Becoming-Grains of Mercury: Documentary Ecologies, Posthumanism, and the Entanglements of Traumas

Abstract

FĂŠlix Guattari, in his ecosophical work The Three Ecologies, urges us to contemplate and, most importantly, to live transversally with the entangled ecologies of nature and culture/society. Specifically, he states that “it is simply wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate;” particularly, he adds, when it comes to the “simultaneous degradation of the three areas.” Guattari’s transversal process is more accurate than ever if we consider how human activity, in the context of the current geological epoch — the Anthropocene — has sent the Earth’s natural ecosystems into a tailspin; into a course of environmental, social, and psychical post- and pre-traumatic syndrome of entanglements of trauma(s). At this moment, what roles do documentaries play in penetrating the geological scars of the becoming-traumatized Earth? How can they convey our transversal and posthuman understanding of the entanglements of traumas? More specifically, how do we consider the ecological disasters that have already occurred and have yet to occur on Earth as entangled human and non-human traumas, respecting that also the Earth-others have been undergoing a process of traumatization? As the entanglements of the traumatic syndrome are an ongoing, impeding, and imminent processual (and imaginative) catastrophe that has not yet happened, thus proclaiming a condition here defined as “pre-trauma,” how do we re-think trauma through a temporal lens which incorporates the notion of pre-trauma? The proposition of this paper is to transversally think about the entanglements of trauma(s) by initiating a conversation between posthumanism, canonical trauma studies, and contemporary documentary ecologies in order to specifically disclose how it is necessary to radically question and renovate our perspectives on trauma and its temporal dimension(s), finally acknowledging the intermeshed amalgam of our terrestrial existence.