Navigating Unrepresentability:
Climate Change, Climate Trauma, Climate Art
Robin Goudsmit
Master’s Thesis Cultural Analysis
June 2019
Supervisors
Dr. D. Duindam
Dr. B. Noordenbos
Contents
Introduction 3
I. Into the Void: Rethinking the Unrepresentability of Climate Change 9 II. Unearthing Unrepresentability: Peggy Weil’s 88 cores 21
III. Grieving for an Unknown Place: Yi Dai’s Misfits, Offcuts, and Castaways, 32 Coda 44
Works cited 49 Acknowledgments 53
Introduction
A black hourglass in a black circle is the symbol of activist group Extinction Rebellion. Founded in October 2018, the group seeks ‘radical change in order to minimize the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse’ through strictly non-violent actions organized following the principle of civil disobedience (XR, ‘About us’). These actions include blockades and disruptions of traffic hubs and airports, activists chaining themselves to buildings, and, most notoriously, die-ins in public places.
For XR, the question of climate change is a question of life or death, and, although their slogan proudly reads ‘Rebel for Life’, they do not altogether seem to be convinced that our planet and its inhabitants will survive the human-induced climate crisis. As such, they echo the bleak vision as articulated by, amongst others, Roy Scranton (2015), who, in his notorious essay Learning How to Die In the Anthropocene concluded that if according to Montaigne, philosophizing was to ‘learn how to die’, the aim of philosophy in the Anthropocene had to include ‘learning how to die as a civilization’ (20-21).
However grim their vision might sound, XR by the time of writing has gained followers worldwide. Perhaps the group’s philosophy of holding no illusions towards the possibility of saving the planet is what attracts people, as it is so deeply opposed to the optimism of mainstream climate movements. In the Netherlands especially, these differences are significant; while the Green Left party’s slogan can be translated as ‘Ready for the future (‘Zin in de toekomst’), the actions of XR in the Netherlands included staging a ‘funeral for the future’ by boat on the canals of Amsterdam, including a real coffin, flowers, and attendees dressed in black (‘Het Parool’ 2019).
As XR gained attention through these actions in The Netherlands, too, a reporter from newspaper Trouw attended one of their meetings. According to the resulting article, multiple members in attendance stated that they experienced a ‘climate depression’. Another member of the group, recognizing these feelings, expressed that one of the group’s objectives was to create a space for ‘mourning’ - i.e. grieving environmental losses. Halfway through the meeting, someone therefore proposed ‘one minute of silence’ that was obeyed by everyone (Straver 2019).
Interestingly, the practice of such a minute of silence suggests an adoption of practices usually associated with commemorating past instances of trauma and violence. In the Netherlands, a moment of silence is mostly linked to the national commemoration of World
War II and the Holocaust on the fourth of May, when the nation holds two minutes of respectful silence from 8 pm onwards.
The members of XR thus seem to engage with what one could describe as memory culture, thereby reflecting on the (largely) future event of climate change as if it was past. This appropriation of memory practice seems further strengthened by the group’s aesthetics and aforementioned political actions that all signify disaster, mourning, death, and trauma.
Such an adaption of a cultural framework of memory has been theorized in the context of the Holocaust by Rothberg (2009) as ‘multidirectional memory’. Rothberg uses the example of the commemoration of American slavery as building on the ‘platform’ of widespread Holocaust consciousness’ to suggest that the memory of one social group’s past can lead to recognition of another group’s (past) suffering (3). As such, memory functions not as a ‘zero-sum-game’, but as a social process fostering awareness and empathy that is potentially intercultural and bridges social differences between groups and communities (6). Taking into account practices such as observing a minute of silence, it seems that XR brings such multidirectional memory in practice, as it aims at recognition of (non-human) suffering caused by climate change.
This theoretical parallel illustrates that trauma and memory studies can provide a relevant framework to gain an understanding of our cultural, social and political responses – or lack thereof- to what has become known as the climate crisis or climate emergency. Indeed, trauma and memory studies, relocating their focus on past events have now begun to venture into the future, resulting in a wide variety on how memory can be of conceptual aid to interpret the challenges of climate change and the Anthropocene (Craps et al. 2017; Pisters 2016; Hulme 2016). One goal of this thesis will be to contribute to this growing field of ‘future memory studies’.
Being conceptually interrelated, trauma and memory studies traditionally combined scientific discoveries regarding post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with conceptualizations of memory within psychoanalysis and philosophical and historical thought on violence in the 20th century in general and the Holocaust in particular. They employed a
methodology stemming from literary studies to interpret the political impact of collective memory (Caruth 1996: 72; Radstone, 2007; LaCapra 2001; Alexander 2004).
Crucially, trauma theory problematizes theories of representation. Since Freud’s classical inquiry into trauma, the traumatic experience has been understood as presenting itself to the traumatized subject only fragmentarily and involuntarily (Freud 1922). The
traumatized subject cannot ‘master’ the narrative of her trauma, consequently being ‘haunted’ by it. Trauma thus resists representation while simultaneously insisting on being represented (Caruth, 1996; Leys, 2000). Moreover, the traumatic experience defies the ‘seeing is believing clausule’; the traumatized subject is even not able to tell whether the traumatic experience indeed happened (Van Alphen 2002).
Put even more strongly, the focus of trauma theory on unrepresentability has taken trauma theory to become a more general theory of ‘distorted referentiality’, as Elsaesser has suggested. Trauma theory, then, has the potential to provide us with a model for epistemological critique. As Elsaesser (2001) concludes, 'trauma theory is not so much a theory of recovered memory as it is one of recovered referentiality': as a result of the limits to representation imposed by trauma, it cannot become clear what the represented trauma refers to. As such, trauma theory provides a model that acknowledges that 'there is no there there’ (Elsaesser qtd in Radstone 2007: 19).
Recently, as part of the aforementioned developments within the discipline, trauma studies have theorized the possibility of trauma derived from future events. Kaplan (2018), basing herself on psychiatric research, has argued that ‘climate trauma’ is a psychiatric condition, comparable to the condition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Such a condition can thus be classified, as Kaplan does, as pre-traumatic stress disorder. However, defined in this sense, and as Kaplan acknowledges, the condition of climate trauma relies on our imagined futures to be traumatic. Put differently, climate trauma derives from representation.
However, climate change in itself has been theorized as resisting representation as a result of its paradoxical nature of happening slowly, elsewhere, and in the future (Morton 2016, 2017; Nixon 2011). Climate trauma and climate change seem to inhabit a similar, paradoxical place. If defined in terms of classical trauma theory, trauma is pushed to its conceptual limits by climate change; the trauma caused by climate change resists representation as it exists mostly in the future, while resisting representation in the present. Thus, trauma in relation to climate change is not so much a trauma from an unmasterable experience, but a trauma without experience. Climate trauma, in other words, must be understood as the paradigmatic example of trauma, revealing what we might call an arche-trauma. As such, the representation, or rather, the impossibility of representation of climate change resonates with Elsaesser’s observation of the ‘epistemological critique’ residing in the core of trauma theory.
In this thesis, I will attempt to make a contribution to the growing field of ‘future memory and trauma studies’ by inquiring into this deep entanglement of the unrepresentability of climate change and climate trauma. It will do so by asking how unrepresentability can be navigated aesthetically, affectively, and scientifically. Consequently, this thesis will explore into how we can cope with the traumatic unrepresentability of climate change.
Furthermore, this thesis aims at further examining the political consequences of such unrepresentability of both climate trauma and climate change by providing an inquiry into the concept of anticipatory memory as defined by Stef Craps (2017). According to Craps, a moral imperative can be derived from the ‘memory of the future’. Under climate change, such a memory of the future consists of a daunting perspective on the future that can possibly urge us to undertake political action in the present. To further investigate this concept in the context of the unrepresentability of the climate crisis, I will contrast Craps’s conception of anticipatory memory with Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence vis-a-vis spectacular representations of climate change, and further obstructions climate change poses to representations in terms of scale. Consequently, I will investigate how the concept of anticipatory memory, if relying on a representation of the future, can be paired with the idea of an unimaginable future under climate change. However, in so doing, this thesis does not aim at providing or developing criteria for successfully representing climate change in order to accelerate political action. Rather, it aims at further developing the concept of anticipatory memory by demonstrating that unrepresentability in itself can be navigated aesthetically, scientifically, and affectively.
In the theoretical framework of this thesis, I will build on a variety of texts and stances. Firstly, classic trauma theory will be providing a theoretical base, as sketched above, by granting the conceptual definition of trauma as a conceptual aid to rethinking the limits of representation. Secondly, contemporary trauma theory will be consulted to interpret climate trauma in further detail. In various discussions, such as the discussion of trauma in relation to complicity and innocence, but also, the representation of the unrepresentable as providing cues to the moral imperative of memory, the roots of trauma studies in Holocaust studies resonate. This is however not only a consequence of the focus of this thesis on trauma studies and climate change, but also as a result of the social and cultural discourses surrounding climate crisis; as demonstrated by the example of XR’s minute of silence, the memory practices as originating in Holocaust memory, as Sielke (2010) suggested, provides a powerful trope.
My suggestion that unrepresentability can be taken as a starting point for thinking about the consequences of climate crises and its future memory requires a further philosophical explanation, one that I have attempted to find in the seemingly very divergent works of Derrida (1967), Lyotard (1990), and Haraway (2016). The first two, however, in their theoretical endeavors to provide explanations and interpretations of the limits of representability and the violence of representation, are no odd choice to discuss memory and trauma in the context of climate change. Haraway, focusing on the posthuman aspect of climate crises, provides the notion of ‘staying with’ as a rejection of thinking about climate crises as a conquerable problem, instead suggesting rethinking the future as irrevocably shaped by climate change.
The outline of this thesis will be as follows. In chapter 1, I will elaborate on the unrepresentability of climate change in relation to climate trauma. I will do so by distinguishing some of the obstructions to the representation of climate change. After Timothy Morton and Amitav Ghosh, I will elaborate on the problem of grasping climate change as a problem of scale, which in turn can be interpreted in terms of temporality and geographical scale. Consequently, Nixon has theorized the representation of climate change as being complicated by the ‘slow’ nature of its violence. These obstructions will consequently be brought into conversation with the aforementioned notion of anticipatory memory to trace how these obstructions to representation function politically.
As stated before, ‘navigating’ unrepresentability does not imply approaching the conceptual problem of unrepresentability as being ‘solvable’. Consequently, in this chapter, I will inquire into the theoretical grounds for the possibility of maintaining unrepresentability with the aid of Derrida, Lyotard, and Haraway, interpreting unrepresentability not as asking for a theoretical, cultural or aesthetic solution, but to be interpreted as a key concept to investigate unparalleled climate crises.
In chapter 2 and 3, I will present two close readings of two artworks; first, 88 cores by Peggy Weil, and secondly, Misfits, Offcuts and Castaways by Yi Dai. In these close readings, what I will attempt to trace is not how these objects present us with a definitive mode of representing climate change and its consequences, but rather, how they negotiate the various obstructions to such representation. As such, the objects can be regarded as paradoxically visualizing the limits of representation. Throughout the thesis however, I will elaborate on a variety of other examples that resonate with both these objects and these questions.
In chapter 2 I will furthermore present a close reading of the artwork 88 cores, a work that focuses on ice and the Arctic. In the wake of scientific discoveries, what has become clear is that parts of our worlds are almost surely beyond recovery from climate change. The Arctic, for example will not remain in its current form. Engaging with ice as a material, 88 cores asks how we can do memory work for matter that is bound to vanish. By elaborating on this disaster, 88 cores, and consequently, its close reading, will shed further light to the unrepresentability of climate change in terms of locality; furthermore, it will elaborate on how past, present and future are entangled in the nature of climate change.
Moreover, 88 cores reflects how this memory work is complicated by the scientific uncertainty with regard to how and when our planet will change. In this chapter, I will reflect on this aspect of 88 cores by interpreting unrepresentability as complexity. Climate science, researching the complex problem of climate science, in itself copes with data that defy human reason. As such, its practice is defined by coping with unsolvable unrepresentability.
In chapter 3, by close reading Yi Dai’s Misfits, Offcuts and Castaways discrepancies in place with regard to climate mourning will be further investigated. Although this thesis is conceptually based on the idea of climate trauma, the affective relation through which some of us, such as the members of XR quoted earlier, relate to climate change can also be characterized as grief. The boundaries between the two cannot always be clarified as both climate change and climate grief are turned towards future or otherwise opaque events. However, as indicated above, in this thesis I will take up a definition of climate trauma as situated in the cultural and conceptual realm; when referring to climate grief, this will point to the emotional and the affective.
In Yi Dai’s Misfits, the question of how one can grief a place, and, what happens if the only relation constituting, defining that place becomes grief. Moreover, in resonance with 88
cores, Misfits does question the links between the causes and consequences of climate change
happening in opposed locations. Consequently, Misfits blurs lines between perpetrator and victim, and, in so doing, shows that climate grief, and perhaps, climate trauma, cannot be understood along the conventional lines of morality.
I
Into the Void: Rethinking the Unrepresentability of Climate Change
Introduction
In May 2019, The Guardian provided its journalists with new guidelines for writing about climate change, stating, inter alia, that they should preferably use ‘global heating’, over ‘global warming’ to underline the severity of the ‘climate emergency’ (Carrington 2019).1 In a
statement, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner said that in so doing, The
Guardian was responding to various organizations, such as the United Nations and climate
scientists asking for a ‘stronger terminology’ to describe what those scientists claim is a ‘catastrophe for humanity’.
The Guardian’s choice of words with regard to climate change illustrates the question
of how to represent a crisis that has proved to be unfathomable. Simultaneously, The Guardian is not only trying to find ways to objectively, neutrally describe a particular phenomenon, but also expressing the need for a mode of representation that inspires action now that time seems to run out.
In this chapter, I will elaborate on the obstructions to the representation of climate change and their political consequences. In the first section of this chapter, I will therefore examine the existing theorizations of the obstructions towards representing climate change. In doing so, I aim at further clarifying the existence of climate change on a crossroads of dichotomies: in between local and global and in between local and global. Moreover, climate change can furthermore be regarded as ambiguous in its violence. As Robert Nixon (2011) has influentially suggested, climate violence can be identified as ‘slow’. As a consequence of these paradoxes, climate change can be deemed ‘unrepresentable’, ungraspable in its nature.
As the example from The Guardian illustrated, representations of climate change are deeply politically invested; as a consequence, academic discussions, too, have been centered on the political resonance of (the lack of) climate change representation. From a trauma studies perspective, such an angle can be found in the concept of anticipatory memory, as described by Craps (2017). In my interpretation, this concept relies heavily on an implied, dystopian representation of climate crises. However, thinking with the dichotomies at work within the nature of climate change and the limitations of dystopias as a cultural trope, I will
argue that such a bias towards dystopian representations may not be as productive in acquiring such anticipatory memory.
However, the ultimate aim of this chapter, as of this thesis, is not to find criteria for the adequate representation of climate change as fostering anticipatory memory. In the second section of this chapter, I will therefore aim at thinking with the perspective on memory as ‘open wound’ and the dynamics of memory and forgetting as identified by Lyotard (1990). Consequently, this section will argue that unrepresentability can be connected to more speculative modes of ‘living together’ or ‘staying with’. As such unrepresentability can serve as a key concept to interpret the possibility of a moral imperative stemming from a ‘memory of the future.’ I will also suggest in this chapter and in what follows, that an aesthetics recognizing and working with the unrepresentability of climate change can be traced in current representations of climate change. In so doing, these representations, like this thesis, aim at thinking with the unrepresentability of climate trauma, contemplating how such an approach in turn leads to a better understanding of living with the uncertainties of the future under climate change.
1. Nothing to See Here: The Unrepresentability of Slow Violence
Being ‘unknown’ to us by definition, our perception of the future can be regarded as being constructed through emotion and affect. The future can therefore conceptually be understood as merely a ‘relation’ (Haraway 2016: 4), defined by the cultural and political moment. As such, the future can only be comprehended as a ‘cultural fact’ (Appadurai 2013: 3). Now, that under climate change, one could argue that our look to the future is painted in mostly blacks and greys, the relation through which we come to know the future is similarly colored by grief, and, perhaps, trauma.
Consequently, as elaborated upon in the introduction of this thesis, trauma studies have theorized the possibility of climate trauma. Kaplan (2018) for example, defines climate trauma as ‘pretrauma’, a state of collective stress caused by the uncertainties and dangers brought by future climate crises (x).
As these scenarios have not been realized yet, climate trauma largely relies on the imaginations as representations. As Kaplan points out, most of these imaginations, in journalism, online, television and film and literature, aim at establishing an affective, personal relation with their audiences; they are invited to ‘identify with future selves in uncertain, dangerous, and ultimately unsustainable worlds’ (xix).
A focus on representation in relation to the future is in this account both a consequence of climate change being a future event, but also, a result of the rootedness of trauma and memory studies in literary studies. Apart from Kaplan, who focuses on film and documentary, trauma theorists have based their assessment of possible climate trauma on, inter alia, representations of climate change in science fiction, or, ‘cli-fi’ (De Bruyn 2018) and literary fiction (Craps 2018).
However, the limits of the representation of climate trauma deserve further assessment, as a multitude in perspectives suggests that climate change is decisively unrepresentable. Timothy Morton (2013) for instance defines climate change as a ‘hyperobject’, an object inhabiting a paradoxical space in-between; in between local and global spaces, and on a time scale so vast it can only be qualified as deep time. As such, the hyperobject of climate change resists the grasp of human knowledge. In similar vein, but focusing on the cultural unrepresentability of cimate change, Ghosh (2017) suggests that climate change presents us with a ‘great derangement’ of space and time, putting us in a ‘crisis of imagination’. Existing cultural tropes, Ghosh argues, cannot appropriately fit the phenomenon of climate change or even work contraproductive to uncovering the asymmetrical social-political consequences of climate crises.
Moreover, the nature of climate violence presents us with a different obstruction to the representation of climate change. Influentially, Nixon (2011) classified the violence caused by climate change as ‘slow violence’, a ‘delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (2). Such delayed destruction consists for instance of slowly rising temperatures and sea levels.
Consequently, Nixon argues, climate change cannot be reduced to a singular event; rather, it consists of a series of slow changes that largely go unnoticed, yet impact our world but do build up, or, as Horn (2018) notes, climate change presents us with
‘(…) a catastrophe without event. It may have many different forms of “outbreak,” but it
essentially (and paradoxically) consists in the sheer perpetuation of current policies, lifestyles, and modes of managing the future. (8)
As a consequence of climate change being both ‘delayed’ and ‘without event’ (both, as we have seen, notions used in relation to trauma), it can be argued that ‘slow violence’ implies a particular politics towards who can be recognized as a witness or victim. As William Gibson
(2004) famously remarked, ‘the future is already here, it is only unevenly distributed’. The ways we experience the future correspond with class lines: while the global poor experience climate change in all its physicality, the global rich experience it in theory; their idea of the future under climate change can still be paired with a certain optimism regarding technological solutions and international cooperation. As such, the issue of the unrepresentability of slow violence could be understood as what Miranda Fricker (2007) has described as ‘hermeneutical injustice’: the injustice born from the lack of access of victims of violence to an appropriate discourse, or even basic terminology, to describe their experiences. However, building on Gibson’s statement, what has not been theorized as elaborately is how the ‘slowness’ of climate violence deprives one’s sight on the consequences of one’s own actions, particularly in the Global North. The consequences of our daily actions are significant, however we often times do not connect them to the climate crisis; it is for these reasons that Mike Davis’s (1995) qualified our daily unsustainable live choices as ‘ordinary disaster’. These ideas will be further elaborated on in chapter 3.
Moreover, it might be worth inquiring what consequences the definition of climate violence as slow violence would have for the conceptualization of climate trauma. Kaplan (2018) for example, in her analysis of climate change in documentary and film, relies on the trope of the dystopia and apocalypse, which certainly could be qualified as ‘spectacular’ forms of violence. Similarly, De Bruyn (2018) names slow violence as an inspiration for his work on science fiction, which, although a diverse genre, does not favor non-spectacular storylines per se.
If one should theorize climate trauma as ‘slow trauma’, one might as well think of it in terms of Lauren Berlant’s (2011) idea of trauma not as a state of exception but as a starting point to understand people’s living conditions under modernity. Although Berlant does not specify climate change in this context, her focus in this regard is on the impact of globalized capitalism and geopolitics on the individual life, causing a condition of ‘unexceptional precarity and constant vulnerability to globalized threats as “crisis ordinariness.”’(Berlant qtd in Coddington 2017: 2). In Berlant’s view, ‘trauma’ is a non-exceptional condition but a structural aspect of contemporary life, resulting from constant exposure to structures of violence.
Key then, to interpreting ‘slow violence’ and its consequent ‘ordinary disaster’ is an understanding how ‘slow violence’ is normalized. Although this is no part of Nixon’s original conceptualization of slow violence, the extent to which violence can be perceived as ‘slow’ or
‘spectacular’ can be apprehended as deeply entangled with cultural tropes and representations; it can be argued that the violence of climate change is not ‘slow’ per se, but ‘slowed down’ by its representations.
Plausibly, such representations can have such power as a result of their significant cultural history. Nicolas Mirzoeff (2014) writes on visuality as the ‘visualizing of history’, a process merely constituted by power structures. In the context of the Anthropocene, visuality would hide climate suffering from view, preventing it from being recognized as disasterous; therefore, Mirzoeff describes Anthropocene visuality as allowing us to ‘move on, to see nothing and keep circulating commodities, despite the destruction of the bio- sphere’ (214).
If Anthropocene visuality tells us that there is ‘nothing to see here’, it thus functions as a stabilizer, re-establishing a status quo, and a paralyzer to political action and awareness towards climate change . A similar line of argument can be detected as a potential critique on the concept of anticipatory memory, as described by Craps (2017), a concept pointing to the politically mobilizing effect of climate trauma.
In Craps’s view, the ‘memory of the future’, could issue a moral ‘call’ similar to the one issued by collectively traumatic events of the past (480). Such a ‘memory imperative’- as for example issued by the events of the Second World War and the Shoah- prompts political awareness, activism, and attention. According to Craps, the ‘never again’ imperative of Holocaust remembrance could in the context of climate change morph into ‘never’ or ‘never in reality’ (488).
However, the concepts of a memory imperative and anticipatory memory rely heavily on the issue of representation. To what extent the imperative is successful depends, one could argue, on the ways climate change is reproduced. In Craps’s account, like in Kaplan’s theorization of climate trauma, tropes of the dystopia and the apocalypse are rendered most effective in their politically mobilizing capabilities. One can however establish that such a conceptualization of anticipatory memory does not reflect the characterization of climate change as slow violence; dystopia classically point to a degree of spectacle, as is also detectable in the accounts of Craps and Kaplan (Craps 2017: 483; Kaplan 2018).
Moreover, thinking with Mirzoeff, the familiarity of such a trope can potentially both normalize and downplay these effects; how much impact could a supposedly shocking climate change documentary really have if we happily watch every new Apocalypse movie, too? With respect to the cultural trope of the dystopian fantasy, one might even theorize the ‘spectacle’ of climate change and its consequent blurred lines between reality, symbol, fantasy and
imagination from the psychoanalytical perspective of Slavoj Žižek (2002). Žižek, in his analysis the attacks of 9/11, suggests that the images of the planes hitting the World Trade Centre blurred the division between ‘Hollywood fiction’ and a ‘raw real of a catastrophe’ (17). However, this ‘Hollywood fiction’ did not only appear on screen, but also lived in the western mind as a fantasy and desire. Now that the fantasy had become reality, coping with its consequent trauma could be realized by reversing reality and fantasy once more: ‘(..) What we experience as fiction, the hard kernel of the Real, we are able to sustain only if we fictionalize it’ (Žižek 2002: 19). As such, his perspective on spectacular points us to the cultural trope of the catastrophe as existing both in our internal world of fantasy and the outside world; what belongs to which is often unclear.
Thus, although dystopian tropes might at first sight seem the disruptive genre per excellence, it can also be rethought as a normalizing trope; if one considers the idea of ‘Hollywood fiction’, this might point to the familiarity of dystopian tropes as a result of their following of cultural patterns and being endlessly reproduced (Kaplan 2018). Also, the familiarity of the genre of dystopia as fiction would potentially foster the idea that the climate crisis does not happen now and in reality, potentially strengthening the discrepancy of the future being ‘unevenly distributed’.
However, it might proof to be hard to evince that the cultural trope of dystopia eventually counteracts political mobilization. Nonetheless, if one follows Craps’s line in interpreting the functioning of memory as a moral imperative, it may be of interest to note that such a moral imperative often is paired to a refusal or refraining of representation. This can be traced in various forms of cultural representation, but also in memory practices. In the introduction of this thesis, for instance, the custom of observing a moment of silence was mentioned; such a moment can be regarded as a refraining from representation in speech, perhaps of what one cannot speak about. Other examples of such a ‘negative sublime’ include the aesthetics of the void or vast color blocks as employed in monuments (Gross 2006).
Although the aim of this thesis is to research the conceptual problem of unrepresentability rather then tracing patterns of representation that advance awareness of climate change, it is interesting to note that representations of climate change have begun to echo such ‘aesthetics of refusal’. Exemplary, the New York Times Magazine in a special on the failure of political leaders to react to climate change in the previous century, chose to publish an all-black cover, stating the magazine’s title in a slightly greyer shade of black. In the middle, the cover announced, in a small white fond, that ‘Thirty years ago, we could have saved the
planet’ (Rich 2018: I). Inside, in the middle of the magazine, this aesthetics was continued, featuring, in the middle of the magazine, two black pages stating ‘We have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean- for how we remember the past, for how we think about the future’ (Rich 2018: 12-13). The magazine in this quote seemed to reflect on anticipatory memory; apparently, we have not yet realized that as a consequence of our failure to act in the past, one now should think about the future as if it was already past. Moreover, instead of the often-used description of violent episodes in our history as ‘the black page’, here, the future is literally depicted as ‘black pages to come’. As such, it can be said that the magazine not only contemplates anticipatory memory, but also actively engages in it.
In an attempt to grasp climate change as a phenomenon in his writing, Ghosh (2016) finds himself ‘reaching instead for the opposite end of the spectrum of meaning –for the extraordinary, the inexplicable, the confounding’. Such a philosophy seems to be underlying the aesthetics of the New York Times Magazine; it is also reflected in the objects that I will discuss in greater length in the chapters that follow. In what follows here, I will therefore make an attempt of interpreting the gesture of ‘reaching for the unexplicable.
2. Living with Climate Unrepresentability
Taking up this perspective, I will make an attempt at constructing an alternative way of thinking with unrepresentability in relation to anticipatory memory, as what remains undertheorized, is the possibility of an unrepresentable future as the ‘open wound’ that can in itself be morally effective. The unrepresentable, then, can be theorized as not being need of a ‘solution’ per se, a void simply to be filled by representation, but as a productive means to theorize anticipatory memory.
In his essay Heidegger and “the jews”, Lyotard states,
[Memory] closes the gaps, collects the so-called past in the service of the future thereby deploying a temporality that is obviously spread between ek-static moments- past, present, future- but nonetheless homogenous through its meta-Installation of the Self. And thus this politics forgets the heterogenous to the Self, but heterogenous in itself, foreign to this sort of temporality. The heterogenous did not enter in into it – and one does not and cannot remember it by means of this soliciting, wrapping up gesture. (10)
The practice of memory thus appears to be contra productive by nature; the attempt to memorize the ‘gap’ or ‘wound’ that the trauma involves only leads to its forgetting. In other words, the attempt of resolving the issue of unrepresentability by finding representation does not bring the object of representation any closer; rather, it escapes the representational grasp. Moreover, Lyotard indicates the politics of memory in their dynamics of openness and closedness. Memory’s potential politics lies in its ability to reduce the complexities of a violent past to a homogenous, accessible phenomenon. As such, practices of remembering are themselves caught up in a double bind.
The aforementioned example of the New York Times Magazine can be seen, in a sense, as illustrating and complicating these theoretical viewpoints. In its attempt to perhaps to avoid reducing the ungraspable scale of both the climate disaster and the anger and sadness following the realization that political decision makers have neglected to act while they could, its aesthetics reverberate a ‘negative sublime’. However, as this in itself implies a cultural trope, it also implies a reduction of complexity.
Lyotard’s critical account of representation and memory in this respect resonates with the Jacques Derrida (1967) suggested that the activity of sense-making involves violence towards the world. Similarly Benjamin Noys (2013: 12) has stated that ‘a form of violence is intrinsic to representation itself’, in the sense that the reductionist quality of representation determines and justifies the violent act itself.
However, a concept of non-violence within these accounts of representation-as-violence seems to be disappearing. As the human life cannot be lead if not being toward the world; violence-as-representation is part of the human condition. Hence, Derrida’s view does not so much allow for a state of non-violence, but merely an ‘economy of violence’ (1967).
Theoretical responses to idea of living with (past events of) violence can be helpful to make an inquiry into consequences of thinking memory as an ‘open wound’. In response to Derrida’s conceptualization of violence and his definition of forgiveness, Weber (2013) for example theorized ‘living together’ as a mode of existence within the acceptance of violence. Living together does not imply solutions, harmony, or any other classic ideal of peace; rather, its starting point exists where one loses faith in such ideals. As Weber states:
“Living together” is manifested at its most as surviving, as sur-vie, when we lose the togetherness necessary for us and feel we are unable to continue living (….). Living together” is at once a deprived life, and we
should consider togetherness beginning from deprivation, from the anticipated departure of the other, from the melancholic wound that keeps the memory of “living together” and foretells its future (….)” (224)
Weber’s conceptualization originated as a perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Derrida’s essays on forgiveness were inspired by the establishment of truth commissions in South-Africa, events deeply defined by political impasse. In the context of climate change and climate trauma, ‘living together’ would resonate with unresolvable, irreversible losses caused by climate change. Such losses do not only include biodiversity and habitats, but also a ‘conceptual’ loss of a mode of living; the affective relations earlier mentioned as constituting the future are forcibly revised. This state of climate trauma is as elusive as it is perplexing; and as such, it can be argued, it is this state of devastation that can give way to ‘living together’ Strangely and speculatively, in the context of climate change these ideas begin to echo with the perspective of Donna Haraway (2016) on ‘staying with the trouble’ . Of course, I acknowledge that there are significant differences between Haraway’s rootedness in new materialism and posthumanism and Derrida’s poststructuralism – the former’s thought is arguably born as an argument against the latter’s philosophical tradition. However, for the purpose of opening up questions on how to ‘live together’ under climate change and under the immanent dangers of climate crises, I would like to bring them into conversation with one another, perhaps in the sense of what Haraway calls, a state of ‘companiable friction’ (43). Haraway’s eclectic way of thinking with the sciences will as well inspire the following chapter of this project.
‘ If ‘living together’ in Weber’s definition is first and foremost a position on human political coexistence, Haraway’s new materialist perspective can expand and clarify the possibility of living together under climate change. Haraway’s theory centers around inter-species affective relationship; the ‘making of kin’, a perspective needed to theorize climate trauma as not only prompted by loss of or related to humans, but rooted in the loss of the non-human as well.
A livable future, Haraway argues, can only be imagined if a conceptualization of Earth as ‘Gaia’ is abandoned. Crucial to her account on the era she preferably calls the Chthulucene is her critical assessment of human ways of sense-making. The Chtulucene is no reconceptualization of the Anthropocene; rather, Haraway emphasizes that the Chthulucene
is ‘now and yet to come’ (16), it is an ‘elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is, and might yet be’ (31). As such, Haraway’s concept demonstrates a ‘temporal promiscuity’ (Van Dooren, 2018: 93). Consequently, when thinking about the future, Haraway prefers speculation to the certainty of either technological utopias or climate crisis dystopias; rather, the future is an implication of a ‘thick now’ (1).
Key to Haraway’s analysis is, then, the preservation of strangeness. Her idea of kinship does not promote finding a familiarity in non-human beings that is in itself unfamiliar, as she states:
Kin making requires taking the risk of becoming-with new kinds of person-making, generative and experimental categories of kindred, other sorts of ‘we’ . (120)
As Jeffrey Alexander wrote, trauma in a cultural sense potentially functions as an ‘expansion of the circle of the we’ (2). Individuals formerly not connected are brought together by the cultural resonance of a past event; yet, these individuals do not have to have experienced this event themselves. As we signaled that climate trauma might be classified as a cultural trauma, such an ‘expansion of the circle of we’ might be read in terms of climate trauma inspiring posthuman sense.
However, Haraway insists that such categories of kindred can only in connection to a resistance to all-encompassing systems of ‘knowing’, or ‘representing’. Echoing Cohen, who argued for a practice of “disidentification” and for the “disoccupation [of] the metaphorics of home’, Haraway rejects idealizations of Earth as preventing us from confronting the present (Cohen qtd, in Haraway 2016: 87). Consequently, Haraway’s idea of ‘representing’ is not so much a linguistic affair, but an activity rooted in storytelling, material practices and sciences.
Thinking with these perspectives, ‘anticipatory memory’ could be rephrased not as a existing because of the memory of the future, but because of a lack thereof. Staying/living together with the violent strangeness of climate crises implies embracing unrepresentability as the idea that climate change cannot be grasped. Moreover, these perspectives suggest a complication of our perception of temporality; Weber’s account is inspired by what she observes to be the entanglement of past and present; for Haraway, the future is a ‘relationship’, prompted by the social by the present.
Thus, ‘anticipatory’ memory could maybe be rethought as not only being inspired by far-of futures represented through dystopian tropes, but as a moral call issued by climate trauma happening in a present that, in turn, will give way to uncertain futures. As such,
anticipatory memory as a concept allows for a degree of speculation that befits the unstable nature of climate trauma and its unrepresentability.
Conclusion
Characterized by its paradoxical nature, climate change ‘resists’ representation. This resistance has been investigated with the aid of a wide range of concepts and approaches. In the first section of this chapter I have therefore touched upon the paradoxical nature of climate change as existing in between geographical micro- and macro scales, and in between temporalities. I have moreover attempted here to sketch the paradox between the ‘slow violence’ of climate change and the spectacular tropes dystopia and cultural fantasy.
Such dichotomies have political consequences. I have made the suggestion that these consequences can be interpreted with the aid of the concept of anticipatory memory, although the obstructions to the representation of climate change in turn nuance this concept as it relies in itself on representation.
In an attempt to interpret anticipatory memory as functioning not as the political consequence of a cultural trope, I have briefly touched upon an aesthetics that preserves unrepresentability. Such aesthetics can be regarded as resonating with Lyotard’s perspective on the ‘open wound’ of memory that will be inherently closed by any form of representation. Naturally, this results in a double bind as the discussed aesthetics, exemplified in the New
York Times Magazine issue, of course imply representation.
Thinking with this approach however, unrepresentability I have argued should not be approached as a ‘solvable’ issue, either by replacing it with representation, or by refraining from representing. Rather, thinking with the posthuman perspective as offered by Donna Haraway in conversation with Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Weber, another perspective of sticking with the idea of unrepresentability could be distinguished. In this sense, Haraway’s notion of ‘staying with the trouble’ and Weber’s ‘living together’ could in this respect be regarded as a mode of recognizing the inherently disastrous effects of climate crises as unimaginable. This recognition politically asks for a way of ‘living together’ with climate grief and trauma rather than attempting to overcome it. ‘Staying with’ in this context would, then, point to a rejection of the idea that climate crises are in any way solvable if current ways of thinking anthropocentrically are sustained. The abandoning of such modes of thinking however, require us to ‘stay with the trouble’ of interspecies solidarity and empathy.
However, since the main objective of the following two chapters is investigate unrepresentability through the different perspectives presented by the different objects
central to them, these more elaborate philosophical perspectives will resonate mostly in the background in the proceeding of the argument. In the third chapter, for example, I will further inquire into climate grief, a notion that echoes the notion of ‘staying with’ by defying the traditional frames of what can be the subject of mourning.
In the next two chapters, the notions of slow violence, the dichotomies in scale, and the notion of anticipatory memory will be further elaborated on in the context of unrepresentability and in conversation with the objects. Consequently, these notions can be further interpreted and nuanced.
II
Unrepresentability Unearthed: Peggy Weil’s 88 cores
Introduction
‘An unfathomable place [..] beyond our scope of knowledge’ is how Dutch climate scientist Maarten Loonen describes his main work base, Spitsbergen, in an interview (Salverda 2019. The article, however, is titled ‘Maarten Loonen’s Climate Change Grief’. Elaborating on the changing circumstances at Spitsbergen, he frequently speaks while ‘tears well up in the corners of his eyes’. When asked whether he still conducts his research ‘out of scientific curiosity’, he answers ‘with conviction’ that his main motivation is now ‘fear’.
Over time, the Arctic has become the symbol per excellence to represent the effects of climate change, with the discourse of climate science prominently bridging the gap between the factual destruction of the Arctic and public imagination. However, this discourse is increasingly informed by panic and grief. Peter Wadham, the British scientist, wrote in his memoir A Farewell to Ice (2016) that the loss of the Arctic feels like a ‘spiritual impoverishment’ (5). If Gillian Rose (2013) termed Adorno’s oeuvre the ‘melancholy science’, that term could now very well be applied to climate science. The status of the Arctic as crucial to our scientific understanding and cultural imagination of climate change can be explained as due to its hypervisual, radical changes; by 2050, the Arctic sea ice will be completely absent each summer, changing the appearance of planet Earth, a process Wadham dubs ‘Man’s first major achievement in reshaping the face of his planet’ (6).
These representations of the Arctic resonate in turn with an aesthetic tradition of representing the Arctic. Historically, the Arctic has spoken strongly to the popular imagination, being one of the last ‘terrae incognitae’, a sometimes-scary place of mystery, associated with perpetual white snow masses and ghostly silence (Wilson 2003). The Arctic figured prominently in especially Romantic literature, poetry and visual arts, ultimately giving way to the 19th century trope of the scientific voyage narrative (Bracket 2010). Indeed, the
Arctic provided a sublime experience; a state of being overwhelmed, astonished, but also fulfilled with admiration. In the context of climate science, such sublimity may take particular forms, as the loss of the Arctic consequents a newly sublime quality of not being able to fully comprehend the immanent destruction (Gallie 2018).
This lack of comprehension can thus be interpreted as both an aesthetic quality and central to climate science. Climate science is still not able to grasp the relation between
various causes of climate change and the scale of its consequences fully. An example of such scientific incomprehension might be found in the recent report on the effects of climate change on the Arctic in the last fifty years as published by Environmental; which found that the acceleration of global warming and the consequences for the climate globally were largely unpredictable, as they structurally exceeded expectations.
In what follows, I will therefore attempt to further interpret the relation between aesthetics, science and unrepresentability, by offering a close reading of Peggy Weil’s 2017 video and photo series 88 cores. This particular piece centers on the material of ice, making use of 88 pieces of the GISP2D ice core, drilled from a glacier in Greenland between 2007 and 2015 (Weil, ‘88 cores’). As such, it sheds light on climate science in the Arctic as a practice of practice of unearthing, conserving and researching ice as an object of memory, while simultaneously the ice, as a signifier of ungraspable climate change, resists knowledge.
In the first section of this chapter, I will therefore relate my close reading to the concept of anticipatory memory as presented in the previous chapter to uncover how 88 cores works with and nuances this notion. In the second section, I will elaborate further on how 88
cores complicates unrepresentability in terms of scale, and consequently, how it reflects the
concept of slow violence. To elaborate further on unrepresentability at the core of climate science, I will end this chapter with a third section on the reading of unrepresentability as complexity.
1. 88 cores: Materiality, Sublimity, Loss, Memory
88 cores was first exhibited at the New York based Climate Museum. Established in 2015 in
the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, the museum officially is a nonprofit organization, aimed at employing the sciences, art, and design to ‘inspire dialogue and innovation that address the challenges of climate change, moving solutions to the center of our shared public life and catalyzing broad community engagement’ (The Climate Museum, ‘About Us’). Being explicit about its activism, the museum’s core objective is raising climate awareness both in its exhibition galleries and outside. In this sense, the museum reflects the (anticipated) entanglement of representation and political mobilization with regard to climate change that can be detected across the cultural landscape.
88 cores consists of a series of photographs and an almost four and a half hour-long
video, both showing various pieces of an ice core, the so-called GISP2D Ice Core. This core was drilled between 1989-1993 as part of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project, a scientific research
project aimed at tracing climatic variations throughout the Arctic’s history. In the video installation, which shows the cores zoomed-in and lightened up, the ice displayed varies in its appearance, its colors ranging from an almost blackish deep blue to white. These color variations are a result of ascending degrees of pressure on the ice and, closer to the surface, compressed snow. Some parts of the core have been broken, shattered, or fragmented due to the drilling process or the core’s transportation to labs for scientific analysis; other variations in shape have been caused by changes, over time, in the core’s environment. Dust and debris reflect seasonal changes in this particular region of Greenland: like trees, ice cores exhibit banding as a visualization of age.
The science behind the GISP2D core however does not play a direct part within the work itself. The viewer does not learn anything in the ultimate outcome of the project, nor is she informed on its original aims or objectives. Instead, the viewer is invited to connect on an aesthetic, affective level to the incomprehensible scale the GISP2D project entails; apart from the cores stretching over 3218 meters long, they cover a time scale up until an estimated 157.000 years before present. Composed by Celia Hollander, the music that accompanies the video is designed to play in a loop, consisting of long, sequenced tones that slope downward and are accompanied by rhythmic sounds that remind one of dripping water. Consequently, the viewer is invited to ‘descend’ both down the geographical scale of an imaginable glacier and down the time scale that the ice core represents.
The combination of the repetitive music and deep colors of the video thus invite the viewer to be emerged, even hypnotized. On first sight, this might be distributing a sublime quality to the ice, echoing a long historical tradition of representing ice and the Arctic. The sublimity present in 88 cores is however complicated by the knowledge that this is a representation of the ice core as scientific object; it regards the sublime experience of the loss of the sublime.
The materiality of ice is logically connected to the concept of loss. Ice implies a volatile temporality; it can melt, it will not be here forever, especially when drilled from the glacier it was once part of. In 88 cores however, a practice of immortalizing refuses this volatility as next to the video, a series of photographs of parts of the ice core is installed. These photographs are aligned at eye level, allowing them to communicate the ambience of a portrait gallery. As such, the larger, almost ungraspable scale of the larger ice core is literally ‘broken down’ into pieces, as if to invite the viewer to connect with each individual piece as well. Notably, in immortalizing the ice, Peggy Weil takes a different approach to ice as a
material than, to name a prominent example, Olafur Eliasson (2014), whose ice project for the Tate Modern in London had large blocks of Greenland ice slowly melt in front of the museum, turning the vanishing of the ice to a performance.
Weil’s approach of aligning the representations of ice in the museum however suggests a practice of memory. The exhibition of individual cores in a gallery suggest that they are ‘worthy’ of being captured and remembered. This association is strengthened by dimmed lights in the exposition hall that hand 88 cores an atmosphere of contemplation. From this point of view, the sequence as showed in the video remind one of the sober aesthetics of memorials, the deep colors reminiscent of the particular aesthetics of voids mentioned in the previous chapter. Breaking down the scale of unrepresentable violence by elaborating on the individual story can be regarded as a pattern in memory culture, the assumption seemingly being that such an isolated story can be related to empathically while the whole of the event cannot. In this sense, 88 cores appears to both imitate and comment on such a practice of memory.
This ‘aesthetics of memory resonates, too, with the material of ice itself. Ice conserves and preserves; it serves as a conservator and thus enabler of memory. 88 cores underlines this possibility while at the same time inviting the viewer to do ‘memory work’ in service of the ice itself as it invites the viewer to actively ‘anticipatorily’ remember the Arctic as a vanishing world.
How, then, can 88 cores be read in the light of anticipatory memory? It can be said that
88 cores implicates, or presupposes, a world without ice as its aesthetics revoke a ‘climate
change sublime’, and, in that sense, that it invokes an ‘anticipatory memory of the arctic’. Thinking back to my remarks regarding this concept, it can be added that 88 cores as a representation of climate change reflects a definition of climate violence that is reminiscent of Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence; 88 cores explicitly makes visible - or rather, points to the ungraspableness of- the changes that the Arctic is subjected to go unnoticed as the effect on our own life worlds are connected to them or to climate change at all. 88 cores furthermore refers explicitly to the vast time scale of climate change, ‘slowing down’ its violence.
Moreover, 88 cores complicates the notion of anticipatory memory by operating on different time scales. As Garrard (2016: 166) mentions on the memory of snow, ‘it is the assumption that climate change is about the future rather than the past’. However, as he suggests, what we know about how the climate and, subsequently, our planet will change is
based on past experiences and data, such as derived from ice cores. Our ‘memory’ of the future is thus always related to, or entangled with the past. In addition, the climate disaster in the Arctic is already happening in the present and in our lifetime.
88 cores thus suggests an anticipatory memory that is further complicated by time
scales and slowness. If we are commemorating anticipatorily, we commemorate things that are unknown to us, not because they exist in the future per se but because they exist in the present, but out of sight. Furthermore, if we do commemorate them because they exist in the future, we can only do so as a result of our knowledge of the past. The function of anticipatory memory might thus not be to motivate us to ‘stop climate change altogether, but to prepare us for what already is, albeit perhaps out of sight, and what is still to come.
fig 1. Weil. ‘88 cores’. Lisa Goulet .,The Climate Museum , The Climate Museum New York, digital image, February 8th 2018.
fig. 2. Weil. ‘88 cores’. Steve Whitehouse, The Climate Museum , The Climate Museum New York, digital image, February 8th 2018.
2. Disruptions and continuities of time and place
Situated across a large window, the video of 88 cores would also play during nighttime, the ice lighting up in the dark, visible also to random passers-by. The ice becomes part of the street décor, not so much a silent reminder of the ongoing climate crisis, but a mere part of daily life. It follows that 88 cores can be reread in interplay with the ‘88 chores’ of the people passing by. As such, ice and street together form an unintended performance that unites two worlds that we might experience as distant, but are connected in myriad ways.
The passing by of cars and passers-by holding plastic coffee cans can be read with Morton’s illustration of the ‘weird weirdness’ of ecological awareness (2016: 6). Morton describes how, on the individual’s scale, life as a part of this ‘massively distributed thing called species’ might seem futile, irrelevant, ‘not weird at all’: as individuals, we all start our car without meaning to harm our environment - a process and feeling that seems to resonate with the Berlant’s description of ‘ordinary disaster’ (8) . Morton however goes on to describe that imagining the action of starting the car has ‘unintended consequences’ that are ‘weirdly
weird’; personal, small actions and human histories become entangled with geological and deep time scales, a conceptual entanglement that we now have come to understand as the Anthropocene (8).
Put differently, the ‘slowness’ of both the climate disaster and climate trauma as caused and experienced by the passersby mingles and coexist with the spectacular, extraordinary violence of the melting ice caps. The setup of the artwork thus suggests both contrast and unity between the two ‘violences’ caused by climate change; the melting ice caps are visible, but only in the background, suggesting not so much a paradoxical relation between the spectacular and the slow, but rather, an interrelation between the two.
However, the ‘ordinariness’ of climate disaster as made visible through the video is apparently communicated by the sheer disinterest of people passing by the artwork. As such, the video registration of the artwork being present in the public sphere also implicates almost a performance of paying attention/not-paying attention to climate disaster; as a result, the memory work one can read into the exposition gesture is put into contrast, perhaps even overpowered by the ‘forgetfulness’ of its audience.
As such, 88 cores entails a reflection on the dynamics of memory and awareness rather than pushing for these social interactions to happen. In the same vein, although reflecting explicitly temporal scales with regard to the representation of climate change, 88 cores does not set out making these scales comprehensible by ‘visualizing’ the effects of climate change; the looping music and video combined seem to achieve the opposite effect of dizzying and confusing the spectator. As the video loops, temporal scales as originally visible in the ice cores are no longer in a linear sense detectable but suggest the incomprehensible time scale that is deep time. In its context, 88 cores appears to ‘stay with’ unrepresentability rather than providing ways for us to overcome unrepresentability. In the next section, I will look at this dynamic from yet another perspective, namely climate science as a mode to navigate unreprsentability.
fig, 3. Weil. ‘88 cores’. Video Still, 02:08, https://vimeo.com/341601598.
fig. 4. Weil. ‘88 cores: Screen Test, -1855 meters and -2952 meters.’ The New School, https://www.newschool.edu/pressroom/pressreleases/2018/88cores.htm . Accessed June 13 2019.
3. Unrepresentability as complexity
Not only does 88 cores reflect the changing conditions of our planet’s climate; the images used in Weil’s work also display technological and scientific evolution between 2004 and 2017, the period of time when the core was excavated. Some of the cores are bruised or broken as a result of their being carried to a lab for research; the oldest cores are shown in protective tubes. As such, the work entails a reflection on the practice of climate science. Climate science in turn, in its attempt to imagine the future of the planet’s climate has as its goal to represent an object that inherently resists representation. As 88 cores can be regarded as working with the unrepresentability of climate change, this reflection on science can therefore be read as the comtemplation, or visualization of how science as an epistemological mode negotiates unreprepresentability.
Earlier, unrepresentability has been interpreted in terms of the limits of representation, as researched within trauma theory, and, in extension thereof, with the aid of Derrida and Lyotard. To focus specifically on the paradoxes of climate science as denoted by
88 cores, unrepresentability can be interpreted in the sphere of complexity theory.
Climate change feedback serves as a prime example of a complex system. Complex systems, then, according to Cilliers, are composed of an innumerable amount of parts, each formed and complicated by its individual history. Although these components interact (in terms of exchanging energy, information, etc.), this interaction never reaches equilibrium. Moreover, information is imperfectly distributed; the components operating within the complex system have no ‘knowledge’ of how the others will behave, or what effects their own behavior will have. This is true both of social complex systems (i.e. economic systems, climate change to a certain extent) and non-social complex systems.
Cilliers (5) mentions the natural phenomenon of the snowflake as an example of a complex system. The ice of the GISP2D might be compressed to such an extent that the original structure of snowflakes that Cilliers cites might not exist anymore, what it does uncover is exemplary for complexity. As visible in the video for example, little bubbles contain air that is possibly thousands of years old. Such bubbles can provide us with data on ancient climates, however, how these factors have influenced in their historic reality is highly complex.
On a macro scale, the idea of a loop is key to today’s understanding of climate change in relation to the melting of the Arctic; climate change ‘feedback’ amplifies global warming. Infamously, the (lack of) sea ice provides such a ‘feedback loop’ as the white ice cools the
planet by reverberating sunlight back into the solar system. The loop of the 88 cores, then, echoes such the loop of climate feedback: if one watches the video long enough, it comes back to the oldest and deepest parts of the ice core. In that sense, the present ‘loops’ back to the past, resonating both Morton and climate science attempting to find explanations for our current climate in the ice’s archive. In 88 cores, the ice thus represents an object of science in the sense that it is an object containing data but at the same time suggests that these data might not be comprehensible at all. As a result, the viewer and the climate scientist, might not know exactly what they are looking at or looking for.
The study of complex systems, it is argued, demand solutions that equal the system’s complexity. In the case of climate science, this implicates that data, like those mined with GISP2D, are subjected to scientific models that escape human comprehension. As Cilliers argues, scientific models allow us to ‘simulate (..) complex systems without having to understand them’ (1-2). Within climate science, ‘the unrepresentable’ does not reside at the outside, but confronts us at the inside; climate science as a practice can thus not be regarded as ‘solving’ unrepresentability. In other words, simulation supersedes representation, while technology supersedes science as a human activity; climate science thus implies a posthuman epistemology, and prompts us to rethink human reason, the role of language, and the function of representation itself in the face of ever-evolving technology.
For Jameson (1991), postmodernism can be characterized as a ‘hyperspace’ in which technology becomes increasingly complicated and influential within human lives; as such, technology moves beyond the grasp of imagination. As such, for Jameson, the sublime experience under late capitalism consists of the experience of being ‘left behind’ by ever-evolving technology. However, with regard to climate science, this emotional state might as well be enhanced by the idea that we are not only ‘left behind’, by incomprehensible science but also ‘let down’ by the promise of technological progress; the science evolution does not per se imply progress or solutions. This conception of a postmodern, sublime condition points to a particular, emotions response to technology and climate science; Jameson seems to suggest that we affectively relate to phenomena that push the limits of representability, as was also illustrated by professor Loonen’s reaction to the disappearing Arctic. Although 88
cores has hinted at this, too, by capturing the ice cores as memory object and by inviting us to
relate to the ice as an aesthetic object, this relation will be further elaborated on in the next chapter.
Conclusion
As climate crises unfold, climate science plays a crucial role in interpreting and representing the state of the planet. Such a discourse has to navigate an inconceivable complexity. Peggy Weil’s work 88 cores reflects on science as communicator of the ungraspableness of climate change. It does so by connecting to the potential of ice as a carrier of memory and a signifier of loss and transience, employing an aesthetics in which a variety of cultural patterns can be detected.
88 cores appears to be elaborating on the aesthetic trope of the Arctic as mysterious and impenetrable as most prominently present in 19th century representations of the Arctic.
Moreover, elaborating on the materiality of ice as a transferor of memory, Weil’s art transforms the material into an object that can be remembered and grieved in itself as a sign of a lost world; in its aesthetics, 88 cores echoes cultural tropes associated with memory culture. 88 cores disarranges structures of memory by being situated in between deep time and daily realities, between geographically far removed and close by, and between slow and spectacular violence.
Yet, the origin of 88 cores as an object of science adds yet a different angle to its representation of climate disaster in the Arctic region. On the one hand, this particular background adds a particular politics to the work itself as the material itself potentially functions as a witness to the Arctic’s climate disaster; a message that is enhanced by its exhibition within the Climate Museum as a political and activist space. However, 88 cores does not reflect per se on climate science as a practice of truth-finding; rather, it points to the ungraspable complexity of climate change and its impact.
Climate change as a complex system demands a science that renders understandable what exceeds the grasp of human knowledge; as such, unrepresentability can be viewed as being at the core of climate science. As these complex models in turn cannot be mastered by humans, a new posthuman epistemology is created, in which forms of representation-as-knowledge can no longer be of use. Thinking with Jameson and Cilliers, unrepresentability as complexity points to a new stage of modernity in which the relation between human, technique and planet have to be redefined. Such a redefinition will in turn entail potentially entail grief and melancholia as it implies the memory of before these changes. In the next chapter, I will therefore attempt to take a closer look of how grieving in the Anthropocene potentially functions.
