The Anthropocene is, first and foremost, not about humans. In the context of its conception in Earth System science, the Anthropocene is about the transformation of the condition of the Earth System. At the same time, linked with the holistic view that sees the Earth as an integrated system of interactive subsystems, the Anthropocene also denotes a chronostratigraphic period (whose potential formalization as an epoch is currently being discussed) in which the primary driver of Earth System transformations becomes system-level human activity(note: Jan Zalasiewicz et al. “The Anthropocene: Comparing Its Meaning in Geology (Chronostratigraphy) with Conceptual Approaches Arising in Other Disciplines,” Earth’s Future 9, no. 3 (2021), 1–25.).
This is where the human world enters the picture. Yet, none of the usual senses we used to attribute to different conceptions of the human apply to the Anthropocene. For the human world enters the picture in its relationality with other sub-systems of the Earth.
If the Anthropocene is difficult to grasp for the human and social sciences, it is precisely because the concept’s appeal to the human has little to do with how the human has traditionally been understood by the disciplines of modernity that have been tasked with studying the human world. From history and anthropology through philosophy and sociology to literary studies, modern disciplines struggle to abstract from their inherited conceptions of the human as an exclusively socio-cultural and political category. The Anthropocene, however, with its systemic fra…