For a swallow that flies through the theatre door and dives on stage, that same prop will have a very different existence as, for instance, a place to stand on and rest. Ultimately what this allows us is to think again, and seriously, the idea of the world as theatre.
By stressing the feral and ruderal, we ask: What happens if we don’t imagine technology only in terms of human forms of externalization, but also of internalization and unexpected proliferation and growth? That’s why Le Guin and feminist re-imaginings of technology matter: we want to get away from thinking of technology as the story of human omnipotence. Rather technology, the science of craft, is an open ended process and it’s always embedded in a particular locale and multispecies worlds.
In any case, four or five centuries from now when the end of modernism seems as obvious a historical fact as the birth of it, I think Latour will be seen as the one who really put his finger on what is central to modernism: an artificial taxonomy of natural and cultural (or world and thought) in which the two realms are supposed to be purified from one another. The reason so many philosophers have a hard time appreciating this is that philosophers are still pursuing a modernist project even as other disciplines have been compelled to move beyond it. The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, so it must not be dusk quite yet. We are still in the late afternoon of modernism.
The concept of the Anthropocene is premised on the fact that humans have been these causal agents on a planetary scale. The question is, given that we’ve had that effect, what kind of new causes can we be, what kind of agency can we bring to it?
