Witnessing the Anthropocene

Abstract

Anthropocene” is the second in a twopart endeavour, following the 2022 special issue on “Witnessing After the Human” in Angelaki (vol. 27, no. 2), which together form an inquiry into what it means to witness “after the human.” The current issue draws on cultural theory of testimony and witnessing to examine the practices and questions drawn out by the goals and objectives of “witnessing the Anthropocene.” The task at hand is marked by a distinctive aporia as it appears at the same time urgent and impossible. The scale of the current planetary crises in the world means that any such aesthetic and social practices of testimony need to acknowledge and work with epistemological and political limits of human subjectivity, individual or collective. While the Anthropocene might by definition be the product of human action, its scale and complexity appear at odds with the capacity of individual human perception or response. At the same time, such testimonial practices also foreground the need for alternative forms of worldly encounters, which radically expose the systems of knowledge, power, and economy that produced the crisis in the first place. This further requires recognition of the unique temporal structures within which “witnessing the Anthropocene” is positioned: rather than give an account of events that were antecedent to its narrative(s), at hand is a crisis that unfolds simultaneously to the testimonial production or even is ahead of it. Witnessing that which is proximate, intimate, and immediate stands in for something much larger and more complex, while also drawing attention to the close imbrications between testimonial materiality and the