“1” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
1
The Anthropocene
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
The Anthropocene is uniquely haunted by the prospect of its own undoing.
Indeed, the Anthropocene is doubly haunted: first, by the nagging suspicion that we Anthropos are not quite the masters of the planet the name “Anthropocene” supposes and, second, that, as a consequence of ignorance and recklessness, we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Geologic epochs are human inventions of course, marked by changing climate, and they have come and gone. What distinguishes the Anthropocene, however, is not just an implicit awareness that it will be succeeded by something else but the active complicity of Anthropos in its end. Call it Anthropocenic irony: what defines the era we name after ourselves is our implication in its conclusion and, indeed, our uncertainty if the name even fits in the first place. The Anthropocene thus insistently calls into question not just its own persistence but indeed its very existence—the name should perhaps more fittingly be rendered under erasure: not Anthropocene but Anthropocene.
The prevailing structure of feeling of the twenty-first century may well be what we might refer to as Anthropocenic anxiety as both critical discourse and popular culture draw repeatedly upon the gothic as a means through which to express concerns about human impotence, hubris, and our future disappearance. In the critical literature, particularly that group of approaches categorized by Richard Grusin as the “nonhuman turn,” including Latourean actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, new materialism, and speculative realism, gothic figures and tropes abound as humans become things, things acquire uncanny animacy, and we brush shoulders with Lovecraftian monsters, serial killers, zombies, and other weird (or eerie) creatures.1 In popular culture, Anthropocenic anxiety is expressed more directly through gothic narratives of human decentering and apocalypse. This is particularly evident when considering the mainstreaming of speculative literature and media featuring narratives in which human autonomy and presumptions of mastery are challenged or the human race is threatened with extinction. Such narratives take many forms and range from Lovecraftian tales of cosmic dread to eco-catastrophe stories to wish-fulfillment superhero narratives in which only the intervention of secularized deities saves the world from some otherwise unstoppable force.
This chapter accordingly will explore not gothic tales in the Anthropocene but rather Anthropocene as gothic metanarrative and will focus on the rhetorical clustering of gothic tropes and analogies that proliferate across contemporary theoretical paradigms that together express a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human. This survey will pivot around three master tropes of gothicized Anthropocentric discourse: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. Spectrality encompasses the weird, eerie, and outside of things; monstrosity addresses the in-/posthuman; and apocalypse concerns anxieties over the fate of the human when confronted by potentially cataclysmic events and effects: climate change, global pandemics, nuclear annihilation, and so on. Despite the frequent attempt to spin or repurpose these tropes as ethical provocations to live more justly, gently, and deliberately, their proliferation and overlap in critical discourse and popular culture express the irony of the Anthropocene: the anxiety that the pinnacle of human achievement has been the creation of the conditions of our destruction.
Spectrality (Geist as Zeitgeist)
The first of the three master tropes of Anthropocenic gothic discourse to be considered here is the one that has been most fully addressed from a metacritical perspective: spectrality, together with the associated concept of haunting. Taken broadly, spectrality can be considered as that which does not materialize fully; haunting is what the spectral does. Writ large, both have to do with incompleteness. As María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren address in the Introduction to their The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Hauntings in Contemporary Cultural Theory (2013), the publication in 1993 of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx is typically considered the catalyst for the so-called “spectral turn” of critical and cultural theory.2 Long before the concept of spectrality ironically crystalized with Specters, however, spectrality had emerged as the organizing premise of both psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Fundamental to psychoanalysis is, of course, the idea of the return of the repressed, while Derridean deconstruction focused on the idea that concepts must be understood in relation to their opposites and that meaning is nowhere present but rather consistently deferred. As I wrote regarding the spectral turn in 2004:
because ghosts are unstable interstitial figures that problematize dichotomous thinking, it perhaps should come as no surprise that phantoms have become a privileged poststructuralist academic trope. Neither living nor dead, present nor absent, the ghost functions as the paradigmatic deconstructive gesture, the “shadowy third” or trace of an absence that undermines the fixedness of such binary oppositions. As an entity out of place in time, as something from the past that emerges into the present, the phantom calls into question the linearity of history. And as, in philosopher Jacques Derrida’s words in his Specters of Marx, the “plus d’un,” simultaneously the “no more one” and the “more than one,” the ghost suggests the complex relationship between the constitution of individual subjectivity and the larger social collective.3
In divisions ranging from “spectral media” to “spectral places” to “haunted historiographies,” Pilar Blanco and Peeren’s 2013 anthology collects together selections testifying to the pervasiveness of the concept of spectrality in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural theory, and the prevailing critical framework—the mode of haunting—is largely the uncanny: the emergence of the strange within the familiar. Reason is haunted by its opposite, science by the occult, familiar places by traumatic histories that refuse to lie quietly, and so on. And it is fair to say that, early into the third decade of the twenty-first century, critical and cultural theory continues to emphasize the linked concepts of the ghost and hauntings, albeit often with a more eco-critical orientation. A case in point is the ambitious two-part collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Organized around the themes of ghosts and monsters, the essays assert that “entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent ‘arts of living’ . . . for survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene.”4 In “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” which opens the “Ghosts on a Damaged Planet” section, the editors emphasize the “Holocene entanglements” of the human and nonhuman as our present is haunted by the past, which in turn directs our possible futures. “Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life,” they write. “We see this clearly in the presence of plants whose animal seed-dispersers are no longer with us. Some plants have seeds so big that only big animals can carry them to new places to germinate. When these animals became extinct, their plants could continue without them, but they have been unable to disperse their seeds very well. Their distribution is curtailed; their population dwindles. This is an example of what we call haunting.”5 The essays that follow in this section then address the consequences of human influence on the environment with emphases ranging from radiation to wetlands to lichens and stones.
“Ghosts on a Damaged Planet” offers an illustration of the assertion that our narration of the Anthropocene is as a gothic tale. That the contributors span multiple disciplines from biology to ecology to philosophy to anthropology suggests the transdisciplinary entrenchment of this narrative. The essays included in the ghosts section utilize a more capacious framework for thinking spectrality than earlier models rigidly focused on human history. It is now the planet that is haunted by the intermingling of human and nonhuman pasts.
Despite the familiar framework of haunting as uncanny—the strange within the familiar—the “Ghosts on a Damaged Planet” assertions of a haunted planet nevertheless start to exert torque on the spectral turn, twisting it in a different direction away from the uncanny and toward the modes to which Mark Fisher refers as the weird and the eerie. Both ghosts and haunting are forms of what Fisher in his final book, The Weird and the Eerie (2016), would consider the strange. As opposed to the horrific, the strange has to do with “a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition, and experience.”6 Fisher then divides the strange into three categories: the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie. The uncanny, as discussed earlier, is “about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange—about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself.”7 The weird and the eerie, in contrast, are not about the familiar but, as Fisher describes it, the “outside.”8 The weird “brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’ (even as its negation).”9 The weird is associated with a “sense of wrongness . . . the conviction that this does not belong.”10 The weird is marked by “the irruption into this world of something from outside.”11 The eerie, in contrast, is marked either by a “failure of absence or by a failure of presence.”12 “The sensation of the eerie,” continues Fisher, “occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or [when] there is nothing present when there should be something.”13 The eerie concerns the unknown: “There must be . . . a sense of alterity, a feeling that the enigma might involve forms of knowledge, subjectivity and sensation that lie beyond common experience.”14 Ultimately, Fisher connects eeriness with questions of agency—the “forces that govern our lives and the world.”15 Put concisely, the uncanny emerges from within, while the weird and the eerie intrude from without. The uncanny is strangely familiar; the weird and eerie are disconcertingly foreign.
The twenty-first-century twist to the spectral turn, the one perhaps signaled by The Art of Living on a Damaged Planet’s roomier articulation of haunting, is one that shifts the spectral turn away from psychoanalysis and deconstruction and instills it instead at the heart of our interactions with objects: in our twenty-first-century narrativization of the Anthropocene, we move from uncanny ghosts to weird spectrality. One place to start to consider this shift is with Graham Harman and the school of philosophy with which he is associated: object-oriented ontology. Object-oriented ontology, or OOO (triple-O), is a twenty-first-century school of thought that rejects “correlationalism,” the perspective that, as Ian Bogost explains, “being exists only as a correlate between mind and world” or, put differently, that “if things exist, they do so only for us.”16 OOO maintains instead that objects exist independently of human perception and are not exhausted in their interactions with us and other objects. In Harman’s 2011 The Quadruple Object and elsewhere, he differentiates between “sensual” qualities and objects and “real” qualities and objects. Our perceptions of things are not their truth. The real is that which exists outside of our sensual apprehension of something—it is that which withdraws from knowing. As Harman puts it in The Quadruple Object, “when I stare at a river, wolf, government, machine, or army, I do not grasp the whole of their reality. This reality slips from view into a perpetually veiled underworld, leaving me with only the most frivolous simulacra of these entities. In short, the phenomenal reality of things for consciousness does not use up their being.”17
Already here we have shifted into the language of ghosts, haunting, and radical uncertainty. We never encounter real objects directly; these withdraw into a “veiled underworld.” Instead, we encounter only “frivolous simulacra”—essentially ghosts of real objects. Harman is associated with the philosophical movement known as “speculative realism”—a general rubric encompassing a variety of different philosophical perspectives united most immediately by their rejection of correlationalism. As usefully summarized by Steven Shaviro:
Speculative Realism insists upon the independence of the world, and of things in the world, from our own conceptualizations of them. . . . Reality is far weirder than we are able to imagine. Things never conform to the ideas that we have about them; there is always something more to them than what we are able to grasp. The world does not fit into our own cognitive paradigms and narrative modes of explanation. “Man” is not the measure of all things. This is why speculation is necessary. We must speculate, to escape from our inveterate anthropocentrism and take seriously the existence of a fundamentally alien, nonhuman world.18
Shaviro’s word “weird” in his overview is also Harman’s word—and in both cases, the use resonates with Fisher’s meditations. Harman uses the word several times in The Quadruple Object to refer to the strangeness of a universe of things that we don’t encounter directly, but then makes it central to his 2012 Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. For Harman, the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft offers useful illustrations of the principles of OOO: “The major topic of object-oriented philosophy is the dual polarization that occurs in the world: one between the real and the sensual, the other between objects and their qualities. . . . Lovecraft’s constant exploitation of these very gaps automatically makes him as great a hero to object-oriented thought as Hölderlin was to Heidegger.”19 That Harman turns to horror fiction for examples to help illustrate his philosophical assertions is part and parcel of the gothic narrative that is the Anthropocene: in the twenty-first century, reality is weird, things in themselves are unknowable, and human beings, as we shall see, are objects among other objects.
The twenty-first-century twist to more conventional gothic discourse relating specters to repression and the uncanny is that speculative realism’s specters are weird—they are, as Fisher remarks of Lovecraft’s gods and monsters, irruptions “into this world from outside.”20 The “outside” for the speculative realists is what Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude (2008) refers to as “the Great Outdoors”—le Grand Dehors in the French—“the absolute outside . . . that outside which [is] not relative to us . . . existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not.”21 The specters of speculative realism are thus glimpses of another universe—they are, as suggested by the title of Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology; or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing (2012)—aliens. The narrative of the Anthropocene as told by the speculative realists is thus a weird one indeed, as it is one in which we are surrounded by alien ghosts irrupting from the absolute outside and highlighting the limitations on what we can truly know.
Connected to the speculative realism school, but coming at the hauntedness of the planet from a somewhat different direction, is Timothy Morton, whose influential concept of “hyperobjects” has catalyzed a substantial amount of intellectual inquiry since the publication of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World in 2013. For the speculative realists, all objects are ultimately unknowable, withdrawing into themselves and hiding their real qualities. Hyperobjects, however, are a special class of unknowable objects defined by their enormous spatial and temporal dimensions. The term hyperobject refers to “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”22 and encompasses things like black holes, climate change, and the “whirring machinery of capitalism.”23 Importantly, we never encounter these objects directly even when they influence, touch, or penetrate us. The local manifestation of the hyperobject is not the object itself—an unusually hot day or a megastorm is not global warming, which “cannot be directly seen, but it can be thought and computed.”24 Hyperobjects are, in Morton’s terminology, “phased”: “they occupy a high-dimensional phase space that makes them impossible to see as a whole on a regular three-dimensional human-scale basis.”25 This means “we can only see pieces of hyperobjects at a time.”26
What hyperobjects do is “humiliate”27 us, bring us low, highlighting as they do our physical, temporal, and intellectual limitations as well as our fragility. Where they are massive, we are tiny indeed, and they are weird in every sense. In keeping with Fisher’s definition, hyperobjects intrude from without rather than irrupt from within and, in doing so, reveal our conceptions of things to be inadequate. In keeping with Harman, they highlight the gap between sensual qualities of things and the things themselves, and in keeping with Harman’s OOO muse, Lovecraft, hyperobjects excite in us a “profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers,” as Lovecraft characterizes the weird tale.28 Our entanglement with them even invokes the older concept of wyrd, fate, as they influence human destiny on the planet. Our experience of them is inevitably incomplete—we only ever encounter spectral glimpses of them even as they haunt our experience. Recycling an idea present in Carl Sagan’s 1985 science fiction novel Contact and its 1997 film adaptation, the third season of the science fiction series The Expanse (2018) has an alien intelligence manifesting before a protagonist in the form of a ghost. The alien civilization is the hyperobject, the ghost a local manifestation of it that our minds can grasp—both metonymy (connected to the alien intelligence) and metaphor (intelligible form of expression). What Morton discusses as the spectral nature of hyperobjects in particular corresponds with what speculative realists assert as the nature of reality in general. We only ever encounter the piecemeal ghosts of things, not the things themselves. Hyperobjects, one must note, are certainly not all new—planetary forces of course predate the Anthropocene; what is new is our awareness of them and our abilities to chart and calculate and speculate on their qualities—and it is our awareness of them and their implications for the human species that, as we shall see, structure the gothic Anthropocene master narrative of apocalypse. Knowledge of our own limitations when confronted with deep time and cosmic forces highlights the precarity of the human situation.
My reference to Contact and The Expanse was an analogy suggested by one final piece that I will briefly consider here before moving on: author and scholar Jeff VanderMeer’s 2016 piece “Hauntings in the Anthropocene.” In this article, VanderMeer—the popular author of weird fiction notable in particular for his Southern Reach trilogy and its first novel, Annihilation, which was adapted for film in 2018—relates Morton’s notion of hyperobjects to his own fiction. Hyperobjects in general, and global warming in particular, according to VanderMeer, should be understood as “hauntings” that not only “make a mockery of what our five senses can perceive” but challenge conventional understandings of the fixed laws of nature.29 In particular, these hyperobject hauntings foreground the entanglement of the human with inhuman forces and time scales. “In the Anthropocene,” writes VanderMeer, “hauntings and similar manifestations become emissaries or transition points between the human sense of time and the geologic sense of time.”30 The spectral acts as a kind of hinge, pivoting us toward the inaccessible real. In the Anthropocene, the age of hyperobjects, “the uncanny has infiltrated the real,” concludes VanderMeer, “and in some sense that boundary is forever compromised.”31 Weird fiction’s contemporary popularity is explained then, at least in part, by its reflection of weird reality. Its defamiliarizations function as analogies for incomprehensible yet lived experience. The weird gives shape to the amorphous irruptions of the outside that puncture the Anthropocene.
Examples can proliferate here. No doubt there are many other directions one could take and paths to consider when exploring the ubiquity of spectral metaphors within twenty-first-century critical discourse, and indeed, that is precisely the point: spectrality, along with monstrosity and apocalypse, has become an organizing conceit of how we narrate our experience of the Anthropocene. When we tell the story of the Anthropocene, whether it focuses on what the human species has done to the world or on how we interact with it, the story seems “naturally” to become a kind of ghost story, a tale of haunting—haunted selves, haunted landscapes, haunted planet.
Monstrosity (from Monster to “Monster”)
If the planet is haunted in twenty-first-century critical and popular culture discourse, it is also overrun by monsters ranging from antagonistic angels to flesh-eating zombies. And, like spectrality, monstrosity has received considerable attention from late twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural critics who deploy the term in various ways, often ironically turning it back on itself to challenge the human–nonhuman binary opposition it frequently signifies. As master trope of Anthropocenic discourse, the monster is frequently rendered as “monster,” calling attention to monstrosity as social construction and relational rather than ontological. The concept functions most centrally in twenty-first-century discourse to trouble humanist understandings of identity as singular and autonomous. This is where the irony of the Anthropocene becomes most obvious: in the Anthropocene, we are all “monsters”—not discrete, independent actors but things enmeshed with other things in various constantly shifting networks. The human is always entangled with the nonhuman; indeed, what makes us human is that we are not fully human.
If Derrida’s Specters of Marx catalyzed the spectral turn, then Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” the Introduction to his 1996 edited collection Monster Theory: Reading Culture, arguably touched off the “monster turn” of critical and cultural studies. In this Introduction, Cohen develops seven theses concerning what monsters are and how they function: (1) they are “pure culture”32 reflecting the culturally specific understandings of normalcy and deviance; (2) they “always escape” both because the anxieties and desires they express are difficult to contain and because the same monster can shift over time to reflect different sets of concerns and desires; (3) they reflect categorical confusion; (4) they give shape to anxieties concerning differences of all types; (5) they warn against transgression of cultural expectations—violate the rules, and you are in danger of either being eaten by the monster or becoming one; (6) they reflect tabooed desires as well as anxieties—monsters are powerful and do not concern themselves with being polite and abiding by social expectations; and (7) they can metacritically prompt us to reflect on our own assumptions, biases, and expectations.
Cohen’s essay has served as a touchstone essay for “monster theory” because of its concise and insightful formulations of what monsters are and what they do, and subsequent cultural criticism related to monsters, directed by Cohen’s essay, has followed two main channels: explications of how monsters function as metaphors for particular anxieties and desires in specific contexts, and appropriations/deconstructions of monstrosity in the name of social and, more recently, ecological justice. While individual readings of particular monsters as canny reflections of contemporary anxieties and desires (say, zombies as giving shape to anxieties concerning global pandemics; vampire heroes as reflecting capitalist demands to consume to stay youthful) and even more ambitious explications of monsters as overdetermined “meaning machines” that “can represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in one body”33 are certainly useful and often compelling, the more interesting thread of monster theory to pursue in our articulation of the Anthropocene as gothic tale is what we could refer to as the “hopeful monster” theme.
What Cohen expresses through his seven theses is that the idea of monstrosity is a social construction dependent on one’s perspective but that the label of “monster” has functioned as a powerful tool of social control (here Cohen channels the work of Michel Foucault). This understanding of the political deployment of monstrosity as part of a program to maintain an exclusionary status quo and license abuse and domination has led to attempts first to invert and then to displace the normal–abnormal binary opposition as forms of political resistance. Central to the inversion step in cultural criticism has been Donna Haraway, who, particularly in her 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto”34 and her 1992 “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,”35 offers an ironic reappropriation of the label of monster as a gesture of sociopolitical liberation. Adopting a strategy similar to the reclamation of the word queer in the late 1980s, Haraway essentially reclaims the word monster as a form of resistance to the discriminatory logic of social expectation: monstrosity as refusal.
Haraway’s reclamation of the label “monster” in general and, famously, “cyborg” in particular reflects a broad cultural shift in which the label “monster” is ironically turned back on those who affix the label in the first place as a strategy of control and domination. While there are still zombies that eat brains and giant resurrected dinosaurs that rampage and destroy, in progressive twenty-first-century discourse, both popular and critical, the recurring lessons are (1) monsters are not intrinsically bad, just misunderstood, and (2) human beings—most often white guys in positions of power—are the true monsters. This is the inversion step reflective of a system of values that now privileges diversity and free expression of individuality (the ironic “we’re all nonconformists here!”). The monsters are not those who look different or act quirky but those who attempt to bend others to their will in the pursuit of power or profit (typically foiled by a gruff but actually goodhearted ogre or a bunch of meddling kids). The logic often boils down to embracing the term monster, on one hand, as a rejection of constraints on the free expression of individuality while, on the other, ironically characterizing those who deploy the rhetoric of monstrosity to further their own designs as the true monsters.
Twenty-first-century cultural theory, however, has taken the next step in the deconstruction of the human–nonhuman (monster) binary, which is to displace the opposition entirely through the notion of the posthuman. The logic here shifts to “we are all monsters/none of us is a monster.” This notion, too, can be traced back to Haraway and her celebration of the cyborg, which she characterizes as a third term that undoes many of the defining oppositions of Western culture, including nature–culture, organic–inorganic, and man–woman. Haraway’s cyborg has come to function as an iconic avatar of posthumanism, that branch of cultural inquiry critical of humanist assumptions about “the human” and “human nature” (assumptions that have often been central to determining who is or is not construed as monstrous).
Twenty-first-century cultural theory, taking its cues from Haraway and others, utilizes the rhetoric of monstrosity to highlight the ways human beings are not independent and autonomous but “entangled” or “enmeshed” in networks of human and nonhuman actants. Here again, Tsing, Swanson, Gan, and Bubandt’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet is instructive. The monsters section, titled “Monsters and the Arts of Living” (which, indeed, includes an essay from Haraway), begins with an Introduction titled “Bodies Tumbled into Bodies” that frames monstrosity as multiplicity. The editors essentially agree with Cohen’s thesis that monstrosity is associated with “category crisis” but then foreground the fact that categorical confusion is the nature of existence, prompting the need to rethink the idea of discrete categories altogether: “Against the conceit of the Individual, monsters highlight symbiosis, the enfolding of bodies within bodies in evolution and in every ecological niche. In dialectical fashion, ghosts and monsters unsettle Anthropos, the Greek term for ‘human,’ from its presumed center stage in the Anthropocene by highlighting the webs of histories and bodies from which all life, including human life, emerges.”36 From the bacteria in our gut to our influence on the ecosystem, human bodies are entangled with nonhuman bodies, and our present is enmeshed with other times. “Monsters,” the editors assert, “are bodies tumbled into bodies.”37 The Anthropocene narrative is that we are all then monsters, everything is monstrous, everything is a monster: “monster.”
There is both peril and promise here. As the editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet argue, “suffering from the ills of another species: this is the condition of the Anthropocene, for humans and nonhumans alike. . . . We are mixed up with other species; we cannot live without them.”38 Humans are not the center of things but nodes in a decentered network. This highlights our vulnerability as a species—indeed, rather than the futuristic cyborg of science fiction, in some respects a more apropos posthuman avatar for the twenty-first century might be the DC Comics superhero Swamp Thing, a humanoid/plant creature vulnerable to pollution. And there is danger here in another respect: reconstruing human beings as objects among objects as part of a “flat ontology”39 in which all things are equal in existing can license rather than diminish exploitation—which is why Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things (2010) suggests “a touch of anthropomorphism” as a strategy to “catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations.”40
At the end of “Seven Theses,” Cohen foregrounds a kind of hope inherent in the monster for living more justly. “Monsters are our children,” he writes. “They ask why we have created them.”41 Reflective consideration of what we consider monstrous can prompt reconsideration of sedimented ways of thinking that participate in forms of political violence and exclusion—no doubt important. But twenty-first-century cultural theory has gone further. The promise of Anthropocenic monstrosity inheres in that catalyzed sensibility that recognizes the human entanglement with the nonhuman. From this perspective, human survival requires shaking off humanist conceptions of the discrete Individual and instead acknowledging our shared monstrosity. We have always been posthuman “monsters,” but current threats to the planet and human survival now require that we acknowledge this and take appropriate steps to stave off catastrophe.
Apocalypse
If we do not do this, we go the way of the dinosaurs—assuming we are not already too late—and the planet, better off without us, will not mourn our passing. The third master trope of the gothicized narrative of the Anthopocene I wish to address is the darkest: apocalypse, associated as well with the extinction of the human species. From global pandemics to climate change to nuclear annihilation, the Anthropocene is the age of apocalypse. To be fair, speculation about the end of the world is nothing new and plays a significant role in many world religions and traditions; however, awareness of the possibility of catastrophe now structures our thinking about ourselves, our relations to others, and the (im)possibility of a future.
Popular culture is awash with apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narratives ranging from the bombast of supervillains threatening human existence to the horror of hordes of ghouls to the quiet majesty of Emily St. John Mandel’s postapocalyptic Station Eleven (2014). The world is constantly ending everywhere we look, including in contemporary cultural theory. Unlike spectrality and monstrosity, however, there is not, as far as I am aware, a single foundational text catalyzing an “extinctionist turn” of cultural criticism—Susan Sontag’s “The Imagination of the Disaster” (first published in 1965) seems important,42 as does Ray Brassier’s 2007 Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction43 and, more recently, Claire Colebrook’s 2015 collection Deaths of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 144 and Patricia MacCormack’s 2020 The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene,45 but none of these seems yet to have established itself as a kind of touchstone text directing subsequent criticism in specific ways. Instead, apocalypse and extinction appear for the most part to serve as the backdrop against which much contemporary cultural theory is articulated: we need cultural criticism because our way of life is killing us. Indeed, it may well be that all the ghosts and monsters have emerged in popular culture and cultural criticism precisely because we seem poised on the edge of catastrophe—we are haunted by the prospect of apocalypse, we are committing slow (but accelerating) suicide, we are the monsters. One master trope, then, to control them all: the Anthropocene as apocalyptic narrative breeding ghosts and monsters.
This is more or less the conclusion of philosopher Eugene Thacker, whose work is often associated with that of the speculative realists and with philosophical nihilists such as Brassier. In In the Dust of This Planet (2011), the first of Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy trilogy, Thacker explores horror narrative as a kind of thought experiment that seeks—like speculative realism—to consider what things are like in their unknowable essence. Here Thacker distinguishes among the “world-for-us,” which is the world “we interpret and give meaning to”; the “world-without-us,” which is a depopulated planet that we can still imagine; and the “world-in-itself,” the inaccessible real world.46 Horror, asserts Thacker—and here he has in mind in particular, like Harman, weird fiction and the cosmic horror of Lovecraft—“is a non-philosophical attempt to think about the world-without-us philosophically.”47 Horror is “about the enigmatic thought of the unknown.”48 Horror narrative is the natural outgrowth of the Anthropocene thought of as the age of extinction, in which the human species is forced to confront its monstrosity in the sense articulated in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet—that is, as bodies tumbled into other bodies, inflicting and receiving suffering as a consequence of entanglement in human–nonhuman networks and bad decisions.
The questions of how to respond and what to do about being on the brink of apocalypse are taken up by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer in his Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (2019)—an at-times personal and lyrical meditation proposing an approach but no easy answers (because there are none). According to Wolf-Meyer, speculative fiction and social theory both confront questions about catastrophe, aftermath, ramifications, and response. The true problem, however, is that, as Wolf-Meyer puts it, the “apocalypse is never singular; it is always multiple. In its multiplicity, the apocalypse is unimaginable. What is to be done when the future eludes our capacities for imaginative play and scientific modeling?”49 How do we prepare for the unimaginable future? How do we grasp the ungraspable hyperobject? How do we know the unknowable real object? How do we negotiate the weirdness of the Anthropocene? “The end of the world,” writes Morton, “is correlated with the Anthropocene, its global warming and subsequent dramatic climate change.”50 Myra Hird articulates a similar sentiment, correlating Anthropocene with the end of the world, “our vulnerability to planetary forces,”51 which she sees connected to anxieties about the “consequences of human proliferation.”52 And she agrees with Wolf-Meyer that the future is ungraspable: “At the limits of the Anthropocene, the future cannot be visualized: It is an unknown aesthetic in excess of scientific prediction, human agency, and good will. It is indeterminate.”53 “Speculative fiction—and social theory—that considers desolation and its aftermath,” responds Wolf-Meyer, “helps to point to ways forward, ways to live through the apocalypse, even if living through doesn’t manage to keep things the same as they were.”54
This, then, is an important chapter in the story of the Anthropocene thus far as articulated both in twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory and in popular culture: a gothic tale of a haunted planet, filled with monsters, framed against the backdrop of apocalypse. Late twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural theory and popular culture have pivoted around these three master tropes: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. So much about them seems to “naturally” express our contemporary structure of feeling—the uncanny hauntedness of our present moment, the strategic deployment of monstrosity and the “monster” as a way to refuse destructive philosophical paradigms, the weirdness of a universe in which we are entangled with nonhuman actors we cannot fully know, the ever-present specter of catastrophe: Anthropocenic anxiety. Anthropocene.
The question to end with, though, is: Must the story be told this way? The very naturalness of these tropes—ghosts, monsters, catastrophe—to tell the story of the Anthropocene should at least prompt us to pause because, as Roland Barthes developed in Mythologies (1957), disguising history as nature is how ideology functions.55 So we at least need to ask: What is at stake in seeing the world as haunted? What is at stake in deploying the rhetoric of monstrosity to reformulate the notion of the human? And what is at stake with the omnipresent apocalyptic imagery? What avenues of investigation do they open and foreclose? Who benefits, and who does not? It may be that the gothic tale is the one we need right now. Indeed, this might even be the beginning point for something called an ethics of the gothic. But before we can go there, we need at least to speculate about how the story could be told otherwise—which will bring us back round again to where we are now: the gothic tale of the Anthropocene.
Notes
Richard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
María Del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities,” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Hauntings in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 6–10 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “Introduction: The Spectral Turn,” in Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 4.
Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), book jacket.
Tsing et al., G2.
Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 8.
Fisher, 10.
Fisher, 10.
Fisher, 10–11.
Fisher, 13.
Fisher, 20.
Fisher, 61.
Fisher, 61.
Fisher, 62.
Fisher, 64.
Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology; or, What It’s Like to Think Like a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 4.
Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2011), 39.
Steven Shaviro, “Speculative Realism—a Primer,” Terremoto 2 (June 1, 2015), https://terremoto.mx/article/speculative-realism-a-primer/, emphasis added.
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2012), 4–5.
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 20.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum International, 2008), 7.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.
Morton, 1.
Morton, 3, Figure 1.
Morton, 70.
Morton, 70.
Morton, 17.
H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1973), 16.
Jeff VandeerMeer, “Hauntings in the Anthropocene: An Initial Exploration,” Environmental Critique, July 2016, http://environmentalcritique.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/hauntings-in-the-anthropocene/.
VandeerMeer.
VandeerMeer.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4.
Jack Halberstam (writing as Judith), Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 22.
See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81 (New York: Routledge, 1994).
See Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 295–336 (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Tsing et al., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, M3.
Tsing et al., M10.
Tsing et al., M4.
On the concept of a “flat ontology,” see Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 19ff.; see also Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 17.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 99.
Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 20.
Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of the Disaster,” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond, 40–47 (London: Wallflower Press, 2004).
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, vol. 1 (London: Open Humanities Press, 2011).
Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2011), 1:4.
Thacker, 1:9.
Thacker, 1:8–9.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
Morton, Hyperobjects, 7.
Myra J. Hird, “Proliferation, Extinction, and an Anthropocene Aesthetic,” in Posthumous Life: Theorizing beyond the Posthuman, ed. Jami Weinstein and Claire Colebrook (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 255.
Hird, 251.
Hird, 264.
Wolf-Meyer, Theory for the World to Come, 15.
See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972).
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