Presented at the 2022 Conference of the Society for Science Literature and the Arts

Sunday, October 9, 2022

The new geological era that we are supposed to have entered, the Anthropocene, is often characterized by the emergence of a new Earth sphere: the technosphere. By some accounts, The new geological era that we are supposed to have entered, the Anthropocene, is often characterized by the emergence of a new Earth sphere: the technosphere. By some accounts, everything in Earth's system can be placed into one of four "natural'' subsystems: the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. The technosphere is a new "artificial" subsystem made up of the interlocked technical structures of industrial civilizations. The ecocidal horrors of our geological era are often attributed to the harmful effects that the technosphere’s emergence and growth have had on the regeneration of the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. This presentation turns to the work of Martin Heidegger and Gilbert Simondon to think about the emergence and growth of the technosphere from two different and contrasting perspectives. Then, turning away from the work of Heidegger and Simondon and towards the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, this presentation considers the sphere of TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge), an Earth sphere of “more-than-human” artifice that could be said to have preceded the emergence of the technosphere. Finally, returning to the work of Heidegger and Simondon and re-considering what these two thinkers refer to as “primitive” practices of making and thinking, this presentation proposes that the technosphere emerges as a “cancerous excrescence” of the TEK-sphere – the term “cancerous excrescence” being deployed here in line with Phillip Thurtle’s work on “Goth Biology”, not referring to a value judgment but to a processual phenomenon that can emerge as a result of any process of ecological selection and growth.