In my current project I investigate how contemporary TV-Series narrate the Anthropocene disorder. The concept and the phenomena of the Anthropocene challenges assumptions about human self- conception and the relation between nature and culture. It enforces new ways of experiencing space, time and agency, which are not mainly perceptible through one’s body senses, but on the other hand the Anthropocene shows, how precarious and entangled human life has become. As the Earth System Sciences or the Geology are indispensable to grasp the concept of the Anthropocene and for the emergence of the discernible phenomenon itself, popular media can contribute with its one poetic capacities and epistemological forms to perceive and think the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene disorder generates, what Jacques Rancière calls a dissensus, where the presuppositions of social topology are to be reordered. Popular media play in this disorder or dissensus the role to generate aDistribution of the Sensible, in which bodies and their senses are reconfigured in the meaning such that the common world can be experienced in new ways.
On the basis of my concept of the formal assemblage I analyse the figuration of junkies, zombies and alloys as important figurations of a politic of aesthetics of the Anthropocene. Whereas the junkies figurate a life in precarious, material entanglements, zombies show the anthropogenic natural force of the Anthropocene: individual human agency is translated in an uncontrollable collective humanoid force, which tries to eat humanity. Alloys figurate translations between humans and zombies. When enwrapped in zombie blood humans can encounter zombies and communalities can be approached. Through this figurations however the dissensus is staged by means of their deconstructive capacities: On the one hand biopolitical reconfigurations can be mediated, when dehumanized others as hitherto ‘nature’ find a voice. On the other hand the biopolitical regimes, which are amongst others responsible for the Anthropocene, are consolidated again. Through zombies, alloys and junkies the question about how and what human life can be reconfigured in the Anthropocene is posed in interdependence to nonhuman communards. But the rescue of the humanists human agent is figurated through the neoliberal violence against junkies and zombies, the reconfiguration of neoliberal environments as dangerous post-democratic patchwork worlds of gated communities, walls and camps.
More theoretically my thesis focusses on the Anthropocene disorder and the reactions to it. My analysis is informed by new materialist theories, especially from a perspective of methodology and relational ecosystems. But it is necessary for my thesis to critical examine how the discourse of new materialism is itself constituted by a web of conflicting aesthetical and theoretical forces. New materialism theory is in the tradition of the democratic aesthetic regime through which it is perfectly equipped for the challenges of the Anthropocene disorder. On the other hand neoliberal reactions may lurk in the premises of the new materialist theory itself, where instability, change, boundlessness and individuality dominate. My current project aims thus with two analytical perspectives to strengthen an aesthetic of the Anthropocene as a possibility for a political opening.
Keywords: Anthropocene disorder, Television Studies, dissensus, aesthetics, zombies, junkies, alloys, neoliberalism, figuration, New Materialism, entanglements
