![]() Such designs are precisely the “technological fixes” that will keep us locked into the same rhythms of extraction and dispossession. Refuse calls to design for the Anthropocene. There is no way to “mitigate” Anthropocenic violence using Anthropocene logics. Subscribe Step 2 | Break this world to make other worlds possible The worlds built by colonialism and capitalism are unliveable for us all. These are the people who remain targets of dispossession and attempted annihilation even - perhaps especially - today as capitalism gets into high gear in its efforts to “go green” and “save the world.” Don’t believe the hype of sustainability rhetoric. Marisol de la Cadena calls our attention to those Anthropo-not-seen, those whose lives and lands continue to be spent in the accumulation of wealth by colonial and neocolonial powers. But they are the condition of our current predicament. They are not inevitable consequences of human evolution or civilisation. Capitalism and colonialism are not to be mistaken as natural or innate to human existence. Remember this: not all are hailed by this figure or form of life. ![]() These destructive forces are propelled, not by all people, but by those particularly egregious ways of doing life modelled on self-aggrandising Man. The Capitalocene and the Plantationocene are apt monikers to identify the forces that have long been at work terraforming the planet. ![]() What we are witnessing is the apotheosis of five hundred years of colonial violence, extractive capitalism, white supremacy and the hubris of human exceptionalism. ![]() These narratives re-centre rather than de-centre Man as the agent with natural dominion over this planet’s future.ĭo not get distracted by the misplaced concreteness of scientific efforts to articulate the physical markers and temporal boundaries of a geological era made by humans. We alone can get us out.”Įven as Anthropocenic thinking attempts to call our attention to - and finally hold us responsible for - the egregious effects of our actions, it still figures humans as a singular agent, transcendent over and separate from some Edenic nature in peril. We cannot forget to keep asking: Precisely who is hailed by this Anthropos, that figure positioned at the helm of the Anthropocene? Anthropocenic rhetoric calls out “Man” as the agent of his own demise and simultaneously vaults him into position as the only viable saviour of the planet: “We got ourselves into this mess. Step 1 | Never forget this: “we” are not “one” We need art, experiment and radical disruption to learn other ways to see, feel and know.Ĭonsider this as an invitation to experiment with ways of dreaming life differently. It is clear that the situation we find ourselves in now leaves us at the limits of language, and grasping at the edges of imagination. It’s time to cast another spell, to call other worlds into being, to conjure other worlds within this world. We have to remember that we are living under a spell, and this spell is destroying our worlds. Just to prepare you for what follows: this is not so much a research paper, as it is an incantation. This form does well to channel both my rage about our current predicament, and my playful and loving - if also serious - aspirations for dreaming worlds otherwise. Taking the impossible and near comedic form of a step-by-step guide to getting out of the Anthropocene, this project picks up recent calls for inventive forms of speculative fabulation. What follows are excerpts from a project I am calling Rooting into the Planthroposcene.
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