Сriticism of Anthropocentrism in Oleksandr Dovzhenko's Earth
Author: Yurii Boiko
Translation from Ukrainian: Galyna Kotliuk
Editor: Clemens Poole
Considering that the distinction between “civilized” and “savage”, or “cultured” and “natural” societies is typical of colonial rhetoric, it is not difficult to understand why criticism of colonial ideology often involves criticism of anthropocentrism or universalism. These theoretical guidelines and discursive practices do not only marginalize and devalue the particular, but also center ethics and epistemology around the “universal human subject” [6]. Based on that, within the framework of ecological discourse arises the opposition between postcolonial ecocriticism or “green postcolonialism” [7], on the one hand, and deep ecology on the other [8].
Both currents aim to overcome “anthropocentric ethics”, offering, however, different ways to implement this. Deep ecology opposes anthropocentrism to “biocentrism” or “ecocentrism”, which is focused on rethinking ethical boundaries and demonstrates a shift from the classical idea of a human being as the only moral subject [9]. Postcolonial environmental ethics together with ecofeminism are critical of this approach, because it stems from a universalist perspective that does not take into account the situation of specific subjects within society, which have historical and political dimensions. Therefore, “biocentrism”, according to postcolonial theorists, is only a latent form of anthropocentrism, which “produces an ahistorical rendering of non-human nature” [10].
Even such a brief overview offered to readers makes evident the ambivalence of the concept of “anthropocentrism” in the framework of postcolonial studies. The problem with anthropocentrism as a category is that the concept of “human” (anthropos), which is criticized, is often left unclarified [11]. Thus, the term “anthropocentrism” can acquire a dogmatic meaning and be used as a label for ideologies that have a “wrong” idea of “human”. That is why the critical impulse to rethink the sphere of the ethical and the human, which gives rise to calls to overcome anthropocentrism in the writings of postcolonial theorists, can be lost behind the opposition to the human as such, which makes further conceptual analysis impossible.
This ambivalence is well illustrated by Oleksandr Dovzhenko's film Earth [ukr. Zemlya] (1930). At first glance, the film demonstrates all the features of the anthropocentric and ideologically engaged Soviet cinema of its time. The storyline is based on ideologically determined ideas about the progressive movement of peasants towards collectivism and the aggravation of the class struggle between the “kurkul” [a rich or supposedly rich farmer who, during the Communist drive to collectivize agriculture in 1929–33, was viewed as an oppressor and class enemy by the regime. Trans.] and the peasants. The main character, Vasyl, can be considered as a representative of the “new Soviet man”, who opposes the particularity and “down-to-earthness” of the peasantry, sacrificing his life for the ideals of the new communist future [12]. This perspective is used during the first wave of the Soviet reception of the film, according to which “Earth” demonstrates “inexhaustible fertile possibilities that crave a smart hand — a new master” [13].
However, focusing only on the anthropocentric characteristics of Earth does not allow us to see the broader layers of artistic thinking that connect Dovzhenko with the movement of “Ukrainian poetic cinema” [14]. The very title of Dovzhenko's film speaks unequivocally about its true meaning. For Dovzhenko, it is not so much about the glorification of Soviet mythology as about the illustration of Earth with its own dynamics, rhythm, and temporality, which are woven into, and tied to, the everyday troubles of the people who live and work on it. Earth is not just an artistic image or a romantic ideal, but the main structural element of the whole picture — its subject.
The death which begins and ends Earth is not “dramatic” in the modern sense of the word, but rather actualizes a deep connection with the ancient Greek concept of “drama” (δρα̂μα) as “accomplishment” or “action”. Such an accomplishment in the poetry of Dovzhenko’s film is never final, and instead marks a transition to something new: carefree children are playing next to the dying grandfather Semen; during Vasyl’s funeral, his mother gives birth to a new child. Human death in Earth is never depicted as a unique or isolated phenomenon, separated from the Earth itself. It is always a part of a temporality in which the symbolic and the physiological constitute an inseparable unity [15].
After the release of Earth, Soviet party ideologists accused Dovzhenko of “biologism” and “pantheism”, which contradicted the communist ideal of a technocratic world with a “human face” [16]. In the film, frames of people are regularly accompanied by frames of plants and other creatures: young men and oxen, a crowd and horses, or the famous opening images of a girl and a sunflower. Dovzhenko does not simply aestheticize the Earth, he goes beyond the Christian, Old Testament command about land created by God for man, and indicates the creative principle in itself. That is why we can talk about the pantheistic identification of God and Nature, which penetrates the entire poetics of Earth. Ideas about natural forces, or natura naturans [17] — nature that produces immanent reality, a part of which is a human being [18] can be traced in the film’s imagery.
Dovzhenko’s Earth not only overcomes anthropocentrism, but also, with poetic insight, demonstrates the very meaning of anthropocentrism, which must be undermined by ecological and postcolonial thought. Therefore, the “problem of anthropocentrism” does not lie in the human as such, but rather in a narrow understanding of the category of human and its isolation from the regulatory order of nature [19]. Earth offers a criticism of anthropocentrism precisely in the sense of human-centric values [20], which are opposed to a broader concept of values that come from a pantheistic idea of the wisdom and agency of the natural world — a world that cannot be described in the colonial one-dimensional perspective of human progress.
Endnotes
02. Author’s emphasis
03. Helen Kopnina, Haydn Washington, Bron Taylor and John Piccolo, Anthropocentrism: More Than Just A Misunderstood Problem (Springer, 2018), 115.
04. Edward W Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2014).
05. Graham Hugan and Helen Tiffin, Green postcolonialism (Taylor & Francis Online, 2007), 1–11.
06. One of the first opponents of universalism is Michel Foucault, who introduces the thesis of the “death of man” [“mort de l'homme”] in the sense of a universal subject and the “ultimate goal” of knowledge. This thesis is an important prerequisite for the establishment of posthumanism theories that rethink and go beyond the limits of the Western (anthropocentric) humanistic tradition. Foucault himself does not use the term “anthropocentrism”, but speaks of the “anthropologization of knowledge” as a characteristic feature of modernity: ‘Anthropologization’ is the great internal threat [le grand danger intérieur] to knowledge in our day. We are inclined to believe that man has emancipated himself from himself since his discovery that he is not at the centre of creation, nor in the middle of space, nor even, perhaps, the summit and culmination of life; but though man is no longer sovereign in the kingdom of the world, though he no longer reigns at the centre of being, the ‘human sciences’ are dangerous intermediaries in the space of knowledge.” (Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966), 359).
07. Graham Hugan and Helen Tiffin, ibid.
08. In Ukrainian context, the term “anthropocentrism” is used, for the most part, within the framework of environmental ethics (although there are exceptions: see Mariya Shymchyshyn, Paradigms and Dimensions of Posthumanism (Kyiv: KNLUb 2013); Semen Mlynko, Historical Fates of Eurocentrism (2019).
09. Helen Kopnina, Haydn Washington, Bron Taylor and John Piccolo, ibid., 113.
10. Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Against Authenticity: Global Knowledges And Postcolonial Ecocriticism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 71.
11. David W Kidner, Why ‘anthropocentrism’ is not anthropocentric, (Springer, 2014), 466.
12. In one of the reviews of Earth (written by V. Levchuk) in 1930, special attention was drawn to the “mechanization” of the village as a leitmotif of the film, which aims “to show the nature of class differentiation in the countryside”. An important role in this process plays out in the appearance of the tractor as a symbol of technical progress, which marks a “revolution in the entire economy” (Volodymyr Myslavskyi, The First Decade of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Cinematographic Art (Kharkiv: Dim Reklamy, 2019), 298).
13. Ibid., 275.
14. Лариса Брюховецька, Прорив до вічного (Київ: Києво-Могилянська академія, 2008), 2–6.
15. Compare the concept of “semiotic ecology” in Kalevi Kull, Semiotic ecology: Different natures in the semiosphere (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 1998).
16. See Herbert Marshall, Masters Of The Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 132.
17. Dovzhenko's pantheistic or naturalistic depiction of the Earth correlates with the Stoic concept of the “seminal reason” [spermatikos logos], which underlies Spinoza’s concept of nature. The conceptual division into natura naturans [creative nature] and natura naturata [created nature], although it appears in the scholastic tradition, has its roots in Stoic teachings about the two principles [arkhai] in nature — active [to poioun] and passive [to paskhon] (Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum, 7.1.). Unlike the scholastic tradition and similar to Stoic-Spinozian natural philosophy, in Dovzhenko’s Earth both of these principles are immanent, that is, inherent to nature itself, which makes the accusation of “pantheism” from the Party ideologists more than just a label.
18. Pierre Macherey, Introduction À L’Ethique De Spinoza: Ptie. La Nature Des Choses (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 137.
19. Earth can also be considered as an artistic embodiment of the project that Bruno Latour later defines as overcoming the dualism between the natural and the social — the localization of the social in the wider context of natural rationality (Bruno Latour, Nous N’avons Jamais Été Modernes: Essai D’anthropologie Symétrique (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2013), 87).
20. Helen Kopnina, Haydn Washington, Bron Taylor and John Piccolo, ibid., 113.
For further reference
Корогодський, Роман М. 2000. Довженко В Полоні: розвідки та есеї про Майстра.
Author
Yurii Boiko
About the author