#Anthropocene Age of Humans

[rupertbbare]

US Civil Defense poster, 1951

[richo1915]

There is a golden spike hiding in a rock face outside the village of Moffat in Scotland that marks the end of the Ordovician, denoted by the appearance of these graptolite survivors—Akidograptus ascensus and Parakidograptus acuminatus, to give them their scientific names. It's not a real golden spike but a line of darker shale and a marker of these graptolites' significance as what's called an index fossil: Wherever such a fossil is found a geologist can be sure those rocks are of a certain age.

We have found the perfect marker for the Anthropocene, or the new epoch of humans, so dubbed for Homo sapiens’s world-changing impacts. It's a rather precise start date, thanks to some unusual isotopes: July 16, 1945, at 5:29 in the predawn New Mexico desert. That's when U.S. scientists exploded the world's first atomic bomb and when the human-induced radioactive isotope clock started ticking.

The three isotopes in question are cesium 137 and plutonium 239 and 240, which will take millennia or more to decay. There are no known natural sources of cesium 137. As a result of the subsequent detonations of hundreds of such weapons around the globe, there will be plenty of these isotopes still around far into the future. Like the meteorite that helped end the Cretaceous period about 65 million years ago, and possibly the reign of the dinosaurs as well, the nuclear detonation may mark for future geologists a turning point in Earth's history.

[smallgodseries]

*We offer this small god for all of you currently baking in the heat of the ever-worsening climate crisis.

Why are there so many divine polar bears?

I mean, really, that seems like the sort of question we ought to be asking.  After all, these hypercarnivorous predators (a real thing—when a creature eats 70% or more animal protein, it’s considered hypercarnivorous rather than just the normal level of carnivorous, and see if that helps you sleep at night) can run up to twenty-five miles per hour, and have a bite force of 1,200 pounds per square inch.  The human skull can be crushed by as little as 520 pounds per square inch.  So it would make sense for humans to fear polar bears, not to deify them.  And yet they keep showing up again and again, predators of the pantheon, stalking their prey from one side of the celestial line to the other.

Which is, quite frankly, bullshit.  We don’t need this many super-predators running around with divine powers!  It’s unsafe, and probably bad for some kind of heavenly ecosystem!  I don’t know!  I’m just the historian!  I’m just—

Right, sir.  Of course, sir.  Please don’t eat me, sir.

No Escape Claus is not as new a god as he might seem, having once driven ice ages across the world, devouring microclimes and driving entire species to extinction.  He grows in power once again, thanks to Anthropocene climate change and the furious ghosts of thousands of slaughtered polar bears hungry for revenge.  They come to take back what was always theirs, what should never have been taken away, and they have little mercy in their hearts.

When a cold wind blows out of season, remember that we put the guns into the hands of poachers, we put the lie of manifest destiny into the hearts of explorers, and we loosed them upon a world that had been doing perfectly fine before they came along.

The phantom polar bears come only to reclaim what’s theirs.

And they have the backing of a god.

[mrhaitch]

Hello, Mr. Haitch

You mentioned before in one of your answers that "climate and social justice are inextricably linked." Do you mind saying how so?

Thank you!

Our current geological age - the Anthropocene - is inextricably linked to the history of capitalism, no matter how you date it. The three main theories are that it began in 1945 at the close of the second world war and the international trade agreements and advent of nuclear testing; that it began with the industrial revolution; or (and this is the theory I subscribe to) it began between 1492 and 1610 with European colonialism in the Americas.

The anthropocene is defined as an age of globalised human control and impact on the earth's environment, ranging from climate change to biodiversity, and the early history of Europe's colonisation of the Americas fits the bill pretty well. Beginning in 1492 the indigenous population of the Americas collapsed by 95% (population estimates run from 60 million to 120+, the loss represents about a 10% global population loss), along with vast amounts of infrastructure including cities, towns, trading outposts, road networks, irrigation systems, and so on - all in an area (especially equatorial America) where the local flora grows rapidly. The deaths of so many with so few colonisers to replace them saw a rapacious period of reforestation, creating a massive carbon sink which drew down an estimated 13 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ushering in The Little Ice Age. Global temperatures fell for the first time since the agricultural revolution, and put huge stress on an already fracturing feudal system. Over the course of 200 years Europe went through fits of social and political revolution, where the aristocracy were (sometimes violently) deposed by an ascendant merchant class ushering in our current age of liberal democracy, the enshrining of private property, and fixation on trade and prosperity.

The population collapse also provided a rationale for the Atlantic slave trade, as the enslaved workforce the Europeans had been using up until then were pretty much all dead.

With me so far?

Since the industrial revolution our economic system has been reliant on exponential growth, leading to an ever increasing appetite for raw materials, land, and cheap (or free) labour. The environmental and human costs have increased in lock step with one another - both crises borne of the same root. We cannot address one without addressing the other.

This is a very condensed version of the argument and I'm glossing over a lot here. If you're interested I'd recommend tracking down the following texts (usually available at libraries, particularly University ones):

The American Holocaust, David Stannard

The Human Planet, Lewis and Maslin

The Problem of Nature, David Arnold

The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert

History and Human Nature, RC Solomon

[spageddy]

Skibidi Toilet

The skibidi toilet (Skibidus latrina) is a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusc in the family Dafuqboomidae. This species can only be found in the United States, primarily in Ohio.

The original habitats of the skibidi toilet are American public restrooms, but due to their adaptability, they have extended their range to outdoor urban areas. Scientists consider them to be an invasive species.

Skibidus latrina is usually diurnal and omnivorous, eating about 27% scrap metal and 73% human flesh. Its only natural predators are cameramen (Homo visus), speakermen (Homo amplificarus), and TV-men (Homo imaginum).

Skibidi toilet engaged in combat with a cameraman in Detroit, Michigan

Evolution

Based on fossil evidence from Dayton, Ohio, the first known members of the Dafuqboomidae family lived in North America in the late Anthropocene about 250 years ago. Similar tooth and skull structures suggest dafuqboomids and humans share a common ancestor, but molecular analysis indicates a closer relationship between skibidi toilets and snails.

A senior skibidi toilet without its shell.

Description

Physical Characteristics

The body weight of an adult skibidi toilet varies considerably with shell size, making it one of the most variably sized molluscs. It can range from 36 to 2246 kg (80 to 4952 lb), but is usually between 41 and 50 kg (90 to 110 lb). The smallest specimens live in southern Florida, while those near the northern limits of the skibidi toilet's range tend to be the largest (see Bergmann's rule). Males are usually 15% to 20% heavier than females.

Skibidi toilets have long, soft, flexible abdomens. The vulnerable abdomen is protected from predators by a salvaged empty latrine or urinal carried by the skibidi toilet, into which its whole body can retract. Multiple skibidi toilets may inhabit the same shell, especially when young.

Mature skibidi toilets develop a snail-like muscular foot that allows them to travel over hard surfaces. The large, flat foot remains attached to the surfaces over which it is crawling due to the adhesive properties of the skibidi slime it secretes to protect its soft tissues.

Intelligence

Studies have shown that skibidi toilets are capable of organized crime. Whether they know what they do is morally wrong is a topic of debate among skibidiologists.

Two male skibidi toilets lust after a female in Cincinatti, Ohio.

Behavior

Skibidi toilets are pack hunters. Typically, the largest skibidi toilet is in charge. Skibidi toilet packs readily accept new members until resources become limited. They are territorial and generally establish territories far larger than they require to survive, assuring a steady supply of prey.

Development and Reproduction

Skibidi toilets are well known for their mating call, which has a similar tune to the song "Give It To Me" by Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, and Nelly Furtado.

Female skibidi toilets lay their fertilized eggs in toilet water. The hatchlings feed on human feces and urine until they become large enough to consume humans themselves. Skibidi toilets reach sexual maturity at 6.9 years of age.

Captive skibidi toilets have been known to live for more than 80 years. However, the species' life expectancy in the wild is only 16 to 30 years, depending on local conditions such as traffic volume and hunting. Young hatched in infrequently used restrooms are vulnerable to starvation, and it is not uncommon for them to vore their own skiblings.

Young skibidi toilets share a shell with their skiblings until they are large enough to find their own.

Skibidi Toilet Syndrome

The bite of a skibidi toilet can cause Skibidi Toilet Syndrome, a serious disease that causes the infected to believe they are a skibidi toilet. Symptoms include sequestering oneself in small spaces such as laundry baskets or cardboard boxes and chanting the skibidi toilet's mating call. There is no known cure.

[queerbrownvegan]

New blog post!

Have you ever heard of the term “Anthropocene”? The term defines this current period of time in which human activity is altering the Earth’s systems. Typically, the periods of time used to define Earth’s history (like epochs and ages) are based on rock layers and the fossils contained within them. While Anthropocene isn’t officially recognized by the International Union of Geological Sciences, this term has still gained support.

What this term tells us: this is a distinct period in time, defined by increasing environmental destabilization from human activity (specifically, destabilization from the extractive and exploitative systems, enforced by an absurdly wealthy ownership class). 

What it doesn’t tell us: what’s next? 

link

instagram

[conkreetmonkey]

Do inaccurate depictions of "prehistoric life" in the Splatoon world have cows grazing alongside triceratops and whales fighting mosasaurs, the same way we often depict stegosaurs, t-rexes, dimetrodons and mammoths side by side despite the hundreds of millions of years between their eras, which we often just lump together as "prehistory?"

Is there a version of Jurassic Park called something like Anthropocene Acres where the big reveal is a field of elephants, giraffes and horses grazing, and cougars are shown to be tiny frilled pack hunters that spit blinding venom? Is there a scene where two larval Inklings hide in a kitchen from a pack of wolves, and are saved in the end by a colossal cave bear?

Do Splatoon people think the gas in their cars is made of humans? Is it a common cartoon trope for a human to be thawed out of a block of ice and start smashing things with a big wooden club? Is there a version of The Flintstones where a family of cave fishfolk have a pet dog in the place of Dino that's named something like Mutt or Fido?

The possibilities of a world where culture parallels our own and most pop culture we have has allegories, but also our current world is considered ancient history like the ice age or the mesozoic, is so ripe for funny shit.

[flowerishness]

Zinnia hyrida

Anthropocene?

As of 2021, we have identified 2.13 million species of plants and animals on this planet and 1.05 million of these are insects. Two thirds of insect species are either beetles, flies, moths or wasps. There are over twenty thousand known species of bees compared to only six thousand species of mammals. No doubt, many times this number of insect species remain to be discovered by science.

Recently, people have started to call our time the Anthropocene, ancient Greek for the 'Age of Mankind' (from anthrōpos: “human being”). However, biological success stories can be thought of in many ways. For our brief moment. human beings now dominate this planet. However, if 'species count' is you're measure of success, then insect species outnumber homo sapiens a million to one. Believe me, the bumblebees will still be here long after we're gone.

In truth, we don't live on the Planet of the Apes, we live on the Planet of the Insects, and it's been this way since they first showed up - 480 million years ago!

[probablyasocialecologist]

Over the long 20th century, mainstream Marxism tended to neglect ecology, if not been downright hostile towards it. From Marx and Engels’s belief in the progressive nature of technological development under capitalism to the extractivist zeal of the Soviet Union, the mainstream of the Marxist historical tradition would seem to make for unlikely environmentalists. In a famous passage from his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Marx argues that, for example, after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, [it is then that] the narrow horizon of bourgeois right [can] be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! The logic seems clear: if technological development under capitalism is inherently progressive—by his own account, a “historical necessity”—and if humans need to dominate nature in order to bring about “a higher phase of communist society,” then the critique from environmentalists is certainly warranted. Saito pins this “ecomodern” Marxism back to the idea that technological development under capitalism is a necessary and progressive stage in history—a precondition for emancipation as capitalism falls under the weight of its own contradictions. But when Marx wrote those words, it was at least reasonable to suggest that productive capacity was premature for the advent of socialism. It is harder to say that now: in terms of aggregate capacity, we produce enough food to end world hunger, generate enough energy for everyone to use a sufficient amount, and have enough wealth to end poverty. And yet, 150 years after Marx penned Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, we are no closer to global socialism than when our collective productive capacity was a fraction of what it is today. There, too, we are deadlocked. In fact, as Andreas Malm has argued in Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016), or Timothy Mitchell in Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2013), the transition from hydropower to fossil fuels or coal to oil was a means of concentrating power in the hands of capitalists, concrete evidence that a transition from an “older” technology to a newer one does not, as such, represent definitive historical progress (especially when that technology threatens to undermine earth’s life-supporting systems or functions to intensify power over workers and the rest of nature). Too many Marxists still suffer from the same scarcity mindset, believing we lack the productive capacity and resources to provide everyone a good life within the means of the planet. But while we can’t fault Marx and Engels for not knowing more about climate change—or for not having the kind of ecological consciousness the 21st century has gifted us with—today’s ecomodern Marxists have no such excuse.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Reframing Narratives With Ecocriticism, With Dr Jenny Kerber

In this episode, Ariel discusses the topic of ecocriticism with Dr Jenny Kerber, Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University.

What is ecocriticism? Why is it important, especially for environmental activists and solarpunks, as a narrative reframing device? Solarpunks work very closely with speculation and imagination and as architects of the narratives by which we live our lives, it helps to have tools like ecocriticism at our disposal.

Join Ariel and Dr. Kerber to think through terms like “wilderness” and “nature” and “the Anthropocene”. How do we hold on to hope, despite critical engagement with the dark side of our environmental narratives? 

References:

A bit more about the WLU Land Acknowledgement

Dr Kerber’s profile at Wilfrid Laurier U

“The Trouble with Wilderness” by William Cronon

 Elizabeth May

Kerber, Jenny. "Tracing One Warm Line: Climate Stories and Silences in Northwest Passage Tourism." Journal of Canadian Studies 55.4 (July 2022): 271-303.

Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment

Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human

David Huebert's Chemical Valley

Lord Byron's "Darkness"

Don McKay, Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland, Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures

[fatehbaz]

[T]hose who live and think at the shore, where the boundary between land and water is so often muddied that terrestrial principles of Western private property regimes feel like fictions, can easily understand how indebted we are to waterways. [...] [T]hese interstitial spaces underpin theories of not only liminality, but also adaptation, flow, and interconnection. Shorelines, indeed, do much to trouble the neat boundaries, borders [...] of the colonial imaginary [...].

Wading in the shallows long enough makes apparent that the shallows is not a place, but a temporal condition of submerging and surfacing through water. [...] And so thinking about shallows necessitates attention to the multiplicity of water, and the ways that tides, rivers, storm clouds, tide pools, and aquifers converse with the ocean to produce [...] archipelagic thinking.

For Kanaka Maoli, the muliwai, or estuary, best theorizes shoreline dynamics: It is not only where land and water mix, but also where different kinds of waters mix. Sea and river water mingle together to produce the brackish conditions that tenderly support certain plant and aquatic lives. It also informs approaches to aloha ʻāina, a Native Hawaiian place-based praxis of care. As Philipp Schorch and Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu explain,

the muliwai ebbs and flows with the tide, changing shape and form daily and seasonally. In metaphorical terms, the muliwai is a location and state of dissonance where and when two potentially disharmonious elements meet, but it is not “a space in between,” rather, it is its own space, a territory unique in each circumstance, depending the size and strength or a recent hard rain. [...]

---

[T]he muliwai might be better characterized not as a space, but instead as a conditional state that undoes territorial logics. Muliwai expand and contract; withhold and deluge; nurture and sweep clean. It is not a space of exception. Rather, it is where we are reminded that places are never fixed or pure or static.

Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez reminds us in his critique of US territorialism that “territorialities are shifting currents, not irreducible elements.” If fixity and containment limit, by design, how futures might be imagined beyond property, then the muliwai envisions decolonial spaces as ones of tenderness, care, and interdependence. [...]

---

But what do we make of the muliwai, the shoal, or the wake, when its movements become increasingly erratic, violent, or unpredictable? [...] The disappearing glacier and the sinking island have become visual bellwethers for the so-called Age of the Anthropocene [...]. Because water has the potential to trouble the boundaries of humanness, it may furthermore push us to think through [...] categorical differences [...]. What happens when we turn our attention to the nonhuman in order to track anthropogenic mobilities; not to flatten the categories of human, but, rather, to consider the colonial mechanisms that produced hierarchies of bodies to begin with? [...] When we linger with waters at the shore, we open ourselves up to evidence that lands and waters are not distinct from each other, that they both flow and flee, and that keeping good relations is fundamental [...].

It is worth returning to the muliwai and its lessons in muddiness, movement, and care to think about the possibilities that emerge from the conditions of change that allow new life to take hold [...].

---

Text by: Hi’ilei Julia Hobart. “On Oceanic Fugitivity.” Ways of Water series, Items, Social Science Research Council. Published online 29 September 2020. [Some paragraph breaks added by me.]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Caravaggio

* * * *

We Are Contextual Beings By Pir Aga Mir Here is one of my central inquiries: If our spiritual and religious practices are not expanding our circle of empathy, compassion, love and care, what is their purpose? If they are not preparing us for our physical deaths, what ends are they serving? Part of the reason that institutional religions have lost their way in this regard is that the praxis of a once-enlightened human cannot be calcified and universalized. As humans, we are contextual beings. The context of Jerusalem 2100 years ago or Mecca 1500 years ago or India 4,000 years ago, or even the Amazon 100 years ago, does not translate into a relevant code-of-ethic or moral philosophy in the messy, entangled world of modernity. In fact, the context of Jesus or Mohammed (may peace be upon them) could not translate from the moment they left the material realm. This is not to say that practices and traditions and aspects of culture should not be preserved and perpetuated. Rather, they should be openly shared and discussed with a contemporary critical lens and the loving embrace of the evolutionary impulse that lies within all of us. Does your spiritual practice make you a better student of the impoverishment of your time? Does it allow you to be in deeper service to the transformations that are happening now? Does it connect you more deeply to the body you inhabit? Does it root you more profoundly to this generous planet that serves as your home and your mother? We have all chosen to incarnate in troubled times. You may describe our context as the Anthropocene or the Kali Yuga (the dark ages in the Vedic cycle) -- a context that rewards short-termism, greed, extraction. We must all be good students of our culture in order to be conscientious objectors. This is the path of the mystic. [...] Some may call that heretical, I would describe it as being contextually relevant.

Part of our spiritual practice is to study our cultures in order to understand the antidote logic. In our culture of modernity, the antidote is to cultivate reciprocal relationships, to live in dialogue with a living planet, to act in solidarity with all Life, to build power and oppose oppression, and to live in the gift, without usury, speculation or accumulation. We know that our souls will continue coming back to this planet until we create heaven on Earth. Non-dualistically, we also understand that heaven on Earth is already here. We source our political power from the simultaneous truths of multiple realities. This is divine will.

I can do no better than to borrow from our siblings who wrote the Talmud:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, But neither are you free to abandon it.

(Ian Sanders)

[rjzimmerman]

This word was rejected by geologists. But it’s already taken over the world. (Washington Post)

What do you call the current time period — when we humans are warming the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans, altering the land and leaving a literal mark on the planet? Not the Anthropocene, according to geologists who rejected the idea of adding a new epoch to Earth’s official geological timeline.

Yet for many activists, artists and academics outside of geology, the Anthropocene, or “Age of Humans,” is here to stay, regardless of what rock specialists have to say.

Earlier this year, a panel of geologists rejected a proposal to officially designate the past seven decades, during which humans profoundly impacted the environment, as the new chapter in the planet’s history.

But as these scientists spent years debating, the term became widely adopted outside geology to encapsulate the angst around environmental degradation — popping up in book titles, music albums and art exhibitions.

For the term’s proponents, the idea that humanity has pushed the Earth into a new geological epoch should serve as a wake-up call. “It’s only been 70 years,” said Francine McCarthy, a professor of earth science at Brock University in Ontario, referring to the start of the new proposed epoch. “We don’t have another 70 years to wait.”

The name’s persistence speaks to a need for a cultural shorthand for referring to the big, complex ecological changes that are defining the present era, advocates say — something akin to terms like the Cold War or the Internet Age that came before it. Even if geologists say they cannot pinpoint its exact start, it is obvious to many who continue to use the term that the Anthropocene has begun.

“I always thought that this geological discussion was perhaps too soon,” said ecologist Inês Martins, whose employer — the Leverhulme Center for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York — has embraced the term. “But the reality is it is a very useful concept to use to identify an era where humans have increased their impacts.”

The term burst into public consciousness in 2000, when the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen suggested the global effect of human activities was so profound that Earth was no longer in the Holocene, the current geological epoch.

[fabiansteinhauer]

Wer will

Der kann Vismannstudien zuschauen: eine kleine, internationale Gruppe präsentiert in Hongkong. Ich stelle Vismanns 'gründliche Linien' vor. Panu Minkkinnen, der im Januar die große Vismanntagung in Helsinki organisiert hatte, der wird auch dabei sein. Panu schreibt:

Law, Media, and Cultural Techniques

The body of work that legal historian and legal theorist Cornelia Vismann (1961-2010) left behind is not vast, but it is highly significant and has been hugely influential. While Vismann is relatively well known as a critical legal scholar, her ‘reception’ in the Anglophone world bypasses a specifically German context in which her thinking developed. In her native Germany, Vismann was, namely, a well-known and highly regarded media theorist, as well. To her Anglophone legal audience, Vismann is primarily known as someone who participated in the reworking of French high theory for critical purposes while her more media-theoretical insights have received less attention. To fully appreciate the uniqueness of Vismann’s work and its significance for themes such as posthuman law, law and new materialism, the Anthropocene, law and technology, and so on, this media-theoretical context needs to be better understood. The papers in this panel aim to do just that and, at the same time, to advance novel disciplinary cross-contaminations between legal imaginaries and media theory.

Convenors: Trish Luker (University of Technology Sydney), Panu Minkkinen (University of Helsinki).

Alexander Damianos (University of Kent), ‘Techno-Juridicalities of the Anthropocene: Geology, Forensics, Law’

In March 2024, the proposal for a formal Anthropocene unit of the Geologic Time Scale was rejected by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. This paper critically reflects on the procedures according to which the Anthropocene Working Group appropriated geo-historical hypotheses as scientific fact. The Anthropocene presents a paradox: it suggests that human activity is so intense as to have fundamentally changed the material constitution of the planet; a geological event on par with the extinction of dinosaurs, or the end of the last ice age. Yet it also confirms human finitude. It implies that humanity is simply a passing event, and that one day the planet will go on without us, albeit substantially altered by our lapsed presence. In this paper, I provide an outline of how such a premise is formalised as scientific fact. I argue that the effort to formalise the Anthropocene as a geological unit unfolds as a techno-juridical exercise. Geologists generate new categories of artefacts, such as the technofossil, in order to illicit accounts of human finitude and planetary dynamics from mundane artefacts of every-day life (the plastic bottle, the bones of genetically engineered chickens, the concrete foundations of buildings and transportation networks). They draw on the formalisation of previous geological units as precedent, according to which they structure their account of the Anthropocene, so as to encourage consensus within the geoscientific community. They engage a formal decision making procedure, submitting their proposal for an Anthropocene unit to the judgement of their peers. My ethnographic account of the Anthropocene Working Group’s failed formalisation presents an opportunity for both appraisal and critique of popular accounts of media theory today.

Benjamin Goh (National University of Singapore), ‘From Archive to Memory in Cultural Techniques’

This paper brings into conversation Cornelia Vismann’s theory of cultural techniques and Aleida Assmann’s theory of cultural memory. Recited in tandem, both idioms direct us to the medial-mnemonic bases of legal orders. The proposed turn from archive to memory in this rethinking of Vismann enables us to read across medial sites of memory that reinstitute, and suspend, law qua legitimate authority. By reprising slices of a national museum exhibition and a graphic novel from Singapore in terms of cultural memory techniques, I suggest that the mediated encounters of embodied viewer-readers with these specimens of law and literature disclose a stratum of legality that merits further study.

Trish Luker (University of Technology Sydney): will surprise!

Panu Minkkinen (University of Helsinki), ‘“La salle des pas perdus”: Waiting for Justice’

In French, the vestibules or waiting areas leading to, among other things, courtrooms and main areas in other public buildings are often called ‘les salles des pas perdus’. Famous vestibules depicted with that equivocal name can be found in Brussels’s ‘eclectic’ Palais de Justice and in the United Nations offices at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. This paper discusses courthouse vestibules as a cultural technique in general, and the ‘salle des pas perdus’ of the new Paris courthouse (Renzo Piano Building Workshop, architects, completed 2017) in the 17th arrondissement in particular. The structural features and materiality of the Paris vestibule allegedly signify the modern ideals of openness and transparency, but factually the judiciary still operates in camera in the murky penumbrae of closed chambers. The paper further argues that the bright light shining through the large windowpanes, reinforced by the reflection of the interior surfaces, produces a harsh luminosity, an unforgiving light in which a defendant’s wait for justice becomes something radically different.

Fabian Steinhauer (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory), ‘Imaging as a Cultural Technique': Our dreams merge, our memory merges. In my dreams and my memory the work of Cornelia Vismann, especially her history and theory of founding lines, has merged with Aby Warburgs history and theory of roman law. The paper presents the effects of this merger.

[radio-anarchy]

6/9/24 Diet Anarchist Newsletter - #1

Biting My Fingernails (radio anarchy)

Currently, I’m trying to stop biting my nails as much. It’s a habit I’ve had for essentially my whole life, and I feel like I’ve tried everything to get myself to stop, but I’ve never been able to. I remember my mother buying me the nail polish that made my nails taste bitter, or before that when I would put hot sauce on bandaids to keep myself from nibbling. None of it ever did anything though, I continued to bite my nails after the Covid-19 pandemic, I continued to bite my nails if they tasted like hot sauce or bitter top coat.

I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder and one way that manifests for me is my skin picking. I see a scab and feel the need to tear it off- or I bite my nails until they bleed. I have no idea why I do it, maybe I hear the thoughts about how overbearing my world is and think that I can rip the scab off to scare those thoughts away, maybe it’s soothing in my mind- I can’t explain it, and I never will truly be able to. As I start my adventure into adulthood I have started to find this habit- and by extension myself- disgusting.

I can confidently say that living with anxiety never makes a single day feel boring. My boring basement in the morning becomes the possible hiding spot of a killer clown once it hits 10 pm. My boyfriend sleeping in becomes his death via vehicular manslaughter. I’ve only been able to explain it to other people by telling them that their 7 reactions are my 2- I can’t calm down because your version of calm down is only obtainable for me under heavy sedation. Just like I can’t kick my nail biting habit because “relaxation” doesn’t belong in my personal dictionary. Even with my nails painted for prom, or with rotten nail polish, I seek self soothing like a horny freshman boy.

More than anything, I wish that I could feel normal. I wish that I could just “calm down”. I wish that my nail polish would stay perfect for more than a few days. Once when I explained how I felt, someone told me I should try breathing. I do breathe- everyone does- the difference is others can soothe themselves by breathing in their nose and out their mouth- I can only soothe by ripping my skin off my fingers.

I can only hope with age my anxiety lessens, or at least I can learn to stop biting my fingers.

Song of the week: Lovesick in Public - Zoe Ko https://youtu.be/J8FaV2s25mY Quote of the week: "You can be crazy and still human." - John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed)