The Unseen Anthropocene
In an era experienced largely through the senses, particularly the visual, the central issue of the Anthropocene is that it is not always visible.
The implications of the Anthropocene, whether in the current economic system, capitalism, or social injustice, are abstract concepts that run the contemporary human civilisation. The question of unrepresentability (NB: Jacques Rancière) leads directly to the way in which political violence “may or may not be put into an image.”
The Anthropocene is an epoch largely shaped by political violence, which is therefore difficult to represent visually. To this end, what do we see in the visuality of the Anthropocene?
When one speaks of issues such as the climate crisis, environmental degradation, or ecological collapse, what immediately comes to mind? Perhaps forest fires, deforestation, smog-filled skylines, or landfills, to name just a few. More often than not, these events are imagined as taking place in “other” parts of the world—Africa, South Asia, or Southeast Asia, for instance. These places, whose imagery is etched into the public consciousness, are depicted as saturated with pollution in air, sound, and water, and are readily associated with culpability. Yet this could not be further from the truth.
It has become increasingly clear that environmental crises exacerbate social stratification and reinforce global inequalities in both social and economic terms.
The Anthropocene is a complex epoch. New terms are continually being coined to help us grasp the concepts that arise from this complexity. One such term is “hyperobjects”(1), proposed by Timothy Morton. Consider the image of an iceberg: what is visible is only the tip. These visible manifestations are not the cause.
By now, many recognise what is fundamentally to blame: the capitalist system that permeates nearly every aspect of life on Earth. Its consequences include, but are not limited to, exploitation, wage gaps, (post-)colonialism, racism, poverty, and war. In Against the Anthropocene, T.J. Demos suggests that one of the potential roles of images is to begin by “naming violence,” rather than relying on the misdirected and obfuscating term “Anthropocene,” which implies that humanity as a whole is responsible for this geological epoch. In response, another term has been proposed: Capitalocene(2).
(1) “A hyperobject could be a black hole. A hyperobject could be the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador, or the Florida Everglades. A hyperobject could be the biosphere, or the Solar System. A hyperobject could be the sum total of all the nuclear materials on Earth; or just the plutonium, or the uranium.“ (Timothy Morton in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World) To put simply, a hyperobject means an object that is so vast that it transcends human’s capacity to imagine and/or fathom, climate change is also one of the examples.
(2) The term was coined in 2009 by the Swedish human ecologist, Andreas Malm.
The Anthropocene, in its various formulations, can be understood as being largely constituted and shaped by hyperobjects such as the internet and climate change, given their expansiveness and pervasive seepage into our daily lives. In this regard, Demos maintains in the aforementioned work that we are experiencing “the expanded spatial and temporal scales of geology that exceed human comprehension.” The Anthropocene—composed of hyperobjects and shaped by forms of political violence that often remain unseen, even if still perceptible—therefore presents a fundamental difficulty of representation.
The distribution of knowledge and information in the mainstream media is indeed influenced by the money of the capitalists. What we learn about the environmental situation, and what we are informed of regarding nature, is largely meant for us to steer our attention away from the destruction these petrol-capitalists have been partaking in for decades.
This raises several pressing questions: to what extent can we trust what is presented to our visual perception? What kind of information do we derive from these images, and how do they make us feel—or prevent us from feeling?
