Infectious rhythms

A commentary on the 1st Auckland Triennial, the chapter engages with the work of artists John Lyall, Mariele Neudecker, Michael Parekowhai and Bill Hammond in order to explore the biological and cultural dimensions of inhabiting an island. It links together processes of biological species introduction (and bio-invasion) with cultural transmission, suggesting that there are similar dynamics at work in the biological and cultural realms. As a site of `infectious rhythms' of invasion, catastrophe and creativity, the material experience of island life, it is suggested, is far from that of the tranquillity and timelessness often imagined by distant metropolitan centres

Animal interface: the generosity of domestication

The chapter engages with historical processes and contemporary conditions of animal domestication, arguing that domestication might best be seen as at least as much an emotive or affective process as an instrumental one. It draws on the notion of `corporeal generosity’ to suggest that there are ongoing, generative and unpredictable flows between human and animal bodies that live in close proximity, and that animal domestication has resulted in unforeseen transformations in the bodies of both human and animal participants. It is also argued that pathogen exchange between different species is one of the most important unforeseen outcomes of domestication- and should be viewed both as a destructive and a generative process

Offering

Steering away from the more obvious concern with the breakdown of social order following Hurricane Katrina, this article draws on weblogs and bulletin boards to highlight acts of generosity and hospitality provoked by the disaster and poses some questions about what disasters might tell us about the emergence of the “social.

The Demon-Seed: Bioinvasion as the Unsettling of Environmental Cosmopolitanism

Spearheaded by Beck and the ‘world risk society’ thesis, contemporary commentators in search of evidence of political renewal ‘from below’ have discerned a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities. But through its foregrounding of the destabilization of matter by new technologies, this ‘environmental cosmopolitanism’ tends to reenact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture. It is suggested that this expresses a metropolitan detachment from the everyday experience of working with flows of matter and life. Drawing on the pivotal role of bioinvasion in the European colonization of the temperate periphery, an alternative perspective on ecological globalization is presented which takes account of the ‘weedy opportunism’ and inherent mobility of biological life. In this way, ‘globalization from below’ takes on the meaning of an opening of culture to the ‘unsettling’ influence of biological and geological histories that manifest themselves at global scales

Anthropocene bodies, geological time and the crisis of natality

In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a `crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction - Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1997) – the paper explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a `stratigraphic time’ (Colebrook, 2009) associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give and take that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body - as evidenced in both McCarthy and Michaels’ gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos