"The Car & the Modern Concept of the Good Life" - Talk at Vivir Bien Conference

The Centre PROEIB Andes at the University Mayor of San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia together with the Max-Weber-Kolleg of the University of Erfurt are organizing a bilingual (English / Spanish) conference about the concept of "The Good Life / Vivir Bien / Sumak Kawsay/Suma Quamana" next week (13th to 16th of June) and I have been invited to give a talk about the car and its exhaust(ed) entanglements with the modern idea of the Good Life.

Find more information and the links to the online sessions of the conference here. 

Below you can find the abstract of my talk.

Living Well with exhaust(ed) entanglements?

The car is perhaps the symbol of the good life in its modern declination. What is called “Modernity” might have started out in Europe with some privileged white men having “enlightened” ideas, but it nowadays has to be regarded as one globalized epistemo-ontological regime that tends to homogenize the planet ever more by means of distributing consumer goods such as the car to ever more regions and corners of the world. For this reason, the term Homogenocene, as proposed by Charles Mann, might be a helpful further specification of the much discussed “Anthropocene” - and the car is one main agent of flattening and paving this planet to an ever more homogeneous habitat for modern humanoids while causing extinction and displacement of many other life forms.

In how far is our modern version of the “good life” toxic? What does it mean if the concepts, ideals and life-forms most of us humans strive for are progressively understood to have a catastrophic ecological effect on the planet? In this talk, I want to address and frame such questions by referring to the concept of “exhaust(ed) entanglements” that I have developed for the eponymous conference I am organizing in May 2022 in Berlin.

While it might be true that “Modernity” as a philosophical, epistemological concept might be somewhat passé (to the extent that some, like Bruno Latour, even declare that “we have never been modern”), the very modern promise of the Good Life seems to live on and continue to attract more and more peoples to this very one modern lifestyle. In the context of the “Good Life”-Conference, I am particularly interested in stimulating a dialogue about these “exhaust(ed) entanglements” with the car, Modernity and its promises of the good life between scholars of Germany (a “fully developed” car nation) and Bolivia (in which car culture isn’t – for good or for worse – developed to a similar degree).