I develop this idea further in the closing section, following my discussion of three examples-two empirical vignettes and one more general account-that help triangulate and flesh it out, marking out some of its key coordinates and continuities. In the following discussion I attempt to delineate one such affect-one which I conceptualize as a particular structure of the wound, an injury that enters experience through a kind of retroactive shock. Despite some early efforts, 5 the mass of these emergent, “anthropocenic” affects is still poorly understood, and largely uncharted. The strange, overwhelming realities of this new epoch-not just pervasive toxicity but droughts and storms and famines, ocean acidification, shifting species ranges, extinctions and extirpations, rising seas, melting glaciers, seasons out of joint-can trigger a range of complex and often contradictory responses. 1 This is one way in which the Arctic serves as a vanguard of the planetary “new normal”: an early window on the realities of life on a “damaged planet,” 2 on modes of terrestrial life that have been altered, 3 or recomposed, through the cellular bioaccumulation of microplastics, 4 heavy metals, and artificial toxins. The distributed pervasiveness of these materials affects the Arctic and Antarctic disproportionately, as wind and oceanic currents grind and transport them toward the poles, sedimenting them in land, ice, water, and flesh. Within a scant few decades, human activities have generated a planetary sheath of novel, anthropogenic substances-plastics, radioactive isotopes, toxins, other synthetic materials-that is sufficiently massive, on its own, to form a distinctive layer or rupture in the future geological record. The global diffusion of synthetic materials is one marker of the much-debated new epoch known as the Anthropocene. Toxicity, colonialism, retroactive shock, anthropocenic affect Introduction
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