Generic Humanity: Interspecies Technologies, Climate Change & Non-standard Animism (2017) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Anthropocene Event in Social Theory: On Ways of Problematizing the Non-Human
2018
Signaling that ‘humanity’ has radically changed the Earth’s environmental parame-ters, the notion of the Anthropocene currently generates debate across the socio-cultural sciences. Noticeably, neo-Marxist and new materialist approaches stand out for the argument that the Anthropocene obliges social theory to 'catch up' with new material realities. While sharing the conviction that the Anthropocene might institute a genuine event for social theory and practice, however, we discuss in this paper some unresolved issues of scientism and economic totalization which, we argue, ne-cessitates a search for alternative ways of 'dramatizing' our eco-political predica-ment. In search of such paths, we turn to science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT), whose long-standing focus on nonhuman agency is pro-longed by Isabelle Stengers’ forceful argument that we must “accept" the reality of Gaia's intrusion into collective historicity. Stengers’ challenge, we suggest, requires the development of an art of immanent attention to the politics of varied matters as they unfold across diverse ecologies of practice. Well beyond the present preoccupa-tions of Euro-American social theory, environmental history, activism and politics offer sites of resistance and experimentation whose political efficacies and conceptual capacities are far from exhausted. Slowing down theory sufficiently to learn from the-se multiple sites, we argue, should be the starting point for an approach adequate to the problems posed by the Anthropocene event, and an irritable, ticklish Gaia. Keywords: Anthropocene; Gaia; new materialism; neo-Marxism; science and technology studies (STS)
The Anthropocene event in social theory: On ways of problematizing nonhuman materiality differently
The Sociological Review, 2019
Signalling that ‘humanity’ has radically changed the Earth’s environmental parameters, the Anthropocene currently generates debate across the socio-cultural sciences. In this context, neo-Marxist and new materialist approaches stand out for the way they oblige social theory to catch up with new material realities. We share the conviction that the Anthropocene might constitute a genuine event for social theory and practice. However, we argue that the search for alternative ways of problematizing and ‘dramatizing’ our eco-political predicament confronts these approaches with unresolved issues of scientism and economic totalization. Looking for another path, we turn to Science and Technology Studies (STS), and especially Actor-Network Theory (ANT). We relay the long-standing focus on nonhuman agency characteristic of this field via Isabelle Stengers’ argument that we must ‘accept’ the reality of Gaia’s intrusion into collective historicity. The challenge posed by Stengers, we suggest, ...
Theory, Culture & Society, 2018
This paper argues that ‘the Anthropocene’ is a deeply depoliticizing notion. This de-politicization unfolds through the creation of a set of narratives, what we refer to as ‘AnthropoScenes’, which broadly share the effect of off-staging certain voices and forms of acting. Our notion of the Anthropo-obScene is our tactic to both attest to and undermine the depoliticizing stories of ‘the Anthropocene’. We first examine how various AnthropoScenes, while internally fractured and heterogeneous, ranging from geo-engineering and Earth System science to more-than-human and object oriented ontologies, places things and beings, human and non-human, within a particular relational straitjacket that does not allow for a remainder or constitutive outside. This risks deepening an immunological bio-political fantasy that promises adaptive and resilient terraforming, an earth system management of sorts that permits life as we know it to continue for some, while turning into a necropolitics for others. Second, we develop a post-foundational political perspective in relation to our dramatically changing socioe-cological situation. This perspective understands the political in terms of performance and, in an Arendtian manner, re-opens the political as forms of public-acting in common that subtracts from or exceeds what is gestured to hold socio-ecological constellations together. We conclude that what is off-staged and rendered obscene in ‘the AnthropoScenes’ carries precisely the possibility of a return of the political. (This paper was accepted for publication in Nov 2017 to be published in 2018.)
In Jouni Matti-Kuukkanen (ed.), Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives. Bloomsbury. , 2020
“Do Anthropocene narratives confuse an important distinction between the natural and the historical past?” asks Giuseppina D’Oro. D’Oro defends the view that the concept of the historical past is sui generis and distinct from that of the geological past against a new, Anthropocene-inspired challenge to the possibility of a humanistically oriented historiography. She argues that the historical past is not a short segment of geological time, the time of the human species on Earth, but the past investigated from the perspective of a distinctive kind of interest, that of uncovering the norms which governed historical agents in different periods of time. The past for the Egyptologist, or for the Roman historian, is not the same past studied by the palaeontologist or the geologist, not because it is infinitesimal short in comparison to geological time, but because the questions asked by historians concerned with the Egyptian or Roman civilization are not the same kind of questions asked by empirically minded scientists. She argues that the accusation that the distinction between the historical and the natural/geological past, rests on unacceptable form of human exceptionalism is based on the conflation of the concept of the historical past with that of the human past and that keeping alive the nature/culture distinction has important implications for praxis. If the distinction between nature and culture is collapsed, and the corollary that historical agents are not distinct in kind from natural agents (such as yeast and microbes) is accepted, then “the anticipation of the future would become a mere spectator’s sport analogous to the activity of predicting the weather”: collapsing the nature culture distinction, D’Oro argues, undermines the possibility of political action against the very threat (climate change) that motivates Anthropocene narratives in the first instance.
Revista Opinião Filosófica
The discourse of the ‘Anthropocene’ has quickly become pervasive, cross-cutting different fields of knowledge. However, it is also a deeply contested category. In the critical light shed by political ecology, we reflect on the conceptual blindspots that mark its narrative, identifying it as a symptom of a broader impasse of the neoliberal governmentality of nature and of the ecological crisis today. On the one hand, the Anthropocene narrative proposes a post-humanist vision, which potentially de-centres anthropocentrism. On the other hand, this same vision becomes an alibi for ever deeper and less reflective interventions of human beings on the biosphere, in particular through technoscientific developments. This paradox responds to a specific need for capitalist valorization of ‘Nature’ and, at the same time, does not seem capable to elaborate solutions to the ecological crisis as a whole. However, if the Anthropocene becomes visible only in the present historical contingency and du...
Review of Richard Grusin (ed.) 'The Nonhuman Turn' (The Anthropocene Review (blog))
This collection of essays emerges from a conference which sought to address how "decentering the human" might provide fruitful ways forward in the arts, humanities and social sciences in the 21 st century. The thought that unites each of these contributions is that even in the Anthropocene, our most pressing concerns-from anthropogenic climate change to issues of privacy-relate to our essential relationships with, in, and as morethan-human entities; entities we have generally hitherto appreciated insufficiently in theory and practice. A common thread throughout the book, for example, is that the 'constructionist' or 'correlationist' thinking that dominated 20 th century critical discourse fails to address the affective and agential contribution of the nonhuman by reducing the entities with which we engage to discourse, social reification or the product of a priori categories of human perception. Each essay in this collection seeks to disrupt the dominant separative, (pejoratively) anthropocentric discourse by attempting to address some element of the nonhuman contribution on its own terms.
Editors' introduction to the Special Section: The ethics and politics of the Anthropocene
In recent years "the Anthropocene" has come to represent a new milestone for human-induced destruction of the environment. There is a widespread consensus that industrialization processes within capitalist modernity have ushered humanity into a new geological epoch bearing little resemblance to the climatic stability of "the Holocene," the roughly 10,000-year span within which all known human civilizations were established. Furthermore, there is general agreement that the ending of climatic stability will have a devasting impact on the Earth's ecosystems, making long-term human settlement and global supply chains difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. This Special Section aims to stimulate critical social theories to explore ways of thinking and acting that would equip us humans better to respond to the multiple challenges we face from the increasingly inescapable reach of ecological disaster. In all five contributions, "the Anthropocene" names a historical moment in which we must reconsider the very category of the human and our constitutive interdependencies with the other-than-human. Challenging the view that only humans possess intrinsic value, Arne Vetlesen calls on us to regard other-than-human beings as moral addressees in their own right. At the same time, he argues that only humans can be considered moral agents due to their powers of reflexivity, abstraction, imagination, and future oriented thinking. These powers make humans alone responsible for their actions. Although at first glance his asymmetric model may seem in tension with it, Vetlesen's argument resonates with Maeve Cooke's call for ecologically attuned relationships between humans and other-than-humans, in which human knowledges are not deemed in principle superior to the knowledges of other-than-human entities and ethical goodness is not determined solely by human concerns and interests but has a partial independence of them. Nonetheless, like Vetlesen, she highlights the continued importance of ethically motivated human action, leading her to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming agency. The proposed conception aims to break decisively with the ideal of the sovereign subject as it has emerged within capitalist modernity. Yann Allard-Tremblay makes a similar argument, urging us to recognize our embeddedness in the natural world while at the same time asserting our capacity for reflexive, responsible self-direction; he calls on us to seek concrete ways in which our relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their localized contexts. For Indigenous peoples, this process necessitates political resurgence and the revitalization of lifeways impacted by the destructive legacy of colonialism. In the case of non-Indigenous peoples, it may require far-reaching, transformations in relation to the land they live upon. John McGuire, too, holds onto the value of selfdetermining human agency, while drawing attention to its historical entanglement with notions of autarkic mastery and warning against the uncritical embrace of technological innovation as the surest means of meliorating ecological disaster. In the same vein, Karim Sadek contends that any adequate response to our ecologically disastrous situation is predicated on the human agent's ability to move beyond an egocentric mode of being that generates, shapes, and nourishes self-centered, self-driven, and self-concerned perceiving, thinking, and acting. Like the other contributors, This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Interlitteraria, 2014
The article explores ecocritically nature-culture interactions in contemporary British and Estonian literature: Monique Roffey's and Andrus Kivirähk's writing. I start by elucidating the portrayal of nature, the way in which the writers under discussion reconsider anthropocentrism and established boundaries. Both novelists turn a delicate eye to nature, portraying a posthuman world where nature and culture are no longer dichotomous but perpetually entangled, challenging anthropocentrism and indicating a different, more envirocentric approach to literature. I will focus first on human-nonhuman interactions, analysing next how the normative human and nonhuman beings are transformed beyond recognition, shattering the anthropocentric core of the concept of agency and voice. In line with material ecocriticism, the currently emerging ecocritical branch that re-conceptualises nature as an active agent, the writers mingle the nonhuman with the human as a Subject, posing a threat to anthropo-normativity and envisioning an uncannily different reality. The article's final section explores the way how nature and culture are inextricably merged, not only their voices but also bodies, indicating the key new materialist idea of trans-corporeality -both culture and nature as tangled corporealities. In line with new materialism, the writers importantly revision the dominant dichotomous anthropocentric world, laying out a future that is naturalcultural. Environment is one of the foremost present-day concerns in our environmentally fragile world, and this issue has also found its way into literary studies. Having gained prominence since the 1990s, ecocriticism as an environmental branch of literary criticism provokes thinking whether literature has done or should do anything to promote environmental awareness. Manifestations of the latter appear, for example, from such genres as apocalyptic narratives,