Termine

An afterimage is an optical illusion: our eyes trick us into seeing the shape of something that is no longer there. It is a visual echo, a physical memory of a former presence. When Anna Tsing and her co-authors in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet speak of the “ghosts” that haunt Anthropocene landscapes, they have something similar in mind: the term Anthropocene denotes a historical moment when “living arrangements that took millions of years to put into place are being undone in the blink of an eye” (1).

But these previous forms of life don’t simply disappear – they remain visible to those who pay attention and refuse the injunction to forget. Landscape is thus not merely a matter of space, but also of time, i.e. of the ways in which past and present ways of inhabiting the land become overlaid in a single image.

In the features of the physical landscape, Deep Time becomes legible – something that geologists have known at least since the days of Charles Lyell, but which acquires a new salience for humanist scholars of the Anthropocene.