Statement of Intent

This is a pretty neat one, from my essay “Ecology” from Imre Szeman's Fueling Culture, coming out soon.

When we divide the world into the categories nature and culture, we are performing the quintessential gesture of modernity. But modernity is predicated on the ecological emergency that has given rise to a totally new geological period: the Anthropocene. “Modernity” is how the Anthropocene has appeared to us historically thus far. Dividing the world into nature and culture is precisely anti-ecological, insofar as it participates in the logistics that enabled humans to act as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. The Anthropocene is also the moment at which Western philosophy decided to restrict itself to the (human) subject–world correlate (Meillassoux 2009:  5). This self-imposed blindness to the real seems to go hand in hand with the direct intervention in the geological real.