Abstract
This study reassesses the concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological age as it is influencing contemporary debates in social theory. As a unit of geological time whose changes are allegedly caused, directly and indirectly, by human beings, this scientific concept challenges the existing constructions of theoretical binaries, such as nature/culture, environment/society, objectivity/subjectivity or happenstance/design, in social theory. The analysis suggests many understandings of the Anthropocene in social theory are politicized over-interpretations of natural events, and these moves appear to be developing moral rhetorics of, and operational plans for, managing the Anthropocene to create specific outcomes for those who are the managers as well as the managed. The fact that human beings do not, in fact, have this measure of technical control is ignored by advocates of Anthropocenarian politics to advance their policy agendas.
In searching for social theory deeply grounded today in historical perspectives, one cannot ignore a new multidisciplinary narrative, namely, ‘the Anthropocene thesis’. It suggests, ‘human-induced changes into Earth’s surface, oceans, cryosphere, ecosystems and climate are now so great and rapid that the concept of a new geological epoch defined by human activity, the Anthropocene, is widely debated’ (Anthropocene, 2013: 1–2). This new debate must be addressed by social theorists, seeking fresh approaches to understand long-run environmental change as well as articulating innovative political agendas for mitigating, and adapting to, such changes.
The HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) maintains, ‘Our notion of nature is now out of date. Humanity forms nature. This is the core premise of the Anthropocene thesis, announcing a paradigm shift in the natural sciences as well as providing new models for culture, politics, and everyday life.’ These are intriguing claims, but this study suggests social theory must be cautious with respect to Anthropocene-centered analysis. Many of its claims about the present condition of the Earth either are overblown or understated. Moreover, the Anthropocene thesis has conceptual, historical, and political shortcomings that this analysis will bring to light.
In disclosing a much more ‘man-made’ world in which putatively, ‘Nature is us’ (Crutzen and Schwägerl, 2011), the Anthropocene thesis also can be positioned as the pretext for declaring a state of emergency to mitigate the Earth’s ecological degradation. Such a transfer of command and control authority under those conditions would go to those who supposedly know ‘Nature’ best; and knowledge could be reduced to the work of geoscientists studying anthropogenic ‘Earth Systems’. Likewise, ‘Society’ would then be served best by seeing the Anthropocene’s social impact through anthropocentric ‘Earth Systems Governance’ policy science (Galaz, 2014). The conceptual and political contradictions here come full circle.
At the end of the day, as Zalaisewicz, Steffen, and Crutzen (2010) claim, the nature/society divide so central to modern social theory has been breached. Policy questions about the present environmental crisis of rapid climate change and the future of society are one and the same. Noting this breach, then, has become an anchor for Anthropocenarian discourses about bridging contemporary ecological crises to discover a ‘good Anthropocene’ that can sustain greater development (Sachs, 2008). Needless to say, many political and social thinkers are enlisting in this movement with the same joy that too many other social theorists once did when the bell for the postmodern movement first rang (Jameson, 1991). Therefore, like Lövbrand et al. (2015: 211–18), this analysis sharply questions those voices in the Anthropocene debate that presume ‘to speak for the Earth’, and it doubts how some social theorists are leveraging the Anthropocene thesis in response to rapid climate change.
Social theory and climate change
To review the merits of the Anthropocene thesis for social theory, this analysis raises three questions about its new material, historical or environmental framing of human and nonhuman life from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. In keeping with the major impetus behind the Anthropocene thought, one must pose these questions by exploring the interdependence of fossil fuel burning with the construction of urban industrial modernity (Mitchell, 2013). Ironically, it is the combustion of fossiled remnants of prehistorical life that makes high-energy forms of contemporary human life possible. Yet, such energy generation also degrades the viability of the biosphere to the point that many contemporary ecosystems and life forms find it increasingly difficult to survive.
Scientific experiments to measure rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere initially were perfected during the 1890s. By the 1950s amid the nuclear arms race that the USA ran with the USSR, systematic carbon dioxide measurements discovered CO2 levels then were 40 percent higher than the pre-industrial levels of the 1760s. By 2015, such monitoring suggested over half of these increases have accrued only since 1980. The Science Advisory Committee serving the White House foresaw 50 years ago that these shifts would soon become ‘deleterious from the point of view of human beings’ (Revelle et al., 1965: 126–7), and that prediction is regarded as commonsensical today.
Life becoming increasingly miserable for human beings, on the one hand, might be irrelevant to the new life forms of machinic assemblages (Kelly, 1995; DeLanda, 2006) evolving out of the thickening clouds of carbonized wastes that new materialists celebrate (Bennett, 2009; Morton, 2013). On the other hand, all organic life forms are endangered (Žižek, 2010; Wuerthner et al., 2014). Murphy, however, suggests, ‘concepts like post-carbon society, decarbonization, low-carbon transition, ecological direction of travel, and ecological modernization are premature and should be understood as denoting aspirations rather than facts’ (2014: 15).
Others, however, already accept the Anthropocene, as a new historical epoch, even though geologists, paleontologists, and stratigraphers are still vigorously debating it. Triggered by modern fossil-fueled energy use, rapid urbanization, accelerating global trade, and new synthetic materialities, new ecological shocks are now a threat both to society and nature itself. This extremely naturalized explanation for social crises, however, is also being twisted against those who doubt its utility in a manner that mystifies the very social forces that rest beside, beneath or behind the anthropogenerative origins and operations of the Anthropocene per se. Most Anthropocene-driven social theories are grounded upon this foundational reappraisal of prehistoric, ancient and recent human history. They are, however, distorted by three difficulties.
First, the world historical shifts in the planet’s geophysical processes are blamed on ‘Humanity’ per se instead of the actual agents of change: smaller sub-sets of human decision-makers in any modern economy or society. Such tendencies toward misplaced concreteness confuse the bigger picture of exploitative economic actions in the Anthropocene.
Second, in this confusion, not much serious attention is paid to levels of analysis questions. At the individual, mid-range, and collective range of aggregation, the macrological totality, or all of ‘Humanity’ for at least 250 years totally blurs together the historical big picture of the Anthropocene with the micrological particularity of each individual human life alive today. This mismatch of economic parts and social wholes (as well as who may or may not be responsible as socio-economic agents for these changes) obscures the actual historical practices of greenhouse gassing over time, which have unfolded complexly in various mid-range planes within many different technical assemblages. Consequently, Anthropocenic analyses typically lay full blame on contemporary individuals for the accrued emission records of all humanity for centuries (Vince, 2014).
And, third, the teleological qualities of the unsustainable world of rapid climate change foretold in Anthropocene thought, as the things to come in the not-too-distant future, are spun to legitimize emergency actions today (Galaz, 2014). Since humanity cannot avoid or adapt to these changes, such writs of emergency often are twisted to justify who can and should manage these pressing titanic changes to safeguard ‘The Future’. Furthermore, it implies that the lack of collective foresight in the past by the democratic masses at large makes leadership by expert elites in today’s dire circumstances more imperative (Gore, 2013). To ask if the project of constructing a new social theory based upon this peculiar geophysical history is worthwhile, more or less, is moot. The converts to the Anthropocene project already answer this question affirmatively (Sachs, 2008).
The Anthropocene thesis for social theory, then, is being refashioned into a fresh historical narrative. To the extent science can document it, humanity is a collective subject. It seeks to exploit more energy to gain material progress, and the quest is self-destructive (McNeill, 2001; Connolly, 2013). This narrative, however, is somewhat anachronistic (Fukuyama, 1992). Indeed, it is one more Occidental vision of world hegemony in a largely westernized, technoscientific discourse for those seeking to maintain, or reassert, the technological, political, economic, and cultural hegemony of the West. Allegedly it is the only way planetary stewardship can be maintained for the good of ‘The West’ both against, and for, ‘The Rest’.
As a foundation for social theory, the thesis of the Anthropocene also justifies steering not only human, but also nonhuman, history on the scale of deep geological time (Žižek, 2010: 315–52). By accepting the world historical attainments of human sociotechnical achievement, in part, through celebrating the remarkable sophistication in human technology’s planned products (Virilio, 1995), the social theories of the Anthropocene stress a different universalizing turn. They now ask for human history to be gauged by the unanticipated consequences flowing from unintended and unwanted by-products (Scranton, 2015) of the urban-industrial and agro-industrial products.
Rather than marking social theory with signs of rational perfection being fulfilled, the Anthropocene thesis focuses upon planetary changes caused by humanity’s unanticipated irrational imperfections as measured by civilization-endangering disruptions of the planet’s air, water, soil, and biota on Earth’s climate (Easterling, 2014). As the planetary infrastructuralization of the Earth recast its workings around urbanaturalized ecologies and ecologies (Luke, 2010), this new dialectic of enlightenment discloses development as disaster.
Moral effects of the arts and sciences = the Anthropocene
Like earlier concepts, ranging from ‘Progress’, ‘Improvement’ or ‘Evolution’ to ‘Development’, ‘Growth’ or ‘Modernization’ (Ekbladh, 2010), the ontofigurative punch of the Anthropocene has tremendous framing capacity: it is an all-purpose noun, verb, and adjective not unlike these other legacy concepts that once commanded equal attention as decisive teleological maps for social change over time. In the footsteps of Social Darwinists, Progressivism, Sociological Positivists or Modernizationism, Anthropocenarians boldly assert today that human beings will only go where no man, woman, animal, mechanism or other actant has gone before, namely, into their Anthropocenarios.
Connolly claims: While capitalism, neoliberalism, communism, secularism, socialism, Christianity, social democracy, humanism, posthumanism, and Judaism were contending unevenly with each other over the type of future to build, they were facing headlong toward the destiny of the Anthropocene. By ‘destiny’ I do not mean that which was foreordained: I mean the overarching trajectory toward which conflicting parties may blindly tend, even as minor voices inside several camps protest against it. (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 265)
The epistemic drivers within his perspective are familiar terms, springing from the crises in European science that erupted over a century ago with complexity theory, gestalt psychology, phenomenological psychology, high-energy physics or ethical vitalism. Speaking as a political theorist, but in a humanist underworker’s quasi-scientific positivist lingo that reverberates with 1915 as much as 2015, Connolly maintains ‘what we need today is a conception of multiple, interacting force-fields’ (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 264). As Macdonald summarizes Connolly’s perspectives, Anthropocene thought is ‘an awareness of the divergent force-fields and modes of autopoiesis swirl between the human and non-human estates, social systems and ecosystems’ (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 265).
The epistemic drivers within his perspective are familiar terms, springing from the crise in European science that erupted over a century ago with complexity theory, gestalt psychology, phenomenological psychology, high-energy physics or ethical vitalism. Speaking as a political theorist, but in a humanist underworker’s quasi-scientific positivist lingo that reverberates with 1915 as much as 2015, Connolly maintains ‘what we need today is a conception of multiple, interacting force-fields’ (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 264). As Macdonald summarizes Connolly’s perspectives, Anthropocene thought is ‘an awareness of the divergent force-fields and modes of autopoiesis swirl between the human and non-human estates, social systems and ecosystems’ (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 265).
Even though Anthropocene-leaning terminology was floating around in obscure natural science literatures in the 1980s, Jameson slipped when he did not add ‘the Anthropocene’ as an exclamation point for his analysis of modernity in The Postmodern Condition. That is, when he asserts, ‘postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good’ (Jameson, 1991: x), Connolly and other theorists presumptuously imply Jameson might have concluded what you actually have is ‘The Anthropocene’.
Once this insight is accepted, ‘The Anthropocene’ concept becomes the ideal permit for much more human intervention in the environment. Nature is gone for good inasmuch as modernization processes continue to bury it in toxic exhaust, plastic waste, and commodified detritus. It is these haphazard, unplanned vernacular qualities of anthropogenic economic change over the last 250 years that are problematic (Brown and Timmerman, 2015).
On the one hand, the autochthonous determinacy once attributed to nature is lost in a swirl of open-ended machinic autopoeisis whose final outcomes are yet to be identified. Yet, on the other hand, this reality makes it much easier to justify dropping whatever lingering constraints humanity may have held against designing a future of intentional collective artifice to mitigate the past and present disasters of human technology (Connolly, 2011). The ‘coming of the Anthropocene’ calls for geoengineering that is rational, planned, and expert by design (Luke, 2009). Fukuyama’s (2002) biotechnological ‘our posthuman future’, Dressler’s (2013) nanotechnological visions of ‘radical abundance’, Kurzweil’s pure faith in a cybernetic ‘coming singularity’ (2005) or McDonough and Braungart’s (2013) truly geomorphic leap to ‘upcycling’ past mere sustainability all then become more legitimate cyborganic, machinic, nanotechnic, and biotechnic spikes in the planet’s biophysical composition. As Schellenberger and Nordhaus (2011) argue, it is time for all humans ‘to love your monsters’ as the new ‘postenvironmentalism’ of the Anthropocene.
For Connolly, the ontofigurative capacity of the Anthropocene thesis also brings out an unruly political spontaneism, which will not be merely traditional micropolitics in a new register. Rather, it must become a new pragmatism for concentrating a planetarian power that ‘does not aim at a pure regime of freedom, or communalism, or market individualism as it seeks to link ecological and egalitarian pursuits together. The Anthropocene drowns purity’ (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 266). As the sociocentrism of pre-Anthropocenarian thought sinks into the depths, Connolly sees the Anthropocene as a decisively significant ‘strategic idea’ in which the goal is to move through accentuation of attachment to the sweetness of life in an unruly world, to a variety of role experimentations that make a cumulative difference to the Anthropocene on their own, to more active participation in social movements, to renewed pressures on electoral politics, to a cross-country general strike that poses a series of stringent interim demands to states, corporations, churches, universities, international organizations, banks, consumers, and the like. Each of these modes of activity, once activated, feeds into, enables, and augments the others. (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 267)
This fatalistic, if not, pietistic perspective on the ‘variety of nonhuman forces on the move that interact fatefully both with each other and a variety of human activities’ (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 265), seems innovative and reactionary at the same time. Even though such worlds are fraught by the fragility of things, it is unclear how Connolly’s thought is not a neo-environmental reductionism, albeit one with an environment brim-full of enchanted things, hyperobjects, and vibrant matter. Nonetheless, the tautological circle is stark: new environment conditions cause everything to condition the environment. Moreover, these synthetic surroundings eviscerate the possibilities for human agency, because inexorable fields of force determine both human and nonhuman action via uncanny co-evolution (Connolly, 2011).
The dismissal of sociocentrism in Connolly’s analysis at the same time ratifies anthropogenerative qualities as the central intellectual drivers of postsociocentric thinking. Rapid climate change, genetic engineering, widespread robotization, nanotechnological production, ubiquitous computing, and the network society are not truly autochthonous phenomena. In traditional social theory, human subjects pursued sociocentric ends as they concocted nonhuman objects to deploy as artifices for individual and collective human empowerment. Small circles of academic political theorists like ‘Arendtians’ or ‘dialectical materialists’ (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 264), may have ignored how ‘the agency of microbes, etc. enter into help to constitute, enable, and limit human modes of agency’ (Macdonald and Connolly, 2015: 266), but far more awareness of these ‘force-fields’ pervades other traditions of analysis, criticism, and scholarship than Anthropocenarians, like Connolly, assume (see Diamond, 1999; Weisman, 2008; Crawford, 2009; Oldstone, 2009; Zimmerman and Zimmerman, 2002).
In undermining the alleged sociocentrism in all prior modern social theory, one wonders if the advocates of the Anthropocene thesis only enshrine a new ‘ontocentrism’ to legitimize their ethical and political project. Arguably, a tautological teleology at the heart of this ontocentrism leaves ‘Humanity’ holding an empty bag. That is, everything causes everything. And, more troubling, it also accentuates their collective expectation that anything in every assemblage of all things can, and indeed will, cause anything that ultimately develops, leaving humans with few evaluative, operative or predictive rules to follow in their actions.
Anthropocentric social theory as misplacement
The Anthropocene, if this term is adopted to characterize today’s historical pivot point for social theory, is not only a question of how to deal with rampant biospheric degradation and hydrocarbon energy exploitation (Smil, 2013). It is also a question of what alternatives might come next as superior energy sources (Reed and Lister, 2014). The debates over choosing which ‘hard energy’ paths to take have been in play for at least 50 years, and direct opposition to fossil fuels has been mounting openly in civil society and the state in wealthy countries since the end of the Cold War. Debates, however, are not decisions, and the Anthropocene itself has come from this long string of non-decision-making, which has now supposedly become a decisive rupture in the Earth’s history.
History as concrete misplacements
The voices raised in favor of the Anthropocene thesis in too many contemporary discourses speak frequently at a high level of misplaced concreteness (Lynas, 2011; Vince, 2014). To an extent, Anthropocene advocates sustain a grand tradition of intellectual mystification in their analyses. ‘Man’ or the human being, who constitutes the ‘Anthropos’ is never made definitive, and so too is how ‘recent’ the time of this epochal ‘cene’, left very vague at the close of the Holocene (Roberts, 1998). Assuming what has yet to be ratified by scientific convention in official stratigraphic taxonomies as already granted in fact is a considerable drawback in these arguments, even though certain neo-greens and new environmentalists already took this rhetorical step years ago (Lemke, 2011). Granting this much concreteness to humanity without qualification is a fallacious-ridden course of interpretation.
Like the precise chronological relations of the Anthropocene to the Holocene in the larger Quaternary period of geological time, timing precisely when geological epochs open and close is not a simple matter. The existing conventions of geophysical chronological succession, historical location or conceptual development to date ‘the end’ of the Holocene are all still contested (Roberts, 1998). The Anthropocene, in particular, appears to constitute a plausible hypothesis only in relation to the rapid urbanization of human settlements, the spread of capitalism worldwide, the utilization of fossil fuels as energy sources, and the recent rate of these accelerating trends correlating with many trouble signs of rapid climate change (Zalaisewicz et al., 2010).
Amidst these complicated clusters of misplaced concreteness, the Anthropocene thesis has become – in turn, at the hands of its over-enthusiastic and uncritical proponents – a severe misplacement of simple reified concepts to tally up all the extremely complex challenges facing human economies and societies. With a typical anthropocentrism that mars most modern accounts of human ethical improvements or failures, the Anthropocene thesis silently serves as another perfect modernist concept that thinks for itself in too many ethicists’ and environmentalists’ depictions of the present. With the soothing music of morality, triggered by ‘strong, ethics-driven reactions and a strong impulse of caring’, Anthropocenarian thinkers actually argue ‘the Anthropocene opens a doorway between supposedly dead matter and living matter … thus, the Anthropocene idea becomes the opposite of anthropocentrism’ (Schwägerl, 2014: xi).
The Pleistocene epoch, which lasted over two million years, was the geological epoch preceding the Holocene, or the ‘wholly recent’ age dating only 11,000 years to the close of the last Ice Age. While Anthropocenic developments might easily be included to span the ambit of the entire Holocene (Luke, 2015), an intense desire in historical time to reorder all understandings of geological time into the moments between the end of the Cold War and start of the War on Terror gained greater force with the Anthropocene hypothesis, which hitherto had been more gingerly advanced by geologists, biologists, and biochemists. Hiding in the place-holding terminology of ‘human-driven processes’, they, however, imprecisely and incompletely account for the origins of intensive urbanization, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, and climate change that are the key markers of the Anthropocene’s emergence.
Not all, and not even many, humans are driving these processes. Such crucial nuances, nonetheless, are lost in this urgent rush to judgment about the Anthropocene. Equally credible questions about who are the ‘processes-driving humans’ behind, beneath or beside these ‘human-driven processes’ are not asked very insightfully, if at all. To answer this question, one would have to more directly identify the key cadres of ‘process-driving humans’ who are in charge of such changes (Luke, 2015: 139–62).
Instead, one finds networks of other scholars leaning heavily upon the cloudy hybridities of ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2009), which can be leveraged to explain the advent of ‘the posthuman’ (Hayles, 1999) and ‘the new biology of machines’ (Kelly, 1995). Here processes, like digital networks or bioengineering technologies, are said to be driving humans to accept new individual and collective subjectivities that have truly posthuman qualities. This shift might be true for the super-powerful and rich 83 individuals at the top of global society who own as much wealth as the 3.5 billion people at the bottom of the world’s population. Yet, these other billions of people will be waiting for this posthumanity a long time, because not all humans are driving these processes, and those processes are not driving all humans to change (Smil, 2013) how they ‘harvest the biosphere’.
Nonetheless, these reifications now allow some social theorists to label today’s new bioengineered evolution, digital development or material innovation, without any irony whatsoever, as ‘the Anthropocene’ instead of the nascent designs of ‘Spaceship Earth’ (Höhler, 2015). From one perspective, a political ecology of things does spew out the toxic detrital wash of pollutants, contaminants, and other wastes that are endlessly accumulating in the geological strata of the Earth. From another perspective, however, posthumanist celebrations of the vital materiality behind cybernetics, electronics or informatics are simply another strain of the new posthistorical environmentalism that presumes such systems are and always will be the solution to their own inefficiencies (Gore, 2013).
Many material markers are being left in the Earth’s geophysical history from global anthropogenic changes, ranging from agriculture’s disruption of the pedosphere for many millennia to nuclear weapon tests’ isotope deposits since 1945 in the atmosphere, cryosphere, and hydrosphere. The systemic lock-in of greenhouse gases found with rapid climate change and fossil fuel consumption clearly is the major factor at play in gauging the Anthropocene’s effects. Attempts to engineer decarbonized energy technologies, return to low-carbon lifestyles or find no carbon energy infrastructures (McDonough and Braungart, 2013) are a growing necessity in the early twenty-first century. At this juncture, ‘Northern European societies are leaders in mitigating anthropogenic climate change’, using a mix of international mitigation and local adaptation strategies ‘without forgoing prosperity or generating unemployment’ or ‘reducing median standards of living’ (Murphy, 2014: 16, 17). Nonetheless, any benefits from such progress also accrue to these societies on the margin in situ while the rest of the planet ex situ and all its ecosystems continue to degrade on the whole (Luke, 2006).
History as analytical leveling
The resurrection of ‘species being’ in social theory during the Anthropocene prods Chakrabarty (2009: 22) to wonder about ‘a human collectivity, an us, pointing to the figure of the universal that escapes our capacity of experience the world’. In the same vein, Žižek speculates that thinking about humanity ‘as species, the universality of humankind falls back into the particularity of an animal species: phenomena like global warming make us aware that with all the universality of our theoretical and practical activity, we are at a certain basic level just another living species on the planet Earth’ (2010: 332).
In one sense, such musings are banalities. Yet, on another level, such banal pronouncements blur cause and effect in politics. Who is ‘we?’ And, who are those environmental elite experts among this ‘us’ that escape enduring misery and enjoy some capacity to experience the world as the almighty power of humanity (Luke, 1999)? Human beings are just one of the Earth’s living species inhabiting the planet, but most humans still see humanity as the crown of creation. Moreover, the social theory spinning around greenhouse gassing as the ultimate perfection of human species being overlooks the handful of specific human beings who consume fossil fuels and produce greenhouse gases in ‘human-driven processes’ of climate change. Behind the Anthropocenarian science, too many social thinkers mistake the control given to a few, powerful, and rich ‘decision-makers’ in global ‘process driving’ as natural imbalances that all others without decision-making authority have forced upon them by the inertial forces of innovation (Luke, 2015).
Systems of immense unequal exchange shape the collective choices organized by individual players whose pay-offs always outweigh those of much of humanity. Their actions are not identical to a conscious campaign to direct the species-being of humanity, but blaming human species-being in these renewed global histories of excessive greenhouse gassing marvelously mystifies the moves of a few people who accrue great material gain for themelves by blaming all human beings as ‘the we’ responsible for rapid climate change in the Anthropocene.
Another concrete misplacement in Anthropocene criticism is the levels of analysis confusions expressed by the open embrace of reification as a new ontology. Some suggest the spatiality, speed or scale of modernity have far surpassed human direction by becoming posthuman reality as such. Therefore, ‘the subject of the Anthropocene is not the human species but modern terraforming assemblages’ (Woods, 2014: 138). The anthropological universals underpinning established notions of history also are dismissed, because the objective technics of industrial technologies, global exchange, and their unanticipated negative effects allegedly are morphing into ‘hyperobjects’ with spatial properties, scalar complexities, and speed levels that humans can no longer understand or control (Morton, 2013). Allegedly unable to comprehend these social formations in sociocentric terms, critics turn to Deleuzean disquisitions with ‘assemblage theories’ that describe ‘large-scale, horizontal patterns of relations among ontologically different entities’ for a fresh accounting for ‘humanity as a geophysical force’ behind the Anthropocene (Woods, 2014: 139). In other words, speed itself is ‘what is’, and acceleration becomes the decisive new ontofiguration with irresistible allure for Anthropocenarian thinkers.
Such pataphysical speculation (Bök, 2002) is considered both an anti-anthropocentric critique and a post-historical chronicle of anthropogenic universalism. Bennett, for example, looks to the material vibrations in a political ecology of things to apprehend the ‘agency of the assemblage’ (2009: 23). Yet, this move also mis-specifies ‘the assemblies of agents’ on a macro scale, as one might see in sociology, management, economics or communication, kicked up a notch as a black-boxed assemblage with agency that simply by definition causes any or all of the agents assembled on micro-levels within it to act. Networks of men and machines, people and animals, women and workplaces, plants and things simply are re-labeled as ‘assemblages such as the oil industry and corn cultivation, big data, industrial beef and pork, or the fertilizer industry’ (Woods, 2014: 140), whose apparent properties explain their own flaws, trigger their own behaviors, and explain their own outcomes.
Mystified politics
The mystified technographies of the Anthropocene lead directly to the unrepentant managerialism of ‘postenvironmental movements’. These social forces, like the Long Now Foundation (www.longnow.org), the signatories to the Copenhagen Consensus (www.copenhagenconsensus.com), or the circles of New Environmentalism (http://the breakthrough.org), want to deploy Anthropocenic social theory, as it is unfolding now, as postenvironmental thought. They also dismiss ‘old greens’, who supposedly treasure ‘wilderness’ against ‘prosperity’ with legislation to police Nature in nature conservancies, natural restorations, and national parks. For these applied Anthropocenarians, old-wave conservation belongs on the ash heap of history.
Long Now Foundation supporters or Breakthrough Institute technocrats tout how the Anthropocene can fulfill humanity’s already proven technoscientific innovations to sustainably develop their up-market green capitalist plans and justify their aspirations for refitting legacy electric utilities, housing designs, and transport systems. Since the Earth now is basking in the sunny prospects of the Anthropocene, these would-be envirocrats aim to manage the biosphere in the most secure, sustainable, and resilient fashion they can enforce (Luke, 2006).
If these mystifications are made concrete and particular, then the specificity identified is typically simple arithmetic per capita calculi extracted from mathematically-leveling ecological footprint calculators. Schwägerl, for example, adopts a Friedmanite notion of democracy in which buying equals voting, that is at best only true by half. That is: consumption behavior already functions something like a continuous Anthropocene democracy. Every day, in millions of shops around the world, a real-time referendum takes place on the Earth of the future. The Anthropocene is the sum of the collective actions of seven, eight, nine or ten billion individuals. (2014: 197)
As the policy papers of the Breakthrough Institute’s network of experts often suggest, ‘development’ still ‘grips the humanitarian imagination’ and the aspiration ‘to improve the conditions of people seen to be in need still moves many worldwide’ (Ekbladh, 2010: 273). Schwägerl’s celebration of the Anthropocene as an ethico-political project coupled with Connolly’s celebration of its multi-dimensional mobilizing capacity are excellent detours around the wreckage caused by earlier modernization and development initiatives during the twentieth century. From the Marshall Plan through contemporary efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘planning remains discredited, the state is viewed with suspicion, various practices continue to attract criticism, and the voices involved in the debate often advocate divergent approaches’ (Ekbladh, 2010: 272).
To implement an effective morality for today’s upscaling sustainable development, Anthropocenarian reasoning is morphing into crucial ideological cladding for today’s contemporary corporate commonwealth (Sachs, 2008). Both sustainability and development have become ‘indispensable to the organs of global politics, be they nation-states, movements, NGOs or international institutions. All are expected by the international public to assure that their visions will somehow improve conditions for those who receive’ (Ekbladh, 2010: 273). Amidst these assemblies of agents, the developmentalist Anthropocenarios of New Earth System Sciences sever policy ties to ‘old greens’ and ‘failed environmentalists’ whose radical preservationism and/or high-tech Green Revolution policies no longer fly as successfully as they once did. At this juncture, the many imperatives of the Anthropocene’s ontofigurative policy frames easily serve as ‘a compelling means to demonstrate the validity of their agendas’ (Ekbladh, 2010: 273).
The Anthropocene thematic is, explicitly or implicitly, anti-environmentalist inasmuch as its twentieth-century proponents assume that ‘environmentalism has been mostly about reducing our interference with nature … hence the reflexive opposition to new technologies from splitting the atom to cloning cattle’ (Lynas, 2011: 10). If the very nature of the planet’s entire geophysical system is now, first, being inexorably transformed by human technological activities; and, second, these activities’ by-products are being layered into the Earth’s soils, waters, skies, and rocks as markers of a new geological epoch, then any attempts to limit human interference with nature are moot (MacKinnon, 2013). The anthropocentric impetus behind the Earth’s degradation, in fact, now justifies an Anthropocenic writ of managerial responsibility. That is, ‘the truth of the Anthropocene is that the Earth is far out of balance, and we must help it regain the stability it needs to function as a self-regulating, highly dynamic, and complex system. It cannot do it alone’ (Lynas, 2011: 10).
Fortuitously, for such Anthropocenarian theorists, there is an emerging consensus that purposive human administration is required to make the Earth’s complex, highly dynamic, self-regulating systems operate robustly, since the planet cannot do it alone. Other self-regulating processes will configure the equilibria of the market places that are degrading the environment, but now ‘We’ – an ineffable and undisclosed collective human subject – will serve as the hidden hand keeping the homeplace of these marketplaces on an even keel. To attain this goal, Lynas also concludes ‘we cannot afford to foreclose powerful technological options like nuclear, synthetic biology, and GE [genetic engineering] because of Luddite prejudice and ideological inertia’ (2011: 11).
In too many ways, a neo-Victorian faith in technological development now nests comfortably in the Anthropocene thesis, and its voyages extraordinaires about vibrant matter, posthuman being, an ecology without nature, and fragile things stand ready to bless whatever new technological innovations arise from its Neo-Promethean myths. The Anthropocene in social theory can ideologically institutionalize anthropocentrism as a new foundational principle, making the Anthropocene into the Anthropocentricene as ‘We’, ‘Us’, or ‘Humanity’ answers the key question: can this collective subject ‘manage the planet – and itself – toward this transition to sustainability?’ (Lynas, 2011: 243). With the ontofigurative sensibilities of anthropocenic consciousness, the answer is made assuredly positive.
A generation ago in the hands of Earth First!, deep ecology extolled the virtues of ‘Back to the Pleistocene’ (Lee, 1995: 180) in its political program for environmental resistance to industrialism by looking to that earlier prehistoric era (Shepard, 1996). Anthropocenarian social theory capitulates to the infrastructuralization of the planet as the new materialists celebrate egalitarian materiality of all things whether ‘artificial’ or ‘natural’. Resistance is futile, and the future will not ever be anything like going back to Pleistocene. Instead, for Anthropocenarianism, ‘Humanity’ as the world changer with all its negative geological impacts ‘decides to wisely integrate into the planet’s workings, enriching itself by its actions as a result. Smart cities, cultivated life forms and landscapes with human-induced biodiversity, are examples of how we can create a positive geological record’ (Schwägerl, 2014: xii). Global eco-managerialism now has another mantra, and ‘Advance to the Anthropocene’ is the perfect ideological pitch for its planetarian vanguard. And, at this juncture, social theory must critically consider how far it wants to reconstruct its discourses around this dangerous political vision of geomorphic thought and practice.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
A longer version of this analysis was presented at the annual meeting of the International Social Theory Consortium, Cambridge University, Cambridge, June 16–19, 2015. It draws upon my earlier research in Telos 172 (2015) and New Geographies 06 (2014).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.