Extinction of Species: The Representation and Logics of Synecdoche
The aim of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of extinction of species and its cultural representations. This will be done with reference to – among other contexts – Ursula K. Heise’s concepts of proxy logics or synecdoche (Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago 2016).
The emotional and affective impact of images of violence against animals and the visualization and narrativization of the process of their dying is extremely strong. This issue has been widely described in scientific literature. Typically, an individual death represented in cultural texts evokes emphatic reactions and provokes the reader’s or viewer’s ethical reflection. Extinction proves to be much more difficult to capture:
it is a superindividual process which exceeds imagination. Therefore, in cultural texts which depict this issue, a specific narrative model is often applied. As Heise noted,
it is based on the logics of proxy or synecdoche (a part represents a whole), which functions on at least two levels, whose hierarchy can be reversed/questioned: 1) a particular species substitutes the ecosystem or biodiversity (i.e. all the species); 2) an individual life substitutes a species. The author of this article analyzes the discourse on extinction, as it functions in cultural texts, as a phenomenon which is marked by referential emptiness and signifies a failure of imagination. It is argued that despite the development of scientific and factual knowledge about the phenomenon itself no narrations or representations which apply the logics of synecdoche are capable of capturing the phenomenon of extinction of species.
