COMMODICINE by Lucy Wainger
"'Commodicene,'” my contribution to the diverse body of 'Anthropocene' alternatives, takes its prefix from the words 'commodity' and “commodify.” It does not attempt to isolate a possible cause or origin point for our present ecological crisis. Instead, it names a psychic posture—a way of looking at reality—that undergirds the many possible causes we have discussed in class, including capitalism, chattel slavery, colonial expansion, and others. In addition to serving the violent historical phenomena that have brought us to this point, the reigning worldview of the commodicene frames and even limits our (well, my) thinking on how best to respond to the ecological crisis in the present and future."
"To illustrate my thoughts on the commodicene, I wrote a poem in the form of a catechism. The asker is a collective of humans who are materially, psychologically, and spiritually invested in the commodicene, and by extension in modern capitalism, ideas of competition and progress, etc. The answerer is the commodicene itself: to my surprise, I ended up imagining it as a self-critical, almost benevolent being who insists its time on earth has ended, despite the pleas of the human collective. It charges itself with having 'narrowed' the humans’ 'conception[s] of benefit' (4) and 'evolving/ to the point' (26-27) that they are cheap, facile, no longer meaningful, yet it also holds humans accountable for their reduced state of being: 'Exchange has made you lazy, mammal' (15)."
An excerpted stanza from Epoch
What can we salvage when we cannot collapse
the distance between disparate planets?
First you must mourn all you have collapsed.
First you must suffer the thousand cuts
that create planets as disparate.