CONTROL: the extractive ecology of corn monoculture

This article tells the history of the industrial and biotechnological development of large-scale corn agriculture, from a new materialist perspective. Addressing the large-scale economy of industrial food production as a form of more-than-human configuration, it demonstrates how corn has been made into a quintessential commodity and factor of production for a consumption-based economy. Set within discourses around the climate crisis, this account critically assesses the Anthropocene and its advocacy for human accountability in regards to the exploitation of nonhuman matters. I ask: who is the Anthropos? How does it/he/she meet with its domesticated subjects, or rather makes them into domesticable materials? Telling the history of corn monoculture from a new materialist standpoint exposes this industry’s distribution of agency, power and control across a diversity of human and nonhuman actors. This is at the centre of this article’s three sections: (1) an argument for inscribing extractivism within new materialist literature, (2) an account of the industrialization of corn monoculture, exposing the industry’s main mechanisms and economic endeavours, as well as its ramifications with a biopolitics of invasion and (3) the biotechnological development of the industry and its shifts from a biopolitics of vegetal matter to an informational extractivism and a necropolitics of killable life. Thus I argue that if the industry of corn monoculture belongs to a broader network of detrimental industries characteristic of the Anthropocene, the geological Anthropos is not to be understood as synonymous with the human species, but as a very restrictive ecology of humans and nonhumans, including corporate, industrial, technoscientific and extractive actors. As such, the article emphasizes the moral necessity of rupturing with the narrative of the Anthropocene, a discourse better suited for supporting existing mechanisms of domination and exploitation constitutive of the economy of climate change.     

Scrambled systems: the (im)mobilities of ‘storm Desmond’

This article examines a 3-day blackout, triggered by a ‘1-in-100-year’ rainfall event. Storms and floods account for almost three-quarters of weather-related disasters, and are typically accompanied by cascading infrastructure failures, which pattern and amplify their effects in highly significant ways. Such disruptions reveal aspects of everyday life that ordinarily remain obscure, including capacities for resilience embodied in people, cities and infrastructure. The article proposes that disruption events be understood in terms of ‘scrambles’, as they involve abrupt demobilisation and remobilisation of a range of people and materials. The article firstly examines the astonishing capacity for failure latent in ‘pervasively powered’ arrangements, as well as the many ways in which people and things were ‘scrambled’ in response. The article then proceeds to explore the ways in which vulnerabilities result in part from mobilisation in response to previous disruption events, before examining the ‘circuits’ that link far-flung places in mobile disaster geographies, global patterns of electricity dependence, the rise of data overload in the ‘cloud’ to carbon overload in the atmosphere. The article concludes by presenting further evidence in support of the thesis that disruptions and disasters are part of a ‘new normal’, and what this means for prevailing sociotechnical arrangements reliant on ‘sunk’ infrastructure.     

全球变暖与历史学发展的四个论题

气候变化科学对以人类为中心的人文主义史学具有重要影响。科学家关于气候变化的观点不仅挑战了人类支撑历史学这门学科的观念,而且挑战了后殖民与后帝国时代历史学家在过去20年来,回应战后非殖民地化与全球化势态时所运用的分析策略。现在的历史知识构建以人文主义史学关于人类历史与自然史古老区分的失效为历史学科的大前提,将人类视为一种地质力量的人类世观念严格限定了人文主义史学,要求资本主义历史与地球和人类进化的更大尺度的历史进行对话。有记载的历史与深层历史进行这种对话是一个探索历史理解界限的过程。     

Of other movements: nonhuman mobility in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This article has two broad aims. The first is to treat and write of nonhuman animals and their lives, deaths, and suffering at the hands of humans and human infrastructure as important to theory, politics, and policy. The second is to explore how social theory can think creatively about specific examples in which nonhuman animals are affected by and need more from human infrastructures – especially those built for human mobility. These two broad aims will be narrowed to consider nonhuman animal deaths upon roads, focused on the potential for enriching human and nonhuman animal life through creative thinking, ethically minded road design, and the acknowledgement of shared vulnerability. In pursuit of these aims it will necessarily focus attention on the experience of human mobility on nonhuman animals, forging an approach that keeps an ethics of entanglement and care at the forefront.     

World revolution or socialism,community by community,in the Anthropocene?

ABSTRACT

The idea of a Fifth International has been around for some time and the historical record is not encouraging. We have all been wrestling with the contradictions the Left faces. The transnational capitalist class has taken setbacks in its stride, while the Left flounders almost everywhere. No communist revolution has resulted in the capture of power by the working class. Now we are all confronted by a new, rapidly unfolding ecological crisis, the Anthropocene. I argue that the most effective response is to exit rather than attempt to overthrow capitalism and the hierarchical state by international revolution. Socialists in positions of authority in state institutions and capitalist enterprises can facilitate this process by enacting legislation that helps people to transition to new smaller-scale non-statist social units, such as producer-consumer co-operatives producing their own food and other essential services over time. Mobilizing the ideas of degrowth, anarching, and consumer-producer cooperatives in the digital age, I argue that under Anthropocene conditions democratic socialism is best constructed from the bottom up, community by community, networked in mutually nurturing relationships.     

Off-centring empire in the Anthropocene: towards multispecies intimacies and nonhuman agents of survival

ABSTRACT

This paper examines colonial legacies in human-nonhuman relations to off-centre empire in the Anthropocene. Imperial methods of collecting, preserving and displaying nature profoundly shaped species perception, which in turn affected the scientific attention and ecological relevance a species was granted. In particular, I reflect on the category of invasibility to show how empire sanctioned the mobility of specific population groups and animal species as border-crossing. This further shows how speciesist logics served to extend, maintain and legitimize imperial power. This analysis is relevant in the Anthropocene where invasibility is mobilised to police movement in the context of increased human and nonhuman migration. Further, I discuss how invasibility is considered as one of main threats for biodiversity, which may misdirect conservation efforts. Overall, the article examines the potential in human-nonhuman encounters to challenge colonial legacies. Based on an ethnographic example of multispecies homemaking with species considered invasive in (hetero)normative modes of intimacy and domesticity, I argue that colonial legacies of racialized, gendered and speciesist hierarchies can be disturbed by human-nonhuman relations of companionship, care and interdependence. Finally, I scale-up the analysis to the landscape, by tracing the transformation of a former imperial wasteland in Vienna’s peripheral South from being perceived as economically and aesthetically worthless to a natural monument. Attending to multispecies entanglements is key here to understand the transformative process that led to the recovery of this wasteland. Here I off-centre empire by challenging anthropocentric narrations of how landscape transforms in favour of a narration that re-centres nonhuman agency. I argue that stories of wasteland recovery guided by nonhuman animals are crucial due to the increase in industrial wasteland and environmental degradation in the Anthropocene.     

Remembering Lucky Dragon,re-membering Bikini: worlding the Anthropocene through transpacific nuclear modernity

This paper examines two recent Godzilla-themed cultural artefacts that highlight the entanglement between nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy: first, the 60th anniversary Godzilla exhibit at the Tokyo Metropolitan Daigo Fukuryū Maru Exhibition Hall; second, the 2014 American Godzilla directed by Gareth Edwards. This paper frames these two distinctive post-Fukushima cultural texts as memory work that mediates post-WWII genealogies of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power as constitutive elements of U.S. militarism and transpacific technological modernity. Specifically, this paper foregrounds how these two recent cultural texts, produced at different Pacific shores, bring the complexity of the often-absented Pacific back into focus. By enacting what Rob Wilson and Chris Connery call ‘worlding’ to make sense of divergent representations of the tragic Lucky Dragon/Bikini incident that decidedly informed the creation of the original Japanese Gojira [1954. Film. Directed by Honda Ishiro. Japan: Toho Co., Ltd.], this paper analyses geopolitical figurations of the Pacific and its peoples in both the specific context of this tragic incident and the broader formation of transpacific nuclear modernity. In so doing, this paper unravels the ways in which these divergent representations grapple with nuclear modernity’s reordering of necropolitics and biopolitics and its effects: specifically, the ways in which the renarration of death-making nuclear technology as a technology of good life conveniently erases the victims of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, and nuclear waste that the reproduction of U.S. nuclearism depends on and continues to produce.     

Forum 3: amphibious architecture beyond the levee

ABSTRACT

According to many critical theorists, the Anthropocene signals the necessity for a critical framework rooted in complex systems entanglement, antihumanism, and diminished possibilities. Exemplary of this approach, Bruno Latour argues that the Anthropocene equals the end of human mobility in the sense of movement from one’s given conditions to a ‘better’ or somehow improved world. Instead, humans must understand that they are ‘earthbound.’ While critical theorists like Latour proclaim ‘our’ unpreparedness for terrestrial existence, counseling diminished expectations and diminished mobility – for many outside of academia’s hallowed halls, the Anthropocene and its ‘back loop’ possibilities look very different. Exploring the use of amphibious architecture in the working-class fishing community of Old River Landing, Louisiana, in contrast to Latour and other Anthropocene thinkers, I argue that such experiments are a testament to how diverse people operate; without transcendents and in ways quite different from models forwarded by critical theorists or resilience experts. Rather than a life enchained to the earth or resilience conceived as riding it out among the ruins, Old River Landing like many other back loop experiments offers a story of people who love the part of earth they inhabit, and a mobility and adaptability critical theorists argue is no longer possible. Rather than accepting or celebrating entanglement in the given order of things as is – flooding = moving = dependence – such experiments entail a way of inhabiting the Earth founded in confident flight as much as gravity, offering a view of another kind of mobility in and on Earth.     

Looking forward,looking back: animating magic,modernity and the African city-future in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

Lagos has recently become the focus of much scholarly interest, with a strong emphasis placed on the city as crucible of global innovation. Rem Koolhaas, in his well-known formulation of Lagos has, for example, memorably theorised the city as an African megalopolis “at the forefront of globalising modernity.” Contemporary African artists have similarly begun, in recent years, to place Africa at the vanguard of planetary discourse, producing a new wave of cultural output that signals the continent as a site from which to imagine the emergence of future worlds. Salient to this growing body of work are the writings of Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, who writes in the register of “African science fiction.” This article takes Lagos as its focus by considering its futuristic representation in Okorafor’s novel Lagoon (2014). Drawing on John and Jean Comaroff’s theories of the city “as future lab to be learned from,” I suggest that it is from Okorafor’s account of Lagos, infused with a series of connections between magic and modern, city and sea, global and local, human and nonhuman, that the novel imagines the potential birthing of a new world order. Given the vital presence of nonhuman interlocutors in Okorafor’s text, this article concludes by arguing that Lagoon merits consideration within the growing field of Anthropocenic studies.