traditional forms of knowledge, this text argues for a detailed analysis of two of its possible genealogies.
It firstly follows a turn to ecology via environ-mentality and the offsets of cybernetics, thereby
proposing that a general ecology itself marks a
current epistemic formation. In contrast, a critical
genealogy of the Anthropocene’s colonial condition
points at coloniality as the unthought but
con-stitutive momentum for the modern episteme. Thus,
both genealogies outline a specific understanding ofmodernity leading to the shifts at stake, and suggest
possibilities to navigate these unsettled conditions.
When oil spills, Earth opens its archives.
Tom McCarthy
The critical writing of history is a continuous struggle to liberate the past from within the unconscious of a collective that forgets the conditions of its own existence.
Susan Buck-Morss
In geology, liquefaction refers to the “becoming-liquid” of a terrestrial surface due to tectonic activity: low-lying water is pressed upwards and liquefies formerly solid layers. The Earth’s surface floats as a floe on aqueous subsoil. At the same time, the term implies any material and physical process of liquefaction, for example the phase transition from gaseous or solid to liquid.
The image of soil liquefaction plays with the simultaneity of these states, a certain indecision, and its temporary limitation. If clods of earth slide over each other, drift apart, or disappear entirely for a time, a previously calm and “reliable” landscape moves and reassembles. Liquefaction implies geological rearrangement and emergence—processual landscapes. It is then not only due to linguistic parallels a metaphor for epistemic dynamics, often referred to in terms such as fracture, discontinuity, emergence, or deposition. Thus, the Anthropocene might be understood as an epistemological fault line with various points of friction or hypocenters, from which sedimented knowledge is liquefied.
In seismology, a hypocenter describes the seismic source of tectonic activity located vertically below the epicenter and along a fault line. Hypocenters are therefore mainly identified by seis-mographs via epicenters that can be measured and located on the Earth’s surface. The slow and continuous movements of a fault line thus might only be mapped indirectly by observing epicenters. The Anthropocene in this regard is neither a single
locus nor an event, but a continuous and winding fault line that 103 can be traced along discourses on epochal ruptures, the climate crisis, buried historicity and narratives, ecological devastation, critical epistemologies, or simply the crisis of future life on the planet. Only what previously seemed solid can liquefy—what has been displaced and forgotten in geological depth streams up into the realm of the visible and utterable. In its sudden appearance on the surface, however, the emerged resists immediate and unambiguous description, although various tendencies and patterns are recognizable in the strata as elements of a displaced past.
Following this vague restlessness, I depart from the assumption that the Anthropocene marks an epistemological fault line. The current re-formation of knowledge represents an opportunity to open up relations between perspectives and questions previously submerged. But from which standpoint might the moving surface be described and mapped, and what would be the possible con-sequences? The intention is to focus on two hypocenters that pro-pose a critical history of structures and formations of knowledge and provide approaches for the turbulent and comprehensive epicenters of globality and agency in the Anthropocene. Firstly, I refer to the genealogy of the concept of ecology, which, gaining its momentum from cybernetics and media technological devel-opments in the twentieth century, makes visible a fundamental ecologization. Secondly, I follow crucial arguments of decolonial theory and its criticism of modernity’s paradigm of knowledge and cognition—highlighting its persistent colonial constitution.
Both genealogies refer to and propose different historical perspectives in the present provoked by the Anthropocene discourse. Therefore, what follows is an examination of (de-) coloniality and ecology as forms of knowledge and possible ways to map the epistemological implications of the Anthropocene on different layers.
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The Anthropocene as an extensive fault line refers to possible pasts and futures twofold. It thus calls for a genealogical and his-torical location and the attempt is to explain its emergence, but at the same time to raise questions of concomitant epistemological effects and formations of knowledge. Following Michel Foucault’s conception of genealogy, the emphasis is on the relations of forces and emergence and how “these forces wage against each other or against adverse circumstance” (Foucault 1996, 149). But genealogy as a history of configurations can only offer an “impure” narrative and a partial cartography of knowledge (Sarasin et al. 2007, 13–14).1 In this sense, geographer Kathryn 1 “Genealogies are fundamentally ‘impure’ – they are stories that tell of
com-plicated circumstances and multiple origins, in which scientific and everyday knowledge interpenetrate, in which original intentions are turned into the opposite and scientific knowledge only becomes what was supposedly sought from the very beginning at the very end of a research process itself.
… Precisely at this point, however … it must turn into a history of knowledge”
(Sarasin et al. 2007, 13–14; my translation).
[Fig. 1] Liquid soil and dust at the beginning of a dream sequence in the “Zone” in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. (Still from 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, 2018, courtesy of the artists)
Yusoff characterizes the task of critical genealogy as the ques- 105 tioning of the sediments involved and the basal entanglement of power and knowledge.
The first step in such a genealogy of knowledge production is to address the processes of subjectification …: specifically, to see what modes of subjectification make it possible for a subject (Anthropos) to become an object of possible knowledge (Anthropocene). (Yusoff 2015, 7)
What then becomes evident is that origin stories are designated leverage points in order to highlight and deconstruct their historical emergence and current effects. Both perspectives explicitly address this logic as it is essential not only for the epis-temo-technological trajectory of cybernetics and ecology but also for a decolonial deconstruction of hegemonic knowledge structures.