“16” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
16
Monstrocene
Fred Botting
For Jacques Lacan, “Freud’s unconscious is not at all the romantic unconscious of imaginative creation. It is not the locus of the divinities of the night.”1 In other words, the Freudian unconscious is not contained by a familiar, universal duality of daylight and darkness, nor does it readily deliver itself to human consciousness or understanding, remaining as impediment, failure, lacuna, and cut.2 As scene, locus, or milieu, it is neither an object nor composed of objects and exhibits an an-anthropocentric agency antipathetic toward humanism. The refusal of the poles of Romantic enlightening and nocturnal divination situates the negating un- of the “unconscious” in a crepuscular gap (producing and disturbing relations between levels, times, places, agencies, objects): not primordial, nor instinctual, something of the unconscious remains “pre-ontological.”3 Where the popular unconscious of imaginative light and nocturnal divinity marks the contours of the monstrocene, the Freudian unconscious lies in relation to undarkness. “Undark” comes by way of another cut, another negation, another un—a darkness that is not (not darkness, not light). The Freudian unconscious emerges as a negation of so many lesser unconsciouses:
the unconscious prior to Freud, is not purely and simply. This is because it names nothing that counts any more as an object—nor warrants being granted any more existence—than what would be defined by situating it in the “un-black” [l’in-noir].
The unconscious before Freud has no more consistency than this un-black—namely, the set of what could be classified according to the various meanings of the word “black,” by dint of its refusal of the attribute (or virtue) of blackness (whether physical or moral).4
Before Freud, it “is not.” With psychoanalytic discourse, the unconscious appears as the fissure resulting from the incision of the signifier in the real, a scission rearranging all prior relationships. “Un-black” is the position from which the unconscious is made to count, the set of all non-Freudian unconsciouses; it re-marks the constitutive gap and structural exceptionality that allows the Freudian unconscious to emerge in the first place. “Un-black” also closes off and opens up an uncounted time and unlit loci of no-space and no-things: undermining formations sustaining light and darkness in a monstrocene framing humanity and its others, Un-black as “undark” discloses a nondarkness preceding night and light, a nonillumination before dark and day.
It may seem inappropriate to invoke psychoanalysis—too human, too linguistic, too phallogocentric—at a time when planetary-scale crises (of ecosystems, climate, species) demand considerations outside or beyond human concerns, but the Anthropocene is too human, too rife with fantasies, anxieties, horrors: it is “our epoch and our condition”; its “shock” is not the impact of an external, alien force but an effect of “our own model of development, our own industrial modernity, which, having claimed to free itself from the limits of the planet, is striking Earth like a boomerang.”5 Unbearably intimate, it is also beyond the grasp of humans. Fact and fantasy, the Anthropocene is “fabulously textual,” to use Jacques Derrida’s account of nuclear apocalypse’s imminence and deferral: its facts derive from the mineral and chemical traces that will have registered, at a geological level, the cumulative effect of human activity on planetary systems, and they fuel the fantasies circulating amid multiple extrapolations, warnings, denials, and speculations of and on the significance and implications of those marks.6 In the Anthropocene, some modes of textuality resurface in efforts to read complex lines of causal interrelation and action, in imaginings of a planet without humans, in rethinking milieux of thought beyond humanist frames and in reimagining worlds of interconnected lives, agencies, bodies, and ecologies. All this, as Donna Haraway notes, requires “webs of speculative fabulation.”7 Unlike nuclear catastrophe (its imminence checked in a mutual assurance of destruction), the Anthropocene has already happened and is still to come: the marks of irreversible human planetary impact lie at a geological level—deeper, that is, than human history—but have yet to reveal their full effects or significance to and on so many members of the species responsible.
Paul Crutzen’s and Eugene Stoermer’s observations that the effects of centuries of human activity—agricultural, industrial, technological, and social—had combined to leave a lasting impact on the planet itself posed new and urgent questions of humanity, its history, its damaging relationship to other forms of life, and their—and its own—milieu: humans have become a “major geological force” or, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “a force of nature in a geological sense.”8 Distinguished by shifting, interdependent, and multiscalar relations and effects, the “epoch” is difficult to construe in older modern and humanist terms because the very conditions and milieux that were previously and necessarily overlooked or naturalized as “nature” in the heavy march of human progress come to the fore in unpredictable, active, and extensive ways: “the human species’ damaging of its own milieu is not an accident that we might otherwise have avoided, precisely because climate—as our milieu—is something that our very dependence upon will preclude us from ever really seeing.”9 What was unseen, unthought, or unrecognized now tests the limits and thresholds of visibility, thinking, and knowing: “man cannot appear to himself as a geological force, because being a geological force is a mode of disappearance.”10
In becoming a “major geological force,” humans are not only confronted with their own destructive planetary impact but find human subjectivity, knowledge, and thinking, and their sense of other beings, things, space, and time, transformed. It is now hard to speak of objectivity and facts because the “objective fact” of climate change shifts relations between subjects and objects to disclose the way that humans are intrinsic to global patterns of cause and effect: “the very notion of objectivity has been totally subverted by the practices of humans in the phenomena to be described.”11 Agency, too, alters and divides: while the Earth “has taken back all the characteristics of a full-fledged actor” in complex global processes, its status remains vulnerable, “an active, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, quaking, and easily tickled envelope.”12 For humans, too, the Anthropocene becomes a “sign of our power, but also of our impotence.”13 Interdependencies and intertwined powers and vulnerabilities hold humans and their world in an increasingly delicate balance, a “precarious attachment to a fragile planet.”14
Being in the Anthropocene, being a subject of or to climate change, undoes a humanist imaginary based on distance, mastery, and vision and undermines distinctions of inside and outside. It refuses a single (authoritative) perspective on—and over—things in a redistribution of agencies, effects, levels, and scales, revealing “multiple and incongruent systems for which we do not have a point of view.”15 In the many acts of consumption that are the daily habit of millions in the West, there are few directly visible consequences that allow consumers to see or take responsibility for the huge effects that the sum of little acts entails at the level of habitats, species, or ecosystems: human agency appears thoroughly nonhuman when it is perceived in terms of different scales.16 Historically, too, the ramifications of climate change are significant: when natural or geological and human histories start to overlap, lines of continuity and difference are disrupted in a “collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.”17 The scale and uncertain temporalities of the Anthropocene signal narrative unravelings of present, past, and future: “we have to insert ourselves into a future ‘without us’ to be able to visualize it.” Such a fantastic and ahistorical projection, losing the thread of a narrative teleology in casting it impossibly toward an inexistent human subject, indicates the extent to which historical practice and understanding have been “thrown into deep contradiction and confusion.”18
If the scale, speed, distance, and proximity of the Anthropocene test the limits and confound the capacities of human action, thought, and history, they also challenge language. Climate change and environmental crisis, as Rob Nixon notes, “present formidable representational obstacles”: the gradual and barely perceptible effects of what he calls “slow violence” require the production and circulation of new, more strategically effective images, narratives, and representations.19 Stories and metaphors matter: “it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems.” Names, too: the current planetary situation means “a big new name is warranted.” For Haraway, “diverse earth-wide tentacular forces” touch on and turn from the weird horror of Cthtulu toward a “Chtulucene” embracing a legion of mythic names (“Naga,” “Gaia,” “Tangaroa,” etc.) to imagine different interanimations of promise and possibility among living figures, “entangling myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages.”20 Stories, names, and figures matter in the process of giving form to the life of things, relations, and notions as yet out of reach.
But names and narrations are also part of the problem, short-circuiting invention, circumlocuting change, curtailing conceptual capacities and considerations, names and narrations promoting denial, occlusion, deception, deferral, and distraction. In respect of climate change, it has never been as simple as publicizing the scientific facts and receiving a global mandate to introduce remedial measures. The “story of awakening is a fable”: there is no moment at which a simple statement of truth separates a “blind past” from a “clear-sighted present”; instead, “it means deconstructing the official account in its managerial and non-conflictual variants, and forging new narratives for the anthropocene and thus new imaginaries.”21 Stories matter in the making of new imaginaries, but media, management, and administrations tell tales too. Engaging with what Michel Serres calls a “second pollution” is also required: along with “material, technological, and industrial pollution,” a “second pollution” remains “invisible” and places “time in danger” in what amounts to “cultural pollution” inflicted on the “long-term thoughts” serving, in the shape of science (truth), bureaucracy (continuity), and media (sensation), as “guardians of the Earth, of humanity, and of things themselves.”22 Unbalanced by short-term interests and pressures for immediate satisfaction, secondary pollution contaminates the planning, respect, and harmony necessary to Serres’s “natural contract.”
“At stake is the Earth in its totality, and humanity collectively.”23 With the global threat comes a new collective human agent: the name of an epoch identifying an obscure object also introduces a new subject. The threat named as “Anthropocene” brings a new “we” into being, a subject coterminous with the epoch identifying its end: this new collective entity distinguishes no enlightened, universal European humanity or manifestation of some enduring progressive spirit but a figure born in the face of its own demise, a species “we” “generated from destruction.”24 At the point of danger and naming, a planetary subject-species dissipates among a range of new names. These names deflect blame; specify different global and class interests; extend, deflect, or condense forces and periods of historical origins: “capitalocene,” “corporatocence,” “plantationocene,” “thermocene,” “thanatocene,” “cthulucene,” “entropocene,” “neganthropocene.”25 A second pollution persists even as the scale and complexity of the first pollution emerge as an obscure, palpable, multilayered agglomeration of interconnected forces and effects: naming, while bringing an issue into focus, may, as it dissipates and dissonates, engender only further factions and distractions, polarizations and deflections, placing different frames around crises and conjuring different threats. Or worse, this new, bewildering, terrifying, barely comprehensible scene might be painted as a monster that only serves to horrify and paralyze all thought, all imagination, all response—another dark Thing prowling the monstrocene.
Dark Things
Mary Shelley writes, “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds that I should first break through and pour a torrent of light onto our dark world.”26 Darkness may not simply be the other side to light, nor the figure for the operations of an unknown, passive, or inert nature that challenges human knowledge to even greater efforts of understanding (and appropriation). Things may be more active, autonomous, and inimical to humanity; they may even be malign. Where objects are ordered and subordinated to human observation and production, other things seem to escape a realm of solid and inert objectivity regulated by a predictable physics of mass, energy, gravitation, and light. Things do things, on their own and to others, suggesting powers in part furnished with qualities normally associated with subjectivity, such as agency, will, or intention. Inexplicable, they are attributed to malignant, if not demonic, determinations. The speculative ghost story “The Malice of Inanimate Objects” (1933) by M. R. James suggests as much when its conversational narrative posits an agency of and intercourse between everyday objects existing outside human supervision. The human world of family and friendships, the life related in realism, is upset by a “world of things” that has no respect for human conversations, commerce, or work: insignificant and everyday objects—collar studs, inkstands, fires, razors, and extra stair steps—manage to “pass word around” and set traps for those moving blithely through a world assumed to accord with human expectations.27 The organized activities of small things can even be fatal, as the story attests.
At the end, narrative speculation balks at the notion of a separate world of things able to act in concert and outside human determination. Inimical and malignant as things are, they remain tied negatively and in opposition to the human world against which they conspire. A different malignancy is, somewhat indefinitely, supposed, “something not inanimate behind the Malice of inanimate objects.”28 Some self-moving, if not living, agent, it seems, directs the machinations of things. Designated as “not inanimate,” this subject-thing is not identified as being human nor, directly, as being animate. Nor is it named as a divine or demonic power: the double negative neither allows nor refuses a definite binary polarization as, refusing dialectical resolution, it withdraws agency from the commerce of things without positing any identifiable figure or force—spiritual, supernatural, physical, or human—as definitive cause. Only a shadowy “something” is suggested, animating things as if at a double remove (the gesture of “not in-” negating the negation of animation without synthesis). While defusing the idea that any agency is possessed by things themselves, it prompts a return to, and quasi-ethical reflection on, the world of human behavior: the story closes with the lesson that humans “should examine and if possible rectify any obliquities in our recent conduct” (otherwise, the malignancy of things will visit retribution on us for our sins).29 The story’s moral—at the limits of a human world threatened by a conspiracy of objects and an uncertain agency—arises, as it were, “in a thing, darkly.”
Things are also active in the familiar and strange darknesses of object-oriented ontology (OOO) and object-oriented—or “dark”—ecology (OOE). For Timothy Morton, the objects that conspire and interconnect in the multiscaled spatiotemporalities of the Anthropocene become “hyperobjects” undermining—to “uncanny effect”—“normative ideas of what an ‘object’ is in the first place” and disclosing an agency that appears “more than a little demonic.”30 The strangeness of the Anthropocence is “weirdly weird” in the manner of speculative realism’s relation to reality.31 Its work of darkness goes beyond conventional frames of horror and gothic monstrosity. Graham Harman’s account, inspired by a curious fellowship with H. P. Lovecraft’s fictions, comments that, “rather than inventing a monster with an arbitrary number of tentacles and dangerous sucker-mouths and telepathic brains, we must recognise that no such list of arbitrary weird properties is enough to do the trick. There must be some deeper and more malevolent principle at work in our monsters that escapes all such definition.”32 Words fail, monsters too: Lovecraft’s style leaves “real objects” “locked in impossible tension with the crippled descriptive powers of language.”33 Which is why reality remains weird: it is “incommensurable with any attempt to represent or measure it.”34 Though “no direct contact” with real objects can be achieved, there may be “indirect access to things-in-themselves” through a process of “allusion” that indicates a thing without making it present: concealed from representation, a thing may nonetheless “deform the sensual world.”35 While experience testifies to a direct link between real and sensual things, the reality of objects remains out of reach because they have no direct relation to each other: they connect only in a “vicarious” manner.36 Connection takes place in darkness and amid spectral powers: “vicarious causation” calls up a world composed not of isolated and mindless atoms but “packed full of ghostly real objects signalling to each other from inscrutable depths.”37 Withdrawn, a real object lies in “obscure, cavernous underworlds,” leaving reality composed of “weird substances with a taste of the uncanny about them.”38 Some kind of “allure” arises when things assume “ghostly power” beyond their evident properties, a power of deep internal animation that seems to be “demonic.”39
Dark ecology, in a similar vein, tracks the way in which reality finds itself possessed by a “withdrawn yet vivid spectrality of things,” a world in which previously solid and fixed forms “become misty, shifty, nebulous, uncanny,” where a “spectral strangeness” shadows all being from discrete life-forms to ecosystems and biospheres.40 Like the weirdness evinced in the speculative realist understanding of objects, the Anthropocene discloses how reality “is becoming more vivid and unreal,” “more spectral,” and demands that “ecological existence” be considered in terms of relations “with ghosts, strangers, and specters.”41 Wider unrealities pertaining to matters of complexity, space, scale, and nature also evoke monstrosity: hyperobjects intimate “monstrously gigantic” temporal scales, preontological “ghosts” haunting social and psychic space and turning smooth and locatable space into places of “truly monstrous and uncanny dimensions.”42 The sense and scale of hyperobjectal haunting register a significant disturbance in—even collapse of—conventional scaffoldings of humanist thinking and, importantly, dispense with any grounding in an all-too-human, Romantic, and maternal idea of “nature.” An “impediment to proper relationships with the earth and its life-forms,” a notion of ecology without a “concept of nature” opens onto a “thinking of the interconnectedness” of living things.43
Yet here, too, be monsters. As the Anthropocene discloses nature “in its truly toxic and nightmare form,”44 glimpses of an open, interconnected living ecology begin to be occluded by the figures thrown up to protect human borders and systems of thinking. The spectral reality of the Anthropocene comes to dominate all existence and every horizon, sucking all darkness into the consuming dark-depressions, dark-uncannies, and sickly dark-sweetnesses of dark ecology.45 Rather than evincing a “dark side” to the “thinking of interconnectedness” required of ecology, the image of a “goth” sensibility—of staying with “a dying world”46—curtails the appeal to and pursuit of other modes of thought: it becomes too (darkly) enamored of a disturbed and dejected situation, too much in love with dis-easeful dying and too absorbed by figures of abjection and horror. Frankenstein’s creature offers an image of human abjection.47 Though appearing in a novel that “questions the very idea of nature,” he enunciates (like the voice of “a poisoned rainforest”) a demand “to love the disgusting, inert, and meaningless,” the very conditions of humanity and its idea of nature that ecology sets out to dismantle.48 Almost a hyperobject, the human species is reduced (again and like the world it has defiled) to a mirrored monstrosity absorbed in specular revulsion: “we,” as human individuals addressed collectively, are said to be “in the vicelike death grip of a gigantic entity,” and that entity is nothing other than “ourselves as the human species.”49 The formulation eloquently entertains coincident divisions of scale perceptible in the misrecognitions engendered by an Anthropocenic embrace of individual and species responsibility. But it also articulates a liberal and guilty abjection and self-loathing evoked in acknowledgments of an unthinking complicity in planetary destruction.
A familiar image from horror fiction reinforces, quite neatly and with weirder effect, the intimacy and self-loathing of human–nonhuman recognition, a zombie species requiring a new form of subjective–collective recognition: “I am a component of a zombie.” It occurs, however, in a familiar space of monstrosity, a “dark mirror” reflecting a human “I” as nothing more than “a cone in one of its eyes.”50 Richly revolting and appropriately weirding in terms of proximity, scale, and point of view, any outside cedes to an other side collapsing on a negative image of sameness: a reversed perspective still preserves (humanized) structures of opposition and difference (dark–light, other–self, monster–human). It follows the lines of polarized differences enunciated as the basis of humanstrosity in Frankenstein’s monstrous Romantic reiteration of Paradise Lost. But the monstrous observations on the identity-in-opposition of man’s perplexing and intractable combination of baseness and nobility moves to another (undead) extremity, a conflation of the monstrocenic doubling of a human first-person plural as the untouchable sacredness of our selves mired in the shit (our feces, our effluent—but not compost) that we are.
In an ecology without nature and a world alien to humanity, there is much of (gothic) darkness and familiar strangeness produced, circulated, and recited in modernity to delineate and sustain inversely a rational and human order of things, as if to affirm negatively—and reassuringly blinkered—that we live, already and again, in gothic times. The loss of nature and the humanized, comforting world that dark ecology proposes imagines only the horrors of inversion, collapse, uncanniness, and abjection. In the process, it finds itself prepossessed by the negative dimensions of its dispatch of human and natural worlds: its avocation of goth sensibility reproduces the darker figures that seem to be as much impediments to the necessity of interconnected ecological thought as nature. We remain on “charnel ground”:
Without a world, there is no Nature. Without a world there is no life. What exists outside the charmed circles of Nature and life is a charnel ground, a place of life and death, of death-in-life and life-in-death, an undead place of zombies, viroids, junk DNA, ghosts, silicates, cyanide, radiation, demonic forces, pollution.51
Being without world or nature—for ecological thought—constitutes a necessary precondition, a sacrifice of the comfort and illusions of Nature’s maternal charms to a realization of our everyday life/death in the fluorescently overlit “emergency room of ecological existence.”52 The new gothic times of this new dark age are indeed riven with familiar horrors, forms, and figures. But while they provide a disgusting and abject description of (humanized) nature and world as toxic and nightmarish, they remain recognizable from popular postapocalyptic fictions: their familiarity returns to human norms (like all good monsters) or closes off—in horrified recoil and paralysis—any glimpse of a future beyond human screens (remaining at the limits of monstrocene).
Dark ecology—rather than engaging with the complex and entangled realm of things—lurks at the edges of an uncanny or nebulous realm that assumes the limit function of “Thing” (das Ding) in object-oriented ontology.53 Fantastic humanist imaginings meet their limit in the Thing without really troubling the phantasmatic-ideological milieu of human existence: “we are losing a fantasy—the fantasy of being immersed in a natural or benevolent Mother Nature.”54 While that loss makes for a “very dangerous person,” it only discloses a vanishing maternal illusion, dissolving the light side of Romantic nature but not crossing the limits of the darkness that holds it place.55
The hauntology and monstrosity prepossessing dark ecology employ a particular version of Derrida’s undoing of ontology without engaging the way in which spectrality acknowledges a more pervasive embrace of (inhuman/monstrous/vampiric) systems of exploitation, occultation, and exchange in which the “fantastic” or “phantasmagoric” form of the commodity defines all relations in a commerce of and among things. From this perspective, the Anthropocene has always been a “phantasmagorocene” in which doubled Derridean monstrosity plays a part:
The future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant.56
Unpredictable, unprogrammed, unrecognizable in any terms the present may project, future monstrosity (altogether different from anything a humanized world can imagine) would, by definition, exceed the representational capacities of fiction. As a dark ecological refrain, Derrida’s “arrivant”—transposed as “strange stranger”—applies to life-forms, reconceives existents (“life is monstrosity”), and redefines species-difference, with the help of Darwin, as a collapse of standard scientific assumptions of “species, variation, monstrosity.”57 “Strange strangeness” also demonstrates an ethical openness to alterity at the heart of any encounter with other beings and an intimacy with hyperobjects as (“strange strangers”) and preserves an open and surprising (if nearly extinguished) future—a “future future.”58
Tautology accompanies invocations of the “arrivant” and strangeness, tacitly acknowledging another, more problematic aspect of Derrida’s monstrous conception of futurity: raising issues of representation, naming, imagining; acknowledging a monstrous capacity of resistance; yet disturbing the ground and frames of figuration to disclose and close off a formless reality or unknown future. Tautology’s repetition of and insistence on representation, however, register both representation’s failure and some elusive, unnameable pressure on representation as it entangles and turns back on itself. Here the circulation of strange or monstrous figures is diverted from the monstrosity they tried to welcome, so that, in repetition, strangeness dissipates and the otherness of any encounter leaks away: “the strange stranger is not only strange but strangely so.”59 A strangely strange stranger is not a familiarly strange stranger, nor a strangely familiar stranger, nor a familiarly familiar stranger, nor even, maybe, a stranger at all. Hanging on to a future future that remains open and unpredictable also, in the repetition of terms announcing its reinvocation, involves (quite literally-rhetorically in the re-citation of the same term) closing it off, an excess tautology that returns to and restores the surfaces and limits of familiar (human) signification (repetition-difference becomes repetition-same).
“As soon as one perceives a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it.”60 That is, strangeness is assimilated and disarmed in a process rendering monsters homely and familiar. Surprise is curtailed, along with any sense of alterity and unpredictability. As difference becomes eclipsed, another effort is required to sustain the monstrosity of an “arrivant”: “normal monstrosities”—domesticated, figured, familiarized—are distinguished from more disturbing and unpredictable types, “monstrous monstrosities.” Differentiation, once framed by the urgency and difficulty of sustaining a position open and able to “welcome” monstrosity and futurity, tends toward a new caution against closing off the future and assimilating otherness: “one cannot say: ‘here are our monsters,’ without turning the monsters into pets.”61 Dark ecology’s strangers are in danger, it seems, not so much of alerting or opening Anthropos to the precariousness and unpredictability of a future that is and is not its own but of remaining amid a familiar gloom, its monstrous, undead, spectral, and replicated avatars less promises of difference and possibility to come than banal, abject figures of barely altered sameness, “anthropets” of an ecology of darkness.
Sublime/Excrescence
Mary Shelley notes that “futurity, like the dark image in a phantasmagoria, came nearer and more near till it clasped the whole earth in its shadow.”62 The capacity to imagine self where it cannot be, beyond the limits of individual or species finitude, and thus, curiously, to enjoy the comforts of terror, traces an apocalyptic path through the Anthropocence: Chakrabarty, commenting on Alan Weisman’s The World without Us (which details how a planet reshapes itself after the demise of humans), defines its impossible historico-narrative flight as an imaginative insertion of “us” into a future where we cannot be in order to comprehend current crises in a mode that privileges imagination over existence.63 As Frances Ferguson puts it, “to think the sublime would be to think the unthinkable and exist in one’s own non-existence.”64 Weisman’s position compares with postnuclear imaginings of a world without humans.
Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth tracked the devastation attendant on accidental nuclear catastrophe and depicted the few—nonhuman—beings capable of living on. Characterized as a “nuclear sublime,” it retained eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic modes in that, maintaining distance, it did not immerse itself in a future of “total annihilation” but diverted into “calculations of exactly how horrible daily life would be,” thereby deploying the “trick” of the sublime—living “to tell the tale of our encounter with it.”65 Evoking a dynamic of imagined loss and recovery, the sublime breaches continuities of sense, reason, imagination, subjectivity, and objectivity, then, in the gap that is thrown up; it invigorates a movement of restoration, the institution of an idea or activation of instincts of self-preservation, that renews consciousness and frees subjectivity from the feeling of “being bound by the world of circumstances” beyond control. In the same movement, it “returns us to the world of circumstances with a certain benevolence towards them.”66 The encounter, however, is always missed; the imagined threat and sense of power are “mislocated.”67
Sublimity does not always proffer freedom, imaginative release, or even a return to self, species, and nature. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man tells of the recovery and editing of fragments of a tale of the future found in the Sibyl’s cave in 1818. The story, the writings of the last man on earth that are left for nonexistent readers of a future past, details the effects of a great pestilence wiping out humanity in the late twenty-first century. Amid its political and Romantic ruminations and melancholy—a melancholy engaging the losses of person, others, world, and future—a different sense of humanity and nature accompanies a revised mode of sublimity. The plague is not the only sign of an elemental disorder of things: great winds ravage the earth for months and intimate the incomprehensible presence of a “hostile agency at work around us.” Its effects are physical and psychological, prompting thoughts not of sublime powers but of individual and species vanity, frailty, and finitude: in the proximity to powers beyond humanity, a proximity in which death is close by and random, individual and species insignificance and vulnerability come to the fore: “What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to the merest accident.” Linked to a juxtaposition of individual frailty and mankind’s immortality, the thought of infinity or species survival is no consolation. Instead, vain, arrogant assumptions about being “lords of creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death,” are shaken by the scale of elemental disruption: “losing our identity, that of which we are chiefly conscious, we glory in the continuity of our species, and learn to regard death without terror. But when any whole nation becomes the victim of the destructive powers of exterior agents then indeed man shrinks into insignificance, he feels his tenure of life insecure, his inheritance on earth cut off.”68 Minor, meaningless, insecure, and divested of the illusion of the earth as his property and the ground of his future, Mankind loses access to the sublimity conjoining self and species. Only its negativity remains, without elevation or restoration: “a feeling of awe, a breathless sentiment of wonder, a painful sense of the degradation of humanity.”69 This erasure of sublimity discloses a more monstrous face and force. The negativity, moreover, assumes the place of Nature, transformed: no longer “our mother, our friend,” it turns on humans with a “brow of menace”; previously passive, gentle, and benevolent, she becomes admonitory and powerful, evincing a cosmic capacity outside human illusions of control to “take our globe, fringed with mountains, girded by the atmosphere, containing the condition of our being, and all that man’s mind could invent or force achieve; she could take the ball in her hand and cast it into space, where life would be drunk up, and man and all his efforts for ever annihilated.”70 Man is nothing, less than nothing: the last man recognizes himself and “all human powers and features” as “a monstrous excrescence of nature.”71
An image of darkly destructive nature, feminine, absolutely indifferent, and capable of reducing humanity to nothing more than monstrous excrescence, also appears in Sadean philosophy, where nature manifests an implacable, relentless, and rational imperative evacuating and annihilating all the trappings sustaining humanity—virtue, goodness, morality, law, religion—except the violence come of pleasure in destruction. No more than “froth,” excrescences cast by an indifferent nature intent on perpetual destruction, humans—in contrast to the vulnerabilities exposed in The Last Man—are enjoined to aspire to and replicate an imperative of violent destruction that can never be satisfied since it imagines—beyond any natural cycles—a “perpetual metempsychosis, a perpetual variation, a perpetual permutation embracing all things in perpetual movement.”72 Nature is divided between a “secondary nature” of cycles of light and dark, death and life, creation and destruction, and a nature of pure negation overriding “all laws” and lying beyond “all foundations.”73 A “pure negation,” undark perhaps, remains beyond the horizon and limit of humanized constructions of nature. While the a-sublimity of Shelley’s nature and the perpetual destruction of Sade’s inversely glimpse its negative powers in violence and the degradation of humanity, the undoing of human illusions of mastery devolves to images of an absolute difference–indifference and another power and malevolence that mirrors the secondary negativity of human projections: rendered subordinate, appendages, excrescences, and froth, and, in Shelley’s case, more open to the vulnerability of self, others, and species, humanity’s status can at least take curious comfort in the fact that the planet is powerful enough to remain as impervious to human actions as it is indifferent to human life. A dark, active, and destructive nature at least remains stable in its malevolence and thereby absolves responsibility and occludes any sense of a precariously balanced and vulnerably interwoven system of relations.
Checked, the sublime stumbles: while imaginative powers of terror, wonder, or awe are turned into glimpses of pure negation, the possibility of renewal or recuperation just about remains. Discounting Burkean and Kantian models—the former for its submission at a distance and the latter for its “lack of speculation”—Morton advocates a “speculative sublime that actually tries to become intimate with the other.”74 To do so involves a disavowal of terror and awe: intimacy requires an encounter based on horror.
Here, it seems, the argument tacitly entangles various threads of horror and alterity: from the ethical “there is . . .” of Emmanuel Levinas (“there is . . . horror”) to the abhorrence arising from crossings of supposedly inviolable corpo-symbolic borders in abjection, to the unbearable intimacy of “horrorism” in which any dignity-and-singularity-in-vulnerability between self and other is quite literally blown apart in a bloody, fatal inmixture. For all the horror it finds exuding from being, ethical respect sits oddly with other forms: abjection’s intimacy engenders repulsion as well as establishing a point for the re-erection of symbolic and sacred values, and, drawing on Ann Radcliffe’s polarization of terror and horror (in which the latter is numbing), horrorism admits only the paralysis of meaning, distinction, and sense that comes of a dissolution of human dignity and singularity.75 Speculative or otherwise, the sublime offers little purchase on the Anthropocene. Neither terror nor horror will do.
The last man is only a figure of “ecocidal totalization.”76 It is difficult, then, to think of the Anthropocene in terms of a “recuperable sublime.”77 Though the “we” of the Anthropocene is born in relation to a projection of destruction and self-destruction, the rapidly succeeding dissipation of its multiscalar objectivity amid different names, times, and blames collapses distances and proximities, agencies and responsibilities, ideas and objects. Anthropocene “erases all sublimity,”78 except perhaps an “ecocidal sublime.”79 In contrast, postapocalyptic imaginings and narratives reenact a mode of sublime recuperation in which a future populated by monstrous humans from vampires to zombies stages a war of and within humanity in which an attempt is made to separate out its own “inhuman fragment.”80 These allegories for “humanity gone awry” employ monstrous figures to embody a “bad humanity” in the future so that good humans can imagine their redemption in the present. Sublime apocalyptic fictions thus exorcise “tendencies that have marked the species to date,” turning current human failings into external and futural threats. Dividing good and bad, diverting humanity from itself, expunging in-humanity and projecting a bad present into a monstrous future, postapocalyptic fictions depart from and return to the present with a purged view of humanity and an all-too-rosy occlusion of its appalling conditions and divisions.81 Projecting terrors and horrors into the future refuses to recognize the extent to which postapocalyptic scenarios are already playing themselves out, though not necessarily amid a “blessed” liberal world of abundant goods, freedoms, or leisure time.82 Given that “the mansion of modern freedoms stands an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use,” and abundance for some is depletion for others, the horror of climate catastrophe is a horror for the “us” of the first world.83 For many, those projected postapocalyptic conditions of precarity, violence, and scarcity are barely different to “what life already is, and necessarily has been, outside the luxuries of first world anxieties about the future of ‘humanity.’”84 Postapocalyptic narratives also close off horizons for thought, action, and different relations of being. Whether in the form of a renascent cosmopolitan humanity (as in Arrival) or a return to primitive humanism (as in Mad Max), future fictions serve to “occlude all the silenced, fugitive, submerged, unlived but imagined futures that are not those of man and world.”85
Fictions, in delineating the losses of current Western lifestyles, give form to a future totality of destruction as nothing but horror. In doing so, they not only prompt anxious recoil, paralysis, or defensive reaction but display a huge failure of imagination: closing off, in horror, any consideration of a future different from the projection of one’s own present displays the “incapacity to imagine what is other than itself as non-catastrophic.”86 Horror stakes a limit in darkness and destruction—and recoils; terror engenders an imagining of evil and a return to good, surviving, newly rehumanized, beyond the darkness. Yet while apocalyptic futures collapse on the present, save it, fantastically, from itself, divert its gaze from itself, or simply let it look away, neither terror nor horror challenges the terms of representation or moves away from polarizations of light and dark in which perceptions are framed. “Against this,” Colebrook suggests, “we might think less of forces in strife or operating by way of good and evil, or light and dark, and more by way of twilight—discernible distinctions but always amid a potentially overwhelming indifference.”87 Indifference signals both a lack of pathological investment pertaining to particular vested interests and a significant reduction, if not rupturing, of the value and dominance given to the binary oppositions sustaining single yet partial perspectives. A crepuscular approach refuses polarities of light and dark with the aim of admitting greater diversity, fluidity, and openness to thinking—an admission, of course, that requires disenchantment and evacuation of prevailing assumptions (otherwise as-yet-but-how-to-be-imagined futures are all too hastily given form and shading).88
Indifference also characterizes a hard and implacable kernel integral to the dynamic of the sublime. Reading de Man reading Kant, Colebrook identifies an aspect of materiality that refuses to give itself to or support human imagination and cognition, a form of sublime whose materiality “has not been humanized” and discloses itself as “inhuman, purely intense, devoid of homely sense and affect.”89 As a mode engendering “privation” and “defacement,” it refuses projections of sense, affect, or image. It is a “sublime without an idea”90 and, by implication, without self or self-preservation. A site of nonrecuperation, nontranscendence, pure negation, an indifferent and in-different (dis)articulation of self and other, idea and thing, the material sublime enables the abandonment of other sublimities (as they institute ideas and preserve selves) and allows the rethinking of nature: “not nature as some absent sacred beyond” but “as a composed interconnected, and dynamic unity that is constituted as a series of modes of existence.”91 Such a dynamic unity is not, however, to be conceived as “Thing,” as yet another limit for human imagination, fantasy, or reason to throw up, but as “some interconnected whole that refuses any noumenal presence.”92 There is no either–or here, no light or dark, but both and more: different relations, other possibilities.
Meshwork
Jacques Lacan: “everything that blossoms in the unconscious spreads like a mycelium.”93 Considering the Anthropocene need not be a matter of (catastrophes of) light or dark, thing or Thing, human or monster. The milieu of planetary existence is beyond the grasp of a humanized, polarized perspective, a matter of living, animate, and inert relations, interconnections, interdependencies; of vulnerabilities and risks within interrelated systems of alterity, rather than hierarchies of power and control; a matter of “precarious attachment to a fragile planet” which—though all-embracing—cannot be subsumed into a visible totality because it is difficult to view one’s own milieu, difficult to establish “a point of view” for “multiple and incongruent systems.”94 The life emerging in this milieu, though “fragile,” “is not especially human”95 but is a multiplicity of temporal and spatial “non-overlapping incompossible lines of life and time,”96 forms of ongoing existences outside and across a merely human perspective, and requires a thinking of it “as the milieu for our ongoing life, and as the fragile surface that holds us all together in one web of risked life, even if we cannot practically grasp or manage the dynamics of this totality.”97 As “one web of risked life,” this milieu links “all bodies (organic and otherwise) into a single complex, multiply determined and dynamic whole.”98 It bears similarity to the “mesh” of entities “interconnected in an interobjective system” that is “infinite and beyond concept” and in which we still find ourselves “hopelessly entangled” while remaining “fully responsible.”99 But the web of risked life is not necessarily monstrous or inhabited by strange strangers. Nor is its totality so infinite and conceptual as not be whole. Nor does it necessarily engender extremes of hopelessness and responsibility for humans. It involves at least and in part a greater awareness of mutual vulnerabilities and shared precariousness as well as an intimacy of otherness that embraces rather than opposes human life, whatever that might become.
Perhaps some relation to this web of risked life can be explored in the unformed form of a mycelium, a meshwork if not a mesh, a planetary milieu or unconscious, as it were. When Lacan opens the unconscious to undarkness, he also cites a metaphor by which Freud characterizes its multiplicity and interconnectedness: “mycelium.” The image of an extensive, interlinked complex of living fungal structures offers, for Freud, a sense of the “intricate network of our world of thought,” a “meshwork” beyond consciousness, subjectivity, and interpretation to articulate the emergence of a dream wish through the “tangle of dream thoughts”; it appears “like a mushroom out of its mycelium.”100 A fecund metaphor for the unconscious, it suggests further entanglements of self, other, subject, enunciation, scene, and milieu. The meshwork concentrates meaning at particular nodal points or buttons (as dream wish) and disperses identity across the multitude of relations, connections, separations, gaps, and holes, whole in excess of finality, totality, or mastery. Marking a distribution and multiplication of sites of being amid conditions of intimate alterity, the meshwork challenges reductive operations of representation and manifests its own generative capacities: in this scene of figuration, whatever presses and condenses across various points of particular entanglement produces diverse effects and images, unformed shapings and shadings offering instances of (metaphorical–metonymic–material) invention and movement. “Mushroom” becomes the dream’s “navel”; biological interconnections extend from ecology to living bodies: the knot and scar of every human birth marks the necessary and insurmountable relation between beings.
Mycelium offers a different image of planetary ecology as a “living network,” a network that displays the possible sentience of, interdependence of, and communication between ecological systems: it is a network, moreover, that might help “save the planet,” given the capacity of fungi to repair habitats, forests in particular; filter polluted water; recycle debris; and remove toxins.101 For Anna Tsing, fungi tell different tales. Her ethno-ecological account examines the matsutake mushroom’s place in and effect on various environmental, social, cultural, commercial, and global histories. It starts from the present as a precarious site of ruins and salvage. Questioning any idea of nature outside human relations, her discussion elaborates “interspecies entanglements” in a manner that refuses to separate ecological relations from capitalist transformations. Instead, she asks “what manages to live despite capitalism.”102 Moving away from Anthropo- requires attending to what may be left, to “patchy landscapes,” “multiple temporalities,” shifting scales, and “shifting assemblages of humans and non-humans.”103 Here mushrooms offer hints of survival—not in saving the world or redeeming our human selves but in “precarity,” in living on and living with indeterminacy, vulnerability, unpredictability. Mushrooms, though living in the shadows amid decay, remain indifferent to the monstrocene, more open, perhaps, to tales of undarkness.
Notes
Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1977), 24.
Lacan, 25, 153.
Lacan, 29.
Jacques Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 704.
Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016), 11, 22.
Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” diacritics 14, no. 2 (1984): 23.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 101.
See Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoemer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” IGBPNewsletter 41 (2000): 18, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 208.
Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays in Extinction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 1:21.
Catherine Malabou, “The Brain of History; or, The Mentality of the Anthropocene,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 1 (2017): 41.
Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 2.
Latour, 3.
Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock, 11.
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 2, and Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, 11.
Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, 11.
Timothy Clark, “Derangements of Scale,” in Telemorphosis, ed. Tom Cohen (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 150–51.
Chakrabarty, “Climate,” 201.
Chakrabarty, 197–98.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2, 14.
Haraway, Staying, 101.
Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock, 12.
Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 30.
Serres, 4.
Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2016), 8.
Cohen et al., 7; Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock, 13; Haraway, Staying; Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, trans. William Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 39.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 54.
M. R. James, “The Malice of Inanimate Objects,” in Casting the Runes and Other Stories, ed. Michael Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 288–92.
James, 292.
James.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 139, 29.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 8.
Graham Harman, Weird Realism (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2012), 22.
Harman, 27.
Harman, 51.
Harman, 238.
Harman, 256.
Graham Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” Collapse II (2007): 187.
Harman, 195; Graham Harman and Keith Tilford, “On the Horror of Phenomenology,” Collapse IV (2008): 348.
Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2010), 137.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 74.
Morton, Hyperobjects, 194; Morton, Dark Ecology, 198.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 25; Morton, Hyperobjects, 181; Morton, Dark Ecology, 20, 8.
Morton, Ecology without Nature, 2, 24, 184.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 59.
Morton, 5, 17, 160.
Morton, Ecology without Nature, 184.
Timothy Morton, “Frankenstein and Ecocriticism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Andrew Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 148.
Morton, Ecology without Nature, 194.
Morton, Dark Ecology, 25.
Morton, 25, 35, 42.
Morton, Hyperobjects, 120.
Morton, 120.
Peter Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes (Falmouth, U.K.: Urbanomic, 2014).
Morton, Hyperobjects, 196.
Morton, 196.
Jacques Derrida, “Passages—from Traumatism to Promise,” in Points, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 386.
See Morton, Dark Ecology, 18; Morton, “Frankenstein and Ecocriticism,” 153; and Timothy Morton, “Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul,” Collapse VI (2010): 271.
See Morton, “Thinking Ecology,” 274; Morton, Dark Ecology, 67.
Morton, “Thinking Ecology,” 274.
Derrida, “Passages,” 386.
Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” in States of Theory, ed. David Carroll (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 80.
Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Morton Paley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 257.
Chakrabarty, “Climate,” 197–98.
Frances Ferguson, “The Nuclear Sublime,” diacritics 14, no. 2 (1984): 6.
Ferguson, 6–7.
Ferguson, 7.
Ferguson.
Shelley, Last Man, 230.
Shelley, 232.
Shelley.
Shelley, 467.
D. A. F. Sade, Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 765–67, 769.
Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone, 1991), 27.
Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 128.
See Emmanuel Levinas, There Is: Existence without Existents, trans. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 29; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 17; Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 23; Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 150.
Cohen, Telemorphosis, 71.
Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, 105.
Colebrook, 81.
Colebrook, 27.
Colebrook, 84.
Colebrook, 206.
Claire Colebrook, Sex after Life: Essays in Extinction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 2:17; Claire Colebrook, “Anti-catastrophic Time,” New Formations 92 (2017): 103.
Chakrabarty, “Climate,” 208.
Colebrook, “Anti-catastrophic Time,” 103.
Colebrook, 108.
Colebrook, 103.
Cohen et al., Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols, 84.
Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, 55.
Cohen et al., Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols, 123, 113.
Cohen et al., 120.
Cohen et al., 118.
Cohen et al., 120.
Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1977), 26.
Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, 11, 21, 11.
Colebrook, Sex after Life, 148.
Colebrook, “Anti-catastrophic Time,” 112.
Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, 10.
Colebrook, 10.
Morton, Hyperobjects, 83; Morton, “Thinking Ecology,” 268, 277.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1976), 671–72.
Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 2005), 55, 58, 69.
Tsing, Mushroom, vii.
Tsing, 19–20.
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