The topic of the latest session of "Anthropocene Humanities" was "Descularizing the Anthropocene," a subject not only dreadfully polysyllabic but, for China, a little delicate. I didn't say "religion" - but then I didn't talk about religion or the religions. I talked about those experiences of surplus feeling, especially in places of complicated interaction with other-than-human forces, which across history have taken the form of spirits. We ended with Bronislaw Szerszynski's brilliant typology of "gods of the Anthropocene" - superhuman agencies arising in ostensibly secular theories of the Anthropocene - but the way in was more subtle.
I started with a brief review of some of the last session's material on apocalypse - which can mean the end of the world but also the uncovering of great knowledge, something new and more true than the "world" which is ending. Apocalyptic times might be the dawning of something radically different, but the main experience is vertiginous, of the collapse of all we've come to think we know. Roy Scranton was our representative Cassandra: our civilization is dead! We're doomed, now what? This is terrifying, a presentiment of the loss of worlds of so many indigenous peoples across the planet, and many more are experiencing it every year - like those discovering that along with hundreds of humans, a billion marine animals were "cooked to death" in the recent heat dome over western Canada.
For others, including presumably most of us in my class, though, it's still just over the horizon, like the steady drumbeat of unassimiliably awful news like that of the Canadian crustacean Apocalype. (A good account of that diffuse unease is Jenny Offill's Weather, an excerpt of which I gave the class to read last week.) To engage these gentler, if also unsettling, experiences I introduced the concept of "solastalgia."
This term, coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, characterizes the psychic distress attending the experience of environmental change, especially in the place you live. It's the paradoxical "homesickness you have when you are still at home." This includes the mourning attending the awareness of things that are no longer present - you used to be able to see X here, there used to be a Y here but it died - but shades into a foreboding about the future, the sense that more loss is certain.
I shared a short video some students at Oxford produced a few years ago, where students used their immobilized faces as canvases for images of widening environmental destruction in the environs where they grew up. (At top, a man from North Dakota depicts nitrification of rivers from industrial agriculture; the woman above is hearing reports on how the air in Seoul will in coming years become harder and harder to breathe. At the end, they reveal their faces, quickly wiping off most, but not all of the paint.) Their mute witness is very powerful, and in many senses brings the Anthropocene home. I asked students in their groups to reflect on why and how this little film was made, and if they had any similar memories. One reported:
The trees near my house were gradually cut down. The buildings replaced the previously heavily wooded area. When I was a kid, I loved tying the hammock to trees and sleeping in them, but now it is hard to find two adjacent trees to tie the hammock. When summer arrived, the whole area was very hot and dry, and everyone was reluctant to go out.
I suppose something like solastalgia is common for most people in China, whose landscape has been transformed beyond recognition with wave upon wave of urbanization. It's not quite the shock at environmental change Albrecht had in mind, but I'll take the image of the child without a second tree to tie his hammock to.
Our discussion proceeded from these disturbed human faces to the "Prophecy" photos of Fabrice Monteiro, where materials found in various pollution and climate-impacted areas in Senegal are brought together (with the help of fashion designer Doulcy) in the form of jinns - spirits defined as much by pain as by power. It's an interesting way into religious imagination, the human form stretched painfully beyond itself. We'll talk next class about some Daoist ideas: more religions. In the meantime, a student shared some images by contemporary Chinese photographer Wan Yunfeng, which employ similar means - that's him, below - to make environmental devastation real to us.
