-
PDF
- Split View
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Cassandra Guan, Adam O’brien, Cinema’s natural aesthetics: environments and perspectives in contemporary film theoryIntroduction, Screen, Volume 61, Issue 2, Summer 2020, Pages 272–279, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa014
- Share Icon Share
From early descriptions of cinema as ‘living picture’ to the ‘crystal-images’ evoked by Gilles Deleuze, the conceptualization of filmic media has left behind an impressive scaffold of organic metaphors and biological analogies. Although a mechanistic image of cinematic modernity prevailed in academia for many decades, we know now from the work of scholars such as Hannah Landecker, Antonio Somaini and Inga Pollmann that early and classical film theory were steeped in, and frequently interacted with, scientific and cultural discourses of life, natural environments, biological formation, and evolution.1 In recent years, new critical approaches informed by philosophical vitalism and post-humanist materialisms have tended to dissolve the specificity of cinema, as a theoretical and historical object, within a greater ecology of animated media, while breaking down epistemological distinctions between subject and object, the vital and the technical, the human and the nonhuman, in a plasmatic sea of animacy. Opting both for more disciplinary specificity and a variety of methodological perspectives, this dossier will rearticulate moving images’ involvement with nature in terms of aesthetic mediation – by which we hope to designate a historically determined range of formal structures and sensible environments, neither fixed nor arbitrary, that condition how moving-image work can be created and experienced.
The perception of cinema as ‘natural aesthetics’ is a thread that runs through early and classical film theory. Within the modernist avant garde, it was not only impressionists such as Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein who felt the elective affinity of movement, light and shadow ‘as they create a rhythmic harmony on the white surface of the screen’; Sergei Eisenstein, too, had sung paeans to the ineffable effect of night mist upon standing water.2 In ‘Ontology of the photographic image’, André Bazin observes that ‘photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty’.3 A similar intuition appears in the late writings of Theodor Adorno, who asserts in his 1966 essay ‘Filmic transparencies’ that ‘the technological medium par excellence is […] intimately related to the beauty of nature’ (Naturschönen).4 As Miriam Hansen has shown, a dialectical conception of natural beauty was already present in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of art’ essay, in which the dense concentration of mechanical processes required by film production did not preclude ‘the vision of immediate reality’, but rather made its experience ‘the Blue Flower in the land of technology’.5
A contemporary dossier devoted to cinema’s natural aesthetics may nevertheless strike some readers as an untimely undertaking. The category of natural beauty seems at first sight anachronistic, evoking the kind of nineteenth-century romantic vista that has become synonymous with conservative taste. The term appears to suggest that aesthetics – judgement, quality, value – has an ahistorical foundation in biological nature. This is, presumably, why so little attention has been paid to the recurrent invocations of natural beauty in film theory. Ecology has today become the standard model for our understanding of art’s engagement with the non-human world, superseding an allegedly naive and obsolete idea of nature.6
Yet in spite – or perhaps because – of the term’s extensive outreach and intensive circulation, it is difficult to define what an ecological approach to the study of moving-image media ought generically to propose. In some scholarly accounts, ecology stands for a concern with the material conditions and environmental impact of cinema as a mass-based industrial medium, while in others it signals a commitment to post-human ontologies and affective networks, sometimes in opposition to socio-semiotic modes of interpretation.7 Similarly the production category of ‘eco-cinema’ has been largely held together by topical concerns rather than by any coherent approach to film form. Works that receive this institutional label run the whole gamut of styles from expository environmental documentary to experimental film and gallery art installation. Whether filmmakers could, or should, transcend the representational conventions of documentary realism when working in an ‘ecological’ mode of aesthetics – and if so, how this might be achieved – remain important questions for screen studies.8
As editors of this dossier, we admit to sensing a certain danger that the sheer urgency propelling contemporary ecological critiques can lead to a form of political presentism that oversimplifies complex historical debates about moving images, their mediation of natural phenomena, and the critical possibilities of aesthetic experience. We perceive that the institutional consolidation of the ‘eco-humanities’ has left untapped critical moments of thought within film theory and film aesthetics, currents that already engage with the concept of nature in philosophically sophisticated and politically unexpected ways. Precisely because of the imminent challenge posed by global ecological crises, this intellectual legacy should be treated as a critical resource rather than a moral liability. In this dossier we want to retrace a number of neglected theoretical paths in the history of film aesthetics, while exploring emergent patterns in the dynamic interplay between ecological awareness, technological mediation and cultural praxis.
The Frankfurt School provides us with an important critical model for how to redeploy the idea of natural beauty for film theory.9 Instead of naturalizing beauty, the vision of film aesthetics espoused by Benjamin, Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, and later put into practice by the filmmaker Alexander Kluge, emphasizes the political potential of art to historicize the world of nature.10 While their designation of technology as second nature generally implies a negative judgement, the possibilities of cinema as an aesthetic experience enhanced by technology but still akin to natural beauty derive from a different critical matrix, described by Hansen in relation to Adorno as one in which ‘nature – a site of possible happiness – holds out the promise that art seeks to keep’.11 This view of nature as unfulfilled promise is at one with Kracauer’s famous description of photography as the ‘go-for-broke game of the historical process’, which was for him a ‘game that film plays with the pieces of disjointed nature’.12 If photography embodied the alienated condition of matter, then film represented the potential of art to ‘stir up the elements of nature’ into new and meaningful configurations.13 Similarly, for Adorno, what cinema recreates objectively is not the external world of reality but the inner realm of images; and it is as the objective mediation of a subjective experience that he likens film aesthetics to natural beauty.14 So rather than a precious relict of romantic nature, Benjamin’s blue flower may have signaled genuine hope of a technology reappropriated for the emancipatory struggle against Enlightenment teleology.
A dossier organized around the framework of ‘natural aesthetics’ inevitably invites comparison and dialogue with the critically related concept of ‘natural history’, as explored by (amongst others) Alex Bush, Nicholas Baer, Sean Cubitt and James Leo Cahill, the latter presenting the natural-historical approach as one in which ‘photographic media render visible the dialectical relationship between nature and history’.15 This dossier likewise argues for the importance of attending to the historical dimension of media technologies and their theory in a discourse that by its focus on the natural, the affective and the non-human frequently resists historicization. Nevertheless, ‘natural aesthetics’ signals a shift in emphasis here, away from the dialectics of history and nature, and towards questions of sensory perception and material mediation. More specifically, two important topics of research in contemporary film theory are brought together in the present discussion: the concept of medium as environment; and the epistemological problem of perspective.16
Both of these concerns can be traced back to Benjamin’s media theory, which has recently become a fresh source of inspiration for those revisiting the history of filmic media from an environmental perspective. As Somaini and Pollmann have each shown, the Benjaminian understanding of medium is informed by environmental theories of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, absorbing the influence of concepts such as milieu, Stimmung, atmosphere, media diaphana and Umwelt.17 Cinema, for Benjamin, was a privileged model of technologically mediated experience, in which the natural and the historical, the psychic and the somatic, the scientific and aesthetic are all fundamentally entwined. While ‘human experience is always configured and organized by different forms of material, technical, and discursive mediation’, the determining effect of natural-historical environments is not totalizing but is rather complicated by the perspectivalism of modernity, which fractures the subject of aesthetic experience along particularly situated sightlines.18 As Gertrud Koch vividly states: ‘The nature that speaks to the camera is different from the nature of the squeaking laboratory rat; what the scalpel (Benjamin’s camera) cuts free are points of view and not facts’.19 To emphasize cinema’s activity as an aesthetic medium, as this dossier sets out to do, is to foreground the immanent and partial – hence inherently political – perspectives that suture historical subjects into their material worlds.
We therefore regard the five essays collected in this dossier as a set of in-material histories: that is, critical accounts of the aesthetic perspectives embedded into the natural environment by historical technologies of media. They also examine the cinematic incorporation of non-human milieux into an anthropocentric frame and the simultaneous decomposition of this order into a myriad of shifting and contentious viewpoints – perspectives that may or may not add up to a coherent image of the world. All five authors are in dialogue, directly or otherwise, with film-theoretical traditions that identify in the medium a particular (and for some surprising) closeness to non-anthropogenic effects and phenomena; but they also complement this recognition with a critical awareness of nature’s instability and contingency, bringing to bear a contemporary awareness of what we might call nature’s ecological character.
Discussions about the long (proto-ecocritical) tradition of environmental film theory tend, for good reason, to give special prominence to the ideas of Kracauer, who celebrated cinema’s attachment to the world of ‘physical reality’.20 The nomination of Kracauer as an ecological thinker, however, raises questions about the syncretistic logic of his ‘realist’ film theory, which mobilizes in a loose and creative fashion such philosophically loaded concepts as ‘nature’, ‘matter’, ‘life’ and ‘reality’. As a scholar who has read Kracauer both in relation to, and as a dissident of, the Frankfurt School, Koch is eminently well positioned to interpret the philosophical lineages of thought running through Kracauer’s postwar writing on film. Her essay in this dossier specifically takes up the influence of Alfred Whitehead’s process philosophy upon Kracauer’s famous formulation of film as a medium of physical reality. Koch argues that Kracauer uses Whitehead to reinvigorate the concept of reality by replacing the philosophical distinction between first and second nature – better known to us as nature/culture – with a living environment composed of complex relationships that encompass the material singularities of things, the activity of cognition and the technicities of human culture. Yet she also maintains that Kracauer does not follow Whitehead into a romantic cosmology, because he reserves for cinema the function of aesthetic reflection, which mediates our experience of the physical world and constitutes the necessary condition for critical knowledge and political transformation.
Paraphrasing Adorno, for whom ‘imagination is not contemplation that leaves beings as they are but an intervention’, Koch contends that in ‘for Kracauer, film intervenes imperceptibly in beings, achieving their configuration into an image’. The special task of cinema as a technical medium is to ‘redeem’ empirical reality, in the Adornian sense of reconciliation with nature, through its amalgamation with the physical environment, a process likened by Kracauer to a blood transfusion. Kracauer’s ‘curious realism’, as expounded by Koch, sheds light on the work of ecological film theory today. It suggests that we can no longer approach cinema solely on the level of materiality qua materiality, or wholly on the level of its representations, since filmic media already subverts the concept of nature as defined in opposition to culture, an opposition that perpetuates the western metaphysical division of being into mind and matter. Its complex materiality requires further theoretical elaboration as well as concrete historical studies. Against the theoretical parameters set out by Koch, the four remaining essays take up these questions of materiality and medium through their investigation of specific case studies.
In Antonio Somaini’s contribution to this dossier, the habitual association of materiality with solid bodies literally melts into air in its genealogy of medium, which looks specifically at László Moholy-Nagy’s theory of light as an agent of plastic expression. As an enthusiastic exponent of photography and film, Moholy-Nagy prophesied in the 1920s a development ‘from stasis to motion, from opaqueness to transparency, and from different concrete materials towards a state of progressive dematerialization’. Somaini’s account of Moholy-Nagy’s writings and experiments confirms how aptly his terms speak to postwar and contemporary trends in art and avant-garde film practice, including the works discussed by Georgina Evans and Selmin Kara later on in the dossier. ‘In Moholy-Nagy’s work’, writes Somaini, ‘film’s inherent affinity with light is raised to a higher level. Rather than simply recording light onto the light-sensitive support of celluloid and projecting light onto the flat, opaque surface of the screen, the new forms of light projection envisioned by Moholy-Nagy were supposed to dissolve the materiality of both the spatial dispositif and of the film screen into the surrounding atmosphere.’ Somaini compares Moholy-Nagy with Benjamin, to the extent that both were ‘convinced that vision and sensory experience in general had a history, and one in which art forms had the possibility of actively intervening’. But it must be said that the discourse of Moholy-Nagy tends further towards the techno-utopian, and it is the capacity of light to transcend the material support of technology that captures his imagination. How to reconcile his aesthetic programme of dematerialization – which set out to challenge the standardized conditions of industrial Fordism – with the manifest tendency of late capitalist economies to dematerialize labour and divest from the material realm of social reproduction, is a question that demands further discussion.
Moving away from a photographic conception of cinema, Daniel Morgan invites us in his essay to reconsider the aesthetic of moving images from the perspective of animation, which broke new ground as an industrial art form during the 1930s and 1940s. Revisiting Eisenstein’s unpublished writing on Disney, Morgan notes Eisenstein’s vocal disappointment with the inertness of backgrounds in Disney animations. While admiring the flowing diversity of form that he identifies as a principle of imagistic thought, Eisenstein was nevertheless dismayed ‘that Disney is unwilling to elevate plasmaticness into a principle governing the film as a whole’. This failure, while justified by economic considerations in industrial practice, has an undeniably ideological dimension. As Morgan reiterates, ‘the backgrounds in animated cartoons tend to be the place of nature’. The decision to activate the figure at the expense of the background reinforces a voluntarist theory of the subject and perpetuates all the familiar oppositions involving culture/nature, activity/passivity, and so on, that a committed revolutionary artist such as Eistenstein would naturally wish to overthrow. In his other, late theoretical writings, Eisenstein formulated a much more progressive vision of cinema’s ‘non-indifferent nature’, synthesizing Romantic natural philosophy with dialectical materialism, which would ‘align a given film simultaneously with the laws of the natural world, the laws of the construction of artworks, and the laws of the human mind’. In Morgan’s account, natural history becomes an apt metaphor – thanks to its abiding capacity to produce flexible reorientations of seemingly fixed terms – for understanding what is at stake in Eisenstein’s passionate critiques of Disney. From the work of the Fleischer brothers, he offers up vivid and detailed examples of Eistenstein’s longed-for plasmatic landscapes, atypical but almost visionary sequences ‘where cracks show, where the separation of foreground and background disappears and the possibilities that Eisenstein imaged in his writings on landscape and animation begin to emerge’.
The contrast between infinitely malleable animated subjects and inanimate minerals is, at first glance, extreme. But Georgina Evans finds in Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) a characteristically audacious and textually complex response to the challenge of filming natural history, and more specifically the impermanence of millennia-old rock formations. The film, Evans explains, is more than aware that its subject is ‘not assimilable to cinematic representation’, but by inviting its viewers to register a sense of the fluid and the fleeting in this most apparently solid and eternal of subjects, Cave of Forgotten Dreams demonstrates some of the ways in which cinema can attempt to illustrate what she describes as the enclosure of human activity. She also adopts the particular concept of ‘deep time’ – through its recent influence on the work of Jussi Parikka and others – to explore the film’s techniques, revelations and blind spots. ‘The images associated with deep time’, writes Evans, ‘offer a fantasy of excavatory visibility’. Although the filmmakers and their researcher-subjects do not excavate as such, they are ‘nonetheless concerned with asserting temporal phases through the identification of material layers’, and one of the film’s most compelling qualities is that it demonstrates the importance of interpretation – of making aesthetic and heuristic claims in the face of geological matter – to the project of natural history.
Although similarly alert to the temporal challenges of a cinematic natural history, Selmin Kara in the dossier’s final essay places her critical emphasis on the intersection of space and time, the globe and the archive, particularly as it is conceived in relation to the Anthropocene. Kara explores an uncomfortable irony at the heart of certain post-cinematic and transmedia projects (and in particular The Anthropocene Project, staged at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2018), and their tendency to ‘feverishly project the unfolding drama of the Anthropocene onto an increasingly splintered and diversified media landscape, with the seeming desire to render the human imprint on ecology readable’. Not only must we wonder for which future ‘readers’ these archives-in-the-making are being developed, we must also interrogate the political aesthetics informing these projects. For as Kara notes, in their attempt to capture the scale of anthropogenic planetary change, such media often lean on a visual rhetoric (in which aerial imagery plays a key role) that Caren Kaplan, Paul Virilo and others have shown to be anything other than outside social structures and prejudices. Kara concludes the dossier with one of the most crucial questions we can ask of cinema’s natural aesthetics: who is watching, and how? The Anthropocene Project, she worries, configures the audience ‘as a universal subject, expected to have not only the intuitive power to extrapolate from visceral imagery a pathway for countering climate change but also the political/economic agency to follow such a path, regardless of the global structures of inequality’.
Kara’s project invites us to consider how artists and filmmakers can redeploy their medium’s aesthetic capabilities to both inform and reform our understanding of nature and environmental relations. In support of such a project, this dossier seeks to complicate the demand for normative representation that assumes representational processes, including cinematic media, can either ‘succeed’ or ‘fail’ at capturing an empirical reality existing outside of any relationship with the discursive act of inscription. This imperative unfortunately perpetuates the dualistic opposition of nature and culture, while reinstating a transcendental perspective in representation – Donna Haraway calls it the ‘gaze from nowhere’21 – from which one could behold the social totality as an imaginary whole. Despite calling the nature/culture division radically into question, the spectre of the Anthropocene has in many ways exacerbated this retreat into a realistic model of representation in discussions of screen media.22 The fabled ‘wind in the trees’ revelatory spectatorship of early filmgoing is probably the most familiar example of this model – an ideal of medium and nature as mutually contingent. But it is one that has perhaps cast too long a shadow over what can be said about their interrelation. Cinema’s Natural Aesthetics introduces some additional film–nature metaphors – the light show, rubberized landscapes, excavation and archive – all of which offer alternative perspectives on the processes of cinematic mediation to machinic revelation. They strive to describe not just representations of nature, but medium-specific aesthetics.
Footnotes
1 See Hannah Landecker, ‘Microcinematography and film theory’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 31, no. 4 (2005), pp. 903–37; Oliver Gaycken, ‘The secret life of plants: visualizing vegetative movement, 1880–1903’, Early Popular Visual Culture, vol. 10, no. 1 (2012), pp. 51–69; Antonio Somaini, ‘Walter Benjamin’s media theory: the medium and the apparat’, Grey Room, no. 62 (2016), pp. 6–41; Inga Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
2 Quoted passage from Germaine Dulac, ‘Quelques réflexions sur le “cinéma pur”’, Écrits, no. 73; cited in Tom Gunning, ‘Light, motion, cinema! The heritage of Loïe Fuller and Germaine Dulac’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 46, no. 1 (2005), p. 113. On the ‘plastic music’ of landscape in the film Potemkin, see Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 218–29.
3 André Bazin, ‘Ontology of the photographic image’, in What is Cinema? Volume I, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), p. 13.
4 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Transparencies on film’, trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, no. 24/25 (1981), p. 201.
5 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 35.
6 Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
7 For a materialist account of film’s relationship to the natural environment, see Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (eds), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015). For eco-film theories effected by the turn to affect and post-humanism, see A. J. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press Environmental Humanities Series, 2013); Alexa Weik von Mossner (ed.), Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014); John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Janine Marchessault, Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation and Game Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
8 For a comprehensive overview of the academic discourse on ‘eco-cinema’, as well as more extensive discussions of particular topics, see Stephen Rust (ed.), Ecocinema Theory and Practice (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012).
9 An important step has been taken in this direction in Daniel Morgan’s analysis of Godard’s late films, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), pp. 70–72.
10 For scholarly accounts of this subject, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Natural beauty, language character’, in Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 229–36; Daniel Morgan, ‘Nature and its discontents’, in Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema, pp. 69–119; Nora M. Alter, Lutz Koepnik and Richard Langston, ‘Landscapes of ice, wind and snow: Alexander Kluge’s aesthetic of coldness’, Grey Room, no. 53 (2013), pp. 60–87.
11 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 230.
12 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 62–63.
13 Ibid., p. 62.
14 Adorno, ‘Filmic transparencies’, p. 201.
15 James Leo Cahill, ‘Cinema’s natural history’, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 58, no. 2 (2019), p. 155. See also Alex Bush, ‘Moving mountains: glacial contingency and modernity in the Bergfilm’, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 59, no. 1 (2019); Nicholas Baer, ‘Natural history: rethinking the Bergfilm’, in Jörn Ahrens, Paul Fleming, Susanne Martin and Ulrike Vedder (eds), Doch ist das Wirkliche auch vergessen, so ist es darum nicht getilgt: Beiträge zum Werk Siegfried Kracauers (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017); Sean Cubitt, ‘Film, landscape and political aesthetics: Deseret’, Screen, vol. 57, no. 1 (2016), pp. 21–34.
16 Without specifically intending to, our decision to move away from ‘natural history’ to ‘natural aesthetics’ doubles the turn made by Adorno himself from his early work in ‘The idea of natural-history’ (1932) to his later vindication of natural beauty in Aesthetic Theory (1965–69) and ‘Film transparencies’ (1966). In his introduction to the English-language translation, Bob Hullot-Kentor suggests that the mature Adorno grew sceptical of ‘natural-history’ as a critical term because it lacks historicity and therefore remains too much of a neologistic invention in the Heideggerian mode that Adorno had by then rejected. In contrast, his late-in-life defence of natural beauty is a carefully grounded intervention into the political history of the enlightenment. See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The idea of natural-history’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Telos, no. 60 (1984), pp. 111–24; Bob Hullot-Kentor, ‘Introduction to Adorno’s Idea of natural-history’, Telos, no. 60 (1984), pp. 97–110.
17 See Somaini, ‘Walter Benjamin’s media theory’, pp. 27–32; Inga Pollmann, ‘Invisible worlds, visible: Uexkull’s Umwelt, film and film theory’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 4 (2013), pp. 806–16.
18 Somaini, ‘Walter Benjamin’s media theory’, p. 7.
19 Gertrud Koch, ‘Film as experiment in animation: are films experiments on human beings?’, in Karen Beckman (ed.), Animating Film Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 137.
20 See, for example, Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (New York, NY: Oxford University Press), ch. 5; Adam O’Brien, Transactions With the World: Ecocriticism and the Environmental Sensibility of New Hollywood (New York, NY: Berghahn, 2016), ch. 2.
21 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (1988), p. 581.
22 Nicholas Mirzoeff offers a particularly enlightening discussion of what he calls ‘Anthropocene visuality’, in ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture, vol. 26, no. 2 (2014).