No Oikos for the Cyborg

Abstract This thesis is a rejection of the universalist connotations of the term Anthropocene, and it critically analyzes the discourse that aims to mark the beginning of said epoch. It believes the designation of this origin story to be a political act, and establishes colonial and capitalist agents and the inherent discourse of modernity and progress as the catalysts of the destructive Anthropocene. It analyzes the othering processes that have been a consequence of the epoch but have largely been ignored in the discussion of the origin story and the global impact.

This thesis identifies the binary social and technological categories established by the discourse of modernity to keep power structures intact, and aims to blur these categories through speculative world-making techniques. By identifying the Anthropocene as an aesthetic event, this thesis calls for a shift in biological and sensorial perceptions in the process of imagining alternative futures. It rejects normative determinism, and achieves this shift in perception through the process of queering. It calls for de-centering of the standardized human subject. This de-centering requires a reimagination of everything that would have previously been encompassed in an oikos—a home, to begin with. Speculated in a post-Capitalist world that is achieved through global Revolution, this thesis creates a world where humans are scavengers. Focusing on the technological tools that the Anthropocene has used to preserve the standard anthropocentric space, this thesis queers the need for original instrumentality. The scavengers find these technological artifacts, but are deprived of the standard anthropocentric and anthroponormative narratives that defined their original instrumentality. This defamiliarization of technology would create a multitude of new subjectivities that would blur the boundaries between human and non-human, standard and the other. This would result in a flat ontology of consciousness that would reveal new ways of collaborative, revolutionary living.