The Spectacular Anthropocene

ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 22 number 4 december 2017 Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 The spectacle is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle eologists claim that we have entered the age of the Anthropocene – an ecological and geological epoch shaped by human activity (Crutzen and Stoermer 17). Humans have arrived at such a state through the industrial, imperial, and mechanical “domination of nature” that has accelerated since the nineteenth century. While there is debate over when precisely the Anthropocene began and what its distinguishing features are, there is growing consensus that human influence has reached an epochal scale that can be measured to a high degree of certainty (Zalasiewicz and Waters 513).1 For those outside the field of geology, such a blanket term risks lumping all humans together rather than distinguishing social and cultural differences that hold different impacts on the planet (Braje 508). Taking a materialist approach, scholars such as Donna Haraway and Jason Moore suggest “Capitalocene” as a more appropriate designator of the exploitative epoch.2 Others, more technologically minded, see the term as an invitation to embrace human-controlled modifications of the global environment.3 Yet the Anthropocene signals neither the realization of modernization nor the final domination of nature, but rather the beginning of a more complicated entanglement. Instead of total environmental control, humans face the unpredictable and threatening effects of climate change. “Weird weather” and unprecedented climate events mark the remainders of global industrial modernization, G andrew kalaidjian THE SPECTACULAR ANTHROPOCENE exhibiting a new, détourned Nature. We are all Frankenstein, and the monster surrounds us. Approaching an understanding of the Anthropocene requires an interdisciplinary effort, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, “to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history” (220). While humans have always influenced their environments, the Anthropocene declares a new, global scale of influences direct and indirect, immediate and diffuse. Additionally, humans have unprecedented means to measure, document and represent their own influence. From photography to computer simulations, satellite imagery to virtual reality, technology provides new ways to visualize and model pollution, ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/17/040019-16 © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1406044 19 Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 the spectacular anthropocene deforestation, consumption and expenditure. The increasingly sophisticated technological mediation that drives the discourse on the Anthropocene gives the contemporary age the status of a global spectacle, where the roles of director, producer, actors and audience are ambiguous at best. The Anthropocene is the physical manifestation of the spectacle’s aspiration to cover the entire globe, as well as the planetary fulfillment of the narcissism that drives endless speculation and reflection on the nature of humanity. It is, in terms that Guy Debord used in his 1988 work Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, a testament to the “globalisation of the false” and the “falsification of the globe” (9–10). Scholars throughout the Environmental Humanities have noted the issues of intangibility and alienation that accompany thinking on a global environmental scale (Neimanis, Åsberg, and Hedrén 73–74). Critics pose the work of environmentally minded artists and writers as crucial to help the public become “affectively engaged” with environmental issues (Duxbury 295). Yet little attention has been given to connecting questions of detachment and apathy towards the physical environment to the proliferation of media and virtual environments. Further, the spectacular aspects of environmentalism itself may lead to undesirable ideologies. Alain Badiou suggests as much by identifying a millenarianism within environmentalist rhetoric that posits ultimate destruction. He writes: A large number of films produced in Hollywood are about nothing else [ … ] These visions of final catastrophe tend to mobilize everyone to conserve the planet just as it is, with its temperature, its pleasant “environment” for the petit-bourgeoisie of rich countries, and its predators of globalized capitalism. (34–35) While environmental efforts can reach a larger audience than ever before, they are not immune to the paralyzing effects of spectacle. Against an environmentalism complicit with global capital, an ecocritical approach to environmental theories found in the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI) can elaborate the spectacular valence that complicates the real-world issues of climate change and environmental justice. The work of the Situationists emerged at a crucial juncture between urbanism and media, lending their theories of alienation and passivity lasting relevance for the digitally saturated present. It was serendipitous that the new technologies of cinema, television, the personal computer and the mobile smartphone arrived in quick succession to save the modern subject from the boredom of the perfectly controlled, hermetically sealed environment. The open, white-walled boxes of modern architecture find their ideal antidote in the black squares and rectangles of the screen. Never has it been easier to tune into every corner of global events; never has it been easier to tune out the surrounding world in favor of the virtual environment. This is not to say, of course, that such technologies exist outside of the material world, quite the opposite. The proliferation of electronic waste (e-waste) throughout the world is one of the measures of the Anthropocene.4 Nor is virtuality something new. The humble novel, after all, invites the reader to enter an imaginary realm. The cliché of “losing oneself in a good book” speaks to the alternative realm that always accompanies the aesthetic. The issue is how to engage with the proliferation of technologically mediated experience without losing sight of the real and pressing environmental issues of the contemporary era. In the Anthropocene, humans have a more direct influence on the environment than ever before. At the same time, never have humans engaged with the world in such an indirect and mediated fashion. This is the paradox at the heart of the Spectacular Anthropocene. To make sense of this contradiction is the central task for establishing a viable environmental aesthetics in the twenty-first century. Coming to terms with a new environmental aesthetics that is of our own making requires a radical reassessment of philosophies of beauty, the sublime and disinterestedness found in Burke, Kant, Marx, Freud, and many others. This article pursues such an environmental aesthetics through a 20 kalaidjian Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 discussion of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth, and contemporary research in virtual reality from Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. The emerging environmental aesthetics of the Spectacular Anthropocene faces the challenge of critiquing technological immersion even while making use of these very same technologies to reveal material and affective connections between humans and the environment. second nature in the built environment The urban aesthetic theories of Guy Debord and the SI provide a significant vantage for coming to terms with the human-dominated environments of the Anthropocene. Anthropogenic climate change presents the atmospheric and geologic realization of what Debord terms a Second Nature that imposes “inescapable laws upon our environment” (Society of the Spectacle 19).5 Though far from an environmentalist, Debord and the SI’s theories of psychogeography, unitary urbanism and détournement provide an early critique of an increasingly anthropocentric world. The SI strongly identified with the Marxist thesis of modernization that outlined a progressive domination of Nature. While not expressed in geologic or ecological terms, Debord’s Society of the Spectacle invokes a Marxist historicism wherein natural history cedes to human history: “History itself,” says Marx, “is a real part of natural history, and of nature’s becoming man.” Conversely, the “natural history” in question exists effectively only through the process of a human history, through the development of the only agency capable of discovering this historical whole; one is reminded of a telescope, whose range enables it to track the retreat of nebulae in time toward the edge of the universe. (SS 92) Debord’s comparison to the telescope is telling, as one of the defining features of the Anthropocene is precisely the use of technology and science to form a self-reflective understanding 21 of human influence on natural history. As Chakrabarty and others point out, the Anthropocene declares a re-evaluation of the long-held humanist distinction between natural history and human history. The Anthropocene, as epistemology, is the logical extension and endpoint of the process of humans gaining greater understanding of the history of the earth. It is at this moment that a spectacular valence enters humanity’s understanding of its own position within the world: human history not only reveals natural history but begins to shape it as well. While the Situationists would be comfortable, then, with the dialectics of the Anthropocene, they would more directly connect to the spatial, geographical and political dimensions of a human-dominated epoch. As Debord writes: The society that molds all of its surroundings has developed a special technique for shaping its very territory [ … ] Urbanism is capitalism’s seizure of the natural and human environment; developing logically into absolute domination, capitalism can and must now remake the totality of space into its own setting. (SS 118) While Debord does not extend this spatial influence to a global level, the capitalist logic of urbanism is also the modus operandi of the Anthropocene. Debord also makes an important point that this spatial seizure does not distinguish between the natural and the human environment. As such, humans become subject to an environmental order of their own creation that nevertheless does not always act in the best interest or at the control of its members. If the Situationists and Debord ultimately reached an impasse when applying their environmental theories to urbanism, their work nevertheless remains well suited to discussing lived experience and sensation during our contemporary moment of global climate change. Theories of détournement, in particular, what Greil Marcus calls “a radical deconditioning: to demystify their environment and the expectations [ … ] brought to it” (7), seem more pressing than ever if the current carbon emissions trajectory is to be changed. Yet such Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 the spectacular anthropocene détournement is difficult to achieve as the forces of capitalism are invested more than ever in maintaining business as usual. Jason Moore proposes the term Capitalocene in order to position “capitalism as world ecology,” where nature as both material resources and human labor supply is notoriously devalued (85). Disrupting this mentality of “Cheap Nature” becomes the chief goal for achieving a “different ontology of nature, humanity, and justice” (114).6 While Moore believes that the material limitations of the planet will ultimately put a stop to “Cheap Nature” capitalism, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything has more confidence in the adaptability of capitalist exploitation. In the first place, she notes the close ties between capitalism and certain brands of environmentalism. As awareness of climate change grew in scientific communities, those in the extraction business invested more resources into shaping the narrative. With its move towards neoliberal globalization, capitalism becomes increasingly able to profit from environmental precarity. Klein’s argument is formidable on such a macro level, but it becomes a bit more tangible when she describes the effects on an individual and social level: Contemporary capitalism has not just accelerated the behaviors that are changing the climate. This economic model has changed a great many of us as individuals, accelerated and uprooted and dematerialized us as surely as it has finance capital, leaving us at once everywhere and nowhere. These are the hand-wringing clichés of our time – What is Twitter doing to my attention span? What are screens doing to our relationships? – but the preoccupations have particular relevance to the way we relate to the climate challenge. (158) While Klein does not fully explore this line of inquiry, this passage notably shares many similarities to a Debordian society dominated by spectacle. Of chief interest for both Debord and Klein is the rise in apathy, alienation, and complacency that accompanies everyday life in the urban environment. For Klein, capitalism is actively working to maintain such a status quo. For Debord, the spectacle operates through the willing acceptance of spectators while simultaneously promoting obeisance. What is needed, then, to change the trajectory of the Spectacular Anthropocene? For starters, it is helpful to look at the Anthropocene’s incipience in the built environment, the integrated machine of modern capitalism and the playground of modern art. Published a few years after Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia explores the tensions and unexpected complicities between capitalist development and artistic expression. The book calls on architects to reflect on their work in a philosophical and not strictly utilitarian vein. Writing after the protests of 1968, Tafuri is sensitive to the ways in which urban space can catalyze or stymie social action. He cites in particular the need to analyze techniques of programming and labor practices in order to better understand the way capitalism is shaping the built environment and social life. Tafuri begins by detailing the aspirations of naturalism that defined Enlightenment architecture. Having unlocked many of Nature’s secrets, the architects of the modern city aspired for organic unity in urban development. Tafuri cites M.A. Laugier who saw the development of the city as a natural phenomenon guided by the aesthetic of the picturesque (4). Laugier proposes the model of a city like a forest, guided by variety, novelty and surprise, while maintaining a harmonious whole. In practice, however, architectural naturalism, as Tafuri points out, was able to sidestep the inorganic and artificial challenges of urban development by neglecting social issues under the banner of natural progress. The close connection that this urban naturalism shares to picturesque landscape aesthetics leads Tafuri to be wary of an ideological role in artistic activity that creates “new sublimations, rendered artificially objective by means of the call to the universality of Nature” (7). In Tafuri’s analysis, architecture, art and literature are not immune to the larger environmental strictures of capitalist society, but are indeed the handmaidens that help the enlightened subject to process and accept new environmental realities. The Situationists – whom Tom McDonough identifies as 22 Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 kalaidjian falling under the banner of Tafuri’s critique of the avant-garde as instrumental to the restless revolution of capitalist society (xi) – wrestled nevertheless with a further iteration of naturalism as ideological control that emerged as the built environment began extending into the representational realm of spectacle. One can detect this same Enlightenment naturalism creeping into discourses on the Anthropocene, where the expansion of human influence can be framed as a natural development of the same forces that built and connected the great cities of global modernity. Such a logic reaches its apex in calls for humans to embrace their new role as epoch makers through geo-engineering, the dream of technological fixes that aim to create a global thermostat. A more nuanced take on the rise of technological networks comes from Gilbert Simondon, who argues that the industrial expansion out of city centers via transportation lines, electrical grids and information cables marks a new interface with nature. “It is not a question here of the rape of nature or of the victory of the Human Being over the elements,” he writes, “because in fact it is the natural structures themselves that serve as the attachment point for the network that is being developed” (9). This integrated system gives rise to a “technical mentality” that enmeshes nature and technology, materiality and thought, individual and community. Although Simondon’s analysis may serve to naturalize technological progress, his focus on the centrality of human energy, thought and affect provides an important ground for aesthetic intervention in an increasingly networked world. Grappling with technological immersion, a new environmental aesthetics can develop awareness of individual actions on a planetary scale. The turn to materialist ecocriticism, as Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman argue, looks to “narratives about the way humans and their agentic partners intersect in the making of the world” (6). Donna Haraway goes further in a call for “thick copresence,” and proposes the term “Chthulucene” to resituate humans among tentacular critters in a system of feeling and striving for connection (4, 31). While Haraway recognizes that digital networks 23 are also tentacular, she does not distinguish these systems from their organic counterparts, nor does she reconcile how thin and light technologies might work counter to the fleshy thickness necessary for the Chthulucene (32). While Haraway rightfully faults the term Anthropocene for returning to an outdated “theory of relations, namely the old one of bounded utilitarian individualism” (49), Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology embraces the scientific turn to the Anthropocene precisely for its ability to rethink the human as both a species and an ideological construct. “Becoming a geophysical force on a planetary scale,” he writes, “means that no matter what you think about it, no matter whether you are aware of it or not, there you are, being that” (21). Outlining such a being becomes Morton’s goal, one that he approaches through a form of ecognosis that is fantastically slippery, ambivalent and perplexing. He meditates on human entanglement with non-human animals, vegetation and inanimate objects to arrive at an aesthetics of ecological attunement. He outlines a number of different levels to this attunement that proceed through an embrace of weirdness. His approach, in this respect, shares similarities with détournement, the process of making the familiar unfamiliar. While critics such as Morton are confident in the ability of art and literature to change humanity’s attitude towards the climate crisis, by Tafuri’s logic such efforts might equally be a way of assuaging anxiety and fear of the new world order. This is a hallmark of the Spectacular Anthropocene: there are unprecedented ways to visualize and aestheticize ecological crisis, yet such activity draws us even deeper into capitalism’s spectacle of anthropogenic power. For this reason it is perhaps only the monstrous return of nature itself – changed, augmented, made weird by human activity – that can disrupt and détourne the human-dominated ecosystem. It takes the arrival of a Hurricane Sandy or historic droughts to thrust society back into reality, to discuss changes to urban planning and emissions futures, even if such efforts are incomplete and short lived. Art, literature and criticism can also promote an Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 the spectacular anthropocene ecological détournement, not to lead us back to some gilded age or forward to some technological utopia, but to bring meaning, relief and compassion to change our contemporary condition. Ian Baucom sees a compelling case for new modes of environmental justice stemming from literary encounters. For Baucom, fictive characters – especially protagonists of historical novels – give readers the capacity to move beyond a narrow sense of self and realize a fuller understanding of their position in the world (154). Like Morton, Baucom poses the aesthetic as ultimately a question of being. “‘Experiencing’ the nondisjunctive plurality of human life across those multiple forms of existence,” he writes, allows one “access to a new conception of justice for, within, and against the looming ‘inevitability’ of the Anthropocene future” (156). Here, again, the city seems a logical starting point for investigating the collective constitution of modern plurality. Tafuri identifies Paris as the likely model for Laugier’s city as forest. In the following section I explore life in this urban milieu as portrayed in Patrick Modiano’s In the Cafe ́ of Lost Youth. This short work engages the emerging aesthetics of Situationism while locating it within the restless and alienating milieu of capitalist modernity. The protagonist, the elusive Louki, is precisely the type of character that Baucom sees as full of potential. Modiano largely structures the work around denying the reader ultimate access or “truth” to this character. Yet his inclusion of four narrative perspectives does present a plurality that undercuts the authoritative voice of the historical novel. Along the way, a new and strikingly timely environmental aesthetics emerges that emphasizes the importance of affective connections between humans and non-human elements of the environment. fixed points and neutral zones Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth explores the connection between psychic geography and the urban environment. For the titular youths, there is little that seems to define their identity other than location. They are, quite simply, an assemblage of individuals who meet at a specific location (the café Condé), modeled on a café in the Latin Quarter frequented by Debord and other members of the SI. They are regulars: it is repetition that defines their community. Yet this is not to say their existence is random. The café itself is not treated as what Marc Augé, for example, terms a non-place. Indeed, the Condé is so specific, so particular, that the first narrator claims one could easily identify its neighborhood and social milieu even if entering with a blindfold. The café, then, is far from inhabiting a “neutral zone,” the nondescript neighborhoods defined by the final narrator Roland. It is closer to a “fixed point,” what Bowing, “the Captain,” terms a refuge “amidst the maelstrom that is a large city” (15). Yet this is not quite it either, as the fixed points are not so much locations but rather moments at a specific location and time. Bowing keeps a notebook wherein he records (for three years) the customers who come and go in the Condé. It is unclear what this record has to offer over, for example, photographs, which also, as it turns out, locate the lost youths years later in a monograph published on Paris.7 If the photographer, himself a Condé regular, takes on a historical role, Bowing performs perhaps a psychological role, tapping into the memory and imagination of anyone who peruses the list of fixed points. While the photograph or the list of fixed points might, in theory, endure perpetually, a leather shop, we discover, eventually succeeds the Condé itself. As much as Bowing’s fixed points appear as resistance to the faceless, alienating march of urbanization, they might equally become aligned with other, unsettling hallmarks of modernity: surveillance, security and data. An elder patron of the Condé, Dr Vala, notes as much when he compares Bowing’s notebook to a police register (21). Critics have noted the strange sympathy between the Situationists and the modern police state. As McDonough points out, What was [ … ] proposed in common by the Situationists and “the police” was nothing less than complete integration of the subject with the mechanisms of socioeconomic 24 kalaidjian Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 rationalization, with what the SI called, in proper Marxist phraseology, “the domination of nature.” (xi) The fixed points, in particular, resonate strongly with contemporary techno-capitalism that operates through smartphones, geo-location, tags, check-ins, etc. to fix the consumer spatially. These are the user-based technologies that have followed the larger project of Nature’s domination. Holding an interface to the world in the palm of one’s hand, achieves, in Tafuri’s words, “the voluntary and docile submission to those structures of domination as the promised land of universal planning” (73). It signals also the spectacular aspect of life in the Anthropocene. Not only has human influence on the environment reached unprecedented, epoch-defining levels, but the extent to which human behavior is mediated through technology is becoming equally inescapable. Against such a fate, the SI proposed a new form of psychogeography that called for the “destruction of the subject” in favor of a vision of a “new, malleable humanity” (McDonough xii). Louki takes such a program to its logical extreme through her suicide. Renouncing her subjectivity, she throws herself out of a window onto the (decidedly inflexible) streets below. The regulatory aspect of the fixed point develops through the second section of In the Café of Lost Youth, where the private investigator Caisley manages to locate Louki (née Jacqueline), only to leave her in freedom. Significantly, it is an actual police register – and the ensuing work of police officer Bernolle – that leads Caisley to Louki’s home address in Paris. Louki earns her place in the police registry for the minor infraction of Juvenile Vagrancy, a particularly telling offense in relation to fixity. Caisley imagines the crime in strongly environmental terms: “Juvenile Vagrancy [ … ] those two words evoked for me a meadow beneath the moon, beyond the Caulaincourt bridge all the way back there, behind the cemetery, a meadow where at last you could breathe in the fresh air” (51). The imagery here – which is similar to Louki’s own narration yet also slightly 25 different – is notably pastoral in nature. It is geographically accurate – describing Caulaincourt and the Monmartre cemetery – but also imaginative, describing an open meadow that seems to exist only in Caisley’s psychic geography. The open meadow provides the antidote to the urban maelstrom bemoaned by Bowing and the regulars at the Condé. Caisley feels a strong sense of empathy towards the young Jacqueline, such that he abandons the employ of her husband Jean-Pierre Choureau in favor of maintaining Jacqueline’s autonomy as the newly renamed Louki. This alliance between Caisley and Louki, one-sided and unknown, comes to replace the institutional sanction of marriage between Jacqueline and Choureau. At the close of his interview with Choureau, Caisley reflects on such alliances, reformulating the logic of Bowing’s fixed points as significant precisely due to their arbitrary nature: In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. (40) Again the cartographic language of Caisley serves to ground the idealistic rhetoric of the Situationists within the larger spatial agendas of a sprawling, capitalist modernity. The remaining two sections of the book – the perspectives of Louki and her lover Roland – showcase a search for freedom and meaning within a vague urban landscape, both physical and psychological. Louki’s narrative largely proves Caisley’s conjecture that she desires escape, to “put herself out of reach for good” (53). Yet her most significant moment of escape comes not in some secluded, out-of-the-way meadow; instead, she achieves relief from climbing to the top of Montmartre. In the process, she compares herself to those (men) who climb the Tibetan mountains in search of Shangri-La, “For me, Montmartre was Tibet [ … ] Up there [ … ] I could truly breathe for the first time in my life” (76). In this narration, Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 the spectacular anthropocene Louki’s escapism takes on a different quality than the secluded meadow that Caisley imagines. At the same time, the escape, the breath of fresh air, is described in equally environmental terms. But the isolated mountaintop differs significantly from the hidden meadow as it symbolizes power and dominance rather than weakness or fragility. Louki takes on the role of the romantic wanderer, climbing to the top of the mountain in search of the sublime, for a moment of transcendence that is the hallmark of a disinterested environmental aesthetics. As if to reinforce this point, Louki compares the intoxication she feels atop Montmartre to the feeling of breaking ties with another person. Yet these moments of escape are not enough for Louki, who desires a further environmental transcendence with nothing but “blue sky and the void” (77). Louki tests the extreme logic of disinterestedness: letting oneself go to the extent of leaving the world entirely. Roland also shares an interest in the void; instead of emptiness, however, Roland is interested in “dark matter,” substance that is invisible and undetectable by humans yet nevertheless exists. His interest in neutral zones stems from an anthropological expression of this fundamental element of physics: a visible, living manifestation of the universe’s secrets. Roland’s neutral zones are positioned opposite to the fixed points. If the fixed points work through identifying people in a specific time and place, the neutral zones encompass generality: a region, a set of out-of-the-way streets, a nondescript building divided into furnished apartments that require little in the way of a tenant’s history or background. The neutral zone is the opposite of the fixed point, yet Roland’s method for outlining said zones is noticeably similar to Bowing’s register of fixed points: the incomplete and ultimately aborted text On Neutral Zones amounts to little more than a list of streets and neighborhoods where said zones purportedly exist (88). Moreover, both Roland and Bowing imbue the neutral zone and the fixed point with certain talismanic properties of protection: the fixed point represents a life vest in the maelstrom of modernity, the neutral zone a protected cove safe from the storm. Roland describes the zones: “There was a series of transitional zones in Paris, no-man’s-lands where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended. Within, we benefited from a certain kind of immunity” (87). Here the neutral zones take on the potential for escapism, hence Roland’s association of Louki with the neutral zones. Yet Louki’s own idea of escape on the top of Montmartre differs significantly from Roland’s idea of her escapism. Roland reveals a bit more about his own escapism in his interest in achieving a certain environmental utopia he calls “the heart of summer, that place where time stops and the hands of the clock permanently show the same hour: twelve noon” (100). Despite his fascination with the neutral zones, what Roland seems to actually desire is a fixed point. Roland’s desire for fixity becomes clear in perhaps the most ecologically charged scene in the book. Reflecting on the past in the present, several years after Louki’s suicide, Roland has a chance encounter with the mystic Guy de Vere.8 The Condé café is now Prince de Condé leather shop. Roland adopts a carefree attitude, a performance of the summertime romanticism he once enjoyed with Louki. His attitude shifts, however, when he encounters a tree: A notice was attached to the trunk of one of the great trees whose leaves offer shelter on the way to the entrance to the gardens further along at Saint-Michel. “DANGER. This tree will be cut down soon. It will be replaced by a new one this coming winter.” For a brief second, I thought I was having a bad dream. I stood there, frozen, reading and rereading that death warrant [ … ] In this world where I felt more and more like a holdover, the trees were on death row, too. (108) In a strange sense, this passage is the emotional center of this elliptical work, a profound moment of détournement that forces Roland to re-evaluate his entire history and environment. Roland’s connection to this tree is detailed with more pathos than any of the 26 Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 kalaidjian other narration spent on the lost youths. This moment carries with it the weight of Louki’s suicide – the loss of a life that cannot be replaced – as well as the generation of lost youths who passed through the Condé. In this sense, the tree functions as something of a pathetic fallacy, allowing Roland to express the emotional depth that goes unsaid in his preceding encounter with Guy de Vere. Yet this focus on the tree and its immanent execution also helps to crystallize many of the spatial and environmental themes in Modiano’s interwoven text. The condemned tree encapsulates the domination of nature pursued by Enlightenment modernity, the industrial revolution and capitalist urbanization. Further, the fact that the tree will be replaced points towards contemporary discussions of life in the Anthropocene and the promises of geo-engineering a sustainable future. Louki and Roland seek to escape the overbearing aspects of the human-dominated environment. Louki does this first by abandoning her husband, whose occupation, fittingly, is as an active partner in the Zannetacci Real Estate Company. The husband Choureau represents the capitalist system of private property that begins with the division between those who own the land from those who pay to inhabit it. His own ground-floor apartment in Neuilly, where Louki abandons their marriage, is the embodiment of a lifeless, suburbanized architecture. If this faceless capitalist system of private property – ownership of the earth – provides one pole, the É cole des Mines, an institution sheepishly attended by the novel’s unnamed first narrator, provides a more utopian model of human advancement.9 An embodiment of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, the É cole des Mines provides the ideological and technological foundations for mankind’s expanding domination of Nature. It would not be a stretch to assume that those behind the tree’s removal and replacement are graduates of such an institution. The first narrator hides his involvement with the É cole des Mines from his friends at the Condé, who prefer a romanticized education in the streets of life. By the end of the book, however, Roland recounts how he and Louki 27 convince the young student to abandon his studies. Economics and Science, then, are the twin poles of anthropogenic power that shape the environment that is Paris, France, and the larger Western-dominated global ecosystem. What escape, then, is possible from such a world? Does the student’s truancy signify a small moment of revolution? Lost youth, in this sense, signals not just the passing of adolescence but the passing of alternatives to an increasingly oppressive social order. The formation of groups such as the Situationist International stands as an attempt to revolutionize society through art. Privileged and problematic as such attempts are, it is still worth asking what alternatives exist that might alleviate contemporary crisis. Does the suicide that is both the presence and absence at the heart of the novel stand for a larger renunciation in the face of implacable social forces? Is there no tonic or effective remedy to environmental unease? Certainly, the spiritual snake oil of Guy de Vere is no comfort. Indeed, it is a mantra learned from de Vere – “Just let yourself go” – that Louki utters before her plunge. Is Louki’s suicide apathy or agency? Such questions, of course, have no answer, and are precisely the stuff that drives the delightful narrative uncertainty of Modiano’s text. One is encouraged to crossreference the narratives against one another, to find points of similarity or difference. The meeting between Roland and Caisley in the final scene is particularly wonderful in this sense. More than answers, or definition, then, the text privileges uncertainty and potential. For all of the interest in the Neutral Zones and the Fixed Points that obsess the characters, Modiano’s own method privileges human connectivity and openness. When Caisley unexpectedly lays his hand on Choureau’s shoulder, for example, the sterility of the featureless apartment dissolves. The most intimate moments between Louki and Roland occur in the prefurnished rooms of the Parisian neutral zones. And of course there is the café itself: the café in which the events of the story unfold and are retold. Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 the spectacular anthropocene The modernist question of alienation vs. connection plays heavily in Modiano’s work. So, too, do the issues of apathy and engagement. These binaries largely determine the environmental control and determination that runs throughout the Parisian milieu. At the same time, the text is also aware of the social transformations that Guy Debord would outline in his 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle. Louki’s juvenile vagrancy, for example, begins with trips to the Ciné Mexico at the end of her street.10 Caisley notes the appropriateness of the name, as it suggests the desire “to travel, to run away, to disappear” (49). This escapism is certainly a major factor of Louki’s vagrancy, yet in her own narration of filmic experience the spectacular effects of the cinema are more complicated: I paid no interest to the plot, only the scenery interested me. Once I was back outside, I was left with a curious amalgam of Arizona and the boulevard de Clichy in my head. The coloring of the illuminated signs and the neon were the same as that in the film – orange, emerald green, midnight blue, sandy yellow – colors that were too violent and gave me the feeling I was still in the movie or in a dream. (60) In her exclusive interest in scenery, Louki immediately focuses on the environmental aesthetics of film. Film presents the unique experience of witnessing the three-dimensional world on a single screen, collapsing the physical space of the theater while at the same time inviting the viewer to imagine inhabiting foreign locations. While the ceremony of viewing a film – the dimming and raising of the lights to signal the beginning and the end – serves to differentiate the filmic world from the real world, for Louki the experience is not so simple. The intermingling of the film with the boulevard that she experiences when she reemerges onto the streets of Paris is a hallmark of Debord’s spectacle, which is never simply contained by its technological apparatuses but always signals the permeability between the real and the spectacular. Louki’s insight into what Debord terms the “reciprocal alienation” of the spectacle allows her to begin changing her relationship with her environment (SS 14). Her experience in the theater leads to the détournement of her perception of everyday life and contains the seeds of a developing environmental aesthetic that culminates in the summiting of Montmartre. Instead of escapism or the apathy/passivity that are hallmarks of a complacent consumer culture, Louki’s engagement with spectacle allows her to see her environment differently: she recognizes the surreal and hyperreal elements that influence her everyday life. This leads back to the question of what influence an environmental aesthetics can have on the actual environment. Scholars question the place of environmentally minded works of art in literature for advancing environmentalist agendas. Malcolm Miles, for example, notes the facility with which global capitalism can incorporate environmental aesthetics to make its products and services more desirable under the banner of green marketing. At the same time, he differentiates a critical aesthetics which exposes contradictions and offers access to moments of wonder and glimpses of another world. But that world is this world transformed either in an imagined alternative scenario or practically, if as yet marginally, within the present ordering of society. (139) The trajectory of Louki’s environmental aesthetics – from the Ciné Mexico to the top of Montmartre – seems to fall into this category of a critical aesthetics, full of contradictions that nevertheless allow her to question her surrounding world and the changes taking place within it. Bowing’s fixed points and Roland’s neutral points might be similarly critical aesthetics, although they are more determinate and cartographic than Louki’s associative and imaginative modes. ecological détournement If Louki’s suicide provides a rather stark end to her growing environmental awareness, what aesthetic responses are viable in the Spectacular 28 Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 kalaidjian Anthropocene? If environmental aesthetics began as a tradition of contemplating the divide between humans and nature, the Anthropocene suggests an impasse for a traditional environmental aesthetics based on themes of beauty, the sublime, and disinterestedness. Environmental aesthetics in the Anthropocene must always consider the human influences, subtle or overt, that have created a second nature. As the architectural and technological sprawl of civilization increasingly envelops the passive spectator, can détournement take on an ecological dimension that might lead to new behaviors towards and understandings of our current environmental issues? One paradox is that technology increasingly mediates knowledge of climate change. As Morton writes: “Machination ruins Earth and its lifeforms, yet it supplies the equipment necessary for human seeing at geotemporal scales sufficient for ecological awareness” (130). Some of the most striking images of climate change, for example, can be found in time-lapse photography of melting glaciers, as seen in the documentary Chasing Ice. Ever more sophisticated climate models based on satellite imagery and complex algorithms aim to create global simulations of the future. Not to mention the rise in disaster entertainment that employs computer-generated images to present climate change in ever more spectacular terms. One might be encouraged, then, to question whether the spectacle surrounding climate change serves to generate change or, conversely, to encourage viewers to further detach from their actual physical surroundings. Jean Baudrillard, for one, identifies an imperialist thrust of control and obeisance to “present day simulators” who “try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models” (Selected Writings 166). Niklas Luhmann argues that detachment is already baked-in to communication about ecological problems because such issues lie at a disconnect from the individual’s world experience. “The ecological imagery,” he writes, “its schemata, its scripts are developed on a greenfield site, so to speak, they form a terrain that is not yet occupied” (111). This is surely changing as nature becomes increasingly 29 détourned and the effects of the Anthropocene start arriving at people’s doors in the form of drought, flood or fire. Yet the ability to isolate and insulate oneself both physically and digitally from ecological issues also increases apace. There is an opportunity for innovative environmental aesthetics to challenge global apathy in the face of mounting media-induced climate change fatigue, but such aesthetics will have to contend with the material forces that drive the Anthropocene in a seemingly unstoppable feedback loop. In their theories of “unitary urbanism,” the Situationists posit a similar model of the autonomous and expanding influence of the built environment. In the editorial notes to International Situationniste 6 (Aug. 1961), “Critique of Urbanism,” the editors write that capitalism is “beginning to shape its own environment,” an environment that operates through the “fundamental principle of alienation and constraint” (108). Despite the clear acknowledgement that capitalist control of space and environment leads to alienation and constraint, the “unitary urbanism” proposed by the Situationists involves an even more schematic approach to everyday life, aspiring to control atmosphere, scent, lighting, appetite, and indeed human activity. Debord outlines such an ambitious scheme in his “Report on the Construction of Situations”: Unitary urbanism first becomes clear in the use of the whole of arts and techniques as means cooperating in an integral composition of the environment. This whole must be considered infinitely more extensive than the old influence of architecture on the traditional arts, or the current occasional application to anarchic urbanism of specialized techniques or of scientific investigations such as ecology. Unitary urbanism must control, for example, the acoustic environment as well as the distribution of different varieties of drink or food. It must take up the creation of new forms and the détournement of known forms of architecture and urbanism – as well as the détournement of the old poetry and cinema. (44) The offhand reference to the science of ecology here is perhaps directed towards the Chicago Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 the spectacular anthropocene School of Urban Ecology, yet Debord’s vision of unitary urbanism does approach the urban milieu as an ecosystem that can be programmed and disrupted. Beyond spatial and environmental concerns, Debord seeks the basis of a new architecture in “atmospheres” and the affective and behavioral responses they elicit (“Report” 45). Such an approach is entirely appropriate for a contemporary aesthetics of climate change, in which the feeling subject must strive to sense circumambient changes taking place in real time. Yet comparisons between the Situationist atmosphere and rising global carbon levels start to break down precisely because human activity is currently accelerating a lack of atmospheric control rather than perfecting it. The Situationist belief in the perfectability of environment finds its analogue in schemes to cool the planet through technological means. While the failures of the utopian dreams of total environmental control suggest a limited viability of applying Situationist theories of environment to present-day concerns, the Situationist focus on détournement remains a more fruitful approach. Ecological détournement can be thought of in line with a tradition of environmental aesthetics that proposes an immersive and enmeshed view of human relationships to the surrounding world. Arnold Berleant outlines such an aesthetics as one of engagement and sensorial immersion (169–70). The discourse of the Anthropocene, however, takes such immersion further by insisting upon the influence that humans have over the geologic and biologic features of nature. Not only are humans in nature, they are shaping what nature looks like on a constant and perpetual basis. Theories of spectacle similarly insist that the spectacle is not a separate, two-dimensional representation that is distinct from human being, but an assimilation of the real and the virtual. While spectacle historically renders humans apathetic or oblivious to real environments, there are ways in which spectacle can interface with environmental awareness. The formerly passive spectator now enjoys myriad ways to interact through technology. The co-creative nature of the internet and social networks invites users to generate, interact and police content. The growing field of Virtual Reality is taking the immersive approach even further. Bernard Stiegler sees in virtual reality an extension of Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of cinema’s “paralyzing” effects wherein the technological sophistication of accurately representing real objects means the spectator “can no longer distinguish between perception and imagination, reality and fiction” (38). At the same time, the importance of user interaction distinguishes the experience of virtual reality from watching a film. This notion of the user creating and manipulating the world hints at virtual reality’s sympathy with the Anthropocene, a connection that Baudrillard makes explicit through his assertion that “the human race and the entire planet are already becoming their own virtual reality” (Vital Illusion 16). Baudrillard makes this comment in relation to Biosphere 2, the beleaguered proving grounds where human researchers attempt to simulate, control and study a multitude of the planet’s ecosystems. While Biosphere 2 is limited by a too literal physical scaling-down of the planet, small-scale wearable virtual reality headsets are allowing users to explore a more expansive virtual plane. Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, Researchers at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) have been able to demonstrate an increase of feelings of connectedness to nature and animals through the creation of simulations that allow humans to embody animals in order to measure an increase in empathy and connection to non-human life (Ahn et al.). One simulation, for example, provides the experience of being a cow and feeling a cattle prod. The description is equal parts surreal, comic and macabre: “When the virtual prod hit the cow in the virtual simulation, participants heard a buzzing noise, felt a vibration on the floor which was in contact with their knees and palms, and a confederate poked them in the back” (405). The reader might be forgiven for wondering whether this is a passage from a dystopian novel rather than a respected science lab. Notably, the virtual experience must incorporate elements from the real world such as vibrating floors and an actual poke in the back 30 Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 kalaidjian to reach maximum levels of virtuality and what the researchers term “body transference.” While imagining oneself as a cow is not such a large leap, another experiment provides an embodiment of a coral reef, simulating the effects of ocean acidification and disturbance by fishing activity.11 Here again the participants encountered environmental degradation, as they “looked down at their coral body corroding and its limbs breaking off” (410). While one might point out the overt anthropomorphism of such an experiment, the results, by the lab’s metrics, were roundly convincing that such virtual experiences go far beyond simply seeing or reading about negative treatment of animals. This type of human embodiment of the non-human, furthermore, is precisely the type of thinking prompted by discussions of the Anthropocene. The coral reef is not simply the same as it has always been, but is continually modified as a result of human activity. The Anthropocene requires the human subject to contemplate his or her insertion into the planetary fabric, noticing the influence of fellow humans. Such a state of being is spectacular, inviting the embodiment of nature as it is poked and prodded by human actors on all sides. It should be pointed out that these virtual simulations were contrasted against another group of participants who watched the same scenarios on a two-dimensional screen. It would be interesting to see how the virtual reality compared to feelings elicited in non-technological scenarios, if participants could be there when an actual cow, for example, is hit with a cattle prod. But this comparison between the two-dimensional representation and the three-/four-dimensional virtual world is telling: the way out of the apathy engendered by the spectacle, it seems to suggest, is not to exit back to reality but to go deeper into richer and more complex simulations. This is in line with the Situationist goal of hijacking the technologies of the spectacle in order to create détournement. The rather paradoxical result is that through the détournement of spectacle humans may indeed become more attuned to environment. This active response to the passivity of spectacle is precisely the effect that Modiano portrays 31 through Louki’s experience at the cinema in Paris. This should give pause. As the geophysical effects of humans increase alongside more technology, more convincingly real simulations of experience, more mediation between humans and their environments, the Spectacular Anthropocene threatens to displace traditional notions of nature and environment completely. The proliferation of screens and “terminals of tele-action” lead increasingly to what Stiegler terms “the industrial temporalization of consciousness” (2). Moreover, from an emissions standpoint, this is perhaps a desirable development. As Simondon notes, “electronics and telecommunications use reduced tonnages, moderate energies, dimensions that are not crushing” (9). Exploring the world in virtual reality, in other words, carries a much lighter carbon footprint than making use of the industrial assemblages of cars and airplanes. Even the new environmental aesthetics of immersion and ambience as outlined by scholars such as Morton and Berleant seems easily co-opted by the larger thrust of anthropogenic capitalism. Immerse yourself in the virtual world! Experience the sensations of nature itself! Go outside and catch digital Pokémon on your phone! Just as in Tafuri’s account, where urban naturalism arose alongside the picturesque, the new environmental aesthetics of vibrant matter, object-oriented ontology and hyperobjects arrive alongside humanity’s reflection on itself as a world-shaping force. If storms, droughts and rising sea levels hail an increasingly détourned nature, the media fanfare around such events keeps up apace. If human-augmented nature is able to take down the power grid momentarily, nothing becomes more imperative than restoring the electricity that feeds the virtual web. This is not to invite a new apathy in the face of human-generated environmental issues that increasingly snowball out of human control but to recognize that environmental aesthetics should always be about returning humans to an interrogation of their place in the world. “Representations,” as Miles asserts, are exactly that – representations, not the real thing – but also, more importantly [ … ] the spectacular anthropocene Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 there is no real thing in human perception as an original or authentic nature prior to mediation by language. Origin is a theoretical limit outside human experience. (125) Modiano makes this clear in his novel: there is no getting at the “truth” or “original” essence of Louki. An understanding of her character can only be approached through different narratives. Even her own narrative does not reveal absolute truth: it is one more approach to the limit of human experience. Recognizing the vocabulary of the Spectacular Anthropocene is a way of mediating an increasingly complex phenomenological existence on the planet. Never before have questions of the real, the artificial, the virtual, the simulation been more intermingled. Taking a critical approach to the Spectacular Anthropocene can start to unravel the questions of politics and power behind its ideology. Technological interests have an increasing incentive to ramp up deliberate efforts of geo-engineering to counteract undesirable geological changes. Small-scale environmental justice efforts risk losing attention to the new imperialist weight given to an epoch-defining environmental shift. The nuances of ecology encounter a bulldozer in the new discourse of anthropogenic power. Thus, while the Anthropocene is a material phenomenon, it invites a host of social and political registers to interact on international levels. To begin to elaborate such effects it is helpful to turn once more to the work of Baudrillard, whose theories of simulation go beyond Debordian notions of the spectacle to, in the words of Andrew Hussey, grapple with an “external paralysing force which is truly international in its ability to melt frontiers away and reduce all particular individual experience to phantasmic reality” (68). In his short text from 1977, Forget Foucault, Baudrillard makes an incisive aside on the ecology of energy in his discussion of the real and the simulation in regard to power and politics: Today especially, the real is no more than a stockpile of dead matter, dead bodies, and dead language. It still makes us feel secure today to evaluate this stock of what is real (let’s not talk about energy: the ecological complaint hides the fact that it is not material energy which is disappearing on the species’ horizon but the energy of the real, the reality of the real and of every serious possibility, capitalistic or revolutionary, of managing the real). (46) The Anthropocene – as real geological epoch – signals the accumulation of the stockpile of dead matter, carbon emissions, waste in all forms, species extinctions, acidification and more. Baudrillard’s reference to the “ecological complaint” references the series of energy and oil crises that persisted throughout the Western world in the 1970s. The fact that France did not see a significant alteration to its oil supplies speaks to the crisis as a political and economic issue more than an ecological one. With the increasing inventiveness of what Klein terms extractivist capitalism, Baudrillard’s diagnosis largely continues to apply to the contemporary moment. So, too, does the specter of a dwindling “energy of the real.” Moments of ecological détournement provide an opportunity to release this energy of the real, to disrupt habit and passive consumption in favor of more productive forms of connection between humans and the larger biosphere. Rather than simply observing environmental destruction on a screen, experiencing an affective response and ultimately moving on, ecological détournement encourages a longer unsettling that leads to sustained activism on environmental justice issues that cannot be conveniently resolved by the end of the episode. Louki seeks the energy of the real in the nighttime excursions that lead her to the summit of Montmartre, just as Modiano’s four narrative vignettes (détournements) are an attempt at maximizing fiction’s ability to access this same energy of the real. Even the immersion of virtual reality ultimately aims to rediscover the energy of the real. And it is this energy of the real that environmental aesthetics in the twentyfirst century should strive to discover. 32 kalaidjian disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. notes 1 It is worth noting that the Anthropocene has yet to be recognized by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. The ICS recently commissioned an Anthropocene Working Group to develop a formal application for the adoption of the term. Downloaded by [107.184.33.45] at 10:01 05 December 2017 2 Moore cites Andreas Malm and David Ruccio as early proponents of the term (5). 3 For a good analysis of the rhetoric of geo-engineering, see Sikka. 4 For more on the physicality of technology, see Short. 5 Hereinafter cited as SS. 6 Moore also notes the emergence of the digital in the contemporary era, citing the role of satellite imagery for planetary monitoring, but he does not take into account the ways in which capitalism also profits from the information age. 7 A reference to Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank, published in 1956. 8 Notably, Guy de Vere is the name of the fiancé in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “Lenore,” which similarly laments the death of a young woman. 9 Established in 1783 by Louis XVI. Now Mines ParisTech, one of the most prominent engineering schools in France with a strong international reputation. 10 The Mexico was closed in 1995. 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