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Imaginaries, Scenarios, and Materialities: The Arts as Part of Ecology
Peter J. Schneemann
Abstract
This contribution seeks to identify some of the methodological implications and challenges for art history as a discipline when confronted with the ecological imperative. There are clear societal expectations to ecological questions, approaches, and attitudes and a new rhetoric by artists and also scientists that anticipates the necessity of an ethical stand. The shift towards notions like sustainability was so fast and so radical, I argue, that we ought to take time to step back and reflect on its implications. I am especially interested in the intersection between the ethical dimension we now apply to artistic production (as a marker of value) and new interpretative perspectives that explore the arts’ potential to manifest new positionings in the world.
Key Words
Anthropocene; discourse analysis; ecological imperative; environmental discourse; environmental crisis; ethical responsibility; mediating; participation; proximity and distance; sustainability; transformation
1. Introduction
This contribution seeks to identify some of the methodological implications and challenges for art history as a discipline when confronted with the ecological imperative. There are clear societal expectations to ecological questions, approaches, and attitudes and a new rhetoric by artists and also scientists that anticipates the necessity of an ethical stand. A growing number of protagonists in the art world have outlined the potential for a new kind of engaged discourse, aimed at changing our vision of being in the world.[1] What are, however, the ideological implications of these paradigmatic moves when transferred to the discussion of the potentials of contemporary art? What is the special significance of art as a cultural technique that reshapes our understanding of and ability to act in the world? How do the humanities contribute to the fight against the environmental crisis? The reference to a state of urgency changes the way our disciplines and their methodological aspirations are perceived. After years of an evolving discourse on ecology, discussing new paradigms is especially important since the scientific positioning and its hermeneutical efforts have become profoundly linked to ethical demands. To answer these questions, we need to analyze the dialectical tension between proximity and distance—between the desire for ethical responsibility in the form of concrete engagement with the here and now (the everyday) versus the ecocritical ambition to do justice to relational systems and holistic models of the world. The shift towards notions like sustainability was so fast and so radical, I argue, that we ought to take time to step back and reflect on the implications. I am especially interested in the intersection between the ethical dimension we now apply to artistic production, as a marker of value, and new interpretative perspectives that explore the potential of the arts to manifest new positionings in the world.
Undoubtedly, the environmental discourse targets some of the most fundamental frameworks for discussing art. A commodification of the general question of the environmental crisis into traditional categories such as topic, genre, or subject matter and delegating pressing issues into a separate discourse dealing with eco-art as a new genre miss the point.[2] Rather, we need to focus on the mediation of the ecological imperative. The philosopher Hans Jonas formulated this ecological imperative, based on Immanuel Kant’s “Categorical Imperative”: “Act in such a way that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on earth.”[3] Taking Jonas’s sweeping maxim seriously means acknowledging that the traditional modes and formats of Eurowestern culture are at stake. What is the power of artworks as media to negotiate the relational system of human and more-than-human life on the planet? These cultural practices relate to specific modalities of various disciplines, Bildwissenschaft, literature, and intermediality studies, among others. The study of expanded art forms like installation art and performance seems especially promising. However, these questions also relate to specific disciplinary research practices, as, for example, visual anthropology, which has developed a highly self-reflective process that I will touch upon later in greater detail. Despite the specific modalities of various cultural practices, I offer ‘mediating’ as a key term that allows us to discuss the aesthetics and formations with which Eurowestern culture addresses and negotiates the ecological imperative. This assumption sounds somewhat simplistic. However, attending to the ecological imperative and to the medial power of artworks allows us to observe how modes of cultural techniques are transformed: from depicting to describing, from experiencing to participating.
In what follows, I will illustrate these paradigmatic shifts and analyze their conceptualization in art historical practice, describing the dialectical quality of three paradigmatic transitions: engagement versus distant analysis, from representation to situation, and contamination and complexity. After several decades of blooming ecological theory and praxis, we need a discourse analysis that allows us to critically reflect on the consequences, limitations, and temptations of a discourse that has, by now, developed its own conceptual history and ideological values.
2. Engagement versus distant analysis
In ecological discourse, one of the main tasks is to come to terms with the precarious oscillation between analysis (distant) and engagement (near). Consequently, an interesting dialectic between distance and proximity has developed. On the one hand, recent interest in the dimension of the planetary, the dive into the deep history of geological time, and the fascination with holistic relational systems signals an interest in immense spatial or temporal distance. On the other hand, there has been renewed stress on the now, the local, and the here.[4] The specificity of site, the appreciation of situated knowledge, and the concreteness of the everyday act mark this other direction.
As art history grapples with this dialectic, it is now common to call for a departure from the observing gaze and in its place adopt a gesture of bodily engagement: Options for action are sought. As part of this paradigm shift, we must investigate the implications of translating the ecological imperative into a new research praxis. Several layers of these paradigms can be described in their impact on the conceptualization of art. They are found both in the articulation of art as a medium in the environmental discourse and in the formation of new modes of approaching artworks. These engaged perspectives not only address artistic activism but chart an art historical retreat from detached and distanced analysis. The intention to take a stand or get involved marks the ecological imperative, as does rhetoric of responsibility, care, healing, or remediation. Such vocabulary attends to the desire to find models incorporating ethical responsibility and concrete engagement into the praxis of research and scholarship.
On a phenomenological level, we are talking about a gesture of getting close. The old museum label reads, “Do not touch.” Now, however, the issue is how the material world touches us and how we are, in turn, touched by it. This is a perspective that emphasizes being in the world, one that aims to reform patterns of perception and action and wants to overcome the model of standing opposite or opposed to the world. I refer here to the philosophy of the “aesthetic experience of the world,” by Wolfgang Welsch, and Pascal Gielen’s idea of situational ethics.[5] And it is social anthropology, not philosophy or art history, that has offered powerful reformulations of how to access and understand the world. For example, Macarena Gómez-Barris and Tim Ingold, in separate monographs, have masterfully explored the significance of the body and the role of the senses. Their treatments recognize the importance of touch and submerged perspectives, rendering them essential components for reflecting on the role of perception in the Anthropocene and the ecological crisis.[6] It is no coincidence that the body plays a decisive role as an organ of perception. The threat of ecological disaster is not a detached one. Pollution and the toxic enter our bodies—both the environment and its contamination become us. This means that the old paradigm of the sublime, a moment of aesthetic limit and distance, no longer works.[7] We are part of the world we try to conceptualize as environment.
Not only do engaged perspectives ennoble artistic activism, they also enact a methodological turn, replacing detached and distanced analysis with the intention to take a stand and get involved. Concomitant with the exploration of the forms of perception and senses on which our discipline is built, the foundational claim of critical distance as a doctrine of academic positioning is up for discussion. So how does engagement as a moment of being involved and clearly positioning oneself for the cause relate to ideology-critical deconstruction? How do appeal and imperative relate to interpretation? Are concepts such as the open work of art (Umberto Eco) or Leerstellentheorie (Wolfgang Iser, Konstanz School), which have been immensely influential in the humanities, made obsolete by the new emphasis on authorship/artistship?[8] Concepts like identity and the biographical experience of the protagonists have regained importance as criteria—markers of authenticity that rhetorically perform the metaphorical work of a body getting close.
Under the maxim of engagement, out of this renegotiation of proximity and distance, other paradigms that shaped modernism come into focus, too. For example, conceptualizations such as the fragment have shifted. Contemporary interest in the holistic is a rejection of one of the central moments of modernity, the apotheosis of fragmentation. For critical deconstruction, the fragmentary possessed a fundamental value, a departure from the great whole, a symbol for the promise of totality.[9] When fragments cannot be put back together, a space for reinterpretation is created. “The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity,” as Linda Nochlin called it, describes a figure of thought that is equally as decisive for concepts of the modernistic world’s self-perception as it is difficult for ecocritical objectives.[10] One of the foremost voices of ecological thinking today, Tim Ingold, vows to overcome this fragmented perception of the world. For Ingold, the rhetoric of fragments “deaden[s]” the world:
Cut out from these currents – that is, reduced to objects – they [(things)] would be dead. Having deadened the meshwork by cutting its lines of force, thus breaking it into a thousand pieces, you cannot pretend to bring it back to life by sprinkling a magical dust of ‘agency’ around the fragments.[11]
The way Ingold picks up the notion of the fragment as a problem in our perception of the world shows parallels to the discourse of deconstruction as critical method.
Deconstructive approaches, according to Bruno Latour or Rita Felski, might now be reaching their limits.[12] Indeed, those who advance the call for post-critique scholarship stridently call for a turn away from critical analysis, away from French post-structuralism. And even interpretation is discussed as a limited, almost negative ambition.[13] Post-critical scholars ask, “What is the cost of […] continually deconstructing, denaturalizing and demystifying the world as we know it? And, equally as important, what could we do otherwise?”[14]
However, in line with Jacques Rancière’s discussion of the “emancipated spectator” in 2009, the question is evident: To what degree does the instruction to participate take on an authoritarian impulse once this is proclaimed the ultimate condition?[15] How far does the imperative contradict our understanding of the autonomy of the artwork? It may well be that we must frame the imperative not as a pedagogical directive but as an appeal, an invitation to act.
Suppose one does want to understand this shift beyond polemical phrasing. In that case, one only has to look at one programmatic (and highly acclaimed) example of artistic self-positioning, one that uses the potential of the manifesto as a format to replace reflection with a call for engagement. Rasheed Araeen’s “Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century” was performed at the Manifesto Marathon in London 2008 and reprinted in Third Text (2009). The artist, born in 1935 in Karachi, is the founder of Third Text and a participant at documenta 14. What kind of rhetoric does this manifesto use? Any formal alienation, self-referential thoughts, or artificial complexity is explicitly avoided. The Western tradition of the artistic manifesto, working with refusal and deconstruction, is reversed. The direct call for concrete action replaces the call for analysis as a gesture of distancing.
Let me quote:
Only when people are in a position to use their own creative potentials, which can be enhanced by an artistic imagination, will a change occur. What the world now needs is rivers and lakes of clean water, collective farms and the planting of trees all over the world […]. We humans are the gift of mother Earth, and it is now our duty as its guardians to protect the earth from impending disaster.[16]
Mapping the terms reveals a tipping figure: acting, engaging, participating, caring, and remediating all mark the attempt to overcome the limits of critical distance. “Critique is not enough” was already a battle cry in the 90s, a call for activism in the arts. Now it becomes an endeavor to incorporate a new dimension of commitment and involvement into academic discourse, too. Engaged perspectives formulate an invitation to shape real-life conditions through interventions on the collective consciousness, an important prerequisite for an attitude of hospitality and genuine involvement.
3. From representation to situation
For art history, the paradigm of engagement has ignited a fundamental crisis of established concepts: of mediation, mimesis, representation, and display. I would argue that we are facing a general problematization of the representational mode. There are two reasons for this claim. First, documentary observation tends to maintain the old attitude of staying outside, of being detached. The renegotiation of being in the world—situation, situatedness—cannot be divorced from form or modes of enactment and engagement.[17] Second, the ecological crisis is not solely a consequence of excess carbon emissions; it is also a failure of representation. We must acknowledge it as a crisis of both perception and mediation.[18] The limitations and power of media—not only art, but all cultural products—are under renewed scrutiny. There are good reasons to acknowledge that one of the core issues of the environmental catastrophe lies in the formats used by politicians, journalists, artists, and scientists to convey the situation to the public. While the data may be precise and, at this point, practically self-evident, charts have proven to be an ineffective way to develop a new, ecological culture.[19] The failure of representation is not on the level of content. The concept of representation as a mode has itself become problematic because it offers aesthetic transformation. For example, the landscape as a framed aesthetic format, one that trains the viewer to retreat to a broader, safer perspective, has been questioned for decades.[20]
There is a growing interest in environmental motive, for example, in the genre of photography. One need only look at Sebastião Salgado’s impact or the interest in the Anthropocene project of Edward Burtynsky.[21] However, the limitations of our aesthetic gaze are undeniable. It has been rightly pointed out that even early modern artists such as J. M. W. Turner exploited the aesthetic effects of air pollution in London in a way that detaches phenomenology from broader social and political implications that call for action.[22]
The logical question that arises at this limit of the concept of representation is, how can we think of the image differently? How can we conceptualize art beyond representation, describing a different function than framing the world in order to put it on display?
To attempt an answer, I draw on the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who became interested in human behavioral patterns in society as early as the 1960s. His approach to the explanation of behavior took a different path than, for instance, consumer studies, which nowadays inquires about environmental behavior in psychology. In his approach to moral philosophy, he reevaluates the idea of individual freedom and deconstructs the notion of a “disengaged reason” as a basis for action.[23] Instead, he describes an ethical orientation of the individual towards the collective and the community’s concretely negotiated values. Explicitly referring to the community and analyzing how values are negotiated, in my view Taylor offers a valuable perspective for discussing the potential of the arts. In addition to his contribution to ethics, what I find particularly interesting is Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary.” Taylor focuses “on the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends.”[24] In Taylor’s text, terms like ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ do not appear: his focus is broad historical and political processes.[25] However, the inclusion of environmental issues into the concept of the social imaginary may help to overcome a certain conundrums in ecocritical discourse: The traditional idea of a separately existing nature, a given, pure sphere, has led to a depoliticization.[26] In the discourse of imaginaries, the ideological (re-)construction of our interests and values, ones we negotiate with nature, can find a place. In fact, Taylor becomes relevant for art historians because mediality and mediation play a central role in social imaginaries. Media are the site(s) where ethical action is defined, contested, and negotiated. For Taylor, the force driving toward models of action lies in these media: “The social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.”[27]
Taylor suggests that collective practices, micro-choices, and communication are based on a primarily visual understanding of the world, one that is both more complex and more direct than a mere depiction or diagram: “It is, in fact, that largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, within which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have.”[28] How can we transform these “unstructured and inarticulate understanding[s]” into something we can communicate and negotiate?
Acknowledging the role of the arts and their contribution to the social imaginary could lead us to another significant term that might be useful. I suggest that the concept of the scenario is an important addition to Taylor’s work on the power of media. One thread of the scenario notion that finds its echo in theater leads back to the Cold War and, maybe not by chance, to Hollywood and the “ecology of fear.”[29] Linked to the RAND organization, founded in 1962, we find the name of Herman Kahn.[30] He was certainly aware that scenario is a concept that, like the term ‘avant-garde,’ comes from military discourse. A physicist and cyberneticist by training, Kahn made his name as a developer of strategy models. He tried to find ways to deal with the unimaginable consequences of a nuclear confrontation:
A scenario results from an attempt to describe in more or less detail some hypothetical sequence of events. Scenarios can emphasize different aspects of future history […]. The scenario is particularly suited to dealing with several aspects of a problem more or less simultaneously. By the use of a relatively extensive scenario, the analyst may be able to get a feel for events and the branching points dependent upon critical choices. These branches can then be explored more or less systematically. The scenario is an aid to the imagination.[31]
One might use Kahn’s idea of the scenario to re-evaluate cultural products such as visual art. Imagination and scenario complement each other: social imaginaries provide the “raw material” from which scenarios are developed, but scenarios, in turn, alter the social imaginary from which they ensue.[32] Expanded art forms, happenings, and spatial installations may be read in their potential to serve as tools for exploring options for our future. These genres, developed in the 1960s, go far beyond the traditional modes of representation and display.[33] Instead of offering a composed image of the world that the individual viewer gazed at, the public was invited to enter a multisensorial environment, thereby transforming itself into an acting agency amidst others. Similar to the landscape garden in the eighteenth century that envisioned a set of possible roles open to visitors, the potential of scenarios, artificial environments, and expanded art forms has to be acknowledged in terms of its performative potential. However, the new scenery is less the pastoral harmony, more the unruly or feral empty lot, the unturned compost or untilled field, the ruin.
It is not coincidental that this concept has been revived in the discourse on the role of the arts in addressing the environmental crisis. For example, Eva Horn, in Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, explains their value in the modern world: “Even if scenarios are invented worlds, they are conceived as possible processes with a given starting point in known reality; as potential courses of events, they are meant to clarify which factors might play important roles in deciding on the situation’s outcome.”[34] Indeed, as Ulrich Beck, the father of the sociological analysis of risk, writes, “only by imagining and staging world risk does the future catastrophe become present—often with the goal of averting it by influencing present decisions.”[35] The complex construction of time and space, which the term scenario addresses in the form of chrono-topoi, is essential in the discourse of ecology and crisis, since time models that exceed the scale of the human are used both in backward- and forward-looking imaginations.[36]
It becomes particularly exciting when the fear of the future is negotiated through historical, failed utopias. I’m thinking here, for example, of Ben Rivers’ film work Urth on Biosphere 2, filmed inside the historical complex; it is a cinematic meditation on past ambitions to operate constructed environments as a vision of the future with a nostalgic aesthetic.
As a contemporary example, the monumental environments by Pierre Huyghe do not evoke a romantic version of nature, but rather a complex scenario in which the vocabulary of culture interacts with a multiplicity of agencies.[37] One expanded art form that combines the symbiotic relationship of the scenario and the social imaginary is the format of happenings, as developed by Allan Kaprow in the 1960s. His scores work with collective actions and the quality of specific sites. Seminal happenings include his piece, Household, in addition to ritual-like acts by artists such as Anna Halprin and Judy Chicago, developed as interactions with nature. The stress on performative dimensions is highly relevant for more recent developments in artistic strategies because they are a form in which social interaction and bodily experience are used to test interwoven attitudes towards living and nonliving entities.[38] The aesthetic concept of being finds its articulation in the situation. Artists test and challenge our sensorial tools, develop scenarios that work by drawing on a new “situational ethics.”[39] The potential of location and relationality is tested. To what degree can they offer an innovative mode of involvement and acting while evoking complex relational systems, even designing new anachronic layers? Situation appears as a social setting in which we not only negotiate our imaginaries but participate in a rehearsal, discovering our roles in interacting in, and with, the shared world. Whereas the scenario tries to explore options for the future, the challenge of the situation is coping with the present.
4. Contamination and complexity
As I have shown in the previous sections, acknowledging that we live in the Anthropocene means acknowledging that the aesthetic border, the possibility of staying untouched, has been destroyed.[40] The term ‘contamination’ describes a process that ostensibly leads to the loss of purity and a potentially harmful confrontation with a new substance. Our bodies are part of a world, and we have incorporated artificial materials like plastic into our previously “natural” bodies.[41] Out of this process of acknowledgment, the mediality and materiality of art emerge as key concepts for discussing the complexity of the ecological imperative. In fact, the questioning of the image—or better, of its representational potential—goes beyond the modernistic idea of self-reference of the medium. Now, the medium is being questioned and developed regarding its interconnectedness to the world.[42] Our concept of the materiality of art mirrors concepts of natural and artificial, of raw and processed, and is linked to concepts of transformation. The medium is being used and understood as an interface that allows us to directly negotiate our bodily and sensory situatedness and has the power to represent itself. It is significant that, after the stress placed on the image as an active force during the age of critique, we are now so interested in material cultures and the agency of materiality. Whereas there is a tendency to link the ecological perspective to the use of organic materials, I suggest we should think in broader terms.
I claim that the potential of eco-art becomes evident when we transcend the established ideas of subject matter and motif, on the one hand, and reconsider, on the other, the notion that art interacts with reality, creates reality, and transforms the physis (physique), a concept with roots that stretch out beyond modernity or the contemporary. While art used to be obsessed with mimesis, the idea that art mirrors reality, today we think about how art transforms reality. My point here is that the ecological perspective should not look at the materiality of the environment, like soil, as innocent and raw, and not as pure, but in its specificity and even in its link to “Kunststoff,” to artificiality. To explore this dimension of materiality, there is no better specialist than artists, with their affinity for alchemy, their aspiration for transformation.
The notion of contamination is capable of indicating much more than the pollution of the environment. Contamination recognizes the fragile and complex constitution of the environment and critically questions purity as a moral and normative claim. In a sense, then, what I have tried to describe in the figure of thought from section one—the fragment—appears here once again. Where the fragment fails to mirror our longing for the whole, the term ‘contamination’ encompasses a process that stands for the challenges of the Anthropocene. Issues such as pollution, toxicity, defilement, or infection mark the loss of the pure. Artists reflect on contamination by investigating the status of the materials used for their art, revealing complex semantic and sensual implications. The focus on materiality and its perceptions goes beyond the visual: Dimensions of touch and fear of infection add affective qualia to the ecocritical dimension. Perhaps contamination offers art a way to negotiate environmental issues by involving the beholder as a collective of perceiving and acting bodies.
The concept of contamination relates to a set of values linked to art and its institutions: the function of the sanctuary or refuge. In this respect, contamination is dialectically intertwined with concepts like the pure, the untouched, or the immaculate. Drawing on recent work in social anthropology, we have to investigate how far art history can open itself to processes of transformation and becoming instead of insisting on the stable and the enduring. A counter-concept to the sterile, exclusive, and morally rigid concept of purity, contamination contains potentially positive or liberating connotations: from this perspective, diversity and hybridity are desirable traits. How do we avoid substituting one universalism for another, from replacing a totalizing vision of nature versus culture with an equally totalizing vision of an authentic, harmonious nature-culture? Contamination is a concept that describes unruly sites, traces, and processes, that undermines the ideology of order, control, and purity. By mediating the toxic, by reminding us of the contaminated world in which we live, the arts can remediate the tempting ideologies of purity.[43] We should be ready to appreciate fluidity, the constant transformations, transmutations, and contaminations of our social imaginaries.
Prof. Dr. Peter J. Schneemann
peter.schneemann@unibe.ch
Prof. Dr. Peter J. Schneemann is full professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern and, since 2001, director of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art History. Since 2021, he serves as Senator and since 2023, as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. Since his fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, one of his areas of research concerns the modes of mediating ecological urgency. He is the Coordinating Principal Investigator (Lead) of the SNSF Sinergia Project “Mediating the Ecological Imperative: Formats and Modes of Engagement” (2021-2024) and the SNSF Project “Öffentlichkeiten der Kunst. Die Geschichte der Schweizerischen Plastikausstellung (SPA)” (2022-2026). He is editor of the book series “Kunstgeschichten der Gegenwart” and co-editor of “Terms. CIHA Journal of Art History.”
Published July 13, 2024.
Cite this article, Peter J. Schneemann, “Imaginaries, Scenarios, and Materialities: The Arts as Part of Ecology,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 11 (2024), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Hannah Baader, Gerhard Wolf, and Sugata Ray, eds., Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024); Heather Davis and Etienne Turbin, eds., Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015); Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl, eds., Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences (Oxon: Routledge, 2019).
[2] Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
[3] Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
[4] Noah Heringman, “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene,” Representations 129, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 56–85, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2015.129.1.56.
[5] Pascal Gielen, “Situational Ethics – An Artistic Ecology,” in The Ethics of Art, Ecological Turns in the Performing Arts, eds. Guy Cools and Pascal Gielen (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2014) 17-42; Wolfgang Welsch, “Wie kann Kunst der Wirklichkeit nicht gegenüberstehen, sondern in sie verwickelt sein?,” in Kunst und Wirklichkeit heute: Affirmation–Kritik–Transformation, ed. Lotte Everts (Bielefeld: transcript, 2015), 179-200.
[6] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Oxon: Routledge, 2011).
[7] Hans Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer: Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979).
[8] Umberto Eco, Opera Aperta: Forma E Indeterminazione Nelle Poetiche Contemporanee (Milan: Bompiani, 1962); Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Constance: Universitätsverlag, 1970).
[9] Lucien Dällenbach and Christiaan L. Hart-Nibbrig, eds., Fragment und Totalität (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1984).
[10] Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 37.
[11] Tim Ingold, “When ANT meets SPIDER: Social Theory for Arthropods,” in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, (Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 89-94, 93.
[12] Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Bruno Latour, “Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, (Winter 2004): 225-48.
[13] Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2004).
[14] Sara Callahan, Anna-Maria Hällgren, and Charlotta Krispinsson, “A Farewell to Critique? Reconsidering Critique as Art Historical Method,” Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 89, no. 2 (August 2020): 62, https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1786159.
[15] Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009).
[16] Rasheed Araeen, “Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” Third Text 23, no. 5 (October 2009): 683-84, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820903189327.
[17] Situated knowledge is a key theme of feminist STS scholarship, foremost among them Donna Haraway’s early work. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
[18] Malcom Miles, Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
[19] For example, novelist Amitav Ghosh argued in The Great Derangement that the modern novel has failed to communicate the urgency of the environmental crisis to a reading public: “the contemporary novel has become ever more radically centered on the individual psyche while the collective […] has receded, both in the cultural and fictional imagination.” Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 78. For an exploration of the failure of images and charts to create meaningful narratives around scientific data, cf. Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic, Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015); Heather Houser, Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
[20] W. J. T. Mitchell, “Preface to the Second Edition of Landscape and Power,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), viii.
[21] Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier, Anthropocene (Göttingen: Steidl, 2019). Shiralee Hudson Hill, “A Terrible Beauty: Art and Learning in the Anthropocene,” Journal of Museum Education 45, no. 1, (February 2020): 74-90, https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2020.1723357.
[22] James Nisbet, “Environmental Abstraction and the Polluted Image,” American Art 31, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 114-31, https://doi.org/10.1086/692160.
Caroline A. Jones, “Atmospheres and the Anthropogenic Image-Bind,” in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, eds. T.J. Demos, Emily E. Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee (New York: Routledge, 2021), 242-51.
[23] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
[24] Charles Taylor, “What Is a ‘Social Imaginary’?,” in Modern Social Imaginaries, eds. Dilip P. Gaonkar, Jane Kramer, Benjamin Lee, and Michael Warner (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23-30, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822385806-004.
[25] Glen Lehman offers a bridge between Taylor’s work and ecological thought. Cf. Glen Lehman, “Interpretivism, Postmodernism and Nature: Ecological Conversations,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 37, no. 7 (June 2011): 795-821, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453711410031.
[26] Erik Swyngedouw, “Immer Ärger mit der Natur: ‘Ökologie Als Neues Opium für’s Volk‘,“ PROKLA. Zeitschrift für Kritische Sozialwissenschaft 39, no. 156 (November 2009): 371–89, https://doi.org/10.32387/prokla.v39i156.420; Slavoj Žižek, “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses. Part I,“ published 2007 on Lacan.com, accessed August 8, 2023, https://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm.
[27] Charles Taylor, “What Is a ‘Social Imaginary’?,” in Modern Social Imaginaries, eds. Dilip P. Gaonkar, Jane Kramer, Benjamin Lee, and Michael Warner (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.
[28] Charles Taylor, “What Is a ‘Social Imaginary’?” 25.
[29] Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (London: Verso, 2020).
[30] The RAND Corporation was founded in 1948 as a think tank offering strategic advice to the United States Armed Forces. For more on the RAND Corporation, systems analysis, the use of models and scenarios, and the Cold War, cf. Fred M. Kaplan and Martin J. Sherwin, The Wizards of Armageddon (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1991).
[31] Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable (New York: Horizon Press, 1962), 143.
[32] Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp,1979).
[33] Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (1979): 30-44.
[34] Eva Horn, The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, trans. Valentine Pakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 14; Eva Kernbauer, “Anachronic Concepts, Art Historical Containers and Historiographical Practices in Contemporary Art,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 16 (June 2017): 1-17.
[35] Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2011), 30.
[36] Aleida Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne (Munich: Hanser, 2013); Aleida Assmann, “The Future of Cultural Heritage and Its Challenges,” in Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences, eds. Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl (Oxon: Routledge, 2019), 25-35.
[37] Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, living entities and inanimate things, Kassel 2011-2012.
[38] Peter J. Schneemann, “Performative Landscapes: A Paradigm for Mediating the Ecological Imperative?,” in Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature, eds. Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023), 393-414.
[39] Pascal Gielen, “Situational Ethics,” 17-42.
[40] Alexander Waszynski, “Berührbarkeit: Krisen der Distanznahme bei Hans Blumenberg und Jacob Burckhardt,” Komparatistische Internet-Zeitschrift (2019), https://www.komparatistik-online.de/index.php/komparatistik_online/issue/view/16.
[41] Monika Wagner, Dietmar Rübel, and Sebastian Hackenschmidt, eds., Lexikon des künstlerischen Materials: Werkstoffe der modernen Kunst von Abfall bis Zinn (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002).
[42] Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (London: Routledge, 2010); Tim Ingold, “Eine Ökologie der Materialien,” in: Macht des Materials/Politik der Materialität, eds. Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier (Zurich: diaphenes, 2014), 69, 71.
[43] Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); Roger Fayet, Verlangen nach Reinheit oder Lust auf Schmutz? Gestaltungskonzepte zwischen rein und unrein (Vienna: Passagen, 2003).