Suchergebnisse

Scenes from mushroom technosciences illuminate forms, practices,
and temporalities of atmospheric attunement. This article reanimates
moments from scientific literature where chemists and mycologists
chase elusive smells and spores, explicating how scientists' experimental
apparatuses of attunement arrange conditions for matsutake to be
reduced and concentrated toward the goal of sensibility. Reduction and
concentration do more than translate atmospheric elusiveness into specification;
achieved through grinding, evaporating, and remixing, they condition
a 'tending to suspension'. Tending to suspension amplifies qualities
and throws subjects and sensorial attention into the middle of volumes
and durations. 'Tending' implies care as well as a 'tending toward'—the
sense that something may develop a tendency. Experimental apparatuses
of atmospheric attunement, tending to such tendings, model a method for
anthropological study of diffuse objects.

Critiques of universalism require rethinking when confronted with environmental political arenas, in which the very concepts of "universality" and "particularity" are in a constant process of self‐conscious deployment. In this article, I attend to the analytic and political implications of such deployments in a recent incinerator controversy in Hong Kong. I suggest that an aesthetic of local appropriateness and its formal requirement of simultaneous universal and particular truth value normalize the politics of environmental expertise such that the only legible form for counterknowledge is one of articulated knowledges. To understand how the knowledges emergent in an NGO–village collaboration were scaled, linked, and mobilized, I analyze a translation of expert knowledge and the event's metapragmatic effects. A subsequent account of unarticulated knowledges emphasizes the political‐economic conditions that limit whose knowledges can count as particular in articulations of counterexpertise.

"The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word.

The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole.

The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril."