A Response to a Renewed Interest Regarding the Anthropocenes and My Own Work

GABRIEL EMBEHA

 

In recent years different figures have noted a renewed interest of our cameras in a strange subject—substantives among the anthropocenes. I cannot help but see a certain irony (and indeed such irony is the whole ethos behind it no doubt), that our cameras are celebrating cultures in which most everyone thought it to be (or otherwise behaved as if it was) impossible to be combined persons, places and things. It became a well-obeyed rule among the anthropocenes to maintain one large, indisputable truth. Oneself and others were each one singular person to whom many fixed things could be attributed and who had occupied many fixed places. Through studying the camera record of their behavior in general, it is clear anthropocenes were mostly unable to theoretically or practically behave in ways that would lead them to confirm the fluidity of substantives, at least as we know it.

Any thorough discussion of the anthropocenes must specifically include the greater subject of the camera as it was understood by them. For those less familiar the anthropocenes, what we call the camera was referred to by them as separate entities including what they distinguished as art, artists, theater, directors, technicians, actors, producers, film, music, musicians, science, and scientists of all sorts. I am also researching what they called allegories in order to find a fair, safe, and accurate way of coming to better understand this renewed interest in the Anthropocene.

Another subject that needs to be addressed is how exactly the anthropocenes actually defined substantives. To them a substantive (also called a noun) was a word. To the anthropocenes this kind of word did not simply function as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or idea, all fixed and never acknowledgeable as fluid. The anthropocenes went further to say such specific objects or sets of objects were their substantives. They did not say the name of this or that was this or that. They said this or that was this or that.

This last fact requires a bit of clarification. I do not mean to say the anthropocenes could not distinguish between persons, places and things and the names of these persons places and things. They were just compelled to say that each and every person, place and thing had its own name because it was its own person, place or thing. Each person, place or thing had an existence that transcended our ability to name it in any precise way. Each person place or thing had not only a name but also its own story which in most cases we would never hear or be able to hear.

Among the anthropocenes there were two ways of behaving. One was official and the other not. The camera record shows that in the official ways of behaving almost any acknowledgement of the fluidity of substantives was a strict taboo. In non-official ways of behaving—where such taboos were transgressed by those who were distinguished as artists, anthropologists, medical persons, and the like—what we know to be the truth about substantives is actually observable in the camera record. One must, however, know where and how to look for it.

Among those whose newfound interest is substantives among the anthropocenes it is by many all too quickly forgotten how hard it is to identify with peoples who understood behaviors like writing as being in the present. They actually saw their cameras as fixing persons, places and things. To them there was a fixed person who had been in certain places and used certain things like type, pictures of all sorts, and so on to fix persons, places and things in the form of another thing. In most cases they called this other thing an article, an essay, a paper, a book and the like. They called the person an author, editor or printer and the place a page, paragraph, sentence or word.

If they could, anthropocenes would read our words like was, were, had, thought, and the like as upholding their own familiar taboos and fixing things in the past. One of the strangest taboos of the anthropocenes was the need to acknowledge that one writes in the present, even when one is writing about the past. They called this form of acknowledgement “interpretation” or “memory.” One example of such a form of acknowledgement was called history and historical criticism. This was not writing about the past as we see it, but rather writing about how one is understanding those in the past who made the record they are using. Another way in which this kind of writing was done took place between peoples of the Anthropocene itself. In what they called Anthropology anthropocenes from other groups were not depicted in as much as those who had depicted these other groups were depicted. The anthropocenes were big on seeing what they did as interpreting or remembering, and maybe even more often as interpreting, predicting, and controlling.

Put another way, the anthropocenes felt a great pressure to deny that a thing could also be an author-person or a place, even after that person was buried in a graveyard somewhere. In studying the camera record one can see the pressure to state this or that author wrote, thought or meant this or that, even when some transgressed this taboo by saying an author who is buried somewhere writes, thinks and means this or that. This is so throughout the peoples of the Anthropocene. Ever present is the taboo against acknowledging the fluidity of substantives. This taboo forever wins out, despite the many notable but ultimately powerless transgressions against it.

To most accurately describe this taboo and its effects all I really have to honestly work with is certain kinds of stories from the cameras of anthropocenes. These stories repeatedly confirm that this inability of persons to see themselves and others as fluid substantives was during this time only in rare situations the exception.

It was commonly maintained in everyday behavior, and many would say out loud if prompted, that fluid substantives had their names for other reasons than because they are in stories. This seems to have played a great role in allowing anthropocenes to act as if they were each separate persons, places and things. It is the ritualistic use of cameras and the names they conveyed in telling these stories that made it possible to show persons, places and things as distinct and separable. They loved to name and date things their camera produced. The reason they did not go beyond this limiting way of behaving was, of course, the inability of their technology, as well as forms of practice, to acknowledge the familykers. They seem to have never quite known the familykers had been there from the beginning and were set to remain indefinitely. They basically had no way of even seeing them, or had in later years lost this ability to see them.

One of the foremost problems here (which has certainly not gone unnoticed by others writing about the Anthropocene), is what to us appears to be a very odd way of understanding substantives like I, you, he, she, it, we, and they as names. I have in other places written that I suspect the forced convention, the distraction of all sounds or words inevitably following names within stories played a big role in this. The anthropocenes did not behave as if they grasped what it was it to be a person, place or thing, either separate or combined, fixed or fluid. Few, if any among the anthropocenes, had any notion of how their ways of behaving were just not right. Among those they called scientists in particular, a rare few if any seemed to have any awareness of familyker-inspired fix tricks, for example. It was not even generally accepted that I, you, he, she, it, they, we and the like should be called names. They were stranded, being compelled to act as if names had some kind of transcendent nature. They seemed to actually be totally unaware that names would not matter, would never be uttered or written, if not in stories. They were unable to conceive of the notion that names would not matter, would never be uttered or written, if not for soul time.

Instead of soul time, the anthropocenes only had a human soul or a human life, human souls or human lives, and soul or life. Soul time as a fluid substantive, with a beginning and set to remain indefinitely, was something about which they were wholly ignorant. Each anthropocene was compelled to actively maintain the importance of the single persons, places or things, combined or separate, that were their own. They actually described themselves as having individual lives. The truth that one participates in soul time as fluid substantives (or in their languages as “persons, places and things at once”), with a beginning and set to remain indefinitely, seemed to be scarcely imaginable among them. I urge you to read these last words again carefully. This is how they understood themselves. Those anthropocenes whose cameras were dedicated to understanding themselves, saw themselves as humans, humanity, anthropos, with little awareness or regard for soul time. Like us, they would participate. They would listen, tell, smile, cry, nod, laugh, otherwise gesture, otherwise mimic, think, and the like. They did so as we too in so many ways, from the beginning have done and to some indefinite ending will continue to do. The anthropocenes described substantives unsafely or unfairly, describing them in stories about, of, or from human lives. They, again, were completely unaware they had no lives. They did not recognize the truth that stories were made up of other, fluid substantives about, of, or from what we know as soul time or immanent sojourn.

Among the anthropocenes their ability to work with fluid personification, reification, and localization was, if not absent, quite limited. Who, what and where at each of us was would have been described by the most knowledgeable among them as individual “allegories of” soul time or immanent sojourn. They would depict you and I as a allegories of not who, what and where we are, but as an allegories of (1) who, what and where we have come from (our beginning), (2) with whom, in what, with what and where we are participating (our world), and (3) whoever and whatever our destination is called (our indefinite ending). I came to see that what they called allegory (and what some saw a something like sociogory) was a kind of lean in to a combined personification, reification and localization of fixed and not-yet-fluid persons, places and things. Put another way, each allegory was a non-fluid, fixed person, place or thing upholding the taboo against acknowledging or acting according to immanence. Each allegory was dedicated to upholding the transcendence of the person, place or thing it was an allegory of. Each anthropocene was God, and each of them logos, each the word and the deed—and some who were said to possess great mana were and remain for some time even greater examples thereof. And, because they were compelled to say and act as if they were their own persons, they were transcendent. Among the anthropocenes each individual is an answer to a question in a series of books. This question is “Who, what and where is logos— the word, the deed, God—as you read my camera record?” And the answer is always, and must always be “Me in this or that place, with these or those things.”

Many among the anthropocenes would rather that my work be about them be made and exhibited via continually making clear I am not them. This would, however, be the most unsafe, dishonest and unfair thing I could possibly do. It is something I have done and have become too old to do anymore. The prevailing ethos among them that wants me to stay a fixed person, place and thing, as so many of them have taken me, is an ethos I have for too long tried to respect, only in the end causing harm and injustice. In addressing the subject of substantives among the anthropocenes that subject is what I am as you encounter and study my work. My work is not about interpretation or being interpreted, memory or being remembered, or prediction and control. It is nothing else other than an answer to a question. It is a response in words and deeds to things written, said and otherwise done. In soul time and immanent sojourn I have made this question as hard to answer as possible. This question is “Who, what and where am I as you encounter and study my work?”