September 2024 – WritingtheAnthropocene

04/09/202404/09/2024

How to Write (Hi)stories in the Anthropocene?

by Anna-Lena Eick, Achim Landwehr and Tom Vanassche

This story has some of the classic elements that a good story should generally have: a recognisable hero, a clear location, an identifiable point in time, an unprecedented event and a clear message coupled with a fundamental change in everything that happens afterwards. And even though the story has already been told so many times that one would be reluctant to tell it again, it should not be left out of any introduction on the subject. It is the story of how, in February 2000 (could there be a more symbolic year?), the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen (a highly decorated, Nobel Prize-winning hero) attended a congress of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and reacted angrily to repeated references to the Holocene as the current geological epoch (accounts differ as to the exact form of the emotional outburst), saying that there was no longer a Holocene, but that the human geological epoch had begun: the Anthropocene. And nothing has been the same since. [1]

In a way, this scene could be scripted as one of the film industry’s clichéd images of the eccentric behaviour of scientists at academic events. In the meantime, however, this scene takes on the function of a mythologem capable of establishing a new myth, just as Paul Crutzen did when he initiated the discussion on the Anthropocene. If historiography can be seen as a form of mythology in a culture that otherwise rejects myth, as Michel de Certeau once observed, [2] then the Anthropocene discourse certainly has mythological qualities. It is, after all, a narrative with a claim to universal explanation that the human species tells itself about itself, and thus this narrative also fulfils the functions of a metanarrative. There is no doubt that the scientific diagnosis of the Anthropocene is essentially about political decisions, endangered animal species, technical solutions, climate catastrophe scenarios, financial resources or the need for fundamentally different ways of living and behaving for the human species. But it is precisely because the concept of the Anthropocene touches on such a wide range of areas that its mythical nature becomes apparent. For like any good myth, the metanarrative of the Anthropocene envelops the whole Earth with all its organic and inorganic components, and is, as Hans Blumenberg said of world narratives, ‘an imaginative excess of anthropomorphic appropriation of the world and the theomorphic enhancement of man.’ [3]

It is not surprising that a supposedly myth-less culture, such as the so-called Western culture based on self-attributed principles such as rationality, Enlightenment or secularity, continues to tell itself myths. Although the gods, or even the one God, only play a minor role in such constellations, mythological elements have by no means disappeared. They remain alive in the form of substitute gods, in the guise of ideologies, principles, foundations or collective singularities, which usually have no more stable basis than the fact that they are constantly being talked about. Whether it is the classless society, infinite growth or history: such abstractions are used to install new gods with an all-encompassing claim to explanation.

The Anthropocene fits seamlessly into this series of neo-mythological figurations. It can be expected to play this role not only because of the impressive career that this term and its essential contents have already completed in the relatively short time of its existence. [4] It can also be trusted because of its fundamental consequences, once one is prepared to accept the concept. It is not just to say that the human species has become the main force influencing the planet, in the same league as the Earth’s plate tectonics, the impact of asteroids or the emergence or extinction of certain life forms. If we really take the Anthropocene seriously, then this also means that it must necessarily be the last age that the human species will experience. This is because a new geological era can only begin when humanity is no longer a major factor influencing the planet. [5]

Regardless of how the acute and ongoing climate crisis will play out in the future, the adoption of the Anthropocene as a narrative makes it clear that humanity is telling its own end, or even or ‘telling towards’ that end: a scope with undoubtedly mythological qualities.

But what if the term is unable to assert itself as a collective singular in the long term? Does the Anthropocene exist at all, or are there not several Anthropocenes? At least three variants can be distinguished. We do not want to deal with the first one here. Suffice it to point out that this is the narrative of self-incurred ignorance or active repression, according to which there is no such thing as human-induced global warming. In this logic, the concept of the Anthropocene is useless because the phenomenon does not exist. Of course, this also requires narratives, and analysing them is undoubtedly of academic importance. However, because the denial strategy clumsily insists on ignoring widely verified and confirmed data, the resulting narratives are not particularly ambitious or imaginative, but are at most impressive for the blatant display of the narrators’ cognitive dissonance.

There are at least two other, and far more interesting, versions of the Anthropocene in circulation. [6] One is the geological one – and as these lines are being written, it is developing into a drama of almost theatrical proportions, the final act of which is yet to be written. To summarise the content, which can also serve as a mythologem, as succinctly as possible: Since 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group, under the decisive leadership of Jan Zalasiewicz, a British palaeobiologist, has been working on the question of whether human influence on the planet can also be determined according to geological criteria, i.e. whether a primary marker including geochronological time can be identified that is detectable across the globe. In the summer of 2023, plutonium was identified as this marker, the year 1950 was defined as the epochal break, and Lake Crawford in Canada was cited as the key witness to the existence of the Anthropocene, that should therefore serve as a benchmark for other determinations of the new geological age elsewhere. According to the procedure for defining geological epochs, the Working Group’s proposal must be accepted by higher-level bodies but was rejected in March 2024 by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) and then also by the highest body, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). These bodies did not attempt to negate the human influence on the planet, but cited methodological arguments related to the defining marker and the appropriate point in time.

Since the geological narrative is currently somewhat confused, at least for non-geologists, what remains for the time being is the much more publicly powerful story: that which can be defined as a political-ecological narrative or as a form of cultural self-interpretation. It has long since been established, independently of specific geological discussions and without having to offer concrete yet subtle marks or dates, that humanity has become a planetary factor. This discourse on the Anthropocene offers a plausible way of describing the current state, the historical development and the future prospects of the human species – another criterion that can be expected of meaningful metanarratives.

But is it really a plausible narrative? There are more than a few doubters in the public debate about the Anthropocene. In addition to climate-denying conspiracy theories, there are also those for whom the Anthropocene narrative is not sufficiently differentiated. Is it even possible to talk about humanity when it comes to the Anthropocene? Who is the anthropos of the Anthropocene, as Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz have asked? [7] Aren’t the Anthropocene and humanity simply bringing more god-like collective singularities into the world? Shouldn’t we be asking much more precisely who is responsible for climate change, species extinction and environmental pollution, so that a term like Capitalocene would actually be more appropriate? [8] Or is the talk of the Anthropocene not once again far too anthropocentric, because it once again tailors the entire narrative to the human species? Shouldn’t we take into account the numerous narrative possibilities, especially those of non-human actors, and instead speak of the Chthulucene, as Donna Haraway has suggested? [9]

Here, too, the confusion is great and the alternatives manifold. Despite all the legitimate concerns that can be raised about the ecological claims of the Anthropocene, one or two sceptical doubts must remain about the formal design of this concept, both from a narratological and a historical-theoretical perspective. Isn’t it strange that previous geological epochs such as the Holocene, the Archaic or the Proterozoic cover hundreds of millions, or even billions of years, and that the transitions between these epochs themselves span very long periods of time – but now the Anthropocene is to be dated to the exact year, few decades after its beginning? And is it not surprising that the Anthropocene brings back the same mechanisms that have always characterised a Western European epochal model, and which – as with the colonial spread of these models of time and history – once again claim global validity? [10]

It is therefore not necessary to deny the ecological, political and economic realities of the Anthropocene in order to find the formal-aesthetic and narrative modes of telling this Anthropocene problematic and inadequate. Rather, it is more a matter of a warning: namely, not to repeat in the narrative of the Anthropocene the very modern patterns that the Anthropocene concept is supposed to critique. These include not least the Western, unilinear modelling of time, the overly rapid universalisation of provincial knowledge, the continued glorification of human action even though this species itself represents the pinnacle of evolutionary possibilities in terms of planetary destruction), or the perpetuation of narratives of growth and progress, even when these are given a negative connotation.

Various fictional genres, be they literary or cinematic forms, graphic novels or computer games, sometimes repeat the problems of the Anthropocene narrative – but in successful cases they can also always show how the causes and effects of a human-influenced planet can be told in a more complex and profitable way. Precisely because the uncertainty is great and the irritations are noticeable everywhere, it seems necessary not to narrow the field too early, not only with regard to concrete ecological options for action, but also with regard to narrative offers of meaning. On the contrary: the epistemological-subversive potential of narrative in the broadest sense must be taken seriously and at the same time its relationship to the metanarrative of the Anthropocene must be explored. For if the concept of the Anthropocene – problematic though it may be – already contains the general statement that things can no longer go on as they have in the so-called European-Western modernity, then the narrative modes cannot remain unaffected by this. After all, they are hardly less important than reducing CO2 emissions or preserving biodiversity. And here we actually find both possibilities and peculiarities of the human species: not only to have narrative possibilities of various kinds, but actually to be dependent on them, because they generate this precious resource called ‘meaning’.

Whatever you want to call what is currently being observed, whether you want to call it, the Anthropocene or something else, at least one thing is clear: it needs to be told. And it needs be told in a way that can be connected and understood, without reproducing familiar patterns that have contributed significantly to the mess that the Anthropocene diagnosis seeks to analyse and heal.

In the Anthropocene discourse, therefore, narrative modes are therefore important on different levels: in the sense of a calendrically identifiable emergence of this mythologem; in the modelling of the Anthropocene as a (geo)historical epoch – however accepted or rejected; in the search for possible alternative narrative and explanatory models for the Anthropocene; in the integration of Anthropocene phenomena into more general cultural narrative traditions – across media boundaries; and finally, with the most far-reaching consequences, in the attempt to remodel and effectively provincialize those Western modern narrative modes that have contributed significantly to the constellation of problems that is referred to as the Anthropocene and that continue to be embedded in this very Anthropocene concept.

It is therefore no trivial matter to ask what stories can be told about the Anthropocene – and whether we should be telling them at all. Especially when it comes to finding our way in a fundamentally changed planetary situation and offering meaningful and plausible narratives, [11] factual and fictional narratives could have a lot to say to each other.

[1] Not this scene, but relevant texts can be found in Paul J. Crutzen: Das Anthropozän. Schlüsseltexte des Nobelpreisträgers für das neue Erdzeitalter, München 2019.

[2] Michel de Certeau: Theoretische Fiktionen. Geschichte und Psychoanalyse, ed. Luce Giard, 2. Aufl. Wien 2006, 57f.

[3] Hans Blumenberg: Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, Frankfurt a.M. 2001, 331.

[4] It has already been established that Paul Crutzen was not the first to use this term. But he established it – quite ambiguously – in the long term. For earlier uses of the Anthropocene, cf. Ariane Tanner: Anthropozän, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte (03.05.2022) https://docupedia.de/zg/Tanner_anthropozaen_v1_de_2022; Hanno Bergthaller/Eva Horn: Anthropozän zur Einführung, Hamburg 2019.

[5] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro/Deborah Danowski: In welcher Welt leben? Ein Versuch über die Angst vor dem Ende, Berlin 2019, 11.

[6] For further details: Gabriele Dürbeck: Narrative des Anthropozän – Systematisierung eines interdisziplinären Diskurses. In: Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 3 (2018) 1-20.

[7] Christophe Bonneuil/Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: The Shock of the Anthropocene. The earth, history, and us, London/New York 2016.

[8] Jason W. Moore (ed.): Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism, Oakland 2016.

[9] Donna Haraway: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthuluzän, Durham and London 2016.

[10] Achim Landwehr: Epochalismus. Zu Symptomatik und Therapie einer Berufskrankheit, in: Andreas Mahler/Cornel Zwierlein (eds.): Zeiten bezeichnen. Frühneuzeitliche Epochenbegriffe: europäische Geschichte und globale Gegenwart, Wolfenbüttel 2023, 91-104.

[11] On the helpful but clearly under-theorised concept of plausibility, see Thomas G. Kirsch/Christina Wald (eds.): Vorläufige Gewissheiten. Plausibilität als soziokulturelle Praxis, Bielefeld 2024.

02/09/2024

Preliminary Considerations on the Literary Textualization of Time under the Sign of the Anthropocene

by Kevin Drews

Upon being awarded the WORTMELDUNGEN Ulrike Crespo Literature Prize 2023 for her essay Schwankende Kanarien, Judith Schalansky diagnosed a “Krise des Erzählens” in the face of climate change, the extinction of species and the acidification of the oceans.¹ It is primarily the climatic tipping points of our ecosystem that challenge our imagination and intellectual processing to the same extend as they doom attempts to depict them narratively to failure. Despite an awareness of the potential for tipping points and, in some cases, the mere probability of their occurrence, there is a lack of awareness of their eventfulness and suddenness. In contrast with the connotations of the term, the process of tipping does not have a defined time structure. Instead, the effects of crossing threshold values are what we can perceive. At the same time, a crisis of experience emerges at these tipping points, situated in the field of tension between geological deep time and human cultural history.

This triangular constellation of crisis of experience, crisis of narrative and crisis of historical consciousness, which is reminiscent of the discussions of the 1920s under the sign of the crisis of historicism, appears to be expanding and intensifying into the planetary realm. Such a diagnosis of crisis also gives rise to a number of questions, not least in terms of the legitimization of the professional study of literature. If tipping points present problems of perception and representation, might aesthetic strategies and experimental arrangements not be predestined to make something visible and to make it appear? The objective is to make the diffusion of different time structures, which also occurs at tipping points, tangible and socially negotiable. However, it is precisely this aspect, the aesthetic potential of making visible, that Schalansky seems to fundamentally question – explicitly with regard to a narrativization of the tense clash of different measures of time.

Schalansky herself responds to this aesthetic challenge of representation by emphasizing the essay as a distinct form of writing. As an experimental form of writing, Schwankende Kanarien manages to combine “contemplation, knowledge and empathy”.² Between conceptual work and sensual contemplation, she investigates the possibilities and limits of literature as an early warning system for climatic tipping points. Schalansky traces the cultural history of the canary in several instances. Canaries were utilized in mining to warn the miners underground of a lack of oxygen in good time. As soon as the canary stopped chirping, it was about time to leave the mine as fast as possible. Based on the phrase ‘canary in the coal mine’, Schalansky explores the extent to which literature can serve as a means of making such a dramatic index of time tangible and accessible to narration. In essence, it is the roommate Sibylle, who features in the essay, who represents the potential for a novel form of writing.

Sybille is currently working on the development of a plot for a streaming series and is drafting the midpoint, the dramaturgical turning point that Schalansky identifies as the tipping points observed in the ecosystems, representing a point of no return. The essay asks whether something can be learned from this concept of the midpoint, from its dramaturgical staging, about the possibilities of literature as an early warning system. It is striking that the essay is not concerned with the plot of the series, about which we learn nothing, but rather intensively with the way in which it is created, with the technical aspect of the production process. All over Sybille’s apartment are yellow post-its with elements of the plot that appear to the narrator like a mosaic, a mobile inventory of sequences that can be arranged in different ways.

For Schalansky, this material practice of entanglement becomes a space for conceptualizing an alternative approach of writing. The process that the essay performatively stages and that is linked to the post-its, can be described as an explorative combination process. In a series of new attempts, the essay combines disparate elements, including the pit birds and literature as comparable warning systems as well as the midpoints of the screenplays, with the tipping points of the climate. To some extent, the underlying poetic principle can be described as an essayistic joke in the sense of a form of knowledge. It is an essayistic combination process that constantly produces new, unexpected similarities, affinities, and neighbourhoods.

The essay as a form is a particularly striking example of an aesthetic borderline case, situated between fact and fiction, between history and stories, between the general and the particular, as well as between a mere enumeration of facts and narrative coherence and betweencritical reflection and vivid condensation. In the case of Schwankende Kanarien, there are also reflections on the ambiguity and reorganization of (disciplinary) orders under the sign of the Anthropocene, particularly with regard to the entanglement and inseparability of nature and culture. Schalansky’s essay stages procedures of text production that do not only say something about time in the Anthropocene through narrative, but also and more fundamentally in their very processual structure. This becomes evident in the formation of sequences, episodes and seriality. It is no coincidence that Sybille develops the plot of a series rather than a movie. This process expresses an intermittent experience of time that brings contradictions and ambivalences inherent to temporality to the fore.

In considering the modes of writing “(hi-)stories in the Anthropocene”, this preliminary look at the diagnosis of a crisis of narrative in Schwankende Kanarien has thus far served to mark my interest in the concrete literary processes of textualizing time, which will be further developed in my conference contribution through another and perhaps more striking form of time-marked writing: diaristic writing. To what extend do diaries and diary novels respond to the challenges of aesthetic representability and literary narrativity that emerge from the temporal tension between deep geological time and human history? How does diaristic writing reflect and represent the specific challenges of ecological crises? What is the function of personal perspectives in diaries play in conveying the global and long-term effects of the Anthropocene? To what extent can diaries be regarded as archives of epochal caesuras and disruptions serving to document both individual and collective experiences? How do diarists navigate the tension between the everyday and epochal changes? What aesthetic strategies do they develop?

Diaries connect individual lifetimes and historical events, reflect current (re)ruptures in time, and exemplify a specific form of time perception that aligns with the mode of daily life itself. In research, diaries have mainly been associated with aspects of introspective and subjectivation as well as notions of authenticity. However, in his comparative literary history of the European diary, Gustav René Hocke also identified the diary’s role as as a chronistic register of events, in which a distinctknowledge of experience is recorded in the field of tension between the individual and history.³ The reference to the chronicle, this fundamental notation method of time, allows a different view of diaristic modes of writing. Both chronicles and diaries take place in the field of the ‘prenarrative’, i.e. unfinishable seriality plays a greater role than narrative coherence. In this context, diverse methodologies are employed to assess provisional interpretations of time that bridge the gap between one’s individual microcosmic experience and the broader historical landscape. However, the reference to the significance of chronological procedures also evokes the restitution of a ‘natural’ time, which, in turn, for its part only appears conceivable in the mode of a permanent crisis, particularly through so-called tipping points, which are striking but unrepresentable events of the current “event horizon”.⁴ An examination of diaries thus allows us to make suggestions as to how the relationship between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation that characterizes modernity could be readjusted.⁵ The argument put forth in this lecture is that literature and contemporary historiography in the Anthropocene should focus more strongly than before on the practical level of the concrete recording of time.

https://poesierausch.com/2023/01/29/wortmeldungen-judith-schalansky-schwankende-kanarien/ ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Vgl. Gustav René Hocke: Europäische Tagebücher aus vier Jahrhunderten. Motive und Anthologie. Frankfurt/Main 1991, S. 45-64. ↩︎
Dipesh Chakrabarty: The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago 2021, S. 36. ↩︎
Zum Verhältnis von moderner Zeitlichkeit, Erfahrungsraum und Erwartungshorizont vgl. Reinhart Koselleck: ‚Erfahrungsraum‘ und ‚Erwartungshorizont‘ – zwei historische Kategorien. In: ders.: Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt/Main 1979, S. 349-375. ↩︎

01/09/202401/09/2024

Eine Natur, zwei Bekenntnisse: Ein Vergleich der Aussichten im Mittelalter und im Anthropozän

Javid Aliyev

Dieser Text wurde zuerst auf Englisch veröffentlicht: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/205

In Le Roman de la Rose [Der Rosenroman] – dem populärsten und einflussreichsten aller mittelalterlichen Romane – wird in einem Kapitel mit der Überschrift „Das Geständnis der Natur,“ beichtet die allegorische Figur der Natur dem Priester weinend ihre Klagen über die Leiden, die der Mensch verursacht, den sie als „proud, murderous thief, a cruel, covetous, miserly traitor, a desperate, scandalmongering rascal, full of hatred and contempt, suspicion and envy“ (296) bezichtigt. Dieses ergreifende Geständnis ist aus heutiger Sicht nicht nur eine historische Erzählung, sondern auch eine deutliche Warnung vor den drohenden Schäden und dem, was im weiteren Verlauf der Menschheitsgeschichte auf uns zukommt. Der Rosenroman, ein Produkt des Spätmittelalters, markiert die Grenze, an der die Natur aufhörte, Symbol eines „restraint in the face of a perfect order“ zu sein, und zum „an emblem of human superiority over the natural world“ wurde (Manes 20).

**Die Natur beichtet beim Priester (Auszug aus ‘Le Roman de la Rose’, Künstler unbekannt)**
**https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/LeRomanDeLaRoseContinuationPartIX.php**

Einer der Pioniere der Umweltgeschichte, Lynn White Jr., vermutet in diesem Wandel die Ursache für unsere ökologische Krise und bringt ihn mit der Entwicklung landwirtschaftlicher Geräte im Mittelalter in Verbindung, wie arbeitssparende Geräte und Automatisierung. Diese Entwicklungen haben das Verhältnis des Menschen zur Natur grundlegend verändert: Er ist nicht mehr Teil der Natur, sondern ihr Ausbeuter. Diese ausbeuterische Haltung wurde stark von der jüdisch-christlichen Theologie beeinflusst, insbesondere vom westlichen Christentum mit seiner ausgeprägten und pragmatischen Einstellung zu Wissenschaft und Technik. Der daraus resultierende wissenschaftliche und technologische Fortschritt im Westen stand im Einklang mit umfassenderen intellektuellen Modellen, insbesondere mit einem äußerst einflussreichen kosmologischen Modell des Mittelalters, der so genannten scala naturae.¹ Dieses Modell beeinflusste das anhaltende Konzept der „Great Chain of Being“, „as a modern, largely post-Enlightenment habit of thought has historically created and reinforced perceived boundaries between human and non-human life in ways that have supported the supremacy of the few — Anglo-European, male, able-bodied, etc. — over the rest“ (Lears und Bude 92).

Auch die Sprache, die wir heute verwenden – eine Mischung aus mittelalterlicher Hermeneutik und Renaissance-Humanismus mit seinem Glauben an Vernunft, Intellekt und Fortschritt – hat zu einem großen Schweigen geführt. Dies hat zu einem Reich des „Nicht-Gesagten“ geführt, das Natur genannt wird und das durch pauschale Behauptungen über ewige Wahrheiten über menschliche Unterschiede, Rationalität und Transzendenz verdeckt wird (Manes 17). Das Schweigen über die Natur, das bis ins zwanzigste Jahrhundert andauerte und in verschiedenen Formen bis heute fortbesteht, hat eine verzerrte und trügerische Version des Homo sapiens hervorgebracht, die den Menschen (und diese erzeugte Formulierung ist beabsichtigt, da das Schweigen über die Natur lange Zeit mit dem Schweigen über Frauen und nicht-binäre Menschen einherging) als den selbsternannten einzigen Sprecher der Welt etabliert. Dieses blühende Narrativ des menschlichen Exzeptionalismus hat in den letzten drei Jahrhunderten dazu geführt, dass menschliches Handeln seine Reichweite auf den gesamten Planeten ausgedehnt hat. Aufgrund seiner weitreichenden Auswirkungen wurde der Mensch zu einem „proper geological (rather than merely social or biological) agent akin to meteorites and volcanoes“ (Vermeulen 3-4).

Doch erst im Jahr 2000 wurde dieser neue Zustand des Planeten unter dem inzwischen geläufigen Namen Anthropozän bekannt, der von dem Nobelpreisträger Paul Crutzen und dem Ökologen Eugene Stoermer geprägt wurde. Das Anthropozän hat nicht nur bedeutende geologische und ökologische Auswirkungen auf das Leben auf dem Planeten Erde, sondern stellt auch einen seismischen Wandel in unserem grundlegenden Verständnis und Glauben über den Menschen und andere Formen des Lebens und der Materie dar. Marek Tamm und Zoltán Boldizsár Simon argumentieren, dass das Anthropozän eine neue Situation für die Menschheit eröffnet hat, eine „new human condition“, die „a radical shift in how we understand and, as a consequence, reconsider our past relationship to the more-than-human world“ (204) erzwingt. Diese revisionistische Sichtweise ist in der heutigen Welt besonders relevant geworden, da sie ein Gefühl des schnellen und radikalen Wandels sowohl des menschlichen Zustandes als auch der kulturellen und natürlichen Umwelt hervorruft. Angesichts des wachsenden Bewusstseins für den vom Menschen verursachten Klimawandel und den Verlust der biologischen Vielfalt, für Naturkatastrophen, Biopolitik, nichtmenschliche Rechte und das Aussterben von Arten „the Anthropocene calls for precisely for the evaluation of human life from the perspective of posthumanism“ (Roelvink 136).

Seit Ende der 1990er Jahre, als der Einfluss der beiden großen Denkschulen des 20. Jahrhunderts, des Poststrukturalismus und der Postmoderne, nachließ, wurde der Posthumanismus von verschiedenen Tendenzen geprägt, die eine entschiedene Kritik am menschlichen Exzeptionalismus und Anthropozentrismus der vorangegangenen Jahrzehnte forderten. Wie Ewa Domanska treffend bemerkt, fordert der Posthumanismus „the very foundations of history understood as a specific approach to the past developed within the framework of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions with their anthropocentric (and even zoocentric) bias, Eurocentricim, geocentrism, and even exclusive human authorship of knowledge building“ (337) heraus. Mit seinen antizipatorischen und zukunftsorientierten Aspekten ermutigt der Posthumanismus dazu, das unausgeschöpfte Potenzial der Vergangenheit zu erforschen, anstatt sich vergeblich mit den Beschränkungen früherer Konfigurationen zu beschäftigen.

Unter den verschiedenen Theorien und Ansätzen des Posthumanismus sticht der Neue Materialismus durch seine innovative Neukonzeption der Geschichte unserer Spezies hervor. Er „reimagines our species through our relations with the multispecies world and our bodily interconnections with vital materialities, […] while simultaneously dismantling human exceptionalism by claiming that we are always already more-than-human“ (Oppermann 259). Ein besonders aufschlussreicher Weg, diese Zusammenhänge zu verstehen, ist die Betrachtung nicht-menschlicher Erzählungen und übermenschlicher Erzählungen. In der neuen materialistischen Konzeption weitet sich das Erzählen auf nichtmenschliche Entitäten aus und überschreitet damit seine traditionelle Anerkennung als ausschließlich menschliche Praxis. Es umfasst nun auch Erzählungen von nichtmenschlichen Entitäten, Verflechtungen und Zusammensetzungen.

**The Nature Book – Cover: Tree Abraham**
**https://ineedabookcover.com/book-covers/the-nature-book-2/**

Ausgehend von der neo-materialistischen Behauptung, dass wir Geschichten über menschliche und nichtmenschliche- Gemeinschaften erzählen müssen, werde ich Tom Comittas jüngsten Roman The Nature Book untersuchen,² der sich mit der „art of noticing… the multiple, interconnected worlds comprised of different human lifeways and other species [befasst] who will co-create stories of resurgence that may help us to live convivially together“ (Oppermann 267) beschäftigt. Ich behaupte, dass das Naturbuch seine literarischen Grenzen überschreitet und zu einer experimentellen Erforschung nicht-anthropozentrischer historischer Darstellungen und Erzählformen wird. Indem er eine Parallele zu Aristoteles’ Unterscheidung in der Poetik zieht, der die Dichter aufgrund ihrer Fähigkeit, das Universelle [kathólou] anzusprechen den Geschichtsschreibern, die sich im Spezifischen [kath’ékaston] bewegen (81), bevorgut, kombiniert Comittas Roman geschickt Geschichte und Fiktion, ähnlich wie das Werk als ein narrativen Archiv-Hybriden angesehen wird, um als Kanal für die Reform unseres Verständnisses historischer Darstellung jenseits anthropozentrischer Grenzen zu dienen. Dieser komplizierte Tapisseriewerk (?) stellt die vorherrschende Betonung der Handlung explizit in Frage und verlagert den Schwerpunkt auf die Beschreibung der Natur, während es gleichzeitig die konventionelle Wahrnehmung des Menschen als ausschließlichen Architekten der historischen Handlung in Frage stellt. Ich behaupte, dass Comitta mit der Einführung des neuartigen Konzepts des „literary Supercut“, als „texts made entirely or almost entirely of found language“ (A Brief) definiert, nicht nur ein neues Erzählgenre einführt, sondern auch eine fiktive Welt ohne menschliche Präsenz schafft. Supercut ist hier übrigens wörtlich zu nehmen, wie die Fotos aus Comittas Atelier zeigen (die wir hier aus urheberrechtlichen Gründen leider nicht wiedergeben können, die aber hier zu finden sind). Sie orientieren sich dabei an den Prinzipien der Multispezies-Erzählung, „[f]ocusing on techniques employed in [post-Darwinian] media, including the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and nonhuman perspectives on events, shifts backward and forward in narrative time, the embedding of stories within stories, and others (Herman 2). Mit akribischer Präzision sammeln sie Naturbeschreibungen aus einer Vielzahl von 300 kanonischen englischsprachigen Romanen und verfolgen dabei einen oulipoetischen Ansatz, der die konventionellen Grenzen des Erzählens überschreitet und die autoriale Vorherrschaft in Frage stellt. Das Ergebnis dieses kreativen Unterfangens ist ein kontemplatives Erzählen, das an die mittelalterliche kontemplative Tradition mit ihren Tugenden der Sparsamkeit und Nüchternheit und ihrem Glauben an die Demut des Ausdrucks anknüpft, „not merely for the individual but for man as a species“ (White 13) anknüpft. Comitta wird mit dieser dezentrierten menschlichen Perspektive und Parteinahme für die nichtmenschlichen Anderen zu einem modernen Heiligen Franz von Assisi, der eine alternative christliche Sicht der Natur vorschlug, die „rested on a unique sort of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate“ (ebd.) beruhte. Ihre Absicht wird auch durch die Wahl des Titels The Nature Book (Das Naturbuch) deutlich, mit dem sie die bekannte Formulierung des „Buch der Natur“ vermeiden, die die Natur als lesbar und interpretierbar wie jeden anderen Text darstellt. Laut Christopher Manes ist dieses Verständnis auch ein Überbleibsel des Mittelalters, in dem die zunehmende Alphabetisierung und die christliche Tradition der Exegese erfolgreich die Idee der Trennung von Natur und Kultur aufrechterhielten. Diese beiden wichtigsten institutionellen Technologien untergruben die vormittelalterliche heute vergessene und verdrängte animistische Sichtweise der Natur, die davon ausging, dass die natürliche Welt und alle ihre menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen lebendig sind und sich artikulieren.Interessanterweise ist Comittas Darstellung der Natur nicht anthropomorphisiert wie in The Romance; stattdessen bekennt sich ihre Natur in der ‘vorgefundenen‘ und anthropomorphen Sprache verschiedener Autor:innen des englischsprachigen Kanons: Sie haben „distorted, praised, belittled, anthropomorphized, projected onto, and spoken through countless animals, landforms and weather patterns“ (Comitta ix). Auf diese Weise vermittelt Comitta die Natur durch das ‘fehlerhafte‘ Medium der menschlichen Sprache, „mov[ing] beyond human-centered rhetoric and embraces the
ontological humility found in evolutionary theory, ecological science, and postmodern thought, even if it challenges the privileged discourse of reason“ (Manes 24). So konstruiert Comitta ein chaotisches erzählerisches Ökosystem, in dem der Leser die Natur gleichgültig gegenüber ihrer Präsenz erleben kann und den Menschen ausklammert, so wie Naturbeschreibungen in Romanen oft zu bloßen Hintergrundelementen oder leicht zu überspringenden Teilen degradiert werden. Stattdessen gelingt es Comitta, eine anregende Lektüre zu schaffen, bei der die Leser des The Book of Nature die Perspektive eines körperlosen Beobachters über die Natur einnehmen, die einer fiktiven Wildnis gleicht, „a place self-willed, a separate, self-sustaining narrative ecosystem with its own imperatives independent of ours“ (Searching). Damit etablieren und beleben sie das mittelalterliche scholastische Konzept der natura naturans, das sich auf „the permanent genesis of things, nature as a process, as productivity“ (Neyrat 135) bezieht, innerhalb der Grenzen des Anthropozäns neu.

Übersetzung: Anna-Lena Eick und Tom Vanassche

Literaturverzeichnis

Adams, Cara Blue. “Searching for Unfamiliar Terrain in ‘The Nature Book’”. The New Yorker, 16. März 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/searching-for-unfamiliar-terrain-in-the-nature-book [Accessed: 24.07.2024]

Aristotle. Poetics. (trans.) George Whalley. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

Comitta, Tom. The Nature Book: A Novel. Minneapolis: Coffe House Press, 2023.

Comitta, Tom. “A Brief History of Citational Fiction and the Literary Supercut.” Literary Hub,
5 November, 2020. https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-citational-fiction-and-the-literary-supercut [Accessed: 17.08.2023].

Domanska, Ewa.“Beyond Anthropocentrism in Historical Studies”. Historein, 10 (2010), 118-130.

Herman, David. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Leards, Adin E. und Bude, Tekla. “Matter and Meaning: Early English New Materialisms”, Examplaria, 35:2 (2023), 91-108.

Lorris, Guillaume and de Meun, Jean. The Romance of the Rose. (trans.) Frances Horgan. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Manes, Christopher. “Nature and Silence,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, (eds.) Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens und London: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Neyrat, Frédéric. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation, (trans.) Drew S. Burk. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

Oppermann, Serpil. “New Materialism and the Nonhuman Story,” in The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, (eds.) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen und Stephanie Foote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Roelvink, Gerda. “The Anthropocene,” in After the Human: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in
the 21st Century, (ed.) Sherryl Vint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Tamm, Marek and Simon, Boldizsár Zoltán. “More-than-Human History: Philosophy of History at the Time of Anthropocene,” in Philosophy of History: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, (ed.) Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen. London und New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Vermeulen, Peter. Literature and the Anthropocene. London and New York: Routledge,
2020.

White, Lynn Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, (eds.) Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens und London: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

“The scala naturae, or ‘Great Chain of Being,’ a depiction of the world as a vast filigree of lower and higher forms, from zoophytes to Godhead, with humankind’s place higher than beasts and a little less than angels, as the Psalm puts it” (Manes 20). ↩︎
Tom Comitta benutzt die Pronomina “they” und “them” – wir haben uns für die Übersetzung des Textes entschieden, den Text leicht umzuformulieren, weil das 3. Pronomen Plural offensichtlich mit dem 3. Prononem Singular (weiblich) übereinstimmt.
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