To Be Thy Adam: Agency, Activism, and Collective Intelligence in the Ruins of the Human

One of the pulsating themes of Dougald Hine’s new book, At Work in the Ruins, is the realization that it no longer makes sense to centralize conversations about our ecological predicament on “climate change,” or to look to science and technology alone for solutions. He believes the framing of “climate change” as a scientific issue limits our ability to grapple with deeper questions about modernity and our relationship to the living world.

The framing logic of climate change reinscribes the logic of mastery, the managerial logistics that is at the heart of the troubling relations marked by anthropocentric gestures.

Something else is at work here. Something ecstatically cosmological, ecological, civilizational, mythological, and theological. Something unspeakable. In Hine’s view, this is the end of the world as we know it. Perhaps, then, the most profound vocation of our times is to cultivate new material capacities for knowing the world differently.

In this public conversation, author Dougald Hine, theologian Catherine Keller, philosopher Alex Forrester, and posthumanist thinker Bayo Akomolafe will dive into the unspeakability of Hine’s sensuous thesis, exploring the emergent geometries of accountability, agency, collective intelligence, and responsibility in a time marked by intractable wars, by insurgent quests for justice and reparations, by the troubling cybernetic phenomenon of AI, and by the all-too-theological questions of how to think with (and within) the ruins of the modern dream.

Summoned by the assemblage of this public inquiry is the genius of Mary Shelley’s ‘monster’ in her eminent novel, “Frankenstein.” Bemoaning its creation and the theological violence of its birth, Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s monster cries: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” The monster directly invokes the order of creation and its disruption, positioning himself as both a creation and a disrupter of the established order.

Something about Hine’s work asks us to sit with this monstrous, more-than-human lamentation, with the refusal of the created order to be productive in human terms, and with the dehiscence of the modern.

Something else wants to be born now. Something unspeakable. How does one speak the unspeakable?

Let’s find out. Together.

Please join us on Wednesday, September 11th at 3:00PM EDT at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, MA for Bayo Akomolafe’s final  event in the Berkshires during his time as the Schumacher Center’s W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow for Trans-Public Intellectualism.

Please note: registration is for in-person attendance only. The conversation will be filmed and shared via our eNewsletter shortly after the event.

The price of tickets ranges from $10 to $50. Please self-select the amount that best matches your ability to pay.