Toxic Temple by De Gruyter Arts

Kilian Jörg

TO XI C

TOXIC TEMPLE

TE MP LE

LE MP TE

C XI TO

Toxic Temple

An Artistic and Philosophical Adventure into the Toxicity of the Now

Anna Lerchbaumer & Kilian Jörg (Eds.)

Contents

Ecology beyond Numbers

Remembering Wasteland or Why the World Is Out of Joint

Elisabeth Falkensteiner

A Panda a Day Keeps the Sorrow Away

Anna Lerchbaumer

Life and Death in the Anthropocene

Heather Davis

112

It’s Getting Late to Give You Up— Promising and Problematic Muddy Temporalities, Toxic Alliances, and Bubbly Commitments

Julia Grillmayr

132

What Kind of (Hi)story Is the End of the World?

156

Toward a Glossary of the Oceanic Undead: A(mphibious) through F(utures)

176

Hounding

Samuel Hertz

198

Can One Hear Global Warming in the Hiss of Air Conditioning?

Anna Lerchbaumer

212

Producing the Afterlife

Sabrina Bühn, Demi Spriggs, Kilian Jörg

var.

Toxic Prayers

232 244 248 249

BIBLIOGRAPHY BIOGRAPHIES IMAGE CREDITS IMPRINT

Kilian Jörg

Julieta Aranda, Eben Kirksey

Kilian Jörg

Von info@ailab.at Betreff FROHES VERSCHWENDEN / MERRY WASTING An undisclosed recipients

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 04:29:18

Dear Fellow Critters, For thousands of years, at the end of every orbit, we celebrate the divine center : the sun. After a relatively short aberration to the patriarchal God, now dead, we return to the archetype: the great radiator. Every year we worship her, the greatest spender at the center of the system. Only by her uncontrolled excess of energy we can exist ! In her wasteful power we graze ourselves—and on this special day we venerate her by imitation: fir trees torn out in masses and adornded by flames, Amazonian deliveries hunt us globally, we indulge ourselves in short-lived plastic pleasures to heap them up to the future layer of the Anthropocene ! Quickly the paper is torn open, our mouths grimace in short-lived joy—we build mountains of garbage to honor her, so that she approaches us again. The technosphere crackles loudly every December 24th—in singing devotion we leave our toxic traces to the after-us—spending our most longlived material in honor of the greatest waster of the system, our source of life ! In February of the year 2020 we will build this new old cult a temporary temple in the AIL. In the Toxic Temple we consecrate ourselves to the poisonous abundance and expect your noble gifts—this Christmas do not hand over your secretions to the ordinary garbage can, but administer them to our priesthood ! We collect everything that will outlive us—for the sun as a monument ! Contact us, and our clergy will joyfully receive your gifts ! Until then, we wish you a MERRY WASTING Bright night, holy night, Your devoted sun-worshippers

Kilian Jörg

Changes in global average surface temperature and increases in sea level are manifestations of changes in the surface energy balance. Perhaps a more fundamental measure of human perturbation of the climate system is the human-driven change to the planetary energy balance at Earth’s surface, as measured by changes in radiative forcing. Human activities, primarily the burning of fossil hydrocarbons, have increased the radiative forcing by 2.29 (1.13 to 3.33) W m² relative to 1750 CE, with a more rapid increase since 1970 CE than during prior The manufacture of new organic polymers decades. (plastics), which were initially developed in the Mineral extraction early 1900s, rapidly grew from the 1950s to an annualone accounts for the al production of about ~ 300 Tg in 2013, comparable displacement of ~ 57,000 to the present human biomass. Tg of sediments per year, Human processes are argued to have had exceeding the current rate of the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle riverborne sediment transport for some 2.5 billion years. The use of the by almost Recent anthropogenic Haber-Bosch process from 1913 CE ona factor deposits, which are the products ward has increased the amount of of 3. of mining, waste disposal (landfill), conreactive N in the Earth system by struction, and urbanization, contain the 120% relative to the Holocene greatest expansion of new minerals since baseline, accompanied by an the Great Oxygenation Event at 2400 Ma and increased flux of nitrogen oxare accompanied by many new forms of “rock,” ides (NO x) from the combusin the broad sense of geological materials with tion of fossil the potential for fuels. The terrestrial biosphere has undergone a dralong-term persismatic modification from 1700 CE, when almost 50% tence of the global ice-free land area was wild and only ~5% was intensively used by humans, to Atmospheric CO2 , now 2000 CE, when the respective perabove 400 parts per million (ppm), centages were 25% and 55%. was emitted into the atmosphere from

1999 to 2010 CE ~100 times as fast as the Average global sea levels are curmost rapid emission during the last glacial rently higher than at any point within termination, and concentrathe past ~115,000 years, since the tions have exceedAtmospheric CO2 and termination of the last ed Holocene CH4 concentrations depart from interglacial of levels since Holocene and even Quaternary patterns starting at the Pleisat least ~ 1850, and more markedly at ~ 1950, with an associated steep tocene 1850 fall in δ13C that is captured by tree rings and calcareous fossils. epCE. An average global temperature increase of 0.6 to 0.9°C from 1900 to och. the present, occuring predominantly in the past 50 years, is now rising beyond the Holocene variation of the past 14,000 years, accompanied by a modest enrichment of δ18O in Greenland ice starting at ~ 1900. Global sea levels increased at 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/‌year from 1993 to 2010 and are now rising above Late Holocene rates. Depending on the trajectory of future anthropogenic forcing, these trends may reach or exceed the envelope of Quaternary interglacial conditions. 22

beyond Numbers Species The past 20 years extinction rates More than 400 (1995–2015) account are today hundreds vertebrate species for more than half of the of thousands of times became extinct in the 50,000 Tg of concrete faster than the “normal” last century, extinctions ever produced, equivarates occurring in the last that would have taken lent to ~1 kg m² of the tens of millions of years. up to 10‌,000 years in planet surface. The losses that we are seeing the normal course of have mostly occurred since our evolution. If we use the ancestors develEven considering same approach to oped agriculture a conservative background estimate today’s extinc11‌,000 years rate of two extinctions per million tions per million speciesago. species-years, the number of speyears, we come up with On a worldcies that have gone extinct in the last a rate that is between wide basis, century would have otherwise taken ten and 10,000 times humans move between 800 and 10,000 years to dishigher than the more of the appear if they were merely background planet around, succumbing to the rate. about 45 gigaAccording to the calculations expected extinctons (billion tons) of the research team, the energy annually, than do tions that happen consumption of humankind during the at random. rivers, glaciers, last 70 years amounts to ~ 22 zetajoules, oceans or wind. whereas in the period from In the journal Geology For comparison, the end of the last ice age in 2000, Hooke estimated he estimated that that over the last 5,000 years of (11,700 years ago) to 1950 meandering rivers human history, the total amount of only ~ 14.6 zetajoules may move about were consumed, includsoil and rock moved by people would 39 gigatons of ing muscle power. be enough to build a mountain sediment a year. range about 13,000 feet The physical technosphere Others have esti- high, 25 miles wide is currently estimated to be a mass of mated that rivers and 62 miles long. 30 trillion tonnes (Tt), or 50 kg/‌m² of the deliver about entire surface of the Earth (including 24 gigatons of The Arctic sea ice oceans), or 4,000 tonnes per sediment to cover has dropped about person alive today. the oceans 13 percent each decade [since each year. 1979] (per the UN’s IntergovermenBetween tal Panel on Climate 1950 and 2015, global proChange). The global average duction of plastics, including resins temperature in 2019 was and fibers, has increased from 2 Mt to 380 1.1 degrees Celsius above the preMt, with the cumulative production totalindustrial period [according to WMO]. ling 7,800 Mt—more than enough To prevent warming beyond 1.5°C, we need to to wrap the entire planet in reduce emissions by 7.6% every year from this year to a layer of clingfilm. The 2030 (EGR, 2019). The total annual global greenhouse exponential growth curve gas emissions reached its highest levels in 2018, with no corresponds to an annusign of peaking (EGR, 2019). Based on today’s insufficient al rate of 8.4%, or more global commitments to reduce climate polluting emissions, than twice the rate of emissions are on track to reach 56 Gt CO2e by 2030, over the global economic twice what they should be (EGR, 2019). growth. 23 Ecology

Kilian Jörg

Ecology beyond Numbers

Kilian Jörg

The ecological catastrophe that marks the 21st century is for the most part discussed in abstract numbers. In this, it is conspicuously distinguished from the majority of other problems that agitate contemporary public discussion. Whereas matters of migration, (structural) racism, sexism or inequality (how, and if, the rich should be taxed) frequently lead to emotionally charged discussions in parliaments as well as at family dinners, the ecological problem rather tends to turn us into simulacrum-like zombies. When stating the latest, ever-accelerating numbers of rising CO₂ emissions, temperatures, sea levels or extinction rates, most people and their politicians1 tend to repeat them with a peculiarly remorseful emptiness in their voices. This is often followed by a sighing reassurance that “we need to do better” that, in all its inaction, seems to permit everybody to go back to normalcy— that is the status quo of late-capitalist being, struggling and suppressing. The “hyperobject” (Morton 2013) of climate catastrophe seems to be too big to get an emotional handle on. It is too slow and too gigantic to reveal itself in unambivalent eventfulness: as a clear-cut sensuous stimulus that forces us to react in an immediate way (as an approaching tsunami wave or a racist attack [hopefully] would). On top of that, we have a deficit of historical precedents that might sensitize us to the hyperobject of global catastrophe that remains for many (at least, the majority of resource holders) an invisible but lethal problem. As climate activist George Marshall puts it, the problem is that the “theories, graphs, projects, and data [concerning climate change] speak almost entirely to the rational brain. That helps us to evaluate the evidence and, for most people, to recognize that there is a major problem. But it does not spur us into action. […] The view held by every specialist I spoke to is that we have still not found a way to effectively engage our emotional brains in climate change” (Marshall 2014, 50). The project Toxic Temple is concerned with this problem: How can we find, create and rediscover sensuous and fully encompassing modes of becoming aware of our ecologically precarious situation that exceed the reiteration and regurgitation of mere numbers? What forms of narrating and relating to what some call the “Anthropocene” would make us not only acknowledge this gigantic problem, but transform with (and because of) it? How far does this require us to transcend the very dichotomy of emotional vs rational in a transdisciplinary manner?

All quotes on the prior pages are taken from the following sources: Waters, Colin & Zalasiewicz, Jan et al. 2016; Earth.org 2021; Saltre & Bradshaw 2019; Syvitski, Jaia, Waters, Colin N. et al. 2020; University of Maine 2014; Gross 2017. 1 It is important to mark that this is written from our Middle-European perspective. From a U.S. one this might still be a different angle.

A Panda a Day Keeps the Sorrow Away

Anna Lerchbaumer

Their black-and-white markings, the characteristic patches around their eyes and their leisurely attitude make panda bears emblematic, attractive and amusing. “A panda a day keeps your sorrow away,” to quote the motto of the iPanda YouTube channel, which uploads live images of panda bears to the internet 24/‌7, straight from surveillance cameras installed in Chinese panda breeding sanctuaries. These images are streamed to screens all around the world, helping viewers through sleepless nights. The giant panda is a star performer in pop culture, and thanks to its iconic look it was chosen for the logo of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), making it one of the most popular symbols of nature conservation and in particular of the protection of endangered animal species. Within the framework of the Toxic Temple, the panda has become both a votive animal and an object of research. On the one hand, the pandas’ lifestyle is strictly governed by the principle of sustainability—they largely adhere to a vegan diet and mate only reluctantly; on the other hand, panda images appear on countless plastic consumer goods which, in the not-so-distant future, will form part of the geological stratum of the Anthropocene. Chinese state property as a means to put on diplomatic pressure? At which point does an animal become an object or a fetish? The WWF logo was based on sketches of Chi Chi, a female panda sold by the Chinese government to the London Zoo in 1958. Originally, Chi Chi was to be sold into the USA, but these plans fell through due to a trade embargo (Wikipedia, 2021). The People’s Republic of China claims ownership of every single panda bear, including those living in zoos around the world. Even when a panda dies its dead body remains the property of the Chinese state. During the first few decades after the Second World War pandas were still gifted to other nations to mark special occasions; meanwhile the PRC has changed its policy, and offers giant pandas only on loan. Occasionally these cute and popular exhibits also cause political discord. In 2005 the PRC government offered Taiwan two giant pandas, whose combined names translate as “reunion.” Taiwan refused to accept the gift and its hidden message. Governments go to great diplomatic lengths to acquire attractions for the zoos in their countries. Take Berlin, for instance: German Federal Chancellor

Anna Lerchbaumer

Angela Merkel herself stepped in to raise the subject with the Peking government, and in 2017 a giant panda couple arrived in Berlin, on loan for 15 years (Coen and Willeke, 2017). When twin panda cubs were born at the Berlin Zoo in 2019, the local daily newspaper Tagesspiegel asked its readers to suggest names for the baby pandas. The Chinese government was not pleased to learn that the majority of the readers voted for the names “Hong” and “Kong,” expressing their solidarity with protesters in that city. Eventually the two cubs, who will be returned to China in a few years, were named Meng Xiang and Meng Yuan, which translates as “long-awaited dream” and “dream come true” (BBC 2019). When giant panda Yuan Yuan arrived at the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna, he was welcomed by Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen in person. The name “Yuan,” which translates as “round,” holds little potential for provocation. Do images become a kind of sanctuary for endangered animal species? Can the way we treat pandas etc. be read as a blueprint for how we will deal with the extinction of our own species? Contrary to the number of living panda bears, the numbers of panda images are ever increasing, both in digital form, i.e. memes, panda videos, emojis, and in analogue form, made of plastic, polyester, etc. Black panda eyes look back at us from phone cases, slippers, coffee mugs, jumpers, signs of fast food chains and countless other consumer goods. Cute cuddly plush pandas share our beds. Panda bears have been embraced by popular culture in a way comparable only to polar bears or the long-extinct dinosaurs. Large animals, also called megafauna, feature most prominently in our pop and consumer culture lives. What is it we find so immensely fascinating about large animals on the brink of extinction? Is it perhaps that, by mass-reproducing and animating rare megafauna, we, humanity, the first ever species to witness its own extinction (Colebrook 2018 in PHG, 152), confront ourselves with the possibility of our own disappearance? Unfortunately, the leftovers and remains of this very consumer culture further accelerate the currently ongoing sixth mass extinction. Is the digital world a form of mourning? Or is it a reanimation? For many decades the polar bear has been an advertising character for CocaCola. The associations it triggers, its cute snow-white appeal, especially in exaggerated digital images, bears no longer any relation to a wild animal.

Panda

Day

Keeps

the

Sorrow

Dinosaurs, though long extinct, live on in blockbusters featuring digitally (re)animated clones, such as Jurassic Park; extremely stylized figures, custom-made to suit the world of humans, they are forever engraved in pop culture memory. In nearly all Latin languages “animation,” i.e. the generation of moving pictures, is distinguished from “reanimation,” i.e. restoring to life, simply by the prefix “re.” Can images from the digital world become real again? In a Coca-Cola commercial from 2012 we encounter a group of CGI-animated polar bears in the Arctic, sitting on a snow sofa in their snow cave, staring at a flat-screen TV. One of the bears steps outside the cave. He looks tired, so his friends toss a bottle of Coca-Cola in his direction. In attempting to catch it he slips, begins to slide over the ice, trying to regain his balance with football-like movements. The other bears are unable to stop him. He ends up sliding on his belly, finally manages to catch the bottle and, heaving a sigh of relief, opens it to a fizzing sound. Only a few years later the CGI animation has become reality. A photographer takes a picture at a zoo of a polar bear holding a Coca-Cola bottle in his paws. While at the end of the soft drink commercial, accompanied by orchestral music, the words “Coca-Cola, open happiness” appear on the screen, the real-life polar bear holding the Coke bottle looks hungry, his fur dirty. He was originally found in North Russia, an orphaned cub. These shocking images of the effects of global warming, showing polar bears on rubbish dumps digging for food and coming across the occasional Coca-Cola bottle, are used as a visual strategy to call attention to the melting polar ice caps. Santa Claus (dressed in red by Coca-Cola) set out from his North Pole home to bring consumer goods to all good children in the Western world, but in the ongoing ecological disaster the tide has turned: consumer goods from all across the world are swept even to the remotest corners of the North Pole, poisoning the animals that live there. Do images work as a modern-day Noah’s ark? Are the last remnants of biodiversity protected by the pixels on the screens? Rare animals, melting ice floes, environmental disasters at regular intervals: filmed up close in high resolution. The technical achievements of our day

Away

Anna Kilian Lerchbaumer Jörg

spinning around Move outta my way I know you’re feeling me ’Cause you like it like this

I’m

You think I’d crumble? You think I’d lay down and die? Oh no, not I, I will survive Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive I’ve got all my life to live And I’ve got all my love to give and I’ll survive I will survive I will survive The tide is high but I’m holdin’ on I’m gonna be your number one I’m not the kind-a world who gives up just like that, oh no

Kylie Minogue, “Spinning Around,” 2000, Light Years. Gloria Gaynor, “I will survive,” 1978, Love Tracks. Atomic Kitten, “The Tide is High,” 2002, Feels So Good.

Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’ And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive With a taste of your lips, I’m on a ride You’re toxic, I’m slippin’ under With a taste of a poison paradise I’m addicted to you Don’t you know that you’re toxic? And I love what you do Don’t you know that you’re toxic?

Bee Gees, “Staying Alive,” 1977, Saturday Night Fever. Britney Spears, “Toxic,” 2004, In the Zone. 80

Ecology

beyond

KaraokeNumbers Healing

Humidity is rising (uh rising) Barometer’s getting low (oh low, girl) According to all sources (what sources now) The street’s the place to go (we better hurry up) You can fight the sleep but not the dream Things ain’t cooking in my kitchen Strange affliction wash over me Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire Couldn’t conquer the blue sky There’s a small boat made of china Going nowhere on the mantlepiece Do I lie like a loungeroom lizard Or do I sing like a bird released Everywhere you go you always take the weather with you Too high Can’t come down Losin’ my head Spinnin’ round and round Do you feel me now? And if you ask me how I’m feeling Don’t tell me you’re too blind to see Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye

The Weather Girls, “It’s Raining Men,” 1983, Success. Crowded House, “Weather with you,” 1991, Woodface. Kylie Minogue, “Spinning Around,” 2000, Light Years. Rick Astley, “Never gonna give you up,” 1987, Whenever You Need Somebody.

Kilian Jörg

Far from disfiguring the landscape, these discarded products of Twentieth-Century industry had a fierce and wayward beauty. Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colors of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink. He was fascinated by the cobalt clouds that drifted below the surface of the water, free at last of all plants and fish, the soft chemical billows interacting as they seeped from the sodden soil. He explored the whorls of steel shavings, foliage culled from a metallic christmas tree, the bales of rusting wire whose dense copper hues formed a burnished forest in the sunlight. He gazed raptly at the chalky whiteness of old china-clay tips, vivid as powdered ice, abandoned railyards with their moss-covered locomotives, the undimmed beauty of industrial wastes produced by skills and imaginations far richer than nature’s, more splendid than any Arcadian meadow. Unlike nature, here there was no death. —J. G. Ballard, “The Ultimate City”—

Ecology

beyond

Numbers

o s e v hi rc a en e sa th ud s e-V oy str inc e d en t— ics t s pla of Th e r ep ctu res a f en nu a t is m co he t nd e l i itio h W ne . t n d e b es

e future of the st, and th eart e pa h w f th ill b so e ce a rt tra h

Heather Davis

rks of our pr ma

an B db — eyond.

ccumu lat ea h t e

lif ,i e th on the ear

ts ry w tu a s en te hc w ill tiet c o nstitu wen te the archives of the t

er na de tte B

Life and Death in the Anthropocene Heather Davis

In 2007, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) detected high levels of bromate, a carcinogen, in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake and Elysian Reservoirs. Bromide is found naturally in groundwater, and chlorine is added to drinking water in order to kill bacteria. But when exposed to sunlight, as was the case in these open-air reservoirs, the two chemicals react and carcinogenic bromate forms. The facilities serve about 600,000 people in Downtown and South Los Angeles, and the city was forced to dump the water (Helfand 2007). The municipal government began to build a new underground facility, but until its completion they needed a way to control this chemical reaction on the other major reservoir, Ivanhoe Reservoir. The temporary solution was to put 3.4 million black plastic balls onto the surface of the reservoir, with the idea that they would absorb sunlight, drastically reduce water evaporation, and also lessen algae growth, while stopping the chemical reaction and thus the formation of bromate (Vara-Orta 2008). The four-inch-diameter polyethylene balls covered the surface of the reservoir, sealing out the sunlight. The newspaper images associated with this event—thousands of plastic balls being poured down a cement embankment to re-surface the water—bore a striking resemblance to contemporary art, such as the earth works and land art of the 1960s and 1970s. Viewers could easily be forgiven if they accidentally thought the event was a new piece by a contemporary landscape or installation artist, such as Olafur Eliasson or Maya Lin. But, in this case, the relationship to contemporary art was entirely accidental, speaking both to the state of art practice today and to environmental aesthetics. This phenomenon, of accidental or incidental aesthetics, is a hallmark of what is being called the Anthropocene—the era in which extractavist logic and capitalist economics have drastically reshaped the chemical, geological, and biospheric conditions of the earth. From the extraordinarily beautiful colors made from tar for the World Exhibition in 1862 (Leslie 2005, 75–78), to the London smog that inspired Monet and other impressionists (Mirzoeff 2014, 220–226), to the trash vortex, “the largest water architecture of the twenty-first century” (Preciado 2013, 33), the re-shaping of the earth by humans has also meant the birth of entirely new colors and aesthetics. The aesthetic effects—as in aisthesis, or affects produced by our sensorial experience of the environment—have been entirely re-ordered by the presence of plastic. The use of the term “plastic arts” was first recorded in 1624 (OED). Until the invention of the synthetic polymer

Heather Davis

that we have come to know as plastic; the arts held a virtual monopoly on artifice, now it is chemical engineers who re-make and re-fashion the earth. The inadvertent aesthetics produced by the event of covering the Ivanhoe Reservoir in plastic balls draws attention to the larger ways in which aesthetics is shifting under the conditions of the Anthropocene. These “shade balls,” as they are called, are typically used to keep birds out of water near industrial facilities and airports and to stop water evaporation in petroleum operations. The LADWP initially bought three million balls to cover the Ivanhoe Reservoir (after the initial phase of introducing 400,000 balls), then nine million more for two other reservoirs in the city, and is scheduled to blanket the L.A. Reservoir, which has a surface area of 176 acres, with eighty million balls, permanently (Kavanaugh 2014). These procedures reveal what plastic does best: it acts as a sealant, a barrier, both literally sealing something off from its surrounding environment—in this case, a reservoir—while also materializing the desire for impenetrability, for objects, bodies, and selves to be discrete, for categories not to mix, for a monadic identity separated from its environment. Plastic: The Substrate of Advanced Capitalism The first synthetic polymer, Bakelite, was created in 1907 and patented in 1909 by Leo Baekeland. It was invented to fill consumer demand for items that were becoming more difficult to get—such as ivory and silk—as anticolonial resistance movements started simmering, and as the earlier pillaging of resources made these items increasingly unavailable and expensive (Meikle 1995, 26). Lauded as the material of a thousand uses, plastic became the cheap alternative, the perfect substance for a burgeoning commodity society that would emerge full force in the post-WWII era. Plastic has always been a thoroughly profit-driven material. Even when the category of what we now think of as plastics was still in formation, its nature was more “commercial than scientific,” as Jeffrey Meikle argues in his illuminating and far-reaching cultural history, American Plastic (1995, 5). In other words, the invention and proliferation of plastics was driven less by a need to develop new technologies, such as medical or warfare applications (although WWII boosted the use of plastics greatly), than to simply replace the objects we already had—but at a price and in a quantity that helped to instantiate a middle class defined by consumption.

Life

and

Death

the

Plastic created the conditions for global trade and consumerism, while these systems themselves became increasingly reliant upon various forms of plastic. As Andrea Westermann notes in her study of PVC (or vinyl) in Germany: “Plastic packaging, in particular, facilitated mass consumption. […] The new ways of handling and distributing commodities in retail and wholesale were not only based on plastic containers and plastic bags, but also required an improved stackability of goods, achieved by material innovations like shrinkwrap” (Westermann 2013, 76–77). Indeed, the infrastructure and speed of advanced capitalism, and the fantasy of unending economic growth fueled by extractivist policies and mass consumerism depend upon plastic. This explains why 280 million tons of plastic was produced worldwide in 2012, with a projected increase to 33 billion tons annually by 2050 (Rochman 2013, et al.). Plastic can be considered the substrata of advanced capitalism. It reveals our utter dependency upon petrochemicals. But its role in our life, unlike the more abstract relationship that we have with other oil products, such as gasoline or electricity, is intimate. We use plastics to eat, clothe ourselves, as sex toys, as soothers for babies. Our computers and phones, those objects we seemingly cannot do without, could not exist without plastics as the lightweight portable devices that they are. Nor could the Internet, with thousands of underwater and underground cables sealed from the elements with plastic coating (Starosielski 2015). Plastic is ubiquitous and infiltrates so many aspects of our daily lives that its presence is easy to take for granted and also hard to fathom. It has introduced entirely new sensorial regimes with its smooth surfaces and bright colors. It also implicates us: there is no way to extract one’s life in the twentieth century from plastic. This is true for people across economic classes and geographies, even if the objects we interact with, and the ways we do it, remain stratified. Plastic is a problem that cannot be externalized. However, the value attributed to plastic, as Gay Hawkins reminds us, is not intrinsic to the material, but is enacted. As Hawkins writes, “Plastic is represented as something that seems to have an unfolding logic already within it—it is an instrument for capital accumulation. The assumption is that plastic has intrinsic economic values that are realized in processes of industrial research or market application” (2013, 49). It accumulates value precisely because of how it is used, what it enables, and how it circulates through the economy.

Anthropocene

Heather Davis

Life

and

Death

the

Plastic represents the promises of modernity: the promise of sealed, perfected, clean, smooth abundance. It encapsulates the fantasy of ridding ourselves of the dirt of the world, of decay, of malfeasance. As Westermann argues, “vinyl’s plasticity and its chemical creation captured what high modernity expected from technology at large: a world freed from the material restrictions that nature traditionally imposed on humanity. By implication, we would also have a world freed of scarcity, a world of plenty” (2013, 69). Plastic represents a shiny new world, one that removes people from the cycles of life and death, one that supersedes the troublesome, leaky, amorphous, and porous demands of our ancestors, our bodies, and the earth. Ridding ourselves of the demands of the earth seemed to promise a world of prosperity through scientific control. In 1941, chemist V.E. Yarsley and research manager of B.X. Plastics Ltd., E.G. Couzens, wrote that the plastic future would be shiny and bright: “Plastic Man,” will come into a world of colour and bright shining surfaces. […] He is surrounded on every side by this tough, safe, clean material which human thought has created. […] [W]e shall see growing up around us a new, brighter cleaner and more beautiful world, an environment not subject to the haphazard distribution of nations’ resources but built to order, the perfect expression of the new spirit of planned scientific control, the Plastics Age. (Yarsley and Couzens 1941, 149–152) This idealist dream, or dream of transcendental idealism, represents the apex of the Cartesian split, as matter itself is dictated and rearranged by the human mind. Planned scientific control envisions this clean, smooth world, sealed off from the outside—it is not just the barriers of a hazmat suit or the miracles of Tyvek house wrap, but the basic building blocks of matter that are manipulated and re-built. As Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent writes: “Matter came to be presented as a malleable and docile partner of creation—a kind of Play-Doh in the hands of the clever designer who informs matter with intelligence and intentionality. Just like the demiurgos in Plato’s Timaeus, the material engineer can impose forms on a passive, malleable chora” (Bensaude-Vincent 2013, 22). This dream of the ultimate passivity of nature, pliable to the wills and whims of the modern subject, has had horrifying implications. Plastic—in its production, distribution, and waste cycles—represents the inevitable corollary to unfettered economic growth: it is both intensely resource-depleting

Anthropocene

Kilian Jörg

110

Ecology

beyond

Numbers

Dark ecology thinks the truth of death, a massive cognitive relief that if integrated into social form would embody nonviolence. It makes you wonder, maybe we should store plutonium neither deep underground with militarized warnings nor in knives and forks without any warning whatsoever (this was actually suggested in the late 1990s). Let’s get small pieces of plutonium, store them in a way that we can monitor them, and encase them in a substance that will not leak radiation, aboveground, so you can maintain the structure and so that you can take responsibility for it. You, the human, made the plutonium, or you the human can understand what it is—therefore you are responsible. Let’s put these structures in the middle of every town square in the land. One day there will be pilgrimages to them and circumambulations. A whole spirituality of care will arise around them. Horror and depression will give way to sadness and joy. We bristle plutoniumly. —Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology—

111

It’s Getting Late to Give You Up—Promising and Problematic Muddy Temporalities, Toxic Alliances, and Bubbly Commitments

Julia Grillmayr

Julia Grillmayr 112

1. In Vonda McIntyre’s science-fiction (SF) novel Dreamsnake (1978), we follow Snake through a desertlike landscape. /‌And then Snake saw the craters,

stretching away across the desert below her. The earth was covered with great circular basins.‌\ She travels on horseback with three snakes that are

used to produce medicine. With the help of specific rituals and nutrition, the snakes’ venom turns into medication and soothing drugs for humans. Snake is a healer. She is needed and honored for her skills, but equally feared and hated due to an uncanny cooperation with the animals—and, not least, because her profession reminds people of a past that they would like to forget. /‌“Do you believe all those old legends, healer?”‌\ It takes the reader (this reader) some time to understand that Dreamsnake is not only a (fantasy) tale of multispecies cooperation, but a portrait of a far future from the reader’s present. /‌the danger of the old world’s relics‌\ This realization shifts my perspective on the book and on the world. The topographies in the post-apocalyptic landscape of Dreamsnake are small villages and communities, and one big and powerful city that monopolizes the most rare and important medicine-producing snakes, the eponymous “dreamsnakes,” allegedly of extraterrestrial origin. They help people to relax in order to heal, but mostly in order to die without pain. /‌“She has radiation poisoning.” “Poisoning? How?

She’s eaten and drunk nothing we haven’t tasted.” “It’s from the crater. The ground is poisoned. The legends are true.”‌\ Yes, this is a reliable marker

that leads the reader to understand that this story is about planet earth. There are highly toxic materials in the ground and the previous generations of human inhabitants are responsible for it. /‌The craters were so large, spread

over such a distance, that they could have only one source. Nuclear explosions had blasted them.‌\ Intellectually, I know about contamination by

radiation or chemicals, but I need stories like this one to help me remember what I think I know and to be able to cautiously approach what this could mean. /‌Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or

introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise.‌\

113

Citations 1. Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), ebook /‌ Donna Jeanne Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 29 /‌

Toward a Glossary of the Oceanic Undead: A(mphibious) through F(utures)

Julieta Aranda, Eben Kirksey

Fig. 1: The chytrids fungus viewed under a microscope.

Julieta Aranda, Eben Kirksey 156

A, a AMPHIBIOUS, adjective: Moving between air and water. Literal amphibians, like frogs and salamanders, can choose among modes of existence. Generally, amphibian species can sun themselves on a rock, dive deep in muddy waters, or even burrow underground. May 15, 1989. A single golden toad, Bufo pereglines, was spotted by a scientist in the elfin cloud forest of Costa Rica. A little later on, a Costa Rican naturalist named Eladio Cruz saw more golden toads as he studied the dull edge of extinction. Within five years, the golden toad was officially declared extinct. Several hypotheses emerged to explain the disappearance of this charismatic animal in a protected forest: global warming, the drift of pesticides, collection for the pet trade. Then, dead frogs began piling up in puddles in Australia and lakes in California. Another idea emerged in 1999 to explain the wave of death sweeping through amphibian populations: a pandemic disease, a kind of chytrid fungus, was driving hundreds of amphibian species extinct. Chytrids generate spheres nested within other spheres. They form clear bubbles containing darker bubbles. They often gather in a swarming multitude on the skin of frogs and salamanders. These gatherings invade and destroy the amphibians’ spheres of immunology, and also create them. Other kinds of chytrids channel death back into life. When surrounded by other beings and things, when living in microbial ecosystems, chytrids can be ontologically indeterminate. In other words, chytrids are ontological amphibians. Ontological amphibians flit among social and ecological worlds, deciding which ontology to inhabit or create. An octopus changes its shape and color as it engages in a mimetic dance with the architecture of a particular world. The best kinds of ontological amphibians are cosmopolitical nomads who tend to worlds as they move among them. They create niches, they cultivate, and they curate. For the octopus, gardening is world-making. They mark their territory with the shells of dead scallops and crabs. This is an undead aesthetics in a multispecies world. Other amphibious forms of life are destructive—they expand exponentially, pushing a given world to its limit before moving on to colonize new territory. Think of the novel coronavirus: it moves between the watery environment of hosts through bubbles of water in the air, living through phase changes at it transitions from viral particle to distributed molecular

157

Julieta Aranda, Eben Kirksey

forms inside a host cell. Humans are ontological amphibians. Cosmopolitical possibilities are in tension with colonial legacies. Piles of shells and dead bodies continue to accumulate. B, b BOATS / BODIES / BIOPOLITICS, adjective (plural); adjective (plural); noun (plural): By speaking about the ocean, invoking some of the bodies that inhabit it, we invoke: the disappeared, the decaying, the poisoned, the waterlogged, the bodies that float back to the surface and haunt us. May 10, 1816. Ruha Benjamin recalls the Middle Passage, somewhere between the Door of No Return and the New World: Mostly there was silence. And the murmurs of those who are trying to make sense of where we are. In several dialects I understood the words “aliens,” “catastrophe,” “abduction,” and “jump.” All of us packed so tightly. Lying on my back I cannot bend my knees without bumping the slab of wood holding the person above me. Finally, it’s time to go above deck for the afternoon meal. But most of my companions refuse to eat the daily ration of horse beans… Just then I felt the chain around my ankle yank, and caught the eye of the Mende woman on the end of the line. In seconds, we all made it overboard, and hovering over the restless sea, I look back at the alien ship. One last time before we flew away. September 6, 2001. Wellem Korwam, a thirty-two-year-old black man, is cut into seven pieces and dumped into the sea. The large plastic bag holding his body bulges with gas and floats in the water near a palm-fringed beach in West Papua. Whitish-green eyes stare unfocused at the man with the camera. His mouth gapes open in a distorted yawn. A jumble of seven different body parts are in the bag: two legs, two arms, his head and torso, and two pieces of the body’s trunk. Memories surface from another moment in time, when 157 indigenous people were dumped off a ship in nearby waters. Thirty-two bodies washed ashore on the beautiful beaches of Biak Island. Strange fruit. A cargo boat glides across the water’s surface, smooth as a mirror. The ship ferries fresh exotic dreams, mostly grown in developing countries.

158

Toward

Glossary

the

Oceanic

Lychee and rambutan from Indonesia, Brazilian limes, dragon fruit from Vietnam, papayas, passion fruits, pineapples, and bananas all glow below decks with the sun-kissed allure of the Global South. Logistics experts from each country of origin must adhere to strict requirements to ensure that the pallets inside the reefer containers arrive at their destinations without malarial mosquitoes, or traces of corruption, hunger, and civil war to ruin the fruit. New flavors satisfy increasing demands. No compromises can be accepted when it comes to hygiene. Temperatures must be controlled. April 18th, 2015, in the middle of the night. In international waters between Libya and the Italian island of Lampedusa, a nameless wooden boat issues a distress signal, invoking the International Law of the Sea. The boat, a former fishing trawler, carries upwards of 1,1000 migrants who are trying to reach Europe. Alerted by the Italian Coast Guard, The King Jacob (a Portuguese container ship that is 147 meters long) comes to the rescue. The two boats collide. This collision happens on more than one plane simultaneously. Up until a few minutes before the encounter, the boats were navigating parallel oceans. Only one of those oceans—the one through which goods are transported—is considered fully visible. The other ocean, the one that is ferrying black and brown bodies towards Fortress Europe, is more clandestine and much more cruel. Opportunists with faulty navigation instruments traffic in people amidst shifting legislation, greed, and the flow of capital. After the collision of both boats and both oceans, hundreds of bodies began to sink into the Mediterranean. Restless on the seabed, some 370 meters below, they joined the subhuman sea state with other decomposing evidence of European necropolitics. June 30, 2016. One last image: a nameless wooden boat arrives in the Port of Augusta, Sicily. It had been hoisted to the surface, at a cost of 9.5 million euros. The boat was given a name, Barca Nostra (“Our Boat,” but who are “we?”). It was shown as a ready-made at the 2019 Venice Biennale. One person’s death goes into circulation as another person’s work of art. C, c CIRCULATION, noun: To read a rubber duck. Plastic flotsam and jetsam has been moving across the seas for nearly one hundred years, navigating ocean currents, converging into the Pacific Vortex.

159

Undead

Julieta Aranda, Eben Kirksey

dispute between an Orientalist and a psychoanalyst—each with their own ego-feelings—we reach instead toward the wonder of eternity and the boundlessness of the ocean. Oceanic feelings open into multiple temporalities, with simultaneous and (possibly) conflicting narratives. Oceans are acidifying and getting hot. But an apocalyptic story line does not capture the complexity of the moment. Worlds are ending, even as new forms of flourishing become possible. Jellyfish populations are exploding with exuberance, even as coral reefs are bleaching. While leaning into oceanic feelings, we must remember the ongoing cascades of death and the cruelty of optimism. Some dreams are cruel because they are “impossible, sheer fantasy,” in the words of Lauren Berlant, “or too possible, and toxic.” Global climate change is outpacing all attempted solutions. The distributed enterprises filling the ocean with plastic seem unstoppable, at least in the short term. But even if we are powerless to prevent certain futures, or even transform our present circumstances, a dystopian perspective is nothing but a trap. Dystopia is not generative. It produces passive resignation to the unavoidable—resigning the future to fate. Eben: Born in the homogenous empty time of Regan and Bush, when capitalism gunned down democracy. This is a time that I learned to leave—finding glimmers of hope at the intersection of social and multispecies worlds. In times of extinction and extraction, it is time to own up to the ways that our own modes of existence are entangled with the dead and the dying. Tactical opportunities lie ahead. We can expose and derail the predictable functioning of power. Careful articulation work is needed to establish and sustain new life-support systems. We can dismantle the assemblages generating double death and discover new possibilities of love and life. We escape the monolithic (and insufficient) depictions of calamity and dystopia by way of modest thinking. It is time to address the things that we want a future for, individually, carefully, thoughtfully, and most importantly, with imagination. Not the Future with a capital F, but the many futures: contradictory, complex, interwoven.

Fig. 2: A Seasprite helicopter performs a recce flight over the grounded ship Rena. 166

Toward

Glossary

167

the

Oceanic

Undead

Julieta Aranda, Eben Kirksey

Fig. 3: Different routes taken by the friendly floatees initially lost in the Pacific Ocean in 1992.

Fig. 4: Lion’s mane jellyfish, or hair jelly, Cyanea capillata, the largest know jellyfish in Newfoundland, Canada.

Fig. 5: Fire on the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon as viewed from the offshore supply vessel Laney Chouest. 168

Toward

Glossary

the

Oceanic

Undead

4 169

Samuel Hertz

182

Hounding

183

Can One Hear Global Warming in the Hiss of Air Conditioning?

Anna Lerchbaumer 198

Since Willis Haviland Carrier invented air conditioning in 1902, static noise of ventilation and temperature modulation is seasonally poured into the streets of cities around the globe. Materialized through their vibrations and drips, the humming of the CO2 emissions generated by our well-tempered interior spaces is part of the summer soundscape, with or without us noticing. The sheer number of YouTube videos entitled “noise for sleep” or similar, proves our affinity for calming noises. Many of these videos feature noises from nature, such as the sound of wind, oceans, or the cries of insects on summer nights. As popular as the sounds of nature are the noises of air conditioning, hairdryers, and TV signals. White noise is even used to block out traffic noise or noisy neighbours. These lullabies on a loop exhaust the broadband connections in the evening hours. For an audio piece I made for my babies, I collected the familiar sounds of their surroundings, the flat we live in, to create a soundscape for falling asleep. Babies start listening to white noise long before they are born, when the foetus is about 18 weeks old. Every baby in the womb finds reassurance in the sound of its mother’s blood coursing through blood vessels, the sound of her heartbeat, her digestion. Once the baby is born it is surrounded by similar noises, but now they are produced by the extractor fan, the hoover, the hairdryer, the ventilation in the bathroom and the power-guzzling heater above the changing table. These noises help the newborn feel at ease, maybe even minimize the shock of their sudden arrival on Earth. The repetitive nature of these sounds is soothing, like when a parent rocks the baby in their arms saying, hush, hush! Noise seems to be continuously present throughout our lives, even before birth, as a calming background score for the environmental problems we are facing. Perhaps, as we listen to repetitive noises or machines at work, we feel that “everything is working fine.” Business is going on as usual. Listening to the Static Hum Our domestic appliances enchant us with their electromagnetic aura; usually we listen through them rather than to them. We have little or no control over these sonic elements of our appliances and machines; the repetitive, rhythmic noise produced by a motor is a side effect of its function. Andy Birtwistle calls this the “sound of technology.” In his research he focuses on film and

199