I
Some years ago, I was invited to speak at a small liberal arts college in the northeast on the subject of my work. It was a typical artist’s talk: slides, the waxing and waning eloquent about my process and inspirations. Typical, that is, except for one thing. Curious to indulge a certain suspicion I’d been having, I had decided to begin the presentation with an experiment. As the students settled into their chairs, their convivial banter still audible amid the shuffle, I flashed my opening slide onto the screen. It was modest enough: against a simple white background void of image or ornament, a line of bold letters spelled out THE FUTURE IS A GOOD PLACE. Suddenly, all went silent. There was a gasp, then a nervous laugh. It was as if I’d lifted the auditorium curtain to reveal a live leprechaun. I let the pause linger a bit, then finally began to speak. Hello, everyone, thanks so much for coming… Gradually, breath returned to the room, and the leprechaun left. We looked at my drawings. I took questions from the audience.
Admittedly, the experiment was a bit disingenuous; who am I – indeed who is anyone – to make any definitive declaration about the future. But it was the response that interested me, and it was just as I had suspected. For in an era charged with apocalyptic rhetoric, positive pronouncements about the world can seem either so foreign as to defy comprehension or, depending on one’s milieu, downright apostatic. This is especially true for the younger generations – the ones who, in the spirit of Greta Thunberg, feel (often vociferously) that their future has been stolen. It is truer still for our young intellectuals: the ones who’ve left thirteen years of education to pursue more of what we call the higher kind. And finally, it is truest of all for those among the latter who, following the earnestness of their hearts and the purity of their passions, land themselves in the arts and humanities.
That an act of positive thinking should so stun a group of art students is no small matter, and in fact it is one that bears heavily on our field. But first, let us not fool ourselves: We do live in extraordinary times. The impending threat of Anthropocene-induced annihilation has become so all-encompassing that many good minds have been reduced to paralysis. Under these circumstances, to remain innocent of despairing moments would seem insensate, even pathological. And on the sociopolitical front, few will deny that we are more embattled than ever; it is as though each day brings a new tribe declaring social war on all the others. But underneath these very legitimate issues, there is another, more subtle reason for suspicion of positivity in the arts specifically and in the humanities in general. This has to do not with another issue against which one might rightfully take up arms, but indeed with the taking up of arms itself – that is, with the affective landscape that makes arms-taking reflexive.
To understand what I mean, consider what has been the single most influential force within both fields over the last few decades. If you’ve been anywhere near a college campus during this span of time, you will no doubt know that this is critical theory. For those who’ve managed to remain outside its orbit, critical theory, or CT (not to be confused with critical race theory), is an approach to scholarship oriented around confronting the oppressive ideological forces at work in society (more specifically, the oppressive ideological forces at work in Western society). As a political philosophy, CT has much to recommend it; what decently empathic person would deny that oppression exists, that it is bad, and that we should do whatever we can to mitigate or eradicate it? But as an interpretive lens through which to assess works of art, CT is itself anything but empathic. The relentless questioning of artists’ motives and agendas, the ceaseless probing of content for inequities and abuses: no matter the subject, CT comes at it with fists swinging, or at minimum with a saber-toothed hypervigilance. It is now widely acknowledged that CT’s heyday has passed, but the movement appears to be dying a slow death. For while quoting Baudrillard or Foucault may now seem woefully derivative, Theory remains very much alive as an affective style – an emotional orientation predisposed toward cynicism and suspicion. And at a time when currents in academia are a shaping force in the larger culture, the art world has been, and remains, canted in the same direction.
Evidence of this oppositional attitude is everywhere in the visual arts. In today’s press releases, for example, we see it on proud display. Interrogate, critique, subvert, disrupt, destabilize: rare is a press release that does not brandish one of these words. Similarly with today’s artist statements, where these same words serve not to describe or explain but to signal the work’s relevance and rigor. Even abstract paintings are often buoyed by the rhetoric of resistance; a series featuring concentric swirls of flesh-toned shapes, for example, might justify itself with a written claim that it is a critical examination of race. The long and short of this is that, along with the image of the artist as an agent of social justice, critical theory has left us with an insidious assumption – namely, that to be relevant as an artist one must be critical. To be rigorous, to be doing Important Work, one must either be incensed – by capitalism, racism, sexism, or what have you – and engaged in a practice of corrective moral instruction, or else proclaiming an identity that stands in defiance of convention. By contrast, the implication goes, to express hope, or to be celebratory, or to be bowled over by beauty is to be an artistic lightweight – and/or to have one’s head in the sand. Or, worse still, it is to be complicit in the dominant ideology of oppression. Silence is violence. Beauty is bourgeois.
But what if we were to turn a critical eye on critique itself? What if we were to ask: Must seriousness be synonymous with criticality and negativity, while expressions of positive emotions be soft, unsophisticated? Must the pursuit of beauty always be shallow while interrogating racism through abstract sculpture be of necessity profound? Further, must any engagement with the positive automatically imply denial of the negative? The answer, it seems to me, is that there are no musts here at all. For surely history is replete with counterexamples: religious art the world over, the tradition of the sublime in the West, the myriad utopian movements that punctuate modernism: all produced outrageously profound works of art, and one would be hard pressed to dismiss any of it as frivolous escapism. And while nobody is suggesting a return to the past (least of all to modernism, whose utopian failures loom large), fear of retrogression is no reason to condemn one entire half of the affective spectrum. The equating of artistic seriousness with criticality is, to use CT’s prized term, nothing but a cultural construct: a culturally fabricated myth masquerading as a law of nature. It is the product, ultimately, of an unquestioned ideology – not the one imposed by the conventional culture, but the one imposed by the monolithic counterculture currently raging against it.
If we’re willing to concede that expressions of positivity can be rigorous, and that art arising from positive emotions can have all the gravitas of its opposite, ambitious artists interested in pursuing such a thing today face a certain understandable uneasiness. For if the gatekeepers of our field – the major critics, curators, museum and gallery directors – are themselves products of the critical ideology, are we not stuck with the current orthodoxy until it runs its course? But why, we might ask, is it not running its course? What makes the critical paradigm so eminently attractive, even in its current shopworn condition? Setting aside any cynical suspicions, let us simply consider this: Is it possible that critique’s dogged persistence is due less to any genuine passion for its premises than to the apparent dearth of rigorous, ideologically comprehensive, hotly relevant alternatives? Might it come down, in essence, to a failure of imagination? If presented with positive work that was smart, culturally engaged, and socially relevant, might these same gatekeepers be compelled to take it seriously too? Might there be an audience out there for such work if the work were captivating? Might the very audiences lauding the critical work themselves come around – or could these same audiences, just perhaps, be longing for something different? Could it just be that art audiences in general have grown weary of sanctimonious moralizing from artists and would unequivocally welcome more art that inspires? And finally – because why stop short of all the way – is it just possible that art espousing a positive vision could be vastly more effective than the critical work in achieving the latter’s purpose – namely, to lead people to change the way they think, feel, and act in the world?
There will, of course, be naysayers. There will be those who, crying foul with accusations of toxic positivity, will prefer to stay at home in the comfort of their cynicism. This is to be expected. But for those willing to wager yes to the above – and really, all it takes is the eagerness to see a more heterodox art culture – perhaps what follows will kindle a turn of mind. For as it happens, there is a light emerging on the cultural horizon that has the potential to captivate entire generations of artists. This light is a growing movement, transdisciplinary in nature, whose sights are set on nothing less than articulating a new way of being human in the world. While it goes by many names, a single word has emerged that distills the shared vision. Not least, it is a movement that wants, and needs, exactly the kind of intelligence that the visual arts have to offer.
II
THE FUTURE IS A GOOD PLACE. When I showed this slide to my young audience that day, I wasn’t being entirely glib. In fact, it was this very light that I had in mind. For just a few weeks before the talk I had come across, in a book on another subject, the curious word Symbiocene. The word denotes a hypothetical epoch in which, emerging from the Anthropocene, human beings renounce our dominion over the planet and begin to nurture relationships with other life forms and living systems. Next to E.O. Wilson’s Eremocene, another possible successor to our current age characterized by the loss of all wild nature, the Symbiocene comes at one with all the force of salvation. Eager to locate the source of the hope-radiant neologism, I discovered that its creator had done much more than just coin a word; in fact, he had established an entire set of principles that form a unifying ideology of radical optimism. The Symbiocene, it turned out, wasn’t some pie-in-the-sky vision to be realized in some distant future; it was a comprehensive plan of action ready for implementation here and now.
The man behind the Symbiocene is Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher from Western Australia. What sets Albrecht apart from others in his field is that, while he is fully aware of the problems we face, he categorically refuses the apocalypse narrative. (Interestingly, he has even suggested that given the intensity of the cultural obsession with the idea, perhaps on some unconscious level people actually want Armageddon). Drawing from the biological sciences, geology, and a deep knowledge of his country’s Aboriginal culture, Albrecht has spent years building a case for a plausible alternative. Language figures prominently in his work, since, he suggests, much of what keeps us mired in the Anthropocene is that so many of our words perpetuate obsolete ideas. In a move to correct this, he has come up with a new lexicon that proposes a host of terms more fitting for our times. Above all, with the passion and urgency of a secular prophet, he argues that we can, and must, exit the Anthropocene now.
So what exactly is it that justifies all this optimism? In fact, what justifies it is a scientific discovery that is nothing short of revolutionary. This is the dawning knowledge, years in the making, that Darwinian models of evolution based on competition do not provide an accurate picture of life. What scientists now know – and the evidence is irrefutable – is that it is symbiosis, rather than competition, that is life’s primary determinant. Competition exists, yes – as do predation and violence and all the other macroscopic signs conflict – but on a much more fundamental level a different set of principles prevails. On the smaller scales only now being revealed to us, it is interconnectedness, interrelationships, diversity, and cooperation that are the primary determinants of the evolutionary process. Examples of symbiosis in nature are legion. One is the newly discovered interdependence between human health and that of the trillions of bacteria living in our gut. We need these bacteria for good immunological function, and they need us, their host, in order to survive. Another is to be found in the microbiome of the forest: the soil-dwelling mycorrhizae whose job it is to transmit life-sustaining nutrients between trees while the latter provide the fungi with energy from photosynthesis. Rather than as isolated, enclosed entities that sometimes interact, all living organisms are now understood to be complex symbionts engaged in constant communication and resource-sharing with radically different life forms. Life, it turns out, is a reciprocal arrangement.
The implications of all of this are tremendous, not least for how we are to now understand ourselves. For if the idea of the autonomous individual has been exposed as a myth, we are called upon to redefine our relationship to the world – to all that is animate and inanimate, all that is human and otherwise. Our systems of ethics, our forms of governance, the way we design our built environment: For the Symbiocene to be realized, all must be reconfigured to reflect the fundamental principle of symbiotic mutualism. And while Albrecht and others are at work on new words, the greater challenge may be how to change the way we actually experience the world. How can we move from a self-world orientation of separate and against to a self-world orientation of connected and for – not on an intellectual level, but on the level of somatic, sensorial, felt, awareness?
And this, at last, is how we arrive at art. For while art can certainly have discursive content, its real power lies in its address to this deeper level of experience. Speaking directly to the body and all those cognitive processes to which we have no conscious access, art has the potential to transform us long before our words and concepts come around to new understandings. Indeed, the promise that the Symbiocene holds for art is not just that it offers a new artistic paradigm; far more interestingly, it’s that it provides an opportunity for artists to participate in, and meaningfully contribute to, a momentous epochal shift.
The pressing question now is how, exactly, art can participate. Let’s begin with artists themselves. The first thing we can do is make an attitudinal adjustment: turning critique on its head, move from pointing out what’s wrong to pointing toward something better. Stop the end-time rhetoric. Stop bemoaning the Anthropocene. Instead of railing against oppression, show us a vision of what a more just world might look like. This is not denialism, mind you; abhorrent things will still exist, and one can certainly take one’s activism out into the streets. Rather, it is a shift in affect driven by a commitment to realizing a better future. Let the change in orientation pour into our artist statements and press releases. Use Albrecht’s terms, or come up with our own. Above all, speak, write, and think in such a way that reflects a positive affirmation of life in all its forms.
And for the work itself? First, let us put an end to heavy-handed didactics. No more art that regales us with facts and figures. If information changed minds, minds would have changed already. What people need is to be moved. Rather than spelling out in our work what we want viewers to understand, let the work draw them in — and keep them there, sensually enveloped and attentionally rapt — so that they can achieve the insights on their own. If one’s work is representational, symbiotic bonds may be suggested implicitly or explicitly. Show us what kinship looks like: human with human, human with animal, animal with animal; all of the above with our many symbionts from the plant kingdom. Show us our dependence on inanimate matter and the myriad ways we ourselves contain it (the foodstuffs that nourish us, the air we breathe, the very minerals of which both we and all matter are made). If our work is not representational, evoke these realities indirectly. Use forms and materials that body forth interbeing. Show us, through the potent language of visual poetry, that even nature and culture need not be opposed – that culture could become a source of nourishment for nature rather than, as it has been, an agent of its destruction. Use art’s unique capacity to hold multiple meanings to help us acclimate to new understandings of all formerly conceived oppositions.
Imagine now: a new kind of identity art. Instead of fixating on what separates individuals from one another, show us the deeper truth of our symbiont nature. Use the unifying words human, human animal, and human symbiont profligately; flood the academies now dominated by the corrosive language of tribalism. With such a radically new understanding of what it means to be human, the ground for an integrative identity art seethes with possibility.
And finally, embrace transdisciplinarity as the new operating paradigm. Following the manner of nature, seek out minds vastly different from our own and work toward cultivating mutually enriching partnerships. Bring our strengths to the table, but also our weaknesses, for it is precisely in these gaps that our symbionts are needed. Embrace humility as a fundamental value. Knowing that we don’t know – even if we don’t know exactly what it is that we don’t know – is a noble, time-honored intellectual position. (It is also quite a bit more attractive than the intellectual posturing for which contemporary artists are known.) Replacing biomimicry with symbiomimicry, let the latter be the guiding principle of a new 21st century discipline: the diversity-celebrating discipline of transdisciplinarity.
But perhaps the most beautiful gift of the Symbiocene extends far beyond art to encompass all of culture and nature. This is what it suggests about the universe itself. We are taught to believe that nature is affectless – that it is cold, indifferent to life – and that to suggest otherwise is to commit a category error. But what if this is wrong? What if the universe possesses not just a kind of consciousness but a consciousness suffused with a certain hue of emotion? And if all life and matter are inextricably intertwined in one throbbing, dynamic dance of becoming, and if this mutualism precedes – is more fundamental than – conflict and discord, might this emotion be described as a form of love? Religious traditions the world over have been making this claim all along; is it just possible that in the future science will share it? Given all that the symbiotic revolution suggests, the idea doesn’t seem such a stretch. But for art to wait for the validation of science would be for it to have the order of things backwards. For what is art if not the very language of eros? That art has denied positive affect for forty years does nothing to negate its rich history of singing this language. To fully realize the promise of the Symbiocene, the whole of culture needs to be shown the symbiotic erotic – not in writing, as a set of concepts, but as an embodied reality addressed to our knowing sensorium. For art to return to eros now would be no retrogression; in fact, little could be more urgently progressive. Will art make the turn from a defeatist, negating, totalizing cynicism toward a love- and life-affirming, radical optimism? We all know what the former portends. To choose it over the latter may mean not just a capitulation to apocalypse but indeed a capitulation to no future at all.
