The poetics of posthuman knowledge-making : the inscription of political possibilities and limits in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This thesis takes as its starting point that the Anthropocene marks two interrelated crises. A crisis of the Modern figure of humanity, underpinned by the nature/culture binary specific to Modern societies, and a crisis of radical political possibility. It is interested in the way posthuman knowledge-making emerges in the unfolding of these crises. From this position, the thesis draws upon Rancière’s politically charged ‘Poetics of Knowledge’ to deconstruct the ‘poetic’ operations of a number of posthuman approaches to knowledge making. Organising these approaches into a series of key ‘poetic regimes,’ which describe the way these knowledges are fabricated through distinct narrational, metaphorical, and logical constructions, the thesis critically evaluates and responds to the political possibilities and limits inscribed in their construction. Making the analysis of these poetic regimes through a series of illustrative case studies, the thesis argues that if posthuman knowledge-practices offer important insights into the crisis of the nature/culture binary, nonetheless, the crisis of political possibility is inscribed in their very poetic fabrication, marking their political horizons with troubling limitations that off-stage radical politics. The thesis responds to these deficiencies with a unique theoretical approach that pairs Barad’s posthumanism, particularly their focus on exclusion-making and the reconfigurative capacities of ‘the void,’ with Rancière’s radical, egalitarian account of political practice. In doing so, the thesis aims to redirect posthuman thought towards a thoroughgoing engagement with concrete, radical, and ecologically oriented struggles, where agency is configured in the voiding of key practical operations of Modernity’s nature/culture binary. The thesis argues that practices of voiding make space for new forms of egalitarian logic and allow new, ecologically attuned modes of bounding the human and the natural to gain force. The potency of this approach is demonstrated through a reading of the Hambach Forest occupation against lignite mining in Germany