Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image

289 Pages·2020·7.094 MB·English

by  Sean Cubitt

Anecdotal Evidence

Anecdotal Evidence
Ecocritique from Hollywood
to the Mass Image
SEAN CUBITT
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3
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Acknowledgements
During its gestation, beginning in 2011, I have had the chance to present and
discuss elements of the current work at the Cinémathèque Québecoise; the
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris; the Cambridge Film and Screen Studies
Research Seminars; the Media Aesthetics seminar at the University of Oslo; the
Comparative Media seminar at MIT; NECS European Network for Cinema
and Media Studies; the Whitechapel Gallery; Tate Modern; a public conversa-
tion with Lanfranco Aceti co- hosted by MIT and Harvard University; and at
Birkbeck, University of London; Curtin University, Perth; and the universities of
Bergen, Lausanne, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nuremberg, Oregon, Oxford,
Plymouth, São Paulo, Southampton, St Andrews, and the Tokyo University of
the Arts. The Source Code chapter was first given as a research seminar at the
University of Southampton with Ryan Bishop and benefits from further work
with Ryan on ‘Anti-H umanist Film’ for Screen 58(1).
I owe thanks to the editors of journals and anthologies where drafts and
fragments have appeared:  Pepita Hesselberth and Greg de Cuir, Gabriel
Menotti, Marcos Bastos and Patrícia Moran, Esther Leslie and Joel McKim,
Allan Cameron and Martine Beugnet, Phillippe Gauthier and Santiago Hidalgo,
Viva Paci, Amy Herzog, John Richardson and Carol Vernallis, Sean Redmond
and Leon Marvell, Paul Thomas and Mike Phillips, John Armitage, and Janet
Wasko. I am immensely grateful to the organisers and delegates at these events
and to the publishers, reviewers, and readers who have shaped the guiding
theses of this book. I had the opportunity to discuss many elements of the
book during seminars in the Fall Semester 2017 at Harvard with Priya Amin,
Ariana Chaivaranon, Aaron Fogelson, Manuel Gebhardt, Sophie Gilmore,
Jovonna Jones, Byung Joon Lee, Michelle Ng, Claudia Oh, Shane Reiner- Roth,
McKinley Rodriguez, Henry Scott, Emilio Vavarella, and especially Mingyi Yu
and Stephanie Lam, to whom many thanks. I am also deeply indebted to my
colleagues and students at Goldsmiths, University of London, especially Lisa
Blackman, James Curran, Julian Henriques, Rachel Moore, Gareth Stanton, and
Pasi Väliaho, and to Elinor Carmi and the SARU group: Alexandra Anikina,
Annie Goh, Sandra Kazlauskaite, Sasha Litvinseva, Roberto Mozzachiodi, and
Nikolaus Perneczky. Many others have talked and read through elements of the
book, challenging and contributing ideas, among them Charles Acland, Sara
Ahmed, Marie- Luise Angerer, Jody Berland, David Berry, Homi Bhabha, Robert
Briggs, Giuliana Bruni, Warren Buckland, Jonathan Burt, Allan Cameron,
x Acknowledgements
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Tom Conley, Verena Conley, Katarina Damjanov,
Michael Dieter, Cate Elwes, Laura Frahm, Benjamin Jörissen, Ken Friedman,
Asbjørn Grønstad, John Hill, José-C arlos Mariátegui, Laura U Marks, Sally-J ane
Norman, Zaher Omareen, John Ó Maoilearca, Jussi Parikka, Sean Redmond,
Eric Rentschler, Craig Robertson, Ozden Sahin, Doug Sery, Anneke Smelik,
Benoît Turquety, Øyvind Vågnes, Deb Verhoeven, Timotheus Vermeulen, and
James Williamson. I owe a particular debt to Dave Morley for his enthusiasm and
encouragement, dating back to my very first book. Without Alison, I would not
have been able to write: my thanks and love forever.
I am especially obliged— a word that reverberates through these pages— to
friends, associates, correspondents, and interlocutors over all the many years
that framed the approach outlined here: too many to number, let alone to name.
We who teach know that we learn as much from our students as they do from us;
but we are also shaped by our teachers. I was blessed with great ones, whose own
formations, varied as they are, have had a special impact on the mode of analysis
expanded in Anecdotal Evidence, among them Michael Waters, Frank Annett,
AC Spearing, Alistair Davies, Iain Wright, Cate Belsey, Irwin Gopnik, George
Szanto, and Darko Suvin . . . but as I try to list them, the list only grows longer and
broader. Of the friends from my generation who made films and film criticism
what they are today, Donald K Ranvaud would have politely skimmed this book;
Paul Willemen would have roundly condemned it. Without their examples, it
would not exist. Today I am increasingly aware of the fellowship of younger
scholars, among them my co- editors on two ecocritical collections, Stephen Rust
and Salma Monani. I would like to dedicate this book, affectionately and respect-
fully, in memory of Don and Paul, to Stephen and Salma and the continuum of
ecocritical scholars.
Introduction
How are we to live well in this world? This is the founding question of politics and
of ecocritique. Ethics asks how I should live well; politics, when it is not reduced
to the administration of public affairs, concerns how we should live, and live well;
and ecocritique recognises that the good life for all includes the well- being of the
world we are involved in at every level from the cellular to the cosmic. Anecdotal
Evidence proposes, experiments with, and tests the hypothesis that anecdotes are
a peculiarly powerful tool for finding out the meaning of living well, as well as the
equally sound question, who is this ‘we’?
The first step is understanding what we mean by ‘living in this world’. Living
starts from the ecological principle that everything mediates everything else.
Media mediate of course, including media such as money and transport systems,
but non- human mediation is even more fundamental. Plants mediate sunlight,
oceans mediate atmospheric carbon, earthquakes mediate heat from the Earth’s
interior, and our bodies mediate all of these. From water’s point of view, human
life is just a phase that water goes through.
Unlike much ecological science and many eco-p hilosophies, ecocritique takes
this principle of primal mediation and confronts it with the unavoidable obser-
vation that the world and our experience of it have become disconnected and
discontinuous. At some lost or imagined moment in the past, or in an ontolog-
ical foundation to which we no longer have access, humans and nature may have
lived harmoniously indistinguishable from one another. Such primordial equi-
librium is no longer ours. The conjoint human-n atural ecology of the modern
epoch is not homeostatic but unstable, conflictual, and precarious. As historical
beings we must act, but we cannot act as if nature or cultural tradition still in-
formed us in the proper roads of action. Doubling the principle of mediation
with the actuality of disconnection makes it obvious not only that thought, word,
and deed have consequences, as implied in the ecological principle, but that nei-
ther instinct nor traditional virtues tell us what to do any more. Of all the gen-
erations before and after us, we are the only one that is alive to think, speak, and
act. It is all the more important that, divorced from nature and tradition, we find
a new understanding of the consequences of our actions. To understand pos-
sible consequences, we need to understand our situation, and to understand that
we need to understand what is at stake in any situation. This is where anecdotes
come in.
Anecdotal Evidence. Sean Cubitt, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190065713.001.0001
2 Introduction
When we hear evidence dismissed as ‘merely anecdotal’ it is usually to con-
trast anecdotes with a more privileged form of evidence, the commonest today
being data. Unlike data, and despite sharing an etymological root, anecdotes
are not things but actions, which is why they appear so often in the form of
stories. As Lisa Gitelman (2013) says, there is no such thing as raw data: data is
always structured, shaped to conform to one system of knowledge or another.
The biodata stored on my passport lists my sex, height, eye colour, fingerprints,
measurements of the distance between my eyes and the height of my fore-
head: tools that have been used for a hundred and fifty years as markers of iden-
tity, of racial and sexual difference, and of criminality (Pugliese 2007). None of
that data adds up to me, the living, walking, talking creature. This kind of data is a
cluster of topics selected as significant, categorised according to a predetermined
way of knowing, whose collection and recording actively excludes anything that
would not fit the system (this is why we are told not to smile or laugh when our
passport pictures are taken). My biodata separates me from the social reality
I live in, and even from the physical world (there is no interest in my clothes,
and I have to take my glasses off: no markers of where and when the photo was
taken are important, only the very particular measures making up a biometric
profile). Anecdotes do not work like this. They are about exactly what data
excludes: the vibrant, constantly evolving animal indissolubly linked to all the
changes that biodata excludes: the weather, fashion, ageing, chatting with border
security. They do not exclude their environment: on the contrary, they are en-
tirely ecological.
This is not a matter of context. The context of data is more data: my biodata
in relation to your biodata, and hers, and his, and everyone else’s. Anecdotes are
not about context in the same way they are not about environments. A context is
the stuff that surrounds a text, defined by being not-t ext. An environment envi-
rons: it is the stuff that surrounds a life, defined by being not-t hat- life. Ecology
tells us that the idea of an environment as something separate from human
beings is completely wrong: ecologically we are inseparable from the world we
breathe, eat, and excrete our wastes into, the parasites that help us digest and the
digestion we perform as parasites on the rest of the world. Anecdotes are eco-
logical because they tell how the world flows through human affairs, and human
affairs flow through the world.
So anecdotes are ecological encounters, unique instances coming into being in
the confluence of influences. Anecdotal truth is of a different order to scientific
and political data. Anecdotes create an alternative to the dominant information
regime with its claim to truth as universality and order. This is why anecdotes
are so speedily excluded from discussions of policy, and equally why they are
so important to the radical political agenda of ecocritique, which exceeds the
human- centred idea of the environment that surrounds and is excluded from
Introduction 3
the human. For ecocritique there is no boundary between human and environ-
ment. There are only the complex interweavings of conditions and situations.
The conditions that make it possible for events to occur and stories to be told
are the events and the stories. It is exactly their contingency— the unexpected
results of criss- crossing influences and causal chains—t hat makes events real,
and grounds ecocritical politics.
This book proposes that we need ecocritique, a step beyond environmen-
talism and ecology. Like any critique, ecocritique starts by critiquing its own
foundations: its principle, its axiom, and its tasks. The ecocritical principle that
everything mediates everything else is already a critique of the more familiar ec-
ological principle that everything connects with everything else. An unexamined
principle is always dangerous. Belief that connectivity is an unmitigated good
circulates not only in ecology but in theories of the free market and network
communication, neither of whose environmental and progressive credentials are
unquestionable, especially when they combine in internet economics (Houston
2018). The principle that everything connects with everything else is not abso-
lutely untrue: it is rather a historically specific instantiation of the ecocritical
principle. Ecocritique holds that the global ecology has a history. The social his-
tory of environmentalisations is a process of dividing human and nature from
one another, and reducing the natural to the status of environs, surroundings,
and contexts of human action. Displaced from the centre of human affairs, na-
ture has become an economic externality to loot from and dump on. Only be-
cause the ecology has a history is it possible to intervene in these relations. An
ontology by definition cannot be changed. Nor is the goal to restore an imagined
lost equilibrium. As long as we believe that these divided entities, nature and hu-
manity, are connected, integrated processes, we will never recognise, never mind
overcome, the historical barriers between social and natural, mind and body. To
achieve the good life for all, human and non-h uman is the axiom of ecopolitics.
The first task of ecocritique therefore is to bring into crisis our formative concept
of ecology, which continually misrecognises the historical production of ecolog-
ical crisis. To begin that task, this book argues, ecocritique needs to bring into
crisis the subjects and objects formed in the rift between social and natural. The
principle of mediation and the axiom of history thus produce a critical task, and
it is that task that shapes ecocritique as a historical and political practice.
We can identify two moments in ecocritical mediation. The first, primal mo-
ment (which perhaps also continues as the ontological state of the planetary
ecology) comprises the processes studied in the objective sciences: the flux of
energy and material flows that constitutes everything. The second is the trans-
formation of mediation into communication, a particular condition of media-
tion which sets senders apart from receivers, messages from channels, signals
from noise, establishing hierarchies, and determining the multiply ambiguous
4 Introduction
subject- object relations that divide human from natural, masculine from fem-
inine, black from white, living from dead, and gods from mortals. Pioneer eco-
feminist Val Plumwood observed that
The dualistic distortion of culture and the historical inferiority of women and
nature in the west have been based . . . on a network of assumptions involving a
range of closely related dualistic contrasts, especially the dualism of reason and
nature, or (in a virtually equivalent formulation), of humanity and culture on
the one side and nature on the other. (Plumwood 1993: 33)
For Plumwood, radical feminism could not assimilate women into the
masculine- rational- cultural rule, or even reverse the polarity to favour feminine-
irrational- natural affect. She demanded an end to the dualism. In the intervening
quarter century, this option has become more challenging. In Mbembe’s anal-
ysis, the modern age sought, through the word ‘Africa’, to designate, among other
things, ‘the inextricability of humans, animals and nature’ (Mbembe 2017: 49).
The first aim of this quest was to reduce African slaves to the status of chattels,
but in Mbembe’s analysis this reduction created its obverse, a utopian potential to
overcome exactly those divisions identified by Plumwood. The problem was that
the human- natural commons posited by racial modernity was never universal;
historically the identification of ‘Africa’ as the basis of race—a real abstraction,
a concept with material force in the world—s tands ‘as a fundamental negation’
of the Enlightenment’s key terms: humanity, justice, and responsibility. By sin-
gling out ‘Africa’, the utopian possibility of a human- animal- natural commons
became instead ‘the very negation of the idea of the common, or of common
humanity’. For Plumwood the universals of Enlightenment rationality exclude
women, for Mbembe they exclude ‘Africa’ (a condition rather than a geograph-
ical entity, especially since ‘other parts of the world are undergoing a process of
“Africanisation” ’; Mbembe 2017: 54). For ecocritique, they exclude foundation-
ally the natural world and, for reasons that will become apparent, continuously
exclude gods and ancestors. We cannot wish away these historical changes by
pointing to the ontological primacy of connection. The historical actuality of the
subject- object division created by the ascendancy of communication over medi-
ation, and the consequent hierarchies of gender, race, and environments, are far
too deeply entrenched.
Feminist and decolonial critique not only foreshadow and demand
ecocritique: with their emphases on real abstraction and on modes of com-
munication, they have demonstrated that critique cannot limit itself to texts
and events with explicitly sexist and racist agendas. If it is to succeed as a prac-
tice, ecocritique must like them unpack the ecological stakes in every form of
communication. At its most radical, the questioning inherent in ecocritique is