Life in More than Human Catastrophy. Anthropocene, Rock Climbing and Walter Benjamin

This article is an attempt to develop a posthumanist messianic figure additional to those created by Walter Benjamin in 20th century. The task of those figures is to provide a way of living in the times of crisis. I argue that the era that we live in –the anthropocene (with all of its catastrophes) –requires a posthumanist update to Benjamin’s philosophy. Therefore I use the case study of rock climbers as a collective subject that dismantles the dominant language of historical politics by creating names of climbing routes based on a mockery. The process of disassembling the language reveals the materiality of the rock and allows its history to be recovered. My attempt is based on the analysis of the El Pułkownik wall in the Liban quarry (Cracow, Poland).

Guattari’s Ecosophies

The article is a meta-theoretical study devoted to the ecosophical project of Félix Guattari developed in his two books The Three Ecologies i Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. According to Aleksandra Ubertowska, the core aim of Guattari’s work is rethinking of the issue of subject which he regards as a process of the non-anthropocentric subjectivisation. Ubertowska devotes particular attention to the notion of transversality, intersection of many processes, social and environmental axes which in Guattari’s work should determine the ecosophical approach. In the late part of the article Ubertowska elaborates on the concept of chaosmosis which Guattari compared to the language of madness, and defines as oscillation between excess of meanings and vacuum of signs.

This article addresses the figural dimension of Gilles Deleuze’s thought in terms of the twofold relation of forces aligned with the dualism of figures emerging in the visual image. The drive towards the differentiation of haptic figures provides an insight into the anti-representative approach to figurative clichéof painting to reveal the crucial tropes of figural presence and the profound understanding of Deleuzian decentration by addressing the inner context of his writings and external writings commenting on his thought. In this essay, I review Deleuze’s argument, his use and critique of Riegl, the central place of what he calls hapticity in this vision, and consider his attempt to illustrate what this “sensation”might be.

Toxic Suburbs. Radioactive Heritage of St. Louis in the Works of Allana Ross

The article follows the radioactive history of St. Louis featured in the works of the artist and activist Allana Ross. Her artistic practice presents an interesting, interdisciplinary approach to the social and environmental problems connected to the radioactive contamination of the city. The aforementioned contamination (apart from the workers directly involved in the processing of the uranium ore) affected mainly the lower middle-class families living in the outskirts.

From the early 1940s until the late 1960s St. Louis based chemical company Mallinckrodt was the major manufacturer of uranium utilized in the Manhattan Project and later on in the development of the American national atomic energy programme. As the result of the negligence of many social and political actors, the radioactive waste produced by Mallinckrodt spread over the city’s suburbs contaminating air, soil and water. These facts, however, were not publicly known for many years. Just recently they received the publicity that they demanded. Even though the radioactive contamination of St. Louis dates back to the 1940s, the affected areas had not been taken care of till the late 1980s, when the city was included into FUSRAP and Superfund programmes, which were established by the U.S. government to “clean the radioactive mess”left recklessly in the American landscape some decades ago.

The author of the article adopts the notion of negative heritage introduced by Lynn Meskell (2002) to interpret the significance of the radioactive contamination of the region and contextualize the works of Ross. The artist herself understands her projects, which may as well fall into the recently established category of artivism, as adaptive strategies for the slowly approaching environmental catastrophe. In a more general sense Ross calls out not only for the redefinition of St. Louis negative radioactive heritage, but also for the new culture of nature and new modes of human –environment relations.

Gardens – Monuments of the Anthropocene

The aim of the article is to analyse the metaphor of the garden as a metaphor which allows one to give an account of the conditions of the Earth subject to human actions and –more importantly –to sketch a utopian project of going beyond the Anthropocene. A new understanding of the garden modifies the traditional view of it as a paradise, where a harmony between humans and nature reigns. Today, gardens are often approached as places of cooperation, negotiation as well as of tensions and conflicts among human beings and other-than-human beings, that is as places where numerous relationships create a human and other-than-human community. The analyses will start with an interpretation of Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (1978–), a public park in Manhattan that was conceived of as a reconstruction of the local precolonial landscape and at the same time as its monument. Sonfist’s work is a good illustration of how the metaphor of the garden is nowadays interpreted and –I contend –it may be also seen as a monument of the Anthropocene.

Bioincrustations: Mosses, Lichens and Matzevot Organic Ornaments

In the article I propose to critically rethink the process of biodeterioration. By following the inexorable growth of mosses and lichen species on Jewish heritage –especially the lapidarium of matzevot situated in the Rzuchowski Forest (former terrains of Waldlager Kulmhof) –I try to reconfigure the meaning of “green matzevah”and suggest the potential ways of understanding microbiological processes occurring on the surface of the tombstones from both ecological and cultural perspective. My goal is to show the complicity of human and non-human subjects in creating the dynamic assemblages of abiotic and organic matter that may be interpreted as a specific ornament on the surface of matzevot. I use the narrative strategy of multispecies storytelling and claim that writing history of ongoing heritage erosion is at the same time writing history of new microhabitats’emergence.

Microbiology of Presence. On Anna Zagrodzka’a Art

This article locates Anna Zagrodzka’s project Alternaria alternata in the context of reflections on the relations between genocide and ecocide as manifested in problems of conservation of Nazi extermination camps. The artist’s photographs depicting elements of the landscape of death camps chronicle the events and processes of deterioration that result from objects, such as buildings, walls, fences and plants, being inhabited by bacteria, fungi and lichen. Approaching the environmental microbiology of mass killing sites by applying the methods of laboratory research to examine elements of buildings, artefacts, water and the soil offers incontrovertible evidence of the relentless vitality of life at such locations. In this article, I show how Zagrodzka’s research contributes to the laboratorial humanities, on the one hand, as well as to field research humanities, on the other. I also demonstrate how her work applies the arts of attentiveness that are typical of the research methods of multispecies ethnography. Analysis of the artist’s work shows that the continued existence (or survival) of Homo sapiens will require the preparation for difficult and long-lasting processes of adaptation to changing conditions brought about by ever new threats, crises and potential catastrophes. Adaptation can be assisted by artworks and by research in the humanities that create future scenarios enabling preparation for possible, though often unforeseeable, events.