Introduction: Anthropocene Austria

Abstract

Introduction:Anthropocene Austria Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Nicola Thomas In the eighth of his 'Lectures on the New Climatic Regime', Bruno Latour discusses an intervention which took place on the fringes of the Conference of Parties (COP) 21 in Paris, 2015. In the course of a performance entitled 'Theatre of Negotiations', young people playing the role of delegates negotiated a model climate agreement on behalf of forty-two groupings, twenty-four of which represented nation-states and eighteen a diverse range of non-state actors. '[T]hey began to climb up on stage,' Latour writes, 'delegation after delegation, "Forest" after "France," "India" next to "Indigenous Peoples," the "Atmosphere" delegation before "Australia," "Oceans" after "Maldives," each one introducing itself with pride, equal in sovereignty to all the others.'1 For Latour, this theatrical performance illustrates the 'earthbound' in all its complexity. 'Theatre of Negotiations' calls into question the historically contingent political formation we call the nation-state, but does so without advocating its abolition in favour of a globe or planet without borders. Instead, the nation-state takes its place as one type of grouping among others; one of many, messy, overlapping ways of distributing agency on an Earth that has never been, and will never be, conceivable as a whole. A dizzying leap of scale is required to think about a small nation like Austria against the background of the seemingly all-encompassing and ever more theorized predicament called the Anthropocene. The critical move implied by the title of this volume risks seeming arbitrary at best or parochial at worst. But, as the 'Theatre of Negotiations' suggests, the juxtaposition of the national (and thus transparently political) and the planetary is not only possible but also necessary. The mere fact that Austria and Austrian culture are undeniably part of the earthwide network of forces which shape, and are shaped, by anthropogenic climate and environmental change is enough to warrant closer examination of this thematic constellation. Timothy Clark has referred to the paradox of focusing on a single national culture in the context of the Anthropocene as 'methodological nationalism'.2 By sitting with this very [End Page 1] paradox, the current volume aims to enable relationships between regional or national context and planetary crisis to come more clearly into view. The category of the national — along with its political and cultural institutions, which include a body of literature and a scene of culture somehow identified with the nation — belongs to the 'old but still useful world of states', as Clemence Hallé and Anne-Sophie Milon describe it, a world which coexists alongside trans-, inter-, sub- and supra-national forces, systems and factors.3 Pace Clark, 'methodological nationalism' may serve as a starting point for analysis, if not a final destination for understanding. It is in this spirit that the current volume brings together readings of Austrian literature and film which engage with the notion of the Anthropocene. If the idea of Austria, like that of any national formation, is 'old but still useful', the other keyword of this volume's title is contrastingly new and of as yet uncertain value. Beyond its original geological context, in which it refers to the current geological epoch of indelible anthropogenic impacts on the fabric of the planet, the term Anthropocene has become a convenient if controversial shorthand for a bundle of interconnected features and effects of industrial civilization in the age of fossil fuels. These effects include climate breakdown and global heating, ecological destabilization, habitat and species loss (which are now also recognized as factors in the rise of zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19), systematic addiction to consumption, including the consumption of fossil fuels, and the political, ideological and discursive regimes that uphold, exacerbate, manage and disavow these realities. Critiques of the term are not hard to find, and the proliferation of alternatives has become something of a running joke in the humanities.4 The most frequently cited and compelling objections relate to the flattening effect of grouping together all humans on Earth into the species-category anthropos: 'the fossil economy', as Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg note, 'was not created nor is it upheld by humankind [End Page 2] in general...