Multispecies Worlding, Eco-Art, and Solidarity in a More-than-human Capitalocene

This month, we will ask about radical aesthetics, ecological arts practices, multispecies worldings, and the possibilities for survival in the epoch many, including Jason W. Moore and Donna Haraway, term the Capitalocene. Those of us who align with nonhuman others in resistance, revolution, and recuperation [1] often rally around sociopolitical acts of worlding; we might identify with creative arts practice; or, we might collaborate through agroecology, urbanism, or citizen science, for example. Undoing the modernist binary of culture and nature — which masks the hierarchy of human, subhuman, and nonhuman, and which fuel the engines of capitalism and colonialism — is of critical importance, and underlies our work.

Radical Aesthetics of Multispecies Worlding, Eco-Art, and Solidarity in a More-than-human Capitalocene
Moderated by Margaretha Haughwout (US) with invited discussants

Capitalocene, a term that challenges the problematic universalizing framework of the Anthropocene, decenters “anthropos” or humanity in general, and centers instead on regimes of power and wealth that exploit human labor and labor beyond-the-human. Moore recognizes capitalism as an entire way of organizing nature — “a planetary system of power, capital, and nature”. Capitalism, to Moore, is a “world-ecology” with a specific history — occurring over the past 500 years — and perhaps, therefore, possible to overcome. To Moore and Haraway, we need to look to the early modern period, to see the beginning of the market system, and its resultant colonial violence on and upheavals of humans, plants, animals, entire ecologies. [2]

This month, [-empyre-]’s guests will extend, complicate and perhaps occasionally answer the following questions:

Week One :: Radical Entanglements, Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems ::
What are the radical aesthetics of ecological practice? How do systems and systems theory inform or depend on a radical aesthetics of multispecies worlding and ecological art in the Capitalocene? How do our practices reify or undo systems and the binaries of modernity? How does this kind of work engage the Capitalocene?

Week Two :: Mediated Natures, Speculative Futures and Justice ::
How can we understand terms like justice, solidarity, ethics, survival, radicality in the Capitalocene? What are the stakes, the costs and the possible futures for different ecologies and the humans that live amongst them?

Week Three :: Weedy Resistance & Debt Solidarity with the More-than-Human ::
Given that art so often contributes to regime of capital, is it realistic to think there is potential for our work to contribute to its undoing? What are some ways that multispecies artists and multispecies worlders achieve resistance? Can we include other engagements beyond-the-human — hauntings, challenges to life, that can aid in revolutionary ecologies?

Week Four :: Capitalocene Times: from Entangled Plants-People to Cheap
Food-Sick Consumers::
Might attention to specific crop commodities such as sugar, rice, and blueberries teach us alternate ways of mapping global, regional, local economies? What kinds of temporalities and historical materialisms are enacted or destroyed by the cultivation of particular crops? Do revolutionary ecologies call into being other temporalities and speculative futures?

1. Deborah Bird Rose, Reports From a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonization (Sidney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004).

2. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016).

Radical Aesthetics of Multispecies Worlding, Eco-Art, and Solidarity in a More-than-human Capitalocene
Moderated by Margaretha Haughwout (US) with invited discussants

October 1 to 7th Week 1: Radical Entanglements, Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems
Discussants: Valentine Cadieux (US), Lissette Olivares (US) Randall Szott
(US)
With Guest: Antonio Roman-Alcala (US)

October 8th to 14th Week 2: Mediated Natures, Speculative Futures and Justice
Discussants: Julie Andreyev (CA), Grisha Coleman (US), Meredith Drum (US), Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa (US)
With Guests Tyler Fox (US), Jordan Yerman (CA)

October 15th to 21st Week 3: Weedy Resistance & Debt Solidarity with the More-than-Human
Discussants: Ellie Irons (US), Christopher Kennedy (US), Max Haiven (CA), Cassie Thornton (US)

October 22nd to 31st Week 4: Capitalocene Times: from Entangled Plants-People to Cheap Food-Sick Consumers
Discussants: Elaine Gan (PH,US), Jason Moore (US), Joline Blais (US)