期刊名称：Rhizomes : Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge
印刷版ISSN：1555-9998
出版年度：2016
期号：30
页码：1-11
DOI：10.20415/rhiz/030.e15
出版社：Bowling Green State University
摘要：Contemporary critical theory contemplates the potential openings created in a world composed of nonlinear heterogeneous assemblages. What if, in all of its connectivity, most assemblages remain unknown to us, are devoid of human presence, and are indifferent to human intention? Karen Barad's research offers timely provocations that push this world of assemblages beyond human exceptionalism. This paper considers constitutive inhuman inclusions through the phenomenon of waste. If the concern with the Anthropocene is that it characterizes humans' de-stratification of billions-year-old fossil fuel and other material layerings from the earth's strata, then landfills and nuclear waste repositories articulate a concern in the opposite direction, with a kind of earthly re-stratification or re-layering. A landfill's contaminating lifespan is estimated at hundreds to thousands of years, and nuclear radiotoxicity endures for upwards of 100,000 years, or 3,000 generations, making the consequences of this re-stratification indeterminate. This in turn draws our attention to the imprescriptibility of our ethical responsibility to future human and environmental sustainability. Adjoining Barad's central concern to articulate a theory of ethics, this paper acknowledges indeterminacy itself as the difficult ground of a social obligation toward the future, as it explores an ethics of indeterminacy in waste-world-making.
