Radical Animism

Reading for the End of the World

Jemma Deer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350111172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The reckoning of climate change calls for us to fundamentally rethink our notions of human centrality, superiority and power. Drawing on a wide range of modern writers and thinkers – from Freud and Darwin to Latour and Derrida, from Shakespeare and Carroll to Woolf and Kafka – Radical Animism develops a new theory of life for a planet in crisis. In this original and timely work, Jemma Deer reframes our thinking of the Anthropocene with ideas from anthropology, astronomy, deconstruction, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, quantum physics and veganism. Through readings that are both inventive and compelling, this book shows how 'literary animism' – the active and transformative life of literature – can open our thinking to the immense power of the non-human world.

1

Radical Animism: Climate Change and Other Transformations

Can such things be,

And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,

Without our special wonder? You make me strange

Shakespeare, Macbeth¹

Awakening

How to live with the strange radiance of this new dawn? All action reveals itself as interaction, in terre action, actions graved into the earth, interred but not put to rest, resurfacing, rupturing, interrupting the ground on which we stand – or fall.

Ear to the ground: beating heart of earth, under threat. Listen.

*

Radical animism has to do with life and living, with what living is, at root, or with what is living, even if it is not, in the strict sense, ‘alive’. It entails a discovery or rediscovery of buried life and a careful or curious attention to the living breathing waking spirit of what is unearthed. It has to do with the experience of being alive, with others, here on planet earth. It involves thinking the pasts and the futures that cannot be separated from such an experience. It must reckon with the events happening now that are named under the heading ‘climate change’, the radical transformations of planetary environments and the multiplicitous implications – many unforeseeable – of these events for life on earth. It involves a careful thinking through the phrase ‘life on earth’ and the dependent relation it encapsulates: the relation between the anima, spirit or psyche, and the material, terrestrial ground. It recognizes that all that is vital, quick, beating with the fragile defiance of life must also come or succumb to death: vitality is mortality. But it also recognizes that the traits or characteristics of life are not restricted to what we usually think of as ‘living things’, that non-human and non-living entities are also animated, alive. It involves thinking through the terms ‘environment’, ‘ecology’, ‘economics’ and ‘extinction’. It has to do with response and responsibility. It will need what lives in language.

The planet is in transformation. Everything is changing. Things are strange and becoming stranger. Humans are implicated. We are responsible, even as we fail to respond. The conditions in which civilization flourished are altering, becoming other. This epoch is being called the Anthropocene: an age in which the human species has become a geological force, incalculably transforming the earth’s systems on every level – altering the hydrosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere. You are becoming aware of the fact that the ground on which you stand is not stable, passive and unmoving, but that it too is a force, has agency, responds. The way things once were begins to feel like a dream.

As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin. He lay on his hard, armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little, he could see his curved brown abdomen, divided by arch-shaped ridges, and domed so high that the bed cover, on the brink of slipping off, could hardly stay put. His many legs, miserably thin in comparison with his size otherwise, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

‘What has happened to me?’ he thought. It was not a dream. His room, a proper, human being’s room, rather too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls.²

Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, translated as The Metamorphosis or The Transformation, is a story for the Anthropocene. The -wandlung (‘change’) of Kafka’s title comes from the same root as the English verbs ‘wander’, ‘wend’ and ‘wind’: the Old Germanic wend, ‘to turn’. This is a transformation in which something turns into something else, in which things are moving, tides and times are turning, perhaps taking a turn for the worse. The German prefix ver- has multiple different associations – one of which has to do with change: the transformation of the ver-wandlung. But it also often implies something going wrong, a misstep (ich habe mich verlaufen; I got lost) or a mistake (eine Verwechslung or ein Versehen). When Gregor awakes to find himself turned into a monstrous vermin, we can only assume that such a transformation is not a positive one. Another possible translation, then, might be The Catastrophe (from the Greek κατά, ‘down’, and στρέϕειν, ‘to turn’) – given its sense of ‘an event producing a subversion of the order or system of things’ (OED).

You are, right now, living that strange morning. Having woken to the reality of anthropogenic climate change, human beings find that they have become the ‘monstrous vermin’ or ‘pests’ of the world: animals that are destructive, noxious or troublesome and that, like parasites, live to the detriment of other animals or plants. For a long time, we got away with it. But our collective body is now so swollen that the cover, like Gregor’s, is slipping off. It is not a dream. We look on, helplessly. Our home, the planet earth, familiar as the four walls of Gregor’s room, has, without changing size at all, suddenly become ‘too small’. The place, the technologies, the lifestyles which we have for so long assumed to be our property, or proper to us – just as Gregor sees ‘his room, a proper human being’s room’ – become altogether inappropriate. ‘What has happened to me?’ he wonders. Or, as German grammar demands, ‘What has happened with me?’, ‘Was ist mit mir geschehen?’ Gregor is somehow implicated. We all are. I am reminded of Heidegger’s questions at the beginning of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. He asks, ‘What is happening to us here? [Was geschieht da mit uns?] What is man, that such things happen to him in his very ground?’³ In this age of anthropogenic climate change, these questions acquire a strange new force, as the assumptions upon which our conception of being is based are called into question and redrawn within an entirely altered framework of responsibility.

Kafka’s tale takes up similar questions: the transformation of its title is not limited to Gregor but also concerns a transformation of what it means to be a human being, what it means to be an animal and what it means to live and die together. ‘What has happened to me?’ asks Gregor. A transformation, a change, a Verwandlung. Above I noted that the ‘-wand’ in this word is a ‘turn’, the old Germanic root of which has several incarnations in English. The verb ‘wend’ (as in ‘to wend one’s way’) wanders through a plethora of senses: it means not only ‘to turn’ or ‘change’ but also ‘to translate’, ‘to go’, ‘to proceed’, ‘to leave’, ‘to cease to exist’, ‘to die’ – thereby shadowing or foretelling Gregor’s whole tale. The related verb ‘wonde’, now obsolete, means to turn away, ‘to shrink from, avoid, shun; to refuse’, just as, perhaps, the rest of the Samsa family turn from their transformed son. In German, as well as the turning motions of Wandlung (transformation), Wendung (a turn, or a turn of phrase: a trope) and wandern (to wander) – all of which occur in the text – the etymologically distinct word Wand also means ‘wall’: the four walls of Gregor’s confinement, the walling-in of his world. Whether or not Kafka was consciously playing on the rich history that turns in this word is not my concern; instead, as will become clear, one of the endeavours of this book will be to pay careful and curious attention to the radical animism of language, to the strange way it does things of its own accord.

I open with this text because it touches on so many of the strange events occurring today, in this age of anthropogenic climate change. Climate change is an animal problem – a problem for animals and a problem that is animate, monstrous, alive. Die Verwandlung brings human beings face to face with a non-human other, with a living thing that they do not recognize as a fellow – despite their once-intimate relation. It also concerns the becoming-monstrous of the human: the precipitous mutation through which our way of living is revealed to be no longer compatible with the planet. It is about the responsibility we bear to human and non-human others, as well as the capacity, or incapacity, to respond. It is about forms of expression and language beyond the limits of human comprehension. It is moved by the uncanny or the Unheimliche – the strange and unsettling disturbance of that most familiar and familial of places: the home.

The transformation

Everyone alive today is a creature of the Anthropocene, even if the word did not exist when they were born. Retroactively ascribed, it is a term that belongs to a time that is very much out of joint. The Holocene – the geological epoch in which, until not too long ago, humans thought they were still living – was brought to an end by the emergence of what Antonio Stoppani called, in 1873, a ‘new telluric force’: human beings.⁴ The OED defines the Anthropocene as the ‘era of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth’. Paul Crutzen, credited with coining the word ‘Anthropocene’ in 2000, dates its advent to 1784, with the invention of the steam engine and the subsequent transformation of industry – and, indeed, this correlates with the increased concentration of greenhouse gases read from polar ice cores.⁵ Humans have, however, left their mark on the planet in other ways too: by clearing forests and practising extensive agriculture, by cultivating and modifying certain plant crops and ‘livestock’, by directly or indirectly causing the extinction or endangerment of millions of species of plants and animals, by producing great swathes of non-degradable waste (some of it radioactive), by damming rivers and by spreading diseases and non-native species to new parts of the world. All of this accumulates force as the human population grows exponentially.

The denomination of the Anthropocene has been criticized for figuring human agency as a unified – or unifiable – force. T. J. Demos, in Against the Anthropocene, notes how the word ‘tends to disavow differentiated responsibility (and the differently located effects) for the geological changes it designates, instead homogeneously allocating agency to the generic members of its “human activities”’.⁶ While this is a crucially important point – and one to which we will be returning – I disagree with Demos’s suggestion that we should avoid the term ‘Anthropocene’ altogether. This is for three reasons. First, as Adam Trexler recognizes, while notions of climate change or global warming are susceptible to being framed as mere ‘prognostications that might yet be deferred’ – however deluded such a stance may be – ‘the Anthropocene names a world-historical phenomenon that has arrived’.⁷ Or as Bruno Latour remarks in Facing Gaia, the designation of a new epoch serves to mark climate change not just as a transitory event, a ‘passing crisis’, but rather as ‘a profound mutation in our relation to the world’.⁸ Second, the naming of a geological epoch massively broadens the frame through which we view human history, thereby effecting temporally what the 1968 ‘Earthrise’ image did spatially, imaginatively providing a radical new perspective from which to understand the contemporary moment – including the unequal distribution of culpability and power by which it is characterized. Third, the term asks us to recognize that all human actions are now – and in fact always have been – inextricably embroiled within the bio-geo-chemistry of the planet. Eating, drinking, breathing, excreting, shopping, driving, farming, composting, hunting, mining – all of these activities, to a greater or lesser extent, are bound up with planetary systems that are beyond the scope of human sense perceptions.

Given the multitude of factors that have contributed to our increasing impact upon the planet, along with the relatively long timescales involved, it is hard to finally or precisely date the ascension of the anthropos to the level of a ‘telluric force’. As Jeremy Davies discusses in The Birth of the Anthropocene, stratigraphic opinion as to the most appropriate start date for the new epoch remains divided.⁹ What all the marks of human life that I have listed above have in common, however, is their potential endurance, their legibility. The designation of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch transforms our thinking of the future as well as the past: it is the recognition that, in millions of years from now, whatever becomes of the human race and life on earth, the story of human civilizations will be told by the planetary records we are leaving behind. Sarah Wood calls the Anthropocene ‘an age in which human agency has written itself, with radically destabilizing effect, into the geology, the chemistry, the plants on our planet’.¹⁰ To speak of the Anthropocene in terms of writing and legibility is no mere metaphor. Rather, the writing of words and the writing of geological traces (and, as we will see in Chapter 3, the writing of life) reveal themselves to be but different species of the same genus. All of these species of writing possess a transformative force that extends far beyond the time and place of inscription. This book will be concerned with elaborating the shared...