A New Earth: Deleuze and Guattari

in the Anthropocene

Arun Saldanha University of Minnesota

Hannah Stark University of Tasmania

Abstract
Twenty years after his death, Deleuze’s thought continues to be
mobilised in relation to the most timely and critical problems society
faces, foremost amongst which is the Anthropocene. What might the
significance of Deleuze and Guattari be in relation to the new and
urgent set of concerns that the Anthropocene engenders? Deleuze’s work
presaged much of the concept of the Anthropocene, not only in his
sustained challenges to humanism, anthropocentrism and capitalism,
but also through his interest in geology and the philosophy of time.
Guattari gave his work an ‘ecosophical’ and ‘cartographical’ dimension
and spoke of a ‘mechanosphere’ covering the planet. Together, Deleuze
and Guattari advocated a ‘geophilosophy’ which called for a ‘new
earth’ along with ‘new peoples’. Not only does the work of Deleuze
and Guattari offer a range of useful concepts that can be applied to
contemporary global problems such as anthropogenic climate change,
peak oil and the exploitation of the nonhuman, but it also models the
kind of interdisciplinarity that the epoch of the Anthropocene requires.
This special issue of Deleuze Studies engages the many philosophical
tools provided by Deleuze and Guattari and their interlocutors in
order to critically approach our particularly tense moment in terrestrial
history. Simultaneously, it asks how this moment could change the ways
in which Deleuze and Guattari are further developed.
Keywords: Anthropocene, Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism, climate
change, anthropocentrism, geophilosophy
Deleuze Studies 10.4 (2016): 427–439
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2016.0237
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/loi/dls
428 Arun Saldanha and Hannah Stark

The Anthropocene is the geological age in which human impact on

earth systems has become irreversible and will be detectable far into the
future. It is therefore the greatest challenge currently facing life on earth.
Its effects are omnipresent: ocean acidification, deforestation, the loss
of species diversity through extinction, changes to the earth’s surface
due to population migration and alterations to geomorphology, global
warming and much more. Describing these changes as indicators of a
new geological epoch acknowledges the unprecedented and planetary
magnitude of human impact on the earth’s ecosystems and geochemistry.
Anthropogenic climate change is but one of the sites of human impact
and its dispersed effects demonstrate the complex and interrelated nature
of our current socio-ecological moment. Climate change manifests in
gradual statistical shifts in temperature averages and extremes, more
frequent droughts, storms, wildfire and flooding, and the impacts of
these increased fluctuations on the oceans and ice sheets, the most
alarming of these being rising sea levels. The year 2015 was the hottest
ever and 2016 is set to be hotter. Except for 1998, the fifteen hottest
years on record are of this century. The UK’s Met Office confirms the
earth has now crossed the threshold towards a global average 1 degree
Celsius higher than preindustrial times. November 2015 also saw the
United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, which reminds us
that the Anthropocene is an urgent geopolitical issue that is both local
and global, and which has galvanised international governments as well
as public sentiment. Most scientists warn, however, that even the hard-
won consensus on cutting carbon emissions at Paris will not be able to
stop the warming of the earth by 4 degrees over the next century.
Climate change therefore presents a dispersed and enduring problem
of such scale that it becomes, according to Timothy Clark (2015),
unreadable. Timothy Morton (2013) calls it a primary example of a
‘hyperobject’, an assembling of elements so complex and distributed
that it challenges the post-Kantian definition of ‘object’. However, this
insistence on ineffability and opacity restrains the kind of thinking
necessary to confront the disastrous earth scenarios that are being
predicted for the twenty-first century. Global human society has arrived
at a pivotal moment in the production of scientific, political and
philosophical subjectivity. The urgency and opportunity of engaging
with the Anthropocene is clear in the unprecedented pace at which
public, political and philosophical debates about climate change are
developing and intensifying.
However, there is a stark disjuncture between the material
manifestations of the Anthropocene and our capacity to conceptualise
 Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene 429

it temporally. Dating the ‘golden spike’ of the Anthropocene, or the

boundary marker between the Holocene and this new geological epoch,
requires a stratigraphic signal of global and permanent change in
geological material (such as rocks or ice cores). Attributing this trace
of the human – its scarring of the earth – to one date has proved to be
contentious, with a range of dates currently being debated. Atmospheric
chemist Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), in an influential piece
widely considered to be the conceptual arrival of the Anthropocene,
locate the onset of the Anthropocene in the late eighteenth century
with the Industrial Revolution, specifically with the invention by James
Watt of the steam engine, which they date to 1784 (see also Crutzen’s
piece in Nature, 2002). More recently, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin
(2015) have proposed the ‘Orbis hypothesis’ dating the beginning of the
Anthropocene to the year 1610. They reject dating the Anthropocene all
the way back to the end of the last Ice Age (Pleistocene), when humans
in many places caused a significant mass extinction event through the
use of fire and hunting, mainly of megafauna (mammoth, moa, etc.).
Lewis and Maslin also reject dating the advent of the Anthropocene to
the development and spread of agriculture, however much it changed
ecosystems from about 10,000 years ago. They take 1610, which they
call the ‘Orbis spike’, as start-date of the Anthropocene because the dip
in atmospheric carbon that occurred that year was directly caused by
the most important demographic and economic shift in the history of
the human species, the European colonisation of the Americas. Through
genocide, war, displacement and pandemics, the great societies of Native
Americans – anywhere from 2 to 18 million in North America, and
at least 37 million in South America, the figures being perhaps the
most contentious in demography – were cut by 90 per cent over the
long sixteenth century (see Mann 2005). Contrary to myth, the largest
societies were urban and agricultural. The most viable explanation for
the dip in atmospheric carbon detectable in ice cores is the massive
reforestation of the Americas in the wake of the decimation (literally)
of the indigenous population. Without farming and hunting there were
more trees and therefore less atmospheric carbon dioxide. The most
astonishing fact of the process of wiping away most human cultures and
their ecosystems from two continents is that it measurably altered the
composition of the planet’s atmosphere. After 1610, population increase
through immigration and steady deforestation made carbon dioxide rise
again.
Hence the fundamental shifts in the global distribution of biota
through the movement of plant and animal species between the Old and
430 Arun Saldanha and Hannah Stark

New Worlds and the opening of global trade routes as well as the lasting
political implications of colonialism are what led Lewis and Maslin to
favour 1610 over 1776, the year Watt put his steam engine to use. After
all, as Marxists have long argued, industrialisation in Europe required
the wealth accumulated through slave labour and raw materials made
possible through the colonisation of the Americas. Lewis and Maslin
do not deny the so-called Great Acceleration of economic production,
mining, waste, transportation and the use of nuclear energy from 1945
onwards, but see it as less decisive than the Columbian Exchange. From
the mid-twentieth century, a growing number of stratigraphers suggest,
there have been rapid changes to ecosystems everywhere, including the
Arctic and Antarctic, and a massive increase in the extraction of fossil
fuels, metals and minerals, parallel to the growth in global population.
The post-war world has also been the nuclear age. Another date being
proposed as the origin for the age of humans is 1964 because of
stratigraphic evidence of a peak in radionuclides from the testing of
nuclear weapons (Waters et al. 2016). A starting date of 1945 or
1964 seems to be emerging as the front runner with the Anthropocene
Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, who
are currently deliberating whether the Anthropocene can be ratified
as an official geological era and where it would fit in the geological
timescale.
The decision of the working group is bound to be hotly debated in
popular, scientific and political discourse. This special issue of Deleuze
Studies argues that philosophy and cultural theory should join that
debate. The stakes have never been higher because, as Waters et al.
(2016) suggest, ‘Not only would this represent the first instance of
a new epoch having been witnessed first-hand by advanced human
societies, it would be one stemming from the consequences of their
own doing’. At stake is nothing less than the understanding of the
impact of the human species on its planet: will it be a story of
empire and genocide, or of the ‘dark side’ of industrial and scientific
progress, or of capitalist and consumerist greed, or of unleashing
the potentially catastrophic subatomic powers of the universe? What
will the dating of the Anthropocene reveal about responsibility? How
will this unifying narrative of the human as a species navigate racial
and cultural difference? After all, whose history is being writ large
as the new narrative about the planet? What will become of key
political-philosophical notions such as universality, destiny, community,
equality, sustainability and the nation-state? What will be done with
the traditional conception of ‘nature’ in Western thought? However, no
 Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene 431

matter where the line demarcating the material Anthropocene is officially

drawn, its meteoric career as a concept shows it will be an obligatory
passage point for critical thinking.
Rapidly gaining currency after Crutzen and Stoermer’s use of the
term (2000), the Anthropocene has emerged as the ultimate but also
intimate conceptual horizon with which we need to grapple in this new
century. The dramatic difference in timescales between the geophysical
Anthropocene and the onset of its conceptualisation itself suggests the
humanities have to radically alter their approach to temporality. As
Nigel Clark (2010) has argued, we have only just started the intellectual
work that a changing earth is requiring from us. It is overwhelmingly
clear that the Anthropocene will have a profound impact on philosophy,
shocking it out of anthropocentric complacency and the accustomed
ways of thinking which situate the human apart from nature. The
Anthropocene disrupts thought itself, requiring that we return to the
question of the place of the human species in the cosmos: a third
Copernican Revolution after that of Kant and Copernicus. Postcolonial
theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty says it signals a ‘profound change in the
human condition’ (Chakrabarty 2012: 15), as the human species has
been discovered to have been a nonhuman force shaping the earth
systems which are its very milieu. As one of the first in the humanities,
Chakrabarty understood the profound impact climate change will have
had on the humanities insofar as they were for centuries systematically
premised on excluding nature from the play of deliberately directed
forces we call history. With this repositioning of the human, however,
any erstwhile conceptual distinction between ‘natural history’ and the
history of human societies has more or less collapsed. While agitating
for the place of the humanities in debates about the Anthropocene, this
special issue also asks whether discrete humanities frameworks are suf-
ficient to think through the enormity of the Anthropocene. In contrast
to the humanities and the social sciences, Deleuze and Guattari have al-
ways known that ‘society’ and ‘history’ are not simply human products.
This special issue is therefore motivated by the nonhuman turn and by
the potential that it has for destabilising the conventional organisation
of the disciplines. It acknowledges, as Elizabeth Grosz so succinctly sug-
gests, that the ‘humanities requires a recognition not only of the politics
of the human that informs and produces knowledge of the human; but
also of the ontological forces of the nonhuman that press the human
from both within and outside’ (Grosz in Roffe and Stark 2015b: 23).
Conceptually, as we come to reconcile ourselves to human impact
on the environment at a planetary scale, the Anthropocene is shaping
432 Arun Saldanha and Hannah Stark

philosophical understandings of the human and its place in a broader

nonhuman context. The human emerges as an ambivalent figure in
the Anthropocene. The question of whether there could be a ‘good’
and not ‘bad’ Anthropocene endows humans with an immense and
unprecedented agency in their relationship to the earth, positioning us as
accountable to future generations for past actions and present inaction.
We should beware of the fact that this moral dimension tends to offer
little more than a biblical version of human stewardship as ostensible
solution for the catastrophic futures that scientists are alarmed about.
It has precisely been such selfish anthropocentrism, and its most vicious
avatar, capital, that landed the species in this predicament in the first
place. If the risks embedded in the Anthropocene conceptually unify
the human as a species desiring food, energy, art and a minimum of
groundedness, it also brings into relief the ways in which a violent
earth further fissures humanity along economic, racial and sexual axes.
Anthropocene anxiety manifests itself variously in reassessments of
the entanglements of the human and the nonhuman, the continuing
breakdown of the subject/object distinction, and an increasingly popular
rethinking of the human body in the context of becomings-animals,
-plant and -mineral. The Anthropocene likewise reminds us of the
necessity to think at more-than-human scales. It has required that we
consider deep time as well as vast space, reflecting in the process on the
inevitability of human extinction and the hypothesis of an earth without
or after us. As geologists like Jan Zalasiewicz (2009) are inviting us to
consider, what worlds are there before, beyond and after human time
and thought?
It is unsurprising that the crisis of thought engendered by the
Anthropocene has also prompted an invigoration of theory in
general and of poststructuralism in particular. The concept of the
Anthropocene has triggered an explosion of ethical and highly political
theorising through the ‘posthumanist’ redeployment of phenomenology,
deconstruction, psychoanalysis, philosophy of science and literary
theory. Theory has the potential to render the Anthropocene
‘meaningful’. A cultural accounting of the Anthropocene is imperative
because if the ‘problems’ addressed by scientific research are constituted
through cultural, social and political processes, then the Anthropocene
is a problem that is social and discursive as well as scientific. Cultural
texts such as theory not only reflect but also construct dominant
attitudes to the environment. Taking stock of theoretical engagements
with the Anthropocene is essential to building a picture of the complex
web of significances – material, philosophical, scientific, ethical, political,
 Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene 433

textual – of a social and environmental problem that both confounds us

and calls us to action.
This special issue is interested in the conceptual resources that Gilles
Deleuze, who died before the conceptual arrival of the Anthropocene,
might offer in this time of profound environmental and epistemic crisis.
Most importantly, Deleuze’s work provides us with tools that help us to
overcome the problematic anthropocentrism of Western philosophical
systems. This can be contextualised with the well-known debate around
humanism in France after the Second World War. The undisputed
master, who offered philosophical resources to put into perspective the
profound disturbance to man’s erstwhile implacable belief in his own
progress after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, was Sartre. In Existentialism
is a Humanism he writes, ‘although it is impossible to find in every
man a universal essence that could be said to comprise human nature,
there is nonetheless a universal human condition’ (Sartre 2007: 42). The
almost-absolute horrors of worldwide war had shown that humans,
being determined by the blind march of history and the rest of the
universe, cannot take anything for granted, certainly not that the future
will be better than the past. There is no essence of man which would
guarantee progress and reason, as is posited by the Renaissance, the
Enlightenment and liberalism. In the face of this void at the heart of
the human condition it is immensely difficult, but at the same time
indispensable, to achieve universality and truth.
In 1964, Deleuze came out strongly in admiration of Sartre’s refusal of
the Nobel Prize for Literature. In an otherwise increasingly ‘conformist
moral order’, Deleuze admired how the older philosopher’s decision
reflected a strong belief in philosophy’s political role: ‘Sartre allows
us to await some vague future moment, a return, when thought will
form again and make its totalities anew, like a power that is at once
collective and private’ (Deleuze 2004: 79). Although he calls Sartre for
this reason his ‘teacher’ in philosophy, Deleuze remained suspicious
about the notion of man. In fact, much of his early work should be seen
as an indirect critique of Sartrean humanism (see for instance the very
early essay ‘Description of Woman’ (Deleuze 2002)). When most of the
French intellectual scene was steeped in phenomenology and a revival of
Hegel, Deleuze turned to Hume, Bergson and Nietzsche to explore the
habitual contractions of impersonal forces at the basis of the human, and
which humans share with animals. As his project was taking shape in
the 1960s, Deleuze had political and ontological affinities with a general
move away from existentialism through the importation of structural
linguistics into anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan),
434 Arun Saldanha and Hannah Stark

Marxism (Althusser) and philosophy (Derrida and Foucault) (see

Deleuze’s sympathetic critique ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’
(Deleuze 2004: 170–92)). Even if he arrived at antihumanism from
different sources, Deleuze was part of a larger generation in France
whose revolutionary impetus derived to a significant extent from a
denunciation of the category of man as the source of history, knowledge
and praxis.
A critique of human exceptionalism and humanist essentialism does
not necessarily mean dissolving the specificity of the human into a free-
flowing, all-encompassing and chaoid Life (Roffe and Stark 2015a). In
fact, Deleuze and Guattari agree with the humanist tradition that it is
incumbent on thought to examine reality from within the intractabilities
and ambiguities of the human perspective. They are heirs to the
Enlightenment in critiquing the structures and prejudices that thwart
human flourishing and in examining the conditions of possibility for
something genuinely new to emerge. At every point in their work,
Deleuze and Guattari clearly distinguish the ethical exigencies that
accompany being human, whether sketching an agenda in What is
Philosophy? for philosophy, art and science or mapping the strata of
the earth – physicochemical, biological and alloplastic or anthropic – in
A Thousand Plateaus, whether naming thought and matter the two
attributes of infinite reality following Spinoza, or proposing a theory
of more-than-human assemblages as continually open to micropolitics
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 1987). Those critics are wrong who fear
that Deleuze and Guattari demolish anthropocentrism simply to lodge
discourse onto an omnivorous eclecticism mushing all processes and
entities on the same horizontal plane of ceaseless interpenetration, where
nothing is stable enough to demand political or epistemic commitment.
On the contrary, A Thousand Plateaus provides an ontology which, with
an unprecedented precision as well as a revolutionary ethos, maps the
singular dependency of the human species on many layers of material
flows from weaponry to order-words, barely held together in a capitalist
system currently going into spirals of self-destruction.
Hence Deleuze is far from pre-Kantian. He reads Hume after
Kant, naming his new method a transcendental empiricism. He also
reads Spinoza after Kant, and argues God-or-nature, or the Plane of
Immanence, is not transcendent to the things and ideas ‘in’ it. Getting
rid of anthropocentrism does not mean getting rid of Kant’s critical
and transcendental turn. Deleuze wholeheartedly supports modern
philosophy’s prerogative to endlessly reframe the question of what
humans are to do with the uncanny fact they are part of, yet separate
 Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene 435

from, the rest of the universe. Deleuze’s antihumanism is quite different,

then, from recent anti-Kantian developments like speculative realism,
which aim to replace the humanist and critical legacies with serene
indifference, and even explicit nihilism. On a different front, Deleuze
would have no time for those radical ecologists who argue the human
species is but a skin disease of the Gaia hyper-organism. Within this
framework, disastrous positive feedback loops of atmospheric and toxic
havoc will lead to a sixth mass extinction, a catastrophic fever after
which the earth will regain ‘her’ health in the absence of the human.
The post-Heideggerian return to the question of technology under the
banner of ‘posthumanism’ has another emphasis than the stratigraphic
framework of A Thousand Plateaus mapping the larger inhuman systems
subtending the aggregates and flows of the human species. Deleuze and
Guattari’s ontology of the imbrication of the human in the nonhuman
is materialist and geographical, revolving around capitalism, the state,
the family, racism and other social territorialisations as explanatory
factors. Instead of thinking at the levels of an abstract individual subject
or humanity as such, Deleuze and Guattari return to the old ethical
question of philosophy, which posits that life is, from the beginning,
collective and political.
Guattari’s therapeutic work, political engagements and solo-authored
writings are central to the Anthropocene politics that we are deriving
from Deleuze’s work. Guattari’s politics is, of course, far more explicit
than Deleuze’s own, aiming specifically to rework communism by
emphasising subjectivity and creativity after the catastrophic dead
ends of the Cold War, the Soviet system, Maoism and ultra-left
terrorism (Guattari and Negri 1990). Almost alone amongst the key
theorists associated with May 1968 (Foucault, Lefebvre, Marcuse, etc.),
Guattari came to understand the looming environmental crisis (then
mostly associated with local chemical pollution) as a fundamental
challenge to the left. Against narrow-minded environmentalism, his
machinic ecology starts with a world-systems analysis of systematic
impoverishment on a variety of scales. The Three Ecologies, his clearest
statement on green politics from 1989, starts: ‘The Earth is undergoing
a period of intense techno-scientific transformations. If no remedy is
found, the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately
threaten the continuation of life on the planet’s surface’ (Guattari 2008:
19). Guattari distinguishes between three interwoven ecologies: social
ecology, subjective ecology and environmental ecology. At one point he
has a remarkable premonition of the disastrous economic and political
times to come:
436 Arun Saldanha and Hannah Stark

In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to
proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts
of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’ by raising rents, thereby
driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned
to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish environmental
ecology. Further proliferation is evident in the savage deterritorialization
of the Third World, which simultaneously affects the cultural texture of
its populations, its habitat, its immune systems, climate, etc. [. . . ] How do
we regain control of such an auto-destructive and potentially catastrophic
situation? (Guattari 2008: 29)

Guattari might point out that in the preoccupation with how computers
will save humanity, theorists forget that 1.2 billion people have no
electricity at all – and perhaps have no need for it. The only possible
response to an economic system bent on destroying itself and its milieu
through endless proliferation and displacement is to replace it with
another. How exactly to get to such a new system is still unclear, but
Guattari provides at least some conceptual innovations to map the global
situation.
Apart from the ecosophical approach of The Three Ecologies,
Guattari also develops a radically new sense of cartography.
The formalism of Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari 2013) is
vertiginous, perhaps to the point of being useless for further application,
but the book does demonstrate how understanding the predicament
of global capitalist society (what Guattari from the early 1970s calls
Integrated World Capitalism) has to be multiscalar and historical and
must develop a strong sense of emergence, system and chaos in the
sense physics gives those terms. Finally, inspired by Lewis Mumford’s
(1967–70) famous notion of megamachine (the hierarchical organisation
of humans like cogs in a bigger machine, paradigmatic examples being
the pharaonic pyramid, the Taylorist factory and the nuclear military-
industrial apparatus), Guattari introduces the term ‘mechanosphere’ as
a name for the planet-wide intermeshing of mechanical, architectural
and biological processes (see Saldanha 2015). Given his interest in
world history, Guattari would no doubt be fascinated with the recent
turn to ‘big history’, blending environmental history with astronomy,
geology and evolutionary biology under the aegis of complexity theory
(see for example Spier 2015). However, even Guattari’s machinism at
times slips back into an anthropocentric technological determinism and
even Malthusianism as he negotiates the difficult terrain of worst-case
scenarios and the calls of mainstream science for geo-engineering:
 Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene 437

Natural equilibriums will be increasingly reliant upon human intervention,

and a time will come when vast programmes will need to be set up in order
to regulate the relationship between oxygen, ozone and carbon dioxide in
the Earth’s atmosphere. We might as well rename environmental ecology
machinic ecology, because Cosmic and human praxis has only ever been
a question of machines, even, dare I say it, of war machines. From time
immemorial ‘nature’ has been at war with life! The pursuit of mastery over the
mechanosphere will have to begin immediately if the acceleration of techno-
scientific progress and the pressure of huge population increases are to be
dealt with. (Guattari 2008: 43)

The mechanosphere can be called Guattari’s name for the Anthropocene,

or the biosphere in the time of irreversible human impact, provided
this tendency towards technological determinism is bypassed. With
the benefit of more science and popular debate, it is now becoming
clear that neither climate change nor other Anthropocene disasters
can be ‘engineered away’. Overconsumption not overpopulation is the
earth’s problem, and if ‘vast programmes’ are indeed necessary, their
experimentation will be political and social, not simply techno-scientific.
From Guattari’s own critique of reductionism, technoscience cannot
have a monopoly on addressing environmental problems even if it forms
an integral part of the conversation.
Ultimately, what Deleuze and Guattari hope for in A Thousand
Plateaus and What is Philosophy? is the creation of a ‘new earth’
and ‘new peoples’, returning to an old messianic and revolutionary
trope. Leaving the content somewhat vague, they call for collective
self-invention in the interstices of existing political formations. Against
the traditional belief in a transcendent essence of a people (a nation,
a state, a race or indeed a class), a ‘return to the earth’ requires an
immanentism, which reorders a revolutionary collectivity according to
the present problems it finds itself in. What we find when we look again
at Deleuze and Guattari’s work, are concepts that we can push towards
an ecological politics: new ways of imagining living with the earth. In
this context, the new earth invites us to work collectively towards an
Anthropocene no longer spiralling closer to systemic breakdown and
extinction.
This special issue investigates, in a variety of ways and from the
perspective of a range of disciplines, what Deleuze and Guattari offer
to the age of the Anthropocene. The papers collected here are a variety
of lengths. We begin with Claire Colebrook’s ambivalent rendering
of the central tension of the Anthropocene: it provides us with an
invitation to think beyond the human while simultaneously asserting
438 Arun Saldanha and Hannah Stark

what she describes as a ‘parochial’ and universalising conceptualisation

of the species. Colebrook mobilises Deleuze and Guattari’s concept
of inclusive disjunction in order to acknowledge and work through
some of the divergent imperatives of Anthropocene thinking. Simone
Bignall, Steve Hemming and Daryle Rigney examine the posthumanist
theoretical imperative so prevalent in the humanities debate about the
Anthropocene. They call for contemporary European philosophy to
engage with indigenous philosophies to find new resources for thinking
about the problem of anthropocentrism and how this has separated the
human from its milieu.
We then turn to two very different engagements with the desert
in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. The first is from Aidan Tynan, who
focuses on the place of the desert in the two volumes of Capitalism
and Schizophrenia and in relation to Deleuze’s sole-authored works.
The figure of the desert, Tynan argues, provides a conceptual framework
for the Anthropocene, a framework that encompasses both its material
and discursive impacts. The second, from Michael Marder, takes on the
contentious figure of the nomad in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, offering
a provocative critique of this figure in the Anthropocene. In counterpoint
to Marder, we turn to Sigi Jöttkandt’s mobilisation of the figure of the
refugee and her meditation on the Anthropocene in relation to Lacan.
Hunter Dukes and Gregers Andersen both mobilise the concept of
the mechanosphere. Dukes turns to the history of science, reading the
mechanosphere as a new critical tool for the Anthropocene and one
that reminds us that the breakdown in human and natural history
predates our current environmental concerns. Andersen turns, as we
have in this introduction, to Guattari explicitly. He contextualises the
mechanosphere with recent work on the concept of the ‘technosphere’
and reads Guattari in relation to media technologies and developments
in computing.
Terri Bird approaches the problem of the Anthropocene from the
discipline of art. Considering a series of artworks as an assemblage of
the geological, historical, political and aesthetic, she questions the ways
that we think about representation in the Anthropocene.
Eugene Holland provides an afterword for this special issue and a
meditation on nomadic organisation in the Anthropocene. This special
issue starts the important work of mobilising Deleuze and Guattari’s
though in relation to our current environmental situation. However, it
is manifestly clear that we are yet to see the full force of their thought in
the Anthropocene.
 Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene 439

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