Beyond Biontology? Bringing Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s Geontologies to Life-Centred Design

Abstract

The concept of “design for life” has been rapidly picking up steam in the last few years. While the discourse around life-centred design leaves the concept of “life” unproblematised, it uses this term to signify an expansion of the sites and stakeholders of design beyond the human. I therefore define life-centred design as mobilising more-than-human approaches with the explicit aim of intervening in (the debate about) what planetary life is and should become. What purposes might life-centred design fulfil by differentiating between life/nonlife and favouring only the former? This article explores how Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s magisterial Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016) can contribute to thinking through the ethical implications of life-centred design. I start by discussing three of Geontologies’ key concepts: the carbon imaginary, geontopower, and geontology. I then brief ly experiment with activating those concepts to think about how three life-centred design practices configure life/nonlife and how those configurations might be involved in tactics of control. I then discuss how life-centred design tends to reproduce a modern Western belief in biontology (the equivalence of life with being) and as such risks teproducing (neo-)colonial practices of control. In conclusion, I both consider some of the ethical implications of life-centred design and speculate on those of a hypothetical post-biontological life-centred design.