Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture

Maura Coughlin, Emily Gephart, Maura Coughlin, Emily Gephart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429602399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte

In this volume, emerging and established scholars bring ethical and political concerns for the environment, nonhuman animals and social justice to the study of nineteenth-century visual culture. They draw their theoretical inspiration from the vitality of emerging critical discourses, such as new materialism, ecofeminism, critical animal studies, food studies, object-oriented ontology and affect theory. This timely volume looks back at the early decades of the Anthropocene to query the agency of visual culture to critique, create and maintain more resilient and biologically diverse local and global ecologies.

1 Introduction

Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart

[I]t is but recently that … public attention has been half awakened to the necessity of restoring the disturbed harmonies of nature, whose well-balanced influences are so propitious to all her organic offspring, of repaying to our great mother the debt which the prodigality and the thriftlessness of former generations have imposed upon their successors—thus fulfilling the command of religion and of practical wisdom, to use this world as not abusing it.

—George Perkins Marsh (1864)

The long nineteenth century casts an even longer shadow across the twentieth century and into our present, with respect to the irrevocable transformations it set in motion. It brought about a geologic era of climactic change that many observers now broadly call the Anthropocene: a term whose anthropocentric hubris is not without its critics.¹ Yet it seems no coincidence that ecology, as both a science and a philosophy, also emerged during this century, amid intensifying imperialist colonization; capitalistic commodification; rising pollution; and global exploitation of human, animal and inorganic resources.

Given the period’s prevailing Eurocentric, Christian and utilitarian faith in humankind’s ultimate dominion over the earth, the ethical imperatives of a more secular, ecological mindset that acknowledged the mutual interdependence among planetary forces faced ambivalent acceptance, if not outright denial. Nonetheless, what many scholars today would call an emergent “ecocritical” consciousness also shaped the century, of the kind proposed by George Perkins Marsh in the oft-cited book Man and Nature (1864).² Even as Capitalocentric logics rose to ideological dominance, the changes that they set in motion fostered a slow-to-dawn acknowledgment of their results (Haraway 2015; Moore 2016). Amid rising demand for goods and resources that mandated wholesale reformulation of global networks, a few keen observers like Marsh began to recognize an even larger dynamic: the idea that all human beings were and had always been part of a “mesh” – a planetwide symbiotic community of interdependent entities (Morton 2011).

This book takes such a community as its core premise, and throughout its assembled essays, its authors speak to the non-hierarchical interconnectedness central to ecological thinking and environmental history. Bringing together a broad range of responses to the task of what Nicholas Mirzoeff has termed “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” the chapters herein articulate a visual culture of ecology during its early development (Mirzoeff 2015). Embracing insights from the interdisciplinary environmental humanities, they echo Karl Kusserow’s recent observation that ecocriticism is not merely a method but a habit of mind (Kusserow 2018; see also Chakrabarty 2009). Beyond merely applying ecocriticism to the art of the nineteenth century, they employ materials, images, technologies and epistemologies as productive “theory machines” (Galison 2003),³ and in so doing, they seek to enrich the field of nineteenth-century visual culture. They read the century’s seismic and world-wide shifts through pictures and with things, and by means of the ecological metaphors set in place during this formative era.

For instance, as both a concept and an organic exemplar, the tree proved a particularly effective image to think with. Among his many accomplishments, German biologist, philosopher, physician and artist Ernst Haeckel is celebrated today for coining the term “Oecologia,” or “ecology,” in his 1866 German-language publication “General Morphology of Organisms.” Despite recognition of the “mutual relations of organisms” dawning across a host of inter-related discourses, Haeckel’s neologism gained momentum slowly as a body of knowledge and model of thinking, earning widespread currency only in the twentieth century (Stauffer 1957; Kelsey 2014).⁴ To his Anglophone readers, Haeckel was better known for his passionate defenses of Darwinian evolutionary theory, many of which he presented as ecological relationships. In the 1879 English edition of his text The Evolution of Man, Haeckel embraced the challenge of explaining Darwin’s occasionally abstruse theories, providing helpful models through which his own equally complicated explanations might take root.

The guiding analogy undergirding Haeckel’s defense of evolutionary processes compared them to the natural growth of trees, as demonstrated by plates in both his 1866 and 1879 texts (Figure 1.1) (Gontier 2011; Lima 2014; Miller 2016). Darwin himself had suggested such a visualization in the only illustration gracing the 1859 edition of the Origin of Species, in which he charted life’s proliferating diversity and evolution’s endlessly bifurcating processes via an effective if rudimentary schematic.⁵ It was Haeckel, however, who truly expanded upon the idea in his own diagrams, which took on increasingly elaborate resemblance to a tree. As a visualization of complex precepts, a tree’s innate and immutable growth patterns proved equally significant to structuring information. Granting all biological development a form that was organically, not divinely, predestined – from taproot to trunk to ever more diverging branches and fine twigs – Haeckel pictured an originary, vitalized, sap-like stream of biotic entities from which all higher organisms grew upward, as if toward the sun’s providential light.

Figure 1.1 Ernst Haeckel, ‘Tree of Life’ in Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866) and The Evolution of Man (1879).

While the tree-form that Haeckel helped popularize may have echoed nature’s organic laws, it also simplified a complex and abstract system by means of pictorially convincing didactic principles.⁶ To Haeckel, this metaphor had its own unassailable logic:

The Natural System of Organisms, which classifies all the[ir] various forms in larger and smaller groups, … can but be represented figuratively under the form of a tree with many branches. This tree is the genealogical tree of the groups related in form, and their relation in form really is their relation in blood. As no other explanation can be given of the fact that the system naturally assumes a tree-like form, we may regard this as an immediate and powerful proof of the truth…. (Haeckel 1879, 112)

His visualization not only literalized his comparison, but also proved morphologically persuasive to readers who might otherwise have remained skeptical of evolution: as symbols and as forms of ‘natural’ evidence, trees upheld an important if un-articulated association with God’s underlying governance. Reconstituting references to Judeo-Christian genealogical trees in terms of nature’s secular logic, Haeckel’s diagram helped assuage lingering doubt that acceptance of Darwinian theory meant abandoning cherished beliefs (Gontier 2011).

Yet Haeckel’s “pedigree of man” did not dislodge, but merely reconfigured the preexisting scientific imperatives of classification, and his illustration upheld an anthropocentric and racially biased system of hierarchical categorization. For Haeckel, as for many of his fellow European and American biologists, white man’s position atop an arboreal crown was unshakeable; the prejudice in this premise was conveniently naturalized by substituting models of ever-ascending dynamic growth for the ontologically fixed ‘great chain of being.’ Moreover, by giving the evolutionary struggle for existence the familiar shape of a pleasant sylvan refuge, rather than representing it as an arena for dark conflict, Haeckel envisioned the limbs of his mighty oak as a site of ecological mutualism. Under the shade of this three, the aesthetic appreciation of ‘nature’ could even be cast as a basic, universal or even ‘instinctual’ human activity (Figure 1.2).

A second visual example that enabled ecological thinking and afforded a profound understanding of the deep time of prehistory emerged in the public consciousness at about the same time as Haeckel’s tree. The mammoth engraved on mammoth ivory, found by archeologist Edouard Lartet, was a nine-inch-long, fragmentary Ice Age image that was displayed at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 and was reproduced in Lartet’s widely published text Reliquiae Aquitanicae (1865–1875). By 1864, Lartet had already uncovered much evidence that “aboriginal” humans and then-extinct mammals had inhabited the same, very ancient French landscape, but the discovery of the mammoth at the rock shelter of La Madeleine in the Dordogne (a site that had been steadily inhabited for 17,000 years) sealed the case, incontrovertibly demonstrating that this extinct creature was a contemporary of the “primitive” who engraved it.

Figure 1.2 Image of a mammoth carved onto an elephant’s tusk. Reliquiæ aquitanicæ: being contributions to the archæology and palæontology of Périgord and the adjoining provinces of southern France, by Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy; edited by Thomas Rupert Jones.

Bearing both representational and indexical witness to prehistory, Lartet’s mammoth opened the door to a hitherto unimaginably vast epoch, prior to Biblical time; he mused on “the coexistence of Man with the fossil Elephant … in the earlier phases of the Quaternary Period” that the “truth of retrospective evidence is deduced now-a-days from so great a number of concordant observations, and of material facts of so clear a significance, that minds the least prepared to admit it are not slow to accept it in all its reality, when they will but take the trouble to look and then judge conscientiously” (Lartet 1875, 207–208).

Lartet’s thoughts on the force of “retrospective evidence” are strangely symmetrical with the words penned 100 years later by prehistory enthusiast and Land Artist Robert Smithson, who wrote in 1968 that it is the passage of time that allows something to be understood as an artwork: “[w]hen a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed into something that is nothing.…The object gets to be less and less but exists as something clearer. Every object, if it is art, is charged with the rush of time” (Smithson 2000, 112). Visual culture, such as the mammoth engraved by a prehistoric artist, “charged with the rush of time” has the capacity to initiate such connective insights.

This image thus facilitated the development of an ecological understanding of a shared human and extra-human history. Such conceptualization anticipates Donna Haraway’s proposition that nonhuman animals and humans have co-constituted each other over the course of our millennia together, in an always-interconnected “natureculture” and that “none of it can be approached if the fleshly historical reality of face-to-face, body-to-body subject making across species is denied or forgotten in the humanist doctrine that holds only humans to be true subjects with real histories” (Haraway 2008, 66). Like Haeckel’s tree, this striking image is an apt point of departure for thinking about how nineteenth-century visual culture might do (or might already have done) more than merely picture our origins or imaginatively place us in the past: it has powerfully produced twentieth- and twenty-first-century relationships to the other-than-human world.

Just as the human influence on the earth’s climate, or what Haraway terms the “anthropogenic processes” (Haraway 2015, 160) of the Anthropocene accelerated, widespread curiosity about the natural world fueled a concomitant desire to picture nature and humanity’s place within it. This collection seeks to demonstrate the range and reach of such curiosity, and to reveal the contradictions that underwrote the work of artists, scientists, historians and philosophers whose combined efforts pursued knowledge about the earth’s fundamental function and structure. Although many of these nineteenth-century scholars found, in the words of English critic John Ruskin, that “the truths of nature are one eternal change—one infinite variety” (Ruskin 1844, 65), they also initiated and perpetuated spurious pseudo-scientific beliefs that are no longer supportable in the twenty-first century. Other ironies proliferated as modern industrialization and transnational expansion called for a new grasp of global interconnectivity: even as resources were extricated irreversibly from their surroundings, scientists studied evidence of inextricable ecological relationships and postulated comprehensive narratives of the world’s deep time, vast scale and dynamic flux.

Scientific and documentary motivations coordinated with art and with emerging and progressive image technologies such as chromo-lithography, photography and microscopy, and with habits of collecting, mounting and displaying plants, minerals and animals as aesthetic evidence;...