POSTCARD I (SW)
My team’s chapter in The Living Book: Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene revolves around the concept of an eco-skeleton, which aims to destabilise anthropocentric perspectives of the world by highlighting how intra-active exchanges between various forms of nature structure, constrain and restrain the mobility of all environmental entities, including human beings. This theoretical framework subsumes the notion of human beings as the dominant producers of the planet – who actively relegate the wider natural world as passive resources to be consumed and commodified in terms of global capitalism – to instead evoke humanity’s limitations and vulnerabilities vis-à-vis the surrounding environment. My postcard project aims to expand on the eco-skeleton by illuminating how it can be mobilised in the context of micro-ecocriticism and macro-ecocriticism – the disjunctions between the big and small […] the unforgettable and the forgettable, the local and the global, the fantasy and the reality, the personal and public – in order to achieve a complex understanding of our relationship to the natural world. Furthermore, this exploration will be assisted by the ideas, visions and approaches outlined in other chapters of The Living Book.
A chapter of particular relevance to the relationship between the eco-skeleton versus the micro and macro levels of everyday life is ‘Plant Worlds.’ My team’s short film The Art of Walking Through Marginal Worlds and curated reading on Bill Brown’s Thing Theory (2001) coincides with Cale Leishman and Stephanie Lim’s employment of Harvard University professor Rosetta S. Elkin’s ideology of plant blindness in order to deconstruct British poet Alfred Tennyson’s six stanza poem The Flower. In her 2018 essay Plant Blindness, Elkin argues that “[p]lant blindness is not an aesthetic disorder” but instead “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s environment […] the importance of plants in the biosphere and […] in human affairs” (Elkin, 2018). Leishman, et al. utilise this notion to illustrate how humanity subsumes the fundamental and environmental significance of plants in favour of their aesthetic value. For example, in The Flower, Tennyson claims that no one appreciated his plant during its initial stages of growth as a weed, but instantly appreciated it in when it was fully grown. This idea is subverted by my decision to juxtapose an accelerated film clip documenting the growth of a plant against a rocket being launched into the sky in The Art of Walking Through Marginal Worlds, which articulates the social significance of seemingly marginal and trivial events that are often overlooked from an anthropocentric lens.
On the other hand, Australian scholar Prudence Gibson’s claim that “some plants are wicked, some are defiant and others cannot be controlled” (Gibson, 2018, p. 2) in her 2018 text The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life, can be used to explore the autonomy of the botanical world vis-à-vis humanity. For example, Leishman, et al.’s emphasis on how the symbolic connotation of thorns as deadly and evil resonates with their physical capacity to elicit blood and pain from the human subject can be supplemented by my curated reading on American literary scholar Bill Brown’s 2001 essay Thing Theory. Brown elucidates how the subtle and ambiguous and daily ways in which nature resist and revolts against anthropocentric ideologies (Brown, 2001) go unnoticed by humanity. Examples of such acts range from being bopped on the head by a falling nut to tripping on a stray branch, which constitute eco-microaggressions that transcend into intra-active exchanges between human and non-human spheres. By combining the writings of Gibson and Brown, the notion of an eco-skeleton which restrains and restructures humanity’s relationship to the material and natural world is manifest.
REFERENCES
Brown, B. (2001). Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry, 28(1), 1-22. doi: 10.1086/449030.
Elkin, R. S., (2018, May 20). Plant Blindness. Retrieved from http://www.franknews.us/essays/107/plant-blindness.
Gibson, P. (2018). The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life. Netherlands: BRILL.
SW.