R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER Philology in the Anthropocene Preliminary Remarks: The Possible Tasks of a Philology in the Anthropocene According to Paul Crutzen and others, ‘we’ - and I will return to the problem of this use of the first-person plural pronoun at the end of this article - might find ourselves in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. An Anthropocene Working Group has already recommended recognizing this new epoch - but has to leave its official acceptation to three parent organizations whose decisions might take some time (“Media Note“). The name of this epoch is as much in need of explanation as the very fact that a whole new epoch is supposed to be commencing. The official epoch so far, the Holocene, is still remarkably young in geological time, just 11,717 years old; besides it is hard to surpass this epoch, since geologists have already described it as the “totally new” epoch (from: ὅλος, ‘totally’, and καινός, ‘new’), and what could be newer than the totally new? Moreover, the mention of the ‘human’ in the title of this proposed new epoch can be misleading, since humans have long existed in the Holocene. (There were already human beings during the Pleistocene, incidentally, although readers of German literature might be perplexed about this: Geiser, the protagonist of Max Frisch’s novel Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, confuses the two epochs, and the title adopts his confusion.) What is newer than the totally new, what is in fact humanly-new (from: ἄνθρωπος, ‘human, and καινός, ‘new’) is that humans have changed the Earth in such a way that the consequences of these changes will in all likelihood continue to leave their mark for a long time yet to come. If 23,000 years from now archeologists from the planet Kepler-186 f (an Earth-like exoplanet only 492 light-years from the Earth) land here, they will find, among other things, enormous hollowed-out layers of stone as well as elevated CO 2 levels, 1 and their research will show these to be caused by humans - even if there are no longer any living specimens of humanity left, even if the stench of billions of human corpses has already dissipated (cf. Horn 12 for a critique of such aseptic post-apocalyptic scenarios like this one I have just invented). Whether the Anthropocene gets dated back to the invention of the steam engine or the atom bomb is relatively insignificant, since these are extremely 1 These can be regarded as indicative signatures, or “geological signals,” in strata now forming for the International Commission on Stratigraphy to formally accept the Anthropocene as a new geographical epoch (cf. Subcomission on Quarternary Stratigraphy). R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 44 brief moments on the geological time scale - whereas the duration of the noticeable consequences will certainly be measurable on this scale: “Humans have become geological agents” (Oreskes 1686). In this “mix up of time scales,” the “distinction between history and geostory” vanishes, Latour notes (“Le mélange d’échelles de temps,” “la distinction entre l’histoire et la géohistorie avait soudainement disparu,” 153-154). This “mix up of time scales” has epistemological consequences among others; as Dipesh Chakrabarty formulated it, “anthropogenetic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (“Climate of History” 201). Chakrabarty primarily looks to Giambattista Vico’s epistemological distinction between the verum, as the object of natural history, and the factum, the man-made, as the object of human history. As Chakrabarty explicitly concedes that this dichotomy is a simplification owing more to Benedetto Croce’s influential reception of Vico than to Vico’s own text, a fresh reading of some paragraphs of the Scienza Nuova might be helpful. After all, Vico’s epistemological reflections also concern philology, the discipline that today’s literary theorists are heirs to. For according to Vico, human history is the essential object of philology, which includes “all the grammarians, historians, critics who have occupied themselves with the cognition of languages and deeds of peoples” (“Questa Degnità per la seconda parte diffinisce i Filologi essere tutti i Gramatici, Istorici, Critici, che son’occupati d’intorno alla cognizione delle Lingue, e de’ Fatti de’ popoli [...],” 120). He adds that philology adheres to the “certain things” (“la Filologia osserva l’Autorità dell’ Umano Arbitrio, onde viene la Coscienza del Certo,” 120) and is able to know these things precisely and only because they have been made by humans (172-173, 187). This connection between the made and the certain can be seen in the Latinate and Romance languages: factum, fatto, fait; facts are made. And it follows from this, in fact, that the melting of the polar ice or the flooding of the South Pacific Islands are part of the subject matter of philology insofar as these phenomena can be traced back to anthropogenic climate change. This conclusion, admittedly, looks megalomaniacal and also, in view of the advanced differentiation of the sciences, impracticable. Moreover, one could object that climate change is not a certainty (Certo) but rather involves various degrees of probability: that it is occurring is a near certainty; the predictions of concrete consequences have very different degrees of probability. Yet this blurring of the boundary between verum and factum, between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture,’ challenges philology to reflect on how it can respond to anthropogenic climate change. At first glance, three possible sorts of reaction are conceivable. (1) As far as philology sees itself as literary studies, it can study literary representations of climate change. In fact an entire genre labeled “Cli-Fi” has already been Philology in the Anthropocene 45 identified and the first anthologies are coming out (Adams). Ecocriticism, a currently fashionable subdiscipline in literary studies, has only turned to the topic of climate change quite recently, however. 2 Moreover, ecocriticism itself tends to reduce speech to the function of appeal. An article on Roland Emmerich’s film The Day After Tomorrow is typical in this regard: After a sheepish admission that the film represents the worst sort of dumbing-down, the article ultimately defends the film, noting that it at least produces an emotional response that could then be further processed in “educational contexts” (Weik von Mossner 254). 3 To take specifically literary speech (or the specific methods of film or other media and arts) more seriously philologists would have to ask, for example, whether climate change is just an object in the sense that a university campus is an object, that is, whether the group of artifacts in question can simply be defined by thematic criteria in advance (Horn 166). Climate change is not so much an ‘object’ as it is a ‘hyperobject’ that is not localizable and cannot be unproblematically objectified (Morton). It requires careful reflection to determine which texts that are not explicitly and thematically related to climate change can nonetheless offer insights, and for what reasons. - In this article I refer only sparingly to texts that count thematically as part of the literature on climate change in the narrow sense; one text I discuss at the end, by Mirko Bonné, deals not so much with climate change as with the difficulty of representing climate change, whereas others (from Sophocles, Lucretius and Wallace Stevens) are not specifically responding to climate change at all. (2) Philology can also bring scientific texts on climate change into its investigations, not only to have a basis of more or less certain facts to refer to as the necessary background knowledge for any engagement with climate change, but also and above all out of an interest in how this knowledge gets generated. This is all the more necessary as many representatives of the ‘literary culture’ hold onto a crude version of Snow’s ‘two cultures’ dichotomy - and are thus even more naïve than the representatives of the ‘scientific culture’ who they accuse of naivety. Intellectuals, who are typically only cognizant of the discussions in mass media - where research results are reported in an extremely reductive form and the mere opinions of ‘climate sceptics’ are severely overrepresented - seem to find it an intellectually responsible position to emphasize that climate research has not produced any certain knowledge and that there are sceptics who shouldn’t be dismissed. (The intellectuals of this pseudo-free-thinking sort include novelists such as Crichton and McEwan - or at least their narrators.) Firstly, however, there is essen- 2 In his Cambridge Introduction, Timothy Clark notes the surprisingly low number of pertinent contributions and explains: “Ecocriticism evolved primarily to address local and easily identifiable outrages and injustices” (10-11). 3 The best possible reaction to this film came just a year after its release: “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow,” the eighth episode of the ninth season of South Park. R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 46 tially no fundamental and scientifically grounded skepticism about the extremely high probability of global warming and its source in human activity (Oreskes); and secondly, those in the climate sciences are very much aware of the fact that they are dealing with probabilities of various degrees and not with certainties - the idea that empirical sciences have to formulate certainties is a projection on the part of non-scientists. “No less than molecular biology or physics, climate science relies on simulations and models, which we nonetheless cannot dismiss as ‘pure constructions’ and therefore untrue” (Horn 176). Some of the procedures for generating knowledge about climate change are far more similar to philological methods than many philologists would ever dream of (Gramelsberger); hence scientists have long adhered to the conclusion from Vico’s epistemological premises that the melting of the polar ice is an object of philology. - This article is not meant to contribute to an analysis of our current knowledge of climate, but it will more precisely describe these procedures in an older form (in Alexander von Humboldt’s work) and argues that the categories developed there can still help to understand the current situation. (3) Finally, philology can examine the forms of speech and writing prevailing in the general discourse (not limited to either literature or the relevant scientific disciplines) about climate change. Many words get used here in distressingly unreflective ways. For example, it is popular to ask in surveys whether or not someone ‘believes’ in climate change - as if this were a religious question, rather than a question that could, after a review of the research results, be translated into the more precise question: ‘According to the results of Naomi Oreskes, out of 928 articles on climate change published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, no single article disputes the warming of the Earth or its anthropogenic character (and nothing essential has changed since then). What do you think is the probability that all of these scientific publishers are being manipulated by financially powerful and ideologically motivated environmentalists who have succeeded in preventing all the climate skeptics financed by the oil and gas industries from publishing their divergent findings? ’ What is more, the words and sentences used to appeal to individuals to do something or other against climate change are rather hollow. These include warnings like ‘the world will end’ or ‘humanity will die out’ - warnings that can be visualized particularly well in literary and cinematic fictions. The flaw of such apocalyptic scenarios is not that they exaggerate or are guilty of fear-mongering - as the know-it-all ‘free-thinkers’ of the Crichton or McEwan variety claim - but, to the contrary, that they downplay the problem by pretending that climate change can be understood as a catastrophic event in the classical sense: as producing a sudden shift or turn (Horn, see p. 166 for some of the most precise formulations of her conclusive critique). The suddenness of our extinction, as these fictions imagine Philology in the Anthropocene 47 it - or even as pictured in a speculative non-fictional work like Weisman’s The World Without Us - leaves out all the time in between. But, “In the meantime, we definitely have a situation” (Don DeLillo White Noise, quoted in Heise, Sense 162, and in Horn 293). Although one cannot be too cautious about predictions, what is far more likely than the immediate extinction of mankind is simply that throughout the course of the 21 st century several billion people will lose the resources they need to survive; I am simply not capable of finding any consolation in this. The undifferentiated use of the words human and related terms (humanity, man, mankind etc.) is one of the methods of reducing speech to the function of appeal and blocking any further reflection. Something similar might be said about the other big word world and the allegedly small pronoun we. - This article focuses on the plurivalence of these three words and makes for the most part historically founded proposals for a more differentiated use - without wanting to insinuate that the meanings of these words could be clarified once and for all with finer distinctions. Moreover, the division between man, world and we is only a heuristic one, since the three words are obviously intimately related to one another. Those working in the humanities will not save humanity, the world, or us, but they may contribute to a more precise way of talking about them. Man (homo vs. ἄνθρωπος) Those working in cultural studies above all tend to be uncomfortable with the name Anthropocene for a new geological epoch, as it might seem to go hand-in-hand with an unreflective reprisal of that “empirico-transcendental doublet” known as man whose time was supposed to be up, as in the famous poetic conclusion of the work, now a half-century old: “- alors on put bien parier que l’homme s’effacerait, comme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable” (Foucault, Les mots 398). 4 The humanities had hardly finished putting man to rest, and had happily arrived in the post-humanist stage - and now the geologists are threatening to drag them back into anthropocentrism (Schmieder). A naïve use of the term Anthropocene could in fact cement the idea that ‘man’ is the measure of all things and can transform the Earth as he sees fit. In the current discussions about responses to climate change this could be used to justify the use of new and obviously risky technologies such as carbon sequestration; Crutzen himself is not entirely innocent of this, since in the penultimate sentence of his short 2002 article he explicitly considers the possibilities of “geoengineering” (23; cf. also his short remark in an interview 4 “[…] then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” (Foucault, Order of Things 387) R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 48 according to which he wasn’t aware of the latent anthropocentric implications in his proposed name Anthropocene, Schwägerl 35). Hence it is all the more important to distinguish between (at least) two conceptions of humanity, as Chakrabarty has done: But what happens when we say humans are acting like a geophysical force? We then liken humans to some nonhuman, nonliving agency. That is why I say the science of anthropogenic global warming has doubled the figure of the human— you have to think of the two figures of the human simultaneously: the humanhuman and the nonhuman-human. (“Postcolonial Studies” 11) The nonhuman-human as geophysical agency has brought about effects that were obviously unintended - the oldest extant description of the nonhumanhuman is: πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει. τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισιν περῶν ὑπ᾽ οἴδμασιν. θεῶν τε τὰν ὑπερτάταν, Γᾶν ἄφθιτον, ἀκαμάταν, ἀποτρύεται ἰλλομένων ἀρότρων ἔτος εἰς ἔτος ἱππείῳ γένει πολεύων. Many things cause terror and wonder, yet nothing is more terrifying and wonderful than man. / This thing goes across the gray / sea on the blasts of winter / storms, passing beneath / waters towering ‘round him. The Earth, / eldest of the gods, / unwithering and untiring, this thing wears down / as his plows go back and forth year after year / furrowing her with the issue of horses. (Sophocles, vv. 332-341) Man 2 , this uncannily powerful being (δεινά is the same root as in dinosaur) which I propose to call ἄνθρωπος, is a ζῷον ἀποτρύον, a fracking animal who has chafed the Earth to the degree that the traces of his work can no longer be distinguished from ‘nature.’ But he works in a blind rage; as Latour acutely puts the point, the Anthropocene is for this reason no anthropocentric figure at all, but rather “the most radical term that would simultaneously put an end to anthropocentrism as well as to older forms of naturalism by suddenly foregrounding the human agent under another shape” (“Le terme le plus radicale pour mettre fin à l’anthropocentrisme ainsi qu’aux anciennes formes de naturalisme en recomposant complètement le rôle de l’agent humain,” 154). I would propose reserving the Latin term homo for Man 1 , “the humanhuman” (according to Chakrabarty) as an empirico-transcendental doublet. The difference between ἄνθρωπος and homo is nowhere clearer than at the point where they seem to converge: in Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, a text dating from the beginning of the episteme where, Philology in the Anthropocene 49 as Foucault sees it, man first gets configured. Here Herder seems to anticipate anthropogenic climate change when he writes: “we may consider mankind, therefore, as a band of bold though diminutive giants, gradually descending from the mountains, to subjugate the Earth, and change climates with their feeble arms” (Herder 269 / engl. trans. by Churchill 316-7). 5 But this similarity is merely superficial: not only because Herder is here thinking of microclimates (such as the changes in the Nile delta due to its canalization and extension), but above all because Herder imagines homo intentionally carrying out these reformations of the Earth, as if he knew what he was doing. Ironically enough, the first volume of the Ideen came out in the same year to which Timothy Morton dates James Watt’s invention of the steam engine - and thus the beginning of the Anthropocene (7). Since 1784 the new ἄνθρωπος has been trailing the equally reconfigured homo like a shadow, though only now is it becoming increasingly visible. Chakrabarty connects his distinction between two “figures of the human” with an appeal for enlightened reform. In a discussion in Munich he drew an analogy to Freud’s famous sentence “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (“Where id was, there shall ego be”): 6 Where the nonhuman-human was, the humanhuman shall be. I am however skeptical whether this model of individual enlightenment can directly carry over to seven billion specimens of the species. I could formulate my skepticism here in grammatical terms: Whereas Freud’s ego and id have an equivalent status (as instances within a model of the psyche), the two “figures of the human” can only be conceived in the collective singular to quite different degrees, can only be seen as “figures of the human” with the help of quite different abstractions. This seems relatively unproblematic in the case of homo or the “human-human,” since this has always been conceived as a collective singular category in a long and fully developed tradition of thought since 1800; this is the grammatical form of an idea of ‘man’ that is realized in each specimen. This idea also underlies Vico’s notion of the “common sense of mankind” (“senso commune di Gener’Umano,” Vico 187, original emphasis). It is not the philologist who is responsible for this idea, but the philosopher. The New Science Vico has in mind must be produced jointly by the philologist and the philosopher, each of them having to supplement the competences of the other and correct the other’s onesidedness (120). While the philologist studies the certo in all its varieties, the philosopher has to insist on the verum (120), on the universal and eternal idea (126) even while this idea is not recognizable in itself, but has to be postulat- 5 See Macho 132 for a succinct analysis of the ambivalent rhetoric in this passage. 6 Editors‘ note: Dipesh Chakrabarty was invited keynote speaker at the conference Meteorologies of Modernity organized by the DFG-funded research training group “Literature and Globalization” at LMU in Munich in 2014. R. Stockhammer refers here to a preceding discussion between Chakrabarty and members of the research training group on the day before the conference. R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 50 ed as a driving force of all human history, in all of its contingencies. In short, the object of philosophy is the homo; the object of philology is the works and deeds of the ἄνθρωποι in an irreducible plural (languages, costumes, laws, wars, peace, etc.; Vico 120). But the collective singular of ἄνθρωπος or “nonhuman-human” essentializes ‘an’ agent that essentially is not one but rather consists in a group of dissimilar agents. Within the discourse on climate change, this collective singular obscures the fact that humans - in an irreducible plural - are emitting carbon-dioxide to very different degrees and are affected by these emissions to very different degrees: “Who was it exactly that changed the planet, who profited from these changes, and who are they hurting? ” (Heise, “Posthumanismus” 39). This collective singular form might also be called for if the extinction of the ‘species’ 7 were imminent (as in “the dodo is extinct”) - as long as this is not very likely, the use of the collective singular appeals to a commonality that does not exist: “very little commonality can be taken for granted, and [...] speaking about humans, humanity, humanness, or the Anthropocene requires a patient and meticulous process of assembly - in its most craftsmanlike and technological connotations” (Heise, “Comparative Ecocriticism” 29). The commonality of homo is not comparable to the inequality within the ἄνθρωποι. Chakrabarty himself illustrates this when he - provocatively but plausibly - criticizes the proposal that every individual on the Earth should have a claim to the same per capita emissions. If everyone in Africa and Asia were now allowed to catch up and to emit as much as Europeans and North Americans already have, the situation would be even worse. “It is, ironically, thanks to the poor—that is, to the fact that development is uneven and unfair—that we do not put out even larger quantities of greenhouse gases into the biosphere than we actually do” (Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital” 11). Humans as ἄνθρωποι are not the most suitable subjects to project a notion of equality onto. Nonetheless not everyone will want to abandon every idea of equality. I myself, for example, would like to hold on to the idea that every human life is equally deserving of protection, so I cannot follow the calculations of a climate ethicist for whom the goal of ethics is optimizing the sum of happiness on Earth, such that the death of 2000 Calcuttans (with an average happiness coefficient of 3) is not as bad as the death of 1200 Swedes (with an average happiness coefficient of 5.6; Gesang 143). 7 Chakrabarty uses this word only tentatively (“Call that mode of being a ‘species’ or something else,” “Postcolonial Studies” 14). Philology in the Anthropocene 51 World (and/ or Earth, Meteorologically vs. Uranologically) Timothy Morton has responded to the threat that the world might soon end with the ingenious observation that the world has already ended, since a world depends on a distinction between background and foreground which has become impossible (99). One of the advantages of this quite pointed formulation is that it draws the attention to what is called ‘world.’ As Martin Heidegger (“Zeit des Weltbildes”) has made clear, a ‘world’ depends on a ‘world-picture,’ and this world-picture, the emergence of which can be dated back to early modernity, might have come to an end. Morton does not dispute that the Earth still exists, and that there are humans living on it. Alexander von Humboldt is one of those who insisted emphatically on the “scientific distinction between world and Earth (“wissenschaftliche Absonderung von Welt und Erde”), and he criticized expressions such as map of the world or new world, since they in fact only refer to the Earth (in the first case) or (in the second case) only a part of the Earth (I: 61/ engl. trans. by Otte 67). Thus I will suspend any discussion of the world for now and reconstruct Humboldt’s description of the Earth, an essential part of which is a theory of climates. The theory can be seen most clearly in a map, which is not taken from Humboldt’s own late work Kosmos, but rather from an atlas that was originally meant to be published as a supplementary volume to Kosmos, but was published separately due to contingent problems with the publishers: Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas, the first larger collection of so-called thematic maps, showing the geographical distribution of organic and anorganic features (like temperatures, animals, languages, human races, and many other things). This atlas opens with a map, entitled “Alexander von Humboldt’s System der Isothermen-Kurven, in Merkator’s Projektion”: R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 52 The indication of the projection used is to be read like an indication of a genre (for example, Wuthering Heights. A Novel). The main reason for the choice of the Mercator projection is that it is the most prominent member of a class of projections called cylindrical. In contrast to azimuthal projections (which show parallels as concentric circles) and conic projections (some of which show meridians and parallels as curved lines), cylindrical projections display the Earth as an arrangement of straight lines, with meridians and parallels at angles of 90°. 8 (Diagrammatic representation of a cylindrical projection) These lines do not preserve any feature reminiscent of the sphericity of the Earth, but, for the very same reason, they are the most rigorous in projecting a geometrically perfect body from the realm of the spherical to the realm of the plane, the plane of a rectangular sheet of paper. In a genre poetics of cartographic projections (yet to be written, as far as I know), cylindrical projections should be discussed as the most radical projections, since they most radically abstract from the curvedness of the Earth in its three-dimensional shape (as well as in its symbolic counterpart, the globe). Berghaus’ map of Humboldt’s isothermal curves shows climate in a double sense, or rather: it shows the very conflict between two meanings of climate, as a conflict between straight and curved lines. On the one hand, one of the Greek names for parallels - only represented as straight lines in a cylindrical projection - is κλίμα. Derived from the verb κλίνειν, ‘to bend’ (preserved in English words like decline or inclination), κλίμα originally denoted nothing more or less than a particular angle of inclination of sunrays at a particular area of the Earth’s spherical surface (Liddell/ Scott, sense I.2.: “terrestrial latitude, latitudes, region”). In Ancient Greek, κλίμα did not 8 The first three maps in Berghaus’ Atlas, all of which are concerned with the representation of climate, pertain to these three classes of projections, as if they wanted to echo the tripartite classification of epic, lyrical, and dramatic genres of literature, codified only in the late 18 th century. - I am skipping the notorious discussion about the allegedly ‘Eurocentric’ shape of the Mercator projection, a reproach that is partly based on oversimplification, partly on ideology (cf. Brotton 378-404 for a recent and sufficiently dialectic reconstruction of this debate); the only important point here is simply that the Mercator projection belongs to the class of cylindrical projections (as does, by the way, Peters’s projection). Philology in the Anthropocene 53 have the implications it has nowadays, and, conversely, most Greek texts that do contain knowledge that would nowadays be classified as climate knowledge do not use κλίμα for this notion. 9 On the other hand, the Humboldtian map does of course deal with climate in the modern sense. By using straight lines for the parallels, the mapmaker evokes the κλίματα (in the sense of parallels) as a horizon of expectation, as a plausible “idea of order” 10 for climate in the sense of average temperatures. In his Kosmos, Humboldt comments: Wenn die Oberfläche der Erde aus einer und derselben homogenen flüssigen Masse oder aus Gesteinschichten zusammengesetzt wäre, welche gleiche Farbe, gleiche Dichtigkeit, gleiche Glätte, gleiches Absorptionsvermögen für die Sonnenstrahlen besäßen und auf gleiche Weise durch die Atmosphäre gegen den Weltraum ausstrahlten, so würden die Isothermen [...] sämmtlich dem Aequator parallel laufen. (I: 340-1) If the surface of the Earth consisted of one and the same homogeneous fluid mass, or of strata of rock having the same color, density, smoothness, and power of absorbing heat from the solar rays, and of radiating it in a similar manner through 9 The text usually entitled “Airs, Waters, Places” (contained in the Corpus Hippocraticum), for example, uses ὥρα for what is translated as “climate”; Aristotle, Politics, uses τόπος (1327 b). Conversely, when Greek texts use κλίμα within the model of “seven latitudinal strips in the οἰκουμένη” (Liddell/ Scott I.4), these are distinguished by the length of the days in the respective strips, not by cold and heat - a perspective only developed in the Arab and medieval Latin tradition. 10 Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” serves as a pretense to use the area around Florida as an illustration. R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 54 the atmosphere, the isothermal [...] 11 lines would all be parallel to the equator. (emphasis added; engl. transl. by Otte 318) Evidently, the isothermal lines - the blue and green lines connecting points of identical average temperature - do not run parallel to the equator. This would be a “hypothetische[r] Zustand” (“hypothetical condition”) only, which Humboldt also calls the “mittleren, gleichsam primitiven Zustande” (“mean, and, as it were, primitive condition,” I: 341/ engl. transl. by Otte 318). This state is used as the basis for what he calls “die mathematische Betrachtung der Klimate” (“the mathematical consideration of climates,” ibid.). And this ‘mathematical’ dimension of climates is distinguished from the ‘physical’ dimension, which includes everything that is responsible for the fact that isotherms do not follow the parallels, that they are inflected (“Alles, was das Absorptions- und Ausstrahlungsvermögen an einzelnen Theilen der Oberfläche, die auf gleichen Parallelkreisen liegen, verändert, bringt Inflexionen in den Isothermen hervor.” / “Whatever alters the capacity for absorption and radiation, at places lying under the same parallel of latitude, gives rise to inflections in the isothermal lines.” ibid.) Primitively, mathematically, the average temperature of New York, for example, could be expected to equal the average temperature of Naples - but it is obviously lower, closer to the average temperature of Munich, about 8° latitude farther north. In order to avoid misunderstandings, it is important to explain Humboldt’s notion of the ‘mathematical,’ especially since the physical view also involves a lot of calculating. To draw isotherms, isotheres and isocheims, millions of data have to be collected at thousands of weather stations, such as the data also published in the Berghaus Atlas: 11 I have left out the isotheres (lines connecting points of identical summer average temperature), and the isocheims (lines connecting points of identical winter average temperature). Philology in the Anthropocene 55 These data have to be statistically evaluated in order to obtain “mean numerical values” which are, according to Humboldt, the “ultimate aim of investigation, being the expression of the physical laws, or forces of the Cosmos” (“der letzte Zweck, ja der Ausdruck physischer Gesetze und Mächte des Kosmos,” I: 82/ engl. transl. by Otte 16). These calculations, however, are R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 56 physical, and not mathematical in Humboldt’s sense, since he reserves the term mathematical for a kind of geometry that deals with idealized geometrical bodies. In a ‘mathematical’ view, the Earth is taken as a perfect sphere for whose complete description only one single value is needed: its diameter. This is the Earth as presupposed in most cartographic projections. The physical shape of the Earth, to the contrary, is far from being a perfect body, but “is affected by all the accidents and inequalities of the solid parts” (“allen Zufälligkeiten und Unebenheiten des Starren,” I: 172/ engl. transl. by Otte 163). Humboldt’s distinction between mathematical and physical description can be related to the distinction between uranology and meteorology, to be found in Aristotle’s book on the latter subject. This analogy is valid not so much with regard to the objects of these disciplines, but rather with regard to the epistemological premises involved. These premises are very clearly displayed at the beginning of his Meteorology, where Aristotle discusses the shift from his Uranology (Peri Ouranou) to the later book which is presented as a sequel to the former: We have already discussed the first causes of nature, and all natural motion, also the stars ordered in the motion of the heavens [...] There remains for consideration a part of this inquiry which all our predecessors called meteorology. It is concerned with events that are natural, though their order is less perfect [ἀτακτοτέρος ] than that of the first of the elements of bodies. They take place in the region nearest to the motion of the stars. Such are the milky way, and comets, and the movements of meteors. It studies also all the affections we may call common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth and the affections of its parts. (Meteorologica 338 a-b) Meteorology is concerned with everything that comes from above without following regular laws (meteors as well as thunderbolts). While uranology, in other words, deals with perfect bodies, meteorology deals with the Earth as a less orderly, imperfect body, a body subject to all the contingent, non-parallel inflections Lucretius termed clinamen (another term derived, of course, from κλίνειν; cf. Serres for an updated reading of Lucretius for a physics of nonlinear systems, which is epistemologically related to meteorology). Humboldt’s mathematical view corresponds to the uranological dimension, and his physical view corresponds to the meteorological dimension. The Earth can be the object of either view, particularly if one abandons the geocentric perspective and sees it, like Humboldt, as an “airport Earth” (Sloterdijk 42) that one could fly to from outer space. The Earth is a globus in two senses of this Latin word (which is usually reduced to the first sense): from afar it seems to be a perfectly rounded, uranological sphere; a closer look shows it to be a very irregular, imperfect meteorological body, a sort of a dumpling (another meaning of globus). And the isothermic map precisely Philology in the Anthropocene 57 represents the tension, the dispute between the Earth as an uranological globus 1 and the Earth as meteorological globus 2 , the dispute between the mathematical “idea of order” represented by the straight lines of the cylindrical projection on the one hand, and on the other hand all the physical, irregular inflections, shown as inclinations (clinamina) of the curved iso-lines. The mathematical figure of the Earth displays a surface on which all points are equidistant from the center; the physical figure of the Earth displays irregularities, “a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal” (Moretti 55-6, using Wallerstein), inequalities that can only be described by means of statistical laws. The isothermic map shows both these figures in their dispute. These distinctions found in Aristotle, Vico and Humboldt can be ordered as a series of oppositions, whereby each pair of opposites is not meant to represent a pair of alternative options one could choose between, but rather the poles of a tension that are to be reflected on in their tension: Aristotle: uranology vs. meteorology Vico: philosophy philology (communal sense) (languages, deeds of different peoples) Humboldt: mathematical view physical view Earth as perfect sphere Earth as imperfect body globus as sphere globus as dumpling κλίματα as straight lines isothermes as inflections homo ἄνθρωποι And now I can finally reintroduce the word world, which Humboldt avoids in his discussions of the Earth. Humboldt’s view that the use of world should be restricted to denoting the whole universe (in German words like Weltraum or Weltgebäude, I: 61/ engl. transl. by Otte 63), ignores the history of the word world, which has almost always also signified “any self-enclosing whole” (Hayot 39) and can be applied on very different scales (cf. expressions like ‘world of ants’). Unlike Timothy Morton, I will not assume that such units have disappeared once and for all; but I suggest that their existence cannot be assumed as self-evident either, and least of all should be assumed that they are coextensive with the Earth. Not only does the world change, what a world can be also changes, in what circumstances there can be a world or even one world. In any case world cannot simply be identified with either of the two conceptions of Earth; but world might be conceived in the tension between these conceptions of the Earth. And yes, here I am intentionally replacing Heidegger’s notion of a “dispute between world and earth” (“Ursprung” 36) with a notion of ‘world as a dispute between two conflicting concepts of Earth.’ The distinction between the mathematico-uranological and the physico-meteorological perspective on global relations may be help- R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 58 ful in describing these relations under different aspects without excluding parts of these relation; it may help in filling the “need [...] to view the human simultaneously on contradictory registers” (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 14), in the tension between the ideal of human equality and the brute fact of humans’ inequality. We (Invs. Exclusivity) One of the typical characteristics of the writing and speech about climate change that limits itself to pure appeal is, ultimately, the uninterrogated use of personal or possessive pronouns in the first-personal plural. “Our responsibility for the future of the Earth” is the subtitle of the stimulating exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene” shown in the German Museum in Munich between the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2016. In their preface to the exhibition, its initiators, the directors of the Rachel Carson Center, explain their agenda: [T]he Anthropocene idea also means that we will only be able to solve the environmental problems that we as humans have created, particularly since industrialization, through the intelligent use of our scientific and technological creativity in full awareness of our responsibility for the future of the Earth. (Mauch and Trischler 8) This sentence contains four personal or possessive pronouns in the firstperson plural, one of which refers to “we as humans,” hence potentially including all seven billion specimens (assuming that they all can read German and have access to a publication that can only easily be acquired in the German Museum bookstore - or can at least read English and can find the translated quote in a specialized medium for English and American Literature). But how many humans have been creating these problems “since industrialization,” how many are in a position to use their “scientific and technological creativity” for “the future of the Earth”? Doesn’t this we hold too many people responsible for the problem who can do nothing or at least very little about it, and doesn’t it at the same time ask too much of these people in obligating them to work towards a solution? Authors who reflect on speaking about climate change occasionally note this problem of the we (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 10; Macho 132); but there has yet been no more precise analysis of the use of this pronoun. Some languages use different forms for the addressee-inclusive and the addressee-exclusive we, such as Tok Pisin, a creole spoken in Papua New Guinea, where the speakers of the substrate language have translated their need for this distinction using the means of the English superstrate language into an opposition between the addressee-inclusive yumi (‘you and me’) and the addressee-exclusive mipela (’me and some other fellows, but not you’). But Philology in the Anthropocene 59 these distinctions work in this ideal form only in spoken language at best, where the situative contexts can be determined with relatively little ambiguity, or to put the point more cautiously: in which the complexity of situative contexts can be reduced in such a way that all those involved can agree on. Derrida’s sentence probably holds of oral speech acts as well, but it certainly holds of written speech acts: that “a context is never absolutely determinable” (“un contexte n’est jamais absolument determinable,” 369, cf. also Stockhammer for a first attempt to introduce speech act theory into an analysis of the discourse on climate change). This indeterminacy of context only enlarges as its scope expands, of course, and thus especially when a topic of potentially planetary scope is at stake. But the context does not grow uniformly in a gradual ascent to larger and larger units such as family, village/ neighborhood, city, region, ethnicity, nation, continent all the way to world. These units are criss-crossed by other forms of communality that do not conform to this topology of concentric circles - with its accompanying assumption of familiarity decreasing in proportion to distance. As Timothy Clark has convincingly demonstrated, it is no longer possible to smoothly zoom from smaller to larger scales or vice versa (Ecocriticism 71). Just as temporal scales are getting blurred, it is increasingly problematic to accomplish any spatial “scale framing” either (73-75). This has important consequences for readings of (fictional, poetical, and other) texts which usually take particular frames for granted, instead of interrogating them, or even breaking them up by acts of “unframing” (104, original emphasis). Since the non-linear system of global climate corresponds to a non-linear multiplication of possible uses of we, these uses are typical instances of acts of framing or unframing. Whose poems, for example, are the “Poems of Our Climate,” to quote the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens that first appeared in the volume Parts of A World (1942)? If the I vocalizing this our is a person living in Hartford, CT, is he - with regard to Humboldt’s distinction between the mathematical and physical view - referring to the κλίμα (in the sense of latitude, 41° N) he shares with people from Madrid, or rather referring to the climate (in the sense of average temperatures, about 9° centigrade, according to the map in the Berghaus Atlas) he shares with people from Dresden? Moreover, who is the we in the concluding lines of this poem: The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. (Stevens 193) According to Aristotle, imperfection is a defining feature of the Earth as a meteorological body; according to Lucretius, life came into being precisely because of imperfections, of non-parallel inflections (clinamina). On the one hand, therefore, this our in Stevens’ poem is all-inclusive, since it refers to all R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 60 of ‘us,’ to all living beings on Earth. All of us for whom delight lies in flawed words in a doubled sense, since flawless words would erroneously insinuate the existence of a flawless world that does not exist? 12 On the other hand, the poem sketches the poetics of an advanced European modernity - or, in the engagement with this modernity, a specifically US-American modernity - the presuppositions of which are far from universal and are not even shared by everyone within Europe and the US. Should ‘we’ not seek for perfection, aesthetically and otherwise? Doesn’t this firstperson plural pronoun exclude many readers? Or is the distinction between an inclusive and an exclusive we not made by the text but rather to be remade anew by every reader? Is every we just an offer than can be accepted or rejected? Does it challenge the reader to make “interpolations of we” (Chakrabarty in the discussion already mentioned) that have to be continually constructed anew? Remarkably enough, the first-person plural pronoun only occurs at the end of the poem, whereas in the twenty prior verses the impersonal pronoun one was dominant (with five occurrences). The climate of the poem becomes ours only by reading the poem. A text of Mirko Bonné marks such an “interpolation of we” and develops it. The text was written for the project Weather Stations, where writers don’t just write Cli-Fi novels but isolate in their writing the different ways it is possible to write about climate change. Bonné’s text starts from an unease with the dominant speech act about climate change and positions his own speech act about climate change as addressed to non-humans, using the Australian saying “Tell it to the Bees”: “Gib nicht auf. Erzähl es den Bienen.” (“Don’t give up. Tell it to the bees.”) He avoids every use of we, every speech in the name of a group. When a marine scientist says “We lost the kelp forests,” the first-person narrator says that he “would have liked to ask who this ‘we’ is supposed to be.” After the report on these conversations with the marine scientist, however, the saying “tell it to the bees” gets transposed into the first-person plural: “No, we won’t give up. We’ll tell it to the bees! ” Thus the text does not offer any explicit answer to the question it poses, “who is this ‘we’ supposed to be” - but it answers implicitly: it is always a group that constitutes itself in the very processes of negotiation. 12 Note that κλίμα also denotes several kinds of inclinations (“flaws”? ) of words, and Lucretius has parallelized the clinamen with the inclinations of linguistic signifiers: “quin etiam passim nostris in versibus ipsis / multa elementa vides multis communia verbis, / cum tamen inter se versus ac verba necessest / confiteare et re et sonitu distare sonanti./ tantum elementa queunt permutato ordine solo”; (“Nay, thou beholdest in our verses here / Elements many, common to many worlds, / Albeit thou must confess each verse, each word / From one another differs both in sense / And ring of soundso much the elements / Can bring about by change of order alone”, I: 823-827). 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