No Oikos for the Cyborg

The Capitalocene is an aesthetic event—it is a narrative that configures perception and renders the aesthetics of destruction beautiful, natural and inevitable.129 This shift in perception is visible in the sunsets that appear more colorful than ever with increasing particulate matter in the sky, or in the images by Edward Burtynksy, such as this one, where exploited landscape appears breathtakingly beautiful. These perceptions are being configured and reconfigured at a rate that we can barely keep up with, and, therefore, the narrative of the oikos allows for a complacency in privileged existence that perceives this exploitative change as “inevitable” for the construction and preservation of the human space on the planet.

The oikos constructs nature in human terms that can be appropriated to be a tool for the Capitalocene.

The paintings of Nature by the Impressionists creates the narrative of a beautiful object that needs to be protected by and from humans; the term ‘natural’ is weaponized to be established as a biological standard to counter dissent against social categories like gender, sexuality and race; the association of nature with the term Mother constructs expectations of being provided for and justifies extraction of resources. Oikos is based on the belief that human capitalocentric reality is the same as a universal planetary reality, and this belief has rendered the planet itself as an other—a resource to be inevitably exploited.

Amanda Boetzkes, draws upon Inuit observations to say, “The world has tilted on its axis,” and therefore, to imagine a post-capitalist futurity, a reconfiguration of sensorial and perceptive systems is required.130 This thesis rejects the notion of an oikos and turns to Indigenous Knowledge to understand the planet and nature as beings that exist on their own accord—not defined in human terms.

129. Heather M. Davis and Etienne Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 11.

130. Davis and Turpin, 11.