Review of Weston, Kath (2017) Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World. Duke University Press. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World
2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weston, Kath, [date] author. Title: Animate planet : making visceral sense of living in a high-tech, ecologically damaged world / Kath Weston. Other titles: anima (Duke University Press) Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Series: anima | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016026991 (print) lccn 2016028136 (ebook) isbn 9780822362104 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822362326 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 9780822373827 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Human ecology. | Human geography. | Climatic changes-Effect of human beings on. Classification: lcc gf41.W475 2016 (print) lcc gf41 (ebook) ddc 304.2/8-dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026991
Affect as Disruption: Affective Experimentation, Automobility, and the Ecological Crisis
Methodologies of Affective Experimentation, 2022
In this text we construe affect as a conservative force, as glue that holds social life in place. With this starting point, we direct our attention towards the unfolding of the ecological crises. Using the case of ‘automobile supremacy’, we discuss a paradigmatic affective formation that keeps Western societies deadlocked in a loop of business as usual, preventing them from adequately addressing the climate catastrophe. Drawing on the concepts of affective arrangement and affective milieu, we chart some of the affective groundings of automobile supremacy and of the widespread failure to overcome the status quo. In response to this conservative thrust of affect, we then survey how ossified affective formations can be disrupted and eventually left behind. Can affect itself be deployed as a resource to disturb, fracture, and break sedimented social formations and patterns? In search of an answer, we explore prospects of obstruction leaning on affective experimentation as a creative method of disruption. By discussing ways to disturb automobility in its unfettered flow, we provide an angle on modes of disruption as small-scale openings that abruptly and momentarily halt the affective relations that were sustaining social formations before.
It is often assessed that the construction of nature, technology and the relation between both is in the midst of a restructuring without specifying exactly what different articulations can be distinguished and how they differ from the modern notion of nature being separated from and domesticated by technology. Through an analysis of car commercials, this study develops a typology of constellations of nature and technology. Besides the well-known modern dichotomy of nature versus technology, with the latter being superior to the former, three types of articulations were found: technology as a flexible and superior technological mimicry of nature; technological mastery as harmful to nature; and nature and technology as two holistically connected realms. Implications for theories about the changing nature of nature and the restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology are discussed.
2012
It is often assessed that the construction of nature, technology and the relation between both is in the midst of a restructuring without specifying exactly what different articulations can be distinguished and how they differ from the modern notion of nature being separated from and domesticated by technology. Through an analysis of car commercials, this study develops a typology of constellations of nature and technology. Besides the well-known modern dichotomy of nature versus technology, with the latter being superior to the former, three types of articulations were found: 1) technology as a flexible and superior technological mimicry of nature; 2) technological mastery as harmful to nature; and 3) nature and technology as two holistically connected realms. Implications for theories about the changing nature of nature and the restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology are discussed.
Just Food Conference, 2021
Contemporary food spaces are often highly sanitized and heavily mediated through packaging, processing, and post-natural design, rendering biological material (food) into media and into commodities. These spaces have systemically devalued the chemical senses of taste and smell in our experience of them. Smell has a particularly taut history of vilification in the West and in conceptions of ‘modernity,' as outlined in scholarship by Alain Corbin. This legacy stretches back to René Descartes, who repudiated the senses as a form of knowing the true nature of reality, denying our perception of the world in our accounting for nature. Contemporarily, the devaluation of smell especially has been a way to signify the 'other,' whereby odors are categories by white diners and shoppers as 'bad' when they are unfamiliar. The fear of smell in food spaces harkens back to a time of prejudice against street vendors and restaurants which did not adhere to a sanitized, odorless version of modernity authored by colonialist and white powers. During the COVID-19 crisis, the sanitization of these spaces became an acute phenomena, as restaurants and grocery stores became desperate to create enclosures safe from the virus. While consumers were further severed from the chemical senses, we discovered anosmia (loss of smell) was a side effect of COVID. My work, consisting of a photo essay and video, explores these sensory losses both in modernity and as highlighted during the last year of the pandemic. The work postures smell as a way to forge more intimate relationships with our food, our environment, and our nonhuman companions in our food systems. Using three different mycelium dirt substrates, I grew oyster and lion's mane mushrooms in my Brooklyn apartment over the months spanning March to November, 2020. This mushroom becomes an anchor in otherwise sanitized food spaces. Three of the six flushes produced successful harvests. The unsuccessful mushroom was preserved in perfumer's alcohol, which is documented in the video
Techno Ecologies: Inhabiting the Deep-Technological Spheres of Eeveryday Life
Our practices of everyday life have become so tightly interwoven with ever more complex and comprehensive technological environments that technology can no longer be seen as an alterity (otherness). Instead we need to see these environments as techno-ecologies, as spheres of life, whose conditions we need to master to ensure our survival (as a human species) on this planet. Following philosopher Felix Guattari’s famous triad of ecological registers ‘the (material) environment, social relations, and human subjectivity this essay explores the implication of this new ‘deep-technological’ condition. Published in: In: Smite, Rasa / Kluitenberg, Eric / Smits, Raitis (eds.) (2012), Techno-Ecologies, Acoustic Space Vol. 11, RIXC Center for New Media Culture & Liepaja University, Riga.
Environmental Alterities , 2021
In the context of accelerating environmental crises and exhausted intellectual paradigms, this book asks what comes after ‘after nature’. Instead of demanding new models and approaches, it invites its readers to look to the endpoints and failures of what is already known, in order to generate alternative forms of ethical engagement with worlds both on this planet, and beyond it. Drawing together scholarship from across science and technology studies, philosophy, and anthropology and bringing it into conversation with rich ethnographic and empirical material, the book asks how we might potentialise the contradictions and oppositions of critical social scientific thinking in order to develop a mode of paradoxical engagement that is in constant movement between knowledge and its edges, practices and their limits, and which allows us to relate to that which is excessive to relations and relationality.
Ethos, 2012
Environmental contamination is socially experienced as environmental suffering, bodily distress, frustration, and even pain. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a contaminated community in New York, I engage the complex and variegated ways in which angst, frustration, and uncertainty linger even after state and corporate scientific schemes to mitigate environmental disaster and contamination are initiated. Inspired by emerging discussions of "emotional geography," I explore how in a sociospatial context where residents live in homes mitigated for intrusive toxic substances, frustration, and uncertainty-both frequent problems experienced by residents living in environments threatened by hazardous substances-continue to inform the pollution experience. Moreover, I address how ethnographic narrative exposes what I call the "emotional ecology of risk mitigation." [toxic environments, risk experience, mitigation, uncertainty, emotion]