Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment
342
Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment
342eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
These interdisciplinary essays model a range of approaches to emotion and affect in considering a variety of primary texts, including short story collections, films, poetry, curricular programs, and contentious geopolitical locales such as Canada’s Tar Sands. Several chapters deal skeptically with familiar environmentalist affects like love, hope, resilience, and optimism; others consider what are often understood as negative emotions, such as anxiety, disappointment, and homesickness—all with an eye toward reinvigorating or reconsidering their utility for the environmental humanities and environmentalism. Affective Ecocriticism offers an accessible approach to this theoretical intersection that will speak to readers across multiple disciplinary and geographic locations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496208569 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 342 |
| Sales rank: | 875,558 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minute atmosphere"
Juliana Spahr and Anthropocene Anxiety
Nicole M. Merola
In 2005, prior to the commonplace adoption in the environmental humanities of the term "Anthropocene" to describe the advent of a new geological epoch characterized by the legibility of anthropogenic impacts on earth systems, including human and nonhuman forms of inhabitation, Juliana Spahr published this connection of everyone with lungs: poems. This connection marks a turning point in Spahr's oeuvre: the beginning of a sustained engagement with human entanglement in large-scale ecological, economic, geopolitical, and social systems that percolates throughout her recent work. In this connection Spahr excavates her complicity with the U.S. military-industrial complex in a post-9/11 world. In the prose-poem-memoir The Transformation (2007) she worries together systems of capital, climate change, colonialism, military-industrialism, politics, social formation, technological mediation, and toxicity. Poems in well then there now (2011) fret about biodiversity loss, climate change, consumerism, pollution, and connection to place. The manifesto #Misanthropocene: 24 Theses (2014), cowritten with Joshua Clover, spits with anger about uneven economic conditions, relative powerlessness in the face of "the sheer scale of the misanthropocene," and extinctions past, present, and future. And in poems in That Winter the Wolf Came (2015) oil culture vexes. Taken together, this connection, The Transformation, well then, #Misanthropocene, and That Winter constellate a set of formal experiments through which Spahr questions, encounters, materializes, and wrestles with the epistemological and ontological pressures that accrue to the newly self-reflexive, anxious position into which the Anthropocene interpellates us.
The Anthropocene is fundamentally estranging: what we thought we knew about the continuance of a habitable biosphere for currently evolved creatures has turned out to be a mirage. The knowledge that we have fouled our only form of life support positions humans in an alienated relationship to the earth. We have made the irrevocable shift from "reading 'the great stone book of nature'" to writing it. The pressure the Anthropocene puts on how to conceptualize humans and our relationships to other humans, other nonhumans, and other things also strains how to think about the contours and roles of cultural forms and their work. If the Anthropocene is among other things a period in which linear time and progressive narratives are undercut by effects of the material persistence of things we thought would disappear (carbon emissions, plastics); a period when speeds of biological change (habitat disruption, extinction, monocultures) exceed natural background rates; a period of diminishments in some locations (glacial ice) and augmentations in others (ocean acidification); a period when measuring and rendering technologies like the Keeling Curve, paleoclimatological records, and projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports force encounters with the recorded and probable consequences of anthropogenic actions; a period when we must find ways to think about things and processes that are too big, nebulous, diffuse, and complicated to easily apprehend or comprehend (climate change, slow violence);5 a period that simultaneously produces and demands scale confusion; a period when individual and collective human actions exceed the boundaries of the body, the neighborhood, the region, the nation in new and frightening ways; then we need to pose the following questions: What genres, forms, tactics, strategies, and politics are commensurate with this strange period? What new or reworked affects does the Anthropocene spawn? What roles can and should cultural forms take in mediating, capturing, registering, modeling, and experimenting with how to live in Anthropocenically precarious times?
Readers familiar with Anthropocene discourse know that robust debates about the advent of the period abound. Candidates include 13,800 BP (human predation of megafauna and vegetation changes), 11,000–9,000 BP (worldwide domestication of plants and animals), 8,000–5,000 BP (the spread of human agriculture), 1492/1610 (contact between New and Old Worlds/the Orbis Spike), 1769 (James Watt's first patent for improvements to Newcomen's steam engine, a catalyst for the Industrial Revolution), 1945 (the United States' detonation of atomic bombs during World War II), and circa 1950 (the beginning of the Great Acceleration). While the Working Group on the Anthropocene (AWG), citing the dispersion of radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests and deployments as the probable Golden Spike, has proposed circa 1950 as the official beginning, I find 1492/1610 the most conceptually interesting as a biocultural marker. While evidence in the geological record might not be sufficient for scientists to use 1492/1610 as the official beginning, positioning the Anthropocene as coterminous with New/Old World contact and its index, the Orbis Spike (a low point of atmospheric CO2, measured in glacial ice and thought to be the result of the rapid population decline of New World peoples due to exposure to disease, war, enslavement, and famine and of contact-driven changes in agricultural practices) usefully elongates the period while also emphasizing these critical elements of the Anthropocene concept absent from earlier start dates: a global scale of irrevocable change, a speed of change distinct from background rates of change, and the establishment of an anthropogenic world-system for exercising power through transporting biological resources (human and nonhuman) across vast distances. These systems are the progenitors of today's global capitalisms.
Within this 1492-to-present Anthropocene period I want to highlight a date I see as crucial for both contextualizing and formulating Anthropocene anxiety, an affect specifically concerned with inaction in the face of and worry about global socioecological change: March 29, 1958. This date marks the first data point on the now iconic Keeling Curve, an ongoing graph of atmospheric CO2 measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory. The Keeling Curve and other related scientific technologies that measure, communicate, and/or project the effects of anthropogenic activities serve as key context for Anthropocene anxiety because they play dual, connected roles. They capture and make legible the effects of anthropogenic activity, offering baseline knowledge that underwrites environmental affect. And, when wrapped with electronic and televisual communication systems and the rise of twenty-four-hour punditry, they work as components in the amplification of Anthropocene anxiety and guilt. That is, the more various detrimental trends (in carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, sea ice loss, etc.) increase, the less we do about arresting those increases, the more anxiety and guilt we feel, the more affective impact the next graph or chart can have, and so on — a classic example of a feedback loop. These capacities for global real-time measuring and future modeling and quick and wide distribution of these charts, graphs, and models, which serve in part to amplify environmental affect, make current forms of environmental feeling qualitatively different than older, more temporally and spatially limited forms.
Scientific measuring technologies and the graphs and charts that synthesize and communicate information are one cultural form for capturing the Anthropocene and understanding some of the catalysts of its affects. Literary forms, which offer another cultural location for Anthropocene capture, can also trap the more embodied and personal forms that scientific technologies sieve; they engage affective registers not conventionally appropriate to scientific forms. A brief example from this connection, which serves as both companion and foil to the Keeling Curve in its expression of awareness of anthropogenic activity, signals how Spahr tracks, worries, and materializes the transition from Holocene to Anthropocene frameworks while also figuring the reset to human-nonhuman epistemologies and ontologies the Anthropocene demands. Spahr closes the poem "December 2, 2002" with three couplets occasioned by Space Shuttle Mission STS-113 (Endeavour). The end reads as follows: "Beloveds, the shuttle is set to return home and out the window of / the shuttle one can see the earth. // 'How massive the earth is; how minute the atmosphere,' one of / the astronauts notes. // Beloveds, what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minute atmosphere?" The affective and conceptual movement across the three couplets, from wonder to anxious awareness of limits, indexes the transition from Holocene to Anthropocene. The first couplet evokes two iconic photographs of earth taken from space, Earthrise (1968) and The Blue Marble (1972). These images highlight the planet's aesthetic beauty and suggest its exceptional nature. In Earthrise the gray surface of the moon fills the frame's foreground, setting off the magnificent colors of an earth that floats in the black void of space. The Blue Marble also emphasizes color: the blue Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the white clouds, the reds, tans, and browns of the African continent, the island of Madagascar, and the Arabian Peninsula. Although these photographs fall within the Anthropocene period, they are not Anthropo(s)cenic in nature since they do not record any legible human impact on the planet. They emphasize, rather, the kind of wholeness conveyed by the term Holocene (from the Greek holos, meaning whole or entire). The second couplet, which introduces concepts of spatial scale, fragility, and limits, interjects the notion of planetary vulnerability and begins the shift from Holocene to Anthropocene epistemologies. The third couplet completes this conversion, foregrounding both human dependence on the earth and its fragile atmosphere and the resignation of our constrained options: all that is left for us is to "keep breathing as best we can." Through the doubled connotation of "minute," the third couplet also figures temporal scale, the time-limited nature of the earth's atmosphere. By setting off the phrase "minute atmosphere" as its own line and by ending the poem with a question, Spahr concretizes anxieties, implicit here but explicit elsewhere in this connection and in her other work, about the impacts of anthropogenic activities on how humans and nonhumans breathe and live. Spahr's focus on respiration here, and on the earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere that enables it, foreshadows a different kind of attention she will pay to breath in "Dynamic Positioning," the poem I consider in depth below.
As environmental humanities scholars continue to mull what to talk about when we talk about the Anthropocene, and as the brief juxtaposition of two kinds of cultural forms above suggests, it is important to tarry at the juncture of form and affect. While form might be commonly understood as mold, or structure, or shape, or essence, I am interested in its agential, performative capacities in the text, in the circuit between text and reader, and in the realm of argumentation. As Ellen Rooney argues, "the extinction of an entire range of modes of formal analysis has eroded our ability to read every genre of text — literary texts, nonliterary texts, aural and visual texts, and the social text itself. The cost is a loss of power for the politicized readings we eagerly seek to project beyond the boundaries of mere texts or disciplines, including readings of cultural forms that are not in any sense literary or (narrowly) linguistic, such as race, the market, the immune system, democracy, virtuality." Although Rooney targets literary and cultural studies scholarship in general when she critiques reading practices that tend toward the thematic, historical, political, theoretical, and contextual at the expense of the formalist, her point pertains also to much environmental humanities work. For Rooney form should be understood as both "the enabling condition and the product of reading," "both theory's/ideology's/history's shadow and the force that permits the text to emerge as ideology's or theory's interlocutor, rather than as its example," and as "the contrariness of the text insofar as it is the moment at which the reading both blocks and engages with any theory." Anahid Nersessian provides another useful angle on form, defining it as an adjustment or an operation that puts experience and representation into a "noteworthy" asymmetrical relationship.
In addition to including the ecological as a category for formalist study, a pivot from the categories Rooney lists, Nersessian's focus on anxiogenic forms also turns us back toward the affect/form interface and into the company of contemporary scholars such as Lauren Berlant, Eugenie Brinkema, Heather Houser, Sianne Ngai, and Rachel Greenwald Smith, with whose work mine converses. Although Brian Massumi's work figures in many affect studies, for my purposes here it is not attentive enough to form. On the relationship between affect and form Massumi and Brinkema occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. For Massumi "affect is unqualified. As such it is not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique." For Brinkema, on the other hand, affect studies turn nonsensical without attention to form and to the reading practices its analysis demands. One of the trenchant questions Brinkema poses — "What, in other words, would happen to the study of affectivity and form if we were to reintroduce close reading to the study of sensation, not as felt by moved bodies, but as wildly composed in specific cinematic, literary, and critical texts?" — indexes the central importance of the text in her work. Thus for Brinkema the human who encounters the text is less important than the text and what it does formally to compose affects. I think the formal experiments Spahr conducts demand affect studies and reading modes that fasten closer to Brinkema than Massumi but that also, contra Brinkema, position the human reader and body as centrally important to the composition, elicitation, production, and circulation of affect. In this respect Houser's formulation "narrative affect," in which "'affect' designates body-based feelings that arise in response to elicitors as varied as interpersonal and institutional relations, aesthetic experience, ideas, sensations, and material conditions in one's environment" and in which "affects are attached to formal dimensions of texts such as metaphor, plot structure, and character relations," offers a useful pathway. However, as I suggest below, through the formal tactics Spahr employs (many of which occupy a physiological register "below" those engaged by plot structure, character relations, or metaphor) her writing complicates the formulation "narrative affect" by excavating and foregrounding William James's notion of the "bodily sounding-board" as an important lever for thinking and feeling Anthropocene affects.
Since the late aughts critics have paid increasing attention to Spahr's writing, focusing, for instance, on how her writing engages issues in contemporary poetics, manifests networks, and evinces an ecopoetics. While much of the scholarship on Spahr is compelling, to date there has been little attention paid to how her formal and syntactic tactics materialize endemically Anthropocene forms of affect. Spahr worries the same concerns across a range of genres and forms, and she engages a range of Anthropocene affects — including very circumscribed forms of interpersonal hope, dis-ease, distraction, irritation, grief, anger, rage, and "west melancholy." As a result, her work offers an exemplary network for attending to what I call the form/affect/Anthropocene seam. As this list indicates, I position Spahr as a doyenne of unpleasant ecological feelings working within the context of a pervasiveness in recent U.S. and British literature and films of what some might identify as less salutary ecological affects, in particular, sadness, despair, grief, melancholy, anxiety, fear, resignation. Encouraged by Stephanie LeMenager's reminder that "feeling ecological need not be pleasant," and in alignment with Houser's work on environment and affect, my examination of Spahr's work helps stake the claim for the importance of remaining open to unpleasant ecological feelings, tracking how they show up in contemporary cultural forms, and parsing the consequences of their appearance. These activities, I wager, can help us articulate how to live with "geological changes moving us rapidly away from a certain ingrained normativity, a certain set of expectations about relations among the past, present, and future." To put it more simply, I see avowal of the eco-unpleasant as commensurate with the Anthropocene.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Affective Ecocriticism"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Toward an Affective Ecocriticism: Placing Feeling in the Anthropocene Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino Part 1. Theoretical Foundations 1. “what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minute atmosphere”: Juliana Spahr and Anthropocene Anxiety Nicole M. Merola 2. From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress: A Cognitive Approach to Love in the Anthropocene Alexa Weik von Mossner 3. A New Gentleness: Affective Ficto-Regionality Neil Campbell Part 2. Affective Attachments: Land, Bodies, Justice 4. Feeling the Fires of Climate Change: Land Affect in Canada’s Tar Sands Jobb Arnold 5. Wendell Berry and the Affective Turn William Major 6. A Hunger for Words: Food Affects and Embodied Ideology Tom Hertweck 7. Uncanny Homesickness and War: Loss of Affect, Loss of Place, and Reworlding in Redeployment Ryan Hediger Part 3. Animality: Feeling Species and Boundaries 8. Desiring Species with Darwin and Freud Robert Azzarello 9. Tragedy, Ecophobia, and Animality in the Anthropocene Brian Deyo 10. Futurity without Optimism: Detaching from Anthropocentrism and Grieving Our Fathers in Beasts of the Southern Wild Allyse Knox-Russell Part 4. Environmentalist Killjoys: Politics and Pedagogy 11. The Queerness of Environmental Affect Nicole Seymour 12. Feeling Let Down: Affect, Environmentalism, and the Power of Negative Thinking Lisa Ottum 13. Feeling Depleted: Ecocinema and the Atmospherics of Affect Graig Uhlin 14. Coming of Age at the End of the World: The Affective Arc of Undergraduate Environmental Studies Curricula Sarah Jaquette Ray List of Contributors Index