The Catabolic turn
Navigating socio-environmental disruption and material negativity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59391/3463yx19Keywords:
metabolism, catabolism, negativity, anthropocene, powerAbstract
The Anthropocene has pushed thinkers to reconsider the agency of humans on natural historicity. Against the backdrop of idealism, different scholars have recently pointed out how human history has become increasingly dependent on how human action shapes the environment itself. Marxist authors, in turn, point out how environmental disruption caused by over-exploitation provokes a “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature. However, until now no account has explored what a post-metabolic reality might entail. The increasing desertification of various regions of the world, along with the transformation of critical zones into irreversibly unusable and uninhabitable ones calls for the concept of a “catabolic turn”, as opposed to “metabolic”. Catabolism is a condition in which an organism feeds on itself due to inaccessibility of resources. In this paper we define contemporaneity in terms of a global catabolic turn and explore its social and political repercussions.
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