Rethinking the ambiguities of abstraction in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

The ambiguities of abstraction were at the heart of critical approaches to the problems of modernity. Abstraction, so fundamental to the modernist episteme, was seen to have alienated humanity from itself and from its entangled relations with its environment, constituting a fundamental rift between the subject and the world. This article analyses how the critique of the modernist episteme has increasingly shifted under the auspices of the Anthropocene. Rather than seeking to overcome the ambiguities of abstraction and return the human to the world, approaches that seek to affirm the Anthropocene have emphasized that modernist thought did not take abstraction far enough. Rather than abstraction being problematic for contemporary thought, abstraction is seen to be a facet of the world in its lively, partial and contingent interaction. This article is organized in three sections. The first section introduces the problematic of abstraction in the Anthropocene, highlighting that critical theory approaches tend to see the Anthropocene within a discourse of modernist critique. The second section draws out the importance of understanding the distinct mode of contemporary affirmation, which rather than seeking to return man to the world, emphasizes the impossibility of finding meaning in the world. It is this inverting of critical understandings that enables abstraction to be seen positively rather than problematically. The final section expands on this point to consider how contemporary theoretical approaches articulate the transvaluation of abstraction as the guide to contemporary modes of life.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• critical theory
• Frankfurt School
• abstraction
• transvaluation
• posthuman
• enlightenment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, London. He is the founding editor of the journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses; his latest books are Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (Routledge, 2018), Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997–2017 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (with Julian Reid) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and Resilience: The Governance of Complexity (Routledge, 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Charles University, Faculty of Social Science.