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Anthropocene Aesthetics: Sublime, Weird and Queer

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2019

Abstract

There exist numerous -cenes (Capitalocene, Chthulhucene, Sociocene, Plantationocene, Technocene...), there exist the "Good, the Bad and the Ugly" scenarios of the Anthropocene, and there exist diffracted aesthetics and subjective experiences of what the 'age of man' might entail. To navigate this semiotic clinamen, this triptych essay offers an aesthetic toolbox which aims to provide perspectives on this cultural ground.

Due to their historical genesis as tools which shoring up the master's house, the sublime, the weird and, arguably, the queer sensibilities are determined to be disposed of, and are here to be read as written under erasure; they are only part objects, each one of them too frail to grapple with the challenges posed by ubiquitous, long-term, and ever accelerating processes of environmental degradation. Like Margaret Atwood affirms in her essay of the same name - "It's not 'Climate Change,' it's Everything Change." For the purposes of this paper, a kaleidoscopic vision of aesthetic categories is employed in order to better remix the manifest images of the real which humanity currently intimates in the hyperobject of climate change.