Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Abstract

Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection—a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for art's work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation, and life. In the book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008, Duke University Press, Durham, NC), that is the subject of this panel discussion, Grosz sets out an ontology of art, looking at its forms of emergence as territorialising force, sexual selection, and nonhuman power. In Grosz's terms, art is an art of existence. This is not a narrow understanding of art as a practice that is about taste, cultural accomplishment, or a reflection of society, but an art that is—at its most provocative—an extraction from the universe and an elaboration on it. This ‘geoaesthetics’ which is both biospheric and biopolitical, presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time, and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly different kind of biopolitics? And what might Grosz's concept of ‘geopower’ offer in terms of a renegotiation of a more active ‘geo’ in geopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise.

Anthropocenic culturecide: an epitaph

“…However, just as the Anthropocene conceptually enables us to think biopower as it produces landscape, it also enables us to see human landscapes 'in another sense, they are an entirely novel and quite gargantuan trace fossil system, one that extends kilometres deep into older rock in the form of millions of boreholes and mineshafts' thus, human history must be seen 'within the deep-time context of the rock record' (Zalasiewicz, 2013). Ultimately the politics of writing history (de Certeau, Page | 10 1988) is undermined through an account of thinking geopower (Yusoff et. al.…”

Back down to Earth: reassembling Latour’s Anthropocenic geopolitics

“…In this much, there are important resonances between Latour's work and that of Elizabeth Grosz whose writings have, to date, provided the principal philosophical inspiration for 'rethinking the geo-' in political geographical debates (e.g. Yusoff et al 2012). However, Grosz's political ontology is, from Latour's perspective, unacceptable in that it defines politics in terms of power.…”

Sublime encounters: Commodifying the experience of the geos

“…This paper has suggested that an important aspect of understanding the geosocial might be around its commodification, through experiences of active and dynamic landscapes as well as through art and culture (Dixon et al., ; Grosz, ; Yusoff et al., ): people are drawn to the sensory and imaginative, knowledge‐generating spectacles of volcanic eruptions because of their affective and personal effects. Such encounters enrich curiosity – several survey respondents stated that the eruption in 2010 had inspired them to study geoscience – and they change the way that people think – in a sense consistent both with Deleuze and with notions of the sublime as simultaneously showing mental limits and pointing beyond them.…”

“…Recent work in the geohumanities has sought to re‐engage with the Earth as a source of inspiration, energy and philosophy (Clark, ; Palsson & Swanson, ; Yusoff et al., ). Grosz () used the notion of “geopower” to understand the interactions between the forces of the earth and the human.…”