The lecture is part of the wider symposium “Languages of the Anthropocene”, organised by Florian Mussgnug (UCL).

LANGUAGES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
International Multidisciplinary Symposium
The British School at Rome | 20 June 2023 – 22 June 2023

The environmental crisis is a global problem but the ways in which the climate catastrophe is experienced
and spoken and written about are far from universal. There are significant differences in the ways in which the understandings of, for example, environment, crisis, climate, transition, and sustainability are articulated in different languages.

The symposium is jointly supported by the British School at Rome, the UCL Cities Partnerships Programme in Rome, and the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University, in collaboration with the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies at Sapienza University Rome and the Department of Humanities at Roma Tre University.

On Wednesday 21 June at 18:00, Stephen Shapiro (Warwick) will give the keynote lecture “Gramsci’s Anthropocene; or, Planning for the Post-Apocalypse”.

Against Gramsci’s hesitation in The Prison Notebooks about using energy regimes as a historical device, this talk will present new perspectives from the Warwick School of world-systems and Heidelberg’s Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic Studies to consider the conditions under which languages of the apocalypse emerge, suggest that the ecological crisis is combining with the collapse of a secular trend grounded on eighteenth-century Enlightenment schemes, explore the current replacement of normalising statistics for assumed probability, and finally consider the new wave of horror and alternative lifeworld games as a contemporary enactment of Gramsci’s argument for cultural creativity as a prerequisite for democratic transformation in an age of planetary crisis.

Further details will be given shortly.