To Wander as a Counter-Cloud 'within' the Anthropocene 

To reflect upon my path through the living book, ‘Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene’ — I must come back to the ‘image’ of a cloud. A Wordsworthian cloud, to be precise. Something solitary and soft, floating through an expansive cerulean sky, as though without fear of any parameter or obstruction which could force its coming to an end. With saying that, my navigation through the cultural imaginaries of the Anthropocene, similarly was commenced not as a means to an end but rather as a discursive exploration into the tenets of contemporary ecological thought. But as the first scene to this ‘play’ substitutes the Wordsworthian cloud with a mushroom cloud — representative of catastrophic violence and ‘man-made’ destruction, I intend for my reader to float through this path then as a counter-cloud to the Romantic notion of nature, a counter-cloud which marks a gateway into understanding the complexity of the ever-shifting condition of the Anthropocene. After all, as Timothy Morton remarks, there is simply no such thing as nature.
 

Furthermore, this cloud, co-exists with the ‘image’. For Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, ‘the Anthropocene is primarily a sensorial phenomenon,’ and ‘unlike all other geological epochs [… it] is still in the making,’ (3-4). Thus, my path which I have constructed as a ‘brief-play’ is incomplete, open to be added to and morphed into another shape — it is as malleable as a cloud. I have particularly focused on the ‘sensory’ aspect of the Anthropocene, evaluating ‘images’ both visual and linguistic, and the way in which the  ‘pharmeikṓn’ pushes through by the inscribing the very presence of its absence. My e-concept, which is derived from a play on words from Derrida’s ‘pharmakon’, proposes the (re)reading of an ecological ‘image’ (eikṓn) in the literal ‘play’ of differences, of différance, which emerges in the deconstruction of a text. The word ‘play’ both in its Derridan and theatrical sense (metonymic of Shakespeare’s humanist legacy), is central to the pages which contribute to my path. My approach is ‘playful,’ and interchangeably uses both formal and informal, personal and academic registers to manifest a mesh of fictive and non-fictive musings. Moving through it, the implicit and explicit, chronological and achronological links in-between the pages should reveal themselves, as sometimes, Act 1, Scene 3, directly speaks to an idea further developed in Act 4, Scene 2. At the end of this path, I hope for the reader to want to trace their path back through my play in reverse, from end to beginning, in order to connect the ideas disseminated throughout different instances of writing, which too, are weaved as comments into the works of previous students to this course. The Living Book’s overarching model of a ‘flat ontology’ inspires the (a)logic of my path.
 

But what does it mean to wander as a counter-cloud? Let us delve further. In writing of the relationship between Romantic literature and clouds, critic Mary Jacobus states that:

Clouds are confusing, not so much because they mix elements or constantly change shape, but because they challenge the phenomenology of the visible with what cannot be seen: the luminous opacity associated with the phenomenology of sight. (12)

This dialectic of visibility and invisibility accurately defines for me what it means to capture an ‘image’ of the Anthropocene — the geological era proliferated by images of its own impending extinction. But in explaining their title, ‘The Twilight of the Anthropocene’, Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook delineate:

Everything appears both with conditions of visibility, but also of obscurity, and one might only become aware of constitutive blindness by way of another dimming of lights. (8)

So thus it is by realising the obscurity of the cloud, both its visibility and invisibility, its affirmation and subversion of sight, non-liminality in terms of foreground and background, mimesis and diegesis, above and below, solid and mist-like, that we are confronted with the realisation that the ecological world does not need us to inscribe itself. Rather, as Cohen and Colebrook suggest, it needs us to re-read our own inscriptions as the light of the Enlightenment has now dissipated and we must adjust our ‘seeing’ to these new conditions of (in)visibility. The counter-cloud aims to thus float neither above nor over but throughout and within the images of the Anthropocene.

~ Vedika Rampal

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Cited Texts:

Cohen, Tom, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller. Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols. Open Humanities Press, London, 2016. http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/twilight-of-the-anthropocene-idols/

Davis, Heather and Etienne Turpin. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. Open Humanities Press, London, 2015.  http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/art-in-the-anthropocene/

Jacobus, Mary. “Cloud Studies”. In  Romantic Things : a Tree, a Rock, a Cloud. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, (2012): 10-35.

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=3300977.