Preface Late in March of this year I attended a lecture by Professor Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where she presented a collaborative project, the Feral Atlas, an online repository of stories about the Anthropocene and how humans and nonhumans together make 01/19 worlds at scale. In her introductory remarks, she spoke of the demand often put forward by humanist colleagues to tell hopeful stories about the Anthropocene rather than view it as an undifferentiated destructive force slowly approaching a zero hour, a reckoning that will come too late. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn her talk, Tsing spoke of the Anthropocene Michael Baers as “patchy,” with development arising in specific places and through specific human interventions, producing unforeseen ancillary A First Step effects (a conceptual framework that also structures her recent book, The Mushroom at the Towards a End of the World, an anthropological study of the international trade in matsutake mushrooms, a Regional Risk delicacy in Japan, that grows in “disturbed” forests). Tsing takes “patch” from “patch dynamics,” a term first coined by scientists in the Assessment 1940s to describe the interactive structure and dynamics of plants occupying discrete ecosystems, since used by ecologists when referring to the mosaic of heterogeneous, interactive sub-ecosystems found within specific biotopes. In Tsing’s usage, “patch” embraces both plant and human interactions resulting from capitalist disruption of natural habitats and modes of production: monoculture cotton farming (with the plantation as a model for industrialization) that transformed the boll t weevil from minor nuisance to a major pest n e s r throughout North and Central America; or global m e s a s trade, as in the recent introduction of the B e l s e s parasitic water mold Phytophthora from Germany a A h k c to the Western United States, where it has killed i s i M R Ê off natural woodlands. The Anthropocene is l a 8 1 n “patchy” because capitalism directs the long- 0 o i 2 g distance destruction of specific locales; because y e a R disturbed landscapes disrupted in the process of m a s — d capitalist wealth accumulation make humans r 1 a 9 and nonhumans into resources for investment w # o l T across scales; because supply chains snake from a n p r e one capitalist patch to another, necessitating t u o S j t “acts of translation across varied social and x s r u i l f political spaces.” She terms this process F - e A “salvage accumulation,” where differing environmental and labor standards are effaced in the process of turning goods into computer- managed inventory, the cornerstone of accounting.1 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ“Patch” may be a useful term to establish a distance from monolithic conceptions of the Anthropocene and capitalism alike (and to refrain from the “crippling assumption” of 05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT 02/19 Illustration by Rutger Sjogrim used in the original publication of “A First Step Towards a Regional Risk Assessment,” Antipyrene Publishing, 2015. 05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT progress as a single hegemonic current). Yet it is through the scrim of eschatological thinking. But deficient in modeling that other feature of the this does not prevent the contrary response – to Anthropocene: climate change. It may be seek out hopeful stories about the Anthropocene unnecessary to repeat the scientific consensus – from evading conceptual bias. As much as I that a mean temperature increase above 2 understand the wish for hopeful stories Tsing degrees centigrade will lead to unpredictable ascribes to her humanist colleagues as, in some disruptions to the environment – adding a sense, a corrective to the terrifying onslaught of further degree of complexity into an already 03/19 the daily news cycle, there is an element of stochastic world – but the question of how to denial in it; a denial as well of that other strand avoid the most disastrous effects of climate of the Western humanist tradition exemplified by change explicitly involves scalar considerations Aby Warburg, who sought with his Mnemosyne that pose the specific and the local against the Atlas to bring to light an encrypted historical far-reaching and endemic. Thus, absorbed as I memory of trauma in the persistence of gestural was by Tsing’s stories of the ways in which global motifs transferred from classical antiquity to commerce and industrial agriculture remake Renaissance painting, fashioning a model of the ecosystems, another part of my mind had cycled mnemonic where even the most limpid back to a question prompted by her introductory depictions of beauty become colored by death remarks: What is this imperative put forward by and disaster, and, per Benjamin Buchloh, “in humanists to tell hopeful stories? which Western European humanist thought ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” would once more, perhaps for the last time, Joan Didion, a writer not known for an excess of recognize its origins and trace its latent optimism, wrote long ago: continuities into the present.”3 “The tendency to reproduce the language of gesture in clear We look for the sermon in the suicide, for outline,” wrote Warburg in his introduction to the the social or moral lesson in the murder of Mnemosyne Atlas, “which only seemed to be five. We interpret what we see, select the purely a matter of artistic appearance, led, by its most workable of the multiple choices. We own inner logic, bursting out of its chains, to a live entirely, especially if we are writers, by formal language that was suited to the the imposition of a narrative line upon submerged, tragic, stoic fatalism of antiquity.”4 disparate images, by the “ideas” with which Warburg’s Atlas suggests human resilience and we have learned to freeze the shifting cultural continuity do not function in spite of phantasmagoria which is our actual social upheaval but because of it. For all the experience.2 other dangers climate change presents to human and nonhuman life forms, it also threatens this Thinking of the news stories that had caught my repository of past disasters codified in cultural attention over the course of the past year, this artifacts. was certainly the case. The wildfires in California t ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊA conundrum appears: the threat presented n e s and the landslides that followed; the series of r by the future is also a threat to past recollections m e s a catastrophic hurricanes visiting disaster on s of danger and disaster, to the sum total of human B e l s e cities ringing the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean s experience. Perhaps it is possible, I thought a A h k islands; the mass bleaching events across c while sitting in the packed lecture hall of HKW, to i s i M R Australia’s Great Barrier Reef; baleen whales Ê extend this idea outside the gestural realm of l a 8 1 slowly starving to death, their bodies tricked into n pictoriality. Perhaps a preoccupation with 0 o i 2 satiation by an overabundance of micro-plastics g disaster, regardless of scale, is a way of y e a R suspended in the sea; reports of unprecedented preserving memory against the depredations of m a s — and accelerating shrinkage of Arctic winter sea d those forms of forgetting that secure history for r 1 a ice; and a single video, widely distributed across 9 its victors – to brush history against the grain, to w # o l the internet, of a starving polar bear loping T borrow Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation. a n p r across the Arctic tundra, perhaps only hours e Perhaps this preservation begins by salvaging t u o S j from death – these had melded together in a t what Sebald called “the recurrent resurgence of x s r u i l narrative arc producing a singular vision of f images which cannot be banished from the F - ecological collapse, to which my response was, e A memory, and which remain effective as agencies invariably, melancholic paralysis or terror. of an almost pathological hypermnesia in a past Whether things will end badly or well, the fact otherwise emptied of content.”5 Disaster is that things will end already imposes a narrative infrequently a blameless event. It is the concern line, separating a before from an after, or an of certain cultural producers to return disaster to inside from an outside. human cupidity, indifference, malice ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊTsing’s work appears to offer a corrective to aforethought, petty self-interest, and so on, as this prevailing habit – or at least my own part of this project of brushing history against prevailing habit – of viewing climate change the grain. Could pessimism be considered a 05.11.18 / 18:50:26 EDT hopeful form of resistance rather than an ironic the point of absurdity. Resistance without means of consigning hopefulness to the any confidence that it will be effective, immobility of despair? resistance quand même, out of a principle ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAmongst the disjointed notes penned during of solidarity with victims and as a Tsing’s lecture, I had written down this phrase: deliberate affront to those who simply let “to grieve and hope at the same time.” Perhaps the stream of history sweep them along, is we need to cultivate a notion of resistance the essence of Améry’s philosophy.”6 I have indifferent to futility or foreclosure, I thought, 04/19 tried to keep these words present in my including our resistance to those forms of mind and to act in accordance with them, economic exploitation addressed in Professor even though I am often discouraged, Tsing’s intellectual project that pay no heed to especially when confronting a topic as the different unique, particular, non-scalable difficult and depressing as the ways of doing or being threatened by globalized Anthropocene.