Wk 1 // Hannah Stark: The Cultural Politics of Mourning in the Era of Mass Extinction

Notes from article:

• "...as soon as the question “What is lost?” is posed, it invariably slips into the question “What remains?” That is, loss is inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is known only by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read, and sustained", p66

• the notion of the "'afterlife’ of animals when, after death, they enter a museum collection."

• "P762...a body that can be read as a repository for the complexity of the emotions that attend to extinction in the Anthropocene."

• "extinction has...what Thom van Dooren has called a ‘dull edge’. It occurs not through a single event but as a ‘prolonged and ongoing process of change and loss that occurs across multiple registers and in multiple forms both long before and well after this “final” death."

• the extinction of the Australian thylacine as an example of settler-colonial violence
  

• "the circulation of living thylacines and specimens between collectors, zoos and museums in an economic and biopolitical network", p68 - what are the implications of this ideologically?

• logic of "species-thinking": "each individual is only perceived as a token of its inexhaustible taxonomic type"

• the museum display: "In replicating the logic of kind, many extinction displays rely on the story of species loss, rather than offering the history or narrative of a particular animal."
  

• "...one of the effects of mass extinction is that it ‘remakes both temporal relations and possibilities for life and death’ (Bastian and van Dooren). Timothy Clark writes that one of the key features of the Anthropocene is a derangement in our usual scales of perception... Temporally, extinction requires that we consider the vast scales of deep pasts and futures, and that we think both in terms of evolutionary time-scales and the urgency of impending species diminishment. Extinction is hard to conceptualise because of its enormity but also because we live in a world filled with species that exist below the level of our perception. This means that we are never fully aware of all the species expiring. ", p69

• "Extinction is also ontologically unsettling in that it troubles the possibilities for individual agency and action. In this context, we need to be attentive, van Dooren suggests, ‘to the diverse ways in which humans—as individuals, as communities, and as a species—are implicated in the lives of disappearing others.’"
  

• Judith Butler, Precarious Life - "‘[s]ome lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a liveable life and a grievable death?", p70 - criticisms of this framework touch on the exclusion of other animals and the denial of our human status as animals, however a good framework to consider the vulnerability of life within

• We share a common vulnerability with all living things - "‘If humans actually share a condition of precariousness, not only just with one another, but also with animals, and with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who we “are” undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism."

• “precarious life” as a non-anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable.

• "...queer ecologies and engagements with the nonhuman ‘emerge, in the contemporary context, as a response to precarity, as the effects of climate crisis extend that condition to encompass all of humanity, and numerous other species as well. All life, we might say, is now precarious life’."

• not a flattening, but a new form of intimacy - "‘we inhabit a queer atmosphere in which the ether of the everyday is marked by senses of transformation and crisis’."
  

• "'How might we think through the complex place of human life at this time: simultaneously, a/the central cause of these extinctions; an agent of conservation; and organisms, like any other, exposed to the precariousness of changing environments?", p71
  

• On Freud - "P762 is eerily familiar she is also a wild creature that provokes the ambivalence concealed within the word heimlich which means simultaneously ‘that which is familiar and congenial’ and ‘that which is concealed or kept out of sight’"

• "...heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops toward an ambivalence, until it finally coincided with its opposite, unheimlich’. The unheimlich or uncanny is that which is repressed and which returns to us as a strange but familiar haunting. As a kind of rupture, the uncanny creates instability through disrupting the psyche with something that it thought it had inhibited." p73
  

• In the context of Australia, the uncanny surrounding the P762 and the thylacine's extinction "‘can remind us that a condition of unsettledness folds into this taken-for-granted mode of occupation’." p74

• "Specimen P762 is a liminal creature. She is a radical little boundary crosser: both intimate and strange, creaturely and objectified, profoundly dead and holding out the promise of futurity"

• "The Australian Museum’s ill-fated resurrection project reveals a pronounced biopolitical logic to the human instrumentalization of animal lives, deaths and biological materials... an abstraction of animals to genetic data in which we see a prioritisation of ‘species over individual, code over life, genes over bodies’."

• Molecular biology as "producing an invisibility of the body whose object is no longer the living organism. It is instead an object beyond living—ready to live, beyond the finitude of an organism and its ongoing interactions with and constructions of an environment’."
  

• "Resurrection and conservation share a similar logic which facilitates human domination of nonhuman animals. After all, it is through intensive breeding programs that humans can work to counteract, and therefore be redeemed from, their culpability in, anthropogenic species extinction", p75

• "In this context and in relation to Chrulew’s framing of resistance to biopower, what kinds of agency might we read into the failure of this project? How is the agency of this non-living museum specimen different to the resistance manifested by living creatures to reproductive intervention? What is at stake here? Can we frame P762’s posthumous ‘refusal’ to give up her genetic ‘secrets’ as a performative feminist and queer rejection of (technoscientific) reproductive futurity?"
  

• "Visual representations thus have significant agency within how these species are remembered, as well as in terms of how biotechnical futures, and the lives of formerly-extinct genetically ‘rescued’ animals, are both envisaged and evaluated.", p76 - the de-extinctionist gaze'

• de-extinction project as scientific spectacle; a "broader cultural refusal to let this animal die"

• "Resurrection initiatives are politically problematic for a variety of reasons. From a resourcing perspective, it is difficult to justify the enormous expense of de-extinction projects in the face of the impending extinctions that we are currently experiencing. Moreover, the logic by which de-extinction is justified often focusses on the redemption of humans for past actions and inactions and through taking responsibility for creating new species futures."

• "What happens politically when we foreclose mourning? When science and technology are positioned as a tool that might redeem humans for their role in anthropogenic species extinction, we see an inability to mourn the finality of extinction."

• van Dooren and Rose - "In short, in our time of anthropogenic mass extinction, dwelling with extinction—taking it seriously, not rushing to overcome it—may actually be the more important political and ethical work. The reality is that there is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action, rather it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response."
  

• "To mourn for P762 is to have an affective connection tied up with the uncanny rupture of an animal who lived in a different historical time and who died well before I was born. It is to mourn across species boundaries and for an undomesticated creature that I have never known, never held, and beheld only through photos", p77

• Walter Benjamin's work on historical materialism - "a ‘politics of mourning might be described as that creative process mediating a hopeful or hopeless relationship between loss and history."

• "‘If we stay with the sense of loss’, she writes, ‘are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of others?"

• "Engaging with extinct species, particularly in ways that enable bad affect—grief, shame, mourning—can have an impact on environmental sentiments, and the performative construction of the human in a more-than-human world. In mourning species loss, we contribute to a more diverse vision of the commemorative landscape of Australia and one that invites us to consider culpability, responsibility and action in the face of the devastating extinction event in which we are currently enmeshed."

Figure 1: Thylacine pouch young [AMS P762 (♀)]. Courtesy Australian Museum. Photo: Prof. Dr Heinz Moeller. Source: International Thylacine Specimen Database, 5th Revision (2013).