{"id":1630,"date":"2014-10-24T05:21:48","date_gmt":"2014-10-24T05:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=1630"},"modified":"2014-11-11T15:48:14","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T15:48:14","slug":"minimal-ethics-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/newecologies\/minimal-ethics-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Living the Good Life after the End of the World: On Joanna Zylinska\u2019s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Joanna<\/a>

Joanna Zylinska, Topia daedala, 2014. Composite image taken from vantage points on both sides of a window. “Human and nonhuman [interweave] creativity by overlaying the outer world of cloud formation with the inner space of sculptural arrangement.”<\/p><\/div>\n

This October, at the House of the Cultures of the World (HKW) in Berlin, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) will commence a series of meetings to decide if the designation of a new geological epoch\u2014the Anthropocene\u2014will be formally accepted. Informally, the term has been widely and varyingly accepted to account for, draw attention to, and agitate against the earth-magnitude transformations of the lithosphere that can be chalked up to human activity. (Sadly, a number of alternatives currently in circulation, including the Cthulucene<\/a> <\/em>(Donna Haraway), the Capitalocene<\/a> <\/em>(Jason Moore), the #misanthropocene<\/a><\/em> (Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr), and the Anthrobscene<\/a><\/em> (Jussi Parikka) will not be considered by the ICS. Nor will the Manthropocene<\/a>, although only one female scientist sits\u00a0on the 29-strong Anthropocene Working Group.\u00a0) While the proposal of a new geological epoch is an event in its own right\u2014the last time this occurred was with Paul Gervais’\u00a0proposal in 1867 of the Holocene for the current inter- or postglacial epoch beginning about 11,700 years ago\u2014the advent of this new epoch known as the Anthropocene is extremely unsettling, for the biosphere and for ethico-political thought alike.<\/p>\n

Against this monumental setting, and against a steady stream of triumphalist titles (e.g. Diane Ackerman\u2019s The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us<\/em>), Joanna Zylinska\u2019s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene<\/a> <\/em>(Open Humanities Press, 2014) might come across as audaciously inapt. In an epoch where the human species is routinely imagined as a planetary cancer or an asteroid strike,\u00a0\u201cminimal\u201d seems to be an incommensurate designation for an ethics that promises<\/p>\n

to consider to what extent we can make life go on and also how we ourselves can continue to live it well, while interrogating what it means \u201cto live life well.\u201d (13)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Minimal Ethics<\/em> isn’t about living the good life as much as it is about rethinking “life” in a way that would be less divisive for living things. In this way a minimal ethics could also be thought of as an elemental ethics. In a historical moment where the shared materiality of the universe is profoundly sensed, where the human and the lithosphere are initimately entangeled, a minimal ethics flips into a maximal one. (Karen Barad\u2019s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter<\/em> is as much of an influence as Henri Bergson\u2019s Creative Evolution<\/em>.) Such an all-at-once ethics is not intended to be applicable across all of time and space; instead, it attends to the temporally and spatially \u201cunbound\u201d perspective of the universe that \u201ccircumscribes how relations, entities and phenomena appear to us<\/em>\u201d (28).<\/p>\n

Similarly, the philosophical underpinnings of \u201cminimal\u201d are quite extensive and not at all negligible. The most immediate touchstone for this minimal ethics is Theodor W. Adorno\u2019s post-war Minima Moralia<\/em>, itself an inversion of Aristotle\u2019s book of Magna\u00a0Moralia <\/em>(\u201cGreat Ethics\u201d). Writing in the wake of the Holocaust and in a period when 1945 was widely regarded as the \u201czero hour\u201d of German history, Adorno\u2019s non-systemic and non-normative \u201creflections from damaged life\u201d were written from a greatly diminished present and a sense of diminished human agency. In these senses Zylinska\u2019s is also a \u201cminimal\u201d and diminished ethics. Yet Minimal Ethics <\/em>is no mere updating of Minima Moralia.<\/em> Zylinska\u2019s reflections are situated amidst the disappearing future and the dissipating humanisms unique to the Anthropocene. Responding to pressures largely unforeseen but well underway in 1951, Zylinska explicitly writes from within<\/em> an ongoing yet dimly understood planetary mass extinction event whose seriality (The Sixth<\/em> Extinction), apparent inevitability, and inability to maintain any reliable distinction between perpetrator and victim greatly complicates the formulation of any ethics, let alone the perpetuation of critical thought. A minimal ethics is well-suited for the reduced ecologies of the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

The nine short essays, twenty-one theses of a biopoetic manifesto, and interpolated photographs that comprise Minimal Ethics <\/em>respond to this diminshing biosphere while abandoning any straightforward articulation of a moral philosophy. It is a book of questions. The avatar for this mode of moral inquiry is the wayfarer, via Tim Ingold. The wayfarer evades excessive anthropomorphizing through its articulation as a conceptual persona for what is provisional, nomadic, and transient: the provisional concept of the human, of species, and of other such \u201ccuts\u201d made into life. Accordingly, the wayfaring reader is invited to enter the book at any point. In medias res<\/em>, Zylinska writes, \u201ccan actually serve as a description of the location of our minimal ethics\u201d (23).<\/p>\n

In this post-masculinist book of questions\u2014it eschews \u201cany enterprise which knows in advance and once and for all what it is striving for\u201d (88)\u2014there are no calls for heroic individual action, no appeals to save the earth, no petitions for energy corporations to ensure that existing fossil fuel reserves remain in the ground. There is no gesture toward climate justice, for this minimal ethics would be foundational to politics: \u201cit needs to prepare the ground for political work in which responsibilities are always shared and demands conflicting\u201d (123-4). Addressed primarily to philosophers and philosophically-minded non-philosophers, its principal admonition is along the lines of Timothy Morton\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t just do something, sit there.\u201d No doubt this will come across as irresponsible to some readers. Such readers may want to begin by reading Chapter Two, \u201cScale.\u201d There we see that Minimal Ethics<\/em> is articulating the radical response-ability of the human to \u201cthe unfolding of matter across time and space\u201d (26). For Zylinska, such philosophical endeavors<\/p>\n

can be foreclosed all too early by the kind of thinking that would carve out entities such as “the animal,” “the body,” and “the gene,” and locations such as “the world,” “Africa” and “the lab,” and then attempt to work out good ways of managing relations between them. (25)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bergson\u2019s philosophy of time and concept of \u201cduration\u201d is a sustained point of reference, but Zylinska\u2019s intervention into Bergson is \u201cless about building a better world as an external unity and more about making better cuts into that which we are naming the world\u201d (87). Minimal Ethics <\/em>is an ethics of the incision. That is to say, it installs ethical reflection first and foremoest at the site of the division of life into human and nonhuman, bios<\/em> and geos<\/em>, and so on and so forth. It asks us to consider to what extent the ethical and political impasses of the Anthropocene can be traced back to such poorly-thought but excellently-executed divisions.<\/p>\n

For several years OHP\u2019s Critical Climate Change<\/a> series has produced a startling number of open-access monographs and edited volumes that variously articulate the relation(s) between epistemo-political and terrestrial mutations. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene<\/em>, the most recent addition, stages a welcome intervention both into this series and into the Anthropocene imaginary. This is not an ethics of <\/em>the Anthropocene but rather for <\/em>an \u201cAnthropocene\u201d that is first and foremost mobilized as an \u201cethical pointer\u201d articulating a radically expanded \u201chuman obligation towards the geo- and biosphere\u201d (19). (As in Adorno, these reflections are not on <\/em>but from <\/em>damaged life; in minimal ethics, prepositions and pronouns are fraught with significance.) As in Levinas, this is a demand that comes from another, but that other can be immanent to<\/em> the human in the form of a \u201cdifferentiation from within\u201d (95) rather than in the form of a transcendental Other.<\/p>\n

The image of the human as \u201ca complex and dynamic network of relations\u201d rather than a discreet, species-specific \u201cwe\u201d thus evades the sticking point of some recent criticism (see Rob Nixon<\/a>\u2019s and Jon Christensen<\/a>\u2019s reviews of Diane Ackerman\u2019s The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us<\/em>). Zylinska\u2019s \u201cwe\u201d is radically capacious\u2014perhaps too much so given \u201cour\u201d unabated exploitation and disavowal of the nonhuman\u2014and her \u201chuman\u201d is polymorphous perverse\u2014but perhaps not enough given the pervasiveness of human exceptionalism. The book\u2019s auspicious beginning points toward such a geo- and biophilic future:<\/p>\n

The seeds of this book were originally planted during the preparations for a wedding of ecosex artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, who married Lake Kallavesi\u2014which is part of the Iso-Kalla lake system in Northern Savonia\u2014at the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland, on September 30, 2012.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The ecosexual exploits of Stephens and Sprinkle\u2014elsewhere documented in Goodbye Gauley Mountain<\/a><\/em>\u2014offer another ethos and another environmentalism than the status quo. Zylinska is quick to dismiss Minimal Ethics<\/em> as \u201cnot just an updated form of environmental ethics\u201d given that<\/p>\n

it does not pivot on any coherent notion of an \u201cenvironment\u201d [\u2026] as an identifiable entity but rather concerns itself with dynamic relations between entities across various scales such as stem cells, flowers, dogs, humans, rivers, electricity pylons, computer networks, and planets, to name but a few. (20)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But as foreign as these objects might be for a traditional environmental ethics, our post-natural history cannot avail itself of an environment not traversed by anthropogenic artefacts. Even if we do not take wedding vows to lakes and mountains, we are increasingly aware of our survival being wedded to theirs. And to electricity pylons, wind turbines, and photovoltaic cells. I, for one, want to read Minimal Ethics\u2019 <\/em>weird assemblages of anthropogenic and nonanthropogenic matter as a 21st<\/sup> century environmental ethics. Among others. It might have little traction at a regional scale\u2014and the totalizing assertion that \u201ceverything is connected\u201d is neither useful nor helpful for many, relatively discreet and preventable disasters like oil spills, industrial pollution of waterways, insect endangerment due to neonicotoids, ozone depletion, etc.\u2014 but it is designed to operate at the scale of the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

Still, no matter how you divvy up the biosphere, its diversity is rapidly diminishing. The WWF\u2019s Living Planet Index<\/a> recently registered a 52% decline in a large sample of wildlife between 1970 and 2010. For an environmentalist kill-joy, an ethics that consists in making novel cuts into \u201clife\u201d is less creative evolution and more a creative accounting that would be complicit in the (capital-friendly, life-adverse) managerial logic of carbon trades, environmental mitigation, and corporate sustainability initiatives. Zylinska insists, however, that the unique human position is neither as manager nor as steward that would stand aloof from her\u00a0nonhuman wards. Just as a minimal ethics adopts a universal scale so too does it, in my reading,\u00a0adopt\u00a0the perspective of\u00a0a general economy.<\/p>\n

In this way, Minimal Ethics<\/em> offers what Claire Colebrook in Essays on Extinction I<\/a> <\/em>calls a \u201ccounter-ethics,\u201d one that \u201cwould be theoretical in beginning from the condition of the present\u2014looming extinction\u2014 without assuming the ethos of the present\u201d (43). Simialrly, Zylinska\u2019s essays shift away at key points from an ethos of \u201clife\u201d and the bios <\/em>and toward another ethos, one in which the division between life and nonlife is no longer articulated. This tentative\u00a0move beyond a carbon imaginary is honey for an emerging Hive Mind: see Martin McQuillan\u2019s \u201cNotes Toward a Post-Carbon Philosophy<\/a>\u201d in Theory in the Era of Climate Change <\/em>(2012), Elizabeth Povinelli\u2019s 2013 \u201cGeontologies<\/a>\u201d keynote to The Anthropocene Project at the HKW, and the discussions of humanity\u2019s \u201cminerality\u201d in Kathryn Yusoff\u2019s \u201cGeologic Life<\/a>\u201d (2013). Living the good life, as Zylinska and her fellow wayfarers provisionally posit, involves confronting the end of life as we know it.<\/p>\n

–Jason Groves<\/a><\/p>\n

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  This October, at the House of the Cultures of the World (HKW) in Berlin, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) will commence a series of meetings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newecologies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1630"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1664,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630\/revisions\/1664"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}