Reflection: Art

Terminology and Stories - Why the Word “Anthropocene” Matters

Throughout this class, there’s been a consistent back and forth in my mind about the idea of terminology as it relates to discussions of the Anthropocene. Even the first articles we read acknowledge how the word “Anthropocene” can be a misrepresentation of the epoch by implying that we, as humans, are all equally responsible for the current state of our planet. In some of our early discussions, we talked about how perhaps arguing about what we should call the Anthropocene was, in a sense, missing the point: it’s our reality regardless of how we talk about it, and arguing over aspects like names and starting dates can often enable inaction. However, concluding the course, I find myself thinking about the question of terminology again, specifically in relation to the idea of storytelling that’s come up in so many of our readings. 

There’s no shortage of discussions for alternate terms to “Anthropocene” among the works we read. “Racial Capitalocene,” coined by francophone scholar Françoise Vergès, is probably the one that caught my attention the most: in reading her work, as well as Kathryn Yusoff’s “White Utopia/Black Inferno,” I found the acknowledgement of our current moment as something beyond the “threat to human beings as an undifferentiated whole” (Verges) that the Anthropocene narrative centers. Both writers make it clear that the Anthropocene is explicitly racial, and to pretend that it began with the Industrial Revolution or the invention of the nuclear bomb is to ignore all of the blood that went into the creation of capitalism as an economic system, stretching as far back as the discovery of the so-called “New World.” Yusoff writes: 

The Anthropocene cannot dust itself clean from the inventory of which it was made: from the cut hands that bled the rubber, the slave children sold by the weight of flesh, the sharp blades of sugar, all the lingering dislocation from geography, dusting through diasporic generations. (3)  

The narrative capitalism has constructed--the idea that it’s the only economic system that could ever work, and that socialism would result in people becoming lazy and complacent--is baked into American society to the point where all interactions feel transactional. The result is not only the dehumanization of people, seen now only for their labor, but the devaluing of nature as well, its worth now measured exclusively in its value as land. Yet in the hegemony of capitalism, we see a kind of storytelling, all of the ways in which the Industrial Revolution is presented in order to glorify Man--the white man--as if it were not made possible by and “dependent on… slavery and its organization of human property as extractable energy properties” (Yusoff 7). To combat this story, Verges proposes “speculative thinking,” discussing how “world citizenship and humanism” as well as “a curriculum of radical pedagogy” are essential to decolonization. While some of us took issue with this upon first reading her work, struggling to reconcile the amount of time it would take to implement widespread changes like these with the immediacy of the current climate crisis, as I’m reflecting on these texts, I find myself appreciating the ways in which they dare us to dream.  

Furthermore, the story of capitalism is, of course, only one story. Given this class’s focus on religion and the Anthropocene, it’s a given that we discussed others, such as the Bible, specifically Genesis and its dominion clause, and how it may have contributed to the sheer amount of power certain humans--predominantly Christians--feel comfortable exercising over the earth. While there is merit to this argument, the Lynn White thesis, Bauman’s response to it is infinitely more useful in reminding us of the limits of this kind of storytelling, the kind that pigeonholes us into one narrative and argues that it is the solution to, or the source of, all of our problems. Narratives are problematic in this sense, as “all narratives have to pick and choose between the information that is included and that which is left out” (Bauman 166), and so there’s a skepticism that goes hand in hand in with storytelling, an understanding that all stories are crafted by people, and that these people, no matter how well-meaning, had intentions. There’s a paradox here in simultaneously acknowledging the ways in which we are trapped by narrative and the ways in which it frees us, but being open to a multitude of stories, as opposed to one, definitive one, is a step in the right direction. 

Still, I’m hung up on the term Anthropocene. Not all critiques of the word stem from race: Donna Haraway’s “Tentacular Thinking'' dismantles the term early on, characterizing our present time as one where “even Western-idebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only history” (30). This points out exactly why calling this epoch the Anthropocene seems counterintuitive, as it only serves to reinforce the idea of humans as some kind of prime species. At a time when we most need to understand that we are not, and have never been, a species separate from nature, or uniquely made in God’s image like stories like Genesis would have us believe, terms like the Anthropocene strip away that work by once again centering the human. Haraway’s proposal of the term “Chthulucene” is fascinating to me particularly because of the imagery she uses to describe it, “myriad tentacles” (31) that tangle together, and, crucially, “the making— of speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism… the patterning of possible worlds… gone, here, and yet to come” (31). 

Fiction as a tool for imagining the future--both storytelling and a profound act of creation--seems to be a common theme here, reinforcing my conviction that the words we use to talk about these concepts matter precisely because they say a lot about the stories we’re trying to tell-- whatever “we” means in this context. The implications of certain words, and how they fall in line with certain patterns of thinking, seem impossible to ignore. Imagining it, it feels almost as if certain language locks away--or grants us access to--new potential futures. Yet this can be a double-edged sword: once again, if we focus too much on language, we can fall into inaction, the paralyzing feeling that I came into this class with, that if I couldn’t somehow single handedly fix the Earth, then it wasn’t worth trying at all. The words we use will never be perfect. Many of us, as humans, are trying to come to terms with the fact that we, also, will never be perfect. Still, this class has left me able to envision more futures than I could fifteen weeks ago, and what matters is not perfect action, but any action at all-- an idea that I find equally terrifying and exhilarating. 

(AL)