Human,all too human ? Anthropocene narratives,posthumanisms,and the problem of “post-anthropocentrism”

Introduction: Narratives, climate crisis, and anthropocene narratives

Narrative plays a key role in collective crisis. It helps to make sense of the crisis and informs short- and long-term political response. Narrative informs how social actors and political participants apprehend, comprehend, and engage with one another: creating expectations, constructing meaning, organizing the plot, and framing the crisis (Miskimmon et al., 2013: 248–249). Narratives frame the past, present, and what should be in the future. They are normative, conveying desire for specific outcomes, policies, and practices (Wertsch, 2000). Furthermore, they are deployed to create and identify crisis (Hay, 1996). Crises can be defined by both exogenous shock and “lived experience mediated through language and cognition” (Voltolini et al., 2020: 615). Narratives can be used to support policy changes related to security challenges, while preserving institutional and ontological security. The construction of crisis and crisis-narratives inform actors’ roles, interactions, and range of responses. Institutions construct the setting, determine the characters’ roles (e.g. the “hero” and “villain”), and extract meaning to create counter-narratives coordinated in response to dominant narratives (Schmidt, 2008). Some conditions sustain multiple competing narratives that inform policy responses (Hay, 2016). Specific features of narrative elements support some actors and constrain others, shaping conflicts, and establishing “dominant” narratives. Crisis construction involves not only discursive contestation, but also legitimizes or delegitimizes states’ actions among the electorate.

The “Anthropocene” is a crisis of global proportions. The “Anthropocene” serves as the basis for competing narratives regarding environmental and humanitarian crises. As Domingues (2021) argues, the “imaginary of climate change” is integral to how political actors respond to this crisis. For example, climate change policy at the UN and IPCC seeks to “depoliticize” the debate in favor of expertise, neutrality, and “consensual knowledge.” The depoliticization of climate change instills a normative, “dominant” narrative that limits institutional ability to act: “[the IPCC] operates within a set of constraints that define its leeway when it comes to assessments, [. . .] At the same time, the IPCC has to be careful so as to maintain its credibility as a scientific body” (Domingues, 2021). While attention has been paid to the rhetoric of “neutrality” as an “a-political” response to the crisis, more attention is required regarding the role of “human” and “nature” in “Anthropocene” narratives. The dominant, technocratic narrative of the Anthropocene is strongly humanistic and anthropocentric, emphasizing notions of human control over nature. This is ironic: the very humanism responsible for the crisis of the “Anthropocene” is also taken as the means of salvation from ecological and geological destruction. Given humanism’s failure, scholars in the critical humanities and social sciences have offered several alternative counter-narratives that claim to be “eco-centric” rather than “anthropocentric,” promoting “posthumanism” rather than “humanism.” These counter-narratives attest to the need to respond to “human-centric” and “anthropocentric” narratives of the “Anthropocene”: to pose the “post-anthropocentric” as an alternative to the “anthropocentric” and the conditions of “humanism” that helped produce the “Anthropocene.” In attempting to overcome the “anthropocentric” assumptions of dominant, humanistic narratives, these counter-narratives aim to combat the failures of humanism and produce stronger policy response by conceptualizing non-human values and intelligence. Nevertheless, despite attempts to narrate alternative renderings of the “Anthropocene,” these counter-narratives continue to retain some degree of anthropocentrism, however weak.

This article speculates on the potential of veritable “non-anthropocentric” and “post-anthropocentric” counter-narratives. The concept of the “human,” “humanity,” and “human nature” remain under-theorized in debates about the Anthropocene (Chernilo, 2017). As Anthropocene narratives are shaped through discursive interventions, scholarly debates on the Anthropocene would be enriched by problematizing human-centric positions, challenging human/non-human binaries, and confronting questions of whether non-human intelligences can be conceptualized in terms other than humanistic. Given that the “Anthropocene” names the impact of human “control” on the geological timescale, it is worth questioning whether the same mechanism of control provides a solution. “Post-anthropocentrism” names narrative attempts at moving beyond the centrality of humanist control: to think through more plastic and diverse narratives while reducing the impact of humanity. This requires further experimentation with the Anthropocene Narrative (Reddick and Caracciolo, 2022).

The aim of this paper is to both problematize current calls for a “post-anthropocentrism” from the alter- and post-humanities, while offering a starting point for such experimentation toward a veritable “post-anthropocentrism.” Positions appealing to human intention repeat the dominating violence of its onto-epistemological design: introducing divisions of “human” and “non-human” along gendered and racial lines. Attempts at overcoming this violence while maintaining the same onto-epistemic presumptions of representation miss the forest for the trees: maintaining the structural tendencies of humanistic violence while trying to overcome the symptoms of that same violence. Noting the difficulty and irony of critiquing human intention and rationality through the powers of rational argument, this article nevertheless strives toward a speculative account of “post-anthropocentrism” through the offerings of “disconnection” and “human abolition.” Understanding our human, all too human, position, these models offer the means toward experimentation rather than ends: an attempt to grapple with the dominating and hierarchizing tendencies of human intention and rationality. To this, we speculate on the question: What conditions are necessary for a non-intentional, non-anthropocentric narrative of the “Anthropocene”? Such speculations—even when limited by the capacities of human thought and the dominant episteme—are necessary for theorizing beyond the limits of humanist violence and destruction.

To begin, we outline the dominant narrative of policy response, or standard “Anthropocene” narrative, which adopts a position of “strong anthropocentrism.” “Strong anthropocentrism” treats humanity as the transcendental actor of the “Anthropocene.” The “human” is granted ontological and epistemological dominance and control over “nature.” Second, we examine “eco-centric,” “alter-humanist,” and “connectivism” or “post-humanist” counter-narratives. Where dominant narratives offer human control and domination, qua “strong anthropocentrism,” these counter-narratives are examples of a “weak anthropocentrism.” The “human” is no longer taken as the singular nexus of value or domination, but instead as an equitable partner (eco-centrism) or an entangled and connected part (post-humanism) of a greater whole. Despite their important and necessary critiques of “strong anthropocentrism,” these counter-narratives tend to retain anthropocentric tendencies by providing a special place for humanity, which remains susceptible to human-centric assumptions. Finally, we re-iterate the challenge of conceptualizing “non-anthropocentrism” and explore contemporary queer and decolonial proposals for not just demoting but abolishing conceptual reliance on the human/non-human dyad.

Strong Anthropocentrism: The standard Anthropocene narrative

Paul J. Crutzen coined the term “Anthropocene” as a “human-dominated, geological epoch, supplanting the Holocene” (Crutzen, 2002: 23). Crutzen’s formulation argues for the need to “guide society toward environmentally sustainable management” (Crutzen, 2002: 23). The “Anthropocene” concretizes the anthropos—a term etymologically derived from “man” or “human” in ancient Greek—within geological time (Zalasiewicz et al., 2008: 4). Earth science discussions of the Anthropocene promote humanistic attempts to “manage,” “engineer,” or “guide” the geological timescale, with humans “optimizing” climate change toward “sustainable ends” (rhetoric of this sort can be seen, for instance, in Crutzen, 2002, 2006; Ehlers and Krafft, 2006; Klepper, 2006; Lochte, 2006). Humanistic narratives mediate human science and geoscience as “geo-social narratives” (Bohle and Marone, 2021: 2). “Geo-social narratives” take the approach of an “ecological humanism” that centers humanity as the geological moral agent (Peppoloni and Di Capua, 2021: 20). Humanistic narratives center the influence of human actions on the regular patterns of biospheric change. Humans or humanity transcend their animal roots through the intellection and the instrumentalization of non-human others. This is the basis of the human (person)/non-human (thing) dyad: an “aporia” or dichotomy of ecological thought (Tynan, 2022).

“Anthropocentrism” is a discernable feature of the standard and dominant Anthropocene narrative. “Anthropocentrism” assumes human volition: the idea that humans are intentional beings who, through a series of intended and unintended actions produce effects that transform the bedrock of the planet. This humanist Anthropocene narrative is undergirded by specific (and often latent) assumptions about the “nature” of human beings, which are used to legally pronounce humans as moral and political agents, while relegating non-humans to a lesser, instrumental status. Anthropocentric narratives prioritize human capacities for reason, autonomy, impartiality, and universality, using these capacities to justify the mastery, stewardship, and management of non-humans who lack them. Human superiority is deeply embedded in Western thought, prioritizing rationality at non-human expense (Biswas Mellamphy, 2021). Narratives centering humanity as ethically conscious individuals that technologically transform the non-human world for the benefit of humanity remain a dominant position that is rarely challenged.

Human-centrism, including human control over “nature,” endures in the standard “Anthropocene” narrative. The “Anthropocene” shares its root, anthropos, with “anthropocentrism” (Ferrando, 2019). Helen Kopnina defines “anthropocentrism” as a “worldview that privileges the aim of improving human welfare over other aspirations” (Kopnina, 2019: 1). “Anthropocentrism” maintains undertheorized assumptions. Some distinguish “humanism” from “anthropocentrism”: the former offers an anthropological distinction between human and non-human while the latter valorizes the difference, granting humanity a special status (Roden, 2014). Kopnina analyzes Tim Hayward’s distinction between a “strong” and “weak” anthropocentrism to trouble this position. “Weak anthropocentrism,” as a “love of one’s own species” (Kopnina, 2019: 2), promotes health, welfare, and human prosperity. In contrast, “strong anthropocentrism” prioritizes humanity at the expense of other species and is often aligned with “human chauvinism” and “speciesism.” Hayward, for instance, argues that speciesism and human chauvinism are a greater issue than humanism or anthropocentrism, writing “The bottom line for the human chauvinist is that being human is a necessary and sufficient condition of moral concern” (Hayward cited in Kopnina et al., 2018: 112). Kopnina et al. (2018) are critical of Hayward’s distinction between a strong and weak anthropocentrism, arguing that speciesism and human chauvinism are both necessary conditions of anthropocentrism as a form of “human supremacy” (p. 114). They maintain that anthropocentrism should be understood as distinct from “ecocentrism” or “biocentrism” where value is no longer solely in the purview of humanity. In contradistinction to anthropocentrism, a “holistic approach leads to realization that both biocentric and ecocentric values make the conservation of the species-variety of the planet (and its genetic diversity) of paramount importance” (Kopnina et al., 2018: 115).

The “Anthropocene” tends to reinforce rather than challenge anthropocentrism, reaffirming the centrality of humanity while subordinating and instrumentalizing non-humans. This standard and dominant ’Anthropocene’ narrative is strongly anthropocentric, maintaining human intention as determining the process. The emphasis on humans “guiding,” “managing,” and “controlling” carbon and the climate retains underlying assumptions about humanity. “Anthropocentrism” raises conceptual problems, with scholarship divided on how to engage the relationship between “humans,” “non-humans,” the “more-than-human,” and “other than human,” including the categorical distinction of “nature,” “culture,” and “cultivation” (for just a few examples, see Alaimo, 2010; Biswas Mellamphy, 2021; Haraway, 2016; Plumwood, 1993; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Willett, 2014). Although arguments, opinions, and agendas vary, debates about “ethical frameworks” have prioritized human-centered epistemologies that conceptualize humanity as endowed with agency and in control of broader relations (see Ehlers and Krafft, 2006; for critique, Baskin, 2019).

Weak anthropocentrism I: Eco-centric approaches and alter-humanist narratives

Despite strong anthropocentrism’s prevalence as the dominant narrative, many scholars have attempted to push back against humanism and human-centrism by constructing counter-narratives to the Anthropocene crisis. Political scholarship has shifted from standard anthropocentric narratives toward “holistic” and “eco-centric” narratives. While by no means homogenous, these Anthropocene counter-narratives are conceptually linked through the refusal of the dominant order. These counter-narratives attempt to reframe the terms of the debate. Scholars in this domain are extremely critical of the dominant narrative for taking humans as separate, special, and superior. They criticize the standard narrative by “de-centering” strong renderings of the human. “De-centering” attempts to challenge certain aspects of the human/non-human dichotomy. For example, David Chandler’s attempt to distance his project from the “command and control” narratives of modernity offers three alternative modes of governance for the Anthropocene condition: “mapping, sensing, and hacking.” Each starts from the position that “the world is not here for [humans]” (Chandler, 2018: 213) to trouble standard humanistic approaches. Despite his critique of theoretical modes of inquiry, Chandler’s conclusion maintains the aim of “newness,” emphasizing “the task of revitalizing a new critical approach to ontopolitics [that] has never been more urgent” (Chandler, 2018: 216). While Chandler is critical of the rhetoric of “possibility,” others are less so, often championing a “newness” grounded in the “possibilities” awakened in the Anthropocene. Ecologically oriented political theorists challenge standard assumptions regarding the role of politics as an institution unique to human interests and presuppositions, justifying humanistic positions of unrestrained power over nature (Krause, 2016). These Anthropocene counter-narratives offer reparative positions that “de-center” the human and move toward “eco-centric” possibilities. Grove (2019), for instance, claims an inspiration in the “possibilities for worlds that can fight back against the Eurocene” (p. xiii), writing to “sketch out what possibilities I think might exist in the terrain of the apocalypse” (p. 229).

Ferdinand (2022) offers a de-colonial counter-narrative, arguing that the dominant narrative reinforces histories of colonialism and imperialism (p. 21). He suggests that the Anthropocene registers a “colonial oikos” (a colonial home) for wealthy, White populations and nation-states (Ferdinand, 2022: 124). Like other counter-narratives, Ferdinand emphasizes that the technocratic ideals that gave rise to the Anthropocene are simultaneously taken as the means for emancipation from its destructive tendencies. These positions have been increasingly damaging to Indigenous populations. For example, in Haiti peasants have been driven off their land due to environmentally focused, idealistic notions of reforestation: an “act of driving out peasants [for an] idyllic image of the forest” (Ferdinand, 2022: 91). The poor become the scapegoat of and must pay the price for the Anthropocene. In contrast to this dominant narrative, Ferdinand offers a decolonial counter-narrative that must attempt “to hold antislavery, anticolonialism, and environmentalism together” (Ferdinand, 2022: 128).

Alter-humanist counter-narratives often pose an alternative to “anthropocentrism” in the form of “eco-centrism” with an emphasis on care, repair, and relationality (what Ferdinand terms “inhabiting-with”). These narratives oppose and openly contest the dominant narratives’ human-centric approach to the issue of the Anthropocene. Humanity is no longer envisioned as separate from nature, but active, engaged, and sometimes even “entangled,” with its environment, milieu, or ecology. Humans are understood as both generated from their environmental and geological conditions while simultaneously impacting those conditions. This, proponents suggest, opens to “new relations” and “new possibilities” that claim an “open future.” These “politics of openness” often narratively frame the Anthropocene as the condition of newness offered by the eco-centric emphasis. Politics of openness refuse the dominant standard Anthropocene narrative by changing the relationship of the human/nature dyad from one of domination to one of equality: where humans and non-humans are taken as equals.

As constructed in alter-humanist counter-narratives, holism and eco-centrism are not clearly distinct from anthropocentrism. Despite a shift in valuation (from domination to equality) it is not clear that “eco-centrism” produces a view of the human that is “distinct from a transcendental consciousness” (Braidotti, 2019). As Francesco Ferrando notes, a “post-anthropocentric paradigm shift” (Ferrando, 2019: 105) would require not only a shift in valuation, but also a shift in the concept of the human body and rationality. “Post-anthropocentrism” requires ontological reformulations that go beyond equitable ethics: it is not enough to value “non-humans” in a capacity that is equal to human life. Post-anthropocentrism requires a shift in the entire form of valuation, not merely in the concepts under evaluation. “Eco-centrism” and the associated counter-narratives of alter-human openness still rests on human notions of “nature” and “culture” that align the “natural” with the “ecological” and “eco-centric.” “Eco-” and “bio-centric” positions remain rooted in a concept of bios and anthropos as decision maker. Humans remain the arbiter of value. As critical post-humanist, Rosi Braidotti, argues, “post-anthropocentrism” would require a turn toward something like “zoe-centrism,” where life processes, themselves, would be taken as arbiters of value (Braidotti, 2013: 60). The introduction of genuine, post-anthropocentric narratives would require a move toward a “post-dualism” that would no longer be bound to an ontological division of “human” and “nature.”

Alter-humanist counter-narratives and politics of openness (re-)center the human as nexus of value, while challenging Anthropocentrism. Some argue that it may be possible to achieve a humanist narrative that challenges standard human-centric axiology (Chernilo, 2017) by using approaches that either distinguish “good” and “bad” versions of the Anthropocene (Dalby, 2016), or that offer more ecologically driven (Bennett, 2010) and “entangled” versions of humanity (Connolly, 2013). Proponents of the former attempt to “use humanity’s powers in service of creating a good Anthropocene [that aims. . .] to shift the human enterprise toward a sustainable relationship with, and within, the earth system” (McPhearson et al., 2021). These counter-narratives pursue “resilience” and “sustainability” driven by humanistic oversight. For instance, political theorist William Connolly suggests the exploration of inter-active human-non-human systems to provide a richer and more thorough understanding of the “volatile ecology of later modern capitalism and the contemporary fragility of things” (Connolly, 2013: 26). Connolly’s position, despite being a counter-narrative to the dominant form of humanism, retains a humanist bent, with a maintained goal “to curtail climate change, to reduce inequality, and to instill a vibrant pluralist spirituality into democratic machines” (Connolly, 2013: 195). Following the work of Bruno Latour, others pose an ontological flatness that might open to a more “sympathetic imagination” of co-species democratic intermingling (Conty, 2022). The third thesis of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History’ moves in an alter-humanist direction as well. Chakrabarty (2009) reflects on the pitfalls of species thinking by introducing questions of essentialism, quasi-Hegelian teleology, and (above all) an “all-inclusive” “blame for the current crisis [when it] should be squarely laid at the door of the rich nations” (Chakrabarty, 2009: 216). However, Chakrabarty ends up endorsing species thinking as a necessary historical project, suggesting that “The crisis of climate change calls for thinking simultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capitalism and species history” (Chakrabarty, 2009: 220).

Alter-humanist counter-narratives, which provide eco-centric alternatives to the dominant narrative, do not eliminate a reliance on anthropocentrism, but produce a weakened reliance. Despite Kopnina’s critique of the term, “weak anthropocentrism” remains a useful way of designating these positions. We maintain that the relation of “human” and “non-human” consists in an operative distinction between “strong” and “weak” (by associating “human” with “strong” and thereby catalyzing the human-centered master model i.e. a defining feature of dialectical philosophy since the ancient Greeks). Unlike Hayward, who posits a normative distinction, we are positing an operative function to the normative distinction such that the relation between “strong” and “weak” is analogous to that of “human” and “non-human.” Here, “strong anthropocentrism” retains the division between human and non-human where humanity is the sole provider of value, as in the standard Anthropocene narrative. This category is inclusive not only of aims of humanistic success, but also scientists who push toward “guiding,” “managing,” and “engineering” the Anthropocene toward equitable and sustainable ends (for either the planet or humanity). Even altruistic anthropocentrism remains strongly anthropocentric as far as they posit the human as the intentional conductor of the geological timescale. The human maintains a position that is separate, special, and superior; granting humanity the mandate to preside, command, and control all others (whether altruistic or tyrannical).

The prevailing dominant narrative of the “Anthropocene” assumes a humanistic version of the “human” who is portrayed as the creator of culture and technology, the bearer of right and responsibility, and the cultivator of civilizations that make use of “non-humans” and other humans. In contrast, “weak anthropocentrism” posits a more interactive human. Humanity is no longer granted a special role within the ecological “web,” but is instead one among many actors. Alter-humanist narratives, often driven by a necessary commitment to anti-coloniality and Indigeneity, provide an important contribution toward recognizing “more-than-human” agencies and “pluralist frameworks” (Bignall, 2022) and can serve as a bridge toward counter-narratives from “non-anthropocentric positions” (Frigo and Ifanger, 2021). Nevertheless, taken on their own, alter-humanist counter-narratives remain centered on the human as logos of weak anthropocentrism, as far as the human is the locus of eco-centric axiology.

Weak Anthropocentrism II: Post-humanist narratives

“Post-humanism” provides a compelling theoretical basis for questioning humanistic narratives and reimagining alternative ethical constructs beyond not only dominant human-centric “Anthropocene” narratives but alter-humanistic counter-narratives as well. It is important to demarcate “post-humanism” from “post-anthropocentrism,” noting that “The former is concerned, above all, with ‘the critique of the Humanistic ideal of ‘Man’ as the alleged universal measure of all things.’ The latter takes issue with the modern doxa of ‘species hierarchy and anthropocentric exceptionalism’” (Susen, 2022). These positions combine a critique of “speciesism,” a focus on de-prioritizing human centrism and atomism, and an attempt to replace the view that humans are separate and superior to other forms of life (Kopnina, 2019). Post-humanist narratives prioritize inter-species co-evolution and co-production on an ontological level. It goes a step beyond alter-humanist counter-narratives, not merely flattening the human/non-human dyad by treating the two sides as equal but taking the two sides of the dichotomy as a dyadic mixture through an ontology of connection or “connectivism.” Post-humanist interventions challenge the legitimacy of human-centric conceptual binaries, such as mind/body, human/animal, nature/culture, and rationality/emotion (to name only a few). Contemporary critical feminist post-humanism offers a basis for challenging the dominant humanistic Anthropocene narrative by naming the “entanglement” that emphasizes compatibilities between humans, non-human animals, and machines. Where humanist narratives promote humanity as a geo-epochal agent, post-humanist narratives follow alter-humanist attempts to “de-center” humanity as having “technical and ideological mastery over nature” (Engert and Schürkmann, 2021: 3).

The broad use of the term “post-humanism” holds promise for attempts to redefine humanity amidst onto-epistemic, scientific, and bio-technological developments (Ferrando, 2013: 26). Post-humanism has been depicted in at least three ways: “as a continuing critique of humanism that drops the starker anti-humanist overtones, as an anticipation of a future populated by enhanced or hybrid humans; and as an unsettling of boundaries between human, animal and machine” (Phillips, 2015: 111). From this third category, attempts to re-frame the Anthropocene narrative refuse the ontological separation of “human” and “nature” in favor of their mutual “entanglement.” Like Alter-humanists, scholars have examined the possibilities opened by the Anthropocene crisis: suggesting that Anthropogenic climate change might lead to possibilities of “entangled” human and “other-than” human natures within “inter-connected” assemblages termed “ecologies of repair” (Blanco-Wells, 2021). Ecologies of repair would reveal the socio-material togetherness that is generative beneath representational epistemologies. This form of “critical post-humanism”—one focusing on refusing boundaries between humans and non-humans (Wolfe, 2010)—sees reparative care ethics as foundational to post-human future that are necessary for any consideration of the future world (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Post-humanist repair is slightly different that alter-humanist theories of repair, with both repair and care being viewed as pragmatic, political practice determined by an already ongoing relation, rather than an imposition of an enlightened human upon nature (Cord, 2022).

Like alter-humanist narratives, post-humanist narratives provide a valuable critique of strong anthropocentrism that is grounded in modern, humanist narratives of domination and transcendence. Both emphasize “multi-species” or “interspecies” ethics that promote care for non-humans and ecological repair that is inclusive of more-than-human-worlds. However, unlike alter-humanist narratives, post-humanism centers an ontological “connection” in response to dominant, humanist narratives. While some alter-humanists promote concepts like entanglement, those entanglements remain the basis for what Connolly (2017: 168–174) terms an “entangled humanism.” Connolly’s concept certainly begins with the troubling of ontological separation, but it nevertheless maintains the priority of the human intellect to determine and evaluate the “entanglements” in which it exists. Post-humanism, on the contrary, attempts an ontological basis where the human is stripped of this meaning-making function. The respective “ecologies of repair” speak to this distinction: where alter-humanist repair focuses on a weakened form of human oversight, wherein the human is promoted as something akin to a “steward” of her entangled reality, post-humanist repair centers the processes of life itself as integrated care-giving processes. Rather than a form of weakened humanist oversight, connected life cycles constitute agents of repair, without the need for any humanist intervention (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Post-humanist “entanglement” goes beyond entanglement as a form of equitable inter-action between humans and non-humans, to instead consider an ontological “entanglement” where humans and non-humans are co-constituted through “intra-active” apparatuses (Barad, 2007). Connectivism occurs at the level of ontology and epistemology. In this sense, Entanglement is ontologically prior to the “individuals” that are taken as entangled: it is not that humans are entangled with bacteria, geological history, dogs, etc., but that “entanglement” is the simultaneous condition of humans, bacteria, geological history, dogs, etc. Care and repair are taken as integral to ontology, rather than as instituted by some altruistic, intentional, human actor.

While post-humanist counter-narratives are a crucial resource for providing alternative perspectives on the tensions between the politics of “de-centering” and “re-centering” concepts of the human, and their promotion of ontological connection provides a helpful distinction from alter-humanist perspectives, the proponents of “ethical post-humanism” tend to retain normative assumptions about humanity’s political capacity within connective ontologies that makes it difficult to distinguish post-humanist from alter-humanist narratives. Thus, despite strong ontological differences, post-humanism often remains weakly anthropocentric, failing to attain a position that is genuinely “post-anthropocentric” (Braidotti, 2013). While theorists may (and often do) attempt to “de-center” the human subject as object of axiology by stressing the need to adopt more holistic frameworks the human remains an integral component of these narratives. While notable, post-humanist narratives fail to de-couple and de-valorize human intentionality as steering political and ecological change. A veritable post-anthropocentrism requires a break from human intentionality and the figure of the human. Post-anthropocentrism requires a counter-narrative of human abolition.

“Connection” prevents post-humanism from being a post-anthropocentric counter-narrative because the connected human remains an integral component and decision-maker within the entangled, ecological web. This is because the “connected” refrain does not abolish the human/non-human dyad but maintains the duality through its mixture. Connection attempts to do away with essential distinction, refusing the human/non-human dichotomy by mixing it in a connected web. Yet, in prioritizing the mixture of human and non-human, these narratives offer connection as a new essence. In his critique of the “philosophies of difference,” Laruelle (2010) suggests that the mixture of difference returns to pre-Socratic forms of “canonical enunciation: Everything is (Water, Earth, Fire, etc.)” (p. 16). In subordinating being and nothingness to the position of difference, the “philosophies of difference” repeat the frame of aporetic essence that they aim to deny: making difference the transcendental condition of possibility while failing to account for its determinacy (Laruelle, 2010: 18–19). The result of this mixture is, according to Laruelle, an attempt to deny dyadic contradiction through “a mutual ‘intertwining’ of contraries” (Laruelle, 2010: 23). Where the “philosophies of difference” pronounce that “everything is difference,” post-humanist counter-narratives pronounce that “everything is connected.” While this strategy is effective in problematizing the human/non-human dyad, it is unsuccessful at renouncing the dyad completely. Instead, human and non-human remain forever bound in an aporetic knot that is consistently tied and untied in the transcendental unity of connection. If anything, this repeats a dialectical tendency: (humanist) human + (anti-humanist) non-human → (post-humanist) connection (Susen, 2022: 79). Insofar as humanity persists in the mixture, the emphasis on rationality and intentionality in human volition remains within the structure of connection. Mixture is not an escape from the dualistic positions of Western philosophy but remains thoroughly transcendental. While critical post-humanism critiques a transcendental subject, it maintains a transcendental framework regarding “post-human subjectivity” within connection (Susen, 2022: 78). Despite their strong and necessary critique of human-centric positions, post-humanist narratives are not post-anthropocentric. By tying together the human and non-human in a dialectical and transcendental mixture, critical post-humanisms think humanity with non-humanity. Per Susen’s equation, the mixture of humanity with non-humanity retains a Hegelian-dialectical formulation grounded in rationalized sublation: dialectical sublations remain insufficient for subverting the dichotomous formulation.

Non-Anthropocentrism: Post-anthropocentric narratives

“Post-anthropocentrism,” as articulated in the critical post-humanities, attempts both a rejection of “species supremacy” and “human exceptionalism” (Braidotti, 2013) and a “paradigm shift” (Ferrando, 2019) that would challenge “the entrenched habits of modern western thought” (Malone and Bozalek, 2021: 96). This requires questioning “what it means to be a human being and reconstituting human interests in ways that exceed the anthropocentric frame itself” (Krause, 2016: 6). Post-anthropocentrism, thus, constitutes not only a move beyond the human as object of value but also the human as arbiter or subject of value. Yet, where “alter-humanisms” attempt to attain “post-anthropocentrism” by reducing human and non-human to an equivalent ethical status, and “critical post-humanisms” attempt to dialectically mix humans and non-humans in new transcendental project of connection, a veritable “post-anthropocentrism” requires a conceptual shift that disconnects from the “human/non-human” dyad entirely. Susen (2022) offers a critique of critical post-humanism that simultaneously allows for a more thorough critique of anthropocentrism. Focusing on the work of Rosi Braidotti, Susen argues that posthuman narratives tend to lack engagement with the “species-constitutive elements” of humanity (Susen, 2022: 76). When Braidotti presents a theory of “zoe-centered justice” it is framed as a quasi-universal position, based in a transcendental, rational framework (Susen, 2022: 78). The attempt at a “position” outside of a humanist rationality is inherently difficult to fathom. Nevertheless, as the alter-humanist and post-humanist positions rightfully identify, the destructive and dominating tendencies of “humanism’s” valorization of rationalism and intentionality mandate the need for alternatives. While recognizing the irony (and, perhaps, the impossibility) of humans attempting to convince other humans of the poverty of rationalism and intention under “anthropocentrism,” we nevertheless strive toward a speculative attempt at a veritable “post-anthropocentrism” by teasing out and addressing the pitfalls of Braidotti and other critical posthumanist’s projects. It remains possible to push back against the ontopolitics ¹ and “structurally confined spaces” of humanism and the “systemic imperatives of domination” which shape the conditions of our speculation (Susen, 2022: 79). In what follows, we offer several works and potentialities that push toward this alternative through a speculation on “disconnection.”

Wakefield (2023) poses a “destituent power” (p. 23) as a model for refusing the dominant order through a politics of experimentation in order to survive in the Anthropocene. While Wakefield’s decolonial position could be read with alter-humanist counter-narratives, their formulation of a “destituent Anthropocene” is notable as a means for disconnecting from prior models: to refuse not only the dominant political order but to step outside and thoroughly “disconnect” from the human/non-human dichotomy altogether. “Disconnection,” as we use it here, provides a refusal of humanistic, alter-humanistic, and even post-humanistic narratives in favor of counter-narratives that refuse, reject, and “disconnect” from the human/non-human dyad: the move to abolish the human entirely. Belief and reliance on human volition, intentionality, and rationality has been a key factor in the production of the Anthropocene: advances in human technological usage and efficiency, driven by the rationalist project, continuously advance climate destruction (Malm and Hornborg, 2014). Human volition is centered not only in the dominant, humanist narrative, but in alter-humanist narratives where human volition is taken as the means to eco-centric ends, and post-humanist narratives where human volition is dialectically mixed into a connected ontology as a transcendental force.

The “human,” “humanity,” and “humanism,” emerge through a science, grammar, and rationality that produce categorical subjugation among numerous dichotomous lines, including gender, race, and the division of human and nature (Da Silva, 2022: 49). In her writings on race, Denise Ferreira Da Silva notes that the post-Enlightenment world rests on a “transparency thesis,” which is defined as an “ontoepistemological account that institutes ‘being and meaning’ as effects of interiority and temporality” (Da Silva, 2007: 4). In other words, transparency takes one’s self-reflective determination of the world as identical with the world. Human concepts accurately reflect the external world. In this context, “transparency” refers to the belief that chaos and complexity can be made intelligible and communicable through humanistic values by reducing, normalizing, and assimilating the aporias and singularities of difference (see, Glissant, 1997: 189–194 on the “right to opacity”). The “transparency thesis” emerges through the humanism of the Enlightenment project. Da Silva argues that any “critical ontoepistemological account” based in transparency ultimately ignores how reason and subjectification reproduces the racial trajectories that emerge through the development of humanistic science (Da Silva, 2007: 8–10). Humanism’s “transparent I” consistently returns to the conditions of subjugation—whether its context be colonial and/or racial—in a return to the total violence of the Enlightenment/humanism. Framing this violence as a “total violence,” Da Silva acknowledges that the violence of the racial event is not “eternal but that it repeats both in time and in that which total violence produces” (Da Silva, 2022: 294). Racial violence is not fundamental but world historical. Yet, insofar as it is world historical, racial violence repeats due to the consistent repetition of the desire for rational, intentional transparency.

Following Da Silva, any attempt at combatting humanism’s protention for ecological destruction without confronting and acknowledging the humanistic legacy (or “unpayable debt”) of human volition, rationality, and intention will repeat the total violence of that legacy. Rather than affirm the assumptions of volition, the repeated tendencies of humanism (within its various “alter” and “post” narrativizations) suggest the inability of human rationality to adequately confront itself. The repetition of humanistic violence as a counter to humanistic violence suggests the human as conditioned through the histories of humanism. To genuinely think “post-anthropocentrism” requires escaping the bounds of the anthropos: a task available only in speculation or a descent into madness (Da Silva, 2007: 260). This speculative “non-anthropocentric” narrative would abolish not only the (human) subject but both subject and object: to think beyond human and nature (including both their dialectical sublation or transcendental mixture) in something like a “new psychiatry” (Bakker, 2016). Disconnection from the “human”—including volition, intention, rationality, and the “possibility” associated with it—involves seeking that which is properly alien (“xeno”): outside the horizon of human/non-human relations or connections and entirely disconnected from human-centrism. Disconnection cannot assume any sort of “and/or” relation between human and non-human. Given that this disconnected position is alien to humanist and anthropomorphic categories, a veritable “post-anthropocentrism” cannot begin with a notion of relation: humanism is always already relational (Susen, 2022: 76). David Roden’s “disconnection thesis” offers insight, maintaining “an emergent disconnection between individuals [that] should not be conceived in narrow biological terms but in ‘wide’ terms permitting biological, cultural, and technological relations of descent between human and post-human” (Roden, 2014: 105). Against an anthropocentric baseline, this disconnection thesis notes that human models and values are not only insufficient but unfeasible for post-anthropocentrism. Speculative positions cannot begin with normative justifications that are mandated by human volition and rational concepts of “justice,” but must be alien (Roden, 2014: 125). “Post-anthropocentrism” must be “non-anthropocentric,” alien to the suppositions, relations, and categories of anthropocentrism.

To break from the damning conditions of humanism, we require narratives that are post-anthropocentric. Object-Oriented Feminism (OOF) and Xenofeminism (XF) offer a starting point for these speculations. OOF and XF cut ties with “agency” and “subjectivity,” focusing on withdrawal (without emergence), objects (without subjects), alienation (without agency), and gender-abolition (against essentialism and performativity). Behar’s (2016a, 2016b) OOF offers a corrective to relational and connective ontologies. A “feminist intervention” into speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, OOF takes the humanist tendency to “objectify” women, racialized populations, and the poor as a starting point for politics (Behar, 2016a: 3). Rather than attempting to bring human “objects” into a shared space of universal, rational human exceptionalism, OOF conceives of this “objectivity” as introducing new problems (Behar, 2016a: 21). Behar notes that hitherto attempts to speak “objects” as withdrawn from presence, connection, and relation, such as Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, remain hindered by humanistic assumptions that privilege connection and causality (in Harman’s case, through the promotion of “vicarious causation”) at the expense of the concept of withdrawal. Behar radicalizes Harman’s Heideggerian use of withdrawal to consider the object as totally separated and alien. In addition to “connection,” Behar recognizes a tendency to maintain a special status for human subjectivity through a failure to implicate humanity as an object (Behar, 2016b: 124). OOF’s radicalization of withdrawal applies to the human as an alienated object: awakening what one commentator notes as the “haunting powers of alienation” (Zaretsky, 2016: 172). For Behar, OOF begins by implicating the “human” as object through necrophilia and Botox. Against an intentional, self-transparent, transcendental, rational subject, human objects are malleable and plastic. This object is not a prosthetic “other” for the rational subject to manipulate but is instead identical to the “human.” Behar’s OOF thus speak to a “newfound inhospitality” for humanity, rather than a “human politics” tied to intentional states of mind and rational forms of justice (Behar, 2016b: 138): “Botox turns us into objects, shoots us up with our own plasticity, and lets us—as objects—exist mutually, independently, and graciously in the dead object world” (Behar, 2016b: 139). The withdrawn, plastic human object is neither relational nor connected but an object that is inhospitably withdrawn.

Laboria Cuboniks (n.d) XF poses a politics of alienation; not an emancipation from alienation. Speaking against the “essentialist naturalism” of post-humanist mixture, XF is “vehemently anti-naturalist” (XF 0x01). XF poses emancipation through “the affirmation of alienation”: “the construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation” (XF 0x01). Such a project is wholly at odds with holistic rejoinders and mixtures of humans and non-humans/nature. This is a refusal of both naturalistic holism and conceptual purity (XF 0x10). Nothing is sacred, everything can be manipulated, including human objects (0x11). Like OOF, XF aims toward plasticity and malleability. Specifically, XF’s politics of gender abolition provide an insight toward the disconnection from humanity as a politics of human abolition. Gender abolition focuses on withdrawal and refusal rather than the post-humanist attempts to “de-center” and mix:

“Gender abolitionism” is shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power. “Race abolitionism” expands into a similar formula—that the struggle must continue until currently racialized characteristics are no more a basis of discrimination than the color of one’s eyes (XF 0x0E).

Gender abolition abolishes the asymmetrical opposition of gender categories. It is not the mixture of gendered divisions in a sublated pairing, nor the reduction of difference to an ontological sameness. As Hester (2018: 22) notes, abolition is distinct from rehabilitation. It neither seeks to rehabilitate gender nor to reduce difference. Instead, it “rejects the validity of any social order anchored in identities as a basis of oppression.” (Hester, 2018: 31). Gender is no longer innate but exogenous. Elements of broader socio-technical assemblages can be manipulated but are never reified or essentialized. Gender is not the result of controlled manipulations nor guided by human actors but result from accidents and contingency.

As human abolition, post-anthropocentrism requires moving beyond the conditions of humanism, which situate both human and the non-human in a dyadic mixture akin to the gender binary. The re-structuring, re-conceptualizing, or re-habilitating of these categories is insufficient for emancipation from humanism. Post-anthropocentrism necessitates the abolition of the human/non-human dyad. This requires a move beyond the structural conditions that made humanism—and the Anthropocene—possible in the first place. Abolition involves rejecting the validity of not only their separation but also their mixture. Lest we repeat the dialectical tendencies of humanist sublation under the conditions of anthropocentric domination, our narratives will never be post-anthropocentric. To be post-anthropocentric requires neither the mixture nor the sublation of the human, but its abolition. The “Anthropocene” concept does not affirm human intentionality and subjectivity. Instead, the “Anthropocene” reveals the opposite: the non-intentionality of the human as a malleable and plastic object, at once withdrawn and alienated. “Disconnection” and “human abolition” speak not to the “end of humanity” but to the end of “humanism’s” valorization of human intentionality, self-transparency, and rational subjectivity. The “human” is a programmatological physiology. While the dominant narrative and prominent counter-narratives of humanism, alter-humanism, and post-humanism maintain hope in human, non-human, and natural possibility through notions of control, stewardship, and connection, disconnection speaks to these as impossible. Like OOF, it withdraws from subjectivity toward objectivity, plasticity, and death. Like XF, this is not an “end” but a starting point to malleable experimentation.

Despite offering strong and necessary critiques of humanist domination through the tendency toward control, alter-humanist and post-humanist counter-narratives maintain a certain human, all too human, logic that maintains anthropocentrism through the use of intentionality and volition. Like humanism, alter-humanist and post-humanist narratives of the Anthropocene offer similar means of emergence: seeking open possibility through the attempt to plan, control, and guide humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans through the crisis. All three narratives remain conceptualized in humanistic terms. The production of non-anthropocentric narratives, toward post-anthropocentric ends, requires a dis-connection from the logics of humanism—including the human/nature dichotomy—through a process of human abolition. Post-anthropocentrism requires human abolition as a “new psychiatry” that exists outside notions of not only control (humanism) and stewardship (alter-humanism) but openness and possibility (post-humanism) as well. Abolishing human exceptionalism, including its tendencies toward domination, involves withdrawing from the assumptions of human subjectivity. We offer the tendencies of withdrawal, objectivity, alienation, and abolition as a starting point for speculations in this domain.