FCJ-226 ‘And they are like wild beasts’: Violent Things in the Anthropocene

Abstract

What can a chair, spoon, table, horse, sow, or wheel do when accused of murder? The Anthropocene has rearranged our material relationships: humans are a geological force ensnaring every object within reach into our diabolical plan to reconfigure the planet through increasing networks of violence. We could refuse to look, but the continual arrival of data across the networks means that more of these violent objects are uncovered, and more and more we are asked to account for their actions. This essay is a critical melodrama set amidst the debris of history. It engages with the common law of deodand that existed in England from 1066 until 1846, placing deodand alongside the vital living objects that pervaded the writing of Anne Conway in the seventeenth century and extending its thoughts into the new world we name the Anthropocene. Perhaps in this unusual genealogy is a way of considering the vitality of objects in the Anthropocene as nature and humans, stones and chairs, bodies and objects emerge anew.

Keywords

• anne conway
• deodand
• mikala dwyer
• ruth buchanan
• trevor paglen
• violence
• nonhuman
• anthropocene
• climate change and art
• jmw turner