Context of Practice: Against The Anthropocene

This book essentially concludes that the fossil fuel industry is evil and corrupt, socially unjust and needs addressing as the foremost issue within our global governance and the future. All these technologies and visualisations of maps and so on, are just distracting us from finer details, such as petrocapitalism and how the oil companies are controlling all of the media, governments, cultural institutions (art galleries etc.). The Anthropocene is just a façade to distract the everyday person into acceptance – beyond our control – an age of human dominance is a natural progression of this earths time span.

Demos' overarching argument is that the proposition of an Anthropocene, is 'Generalising and disavowering responsibility for earth-systems disruption, validating further geo-engineering experiments, and diffusing political traction in the struggle against climate change'.

Key terms:

Cultural Normalisation
Climate Justice
New media ecologies: the study of media, technology and communications and how they affect human environments
Corporate dominated environmental governance
Capitalocene: the age of capital - has the advantage of naming the culprit, sourcing climate change not in species being, but within the complex and interrelated processes of the global-scale, world-historical, and politico-economic organisation of modern capitalism stretched over centuries of enclosures, colonisations, industrialisations, and globalisations.
doesn’t sugarcoat – foregrounds how capitalism evolved within and against nature’s web of life, as well as brought ecological transformations with it. Thus the crisis of climate change is owed to complex socio-economic, political, and material operations, involving classes and commodities, imperialisms and empires, and biotechnology and militarism
Homogenocene: genetically & industrially induced monocultures, at the cost of mass extinctions, identifying the de-biodiversifying effects of globalisations reduction of nature to the commodity form via corporate-extravist-strip-mining-oil-drilling-monocrop-planting-dam-building neoliberalism
Plantationocene: commodification of nature
Plasticine: the age of plastic
Petrocaptalism: an epoch where nature is made visible only as ‘natural capital’ in economic trade-offs, or as a backdrop to a techno-optimism that places our collective fate in the hands of markets and technology

All these theorise help forward a post-fossil fuel future, where all will not be blamed for the activities of the few, and culpability for ecocide is assigned to those responsible, so that the future becomes not only possible but guaranteed.

Notes:

Globaia – dedicated to fostering awareness among citizens by promoting the emergence of a global vision of our world and of the great socioecological challenges of our time
Global shipping, air transport routes, pipeline networks, submarine fiber-optic cable systems, growth of carbon dioxide pollution
How can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political interventions, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time?
Choice of satellite imagery / scientific graph over photography – digitalised files, processed quantities of data – GPS (1991) WWW (1992) widespread mapping made possible by Google Earth (2005)= = entrance into the visuality of the Anthropocene – ‘sociotechnical system that collects data, models physical process, tests theories, and ultimately generates a widely shared understanding of climate and climate change’ – packaged as pictures without data/ source info thus the images seem hyper-legible but are in fact far from transparent or direct
Trevor Paglen importantly points out that satellite imagery is “produced by, and in turn, productive of an enormous relational geography wth political, economic, legal, social and cultural aspects”
Such enables the military-state-corporate apparatus to disavow responsibility for the differentiated impacts of climate change, effectively obscuring the accountability behind the mounting eco-catastrophe and inadvertently making us all complicit in its destructive project
1972 Blue Marble image – world perspective – bringing earthlings together socio-politically
Martin Luther King Jr. 1967 – “if we are to have peace on Earth we must develop a world perspective”
Heather David, Etienne Turpin – introduction to ‘Art in the Anthropocene’ – “the Anthropocene is not simply the result of activities undertaken by the species Homo sapiens; instead, these effects derive from a particular nexus of epistemic, technological, social, and political economic coalescences figured in the contemporary reality of petrocapitalism’
Petrocapitalist Anthropocene – a epoch when “nature is made visible only as ‘natural capital’ in economic trade-offs, or as a backdrop to a techno-optimism that places our collective fate in the hands of markets and technology” – Katrina Forrester
Donna Haraway ‘staying with the trouble’ – “requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters, entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)
Timothy Mitchell – “in tracing the connections that were made between pipelines and pumping stations, refineries and shipping routes, road systems and automobile cultures, dollar flows and economic knowledge, weapon exports and militarism, one can see how a particular set of relations was engineered among oil, violence, finance, expertise and democracy” (carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil) (London: Verso, 2011)
Edward Burtynsky ‘OIL-artist statement’ “The car that I drove cross-country began to represent not only freedom, but also something much more conflicted. I began to think of oil itself: as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat.”
If we are to survive the Anthropocene – which is indeed a big if – what we need urgently is more activism, not neutrality, to rescue the democratic political process from corporate oligarchs, to enact a just transition beyond the fossil fuel economy, to reassert the priorities of quality, and to eliminate discrimination and prejudice. Whatever we do, we cannot sit back passively and witness our own destruction as a source of either visual pleasure or neutral observation. What is required is "a revolt against brutality" against the violence of climate change-and the language that perpetuates it- as Solnit contends, not the neutral observation of the fossil-fuel-driven destruction of Earth

Further readings to explore that the book touches on:

Context of Practice

Monday, 19 November 2018

Against The Anthropocene

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