[spectre] New Issue of Culture Machine: Anthropocene Infrapolitics
Gary Hall
mail at garyhall.info
Tue Dec 5 13:56:07 CET 2023
Culture Machine is proud to announce the publication of its latest
volume (vol. 22) on /Anthropocene Infrapolitics/, guest-edited by Pedro
Aguilera-Mellado (Notre Dame), Peter Baker (Stirling) & Gabriela Méndez
Cota (IBERO, Mexico City).
https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/
Below is the table of contents and editorial introduction. We hope you
enjoy it!
---
/On Anthropocene Infrapolitics/, edited by Pedro Aguilera-Mellado, Peter
Baker & Gabriela Méndez Cota
https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/
Contents
Editorial Introduction
https://culturemachine.net/submissions/vol-22-cfp-anthropocene-infrapolitics/editorial/
Since Paul Crutzen suggested the term in 2000, ‘the Anthropocene’ has
become established as a narrative frame for the convergence of numerous
discourses and collections of data exploring the reach, as well as the
limits, of human agency within inherently dynamic Earth processes
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/clark-2011-la-justicia-y-el-cambio-climatico-abrupto/>.
This volume of Culture Machine arrives in the wake of a decade-long
acceleration of Humanities discourse on the Anthropocene, the radical
implications of which remain, in our view, unthought.
Already in 2016, Cohen, Colebrook and Hillis Miller thought of the
Anthropocene as a twilight concept
<http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Cohen-Colebrook-Miller_2016_Twilight-of-the-Anthropocene-Idols.pdf>:
‘a form of half-recognition that can only occur in the moment of
waning’. They noted that even if the idea of the Anthropocene had fully
exposed the fictions of Cartesian Man, its paradoxical effect had been
to stir, almost immediately, a production of counter-narratives, most of
which failed to question /narrative as such/. In other words, the boom
of the post-human and the non-human, alongside so many /political/
challenges to the universalizing claims of the Anthropocene, most often
provided a way of sustaining the human as a problem. By contrast, Cohen,
Colebrook and Hillis Miller called on us to ask about the ways in which
technical modes of inscription produced ‘the Anthropocene’ as a
masculinist delusion of self-erasure and anthropo-political narrativizing.
Almost a decade later,the unrelenting chaos
<https://desertreport.org/the-anthropocene/> associated with the
Anthropocene still calls for intellectual responsibility
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/fernandez-planetary-nothing/>,
but structural difficulty persists in (and beyond) university discourse.
If the latter is characterized, in our time, by a political saturation
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/alvarez-yaguez-antropoceno-y-filosofia/>,
the structural difficulty concerns finitude as such, the experience of
which increasingly converges with technological acceleration
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/vilaros-la-piel-de-la-tierra/>
and the threat of human extinction
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/cerrato-baker-futurology/>.
The question insists
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/aguilera-interrogacion-infrapolitica/>:
is the Anthropocene above all a political question, a question of
narrative? Broadly conceived as the absolute difference between life and
politics
<https://academic.oup.com/fordham-scholarship-online/book/42617/chapter-abstract/357654941?redirectedFrom=fulltext>,
between being and subjectivity, between writing and narrativizing,
infrapolitics gives way to the task of thinking existence in the ‘epoch
without epoch
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/moreiras-epoca-sin-epoca/>’
that is now framed as the Anthropocene.
More specifically conceived as a second turn of deconstruction,
infrapolitical /reflection/ recuperates the Heideggerian problematic of
the ontico-ontological difference at the time of the consummation of
metaphysics, of the reduction of life –including culture and politics
–to calculability, or the principle of general equivalence under the
guise of late post-industrial capitalism. Reframed today as an archive
of planetary devastation, the Heideggerian concept of /Gestell
/continues to pose a question about the limits of storytelling
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/mendezcota-infrapoliticalepimetheia/>
and the need for, as Weinstein and Colebrook (2017) put it, no less than
a decision on the value of existence/. /As formulated by Alberto
Moreiras, infrapolitics is always in every case a commitment to think
that decision in terms of an exception to the principle of general
equivalence.
/Anthropocene Infrapolitics/ gathers contributions that strive to think
the exception, the incalculable, in the Anthropocene. Most of them are
based on presentations given at the II International Seminar of
Contemporary Thought which took place on 29-30 June 2023 in the
Universidade de Vigo, in Galicia, Spain, and was organised by Alberto
Moreiras (Texas A&M University), Helena Cortés Gabaudan (Universidade de
Vigo), Jorge Álvarez Yagüez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Carmela
García González (IES Vigo), Arturo Leyte (Universidade de Vigo),
Cristina Moreiras (University of Michigan), Teresa Vilarós (Texas A&M
University) and Gareth Williams (University of Michigan). We want to
express our sincere gratitude to all of them and to the participants of
the Vigo meeting for having accepted our invitation to edit and
disseminate their work in Culture Machine with a spirit of radical open
access <http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/philosophy/>.
Even if the meeting was made possible and nurtured by the institutional
frameworks of academic scholarship, /Anthropocene Infrapolitics/ does
not seek, above all, to make ‘progress’ on ‘knowledge production’ by
telling more stories about planetary catastrophe. More fundamentally it
seeks to ask, once again, what /thinking/ means, with an openness
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/runnels-plant-thinking-infrapolitical-ethics/>
to the proliferation of singular experiences and working against all
attempts to construct a new hegemonic framework for academic work via
scientific, economic or cultural knowledge about the human.
As such, infrapolitics is irreducible to technics, ethics or politics,
and we may, at best, regard it as a call for an attunement to somewhere
strange and unthematizable. Working at the limits of language, writing,
and thought, one of the main questions for infrapolitical reflection is
therefore over the form or style that the announcement of the
infrapolitical should take, where writing is always understood as the
writing of life itself, or perhaps more accurately, as /what sub-cedes
and sub-sists of life beyond or below its metaphysical capture. /In this
regard, we give special thanks to Luz María Bedoya for a very special
contribution to /Anthropocene Infrapolitics, /namely, the artwork
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/bedoya-nula-o-el-lugar/>
included in this issue.
/Anthropocene Infrapolitics/ seeks to make space, within the most
rigorous scholarship in the theoretical Humanities, for untimely textual
inscriptions, or writings that attempt to consciously bear the mark of
their own historical or existential circumstances. We would like to
acknowledge Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Jessica Bekerman, Tatjana Gajic,
Cristina Moreiras, Benjamín Mayer-Foulkes, Janneke Adema, Fiona Noble,
José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Claire Colebrook, and Ángel Octavio
Álvarez Solís, for carefully and enthusiastically taking part in the
open peer review alongside the guest-editors and the contributors to
this volume. The non-anonymity of peer reviewing was, in this case, a
wager and a test for our infrapolitical desire to affirm that /another
scholarly writing is possible/, and that open writing collaborations
matter, beyond scientific standards or political convictions, for the
task of thinking existence in the Anthropocene.
Selected exchanges from the open peer review process will be edited and
published throughout Winter 2023-2024 in Culture Machine’s Interzone,
<https://culturemachine.net/interzone/> as part of an extended
conversation on /Anthropocene Infrapolitics/.
--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University:
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures
https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/
Website:http://www.garyhall.info
Director of Open Humanities Press:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Latest:
Project: Experimental Publishing Compendium, curated by Janneke Adema, Julien McHardy and Simon Bowie, compiled by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall, Rebekka Kiesewetter, Julien McHardy, and Tobias Steiner:https://compendium.copim.ac.uk/
Blog: 'Is Big Publishing Killing the Academic Author?':http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2023/11/20/is-big-publishing-killing-the-academic-author.html
'Creative AI – Thinking Outside the Box':http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2023/10/23/creative-ai-thinking-outside-the-box.html
Interview: (open access) ‘How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’:https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pb-assets/OA%20chapters/Briel_9781802076622_ch5_OA-1687267442.pdf
Book series (open access): Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series, edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall and Rebekka Kiesewetter:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/
1st book in series (open access): Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota:https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/
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