Bathing in the River

The rivers of the Anthropocene sometimes are shallow, even disappear, leaving behind a dry river bed under a hot Californian sun. They are also torrential, gobbling up livelihood in a swift stomping fit of rage in a Ger-man village. Sometimes the rivers of the Anthropocene are flowing into the ground, 2000, 3000 metres. These rivers need to be dead rivers, they cannot contain any oxygen. Oxygen scavengers were used to make sure of this. There must not be any life in the pipes, the bed of these rivers, as it could destabilize its fluids. We don’t know what’s in these rivers, as this would be up to their owners to reveal. And disclosing its consistency would diminish the value of the river, take away its purpose altogether. These waters are miraculous, as even at temperatures over 1300°C they remain fluid (Montgomery and Smith 2010).

What we do know is that they are vast: to hold them still we would need to erect a tub of about 24m x 24m x 24m outside Brockham Oil Field. The rivers of the Anthropocene are ancient and the result of great pressure. If you hold a gallon of petroleum in a container, open it and let it run onto the ground, what you witness is the result of about 90,000 kg of decomposed organic matter (Dukes 2003). If you float on the rivers of the Anthropocene, make sure you stay on the surface, face up.

An Optimism yet Crueler

Why would we willingly create a torrential river and stir it up continuously, while we all do have to float on it and keep our head over water? This isn’t only due to missing awareness about the climate crisis or the climate being a hyperobject difficult to grasp and engage with for it’s sheer scale. It also isn’t just the anthropocentric ideology of not thinking of the Human in the West as a part of the ecosystems on the planet or the little regard paid to vulnerable landscapes and precarious communities, even though this all is part of it. It is also an attachment to what Lauren Berlant calls “The Good Life”.

This concept is characterized by an upwards mobility, in both individual livelihoods and technological progress. It reaches across the intimate and economic, while continuously establishing and reinstating itself with a set of morals but also through pleasurable, optimistic attachments (Berlant 2). These optimistic attachments might be the believe in for example the heteronormative family, a career which will lift one’s social status, or any consumable non-essential goods. All the while keeping the individual in a precarious situation as privatization, decline of social services, public spac-es and an ongoing narrative of crisis keep pressing hard onto us and might always keep true contentment at arm’s length. Berlant argues that capitalist systems thrive on precrity and these attachments, which are both political and ideological forces, hinder us from truly thriving and building a sustain-able and inclusive way of life. It is worth noting that this ‘Good Life’ relies heavily on the production of fossil fuels. But what does one do if, as Berlant puts it, one realizes that the world as we know it is not worth attaching our-selves to actually hinders us from living well (2019)?

Even if one would detach oneself from ‘American Dreamesque’ ambitions, I argue that the attachment is far stickier: even an ideological de-tachment does not enable one to exit the participation behaviors which are destructive to the environment through their embeddedness in fossil fuels. One finds themselves in a circle of pleasure and destruction. If the Good Life was an impasse, then so is the detachment from this narrative - for where is the outside of this system located? Berlant’s work considers the present spatially as an impasse and describes it as “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering ab-sorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event” (6).

What can a critique of a system which causes irreversible damage to the planet then look like when the critic themselves is perpetuating, deeply sunken inside the very object of their critique?

Melancholy as resistance

Considering what the impasse feels like, the good news is that this is very much negotiable, the bad news is that this agency might not extend into shifts in the constitution of the material world immediately or necessarily. But to ‘live-on’ is to nest in the impasse of the present, with our eyes wide open, even when it causes discomfort. This is our shared home now and as there is no elsewhere, only the thick present, mastering its inhibition, mastering the ‘art of living on a damaged planet’ as Anna Tsing et al pro-pose, is a challenge which requires just as much emotional labor as much it does physical labor (2017). Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands proposes that Melancholia might be a productive sentiment to enable a collective mode of thinking about the disaster, from inside the disaster (2010). Its close inspec-tion might even open a possibility to overcome it (S.W. Sebald 1994)

Leaving a paradigm which promises stability and leaping into the unknown requires new cultural practices, building new muscles and the strong hands of good friends to cling onto. When there is a disruption in the flow of life, here, a loss of innocent trust in an anthropocentric paradigm, and the consequential wide-eyed stare onto the great abyss of losses in natural environments and people’s livelihoods caused by this mode of living, two things need to be considered: What is it we are grieving as we look at the Capitalocene unfolding around us, is grief possible and if so, what mode of grieving is productive?

There are graphs of rising temperatures, images of floods, islands of waste in the ocean. How can we look at them not as simple representations, counterparts of images of a fetishized ‘raw’ nature - in short, how does one look onto nature without it merely taking a symbolic or narrative form and realize its entangled materiality and the self as part of this mesh? Grieving nature is complicated, as it isn’t in all cases simply ‘lost’ or ‘disappearing,’ but also transforming, coming out of balance and leaving trails of death and struggle. The object of grief is therefore more destruction itself, in all its forms and perhaps the realization that the Human of petro-capitalism has not shown integrity as a member of the planetary ecosystem.

In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Sigmund Freud defines two modes of grief in which he finds mourning to be the more productive one. The mourning subject overcomes grief by detaching the ego from the lost object and attaching it to a new object while the melancholic subject refuses to let the object go and internalizes, making it part of the self in order to preserve it. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands suggests that when the object is seemingly ungriefable, as the destruction of the planet which we might not feel pain and empathy for is, a melancholy mode of grief can become an act of resistance: it is the refusal to acknowledge a destroyed natural environment simply as a notion which can be endlessly replaced with a fetiziated representation of a ‘raw’ natural environments, which in the end is always just another commodifiable idea (2010). Melancholy is carving a dent in the present and extending it temporarily, it is the ego becoming undone as it lets the lost object take over and change the grieving subject and take over their self-understanding.

This does not yet solve the problem of ‘grief-ability’ and presents another challenge: potentially reducing the object of grief - the destruction of the planet - to yet another anthropocentric notion of nature as the metaphor of an ‘other’ or a site the human can establish his identity through. It is therefore productive to propose that melancholic gestures might not require a presupposed grievance but rather work deductively, rolling the matter up backwardly. They might be an exercise and a performative act needing repetition until they eventually let the griefing subject be overcome by the object of grief.

It might only require the repetition of the smallest gestures: feeling the grabble pinch into your skin as you lay on the ground next to an artificial landscape that shouldn’t have been, that is impenetrable, disorientating and hostile. To lay there, in the absurdity and contradiction and become aware of the sense of confusion and frustration that might wash over your body while you feel vulnerable and frightened. You might look closely at the objects around you, documenting destruction as your gaze and your fingers run over the soil and the ‘dislocated matter’. You may realize a sense of loss towards that you might have never felt a part of but are bodily entangled with. And it is perhaps here that we finally become ecological, when the embodiment of commemoration “constitutes the self” through the “loss of the beloved” (Mortimer-Sandilands 332).

It might feel like a place of failure and disbelief, stripping one naked and afraid, a space of at times stubborn, at times exhausted trial and error, trying to make meaningful or reparative gestures that are ultimately foolish and too late. Like the attempt of returning a fossil to the ground. Yet it might hold some agency and shape the mourning person’s ontological self-under-standing, as a being from the ground, from within the ground, sharing the same vulnerability with the ground we stand on. Melancholic gestures then resist impassivity within our new home, the impasse.

For now we may start by laying close to the environments of the Anthropocene and make a home there. We may continue to
breathe deeply.

We may let the sun shine on our backs and remember how friendly this place is we get to call our home and that it provides us with the air and water we need, it holds our feet on its ground, it cradles us and cares for us if we let it.

Bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.

Montgomery, Carl T., and Michael B. Smith. “Hydraulic Fracturing: History of an Enduring Technology.’” Journal of Petroleum Technology, Dec. 2010.

Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona. “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies.” Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Bruce Erickson and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Indiana University Press, 2010, pp. 331–358.

Sebald, W.G. Die Beschreibung Des Unglücks. FISCHER Taschenbuch, 1994.