Suchergebnisse

We develop the term "the Anthropo-obScene" to show how various discourses on "the Anthropocene" have created a set of stages that disavow certain voices and render some forms of acting (human, non-human, and more-than-human) off-stage. Examples include consensual narratives of adaptive, resilient, and geo-engineered governance, but also more-than-human ontologies that, in spite their purported radicality, could lead to a problematic strengthening of technomanagerial discourse. With the Anthropo-obScene, we seek to interrupt the deepening of "immunological bio-politics" and a politicization of the socio-ecological conundrum we are in, while fully and radically embracing our interdependence with non-humans. ; QCR 20190211 ; Socioecological Movements in Urbanized Ecosystems (MOVE, Formas, PI H Ernstson)

We use postcolonial theory to interrogate the discourse of €œthe Anthropocene€ and its depoliticizing effects. It is maintained that the way that the Anthropocene€ discourse has been articulated within parts of postcolonial theory is deeply problematic and risks making the political itself categorically unthinkable and ontologically evacuated. In an attempt to disrupt this deadlock, we combine post-foundational and postcolonial theory to propose three performative interruptions against conditions of exclusion—the politics of time, the politics of translation, and the politics of the stage. These build a platform to re-launch the political performativity of subaltern experiences in the here and now. ; QC 20190207 ; Socioecological Movements in Urbanized Ecosystems (MOVE, Formas, PI H Ernstson)

Information in our era of networks and genome maps, according to Sloterdijk, binds man and his tools that transform nature into one operative system. This "post‐metaphysical" condition not only tends to abolish the separation between the subjective person and "objective spirit," but the distinction between culture and nature as well.For Sloterdijk, one co‐intelligent system now encompasses subject and object, culture and nature. This information ecology gives man a new fused identity with the other, with his world and his tools. He is no longer an identity apart.Such a civilization of co‐intelligent "anthropo‐technology" requires an entirely new perspective on ethics. For Sloterdijk, today's passionate debates over man's domination of nature or technology's domination of man miss the point because they are fearfully rooted in the obsolete master‐slave dichotomy that holds such a hallowed place in Western philosophy. As Sloterdijk sees it, this dichotomy, based as it was on the opposition between subject and object and between culture and nature, needs to be updated: In our time, master and slave are dissolved in the advance of intelligent technologies whose operability is non‐dominating. One can only talk about self‐manipulation, not slavery; not about a master, but about self‐mastery.Unleashing the basic force of nature against the people of Hiroshima may have been possible prior to the information revolution when "allo‐technology" (the division between man and machine) still predominated. But, the anthropo‐technology of the post‐metaphysical 21st century, Sloterdijk contends, holds out a generous promise. In this system bound together by information feedback and artificial intelligence, the preservationist instinct of the co‐beneficiaries of co‐intelligence will limit the destructive acts of anthropo‐technology against itself.Between the lines, Sloterdijk even seems to suggest that the "astraying" fate of alienated Being may at last find its dwelling place rejoined with nature and the world.In May 2000, Sloterdijk gave lectures at the Goethe Institute in Boston and in Los Angeles that covered these topics. Some excerpts appear below.          —NATHAN GARDELS, editor

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits.Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by "self‐organizing," not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being.The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: "What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today" as Prigogine puts it. "The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction."Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate.In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.

Sex sells. Already a ten-billion dollar business-and growing-most sex businesses require relatively low start-up costs and minimal equipment. No wonder retired porn stars, homemakers, college students, and entrepreneurs of every stripe are eager to jump on the smut band wagon. Following the money trail, or in this case, the telecom routes, the author reveals how some big phone companies are cashing in too. Obscene Profits offers a startling and entertaining new look at this very old business, and shows why pornography, in all of its variations--videos, magazines, phone-sex, spy cameras, etc.--

This chapter focuses on the book's central theme on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Framed against the background of five major transformations that deal with planetary urbanisation to de-politicization, we argue that while UPE and associated fields have offered ways to analyse the politics of nature, they have less to offer in terms of what to do, in terms of thinking with radical political activists about new imaginaries and practices of emancipatory socio-ecological change. In light of this, we present the chapters as enriching the approaches to re-centre the political in thought and action in environmental and urban studies. ; QC 20190211