Kathryn Yusoff

Geologic life : prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene

The diagnostic of the Anthropocene proposes a new geological epoch that designates humans as beings capable of geomorphic force, shaping Earth systems on a par with inhuman forces. This social geology marks an ascendance to inhuman planetary power fuelled by fossil fuels from the Carboniferous. Yet nowhere are the geophysical, genomic, and social narratives of this geologic subjectification considered together to interrogate these geologic capacities, not just in terms of impacts on the Earth, but as forces that subjects share—geologic forces that compose and differentiate corporeal and collective biopolitical formations. I argue in this paper that the concept of the Anthropocene is axiomatic of new understandings of time, matter, and agency for the human as a collective being and as a subject capable of geomorphic acts; a being that not just affects geology, but is an intemperate force within it. This immersion of humanity into geologic time suggests both a remineralisation of the origins of the human and a shift in the human timescale from biological life course to that of epoch and species—life. The paper is structured as a modest conversation between two fossilised subjects that define the imagined origin and ending of the narrative arc of the Anthropocene—one from the prehistory of human origins, the other from the future of the Anthropocene—in a conversation about time, geology, and inhuman becomings. Examining fossils as material and discursive knots in the narrative arc of human becoming, I argue for a ‘geological turn’ that takes seriously not just our biological (or biopolitical) life, but also our geological (or geopolitical) life and its forms of differentiation. Fossils unlock this life—death, time—untimely, corporeal—incorporeal equation, suggesting the need for a theory of the geologic and a reckoning with the forces of mute matter in lively bodies: a corporeality that is driven by inhuman forces. This paper investigates what I am calling “geologic life”—a mineralogical dimension of human composition that remains currently undertheorised in social thought and is directly relevant for the material, temporal, and corporeal conceptualisation of fossil fuels. This geologic life prompts a need to rethink the coherency of the human as a territorialising force of the Earth in its prehistoric, contemporary, and future-orientated incarnation. As such, this paper proposes a speculative theoretical framework for thinking modes of geologic life within the Anthropocene.

Arts, sciences and climate change:practices and politics at the threshold

Within climate change debates, writers and scholars have called for expanded methods for producing science, for proposing strategies for mitigation and adaptation, and for engaging with publics. Arts–sciences discourses are one area in which increasing numbers of practitioners and researchers are exploring ways in which interdisciplinarity may provide a space for reconsidering the role of cultural and creative responses to environmental change. Yet what new perspectives does the arts–science intersection offer for rethinking climate change? Which historic conjunctions of arts–sciences are most useful to consider in relation to present-day practices, or in what ways do these previous alignments significantly shift in response to climate change? The uncertainty, contingency, and experimentation necessarily characteristic of climate change may generate emergent forms of practice that require new approaches—not just to arts and sciences, but also at the new thresholds, or ‘meetings and mutations’ that these practices cross. Thresholds—narrated here through the figure of ‘zero degrees’—offer a way to bring together sites of encounter, transformations, uncertainties, future scenarios, material conditions and political practices in relation to climate change. Such shifting thresholds and relations lead not to fundamental re-definitions or demarcations of arts and sciences, arguably, but rather to shared encounters with politics. Drawing on philosophies of aesthetics and sciences elaborated by Jacques Rancière and Isabelle Stengers, we point to the ways in which political possibility is entangled with aesthetic-material conditions and practices, and how recognition of these interrelations might enable ‘collective experimentation’ within both creative practices and climate sciences.

Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change

As environments and their inhabitants undergo a multitude of abrupt changes due to climate, in the aesthetic field there has been a hardening of a few representational figures that stand in for those contested political ecologies. Biodiversity loss and habitat change can be seen to be forcing an acceleration of archival practices that mobilize various images of the ‘play of the world’, including the making of star species to represent planetary loss, and the consolidation of other species into archives implicitly organized around the category of their destruction. The first section of this article looks at Jacques Rancière’s concept of political aesthetics in order to extend an argument about the importance of aesthetics in multispecies living beyond a concentration on practices per se and into a more excessive engagement articulated by Georges Bataille. I argue that aesthetics must be considered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realm of what is possible in that politics. This is to suggest aesthetics as a form of ethics or an ‘aesthetics of existence’, as Foucault put it. The conclusion considers how a biopolitical aesthetic comes into being through such archival practices, and asks what aesthetic shifts would make the ‘play of the world’ more present in its absences.

Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection—a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for arts work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation, and life. In the book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008, Duke University Press, Durham, NC), that is the subject of this panel discussion, Grosz sets out an ontology of art, looking at its forms of emergence as territorialising force, sexual selection, and nonhuman power. In Groszs terms, art is an art of existence. This is not a narrow understanding of art as a practice that is about taste, cultural accomplishment, or a reflection of society, but an art that is—at its most provocative—an extraction from the universe and an elaboration on it. This ‘geoaesthetics’ which is both biospheric and biopolitical, presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time, and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly different kind of biopolitics? And what might Groszs concept of ‘geopower’ offer in terms of a renegotiation of a more active ‘geo’ in geopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise.

Excess, Catastrophe, and Climate Change

This paper seeks to give expression to notions of excess within economies of climate change. The paper begins by addressing the dominance of scientific modelling in the scientific and political constructions of climate change manifested through general circulation models and scientific visualisation. Considering this ‘digital earth’, the paper further investigates how the unit-based accumulation of earth data has actively secured the production of political responses that have both emulated and reinstated a model of accounting (such as the Stern Review and carbon trading). Considering the rendering of digital earth as a specific assemblage of globalisation produced through digitalisation, I argue that the digital realm is productive of its own forms of excess (expressed in aesthetics and globalism). I suggest how this excessive globality reveals its own fragmentation through negative presentation. Drawing from Georges Batailles notion of expenditure and Maurice Blanchots writing of the disaster I seek to describe a terrain of knowledge and loss that breaks with this aforementioned circuit of accounting, and instead considers another kind of relation (Batailles concept of expenditure) to account for the wasting of the world. The paper concludes with a Bataillean ‘sketch’ to consider how this excess may be recuperated as an emergent ethic within the disaster yet to come.

Geologic subjects: nonhuman origins, geomorphic aesthetics and the art of becoming inhuman

This paper addresses the formation of subjectivity in the context of rock art, focusing on two prehistoric moments that exhibit the interrelation of nonhuman and inhuman forces in the art of becoming human. The first geologic subject of the prehistoric that is discussed is the ‘Birdman’ of Lascaux as an originary figure in human origins. The second subjects are the Gwion Gwion figures that were painted with the ‘living pigments’ of bacteria and fungi that continue to reproduce over geologic time to produce an image of human identity. This foray into the Palaeolithic imagination is done for two reasons: firstly, to examine the conceptual and corporeal genealogy of geologic subjectivity through an inquiry into originary and symbolic images; secondly, to examine geomorphic aesthetics as a space of inquiry within the apprehension of the Anthropocene. Methodologically, this paper moves beyond the boundary-work of hybridity to argue for the consideration of a queer ecology where subjects emerge as a constellation between inhuman time, nonhuman forces, and geologic materialities. In the opening of subject positions to nonhuman and inhuman forces, as both interior and prior to the emergence of identity, this paper argues that subjectivity always contains both an anterior and interior nonhuman excess; a surplus to identity that opens to non-normative arrangements that queries origins to suggest a queer genealogy, rather than an exceptional model of human subjectivity. In abandoning the assumption of discrete, identity-making autopoetic subjects, I explore the possibilities for apprehending a nonlocal, inhuman dimension of subjectivity that is difficult to accommodate in a relational ontology. Ecologies of subjectivities are discussed through the rock images to argue that the human is both constituted and riven by the torques of nonlocal forces in both identity and etiology, and this needs to constitute a new ontology of in/human sociality. I conclude that aesthetics possess an untimely quality that allows a passage into the radically incommensurate time of the geologic and therefore provide a possible site and mode of sensibility for engaging with the temporal and material contractions of the Anthropocene.

Combustion and Society: A Fire-Centred History of Energy Use

Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards fossil-fuelled ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter.

Insensible worlds:postrelational ethics, indeterminacy and the (k)nots of relating

Within the context of biodiversity loss, this paper asks the question: What is response? In asking how responsibility is raised as a sensible question, I argue there is a need to address the insensible, immaterial, and untimely dimensions of matter and relations. I suggest that thinking along the cusp of the insensible offers a way into an expanded realm of relationality that queries the exclusions that govern the sphere of intelligibility, and help us think between natures to promote a noncontemporaneous ethics of apprehension. Taking up Jean-Luc Nancys concept of sense and specifically his ideas around the direction of sense, I argue that the insensible is a realm of possibility within the praxis of social and affective norms of sense that may release other modes of being into being. This is a paper about sense as matter forming, as cohabitation, and as an exclusionary tactic that bears on the cohabitation of worlds. I argue that an understanding of how sense is enrolled into our habits of thought and theories of materialities is crucial if we are to create new practices of sensations and new sensibilities around such diffuse, recalcitrant, and dislocated issues as biodiversity loss, new forms of biotechnological life, and climate change. I conclude that if the insensible alerts us to the work of sense in securing the bringing into relation, its configurations, and its a priori orientations, then it also points towards modes of exclusion and forms of resistance in our thinking with nonhuman others that are before and beyond relationality.

Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene

If the Anthropocene represents a new epoch of thought, it also represents a new form of materiality and historicity for the human as strata and stratigrapher of the geologic record. This collision of human and inhuman histories in the strata is a new formation of subjectivity within a geologic horizon that redefines temporal, material, and spatial orders of the human (and thus nature). I argue that the Anthropocene contains within it a form of Anthropogenesis – a new origin story and ontics for man – that radically rewrites material modes of differentiation and concepts of life, from predominantly biopolitical notions of life toward an understanding of life’s geophysical origination (geontics). Here, I use the term Anthropogenesis to suggest that two things explicitly happen in the nomination of the Anthropocene: 1) the production of a mythic Anthropos as geologic world-maker/destroyer of worlds, and 2) a material, evolutionary narrative that re-imagines human origins and endings within a geologic rather than an exclusively biological context. In contrast to the homogeneous geomorphizing of the Anthropocene, I suggest that socializing the strata needs a more nuanced notion of ‘geologic life’ that challenges the construction of the Anthropocene as an undifferentiated social stratification.

Visualizing Antarctica as a Place in Time From the Geological Sublime to “Real Time”

This article presents a chronogeographic account of the Antarctic spatialities that are inflected through the image of the RADARSAT map. Focusing on time as a spatializing operation within the visual geography of globalizing and globally available cartographies, the author questions the multiple geographies that must be considered in a geopolitical account of such a mapping. The subject of this topology is the “event” of the NASA RADARSAT map of Antarctica exhibiting the effects of global warming as a scientific and media event on the Web. Specifically the RADARSAT map documents destruction and also renders it innocuous through technologies of distance. This realization of geopolitical imperatives through scientific visualization reveals particular tensions and operations within Antarctic and global visual cultures. As a narrative cartography, it exhibits how geographic information systems operate in a plurality of visual regimes. The author concludes that the politics of visualizing Antarctica is embedded in the histories of its media production and in this reveals how time has a chronogeographic operation.