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<p>Culture Machine is proud to announce the publication of its
latest volume (vol. 22) on
<i>Anthropocene Infrapolitics</i>, guest-edited by Pedro
Aguilera-Mellado (Notre Dame), Peter Baker (Stirling) &
Gabriela Méndez Cota (IBERO, Mexico City). </p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/">https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/</a><br>
<br>
Below is the table of contents and editorial introduction. We hope
you enjoy it!<br>
<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:black"><i>On
Anthropocene Infrapolitics</i></span><o:p></o:p><span
style="color:#333399">, </span>edited by <span
style="color:#333399">Pedro Aguilera-Mellado, Peter Baker</span>
<span style="color:black">& </span><span
style="color:#333399">Gabriela Méndez Cota</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/">https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/</a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Contents<br>
</p>
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</span><o:p></o:p></p>
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<br>
<br>
Editorial Introduction</div>
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</div>
<div class="moz-forward-container"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://culturemachine.net/submissions/vol-22-cfp-anthropocene-infrapolitics/editorial/">https://culturemachine.net/submissions/vol-22-cfp-anthropocene-infrapolitics/editorial/</a><br>
<p>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
<a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/clark-2011-la-justicia-y-el-cambio-climatico-abrupto/">
<span style="color:#FF6600">inherently dynamic Earth processes</span></a>.
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.</p>
<p>Already in 2016, Cohen, Colebrook and Hillis Miller thought of
<a
href="http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Cohen-Colebrook-Miller_2016_Twilight-of-the-Anthropocene-Idols.pdf">
the Anthropocene as a twilight concept</a>: ‘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
<em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">narrative
as such</span></em>. In other words, the boom of the
post-human and the non-human, alongside so many
<em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">political</span></em>
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.</p>
<p>Almost a decade later,<span style="color:black"><a
href="https://desertreport.org/the-anthropocene/"> the
unrelenting chaos</a> associated with the Anthropocene
</span><a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/fernandez-planetary-nothing/"><span
style="color:#FF6600">still calls for intellectual
responsibility</span></a>, but structural difficulty
persists in (and beyond) university discourse. If the latter is
characterized, in our time, by <a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/alvarez-yaguez-antropoceno-y-filosofia/">
<span style="color:#FF6600">a political saturation</span></a>,
the structural difficulty concerns finitude as such, the
experience of which increasingly converges with
<a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/vilaros-la-piel-de-la-tierra/">
<span style="color:#FF6600">technological acceleration</span></a>
and the threat of human
<a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/cerrato-baker-futurology/">
extinction</a>. <a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/aguilera-interrogacion-infrapolitica/">
<span style="color:#333399">The question insists</span></a>:
is the Anthropocene above all a political question, a question
of narrative? Broadly conceived as
<a
href="https://academic.oup.com/fordham-scholarship-online/book/42617/chapter-abstract/357654941?redirectedFrom=fulltext">
the absolute difference between life and politics</a>, between
being and subjectivity, between writing and narrativizing,
infrapolitics gives way to the task of thinking existence in the
‘<a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/moreiras-epoca-sin-epoca/"><span
style="color:#FF6600">epoch without epoch</span></a>’ that
is now framed as the Anthropocene. </p>
<p>More specifically conceived as a second turn of deconstruction,
infrapolitical
<em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">reflection</span></em>
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
<em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Gestell
</span></em>continues to pose a question about
<a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/mendezcota-infrapoliticalepimetheia/">
<span style="color:#333399">the limits of storytelling</span></a>
and the need for, as Weinstein and Colebrook (2017) put it, no
less than a decision on the value of existence<em><span
style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">.
</span></em>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.</p>
<p><em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Anthropocene
Infrapolitics</span></em> 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
<a href="http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/philosophy/">radical
open access</a>. </p>
<p>Even if the meeting was made possible and nurtured by the
institutional frameworks of academic scholarship,
<em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Anthropocene
Infrapolitics</span></em> 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 <em><span
style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">thinking</span></em>
means, with an
<a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/runnels-plant-thinking-infrapolitical-ethics/">
openness</a> 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. </p>
<p>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
<em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">what
sub-cedes and sub-sists of life beyond or below its
metaphysical capture.
</span></em>In this regard, we give special thanks to Luz
María Bedoya for a very special contribution to
<em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Anthropocene
Infrapolitics, </span>
</em>namely, the <a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/bedoya-nula-o-el-lugar/">
<span style="color:#FF6600">artwork</span></a> included in
this issue.</p>
<p><em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Anthropocene
Infrapolitics</span></em> 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 <em><span
style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">another
scholarly writing is possible</span></em>, and that open
writing collaborations matter, beyond scientific standards or
political convictions, for the task of thinking existence in the
Anthropocene.</p>
Selected exchanges from the open peer review process will be
edited and published throughout Winter 2023-2024 in
<a href="https://culturemachine.net/interzone/">Culture Machine’s
Interzone,</a> as part of an extended conversation on
<em><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Anthropocene
Infrapolitics</span></em>. <br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures">http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/">https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/</a>
Website: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.garyhall.info">http://www.garyhall.info</a>
Director of Open Humanities Press: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.openhumanitiespress.org">http://www.openhumanitiespress.org</a>
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: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://compendium.copim.ac.uk/">https://compendium.copim.ac.uk/</a>
Blog: 'Is Big Publishing Killing the Academic Author?': <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2023/11/20/is-big-publishing-killing-the-academic-author.html">http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2023/11/20/is-big-publishing-killing-the-academic-author.html</a>
'Creative AI – Thinking Outside the Box': <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2023/10/23/creative-ai-thinking-outside-the-box.html">http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2023/10/23/creative-ai-thinking-outside-the-box.html</a>
Interview: (open access) ‘How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pb-assets/OA%20chapters/Briel_9781802076622_ch5_OA-1687267442.pdf">https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pb-assets/OA%20chapters/Briel_9781802076622_ch5_OA-1687267442.pdf</a>
Book series (open access): Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series, edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall and Rebekka Kiesewetter: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/">http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/</a>
1st book in series (open access): Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/">https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/</a>
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