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Should we connect children to nature in the Anthropocene?

Brendon M. H. Larson, Bob Fischer, Susan Clayton

Abstract

  1. To most conservationists and many parents, it seems obvious that it is a good thing to teach children to value the natural world. Not only does connection with nature support their development and well-being, but it also supports ongoing efforts by humans to sustain the natural world.
  2. However, there are incontrovertible trends towards a diminution of the state of nature as a consequence of human activities.
  3. In this context, as a thought experiment, we address a rather grim question: Should we still encourage children to be connected to nature, to care for it and be concerned about it?
  4. We first consider the meaning of connection to nature in the Anthropocene, and then turn to a consideration of several ethical dimensions of this problem, including the potential trade-off between well-known health benefits of time in nature and the long-term psychological impacts of loss of nature (e.g., ecological grief and solastalgia).
  5. While there is no simple answer to our question, our analysis does highlight underappreciated ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene as well as the value of the local, urban forms of nature to which children around the world are increasingly exposed and engaging with in unprecedented ways.

A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

The end of nature probably also makes us reluctant to attach ourselves to its remnants, for the same reason that we usually don’t choose friends from among the terminally ill. I love the mountain outside my back door … But I know that some part of me resists getting to know it better—for fear, weak-kneed as it sounds, of getting hurt. … There is no future in loving nature (McKibben, 1989).

1 INTRODUCTION

On an evening in early spring, one of us (BL) brought his 5-year-old son to see two species of mole salamanders crossing a small road to travel from a woodland, where they overwinter underground, to a breeding pond. It was cool and rainy, so the conditions were salutary for salamanders, and father and son observed about 30 of them make their way. From our perspective as environmentalists and parents, this scene is a positive one because a member of the next generation was learning to value living beings and the natural world. At one point in the evening, however, upon finding a dead salamander that had been crushed by a car, the child broke down in tears. We cannot help but wonder whether his sorrow was outweighed by the benefits of this excursion, by the pleasures and wonder of a first-hand connection with these beautiful creatures (see Carson, 1998).

Our aim here is to pose a related question, although at a much larger scale: whether, in this era of mass extinctions and environmental degradation, children should still be encouraged to be emotionally invested in the natural world (and if so, why).

The prevailing view is not only that parents should encourage connection with nature, but that it is critical that they succeed. In his classic book, Richard Louv (2008) documented the growing disconnection of children from nature, with increasingly urban children spending less time outside and more time looking at screens (or capturing virtual Pokémon creatures outside; Dorward et al., 2017), and argued that it is essential to overcome ‘nature-deficit disorder’.1 More recently, Soga and Gaston (2016) reviewed the causes (i.e. loss of opportunity and orientation) and consequences (i.e. changes in health/well-being, emotion, attitude and behaviour) of the resulting ‘extinction of experience’, and proposed ways to reverse it. Accordingly, Abson et al. (2019) consider reconnection with nature to be one of three ‘transformational “sustainability interventions”’. This growing body of research has contributed to a veritable parenting movement to get children outdoors.

There is a curious disconnect, however, between this invocation to connect children with nature and the state of said nature.2 Nature has changed dramatically over the past several decades, and it continues to change, with many indicators revealing seemingly inexorable declines wrought by human activity (e.g. IPBES, 2019). It is the sum total of these human impacts, evidenced by certain geological markers, which has given rise to the proposal that humans now inhabit the Anthropocene epoch (Corlett, 2015).3 Although diverse commentators, poets and scholars are asking hard questions about how to face up to the Anthropocene (e.g. Bringhurst & Zwicky, 2018; Ghosh, 2016; Major, 2018; Scranton, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017; Wallace-Wells, 2019; Wapner, 2010), most people generally proceed as though humans will figure things out and reverse the trends, despite the evidence of the growing challenge to doing so (e.g. IPCC, 2021; Jewell & Cherp, 2019; UNEP, 2019). People behave as if it were not the case that ‘around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history’ and the ‘average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900’ (IPBES, 2019). These changes are already creating sadness and anxiety among children (Chawla, 2020). Despite recognition that nature’s ‘baseline’ is changing (Soga & Gaston, 2018), parents go on parenting as though their children will inherit a world that looks much like the one they have known.4

Assume, for the purpose of this thought experiment,5 that dramatic climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental harms are largely irremediable, so the state of nature will continue to precipitously decline. We strongly hope this assumption is false, yet we are interested in exploring its implications. In particular, we ask an important—albeit unsettling—question for anyone invested in raising and educating children6: Should we continue the common practice of trying to connect children to nature? If so, why? The environmental crisis is likely to impose all sorts of costs on children already. Should we at least minimize the emotional burdens associated with the decline of nature?7

We approach these questions as nature-loving parents ourselves, parents who feel that the lives of our children would be much, much diminished with fewer connections to the natural world. We cannot help but recoil in raising this question. Nonetheless, insofar as views about raising children have been shaped by prior, pre-Anthropocene ways of thinking, conventional wisdom may need to be overturned in the Anthropocene (e.g. Hamilton, 2017; Head, 2015; Latour, 2018; Lövbrand et al., 2015). For example, although some readers might consider our argument to be anthropocentric given its focus on human well-being rather than the well-being of other species, our thought experiment begins with the assumption that it is too late for many of those other beings—and the very concept of anthropocentrism is being challenged giving the prevalence of human impacts in the Anthropocene (see Hamilton, 2017). We approach these questions in the spirit of promoting better dialogue among conservationists and naturalists, parents and educators, all of whom are wrestling with questions about how to raise children and teach them about nature and its value in this new epoch.

Ultimately, we argue that several of the reasons people might offer for connecting children with nature are weaker than many might be inclined to suppose, at least given the assumptions we make here. Still, some notable reasons remain: first, as a way for people to connect with their children; second, as an attempt to slow the inevitable; and third, as a way to live out our own love for nature.

2 CONNECTION TO NATURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

We begin by clarifying the meaning of ‘connecting to nature’ in the Anthropocene.8 Connection to nature is generally considered to include an emotional and a cognitive component. The emotional component is something like loving nature, which comprises both deep appreciation and affection for the object of love. The cognitive component involves developing a self-concept that incorporates an interdependence with the natural world—by locating oneself in relationship to nature. A visual analogue can be seen in the ‘inclusion of nature in the self scale’ developed by Schultz (2001). It asks people to rate their connection to nature by identifying the appropriate distance between two circles, one of which represents the self and one of which represents nature.

But what, exactly, is it that environmentalists want their children to connect to? The idea of connecting to nature is contentious (Fletcher, 2017; Zylstra et al., 2019), mainly because a number of scholars have argued that it is untenable to define nature as a realm distinct from human influence (e.g. Clayton et al., 2017; Fletcher, 2017; Hamilton, 2017; Lorimer, 2012). Consequently, we are not focused here on nature in terms of a wilderness ideal, but on nature in its diverse manifestations, from more or less urban regions through to more ‘wild’ landscapes (e.g. Caro et al., 2011). It is important to recognize that—although connection to nature can be both activated or suppressed among adults—the foundations for connection are laid in childhood, and children who have early experiences with wild nature are more likely to experience that connection (Chawla, 2020; Hosaka et al., 2017).

As this last point suggests, connection to nature occurs along a continuum. At one extreme, imagine a child who rarely leaves the center of a metropolis, whether Mexico City or New York or Tokyo, a child whose connection to nature is largely limited to interactions with a few trees, the occasional bird and glimpses of sky. Soberingly, on a global scale, such a child would often inhabit a slum, whether Khayelitsha in South Africa or Neza in Mexico City, and the visible parts of nature would be filtered through smog. Moving towards the other extreme, a child may be commonly immersed within a natural space (whether a lakeshore, a savannah, or a forest), although these landscapes will vary in the degree to which they have been impacted by humans. Obviously, not all families live in places that have been damaged equally in the Anthropocene—nor are their abilities to connect to nature equitable. For simplicity’s sake, we focus on children raised in relatively urban locations, as this will be the normal experience for children given global trends (UN, 2018).

Connection to nature is also both particular and selective. It is particular in the sense that, at least when children are young, they do not connect with something as abstract as the entire natural world, but instead with particular flowers, trees and charismatic megafauna—or even bees, snakes and worms. They may also have little concern for abstractions that matter to adults. Genovart et al. (2013), for example, found that Spanish adolescents are better able to recognize exotic species of mammals and fish than native ones, probably because they encounter them more frequently.

Connection to nature is selective in the sense that positive emotions are not typically linked to all parts of nature equally. Nature, of course, is not all beautiful vistas and majestic megafauna.9 It is, in addition, hurricanes and cancer and animals dying of thirst during droughts. Additionally, it is extinction events and climate change—both of which can have natural causes, although the recent examples of concern are obviously anthropogenic. The point is just that when people talk about wanting their children to connect to nature, they generally have in mind the parts of nature that somehow serve their interests, whatever those interests may be—aesthetic, spiritual, cultural and material. They are less keen on the parts that are actively harmful; children who became overly concerned that coronaviruses were going to be eradicated might be a cause for concern. Most people have no objection to their children being attached to nature selectively; indeed, it seems like a good thing. Appreciating the selectivity matters, though; in order to inculcate connection to nature, we must be more precise about what, exactly, children are being connected to.

Returning to the main thread: Parents may have several motivations for wanting to connect their children to nature. On the face of it, this seems reasonable, both relative to the values of individual parents and from a more general environmental perspective. If parents do not connect their children to nature, those children will likely care less about it and be less aware of its continued deterioration, and thus be less likely to pass along these values to their own children, etc. This could undermine the basis for conservation efforts. As Kahn et al. (2009) observed, ‘It is hard enough to address environmental problems, such as global climate change, when people are aware of them; it is all the harder when they are not. Thus, the problem of environmental generational amnesia may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our lifetime’. Psychologists have indeed found that parents’ environmental values have a strong influence on those of their children (e.g. Casaló & Escario, 2016) and that time in nature as a child (rather than knowledge per se) is one of the strongest predictors of ‘environmental citizenship’ as an adult (e.g. Asah et al., 2018).

Nonetheless, adults have to consider the extent to which our reasons for connecting children to nature, including the desire to share our values with them, hold up in the Anthropocene. Our argument here turns on recognizing that nature is no longer stable in the way we have come to assume in the Holocene, and that it will continue to change—perhaps more and more rapidly—even under the most optimistic scenarios. Strikingly, for example, children are currently receiving education about a world that is arguably fading away: a world with polar bears and orangutans and rhinos. The pioneering work of Glenn Albrecht et al. (2007) was the first to describe a new form of psychological distress people may suffer: ‘As opposed to nostalgia—the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home—solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment’. This is a particular form of distress for those who are connected to nature—one echoed in the quotation from Bill McKibben that opens this paper and in the commonplace observation that environmentalists inhabit ‘a world of wounds’. And it merely compounds more widespread versions of environmentally inflected psychological burdens, such as climate change depression, climate change anxiety and ecological grief (see Burke et al., 2018; Clayton, 2020; Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018).

Perhaps, then, promoting a love for nature is a bit like promoting a yearning for the Roman Empire. There is no real possibility of recovering that world, and a child who values it may be both dissatisfied with, and unfit for, modern society. Likewise, if there is no real possibility of recovering the natural world that people have so long valued, a child who acquires those values may simply inherit a nostalgia for a world that is no longer available.

With all that in mind, perhaps it is better to prepare children for a future that is increasingly likely rather than for a past for which adults feel nostalgia. Again, we say this not as technophiles who wish to escape to the stars, but as nature-loving parents who are considering how best to navigate our unfortunate present.

3 SOME ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Does it make sense to raise children differently given the severity of the environmental crisis? How might this question be addressed? The most obvious way to approach it is to ask whether it is good for children to have certain values. This leads us to examine the nature of human well-being. There are several theories that philosophers have developed about what makes human lives go well—that is, about what is good for individual human beings, rather than what is good for society, the environment or anything else. Two of the most prominent theories are hedonism and the objective list theory. We consider their implications in turn.

3.1 Hedonism

Hedonism is not the view that people crave sensual pleasures. Rather, it is the view that positive and negative affective states—pleasures and pains, happiness and unhappiness—are the only things that contribute to someone’s well-being. All else equal, hedonism says that your life goes better insofar as it has more positive affective states; it goes worse insofar as it has more negative affective states. Given this theory of well-being, the question of whether it is good for children to have certain values boils down to this: does having those values produce more positive versus negative affective states?

Insofar as a child who is connected to nature values experiences in nature and thus is more likely to pursue those experiences, it is possible that the experiences do indeed produce more positive versus negative affective states. After all, there appear to be many important benefits to such experiences (see Children & Nature Network, 2021). Consider this summary from Kuo (2015):

Contact with nature has been tied to health in a plenitude of studies. Time spent in and around tree-lined streets, gardens, parks, and forested and agricultural lands is consistently linked to objective, long-term health outcomes. The less green a person’s surroundings, the higher their risk of morbidity and mortality – even when controlling for socioeconomic status and other possible confounding variables. The range of specific health outcomes tied to nature is startling, including depression and anxiety disorder, diabetes mellitus, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), various infectious diseases, cancer, healing from surgery, obesity, birth outcomes, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal complaints, migraines, respiratory disease, and others … Finally, neighborhood greenness has been consistently tied to life expectancy and all-cause mortality.

However, we caution against drawing unduly optimistic conclusions from these studies. Insofar as children have limited access to nature, valuing and enjoying it may be a source of frustration rather than various benefits. This is, of course, the main concern that drives our paper. Promoting love for nature makes sense if children will have access to what they love. But if the object of love is lost, promoting love of nature seems like a way of making children vulnerable rather than happy (Chawla, 2020).

There is also a risk of overstating the significance of the research on connection to nature and various health outcomes. What many of these studies show is that there are appreciable benefits associated with being around trees and running water; they do not necessarily show that human beings benefit from extensive wild nature per se, and certainly not the kind required to, say, conserve many of the species that are currently being lost. Although some research has demonstrated the importance of greater biodiversity for human mental health and a great deal of research shows the importance of healthy ecosystems for physical health, much of the research on nature’s psychological benefits uses fairly minimal standards for nature—a view out a window, a plant in an office, or even a painting on a wall (Aerts et al., 2018). It seems plausible that some of these health benefits could be explained by factors not inherently tied to nature, much less to the kind of nature that is at issue in the environmental crisis. One can imagine, for instance, creating artificial environments that are less stressful and have superior air quality, which may well have the same effects as the natural environment. It is also the case that greenspaces can be preserved without our managing to preserve polar bears or coral reefs; even if there are benefits from being around trees per se, that does not necessarily mean being around native trees, or extensive biodiversity, or what have you (although see Lev et al., 2020).

So, while there may be a sense in which experiences of nature benefit children, it would be cold comfort to environmentalist parents if the ‘nature’ they experience is simply a manicured park. This strongly suggests that while environmentalist parents probably do want to benefit their children by teaching them to love nature, it is a particular sort of nature they want their children to value. The target is not ‘whatever provides certain psychological and health benefits’, but rather the rich biological and ecological diversity that, of course, is now so severely threatened.

3.2 The objective list theory

Consider a second theory of well-being. Objective list theorists say that some things are good for you even if they do not produce more happiness. For instance, it may be good to know certain truths about the world, even if they are not comfortable or encouraging. In the current context, for instance, there are the truths about the ways in which people are damaging the natural world: on balance, any particular individual might not get any pleasure (and indeed, might experience some significant psychological discomfort) when staring down the fact that they may soon live in a world with no Great Barrier Reef. Still, you might think that it would be bad for that person to put their head in the sand—not just because they thereby ensure that they will not be some small part of broader solutions, but because they are less in touch with reality as a result of not knowing. It is bad for them, not just bad for the world.

This view is sometimes developed by appealing to the idea of eudaimonia or flourishing. According to ancient Greek thought, beings achieve eudaimonia when they are operating as they ought to operate, when they are living out their natures and being the best versions of the kinds of things they are. On such views, things can be good for you without affecting your affective state. It is often thought that when humans achieve eudaimonia, they will have a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as personal autonomy and feelings of connection (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a sense of connection to nature is associated with this particular approach to well-being (Cervinka et al., 2012).

Even if we grant the objective list theory of well-being, though, we do not yet have an argument for the importance of loving, or connecting to, nature, but only for knowing things about nature. To get that stronger claim, someone might insist that it is good for us to love things that are valuable; and, since nature is valuable, it is good for us to love nature—even if it is sometimes costly, in hedonic terms, for us to do so.10 This is sometimes how people think about appreciating art. The view is something like: it is good to be the sort of person who experiences awe in front of masterpieces, as that means you have developed the ability to be sensitive to—and richly appreciate—certain forms of value.

Note, however, that there are at least three problems with this argument. First, even if it is good for us to love things that are valuable and nature is indeed valuable, the objective list theory does not imply that it is good for us to love nature all things considered. After all, the objective list theory agrees with hedonism that happiness and unhappiness are relevant to well-being; it simply disagrees with hedonism that they are the only things relevant to well-being. If the hedonic costs of loving nature are high enough—as, we worry, they will be for many children—then it is not good for them to love nature all things considered, even if it is good for them in one respect.

Second, while it may be good to love things that are valuable, it does not follow that it is good to love everything that is valuable. It may be that there is only so much room in a life to devote attention and effort to the things that are loved. This suggests the need to be selective in terms of the values that adults promote in our children. Additionally, there is a significant difference between loving nature and appropriately appreciating its value. We are raising the possibility that adults should not teach children to be enamoured with nature, not that they should not teach them to see its worth. This is akin to discouraging children from being enamoured with Jackson Pollock’s paintings, although it may still be important for them to see why they are valuable as works of art. You can appreciate the value of a thing without being depressed by its loss, as demonstrated by most people’s ability to watch the news without descending into despair. Again, promoting love for nature may be a bit like promoting love for the Roman Empire, rather than an appreciation for the way it advanced some people’s interests at the time.

Third, this argument for loving nature depends on nature having intrinsic value. For those already enamoured with the environment, this may be an attractive view. But it is worth wondering how it could be defended. After all, it is notable that many environmentalists retreat to instrumental defences of nature in public fora: they appeal to ecosystem services (but see Dempsey & Robertson, 2012). This may be some indication that the arguments for the intrinsic value of natural systems are less persuasive than they may at first appear (see Newman et al., 2017). Moreover, even in private, conservationists would likely acknowledge that the view that nature has intrinsic value has some unpalatable implications if not carefully qualified: recalling the earlier points about coronavirus extinction, very few of us want to say that all dimensions of nature are valuable.

3.3 What is good for parents?

Perhaps we have taken too atomistic of an approach. We are writing as environmentalists, so our reasons for wanting our children to love nature are not simply about promoting the good for our children. Compare: if we love classical music, we might want our children to love it as well simply because we think that classical music is worth valuing. But we also might want our children to love classical music because having shared values makes them people to whom we can relate. Shared values can enhance our relationship in a way that divergent values may not. It is like passing along a culture, and thus extending our legacy. Many Indigenous peoples, for example, describe relationships with the natural world and experience this as a component of health and well-being. If children were to reject this worldview (as they were sometimes forced to do by colonizing forces), it might be seen as a disturbing rejection of those cultural values.

Granted, people often fail to pass on their values. When these values are not central to our identity, the differences between us and our children can be occasion for celebration—we learn their unique contours as individuals. But when these values are more central to who we are—when our children reject our religious tradition (or our lack of one), when they are not concerned about the causes we hold dear—such differences can create distance. In many cases, that is not the end of the world. But the gulf is no less real for that.

In any case, some people may find themselves emotionally constituted such that, if their children were not to have certain values with respect to the environment, they would find it hard to relate to their children. So, even if it is not good for our children to have certain values with respect to the environment, we may well find ourselves determined to pass these parts of ourselves along. In so doing, are we acting selfishly? Very possibly. And yet it is hard to criticize selfishness in this context, as it is in service of sustaining the relationships that are most central to our lives. Many people would find it difficult to shrug off their values with respect to the environment as simply one of the many differences between generations. To the contrary, these values feature prominently in their identities as environmentalists and nature lovers. So this may be one of many cases where who we are has an enormous influence on what it makes sense to do.

Obviously, this is a far cry from the defence of environmental parenting we might have wanted. If the best we can say is that we are trying to connect our children to nature so that we can connect to our children, then while we will have a perfectly understandable rationale, it is no longer a rationale that is really about nature. Nature is, on this view, just one more means to an end—an attitude that, of course, is part of what led to the environmental crisis in the first place. Obviously enough, this charge could be levelled just as fiercely against the previous attempted justification, the one that tried to explain the aim of connecting children to nature in terms of their own well-being. Still, we have indeed found a reason to encourage our children to love nature, and that is notable. Can we, perhaps, strengthen that reason with some additional considerations?

3.4 What is good for nature?

At this juncture, the obvious move is to revert to more traditional arguments about creating the next generation of environmentalists for nature’s sake—not ours or our children’s (even if they also benefit). The thought might be that teaching children to love nature is the best protection against the myriad cultural and economic forces that promote a purely instrumental view of nature’s worth.

There are two problems with this. The first is that if this really is an era defined by foregone environmental conclusions—if humans are past the point of being able to prevent numerous species losses, climate change and the loss of various ecosystems—then it will be harder to defend teaching children to love nature for nature’s sake. Many of the valuable things people would hope to preserve simply cannot be preserved. Likewise, it will be difficult to defend teaching children to love nature for society’s sake. After all, the ultimate reason why conservationists want certain values to be common in society is because those values can, in the aggregate, make a difference to the environmental crisis. If humans can indeed avert that crisis, then it makes sense for parents to do their part and raise their children accordingly. But under the assumption that this crisis cannot be averted, then parents’ reason to do their part evaporates.

Second, and rather bleakly, it is not clear that children would be making a mistake in having a more instrumental view of nature’s worth—or, at least, an instrumental view of the worth of the nature that they will inherit. To appreciate this point, imagine a beautifully maintained classic car, perfectly detailed and lovely in all the ways such a vehicle can be. Now suppose that this car is used and abused to the point where all its aesthetic virtues have been lost; it is only good for short trips to and from the grocery store. In such circumstances, there is no mistake in having an instrumental view of the car, even if it would have been a mistake not to have appreciated it differently in its former glory. Likewise, if much of nature’s value is bound up with its beauty, diversity and complexity, then it may not be a mistake—or much of one—to devalue an uglier, more homogenous and flattened natural world.

3.5 What is good—Revisited

There may, however, be some better arguments for encouraging children to love nature. First, from a nature-centric perspective, it is generally accepted that people who feel connected to nature are more likely to act on its behalf. While it is certainly true that humans cannot completely prevent species loss and ecological degradation at this point, we recognize that it is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Even given the assumption that radical change is inevitable, people may still be able to slow it, thereby increasing the longevity of what evolution has wrought—both for its own sake and for those who will be able to enjoy it. Teaching children to feel a connection to the natural world will, we hope, make it more likely that larger steps are taken to protect it. This pushes the problem back, of course: our children may not be able to run this argument for their children, or at least not for their grandchildren. But we are not looking for reasons that will last until the end of time; we are looking for reasons that can guide parents making choices in the present.

Second, from an anthropocentric point of view, connecting to nature does seem to have benefits for people. The biophilia hypothesis proposed by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (1984) suggested that people have an instinctive tendency to connect to the natural environment. Ecopsychologists and others have interpreted this to mean that such a connection is necessary for mental health (Kahn & Hasbach, 2012). As stated above, there is evidence that a connection to nature is associated with indicators of psychological well-being; and exposure to natural scenery appears to enhance people’s social relationships and not just their individual well-being (Castelo et al., 2021; Cervinka et al., 2012; Olivos & Clayton, 2017). It is unclear how much nature, and what kind of nature, is necessary to establish a connection, but establishing a connection to nature appears to have benefits beyond merely a positive mood.

Finally, promoting love for nature can be important as an expression of our own love for nature, where the odds of success are largely irrelevant to whether we act on its behalf. For those of us who are already environmentalists, the destruction of the natural world is a vision of hell. Accordingly, we continue to raise our children to love the natural world in the hope that our actions will make a difference, even if the odds are very long (e.g. Bain & Bongiorno, 2019; Ojala, 2017; Pihkala, 2017). This is the view that is expressed powerfully in an arresting exchange in Barbara Kingsolver’s (2012) novel, Flight Behaviour, between Ovid, a scientist studying monarchs and Dellarobia, the protagonist:

Ovid: ‘Not everyone has the stomach to watch an extinction’.

Dellarobia: ‘So you’re one of the people that can? … Watch an extinction’.

Ovid: ‘If someone you loved was dying, what would you do?’

Dellarobia: ‘You do everything you can … And then, I guess, everything you can’t. You keep doing, so your heart won’t stop’.

4 CONCLUSION

These arguments are tentative, and leave out a great many important issues. For instance, even if adults should try to promote connection to nature, there remain difficult questions about methods. Our children may connect to nature quite differently than past generations, not only because of the shifting-baseline syndrome (Soga & Gaston, 2018), but also because their lives are caught up in swirling socio-cultural and technological changes that remain (and will remain) foreign to most parents (Clayton et al., 2017). It is possible, for example, that digital games and screen time may help connect children to nature, although that is hardly clear (e.g. Edwards & Larson, 2020; Fletcher, 2017). There are also hard problems about how children’s connection to nature should be informed by the need to engage with issues of justice. How can children engage in conservation that ‘takes seriously our economic system’s structural pressures, violent socio-ecological realities, cascading extinctions and increasingly authoritarian politics’ (Büscher & Fletcher, 2019)? As children engage with nature in the ways of the future, it may be even more important for parents, and other involved adults, to facilitate other ways of knowing and to actively encounter ‘the paradoxical tension between endings and possibilities’ (Moser, 2019) and the mourning (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017) demanded by the times. As parents and also as teachers and as a society, we need to investigate ways to provide children with the tools that will give them emotional resilience in a time of existential crisis (Baker et al., 2021; Ojala, 2017; Ojala & Bengtsson, 2019).

Our aim here has not been to provide definitive answers to fraught questions about whether and how to promote connection to nature among children. Obviously, individual parents will have to apply their own wisdom to the unique experience of raising each particular child. We have instead tried to prompt a more systematic conversation about these questions — a conversation that, as parents and environmentalists, we hope our children will eventually join.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We appreciate comments on the draft manuscript from Rachael Edwards and Clare Palmer and from the editors and reviewers, including Thomas Beery and Dave Kendal.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS

B.M.H.L. conceived the project; B.M.H.L. and B.F. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All three authors contributed to revisions and have approved the manuscript for publication.

ENDNOTES

  • 1Our edition of Louv’s book concludes with a ‘field guide’ containing ‘100 actions we can take’. 
  • 2Although it is perhaps not such a curious disconnect if one recalls the proportion of humanity that has little regard for nature and its value; for a brilliant satire on this point, see Chapron et al. (2018). 
  • 3We adopt this term with awareness that it is controversial; for discussion, see Bilgrami (2020), Hamilton (2017), Haraway (2016) and Tsing et al. (2017), among many other commentators. We are also wary of our question being interpreted as an apologia for the destruction of nature, which we wish to unequivocally declare that it is not. 
  • 4Other scholars have considered the reasons for our denial and inaction as well as the inertial and psychological reasons we assume for the best (e.g. Hulme 2009; Hamilton 2010; Norgaard 2011). 
  • 5For a related, entertaining and thoughtful engagement with ‘despair’, see McMurry (2018). 
  • 6One might think that this would be all of us, although many commentators take a decidedly less optimistic view of the human race–not to mention the decision many couples have made to not have children. 
  • 7Someone might object to the very question. They might say that if we are going to change the way we encourage our children to relate to nature for the sake of their well-being, then why would not we change the way we encourage them to relate to other things for the sake of their well-being? For instance, it is awful to lose pets and romantic partners. Should we discourage our children from loving pets and people, in the interest of preventing them from suffering loss? By way of reply, we should note that parents sometimes do discourage children from loving too much; they recommend maintaining perspective on the objects of their affection. For example, some parents may have had pertinent conversations with their teenagers about high school relationships. Accordingly, something similar may be good advice when it comes to nature. The obvious difference is that, at some point, we hope our children will form lasting bonds with people (and perhaps other organisms, too). If that is the aim, then there comes a time when reserve is inappropriate. At some point, most romantic relationships require you to be ‘all in’. Our partners expect us to invest in our relationships in ways that assume their longevity. But your relationship with nature is not like that: nature itself has no expectations. 
  • 8Although we focus on the concept of ‘connection to nature’, our argument could alternatively be couched in terms of the ‘extinction of experience’. Using the classification of Gaston & Soga, 2020, we are considering whether, to some extent, reduced childhood interactions with nature may be adaptive at this point in human history. Note that we are not promoting the absolute extinction of these interactions, although perhaps shift emphasis to interactions with living organisms as opposed to wild nature [which Gaston and Soga (2020) refer to as a ‘broader’ view]. 
  • 9E. O. Wilson’s (1984) biophilia hypothesis, notably, implies that a negative emotional response to some aspects of nature can also indicate a connection, albeit not the kind most relevant here. 
  • 10We can get a similar result via an indirect route. People might think that it is good for our children to develop a sense of wonder and intellectual curiosity. And they might think that one important way to do that involves promoting love for nature. In that case, it might be good for them to love nature even if loving it involves some hedonic costs: the price of a sense of wonder is being saddened by the way that nature is being damaged, but wonder is worth the price. 

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Spatiotemporality in the Anthropocene: Deleuzoguattarian Philosophy, Quantum Physics, and the German Netflix Series Dark

In: KronoScope

Hedwig Fraunhofer

Abstract

Crises alter our perception of time. For medical personnel faced with treating unprecedented numbers of critically ill patients under conditions of personal threat, COVID-19 has most recently accelerated the subjective perception of time. For millions of others, social isolation has decelerated our lives. For all of us, at least in the short term, the future has become more uncertain. Theoretical physicists tell us, however, that under any conditions, the human perception of the flowing of time is only a result of our blurred, limited, macroscopic vision. As the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli writes, therefore, “[t]o understand ourselves is to reflect on time” (2018: 179). Potentially caused by humans’ failed interactions with wild animals, the contemporary global pandemic, as well as previous outbreaks such as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-related coronavirus) or the bird flu, has led to calls to reevaluate humans’ relationships with nonhuman life, with the natural environment that includes us, in the epoch that may soon be named for our very failure – the Anthropocene. In an era in which our usual, day-to-day certainties and desire for human control have been upended, not only by the current medical crisis but also by the continuing existential threat to terrestrial life that is climate change, a rethinking of the category of the human, a new conceptualization of the entangled (human and nonhuman) material relationships on our planet and beyond, requires reflecting on time. This article engages in such reflection through a conversation with the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Keywords: time; Anthropocene; posthuman; materiality; quantum; Deleuze; Dark; contagion

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh wonders if “science fiction is better equipped to address the Anthropocene than mainstream literary fiction.” In the end, however, Ghosh comes to the conclusion that

cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future, and that … is exactly the rub. The future is but one aspect of the Anthropocene: this era also includes the recent past, and most significantly, the present … the Anthropocene resists science fiction: it is precisely not an imagined ‘other’ world apart from us (2016: 72).

For Ghosh, climate change, along with the threat of mass extinctions that humans pose to multiple forms of life, is a problem set in the present and on this planet, not in an imagined future or in space. The first German Netflix series, Dark (2017–2020) enacts a staple of science fiction, namely time travel, putting it in intra-action with such physical or theoretical phenomena as black holes, wormholes, quantum leaps from one energy level to another, light, and lunar and solar cycles. In dialogue with our contemporary scientific understanding of quantum physics and spacetime as well as with the uncanniness of the horror genre, Dark enacts one of the global threats marking the Anthropocene, a threat widely discussed in Germany in recent years: the very real dangers of nuclear energy that link past, present and future on our planet.

Asked recently why time travel is so in vogue in popular culture these days, Jantje Friese, one of the creators of Dark, responded: “we live in uncertain times, we fear what is coming in the future and we have a nostalgic thing about the past, about going back to how it used to be …, to better times” (Robinson and Ashurst 2020). As in the current global pandemic, in which time has found a new rhythm, in Dark an endless succession of catatonic episodes or flashes sweep away subjective interiorities in a strong common affect. As ‘we’ shelter in place, in a physical interiority, this exteriority – the velocity of this exteriority – nevertheless dominates everything.1

1 Space-Time: Science and Philosophy

A year before the pandemic threat caused by the new coronavirus, on April 10, 2019, the news exploded with a different sensation, of not only global, but cosmic, dimension. Astronomers had captured an image of what Dennis Overbye, in that day’s New York Times, called “the unobservable”: a black hole. By definition, black holes are matter that “has collapsed upon itself and has disappeared from our view” (Rovelli 2016: 45) and thus from any sense of human control. Black holes are created when too much matter accumulates in one place and the force of gravity becomes so overwhelming that no matter or radiation in its proximity can escape its pull. Matter, time and space are profoundly altered near black holes.2 A black hole is thus a “major disruptor of cosmic order” (Overbye 2019). Such a major disruption of cosmic order marks the events enacted in Dark. Black holes are also an example of what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” i.e. “things that are massively distributed in space and time relative to humans” (Morton 2013: 1). As Michael Cronin notes, hyperobjects change our perception of time: “The future … is no longer in the future. It informs the here and now” (2017: 3). We are confronted “now” with an uncontrollable object, an existential threat somehow hurtling towards us.

Giving expression to our ensuing sense of apprehension, Overbye (2019) described the black hole observed as “an eternal trap,” “a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity,” or “the doughnut of doom.” Tinging scientific optimism with awe, such verbal images link physics and metaphysics, nature and the supernatural. A similar link also contributed to the recent success of Dark. Infusing from the start a transcendental dimension that gives this cinematic fiction about the quantum entanglements of the physical universe its affective power, Dark, at the very beginning of the first episode, sets the tone of the series by characterizing black holes as the “Höllenschlund des Universums” (“the hellish pit of the universe”).3 It is exactly this supernatural but also deeply human dimension, involving questions of good and evil, that provides Dark with its specific affect of fear.

While Dark establishes a conversation between science and philosophy, the present article aims as well to move beyond a one-sided analysis that sees representation/meaning/the human, on the one hand, and more-than-human materiality, on the other hand, as two incompatible sides of a dualistic opposition. Taking the popular Netflix series as a starting point and illustration, the article specifically focuses on Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s philosophy as a key to temporality in the Anthropocene. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s process philosophy and quantum physics share many insights; Dark, as well, draws on this conversation.

The TV series starts with a quotation from Einstein: “the distinction made between past, present, and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion” (S1: E1, also quoted by Rovelli, 2016: 60). In contrast to Newtonian physics, the theory of general relativity taught us that space and time are not inert boxes, that they are, instead, dynamic (Rovelli 2016: 42). As the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking explains, “the theory of relativity forces us to change fundamentally our ideas of space and time. We must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space but is combined with it to form an object called space-time” (2005: 33).

According to Overbye, Einstein’s general theory of relativity “led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl like a mix-master and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole” (2019). While the theory of black holes emerged from his equations, Einstein himself remained reluctant to accept their existence, remaining a life-long sceptic of this aspect of the quantum revolution (Barad 2007: 104). Einstein’s general theory of relativity – the theory of gravity, space and time – does not account for the uncertainty principle4 and is thus itself not a quantum theory (Hawking 2005: 122). According to the general theory of relativity, one cannot travel in time. The world enacted in Dark, however, is a universe based on quantum entanglement. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two kinds of science. They speak of an “eccentric science,” a “nomad science” that is different from the sciences “in the royal, imperial, or legal sense.” It is a science of flows, flux, and a different kind of consistency: “The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant” (1987: 361, 362). It is this kind of science, quantum physics, that asserts itself in Dark – a science of phenomena or events rather than a science of stable properties or stable substances.

Both in the cosmos and in Dark, spacetime is not a pre-existing, Newtonian, stable container; it is iteratively produced in the dynamic making and remaking of boundaries and exclusions. Dark meets the physicist-philosopher Karen Barad’s description of “intra-actions” as “the dynamics through which temporality and spatiality are produced and iteratively reconfigured in the materialization of phenomena and the (re)making of material-discursive boundaries and their constitutive exclusions” (2007: 179). In Dark, topological questions of boundaries, connectivity, interiority and exteriority abound. For the understanding of time, the issue is not merely that time and space are relative in Einstein’s sense, but rather that intra-active relations iteratively reconfigure space and time. This material reconfiguration is part of the fearful suspense and mystery of Dark, posing questions of acute contemporary relevance – questions about identity, denial, agency, responsibility and accountability – in an ongoing reconfiguration of the real and the possible, the visible and the invisible.

2 Haecceities: Rain, Hail, Wind and Pestilential Air

Both Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Dark, are interested in the creative potentialities of black holes.5 The former speak of black holes as “keys that open or close an assemblage, a territory” (1987: 334). In Dark, black holes allow time travel and thus form the catalysts for an assemblage of years and space. Questioning the Western epistemological tradition’s binary distinction between material and semiotic components,6 between (nonhuman) nature and (human) culture, as well as conventional notions of causality, Dark enacts an ongoing flow of agency and a making of spacetime that cyclically links and iteratively reconfigures four different time periods or related “events” (from 1953 to 2052), each 33 years apart. Each of the years featured in Dark is a milieu in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense, “a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component.” For Deleuze and Guattari, “one milieu serves as the basis for another,” a process that they refer to as “transcoding” or “transduction” (1987: 313).7

The topology of connected years in Dark: the howling winds and the rain, the forest and caves of Winden, along with nuclear radiation, are more than mere metaphors, more than merely supplementary, decorative backgrounds that situate human subjects. Instead, the multiple nonhuman and human actants in Dark are haecceities or events in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense. (The term haecceitas is borrowed from medieval philosophy; it concerns, among other things, the question of what we call ‘identity’.) Their description warrants quoting at length:

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. When demonology expounds upon the diabolical art of local movements and transports of affect, it also notes the importance of rain, hail, wind, pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious particles, favorable conditions for these transports. Tales must contain haecceities that are not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects (1987: 261, emphasis in original).

One could well take this passage from A Thousand Plateaus, in which Deleuze and Guattari propose a posthuman and post-substantialist conceptualization of individuation, as a description of Dark. Haecceities enter into conjunction with each other in assemblages on what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of consistency or composition. This plane “holds together” heterogenous elements (establishing consistency between disparate elements that were previously co-present or succeeded each other – 1987: 323, 330); it frees “variations of speeds and slownesses between movements in composition” (1987: 267). Dark is such an enactment of variations of speeds and slownesses between heterogeneous elements. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “[an] haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle … It is a rhizome” (1987: 263). In Dark as well, time is rhizomatic. While the narrative starts in 2019, it soon intra-acts with other years, in an ambulant8 model that constitutes and expands space and time, a zigzagging in which the direction of the narrative varies endlessly. With its “gaps, detours, subterranean passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc.,” the cave system in Winden meets Deleuze’s and Guattari’s description of a rhizome (1987: 415).

3 The Unpredictability of Smooth Spaces: from Radioactivity to COVID-19

“Everything is connected” (“Alles is miteinander verbunden”) is the leitmotif of Dark. But is Dark unequivocally a multilinear system in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense, where “everything happens at once,” where “the line breaks free of the point of origin,” where “the transversal breaks free of the diagonal as a localizable connection between two points” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 297)? On the one hand, given its references to Greek tragedy and its emphasis on inevitability or its allusions to Christian predestination, Dark provides a “striated” space where movement-matter is organized on a linear, chronological timeline, “produc[ing] an order and succession of distinct forms” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 478). Deleuze and Guattari quote the French composer Pierre Boulez, who “says that in a smooth space-time one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated space-time one counts in order to occupy” (1987: 477). The intertwined, but “fixed” years in Dark help occupy, territorialize, a striated space-time, a “long-distance vision.” The 33-year cycles arguably establish what Deleuze and Guattari call an “invariance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of reference” that is typical of striation. These points of reference or years are inertial because they – the past, present or future – ultimately cannot be changed. In striated spaces, these points are “interlink[ed] by immersion in an ambient milieu,” here the city of Winden and its caves. In addition to this central location, the protagonist, Jonas, provides the central perspective required by a striated space (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 494).

The anxiety that pervades Dark, however, indicates that the flows and variation of matter persist in the series, that they have not been completely warded off by the “constancy and eternity” of a striated space (Deleuze 1987: 496). In fact, during the first two seasons of Dark, the central characters in Dark arguably all struggle in their own ways against smooth spaces/change. In addition to elements of striation, however, Dark also enacts a “smooth” or nomad space, a space of non-subjectified, depersonalized affects, events and haecceities “occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities,” a patchwork where we follow the flow of cosmic energy-matter through “local linkages between parts” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 496), in a movement or process that is “alive as a continuous variation,” constantly changing direction, becoming “perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:497–8). In Dark, the local linkage between parts is provided by the underground Gate that allows time travel. The series’ affect is co-created and reinforced by the production of disturbing sounds reminiscent of the French playwright Antonin Artaud’s synesthetic theatre of cruelty. Not only is Dark a series about (nuclear) energy; it also enacts a related, affective energy or contagion, one could say as its method, bridging the gap between perception/experience/expression and representation.

Recalling Artaudian atmospherics as well as the convergence in Romantic literature of cosmic elements (the weather) and events affecting humans, it is raining heavily and constantly in the fictional German town of Winden, where Dark is set. The series’ title, of course, also pre-announces the material-discursive (physical and metaphorical) importance of light and darkness and of their impact on the series’ tonality. In the summer of 1986, a half-year after Chernobyl, an accident at the nuclear facility in Winden, while covered up by its directors, sets off the gravitational wave impulses9 that cause a black hole/wormhole, setting in action the central plot of Dark. This gravitational effect on nearby objects or on light passing by explains why flashlights will not function dependably in the proximity of the caves of Winden, which include areas of the local nuclear plant where radioactive waste was stored. The “violent jet of energy” and the “intense pressures and magnetic fields” (Overbye 2019) unleashed on all sides by matter’s falling into black holes could also explain the winds’ howling through the forests and caves of Winden to much atmospheric effect. The nuclear warning signs visible everywhere in the forest around Winden co-produce the ominous tonality of the series.10

In Dark, space-time is both striated and smooth, a Deleuzoguattarian body without organs,11 “always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 161). In the body without organs, Deleuze and Guattari write, “life tears itself free from the organic by a permutating, stationary whirlwind” (1987: 499). The winds that spring up when the Gate in the caves beneath Winden is opened, the passage or flow of matter between years, is what creates a smooth space12 in Dark. Does the series then “sufficiently change the general conditions of space and time perception,” to the extent that characters and viewers “can succeed in passing through the holes in the world and following … lines of flight” (French fuite, fleeing) in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense (1987: 286)?13 Does Dark meet the scientific requirements of quantum physics as well as those of Deleuzoguattarian philosophy?

Deleuze and Guattari remind us that “the air, the sea, or even the earth” are smooth spaces, open spaces with vortices, movements that have nothing measured or cadenced, where variation can arise at any moment (1987: 363–4). The radioactive spaces of Dark and the air carrying a deadly virus in the current global pandemic are smooth spaces in this sense. The unpredictability of the vortical movement – a vortex that marks both Dark and our world in the times of COVID-19 – contributes to its affective impact. While Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the creative, expressive possibilities of smooth spaces, they remind us that, as is evident in our current predicament, “smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory … Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (1987: 500). As Deleuze and Guattari point out, lines of flight (escape, leaking, vanishing into the distance – rather than flying), “always risk abandoning their creative potentialities and turning into a line of death, being turned into a line of destruction pure and simple (fascism)” (Deleuze 1987: 506).14 The threat of fascism and destruction is also present in Dark.15 What we were witnessing in the U.S. in 2020 and early 2021 – in the combination of an acute medical crisis and ineffective, tendentially totalitarian political leadership – was a smooth space potentially turning into a line of destruction pure and simple.

4 The Eternal Return: Deleuzian Contagion

Dark presents spatiotemporality as a circle, explicitly in reference to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same, in which the present and the future seem to be able to mutually influence each other. The series’ characters are able to move forward and back on a processual network of interconnected years. In Einstein’s theory as well, “[t]he single quantity ‘time’ melts into a spiderweb of times … The world [is] a network of events affecting each other” (Rovelli 2018: 16). The German-Austrian logician Kurt Gődel as well realized that “advancing always toward the future, one can return to the same point in spacetime … In this way, a continuous trajectory toward the future returns to the originating event” (Rovelli 2018: 53).

Dark is centrally structured around a 33-year cycle, the lunar-solar cycle in which “everything repeats” (“dass sich alles wiederholt”) (S1: E5). A lunar year has approximately 354 days. A solar year has 365 days. Over the course of 33 years, there will thus be a difference of one year between solar and lunar calendars. In purely lunar calendars like the Islamic calendar, the lack of intercalation causes the lunar months to cycle through all the seasons of the Gregorian year over the course of a 33 lunar-year cycle (Lee 2018). After 33 years, the seasonal change then starts to repeat again. At this point, as Charlotte explains in Dark’s S1: E8, all stars are again in the same position.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, however, Deleuze argues that Nietzsche in fact denies (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883) that “the eternal return is a circle which makes the same return” (Deleuze 1983: ix–xii, 4, 15, 151). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes: “The ultimate element of repetition is the disparate [dispars], which stands opposed to the identity of representation” (1994: 57). Rather than identity or sameness, Deleuze argues, Nietzsche’s return embraces the disparate. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari furthermore reference Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return as “a little ditty, a refrain, but which captures the mute and unthinkable forces of the Cosmos” (1987:343). Dark is driven by disparate cosmic forces, forces that include time and space.

Spatiotemporality, or what Deleuze and Guattari call “speed(s),” becomes the major actant in Dark, a force that sweeps up the human characters and everything else. Deleuze associates Nietzsche’s work with the time modality aeon. In contrast to chronos (“the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject”), this impersonal mode of temporality is also enacted in Dark:

the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 262).

The plane enacted in Dark is a desubjectified, depersonalized plane of “nonvoluntary transmutation,” “[a] strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war … and contagion-proliferation-involution [involution as dissolution of form – opposed to evolution]” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 269, 270). Contagion, in other words, is more than a thematic element or representation in Dark; it is a material process of agency, a “style” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 318–9) that enters into conjunction with a nonlinear mode of temporality, with “speeds and slownesses, movement and rest” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270) on the plane of consistency of variation.

The two planes that Deleuze and Guattari discuss, the immanent plane of consistency and the “stratified” plane of organization or development/ transcendence, are in constant interaction; in spite of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s preference for the former, both planes are necessary:

so much caution is needed to prevent the plane of consistency from becoming a pure plane of abolition or death, to prevent the involution from turning into a regression to the undifferentiated. Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions,16 a minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages? (1987: 270)

Not held in check by striation, the plane of consistency can regress into undifferentiation and death. Is the antagonist Adam’s goal in Dark – his goal of halting human suffering and time – an excess of striation, or is it located on a plane of abolition or death, a regression to the undifferentiated? Would this regression stop the process of desire that is Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “becoming”?17 Or is it Adam’s goal to simply uproot feelings from the interiority of a subject, to leave nothing but a “pure exteriority” (Deleuze 1987: 356), a depersonalized affect? Although the viewer identifies with the characters’ (and in particular the protagonist Jonas’) fears, Adam’s goal is a depersonalization of emotions and the complete stoppage of time to the point of every character’s death (S2: E8). In Dark, Adam wants to do away with human desire and end the flow of time and pain. Deleuze, on the other hand, it is important to note, associates the biblical Adam with quantum flows, deterritorialization, decoding and lines of flight (1987: 223).

In contrast to the materials, affects and assemblages that flow in Dark on a plane of consistency of variation, the “subjects, forms, resemblances between subjects” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 272) are on the plane of organization or development. Dark refers to the inevitability that typifies Greek tragedy and that also marks the proximity of a black hole. Once matter is inside the black hole’s horizon, moving into the hole becomes inevitable. In contrast to the temporal modality that is aeon, chronos, a temporality that seems anything but random, is also present in Dark’s highly developed, often symmetrical formal structure, in its geometrical proportionalities and analogies. The structural repetitions in the series are a human imposition of order/striation onto the cosmic forces of chaos.

Replacing traditional notions of causality with “the richness and complexity of causal relations in physics” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 431), Dark also cuts between years in a non-linear, associative manner. Quantum mechanics is based on the uncertainty principle, which stipulates that “events cannot be predicted with complete accuracy: there is always a degree of uncertainty” (Hawking 2005: 134–5). The interplay between inevitability and uncertainty is central to Dark.

The physicist Rovelli states: “The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention … in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference” (2018: 21). Trained in quantum physics, Barad similarly writes: “The past matters and so does the future, but the past is never left behind, never finished once and for all, and the future is not what will come to be in an unfolding of the present moment; rather the past and the future are enfolded participants in matter’s iterative becoming” (2007: 181). In Dark, there is no linear causality moving only in one direction. Past, present, and future are enfolded in a common iterative becoming.18

5 Anthropocentrism and Beyond

Human characters are central to Dark, foremost among them the protagonist, Jonas Kahnwald; but Dark is also driven by nonhuman “characters” or actants, including most prominently spacetime itself and time travel through wormholes. First theorized in 1916, wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges are hypothetical/calculable shortcuts across the universe directly through curved spacetime.19 One of the drawings on a character’s, the Stranger’s, walls in his hotel room shows a wormhole. But we also learn in the series that Einstein and Rosen have “overlooked something” (S1: E8). As the series’ scientist, Tannhaus, tells us, they have overlooked the co-extensiveness of past, present and future (S1: E8). Enacting the theme of symmetry, the Introduction to Dark consists entirely of visual symmetries, and the series centrally enacts plot and character symmetries. Characters look alike; they lead double lives; motifs and images recur.

As a human illusion, time as we know it, however, is “inherent to subjectivity” (Rovelli 2018: 186–7). Limited human perception and memory – our anticipation, our weak attempts at changing the course of time or at keeping change at bay – are the source of our suffering (Rovelli 2018: 190–1). Not only can our limited human vision not accurately perceive that there is no inherent difference between past, present and future; in the physical world, space and time are not things: “ours is a world of events rather than of things” (Rovelli 2018: 195). By necessity, a philosophy of phenomena and events replaces the physics and philosophy of static substances. While the spiderweb of interconnected years and time travel are the result of a nuclear accident in Dark, an objective indeterminacy and indistinguishability of past, present and future seem in fact part of the fundamental functioning of the universe.

Dark also enacts the close physical link between energy and spacetime and the second law of thermodynamics. According to the second law of thermodynamics, when energy changes from one form to another form, or when matter moves freely, entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases. The history of the cosmos is characterized by an increase in entropy. Rovelli explains this “halting and leaping cosmic growth of entropy” by using the image of opening a door. The slow, cosmic growth of entropy only occurs “when something opens a door upon a process that finally allows entropy to increase. The growth of entropy itself happens to open new doors through which entropy can increase further” (2018: 163–4). Rovelli includes nuclear fission – the central problem of Dark – in this cosmic history: “The ignition of nuclear fission opens the door that allows the further increase in entropy: Hydrogen burning into helium” (2018: 164). These “doors,” whether Rovelli’s or the fictive door (the Gate in the Winden caves) that allows time travel in Dark, establish a relationality, a network of processes, that create change and disorder. The characters in Dark try in various ways to reverse this entropy and to (re)create order.

The only difference between the past and the future thus has to do with the lower entropy of the past. Events only leave traces, that is, stop moving, in a process that is in fact irreversible: the degradation of heat into energy (Rovelli 2018: 167). Since this process is irreversible, the past can then ultimately not be changed. In Dark, Ulrich cannot prevent his son’s fate, and Jonas cannot change the future (by helping Mikkel return) without erasing his own future. The fact that, after the end of Season 1, fans of Dark were eagerly awaiting the second season (which started on June 21, 2019) to flesh out what would exactly happen in 2052, kept certain conceptualizations of futurity, continuity and direction alive. The German Trailer for Season 2 ended with: “Die Apocalypse muss kommen” (“The apocalypse must come,” cf. also S2: E1). As we have seen, however, perspectival perceptions or impositions of temporal (linear) order have more to do with humans’ physical limitations and limited interaction with the world (Rovelli 2018: 196) than they do with the processes and forces of the universe.

Another key discovery accomplished by the quantum revolution, a discovery that connects to our contemporary situation in the Anthropocene and in the midst of the current pandemic, is indeterminacy. It is not possible to predict exactly where any event – including spacetime, as event – will take place. Like a contagious virus, in other words, spacetime has no precise position and fluctuates between different probable configurations. As a result, Rovelli states, “an event may be both before and after another one” (Rovelli 2018: 88). In Dark, the Stranger unintentionally creates the wormhole that is then already present in previous years; the building of the time machine, as well, is a paradox undoing any sequentiality between original and copy. Instead of being pre-given, an event becomes concrete, is realized only in relation to the other events with which it is intra-acting. In quantum mechanics, a focus on processes and temporary events and forces thus replaces a physics and philosophy based on pre-given substances and determined attributes (Rovelli 2018: 87–91).20 Does Dark ultimately enact this most radical discovery of quantum physics? The question that all the characters in Dark try to answer is: Is reality malleable or does it coalesce from the past according to unchangeable laws?

Representing time as entangled in an agential material environment that reverberates with many insights of Deleuzian, new materialist philosophy, Dark presents not only humans but also nonhuman materiality as agential forces. Like the novel coronavirus, the physical phenomena enacted in Dark are nonhuman actants in a material universe. The central nonhuman threat (in Dark, nuclear contagion) is, like climate change, correctly identified as having been ultimately caused by humans, however, as the material price humans pay for their Faustian pacts.

During its first two seasons, Dark does run the risk of not going beyond an anthropocentric problematic. Although it represent humans’ self- or subject-based attempts to change fate as ultimately fruitless, the very suspense of the series is nevertheless based on the hope that they will be able to do so after all (and defeat a supernaturally-tinged “evil”). Although everything is connected and continuous in Dark, the portrayal of Jonas Kahnwald as an heroic human character (with Christ-like traits) ultimately remains within the identity/ subject confines of anthropocentrism. It seems that what the new materialist, posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti calls “an ethics of eco-philosophical empathy and affectivity which cuts across species, space and time” (2006: 156) ultimately still eludes Dark.

Nevertheless, Dark offers us much to think about. What we witness in Dark is indeed close to what Braidottti describes as “the recurrence of difference in successive waves of repeated, successive and excessive becomings, in which ‘I’ participates and gets formatted, whereas Zoe acts as the motor” (2006: 157). Like zoe, the impersonal life force, spacetime is not just a setting, but indeed an actor, a motor in Dark. The series’ main question remains, however: “Was ist der Mensch? Woher kommt er?” (S1: E9) (“What is man? Where does he come from?”) What are the characters’ true identities and what is the role of humans? Do humans retain freedom of choice, or are we utterly subject to the inevitable circularity of time? Rather than simply echoing this false dichotomy (a dualism in fact resolved, together with all other dualisms, in the third season of Dark), the present article poses a different question: Is the philosophy that structures Dark an epistemology based on human subjectivity or a process ontology in which forms are not produced by subjects and where phenomena in play “find their individuation in the assemblage of which they are a part, independent of the form of their concept and the subjectivity of their person” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 264)? Deleuze himself warns us that “no flow, no becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without molar components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible landmarks for the imperceptible processes” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 303). The formal striations described and the years and characters that structure Dark are arguably such necessary, molar, territorialized landmarks. “But,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “these territorialized functions and forces can suddenly take on an autonomy that makes them swing over into other assemblages, compose other deterritorialized assemblages” (1987: 325). The imperceptible processes or molecular becomings that pass between coordinates or assemblages – effecting deterritorialization, change and continuous variation in a smooth space – are the impersonal, more-than-human driving force of Dark.

While Season 1 presents the inherent link between time and space (“The question is not where but when”), the ending of Season 2 opens up to the potential existence of different worlds. A woman who looks like Martha (the woman Jonas loves, tragically) returns after Martha’s death and says to Jonas (who asks her from which time she is): “Die Frage ist nicht aus welcher Zeit, sondern aus welcher Welt” (“The question is not from which time, but from which world”) (S2: E8). Season 3, released in June 2020, then takes us to a more-than-human, posthuman world, to a multiverse in the sense of quantum mechanics’ Many Worlds model, which theorizes the existence of parallel realities.

In the final, third season of Dark, different time scales, characters, worlds, good and evil, become entangled to the point of becoming indistinguishable. The “origin” lies beyond the two worlds known previously, in a third dimension that goes beyond dualistic divisions. A Deleuzian, posthuman process ontology inspired by quantum physics replaces the anthropocentrism of Cartesian epistemology. Adam says to his younger self, Jonas: “Was wir wissen ist ein Tropfen. Was wir nicht wissen ein Ozean” (“What we know is a drop. What we don’t know is an ocean”) (S3: E8). Human knowledge and human time scales are not at the center, but are only a minute part of a much vaster and diverse, more-than-human cosmos.

References

1Cf. Deleuze 1987: 356.

2“[T]he spacetime of the quantum collapse of a black hole passes through a phase in which time fluctuates violently, there is a quantum superimposition of different times, and then, later, a return to a determined state after the explosion” (Rovelli 2018: 127).

3All translations are my own.

4For an explanation of the uncertainty principle, see Hawking’s: “The principle, formulated by Heisenberg, that it is not possible to be exactly sure of both the position and the velocity of a particle; the more accurately one is known, the less accurately the other can be known” (2005: 153).

5In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that “it may be necessary for the release of innovative processes that they first fall into a catastrophic black hole: stases of inhibition are associated with the release of crossroads behaviors” (1987: 334).

6Cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 334, 337.

7“… not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another; they are essentially communicating. The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieu’s answer to chaos. What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between – between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or chaosmos … There is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to another, a communication of milieus, coordination between heterogeneous space-times … rhythm is critical: … it ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 313).

8Cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 372.

9“Gravitationswellenimpulse,” according to the scientist Tannhaus in S1: E8.

10The resemblance between the tripartite structure of the nuclear energy symbol and the triquetra symbol (from the Emerald Table) that is central to the series also shows the clear link between physics and mythology in Dark.

11Cf. Deleuze and Guattari: “the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not ‘my’ body without organs, instead the ‘me’ (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds” (1987: 161).

12Cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 505.

13Ironically, while Deleuze and Guattari associate black holes with stasis, black holes make nomadic movement or time travel possible in Dark.

14Cf. also Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 510.

15In a reference that might remind a German audience of the country’s national-socialist past, Noah says that his bunker “creates order” (“schafft Ordnung;” S1: E9). In this “ark,” in 1986, Noah conducts scientific experiments with time travel, killing children in the process. Noah says to Bartosz, whom he is trying to recruit for his efforts, that the end justifies the means (“Sieg erfordert Opfer.” “Victory requires sacrifice.” S1: E10) – a statement with obvious, historical connotations for a post-1945 German audience.

16Cf. Deleuze and Guattari: “causalities, hierarchies, and framings” (1987: 335).

17“Starting from the form one has, the subject one is, … or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 272, emphasis in original).

18Cf. Deleuze and Guattari: “all history is really the history of perception, and what we make history with is the matter of a becoming, not the subject matter of a story. Becoming is like the machine: present in a different way in every assemblage, passing from one to the other, opening one onto the other, outside any fixed or determined sequence” (1987: 347).

19In 1935, Einstein and the physicist Nathan Rosen used the general theory of relativity to elaborate on the idea (Redd 2017). Dark refers to Einstein-Rosen bridges by name (S1: E8).

20Cf. Rovelli 2018: 50ff. and 2016: 17–8.