The Anthropocene creates a new chronotope with a multipolar time-space configuration. ”6 The Revenant recycles the frontier chronotope, a time-space configuration that generates plot after plot of gendered whiteness. The intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.”5 New chronotopes, Bakhtin said, create “previously nonexistent meanings.” Old ones “continue stubbornly to exist” even after they have “lost any meaning that was productive in actuality or adequate to later historical situations. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible likewise, space becomes charged and responsible to the movements of time, plot and history. “In the literary artistic chronotope,” said Bakhtin, “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. The Anthropocene is also what narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called a chronotope, a particular configuration of time and space that generates stories through which a society can examine itself. Indeed, writing becomes the way of posing the question of how to live. For most of thewriters here, the question of howto live theAnthropocene is inseparable from the question of how to write it. “Concepts are ways of adding ideality to the world,” she explains, “transforming the givenness of chaos, the pressing problem, into various forms of order, into possibilities for being.”3 They “enable us to surround ourselves with possibilities of being otherwise.”4 The point of “Anthropocene” is to enable reflection in Western academic circuits on what this volume calls “arts for living on a damaged planet.” The concept starts a conversation on “what we humans are going to do now, in the midst of an increasingly given fate of ruination and extinction” (Bubandt). “All concepts,” they say, “are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning, and which can themselves only be understood as their solution emerges.”2 As Elizabeth Grosz elaborates, this means that concepts are never true they only enable. In this respect, “Anthropocene” is what Deleuze and Guattari would call a concept. What is at stake in these essays is not what the Anthropocene is but howitwill be lived.Whetherthe stratigraphic authorities authorize the term will make no difference. He has found the Anthropocene, avant la lettre.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |