In contemporary cultural production, the constant search for transgression and newness demands that movements and cultural phenomena be declared over as soon as they begin. As such, it is popular to be “post-.” We are post-digital and post-human. We are post-industrial, postmodern, and (already!) post-Anthropocene.
The extent of the “post-” is, of course, questionable in each of these cases—we are still heavily digital, human, industrial, and modern, all while continuing to alter the geology of the earth at increasing speeds, as per the definition of “Anthropocene.”
Perhaps, the simple declaration of “post-” is not enough to achieve a true sense of afterness. In fact, “post-x” seems to be forever bound to that “x” in a way that forecloses further paradigmatic change once “post-x” has run its course. “Post-” does not tell us what is coming. It only tells us what has passed. In this light, our current aspirational “post-”—post-carbon—runs aground, for we can no longer remain inextricably tied to the material and cultural foundations of carbon modernity.
Furthermore, carbon is the wrong “x” to be “post-.” Carbon is a chemical element that serves as one of the basic building blocks of organic life. As such, carbon itself cannot be exceeded or defied. While it is true that extinction looms due to an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the culprit is not carbon itself but rather the way that human civilization utilizes carbon-intensive energy and thus disturbs the carbon cycle. This disturbance has gone so far that even if emissions were largely curbed, to stay within safe levels of atmospheric heating, CO2 would have to be actively removed from the atmosphere via carbon sequestration landscapes and infrastructures of mechanical carbon removal. Put in architectural terms, our relationship to carbon will continue to shape space, even if we succeed in bringing about an energy transition.
Therefore, the project for architecture in the face of the climate crisis is not one of relegating carbon to a distant past, because carbon itself is not the problem. It’s how we use it. It’s not carbon; it’s carbon modernity. It’s not carbon dioxide; it’s carbon dioxide as a byproduct of carbon form. So, as we look forward to a different energy paradigm, the deepest changes must occur within the social and spatial structures that precede and give form to an energy-intensive society. As such, there will be many intermediary steps before our ties to fossil fuels are shed. Before we can claim “post-,” we must first be other.