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  • Sides Views Split(A Response to Jodi Dean’s “A View from the Side”)
  • Tony C. Brown (bio)

0. The original response I gave to Jodi Dean’s characteristically incisive and committed presentation followed closely the written text of it Dean had kindly provided me several weeks prior to the symposium. The response I include here remains roughly what I said at the time, though with several alterations, first for clarity and second (with one exception noted below) for continuity in light of changes Dean has made to her text since the symposium—changes that Dean, again, shared in advance of my completing the response that now follows. I say all this by way of introduction, not only to give a sense of the favorable conditions under which I have been able to respond but to underscore Dean’s openness to engagement, a quality that may at times seems missing in the polemical charge of her argument against what she calls anthropocenic enjoyment.

Dean demonstrates in her professional practice how one can be strident and committed and yet open and engaged. She exemplifies the importance of combining strident commitment with open engagement and shows us not to be afraid of mixing one with the other. Such lessons are important to bear in mind. They may help one avoid a possible misreading of Dean’s argument. Her questioning of anthropocenism is not a rejection of climate change or of planetary damage due to certain actions by certain human beings. Rather, Dean’s claim vis-à-vis anthropocenic talk is something like this: the terms by which it addresses planetary damage as caused by the human species, by humanity tout court, prevent effective responses to the damage. Particularly, they block effective criticism of, and action against, those individuals and institutions that continue to profit from the damage they continue to obscure or simply deny.

As a far better option, Dean offers The Natural History Museum (NHM) as a model of active and effective response. The project seeks, [End Page 102] Dean says, to “make legible” certain infrastructural aspects of natural history museums and in doing so pressure such institutions to acknowledge their own involvement in climate change and its dangers—and ultimately make the institutions themselves change, forcing them to acknowledge and address their own involvement in climate change and its dangers. The aim is hard to disagree with (though it does remain uncertain how an institutional change such as the one Dean describes—namely, the change in the American Natural History Museum’s board of directors—intervenes in climate change). Still, what I suggest comes down to this: just as a figure disfigures, a making legible may at once make unreadable. And what becomes illegible, what is, as it were, being disappeared, has proper names like Tuvalu and Carterets.

  1. 1. Now, to respond, I will start at the beginning, or just before it, with the title of Jodi Dean’s presentation, “A View from the Side”:

    • i. “a view”: there would be more than one view, then, and what comes after the title will be one view among other possible views “from the side.”

    • ii. “the side”: whatever the view taken, it is from the side. This will not be “a view from a side” among other possible sides; there is just the one side.

    By the title, then, the initial opening of possible views (a view as one among other possible views) is quickly tempered and limited, there being just the one side from which to take a view. Following the title, yet still with the title—we have a subtitle—the side view to be taken is named “The Natural History Museum.”

  2. 2. Beyond the title, it soon becomes apparent that “the side” is in fact split, meaning:

    1. i. on the one hand, “the side” as anamorphosis, on the model of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (to which I will return, but which Dean has already presented, saving me, at this point, the need to explain); and,

    2. ii. on the other hand, “the side” as a taking-sides-against, “the side” becoming the side of the partisan, the side of the one side as against the other that is not...

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