the minnesota review 2014:2 (83)

Sometime around 2016, the International Commission on Stratigraphy may recommend that the "Anthropocene" be denuded of its scare quotes and enter into the official scientific record as the name of the geologic epoch we currently inhabit. The art and theory of the Anthropocene registers what is properly at stake in the self-naming by a species of an epoch of geologic time, often in a language unavailable to other forms of scientific discourse. Tracing the consequences for any form of writing in our present—a present being constantly reconstructed by the image of its ecological future and an increasing awareness of how the large scale actions of a species’ past initiated processes only now becoming legible—is the ultimate aim of this project to describe, narrate, and imagine this particular moment in geologic time.