Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event.” (Derrida 1978: 278)
Circumstances are extraordinary. Days are like weeks. Spring arrives, but the streets are empty. An abundance of caution overwhelms all plans. We reach out in darkness for a wall to walk along. The problem is one of forecasting—of the dim sense that things are shifting but at non-linear rates. Feedback is the specter haunting our world. Intensification and dissipation somehow seem equally plausible: an irruption of deer freed from predation; a doubling of the number of infected every six days; the extinction of a species after decades of population decline; an abrupt shift in the trade winds from an incremental rise in ocean temperatures. We adjust our eyes to see the outlines of the thing. We make predictions about its behavior, like drawing blood from a stone.
We practice “horizoning work” as Adriana Petryna terms the forecasting of sudden environmental transitions by scientists: “local and highly practical forms of research that attempt to bring an unknown or runaway future into the present as an object of knowledge and intervention” (Petryna 2018: 573; see Petryna & Mitchell 2017). Horizoning work is about more than making something known. Demanding speculation, it involves extricating ourselves from familiar signs and their organizing principles, even as we mourn the loss of familiarity. It poses a question about the limits of thought in times of change. How could existing concepts possibly apprehend something new and unknown? Here, Jacques Derrida’s (1978) interrogation of structuralism and ethnology is useful:
Here there is a kind of question, let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing—but also with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. (Derrida 1978: 293)
Today, questions of structure, change, and humanism have sharpened again for environmental anthropologists. Something unnameable looms just beyond our crises of climate, of health, of biodiversity, and of inequality. This thematic series examines the horizoning work needed in confounding times, with inspiration and commentary from Adriana Petryna.
Series Posts:
Have Some Mental Health: The Black Summer Bushfires, COVID-19, and the Governance of Psychic Retreat
by Aaron Neiman
The Vanishing Land: In Search of a Myth for Samothraki
by Eleni Kotsira
Horizons, Not Curves: Creating Space for Radical Care in a Pandemic
by Randy Burson II and Angela Ross Perfetti
Cattle, Fracking, and the Problem of Latent Control in American Settler Ecology
by Néstor L. Silva
The Epistemology of Cutting and the Metaphysics of Continuities
by Meredith Root-Bernstein
Commentary:
More Horizon: A Commentary
by Adriana Petryna
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 278–94. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Petryna, Adriana. 2018. “Wildfires at the Edges of Science: Horizoning Work Amid Runaway Change.” Cultural Anthropology 33(4): 570–595.
Petryna, Adriana, and Paul Wolff Mitchell. 2017. “On the Nature of Catastrophic Forms.” BioSocieties 12(3): 343–66.
Read the original call for posts here.
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