Practical Research: Visualising the Anthropocene

'Visualizing the Anthropocene'

Nicholas Mirzeoff

Essay
Public Culture 26:2
2014

Contextual insight into a history of art perspective of the various visualisations of the Anthropocene dating back to the times of the Industrial Revolution, and the domestication of humans evident in the perspective of famous paintings.

Mirzeoff gives a great perspective into our natural acceptance of the visual aesthetic of the Anthropocene as it has been embedded into our visual culture and understanding of viewpoint, colour and scene (i.e. looking out of a window / polluted skies / machinery).
'It appears that the desire to live in the modern city was so great that it literally anaesthetised the senses, or at least allowed people to disregard what they saw and smelled in the water', presenting the emergent class system and the connotations of desire to live it (where man-made materialism became separate to natural landscape).

'Climate change is the polite name for the robbing of the commons, the over-developed world as a whole is the thief in relation to the dominated world...The difficulty of doing anything against the modern Leviathans of multinational corporations, consumerism, and the fossil fuel industry...I do not wish to participate in their visualisation of the planet as a battlefield and hence presume that to mitigate the effects of climate change they must somehow be defeated...I think that the reclaiming of the imagination entails an undoing of their authority, which they themselves literally cannot conceive . The theory of society as permanent war cannot envisage an alternative.' 


Findings:

• Athropocene: 'new era in geology caused by human intervention, primarily the burning of fossil fuels' - thus his perspective is that of an anti-petrocapitalist 
• 250 years old, 'a mote in the eye of geological time'
• 10,000 years of preceding Holocene - unusually stable climate conditions made human agriculture and civilisation possible
• it affects everything from the lithosphere to the upper atmosphere and all the biota in between - making the visualisation of the Anthropocene difficult 
• 'The Anthropocene is a human-created machine that is now unconsciously vet on its own destruction, a purposiveness without purpose, to repurpose Immanuel Kant's famous definition of aesthetic' 
• the Anthropocene defines the entire planet 
• Human agency must render this phenomenon into an aesthetic, comprising both the ancient concept of bodily perception and the modern sense of the beautiful 
• 'the first step is to recognise how deeply embedded in our very sensorium and modern ways of seeing the Anthropocene-aesthetic-capitalist complex on modern visuality has become'
• this interface moves in nonlinear and networked form - neither singular nor self-contained 
• patterns of material, social, human, and nonhuman interaction
• nature so often used by humans to define perversity as unnatural, has itself become perverse (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010: 1-47) undoing all theologies, eisms, Spinozisms, and other forms of the transcendent
• We now find ourselves confronting autoimmune capitalism that seems determined to extract the last moment of circulation for itself, even at the expense of its host lifeworld. 
• Learning to think anthropocenically, to coin a term, will mean letting go of both the division of time and space that define research and the myth of the solidarity intellectual. Crowd-sourced collective and horizontal practice is not just desirable but necessary.
• the Anthropocene might redirect our attention to the universal, because it affects everyone  
• our planet will continue regardless of the future of the carbon-based life that currently inhabits it
• its effects across the planet are very uneven, requiring a decolonisation of the atmosphere
• a planetary counter-visualisation to global financialisation 
• countervisuality - the resistance has begun against consumer capitalism - defending green space -  effective and coordinated protest campaign to defend space and invent democracy
• the Anthropocene cannot visualize itself, no more can the market or empire, and yet the "authority" of both can be felt across the world. Imperial authority allowed thousands to rule millions. Market authority is what is known as "confidence" in whose name entire populations are subjugated by austerity. Anthropocene visuality allows us to move on, to see nothing and keep circulating commodities, despite the destruction of the biosphere. We do so less out of venal convenience...than out of a modernist conviction that "the authorities" will restore everything to order in the end
• Anthropocene visuality keeps us believing that somehow the war against nature that Western society has been waging for centuries is not only right; it is beautiful and it can be won. if this is certainly a Western imperial project, the shame and the crisis is that is has affected every living thing whatsoever. But, as we shall see, it does not do so evenly and equitably.
• the power to imagine has itself been colonised and dominated so that we understand the fundamental human impulse to be one of conflict rather than communal action 
• 'the conquest on nature' integrated into Wester aesthetics throughout the Anthropocene - a new configuration of the modern, imperial subject as being constituted by his "superiority over nature"
• the masculine superiority required to create civilisation was epitomised for Kant by the practice of the military general 
• the Anthropocene anaesthetised the perception of modern industrial pollution  
• Phantasmagoria 
• The Anthropocene is so built in to our senses that it determines our perceptions, hence it is aesthetic 
• Imperial smoke is a positive sign of the energy and vitality of the modern metropole, whereas the smogs of developing world capitals are miasmas, threatening to health and vitality; as seen in the 2008 Beijing Olympics versus the 2012 London Olympics, where the former received 'tremendous concern' in Western media about the effects of air pollution, and the latter no mention even though it 'coincided with an air quality alert'.
• Countervisuality - the project is to create a mental space for action that can link the visible and the sayable 
• Julian Aguon (2008) "disposable human" - the most radical possible gesture would be if all living people were considered fully human...For if we did genuinely hold all human life to be self-evidently equal, there would already be dramatic action to protect those whose way of life is radically under threat, such as Pacific islanders and other residents of low-lying nations like Bangladesh threatened by rising sea levels
• 'One-third of all currently spoken languages are found in Oceania, meaning that great swathes of huan culture should be places on the endangered list.'
• scientists have suggested that we need to classify the moment as the sixth mass extinction in earth's history (Novacek 2007)
• 90% of the DNA in our bodies is not "ours" but microbial (Human Microbiome Project)...it is the result of a long sharing between generations...certain "switches" in the genome are turned on by experiences...that lead to changes in the body...[let that] resonate with us and lead to a restoration of the commons...the imperial state has been devoted to making that switch invisible to us...The long obsession with surveillance that has reached new heights in the digital era has been motivated by the anxiety that imperial subjects might start to think and act in common...prior to all law, there is relation between people...one neuroscientists identified a set of "mirror neurons" in the brain (Gallese 2003)...human connection...love...that relationship cannot be represented because it exists only in common as it passes between people.
• Countervisuality, like other forms of resistance to capitalism, does not move in a linear, tactile fashion (link to Moore - linear capitalism)
• HE CONCLUDES: contesting Anthropocene visuality is a decolonial politics that claims the right to see what there is to be seen and name it as such: a planetary destabilisation of the conditions supportive of life, requiring a decolonisation of the biosphere itself in order to create a new sustainable and democratic way of life that has been prepared for by centuries of resistance 

Noteworthy case study:

In 2008 legislation was proposed in Bolivia that would give the planet legal standing and rights, defined as an "indivisible community of all living systems and living organisms, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, which share a common destiny". 
The "Declaration of the Right of Mother Earth" was a legal project and ethical commitment to vivir bien (living well), defined as "adopting forms of consumption, behaviour and conduct that are not degrading to nature. It requires and ethical and spiritual relationship with life. Living Well proposes the complete fulfilment of life and collective happiness" (WorldTruth.TV 2012). 
Drafted by Unity Pact, the law represented all of the country's 36 indigenous groups and a total of 3 million people. 

(Further investigation) Wikipedia.com:

Law of the Rights of Mother Earth (Spanish: Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra) is a Bolivian law (Law 071 of the Plurinational State), that was passed by Bolivia's Plurinational Legislative Assembly in December 2010. This 10 article law is derived from the first part of a longer draft bill, drafted and released by the Pact of Unity by November 2010. The law defines Mother Earth as "a collective subject of public interest," and declares both Mother Earth and life-systems (which combine human communities and ecosystems) as titleholders of inherent rights specified in the law. 

http://archive.wphna.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2010-12-07-Bolivian-Law-of-rights-of-Mother-Earth.pdf

"Mother Earth is the living dynamic system made up of the indivisible community of all living systems and living beings, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, which share a common destiny. Mother Earth is considered sacred; it feeds and is a home that contains, sustains and reproduces all living things, ecosystems, biodiversity, societies and the individuals that compose them.” – Bolivia’s Framework Law for Mother Earth and Holistic Development to Live Well, October 2012

'Can the Earth have legal rights? Is a radical change in the way governments and people interact with the planet possible? A new Bolivian law says yes, defining Mother Earth as a living system with rights instead of an object open to unlimited exploitation.' 

- https://boliviadiary.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/bolivia-enacts-new-law-for-mother-earth-ict/

The law is a key example of the East versus West, as well as North versus South global divide, in which entire structures, ecologies, theologies differ so much that it is unimaginable that a law like this could and would be passed in a western culture. The fact that one country has adopted these beliefs into their fundamental law, shows that like-mindedness and ideals of the divine nature and care for our home can easily be sanctioned and endorsed into practice in all societies. It is just western imperialist capitalist culture which favours industry and the ignorant man.