Maya KÓVSKAYA (Univ. de Chiang Mai)

Moderator: Gonçalo Santos (CIAS / Sci-Tech Asia / University of Coimbra)

Aesthetic paradigms constitute power as they rationalize and legitimize, normalize and naturalize certain ways of seeing and being, knowing and valuing. The term Anthropocene was originally intended as a neutral reference to humanity’s unprecedented and destructive recent ecological, biogeochemical, and geological engagement with the web of life. The titular “Anthropos” has been rightly critiqued for presenting humanity as a homogenized, universal collective agent of ecological destruction. Alternative terms, including Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene, etc., highlight varying causal characteristics, perpetrators, and timelines of emergence. My concept of the Anthroposupremocene is “patchy” and refers to the dominant historically-specific aesthetic paradigm of “Anthropos” as the “Master of Nature.” Anthroposupremacism entails an ontologically-constitutive abjection of the animal from the human, and a negation of the intrinsic value of the more-than-human world, and other-than-human beings and entities. The logic of this radical negation has been widely applied to classify myriad humans relegated to invidious hierarchical, dualist, gendered, and racialized categories of dehumanized “Nature,” and thus coded as “less-than-human.” 

The Anthroposupremocene has shaped the modern world through the necropolitical processes of genocidal colonialism and ecocidal capitalism that gave rise to the existentially perilous conditions for which the term “Anthropocene” was created. The titular Anthropos is not a neutral descriptor of a humanity that bears equal, species-level responsibility for the epochal world-breaking of the Earth’s life-support systems that is driving the Sixth Mass Extinction. Rather, Anthropos exemplifies the historically specific universalizing claim to “humanity” that Sylvia Wynter brilliantly characterized as the “overrepresentation of Man,” in which a particular “genre of the human” claims universal supremacy over all other beings. To confront and remediate this damage, which threatens our species and a myriad of other life forms, we urgently need to dismantle this aesthetic paradigm—to “unsettle” the claimed dominion of Anthropos, decolonize relations, make reparations, return stolen lands, and undo Anthrosupremacy together with the systemic racism and misogyny that it subtends. Art offers a space to shatter the doxa of the dominant modality of being human, and imagine and enact non-invidious, non-binary, non-dualist, non-speciesist modes of being human and forge genuinely intersectional multispecies worldmaking solidarities—rejecting the underlying aesthetic paradigm that separates humanity from itself and the natural world, and working together to recuperate, extend, or re-imagine non-toxic visions of how to be human in a more-than-human world organized around principles of mutualism, symbiopoeisis, respect, reparation, reciprocity, “response-ability,” and regeneration.