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Kaminski, J. D. (2022). Aestheticism Meets Environmental Ethics — Anna Lerchbaumer
and Kilian Jörg (eds.),
Toxic Temple: An Artistic and Philosophical Adventure into the
Toxicity of the Now
(2022) Berlin: DeGruyter.
Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman,
Posthuman,
3(1):7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/ahip.1332
REVIEW
Aestheticism Meets Environmental Ethics — Anna
Lerchbaumer and Kilian Jörg (eds.),
Toxic Temple: An
Artistic and Philosophical Adventure into the Toxicity
of the Now
(2022) Berlin: DeGruyter
Johannes D. Kaminski
Toxic Temple
pursues an interdisciplinary approach to anthropocenic issues in criticism and the arts. By
integrating aesthetic and educational perspectives, the book oers new approaches for understanding the
cultural and environmental ramications of the Age of Extinction.
Keywords: utopia; moralism; aestheticism; plastic; pandas
Anna Lerchbaumer and Kilian Jörg’s volume pursues
an interdisciplinary approach to anthropocenic issues
in criticism and the arts. Emerging from a multi-day,
performance-heavy event held in Vienna, Austria, in
February 2020, the book features three different strands
of inquiry. While the whole project lifts off from the
springboards of speculative philosophy, the book also
features scholarly articles sourced from New Materialism
and cultural studies. There are also contributions that rely
upon visual art to advance their own aesthetic agenda.
To render this heterogeneity agreeable to the eye, the
editors have relied on sophisticated typesetting and
layout by Theresa Hattinger. The volume forms part of
similar explorations into the arts and the Anthropocene,
such as Bill Gilbert and Anicca Cox’s Arts Programming
for the Anthropocene, which investigates ‘how the arts
can contribute to strengthening cultural resiliency in the
face of rapid cultural and environmental change’ (Gilbert
and Cox 2019: 1). Susan Ballard’s Art and Nature in the
Anthropocene (2021) also pursues a similar programme.
The visual opulence and speculative vigour of Toxic Temple
suggests that Lerchbaumer and Jörg see the arts in a less
subordinate and functional role.
Jörg’s introductory essay, ‘Ecology beyond Numbers’,
is programmatic for the volume. Drawing on Georges
Bataille’s The Accursed Share (La Part maudite, 1949),
in which the French poet and philosopher recasts
wastefulness and decay in positive terms, the co-editor
conjures the transformative power of death. As an
alternative to the rationalism of the homo oeconomicus,
he uses this approach to reject the relentless reference
to numbers and statistics in Anthropocene research, a
methodological proclivity that he deems more damaging
than helpful. Instead, Jörg proposes quasi-religious
forms of worldmaking, namely a speculative religion that
embraces ‘a certain joyful lure to waste, to pollute, to
destroy, mutate and disfigure’ (33). This said, Toxic Temple
is ‘not a project that gives in to nihilism and defeatism.
[…] We do not seek the beauty and lust in this hugely
dangerous, apocalyptic problem because we have given
up’ (34). In fact, the the essay closes with a utopian hope:
‘[T]he worlds that will come after might be more beautiful,
more thriving, more colourful and more plural than the
ugly Anthropocene with its uniform highways, shopping
centers, shipping ports or plastic products’ (38).
The essay’s provocative gesture cannot quite conceal
its inner contradictions. Because such disagreements
are quite relevant for the volume at large, they deserve
special scrutiny. On the one hand, Jörg makes a case
for the aesthetic fascination of the destructive power
of the anthropos, a stance that reminds the reviewer of
French symbolism, exemplified by the poetry of Charles
Baudelaire. This poetic worldview is characterised by
ethical irony and ambiguity (Kaplan 2006: 89), to the effect
that compassion and care are rejected as philistine and
bourgeois. Recently, Clint Burnham and Paul Kingsbury’s
volume Lacan and the Environment also ventured to
avoid the moralism endemic to environmental studies,
reimagining the environment as ‘a site of play, of a flutter
of jubilant activity’ (Burnham and Kingsbury 2021: 3).
On the other hand, Jörg attributes an educational
quality to this artistic approach to destruction, a view
he shares with Ballard’s and Gilbert and Cox’s recent
books. The hope is that such aestheticism also rekindles
Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia, DE
jdkam@posteo.de
Kaminski: Aestheticism Meets Environmental Ethics — Anna Lerchbaumer and Kilian
Jörg (eds.),
Toxic Temple
Art. 7, page 2 of 4
Kaminski: Aestheticism Meets Environmental Ethics — Anna Lerchbaumer and Kilian
Jörg (eds.),
Toxic Temple
Art. 7, page 3 of 4
utopian impulses. As a reviewer, one cannot fail to take
note of a potential pitfall: What if the ‘joyful lure to
waste’ fails to generate the desired moral effects? How
might the amoral stance of aestheticism be reconciled
with conventional posthuman ethics, such as Donna
Haraway’s oft-quoted appreciation of sympoiesis or
multi-species entanglement?
The book’s co-editor Anna Lerchbaumer belongs to
the camp of the aesthetes. ‘A Panda a Day Keeps the
Sorrow Away’ puts forward a meditation on the pop-
cultural appeal of pandas. She notes a discrepancy
between their endangered status as wildlife and their
pictorial proliferation in consumer culture. What is
more, the animals’ popularity on video sharing platforms
exacerbates the problem, as energy-intensive technologies
like streaming further aggravate global warming and the
erosion of wildlife. Considering such drivers of extinction,
Lerchbaumer wonders: ‘Do images become a kind of
sanctuary for endangered animal species?’ (70). Indeed,
such conundrums emblemise the great originality of
Toxic Temple. In a congenial Zen cult of the future, such
questions could serve as kōan, think pieces to unsettle
one’s sense of normalcy.
As the most exuberant textual output of the volume,
the collaborative piece by Sabrina Bühn, Demi Spriggs
and Jörg, ‘Producing the Afterlife’, imagines a future
ethnographer who traces the rituals of the Toxic Temple
and reports: ‘The cult fervently negates that anything on
the earth may be static/survive other than the trinity of
plastic polymers, sacred plutoniumid creations and heavy
metal legacies’ (215). According to the ethnographer’s
inflections, the Templars made pilgrimages to the
wastelands left behind modern societies, ‘waiting for
necrosis to ensue, to allow their bodies to be consumed by
the dead-zone’ (222). Their aim was to be reborn ‘as pure
life, pure energy, paradise: fossilization’ (223).
Amid so much speculative fancy, Heather Davis’s
article, ‘Life and Death in the Anthropocene’, leads back
to the original question of accountability. She delivers a
classic portrait of the ‘inadvertent aesthetics’ of plastic.
According to Davis, plastic ‘is the materialization of the
horror of identity, of the stability of form, of a futurity
without change’ (97). While the suffocation of the
planet under synthetic polymers conjures apocalyptic
images, Davis prefers to conceive of the relationship
between humans and their environment along the idea
of extinguishment: ‘This civilization may die, but within
that death is the possibility for a reconfiguration with
what may be left’ (100). This idea connects to Jörg’s
‘worlds that will come after’, yet Davis’ ideas remain
difficult to incorporate within the Toxic Temple’s amoral
toxophilia. In fact, Davis strikes a moralizing tone
when she advocates the ‘acknowledgment of biological,
technological and social limits’ (100) and wraps up her
argument with an imperative: ‘We must finally break
free of the logic of plastic’ (102). Here, the Toxic Templar
interrupts her pilgrimage to slip into the role of the
iterant preacher.
The same is the case with Julieta Aranda and Eben
Kirksey’s ‘Glossary of the Oceanic Undead’, which
lists seven maritime themes in which the biosphere
and globalization are linked. What do dramatic oil
spills, drowned refugees and the Great Pacific garbage
patch have in common? Since the inner connection
between these themes is left uncommented, the
authors apparently bank on the effect of indignation
to provide a common denominator. Measured against
Jörg’s dialectics, this approach skips the aesthetic phase
altogether.
Finally, Julia Grillmayr’s ‘It’s Getting Late to Give You
Up’ and Samuel Hertz’s ‘Hounding’ explore toxicity
in urban life. Grillmayr elaborates on the unexpected
fertility of abject material, including snake poison and
tomato seeds in sewage sludge, then switches to an
edifying conclusion, in which she recommends food
fermentation as a ‘hopeful practice, an investment in the
future’ (120). Samuel Hertz’s loosely argued paper on the
connections between doom metal, extractive practices
and bioacoustics also concludes by encouraging ‘non-
fatalistic ways of sensing slowly changing environments’
(177). Clearly, there exists a discrepancy between allowing
oneself to be fascinated with degraded life-worlds and
the urge to condemn such practices and to preach about
how best to abandon them.
The overall tone of the volume is edifying and hopeful,
thereby compromising the conceptual afterlife of
Bataille’s celebration of wastage. Have the Toxic Templars
already witnessed their first religious schism, as the
utopian camp has won an early victory over the aesthetes?
While this impression indeed applies to the arguments
featured in the volume’s textual contributions, the book’s
visual abundance indeed strengthens the case of those
who embrace the ‘joyful lure to waste’. The photographs
of Anna Lerchbaumer’s objets trouvés show disposable
consumer goods and appliances reassembled as exquisite
sculptures, such as the groundhog made up by a glue
stick, a fragment of a MacBook charger and the plaster
cast of a set of dentures (see 131). There is also a charming
still life, consisting of an extension cord, plastic bottles,
lilies and something resembling the tip of a plastic spear
or the end of a curtain rod (see 110). In such assemblages,
the cycles of consumption come to a temporary, if only
symbolical, rest even as these objects do not hide their
status as metonymic signifiers of soil degradation and
microplastic pollution.
Despite the book’s initial claim that a quasi-religious
approach to anthropocenic issues renders the ‘historic
divide’ between science and art obsolete, the reviewer finds
that the volume reveals a dichotomy that is emblematic
of the environmental predicament of the present. The
commitment to do justice to the world, unidealized, in all
its wretchedness, clashes with the moral mission to make
it a better place. While the arts appear better equipped to
deliver on the former approach, critical discourse cannot
sustain a disinterested gaze for long without articulating
prescriptions for a better future. Possibly, the condition
humana—or if you will, conditio posthumana—is perfectly
illustrated by this divide, as we remain deeply ambivalent
about the world we inhabit and the drastic choices we face.
Sometimes, the allure of toxicity yields to indignation, but
Kaminski: Aestheticism Meets Environmental Ethics — Anna Lerchbaumer and Kilian
Jörg (eds.),
Toxic Temple
Art. 7, page 4 of 4
How to cite this article: Kaminski, J. D. (2022). Aestheticism Meets Environmental Ethics — Anna Lerchbaumer and Kilian Jörg (eds.),
Toxic Temple: An Artistic and Philosophical Adventure into the Toxicity of the Now
(2022) Berlin: DeGruyter.
Anthropocenes – Human,
Inhuman, Posthuman
, 3(1):7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/ahip.1332
Submitted: 09 June 2022 Accepted: 25 June 2022 Published: 19 August 2022
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman
is a peer-reviewed open access journal published
by University of Westminster Press.
also the opposite can be true: moral outrage is drowned
out by detached jouissance.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.
Author Information
Johannes D. Kaminski is a scholar on comparative
literature with special consideration of contemporary
apocalyptic fiction and Chinese-language science fiction.
His current project, based the Institute of World Literature
at Slovak Academy of Sciences (Bratislava), inquires into
the imaginary of the World Government as a panacea for
times of crisis.
References
Ballard, S. (2021). Art and Nature in the Anthropocene.
New York: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.
org/10.4324/9780429328862
Burnham, C., & Kingsbury, P. (eds.) (2021). Lacan and
the Environment. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67205-8
Gilbert, B., & Cox, A. (2019). Arts Programming for the
Anthropocene. London: Routledge.
Kaplan, E. K. (2006). Baudelairean Ethics. In
Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (ed. by R.
Lloyd) (pp. 87–100). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO
L052183094X.006
