On Ecocolonialism and Speculative Crime Scenes

The Anthropocene has been embraced by the humanities, social sciences, and visual arts as a new geologic epoch that captures the planetary dimension of the long-term human impact on the environment. This talk will instead propose to approach the Anthropocene as the epistemic scene constructed by the scenario methods of Earth system scientists and engineers of the global environment. Introduced and popularized by planetary management research programmes, the Anthropocene is the crime scene of energy megaprojects, the stage for the scenario thinking and socio-ecological modelling of supranational organizations. Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés and other artistic crime scenes suggest strategies for delinking from the ecocolonization of the Earth’s future and imagining alternative relations with the environment.

Federico Luisetti is Associate Professor of Italian Culture and Society at the University of St. Gallen. His publications include The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas (edited with J. Pickles and W. Kaiser, 2015) and Una vita. Pensiero selvaggio e filosofia dell’intensità(2011). He is currently writing a monograph on the Anthropocene as the state of nature of neoliberalism.