Im/mortality and In/finitude in the Anthropocene: Perspectives from the Environmental Humanities
2-4 December 2014, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Organised by: Thom van Dooren & Michelle Bastian
NB: THE SPECIAL ISSUE OF ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY ARISING FROM THIS WORKSHOP IS NOW AVAILABLE
While the fear of capricious immortals living high atop Mount Olympus may have waned, the current age of the Anthropocene appears to have brought with it insistent demands for us mere mortals to engage with unpredictable and dangerous beings that wield power over life itself. Plastics, radioactive waste, fossil fuels and species extinctions have interpellated us into unfathomably vast futures and deep pasts, with their effects promising to circulate through air, water, rock and flesh for untold millions of years. Human time, geological time and a host of other temporal frames and possibilities confront each other in new ways, with little understanding on our part of how to find calibrations that might allow a reconciliation between them (Hatley; Chakrabarty; Bastian; Metcalf and van Dooren).
One consequence is that relationships between life and death, creation and decay have become uncanny; no longer entailing what was once taken for granted. The unravelling of inter-generational and inter-species relationships in the current mass extinction event shifts death from being a partner to life toward the ‘double death’ that amplifies mortality until it overruns life altogether (Rose). While at the same time, the finitude of acts of creation, evoked so clearly in Shelley’s Ozymandias, is no longer as certain as it might once have been. Instead, in specific, but crucial contexts, it is not the dissipation and silencing of our creative and technical works that is feared, but the threat that they might circulate endlessly (Masco; Morton).
The aim of our symposium, then, was to explore the shifting relationships between time, mortality and finitude in the context of the Anthropocene. Over three days we heard from an amazing array of speakers, created our own DIY exhibit, tried out Open Space and generally had a lovely time courtesy of our hosts at KTH.
To find out more about what we got up to, see our event programme (pdf) and our full list of paper abstracts. Attendee Hugo Reinert also curated an illuminating collection of tweets on storify [NB the Storify service is no longer available].
While the fear of capricious immortals living high atop Mount Olympus may have waned, the current age of the Anthropocene appears to have brought with it insistent demands for us mere mortals to engage with unpredictable and dangerous beings that wield power over life itself. Plastics, radioactive waste, fossil fuels and species extinctions have interpellated us into unfathomably vast futures and deep pasts, with their effects promising to circulate through air, water, rock and flesh for untold millions of years. Human time, geological time and a host of other temporal frames and possibilities confront each other in new ways, with little understanding on our part of how to find calibrations that might allow a reconciliation between them (Hatley; Chakrabarty; Bastian; Metcalf and van Dooren).
One consequence is that relationships between life and death, creation and decay have become uncanny; no longer entailing what was once taken for granted. The unravelling of inter-generational and inter-species relationships in the current mass extinction event shifts death from being a partner to life toward the ‘double death’ that amplifies mortality until it overruns life altogether (Rose). While at the same time, the finitude of acts of creation, evoked so clearly in Shelley’s Ozymandias, is no longer as certain as it might once have been. Instead, in specific, but crucial contexts, it is not the dissipation and silencing of our creative and technical works that is feared, but the threat that they might circulate endlessly (Masco; Morton).
The aim of our symposium, then, was to explore the shifting relationships between time, mortality and finitude in the context of the Anthropocene. Over three days we heard from an amazing array of speakers, created our own DIY exhibit, tried out Open Space and generally had a lovely time courtesy of our hosts at KTH.
To find out more about what we got up to, see our event programme (pdf) and our full list of paper abstracts. Attendee Hugo Reinert also curated an illuminating collection of tweets on storify [NB the Storify service is no longer available].
Presentations
Click on the links below to listen to the audio
Conference Welcome
Keynotes:
Papers:
Panel 1 – Extinction
Panel 2 – Temporal Worlds
Panel 3 – The living, the dead, and …
Panel 5 – Cohabitation
Panel 6 – Unsettling Times
Panel 7 – After Lives
Conference Welcome
Keynotes:
- Joe Masco (Chicago) - The Six Extinctions: Visualizing Planetary Ecological Crisis Today
- Vinciane Despret (Liège) and Michel Meuret (INRA, Montpellier) - Cosmo-ecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet
- Bronislaw Szerszynski (Lancaster) - The Martian Book of the Dead
- Sverker Sörlin (KTH) - Ontologies of Planetary Ephemera: Life Cycles and Synchronicities of the Cryo-sphere
Papers:
Panel 1 – Extinction
- Susan McHugh - Im/mortal Perspectives: The “Useful Dead” in Contemporary Fiction
- Michelle Bastian - Tagging turtles and chasing ghosts: exploring the times and spaces of extinctions
- Audra Mitchell - No Promises: Mass Extinction, Security and Intervention in the Anthropocene
Panel 2 – Temporal Worlds
- Sabine Höhler - From Life to Life Support: Ecotechnological Futures in Space
- Sara Penrhyn Jones - Poetics of place and trickeries of time: the creative challenges of evoking 'the anthropocene'
- Elaine Gan - Shattering Seeds: Temporalities of Miracle Rice
Panel 3 – The living, the dead, and …
- Heather Davis - Life and Death in the Plastisphere
- Monika Bakke - Wisdom of the rocks: Art and the organic after a geologic turn
- Elizabeth Johnson - Unsettling Life/Death: Living with and as jellyfish
- David Farrier - Disaster's Gift: Anthropocene and Capitalocene temporalities in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’
- Astrida Neimanis - Deep Time as an Archive of Feeling (Queering the Anthropocene)
- Libby Robin and Dag Avango - Placing the Anthropocene
Panel 5 – Cohabitation
- Jeffrey Bussolini - Interfaces of Felidae and Extinction: 'Victim' and 'Cause'
- Thom van Dooren - The Unwelcome Crows: Hospitality in the Anthropocene
- Astrid Schrader - On time, finitude and infinite compassion: How do we begin to care?
Panel 6 – Unsettling Times
- Stefan Skrimshire - Is loss a precondition for activism? Critiquing mourning / melancholia distinctions in the context of ecological irreversibility.
- Owain Jones - Towards a reading of temporal ecology and differentiated natural temporalities (durations, rhythms, tempos) in the narrative timescapes of modernity
- Emily Thew - De-Extinction and Melancholia: Narcissistic Attachments
Panel 7 – After Lives
- Dolly Jørgensen - Endlings, endings, and new beginnings
- Stephanie S. Turner - Anthropogenesis: Rescue Genetics in the Anthropocene
- Shane McCorristine and Bill Adams - Ghost Species
