/script> Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona
 
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Llibres de ciència, cultura i actualitat
Març
2019
Novetats editorials d’Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona
«In the context of a globally-linked, technologically-mediated world defined by an increasing resource depletion and raising inequalities, the ascent of wars under the regimes of necropolitics, biopiracy and dispossession, we – human animals, non-human animals and all living entities – are exposed like oil, gas or minerals to exploitative, extractivist and commodifying practices through which advanced capitalism keeps on accumulating and producing value.»

«Within this framework, humanities are compelled to envision an analysis that might account for the systemic and fluid complexities of our times affecting our existence, one that would incorporate a call for action anticipating modes of being together otherwise. This analysis would have to trace more intricate, multi-layered interdependence between nature, culture and technology, shifting the simplistic vision of the effect of shared vulnerability of current catastrophic, end-of-the world narratives, into productive, generative trans-species alliances for the sake of the sustainability of life on the planet. In short, it becomes imperative to provide a more self-critical, egalitarian and ecological understanding of the present and the future.

»Guattarian ecosophy manages to grasp this complexity through the notion of transversality. To think ecosophically is to be capable of tracing relations between individual subjectivity, social relations and the environment from a transversal perspective, considering the problems affecting the three systems from an integrated approach. Nature, culture and technology are situated in a radical flat ontology where ecology is defined as the method of grasping interactions between the infinite machines populating the world. Former essences are now defined as machines invested in setting couplings and connections with other machines in a permanent flux of transmission. These machines are being understood as auto-poietic systems capable of reading intensities and negotiating equilibrium through their feedback loops. Through the power relations traversing us, processes of subjectivation escaping them could be opened, allowing us to access other existential modes. Posthuman ecophilosophy developed by Rosi Braidotti gives further impetus to Guattarian ecosophy insofar as the acknowledgement of the structural, transversal and post-anthropocentric bond implied in the position of the posthuman subject provides a decisive opportunity for the creation of a new social nexus. This would have to be forged on the basis of a redefinition of elemental notions such as kinship, interdependence and accountability not only among humans but also between non-anthropomorphic and technologically-mediated others.

»Both approaches point to the presumption that living in posthuman times, basic notions such as nature and the human have undergone profound mutations determining the question of subjectivity. This is to say, recent material and socio-economic reconfigurations of the world proves a quest for examining how ways of being and acting in that world may have undergone transformations.

»The post-anthropocentrism implied in both models points not merely to the criticism of humanism but amounts to the productive creation of alternative conceptions of the self, the human, society and the arts that may imagine a world yet to come. Far from being exhausted in the advent of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Guattarian radical ecology deserves more than ever further scrutiny. It compels us to act out multiple explorations into how his philosophy may be implemented by practical and experimental applications into everyday life. In this essay I will explore how Guattarian ecosophy ressonates with Braidotti’s posthuman ecophilosophy in terms of envisioning others forms of habitual dominant subjective formations and by being committed to the invention of new possibilities of life, and by reconsidering our relation with alterity, engaging in routes toward more openness, new sensibilities, by generating post-anthropocentric and anti-humanist ethics and politics.

»If the decline of the centrality of Man and the dislocation of the human brought about by the emergence of posthuman discourses has led to a new understanding of the relation of humans and non-human life and to more complex interactions, what would be the place of art within these parameters? If the practice and study of art used to be centred on humanness, what would be the role of art within a planetary, geo-centred, cosmic frame anticipated by the posthuman predicament? Following Anne Sauvagnargues’ account of art as a machine modulating forces and materials unfolding upon maps of affects, I expand into how art makes visible the intensities and forces of materiality beyond cultural machines of representation and interpretation. I argue that the art encounter is capable of opening up thresholds of intensity unleashing an active, self-expressing matter with which we interact in a process in which meaning and affect interweave, allowing new forms of subjectivity to take place. The ecosophic artist opens up, materializes, composes a new world, a new existential territory always there yet unhabited, and in so doing we meet the deterritorializing power of the machinism operating in art. In creating micropolitical mutations and posthuman becomings, generating new existential territories and universes of value, the praxis of the ecosophic artist can be seen as operating a rupture with capitalistic forms of subjection, anticipating new forms of relation and modes of being together otherwise.»


 
 
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