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Abstract
This article considers the transvaluation of critique through the lens of the new affirmative critical approaches of the Anthropocene. The first section introduces the problematic of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch and also as symptomatic of the end of modernist ontological and epistemological assumptions of the divide between culture and nature. The second section then highlights how the Anthropocene thesis poses a problem for critique through fundamentally decentring the human as subject and challenging the temporal claims of Enlightenment progress. The third section analyses the implications of this closure for critical approaches and the shift towards a more positive view of the present: no longer seeking to imagine alternative futures but rather drawing out alternative possibilities that already exist. Critique thus becomes additive, affirmative and constructive. The final section expands on this point and concludes with a consideration of how contemporary theoretical approaches articulate the transvaluation of critique.
Notes
1 A concept coined by Eugene Stormer in the 1980s and popularised by Paul Crutzen in the 2000s, see Crutzen and Stoermer “The ‘Anthropocene’”, Global Change News, Vol. 41 (2000), pp. 17–18
; also Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”, Nature, Vol. 415 (2002), p. 23 ; Crutzen and Will Steffen “How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?” Climatic Change, Vol. 61 (2003), pp. 251–257 .2 The difficulties of raising the importance of the Anthropocene concept in International Relations is dealt with well by Cameron Harrington, see his “The Ends of the World: International Relations and the Anthropocene”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2016), pp. 478–498
3 Perhaps the political, social and emotional creativity of radical thought when the world was “turned upside down” in the mid-17th Century, amidst the English civil war, could be one comparison; see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1991
.4 For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Antichrist: An Attempted Criticism of Christianity”, in Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 93–163
.5 Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby and Daniel Levine, “Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2016), pp. 499–523; 500; 507
.6 The previous understanding was that earth was in the epoch of the Holocene, which began at the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago. The Holocene is understood to be an epoch of relative temperature stability, which enabled the flourishing of human progress: the naming of the Anthropocene as a new epoch calls attention to how human impacts on the earth have brought this period of stability to an end. At the time of writing the International Commission on Stratigraphy had not reached a formal decision on the naming or dating of the Anthropocene as a new epoch.
7 Working Group on the 'Anthropocene', “What is the 'Anthropocene'?—Current Definition and Status”, QuaternaryStratigraphy. Accessed at: https://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/. These impacts include the emissions of “greenhouse” gases leading to global warming, the collapse of biodiversity including debate about whether we can speak of a “sixth extinction”, the acidification of the oceans and changes in biogeochemical cycles of water, nitrogen and phosphate. The earth system scientists of the Resilience Centre in Stockholm list nine planetary boundaries: stratospheric ozone depletion; loss of biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and extinctions); chemical pollution and the release of novel entities; climate change; ocean acidification; freshwater consumption and the global hydrological cycle; land system change; nitrogen and phosphorus flows to the biosphere and oceans; and atmospheric aerosol loading. Four of these are currently operating beyond the safe operating space and two are not yet quantified (Stockholm Resilience Centre, “The nine planetary boundaries”, Stockholm Resilience Centre. Accessed at: http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries/planetary-boundaries/about-the-research/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html).
8 Bruno Latour, “Agency at the time of the Anthropocene”, New Literary History, Vol. 45 (2014), pp. 1–18
; Neil Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (Sage Publications, 2010), Kindle Edition ; Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, Environmental Humanities, Vol. 6 (2015), pp. 159–65 ; James D Proctor, “Saving nature in the Anthropocene”, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Vol. 3 (2013), pp. 83–92 ; Eric Swyngedouw, “Whose environment? The end of nature, climate change and the process of post-politicization, Ambiente & Sociedade, Vol. 14 (2011), p. 2 . Accessed at: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1414-753X2011000200006; Robert Macfarlane, “Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever”, Guardian, 1 April, 2016. Accessed at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever; Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2016 .9 Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016, p. 5
.10 Latour, Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, Edinburgh, 18th-28th of February 2013 (draft version 1-3-13), p. 77.
11 Any attempt to quantify a political shift in understandings via geological markings or historical events is inevitably going to be unsatisfactory as it is impossible to demarcate a change empirically, when the key aspect is the changing interpretation of the facts rather than the facts themselves.
12 Simon L Lewis S and Mark A Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene”, Nature, Vol. 519 (2015), pp. 171–180
.13 For discussion, see Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, pp. 14–18
.14 Ibid., pp. 32–33.
15 Latour, Facing Gaia, op. cit., p. 129.
16 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 6
.17 Ibid., p. 26.
18 Ibid., p. 36.
19 Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, op. cit., p. 21.
20 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, p. 99
.21 “ … there is no meaningfulness possible in a world without a foreground-background distinction. Worlds need horizons and horizons need backgrounds, which need foregrounds … We have no world because the objects that functioned as invisible scenery have dissolved (Ibid., p. 104).
22 Latour, Facing Gaia, p. 4; see also p. 63; p. 100.
23 Ibid., p. 78.
24 Ibid., p. 125.
25 See Jason W Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015
.26 See the extensive discussion in Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, who provide seven, in depth, historical narratives.
27 See Moore (ed.) Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016
.28 Cf. G. Baker, “Critique, Use and World in Giorgio Agamben’s Genealogy of Government” Global Society 33, 1, 2019
.29 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 1; p. 60. As Myra Hird and Alexander Zahara note (“The Arctic Wastes”, in R Grusin (ed.) Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. 121–145, p. 123): “waste constitutes perhaps the most abundant and enduring trace of the human for epochs to come”.
30 Etienne Turpin, “Introduction: Who Does the Earth Think It Is, Now?”, in Turpin (ed.) Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013, 3–10; 3–4
.31 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
; Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) .32 Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 181. It is important to note that this position has been criticised by those who share these conclusions but see theorists like Latour and Morton as dismissing the existence of a rich non-Western tradition of thought which was never “modern” in terms of the centrality of the culture/nature divide and to which decolonial and other “post-critical” approaches in global and international studies are increasingly paying heed. See, for example, Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World. Cambridge: Polity, 2017
; Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism”, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2016), pp. 4–22 ; David L. Blaney and Arlene B. Tickner, “Worlding, Ontological Politics and the Possibility of a Decolonial IR”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2017), pp. 293–311 .33 Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Paris: Open Humanities Press, 2015, p. 17
.34 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, p. 100
.35 Latour, Facing Gaia, pp. 76–77. As Claire Colebrook notes, “We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene: The Anthropocene Counterfactual”, in R Grusin (ed.) Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. 1–20, p. 16, discussion of the Anthropocene, “lends more weight to Walter Benjamin’s claim that every document of civilization is a document of barbarism”.
36 Clark, “Geo-politics and the disaster of the Anthropocene”, The Sociological Review, Vol. 62 (2014), S1, pp. 19–37, p. 28
.37 Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, op. cit., p. 21
38 Clive Hamilton, “Human Destiny in the Anthropocene”, in C Hamilton, C Bonneuil and F Gemenne (eds) The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 32–43, p. 35
.39 Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994), p. 4
; Ulrich Beck, World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009 .40 David A Baldwin, “The Concept of Security”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 23 (1997), 1, pp. 5–26
; David Chandler, “Neither International nor Global: Rethinking the Problematic Subject of Security”, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, Vol. 3 (2010), pp. 89–101 .41 William E Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017)
.42 Latour, Facing Gaia, op. cit., p. 9.
43 See, for example, Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. ix-xiii; Ilya Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London: Fontana, 1985)
; Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998) .44 Jan-Peter Voss and Basil Bornemann B “The Politics of Reflexive Governance: Challenges for Designing Adaptive Management and Transition Management”, Ecology and Society, Vol. 16 (2011), 2
, art.9; Fikret Berkes, Johan Colding, and Carl Folke (eds) Navigating social–ecological systems: building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.45 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, op. cit., p. 47.
46 See Madeleine Fagan “Security in the Anthropocene: Environment, ecology, escape”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 23 (2017), 2, pp. 292–314
.47 Latour, Facing Gaia, op. cit., p. 81.
48 Ibid., pp. 81–82.
49 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, op. cit., p. 3.
50 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, p. 8; see also Stengers, “Autonomy and the Intrusion of Gaia”, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 116 (2017), 2, pp. 381–400, p. 384
: “whatever the geoengineering method, it would require that we keep extracting and mobilizing the massive necessary resources, to keep on feeding the climate manipulating machine … ”.51 Latour, Facing Gaia, op. cit., p. 66
52 See, for example, Andrew C Revkin, “Exploring Academia’s Role in Charting Paths to a “Good” Anthropocene”, New York Times, 16 June 2014. Accessed at: https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/exploring-academias-role-in-charting-paths-to-a-good-anthropocene/?mcubz=2.
53 Colebrook, “We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene”, op. cit., p. 18.
54 Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, op. cit., p. xiii; p. 49.
55 Ibid., p. 86.
56 Hamilton, “Human Destiny in the Anthropocene”, p. 41; see also Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (London: Yale University Press, 2013).
57 Richard Grusin, “Introduction: Anthropocene Feminism: An Experiment in Collaborative Theorizing”, in R Grusin (ed.) Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. xii-xix: p.ix
.58 Simon Dalby, “Autistic Geopolitics / Anthropocene Therapy”, Public Imagination, Vol. 10, No. 42
, 22 June 2017. Accessed at: http://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/june-2017/autistic-geopolitics-anthropocene-therapy.59 For example, J K Gibson-Graham and Gerda Roelvink, “An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene”, Antipode, Vol. 41 (2010), s1, pp.320–346
.60 See, for example, Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011); Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 77, p. 183
.61 In this regard, the implications of the Anthropocene accord closely with perspectives forwarded by a wide range of critical theorists associated with posthuman, new materialist and speculative realist approaches among others (for example, Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (London: Duke University Press, 2010); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (London: Duke University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (London: Duke University Press, 2010); Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (London: Duke University Press, 2013); Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010).
62 Morton, Hyperobjects, op. cit., p. 21.
63 Ibid., p. 36.
64 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 25
.65 Morton, Hyperobjects, op. cit., pp. 160–161.
66 Ibid., p. 21.
67 Connolly, Facing the Planetary”, op. cit., p. 4.
68 Latour, Facing Gaia, op. cit., p. 126.
69 Ibid.
70 Anna L Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. vii
.71 Ibid., p. 2.
72 Ibid., p. 21.
73 Ibid., pp. 4–5.
74 Cf. P. Bargués-Pedreny, “From Critique to Affirmation in International Relations” Global Society Vol. 33, No. 1 (2019), pp. 1–11
.75 Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30 (2004), 2, pp. 225–248, p. 232
.76 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum, 2008, p. 50
.77 Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), p. 135
.78 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, op. cit., p. 278.
79 Ibid., p. 18.
80 Ibid., p. 20.
81 While there is plenty of interesting critical work on climate change governance, in the field of International Relations (for example, Eva Lövbrand and Johannes Stripple, “Making climate change governable: accounting for carbon as sinks, credits and personal budgets”, Critical Policy Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2011), pp. 187–200
), the assumptions are always those of modernist ordering and control, ones that sit much less easily with the very different critical work that is done in relation to the Anthropocene.82 Fagan, “Security in the Anthropocene”, op. cit., p. 308.
83 Audra Mitchell, “Is IR going extinct?”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2017), pp. 3–25; p. 12
.84 Ibid., p. 17.
85 See Scott Hamilton, “Securing ourselves from ourselves? The paradox of “entanglement” in the Anthropocene”, Crime, Law and Social Change, First Online: 29 July 2017.
86 See object-oriented ontologist Ian Bogost’s Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, The Uses of Boredom, & the secret of Games (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
87 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, op. cit., pp. 2–4
88 Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (Sage Publications, 2010), Kindle Edition, Kindle location, pp. 220–221
.89 Ibid., Kindle location, pp. 917–918.
90 Sara Nelson and Bruce Braun, “Autonomia in the Anthropocene: New Challenges to Radical Politics”, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 116 (2017), 2, pp. 223–235, p. 224
.91 Ibid., p. 229.
92 Highlighted as a “metabolic rift” by McKenzie Wark (Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2015, p.xiv): “where one molecule after another is extracted by labor and technique to make things for humans, but the waste products don’t return so that the cycle can renew itself”.
93 See, Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, op. cit., p. 226.
94 See, for example, Siliva Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012)
.95 See discussion in Jason Read, “Anthropocene and Anthropogenesis: Philosophical Anthropology and the Ends of Man”, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 116 (2017), 2, pp. 257–273
.96 Stengers, “Autonomy and the Intrusion of Gaia”, South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 116 (2017), pp. 381–400, p. 383
.97 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Anthropocene and the Convergence of Histories”, in C Hamilton, C Bonneuil and F Gemenne (eds) The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015, 44–56
, p. 49; see also Chakrabarty “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35 (2009), 2, pp. 197–222 .98 Ibid., p. 50.
99 Stengers, “Autonomy and the Intrusion of Gaia”, op. cit., p. 387.
100 Ghosh, The Great Derangement, op. cit., pp. 109–110.
101 Ibid., p. 119.
102 Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, op. cit., p. 40.
103 Chakrabarty, “The Anthropocene and the Convergence of Histories”, op. cit., p. 55.
104 Nelson and Braun, “Autonomia in the Anthropocene”, op. cit., p. 233.
105 Connolly, Facing the Planetary, op. cit., p. 20.
106 Hamilton, Bonneuil and François Gemenne, “Thinking the Anthropocene”, in C Hamilton, C Bonneuil and F Gemenne (eds) The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 1–13, p. 9
107 Ibid.
108 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, op. cit., p. 53.
109 Ibid., p. 58.
110 Ibid.
111 Stengers, “Matters of Cosmopolitics: On the Provocation of Gaia (in conversation with Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin)”, in Turpin, Architecture in the Anthropocene, 171–182, 179.
112 Ibid., 179–180.
113 Cf. P. Bargués-Pedreny and J. Schmidt, “Learning to Be Postmodern in an All Too Modern World: “Whatever action” in International Climate Change Imaginaries”, Global Society, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2019)
; Pol Bargués-Pedreny, “Connolly and the never-ending critiques of liberal peace: from the privilege of difference to vorarephilia”, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 30 (2017), 2/3, pp. 216–234 .114 Colebrook, “We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene”, p. 7. In fact, Richard Grusin, “Introduction”, p. viii, argues that “the concept of the Anthropocene has arguably been implicit in feminist and queer theory for decades”.
115 Jessi Lehman and Sara Nelson, “Experimental politics in the Anthropocene”, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 38 (2014), pp. 444–447, p. 444
.116 Stephanie Wakefield “The crisis is the age”, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 38 (2014), pp. 450–452, p. 451
.117 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, op. cit., p. 21.
118 Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, op. cit., p. 3.