Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics

The understanding of post-humanism is incomplete, especially when considering politics and aesthetics. Geophilosophy has evolved, into a comparative planetology, where the study of earth as a state can be thought of and looked upon from computations on the outside. This idea entails an acceleration from the initial recognition of local planetary economics toward a more universal recombinancy for which the political and aesthetic representations of human experience are tilted off-center. If accelerationist can refer to this exterior study, then is this a acclerationist geopolitical aesthetic, and toward what? The essay wishes not to grapple with the opinion or feelings associated with contingencies, philosophy, or politics, rather it states traces and effects of this geopolitical aesthetic already in our minds. Computation as a style of thought, is hindered by its association with economic instrumentality, yet also has an opening through algorithmic incompleteness, which allows the process to potentially cause/show unknowable and unknown political architectures.

Steven Shaviro states accelerationist aesthetic. The value- to draw out what it feels like to be in the contemporary moment. This value envisions the anthropocenic crash, so that we might adapt in advance. rather than creating innovations that we hold onto until our end, the imagining stares straight down destruction. Shaviro believes this imbues an individual with a heightened sense of place. This process, provides no path, idea, solution, or even specific outcomes, therefore it can’t be used for any political goal. However, the envisioning can train and redeem politics in the shock of its affect.

We as artist and designers, to be able to predict and prototype what may or may not survive an anthropocenic shift, must toil around with material interdependencies and the effect of subtraction/amplification any one might have on another. We however can’t know any of this, especially in regards to a geopolitical aesthetics in the jamesonian (Fredric Jameson) sense. This ends up being an exercise in apophenia, the drawing of connections between what can’t, or rather shouldn’t, be connected. There cannot be a post-anthropocenic politics, at least not in a normal recognizable sense. To do that we would have to distinguish between existential risk and absolute invention, and mobilize positions, which is just impossible. So we must mobilize without distinction. For us to then govern- to be able to adapt to economic decay and creation with nominal authorship- we must need something else.

Capitalism absolutely defines our current Anthropocene. It is both the condition and construct of the megamchine of the anthropocene. This is seen as resulting from our omnivore dominance, and/or an alien entropy machine for the processing of terrestrial material, value, and information into absolute speed. to eat or be eaten. there is however a reversabilty to the dichotomy, which is necessary to shift/retrain the focus of “political” away from confrontation with or acceleration of capitalism as the scope of the problem into a direct engagement-in-advance with what succeeds or exceeds it.

There is a needed shift in naming, and so we should refer to it as post-anthropocene rather than post-capitalism. Post-anthropocene indicates that “xenogeopolitcal aesthetics” can only be done in relation to a mature alienation from human history and anthropocentric time and scale. As it foreshadows and foregrounds the extinction of anthropocenic anthropology and our models of governance, it establishes not only that humans die with humanism (or vice versa) but that existing genetic models will once again rise, in the post anthropocene, as new unthinkable animal machines, New Earths.

Consider the “Arche-Fossil” an idea by Quentin Meillassoux. Meillassoux , in After Finitude, invokes the concept of the “arche-fossil” which is an object that indicates “the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life.”2) In other words, the arche-fossil is “evidence that exists independently of humans.” When talking about the post-anthropocene, we must shift this definition from one of ancestrality into one of alien descendence. Just as we see in this fossil the contingencies of a previous world, we are forced to, by our inherit condition, see-in-advance the descendent for which we are the ancestor and for which we are the unthinkable fossil. Our presence is an anterior precondition for our future dissolution, and the appearance of a lifeform that we cannot conceive, which will be as alien and foreign to us as the cenozoic fossil that predates us.

We can’t know of the post-anthropocenes structures and systems. The current perspective offer to us by this ancestral retrospection-in-advance challenges the conceit that, should anthropocenic shift make familiar human systems insupportable, then whatever genetics and chemicals projects we pass on through phylum, biomass, and phenotype will have no reality. This may be true or not. However we can reconcile one truth from this, should “we” survive the anthropocene, it won’t be as “humans”.

No discussion of an accelerationist geopolitical aesthetic (or of the partial inventory above set in relationship to the post-Anthropocene) can or should develop without passage into the life and afterlife of Anthropocenic Capitalism, particularly with regard to planetary-scale computation as its onto-financial substrate and circulatory system. Instead of locating the post-Anthropocene after the Anthropocene along some dialectical timeline, it is better conceived as a composite parasite nested inside the host of the present time, evolving and appearing in irregular intervals at a scale that exceeds the Eros/Thanatos economy of the organism. What mathematician Giuseppe Longo calls “the next machine,” the one that comes after Computation, and whose processes might then provide metaphors and epistemologies of life, thought, and systems, just as computers do today, will also involve, by definition, “the next economics.” We assume that neither of these (the next machine or the next economics) is likely to arrive without the other one in tow. Whether they can or will or should arrive to “us” or for “us” is a different matter. They may arrive only when we are exhumed, by some unthinkable descendant, as speechless, mineralized fossils. Or maybe faster than that, if we hasten them.

In regards to “the next machine” or the “next economics”, can or will or should it arrive to us or for us?

In other words, will we experience the evolutionary shift that brings about the post-anthropocene (the post-human) or is it simply that, post/human?