Peut-on changer d’échelle sans changer de nature? Sans doute quantité de phénomènes sont altérés quand on étend leur domaine d’exercice : il y a plus qu’une différence de taille entre un jardin de quelques mètres carrés et un alignement de serres sur plusieurs hectares. La modernité coloniale s’est distinguée par cette sorte de foi en la « scalabilité » de la production. Son modèle est la plantation esclavagiste : un système fondé sur l’exploitation de vivants humains et non-humains qu’on coupe (...) de leur racine et de leur environnement natif. La logique des « économies d’échelle », la logique de l’expansion emprunte son idéologie à cette histoire et c’est pourquoi il est nécessaire de lui opposer un antidote : la description et l’invention de mondes non-scalables, où les agents ne sont pas interchangeables, où les réseaux de dépendance sont locaux, situés, et mutuellement transformateurs pour ceux qui y vivent et ceux qui en bénéficient. (shrink)

Prologue: autumn aroma -- What's left? -- Arts of noticing -- Contamination as collaboration -- Some problems with scale -- Interlude: smelling -- After progress : salvage accumulation -- Working the edge "freedom" -- Open ticket, Oregon -- War stories -- What happened to the state? : two kinds of Asian Americans in translation -- Between the dollar and the yen -- From gifts to commodities and back -- Salvage rhythms : business in disturbance -- Interlude: tracking -- Disturbed beginnings (...) : unintentional design -- The life of the forest : coming up among pines -- History -- Resurgence -- Serendipity -- Ruin in gaps and patches -- In science as translation -- Flying spores -- Interlude: dancing -- In the middle of things -- Matsutake crusaders -- Ordinary assets -- Anti-ending : some people I met along the way -- Spore trail: the further adventures of a mushroom -- Notes -- Index. (shrink)

How might Strathernian comparison extend anthropology beyond human exceptionalism? This essay explores how a fungal spore might guide attention to more-than-human nature. The exercise allows us to reflect on knowledge tools we use for understanding human as well as nonhuman social relations.

Because computers zoom across magnifications, it is easy to conclude that both knowledge and things exist by nature in precision-nested scales. The technical term is “scalable,” the ability to expand without distorting the framework. But it takes hard work to make knowledge and things scalable, and this article shows that ignoring nonscalable effects is a bad idea. People stumbled on scalable projects through the same historical contingencies that such projects set out to deny. They cobbled together ways to make things (...) and data self-contained and static, and thus amenable to expansion. In European New World plantations, the natives were wiped out; coerced and alienated plants and workers came to substitute for them. Profits were made because extermination and slavery could be discounted from the books. Such historically indeterminate encounters formed models for later projects of scalability. This essay explores scalability projects from the perspective of an emergent “nonscalability theory” that pays attention to the mounting pile of ruins that scalability leaves behind. The article concludes that, if the world is still diverse and dynamic, it is because scalability never fulfills its own promises. (shrink)

In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing explains how bare land is formed. Capitalism produces ‘ruins’ by stripping living beings of the capacity to form their own ecological relations, a necessary condition for the reproduction of life. Contemporary capitalism alienates living beings from ecological relations, i.e. capitalism generates “the ability to stand alone, as if the entanglements of living did not matter. Through alienation, people and (...) things become mobile assets; they can be removed from their lifeworlds in distance-defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds, elsewhere” (Tsing 2021, 5). Cutting the threads of the web of life through capitalist alienation, however, produces bare land as a side effect, infertile waste deprived of the means to reproduce itself without capitalist support. Alienation is the deracination of living beings from their lifeworld, transforming them into passive cogs for capitalist accumulation. However, Tsing upholds matsutake mushrooms, rare fungi popular among Japa- nese foodies, as exemplars of the resilience of ecological relations. Even amidst ruins, matsutakes successfully form beneficial relations with other living beings, like pine trees, other fungi and human beings. The insistent capacity to regenerate ecological relations is the ineluctable means of reproduction for the matsutake mushroom. Even at the end of the world, the matsutake persists by perpetually co-producing new lifeworlds for itself and fellow living beings (see also Haraway 2016). I claim that Tsing’s approach to capitalist alienation is descriptively convinc- ing but lacks the affective force for ecological class consciousness. Tsing surveys the web of life from the perspective of living beings quite distant from humankind, articulating a theoretical diagnosis rather than a political exhortation. On an affective level, it is challenging to generate ecological class consciousness among the (presumably) human readers of my chapter if they are presented with only the biographies of mushrooms growing far beyond my home. As Chantal Mouffe (2018, 72) argues, the construction of an emphatically political identity requires an appeal to the affects, like hope, indignation or compassion. Latour and Schultz also stress that ecological politics currently suffers from an affective misalignment, with people failing to identify with the fate of their increasingly inhospitable environments (2022, 47). Why would European humans care about these unknown fungi? The reproduction of our CO2-intensive livelihoods largely depends on the emission of bare land elsewhere, so in the short run, we stand to benefit more from putting our heads in the sand. I employ Chakrabarty’s (2021) suggestion of grounding post-humanist politics first in strategic anthropocentrism to subsequently push for a post-humanist expansion of our human understanding. One must first feel personally interpellated by the crisis of the global means of reproduction before one can grasp the need for an ecological class politics beyond human confines. I turn to John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath as a kindred spirit with more mobilising potential. Steinbeck tells the story of a family of impoverished farmers from Oklahoma, the Joads, travelling to California in pursuit of a better life, yet only encountering more poverty, exploitation and anti-immigrant racism. Steinbeck describes in detail the environmental and social devastation, but he focuses on the commodified labour power of migrant farmers rather than commodified mushrooms. Steinbeck’s main characters are also uprooted from their entangled histories in the land and community of rural Oklahoma, but they present a more familiar face of the ecological class deprived of the means of reproduction. Steinbeck’s outcry against alienation-as-deracination is clear, but the shift in perspective facilitates the empathetic outrage required for building ecological class consciousness. Steinbeck’s strategic anthropocentrism helps human readers understand why alienation-as-deracination is a concern. (shrink)

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Edited By Tsing Anna Lowenhaupt, Swanson Heather Anne, Gan Elaine, Bubandt Nils.

Propõe-se protocolo de utilização pedagógica de mídias e cultura popular para desenvolver conhecimentos sobre direito e suas imbricações com os conceitos de biopoder e biopolítica. As práticas apresentadas têm por público alvo crianças, adolescentes e adultos, sendo escolhidas três obras, cada uma delas correspondente a uma das diferentes faixas etárias. Para a elaboração do presente texto, utilizou-se de fundamentação teórica jurídica e dos estudos foucaultianos, assim como estudo empírico das obras audiovisuais.

Abstract:This assessment of the field explores a confluence of feminist thinking about the 20th-century Great Acceleration in the United States: post-World-War II projects of modernization made the security of white nuclear families global models of well-being, while banishing the work of their securitization to non-white sacrifice zones—which eventually came to encompass most of the earth. “Anthropocene” is thus a project of making race and gender as much as making capital. The essay continues into feminist arguments for limiting the Anthropocene to (...) maintain spaces of more-than-human livability. We end with work of emerging scholars. (shrink)

An invitation. A puzzle. A provocation to engage with unknown potentialities. At first encounter, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet as a physical artifact is deliberately indeterminate. Its format: a topsy-turvy/front-to-back/backto-front arrangement, disrupts any notions of a point of entry, throwing the reader back on themselves to decide how to proceed, how far to apply learned templates of conventionality, or how far to take the opportunity to pursue less conditioned responses. From the outset, this book offers an explosion of (...) possibilities.Inspired by the conference Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2014, and a follow-up conference held in... (shrink)

À partir du Champignon de la fin du monde d’Anna Tsing, ce texte interroge l’imaginaire résolument optimiste de découverte et de reconquête nourrie par l’attention à ce qui échappe à la destruction, propre à plusieurs travaux récents. Revenant sur la position du chercheur avide de nouveaux récits, soucieux également de ne pas les écraser sous des jugements déterminant a priori ce qui compte et ne compte pas, au risque de les étouffer, l’article invite cependant à ne pas négliger la (...) dimension de perte associée aux catastrophes passées et en cours. À cet égard, il convoque d’autres voix, en dehors des sciences sociales, en particulier celle de l’écrivant allemand W.G. Sebald, lequel accorde une place très importante aux ruines et à la remémoration des mondes perdus, de ce qui a compté pour les disparus, tel l’inlassable effort caractérisant la vie au sein des milieux fragiles. (shrink)

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us”, and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black (...) life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty. (shrink)

The article proposes a new, interspecies interpretation of Joanna Rajkowska’s Oxygenator. Read as what Anna Tsing calls latent commons and problematized through Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic spaces, the canonical piece of public art is shown to have been an experimental site of more-than-human resurgence.

Attention in the 21st century is commonly perceived as being in insufficient supply. Increasing numbers of children and adults arediagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) worldwide. This article suggests that our understanding of attentional deficits could gain from a double reframing. First, the notion of “impairment” (as recently discussed by Jonathan Sterne) seems more appropriate than the category of “disorder” to unfold the stakes of attentional problems. Second, approaching attentional issues as collective and organizational questions seems more empowering (...) than as individual shortcomings—and the notion of “ferality” (as developed by Anna Tsing and the contributors to the Feral Atlas) provides an enlightening tool to account for the role played byinfrastructures in the production of attentional deficits. As a result, the article sketches two compasses designed to help us develop a “collapsonaut attention” more in tune with the challenges of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Posthumanism has come to synthesize philosophical, literary, and artistic responses to the pressures of technology, globalization, and mass extinction in the Anthropocene. It asks what it can mean to be human in an increasingly more-than-human world that has lost faith in the ideal of humanism, the autonomous, rational subject, and it models generative alternatives cognizant of the demands of social and ecological justice. Posthumanism in Art and Science is an anthology of indispensable statements and artworks that provide an unprecedented mapping (...) of this intellectual and aesthetic shift in a global context. It extends across a broad range of fields such as art theory, media studies, continental philosophy, natural science, literary studies, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, environmental humanities, social and political theory, and animal studies. The reader features a diverse sampling of major thinkers including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Michael Marder, Karen Barad, Alexander Weheliye, Jay Prosser, Anna Tsing, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, N. Katherine Hayles, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Francesca Ferrando, and Cary Wolfe, as well as innovative, acclaimed artists and curators such as Yvonne Rainer, Chus Martínez, William Wegman, Nandipha Mntambo, Cassils, Pauline Oliveros, Doo-sung Yoo, and Gavin Steingo. Their provocative and compelling works, including previously unpublished interviews and essays, speak to the ongoing conceptual and political challenge of posthuman theories in a time of unprecedented cultural and environmental crises. An essential primer and reference for educators, students, artists, and art enthusiasts, this volume offers a powerful framework for rethinking anthropocentric certitudes and reenvisioning equitable and sustainable futures. (shrink)

Inspired by Ursula Le Guin's ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, contemporary feminist writing in the social sciences and the humanities has been characterised by a strong renewal of interest in storytelling, as is evidenced by the works of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway among others. How can storytelling grow with and beyond its literary origin to become a political and heuristic tool? And how does the Anthropocene – our specific geologic epoch – require the renewal of the means (...) of expression of such an old tool as storytelling, so that it becomes a human and nonhuman process? To answer those questions, Deleuze's and Haraway's takes on ‘fabulation’ are intermingled along three lines: the part played by storytelling in the construction of earthly knowledges, the imbrication of speculation and politics, and the nonhuman dimension of fabulation that allows for the liberation of forces of life repressed by an anthropocentric approach. (shrink)

The most important term in Wang Yang-ming’s 王陽明 (1472-1528) philosophy, “liang-zhi 良知,” has been interpreted in various different ways. However, these different interpretations have failed to provide a satisfactory understanding of Wang Yang-ming’s philosophy. To give a reasonable interpretation of Wang Yang-ming’s idea of liang-zhi that coheres with his philosophy, we have to move beyond the approach of mentalism, no matter whether it be of a transcendental or nontranscendental type. In this paper, I elaborate the deep structure of liang-zhi and (...) demonstrate that liang-zhi cannot simply be described as non-empirical, more importantly, I show that it cannot be identified as any kind of knowledge or knowing capacity, enlightenment or enlightening capacity, intellectual intuition or mystical feeling. Liang-zhi is not an epistemic concept in any sense. To treat liangzhi as some kind of knowing faculty or mental capacity is to stray from Wang Yangming’s main philosophical train of thought. -/- The major purpose of this paper is to give a new and coherent interpretation of liang-zhi which is consistent with the doctrines of “xing-ji-qi 性即氣,” “xin-wai-wuwu/ shi 心外無物／事” (no things/events outside the mind), “xin-wai-wu-li 心外無理” (no orders/principles outside the mind) and “zhi-xing-he-yi 知行合一”1 (the unity of enlightenment and action/act). In this paper, I use the concepts of “realization” and “supervenience” to explain the relationship between xing and qi, on the one hand, and the relationship between zhi and xing, on the other. Based on this preliminary study, I conclude that Wang Yang-ming viewed all the things/events in the organic universe as being endowed with a (emergent) power or (functional) property of cosmic vitality or universal spirituality, i.e., the (functional) property of sheng-sheng 生生 (the cycling order of natural production). This universal power or property by itself is invisible, without trace, and does not have an independent ontological status. However, the actual function of the power or property can be found in phenomena because certain responsive mental events made by human beings can be recognized as the realization of this power or property. In turn, certain related physical events initiated by human beings can be understood as the bases on which the mental events are supervenient. Based on these two distinct relationships: realization and supervenience, we can elaborate a framework of three layers consisting of the layer of cosmic spirituality, the layer of the mental, and the layer of the physical. This framework of three layers is moreover situated in two domains: the internal domain of the human body and the external domain of human action. Based on this framework of three layers and two domains, I elaborate a theory concerning “heaven’s production” (tian-cheng 天成), or “accomplishment and assistance in the universal process of production and reproduction,” concluding that it can be understood as an important component of Wang Yang-ming’s philosophy. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article adopts a historical perspective to examine the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine, an auxiliary field which formed to facilitate the work of the biomedical sciences by systematically improving laboratory animal production, provision, and maintenance in the post Second World War period. We investigate how Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine co-developed at the local level (responding to national needs and concerns) yet was simultaneously transnational in orientation (responding to the scientific need that knowledge, practices, objects and animals (...) circulate freely). Adapting the work of Tsing (2004), we argue that national differences provided the creative “friction” that helped drive the formation of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine as a transnational endeavor. Our analysis engages with the themes of this special issue by focusing on the development of Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine in Norway, which both informed wider transnational developments and was formed by them. We show that Laboratory Animal Science and Medicine can only be properly understood from a spatial perspective; whilst it developed and was structured through national “centers,” its orientation was transnational necessitating international networks through which knowledge, practice, technologies, and animals circulated. (shrink)

In _Facing the Planetary_ William E. Connolly expands his influential work on the politics of pluralization, capitalism, fragility, and secularism to address the complexities of climate change and to complicate notions of the Anthropocene. Focusing on planetary processes—including the ocean conveyor, glacier flows, tectonic plates, and species evolution—he combines a critical understanding of capitalism with an appreciation of how such nonhuman systems periodically change on their own. Drawing upon scientists and intellectuals such as Lynn Margulis, Michael Benton, Alfred North Whitehead, (...) Anna Tsing, Mahatma Gandhi, Wangari Maathai, Pope Francis, Bruno Latour, and Naomi Klein, Connolly focuses on the gap between those regions creating the most climate change and those suffering most from it. He addresses the creative potential of a "politics of swarming" by which people in different regions and social positions coalesce to reshape dominant priorities. He also explores how those displaying spiritual affinities across differences in creed can energize a militant assemblage that is already underway. (shrink)

This paper explores the laborious and intimate work of turning bodies of research animals into models of human patients. Based on ethnographic research in the interdisciplinary Danish research centre NEOMUNE, we investigate collaboration across species and disciplines, in research aiming at improving survival for preterm infants. NEOMUNE experimental studies on piglets evolved as a platform on which both basic and clinical scientists exercised professional authority. Guided by the field of multi-species research, we explore the social and material agency of research (...) animals in the production of human health. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s concept of “collaborative survival”, we show that sharing the responsibility of the life and death of up to twenty-five preterm piglets fostered not only a collegial solidarity between basic and clinical scientists, but also a transformative cross-fertilization across species and disciplines—a productive “contamination”—facilitating the day-to-day survival of piglets, the academic survival of scientists and the promise of survival of preterm infants. Contamination spurred intertwined identity shifts that increased the porosity between the pig laboratory and the neonatal intensive care unit. Of particular significance was the ability of the research piglets to flexibly become animal-infant-patient hybrids in need of a united effort from basic and clinical researchers. However, ‘hybrid pigs’ also entailed a threat to the demarcation between humans and animals that consolidates the use of animals in biomedical research, and efforts were continuously done to keep contamination within spatial limits. We conclude that contamination facilitates transformative encounters, yet needs spatial containment to materialize bench-to-bedside translation. (shrink)

Dans cet essai qui privilégie la joie d'une pensée insoumise plutôt que la dénonciation, Isabelle Stengers prend le relais d'Alfred North Whitehead lorsque, diagnostiquant le "déclin de la civilisation moderne", celui-ci assigna à la philosophie la tâche de "souder le sens commun avec l'imagination". Face aux prétentions à déterminer ce que nous avons le droit de savoir, elle cherche à donner force à ce que nous savons. Face aux oppositions doctrinales prédatrices qui démembrent le sens commun, elle affirme la philosophie (...) comme puissance de problématisation. Prolongeant et renouvelant les ressources proposées par Whitehead, elle fait exister tant la possibilité d'une science "civilisée" que celle, politique, de dispositifs susceptibles d'habiliter les "gens du commun" à faire valoir les questions qui les concernent. Au déclin de la civilisation a aujourd'hui succédé la débâcle : "Nous entendons déjà les grincements et les craquements sourds marquant la rupture des plaques de glace, démantibulant le sol que nous avions défini comme assuré." II s'agit désormais d'apprendre à vivre dans un monde devenu lui-même intrinsèquement problématique. D'autres voix, et notamment celles, contemporaines, de Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, David Abram ou Anna Tsing, viendront dès lors s'associer à celle de Whitehead dans l'exploration des manières de "faire commun" que demande notre époque. (shrink)

This article draws on research at an eco/feminist peace camp set up to facilitate blockades against clear-cut logging in coastal temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada in the early 1990s. The camp was said to be based on feminist principles and sometimes these were even articulated as eco/feminist principles. The slippage between these terms provides a focus for my discussion. Specifically the article explores the apparent paradox of the sheer vitality of this eco/feminist activism, (...) and in particular its insistence on international connections, in contrast to the widely circulating accounts of the end of feminism, and especially the end of global sisterhood, which emerged in the early 1990s. Thus this article is also necessarily about how recent histories of eco/feminism, including tensions between theory and activism, are narrated. I take as a departure point references to the work of Vandana Shiva and the Chipko movement which circulated in accounts of the camp, and explore ways in which eco/feminists might read such utterances as more than evidence of a naive and problematic universalism. I situate eco/feminism’s internationalism genealogically in feminism and eco/feminism and read this as a counter-narrative to the ending of global sisterhood. Through paying attention to various movements, back and forth, between Clayoquot and Chipko, Canada and India, and drawing on Anna Tsing’s notion of ‘friction’, I offer an account of what has been at stake in disavowals of the possibility of reading Chipko as eco/feminist, and suggest the importance of a more generous reading of eco/feminists’ attention to the Chipko movement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:After Extinction ed. by Richard Grusin, and: Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction by David FarrierChris CrewsRichard Grusin, editor. After Extinction. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 272pp.David Farrier. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 176pp.Thinking Critically and Poetically with the AnthropocenePublished within a year of each other, Richard Grusin’s edited collection, After Extinction, and David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics offer (...) two valuable perspectives on the themes of extinction and the Anthropocene. Most readers are likely familiar with some version of the Anthropocene by now, and its usage in these books (with a few exceptions) follows a common refrain in the humanities and social sciences, where it is used as an umbrella term to describe a wide range of (mostly negative) impacts to the Earth associated with industrial civilization and human activities.The topic of extinction is a much older issue, but increasingly frequent (and alarming) reports about biodiversity loss and extinction from bodies like the United Nations, combined with activism from groups like Extinction Rebellion, have raised its profile. Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which performs a sort of Derridean hauntology throughout the pages of After Extinction, further reinforced this trend. As Richard Grusin notes in his Introduction to After Extinction, the book emerged from a conference hosted by the Center for Twenty-First Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee which focused on the question of what comes after extinction. Each chapter is thought-provoking, but at times they sat uneasily together, producing a sort of Chthulucenic cacophony drawn from multiple disciplines and themes, from entangled humanism and the power of photography to a rethinking of disability and Indigenous languages in the Anthropocene. [End Page 156]I found David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics harder to pin down, despite being a more cohesive text. The book offers a series of ecocritical musings that engage with a series of poets and authors whose work Farrier uses to draw out a poetic imagination of the Anthropocene. Farrier develops this Anthropocene poetics through a dizzying array of textual and artistic examples that draws inspiration from queer ecology and New Materialism (e.g., Elizabeth Grosz, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Quentin Meillassoux) to problematize the liminal spaces and borders between human and non-human agencies and affect, animacies and intimacies, while suggesting that poetry is well suited (perhaps best suited?) to help us rethink our relationship to deep time and geologic agency. While reading Farrier’s book, I could not help but think of Bruno Latour’s comments about how we need a new geostory to help us make sense of the Anthropocene.Farrier engages widely with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing to develop some key themes, yet there is no attempt to force the concept of the Anthropocene into any prefigured box, despite his study’s grounding in ecocriticism and his stated sympathy with the fledgling field of Anthropocene studies. As Farrier notes, “I pursue a more inclusive approach to defining the Anthropocene, that is, that each discipline must do so according to its own terms and, by implication, that each discipline must reappraise its boundaries and assumptions in the Anthropocene’s shadows” (3). Farrier’s familiarity with both the scientific basis and cultural debates around the Anthropocene allows him to pull this off successfully.A key aim for Farrier is to explore what an Anthropocene poetics might look like, and to show how such a poetics can allow for more fluid engagements with the Anthropocene. He does this through three framing devices: intimacy (deep time), entanglements (sacrifice zones), and swerve (kin-making), each of which allows him to think more deeply about our growing awareness of deep time (past and future) and our entanglements with a changing planet. Farrier suggests this awareness is creating a deeper appreciation for how the human project is (and always has been) deeply bound up with other than human beings and non-human agencies. As Farrier argues: “One of the most striking and unsettling aspects of the Anthropocene is the newly poignant sense that our present is in fact accompanied by deep pasts and... (shrink)

The author analyses the problem of the communication from the epistemological point of view, noting that the interest to the theme is obviously determined by the enormous ambiguity and by the disciplinary vagueness of the communication's notion itself. It is argued that it is the philosophical conceptualization of the communication that allows in a certain sense to «save» philosophy itself. The author notes that the philosophical studies of communication as if return the relevance to the classical philosophical problems: to the (...) (communicative) sphere, (communicative) time, (social) causality, (collective) subject and object, filling them with the meaningful characteristics and testing their concepts by the experience of the functioning of real society and communication. He concludes that the epistemological content of the concept of communication is comes together with several aspects of human cognition. The first aspect has to do with the dimensions for defining the adequacy for determination of the statement made by the Other (i.e. the other participant), given that the content of the Other's consciousness is unavailable. The second aspect is related to the principle of a double purpose of any communication: on the one hand, integration and mutual understanding and, on the other, informational description of the subject of the message. The third aspect is that communication is based on the most important epistemological distinction between knowledge and ignorance, i.e. on the predominance of any information to one participant of the communication and of its uncertainty to the other participant, and that such a situation actually conditions the formation of communication systems, as well as of a wide variety of forms of sociality. The author also addresses the problem of whether contemporary media make communication at all possible since they decrease the impact that the secrecy of the Other's consciousness has on communication by triggering a communicative act. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This special issue provokes a conversation between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms by asking what they are, how they speak about each other, and how they can speak to each other. Read together, the articles engage and sometimes trouble the temporal and spatial distinctions drawn between decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Kiran Asher explores overlaps between decolonial and postcolonial thought by comparing the ideas of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Silvia (...) Rivera Cusicanqui on representation. Aimee Carrillo Rowe also stages a dialogue between these approaches when interrogating her family ’s Chican@ settler history. Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer offer an account of how recent scholarship from Hawai‘i and Guåhan (Guam) has elaborated Indigenous epistemologies in settler contexts. Two articles excavate colonialism’s relationship to science: Jennifer Hamilton, Banu Subramaniam, and Angela Willey explore how two instances of population genetic research illustrate the racialized knowledge systems that undergirded colonialism, while Sandra Harding points out how the colonization of Latin America contributed to the edifice of Western science. In a related vein, Breny Mendoza centers the material role of Abya Yala (the preferred term for Latin America) in not just Spanish colonialism but British colonial expansionism and eventually the eclipsing of China. Patricia A. Schechter reflects on her trajectory as a scholar and teacher of US women’s history and the insights she has gained through 504Preface engaging decolonial scholarship. Amy Piedalue and Susmita Rishi argue for a more expansive understanding of postcolonial feminism’s reach as they review recently published titles in the field. Although Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron’s review of feminist scholarship about the Anthropocene does not directly mention postcolonial or decolonial approaches, it nonetheless engages relevant scholarship on the environmental impact of settler modernization and capitalism. An art essay by Hyunji Kwon introduces the largely unrecognized paintings of former comfort woman Duk-kyung Kang (1929–1997) and focuses on the potential of Kang’s work to challenge Japanese colonial hierarchies. Our featured poets in this issue are Emily Zhang, Megan Kaminski, and Raina J. León. Both postcolonial and decolonial scholars have been committed to critiquing the material and epistemic legacies of colonialism. The distinctions that are frequently drawn between the two approaches, however, have been a source of disquiet to the editors of Feminist Studies, and they prompted our journal’s call for papers in 2016. A common temporal marking that concerned us was the eclipsing of postcolonialism, which was increasingly becoming viewed as passé, and a setting up of decolonial feminism as always already better in time. Decolonial approaches sometimes depicted postcolonial feminism as being only about the past, despite postcolonial feminism’s stated commitment to studying the continuing impact of colonial processes and its complex use of the prefix “post.” Our concern was, as well, with misrepresentations of postcolonial feminist priorities. The depiction of postcolonial feminism as deconstructive, abstract, elite theory confined to the ambit of modern colonial knowledge systems overlooked the important quandaries that postcolonial feminism raised about how to represent marginalized people ethically and, indeed, how to understand the very desire to represent the marginalized—whether or not we claim belonging to them. Postcolonial feminists warned against an easy embrace of alterity, noting that the desire for positioning oneself outside colonialism could naively ignore the power of colonial discourses to frame colonialism’s Other. Another set of hopes for this special issue was to dwell on the spatial markings of decolonial and postcolonial feminisms: decolonial feminism is often associated with Indigenous scholars and those from the Americas, and postcolonial feminism with scholars from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These regional emphases, although not always as tidy as sometimes depicted, have produced distinct intellectual Preface 505 priorities. We must heed decolonial feminism’s insistence on engaging with the genocidal history of settler colonialism, the current manifestations of the violent dispossession of land, and its constitution of gendered racial capitalism the world over. (FeministStudies will soon publish a special issue on Indigenous Feminisms). Yet, if postcolonial feminism is circumscribed geographically to only South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, we risk ignoring its powerful transcontinental mapping of imperial gender formations and its scrupulous attention to the ethics of representing... (shrink)

Critical posthumanism is an invitation to think differently about knowledge and educational relationality between humans and the more-than-human. This philosophical and political shift in subjectivity builds on, and is entangled with, poststructuralism and phenomenology. In this paper we read diffractively through one another the theories of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and feminist posthumanists Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. We explore the implications of the so-called ‘ontological turn’ for early childhood education. With its emphasis on a moving away from the dominant (...) role of human vision in educational research we show how videoing and photographing works as an apparatus in an analysis of data from an inner-city school in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are struck by children’s seeing with the ‘eyes of their skin’ and ‘seeing’ with/in the world, as their obvious distress is felt when a small tree sapling has been mowed down in a nearby park. We analyse the event with the help of a variation on Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming-child’: ‘becoming-little’, and Anna Tsing’s ‘the arts of noticing’. ‘Becoming-little’ as a methodology disrupts the adult/child binary that positions ‘little’, younger humans as inferior to their ‘bigger’ fully human counterparts. We exemplify ‘becoming-little’ through 4 and 5 year-olds’ learning with the little tree and adopt Barad’s temporal diffraction to ‘see’ what is in/visible in the park: the extractive, exploitative, colonising mining practices of White settlers. These are still part of the land on which the park was created but are in/visible beneath the ‘skin’ of the earth. (shrink)

On some accounts, Sophocles’ Philoctetes is most notable for what it lacks: alone among the extant Attic tragedies, there are no women in the dramatis personae; alone among the extant plays of Sophocles, no characters die; and the chorus plays a relatively diminished role, adhering most closely to Aristotle’s injunction in the Poetics that a chorus should take on the role of an actor. But when viewed through the lens of ecocritical feminism and vibrant materialism, notably the work of Donna (...) Haraway, Mel Chen, Jane Bennett, and Anna Tsing, the play’s landscape, the island of Lemnos, comes to life; and it teems with feminine energies as well as compromised and complicated animacies, while the chorus serves as an empathic focalizer and world-builder. This paper argues that in addition to animating the island’s material ecosystem, Sophocles conjures Lemnos’ mythic ecosystem, most notably the tale of the notorious, murderous, and malodorous Lemnian Women. All of these elements cohere to characterize Philoctetes as an abject, sterile menstruator. Furthermore, the chorus’s brief, strange Hymn to Gaia encapsulates the play’s tension between a masculine, heroic, teleological narrative and the feminine, primordial, bestial world of Lemnos. These dynamics are further considered through the lens of fifth-century Athenian colonization, the story of the indigenous Lemnian Pelasgians, and a colonial reading of the Odyssey’s Cyclopeia. Finally, the paper explores the close, mutually constitutive relationship between text, landscape, and body via the popularity, in later antiquity, of pharmacological applications of Lemnian Earth, used to treat, among other ailments, snakebites and menstruation. (shrink)

De acuerdo con la formulación de Haraway y Tsing, el Plantacionoceno sería un modo de nombrar esta época que permitiría, con mayor especificidad que el Antropoceno, señalar las características del sistema mundial moderno. En este artículo revisamos las diferentes versiones del Antropoceno y el tipo de problemas que habilita (especialmente los de la escala y la agencia material). Luego nos abocamos a la emergencia de la noción de simbiosis como forma de hacer comunidad más allá de lo humano tal (...) como aparece primero en Michel Serres y luego en Haraway, el marco ofrecido por la ecocrítica materialista y el modo en que el Plantacionoceno se justifica. Adoptando este enfoque, leemos las narrativas fundacionales de la identidad argentina como aquellas donde esta es figurada como la del varón valiente (primero un marginal y luego un héroe nacional) cuya tarea principal es borrar (material y simbólicamente) el legado indígena. Por último, abordamos la novela de Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Las aventuras de la China Iron, donde el poema épico nacional de José Hernández, Martín Fierro, es totalmente re-escrito. A lo largo de esta indisciplinada narración de alteración de mundos, la plantación es transformada en una humildad no jerárquica que nos ubica en el umbral de un plantismo queer. (shrink)

This collection of essays analyzes relations of social inequality that appear to be logical extensions of a "natural order," and in the process demonstrates that a revitalized feminist anthropology of the 1990s has much to offer the field of feminist theory. Fashioned as a response to the lack of cultural analysis in feminist scholarship, the contributors question the category of gender within the inclusive context of the structural dynamics of inequality. They also examine how cultural identities, domains and institutions affect (...) our perception of gender in society. The first selection of essays addresses how ideas of family and kinship have fostered society's hierarchies and legitimized the status quo. In part two, the essays show how several dimensions of inequality are implicit in the construction of identities that are based upon ideas of social solidarity. Contributors: Susan McKinnon, University of Virginia; Kath Weston, Arizona State West; Rayna Rapp, New School for Social Research; Janet Dolgin, Hofstra University; Harriet Whitehead, Duke University; Carol Delaney, Stanford University; Brackette Williams, University of Arizona; Sylvia Yanagisako, Stanford University; Phyllis Chock, Catholic University; Sherry Ortner, University of Michigan; Anna Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz. (shrink)

Phenomenological analyses of ageing and old age have examined themes such as alterity, finitude, and time, not seldom from the perspective of “healthy” aging. Phenomenologists have also offered detailed analyses of lived experiences of illness including lived experiences of dementia. This article offers a phenomenological account of what we label as entering the grey zone of aging between “healthy” aging and aging with a disease. This account is developed through a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis of elderly persons’ lived experiences of (...) being tested for dementia through primary care in Sweden, i.e., within a cultural context where dementia commonly is understood as a frightening a loss of self even though this understanding also is questioned. To enter this grey zone of aging, we argue, does not dissolve dynamic self-becoming but can involve an experience of oneself as being old. Further, in the grey zone, the self experiences itself as neither fully healthy nor as having a disease, and as needing to negotiate and live this ambiguity. To enter this grey zone is to enter an affectively charged, sociocultural and medicalized zone, and while the self can still act in different ways within it, staying in the grey zone can result in a re-orientation in the self’s mode of being, in ways that are thoroughly beyond its control. To stay in the grey zone can have detrimental effects on the self, even though the self does not have a disease: the self can become “stuck” in a reflective mode of attending to embodiment, aging, health, and disease. (shrink)

Using relevant encyclicals issued over the last 100 years, the author extracts those principles that constitute the underpinnings of Catholic Social Teaching about the employment relationship and contemplates implications of their incorporation into human resource policy. Respect for worker dignity, for his or her family's economic security, and for the common good of society clearly emerge as the primary guidelines for responsible human resource management. Dovetailing these three Church mandates with the economic objectives of the firm could, in essence, alter (...) the firm's nature because profit motivations would be constrained by consideration for worker and societal welfare. Integration of Church teaching with current corporate goals should therefore impact greatly on a variety of human resource policies. (shrink)

My goal is to define intending. I defend the view that believing and desiring something are necessary for intending it. They are not sufficient, however, for some things we both expect and want (e.g., the sun to rise tomorrow) are unintendable. Restricting the objects of intention to our own future actions is unwarranted and unhelpful. Rather, the belief involved in intending must be based on the desire in a certain way. En route, I argue that expected but unwanted consequences are (...) not intended, examine the two senses of "desire," distinguish intending from being willing, and relate intending to a variety of other propositional at? titudes. (shrink)