CODA

CONCEPT
AND CHRONOTOPE
Mary Louise Pratt

Monsters and ghosts are the rubrics organizing this volume. As

I compose this note, a new mini-monster, the Zika virus, wends its
way across the planet, leaving a generation of microcephalic babies
in its wake. Its spread is born of collaboration between humans and
Aedes aegypti mosquitos, who thrive in the wet spots of urban slums.
Meanwhile, artistic awards rain down on a Hollywood film titled
The Revenant—“the ghost,” literally “the one who returns.” The film
recounts the gruesome endurance-and-survival story of a nineteenth-­
century white fur trader in the far north. The movie itself is a reve-
nant, replaying an exhausted white man frontier fantasy in an ecology
that is rapidly dissolving as the planet warms. At the same time, the
relentless brutality of the film gestures forward toward our imagined
apocalyptic future of environmental collapse, where civilization fails
and all are pitted against all.1 Complicating that grim but plausible
story is one of the preoccupations of this book.
A kind of rough draft of the Anthropocene  story, complete with
revenants, appeared in 1968, in Franklin Schaffner’s classic film
Planet of the Apes. After nearly four thousand years in space, a crew
of American astronauts lands on a planet where humans are despised
and enslaved by a highly developed (English-speaking) society of
apes. Most of us remember the climactic moment when, on a beach
in the “Forbidden Zone,” Charlton Heston encounters the half-buried
remains of the Statue of Liberty and realizes he is on earth in the long
aftermath of nuclear holocaust. The film also includes an ape archeol-
ogist, Cornelius, who is conducting a dig in the Forbidden Zone. He is

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G170  ●  Mary Louise Pratt

puzzled because the more deeply he digs, the more highly developed
the culture becomes. He has found the Anthropocene, avant la lettre.
Once again, art precedes life.
What is at stake in these essays is not what the Anthropocene is but
how it will be lived. Whether the stratigraphic authorities authorize the
term will make no difference. In this respect, “Anthropocene” is what
Deleuze and Guattari would call a concept. “All concepts,” they say,
“are connected to problems without which they would have no mean-
ing, and which can themselves only be understood as their solution
emerges.”2 As Elizabeth Grosz elaborates, this means that concepts
are never true; they only enable. “Concepts are ways of adding ideal-
ity to the world,” she explains, “transforming the givenness of chaos,
the pressing problem, into various forms of order, into possibilities
for being.”3 They “enable us to surround ourselves with possibilities of
being otherwise.”4 The point of “Anthropocene” is to enable reflection
in Western academic circuits on what this volume calls “arts for living
on a damaged planet.” The concept starts a conversation on “what we
humans are going to do now, in the midst of an increasingly given fate
of ruination and extinction” (Bubandt).
For most of the writers here, the question of how to live the Anthro-
pocene is inseparable from the question of how to write it. Indeed,
writing becomes the way of posing the question of how to live. The
Anthropocene is also what narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called a
chronotope, a particular configuration of time and space that generates
stories through which a society can examine itself. Bakhtin studied
novels. “In the literary artistic chronotope,” said Bakhtin, “spatial and
temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete
whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically
visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsible to the move-
ments of time, plot and history. The intersection of axes and fusion of
indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.”5 New chronotopes,
Bakhtin said, create “previously nonexistent meanings.” Old ones
“continue stubbornly to exist” even after they have “lost any meaning
that was productive in actuality or adequate to later historical situa-
tions.”6 The Revenant recycles the frontier chronotope, a time-space
configuration that generates plot after plot of gendered whiteness. The
Anthropocene creates a new chronotope with a multipolar time-space
configuration. The human in the present imagines a subject who, long
after humans are gone, reconstructs our era through what it will have
 Coda  ●  G171

left behind. Our detritus, to some hypothetical future and probably

nonhuman geologist, will reveal a world that became increasingly
“shaped by human activity but .  .  . also increasingly outside human
control” (Bubandt). There may be multiple chronotopes at play here.
The human mastery of nuclear fission in the 1940s marks one new
time-space configuration, explored here by Brown and Barad; genetic
science (Svenning, Hejnol) obliterates the vertical imaginings of evo-
lutionary theory. In our deep future (Barad’s beautiful term), we may
be sponges. Throughout, though, the question becomes, how will peo-
ple get from here to there? What material, ethical, political, esthetic,
affective, choices are we and will they be called upon to make? What
will be possible? Through questions like these, the Anthropocene
calls forth “previously nonexistent meanings” for human experience,
new possible futures, configurations of desire, action, value, intent. It
promotes, in Mathews’s words, the “coemergence of material forms
and linguistic terms, of causal accounts and of histories that can mul-
tiply our ways of thinking and acting in the face of overwhelming
environ­mental change.” It is a device, and an invitation, for Western-­
identified subjects to resituate themselves in the space-time-matter
of the planet.
Bakhtin would applaud Mathews’s insistence on language and nar-
rative. It is no accident that many of the essays here are experiments
not just in thought and action but also in genre and style. In what
discursive forms will this newly conceived relationship of humans to
the planet and the future be expressed? Many of the writers experi-
ment with nature writing. They look for ways of reading (i.e., writing)
landscape not as detached from humans but as densely populated by
ghosts and afterlives of human activity that have been absorbed and
enmeshed into the landscape’s own generativity. In the Anthropogenic
chronotope, human and nonhuman agency are no longer distinguished,
visually or analytically. What Rose calls “multispecies entanglements”
are among the new plot elements. “Forest” in Mathews’s Italian sce-
nario is a space filled with old walls, rewilded chestnut trees, elders
who remember the words for long-gone husbandries. Stern’s Tijuana
border zone is a ruin of dead tires and salvaged wetlands, where human
detritus generates the unpredictable and uncanny, what in Spanish we
call the insólito. Bubandt explores the aftermath of ecodisaster in Indo-
nesia, coproduced (no one quite knows how) by some combination of
human and nonhuman agency. Here, too, the thing to be grasped is
G172  ●  Mary Louise Pratt

the unpredictable generativity of the wreckage-strewn time-space for

the humans who inhabit it and are inhabited by it. Javanese arts of
living, peopled by ghosts and spirits, become mirrors for the emergent
Western Anthropocenic subject. Pringle, meanwhile, wanders a New
England graveyard and finds eternal life not on the tombstones but
in the lichens. These writers are not discovering Anthropocenic land-
scapes; they are creating them, in language. They are realized in the
aesthetic (vs. anesthetic) responses of the reader, driven by the artistic
principle of estrangement, the making of wonder.
The figure of the nineteenth century naturalist reappears in
repurposed form in these essays as reader not of primal nature but
of the history-laden, ghost-ridden spaces of Anthropocene earth. Our
“worlds of loss,” says Rose, call for “radically reworked forms of atten-
tion.” Stern calls for “new ways of seeing.” These naturalist revenants
retain key aspects of their predecessors: curiosity, the practice of read-
ing landscape as it is walked, a deep love of the earth and its creatures,
and, perhaps above all, the desire to find magic, to enchant or reen-
chant the world, to make it possible to inhabit it with love. Look at
the opening of Alexander von Humboldt’s famous nature essay “On
Steppes and Deserts” (1805):

At the foot of the lofty granitic range which, in the early ages of our planet,
resisted the irruption of the waters on the formation of the Caribbean gulf,
extends a vast and boundless plain.

Now read Bubandt’s first sentence:

If you travel south by car from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city

located on the sweltering north coast of Java, toward the cool mountain
town of Malang, you will, after about twenty-five kilometers, come upon a
vast elevated landscape of mud.

I cannot be the only one who hears the echo of Humboldt in Bubandt—
and the same impulse to enchant. (Students of literature learn that
the raw material for writing is other writing.) Apocalypses are the ter-
ritory of the poetics of the sublime, the merging of beauty and terror.
That is the shimmer Brown finds in the ghastly underworld of Cher-
nobyl or the ghastly trace of Madame Curie’s radioactive fingers on
her notebook in a library in Japan. Alongside these new naturalists, it
becomes easy to imagine an Anthropocenic flâneur who remakes the
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city as a multispecies chronotope where human, animal, plant, fungal,

and viral life-forms negotiate their cohabitation.
These naturalist revenants remind us that the Anthropocene
chrono­tope leaves humans, modern, Occidental humans, at the center
of the narrative. Its story is still all about an “us.” Perhaps its revela-
tory powers will exhaust quickly. But Rose reminds us that the quest
for enchantment, poetry, “shimmer,” is not a uniquely human trait.
The orchestration of desire, the impulse to attract, she argues, is the
way of life in all its forms.7 Trees erupt into perfume and flower to
attract the animals whose bodies are adapted to pollinating them.
Life perpetuates itself through orchestrated aesthetic display. Music,
color, dance, belong as much to birds as to people.
In the course of the days I spent writing these words, Honduras’s
most powerful environmental activist, Betty Cáceres, was assassi-
nated in her home, the tenth such activist to be killed in Honduras
this year;8 nature lovers in Portland, Oregon, discovered that the moss
on their trees is full of toxic chemicals from factories; and two Mon-
terey marine scientists announced that Southern California’s offshore
oil rigs are teeming with flourishing marine life. How will we slouch
toward our deep future, toward an almost certain demise whose
script we are writing but cannot imagine? How to define the stakes
for the life-forms that are not human but inextricably enmeshed with
humans? By what scales can human action now be gauged? The writers
of the Anthropocene, like the diviners on the Javanese mud pile, are
seeking the meaning machines and desiring machines through which
the dramatic, unknowable trajectory on which we are embarked can
become a story and be lived.

MARY LOUISE PRATT ’s pioneering book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing

and Transculturation transformed the study of colonial encounters
across the humanities and social sciences. She has developed import-
ant theoretical tools for postcolonial scholarship, most notably the
concept of “contact zones” to describe the spaces where colonizers
and indigenous people meet. She has contributed often to the dialogue
between anthropology and the humanities. She is Silver Professor
(emerita) of Social and Cultural Analysis, Spanish and Portuguese, and
Comparative Literature at New York University.
G174  ●  Mary Louise Pratt

Notes
 1. Accepting the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the film,
Leonardo DiCaprio spoke of its allusion to the climate change e­ mergency.
 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 16. Cited in Elizabeth Grosz, Becom-
ing Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 78.
 3. Grosz, Becoming Undone, 78.
 4. Ibid.
 5. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,”
in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), 84.
 6. Ibid., 85.
 7. Her compatriot, feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, makes the same
point, also in reference to Australian Aboriginal painting and to her
interactions with a group of women painters. Grosz, Becoming Undone,
part III.
 8. Cáceres was a leader of the four-hundred-thousand-member Lenca
indigenous people. She was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize
in 2015 for leading a successful struggle to stop a huge Chinese hydro-
electric project in Honduras. She was forty years old and a mother of
four.