Speculative Taxidermy

28INTRODUCTION

with ecological thinking beyond the pure rhetorical level requires dab-
bling in irresolvable ambiguities, overlapping loops, and darkness.

Dark ecology puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness

back into ecological thinking. The form of dark ecology is that of noir

film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situa-

tion, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that she

or he is implicated in it. The point of view of the narrator herself becomes

stained with desire. There is no metaposition from which we can make

ecological pronouncements. Ironically, this applies in particular to the

sunny, affirmative rhetoric of environmental ideology. A more honest

ecological art would linger in the shadowy world of irony and differ-

ence.... The ecological thought includes negativity and irony, ugliness

and horror.^47

This is the backdrop against which speculative taxidermy emerges.
Speculative taxidermy is always concerned with what Haraway calls the
“knots of technocultural reinvented pastoral-tourist economies and ecol-
ogies,” which raise questions of “who belongs where and what flourish-
ing means for whom.”^48 A more complex concept of “becoming with,” one
articulated in linguistic as well as carnal registers, quickly takes shape as
the recurrent condition in current anthropogenic discourses.
Despite the controversy surrounding the genesis and uses of the term
Anthropocene, this term focalizes the inconfutable impact of human ac-
tivities on the webs of interconnectedness that characterize the biosphere.
In a sense, it makes us all aware of a being-with that has not previously
been central to the humanities. The era of climate change characterized
by the pervasive and unpredictable impact of human activities on the
planet has already demanded the crafting of new optics, methodologies,
and concepts, and most importantly requires engagement with media
and histories traditionally kept discrete. At this very point, a new rela-
tionship between philosophy and art  comes to the fore. Philosophers,
artists, art historians, and curators are today, more than ever, committed
to notions of artistic production envisioning alternative historicities, rhi-
zomatic notions of multispecies interconnectedness, previously uncharted
registers of biopolitics, new materialist approaches, reconsideration of
agential potentials, capitalogenic conceptions of production and con-