The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture by Mark Bould

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture by Mark Bould Nathaniel Isaacson "I live my life a quarter mile at a time" (Dominic Toretto). Mark Bould. The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. Verso, 2021. 176 pp. $19.95 hc, $9.99 ebk. In his latest book, The Anthropocene Unconscious, Mark Bould demonstrates that "the art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness" (3). Quoting Amitav Ghosh's argument that "'serious literary fiction' has mostly failed to engage with climate change … exchang[ing] exclusion for insight" (3), Bould points to a form of "expressive aphasia": the inability of the novel, cinema, and other narrative forms properly to articulate the nature of humanity's impact on the planet, as well as the dire consequences of our destruction of the biosphere that at this point can at best be managed, not prevented. In grade-school terms, a lot of fiction is about climate change, and even when it does not say it is about climate change, it is pretty obvious that it is. One should not read The Anthropocene Unconscious as an academic exercise in the field of cultural studies, because it does not do the kind of hand-holding and defensive posturing required of that genre. Do read it as a clear call to action, an attempt to awaken us from our slumber. As Bould argues, "We cannot allow the scale of the crises we are already living through, and of those to come, to trump their urgency" (14). Bould briefly traces the emergence of the term "Anthropocene" and the debate regarding exactly when the period itself began, illustrating some of the other debates regarding nomenclature and historiography central to the environmental humanities. Listing over three dozen similar formulations, including the Cthulucene, Econocene, and the White (M)Anthropocene, Bould posits that (in his typography) -cene is the new -punk (7-8) There are infinite and generally insignificant variations on how we describe anthropogenic climate change as a geological epoch, when it began, and what its most salient features are. Perhaps more importantly, this point of contention between otherwise like-minded individuals belies a general agreement among anyone with a modicum of scientific literacy that we are in really deep shit. In Bould's words, we seem to have settled on "Anthropocene" because it "makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity's strategic relations of power and production" (12). Assigning responsibility for the [End Page 555] destruction of the biosphere to humanity as a whole means there is plenty of blame to go around, but there is also no need to blame any one individual, corporation, industry, race, nation-state, or institution more than any other. It is just as difficult to pin down what is responsible for climate change as it is to put our collective finger on who is responsible: capitalism or communism? Fossil fuels in general or oil in particular? A chicken in every pot or a billionaire's yacht in Rotterdam? It is also easy to get lost in the where: acidifying oceans or melting icecaps? Beaches in Pulau or bayous in Louisiana? The problem with the global climate crisis is one of scale: it matters all over, and it matters in very specific places in very specific ways, and that makes it very easy to get lost. One wonders whether the "anthropocene unconscious" is that which we are unaware of in our consumerist slumber, or is that which we choose not to be conscious of because of the terror of its implications. Or, perhaps this is an alternative to the "climate subconscious": that which we are only partially aware of, and which manifests itself in seemingly unrelated affective and behavioral manners. These forms of unknowing are variously present in Bould's eclectic data-set, engaging with the Anthropocene across a number of forms, genres, and texts. Bould's work is most apparently an intensive engagement with Amitav Ghosh's work in and on the genre of petrofiction and an assortment of critiques of Ghosh's work. After a short introductory chapter explaining the stakes, methodology...