June 2025
13 th
Major week for exchange of texts from Phil Jones and John Sitter. We are now assured that we suffer from Anthropocene Disorder, apart from also being 81 years old.
Phil —
Hello,
Today I'm feeling very 80, almost 81. It's not due to any physical problems. Rather, it's the effect of listening to an hour-long discussion about politics and the future between Pete Buttigieg and Heather Cox Richardson today. In the past, I've been impressed by Richardson's knowledge of history and her ability to make something in history relevant to what is happening today. I get her daily newsletter, and usually I agree with what she has to say. I've also heard Buttigieg talking about issues and felt he is far more knowledgeable than any other politician I've heard recently. Yet their discussion today left me feeling depressed. Richardson went to Exeter and Harvard, and Buttigieg went to Harvard and Oxford, and both did extremely well. Perhaps that was part of the problem. I felt that all they did today was express all the "right" opinions about current American political issues as they displayed their in-depth knowledge of both our history and current politics. I suppose nearly all listeners except Republicans would likely have given them an A+. But I felt that all they did was simply "ace" a grad school exam rather than analyze what really needs to be done going forward. Perhaps they needed BSc degrees rather than their BA's to really understand and address the huge problems all the nations on earth face. On the other hand, even if they could discuss techie problems, I'm sure they both knew that talking in techie terms loses listeners and voters and, likely, elections. So what occurred today was just one more discussion of today's American politics. "What do Dems need to do to win elections?" Which, of course, is better than today's Reps winning, but, as Buttigieg admitted, that doesn't really mean that necessary solutions to major problems will be adequately addressed. And it all left me feeling like a depressed, perhaps overly critical old man who thinks societies and industries and economies over this entire world are facing HUGE, soon to be URGENT, natural shortages and other big, overwhelming technical problems that could affect human survival yet are not being addressed in any meaningful way by Dems who can't stop talking about income inequality, gay rights, Ukraine, trans rights , Russia, immigrants, China, race, and, of course, Trump and MAGA. In other words, what today's American voters and politicians know and care about....... So I took a 2.5 mile walk but that didn't help improve my critical old-man view of this typical discussion today…………..Phil
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John's reply —
Hail, Phil.
First reaction is Welcome to my world (meant less flippantly than it sounds). Much of what you describe is much of what I've been feeling for the past two decades, since I started teaching mainly environmental lit and sustainability studies. It is a sense, in my case anyway, of living in two worlds. One is a growing consciousness of global emergencies (all the more alarming for being undeclared emergencies) and the other the sense of being locked into the business-as-usual world that ,if not always explicit denialism, is de facto denialism.
You're right that little of the discourse is on target. I can't help thinking that if a few hundred votes had gone the other way in Florida 25 years ago the country as a whole might be better educated by now on climate and other environmental issues. Since then, even the Dems seem to have taken to heart the idea that the last presidential candidate to call for recognizing limits, Jimmy Carter, did not get re-elected. One small but emblematic problem: ethanol. One of the dumber ideas in our lifetime: using cropland to grow "food" for cars. But what are the odds of a candidate campaigning in Iowa and saying that?
You & I seem to be suffering from Anthropocene Disorder.
I'm pasting in below a description from an English literary critic I admire, Timothy Clark. For the phrase "of what lit crit and interpretations" insert "of what most of the things we consider meaningful.
"The disruptions of the anthropocene (“the death of nature”) are set to be so massive as to pose anew major questions of what literary criticism and interpretations are for, and in relation to what emergent or unknown norms. The more degraded and dangerous the once-natural environment becomes, the more the future or possible futures will insist on themselves as part of any context to be considered or critical method to be used. . .
[“Anthropocene disorder”] The phrase is coined to name a new kind of psychic disorder, inherent in the mismatch between familiar day-to-day perception and the sneering voice of even a minimal ecological understanding of awareness of scale effects; and in the gap between the human sense of time and slow-motion catastrophe and, finally, in a sense of disjunction between the destructive processes at issue and the adequacy of the arguments and measures being urged to address them. In response, the mind is suspended, uncertainly between a sense of rage and even despair on one side, and a consciousness of the majority perception of such reactions as disproportionate and imbalanced on the other."
-John
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I chimed in —-
me in dis boat, too. these boats
currently reading
Knowledge of Hell life under Salazar in a psych hospital by doc fed up with psych Lobo Antunes the author
also Goytisolo's book Count Julian, in exile from Franco's Spain
nice passage by Clark and fine name for the whole
new despair Anthropene Disorder Studies departments
must be somewhere now
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looked up some of Timothy Clark's work—-quite an extensive bibliography, University of Durham. Got into anthropocene criticial thought via Derrida, Blanchot, Heidegger et al. Found one review in TLS Education that has a fllip
British last line that both appalls and delights.
The Value of Ecocriticism, by Timothy Clark
Book of the week: Leo Mellor assesses a bold attempt to make the case for literature and criticism in the light of environmental disaster
June 20, 2019
Leo Mellor
Last Friday, I walked to work past many banners. There were the direct “We love the earth”; the desolate “There is no planet B”; and one even had a stylised student flinching from books: “What’s the point of page turning if the world is now burning?” Yes, fair enough. The climate strike again gave the world a vision of action rather than fatalistic acceptance. But might some turning and looking at pages actually be part of the answer? Both to understand how we got here and the kinds of writing that might explore the current condition.
The Value of Ecocriticism is a dense, perceptive and provocative book, and it makes a convincing case for its title. But it does have a fight on its hands. There is both cynicism and doubt about ecocriticism: some see it as little more than an intellectual landgrab; others as a way to further reduce literary study to silos of specialism; or even, through the affirming infrastructure of conferences, a spectacular way to perform bad faith and gain air miles, flying to talk about climate change. Such misgivings are prevalent, perhaps most bracingly among self-identifying ecocritics.
The first two chapters unpick the Anthropocene as a concept in both planetary history and cultural critique. As a way of designating the current time in which we live, “the human-influenced age”, the term was first formally adopted by a working group of the International Union of Geological Sciences in 2016. Clark’s work here is in dialogue with his much longer analysis in Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015). He is also a scholar of Derrida, Heidegger and Blanchot, so it is unsurprising that his theoretical coordinates lead him to be suspicious of critical works that do not reflect on how they are themselves shaped by what is thinkable within language. Sometimes his disdain can be glimpsed, as in his assessment of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), as “a provocative if at times simplistic polemic”. Well, yes. But there might well be a place for such polemics. Perhaps Robert Macfarlane’s recent Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) could be useful here, partly as a literary work which, by being so hard to categorise, asks questions about cultural forms that do not just leave us helpless when considering timespans beyond the individual human life.
The penultimate chapter is on “material ecocriticism”, one of the most austere subdisciplines, where Clark notes that “the determining context…remains that of a primarily academic politics. By using terms such as ‘conversations’, etc. in relation to fields, rivers, etc. material critics are covertly staking a claim of a humanities discipline and its terms to the study of the environment”. But it gets worse: “academic politics is also apparent…in the exaggerated manifesto-like essays, texts whose shrill tone exemplifies the competitive institutional culture of the modern Western university”.
But traces of hope shape the final chapter, a place where theory does more – and more useful – work in thinking globally, and exploring the implications of this in an age of rapacious and totalising capitalism. And the activity of criticism might thus be rather more sympathetic to the art it encounters, such as when Clark quotes approvingly from a dictum: “criticism should not seek to reduce literature, like a dam in a river, to an ideologically fixed point”. For a book that is thoroughly suspicious of transcendent concepts this is perhaps a telling point. Indeed the implicit rationale of this series is that literary criticism has an identifiable “value” as a fluid activity, rather than structure, worth defending. This will require different kinds of reading, and of action, some of which will involve turning pages.
Leo Mellor is Roma Gill fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.
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Theory all over again. The rational mind doing it's damndest to explain, still faith seeking understanding, theology all over again.
Meanwhile I enjoy Lobo Antunes' attack from the inside on psychiatry and psychology, from within the mental hospital our hero works in, after having done time in the Angola war hell years before. "Knowledge of Hell" feels as though Lobo Antunes is still teaching himself to write, to write in order to save himself from hell. Brilliant word hoarding, word rich fluidity of consciousness, portraits of the denizens of the hospital-hell. Granted my times in Eugenia Memorial Hospital near the Main Line were two short 7-10 day periods but they gave me a first-hand experience I still recall and which I can use to enjoy this book with a special, personal savor.
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