Wytwarzanie światów poza ludzką skalą i perspektywą

The framework for the article is provided by the current critical approaches, particularly those inspired by Black Feminist Theories, Ecocriticism and Decolonial Studies, to the concept of the Anthropocene, which has been premised on the idea of the Man. As Sylvia Wynter argues, the Man designates here the particularly Western, secular, imperial version of the human, and is defined as the being who is, or who can be, "Master of himself" (and everything else). Trying to recognize the ecological stakes of human mastery, the article focuses in particular on two main dimensions of world-making and knowledge-producing: scale and perspective. Both have been employed by the Moderns and resulted in the destruction of all alternative knowledges and ways of living, which in his "Epistemologies of the South", Boaventura de Souza Santos explicitly calls epistemicide, premised on the epistemological privilege given to scientific knowledge and Western-centered understanding of life (worth living). The currently deepening eco-eco crisis urges us to look for such emancipatory transformations which will follow the grammar and scripts other than those developed by Western critical thinking. Taking as its starting point both Alexander G. Weheliye’s critical approach to Agamben’s concept of bare life in his "Habeas Viscus" (2014) and Julietta Singh’s concept of dehumanism and decolonial entanglements in her "Unthinking Mastery" (2018), the present article looks into the way counterhegemonic theorists renegotiate the concept of the Human, trying to provide experiences of enfleshed alter-living that undermines the naturalized notions of scale and perspective. These experiential renegotiations and subversions have been often voiced not only in theories but also in contemporary speculative fabulations which call the Western subjectivity into question in order to exercise dehumanist possibilities of new human forms and conceptions of agency. To demonstrate other possible “modalities of the human” (Weheliye), the article refers to Kim Stanley Robinson’s "Mars"-trilogy - "Red Mars" (1992), "Green Mars" (1993), "Blue Mars" (1996). However, it is not terraforming program as such which the author focuses on but rather the fundamental problem of human mastery. What is important, the planet Mars stands here primarily for new gravity and living conditions for the First Hundred, with new scale and perspective enforcing other performances of the human. Starting in 2026 and spanning almost two centuries, the trilogy chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet in order to demonstrate how matter actively contributes to and shapes environments, communities, politics as well as knowledge production. In such a way, Robinson’s "Mars"-trilogy reaches toward other modes of relational being that may not yet be recognizable on Earth where the human is revealed to be not only a historically contingent subject but one that continues to be ideologically and structurally enforced. Therefore, a close reading of the "Mars"-trilogy seems to be the best way to demonstrate how artists try to engage their public in speculations about new life practices, preparing them for a (more sustainable) future after the Anthropocene.