Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Bruce Braun, University of Minnesota

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Description:

The Anthropocene is frequently associated with endings. But the visual and discursive imaginaries that dominate film, theory, and scientific reports are almost always of apocalyptic ends driven by nonhuman forces: rising seas, blazing wildfires, etc. In contrast, human agency in the Anthropocene is frequently theorized as a matter of continuation and survival: design for the resilience of urban spaces; recalibration of technomodernist systems that allow neoliberal life to limp along; or arts of collaborative survival amidst neoliberalism’s ruinous infrastructures and environments.

Far less thought however has been given to the question of human-enacted endings in the Anthropocene, even though the need for endings is often assumed, if not asserted, in such diverse political imaginaries as degrowth, ecosocialism, and decolonization. This seems to us an important matter for critical consideration, since a diverse and growing array of actors now maintain that much in this world—not only existing social-ecological-political systems but also many of the infrastructures, networks, and platforms that subtend them — must be brought to a close if other worlds are to take their place. With neoliberal civilization already exhausted, as many argue, and the effects of climate change becoming more apparent, might we be witness to the emergence within design, engineering, and architecture, as well as politics and social policy, of a shift toward other approaches besides simply keeping systems going, for instance, learning how to ‘depresence’ and ‘dismantle’ a ‘negative commons’ (Monnin, 2021) of contaminated soils, deadly logistics, perpetually-flooded urban spaces, and perception-shaping digital platforms?

This session critically examines the varied ‘arts of closure’ possible, called for, or considered necessary in the Anthropocene. Building on and engaging with pragmatic and conceptual questions of Anthropocenic design as 'depresencing' raised recently by Emmanuel Bonnet, Diego Landivar, and Alexandre Monnin (2021) we are interested in how things come to be seen as in need of dismantling and how different (and difficult) the practices of closure may be depending on the objects, materials, and social and political-economic relations involved. Our intention is not to propose ‘depresencing’ as a new practice or politics for the Anthropocene. Rather, we are interested in exploring when and how depresencing is announced as necessary and the manifold, real world “cosmotechnics,” to use Yuk Hui’s (2020) term, proposed for bringing things seen as obsolete or dangerous – but which by lingering foreclose the possibility of other worlds — to a close. Entrenched technological, institutional, conceptual, or spatial structures: what spaces and things are seen as in need of abandonment, dismantling, or closure to allow for other worlds? What do we imagine cannot simply be “put to new use”? How have designers, planners, or communities begun to explore the end of resilience? What intentional, thoughtful, and strategic techniques of closure are considered necessary to achieve political and ecological goals? How does one end things around which worlds have congealed, with all their attachments, desires, violences, and inequalities? Who decides -- and by what criteria -- that which must be closed down? What forms of solidarity already exist or must be built to bring things to an end in socially and environmentally just ways? And how is ‘depresencing’ related to, or different from practices of ‘care’ or ‘repair’?

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda