Respite: 12 Anthropocene Fragments
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A deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen. …
UN official on the most recent climate change report (2018)
In fact, "contingency" is too weak a word for the degree to which I consider myself slammed, pierced and annihilated by historical fact, by a single eviscerating historical fact, the millennia-long political and ecological catastrophe whose name has been lately (Adamically) formulated: the Anthropocene.
Joyelle McSweeney (2014)
According to me, what an artist is, who an artist is, is simply somebody who helps you see reality again. It is only the artist who has really given us any sense of what it's like to be alive, to be trapped and to glory in this fact, that one is forever, or for a very short time, between that sky and this earth, and you came from someplace and you're going someplace else, you don't know where you're going and you don't know where you came from, and what it feels like to be here, and to triumph in it. Can you all hear me?
James Baldwin (1984)
1. autocollage
Every few days I tack scraps of myself to the bulletin board next to my desk, removing old fragments to make way for the new. Recent additions include a late 1960s snapshot of my mother with me on the back of her Dutch bicycle in a land struggling to hold back the sea, a 2018 news report about Australian flying foxes felled and piled high by heat, a global warming graph next to the word "stochastic" in bold. Autotheory starts here, with "I" mirrored by a collage on a wall, autobiography merging with doomsday headlines about rising sea levels, mass species extinction, and a warming planet. [End Page 167]
How to write a life in the midst of the "slow violence" (Nixon) of life's ruin? Around every corner the Anthropocene hovers, an angel of death, its progeny blooming as books, essays, films, journals, conferences, task forces, exhibitions, art installations, and websites. Timothy Morton calls the Anthropocene a "hyperobject": we cannot know it. Nonetheless, for almost a decade I've been striving to know it, reading "the Anthropocene" like a runic inscription whose meanings I will come to divine.1
Here, now, I invoke the Anthropocene not as meanings to be grasped, but as a practical reference point, a spatio-temporal orientation for hacking into the present. Following Foucault in his histories of the present, I cut into the present not as a stable place but as a border that is both "us" and "not us," both anthropos and not. This orientation is genealogical, in the Foucauldian sense: to apprehend the Anthropocene for autotheory is to allow the coherence of self, anthropos, and our age to shatter. Such an allowance has steered my self-writing toward the "rags" and "refuse" (Benjamin 460) of the Anthropocene archive: an Anthropocene in fragments. And with that redirection of my writerly attention, I am slowly learning what poets know: "I needn't say anything. Merely show" (Benjamin 460). Exhibit One: the stuff of Anthropocene autotheory [Fig. 1].
Like my bulletin board scraps, this stuff requires a means of sifting: a method. I borrow mine from Walter Benjamin's Arcades, where I've wandered for years, practicing his "ragpicker" approach to writing as "literary montage" (460). Benjamin's ragpicker gives me a model for allowing the Anthropocene's rags and refuse to "come into their own" (Benjamin 460), like trash on a beach. I admit there is something monstrous about this way of imagining my autocollage, seeing myself as detritus for a literary montage of garbage-writing. But the monstrosity is not self-deprecating: it's not personal. Just being in what is.
Other fragments wait in the wings, mutating as thoughts that arise and fall away, attaching to the "I," then receding. Thoughts grow new wings, extra fins, double heads. Thoughts are phantom limbs, the result of perseveration. In the esprit en escalier of thinking, "I" imagines she is staving off death, generating a long-winded text. The flotsam wants to swarm, like plastic or jellyfish covering the ocean, like California earthquakes, breathing...
