Critical Environments

This talk deals with four lures proffered by the Anthropocene. The first three: hyper-modernisation, or the colonisation of deep time by the anthropos; apocalypse therapy, or melancholic revelry in the end times; the significance sky hook, or “cfp: X in the Anthropocene”. These three are lures to be avoided. I then note a latent underspecified tendency shared by many – from progressive policy folk to biophilosophers – to invoke gardening as metaphor for planetary ethics. Drawing on my research into real and imaginary gardens, I outline something of what such an ethic might partake: anticipating life with vegetal philosophy; domesticating decomposition and death; flourishing awkwardly while fighting wars against the enemy. These take us to a final, more attractive lure. Beginning from nomadic points of difference, we might glimpse beyond the Anthropocene the utopian lure of new collectives and new kinds of humans, composed for more sanity and for feeling more deeply the earth and all its knotty difficulties. Franklin Ginn is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh, where his work focuses on geographies of nature, the more-than-human and environmental politics. His forthcoming book, Domestic Wild: Nature, memory and gardening in suburbia explores how memory and time are implicated in ecological consciousness. His current research explores cultures of everyday apocalypse and the Anthropocene, and as part of an AHRC-funded project, spiritual responses to climate change.

An important theoretical underpinning of biosemiotics is the semiotic philosophy of American scientist and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his observation that ‘the universe is perfused with signs’. Semiotic biology was born from a similar insight, that living systems – cells, organisms, and ecologies – are not mechanical but are scaffolded by semiosis. Semiotic systems characterise life throughout. Sign relations are responsible for the efficacy of biological systems as much as they are for abstract human conceptual systems. All obey the same triadic Peircean semiotic logic. As Norbert Wiener long ago implied about information in cybernetic systems, such informational, or in living things semiotic, relations require material bearers (codes and channels), but are, themselves, immaterial. All sign relations are manifested in von Uexküllian semiotic species umwelten, and while these (including the human) are thus necessarily incomplete models of reality (there being, as Thomas Nagel has noted, ‘no view from nowhere’), sign relations nonetheless form a semiotic bridge between mind and nature, subject and object, and intentional concept and reality. This is the case for every living organism: semiotic relations bridge the supposed gap between mind and body, culture and nature, and idealism and realism. Wendy Wheeler is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London Metropolitan University. She is also a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths and RMIT in Melbourne. In 2014, she gave the first annual University of Tartu Jakob von Uexküll Lecture to the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment in Estonia. She is the author of four books, two on biosemiotics, and many essays on the same topic in journals and edited collections. She is on the editorial boards of several journals – New Formations, Green Letters, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, and Biosemiotics – and is currently completing her fifth monograph The Flame and Its Shadow: Reflections on Nature and Culture from a Biosemiotic Perspective.

Philip Steinberg (http://philsteinberg.wordpress.com) is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University and Associate Editor of Political Geography. At Durham, he is Director of IBRU: Durham University’s Centre for Borders Research and he also coordinates the ICE LAW Project (the Project on Indeterminate and Changing Environments: the Anthropocene, Law, and the World). Phil’s research focuses on the projection of social power onto spaces whose geophysical and geographic characteristics make them resistant to state territorialisation, spaces that include the world-ocean, the universe of electronic communication, and the Arctic. His publications include The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001), Managing the Infosphere: Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion (Temple, 2008), What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina (Georgia, 2008), Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North (I.B. Tauris, 2015), as well as recent articles in journals including Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Society & Space, Ocean Development & International Law, Antipode, Polar Geography, and Atlantic Studies.

Plants historically have been located between the mineral and animal worlds. Not only did they occupy the perplexing border area between the living and nonliving, and were therefore called living crystals, they were also denied any sensitivity or capability for decision making. This talk will investigate how recent philosophical inquiries into plant lives, art practices involving their bodily presence, and the scientific discoveries of plant biologists lead to a conclusion that plants, although occupying a position of full visibility, have been seriously overlooked. Bearing in mind that the evolutionary paths of plants and animals split about two billion years ago, we rediscover plants, observing how they developed their own peculiar body plans, life styles and modes of reproduction, which now come to our attention as a source of inspiration in postanthropocentric efforts to find yet another way of being together. Monika Bakke writes on contemporary art and aesthetics, with a particular focus on posthumanist, gender and cross-cultural perspectives. She lectures in the Philosophy Department at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. She is the author of two books: Bio-transfigurations: Art and Aesthetics of Posthumanism (2010, in Polish) and Open Body (2000, in Polish), co-author of Pleroma: Art in Search of Fullness (1998), and editor of Australian Aboriginal Aesthetics (2004, in Polish), Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture (2006) and The Life od Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating (2011). Since 2001 she has been an editor of the Polish cultural journal Czas Kultury (Time of Culture).

The logic – or perversion – of the notion of origin has been linked to different imaginaries and economic regimes of nation-states; to such an extent, that it is no longer clear who constructs whom, if it ever was. In this lecture- performance, geocultural understandings of origin will be tasted through food as method to understand whether a territory is defined by its original produce; or whether origin itself might have eventually superseded the geography that was supposed to define it. The analysis of quality and standards in relationship to a created original serves as a basis to explore how food empires construct perceptions of space and time as other forms of power. Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners that emerged out of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. It was born to explore the systems that organize the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics. Their work has been exhibited at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York dOCUMENTA(13); Peggy Guggenheim Collection; CA2M; TEDx Talks, Madrid; Fiorucci Art Trust; ACC, Weimar; 2014 Biennale INTERIEUR, Kortrijk; OFFICEUS, the exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; and have been residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They have recently been awarded a Jumex Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo grant to research Islands of Food and Desire in the Caribbean.

Much aesthetic theory has concerned itself with the status and significance of the image. Resisting this "photology," my paper (a chapter from the forthcoming SOUNDS: THE AMBIENT HUMANITIES) will explore, by contrasting the sonic to the phonic, the attractions of tying aesthetic experience to sound, specifically the sound of "the gasp." Through readings of Derrida's SPECTRES OF MARX, McNally's LAST GASPS and Rushdie's THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, I will propose that the gasp vents us to what Spinoza called "admiratio" (wonder), a break that stirs the perception "photology" has long organised around the image (whether beautiful, sublime or craven). Photology, like the particulate matter generating the optical effect of a sunset, is thus read as an inaudible mode of sound pollution.