An Experimentation with E-Concepts
Nature and Culture’s ‘Co-estrangement’
The above image is a bleak portrayal of dualism’s dominating force in governing the intra-actions between humans and the natural world. It symbolically illustrates the ever-widening division between nature and culture, and more harshly humanity’s alienation and disconnection to the natural realm. This brings in the concept ‘co-estrangement' - a paradox that reveals how the unity between culture and nature is no longer optimistic, but rather premised on their mutual experiences of estrangement with other realms. ‘Co-estrangement’ is highly emblematic of the challenges of the Anthropocene, signifying a desperate attempt to unify culture and nature by any means in a severely reductionist society. To acknowledge the world as ‘co-estranged’ is a step towards ecology unison, given that ‘co-estrangement’ mournfully arises from an understanding of nature and culture’s interconnectedness.
Mother Nature and ‘Father Modern’
The dilemma of land clearing reveals the way in which anthropocentricism and androcentrism are pervading forces of the Anthropocene. The image interweaves feminist post-humanist ethics to represent the industrialisation of the global world as an interplay between phallogocentricism and ‘yonicentricism’. As such, the image depicts the malignant relationship between man and nature through the phallus’ seduction and exploitation of mother nature’s obstinately docile persona. The positioning of the masculine hand on the female chin asserts androcentric control and nature’s subservience to humanity's hubris. To combat imbalanced power relations between the realms, ‘de-genderism’ is required to strip the realms from their gendered identity, where nature is neither feminine nor masculine, in order to create an escape route from the institutionalised gendered inequality.
‘Tech-mutability’
Land clearing is a practice that has been harshly exacerbated by technological advancements. Human destruction of the natural landscape is thus reliant on large scale machinery –symbolic of human and technology’s co-dependence and alliance. As such, the post-humanist illustration reaffirms this notion, depicting a cyborg removing their human mask, which appears to be intertwined with the body’s consciousness. Donna Harraway is critical to this discussion as one who is acutely invested in showcasing the fluid agency of technology and the way it has mutated as an inseparable part of the human body. Ultimately, humans’ de-identification with nature is directly linked to the infiltration of technology into the human sphere as an entity with significant capacity to shift manifold intra-actions and reconstruct a culture (‘tech-mutability’).
Sarah Laanani (z5260338)