Text Matters Issue 18 (2028)

Editors: Justyna Stępień (University of Lodz) and Audronė Žukauskaitė (Lithuanian Culture Research Institute)

Climate Parallax: Matter and Cognition at Different Scales and Temporalities

 In his 2023 essay collection, One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax, Dipesh Chakrabarty offers a critical perspective on navigating the multiple dimensions of the climate crisis that define the Anthropocene's patchiness. While humans have become a planetary force destabilising the climate system, Chakrabarty forces us to confront a deeper reality: we are not just losing ecosystems; we are losing the fundamental coordinates of time, space, and scale we use to make sense of our place in the world. "Nothing [is] at the right scale,” as Latour concludes (2013, 109). Even though we have developed new techniques for recognising and recording the planetary differences, a profound gap remains between the physical reality of climate and our cognition of it, as our optics shift with the position we occupy. This spatial disorientation is further compounded by temporal collapse. As Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro note, this happens because “everything that can be said about the climate crisis becomes anachronistic” as we face “metatemporal instability conjoined with a sudden insufficiency of world” (2017, 10). As a result, we find ourselves conceptually stranded, trying to map planetary processes with obsolete cultural and political tools.

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