Post-anthropocentric Dwelling in the City of (Not Only) Mushrooms

Filozofija i društvo, 2024

By examining debates on the Anthropocene era ignited by new materialist and posthumanist scholarship, this paper aims to discern how these perspectives can reframe the human-nature nexus. It also considers how various "developmentalist" approaches might assume the role traditionally held by the concept of human nature. The first section highlights concerns raised by posthumanist and neomaterialist scholars about the marginalized status of "nature", life, and biology within dominant constructivist viewpoints. A central argument posits that notions like "denaturalization" and biopolitics amplify societal dominance over nature, pushing social theory towards an anthropocentric and potentially biologically indeterminate stance. Contrasting this, the second section delves into modern interpretations of the planet in social theory, inspired by the emergence of the Anthropocene. This lens reveals a dynamic, co-constitutive relationship, tilting less towards the unilateral commands of "nature" and more towards understanding the evolution of human life and societal structures within Earth's expansive temporal and spatial realms. The third section further unpacks these developmental ideas by juxtaposing the theories of Bruno Latour and Tim Ingold. The paper contends that both approaches endeavor to illuminate the complex processes underpinning the evolution of life forms, underscoring the significance of culture. In conclusion, the intricate postnatural landscape of the Anthropocene necessitates a more integrated human-nature relationship. This calls for not only discarding dehumanizing facets of human nature, but also fostering a renewed sensibility-a deeper form of humanizing that acknowledges and celebrates our shared existence with other species and entities.

L. Valera and J. C. Castilla (eds.), Global Changes, Ethics of Science and Technology, 2020

The Anthropocene-term proposed by the scientific community for the current geological epoch to signal humans as a leading geological force in earth history-has open intense debates across the sciences and humanities, in that the traditional gap between natural and social phenomena, occurring respectively at slow and fast temporal rates, have been questioned. Despite the enthusiasm, an irre-solvable conceptual limitation marks the term. Irrespective of the very heterogene-ity-human and other-than-human-that is currently at risk in this new epoch, the term often refers to a universal male human, sitting above nature. Humans are to be found simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, which risks diluting environmental responsiveness. This global dilemma resonates with the epistemic distance on which knowledge of the Anthropocene is constituted, which requires achieving a cosmic view on earth at the expense of ecological intimacy. Such cosmic view resonates, in turn, with the place the built environment affords humans, as ex-habitants of the earth. Yet, life-human or any other-is not lived on the exterior of a globe but in the Earth, nurtured by sensory attunements to the material transformations of an environment in constant becoming. Acknowledging the immanence of life, this chapter argues, requires a redefinition of what it means to be human. It is through this immanence that environmental responsiveness remains possible in a world in crisis. The chapter concludes by distinguishing responsibility from responsivity, two contrasting modes of engaging with environmental change, defined respectively as a retrospective act resulting from the achievement of epistemic distance and a forward-looking capacity related to knowing intimately the ongoing transformations of the environment.

Sound end Environment: Contemporary Approaches to Sonic Ecology in Art / Zvuk a prostředí: Současné přístupy ke zvukové ekologii , 2020

The Western concept of nature draws heavily on the tradition of landscape painting and the modern organization of visuality in the arts and sciences, which rests on the distinction between the observing subject and the world that unfolds before his eyes. 3 In the Western tradition, man, the anthropos, is most commonly defined by his di erence-in degree, quality, or status-from nature and from that which is non-human. Acoustic ecology has attempted to refigure the default mode of the modern scientific 1 This paper was written in the framework of the research project The Second Sense: Sound, Hearing and Nature in the Czech Modernity (-Y), funded by the The Czech Science Foundation.

The purpose of this article is to present a brief analysis of the book “The Posthuman” by R. Braidotti (2013) to reconsider the long view of humanity in the Anthropocene, to view humans and nature. Our perception of the future of the planet and humanity is a significant political and social issue. Yet the general flow of an unequivocal debate for a fully human relationship with the earth is still greatly hindered. Until such a conflict becomes clear, it is unlikely that we will begin to reign in environmental change because we are creatures of topographic energy who have created Anthropocene. We need to consider whether it is possible to bring about social change with an alternative view of what our identity is, what it was, and what could upset the existing perception of human’s relationship with nature. A rational sense of sustainable and developmental substance that manages human culture within a wider world is an important extens2ion to the totality of political activity.

2009

The human-nonhuman animal boundary marks the interchange between human and animal, culture and nature, the social and the natural. This powerfully symbolic site has traditionally been structured via religion-based ideas of humanity's origins, that in the West have been used to maintain a strictly impermeable boundary: humans, created in God's own image and blessed with a soul on one side, on the other the senseless, soulless beast. This image is one which has come under threat from work in multiples branches of the natural and social sciences; in the humanities; and from animal rights activists and other social movements. Such culturally contested territory makes fertile ground for the study of interactions between science and popular culture, framed via Gieryn's concept of 'boundary-work' (1983), and Bowker & Star's sociology of classification .

Berlin: Peter Lang, 2023

2015

Nature is one of those ever-present yet somewhat uncomfortable words that structure our everyday lives. In the twenty-first century it is becoming increasingly apparent that whether we consciously address it or not, human cultures and societies are entangled with nature and vice versa. Entanglement is a useful concept here, insofar as unlike terms such as interconnection, it suggests that these terms cannot be considered in isolation from one another. Recognition of this state of affairs has given rise to a new language of the Anthropocene: a new era of history that recognises the ability of humans to intervene and alter the non-human world. However, even as recognition of climate change and man-made extinction become commonplace, and concepts such as sustainability and resilience enter into the conversations of state and corporate actors, it remains unclear how those ideas might speak to our everyday practices and behaviour. In this symposium, we seek to explore what it might mean to conceive of this environmental entanglement in terms of ‘working with nature.’ Are there more or less preferable ways of working with nature? What forms might this work take and how do we distinguish between them? Is the idea of ‘nature’ even sufficient to approach such questions, or do we need to reconsider such a question in terms of environments, ecologies or the broad notion of the non-human world? With a mind to bringing together a range of contributors and stake-holders from across the tertiary sector and the wider community, this symposium seeks to examine how such questions might help us understand and assess the different ways in which humans transform, engage and interact with the nonhuman world. On a global scale, we are witnessing an increasing concern with the different ways in which human behaviour works to shape nature. From climate change to drives towards sustainable communities and ongoing concerns with waste and pollution, the interaction between human and non-human worlds looks set to be a central concern of the twenty-first century. Such concerns have particular resonance in Aotearoa-New Zealand, where there is a long history of direct and directed human interaction with nature: from the introduction of flora and fauna by European colonists, to contemporary efforts to conserve and re-establish threatened ecosystems and, just as importantly, to the role of farming and other primary industries as cornerstones of the national economy and culture. We welcome submissions that engage with human-non-human interactions in any number of theoretical, scientific, ecological, sociological, anthropological, textual, historical, political, ethical, or other methods. We would especially like to encourage submissions from artists and activists whose practices converge with notions of the environment and nature.

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

The era of human impact throughout the Earth’s biosphere since the Industrial Revolution that has recently been named the Anthropocene poses many challenges to the humanities, particularly in terms of human and non-human agency. Using diverse examples from literature, travel reflections, and science that document a wide range of agencies beyond the human including landscape, ice, weather, volcanic energy or gastropods, and insects, this essay seeks to formulate a broader sense of agency. All of our examples probe new kinds of relationships between humans and nature. By configuring a close interconnection and interdependence between these entities, the Anthropocene discourse defines such relationships anew. On the one hand, our examples highlight the negative effects of anthropocentric control and supremacy over nature, but on the other, they depict ambivalent positions ranging from surrender and ecstasy to menace and demise that go hand in hand with the acknowledgment of non-human a...

In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as ‘great stone book of nature’, and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. Debates about the geological status of the Anthropocene focus on the identification of stratigraphic ‘signals’ that might be being laid down for the geologist-to-come, but I suggest that marking the base of the Anthropocene layer is not a merely technical task but one which is entangled with questions about the human — about the Anthropos of the Anthropocene. Who would be the ‘onomatophore’ of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of Anthropos? I consider a number of ways of characterising the geological force of the Anthropocene – Homo faber, Homo consumens and Homo gubernans. But I then situate this dispersal of the Anthropos into ‘syntypes’ against the background of a more general dispersal of ‘man’ that is occasioned when human meets geology. I do this by bringing into dialogue two works: Foucault’s Order of Things, and Derrida’s Of Grammatology, focusing on their passages about the end of ‘man’ and the end of ‘the book’ respectively. I suggest the becoming geological of the human in the Anthropocene is both the end of the great stone book of nature and the Aufhebung of ‘man’ —both his apotheosis and his eclipse.

Routledge, 2020

(From book cover): This ground-breaking book critically extends the psychological project, seeking to investigate the relations between human and more-than-human worlds against the backdrop of the Anthropocene by emphasising the significance of encounter, interaction and relationships. Interdisciplinary environmental theorist Matthew Adams draws inspiration from a wealth of ideas emerging in human–animal studies, anthrozoology, multi-species ethnography and posthumanism, offering a framing of collective anthropogenic ecological crises to provocatively argue that the Anthropocene is also an invitation – to become conscious of the ways in which human and nonhuman are inextricably connected. Through a series of strange encounters between human and nonhuman worlds, Adams argues for the importance of cultivating attentiveness to the specific and situated ways in which the fates of multiple species are bound together in the Anthropocene. Throughout the book this argument is put into practice, incorporating everything from Pavlov’s dogs, broiler chickens, urban trees, grazing sheep and beached whales, to argue that the Anthropocene can be good to think with, conducive to a seeing ourselves and our place in the world with a renewed sense of connection, responsibility and love. Building on developments in feminist and social theory, anthropology, ecopsychology, environmental psychology, (post)humanities, psychoanalysis and phenomenology, this is fascinating reading for academics and students in the field of critical psychology, environmental psychology, and human–animal studies.