May 18, 2017
Anthropocene Lecture
- 19:00
- Anthropocene Lectures
- Dept. I
- McKenzie Wark
How can we radically reconceptualize the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humanity has become a determining factor in the planet’s further evolution? In the framework of the Anthropocene Lectures, McKenzie Wark presents his critical theory of the relation between labor and nature.
“The Anthropocene runs on carbon. It is a redistribution, not of wealth, or power, or recognition, but of molecules.” In his book Molecular Red. Theory for the Anthropocene (2015), recently released in German, the media theorist McKenzie Wark urges us to consider: “What the Carbon Liberation Front calls us to create in its molecular shadow is not yet another philosophy, but a poetics and technics for the organization of knowledge.” Referring to utopian concepts formulated by thinkers such as Alexander Bogdanov, Andrej Platonov, Donna Haraway, and Kim Stanley Robinson, he suggests an alternative realism capable of rethinking the very role of the working human. In conversation with the science historian Giulia Rispoli he discusses how an organization of knowledge and labor could be reshaped that does not put the existence of current life on this planet in peril.
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin, Germany
About This Series
The Anthropocene—the geological epoch of humanity—has established itself as a key concept within a wider scientific and social discourse. In the midst of the dramatic and destabilizing changes to the basic conditions for life on our planet, new epistemic potentials for human action upon the Earth are to be explored.
In the framework of the Anthropocene Lecture series, a number of distinguished speakers accentuating the Anthropocene debate are invited to respond to a topic that will be a central challenge for many generations to come. The lectures take place at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam.