A recurring trope of the pedagogical essay is the “etymological quip”: a gratifying, often somewhat spurious, short-circuiting of distant ideas through reference to genealogical linguistic proximities. A “course” of lessons links up with the Latin cursus and currere, which also gives us “courier” in English and the Italian word for “running” (correre). A “pathway,” or hodos, also composes the latter half of the Greek word methodos. What such linkups in language point out, possibly speciously, is how Western cultures describe and prescribe learning, study, instruction and research also as a kind of epistemic geography, an expedition spanning space and time, attaining closeness and presence. Such journeys “toward” the “real” are ambiguous, as they partake of the colonial conquering of an as-yet to be described territory. They can also compose or allow for new intimacies among beings.

“Everything that happens, happens in a place” was a line my high-school geography teacher in Canada opened most of his classes with; his self-amusing way of underlining the disciplinary importance of his teachings over those of his fellow instructors. The creation of a course curriculum for a proposed new geological era, by contrast—a syllabus addressing, for, and out of the Anthropocene—is necessarily an interdisciplinary, collaborative, distributed, dynamic, and responsive endeavor. An anthropocenic syllabus most obviously requires knowledge of economies and human industries, planetary geology, and natural ecologies. Perhaps less obviously, such a syllabus needs to also cultivate an awareness of knowledge practices as a material resources, with natural histories: a material arrangement of technologies, bodies, and neurons enmeshed in a complex archive of distributed solarity.

A syllabus or course plan is in itself a pathway and method, a topical world created as a conceit for navigation. When done well,0.2.1 it should give those who follow it a sense of having traveled “close” to the topical landscape it is addressing. Do we get closer to the thought and practices, the varied communities, that frame its meanings? Does the path taken create stable enough renderings and teachable moments that synthesize and connect, bringing distant concepts into new conjunctive, intersectional proximity? In getting closer, do we articulate a respectful intimacy, a reverent or tough love, for the topics and beings encountered along our way?

Our decidedly terrestrial existence subtends all our practices of meaning-making, producing a host of rather heterogeneous, convoluted, and overlapping ways in which “horizons,” as well as how “close” or “far” are conceptualized (in the sense of “becoming concepts”). Getting closer doesn’t always help things become more clear,0.2.2 nor do these metaphors—these enmeshed valuations of distance and visuality—provide any escape0.2.3 from the horizons0.2.4 and groundedness0.2.5 of all thinking; from our always, already, only ever earthly knowing.

As for curricular essentials, “we” (a problematic, expectant, generalizing pronoun) should turn our attention to one of the most important aspects of any syllabus: exercises, and in this case, exercises explicitly about differently abled bodies flexing their physical, spatial variability. Bodies, moving in space, attuning these bodies’ sensibilities to space, distance, proximity, and their dynamics. The 2016 exercise “Exploring Space,”0.2.6 developed during the second Anthropocene Campus, is just such an opening for participants to extend these sensibilities. What are the actual distances between the bodies we inhabit, and how do these constitute or inform our sense of extension, our links to one another, our planetary knowledge practices? How might we even approach such an exercise in a world made different in the ways it has by a viral pandemic? The topic of barriers—physical and conceptual impediments to proximity—would also be on a list of fundamentals. With another exercise, “Build Your Own Fence,”0.2.7 we are asked to construct a section of a fence, “real or imaginary, abstract or specific, past or present or future,” that tells some story of keeping things in or out, apart or together.

“Potency and Partial Knowledge”0.2.8 and “Pockets”0.2.9 are further curricular exercises, “attunements towards movements, and sensing towards knowing,” that cultivate our more-than-one-ness in terms of the porous aesthetic membranes we call bodies. In the former, artists Andrew Yang and Jeremy Bolen write of the possibility of countering the inaccessibility of planetary-scale concepts, proposing “an alternative to the abstractions of magnitude and scale through which the Anthropocene is so often perceived.” How can we turn the abstracted “nowhere” of technologized and globalized views into a “now-here” of planetary intimacy, at the limit of embodied inquiry, imagination, storytelling, and experience? Certainly not with popular offerings like the so-called “flights to nowhere,” which became a phenomenon amid COVID-19 travel restrictions, where passengers paid to fly in a loop in order to reconnect to the self-departure that comes with frequent and profligate commercial air travel. But perhaps we could attain this “now-here” through other kinds of “Anthropocenery,” whereby, for example, a different kind of anti-tourism, as non-voyage, could reframe a central European city, just as environmental researcher Sandra van der Hel did by tracing with her camera “signs of this exceptional epoch on every street corner and behind every tree” in Amsterdam.0.2.10

The empirical impulse—a particular kind of desirous intimacy—has moved the Anthropocene Curriculum from “a seminar room at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin”0.2.11 toward effortful fieldwork journeys, encounters, experiments in embodiment, and embodied experiments. This shift aligns with somewhat corrective attempts—at upholding “good globalism” over “bad,” at destabilizing the distances between some purported center and the peripheries of “global culture” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). We have arrived at a moment in which many artists, intellectuals and researchers are gravitating toward and elaborating conscientious, ambient concepts like planetarity and the Anthropocene’s distant connotations of deep time, as well as dealing with maligned and messy concerns about culture, ethnicity, or kin. (I am deeply indebted to artist and researcher Clémence Hallé0.2.12 for our conversations on these topics. Her insightful sharing on such topical shifts within institutions have helped me see how the relatively rapid adoption and popularity of Anthropocene topics in and among formerly “multicultural” cultural institutions reinstalls a kind of omniscient, technoscientific objectivity while helping to mitigate risk in an age of identitarian politics. These are topics Clémence explores deeply and subtly in her academic and artistic work.)

Trials impelling many bodies to move through space, engendering experiences of barriers and multitemporal intimacies—a curriculum of “now-heres”—have taken place, and along the length of one of the world’s great rivers: the Mississippi.0.2.13 It is the kind of continental journey-making that carves out a pathway for knowledge, a transformational trip as a kind of method. An Anthropocene curriculum that literally or actually stages plays of distance and proximity, promising a kind of planetary intimacy or proprioception is a theme elaborated through the key contribution that accompanies this pathway. Such journeys of bodies and minds are seemingly something that can be spatially defined, by entities like the United States Geological Survey,0.2.14 and yet they are experienced as fragmented, broken-up and scaled-down, ebbing and flowing floods of memory, matter, and media,0.2.15 in which “spatial and temporal distances [are] suddenly annihilated.”0.2.16 What intimacies emerge in encounters along such research processions, such rivers, such journeys? And what kinds of distances exist between these projects and the lived realities of supposed exemplary sites, through their generalization as representatives of broader consequences?