Demos, T. J. (2017) Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Publisher’s website: http://www.sternberg-press.com/cms.php?pageId=1771
Reviewed by: Finn Daniels-Yeomans
In Against the Anthropocene, T. J. Demos employs his expertise in visual culture to offer a searing critique of the Anthropocene thesis: the proposal (widely accepted in the humanities and sciences) that we have entered into a new geological epoch fuelled by human activity. Moving across, and bringing together, scholarly accounts, eco-activist undertakings, (popular) scientific discourse and diverse examples of contemporary visual culture, Demos’ pocket-sized and polemical study argues for an impassioned rejection of the Anthropocene as a means of conceptualizing the biospheric transformations that define the millennial age. He shows that its universalising and depoliticising logic works ideologically in support of corporate globalization: the collective “we” of the Anthropocene subject, with its homogenously distributed responsibility for the differentiated causes and impacts of climate catastrophe, masks the real culprits. These are the petrocapitalists, fossil fuel extractivists, corporate lobbyists, climate-change deniers and other “Capitalocene” enterprises that are structurally responsible for, and indeed reliant on, ecological exploitation (19). The Anthropocene rhetoric, as Demos summarises:
frequently acts as a mechanism of universalization […] which enables the military-state-corporate apparatus to disavow responsibility for the differentiated impacts of climate change, effectively obscuring the accountability behind the mounting eco-catastrophe and inadvertently making us all complicit in its destructive project. (19)
While Against the Anthropocene joins a growing number of voices critical of the Anthropocene narrative and its neoliberalisation of nature – two notable examples being Jason W. Moore and Donna Haraway, both prominent in Demos’ study – what sets this work apart is that it shows how these debates are playing out in the battlegrounds of contemporary visual culture. Demos’ objective, in this respect, is threefold: to highlight how the ever-expanding mechanisms of visual culture are directly implicated in the Anthropocene’s obfuscations (chapter 1 and 2); to analyse the critical role that visual culture can play in exposing and challenging such obfuscations (chapter 3 and 4); and, finally, to explore how different visualisations can help conceptualise alternatives to the often “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011) of the Anthropocene’s disavowals (Chapter 5). Or, as Demos asks in the opening chapter, “how is the Anthropocene thesis […] abetted or contradicted by different kinds of visualisations, and how might artistic-activist practices not only confirm but also provide compelling alternatives to adopting its rhetoric?” (9).
Demos uses the first chapter to introduce the Anthropocene debate, surveying fields and thinkers for whom this term has become a contested topic of study, before highlighting his initial point for investigation: “How does the Anthropocene enter visuality, and what are its politics of representation?” (12). Anthropocene images, Demos suggests, primarily serve “to raise awareness of the “human activities” that have disrupted the earth’s natural systems” (21). Typically produced via post-photographic imaging technologies – data visualisation processes, high-resolution satellite imaging, and remote sensing technology – this “scientifically framed imagery” (13) offers seemingly “self-evident” (14) and “hyper-legible” (17) illustrations of human-induced climate change (rising carbon dioxide pollution, acceleration in human activity etc.) that are, of course, “deeply political” (17). His central suggestion is that Anthropocene visuality, while innocent-seeming, is “far from transparent” (17): it secures and scientifically legitimates the Anthropocene’s allocation of responsibility for geological change to the generic category of “human activity”.
Chapter two extends these insights into the debates surrounding geoengineering: the question of whether to combat climate change by modifying human behaviour toward the environment or by deliberately and – according to the Anthropocene thesis – necessarily intervening in the Earth’s natural systems. Demos suggests that Anthropocene images represent the effects of climate change by deploying visual strategies that tacitly affirm geoengineering as the most viable option. Routinely granting viewers a sense of control over the represented object of their gaze, Anthropocene visuality downplays the risks of geoengineering by fetishizing mastery of the visual field, thus reinforcing the techno-scientific position that “we”, the anthros, have mastered nature, and can by extension reconfigure it to avert total catastrophe. That such geoengineered reconfiguration is the unique province of big corporations, means that this kind of visuality ultimately entrenches the power of the very systems that Demos will argue are responsible for ecological devastation in the first place. Anthropocene visuality thus not only obscures the role that corporations play in causing ecological crisis, as chapter one argues, it also reinforces the suggestion that only lucrative/destructive geoengineering projects can save the day.
In chapter three, Demos shifts registers. Moving away from the “greenwashing” of Anthropocene visuality, Demos shows that for a visuality to be truly “against the Anthropocene” it must reject the viability of the term’s conceptual basis (49). Taking his cue from grassroots and indigenous climate activism in North America – the sHell No! demonstration and other First Nation “blockadia” protests (Klein, 2014) are his central focus – Demos argues that the visuality of such movements “throws a wedge into the universalising logic of the Anthropocene” (44). Not only do these activisms challenge the disavowal of differentiated responsibility for climate crisis – sHell No!, as the name suggests, visibly points to multinational responsibility – they also make manifest the imperative to foreground uneven distributions of environmental disaster. They highlight the disproportionate vulnerability of the marginal and the disenfranchised – indigenous populations, post-colonies, low-income communities and the rural working classes – and they think critically about the Anthropocene thesis through the diverse perspectives and experiences of such peoples. The decolonising and indigenising impulses present in these social movements prompts Demos to declare that “it is time to defy the Anthropocene” (54), and to replace it with the more precise and politically enabling descriptor of the “Capitalocene”: the geological epoch not of humanity but of capital, which roots the unevenness of climate change in the “interrelated processes of global-scale, world-historical, politico-economic organisation of modern capitalism stretched over centuries of enclosures, colonialisms, industrialisations, and globalisations” (86).
Chapter four uses Capitalocene logic to further scrutinise the ways in which the anthropocene has been visualised, and it is here that Demos is at his most analytically astute. Particularly illuminating is his critique of Edward Burtynsky and Louis Helbig’s highly aestheticizing photographs of environmental exploitation. For Demos, Burtynsky’s conjuring of a “petro-industrial sublime” (65) and Helbig’s “beautification of destruction” (71) have the effect of naturalising petrocapitalism. Within the abstract compositions of these putatively innocuous images, environmental toxicity is photographically transformed into mesmeric visual splendour, participating in the Anthropocene’s disavowals by distracting viewers from the realities and origins of Capitalocene violence. Demos compares such photographic “greenwashing” with Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s Petrochemical America (2012), showing how their images of the toxic landscapes of “Caner Alley” reject the Anthropocene’s obfuscations by implicitly linking environmental violence to the fossil fuel economy . These images – which are presented alongside diagrams, infoscapes and an “ecological atlas” (71) – are situated within their constitutive economic, socio-political and ecological context, thus making manifest the entanglement of economic and environmental violence. An illustrative example of Capitalocene visuality, Petrochemical America visibly connects ecocide to economic gain, thus encouraging viewers to politically mobilize against petrocapitalism and its environmental exploitation: “a political (and politicising) relationality otherwise absent in Anthropocene discourse” (71).
Chapter five fleshes out the “Many Names of Resistance” (85) that have emerged in response to the anthropocene, and which are necessary to account for and mobilise against the current geo-politico-economic formation (Haraway’s Chthulucene, the feminist-led Gynecene, and the anti-colonial Plantationcene, amongst others, are all given exceptionally coherent treatment). Jason W. Moore’s version of the Capitalocene is Demos’ choice descriptor: it allows us to name and locate the origin of the current crisis – and indeed it is Moore’s thinking, particularly his ecological Marxism in Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015), that provides the implicit theoretical backbone for Demos’ work as a whole. However, Demos does not pit neologisms against one another; instead, he attends to their generative commonalities so that a “comprehensive politics of intersectionality” can emerge (99). The struggle for alternatives must “be waged on multiple interconnected levels” (99), and Demos duly identifies how artistic-activist projects are central to this endeavour, and how such projects are already embedding experimental visual culture within social movements posed (truly) “against the Anthropocene”. The remainder of the book gives a snapshot of these diverse practices, and of the anti- or post-anthropocene visuality to which they give rise. Ursula Biemann’s mixed-media installation Forest Law (2014), the “interspecies cosmopolitics” (105) of Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson (2011; 2013-ongoing), and the climate-justice adventure Climate Games (2015) initiated by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: Demos illustrates how these creative activisms gesture toward more democratic, intersectional and sustainable alternatives to the Anthropocene thesis, and to the Capitalocene violence that it obscures. Whether these emergent visual cultures “will be enough to stop the ravages of near-future catastrophe”, as Demos asks in conclusion, “is another question” (112). What they highlight, however, is that alternatives to the anthropocene can and do exist, and Demos does a fine job in showing why they matter.
In attending to the complex intersections between contemporary art, global politics, postcoloniality and ecology, Against the Anthropocene joins a critical trajectory of work that addresses visual culture’s pivotal position in the climate change debate. The book can be placed alongside writing by Nicolas Mirzoeff (2014), for example, and considered together with the anthology Art in the Anthropocene (Davis and Turpin, 2015), or with Demos’ own Decolonising Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016). A slim volume, Against the Anthropocene allows less room than this earlier monograph for Demos’ characteristically rich and illuminating textual analysis – although his excellent comparative discussion in chapter four is as incisive as anything in Decolonising Nature.
It is also the book’s economy – 115 pages short – that leads into some potential limitations to Demos’ analysis more generally. Demos decides to provide a relatively brief interrogation of the Capitalocene thesis, and readers either unfamiliar with or unconvinced by its arguments may conceivably take issue with the identification of capitalism as the sole cause of environmental destruction. Demos does concede that this one neologism alone is not sufficient to account for the complexity of the current geo-economic formation, and highlights (via Haraway) the Capitalocene’s defeatist “‘game-over’ rhetoric” (88). He is also aware that environmental destruction is not only the province of capitalist exploitation, and that other economic systems – Soviet Communism is his key example – have also caused massive ecological harm. But such regimes, Demos points out, have either ended, remain relatively small scale, or have now been inducted into the neoliberal order (87). They thus do not compare to the world-ecological violence that the Capitalocene names. Some may question this logic, and perhaps Demos’ defence of the Capitalocene could be more fully fleshed out. However, for this reader, who is already convinced by Moore’s/Demos’ thinking, the efficient treatment of these complex debates is welcome.
Indeed, it is precisely the concision of Against the Anthropocene that sets the book apart, marking it out as a piece of academic activism. Demos’ formidable ability to accessibly summarise highly complex ecological theories, his lucid surveying of diverse environmental, activist and scholarly accounts, and the ease with which he moves across visual and cultural forms produces a work that is as scrupulous and far-reaching as it is concise and readable. As he draws theory, activism and cultural production into contact with one another in this way, Demos further underscores a contemporary imperative to bring together the different (and often marginalised) voices of those for whom environmental crisis is an issue that can no longer be only half-addressed. Less a manifesto than a collection of manifestos, Against the Anthropocene is both a clarion call to rethink the Anthropocene and its conceptual apparatus, and a compelling argument for the vital role that visual culture plays in a diversely realised but collaborative struggle against climate crisis.
References
Davis, H. and Turpin, E., eds. (2015) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press.
Demos, T. J. (2016) Decolonising Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Foster, J. B (1999) The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Klein, N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Allen Lane.
Mirzoeff, N. (2014) ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture 26(2 (73)): 213-232.
Moore, J. W. (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso.
Moore. J. W., ed. (2016) Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press.
Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Finn Daniels-Yeomans is completing his AHRC-funded PhD in film studies at the University of Glasgow. His research looks at post- and decolonial African documentary cinema, and his work has been published in the journal Studies in Documentary Film. He also programmes for the Africa in Motion film festival.
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