{"id":12025,"date":"2021-08-11T19:49:52","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T00:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=12025"},"modified":"2021-10-15T09:37:12","modified_gmt":"2021-10-15T14:37:12","slug":"through-an-anthroposcenic-glass-darkly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/08\/11\/through-an-anthroposcenic-glass-darkly\/","title":{"rendered":"Through an Anthropo(s)cenic Glass, Darkly"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My thinking about the Anthropocenic predicament continues to be informed, even haunted, by Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris <\/em>and Stalker<\/em>, along with their literary predecessor novels by (Lviv-born) Stanis\u0142aw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, respectively. Two keynote talks I’ve been invited to give this October — one for Ukraine’s Congress of Culture<\/a>, to take place in Lviv around the theme “The Scene of the Future,” the other for the Vermont Humanities conference<\/a>, with a “Humanities and Climate Change” theme — will offer me an opportunity to work through this hauntedness a little further. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

For the Vermont Humanities Conference:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Zone is Us: Sacrifice in the Space-Time of Climate Change<\/strong><\/p>

The Anthropocene is less a time than it is a Zone, a \u201cspace-time\u201d encircling the central event of impending climate change. Like the gale-force winds that build into a spiraling hurricane, this stormy Zone circles around an \u201ceye\u201d that can hardly be faced directly\u2014that of climate trauma. We humans are positioned variously in relation to it: there are the pre-traumatic<\/em>, who have managed to shelter themselves so far; the becoming-traumatic<\/em>, who face loss of shelter and bearings in a readily imaginable, almost-here future; the already-traumatized<\/em>, refugees seeking shelter from wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, rising seas, and wars over land, water, and other climate-affected conditions; and the continuously-traumatized<\/em>, including Indigenous and colonized populations for whom climate change is continuous with centuries of world-destroying and identity-rupturing trauma. How we engage with these layers of the Zone will dictate how successfully we might navigate through it. <\/p>

Gleaning from ancient Greek mythology, I propose three paths for engaging this relationship: those of Chronos, or causal determination (a space for science and the measurement of progress through the Zone); of Aion, or imaginative constitution (a space for the arts and humanities); and of Kairos, entailing the leap into action without guarantees.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And for the Congress of Culture in Lviv, Ukraine: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Future Culture, Through an Anthropocenic Glass, Darkly<\/strong><\/p>

To speculate about the “future of culture” in a time of “anthropocenity,” as Canadian philosopher Todd Dufresne has called<\/a> the Anthropocene predicament, is to peer into a crystal ball swirling with foggy uncertainties. This is not unlike a visit to the planet Solaris, the strange subject-object of Stanislaw Lem\u2019s literary (1961) and Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s cinematic (1972) imaginations. We cannot describe it without describing ourselves and our collective condition — a condition of doubt, anxiety, guilt, and paralysis, tinged with utopian aspirations and dystopian fears, and seen through a parallax of vision in which the present moment intersects with geological time, the modern era throws itself open to the poker-faced immensity of the cosmos, and one’s own vulnerability is measured against that of others more or much less fortunate.<\/p>

If culture today has become mediatized, globalized (yet echo-chambered), anesthetized (yet hyper-articulate), and variously weaponized (toward uncertain ends), what will culture be tomorrow? Which culture, and whose<\/em> culture? In the thick atmosphere of this new planetary configuration, the Planet Anthropocene, we are yet to find if the air will be breathable<\/a> (as Achille Mbembe has warned us<\/a>). This talk will probe some of the challenges of prognosticating a culture for and beyond the Anthropocene.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I’ve written a lot about the “Zone<\/a>,” especially in my work on cinema. Slavoj \u017di\u017eek’s analysis of both of the mentioned films is illuminating, but his take on Stalker<\/em> has been particularly helpful for my own, which served as<\/a> the paradigmatic model for the film-philosophy developed in Ecologies of the Moving Image<\/em><\/a>. By contrast, I wrote about Solaris<\/em> only fragmentarily there (especially in reference to Steven Dillon’s The Solaris Effect<\/a><\/em>), and a bit more here<\/a> (in reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s “new earth” and a “people to come”). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spat between Lem and Tarkovsky<\/a>, on the other hand, crystallizes something important in how we might come to treat “anthropocenity,” which concerns how and whether this strange planet\/condition we are encountering is a genuine Other, something utterly new and perhaps even unthinkable up to now (Lem’s view, more or less), or a mirror unto ourselves which may or may not reveal something we aren’t normally capable of seeing, or wanting to see, in ourselves (Tarkovsky’s). In other words, it concerns a certain “anthropocentrism” which, when interrogated, might reveal something very Other at the “center” of this “anthropos” (Tarkovsky?), yet which itself may be the very problem in how we approach the others around us and far from us (Lem?). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing Tarkovsky adds to Lem’s and the Strugatskys’ more science-fictional reference points is the kind of Earth-groundedness that \u017di\u017eek refers to in his analysis of Stalker<\/em>. I’d recommend \u017di\u017eek’s readings of both Tarkovsky films as appropriate pre-viewing for both of my talks; he summarizes them in the videos below. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I also feel the need to introduce something more concretely geocentric — for which Peter Brannen’s<\/a> recent piece in The Atlantic, “The Dark Secrets of the Earth’s Deep Past<\/a>” (renamed a bit more extremely in its online version) is a beautifully evocative reading. The Zone, after all, is not just a psychological and emotional Zone. It is the Zone of a dynamic Earth<\/a> out of which we’ve been fortunate to have carved out an immunological<\/a> “safe space<\/a>” of the Holocene, a space<\/a> that’s in serious danger of threading apart over the course of a few generations of humans. The Anthropocene event<\/a> is in this sense the signpost marking our exit from the comfort of a civilization-harboring Holocene reality, and our re-entry into a wilder, untamable and unknowable Zone. (Read the just-released IPCC report<\/a> for more hints on that.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For the Ukraine talk, I might also recommend Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly<\/a><\/em>, and Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13<\/a>, the source of the titular phrase, with all of its mirrored reflection on knowing and not-knowing oneself and not-oneself: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There are utopian, millenarian assumptions infusing St. Paul’s promise that we will know<\/em> even as we come to know ourselves<\/em>. The anthropocenic Zone, however, suggests neither may come to pass. (And please recall that the Anthropocene is named after its instigator, but has no bearings on whether that instigator — humans — will actually survive into the epoch named after it. If we do not, the name is likely to also go the way of the dodo, or the passenger pigeon<\/a>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, perhaps, that we need some sort of new religious dispensation to make the Zone livable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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