Post-post
- Post is never fully post.1 Post-industrialization is never over, even if “they” shut down a factory, even if “they” claim to close an industry. Well, somewhere else, there is something ready to be exploited and consumed. Post-industrialization involves a plan that considers continuing the production somewhere else—a bit far or close, it doesn’t matter—but, for instance, a place, a land, a town, a forest, a community,2 a wetland is already written on the list of “progress.”
- Post is never post; nevertheless, as a prefix, it can construct different groups or chains of words that transform their meanings constantly in “human language.”3 For example, for the word “wetland” the following are possible: post-wet-land, post-drained-land, post-mosquitos-land, post-ooze-land, post-land-land, post-wet-mothertongue-land, post-war-mosquitos-land, post-land-migration-land-migration, post-civilization-wet-drained-land, post-consent-post-post-land-land-post...
- Anyway, it is recommended to be careful with some prefixes, especially cis-, crypto-, euro-, meta-, mono-, omni-, supra-, ultra-. (And also—sometimes—be careful with the suffixes, even if they usually sound inoffensive.)
View of the now-closed coal mine and coal waste from a park by the Pacific Ocean in the post-mining town of Lota, Chile, 2023 (Photo: Eduardo Cruces)
1 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
2 Ameneh Solati, “Wetlands of Resistance,” e-flux Architecture, May 2023. Accessed: 02.12.2025, www.e-flux.com.
3 For example, Margaret Atwood’s poem “Marsh Languages.”