Rosi Braidottis talk Necropolitics and Ways of Dying (2019) for Sonic Acts is brilliant. It’s complicated, sharp and puts concepts such as the anthropocene and post-human into context. She identifies that in popular discourse these refer to a process of “white urban masculinity becoming to terms with their personal vulnerability”. She wants to reconfigure the anthropocene. In the start Braidotti identifies a “forensic turn” trough which the dead have entered common consciousness: Images of the dead are frequently used as evidence of events. She reminds that biopower is only partly about the living (who are being controlled), more importantly it’s about the ones who are left to die: “Some humans are much more mortal then others” (infra-humans). She claims that apocalyptic fantasies and speculations, have led to a fatigue of political activism. As a solution she urges her audiences to speak from “somewhere specific” and to ground their opinions, as only by grounding opinions we become accountable. Citing Deleuze she urges us to focus on temporal scales.
We can be a large community if we agree to ground our opinions: If we do not generalize. I would ground the we, into politics of location and different understandings of time and timing [Multiple temporaries: Reproduction cycles and social cycles of labor etc.].
The death of man is the opening of multiple possibilities which call upon serious engagement on our part. Thinking of the present as virtual future, what we are at the process of becoming, is a praxis and hard work. There is no time to here to indulge in apocalyptic lames or luxuriate in the spectacle of our own demise. Roll up your sleeves and lets work on an alternative and what we need to do. [Opposing is not the way forwards because we, the capitalists etc. are the problem] The question is not about extinctions, its about what we are in the process of becoming. Lets deal with it.
Braidotti is also referenced in Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth (2019) by Sarah T. Roberts and Mél Hogan (I’ve been following Hogan since she organized the “Salon des Refusés” online screening program).
Whether Earth’s collapse will come due resource extraction, environmental destruction, or war (or a combination thereof), the technocratic élite are not only both predisposed and poised to start anew somehow and somewhere else well beyond the backyard bunker but may even welcome or initiate it by way of inaction in the face of destruction on Earth.
Maria Teriaeva, an interesting electronica artist from Moscow. Also looking forwards to visit All For DJ shop.