Examining the connections between geontologic and interrelational theories of place counter-mapping practices offers important methodological and pedagogic lessons in environmental sustainability e...

This article is an interview with Elizabeth Povinelli, by Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff. It addresses Povinelli’s approaches to ‘geontologies’ and ‘geontopower’, and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, her retheorization of power in the current conditions of late liberalism, and the situation of the inhuman within philosophical and anthropological economies. Povinelli describes a mode of power that she calls geontopower, which operates through the governance of Life and Nonlife. The interview is accompanied by a brief (...) contextualizing introduction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Queer Coal:Genealogies in/of the BloodKathryn YusoffIntroductionAn inhuman equationA genealogical account of coal ± a solar line of descentSolar -/- plant -/- coal ≤ plant minor/miner ≠ bloodlineFossil fuels are dark and patient and have a history that is in/of the blood. Fossil fuels are pockets of sunshine that have a solar line of descent. Fossil fuels are a chemical “blood knowledge” (Cixous 1991, 103) that coheres at the seam, (...) coal face, plant, and picket line.A genealogical account of coal in the Anthropocene must go in two directions: into the specificities of bodies, sites, and political formations in which coal comes to matter and through inhuman agency and its continuance notwithstanding the human (as if the human, like Bataille has claimed, is a roundabout for energy, a mere diversion of the forces of the cosmos). If the global claim for geologic force in the Anthropocene is realised through the liberation of vast standing stocks of fossil fuels by major powers, then slicing through Anthropocenic monumentality requires a deliberately minor/miner cut, which is made here through underground passages, sexual politics, and queer solidarities to explore the inter-implications of substances and subjects in coal mining; explicitly, mining is considered as an aesthetics, method, and epistemology that elaborates on an inhuman sociality of the blood; it is a sociality whose passages are specifically located within the 1984–85 miners’ strike in Britain. I focus on these minor (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) stories of solidarity and violence amidst the broader landscape of coal as a defining social materiality in political, judicial, and class powers. While Anthropocenic [End Page 203] discourses claim a global instantiation on behalf of humanity, the planet, and the species-being, this blood knowledge of coal can be considered as an instantiation or a fleshy reminder of the geontological forces of black rocks and their inheritances; what René Char called “its reality of earth, its matter-emotion” (Char quoted in Blanchot 1995, 108) in the corporeal impregnation of an incorporeal universe. In these messy personal-political subjectivities that are entangled with fossil fuels, something might be said about how to begin to apprehend the geontological coordinates of the Anthropocene and the possible forms of sociality that the inhuman enacts (and incites) in ways that eschew its universalising claims.In this process of joining coal to its somewhat unexpected sociopolitical formations—in terms of queer and minoritarian support for the British coal miners—I want to say something about a biopolitics that is subtended by geology (and this is why there is/and will be/blood). This is a biopolitics that moves away from the governance of life and death into a consideration of how the geosocial formations of fossil fuels constitute the very possibilities for certain types of social, sexual, political, and labor arrangements. To study the geosocial matrix as it pertains to both power and possibility is not to add the geologic (or inhuman) as a supplement to an already existing biopolitical conceptualization. Rather, it is to register that the geologic is a mode of material expression that is already active within these formations, yet often bracketed out, and its political potential as a dynamic power within socialities, underplayed. Such an understanding of the permeable materiality of fossil fuels might just bear on the reconceptualization of the Anthropocene as an epoch characterized by a differentiated corporeal geology of/in the blood, rather than as a universal stratigraphic trace in some future geologic record.Against the Promethean trust of the Anthropocene, I follow Hélène Cixous’s dream in The Book of Promethea of “writing fire in the fire” (Cixous 1991, 134); an account made in proximity to the desirous intersection of experience. Such a mode of feminist geophilosophy seeks out the form of the underground—the underground as a way of being or a “thing state” (Lispector 2014, 109)—closing the gap between writing and being written. What follows is a fragmented genealogy that begins in the general conditions of inhuman matter and ends up in the specifics of the British coal mining strike in the 1980s. First, some mining methodology and Anthropocene drill sites.Some Drill Sites... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Earth-O-Meter: Color Studies OchreElpitha Tsoutsounakis (bio)Ochre is always in a state of becoming—becoming color, becoming blood. Ancient, stellar death becoming current, terrestrial life; geological making. Design becomes epistemic tool beyond aesthetic representation.I join a body of academic and community scholars around the globe who think with Ochre from a variety of disciplines. How have we evolved through and with Ochre? What future does Ochre bring as art or technology? (...) How can Ochre remediate legacies of extraction? How can we return to the material from our current abstraction and commodification of color? How can we relate to terrestrial beings beyond anonymous resource? How can Ochre reveal plural realities of time and place through erased or forgotten narratives?This exploration has become the Field Studio Geontological Survey (FSGS), a design research collective assembling and extending Ochre dimensions to expand human/nonhuman inter-subjectivity. The collective is inspired by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which has surveyed, mapped, and catalogued the U.S.—and the world—extensively and completely, translating earth matter into anonymous “natural” resources. Through its manipulation of geopower, USGS mediates our human relation to the more-than-human. The Geontological Survey diverts USGS tactics—survey, map, catalog, archive—towards a future feminist Ochre imaginary though collective practice in field, community, and studio operations. Ochre bodies, pigments, swatches, and the maps and artifacts produced with/by them, are archived at UnknownProspect.org.Earth-O-Meter 231101 (see Fig. 1) is assembled with thirty-six Ochres from FSGS Folio 2301,1 all surveyed in field operations at Temple Mountain Mining District in the San Rafael Swell, Utah. The swell is a geological anomaly at the edge of the Colorado Plateau, an anticline pushed up 60 million years ago during the Laramide Orogeny. It measures roughly 64 [End Page 109] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Earth-O-Meter 231101: Ochre bodies from Folio 2301 and their respective swatches made with pigment in gum arabic and water. Full-scale color image and more on Ochres from Folio 2301 can be seen at unknownprospect.org.km wide and 121 km long. Erosion has revealed millions of years of geological time exposed to the desert sun along the reef edge where so-called Temple Mountain emerges from the southeast flank. An ancient marine environment left us the Chinle Formation in the Triassic Period—a formation marked by colorful instances of oxidation or reduction based on [End Page 110] fluctuating sea levels and water conditions. The meter begins and ends with Ochre that appears “green” (28.006) alongside Ochre that appears “violet” (18.003). They arrive next to one another just as they are found in the landscape: green nestled in violet, reminding us of lapping waters so long ago.Folio 2301 and the Earth-O-Meter are lines of flight for a material color theory, one in which color is not an abstract, perceived characteristic observed by physics, or a trick debating its place in or out of the mind. Color, or chroma, are material signs in the universe. Folio 2301 archives Ochre bodies from Temple Mountain alongside their respective pigments and the registry of community members who prepared them. The pigments were swatched to produce eight plates containing color studies or “palettes of place.” In Ochre, heat moves iron from yellow to red, water differentiates green from violet. Fluctuations of heat, time, pressure, electromagnetic field, and energy all play a part in the matter of color.While it is inspired by the cyanometer, a tool made to measure the blueness of the sky,2 the Earth-O-Meter is not a tool for measuring color, or earth-ness. It is a portal and a sign where the energy and intelligence of iron is flowing and evolving—all around us, before us, and after us. The cyanometer is made using Prussian blue, which is an oxidation of ferrous ferrocyanide salts. Prussian blue is known as the “first synthetic pigment.” By tinting Prussian blue to create the spectrum of the sky, technics modify iron to produce a divergent color in order to measure an ephemeral effect of atmosphere. The sky’s blueness is our experience of... (shrink)

Philosopher and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli is the author of several books criticising multicultural late liberalism in Australia and the United States. Over the past few years she has created the Karrabing Film Collective with Indigenous people from Northern Australia to produce short experimental narrations filmed using smart phones, partly improvised and inspired by what she calls the animist strategy. This article discusses how, in Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Povinelli articulates her figure of Animism, with two others, the Desert (...) and the Virus, so as to portray the projections of the life and death of humanity within our current geological era that some call or denounce as the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Resumo: O artigo desdobra algumas implicações decorrentes de uma análise ficcional em torno das artes neoliberais de governo. Nessa direção, articula os pressupostos das teorias biopolíticas da formação humana agenciadas pela entrada no Antropoceno, a fim de pensar a desabilitação do que Elizabeth Povinelli chama de imaginário do carbono e seus processos de marcação, distinção e desqualificação ontológica. Trata-se, portanto, de um ensaio especulativo produzido em torno do diagnóstico de um desmoronamento catastrófico da distinção fundamental da episteme moderna, a distinção (...) entre as ordens cosmológica e antropológica, sugerindo uma cartografia precária dos corpos ingovernáveis ancorada em uma sutil arte política: a arte de segurar o céu pelas diferenças. Essa arte almeja atravessar o abismo que historicamente separou um povo com filosofia em oposição aos povos com mito, construindo pontes que incitem a Filosofia da educação e seus praticantes a se situarem na equivocidade dos mundos e aí habitar. Palavras-chave: Antropoceno. Geontologia. Cartografias da diferença. Formação humana. Altered bodies, ungovernable bodies: ethical-aesthetic cartographies to hold the sky through diferences: The article unfolds some implications arising from a fictional analysis around the neoliberal arts of government. In this sense, it articulates the presuppositions of the biopolitical theories of human formation that were introduced by the entry into the Anthropocene, in order to think about the disabling of what Elizabeth Povinelli calls the carbon imaginary and its processes of marking, distinction and ontological disqualification. The argument is a speculative essay produced around the diagnosis of a catastrophic collapse of the fundamental distinction of modern episteme, suggesting a precarious cartography of ungovernable bodies anchored in a subtle political art: art of holding the sky through the differences. This art aims to bridge the chasm that has historically separated a people with philosophy as opposed to people with myth, building bridges that incite the Philosophy of education and its practitioners to lie in the equivocity of worlds and dwell there. Keywords: Anthropocene. Geontology. Cartographies of the difference. Human formation. Cuerpos alterados, cuerpos ingobernables: cartografías ético-estéticas para sostener el cielo a través de las diferencias Resumen: El artículo desarrolla un análisis sobre las artes neoliberales del gobierno. En este sentido, refleja las presuposiciones de las teorías biopolíticas de la formación humana frente a la entrada al Antropoceno, a fin de pensar la desactivación de lo que Elizabeth Povinelli llama el imaginario del carbono y sus procesos de distinción y descalificación ontológica. Es, por lo tanto, un ensayo especulativo producido en torno al diagnóstico de un colapso catastrófico de la distinción fundamental de la episteme moderna, sugiriendo una cartografía de cuerpos ingobernables anclados en un sutil arte político: la arte de sostener el cielo a través de las diferencias. Esta arte tiene como objetivo cerrar el abismo que ha dividido un pueblo con filosofía y un pubelo con mitos, construyendo puentes que inciten a la Filosofía de la educación y a sus practicantes a pararse en la ambigüedad de los mundos y habitar allí. Palabras clave: Antropoceno. Geontología. Cartografías de la diferencia. Formación humana. (shrink)