Posthuman Entanglements

Poetry in the Technocene

Antje Schmidt, M.Ed.

In the early twenty-first century, two global processes are coming into focus: rapid science-based technological development and the advancing climate catastrophe. These developments are not occurring separately; rather, human, technological, and supposedly natural processes are constitutively entangled in the “Anthropocene.” This is one of the fundamental insights that have recently given rise to poetic exploration. Moreover, contemporary multimodal poetry i.e., poetic works combining various forms of representation (e.g., textual, visual, audible), in German and English, depict the age of humans as the age of technology, also termed as the Technocene, visualizing significant material “entanglements” (Haraway) that also transcend the human. These poetic works generally make reference to critical theories – e.g., posthumanism, (eco-)feminism, and new materialism – that work toward decentering the anthropos and emphasize the agency of non-human matter.

This ecocritical postdoctoral project will investigate these multimodal poetic sketches of the entanglements between technical, human, and more-than-human agencies, such as microorganisms, plants, and animals. To do so, it will examine poems in books, digital visual poetry, and lyrical installations, and explore playful, visionary, and catastrophic sketches of the present and the future of the Technocene. How do poetic artworks negotiate human and other forms of corporeality/materiality? What spheres of intermaterial interaction – e.g., the deep sea or the soil – do they stage? What role do references to visual culture play in these works – for instance, references to the genres of climate and science fiction? What kinds of scientific knowledge do they process poetically? What kinds of poetic reflection on concrete social, economic, and political practices can be found? Poetic and material devices for decentering the human subject in favor of other agents will also be of particular interest, for example, “co-creative writing” (Bajohr) in collaboration with AI or animal agents.

Poetry in the Technocene not only verbalizes the indissoluble entanglement between the “natural,” “human,” and “technological” spheres but also makes them visually concrete and tangible. Thus, this poetry also has an epistemic function: it makes complex interconnections visible on a micro and macro level, as well as certain dimensions of the potentially incomprehensible “hyperobject” (Morton) – the climate catastrophe – and thus shifts them into the recipients’ horizon of experience. In addition, poetry models alternative visions of “becoming-with” (Haraway) in “posthuman ecologies” (Olsson) and can thus potentially unfurl utopian powers.

The project’s focus on Technocene human-technology-‘nature’ relations on the one hand and multimodal works on the other aims to expand the field of investigation into “poetry in the Anthropocene” (Goodbody), which has already been described in terms of its lyrical forms of presentation in books. However, the way that lyrical poetry reflects on technological agents – on a discursive and on a material level – and their interconnectedness with other agents has so far been overlooked. The projects’ focus will be on lyrical works written in German, with works written in English included for comparison.