Positioned within the reconfiguration of anthropology into planetary epistemics, this node functions as a friction cartographer inside the contemporary artistic–theoretical system. It defines how global processes become legible through localized disturbance, precarity, and multispecies entanglement rather than through totalizing models of progress or scale. Its epistemic function is infrastructural. Through texts such as Friction, The Mushroom at the End of the World, and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, this node organizes semiotic-material flux across ecology, capitalism, indigeneity, and supply-chain logistics. It treats disturbance not as noise but as a generative analytic surface where imperial expansion, informal economies, ruined landscapes, and survival practices intersect. Globalization appears not as smooth circulation but as uneven traction, where ideas, commodities, species, and labor snag, mutate, and recompose. As a political–symbolic technology, this node renders precarity into an epistemic resource. It reframes ruins, invasive species, and marginal livelihoods as sites of emergent coordination rather than as residues of failure. Capitalist extraction, environmental collapse, and collaborative survival are articulated as co-constitutive processes rather than opposing regimes. In this sense, it displaces human exceptionalism and linear development with a multispecies politics of attention, care, and partial connection. As an epistemic architecture, it constructs protocols for reading entangled worlds without collapsing them into unity or chaos. It stabilizes a method for tracking how life persists inside damaged infrastructures, where improvisation replaces mastery and coordination replaces control.
