As we started the second half of the "Anthropocene Humanities" course today, the tables turned. We'd wrapped up the first half, which canvassed debates about the nature and timing of the Anthropocene cataclysm among scientists and historians with Clive Hamilton's dark warnings about the godlike pretensions of ecomodernists and Roy Scranton's reuminations on "learning to die in the Anthropocene," since "our civilization is already dead." Pretty depressing stuff, all!
Today's class started with Joanna Zylinska's eerie photo film "Exit Man," included with her book The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse, in which a digitally altered voice with no inflection or recognizable gender challenges us to see the Anthropocene as the welcome end of the failed experiment of the "stand-alone subject" of modern ethics and politics and a "subjectivity that is pinned to a competitive, over-achieving and over-reaching masculinity." Zylinska's "feminist counterapocalyptic agenda promises liberation" from such distortions and "opens up to the precarious lives of human and non-human others." New possibilities are disclosed in those whose existence has long been rendered precarious by "man": "women and those of nonbinary gender, animals, fungi, microbes."
Students had read two essays. One was a critique of the continued fantasies of control and mastery in the naming of the Anthropocene - man did this, man has to address this! - which led to an overview of queer ecology, the sense that all things are entangled and entangling in ways transgressing our categories and fantasies of boundaries. The other was an argument for dating the Anthropocene to 1610's "Orbis Spike" to signal that its ultimate cause was not capitalism or the industrial revolution (let alone human nature) but colonialism's destruction of indigenous worlds, a severing of relations with the natural world in service of universalizing reason that is now affecting the colonizing cultures, too. This isn't the first Apocalypse.
I ended with a list of alternative names proposed for the Anthropocene, each connected to an account of its nature and origins and to a program for the future. Each adds a further dimension of trouble and even horror, and calls for mourning and perhaps repentance. Yet while haunted by post-apocalyptic trauma they may also disclose ways of surviving, models for the "staying with the trouble" called for by Donna Haraway (final reading of our course).
Was this awkward material to present to a class of mostly (85%?) female Chinese students as a white settler American man? You betcha.
