Born Secret (Cash for Kryptonite): A field guide to the Anthropocene mode of production

Abstract

The article offers a discursive complement to an audiovisual artwork created by the authors for the cultural program Mississippi. An Anthropocene River. It explores philosophical, technological, and political aspects of the modernization process that reshaped the landscape of the Tennessee Valley for the generation of hydroelectric power in the 1930s, laying the groundwork for the region’s integration to the continentalscale Manhattan Project in the following decade. Government management of scientific research and industrial production for military imperatives is identified as the origin of a characteristic Anthropocene mode of production which subsequently spread around the world, contributing decisively to the Great Acceleration of the global economy in the 1950s. Cast in the form of a “field guide” and addressed to a broad audience, the article suggests that sustained attention to anthropogenic patterns in any modernized landscape will reveal parallel developments of this mode of production.