Papers by Elizabeth Johnson
This paper explores how biomimicry, an increasingly popular trope within the discourses and pract... more This paper explores how biomimicry, an increasingly popular trope within the discourses and practices of the green economy, encourages a new industrial paradigm that ostensibly leaves behind the crude violence of Francis Bacon, the domination of nature-as-machine, and a history of toxic production processes that have given rise to a present and coming climate crisis. By recasting natural resources as an untapped abundance of innovative potential rather than limited materials to extract, advocates of biomimicry imagine a future of sustainable production and limitless economic growth.
In 1993 Michael Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity revitalized the power of the mimetic faculty to cr... more In 1993 Michael Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity revitalized the power of the mimetic faculty to craft a vision of nature that was neither the alienated subject of modern science nor the passively malleable medium of late twentieth-century social constructivism. Taussig drew explicitly on a tradition of earlier twentieth-century scholarship—Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno—that located in the mimetic faculty a way out of a techno-fetishized social milieu. This essay explores how mimesis has once again been endowed with revolutionary potential in the contemporary moment through the growing field of biomimicry. I show how mimesis promises a way toward a future free from human hubris and ecological catastrophe—and a way out of the conditions that have created the Anthropocene. I explore how this works in biomimetics, with a detailed look at one of the most celebrated examples of the biomimetic paradigm: the gecko's foot. But, I ultimately suggest that what has been so seductive about mimesis throughout history is that it offers a “way out” of political confrontation. In doing so, I argue mimesis too easily serves as a double mirror—rather than transform production, nonhuman life at the level of biology becomes a force for production.
Examining scientific practice and language rather than aesthetics, I find that jellyfish and thei... more Examining scientific practice and language rather than aesthetics, I find that jellyfish and their study are not eroding “humanist claims to sovereign knowledges” (Alaimo 2013, 155) but are instead becoming part an ongoing respatialization of those claims. I show how the science of jellyfish research has become part of changing spatial practices of biological governance, consistent with the nomination of “the Anthropocene” as our current era. While a universalized human problematically stands at the center of this proposed geologic stratum, the era’s nomination also references our deep entanglement with other organisms, organisms who respond—positively and negatively—to our manipulations of the earth. Jellyfish are emblematic of this shift in planetary awareness. Scientists tie the growth of their populations to anthropogenic climate change and ecological degradation; their uptake in the cosmetic and biopharmaceutical industries integrates their liveliness to our own even more tightly. As a result, these organisms are paradoxically figured both as the uncontrollable agents of a coming apocalypse and as a vehicle of biopharmaceutical innovation that will enable humans to attain immortality. The science of jellyfish therefore crystalizes what philosopher Frederic Neyrat (2014) considers one of most pressing paradoxes of the Anthropocene: that we are increasingly driven to recognize our own mortality and finitude—as individuals and as a species—but continue to organize our social lives (at least in the West) as if we are immortal. This tendency and its corresponding focus on a particular understanding of human survival has prompted an expanded discourse and practice of securitization into new spaces and into the bodies of nonhuman organisms.
Over the past twenty years, university administrators in North America, Europe and elsewhere have... more Over the past twenty years, university administrators in North America, Europe and elsewhere have used the apparent ‘crisis’ in higher education as an opportunity to roll out neoliberal policies. For many working in the academy, the effect has been felt as a very real crisis of time, as budgets, resources and job positions are cut, and the working day is stretched to the limit. Resistance has often taken the form of struggles over wages and job security, and, by extension, over time measured in terms of the length and intensity of the working day. While such struggles are necessary, our contention is that they are not enough. Extending the distinction between kairos and chronos as developed in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Cesare Casarino, we wager that transforming higher education must involve more than “making more time” for our work; it must also “change” time. Only by so doing, we argue, can we realize — and expand upon — the university’s potential to interrupt the empty, homogenous time of capital and cultivate non-capitalist alternatives in the here-and-now. This paper thus makes three moves: one which critiques and analyzes the practices by which the university harnesses the creative time of living labor, making it both useful and safe for capital; a second which develops a ‘revolutionary’ theory of time that enables us to see capital not as the generative source of innovation, but instead as parasitic upon it; and a third, affirmative, move that explores experiments within and beyond the university with self-valorizing practices of collective learning, no longer as resource for state and capital, but as part of the ‘expansionary’ time of the common.
For over two decades, geographers concerned with undoing what Judith Butler has referred to as ‘t... more For over two decades, geographers concerned with undoing what Judith Butler has referred to as ‘the conceit of anthropocentrism’ have brought animals in from the margins of thought. Geography’s contributions to animal studies have been diverse, but a key consideration has been a retreat from thinking with animals toward a plural, morethan- human analysis. A recent privileging of ‘spaces of encounter’ with nonhuman others challenges the significance of animals altogether, equating them to other nonhuman entities—along with nonliving processes, the movement of molecules, viruses, forces, and affects that circulate and connect in ‘events’ and ‘sites’—on the terrain of ethical and political conflict. There is much at stake here in terms of how geographical methods are carried out and how response, analysis, and political action proceed. In what follows, I reflect on field notes from an ethnographic encounter with lobster experimentation in a neuroscience laboratory to contrast thinking ‘with animals’ and ‘with encounters’. I assess the implications of each for transforming who and what we consider in ethical and political terms. I find that while the encounter moves beyond the limitations of more traditionally defined animal studies, a corresponding focus on the present loses sight of wider temporal and spatial relations—including the political economies—that are relevant to the elements in any encounter. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Astrid Schrader, I argue for a geography of the encounter that ‘expands the present’ rather than residing in it, with consequences for the ‘new materialism’ movement. In the case of the lobster experiment, this leads me to consider how scientific practices with animals are also immediately a part of ongoing trends in the US that ‘militarize’ biological life. In conclusion, I argue that concern for animals in the laboratory ought to expand to include concern for past and future political conditions of life, death, and the production of knowledge.
Keywords: encounter, event, new materialism, animal studies, ethics, militarization
Crutzen and Stoermer’s (2000) naming of the ‘Anthropocene’ has provoked lively debate across the ... more Crutzen and Stoermer’s (2000) naming of the ‘Anthropocene’ has provoked lively debate across the physical and social sciences, but, while the term is gradually gaining acceptance as the signifier of the current geological epoch, it remains little more than a roughly defined place-holder for an era characterized by environmental and social uncertainty. The term invites deeper considerations of its meaning, significance, and consequences for thought and politics. For this Forum, we invited five scholars to reflect on how the Anthropocene poses challenges to the structures and habits of geography, politics, and their guiding concepts. The resulting essays piece together an agenda for geographic thought – and political engagement – in this emerging epoch. Collectively, they suggest that geography, as a discipline, is particularly well suited to address the conceptual challenges presented by the Anthropocene.
Advocates of biomimicry encourage a new industrial paradigm that ostensibly leaves behind the cru... more Advocates of biomimicry encourage a new industrial paradigm that ostensibly leaves behind the crude violence of Francis Bacon, the domination of nature-as-machine, and a history of toxic production processes that have given rise to a present and coming climate crisis. As part of a broader trend towards the conceptualization and development of a ‘bioeconomy’, we argue here that biomimicry produces ‘nature’ in new ways. At face value, these new approaches to valuing nature may seem less violent and exploitative. Yet, new natures can and are tortured in new ways. We argue that biomimicry produces ‘nature’ through well-worn logics of resource enclosure and privatization, focusing upon two fundamental shifts in how nonhuman life is figured and put to work: (1) the production of nature as intellectual property (as opposed to raw materials); (2) the production of nature as an active subject (as opposed to a passive receptacle or vehicle).
The growing field of biomimicry promises to supplant modern industry's energy-intensive models of... more The growing field of biomimicry promises to supplant modern industry's energy-intensive models of engineering with a mode of production more sensitively attuned to nonhuman life and matter. This article considers the revolutionary potentials created by biomimicry's more-than-human collectives and their limitations. Although biomimicry gestures toward a radical reontologization of and repoliticization of production, we argue that it remains subject to entrenched onto-political habits of social relations still dominated by capitalism and made part of a “terra economica” in which all is potentially put to profitable use and otherwise left to waste. With reference to Marx's notions of general industriousness and the general intellect, we find that this universalizing tendency renders myriad biological capacities and ways of knowing invisible. Drawing a comparison with the reworkings of life and knowledge explored in Shiebinger's work on nineteenth-century abortifacients, we show how biomimicry's more recent ontological remakings reproduce some forms of knowledge—and life—at the expense of others. Reflecting on biomimicry's inadvertent erasure of nonindustrial ways of knowing, we advance the notion of a pluripotent intellect as a framework that seeks to take responsibility for the cocuration of forms of life and forms of knowledge. We turn to Jackson's Land Institute as a grounded alternative for constructing more-than-human techno-social collaboratives.
The techno-scientific framework known as biomimicry ‘reverse-engineers’ animal life to develop te... more The techno-scientific framework known as biomimicry ‘reverse-engineers’ animal life to develop technologies and tactics that solve social and environmental problems. Its advocates have promised that it will spark a technological, environmental, and even social revolution. By viewing nature as a ‘mentor’ rather than a resource to be extracted, members of the biomimetic movement have also suggested that its practice will also overturn notions of human exceptionalism. This paper explores biomimicry’s 'revolutionary’ potential by analyzing the work of advocates and supporters of biomimicry in the context of posthuman theory. It further places this potential in conversation with the broader economic conditions of biomimetic production. It ultimately asks how, in spite of its promises, biomimetic productions have thus far only managed to reinvent and reinforce current circuits of economic and geopolitical power. In conclusion, the paper works toward highlighting – and embracing – the ambivalence of both biomimicry and so-called post-humanism as the first step in developing a politics adequate to new forms of
technological and biological production.
Books by Elizabeth Johnson
Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea, 2020
Blue Legalities is inspired by the emerging blue turn in social sciences and the humanities about... more Blue Legalities is inspired by the emerging blue turn in social sciences and the humanities about oceans and their inhabitants. But as important and compelling as this blue turn has been, it has yet to substantively and creatively take up questions of ocean law and governance. Specifically, increasing concerns around warming temperatures, increased pollution, sea level rise, ocean acidification, bio-harvesting, and deep-sea and sand mining are driving regulatory changes and raising questions about the nature of territory, sovereignty, and long-established claims in international law. The rapid technological and ecological transformations that have taken place over the past few decades are now altering the ways that the seas are governed, suggesting an urgent need for more critical attention to the laws of the seas, in their broadest and most pluralistic articulations. Blue Legalities offers such an intensified analysis, focusing on the ways in which our political frameworks and legal infrastructures have been made, contested, and are currently being remade in the oceans.
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Papers by Elizabeth Johnson
Keywords: encounter, event, new materialism, animal studies, ethics, militarization
technological and biological production.
Books by Elizabeth Johnson
Keywords: encounter, event, new materialism, animal studies, ethics, militarization
technological and biological production.