Not About the Anthropocene: The Political Ontology of Life Projects

• In Event: Finitude in Other Terms: Uncommoning Extinction - I

Abstract

The Anthropocene is a ‘Big Story’ that conjures big responses. From the management of Earth Systems to dismantling capitalism and to the careful composition of the ‘common world,’ proposed responses involve nothing less than ‘the world.’ While in one end the image might be of a well-integrated, self-coherent and promethean Spaceship Earth; and in the other of a messy, contradictory, and symbiotic pile of planetary compost, both images submit to the big, the planetary, the whole. And being big, these narratives seek to interpellate everyone with a sense of urgency emanating from the shared dramatic backdrop of extinction. In this presentation I want to contrast these big stories with the Life Projects of emplaced collectives. Life projects embody ‘small stories’ about the good life; stories that, rather than assuming (or even aspiring to) interpellate everyone, are fundamentally concerned with enhancing their own plausibility amidst (and along) other stories. Paradoxically, while not being necessarily about it, Life Projects open unthought of paths to address the fundamental political question that subtends concerns with the Anthropocene, namely, how can ‘we’ (humans and non-humans) go on living together. It is telling that an exclusive form of the first person plural (i.e., ‘we’) is quite common in the (human) languages associated with emplaced collectives. This exclusive ‘we’ points to a political ontology that shift slightly the fundamental political question rendering it, “how can we go on living together in divergence.”

Author

• Mario Blaser, Memorial University