What if the Anthropocene was less a change of era than a transformation of space ? Investigating the concept of zone, from science fiction to political ecology, allows us to consider our living environments as agents of transformation, while disrupting our benchmarks.
Jeanne Etelain’s work presents the notion of zone and manages to make it a relevant concept for thinking about a large number of contemporary problems linked to the Anthropocene which she analyzes from three aesthetic, psychoanalytic and ecological perspectives.
His hypothesis: the Anthropocene is not an entry into a new time but into a new space which has impacts on the way of thinking about duration and life. A space that lasts, that acts, that lives and merges with the rhythms of the Earth – which is no longer the absolute, Newtonian framework in which bodies move, but an agent-space operating on the environment of life and time.
These are the main starting points of an investigation which unfolds along three axes: an analysis of the notion of zone in the film Stalker by Andreï Tarkovsky, a study of the transformation of the concept of erogenous zones by Luce Irigaray, and a demonstration of the relevance of the concept of zone for problematizing the questions posed by the Anthropocene.
Zone the area
The author undertakes to bring to light the paradoxical character of the notion of zone which, etymologically, means a belt which circumscribes a space, and whose derived meaning orients towards indeterminacy, vague and indefinable movement. The question arises of holding together these two apparently opposite meanings: the zone as division and as movement. Jeanne Etelain achieves this by proposing to think of the zone as a method. Drawing on Deleuze’s analysis of the concept, which makes it a tool for problematizing, it makes the zone a tool for posing the meaning of a problem. The term zone becomes a symptom, a problematic sign which allows us to give substance to something which escapes the categories already there.
Taking up Bergson’s critique of the spatialization of time, the author reverses the point of view: the zone is a temporalization of space, which she stages in the theater of life and the world. The author speaks in this sense of space trans : “ It is rather a ‘trans’ space like the verb ‘zone’, marked by movement, circulation and wandering across disciplines, mediums, languages, cultures, eras and regions. » (p. 21).
Test the area
Applying this “ method » from the zone to science fiction, Jeanne Etelain offers a reading of the film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, in which the area is treated as a portion of space. Enigmatic, with mysterious origins, this space is endowed with supernatural powers. Although the Zone is separated from the outside world, it has the extraordinary ability to transform it. The author sees in this treatment overlaps with her analyzes of the area as a dynamic, reactive space and agent of transformation. Space is no longer a framework object, but a subject which participates in the metaphysics of becoming.
Tarkovsky thus makes the Zone a problematic space that forces us to think. The three characters at the center of the film roam the moving space of the Zone to try to reach the Chamber where all desires are fulfilled, including that of changing the world. One of the protagonists, a physics professor, symbolizes the entanglement, in the Imaginary Zone of the film, of two new sciences: non-Euclidean elliptical geometry and quantum mechanics, in order to shape the moving space of indeterminacy (in reference to Heisenberg and the indeterminacy relations of quantum mechanics). These relationships of indeterminacy applied to the Zone promote the fulfillment of wishes: the Zone produces a fluid and mobile reality where the laws of classical mechanics do not work. The changing space of the Zone is not Newtonian, it is not a frame of reference for movement but it produces movement, always in interaction with the outside world.
Just as the character of the guide, Stalker, throws a nut to test the Zone he is exploring, likewise Jeanne Etelain, proposing to use the zone like the antennas of a snail (which test a problematic space where the landmarks move and force one to think differently), to turn towards the erogenous zones, not as fixed anatomical points, but as places of passage for libidinal energy.
Erogenous zones and logic of the body
The Freudian notion of erogenous zones was re-discussed by Lacan in his structuralist overhaul of psychoanalysis, and by Luce Irigaray in her feminist critique of phallocentrism. However, it opens new perspectives in contemporary debates on the sexual body including questions of sex, gender and desire, within feminist, queer and trans studies. Already in Freud, the erogenous zones are what the subject uses to create a body. Both differentiating and unifying, they designate the process by which the drive is singularized in certain places but unifies the erogenous body through the connection and links that it establishes between the different parts of the erogenous body. We find the paradoxical character of the notion of zone, which separates and unifies.
While Lacan seeks to make it a tool for a topological approach to the instinctual body, conceiving the erogenous zones as nodes which serve to articulate the Real and the Symbolic to form the paradoxical space of subjectivity, Luce Irigaray, for her part, criticizes the phallocentrism underlying psychoanalysis, proposing to change the imagination and replacing the phallus with the figure of the lips. Jeanne Etelain studies this new symbolic figure while dispelling a certain number of misunderstandings about Luce Irigaray, notably on her alleged confusion of biological essentialism and social constructivism – the latter resulting from the method of critical mimicry adopted by Luce Irigaray, which uses the same language as the texts she copies, while reconfiguring the process of sexual differentiation of the body in a symbolic and non-biological sense.
What Jeanne Etelain remembers is that Freud, Lacan and Irigaray rely on the concept of zone to differentiate themselves from an anatomical model of the body which is based on the relationship of parts to the whole. The concept of zone serves an art of shift, produces gaps in meaning which undermine the conception of homogeneous and uniform space.
From the globe to Gaia
This logic of shift and spatial exception finds a powerful echo in the very history of the conception of the world. The theory of zones in geography dates back to the cosmology of the Ve century BC, according to which five zones are defined according to their habitability: two temperate zones located between the tropics and the polar circles are habitable, a torrid zone between the tropics around the equator and two frigid zones of the poles are not. This theory conceives the Earth as heterogeneous, discontinuous and regional.
During the Renaissance there was a decisive turning point with the emergence of the modern concept of the terrestrial globe. Portuguese navigations along the African coast show that not only is the torrid zone habitable but that it is inhabited. The globe unifies space: all parts of the Earth become interchangeable, which allows the emergence of colonial relations and a global system centered on Europe. This “ colonial habitat » implies a holistic conception of the world where differences do not call into question its unity but reinforce it. Thus all practices of domination can take place and regional cultures or local particularities make no real difference. This observation explains why the concept of zone has gained importance in postcolonial studies characterized by the notions of hybridity, translation and cultural transfers. The zone, in fact, allows us to think about the plurality of global space in movement, through metamorphoses, which leads to thinking about a global space in translationthat is to say both in transit and in translation.
Thus considered, it is not surprising, notes Jeanne Etelain, that the acronym ZAD has changed its main reference: from Deferred Development Zone, it becomes Zone To Defend. The notion of zone allows us to think of space as an agent of transformation ; it allows us to confer autonomy on the parts in relation to the whole and even to conceive that the parts, by their singularity, by their power to act, are more important than the whole. The holistic conception of the world gives way to the Gaia hypothesis, developed by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock in the 1970s, and to the notion of critical zone, which gives rise to a new concept of Earth.
With this reversal, it is no longer a question of thinking about the transition from a universally habitable planet to a fully inhabited planet but of thinking about the transition from a fully inhabited planet to a potentially uninhabitable planet. In doing so, the ancient correlation of area and habitability is reconfigured in the new terms of the Anthropocene. The vision of the Earth, whose habitable conditions are threatened by the use of fossil fuels, contrasts sharply with the image of the homogeneous, continuous and uniform terrestrial globe. The Gaia hypothesis therefore consists of making the living a geological force of primary importance: the living makes its environment but the environment also makes the living. The planet thus becomes a part of life, like the shell of a snail, according to the expression that Jeanne Etelain takes from Lovelock. Once again, the author reworks Bergson by referring to creative evolution, which she extends to the entire planet and not only to living things.
Towards a critical zone
In this sense, according to the author, it is important to introduce the new conception of a creative and evolving space into the conception of time. This space correlated to the movement of life has a name, that of critical zone, defined by the National Research Council of the United States (NRC) in 2001 as the heterogeneous environment on the earth’s surface in which interactions between living beings and physical elements regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of the resources necessary for life. In other words, the critical zone embodies the habitable space of the planet – where Gaia actually is.
For Jeanne Etelain, the concept of zone, applied to Gaia, expresses the fundamental tension between the need to divide and understand specific parts and the impossibility of grasping the global dynamic whole of the Earth. The author thus proposes an analogy between the zone and the event to grasp the temporal dimension of space and, conversely, the spatial dimension of time: if the event is what must take place to arrive, the zone is what must have time to arrive. Without spatializing time or temporalizing space, the zone invites us to conceive space and, as a corollary, time in a more complex way: space is equipped with a power to act which makes it capable of understanding temporal processes, historical dynamics and the structure of events. The area thus acts as a catalyst for thinking about a creative and evolving space and the various interactions of coexistence that populate it.
These developments on the critical zone, certainly the most accomplished, analyze the impossibility of totalization and the constant redistribution of the parts and the Whole through the figure of the spatial exception: the zoning of space is that of an Earth always in the process of being made. It is certainly possible, as Jeanne Etelain suggests, to establish links between the film Stalkerthe notion of erogenous zones and the concept of critical zone, through a ticklish Earth with the erogenous body, but the great mastery of the passages devoted to the critical zone almost makes one regret that they were not more fully developed for themselves.