I’m happy to share my talk from the recent Vermont Humanities conference. It captures the essence of things I’ve been writing and thinking about over the last while. And rather incredibly for a humanities conference, it was 100% glitch-free (despite the talk’s audio-visual intricacies; well, the image fades aren’t perfectly smooth, but those can be difficult for videoconferencing software to deal with).
The talk is 40 minutes long; the remainder is Q&A. Thanks to Vermont Humanities and its director, Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, and programs and communications director Ryan Newswanger, for the invitation to speak and for the smooth delivery of the event. And thanks to Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Yeampierre, and the others who made This Mazéd World a provocative and rewarding week of climate-focused presentations, and to the UVM Center for Community Engagement for supporting it.
It seems the world is coming to realize what Environmental Studies folks have been saying since I first became a Master’s student in that field 34 years ago: that humanity risks careening off the rails into a species-wide, if not planet-wide, smash-up unless it profoundly reorients the way it functions on this planet.
That three-decade time lag — characterized by disbelief by most, and systemic denial and obfuscation by some (especially vested interests like Big Oil) — has given much greater punch to the pessimism of that message, a pessimism that media are recognizing as “existential” for the current generation of young people. Today’s episode of On Point on “The Pessimistic Generation” was all about that. Host Meghna Chakrabarti’s response to a question about how she deals with news about climate change is revealing: “I read less of it.” That’s the response of someone whose job it is to read more than the rest of us. (Wow.) But her interlocutor turns it into the real point here: that we are all vulnerable to PTSD (exactly I’ve been saying about climate trauma) and that it’s a matter of survival to be selective about what we take in.
Given that my field has had 34 years to think about this issue (33 if we date it to Jim Hansen’s Congressional testimony about climate change) — the issue of how to come to grips with an apocalyptic prognosis for humanity — what have we come up with in response?
As we prepare for another Climate Change Conference of the Parties, and all the activist organizing around it, it’s important for us to come to terms with exactly what we are dealing with. This post approaches climate change from a somewhat oblique, exo-planetary perspective.
I have given a few talks recently in which I propose that climate change, along with its “traumatic core,” is analogous to the phenomena encountered by the fictional scientist-visitors to the planet Solaris in Stanislaw Lem’s 1962 novel of that name and its cinematic adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. As Lem put it,
The peculiarity of those phenomena [witnessed on Solaris] seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings.
Attempting to make sense of that “seemingly rational activity” comes to be called “Solaristics.” But alongside that activity, the Solarian ocean triggers psychological and metaphysical traumas for the humans who visit it. Solaristics, or the effort to learn about this ontologically indeterminate alien Other, becomes a profoundly unsettling activity: it is, Slavoj Zizek describes it, an encounter with one’s own “traumas, dreams, fears, desires… the innermost of your inner space.”
Here I want to compare that argument with a different kind of “encounter phenomenon,” that of reported sightings and encounters with scientifically anomalous non-human intelligences, or SANHI. I take that term from the literature on UFOs and ETs, but modify it to make clear that it doesn’t include scientifically accepted or explainable non-human intelligence, such as that found in other mammals, cetaceans, cephalopods, and the like.
One of the things modern humans aren’t very good at is being fully present in a given moment — being here now, as Ram Dass famously put it — and remaining so in the midst of the activities, distractions, and challenges of the day. Meditation apps and mindfulness teachers can train you to do that while sitting with your eyes closed, but being fully present while feeding your kids, running to catch a bus, reading a blog post, or arguing with your boss is not as easy. (Okay, I don’t scream often, so the heading of this blog post is a bit over the top. But sometimes I’d like to.)
One can ask what it means to be “fully present.” My quick answer is: with all of one’s capacities. If there’s one thing that process-relational philosophy, considered as a way of living, intends to help you with, it’s that. As napkin scribble #8 puts it: The present is all that there is; how you respond to it is all you can do. Philosophy-as-a-way-of-life is the theme of the second third of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, and its core question is “How can I best engage this moment in its full range of possibilities?” (followed by “How can I get better at that?”). The other parts of the book deal with the reasons for doing that — for instance, to lessen the suffering occurring around us as the Anthro/Capitalocene unfolds — but here I focus only on the method.
My own talk, “Event, Time, Trauma: Perambulations in and around the Anthropocenic Zone,” is here, and reproduced below. It’s short, but the Q and A rounds it out to half an hour. The talk is a brief version of a rather longer one I’ll be giving at the Vermont Humanities Conference in a few weeks. (More background on it here.)
Marking the passage of the seasons from summer to winter and back again is something people have done for millennia. Seasons are reliable — anyone living outside the equatorial band will continue to have colder and warmer seasons, probably for the rest of our lives. But many of us are realizing that larger cycles may not be so reliable, which means that the relative extent of warmth and coldness is changing. With an eye toward those larger cycles, here are a few propositions about people and the planet that I want to share on this autumn equinox.
I’ve written before of the ways that contemporary media, with their recording/archiving and modeling/projection functions, enable a simultaneous opening up of the past and the future, even as they leave us dependent on them so that our own capacities for memory and prognostication fail when our media fail. As we continue to build a universal image machine, we become more vulnerable to the technological pandemic to come.
There’s another dimension to this, which is that surveillance, once it becomes decentralized as a matter of corporate functioning (every company wants to know what its clients and competitors are doing and wanting), takes on its own agency and slithers out of the control of its users.
My thinking about the Anthropocenic predicament continues to be informed, even haunted, by Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker, along with their literary predecessor novels by (Lviv-born) Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, respectively. Two keynote talks I’ve been invited to give this October — one for Ukraine’s Congress of Culture, to take place in Lviv around the theme “The Scene of the Future,” the other for the Vermont Humanities conference, with a “Humanities and Climate Change” theme — will offer me an opportunity to work through this hauntedness a little further.
Below are slightly expanded versions of the abstracts I have sent in for these two talks, followed by some comments on the traumatic “zoneness” of impending climate change.
“Trust your immune system.” One often hears this slogan, or some version of it, from people who are against vaccination. But what does it mean, or what should it mean for an intensely social species like ours, living in a microbiologically fluid and creative environment like Earth’s biosphere?
We can only trust something if we know it to be well functioning. So on the supposition that trusting also means strengthening and maintaining, “trust your immune system” means to treat it as an individual protective shield, a kind of personal atmosphere around the planet of one’s “self,” and to feed it with what it needs — exercise, rest, a diet of nutritious and biotically regulating foods, and the like. In social philosopher Charles Taylor’s words, this individualized immunity represents the “bounded” or “buffered” self, which, as he shows, is the self of modern liberalism.
But this ignores both the biosociality of humanity and the globalizing “anthropocenity” of today’s world, so it is far from enough. Viruses do not respect individuality; they are microbial, and they spread laterally and rapidly across the boundaries of individuality we so treasure. They make individuality porous, not bounded (which, for Taylor, is exactly what religion had traditionally done; see my account in Shadowing the Anthropocene, pp. 164-180, for more on that).
I often “think out loud” on this blog. That’s been very useful as a way of getting feedback on work in progress; it also forces me to be both honest and careful with my words. The following is being shared in the same spirit: it’s related to teaching and writing in progress, but also to my participation on my university’s (informal) Indigenous people’s working group. It is thinking that’s very much in progress and subject to revision. I hope it contributes to fruitful conversations with others. I anticipate that this will be the first post of two or more, but I offer no promises on when the others may come.
Preamble: self-positioning
I should preface this with two notes: one on the relationship between these issues and the cultural and philosophical themes I more commonly write about on this blog; the other about my limited qualifications for writing about Indigenous issues. Regarding the first, my thinking here is loosely informed by my broader philosophical “project,” but I will leave that relationship for a follow-up post in which I’ll delve into some specific connections to environmental philosophy, poststructuralism, and the cultural politics of identity.
As for the second topic, I am not a scholar of Indigenous studies. I have participated in Indigenous solidarity groups over the years (going back to my activity with a group that solidarized with the traditional chiefs of the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne at a time when that nation turned out to be in a state of deep civil strife; I learned how to remove myself from the crossfire when necessary). My research, going back to my Master’s thesis, has often touched on “indigeneity” as a concept, set of discourses, and ideal, both for “wannabe Indians,” environmentalists, and “regular [white] folks,” and for Indigenous people. The research for my doctoral dissertation included interviews with a handful of Indigenous leaders in Canada and the U.S., though only the U.S. part of that made it into the final product and the book that followed. But I claim no expertise, and certainly no Indigenous ancestry, blood, or identity. (Well, there were some efforts to look into what indigeneity may mean in my “ancestral homeland” of Ukraine, but those ended up more of a prompt for deconstructive critique than an ongoing pursuit.)
All that said, my commitments, as I have expressed them over the years, are toward decolonizing, which means, in part, learning to be an ally with Indigenous people in their struggles (with all the fraughtness that entails). And my own personal vision of a viable future is a reindigenized one, by which I mean
I just sent in my abstract for the Aarhus University conference The Garden and the Dump: Across More-than-Human Entanglements. Other speakers include Tim Morton, Michael Marder, and Chinese science fiction writer Chen Qiufan. The conference, which is open to all, will take place online on September 15 and 16. Further information here. (I like the Bosch imagery, which I’ve also been using in talks and on my FB page recently.)
Here is my abstract:
Event, Time, Trauma: Perambulations in and around the Anthropocenic Zone
The Anthropocene, or the Anthro-Colonial-Capitalocene (ACCene, for short), is not a time so much as it is a Zone, which enfolds and circles around the Hyper-Event of climate trauma. We humans are positioned at various stages in relation to this Event: pre-traumatic (for those who have managed to shelter themselves so far), becoming-traumatic (for those facing loss of shelter and bearings in a readily imaginable future), already-traumatic (for current refugees, both physical and existential), and continuously-post-traumatic (for those for whom this merely continues centuries of world-destroying trauma). How we engage with these layers of the Zone will dictate how successfully we might navigate through it. I propose three temporal paths for engaging this relationship: Chronos, or the time of causal determination (and fatedness to pass); Aion, or the time of imaginative constitution (and fatedness to meaning); and Kairos, or presence to rupture (and fatedness to act).
I’ve created a new page for my trilogy of piano recordings, made between 2006 and sometime in the mid-2010s, which made use of the Yamaha Clavinova’s capacity for altering the piano’s tuning system away from the “equal temperament” westerners (and now the world) have gotten used to, and toward some more interesting sonic terrain. As I write there,
While a piano always remains a piano — its keys are struck to resound in their fixed tonalities, unlike strings (bowed) or wind instruments (blown) which can be bent, pulled, elongated, and woven into tensile braids — the possibility of modifying the tonal relationships of a pianistic keyboard opens up a vast new world. Its harmonies become movable strata, with new rhythms and relationships introduced in their overtone structures. With its timbres become more adjustable as well, a piano can come to resemble something more like a tuneable gamelan orchestra.
