Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

The Invasive Species

Bill Brown’s ‘Thing Theory’ analysis was a thought-provoking piece as it laid the foundation in order to understand how human species have made the most elaborate attempts to modify the earth’s ecological systems and the organisms living within them. The analysis interestingly made me think of how Thing Theory particularly exposes the way humans mischaracterize animal cognition, through an anthropocentric lens. I followed to connect this to the Chimera concept we explored in the Animal world. The emergence of technological development in material entities within our society has encouraged humans to alter creations in the world using human/animal hybrids. Chimeric animals is a window into the Anthropocene, and with the exploration of animality and birth of chimeras, the surfacing of a new type of discourse (post-humanism) is generated on to the scene.
Thing theory leads humans to creations that we never expected to see, and the crisis of posthumanism developing in the discipline of animal studies in order to create chimeras, only measures more divide amongst animals, and continuously catapults a sense of superiority and entitlement that comes from anthropocentrism. Mixing human and animal organisms shake the foundations of natural entities and expose an anxiety and some form of resistance towards this evolutionary ‘progression’ if you call it. Anxiety in the sense that we suspect that integrating identities of a human through biotechnological force, onto an animal, can be accompanied as untold suffering on the animal. This emotion that we feel entails us to acknowledge the compelling notion of ‘animal rights.’ The apparent tension that borders between human and non-human rights I see, is that the very concept of ‘human’ rights, according to Cary Wolfe, reminds us that rights simply cannot be given to anyone, rather, to be ‘earned’ through political struggle. At this point, how do we satisfy the animal claims with the legitimacy and whatever status is rightfully theirs? How do they begin to earn such rights?
No doubt that the comparisons made between species based on the functional role that they play clouds the interest of environmental and animal philosophy. These boundaries that traverse between nature and science is similarly explored in Water worlds close readings.



Tash 

Wolfe C. 2003, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, University of Chicago Press, pp5-15

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