Recently, I assumed the new task of editor-in-chief of the journal ‘Cultural Science. A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than-human culture’. In the Anthropocene, cultural science pursues the study of culture by liberating culture from anthropocentrism: We can no longer treat culture as a, or even ‘the’ human domain exclusively, both in the sense of culture as an object of study that is limited to human culture, and in the understanding of culture is limited to human activities, in particular as self-reflecting upon culture. This transition manifests in the explosion of Anthropocene scientific and cultural endeavours over a very short period. However, this discourse has generated a paradox: Stepping into the Anthropocene, the cultural foundations of this scientific imaginary collapse, as more-than-human culture means this epoch is shaped by powers beyond the ‘Anthropos.’ Recognizing the Anthropocene means transcending it at the same time. This paradoxical historical juncture requires critical cultural reflection: cultural science.
Cultural science explores more-than-human culture in the two additional dimensions of a culture of living beings (biosphere, with humans included) and the culture of artifacts (technosphere, with humans as co-producers). Yet, these are only dimensions in which culture is approached as a phenomenon of assemblage across that conceptual domain. I overview the conceptual space with examples in the figure below.
In the Vernadsky tradition of approaching the Earth system as layered and embedded spheres, cultural science focuses on the interactions between the biosphere, anthroposphere, and technosphere and emerging cultural assemblages, such as the city as a hybrid of the ecosystem, a social field and a physical machine. There are cultural phenomena in each of the conceptual domains, and their crossings are shown in the figure.
- In the biosphere, an important example is animal aesthetics, which has already motivated the expansion of the human notion of the ‘artworld’ beyond the human.
- The deep fusion of biosphere and anthroposphere is studied in ecosemiotics and zoosemiotics, which is a recognized fact in so-called Indigenous thought for a long and has motivated the demand to include this cultural knowledge in transdisciplinary approaches to eco-social transition conceived as a cultural change.
- The intellectual movement of landscape urbanism unfolds at the intersection of anthroposphere, biosphere, and technosphere. It is an example of the emergent approach to the interspecies design of cultural artifacts of all kinds, especially in the context of cities, and the response to the need to radically transform human urbanity as an ecological cohabitation.
- The interaction between culture and technology is commonplace in cultural studies and sociology, from writing to social media and, finally
- The autonomous creation of culture by AI is a much-debated theme in the public today.
Looking at the diagram, the sphere of culture in the traditional understanding shrinks to two tiny patches where the anthroposphere does not overlap with other spheres. Even though this is just the effect of the drawing, this signals the shift away from anthropocentrism towards the study of more-than-human culture.
Historically, culture has often been seen as the defining feature of being human. This position must be taken seriously, with attention to the different specifics of being human. The question was raised whether animals have culture, which is sometimes confirmed, albeit in terms of human culture. The term culture did not include the radical, other living being; hence, neither was it a revolutionary, different culture. Similarly, today, the question is whether AI will become a cultural agent in human society, implying that AI will share human culture with others. Yet, in producing cultural artifacts such as paintings, humans no longer know how the software initially created them. This otherness is the same as the otherness of other living beings.
Cultural science approaches culture as a phenomenon of planetary scope, staying in the tradition of notions such as the noosphere or the semiosphere. Culture is an emergent property of Earth system evolution in the medium of signs. As such, human culture is a paradigmatic case: Contra fixations in ideas like ‘national culture’ or ‘stages’ and ‘epochs’ of cultural change, human culture has always been an unbounded flow of mergers, bricolage, and creolism driven by the unlimited powers of creativity of signs: humans have always created signs, and signs made humans. The logic of culture is to draw boundaries between inside and outside, between Ego and Alter, between here and there, and explore reflexive operations on these boundaries to create new boundaries. In this dialectical process, culture enriches the world ontologically regarding the two sides of the sign, the meaning and the thing, and about a third, the interpreting flows of action. Cultural science explores this cultural flourishing on the more-than-human Earth.
On the one hand, this stays in the ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ tradition as seminally conceptualized by Dilthey. The sign is the abstract term that covers the rich ecology of cultural things in human societies, from basic artistic techniques such as writing to aesthetic artifacts such as a painting, from pottery adorned with symbols to government buildings, from music to poetry. Such signs define culture as ‘objective,’ as embodied and materialized. Following recent thinking about new materialism, cultural science approaches these things as elements in assemblages with human beings, which produce their identities and agencies. However, cultural science transcends the borders of the human. It recognizes that human culture has imbued humans with a false sense of exceptionalism and uniqueness, denying recognition and participation to the more-than-human. Posthumanist materialism heals this flaw, the root cause of our current ecological dilemma. The key idea is that human action flows from agency distributed and semiotically mediated in assemblages of humans, other living beings, and things. Cultural science explores a specific form of agency, that is, distributed creative agency, in rearranging such groups and their expressions in larger patterns of processes on the population level, which feed back on creative agencies.
Human culture has always been in tight interaction with other beings, which, in the Western worldview since the Enlightenment, have not been seen as cultural agents of their own, very different from Indigenous thinking. Whales, for example, belong as beings to the more-than-human worlds of indigenous fisher people and even have a place in Western arts and literature such as Moby Dick. But only today, with new technologies emerging, humans make serious attempts at recognizing whales as autonomous agents of culture embodied in signs of their own making. A vision of more-than-human culture appears that straddles the technosphere and biosphere in making the other Uexküllian Umwelten accessible to humans culturally encapsulated in the anthroposphere.
The technosphere, our agency, our planet 