Maria Sledmere

HEI: University of Glasgow

Project Title: Hypercritique: towards a lyric architecture for the anthropocene.

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What was your research about?

Hypercritique: Towards a Lyric Architecture for the Anthropocene offers a critical poethics of ‘hypercritique’: a performance of im/possibility and coming-to-thought within the situated and saturated encounters of the anthropocene. Bracketing debates about origins and scientific parameters, I consider the anthropocene as ‘a thought device that helps us to visualise the multiple event of extinction’ (Zylinska 2016: 178). Taking seriously Sara Ahmed’s insistence on citation as a ‘reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world’ (2013), my readings of dreamwork, daily life, suspension, sickness, architecture and the commonplace in writers such as Jackie Wang, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil, Anne Boyer, Lisa Robertson and Fred Moten claim ecological valence in texts outside of prominent canons of environmental literature. I look to a dense array of works whose ways of sheltering, dreaming and bearing help us orient towards unevenly distributed experiences of environmental harm, sociopolitical upheaval, eco-solidarity and possible futures.

The modular structure of this thesis, divided into self-contained chapters and subchapters (called intensities), with accompanying glossary, invites non-linear, provisional and experimental readings which involve the reader in reassembling the ‘house’ in ecology’s oikos. Borrowing from affect theory, dark and queer ecologies, poststructuralism, materialist feminism and media theory, I begin by defining hypercritique by way of the iterative refrain of dream, before unfurling its stakes of excess, play, exposure and suspension in relation to key concepts of ambience, ongoingness, swerve, rest and radical passivity, meadowing, entanglement and shimmer. Using the speculative figure of the glasshouse, this thesis is envisioned as a precarious architecture of refractive and incubating thought within daily life: where our ecological orientations are constantly challenged, turned, nurtured and blurred.