-oriented practices is indebted. Where exactly we should pick up our narrative “thread” is by no means obvious. For a long time, it was thought that that the weaving loom—a device for intersecting latitudinal and longitudinal fibrous threads into a tightly enmeshed fabric—was an invention of agrarian Neolithic societies, or in geological terminology, the early Holocene. Then, in the 1990s, archaeologists working at the Dolni Věstonice and Pavlov sites in today’s Czech Republic unearthed fragments of fired clay that bore impressions of cloth so tightly knit that it could only be produced on a loom (Vandiver et al. 1989). Not only did this discovery push the earliest evidence of woven fabric back to some 24,000–28,000 years BC; it extended weaving to semi-nomadic societies located deep in the volatile climatic regime of the Pleistocene. Weaving in turn inherits much longer traditions of thread-making, the twisting together of filaments of plant or animal fiber to create a composite cord or yarn. As paleoanthropologist Bruce Hardy and colleagues observe, “[o]nce the production of a twisted, plied cord has been accomplished it is possible to manufacture bags, mats, nets, fabric, baskets, structures, snares, and even watercraft” (Hardy et al. 2020, 5). So important was the invention of “simple string,” speculates historian Elizabeth Barber, that it “enabled us to move out into every econiche on the globe during the Upper Palaeolithic” (Barber 1994, 96). Though who exactly counts as “us” is currently under revision: microscopic analysis of tiny string fragments excavated from a French cave by Hardy’s team indicates that Neanderthals were making three-ply cord as early as 50,000 years ago. As we saw earlier, the derivation of “multiplicity” from the Proto-IndoEuropean plek-, to plait, semiotically links it with foundational acts of twining. More pragmatically, we can view cord-making, through its application to clothing, shelter and provisioning, as enhancing the ability of human collectives to withstand the variability that Earth processes visit upon them. So too can we conceive of spinning and weaving as means by which earthly multitudes channel properties that inhere in the workings of the Earth itself. As anthropologist Tim Ingold points out, what holds human-made string, spun fiber or basketry together is a dynamic equilibrium between two or more spirals with contrary forces. This structural logic, he observes, recurs at multiple scales in the organic world: “Bodies […] are a tissue of twisted fibers at every level of resolution from the DNA of the chromosomes to the coils of the guts, and to the vocal cords and heartstrings” (Ingold 2013, 121).

84  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski In the same vein, cultural theorist Sadie Plant reflects on how weaving and related crafts elaborate upon processes of entanglement that organize and structure organic worlds: When weavers interlace their threads, they jump into the middle of techniques which have already emerged among tangled lianas, interwoven leaves, twisted stems, bacterial mats, birds’ nests and spider’s webs, matted fleeces, fibers and furs. (Plant 1997, 80–81) And in this way, Plant, like Ingold, implicates human craft in the greater self-making of the Earth and its constitutive systems. Our second case study—the use of high heat to transform the properties of matter, or “pyrotechnology”—likewise draws us into the dynamic, self-organizing capabilities of our planet, but this time centered on the inorganic. As we indicated above, the fiber arts and the firing of earthy materials already intersect in the semi-nomadic communities of the late Pleistocene steppe. The reason we have evidence of woven fiber at Dolni VěstonicePavlov is that their inhabitants baked pieces of clay, which bore impressions (either accidentally or intentionally) of cordage and textiles. Along with some 10,000 fired ceramic objects, archaeologists working at these sites also unearthed rudimentary kilns. These are the first known chambers for enclosing and intensifying fire, and as with the more hypothetical weaving looms, these kilns push back the origins of pyrotechnology some 12,000 years before previous estimations. The fired-clay pieces excavated from Dolni Věstonice-Pavlov, which include a number of “Venus” female figurines, animal figures and a profusion of more amorphous forms, were fashioned from glacial loess soils and baked at 500–800°C. While none of the recovered objects has any discernible utility—there are no vessels or crockery—researchers attest to the “control over materials technology” that they demonstrate (Vandiver et al. 1989, 1008). The close association of high-heat technology with the “female domain of hearth-centered activities” suggests that, like textile manufacture, chambered fire emerged out of artisanal experimentation by women (Haaland 2006, 5). As is the case with weaving, pyrotechnology goes through developments in and around the expanding agrarian centers of the mid-Holocene. The smelting of metallic ores and glassmaking are generally considered to be offshoots of advancing ceramic techniques (Forbes 1950, 29). Like the shaping and firing of clay, metallurgy seems to emerge as a decorative art, only later to acquire a wealth of uses ranging from tools and weapons to weights and coinage. While the consequences of the social uptake of various metals— copper, bronze, iron—have received considerable attention, what we want to present here is a more general characterization of high-heat technology as a human enfolding of geologic powers that belong to the Earth itself.

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes  85 Conversing with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of involution, Grosz (2008, 3) makes the point that by creating a boundary or perimeter of some kind, it becomes possible for skilled human agents to carve off and work with physical forces that would otherwise be overwhelming. While we might envision the chambering of fire as an enclosure of the power of wildfire, the involution involved in the pyrotechnic heat chamber goes further and deeper than this. Geologist Simon Wellings (2016) explains: “[w] hen a clay-mineral rich rock is buried in the guts of a mountain range, it is transformed into a metamorphic rock. Taking clay and baking it in a kiln is the same process—a human created form of metamorphism.” If the potter’s kiln offers a controlled version of metamorphic geology, metallurgy might be seen as a capture of and elaboration upon the igneous processes driven by the superheated subcrustal Earth. We now know that the temperatures of 1200–1300°C degrees that ancient pyrotechnicians regularly attained in their kilns approximate the maximum heat of magma and lava (Rehder 2000, 54). With the benefit of contemporary geological insights, we begin to see that what pyrotechnic artisans do in their furnaces—melting and recrystallizing rock and decomposing and concentrating metallic elements—is a microcosm of what happens to rising magma on its stop–start journey from the Earth’s mantle toward the planet’s surface (Clark 2018). Alongside utilizing fiber, putting fire to work is one of the earliest and most momentous ways that ancestral hominins fashioned themselves into earthly multitudes. Just as the invention of the weavers’ loom takes the natural entanglement of fiber to new levels, so does the chambering of flame facilitate an unprecedented degree of control over the transformative power of fire. In both cases, we contend, it is the bracketing off or enfolding of extensive elemental processes that enables the concentration of earthly powers, the elaboration upon their general theme and the resultant genesis of forms and structures in excess of those already generated by the selforganizing tendencies of the wider Earth. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that this basic enframing operation works very differently in our two examples: enhancing an existing capacity for manual interaction in the case of fiber, as distinct from permitting hitherto untouchable forces to be “manipulated” in the case of high-heat technology. High-heat technologies and the fiber arts, in their respective ways, are among the preeminent interscalar vehicles that humans have assembled for themselves. Enfolding or acts of involution are key to new kinds of human biological and geological agency, which in turn unfurl themselves across the surface of the planet. Earthly multitudes convened around chambered fire and woven fabric produced new objects, structures and devices that allowed them to move into new environments and to transform their existing worlds. Pyrotechnological and textile-manufacturing capabilities themselves traveled, proliferating into networks of practices that spanned continents and endured over millennia, in what we might see as ancient predecessors of

86  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski the global intellectual commons that is being strung together in Hardt and Negri’s contemporary multitude (Clark 2015). Eventually, though not inevitably, the chambered fire of the kiln mutated into the boiler, the heat engine, the explosive device, while the weaving loom spawned the flying shuttle, the water frame, the spinning jenny, the power loom (Plant 1997, 64; Barber 1994, 62–63). Just as high-heat technology and weaving intersected on the edge of the Eurasian steppe some 25,000 years ago, so too did their descendants converge with momentous consequences in the steam-powered cotton mills that spearheaded the Industrial Revolution. And this confluence continues to shape the world. While pyrotechnical operations underpin the electroplating of integrated circuits, the wiring of digital devices and the drawing of optical fibers, Plant (1997, 60–69) makes a compelling case that the “programming” of thread sequences at the heart of the earliest weaving looms is the primordial form of all subsequent automated machinery (see also Schneider 2007). In this way, over many millennia, the wisp of thread and the flicker of flame have been scaled up into forces capable of shifting the operating state of the Earth. But something of this potentiality, we have been suggesting, was there from the outset, for the knotting and spiraling propensities of fiber and the metamorphic powers of flame were always already expressions of planetary multiplicity, manifestations of a dynamic, self-organizing Earth. If the task before us is to come up with new stories, to compose narratives that will help us take responsibility for the geopowers that we have accrued, then it makes sense to situate the vital developments of spinning, weaving and high-heat technology in the distributed social worlds from which they emerged. But so too should we keep in mind that these practices channel Earth processes that exceed any human presence—that they reach into the deep structuring forces of our planet and open, finally, to “the Whole of the universe.”

Crafting Stories for the Anthropocene For some progressive social thinkers, a glaring shortfall of Anthropocene science has been its failure to identify and indict the specific socio-structural forces driving dangerous environmental change. While this, admittedly, is not a strength of most contemporary geoscience, getting stuck on this line of critique risks missing the more general lessons of decades of groundbreaking inquiry into the properties and dynamics of the Earth. As we follow the idea of planetary multiplicity further, the immanent capacity of the Earth to become other to itself can add new dimensions to our explorations of sociocultural and historical difference. The deeper our pursuit of these leads and the more multitudinous the Earth-oriented practices we encounter, the wider the range of possibilities we might consider when facing emergent states of the Earth system—and the better our chance of understanding the

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes  87 very logics behind the conjoining of our own forces with those of the Earth and cosmos. To effectively compose, embellish, evaluate and share Earth-oriented practices is as much a matter of storytelling as it is a question of tussling with the stuff of the world. As we suggested earlier, Benjamin is a perceptive guide to the indissociability of physically intervening in earthly rhythms and the trans-temporal crafting of storylines. But in the case of our spinning–weaving example, others—more attuned to the gendering of stories and their telling—have helped tease out the narrative threads. “Weaving was already multimedia—singing, chanting, telling stories, dancing, and playing games as they work, spinsters, weavers, and needleworkers were literally networkers as well,” observes Plant. “Spinning yarns, fabricating fictions, fashioning fashions …: the textures of woven cloth functioned as means of communication and information storage long before anything was written down” (1997, 65). As if intuiting the potential of twisted fiber and woven thread to spiral out and transform the world, spinning and weaving folktales are full of magical transformation—both hopeful and dangerous (ibid., 68–70), and in this sense it is revealing that spells, like stories, tend to be “woven.” Spinning, noted historian Mircea Eliade, is “a perilous craft,” often bound up with “the conception of the periodical creations of the world […] and the idea of Time and Destiny” (Eliade 1958, 45–46). Our other example is also a medium and theme of effusive storytelling. The hearth fire, it hardly needs to be said, is the primordial site of recounting tales. Not so homely as the hearth, the concentrated flame of high-heat techniques is nevertheless as imbued with the aura of transmutation as the fabric arts. While it’s difficult to decipher the messages embodied in the Dolni Věstonice Venus figures, anthropologist Olga Soffer and her coauthors suggest that they are bound up with processes of “constructing female identities” and expressing what is of value in women’s lives and work (Soffer et al. 2000, 523–524). As we turn from heat-induced transformation of clay to the domain of metallurgy, commentaries on the magico-mythical dimensions of material transubstantiation are at once more frequent and more assured. Eliade (1978, 79–86) proposes that the mastery of fire links the smith to the magician and the shaman, while Robert Forbes (1950, 78) observes that in “primitive societies,” the smith “is either honoured or despised, but always held in awe.” While early metalworkers had no way of knowing that their furnaces approximated temperatures of magma, in mythic terms there is notable overlap between gods of volcanism and the underworld and those who preside over forges and the metallurgical arts (Goudsblom 1994, 110). Closer to our own time, the transmutational and purifying force of concentrated flame has frequently been enfolded into narratives of revolutionary change, showing up in “inflammatory” actions, “incendiary” words, and in what philosopher Michael Marder describes as “the almost compulsive metallic and metallurgical imagery in the poetry and prose of Soviet Russia”

88  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski (Marder 2015, 55). And we must unfortunately add the terrible inversion of the enlivening flame in the inferno of the Holocaust, with its searing image of the light-giving fire that destroys the very things it would illuminate (Derrida 1991). In these and other ways, the fiery crafts and the fabric arts furnish storytelling traditions with some of their most enduring and resonant imagery, figures that quite literally span geological epochs as well as cultures and continents. But the co-implication of transforming matter and telling stories is literal in another sense. More than a matter of tropes or metaphors, the “storying” of Earth-oriented practices is inseparable from the “earthing” of storytelling, as we would have it, because of the way that earthly multitudes embroil themselves in the variability and self-differentiation of the Earth itself. To play off Hecht’s terminology, stories are the maps, the operating manuals, the headlights and indicators of interscalar vehicles. And when they do this well, which is by no means always the case, stories help these vehicles to be responsive and responsible as they negotiate worlds that are themselves in constant motion. While this may not necessarily be expressed strictly in terms of scale, skilled Earth-oriented practitioners seem to grasp that their interventions in an active materiality can have repercussions extending beyond the here and now—an intuition conveyed in the at-once cautionary and exultant tone of accompanying stories. For wherever people dwell in place long enough to get a sense of the rhythms and periodicities of their worlds, and wherever material practices are developed and refined over time, collectives are likely to come to an understanding that their own activities are nestled within broader sets of dynamics. This means that what worked well at one time may be less effective in another situation—or may work too well, if it is picked up and amplified by powers of the wider world. In this regard, stories associated with earthly multitudes can play a vital role, not just in the transmission of skills or technique, but as a guide to the inconstant ways that the Earth and cosmos might respond to our physicomaterial overtures. Or, to put in the terms we have been using, well-crafted stories offer guidance for the ascending or descending of scales that is the inevitable corollary of intervening in worlds that open onto wider worlds, as suggested by Benjamin’s own more-than-metaphorical reference to the act of “scaling.” “All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience as on a ladder,” he observes. “A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds” (1968, 102). Though it should be added that in the context of the climatic and Earth-system scalar “derangement” we spoke of earlier, it has become ever more difficult to discern the direction in which narrators and their narratives may be traveling. Feedback loops, nested worlds, bending or breaking out of the frame, the wider context: here again are figures that evoke fibrous tangling and its artful extrapolations. Text and context come from the Latin texere, “to weave, fabricate,” from the Proto-Indo-European root *teks-, “to weave, to fabricate,

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes  89 make wicker or wattle framework” (Online Etymology Dictionary n.d.). It hardly needs to be added that contemporary social thought that engages with materiality and the environment is replete with metaphorical weaving, binding, knotting. In relational styles of thought, tropes of “entanglement,” “entwinement,” “networking,” “intermeshing” and “interconnectivity” are deployed prolifically, most often as ways of conveying an ontological and ethico-political lesson that our lives are constitutively bound to other lives, both human and more-than-human. In the words of environmental humanities scholars Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman, “the world’s vibrant materiality appears as a ‘web teeming with meanings’ in which humans, nonhumans, and their stories are tied together” (2014, 5), while Haraway evokes the “string figure of multispecies becoming-with” (2016, 71). Inspired to “follow these threads” as deep and far as possible, we also want to pause at this point and offer a supplement to twined and tangled relationality. This is the first of three concluding points we want to make about storying the Anthropocene.

Conclusion In constructing interscalar vehicles, as we have seen, stories matter, while active matter is the stuff of vital storytelling. As Ingold puts it, “[i]t is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived” (Ingold 2013, 72–73). But the friction, the roughness, the force of fire is different from that of fiber. The way that fire has been put to work—how chambered flame channels the metamorphic and igneous powers of the geological Earth—is not the same as the way that the fiber arts tap into the tensile twisting and spiraling of the biological realm. Whereas the more-or-less symmetrical forces of the ecological entanglement invite a tactile intimacy, the intensity and power of minerals morphing under high heat requires a very different kind of “handling,” one involving barriers and insulation. While both practices entail a certain enfolding, as we suggested earlier, the firewall of the furnace and the frame of the weaving loom function in very different ways. In more general terms, if we are to compose responsible and effective interscalar stories for the Anthropocene, then it matters which earthly powers we are joining forces with and what their particular properties, dynamics and potentialities might be. Our second Anthropocene takeaway point circles back on our claim that the “everyday” scale at which the “lived experience” of “real people” plays out inevitably opens out into other scales. While concern for justice and recognition in this context is commendable, this is less than helpful if it comes with the disavowal of practical and imaginative exchanges with other fields or levels of existence. Our case for the constitutive opening of earthly multitudes to planetary multiplicity is intended as a reminder that human collectives did not await our own epoch before they engaged

90  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski with and incorporated something of the dynamism of the universe—even if it did take a lot longer for the forces which had been enfolded to gather enough strength to unfurl themselves at a fully planetary scale. But what this also means is that the Anthropocene narrative, for all its novelty in decoding and articulating Earth-system change, is a late entrant to a deep, diverse history of storying the human interchange with the Earth and the cosmos. We agree with critics that Anthropocene science, when it stakes its claims in transdisciplinary or public arenas, still has much to learn about positioning itself. However, this is more than a matter of situating its truth claims in pre-constituted, socio-cultural or historical spaces. And this brings us to our third and final summary point. The challenge that contemporary Earth and life scientists have taken upon themselves is one of learning to speak about the thresholds that lie between the familiar Earth and whatever the planet is becoming. But—as researchers’ own struggles with anxiety, grief and exhaustion attest—this is also a matter of learning to speak from within those thresholds: of finding ways to live and work on a ground that is rifting apart. When we dig into the deep history of Earth-oriented practices, it’s hardly surprising to find that tales of a world that can become other to itself so often have otherworldly dimensions, whether these go by the name of magic, myth, folklore or spirit stories. As vehicles or devices that mediate between familiar and unknown worlds, this kind of storying can be as much about how to live with exposure and vulnerability—of dealing with shock, hurt and loss—as it is about the best way to do things. And it may well be that it is this aspect of the Anthropocene concept, more than any other, that calls out for a plurality of narrative strands, a weaving or welding together of multitudinous insights and stories.

Note 1 There is no room here to fully engage with those human geographers in the late 1990s and early 2000s who chose to equate scale with the epistemological and ontological privileging of strictly hierarchical or “vertical” relations—while marshalling Deleuze and Deleuzian thinkers to support a case for scale-less, “flat” or “horizontal” onto-epistemologies (see especially Marston et al. 2005). Our own reading would have it that while Deleuze and Guattari renounced any recourse to a transcendent scale or category of existence, their affirmation of movement across nested hierarchies and multiple levels of reality by no means implied the wholesale abandonment of a concept of scale.

Works Cited Barber, Elizabeth W. 1994. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. New York: Norton. Bataille, Georges. 1988. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Volume I, Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books.

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes  91 Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” in Illuminations, translated by H. Zohn, New York: Harcourt, pp. 83–109. Brooke, John L. 2014. Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey. New York: Cambridge University Press. Carr, E. Summerson, and Michael Lempert. 2016. “Introduction: Pragmatics of Scale.” In Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life, edited by E. Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1–21. Clark, Nigel. 2015. “Fiery Arts: Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene.” GeoHumanities 1, no. 2, 266–284. Clark, Nigel. 2018. “Earth, Fire, Art: Pyrotechnology and the Crafting of the Social.” In Inventing the Social, edited by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim, and Alex Wilkie. Manchester: Mattering Press, 173–194. Clark, Nigel, and Bronislaw Szerszynski. 2021. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity. Clark, Timothy. 2012. “Scale: Derangements of Scale.” In Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Volume 1, edited by T. Cohen. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 148–166. Deleuze, Gilles, 1988. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jaques. 1991. Cinders. Translated by Ned Lukacher. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Edgeworth, Matt, Erle C. Ellis, Philip Leonard Gibbard, Cath Neal, and Michael A. Ellis. 2019. “The Chronostratigraphic Method Is Unsuitable for Determining the Start of the Anthropocene.” Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment 43, no. 3, 334–344. Eliade, Mircea. 1958. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. Translated by Willart R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row. Eliade, Mircea. 1978. The Forge and the Crucible. Translated by Stephen Corrin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forbes, Robert J. 1950. Metallurgy in Antiquity: A Notebook for Archaeologists and Technologists. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goudsblom, Johan. 1994. Fire and Civilization. London: Penguin Books. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Haaland, Randi. 2006. “Technology, Transformations and Symbolism: Ethnographic Perspectives on European Iron Working.” Norwegian Archaeological Review 37, no. 1, 1–21. Hamilton, Clive. 2015. Can Humans Survive the Anthropocene? . Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3, 575–599. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

92  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski Hardy, B. L., M. H. Moncel, C. Kerfant, M. Lebon, L. Bellot-Gurlet and N. Mélard. 2020. “Direct Evidence of Neanderthal Fibre Technology and Its Cognitive and Behavioral Implications.” Scientific Reports 10, no. 1, 4889. Head, Lesley, and Theresa Harada. 2017. “Keeping the Heart a Long Way from the Brain: The Emotional Labour of Climate Scientists.” Emotion, Space and Society 24, 34–41. Hecht, Gabrielle. 2018. “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1, 109–141. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2014. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1–17. Kendall, Stuart. 2013. “Toward General Economy.” Scapegoat 5, 26–32. Langton, Marcia. 2018. Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia. Richmond, VIC: Hardie Grant Travel. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liebenberg, Louis. 1990. The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science. Claremont, South Africa: D. Philip. Lövbrand, Eva, Silke Beck, Jason Chilvers, Tim Forsyth, Johan Hedrén, Mike Hulme, Rolf Lidskog, and Eleftheria Vasileiadou. 2015. “Who Speaks for the Future of Earth? How Critical Social Science Can Extend the Conversation on the Anthropocene.” Global Environmental Change 32, 211–218. Marder, Michael. 2015. Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Marston, S. A., J. P. Jones and K. Woodward. 2005. “Human Geography Without Scale.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 4, 416–432. McBride, Glen. 2014. “Storytelling, Behavior Planning, and Language Evolution in Context.” Frontiers in Psychology 5, 1131. Morton, Timothy. 2018. “Third Stone from the Sun.” SubStance 47, no. 2, 107–118. Online Etymology Dictionary (n.d.) *teks-, . Plant, Sadie. 1997. Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday. Rehder, J. E. 2000. The Mastery and Uses of Fire in Antiquity. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press. Schneider, Birgit. 2007. Textiles Prozessieren. Zurich: Diaphanes. Soffer, Olga, James M. Adovasio and David C. Hyland. 2000. “The ‘Venus’ Figurines: Textiles, Basketry, Gender, and Status in the Upper Paleolithic.” Current Anthropology 41, no. 4, 511–537. Steffen, Will, Regina Angelina Sanderson, Peter D. Tyson, Jill Jäger, Pamela A. Matson, Berrien Moore III, Frank Oldfield, Katherine Richardson, John H. Schellnhuber, B.L. Turner II, and Robert J. Wasson. 2004. Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2004. “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’? Networks, Territories and Rescaling.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17, no. 1, 25–48.

Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes  93 Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2016. “Out of the Metazoic? Animals as a Transitional Form in Planetary Evolution.” In Thinking about Animals in the Age of the Anthropocene, edited by Kristin Armstrong Oma, Silver Rattasepp, and Morten Tønnessen. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 163–179. Vandiver, Pamela B., Olga Soffer, Bohuslav Klima, and Jiří Svoboda. 1989. “The Origins of Ceramic Technology at Dolni Věstonice, Czechoslovakia.” Science 246, no. 4933, 1002–1008. Wellings, Simon. 2016. Man-Made Metamorphic Rocks, Metageologist . Zalasiewicz, Jan. 2016. “The Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene.” In Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 115–131.

5

Plant Scale and the Anthropocene Heather I. Sullivan

Introduction: Plant Scale The vast scale of anthropogenic change to the Earth’s climate and ecosystems, as this volume attests, requires new understandings and representations of its forms that exceed individual human perception even as they result from human activities. In this critical plant studies chapter, I suggest another means of entry into the problem of visualizing the degree of the Anthropocene’s changes: by acknowledging that the human scale—however dramatic, Faustian or toxic—is still a subcategory of the larger scale of vegetal, photosynthesizing life. I discuss here several texts that offer creatively uncanny thought experiments about our botanical infrastructure, whose scale is vaster, older and greener than we are, a scale that is so very familiar and yet so alien in its inhuman sprawl toward light across continents moving aggressively but at a pace invisible to our senses. And yet botanical life is suffering greatly in current conditions of deforestation, climate change, widespread pollution and the industrial, monocrop agriculture dependent on fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, bee-killing pesticides and large quantities of herbicides; some plants, on the other hand, are expanding.1 Even as many plants are disappearing in the ongoing sixth mass extinction event of the Anthropocene described by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014), vegetal biomass is still approximately 80% of all life on Earth.2 Furthermore, plant life, along with oceanic phytoplankton, produces the oxygen we need to breathe. In order to see our plant-shaped world with vegetal awareness, I borrow from science fiction and Darko Suvin the strategy of “cognitive estrangement,” which is, according to Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson (2014, xi), an “alienated view-from-outside” that “allows us to examine ourselves and our institutions in new (and rarely flattering) light; SF distances us from the contemporary world-system only to return us to it, as aliens, so that we can see it with fresh eyes.” To this end, I consider narratives making visible in startling and subversive ways the life-producing vegetal and algal power that has always fed us and our companion species, provided all land-based breathers with oxygen and altered the planet’s climate and ecosystems. We human beings are not the only species with global impacts. Plants have DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-5

Plant Scale and the Anthropocene  95 enabled our current ecological circumstances, and we are dismantling them experimentally, blindly even, without noticing that the physical surroundings we occupy have been shaped by the vegetal. What might it mean for human hubris blindly undertaking the ongoing devastation of global ecological systems and the scales of the Anthropocene when we note that Homo sapiens is not actually the dominant form of life in terms of impact and quantity? For one thing, plants and their fungal friends/ enemies are much older than human life and were the original pioneers that covered the rocky ground with life in a massive transformation of Earth on a vast scale. The editors of The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan and Patricia Viera write: Plants are perhaps the most fundamental form of life, providing sustenance, and thus enabling the existence of all animals, including us humans. Their evolutionary transition from Paleozoic aquatic beginnings to a vegetative life out of water is undoubtedly one of the farthestreaching events in the history of the earth. It was the silent yet relentless colonization of terrestrial environments by the earliest land plants that transformed the global landscape and radically altered the geochemical cycles of the planet. This resulted in lowered concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and thus set the scene for the emergence of terrestrial animals about 350 million years ago. (Gagliano et al. 2017, vii) However, plants also have their own hard-core and “selfish,” as it were, survival strategies: they actively recognize themselves, purposely help or harm neighbors, communicate with each other and different species3 and, particularly relevant for Homo sapiens, manipulate many life forms to get help with pollination and dispersal of their seeds.4 They use vivid flowers with nectar, appetizing fruits, nourishing seeds (most of our food staples are seed based)5 and all kinds of mind-altering substances like caffeine to accomplish these goals and to fight off competitors and pests. While human actions are changing the world’s biosphere, we gain insights (and horror) when we understand these actions in terms of a multispecies-justice agenda from within the florosphere, to coin a term describing the systems of water, air, weather and life created and altered by plants from the depths of the oceans to the atmosphere’s gases. This chapter presents the florosphere with tales of our disturbingly complete dependency on the larger, dominant green life forms, without which we and our fellow animal, bird, insect, reptile, etc. species could not, for the most part, exist. Let us here consider, then, a vegetal scale as a reference point, or base, for the other scales of the Anthropocene. A florospheric view, however estranging and skewed by human inflection it will inevitably be, grounds our thinking with a multispecies frame. All forms of human culture reflect the types of relationships we have to the vegetal, whether based on gathering/hunting, small-scale gardens and

96  Heather I. Sullivan agriculture or large-scale industrial agriculture now dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and the machine caretakers of the fields. Instead of considering the vegetal in terms of the kinds of apparent control we have over plants with gardens or gathering, with small-scale farms or large-scale industrial agriculture, this chapter is a thought experiment in conceiving human scale through the larger, life-dominating and animallife-enabling plant scale. Perceiving trees and other plants as optional background, irrelevant unless creating vast gardens for the wealthy or industrial agriculture for the masses is an oddly plant-focused blindness to the reality of human dependence on plants. Indeed, plant scientists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler (2001) refer to this phenomenon as “plant blindness.”6 One reason we fail to “see” plants in industrialized cultures is that the scale of their lives is so different from the short, animal speed of the human scale. Yet, despite their monumental contributions to our existence, despite our utter dependence on their bounty for food and air—and caffeine—we tend to relegate the vegetal (in our perception) to a passive zone, a green background for animated stories of human activities and creations. Numerous recent texts seek to reveal our relationship to plants; Richard Power’s moving novel from 2018, The Overstory, is an exemplary example with his beautiful tree stories. His strategy, however, is to reveal the beauty of tree life alongside human struggles with extreme pathos; in contrast, this chapter will avoid pathos in favor of an estranged sense of dependency that may lean toward horror at our vegetal existence that we overlook at our own peril. Attending to the realities of plant power and vegetal scale in the florosphere decenters the human being slightly from the narrative frames considered, and such a shift can be disorienting if not nausea-inducing.

Goethe’s Plant-Ocean and Faust Our entrance to the florosphere is with Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749– 1832), famous for his literary but also scientific undertakings, including botanical studies. Goethe coined a helpful term for this project, that is, a “plant-ocean” (“Pflanzen-Ozean”) in his scientific writings: The entire realm of plants, for example, will appear to us as a massive ocean, which is just as necessary for the dependent existence of insects as are the world’s oceans and the rivers for the dependent existence of fishes. And we will see that a massive number of living creatures are born and nurtured in this plant ocean. (Goethe 1987, 214)7 While he describes the plant-ocean as a world specifically for insects, I suggest that its oxygen-infused air also houses human beings and therefore is a synonym for the florosphere. Indeed, in his physics lectures, Goethe also discussed what he described as the “air-ocean” (Luftmeer) that specifically

Plant Scale and the Anthropocene  97 encompasses human beings: “We, too, are folk of the air-ocean” (Goethe 1989, 165).8 With a similar idea, Luce Irigaray writes in her 2016 dialogical book Through Vegetal Being, with the plant philosopher Michael Marder, how the air we breathe is a nurturing realm provided by the vegetal and photosynthesizing life forms: “It was the vegetal world that ensured mothering care with the environment it arranged around me” (Irigaray and Marder 2016, 21). She continues (ibid. 22): Together with the space and the air it provided me with, nature, above all as the vegetal world, gave autonomy back to me. It proved to me that I was dependent upon no one to live: breathing suffices for living, and I could do that only by myself, with the help of the vegetal world. Irigaray’s sense of the breathable realm provided by the vegetal world is also similar to my concept of the florosphere; the only key difference is that I also emphasize the seemingly manipulative, selfish and actively powerful aspects of the vegetal, the non-mothering lives that nevertheless enable our lives. Using this darker idea of the florosphere as a cognitively estranging frame, I discuss Sue Burke’s 2018 science-fiction novel Semiosis that portrays the absolute dominance of intelligent vegetal life on the faraway planet Pax to which colonizing humans must adapt or die. I consider how much this plant-controlled planet mirrors our own existence on Earth. Finally, the chapter concludes with comments from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 botanical study, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, a brilliant work modeling multispecies justice with its focus on how many plants and all humans do best when working together as collaborative “co-species.” These literary, philosophical and scientific studies guide our quest for portraying the disturbing yet essential scales of multispecies, plant–human interactions in the florosphere. I begin with an era-defining text of the early Anthropocene (in the sense of Paul Crutzen 2002), Goethe’s world-famous 1808/1832 epic drama of emerging “modernity,” Faust I and II. Our brief visit with Faust focuses on Act V of part II, at the very end of the play. This scene features sight, blindness and the removal of the famous Linden trees. At the behest of Faust, Mephistopheles burns down the Linden trees blocking the view of their newly built dike, the symbol of modern technological power. Faust states: “I want their Linden for my throne, / The unowned timber-margin slender / Despoils for me the world I own” (Goethe 2001, 318).9 That night, the keeper of the watchtower, Lynceus sings out with celebratory comments on his task as a seer, who can see everything even in the deepest night, “To seeing born, / To scanning called, / To the watchtower sworn. / I relish the world / Sighting the far, / Espying the near” (Goethe 2001, 320).10 His emphasis on seeing his connection to the beautiful world stands in sharp contrast to Faust who sees only what he wants and then is literally blinded several scenes later. Lynceus turns from celebration to a cry of horror when he catches sight of the fire set

98  Heather I. Sullivan by Mephistopheles to solve the Linden problem and the local residents who are to be re-located (but are burned to death). Like a glowing fiery steeple / Redly soars the mossy frame, / Scarcely could the honest people / Flee this raging hell of flame! / Through the boughs, their leafy tracing, / Soaring tongues of fire are racing, / Branches furnish ready fuel, / Flash and tumble down the trees. / Ah, the gift of sight is cruel / Showing horrors such as these! (ibid. 320–321)11 The full fiery devastation, according to Mephistopheles, was an accident when the flames escaped his control and destroyed not only the trees but then also the little hut and its occupants, the idyllic representatives of antiquity, Philemon, Baucis and their guest. Many commentaries on the play emphasize the vast dike itself as a symbol of modernity, whether for better (as a sign of development, technological prowess producing “free land,” and “progress”) or for worse (as environmental damage, murder and oddly magical construction).12 The trees barely rate attention, though the deaths of Philemon and Baucis do. For this chapter, I suggest a focus on the lost Linden trees themselves, on seeing them, and on the blindness Faust has—in some ways itself a form of “plant blindness”—to their relevance, in contrast to Lynceus, the mythological seer who describes at length the demise of the boughs, leaves and roots. Linden trees have an ancient and wellknown meaning in German culture as the markers of community centers, “Heimat,” and mythological and religious associations.13 Their destruction carries definitive weight as the destruction of the symbolically sacred. In fact, the very same night at midnight, “Sorge,” or “Care” personified as an old woman, comes with her similarly allegorical sisters, Want, Debt and Need, to visit Faust. Only Care is able to get into his palace, where she blinds him. Kate Rigby stresses the implications of Faust’s blindness in that he is “[b]linded by the allegorical figure of Care, in an apt concretization of his metaphoric blindness to the price of his Promethean quest” (Rigby 2007, 250). Similarly, James van der Laan writes: Faust’s loss of sight proves especially telling with respect to his technological accomplishments. Typically, his physical blindness has been understood to result in an even more perceptive inner insight. A more careful reading suggests, however, that his blindness is not only physical, but intellectual and spiritual as well. […] [H]e is utterly blind to the trouble with his investment and trust in a technological mastery of the natural world. (Van der Laan 2007, 106) Goethe provides further evidence of Faust’s blind delusions with Faust’s false assumption about the shovels he hears at the end, wrongly believing

Plant Scale and the Anthropocene  99 that Mephistopheles’ magic helpers, the lemurs, are digging channels to drain the swamp left by the dike but they are actually digging his grave. While there is an ongoing debate regarding the meaning of Faust’s blindness as an outcome of his dike with its putrid swamp either as a site of “progress” opening up land to people or as an indication that Faust is blind to the negative aspects of his impact, including murder and the brutal trade, war and piracy that funded his project, I concur with Rigby and Van der Laan that Faust’s loss of sight indicates his inability to see the terrible impact of his actions and of modern, technological developments more broadly, of which Goethe was famously skeptical.14 Goethe’s skepticism aligns with some of the critiques of the Anthropocene discourse, despite Faust’s own rather Promethean aspects.15 The loss of the Linden trees is suggestively devastating, especially in association with the deaths of Philemon, Baucis and their guest. Goethe’s views on felling of trees generally was, of course, rather complex; he was the advisor for forestry in Weimar,16 but he also had his famously melancholy Werther in his 1774 international best-selling novel of sentimentality, The Sorrows of Young Werther, bemoan with horror the felling of the nut trees by the vicar’s new wife.17 What would it mean for Faust and for thinking about the florosphere broadly if we took the Linden trees, “the non-human,” seriously, especially if we accept the drama’s role as a marker of the entrance into modern, technological and industrial culture, and thus, as an opening text for the Anthropocene?18 Goethe’s drama reveals a complex moment of blindness as Faust is enamored with technological wonders and overlooks burning trees and murder. Like Faust, many cultures and individuals, especially in “modern” industrial societies, do not see the trees, or at least, not as relevant. Perceiving or experiencing trees and their wild vegetal relatives as anything other than a matter to be conquered and controlled, or as aesthetic space-holders, represents (quite problematically) a stereotypical state of being “non-modern,” non-industrial and/or “undeveloped.” As Robert Pogue Harrison writes in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, European cultures associated deforestation and clearing of the land as a necessary step to achieve “civilization,” and recent politicians like Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, have claimed exactly along these lines the right to deforest the Amazon in Brazil in order to further “culture.”19 With a similar idea but in reverse, speculative texts like Brian Aldiss’ Hot House and J.G. Ballard’s Drowning World, both from 1962, imagine the future of humanity as a downgraded “return” to the “jungle,” dominated by botanical power with a rather racist, colonial vision of “primitivism” like Joseph Conrad’s idea of the Congo in Heart of Darkness.20 Such texts play with the anti-vegetal and colonial idea that we exist either within (“primitive”) plant worlds or in civilization; in other words, they explore the problematic idea that having a dependence on, or visual dominance of, the vegetal is the opposite of human success and power. In terms of the Anthropocene’s scenes of anthropogenic alterations, the remaking of the florosphere appears startlingly extensive (deforestation)

100  Heather I. Sullivan and rather out of control (such as the massive impact of invasive plants) if one is aware of, or actively considering, our vegetal dependency. This impact is a shared process of the interwoven activities and lives of human and nonhuman alike, however, as Anna Tsing describes in her 2015 book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in the Capitalist Ruins, and Donna Haraway in her 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. We cannot forget the agentic and active power of the nonhuman, especially the vegetal and its ongoing collaborations with other species. The Faustian or Promethean blindness contending that industrial human culture is beyond the influence of “mere” plants assumes that human beings have “active” roles in contrast to the supposedly “passive” vegetal realm. Plants and their photosynthesizing cousins, algae and phytoplankton, are anything but passive, as we see in the havoc wreaked by kudzu vines, pigweed destroying large swaths of agriculture in the South and toxic algal blooms in lakes and oceans. The horror associated with seeing the vegetal as active and even agential is nicely assessed in the volume by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (2016). Realizing that our green world is a realm of conquering, battling enablers—and collaborators— brings not just potential cognitive estrangement but also uncanny horror.

Sue Burke’s Alien Plant World Turning now to Sue Burke’s 2018 novel Semiosis as an example of recent literature that presents a rather anti-Faustian perspective with elements of horror, we see just such terrifyingly and overtly domineering plants when a group of human pioneers abandon a polluted and commercialized Earth and travel through space to found a colony on the planet they name Pax. They quickly run into trouble with the local species, that is, the flora not the fauna, and they eventually realize two very important facts for their survival and with much relevance for this chapter: first, the dominant species on this planet are plants, and they are huge and interconnected with each other and their fungal collaborators. Second, plant intelligence in the novel is distributed, as it is on Earth (rather than located in a central nervous system), and the typical Faustian blindness to plant issues makes the pioneers oblivious at first to other kinds of intelligence. The Pax humans begin to die and soon discover that they, like the local animals, are mere pawns in ongoing battles between various plants as they compete for preeminence. The colonists first assume, as is typical for industrialized Earthlings, that they will be the dominant species, they or some other animal, thinking of the plants as mere tools: “‘But we know what plants do,’ she said. ‘They grow. They’re useful or they’re not. And that’s all we need to know’” (Burke 2018, 24). And so three of their friends die when one snow vine on the west side of their newly founded living area changes its fruit that they had been happily eating into a poison fruit, while the eastern vine of the same species continues to produce

Plant Scale and the Anthropocene  101 healthy fruit. The humans already knew that they had to adapt themselves and their digestive systems to local planetary systems, after having suffered from failed experiences on Mars that you cannot simply transplant crops across planets: We had already realized from the disaster on Mars that transplanting Earth ecology wouldn’t work. Crops would not grow without specific symbiotic fungi on their roots to extract nutrients, and the exact fungi would not grow without the proper soil composition, which did not exist without certain saprophytic bacteria that had proven resistant to transplantation, each life-form demanding its own billion-year-old niche. (ibid. 25) Now the settlers start to see what adaptation to Pax requires. Shortly after the snow vine poisoning, the vine and its followers attack their wheat crop with root rot; the plants can direct both fungi and animals like the native fippokats to carry out tasks and to join the fight against the foreign plants. The settlers realize with shock: “‘It’s the vines,’ I said. Uri stared wide-eyed at the shoots. ‘The snow vines poisoned the field. It’s allelopathy. The plant gets rivals out of the way to clear space for itself’” (ibid. 32). At first, the humans feel superior and assume they will overcome the “killer houseplant” (ibid.). But the scale of the situation begins to dawn on the Pax inhabitants as the snow vine competition continues, conquering more of their earthly plants and feeding off of the human graves: At the university, we had joked about the ways plants abused insects to make them carry pollen or seeds, but insects were small. On Pax, the snow vines were enormous. Next to them, humans and fippokats were insects, objects to abuse. (ibid. 35) Not only do they see the vegetal scale as much bigger; they also realize that they have to work with the vines, carrying out cooperative service in order to survive. This realization brings also the growing awareness that these plants are intelligent. Since the west plant was their ally, they tried to transplant it to create a wall against the antagonistic east snow vine: “I transplanted snow vines and aspen trees from the east thicket to the western edge of our fields as a shield. They thrived and attacked. We replanted our crops and they grew unmolested” (ibid. 40). The first generation carries on, living between the two battling vines, but the second generation later discovers another, previously inhabited city by unknown beings and decides to move there. At the new site, an enormous rainbow bamboo reigns supreme and the Pax people begin to work with it as their plant leader, eventually bestowing it with the name Stevland (named

102  Heather I. Sullivan after one of the original botanists). They eventually discover that Stevland can communicate with them, as he had done with the builders of the city, the also alien “glassmakers” who left to escape Stevland’s power but begin to die without his intentionally helpful vitamins necessary to balance their diet. Oddly, the Pax settlers refer to this powerful plant as “he” although the gender choice is never clarified (though earthly plants do, indeed, exist with gender with some male plants, some female and some with both parts). Stevland, “he,” provides the necessary nutrients to human beings and he controls them, too, changing the level of hormonal influences in their food, sedating the violent individuals, banning alcohol and making other unilateral decisions about human health without consulting them. When the human community later ends up in a battle with rebel glassmakers, Stevland prepares his humans with intelligence-enhancing fruit (but only before a battle). He states, “I give-you more intelligence, give-you blue and small fruit high on stem near office gate. Good for animal brain.” Intelligence fruit? I had to think about that. Stevland gives fruit tailored for specific individuals to cure infections or ease childbirth or provide extra nutrients or enzymes, among so many other things. (ibid. 148) Every aspect of their life becomes a negotiation with the plants, through Stevland, who speaks for the rest of the plants. The locustwood, for example, agreed to provide them with good wood in return for limited cutting and having the humans plant their seeds widely. Of course, some plants, like the orange trees, resist Stevland and the humans and they are punished accordingly. The entire novel is an exercise in cognitive estrangement where human beings must learn openly to see their lives as dictated fully by vegetal influences since they would sicken and die without Stevland’s nutrients, or be killed quickly by purposely poisoned food. The final battle is fought by the resistant glassmakers and rebel plants against Stevland, his helpful humans, obedient plants and tame glassmakers. Stevland and his minions win even though the rebels use fire to battle against the overwhelming plant force, much like Faust’s Mephistopheles and the Linden trees. In Semiosis, the plant-obedient humans are victorious yet subservient. Stevland, the powerful and vast rainbow bamboo eventually becomes a full member of the human counsel; he learns some semblance of democratic action, but he maintains a sense of power: “I am a dominant species, and it is my nature to dominate” (ibid. 320). The plant–human–glassmaker– fippokat unity becomes a functional multispecies community with some level of harmony in Pax’s florosphere, at least until Burke’s next novel from 2019, Interference, in which Stevland manages to send a shoot of himself back to Earth and achieve an easy takeover. Back on Pax at the end of the

Plant Scale and the Anthropocene  103 first novel, Semiosis, Stevland, the rainbow bamboo, is portrayed as the visual and literal frame for all human and glassmaker existence, who have fully accepted his plant scale as their reality: “Around me rose his bright stalks and graceful leaves, the curves of their boughs echoing the curves of the roofs. I had water and sunshine, and warmth and food” (ibid. 332). Now, the humans see their own happiness rather ironically framed in terms of vegetal desires, that is, in terms of water and sunshine, a plant philosophy embodied and demanded by their bamboo friend/leader/collaborator. Burke’s Semiosis documents a fictional alien plant dominated by plant scale, in which a vast living creature shares its “knowledge” and chemical messages with a huge array of other vegetation and fungi. As such, the scale of human lives is juxtaposed against the much larger botanical realm that literally dominates and controls their options, in this case an aggressive florosphere—but no vegetal realms are actually quiet and peaceful even if we cannot easily see their ongoing battles for space, light and resources. Burke describes her research into the science of plants and plant–human history for the novels, noting especially how aggressive plants can be, in a 2020 interview: Semiosis is about colonists on a planet called Pax who discover that an indigenous plant species is sentient. One evening back in the ’90s, I was watering my plants and realized that one of my houseplants had killed another plant. It was a pothos vine, and it had wrapped itself around the other plant, starved it for light, and killed it. At the time I felt like it was my fault, because I should have been paying more attention. Less than a month later, a different plant tried to kill another plant, and I thought that was suspicious. I began to do some research and discovered that plants are actually very aggressive—they fight to the death over sunlight in all sorts of different ways. The more research I did, the more I realized I had a lifeform so different from us living in my house, and it needed to be put into a story. (Burke 2020, 48) The human settlers on Pax find that agreeing to the bamboo’s terms is the only possibility for survival. What does such a science-fiction vision of vegetal scale tell us about our own, earthly scale? While the earthly version of distributed intelligence in plants is a standard understanding of the vegetal “mind” or at least communicative, interactive functioning, it does not include Stevland-level philosophy, language and emotional range; there are, however, excellent studies of plant intelligence on Earth such as the volume by Gagliano, Ryan and Vieira (2017). In other words, Burke’s alien vegetal dominance is not as foreign as we might think. There is no survival on Pax for the two alien intelligent humanoids, the human beings and the glassmakers, since they require the nutrients provided by plants to survive as well as

104  Heather I. Sullivan the plant protection from the other aggressive and deadly competitor plants. And we beings on Earth, animal, human, bird, reptile, etc., also dwell in a realm of botanical coverage, in the plant-ocean, as Goethe calls it, or the florosphere, where oxygen is plenty and the vast majority of our food is vegetal based. If we think we are free of Stevland’s manipulative mental control, we might think briefly of Michael Pollan’s documentation of the impact of caffeine, fruit sugar, tobacco, sugar and other mind-altering substances derived from plants. That plants manipulate other species is clear, but the debate continues regarding whether, or how, to speak of plant intelligence and will or not.

Conclusion The vast scale of the vegetal, interconnected with fungal lives, dwarfs the small human colony in Semiosis, as it also does the much larger human population on Earth. However we define or measure it, we, too, exist within, or are citizens of, the plant scale of the florosphere, or “plant-ocean.” There is no known form of survival without the nutrition, oxygen and local environmental shape provided by our earthly vegetation. Plants have lived without us, but we have never lived without them, and many modern plants have become fully interconnected with humans and other recent species. With this complex set of relations and interconnectivity in mind, I conclude with thoughts from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s extraordinary memoire/ scientific study of plants, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), that reveals the longterm human–plant relationships that provide success to both species. As a trained scientist with a doctorate in botany, and a Native American of the Potawatomi people, Kimmerer combines her long-term community knowledge with scientific studies to document how we live in a plant-based world and how cross-species collaboration is crucial. Indeed, her book is a model text for multispecies justice as well as an indictment of human horrors against other living things both vegetal and animal. The titular sweetgrass, she reveals from her research, actually thrives more successfully when it is partially picked for use in basket weaving, and the sites with careful human contact are far more successful than the patches left entirely on their own. The scientists expected the opposite: The surprise was that the failing plots were not the harvested ones, as predicted, but the unharvested controls. The sweetgrass that had not been picked or disturbed in any way was choked with dead stems while the harvested plots were thriving. (Kimmerer 2013, 162) She writes of how the students in her general ecology class only saw human– plant relationships in negative terms.

Plant Scale and the Anthropocene  105 I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day— brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl—truncated their ability to see some good between humans and the earth. (ibid. 6) Instead of insisting on plants for themselves, separate from human beings, Kimmerer delineates how plants and humans live together and flourish. She sees cross-species collaboration, not as a passive object and an active subject as the English language usually implies for plants: “The botany I was taught was reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective. Plants were reduced to objects; they were not subjects” (ibid. 42). This problem of viewing plants is not just based on a specifically “Western” perspective but rather is deeply grounded in subjective linguistic structures: “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human” (ibid. 57). Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, like Burke’s Semiosis and, possibly, the Linden scene in Goethe’s Faust as described by Lyneus, demonstrates in various ways our human connection to, and/or reliance on, plants. Nevertheless, many industrial humans often fail to see this connection other than in instrumentalized terms of our use and control of the vegetal. Blinded as so many are by our own human antics, creations and belief in human control over the nonhuman, we fail to see and recognize the relevance of plant power, plant scale and the photosynthetically oxygenated air we need to live, that is, to see plant–human relations as our basis. Like Kimmerer, Tsing, and Haraway, I focus on the shared, collaborative, but also competitive aspects of human–plant life, as our “co-species,” a term I adapt from Haraway’s 2003 work on the co-evolving “companion species” of humans and canines. Plants are humans’ co-species, which is to say that we exist only with their support. The reverse is only partially true, since humans are only recently, geologically speaking, the co-species to plants who have many other species with whom they work including fungi, birds, all sorts of insects, other mammals and, of course, their fellow vegetal species. Recognizing and seeing our total reliance on our vegetal enablers and overcoming our “plant blindness” is an important, if disturbing, challenge in the high-tech, high-velocity Anthropocene. While Goethe’s Faust shows us modernity’s ambiguous response to burning trees—progress or devastation?—Burke’s Semiosis brings home our dependence on the vast vegetal scale with a story of alien plant–human relations where you cannot escape the vegetal. Formulating a scale for the Anthropocene should address the florosphere as the realm and the scale in which we exist, and which we are altering at a rapid pace without considering how our plant–human relations will change in these new collaborations.

106  Heather I. Sullivan

Notes 1 For discussions of plant death and plant expansion in the Anthropocene in the United States and Germany, see Grebenstein 2013 and Reichholf 2006. 2 For biomass statistics, see the database B10NUMB3R5: https​:/​/bi​​onumb​​ers​.h​​ms​. ha​​rvard​​.edu/​​bionu​​mber.​​aspx?​​s​=n​​&v​=3​&id​=115270 and the essay with excellent charts by Brian Resnick and Javier Zarracina, who describe plants as the dominant form of life: “And though plants are still the dominant form of life on Earth, the scientists suspect there used to be approximately twice as many of them—before humanity started clearing forests to make way for agriculture and our civilization” (2018). 3 Recent studies on plant impact and intelligence include Jahren 2016; Haskell 2017; Gagliano, Ryan and Viera 2017; and Reedy 2018. 4 See especially Pollan 2001. 5 See Hanson 2015. 6 See also the inspiring work by Ryan 2018, especially the introduction. 7 Original: “Das ganze Pflanzenreich z.E. wird uns wieder als ein ungeheures Meer erscheinen, welches eben so gut zur bedingten Existenz der Insekten nötig ist, als das Weltmeer und die Flüsse zur bedingten Existenz der Fische, und wir werden sehen daß eine ungeheure Anzahl lebender Geschöpfe in diesem Pflanzen-Ozean geboren und ernährt werde.” (The emphasis here and the translation of Goethe’s science essays are mine.) 8 Original: “Auch wir sind Völker des Luftmeeres.” 9 Original: “Die Linden wünscht’ ich mir zum Sitz, / Die wenig Bäume, nicht mein eigen, / Verderben mir den Weltbesitz” (Goethe.1994. Faust, 11240–11242). 10 Original: “Zum Sehen geboren / Zum Schauen bestellt, ‘Dem Turme geschworen / Gefällt mir die Welt. Ich blick in die Ferne, / Ich seh in der Näh” (Goethe, Faust, 11288–11293). 11 Original: “Flamme flammet, rot in Gluten / Steht das schwarze Moosgestelle; / Retteten sich nur die Guten / Aus der wildentbrannten Hölle! / Züngelnd lichte Blitze steigen / Zwischen Blättern, zwischen Zweigen; / Äste dürr, die flackernd brennen, / Glühen schnell und stürzen ein. / Sollt ihr Augen dies erkennen! / Muß ich so weitsichtig sein!” (Goethe 1994. Faust, 11320–11329). 12 For celebrations of Faust as a paradigm of modernity, see Stephenson 2006; Lipinski 2000; and Molnár 2002. For critiques of Faust, especially in terms of environmental or social justice issues, see Hermand 1991; Rigby 2004; and Sullivan 2010. 13 See Hentschel 2005 and: https​:/​/ww​​w​.uni​​-goet​​tinge​​n​.de/​​de​/sy​​mboli​​k​-der​​-lind​​e​​/ 417​​70​.ht​​ml. 14 Mephistopheles comments with his usual irony that the project is funded by brutal force: “You have the force and might is right.” And: “For commerce, war, and piracy, / They form a seamless trinity” (Goethe, Faust, 2007, 317, 11184 and 11187–11188). 15 For a critique of the Promethean aspects of the Anthropocene discourse, see especially Hamilton 2015 and Rose et al. 2012. 16 For a discussion of Goethe’s forestry work, see Maierhoffer 2012. 17 In the letter from September 15 in Book II, Werther expresses outrage at the vicar’s wife for cutting down the walnut trees (Goethe 1983, 56–57). 18 On the “non-human” in the Anthropocene, see Dürbeck, Schaumann and Sullivan 2015. 19 See Marina Lopes, “Brazil’s Bolsonaro Calls Amazon Deforestation ‘Cultural,’ Says It ‘Will Never End’” in The Washington Post from 2019.

Plant Scale and the Anthropocene  107 20 Brian Aldiss’ science-fiction novel was first published serially in 1961 and then as a novel in the United Kingdom in 1962; J.G. Ballard’s Drowning World 1962; and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in 1899.

Works Cited Burke, Sue. 2020. “Aliens Among us. Sue Burke.” Locus March, 48 and 70. Burke, Sue. 2019. Interference: A Novel (New York: Tor Books). Burke, Sue. 2018. Semiosis: A Novel (New York: Tor Books). Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds. 2014. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press). Crutzen, Paul Josef. 2002. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415: 23. Dürbeck, Gabriele, Caroline Schaumann, and Heather I. Sullivan. 2015. “Human and Non-Human Agencies: The Anthropocene, Material Ecocriticism, and the Contributions of Literature.” Ecozon@ 6, no. 1: 118–136. Gagliano, Monica, Ryan John C., and Viera Patricia. 2017. “Introduction.” In The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, edited by Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Viera (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), vii–xxxiii. Goethe von, Johann Wolfgang. 2001. Faust: A Tragedy, edited by Cyrus Hamlin, translated by Walter Arndt (New York: Norton). Goethe von, Johann Wolfgang. 1994. Faust, edited by Albrecht Schöne. Frankfurt/M. Goethe von, Johann Wolfgang. 1989. “Physikalische Vorträge.” In Schriften zur allgemeinen Naturlehre, Geologie und Mineralogie, vol, 25, edited by Wolf Engelhardt von and Manfred Wenzel (Frankfurt/Main: Klassiker), 142–179. Goethe von, Johann Wolfgang. 1987. “Zur Vergleichungslehre.” In Schriften zur Morphologie, vol, 24, edited by Dorothea Kuhn (Frankfurt/Main: Klassiker), 176–214. Goethe von, Johann Wolfgang. 1983. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. Victor Lange, edited by David E. Wellbery (New York: Suhrkamp). Grebenstein, Emily. 2013. “Escape of the Invasives: Top Six Invasive Plants Species in the United States.” Smithsonian Insider, April 19. Hamilton, Clive. 2015. “The Theodicy of the ‘Good Anthropocene’.” Environmental Humanities 7, 233–238. Hanson, Thor. 2015. The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History (New York: Basic Books). Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. (Duke University Press). Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press). Harrison, Robert Pogue. 1992. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Haskell, David George. 2017. The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York: Viking). Hentschel, Uwe. 2005. “Der Lindenbaum in der deutschen Literatur des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts.” Orbis Litterarum 60, no. 5 (September): 357–376.

108  Heather I. Sullivan Hermand, Jost. 1991. Im Wettlauf mit der Zeit: Anstöße zu einer ökologiebewußten Ästhetik (Berlin: Sigma Bohn). Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. 2016. Through Vegetal Being (New York: Columbia University Press). Jahren, Hope. 2016. Lab Girl. (New York: Vintage). Keetley, Dawn, and Angela Tenga, eds. 2016. Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions). Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt and Company). Laan van der, James. 2007. Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust (London: Continuum). Lipinski, Krzysztof. 2000. “‘Denn dies Metall lässt sich in alles wandeln…’ Gold und Sexualität als Instrumente des Bösen in Goethes ‘Faust.’” In Resonanzen, edited by Sabine Doering et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann), 159–169. Lopes, Marina. 2019. “Brazil’s Bolsonaro calls Amazon deforestation ‘cultural,’ says it ‘will never end.’” The Washington Post. November 20. Maierhoffer, Waltraud. 2012. “Goethe and Forestry.” In Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, edited by Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giula Pacini (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation), 265–280. Molnár von, Géza. 2002. “Hidden in Plain View: Another Look at Goethe’s Faust.” Goethe Yearbook XI, 33–76. Pollan, Michael. 2001. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House). Powers, Richard. 2018. The Overstory (New York: W.W. Norton). Reedy, Christianna. 2018. “Researchers Have Mapped Out How Plants Sense Our World.” Futurism (News), January 20. Reichholf, Josef H. 2006. Der Tanz um das goldene Kalb: Der Ökokolonialismus Europas (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach). Resnick, Brian, and Javier Zarracina. 2018. “All Life on Earth, in One Staggering Chart.” Vox, August 15 (https​:/​/ww​​w​.vox​​.com/​​scien​​ce​-an​​d​-hea​​lth​/2​​018​/5​​/29​/1​​ 73861​​12​/al​​l​-lif​​e​-on-​​earth​​-char​​t​-wei​​​ght​-p​​lants​​-anim​​als​-p​​nas). Rigby, Kate. 2007. “Prometheus Redeemed?: From Autoconstruction to Ecopoetics.” In Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, edited by Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press), 233–251. Rigby, Kate. 2004. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press). Rose, Deborah Bird, Thom van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew, Stuart Cooke, Matthew Kearnes, and Emily O’Gorman. 2012. “Thinking through the Environmental, Unsettling the Humanities.” Environmental Humanities 1, 1–5. Ryan, John Charles. 2018. Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination (New York: Routledge). Stephenson, R. H. 2006. “The Diachronic Solidity of Goethe’s Faust.” In A Companion to Goethe’s Faust: Parts I and II, edited by Paul Bishop (Rochester, NY: Camden), 243–270. Sullivan, Heather I. 2010. “Ecocriticism, the Elements, and the Ascent/Descent into Weather in Goethe’s Faust.” Goethe Yearbook 17 (2010), 55–72.

Plant Scale and the Anthropocene  109 Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Van der Laan, James. 2007. Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust (London: Continuum). Wandersee, James H., and Elisabeth E. Schussler. 2001. “Toward a Theory of Plant Blindness.” Plant Science Bulletin 47: 2–9.

6

Anthropomorphism and Alterity Bernhard Malkmus

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch gerade ertragen, und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht, uns zu zerstören. Rainer Maria Rilke1

Zooming in on the Rogue Planet In the film Melancholia from 2011, Lars von Trier yokes together cosmology and human psychology. It is a chamber play that studies the dispositions and behavioral changes of two couples under the auspices of a cosmic event: a rogue planet is approaching planet Earth and is expected “to fly by,” according to the scientific consensus that falls apart at the end of the movie. The audience is privy to the narrator’s sputnik’s eye perspective during the film’s prelude and thus finds itself in a surreal extra-terrestrial reception position, anticipating the collision with the planet and the destruction of life on Earth. At one point, John, one of the protagonists, tries to soothe his wife Claire by encouraging her to focus on the celestial body through a wire sling and to repeat the procedure again after five minutes (1:38:18). She rejoices as she realizes that the planet does, indeed, appear diminished. When she tries to gauge the movement of the celestial body a few hours later, however, she realizes that it has transgressed the confines of the sling, apparently fast approaching planet Earth (1:43:30). These observations are not measured under the exact same conditions and thus do not constitute objective data. They rather mirror the desire to comply with the symbolic order of science, embodied by John, and the fear of losing every sense of order. The wire sling can be read as the fragile frame of imagination without which humans would not be able to navigate reality. Imagination’s ability to envisage the end of humankind, the film seems to suggest, creates a virtual sense of integrative selfhood through a kind of cosmic sublime, while disrupting the very symbolic code in which that sense of selfhood is rooted. Melancholia is about anthropomorphic scales and their failure vis-à-vis an impending absolute reality that imposes itself as a radical alterity—an DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-6

Anthropomorphism and Alterity  111 alterity that can barely be envisaged by imagination, let alone integrated into human symbolic codes. The gaze imposed on the audience is the disembodied gaze of the subject imagining collective non-existence. There is, Lars von Trier’s experiment with his audience seems to imply, always already a scalar discrepancy inscribed into the genealogy of the modern subject. For Michel Foucault, modern subject philosophy tried to process this scalar discrepancy by reconfiguring the human subject as an “empirical-transcendental doublet” (1970, 319), which emerged in the late eighteenth century: the human is postulated both as an object and as a transcendental source of empirical knowledge—a paradoxical figure that has always already presupposed itself when generating knowledge about the world. Von Trier draws on a cultural memory of dramatizing self-reflection in modernity. His visual grammar taps into a fertile post-Enlightenment exploration of subjectivity: it is predicated on the ability of the “empiricaltranscendental doublet” to scale its faculties of reason and imagination up to a point of discrepancy that cannot be re-integrated into its operations of selfreflection. Throughout the nineteenth century, reflections on imagination, understanding, reason, creativity and agency take center stage in European cultures, as humans are trying to respond to a rapidly expanding sense of “the future” in the wake of the gradual industrial transformation of social and natural environments. Much of this thinking is concerned with individual freedom and espouses a wide range of different tenets about its scope and limitation. Yet, what these different approaches have in common is the negotiation of subjectivity around seemingly opposite forces: the everexpanding agency of human reason and imagination in re-shaping human lifeworlds, on the one hand, and the experience of an ontological difference that cannot be translated into anthropomorphic scales, on the other. In the Anthropocene, the liberal humanist promise of an increasing malleability of the world is tempered by an awareness of human dependence on natural systems.2 As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno have argued, totalized human domination and domestication of nature (Naturbeherrschung) creates a scalar blind spot that renders humans oblivious of the otherness in nature. This oblivion sets in motion a dialectical movement: the expanded scalability of human technology and the ensuing domination of nature create their own mythology and, in doing so, lead to an ever-deeper dependence on nature (Naturzwang) (1988, 264–271). The more humans have replaced natural systems with manmade ones, the more they are confronted with the fact that the biosphere cannot be subjected to a totalized control. The scalar discrepancy between an ever more homogenized world tailored to human needs, on the one hand, and humankind’s concurrent reliance on nature (or, in Anthropocene terms, Earth systemic integrity), on the other, is one of those dramaturgic and visual residues of post-Enlightenment philosophy that still looms large today. It is this residual “coherence of the discrepant” in Western collective memory that von Trier is able to draw on in Melancholia: it

112  Bernhard Malkmus dramatizes our gaze into the cosmos as the product of the co-emergence of the autonomy of the human subject and the homogenization of the objectified world. Human agency, which has adopted larger and larger scopes and scales of agency, is now confronted with the impact of this fractal upscaling on the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere. Humans have become agents on temporal scales as diverse as Earth-systems history and evolutionary history. They experience their interaction with these different spheres increasingly as a kind of “sublime” in which the sense of being overwhelmed by the sheer force of anthropogenic technology (Lyotard’s “Postmodern Sublime”) converges with a sense of impending ecosystemic collapse. Human agency is extended to such a degree into a new systemic dynamism (the “technosphere”) that it cannot be processed and integrated by human imagination. Humankind is awestruck by its own demiurgic powers. The replacement of a sense of temporal order beyond the reach of human imagination by the standardization of time in Western secularism, Charles Taylor argues, leads to the emergence of a persistent reflective constellation: a theological imaginary that cannot be appropriated by and made available to the operations of Foucault’s empirical-transcendental doublet (see Taylor 2007, 54–59). This imaginary ranges from Kant’s concept of the “sublime” to Kierkegaard’s “kairos,” Schopenhauer’s “will,” Nietzsche’s “tragedy,” Heidegger’s “event” or the “real” in psychoanalysis, among others. In these post-Enlightenment attempts to understand the human condition under the radical transformations of modernity, a consistent dialectical movement emerges that articulates the very conditions for the possibility of freedom: humans can only become or remain human if they do not render the world entirely human, that is, if they remain open to an agency that exceeds the self-affectation of human reason, human imagination and human action. This reflective operation, it seems to me, becomes particularly prevalent in the Anthropocene for two reasons: (1) The realm of the anthropomorphic has expanded dramatically, and humans are now knowingly interfering with the deep future of life on planet Earth. (2) This expansion has, in certain aspects, lead to a qualitative rather than a quantitative transformation, in the sense of Hegel’s qualitative leap resulting from quantitative change. This is certainly true of the Great Acceleration and its most persistent effect: locking an ever-increasing proportion of the planet’s inhabitants into an industrial rationale of production and consumption. In the wake of this development, an entirely new sphere has evolved, which the earth scientist Peter Haff has termed the “technosphere.”3 Recent research suggests that this anthropogenic sphere follows its own systemic autopoiesis, moves beyond anthropomorphism and thus confronts humankind with its own otherness. Innovative theories, by scholars such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway and others, during the past decades have attempted to deconstruct

Anthropomorphism and Alterity  113 the dualism between subject and object, ontology and epistemology at the heart of Foucault’s “empirical-transcendental doublet.” They have shown the complexity of how different abiotic and biotic agencies interrelate in the emergence and perpetuation of life and have stressed the ontological primacy of relations over essence. However, these efforts have sometimes been (mis)interpreted (or vulgarized) as a seemingly new monism that categorically precludes any ontological differences and implicitly endorses an essentialism of relationality. The inflationary use of concepts such as “network,” “assemblage” or “natureculture,” often unmoored from their original theoretical contexts, has introduced a facile ontological flatness of the relational in some humanities discourses; it tends to disregard qualitative differences of evolutionary, human and industrial agencies, ignore the historicity of agency as such and ultimately impede an analysis of hegemony and ethical evaluation of agencies.4 This chapter argues against the category mistake implied in monistic reinterpretations of deconstructed dualisms: an epistemological observation (humankind experiences its own geo-chemical impact on Earth systems and thus an unprecedented scalability of its agency) is mistaken for an ontological one (all agencies are qualitatively isomorphous and, while constantly changing, are ultimately ahistorical). It takes issue with the slippery slope of monism, which often tends to be apolitical and eschews ethical considerations, by reflecting on the scalar limitations of human perception, knowledge and imagination. In tracing, in a first step, the productivity of configurations of alterity in two seminal thinkers bracketing the nineteenth century (Kant and Nietzsche) I am setting the stage for exploring, in the second part of the main argument, their persistence and relevance in reflections on the human condition in the Anthropocene by engaging with Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno and Hartmut Rosa. The chapter also aims to wrest a meaningful concept of “nature” from monistic tendencies in the Anthropocene discourse and stresses the duality of the human as both the product of evolutionary history and the initiator of anthropomorphic artifices and technospheric dynamics over which humans have decreasing control (and which exert increasing evolutionary pressure on all life forms, including humans). Any meaningful concept of “ecology” today, it argues, needs to be understood in terms of a triangulation between the natural spheres, human cognition and agency and the dynamics of the technosphere.

Subjectivity and Alterity The wire sling scenes in Lars von Tier’s Melancholia can also be seen as asides on two of the most vital questions Immanuel Kant has posed: How can we know “what is,” that is, keeping “sensible concepts” uncontaminated by our desires or our moral reasoning? And, is there a connection between “sensible concepts” and “intelligible concepts” that could govern moral

114  Bernhard Malkmus reasoning and the question “what ought to be”? The film suggests that our symbolic codes can only provide a tentative frame for the way in which we navigate “the real” and no frame for our moral sensibility. Kant tried to bridge this gap in his Critique of Judgment. There, he conceptualized the notions of “natural beauty” (das Naturschöne) and “the sublime” (das Erhabene) as attempts to mediate between causes (sensible concepts) and reasons (intelligible concepts). The two experiences trigger complementary aesthetic responses: while the Naturschöne facilitates an experience of a purposeful inner coherence, or “harmony,” of nature as a system that is not accessible to the empirical observation (Kant 2009, §23, 577), the “feeling of the sublime,” which is evoked in humans by forces beyond anthropomorphic scales, runs against purpose-oriented judgments and overtaxes human imagination (ibid., §23, 576). This experience of being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude (the mathematical sublime) and sheer force (the dynamic sublime) of scalar difference provokes, according to Kant, a reaction of self-distancing and self-reflection. The ability to translate that difference between the observer and the observed into an operation that testifies to the supremacy of reason over sensory perception becomes the focal point of Kant’s analysis (ibid., §27). This line of argument is often read as a triumphalist act of self-formation that subsumes an experience of alterity in the self-affirmation of the modern subject (Böhme and Böhme 1996, 215–224). However, there is a paradox built into Kant’s attempt to conceptualize self-formation through alterity: the struggle between imagination (Einbildungskraft) and reason (Vernunft) forces the former to its limits and, in doing so, exposes it to the infinite range of ideas in the very moment of being confronted with its own inoperability (ibid., §26). In revealing the inadequacy (Unangemessenheit) of imagination (ibid., §26, 588), the experience of the sublime is a moment of subjective confrontation with the infinity of reason. Exposure to the sublime is thus a paradoxical confrontation with the limitations of human imagination in the very moment when it is called upon to transgress its own boundaries. However, there remains an ambiguity: the sublime is an encounter of the self with its potential for reason as a faculty superior to the senses; at the same time, it also highlights the inability of imagination to meet that challenge. Be that as it may, the decisive feature of Kant’s attempt to locate an a priori intuition of (both pure and practical) reason in the sublime is the experience of an inappropriable alterity: it confronts the self’s imagination with its limitations even if it enables the self to consolidate around an a priori of reason (Böhme and Böhme 1996, 231–245); at the same time, it dramatizes the incommensurability between the faculties of the human mind and nature, thus recognizing the ontological autonomy of the nonhuman realm. Kant’s inability to offer a fully satisfactory integration of pure and practical reason, however, is reflected in the rise of tragedy as a mode of reflection on the human condition throughout the nineteenth century— during an age when it gradually lost its luster as a literary form. Especially

Anthropomorphism and Alterity  115 in Hegel, tragedy becomes an exposition of the conflict between immutable orders co-existing in humans: “nature” as the realm of necessity—the sensory, the finite—and “freedom” as the realm of practical human selfprojection into the future constitute orders that cannot be integrated by a common moral law. Friedrich Nietzsche pushes this line of inquiry further: he radically questions the dualist ontology of modern humanism and argues that it leads to life-denying asceticism, pitting humans against nature. Yet, he is equally wary of any facile attempt to assume an isomorphous relation between nature and the humanist human. He rejects teleological solutions to Kant’s problem, which may appear life-affirming but are, in fact, he insists, hostile to an affirmative evaluation of non-teleological processes of nature: “Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics argues that negation is the anthropomorphism par excellence, the fundamental ‘moral’ cornerstone underpinning post-Socratic culture” (Urpeth 1999, 130). Instead, he seeks to overcome humanism by thinking beyond what he regards as the fundamentally tragic psychology of modernity: humans would rather “will the void” than “void the will” (2007, 339). What Nietzsche offers in response to his critique of humanism is what Jim Urpeth has called the “tragic sublime,” that is, an affirmation of the processes of self-expenditure in life that, in turn, reveal the limits of human cognitive faculties (Urpeth 1999, 131–135). This leads to Nietzsche’s mutually reinforcing projects of re-evaluating human values and transfiguring life through art. Art, for him, is not part of cultural but of evolutionary history—a physiological reconnection of culture with its material bases: “art is the least human of all ‘cultural’ products. It is a fundamental process of material life that periodically invades the ‘human’ and employs it in order to expend itself ‘without purpose’” (ibid., 134). In this self-transfigurative process of life, humans are the medium for a “self-justification” (Selbstrechtfertigung) of nature (Nietzsche 1999, 680). Celebrated as the pinnacle of civilization, art is thus re-evaluated as an integral part of natural history—a form of self-intensification of life that is marked by a lack of purpose and defies instrumental reason. Precisely what bourgeois culture embraces as the epitome of authentic individual self-expression becomes an experience of radical alterity, breaking as a natural force through the tragic self-inoculation of humans against life and its vicissitudes: “chance, the uncertain, the sudden” (der Zufall, das Ungewisse, das Plötzliche) (ibid., 1019). Art here becomes a mystagogue reminding humans of the nihilism behind their attempt to anthropomorphize everything and anything that is not human. What Nietzsche underestimates, however, is the fact that the “empiricaltranscendental doublet,” that is, the subject position of modern humanism, engenders its own material history that increasingly interferes with the history of life. Foucault ended The Order of Things with the unabashedly Nietzschean hope that the modern humanist episteme will be “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1970, 387). A hundred

116  Bernhard Malkmus and fifty years after Nietzsche and fifty years after Foucault, we know that this projection is ill-conceived. The face of the humanist human may, indeed, vanish, but the legacy of its material history has left a lasting fossil record in the ground. Kant and Nietzsche negotiate, in different ways, the ontological insecurities opened up by the epistemic shifts in modernity that have gradually installed what Taylor calls an “exclusive humanism”: This humanism, which puts the individual at the center of its attention, was accompanied by an increased sense of human power, that of the disengaged, impartial ordering agent, or of the self-giver of law, or of an agent who could tap immense inner resources of benevolence and sympathy, empowering him/her to act for universal human good on an unprecedented scale. […] the buffered identity, capable of disciplined control and benevolence, generated its own sense of dignity and power, its own inner satisfactions, and these could tilt in favor of exclusive humanism. (Taylor 2007, 261–262) Kant and Nietzsche navigate such an ever more dominant “exclusive humanism” and its phantasma of an autonomous identity, created from nothing and buffered against nature, in very different ways, but both rely on a concept of radical alterity in their analyses of the subject’s relation to the world: Kant, unable to reconcile what he saw as a widening gap between scientific knowledge and moral orientation, turned to the experience of “the sublime” as an encounter with something that points human imagination beyond itself and, at the same time, cannot be appropriated by it. Nietzsche, by contrast, emphasized the potential of self-forgetting and self-expenditure in human creativity to transcend the realm of culture, thus embedding creativity in the natural history of creatureliness. It is, he suggests, this ability to avail oneself of one’s creatureliness that affords the potential to overcome humanism and become human. For both thinkers, a theoretical configuration of unavailability or absolute alterity is the condition for the possibility to negotiate freedom. Both locate this negotiation in experiences of nature that emphasize, as Giorgio Agamben has put it, the concurrent “extreme separation and vertiginous proximity” between the human and the other-than-human (2016, 90).

Human Scale in the Anthropocene The converging of the history of Earth systems, the history of life and the history of human civilizations in the Anthropocene does not synchronize these different scales in one history. Contemporary thinking about ontology, however, often essentializes the non-essential, thus rendering impossible historically informed analyses of alienation and hegemony, and is

Anthropomorphism and Alterity  117 often unable (or unwilling) to account for systemic processes of differentiation and the role of scalar differences and alterity in these processes. This holds also true of the use of “ecology” as a key metaphor in cultural theory. Timothy Morton, for example, frequently endorses “ecology,” as opposed to “nature,” as an Anthropocene ontology, while, in fact, making an argument about its alleged superiority as a mode of moral reasoning (Morton 2010, 9–10). This chapter engages with three attempts to understand the human condition in the Anthropocene. They emphasize, in different ways, the necessity and productivity of alterity, thus continuing the efforts of Kant and Nietzsche under the auspices of human geological agency: Hannah Arendt’s reflection on the human condition, written during the Great Acceleration as a major reflection on the nuclear age, Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, written during an early phase of a global ecological imaginary, and Hartmut Rosa’s recent theory of resonance that explores the social and psychological conditions for establishing relations with an increasingly homogenized and anthropomorphic world. Arendt emphasizes the importance of the Greek concept of phýsis— commonly translated as “nature,” literally “that which is born out of itself”—for an understanding of the human condition (Arendt 1998, 150). Humans, she argues, are rooted in the history of that phýsis and, at the same time, radically different from it, due to the momentum of their work. Marx had already, under the impression of Justus von Liebig’s experiments, reflected on the differences and potential discrepancies between natural and social metabolisms (and highlighted potentially far-reaching consequences of ecological degradation). Arendt distinguishes between three different forms of human activity: “labor” is tantamount to working the ecological metabolism for sustaining human biological life; “work” is the “erection of a world of things” (ibid., 144) that follows its own inherent rules and increasingly interferes with the ecological metabolism; “action” is the perpetual public negotiation between what we can be and what we ought to be under the conditions of our inherent individual plurality (ibid., 188–192, 207–212). It is in the realm of “action” that humans become political. But the integrity of the political realm—which is what constitutes the Anthropocene dimension in Arendt’s thinking—is dependent on acknowledging the scalar differences of “labor” and “work” in relation to phýsis. Otherwise, she argues, everything will, sooner or later, be homogenized by the momentum of “work” (for which the industrial–military complex of the Cold War provided the blueprint at the time). During the Great Acceleration and the Cold War, Arendt analyzed two central dangers: (1) “world-alienation” due to a systematic replacement of labor and action through work; (2) “earth-alienation” due to a systematic disembedding of our createdness and our freedom through engineered networks. Both forms of alienation, she stresses, are “a rebellion against human existence as it has been given” (ibid., 2; see also Arendt 2000).

118  Bernhard Malkmus Phýsis, by contrast, for Arendt affords an irreconcilable experience of belonging and difference: it allows us to relate to the ecological metabolism that sustains us and, at the same time, to relate to the pain and hope associated with birth and death. Remembering this dual framing of the human is, for Arendt, the origin of “the political.” In the nuclear age, when science and technology have become the arena for a fundamental transformation of phýsis, she reminds her readers that the “earth is the very quintessence of the human condition” (ibid., 2). She thus takes issue with conflating the metabolism of phýsis with an artificial second nature—the forerunner of the autopoietic “technosphere” that she already sees at work in the industrial “machine”: As long as the work at the machines lasts, the mechanical process has replaced the rhythm of the human body. Even the most refined tool remains a servant, unable to guide or replace the hand. Even the most primitive machine guides the body’s labor and eventually replaces it altogether. (ibid., 147) She emphasizes that the modern human condition is completely dominated by “work,” i.e. modes of production and consumption that keep us locked in the autopoietic logic of the world we created as an artifice. It prevents us from (1) engaging with our ecological conditions and from (2) becoming political by exercising the faculties that would safeguard the future of plurality and natality. Instead, we have ceded “complete victory to society”: The social realm, where the life process has established its own public domain, has let loose an unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural; and it is against this growth […] that the private and intimate, on the one hand, and the political […], on the other, have proved incapable of defending themselves. (ibid., 47) That accelerated “growth” of the realm of “work” and “society” means that we are channeling all our cultural energies into preserving an anthropomorphic bubble; it means that we disregard (or exterminate) other scales that could challenge that bubble; it means that we refuse to become political, which for Arendt means to tackle both our world-alienation and our earth-alienation; and it means that we lose our ability to resonate with the world we inhabit and the earth that sustains human life. Changing this cultural and political conditioning would, as Agamben points out, require a “deactivation of the Aristotelian apparatus potential/act, which assigns to energeia, to being-at-work, primacy over potential” (Agamben 2016, 93). He espouses, probably taking his cue from Arendt, a concept of “using the world” that acknowledges that our relation to the world ultimately needs

Anthropomorphism and Alterity  119 to be “possessionless” and “poor” in order to be just. “Use” thus becomes “the only possible relation to that supreme state of the world in which it, as just, can be in no way appropriated” (ibid., 81). In order to maintain potential vis-à-vis enérgeia—Arendt’s “action” vis-à-vis Aristotle’s “act”—“use” relies on humans’ ability to establish resonances with their surroundings rather than on the density of instrumental or strategic partnerships that are designed to serve specific goals. These resonances constitute an intrinsic sense of enlivenment and long-term structures of belonging: the openness to being addressed and affected, the ability to be responsive and develop self-efficacy and the willingness to be transformed by emerging resonances with the world (Rosa 2020, 38–45). In addition to the fulfillment of personal relationships with other people, these resonances facilitate processes that point beyond the individual and interpersonal relationships: the liveliness of life at large. Sociological theories of resonance have amplified concepts of the self that emphasize the role of communication, mutuality and recognition. The very notion of resonance always implies a certain resistance, obdurance and friction through which resonance can emerge. It implies that the world does not oblige to the desires of the individual and that it eludes the modern phantasma of anthropomorphizing the world on a planetary scale. The Anthropocene is the moment when this elusiveness becomes palpable as a loss of resonance with the world. The Anthropocene is the phase in modernity when two related developments coalesce. Firstly, humans have re-shaped the biosphere according to human scales by marginalizing or exterminating other expressions of life and alternative forms of cohabitation with life. Max Weber famously identified two aspects as the root causes of those processes of homogenization that manifest themselves as planetary anthropomorphism in the Anthropocene: first, the belief that, in principle, everything can be known and therefore quantified and thus dominated, which he associates with Friedrich Schiller’s concept of “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) (1958, 139), and second, the standardization of time and the encasing of our sense of time in a single dimension of time that he likens to an “iron cage” (stahlhartes Gehäuse) (Weber 1958, 181). This temporal order is challenged today by the asynchrony with the deep histories of life and matter. This process of anthropomorphic homogenization of humankind’s lifeworlds has, in industrial societies, led to a loss of resonant relations with the world, argues Rosa: A relation to the world that does not allow and tolerate any disturbance and disruption, any encounter with something alien and unfamiliar, any experience of estrangement from the self or the world, would not only tend to be one-dimensional and—by suppressing anything nonidentical or non-harmonious—potentially totalitarian. It would also turn into a mute relation to the world, because the world would lose its inappropriable character (das Unverfügbare), its own voice and, thus, its

120  Bernhard Malkmus ability to respond. By the same token, the subject would lose its ability to translate something that is alien into something that is one’s own—a process that exposes the subject itself to transformative processes. (Rosa 2016, 59–60, own translation) Secondly, while the planet echoes the agency of anthropomorphism that has led to the transformation of the Earth’s life-support systems, it also increasingly disrupts the “buffered self” that, according to Charles Taylor, marks the self-enclosure of the modern subject in instrumental relations: The buffered identity is deeply anchored in our social order, our embedding in secular time, the disengaged disciplines we have taken on. This anchoring ensures our invulnerability. But it can also be lived as a limit, even a prison, making us blind or insensitive to whatever lies beyond this ordered human world and its instrumental-rational projects. The sense can easily arise that we are missing something, cut off from something, that we are living behind a screen. (Taylor 2007, 301–302) The various macrosystemic rebound effects that force contemporary humans into a global ecological reflexivity (and that Isabelle Stengers has memorably captured by the image of the ticklish Gaia) create the kind of friction that could dialectically trigger new resonances or even a sense of planet (Stengers 2015, 45–46). The planetary crisis could, theoretically, pose an opportunity for re-discovering “the world” as a frame for our sense of agency that precedes our sense of selfhood—rather than as a mere resource for furnishing selfhood. (It could, however, also deepen the narcissistic psychology of the “buffered self.”) The Anthropocene thus does not only mark humankind’s becoming a geological agent and thus perpetuating and deepening two major selfdynamic developments of industrial modernity: the systemic differentiation through acceleration and the expansion of individual agency through standardization and homogenization (see Rosa 2016, 599–614). It also marks a double caesura in the history of modernity: first, Foucault’s “empiricaltranscendental doublet” cannot maintain the dualism between Prometheus as the subject, on the one hand, and nature as an objective object, on the other; second, the rebound effects of anthropogenic transformations of major Earth systems on human civilization perforate Weber’s “iron cage” and call into doubt the efficacy of instrumental reason. Paradoxically, in the very moment when humans are ascending to geological agency as an unintended cumulative consequence of instrumental reason that mutes human–nature resonances, the human-induced changes in Earth systemic processes force humans into a new form of resonance with the planet. The ability to create oases of resonance in an environment transformed by a totalized efficiency paradigm becomes a question of survival in the Anthropocene, rather than

Anthropomorphism and Alterity  121 just a question of individual well-being, the “good life” or communal resilience, even though these aspects are interconnected. Throughout the nineteenth century, the human world is less and less experienced as something that corresponds to nature, but increasingly as radically different from it. Nature thus becomes a central compensatory mechanism for the challenges of modernity: Weber’s rationalization, bureaucratization and disenchantment. We can only find the surreptitious correspondences, that we moderns are still looking for in nature, in what is inappropriable, unavailable, not at our disposal, or unverfügbar—what we cannot translate into a balance sheet. Philippe Descola has argued emphatically that Western modernity is marked by what he terms “naturalism” and its paradoxical rift: it draws an epistemic distinction between animated culture and unanimated nature while purporting a material continuity between all “physicalities,” thus blurring all ontological differences (Descola 2013, 232–235). This rift has been inscribed into Anthropocene culture as the dissociation between environmental awareness and environmental ethics. While we are telling ourselves that humans are simply yet another agency among many, our minds are increasingly inhabiting spaces that are disconnected from any ecological metabolism. While this attitude may just nourish the lethal illusion that we can sustain ourselves outside ecological metabolisms, it creates its own anthropomorphic fossil record. While our culture continues to deny nature a voice, we are ever more impatiently expecting it to speak to us. This problem cuts to the epistemological core problem of the Anthropocene: in an age of terraforming and anthropo-technology, the relation between pure and practical reason, between empirical causes and moral reasons, becomes more blurred by the day. If we lose the ability to tell apart the scalar differences between the biosphere, the human sphere and the technosphere, the loss of resonance with nature will become the central anxiety of our age: The core of the deep-seated present-day environmental concern is not that we will lose nature as a resource, but that nature will fall silent as a sphere of resonance—as a self-contained counterpart that is able to respond to us and thus offer some kind of orientation. (Rosa 2016, 463, own translation) The fear Rosa articulates here is the fear that a totally anthropomorphic world under the auspices of an anthropogenic transformation of life will deprive us of the ability to experience anything other than human interests and hegemonies. The inability to develop resonances with the world, the totalization of anthropomorphism, will ultimately deprive us of the ability to become human. The total emancipation from nature—the great promise of the Enlightenment—is predicated upon the horror vacui of a totally silenced world.

122  Bernhard Malkmus For Adorno, the muteness of nature is a result of humans rendering it anthropomorphic and thus—in the terms of the Dialectics of Enlightenment— mythological. The issue of resonance is an eminently aesthetic problem that he sought to tackle in his Aesthetic Theory. Natural beauty in modernity, he suggests, is always already mediated by art—as a form of remembering nature through the veil of its becoming-myth. Art, he insists, is able to unearth a trace and a voice in nature and thus facilitate resonances where they have become otherwise impossible: “Natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity” (Adorno 2002, 73). In commemorating the “nonidentical,” natural beauty points beyond the reduction of nature to industrial homogeneity and the exigencies of instrumental reason—and toward its potential to create resonances with human life. The naturalness of nature is, according to Adorno, perpetuated rather than emancipated or reconciled in industrialism: “Just how industrial it looks in inorganic outer space will someday be clear” (ibid., 68). The modern project of total domination of nature intensifies what Adorno associates with naturalness in nature: a conjoining of entropy and Darwinian principles (an idea which would be contested by most theoretical biologists who define the genetic code and evolution precisely as life’s resistance to entropy). Natural beauty becomes a trace of the potential for resonances and for the mutually reinforcing enlivenment between the realm of the human and the realm of nature, because it exhibits rather than disguises the differences between these realms. For Adorno, this constitutes the precondition for a “reconciliation” of humans with themselves and a “redemption” of nature from its “naturalness” (ibid., 77. 107). Contemplating the “trace of the nonidentical” in aesthetically rendered natural beauty thus becomes an act of commemoration as well as an initiation into emancipating oneself from totalized anthropomorphism, which—for Adorno—is a continuation of the unredeemed forces of nature. What privileges art for this ethos of commemoration and emancipation is the experience of alterity inherent in artistic form. In dedicating ourselves to the autonomy of form in an artwork, Adorno insists, illusions of omnipotence and master narratives are dispelled. Both creator and recipient are exposed to a “shudder” (Erschütterung):5 Shudder, radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience [Erlebnis], provides no particular satisfaction for the I; it bears no similarity to desire. Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken, perceives its own limitedness and finitude. (ibid., 245) This profound disorientation afforded by art confronts the subject with a sense of his or her own creatureliness; it requires a self-dedication that frustrates the illusion of omnipotence and thus prompts human imagination to conceive of alternatives to instrumental reason. Natural beauty, mediated

Anthropomorphism and Alterity  123 through an artwork, sets in motion a shock of recognition that Adorno envisages as a necessary condition for his ethos of “reconciliation.”6 Even though Adorno has distanced his concept of natural beauty from Kant’s influential reception aesthetic category of “disinterested pleasure,” the discussion of reflective taste judgments in Kant does already point toward what Adorno unfolds in his Aesthetic Theory (2002, 11). For Kant, judgments of the beautiful in nature and art move beyond conceptual determinism: they “quicken” imagination (Kant 2009, §14, 550), and natural beauty, in particular, instills a “feeling of life” (Lebensgefühl) into humans—a resonance with life predicated on the absence of teleology in nature (ibid., §1, 522). In reflective taste judgments of natural beauty, “the human subject experiences nature not as an object of the determination of the faculties of reason […] but as an occasion for the subject’s own ‘quickening’” (Gosetti-Ferencei 2004, 151). Relating to nature outside a non-legislative determination of nature is tantamount to a recognition of the fact that nature is not entirely at human disposal and ultimately remains inappropriable. This ability to experience resonances by virtue of recognizing the radical otherness of a life agency beyond reason is, according to Kant, the basis for a “sensus communis” that forms the basis for human universality (Kant 2009, §20). In spite of their subjective nature, taste judgments lead to the objective certainty that the freedom that comes with disinterested pleasure is universally shared. The freedom of the taste judgment thus facilitates a comprehension of the unity in diversity in nature.

Conclusion George Berkeley is, mistakenly, credited with posing the thought experiment: “If a tree falls and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”7 The answer is in the negative: without a human “someone” to decode the vibrations and sounds of the falling tree, there is no falling tree. This is the kind of answer characteristic of an age that mistakes the procedural aspects of its social organization (Arendt’s “work”) and its order of knowledge (Kant’s “pure reason”) for reality. There is, however, no ecological situation conceivable anywhere on the planet in which the falling of a tree wouldn’t be decoded in various ways by myriads of creatures. The wet nurses at the cradle of modernity whispered homo mensura, and the age has, indeed, grown into an anthropomorphic one: we have stopped inhabiting the world and moved to our artificial worlds; we have stopped going into the forests and silenced our intuition that a forest is a web of life. We have conditioned the world we are inhabiting according to what we perceive as our needs. We have thus scaled and shaped everything according to our species. We are, as dutiful Darwinians, calling ourselves just yet another species, so that we don’t have to admit to ourselves how radical the evolutionary pressure is that we are inflicting on other species. We have emancipated all kinds of agencies in flat ontologies and are reinventing ourselves as “ecologists” for

124  Bernhard Malkmus whom everything is connected with everything. That way we don’t have to work through our human condition in the Anthropocene and mourn our loss of resonances; that way we don’t have to confront our createdness and work on the Arendtian political “action” that would really make a difference: a philosophy of letting be and a praxis of healing as opposed to total engineering, for example, or the experience of wilderness as an ethics of resonance. “What would the world be, once bereft / Of wet and of wildness?” asks Gerald Manley Hopkins in his poem “Inversnaid” (Hopkins 2002, 153). The world without wilderness, he fears, would not be able to regenerate itself from its own resources—which is the very definition of the Greek term phýsis. His question is, however, also a question about “the human,” for whom a world without wilderness will entail the loss of alterity and thus the loss of the potential for resonance, transformation and emancipation. This is what Walter Benjamin has remarked upon with unsurpassed succinctness while walking through the Arcades of nineteenthcentury capitalism: “That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe” (Benjamin 1999, 473).

Acknowledgment The author gratefully acknowledges support by the Alexander-vonHumboldt Foundation for working on this chapter during a fellowship at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.

Notes 1 First Duino Elegy: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror / which we are barely able to endure and are awed / because it serenely disdains to annihilate us” (trans. Albert Ernest Fleming). 2 On the history of a global ecological reflexivity since the late eighteenth century, see Bonneuil and Fressoz 2015. 3 See Haff 2019, 139: “In emerging as a global phenomenon, the technosphere has joined the classical spheres [atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere] to become an autonomous Earth system, operating without direct human control. […] the technosphere is currently overwhelming the ability of other spheres to meet its demands for raw materials and essential services such as waste recycling. […] the technosphere itself is endowed with its intrinsic purposiveness.” 4 This tendency can be seen, for example, in Harman 2009; Morton 2009, especially Chapter 3; and Oppermann 2011. Even foundational texts of what is often termed “new materialism” do not entirely eschew this problem and sometimes circumvent it by unsatisfactory axiomatic argumentative moves. It is, for example, remarkable that neither Barad (2007) nor Bennett (2010), in spite of the undisputed advances and merits of their approaches, is able to articulate a theory of life as an integral part of their materialism and agential realism, respectively. 5 “Shudder” is an infelicitous translation of Erschütterung, which implies a dimension of deep existential unsettling.

Anthropomorphism and Alterity  125 6 This discussion of Adorno aimed at highlighting the degree to which one of the most advanced aesthetic theories developed under the conditions of the Great Acceleration operates with concepts of alterity. Needless to say, the emphatic notion of the artwork, the ethos of Erschütterung through aesthetic praxes and the analysis of natural beauty invite critical scrutiny that cannot be conducted within the limitations of this chapter. Gernot Böhme begins such a scrutiny in Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik 1989, 19–23. 7 For an extensive discussion, see Campbell 2014.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Aesthetic Theory, edited and translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer 1988. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Agamben, Giorgio. 2016. The Use of Bodies, translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 2000. “Natur und Geschichte,” Zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft: Übungen im politischen Denken I, edited by Ursula Ludz. Munich: Piper, 54–79. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham/NC: Duke University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham/NC: Duke University Press. Böhme, Gernot. 1989. Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Böhme , Gernot and Hartmut Böhme. 1996. Das Andere der Vernunft. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2015. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, translated by David Fernbach. London: Verso. Campbell, John. 2014. Berkeley’s Puzzle: What Does Experience Teach Us? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture, translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. 2004. Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein. New York: Fordham University Press. Haff, Peter. 2019. “The Technosphere and Its Relation to the Anthropocene.” In The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate, edited by Jan Zalasiewicz et al. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 138–143. Harman, Graham. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Repress.

126  Bernhard Malkmus Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 2002. The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2009. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Schriften zur Ästhetik und Naturphilosophie, edited by Manfred Frank and Véronique Zanetti. Frankfurt/M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2009. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2007. Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der Moral (KSA 5), edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: dtv. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. Nachlass 1884–85 (KSA 11), edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: dtv. Oppermann, Serpil. 2011. “Ecocentric Postmodern Theory: Interrelations between Ecological, Quantum, and Postmodern Theories.” In Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, edited by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 230–242. Rosa, Hartmut. 2016. Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Rosa, Hartmut. 2020. Unverfügbarkeit. Salzburg: Residenz. Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, translated by Andrew Geoffey. Open Humanities Press. http:​/​/ope​​nhuma​​nitie​​ spres​​s​.org​​/book​​s​/dow​​nload​​/Sten​​gers_​​2015_​​In​-Ca​​tastr​​​ophic​​-Time​​s​.pdf​ Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Urpeth, Jim. 1999. “A ‘Pessimism of Strength’: Nietzsche and the Tragic Sublime.” In Nietzsche’s Futures, edited by John Lippitt. London: Macmillan, 129–148. Weber, Max. 1958 [1904–1905]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribner. Weber, Max. 1958 [1917]. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. trans. and ed. by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press. 129–156.

7

“We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure” Arendtian Ethics and the Narration of Scale in the Anthropocene Adeline Johns-Putra

The neologism, that is the Anthropocene, brings humankind, or ánthrōpos, into conjunction with geological processes, the “-cene” suffix having been modeled on existing geological epochal nomenclature. Moreover, “-cene” (from kainos, meaning “new”) heralds a new age, whether wholly new as in the Holocene (hólos means “whole”) or mostly new as in the Pleistocene (pleīstos, for “most”). This new age of the human thus places human-sized time, with human-sized concerns, ambitions and agency, alongside the dramatically larger durations of geology. In other words, the juxtaposition inherent in the idea of—and the very word—the Anthropocene is primarily a scalar disjunction, a mismatch between human perception and experience on the one hand and the planetary history of the Earth on the other. As many have pointed out, this sense of disjunction operates along the axes of space and time. Thus, Timothy Clark has found that “the Anthropocene enacts the demand to think of human life at much broader scales of space and time” (2015, 13), leading to what he terms “Anthropocene disorder” (2015, 139–157), and Amitav Ghosh has suggested that the Anthropocene surfaces “forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space,” the collision of intimacy and vastness creating a “great derangement” (63). The temporal and spatial dimensions of this disorder and derangement have been scrutinized in several other influential investigations. Dipesh Chakrabarty analyzes the difference between the individual and communal longues durées that are the chief concern of conventional historiography and the massive biological timeframes in which species emerge, evolve and, in some cases, become extinct: he makes the case, therefore, for attending to what he calls “species history” (212). Meanwhile, and just as famously, Timothy Morton (2013) coined the phrase “hyperobject” to describe objects, including the concepts and ideas disclosed by the Anthropocene, such as climate change, that are, as he puts it, “massively distributed in space and time relative to humans” (1). Driving this spatial and temporal derangement, of course, is another distinction, namely the gap of perspective between Homo sapiens

DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-7

128  Adeline Johns-Putra and the trillions of nonhuman species that occupy the planet, all of which inhabit spaces and timeframes sometimes vastly different to those of humans, whether conceived of on the evolutionary, species level or on the individual, organismal level—just, for example, consider that the average lifespan of a bacterium is 12 hours, that of a Greenland shark over 400 years and that of a giant sequoia about 2,000 years. The spatial and temporal disjuncts that come with living in—and being aware of living in—the Anthropocene lead to a gap in our perceptions versus that of the species with whom we share the biosphere; this gap is a cognitive dissonance when it comes to attending to and accounting for the reality of multispecies agency on the one hand and retaining a sense of human-sized responsibility (and the agency that accompanies this) on the other. This, I suggest, is a key part of the Anthropocene’s scalar disjunction and, in particular, is at the nub of our experience of the Anthropocene as a dilemma, specifically, an ethical dilemma. How, then, to retain a human-sized dimension to narrative, sufficient both to recognize the differences within human experience and to activate human responsibility and agency? What follows is a case for the relevance of narrative and the strategic retention of the human in the stories we tell, as well as the ethics that underpin them, in the Anthropocene. First, I consider how Anthropocene questions of spatial and temporal scale are also questions of representational and ethical disjunction. However, as I then show, conventional versions of literary—especially, narrative— ethics tend to operate at the human scale, and only exacerbate this sense of disconnection. I turn therefore to the political thinker Hannah Arendt for a very different kind of literary ethics, one that acknowledges the importance of human thought in generating an ethical response. An Arendtian literary ethics, I suggest, uses that thought to imagine a new scalar awareness, but at the same time proposes a model of human thought that is capable of decentering itself even as it operates. Finally, I briefly consider the science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem (2014), by the Chinese author Liu Cixin, as an exercise in Arendtian thought.

Narrative and Scale: Representational and Ethical Questions Whether literary narrative can help to address or only further embed the effects of scalar derangement is a point of some debate. For Ghosh, the spatial and temporal scale of the novel, by which he means primarily the realist novel, is inherently anthropocentric, derived from the particularities of its “setting” and its “period” and the deliberate receding of other places and times away from these: “It is through the imposition of these boundaries, in time and space, that the world of a novel is created” (Ghosh 2016, 63). For Clark, similarly, “the still-dominant conventions of plotting, characterization and setting in the novel need to be openly acknowledged as pervaded by anthropocentric delusion” (Clark 2015, 191).

“We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure”  129 Both Ghosh and Clark emphasize that this is, fundamentally, not just a representational but an ethical dilemma. Clark, citing Claire Colebrook’s consideration of how the erasure of the human scale in representational terms is also, dangerously, an erasure of human responsibility in ethical terms, wonders if “what becomes visible in the Anthropocene is that our very notions of the moral and ethical are at fault” (Clark 2015, 153; Colebrook 2012, 188–189). Ghosh sounds a more hopeful note. While he opines that realist fiction, with its emphasis on the “sincerity and authenticity” of single and singular experiences and consciences, has contributed to “an individualizing human imaginary” that is inadequate to the collective imaginary and agency required to respond to climate change, he argues nonetheless that it is, perversely, fiction that is best suited to organizing a collective response: “the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis” (Ghosh 2016, 128–129). Ghosh’s optimism for the potential of fiction to respond to scalar difficulties is noteworthy, not least because it is supported by a closer consideration of what fictional representation is capable of achieving. In terms of representational examples, it is worth distinguishing, for ease of analysis, between the extent and the effect of scalar disjuncture in terms of space and time, respectively (though both parameters have a bearing on the speciesist implications of this disjuncture). Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller helpfully divide the Anthropocene’s critical concerns between those that deal with the planetary from those that deal with deep time (141–169). When one turns to novels that contribute to a global imaginary, one finds that they are not so focused on the particularities of personhood, as Ghosh suggests, that they are incapable of showing the mutually shaping connections that distinctive subjects have, not just with each other but with their environments. And the realist novel, whose limitations Ghosh so laments, has shown itself supremely capable of shedding light on these connections, including (and, perhaps, especially) the conventionally realist panoplies that form the backdrop of the long novels of the late nineteenth century. Thus, Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels (1871–1893) depicts the symbiosis between the families of the series’ title and the unique terroir that they inhabit and shape, in ways that, as Jessica Tanner and John Parham point out in separate analyses, emphasize climatic and ecological interdependences (Tanner 2017, 20–33; Parham 2017, 45–47). Victorian fiction often imbricates human activity with climatic disturbance, not only literally (as when the London fog that shrouds Dickens’ novels is depicted as anthropogenic) but figuratively (as when emotional atmospheres are correlated with physical ones). So much so that, as Jesse Oak Taylor suggests, the Victorian novel works as a kind of climate model (Taylor 2016). Moreover, moving beyond nineteenth-century realism, it is possible to find novels that widen the lens further, taking not a regional but a planetary view. Ursula Heise identifies fictional interconnections between human, nonhuman and

130  Adeline Johns-Putra wider environmental experiences that form a global whole—what she calls “eco-cosmopolitanism”—as the special ability of science fiction (Heise 2008, 59–62). The global imaginary, as Horn and Bergthaller remind us, is best conveyed through the idea of human and nonhuman species combining into a distributed agency, and the novels that Tanner, Parham, Taylor and Heise analyze all offer versions of this (Horn and Bergthaller 2020, 151). When it comes to responding to geological deep time, a different set of possibilities exists. The challenge of rendering epochal time in geological terms is not simply historical but metahistorical, Horn and Bergthaller argue (157). In other words (and to return to Chakrabarty), what is at issue is not comparing and contrasting subjective experiences but stepping outside the experiential altogether in order to chart species evolution—as Chakrabarty puts it, species is a concept and “one never experiences being a concept” (220). Thus, Horn and Bergthaller turn to the methods of “Deep History” and “Big History,” specifically, the former’s chronicling of “the long process by which anatomically modern humans gradually eclipsed other hominids and developed into behaviorally modern humans” and the latter’s mode of situating “the history of humankind […] within the larger history of life,” including that of “the history of the solar system” and “the history of the universe” (163–164).1 For Horn and Bergthaller, this raises the “decisive question” of “how such a history can be narrated” (163). Robert Markley, in considering how best to represent what he calls climatological—rather than geological—time, seems to offer one answer. In his analysis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Shaman (2013), set in the Ice Age some 40,000 years ago, Markley contends that Robinson allows us to immerse ourselves in a world of “history before history—before writing, agriculture, sophisticated technologies of calculation, and socioeconomic hierarchies” (Markley 2019, 27). Robinson’s novel thus acts by “defamiliarising time and history” (30). One might add that, in its depiction of life at the edge of human extinction, it also defamiliarizes humankind’s sense of itself as a species at the center of time and history. One might further add to the example of Robinson’s novel by considering a less recent text such as William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955), which achieves a comparable effect by enacting a very human drama with a strikingly nonhuman ensemble of Neanderthals, identified as “the people,” who compete with incoming Homo sapiens, or “New People,” in a way that engenders an awareness of humans as one species among others. Representational strategies such as these work best by either connecting or juxtaposing the ontological realities operating at vastly different scales. What is key, however, to their effectiveness in the Anthropocene is not a smooth switching between scales but an acknowledgment of the gaps between them. This highlighting of disjuncts is what Derek Woods calls “scale variance” within the larger practice of “scale critique,” which “shows the sleight of hand whereby accounts of human agency from familiar (individual, novelistic, small group) scales get scaled up across

“We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure”  131 disjunctures” (Woods 2014, 137). For Woods, the operative concept is that of assemblage, recognizing agency as emerging out of inter-species interaction (137–140). That is to say, scale variance and critique can engender an awareness of humans as species in relation to other species, whether spatially or temporally—in other words, ecologically and evolutionarily. This comes as close as representationally possible to an enactment of the experience—or, more accurately, non-experience—of species-hood that Chakrabarty describes, but which, by virtue of being outside of experience, is elusive. As I have indicated, the representational challenges are also ethical ones and cannot quite be separated out. Herein, then, lies the dilemma. As my discussions of Ghosh and Clark already suggest, behind the question of ethics is the question of responsibility, and behind the question of responsibility is that of agency: Who is responsible and who is able to effect change? Similarly, behind the question of representation is that of perspective, not just how events or experiences are depicted but from what position, that is, how are we invited to make sense of them? And it is where matters of perspective touch on matters of agency that representational challenges touch on ethical ones. That is to say, conventional models of literary (especially narrative) ethics assume that perspective equates to agency—that readers’ ability to share a fictitious view or inhabit a fictitious space is what drives their willingness to engage imaginatively, psychologically and perhaps morally. It follows that this engagement must perforce occur on a human scale. What is needed, then, is a decidedly unconventional model of ethics that invites readers’ consideration of (human) moral responsibility and concomitantly activates a sense of (human) agency, while providing a diversity of human and nonhuman perspectives that disclose the range of positions, powers and agencies across these. Clark has more recently suggested: A supremely important task for modern literature and for criticism becomes for them to find ways of representing this new reality of elusive agencies and distant or invisible wrongs, happening at counter-intuitive scales, and to do so in ways that are engaging, credible and pertinent. (2019, 84) The question, in other words, is: How might fictive worlds of interconnections, multiple scales and de-centered human agency speak to individual human readers? This difficulty—or perhaps downright impossibility—in promoting individuals’ engagement with assemblage agency is something that, according to Woods, Chakrabarty does not quite address. For Woods, Chakrabarty continues to emphasize “species identity” (Woods 2014, 139). A privileging of human identity assumes that a human perspective in narrative is required to activate human identification. And this difficulty—this gulf—is one of the most troubling points in the full range of scalar discontinuity wrought by the Anthropocene.

132  Adeline Johns-Putra

Arendtian Literary Ethics: The Experience in Thinking The conventional view of the ethical purchase of fictive narrative is predicated on a process of emotional and empathetic identification and connection with the plot and the character. This is the case in the work of recent engagements with literary ethics, ranging from moral philosopher Robert Solomon to literary scholars Suzanne Keen (2007), Kenneth Asher (2017) and Alexa Weik von Mossner (2017). It is most obviously so in the influential work of Martha Nussbaum (1997, 2001, 2013). Nussbaum draws on the Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia, that is, human well-being or flourishing, and particularly Aristotle’s conceptualization of how the parameters of ethical decision-making are determined by the things that contribute to one’s well-being (2001, 300). Nussbaum focuses particularly on how emotions, such as compassion, draw consideration for others’ well-being into the “circle of concern” of one’s own well-being (2001, 319). Literature, particularly the novel, becomes a powerful tool because it allows the witnessing of and sympathizing with the experiences of unknown others; literature widens the circle of concern drastically (1997, 88; 2013, 11). Such a framework focuses on the process of identification as the basis for eudaimonistic compassion. However, here, I seek to move beyond such assumptions.2 I do so in view of the seemingly impassable breach between the human scale at which the identifying reader sits and the geological, planetary and even cosmological scales at which the Anthropocene’s diffuse forms of agency proliferate. Specifically, I speculate on the possibility for a narrative text to deploy the reader’s critical faculties in order to think through and remove the question of personal identity once and for all; furthermore, I ask whether a narrative might provoke readers into acknowledging their places in the world as basically multi-centered and their voices as inherently dialogic. I attempt to answer that question by considering literary narrative as what Arendt termed the “experience in thinking” (Arendt 2006a, 13). Arendt’s preface to a collection of essays entitled Between Past and Future, first published in 1961, describes these essays as “exercises in political thought” (2006a, 14). Far from being a vague or figurative reference to activity or performance, Arendt’s use of the word “exercise” is meant to connote constant and repetitive exertion. She means especially a kind of thinking that, first, is unconventional and, second and by implication, requires continuous drilling. It is “different from such mental processes as deducing, inducing and drawing conclusions whose logical rules of noncontradiction and inner consistency can be learned once and for all and then need only be applied” (13). Such an “experience in thinking […] can be won, like all experiences in doing something, only through practice, through exercises” (13). The unconventionality of such thinking stems from the equally unprecedented circumstances that demand it, an unprecedentedness that Arendt,

“We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure”  133 at other points in her career, characterized as a lack of familiar markers and measures, that is, as a loss of scale. Later in life, speaking at a 1972 academic symposium devoted to her work, Arendt explains this as thinking without a banister. In German, “Denken ohne Geländer.” That is, as you go up and down the stairs you can always hold on to the banister so that you don’t fall down. But we have lost this banister. That is the way I tell it to myself. And this is indeed what I try to do. (2018, 473) This recalls a much earlier description of the work of thinking, when Arendt was actively engaged with the subject that would preoccupy her for much of the 1950s and for which she first gained notice—totalitarianism. In a 1954 essay entitled “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” Arendt likens the problem of comprehending the absolute evil of totalitarian regimes such as the Third Reich or Stalinist Russia to coming to terms with a complete destruction of the means of calibration, to being “confronted with something which has destroyed our categories of thought and standards of judgment.” “How,” she asked, “can we measure length if we do not have a yardstick, how could we count things without the notion of numbers?” (2006b, 313). Arendt is referring here to moral standards; her preoccupation is with how to assess others and their actions when these display a thoroughgoing absence of those standards. In deleted sections of the essay, later published separately as “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” she writes that the “curious incalculability of totalitarian politics, which so obviously violates all rules of self-interest and common sense,” arises because “the world [is] used to calculating actions and reactions by these yardsticks” (2006c, 353). While Arendt’s focus here is directly on the ethical, nonetheless, her words, and particularly her exhortation to find a way to think the unthinkable and evaluate the immeasurable, also bring to mind the ontological and epistemological dilemma of the Anthropocene, a dilemma which, as I have shown, gives rise to ethical issues. While I do not wish to draw any simple equivalence between the twentieth century’s totalitarian excesses, particularly the horror of the Holocaust, and the ecological devastation of the Anthropocene, here I adopt and adapt Arendt’s advice on what kind of human response is possible when none of the old human responses are even remotely relevant. The alternative offered by Arendt is not only to think in the absence of such yardsticks, but to understand their particular histories. The essays of Between Past and Future decontextualize political concepts such as “justice” and “authority” from their recent pasts (for Arendt, politics, since it denotes the intersection between public and private conducts, includes ethics). Arendt’s broad aim was to trace the long development of these concepts, assessing which historical aspects of those ideals might be salvageable and renewable for the future. Yet, she maintained, too, that one has

134  Adeline Johns-Putra continually to revisit this assessment: hence, the notion of exercise. Arendt’s specific objective was to maintain in her readers the habit of constant evaluation of our public and private codes of conduct. The most acute of the lessons Arendt can teach us in the Anthropocene, therefore, is the need to keep appraising, vigilantly and routinely, our ontological status as humans and the epistemological constructs that we take for granted as part of that status. For Arendt, reading is concomitant with such regular mental exercise; at least, she implies this when she states in the preface that “the essay as a literary form has a natural affinity to the exercises I have in mind” (2006a, 14). Her comments elsewhere corroborate the idea that written words play a role in the activity of thinking. To begin with, the pure exercise of thought, like reading, is solitary. In her 1972 remarks, Arendt asserts that the fundamental experience of the thinking ego is in those lines of the older Cato which I quote at the end of the book [The Human Condition]: “If I do nothing I am most active and if I’m all by myself, I am […] least alone.” (Arendt 2018, 446)3 She expands on this by describing thinking as “an experience of sheer activity unimpeded by any physical or bodily obstacle” (446). Yet, while solitary, the experience of thought is also dialogic; in this way, too, it resembles reading. In 1954, Arendt compares thought, or “understanding,” with “philosophy, in which great thoughts always turn in circles, engaging the human mind in nothing less than an interminable dialogue between itself and the essence of everything that is” (Arendt 2006b, 322). “True understanding,” moreover, “does not tire of interminable dialogue and ‘vicious circles,’ because it trusts that imagination eventually will catch at least a glimpse of the always frightening truth” (ibid.). That is, the kind of thinking that engenders habitual epistemological reinvention is a conversation—which Arendt also often called “reconciliation”—between oneself and the world of which one seeks to make epistemological sense (Arendt 2018, 444). What looks like an endless going around in circles is necessary to a grasping of “truth,” that is, of clues to the way forward (by “truth,” of course, Arendt does not pretend at anything fixed, for, as I discuss below, she also insisted on unpredictability). Furthermore, Arendt went on to refine this idea of dialogue into a claim that thinking (as opposed to mere “consciousness”) was primarily a dialogue with oneself—“the two-in-one” thought that she traced to Socrates (Arendt 1981, 179–193). It is, then, not much of a leap to compare such deep dialogue both within the mind and between the mind and the problems of the world with the process that takes place between a reader and a text. It is, surely, not a further leap to suggest this of not just essays but of certain kinds of narrative. Certainly, Arendt herself

“We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure”  135 indicates as much when she praises Franz Kafka’s ability to “create a kind of thought-landscape” (Arendt 2006a, 9). All this echoes Toni Morrison’s description of literary narrative as the “intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another’s,” as the “experience [of] one’s own mind dancing with another’s” (Morrison 1996, 15). Morrison’s “dancing mind” is engaged precisely in an Arendtian circling of thought. Literary narrative as the source of an Arendtian experience in thinking not only depicts the kind of ethical venture necessary in the Anthropocene— it enacts it. In other words, I am pointing to a form of narrative that decenters the human reader (inasmuch as it encourages dialogic thought) while acknowledging the need for human intervention (inasmuch as it invites human thought at all)—it embraces assemblage agency and human responsibility at once. I am also delineating here how that narrative would achieve this by deploying “the thinking ego” (and thus the scale at which the ego exists) but, first, defines that ego in terms of internal dialogue and reconciliation with the world at large, and second, sets the ego to imagining a world without the encumbrance of scales and yardsticks. This is a refinement of Ghosh’s speculation that the imaginative power of fiction should encompass the ability to “imagine other forms of human existence” (Ghosh 2016, 128). In an Arendtian model, that imagining would entail an interrogation and reassessment of those scales and their falling away; the ego, meanwhile, is also split and thus, for want of a better word, egoless. The Arendtian experience in thinking has the ethical potential to imagine a future world. It is worth returning to the preface to Between Past and Future, in which Arendt sets out the need for such exercises in the first place, and, in doing so, it is worth restating Arendt’s concept of thinking without banisters under another set of terms that she often adopted in her work—that the present is “the gap between past and future” (Arendt 2006a). More than a mundane observation, this definition of the present records her concern at what she thought of as the breaking of the thread of tradition and thus the inability of continuing into the future as a matter of course—another way of describing the loss of yardsticks. In her final, unfinished work, The Life of the Mind (1981), for example, Arendt writes that “the thread of tradition is broken and […] we shall not be able to renew it. […] What you then are left with is still the past but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation” (Arendt 1981, 212). For Arendt, however, the present offers an opportunity; specifically, the present is a “small non-time-space in the very heart of time,” because it offers space for reflection (Arendt 2006a, 13). This gap is where “two antagonistic forces” meet, “the one coming from an infinite past and the other from an infinite future,” but at this meeting point of conflicting forces stands the subject in the present (12). That subject, that “thinking ego,” produces a third force, emerging diagonally out of this meeting point: “This diagonal force […] is the perfect metaphor for the activity of thought” (13). In other words, the

136  Adeline Johns-Putra present offers us the opportunity to look back at the past critically and forward to the future experimentally. Arendt elaborates on this with a parable (thus demonstrating the power of narrative as an exercise in thought). She refers to Kafka’s tale, originally appearing in his 1920 diary, about a soldier in the frontline, pushed by the man behind him (his comrade) and forced to fight the one in front of him (his enemy). The soldier dreams of jumping out of the fighting line and becoming the umpire in this fight between the past and the future: He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle to both. […] the first […] wants to push him forward, and […] the second […] drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment—and this, it must be admitted, would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet—he will jump out of the fighting line […] to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other. (Arendt 2006a, 7) In order to “jump out of human time altogether,” argues Arendt, we must renegotiate the relationship between the past and the future, since not to do so would mean either floundering without yardsticks or going blindly into a violent, brutal future (11). And that negotiation, that creation of a future, is achieved through the activity of thought. For this reason, Arendt viewed the activity of thought as creative, as an originary force. In her 1954 essay, she writes: Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality. (Arendt 2006b, 321) Arendt’s description of thought resembles what she calls “action” in her best-known work The Human Condition (1958). Arendt conceptualizes the human condition, or the vita activa, as consisting of “labor” (the practices required to maintain the biological or “natural” processes of life), “work” (those practices that transform “natural” processes into an artificial world of things) and “action” (political and public practices) (Arendt 1998, 7–8). This third category of action, a key component of the vita activa, refers to public collaboration and social interaction; it is “the only activity that goes on directly between men,” and it “corresponds to the human condition of

“We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure”  137 plurality” (7). Because it is in interaction that we truly discover ourselves, each other and ways forward together, action is productive, creative and, hence, unpredictable. Arendt writes: “Action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth” (178). However, thought is not identical to action; it is causally related to it. Thought necessarily precedes action. In her 1954 essay on understanding, Arendt describes understanding and action as two sides of a coin: If the essence of all, and in particular of political, action is to make a new beginning, then understanding becomes the other side of action, namely, that form of cognition, distinct from many others, by which acting men […] eventually can come to terms with what irrevocably happened and be reconciled with what unavoidably exists. (Arendt 2006b, 321–322) As I have already indicated, Arendt ended The Human Condition with Cato’s words on thought; she did so precisely because, as she concluded her considerations on action, she began to turn her attention to the primary role of thought. She notes in these final lines of her book that if “no other measure but the extent of sheer activity were to be applied to the various activities within the vita activa, it may well be that thinking as such would surpass them all” (Arendt 1998, 325) Much later, she sought to complement this magnum opus on the vita activa with a similarly detailed disquisition on the vita contemplativa, though she did not live long enough to complete it—The Life of the Mind was published posthumously. What I am suggesting here, then, is that the reading of a literary text is an example—or, perhaps more accurately, can act as a component—of the simultaneously solitary and dialogic work of thought. Arendt might have shed further light on the role of literature in her model of the experience of thinking had she lived long enough to delve more deeply into the vita contemplativa. She often argued for the potential of narrative, particularly narratives about and by writers aware of the loss of touchstones, to provoke the experience of thought in her work, as indicated not just by the tale from Kafka but by the less well-known but quite extensive literary criticism she produced throughout her career (Arendt 2007).

An Arendtian Consideration of The Three-Body Problem I turn now to the Chinese science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem and its potential to enact an Arendtian experience of thought. Its author, Liu Cixin, is often regarded as China’s preeminent science-fiction author, having won China’s Galaxy Award for science fiction nine times and the Hugo Award for The Three-Body Problem. This, his most famous work, was first published in Chinese as Sān Tǐ (“Three Body”) in 2006 and translated into English in 2014 with a postscript written by the author especially for Anglophone—and particularly American—readers.

138  Adeline Johns-Putra The narrative, set in the present, tells of a planned invasion of Earth by an advanced alien civilization, whose planet, Trisolaris, is struggling with the unpredictable climatic effects of its three suns (the “three-body problem” of the title, which also references a well-known mathematical conundrum in physics). Because their journey to Earth would take some 400 Earth-years, the Trisolarians decide to logjam Earth’s technological progress and prevent humans from becoming sophisticated enough to resist the impending attack. Using advanced super-nanotechnology, the Trisolarians disrupt particle accelerators and turn conventional science on its head, causing breakdowns and suicides among scientists. For most of the novel, much of the action centers on scientist Wang Miao, who, as part of an inter-governmental effort, attempts to uncover the reasons behind these disruptions. Wang discovers, and becomes an expert in, a bizarre virtual-reality game depicting a planet that, the reader learns, is a faithful representation of the Trisolarian world. The reasons behind the alien invasion are revealed in what initially looks like a side plot and frame narrative involving an older scientist called Ye Wenjie. In the first three chapters, set during the Cultural Revolution, Ye as a young woman experiences the worst of this brutal civil warfare and government-sanctioned suffering. She is then exiled to a remote research laboratory set up to search for and communicate with extra-terrestrial intelligence. Here, Ye, the novel explains later, is inspired by a bootleg copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and correlates humankind’s propensity for socio-political crimes with their predilection for ecocide. When alien contact is made, her extreme misanthropy leads Ye to issue an invitation to invade Earth. Along with a wealthy American environmentalist who advocates “Pan-Species Communism,” Ye creates a secret, large-scale organization to collaborate with the Trisolarians to enable them to supplant humankind (Liu 2014, 307). Indeed, it is revealed that the virtual-reality game played by Wang is the organization’s recruitment tool. Eventually, Wang makes a breakthrough in the game by identifying its climatic chaos as the result of the three-body problem—and thus make a major contribution to the Trisolarian dilemma—and meanwhile the inter-governmental forces defeat Ye’s organization, but not before a faction of Trisolarians have initiated hostilities with Earth. This war is taken up in the sequels. As this necessarily lengthy synopsis suggests, the novel is characterized by meticulous astrophysical detail, an ensemble of characters and gordian plot convolutions. These produce two key effects on its readers: first, they involve us not in close identification with characters but with the intellectual problem of the title; second, the scale at which the scientific conundrum plays out is both planetary and species-oriented, that is, it operates cosmologically (and not just ecologically) as well as evolutionarily. The intellectual dilemma at the center of the novel rapidly transforms into an ethical one because it is an existential one. The novel is structured so that Ye’s traumatic experiences are quickly dispensed with and the narrative

“We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure”  139 focuses instead on solving the mysteries of the scientist suicides and on Wang’s addictive immersion in the game. That is, any readerly involvement in personal drama is curtailed in favor of mental gymnastics—the detective-style whodunnit behind the deaths and the “Three Body” challenge. Moreover, the scale on which Trisolarian life occurs is unfathomable. Both Ye’s individual lifetime of suffering and the national, epochal disasters of the Cultural Revolution are nothing when set alongside intergalactic scales, not just dwarfed in comparative terms (by the 400-year journey contemplated by the Trisolarians) but rendered senseless by unthinkably different planetary configurations (for example, the Trisolarian experience of unpredictably interspersed “Chaotic Eras” and “Stable Eras,” each of which can last anything from minutes to centuries because of the seemingly random gravitational effects of their three suns) (96). Jia Liyuan notes that “Liu Cixin’s talents lie […] in his ability to combine events on the scale of lightyears with those of his home country to form a peculiar tension” (Jia 2018, 59). I would suggest that the emphasis explicitly tips toward the former, as the reader of this novel is forced to think in terms of the scales by which cosmic objects influence each other and, by extension, by which planets come to be inhabited by life forms. Furthermore, each of the novel’s intellectual problems (techno-scientific collapse on Earth and climatic chaos on Trisolaris) is connected to an existential threat to each species (the human and the Trisolarian) and thus to ethical questions about humankind’s moral responsibility. As the middle part of the novel flips between present-day Earth and the virtual Trisolarian world, the game’s experiential and experimental nature offers a metatextual comment on the construction of the novel as a whole, figuring both the game’s virtual world and the novel’s storyworld as invitations to the reader. That is, the reader, like Wang, must think through the planetary, climatic problems faced by another species alongside the viability of our place on our similarly climate-changed planet. However, when the link between these two species’ fates is revealed (that is, when the reader learns that the Trisolarians seek to leave their planet and invade Earth), another ethical dimension opens up. Specifically, when the Trisolarian invasion is shown to be the outcome of what Ye has judged to be humans’ wanton destruction of their home, a moral contrast is made explicit, for the Trisolarian climate crisis—unlike that on Earth—is not self-inflicted. Just as Wang must carry on an internal, hypothetico-deductive dialogue to resolve the problem of the Trisolarian climate, so too must readers assess within themselves questions of what it means to inhabit a planet. Throughout Liu never allows his readers simply to function on a humansized scale, spreading his narrative over intergalactic space and climatological time. He writes of the scalar awareness he has possessed since boyhood: Scales and existences that far exceeded the bounds of human sensory perception—both macro and micro—and that seemed to be only

140  Adeline Johns-Putra abstract numbers to others, could take on concrete forms in my mind. I could touch them and feel them, much like others could touch and feel trees and rocks. (Liu 2014, 393) Liu’s readers are asked to touch and feel existences at these scales.

Conclusion Arendt conceived of the exercise of thought—a constant appraisal and reappraisal that is solitary and dialogic at once—as the only way of comprehending a world in which scales have become unfixed and once-reliable yardsticks meaningless. In this exercise of thought, the past is critically examined, so that what used to be our touchstones can themselves be revalued, and the future reinvented. Arendtian thinking—which, I suggest, is concomitant with reading—is also, then, a productive and creative site of what Arendt called action, where action always carries transformational potential. Thus, an Arendtian literary ethics operates in terms not of reader identification and empathy but of intellectual reflection on and reconciliation with a rich, complex and scale-shifting world; it engages not with singular lifetimes on a fixed, anthropocentric scale, but with agencies that emerge from a diversity of seemingly disjointed scales, the scales at which Anthropocene awareness occurs. Most strikingly of all, that engagement is not just an encounter with diverse agencies; it is the reader’s active participation within them. The experience of reading The Three-Body Problem is akin to an experience in thinking in these terms. The novel is an Arendtian invitation not only to perceive seemingly impossible scales, but to acknowledge these scales to be where human existence—and all existence—necessarily resides.

Notes 1 Here, temporal concerns bring out spatial ones, for the “bigness” of this big history is spatially extreme, expanding from the planetary to the cosmic. 2 These are assumptions I have made in previous work, inasmuch as that work has assumed that identification must first be activated only to be critically deactivated (see, for example, Johns-Putra 2019, 42–55). 3 Here, Arendt’s paraphrase of Cato is erroneously reproduced as “If I do nothing I am most active and if I’m all by myself, I am at least alone”; I have omitted the word “at” to preserve Arendt’s, and Cato’s, meaning.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1981. The Life of the Mind. [1978]. Reprinted. San Diego: Harcourt. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition [1958]. Reprinted with an introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

“We Have Lost Yardsticks by Which to Measure”  141 Arendt, Hannah. 2006a. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought [1961]. Reprinted with an introduction by Jerome Kohn. New York: Penguin. Arendt, Hannah. 2006b. “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding).” In Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954. New York: Schocken Books, 307–27. Arendt, Hannah. 2006c. “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding.” In Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 328–60. Arendt, Hannah. 2007. Reflections on Literature and Culture. Edited by Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 2018. “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt.” Thinking without a Banister: In Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, New York: Schocken Books, 443–75. Asher, Kenneth. 2017. Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter): 197–222. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury. Clark, Timothy. 2019. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2012. “Not Symbiosis, Not Now: Why Anthropogenic Climate Change is Not Really Human.” Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2: 185–209. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Golding, William. 2012. The Inheritors [1955]. Reprinted with an introduction by John Carey. London: Faber. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horn, Eva, and Hannes Bergthaller. 2020. The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities. Routledge: Abingdon. Jia, Liyuan. 2018. “Chinese People Not Only Live in the World but Grow in the Universe: Liu Cixin and Chinese Science Fiction.” Translated by Du Lei and James Fashimpaur. Chinese Literature Today 7, no. 1: 58–61. Johns-Putra, Adeline. 2019. Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liu, Cixin. 2014. The Three-Body Problem. Translated by Ken Liu. New York: Tor Books. Markley, Robert. 2019. “Literature, Climate, and Time: Between History and Story.” In Climate and Literature, edited by Adeline Johns-Putra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 15–30. Morrison, Toni. 1996. The Dancing Mind. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1997. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

142  Adeline Johns-Putra Nussbaum, Martha C. 2013. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Parham, John. 2017. “Sustenance from the Past: Precedents to Sustainability in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.” In Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text, and Culture, edited by Adeline Johns-Putra, John Parham and Louise Squire, 33–51. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tanner, Jessica. 2017. “The Climate of Naturalism: Zola’s Atmospheres.” L’Esprit Créateur 57, no. 1 (Spring): 20–33. Taylor, Jesse Oak. 2016. The Sky of our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2017. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Woods, Derek. 2014. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” Minnesota Review 83: 133–42.

8

Sound and Silence Punk and the Anthropocene John Parham

Anthropocene Affect Reviewing Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino’s Affective Ecocriticism, Andrew Ross poses two questions now at the heart of ecological aesthetics: “What does the Anthropocene feel like?” and “How do feelings trace the contours of such an epoch?” (Ross 2019, 499). We feel the Anthropocene in various ways: terror—if one lives within reach of rising sea levels or dry, combustible forests; nausea, perhaps, where a basement tenement, hut or favela flanks toxic water; foreboding, if one consumes (say) “nonhuman” computer games or science-fiction novels and films; or a vacant, cloying guilt, if we’re the ones buying too many such games or who contributed to the 4.54 billion flights worldwide in 2019.1 How we feel the Anthropocene depends on how, exactly, each one of us inhabits it: which impacts affect us; our degree of culpability as consumers; the historical moment; our social or geographical location; and experience and cultural taste. Because it concerns the human and because it exists and is evolving right now, the proposed Anthropocene epoch presents immediate questions for “both science and society” (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010, 2228). This is why it has excited such an outpouring of interest in humanities, social sciences and arts. Yet in disciplines like literature, media, and cultural studies, critics, scholars and practitioners have struggled to formulate appropriate aesthetic models. A harsh critical audit has adjudged, for example, that literature and literary studies are ill-equipped to meet the challenge of responding to the Anthropocene. Firstly, it has argued that, historically speaking, the now dominant literary forms—the novel, nature writing, the stage play—evolved at about the same time as the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere. Hence, an apparent absence of climate crisis in texts implicates literature in the “derangement” described by Amitav Ghosh, a collective evasion of climate change for which we are all culpable (Ghosh 2016, 7, 9, 66). Secondly, literature is, anyway, intrinsically anthropocentric: narratives occur in accordance with human timeframes and places—households, workplaces, communities—center on human drama and reach humanly meaningful or rewarding conclusions with little reference to environments, other species or DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-8

144  John Parham the Earth. Conventional literary forms seem too linear and simplistic against the epoch’s ontological, ethical and political complexities and cannot address scalar dimensions brought to the forefront by the Anthropocene’s imposition of both microscopic and vast nonhuman macroscopic scales of human existence: the minute materiality of plastics and toxins, or, conversely, deep history and cosmic space (Ghosh 2016, 59–60; Clark 2015, 178, 182). The scale critique developed by writers like Timothy Clark and Derek Woods suggests that the human mind and its orchestrating faculties of imagination, representation or mediation may prove unable to grasp the vast dimensions of time and space which the Anthropocene plunges us back into. Perhaps, then, as Kathryn Yusoff has argued, rather than trying to interpret the Anthropocene we should just “begin to inhabit it,” “feel its affects” and start thinking with those affects (Yusoff 2015, 388). In his review, Ross indicates that we can feel the “contours” of the Anthropocene by following the line that affect theory traces from bodily sensation to emotion to feeling to thought. This chapter considers how one affective stimulant, sound—or more precisely noise, as generated (in my example) by the music of punk— might exemplify an Anthropocene aesthetic. Specifically, I will explore the extent to which sound can trigger a sensory response to how we inhabit the Anthropocene and how this might ultimately trigger thought—thoughts about how we do live or could live within the proposed new epoch. We can begin to think about this by turning first in the opposite direction.

The Sound of Silence The critique of literary aesthetics in the wake of the Anthropocene is about silence: our own culpable silence and our silencing by forces we don’t understand and cannot control. Yet the second of these insights—that the scalar discrepancy between human lifespans and deep time and planetary space may render us silent—is not new. Dylan Thomas’ 1933 poem “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” weighs human life against nonhuman nature’s perpetual cycle of life, death and rebirth. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams Turns mine to wax. And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks. (Thomas 2014 [1933], 43)

Sound and Silence  145 “The Shock of the Anthropocene” confronts us with scales of Earth that “exist […] before and after human time” (Ackerman 1996, 44)—and a sense of processes, forces and entities which elude human observation or analysis; nonetheless, a sense of the epistemological challenge that this presents arose with advances in geology in the nineteenth century. These instigated, write Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, “a separation of timescales” because of “the gradual extension in the estimated age of the Earth.” What arose, therefore, was “open discordance between the time of nature and the time of humankind” (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017, 28, 30). That the immensity of deep geological time can render humans silent was recognized more or less immediately. John Ruskin’s three volume The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) contextualizes and diminishes the human historical utterances of architecture—specifically grandiloquent Venetian architecture—back to rock. Likewise, the book incorporates vivid descriptions of what Ruskin saw—or perceived—beyond solid ground, as he traveled around Venice by gondola. What he perceived was an illusionary, impermanent city, set in dimensions of time and space that do indeed evade human comprehension and articulation. Venice, a city whose construction was only just about possible because of particular rock formations and particular sea levels, becomes in this light a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak—so quiet,—so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow. (Ruskin 1903–1912, 17) So with the Anthropocene, human endeavor appears to have reached, as Clark argues, a “threshold.” We seem to be dumb. Humanist belief in the power of art, culture, literature or criticism to shape awareness and action, not least that of literary practices and methods (symbolism, metaphor and narrative), has dissipated (cf. Clark 2015, 21). Writing and writers are silenced. Yet silence might also reveal. In “The Rest Is Silence: Postmodern and Postcolonial Possibilities in Climate Change Fiction,” Adeline Johns-Putra examines two novels—Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) and Changrae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014). Both are set in future worlds “ravaged by climate change” and both depict intentionally silent characters. Consequently, Johns-Putra makes a case for voicelessness. The withdrawal of voice functions, she argues, both as an antidote to an anthropocentric bias connoted (for example) by literary devices—narration, characterization, focalization, etc.—and as a means to re-orient the reader to the nonhuman environment and “an alternative, ecocentric reality” (Johns-Putra 2018, 27, 35).

146  John Parham A recognition of the critical and progressive possibilities of silence, or space, runs across any number of cultural forms: in the computer game Journey (developed by thatgamecompany) a visually uniform, empty desert landscape, a voiceless avatar and a lack of goal-oriented gameplay all connote human insignificance against vast spatial scale; the American poet Brenda Hillman uses seemingly empty “negative spaces of literary form” (Peacock 2012, 95)—page margins or the space between words and lines— to materialize barely perceptible aspects of nature, the activity of air or the relation of human history (individual or social) to distant scales of geological time that evade human explanation or conception: chestnut blossoms fall diagonally between history and an endish time. (Hillman 2005, 11–12) In Warren Ellis’ post-apocalyptic graphic novel FreakAngels, 12 human survivors subvert the Earth’s geomagnetic field, provoking a tsunami. After one of them shouts, “There’s a scale to this shit that I don’t think you’re getting,” they are fractured—on the page—into 12 anguished, speechdevoid frames. Chris Welsby’s art film Sky Light, filmed 48 hours after the announcement of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, transitions from idyllic landscape imagery to white noise (mechanical and electrical) to invasive abstract blocks, shuttered images of red and yellow. This conveys an assemblage of technological and natural forces which, though (respectively) created and altered by humans, has come to elude human comprehension or agency. Similarly, the indie rock band British Sea Power’s “Oh Larsen B,” a semi-ironic paean to how transitory—chronostratigraphically speaking—human activity has wiped out 12,000 years and 500 billion tons of “pure” pack ice, concludes with a two-minute instrumental that turns the (geological) tables: a chiming, echoing guitar mimetically interprets a preCambrian, pre-human permanence and invokes its return if we continue to consume, abuse and meddle with both technology and nature. Anthropocene art, literature and popular culture are marked, then, by a radicalism of silence. Except, as Robert Minhinnick points out in his poem “An Isotope, Dreaming,” “There is never only silence.” Actually, silence is problematic with regard to both the aspects Johns-Putra identifies as possibilities. First, silence doesn’t always temper the anthropocentrism of (say) narrative fiction; it doesn’t necessarily quell word for world (Bristow 2015, 17–18). For silence is, of course, always narrated, or spoken: abstract images are made; white space in comic books and poetry is framed; the instrumental epilogue of “Oh Larsen B,” while effectively taking over from the human voice (in echoing the chorus),2 is anything but unspoken; long geological time is inscribed by guitar riffs which, in a convention of rock

Sound and Silence  147 music, epitomize human self-articulation. Secondly, even where blank space and silence might still the domineering speech and imperializing narratives of the human epoch (the Holocene) by invoking a sense of unfathomable geological time, it often does so only by entertaining the rather desperate void predicated in an entire genre of Anthropocene literature: The World without Us (Weisman 2010); The Earth after Us (Zalasiewicz 2008); The Uninhabitable Earth (Wallace-Wells 2019). This is the other “ecocentric reality” toward which silence might lead—one that already “assume[s],” as Richard Grusin puts it in his introduction to After Extinction, “a future world in which human presence on Earth has been reduced to a lithic layer” and which already “contains […] the anticipation of human extinction” (vii). Valuable as silence or white space or abstraction is in helping us notice dimensions beyond humans’ embodied or experiential time, and as a critique of anthropocentrism, can such devices lead anywhere other than to a resignation toward our own annihilation? If an essential ingredient in embodying how we feel (about) and might act upon the Anthropocene is an ability to speak and be heard, then maybe there’s a virtue in heading now in the opposite direction—to sound, or even to noise.

Extinction’s Noisy Rebellion There is a growing number of paradigms of Anthropocene aesthetics. One of the most useful is Anahid Nersessian’s “calamity form.” Human “civilisation” and activity—for example, political economy—deranges material form; it goads things to jump out of their material being into something less tangible—for instance, Marx’s commodity form (Nersessian 2013, 307). Attempts to conceive of the world as it has, subsequently, become—i.e. as an amalgam of material and fabricated, intangible being— might begin, therefore, by exerting pressure on and through cultural form. Nersessian develops just such a model by turning to romantic experiments in “language, syntax, and image” which denoted, she writes, an intellectual crisis brought on by the period’s own sense of impending catastrophe, an unknowable future and “the uncertain impacts of our actions on it” (324). Specifically, Romanticism’s “calamity form” met potential catastrophe by “assuming unexpected rhetorical postures”; it created, that is, an aesthetics of disruption, surprise or incongruity (cf. 312). This model, by which “unexpected” disruptions of form could begin to reconstruct knowledge, might easily equate Anthropocene aesthetics with avant-garde, experimental or high literary forms such as modernism or (say) open field poetry. Nersessian illustrates calamity form, however, via two contrasting horticultural poets, William Cowper and Derek Jarman. The unexpected posture each takes is to “negotiate calamities personal and global by laminating ordinariness atop abnormality” (318). This occurs in corresponding poems—Cowper’s “The Rose”; Jarman’s “I Walk in This Garden”—that, almost absurdly, juxtapose the uncertainty a

148  John Parham gardener feels about their ability to keep flowers alive with parallel, exponentially profounder doubts, about whether any human action can alleviate processes that are, broadly speaking, too vast to comprehend let alone articulate: respectively, the climate change that Cowper was beginning to perceive and Jarman’s direct personal experience of the contagion of HIV/ AIDS. In these scalar discrepancies, calamity form “raises the possibility not only that nothing we do matters but that everything we have done has doomed us in large and small ways.” And yet the “operation performed on language”—i.e. that of staging a “particular form of intellectual crisis,” uncertainty or fear—is designed, Nersessian argues, to “provoke” rather than “void” (324). As with the impending calamities being represented, we do not know the outcome of such postures. Yet the act of exerting pressure on aesthetic form provokes “an adjustment” primarily by restoring a sense of material form to counteract the intangible and which might, as a result, begin to repair the calamity by remaking knowledge and linking that knowledge to action (Nersessian 2013, 311–313). Jarman is known, among other things, both for his garden and for directing the British punk film Jubilee (1978) (as well as numerous music videos and short films). Punk, too, was a cultural moment characterized by an aesthetic jolt; it, too, could offer a paradigm, as has been said about science fiction, for “view[ing] our predicaments differently” (Swanson et al. 2015, 149). Punk—or more precisely the early British punk through which Jarman made his name—is commonly divided into two “waves.” While the second wave (discussed below) consciously directed itself toward social engagement and strong political messages, the “first wave” punk, which emerged around about 1976, is described by Jude Davies as “nihilistic, shocking, apocalyptic” (Davies 1996, 9). It sought to disrupt an established social order with chaos, shock, trash and an investment in “anarchy.” Employing devices akin to Brecht’s aesthetic of alienation, punk coupled, argues Dave Laing in One Chord Wonders, a nihilistic message (“no future”) with equally nihilistic generic conventions that distorted mainstream pop or rock: super-fast, brutally simple, over-amplified music; aggressive vocals; indecipherable lyrics (Laing 1985, 81). While, by this description, punk exemplifies the rupture Nersessian proposes, it is, nevertheless, more than just a paradigm for Anthropocene aesthetics. Few first wave bands had any direct interest in environmental themes. Yet there is, in some of the songs, a suggestive relation to our own potential ecological calamity: punk was in the Anthropocene even if not directly about it. The analysis which follows will focus on a less discussed aspect of first wave punk’s aesthetic of disruption—repetition. For the message, “no future,” was often matched with songs which went round and round in circles, so that, for all the noise, they appear dumb in the sense that they appear devoid of meaning. I will consider two examples to explore both what Anthropocene aesthetics could look like and what, if only in passing,

Sound and Silence  149 punk might have to say about the Anthropocene. The first, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Spellbound,” was released relatively late (1981) but is a track by one of the principal first wave bands.

Spellbound Pete Dale has suggested that punk’s amateurism often masked genuine musical proficiency (Dale 2016, 32). A case in point is X-Ray Spex’ Poly Styrene, declaring, “Although I could actually sing, I didn’t want to sing—I wanted to be an anti-singer” (cited in O’Brien 1999, 196). Yet even where the punk sound might accurately be put down to limited musicianship, this was often purposeful. It is celebrated, belligerently, in the song from which Laing gets his title. The Adverts’ “One Chord Wonders” imagines the band playing on as record company scouts, journalists and audience walk out on a shambolic live performance. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ debut at the 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street, in September 1976, is that gig. It is notorious, and historic, because they could not play their instruments. The singer Siouxsie Sioux’s long-term writing partner Steve Severin reportedly only picked up a bass guitar 24 hours before. Sid Vicious, who became the Sex Pistols’ bass player, was enlisted too, played drums more or less randomly and then walked off stage once he had lost interest. Yet the chaos was also strategic. “I wanted something apocalyptic to happen,” said Siouxsie Sioux.3 The Anthropocene requires us (as we have seen) to face up to the prospect, if distant and perhaps not yet inevitable, of our own potential apocalypse. It demands forms that anticipate, model or enact that. Intimately tied to impending catastrophe is climate change, shaped by the industrial and technological foundations of lifestyles in prosperous nations: the overheating of homes; car driving; air travel; commodity consumption; incessant online or digital media use. “Spellbound” was released five years after Siouxsie and the Banshees’ first gig, well into a career ultimately marked by increasing musical proficiency, innovation and a palpable influence on subsequent musical movements such as post-punk and goth. Nicholas Rombes has described punk bands as “playing music so repetitive yet earnest that their intentions remained mysterious” (Rombes 2009, 305). “Spellbound” typifies just that conjunction in its coupling of rudimentary lyrics with more complex music and themes. An opaque track which seems to invoke intermixed cinematic tropes of evil children, haunted houses, poltergeist and paranoia, “Spellbound” is marked, lyrically, by repetition. The first three verses are near identical—laughter and voices pursue the “you” addressed by the song. The eventual next line—“Following the footsteps/ of a rag doll dance”—is also repeated. After more repetition, seven times over, of the word “Spellbound,” only a middle eight stands alone. Amidst that there is a line about toys going berserk. Cumulatively, what emerges in these references to toys, rag dolls, a “beckoning voice” are intimations

150  John Parham of consumerism, advertising and even Althusser’s “interpellation” by which the seduction of commodities and the persuasion of advertisers “hails” the individual into consumerist ideology (Althusser 2014, 264). Yet the hailing is cast, as indicated above, in a gothic-horror scenario of entrapment: laughter coming through the walls of what appears to be the type of suburban house in which—near Bromley (south of London)—both Siouxsie Sioux and Severin grew up. In that context, “Spellbound” seems to connote a more general condition of the Anthropocene: one in which the derangement Ghosh describes—a collective evasion of humanity’s impact focused, in this song, on consumerism—is leaving us too, our conscious selves, increasingly “deranged.” The song is circular as well as repetitious. The two dominant verses return, the “rag doll dance” repeated four more times. Neither repetition nor circularity is comforting. They are not allowed to be. Lyrically, the individual, sent spinning, has “no choice”—they have “illusions” that cannot be “shirked.” Correspondingly, though the song has a fairly conventional melody, Siouxsie’s voice is piercing, the music over-amplified, the percussion (drums, tambourine) mixed disquietingly to the fore and the rhythm propelled a beat or two too quickly. Listened to, with headphones or loudly, the track is unsettling, anxiety-inducing. Read from within a vortex of psychological and ecological crisis brought about by rampant, insatiable consumerism, we are all endlessly deranged, “spellbound,” or (in the word with which the song ends) “entranced.” That word, too, is sung repeatedly. The track offers no resolution.

Babylon’s Burning The dark foreclosure of the repetition in “Spellbound” suggests that we are both deranged by and trapped within consumer lifestyles into which we have been hailed. There are, too, other (related) ways in which punk has framed the proposed new epoch. Rob Nixon has distinguished between generic and historical and politically specific versions which he calls the “aggregate” and “divergent” Anthropocene (Nixon 2014). The first locates culpability in humans per se, the other—the “divergent” Anthropocene—suggests that some humans are more responsible than others who, in turn, disproportionately suffer from its consequences. This is often seen as a distinction between the global North and the global South, the latter referring to nations in Africa, Asia, or the Caribbean, which have experienced, for instance, habitat loss, accelerated urban development, pollution, toxic contamination or rising sea levels invariably as a consequence of the lifestyles (and energy consumption) of the North. Yet, as Nixon acknowledges, what is also true is that, within these affluent nations, there is, as Steve Goodman writes, a “periphery […] folded into the core” in the shape of “urban ghettoes” that constitute a kind of “internal south of the global system” (Goodman 2009, 3). This is close to what punk—in its more political moments—railed against: the disadvantage of an inner-city working class in a capitalist economy. This, then, puts punk

Sound and Silence  151 on common ground with the concept of the “Capitalocene” perhaps the most commonly used of the numerous terms competing with “Anthropocene.” Conceptualizing the Capitalocene, critics such as Jason W. Moore (2016) and Andreas Malm (2016) have shifted the blame from humans as an aggregate—even as an aggregate of consumers—to the capitalist economic infrastructure and its supporting social system. For punk, to address things at a similarly more structural, political level required, so it would appear, a shift from its “first wave” aesthetic to what Davies designates as punk’s “second wave” aesthetic. Davies argues that while an “eschewal of consciousness” had been the punk bands’ “greatest weapon against recuperation [it] also severely limited their ability to envision social change” (22). This brought about, from around 1978, a second or “new wave” motivated by a desire to communicate (rather than alienate). This form addressed society and politics and was accompanied by “enhanced musicianship, clearer more discursive lyrics, and a [greater] sense of narrative” (Parham 2011, 83). The problem, however, is that new wave has been habitually denigrated in punk as (variously) “pseudo-intellectual,” manufactured, or as what The Clash’s bass player Paul Simenon called “the weak stuff, the dross” (Colegrave and Sullivan 2001, 357).4 While rather unfair, it could be, compared to the first wave, uninspiring and conservative both in music and message. “New wave” could be jammed, that is, into inherited conventions, unable to effect a necessary radical disjuncture much like Clark (2015) or Ghosh (2016) argue about the inadequacy of the novel and narrative in the face of the Anthropocene. As with punk’s address to both urban disadvantage and suburban affluence, Anthropocene aesthetics obliges both radical forms and forms capable of speaking to the “mainstream” and in “the idiom and conventional narrative structure of personal experience” (Kerridge 2014, 368; my emphasis ). Unraveling how that might work is tricky. A possible model lies in Lipstick Traces where Greil Marcus locates the origins of punk’s aesthetics in Dadaism, surrealism and situationism. Marcus makes a crucial distinction analogous to the way in which Nersessian’s calamity form provokes rather than voids action. He argues that first wave punk is not so much nihilism—oblivion, or “the wish to become nothing”—but “negation,” a standpoint with marginally greater reconstructive possibilities. This complex distinction is worth quoting at length: Nihilism means to close the world around its own self-consuming impulse; negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems—but only when the act is so implicitly complete it leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing, that nihilism as well as creation may occupy the suddenly cleared ground. The nihilist, no matter how many people she or he might kill, is always a solipsist: no one exists but the actor, and only the actor’s

152  John Parham motives are real. When the nihilist pulls the trigger, turns on the gas, sets the fire, hits the vein, the world ends. Negation is always political: it assumes the existence of other people, calls them into being. Still, the tools the negationist seems forced to use—real or symbolic violence, blasphemy, dissipation, contempt, ridiculousness—change hands with those of the nihilist. (Marcus 2001, 9) Playing with form—in the many tracks which sonically articulate a disenchanted urban environment—punk exerts pressure on a world that “is not as it seems.” Its sound kettles an aesthetic model of discordance and the ontology of an anarchic, unknowable, perilous future. However, while Marcus demonstrates that both the mind-set and “tools” of nihilism and negation are interchangeable, almost to the point of the distinction being meaningless, this isn’t quite so. Goodman’s reading of “shanty house” (forms such as Jamaican dancehall or favela funk) in his book Sonic Warfare is similar to how Marcus sees punk. In what Goodman calls the “vibratory ecologies” of urban sound, “predatory locales subject to significantly unequal development are temporarily taken over” by music that is, he writes, “mercilessly hooligan in its agenda, [and] synthetic by choice and necessity” (172, 174). For Goodman such music is predominantly sub-political; it constitutes “a war without aims concerned more with disposition and potential movement than ideology.” But he suggests something more in describing “potential movement” and, then, “abduction”—i.e. the act of leading something or someone away (107; my emphasis). For this to be possible centers—in the distinction Marcus makes and Goodman implies—on the passage between nihilism’s affective force and negation’s sociality. In the case of punk this happened in a liminal area where first wave nihilism shaded into the new wave’s social and political sensibility and where, too, its aesthetic opened into a cross-generic hybrid with other sounds and cultures, a combination that held the promise of forging broader social alliances. Bands who occupied that space included, most notably, The Clash, The Ruts (both from West London) and Belfast’s Stiff Little Fingers. Each of these paired social realism and a political agenda with a more melodious and hybrid sound (notably in melding first wave punk to reggae). My second example—The Ruts’ 1979 single “Babylon’s Burning”—is typical. “Babylon’s Burning” is, like “Spellbound,” a repetitive song, almost to the point of no meaning. Opening with a heavy, chugging rhythm, which initially appears to drive the song’s apocalyptical message of burning streets forward, the track barely extends beyond a repetition of that rhythm and the central statement—that “Babylon” is burning “with anxiety.” Excepting a verse beginning “You’ll burn at your work/You’ll burn at your play,” the song only has one verse and a recurrent chorus. Moreover, the end of the song risks sliding into passive acceptance or misanthropic despair. For if

Sound and Silence  153 the circular guitar riffs at the end signify anything it is most likely death, or extinction, given the track’s definitive close. Not unlike an Anthropocene aesthetics of silence, there is a danger of becoming petrified by one’s own experience, perspective or nihilism. Leaving open the very real possibility “that the world may be nothing” (Marcus 2001, 9),5 the track is, nevertheless, an act of negation: it questions commonplace assumptions and calls other people—us, the listeners—“into being.” Again, “Babylon’s Burning” is not about environmental crisis but is about the Anthropocene. That aspect resides in the song’s three key words. “Babylon” relates to both its conventional meaning (from the Oxford English Dictionary) of a “great and decadent city” and (because of the Ruts’ links to reggae) its more specific Rastafarian meaning as a critique of “white society” that includes (writes Ennis Barrington Edmonds) the “social, political and economic institutions” that shape a black experience of prejudice and inequality (Edmonds 2003, 41). This, furthermore, could be translated (as it was by punk) to encompass adjacent “peripheral” spaces such as urban, white working-class “ghettoes.”6 “Burning” might imply Brenda Hillman’s “endish time,” but when connected as “Babylon’s Burning” the apocalyptical connotations bring us closer to the Capitalocene. The Rastafari “Babylon” has also been read as pinpointing “late modern capitalism’s radical depersonalization of men and women through the cash-nexus alliance” (Middleton 2015, 6). While, signified like this, the track intentionally places blame on the capitalist economy and its social system, the couplet “You’ll burn at your work/You’ll burn at your play” conjoins structural analysis with a consideration of individuals’ singular, more modest agency. For these lines resonate with another Marxist theorist, Theodor Adorno, who contends, in his essay “On Popular Music,” that commodities, leisure activities and the workers themselves are all “kneaded by the same mode of production.” Adorno continues, “Spare time serves only to reproduce their working capacity […] Popular music is for the masses a perpetual busman’s society” (81). The first half especially of “Babylon’s Burning” calls “others” into being; while it may well be true that we have all been unconsciously interpellated into the commodity economy, it is, nonetheless, the “you” addressed in the lyrics who is burning the “streets” and burning the “houses,” as much as the generalized “society” described on the track’s B-side. That diagnosis underlies the third key word—“anxiety”—which really points toward the argument I wish to make: that the band’s execution of form brings this angry, foreboding and (some might say) vacuous song into a political analysis that compels us to question our own complicity in the derangements of the Capitalocene. For having broadened punk’s appeal with decipherable lyrics and a “tougher yet powerfully melodic” sound (with intimations of funk in the bassline) (Robb 2010), the critique of “Babylon’s Burning,” a song over 40 years old, was articulated in a mainstream “idiom” which, consequently, might develop now into a dialogue with the hopelessness and nihilism many feel about the Anthropocene as that, too, enters popular culture.

154  John Parham

Conclusion For John Ackerman, Dylan Thomas’ poetry represents a severe compression of ideas. Sense comes as much through the body, from repetition or rhythm, as from any written meaning (Ackerman 1996, 45). Punk, likewise, achieves a powerful negation via affective devices. Like silence, white space or white noise, punk’s discordance or indecipherability or repetition compel us to inhabit the world as it is. At the same time, however, these devices provoke consciousness, understanding and hopefully even action in response to complex social, economic and natural forces that are, in more conventional ways, extremely difficult to mediate, represent or narrate. While punk has become an international genre, and subculture, its most powerful critiques have often been of unsustainable, ecologically destructive consumer societies in the affluent global North. The need to be led away from excess consumerism has not exactly diminished since 1979 or 1981. The parallels between punk and the Anthropocene are closer than we think. Prior to the overt politics of its second wave, punk’s main form of critique lay in situationist acts of détournement, the ripping of everyday consumer items from their domestic context—as in the wearing and re-appropriation of zips, chains, padlocks or dog collars. These acts deconstructed what Heather Anne Swanson (2017) calls the “banality of the Anthropocene.” Swanson argues that, in the global North in particular, we have failed to notice the onset of the Anthropocene—not least its impact on other people and other nations— essentially because the agents of ecological détournement are the very housing developments, offices, agribusinesses, transport, modified food and consumer goods that constitute routine everyday life. While each requires analysis and explanation, we also need an aesthetics of negation that can make us notice in the first place. We require, that is, sounds, images, stories or games that can mirror punk’s acts of negation and shock: we need to be shaken out of our complacency; we need to feel our anxiety.

Notes 1 “Global air traffic – scheduled passengers 2004-2021,” statista​.c​om (http​​s:/​/ w​​ww​.st​​atist​​a​.com​​/stat​​istic​​s​/564​​717​/a​​irlin​​e​-ind​​ustry​​-pass​​enger​​-​traf​​fic​-g​​lobal​​ly/, accessed June 29, 2020). 2 My thanks to Pippa Marland for this insight. 3 See Nichols 2011 and Savage 2001, 219–220. 4 Colegrave and Sullivan (2001, 357) compile an entire page of derogatory quotes about “new wave.” 5 A possibility with tragic undertones. The Ruts’ singer Malcolm Owen fought a long-standing drug habit but died of a heroin overdose in 1980. 6 There is (maybe) a whole other essay to be written relating Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), and the connection she makes between the extractive economies of the Anthropocene and colonialism and slavery, to punk’s articulation of a white working-class experience of environmental injustice, the alliance of that with black migratory cultures through the Rock Against Racism movement and a countervailing pull (in certain cases) of punks and punk bands toward racist, right-wing politics.

Sound and Silence  155

Works Cited Ackerman, John. 1996. Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. “On Popular Music.” In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey. Harlow: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 73–84. Althusser, Louis. 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Translated by G.M. Goshgarian. London and New York: Verso. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2017. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London and New York: Verso. Bristow, Tom. 2015. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. British Sea Power, “Oh Larsen B,” Track 9 on Open Season, Rough Trade RTRADCD200, 2005, compact disc. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Colegrave, Stephen, and Chris Sullivan. 2001. Punk. A Life Apart. London: Cassell & Co. Dale, Pete. 2016. Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground. London and New York: Routledge. Davies, Jude. 1996. “The Future of ‘No Future’: Punk Rock and Postmodern Theory.” Journal of Popular Culture 29, no. 4 (1996): 3–25. Edmonds, Ennis Barrington. 2003. Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, Warren. 2010. Freakangels, vol. 4. Artwork by Paul Duffield. Rantoul, IL: Avatar Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Goodman, Steve. 2009. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grusin, Richard, ed. 2018. After Extinction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hillman, Brenda. 2005. “Near Stations.” In Pieces of Air in the Epic. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 11–12. Johns-Putra, Adeline. 2018. “The Rest Is Silence: Postmodern and Postcolonial Possibilities in Climate Change Fiction.” Studies in the Novel 50, no. 1 (Spring): 26–42. Kerridge, Richard. 2014. “Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 361–376. Laing, Dave. 1985. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London and New York: Verso. Marcus, Greil. 2001. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Faber and Faber. Middleton, Darren. 2015. Rastafari and the Arts: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Moore, Jason W. 2016. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.

156  John Parham Nersessian, Anahid. 2013. “‘Two Gardens’ An Experiment in Calamity Form.” Modern Language Quarterly 74, no. 3 (September): 307–328. Nichols, Paul. 2011. “Siouxsie and the Banshees First Gig.” July 22. https​:/​/ww​​w​. prs​​formu​​sic​.c​​om​/m-​​magaz​​ine​/f​​eatur​​es​/si​​ouxsi​​e​-and​​-the-​​bans​h​​ees​-f​​irst-​​gig. Nixon, Rob. 2014. “The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence: Vulnerability in the Anthropocene.” MLA Profession, March. https​:/​/pr​​ofess​​ion​.m​​la​.or​​g​/the​​grea​​t​-acc​​elera​​tion-​​and​-t​​he​-gr​​eat​-d​​iverg​​ence-​​vulne​​rabil​​ity​-i​​​n​-the​​-anth​​ropoc​​ene/. O’Brien, Lucy. 1999. “The Woman Punk Made Me.” In Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, edited by Roger Sabin. London and New York: Routledge, 186–198. Parham, John. 2011. “A Concrete Sense of Place: Alienation and the City in British Punk and New Wave 1977–1980.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 15, no. 1: 76–88. Parham, John, ed. 2021. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peacock, Laurel. 2012. “SAD in the Anthropocene: Brenda Hillman’s Ecopoetics of Affect.” Environmental Humanities 1: 85–102. Robb, John. 2010. “Remembering Malcolm Owen: The Ruts 30 Years On.” The Quietus, June 15. https​:/​/th​​equie​​tus​.c​​om​/ar​​ticle​​s​/044​​32​-th​​e​-rut​​s​-mal​​colm-​​owen-​​ 30​-ye​​​ar​-an​​niver​​sary. Rombes, Nicholas. 2009. A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974–1982. New York: Continuum. Ross, Andrew. 2019. “Review of Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment.” edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26, no. 2 (Spring): 499–501. Ruskin, John. 1903–1912. The Stones of Venice (3 vols, 1851–1853). The Complete Works of John Ruskin, edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 9–11. The Ruts, 1979. “Babylon’s Burning.” Virgin VS 271, vinyl. Savage, Jon. 2001. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber and Faber. Siouxsie and the Banshees, 1981. “Spellbound.” Polydor POSP 273, vinyl. Swanson, Heather Anne. 2017. “The Banality of the Anthropocene.” Fieldsights, February 22. https​:/​/cu​​lanth​​.org/​​field​​sight​​s​/the​​-bana​​lity-​​of​-th​​e​-ant​​​hropo​​cene. Swanson, Heather Anne, Nils Bubandt, and Anna Tsing. 2015. “Less than One but More than Many: Anthropocene as Science Fiction and Scholarship-in-theMaking.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 6: 149–166. thatgamecompany. 2012. Journey. Sony Computer Entertainment. Thomas, Dylan. 2014. “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” (1933) In The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, edited by John Goodby. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Wallace-Wells, David. 2019. The Uninhabitable Earth. London: Allen Lane. Weisman, Alan. 2010. The World Without Us. Toronto: Harper Collins. Welsby, Chris. 1988. Sky Light. Arts Council of Great Britain. Woods, Derek. 2014. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” The Minnesota Review 83: 133–142. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2015. “Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics and the Art of Becoming Inhuman.” Cultural Geographies 22, no. 3: 383–407.

Sound and Silence  157 Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zalasiewicz, Jan. 2008. The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Will Steffen, and Paul Crutzen. 2010. “The New World of the Anthropocene.” Environmental Science & Technology 44, no. 7: 2228–2231.

Section III

Scale and Space



9

On Being the Right Size Scale, Democracy and the Anthropocene Ayşem Mert1 and Dougald Hine

On Being the Right Size In the early twentieth century, biologists focusing on growth and size in organic life forms made some important observations. In 1923, J.B.S. Haldane gave a lecture at the Heretics Society of Cambridge University entitled “Daedalus; or, Science and the Future,” in which he discussed the prospects for scientific research and its relationship to ideology, economy, anticipation and the future. On the one hand, he observed that scientific research had little to fear from the existing political and economic systems and their alternatives: competitive nationalism, capitalism and “labor” all had reason to support the progress of science; on the other, he expressed skepticism over certain scientific advances of the time, most notably in the study of eugenics, and anticipated the world-destroying potential of radioactivity (Haldane 1924). Haldane was a Marxist author, who worked on population genetics. In his famous essay “On Being the Right Size,” Haldane (1926) argued that plants and animals are shaped by their size and sized by their shape. The proportions of a species cannot exist beyond a certain upper and lower limit: you cannot have a mouse the size of an elephant, because the weight increases as a cube of the animal’s size and legs capable of carrying this increased weight would cease to have the recognizable proportions of a rodent. This became known as Haldane’s principle. Haldane’s lecture is striking also in terms of the debates and policy concerns. While climate change is not on his agenda, the consideration of “the exhaustion of our coal and oil-fields” leads him to conclude that the future of industrial society will depend on an Energiewende involving wind and solar generation combined with the development of “a cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery” (Haldane 1924, 6). Turning to the future of food, he anticipates that “a completely satisfactory diet” will be available by the 2040s through the industrial production of synthetic foodstuffs, “including the proteins” (10). Aside from his skepticism about “the commercial possibility of induced radio-activity” (7), Haldane’s vision has remarkable similarities to An Ecomodernist Manifesto (Breakthrough DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-9

162 Ayşem Mert and Dougald Hine Institute 2015), which suggests humans should intensify their economic activities and use their growing powers to make life better, leading to the so-called “good Anthropocene.” Finally, three years after the League of Nations was founded, Haldane considers that the increase in the power of man over nature requires the formation of an international government: The league exists and is working, and in every country on earth there are many people, and ordinary normal people, who favor the idea in one form or another of a world state. I do not suggest that a world-state will emerge from the present league—or for the matter of that from the third international. I merely observe that there is a widespread and organized desire for such an institution, and several possible nuclei for it. It may take another world-war or two to convert the majority. (Haldane 1924, 20) Haldane’s idea was that the size of the government would have to match the scale of humanity’s transformative power over nature. This was the kind of proportionality many intellectuals aspired to at the time, yet it has not been his main legacy. About a decade after Haldane’s essay, in the early 1930s, Max Kleiber (1932) proposed what would become Kleiber’s law observing that the body mass of most animals is correlated with their metabolic rate. Applying laws of physics and geometry to biology, Haldane and Kleiber were following in the footsteps of an earlier inquiry into allometry, i.e. the study of the relationship between size and shape, and D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form was one of the most abstract enquiries to date into the question of what form fits which size. Thompson challenged the scientific norm that assumed the linear extension of properties: An organism is so complex a thing, and growth so complex a phenomenon, that for growth to be so uniform and constant in all the parts as to keep the whole shape unchanged would indeed be an unlikely and an unusual circumstance. Rates vary, proportions change, and the whole configuration alters accordingly. (Thompson 1942, 205) Leopold Kohr made the biological morphology of Thompson and Haldane the starting point of a social morphology, in which societies are shaped by their size and sized by their shape. Kohr’s work on overdeveloped nations (1978) was a direct critique of the post-war ideology of developmentalism, and his critique of limitless growth was radical at a time when economic growth was the main goal of both capitalism and mainstream socialism. It inspired several thinkers influential in the emergence of green thought, among them Kirkpatrick Sale, Ivan Illich and E.F. Schumacher, who also

On Being the Right Size  163 critiqued growth, linear thinking and use of time- and context-free scientific knowledge. It is this tradition we wish to explore in the next sections, to investigate other possibilities for the role of scale, proportion and limits in thinking about democracy and governance in the Anthropocene. We draw on Illich’s concept of “threshold” to suggest the possibility of a literacy of scales in which, rather than staging a contest between “small is beautiful” and “big is best,” we attend to what becomes possible and what ceases to be possible as we move between scales. First, it may be helpful to retrace the role of scale within the existing debates, in which the term Anthropocene has landed. Then, we turn our attention to scale in democracy.

Paradoxes of Scale The Anthropocene has arrived as a keyword in environmental discourse which began to emerge more than half a century ago. Revisiting the texts and cultural interventions which shaped environmentalism, environmental politics and its interrelation with global governance, the theme of scale is recurrent and often a source of paradoxes. One of the most important texts of post-war environmentalism, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) documents the environmental impact of pesticide use on ecosystems and humans. The book sold millions of copies in dozens of countries and catalyzed a new wave of grassroots environmental consciousness and activism. Other than documenting the thinning of eggshells due to the agricultural use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, the book was a radical attempt to formulate ecology as a subversive subject, transforming the discipline into a radical political project (Kroll 2002). In other words, Carson’s critique of technological control of micro- and macro-biological systems (technologically engineered control of nature and the human body) is symbolic in linking the critiques of technoscience with concerns about health and environment. Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations (1962) was another popular book of the same year which presented what still remains the dominant theory for “scaling up” of innovation across the private sector and in policymaking. The fieldwork on which this influential model was based took place in rural Iowa, where Rogers had studied the willingness or resistance of farmers to adopt the very pesticides whose wider effects were the subject of Carson’s book. Five years after Silent Spring, another classic of environmentalism first appeared in print. The Whole Earth Catalog of 1968 marked the arrival of its editor, Stewart Brand, as a key figure in the intersection between the West Coast counterculture, the military industrial research milieu that would give birth to Silicon Valley and the emerging environmental movement. The Catalog has been central to the back-to-the-land movement. Brand was struck by the question: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph

164 Ayşem Mert and Dougald Hine of the whole earth yet?” and was convinced that such an image would catalyze a shift to a planetary consciousness, awakening the citizens of the world to their common interest. As a prophetic vision, this was both farsighted and, ultimately, a failure: Brand was right to anticipate that the NASA photographs would furnish the environmental movement with an icon and capture the wider imagination; yet the shift of register between the playfulness of the original Whole Earth Catalog editorial (“We are as gods and might as well get good at it”) and its recapitulation on the opening page of Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline (2009, 1), “We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it,” is an indicator that this icon had not had its intended effect over the four decades in between. These early landmarks of the emergence of the environmental movement are notably centered on the United States. In the early 1970s, the rising tide of environmental awareness took on an international shape. The Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth (1972), speaking to a historical moment in which the long post-war period of rising and broadly shared prosperity across the Western countries was encountering its own limits and leading into ecological, economic and political crises. Drawing on the computing technologies which fascinated Brand and others around the Whole Earth Catalog, the report provided a quantified model of environmental crisis that implies the planet as the object of technoscientific management (Sachs 1992). In 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment marked the arrival of “the environment” in the sphere of global governance and the foundation of the United Nations Environment Programme and saw it take its place within the apparatus of international institutions in which the hopes of those who desired Haldane’s “world state” were vested. To summarize, modern environmentalism is riddled with paradoxes of scale. The technological control of biological and ecological systems from micro to macro levels instigated two processes at once: on the one hand, “the success of expansion through scalability shaped capitalist modernization” (Tsing 2015, 40), on the other hand, the concern over the state of the environment at a planetary scale has become one of the main and continuing concerns of politics at all levels.

The Anthropocene as a New Scale The Anthropocene is a multi-layered narrative, still in the making (Lidskog and Waterton 2018), with various dimensions and connections to fundamental cosmological and political concepts. Some argue that the Anthropocene is problematic or dangerous in its most general premise and propose alternative frames (cf. Swyngedouw 2015; Moore 2017; Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018). But there are at least two ways in which the Anthropocene is framed, which do not completely preclude the relevance or usefulness of the term: “positivist” and “deconstructivist” frames of the Anthropocene (Mert 2019a; Mert and Marquardt 2021). The former regards the Anthropocene as the

On Being the Right Size  165 new geological epoch characterized by the unprecedented impact of human species on planetary ecosystems. Influenced by natural sciences and the ecomodernistic, rationalist and post-positivist traditions in the social sciences (cf. Fremaux and Barry 2019), while also taking note of environmental degradation, it focuses on the human capacity to transform and destroy the planet and frames the ecological crisis as the result of historically aggregate industrial and economic activities of all humans. Against this, the deconstructivist frame aims to show its underlying logics, problems and dilemmas. Without denying the ontological novelty that the concept represents, this framing highlights how the Anthropocene represents a continuum of co-existing rationales and bringing an end to the dichotomies such as nature/culture, human/nonhuman, rational/irrational, agency/structure and being/becoming. They range from debates in popular science and news blogs to leading scholars of environmental social science proposing to extend the conversation on the Anthropocene by cultivating “multiple interpretations of the Anthropocene [so that] the social sciences can help to extend the realm of the possible for environmental politics” (Lövbrand et al. 2015, 211). Both frames reflect on the necessity of thinking about the scale of the environmental crisis and that of the response addressing it requires; yet, the positivist framing explicitly focuses on the scale of the required solution. It constructs the Anthropocene and the ecological crisis in a way that proposes potential solutions that span across the spectrum of modernistic imaginaries. Some argue for stakeholder involvement in making short-term decisions coupled with the input from social scientists on the desirability and plausibility of these decisions in the long term (Berkhout 2014). Others argue for large-scale human interventions to address climate change (Kintisch 2010), normalizing geoengineering solutions and even arguing that geoengineering could solve “policy dilemmas” in climate governance (Crutzen 2006), despite the critique that these policies are “rich man’s solutions” (Biermann and Möller 2019) or “the dictator’s technology of choice” (Hamilton 2013, 119). Jeremy Baskin (2019) notes that almost all key scientific papers on the Anthropocene defend or at least make geoengineering imaginable. In other words, the positivist Anthropocene narratives provide impetus to “think big” and “move fast”: to take climate change seriously, and address it realistically, is often presented as working on the largest scale possible. This has three significant implications. The first is the speed and scale that is afforded: time-consuming democratic processes can be circumvented to ensure convenient solutions to global environmental threats, if authoritative experts guide decision-making based on the available scientific knowledge. This would be more feasible and efficient, in the face of approaching doom, compared to a deep social, economic and political change bordering an ecological revolution, on which millions of individuals and hundreds of states are unlikely to agree and act (cf. Mert and Marquart 2021).

166 Ayşem Mert and Dougald Hine Second, what is considered realistic in terms of governance and government is largely limited to managing the effects of climate change as opposed to mitigating its progression. As Nicholas Beuret reports: From military doctrines that seeks [sic] to wage resource wars in increasingly hostile environments, to border regimes that attempt to hold back a feared tide of climate refugees, land grabs securing agricultural land for future population growth, the marketisation of forests and the atmosphere, the proliferations of new walls and enclave societies, to the development of global agreements and national carbon budgets: all that these projects do in the end is seek to minimise how bad climate change will be. They are all bound together as political projects as attempts to secure climate change’s least bad outcome. (Beuret 2020, 2–3) Third, to address the problems emerging at planetary scale, political agency, economic power and level of governance have to match the scale of Haldane’s “world state”—but which “world”? In the introduction to A World of Many Worlds, Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (2018) observe that the debates on the Anthropocene sensitized the rich and powerful, as their world also came under threat of destruction in a way comparable to those worlds that disappeared on the path to development and progress. Ideally, such sensitization may provide an opening to “reconsider the requirement that worlds be destroyed,” yet, the economic and technoscientific plans and proposals to address the crisis seem to prioritize the world that is responsible for its plausible destruction (Cadena and Blaser 2018, 3–4). Faced with the dead-end of realism, it is necessary to re-examine the “think big” and “move fast” assumption, entertaining a more paradoxical approach to scale. This might require, similar to what Beuret concludes, going beyond what can be done “realistically” and seeking practices and logics that might at first appear marginal or too small to be taken seriously. In sum, the conception of scale in the debates around the Anthropocene highlights the scale (a) of the ecological crisis we live in, (b) of the responses that can address such a crisis and (c) of the political agency and political will that is required to ensure these policy responses. While one way of responding to the mismatch of scales is to urge for swift, “realistic,” largescale action, another response is the opposite: to slow down and to focus on what is already happening, albeit at a smaller scale.

“The Times Are Urgent, Let Us Slow Down” Narratives of scale operate in time as well as in space—the “zooming out” logic of Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog is mirrored in his later collaboration with Brian Eno to create the Long Now Foundation, which promotes “ten thousand year thinking.” The accelerationism of Nick Srnicek and

On Being the Right Size  167 Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future (2015) is articulated in terms of space as well as time, with their critique of folk politics aimed at what they see as a fetishization of localism in the post-Cold War left. Concerns over speed and democracy are raised by the rise of organizing around calls for governments and international bodies to make declarations of “climate emergency” (cf. Hine and McLaren 2019). On the one hand, the goal of climate emergency mobilization is to prioritize climate change in the policy agenda and take meaningful action. On the other hand, these narratives of speed and scale also have implications for democracy. Particularly, they can at times be the justification for scientists’ and experts’ call for anti-democratic policy responses or skipping democratic processes (e.g. Shearman and Wayne-Smith 2007). These post-political arguments highlight the urgency and severity of the ecological crisis (climate exceptionalism) while framing democracy as too slow and ineffectual (Lövbrand et al. 2015). In academic literature they have been repudiated conceptually (Niemeyer 2014; Stevenson and Dryzek 2014; Mert and Marquardt 2021) and proven empirically wrong using countrylevel data at large (Purdy 2015), yet they seem to influence media and citizens every so often. For instance, James Lovelock’s 2010 interview with The Guardian (2010) is already striking in its headline, “Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change: […] the scientist blames inertia and democracy for lack of action” (The Guardian 2010). Here Lovelock states that modern democracy is one of the main obstructions to meaningful climate action and compares it to a war and suggests putting democracy on hold. Not only the militaristic tone but also the speed and scale of mobilization assumed here are noted by Isabelle Stengers: When I am speaking of slowing down, I am equating speed with mobilization. A mobilized army is an army that crosses the land with only one question—can we pass?—indifferent to the damage it causes. Whatever may inspire hesitations or attention must be banished within this framework of mobilization. What slows the army down is seen only as an obstacle. And, indeed, I see as a major challenge this sense of urgency that the fast transformation of the Earth may produce—we must stop quibbling, no time for that, we must act! (Stengers 2013) The alternative to mass mobilization for a climate emergency is captured aptly by the Nigerian activist and author Bayo Akomolafe’s (2020) return to the paradoxical African saying: “The times are urgent, let us slow down.” According to Kyle Whyte, slowing down might save us from another catastrophe. Starting from “the qualities of relationships connecting indigenous peoples with other societies’ governments, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations,” Whyte (2020, 3) argues that a relational tipping point toward dangerous climate change may have been crossed

168 Ayşem Mert and Dougald Hine before we reach the ecological tipping point. His argument rests on the impossibility of moving fast when the work required is relational: While qualities like consent or reciprocity may be critical for taking coordinated action urgently and justly, they require a long time to establish or repair. […] The time it takes to address the passage of this relational tipping point may be too slow to generate the coordinated action to halt certain dangers related to climate change. (Whyte 2020, 1) Whyte’s call for focusing on slower, relational work resonates with Beuret’s call for paying attention to marginalized practices and logics to address the Anthropocene. This does not necessarily mean that slower processes, smallscale democracy or local environmental action is preferable to large-scale or global projects. It rather introduces a prerequisite quality to the processes, rather than insisting on a specific scale. This is where Ivan Illich’s conceptions of thresholds and counterproductivity are useful. Central to Illich’s thinking is the idea that many institutions and technologies reach a threshold where they progress from addressing a pressing social problem to negating their original usefulness. One example is transportation infrastructure (Illich 1973, 141–142), which Illich presents as having undergone two watersheds. At the first watershed, automobiles and improved roads facilitated mobility. At the second watershed, the magnifying scale and scope of the technology led to counterproductive results: the increasing focus on speed required smoother, more expansive highways demanding ever-increasing sums of tax money. Modern highway infrastructure began to dominate lifestyles, which made a car-free lifestyle impossible. Counterproductivity therefore is the pursuit of a technical process to the point of undermining its initial goals and frustrating alternatives. Counterproductive processes and institutions tend to develop effects contrary to their initial aims, not intrinsically but as the scope of operations increases. To mask this paradoxical effect, they often assume a therapeutic and compassionate image. Medicine makes cultures unhealthy; education tends to obscure the environment; vehicles wedge highways between the points they ought to bridge. Each of these institutions, beyond a critical point of its growth, thus exercises a radical monopoly [and] deprives the environment of those features that people need in a specific area to subsist outside the market-economy. [It] paralyzes autonomous action in favour of professional deliveries. […] This radical monopoly would accompany high-speed traffic even if motors were powered by sunshine and vehicles spun of air. […] At some point in every domain, the amount of goods delivered so degrade the environment for action that the synergy between use-values and commodities turns negative. Paradoxical counterproductivity sets in. (Illich 1977, 31–33)

On Being the Right Size  169 Counterproductivity is caused by the institutionalization of technologies and economic models based on heteronomous production, which ignores use-values. It leads to commodification and manipulation of the citizenry through the creation of newly designed needs, taking away their autonomous self-guided ways of tackling the same problem (29–32). It is possible to imagine, then, that even a normative ideal such as democracy can become counterproductive when pursued beyond its use for the citizen. Given the necessity of structural transformations for life in the Anthropocene, we should turn our attention to the question: At what scale and under what conditions would democracy be able to address the requirements of the Anthropocene without becoming counterproductive?

Decolonizing the Democratic Imaginary Democracy isn’t some historic cargo ship It’s not a Finland ferry Democracy is more like a little boat We are small animals on the boat World history is the sea And the boat is trying to make its way. Den svenska demokratins historia (“The History of Swedish Democracy”) devised and performed by Troja Scenkonst Den svenska demokratins historia was a theatre production which toured Swedish high schools in 2014–2015. The show was a response to the emergence of the Sweden Democrats, a far-right party whose rise appeared to threaten the values of democracy even while invoking them. Yet the image of democracy as a small vessel of hope afloat on the vast darkness of world history is a specific representation of a Western narrative of democracy, which originates in ancient Athens, and after a long dark age, the lights really start to come on in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century, expanding to the rest of the world through decolonization and modernization. This peculiar narrative of democracy is problematic in several ways, as it remains Eurocentric, dismisses the colonial history underlying current experiences across the world, disregards the diversity of regimes that are categorized as democracies and idealizes a system that is leading into planet-wide ecological disaster at the end. In mainstream cultural contexts, the history of other democracies is usually only glimpsed in passing. Early in his autobiography, Nelson Mandela (1994, 18) describes the tribal meetings he witnessed as a child in Mqhekezweni, the capital of Thembuland: It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner

170 Ayşem Mert and Dougald Hine and laborer. People spoke without interruption and the meetings lasted for many hours. The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens. (Women, I am afraid, were deemed second-class citizens.) The South African example is not an exception. During decolonization, colonies have appropriated democracy in many diverse and radical ways, imagining various democratic futures. This is a significantly different take than the grand narrative reproduced in the Swedish example, where democracy is assumed to have globalized through copying and pasting the Western model. This presumption is aptly called “vernaculars cross-dressed as universals” in James Scott’s 2009 study of globalization. In other words, there were always already many democracies, and they are still with us. It could be argued that the scale of a village is incomparable to that of a large nation-state or even the whole planet. However, this is exactly the kind of scalability that we should refrain from in thinking about democracy in the Anthropocene. As Anna Tsing (2015, 142) notes, “the only way to create scalability is to repress change and encounter,” whereas democratic engagement at the planetary level requires both of these. Furthermore, it can be equally emancipating for Western democratic imaginaries to learn about the democratization experiences of large postcolonial nation-states such as India. This brings us to the second part of the question we asked at the end of the last section: How can democratic scale in contemporary societies be reconsidered to avoid crossing the threshold that Illich warns against. Governance and international relations scholarship generally assumes that states have a high threshold of democracy, while at larger scales “the threshold of acceptability should not be as high as a well-ordered society” (Keohane 2011, 100). Scholars tend to apply nation-level democratic principles to the international level mainly because states are the main agents in present international society. However, this nation-level bias structures and limits the democratic imaginary, resulting in the assumption that the necessary infrastructure for democracy is absent at the global level, and that at best we can have a nominal democracy with some key features of national democracies, such as accountability of elites to publics, widespread participation, protection of minority rights and deliberation within civil society (Keohane 2016, 938). Yet, there is no inherent reason for democracy in the Anthropocene to be based on nation-state principles. In its historical development as a regime, democracy has been fundamentally transformed when it was being applied to a new political scale. During the American and French revolutions, the principles of an ancient, small-scale regime were reinterpreted and significantly transformed to suit the needs of larger nation-states, with an extensive demos. As the scale of democracy has changed from the polis to the nation-state, the citizen base has enlarged

On Being the Right Size  171 and a monarchic practice called representation was introduced as a substitute to direct participation. Many new institutions and practices have emerged and old ones have been appropriated to “invent” a nation-scale democracy. Reimagining planetary-scale democracy also requires significant structural changes (also see Dryzek and Pickering 2019; Mert 2019a; Biermann 2020). Currently, the debates about democratizing global governance institutions focus on stakeholder participation, accountability and transparency. Policy practitioners, politicians and governance researchers who agree that not only direct participation but also representation is impossible at a global scale, encourage these as second-order democratizing principles and criteria. However, there are significant problems with these democratizing principles. For instance, Bäckstrand and colleagues (2010) note that the intense academic and corporate interest in accountability and transparency indicates that some of these measures have institutionalized in the dominant system of rules and might not address the problems they were set to address. Kramarz and Park (2016) also suggest that accountability remains a weak tool, since it is regarded as an appendage, or an afterthought to agenda-setting. Furthermore, many of these corporate and institutional accountability and transparency measures are voluntary. Yet, without the shadow of hierarchy, voluntary measures often fail to address the democratic deficit (Mert 2009). Finally, most accountability and transparency measures are geared toward disclosing information without any behavioral change on the side of the governance institutions and the corporations. As a result, accountability at the global level means accountability to a limited number of actors, often experts and the international development elite (Hardt and Negri 2004). In Illich’s terms, these measures have become counterproductive as they have ended up legitimizing and maintaining existing power imbalances and disempowering autonomous reinvention of democratic practices (Mert 2019b), rather than democratizing governance institutions. They do not increase the democratic quality of global governance by simply making governance platforms more inclusive, accountable and transparent; on the contrary, they require new mechanisms of checks and balances, specifically designed so as to ensure the continuity of the current global governance architecture (Lipschutz and Fogel 2002; Mert 2015). In the Anthropocene, democracy requires yet another r­einterpretation. A second scalar revolution is to fundamentally transform the practice and conception of democracy for the planet. The Anthropocene threatens and potentially invigorates the practice of democratic governance at once; it forces us to think innovatively about democracy, to deconstruct certain traditions and to learn from peripheral and marginalized knowledge-bases and the nonhuman environment. There is much academic work in this direction. For instance, Robyn Eckersley’s (2017) account of a hyper-reflexive

172 Ayşem Mert and Dougald Hine geopolitan democracy in the Anthropocene reimagines the human as the earthling, while her engagement with the new materialist “ecological democracy 2.0” (Eckersley 2020) rethinks democracy. Simon Niemeyer (2020, 25) proposes a “nested polycentrism via the upward transmission of citizen discourses formed under ideal deliberative conditions” to better connect the individual citizen with the global-level discourses and contestations. John Dryzek (2016) adds ecosystemic reflexivity, foresight and anticipation as core principles for democracy in the Anthropocene, whereas together with Jonathan Pickering (Dryzek and Pickering 2019), he details the ways in which participatory public reason, institutional self-confrontation and reform and emergent political agencies in the Anthropocene can initiate a process of reflexive social reorganization. The conditions under which democracy will be practiced in the Anthropocene can be listed as follows (also see Mert 2019a): institutions and societies that can be adaptable under swiftly changing circumstances will be institutionally and ecologically reflexive. This means critically analyzing the results of past choices and policies from the viewpoint of socio-ecological change and reforming them accordingly. Democratic governance institutions in the Anthropocene will have to incorporate procedures that cyclically examine the results of their policies, while accountability and success in politics need to be redefined accordingly. In terms of agency, democracy in the Anthropocene requires the empowerment of the democratic citizen, making this the central identity to people’s lives rather than various other identities (e.g. the consumer, the shareholder or the entrepreneur). Managerial and technoscientific solutions can jeopardize the democratic quality of the debate if promoted as the main or the only solutions to the ecological crises. Instead, epistemological pluralism must be a building block not only for science but also for a democracy that makes it possible to discuss the various futures of the planet with previously marginal communities who have different ways of relating to nature and knowledge-making traditions (Hulme 2010). Scientific as well as political institutions should maximize the ways and capacities for participation of various objective and subjective knowledge-holders so that communities can adapt and mitigate the ecological crises in a multiplicity of ways. Finally, narratives of climate exceptionalism will have to be replaced with the recognition that “there is nothing so unique about the issues of environmental governance that puts them out of the reach of democratic deliberation” (Baber and Bartlett 2016, 167). Finally, the greatest challenge to democracy will come from the way citizens respond to the dislocations resulting from the uncertain socio-ecological conditions of the Anthropocene and feelings of loss, grief, deep uncertainty and insecurity. The survival of democratic institutions that emerged in the Holocene will depend on how they provide citizens with basic security while also providing them with narratives around which transformations that are required can be debated and agreed upon, without ignoring the material conditions under which they live.

On Being the Right Size  173

Conclusion The existing governing structures as we enter the Anthropocene have emerged in the steady conditions of the Holocene, where decision-making could take a long time. Yet, they were already suffering from a democratic deficit that has resulted from nation-level democratic imaginaries having pervaded global governance. This chapter has explored the ways which scale, democracy and the emergent imaginaries of the Anthropocene interact. Specifically, we have investigated narratives of size and speed and have emphasized that the dominant Anthropocene narratives provide impetus to “think big” and “move fast,” whereas what is required to rethink democracy at a new scale is to slow down and focus also and particularly on the marginal practices that provide fundamentally different relationalities and rationales than those which have culminated in the current ecological crisis. Following Ivan Illich’s ideas on thresholds and counterproductivity, we understand the Anthropocene as a new scale which forces us to rethink existing practices, including democratic practices, and as an opportunity to reconstruct novel democratic imaginaries. Some of these failures emerge when state-level practices are scaled up to the level of global governance. Others come from historical representations of democracy that understand democracy as a scaling up of an ancient European concept, yet fail to engage with colonial histories and the diversity of democratic regimes across the world. In the end, we have proposed several principles that a new scale of democracy would have to adopt to address the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Note 1 Ayşem Mert’s involvement in the writing of this chapter was financially supported by the Occupy Climate Change! project funded by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS; Contract No.: 2017-01962_3).

Works Cited Akomolafe, Bayo. 2020. “The Times Are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down.” https​:/​/ba​​yoako​​ molaf​​e​.net​​/proj​​ect​/t​​he​-ti​​mes​-a​​re​-ur​​gent-​​​lets-​​slow-​​down/​ (accessed: 23-12-2020). Baber, Walter, and Robert Bartlett. 2016. “Democratic Accountability in the Anthropocene.” In Environmental Politics and Governance in the Anthropocene: Institutions and Legitimacy in a Complex World, edited by Philipp Pattberg and Fariborz Zelli, 167–182. London: Routledge. Bäckstrand, Karin, Jamil Khan, Annica Kronsell, and Eva Lövbrand. 2010. Environmental Politics and Deliberative Democracy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Baskin, Jeremy. 2019. Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Berkhout, Frans. 2014. “Anthropocene Futures.” The Anthropocene Review 1(2): 154–159.

174 Ayşem Mert and Dougald Hine Beuret, Nicholas. 2020. “Containing Climate Change: The New Governmental Strategies of Catastrophic Environments.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, (Online first: January 2020). https://doi​ .org​ /10​ .1177​ /251 4848620902384. Biermann, Frank. 2020. “The Future of ‘Environmental’ Policy in the Anthropocene: Time for a Paradigm Shift.” Environmental Politics. DOI:10.1080/09644016.2020.18469581-20. Biermann, Frank, and Ina Möller. 2019. “Rich Man’s Solution? Climate Engineering Discourses and the Marginalization of the Global South.” INEA 19(2): 151–167. Brand, Stewart. 1968. Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park: Portola Institute. Brand, S. (2009). Whole Earth Discipline. London: Penguin Books. Breakthrough Institute. 2015. “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” http:​ /​ /www​​ .ecom​​ odern​​ism​.o​​rg​/ma​​nifes​​to​-e​n​​glish​. de la Cadena, Marisol, and Mario Blaser. 2018. A World of Many Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Carson, Rachel. 1962/2002. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Crutzen, Paul. 2006. “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” Climatic Change 77(3–4): 211–220. Dryzek, John S. 2016. “Institutions for the Anthropocene: Governance in a Changing Earth System.” British Journal of Political Science 46(4): 937–956. Dryzek, John S., and Jonathan Pickering. 2019. The politics of the Anthropocene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eckersley, Robyn. 2017. “Geopolitan Democracy in the Anthropocene.” Political Studies 65(4): 983–999. Eckersley, Robyn. 2020. “Ecological Democracy and the Rise and Decline of Liberal Democracy: Looking back, Looking Forward.” Environmental Politics 29(2): 214–234. Fremaux, Anne, and John Barry. 2019. “The ‘Good Anthropocene’ and Green Political Theory: Rethinking Environmentalism, Resisting Eco-modernism.” In Anthropocene Encounters. New Directions in Green Political Thinking, edited by Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand, 171–190. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haldane, John B.S. 1924. Daedalus, Or, Science and the Future: A Paper Read to the Heretics. New York: E.P. Dutton. Haldane, John B.S. 1926. “On Being the Right Size.” Harper’s Magazine 152: 424–427. Hamilton, Clive. 2013. Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering. New Heaven: Yale University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Hine, Dougald and Duncan McLaren. 2019. “Climate Emergency: The Democracy Fork.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.ope​​ndemo​​cracy​​.net/​​en​/cl​​imate​​-emer​​gency​​-demo​​cr​acy​​-fork​/. Hulme, Mike. 2010. “Problems with Making and Governing Global Kinds of Knowledge.” Global Environmental Change 20(4): 558–564. Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper and Row. Illich, Ivan. 1977. Disabling Professions. London: Marion Boyars. Keohane, Robert O. 2011. “Global Governance and Legitimacy.” RIPE 18(1): 99–109.

On Being the Right Size  175 Keohane, Robert O. 2016. “Nominal Democracy? A Rejoinder to Gráinne de Búrca and Jonathan Kuyper and John Dryzek.” International Journal of Constitutional Law 14(4): 938–940. Kintisch, Eli. 2010. Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope-or Worst Nightmare-for Averting Climate Catastrophe. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Kleiber, Max. 1932. “Body Size and Metabolism.” Hilgardia 6(11): 315–353. Kohr, Leopold. 1978. The Overdeveloped Nations: The Diseconomies of Scale. New York: Schocken. Kramarz, Teresa, and Susan Park. 2016. “Accountability in Global Environmental Governance: A Meaningful Tool for Action?” Global Environmental Politics 16(2): 1–21. Kroll, Gary. 2002. “Ecology as a Subversive Subject.” Reflections: Newsletter of the Program for Ethics, Science and the Environment 9: 2. Lidskog, Rolf, and Claire Waterton. 2018. “The Anthropocene: A Narrative in the Making.” In Environment and Society, edited by Magnus Boström and Debra J. Davidson, 25–46. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lipschutz, Ronnie D., and Cathleen Fogel. 2002. “‘Regulation for the Rest of Us?’ Global Civil Society and the Privatization of Transnational Regulation.” In The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance, edited by Rodney B. Hall and Thomas J. Biersteker, 115–140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lövbrand, Eva, Silke Beck, Jason Chilvers, Tim Forsyth, Johan Hedrén, Mike Hulme, Rolf Lidskog, and Eleftheria Vasileiadou. 2015. “Who Speaks for the Future of Earth? How Critical Social Science Can Extend the Conversation on the Anthropocene.” Global Environmental Change 32: 211–218. Mandela, Nelson. 1994. Long Walk to Freedom. New York: Little Brown and Company. Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New York: Potomac Associates/Universe Books. Mert, Ayşem. 2009. “Partnerships for Sustainable Development as Discursive Practice: Shifts in Discourses of Environment and Democracy.” Forest Policy and Economics 11(5–6): 326–339. Mert, Ayşem. 2015. Environmental Governance through Partnerships: A Discourse Theoretical Study. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Mert, Ayşem. 2019a. “Democracy in the Anthropocene: A New Scale.” In Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking, edited by Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand, 128–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mert, Ayşem. 2019b. “Participation(s) in Transnational Environmental Governance: Green Values versus Instrumental Use.” Environmental Values 28(1): 101–121. Mert, Ayşem and Jens Marquardt. 2021. “Reframing the Anthropocene: Democratic Challenges and Openings for Sustainability.” In Handbook of Democracy and Sustainability, edited by Basil Bornemann, Henrike Knappe and Patrizia Nanz. London: Routledge. Moore, Jason W. 2017. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(3): 594–630. Niemeyer, Simon. 2014. “A Defence of (Deliberative) Democracy in the Anthropocene.” Ethical Perspectives 21(1): 15–45.

176 Ayşem Mert and Dougald Hine Niemeyer, Simon. 2020. “Deliberation and Ecological Democracy: From Citizen to Global System.” Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 22(1): 16–29. Purdy, Jedediah. 2015. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rogers, Everett M. 1962. Diffusion of Innovations. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Sachs, Wolfgang. 1992. “Environment.” In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, 26–37. London and New York: Zed Books. Scott, James C. 2009. “Vernaculars Cross-dressed as Universals: Globalization as North Atlantic Hegemony.” Macalester International 24(1): 7. Shearman, David J. C., and Joseph Wayne Smith. 2007. The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. 2015. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. London: Verso. Stengers, Isabelle. 2013. Matters of Cosmopolitics: On the Provocations of Gaïa. Open Humanities Press. DOI: http:​/​/dx.​​doi​.o​​rg​/10​​.3998​​/ohp.​​12527​​215​​.0​​001​.0​​01 Stevenson, Hayley, and John S. Dryzek. 2014. Democratizing Global Climate Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2015. “Depoliticized Environments and the Promises of the Anthropocene.” In International Handbook of Political Ecology, edited by Raymond Bryant, 131–145. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Swyngedouw, Erik, and Henrik Ernstson. 2018. “Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene: Immuno-biopolitics and Depoliticizing Ontologies in the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture & Society 35(6): 3–30. The Guardian. 2010. “James Lovelock: Humans Are Too Stupid to Prevent Climate Change.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/sc​​ience​​/2010​​/mar/​​29​/ja​​mes​-l​​ovelo​​ck​​-cl​​ imate​​-chan​​ge (accessed 29-03-2010). Thompson, D’arcy Wentworth. 1942. On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Troja, Scenkonst. (2014) “Den Svenska Demokratins Historia.” Unpublished manuscript, 28 November 2014, typescript; our translation. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Whyte, Kyle. 2020. “Too Late for Indigenous Climate Justice: Ecological and Relational Tipping Points.”WIRE: Climate Change 11(1): e603.

10 Cosmos vs. Anthropocene Multi-scalar Praxis for Socio-environmental Justice with Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy Kathrin Bartha Introduction The idea of the Anthropocene has expanded exponentially in recent years; within academia, there are few concepts that have spread so widely and so quickly across multiple disciplines. Crucially, however, the Anthropocene term has also proven unpopular among humanities scholars who have taken issue with the universalizing category “human,” as it obscures power differences of race, gender, class, ability, age or location and focuses on humanity to the exclusion of other species that constitute the very ecosystems needed for human survival. In this sense, the Anthropocene conveys that environmental devastations across the planet are everybody’s (and by extension nobody’s) fault. My employment of the Anthropocene builds on the work of (environmental) humanities scholars who do not welcome the concept so much as use it critically as a term that can be said to have entered our zeitgeist. In my contribution to this volume, the Anthropocene is, thus, used with the consciousness that it is a deeply ambiguous concept. Although the Anthropocene encapsulates a kaleidoscope of socio-eco-political crises that have now reached a planetary scale, I am careful not to perpetuate the Anthropocene’s environmental “decline-narrative,” which Ursula Heise has defined as the tendency to think “that modern society has degraded a natural world that used to be beautiful, harmonious, and self-sustaining and that might disappear completely if modern humans do not change their way of life” (Heise 2016, 7). While a narrative of environmental decline can be accurate for certain contexts and important for shaking societies up, an over-emphasis on decline risks encouraging a certain anti-humanism, anti-modernity, scarcity thinking and, perhaps, nihilism and apathy. As Haraway writes, the Anthropocene term indicates a “boundary event,” a crisis, not an end result (Haraway 2016, 100). Therefore, this chapter seeks to highlight the power of language, narrative, the arts and activism for bringing about positive change. I seek to point to the need for constructive narratives and strategic movements in the face of increasing socioenvironmental calamities.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-10

178  Kathrin Bartha As an offering for challenging the Anthropocene framework, my chapter engages with the ancient Greek and pagan idea of “cosmos” (“the order of the world”) and “cosmology” (“the discourse about the order of the world”), which have recently been resurrected as the “oldest ecological vision” (Walls 2016a, 47). In the following, I will give a brief overview of the etymology of cosmos and cosmology, in order to explicate the current “renaissance” of the term. I will then dive into an exploration of Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017) as an example of the rising popularity of a cosmological approach in the context of the Anthropocene. Emergent Strategy is part manifesto, part, as the blurb puts it, “self-help, society-help and planet-help” and is written from the first-person perspective, but also contains poetic insertions by the author, as well as quotes and interviews with inspirational people. Based on Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series (1993, 1998), Brown develops six key principles summed up under “Emergent Strategy” that describe relatively small interactions in order to achieve systemic change. Although the book does not explicitly employ the term “cosmos,” Brown can be said to evoke key principles of it. Emergent Strategy is an example of a cosmological approach, I argue, because Brown unites different kinds of knowledge, such as ecosystemic reflections on the material world, movement building strategies, literary studies, as well as African-American thought and cultural practices of self-liberation and social organizing. By drawing a parallel between the concepts inherent in “cosmos” and Emergent Strategy, I propose that the book undoes the separation between culture and “nature”; human and environment; and intellect, emotion and practice. It therefore serves as an example of holistic, multi-scalar thinking that generates a pragmatic vision despite and beyond socio-environmental calamities.

The Renaissance of “Cosmos” and “Cosmology” in the Anthropocene The word “cosmology” derives from the ancient Greek kósmos (order or world) and lógos (discourse), which described not the universe in general, but the universe understood as a unified system of beauty and order, which arises out of chaos (Walls 2016a, 47). The old kósmos evoked that the universe appears ordered and beautiful through reciprocity with humans. However, today this seemingly simple idea has many different uses in our vocabulary: in common use, “cosmos” refers to the universe and to the stars and planets beyond Earth. “Cosmology” refers to—on the one hand—mythology and creation stories—on the other hand—to astronomy, a branch of physics. Scientific cosmology involves examining the origin and evolution of the universe—the “large-scale properties of the universe as a whole” (NASA Science n.d.). The history of this word is complex: until the nineteenth century, the ancient Greek kósmos was largely forgotten and mainly remnant in the word “cosmetics,” which carries the earliest meaning

Cosmos vs. Anthropocene  179 of kósmos through the sense of beauty and adornment (Walls 2016a, 48). Explorer Alexander von Humboldt then revived the term for a broad general and scientific audience with his pathbreaking multivolume work Kosmos (1845–1862). Inspired by his travels across the globe, and especially by his encounters with Indigenous peoples in South America, Humboldt employs “cosmos” as a unifying concept that binds together the history of the planet as a history of the physical sciences and as a history of different cultures. As historian Laura Dassow Walls puts it: There was no word in modern European languages for Humboldt’s insight. So he resurrected and reintroduced the ancient Greek word κόσμος for the universe as both ordered and beautiful; his point was that while the physical universe exists apart from and without humans, the universe as a Cosmos, beautiful and ordered, exists only through human reciprocity with nature. (Walls 2016b, 196) Thus, Humboldt sought to describe our planetary network not just scientifically, but also poetically, giving equal value for understanding human situatedness in the more-than-human world. As Walls describes, Humboldt equated order with the perception of scientific laws as well as beauty: “the doing of science combined rigorous and exacting labor with the joy of poetic creation and an almost spiritual sense of revelation” (Walls 2009, 8). As Humboldt combined scientific, cultural and lyrical observations, he did justice to the ancient meaning of kósmos as discourse about the order and beauty of the world. In a recent biography, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (2015), Andrea Wulf explores the profound impact Humboldt had internationally: Everybody learned from him: farmers and craftsmen, schoolboys and teachers, artists and musicians, scientists and politicians. There was not a single textbook or atlas in the hands of children in the western world that hadn’t been shaped by Humboldt’s ideas. (Wulf 2015, 335) Walls and Wulf point out, however, that although Humboldt’s work received the highest recognition globally, and across a wide interdisciplinary and popular audience, the crises of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century overshadowed his work so that the idea of cosmos “devolved from an ecological vision unifying cosmic, geological, organic, and human history […] to a term for the heavens removed from our sublunary system” (Walls 2016a, 48; Wulf 2015, 335). In other words, the complexity of the idea of “cosmos,” which sought to combine “nature” and culture, or matter and meaning, was lost in the last two centuries, as it became a term that describes the physical universe divorced from human influence and perception.

180  Kathrin Bartha Yet today, “cosmos” has once again been resurrected as a key word for the Anthropocene. Walls proposes that the idea of cosmos is “the oldest ecological vision of our planet” and is capable of undoing the harmful separation between “culture and nature, human and environment, mind and matter, intellect and emotion” (Walls 2016a, 48). Although only alluding to it briefly, Walls implies here that the notion of cosmos provides a kind of solution to the decline-narrative of the Anthropocene, as this grave predicament names the “inability to think the cosmos” (Walls 2016a, 48). As is conveyed in this statement, the environmental crises of the Anthropocene can be seen as deriving from powerful worldviews, or grand narratives, resulting in the failure to assign intelligence to the more-than-human world and creating systems that are unable to limit the decline of ecosystems and species, wrongfully separating humans from “nature” (and everyone associated with it), mind from matter and emotion from intellect. Instead of envisioning humanity as part of the cosmos, “the inability to think the cosmos” suggests that certain worldviews have become dominant that cast humanity as master species, rather than as dependent on, interconnected with and situated in an ecosystemic order. In this way, the idea of cosmos, understood as the oldest ecological vision, becomes key for addressing the practices that have led us into the Anthropocene. Yet how can we define cosmology if it is such a slippery interdisciplinary term that combines the vast scales of the terrestrial and celestial, the universal and particular, transcultural scientific insights (currently the Big Bang Theory) and culturally specific local cosmologies? In this chapter, I use “cosmology” to refer to the narrative of wholeness and interconnectedness grounded in the planetary ecosystem. This narrative can be revealed and shaped by the sciences, arts, humanities and activist movements. Narratives are usually thought of as human creations, but the notion of “cosmos” operates at the intersection of human construction and material reality: ecosystemic order is not “merely” a narrative, just as climate change is not “only” a story, but a state of the world. While narrative and cosmos are linked in important ways, cosmology goes beyond the idea of narratives as a human construct only. I consider cosmology a valuable term because it suggests a meta-discursive narrative that encompasses specific cultural interactions with the more-than-human world. As I will explain throughout the discussion of Emergent Strategy, the notion of cosmos and cosmology includes ideas of interconnected scales, interdependence and collaborative evolution, external order, a process of becoming conscious of this order, ethics and politics in upholding this order, pleasure, beauty and mystery. Cosmology can therefore be loosely understood as a universal terrestrial discourse (although it can encompass culturally different narratives) in that it argues for the interconnectedness of the universe/pluriverse. Therefore, I use “cosmos” as a constructive term, as it seeks to create an ethical discourse arguing for the need to recognize that everyone and everything is interconnected.

Cosmos vs. Anthropocene  181 Before I proceed to introduce Emergent Strategy further, however, it first seems necessary to define the relationship between the Anthropocene and cosmology more clearly. Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the Anthropocene a “negative universal,” as it describes the human species as a perpetrator so that humanity is only united through the sense of a shared catastrophe (2009, 222). In this way, the Anthropocene could also be called a “negative cosmology” because it presents a decline-narrative that maps the harm done to the biosphere, rather than supporting the fact that sustainable cultures and practices do and can exist. Moreover, as a term that was formed by Earth-systems science, the Anthropocene is linked to “cosmos” in that it expresses the understanding that there is indeed an order to our planetary ecosystem and that certain behaviors (in their accumulation) are threatening the order, causing it to fall increasingly into unpredictability.1 The process of defining the Anthropocene conveys the challenge of thinking of the planetary ecosystem in terms of a relative steady former order (the Holocene) and increasing environmental instability (the Anthropocene), which echoes the ancient Greek use of cosmos as a materially and spiritually interwoven system that emerged out of chaos. In short, rather than moving out of chaos to order, the trajectory of the Anthropocene symbolism appears to move from order to chaos. In this sense, the Anthropocene could even be called a chaosmology, to borrow James Joyce’s term, as it expresses a moment of crisis in which the balance from Holocene (order) tips into increased unreliability (Beaulieu 2016, 201).2 Moreover, as this volume testifies, numerous scholars have pointed out that the Anthropocene presents the problem of reconciling divergent scales of space and time. I consider the terms “cosmos” and “cosmology” important because they, too, evoke interwoven scales: fabrics of the global and local; past, present and future; and stories as ethical guidelines and markers of community. Both “cosmos” and the Anthropocene, then, present the problem of reconciling divergent scales of space and time that cannot be homogenized. However, although the Anthropocene is linked to the idea of cosmos in myriad ways, the differences are telling: if the Anthropocene describes the predicament caused by socio-economic and political factors, cosmology provides tools to rethink and learn from sustainable practices. Grounded in the reciprocity of ecosystemic facts with human cultural lenses and understood as an ecological vision, the idea of cosmos expresses the potential for changing the decline-narrative of the planetary ecosystem toward healing and justice. Thus, along with Walls and others discussed below, I consider “cosmos” and “cosmology” useful because the terms challenge writers and, perhaps, readers to become aware of the importance of the cultural view on the environment, while provoking reflection on an ecosystem that precedes humans and the existence of any one species. The following discussion explores how Brown’s Emergent Strategy provides a timely practical application of interconnected scales, without losing sight of particular histories—in this case African-American liberation

182  Kathrin Bartha strategies and movement building. As Emergent Strategy suggests, there is a renewed interest in ideas related to “cosmos,” which, perhaps, emerges out of the accelerating socio-environmental predicaments summarized by the Anthropocene term. This “renaissance” of cosmic ideas can also be seen through the fact that both Brown’s and Butler’s work have recently become bestsellers,3 through the renewed interest in Humboldt’s Kosmos, as evinced by recent scholarship as well as by Wulf’s internationally bestselling popular biography. Moreover, through my dialogue with Emergent Strategy, I argue that literature has an important role to play in constructing and communicating cosmologies; after all, the book was largely inspired by Butler’s work so that Brown can be said to use what I call Butler’s “literary cosmology” to develop a socio-cultural praxis. While a “literary cosmology” can be understood as a worldview shaped by a particular literary work, I here employ the term to also point to a general function of literature and storytelling as assigning meaning to and potentially building worlds beyond fiction.4

Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy and Multi-scalar Praxis Emergent Strategy builds on Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998), which have recently experienced a popular renaissance—27 years after the original publication, the series has become a New York Times bestseller for the first time—not least because of Butler’s dedicated reader base that seems to have brought the novels to popular attention over the past two decades. This renewed interest in Butler’s Parable series can also be seen as linked to the Trump-years, as Butler presciently tells of a post-apocalyptic near-future in the United States (starting from the year 2024) that has been ravaged by corporate greed and climate change, and in which a right-wing president rises with his promise to “Make America Great Again.” In this near-future scenario, social “order” is marked by violent gangs, the chaos of an unstable climate and a broken economy, so that the novels dramatize the quest to survive and flourish in, and despite, a failed state. In the midst of this socio-environmental instability, the young protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina (who is 15 at the start of the series) forms her own “religion” which she names Earthseed. The Parable of the Sower is centered around Lauren’s strength as a survivor and a leader, as informed by her earth-based spirituality. After her home near Los Angeles comes under severe threat from violent gangs, and most of her family has been killed or kidnapped, Lauren leaves her gated compound, leading a small group of friends by foot along the Californian highways. As these refugees walk and meet people along the way, their community grows larger, and the novel ends with the group eventually forming a settlement they name Acorn in “Humboldt County” (Northern California). Picking up these experiences a decade or so later, the sequel The Parable of the Talents then reflects upon

Cosmos vs. Anthropocene  183 the community project and the destiny that awaits them, mainly through Lauren’s journal entries and her partner Bankole’s writing, retrospectively compiled and commented on by their daughter, Asha. The diverse multiethnic and multi-lingual community is largely self-sufficient, collaborative and bound together through the philosophy of Earthseed, which exists in hybrid form with beliefs and rituals of other spiritual traditions. Earthseed is based on the idea that humans must adapt to and embrace the inevitable basic premise of change if they are to survive and flourish. Some of the founding verses Lauren composes from the opening lines of the Parable series are: All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God Is change. (Butler 1998, 3) Earthseed could be summarized as containing elements of biomimicry (the need for embracing diversity and collaboration is seen as key for adapting to evolutionary change); cosmologies of wholeness and interconnectedness (humans must act and actively shape the world/change/God in order for life to flourish); animism (the material world has energy and aliveness, as humans shape “God, Water, Fire, Sculptor, Clay”); spiritual traditions of kindness, love and care (which ease the fear of change and aid collaborative partnerships and communities); and belonging to the Earth as well as to the larger universe (“The Destiny of Earthseed / Is to take root among the stars […] to become new beings, / And to consider new questions”) (Butler 1998, 63, 265). Throughout Emergent Strategy, Brown develops self-liberation and social organizational tools based on the principles of Earthseed. Brown (an avid Butler scholar and African-American socio-environmental justice activist)5 explains the genealogy of the book’s coining of “Emergent Strategy”: Emergent Strategy was, initially, a way of describing the adaptive and relational leadership model found in the work of Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler (and others). Then it grew into plans of action, personal practices and collective organizing tools that account for constant change and rely on the strength of relationship for adaptation. (Brown 2017, 23)

184  Kathrin Bartha In short, the philosophies Brown names Emergent Strategy are developed from science-fiction (SF) theory, African-American thought, theories of activism and collaborative leadership, and biomimicry (all aspects that also seem to inform Earthseed). Its six key principles, which also form the titles of the book chapters, are: fractals (“the relationship between small and large”), intentional adaptation (“how we change”), interdependence and decentralization (“who we are and how we share”), nonlinear and iterative change (“the pace and pathways of change”), resilience (“how we recover and transform”) and creating more possibilities (“how we move toward life”). Brown explains “emergence” with the help of Nick Oblensky’s Complex Adaptive Leadership (2014): “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions” (Brown 2017, 3). The notion of “strategy” simply means “a plan of action towards a goal” (Brown 2017, 20). Emergent Strategy, then, presents a practical approach “for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions” (Brown 2017, 2). The book is informed by Brown’s long experience of community and activist work, and the aim is to create vision and prevent burnout—the key question being “[h] ow do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration if that is the way we will survive?” (2017, 9). As Brown argues, the practice of Emergent Strategy stands in contrast to the common organizational pitfalls of “linear, hierarchical, outcome-oriented strategies and strategic plans that can’t adapt to changing conditions [as] we need ways of strategizing together based on understanding and respecting change” (Imarisha et al. 2015, 279). The book offers concrete reflection questions and facilitation tools for experiential learning, such as the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, the formulation of group principles and protocols, efficient consensus decision-making and examples of agenda templates (Brown 2017, 224–251). Moreover, the open-endedness of facilitation work has led the author to gather resources on an online platform, the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute.6 According to anthropologist and civic action researcher Jen Sandler, Brown’s Emergent Strategy “speaks to the current hunger in the field of social change for robust ‘theoretical practices’ of collectivity, organizing, and facilitation as foundations for effective movements” (Sandler 2019, 103). This “hunger” for embodied, pragmatic, imaginative and theoretical practices, Sandler describes, can be seen as linked to the multi-scalar crisis connoted by the Anthropocene.

Reading Emergent Strategy Cosmologically Importantly for this chapter, the notion of Emergent Strategy creates a pragmatic set of tools out of what could be called a “cosmology” of time and place. Imaginative reflecting on the various scales of time and place, seeing their “wholeness” and deriving knowledge and guidance from their “order,” informs the core principles of Emergent Strategy. It seems apt to

Cosmos vs. Anthropocene  185 call this reflection on time and space a “cosmological approach,” I argue because Brown brings together different kinds of knowledge traditions that encompass the sciences, the humanities, the arts and specific cultural traditions to develop a socio-ecological vision. As Brown writes: “I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility and wholeness in it. […] We are all healers too—we are creating possibilities, because we are seeing a future full of wholeness” (Brown 2017, 19). As Brown uses the terms “healing and justice,” which might otherwise sit uncomfortably in academia, I propose that Emergent Strategy can be considered an interesting non-academic example text that environmental justice and environmental humanist scholars may want to engage with. In fact, I argue that the book reflects some of the ambitions developed in the recently formed field of environmental humanities, which is concerned with the question of what the humanities can offer to wider society in the context of increasing socio-environmental devastations (Holm et al. 2015, 979). For example, after decades of researching the history of science and showing the limitations of its methods, Bruno Latour found himself confronted with the sheer fact of widespread climate change denial and science skepticism. In light of climate change, Latour emphasizes the need for academics to also offer constructive concepts and spaces, in addition to the important practices of analyzing and critiquing: The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. (Latour 2004, 246) Here, Latour proposes that it is important to not just deconstruct a framework and be done, but to propose possibilities for ethical change and exchange. Similarly, Brown emphasizes the need to go beyond critique and engage in “healing behavior,” which simply refers to the offering of concepts and concrete practices to further socio-environmental justice (that, of course, do not need to be free from critique). As I aim to emphasize here with my “cosmological reading,” a commitment to furthering socioenvironmental justice can combine a political and visionary goal with an orientation toward the material world. In academia, a similar approach has taken place in the fields of new materialism and material ecocriticism, both of which explore the ways in which “human and nonhuman agencies exchange energy, matter, and information” (Sullivan 2017, 403). Jane Bennett famously referred to this new attention to the material world as exploring the way “vibrant matter” shapes, or interferes with, our narratives about the world; this, she argued, can lead to the political project of “encourag[ing] more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things” (2010, viii).

186  Kathrin Bartha The application of science-fiction concepts of time throughout Emergent Strategy conveys what I call a “cosmology of time.” As Brown writes, time leaps are crucial for imagining and bringing about generative change, because as long as we operate in time the way we currently do—remembering the past, observing and acting in the present, imagining the future— there will be divergent paths that are moving in and out of alignment, in and out of conflict. (Brown 2017, 17) This interest in timescales as tools to make sense of, and shape, the present moment evokes Ursula Heise’s essay “Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene” (2019), which foregrounds the genre’s explicit relationship to scale. Through an extensive survey of SF novels, Heise identifies the particular narrative devices of time travel, time leaps and serial protagonists, species narrative, time collages and time palimpsests to illustrate the ways in which “science fiction has developed a variety of techniques over the last century for addressing the anisochrony7 that deeptime narrative entails” (Heise 2019, 299). This capacity to illustrate vast timescales, as Heise argues, disproves anxieties of the novel as unable to meet the challenges of representing the Anthropocene: Neither is scale in and of itself a problem for a genre whose settings include entire planets, solar systems, and galaxies. Indeed, given the ingredients of the genre, one way of describing science fiction is a continuation of the epic tradition in the age of the novel. (Heise 2019, 281) While Heise here highlights the particular predilection of science fiction to illustrate different scales, Brown stresses and encourages the unique ability of science fiction to help shape time and change, by providing a vision of the future that can generate fear, hope and the motivation to act. In Brown’s previous book (co-edited with Walidah Imarisha), the short story collection Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015), the term “visionary fiction” is coined to express the relationship between science fiction and activism. As Imarisha writes: Visionary fiction is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. (Imarisha et al. 2015, 3)

Cosmos vs. Anthropocene  187 As Imarisha continues, and as Brown cites in Emergent Strategy, science fiction is a genre through which one can explore possibility: “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction” (ibid.). As Imarisha notes, this emphasis on timescales, vision and organizing emerges from the specific African-American experience of needing to work toward liberation even if this liberation would only affect the next generations: [F]or those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us. For adrienne [sic] and myself, as two Black women, we think of our ancestors in chains dreaming about a day when their children’s children’s children would be free. (ibid.) As the significance of science and speculative fiction here shows, Emergent Strategy is indebted to the tradition of Afrofuturism,8 as well as to AfricanAmerican thinkers and leading activists more broadly (Brown 2017, 162). In addition to this “cosmology of time,” Emergent Strategy also creates what I call a “cosmology of place,” since the book takes inspiration and guidance from what Brown refers to as the “natural order” or “web of life” (2017, 4). Although the contentious term “nature” is also present in the book, Brown is aware of its complexity, knowing that “the natural world actually supports any worldview—competitive, powerless, isolationist, violent” (2017, 4). Thus, Emergent Strategy seems to mostly refer to the “natural world” by referencing the web of life that sustains life on earth— something that Haraway has referred to as the “Chthulucene,” which draws on the Greek root chthonic, meaning “in, under, beneath the earth.”9 Brown writes about this web of life: [T]here is something to be said for adaptation, the adaptation of small, collaborative species. Roaches and ants and deer and fungi and bacteria and viruses and bamboo and eucalyptus and squirrels and vultures and mice and mosquitos and dandelions and so many other more collaborative life forms continue to proliferate, survive, grow. Sustain. (Brown 2017, 4) Thus, the emphasis of Emergent Strategy lies not so much on deconstructing dominant ideas of “nature,” but on using elements of the “natural order” that are remarkably resilient and that connote collaborative survival in perilous times. Brown continuously stresses that they are neither the first nor the only one to employ this orientation toward the physical sciences in

188  Kathrin Bartha order to generate social organizational principles; among others, Brown is deeply indebted to the activist and writer Grace Lee Boggs (2012), who uses quantum physics to underline the value of local and small-scale change. Most prominently, Emergent Strategy uses the principles of biomimicry, permaculture, fractals and symbiosis for a characterization and explanation of the web of life. I will briefly employ biomimicry and fractals as an example for the “cosmology of place” Brown puts forward. Biomimicry or biomimetics is defined as “the imitation of models, systems and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems” (Brown 2017, 23). Biomimicry is then employed to develop social patterns that “avoid useless predation, spread lessons, proliferate change” (Brown 2017, 23). Similarly, Brown uses the example of fractals to designate “[a] never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop” (Brown 2017, 51). Brown writes about the multi-scalar thought patterns behind Emergent Strategy: “I have become obsessed with how we can be movements like flocks of birds, underground power like whispering mushrooms, the seashell representation of galactic vision for justice” (Brown 2017, 23). Inspired by bird murmurations, seashells, weeds and fungi as examples of biomimicry and scale, Emergent Strategy poses a large-scale question about human purpose(s): “A mushroom is a toxin-transformer, a dandelion is a community of healers waiting to spread … What are we as humans, what is our function in the universe?” (Brown 2017, 9). Here, biomimicry and fractals are used to pose questions about purpose, value and social organization and to argue for small-scale practices to achieve structural change. This notion of considering different scales—personal, social, political, species—not only evokes the feminist principle that the “personal is political,” but it is also deeply informed by Butler’s literary works. As Brown writes: Octavia [Butler] was concerned with scale—understand that what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to understand the whole of society. In many of her books, she shows us how radical ideas spread through conversations, questions, one to one interactions. Social movements right now are also fractal, practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level. No more growth or scaling up before actually learning through experience. (Brown 2017, 22) As this quotation suggests, the fractal conception of social change conveys that one’s personal life and work can be seen as the front-line for social change, “a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet” (Brown 2017, 53). In each chapter, the principles of Emergent Strategy are developed into more concrete examples, which formulate clear visions, values and practices, including diversity (“we have

Cosmos vs. Anthropocene  189 to create futures in which everyone doesn’t have to be the same kind of person”); the learning of generative conflict for healthy relationships (personal and within groups); the furthering of collaborative rather than competitive ideas and leadership; allowing a slow, “messy” and pleasurable working process; and engaging in transformative justice (as opposed to punitive systems that treat people as “waste”) (Brown 2017, 57; cf. Brown 2020). Together, these visions serve to “create more possibilities,” abundance and diversity within movements (Brown 2017, 151). Although I have here separated the cosmologies of time and place that Emergent Strategy conveys, the book also implies that time and place are interconnected. This is suggested in a quote by poet and media-activist Malkia Cyril featured in the book: But the most important lesson of all, for me, has been how history embeds in every living thing. The land speaks to me of a much longer time frame than the one my body understands. It reminds me that ours are generational fights that are passed down like legacy. (Cyril, quoted in Brown 2017, 69) As Cyril argues, time can be understood to manifest in place, as “history embeds in every living thing.” The book’s employment of a “cosmic,” multiscalar or holistic approach thus has the effect of redefining dominant notions of nature as the “other” and of culture being separable from “nature” (as is partly suggested in the Anthropocene discourse through scholars with a managerialist perspective). In this way, the cosmological thought presented in Emergent Strategy evokes Humboldt’s definition of “nature” as “a planetary interactive causal network operation across multiple scale levels, temporal and spatial, individual to social to natural, scientific to aesthetic to spiritual” (Walls 2009, 11). Importantly, Emergent Strategy adds to this definition that a commitment to holistic ideas requires practice. This is central to the entire project: as Brown writes, practices are so crucial because they involve the body and mind, which is only fitting for a “crisis at each scale we are aware of, from our deepest inner moral sensibilities to the collective scale of climate and planetary health and beyond, to our species in relation to space and time” (Brown 2017, 3). The author here makes the important point that the planetary crisis is no longer a crisis of scientific consensus, but of sociocultural awareness: “At this point, we have all of the information we need to create a change; it isn’t a matter of facts. It’s a matter of longing, having the will to imagine and implement something else” (Brown 2017, 21). And indeed, in addition to the already mentioned visions for practices that enhance pleasurable and deep relationships in the realm of the personal and the social, Emergent Strategy collects a variety of lifestyle practices important to the author and interviewees, such as mindfulness and meditation, somatics and the incorporation of pleasure in daily life and movement. In sum, Emergent

190  Kathrin Bartha Strategy is a remarkable offering of theory and practice for personal liberation and effective movement building that brings together cosmologies of time and place (science fiction, timescales, inter-generational thought, multiscalar perspectives, etc.) with the physical sciences (biomimicry, fractals, symbiosis, etc.). The book presents a productive example for a cosmological approach amid the socio-environmental issues and is, I argue, an enticing text for environmental justice scholars to reflect on the intersections of the arts, humanities, activism and practice.

Conclusion The Anthropocene is a problem on multiple scales: personal, social, local, global and planetary. Yet, as mentioned in the introduction, the Anthropocene has also been criticized for homogenizing vastly different scales and cultures, problematically naming a universal perpetrator—the human—which runs the risk of unhelpfully assigning non-descript guilt of “everybody” (and therefore “nobody”). In contrast to the unsatisfying and potentially harmful decline-narrative inherent in the Anthropocene, I have pointed to the recent revival of the ecological vision of the idea of cosmos that puts forward a more complex, holistic and embodied understanding of “nature.” Framing Emergent Strategy as “cosmological” captures Brown’s employment of both transcultural ecosystemic and culturally specific narratives. In this way, the book (via Octavia E. Butler) complicates what might be regarded as mainstream ideas of “nature”: “God is change,” and so “nature” is also shaped by cultural visions and embodied practices. If the decline-narrative of the Anthropocene presents us with the “inability to think the cosmos,” Emergent Strategy can be seen as a fascinating example of the resurgence of holistic thinking and practicing. Ultimately, Emergent Strategy is a testament to the profound importance of culture—especially literature and storytelling—for developing strategies of socio-environmental justice. As this chapter has shown, one of literature’s unique contributions (a contribution—not the only one) is to create sensitivity to different scales and, potentially, visionary thinking. In this way, the cosmological approach employed by Emergent Strategy uplifts the often marginalized role of arts and humanities in building community and shaping change.

Notes 1 Here I employ the contentious and provocative terms “order” and “chaos” in order to reflect on the symbolic implications of the Anthropocene discourse in relation to cosmology. However, by no means do I wish to suggest that Earthsystems science evokes a harmonious a priori order that generic “humans” disturb and throw into chaos. Rather, my aim is to explore the links between the ancient idea of kósmos and the symbolism of the proposed turn from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. In fact, the idea of “order” in the sense of harmonic cycles

Cosmos vs. Anthropocene  191 and stability relates to earlier ideas inherent in (eco)systems theory that draws on cybernetics. In other words, order is relative: as Earth-systems science analyzes the Earth system via positive or negative feedback loops, “chaos,” disorder or deviation could also be understood as part of the functionality and resilience of a system. 2 As Alain Beaulieu writes, “Joyce’s neologism ‘chaosmos’ expresses the fact that chaos and cosmos (disorder and order) are not opposites, but part of a larger continuum: ‘every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway [are] connected.’” 3 Brown’s subsequent book Pleasure Activism (2019), which partly builds on Emergent Strategy, became a New York Times bestseller in 2019, and Butler’s Parable series became a New York Times bestseller in 2020. 4 I did not invent the term “literary cosmology”: the term has loosely been used by literary scholarship that, for example, draws a link between particular authors and their use of astronomical/cosmological imagery. However, in my PhD thesis (2020) I develop the idea of “literary cosmology” further, and here I employ it as an example for the world-building capacity of literature in and beyond fictitious worlds. 5 While Brown’s profession has involved leadership positions in different social and environmental justice organizations, their scholarship has largely taken place outside of institutional academia. Brown uses the term “organic intellectual” to refer to the writer and activist Grace Lee Boggs, yet the term could also apply to themselves. 6 https​:/​/al​​liedm​​edia.​​org​/s​​peake​​r​-pro​​jects​​/emer​​gent-​​strat​​egy​-i​​deati​​​on​-in​​stitu​​te. 7 Anisochrony is “the difference between the duration of the narrated events and the duration of the narration itself. […] SF has sometimes reduced this gap at least marginally through the popular format of the trilogy or even longer series” (Heise 2019, 284–284). 8 Brown employs Mark Dery’s definition of Afrofuturism, as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture” (cited in Brown 2017, 161). 9 The term “Chthulucene” was coined by Haraway to critique the Anthropocene’s fixation on anthropos by suggesting that humans have never been selfcontained, but have always lived in multispecies communities (cf. Haraway 2016, 101).

Works Cited Beaulieu, Alain. 2016. “Introduction to Gilles Deleuze’s Cosmological Sensibility.” Philosophy and Cosmology 16, no. 16: 199–210. Bartha, Kathrin. 2020. Uncanny Anthropocene: Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature. PhD thesis. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Boggs, Grace Lee. 2012. The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Scott Kurashige. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Brown, Adrienne Maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press. Brown, Adrienne Maree. 2019. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Chico, CA: AK Press. Brown, Adrienne Maree. 2020. We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice. Chico, CA: AK Press.

192  Kathrin Bartha Butler, Octavia E. 1993 Parable of the Sower. London: Headline Publishing Group. Butler, Octavia E. 1998. Parable of the Talents. 2019 ed. London: Headline Publishing Group. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2, 197–222. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Heise, Ursula. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heise, Ursula K. 2019. “Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene.” ELH 86, no. 2: 275–304. Holm, Poul, Joni Adamson, Hsinya Huang, et al. 2015. “Humanities for the Environment—A Manifesto for Research and Action.” Humanities 4, no. 4: 977–92. Humboldt, Alexander von. 1845–1862. Kosmos: Entwurf einer Weltbeschreibung. Various Editions. Imarisha, Walidah, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Sheree R. Thomas. 2015 Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2: 225–248. NASA Science. 1969. “Introduction to Cosmology.” https​:/​/sc​​ience​​.nasa​​.gov/​​intro​​ ducti​​on​-co​​s​molo​​gy. Sandler, Jen. 2019. “Critical Relational Solidarity: Collectivist and Transformative Knowledge Practices in and beyond the Us Academy.” Collaborative Anthropologies 12, no. 1–2: 76–106. Sullivan, Heather. 2017. “Material Ecocriticism and the Petro-Text.” In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann. 414–423. London: Routledge. Walls, Laura Dassow. 2009. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walls, Laura Dassow. 2016a. “Cosmos.” In Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow. 47–50. New York: NYU Press. Walls, Laura Dassow. 2016b. “Natural History in the Anthropocene.” In A Global History of Literature and the Environment, edited by John Parham and Louise Westling. 187–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wulf, Andrea. 2015. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

11 Google Gaia Feedback Loops for Action with Global Forest Watch Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider

Everyone reading this book is familiar with the famous “blue marble” images of the Earth acquired by astronauts in the 1960s and 1970s—and likely also with the role these images have played in environmental narratives since that epoch. Similarly, readers are likely familiar with “red marble” or “burning world” images that appeared alongside the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports of the 1990s and following—visualizations of the earth’s surface temperature under various global-warming projections (cf. Schneider 2016). Not as many readers may be familiar, however, with the “green marble” images, which, thanks to recent advances in remote sensing and digital mapping, have enabled a vision of the global Earth as a function of its vegetation. The green marble is in many ways a combination of the blue and red marbles: it presents the earth as a coherent, living organism but also communicates its fragile, threatened situation. Furthermore, through its incorporation into interactive visualization platforms for monitoring deforestation like Global Forest Watch (GFW), the green marble promises something the blue and red marbles could not—the possibility of intervention. Following John Tresch’s work (2005; 2007), Birgit Schneider (2016) has referred to these moralistic images of the earth as “cosmograms.” Cosmograms tell stories about how everything within them should be seen as working together. If the blue-marble cosmogram tells a story of Gaia, an organic biocybernetic system above and beyond human control, and the red marble cosmogram is a jeremiad about the hellscape we have doomed ourselves to live in, then the green-marble cosmogram is “Google Gaia”—a being we can still save if we monitor her deforestation from the sky above and stop it on the ground below (we borrow here from Leon Gurevitch’s (2014) work on “Google Warming”). But connecting the ontological levels of the cosmogram—its “above” and “below,” its layers of being and scales of viewing—is not an automatic process. As we have argued elsewhere, “zooming” from green-marble views of the worlds’ forests to on-the-ground views of the trees that make up those forests entails not a single, smooth optical motion but rather multiple visual-rhetorical acts of articulation and reconciliation (Schneider and DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-11

194  Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider Olman 2019; Schneider and Walsh 2019). In this previous work, we were able to identify clearly the problems with Google Gaia-type platforms, but we were not yet in a position to offer solutions. Here, with the help of Tresch’s cosmogram theory, and also the work of David Turner (2018) on “Anthropocenic narrative,” we suggest at least one solution for articulating the forest with the trees in Google Gaia platforms—the cosmographic narrative. Narrative is a rhetorical strategy that enables the coherent articulation of seemingly incommensurable ontological scales—e.g. geologic, nonhuman and human1—into a cosmogram that can motivate action and responsibility at multiple political scales—e.g. local, national and transnational. We continue in this chapter to work with our primary example, the most dataintensive forest-monitoring platform Global Forest Watch. We investigate how this platform links knowledge and data with responsibility and with action on individual and institutional levels, but also how different scales and their transitions are linked to certain types of responsibility. In this chapter we combine perspectives of anthropology and critical cartography with earth-system science, rhetorics and media studies. We want to address this question by trying to elaborate on the cosmographic narrative behind Global Forest Watch: How is the forest narrated here, by whom is it narrated and who is addressed? And we ask what role processes of scaling play in a monitoring platform that claims to contain every forest with a diameter of a few meters in the whole world.

The Global Satellite View—from Blue to Green Marbles For 50 years the blue marble has been the strongest image of any environmental movement. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the photo shot on the flight to the moon became the icon that visually united all “earthlings” because its message was so simple, beautiful and evident: Earth is the unique living planet with a dynamic atmosphere of the solar system, it is a global ecology of relations, it is the ground and condition for (human) life (cf. Jasanoff 2001; Diederichsen and Franke 2013; Grevsmühl 2014; Dunaway 2015). Today, we know that the power of the blue-marble image turned into a hypocritical image of nature. Although the image was again and again used as an impulse to unite actors, profound subsequent actions “to save the planet,” as the slogan goes, were not taken. This is why scholars started to criticize the perspective and “god trick” of whole earth images as such, asking what paradigm of thinking and logic of action the image stands for (cf. Haraway 1997, 136; Latour 2014; Woods 2014). This criticism reflects a general doubt of synoptic earth images. It has been shown that global and synoptic maps and images evolve from scientific and technical conditions which are part of the problem—an instrumental and objectifying relationship to the world.

Google Gaia 

195

Figure 11.1 “Green Marble,” NASA 2013. Source: NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS).

Green-marble images have been developed in response to this criticism as a vehicle to give the blue-marble subjectivity and agency. With the launch of the US Landsat program in 1972, surface vegetation and forest cover became an important focus of satellite observation. The recognition of different types of forest cover has been an interest of different stakeholders— ecologists, climate scientists and forest managers alike. They are interested in how much land surface is covered with forests and how surface vegetation changes throughout the year and in longer time periods. With a system sensing visible and infrared wavelengths installed on the weather satellite Suomi NPP in 2011 of NOAA/NASA, it was possible to monitor global forest dynamics. These satellite instruments help observe weather, climate, oceans, nightlight, wildfires, movement of ice and changes in vegetation and landforms. The measurement series of Suomi NPP resulted in 2013 in the “green marble” made from thousands of composite images. Like a thick carpet, a green layer covers large parts of the continents (cf. Figure 11.1). The climatic zones of the tropics and temperate latitudes are clearly visible, while the dry deserts stand out from them with their light color. With this kind of representation, the Earth appears as a living and potentially growing organism, like a colony of algae or moss. However, green-marble images are still undeniably the result of the military–industrial complex and the politics flowing out of that complex. Forests are monitored as a matter of biosecurity and economic profit: to that extent, the criticisms that apply to blue-marble images also apply to green-marble ones—that the Earth is still depicted as a resource to be capitalized by transnational neoliberal corporations and programs (cf. Humphreys 2003). The response to this criticism has been to complement

196  Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider global perspectives of Earth’s environment and climate with local ones (also spherical ones, as we will discuss shortly). Multiple climate-monitoring platforms—such as Global Climate Monitor, the EUMETSAT platform, NASA and NOAA platforms—have made extensive use of whole earth images and maps expressly in order to “downscale” blue-marble images of Earth into local perspectives. Global Forest Watch has done the same for green-marble images as we wish to show.

Global Forest Watch—an Interactive Green-Marble Tool Forest data captured by satellites have been integrated with GPS/GIS mapping platforms—primarily Google Earth—in order to provide interactive functionalities such as zooming, searching and tagging. Climate action and climate services meet in these platforms as well because global data maps, satellite images and visualizations are essential means for enabling more responsible forms of interaction with the planet. Indeed, interactive greenmarble platforms were quickly adopted by the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) programs that started after Copenhagen 2010 to monitor deforestation and fund reforestation. Since forests are the most brilliant transformers of CO2 into O2, platforms like GFW have become the ideal tool of the transnational organizations that now serve as Anthropocene “stewards of the Earth system” (Crutzen and Steffen 2003, 256), measuring the forest as a living resource globally, calculating its oxygen production as a single number. Users can calculate carbon dioxide emissions from tree cover loss by tons per hectare on a regional and global level. In the same time (2014), GFW, a true “quadruple helix” partnership among academic, industry, non-profit and governmental partners (Carayannis et al. 2009) was founded. Loading with the headline “Forest monitoring designed for action” (globalforest​ .o​ rg), GFW is organized around a green-marble map of the world’s forests, upon which several layers can be viewed (Figure 11.2): primarily tree loss and gain since 2001; remotely sensed deforestation alerts; and remotely sensed fire alerts. The map is interactive in that users can play movies of tree loss and gain over time on a global or local scale; they can select countries or polygons of an area to analyze in terms of total forest change; and they can click on tags to read stories of forest conservation or destruction authored by a network of journalists called Mongabay Stories; users also can explore curated versions of the base map around topics such as fire or climate; or, using the developer tools, they can import global GFW data into sandboxtype websites where it can be analyzed in user-driven ways and combined with user-uploaded data. GFW claims over 4 million visitors and “thousands” of users around the globe (cf. “About GFW”); it provides an interactive globe listing 30 of those users, ranging from non-profit advocacy organizations to governments

Figure 11.2 Screen-capture of Global Forest Watch, Landing Page of the World Map. Source: Screenshot of the Website of GlobalForestWatch.

Google Gaia  197

198  Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider and research institutes. GFW won a “Big Data Climate Challenge” award from the UN in the founding year of 2014 and tracks other “impacts” the platform has had—ranging from governmental monitoring of illegal logging to self-policing by palm-oil producers such as Unilever (a funder and partner of GFW). These are the multifaceted impacts which particularly interest us in the following sections, given the problems we noted previously with “zooming” platforms like GFW. In other words, we want to ask how GFW articulates the views it provides at different scales in order to motivate and support climate action. At which scales is this action taking place? And what are the political ramifications of this action? To answer these questions, we need a framework that articulates different worldviews (both literally and figuratively) between diverse actors and politics. We assemble this framework in the next section before returning to the analysis of GFW.

Cosmographic Narrative Framework As is hopefully clear by this point, blue-marble, red-marble and green-marble images of the earth are not just technical, they are political images, i.e. they inscribe the beliefs of one polity or another about what is valuable, what can and should be saved and which special roles humans play here. In this view, the marble images can be described as cosmograms. Cosmograms are images of the world that “establish the relation between different domains or ontological levels” (Tresch 2005, 69). In an interview, anthropologist John Tresch explains: All cultures have cosmograms, which are attempts to say: “This is how the world works, this is how everything fits together”—humans, all the divisions of nature, all the divisions with human society, and then the divinities around it or above it, the metaphysics underlying it. In order to convey cultures and beliefs, to teach them, to re-inscribe them and make them true and activate them, they need some kind of form to embody them. And I call anything that takes that form a cosmogram. It can be a building, a painting, a poem, or a book like the Bible—or a song. It can apply to many, many different kinds of human products. (Tresch 2015) Cosmograms function as narrative synopses of cosmologies, which Tresch defines as follows: A cosmology is more than a system of classification, an origin myth, or a theory of the relationships among what there is in the universe; it also involves affective and aesthetic dimensions and the sense of coherence of a group’s characteristic words, practices, and objects. (Tresch 2007, 84f.)

Google Gaia 

199

Figure 11.3 Ebstorfer World Map, ca. 1300, Germany. Source: Creative Commons.

So images showing the cosmic order such as religious altarpieces, the mandala, but also the medieval Ebstorf Map (Figure 11.3) or other mappa mundi can count as cosmograms of a particular epoque and culture. In this sense, GFW can also be called a cosmogram created by modern science and technology. While it seems uncontroversial to posit that green-marble platforms like GFW function as cosmograms, at least two questions remain. First, how exactly does a platform like GFW “establish the relation between different domains or ontological levels” in the sense of Tresch as it zooms from global views of forests to local stories of forest conservation. And second, how does a cosmogram like GFW narrate “cultures and beliefs […] teach them […] reinscribe them and make them true and activate them,” and how can we tell what this cosmology is just by reading the cosmogram? In order to answer these questions, we need to articulate Tresch’s theory

200  Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider with two others: Tim Ingold’s globes/spheres distinction and David Turner’s “Anthropocene narrative” framework. Ecosystem scientist David Turner has written a monograph on the “green marble” idea in which he ties the image specifically into an “anthropocene narrative” that moves through multiple “spheres” of planetary life over time. This narrative begins with the “gaian self-organization” of the geosphere and biosphere in pre-human times (Turner 2018, 13), then undergoes a rupture called the “Great Separation,” when humanity has developed enough technological prowess to insulate itself from the gaian biosphere inside the technosphere during the Industrial Revolution. The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have brought us through the Great Acceleration of the technosphere after the Second World War and the Great Transition of the 1970s, when concerns about the human population overwhelming the available life resources began to dominate; at this epoch we enter the “technobiosphere,” as Turner calls it. In the future of this Anthropocene narrative, Turner places the period of Equilibration, when “humanity learns to self-regulate and manage the Earth system” (Turner 2018, 14). Turner dates the emergence of the green marble in the technobiosphere and expresses hope that the image will be useful for ushering us into the era of Equilibration (this concept is related to the concepts of the noosphere and the technosphere by Vernadsky 1998; Haff 2014). Here it is worth noting the distinction between spherical and global ways of imaging the Earth. Whereas Turner makes no distinction between topdown images of the Earth like the green marble, and inside-out conceptions of Anthropocene life like the technobiosphere, anthropologist Tim Ingold draws a distinction between global (top-down, outside-in) and spherical (bottom-up, inside-out) views of earthly life (Ingold 1993). By this, Ingold rethinks the geometrical opposition of global/local via a global/spherical paradigm (cf. Figure 11.4). Where globes form the scene of observation, spheres form the scene of action. Adding this helpful distinction to Turner’s theory, we are able to note that global images—the first world maps in the Age of Exploration, the blue marble, the green marble—appear precisely at the transitions in Turner’s Anthropocene narrative. We therefore posit that, as Turner suggests, global images can serve as narrative catalysts—drawing us out of a habitual spherical view of the world to obtain an outside view, which then prompts us to reinvent, or “redescribe,” in Tresch’s words, the sphere of our earthly life. In fact, Tresch goes on to argue for a cosmogram like the green marble as a narrative catalyst: In this sense, cosmograms have a relation to time like that of the rites of passage that all societies have: the liminal time in which ordinary relations are suspended, in which there’s often a symbolic recreation of the world and of society, at the same time as the formation of a community outside of ordinary social structures. After the ritual sequence, the participants come back to a transformed world, with the structures

Google Gaia 

201

Figure 11.4 Illustration of Spherical View (left) versus Global View (right) of Environment and Climate (adapted from Ingold 1993). Source: Remake of the scheme in Ingold, Tim. 1993. “Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism.” In Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, edited by Kay Milton. London: Routledge, 31–42.

redefined, the cosmos remade: the space of possibilities is closed up again. Cosmograms often guide this recreation and restabilization of the world. (Tresch 2005, 74) So, combining Tresch’s theory with Ingold’s and Turner’s, we arrive at a cosmographic narrative framework, in which global images of the earth such as the green marble serve at key junctures in political history to catalyze a narrative transition or evolution between an older spherical view of the Earth and a newer one that, as it contains new ontological dimensions, also presents new affordances for political action: so, for instance, according to Turner the image of blue marble appeared at the very moment in our political history when “cracks” (Tresch 2005, 74) were observed in the technosphere—when we were beginning to realize that our enormous technical leverage was starting to bend and break the biosphere; the blue-marble image catalyzed a return of the gaian biosphere, followed by a hybridization with the technosphere that generated the technobiosphere that we now occupy. Understanding global images as evolutionary catalysts which enable the articulation of cosmograms across temporal and spatial scales equips us to analyze the political impacts of Global Forest Watch. In the following sections, we examine the ways that GFW articulates globes and spheres,

202  Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider images and stories, in order to ask what kinds of cosmographic narratives the platform affords users and what political cosmologies those narratives support.

Global Engine Forests—GFW as Google Gaia The global view in GFW is articulated by both the media ecology of the Google Earth Engine and the ecology of the forest. Google defines their engine as a combination of “a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities” (cf. Google Earth Engine website). The company makes its data-ecological engine available for scientists, researchers and developers “to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth’s surface” (ibid.). On their website, Andrew Steer, the president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, is prominently quoted saying, Google Earth Engine has made it possible for the first time in history to rapidly and accurately process vast amounts of satellite imagery, identifying where and when tree cover change has occurred at high resolution. Global Forest Watch would not exist without it. For those who care about the future of the planet Google Earth Engine is a great blessing! (ibid.) The global view of satellite imagery and datasets via the Google Earth Engine tool is the conditio sine qua non to experience global forest change. This leads to the question: How are power and knowledge connected—if in GFW the vision and action on the forest are linked within the logic of this engine? As mentioned above, the cosmogram of Earth as a coherent, living organism is part of a larger cosmology that Turner terms the “gaian biosphere” (Turner 2018, 12). Within the Gaia hypothesis developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the earth is considered as a coherent living whole consisting of uncountable feedback loops. Bacteria, algae and plants play the major role in the composition and stability of the atmosphere that makes life possible. Even if forests are only a part of this ecology, they are an important contributor when it comes to the production of oxygen and the decomposition of carbon dioxide. Global forests are an essential component of the earth’s self-regulating lungs. What happens to the gaian biosphere when it is brought inside a computer? Media scholar Leon Gurevitch (2014) has thought through this problem for blue-marble images in his study of Google Earth. For him, the key transformation here is between the blue marble as a static, analog representation of the Earth and Google Earth as a dynamic mathematical model. This key transformation renders the Earth as a design object, able

Google Gaia 

203

to be instrumentally altered with a click of the mouse as is a computerassisted-design (CAD) rendering of a building. He writes, “[n]either entirely virtual nor entirely indexical, Google Earth operates as a machinic hybrid in which the panoptical power of satellite imaging is combined with the simulative capacities of the product design–engineered object” (Gurevitch 2014, 88). Furthermore, Gurevitch argues that this design-centered view of Google Earth conduces to global engineering solutions to climate change like stratospheric aerosol injection, or space mirrors. He terms this phenomenon “Google Warming” and links it to neoliberal, transnational models of economic globalization: Representing both the environmental feedback of satellite surveillance and the computer-automated construction of a virtual environment the machinic panopticism of Google Earth reflects a new representational politics in which the earth’s ecosystems are rationalised as always already industrialised (or industrialisable). (ibid. 88) Both aspects are a central part of the logic which GFW shares. When we consider the related transformation of green-marble images into the dynamic forest-monitoring environment of GFW, we are encountering a very similar situation to Gurevitch’s “Google Warming.” We have already leveraged Turner’s term “technobiosphere” for GFW to describe the amalgam of gaian biosphere and technosphere. Here, we want to go a step further and describe the kind of cosmogram which the technobiosphere of GFW represents using Gurevitch’s work. For this special case we have chosen the term “Google Gaia”: in other words, GFW combines instrumental feedback loops to construct a dynamic gaian technobiosphere, a metabolic narrative of forest health that can be monitored and intervened in remotely. The metabolic narrative of global forests or Google Gaia can be found in many features of GFW. Land cover and land use are at the center to observe the forests change. The platform monitors all changes, caused naturally or by humans. But the main focus is on human impacts, which are the reasons for the most severe changes in global forest metabolism and ecology of our time. Consequently, the platform’s main aim is to relate the critical relationship of humans and forests to the current ecological crisis—and to protect forests from human impacts. The platform makes the argument that deforestation is mainly commodity-driven. So we may say that GFW is a powerful tool to observe forest changes caused by the exploitative and neo-colonial logic of the “Capitalocene” (Moore 2015), even though the platform doesn’t emphasize this approach explicitly. Global Forest Watch articulates the relationship between human action and forest changes via five themes or topics: biodiversity in forest habitats and the sixth mass extinction, the role of forests to mitigate climate change, the great factor of commodity-driven deforestation, forests as protection

204  Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider against flooding and the increase of fires. Forests certainly play a key role in all of these issues with drastic changes during the last decades—which remarkably coincide with the development of satellite imagery and GPS. These five topics can be explored in detail for many regions. In pandemic times, the platform also allows us to trace the connection of deforestation, habitat stress and biodiversity loss with the zoonotic spillovers as had happened with MERS, SARS and other viruses. What does it mean if we think of GFW as a Google Gaia? Monitoring the forests globally brings humans and forest change into the picture together and creates a kind of equivalence between these human and nonhuman systems. Thus, GFW makes visible the intrinsic mixture and manifold relationships of the technosphere and forest vegetation, which are exploitative in so many cases. These relationships create a feedback loop in themselves. But if the monitoring platform only represented gaian processes, it would not be a Google Gaia. To deserve this name, the tool itself must become part of the gaian feedback loops. And, we argue, this is indeed the case: first, the platform is connected to the biosphere on a material level by using up energy and materials to drive all agents of the monitoring infrastructure such as satellites, internet infrastructures and data centers and server farms. Second, GFW as a monitoring tool is meant to function as a reason to act and by this intervene directly in the technobiosphere with political measures, or to put it into other words, to induce political action. GFW becomes most apparent as a Google Gaia when looking at the following functions. On the level of forest changes, observers can use GFW as a global forest cinema to monitor different “patients,” such as primary forests, as they shrink or suffer due to excessive logging. Users can play time lapse videos that show land-cover changes for any region and any scale. Or they can calculate forest gain and forest loss and relate deforestation to human action in regard to land use and land rights. To give an example with the calculation for Nicaragua: from 2001 to 2019 the country lost 460 kha of humid primary forest. This number makes up more than 30% of total tree cover loss during this same period. Overall, humid primary forests in Nicaragua shrank by 77% from 2001 to 2019. If one starts the time lapse video from 2001, when satellite data have become available, one can observe the spread of deforestation in Nicaragua like the spread of a red rash that affects almost the entire country. But GFW doesn’t stop here. Users can draw connections between deforestation and different types of concessions such as mining, logging or plantations, but also between deforestation and global capital. So GFW relates the analytical level with the level of potential political and economic action. Many countries in the platform provide the addresses of responsible institutions and regional or national legal information. Using this information, users— who according to GFW’s statistics are generally affiliated with government, university or non-profit organizations—can plan potential action by means of politics and law. But doing so requires an articulation of global

Google Gaia 

205

and local levels of political action, not just in users’ lived experience but in the visualization framework itself.

The Zoom Tool as a Virtual Connector of Global and Local Views in GFW Global Forest Watch links synoptic views from the sky to local ground by using the zoom tool. By clicking on “+” or “−,” users can down- or upscale the map. This is the conventionalized basic function of Google Earth since its beginning. With the help of this tool, online platforms like GFW successfully realize Edward Tufte’s visual-information-seeking doctrine, which Ben Shneiderman later summarized with the handy formula “overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand” (Shneiderman 2003, 364). The zoom tool relates global and local/spherical scales in interactive climate visualizations, not physically or literally but via a metaphor. Here, it is important to mention that interactive visual downscaling turns out to be not as automatic and transparent as the slider bar or “zoom tool” featured in many of these applications lead us to believe: rather, “zooming” is a rhetorical trope—both verbal and visual—that manufactures logical and political continuity out of what is in reality a diverse and incommensurable set of views of climate. The seeming continuity of the visualization, the “zoom,” is an illusion composed of editing techniques such as fades, blends and morphs. Politically, what the zoom tool does is impose global, transnational regimes of seeing, defining and governing forests at the local level. In previous work we spent some time considering the case of a REDD+ project in Nicaragua that was failing because Canadian forestry practices were being forced on local farmers according to neoliberal logics (cf. Müller 2012). Here, we can go a step further and say that the politics of zoom results explicitly from a Google Gaia cosmology that reduces the local to a holographic slice of the global. “Connectivity, yes; scale, no,” Latour writes at the end of his essay “AntiZoom” (2014, 124). Scholars of cultural geography have recognized since the 1980s that regimes of cartographic scale and the geometric practices designed to alter them were inseparably linked to politics. Critical geographers and ecologists have published critiques of the politics of scale and interscalarity in global visualization (see, for example, Castree et al. 2007; Cosgrove 2008; Crampton 2001; Herod and Wright 2002; Moore 2008; Smith 1992; Taylor 1982). Prompted by the materialist argument that maps produce realities, critical and political cartography has presented the political implementations of different scaling practices in detail. Tim Ingold’s work participates in this movement, distinguishing spherical views of the Earth from local ones: local views are part and parcel of a Google Gaia cosmology; spherical views, on the other hand, starting as they do from the bottom and going up, starting from the inside and radiating outward, activate other cosmographic narratives. And while GFW dominantly supports

206  Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider cosmographic narratives which participate in the Google Gaia paradigm, it does create space for alternate cosmographic narratives when it supports the non-reductive articulation of non-synoptic images and stories of forest and climate with its global model.

GFW as Alternative Cosmographic Narrative: User Data and User Stories What about spherical versus global views of forests in GFW? Do they exist? If so, can they construct alternative cosmographic narratives to the Google Gaia narrative? We will focus in this section on the uploading of data and stories by users. Through their developer tools, GFW makes it possible to create custom maps that integrate the global satellite data collected, which are visualized by GFW developers with local data uploaded by community users via the GFW smartphone app. An example of this sort of project is the 2S2D project in Cameroon, which used teams of community members to confirm remotely sensed deforestation and to log deforestation that the satellites could not pick up due to lag in time or insufficient thinning of the canopy. Poachers move extremely rapidly through areas, logging at night and moving on before the damage they have done can be registered by a satellite flyover and passed to the GFW team: meanwhile, local residents patrolling the forests near their houses can detect this activity and alert the authorities. But knowing where to look for new damaging activities can be greatly assisted by the satellite views—just as wildlife conservationists are now using drones to quickly detect poaching activity on game reserves in East Africa. The 2S2D project is a good example of an alternative paradigm to Google Gaia: instead of global views conducing to global action on deforestation, global views guide the deployment of just-in-time (e.g. “en temps quasi-reel,” 2s2d​ .o​ rg) spheres of vision and action within local polities in Cameroon. This cosmographic narrative afforded by GFW serves as a better fit to the temporal and political scale of action around poaching in African forests. The second example of an alternative cosmographic narrative in GFW is found in the User Stories. Originally, the idea with User Stories was to provide a global platform for local reports of monitoring and reforestation initiatives. When we began studying GFW in 2017, there were more stories of local origin, some in the languages of the users who uploaded them. In April 2019, GFW announced a change to User Stories driven by the Places to Watch feature—in which GFW technicians identify via the remote-sensing data “hotspots” of deforestation and then conduct investigations or ask local users to upload data on these hotspots. The new method tasked a conservation network called Mongabay to carry out this reporting. Now, the only stories shown on the map are in English, and most of them are written by Western journalists working for Mongabay, who either visit the hotspots or report remotely on events happening

Google Gaia 

207

there—like illegal logging in Senegal or wildlife conservation efforts in Vietnam. This shift is in keeping with the Google Gaia cosmographic narrative, in which transnational organizations are responsible for climate action rather than local actors. However, as part of the User Stories feature, GFW does provide accounts of how the platform has been successfully used by local activist groups to catalyze climate action. In “5 Creative Projects Using GFW,” reported on the blog feature of GFW, Sarah Ruiz writes of a project in Oaxaca that mapped several layers of GFW information—including deforestation alerts—over a base map of the state. The project created this hybrid map in order to empower local ejidatarios—individuals and groups entrusted with maintaining the vast system of communal-use land called ejidos established by the Spanish during colonization—to make good decisions about land use for their communities: where to plant, where to set guards against illegal logging, where to build or not to build, etc. The project involved building an app that can be used offline on a cell phone and only needs to refresh every 15 days, accommodating the poor internet coverage in remote areas of Oaxaca. The app visualizes GFW data differently than the global base map does—primarily as heat maps of deforestation risk. As such, the map is very meaningful to the ejidatarios but less so to people who live elsewhere—especially once the map is zoomed into the local level, major city names and the contours of surrounding states disappear. The app’s visualizations are therefore dominantly spherical, emphasizing local traditions (the ejido system) and matters of concern (illegal logging, land-use management). But the map could not generate these spherical visualizations without global data: as Ruiz explains, “many ejidos do not always have access to the geographic information that could help them make informed decisions about farming and land management” (Ruiz 2019, para. 2). The Oaxaca project thus constructs a different sort of cosmographic narrative out of the global GFW data—one that expresses and supports the cosmology of the local indigenous population rather than a Google Gaia cosmology. What the Oaxaca visualizations lose in transnational portability they gain in the ability to empower ejidatarios to take political action within the scope of their polity—a polity that has had a longer tenure as “stewards of the Earth system” in Oaxaca than the transnational organizations that fund GFW.

Google Gaia—the Narration of Cosmological Imperialism As we hope to have shown, cosmograms are not neutral. What practices are related to the cosmograms of a heating planet created by satellite imagery? How do they influence politics? What kind of cosmology does the cosmogram presented by GFW support then? A platform like GFW is a cosmogram to the extent that it narrates the role of global forests in a specific way: as a manageable and competitive shrinking resource, an agent in anthropogenic climate change that is worth protecting, but which ultimately can be scaled

208  Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider spatially and temporally by transnational agencies acting outside/above the forest from a “Google Gaia” cosmological paradigm. The forest-monitoring platform GFW is a cosmogram because it narrates how forest ecology, humans and nature fit together and how they are related with another. The worldview it gives, its narrative logic, can be also described as an anthropocenic and instrumental cosmology. Humans are in control, knowledge is power. If we turn to the dominant top-down logic of the platform, we may interpret the Google Earth Engine in terms of colonial imperialism and exploitation. Although the platform aspires to constrain exploitative actions, the tool it uses belongs to the same history, and the same paradigm of exploitation, only on a larger inhuman scale. If we look at the bottom-up logic of the platform we see potential for different, spherical paradigms and alternate cosmologies to be narrated. However, the question remains: Whose cosmology wins? Is it the Googlist’s synoptic global view or, in contrast, the environmental-justice spherical view of local users? Is it the top-down and detached logic of a global capital or located and situated action? Who feels like living in Google Gaia? It seems clear that a platform like GFW participates in what Leon Gurevitch calls “Google Warming.” As discussed above, Google Warming is the idea that we can control the world with technical solutions once it has been visualized with Google Earth: a keystroke here or there makes alterations to the image; the same kind of leverage applies to ideas for geoengineering on a global scale to combat climate change—deploying space mirrors or spraying tons of calcium carbonate into the stratosphere. In fact, a transnational nonprofit called SilverLining just announced a $3 million grant to test various stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) scenarios in global computer models, to see how much solar reflection and cooling can be achieved before various negative effects accumulate in extreme weather, ocean pH change, etc. One engineer associated with the tests put their primary research question, “Is there a way, in our model world at least, to see if we can achieve one without triggering too much of the other?” (Flavelle 2020, para. 14). The conflation of Google Earth with the real one is stark, and so is the nearly nuclear scale of the interventions and consequences being discussed nonchalantly by white Western researchers who will be buffered by their privilege from the fallout of “the other” side of their scenarios. One expert glibly compared SAI to “chemotherapy for the planet,” and a major funder of SilverLining issued this dramatic statement: “If we don’t explore climate interventions like sunlight reflection now, we are surrendering countless lives, species, and ecosystems to heat” (Flavelle 2020, para. 3, 10). However, the article fails to mention the input of these “lives, species, and ecosystems” or to consider the impact of SAI on their cosmologies. Narratives such as these partake in what we would call cosmological imperialism. If the top-down logic of the platform is totalized, global, technocratic action will be imposed on everyone’s environments. Google Gaians think they can fix the planet, because in their models forest-ecological

Google Gaia 

209

problems always work out if the parameters are set correctly. Plantations and geoengineering are the logical solutions to a problem seen only from space. So the logic of the Google Gaia Engine is yet another justification for a blue-marble, instrumental stewardship of Earth. From an environmental-justice perspective, cosmological imperialism is obviously an undesirable narrative. But it is not the only narrative supported by GFW and platforms like it. If the bottom-up views such as the stories and situated ground data unfold greater impacts, this would be a chance to add and empower other logics. The concept of the spherical entails a different cosmology, one that moves inside-out from an experienced world to a data platform through the upload of user data and its articulation with global images of forests and climate. The politics of zoom can in this way be replaced with a cosmographic narrative that works via resonance between global and spherical images of Earth to assemble a coherent, actionable cosmogram. Researchers have proposed innovations along these lines when they suggest abandoning world images altogether and using “terrestrial” visions. “Gaïa-graphy” of the Critical Zones and Anti-Zoom, for example, have been suggested (Latour 2014; Arènes et al. 2018) as a way of generating maps that cannot be “landed on,” but can be lived in, thus generating cosmographic narratives that can motivate sustainable and just climate action around forests.

Note 1 Recognizing there is a debate over whether the notion of scale is ontological or epistemological, we note that we follow Latour’s (2013, Chapter 14) work in treating scale ontologically, as a function of relative distinctions among orders of being.

Works cited Arène, Alexandre, Bruno Latour, and Jérôme Gaillardet. 2018. “Giving Depth to the Surface: An Exercise in the Gaia-Graphy of Critical Zones.” The Anthropocene Review 5, no. 2. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/2053019618782257. Carayannis, Elias G., and David F. Campbell. 2009. “‘Mode 3’ and ‘Quadruple Helix’: Toward a 21st Century Fractal Innovation Ecosystem.” International Journal of Technology Management 46: 201–234. Castree, Noel, David Featherstone, and Andrew Herod. 2007. “Contrapuntal Geographies: The Politics of Organising Across Socio-Spatial Difference.” In Handbook of Political Geography, edited by Kevin Cox, Murray Low, and Jennifer Robinson. London: SAGE, 305–322. Cosgrove, Denis. 2008. Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World. London, I. B. Tauris. Crampton, Jeremy W. 2001. “Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communication and Visualization.” Progress in Human Geography 25, 235–252. Crutzen, Paul Josef, and Will Steffen. 2003. “How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?” Climatic Change 61, no. 3: 251–257.

210  Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider Diederichsen, Diedrich, and Anselm Franke, eds. 2013. The Whole Earth California and the Disappearance of the Outside. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Dunaway, Finn. 2015. Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Flavelle, Christopher. October 28, 2020. “As Climate Disasters Pile Up, a Radical Proposal Gains Traction.” The New York Times. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​ 020​/1​​0​/28/​​clima​​te​/cl​​imate​​-chan​​ge​-ge​​oeng​i​​neeri​​ng​.ht​​ml. Grevsmühl, Sebastian. 2014. La Terre vue d’en haut. L’invention de l’environnement global. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Gurevitch, Leon. 2014. “Google Warming: Google Earth as Eco-Machinima.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20: 85–107. Haff, Peter. 2014. “Humans and Technology in the Anthropocene: Six Rules.” The Anthropocene Review 1/2: 126–136. Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modes​t_Wit​ness@​Secon​d_Mil​lenni​um.Fe​malem​an(C)​ _Meet​s_Onc​omous​etm: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. Herod, Andrew, and Melissa W. Wright, eds. 2002. Geographies of Power: Placing Scale. Oxford: Blackwell. Humphreys, David. 2003. “Life Protective or Carcinogenic Challenge? Global Forests Governance Under Advanced Capitalism.” Global Environmental Politics 3: 40–55. Ingold, Tim. 1993. “Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism.” In Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, edited by Kay Milton. London: Routledge, 31–42. Jasanoff, Sheila. 2001. “Image and Imagination: The Formation of Global Environmental Consciousness.” In Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, edited by Paul Edwards, and Clark Miller. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 309–337. Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2014. Anti-zoom: Contact, catalogue de l’exposition d’Olafur Eliasson. Paris: Fondation Vuitton. Moore, Adam. 2008. “Rethinking Scale as A Geographical Category: From Analysis to Practice.” Progress in Human Geography 32: 203–225. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London and New York: Verso. Müller, Birgit. 2012. “Farmers, Development, and the Temptation of Nitrogen: Controversies about Sustainable Farming in Nicaragua.” RCC Perspectives 5: 23–30. Ruiz, Sarah. 2019. “5 Creative Projects Using GFW to Protect Forests.” Global Forest Watch. https​:/​/bl​​og​.gl​​obalf​​orest​​watch​​.org/​​peopl​​e​/5​-c​​reati​​ve​-pr​​oject​​s​-usi​​ ng​-gf​​w​-to-​​​prote​​ct​-fo​​rests​/. Schneider, Birgit. 2016. “Burning Worlds of Cartography. A Critical Approach to Climate Cosmograms of the Anthropocene.” Geography and Environment 3, no. 2. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​/geo2​.27. Schneider, Birgit, and Lynda Olman. 2019. “The Geopolitics of Environmental Global Mapping Services: An Analysis of Global Forest Watch.” In Environmental Geopolitics: A Research Agenda, edited by Shannon O’Lear. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 44–57.

Google Gaia 

211

Schneider, Birgit, and Lynda Walsh. 2019. “The Politics of Zoom: Problems With Downscaling Climate Visualizations.” Geography and Environment 6, no. 1, Art. e00070, https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​/geo2​.70. Shneiderman, Ben. 2003. “The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations.” The Craft of Information Visualization, edited by Benjamin B. Bederson and Ben Shneiderman. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 364–371. Smith, Neil. 1992. “Geography, Difference and the Politics of Scale.” In Postmodernism and The Social Sciences, edited by Joe Doherty, Elspeth Graham, and Mohammed H. Malek. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 57–79. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no. 8: 614–621. Taylor, Peter J. 1982. “A Materialist Framework for Political Geography.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 7: 15–34. Tresch, John. 2005. “Cosmogram.” In Cosmograms, edited by Melik Ohanian, and Jean-Christophe Royoux. New York: Sternberg Press, 67–76. Tresch, John. 2007. “Technological World-Pictures. Cosmic Things and Cosmograms.” Isis 98, no. 1: 84–9. Tresch, John. 2015. “Interview with Sonic Acts #20.” https​:/​/so​​nicac​​ts​.co​​m​/mob​​ile​/ p​​ortal​​/inte​​rview​​-with​​-john​​-tres​​ch​-on​​​-cosm​​ogram​​s. Turner, David. 2018. The Green Marble: Earth System Science and Global Sustainability. New York: Columbia University Press. Vernadskij, Vladimir I. 1998. The Biosphere (first published in Russian in 1926). New York: Springer Science+Business Media. Woods, Derek. 2014. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” Minnesota Review 83: 133–142.

12 Art, Irony and Scaling the Anthropocene J Henry Fair in Conversation with Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes

Industrial agriculture, hydro-fracking drill sites, power plants, coal mines, refineries—your photographic imagery traces the visual impact of the many different energy-consumptive machineries and material infrastructures of Western civilization on biochemical material cycles, ecosystems with their biotic and abiotic components, geological processes and so forth. These visual traces can be understood as “artifacts” of the Anthropocene, as the title of your very successful joint exhibition Artifacts at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, suggests. How would you describe the relation between the particular environmental situations which your images depict, on the one hand, and the overarching concept of the “Anthropocene,” on the other (Figure 12.1)? “The Anthropocene” is defined as the era in which humanity is a geophysical force which changes the planet. But even the scientists that coined the term and applied it cannot agree on the precise meaning or beginning. It is even more difficult for “regular” people to define or understand, because the concept is vague, and not part of their daily lives, and because they have always known an altered world. My pictures are documents, records of the Anthropocene, but they are much more. They are created and intended to stimulate an emotional response and thus make this complex topic tangible for the viewer. Anthropocene is a big concept, but in fact, it is the cumulative result of our desires. We live in the world of plentiful things provided for us which all have a hidden cost much larger than the monetary cost we pay at the store.1 When we buy cheap bacon, we don’t think of the water that is polluted to provide that meat at that cheap price (Figure 12.1). In economic terms, these hidden costs are called externalities, those costs which the producer does not have to pay. The Anthropocene also is associated with concepts which have become political: such as climate change, and the moral value of extracting mineral resources and overwhelming nature in the process. The opinion one has on these issues depends on many factors: education, news source and peer group. By relating to aesthetic triggers my images “sidestep” the “rational” filter, which we apply to charged concepts and thus, hopefully, appeal to a more universal audience, even those who might disagree with the underlying realities because of their political beliefs. DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-12

Art, Irony and Scaling the Anthropocene  213

Figure 12.1 Wetlands with Heavy Algae Growth Adjacent to Hog Factory Farm, 2008. Source: © J Henry Fair (https://www​ .jhenryfair​ .com​ /growth) (3301-134).

The “Artifacts” exhibition was a collaborative exhibition. Was this a new and important experience for you to work in such a particular context? The Artifacts exhibition was five years in the making, growing and evolving throughout that process. We knew what we wanted to express with the project and went through many concepts in the planning process. The realization of significant funding and collaboration with the EU science department gave it the capability and cachet to enable a breadth with more than 500,000 visitors that was only a dream at the beginning. From the exhibit experts at the museum to the scientific experts at the Joint Research Center, the total became much more than the sum of the parts. This collaboration enabled us to build an exhibit that was much larger than the original idea and far more effective in disseminating the information we wanted to provide. Also, for me, working largely as a solo artist, the opportunity to collaborate with a large group of talented specialists was a personal joy. My work flow starts with research: either about an environmental problem or a pending change in regulations. I must first learn the topic, then how it is manifested in the production process and then where in the world to find an example. Then there must be a plan to get there and hire a small plane, hope the weather is good and go photograph it. Finally comes the post production of the images and more research. All of these steps are done alone, which makes for a lonely work process, so to go

214  J Henry Fair every day to one of the greatest museums of the world and collaborate with some of the best practitioners of these many different crafts was a joyful learning experience. Your aesthetic dedication to environmental change and your narrative accounts suggest that artists have a responsibility for the Earth (system) and for how to artistically engage with it. Can you elaborate on the relationship between (your) art and activism and about how artists should ideally deal with the Anthropocene? I believe that we all have a responsibility for protecting the earth’s natural systems, which sustain our life. Being an adult means being responsible. Artists do what their natures demand. Some write poetry, some make music, others make images. I am compelled to make images and correlate the science behind them, because I feel so strongly about the threats to our common home. But a few artists “doing their thing” have no chance against the giant corporations with unlimited resources which broadcast their disinformation telling the public that everything is fine and good as it is. Advertising and “news” (which are the propaganda wings of the industrial complex) are far more influential and pervasive than the voices of a few dissident artists. And we want to believe it. We don’t want to think that our vacation to Sardinia or that fast-food hamburger will destroy the planet for the next generation. (Before Covid, Ryan Air was the tenth largest carbon emitter in Europe, and the Amazon is being deforested to grow cows for cheap beef.) Only collective action to demand the preservation of our sustaining ecosystem will bring about the change we need. My hope is that the art I make will motivate some people to demand that change (Figure 12.2).

Figure 12.2 Chris Puddy, Pilot and J Henry Fair, 2016. Source: © J Henry Fair.

Art, Irony and Scaling the Anthropocene  215 Your images depict many different forms of anthropogenic impact or of its bio-, geo- and ecological effects and allow us to reflect upon planetaryscale transformations. While making such manifold resource- and energydepletive processes visible, the material conditions of this aesthetic endeavor are themselves energy and resource consumptive, since you rely on planetary-spanning transportation systems and communication infrastructures, in order to put your projects into practice. How do you deal with your own “footprint,” given that your photographs are usually taken from the board of an airplane fueled by earth resources? Do you think that, as an artist, it is necessary to make a certain compromise in this regard? Some years ago a German environmental group that wanted to make a collaboration expressed the concern that the production of my pictures required flying in airplanes and asked if we could perhaps use a hot air balloon for a collaboration. I asked if they thought a giant plastic balloon filled with air heated by burning petroleum gas from a tank was any less environmental than a small, 40-year-old, airplane burning gasoline. Ultimately the collaboration did not happen. Making my art requires that I go to distant places and fly in airplanes to find and photograph the subjects that tell the stories I think are important. It is a fact. My solution is to be the best citizen possible in every aspect of my life. When it is possible, I take a train rather than flying, bicycle or walk instead of driving, never eat factory farmed food, never take a disposable coffee cup, rarely eat meat, recycle everything, turn off every electric appliance when not using it, reuse every piece of paper with a white side, save grey water in buckets to flush toilets, never use chemical cleaners, never spend my money to support an earth destroying industry and more. I make myself crazy finding ways to reduce my footprint, in every aspect of my life. Every adult has a responsibility to live in a sustainable way. Doing otherwise is anti-social. The artists have the same responsibility as all other citizens, whether they be artists, engineers or coal miners. Your images of “industrial scars” are described as “mesmerizingly beautiful,” but on a closer look they depict disturbed, toxic or devastated landscapes. How would you describe the relevance of aesthetic form for your work as an environmentalist and artist at the same time? Is there an intended ambiguity in your work between the form of your photographs and their function? The “form versus function” question has always fascinated me, and thus the graphic aspect of machines has always been a subject of my photography. Ruins (including decrepit machines) are artifacts of civilization in decay (as are the erosion of regulatory protections of public health). Similarly, fluid dynamics, whether macro or micro, form amazing visual patterns. We live in the contemporary world surrounded by indulgences, from cheap meat to budget vacations in faraway places, to magical devices that connect us to all of the information in the world (and access to more indulgences). The irony is that none of it is what we need to live, and furthermore, each of these indulgences does specific damage to some aspect of the

216  J Henry Fair natural world, whose complex systems provide the clean air and water to sustain life on the planet. It is even more ironic that those who consider all of these things know that they are taking from the future, no matter how hard they try to live sustainably. Irony is the language of my pictures. I exploit the irony of making beautiful images of horrible things. This reflects the irony that each of us, no matter how sensitive, living in the modern world, are living beyond our budget and thus depriving our children of the possibility to live on such a beautiful planet. And if the images aren’t beautiful, people won’t look at them. It’s only because they are beautiful and unsettling at the same time that people look at them and are interested in the facts and the message. I find that the close view, the detail shot, is often more effective at telling the larger story than a wider view (the establishing shot). Close-ups intrigue us, make us want to know more. The project is all about causing people to stop and consider the consequences of their actions and purchases. My hope is that a viewer is enthralled by a beautiful abstract image and becomes interested enough to explore the scientific explanation of the picture. Then, she/he will realize that this mesmerizing photograph is the pollution from the facial tissue she/he throws in the trash after using once to blow her nose, and that to produce it, an old growth forest will be cut down and millions of gallons of toxic effluent will be dumped in to a river and significant greenhouse gases generated (Figure 12.3).

Figure 12.3 Aerators Agitating Waste from the Manufacture of Pulp for Facial Tissues, 2005. Source: © J Henry Fair (http://www​ .jhenryfair​ .com​ / tissue).

Art, Irony and Scaling the Anthropocene  217 Hopefully she/he will then decide to buy a brand made from recycled newspaper, or better yet, use a handkerchief. In the Anthropocene discussion, the bird’s eye view has been somehow discredited as a “good trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (Donna Haraway). Would you describe the bird’s eye view as a sublime perspective, or would you reject that? How can you render individual positionality in your environmental art work? I had always wanted to use my skills to tell a story about our ecosystem in peril. Art can touch us in a way that dialog cannot. But it is hard to make art that is new, unique and captivating, and that will make people think. Logistically, the things I want to photograph are often sequestered behind fences, hidden from view or in distant places. Being in a plane enables me to jump the tallest fence, cover long distances and see what is hidden from most people. So in fact, the aerial view is the only way to tell the stories I want to tell. And the only way to get a “sense of scale” is to see it from above. Scale means comparison. Comparison means seeing of things as opposed to another. As terrestrial animals, the aerial view is inherently fascinating, who has not dreamed of flying? To illustrate, we can compare two photographs of the “red mud” from aluminum refining, a tremendous toxic waste disposal problem. In the first photograph (Figure 12.4) taken from the ground, we can see what is obviously a large expanse of some dark material, which might be earth, as far as we can tell. In the background is some industrial facility. But the

Figure 12.4 Bauxite Waste at Aluminum Refinery, 2007. Source: © J Henry Fair.

218  J Henry Fair photograph does not touch our emotions and thus has no meaning for us. In the aerial photo of the same site (Figure 12.5), we get much more of a sense of the place, and the picture is more engaging. But still it is not compelling. For that, we must go deeper, look closer and find the patterns and colors that will engage the viewer and make the viewer feel something (look, for example, at Figure 12.6). The scale of the Anthropocene (concept), it seems, cannot be made accessible through a camera held in human hands. It relies on media which operate to a large degree independent from human decisions—the analysis and observation of the Earth as a system temporarily “stuck” in the condition of the Anthropocene depends, above all, on remote sensing technologies, satellite imagery and planetary-scale computation. What does this mean for your work as an environmentalist? To understand something, one must see it from all different perspectives. Just as a close-up in a movie tells us more than we can understand from the wider shot, viewers get something from these beautiful abstracts that they don’t get from remote sensing technology. To get a true understanding of the scale of the Anthropocene, we need a plethora of views and measurements. Just as we must have a satellite image, there must be a close-up for comparison. Just as we must measure the thickness of the ice caps, we must know the dilution of ocean salinity. But at the same time, we cannot hide behind the very safe shield of “we need more research on this question.”

Figure 12.5 Large Impoundment of Bauxite Waste, with Aluminum Refinery and Mississippi River, 2007. Source: © J Henry Fair.

Art, Irony and Scaling the Anthropocene  219

Figure 12.6 Galaxy Road: Excavator Tracks in Bauxite Waste at Aluminum Refinery, 2007. Source: © J Henry Fair (https://www​.jhenryfair​.com​/aluminum).

We have known the science about the climate crisis since the 1950s, and we have done nothing to fix the problem. Regular people don’t understand numbers, and they are not persuaded by reason. They need an emotional trigger. Art. The “scale” question as it pertains to the Anthropocene is relevant on any slice of the issue. If we think about the causes of the changes we are causing on the physical planet, the driving force is our limitless hunger for more: more electronic toys, more meat, more travel. As our societies have grown more wealthy, our appetites have grown out of “scale” with the capability of the earth systems to sustainably support those desires. Thus we must “scale back” our wants, if we would leave a livable planet for our children. In the image “Galaxy Road” (Figure 12.6), we see tracks, presumably from a large excavator, across a field of bauxite waste from the refining of aluminum. Aluminum, strong and lightweight, vital for airplanes, computers, wiring, cookware and soda cans, is the most common metal in the earth’s crust, though it is never found in a free state. Refining the metal from its ores is a complex process with numerous environmental impacts. The tremendous amount of electricity used has its own repercussion and the chemical reaction releases significant greenhouse gases and produces large volumes of solid waste which is extremely caustic.

220  J Henry Fair While the scalar immensity required to scientifically map the Anthropocene has been criticized by many scholars, it also appears to be a fundamental methodological necessity from the point of view of Earth-system sciences. For the latter, “scale” is a methodological condition of mapping anthropocenic issues such as climate change, resource depletion, waste and pollution, energy-consumptive technologies, etc. For the former, conventional assumptions about “scale” become problematic per se. Your artistic approach toward scale differs fundamentally from the scientific means of bringing “anthropocenic” issues in discussion. In a keynote you held at the conference Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, you mentioned that your photographs bring scale to collapse. Can you elaborate on this notion of collapsing scale? We are racing toward a collapse of systems that will drastically impact the human race, or rather the collapse of several of the many natural systems that abet life as we know it, the inevitable progression of the era. “Regular people” do not spend much time considering the Anthropocene, or the consequences thereof. The demands of daily life consume our attention. We are rushing toward a collapse of the natural systems that support our civilization. But just as we cannot comprehend our own death, we cannot grasp the meaning of the end of our world as we know it. This is the realm of the scientists and philosophers that consider these colossal issues. But to the question of mapping or visualizing the Anthropocene, I must bring the example of Plato’s Cave. If we live in a cave, and only see the shadows we cast on the back wall, then that is our reality. We must make every effort to expand our mapped (visualized) reality and thus our understanding of the physical world. Otherwise, we are just the poor beings staring at the back wall of the cave. In my picture “The Last Stand” (Figure 12.7), we see a small stand of trees on the last of a mountain ridge in West Virginia as large machines tear it away to get the coal beneath it. This is a perfect anthropocenic image, precisely because it does give scale to the idea that humans can physically alter the world, a concept that is difficult for regular people to understand. The man that cut the last tree on Easter Island did not consider the collapse of that civilization as the result of his act; he thought only of his own accomplishment. By showing a small view of a small aspect of an impending collapse, I hope viewers will begin to understand the larger scalar collapse we face. Scale is also crucial in the visual element of my work because the absence of scalar reference in close-ups leaves the viewer to ponder the questions. In fact, many of your impressive images literally bring scale to collapse. They do not grant recipients access to a “transcendent” and distanced overview perspective, but in many cases they lack any indicator of the scale of the depicted object as well as of the scale you have applied to depict them. In this way, you show the flows and transformation of matter without reducing them to a distinct scale of spatial organization. On the other hand, your

Art, Irony and Scaling the Anthropocene  221

Figure 12.7 The Last Stand: Mountaintop Removal Coal Mine at Night, 2005, © J Henry Fair (https://www​.jhenryfair​.com​/mtr).

images are often accompanied by textual, narrative accounts on what is being depicted. Would you say that these accounts are an integral part of your artistic work to put the very abstract images into perspective? My methodology is to create a piece of art to captivate the audience and make them want to know more. If the viewer wants more information, I then provide the “what, when, where, why, and how” about what is seen in the image so that the viewer can understand the larger scale of what we are doing to our ecosystem. Only in “modern” times have the disciplines of art and science been separated. Leonardo da Vinci was celebrated in both fields (and many others). In earlier times, education and exposure to “higher learning” was tightly controlled by the priests and upper classes. Gutenberg and Luther changed all that. But as our world has become more complex, and anthropocenic topics like the climate crisis politicized, knowledge about science has been pushed out of the common understanding. But only when people understand the relationship between their actions and the larger planetary changes that we are provoking can we change those directions. Thus, I try to include a synopsis of the larger picture of what is happening in each of the photographs I make. I see myself as a story teller, data collector and correlation engineer. Photographs are visual data (especially in the digital age) and most of my time is spent doing research and gathering additional data to correlate to the visual data. For me a photograph that does not have a deeper meaning is simply decoration. I want my images to work

222  J Henry Fair on multiple levels: as decoration, certainly, but also as stimuli for inquiry and catalysts for change. This means including environmental activism, science, engineering and art all together in an explanation. The intrinsic relationship between photography and textual narrative puts into question the role of representation. It seems that, on the one hand, a suitable way to engage aesthetically with the Anthropocene is to (visually) disturb representation—this is what happens in many of your images— while on the other hand, narrative can function as a way to represent environmental disaster. What do you think about the role of representation, considering environmental phenomena which, in their complexity, are too complex for representational tools to be grasped? Photography, as the quintessential modern art form, is whatever the user wants it to be. Especially in the contemporary era in which everyone has a high-quality, easy-to-use camera with them at all times, photography is the art/ document of the everyman. But a photograph, by definition, is of something. It represents something, even if only indiscernible light and shadow. My work walks on a thin line between abstract art, document and political statement. It is all of the above. As an artist, one does not know what a viewer will receive from the work. Most people cannot relate to complex scientific concepts. I hope my work can help explain such concepts. Most people are consumed with daily existence, getting food on the table and the children to school. Also, science education is sorely lacking in most education systems. On top of it all, people want to hear “good news” and want diversion from daily existence. Consequently, contemplating complex environmental issues is not in the everyday thinking of most people. But the change that is needed to avert environmental crisis only happens from governmental edict, and governments usually respond to the large corporations that give them money. Thus change happens only when large numbers of people demand it in one voice. A perfect example is the ancient Hambach Forst, home to numerous endangered species, but being for years only destroyed by a large corporation to access the brown coal below it. Only when 50,000 concerned Europeans walked into the forest and demanded a cessation of the cutting was it stopped (Figure 12.8). The momentum that prompted this mass demonstration of the public will come from the fact that the issue was put before the public in forms that they could understand and digest: images and simple slogans repeated again and again until a large mass of people was motivated to act. How will your future engagement with scale and the Anthropocene look like? Will it be a continuation of your recent work, or are you considering to take into account new aesthetic and activistic strategies? The collapse of the natural systems that sustain life on this rock we call earth is, at this point, inevitable and accelerating. The tundra will melt and release its methane. The oceans will rise. Storms will increase. We must adapt. Coastal cities will be some of the first to be impacted. We must make

Art, Irony and Scaling the Anthropocene  223

Figure 12.8 Waste Liquid at Brown Coal Mine, 2018. Source: © J Henry Fair (https://www​.jhenryfair​.com​/hornbeam, https://www​.jhenryfair​.com​/ hambach).

Figure 12.9 Freighter Enters Malamocco Channel with the Doors of Mose Project, Prior to Installation, in the Foreground, Venice in the background, 2018. Source: © J Henry Fair (https://www​ .jhenryfair​ .com​ /mose) (4436-300).

224  J Henry Fair the decision to move them or protect them. These are major societal decisions and will cost vast amounts of money either way. Indonesia has made the decision that Jakarta, one of the most populous cities in the world, cannot be saved and must be moved. Venice has built gates to close off its lagoon from the ocean. None knows if the €6,000,000,000 project will work. Currently, I am photographing coastlines and the infrastructure there and the adaptations being built (Figure 12.9).

Note 1 J Henry Fair (2016). Industrial Scars. The Hidden Costs of Consumption. Foreword by Bill McKibben. Texts by Lewis Smith. Winterbourne: Papadakis Publisher.

13 Afterword On Scale and Deep History in the Anthropocene Dipesh Chakrabarty

The Anthropocene, one may say, is all about scale. It requires us to think simultaneously about events and phenomena that span widely different— though often overlapping—swaths of time and space. For instance, we may argue about when the Anthropocene started. Thinking about the early, middle, and late Anthropocene hypotheses involves thinking about a few hundred years—from the 1950s, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, or the time of European colonization of the Americas—about the 12,000 years since the invention of agriculture, and about the past a few million years, as some argue that the hominin use of fire was the earliest instance of a biological species having at its disposal more energy than its muscles alone could produce. Some, looking forward to the future, may not care so much about the origins of the Anthropocene but about its long-term impact, about, for instance, the fact that human activities have already changed the climate of the planet for the next 100,000 years! These are all examples of scaling. Both scales of time and space—the unit by which we measure the amount or quantity of something—and rates of change over time are at play here. Yet for all its ubiquitous presence in the literature on the Anthropocene, scale as such is perhaps not the problem when it comes to discussing the Anthropocene. The word “scale,” when used in this context, carries at least two different meanings. It could mean the unit on a particular scale of measurement. Thus, the Anthropocene is expected to be an epoch, the smallest unit in the chronological scale that is used to periodize the earth’s geological history. But the word “scale” could also be used to signify the amount, quantity or extent of something as in the expressions “large scale” or “small scale.” When Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer formally introduced the term “Anthropocene” in 2000, they used it to dramatize the extent of the impact human activities and their technology are having on the planet, leaving for stratigraphers and their colleagues the unenviable task of working out a stratigraphic basis for the Anthropocene.1 The term Anthropocene as used by earth-system scientists could also be a way of connecting events far out into the future (Sixth Great Extinction, the next Ice DOI: 10.4324/9781003136989-13

226  Dipesh Chakrabarty Age) with events of deep history (such as the natural formation of fossil fuel hundreds of millions of years ago) and so on. The critical question for this volume and elsewhere, it seems to me, is what scaling in the Anthropocene could mean in human terms. One could ask, for instance: At what distance of time or space do things seem to lose any significance for humans? When do we feel outscaled by the consequences of our action? What relationship is formed when we scale something up (for example: the number of microbes in animal microbiomes) or down (the age of the universe) for reasons of comprehension, between that activity of scaling and our affective and imaginative capacities? When is a spatial or temporal measure unimaginable for humans? We may also ask: How do we understand the relationship between the individual flesh-andblood persons that we are—with specific histories, finite lives and limited capabilities (both shared-evolved and learned)—and the impact on the environment that we have collectively? Is the collective simply a matter of how many humans there are altogether? Or do we have to conceptualize the collective as another mode of existence of what really is an ensemble—an assemblage—of technology, humans, the animals we farm and the species that depend on humans for survival? But then, isn’t the individual human body an assemblage as well? What happens to the idea of responsibility once we distribute agency over the various entities that make up an ensemble? All these questions stir at the heart of this volume as the different chapters collected here seek—creatively, heroically and imaginatively—to rise to the challenge of these questions. What I want to raise in this afterword— without in any way aiming to be conclusive or to summarize what others have said—are some speculative reflections of human meanings of “scale” in the Anthropocene as the growing planetary environmental crisis brings into view the relationship between what I may call the “everyday common sense or heuristics” of humans and our deep, evolutionary history. In other words, it is when we ask questions of the affective-dispositional side of human relationship to problems we label “the Anthropocene” that we begin to see how some of the evolved traits of humans get in the way of or seriously qualify actions that may seem warranted and desirable from a purely rational point of view. I realize that in speaking thus I make an artificial and possibly unsustainable distinction between the rational and the affectivedispositional, but I make it in the interest of clarity of exposition. To illustrate what I have in mind, let me begin with an example from my paleoclimatologist colleague David Archer’s fascinating book, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. Writing for a non-specialist audience, Archer realizes early on in the book that in order to instill in people a sense of urgency or concern, he has to bring very large (in human terms) and geological scales of time into the varieties of ways in which humans make sense of time and space, how, for instance, they understand things as old or new—in other words, to translate geological scale into a temporal scale meaningful for humans. Explaining why

Afterword 

227

it will take “centuries” for fossil fuel CO2 to dissolve in the oceans, Archer stops to remember that “several centuries seems—to me, personally—like a pretty long time.” “Mozart lived several centuries ago” (Archer 2009, 4). But for human-induced climate change, “this is only the beginning.” He goes on to explain that it will take “thousands of years, even hundreds of thousands of years […] to completely scrub the planet of our extra CO2” (5). This is a problem—the differences and connections between humanexistential sense of time and the human-constructed formal scales of time, whether geological or historical—that haunts Archer’s exposition throughout the book, though, not being a humanist, he can only take stabs at this problem on the basis of “experience” that he regards as “personal.” But, as we shall see, what Archer speaks of in a personal idiom relates directly to what one might, in a Heideggerian idiom, call the ontic-ontological aspects of the human sense of time. Archer’s “Mankind”—humans in general—is an expansion of his experiencing “I.” Thus he writes, “Mankind has a kind of vested interest in time spans of centuries.” The immediately following sentences are: I personally can visualize centuries. I like to think that Benjamin Franklin’s childhood was not unimaginably different from my own (Ok, so I probably watched more TV than he did). I know people who knew people the beginning of the last century. I can look the last century in the eye. Looking forward, a century is about how far I can really imagine also. Sixty years is grandchildren. One hundred is great grandchildren or great, great grandchildren. After that, they are on their own, am I right? “It makes perfect sense,” he adds, “to focus our attention on a time span that is imaginable given our own century-timescale lifetimes” (Archer 2009, 5). Clearly, Archer is not speaking for every type of human being on earth. His voice is that of a financially stable, middle-class person of a developed nation, someone who can reasonably foresee a longish (in human terms) life, good health and the coming of children and their children. This is not everybody. True. But we can see that there would be versions of such narratives of the human sense of time that others in other parts of the world— or at other times—could also produce. We cannot imagine a human being who, whatever their specific circumstances, would find the difference in time between, say, 5,000 and 10,000 years meaningful in their own lives. Humans just don’t project themselves personally on to that kind of scale of time. Mythical times of human rituals that often span large extents of mytho-historical time are times that return and blend themselves into the timescale of individual lives. So, if humans are changing the climate of the planet for the next 100,000 years, why should they be concerned about it? Why now? A hundred thousand is so many years after the authors and the readers of Archer’s book—or

228  Dipesh Chakrabarty for that matter, this book—will be gone! “Why should we mere mortals care about altering climate 100,000 years from now?” asks Archer. This is the reason, he explains, why “Climate Change is forecast to the year 2100, a year that very few people now reading this [his] book will see, but a time span considerably shorter than 100,000 years.” Perhaps humans can have feelings over events that happen on a shorter time scale? Can one convert today the Western pride in “Western civilization” into care and concern for the present and the future? “How would it feel,” asks Archer, trying to generate an affective response in his reader, if the ancient Greeks, for example, had taken advantage of some lucrative business opportunity for a few centuries, aware of potential costs—such as, say, a stormier world, or the loss of 10% of agricultural production to rising sea levels—that could persist to this day? That is not how I want to be remembered. (Archer 2009, 9–10) I am not sure that Archer’s rhetorical device would have worked with his reader. Would ancient Greek slave-holders have cared much about what posterity thought of their systems of slavery? Even more recent slave-masters do not appear to have felt restricted by the possibility of criticisms they might face centuries after they had departed the world. Besides, in thinking about their futures, humans typically prioritize their choices. If I am thinking of the future when I think I am already “old,” surely my priorities would be different from those of a person coming into her or his adulthood. Prioritizing is a practice one can liken to what theorists of scale call interscaling—“drawing connections between disparate scalable qualities so that they come to reinforce each other” (Carr and Fisher 2016, 134). Parents prioritize differently from children. Thus, think of the example (that I have used elsewhere) of the recent boom in the sale of air-conditioners in the warming city of Delhi, India’s capital. Delhi, like many other Indian cities, is becoming a “heat island” where, by the end of this century, the number of unbearably hot days in the year are predicted to be in the range of 80–90 compared to the current figure that is well under 10. Air-conditioners would only make the city get hotter. Purchasing air-conditioners—and Indian airconditioners that use older technology are particularly bad for the warming of the planet—in such a situation therefore involves a trade-off between immediate comfort and saving of life and the future uninhabitability of the city. Yet many lower- and middle-class Indian parents are making exactly this choice. Why? Because air-conditioners in the present make it easier for their children to study and perform better in India’s extremely competitive systems so that they, the children, can, if need be, afford to move out of the city when it becomes truly unlivable! And the parents—such a thought must have gone into their thinking—would be gone by then.2 Shortsighted? Could be, but it is a result of prioritizing—that is to say, interscaling the

Afterword 

229

time of human life with the scale of warming of the urban landscape of Delhi. And the basis of this interscaling is the human being’s own temporal sense of being—again, to speak in Heideggerian terms, the “having to be” of a “being-toward-death.” It is the ontological finitude of the being of every person that provides the ground for human action, and action with regard to the threat of the Anthropocene is no exception to this. This is why the scale of human lifetimes would always be present in whatever decisions humans make in terms of other scales of time and space. This is also why, as a humanist historian, I feel that the experience of every human being counts. The scale question, as it arises in the context of the Anthropocene, thus has something to contribute with regard to the problem of how phenomenological (i.e. ontic-ontological) aspects of being human could be brought into conversation with the discussion of “scale” in the social/human sciences. Social scientists often emphasize the social-institutional origins of scaling to the exclusion of the evolutionary-ontological. I am not dismissing the importance, especially the political importance, of questions of social-institutional origins of scaling. My colleague, Neil Brenner, in his thoughtful and erudite book, New Urban Spaces, pits the social origins of scaling against the “ontological,” a word he understands in a particular way. He quotes with approval two geographers, David Delaney and Helga Leitner (1997): “Geographical scale is conceptualized as being socially constructed rather than ontologically pre-given.” Or the cultural anthropologist Anna Tsing puts it this way: “scale is not just a neutral frame for viewing the world; scale must be brought into being […]. Scales are claimed and contested in cultural and political projects” (quoted in Brenner 2019, 49, 50). Similarly, my colleague E. Summerson Carr and her collaborator Michael Lempert, in their introduction to an edited volume, Scale, emphasize the question of how scales are socially “forged” and refer to the “[social] work required to bring scale into being and make it matter in social and cultural life” (Carr and Lempert 2016, 8, 9). They write of what they regard as “ontology” in a tone of disapproval: “We ontologize scalar perspectives, rather than ask how they were forged and so focused” (8). I am not sure what “ontology” means in the text by Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert. It perhaps means something fixed and prefabricated. In Brenner’s prose, it is clear that “ontology” stands for ahistorical, unchanging and fixed “essence” of being. He writes, for instance: “for [Henri] Lefebvre, the hierarchically configured properties of interscalar relations are not expressions of a fixed, ontological essence.” Or: Thus conceived, the process of urban theorizing is not tied to an underlying ontological foundation through which the intrinsic properties of the urban could somehow be demarcated “once and for all.” Rather, in the dialectical, postfoundationalist philosophical traditions in which this

230  Dipesh Chakrabarty book is situated, urban theorizing is always historically constituted and contextually situated. (Brenner 2019, 81, 335) Summerson Carr and Lempert clarify what is at stake for them in not “ontologizing”—which means, I think, as in Brenner’s case, making scale static—when they claim that “the sheer diversity of scalar practices and projects” documented in their volume “suggests that social existence is radically scalable” (Carr and Lempert 2016, 18). At stake, then, in this opposition between “ontology” and “social construction” is some emancipatory potential that the practice of scaling contains for humans: if hierarchies, elites, and market ideologies are products of scaling projects, so are morality, sensory experience, community, ritual, and our very sense of who, where, and what we are. So while we must be ever alert to the ways that scalar logics limit our imagination of passable human terrain, we should remember that precisely because scaling is inherently perspectival and relational, it is also potentially transformative and humane. (19) Interestingly, Brenner also ends his innovative study of urban form and scaling by referring to the “potentially transformative” opportunities that the otherwise “brutal injustices and the devastating social and ecological violence” can reveal on analysis and thus help to “actualize” (Brenner 2019, 394). It is clear then that in Brenner’s and Summerson Carr’s and Lempert’s treatment of scale and scalability what history—the history of institutions, power and domination—stands opposed to is fixity, the idea of things having a “fixed essence,” and “ontology” is identified with the latter. But this is where Archer’s imaginary encounter with the human sense of time, with the question of what and how humans would prioritize when faced with the finitude of their civilization in the Anthropocene, helps us to get out of the history/fixity binary. Once again I draw on the Heideggerian tradition of thought. In that tradition, essence does not amount to fixity. As Heidegger wrote: When we are seeking the essence of “tree,” we have to become aware that that which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees. Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. (Heidegger 1977, 4)3 Similarly, the essence of the human sense of scale is not a scale of a fixed quantity. The human sense of scale arises in human relationship to the world where every individual human faces the finitude of their existence.

Afterword 

231

This is not a relationship with a fixed, pre-given content. This is a changing relationship depending not only on what historically available institutions do to human existence but on how humans have evolved and will evolve in future. Thus viewed, opposed to the movement of the relatively short history of capital that Brenner foregrounds stands not any “fixed essence” but a slower and deeper history, but a history all right: the history of evolution that shows up as everyday heuristics in the present. Thus, the ontic-ontological—the evolutionary aspects of the human as found embedded in our everyday decisions and dispositions—is also what makes the deep history of humans visible in discussions of “meaningful” human options in the Anthropocene. It is about the history of evolved capacities of which every human being is an imperfect bearer. Particular forms of scaling are, of course, socially produced but scaling as such, it would seem, comes naturally to humans. Just as it is hard to imagine a human being who does not have a sense of direction, it is also hard to imagine humans evolving without some capacity for measuring, quantifying, distinguishing between distance and closeness and between “here” and “there.” Not just humans, it has now been established scientifically that even honeybees can, within limits, measure and indicate distances. They can, in addition, rank numerical quantities according to the rules of “greater than” and “less than,” and can even “understand” abstract concepts like “sameness” and “difference” (Nieder 2019, 46–48). The capacity to scale—in however “primitive” a form—would appear to be an evolved capacity in many animals including humans. As the biologist George Gaylord Simpson said in 1963: “The monkey that had no realistic perception of the branch he was jumping for was soon a dead monkey—and did not belong to our ancestors” (cited in Nieder 2019, 9). “The innate intuition of numbers” (i.e. that capacity to scale) is “one of several systems of ‘core knowledge’ human cognition is built on […] both in ontogeny—that is, during the development of an individual—and in phylogeny, the evolutionary history of humans” (8). Why do I raise this point? Because I think that the question of how humans negotiate the Anthropocene makes visible in any analysis—if only we can see—the deep-historical/ontological basis of our capacity to scale, the expression of which is always contextual and appear in particular forms in particular societies at particular points in their history. This appreciation of deep history as it works through our everyday existence could help arrest a tendency in the social sciences to reduce the human to the chronologically shallow history of institutions, overlooking the deep-historical processes that also contribute, sometimes critically, to our capacity to scale. The limits to affective human sense of time—the historical question of the amount of time that humans can give “a stuff” about—arise from this ground. Missing this aspect of our deep history as it comes to play in the Anthropocene can also lead to overestimation of the scales over which—or even the freedom with which—humans can engage the problems of the Anthropocene. What humans can successfully interscale about this epoch and grasp with their

232  Dipesh Chakrabarty deep-historical apparatus of sense-making and what will leave humans feeling outscaled remains an open question for the future but the deep-historical elements of our ontic-ontological life will always play a part in shaping that experience.

Notes 1 See the discussion in my essay, “Anthropocene Time” (2018). 2 For a more detailed account of the air-conditioner story, see chapter 4 of my book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). 3 See also the commentary in Gelven (1989, 48–49).

Works Cited Archer, David. 2009. The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brenner, Niel. 2019. New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question. New York: Oxford University Press. Carr, E. Summerson, and Brooke Fisher. 2016. “Interscaling Awe, De-escalating Disaster.” In Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life, edited by E. Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert, 133–156. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carr, E. Summerson, and Michael Lempert. 2016. “Introduction. Pragmatics of Scale.” In Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life, edited by E. Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert, 1–21. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2018. “Anthropocene Time.” History and Theory 57, no. 1: 5–32. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Delanay, David, and Helga Leitner. 1997. “The Political Construction of Scale.” Political Geography 16, no. 2: 93–97. Gelven, Michael. 1989. A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. by William Lovitt. New York: Harper. Nieder, Andreas. 2019. A Brain for Numbers: The Biology of the Number Instinct. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Index

**Page numbers in italics reference figures. accountability 171 Ackerman, John 154 action, human activity 117, 119, 136 activism, art and 214 activity of thinking 134–136 Adleman, Daniel 24 Adorno, Theodor W. 111, 122–123, 153 aesthetics 14, 32, 42, 143–144, 153, 215; Anthropocene aesthetics 147–148, 151, 153 affect theory 144 African-American experience 187 Afrofuturism 187 Agamben, Giorgio 116, 118 air-conditioners, Delhi, India 228 Akomolafe, Bayo 167 Aldiss, Brian 99 alienation 117 Alley, Richard B. 65 allometry 162 alterity 113–116 aluminum 219 Amazon 214 ambiguity 215 Amery, Carl 50–51 anisochrony 26–28, 32, 34, 186, 191n7 Anthropocene 2–3, 6–7, 10, 177, 181, 190, 212, 225; disorder 127; hypothesis 75, 77–80, 225 Anthropocene fiction 44 Anthropocene narrative 11, 77–78, 90, 165, 173, 200 Anthropocene Working Group 78, 82 anthropomorphism 13, 112, 115, 119–122 Anthropos 2, 3, 6–7, 12, 127, 191 anthroposphere 11, 67 apocalyptic time 35

Archer, David 7, 226–228 Arendt, Hannah 117–119, 128; literary ethics 132–137 Aristotle 119, 132, Aristotelian 118 art 115, 122–123, 219; activism and 214; footprints 215; irony 216 Artifacts exhibition 212–213 Asher, Kenneth 132 assemblage 80 assemblage agency 135 Atwood, Margaret 43 Bacigalupi, Paolo 43 Bäckstrand, Karin 171 Ballard, J.G. 99 banality of the Anthropocene 154 Barad, Karen 26 Barber, Elizabeth 83 Baskin, Jeremy 165 Bataille, Georges 80 Beaulieu, Alain 191n2 Benjamin, Walter 42, 81–82, 88, 124 Bennett, Jane 12, 185 Bense, Max 68 Bergson, Henri 27 Bergthaller, Hannes 5, 129, 130 Berkeley, George 123 Beuret, Nicholas 166 biodiversity loss 3, 7, 51, 204 biomimicry 188 biosphere 95, 111–112, 119, 121, 124n3, 128, 181, 200, 204 bird’s eye view 217–219 Blaser, Mario 166 blue marbles, images of earth 193–194 Boggs, Grace Lee 188 Bolsonaro, Jair 99 Bonner, John Tyler 6

234 Index Bonneuil, Christophe 17n7, 124n2, 145 botanical life 94 Brand, Stewart, Whole Earth Discipline 163–164 Brenner, Neil 229–230 British Sea Power 146 Burke, Sue 12, 97, 100–104 Butler, Octavia E. 182–183 calamity form 147–148 Canavan, Gerry 94 Capitalocene 151, 153, 203 carbon dioxide emissions 196; see also CO2 Carson, Rachel 163 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 3, 5, 7, 16, 33, 127, 130–131, 181 chaosmology 181 chaosmos 191n2 Chthulucene 187, 191n9 Clark, Timothy 4–5, 8, 32, 40, 127–129, 131, 144 Clarke, Bruce 28 Clarke, Michael Tavel 5 climate change 3, 4, 7, 39–40, 42, 44– 45, 49–51, 75, 79, 94, 127, 129, 139, 143, 145, 148–149, 161, 165–167, 180, 182, 185, 203, 207–208, 212, 220, 227–228 climate change narratives 43, climate change fiction 10, 145 climate control 61 climate crisis 219 climate exceptionalism 167, 172 climate governance 165–166 climate time 64 Club of Rome 164 CO2 65, 196, 227 Coen, Deborah 41 cognitive estrangement 94 coherence of the discrepant 111 Colebrook, Claire 7–8 collaborative, collaboration 12, 97, 105, 180, 183–184, 187, 189, 213 communication theory 64 comparison 7; see also scale computer simulation 63–68 Conrad, Joseph 99 contextualism 78 cosmograms 193, 198–199, 207; GFW (Global Forest Watch) 208 cosmographic narrative 194 cosmographic narrative framework 198–202

cosmological imperialism, Google Gaia 207–209 cosmology 178–180, 198 cosmology of place 187 cosmology of time 186 cosmos 75, 80–81, 87–88, 90, 112, 178–182, 190, 191n2 co-species 105 counterproductivity 168–169 Cowper, William 147–148 crafting stories for Anthropocene 86–89 Craps, Stef 40 Crutzen, Paul 2, 225 cybernetics 62, 68 Cyril, Malkia 189 Dale, Peter 149 Davies, Jude 148, 151 decline narrative 180–181, 190 de la Cadena, Marisol 166 decolonizing, democratic imaginary 169–172 deconstructivist frame 165 deep time 8, 10, 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32–35, 41, 66–67, 78, 129, 130, 144 deforestation 99 Delaney, David 229 Deleuze, Gilles 5, 80–81, 85, 90 Delhi, India, air-conditioners 228 democracy 166–172 Descola, Philippe 121 determinate durations 24 détournement 154 disaster(s) 50, 101, 139, 146, 169, 222 disenchantment 119, 121 disinterested pleasure 123 disruption, punk 148 divergent Anthropocene 150 Dolni Věstonice-Pavlov 83–84, 87 Doppelgänger technique 40 Dryzek, John 172 durations 27; geomedia and 27–32; half-life of plutonium 25; mid-length 32–33 earth-alienation 117 earthly multitudes 12, 76, 79–82 earth-oriented practices as, interscalar vehicles 82–86 Ebstorfer World Map 199 Eckersley, Robyn 171–172 eco-cosmopolitanism 130 ecology 113, 117 Edgeworth, Matt 83

Index  ego 135 ejidatarios 207 elemental ecocriticism 26 elemental media 26 Eliade, Mircea 87 Ellis, Warren 146 Empedocles 69 empirical-transcendental doublet 111–113 Energiewende 161 environmental: awareness 121, 164: crisis 165; decline 177; degradation 165; discourse 35, 163; ethics 121; movement 163–164; processes 4 environmental fiction 52 environmental humanities 13, 89, 177, 185 environmentalism 163–164 Epstein, Jean 55–60, 66, 68–69 Equilibration 200 erasure of human scale 129 ethical decision-making 132 ethical questions 128–131 ethics 121, 124, 127–128 eudaimonia 132 exclusive humanism 116 experience in thinking 132–137 externalities 212 extinction 23, 35, 44, 69, 94, 130, 147, 153, 203, 225 fabric, woven 83, 85 feeling the Anthropocene 143 Ferguson, Francis 23 fiber, woven fiber 83–86 fiction 129; science fiction 43–45, 186; visionary fiction 186 fire, storytelling 87 florosphere 12, 95–97, 99, 102–105 footprints, art 215 Forbes, Robert 87 forests, GFW (Global Forest Watch) 202–205 Foucault, Michel 111, 115–116 fractals 67, 69, 112, 184, 188, 190 freedom 32, 34, 111–112, 115–117, 123, 231 Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste 17n7, 124n2, 145 Friedrich, Franz 10, 40, 51 Gaarder, Jostein 44–45 Gaffney, Owen 7 Gagliano, Monica 95 Gaia 193, 202; see also Google Gaia

235

gaian biosphere 15, 200–203 Galileo 6 Galison, Peter 33 gap in perceptions 128 geoengineering 61, 165, 208–209 geological agency 76, 85, 117, 120; geophysical agency 7 geological deep time see deep time geology 23, 25, 33–34, 66, 85, 127, 145 geomedia 10, 24, 27, 32, 36n7; durations and 27–32 geoscience 63, 78, 86 GFW see Global Forest Watch Ghosh, Amitav 43, 77, 127–129, 131, 143 Gleick, James 51–52 global and local 181, 204–205 global engine forests 202–205 Global Forest Watch (GFW) 193–194, 196–198; zoom tool 205–206 global satellite view 194–196 global weather control 61 god trick 12, 14, 77, 194 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: air-ocean 96–97; Faust I and II 97–99; plantocean 96–100 Golding, William 130 good Anthropocene 162 Goodman, Steve 150, 152 Google Earth Engine 202–203, 208 Google Gaia 193–194, 207; cosmological imperialism 207–209 Google Warming 203, 208 Gould, Stephen Jay 25, 33 governance 165–166 Great Acceleration 112, 117, 125n6, 200, accelerated growth 118 green marble 200 Green Marble (NASA) 195 Grosz, Elizabeth 79, 85 growth 162–163 Grusin, Richard 147 Guattari, Félix 80, 85 Gurevitch, Leon 202–203, 208 Haff, Peter 3, 112 Haldane, J.B.S. 161–162 Haldane’s principle 161 half-life of plutonium 25–27 Hambach Forst 222 Haraway, Donna 8, 12, 14, 77–79, 89, 100, 177, 187, 191n9, 217 Hardt, Michael 81 Hardy, Bruce 83 Harrison, Robert Pogue 99

236 Index Hecht, Gabrielle 76–78 Heidegger, Martin 230 Heise, Ursula 26, 39, 43, 129–130, 177, 186 Heringman, Noah 33 high-heat technology 84–87 Hillman, Brenda 146 HIV/AIDS 148 Holocaust 88 Hopkins, Gerald Manley 124 Horkheimer, Max 111 Horn, Eva 5, 129–130 Horton, Zach 11 human activity 2, 3, 7, 10, 117, 129, 146, 147 human agency 13, 48, 59, 77, 111–112, 120, 127–128, 130–131, 146 human bipedalism 82 human geography 1, 5, 12, 16 human interventions 55, 79, 135, 163, 165, 193, 208 human scale in Anthropocene 116–123 human sense of scale 230 human sense of time 226–229 humanism 115–116 humanities 2, 7, 15, 64, 75, 113, 143, 177, 180, 185, 190; see also environmental humanities Humboldt, Alexander von 179, 182, 189 hyperobject 4, 23, 26, 32, 127 hyper-reflexive geopolitan democracy 171–172 identity 131 Illich, Ivan 162, 168 images 42 Imarisha, Walidah 186–187 industrial scars 215 Ingold, Tim 83, 89, 200, 205 intelligible concepts 113–114 interdisciplinary 2, 9, 16, 17n1, 179, 180 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 191n9 interscalar vehicles 12, 78, 80; earthoriented practices as 82–86 intersecting scales 8 involution 80, 85 Iovino, Serenella 89 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 191n9 Irigaray, Luce 97 iron cage 119–120 irony of art 216

Jakarta, Indonesia 224 Jeschke, Wolfgang 48–52 Johns-Putra, Adeline 42, 145 Joyce, James 181 Kafka, Franz 135, 136 Kant, Immanuel 112–114, 116, 123 Kaplan, Ann 28, 29 Keen, Suzanne 132 Keetley, Dawn 100 Kendall, Stuart 80 Kimmerer, Robin Wall 97, 104–105 Kleiber, Max 162 Kleiber’s law 162 knowledge, situated knowledge 77 Kohr, Leopold 162 Kolbert, Elizabeth 94 Kramarz, Teresa 171 labor 117, 136 Lacan, Jacques 62, 68 Laing, Dave 148 Landsat program 195 Langton, Marcia 82 Latour, Bruno 8, 185, 205 Lee, Changrae, On Such a Full Sea 145 Lefebvre, Henri 229 LeGuin, Ursula 43 Leitner, Helga 229 Lempert, Michael 229–230 literary cosmology 182, 191n4 literary ethics 132–137, 140 literary realism 42 literary strategies to promote change 39–40 literature: absence of climate crisis 143; Anthropocene realism 42; see also narratives Liu, Cixin 137–140 living memory 64 local-global entanglement 77, 79 local views, GFW (Global Forest Watch) 205 Lövbrand, Eva 77 Lovelock, James 167, 202 Lyell, Charles 65 Madsen, Michael 10, 23–35 Malm, Andreas 151 Mandela, Nelson 169–170 Mankind 227 mappa mundi 199 mapping anthropocenic issues 220 Marcus, Greil 151–152

Index  Marder, Michael 87, 97 Margulis, Lynn 202 Markley, Robert 130 Marston, Sallie A. 5 Marxist 153, 161 material agency 12, 27 McBride, Glen 82 McGuire, Richard 40 McPhee, John 33 media, elemental media 26 media environment 67 media studies 1, 9–10, 15–16, 194 mediation, scale and 2–8 Melancholia (von Trier) 110–111, 113–114 memory, living memory 64 Mertens, Mahlu 40 mid-length durations 32–33 Minhinnick, Robert 146 modern environmentalism 164 modernity 47, 65, 69, 97–98, 105, 111–112, 115–116, 119–121 Mongabay 206 mono-scalar patterns 6 Moore, Jason W. 151 Morgan, Benjamin 33 Morrison, Toni 135 Morton, Timothy 3–4, 78, 117 Moss, Rob 33 multiple-track narratives 7 multi-scalar thought patterns 188 multispecies agency 128, 226 multispecies justice 95, 97, 104 multispecies-justice agenda 95 the multitude 81 narratives 7–8, 13, 15–16, 23–28, 30–32, 34, 40–49, 52, 66–67, 83, 86–88, 90, 96, 122, 128, 130–132, 135, 137, 143, 146–147, 151, 165–167, 172–173, 177, 180, 185, 193, 200, 214, 221, 227; cosmographic narrative 15, 194, 198, 201–202, 205–207, 209; grand narrative 170, 180; multi-layered narrative 164; multiple-track narratives 7; science fiction see science fiction; second-persona narrative 28, 30 nation-state 170–171 natural beauty 114, 122–123 natural order 187 nature 3, 14, 15, 26, 29, 33, 41, 50, 64, 97, 102, 111, 113–118, 121–123, 180, 187–188, 190, 194, 198, 208, 212

237

negation 151–153 negative cosmology 181 negative universal 181 Negri, Antonio 81 Neimanis, Astrida 2 Nersessian, Anahid 147–148 new wave, punk 151 Niemeyer, Simon 172 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29–30, 115–116 nihilism 151–152 Nixon, Rob 150 nonhuman, vegetal 100 non-human agency 26, 40, 130 nuclear weapons testing, photography 26 Nussbaum, Martha 132 Oaxaca project, GFW (Global Forest Watch) 207 Oblensky, Nick 184 ontology 229–230 operative time 63–68 Opperman, Serpil 2, 89 overdeveloped nations 162 Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 65 Parham, John 129 Parikka, Jussi 26 Park, Susan 171 Pendell, Dale, The Great Bay 40 perceptual incommensurability 4 PETM see Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum Pharand-Deschênes, Félix 7 philosophy 9, 52, 66, 103, 111, 124, 134, 183 photography 26, 31, 215, 222 physis (nature) 117–118, 124 Pickering, Jonathan 172 Places to Watch, GFW (Global Forest Watch) 206 planetary multiplicity 12, 76, 79–82 planetary-scale democracy 171 planetary stewardship 2 Plant, Sadie 84, 86–87 plant blindness 96, 98, 105 plant-ocean 96–97 plants 94–95; plant-ocean 96–97 plutonium 30; half-life of 25–27 political agency 166, 172 Pollan, Michael 104 population genetics 161 post-Enlightenment 111–112 posthuman, posthumanism 3, 24, 29, 30

238 Index Power, Richard 96 Pringle, Thomas Patrick 26 prioritizing, human sense of time 228 promoting change through literature 39–42 Puddy, Chris 214 punk 148–149, 154 pyrotechnology 84–86 realist novels 128–129 reconciliation 134 REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) programs 196 repetition 149–150 representational questions 128–131 resonance 119–120, 122 responsibility 1–3, 6–10, 14, 16, 23, 29, 31, 41, 78–79, 86, 128, 131, 135, 139, 194, 214–215, 226; erasure of human responsibility 129 responsible human stewardship 2 rhizome 80 Rhombes, Nicholas 149 Rigby, Kate 98 Robinson, Kim Stanley 43, 52n1, 94, 130 Rogers, Everett 163 Rosa, Hartmut 119–121 Ross, Andrew 143, 144 Rougon-Macquart (Zola) 129 Ruiz, Sarah 207 Ruskin, John 145 Ryan, John C. 95 Ryan Air 214 SAI see stratospheric aerosol injection Sale, Kirkpatrick 162 satellite images of earth 194–196 saturated time 70n4 scalar complexity 8–9 scalar deconstruction 32 scalar disjuncture 129 scalar imagination 41 scale 1–17, 24, 26, 28, 30, 40, 42–43, 51, 66, 75–77, 88–90, 96, 104–105, 116, 119, 128–129, 132, 138–140, 146, 162–168, 173, 177, 186, 188– 189, 196, 202, 204–205, 208, 217– 222, 225–230; characteristic scale 3; derangements of scale 8, 14, 88, 127, 128; geographical scale 229; human scale 116–123; human sense of scale 230; literacy of scales 163; mediation and 2–8; narratives and 128–133;

paradoxes of scale 163–164; political scale 170, 206; trans-scalar thinking see trans-scalar thinking; vegetal scale 94–95, 101, 103, 105 scale critique 10, 32–34, 130, 144 scale effects 3, 5 scale framing 10, 32 scale invariance 6–7, 9, 32 scale variance 12, 130–131 scales, intersecting scales 8 Schiller, Friedrich 119 Schneider, Birgit 193 Schneider, James June 60 Schumacher, E.F. 162 Schussler, Elisabeth 96 Schwab, Gabriele 31, 33 science fiction 10, 12, 15, 42, 43, 45, 48, 94, 97, 103, 128, 130, 137, 143, 148, 184, 186–187, 190; time travel see time travel sciences, natural 6, 62, 64, 68, 75–76, 165, 179–180, 185, 187, 190 Scott, James 170 second-persona narrative 30 self-alienation 11 self-expression 115 self-formation 114 self-justification of nature 115 sensible concepts 113–114 Serres, Michel 64, 66–69 Severin, Steve 149 Shelley, Mary 35 silence 144–147 SilverLining 208 Simenon, Paul 151 Simpson, George Gaylord 231 simulation 63–68 Sioux, Siouxsie 149 Siouxsie and the Banshees 149–150 situated knowledge 77 size 4–6, 14, 161–162, 173 smooth continuum, scale 6 socio-environmental justice 177, 183, 185, 190 social morphology 162 social sciences 62, 76, 143, 165, 229, 231 Soffer, Olga 87 Solomon, Robert 132 Sonic Warfare (Goodman) 152 South Africa, democracy 169–170 species 131 species history 127, 130 species identity 131 Spherical View 201

Index  Steer, Andrew 202 Steffen, Will 2 Stengers, Isabelle 167 Stoermer, Eugene 2, 225 storytelling 81–82, 89; crafting stories for Anthropocene 86–89 stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) 208 Styrene, Poly 149 subjectivity 113–116 sublime 112, 114 Summerson Carr, E. 229–230 Suomi NPP 195 Swanson, Heather Anne 154 Sweden Democrats 169–172 Swift, Jonathan 5, 6 Szerszynski, Bronislaw 64 Tanner, Jessica 129 Taylor, Charles 112, 116, 120 Taylor, Jesse Oak 129 Taylor, Peter 5 technobiosphere 200, 203 technological mediation 4 technosphere 3, 13, 112, 113, 118, 121, 124n3, 200–201, 203 Tenga, Angela 100 Thomas, Dylan 144 Thompson, D’Arcy 162 thresholds 163, 168 time 27, 145; apocalyptic time 35; climate time 64; human sense of time 226–229; human time 67; model time 64; operative time 63–68; saturated time 70n4; see also deep time time travel 42, 45–52; science fiction and 43–45 timefulness 70n6 totalitarianism 133 tragic sublime 115 transforming matter through heat 84–86 transparency 171 transportation infrastructure 168 trans-scalar thinking 39, 42; time travel see time travel trees 97–99 Tresch, John 193, 198 Tsing, Anna 100, 170, 229 Turner, David 194, 200, 203 Turner, George 43 uncertainty 11 United Nations: Environment Programme 164

239

unknown unknowns 11 unsettling possibilities 79 urban ghettoes 150 urban theorizing 229 Urpeth, Jim 115 User Stories 206–207 van der Laan, James 98 Vaye Watkins, Claire 43 vegetal biomass 94 vegetal world 97, 100, vegetal life 94 Venice 224 Vicious, Sid 149 Victorian fiction 129 Viera, Patricia 95 Vince, Gaia 7 visionary fiction 186 voicelessness 145 von Neumann, John 61 von Trier, Lars 110–111, 113–114 Walls, Laura Dassow 179 Wandersee, James 96 weaving 83–84, 87–89 web of life 187 Weber, Max 119, 121 Weik von Mossner, Alexa 132 Wellings, Simon 85 Wells, H.G. 43–44 Welsby, Chris 146 white space 146–147 Whyte, Kyle 167–168 Winterson, Jeanette 40 Wittenberg, David 5 Woods, Derek 6, 11–12, 130–131, 144 work, human activity 117–118 world-alienation 117 world state 166 woven fiber 84 Wright, Alexis 145 Wulf, Andrea 179 X-Ray Spex, Styrene, Poly 149 Yusoff, Kathryn 144 Zalasiewicz, Jan 78–79, 147 Zola, Emile 129 zoom effect 6, 8, 14–15 zoom tool, GFW (Global Forest Watch) 205–206 zooming 110, 166, 193, 196, 198 Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma 61