Situating the Anthropocene: planetary urbanization and the anthropological machine

摘要

The anthropological machine is the discursive framework, the dispositif that grounds Western man in a sense of civility, secured through a violent division within and between the human and nonhuman: not the after-effect of the civilizing act but its very foundation. This paper explores Agamben's machine at multiple sites: in its expression in everyday lives of urban citizens, and its legitimation of capitalist urbanization on broader spatial and temporal scales, its worlding through planetary urbanization and normalization of climate change. Complicit in capitalist urbanization and climate change, the anthropological machine has acted as a switch point since the 1600s. It now frames an emergent response: triage as the inevitable sacrifice of some peoples and parts of the planet to preserve others. If the urban is to become the site of mondialization, confronting the apparent inevitability of triage we must think beyond the either-or of a people or a planet. Thought in relation to the urban, the anthropological machine offers a meeting ground between urban political economy and assemblage urbanism. It enables us to situate the Anthropocene and differentiate the urban. But it also exposes a deep divide between scholars reframing the human beyond Western man: between those for whom the more-than-human expresses the dreams of a biophilic city and those for whom the less-than-human is increasingly its living nightmare.