Ecocritique and Anecdote

Section 1 starts by considering the central notion of this book: a “ecocritique”. The ecocritique recognises that the good life for all includes the well-being of the world we are involved in at every level from the cellular to the cosmic. It is all encompassing. Section 1 then considers how the term “anecdote” relates to ecocritique. Anecdotes provide a peculiarly powerful tool for finding out the meaning of living well, as well as the answering the oft-asked question: who is this “we”? The beauty of anecdotes is that they operate in a non-contemporaneous time. They operate equally well in the past, present, and future. A primary political and ecocritical task of anecdotal method, therefore, is to recognise this hybrid temporality, and to free and maintain its capacity to generate new futures and new pasts.

The Non-identical World

There exists a powerful fantasy that the world is not only describable in numbers but is composed of code, in which case the world-as-code can be rewritten. This theme has already emerged in the analyses of Oblivion and Déjà Vu, and is shared by a group of what are here named as ‘irreality’ films made during the global financial crisis. Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011) dwells on the fate of a protagonist who is the archetypal brain in a vat, another posthumous central character. The analysis draws out the historical formation of subjectivity and the history of the instincts that tie human personality to natural processes, discusses the utopian potential of the performative principles of software, reveals how, in a critical process shot, this utopianism is directed simultaneously towards the construction of community and of the romantic couple, and how these relate to the invisibility, in the repeated shots of the Chicago skyline, of the futures market housed in its downtown area.

Otherwise than Human

Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski, 2013) is the story of a clone haunted by memories of a previous existence. In the opening sequence, this ambivalent existence is echoed in the mix of digital and physical effects. Discussion of this ambivalence leads into an analysis of nonidentity versus identity, especially in a critical sequence in which clone Jack watches and is observed by a fish. Themes of individualism raised in the chapter on Iron Man return here in more complex form as Jack oscillates among individuality, fidelity to a model, and species-being. This is the third film in a row which raises issues of debt and obligation through the trope of a character who is dead, dying, or reborn, a theme of posthumous existence in this case posed as the only alternative to an absent community.

Part 2: Remaking the Mass Image

‘Is it possible to differentiate between dominant and oppositional networks, for example? Or are they all so inextricably tied that even an analytical separation of them becomes useless?’ asks Arturo Escobar (2008: 11). Could a reconstituted form of image database exist? Could the mass image engender an oppositional agency that does not simply replicate the teleology of capital? If so, would there still exist a subject capable of responding?...

A Glitch in Time

Déjà Vu, the 2006 film starring Denzel Washington directed by Tony Scott, is characterised by a number of glitches, marking aspects of the time-travel media and narrative as well as the condition described in the title. The chapter opens with a consideration of the economic doctrine of perfect communication and argues that no system can be both complete and coherent, so no communication can be both universal and without noise. The glitches are traced especially through a shot-reverse-shot sequence early in the film when the African American protagonist recognises his obligation to a dead African American woman, leading to a consideration of the film’s evocation of slavery. The challenge of noise emerges in the flawed distinction between continuity and discontinuity first raised in the editing and the glitches, central to the fictional quantum physics of the plot, and acted out in a flamboyant action sequence where hero and audience can see two times simultaneously.

Introduction

The Introduction introduces the concept of ecocritique as a radical form of environmentalism and ties it to the anecdote, where human and ecological forces combine to produce a unique event, whose telling is also an event. It establishes the idea of encounter between historical and natural agencies, and among teller, telling, and audience, lodging the claim that anecdotal evidence provides a key technique in the task of the humanities: to judge between the claims of different forms of the Good. It argues for the value of treating popular media as anecdotes, and asks how encounters might be possible in the age of digital distribution.

Part 1: Making the Mass Image

The final challenge in proving the relevance of anecdotal method for contemporary purposes lies in the need to confront the now-dominant mode of accessing moving and still image media. Vast databases of social and streaming media now contain, store, process, and deliver video, audio, and visual content. It is always possible to encounter one or two images at a time; but millions are now stored and constantly updated form a single mass image of the world, structured and restructured through metadata including human behaviours of searches, likes, and shares, in an evolving topology only partially designed for human users. For anecdotal method to have a claim, it must answer the question: Is it possible to encounter a database? Arguing that the mass image database is the logical outcome of a history of mechanical imaging, the chapter argues that humans are now reduced to behaviours, that time is no longer consolidated experientially but undergoing a chronoclasm, bringing the central position of the human to an end. It goes on to argue that this creates a new opportunity for ecocritical aesthetic politics by excluding the human, thus placing humanity on the side of both nature and technology. This opens a discussion of the nature of the ancestral dead labour, skills, and knowledge enshrined in technologies, and the obligation to the victims of ecocide and genocide, and to the proposal of an encyclopedic commons as the medium for ecocritical politics.

Posthumous Media

The coincidence of the departure of the two Voyager spacecraft from the solar system with the Global Financial Crisis brought their mission and associated media back into prominence. The animations made by James Blinn, Charles Kohlhase, and colleagues at the time of their launches and the golden discs designed by Carl Sagan to carry sounds and images of Earth on a flight that will not conclude for a million years gives a new perspective on the idea of the posthumous. Drawing together themes of coded irreality, melancholia, obligation and debt, redemption, and the subjunctive mode of anecdotes, this chapter demonstrates how the critical moments observed in each of the previous films can be assembled into a collective vision of a period in history.

Hope in Children of Men and Serenity

Building on the melancholia of the films analysed thus far, a comparison between Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 Children of Men, based in a world in mourning for its future, and the space opera Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005), which concludes the story arc of Whedon’s TV series Firefly, gives an opportunity to further the discussion of history through an analysis of two mythic formations of hope, the redeemer and the frontier respectively. The chapter rounds off the theme of personal redemption versus the redemption of the collective, and the theme of obligation to the past necessitating a politics not of a deferred future but of redeeming the present in the name of the numberless dead, by an analysis of what does and does not count as human in the two films.

Those Dying Generations

Like other films analysed here, No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007) abandons humanism, but rather than offer recoding as a solution for historical impasses, it acts out two modes of history: as obligation, and as predestination. The border setting of the film’s action is more than metaphorical of these forms of history. It evokes both the fraught political-economic relations between the United States and Mexico and is acted out on a landscape whose emptiness and moral threat, the chapter argues, derives from the genocide of First Nations. This is revealed in a critical moment when a minor character tells an anecdote from the area’s history, the only mention of indigenous peoples, which reverberates in the depiction of Chigurh, the dark angel of vengeance who haunts the narrative.