INTRODUCTION27work of art could require the crafting of a new methodological approach,
or at least might instill a desire to write with the work, rather than about
it, or to engage in a shared flight rather than a dissection.
These subject-specific limitations brought me to reconsider Foucault’s
postphenomenological approaches to art. To some, this choice will seem
odd, and to others, it might appear that my appropriation of Foucault’s
methodologies and ideas doesn’t do justice to his broader body of work.
These concerns might be legitimate, but focusing too much on this aspect
of my work would mean to miss the point: philosophical concepts should
be alternated, remodeled, expanded, picked up, and dropped in relation
to the task and the productivities they bear in unraveling relevant dis-
courses and practices inscribed in a work of art. Knowing when to switch
tools is essential to the successful completion of the task, and crafting new
tools in the process is a definite advantage. In this spirit, my tools of in-
quiry in this book also incorporate components of new philosophical
movements, such as speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and
new materialism. The aim is not to test the frequently questioned appli-
cability of these frameworks to artistic discourses but to appropriate
aspects of their key arguments to find productivities in them.
These frameworks will be inscribed within the broader concept of the
Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which the human impact on the
earth’s ecosystems is acknowledged as an undeniable and defining force.^45
The Anthropocene is well defined by the acknowledgment that, every
year, humans exceeded by more than half the resources produced on the
planet. In the Anthropocene, overconsumption is underpinned by a deep
and general sense of unconnectedness with nature, which is compen-
sated only representationally by the emergence of sublime-catastrophic
visions of rising temperatures and sea levels. This is the lens through
which the negative postcolonial connotation of taxidermy can be coun-
terbalanced. Anthropogenic vantage points do not discard postcolonial
perspectives altogether, but they problematize them through the eco-
criticist acknowledgment that the human impact on the planet is also con-
volutional and productive, not simply and unilaterally destructive. Tim-
othy Morton’s theorization of dark ecology is the predominant modality
that characterizes systems, entities, and thoughts in the context of the
cultural, environmental, economic, and political crises we are currently tra-
versing.^46 The proposal of dark ecology rests on the notion that engaging