Depresencing the human
Topics: Anthropocene
, Urban Geography
, Historical Geography
Keywords: design,anthropocene,coloniality,urbanization,climate,human,Sylvia Wynter
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59
Authors:
Ross Exo Adams, Bard College
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Abstract
Today, we design closure. Ranging from the benevolently innocent to the downright darwinian, the spatial aesthetic regime of our present moment seems firmly ensnared in endings that, at the same time, suffocate any situated speculation on other becomings—the presencing of other worlds. ‘Depresencing’ may sit at the heart of the current epistemological world.
This paper suggests that a different approach to closure with a different goal may be needed. In order to advance any decolonial, anti-capitalist futures, the depresencing that matters, I argue, is the de-representation of our current mode of being human. Thus, rather than seeing closure as a willful act of withdrawal—a noble gesture of abandonment for the greater good—I would like to imagine it as a praxis that attends to ways of being human that have survived amidst what Sylvia Wynter has called the overrepresentation of ‘Man2.’ Because professionalized modes of spatial design have always taken Man1 and Man2 as its unannounced epistemological subjects—the coordinates for its commonsense—it thus works to re-represent and naturalize this human as a universal, timeless figure in the spaces it produces. Space, as such, ingrains this figure into everyday experiences: infrastructure, domesticity, urbanization all mediate our relation to the world, foreclosing us to limited possibilities of being in the world. The ambition of critical, decolonial and radical design practices may be to depart from a different understanding of what it means to be human, and thus to help bear witness to other worlds emerging in the gaps of the former.
Depresencing the human
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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