Abstract
Scholars often observe that climate change is difficult to engage with and theorize. Rather than admit theoretical defeat, this article proposes that examining climate disruption through the framework of energy offers a way of thinking through, with, and against anthropogenic climate change. As I argue, climate change is an assemblage of shifting energies that includes pressure systems, temperature gradients, and storms. Climate change-as-energy inscribes itself onto material bodies, writing itself into the geologic record, leaving its imprint in plants, and stamping its presence in the flesh of the human and more-than-human. I call this ability of climate energetics to inscribe earthly bodies inscriptive energetics. The material traces of climate change, or inscriptive energetics, can be read on, in, and through bodies. Writers and artists have considered the inscriptive energetics imprinted upon forms—but implicitly, without identifying their own theorization of climate change as a problem of energy. Lynda Mapes’ Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak is a nodal point through which to explore how climate change itself acts as a form of energy that re-writes the world. Her book becomes a touchstone for a larger theory of inscriptive energetics, which expands out to consider examples of literary, artistic, and scientific discourse. As such, this article makes two primary contributions. First, it introduces the concept of inscriptive energetics, offering a theory of climate change based upon the interrelated study of energy and materiality. Second, it provides a way to conceptualize and understand the material impacts of climate change.
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Notes
Morton refuses to subscribe to the term “climate change” because he believes this phrase evades concern and supports denial. Instead, he uses the term “global warming” to describe recent alterations in climate patterns caused by humans.
There have been a growing number of art projects and narratives produced in recent years that grapple with the bodily effects of climate change. Authors are writing climate fiction (popularly known as “cli-fi”), along with speculative and science fiction narratives about the changing climate and the ways it marks bodies. Artists are exploring new ways to experience intense climate disruption, creating interactive exhibits that emphasize the bodily impacts of climate change. Playwrights and theater directors are orchestrating human and nonhuman bodies in performative acts of becoming. Finally, digital humanists are creating ecological digital humanities (or, “EcoDH”) projects that strive to use “multimodal rhetoric” to investigate and teach the bodily effects of climate change (Cohen and LeMenager 2016, 345).
Biosemiotics, the study of semiotic communication between organisms, aims to “restore the ‘subjectness’ or agency of living organisms” (Maran 2016, 29). The field emerged from the work of Jakob von Uexküll (2010) and has been particularly inspired by his concept of Umwelt, or, as Wendy Wheeler succinctly defines it: “a species environment which signifies” (2006, 101). Charles S. Peirce’s work on semiotics was also crucial to the development of the field. Biosemiotics became recognized with Thomas A. Sebeok’s research (2001) that synthesized Uexküll and Peirce (Sagan 2010, 4). In recent years biosemiotics has turned to other disciplines, including ecocriticism. Wheeler is particularly interested in placing the two fields in conversation, noting that ecocritical scholarship “reflects a properly provocative attempt to reframe critical understandings of the relationship between signs, texts, languages, and world” (2008, 139; 2014). Additionally, Timo Maran (2014) has sought to uncover and promote common ground between biosemiotics and material ecocriticism. According to Maran, “[T]here is a crucial difference between material ecocriticism and biosemiotics: whereas the former has taken a critical approach to human social and cultural processes, the latter has not” (2014, 141). This article brings an emphasis on anthropogenic disturbance to the study of biosemiotic processes.
Mike Hulme shares this reimaginative ambition, calling for a reconceptualization of climate itself. In his most recent monograph, Weathered: Cultures of Climate, Hulme argues that climate is a cultural construction designed by humans to cope with the volatility of weather (2017). Unlike Hulme, however, I see value in studying climate, particularly climate change, as a system of physical and material processes. This materialist study renders climate change thinkable.
At least two additional, and secondary, observations about Freud’s theory of inscription can be made. First, the surface or material receiving and displaying the inscription is passive. For Freud, the individual controlling the stylus possesses complete agency and power. Second, the Mystic Pad is both a technology of inscription and a text: it reproduces coded messages.
In a later work, Vieira, along with Monica Gagliano and John C. Ryan, offer a third term for the inscription of plants found in narratives: “vegetal textuality” (2016, xvi).
One may be wondering how inscriptive energetics differs from Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeality (2010). While both concern the movement and bodily becoming-with of “dark” matter, I see three primary distinctions. First, the inscription of climate energetics is a text that can be read. Transcorporeality is a messy entanglement that often frustrates human modes of interpretation. Second, acts of inscription are associated with acts of reading and writing while transcorporeality is associated with biological and more-than-human becoming. Finally, an inscription is a material displacement. Transcorporeality often concerns the material transformation of bodies, not simply a physical displacement or restructuring.
The phrase “witness tree” was originally used by European colonists to describe the arboreal landmarks that established the metes and bounds of newly claimed colonial land (Mapes 2017, 7; Young 2013, 131). The witness tree, therefore, is a form of settler colonialism, representing both a colonial technology that enabled strategies of indigenous land dispossession and a body inscribed by colonialism-induced climate change (Whyte 2017).
For a discussion of talking trees, see Marder (2017).
While writing about fossils, Kathryn Yusoff refers to mineralized bodies as “narrativistic devices” (2013, 787). Fossils, for Yusoff, tell stories of more-than-human becoming and being. In this sense, James’s “sites of narrativity” and Yusoff’s “narrativistic devices” function in similar ways and can be thought together. Wheeler makes a similar point about narrativity, noting: “All living things are in constant creative semiotic interaction with their environments: each makes the other in a continual process” (2014, 122).
While the visual apparatus is the preferred method to study the inscriptive energetics found on and within the oak tree, various technologies were also used to examine inscriptions and these technologies left marks on the tree. For example, the “Witness Tree Cam” is installed to survey the tree at all hours; climbing gear is used to scale the tree; and coring instruments are used to extract tissue samples from the oak.
As Jeff Oliver and Tim Neal point out, the physical disfigurement of trees has long been viewed with abhorrence. They observe that tree carving, in particular, “damages trees, it spoils the natural beauty of the bark, it is messy and clutters the view with scripts that obscure the picturesque” (2010, 17). Mapes subscribes to this view while discussing the “combat zone” caused by inscriptive energetics.
The BBC (Amos 2018) reported on this scientific article and news outlets around the world quickly followed. Trees and their inscriptive capacities fascinate people.
Mapes, for example, describes in detail the ancient forests that created fossil fuel deposits (2017, 186–87).
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Stephanie LeMenager for providing valuable feedback and guidance on previous drafts, and to the anonymous reviewer who helped strengthen the argument. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the virtual symposium A Clockwork Green: Ecomedia in the Anthropocene and the 7th Annual University of Oregon Climate Change Research Symposium. The essay benefitted from the questions and comments provided by conference attendees at these two events.
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Otjen, N. Inscriptive energetics: climate change, energy, inscription. J Environ Stud Sci 9, 45–53 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-018-0516-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-018-0516-3