Introduction / Issue 38: Ecologies of Excess

Ten years ago, InVisible Culture released Issue 20, “Ecology,” which embraced ecology as a framework for the study of visual culture, drawing together trans-disciplinary understandings of ecology as both a classificatory system for media as well as relationships between organisms and their environment. Invoking Jane Bennett’s theory of vibrant matter to account for the dynamic relations between ecologies of the “natural,” “virtual,” and “visual,” the “Ecology” issue presciently grappled with the increasingly evident excess of agencies—human and nonhuman alike—that push against the systematic partitioning of human culture from the natural.1 In the years since this issue, theoretical debates over ways to move beyond the nature-culture divide have intensified. For example, Bennett’s attribution of agency to a vitalist “thing power” has met frequent criticism for its mystifying under-theorization of the seemingly transcendental source of such vitality.2 Bennett is not alone, however, in her discursive recourse to a seemingly ineffable “beyond” to describe more-than-human agencies: contemporary theories of ecology abound with tropes of darkness, “chthonic ones,” monsters, and ghosts, which all venture to name that which has been repressed, rendered disposable, or made unspeakable in the Anthropocene, the epoch in which domains of cultural and natural ecologies are decidedly no longer—as if they ever were—isolable.3

With Issue 38, “Ecologies of Excess,” InVisible Culture revisits the notion of ecology and all that haunts it. Needless to say, ecology has overrun its founding (imperialist and eugenicist) aspirations of containment and predictability, while subsequent frameworks of ecologies continually overflow themselves, betraying their disavowed, repressed, but no less constitutive, material and social excesses. Given the unevenness of anthropogenic climate change, InVisible Culture maintains that the visualization and (in)visibility of waste, pollution, surplus labor populations, and those deemed socially abject demand a critical approach that confronts received Western representational and epistemological frameworks. Resisting the impulse to reduce ecology to an epistemology of systems, “Ecologies of Excess” considers the limits and possibilities of visual media in the wake of the climate crisis, as well as the constitutive and resultant excesses of climate crisis that betray the ongoing entanglement of nature-culture.

In turn, Issue 38 takes its cues from founding ecocritical investigations into what lies in excess of received regimes of visuality. In “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Nicholas Mirzoeff writes that modern aesthetics and their representational approach to the Anthropocene are inextricable from Western imperial aesthetics, which relied upon the naturalization of the earth as a terra nullius destined to be conquered.4 Under this regime, aesthetics came to be elevated as a cultural means of dominating nature via mimetic capture while the sensorium of the modern Western subject also became anesthetized to the material effects of the earth’s colonization (such as industrial pollution).5 The totalizing nature of “Anthropocene visuality,” as Mirzoeff terms it, makes contemporary recourse to haunting—and indelibly haunted—figures of climate change understandable. As Amitav Ghosh writes, awareness of the climate crisis erupts in “moments of recognition, in which it dawns on us that the energy that surrounds us, flowing under our feet and through wires in our walls, animating our vehicles and illuminating our rooms, is an all-encompassing presence that may have its own purposes about which we know nothing.”6 Such haunting moments of recognition disrupt the anesthetizing effects of Mirzeoff’s Anthropocene visuality and demand modes of critical visualization that resist totalization or mystification—this is this fraught task that motivates InVisible Culture’s return to the excesses of ecology.

Since the 2014 “Ecology” issue, a number of ecocritical approaches to art and media have emerged to grapple with such excesses. Macarena Gómez-Barris’s The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives examines film and art made in the extractive zones of Latin and South America as forms of decolonial aesthetics.7 Andrew Patrizio’s The Ecological Eye: Assembling an Ecocritical Art History proposes a mode of perception that attends to the periphery in order to write an ecocritical art history that includes “the material substrate to all life, whilst recognizing systemic connectivity at the largest levels too.”8 More broadly, Alan Braddock’s Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History proposes an ecocritical art history that “implicates” all art objects in ecology, as well as the author’s own positionality within regimes of sight and scholarship.9

As these scholars demonstrate, the Anthropocene necessitates a paradigmatic sensory shift attuned simultaneously to the situated, embodied condition of perception as well as the scope of climate crisis which overruns that perception—all while resisting the impulse to visualize in any totalizing sense. The assembling of this new sensorium is necessarily precarious and partial, requiring perspectives that cut across seemingly disparate ecologies and their historicization to rethink their excesses. Responding to this call for a paradigm shift, the essays and artworks in Issue 38 speculatively employ alternative methodologies and ways of sensing that might implicate scholars and artists in a complex ecology of critical thought and action.

In “Reframing Utopia and Wasteland: The Greenbelts and Photographic Traditions of the Resettlement Administration,” Emily Broad re-examines the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) photography archive, noting its tens of thousands of overlooked photo negatives to push against existing scholarship that homogenizes the FSA photography project as one of social documentary. Broad specifically focuses on the Resettlement Administration (RA) project to relocate low-income families from urban centers to newly devised utopian Greenbelt towns during the Great Depression. Analyzing a RA advertising pamphlet for the Greenbelts alongside an archive of miscellaneous snapshots, Broad shows that the Greenbelts served as forms of enclosure that also reframed sanitary infrastructures as a human right. As editorial board member Elif Karakaya writes:

Bridging photography scholarship with waste studies, Foucauldian biopolitics, and posthumanist theories, “Reframing Utopia and Wasteland” makes a two-fold intervention into “ecologies of excess”: On the one hand, the article reveals the sanitary function of the Greenbelt imagery “to visually combat the waste seeping into the public eye” in the context of the Depression and the environmental catastrophe in the 1930s. On the other hand, it reflects on how waste studies can help theorize the photographic excess, long overlooked in the historiography of FSA photography.

Meanwhile, in “Sounds of De-Composition,” Bethany Fincher reviews Pharmakon’s recent album Maggot Mass and explores how the sonic excesses of loud volume, noise, and screams might destabilize representational frameworks in an effort to sense humanity’s uneven, embodied implication in the myriad systems embroiled in climate crisis. As Fincher notes, the album churns the harsh, punishing techniques of industrial music and power electronics into a soundscape that evokes both the putrefaction of humus and the violence of extraction. Fincher suggests that the album’s hybridization of extreme genres and ecocentric lyrics reflects the affirmative, if unassimilable, potentials of Bataillean base matter, the excesses of which continually interrupt humanist bifurcations of subjects from inert matter.

As much as the etymology of excess denotes outward movement, it also betrays the constitutive excesses that complicate divisions between internal and external, such as that of an archive, a body politic, or an individual. In “On Tears, Excess, and the Academic Conference,” Catalina Segú considers crying as one such constitutive excess—evidence of the body’s “watery constitution,” as Segú puts it, which belies what Astrida Neimanis calls the “dry myth” of “discrete individualism.”10 Segú’s experimental essay submerges readers in a watery meditation on the panel she organized, “Methodologies of Excess in the Latin American Southern Cone: Practices of Imagination, Fiction, and Contagion,” for the 2024 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) conference Not a Luxury. Reflecting on the aspirations of the conference theme—which considered the relations between excess, need, and access—against the dry, rigid infrastructure of the neoliberal conference format, Segú’s essay sustains the questions, speculations, and possibilities opened up by each panel participant in their briefly allotted presentation time. The essay floods the reader with methodological possibilities, including Segú’s own “methodology of submersion,” artist-scholar Camila Galaz’s experimental historiography on post-dictatorial trauma, Hugo Sir’s “critical intensification” of the speculative and fictional dimensions of colonial scientific narratives, and Samuel Espíndola Hernández’s study of ash as a figure of environmental change.

The artworks in this issue likewise contend with material excesses that are obscured or anaesthetized by regimes of representation, particularly those of extraction. Artworks editor Daly Arnett writes:

For Madalen Claire Benson’s photo-essay the dust at your edges, the artist documents bucolic vistas in the Eternal Fountain Recreation Site on Kwakiutl First Nations territory in British Columbia. Driving along access roads cut by the lumber industry, Benson narrates the privilege of her encounter with the wilderness as a mutual condition of its destruction. miguel costa [maarqa] organizes the colonial preconditions of such extractive economies through the method of critical cartography, as laid bare in the installation Geographies of Extraction / floating economies. His work traces the identification, cultivation, and transportation of cinchona, the plant from which quinine is extracted for the treatment of malaria. Finally, Ka Ying Wong’s My One and Only overflows with the by-products of our contemporary consumer culture, maximizing layers of visibility with photomontage, drawing, and collage. Above and below the surface of her canvas, butterflies—represented by photographs, drawings, and in plastic toys and adornments—are arrested by synthetic resin. Unlike insects fossilized in amber, the butterflies are trapped in the excess of their own production.

The essays and artworks set forth in this issue approach excess as method, analytic, and subject. They take up the questions of how excess is visualized in art and media in the wake of ecological crisis; what excesses have been accounted for by the ecocritical turn in visual studies; and what social, material, and theoretical remainders are yet again relegated to the periphery.

The contributing editors of this issue are Daly Arnett, Jacob Carter, Bethany Fincher, Elif Karakaya, and Haebin Koh.