At times, I style references to the debate around our current temporospatial location on the geologic time scale like this: Anthropocene.
At other times I’ll use “post-Holocene” or one of the many other ‘cenes that have surfaced in the past couple of decades as we have sought a way to name the massive degree of radical change that humankind has visited upon the Earth in our very short time on the planet.
I do this to try to register the controversies involving the term, its intended referent, and the swarm of connotations and associations that pour forth from an attempt to name the end of the world as we know it.
Here’s a working breakdown of what I hope the struck-through Anthropocene might do:
Note the controversy within the community of Earth Systems scientists regarding the question of whether we have indeed left the Holocene and entered a new geological epoch. This controversy hinges on whether or not definitive evidence, in the form of a “golden spike” or GSSP, can be agreed upon….
Note the controversy among scholars in the Humanities and other critics regarding the name for our proposed new geological epoch: The Anthropocene. This controversy hinges on whether attributing anthropogenic global warming and other perturbances in Earth systems—changes that threaten mass extinction of species (including ours), or at least a great deal of death and suffering—to a generic anthropos, or humankind, is accurate and ethically sound. Surely, after all, we can’t blame all humans everywhere and throughout all time for ecological disruptions caused in the main by the unevenly distributed emergence industrial society!
And surely it is anthropocentric arrogance to place ourselves above all of nonhuman nature, and it is dangerous to imagine that we can wield our immense power without unleashing catastrophic unintended consequences upon ourselves and the world as we know it—perhaps to the advantage of a post-human (or entirely inhuman) machine intelligence that assembles itself in our pursuit of an artificial superintelligence of one sort or another.
This controversy has given rise to an abundance of alternate names for a new geological epoch: Jason Moore’s Capitalocene; Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene; the Plantationocene of Anna Tsing and others [check]; James Lovelock’s Novacene; and so on. It has also engendered a set of more playful (if generally dark) riffs, from Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr’s Misanthropocene to the advent of talk of a Trumpocene. Finally, there are various plays on the term that point to a particular feature of anthropogenic disruption, such as the Pyrocene. (I’m guilty in this final category of having proposed a Sericene layer into the discourse as a means of following Jen Bervin’s lead in exploring the cultivation of silk from the silk moth life cycle.)
Note the threat of extinction, the x-Risk, implicit in the concept of the end of the Holocene — human civilization’s Goldilocks zone — not only in terms of what the ICCP tells us the possible outcomes of a 3°C+ rise in global average temperatures might entail, say, but also in terms of our cultural imaginary, our obsession with dystopian and apocalyptic tales and imagery in narratives ranging from the religious to the science-fictional (and, some suppose, hyperstitional).
Argue for radical immanence, noting that anthropos, despite the high regard that we often hold for ourselves, is not above, beyond, outside of our in control of nonhuman nature, but rather is entirely within and subject to Nature (obviously, “Nature” and “nature” are themselves enormous problem words, too) — a view that finds justification in, among other things, the fact that we Homo sapiens barely register on the geologic time scale’s 4.54 billion-year range, let alone on our current leading cosmological model’s 13.8 billion year time scale.
Despite implicitly rejecting transcendence, the above view is not necessarily bereft of spirituality, nor must it devolve to brute materialism or even nihilism. Rather, by drawing on a number of philosophical and naturalistic texts and traditions that in various ways interact with the historic Changes — including philosophical Daoism and Buddhist thought, Confucianism and other Chinese schools of thought and forms of belief, as well as the uptake of the Changes outside of China and especially in the West—from early encounters featuring figures like Leibniz, to 20th century modernist and postmodernist engagements by numerous figures in the arts, from John Cage to Octavio Paz to Philip K. Dick to Richard Berengarten, as well as productive and often playful speculative (if all to often overly woo) thought seeking to use the Changes’ system of binary code, its algorithmic potential, and its role in the development of sophisticated nontheistic lines of thinking within Chinese and China-influenced Eastern traditions to provide perspective and points of entry into thinking through the form, content and implications of contemporary physics, computational sciences, neuroscience and the study of consciousness, and so on.