Abstract
The emergence of the term Anthropocene has prompted a range of critical responses, many of which highlight the ways in which the concept both foregrounds humanity’s environmental entanglement and precludes any real reckoning with the agents of environmental degradation. It is this ambivalence within the Anthropocene concept – reflected in the wider debates about the legitimacy and periodization of this new geological era – which makes it such a productive vector through which to interrogate the ways in which nature has historically been conceptualized. In this project, I contend that such conceptualization can best be understood through reference to the sublime, a concept that gained prominence as a figure for the natural world during the Romantic period, but which has since been applied to technological objects and systems.In the context of contemporary ecological crisis, the sublime offers an aesthetic response to the seemingly incomprehensible magnitude of environmental destabilization the Anthropocene represents. At the same time, as this project shows, a version of sublimity that has passed through and been modified by the conceptual terrain of technical media also determines elements of contemporary Anthropocene discourse, especially the status of nature. The Anthropocene and the sublime are therefore, to some extent, co-constitutive, with the former reflecting both the radical potential and the inherent biases of the latter. To establish this argument, I engage with a form of periodization that understands the Anthropocene as emerging alongside Romanticism, which, in this reading, represents a nascent, profoundly ambiguous, response to the Anthropocene framework and its intimation of nature’s simultaneous intimacy and exteriorization. This periodization allows for comparative readings of Romantic texts with a series of more recent works that engage with sublimity as an ecological or technological phenomenon. Ultimately, through such comparative readings, I attempt to bring into focus a form of Anthropocene sublimity that engages with the ambivalence at the core of both the Anthropocene and the sublime: the duality between anthropocentricism and the notion that the self is deeply interconnected with a more-than-human environment, on both a material and a discursive level.
Alongside such ambivalence, this project traces the ways in which an Anthropocene sublime might gesture towards forms of uncomputability that offer an alternative to the dominant paradigm of Anthropocene ecological thinking. The radical potential of such an uncomputable element becomes evident when we consider the pervasive forms of bio-technological entanglement that inform the Anthropocene, and the ways in which the totalizing imperative of capitalism attempts to inscribe its own computational epistemology on the natural world. The dominance of such a computational epistemology can be considered a structuring element of Anthropocene thinking, which attempts to model nature through computation. Furthermore, it is in response to such a totalizing project that entanglement and immanence emerge as the two defining tropes of the Anthropocene sublime: the entanglement of the human self with the nonhuman other, either ecological or technological in nature, and the immanence experienced by that self within systems of extraction and annexation – systems that reveal how capitalism has subsumed and exteriorized nature, and has therefore made it into a technological terrain.
The isomorphic relation between nature and technology revealed by such immanence provides the crux of this project, as I examine how the categories of nature and technology were already deeply interwoven in Romanticism, in ways that were figured as sublimely incommensurable and which prefigured the digital. Such an isomorphic relation underpins digitality’s co-optation of ecological modes of being, and the concomitant application of technological concepts to nature. It also reveals how inescapable the technological mediation of nature has become, something which is encapsulated in the cascading series of climate crises we now face, crises that are experienced as both implacable manifestations of bio-technological entanglement, and inconceivable on an individual scale; in other words, as sublime. The Anthropocene sublime therefore emerges as one means of indexing these crises and elaborating the forms of anthropocentric thinking that led to such a point of catastrophe. However, the radical potential of such a response remains to be seen; does this version of the sublime, given its inherent contradictions, allow for anything more than stasis and silence in the face of ecological breakdown? Can the ambivalences of an Anthropocene sublime be reconciled in a productive manner, or does the evocation of sublimity merely represent a reinscription of the anthropos as separate from the nonhuman world?
| Date of Award | 1 Oct 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Seb Franklin (Supervisor) & Jane Elliott (Supervisor) |