A moving view: an introduction to Our Sentimental Natures

KEYWORDS:

• Sentiment
• environment
• emotion
• media

This special issue emerges from a much-deferred symposium in December 2020 in the midst of the Covid pandemic, that took place, like so much in the Anthropocene, in a strained atmosphere of both anxiety and hope. While the symposium unfolded on-line – we had hope, but not wild optimism – it was in dialogue with an exhibition of Nicole’s landscape photography, Deerubbin at Dawn: River lives on the Hawkesbury, that was firmly located in situ. The show, part of Sydney’s annual Head On Festival of photography, took place at an art gallery not half an hour’s train ride from the river. This council-run arts centre aimed to display the work of locals and art which represented their neighbourhood. The exhibition was programmed, no doubt, with a sense that it would speak to the affection of local residents for the waterway that flanks Hornsby Shire, passing through unceded Guringai, Garigal, Dharug and Darkinjung land.

Locals passing through for art classes or coming in off the street to the free exhibition would comment on their happy memories of the river, of childhood camping trips, fishing expeditions, or days of sailing with a much missed husband. Two weeks of daily sitting ‘with’ the exhibition, tucked under a grand staircase at the entrance of the remodelled nineteenth century mansion, inspired something of the same sense of connection, repetition and pleasure as the decade of paddling the same waters which had produced the exhibition’s photographs. Images taken through a long lens from the waterline, of oysterpoles and their cormorants, weed-decorated boats minding moorings, and Sydney red gums in the hazy distance of a hazard reduction burn, offered dreamy minimalist scenes of, in the words of one visitor ‘The Hawkesbury at its best’. After taking a tour of the exhibition while waiting for his grandson to emerge from chess class, another local resident commented to the photographer – ‘you’re a sentimental girl!’.

Both Deerubbin at Dawn, with its images of an ‘estuarine pastoral’, as described by Ian in the show’s catalogue essay, and visitors’ reactions to the exhibition, open up questions of mediated feeling that we aim to explore in this special issue. How do we recognize sentimentality about place and the non-human others? To paraphrase British novelist Graham Greene, are people accused of sentimentality simply guilty of holding sentiments different from their accusers? What political work does such feeling do? How do we trace feeling as it swirls around and emerges in media forms? How might sentimentality shape the ways we ways of looking and listening to mediated environments?

Sentimentality is often used critically and not just because of its relationship to feelings. Rather, sentimentality is so critiqued because it is thought to be founded emotions that are fundamentally dishonest, misleading, and unnecessary (Pugmire 2005, 128). As Benjamin Myers defines it, sentimentality is fraudulent because it provides ‘emotional satisfaction without emotional connection …’ (Myers 2016). To be ‘sentimental’ is not to be emotional but to have the wrong emotional relationship with the wrong subject or object, and to have this relationship for the wrong reasons. Thought of as a vice, this line of thinking goes, sentimentality allows us to avoid facing up to the hard surfaces of reality and reason. Sentimentality leads us to lose our sense of proportion, perspective, and objectivity is therefore lost under sentiment’s reign. Sentimentality might also be thought of an indulgence, that the feeling is more important than the object of those feelings. In such circumstances sentimentality borders on narcissism. There is also the sense that sentimentality might make us vulnerable, open to manipulation by clear-eyed others – to be sentimental is to be both deluded and duped.

Sentimentality hasn’t always had such a bad image. It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the term became a pejorative, a period when it began to be associated with a certain hegemonic notion of femininity. Indeed, labelling something sentimental – be it a position, thought or object – has come to entrain a collection of negative feminized terms (see Barcan and Johnson in this collection). Earlier in the eighteenth-century, sentimentality was framed more positively and had a largely ungendered meaning (Rainer 2015, XX). For the likes of enlightenment philosopher David Hume, for example, sentimentality was a positive attribute, positive because ‘a propensity to the tender passions makes a man agreeable and useful in all the parts of life; and gives a just direction to all his other qualities, which otherwise may become prejudicial to society’ (Hume cited in Rainer 2015 p.129). Far from being a vice, sentiment here is both a positive and necessary augmentation of the self in a good society.

Accusations of sentimentality have been used to undermine environmentalists, whose sentimental relationship to the more-than-human world is thought to cloud their judgement about what really matters: development, progress and profit. Environmentalists labelled sentimental have often been feminized and seen an ‘unmanly’ (Collinson 2022; Simon and Matthews 2020). Historian Adam Rome gives the example of a cartoon from the turn of the twentieth century, that depicted environmentalist John Muir, dressed as a maid, wielding a broom labelled ‘The Sierra Club’, sweeping up the mess caused by a proposed dam construction (Rome 2006).

While there are occasions where a sentimental attachment to nature might be counterproductive (Ingram 2010), where certain feelings act as a barrier to sound scientific decision making, a strong case has been made that meaningful action on environmental problems like climate change is most likely to be sparked by appeals to emotion rather than reason alone. Social researcher Rebecca Huntley argues that feelings and emotions are key to any discussion about issues like climate-change. Emotions matter because they unite people, shape understandings of the world and drive change (Norgaard 2011, 213). While, fear mobilized through the tropes of disaster and apocalypse have long been used to catalyse action (Buell 1995) emotions like hope and love, it has been argued (Mauch 2019, Bird Rose 2011, Soule in; Leath 2018; Huntley 2020) can drive changes in attitudes about the environment.

This collection of articles is neither a condemnation of sentimentality nor an act of uncritical recuperation. Instead the articles here examine the various ways in which ecomedia is entangled in feeling. This special issue asks the question: what is at stake when such sentimental attachments are visible in mediated form? What work can sentimentality perform?

Questions of sentimentality and the environment have often been addressed in the context of literary works and film. In this special issue, we want to broaden the range of media forms that we might consider in the light of sentiment and the environment. To this end, the special issue features articles on a diverse range of media: scientific film-making, musical field recordings, popular music, Indigenous resistance writing, social media, and photography. A number of themes emerged.

One theme emerging from the papers submitted for the special issue concerns how we might trace the environment-related flows of feeling evinced by and shared through media forms. Jessica Robinson’s article ‘Climate Nags’ traces the way ‘issue publics’, groups brought together by concern around similar matters, can coalesce into larger global risk communities connected by flows of feeling. Robinson maps these emotional connections through sentiment analysis of tweets around climate change and three disparate global events: the Covid pandemic, the 2020 American presidential race, and the beginning of the Ukraine–Russia war. Climate risks, she argues, both allow a way of making sense of new threats, with ‘affect operating as a means of pivoting between issues and helping to make sense of who is to blame.’ In contrast to the quantitative dimension to Robinson’s approach, Hollis Taylor’s paper draws on her creative practice as a composer and performer. Her paper considers the value of field recordings as a resource for creativity – for example, in her widely admired compositions based on the music of the pied butcherbird. The article also proposes that audio recordings which transport listeners to the complex ecosystems they document can play a role in forging connections to the more-than-human world. Taylor’s article speaks to a central theme in the special issue – the ways in which eco-media can provoke alternative modes of listening and looking.

Simon Troon, too, discusses shifting modes of attention to media in relation to a type of filmmaking that doesn’t normally attract much critical attention: films made by scientific organizations as part of their research work. Part of the organizations’ scientific communication, these [films] can be streamed live on organizations’ social media platforms. Through an examination of camera technology and films produced by Australia’s CSIRO, Troon shows how the organization’s live streams go beyond their intended epistemological purpose. The camera technology mediates the viewer’s encounter with life in the deep oceans, in this specific case, the life of coral. Drawing on the film theory of André Bazin, Troon argues that in addition to the scientific value of these films, they also provide a ‘cinema of encounter,’ and that the ‘… cinematic aesthetics and ethics’ of these moving images may ‘engender attunement to pervasive processes of despoliation, ecological degradation, and potential recovery that, occurring at depth and on timescales that exceed humans, usually remain hidden from our view’.

James Gourley in ‘The Temporality of Community Sentiment on the Australian Continent: Mineral Extraction, Waste Storage and Indigenous Protest Writing’ addresses this question of temporality in relation to sentiment around nuclear waste storage and extractive industries. In particular, Gourley makes a case that Indigenous feeling about such phenomena have been ignored by government decision-makers. Indigenous sentiments have been overlooked because such decision makers have operated within a western linear temporality, one which confine wrongs to the past and ignores their persistence into the presence. Using a literary studies framework, the article considers examples of Indigenous protest writing from the 1950s onwards, writing that articulates clearly the concerns of Indigenous people about the negative effects of nuclear waste storage and extractive industries on their communities.

In their article on musician Jack Johnson, Ian Collinson and Brent Keogh examine the role musicians and music might play in manifesting hope for a better relationship with the more-than-human-world. Johnson does this by winding back of the fear and catastrophism that features so prominently in ecomedia. Such ‘quiet activism’, manifest in his music and behind the scenes of his performances, proposes new affective registers through which to relate to environmental problems like the proliferation of plastic waste. The authors argue that through Johnson’s modest, undramatic and often back of house’ efforts to ‘green’ his music – including through the environmental documentary, The Smog of the Sea (2016) – he moves beyond apocalyptic visions. Rather he looks to engender a hope that gives his audience a sense of agency, when they might feel they have none.

A final theme emerging from the collection of articles here is the political purchase of proximity, intimacy and care. Julie Vulcan’s lyrical article reflects on the role of legacy media in framing the aftermath of the devastating Australian bushfires of 2019–2020. While press and television reports depicted all-consuming fires, hyper-focussing on the trope of the flammable eucalypt, ‘Beyond the Spectacle’ details the role of social media in articulating locals’ intimate observations of initial responses and incremental returns by non-human others points towards troubling material effects of apocalyptic tropes and the value of affective attachments to place for conjuring hope. Along related lines, Ruth Barcan and Jay Johnston explore the affordances of online spaces for everyday ornithology. In their examination of the Birds in Backyards Facebook page, Barcan and Johnston ask question about the relationship between sentimentality and ecological knowledge, environmental politics and care. They conclude that ‘today, there is no place for an opposition between feeling and doing, and scientific action often requires and mobilises emotion’.

Vulcan and Barcan and Johnston’s papers lend support to arguments for the value of ‘critical proximity’ as an analytic practice (Simon 2010). Rather than seeing clarity and insight as emerging from distanciation and abstraction, such arguments suggest that familiarity, intimacy and affective connections might produce the fine-grained understandings linked to attachment. Peter Martin, along these lines, has proposed that ‘proximity is the most powerful determinant of caring behaviour and is a precursor to relatedness’ (Martin 2007, 59). Sentiment might be not so much the confusion or obfuscation of rational understandings but an investment that delineates a perspective.

Perhaps the elderly Czech-Australian visitor who remarked on the sentimentality of Dawn on Deerubbin’s scenes from the intertidal zone was pointing towards not only the love visible in these pictures, but the fact that the loving gaze was so clearly situated. No one visiting the exhibit could mistake the perspective of the photographer with a ‘Promentary gaze’ – from an elevated viewpoint surveying down the landscape (Smith 2018), or indeed ‘the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ in the words of Donna Haraway in her germinal article on the importance of situating knowledges (1988). This special issue, then, considers that the possibility of being moved – following the flows of feeling (Verlie 2019) as much as the rise and fall of the tide – might be a way to maintain hope in a slow catastrophe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).