Practices and Poetics of Extraction

Today, the impact of human activity on nature is so profound that it has become inscribed in the geological layers of the earth. Some scientists therefore speak of a new geological era, the Anthropocene, i.e. the age of humans or the epoch in human history in which the active shaping of the earth`s physical surface has become the determining factor. Various features can mark the beginning of this epoch: from the deposition of radioactive isotopes since the first nuclear tests and the geologically verifiable increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the beginning of industrialisation to the mass extinction of flora and fauna caused by human actions. What all these features have in common, however, is that they are based on extensive practices of extraction, i.e. the extraction or mining of raw materials such as coal, oil, plutonium or lithium. The project presented here is based on the assumption that with the historical expansion of extractivist or, in a double sense, exploitative practices understood both as the exploitation of humans and animals as well as the exploitation of natural resources a specific ideology of extractivism has emerged. It is characterised by an understanding of nature as something from which both knowledge and material resources can be gained or extracted. In order to shed light on the formation of this specific understanding of nature as a condition for the possibility of extractivist practices, the project examines the connection between the development of mining and geological sciences on the one hand and the literary engagement with mining and the relationship between humans and nature on the other. The aim is to explicate a poetics of extraction, i.e. literary designs or modes of representation, and to analyse them in their interrelationship with practices of extraction. In order to show language and action are thus mutually dependent, the project looks at two case studies: First, German Romanticism and its enthusiasm for geology and mining in the early 19th century and, secondly, the suppression of alternative epistemologies or kinds of knowledges about the earth during colonial rule in India and the accompanying exploitation of Indian raw materials. The scientific and literary texts examined in the project are predominantly written in German, English, Hindi and Urdu.