Early Thoughts on Representing Climate Change and the Anthropocene, with Hegel and Adorno

The task of art confronted by the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ and so-called ‘Climate Change’ consists not in finding expression adequate to each-as-given but in annihilating each as-a-given through recovering the truth of the moment: that climate change is nothing more or less than the spiritualization of the whole biosphere into an immense realm of unfreedom that thunderously announces once and for all the truth and untruth of totality, that “the true is the whole” in that the whole exist as a becoming interpenetrating and mutually determination with every particular, and that “the whole is the false” in that this whole is not necessary or fully self-identical. Climate change, or, better, biosphere extermination, or, better yet, the late holocene capital-biosphere extermination event, is a mode of human activity, a form of mediated class violence that marks the emergence of capitalism’s highest-yet-achieved level of development of its apparatuses for accumulation by dispossession, for now it is nothing more or less than planetary time and global life-force in its totality that is being violently accumulated and abstracted into (exchange) value. Wherever art aspires to represent the appearance of ‘climate change’ as a dominating natural force, it will succeed only in producing a Burkean sublime of submission, a moment of aesthetic false consciousness, and so will only fail. Following the path along which might be found a form and content adequate to the truth of the late holocene capital-biosphere extermination event as human activity, a form and content which might further be turned to the task of determinately negating this event as necessary and inevitable and through this determinate negation posit a not-yet reconciliation achievable through collective human activity… this alone can possibly lead to success.