News Roundup

Ialenti's final article for the NPR 'cosmos and culture' series was published today.

Check it out: Embracing 'Deep Time' Thinking.

In the article, Ialenti graciously mentions and links our course --this will probably be the first and last time submitting your homework appears as national news!

Also, if you haven't already seen it, Jim Robbins has an article in the NYT Sunday Review, Building an Ark for the Anthropocene that might interest you. The trope of the Biblical "Flood" is something we will be discussing when we read Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow (2012), but in the meantime I suggest you look through Genesis Chapter's 6-10 (not only does God speak in meteorological terms, he's also into "purifying" violence).

You might remember from Kolbert's chapters in the The Sixth Extinction, Cuvier and other naturalist of the 19th century saw themselves as piecing together a history of cataclysmic events framed by the imaginary context of Judeo-Christian versions of the Flood.

As Cuvier wrote in 1821:

"Life on earth has often been troubled by terrible events. Human beings without number have fallen victim to these catastrophes. Some, living on dry land, have been swallowed up by floods. Others, living in the midst of the waters, have been stranded as the sea bed has risen to the surface". 

While subsequent geological discoveries forced most scholars to abandon the project of historicizing the Bible, in many ways the myth of the Flood has retained its potency as an organizing metaphor for thinking through climatic catastrophe --what's changed is the temporal direction of the mythical projection. In Lucian Boia's The Weather in the Imagination (2005), there's an excellent chapter that traces this turn, from Camille Flammarion's La Fin du monde (1894) and into the early science fiction of H.G. Wells and others. More recently, Darren Aronofsky's biblical epic Noah (2014) gives us an interesting twist: voiced-over scripture read by Russel Crowe set to satellite imagery of an Earth blanketed by hundreds of hurricanes, reminiscent of what we see today used to illustrate climate change scenarios by NOAA (pronounced "Noah"). As the director explained in a panel on the nexus between faith and environmentalism (available here), "Noah is saving the animals. It's not about saving babies." Of course, in a time when climate change is often read as a "sin against nature" is it really any surprise that efforts to save critical species into the "deep future" are so often imagined through the Biblical metonym of the Ark?

Titles and Citations

I. Naming

Don't forget to give your essay a memorable title! The easiest way to do this is to play around with some of the key words from your thesis or conclusion.

For example, 

Nature Work: The View from Cornell, with Nets

"We Rush Our Old Young": The Poetics of Violence in the age of Anthropocene 


II. Citations

Please follow the MLA guidelines

Week 6. Pollution Conditions [Rd]

9/30. Ritual Irritants 

• Douglas, Mary. 'Secular Defilement'. Purity and Ritual.

• Nagle, John. (2013). Good Pollution, 79 The University of Chicago Law Review Dialogue.

10/2. Carbon Pollution

• Mass v. EPA. 2007. 'Opinion of the Court'. 

• Obama, Barack. 2013. 'Remarks by the President on Climate Change'. [video below]

The fluff of civil martrydom

Police have arrested the polar bear #FloodWallStreet pic.twitter.com/jKq7byFUxG
— Jordan Mammo (@jordanmammo) September 22, 2014

The long awe?

Your comments and our discussion in class provoked Vincent to link the "sublime" to the question of visualizing climate change, which is reflected in his most recent article published yesterday on NPR's website ['Pondering 'deep time' could inspire new ways to view climate change']. This should particularly pique the interest of those of you who are currently writing about the logic of the sublime in the Anthropocene (essay #2, option 1).

People's Climate March (live feed)

 We can all be armchair anthropologists of protest...

ANTHROPOGENIC SUBLIME

Essay #2

Draft 1, Due: 9/25 (in class) 
Final, Due: 9/28 

Length: 6 pages

Choose one of the following:

I.  Compare and contrast the aesthetics of the sublime in the work of Humboldt, Sloterdijk, Siegel, and Ferguson.

• Instructions: Begin by addressing concerns that the authors raise but do not discuss to your satisfaction; building on this critique, propose a new version of the sublime more in sync with the particular sense of awe arrived at through the encounter with anthropogenic climate change. What happens to the logic of the sublime and its familiar sensibility of wonderment --an encounter that since the early 18th century has occurred largely under the imaginary canopy of "Nature"-- once we enter the new time of the Anthropocene? Make sure to ground your argument in concrete examples and quotations from the texts.
• Additional Materials: Vincent Crapanzano's Imaginative Horizons; key terms [infinite/finite, beauty, terror, self, deep time, space, ethics, sublime object, boundlessness, uncertainty, fullness, visible/invisible, understanding, excess, climate change, freedom/unfreedom, catastrophe]   

II.  Analyze the implicit theologies of Nature that underpin the meaning, significance, and experiential impact of the view from Cornell.

• Instructions: In the article 'Academic Work', James Siegel brings together a discussion of the symbolic and material boundaries of the view from Cornell, the spatial poetics of knowledge it structures, and the various ways that students and faculty members have learned to think about life, death, and the technologies of safety. Thirty-five years on, the view from Cornell remains open to new interpretations and understandings by its viewing subjects. In this essay, your task is to rethink James Siegel's article 'Academic Work' using course readings, data collected during in class field exercises, and any additional materials of your choosing. What happens when the “nature of youth suicide” and the “Nature” of the Romantic sublime become entangled? Carefully unpack the connection between the aesthetics of Nature and the formulation of suicide as a 'foreseeable' pathological condition at Cornell. How does Cornell’s “unique physical environment” circumscribe the horizon of potential security “fixes” imagined as being available to the university? When and how does climate and weather play into these discussions? 

• Additional Materials: 'Preventing Suicide By Jumping from Bridges owned by the City of Ithaca and by Cornell University'; Bridge Means Restriction Pre-Schematic Presentation; Ginsburg v. City of Ithaca et al; key terms [nature/natural, sublime, aesthetics, beautiful, disease, iconic, eyesore, responsibility, fences, nets, boundaries, liability, foreseeable, inside/outside, near/far, shell] 

III.  Agree or disagree: The Anthropocene designates a new form of collective self-murder.

• Instructions: Use course readings, field exercises, and any other related materials to organize and shape a discussion around the question of whether or not the Anthropocene signals a new geological age in which 'voluntary death' becomes inscribed as a material strata. Develop a theory of what makes an act suicidal, or construct a critical typology of collective self-violence in order to situate the Anthropocene along a spectrum of murderous acts. You do NOT want to end up with a claim that says nothing more than "The Anthropocene is (or is not) a new form of suicide". Instead, your goal is to say something new and not obvious about what you have read.
• Additional Materials: Durkheim's Suicide: A study in sociology; Climate Vulnerability Monitor; IPCC Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability 2014 Report; Climate Change and Social Murder;  key terms [irreversible, tipping point, edge, precipice, vulnerability, madness, insanity, denial, deep time, geological force, death, systemic violence, catastrophe, intentional]        

Week 5. Belief and Denial [Hw]

Choose a scene from the film Disruption (2014) and answer the following two questions. 

• What is the scene telling you to desire? 
• How does it teach you to desire it? 

Keep your response brief (no more than 400 words). 

Week 5. Belief and Denial [Rd]

9/23. Blame

• Disruption. 2014. Directed by Kelly Nyks & Jared P. Scott

• Ruidak-Gould, Peter. 2014. 'Climate Change and Accusation: Global Warming and Local Blame in a Small Island State.' Current Anthropology. 55(4): 365-385

9/25. Unknown Knowns

• Oreskes, Naomi and Erik M. Conway. 2013. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Daedalus. 142(1)

Colbert, Latour (sort of), and Frankenstein

The Colbert Report
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Colbert Report on Facebook

Here's a trailer for the film Pandora's Promise, which offers us a good example of the new wave of reconciliatory discourse that seeks to "re-brand" nuclear energy as "climate friendly". 

Student Meetings

Please sign up for a time to meet with me in the comment section below.

NOTICE: I will not be holding regular office hours tomorrow.

Thursday 9/18
3:00 - 3:20
3:20 - 3:40
3:40 - 4:00
4:00 - 4:20
4:20 - 4:40
4:40 - 5:00
5:00 - 5:20
5:20 - 5:40
5:40 - 6:00

Friday 9/19
11:00 - 11:20
11:20 - 11:40
11:40 - 12:00
12:20 - 12:40
2:00 - 2:20
3:00 - 3:20
3:20 - 3:40
3:40 - 4:00
4:00 - 4:20

*If none of the remaining times fit your schedule please indicate what time you'd be available to meet on either Thursday or Friday.

Guest Speaker: Vinny Ialenti (9/18)

This Thursday the anthropologist Vincent Ialenti will be joining our class. Come in thinking shape: that means awake and with prepared questions and points of discussion. He is planning to give us a short presentation of his research on 'deep time' in Finland.

I have already assigned one of Ialient's short articles, but I also suggest that you read his most recent piece, published as part of NPR's Cosmos & Culture' series just this past weekend. In it he briefly addresses the question of the Anthropocene.

See: Envisioning Landscapes Of Our Very Distant Future

Kantian Sublime

At some point, twice-removed summaries and third-party recitations of "They say, I say," become too much; eventually one must seek out the text that they keep hearing about and read it for themselves. It is my strong recommendation that you begin to read systematically from the start of your undergraduate career. There is NO substitute for encountering a classic work of social thought on your own; when you read it yourself, you get to listen to it poorly in your own way, and thus, to hear something more.

So: here is the 'Analytic of the Sublime' by Kant.

✶ Bonus

Sloterdijk on Kant: 

Alexander von Humboldt had been given the missions of formulating the return from cosmic exteriority to the self-reflexive world of humans in exemplary fashion. A generation earlier, Immanuel Kant had characterized the human mind's capacity to return to itself from the enormous, the utmost and the most foreign as the sense of the sublime --what he considered sublime was the human consciousness of one's own dignity, resisting all temptations to abandon oneself in the overwhelming. By enacting the return from the terrible expanse of nature, the astral and oceanic dimensions, into the educated salons with edifying thoroughness, Humboldt's picture of the world offered his contemporaries a final initiation into the cosmologically sublime. A view of the world on the largest possible scale here became an emergency of aesthetic life. This meant the continuation of the vita contemplativa by bourgeois, and thus ultimately consumptive means. If humans wanted to be 'moved' and 'deeply feel the monstrous', they now had to seek their own interiors."  (p.24)

Ferguson on Kant: 

There was once a name for the experience of massive power held in abeyance: the sublime. Edmund Burke (and the early Immanuel Kant) provided a dogmatic anthropology of its workings, which Kant then reworked in the Third Critique. Where Burke talked, among other things, about the relationship between despotic power and fear ("dread majesty"), Kant spoke of a fear that was already overcome in the perception of the power itself. Dynamically apprehended, it was apprehended as always in a state of potentiality, something to be thought about. Mathematically apprehended, it was apprehended as a reconfiguration of ongoing enumeration into the notion of infinity, a movement of thought to be thought about.

Kant's aesthetic theory is often spoke of --as Kant spoke of it-- as providing a bridge between his account of understanding and his work on practical reason. But the example of climate change helps to bring its place into clearer focus. The theory of the sublime does not, as is frequently thought, intimate a kind of aesthetic appreciation that would be a substitute for action. Rather, it provided a model of what it's like to feel that the world is posing a problem to all of the usual ways we have of conceiving of our actions. (p.35) 

Siegel on the sublime: 

Indeed Cornell's plan seems to have been shaped by the thematics of the Romantic sublime, which practically guaranteed that a cultivated man in the presence of certain landscapes would find his thoughts drifting metonymically through a series of topics --solitude, ambition, melancholy, death, spirituality, 'classical inspiration' --which could lead, by an extension, to questions of culture and pedagogy. (p.69)

Week 4. Worlding the Anthropocene [Hw]

 Marina Zurkow, The Poster Children (2007)

This week your homework has two parts:

1. Select one quotation from each of the assigned readings and provide an explanation of why you think this quotation is important for understanding the reading. It's worth noting that the achievement of understanding is not necessarily the same as having a grasp of a text's central argument. There's more to the art of quoting than the obvious efficiency of reproducing another person's argument on the terrain of your paper. Instead, this week I want you to look for quotations that index some inner paradox or tension. Alternatively, you might choose quotations that speak to how the author uses imagery, texture and other sensory details to ground their position, or to generate a particular affect in the reader. As always, try to make the quotations bend back upon earlier readings and discussion.

2. Select at least one term and look it up. This should be done using the library portal system. In your homework post, write and report back to the class your new understanding of that term or concept. 

Week 4. Worlding the Anthropocene [Rd]

9/16. Inhuman Time 

• Hong, Cathy Park. 2012. 'The World Cloud'. Engine, Empire. W & W Norton and Company. pp. 65-93

• Irvine, Richard. 2014. Deep Time: An Anthropological Problem. Social Anthropology. 22(2): 157-172

• Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Henry Holt and Co: pp. 92-110 ('Mastodon's Molar' is optional) 

9/18. Time Depth and Density

• Ialenti, Vincent. 2014. When Deep Time Becomes Shallow: Knowing Nuclear Waste Risk Ethnographically. Discard Studies.

• Latour, Bruno. 2012. 'Love your Monsters'. Breakthrough Journal. Winter 2012