Traveling along the consequences of a past idea,
a thought that was passed on,
things that passed
while a peculiar landscape gradually evolved. And others disappeared.
Digesting the past and its histories of having been made,
its entanglement with a specific future which is
this present.
Something is swimming in a toxic lake
This radio-active lake is the material backbone of digital culture,
a technologically determined life-style
and global supply chains,
that reconfigured reality – in fiction and fact.
We would not be these humans if there were not
airplanes and drones,
plastic and oil,
dogs and stones,
tables and chairs,
computers and smartphones.
Disposable for some and not for others.
But wait! Which we?
Who is part of it?
Nonhuman things have always already dispossessed us to a certain degree.
The autonomous self,
the self-sufficient human subject -
a desperately anthropocentric lie,
a colonial and neoliberal telltale of exploitation
of those who believe that nothing matters except personal risks, investments, optimization and expansion.
What about material consequences – beyond traces – embodied and embedded?
What about lessness?
What does it mean to be post-cyborg?
entangled with other post-cyborgs
who ask themselves
how to live,
how to love,
how to act,
how to be
in this temporality that they are entangled in and that their movements coproduce,
in a time that shouts: Almost too late, but not yet.
Modernity was the era when humans took a lost god´s place.
This was the natal hour of scientific humanism characterised by a variety of phallocentric careers and human exceptionalism.
Thinking was sexy. Moving was good. Faster was better. The future seemed bright.
Today noone really knows what a non/human body is capable of if it is disentangled from those (non/human beings and things) that let it be.
If we conceive of land not as a property or territory but as a time-being,
a sedimented history of practices,
a mulit-species lifeworld,
a material-geo-biography of
bones and bodies,
ashes and earth,
the place where death and life meet,
what then, is freedom
where terra-forming and material autonomy intertwine?
And for whom?
They were political with the body
from within the nexus of enheritance and capitalist embodiment.
As human bodies embedded in globalized, digitial bodies.
They wanted to be political with the body
beyond opting for a peculiar self-staging.
If freedom is not the possibility to fulfill all our narcissistic desires,
if it is not the capability to manage everything alone,
it could be the possiblity to change unilateral relationships and to develop those that are mutually invigorating (relationships of species of all kind).
In the present geo-chronological era named the anthropocene some face the following aporia: They are aware that at present human beings radically transform the geology and climate of this planet with the sort and scope of their activities. At the same time they do not want to reduce every phenomenon to a human producer or maker or its cultural construction. Terminologies are not neutral. And the „anthropocene“ also sounds a bit like human omnipotence.
Something is swimming in the black lake.
It adopts the black colour of the radio-active mud -
a residue of the extraction of rare earth,
pumped into a big hole
---
until a whole new lakescape emerged.