ARCHIVE FEVER IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

SPECULATIVE ECOMEMORY

Abstract

ARCHIVE FEVER IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: SPECULATIVE ECOMEMORY

Abstract: The “end” (of history, time, narrative) as the zeitgeist resulting from the epistemological rupture brought about by the decline of the grand narratives that defined Western modernity, gave way to a feeling of (ontological, mnemonic, ideological, and environmental) loss. These losses have led us to gaze increasingly (albeit with trepidation) toward the future. In my article I argue that, within this process, memory has become what Castree (2013) refers to as “anticipatory semantics” – an exercise of searching for answers to the anthropogenic turn through speculation. The Anthropocene affects memory objects, the scale of remembrance, and the underlying humanism in memory studies. Within this dimension and scale, I have opted for introducing, along with other scholars, such as Crownshaw (2017) and (Colebrook (2017), the notion of planetary memory. Planetary memory is characterized by the Anthropocene and, by extension, inscriptions left by human activity. We live at a moment in which the cultural is so imbricated in the natural that any notion of objectively registering Earth, without human interference, is untenable. Such is the archivistic challenge: Even the History of Science cannot escape cultural narratives, so amalgamated are they to Earth itself. There is a stream of eco-speculative fiction deserving our attention, that deploys a mediating artifice, which I will call the “archon of the future”, whose narratives recalls our present moment through a future perspective – usually dystopic, posthuman, and marked by intense climatic changes. It is worth listening to what he has to tell us. 

Keywords: planetary memory; the Anthropocene; eco-speculation