Apocalypse Where? Inattentiveness, Indigeneity and Invisibilities

Thursday 5th September, 2024
Conference Paper, Presented
ASLE-UKI Arts of Noticing: Attention and the Environment
Written and Presented by Andrew Martin Lee

Abstract:

If, as McLuhan (1964) proposed, the electric age has stretched the individual nervous system across the globe, this performance paper focuses on the current effects of such a thinning in attentiveness to temporal experiences situated within the more-than-human ecological web. Furthermore, it brings to light the ways in which an information saturated culture leaves its inhabitants paradoxically inattentive, as though not noticing, of more-than-human suffering, yet constantly informed of its occurrence.

In seeking to expose this paradox as a disavowal of ‘response-ability‘ (Lehman, 2006: 185), this performance paper analyses the organisation of multiple times within an annual cycle, known to druids as the eightfold wheel. Through reformulating pre-colonialised concepts of time and retro-activating indigenous practices that I am native to, my art/magic practice-research seeks to counteract the “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011) within an accelerated information age and refutes what Timothy Morton claims to be ‘the present moment [...] swallowing the future as fast as new features are invented’ (in Campagna, 2018: x).

Morton’s eschatology symptomatically repeats the disavowals within information saturated culture. The consequences of waste export to and extraction of mineral resource from the global south alone, provides sufficient parameters for contesting Morton’s claim. The future he posits as to be consumed has, in fact, already been imposed to regions where attention to its visibilities are normatively encountered in a mediated form.

 Thus, suspended between the paradoxes of ‘interwebbed’ inattentiveness and the rituals of indigenous practices rooted in the more-than-human-web, my art/magic performance paper weaves the sticky spaciotemporal dynamics of climate apocalypses that are already happening... just seemingly not here, and not quite yet.

References:

Campagna, F. (2018) Technic and Magic. London: Bloomsbury Academic

Lehmann, H.T. (2006) Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. London: Routledge

Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard: Harvard University Press