In April 2016,
The Anthropocene is generally understood as our current geological epoch, a period in which human activity has become the dominant force on climate and environment. While Bruno Latour describes it as ‘the best alternative we have to usher us out of the notion of modernization’ (
When the celebrated nature and travel writer Robert Macfarlane published ‘Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever’ in
In May 2016, Contemporary Studies Network (CSN)
Rachel Sykes and Arin Keeble
Chair and Vice-Chair of Contemporary Studies Network (CSN)
Friday 1 April 2016 12.00 BST Last modified on Tuesday 20 September 2016 10.50
Illustration by Eric Petersen.
In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia
Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible. Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the present – we might think of John Clare
Albrecht’s coinage is part of an emerging lexis for what we are increasingly calling the ‘Anthropocene’: the new epoch of geological time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long-term signature in the strata record. And what a signature it will be. We have bored 50m kilometres of holes in our search for oil. We remove mountain tops to get at the coal they contain. The oceans dance with billions of tiny plastic beads. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of rainforests for monoculture production sends out killing smog-palls that settle into the sediment across entire countries. We have become titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come.
The idea of the Anthropocene asks hard questions of us. Temporally, it requires that we imagine ourselves inhabitants not just of a human lifetime or generation, but also of ‘deep time’ – the dizzyingly profound eras of Earth history that extend both behind and ahead of the present. Politically, it lays bare some of the complex cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other species, as well as between humans now and humans to come. Conceptually, it warrants us to consider once again whether – in Fredric Jameson’s
Rainforest burning in Brazil, 1989. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features.
There are good reasons to be sceptical of the epitaphic impulse to declare ‘the end of nature’. There are also good reasons to be sceptical of the Anthropocene’s absolutism, the political presumptions it encodes, and the specific histories of power and violence that it masks. But the Anthropocene is a massively forceful concept, and as such it bears detailed thinking through. Though it has its origin in the Earth sciences and advanced computational technologies, its consequences have rippled across global culture during the last 15 years. Conservationists, environmentalists, policymakers, artists, activists, writers, historians, political and cultural theorists, as well as scientists and social scientists in many specialisms, are all responding to its implications. A Stanford University team has boldly proposed that – living as we are through the last years of one Earth epoch, and the birth of another – we belong to ‘Generation Anthropocene’.
Literature and art are confronted with particular challenges by the idea of the Anthropocene. Old forms of representation are experiencing drastic new pressures and being tasked with daunting new responsibilities. How might a novel or a poem possibly account for our authorship of global-scale environmental change across millennia – let alone shape the nature of that change? The indifferent scale of the Anthropocene can induce a crushing sense of the cultural sphere’s impotence.
Plastic and rubbish floating in the ocean. Photograph: Gary Bell/zefa/Corbis.
Yet as the notion of a world beyond us has become difficult to sustain, so a need has grown for fresh vocabularies and narratives that might account for the kinds of relation and responsibility in which we find ourselves entangled. ‘Nature’, Raymond Williams famously wrote in
Projects are presently under way around the world to gain the most basic of purchases on the Anthropocene – a lexis with which to reckon it. Cultural anthropologists in America have begun a glossary for what they call ‘an Anthropocene as yet unseen’, intended as a ‘resource’ for confronting the ‘urgent concerns of the present moment’. There, familiar terms – petroleum, melt, distribution, dream – are made strange again, vested with new resilience or menace when viewed through the ‘global optic’ of the Anthropocene.
Last year I started the construction of a crowdsourced Anthropocene glossary called the ‘Desecration Phrasebook’, and in 2014 The Bureau of Linguistical Reality
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The word ‘Anthropocene’ itself entered the
In 1999, at a conference in Mexico City on the Holocene – the Earth epoch we at present officially inhabit, beginning around 11,700 years ago – the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen was struck by the inaccuracy of the Holocene designation. ‘I suddenly thought this was wrong’, he later recalled. ‘The world has changed too much. So I said, ‘No, we are in the Anthropocene’. I just made the word up on the spur of the moment. But it seems to have stuck’.
The following year, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer – an American diatom specialist who had been using the term informally since the 1980s – jointly published an article proposing that the Anthropocene should be considered a new Earth epoch, on the grounds that ‘mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years to come’.
Stratigraphy is an awesomely stringent discipline. Stratigraphers are at once the archivists, monks and philosophers of the Earth sciences. Their specialism is the division of deep time into aeons, eras, periods, epochs and stages, and the establishment of temporal limits for those divisions and their subdivisions. Their bible is the International Chronostratigraphic Chart,
The Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy
The group’s report is due within months. Recent publications indicate that they will recommend the designation of the Anthropocene, and that the ‘stratigraphically optimal’ temporal limit will be located somewhere in the mid-20th century. This places the start of the Anthropocene simultaneous with the start of the nuclear age. It also coincides with the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’, when massive increases occurred in population, carbon emissions, species invasions and extinctions, and when the production and discard of metals, concrete and plastics boomed.
Manila Bay in the Philippines covered with plastic bags and rubbish. Photograph: Joshua Mark Dalupang/EPA.
Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the ‘Plasticene’. We currently produce around 100m tonnes of plastic globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade, some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record. Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo bottles and deodorant caps – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. ‘What will survive of us is love’, wrote Philip Larkin.
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The Deutsches Museum in Munich is currently hosting ‘An Anthropocene Wunderkammer’, which it calls ‘the first major exhibition in the world’ to take the Anthropocene as its theme. Among the exhibits is a remarkable work by the American writer and conservation biologist Julianne Lutz Warren,
Warren’s exhibit makes Bateley’s crackly recording available, and her accompanying text unfolds the complexities of its sonic strata. It is, as Warren puts it, ‘a soundtrack of the sacred voices of extinct birds echoing in that of a dead man echoing out of a machine echoing through the world today’.
Anthropocene art is, unsurprisingly, obsessed with loss and disappearance. We are living through what is popularly known as the ‘sixth great extinction’.
Art and literature might, at their best, shock us out of the stuplime. Warren’s haunted study of the huia finds its own echo in the prose and poetry of Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson.
Rory Gibb smartly notes that the work of Skelton and Richardson is different in kind from conventional eco-elegy: it evokes ‘a more feral feeling of being stalked by ecosystemic memory’.
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Perhaps the greatest challenge posed to our imagination by the Anthropocene is its inhuman organisation as an event. If the Anthropocene can be said to ‘take place’, it does so across huge scales of space and vast spans of time, from nanometers to planets, and from picoseconds to aeons. It involves millions of different teleconnected agents, from methane molecules to rare earth metals to magnetic fields to smartphones to mosquitoes. Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent and its structures withdrawn.
In 2010 Timothy Morton
Creative non-fiction, and especially reportage, has adapted most quickly to this ‘distributed’ aspect of the Anthropocene. Episodic in assembly and dispersed in geography, some outstanding recent non-fiction has proved able to map intricate patterns of environmental cause and effect, and in this way draw hyperobjects into at least partial visibility. Elizabeth Kolbert’s
Last year also saw the publication of
Tom Hardy in
Tsing is also concerned with the possibility of what she calls ‘collaborative survival’ in the Anthropocene-to-come. As Evans Calder Williams notes, the Anthropocene imagination ‘crawls with narratives of survival’, in which varying conditions of resource scarcity exist, and varying kinds of salvage are practised. Our contemporary appetite for environmental breakdown is colossal, tending to grotesque: from Cormac McCarthy’s
The worst of this collapse culture is artistically crude and politically crass. The best is vigilant and provocative: Simon Ings’
Such scarcity narratives unsettle what we might call the Holocene delusion on which growth economics is founded: of the Earth as an infinite body of matter, there for the incredible ultra-machine of capitalism to process, exploit and discard without heed of limit. Meanwhile, however, speculative novelists – Andy Weir in
The novel is the cultural form to which the Anthropocene arguably presents most difficulties, and most opportunities. Historically, the novel has been celebrated for its ability to represent human interiority: the skull-to-skull skip of free indirect style, or the vivid flow of stream-of-consciousness. But what use are such skills when addressing the enormity of this new epoch? Any Anthropocene-aware novel finds itself haunted by impersonal structures, and intimidated by the limits of individual agency. China Miéville’s 2011 short story ‘Covehithe’
‘It’s easier to imagine the extraction of off-planet resources than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ … Matt Damon in The Martian. Photograph: Moviestore/REX Shutterstock.
Most memorable to me is Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel,
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As the idea of the Anthropocene has surged in power, so its critics have grown in number and strength. Cultural and literary studies currently abound with Anthropocene titles: most from the left, and often bitingly critical of their subject. The last 12 months have seen the publication of Jedediah Purdy’s
Across these texts and others, three main objections recur: that the idea of the Anthropocene is arrogant, universalist and capitalist-technocratic. Arrogant, because the designation of the Anthropocene – the ‘New Age of Humans’ – is our crowning act of self-mythologisation (we are the super-species, we the Prometheans, we have ended nature), and as such only embeds the narcissist delusions that have produced the current crisis.
Universalist, because the Anthropocene assumes a generalised
And capitalist-technocratic, because the dominant narrative of the Anthropocene has technology as its driver: recent Earth history reduced to a succession of inventions (fire, the combustion engine, the synthesis of plastic, nuclear weaponry). The monolithic concept bulk of this scientific Anthropocene can crush the subtleties out of both past and future, disregarding the roles of ideology, empire and political economy. Such a technocratic narrative will also tend to encourage technocratic solutions: geoengineering as a quick-fix for climate change, say, or the Anthropocene imagined as a pragmatic problem to be managed, such that ‘Anthropocene science’ is translated smoothly into ‘Anthropocene policy’ within existing structures of governance. Moore argues that the Anthropocene is not the geology of a species at all, but rather the geology of a system, capitalism – and as such should be rechristened the Capitalocene.
There are signs that we will soon be exhausted by the Anthropocene: glutted by its ubiquity as a cultural shorthand, fatigued by its imprecisions, and enervated by its variant names – the ‘Anthrobscene’, the ‘Misanthropocene’, the ‘Lichenocene’ (actually, that last one is mine). Perhaps the Anthropocene has already become an anthropomeme: punned and pimped into stuplimity, its presence in popular discourse often just a virtue signal that merely mandates the user to proceed with the work of consumption.
I think, though, that the Anthropocene has administered – and will administer – a massive jolt to the imagination. Philosophically, it is a concept that does huge work both for us and on us. In its unsettlement of the entrenched binaries of modernity (nature and culture; object and subject), and its provocative alienation of familiar anthropocentric scales and times, it opens up rather than foreclosing progressive thought. What Christophe Bonneuil calls the ‘shock of the Anthropocene’ is generating new political arguments, new modes of behaviour, new narratives, new languages and new creative forms. It asserts – as Jeremy Davies writes at the end of his excellent forthcoming book,
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In 1981 the research field of ‘nuclear semiotics’ was born. A group of interdisciplinary experts was tasked with preventing future humans from intruding on to a subterranean storage facility for radioactive waste, then under construction in the New Mexico desert. The half-life of plutonium-239 is around 24,100 years; the written history of humanity is around 5,000 years old. The challenge facing the group was how to devise a sign system that could semantically survive even catastrophic phases of planetary future, and that could communicate with an unknown humanoid-to-be.
Construction of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, an underground nuclear waste dump. Photograph: Eric Draper/AP.
Several proposals involved forms of hostile architecture: a ‘landscape of thorns’ in which 15m-high concrete pillars with jutting side spikes impeded access; a maze of sharp black rock blocks that absorbed solar energy to become impassably hot. But such aggressive structures can act as enticements rather than cautions, suggesting here be treasure rather than here be dragons. Prince Charming hacked his way through the briars to wake Sleeping Beauty. Indiana Jones braved wooden spikes and rolling boulders to reach the golden idol in a booby-trapped Peruvian temple. Sometimes I wonder if the design task should be handed wholesale to the team behind the Ikea instruction manuals: if they can convey in pictograms how to put up a Billy bookcase anywhere in the world, they can surely tell someone in 10,000 years’ time not to dig in a certain place.
The New Mexico facility is due to be sealed in 2038. The present plans for marking the site involve a berm with a core of salt, enclosing the above-ground footprint of the repository. Buried in the berm will be radar reflectors, magnets and a ‘Storage Room’, constructed around a stone slab too big to be removed via the chamber entrance. Data will be inscribed on to the slab including maps, time lines, and scientific details of the waste and its risks, written in all current official UN languages, and in Navajo: ‘This site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Site) when it was closed in 2038 AD … Do not expose this room unless the information centre messages are lost. Leave the room buried for future generations’. Discs made of ceramic, clay, glass and metal, also engraved with warnings, will be embedded in the soil and the shaft seals. Finally, a ‘hot cell’, or radiation containment chamber, will be constructed: a reinforced concrete structure extending 60 feet above the earth and 30 feet down into it: VanderMeer’s ‘Tower’ made real.
I think of that configuration of berm, chamber, shaft, disc and hot cell – all set atop the casks of pulsing radioactive molecules entombed deep in the Permian strata – as perhaps our purest Anthropocene architecture. And I think of those multiply repeated incantations – pitched somewhere between confession, caution and black mass; leave the room buried for future generations, leave the room buried for future generations … – as perhaps our most perfected Anthropocene text.
• This article was amended on 6 April 2016 to correct the name of Henare Hamana.
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For something published in a mainstream newspaper, this is perilously close to academic writing, albeit of a kind that aims at accessibility even as it draws on sources as diverse as Fredric Jameson, contemporary cultural and scientific theorists, and working groups. Could it be considered a model for accessible academic writing?
I was also fascinated by the central conceit of the piece, that we need to understand human time as one – finite – moment in ongoing geological time through trying to understand what kind of trace we might leave in the fossil record. As a Cormac McCarthy specialist, the phrase ‘our legacy legible for millennia to come’ struck a particular chord with me, evoking as it does Judge Holden’s ‘Sermon on the Rocks’ from
I had a similar reaction to Daniel King, as I thought that Macfarlane’s article was an excellent example of academic writing for a public audience: accessible, informative, and engaging.
The relationship between the Anthropocene and time also stood out for me. Since I am a scholar of post-apocalyptic fiction and also particularly interested in the imbrication of narratives and time, I was drawn to Macfarlane’s sketch of the temporal and political questions that the Anthropocene asks of us, as well as to the representational issues that the epoch poses to the novel-form. Specifically, how can a novel conceptualise, and plot, the Anthropocene’s networks of global responsibilities and connections distributed over centuries, and even millennia? This led me to think about the temporal and structural experimentations of contemporary fiction – David Mitchell’s novels, because of their apocalyptic themes, immediately come to mind, as well as John Updike’s
When I started to read Macfarlane’s article, I experienced a series of quite satisfying chimes and resonances. This happens to me when someone writes about an experience I have had, in a way which succinctly reveals and articulates what that experience feels like – I’m thinking about the ‘ambient hum of guilt’ in particular. However, by the time I got to the notion of ‘stuplimity’, I had become a little unsatisfied with the language, a little more circumspect about the cleverness of the words and a feeling arose then that there is something about the Anthropocene that is, and should be, beyond language.
As a performance-maker and researcher of performance, it is probably not surprising that I invest in modes of expression that might be beyond the reach of or outside the range of the written word. In the act of performance, the quality and rhythm of the movement of the body, its occupation of space, as well as, for example, combinations of light, sound and image on stage can communicate as powerfully as the words spoken by a performer. This is particularly true in much contemporary or ‘postdramatic’ performance, where, as Hans-Thies Lehmann describes, ‘text… is considered only as one element, one layer, or as a ‘material’ of the scenic creation, not as its master’ (
I found his article quite visionary in its outlining of concepts relating to climate change and the Anthropocene, as they influence contemporary fiction and cultural debates. It seemed to me an exploratory article rather than a piece that was making a strong position statement, as it presented us with different views and ideas on the fashionable notion of the Anthropocene in critical theory today.
I would probably feel even more pessimistic and apocalyptic about the impact of climate change on our earth and our society than Macfarlane outlines, given the speed at which enormous and far-reaching environmental changes are occurring (the
Working in the Marxist tradition, I would situate the article, and the questions it poses regarding now irreversible planetary ecological shifts, as a form of praxis or action, an intervention within a concrete or real situation. While Neelam has already diagnosed what is missing from the text – and, ultimately, I share something of her pessimism – such developments still call for the importance of a more critical utopianism, and movements that challenge the destructive logic of capital. Tom Moylan, for instance, discusses texts and images that are not necessarily blueprints but ‘beginnings, at the level of the imagination, of actual solutions to current problems’ (
I likewise considered the article analytically useful and well written, often giving tantalising glimpses of how the ideas can be applied or pursued elsewhere. Yet, so far, the roundtable has ignored Macfarlane’s use of images, which I found compelling, even if they weren’t selected by the author: rainforests on fire, plastic in the ocean, colossal rubbish heaps. This is then supplemented with stills from recent blockbuster films including
I find the article exhilarating for finding a language to crystallise the contemporary moment (very broadly understood – perhaps to include the whole of human history) and ask questions of it. In particular, it helps us understand our place within (not as separate from) the ecosystems that constitute the world and to reflect on the social, cultural and economic consequences of that place. Like everyone else, I find the bridging of academic and journalistic modes useful. Macfarlane is one of our great writers on nature and culture:
I also welcome the call to find a vocabulary for the contemporary moment, but I dread a proliferation of neologisms as people build careers by staking out ground in the Anthropocene. I disagree that the novel is the form most challenged by the Anthropocene, for the struggle for a language to render human experience in the broad and deep planetary contexts demanded by the Anthropocene is surely as profound in other forms, like poetry and drama. In each case, the challenge remains the same: how does the definitively human perspective provided by human language speak beyond the human to the universe before and after our existence? For example, when in his poem, ‘Song of Myself’, Walt Whitman writes, ‘I find I incorporate gneiss [metamorphic rock] and coal and long-threaded moss and fruits and grains and esculent roots,/And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over’ (
Hence, although my main critical interest is in the novel, I am intrigued by the means by which other literary and cultural forms might rise to the challenge of the Anthropocene. For this reason, I like Joanne’s suggestion of the ways in which performance might engage with it. It may even be that focusing on the idea of the Anthropocene as a ‘challenge’ overstates our failures and leads us to ignore the glimpses of the Anthropocene that our literature gives us. If we think of the Anthropocene as a product of reading rather than simply of writing, we open up the storehouses of literary history: the Anthropocene is not only a contemporary concern. For instance, though they predate the coining of the term ‘Anthropocene’, both Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel,
I think the idea of setting the Anthropocene period back to the dawn of large-scale agriculture is one of the more productive lines of enquiry here, and I feel that this is an ambition matched by current trends in literature. Alongside the examples Macfarlane offers, I think of William Vollmann’s
What differentiates this project from others that I have seen is the introduction of a new critical vocabulary, though I did find myself wondering about the utility of these terms which run the risk of coming off as somewhat gimmicky. However, these attempts to recast language – Macfarlane’s link to the ‘Bureau of Linguistic Reality’ is a key example here – show a striking and admirable ambition to deliver a ‘jolt’ to the human imagination.
The main difference with ecocriticism is that the Anthropocene is not a critical framework
I agree with Diletta that I would not necessarily view the Anthropocene as a strand of criticism, though clearly, as Macfarlane demonstrates, it can be used as a critical tool – in grouping, characterising and analysing a set of related artistic responses. It also seems to differ slightly in tone from the broader field of ecocriticism, in that, as the article suggests, the Anthropocene is specifically characterised by a set of expansive concepts related to our positioning in the world now, which are deliberately difficult to conceive of and represent – ‘deep time’ for instance. It also finds its most interesting focus, I think, in ways of describing how it feels to be alive now – Glenn Albrecht’s (
I also think the Anthropocene could offer something in terms of prompting a shift in practice or re-positioning of habitual frames of reference. Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh state that the Anthropocene, ‘in addition to its geological meaning’, also ‘describes the coming into being of a new ambivalent and troubling mode of knowledge’ (
I like that idea of the Anthropocene as a ‘critical tool’. There are two areas in which I’d like to put it to use.
Firstly, as someone whose research focuses on nuclear culture, it gives me a way of thinking beyond the immediate nuclear emergencies of the Cold War to the longer term resonances of nuclear materials and cultures through deep time. I’ve been thinking recently how nuclear culture articulates a ‘politics of vulnerability’, and I believe that also resonates with the Anthropocene. Robert Macfarlane calls McCarthy’s
Second, it takes me back to an earlier interest: the ‘two cultures’ debate and relations between the Sciences and the Humanities.
It strikes me that for there to be a true Anthropocene, it does have to be a global phenomenon – that is how geological time has to work. It is also true that a lot of what Macfarlane writes about here – deforestation, mining, global capitalism, the environmental catastrophe of plastics – has a global reach. However, the new language surrounding the Anthropocene and the efforts to defamiliarise existing concepts I mentioned above are really only accessible to those with easy access to the aforementioned Bureau’s websites, and to people who read English. Alternative modes of ‘getting the word out’ need to be found if the Anthropocene is to have a truly global reach, but the potential of these ideas as loan words – comparable to perhaps the early 2000s rise of ‘sonder’ – can very well be a highly effective way to bridge linguistic gaps.
As Daniel King remarks, as a new epoch of geological time the Anthropocene cannot but be conceived as a global concept. Yet, as Macfarlane underlines, one of the criticisms that we can level at the concept is that it presupposes a universal human nature that ignores inequalities and historically rooted dynamics of oppressions. The ‘anthropos’ implied by the term Anthropocene is often that of the Global North. Carbon emissions trading, which is supposed to relieve climate change, has been accused of ‘carbon colonialism’ (
Leading on from King’s discussion of language, I am intrigued by Jason W. Moore’s suggestion that ‘Capitalocene’ (
I agree with Daniel and Diletta about issues of accessibility to these debates and with the universality that the ‘anthropos’ implies, which is problematic. Though the term itself by its geological nature is global, the ideas and discourses that surround it feel like they sit very much in the domain of the academic. Having said that, there are ideas within the article, that Macfarlane connects to the Anthropocene, which feel very resonant and real and relatable. As referenced above, Albrecht’s notion of ‘solastalgia’ (
Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently taken on the notion of the Anthropocene in his contribution to a multi-authored debate on ‘The State of Postcolonial Studies’ in
For me, the Anthropocene could benefit enormously by being tied to Marxism. Leerom Medovoi has recently argued that eco-critical approaches, ‘perhaps the youngest of contemporary literary hermeneutics’, ‘can and should be dialectically assimilated to the project of a Marxist literary and cultural criticism’ (
My point here is that Marxism, unlike other theories, argues the unity of theory and praxis – distinct, as Fredric Jameson notes, from ‘the implied autonomy of the philosophical concept’ (
As Daniel and Diletta say, by definition this is a planetary concept, though like Daniel I’m not confident I can step outside my perspective, rooted in the West and Global North, to speak of its relevance for others. If it’s useful for them, they’ll find ways to make it speak.
Neelam and Andrew provide good examples of how their own theoretical perspectives might shape understanding of aspects of the Anthropocene and how these could forge communities of understanding, but I’d be wary of attempts to appropriate it within a single theoretical perspective. It’s a tool that can be put to work usefully in different critical perspectives, for specific ends (and vice versa: those perspectives help us access different facets of the Anthropocene), but we have to leave room to be challenged. This is an exciting, new concept and we have to have the courage to allow it to unsettle not only our sense of ourselves (in the West; in the Global North), but also the theoretical lenses through which we view the world.
There is a certain paradoxical element to the notion of the Anthropocene. On the one hand, this era is inherently about human agency powerfully affecting the planet. On the other, as Neelam underlines, the Anthropocene also raises the issue of human impotence in the face of the irreversibly nefarious human impact on the Earth. As Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne put it, the Anthropocene is the ‘age in which the irreversible must somehow be governed’ (
Macfarlane’s article is engaging, informative, and clearly aimed at some kind of political galvanising in his readers. It is this overtly political aim that makes it all the more significant, and it is notable that
The key word is ‘potential’. Macfarlane’s essay doesn’t formulate a coherent political position, but that’s neither its purpose nor its value. What it does do is make visible and communicate a concept that helps us reconceptualise and think through the contemporary epoch. The political efficacy of the Anthropocene lies then in how we use this critical tool – say, to read the significance of the texts he cites, or of others that we consider to be Anthropocene texts.
I don’t think the politics is straightforward, and if we simply appropriate the Anthropocene for our pre-established political positions without accepting that it might challenge or change them, then we’re likely to miss some opportunities. As Diletta suggests, the issue of human agency is a complex one. Certainly, there’s not much point in formulating a politics if we think we’re impotent, so it has to be a politics based on hope, even if that hope doesn’t translate into confident expectation. Ultimately, it has to be a global politics too, albeit one that works through the complex resonances between local and global perspectives and actions.
I agree with the previous comments but would posit a further distinction between the ethical and the political to explore these debates more fully. Žižek’s reading of Lenin is helpful here. For Žižek, the ethical is a duty of care to that which remains – perhaps even a sense of resignation to the inevitable or that which is ultimately out of our hands. In turn, the political recognises the importance of practical decisions and accepts the consequences of action (Žižek qtd in
I am interested in the distinction between the ethical and political, referenced by Andrew above, in relation to the state of play Macfarlane outlines. Clearly, the writing prompts both a sense of responsibility and the possibility of an active response to the ‘shock’ of the Anthropocene. It is true, as Daniel Cordle says, that Macfarlane does not set out a political position as such. Rather, he presents the reader with a set of neat formulations for what the Anthropocene is and how it might usefully ‘unsettle’ thinking about our place in the world, acknowledging, as Diletta points out, the complexity of this in relation to human agency. It seems to me that it is this fresh and ‘unsettling’ way of understanding where we are that Macfarlane offers, rather than a call to arms, as such. If it is indeed a call to arms, it does not really give a sense of how we should arm ourselves or whom we would be fighting, if not ourselves. What we make of it then, whether that is art or action or both, is, I suppose, up to us.
As said above by others, I think the political potential of Macfarlane’s article lies in drawing on the resources of literature to supplement climate change narratives with direct appeals to emotion and aesthetics. A novel like Amitav Ghosh’s
I do think that the most interesting by-product of this discussion on climate change has been the reflection on, and change in, creative forms – I’m thinking especially of cinema (the vivid evocation of an Earth slowly suffocating due to the effects of the dust bowl in the 2014 film
As the Anthropocene entails enormous changes whose exact ramifications are difficult to anticipate, speculative fiction may be one of the genres better equipped to deal with the era.
Novels are also responding to this new era and its complex network of responsibilities by accommodating increasing timescales and different geographic locations within their form – see, for instance, the previously mentioned fictions by David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, and John Updike. More broadly, by avoiding Manichaean logic and normative visions, critical utopias – that is, utopias that reject the idea of utopia as blueprint but preserve it as dream (
I agree with Diletta that science and speculative fiction may offer useful ways to think about the Anthropocene, as their sometimes vertiginously futuristic settings can offer useful angles from which to look at the lasting impact of humanity. One need only think here of well-known examples such as Margaret Atwood’s
To this list of more traditional prose novels I’d add more recent comics like Ray Fawkes’
From my own research, I think that Cormac McCarthy’s interest in the lasting impact that humans have had on their environment is a recurring theme across much of his work, far beyond
I think texts of the Anthropocene would definitely include speculative fiction and cinema, especially those that use realist techniques to imagine a speculative story set in the future – think of a film like
I’m grateful for Diletta’s and Daniel’s suggestions. I like the idea of reading McCarthy beyond
I’d firmly place Ursula Le Guin’s
I’d also like to see us broaden our sense of an Anthropocene canon beyond fiction. I mentioned the documentary film
I agree with the above suggestions; certainly that we can look outside of fictional texts for inspiration – I would also include theoretical texts here, although, once again, reception and dissemination play their part. Kim Stanley Robinson’s science-fiction epic
I am going to take up the gauntlet very usefully thrown down by Daniel Cordle, through addressing the idea of a text here in its broadest sense.
For me, many of Beckett’s works resonate with the Anthropocene, in their sense of ‘deep time’ and human culpability and vulnerability. Particularly in performance, they generate powerful visual impressions, whether it is the raging disembodied mouth of
I also think about Ana Mendieta’s siluetas, where the fragile impression of her human form is left in the earth, certain to be erased in the near future and yet also marked and preserved there. Arcade Fire’s album,
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The discussion conducted above took place in May 2016, three months before
For instance, speaking to what Joanne Scott describes as ‘deep and elemental connection and co-dependence’, many of our contributors found a body of shared authors, from post-apocalyptic fictions by Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood, to slightly older works of science fiction like Ridley Scott’s film
Overall, our ‘roundtable’ discussion suggested that, as a concept, the Anthropocene feels both old and completely new, emptying out older literary categories and unsettling discussions of the speculative or futuristic through the definitive declaration of humanity’s final, catastrophic impact on and possible removal from the Earth. We might therefore conclude that, as a concept, the Anthropocene has emerged as a theoretical lens through which to view the existing world, one which might, as Daniel King puts it, be ‘somewhat gimmicky’ but through which our contributors have suggested dynamic, inventive, and ultimately unexpected routes for present and future inquiry.
For recent and existing scholarship on the Anthropocene see Trexler (
Contemporary Studies Network aims to provide a platform for discussion of emerging research and to support networking and public engagement opportunities amongst scholars with an interest in contemporary literature, culture, politics, and critical theory, who are based in the Midlands and North of the United Kingdom. See:
Macfarlane’s article was originally published in
See Glenn Albrecht’s TEDxSydney lecture ‘Environment Change, Distress & Human Emotion Solastalgia’:
See George Monbiot, ‘John Clare, the poet of the environmental crisis – 200 years ago’,
See Nicholas Lezard, ‘
See Andy Beckett, ‘Battles over language’,
See The Bureau of Linguistical reality’s website:
P. J. Crutzen, ‘The ‘Anthropocene’ in
The International Chronostratigraphic Chart,
See ‘Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’’ on the
See Jeremy Axelrod, ‘Philip Larkin: ‘An Arundel Tomb’: Poem Guide’, n. date,
See Julianne Lutz Warren’s staff page on the
See Julianne Lutz Warren, ‘Sound Recording of Huia’,
Julianne Warren, ‘The Poetry Lab: ‘Hopes Echo’ ’,
See Adam Vaughan, ‘Humans creating sixth great extinction of animal species, say scientists’,
See the Corbel Stone Press website:
See the Aeolian website for further information about this digital album:
See the Aeolian website for further information about this digital album:
Rory Gibb, ‘A Crushing Embrace With The Earth: Ecological Sound In 2015’,
For further information about Professor Timothy Morton, see his staff page at the Department of English, Rice University:
See Anushka Asthana, ‘Feeling the heat: Review of
See Naomi Klein, ‘This Changes Everything: video’,
See Tim Radford, ‘Adventures in the Anthropocene by Gaia Vince – review’,
See ‘A climate change poem for today: Sean Borodale’s ‘Scratching for Metaphor in the Somerset Coalfields’ ’,
See Alan Warner, ‘The road to hell: Review of Cormac McCarthy’s
See Mark Kermode, ‘The Survivalist review – a beautifully bleak end to civilisation’,
See Rich Stanton, ‘Fallout 4 review – spectacular, messy and familiar’,
See Toby Litt, ‘
See Adam Thorpe, ‘
See Justine Jordan, ‘
See Eric Brown, ‘Science fiction roundup – reviews’,
See James Smythe, ‘Why Kim Stanley Robinson’s
China Miéville, ‘Covehithe’,
Simon Ings, ‘You’ll find yourself afraid to turn the page: Review of
See the
See for example Chakrabarty (
‘The term Anthropocene suggests: (i) that the Earth is now moving out of its current geological epoch, called the Holocene and (ii) that human activity is largely responsible for this exit from the Holocene, that is, that humankind has become a global geological force in its own right’ (
The term, the ‘two cultures’, as it is used here, originates with the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture (
Literature-science studies is a broad field, exploring the representation of science and scientists in literature, as well as more subtle relations between the Humanities and the Sciences. The scholarly organisations, The Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA), based in the USA, and the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS), are key in promoting work in this field. Gillian Beer’s work (
Used as a noun, ‘sonder’ is the realisation that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. Though its origin is obscure, it seems to have originated from a popular – and mostly fictional – online word blog,
Arthur Nelson, ‘Bhutan has “most ambitious pledge” at the Paris climate summit’,
The precise nature of academic impact is a matter of debate among scholars but the definition
Examples of critical utopias mentioned in Moylan (
The authors have no competing interests to declare.