This talk deals with four lures proffered by the Anthropocene. The first three: hyper-modernisation, or the colonisation of deep time by the anthropos; apocalypse therapy, or melancholic revelry in the end times; the significance sky hook, or “cfp: X in the Anthropocene”. These three are lures to be avoided. I then note a latent underspecified tendency shared by many – from progressive policy folk to biophilosophers – to invoke gardening as metaphor for planetary ethics. Drawing on my...

An important theoretical underpinning of biosemiotics is the semiotic philosophy of American scientist and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his observation that ‘the universe is perfused with signs’. Semiotic biology was born from a similar insight, that living systems – cells, organisms, and ecologies – are not mechanical but are scaffolded by semiosis. Semiotic systems characterise life throughout. Sign relations are responsible for the efficacy of biological systems as...

Philip Steinberg (http://philsteinberg.wordpress.com) is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University and Associate Editor of Political Geography. At Durham, he is Director of IBRU: Durham University’s Centre for Borders Research and he also coordinates the ICE LAW Project (the Project on Indeterminate and Changing Environments: the Anthropocene, Law, and the World). Phil’s research focuses on the projection of social power onto spaces whose geophysical and geographic characteristics...

Plants historically have been located between the mineral and animal worlds. Not only did they occupy the perplexing border area between the living and nonliving, and were therefore called living crystals, they were also denied any sensitivity or capability for decision making. This talk will investigate how recent philosophical inquiries into plant lives, art practices involving their bodily presence, and the scientific discoveries of plant biologists lead to a conclusion that plants,...

The logic – or perversion – of the notion of origin has been linked to different imaginaries and economic regimes of nation-states; to such an extent, that it is no longer clear who constructs whom, if it ever was. In this lecture- performance, geocultural understandings of origin will be tasted through food as method to understand whether a territory is defined by its original produce; or whether origin itself might have eventually superseded the geography that was supposed to define it. The...

Much aesthetic theory has concerned itself with the status and significance of the image. Resisting this "photology," my paper (a chapter from the forthcoming SOUNDS: THE AMBIENT HUMANITIES) will explore, by contrasting the sonic to the phonic, the attractions of tying aesthetic experience to sound, specifically the sound of "the gasp." Through readings of Derrida's SPECTRES OF MARX, McNally's LAST GASPS and Rushdie's THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, I will propose that the gasp vents us to what Spinoza...