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Abstract
Knowledge of Earth history is produced by the geological interpretation of material traces as signs of past events and processes. The system formed by material traces, geological practices of interpretation, and written accounts of Earth history promotes the notion of “planetary textuality.” In a close reading of Asmus Trautsch’s poem “Die Urwälder Europas” (2016), this essay shows how literature, owing to its meta-poetic reflection on language, can contribute to a better understanding of and critical inquiry into nonlinguistic systems of meaning that allow humans to situate themselves within Earth history. As humans are agents of Earth history in the Anthropocene, and as their activities increasingly inscribe themselves into the planet’s material records, these records become an essential source for understanding human history and existence. Therefore, the narration and representation of Earth history have important cultural and political implications. Combining planetary textuality and geological practices of interpretation with cultural and literary criticism offers crucial meta-poetical insights into the production of the Earth as a text.
Notes
1 Cf. Asmus Trautsch, “Die Urwälder Europas,” in Treibbojen, Asmus Trautsch (Berlin: Verlagshaus J. Frank, 2010), 15.
2 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” IGBP 41 (2000): 17–18.
3 Cf. Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of Humans,” Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 165–84; Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall, “Writing the Anthropocene: An Introduction,” Minnesota Review 83 (2014): 60–72.
4 Cf. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Anthropocene Time,” History and Theory 57, no. 2 (2018): 5–32.
5 Asmus Trautsch, “Die Urwälder Europas,” in All dies hier, Majestät, ist deins. Lyrik im Anthropozän, ed. Anja Bayer and Daniela Seel (Berlin and Munich: kookbooks and Deutsches Museum, 2016), 8. In my interpretation, I will refer to the 2016 version, which emphasizes the magnitude of human destruction in its final lines.
6 Cf. Helmuth Trischler, “Zwischen Geologie und Kultur: Die Debatte um das Anthropozän,” in All dies hier, Majestät, ist deins, 269–86.
7 Axel Goodbody, “Naturlyrik – Umweltlyrik – Lyrik im Anthropozän: Herausforderungen, Kontinuitäten und Unterschiede,” in All dies hier, Majestät, ist deins, 287–305.
8 Cf. Karin Fellner, “Stacheln sprechen. 5 ⅕ Denkansätze zum Schreiben von Gedichten im Anthropozän,” in All dies hier, Majestät, ist deins, 306–13.
9 To conceive of humans as a “major geological force” is one of the key elements of the Anthropocene as a concept, cf. Crutzen and Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” 18.
10 Cf. https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/anja-bayer/all-dies-hier-majestaet-ist-deins-lyrik-im-anthropozaen.html, retrieved 21.10.2021.
11 Cf. Goodbody, “Naturlyrik – Umweltlyrik – Lyrik im Anthropozän.”
12 Trautsch, “Die Urwälder Europas,” 2016.
13 Cf. Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow Time’s Cycle. Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, 9th ed. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1.
14 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are mine.
15 Cf. Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) as presented in Gould, Timés Arrow Time’s Cycle, 4.
16 Cf. Peter Schnyder, “Geologie,” in Literatur und Wissen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Roland Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013), 75–79, 76.
17 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (The Pennsylvania State University, 2001), 278.
18 Cf. Oliver Völkers, Langsame Katastrophen. Eine Poetik der Erdgeschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021), 48.
19 Schnyder, “Geologe,“ 76.
20 Georg Braungart, “Poetik der Natur. Literatur und Geologie,” in Natur – Kultur. Zur Anthropologie von Sprache und Literatur, ed. Thomas Anz (Paderborn: mentis, 2009), 55–78, 67–68.
21 Cf. Adelene Buckland, Novel Science. Fiction and the Intervention of Nineteenth-Century Geology, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 14.
22 Cf. Schnyder, “Geologie,” 76.
23 Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The End of the End of Nature,” 165–7.
24 Cf. Timo Maran, “An Ecosemiotic Approach to Nature Writing,” PAN 7 (2010): 79–87, 81.
25 Cf. Crutzen and Stoermer, “The Anthropocene.”
26 Trautsch served as editor for Daniel Falb’s poetological manifesto Anthropozän. Dichtung in der Gegenwartsgeologie, (Berlin: Verlagshaus Berlin 2015).
27 Daniel Falb, “Poetik für Anthropozän Institutionen,” edit 80 (2020): 40–57, 47–9.
28 Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Colin P. Summerhayes, Alexander P. Wolfe, Anthony D. Bamosky, Alejandro Cearreta, Paul Crutzen, Erle Ellis, Ian J. Fairchild, Agnieszka Galuszka, et al. “The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of Evidence and interim recommendations,” Anthropocene 19 (2017): 55–60, 59.
29 Cf. Boes and Marshall, “Writing the Anthropocene: An Introduction,” 63.
30 Ibid., 64. Or as Thomas Ford puts it: “Any instance of text, whatever it might say, is also in social and material terms so many kilograms of embodied CO2, a future thickness of submarine limestone, and so is potentially legible climatologically and stratigraphically, as well as in any more traditionally literary sense.” Thomas Ford, “Punctuating History Circa 1800. The Air of Jane Eyre,” in Anthropocene Reading. Literary History in Geologic Times, ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 78–95, 85.
31 Derek Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” The Minnesota Review 83 (2014): 133–142, 134.
32 Cf. In Johann Christoph Lichtenberg’s writings on geology in his Betrachtungen über die physischen Revolutionen auf unserer Erde (1794) it is also the word and concept of ‘revolution’ that allows him to relate human and planetary history to one another, cf. Braungart, “Poetik der Natur,” 60–1.
33 Cf. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History. Four Theses,” Critiqual Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. This trend towards a new ‘Grand Narrative’ is explicitly affirmed, for example, in Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 79. Such tendencies are also clearly discernible in the foundational texts of the Anthropocene discourse, see for example, Crutzen and Stoermer, “The Anthropocene”; and Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002): 23. They seem to be somehow inherent in the Anthropocene concept as it operates on a planetary scale and thinks about human animals on a species level.
34 Cf. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, History and Us, trans. D. Fernbach (London: Verso 2017); Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–9.
35 For an analysis of the Anthropocene’s dependency on practices of reading the Earth from a media-theoretical perspective and a critique of the anthropocentrism inherent in such practices, see Philip Hüpkes, “Anthropocenic Earth Mediality: On Scaling and Deep Time in the Anthropocene,” in Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene, ed. Gina Comos and Caroline Rosenthal (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars 2019), 196–213.
36 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), https://manifold.umn.edu/read/untitled-5f0c83c1-5748-4091-8d8e-72bebca5b94b/section/6243cd2f-68f4-40dc-97a1-a5c84460c09b (accessed January 7, 2021).
37 Bruno Latour, Wir sind nie modern gewesen. Versuch einer symmetrischen Anthropologie (Frankfurt Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2017), 19.
38 Steffen Richter argues that not-knowing plays a central role in Anthropocene poetics, cf. “Natur-Maschine-Mensch. Auf dem Weg zu einer Poetik für das Anthropozän,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik XXVIII, no. 1 (2018): 89–101, 92.
39 Derek Wood, “Accelerated Reading: Fossil Fuels, Infowhelm, and Archival Life,” in Anthropocene Reading. Literary History in Geologic Times, ed. Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 202–19, 215.
40 For detailed reflections on the problem of thinking together historical and Earth-historical time scales, see Chakrabarty, “Anthropocene Time.”
41 Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, “Das Anthropozän – Ein Prozeß-Zustand am Rande der Erdgeschichte,” in Was geschah im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016), 7–43, 8.
42 Szerszynski, “The End of the End of Nature,” 168.
43 Ibid., 179 and 180.
44 Cf. Ibid., 179.
45 Ibid.
46 Cf. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the possibility of Life in capitalist ruins, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 7–8; Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 101.
47 Cf. Daniel Falb, Orchidee und Technofossil (Berlin: kookbooks, 2019), 9.
48 Cf. Philip Weiss, Jona Jonas. Terrain Vague, in Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2018), 54.
49 Cf. Esther Kinsky, Schiefern (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020), 12 and 38.