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 activityJan 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 framing of human agency on a planetary scale, demands to see the human in terms that exceed the confines of such most accustomed human and social scientific categories (without denying their continuing relevance).
Nowhere are these difficulties more tangible than in questions revolving around time and temporality. The timescales of Earth System transformations largely exceed the confines of human lifetimes. As Dipesh Chakrabarty remarked, the Anthropocene confronts us with “relationships and time that necessarily cannot be addressed from within the temporal horizon of human experiences and expectations.”Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 89. Consequently, if we want to take seriously the work of Earth System science in human and social scientific discussions about the Anthropocene (as I think we should),Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Julia Adeney Thomas, “Earth System Science, Anthropocene Historiography, and Three Forms of Human Agency,” Isis 113, no. 2 (2022), 396–406. then we need to take seriously the extent to which Anthropocene temporalities are more-than-human.
Taking Earth System science seriously, however, does not mean discarding the temporalities that have previously been seen as specifically human. It rather means seeing together the more-than-human times of the Anthropocene – which reference the human on the level of Earth’s sub-systems – with the times we inherit from modernity, as Patrice Maniglier nicely phrased it recently.Patrice Maniglier, “Des Temps modernes aux Temps qui restent: Historie et avenir d’une revue, histoire et avenir du monde,” Les Temps qui restent, no. 1, 2024 The inherited modern times are human times as we know them, and inasmuch as they are human, they are manifold. At their largest, such human times even include modernity itself as a way of conceiving human existence in time “historically,” as a project of moving forward in societal development. On smaller scales, the inherited human times equally include all future-oriented human endeavors from social emancipations through economic growth imperatives to the desired futures of political ideologies of any kind (even when those futures desire returns to idealized pasts).
In the last two decades, in a broad discussion that reflects extremely diverse understandings of the Anthropocene, the necessity of seeing these inherited human times in complex but meaningful relations to the times of nature has been addressed with increasing frequency.For diverging views on Anthropocene temporalities that reflect diverging human and social scientific understanding of the Anthropocene, see, for instance, Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” English Language Notes 55, no. 1–2 (2017), 153–162; Julia Nordblad, “On the Difference between Anthropocene and Climate Change Temporalities,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 2 (2021), 328–348; Anders Ekström and Staffan Bergwik (eds.), Times of History, Times of Nature: Temporalization and the Limits of Modern Knowledge (New York: Berghahn. 2022). However, somewhat regrettably, much less has been said about how these inherited times cannot remain intact in their encounter with the larger-than-human timescales of the Anthropocene, in the more specific sense of Earth System temporalities.
For it is in their encounter with the times of the Earth System (and not with a vaguely misconstrued Anthropocene as human-environment relations) that the human times inherited from modernity transform, and even give rise to previously inexistent conceptions of time. Out of the collision of the times of the Earth System and the inherited modern times emerge what I would like to call the human times of the Anthropocene – new times that cannot be reduced neither to the inherited modern times nor to the times of the Earth System.
The collision of inherited human and new Earth System temporalities represents a theoretical and cognitive challenge. Entwined in the fabric of the theoretical challenge, there is also a more practical one, focused on the human times of the Anthropocene: the challenge of navigating the Anthropocene predicament. It is the challenge of responding to the collision of Earth System times and inherited modern times by maneuvering through the conflicts of societal practices that create and mobilize the new human times of the Anthropocene. For it must be clear that, regardless of their novelty, the human times of the Anthropocene are conflictual times. They are times that conflict not simply with the inherited modern times (the times of progress, the times of emancipation as gradual empowerment over time, and so forth), and not simply with the times of the Earth System and the times of nature, but also with one another.
But what exactly are these new human times? And how exactly do they conflict? To answer these questions, the coming pages will dwell a bit more on the temporal intricacies of the contemporary predicament by advancing three claims or theses on the human times of the Anthropocene.
1. The human times of the Anthropocene are its social and political times against the backdrop of a yet unknown form of human universalism
It would be impossible to understand the human times of the Anthropocene without attempting to understand, first, the backdrop against which they emerge: a new universalism of humanity intrinsic to the times of the Earth System. However, to get a better grasp of that new universalism, it must be uncovered from under thick layers of misunderstanding.
Easily triggered by universalizing impulses, twenty-first-century human and social scientific critique mistook the new human universalism of the Anthropocene for older forms of universalism that earlier streams of critique have thoroughly deconstructed in the last century or so. It mistook Anthropocene human universalism for what Claire Colebrook describes as the “supposedly universal ‘human’” of modernity; one that “was always white, Western, modern, able-bodied and heterosexual man; the ‘subject’ who is nothing other than a capacity for self-differentiation and self-constitution is the self of market capitalism.”Claire Colebrook, “What is the Anthropo-Political?” in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis Miller, Twilight of Anthropocene Idols (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), 91. After more than half-century of critique, “to return to ‘anthropos,’ now, after all these years of difference seems to erase all the work in postcolonialism that had declared enlightenment ‘man,’ to be a fiction that allowed all the world to be ‘white like me,’ and all the work in feminism that exposed the man and subject of reason as he who cannibalizes all others and remakes them in his image.”Claire Colebrook, “What is the Anthropo-Political?” in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis Miller, Twilight of Anthropocene Idols (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), 91.
Equating the Anthropocene human universalism of Earth System temporalities with the old forms of universalisms of Western modernity is nevertheless not the only interpretive fallacy of contemporary critique. The alignment of old and new human universalisms constitutes the ground for advancing the claim that the Anthropocene entails an apolitical narrative in which humanity becomes a geological force.For instance, Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016); Daniel Hartley, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the Problem of Culture,” in Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 154–165. Critique in this regard equally highlights the differentiated responsibilities in bringing about the catastrophic prospects of the Anthropocene and the socially differentiated vulnerabilities to such catastrophic futures. Needless to say, it is both perfectly true and tremendously important to spotlight the many ways in which responsibilities and vulnerabilities are uneven among the rich and the poor. But this cannot exempt us from the cognitive blunder of misconstruing Anthropocene human universalism. The mistake of contemporary critique consists of targeting the occurrence of a word (anthropos, human) before even trying to understand the concept (Anthropocene). Meanings of concepts do change, even when words appear to remain stable. The seemingly tiny difference between word and concept might make it difficult to see how, in reality, the occurrence of the same word in different contexts over time can veil differences as massive as those between worldviews.To avoid misunderstandings, I would like to point out that my critique of critique by no means intends to picture the critical work of the human and social sciences as a failed exercise. It simply detects malfunctions in contemporary critique in the hope that attending to these malfunctions would enable us to renew the critical endeavor by adjusting it to the realities of the day. This, I believe, was also the spirit of Bruno Latour’s intervention already two decades ago, even though in a very different argument. Cf. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Stream? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30:2 (2004), 225–248.
Based on these preliminary thoughts, let me proceed by formulating a claim and then proving its point. The claim is that, contrary to rumors, the Anthropocene is not an apolitical concept (not even in its Earth System science formulation), and its invocation of the human does not bracket social differentiation by an appeal to familiar ways of human universalism. Instead, it seems to me that the Anthropocene harbors a hitherto unknown human universalism by virtue of accommodating Earth System temporalities which are not political in any sense that the modern disciplines of the human and social sciences typically attribute to the “political.”
To see how the Anthropocene is not political and not universal in ways we are accustomed to using these categories, consider that Earth System temporalities revolve around states of the Earth System and feature humans only to the extent of Earth System-level human impact. The planet itself doesn’t have human expectations and doesn’t know human anxieties. Human activities do affect its condition, but regardless of whether the planet remains habitable for humans and hospitable for human societies, it will continue to circle the Sun. The human-induced transformation of the Earth System will survive humans, and without humans, there will be no one to think that one or another condition of the Earth System would be preferable. We are the ones who have our preferred ways of how the planet looks like, not the planet.
Whereas modern socio-cultural and political understanding of human universalism revolved around the fate of humanity, the new human universalism of the Anthropocene revolves around planetary conditions. Such universalism is neither the usual human universalism that the human and social sciences deconstructed in the decades of social critique nor it is simply a species-level human universalism. Rather, it refers to the human as a subsystem – a component of systems-thinking – in the functioning of the Earth. It is the human and social sciences that tend to project a modern cultural understanding of a unified humanity onto the Anthropocene concept – a kind of universalism that it never actually promoted. Such a cultural understanding of humanity, a togetherness of humanity to be achieved through societal development over time, was characteristic of modernity, of modern philosophies of history, that informed most (if not all) modern knowledge systems. But the human universalism of the Anthropocene is not the unity of humanity as the future-oriented telos of the march of modernity.
Like any other universalism, Anthropocene human universalism can and must be subjected to critique. Critical questioning might address the human focus of Anthropocene universalism in favor of a more-than-human universalism, as well as it might address the extent to which one could be skeptical about each and every kind of universalism. But, in order to do so, the novelty of Anthropocene human universalism needs to be properly grasped, first. And that novelty, I believe, lies in the way it decouples human universalism and human unity. Anthropocene human universalism remains universalism to the extent that, by virtue of elevating the category of the human into a sub-system of the Earth System, it does encompass each and every human as humans. But, in so doing, it does not require that each and every human becomes equal, emancipated, and attains unity over the course of a historical process. Simply put, Anthropocene universalism is a human universalism that does not require human unity: it is universalism without unity.
I might risk the claim the contemporary critique misfires when targeting Anthropocene universalism. It is very likely that the intended target of critique is more some assumed human unity and less human universalism on the level of the Earth System. But that assumption of unity is only a projection. The cultural universalism that refers to the unity of humanity is a specter of the human and social sciences, rather than the universalism of system-thinking about human agency that indeed underlies the concept of the Anthropocene.For an opposition of the “siloed approaches” of modern disciplines and the systems-thinking that informs Earth System science conceptualizations of the Anthropocene, see Julia Adeney Thomas, “Introduction: The Growing Anthropocene Consensus,” in Julia Adeney Thomas (eds), Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 1–17. The latter, in turn, is the new kind of universalism that constitutes the backdrop against which the human times of the Anthropocene emerge and enter into a variety of conflicts. What exactly, then, are these new times?
The new human times of the Anthropocene inform all societal practices that attempt to navigate the Anthropocene predicament on a spectrum between extinction and turning the Anthropocene into the brightest of prospects. At one extreme, the time of the Anthropocene is the endtime of human existence by virtue of the prospect of the planet becoming inhabitable. At the same time, for those who contemplate the prospect of societal collapse rather than full-scale human extinction,See, for instance, collapsology in France. Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2020); Pablo Severigne, Raphaël Stevens, and Gauthier Chapelle, Another End of the World is Possible: Living the Collapse (and Not Merely Surviving It), trans. Geoffrey Samuel (Cambridge: Polity, 2021). For a critique of collapsology, see Pierre Charbonnier, “The Splendor and squalor of Collapsology: What the Survivalist of the Left Fail to Consider,” trans. Ruth Grant, Revue du Crieur 2 (2019), 88–95. the time of the Anthropocene is also the time of a new beginning. At the other extreme, as we shall see soon in more detail, the time of the Anthropocene is the prospect of human flourishing through the increase of human technological mastery over the nonhuman world. In between these endtimes and brightest futures lie a host of temporalities that aim to extend the time span of the human societal endeavor in navigating the Anthropocene predicament.
The most visible Anthropocene temporalities are likely the ones that characterize the quickly mushrooming sustainability practices in contemporary societies. At the forefront of sustainability initiatives, institutions and organizations are rapidly emptying out the concept of sustainability by using it as a public shield that enables the continuation of business as usual behind the scenes. So do sustainable development agendas that make use of the concept as a qualifier to the modern idea of development,For critiques of the developmentalist appropriations of sustainability, see Eduardo Gudynas, “Debates on Development and its Alternatives in Latin America: A Brief Heterodox Guide,” in Permanent Working Group on Alternatives to Development, Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2013), 15–39; and Maristella Svampa, “Resource Extractivism and Alternatives: Latin American Perspectives on Development,” in Permanent Working Group on Alternatives to Development, Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2013), 117–143. which, again, enables the continuation of business as usual, even openly. At its emergence in the 1970s and 1980s, however, sustainability was meant to oppose business as usual by counteracting “a moribund economic system that has drained the world of many of its finite resources, […] generated a meltdown in global financial systems, exacerbated social inequality in many parts of the world, and driven human civilization to the brink of catastrophe.”Jeremy L. Caradonna, Sustainability: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 4.
The aforementioned discourse on sustainability falls into three groups: organizational, developmentalist, and ecological. The three groups of the sustainability discourse, I think, represent three distinct temporalities. Whereas the oppositional imperative of ecological sustainability advocates the necessity of radical social transformation, the organizational appropriation of sustainability simply aims at maintenance without advocating change. In its turn, the developmentalist use of sustainability retains the transformative aims of ecological sustainability, but it tames the necessity of radical societal change into a scenario of regular modernist progression by turning the ecological idea inside out and subordinating it to the very social, economic, and political systems that ecological sustainability was initially meant to displace. Moreover, whereas ecological sustainability demands a future that differs in kind from the present, the developmentalist takeover of sustainability agendas aims to continue the modernist project in disguise, while organizational appropriations use the concept in order to keep the conditions of the present.
Even though the temporalities of sustainability constitute only a fragment of the human times of the Anthropocene, they perfectly illustrate three of the most prominent Anthropocene temporalities that one can encounter across a broad range of societal practices: transformative (ecological sustainability), presentist (organizational sustainability),Presentist temporality does not refer to a full-blown “regime of historicity” as in François Hartog’s insightful analysis of contemporary Western societies. Cf. François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). and modernist-progressivist (developmentalist sustainability). As the modernist-progressivist label might be deceptive, it is crucial to note that the modernist-progressivist Anthropocene temporality is not an equivalent of a singular temporality of modernity. Modern times, as we know, were plural, too. It might as well be that each of the aforementioned temporalities can be seen as inheritances of modernity that, to diverging extents, transform in their encounter with the times of the Earth System. In that sense, distinguishing between these three temporalities for illustrative purposes intends to open a discussion about inheritances, transformations, and the possibilities of genuinely new human times of the Anthropocene. Needless to say, the categorization does not exhaust the far larger set of temporalities that the human times of the Anthropocene most certainly contain. Nor do the categories refer to clear-cut distinctions. None of the human times of the Anthropocene manifest in societal practices in such clear-cut ways. Yet, it seems plausible to hold that certain societal practices and discourses lean toward one or an kinds of temporalities.
Ecomodernist thinking, for instance, deliberately associates itself with a modernist inheritance in advocating solutions to the crises of the Anthropocene that mobilize technology in attempts to engineer the Earth System. At its most ambitious, it even aims to turn the contemporary predicament into “a good, or even great, Anthropocene.”John Asafu-Adjaye et al., An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015), 6. Available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5515d9f9e4b04d5c3198b7bb/t/552d37bbe4b07a7dd69fcdbb/1429026747046/An+Ecomodernist+Manifesto.pdf At the same time, for anyone who thinks that the social, economic, and political systems and structures of modernity have to do with bringing about the crises of the Anthropocene, the idea of a good Anthropocene is not simply a sheerense but the clearest manifestation of a human-centered worldview that needs to be dismantled, needs to be abandoned through a transformation on the level of worldviews. What transformative temporalities of the Anthropocene tend to aim at is precisely to transcend the (eco)modernist mindset in order to move toward alternative futures.
2. The human times of the Anthropocene are conflictual times
As the human times of the Anthropocene manifest in social, cultural, and political practices, each of them befits certain social groups. Even if they can be appropriated across social contexts and might accidentally be useful for other social groups, that which befits a certain social group can easily disregard, disfavor, or openly harm others. Little surprise that the human times of the Anthropocene not simply intersect one another, but often clash and conflict in complex constellations.
In commenting on the ecomodernist idea of a good Anthropocene, Simon Dalby captured the conflictual nature of Anthropocene futures by alluding to the title of Sergio Leone’s classic 1966 Western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The Anthropocene, according to Dalby, “is neither good nor bad,” but “the politics of shaping its future are probably going to be both ugly and unavoidable.”Simon Dalby, “Framing the Anthropocene: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Anthropocene Review 3, no. 1 (2016), 34. Just how ugly things can get exactly, depends on very many factors.
In between the local scale of resistance against extractivist projects and the scale of Earth System governance, the politics of the Anthropocene are likely to play out in complex ways. While many of these ways are unforeseeable, some are already tangible or easily predictable. To mention but one: transformative social change seldom occurs without violence. As the planet heats at an increasing pace and as social systems and the dealings of economic actors held responsible for driving Anthropocene crises keep on remaining intact, forms of activism are facing a choice between maintaining pacifism and engaging in acts of violence.Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (London, Verso: 2021). On a subtler level, it is equally hard not to notice how even the most profound intellectual reflections on the contemporary predicament tend to deploy a militant language.Think of, for instance, how Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro add new layers to Bruno Latour’s ideas about the conflicts of the Anthropocene by reinforcing a war-narrative. See the Chapter “Humans and Terrans in the Gaia War,” in Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, trans. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 79–108. See also Michael E. Mann, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back the Planet (New York: PublicAffairs, 2021).
Now, the point I want to make is not about whether violence is likely to increase or not. Nor is the point the truism that politics is conflictual. What I want to highlight is that the socio-political conflicts of the Anthropocene are time conflicts, that is, the clashes over Anthropocene futures are distinctly temporal. This is not to say that Anthropocene conflicts wouldn’t play out on the materiality of everyday realities. It is only to say that the socio-political clashes manifest a politics of time characterized by conflicting temporalities entailed in the different Anthropocene futures that different social groups aim to realize. Once again, this might be an inheritance of modern times. For wherever there are multiple temporalities, there will the time conflicts. The open question, here too, concerns the dynamics of inheritance and transformation of temporalities in their encounter with the times of the Earth System.
Let me illustrate the point by highlighting a set of conflicts revolving around the idea that human survival necessitates escaping Earth and establishing human settlements on other planets. The legitimizing narrative behind the idea, pushed by the wealthiest of the tech-entrepreneurial bubble (as well as being a trope of science fiction and space documentaries), pictures the great adventure of humanity in search of a new home in the stars, necessitated by the human consummation of the Earth. At first sight, the narrative looks like a popular iteration of the modernist time of human progress by means of technological mastery. Yet, it is far more than that. On the one hand, the escapist narrative takes on board everything that is by now hardly deniable, acknowledging the facticity of the human-induced degradation of the planet. Instead of mobilizing technology to sustain a habitable planet, it bets on the doomsday scenario of human endtimes on Earth. On the other hand, the narrative doesn’t bother much with how the consummation of the planet relates to the very modernist drive toward progress. Precisely because, to achieve its goals, it does not simply continue business as usual, but upscales its activities of technological mastery: instead of mobilizing technology to sustain a habitable planet, it extends technological mastery over other planets.
In their technological upscale, escapist plans cannot but increase also the social costs of putting plans into practice. For one, the grandiosity of planetary escape cannot but entail grandiosity in regard to demands for resources. And the outlooks of resource extraction do not shine as bright as the outlooks of “making humans a multi-planetary species.”Elon Musk, “Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species,” New Space 5, vol. 2 (2017), 46–61. Even though resource extractivism has a long history, Maristella Svampa warns that the last decades have witnessed the rise of a neo-extractivist model. In correlating the new model with the Anthropocene,Maristella Svampa, Neo-Extractivism in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 12. Svampa describes neo-extractivism as “a way of appropriating nature and a development model based on the over-exploitation of natural goods, largely non-renewable, characterized by its large scale and its orientation toward export, as well as the vertiginous expansion of the borders of exploitation to new territories, which were previously considered unproductive or not valued by capital.”Svampa, Neo-Extractivism in Latin America, 6–7.
Neo-extractivism is fought on several grounds, from indigenous resistance movements to degrowth initiatives. Each of these invokes their own temporalities that range from the presentist conservation of that which exists to reversing the direction of environmentally harmful processes by downscaling the human footprint. Yet, calling out neo-extractivism does not necessarily lead to giving up on developmentalist agendas. As usual, regardless of whether counter-movements emerge within or outside the social, economic, and political spaces of the Western world, Western strongholds find ways to appropriate counter-movements in ingenious yet foreseeable – and perhaps inevitable – ways. Hence, one can witness today’s attempts to incorporate degrowth and anti-extractivist principles into a framework of “inclusive development,”Ulrich Brand, Tobias Boos, Alina Brad, “Degrowth and Post-extractivism: Two Debates with Suggestions for the Inclusive Development Framework,” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 24 (2017): 36–41. or to make the case for “transformative governance” that would be attentive to indigenous resistance to extractivism.Jen Gobby, Leah Temper, Matthew Burke, Nicolas van Ellenrieder, “Resistance as Governance: Transformative Strategies Forged on the Frontlines of Extractivism in Canada,” The Extractive Industries and Society 9 (2022): 100919.
At the same time, let’s not forget that technological mastery is not reduced to planetary escape plans and extractivist practices. Nor does it entail a shared temporality. Technology is and will be mobilized in several ways in navigating the Anthropocene predicament, and escapist ways of technological mastery conflict even with ecomodernist ones, which, in a more traditionally modernist sense, envision earthy progress. So do scientific pleas for “planetary stewardship” stick with efforts aimed at keeping Earth habitable for human and human societies sustainable. Nevertheless, appeals to stewardship in Earth System science typically have nothing to do with ecomodernist optimism about a good Anthropocene. They rather concede that even a “Stabilized Earth” pathway – as opposed to a “Hothouse Earth” pathway – works with scenarios beyond anything that can be seen as ideal.Will Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” PNAS 115, no. 33 (2018): 8252–8259.
The temporalities of escapism, ecomodernism, and planetary stewardship clearly diverge and conflict with one another, despite the fact that all rely on the idea of technological mastery. At the same time, that shared core of mastery is indicative of one of the central sources of conflicts in the Anthropocene, even beyond the realm of technology-fueled responses. For at the heart of the time conflicts of the tech-escapism, neo-extractivism, protest politics, degrowth initiatives, and planetary stewardship, lies but one question: that of anthropocentrism.
3. The human times of the Anthropocene simultaneously invite anthropocentrism and efforts to go beyond it
In the time conflicts of the Anthropocene, the human-centered view that sees the planet and planetary life as means to human ends is called into question in many ways, from environmental movements to different branches of human and social scientific scholarship. If the exploitation and technological mastery of nature (conceived as distinct from the word of humans) has been central to modernity’s contribution to what later came to be recognized as the systemic crises of the Anthropocene, then it seems rather self-evident that adequate responses to the Anthropocene need to overcome or at least scale down the anthropocentrism that drives the exploitation of the planet (and, in doing so, the exploitation of humans by wealthier humans).
In that sense, despite all anthropocentrism entailed in the continuing appeal of technological mastery in navigating the Anthropocene, the human times of the Anthropocene invite moving toward downscaling or overcoming anthropocentrism. At the same time, being geared toward the goal of survival, the human times of the Anthropocene cannot escape be anthropocentric. The very idea that anthropocentrism needs to be dismantled serves the purpose of ensuring the continuation the human endeavor under the most favorable conditions. Overcoming anthropocentrism has become the agenda of the day precisely because this is what serves human interests the best under the conditions of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, it is the very anthropocentrism of the human times of the Anthropocene that invites anti-anthropocentrism to become the towering human imperative of the day.
Where does all this leave us? It seems to me that the way in which even the non-anthropocentric imperative is fueled by anthropocentrism demands a more profound exploration of the question of anthropocentrism. What can be said at this point is that the human times of the Anthropocene nurture a set of paradoxes clustered around anthropocentrism. But what exactly are those paradoxes? Is anthropocentrism necessary and impossible at the same time, or can there be ways to overcome anthropocentrism without falling back to its assumptions? Let me abruptly end here by posing these cliffhanger questions – if only in order to return with some answers soon, in a sequel to this essay.
To be continued: “The Paradoxes of Anthropocentrism” is forthcoming in the Winter 2024 issue of Les Temps qui restent.