Textures of the anthropocene : grain, vapor ray [4 vol. set]

The Anthropocene hypothesis regards humanity as a geological force, its activities effectively altering the earth system's metabolic structures: sediments, currents, and rays are redistributed towards unknown configurations. Grain Vapor Ray engages with earthly conditions and human imagination in a discursive, trans-historical experiment. Departing from a corpus of historical documents spanning several centuries, scholars, theorists, scientists, and artists have been asked to grapple with the constantly shifting qualities of the particular, fleeting, and energetic, presenting new positions on the textures and forms that knowledge takes on within the Anthropocene.

Grain: Granular materials add up to concrete forms; insignificant specks accumulate into complex entities. The texts in this volume narrate some of the fundamental qualities of the granular. In one pairing of texts, Robert Smithson compares the accumulation of thoughts to the aggregation of sediment, and an environmental historian writes about the stakes for earthly knowledge today. Other authors include Alfred Russel Wallace, Denis Diderot, and Georges Bataille.

Vapor: The vaporous represents matter's transformations. In this volume, a political scientist compares Kafka's haunting “Odradek” to “vibrant matter”; a media theorist responds to poems and diagrams by Buckminster Fuller; and more, including texts by Hippocrates, Italo Calvino, and James Clerk Maxwell.

Ray: A ray is an act of propagation and diffusion, encompassing a chain of interdependencies between energy and matter. This volume includes texts by Spinoza (with a reconceptualization by a contemporary philosopher), Jacques Lacan (followed by an anthropologist's reflections on temporality), Thomas Pynchon (accompanied by an interpretation of Pynchon's “electro-mysticism”), and others.

These volumes constitute a unique experiment in design and composition as well as content. The mingling of texts and the juxtaposition of different areas of knowledge represented in a variety of forms express the dynamics of a world in change.

With contributions by
Elmar Altvater, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Jane Bennett, Josh Berson, Akeel Bilgrami, Torsten Blume, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dietmar Dath, Kodwo Eshun, Natasha Ginwala, Goldin+Senneby, Armin Haas, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Stefan Helmreich, Erich Hörl, Tim Ingold, Friedrich Kittler, Adrian Lahoud, John Law, Flora Lysen, Margarida Mendes, Gloria Meynen, Molly Nesbit, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Jürgen Renn, Dorion Sagan, Bernd M. Scherer, Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Sverker Sörlin, Benjamin Steininger, STRATAGRIDS, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Paulo Tavares, John Tresch, Etienne Turpin, Christina Vagt, Bettina Vismann, Cecelia Watson, Allen S. Weiss, Jan Zalasiewicz.