Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Capitalobscenery

Sometimes what are images of the Capitalocene are festooned in swathes of obnoxious greenery; statements of apparent symbihonesty about how the forces of capitalism work with and for the many lives, human and parahuman that it puts to work in service of the hypergrowth that is its mantra. Here a high-rise building is dipped in dripping leaves in the heart of Sydney’s CBD like some monolithic moss totem in worship of urbananity; Capitalobscenery. These are vistas of the world that seem as effortlessly abundant as they are commercial; as synthetic as they are natural; competitive as they are harmonious – Capitalism is Nature, they seem to say. And this is true. Humans are nature. Humans created Capitalism. Capitalism is nature. But what kind of nature? Capitalobscenery denies the dark underbelly of its machinations – the enslavement, the devastation, the pollution. It smiles even as it knows that you can see it all. The reflective and fur-leafed grid of glass that captures the sky in its eyeballs on this greenbellied building asks us to stroke its exposed plant world like a cat; it assures us what goes on behind it is completely natural, no matter how ugly the reality of it may be – no matter how many lives, human and parahuman were lost, degraded and/or exploited in achieving this glitteringly glass humanden.  

As Rosie Braidotti says, the Capitalocene has become Post-Human, but not in a way that is life affirming. Rather, it is Post-Human in that it has realised, like god reflecting on the vastness of all his productive value for the first time, that humans and parahumans are equally worthy of its measuring, coding and quantifying in terms of capital value; equally worthy of being uprooted from lives of comfort, freedom and love, only to be displaced into lives of torture, enslavement and cruelty. Here the majesty of greyhounds in full sprint is muzzled from our eyes by the crude plumage of a money making ritual. The grass glistens like hills stretching away from the eye into the horizon of this circulaceration on our souls. We feel our fear for them chasing them onwards into the pixelatent digital scream that separates us from this race for their lives. We know those who cannot win will be shot. And yet, the Capitalobscenery that this image propagates in our minds is that the greyhounds were running this race all along – it is not humans that chase them with the threat of death, but Nature. Survival of fastest. Along their spines and skullsT the metal fence hammers into their flesh like harmless farm enclosers quilting the land into patches of gambling Eden where greyhounds are a piece of pastoral paradice rolling around the great circle of life roulette.  


But where is the green in which we would imagine these cows? In place of obscene greenery to warm our souls in the heart of this dairy farm there is a holy light; a white in the darkness of parahuman rummaginings through the soil empaved by these humangels’s flight into nowhere they belong but everywhere as the sun can touch along the tips of heavenly gates at which the paramortals crowd. It is not for cows. Their place is in the dirt; the clay from which Adam was made they may search for the grass that eludes them like an unpresent Elysian fields to which they may return in their dreams once their lives have been offered like milk to bathe the Cleopaternal world in human rule; drench its skin in the scent of mother always there invisibly unedged forever as ever the dairy farmers may walk away from the nature they created; from the Capitalobscenery careening its neck to see what has been left behind on the other side. What we also do not see are the tubes connected like power pointments blessing their bellies breathing life into the economeeting place of natural salectivation and divine right to resources. Here we have a world where Capitalism is not just Nature, it is Divine Nature.

By Claire - z3393668.

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