One of the first photos in the book shows two white storks, one of them sitting in a nest on the top of a post, the other caught in flight (Ramaniuk, Kliashchuk and Byshniou 2006: 16). Close by is a floodplain and behind the water are green forests. The landscape is flat. Two seemingly well-kept rowing boats lie on the shore. In the foreground is a blossoming small tree, probably a blackthorn. The caption says: 'Storks are leaving the Zone. Since the dawn of time they settled close to humans and now, when people are gone, they feel unprotected in the abandoned villages. Stork nests decay and fall down just like human houses. The storks do not come back'.

Another photo shows a heavy, muscular European bison gazing into the camera (Figure 12.2), surrounded by bushy forest (Ramaniuk, Kliashchuk and Byshniou 2006: 17). On the ground, just in front of the

Figure 12.2 — The European bison once populated the forests of Belarus. Today it is reintroduced as part of the envisioned, but contested, rewilding of the radioactively contaminated zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. (Photograph by I. Byshniou, reproduced with permission from Ramaniuk, Kliashchuk and Byshniou 2006: 17).

bison, stands what might be a metal tray for cattle feed. In the foreground is a wooden signpost, slightly out of focus, with a warning message in Russian: 'Radioactive contamination. Entry is PROHIBITED'. The caption describes how humans previously hunted the wild European bison to extinction and later restored the stock through big efforts and, finally, in 1995, how a group of bison were brought to the Chernobyl Zone in order to recreate a wild herd there.

Turning yet another page, we meet the eye of a grown-up wolf (Ramaniuk, Kliashchuk and Byshniou 2006: 19). It lies indoors on a floor with its head raised and turned towards the photographer, teeth shown. The floor is covered with pieces of cloth, broken bricks, gravel and pieces of paper. The interior wall behind shows ragged generations of wallpaper. Two windows are shining white in backlight and a metal headboard is leaning against the wall. The caption says, in the voice of the photographer: 'Wolves take eye contact as a challenge. But I avoid it, because he is the master here, not I'.

In the many following photos, captions and running text, the reader meets wild boar, herons, a bear cub, eagle owls, hedgehogs, mice, elk, deer, tortoises, swallows and black storks, all seemingly prospering and in charge of their situation. The Zone – here denoting not only the evacuated and closed-off territory around the Chernobyl plant but the whole area in Belarus suffering from radiation – has in these depictions become a natural wilderness. The swallows assemble on barbed wires in the evenings, the hedgehogs hunt on overgrown village streets and the tortoises find rest in broken, left-behind pots – all signs of human withdrawal, and of animal and vegetation taking back the territory.

In the book, the Zone is described alternately as a refuge, a zoo and a paradise (Ramaniuk, Kliashchuk and Byshniou 2006: 28, 30, 35). One of the authors hears the swallows twittering as if to say: "'Tomorrow will be fine and peaceful here'… A life in which human beings are superfluous" (2006: 35). He also observes how the deer are roaming differently in the Zone compared to the rest of the Belarusian countryside: "they are less cautious here. For here neither a hunter nor a mushroom-gatherer can frighten them" (ibid). Instead, together with foxes, martens and raccoon-dogs, the deer are said to enjoy "gifts from humankind" (2006: 45) such as the crop of apples and pears in abandoned gardens. Depictions of a thriving nature in the Zone, resembling the imagery of this book, have been widely spread in international media but are certainly also questioned, especially when it comes to observed dysfunctional microbes, worms, larvae and insects – key to the process of breaking down organic matter and to pollination (Brown 2019: 138–145).

According to the book, the only animal species that seems less content are the white storks – those who fictionally deliver human babies – who prefer to live close to human settlement and therefore leave the Zone along with the humans, as well as the dogs and cats that are brought along by the closed territory's checkpoint staff. The pets keep disappearing, probably due to the wolves (Ramaniuk, Kliashchuk and Byshniou 2006: 33). Apparently, the rewilding Zone is not a friendly place for too human-dependent species. In passing, the authors also note that, against expectations, no "three-headed snakes, two-tailed wolves and other mutants" (2006: 39) were ever sighted. Thus, not even in terms of radiation-caused biological disturbance is the human visible in the Zone – at least not in this part of the story.

The book conveys an account of spontaneous rewilding within the Zone, due to human absence. The spontaneous processes are furthermore reinforced by the conscious reintroduction of the European bison into this new wilderness – a species that has the status of being a highly valued national animal of Belarus. In his vivid account of centuries of bison lore connected to the Białowieża forest, which straddles the border of today's south-west Belarus and Poland, Simon Schama notes how the bison "became a talisman of survival. For as long as the beast and its succouring forest habitat endured, it was implied, so would the nation's martial vigour" (Schama 1995: 41).

The story about 'Nature' is however only the first part of the book Charnobyl'-Chernobyl-Tschernobyl. It is followed by sections on 'Folk', 'History' and 'Individuals'. When changing perspective, the reader realizes that the Zone is not all that empty of human activity, even though the extent and character of these activities have certainly changed dramatically. Indeed, numerous forced migrants regularly come back to the Zone and a few elderly people have actually resettled in their home villages. Twice a year, honey from the many beehives in the Zone is harvested (Ramaniuk, Kliashchuk and Byshniou 2006: 86). On special days, traditional ceremonies are performed including drinking and washing oneself with water from local sacred springs (2006: 120–1). Cemeteries are carefully maintained and many people now living far away still choose to have their grave in the village of their childhood, now within the Zone (2006: 112–119). In springtime, former village neighbours meet on the orthodox commemoration day Radunica, or Radunitsa, to remember their departed and to eat and drink together at the place where they used to live. The almost idyllic depictions show colourful and sunny gatherings of young and old (2006: 112, 116–17). In parallel, the authors remind the reader that "for us these places have become deadly" and "we shall never live in this home again" (2006: 35, 28).

All the photos, including those depicting solely animals and natural scenery without any trace of human activity whatsoever, are all carefully located in geography. Places have names: Aravichy\*, Chapajeuka\*, Viazhyshcha\*, Dubrova\*, Novaja Jelnia\*, but at the same time an attached asterisk (\*) indicates that these particular villages 'no longer exist' (Ramaniuk, Kliashchuk and Byshniou 2006: 4). The places are thus simultaneously present and absent; this used to be a human settlement with a human name, but now the humans have left and the village is no more, or at least it is changing into something else. To the geographical specification of a no longer existing village or place, strict contamination data is added, such as, "Cs-137 contamination – 84,09 Ci/km2 , 2102, 25 exceeds normal" (2006: 8) and sometimes the distance to the disastrous reactor is also pointed out: "39 km to the reactor" (2006: 4).

In the Belarussian countryside, 485 villages were lost due to the Chernobyl catastrophe, along with fifty-four collective and state farms and 2,500 square kilometres of cultivated land (Ramaniuk, Kliashchuk and Byshniou 2006: 45, 30). The river Dniapro, or Dnieper, passes through the most heavily contaminated areas of Belarus and is here widened into a large floodplain or wetland, which has for a long time been of great significance as a breeding habitat and migration stopover. The wildlife in the area therefore has a history, and since 1988, two years after the catastrophic reactor meltdown, the Belarussian state established the Palessie State Radio-Ecological Reserve in the country's part of the closed-off territory around the Chernobyl plant. The authors of the book do not really address the paradoxes of the establishment of this natural reserve and the fact that a vast majority, about 80%, of the radioactive fallout was captured by its forests, or how the contamination might affect the ecosystems. Instead, it is simply noted that the "most perfect retainers of radiation are the oaks" (2006: 30).

This landscape close to a nuclear power plant was once inhabited by farmers and their cultivated crops, livestock and pets, and the white storks. Although ambiguous, the Zone and the forced and painful evacuation of people and domesticated animals is portrayed in the book as partly healed by the return of the wildlife. After two decades, the people return occasionally for remembrance and for semi-wild harvests such as honey. But the territory now belongs to the wild animals and the noncultivated vegetation – superficially reminiscent of an imagined pristine paradise. The seemingly prospering wildlife speaks about some kind of reconciliation, but the mourning of the forever lost homes nevertheless still permeates the Zone.

# A rune stone and a green lawn at Barsebäck, Sweden – an exhibition

The Barsebäck nuclear power plant in Sweden was expected to become a major tourist attraction even before it was completed and, as a result, an exhibition pavilion opened in 1972 at the fringe of the plant construction site, three years before the first reactor went into operation. The so-called Expo building is a dark green wooden structure with a sharply pitched roof, located on the meadows almost directly on the shore of the Swedish south-west coast, and was described at the time as "architecturally daring" (quoted in Krohn Andersson 2012: 145). The windy, open, flat landscape offers an uninterrupted view over the Sound towards Denmark, only twenty kilometres away as the crow flies. The Expo housed an auditorium, a small café and a showroom with plates about nuclear technology, the long history of the area and also a number of archaeological objects that were found during excavations preceding the construction work.

One of the displays shows a colourful and illuminated outline of a nuclear reactor. A panel with two buttons invites the visitor to move control rods up and down inside the reactor vessel by pushing the buttons and thereby affect the energy output. In the schematic depiction, the reactor is connected to a turbine which in turn is connected to a generator, to a transformer and finally to the grid. The turbine is also linked to a condenser using cooling water from the sea and a pump that closes the loop back to the reactor.

Another lit plate shows the contours of a male human body surrounded by a number of small photos depicting, for example, a television set, a plate with food, an aircraft, a miner, a city skyline, a team of surgeons at work around an operating table and, in the low corner, the nuclear power plant framed by trees and an open field. The plate informs that the dose of radiation exposure for a pilot is 7.0 mSv/year, for a miner 20.0 mSv/year and for the general public having medical treatment 0.8 mSv/year, and so forth. By comparison, the exposure caused by the nuclear power plant to nearby residents is no more than 0.0007 mSv/year.

At the time of my first visit, a human-size 'rune stone' made with Styrofoam is mothballed in a storage room of the Expo. The inscription in red faux-runic letters says: 'SKB's [the Swedish nuclear fuel and waste management company] pointing device. Point and you will get an answer. Facts about the waste of nuclear power production'. In the middle of the rune stone is an empty space where a digital screen once was, and below this void is an 'engraving' of a snake or dragon that almost bites itself in its tail and so creates a loop. Snakes and dragons are common in Nordic mythology and often depicted on rune stones, for example the dragon Fáfnir who greedily guards a cursed gold treasure or the Midgard Serpent which embraces the universe.

The two reactors at Barsebäck went into operation in 1975 and 1977 respectively. They were finally shut down in 1999 and 2005, after almost three decades of electricity production. The Barsebäck plant was the most politicized nuclear facility in Sweden, and the closedown was highly contested both in the local context, nationally within Sweden and between Sweden and Denmark. As one part of the reorientation after the closure, a new information centre opened in 2008, replacing the old Expo. Like its forerunner, the new 'Infocentre' or 'Barsebäck's energy and environmental exhibition' houses a small auditorium/cinema, showrooms, a café and a corner with books, crayons and paper where kids are encouraged to make drawings to pin to the wall. The new building is low, white and directly connected to, but still outside, the fenced and guarded entrance to the plant area. The walls are glazed, which emphasizes openness and transparency. As regards contents, the themes from the old Expo are still very much present, although in a modernized visual language. In addition, the task to decommission and dismantle a nuclear power plant and how to take care of the radioactive waste are new features.

The explanations of how the technology works are still there, as are the radiation exposure comparisons, in new form. In the Infocentre, the visitor encounters a number of dioramas – three-dimensional miniature models in glass showcases – where female, long-haired Barbie dolls collect their suitcases upon entering the airport, put laundry into the washing machine, sunbathe by the sea and, finally, work at a nuclear power plant dressed in white protective clothing. Again, the figures of exposure to normal background levels of radiation in air travel, homes and sunlight are, with comforting results, matched with exposures for a nuclear industry worker.

Close by is a sequence of three photos answering the question 'What will it look like afterwards?', that is, after decommissioning and dismantling the nuclear power plant. The photos are aerial views of the dismantling of the Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant in the US (located about 200 km from the Yankee Rowe plant described above in the decommissioning video). The first photo from 2003 shows the Connecticut Yankee plant with numerous industrial buildings, cooling water intakes and parking lots located in between a waterfront and a forest. In the second photo, from 2005, the reactor building and some other buildings are gone. In the third photo, from 2007, the flat space is empty, beige in colour. The place where the reactor once was, stands out as a green oval. The message of these photos in the Barsebäck Infocentre seems to be clear: there are role models to learn from, and there will be nothing left of the Barsebäck plant when we are done here.

In a separate room without windows, the walls imitate granite bedrock which makes the space dark. Here the management of nuclear waste is addressed. A large photo of the Sound between Sweden and Denmark is on the wall. The Öresund Bridge is in the background, an impressive engineering masterpiece arching over small sailing boats discernible in the water. In front of the photo is a free-hanging transparent glass plate featuring a photo of a red and white transport vessel. The caption says that it is MS Sigyn, a specially constructed vessel that transports radioactive waste from Swedish nuclear power plants to the two nuclear waste facilities in the country.

Next to this combination of two photos is a mock-up of a copper canister (Figure 12.3) with deep rectangular compartments to house the most highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies. A caption explains about the thickness and weight of copper and steel in the construction, indicating its ability to resist corrosion and external pressure. Around the shining cylindrical mock-up is a soft bench covered in bright-coloured cloth representing a buffer layer of bentonite clay, on which visitors can sit down and take a rest.

While the archaeological treasures and the rune stone were not brought along from the first to the second version of the exhibition, ancient times and mythological dimensions are present in other ways. The naming of the transport vessel for nuclear waste, Sigyn – not a common name in Sweden –stands out. Like the dragon or snake on the rune stone, Sigyn is a character in Nordic mythology. She is a goddess and

Figure 12.3 — At the Infocenter of Barsebäck nuclear power plant, Sweden, the exhibition features a mock-up of a copper canister for storing spent nuclear fuel. The soft and bright-coloured sitting bench around the metal construction represents an additional protective layer of bentonite clay. (Photograph by Anna Storm).

the wife of Loki who, after many evil actions, was chained and doomed to eternity to get poisonous blood from a snake dripping onto his face. Sigyn, the faithful wife, stays at his side and catches the blood in a bowl, thus hindering the caustic blood to hurt his face. When the bowl is full, and she has to leave temporarily to empty it, Loki shakes his chains in pain so that the Earth tremors.2

Also connected to the management of hazardous waste, and partly extending human time perspectives, are the abiotic elements. The sea did not only serve as a necessary coolant when the nuclear plant was in operation, but continues to provide a safe and efficient transport route for the specially built vessel, while the granite bedrock forms a reliable long-term companion together with copper, steel and clay to contain the nuclear power production's unwanted leftovers isolated from humans into eternity. The dismantling of the plant is envisioned to result in a flat mowed green lawn, open and free to be reused for new purposes, a manifestation of the nuclear industry's goal of 'unrestricted release'. In the local municipality, there are elaborate plans to build a fancy residential area on the future denuclearized coastal landscape: "Seaside Barsebäck" (Storm 2014: 72–3). But as the plant owner instead has lately built an interim storage for radioactive waste on site, it will take several decades, if ever, before children will dig and play in sandboxes on the former nuclear territory.

#### Mutants, monsters and stones

When humans leave nuclear territories, care for radioactive remains is handed over to nonhumans. Nuclear heritage simultaneously disappears by its enclosure into rewilding natures or into controlled biotic and abiotic elements such as green lawns and stones.

The rewilding exemplified in the film about the dismantling of the Yankee Rowe plant and the book about radioactively contaminated abandoned villages in Belarus focusses on large fauna such as bear, bison and wolf. These large animals convey a powerful message about the pristineness of the place, after humans have left, and also drown out more elusive messages carried by microbes and insects. Such megafauna, which were present almost all over the planet prior to the arrival of modern humans, have recently began to generally increase in numbers. Among other things, this is due to the ongoing urbanization leaving large land areas empty of human inhabitation, along with conscious reintroduction schemes (Svenning 2017). Thus, not only does nuclear deterritorialization lead to rewilding, or a post-nuclear 'jungle' (Byshniou 2005), but it forms part of a larger process of human interventions in the production of 'nature' (see Breithoff and Harrison, this volume), contributing to the ways in which rewilding nuclear territories can be conceptualized as normal and under control.

The visualization of an ongoing reinstating of a pre-disturbed status, including reintroduction of species like bison, mirrors traditional ecological restoration work (Kowarik 2005; Jørgensen 2015; Cronon 1995), sometimes with the eventual goal to "erase human history and involvement with the land and flora and fauna" ( Jørgensen 2015: 487). In the case of the nuclear plants, the often already existing nature reserves of the security buffer zones also complicate the picture of return and erasure. More recent ecological work in such zones rather emphasizes hybrid landscapes including humans and related social values. This category of a "natureculture" is widely regarded as a "condition of the Anthropocene" ( Jørgensen 2017: 849; see Harrison 2015 in relation to Anthropocene heritage) and so forcefully rejects the very idea and possibility of complete human withdrawal from any landscape, radioactive or not. Joseph Masco suggests, however, that "hybrid" might not be the best term to use to scrutinize the complexity of "naturecultures" since this concept formally denotes an infertile offspring, and he suggests that we should use the term "mutant" instead (Masco 2006: 301). In consequence, even if no three-headed snakes were observed in any of the particular places described here, these territories might in fact be understood as mutants, nonetheless.

Pristine or mutant – the megafauna are rich in symbolic connotations. The wolf, for example, in Western imagination appears as a "noble animal, unlike the degraded servant, the dog" (Freccero 2017: M97), which might explain the photographer backing off from his encounter with a wolf in the Chernobyl Zone, as the wolf 'is the master here'. The bison lore, as we saw, brought messages of "survival" and "national martial vigour" and was, in addition, often described as a "monster" of heroic savagery (Schama 1995: 41). Swanson et al. highlight how "monsters… have a double meaning: on one hand, they help us pay attention to ancient chimeric entanglements; on the other, they point us toward the monstrosities of modern Man [sic]" (2017: M2). Is this how we should frame the serpent on the rune stone embracing a world of nuclear waste or if it is a dragon guarding a cursed treasure, or the goddess Sigyn who at some point has to empty the bowl of poisonous substance that will make the Earth tremble?

In times of disaster, we rely on stones. Reliable things are said to be "solid as a rock" and stones "bring a gift of hope, of fortune, of insight, of the possibility of living-with" (Gan et al. 2017: G11). In this way the rune stone with engraved messages from the past to the future, and the bedrock and clay representing deep pasts and deep futures, can be seen as signifying hopes for healing wounds into scars one can live with (Storm, forthcoming). The world's very first nuclear reactor, constructed on the campus of Chicago University in 1942, was eventually buried underground in a forest outside the city. The site is marked by different stones, like headstones, one of them with the inscription: 'Caution – Do not dig' (Storm, Krohn Andersson and Rindzevičiūtė 2019).

What do these suggested characteristics of human withdrawal from nuclear landscapes tell us about the status of current responsibilities, and about contemporary human and nonhuman relations to the temporalities of radioactive decay? The nuclear world has long since lent itself to utopian and dystopian views, and when radioactive waste management more prominently entered the picture, the nuclear industry found itself in between a detailed technical discussion and humanity's existential questions of survival and communication with future generations, extending further into the future than any archaeological record extends into the past. Perhaps that is why mythology is part of the human imaginations of radioactive futures, and why the nonhuman is put in charge of guarding our nuclear heritage.

# Human and nonhuman entanglements with radioactive remains

In this chapter, I have argued that humans are now successively leaving and unmaking nuclear territories. However, this process of deterritorialization is not complete, but partial and in many respects superficial. The decommissioning and dismantling of nuclear reactors and the evacuation of people and livestock from contaminated lands are paralleled with a relocation of nuclear waste to new-built storage sites and a continuous exchange with the left-behind territories, for example, in terms of bird migration and human revisitation. Hence, the movement and reconfiguration of nuclear residues not only implies deterritorialization but a reterritorialization of the same places, or of places elsewhere.

Furthermore, such attempts at abandoning and unmaking nuclear territories highlight aspects of human-nonhuman entanglements with consequences for understanding the role of heritage in the Anthropocene. The hazardous radioactive remains will stay with us into the deep future, and negotiations about their containment and isolation from living biota involve questions ranging from the expected corrosion characteristics of copper to possible means of communication with future human generations. These deliberations could certainly be conceptualized as highly existential heritage processes, although they are seldom articulated as such. Instead, a double objective of making-invisible imbues current nuclear decommissioning activities: first, to let nuclear heritage – in its industrial and social sense – disappear and, second, to move those remnants that cannot disappear – the radioactive waste – principally out of sight. Both these goals are rationalized as unquestionably responsible actions, thus normalizing and removing such processes from critical evaluation.

If unchallenged, this ongoing making-invisible will leave us with an institutionalized nuclear heritage focusing primarily on positive-affirmative and nationalized scientific achievements, narrated partly by the nuclear industry itself, and on difficult-heritage warnings of globalized nuclear disasters and atrocities, narrated primarily within a context of war memorials. The industrial and social aspects of nuclear heritage will to a large extent be lost or, rather, their disappearance transformed into a continuation of the nuclear industry's self-proclaimed identity of cleanness and control. The neat and tidy – responsible – aftermath of a nuclear power plant is in this perspective a green lawn, free and safe to use for any purpose. No signs or markers of previous usage will be relevant as the land is imagined to be completely denuclearized.

However, radioactive remains are not easily rendered invisible, and trigger both technical and existential debate. As a human legacy, or heritage, these remains force humanity to conceptualize responsibilities of care into distant futures but this act of imagination, that is, to safely manage this toxic residue for such long-time horizons is certainly very difficult. In that sense, radioactive remnants may be understood as difficult heritage, akin to, for example, the persistence of ruined and toxic landscapes or memories of the experiences of genocides and war atrocities. But while some difficult heritages have become integrated in public negotiations of reconciliation and the politics of memory, radioactive remains have hitherto eluded such processes, just like the half-lives of radioactive isotopes elude human temporalities. I have suggested in this chapter that one way in which humans have attempted to bypass this fundamental and challenging issue is to hand over the care of radioactive remains to nonhumans, to animals and vegetation, bedrock and clay, sometimes with an added hint of myth. The nonhuman and the mythological both seem to provide a reliable route into ancient pasts as well as into elusive distant futures, and thus may persist even when we have finally left the nuclear territories.

# Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank Anders Houltz, Oscar Jacobsson, Lars Kaijser, Tatiana Kasperski, Fredrik Krohn Andersson and Anders Nordebring for their help and valuable comments on an earlier version on this chapter.

#### *Notes*

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Tafvelin Heldner, M., E. Dahlström Rittsél and P. Lundgren. 2008. Ågesta*: Kärnkraft som kulturarv.* Stockholm: Tekniska museet, Stockholms läns museum, Länsstyrelsen i Stockholms län.

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Yankee Rowe. 2018. *Demolition Video*. http://www.yankeerowe.com/ decommissioning\_dismantle.html.

# Coda

#### *Chapter 13*

# The Future is Already Deterritorialized

Claire Colebrook

#### The future is already deterritorialized

The future is already deterritorialized. The present is not simply oriented to its own ongoing existence, but has already been captivated by a future in which humanity ceases to be. One element of the living system that is the Earth has come to regard itself as the point of view from which all futurity ought to be imagined, and this captivation of the future by Anthropos becomes all the more intense as the possibility of various existential threats are played out in the Anthropocenic imaginary. Although there have been many significant and important objections to referring to the Anthropocene (rather than the Capitalocene [Moore 2015] or White Supremocene [Mirzoeff 2018]) it is important to keep Anthropos as a term of consideration, especially when one recognizes the acutely deterritorializing force of Anthropos *and* the intimate relation between the deterritorialized future and existential threats. (I will argue later that Anthropos has *always* been defined by existential threats, that he is set apart from all life in the world by his existential fragility, by the alwayspresent possibility that he may not be. This is a specific mode of deterritorialization where what had formed as a species – homo sapiens in relation to various forces of its milieu – becomes something different by now orienting itself towards its threatened non-existence, and then allowing that idea of non-being to dominate all other relations, especially to those who do not count as Anthropos, do not feel this existential fragility). By repeatedly imagining the destruction of humanity from elsewhere – viral pandemics, zombie or alien invasions, runaway technology, systemic collapse, resource depletion and a supposedly accidental climate catastrophe – the future becomes nothing more than the vanquishing of existential threats.

What the twenty-first century has witnessed is not only the local use of possible catastrophe to contain the present, such that various states of emergency are declared in order to focus policy, law, resources and attention on security concerns; the Anthropocene has produced, or expressed, a species emergency. By imagining humanity's non-being, Anthropos is constituted as that which must be saved, and as that which must destroy all threats. Far from this horizon of non-being chastening the present it has, instead, led to an Anthropocenic imaginary, where the future is oriented to nothing more than the destruction of existential threats. Our current Anthropocenic and post-apocalyptic horizon has been captured by one thing alone: the possibility that we might cease to exist, and that the horizon of our existence must be focused on the destruction of existential threats. We will survive because we must destroy that which threatens our being. Rather than an imaginary that is oriented to the territory, the relations of forces that form us, and rather than be oriented to a higher deterritorialization – relations that cut into the territory and take us elsewhere – we know only Anthropos, and know him only as a being whose existential precarity demands an extensive destruction of all that threatens us.

Of course, the present *does* seem to be one where the species and planet are threatened, and it is ethically imperative not to be glib about the ways in which climate change threatens those who simply cannot afford to be deniers. But this general milieu poses a problem: how does one negotiate the genuine brutality of the present without buying into a fantasy of apocalypse that fetishizes the redemption of humanity by way of a violent destruction of all that renders humanity fragile? How to take the real threat of climate change and systemic collapse seriously without buoying up disaster capitalism and a sense of a global state of emergency that puts all minor sufferings on hold? There is, after all, something worse than the end of the world, and that is the intensification of suffering and barbarism while what calls itself humanity ekes out its last days in existential panic.

It is with this negotiation of the genuinely fragile future that I would mark a distinction between two modes of deterritorialization. The first would be the deterritorialization that enables and characterizes the Anthropocene: humanity emerges as an effect of a series of relations (including colonization), with the future ultimately becoming nothing more than the project of saving humanity from all that threatens their emergent complexity. What forms itself as Anthropos, does not only take itself as the norm and proper end of the whole, but also constantly regards itself as threatened by the present; the future is not the future of the species so much as the flourishing of humanity having fully conquered all that renders it precarious. The second mode would be a decolonized deterritorialization; here the present is captivated, rather than captured, by a quality that creates a cosmic or counter-anthropic stratum. As an example of the first mode of deterritorialization one might think of any number of post-apocalyptic cinematic epics where some threat to humanity – viral, technological, extra-terrestrial, ecological – must be destroyed. The future is given *only* in vanquishing that threat. (We talk of fighting or combating climate change; we talk of working against resource depletion; we predict water wars; we discuss various ways of averting catastrophe: the future is one of being at war with all that renders us fragile.) The second mode of decolonizing deterritorialization would release qualities from Anthropos, no longer defined in terms of survival of the fragile: how might we think of rivers, non-human organisms, sounds and colours if they were not determined in advance from the point of view of Anthropocene humans? The threshold between these two modes of decolonization is difficult if not impossible to fully determine. In Deleuze and Guattari's work, for example, the modes of modernist art that release colours and sounds from everyday human purposiveness at once promise some sense of what is beyond the human at the same time as they strengthen a sense of the modernist subject of artistic sensibility as uniquely threatened and (therefore) worthy.

Cato the Elder was known for ending missives with the imperative that Carthage must be destroyed (Kiernan 2004). I raise this anecdote for two reasons: I have also become prone to a compulsive repetition in every argument I make, referring with horror to Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute.1 But just as I find myself akin to Cato the Elder in repeatedly looking with horror at an adversary, the greater similarity is between Cato the Elder and the Institute itself, both intensely focused on destroying existential threats. There is also a global-political resonance between Rome's then civic humanism and Oxford Institute's capacity to see humanity as it happens to be as an impediment to humanity as it ought to be. To destroy Carthage, for Rome, was the only way for a fraction of the species that saw itself as 'humanitas' – what humans ought to be – to become humanity in general. In his 'Letter on Humanism' Heidegger saw the Roman mission of 'humanitas', the cultivation of good citizens through logic, as the loss of the world. *Legien* or speaking about the world became a system unto itself and established the logic of the humanities as that which could and should purvey the world from its lofty but fragile height (Heidegger 1998: 244). What ties that moment of the Roman empire to the present is the possibility of discerning an existential threat, of defining oneself as Anthropos against the barbarians at the gate. This is a specific type of deterritorialization that has its own cogito: there is a threat to my being in the future that must not be, and therefore I am. Deterritorialization takes a territory, a formed set of relations, and generates a new stratum: the 'man' of Western thought and empire increasingly becomes the ordering term of the whole, especially when that man of history is threatened. Dipesh Chakrabarty's step away from postcolonial dispersed peoples towards the now universal humanity threatened by climate change typifies this deterritorialization (Chakrabarty 2009). In the face of non-being we all become members of a humanity whose future must now be focused on life as such. Existential threats are not diminutions of one's being – not catastrophes where there is a massive loss of life – but an event where *who we are* is at risk. For Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute's director Nick Bostrom there is a folkish and fallacious tendency to want to minimize the number of deaths or losses to the species; however, what *should* concern us, he insists, is not how many lives we lose but threats posed to intelligent life as such. It is not rational, according to Bostrom, to focus all or most of our energy on preventing events like the Holocaust or other such large-scale disasters (Bostrom 2013). These occurrences may feel catastrophic but humanity as a whole does recover. One could not say the same if *all* intelligence were annihilated. The difference between a massive loss of life and the loss of a definitive and properly human quality of life makes all the difference; for Bostrom it is *the* difference that ought to guide our relation to the future. The loss of many lives is lamentable, but ultimately humanity as such recovers; the loss of intelligence and the thwarting of technological maturity are truly catastrophic. What is at stake is far more important than reducing suffering, for it is the possibility of *non-being* that really ought to concern us*.* By imagining the non-existence of a certain type of humanity as utter existential loss, we not only fail to consider different forms of human life, but also fetishize a certain conception of life marked off from non-life, a threshold that (according to Elizabeth Povinelli) characterizes late liberalism (Povinelli 2016).

The concept of existential risk does a great deal of normative, practical and imaginative work. The possibility of the non-being of a fraction of the whole trumps the importance of reducing the barbarism of actuality. '*Existential* risk' marks out a difference between life as such and some quality (such as intelligence) that is the proper potential of life. A fragment justifies and orients the future of the whole. This detached fragment then generates a distinct temporality and modality of the imagination; it is *not* a question of how we ought to live but rather a question of maximizing and intensifying the supposed best of what we already are. 'Intelligence' comes to stand for this definitively human and existential value, extending – without any question – a current techno-scientific trajectory. Where 'humanity' is now the outcome of the development of a certain trait, the future ought to be the maximization of this potentiality. The Future of Humanity Institute's attention to existential risk is not a minor research endeavour but typical of a type of deterritorialization that defines humanity of the Anthropocene and its future. It is oddly consonant with post-apocalyptic culture, where the imminent thought of the non-being of 'humanity' (always represented as Western, urban and predominantly white) generates an imperative and right to life. How many post-apocalyptic end-of-world epics depict a threatened or depleted humanity triumphing over a foe that is humanity in its lesser form? The 'Anthropos' of the Anthropocene is just this self-elevating, threatened and deterritorialized fragment.

Humans as a species branch out into different spatial-temporal directions (the sense of the unity of the species being the effect of a series of movements and relations); what comes to be formed as *homo sapiens* is the effect of centuries of migration and encounter. We might refer to this as territorialization, a relative stability attained through patterns of mobility. One of those lines increasingly develops a certain capacity to change the environment, eventually creating a new stratum: one might think of the imperialist conceptions that one is not simply a being occupying the here and now but is exemplary of humanity in general. This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as deterritorialization, where a potentiality of a body takes on a new time and space. One of their best examples refers to the hand as a deterritorialized paw; the body's grasping, clawing, fighting, touching movement starts to become gestural, and then a new layer of sense and a new temporality of inscription are generated (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 61).

The Anthropocene is also an event of deterritorialization; the global diversity of humans as a species is overtaken by the way in which one species both alters the planet as a living system, *and* generates a deterritorialized future. The future ceases to be multiple and divergent, with 'Anthropos' becoming definitive of a new stratum. This stratum is at once geological (in the narrow sense of the Anthropocene) but also a stratum in Deleuze and Guattari's sense. A whole new mode of relations is formed when the 'humanity' that had defined itself through a specific mode of civilized time comes to stand for that which is threatened, and therefore that which must be saved. The possible non-being of a quality ('humanity') generates the imperative that all must be done to save just that predicate. This event of deterritorialization might seem at first to be a minor scholarly point or even a primarily geological point but it is far more significant than that: the very notion of an existential threat relies on the production of a virtual humanity. A decade of Anthropocene mourning and panic has shown us that it is neither the loss of life as such *nor suffering* that ought to be our concern. Instead, the possible loss of a quality – intelligent life – somehow allows one to define that quality alone as that which gives the species value. If we were to be honest we would admit that human history has been nothing more than loss, suffering and extinction: if one were to weigh suffering and barbarism against what has called itself 'progress' the past would look at least as bleak as the supposed future dystopias we are beginning to imagine. Bostrom, following Parfit, is quite right: it does seem indeed that what is catastrophic for us is the loss of 'intelligence' and not the vast panorama of pain that lies behind us. This is how we should think about 'Anthropos': a capacity – thinking, intelligence, 'civilization' – that outweighs and orients every other value.

#### Anthropos

Much has already been written about the 'Anthropos' of the Anthropocene, and even more has been written about the 'human' and its aftermath in posthumanism; the various senses and uses are too diverse to enable a single coherent critique. Nevertheless it is just this messy dispersal that forces one to recognize that both 'Anthropos' and 'human' are deterritorializations: more specifically, both are formed through the thought of their non-being, and both move from the possibility of nonbeing to a virtual form that displaces the actuality of suffering. I have already suggested that a common contemporary manifestation of this deterritorialization occurs in post-apocalyptic disaster cinema: the world of white Western affluence is on the brink of becoming the type of space that the West had always outsourced to its third world, and this very possibility generates an imperative for a truly human and triumphant future. The fact that 'man' is always so threatened with his demise has allowed futurity in the West to focus on the annihilation of risks. In its earliest stages in Plato, it is the horror of *not thinking*, of being enslaved to the shadows and not turning towards the light of reason that defines what we must be. The fact that being enslaved is the founding metaphor of Western politics evidences the extent to which Anthropos is in constant battle with an always threatened non-being. The same applies today when thinkers such as Alain Badiou or Bernard Stiegler warn that humanity is falling back into non-being, seduced by its lesser and enslaved modes. Badiou's *Ethics* sets itself the task of railing against the "violently reactionary" Western order that has become increasingly entrenched, primarily as a result of lazy thinking, a failure to confront the abyss of truth events (Badiou 2001: 5). Stiegler also (but in different ways) is indebted to a Platonism that resists the lure of banality. His pharmacology captures the deterritorialization of the Anthropos and the Anthropocene: we are always at war with stupidity and entropy, have always had to work against falling back into the shadows of non-being that are made possible by the very systems of writing that elevate us. Following Adorno and Horkheimer and the tendency of enlightenment to enchain itself in rationalization, Stiegler argues:

Stupidity is *never* foreign to knowledge: knowledge can itself become stupidity par excellence, so to speak. And this is so because knowledge, and in particular theoretical knowledge as passage to the act of reason – or more broadly, *noēsis –* can occur only *intermittently* to a noetic soul that is constantly regressing, and that, as such, is like Sisyphus, perpetually ascending the slope of its own stupidity, given that, as stated by Simonides and cited by Aristotle, "God alone enjoys this privilege," that is, the privilege of being always in actuality, of never being stupid, of never going down the path of disindividuation, reification and proletarianization.

This is why not only can knowledge make thought base, but it is essentially a matter of thought's own baseness – ever threatening, ever the threat (Stiegler 2015: 45–6, original emphasis).

'Humanity' and 'Anthropos' are constantly defined by warding off existential threats: not minor damages, and not suffering. As the Future of Humanity Institute makes clear, one of the main existential threats is failure to reach technological maturity, the failure for *thinking* to maximize itself. Here, again, Bostrom warns against us taking a narrow point of view that would focus on immediate welfare; one needs to consider technology rationally and globally. This is Anthropos in full flight, the diminution of minor harms for the sake of the big *future* picture: "Even from a so-called 'person-affecting' moral perspective, therefore, when assessing whether a flawed realization has occurred, one should focus not on how much value is created just after the attainment of technological maturity but on whether the conditions created are such as to give a good prospect of realizing a large integral of value over the remainder of the universe's lifetime" (Bostrom 2013: 23). It is within this range of consideration that Bostrom considers 'humanity's' future path of colonization:

mature technology would enable a far more efficient use of basic natural resources (such as matter, energy, space, time and negentropy) for the creation of value than is possible with less advanced technology. And mature technology would allow the harvesting (through space colonization) of far more of these resources than is possible with technology whose reach is limited to Earth and its immediate neighbourhood (Bostrom 2013: 20).

#### Colonization

Deterritorialization in general accounts for the way in which complex systems generate points of stability that can, in turn, generate new forms of relation. Colonization is a quite specific form of deterritorialization that has always been bound up with a peculiar sense of existential threat. If one thinks of territorialization as the movements that form bodies and space in tandem, one might think of deterritorialization as a movement across that territory that generates a stratum that reorients the whole. One might think here of the way in which white settlers saw the space and movements of Indigenous bodies as non-human, and responded with a hegemonic sense of a virtual humanity that would ideally subsume all bodies. When white Europeans invaded Australia and encountered the Indigenous mode of occupying space that was not their own, they imagined a future in which these seemingly inhuman bodies would no longer threaten their existence. Centuries of genocide, assimilation and displacement were accompanied by an intensified sense of *the human*, an 'Anthropos' that formed itself only by destroying everything that might count as an existential threat. The settler's gaze that demands that 'we' must not amount to this, that 'we' are a humanity of technological maturity, is what has underpinned the Anthropos of the Anthropocene, where 'our' future must not be that of the nomadic, non-state, non-nature-mastering peoples 'we' have destroyed. By imagining the non-being of man – the threat posed to Anthropos – something like the 'future of humanity' is formed and secured. If there is something that counts as an existential threat – technological immaturity, stupidity, loss of intelligence – then a future becomes possible only by way of its destruction. A territory is no longer formed by bodies assembled across a space, but is oriented towards a future where what counts as properly human is maximized to the point where it overtakes the whole.

When Rome set out to destroy Carthage it was not concerned with the threat of a trading partner, an unmanageable province or a power that perhaps might become too strong in allying itself with Numibia. One way to explain Rome's destruction of Carthage is to see it as an example of a deterritorialized future: the potentialities of the globe were no longer played out in a relation among competing powers, but instead overtaken by a sense of *the citizen in general.* What must not be allowed is a future that exists beyond 'Anthropos', beyond what Rome would define as 'humanitas', and what the twenty-first century would elevate in the Anthropocene.

If we think of territorialization as the coming into being of relatively stable bodies by way of the formation of relations, then we can think of deterritorialization as the formation of a different mode or style of relations. In this respect capitalism is at once the most exemplary event of deterritorialization, where relations among bodies and forces become liberated from any intrinsic potentiality, while warding off absolute deterritorialization. What needs to be noted is the specific production of the Earth in the movement of state and then capitalist deterritorialization. The monotheism eventually becomes the single 'man' of subjectivity, the Anthropos who must always shore himself up against the supposedly destructive forces of chaos:

And that is what is concealed in the two acts of the State: the residence or territoriality of the State inaugurates the great movement of deterritorialization that subordinates all the primitive filiations to the despotic machine (the agrarian problem); the abolition of debts or their accountable transformation initiates the duty of an interminable service to the State that subordinates all the primitive alliances to itself (the problem of debts). The infinite creditor and infinite credit have replaced the blocks of mobile and finite debts. There is always a monotheism on the horizon of despotism: the debt becomes a debt of existence, a debt of the existence of the subjects themselves (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 215).

Without getting too immersed or bogged down in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, I do want to draw attention to the difference between absolute and higher deterritorialization in order to move on to the necessary problem of decolonization. If territorialization amounts to the formation of a space and bodies through the assembling of qualities, and deterritorialization generates a new stratum absolute deterritorialization would be what, for capitalism, *must be destroyed.* The release of qualities and forces from relatively stabilized and relational systems would amount to the end of the world and perhaps the end of embodied and organized/organic life. Deleuze and Guattari refer to *higher deterritorialization* as something different again: if, for example, a bird comes into being by marking out a space of coloured leaves, and producing a refrain that gives this assemblage a marker, and if various human art practices seize upon these colours and rhythms to produce what came to be known as art, then higher deterritorialization would occur when the qualities from which the world was composed could be imagined or intuited *as if for all time and beyond this world.* This conception of higher deterritorialization bears an ambivalent and problematic relation to colonization and futurity. As I have already suggested, white settler culture deterritorializes by way of imagining the future as what must be secured in the face of existential threats. Can one imagine a deterritorialization that does not amount to the dissolution of all lines of assemblage, and that does not rely on the fetishized elevation of the 'Anthropos'? Is it possible to imagine an end of Anthropos that opens out to future worlds?

What this amounts to, or ought to amount to, is a negotiation with the problem of decolonization, especially with the problem of decolonization as a metaphor. If colonization is – insofar as one can think literally – the taking over of a place by a group of bodies from elsewhere, then decolonization would amount to a form of exit. This might be achieved either by imagining the dissolution of what exists, *or* it might more fruitfully be approached as abandoning the deterritorialization of the future that proceeds by way of existential threats. Might there be something other than an Anthropos that has always formed itself by warding off its increasingly fetishized non-being? That is, does deterritorialization have to take the form of Anthropos who can only imagine his continuation as an ongoing war against his dissolution?

It is deterritorialization that enables the Anthropocene, both geologically and conceptually; a potentiality of the species reaches such an intensity that it generates a whole new scale and range of relations. A part overtakes the whole; humanity, man or Anthropos comes to appear as the ground and organizing whole. Intensive agriculture and technoscience gradually create forms of private, high-consumption and entitled individualism that increasingly allow for no future other than that of man as universal, world-transforming subject. There is, then, an intimate relation between the formation of the world as an Anthropos scene, and a future defined by non-being. The more 'the human' understands itself as a fragile emergence capable both of transforming the world but *also*  capable of falling back into stupidity, the more the future becomes nothing more than saving who we are. How is it that what comes to understand itself as 'human' as 'Anthropos' is so easily *not* itself, so intimately related to its non-being and disappearance? To be properly human is to be at risk, to be threatened with falling back into being mere life, a part of the world, becoming nothing more than a body without a sense of the globe, man or Anthropos.  When Heidegger described the shift from a relational *legein* that disclosed the world to a 'logic' that reduced the world and thought to so much standing reserve he was not simply being nostalgic; he was also anticipating Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialization. An assemblage that brought terms into relation would be subjected to a single logic; a humanity that opened itself and its world through expansion would become subjected to the very complexities it generated. Heidegger's turning back to an original revealing along with his sense of the parasitism, decay and loss that would ensue if the inauthentic potentialities of existence were not destroyed dovetailed tragically with fascism. One might see Heidegger's manoeuvre as a reterritorialization; if *Dasein* is the experience of the world as nothing more than that which is unfolded or cleared by way of time, and if *das Man*  is what happens when that event of revealing is taken to be a real thing, then an appeal *back* to thought's origin in order to save the future is a reterritorialization.

To insist that the future be that of Anthropos redeemed and regained is to take the event of deterritorialization – technical 'man' – and posit it as the only future possible, thereby disabling and destroying other futures. Heidegger's all too obvious and predictable fascism ought to render us wary of all those projects – from Rome's destruction of Carthage to the Future of Humanity Institute's fear of not reaching technological maturity – that use an event of deterritorialization to colonize the future. Heidegger advocated returning to the emerging sense of logos, or the 'speaking about' (*legein*) that would draw us closer to the Earth and thereby avoid the utter ungrounding or 'uprooting' of systems that were associated with a fall into detached technologies, the worst of which would be banking/money and idle speech. It was as though for Heidegger the emerging difference of language's coming into being might be regained, restored and renewed. This should at once alert us to the intrinsic possibility of reterritorialization that haunts every event of deterritorialization. 'Humanity' is not the ground or cause of history but is, rather, an effect of historical forces – a deterritorialization; when the future becomes determined as a project of destroying everything that threatens humanity we have reached an intensification that amounts to a reterritorialization. Nothing other than Anthropos is deemed worthy of ongoing life.

There is, however, another possibility that would follow from thinking territorialization not as the original movement of migration that must take over the Earth towards ever greater maturity, but as a staying in place that embraces a certain immaturity. Is territorialization, the creation of spaces through the movement of bodies, the most rigorous way to think about the history of Anthropos and our already territorialized future? Do we need to accept the now common assumption that the Anthropocene has created a tragedy of the commons with nowhere else to go, and no future other than the one we now make and remake for ourselves? Or, do we question the forward path of deterritorialization, where the only future is intensification of the present, and instead open up the radical exit and separation of decolonization? Two paths (at least) open up: technological maturity and the fulfilment of Anthropos against all that threatens his full potentiality, *or* an exit from the war on existential threats, and taking seriously what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as nomadism. This approach would not accept the valorization of emergence, would not assume the prima facie value of a complexity supposedly generated from a less worthy chaos. This, I think, would amount to genuine decolonization – *not* privileging the trajectory of humanity to date, not assuming that enlightenment might still happen someday if we keep on warring with enlightenment's lesser tendencies. Perhaps life without the State would not be the end of the world.

#### The decolonized future

One way of thinking about the future would be to privilege the ways in which life brings place into being, and this might seem to be especially pertinent today when dreams of globalism and the expansion of liberal affluence have encountered resource depletion and climate change and, in turn, have seemingly generated new forms of enclosed populism and nationalism. One might say that the effect of more and more bodies traversing space has both created an empire of 'man', and then a myth of nationhood and civic birth right. In the wake of putting America first, and making America great again, it might seem necessary to point out that America itself was the result of migration. Any territory, one might want to argue, is already the result of deterritorialization; it is not that there are owned spaces and identified bodies that are then disturbed by movement, but that it is from movement that spaces and ownness come into being. All territories are in part already deterritorialized, disturbed by movements of departure and flight. This would be true not only of the white settlers and slave traders who saw America as a space of freedom, and not only for the subsequent waves of migration, but also for the Indigenous persons whose mode of existence was bound up with the spaces traversed and the forces those journeys brought into being. Even if one thinks of the coming into being of a people and a space as territorialization, this originating move cannot be decoupled from deterritorialization: one becomes who one is not simply by traversing a space but by coupling those formed relations with other migratory patterns. A tribe takes on a relation to a formation of rivers; a city invents itself as the offspring of the gods; or a nation imagines itself as expressive of humanity in its most liberated or rational form. In all cases a territory, or the formation of bodies through a traversal of space, opens out to another plane that it takes as its ground. But this positing of a transcendental modality is problematic for two reasons. Is it possible or desirable in an era of neoliberalism to think only in terms of movements, forces, and flight? Deleuze and Guattari have persuasively argued for capitalism as deterritorialization; it is perhaps unfair and inaccurate to see their work as buying into a neoliberalism of ongoing self-creation, and yet it is necessary to see the ways in which their work broached the difficult thresholds of deterritorialization. If everyone is ultimately a migrant or nomad, with no essential relation to space, how does one negotiate the violence of displacement and the claims for native title that challenge liberalism's long history of the world as so much appropriable free space? It is telling that one of the common liberal challenges to resurgent white nationalism and anti-immigration rhetoric is that countries such as America and Australia were built on immigration, an appeal to tolerance and openness that fails to register the enslavement and displacement that underpinned these supposed lands of the free.

What might it mean to think of the traversal of space *not* solely as an original territorialization but as a transcendental colonization? This second approach would engender a less flat conception of territorialization. This possibility is already implicit in Deleuze and Guattari's account of space, life and *de*territorialization: how do certain elements in a field of relations create a new plane of relations that captures the first? What one thinks of as colonization in the quite literal and extreme sense – the history of white settlement and displacement – has a prehistory in all those moments of historical capture and empire that subject space to a body that leaps outside the terrain and takes itself as the origin of the whole. Slavery and colonization do not begin with the European conquering of the globe. One has to go back a long way, *though it is possible*, to think of genuinely nomadic groupings of bodies that have not yet been subjected to the State form, have not yet allowed somebody to stand in for the sense of the whole. This potentiality of stateless nomadism is not, and should not be a metaphor; it is important to think just how precarious and fleeting life without state subjection has been, while also insisting that it nevertheless opens the thought of a higher deterritorialization beyond capitalism. One might think here of James Scott's *Against the*  *Grain* where the emergence of state forms is *not* an unquestioned flourishing of maturity, or many of the recent articulations of Indigenous modes of existence where being a self is *not* defined by a sense of a universal Anthropos, but instead by one's relation with multiple and inhuman others (Scott 2017; Viveiros de Castro 2015). John Protevi's recent *Edges of the State* (2019) identifies moments where states breakdown and 'nonstate peoples' offer other modes of existence; David Wengrow and David Graeber write about non-state forms of existence that bear a different mode of complexity and dynamism that is at odds with the conception that the present and future are, and should be, thought of as mature versions of humanity's childhood (Wengrow and Graeber 2015).

Deterritorialization is always an ex post facto futural form. A potentiality appears to be the ground and origin of the whole, and thereby dictates the proper form of the future. One might think of this in many ways, one of which would be Lee Edelman's concept of reproductive humanism, where the child stands for an innocent promise of humanity to come (Edelman 2004). When this is bound up with environmental imperatives the future becomes that which must be saved for our children, the future thereby becoming the fulfilment of a past that never was (Sheldon 2016). This structure is evident both in post-apocalyptic culture and Anthropocene studies. Actual humanity may have come near to destroying itself and the planet, but the very feature that made humanity possible – techno-scientific indomitability – is what will save the future. This sense that who we *really are* might save us is given both in the forms of geo-constructivism criticized by Frederic Neyrat, who ties both environmental and managerial forms of saving the Earth to a common notion of the Earth as object of our making (Neyrat 2019), and in fantasies that the colonizing spirit that formed America will also generate our cosmic future. The future is at once deterritorialized by no longer being bound to humanity as it happens to be, and reterritorialized by being the fulfilment of what we ought to be. Think of post-apocalyptic epics, such as Christopher Nolan's 2014 *Interstellar* where a rapacious corporate capitalism has not only destroyed the planet, but has limited the future to be nothing more than mere living on. The future is, however, saved (by a former astronaut) for the sake of the yet-to-be-corrupted child, who promises humanity as it ought to be. Similarly, the Future of Humanity Institute argues for 'technological maturity' – not the survival of who we are, nor some conception of humanity that might exist otherwise, but the elimination of existential threats that would hamper the flourishing of who we imagine we ought to be.

# Deterritorialization and territorialization

Without even turning to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the proper names attached most often to conceptions of deterritorialization, it is possible to think of two possible ways in which an ethics of territorialization (and deterritorialization) might be posed. The first would be to think of territorialization as a form of unnatural or elicit takeover, the occupation of a space or the organization of a space by a life or force not proper to the space. Territorialization might be something akin to colonization, which not only installs an order but *identifies* each element that falls subject to such ordering. If this were so then deterritorialization would be something of a liberating movement, allowing forces to be released from their capture. This conception of territorialization would need to assume that there are natural bodies, whose proper nature precedes order, and that there are spaces that exist prior to transit. Perhaps the story of the first migration from Africa would enable this understanding, of an original home and dwelling *from which* everything else is theft and impropriety.

Two problems present themselves here: do we really want to grant all migrations the same status? Do we really want to say that we are all migrants really, thereby downplaying the violence of colonization? Second: *all* bodies – human, animal, political, planetary – merge from movement and space. Even those first humans emerged from movement and the traversal of space, evolving in relation to a milieu that was also composed from movements and encounters among forces. Territorialization and deterritorialization would not be before and after terms, and not amount to a binary of good and evil, but would always be in a contested relation to each, with territorialization referring to forces entering into relation, and deterritorialization referring to elements that branch off to form new strata. This is the key significance of thinking about life *not* from the point of view of bodies but from the point of forces. What this would amount to is an abandonment of a proper space and embodiment that gets overtaken by an external power, and instead a potentiality in any body for a 'line of flight', where a potentiality generates a new plane and strata of relations.

Territorialization and deterritorialization are dynamic and relational concepts, generating a different way of thinking about politics, ethics and futurity. All futures and all spaces are, *to some extent*, always already deterritorialized; the human bodies that form a tribe, by marking out a space, and taking on the sounds, figures and movements of their milieu are already effects of an entering into relation of pre-human forces. When a tribe is then subjected to the power of the chieftain, and the Earth appears as a divine ground from which authority emerges, a new event of deterritorialization opens a new system of relations, and a new future. As Deleuze and Guattari trace the history of bodies and state forms in *Anti-Oedipus* and *A Thousand Plateaus*, it is *deterritorialization* that stratifies and allows bodies to appear to be indebted to a higher body, ranging from the chieftain, to the despot, to 'the subject'. From a territory, a relation among forces that produces an assemblage of bodies, one moves to what appears to be a space, polity, life or law that offers the ground and reason of any part of the whole:

It is overcoding that impoverishes the Earth for the benefit of the deterritorialized full body, and that on this full body renders the movement of debt infinite. It is a measure of Nietzsche's force to have stressed the importance of such a movement that begins with the founders of States, these artists with a look of bronze, creating 'an oppressive and remorseless machine,' erecting before any perspective of liberation an ironclad impossibility (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 199).

How, then, might one negotiate a politics in this dynamic movement of territorialization and deterritorialization? One path that is not viable is to see territorialization as bad and deterritorialization as good (or vice versa). Moving beyond good and evil one might start intuitively: how do we balance the theoretical insight that there is no such thing as a proper or original body (with everything beginning as movement, migration and encounters among forces) with late capital's overtaking of all relations and spaces and subsuming them beneath the logic of exchange? I think the answer to this question is to add another concept into the mix: decolonization. The problem with colonization is, after all, neither of territorialization – the formation of a space – nor deterritorialization (the generation of a new stratum that captures the relations of the whole). Colonization operates not with the dynamism of territorialization but with the fixity of a single event of deterritorialization – the formation of the figure of man as Anthropos, and the reduction of all territories to variants of the human. Colonizers more often than not did not see themselves as thieves but as bearers of enlightenment, humanism and progress. Colonization deterritorializes – generating the global network of late capitalism – and then reterritorializes on the figure of Anthropos: 'we' are now all human, all facing the same precarious future. Precarity, here, is a loss of the conditions of *man:* the terror that we might fall back into the conditions that we surveyed in the 'third world' and recognized as immature and inhuman.

One might start to think of the difference between the postcolonial and decolonization in terms of deterritorialization. Once the colonizer has physically left the territory the colony can still be subjected to the figure of man, with the very terms of liberation, sovereignty, rights and ownership relying on the Anthropocenic logic that subjected the world to a single system of exchange. (The Anthropocenic differs from the anthropocentric in this respect: man is no longer at the centre of nature viewed as a natural resource, but is rather the purveyor of the Earth as a single living system with all life and humans now bound to the same precarious future.) Decolonization might, however, be thought of neither as a return to the territory, nor as another event of deterritorialization where some other stratification exists alongside Anthropos. As Anthropocene discourse has made clear, the future is deterritorialized, and there is no other horizon than that of precarious humanity and its seemingly prima facie right to life.

It might be better, then, to see territorialization as an immanent movement, as the coming into relation of forces *from which bodies emerge.* This would then mark a difference between territorialization and colonization: the former would be the co-formation of bodies and spaces, and this would explain why Deleuze and Guattari make so much of nomadism, or the traversal of a space that brings bodies and the relations of a territory into being. If territorialization is quasi-originary, not reducible to life itself but better thought of as the movements that allow something like 'the lived' to come into being, then *deterritorialization* would perhaps be closer to the potentiality for colonization that might nevertheless generate an *uncivil* future (a world in which the borders of the civic have not yet subjected terms to the sense of 'the human') (Muecke 2019). To think of territorialization *not* as the coming into relation of bodies, but as the formation of bodies through forces that take on a quality by way of their encounter allows us to think of a quite distinct relation among the terms colonization, decolonization, territorialization and deterritorialization.

Territorialization is not something that happens to bodies, but brings bodies into being. When Deleuze and Guattari write about the hand being the deterritorialized paw, they do so within a *geology* of morals, where layers and sedimentations allow for further formations, but also – as the current discourse on the Anthropocene has made evident – where later formations can create a new composition of the whole. For the most part humans have adapted to their climate, but their technological formations have altered the climate in turn, with the Anthropocene signalling a point where the Earth as a living system is altered by the technological changes that various ecosystems had made possible. To deterritorialize is not the dissolution of territorial relations; it is better thought of as the ongoing creation of further relations of possibility. The forces that allow relations to form relatively stable wholes may take on a life of their own and destabilize but also reconfigure the initial territory. Deterritorialization is double-edged, releasing the forces that formed territories into new relations, but also generating new stabilities.

What is the value of thinking about decolonization alongside deterritorialization? I want to suggest that the answer to this question resides in the difference between theories of territorialization and theories of emergence. If one follows theories of emergence, social wholes and organs are complex assemblages that are generated from less complex elements. If that is so then any event of decolonization would be the overthrow of one state form, leaving a vacuum or absence. Even in theories that are not strictly or explicitly tied to emergence, the assumption that wholes and bodies are *more* complex and differentiated than their elements characterizes a great deal of cultural theory. One might go back as far as psychoanalysis and its premise that without some subjection to the symbolic order one falls into psychosis, or liberal theory's minimal requirement that one imagine one's own decisions as universalizable for humanity in general, or Judith Butler's account of recognition, where some minimal performance of normativity is essential to being a subject (Butler 2010). In all these cases the assembled whole is more complex than whatever precedes, especially if the prior self is effected through subjection. One way to read Franz Fanon would be to see his work as a continuation of the psychoanalytic and existential assumption that who I am is effected through the assumption of the recognition of the other. Here his work would be in line with a familiar argument in postcolonial theory where the territory after colonization has no language or sense of self other than that of the colonizer. If one takes away the governing order one is left with an absence or void. However, there is another and more fruitful way to read Fanon, where the destruction and exit from what counts as man – and *not* admittance to the human – is the path to the decolonized future:

The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past. Earlier revolutions relied on memories out of world history in order to drug themselves against their own content. In order to find their own content the revolutions of the nineteenth century have had to let the dead bury their dead. Before, the expression exceeded the content; now, the content exceeds the expression (Fanon 2008: 199).

The idea of humanity, or the sense of the social whole, does not elevate and render worthy and complex the bodies it assembles; it *reduces* the complex relations, forces and potentialities that make up any body. This is the doubled-edged sword of deterritorialization, as both creation and annihilation. One might think here of all the desires and interests that are created by the production of social strata; deterritorialization is neither the negation nor creation of complexity but the formation of different strata. The value of thinking in terms of strata or plateaus – of thinking rhizomatically – is that one can account both for relations of subjection and for spaces that exist alongside each other. One can think of the deterritorialization of 'man' as a subsuming stratification, allowing every territory to be seen as a variant of a single Anthropos. One can also think of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as higher deterritorialization where a fragment is detached from the assembled strata of relations and intuited from the point of view of the cosmos (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 197). This would grant us a fully decolonized and affirmative sense of the end of the world; detached from the formed world of sense, survival, man, history, technological maturity and the lived. One might see a predicate as out of time, as that from which formed worlds might be possible.

This conception of higher deterritorialization yielding an affirmative and decolonized end of the world is possible because the concept of territory is not grounded in a theory of emergence, but its opposite: it is not that complexity and formations come into being from simple units, but rather that the complexity and intensity of matters are reduced when matters are formed into relations. Light, for example, could be so much more than the colours perceived by the human eye; and the human eye could be more than the eye of the sensory-motor organism that perceives lines and colours in terms of its own world rather than as forces that open up the cosmos. To deterritorialize is therefore not a linear movement away from ordering, just as territorialization is not reducible to ordering; one might even see territorialization not as order from disorder, but the formation of relations from a chaos that has far more complexity than emergent and subsequent wholes.

I want to conclude by exploring two questions that are raised when one thinks about deterritorialization as a concept in Deleuze and Guattari's sense, as a way in which thinking orients and configures itself (with 'thinking' *not* being reducible to intellect). First: part of the motor of the concept is its attempt to think of political movements and bodies as contractions and stabilizations of forces that are more complex and differentiated than the strata that emerge. This raises the question of vitalism, and whether a theory of life generates an ethics. Does higher or absolute deterritorialization – a release of forces from any specific world – constitute an ethics that is beyond good and evil? One would have to think about forces *as such* and not insofar as they serve the history and world of Anthropos. This would generate an ethics at a cosmic level, a thought of what might be beyond the way the world happens to be for us. If this does count as a form of vitalism it is one in which actual life is itself a territorialization of the prevital and cosmic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 43). If this is so there seems to be an imperative to pursue ethical inquiry beyond the level of the actual, in order to think deterritorialization in terms of an inhuman and prevital potentiality. Does this amount to a naturalized or vital politics? Would we say, as Deleuze and Guattari seem to do, that embodied life has a prior condition of intensive complexity that offers the potential for a future beyond the lived body? If so, deterritorialization would be a movement from which organic life emerges that might nevertheless provide a way for life to move beyond itself. The *prevital* or inhuman conditions for life would be life's 'proper' end. This might at first appear to be a repetition of a Western and high modernist fetish for transcendental elevation, where one negates the world as it is for the sake of what might be thought. That is, indeed, one way in which deterritorialization might be negotiated, and this would lead to a second question: if a radical theory of deterriorialization takes us back to life, how do we think about life? Is life best thought of at the level of the organism, with Anthropos as the exemplary rational animal who is the steward of the planet and the future, *or* might life be thought beyond organic forms – the life that exceeds animality? Such a life has often been meditated upon by various Indigenous peoples oriented towards life's cosmic and planetary dimensions.

Rather than saving the world as it is by elevating a fragment (Anthropos who becomes the raison d'être of the world), one would exit from the current stratification. One might think of the ways in which various forms of Indigenous culture hint at this type of ethics, where the current world is seen as a contraction of a grander world of non-human spirits and places, and where this world is multiple, capable of generating any number of encounters with spirit-others. Deterritorialization cannot, then, be opposed to territorialization as a simple move of freedom. Rather, what needs to be negotiated – beyond good and evil – are the various ways in which deterritorialization either captures all other strata within the range of Anthropos, or enables a thought of life beyond any single stratum

To move towards a conclusion, we might say that territorialization is the coming into being of relations through reductions of intensive difference, allowing bodies to emerge as formed matters. Accompanying this movement there are always various lines of deterritorialization: the rivers, birds, sands and undulations of one's mapped space might be experienced as forces of the cosmos. This sense of the cosmos might generate a higher deterritorialization of expressive matters as such – the potentiality from which worlds emerge – or, it might be drawn back to the vision and range of Anthropocene man. It is not a question of whether or not the future is deterritorialized but whether that deterritorialization is thought in line with logics of emergence or of decolonization. If social orders are thought of as complexities that have emerged from an anarchic chaos, then it follows that when they are swept away what remains is disorder. This leaves the classic postcolonial critique and predicament: we are left with the tools of the master's house, and all we can do is continue to speak ironically. This is one way to read minor literature and deterritorialization. One speaks one's own language as a foreigner, creating murmurs and destabilizations. However, if chaos is thought of as *more* differentiated and complex than social orders, then the exit of decolonization would amount to a creative opening, allowing for new worlds well beyond the Anthropos who always saw the 'new world' as requiring his care. This yields a different conception of the minor, not as a deviation or deflection, but the cutting into the sounds and perceptions that have composed the whole to release new worlds. If Franz Fanon can be read as a theorist insisting on the ways in which colonization installs its figure of normative whiteness in the psyche of the colonized, thereby indicating a deterritorialization that subjects us all to Anthropos, he can also be read as offering a different or higher deterritorialization.

It was through Fanon that Deleuze and Guattari reversed the oedipality of colonization. The colonized subject is not territorialized in the family, and then further subjected to the colonizer; it is precisely at the scene of colonization that one recognizes that the figure of familial, individual Anthropos is the effect – not the ground – of empire. It is decolonization – the recognition of those who have no desire for Anthropos – that enables higher deterritorialization:

When Frantz Fanon encounters a case of persecution psychosis linked to the death of the mother, he first asks himself if he has 'to deal with an unconscious guilt complex following on the death of the mother, as Freud had described in *Mourning and Melancholia*.' But he soon learns that the mother has been killed by a French soldier, and that the subject himself has murdered the wife of a colonist whose disembowelled ghost perpetually appears before him, carrying along with it and tearing apart the memory of the mother. It could always be said that these extreme situations of war trauma, of colonization, of dire poverty and so on, are unfavourable to the construction of the Oedipal apparatus – and that it is precisely because of this that these situations favour a psychotic development or explosion – but we have a strong feeling that the problem lies elsewhere. Apart from the fact that a certain degree of comfort found in the bourgeois family is admittedly necessary to turn out oedipalized subjects, the question of knowing what is actually invested in the comfortable conditions of a supposedly normal or normative Oedipus is pushed still further into the background.

The revolutionary is the first to have the right to say: "Oedipus? Never heard of it." (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 96).

Through Fanon and decolonization, Deleuze and Guattari reverse the temporality of deterritorialization; rather than begin with the simplicity of the subject and the family that then generates complex social wholes to arrive at the universality of humanity, they see the original scene as multiple and political, with what comes to be known as Anthropos and the family as a contraction and impoverishment of rich and complex differences. The logic of colonization has always relied on something akin to a philosophy of emergence, allowing settler culture to see itself as bringing into being the proper potentiality or true complexity of the territory which – on this account – has less order than the imposed state. From the point of view of emergence, the task of life would be to reach its greatest level of achievement in terms of the intricate, complex and evermore sophisticated systems of order. *Decolonization*, by contrast, might then be thought of – if we follow the territorializing/deterritorializing potential – as the articulation of intensities that are cosmic (existing beyond the orders they have brought into being). Life should not be thought of in terms of the forms which have emerged; the Anthropos who arrives at the end of history and recognizes himself as the author of a new era of the Anthropocene can think of no future other than his own end.

#### The nature of life

One way of thinking about modern theory, and one that is dominant in what is often referred to as new materialism, is that post-Kantian thought (and therefore liberalism) precluded a transition from a theory of life to a politics or ethics. Quentin Meillassoux (2008) has criticized this as the assumption of correlationism, that we only know the world as it is given to us, with no possibility of stepping outside of subjectivity. Meillassoux is not the first to criticize the ethics of liberal subjectivism; prior objections from neo-Aristotelian ethics and phenomenology had insisted that even if one cannot know life in itself, this should not preclude the formation of ethics by way of the lived. The twentieth century was marked by a split between forms of post-Kantianism that insisted that 'life' was yet one more symptom of metaphysical over-reaching that needed to be bracketed or suspended, and various vitalisms and quasi-vitalisms that grounded the ethical and political on life, including theories of emergence. Deterritorialization, when coupled with decolonization, provides a conceptual exit from the impasse between Kantian anti-foundationalism and new materialisms, which are often also new literalisms.

From Kant to Rawls, liberalism has insisted that the social order cannot be based on what one claims to know, as if one could possess expertise of life that would yield imperatives for us all. In the absence of such expertise, and with the explicit and self-conscious refusal to make an elevated exception of oneself, the liberal subject imagines the social order as one that might be accepted by any possible rational subject regardless of their position in the social whole (Rawls 1971). Liberalism and its aftermath rely upon an event of futural deterritorialization: the present is lived *as if* it were to be judged by any subject whatever. One imagines oneself as a fragment of humanity in general. This mode of deterritorialization, the deterritorialization of Anthropos, of humanity in general, may have been forged in liberalism and the suspension of nature in itself, but it continues into the twentieth century. Deconstruction, or what came to be known as 'theory', intensified the bracketing or suspension of life: not only can we not know life with any degree that might enable us to prescribe a future, the very conditions of knowing anything at all – that we write, think and speak within a differential system – are essentially open and self-ungrounding. For deconstruction, the condition for life – the knowledge of the lived in its stable predicable form – is death: one can only know life through some system that remains stable through time (Derrida 1978). Not a repetition of that which preserves, sustains and enhances itself, but a tracing movement that each time incurs loss, nonbeing and corruption. The seeming opposition between life in itself that would provide a foundation for ethics, and an attention to the systems through which life is known, reaches its limit in decolonized deterritorialization. Rather than turning back to life itself (as new materialisms and theories of emergence tend to do) and rather than bracketing life within human or inscriptive systems, one might think of decolonization as the creation of a higher deterritorialization, a break with the stratum of Anthropos.

This is where decolonization needs to be taken seriously. Not only the Anthropocene, but various forms of seeming posthumanism allow a new term of 'life' to create a new moral stratum that organizes the present. Everything we do ought to be oriented to saving life, where life is either intelligent life, the life of *our* planet or a life that forms the basis for a general theory of emergence. I want to suggest that such seemingly radical turns to life are continuations of Anthropos and its mode of all-subsuming *relative* deterritorialization. To turn back to life, especially in theories of emergence, is to produce a point of view that accounts for all other strata and forms of relations. This is the case even when life is no longer seen as foundational. Indeed, it is perhaps recent anti-foundational accounts of life that enable us to mark a clear distinction between those modes of deterritorialization that have enabled an all-encompassing Anthropos, and decolonizing deterritorializations that cut into the world as it is to generate some type of exit.

Two recent theories, both of them post-deconstructive, follow this cue. Timothy Morton's 'Queer Ecology' uses evolutionary theory to argue that biology is already anti-essentialist, and that queer theory is the natural ethic for environmentalism:

Just read Darwin. Evolution means that life-forms are made of other life-forms. Entities are mutually determining: they exist in relation to each other and derive from each other. Nothing exists independently, and nothing comes from nothing. At the DNA level, it's impossible to tell a 'genuine' code sequence from a viral code insertion…

In a sense molecular biology confronts issues of authenticity similar to those in textual studies. Just as deconstruction showed that, at a certain level at any rate, no text is totally authentic, biology shows us that there is no authentic lifeform. This is good news for a queer theory of ecology, which would suppose a multiplication of differences at as many levels and on as many scales as possible (Morton 2010: 275).

Using physics and the life sciences, Karen Barad has also argued for the queerness of life and, like Morton though in different ways, for the blurring of identities because of the relational nature of life. Writing about slime moulds, and the moralizing rhetoric of the reporting on their behaviour, Barad concludes that queer performativity is not the privilege of drag queens or even gender-conforming humans, but occurs at the level of pre-intentional amoebic life:

[S]lime moulds [of which social amoebas or cellular slime moulds (*Dictyosteliida*) are classified as one kind] are 'no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath, yet they manage to have various behaviours that are equal to those of animals who possess muscles and nerves with ganglia – that is, simple brains.' What is or isn't an 'individual' is not a clear and distinct matter, and that seems to be precisely the scientific sticking point: the question of the nature of identity is ripe here – it's what's so spectacularly exciting from a scientific point of view. No wonder that social amoebas are taken to be model organisms in molecular biology and genetics for studying communication and cell differentiation. Social amoebas queer the nature of identity, calling into question the individual/group binary. In fact, when it comes to queering identity, the social amoeba enjoys multiple indeterminacies, and has managed to hood-wink scientists' ongoing attempts to nail down its taxonomy, its species-being defying not only classification by phylum but also by kingdom (Barad 2012: 26).

Barad neither warns against, nor shies away from anthropomorphism, but rather questions that there is such a thing as a bounded and autonomous Anthropos who could or should attribute agency to non-humans.  It is not one's sexuality that makes one queer: one can only be an individual and then claim something like 'a' sexuality if there have already been all sorts of strange and never fully intended couplings. This is not true only of life, but also of time and – if we want to think at the atomic level – the very composition of anything at all:

Where and when do quantum leaps happen? If the nature of causality is troubled to such a degree that effect does not simply follow cause end over end in an unfolding of existence through time, how is it possible to orient oneself in space or in time? Can we even continue to presume that space and time are still 'there'?

This queer causality entails the disruption of dis/continuity, a disruption so destabilizing, so downright dizzying, that it is difficult to believe that it is that which makes for the stability of existence itself. Or rather, to put it a bit more precisely, if the indeterminate nature of existence by its nature teeters on the cusp of stability and instability, of possibility and impossibility, then the dynamic relationality between continuity and discontinuity is crucial to the open-ended becoming of the world which resists acausality as much as determinism (Barad 2010: 240).

To argue that life is queer, as both Barad and Morton do (though in different ways), and then to tie this queerness to futurity and the Anthropocene, generates two different forms of posthuman futurity both of which nevertheless rely on some ethic or post-ethic of emergence. In this, both models challenge conventional understandings of heritage as embedded in the genealogical relations of people, politics, history and place (Sterling and Harrison, this volume). Barad, writing about postnuclear landscapes in the time of the Anthropocene, argues that rather than a planet, or a species humanity, that goes through time, past events are bound up with each other in multiple temporalities – not by erasing the human and replacing it with some non-human natural innocence, but by reading the space of the Earth and its events as already wounding, scarring, killing and preserving itself differentially across the species and its landscape. Barad concludes:

In these troubling times, how can we not trouble time? Nothing less than the nature of and possibilities for change and conceptions of history, memory, causality, politics and justice are conditioned by it. At the very core of QFT are questions of time and being. The indeterminacy of time-being opens up the nature of matter to a dynamism of the play of being and nothingness. Is there something about the nature of this dynamism that might lend some insight into what the practice of the politically committed work of mourning attuned to justice might look like? Or that would make it possible to trace the practices of historical erasure and political a-*void*-ance, to hear the silent cries, the murmuring silence of the void in its materiality and potentiality? What are the conditions of im/possibilities of living-dying in voids produced by technoscientific research and development, projects entangled with the military-industrial complex and other forms of colonial conquest? (Barad 2018: 215).

Both Barad and Morton stress the relational nature of life, and life's impurity and non-identity, to argue that the future ought to be neither the erasure nor fulfilment of the human, but a world in which the queerness of life amounts to a deflation of human exceptionalism. There is no pure nature to which we can return, nor is there a human nature that ought to realize its full potential and maximize its self-recognition for the future. The Anthropocene is not an opportunity to step up and save the day for us all – a common motif of reterritorialization that one finds in post-apocalyptic culture, where humanity in its better form is the only force that may save the world. Rather, the Anthropocene is a moment of recognizing that the pristine nature that we lost never existed (Morton 2009) and that the future of humanity is not human, but genuinely collective. A dominant motif of the Anthropocene is reterritorialization, such that humanity finds itself at the end of history and (however guilty *or by way of being guilty*) finds its proper self for the future. Against this, both Morton and Barad (and a series of other major theorists of the Anthropocene, including Bruno Latour [2017] and Donna Haraway [2016]) argue for something like a levelling out of humanity by way of relationality and non-identity. By recognizing that there has never been a self-present or self-determining humanity for which nature is a mere backdrop, one might allow for a future of fully Earth-bound kin.

Such arguments for a posthuman future are at odds both with some scholarly attempts to think of a new sense of species unity and redemption (Ellis 2016), and the post-apocalyptic imaginary, where the sense of imminent annihilation is precisely what prompts a regrouping of humanity, and an imperative for survival. One might contrast two projections for a future of the Anthropocene, one with a focus on historical emergence and self-recognition – the supposed 'good' Anthropocene of geoengineering – and another with a sense of vital emergence and a sense of dissolution. It is in the spirit of saving what humanity ought to be that Naomi Klein has insisted that it is capitalism, and not human nature, that has led to catastrophic climate change; if this is so then it is still possible for humanity to diagnose and overcome the historical trajectory that has damaged the planet. Her sense of a proper humanity at the end of history that might redeem itself and meekly inherit the Earth is typical of the popular post-apocalyptic imaginary in which it is *not* human nature, not anything that one might recognize as a species universal, but capitalism that captures relations among humans and deflects living bodies from their own desires. Following up on her 2014 book, *This Changes Everything*, Klein disputed an extended piece in the *New York Times Magazine* where Nathaniel Rich argued that inaction on climate change was due to a human inability to make short-term sacrifices:

If an inability to sacrifice in the short term for a shot at health and safety in the future is baked into our collective DNA, then we have no hope of turning things around in time to avert truly catastrophic warming.

If, on the other hand, we humans really were on the brink of saving ourselves in the '80s, but were swamped by a tide of elite, free-market fanaticism – one that was opposed by millions of people around the world – then there is something quite concrete we can do about it. We can confront that economic order and try to replace it with something that is rooted in both human and planetary security, one that does not place the quest for growth and profit at all costs at its centre.

And the good news – and, yes, there is some – is that today, unlike in 1989, a young and growing movement of green democratic socialists is advancing in the United States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an electoral alternative – it's our one and only planetary lifeline…

There is nothing essential about humans living under capitalism; we humans are capable of organizing ourselves into all kinds of different social orders, including societies with much longer time horizons and far more respect for natural life-support systems. Indeed, humans have lived that way for the vast majority of our history and many Indigenous cultures keep earth-centred cosmologies alive to this day.

Klein is quite right to note that an appeal to 'human nature' not only forecloses any critical account of the different ways in which life has generated social formations, but also narrows the range of what futures might be imagined. Even so, what her critical account leaves open is the threshold at which one refuses nature in one's account of life, emergence and futurity. That is, it seems reasonable and necessary to say that there is nothing natural (and therefore nothing inevitable) about capitalism, but to what extent does a claim for the non-naturalness of the present – because of other possibilities of life – allow for a dissolution of the present? This is where I think that the concept of deterritorialization can expand the range of the problem of the human: rather than refuse any concept of human nature and insist that we can always become other than what 'we' are, we might see 'human nature' as a formation that exists in ways that are far more complex (and embedded in the Earth) than capitalism.

# Futurity

As I have already argued, accounts of life and emergence have allowed for a certain dissolution of the present. If there is no such thing as humanity that simply goes through history in order to recognize itself, and there is instead an always intertwined mesh that is nevertheless not fully in command of itself, then perhaps the present is innocent after all. This conclusion is taken up by Timothy Morton, and it is one that ought to prompt us to question a simple ethics of deterritorialization:

Every aspect of hyperobjects reinforces our particular lameness with regard to them. The viscosity that glues us to the hyperobject forces us to acknowledge that we are oozing, suppurating with nonhuman beings: mercury, radioactive particles, hydrocarbons, mutagenic cells, future beings unrelated to us who also live in the shadow of hyperobjects. The nonlocality of hyperobjects scoops out the foreground–background manifolds that constitute human worlds. The undulating temporality that hyperobjects emit bathes us in a spatiotemporal vortex that is radically different from human-scale time. The phasing of hyperobjects forcibly reminds us that we are not the measure of all things, as Protagoras and correlationism promise.

Morton's three concepts of hyperobject, lameness and Rift all work to demote humans from self-mastery and world-mastery. Hyperobjects can only be known in their effects, never as they are in themselves. We see wildfires, flooding, tick and mosquito borne viruses, sea-level rises, heatwaves and deforestation but never an object that might be known as climate change, or even climate. For this reason the very world and relationality that composes our being is never something we can grasp; what makes us who we are is all too *real*, and therefore distant. We are not self-composing, for the rift between what we know and what there really is renders us lame. Like Barad, Morton concludes with a demotion of human supremacy and autonomy.

Here, again, we are brought up against two modes of deterritorialization, both operating with different inflections of emergence. First, one might think of the ways in which 'humanity' emerges from all the disparate modes of existence of *homo sapiens*. Through empire, colonization, slavery and global capitalism a figure of the average white man comes to stand for the whole. A body formed within the territory is no longer a body among others but comes to regard itself as the essence and end of the whole; everybody in the territory is now seen as an expression of man, an example of a humanity that will find itself at the end of history. If one accepts this notion of deterritorialization, where a body emerges and becomes a force in its own right, one can intensify this movement and demand a full actualization and redemption of the human. We have found ourselves at the end of history, and once recognizing our emergence know that we too can turn back, accept our role as planetary guardians and allow human life to flourish. This could amount either to a new or queered humanity of self-recognition and lameness, or a hyperhumanity – where the very technoscience and mastery that has allowed for altering the Earth at a geological level can lead to a heightened control of 'our' milieu. To recognize emergence would be to take the trajectory of complexity as a moral imperative, as a justification for 'technological maturity' and the saving of what has come to know itself as humanity at all costs. This is what I mean when I suggest that the future is already deterritorialized: what thinks of itself as humanity no longer claims to be some divine essence, and not even a universal norm, but a procedure of maximization of potentiality. This can occur at a micro-level, where the twenty-first century is no longer a soul-searching journey of discovering who one is, but a day-to-day self-management, intensifying what one might become.

If the history of human technology has unfortunately rendered the planet uninhabitable then we can embark on interstellar travel, reverse extinction, create various forms of carbon sinks, find other forms of energy or become some form of superintelligence that leaves those requirements and limits behind. This conception of deterritorialization has a long history in philosophy, and contemporary purchase in both pop and high culture. The liberal imperative (perhaps stated most forcefully by Kant) is that if it is possible to think or desire another state of affairs – such as imagining humanity as *not* bound by the causal order of nature – then the very thought of that elevation creates an imperative; we should always be a humanity to come. Today it is the very imagination of planetary destruction that allows humanity to free itself from causality and the past. Because climate change is a global catastrophe, humanity must emerge as a futural force, retrieving itself from the wreckage by imagining itself not as what it actually is, but demanding the emergence of a higher potentiality. If life can become other than what it is, and if human life to date has been destructive, then the future becomes one in which the evil potentialities are cast off and set into the past, while the future becomes the moment to be born again.

The second mode of deterritorialized futurity would see emergence neither from the point of view of the creation of worthy complexity from nightmarish chaos, *nor* as an ethical imperative of ungrounded becoming. Here it might be worth thinking about the future and deterritorialization in a more radically linear manner. It is all too easy and common to dismiss linearity, but a certain non-linearity has enabled a neoliberal and hyperhumanist form of deterritorialization. Whatever we happen to be now, and whatever we happen to have become, this does not preclude demanding a future in which renewal, redemption and renovation allow for a planet of tomorrow. Rather than accepting that who we are now is the result of a long history of repetition without difference, and that what has come to call itself humanity is bound up with capitalism and anthropogenic climate change, we imagine all sorts of redemptive turns and breaks. We think that we might refer to something like the Capitalocene and thereby allow humanity to be a virtuous and virtual remainder that might rise, like a phoenix from the ashes, having broken from its grubby past. Because we are committed to a certain logic of emergence we define humanity as nothing other than a capacity for becoming-other. What might happen if deterritorialization were not thought of as a godlike emergence ex nihilo, as ongoing self-creation and renewal, but as always bound up with forces allowing for highly singular lines of flight? Here I go back to what it might be to think beyond a theory of emergence and its morality of complexity from chaos. If complexity has *more* difference than the stable forms that emerge, then a future that is not bound up with humanity's self-narrativizing and self-preserving line of redemption would require a dramatic reversal in order to generate a line of flight. One might think of various forms of what we too often look at as pre-history or the uncivilized and inhuman as offering a 'higher deterritorialization'. In this case one might deploy one's theory of life not as a mode of normativity, where whatever is is right, but as a mode of exit: how might an account of life open up to the unlived? The unlived would amount to all those forms of existence that hitherto have appeared as the end of the world, but that might after all offer 'a' future, even if it is not ours.

#### *Notes*

1. https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk

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# About the Contributors

Cecilia Åsberg is Guest Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Gender and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, and Professor of Gender, Nature, Culture at Linköping University. She is Founding Director of the Posthumanities Hub, and the Seed Box: An Environmental Humanities Collaboratory; and associate editor of the journal *Environmental Humanities*. Åsberg has published extensively (in Swedish, Dutch, English); taught gender studies, Environmental Humanities, STS and posthumanities to BA, MA and PhD students in various research, managing and teaching positions at KTH, Linkoping University and Utrecht University (NL), and been guest professor at several German and Nordic universities (Rachel Carson Centre, LMU). Recent publications include 'Planetary Speculation: Cultivating More-Than-Human Arts', in *Cosmological Arrows*. Stockholm: Art And Theory, 2019; 'Feminist Posthumanities in the Anthropocene: Forays into the Postnatural' in *Journal of Posthuman Studies* (2018); 'Toxic Embodiment' *Environmental Humanities* 11, no. 2 (2019, special issue ed. with Olga Cielemęcka); and *A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities* (2018, ed. with Rosi Braidotti).

Anna Bohlin is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has previously researched issues of memory and temporality in relation to place, in particular in connection with various state projects such as democratization (South Africa) or river restoration (Sweden). Current research interests include people's relations to everyday domestic items; waste; and second-hand and reuse as embodied and alternative forms of heritage. She is part of the leadership group of the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (University of Gothenburg/University College London) and the Research Cluster Making Global Heritage Futures, where she explores the intersection between things/materials, temporality and sustainability, most recently within the project 'Staying (with) Things: Alternatives to Circular Living and Consuming', Swedish Research Council 2020-2024.

Esther Breithoff is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Lecturer in Contemporary Archaeology and Heritage at Birkbeck, University of London. She has held postdoctoral research positions at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and University College London. Her research spans the fields of Contemporary Archaeology and Critical Heritage Studies and traces a common set of interests in the relationships between conflicts, resources, recycling and rights across the human/non-human divide in the Anthropocene. Esther is also Affiliated Researcher on the Heritage Futures research programme, based at UCL, and the Review Editor for the *Journal of Contemporary Archaeology*.