SONIC ACTS Festival - The Geologic Imagination
Graham Harman: Anthropocene Ontology
26 februrary 2015 - Paradiso, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
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The proposed Anthropocene Epoch is not an Anthropocentric Epoch, for the obvious reason that it highlights the fragility of the human species rather than human supremacy. This split between the Anthropocene and the Anthropocentric compels us to recognise an important philosophical distinction that is seldom acknowledged. Namely, the fact that humans are involved as ingredients in the creation of some entity does not entail that the entity has no autonomous reality apart from humans. The Anthropocene climate is generated by humans and independently mysterious to us, and the same holds for other fields that have been ‘anthropocene’ from the start: human society, art, economics.