On 12/12/2014 11:24, nettime's avid reader wrote: This is the meaning of the Anthropocene: that the futures of the human and material worlds are now totally entwined. Just as Nietzsche declared that God is dead, now we know that ecology is dead. There is no longer a homeostatic cycle that can be put right just by withdrawing. There is no environment that forms a neutral background to working and hacking.
Just as the category of `man' collapses once there is no God, so too the category of the social collapses when there is no environment. The material world is laced with traces of the human, and the human turns out to be made of nothing much besides displaced flows of this or that element or molecule. What a load of crap. It is this fantasy of total-control - of the collapse of the more-than-human world into the human world - that is undone by the Anthropocene. It is not ecology that is dead but *society* and along with it the macho-dream of 'Hacking the Planet!'). Ecology is alive and kicking, as is geology. The vast majority of the bio- and geological worlds are not only apart from us but also utterly indifferent to us. There is no symmetry here between 'culture' and 'nature' as implied by Wark (and, just to say, Latour well before him). There is only a radical asymmetry between the human and inhuman, one that means the Earth has never been a backdrop but a participant, and a domineering one. The converse is not true however - Humanity has never been a context for the Earth, even in the Anthropocene. To have an effect, an unintended one, is not to radically undo the asymmetries that make the Earth the context of human life, and humanity but one species and force amongst others. The Anthropocene is, after all, the name for a world accidentally polluted by some people, engaged in some specific socio-economic practices. It is far, far, from an expression of either species-being or species-agency. The Anthropocene means not learning to master the world anew, to resurrect Modernist fantasies, but to learn to live on unstable ground, to give up visions of control and to inhabit the world vulnerably. The Anthropocene calls not so much for new ways of thinking as for new ways of practicing knowledge. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And it is likely to get weird -- in this lifetime, or the next. That's why I think we could start working now, not on theory of the Anthropocene, but theory for the Anthropocene. One could do worse, I think, than imagine and practice again something like a tektology and a proletkult - a tektology for hackers, a proletkult for cyborgs. Let's build a world, and live in it. someone beat him to it - its called geoengineering, and its about maintaining the illusion of progress and the process of endless accumulation after the end of frontiers... nic # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
