TJ Demos – Against the Anthropocene. The Many Names of Resistance
T.J. Demos | Against the Anthropocene from Kaaitheater on Vimeo.
How do we critically reflect on climate change through the arts? TJ Demos’ previous books include “Decolonising Nature” and his latest book “Against the Anthropocene”. His latest book has a more activist stance. The term Anthropocene coined in the early 2000s. The term supported a strongly technical and scientific sense, with not much in the way of political discussions. This proved problematic for TJ Demos, hence his polemical work “Against the Anthropocene”.
There is no such thing as discrete human subjectivities, we are connected to nature and enmeshed with it. Anna Sing’s book “Multispecies Salon” argues this. The term Anthropocene looks more at humans only, and in general as being responsible for climate change. However it is not all humans, but particular ones that are responsible for climate change. Some have been more adversely affected depending on wealth, poverty, class, gender, race etc. There is a disproportionate impact of climate change depending on who and where you are.
“Climate change represents the burning of Africa.” - TJ Demos
Political conference delegates agree on 1.5 degrees celcius warming, but this would be catastrophic for people in coastal regions in Bangladesh for example. There is a suggestion that geoengineering may be a necessary response to climate change. Technofixes for climate change deals with the symptoms but not the causes. Economic growth is seen to be compatible with climate solutions, but is this belief true? The Capitalocene these argues that climate change has been going on for 500 years, but if we are to address it properly we need to address this capitalist history.
The dates of the Anthropocene are proposed to have begun in the 1950s by geologists. This is when nuclear power was globalised. The book “Anthropocene or Capitalocene” edited by Jason W. Moore, rejects technoscientific empiricism in favour of looking at the cause from a political, colonial perspective. Capitalocene emphasises environmental violence and injustice against oppressed people and nature. Intersectionalist discussions look at the racial and colonial injustice that has accompanied the environmental transformation.
Forensic Architechture has also looked at the Capitalocene. Eyal Wiseman suggests that environmental transformation or climate change is not an unintended accident, but rather an intended aim of colonialism from the start. TJ Demos helped set up the Centre for Creative Ecologies to encourage this research and discourse. There is a risk of environmentalism becoming a privileged domain. In his view it needs to be linked to social justice domains. Environmentalism must not become a white domain, it needs to be intersectionalist and support social justice.
The Cthulucene: a term coined by Donna Haraway, from her book “Staying with the Trouble”. Linked to HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu, without the sexist undertones. Diverse mythological constructions such as naga, pachamama, or mother earth. Cthulucene is the era of multiscpecies being. Visualisations of the Cthulucene have been created by artists such as the Crochet Coral Reef. They sometimes show them as bleached to emphasise their destruction. Also shown are Navajo weaving and Pigeon Ring.
We need many names. A “Manifesto for the Gynecene” was an idea by artists Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea in 2015. They proposed that patriarchy should be excluded in all its violent expressions such as colonialism, profit etc. Practices such as pachamana and rights of mother earth come out of indigenous traditions which are an example of the Gynacene. Defend Our Mother was an example of a poster by Fabiana Rodriguez, Gynacene aesthetics. Standing Rock against Dakota Access pipeline: “Water is life” proposing a different ontology based within a non-capitalist, non-commoditised understanding of environmental issues. Geontology is seeing the conditions of being as rift zones where different world views come into a clashing relationship.
Mountain top removal mining is when companies blow up mountain tops to get at coal underneath. Plantationocene is where agriculture has been turned into a science of colonialism. Anna Sing shows how divisions between genders and races are regimented into Capitalist labour systems, within a monocrop area. Plasticene is about the spread of plastics and micropolymers throughout the world. This is only going to grow in the future. We are plasticising the planet. Plastic as a material of Capitalism. The Pyrocene relates to the spread of wildfires such as in California.
"A World at War" is an article in New Republic. Our only hope is to mobilise like we did in world war 2. They want to decrease the CO2 in the air to under 300 parts per million. But they are looking at it from only a technoscientific viewpoint, and not looking at the 500 year history of Capitalism and its effects on climate change. Communities of colour are more endangered by incinerators than others, their lives are seen as less important somehow. We must decolonise environmentalism. Avoid the ecologies of affluence of white environmentalism. Ecological struggles are really the struggle for universal emancipation.
Artistic project “Forest Law”, 2014, investigates decades of oil exploitation in the Equadorian Amazon by oil companies, drilling for oil and leaving oil by-products on the floor. Artists building solidarities and connections with social movements is crucial. “The Party of Others”, a political party that is non-anthropocentric and includes animals and others so they can have a political voice. Rosa Braidotti calls it developing a zoe-centred (animal or non-human) egalitarianism. “The Climate Games” included Inflatables to activate participants, creating space between activists and police. There is a history of the use of cobblestones in revolutions in France. Non-violent civil shutting down of coal mines, “we are nature defending itself”, avoiding the anthropocentrism of the nature/culture binarism. In New York “not an alternative” wrote a letter to museums to detach from fossil fuel funding. David Koch, a fossil fuel corporate figure, got kicked off the board of the American Natural History Museum. Liberate Tate have been doing performance interventions showing the cost of petrocapitalism, and got Tate to stop its association with BP: institutional liberation. Non-reformist reform, welcomes small steps but also recognises it is inadequate.
Discussion after the talk:
Sustainability as an empty signifier. It supports not ecological sustainability but economical sustainability. Post-representational system in which language is dead. Evidence doesn’t necessarily change minds, people become sensitive and embedded in their positions. Create art based within the affect of social justice. What is Art in the post-representational present?
Billionaires buying escape silos in case of catastrophic futures. Others cannot do this. “Breakthrough Institute” (setup by people such as Bill Gates and other corporate leaders) don’t talk about racism or economic inequality, they talk about saving humanity and humanism through geoengineering and saving humanity with all its inequalities intact.
Demos, T.J.; "Against the Anthropocene"; Sternberg Press, 2017.
