Geo-narrativity: Anthropocene, Aesthetics, Forensics

This paper examines how the Anthropocene becomes perceptible as a speculative geological future through the medium of the technofossil. Invoking plastics, Styrofoam, and other artefacts particular to the recent past, the technofossil is generative of a novel aesthetic remarkably successful at facilitating a sensitivity to geological deep time in the present. I develop an account of how the technofossil was invented, how it unfolds as an approrpriation of palaeontological techniques, and how geologists draw on fossils as at once an impartial practice (the evidence is ‘set in stone’) while at once speaking ‘on behalf’ of technofossils to advance entirely political speculations about the future, as well as contemporary society. The technofossil therefore unfolds as a speculative forensics.