Review: Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene

Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene speaks to a widespread contemporary perception of crisis which is constituted, among others, by rapidly deteriorating environmental conditions, the rise of nationalist politics, and the spread of infectious disease. The book's chapters offer a wide range of compelling engagements with the predicaments of existence in the era that is called the Anthropocene, with subjects ranging from the climate emergency to geotrauma to urbicide, and from indigenous cosmologies to ageism to selfies. 

The Microbiopolitics of Pots and Compost Making

This visual essay explores more-than-human relationships between microbes and humans emerging across agricultural fields and scientific laboratories. Through material collected across fields and labs, and drawing on the concept of microbiopolitics proposed by Heather Paxson, the essay reflects on emerging attitudes of both affect and management. These relationships arise and become visible through growers’ and scientists’ practices, the objects they employ and the spaces they occupy. Seen in this light, pots and compost become the manifestation of attentive relationships with invisible nonhumans, potentially important in tracing the unfolding of ongoing environmental crises.

Strange strangers, epidemics and cosmological contagion: A reprise of the outside in three acts

In this essay I attempt to draw some crucial theoretical parallelisms between ancient Greek cosmology and the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Marcel Detienne and Timothy Morton’s work, I deploy the figure of Dionysos as a conceptual persona which can help us think of strangeness as a non-human mode of relationality Anthropocene societies must urgently engage with. Events such as the ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, through which non-humans are brought to the forefront of politics and social relations, traditionally result to attempts of sublating strangeness through human modes of knowledge. As I argue, epidemics instead demand the creation of practices, collectives and techniques through which strangeness is not eliminated or ‘understood’, but rather elevated to a fundamental feature of social relations. In such sense, the ancient world presents a critical vector of intervention to the current state of the Anthropocene, since it showcases a cosmos in which human life and society is constantly embedded and negotiated amid non-human strangeness.

Code is Law –Deterritorialisation and Reterritorialisation of Law, Law is Code – Cyberspace, Personalisation Algorithms and Human Cognition

This narrative is a theoretical exploration of the encounter between law and cyberspace. It is a conversation about what lines of de/reterritorialisation can do with that encounter. It is becoming in contact with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts: rhizome, assemblage, becoming, territorialisation, deterritorialisation, and reterritorialisation and with Lawrence Lessig’s theory code is law. Code may be law, but perhaps law can also become code. This paper thinks about democratic states in which there is a desire to let law proceed from the people, and about how the law and code seem to affect human behaviour in similar ways. As an example, I explore how code in personalising algorithms affects human cognition; how code that enables certain cognitive processes can disable certain others; and how code regulates human cognition. The paper thinks about how law is territorialised in the encounter with cyberspace, deterritorialised when code challenges legal sovereignty, and how it can reterritorialise through ‘code is law’ or through ‘law is code’. I am suggesting that, in this process, a need is emerging: a need to let code proceed from the people.

Telluric Recollection: On the Disappearance of History in Deep Time

Since the turn of the millennium, the humanities have been progressively forced to come to terms with the materiality of a warming world, in particular the entanglement of natural environments with technical infrastructures that lies at the heart of anthropgenic environmental change, and its implications for the hithertofore seemingly impentetrable ontological wall of separation between natural and human history. In an effort to address the concomitant insufficiency of remaning solely at the discursive level, one such attempt has been to reorient the interpretative concerns of the humanities by submerging the modern subject into geological registers of deep time. This paper cautions that along with such a reorientation, however, any sense of a limit – such as a hermeneutical horizon belonging to human history – thereby disappears into the fundamental depthlessness of deep time, and the subject suddenly vanishes from the center of the global environmental drama. Ironically so, since the purported novelty of the globalization of technology is precisely the manner in which it highlights the anthropogenic dimension of global environmental change, and thus the deep time consequences of human action.

On Thinking in the Anthropocene: A Sketch of a Proposal

The paper suggests, on the basis of paleoanthropological evidence, a hypothetical differentiation of human modes of thinking. Moreover, on the basis of historical evidence, it reconsiders the so-called passage from mythos to logos as a Greek rationalization of the shift between the technologies of speech and writing and their associated modes of thinking respectively. Finally, it relies on these considerations to construct digital information as an opportunity at once to redistribute the powers of writing and reconfigure thinking.

Materialism: A Caring Obituary

The notion of materialism initially appears in the writings of its Christian opponents in late seventeenth-century England. Only in eighteenth-century France materialism is first posthumously claimed by a catholic priest, Meslier, and then by authors such as La Mettrie and d’Holbach, at the risk of persecution and imprisonment: Diderot enjoys the hospitality of the fortress of Vincennes for rearranging the materialist stance within his sensualist multiverse. In the nineteenth century, Marx reshapes materialism as part of his critique to decontextualized knowledge. Stirner’s discontent with naturalistic objectivity anticipates Nietzsche’s rejection of matter in favour of practices: Engels’ historical materialism and his ahistorical dichotomic construction of materialism versus idealism are instead embraced by Lenin via Plekhanov, and they are further simplified by Stalin. Nietzsche’s approach is recovered by Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, who challenge both political and theoretical representation. More recently, Barad recasts this challenge into a processual vocabulary, which renews the semantic constellation of realism, materialism, and materiality. Whilst not dismissing Barad’s new tools, the essay suggests raising the wager: it proposes to extend its own genealogical practice, which reconnects materialism (and matter) with its historical process of production, to any other theoretical object. This recomposition may not only disentangle us from the lexicon of entities – including materialism and matter – but it may also help to construct a novel and potentially hegemonic language of practices.

Landscapes of Heathrow: The Aircraft Landing Gear Compartment and the Politics of Global Transfer

This paper, an output of an art research project, explores the agency of the aircraft landing gear compartment in global transfer. Through the prism of historical events involving aircraft preparing to land at London Heathrow, it reflects on the part played by the compartment in ecological and humanitarian struggle. Its theoretical frameworks include John Ruskin’s writing on geology, new materialism, and the planetary garden. These are brought into proximity with methodologies and collaborations developed through practice-based elements of the research, such as architectural modelling, geoforensic science and exhibition making. It incorporates an account of the process of reconstructing a compartment, as well as extracts from a microstratigraphic survey commissioned as part of the project. It examines the landing gear compartment’s capacity as a vessel in which dust, seeds, insects, pollen and even people are transported around the globe. It explores, too, its role as expository instrument, as far as it makes available for inspection the politics inscribed into its formal, spatial and temporal configuration. The paper argues that the wheel bay gives shape to a set of otherwise intangible aeromobilities, knowledge of which is integral to a nuanced understanding of the political geography of London Heathrow.

Landscapes of Heathrow: The Aircraft Landing Gear Compartment and the Politics of Global Transfer

This paper, an output of an art research project, explores the agency of the aircraft landing gear compartment in global transfer. Through the prism of historical events involving aircraft preparing to land at London Heathrow, it reflects on the part played by the compartment in ecological and humanitarian struggle. Its theoretical frameworks include John Ruskin’s writing on geology, new materialism, and the planetary garden. These are brought into proximity with methodologies and collaborations developed through practice-based elements of the research, such as architectural modelling, geoforensic science and exhibition making. It incorporates an account of the process of reconstructing a compartment, as well as extracts from a microstratigraphic survey commissioned as part of the project. It examines the landing gear compartment’s capacity as a vessel in which dust, seeds, insects, pollen and even people are transported around the globe. It explores, too, its role as expository instrument, as far as it makes available for inspection the politics inscribed into its formal, spatial and temporal configuration. The paper argues that the wheel bay gives shape to a set of otherwise intangible aeromobilities, knowledge of which is integral to a nuanced understanding of the political geography of London Heathrow.