CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Adrienne Ghaly The Aesthetics of Extinction: Four Methods
The Aesthetics of Extinction: Four Methods argues that core methods and approaches of literary studies reveal crucial aspects of biopower over nonhuman life, contributing to the emergence of the sixth mass extinction.
The historical moment Foucault identified as the birth of biology as an episteme is also the rise of processes in North America and Northern Europe that produce deep and wide impacts on species’ component populations. These impacts accelerate and accrete to become the biodiversity crisis. My project explores how aesthetic works structure relations to nonhuman life through biopolitical logics that produce widespread violence that often does not look like violence at all. It argues that biopower is bound up with the aesthetic production of the social, absorbed and metabolized into everyday practices and ways of thinking that aesthetic texts and objects participate in and reproduce. It examines texts and aesthetic objects for cultural habits, ways of thinking, and structures of feeling to unfold the ‘biopolitical phenomenologies’ of extinction. The project reframes four core methods of literary studies: aesthetic encounter, affect, the aesthetics of infrastructure, and ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading through digital textual analyses, to claim these methods make legible the extinctionary regimes impacting other-than-human life.