This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Comment on close reading of 'Marginal Worlds'

Interaction and Intra-action:

The close reading of 'A brook in the City' makes an interesting reference to Karen Barad’s term of “intra-action”. However, in doing this, it raises the problem of looking at time interacting or intra-acting. The photo essay of a butterfly flapping its wings, and causing a tsunami is an interaction, an isolated event. In the same way it is anthropocentric time in a linear fashion – in isolation. The butterfly effect can be viewed as anthropocentric – a butterfly’s wings do not only interact with the environment, they must be “threaded through with the entanglements of parting” (Barad 406). Therefore, without intra-action, we cannot see the entanglement of the butterfly and the tsunami, or life and death, beyond cause and effect. A tsunami could cause a butterfly on the other side of the world to flap its wings. Therefore, a butterfly flaps its wings… and then must flaps its wings again, to stop it falling.

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:
2. Athabasca Oil Sand (Matthew Gurney) Reading the close reading in ‘Marginal Worlds’ made me think about anthropogenic environments that do not fit in the binary of nature and culture, places “caught in a sort of a halfway point between the two”. Worlds like this also exist beyond the marginal: they exist out of the limelight, where human existence, and our imaginations, do not dwell. It is as if they exist in a dark, other world, beyond anthropocentric focuses of the natureculture. The image is a flock of Canada Geese flying over a surface mine in the Athabasca, Canada oil sands. This environment is clearly unnatural and yet uninhabitable for humans too, subverting natureculture – there is no culture in this land, it is turned up and destroyed to preserve a culture that is spatially far away. The mining companies have not thought of what this means for the geese. It is hard to imagine what these birds perceive of their world, it can only to them be an uneasy, hostile expanse. These sorts of images make me think what will exist in these empty spaces, and what the significance of empty expanses like this are in the future.

This page has paths:

Contents of this reply: