Agamben is very intersting, but he is avant garde in the strangest way,
being a radical rethinking of old Italian Cathoic nostra -- in ten years'
time he'll be being criticized in the same way maybe (and I can't say that
Deleuze is being criticized in this way for sure) as Deleuze is now, out of
very, very old scholastic preoccupations that stay with us because no one is
ready to be convinced by the absolutist certainties that underly the
religious conviction.

Discuss.

P

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to
> poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Alison Croggon
> Sent: 26 September 2005 00:52
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [POETRYETC] Climate change &c
>
> Interesting article on the (lack of) literary reaction to
> climate change, which makes me wonder if it is really the
> case. I know it's one of the things that really haunts my
> own poetry. But to be less egocentric, environmental
> degradation has always been a big part of Kinsella's work, or
> Peter Minter's, just to pick a couple of contemporary poets;
> and I think also of WG Sebald's image of human beings as a
> slow conflagration devouring the planet. Anyone else have any
> thoughts?
>
> PS, Judy, I have this feeling that politics is being slowly
> reinvented too.
> It's all happening under the radar of the mass media, which
> is why it's not reported about...and it's hard to know what
> will result. I am not entirely pessimistic, though it's hard
> not to feel a bit black when you look at how things are and
> how rapidly they have spiralled inwards over the past five
> years. I'm presently reading a fascinating book which
> rethinks politics by Giorgio Agamben; it's both unsettlingly
> prescient and, insofar as I understand it, gives some basis
> for rethinking what a politics is in an age of creeping tyranny.
>
> Best
>
> A
>
>
> http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1576251,00.html
>
> The burning question
>
> Robert Macfarlane argues that writers can play a crucial role
> in helping us to imagine the impact of climate change
>
> Saturday September 24, 2005
> The Guardian
>
> The effects of climate change are now perceptible in language
> as well as in degrees Celsius. On Banks Island, in the
> Canadian High Arctic, environmental shifts are happening so
> fast that the Inuvialuit inhabitants do not have the words to
> describe what they now see around them. New species of fish,
> bird, and insect have migrated north to the island, following
> the isobars. Autumn thunder and lightning have been witnessed
> from Banks for the first time.
> "Permafrost" is no longer tolerable as a term, for the ground-ice is
> melting: in Sachs Harbour, the main settlement on Banks,
> buildings are subsiding and road surfaces are slushing up.
>
> There have been disappearances as well as arrivals on Banks.
> The permafrost melt has caused an inland lake to drain into
> the sea. The intricate stages of hardening through which the
> sea-ice around Banks cycles - frazil, grease, nilas, gray -
> are no longer being fulfilled in many places during summer,
> for the temperature of the sea water is spiking above the key
> freeze-point of 28.6°F.
>
> The Inuvialuit culture is unprepared for these rapid fluxes.
> Old words (the name of an inland lake) are now unaccompanied
> by their phenomena; new phenomena (a fork of flame in a
> previously lightningless sky) are unaccompanied by words.
>
> Contemplation of the situation on Banks Island prompts a
> broader question about the relationship of climate change and
> language. Where is the literature of climate change? Where is
> the creative response to what Sir David King, the
> government's chief scientific adviser, has famously described
> as "the most severe problem faced by the world"?
>
> Cultural absences are always more difficult to document than
> cultural outpourings. But the deficiency of a creative
> response to climate change is increasingly visible. It
> becomes unignorable if we contrast it with the abundance of
> literature produced in response to the other great
> eschatological crisis of the past half-century - the nuclear threat.
>
> The authoritative bibliography of American and British
> nuclear literature runs to over 3,000 items: it includes Ian
> McEwan's oratorio "Or Shall We Die", JG Ballard's The
> Terminal Beach, Martin Amis's Einstein's Monsters, Raymond
> Briggs's When The Wind Blows, as well as work by Edward
> Abbey, Ray Bradbury, Upton Sinclair, Neville Shute. This
> literature did not only annotate the politics of the nuclear
> debate, it helped to shape it. As well as feeding off that
> epoch of history, it fed into it.
>
> There is nothing like this intensity of literary engagement
> with climate change. Climate change still exists principally
> as what Ballard has called "invisible literature": that is,
> the data buried in "company reports, specialist journals,
> technical manuals, newsletters, market research reports,
> internal memoranda". It exists as paper trail, as data
> stream. It also exists, of course, as journalism, as
> conversation, and as behaviour.
> But it does not yet, with a few exceptions, exist as art.
> Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the
> libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety?
>
> The question is pressing. For an imaginative repertoire is
> urgently needed by which the causes and consequences of
> climate change can be debated, sensed, and communicated. Bill
> McKibben, author of the premonitory classic The End of Nature
> (1989), has written of how individuals would not act against
> climate change - altering their habits of consumption,
> lobbying policy-makers - until they felt "fear in their
> guts". Literature has a role to play in inducing this gut
> feeling, for one of its special abilities is that of allowing
> us to entertain hypothetical situations - alternative lives,
> or futures, or landscapes - as though they were real. It has
> a unique capacity to help us connect present action with
> future consequence.
>
> The problem is that climate change is not - not yet -
> apocalyptic in its consequences. Apocalypse comes swiftly and
> charismatically, and as such offers great opportunities for
> the literary imagination. This is attested to by the extent
> and age of the literature of apocalypse, beginning with
> Revelation, with its war-chant rhythms, its grim mandala-like
> structure, its incantation of massive death foretold.
>
> By contrast, climate change occurs discreetly and
> incrementally, and as such, it presents the literary
> imagination with a series of difficulties:
> how to dramatise aggregating detail, how to plot slow change.
> Though the cumulative impact of climate change may be
> catastrophic, and may push us into a post-natural world, this
> is not yet scientifically certain. And so climate change does
> not yet have its millenarian icons: the grim brilliance of
> the nuclear flash point (a sudden sunrise which is really the
> last dusk), or the plump red button beneath its clear plastic
> flip-case, or the kitchen-table fallout shelter.
>
> Indeed, any literature of climate change would, for the time
> being, have to steer determinedly away from apocalyptic
> scenarios. For the modern environmental movement has, in the
> past, tried to bring about social change by harnessing the
> power of nightmares. In the 1970s and early 1980s in
> particular, dire dystopian predictions were made about
> over-population, imminent Gulf Stream shut-off, and sudden
> sea-level rises. All were proved wrong, and the damage to the
> credibility of environmentalism is unrepaired.
> Climate-change sceptics gladly trip off a list of these
> zealously envisaged
> catastrophes: lurid acts of fairground clairvoyance which
> have never come true.
>
> So any literary response to the present situation would need
> to be measured and prudent, and would need to find ways of
> imagining which remained honest to the scientific evidence.
> It might require, one would think, forms which are chronic -
> which unfold within time - and are therefore capable of
> registering change, and weighing its consequences. And it
> might require literary languages which are attentive to the
> creep of change; which practise a vigilance of attention and
> a precision of utterance (one thinks back to Thoreau,
> recording the day each year on which Walden Pond first froze,
> or of Ruskin, in his home on the shores of Coniston, making
> painstaking daily measurements of the blueness of the sky, to
> check the effects of air-pollution upon its colour, or of
> Gilbert White ascertaining the different keys in which owls
> of different woods hooted). But presumably there would be
> room, too, for more bumptious vernaculars: for satire, say,
> or for polemic. Might John le Carré, who took on the global
> pharmaceutical industry so angrily and well in The Constant
> Gardener, do the same for the politics of climate change?
>
> An odd parallel with our current situation can be found in
> the 19th century.
> For the Victorians of the later 1800s lived in the
> fear-shadow of their version of climate change: global
> cooling. In 1862, the physicist William Thomson - better
> known as Lord Kelvin - made public his belief that the sun
> was cooling without renewal of its energy. Owing to the
> irreversible seep of entropy, Thomson announced, the solar
> system was condemned to what was christened "Heat Death". The
> Earth would slowly lose the benefit of its lantern and
> radiator, and would gradually become encased in ice. A
> "universal winter", as Thomas Huxley put it, would ensue.
>
> Solar physics immediately became a hot topic of discussion
> among Victorians, who were appalled at this demonstration of
> the universe's indifference to humanity. And the idea of
> global cooling precipitated quickly into the literary culture
> of the period. It can be found, among other places, in the
> work of Samuel Butler, James Thomson, Richard Jefferies,
> William Morris, GF Watts, Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin (who
> noted in his autobiography that he found it "intolerable"
> that humanity should be "doomed to complete annihilation
> after such long-continued slow progress"), John Ruskin ("I
> want to believe in Apollo - but can't - the sun is said to be
> getting rusty (is not it?)", he wrote anxiously in a letter
> to a friend on 19 November 1862), Thomas Hardy, and HG Wells
> (in The War of the Worlds it is the cooling of the solar
> system that forces the Martians to "carry warfare sunwards").
> The annual death of the sun at the solstice, and the daily
> death of the sun at sunset, took on new and sinister
> resonances within fiction and poetry of the period. Old myths
> - especially the Norse myths of Ragnarok and Balder, in which
> a young hero dies in his youthful vigour - were
> rehabilitated, and used to trope the sun's extermination.
>
> There are differences between then and now, of course; not
> least that what frightened the Victorians was the universe's
> passivity to human action, whereas what frightens us is its
> reactiveness. But it is clear that Victorian worries at Heat
> Death, and the prospects for life on a cooling Earth, led to
> a great cultural output, which partly debated the science and
> partly dramatised it. "Imaginative figuration and scientific
> inquiry," wrote Gillian Beer, in a fine essay on the subject,
> "operated in inseparable co-operation with one another." It
> is a "co-operation" which has not happened in our period.
>
> But signs of change exist; initiatives are afoot. David
> Buckland's visionary Cape Farewell project has recently
> sailed artists - including Antony Gormley, McEwan and Rachel
> Whiteread - to the Arctic, with the aim of "illustrating the
> workings of this crucial part of the planet, and engaging the
> public and schools in the debate about climate change". The
> RSA has launched an excellent "Arts & Ecology" programme,
> with the aim of bringing together environmentalists,
> scientists, and writer-thinkers "to explore the roles and
> responsibilities of contemporary art in ecology"; among their
> events is a public discussion on climate change and
> literature. The exemplary Open Democracy website is hosting a
> climate change debate. The latest edition of Granta magazine
> this month carries a feature called "The Weather Where You
> Are", in which writers across the world describe the
> meteorological shifts they have witnessed. And a fortnight
> ago, I was part of an unorthodox conference, hosted by the
> Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, at which
> 30 scientists and 30 artists - including McEwan, Philip
> Pullman, Caryl Churchill and Gretel Ehrlich - were brought
> together to discuss how art and science might collaborate in
> fighting climate change.
>
> So perhaps the cultural climate is changing. Or, perhaps,
> cultural change will be overtaken by the climate. For the
> effects of global warming may not remain discreet and
> incremental for long. Sudden climatic step changes may soon
> become evident, which radically displace precipitation
> patterns, changing the moisture economies of whole
> territories, with drastic consequences. Last month, for
> instance, a senior Chinese environmentalist predicted that
> China's "arid-north, wet-south" geographical paradigm would
> invert within 15 years. It has also been proposed, but not
> proved, that the severity of Hurricane Katrina was
> exacerbated by climate change. It has been shown that human
> influence more than doubled the risk of harm occurring during
> the murderous European heat-wave of 2003. In the future,
> indeed, it may become hard for writers not to take climate
> change as their subject.
>
>
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au Home page:
> http://alisoncroggon.com
>