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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]

(c) Achim Landwehr

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.

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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.

  1. https://poesierausch.com/2023/01/29/wortmeldungen-judith-schalansky-schwankende-kanarien/ ↩︎
  2. Ibid. ↩︎
  3. Vgl. Gustav René Hocke: Europäische Tagebücher aus vier Jahrhunderten. Motive und Anthologie. Frankfurt/Main 1991, S. 45-64. ↩︎
  4. Dipesh Chakrabarty: The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago 2021, S. 36. ↩︎
  5. 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. ↩︎
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On the Philosophical Affinity Between Postmodernism and the Anthropocene: A Paradoxical Teaser

by Florian Wobser

This text was originally published in German: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/247

Eight years after the epoch-making study, The Postmodern Condition (1979), philosopher Jean-François Lyotard reflects on its effects in the essay Rewriting Modernity (1987). He offers the following commentary:  “I have myself used the term ‘postmodern’. It was a slightly provocative way of placing (or displacing) into the limelight the debate about knowledge. Postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity’s claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology. But as I have said, that rewriting has been at work, for a long time now, in modernity itself.” [1] In my talk in Constance, the objective is to utilize the postmodern debate as a point of departure to delinate a philosophical trajectory that connects with the contemporary Anthropocene discussion.

It will become evident in the lecture that these two epochal designations as categories of reflection exhibit a genealogical concatenation that simultaneously entails a conceptual affinity that has historiographical and narratological consequences. It is appropriate to discuss the selective affinity between postmodernism and the Anthropocene at the conceptual juncture of the Constance conference.

In the entry “Wie vom Anthropozän erzählen?” (24.05.24; on this blog), the organisers refer to Hans Blumenberg’s reflections on metaphorology as a means of integrating the ‘Menschenerdzeitalter’ into the ‘Reihe neomythologischer Figurationen’ [2]. In addition to his model of the human-world relationship, we could place that of the social human-nature relationship in accordance with the Dialectic of Enlightenment as put forth by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Lyotard is a prominent figure in the field of post-structuralism, which can be conceptualised as a third way that facilitates cross-connections.

In contrast to the thought models originating from Münster and Frankfurt, this Parisian provenance is considered groundbreaking for ʽpostmodernismʼ. Similarly, the concept of the Anthropocene is frequently referred at but rarely fully conceptualised and defined. Both are epochal designations. This is historically and literarily significant for this conference. While Blumenberg and Adorno adhere to a modernist perspective in order to interpret modernity as a decline caused by modern research or capitalist exchange, postmodernism is intended to counter criticism with a new approach that enables orientation towards an open future. Lyotard’s approach around 1980, which also characterises his The Differend (1983), is that of a narrative pragmatics [3], without which conferences such as the one in Constance would not be possible. The call poses the question whether “a literary/artistic historiography [can] emancipate itself from the premises of traditional historiography [and] what possibilities literature and the visual arts […] for the formation of alternative historiographies offer [and] [w]hich possibilities exist to escape from the dilemma of modernization.” [4].

As exemplars of a novel approach to historiography, the concept refers to the arts, including literature, which held significant sway for Blumenberg, Adorno and Lyotard. On the one hand, I could take up philosophically inspired reflections from literature and media art for the transdisciplinary discussion. This is a crucial aspect, as the call emphasises the necessity for a ‘reorientation of historiography in an inter- and transmedial context.’ The repetition structure between the debate on postmodernism and the Anthropocene, which includes a shift from the paradoxical no-future optimism of the 1980s to the ecological scepticism of the 2020s can be traced philosophically and literarily in its poetological expression. This shift can be explained in terms of geology and deep time.

The concept of “anthropo-ʼ or ʽnatural de-centricityʼ currently critically discussed by Hannes Bajohr and Jörg Noller in the context of the Anthropocene and posthumanism (see below), is characterized by an inherent ambivalence, oscillating between a state of decentralization and a subsequent re-centralization. [5; 6]. This dynamic and recursive figure of thought is not only that of traditional hermeneutics, but also of a deconstructive movement that seeks to escape it. Bajohr benefits from this approach, which allows him to adopt a more modern position as a negative anthropology. In contrast, Noller displays greater creativity conceptualizing beyond first and second natures to explore a third nature. The circularity or perhaps counter-spirality, between periphery and centre, could be circled by authors with an affinity for theory, history and form.

One might also consider the work of Rainald Goetz, who, in the 1980s, explored the potential of a hyperactive poetology informed by the spirit of punk. In doing so, he revealed the ambivalence inherent in the fascination with post-structuralism and postmodernism. Firstly, Hirn (1984) states: ‘Irgendwann entdeckt das jeder, der Bücher liest […]. Dann blättert man in diese strukturalistische oder post- oder postpost-Welt hinein, liest hier einen Satz dann dort, dann macht man das Buch zu, haut sich den Rücken an den Kopf, fertig. Dann mischt man das […] mit […] eigenen hangups und Idiosynkrasien, dann vergißt man es, entdeckt es morgen neu, hat damit jede Menge Spaß.’ However, the heuristic fun that favours poetology and narratology quickly passes Goetz by, so that in the same volume he says: ‘Es ist der Zeitpunkt für […] spielerische Philosophie, Mode und Pop. Wie gerne würde ich all das noch einmal feiern. Doch es ist angekommen […] und wird nun, wie alles Angekommene […] ohne Sentiment und mit Lust zu Stück gehaut [7].

On the other hand, there is almost nothing in Alexander Kluge’s expansive multimedia oeuvre that does not exist. Kluge’s audiovisual essay Die Sahara wurde Sumpfgebiet (2008 [8]), for instance, could be employed to honour a media expression – situated between Frankfurt and France – that affects all contexts of the conference. A comprehensive overview from the Big Bang to the techno club culture of the 2000s engages the audience in a thought-provoking journey and, in mass media self-reflexivity (Fig. 1/2), implicitly challenging every form of temporal linearity (Fig. 3), evolutionary hybridity (fig. 4), a separation of ʽfacts & fakesʼ (fig. 5/6), the dichotomy of natural and cultural history (fig. 7/8), and a self-assured anthropocentrism (fig. 9-12). In this irritating way, a humorous ʽliquefactionʼ of history, evolution and geological deep time is presented to a broad audience on (web) TV [9].

However, any engagement with postmodernism is inherently multifaceted and presents a multitude of possibilities. Conversely, this means that despite my profound fascination with narratology and media aesthetics, I am proposing historiographical considerations that are atypical for Constance. This ‘teaser’ thus announces much that it does not fulfil – which makes it somewhat paradoxical (see above). By referencing Lyotard’s initial quotation, it is proposed that the cyclical process which links postmodern logic with the Anthropocene will be subjected to more detailed examination and interpretation through the lens of genealogy and conceptual analysis. Both postmodernism and the Anthropocene are susceptible to the potential pitfall of creating a new grand narrative in the absence of established ones, as stated by Lyotard. Additionally, the attempt to decentre the human being may paradoxically result in reinforcing its centrality.  As previously noted by the conference organisers in their blog post, performative self-contradiction represents a significant historiographical concern: it is therefore important “bei der Erzählung vom Anthropozän nicht genau die neuzeitlichen Muster zu wiederholen, die doch eigentlich durch das Konzept Anthropozän kritisiert werden sollten. Dazu gehören nicht zuletzt westliche, unilineare Zeitmodellierungen, […] oder die Beibehaltung von Wachstums- und Fortschrittsnarrativen, selbst wenn diese mit einem negativen Vorzeichen versehen werden.”

This possible circularity, which Goetz seeks to break up and Kluge attempts to dissolve through montage art, is critically discussed on the grounds of the elective affinity between postmodernism and the Anthropocene. Both concepts share the prefix ʽpost-ʼ, which is not only explicitly relevant in the earlier debate on modernity, but also implicitly for the Anthropocene. In a similar manner to the concept of ‘postmodernism’, the Anthropocene can be understood as a ‘post-Holocene’ discourse. This parallel can be made plausible by current theories that closely link the Anthropocene and posthumanism (Lyotard had already collected these ideas in the volume The Inhuman). The editors of Posthuman? Neue Perspektiven auf Natur/Kultur (2023) highlight the close intertwining of the two discourses in their attempt at categorization. The term ʽposthumanʼ was first used in the course of early post-structuralism. Alongside critical theory and philosophical anthropology, it is important for the theoretical context, among other things [10]. Representatives of posthumanism could thus be understood as the ʽsecond generation of postmodernismʼ, developing a ʽphilosophy of the Anthropoceneʼ [11]. Although the concept of ʽde-/centrationʼ outlined above leaves its textual and sign worlds, it remains a heuristic model for characteristics of the discourse on the Anthropocene, which is itself characterized by post-anthropocentrism and dualism (e.g. between nature and culture) as well as perspectivism [12].

If it is accurate to conclude that discussions about the potential ʽhuman-centrednessʼ are still indebted to the preliminary work of the actors of post-structuralism and the ʽde-centring of meaningʼ, the repetition loop or continuation spiral that serves for historical categorisation would be given. From a historiographic point of view, it is noteworthy that this reference to the risk of a negative narrative of progress would genealogically correspond to a doublet of the Anthropocene and postmodernism. The latter exhibits a synchronous, conflicting plurality of discourses that is also shared by the Anthropocene, if we think of the conflict between the ʽCapitaloceneʼ and the ʽAnthropoceneʼ [13] or the five narratives that made up the ›Menschenerdzeitalter‹ʼ [14]. In this context, history reasserts itself, pushing, from an ecological perspective, for priority and from a diachronical perspective for normativity (with regard to human-nature relationships, among other things). This marks a clear divergence to the former ʽposthistoireʼ. That raises the next question: what relevance does this theoretical-historical simultaneity of repetition and progress/catastrophe have for Anthropocene ʽ(hi-)storiesʼ? Lyotard considered the ʽediting of modernityʼ to be its ‘working through’ [15]. Is the ‘Anthropocene’, by analogy, always already a ʽworking throughʼ of our Holocene? This presumption through science and technology was also noted by Lyotard. Does this debate about a narratology or historiography – the ʽlaboratory of (hi-)storiesʼ – thus (see above) ʽcome into full lightʼ and if so, what is the purpose of theoretical-poetological change of perspective after all?

Translation: Anna-Lena Eick and Tom Vanassche

References

[1] Lyotard, Jean-François (1991): „Rewriting Modernity“. In : The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Cambridge: Polity Press, 24-35; 34.

[2] Eick, Anna-Lena, Achim Landwehr und Tom Vanassche (24.05.24): „Wie vom Anthropozän erzählen?“. WritingtheAnthropocene (abgerufen am 08.08.24 von https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/63).

[3] Lyotard, Jean-François (1999). Das postmoderne Wissen. Ein Bericht. Wien: Passagen, 63-86.

[4] The CFP can be found here: https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20036691/geschichten-schreiben-im-anthropozan-konstanz-4-6-september-2024  (last accessed: 08 August 2024).

[5] Bajohr, Hannes (2023): Keine Quallen. Anthropozän und Negative Anthropologie. In: Cress, Thomas; Murawska, Olivia; Schlitte, Annika (Hrsg.): Posthuman? Neue Perspektiven auf Natur/Kultur. Paderborn: Brill; Fink, 73-88; 84; Noller, Jörg (2023): Ethik des Anthropozäns. Überlegungen zur dritten Natur. Basel: Schwab.

[6] Diese Denkfigur habe ich in mehreren Publikationen verfolgt, etwa angewendet auf Essayfilme: Wobser, Florian (2023): ›De-/Zentrierung‹ des Menschen im Anthropozän – Reflexion wissenschaftlichen und künstlerischen Ausdrucks im Film (Herzog; Geyrhalter). In: Kloeg, Julien (Hrsg.): International Yearbook for Philosophical Anthropology, Volume 11 (2022): art/science. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 173-195 bzw. auf Fotografien und Dokumentationen: Wobser, Florian (2024): Mensch-Natur-Beziehungen im Anthropozän. Ideen für Bildung und Didaktik im Fach Philosophie/Ethik. In: Ders. (Hg.) Anthropozän. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven und philosophische Bildung. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus, 193-216.

[7] Goetz, Rainald (2003): Hirn. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 59; [?].                      

[8] Zu diesem Clip von Alexander Kluge (2008): https://www.dctp.tv/filme/die-sahara-wurde-sumpf/ (abgerufen am 08.08.24).

[9] Wobser, Florian (2024): Interviews und audiovisueller Essayismus Alexander Kluges. Ein ästhetisch-performatives Bild-ungsprojekt und seine Relevanz für Philosophie- und Ethikunterricht. Berlin: Metzler/Springer, 219-222.

[10] Cress u.a. 2023, 6; 11.

[11] Ferrando, Francesca (2019): Philosophical Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury, 2; 187

[12] Cress u.a. 2023, 12-22.

[13] Moore, Jason W. (2016): Anthropocene or Capitolocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press; Kairos.

[14] Dürbeck, Gabriele (2018): „Das Anthropozän erzählen: fünf Narrative“. In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Klima (21-23), 11-17.

[15] Lyotard 1991, 26.

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Narrating the Anthropocene historically – but how?

by Ernst Langthaler

This text was first published in German: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/235

Since Paul Crutzen proclaimed the ‘Anthropocene’ in 2000, thus creating a mythical history of humanity and planet Earth [1], the narratives about the ‘age of man’ have diversified considerably. According to Christophe Bonneuil, four master narratives can be distinguished in the Anthropocene discourse – without claiming to be exhaustive. The mainstream is characterised by the naturalist narrative, according to which the human species has achieved planetary agency using fossil energy since the Industrial Revolution. It is now up to geoscience to make the public aware of the associated risks and to educate political and economic decision-makers about appropriate countermeasures. The post-nature narrative understands nature as a human construction and calls for the reflexive use of modern technology to create an optimised world (good Anthropocene). The eco-catastrophist narrative sees modern civilisation on the path to an ecological catastrophe that can only be averted by a less resource-intensive way of life. The eco-Marxist narrative attributes the transgression of planetary boundaries not to the anthropos per se, but to capitalist accumulation and geopolitical domination. Its proponents, such as Jason Moore, speak of the ‘Capitalocene’ rather than the ‘Anthropocene’. [2]

These master narratives not only stand on their own, but also provide traces of the overarching order of the Anthropocene discourse. Two order-creating dimensions can be identified. One, more analytical dimension distinguishes between the poles of the geologisation of the social, represented by the naturalist narrative, and the socialisation of the geological, represented by the eco-Marxist narrative. The other, more normative dimension distinguishes between the poles of the critique of modernity, represented by the eco-catastrophist narrative, and eco-modernism, represented by the post-naturalist narrative. There are undoubtedly other dimensions to the Anthropocene discourse, but these two dimensions alone characterise a discourse order that enables and limits scientific thought and speech – and thus also action.

(c) Ernst Langthaler

What can historians “do” with the Anthropocene, not only in terms of discourse, but also in terms of actual history? First, it is important to critically question the master discourses of the Anthropocene and their respective perspectives. Each of these narratives contains manifest and latent attributions of meaning that refer to points of view based on interests and values. Perspectivity is most evident along the dimension between a critique of modernity and eco-modernism. But the other dimension is not free of interests and values either, since it is about the hegemonic struggle between the natural and social sciences.

The next step is to make the plurality of master narratives fruitful. Each of these narratives contains important elements of a theory of planetary thinking [3]: the naturalist narrative entails a requirement to think planetary and human time scales together; the post-naturalist narrative the need to extend agency to include ‘more than human’ networks; the eco-catastrophist narrative the idea of irreversible tipping points of the Earth system; and the eco-Marxist narrative the impact of capital and power interests, social inequality and cultural hegemony on the planet.

In addition to multi-faceted descriptions, it is also important to generate differentiated explanations of the dynamics of the Anthropocene. This is precisely the core competence of the social and cultural sciences in general and history in particular. While the geosciences have strong descriptive data sets and methods that are inaccessible to most historians, their explanations – especially when it comes to anthropogenic aspects – are often weak. Historians can counteract this shortcoming by means of empirically saturated and theory-led explanations. [4]

Finally, historians who are not part of multi- and interdisciplinary project teams with ample resources need to find a focus in order to meet all these demands. In my research, I take a commodity-historical perspective on the Anthropocene. The soybean, a key commodity of global capitalism in the 20th century, serves as a prism. I distinguish several regime phases in the period from 1870 to 2020, which frame cycles of regional soybean expansion and global soybean trade, as well as regime crises and transitions in between.

Translation: Anna-Lena Eick and Tom Vanassche

[1] Anna-Lena Eick, Achim Landwehr und Tom Vanassche, Wie vom Anthropozän erzählen?, https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/63

[2] Christophe Bonneuil, The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene, in: Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil und François Gemenne (ed.), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis. Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, London and New York: Routledge, 2015, 17-31.

[3] Nigel Clark und Bronislaw Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought. The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity, 2021.

[4] Julia Adeney Thomas, Mark Williams und Jan Zalasiewicz, The Anthropocene. A Multidisciplinary Approach, Cambridge: Polity, 2020, 112-135.

[5] Ernst Langthaler, Soy, in: Jeannie Whayne (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 304-324.

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Traces in the Ice. Some thoughts about Nature-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene

By Gabriele Dürbeck & Simon Probst

This text was first published in German: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/177

The thoughts we present in this blog post will be developed more systematically in an essay to be published next year: Probst, Simon und Gabriele Dürbeck (2025). Ice Witnesses. Exploring the Natural-Cultural Memory of Climate Change (Susan Schuppli’s Learning from Ice) Memory Studies Review, Special Issue Climate Witnessing.

In scientific as well as journalistic and literary texts, ice is given many names that contextualize it in the spheres of historiography and memory. In poetic phrasings, which can also be found in scientific discussions of ice, it is referred to as a “two-mile time machine”,[1] as “ice memory”,[2] as “frozen time”,[3] as a “book” to be read or as the “ice of truth”.[4]. In these formulations, ice becomes at once a vehicle for visualizing the past, a spatialization of time and a medium that stores and transmits information. A metaphorical trace can also be found in the scientific terminology of ice as a ‘climate witness’ or ‘climate archive’. Such language charges ice’s materiality with ideas of the institutional storage and collection of historical documents, the privileged access to the past that eyewitnesses happen to have, as well as with images of the judicial trial of the course of events. The metaphorical transfer of these ideas into the context of climate history suggests an initially vaguely defined function of ice in the cultural memory of climate change.

The technical term ‘climate proxy’ seems, at first glance, to set limits to the metaphorization of ice. Climate proxies generally refer to material traces that allow scientists to determine approximate values for past climates – even when no measurements are available. These include, among others, tree rings, coral skeletons, deep-sea sediments, and ice cores. But metaphorization is often present and so these material formations are often referred to as ‘natural archives’. And because potentially legible traces of the past are inscribed into these material formations, their totality is sometimes conceptualized as planetary memory, or ‘memory of the Earth’. [5]  In this expression, the metaphor of memory and practices of natural science are closely related.

However, these archives and climate proxies – the ‘memory of the earth’ – are by no means ‘natural’: they are produced through scientific procedures and cultural processes of interpretation. [6]  In the case of ice, expeditions are first required to extract ice cores – endeavours that take place, among other things, in a cultural context of heroic discovery, in which scientific teams compete to find ever older ice. These cores are packaged, labelled with contextual information and transported to mostly government-funded deep-freeze storage facilities, where they are archived according to various classification criteria. In a next step, scientists take the ice cores to specialised laboratories, where they use mechanical methods to isolate the very old air bubbles trapped in the ice – traces of long-gone atmospheres – and then subject them to chemical analysis. The results of these analyses are subsequently categorized and interpreted in the context of geological knowledge. Only through these steps can a wide range of conclusions be drawn about past climates: from the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere to the amount of snowfall, wind speeds, and the concentrations of carbon dioxide and air pollution.

Such ‘natural archives’ are indispensable for writing historiography in the Anthropocene. On the one hand, they allow us to look beyond historical sources in order to better understand the links between social developments and the environment. On the other hand, they make it possible to scientifically trace the history of climate far beyond the beginning of systematic weather recordings. They also enable us to assess the increasingly intensive enrichment of the Earth’s atmosphere with CO2 since the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent warming of the Earth’s atmosphere in a larger climate-historical context. It is only in the context of this larger picture that it becomes clear that the current human-induced climate change is bringing a period of relative stability in the Earth system to an end: the Holocene. – The stability of the Holocene now has lasted for over 11,700 years and its man-made destabilisation thus poses an enormous risk to the continued existence of global civilisations.

Computational models of climatological futures that form the foundation of international climate policy, also depend on the Earth historical knowledge gained from the ice and other material formations. Thus, the understanding of our present moment in the context of a planetary history and all the resulting efforts at adaption and transformation are based not least on the cultural conditioning of nature as an archive for the Earth’s history. Identity-forming narratives are thus linked to the interpretation and updating of this archive in the public debate on climate change. In this sense, in the context of a planetary history and the diagnosis of the present, socially and culturally mediated approaches to the past are no longer based solely on symbolic forms of externalised memory (books, monuments, rituals, etc.), but also on non-intentional material traces of natural processes. In this respect, cultural memory in the context of Anthropocene histories must be described as natural-cultural memory.

The perspective of natural-cultural memory opens our eyes for the scientific and cultural practices through which material traces assume an archival function and ultimately find their way into social constructions of the past, present, and future that are relevant for identity formations. Analyzing these practices, makes the production of nature-cultural memory accessible to a critique of the underlying assumptions and epistemologies.

The object of such a cultural critique of ice could be, for example, that the scientific study of ice usually places the information gained from it in the context of a global Western history. Events such as the birth of Jesus Christ, the fall of Rome, the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, the Industrial Revolution or human-induced climate change are usually projected onto the time scale of ice cores.[7]  In contrast, little attention is paid to the stories of the people who live on and with the ice, whose ‘cold rights’ are not respected and whose living environments are disappearing. The practice of archiving and destroying ice in order to make it legible (either by melting or smashing it) also reduces it to an object of rational cognition. These scientific relations to ice run the risk of being ignorant to ice as a threatened habitat of humans and other beings, a habitat with which people maintain culturally significant relationships of reciprocity and for whom it is an animated part of their everyday narratives. [8]

Many fundamental questions arise for the reflection in cultural studies on natural archives and the production of nature-cultural memory: How are ‘natural archives’ entangled with colonial and neo-colonial epistemologies? What would it mean to decolonise these archives? Who do the planetary stories told on this basis address? Which ‘we’ do they produce? Who do they include, who do they exclude? What kinds of cultural identities do they support, produce or destabilise? How much are planetary histories and Anthropocene narratives determined by practices of producing ‘natural archives’? Are institutionalised relations to the ‘memory of the Earth’ conceivable that go beyond modern geosciences? And do cultural groups reflect on the role of material traces as the basis of our natural-cultural memory recognised or does it remain largely unconscious?

In contemporary literature and art, first attempts to consciously reflect on natural-cultural memory can be found. According to Canadian researcher and media artist Susan Schuppli, material witnesses such as ice tell us at least as much about the events that have left traces on them as they do about the infrastructures used to produce the evidence of these events and to negotiate their meaning.[9] These infrastructures include technological apparatuses, scientific procedures, epistemological assumptions, and the acceptable forms of narrative and the representation of events. In her film Ice Cores, Schuppli uses slow, almost meditative shots to show everyday life in an ice core archive: the arrival of new ice cores from a disbanded archive, their examination by two researchers, their classification, the discussion about the quality of the preserved ice material, but also the extraction of air bubbles in a laboratory. At the end of the film, the camera moves vertically along an ice core for about a minute and a half, showing us the shimmering air bubbles in the ice as well as the core’s plastic packaging and the metadata written on it. Schuppli explains the significance of the core from off the screen:

Tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped within vertical columns of extracted ice, a planetary archive, whose records have enabled scientists to reconstruct a continuous history of past climates, reaching back more than 800,000 years: earth evidence of a rapidly heating world.[10]

What the film shows us, however, is not just the material basis and everyday life of scientific research. Rather, it shows us the production of ‘natural archives’, drawing attention to an often-neglected site of work on cultural memory, without which the story of the Anthropocene would be incomprehensible.

Translation: Anna-Lena Eick and Tom Vanassche

[1] Alley, Richard B. (2000). The two-mile time machine. Ice cores, abrupt climate change, and our future. Princeton University Press.

[2] Kolbert, Elizabeth (2002). Ice Memory. New Yorker, January 7.

[3] Walker, Gabrielle (2004). Frozen Time. Nature 429 (6992): 596–97.

[4] Schröder, Tim (2021). Eis der Wahrheit. MARE 148: 58–66, hier 58.

[5] Colebrook, Claire (2018). The intensity of the archive. Memory Studies 11(4): 506-509, hier 507.

[6] Toepfer, Georg (2019). On similarities and differences between cultural and natural archives. In Susi. Frank & Kjetil Jakobsen (Hg.), Arctic archives. Ice, memory, and entropy (S. 21–36). Transcript, hier 31.

[7] Antonello, Alessandro & Cary, Mark. (2017). Ice cores and the temporalities of the global environment. Environmental Humanities 9(2): 181-203, here 191.

[8] Cruikshank, J. (2005). Do Glaciers listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. UBC Press, 3.

[9] Schuppli, Susan (2020). Material Witness. Media, Forensics, Evidence. MIT Press, 3.

[10] Schuppli, Susan (2020). Ice Cores. Film, 1:04:35-1:04:55. https://vimeo.com/374626847.

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The Anthropocene as a guiding concept

by Johannes Waßmer

The Vagueness of a World in Flames

“The world is on fire” (Saito 2022, 1). The Japanese philosopher and Marxist Kohei Saito begins his book Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism with the image of a world in flames. He repeats the historical-philosophical thesis of the imminent ‘end of history’ – in his case with an apocalyptic undertone – and sees “democracy, capitalism and ecological systems in [a] chronic crisis” (Saito 2022, 1). For him, this crisis has a name: the Anthropocene. And for him, it has an associated cause: capitalism. “[T]he modern world presupposed for a long time is gone for good because global capitalism considerably modified the entire planet, leaving no pristine nature untouched. This situation is now generally called the Anthropocene” (Saito 2022, 2).

Saito is not alone in this diagnosis of the Anthropocene world on fire. The sociologist and Latour disciple Nikolaj Schultz as well as the Japanese entrepreneur and philanthropist Soichiro Fukutake describe a world on fire threatened with extinction. In his confessional book Land Sickness, Schultz states: “It seems the Anthropocene is not a nice place to sleep” (Schultz 2023, 8). The first sentence of Fukutakeʼs book on Revitalizing Rural Communities is similar to those of Saito and Schultz: “Rapid climate change and excessive urbanisation are harming our world” (Fukutake/Henderson 2020, 3).

Although all three books differ in terms of objectives and academic backgrounds, they all refer to the Anthropocene. Saito even includes the term in the main title of his book: Marx in the Anthropocene. But the term itself remains strangely vague. With Paul Crutzen, Saito defines the Anthropocene as the epoch in which “humankind has become a ‘major geological force’”. He associates it with the “massive scientific and technological power to transform the entire planet on an unprecedented scale” and includes “[c]limate change” and, in general, a nature that is increasingly beyond human control (Saito 2022, 2f.).

There is undoubtedly a consensus in the sciences and humanities across all disciplines that these and similar descriptions of the current state of the Earth are generally accurate and that the various ecological, climatic, political and economic changes are interacting. It is therefore useful  to choose a key concept that shows that these phenomena cannot be considered in isolation: The Anthropocene.

However, for a concept that claims to be scientifically valid and which, as a catchword, gives Saito’s book a programmatic direction, the definition of the Anthropocene is blurred. Since geology has refused to classify the Anthropocene as an epoch and thus to describe humankind as a current ‘geological force’ based on stratigraphic data, (cf. e.g. ICS 2024; Crutzen/Stoermer 2000; Waters, Williams, Zalasiewicz 2014) the question must even be asked: What exactly does the Anthropocene actually refer to? Why and how is it used scientifically? In this blogpost I lead up to the topic in my talk in Constance in showing that the Anthropocene is used as a guiding concept that refers to the newly developed awareness of the intensity of human impact on planet Earth.

The Epoch: concept and consciousness

According to the founders of the concept, Stoermer and Crutzen, the Anthropocene refers to the geological epoch that follows the Holocene. As a concept for an epoch, it historicises a certain type of influence of the human species (anthropos) on earth (cf. Chakrabarty 2015, 159). More precisely, the concept denotes an epoch with a double time structure, extra-human and intra-human. With reference to Karl Jaspers, Dipesh Chakrabarty understands the Anthropocene as an “epochal consciousness” of humanity for its own present (ibid., 142). Humankind has become aware of its lasting impact on earth. This epochal consciousness has also found its way into numerous disciplines of academia. It is applied to disciplinary knowledge and the methods of knowledge production.

The starting point of the Anthropocene epoch depends on which discipline sets it and which impact of humankind on its environment is considered to be particularly threatening. The ‘Great Acceleration’ (oil and nuclear age), the Industrial Revolution (coal), the ‘Columbian exchange’ (European colonialism) or the ‘early Anthropocene’ (equated with the Holocene) have been chosen to define its beginning. The Anthropocene is supposed to capture the “non-human aspects of climate” (Trexler 2015, 5) or to describe the realisation that the previous binary distinctions between ‘local and global, natural and artificial’ are no longer sufficient to describe the world (cf. Völker 2023, 23).

Consequently, the concept of the Anthropocene always expresses a critique of an epoch or a time regime: “Modernity has designed a time regime of progress and endless growth. / The Anthropocene is the fulfilment of this time regime and future regime. But its fulfilment reveals the very aporias of the modern temporal regime: its tendency towards monstrous growth and increased acceleration, the negation of the finiteness of resources, the brevity of the time horizons considered” (Horn 2020, 28, transl. J.W.). The concept of the Anthropocene thus exhibits the rapid dynamization of our concepts of time (cf. ibid, 29f.). This dynamization has been comprehensively described since the late 1970s (cf. Virilio 1977, 1999).

Obviously, the Anthropocene refers both to the discourse on a specific relationship between humanity and the earth and to the discourse on humanity’s awareness of its relationship to earth and the conceptual and temporal forms of describing this relationship. The boundaries of both discourses are blurred. What these humankind’s influence consists of and what characterises humankind’s consciousness of it is not precisely defined. The discourse statements about the Anthropocene have in common the assumption that the influence of humankind on earth exist and that there is an awareness of this influence. The Anthropocene is a “global ecological diagnosis” of a current “planetary emergency” with various “interdependencies between localities, actors, technologies, and ecological processes” (Horn/Bergthaller 2020, 142, 154). It is therefore by no means (only) a geochronological concept.

Guiding concept

The discourse power of the concept of the Anthropocene is based on its academic nature. Those who use the term Anthropocene refer to research findings from various academic fields. Saito can use it to title a Marxist book because the term is perceived as academically serious and can be grasped scientifically. We have reason to know that the concept of the Anthropocene is an appropriate concept to describe the current state of earth, for we can gather numerous scientifically valid reasons from different disciplines in favour of this thesis. The concept obviously expresses a body of knowledge.

For this reason, Saito can use the term to gain other knowledge in another discipline. Thus, the Anthropocene not only provides insight into a concept, but also serves as a concept that opens new possibilities for knowledge. Its mediating position between known and new knowledge and in between academic disciplines makes it a guiding epistemic concept.

Foucault understands the episteme as “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems” and “the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities” (Foucault 1973, 191). I understand an epistemic guiding concept to be a concept that decisively controls the discourse practices in academia and their relationships with one another. This applies to the Anthropocene.

The use of the Anthropocene concept changes the possibilities and rules for gaining knowledge in academia. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Eva Horn and Solvejg Nitzjke, Gabriele Dürbeck et al. and others have already drawn attention to this (cf. Chakrabarty 2009, Dürbeck/Probst/Schaub (eds.) 2022, Nitzke/Horn 2020). They have named narratives associated with the concept or the demand for an anthropodecentric approach linked to it and they pointed out its connectivity to different disciplines in academia. For the Anthropocene as an epistemic guiding concept its political relevance in the public sphere is not that decisive (cf. Horn 2020, 26). Rather, as a concept the Anthropocene bundles sub-concepts that are themselves widely used: Climate change, globalisation, resource consumption, etc. and it is used in numerous scientific disciplines.

In my talk in Constance, I aim to lay a foundation for this understanding of the Anthropocene as a guiding concept in academia by showing its meanings in different academic disciplines and its function as a concept that organises academic research and defines boundaries. Although I fully agree with Horn’s and Bergthaller’s statement that the Anthropocene “calls for a new cooperation between academic fields, be it in the form of a mutual exchange of data, concepts and hypotheses, or in the form of complementary approaches to shared problems” (Horn/Bergthaller 2020, 6) and strongly support intensive interdisciplinary cooperation, I will argue for maintaining disciplinary boundaries in sciences and humanities. There are epistemological, methodological and science policy reasons for this. Specifically, in my lecture I will argue for maintaining the boundaries between historiography, literary studies and literature, especially in view of the Anthropocene.

Works cited

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2015): The Human Condition in the Anthropocene. The Tanner Lectures in Human Values, Yale University.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2009): The Climate of History: Four Theses, in: Critical Inquiry 35, Nr. 2, 197-222.

Crutzen, Paul J./Stoermer, Eugene F. (2000): The Anthropocene, in: Global Change Newsletter 41, 17-18. 

Foucault, Michel (1972): The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon.

Fukutake, Soichiro/Henderson, Jay (2020): With Art As My Weapon: Revitalizing Rural Communities and Introducing Public Interest Capitalism, San Francisco: Long River.

Horn, Eva (2020): Anthropozän, in: Michael Gamper/Helmut Hühn/Steffen Richter (eds.): Formen der Zeit. Ein Wörterbuch der ästhetischen Eigenzeiten, Hannover: Wehrhahn.

Horn, Eva/Bergthaller, Hannes (2020): The Anthropocene. Key Issues for the Humanities, London/New York: Routledge.

ICS: Joint statement by the IUGS and ICS on the vote by the ICS Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, online: https://stratigraphy.org/news/152, 08/20/2024.

Nitzke, Solvejg/Horn, Eva (2020): Cultures of Climate. On Bodies and Atmospheres in Modern Fiction: An Introduction, in: Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11, Nr. 1, 1-8.

Saito, Kohei (2022): Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Schultz, Nikolaj (2023): Land Sickness, Cambridge: polity.

Trexler, Adam (2015): Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Charlottesville/London.

Virilio, Paul (1977): Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e).

Virilio, Paul (1999): Polar Inertia. London: Sage.

Völker, Oliver (2021): Langsame Katastrophen. Eine Poetik der Erdgeschichte, Göttingen: Wallstein.

Zalasiewicz, Jan/Williams, Mark/Waters, Colin N. (2014): Can an Anthropocene Series be defined and recognized, in: Geological Society, London, Special Publications 2014, 39-53.

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Formatting Human Agency

by Pieter Vermeulen

You may find a German translation of this article here: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/348

In a 2019 report, the global sustainable development consultancy ARUP offers four plausible scenarios for what the world will look like in 2050. These scenarios, the report explains, are “intended to develop a vocabulary and framework to help us envision different plausible futures” (68). As is typical of the genre, the consultancy report is a hybrid of textual and visual constituents. Pictures, infographics, and drawings share the page with vignettes that tell the stories of what it might mean to inhabit one of these scenarios in 2050. Might mean: the stories are plausible, not real (yet), and the world they illustrate might or might not come into existence by 2050. Strategic consulting here shades into the domain of fiction, of literature—of forms of discourse constrained by criteria of plausibility rather than factuality.

Recent work in literary studies has begun to explore how contemporary literature has developed strategies to encode uncertainty—to design forms of speculative rather than mimetic world-building, to develop a kind of upscaled planetary realism, or to juxtapose different ontologies in order to salvage a role for human agency. Reading consultancy reports reveals that the challenge to incorporate uncertainty and find a place for human action is shared between literary and nonliterary forms.

Novelist Hari Kunzru has recently identified the emergent genre of the apocalyptic systems thriller—a kind of deeply researched disaster fiction that functions as a form of scenario planning for near future global crises (Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is paradigmatic here). This genre competently and exhaustively lays out the systemic forces that determine planetary life, while it remains committed to the possibility of human agency meaningfully intervening in the future of life of Earth. In his response to Kunzru, international affairs scholar Henry Farrell has noted that the kind of scholarly books he himself tends to write faces exactly the same challenges as the writers of apocalyptic systems thrillers do: that of striking a balance between vast systemic forces (climate change, market power, financialization, geopolitical drift, …) on the one hand and human agency on the other.

Returning these insights to the ARUP report, it is striking to see that it leaves the question of human agency largely unaddressed. While it imagines different timelines to the possible futures it imagines (“2033: Black market sand at an all-time high”; “2037: Indonesia goes circular”), it rarely identifies the specific actors that would help bring those worlds into existence. Instead, the report relies on a rhetorical mobilization of an unspecified (and presumed to be universal) “we,” most spectacularly and breathlessly in ARUP’s Director of Global Foresight, Research and Innovation’s foreword, which ends with a cascade of first-person pronouns: “To help us understand and plan for our communal future, sometimes we must push ourselves to imagine the possible. To think outside of our daily lives, and envision the world as it could be, should be, might be, what we hope it will be and what we hope it won’t be. Although future pathways are not clear, we can, and must, move forward with both aspiration and intent. These scenarios should help us to consider how we craft the parameters of that intent.”

Criticism of the notion of the Anthropocene has not ceased to point out that the anthropos, the version of human life, that it centers is a false generalization that obliterates vast differences between different groups of humans. It has time and again argued that the notion of the Anthropocene, by declining to specify different constituencies, surreptitiously puts forward a normative account of human life (both negatively and positively: condemning the forces that got us in this mess, and upholding those that are supposed to get us out if it). The quotation above illustrates how assumptions of agency coincide with encrypted normativity, as it compounds the vagueness of the first person plural with shifting modalities—“could,” “should,” “might,” “we can, and must,” “should,” … The drift of these terms illustrates a lack of direction that is characteristic of many Anthropocene discourses.

The most striking feature of the report is an illustration on page 8:

retrieved from: https://www.arup.com/insights/2050-scenarios-four-plausible-futures/

This matrix brings together the four scenarios the rest of the report elaborates. This diagram is, like every diagram, not neutral. The four-square matrix organizes the four scenarios around two axes: planetary health and societal condition. I have become fascinated by such 2×2 speculative matrices, which not only abound in consultancy reports, but also in online self-help discourses, policy reports, and more recently also in political and critical theory. These matrices seem to have a particular rhetorical force: they present the future as open (there are still several options, nothing is lost), but not too open (there are exactly four—our brains can handle that); they seem to present these four options as equally valid or likely, yet the choice of the axes, the labels (who would ever go for “Extinction Express?”), and even the color code (blue is never bad) nudge the audience toward a normative account of the future (in this case, to the sustainable future of what it calls the Post Anthropocene); they do not specify the viability of human agency, but by presenting the future as a matter of choice between four options, they at least smuggle in a form of agency; also, their resemblance to scientific graphs evokes a kind of empirical grounding that is far from obvious in such imaginings of the future.

How precisely do such speculative matrices operate? How do they encode uncertainty, agency, and normativity in ways that do not force their authors (or their audience) to spell out their convictions—or their lack of conviction? And what does it mean that such matrices have now also become a part of critical discourse? These and other questions have so far gone unaddressed, but their answers might tell us something important about the affordances and limits of Anthropocene storytelling.

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One Nature, Two Confessions: Comparing Outlooks in the Middle Ages and the Anthropocene 

by Javid Aliyev

“A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.”

                                         ─   I to Myself, Henry D. Thoreau

Halfway through Le Roman de la Rose [The Romance of the Rose] – the most popular and most influential of all Medieval romances – in a chapter titled “Nature’s Confession,” the allegorical figure of Nature weepingly confesses to the priest her lamentations over the distresses caused by the human (294) whom she scolds as being “proud, murderous thief, a cruel, covetous, miserly traitor, a desperate, scandalmongering rascal, full of hatred and contempt, suspicion and envy” (296). This poignant confession, readfrom our current vantage point, is not just a historical narrative but a stark warning of the impending damages and what is to come in the later periods of human history. The Romance, a product of the Late Middle Ages, marks the boundary where Nature ceased to be the symbol of “restraint in the face of a perfect order” and became “an emblem of human superiority over the natural world” (Manes 20).

(detail) Nature confessing to a priest from ‘Le Roman de la Rose’ by Unknown artist
https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/LeRomanDeLaRoseContinuationPartIX.php

One of the pioneers of environmental history, Lynn White Jr., conjectured this shift as the root of our ecological crisis and related it to the development of agricultural implements in the medieval period, such as power machinery, labor-saving devices, and automation. As a consequence, these developments have profoundly changed man’s relation to Nature, from being part of Nature to being an exploiter of Nature. This exploitive attitude was deeply influenced by Judeo-Christian theology, especially in Western Christianity, with its distinctive and pragmatical approach to science and technology. The ensuing scientific and technological advancements in the West were in harmony with larger intellectual patterns and, in particular, with a highly influential cosmological model through the Middle Ages, called scala naturae. [1] This model influenced the enduring concept of the ‘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 and Bude 92).

Equally, the language we use today – a mixture of medieval hermeneutics and Renaissance humanism with its faith in reason, intellect, and progress – has created vast silences. This has led to a realm of “not saids” called Nature, obscured by sweeping claims of eternal truths about human differences, rationality, and transcendence (Manes 17). The silencing of Nature, which persisted into the twentieth century and continues today in various forms, has generated a biased and deceptive version of homo sapiens, establishing man (and this engendered formulation is intended, since the silencing of Nature has long been accompanied by the silencing of women and non-binary people) as the self-declared sole speaker of the world. This flourishing narrative of human exceptionalism of the past three centuries has led to the point that human action has extended its reach across the entire planet. As a result of their far-reaching impact, “humans have become a proper geological (rather than merely social or biological) agent akin to meteorites and volcanoes” (Vermeulen 3-4).

However, it was not until 2000 that this new planetary condition has come to be known by now familiar name of the Anthropocene, coined by Paul Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Prize, and ecologist Eugene Stoermer. The Anthropocene, apart from its significant geological and ecological implications for life on planet Earth, represents a seismic shift in our fundamental understandings and beliefs about humans and other forms of life  and matter. Marek Tamm and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon argue that “the Anthropocene has opened a new situation for humanity,” a ‘new human condition,’ which “forces a radical shift in how we understand” and, as a consequence, reconsider “our past relationship to the more-than-human world” (204). This revisionist outlook has become especially pertinent in the contemporary world, bringing about a sense of rapid and radical transformations to both the human condition and the cultural and natural environment. In the face of heightened awareness about human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity, natural disasters, biopolitics, non-human rights, and extinction of species, “the Anthropocene calls for precisely for the evaluation of human life from the perspective of posthumanism” (Roelvink 136).

Since the late 1990s, after the waning of influence from two major schools of thought of the twentieth century, namely poststructuralism and postmodernism, posthumanism was informed by various tendencies that required robust criticism of human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism of the previous decades. As Ewa Domanska accurately contends, posthumanism “challenges 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). With its anticipatory and future-oriented aspects, posthumanism encourages the exploration of unrealized potential in the past rather than futile preoccupation with the limitations of previous configurations.

Among the diverse theories and approaches posthumanism utilizes, new materialism stands out for its innovative reconceptualization of the history of our species. In broader terms, it  “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). One particularly insightful way of understanding these interconnections is through non-human narratives and more-than-human storytelling. Therefore, in the new materialist conception, narrative extends to more-than-human entities, transcending its traditional recognition as an exclusively human practice. It now includes the stories of more-than-human entities, entanglements, and assemblages.

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

Taking up the new materialist assertion that we need to tell stories of human-nonhuman assemblages, I will explore Tom Comitta’s [2] recent novel, The Nature Book, which engages with “the art of noticing… the multiple, interconnected worlds comprised of different human lifeways and other species who will co-create stories of resurgence that may help us to live convivially together” (Oppermann 267). I suggest that The Nature Book transcends its literary boundaries to become an experimental exploration of non-anthropocentric historical representation and narrative forms. Drawing a parallel with Aristotle’s distinction in Poetics, favoring poets for their ability to address the universal [kathólou] while historians navigate the specific [kath’ékaston] (81), Comitta’s novel adeptly combines history and fiction, akin to his view of his work as a narrative-archive hybrid, to serve as a conduit for reforming our understanding of historical representation beyond human-centric boundaries. This intricate tapestry challenges the prevailing emphasis on plot progression, shifting the focus to nature descriptions while simultaneously questioning the conventional perception of humans as exclusive architects of historical agency.

I argue that by introducing the novel concept of a ‘literary supercut’ which they define as “texts made entirely or almost entirely of found language” (A Brief), Comitta not only pioneers a new narrative genre but also crafts a fictional realm devoid of human presence. ‘Supercut’, by the way, is to be taken literally here, as demonstrated by photographs of Comitta’s studio (which we sadly cannot reproduce here for copyright reasons, but which can be found here). In this way, it aligns with the principles of multispecies narratives, “[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). With meticulous precision, they curate natural descriptions from a vast array of 300 canonical Anglophone novels, employing an Oulipoean approach that pushes past conventional narrative confines and challenges authorial supremacy. The result of this creative endeavor is a contemplative narrative that resonates with the medieval contemplative tradition with its virtues of spareness and sobriety, and its belief in humility of expression “not merely for the individual but for man as a species” (White 13). Comitta, with their decentralized human perspectives and advocacy for non-human others emerges as a modern-day Saint Francis of Assisi, who proposed an alternative Christian view of Nature that “rested on a unique sort of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate” (ibid).

Their intent is also evident in the choice of their title, The Nature Book, avoiding the familiar formulation of the “Book of Nature,” which posits Nature as readable and interpretable like any other text. According to Christopher Manes, this understanding is also a remnant of the Middle Ages, where growing literacy and Christian exegetical tradition successfully perpetuated the idea of the Nature vs culture divide. These two main institutional technologies eroded the premedieval animistic view of Nature, now forgotten and repressed, which suggests that the natural world and all its entities, human and non-human, are alive and articulate.

Interestingly enough, Comitta’s depiction of Nature is not anthropomorphized as in The Romance; instead, their Nature confesses in the “found” and anthropomorphic language of various authors of the Anglophone canon who “have distorted, praised, belittled, anthropomorphized, projected onto, and spoken through countless animals, landforms and weather patterns” (Comitta ix). Thus, Comitta conveys Nature using the “faulty” medium of human language, “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).

Consequently, Comitta constructs a chaotic narrative ecosystem where readers can experience Nature indifferent to their presence, excluding humans in the same way that natural descriptions in novels are often relegated to mere background elements or easily skipped parts. Instead, Comitta succeeds in creating a challenging read where readers of The Nature Book adopt the perspective of the disembodied observer over Nature, which resembles a fictional wilderness, “a place self-willed, a separate, self-sustaining narrative ecosystem with its own imperatives independent of ours” (Searching). In doing so, they reestablish and revive once more the medieval scholastic concept of natura naturans, or nature naturing, which refers to “the permanent genesis of things, nature as a process, as productivity” (Neyrat 135) within the confines of the Anthropocene writing.

References

Adams, Cara Blue. “Searching for Unfamiliar Terrain in ‘The Nature Book'”. The New Yorker, 16 March, 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), p. 118-130.

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

Leards, Adin E. and Bude, Tekla. “Matter and Meaning: Early English New Materialisms”, Examplaria, 35:2 (2023), p. 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 and 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 and 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 and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

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 and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

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

[1] “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).

[2] Tom Comitta’s pronouns are they/them, so I will use those pronouns throughout the text to align with their preference.

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Ghost Trees. A Challenge to Multispecies-(Hi-)Stories

by Solvejg Nitzke

This text has been translated to German: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/366

Ghost trees are the result of a failed bet. Bald cypresses (Taxodium distichum), the signature tree species of the Southern wetlands from Louisiana to the Carolinas, have developed a series of strategies to survive and thrive in environments that would literally overwhelm most other trees. Where even most wetland species such as willows and poplars might tolerate occasional flooding, bald cypresses grow right in the middle of the swamp, supporting islands of life in otherwise hostile conditions. Occupying prime ground, the trees contribute to immensely productive ecosystems. Their equally deep and high roots – bald cypresses grow “knees” granting them access to air when flooded – anchor the trees and allow them to grow for thousands of years, becoming giants that produce their own climate and environment. Thus, in effect, they become the major actors in wetland-systems on which myriads of other humans and nonhumans depend. However, there is a caveat to this way of life: it depends on fresh water.

William L. Farr, Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) growing on the Guadalupe River, Kerr County, Texas, USA (14 April 2012), CC BY-SA 4.0

Many of the wetlands in the Southern USA line the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Usually, that does not bother any of the large trees, and yet, they depend on betting that saltwater is kept off by the pressure of fresh-water rivers flowing into the sea and by salt marshes acting as borderlands between the swamps and the ocean. Sometimes this bet fails. When saltwater pushes back and flows into the swamp, the trees become victim of their own steadfastness. Stating their inability to run away seems redundant, but it is their very rootedness that seals their fate. Once the salinity of their environment crosses a certain threshold, death is certain. Salt crystals find their way through the vascular tissue of the tree and destroy cell walls on their way, cutting of life support in both directions (water flowing upwards and sugars downwards). Like poison into veins or, maybe in a more apt comparison, gas into (mammalian) lungs, the spreading of the deadly substance is irreversibly taking over and destroying the body of the affected being.

All that remains are ghosts. Bleached trunks and defoliated branches materialize the absence of the once vibrant green, denying – sometimes for centuries – the cathartic fall that in human imaginations marks the death of a tree. Uncanny enough, ghost trees are a so-called natural phenomenon (see National Geographic). Storm surges happen, and trees that grow to close to the sea will lose the evolutionary bet while others, whose seeds sprouted at luckier places, continue to thrive. That is, until human beings enter the scene. An article in Wrightsville Beach Magazine, geared at tourists visiting the area in North Carolina, recommends visiting the eerie spectacle. By drawing attention to the ‘inexorable’ rise of sea levels due to anthropogenic climate change, the touristy recommendation inadvertently draws the picture of an apocalyptic future worthy of J.G. Ballard’s science fiction classic The Drowned World (1962).

Bald cypresses (Taxodium distichum) and Royal Fern (Osmunda regalis) in an artificial swamp at Ruhr-University Bochum’s botanical garden. At the base of the trunk of the right-hand tree the characteristic knees are visible. (c) Solvejg Nitzke

Reverence for trees and the multispecies ecosystems they enable and are enabled by depends on several factors. One of them is their perceived beauty; another, often trumping the first, is profit. Bald cypresses may be one of the few aspects that generated affective attachment to the swamp lands and, thus, helped protect them. (Despised as they were by colonizers, these were therefore often drenched and destroyed.) But bald cypresses also stabilize conditions which make it difficult to ship the wetlands and thus transport goods from the sea into the continent and vice versa. When European settler-colonialists (mostly French and British) tried to figure out ways of exploiting the landscape that in their imported traditions was associated with illness and moral depravity (still prevalent in the Southern Gothic genre), digging canals was the obvious solution. These literally transgressed the boundaries between land and seas increasing the number of saltwater floods pushing into the swamps and killing trees. Ghost forests line these canals but (in typical capitalist fashion) rather than interpreting them as signs of potentially dangerous interventions, presently, they attract tourists and storytellers who revel in their eerie presence and appreciate the photo-op. Yet in the background of the very tourist-imageries looms a larger catastrophe, which foregrounds, once again, the role of ghost trees as warning signs that assemble the mistakes of past interventions and future catastrophe in the present moment: when, for example, a tourist magazine almost casually refers to the spectre of rising sea levels, it becomes visible that these trees embody a future in which neither trees nor humans might be able to survive.

A bald cypress’s “knees” poking out of the soil. (c) Solvejg Nitzke

These trees and the ecological as well as medial conditions of their existence pose challenges to multispecies (Hi-)Stories and storytelling not only because of their ghostly appearance, but also because they entangle temporalities (arboreal and human, oceanic and aquatic) and produce “chronoferences” (A. Landwehr), that is, they manifest past, present and future in a body whose role in the ecological and economic networks cannot be reduced to a binary of dead or alive. But swamp trees are not the only arboreal spectres that trouble human stores and histories. Literature, especially so-called genre-texts, is positively swarming with possessed trees, trees harbouring spirits and trees haunting humans. Whether it is the ghostly rattling of branches against windows, the monstrous shapes of trees in the forest twilight or the haunting presence of trees who seem to have forgotten that they are neither supposed to move nor think, let alone speak. By taking some of the uncanny abilities of trees seriously – abilities that are just being ‘discovered’ by science –  ghost stories as well as weird and gothic stories – such as Annette von Droste Hüllshoff’s Die Judenbuche, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Giant Wistaria and Algernon Blackwood’s The Man Whom the Trees Loved and The Willows – envision plants as actors in more-than-human worlds which are not dependent on humans to recognize their agency. Thus, there is a whole taxonomy of ghost trees which challenge the ways in which humans are (un-)able to act with and conceptualize their intervention in more-than-human environments.

View of the relatively young bald cypress’s crowns at RUB’s botanical gardens. (c) Solvejg Nitzke

By comparing the bald cypresses from the US-American South to two of their literary counterparts – Elif Shafak’s fig tree in The Island of Missing Trees and Andrew Michael Hurley’s oak in Starve Acre – I will explore arboreal chronoferences as a concept that bridges (environmental) history and (ecological) storytelling in and for the time of human intervention on a planetary scale. Connecting the historical and literary concepts of (Hi-)Stories to anthropological and ethnographic (Anna Tsing et al) as well as new materialist (Karen Barad) approaches to multispecies-stories, I will propose a way of acknowledging trees and their vibrant existence beyond ‘death’ as an active approach to embodied and, possibly, rooted mediation of (Hi-)story-writing as an ongoing, open process of connecting and caring for more-than-human worlds.

Dr. habil. Solvejg Nitzke is interim professor of comparative literature at Ruhr-University Bochum. Her work revolves around questions of knowledge production under precarious circumstances in climate fiction, disaster stories and plant worlds. In her project “Making kin with trees/Fremde Verwandtschaft. Eine Kulturpoetik der Bäume” she investigates human-tree relations. Making Kin with Trees. A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care will be published with Palgrave in 2025.
https://www.komparatistik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/mitarbeiter/nitzke/publikationen.html.de