With my writing-partner and currently favorite person to think with we will give a talk at Ottawa's "Noons For Now" as part of the Carleton Climate Commons. You will be able to attend via Zoom (like I will) if you register online!
Often science fiction depicts the climate future as unlivable, or as barely survivable only through an intensification of “capitalist realism” – everything is for sale, only the rich have access to technologies sufficient for minimal comfort, and Earth ecologies are in continual free-fall or already destroyed in service of profit. In this conversation, we discuss science fictional imaginings of livable collective futures. We put two recent texts (Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden and M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhabi’s Everything for Everyone) in conversation with an older non-dystopian imaginary (“P.M”’s bolo’bolo).
Alexis Shotwell is theory and science fiction fan, functional potter, and she bike rides in all weather. Alexis has been part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton since 2012 and cross-appointed to Philosophy and the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies. Kilian Jörg is a philosopher and artist based in Vienna and Berlin whose research focuses on ecological epistemology and the intersection of art and philosophy.
Many of you know I have been working on what could be understood as Reasonability in the Anthropocene for more than 8 years. Well, what has been my PhD has now been released as a book titled Ecological Reasonings with Bloomsbury.
"Beautifully and carefully intervening in what have been perhaps too-settled waters, the book offers a compelling account of the sensuous and situated reasoning practices we might craft in confronting the multiple ecological catastrophes we face. Understanding reasonings as a collective endeavour, built in relationships among beings, actants, and our unevenly shared milieux, Jörg offers an inspiring call to building a different “we” that can playfully and in an ongoing way contribute to shared life in a living world."
What role does 'reason' have in tackling the catastrophic ecological situation of the early 21st-century? Can the concept shrug off its problematic role in Western epistemology and find a new place and function in dealing with the Anthropocene? In Ecological Reasonings, Kilian Jörg argues that we ignore reason at our peril.
This book revolves around the idea that in order to salvage reason, we must include it in the current move to pluralize the key concepts of Western philosophy – where we once talked of nature, science and technology, we now talk about natures, sciences, and technologies. In the same way, it is time to reconceptualize reason as reasonings – a diverse and multi-perspectival wealth of interactions that can create a vital alternative to the mainstream academic thought. Drawing on a broad span of theoretical traditions including new materialism, eco-feminism, embodied performance and speculative philosophy, Jörg weaves countless voices and aspects together to demonstrate the rich texture of his pluralized vision. The impact of these new reasonings on the pressing challenges of our time can be seen in the sheer scope of these elements, from the role of artificial intelligence to the post-truth society and how science can shape our own self-understanding.
I am already very much looking forward to this event:
My Abstract: Donna Haraway’ s formula “staying with the trouble” frequently appears in discourses concerned with ecological catastrophe. Despite their ostentatious rejection of utopian thinking, Haraway and like-minded thinkers tend to consider messiness, tension or even conflict as antithetical to their ideal state of (no longer only human) society. A cultivation of a specific life- promoting and enabling messiness and ambiguity, however, is essential for nourishing new forms of a minoritarian, “messy” utopianism. This article reflects on contemporary utopianism’ s relation to war: do contemporary utopias address war explicitly or implicitly? In this context, bolo’ bolo (1983), written by sci-fi author and anarchist P. M. (a pseudonym of Hans Widmer), can serve as a helpful reference. This speculative utopia sketches out a different relation to conflict and its underlying presumptions of stately order, property, control and subjective self-determination. It proposes to conceive of violence as something not akin to war and thus offers a welcome alternative to simplistic notions of a “natural state”, in which humans are determined either by a bellicose or a peaceful inclination. This approach fills important gaps in the discussion of no-longer-modern utopianisms.
Trash will outlive us all—it is here to stay much longer than we are. It thus can be understood as the modern, superficially secular prayer to the human afterlife. But what are we telling our ancestors with the gigantic heaps of trash we release into the oceans, bury in our mountains, and hide in the underground? We of the Toxic Temple sense that there is still a confusion, or, rather, a lack of profound reflection and cultivation, around this obvious, and—from a geological and cosmological perspective—central element of our culture. It is about time we cultivate and develop it, particularly because our societies might in fact only appear secular and non-religious on a superficial level. We of the Toxic Temple believe that our relationship—yet brute and uncultivated—to the most long-lasting trash we leave behind can only be understood and at the same time tamed as a form of religious communication. And this is why the Toxic Temple was founded and invites you to join our cause: to experimentally give you a room for the expression, cultivation, and veneration of a transcendent desire we moderns clearly seem to be having—although few heathens yet appear comfortable to speak about it or even seem to be able to understand it for themselves. The Toxic Temple is there for you to embrace your most dirty and wasteful desires!
"Kilian schlägt vor, die automobile Kultur durch eine gemeinschaftsorientierte Lebensweise zu ersetzen, bei der Mobilität nicht als Konsumgut, sondern als Gemeinschaftsrecht begriffen wird. Er verweist auf Beispiele wie das besetzte Gelände „ZAD“ in Frankreich, wo Menschen auf Gemeinschaftsbesitz angewiesen sind und alternative Lebensstile erproben. Dies könne ein Modell für eine nachhaltige, „post-automobile“ Gesellschaft sein, in der Ressourcen geteilt und neue Mobilitätsformen etabliert werden, die weniger auf individuelle Besitzansprüche als auf kollektive Verantwortung setzen."
Ich durfte mit Katja Diehl in ihrem wunderbaren Podcast She Drives Mobility über das Auto diskutieren! Es war ein sehr schönes und spannendes Gespräch und ihr könnt es hier als Podcast anhören. Weiters findet ihr auf der selben Seite eine super Zusammenfassung unserer Punkte! Danke Katja für diese großartige Arbeit!
