Here Comes the Sun!: Toward a Critical Ecological Rhetoric for the Anthropocene

The geologic epoch of the Anthropocene, or the age of human domination, is a metacondition animated by unprecedented planetary change. Global warming, regular mass extinction events, and ecological disaster wrought from human activity spell crisis for all planetary life while exacerbating dominative relations among the human species. Thus, the Anthropocene may be viewed as an age wherein spheres of precarity widen and (in)direct impacts of ecological disaster differentially harm populations predicated upon their predetermined social location under dominative governmental, economic, and social structures. This metacondition poses a challenge for activists, critical scholars, and critical pedagogues working toward social emancipation. To interpret and combat the complex and scalar logics of power in the Anthropocene, this critical/cultural, rhetoric, and performance project advances a turn toward what I term critical ecological rhetoric. Drawing inspiration from Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies and Raymie McKerrow’s critical rhetoric – two modes of theorizing which sought to articulate dominative relations under the metacondition of neoliberal hegemony –this critical ecosophical turn seeks to address power as dispersed across material, social, and psychological registers and as complexly entangled within the metacondition of the Anthropocene. An integral element of critical ecological rhetorical practice is demystifying the presence, construction, and defense of borders imposed within and between ecological registers, as such bordered constructs of difference serve to justify violent domination while concealing ecological logics of interconnectedness.Across three case studies which differently privilege one of three ecological registers, I demonstrate the dynamism of critical ecological rhetoric. In “Pyropolitical Phoenix,” materialist, elemental implications of governmentality in the urban ecology of Phoenix, Arizona are examined as a rhetorical circulation synecdochic of repressive relationships in urban ecologies under worsening conditions of climate change. In “I’m Real When I Shop My Face,” the circulation of glitch feminism by pop artist Sophie across digital media ecologies is examined to demonstrate capacities for queer worldmaking within cisnormative algorithmic architectures. In “All My Happiness Is Gone,” I examine my ecology of depression as enmeshed in complex genetic, social, and material entanglement.