The poetics of knowledge in the Anthropocene: Rancière and the politics of posthuman knowledge

Abstract

This paper responds to debates over the politics of knowledge in the Anthropocene, which often centres on affirmational and negative approaches to posthuman theory. In dialogue with post-foundational geography, the paper outlines a different critical direction that utilises Rancière’s conception of ‘the poetics of knowledge’. It argues that this approach centres the possibility-reconfiguring power of radical politics as an analytical vantage point to critically examine the kinds of spaces, actors, and practices that posthuman theories can support and sustain or contest and disrupt. Doing so offers a means of critical traversal that can reorient posthuman theory to radical political horizons.

Keywords

Anthropocene posthumanism post-foundationalism Rancière critique

Introduction

‘The Anthropocene’ names an epochal change in the Earth’s environmental conditions: the moment at which the collective impact of human (anthropo-) activities exerts geological force upon the planet, disrupting the relative stability of the previous geological epoch, the ‘Holocene’ (Steffen et al., 2011). This disruption is starkest in the anthropogenic environmental disasters of climate change and the 6th mass extinction event. These phenomena mark the intrusion of other-than-human agencies, spatiotemporal scales, and imperatives upon Modern capitalist societies, an intrusion that ‘undoes thinking as usual’ (Haraway, 2016a: 4). This intrusion destabilises the ‘nature/culture’ binary (Latour, 1993), the distinction that underlies the hegemonic figuration of domineering ‘Man’ in the mould of the white, Western, bourgeois male (Wynter, 2003), and ‘Nature’, understood as a passive, malleable set of resources that are unproblematically available for domination and exploitation (Moore, 2015). As critical scholars have shown, this binary has been the basis for ordering hierarchies of both humans and other-than-humans through the development of capitalism, and it is at the heart of the crises of the Anthropocene (Clover and Spahr, 2017; Colebrook, 2016, 2017; Moore 2015, 2022; Schulz, 2017a, 2017b; Yusoff, 2018).

Under these circumstances, nature-culture entanglements and nature/culture boundary-making practices have become increasingly urgent objects of critical interrogation in human geography, as well as the social sciences more broadly. These inquiries have drawn from what I am clunkily uniting under the term ‘posthuman theory’. This term encompasses the range of new materialism, vitalisms, and speculative realisms which have, by no coincidence, emerged alongside the intrusive phenomena of the Anthropocene (Colebrook, 2017: 7; Latour, 1993: 8–10). The developments of posthuman theory have helped geographers to contest Modernity’s nature/culture binary as a foundational principle of our knowledge-making practices, providing useful tools to better interrogate the constitution of space through more-than-human practices and processes, and to conceptualise and address ethico-political concerns that unfold from them (e.g. Barua, 2021; Castree, 2003; Dowling et al., 2017; Gibbs, 2024; Hawkins, 2023; Johnson et al., 2014; Jones, 2009; Liebman et al., 2023; Mahony, 2022; Mahony and Hulme, 2018; Whatmore, 2002). As such, posthuman approaches have often seemed well placed to help us negotiate the problems of more-than-human entanglement that the Anthropocene poses and to generate appropriate ethico-political responses (Wilmer and Žukauskaitė, 2023).

Although the achievements of this work are significant, this paper begins from a disquiet precisely about this relationship between theory and ethico-political practice, which I am calling ‘the politics of posthuman knowledge’. By this, I mean how different modes of theorising nature-culture entanglements and nature/culture boundaries give intelligibility to distinct models of critique and, with them, ethical imperatives and terrains of possible political intervention. These formations of intelligibility necessarily imply unintelligibility, in which choosing one theoretical path rather than another obscures other critical, ethical, and political possibilities. Therefore, the interplay of un/intelligibility within posthuman theorising is consequential in determining what kinds of political projects our research practices help to support and sustain and/or disrupt and resist.

This interplay of un/intelligibility is particularly important in the Anthropocene, where a radical, de-hierarchising transformation of our relationship with the environment is urgently necessary to mitigate an on-coming, multi-species catastrophe. However, the crystallisation of posthuman approaches into the two, seemingly mutually exclusive camps of affirmation and negativity may forestall the intelligibility of the kinds of radical politics that would make this transformation possible, which circumscribes the capacities of geographers to support these kinds of politics as they emerge. As I will detail below, on the one hand, a growing chorus of critics increasingly recognise that an affirmational politics of knowledge often re-grounds the human in the world in ways that reproduce the dominant hierarchies and instrumental practices of capitalist Modernity (Chandler and Pugh, 2023; Dekeyser and Jellis, 2020; Neyrat, 2018; Noys, 2010; Ramírez-D’Oleo, 2023; Rekret, 2016; Wakefield et al., 2022). On the other hand, critics of negativity recognise that it often fosters forms of nihilistic detachment and agency-attenuating forms of totalisation that impede the possibility for engaging with radical, transformative politics (Braidotti, 2019, 2021; Falcon, 2023; Roberts and Dewsbury, 2021; Woodyer and Geoghegen, 2012).

In response, I suggest that paying attention to the poetics of radical politics can form the basis for a useful, critical alternative for engaging with the politics of posthuman knowledge. In dialogue with recent attempts to develop a politically charged ‘post-foundational’ geography (Blakey et al., 2022; Landau et al., 2021; Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023), I draw upon the post-foundational political theory of Jacques Rancière to ground this alternative. I argue that Rancière’s conception of radical politics as an aesthetically disruptive contestation over the foundational common senses that (re)produce the hierarchical roles, places, and practices of any given social order (1999; 2010) enables a politically pragmatic approach to the politics of posthuman knowledge. This pragmatic approach attends to the question of what parts of the world posthuman theories help to make intelligible, or ‘matter forth’ (Povinelli, 2021: 6), and it critically evaluates the answers to this question from the egalitarian, possibility-reconfiguring horizon of radical politics.

To flesh out this approach, I present Rancière’s lesser-known critical reading practice, the ‘poetics of knowledge’ (Grünfeld, 2020; Rancière, 1994). A poetics of knowledge interrogates the use of poetic techniques in knowledge production, such as narrative, metaphor, symbolisation, and description, which Rancière suggests are the means of making knowledges intelligible within a common world of sense and experience. As such, the poetics of knowledge are continuous with the broader common senses by which our social (or socio-natural!) orders are composed, and they are a key site in which these common senses can be contested. If posthuman theories rely upon poetic practices to make nature-culture entanglements and nature/culture boundaries intelligible, then a poetics of knowledge can foreground the ways that these poetic practices reproduce common senses about the hierarchies, places, and practices of our world. Alternatively, it can foreground the ways that poetic practices can disrupt and contest these common senses, opening onto a more radical terrain of political practice.

Rather than taking the side of either affirmation or negativity, Rancière’s account offers critical tools to disrupt these terms as the thinkable limits of the politics of posthuman knowledge. Instead, it places the possibility of radical politics at the heart of critical engagements with posthuman theories. In doing so, Rancière’s approach can help to locate the points at which posthuman theories may be re-articulated with the kinds of radical thought and practice that are so necessary for the crisis-laden Anthropocene epoch. This is not, as Latour once quipped, to centre human geographers and other social scientists as ‘the Lenin of social change’ (2007: 138) but to contribute towards disrupting the inevitability of the hierarchies and violences of the Modern nature/culture binary. A minor contribution to a fabric of discourses and performances through which egalitarian, more-than-human worlds might become more possible.

In order to make the argument, I first give an overview of affirmational and negative approaches to posthuman theory, where I problematise the critical and ethico-political affordances they make available. I then counterpose these approaches with those coming from ‘post-foundational’ geography, where I outline how post-foundational political theory can help us to reframe the critical, ethical, and political horizons of posthuman theory, or what I am calling ‘the politics of posthuman knowledge’. This lays the groundwork for a more intimate dialogue between posthumanism and the post-foundational political theory of Jacques Rancière and his account of a poetics of knowledge, where I detail the specific ways that Rancière’s aesthetic conception of radical politics and of knowledge can make a different, more radically charged politics of posthuman knowledge intelligible. The paper culminates in a demonstration of the critical value of a poetics of knowledge, where I read the poetics of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, performing a critique that traces the threads of common sense that knot his theoretical work to specific actors, spaces, and practices of politics in the Anthropocene. Finally, I conclude with a few reflections on how this approach can help to reorient geographers to a radical, transformative politics of the Anthropocene epoch.

The political limitations of posthuman approaches to knowledge production

In this section, I give a brief overview of the different politics of posthuman knowledge that are made available within the broad camps of affirmation and negativity. Taking these camps in turn, I begin with the ways that they operate at the conceptual level, producing distinct characterisations of nature/culture boundaries and nature/culture entanglements. I then unpack the way that these characterisations are formative of particular models of critique or criticality that implicate ethico-political imperatives for both knowledge production and political practice. I respond by problematising some limitations that they pose for thinking about a politics with radical, transformative horizons.

The political limitations of affirmation in posthuman approaches

Some commentators have noted that an ‘affirmational’ approach to knowledge production predominates within geography (Dekeyser and Jellis, 2020; Harrison, 2015; 2001; 2004a, 2007). This affirmational disposition is, to some degree, indebted to the work of posthuman theorising. For example, Tara Woodyer and Hilary Geoghegan’s significant contribution to affirmational criticism within geography (2012) relies upon both Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (1993, 2007) and Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism (2001). For both Latour and Bennett, the affirmational premise is an affirmation of our capacities to access material reality and to find forms of agency within it that can’t be reduced to the projection of the human mind and its psycho-social coordinates. Latour’s ANT asks us to create an ‘empty, relativistic grid’ (2007: 221) in order to detect the agentially distributed relational networks that compose the ‘facts’ of material reality (2004a, 2007). What can be found there is not capital-N ‘Nature’, understood as simple matters of fact, but instead ‘matters of concern’, understood as the fragile gatherings of humans and other-than-humans in ‘democratic’ relations of cooperation, resistance, and stabilisation (ibid.). Bennett’s Vital Materialism asks us to embrace ‘moments of methodological naiveté’ that ‘might render manifest a subsistent world of nonhuman vitality’ where we can locate ‘thing-power’ or the agency ‘in-itself’ of material objects and relations (2010: 17–18).

As reference to an ‘empty, relativistic grid’ and to ‘methodological naiveté’ implies, this affirmation necessarily suspends the hermeneutics of suspicion that accompany a traditionally negative approach to critique, in which the appearances of agential materiality would be understood critically as mere effects of, for example, the capitalist, patriarchal, and/or colonial socio-historical coordinates of the world. As Thomas Dekeyser and Thomas Jellis argue (2020), negativity is not only suspended in affirmational approaches but is itself subjected to critique. It is accused of ‘too.. much. But also too little’ (ibid.: 322). Its destructive power is alleged to license ‘too much’, severing us too radically from a world that is too entangled in complex forms of distributed agency to be handled without due caution or care (Barad, 2012; Bennett, 2010; Latour, 2004a). Rather than revealing causal mechanisms that might inform effective political action, the negativity of critique is understood to engender overly simplistic, paranoiac, and hubristic orientations to the world. In this sense, it operates as ‘too little’, bringing only ineffectual moral condemnations that misapprehend and disengage from the world (Barad, 2012; Bennett, 2010: 37–38; Latour, 1993: 5–13, 43–46, 2004a; Morton, 2013: 134–159; Sedgwick, 2003: 123–151).

Instead, an affirmational orientation is supposed to foster a positive, relational ethico-political engagement with the world, adept to the epoch of ecological crises. For example, in Latour’s account, the affirmational critic ‘assembles’ and ‘gathers’ the participants through which material reality is produced and, in doing so, recognises the fragility of that reality (2004a: 246). From this recognition follows the ethical injunction to treat it with ‘care and caution’ (ibid.). In later work, he would suggest that this is the basis for combatting the crises of the Anthropocene, by helping to compose ‘the “we” that humans are supposed to feel part of’ and ‘assemble a political body able to claim its part of responsibility for the Earth’s changing state’ (2011: 7-8). For Bennett, an affirmational orientation is supposed to ‘inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin … in a knotted world of vibrant matter’, where ‘to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself’ (2010: 13). This necessitates an ethical commitment to increasing ‘channels of communication’ across more-than-human relations in order to mitigate harms and to drive the reform of an ecologically attuned society (ibid.: 104).

The potential problems of these approaches are perhaps best summarised by the question ‘who renders whom capable of what, and at what price, borne by whom’ (Haraway, 2016b: 23)? Might the affirmational injunction to support and sustain relational networks and their ‘democratic’ publics overlook the violence of exclusion and minimise the violent constraints of inclusion that constitute these networks? Would contending with these issues demand a more radical, oppositional politics? It is on the basis of questions like these that affirmational strands of posthumanism are criticised for accepting the world too readily on its own terms (Culp, 2016; Chandler and Pugh, 2023: 46–52; Dekeyser and Jellis, 2020; Giraud, 2019: 98–117; Macfarlane, 2017; Noys, 2010: 80–105). Of course, feminist contributions to posthuman theory have long reckoned with these problems (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 1996; Star, 2007; Sturman, 2006). Adapting lenses from the social sciences, including from feminism, Marxism, and post-colonialism, these approaches temper the critical limitations of affirmation with situated perspectives, which acknowledge the uneven terrain of inclusion and exclusion through which more-than-human relations are constituted.

With the increased critical strength of these approaches comes a greater willingness to acknowledge the need for the negativity of oppositional politics. However, this is often downplayed. For example, Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism acknowledges the need for ‘negative criticism and oppositional consciousness' (2021: 149), but she subordinates this to an affirmative ethico-political project: ‘a collective relational endeavour of co-creation of the conditions to actualize’ a virtual potential for a just otherwise (ibid.). This is grounded in a knowledge practice that produces ‘affirmative forms of defamiliarization or disidentification from century-old habits of humanistic, Eurocentric, and anthropocentric ways of thinking’ and, consequently, that fosters the capacity to relate otherwise with other-than-human beings and forces (ibid.: 158). Despite her acknowledgement of its political necessity, Braidotti predominantly casts the negative as the conditions under which capitalism operates (ibid.: 145) – a ‘reactionary power’ (ibid.: 148) that produces only the ‘effect of arrest, blockage, and rigidification that results from a blow, a shock, an act of violence’ (ibid.: 153). Any sense of its utility for radical politics is made unintelligible. Instead, it must be resisted and transformed into the affirmative project of posthuman assembly for a collective becoming otherwise (ibid.: 154, 156). But, as critics have suggested, prioritising the affirmational ‘yes’ of relation and diminishing the negative ‘no’ of opposition effectuates a willingness to accommodate the world as it is ahead of time (Dekeyser and Jellis, 2020; Ferguson, 2022: ix-xxi), and this circumscribes the radicality that Braidotti is nominally committed to.

The political limitations of negativity in posthuman approaches

However, the negative alone is no guarantor of radical politics either. For example, Timothy Morton’s approach (2013, 2017) is negative rather than affirmational because it describes the world as composed of objects that are all withdrawn from one another and, therefore, mutually inaccessible. On the one hand, Morton suggests that we can detect the force of objects like the climate when we are caught in their ‘zones’ (2013: 141–147), from which they appear to emit directives, ‘like a demonic force field’ that compels us to act (ibid.: 142). On the other hand, because they are withdrawn, objects appear negatively as a ‘compelling mysterious spell’ that is opaque to human knowledge and understanding (ibid.). Thus, whilst we are compelled to act, any possible action is simultaneously rendered as both wrong and inadequate (ibid.: 136–158). The ethico-political stakes of Morton’s conception are to push back against the hubristic attitude that inheres in an instrumental approach to producing knowledge, which Morton suggests is ‘directly responsible for the ecological emergency’ (ibid.: 155).

Morton’s account centres finitude as a countervailing force upon the excesses of instrumental knowing, which resonates with the project of Negative Geographies (Bissell et al., 2021). Against the capaciousness of affirmational approaches, finitude is said to protect against the seductiveness of power (ibid.: 21), demanding an ethical acceptance of ‘our incapacities in the face of a world that is perhaps more mysterious, unknowable, and unpossessable than we might previously have been comfortable in admitting’ (ibid.: 25-26). Whilst it is politically undesirable to sustain or further inflate the hubristic model of knowledge belonging to the bourgeois, white, male figure of ‘Man’ (Wynter, 2003), nonetheless, it may be ineffective to root ethico-political practice in the deflation of subjectivity, via an ethics of ‘silence, withdrawal, ineffectiveness, and ignorance’ (Bissell et al., 2021: 25), or ‘hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness’ (Morton, 2013: 22). As Noys argues, if a deflated figure of subjectivity is supposed to be resistant to the excesses of knowledge-power and agency that define contemporary capitalism, nonetheless, it ‘leaves mysterious the processes by which the failure of the subject will be converted into active and successful resistance’ (2010: 17). Put simply, does this form of negativity not also – like its affirmational counterparts – run the risk of being outflanked and over-run by those same forces that its adherents wish to push back against?

A negativity with more critical intensity is found in the work of Claire Colebrook (2016). For Colebrook, the Anthropocene indexes a ‘geological impact, and not just change within the human milieu’ (ibid: 104). As such, its predictive force emerges from the inhuman temporal scale of the geological, promising that humanity will be readable as a scar in absolute not just human terms (ibid: 104-106). This promise – coming to us from outside of what we take to be ‘our’ world – impinges upon our imaginary of an open future that promises, via its sheer inexhaustibility, a becoming otherwise that could be just. Instead, Colebrook argues that this suggests that what seemed so essential for a politics of justice, the political horizon of aligning a collective humanity and ‘our’ world, could only become intelligible from within a social formation that is destroying the stable milieu that made it possible in the first place (ibid: 115). Thus, the potentialities for a becoming-otherwise of humanity are too-often premised upon the self-destructive force of a disavowed non-relation hidden beneath Modernity’s nature/culture binary; that ‘there is no relation or correlation, no extension or continuity between the linear and human sense we make of what we take to be our world, and the multiple, volatile, and infinite forces that operate with blind disregard for human sense and intentionality’ (ibid.: 111).

If the typical political registers of class, race, gender, sexuality etc. that belong to our world are also premised upon this destructive non-relation, then these registers and our politics are exhausted by the Anthropocene. Rather than an attempt to stage a renewed politics of possibility, what emerges from Colebrook’s perspective is a call for ‘world-destructive theory’ (2021), a form of negative critique that does not open out onto any positive political horizon. Like Walter Benjamin’s conception of divine violence, it is a force ‘without ground that destroys the barbarism of the whole’ (ibid: 526). Colebrook’s call is reflected by those in geography who take up ‘refusal’ as the negative horizon from which to respond to the limits of affirmationism (Dawney and Jellis, 2024; Dekeyser and Jellis, 2020). It is taken up more explicitly in the ‘abyssal geographies’ project (Chandler and Pugh, 2023: 91–92), which draws from thinkers in critical Black studies rather than posthuman theory.

Certainly, a project of continuous refusal might lead us to find a political radicalism that might at last be radical. However, I question whether the force of non-relation at the heart of these approaches undercuts this radicalism by readily accepting the exhaustion of political possibility within the world it critiques? Does the method of negative critique presented here ultimately reinforce the dominance of the system it indicts, as Woodyer and Geoghegan warned in their turn to affirmation (2012: 199)? Are vitalist geographers Tom Roberts and JD Dewsbury right to be concerned about the ‘nihilism’ of the negative, which can only define itself negationally and is thus unable or unwilling to engage positively with difference (2021: 1524)? If our options are reduced to either accepting too much of the world on its own terms or a ceaseless refusal of the world and of the possibility of remaking the world, do the positions of affirmation and negativity deny us the possibility of seeing a difference that makes a political difference?

The post-foundational alternative

My disquiet with the politics of knowledge on offer on either side of the affirmation/negativity debates has grown with the existential crises of the Anthropocene; crises not just for ‘Man’ but for the more-than-human ecologies that are caught within ‘his’ globalised project. As climate scientists have argued convincingly, a radical transformation of the global economy and the energy-systems that it relies upon are required to avoid the worst of climate change’s effects (Harvey, 2022, 2023). But this urgency crumples against governance systems that too often lock out radical opposition to the capitalist status quo (Brock, 2020; Brock and Dunlap, 2018; Swyngedouw, 2010; Williams and Booth, 2013). With this in mind, the political limitations of affirmation and negativity – as frames for the politics of posthuman knowledge – seem to reinforce the attenuated politics of the contemporary moment, which is said to be marked by impotency, exhaustion, and impasse (Bissell et al., 2021; Fagan, 2023; Grove, 2019; Linz and Secor, 2021; Schaffner, 2016).

If ‘our catastrophe cannot be solved within the parameters of global capitalism’ (Swyngedeouw and Wilson, 2014: 310), and at the same time a radical politics that could overturn these parameters seems impossible, then a greater focus upon reconfiguring this terrain of im/possibility might be a good starting point to find a useful alternative to affirmation and negativity. Drawing on Alain Badiou’s radical account of politics as the ‘art of the impossible’ (Badiou, 2018), Lucas Pohl argues that the political is ‘a moment of rupture that traverses the realm of … possibilities and reveals their inherently repressive nature’ (Pohl, 2023: 368). Political rupture is not given in the terms of the possible and, as a transgressive performance of impossibility, it exposes the imposed limits of the given and reconfigures possibilities previously rendered unintelligible and unimaginable (ibid.). With that in mind, could the practice of radical politics itself, rather than an affirmative commitment to relation or a negative commitment to withdrawal or non-relation, hold a promising alternative vista from which to engage the politics of posthuman knowledge?

Pohl’s work is part of recent efforts towards developing a ‘post-foundational’ geography research agenda (Blakey et al., 2022; Landau et al., 2021; Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023), which renews engagements with post-foundational political theory (PFPT) (Marchart, 2007). Largely centred around the radical French political philosophers such as, but not limited to, Chantel Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and Alain Badiou, PFTP begins from the premise of contingency. There is no firm ontological foundation, ‘no God, no biological law or genetic code, no market, no anthropological essence, no relations of production’ from which socio-natural orders can be grounded (Landau et al., 2021: 9), ‘no matter how sturdy or natural they seem’ (Blakey et al., 2022: 2).

This sense of contingency is shared with posthuman approaches. For example, in Latour’s project to denaturalise the matters of fact of ‘Nature’ in order to expose the contingency of their relational constitution as ‘matters of concern’, or in Braidotti’s affirmation of the possibility that we may become radically otherwise. Where this approach differs, as Landau-Donnelly and Pohl note, is that contingency is grounded in radical negativity (2023: 488). Contingency does not reveal the ‘richness and abundance’ of a plenitude of earthly agencies that has been constrained by our social orders (ibid.) – an error that can be corrected by adding them to our understanding of the world. Accordingly, the ethico-political warrants of affirmation do not follow from this sense of contingency. Instead, contingency reveals the constitutive outside or exclusions upon which a given socio-natural order depends (ibid; Blakey et al., 2022: 2). This undermines the claims of that order to adequately represent and arrange the socio-natural world. As Rancière’s account suggests, this negative sense of contingency is more politically charged, holding the possibility of an oppositional claim against that order as ‘wrong’ (1999: 21–42).

Landau-Donnelly and Pohl point out that this conception of negativity is distinct from negativity understood as absolute limits or finitude (2023: 487), which can be found in Morton’s account and in the negative geographies agenda. Instead, it is ‘a question of borders… demarcations or sedimentations that are radically constructed’ (ibid.). The constructed sense of borders is enabling of contestation because it implies that they can be erased and/or redrawn, opening onto the possibility of radically different forms of social order, unlike with the implied permanence of limits. In this way, it also differs from the non-relational negativity of world-destructive theory and abyssal geographies. This is because these demarcations are not ‘outside’ in an absolute or non-relational sense, as they seem to be with the conceptualisations of the inhuman and Blackness, respectively. Instead they are ‘internal, they border on an outside which lurks within the inside’ (ibid.; quoting Dolar, 2016: 68). Rather than a world (and a human!) closed to its constitutive exclusions, in which political possibility is therefore exhausted, this outside within the inside is productive of an ‘always open space of possibility’ (Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023: 489; emphasis added), albeit premised on a radical antagonism to the foundations of a socio-natural order.

These premises take shape in an account of politics that can attune us to the kinds of difference that would make a political difference. Indeed, what is most promising about the renewed engagement with PFPT is a stronger emphasis on the analytical utility of what has been called ‘the political difference’ (Marchart, 2007). On the one hand, this defines ‘politics’ or what Rancière calls ‘the police’ as practices that attempt to ground and sustain a hierarchical social order (Rancière, 1999). On the other, it distinguishes this from ‘the political’, where radical contestation from a position of constitutive exclusion challenges these grounds and rejects the horizons of possibility that they engender (e.g. Badiou, 2018; Rancière, 1999).

Earlier engagements with PFPT in geography have been dismissed by some critics as overly concerned with the ‘post-political’ state of the present (Blakey et al., 2022: 3; Dikeç, 2017), in which the political has been ‘repressed, disavowed or foreclosed’ by governance and management techniques that install and preserve a neoliberal terrain of politics/policing (Blakey et al., 2022: 3). As such, the conceptual utility of ‘the political’ for geography has been diminished by this account of the literature. Blakey et al. argue that this misperception of PFPT emerges from the presentation of politics/the police and the political as radically distinct spheres, which creates a sense that they are mutually exclusive (2022: 4, 6). Thus, the political, contrary to politics/the police, is rendered as a ‘rare’ and ‘pure’ event (Chambers, 2011). It is alleged that this has led to unduly narrow perceptions of political change (Blakey et al., 2022: 4; referencing Barnett, 2017), which can reinforce the ‘post-political’ sense of political closure (Beveridge and Koch, 2018: 31).

Of course, the continued impasse of the Anthropocene does perhaps suggest that the political is indeed a relatively rare event or, at least, too rare of an event. As such, I am more willing to sustain a firm distinction between these two categories than some (e.g. Blakey et al., 2022: 6–7; Chambers, 2011, 2012; Ruez, 2013). But it is certainly true that the mischaracterisation of the literature as primarily concerned with the ‘post-political’ has obscured what I take to be most valuable in its account of politics – that politics/the police and the political are always enmeshed (Blakey et al., 2022; Dikeç, 2017). This means that the political isn’t a ‘pure’ moment doomed never to emerge from the mundane sphere of politics/the police. Instead, ‘any order of politics necessarily takes place in the context of the political’ and ‘any political event occurs within and against the spaces of politics’ (Blakey et al., 2022: 3). The political always threatens to emerge from and contest the limits governing a concrete terrain of political possibility, because it is the ‘outside which lurks within the inside’ (Landau-Donnelly and Pohl, 2023: 488). It is in this enmeshed sense that the political has successfully been put to work more recently as a ‘hauntological’ absence/presence that troubles attempts to stabilise the meaning of spaces (Landau and Pohl, 2021), and as an empirical phenomenon, where both micro and macro occurrences of the political alter spatial demarcations and provide important insights for geographical thought (e.g. Blakey, 2021; Bragaglia, 2024; Dikeç and Swyngedeouw, 2017; Landau-Donnelly, 2025).

What I wish to add here is that the enmeshed nature of ‘the political difference’ means that it is also useful as a position from which to construct an alternative approach to critique. This is, I suggest, because the political difference is simultaneously grounded and ungrounded, a proposition that requires some contextualising before I can further unpack it.

If we accept that there are no firm foundations for any socio-natural order, then that is also to accept that any regime of knowledge cannot offer itself up in an absolute sense to be that foundation either. This is despite the utilisation of disciplines like neoclassical economics, ecology, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology to try and do so. Not only is knowledge contestably contingent in the same way that politics/the police is, but knowledges often work to ground or sustain politics/the police, and so the contestation of knowledge and of politics/policing are intimately bound together. This has long been established (Foucault, 1980; Rancière, 1994). But I suggest that in accepting the intertwined contingency of knowledge and of politics/policing, what follows is an ‘aesthetic’ and politically pragmatic terrain for critique. In using the term ‘aesthetic’ here, I do not mean a concern with art and its appreciation. Instead, I follow Rancière (1999, 2010) in reclaiming the sense of the term from the Greek aisthanesthai, meaning that it deals with questions of perception and intelligibility, broadly conceived. What I mean by an ‘aesthetic and politically pragmatic terrain’, then, can be discerned in the approach of Elizabeth Povinelli, who directly confronts the underlying implications of contingency for the politics of knowledge in the Anthropocene (2021; Yusoff and Coleman, 2014).

Accepting radical contingency, Povinelli draws upon the pragmatist philosopher William James to argue that knowledge is ‘irreducibly immanent to one’s location in… entangled regions of existence and thus irreducibly informed by the forces and powers that kept it in place or could be mobilized to displace it’ (2021: 4). Povinelli’s account of pragmatics accepts that there is no privileged relationship between any singular set of epistemological procedures and the kinds of foundational truth that could ‘properly’ ground a universal socio-natural order. Truth is both innately plural and inseparable from the politics of what part of the world it helps to ‘matters forth’ (ibid.: 6). This politics flows from the fact that knowledge is the subject of social forces and relations, in which ‘the ability of one region to seize hold of habituated practices across regions’ forestalls ‘other possibilities that are in existence from taking hold and extending themselves’ (ibid.: 4). This being so, as Povinelli puts it, ‘the question is not what is true in a metaphysical sense, but what is true in a political sense’ (ibid.: 6). It does not matter whether the idea ‘meets the criteria of absolute intensive consistency[,]’ instead it is about what difference is made intelligible where and, most importantly, with what effects (ibid.). Povinelli moves critical analysis away from epistemology towards politically loaded, aesthetic questions like what parts of reality do knowledges help make visible, how, and with what effects? What practices does this help to shape and produce? What parts of reality do they help to displace or make invisible, how, and with what effects? What kinds of practices does this move beyond the frame of legibility?

Whilst Povinelli’s account is helpful in articulating this aesthetic, politically pragmatic terrain for critical knowledge production, I suggest that the un/grounded nature of the political difference – and specifically Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic account as I will demonstrate shortly – is particularly attuned to addressing this terrain. On the one hand, the abstract sense of the political offers an ungrounded horizon of transformative politics that is not beholden to, nor affirming of the distribution of possibilities governed by the dominant conditions of the world as it is. This is because the political is an im/possibility that hovers at the inside’s outside of any given order of politics/the police. On the other, because the im/possibility of ‘the political’ is at the inside’s outside of politics/the police, it is also enmeshed with – that is, grounded within and against – the concrete logics and practices that compose politics/the police. Therefore, we can work between grounded position and ungrounded horizon to ask what kinds of projects our knowledge practices serve. Do their terms of legibility do the work of the police, keeping the dominant forces of the world in place? Or do they make space in which it is possible to mobilise the political, legitimising the antagonisms that might displace those forces and transform the horizons of the possible?

Rancière’s aesthetic conception of politics

The preceding section elaborated the analytical significance of PFPT’s ‘political difference’, including Rancière’s distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘the police’. Here, I want to elaborate the aesthetic character of this distinction in Rancière’s work, which I believe makes it particularly adept at speaking to the aesthetic, politically pragmatic terrain that I outlined above. His characterisation of both political practices and knowledge practices as aesthetic practices forms the continuity between his political philosophy and his critical reading practice, which he terms ‘a poetics of knowledge’ (1994: Grünfeld, 2020). And it is this continuity that can be fruitfully put to work as an alternative to affirmational and negative modalities of critical knowledge production.

Rancière’s approach is oriented around his concept of the partage du sensible or ‘partition of the sensible’. As Rancière argues, partition should be ‘understood in the double sense of the word: on the one hand, as that which separates and excludes; on the other as that which allows participation’ (2010: 36). As such, the partition of the sensible demarcates ‘what is visible and what not… what can be heard and what cannot’ (ibid.), or the aesthetic inclusions and exclusions that give specific form and function to the bodies gathered within a given configuration of the social. In doing so, it fabricates the ‘common-sense’ which makes that configuration appear natural or self-evident. Therefore, we first encounter the partition of the sensible as the aesthetic configuration that fabricates, legitimises, and sustains ‘the police’, ‘an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task’ (1999: 29). By way of an example, we might say that through the operations of the Modern nature/culture binary, it appears obvious that bodies deemed other-than-human simply make noise or don’t speak at all. Their incapacity for reasoned speech serves as the self-evident justification for their instrumental domination as resources for the police order of capitalist Modernity. In this way, the nature/culture binary itself can be characterised as a partition of the sensible (Bennett, 2010; Booth and Williams, 2014; Janicka, 2020).

The police’s claim to legitimacy is grounded in its self-understanding as having accurately accounted for everything with no remainder or supplement (Rancière, 2010: 44). It is on the basis of being seen to have put everything in its proper place that the foundations of the police appear as self-evident or natural. Because of this, the speech of an excess or remainder that has no part to play in the police’s hierarchies would disrupt the common-sense relationship by which the distribution of bodies, speech, spaces, and tasks is naturalised. This kind of disruption to the partition of the sensible would demonstrate that the police order, rather than a simple reflection of the ‘nature’ of the world, is a contingent affair, and one that is sustained by the exclusion of that excess. As such, the intrusion of an unaccounted-for part – or a ‘part of those who have no part’ as Rancière names it (1999: 29–30) – is the basis of politics proper or ‘the political’. It generates the possibility of what Rancière calls dissensus or a disagreement over the nature of both the part and the order that counts it (ibid.: 29–42).

Central to dissensus is the capacity of a ‘part of those who have no part’ to make a claim to ‘wrong’, understood in the double sense of naming a miscount and arguing that this miscount is unjust. ‘Wrong’ is an aesthetic disruption of the common-sense that suggests a body is exactly where it belongs in the hierarchies of the police by utilising a capacity for speech not given in that order, belying the sensorial hierarchies of the police with an equal capacity for speech (ibid.: 35–42). Thus, wrong is a radically negative claim to equality that is grounded in the demonstration of the capacity that the part of no part was supposed to lack; the equal capacity of speaking beings (ibid.). It offers a fundamental challenge to the hierarchies of the police and the forms of common sense through which they are legitimised. Because it emerges from voices uncounted in the existing police order, dissensus necessarily reconfigures the partition of the sensible and alters the horizons of what was previously deemed possible (ibid.: 42). At the same time, these possibilities are constrained by the police, which responds by trying to re-account for and assimilate the disruption (ibid.: 30–36).

Given the more-than-human nature of posthuman theorising, an obvious objection to the focus on the equality of speaking beings emerges here. As some have pointed out (Bennett, 2010; Bryant, 2011; Janicka, 2020), Rancière is fairly explicit in rooting the political in the equal intellectual capacity of humans to exceed and undo the hierarchies of the police order through reasoned speech acts. Could such an anthropocentric account of politics permit a political analysis of the disruption to the nature/culture binary we are addressing here? Firstly, as Levi Bryant points out (2011: 26–27), Rancière’s claim that the central stake of the political is the boundary between non/speaking being should preclude us from hemming speech straightforwardly within the bounds of the human body ahead of time. This is precisely because what constitutes a speaking being cannot be entirely foreclosed by any given sense of the limits of speaking being. Secondly, the disruptive phenomena that we have come to associate with the Anthropocene – ocean acidification, species extinction, climate heating, forest fires, the escalation of natural disasters, and so on – are surely telling us something about the exclusionary and hierarchical limits of our police order! Granted, what that something ‘is’ possesses a unique degree of ambiguity insomuch as it doesn’t necessarily operate within human systems of signification. Without a straightforwardly accessible logos, concepts such as translation – originating in the work of Michel Serres (1982) and Michael Callon (1986) – have been essential to the development of posthuman accounts of more-than-human relations and they are important here too.

What does the necessity of this work of translation mean? It means that there is an extraordinary level of disagreement precisely over what the Anthropocene does ‘mean’. An intensified proliferation of posthuman theorisations, all translating this disruption of the sensible into different theoretical frameworks that can take account of this disruption, which is simultaneously to matter forth some parts of the world at the exclusion of others. The necessity of translation here does not preclude the possibility of ‘political’ speech but amplifies the possibility of political antagonism in the mediational work that produces speech. In other words, taking this approach centres the questions of who speaks ‘for’ or ‘with’ ‘nature’ and through what means of translation as locations of hierarchy-construction and egalitarian contestation or, more simply, as sites of policing and the political.

Reading the field of posthuman theory through an adapted version of Rancière’s schema, I suggest that the Anthropocene concept indexes a disruption of the Modern, capitalist partition of the sensible, which should be read as a challenge to the naturalness of its police order(s). Perhaps above all else, this means that the Anthropocene concept marks the nature/culture binary or partition of the sensible as a wrong or miscount, both in terms of the specificity of the figure of ‘Man’ that the binary elevates and the figure(s) of ‘Nature’ that it dominates. From this perspective, the advent of posthuman theoretical approaches that seek to overcome the binary are processing that wrong in one way or another. Rancière’s aesthetic account of the political difference provides a heuristic for navigating the aesthetic, politically pragmatic terrain of knowledge production that I have tried to draw out. It asks the aesthetic question of how these knowledges alter the existing partition of the sensible. What parts and places are distributed within a given posthuman approach, and what parts have no part to play? Who or what can speak within this approach, according to what limits? It connects the answers to these questions to a politically pragmatic analysis of whether a posthuman approach polices the ‘wrong’ of the Anthropocene as a simple miscount that needs to be re-accounted for within the terms of the existing partition of the sensible, or politicises this miscount as a ‘wrong’ in the sense of an injustice, which requires a more radical and egalitarian sense of socio-natural transformation.

Rancière’s poetics of knowledge

If Rancière’s aesthetic account of the political difference provides a useful analytical distinction, nonetheless, this needs to be integrated into a more detailed account of reading knowledges for these distinctions. In this section, I draw from Rancière’s account of a ‘poetics of knowledge’ in order to do so.

The poetics of knowledge

Rancière’s understanding of poetics designates the always literary and aesthetic techniques by which knowledge is created and signified as such:

A poetics of knowledge can be viewed as a kind of ‘deconstructive practice’, to the extent that it tries to trace back an established knowledge – history, political science, sociology, and so on – to the poetic operations – description, narration, metaphorization, symbolization, and so on – that make its objects appear and give sense and relevance to its propositions (2011: 14).

Therefore, a poetics of knowledge takes the position that making knowledge is a literary practice of production. This means that a poetics of knowledge seeks to locate the literary devices that compose knowledge’s self-account. This understanding of poetics is not simply a question of the style through which knowledge is presented but an account of the ‘making’ or ‘invention’ of knowledge practices (Rancière, 1994: viii). For Rancière, then, the poetic dimensions of knowledge are not a secondary phenomenon that decorates thought but the very substrate for fabricating the intelligibility of thought; the poetics of knowledge shape the nature of the thinkable itself (Grünfeld, 2020: 48; Rancière, 1994: 101).

From this perspective, the aim of a poetic analysis of knowledge is ‘not to provide norms for [knowledge production], nor to validate or invalidate its scientific pretense’ (Rancière, 1994: 8). Indeed, Rancière’s aesthetic model of knowledge affirms no ‘better’ way of producing knowledge, at least not in the sense that it could more adequately close the gap of contingency that stands between us and a universal or absolute sense of truth. Rather, it ‘requires the assertion that these knowledge-discourses, like other modes of discourse, use common powers of linguistic innovation in order to make objects visible and available to thinking, in order to create connections between objects etc’ (Rancière and Panagia, 2000: 116). Thus, the poetic dimension of knowledge is the means by which knowledge is articulated as a communal practice of intelligibility making; the ‘creative activity of invention that allows for a redescription and reconfiguration of a common world of experience’ (ibid.).

As practices that (re)configure a common world of experience, the poetic practices of knowledge-making help to reproduce or alter the partition of the sensible, with its necessarily political connotations. This means that, in the mobilisation of particular poetic practices, ‘visibility is also invisibility, possibility is also impossibility, inclusion is also exclusion’ (Grünfeld, 2020: 54). Thus, adopting the approach of a poetics of knowledge is to recognise that poetics are the means through which we make the world thinkable to each other; the entities that compose it, the spaces that divide it, and as a necessary consequence, the political terrain of possible actions (ibid.: 55). And they do so at the expense of other possible poetic accounts that shape other partitions of the sensible, which might imply other political possibilities.

By attuning us to this nexus of knowledge-making, communal intelligibility, and political possibility, a poetics of knowledge does in fact invite us to do more than describe the aesthetic construction of knowledge. It is also a polemical and normative exercise with an emphasis on ‘the possibilities of redistribution’ (ibid.: 54). Here, Rancière’s characterisation of a poetics of knowledge as a deconstructive exercise comes to the fore (2011: 14). Reading for the poetic or dimensions of knowledge can expose that any regime of knowledge-making is always contingent upon articulating itself within (and potentially against) a specific socio-historical set of circumstances, which it does through a necessarily interpretive set of poetic devices in order to construct the necessity of its objects and operations (Rancière and Panagia, 2000: 116). Exposing the interpretive contingency at the heart of poetic fabrication makes it possible to disrupt the way a given set of knowledges attempt to make a particular partition of the sensible seem natural or inevitable.

Accordingly, the poetics of knowledge open up the possibility of aesthetic redistribution. As Grünfeld summarises, poetics

are uncovered not merely to show what and how they make knowledge possible through historically specific distributions of the sensible, but also how they are historically constituted and may be challenged by alternate poetics that redistribute the sensible and the thinkable (2020: 55).

Here, the possibility of redistributing the sensible (and thinkable) in knowledge echoes Rancière’s conception of the political, in which redistributing the partition of the sensible is a possibility-reconfiguring moment that alters what it is possible to say, do, and be in a particular space and time . Hence, analysis is always oriented to a relationship with the concrete terrain of the police from which knowledge emerges and the horizons of policing and of the political that it enables.

Bringing this approach to the politics of posthuman knowledge, I suggest that a poetics of knowledge is uniquely placed to investigate, in a granular way, the mediations of translation, where the disruption of the Anthropocene and the problems of more-than-human entanglement gain intelligibility as specific kinds of thinkable problems. The poetics of posthuman theories conceptualise and problematise nature-culture entanglements and nature/culture boundaries in ways that are necessarily inseparable from the broader partition of the sensible that gives sense to the police order of roles, places, and practices that make this world operational. If the phenomena of the Anthropocene are a disruption of the Modern, capitalist partition of the sensible to which posthuman theories respond, as I have argued, then the poetics of posthuman theories are means through which this disruption is policed, or articulated as a problem that can be accommodated and administrated within the existing distributions of the partition of the sensible. On the other hand, the poetics of posthuman theories are also sites of (re)invention and aesthetic redistribution through which more fundamental conceptions of ‘wrong’ can be articulated. In other words, they are sites that can open space for a meaningful engagement between posthuman knowledge production and the political.

Pushing this insight further, I follow Rancière’s understanding that, despite the partitions that demarcate the space and practices of the academy from the rest of the world, knowledges are part of a broader ‘configuration of sense’ (2009: 120). This implies a sense of continuum between theory and practice, rather than a hierarchy of determination: ‘there is not, on the one hand, “theory” which explains things, and, on the other hand, practice educated by the lessons of theory. There are… knots tying together possible perceptions, interpretations, orientations, and movements’ (ibid.). I suggest that this invites us to situate these knowledge practices within the world they emerge from and speak to. By blurring the ‘boundaries that separate the genres and levels of discourse’ (Rancière, 2011: 14), a poetics of knowledge can be used to trace and present resonant knots of common sense across boundaries, like those that separate the space of academic knowledge-production from the spaces of NGOs, policy-makers, political actors, movements from below, and so on, as they themselves narrate and legitimise their socio-political practices. This means we can begin to think more clearly about how posthuman theories help to ‘matter forth’ more specific practices on either side of the political difference – not in a one-sided, deterministic way, but as articulations of and contributions to shared common senses, which makes some possibilities more likely at the expense of others.

The poetics of Latour’s actor-network theory: Policing the Anthropocene

In this sub-section, I briefly illustrate this approach with an example from my own empirical research, where I have spent some time dwelling upon the links between the politics of posthuman knowledge and emergent forms of ecological governance as well as political protest. In what follows, I pick out some threads of a configuration of sense that I have identified, which tie the poetics of Latour’s account of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to contemporary governance strategies endorsed by the large international NGO, International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). This example serves to demonstrate how a poetics of knowledge can interrogate the configurations of sense through which some posthuman theories find shared ground with practices that police the crises of the Anthropocene.

Latour’s account of ANT is shaped by a recurrent narrative framing of our time as one of proliferating uncertainty about the socio-natural composition of the world, which defies the traditional categorisations and ontological assumptions of Modern knowledge disciplines (1993, 2004b, 2007). This narrative disclosure of the problem gives rise to the symbolic representation of ANT as an ‘empty, relativist grid’ that maps in a passive mode, seemingly reducing uncertainty by allowing the socio-natural world to pass through its observational apparatus on its own terms (2007: 221). Here, the symbolic work of the empty grid effectuates a paradoxical sense of transparency, in which the situated and subjective labour of constructing the observational grid is rendered opaque by the apparent capacity of that grid to simply disclose the world. The tension between the obscured activity of construction and the apparent passivity of observation is repeated in the difference between Latour’s literary inversion of the famous expression from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, ‘social scientists have transformed the world in various ways; the point, however, is to interpret it’ (Latour, 2007: 42), with the passivity that this connotes, and the more active description of ANT’s central task as ‘collecting the collective’ (e.g. ibid: 118, 138, 164, 171, and 174). On the one hand, the grid acts simply as infrastructural marks which recede to give intelligibility to nature-culture entanglements as they unfold. On the other hand, the grid is a cage in which these entanglements are held and possessed. But who is the subject of knowledge-making that can unproblematically occupy this tension between active and passive? Who constructs the map that transforms – via a kind of ‘ambiguous illusion’ – into the cage? And to what ends?

I find the clearest answers to these questions in Latour’s political writing (2004b), where he deploys the metaphor of ‘parliamentary democracy’ – which I read critically with all its Western, Bourgeois, and politically attenuated specificity – to represent the deliberative processes of ‘hierarchization’ by which emergent nature-culture actors ‘find their rank and place among those which are already established’ (ibid.: 108). Here, the parliament metaphor represents a zone for deliberation within an order of spaces and roles that has already been ‘established’ and to which nature-culture entanglements, those sources of uncertainty, must be subjected. Moreover, I suggest that this metaphorical invocation of parliamentary democracy, the liberal institution of legitimation par excellence, discloses both the situated coordinates of the Western, Bourgeois subject that constructs the grid and the utility of the grid for the problem of uncertainty. For it is this subject – whom Sylvia Wynter has called ‘Man’ (2003), the hegemonic model of the human constructed at the expense of all others – that can readily occupy ANT’s simultaneous passivity and activity. It could never be more plausible or comfortable to observe the world seemingly ‘on its own terms’ than when the dominant terms of that world were made in your image. From those terms, then, the active imperative to ‘collect the collective’ is the imperative for ‘Man’ to better take hold of and resolve uncertain nature-culture entanglements – via the process of ‘hierarchisation’ – within a world, a partition of the sensible, an order of the police made on his terms.

What knot of common-sense about the world might this poetic configuration be bound up with? The conservation NGO, International Organization For Conservation of Nature (IUCN), notes that businesses are having to reckon with the ‘risks’ that previously unrecognised dependence and impact upon ecosystems pose, not just in terms of potential resource scarcities but also their social legitimacy (IUCN, 2013: 3; Imboden et al., 2014: 9). It is a narrative that translates ‘uncertainty’ about nature-culture entanglements into a ‘risk’ to the operations of businesses as already ‘established’ entities in the world, to echo the language of Latour. If this narrative is resonant with Latour’s, it has a similar effect on the frame of thinkable responses. In the first place, it becomes necessary to map the potential effects of business practices upon the environment and upon local communities (ibid.: 50). Echoing the language of ‘hierarchization’, the IUCN recommends producing a ‘mitigation hierarchy’ from this mapping process, which plots the risks of environmental harm against the necessities of business operations in order to create a series of remedial actions that move from the least costly, like finding alternative sites or processes, to the most costly, like using biodiversity offsets to compensate for the damage by benefitting ecosystems elsewhere (ibid: 49). Mirroring Latour’s metaphor of parliamentary democracy, the IUCN also recommends a detailed stakeholder engagement plan, in which affected communities are given forums for ‘meaningful consultation’ and ‘inclusive participation’ (IUCN, 2021: 7). The level of responsiveness of these mechanisms is hierarchically determined by the level of negative impact caused and the land or community rights that different affected members of the community possess (ibid.: 4).

These mechanisms are not designed to create a forum for the political; to give voice to a radical ‘no’ to business interests on the grounds that the environmental harms they produce represent a deeper, more fundamental ‘wrong’. Instead, they ensure a company’s ‘impacts, both direct and indirect, do not negatively affect their own business operations or investments’ (IUCN, 2013: 3), as well as increasing ‘a company’s social license to operate by demonstrating a corporate commitment to address civil social concerns at the local and global levels’ (Imboden et al., 2014: 19). Put differently, both stakeholder engagement and biodiversity mitigation mechanisms transform the uncertainty of nature-culture entanglements into processes by which the entities that compose those entanglements can ‘find their rank and place among those which are already established’ (Latour, 2007: 108). I suggest, then, that at least one knot of common sense that binds the IUCN and Latour together translates the disruptive entanglements of the Anthropocene into a problem of mis-accounting. Rather than radical transformation, it is a question of processing the emergent phenomena of the Anthropocene according to the partition of the sensible that sustains the contours of the world just as it is. It is, therefore, the articulation of the problem as one of policing, which demands a better accounting of entities either side of the nature/culture binary, rather than its over-turning.

Conclusion

To conclude, Rancière’s account of the political difference does not take the side of either affirmation or negativity in the existing debates over the politics of posthuman knowledge. On the one hand, it is counterposed to affirmational approaches because it recognises that the limits of relationality within one partition of the sensible – the inside’s outside – are where the important, possibility-reconfiguring work of the political begins. Moreover, it holds that ‘becoming otherwise’ in relation is only possible through the radical negativity of the political; the radical negativity of ‘wrong’, which indicts the hierarchies of the socio-natural order and makes other, more egalitarian configurations possible. On the other hand, this negativity is different from its characterisation as finitude or non-relation within much posthuman theorising. In Rancière’s conception, the outside of relation is not absolute, at least not most of the time. Instead it is at the inside’s outside, meaning that the boundary between inside and outside can be redrawn through the construction of a particular, aesthetically disruptive kind of relation; the political. As such, Rancière’s account affirms the capacity of any excluded speaking being, including more-than-human speaking beings, to construct this relation and to transform the horizons of what is sensible and, thus, what is possible.

Bringing Rancière’s aesthetic conception of the political difference to these debates redistributes the partition of the sensible that determines affirmation and negativity as the thinkable limits of the politics of posthuman knowledge. Instead, affirmation and negativity can be read as some poetic devices amongst others that contribute to making the disruption of the Anthropocene thinkable as a particular kind of problem, demanding a particular kind of ethico-political response. Consequently, affirmation and negativity are subordinated to a different model of critical analysis, the poetics of knowledge, which asks what work the broader range of poetic techniques of posthuman knowledge do vis-à-vis the political difference? Do they police the disruptive crises of the Anthropocene or do they articulate ‘wrong’ and the necessity of the political? What this approach offers, then, are more nuanced tools for critically traversing the politics of posthuman knowledge, which can make clear demarcations of the points at which posthuman frameworks and the radical, transformative sense of the political are incommensurable, and the points where the political can be elaborated from within a posthuman frame.

This is not an abstract analysis, but one that traces configurations of sense that tie posthuman theories to specific spaces, actors, and practices of policing and of the political. I have presented an example using the shared threads of common sense that tie Latour’s account of ANT to strategies of stakeholder management and biodiversity mitigation hierarchies that police the crises of the Anthropocene. By contrast, posthuman theories might also redistribute the sensible in ways that are commensurable with the political by attending to the overlapping points at which the Modern nature/culture binary is implicated in both ecological destruction and the construction of intra-human hierarchies. From these points, it becomes possible to articulate more-than-human subjects of ‘wrong’, and to forge links with accounts of struggle already occurring at these intersections and already mobilising more-than-human political subjectivity, for example, at Standing Rock (Estes, 2019), over the legal personhood the Whanganui River, in Aotearoa New Zealand (Salmond, 2014), and at Hambach Forest in Germany (Kaufer and Lein, 2020), to name just a few. By making connections through these points of commensurability, perhaps we can become better equipped to locate the kind of radical politics that are so necessary for the epoch of the Anthropocene and to make a small contribution to opening alternate worlds of more-than-human egalitarianism.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the reviewers for their very sage feedback; his PhD supervisors, Jon Pugh, Robert Shaw, and Matt Davies for their crucial guidance whilst completing the work presented here; and Josh Bowsher and Kevin Grove for reading drafts of the paper.

ORCID iD

Ben Bowsher

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and authorship of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of their Doctoral Training Partnership studentship scheme.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Ben Bowsher is an independent researcher who completed his PhD in 2024 at Newcastle University's School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology. He was awarded the Newcastle University Doctoral College Thesis Prize for his thesis.

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