Questions about the narratives of the Anthropocene—and the standards used for its delimitation—lead us to a highly relevant topic: the way that past events are coherently presented in forms of memory practices. Memory, as the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1911) famously argued, involves a dynamic process of transmission and transformation rather than a repository of lineally unfolded history from past to present. The practice of remembering implies the actualization of the “unlimited experi-ence” (Bergson 1911, 186) of the past. It is the reduction of the vir-tual, that passive potentiality that no longer acts, into the limited conditions of the present—the “actual.” The actual, at the same time, is in a constant process of virtualization as the present is
52 preserved in duration or, as Middleton and Brown (2005, 62) put it, “the experience of time passing.” This continual process of actualization and virtualization is what memory involves—“the action of committing record, to leave invisible traces verifying the veracity of an event,” according to Geoffrey Bowker (2005, 7).
One of Bergson’s most fascinating contributions to the studies on memory is the object-oriented approach he proposes. For the author, remembering is not an abstract act of “storing” that takes place in people’s minds. It is instead a process mediated by materiality that provides the proper conditions for the recon-struction of the past. The double process of virtualization and actualization requires concrete objects containing traces of duration, giving non-human actors a central role in practices of memory.2 In the case of disaster memory, materiality does not just include representations per se of disasters, such as paintings, photographs, film footages, books, and newspapers (Juneja and Schenk 2014; Agostinho 2015); it also considers traces like flood marks, which “work to blur distinctions between the past and present and to condense the different events in time, which they originally referred to, within a perception of disaster as a single repetitive event” (Juneja and Schenk 2014, 9).
Although memory is commonly associated with the collective efforts of civil society, scientific and planning reasoning are also producers of their own practices of memory, whether explicitly or implicitly. Scientific studies look for traces of previous events to materialize their magnitudes and impacts into models, maps, and diagrams used for the politics of preparedness and
2 Further approaches, such as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), have explored this mediating condition of objects through the notion of translation, namely, “all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor [whether human or non-human] or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force” (Callon and Latour 1981, 279). For a deeper analysis about the notion of translation and memory, see Middleton and Brown (2005, 145–57).
recovery, including master and regulatory plans articulating 53 urban environments (November, Camacho-Hübner, and Latour 2010; Farías 2014). According to Bowker (2005, 9), this vast list of technologies and practices used by different groups of agents can be classified as “memory regimes” or, “the sets of memory practices that permit both the creation of a continuous, useful past and the transmission sub rosa of information, stories, and practices from our wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past.”
Understanding memory as a regime is a valuable contribution to the analysis of climatic narratives. First, it conceives memory as a set of material practices to describe the past collectively, beyond individual acts. Second, conceiving of memory as a regime allows the identification of certain homogeneities in which the past is described, enabling the coexistence of multiple schemes of memory simultaneously.
Memory regimes are never tension-free. Similar forms of past constructions, for example those unfolding from scientific schemes, can lead to different creations and explanations of the past—take as an example the previous discussion about the inaugural act of the Anthropocene and how diverse the arguments and narrations are. Similarly, different memory regimes sustained on different types of practices and standards clash when creating coherent causal explanations of past narratives. Think about an alternative world creation—for example, the Andean notion of Pachakuti, or “the disruption of the universe,” used to understand the cyclical condition of the cosmos and its permanent renewal through catastrophic events (see Rivera Cusicanqui, 1991)—versus a scientific explanation of disasters. Both emphasize the causes that lead to a catastrophe, but in order to do so, they appeal to a completely different set of practices, technologies, narratives, and even temporalities.
Different memory practices and regimes lead to different under-standings of the Anthropocene as material reality—a period of increasing global heating more prone to extreme events. Never-theless, my goal here is not to talk in detail about the inaugural
54 event of the Anthropocene. Instead, I will put the attention on climatic controversies emerging in locations affected by the con-sequences of massive carbon dioxide emissions. The increasing risks of local climatic-induced disasters like extreme floods are an expression of our current planetary crisis. However, just like for the Anthropocene, the starting point of such events is neither clearly defined nor delimited. When does a catastrophe such as a flash flood take place? Is it when the massive runoff made by mud and water hits the first settlements? Or is it when the local government authorizes the construction of houses near the exposed areas? Or is it even earlier, when industrial development in Western countries led to the release of unmeasurable tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Or is it the mere existence of humankind that can be blamed for the possibility of disasters?
Furthermore, what sort of conclusions about the Anthropocene can we make by searching for concrete cases of climatic
narratives? If we understand the Anthropocene as a unified event with a single, clear inaugural act, does not this necessarily imply agreeing on only one possible explanation for the occurrence of extreme events? On the other hand, if we accept the temporal dif-ferences and narratives about the Anthropocene, would not this mean expanding the very concept of time for this new geological epoch, and including even other types of world arrangements that escape the traditional scientific paradigm?