Medienepistemologie sympoietischer Weltbezüge. Zur Kritik eines ikonisch-humanistischen Anthropozentrismus

The article examines the epistemic conditions of human world relations in the Anthropocene by adopting a media-philosophical perspective on the interplay between anthropocentrism, visuality, and the medial figurations of epistemic premises. It departs from the diagnosis of a disrupted communication between humans and their environment(s), a disruption rooted in a humanistically grounded anthropocentric worldview. This worldview manifests not only in practices of distancing objectification and universalization but also in medial forms through which “world” becomes visible and thinkable.
Using the Blue Marble—NASA’s popular photograph of Earth—as a case study, the article analyzes how an icon of planetary wholeness stabilizes the epistemic architecture of a quasi-cosmic observer standpoint. The image generates a normative holism that brackets the processual, conflictual, and situated character of terrestrial relations, thereby reproducing a hierarchical relation between observer and observed. In the objectification and utilitarian reduction of the Earth, the same circular logic of control is reiterated—one that has contributed to the ecological disruptions characteristic of the Anthropocene.
Against this iconic totalization, the article proposes a sympoietic approach that foregrounds the participation of non-human actors in world-making and conceptualizes media as instruments for rendering their forces and agencies perceptible. Media are thus understood as partial, relational, and processual actors. A media epistemology of sympoietic world relations makes it possible to conceive mediality beyond the ideals of a god-like observer position: as a situated, dependent, and co-produced mode of being-in-the-world. In doing so, the article sketches an epistemic model that does not seek to transcend the centrality of the human in thought, but rather aims to situate human existence within the relational entanglements between humans and their environment(s).