The scales extend from the intimate to the continental and the global. The cast of characters includes inhabitants, machines, landscape features, animals, ruins-an entire political ecology continually probed by techniques of measurement and analysis, and overlaid with logics of governance and control. At issue are the processes whereby oil is turned into the energy of our lives, with multiple unwanted consequences.
These experiments begin in the partially abandoned industrial zones of the city, where the core functions of metropolitan technology receive almost no public attention. A subgroup of that commission continues to debate whether, how, and where to establish the boundary point at which the current geological epoch (the Anthropocene) can be distinguished from the previous one (the Holocene).ĭon’t we need more subgroups like that, of many different kinds? What I want to explore in the metropolitan context-taking the example of Chicago where I live-are experiments in perception, expression, and action that use aesthetic means to characterize the present epoch. In this sense, correlation precedes definition.” 2 Within the scientific community, this activity of correlation is taken on by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. its correlation potential-has to be thoroughly tested. As one expert notes: “Before formally defining a geochronologic boundary by a GSSP, its practical value-i.e. Instead, its placement is correlated with observations across the planet, so that the periodization it exemplifies can be recognized by anyone anywhere. Yet the golden spike does not just record a singular fact, nor even just a complex of local or regional observations. Present to the senses when they are sharpened by knowledge, the rocky outcropping itself becomes exemplary of an epoch’s fossil signature and its place in earth’s history. It is literally driven into the rock at the lowest level where a fossil characterizing a given geological period can be observed. Technically known as a Global Stratotype Section and Point, or GSSP, the golden spike is a marker inserted into an exposed sedimentary stratum. The placement of a “golden spike” is a public documentary practice in contemporary geology. To understand how it works, one can do as the proponents of the Anthropocene have done, and take a cue from the stratigraphers. I’m going to argue that this transformation is an aesthetic operation. For such action to become significant in the terms of contemporary ecological debates, the metropolitan scale has to be made affectively sensible and recognizable as something quite new: namely, as Anthropocene public space. At the same time it constitutes a very tangible arena in which to act as a citizen, a member of a social movement, an intellectual, or a revolutionary.
ARCHITECTURAL SPIKE MEANING DRIVERS
Could it be that all the abstract drivers of global environmental change-things like Science, Technology, Capitalism, and Militarism-are internalized, reworked, and expressed anew on the metropolitan territory? Such a scale (say, a dense urban core plus its adjacent suburban-industrial sprawl) remains large enough to encapsulate the entire toolkit of contemporary industrial civilization. Instead I’m going to make a complementary move, which is to turn the analytical lens to the metropolitan scale, where individuals and groups confront the processes, products, organizations, and institutions of the present era. In this text I’m not going to argue against the global scale, or against scientific abstraction, or against the Anthropocene. Similarly, the agency of global change is ascribed to an abstract figure of Humanity, introduced with a capital letter (the “Anthropos” who just made the planetary scene). Global environmental change is usually approached through abstract scientific measures, such as the rising atmospheric concentration of CO2 (“410 parts per million”).
By now technology has become as much a part of life as metabolism.
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