Abstract

Among the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, perhaps none has been more central than redefining ‘the human’ that this epoch seems to name. It is no secret that the European liberal subject has been the directing force of the Anthropocene and the model from which a global humanity, and its globalising technology, has been envisioned. This essay begins by bringing together a diversity interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives to ask: does the Anthropocene mark the realisation of this homogenous human subject, or its end? Extinction seems constitutive of a climate narrative dominated by a Euro-American imaginary, wherein a fixation on endings suggests the anxieties – and the possibilities – of that imaginary coming to an end as a globalising worldview. Two recent performances by Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company, Conversations (at the end of the world) (2017) and SOMETHING (out of nothing) (2019), imagine extinction through scenarios depicting human figures displaced and overtaken by sentient landscapes. Composed of synthetic materials and activated by bio-technical forces, these landscapes scale down a computational planet, embodying an accumulated history of technological progress and human interventions in environments. Extinction, in these works, is not the end, however, but rather the slow dying out of a singular idea of the human subject, if not its singular narrative of technological progress

摘要

在人类世带来的挑战中，也许没有什么比重新定义这个时代似乎命名的“人类”更重要了。众所周知，欧洲自由主义主体一直是人类世的指导力量，也是设想全球人类及其全球化技术的模式。本文首先汇集了多元的跨学科和跨文化视角来提问：人类世标志着这一同质人类主体的实现，还是它的终结？灭绝似乎构成了由欧美想象主导的气候叙事，其中对结局的执着暗示了这种想象作为全球化世界观结束的焦虑和可能性。Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company 最近的两场表演，对话（世界末日）（2017）和某事（无中生有）（2019）通过描绘人物被有情景观取代和超越的场景来想象灭绝。这些景观由合成材料组成并由生物技术力量激活，缩小了一个计算星球，体现了技术进步和人类对环境干预的累积历史。然而，在这些作品中，灭绝并不是结束，而是关于人类主体的单一观念的缓慢消亡，如果不是其对技术进步的单一叙述的话