4

The Anthropocene
Kathryn Yusoff and Mary Thomas

The human is but a momentary blip in a history and cosmology that remains
fundamentally indifferent to this temporary eruption. What kind of new under-
standing of the humanities would it take to adequately map this decentering that
places man back within the animal, within nature, and within a space and time
that man does not regulate, understand, or control?
(Elizabeth Grosz)1

The Ends of Man and the Beginnings of the Cosmos

The scientific proposal of a new epoch of Earth history – the Anthropocene – puts the
‘Anthropos’ or Man firmly at the centre of dynamic earth systems, and once again
brings the concept of the human and its modes of differentiation to the fore. Non-
human (animal) and inhuman (geology and cosmology) forces constitute the construc-
tion site of the human as both a material and conceptual being. Within the context of
evolution and the pragmatics of earthly cohabitation on a busy and volatile planet,
animal boundaries and inhuman indifference maintain and organise the borders of
the human differentiation. The material and conceptual differences (from the percep-
tual range of sense organs to the size of organisms) are used to marshal the forms of
human social reproduction as a distinctive, if not exceptional, mode of production
within animal and plant life, even as there is the recognition that these broader plan-
etary forces of non-human and inhuman life underpin the very plane on which such
reproductions take place (socially, sexually, chemically, biologically, geologically and
psychically). Narratives about the ‘place’ of the human in taxonomic, philosophic,
cognitive, sensory and evolutionary orders are all constructed within this contested
terrain of non-human and inhuman forces, and the understanding of their relational
forms and constitutive materialities. The pull of non-human forces is a provocation for
life even as the push of their disordering qualities (from volcanic eruptions and viral
infections to blips and strikes in cosmic history) generates an ongoing question of con-
vergence in the human; a question of belonging that rumbles through every aspect of
social and scientific knowledge, and is precisely made in the Anthropocene diagnosis
of planetary precarity.
Each new knowledge act (or ‘discovery’) in the Life and Earth Sciences continues
to complicate the distinctions between inhuman, non-human and human entities, even
as these are often the disciplines shoring up the notion of incontestable natural entities

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through descriptive and spatial acts; acts that often foreclose the decentring of Man
through the rationality of epistemic orderings. Whether ordering the world around
the human as planetary ‘type’ specimen in a geologic epoch or structuring taxonomic
impulses from a particular (human) point in time and space, these epistemic acts often
seek to confer human exceptionalism on this human-animal. Science and its popular
representations are both arbiter and organiser of the field in which these boundary-
crossing questions take place. In a refusal of this power of arbitration, the philosopher
Quentin Meillassoux asks us to imagine, in Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction,
what are the consequences of thinking through the concrete possibilities and conse-
quences of cosmological chaos if human beings could no longer resort to science to
ground their knowledge and existence (a world where human beings survive but sci-
ence does not).2 While science organises the human as the centre and counter point of
knowledge, the place and materiality of the human, as Elizabeth Grosz argues, is not
limited by the frame of human experience or knowledge and reaches far into under-
standings of the temporality of the cosmos and through the minutiae of the desired
forms of reproduction. Thereby social and scientific questions are conjoined in ways
that far exceed scientific knowledge and analysis. As Grosz argues, a new modality
of the humanities is required which dislodges and shakes this historical, material and
patriarchal authority that keeps Man firmly at the centre of the scene. What, for exam-
ple, would this decentring of Man allow in terms of a mode of thought that did not
immediately consider the question of its own survival as the conceptual frame for pos-
ing the problem of critical ecologies in the Anthropocene? That would be to imagine
all social processes and biological conceptions through their geophysical contexts, and
all its chemical, chaotic and cosmic residues rather than through those of the human.
Attending to the changed place of the human in both non-human and inhuman
contexts, Grosz argues:

A new humanities becomes possible once the human is placed in its properly inhu-
man context. And a humanities that remains connected not only to the open varieties
of human life (open in terms of gender, sex, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion,
and so on) but also to the open varieties of life (its animal and plant forms) is needed,
one that opens itself to ethologies and generates critical ecologies.3

Thus, the formation of critical ecologies can only emerge once the openness of non-
human and inhuman contexts within ethology displaces the centrality of Man in favour
of a more materially and conceptually expansive account of planetary relations. While
Grosz calls for a new humanities that unshackles its attachment to the importance of
the human as an exceptional being in the universe, the discourse of the Anthropocene
both anticipates her call in the consideration of planetary scope, and simultaneously
reinserts the Man as the auteur of planetary agency (without shaking the authority of
that position). Yet, if Earth History teaches us anything, it is that extinction is without
end (teleologically or otherwise).
The proponents of the Anthropocene in the sciences proudly announce the new age
of the ‘Geology of Mankind’ as one that can be objectively substantiated by the impact
of humans on key stratigraphic markers, from earth flows such as nitrogen and carbon
to fossil deposits and radioactive markers in the soil to mining scars left in stone. Of
course, we should be wary of restricting the Anthropocene to a scientific neologism,

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as it makes broad claims to the human ‘capture’ of geologic force and time; thereby
signifying a field of human meaning within the extinction events of evolution and the
indifference of cosmic time. Indeed, in these strange times of the Anthropocene and
the shabby global exhibits of radioactive traces, plastic oceans, nitrogen disruptions
and climate combustions, the earth itself is being declared a new museum of human-
ity, defined through the impacts of social life on geologic strata. The possession of a
planetary geomorphic force raises implicit questions of human agency within inhuman
forces, in concert with the violent impacts of human activities on other biotic subjects.
But in ‘The Age of Mammals’ questions are often presupposed, not themselves inter-
rogated, about biologic forms of collective survival and modes of extinction. Not only
does the Anthropocene install the ‘Anthropos’ as a central figure of narration in this
self-designated epoch, it also presumes that life does indeed need to be preserved in
its current forms, and that species-thinking is a means by which to achieve this. To
reformulate Grosz’s question, what would the Anthropocene look like considered not
from the point of view of one species and its survival, or even from a concern with life,
but instead understood through its inhuman forces; inhuman forces that subtend life
and all possible configurations, from the geophysics of the planet to the wide array of
contemporaneous animals and biota?
Unlike Michel Foucault’s figuration of Man as a recent historical invention drawn
in the sand who will be wiped away by the coming tide, the Anthropocene seeks a
reversal in that flow to establish Man as universal planetary ground. Disregarding
Foucault’s claim that ‘one thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the
most constant problem posed for knowledge’, the discourse of the Anthropocene both
reignites a latent humanism and reinstates a linear historical narrative based on casual
determination. Humans or Homo sapiens, in this, their last epoch, have laid down
their stratigraphic trace with wild abandon and across a wide array of biotic subjects,
stamping insistent marks of presence on organism development and initiating prodi-
gious extinction rates directly in regimes of killing and letting die, or indirectly through
the bonds of shared exposures to environmental conditions and toxicity. The naming
of the Anthropocene in turn represents how Man has inscribed these marks, such as
toxicity, extraction, extinction and pollution, as permanent monuments through plan-
etary relations. In the recognition of the ‘achievement’ of this reach through the bio-,
atmo-, hydro- and litho- sphere, the excess of human activities increasingly becomes
scripted and purposeful, and the undoing of humanity can be branded into a lasting
marker of Man’s eternal achievements in time in the real-time geological project of the
Anthropocene.
Coming at the tail end of a century and a half of the conceptual frameworks
that carry forward a biological conception of life as the agential power on earth, the
Anthropocene raises several important challenges for the reconceptualisation of both
hominid and animal life within the context of inorganic ‘life’ or dead matter. What
once seemed like a deeply naturalised conversation about how to preserve and gener-
ate life’s flourishing seems now to be wilfully neglectful of the material conditions that
subtend life’s possibilities in the first instance, and demonstrates an inattentiveness to
how those conditions propel its continuance in the future. The presumption of life’s
priority and its sphere of control establish the epistemic hierarchies of life and nonlife,
as well as the material boundaries of the categorisation that separates these forces out.
This partition in the agency and exceptionalism of life has generated ‘dead’ categories

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of inhuman life that are taken as incidental to the narrative of life itself. Whether
conceptualised as mere standing stock to be extracted without consequence or as con-
ceptual outside to social relations that is unknown and unknowable, the geophysical
context of life has been under-theorised and materially overlooked.
Furthermore, Anthropocene narratives propagate understandings of species life, a
‘Geologic Age of Mankind’ (in the words of Paul Crutzen) that comprehends a human
species-based universal actor, unifying agency across human difference to establish the
human as the planetary agent of the earth. This concept of geologic agency and the
recalcitrant sites of its subjectivity, in turn challenge the long issue of what the human
is, in terms of its historicism: a human that is constituted by human history or natural
history, by human time or deep time, by nature or culture. If social forces are now
modes of planetary expression in the Anthropocene, then it would follow that plan-
etary modes of expression constitute modes of sociality (and its organisation in terms
of gender, sex, class, race, and so on). The human that is presented in the Anthropo-
cene is seemingly part of and outside of planetary nature; both author of stratigraphic
traces and the idealised subject of its end. This notion of a single species as planetary
governor (as in planetary governance theory) establishes the search for ends, or moral-
ity, as the defining question of Anthropocene engagement, rather than concentrating
on the possibilities of more critically expansive ecological thought.
A geologically-constituted Anthropocene human subject that is both world-shaping
and shaped by the constitute minerals of the world poses a whole set of questions about
the kinds of narratives, genealogies and modes of reproduction we still hold onto in
order to give the human a coherent unity of identity. While Jacques Derrida’s question
of The Animal That Therefore I Am gave a certain valiancy to navigating the divisions
of animality within the idea of the human that never was, and Donna Haraway’s notion
of the one becoming with many secured a notion of the human as a multispecies being,
the narrative of the Anthropocene confidently sneaks the human back in as the unifying
subject and agent of geology. The Anthropocene might seem to express a certain dis-
sonance in long-held orderings of the human-animal, culture-nature divisions that were
long made through the claim of the exceptionality of human logic and technical agency
in order to overcome nature and seemly elide natural forces their evolutionary claims.
The Anthropocene, and its ‘message’ about unintended consequences (the Oops! Man-
it’s-a-bad-scene) seem to express an epic reversal of fortune, from planetary conquest
to planetary failure, from God’s-eye view to life on the rubbish heap. While stark in its
warnings about ecological disaster, gaining geologic powers is an ambiguous achieve-
ment alongside its accompanying warnings of the terminal subjectivity of humanity. It
is like attending your own funeral.
Established in the ideological mud of nature, narratives of natural history are
caught in the context of making sense, experience and use of human-animal-planet
relations in a way that takes on new significance now that human history has suppos-
edly crossed the threshold into natural history in the geologic age of the Anthropocene.
In the rest of this chapter we turn to the American Museum of Natural History to
examine one of the last grand fossil halls of Man and its narratives of the distinctions
and orderings that both inform and orientate what it means to be a subject of the earth
and a creature of the planet. The museum energises and disciplines the categories of
meaning and structures of thinking that are most at stake in the Anthropocene in terms
of the unity of a distinct human identity and its material and conceptual composition.

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Thus, we argue, the museum is the siting of epic origin stories, not their exhibition as
such: of the earth, the preferred and essentialised human subject and its narrow habit-
uated trajectories, nature (as a plural subject and resource), animality, organic and
inorganic life (the organisation of space and time), and most importantly, of the future
secured through preferred forms of social and sexual reproduction of ‘life’. We can see
in the museum a set of logics at work that produce a sensible map of the organisation
of human-animal, human-planetary relations through both visual and racial technolo-
gies and their affectual narratives.

Hominid Heyday: Human Origins and One Species Triumphant

So, nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in
or bank, nor an essence to be saved or violated. Nature is not hidden and so does
not need to be unveiled. Nature is not a text to be read in the codes of mathematics
and biomedicine. It is not the ‘other’ who offers origin, replenishment, and service.
Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the
reproduction of man.
(Donna Haraway)4

In ‘Teddy Bear Patriarchy’, Haraway charts an origin story about the American
Museum of Natural History through race and gender, by placing its genesis within its
public activities: exhibition, eugenics and conservation. She writes,

Exhibition was a practice to produce permanence, to arrest decay. Eugenics was

a movement to preserve hereditary stock, to assure racial purity, to prevent race
suicide. Conservation was a policy to preserve resources, not only for industry, but
also for moral formation, for the achievement of manhood.5

Haraway continues by arguing that the Museum’s three activities ‘attempted to insure
presentation without fixation and paralysis, in the face of extraordinary change in the
relations of sex, race, and class’.6
The Anthropocene, as humanity’s last stand, comes into the newly designed (it
reopened in 2007) Hall of Human Origins through uncanny similarity, though today
the concern is not racial purity, but humanity’s survival. Figuring the human within
the temporal context of the Anthropocene brings the investments of human origina-
tion into obvious view. The telling of human origins and speciesism has a purpose in
advancing a hetero-gendered reproductive futurity, in perpetuity. Three examples from
the Hall of Human Origins illustrate the point.
First is a replica of human ancestors. Three and a half million years ago, two homi-
nids’ footprints left in mud became preserved after a volcanic eruption layered them
carefully in ash in what is now eastern Africa. Discovered in 1978 by Paul Abell with
Mary Leakey’s team of paleontologists, the 27-metre footprint trail, called The Laetoli
Footprints (for the Tanzania town of Laetoli) were likely left by members of the species
Australopithecus afarensis, whose fossils remained at the same sediment layer as the
footprints. One set of footprints was smaller than the other, but both indicate a short-
legged, upright bipedal hominid.

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In the Hall, this site is commemorated through a fantastical interpretation of the

species that made the footprint, rather than through an analysis of the rocky evidence
itself. The long trace of fossilised footprints has been reduced to a remarkably claus-
trophobic exhibit enshrined in glass walls and marked by a sign reading, ‘With grate-
ful appreciation to Arnold and Arlene Goldstein for their wonderful generosity’ (see
Figure 4.1). The large font ‘Arnold and Arlene Goldstein’ seem to name the couple of
Au. afarensis hominids reproduced as the footprints’ strolling agents. We emphasise
couple, since the casually strolling pair is intimately bound in proud human-hetero-
sexual form. The exhibit interprets the size difference of the feet as a companion male
and female (rather than as two nearby walkers, or sequential walkers, or an adult
and child, though a plaque to the side notes this possibility). Arnold and Arlene walk
together side by side in time, through time, their gaze to the horizon marking the
future humanity that will reward their own species’ still-unknowable role in evolution.
That intimate, in-sync, upright gait and the open mouths appear to show them capable
of language and conversation, overcoming their hairy apelike bodies and faces. They
are animals with the sure, triumphant expectation of becoming human.
The human formations of love and care, and binary sex-gender, determine the exhib-
it’s messages about the Anthropocene. Arnold’s protective arm around the diminutive

Figure 4.1 Arnold and Arlene, Museum of Natural History, New York.
Image credit: Kathryn Yusoff, 2016.

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 58 kathryn yusoff and mary thomas

Figure 4.2 Rear view of Arnold and Arlene, Museum of Natural History, New York.
Image credit: Kathryn Yusoff, 2016.

female precludes other speculative surrounds that might insinuate other social or repro-
ductive formations than inevitable human ones, a more expansive contextual scene with
other species in view, or even a grotesque gesture to a violent and scrappy existence (see
Figure 4.2). After all, the species went extinct, as ours will eventually. The exhibit in
effect bluntly masks both extinctions in time and nods instead to an evolutionary tale of
marching onward: the accomplishment of a modern and universal human species. Not
to mention that the directional evolutionary march to humanity negates the animal in
Arnold and Arlene – a necessary precursor for the Anthropocene’s also-inevitable uni-
versal subject. Au. Afarensis exists in the Museum’s presentation merely as a message of
human survival.
The Museum’s human origin displays do consistent work to situate the planetary
spread and uniformity of the species Homo sapiens. As such, the exhibits push aside
any real grappling with or challenges to humanity’s universality, accomplished in
large part through a tightly narrated presentation of gendered bodies. For the second
example, in Bodies of Evidence (see Figure 4.3), the titling text reads, ‘Within each
human body we can find traces of evolutionary history – evidence that our species
has changed over time. Some of the differences between humans and other species
can be found in DNA, which others are visible to the naked eye.’ The white forms
of the gendered bodies are meant to be filled in as each/every human body (though

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Figure 4.3 Bodies of Evidence, Museum of Natural History, New York.

Image credit: Kathryn Yusoff, 2016.

the slim bodies and straight hair presume the idealised form those representational
bodies prejudicially take). The two dominant forms, a female and male, are ridicu-
lously stereotyped. Feminism seems to have had no effect on the Museum’s presenta-
tion of intellect (man’s brain) and reproduction (woman’s tail, the double entendre of
which seems to have escaped Museum designers). The curve of the ‘base of the human
spine’ maps nicely on the curve of the woman’s buttocks, her other curves also stand-
ing out against the stronger stance of the masculine, whose pelvis is literally leaning
towards hers. The animality of the human is also depicted as remnant and ancestral,
particularly in the case of the female form. The woman’s tailbone, according to the
signage, ‘reminds us that humans have descended from ancestral animals with tails’,
while the man’s ‘DNA “signatures” in the human brain show that its structure and
inner circuitry changed rapidly during recent human evolution’. Women, it seems, are
more tied to their animal pasts than men.
While gender binarism holds the Hall’s evolutionary messaging together, race
occupies an afterthought, albeit a necessary one, at the end of the gallery. In the final
displays, to illustrate the third example, the challenge of racial difference to species-
thinking is diluted through the emphasis on majority genetic code. The viewer is
asked to prioritise the shared 99.9 per cent of the genetic code and foreground the
human, rather than highlight the minority code that individualises the human. This
message is accomplished through multicultural discourse, that is, that ‘we’ are all

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Figure 4.4 Beneath the Surface, Museum of Natural History, New York.
Image credit: Kathryn Yusoff, 2016.

the same ‘beneath the surface’, save for the ‘tiny’ fraction of human DNA that dis-
tinguishes ‘individuals’ (see Figure 4.4). In essence the overarching idea in the Hall
is that individuals are vastly more the same than different, resulting in one species
sharing ‘99.9% of the same DNA’. Individuals of colour – again, the female in side
profile! – represent the challenge to the ‘sameness’ of the species, lest we focus too
much on the ‘inherited differences [that] stem from the one tenth of one percent of
human DNA that varies from person to person’. The survival of the species requires
the diminished impact of those ‘tiny’ amounts of three million differences.
One of the starkest narratives in the museum in both animal and human halls is of
the racialisation of survival and endurance told through the lens of speciesism, of what
and who gets to persist and resist evolutionary narratives, naturalising some deaths and
not others, not to mention who gets folded into an evolutionary past and is thereby
erased from the possibility of being present, and who gets left out entirely because
they fail to reproduce in socially significant ways. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey comments on
the taxonomic synergies of race and species in discourses of dingo purity and the ‘race
panic’ of hybridity, to talk about ‘how dingo hybridity shares a genealogy with misce-
genation discourses and Australian twentieth-century plans for the biological assimila-
tion of Aboriginal people; both sets of ideas featuring perceptions of mixed race people
as living embodiments of extinction’.7 Arguing that speciesism is race by other means,
she asks: do audiences hear only species talk or do they also hear race panic? And, how
does speciesist racist talk contain ‘plausible deniability’,8 or the political talk of dog
whistling, while propagating the category of racial purity? As well as providing alle-
gorical ends for the contemplation of human extinction, non-human species are also a

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storehouse for racialising reasoning. Probyn-Rapsey questions how speciesism mobil-

ises racist questions about subjects without proper categories of belonging, and that
there exists a stickiness between domains whereby species mobilises racial logics to do
taxonomic work (and vice versa). Alongside Claire Kim, she suggests that racialising
logics move across human and animal borders to ‘sustain and energize one another’9
keeping racial thinking alive and in circulation ‘to become reattached anew to human
and non-human bodies’.10 The theory of the synergistic kinship between species and
race is exemplified in the museum in the aforementioned examples, but it is also evi-
dent in a growing number of disciplines that seek to engage with planetary politics.
Recourse to speciesism in the Anthropocene arises in the most unlikely places, such
as a new planetary genre of postcolonial studies. Drawing on the view of the Anthro-
pocene as a biological end game for humanity and the desire to consolidate human-
ity’s fate in a less perilous future, Shital Pavinchandra examines the recent universalist
aspirations of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Paul Gilroy, in their respective commitments
to rethink the logics of incommensurability and difference through species thinking.11
In the context of climate change and what is perceived to be a common susceptibility
to environmental risks, Pavinchandra suggests that both Chakrabarty and Gilroy put
forward speciesist thinking as a reluctant means to prolong a shared concept of the
future or version of sameness that might make a common cause of survival, rather
than divergent appeals for cultural preservation. Ironically, the ‘common cause’ of an
inclusive humanity falls into the universalist language that has long maintained vio-
lent exclusions in its presumptions of biological conformity. Critiquing the rhetoric of
‘life preservation’ that she sees as evident in both scholars’ attachment to species, she
puts forward an alternative set of fictional texts that engage the postcolonial dynamic
with more exuberant, less defensive modes of engaging with the precariousness of sur-
vival.12 Importantly, she emphasises modes of engagement that are not predicated on a
presumed, shared instinct for survival that protects and reproduces an unproblematic
self-same. She writes: ‘The ethical appeal of their respective arguments resides in their
focus on vulnerability and finitude, and, accordingly, their interventions mobilize life as
a concept linked to longevity, duration, regeneration, and reproduction’.13 What Pavin-
chandra identifies in Chakrabarty and Gilroy, albeit in different guises, is a ‘self-legit-
imating rhetoric of (human) life preservation’, the very same attempt to guard against
vulnerability in the name of survival that has ‘led to our present planetary predicament
in the first place’.14 She suggests that a far more ‘radical possibility – that we recognize,
accept and embrace our vulnerability – is inevitably foreclosed’.15 In the recognition
and embrace of vulnerability as vulnerability, rather than something to be overcome,
alternative logics that do not build on the existing modes of exclusion and normative
reproductions of the self-same might provide a more energised means with which to
face the radical asymmetries of both inhuman nature and the uneven hand of justice.

Species Life, Animal Life, Geologic Life

We wonder, however, if these speciesist arguments yet retain the disproportionate pri-
orities of humanity, since an insistent doubt remains whether humans and the genus
of hominids is even a stable category with any ability to render its vulnerability within
categorisation whatsoever. Everything in the sciences of Human Origins Theory tells
us that the story of hominids is more compellingly told through the divergence of evo-
lutionary paths, chance encounters with bacterial and other entities, climate change,

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huge tectonic shifts, migrations and sometimes just chance. Hominid animality is both
replaced by a purposeful geologic agency and resisted through the cauterised ends of
species thinking in the Anthropocene. At the same time that there is an opening up of
evolutionary contexts as part of the insertion of human life into earth histories, there is
also the re-suturing of human life into the earth as a common entity with a combined
fate (thereby enlarging the sphere of human agency to the planet without taking on the
disparate ends of cosmological trajectories). This displays a spatial logic of enlarge-
ment without a concomitant temporal logic of the radical alterity of cosmic material-
ism. As Neil deGrasse Tyson narrates in the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of
Natural History, the planet is unexceptional in the great vastness of the universe. In the
field of cosmology no claim of exceptionalism is made on behalf of humans.
While there is a cleaving apart – of rocks from animal in the Hall of Biodiversity
and the Hall of Planet Earth, and between the human in the Hall of Human Origins
and the animal in the Halls of Natural History – what connects these divisions is the
contemplation of the extinction of humans within the context of other mass extinc-
tions, both in and out of speciesism. Both in and out of speciesism positions Homo
sapiens on the cusp of animal and non-animal life, both in and out of the binds of bio-
logical life, and with the possibility of transcendence of their material circumstances
and drives. The easy binaries of life and nonlife that have guided the museum and the
positive affirmation of much multispecies literature are radically unsettled through the
acknowledgement of geologic affiliations to the planet, and the problematic asymme-
tries with inhuman nature that are brought to the fore in the non-reciprocity of geo-
logical events; events that are themselves the very basis, or ground, of all life on earth.
Within the context of geologic life,16 rocks, minerals and geophysics take on agentic
powers within a broader field of survival, as the very precondition of any kind of pos-
sibility; or, what might be called a proto-geopolitics of life. On the other hand, the
opening to the rocky dimensions of life that the Anthropocene narrative enables are
met with a form of species triumphalism that proclaims the unique and special powers
of humans to harness the geologic forces of a planet (perhaps forgetting the awesome
achievements of bacteria as the geomorphic force). In their argument for the recogni-
tion of an Anthropocene biosphere, Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, P. K. Haff et al.
argue that the geological record shows two fundamental stages for the evolution of the
Earth’s biosphere: a microbial stage from 3.5 to 0.65 Ga, and a metazoan stage evident
by c. 650 Ma. The authors suggest that the modern era differs from these bacterial
stages of the earth’s development to announce a third stage of the biosphere evolu-
tion characterised by 1) global homogenisation of flora and fauna; 2) a single species
(Homo sapiens) ‘commandeering 20–40% of net primary production and also mining
fossil net primary production (fossil fuels) to break through the photosynthetic energy
barrier; 3) human-directed evolution of other species; and 4) increasing interaction of
the biosphere with the technosphere’.17 The authors confidently conclude that this new
biospheric moment heralds ‘a new era in the planet’s history’ named the Anthropocene
biosphere, which differs markedly from microbial and metazoan stages. Yet this prob-
lematic notion of succession erases the collaborative work done between humans and
microbes and assigns agency on the part of humans, rather than comprehending the
ongoing agency of microbial life in modulating and sustaining human life.18
If we consider the Anthropocene as an opportunity to recognise new genealogies of
existence that are embedded in geologic life, such as animal and plant origination in

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fossil fuels, not to mention ancient cosmic materials, then the forms of reproduction
that secure survival are enlarged from the usual heteronormative models of human
male and female to include a much more radically diffuse and diverse assortment of
collaborations. Then we could ask, how does the human become enlivened within the
context of the Anthropocene through its dependence on animal, plant and mineral
life? While speciesism has been a means to ensure a survivalist narrative in the evolu-
tion of what brought us to this place, it is what happens to all the non-purposeful
evolution that promises a future that differs from the present, and was always differ-
entiating from it. If the historic division of animal and human was levelled on the basis
of rationality and the philosophical framing of labour against the animal through that
rationality, the Anthropocene reveals a non-rational actor, and rationality as a precur-
sor to extinction rather than any nourishment of life. In this sense the human becomes
lacking, self-destructive in itself rather than self-preserving in time, or overcoming of
the evolutionary binds of time, instead focused on its own annihilation. Perhaps, in
this context of unsure reproductions, vulnerability can be seen as a state that generates
and provokes life, or even refuses its reproduction in service to other concerns and
pleasures.19 Grosz argues that life is not consistent with itself, it is at variance with
everything around it, and it precisely relies upon this disjunction to provoke its affili-
ations and forms of commitment to being (in a biological, political and sexual sense).
According to Grosz, this is the very engine of being, and we might suppose, given
the extraordinary openness of the biosphere to the cosmos, that this is the engine of
being planetary. That is, the very inconsistencies that fracture rather than unite life are
where life draws its strength, and potentially its resources for different kinds of futures.
Co-joined with this disjunction is the exposure to the outside and the forms of vulner-
ability that allow life in all its variance to get what it needs.

Notes
1. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 25.
2. Quentin Meillassoux, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2015).
3. Grosz, Becoming Undone, p. 21.
4. Donna J. Haraway, ‘The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d
Others’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 296.
5. Donna J. Haraway, ‘Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York
City, 1908–36’, Social Text 11 (1984/85), p. 57.
6. Ibid.
7. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, ‘Dingoes and Dog-Whistling: A Cultural Politics of Race and Species
in Australia’, Animal Studies Journal 4:2 (2015), p. 57.
8. Ibid. p. 58.
9. Claire Jean Kim quoted in Probyn-Rapsey, ‘Dingoes’, p. 61.
10. Probyn-Rapsey, ‘Dingoes’, p. 62.
11. Shital Pravinchandra, ‘One Species, Same Difference?: Postcolonial Critique and the Con-
cept of Life’, New Literary History 47 (2016), pp. 27–48. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty,
‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35:2 (2009), pp. 197–222; and Paul
Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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 64 kathryn yusoff and mary thomas

12. Pravinchandra, ‘One Species’, p. 28.

13. Ibid. p. 29.
14. Ibid. p. 38.
15. Ibid. pp. 38–9.
16. Kathryn Yusoff, ‘Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2014), pp. 779–95.
17. Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, P. K. Haff et al., ‘The Anthropocene Biosphere’, The
Anthropocene Review (2015), pp. 1–24, p. 1.
18. See the ‘Microbes’ chapter in this volume.
19. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005).

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