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Hanna Morris. A Manifesto for Media in a Warming World. Media Theory, Media Theory, 2018, Standard Issue, 2 (2), pp.245 - 257. �hal-02047782�
A Manifesto for Media in a Warming World HANNA E. MORRIS
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Media Theory Vol. 2 | No. 2 | 245-257
© The Author(s) 2018 CC-BY-NC-ND http://mediatheoryjournal.org/
Abstract
Global warming is popularly visualized as distant, immaterial and abstract. Images of polar bears and melting icebergs paint climate change as a de-humanized and irrelevant phenomenon. But global warming is anything but irrelevant – it is a very real, very tangible and very material present reality “stuck” to each and every one of us.
Global warming is a physical act of unresolved imperial violence – with a disproportionate degree of impact on the “formerly” colonized world. And yet, this violence often goes unnoted. A visual intervention is required. In my manifesto, I propose a set of three intercessions for the mediation of global warming. I argue that global warming should be mediated as: (1) Situated and Intimate, (2) Transhistorical Trauma of Imperial Modernity and (3) Uncanny Undulation. Mediations must overwhelm, disturb and break the binaries of self and other, seen and unseen, here and there, now and then. Recognition and resolution of the material consequences of global warming will not occur otherwise.
Keywords
global warming, trauma, visual studies, postcolonial studies
I. Paradox of Modern Perceptibility
What comes to mind when you close your eyes and visualize “global warming”? Do polar bears float by on melting icebergs? Do red, graphical lines dart up and up and up? Do flames and embers crackle and burn in a doomsday scenario? A quick Google Images search of “global warming” is revealing. Several cartoon globes engulfed in fire, gaunt polar bears, glass thermometers and an orangey-reddish hue of apocalypse color the screen. These images parallel the popular understanding of global warming as abstract, distant and apocalyptic. Climate change, as it goes, is
“intangible.” It is “incomprehensible.” It is vague, hazy and opaque. It is easily ignored. But global warming is not a far-off specter – it is a very real, very tangible and very material present reality.
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Figure 1. Google Images, “global warming,” December 15, 2017.
So why is climate change so difficult to visualize, sense and perceive? Timothy Morton proposes one answer. Morton describes global warming as a “hyperobject”
or as an entity that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.”1 Global warming, as hyperobject, defies human perception. Empirical graphs and figures may map the ebbs and flows, spikes and dips of our warming world, but these models fail to depict the full extent of crisis. In fact, Morton contends, we are not in a crisis at all but, rather, in a new epoch of unprecedented anthropogenic environmental change – the “Anthropocene.”2 And in this “new world” of the Anthropocene, photographic images and journalistic narratives of rising seas, plummeting water supplies and plateauing resources fall short of the whole story.
Indeed, global warming cannot be told as a tale. It defies representation. There is no clear beginning, middle or end. Climate change is far too extensive and vast for the confines of modern storytelling. Global warming is everywhere and is everything. It is “viscous” and “sticks” to each atom, arm and automobile.3 Nothing and no-one can escape the viscosity of the Anthropocene.
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Figure 2. The Guardian, “Timothy Morton: the philosopher prophet of the
Anthropocene,” June 15, 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/15/timothy-morton-anthropocene- philosopher
But, Morton‟s “new world” vision of global warming has a serious – and often overlooked – flaw. Or in the words of Jason W. Moore, “the Anthropocene is a comforting story with uncomfortable facts.”4 The lens of the Anthropocene risks perpetuating the disproportionate violence of global warming. The “Anthropocene,”
according to Moore, neutralizes and naturalizes the “inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity‟s strategic relations of power and production. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all.”5 And by emphasizing the “planetary” problem of climate change that requires “we” as
“humankind” to rethink “our” understandings of “self” as a “species,” Morton sidesteps this necessarily “uncomfortable” engagement with global warming as a reverberant trauma of imperial violence.
According to Françoise Vergès, the Anthropocene narrative centers “on the threat to human beings as an undifferentiated whole” and fails to take into account the
“asymmetry of power” as it persists along the lines of constructed difference forged by empire.6 That is, global warming is a transhistorical trauma of “colonial and racial violence” and we must “address the long history and memory of environmental
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destruction” through the lens of “Racial Capitalocene” as opposed to
“Anthropocene.”7 According to Vergès, “we must, in our narrative of the Racial Capitalocene, integrate this long memory of colonialism‟s impact” and understand global warming “in the context of the inequalities produced by racial capital.”8 But how can this be done? How can global warming be visualized through the lens of the
“Racial Capitalocene”? How can the modern, imperial eye see what escapes its limited gaze? A manifesto for media in a warming world is of crucial importance.
II. Aesthetic Intervention
The paradox of modern (and imperial) perceptibility is of profound ethical and existential consequence and demands resolution. Nicolas Mirzoeff suggests a fundamental shift in the aesthetics of modernity.9 Modern aesthetics, according to Mirzoeff, stunt visual and bodily sensations – they anaesthetize.10 And this “aesthetic anesthesia” numbs and evacuates the senses.11 Mirzoeff explains how the “conquest of nature” has become so embedded within the modern visage as “natural, right, then beautiful” that “modern industrial pollution” evades perception.12 In other words, “the theory and practice of the conquest of nature has become [so] integrated into Western aesthetics” that toxic pollutants, fossil fuels, mine tailings, smog, oil spills, you name it – are disregarded and ignored.13 Mirzoeff explains how “the degradation of the air is seen as natural, right, and hence aesthetic, a key step in any visuality: it produces an anaesthetic to the actual physical conditions.”14 Modernity numbs, stunts and blinds. And this fallout of feeling perpetuates violence against people and place for empire or, perhaps more aptly in today‟s lingo, for capital. The aesthetics of imperial modernity have effectively made the nonhuman and “non- European world a space in which there [is] „nothing to see here‟” and therefore open for excavation and exploitation.15 Mirzoeff therefore concludes that “we” need to
“decolonize” the modern eye and develop “counter-visualities” in order to perceive global warming and imperial violence as it pervades.16
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Figure 3. Getty Images, “A couple walks the streets of London in November 1953; nearly a year after the Great Smog, masks were still necessary”.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151221-the-lethal-effects-of-london-fog
But although resonant with his call for “counter-visualities,” Mirzoeff falls into the very same trap as Morton‟s fatal flaw. Mirzoeff co-opts “decolonization” as a metaphor to develop his universal call for a new, less violent, global aesthetic.17 But, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang make critically clear, “decolonization is not a metaphor” – decolonization is what “brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” and it should not be used as “a metaphor for other things.”18 Mirzoeff‟s appropriation of “decolonization” for the dissolution of modern aesthetics is problematic because his proposed intercession again privileges the Euro- American campaign for a new, planetary/global vision of the “Anthropocene.” Mirzoeff is entirely correct with his assertion that the aesthetics of modernity need to be disturbed and unsettled – but this disruption cannot occur through a universalized and undifferentiated global lens. Indigenous, non-Western perspectives and ways of seeing, sensing and being need to be centralized. And no one lens should dominate another. Recognition of global warming as a transhistorical trauma of imperial modernity cannot occur otherwise. Or, in Donna Haraway‟s terms, the aesthetic anesthesia19 of modernity can only be addressed by “staying with the trouble”20 and working through the “uncomfortable facts”21 of global warming.
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III. Mediations of the Trouble
Global warming is imperial violence. But this violence is marked by “absence” – or, that which defies the modern eye. Absence is an unseen yet intimate presence – and it is transformative because it disturbs. Absence unsettles the binary notion of intimacy and distance, or of self and other. But this disturbance is elusive in the entrenched conditions of postcolonial modernity whereby the scientifically unobservable and indeterminate are paradigmatically rejected as “false,” “illogical”
and “dangerous illusion.”22 I therefore propose a set of three visual interventions including: mediating global warming as (1) Situated and Intimate, (2) Transhistorical Trauma of Imperial Modernity and (3) Uncanny Undulation. And these intercessions, I argue, must begin with intimacy.
1. Mediate Global Warming as Situated and Intimate
Global warming must be mediated as situated and intimate – or as viscous, “sticky”
and stuck to everyone and to everything. Global warming is inescapable and pervasive – it cannot be ignored. Climate change must be mediated as very personal – affecting every atom and every fiber of one‟s being. Mediations should not be abstract or distant – they should be situated. Photographs of polar bears, graphs with climbing vectors and images of flaming earths should be replaced with mediations of global warming as close and immediate – or, of intimate presence and place.
Public art in towns, cities and villages are crucial for this mediation of global warming. Visual interventions in everyday life will invoke recognition of the overlooked presence of global warming “stuck” to the dwelling places of home. The artist Jason deCaires Taylor mediates the viscosity of global warming as an intimate presence “stuck” to his hometown of London through his 2015 sculpture project entitled, The Rising Tide. DeCaires Taylor‟s public art installation consisted of a set of four stone horses with skulls molded into the shape of oilrig pumps or “horse heads.” Atop each of the four equine hybrid beings sat a human figure of the same stone material. The sculptures were installed on the edge of the Thames near the bankside of Vauxhall Bridge adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. The Guardian described deCaires Taylor‟s installation as “barely” noticeable, stating: “at high tide, you might barely know they‟re there. But as the water level of the Thames comes and
251 goes twice a day with the tide, the four ghastly heads – and the horses they sit atop – slowly emerge fully into view.”23 In other words, the formerly unseen yet material presence of global warming was mediated through the practice of situated intimacy.
The “barely” visible presence of the statues disrupted and disturbed. Key to this disruption was the situation of the figures within the daily, intimate dwelling-place of Londoners. Mediations of global warming must invoke recognition of the tangible, immediate and viscous existence of climate change – they must situate global warming as intimate and entangled within the body of self and home.
Figure 4. Getty Images, “Installation of the Rising Tide Sculpture on the Banks of the Thames,”
September 2, 2015. http://www.gettyimages.com/event/installation-of-the-rising-tide- scupture-on-the-banks-of-the-thames-574843921?#the-rising-tide-by-british-underwater-
sculptor-jason-decaires-taylor-picture-id486429412.
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Figure 5. Getty Images, “Installation of the Rising Tide Sculpture on the Banks of the Thames,”
September 2, 2015, http://www.gettyimages.com/event/installation-of-the-rising-tide- scupture-on-the-banks-of-the-thames-574843921?#the-rising-tide-by-british-underwater-
sculptor-jason-decaires-taylor-picture-id486429412.
Figure 6. Ben Pruchnie, “The Rising Tide, by British sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor. The four ghostly statues will only be visible twice a day at low tide,” The Guardian, September 2, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/02/underwater-sculptures-thames-
london.
253 2. Mediate Global Warming as Transhistorical Trauma of Imperial
Modernity
Global warming is diffuse and sticky yet also disproportionate in degree of impact.
Peoples of the “formerly” colonized world are hit the hardest by droughts, superstorms and degraded environments. The Coast Salish peoples of Vancouver, British Columbia, for example, have been in constant battle against oil spills, pipeline construction and destructive projects of excavation ever since the first English colonists set foot on their unceded territories two hundred years ago. Global warming is a transhistorical trauma of imperial modernity – and it remains unrecognized and unresolved at scale. It is therefore essential that global warming be mediated as an unresolved, recurrent and disproportionately harmful act of imperial violence.
Figure 7. Marianne Nicolson, “The Sun is Setting on the British Empire,” Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., March 3, 2016.
Marianne Nicolson, an artist and Ph.D of Scottish and Dzawada ‟enux w First Nations descent, mediates global warming as a transhistorical trauma of imperial modernity through her 2016 mural entitled, The Sun is Setting on the British Empire. Positioned at the top of the Belkin Art Gallery‟s exterior brick wall and in the heart of the University of British Columbia‟s (UBC) Vancouver campus, a vibrant yellow face with a crown of sunbeams and two open palms leers above a flattened and horizontally elongated British flag. Nicolson painted this mural – in part – with
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symbolic intent. In Nicolson‟s words, the mural “reworks the elements of the British Columbian flag, restoring the original position of the sun above the Union Jack, thereby symbolically altering the economic and political relationships it signifies.”24 Or, in reversal of the notion of “the sun never sets on the British empire,”
Nicolson‟s title asserts: The Sun is Setting on the British Empire.
But Nicolson‟s mural mediates beyond symbolic “altering.” Transhistorical trauma defies symbolic and narrative representation. The symbolic meaning of the mural‟s pictorial content cannot invoke recognition of the disembodied permeation of colonial violence. Nicolson‟s mural is, therefore, crucially situated within the unceded Coast Salish territories – which the UBC campus occupies. The unceded Coast Salish territories, or the Land itself, is essential for Nicolson‟s mediation. The importance of place for the mediation of transhistorical trauma reemphasizes the initial intervention of situated intimacy. But as an extension of the first intervention, the unresolved and pervasive presence of global warming as an act of imperial violence must be invoked. Nicolson‟s mural, crucially, summons recognition of the unceded Coast Salish territories as a site of violent colonial occupation. The Sun is Setting on the British Empire was purposefully painted in conjunction with Indigenous protests against the construction of a cross-territory pipeline and the transportation of oil unjustly – and brutally – extracted from the Coast Salish Land. Global warming is imperial violence – and Nicolson, necessarily, positions this “uncomfortable fact”25 at the core of her mediation. Her mural – in mediation of imperial violence – disturbs the temporal and spatial fortifications of Vancouver‟s colonial settlement.
3. Mediate Global Warming as Uncanny Undulation
The reverberant, material consequences of climate change grow and morph, emerging and reemerging in unexpected locations and at unexpected times – whether as pipeline, tar sands, mine tailings, etc. Global warming is therefore strangely familiar and familiarly strange – it is uncanny. The unpredictable reemergence of imperial violence unsettles and disrupts modernity‟s linear notion of time. Global warming disturbs the myth of progress. The burning of fossil fuels, dumping of mine tailings and decimation of Indigenous lands for imperial power and profit have not stayed in the past. The violence of colonization has returned as a haunting presence
255 with physical, material consequence. The past is not of the wayside. And the project of perpetual progress and growth has threatened the very well-being, health and happiness of humans and non-humans – with a disproportionate degree of impact on Indigenous life. Global warming is a situated, intimate and transhistorical trauma of imperial modernity, reemerging in strange forms and in unpredictable ways.
Mediations must therefore undulate – vibrating and shifting and transforming within non-linear time.
Figure 8. Tania Willard, #haunted_hunted, BUSH Gallery, Secwépemc Nation Reserve, B.C., 2014.
Tania Willard, through her visual project #haunted_hunted, mediates the uncanniness of the recurrent, unpredictable undulation of colonial violence through an ongoing series of faceless, human figures adorned in traditional tribal blankets within her reservation of the Secwe pemc Nation. Like Marianne Nicolson‟s mural, these cloaked forms were initially and purposefully positioned in tandem with the construction of a highway across her reservation‟s sacred grounds. This highway was built to transport oil – unearthed from unceded Indigenous Land. Throughout the construction process and thereafter, the shrouded figures emerged and remerged in unexpected locations and at unexpected times within the Secwépemc Nation reservation. These uncanny figures dwell within “undulating time.”26 The temporality of global warming is non-linear – vibrating, re-emerging and diverging in
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unpredictable ways. The shifting, uncanny figures visually indicate a previously unseen presence – the atmospheric trauma of imperial modernity unbounded in time and space. Through depleted fish stocks, polluted rivers, mine tailings, tar sands, imperiled health, pillaged Indigenous territories – the transhistorical trauma of imperial violence persistently haunts or “acts out” with real, material consequences.
Visual indicators of global warming as transhistorical trauma therefore “come and go” – whether as oil pipeline, highway or cloaked figure. But their “coming and going” is an indication of modernity‟s stunted perception – not of their fiction. And by mediating global warming as an uncanny undulation, recognition of the unresolved and unpredictable emergence and reemergence of imperial violence can be invoked.
IV. From Recognition to Resolution
Global warming is an intimate, transhistorical trauma of imperial violence that emerges and remerges in unexpected locations and at unexpected times whether as pipeline, superstorm, oil spill, mine tailings, etc. But despite this tangible violence, global warming defies modern perception. An intervention is required. The paradox of modern perceptibility needs to be addressed. And a shock to the system will only occur when global warming is mediated as (I) Situated and Intimate, (2) Transhistorical Trauma of Imperial Modernity and (3) Uncanny Undulation. Mediations must overwhelm, disturb and break the binaries of self and other, seen and unseen, here and there, now and then.
Notes
1 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.
2 Ibid., 4.
3 Ibid., 1.
4 Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 595.
5 Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA:
PM Press, 2016), 82.
6 Françoise Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial?,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso, 2017),
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3376-racial-capitalocene.
7 Ibid.
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8 Ibid.
9 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 213.
10 Ibid., 224.
11 Ibid., 224.
12 Ibid., 220.
13 Ibid., 219.
14 Ibid., 223.
15 Ibid., 218.
16 Ibid., 230.
17 Ibid., 230.
18 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1.
19 Mirzoeff, Visualizing the Anthropocene (2014), 224.
20 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016), 1.
21 Moore, The Capitalocene (2017), 595.
22 W. J. T. Mitchell, “What is an Image?,” New Literary History 15, no. 3 (1984): 507.
23 Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “Underwater Sculptures Emerge from Thames in Climate Change Protest.”
The Guardian (London, UK), September 2, 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/02/underwater-sculptures-thames-london.
24 “Marianne Nicolson‟s The Sun Is Setting on the British Empire.” Coastal Art Beat, March 2, 2016.
http://www.coastalartbeat.ca/marianne-nicolson-the-sun-is-setting-on-the-british-empire-2016/.
25 Moore, The Capitalocene (2017), 595.
26 Morton, Hyperobjects (2013), 1.
Hanna E. Morris is a PhD student researching visual media and global warming at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Hanna is the 2017 recipient of the New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship awarded by the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). Hanna is the Graduate Student Representative on the Board of Directors for the IECA.
Email: hanna.morris@asc.upenn.edu
