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Breakout Session 1

Animals

Ontologies

Literatures

Breakout Session 2 Breakout Session 3

Games and Afterlife Indigeneity and Race

Capitalism and Labor Deextinction

Tools and Technology Waste and What’s Left

Breakout Session 1

Animals

Juno Parrenas (Ohio State University), “Orangutans After Extinction: The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center as a Hospice for a Dying Species”

Orangutan rehabilitation centers respond to the crisis of pending extinction by offering sanctuary to displaced orangutans, encouraging population growth through facilitating forced copulation, and capitalizing on species loss through fostering commercial encounters with the most solitary of all endangered apes. Wildlife here seem to have wild life, embodying a sublime aesthetic of freedom, one resonating well enough with British eco-­-volunteers for them to support rehabilitation efforts with both money and manual labor. Yet efforts to end orangutan extinction brutally constrain orangutans by imposing social relations through limits on their space and movement. If we no longer impose the fantasy of open and wild freedom for orangutans, and instead begin to entertain the real possibility of their extinction within the 21st century, with what are we left?

This paper speculates that orangutans after extinction will be forced to live in either rehabilitation centers or zoos, both of which act as hospices for a dying species.

Rehabilitation centers, with open space and free-­-range mobility, are contrasted from zoos, as recently exemplified in the Argentine court decision involving a captive orangutan’s rights as a non-­-human person. Yet both the zoo and the rehabilitation center fulfill the same purpose. How these spaces will care for those facing extinction may depend on the question of who funds these sites. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork on Malaysian Borneo conducted between 2010-­-2012, this paper examines how the global economy of species loss and rehabilitation is intertwined with competing values concerning the loss of freedom, movement, and life.

Ron Broglio (Arizona State University), “Animal Revolution: Say the Animal Respond”

So you have written them off already, these animal others, and now you want to savor the taste of loss and future losses. What is life after extinction of species? Look at the Passenger Pigeon, the Dodo, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. In Beckett-like fashion, humans give blank stares, feign concern, and move on to other distractions. For the less charismatic species it fairs far worse. Who is mourning the loss of the Lehmann’s Poison Frog and the Montana Toad? Have you heard of the Humpback Chub or care for the chub’s demise? The so-called secondary species will go first.

These background species, which are not primary to the area but are a sign of its thriving, signal with little fanfare larger problems at hand. In good form and cultural fashion, we set the table for species consumption. Such tables include IUCN Red List of 44,838 assessed species, of which 905 are extinct and 16,928 threatened. Or sample the formidable table set by the WWF, which estimates 2 millions species on “our” planet of which 200 to 2,000 go extinct each year. Then there are the unknown unknowns, the undiscovered extinct species for which scientists project a 15 to 60 percent extinction range (depending on region and taxa). We then savor the Kantian sublimity of such numbers. Despite loss and disorientation in the sublime, humans find recompensed for this loss by insight into the power of reason and our supersensible moral vocation. The observer leaves the table of sublime numbers with a sense of reason and purpose. Oh shepherds of being, how you taste the loss of animal becoming. Let this conference not become such a tasting menu.

How does one propose to make such loss feel more palpable, and perhaps less palatable and less Kantian? Anthropocentrism calls for empathy—that we can know the loss of the other through our own sense of loss. And so we play dress up and humanize the charismatic megfauna—what has gone wrong with the Right Whale, for example? Yet we lack mourning because we do not know how to incorporate animals other than by consumption. We do not know how to mourn such irrevocable loss for which there is no substitute. Instead, in TedTalk fashion we gesture neatly toward “de-extinction” or #DeExtinction.

I write on behalf of the animal revolution which refuses such representational sums on human terms. The weapons of the revolution remain indigestible on your tables and in a rational fashion work at the blind spot of human reason. These animals that go unmourned create a spectral hauntology that confounds human building, dwelling, and thinking. Moreover, at the limit of reason and anthropocentrism, the revolution presents species extinction as the end of the human species. The revolution does not care to set the date for the rise of the anthropocene. Rather, it performs the parameters by which we can say there will be an end to the anthropocene and an animal life after human extinction. Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.

As a Field Marshal of the Animal Revolution, I will present the manifestation of spectral haunting and the end of the anthropocene which will arrive through human inability to account for corporality and nonhuman ways of worlding.

The revolution to come—will you have it nor no?

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Ontologies

Claire Brault (UMass-Amherst), “Nietzsche’s Eternal Return in Times of Ecological Crisis; Traversing Extinction Synchronically”

The context of the extinction that we are in demands the rethinking of temporality: the urgency of the crisis, end-times discourses, future generations or the absence thereof, the tensions between a need to act fast in a fast-extinguishing world, and that to take the time to think such changes, all these converge to beg a question I will argue can be addressed through Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return. Can there be any joy in times of extinction?

While William Connolly sees the eternal return as incompatible with a “true philosophy of becoming” he rightly defends, and while he relegates this dismissal to a footnote in his latest book, I claim that Nietzsche’s concept has critical, ontological, and ethical dimensions especially worthy of examining under the obscure light of extinction.

Often read as a provocation, it is in fact from the Nietzschean call to consider our lives as though we were to re-live them eternally that his defense of a transmutation of all values stems. Nietzsche’s demand to joyfully call “da capo!,” along with Zarathustra’s laughter and dance, are particularly pertinent in an epoch some wish to name the (all too human) “anthropocene,” where melancholy may result from the unbearable lightness of becoming, and the material question of “what will have mattered?” weighs acutely on each of us.

Radically refusing any teleological understanding of time (as progress, as driven by limitless growth in a limited world), the eternal return forces the demanding “synchronic” experience of every moment as including the infinity of the past and the infinity of the future, an ontologico-ethical intensity which resonates with the experience of (self-)extinction.

Alexandra Franco (Chicago-Kent College of Law), “The Law After Human Extinction: Finding a Legal Definition of Human Amid The Deafening Noise of the Transhumanist Debate for a Balanced Regulatory Approach”

Human germline modification is a controversial branch of genetics that has prompted heated debate about its potential risks and forced discussion about the need for regulation that thinks after human extinction, either as a result of alterations to the human genome, or at the hands of genetically altered transhumans. The problem that arises when the law thinks after human extinction is that there is not a consensus about what it means to be a human being under the law. Opponents such as Francis Fukuyama advocate a ban on germline modification, arguing that our human essence will go extinct. Moderate opponents such as Lori Andrews believe that there is a need to prevent Homo sapiens’ extinction to secure the foundation for human rights. Proponents like James Hughes do not see a problem with humans becoming extinct in the genetic sense, because they identify human essence as a non-biological factor. Other problems arise such as the possibility of extinction of selected groups of humans, like minorities and people with disabilities. Reaching a working definition of human being and/or person that takes into account biology, law, history and philosophy becomes imperative before determining whether germline genetic modification may lead to an event of extinction of humans as a species and/or as a concept. The intersection between law and biology hinges upon human psychology and therefore, the distinction between humans and nonhumans will have to rely on essential notions of our subconscious, to ensure peace and prevent the extinction of humanity as a concept.

Natasha Zaretsky (Southern Illinois University), “A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: Nuclear Winter Theory in the 1980s”

My paper explores the theory of nuclear winter (NWT) that emerged in the early 1980s alongside mounting public fears of nuclear war. With its origins in aerology, NWT imagined nuclear war as a planetary emergency: detonations and fires would release large amounts of dust into the stratosphere, blocking sunlight from reaching earth. Within this scenario, a deep freeze would settle over the northern hemisphere, soot would block out the sun, water supplies would freeze, and the sub-freezing weather would lead to catastrophic crop failure. In 1983, a conference on the topic was held in Cambridge; articles appeared in journals such as Science, Nature, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; and astrophysicist Carl Sagan published an article in Parade Magazine that explained NWT to a lay audience.

In my paper, I will trace the circulation of NWT, show how it placed species extinction at the center of the nuclear war threat, and situate it within the longer intellectual history of extinction. The concept of extinction first emerged in eighteenth-century France, but questions remained about its fundamental character. Could extinctions happen quickly enough to be observed by humans, or did they occur slowly over longer time horizons? Was extinction a result of Darwinian evolution, or was it the result of a catastrophic singular event? NWT supported the claim that species extinctions could occur with remarkable rapidity. The fates of entire species could be irrevocably changed on what science writer Elizabeth Kolbert—riffing on the title of a children’s book—has called one “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.”

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Literatures

Eric Gidal (University of Iowa), “After Ossian: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age”

This paper will approach the question of extinction through a reading of the poems of Ossian and their reception in the context of Scottish industrial and environmental history. James Macpherson’s controversial eighteenth-century rendering of Gaelic oral traditions as the epic creations of the blind bard Ossian provides us not only with a poetic figure of cultural extinction, but a poetic figuration of environmental catastrophe. As “the last of his race,” Ossian occupies a well- established mythic and literary tradition, finely traced by Fiona Stafford from Milton’s Adam through Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. But over the course of the nineteenth century, Ossian was taken up by a number of witnesses to the industrialization of Gaelic lands on both sides of the Irish Channel who sought to map and thereby vindicate the poems as indigenous accounts of a vanishing world. Their fantastic geographies record the social and spatial transformations of industrial modernity, the “incremental and accretive” unfolding of what Rob Nixon has termed the “slow violence” of environmental degradation. Even as Ossian and his defenders recurrently valorize endurance of experience and legibility of expression, their projects repeatedly reveal that these conditions can no longer be taken as axiomatic in the face of unprecedented changes to the people and the land. In our own moment of the Anthropocene, the poems of Ossian insist upon not only the haunting of the present by the past but, even more so, the absenting of the present from the future, a world without us.

Peter Paik (UWM), “The Narrative of Extinction and the Extinction of Narrative: On Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island“

The idea of human extinction has become an object of intense theoretical fascination in recent years. Extinction represents a more radical form of termination than death, since those who die remain in the memories of those still living. Extinction on the other hand heralds the annihilation of the symbolic itself, eradicating the very basis for the confrontation of thought with the limit posed by mortality. The climate crisis, which has set in motion a mass extinction of myriad species, has forced a reckoning with the possibility of the collapse of civilization and the extinction of the human species. The idea of the Anthropocene, which has lately become ubiquitous, reflects the critical impulse to expand and magnify one’s temporal frame of reference to encompass the demise of entire species with the passing of geological eras. According to Claire Colebrook, the concept of the Anthropocene demands that we relinquish our right to life. The task of theory, under the heading of the Anthropocene, is to make “extinction” into the guiding principle of textual interpretation. In this paper, I will argue how the efforts of Colebrook and other eco-critics to overcome anthropocentrism by invoking the Anthropocene cannot finally evade a theocentrism that is constituted by a force that punishes human beings for their destruction of the environment. The passage out of anthropocentrism, I contend, entails an indifference to human survival, rather than a moralistic condemnation of human beings and human behavior. I will examine the novel The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq as a narrative that enacts this very passage in narrating a tale of human extinction. Yet, the narrative hinges on the paradox that the experience of conversion, which in René Girard’s terms reflects the capacity to write the novel itself, is only possible in non-human and alien terms.

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Breakout Session 2

Games and Afterlife

Stuart Moulthrop (UWM), “Fiction After Extinction: Object-Oriented Narratives and Strange Remediation”

This paper examines an interestingly unrelated pair of similar texts: John McDaid’s hypermedia novel, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse (1993), and the Fulbright Company’s first-person videogame, Gone Home (2013). The texts stand on opposite sides of the millennium and other cultural watersheds, but share functional identity: each operates through “modally appropriate” encounters with objects in a simulated context or environment. In a sense, each text explores, in various versions of domesticated data, the aftermath of extinction or loss: in the Funhouse, through the reader’s receipt of relics of a disappeared writer; in Gone Home, through a homecoming to a strange house in which the player- character has never lived, which is filled with evidence of a family emergency.

Overlying this discourse of uncanny witness is an extradiegetic predicament: both texts are exposed to technical obsolescence—the ultimate nemesis of any medium, but particularly exigent for software. The Funhouse became inaccessible on contemporary systems when support for its platform ceased in 2010, and while the situation of Gone Home seems more durable, it too must eventually succumb.

There is no formal relationship between the texts—the developers of Gone Home appear to know nothing about the Funhouse—yet it seems compelling to read these narratives of object-obsessed haunting or displacement as themselves participants in a trans-extinction event. Gone Home could represent the re-emergence of a narrative form or concept that first flourished in an earlier time and platform. The phantom of the Funhouse comes home again, as phantasms will in the uncanny space of remediation.

One could normalize this scenario of catastrophe and persistence through some memetic framework in which art-concepts propagate through diffuse cultural heritage or generalized literacy, making it unnecessary for a later creator to have encountered earlier work, only to be subject to common attitudes or influences. However, by restricting ourselves to the local context, we can preserve the interesting resonance between the diegetic and extradiegetic dimensions of the works in question. There is, arguably, something distinctive about a text that approaches narrative through the simulation of lost, mute, or decontextualized objects, while in its artifactual or material form itself sharing or approaching that condition. I will suggest these texts offer an index of paradoxical or non-linear remediation which might be of particular value to theories of radical mediation.

Stina Attebery (UC-Riverside), “Technological Obsolescence and Extinction: Rethinking Uplift Animals in the RPG Eclipse Phase”

The impulse to create synthetic animals is often linked to anxieties about species extinction and environmental collapse. Akira Mizuta Lippit’s Electric Animal and Ursula Heise’s “From Extinction to Electronics” both investigate ways that digital and robotic lifeforms designed after animals have been viewed in art and literature as replacements for vanishing biological species. Building off of this work, I suggest that while many synthetic animals are figured as replacements for extinct or endangered species, these synthetic animals have a more complex relationship to biological animals. In particular, the rapidly changing technologies and economics in the fields of robotics and computer programming make synthetic animals more vulnerable to environmental collapse and extinction than biological animals. I have previously considered this issue in Ted Chiang’s novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, where technologically obsolete software platforms for artificial life experiments are explicitly compared to biological species extinctions, and I am now considering how this relationship between technological obsolescence and extinction plays out in a different medium. The tabletop Role Playing Game Eclipse Phase, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic transhuman society, prominently features a variety of uplifted animals—including “Neo-Hominids,” “Neo- Cetaceans,” and “Neo-Neanderthals”—who serve as indentured corporate servants, renegade artists and scientists, and underground activists. Their “transbiology” reflects both their own need to preserve their species and their corporate owners’ desire to keep this uplift population docile through sterilization and genetically programmed obsolescence, making this game a productive example for rethinking the connections between synthetic and biological life.

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Capitalism and Labor

Arun Saldanha (University of Minnesota), “Capital, extinction, race: Undead as a dodo”

The philosophical framework of this paper is an uneasy alliance of Marx (on capital), Adorno (on catastrophe), Mbembe (on necropolitics), Zizek (on the undead) and Glissant (on universality against Eurocentrism). First I argue anthropogenic climate change has in retrospect been nothing but a machinic reordering of populations allowing a rich white minority live longer while increasing the likelihood of disaster (famine, epidemic, civil war, refugees) amongst the brown majority. Second, using the extermination of the dodo by wolfish Dutch sailors in the Indian Ocean as an example, I theorize a blind exterminating attitude as central, not incidental, to capitalist modernity, even though this racism is not necessarily built on deliberate exclusion or othering.

Third, with the Anthropocene the eschatological dimension of earthly history has come back on the theological agenda. Apocalyptic narratives have always shown how the end of the world is imagined in crypto-racist terms: some are redeemed as the rest perish. Can political theology be twisted into a new communist politics? In the face of disaster—from Auschwitz and Hiroshima to Google Glass and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a possibility opens for stopping the slow geno- and ecocides all around us by reaffirming an immanent universalism, which exposes the false universalities interwoven with empire, capital and scientism. Derived from the Judea-Christian legacy but going beyond it, communism is strengthened by the growing number of undeads and by the urgency and immensity of the tasks ahead.

Miriam Tola (Rutgers University), “The Extinction of Species-Being”

This presentation approaches the theme of extinction through the engagement with Marx’s notion of species-being. Associated to Marx’s early work, and therefore often dismissed as expression of a humanism subsequently abandoned in Marx’s mature writings, species-being refers to the properly human capacity to refashion nature as human produced world. Through this process, for Marx, man comes to see himself in the world. Thus, Marx poses labor as the basis for human realization. Recently a number of theorists, including David Harvey, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Paolo Virno have revitalized “species-being” by deploying it in the analysis of contemporary capitalism. In this paper I depart from these authors in that I draw attention on how Marx’s concept emerged out of the species discourse of the 19th century, one characterized by an intense flow of ideas between biology and political economy. Expanding on Gayatri Spivak’s insight on species-being, I argue that this concept operates through the production of racial differentiation within the category of the human, as well as between the human and other animals. Further, I ponder the question of the extinction of species-being raised by Marx when he suggests that the interruption of productive labor would cause the disappearance of human nature. Specifically, I speculate on what the extinction of the idea of species-being, and the centrality of human labor could mean for critical theory. This paper asks: What comes after the conception of human living labor as the primary force making the world?

Ashley Dawson (CUNY), “Capitalism and Extinction”

Extinction is the product of a global attack on the commons. The destruction of global biodiversity needs to be framed, in other words, as a great, and perhaps ultimate, attack on the planet’s common wealth. While this attack is playing out largely (but certainly not exclusively) in the global South, it emanates from the economically and politically dominant nations in the global North. Indeed, extinction needs to be seen, along with climate change, as the leading edge of contemporary capitalism’s contradictions. As the rate of speciation—the evolution of new species—drops further and further behind the rate of extinction, the specter of capital’s depletion and even annihilation of the biological foundation on which it depends becomes increasingly apparent.

In this presentation, I will discuss capital’s response to the extinction crisis, which I call disaster biocapitalism. In particular, I look at two of the most recent proposed solutions to extinction: rewilding and de-extinction. Both rewilding and de-extinction imagine a brave new world of biodiversity, to be created through the Promethean efforts of cutting-edge contemporary technologies such as synthetic biology. De-extinction in particular offers a seductive but dangerously deluding techno-fix for an environmental crisis generated by the systemic contradictions of capitalism. It is not simply that de-extinction draws attention—and economic resources—away from other efforts to conserve biodiversity as it currently exists. The fundamental problem with de-extinction is that it relies on the thoroughgoing manipulation and commodification of nature, and as such dovetails perfectly with biocapitalism.

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Hugh Crawford (Georgia Institute of Technology), “Where Have All the Axes Gone?”

The American manufacturer Mann’s Edge Tools at its peak made axes in more than 70 patterns. An 1859 Scientific American article on axe manufacture notes with some humor that “It is true, if not touching, that many choppers think of and cherish their axes as though these were so many children or precious talismans. We are not sure the choppers could not be found who swear by their axes, and take them regularly to bed as a vade mecum” (267). Today a visit to your local home center will turn up perhaps a couple of hatchets and maybe three or four differently labeled but essentially identical tools. A lesson from a history of axes: when tools near extinction, what social forms, attitudes, and material-cognitive practices disappear with them? If tools are ways of knowing (a point I would insist on), what knowledge disappears when the tools do?

This paper will examine the history and manufacture of the American axe (as a significant technological innovation), various woodcraft manuals, along with the work of Annie Dilliard, Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Heidegger whose concepts of “equipmentality,” “ready-to- hand” and “present-to-hand,” and, taken quite literally, the “clearing” help articulate the ontology of tools both as equipment and vade mecum. At the same time, a discussion of his “Question Concerning Technology” helps understand the role nostalgia plays in our articulation of extinction.

Shane Denson (Duke), “Post-Cinema after Extinction”

In this presentation, I argue that contemporary, digital moving image media—what some critics have come to see as properly “postcinematic” media—are related materially, culturally, and conceptually to extinction as their experiential horizon.

Materially and technologically, postcinema emerges as a set of aesthetic responses to the real or imagined extinction of film qua celluloid or to the death of cinema qua institution of shared reception. Significantly, however, such animating visions of technocultural transformation in the wake of the demise of a formerly dominant media regime are linked in complex ways to another experience of extinction: that of the human. That is, postcinema is involved centrally in the (pre-)mediation of an experience of the world without us—both thematically, e.g. in films about impending or actual extinction events, and formally, in terms of a general “discorrelation” of moving images from the norms of human embodiment that governed classical cinema. Such discorrelation is evidenced in violations of classical continuity principles, for example, but it is anchored more fundamentally in a disruption of phenomenological relations established by the analogue camera. Digital cameras and algorithmic image-­processing technologies confront us with images that are no longer calibrated to our embodied senses, and that therefore must partially elude or remain invisible to the human.

Anticipating and intimating the eradication of human perception, postcinema is therefore “after extinction” even before extinction takes place: it envisions and transmits affective clues about a world without us, a world beyond “correlationism,” that arises at the other end of the Anthropocene—or that we inhabit already.

Antoine Traisnel (Cornell University), “Eadweard Muybridge and the Animal in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”

If species extinction is undeniably a matter of (sexual) reproduction, what becomes of the animal in the age of its technological reproducibility? Akira Lippit has noted that while animals rapidly disappeared from the empirical world in the second half of the nineteenth century in the West, they were clandestinely reincorporated in modern technological apparatuses to reappear not only as images on our screens but in the very notion of animation central to cinema. And indeed, the remarkable coincidence (and unrecognized complicity) between the mass slaughter of animal capital for human consumption and the development of the moving image has led Nicole Shukin to identify the disassembly lines of the Chicago slaughterhouses (on which Ford’s assembly lines were modeled) as the primal cinematic scene.

What Shukin’s and Lippit’s accounts leave out of the picture, however, is that the modern tangle of animality and technology demands that we rethink the very concept of representation. It is not just the manner in which animals materially and mimetically powered capitalistic modes of (re)production or what kind of animistic transfer informed modern technologies that we must consider, but the new ontological regime that, supported by fast-changing technologies, altered the very being of representation understood as a mode of “capture.” Focusing on Eadweard Muybridge’s motion capture experiments, I’ll argue that the development of technological reproducibility does not simply signal a transition in the way we perceive and conceive animals; rather, epistemology and aesthetics become the sites of a profound metamorphosis in the essence of animal knowledge and representation.

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Breakout Session 3

Indigeneity and Race

Joseph Klein (UC-Santa Cruz), “Being Uncertain: Rumor & Extinction in Western Indonesia”

Conservation biology depends on cataloguing the existence and non-existence of life on Earth, establishing which beings are real, where they are found, and where they fall on the scale sliding toward extinction. But what about gaps in the catalogue-oversights and exclusions, lifeforms whose mere potential existence opens up a space of radical possibility, a space populated by beings of uncertain reality?

This ethnographic paper explores extinction through two cases of “being uncertain” in western Indonesia. First, in Sumatra, a friend tells me that a legendary hominid creature, the orang pendek or “short person,” has recently gone extinct from the forests near his home. Second, among ordinary Indonesians, chattered rumors abound that the Javan tiger, thought to be extinct since the 1970s, might still roam the forested mountains of eastern Java. These stories circulate locally and nationally, drawing into question public consensus on existence, extinction, and the constancy of biological knowledge. Furthermore, these stories highlight new hopes, desires, fears, and uncertainties that abound in this moment of public concern for mass-scale species loss. Such accounts, as Mary Steedly reminds us, possess a “power of their own … the power of the singular event to confound generic explanation” (1994: 238). New questions arise: What happens when beings we did not know (or did not believe) existed become extinct? Likewise, what happens to the Lazarus species whose declarations of extinction turn out to be wrong? Finally, whose knowledge and experience counts in making “official” declarations of extinction, or, of existence?

Les Beldo (University of Chicago), “”Just Don’t Take the Last One”: Management and Extinction in the Makah Whaling Conflict”

This talk will examine the multiple senses in which the specter of extinction and extirpation continues to shape and limit conflicts over indigenous whale hunting in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

The Makah are a small Native American tribe in Washington state that sparked controversy when they revived their centuries-old whaling tradition in the late 1990s after a hiatus of over seventy years. Lawsuits filed by anti-whaling activists shut down Makah whaling shortly after it was resumed, and today the Makah Tribe continues to seek legal permission from the U.S. federal government to hunt whales. The Eastern Pacific Gray Whale was removed from the Endangered Species List prior to the hunt at the behest of the Makah Tribe, who then sought to characterize anti- whaling activists as unscientific and “radical” for opposing the hunt. Seeking to invert preservationist discourses, the Makah Whaling Commission has argued that their whaling traditions are at risk and that they, more so than gray whales, are an “Endangered species” in need of protection. Meanwhile, strict federal oversight has compelled anti- whaling activists to respond within the channels of the dominant “stock-based” management paradigm, which, in the simplest terms, aims to avoid the extirpation of vulnerable species as a result of commercial activity. By engaging with the logics of stock-based management out of practical necessity, however, activists inadvertently collaborate in shifting the debate away from a discussion of the ethics of whaling and toward a space where the killing of whales is tacitly acceptable, if momentarily imprudent.

Nick Mirzoeff (NYU), “The Trace of Systemic Racism in Extinction”

Following the emergence of a discourse of extinction in the early nineteenth century, natural historians became adept at discerning its possibility through visual traces in landscape, birds, fossils and boulders. Without hesitation they sought to apply this visual system of distinction to humans, claiming to see evidence for separate “races” of humans that created the possibility of systemic racism outside chattel slavery.

In this presentation, I discuss the intersection of trace, race and extinction in four moments: 1) how the abolition of slavery is interfaced with the ornithology of Jean-Jacques Audubon; 2) the discovery by British naturalist Richard Owen of the Moa, an extinct giant bird in the islands that Britain was colonizing as New Zealand—from a single fossilized bone; 3) Louis Agassiz’s deduction of the Ice Age from striations on rocks in Switzerland; and 4) the parallel made by British colonial official J. G. Buller between the disappearing indigenous birds in New Zealand and the Maori as soon-to-be-extinct species. While Agassiz’s effort to codify distinct human races by photographing the enslaved in South Carolina in 1855 is notorious, it was in fact indicative of a wider belief that race and extinction were immediately visible to the trained eye in a single trace. As we enter into the sixth mass extinction and a new wave of global racisms, these connections need to be explored and understood.

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Deextinction

Luis Campos (University of New Mexico), “Jurassic Ark: Or, A Menagerie of Methods for Thinking Historically About De-Extinction”

Contemporary synthetic biology has recently begun to position de-extinction as a new tool for conservation. In this paper, I analyze the cultural imaginaries surrounding both contemporary and historical efforts at de-extinction, and relate these to their fictional future counterparts to suggest that we have always been chasing “after extinction”—that is, we have always been de-extincting.

Not necessarily literally, of course. The particular technologies and alignments of institutions and possibilities of de-extinction are new. The ways that we talk about it and understand it, however, are of longstanding vintage, and many aspects of the discourses of de-extinction have maintained surprisingly constant features over time. Familiar groups of elites in predictable geographical locations, with relatively unconstrained fantasies of de-extinction (and often far removed from the concerns of those most directly in charge of the animals themselves), perpetuate particular visions of restored iconic life forms—and these visions are themselves deeply immersed in discourses of hereditary purity and national identity. Paying attention to these sorts of recurring intersections of “mammoth” and “mammon” over time can help to productively question the seemingly constant desire to narrate that we are ever at some brink, some transitional moment.

By taking the gee-whiz novelty out of de-extinction, we can not only better understand how it ties into history, but how commonplace fictional futures likewise condition contemporary discussions of de-extinction. Such fictional futures (whether called Jurassic Park or “conservation scenarios”) are thought-experiments about viable futures of past lives, likewise drawing on common cultural imaginaries. By juxtaposing Panama’s new Biomuseo with Boston’s Gingko Bioworks (and other places where extinction and humans are curated together), I analyze how deployments of Jurassic Park narratives are not merely one-off responses in public relations efforts, but are further instantiations of deep cultural narratives in the most high- tech of spaces. Indeed, the striking resurrection and reappropriation of familiar older religious terminology—longstanding discourses of “creation” and the moral language of “restitution”— and their infusion into the most contemporary of de-extinction efforts is yet another indicator of the ways in which we have long been “after extinction.”

Amy Fletcher (University of Canterbury), “Sweet Billions Overhead: Dreaming of the Passenger Pigeon”

This paper asks: how does our relationship to nature change once we begin to believe that biotechnology provides a pathway to resurrecting an extinct species?

Throughout the 20th century, environmental organizations deployed some variation of the warning “when they’re gone, they’re gone forever” to motivate financial and political support for wildlife conservation. Yet in March 2013, Mother Jones listed the thylacine and the saber-toothed tiger among “12 animals we wish we could de-extinct.” The idea referenced the highly publicized March 2013 TEDx De-Extinction event held in Washington, DC, in which prominent scientists, conservationists and ethicists discussed seriously the prospect of resurrecting extinct species through the use of advanced biotechnologies.

Drawing upon the literature on environmental imaginaries, I analyze (via narrative inquiry) the interwoven scientific and popular debate about Project Passenger Pigeon—an attempt to bring back an iconic American species that went extinct in 1914. I argue that de-extinction represents a highly contested paradigm shift in conservation practice that inevitably becomes political because it destabilizes the boundaries we tried to draw in the 20th century between science and society and between science and science fiction. These attempts to recreate lost worlds also seem less about nostalgia for the past than terror of the present and hope for the environmental future.

Nigel Rothfels (UWM), “Extinct in the Wild (EW)”

Przewalski’s Horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) was scientifically described based on sparse materials in 1881. Within a century the horse had become “extinct in the wild.” Beginning in the mid 1990s, however, small populations of the horses were reintroduced from captive populations into “wild” habitats in Europe and Asia. With the successful reproduction of these horses, the status of the animals, according to the IUCN, improved to “critically endangered” (2008) and then “endangered” (2011) with the population trend “increasing.” The horses are being seen as a compelling example of how international cooperation, careful scientific management, and enlightened conservation policy can bring animals back from the brink of extinction. The claim in all of this is that the horses being returned to the “wild” are somehow identical with both the creatures that entered captivity a century ago and that became extinct in the wild in the 1960s. This presentation challenges that claim and thereby challenges central concepts in arguments for reintroduction, rewilding, and even de-extinction.

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Waste and What’s Left

Katherine Behar (Baruch College), “E-Waste: ‘Modeling’ post-species”

“E-Waste” is a series of sculptures inspired by commonplace USB devices, ossified or fossilized in stone. This interdisciplinary presentation offers the artworks as artifacts to speak for themselves, and discusses their potentialities through object-oriented feminism, speculative realism, and science fiction.

“E-Waste” centers on a science fiction scenario in which modest USB peripherals are doomed to continue working, long after the humans they were designed to serve have gone extinct. The gadgets are transformed into mutant fossils, encased in stone with lights blinking, speakers chirping, and fans spinning, eternally. Combining machine-made, handmade, and organic forms, the works take on an extraterrestrial quality, highlighting the surplus of consumer media artifacts, and drawing attention to its environmental impact. The project resonates with several recent C21 themes—the nonhuman, anthropocene feminism, the dark side of the digital—as well as after extinction.

If extinction places us along a trajectory toward nonlife, does the notion of “species” die with it? If so, what replaces species, “after extinction”? “E-Waste” accounts for affinity and variation by appropriating the logic of “models,” suggesting how the artifactual, the informatic, and the performative interpenetrate. Anna Watkins Fisher writes of “E-Waste”: “Modeling […] signifies in multiple, contradictory directions: as both the work of mechanical reproduction (as in something modular, the endless parade of obsolete models) and the unrepeatable (as in the singularly indexical act of modeling clay).” Moreover, Fisher explains, “to model is also to perform;”1 thus “modeling” relates to Meillassoux’s notion of the arche- fossil, but with important implications for embodiment, which extinction seems to render inconsequential.

Bettina Stoetzer (University of Chicago), “Ruderal City: Urban Ecologies in a World of Rubble”

Toward the end of World War II, large rubble fields dotted the heavily bombed city of Berlin. As the city grew increasingly divided with the onset of the Cold War, many non- native plants flourished in the city’s rubble and triggered the curiosity of West Berlin botanists—surrounded by the Berlin Wall and cut off from their usual field sites in the countryside. As the botanists, began to trace the rubble plants’ ecologies, a world of cosmopolitan connection and profound environmental destruction unfolded in front of their eyes. This emergence of rubble plants as a scientific object of study triggered the proliferation of the field of urban ecology and impacted environmental policies in a traumatically reeling city.

Engaging with this history of urban ecology in Berlin, this paper develops the concept of the ruderal (from Latin rudus, rubble), to refer to communities that inhabit degraded environments in the city: the spaces alongside roads and train tracks, urban wastelands or rubble fields. The notion of the ruderal offers an analytic framework for tracing the unintended consequences of anthropogenic landscapes. Exploring ruderal life in the city, I argue, opens up new possibilities for rethinking nature and culture in the analysis of ecological and social crises. This perspective draws attention towards life in the face of extinction: the often unnoticed, cosmopolitan and precarious ways of remaking the urban fabric.

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