The Emotions of the Late Anthropocene in Visual Arts

Abstract

This guest editors' introduction to the special issue provides a brief overview of ecological emotions, important philosophical accounts of emotion, the distinctive nature of visual arts and their interplay with affective experience, and the introductory summary of the special issue's articles.

Keywords:

• Climate Crisis
• Environmental Emotions
• Perception
• Visuality
• Visual Arts

This special issue collects pieces exploring the role of images, visual arts, and our visual culture in general, in the wake of the climate crisis. This changing role reflects the developments that gradually took place in human imagination and awareness of the crisis over the past several decades: from the avant-la-lettre, fringe, misunderstood, or only later reinterpreted (as ‘prophetic’) perspectives and witness voices through conscious and intentional interventions into the growing awareness of the crisis, to the current multiplicity of expressions, reflections and modulations of the ways in which the visual presence of the crisis can be interacted with and in which we can perceive, see and capture what it is like to live with and under (knowledge of) this crisis.

The climate crisis, as a perceptible presence in our lives, has already had a relatively complex history. It used to ‘behave’ culturally as a hidden, difficult-to-fathom issue mostly to be seen only by those who had ‘eyes to see’ it. Prototypically, it has been the object of interest, discussion and treatment by scientists, environmentalists and conservationists. Consequently, for a long time, it has also been framed as an object of expert debates in climate science, and the lack of a general public consensus on measures to be taken (as recommended by a series of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and of efficient public (political) endeavour to take them has often been discussed as a peculiar epistemological problem – or irrationality, unreasonableness, lack of information, or failure (unwillingness) to admit facts,¹ even akrasia.²

Over the last decade or so, though, the climate crisis has morphed into a presence of overwhelming, palpable visibility for each ‘everyman’. Thus, another aspect of human interaction with and reflection on it has become the target of academic interest, besides the ongoing focus on facts about it, the ways of knowing these facts, and (the failure of) acting upon this knowledge. At first, it has been scientists who responded in a distressed way to the environmental damage and degradation.³ However, as the general awareness of the climate crisis among the public grew, the distressed responses to the recognition of the crisis have gradually become endemic, independently of expert exposure to the topic.

The terms circulating in academic writings about these responses are multiple. Some talk about environmental grief,⁴ some about climate anxiety,⁵ some about eco-(logical) anger;⁶ but there are also less frequent and more niche terms used to characterise the response, such as melancholia⁷ or trauma.⁸ While we can find precursors of these experiences also in some classic works of environmental writing, for instance in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac⁹ or in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,¹⁰ it is commonly argued that due to the unprecedented nature of the object triggering these responses – the climate crisis – these responses themselves may represent a new phenomenon on the map of human psychology and experiencing.

This has led Bruce Albrecht to coin a new term, ‘solastalgia’, that combines (the lack of) solace, desolation and nostalgia in ‘the chronic distress and melancholia of the lived experience of negative environmental change’.¹¹ Albrecht’s terminological move also tries to do justice to the fact that in the specific environmental or climate contexts, these emotions often intersect or blend and create unprecedented complexes, difficult to disentangle compared to cases of grief and anxiety as experienced in non-environmental contexts. There are already first attempts at classifying these environmental emotions, paying attention for instance to the differences between emotions past- or loss-oriented (grief, solastalgia), emotions future- or threat-oriented (anxiety, dread), and relatively self-contained conditions, resembling mental health issues (depression, trauma);¹² in general, though, it turns out that that the territory of environmental emotions is very rich and difficult to survey.¹³

That we talk in the case of these experiences of emotions is not accidental; it is probably the most natural umbrella term to cover experiences so diverse (yet sharing an experiential character) as to earn labels such as grief, anxiety, anger, depression or trauma. All these are certainly affective experiences, but some – such as, prototypically, anxiety – might call for being more properly characterised as moods.¹⁴ With anxiety, the difference consists, in standard accounts, of the absence of an identifiable object, as compared to the objects of grief or anger. While such a clear-cut distinction may hold in non-environmental contexts, in relation to climate it becomes fuzzier, as environmental grief can cover cases so diverse as the extinction of a particular species and the imperceptible decay of the planetary ecosystem. In a sense similar to our use of the term ‘emotion’, Matthew Ratcliffe talks about existential feelings,¹⁵ which, perhaps somewhat contrary to the more specific way in which philosophy talks about feelings (in the wake of William James), also cover a wide and diverse territory that includes anxiety. Ratcliffe’s existential feelings all disclose something about our whole life or existence; and environmental emotions resemble them in the sense that they can be said to constitute an interconnected (if not unitary) territory of human experience in virtue of highlighting, collectively, the fragility, vulnerability and precarity of human life as something that takes place on this planet and necessarily as a part of its (functioning) biosphere.

While emotions are occasionally described in philosophy as more or less instinctive, automated replies of the organism to the perceived stimuli in its environment,¹⁶ occasionally with a strong emphasis on their rootedness in our hard-wired evolutionary inheritance,¹⁷ these characterisations apply to environmental emotions only with some difficulties. One reason is that they seem far from being automated (compared to, say, fear or joy), as testified also by the diversity of people’s emotional responses to facts about the climate crisis, known to all of them. In this respect, they seem to be closer to specifically moral emotions such as compassion or remorse, which need to be cultivated and are a proper subject of what is called ‘moral education’. Another reason is that, being now framed and reflected on in a vivid public debate, these emotions are naturally understood as being subject to evaluation regarding being more or less justified, adequate, exaggerated or insufficient, and so forth. In order for these evaluations to be intelligible, emotions need to be taken as responsive to reasons – rather than being caused. We do not thereby subscribe to any general theory of emotions, though, cognitivist or other;¹⁸ in the case of any emotions and perhaps especially in the case of environmental emotions, any particular theory illuminates only some aspects of the phenomenon in question, while it applies to others only with difficulty.

The prime example of sources forming – cultivating – our affective experiencing that is, nevertheless, responsive to reasons of a kind, finds itself in arts and narratives.¹⁹ Much of the register of environmental emotions responds, however, to what we witness – that is, to what we can perceive. We do perceive the sceneries in our lives that feature ‘nature’, ‘landscape’, ‘climate’, ‘animals’ or ‘biosphere’ under a certain description – that is, our perception is conceptually informed;²⁰ yet it is still perception – how we see things (literally or figuratively) – and among art forms that cultivate our perception of the climate crisis, an important role will thus be played by visual forms of arts, and, by extension, visual contents, visual tools and (working with) our visuality in general.

Our visual culture has traditionally carried the above-mentioned task of framing, contextualising and rebuilding our perceptions. This role may be understood in a narrowly didactic sense (and arts have indeed always played it, too). Given that one central challenge for the discourse on the environmental crisis consists of acknowledging, making salient and visualising what climate scientists have established as fact, much of the ecocritical visual culture of the past decades has aimed at helping along our acknowledgement of the dire situation by contextualising and guiding our perceptions: teaching us to see what is going on.²¹ These didactic attempts are predominantly present in eco-documentaries, news reports, and journalistic work within visual media.

 However, there is much more to the interplay between arts and our perception. In the wake of modernity, high as well as popular art has traditionally also contrasted itself with the didactic function. As John Gardner puts it: ‘Art is as original as it is precisely because it does not start out with a clear knowledge of what it means to say’.²² In a similar way, Merleau-Ponty articulates how art in modernity gave up on the classical idea of realism: ‘One of the grandeurs of modern thought and modern art is to have loosened the false lines which tied valuable work to the finished work. Since perception itself is never finished, since it gives us a world to express and think only through these partial perspectives’.²³ In this sense, art – whether we talk about photographs, paintings, cinema or video art – gives us something different than facts about the world or verisimilitudinous representations. Furthermore, this aim (among many others) of art is not programmatic; it does not tell us how to act ethically or how to solve political, societal or environmental problems.

There is an important realisation involved in this idea of the autonomy (from ideology, politics, commonly held views and norms) of the arts. The predominant contemporary challenge is not that we lack the facts about what is going on with our climate. We do have quite detailed and reliable research on the anthropomorphic mechanisms that drive climate change. In this sense art, visualisation, aesthetics and creativity may provide something that the sciences cannot. Images reframe, contextualise, change our perspectives, enable new connections, and cultivate our emotional responses. The role of the artist is not necessarily to tell us how the world is, but rather, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, to manipulate techniques of visualisation:

through custom[s], [that] are already endowed with common meaning – the writer’s task is to choose, assemble, wield, and torment these instruments in such a way that they induce the same sentiment of life that dwells in the writer at every moment.²⁴

In addition to portraying how the world is, our visual culture – and particularly that which we call art – enables us to take a position from which we understand what it is like to experience this or that.

To expand on Merleau-Ponty’s idea, the artwork’s communicative potential is not limited to the experience of the author. In Adorno’s aesthetics, we find a description of the image as an agent that shows me the otherness of the other. It permits the depicted to utter: ‘Here I am or This is what I am’²⁵. He continues, ‘Mimetic behavior does not imitate something but assimilates itself to that something’.²⁶ For Adorno, mimesis is a way in which human judgement and works of art behave, and behaviour is not fixed, but rather a dynamic process that enables the artwork to communicate the phenomenological qualities of experiencing.

What is it like to be an environmental activist working against the all-encompassing petro-capitalist system (It All Begins; see Droz and Baudet, this issue), or a depressed individual witnessing the end of the world (Von Trier, Melancholia; see Beran, this issue)? In the wake of the recent non-human turn²⁷ these questions may be extended to the following: What is it like to be a drone camera surveilling the Antarctic landscape (Frem; see Fredriksson, this issue), What is it like to relate to animals as friends, companions and family members (see Fiserova, this issue), or even What is it like to be the surface of planet Earth (see Likavčan, this issue)?

Whereas these qualities of what-it-is-likeness might not pertain to hard facts or strategies for action regarding the climate, they do give us a potential for emotional connection with affects and experiences in the context of the Anthropocene paradigm of environmental crises.

The works in this volume present a very limited and perhaps idiosyncratic sample of visual culture concerned with environmental emotions. The aim here is not to summarise or theoretically categorise the current movements within this vast field. Rather, we intend to articulate the dynamics of perception, visualisation, art, emotions and ethics through philosophical analysis.

*

Laÿna Droz and Justine Baudet’s paper ‘How Do Ecological Emotions Emerge?’ approaches the topic of this special issue in a wide range, asking the question of how visual arts and media contribute to nurturing ecological emotions in general. Based on a discussion of several documentary films, they fully acknowledge the range of ways in which arts influence us and the variety of cultivated environmental emotions and their interconnectedness. The key component making the difference between arts and factual information, the authors argue, lies in the transition from knowledge to images and in the unique capacity of images to incite emotions, as that which can lead to (but also hinder) actions in powerful ways.

Antony Fredriksson’s article ‘Nonhuman Images: Environment and Emotion in Two Films by Viera Čákanyová’, tracks the developments in visualisation technologies from the advent of the photographic image to the current visual culture of digital formats, drone cameras and artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Through a reading of Čákanyová’s films in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the nonhuman, the relations between humans, nature and technology are put into question. What role does imagining the nonhuman, the superhuman or the beyond-human play in our visual culture? Does the gaze of the machine provide us with something useful? Or does it deprive us of something that is needed for us to understand our position in the world? To answer these questions, Fredriksson distinguishes between two very different understandings of the concept of the nonhuman. It is used to describe a superhuman perspective in which visualisation technologies (camera, drone, AI) aid us in transcending the human life form. But the concept of the nonhuman also refers to a dismantling of anthropocentrism through which the acknowledgement of our kinship with nature is made salient.

In his article ‘Elemental Mediality of Starlight: From Cosmic to Earthly Information Metabolisms’, Lukáš Likavčan expands on the notion of visual media to include the meaning-constituting aspects of inorganic matter. Starting from the first theory of photography by William Henry Fox Talbot, our visualisation technologies have constantly developed means to grasp aspects of the visual world that are creating meaning independent of human involvement. Likavčan makes the bold claim that the surfaces of planets (Earth included), organic biological matter like trees, and animal life, may be understood as capable of recording and producing visual information, much like the human-made photographic surfaces, i.e. nature in-itself creates recordings and representations of visual information. From this realisation, Likavčan infers a non-human foundation for ethics, in which anthropocentrism is dismantled. By reviewing contemporary artworks by Tega Brain and Tomás Saraceno, and a performance by Eduardo Navarro, Likavčan articulates a non-exploitative and anti-extractivist ethical stance towards both organic and inorganic matter.

Ondřej Beran’s paper ‘Don’t Look Askance’ offers a discussion of one particular environmental emotion: ecological anger. Based on the traditional heterogeneity in philosophical accounts of anger, he suggests that some kinds of eco-anger (as exemplified by the recent satirical film Don’t Look Up and the cinematic tools it uses) are honour-related and differ in important ways from its justice-related forms (as represented by the school strikers of Fridays for Future). A possible environmentalist reading of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is explored, as a counterexample of deploying a similar narrative but free of condescension and artistic vengeance-making, as well as ‘lucidly pessimistic’.

Michaela Fišerová’s article ‘Outsiders or Insiders? John Berger and Ethical Reframing of Animals’ asks a specific question about how the perception of animals and its corresponding moral framing has been influenced by changes in Western visual cultures over past decades. It explores how more recent genres of working with visuality – investigative documentaries and activist blogs – helped erode the traditional division between the human world and animals-strangers in it. The public gaze shifted towards seeing animals as parts of urban spaces, public and private, which, as the author argues, eventually does justice to the full complexity of our (relational) life with animals.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grant no. 22-15446S, ‘ECEGADMAT’, of the Czech Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Ondřej Beran

ONDŘEJ BERAN is one of the Heads of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, and an associate professor of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Pardubice. He has written about various topics, mainly in ethics and the philosophy of language, and primarily in the post-Wittgensteinian tradition; currently, he is the principal investigator of a research project (under the Czech Science Foundation) about environmental emotions. His recent publications include Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking (Routledge 2021) and Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein (co-edited with S. Aldrin Salskov and N. Hämäläinen; Springer 2022).Email: [email protected]Personal website: https://centreforethics.upce.cz/en/doc-ondrej-beran-phdhttps://upce.academia.edu/OndřejBeran

Antony Fredriksson

ANTONY FREDRIKSSON is an associate professor in environmental ethics and aesthetics at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice. His areas of interest include aesthetics, attention, ethics, film and philosophy, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, philosophy of perception, and Wittgenstein. He has taught philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, the University of Helsinki and the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. His most recent work focuses on existential questions concerning the faculty of attention, including the book A Phenomenology of Attention and the Unfamiliar: Encounters with the Unknown (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2022) and the articles (with Silvia Panizza) ‘Ethical Attention and the Self in Iris Murdoch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’ (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2020) and ‘The Art of Attention in Documentary Film and Werner Herzog’ (Film-Philosophy, 22.1/2018).

Email: [email protected]Personal website: https://centreforethics.upce.cz/en/antony-fredriksson-phdhttps://upce.academia.edu/AntonyFredriksson

Notes

1 See the representative discussion by Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

2 Lisa Kretz, “Climate Change: Bridging the Theory–Action Gap,” Ethics and the Environment 17 (2012): 9–27; Elisa Aaltola, “The Meat Paradox, Omnivore's Akrasia, and Animal Ethics,” Animals 9, no. 12 (2019), 1125. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9121125

3 See the classic by Phyllis Windle, “The Ecology of Grief,” BioScience 42 (1992): 363–6; or, more recently, Lesley Head and Theresa Harada, “Keeping the Heart a Long Way from the Brain: The Emotional Labour of Climate Scientists,” Emotion, Space and Society 24 (2017): 34–41.

4 Kriss A. Kevorkian, “Environmental Grief,” in Non-Death Loss and Grief, ed. Darcy L. Harris (New York: Routledge, 2019), 216–26.

5 Caroline Hickman et al., “Climate Anxiety in Children and Young People and Their Beliefs about Government Responses to Climate Change: A Global Survey,” The Lancet Planetary Health 5 (2021): E863–73.

6 Samantha K. Stanley et al., “From Anger to Action: Differential Impacts of Eco-Anxiety, Eco-Depression, and Eco-Anger on Climate Action and Wellbeing,” The Journal of Climate Change and Health 1 (2021), article 100003. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100003

7 Renee Lertzman, Environmental Melancholia (New York: Routledge, 2016).

8 E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

9 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. And Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 [1949]), see 93ff.

10 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002 [1962]), see chap. 8.

11 Glenn Albrecht, “Solastalgia and the New Mourning,” in Mourning Nature. Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, ed. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press), 292–315; see also a more systematic account in Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions. New Words for a New World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

12 Susan Wardell, “Naming and Framing Ecological Distress,” Medicine Anthropology Theory 7 (2020): 187–201.

13 As suggested for instance by a recent attempt (still one of the first few) at an exhaustive classification, by Panu Pihkala, “Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions,” Frontiers in Climate 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2021.738154

14 See Julien A. Deonna and Fabrice Teroni, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2012), chap. 1.

15 Matthew Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

16 See Jesse Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

17 See Jonathan Haidt,“The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” in Reasoning. Studies of Human Inference and Its Foundations, ed. Jonathan E. Adler and Lance J. Rips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1024–52.

18 Since what is being taken as constituting the ‘class’ of ‘emotions’ is itself the product of a complex development full of historical and cultural contingencies; see Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” The Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 139–61; or Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Enough Already with ‘Theories of the Emotions,’” in Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, ed. Robert C. Solomon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 269–78.

19 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

20 See the classic extrapolation of “under the description” into the context of perception by G.E.M. Anscombe, “The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature,” in Analytic Philosophy, ed. Ronald J. Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 158–80.

21 See Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt, eds., Eco-Media: Key Issues (New York: Routledge, 2016), 17.

22 John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 13.

23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 56, emphasis in the original.

24 Ibid., 48.

25 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), 147.

26 Here we quote the earlier edition and translation: Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 162. In the newer version the same sentence is translated as follows: ‘If mimetic comportment does not imitate something but rather makes itself like itself’. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), 145.

27 Richard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), vii–xi.