Iovino (Chapter 13) - (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Lit

The Anthropocenic Turn
This interdisciplinary volume discusses whether the increasing salience

of the Anthropocene concept in the humanities and the social sciences
constitutes an “Anthropocenic turn.” The Anthropocene discourse cre-
ates novel conceptual configurations and enables scholars to re-negotiate
and re-contextualize long-established paradigms, premises, theories and
methodologies. These innovative constellations stimulate fresh research
in many areas of thought and practice. The contributors to this volume
respond to the proposition of an “Anthropocene turn” from the perspec-
tive of diverse research fields, including history of science, philosophy,
environmental humanities and political science as well as literary, art
and media studies. Altogether, the collection reveals to which extent the
Anthropocene concept challenges deep-seated assumptions across disci-
plines. It invites readers to explore the wealth of scholarly perspectives
on the Anthropocene as well as unexpected inter- and transdisciplinary
connections.
Gabriele Dürbeck is professor of literature and culture studies at the

University of Vechta. Her research includes German literature from the
18th–21th century, postdramatic theater, travel literature, postcolonial-
ism, ecocriticism and narratives of the Anthropocene. She has authored
“Ambivalent characters and fragmented poetics in Anthropocenic lit-
erature (Max Frisch, Iliya Trojanow)” (The Minnesota Review, 2014)
and co-authored “Human and Non-human Agencies in the Anthro-
pocene” (Ecozona, 2015). She is co-editor of Ecocriticism. Eine Ein-
führung (Böhlau, 2015); Ecological Thought in German Literature and
Culture (Lexington, 2017); Handbuch Postkolonialismus und Litera-
tur (Metzler, 2017); Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschen Literatur
des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts—neue Perspektiven und Ansätze (Peter
Lang, 2018); Repräsentationsweisen des Anthropozän in Literatur und
Medien/Representing the Anthropocene in Literature and Media (Peter
Lang, 2019).
Philip Hüpkes is research assistant at the Institute for Media and

Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, and
a PhD-candidate (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Dürbeck) at the Uni-
versity of Vechta. From 2017 until 2019, he was employed as research
assistant in the DFG-funded research project “Narratives of the Anthro-
pocene in Science and Literature. Themes, Structures, Poetics” at the
University of Vechta. Recent publications include: “Der Anthropos als
Skalenproblem” (Der Anthropos im Anthropozän: Die Wiederkehr des
Menschen im Moment seiner vermeintlich endgültigen Verabschiedung,
de Gruyter, 2020); “Anthropocenic Earth Mediality: On Scaling and
Deep Time in the Anthropocene” (Literature and Culture in the An-
thropocene, Cambridge Scholars, 2019); “‘A New Political Body Yet to
Emerge’: Zur Darstellbarkeit des anthropos in Bruno Latours ‘Kosmoko-
loss. Eine Tragikomödie über das Klima und den Erdball’” (Repräsenta-
tionsweisen des Anthropozän in Literatur und Medien/Representations
of the Anthropocene in Literature and Media, Peter Lang, 2019).
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

The Anthropocenic Turn
The Interplay between Disciplinary
and Interdisciplinary Responses to
a New Age
Edited by
Gabriele Dürbeck and
Philip Hüpkes
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
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© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes to be
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Typeset in Sabon
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Contents
List of Figures ix
SECTION 1
Creating Knowledge in the Anthropocene 25
1 The “Material Turn” and the “Anthropocenic Turn”

from a History of Science Perspective 27
H A N S - J Ö RG R H E I N B E RG E R
2 The Anthropocene and the History of Science 37

J Ü RG E N R E N N
3 The Dirty Metaphysics of Fossil Freedom 59

F R A N Z M AU E L S H AG E N
4 Thoughts on Asia and the Anthropocene 77

H A N N E S B E RG T H A L L E R
SECTION 2
Narrating the Anthropocene 91
5 Safe Conduct: The Anthropocene and the Tragic 93

BERNHARD MALKMUS
6 Literature Pedagogy and the Anthropocene 113

RO M A N B A RT O S C H
viii Contents
7 Dating the Anthropocene 130
P H I L I P P PAT T B E RG A N D M I C H A E L DAV I E S -V E N N
8 When Humans Become Nature 150

BERND SCHERER
SECTION 3
Sensing the Anthropocene 157
9 Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene 159

E VA H O R N
Notes on Contributors 253

Index 259
Figures
1.1 Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Duelo a Garrotazos,

1820–1823, Técnica mixta. © Photographic Archive
Museo Nacional del Prado, courtesy Museo del Prado 31
9.1 Casper David Friedrich, The Great Enclosure Near
Dresden, 1831/1832, Oil on Canvas. © Staatliche
Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photo: Jürgen Karpinski,
© bpk-Bildagentur, courtesy bpk-Bildagentur 160
9.2 Andreas Gursky, 99 Cents, 1999. © Andreas Gursky /
Bildrecht, Vienna, 2019, courtesy Sprüth Magers
Berlin London 165
9.3 Tara Donovan, Untitled (Plastic Cups), 2006,
Installation (plastic cups), at: New York: Pace Gallery,
© Tara Donovan, courtesy Pace Gallery, Photo: Kerry
Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery 167

12.3 Futurefarmers, Flatbread Society Seed Collection,
2014. Photo: © Futurefarmers, courtesy Futurefarmers 229

x Figures

Anthropocenic Turn?—An
Introduction
Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes
Since the term was first coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer
(2000), the Anthropocene concept has affected debates in almost every
discipline and has developed into a rapidly growing and controversial
inter- and transdisciplinary object of research.1 By placing anthropo-
genic impact on the earth systems at the core of geological and systemic
analysis up to planetary scale, the concept of the Anthropocene has
prominently challenged the dichotomy between “nature” as domain of
the natural sciences and “culture” as the domain of the humanities, re-
spectively, of “the social” as the domain of the social sciences.
Against the backdrop of rapidly changing earthly phenomena such as
climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, glacier meltdown
and species extinction the Anthropocene seems to respond to the scien-
tific necessity to understand the epistemological and ontological role of
“anthropos,” the human species. As a result of the original conceptual
prioritizing of anthropos, the Anthropocene debate has at least partially
emancipated itself from the concept’s exclusively earth system scientific
and geological origins. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2018, 9) has put it, the
Anthropocene now lives “two lives,” one scientific “involving measure-
ments and debates among qualified scientists,” and one popular “as a
moral political issue.” Similarly, Helmuth Trischler (2016, 312) distin-
guishes a “geological” and a “cultural” Anthropocene concept. And Jan
Zalasiewicz (2017, 124) states that “there are many Anthropocenes […]
used for different purposes along different kinds of logic in different dis-
ciplines.” Such distinctions take into account the difference between the
numerous contributions of natural scientific disciplines, which primarily
seek to develop the scientific base of the Anthropocene on the one hand,
and the manifold approaches from the social sciences and humanities
to reflect upon the historical, philosophical, ethical and political im-
plications of the new concept and discourse on the other hand. An im-
portant manifestation of the “geological concept” of the Anthropocene,
respectively, of its “scientific life,” is the journal Elementa—Science for
the Anthropocene (since 2013), which mainly focuses on earth system
scientific, geological, chemical and biological research. On the other
hand, there are various examples of engagements with the Anthropocene
2 Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes
which address, highlight or mediate its cultural dimensions and contrib-
ute to the concept’s popularity.2 Among them are the inter- and transdis-
ciplinary Anthropocene Project (2011–2013) at the Haus der Kulturen
der Welt (HKW), Berlin, and the Anthropocene Curriculum, a collabo-
ration between the HKW and the Max Planck Institute for the History
of Science, Berlin; the joint exhibition by the Rachel Carson Center and
the Deutsche Museum Willkommen im Anthropozän (Welcome to the
Anthropocene) in Munich in 2014–2016 (cf. Möllers et al. 2015); or the
Anthropocene exhibition of Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and
Edward Burtynsky in the National Gallery of Canada and Art Gallery
of Ontario (2018–2019) and the documentary Anthropocene: The Hu-
man Epoch (2018) by the same artists.
Despite the heterogeneity of approaches in the different disciplines,
the Anthropocene still remains recognizable as a set of interconnected
ideas. A distinct “Anthropocene discourse” is now well established in a
wide range of disciplines and institutions in the social sciences and the
humanities as well as the arts, museums, popular science, the media
and—rather implicitly—in political arenas. Although the central idea
of the Anthropocene concept—i.e. humans playing a decisive role in
the overall functioning of the earth systems—is not new, the extent of
scientific engagement with it seems unprecedented.3 For disciplines like
history, sociology, political science, philosophy, cultural, literary and
media studies, the Anthropocene signifies the opportunity to engage in
a domain previously beyond their scope—the earth system—and thus
to rethink or resituate their individual epistemic and operational frame-
works. The remarkable hype that has evolved around the Anthropocene
both mirrors and questions the particularity of these disciplines them-
selves, but it also facilitates the opportunity of new interconnections be-
tween them under the overarching framework of a new geological epoch
with anthropos as its main force.
Drawing on the prime role that the Anthropocene concept has been
playing in the discourses of the humanities and the social sciences for at
least the past ten years, this volume seeks to assess whether the scale and
scope of impact that the Anthropocene has on the different disciplines
justifies to speak of an “Anthropocenic turn.” This, however, is not to
ask whether it is necessary to actively and strategically proclaim such a
turn, thereby implying its necessity and significance for the humanities
and social sciences. Rather, this volume aims at mapping a number of
significant disciplinary as well as inter- and transdisciplinary develop-
ments, which suggest that the Anthropocene fulfills a number of condi-
tions of what could be termed an “Anthropocenic turn.” The approach
of this volume is not so much grounded in an affirmative attitude toward
the scientific relevance of the Anthropocene concept with its far-reaching
implications, but in a reflexive perspective on the concept’s uses and
the ensuing effects on (inter- and trans-)disciplinary engagements with
Anthropocenic Turn?—An Introduction 3
the relationship between humans and Earth. Within the Anthropocene
discourse existing paradigms, premises, theories and methodologies are
re-negotiated and re-embedded into novel conceptual configurations.
We argue that the Anthropocene has the potential to “format” elemental
premises and assumptions of various fields of thought in a new way for
a substantial duration of time, thereby fulfilling a basic requirement of
what could be seen as the foundation for a “turn” in the making.
Yet Another Turn?

An obvious and legitimate question is at this point: do we really need yet
another “turn”? The suggestion that an Anthropocenic turn is currently
in the making obviously poses a number of problems. Above all, the
notion “Anthropocenic turn” might seem particularly unnecessary con-
sidering the simultaneous emergence of related “turns” and paradigms
addressing similar developments in research. The increasing popularity
of the Anthropocene beyond the natural sciences could well be inter-
preted as an effect or symptom of a far more general interest in ecologi-
cal, geological and planetary-scale research topics. For instance, media
philosopher Erich Hörl (2017) discusses the Anthropocene concept as
part of a “new ecological paradigm,” which has emerged in the course
of the development of cybernetics as the effect of an increased “ecologi-
zation of thinking.” A pendant to Hörl’s idea of a paradigm shift toward
the ecological can be found in the proclamation of a “planetary turn”
(Elias and Moraru 2015)—understood as the proliferation of artistic and
literary engagements with the conceptual and political framework of the
“planetary” in the course of the 21st century. Complementarily, the idea
of a turn toward the geologic has been discussed in a number of articles
(Yusoff 2013; Ivanchikova 2018), volumes (Ellsworth and Kruse 2013;
Turpin 2013) or Gabo Guzzo’s art project The Geological Turn: Art and
the Anthropocene at Banner Repeater, London (May 24–30, 2012).
An examination of such turns as the ones named above leads to a
second problem: a proliferation of the quantity of proclaimed turns,
which eventually prove to be the only temporarily relevant fields of in-
terest. The endurance of a turn, i.e., its historical significance in science,
might be proved only in the course of time and thus relies on retro-
spective approval—with the consequence that many quickly or casually
proposed turns run the danger of undergoing the suspicion of being a
mere “hype.” Up to this point it might not be entirely calculable whether
the Anthropocene “is here to stay.” The most significant reason against
assuming a turn comes from a geological point of view: the Anthropo-
cene is formally still not considered as the present geological epoch al-
though the majority of the Anthropocene Working Group has agreed in
May 2019 to designate a new geologic epoch starting around 1950 with
the atomic age.4 As long as humanity is still “officially” dwelling in the
“Holocene,” there remains a probability that the geological Anthropo-
cene concept is only of temporary relevance.
A third problem lies in the semantics of the “turn” itself and in the
resulting research’s political implications. The 20th century has wit-
nessed various turns, the most significant of which is the development
of a skepticism about the transparency of language as a medium of reg-
istering and communicating reality. The so called linguistic turn, which
spreads across various disciplines, substantiated the recognition that
language functions as an ineluctable condition of thought. This recogni-
tion, however, has affected the development of and has been manifested
in many of the most important currents of the 20th century western
intellectual history, most prominently structuralism and poststructur-
alism. But far from having only a positive impact, the linguistic turn
has also contributed to the exclusion of everything which eludes or sur-
passes discourses. The “iconic turn” (or alternatively “pictorial turn”)
in the 1990s can be regarded as a direct response to the ongoing focus
on the “hegemony” of the sign and textuality. Hence, it is important to
consider that widespread developments such as the linguistic turn can
have a totalizing tendency, which counteracts the broadly accepted rec-
ognition of a plurality of coexisting paradigms, which do not necessarily
contradict each other. In accordance with Doris Bachmann-Medick’s
(2006, 16) plea for “cultural turns,” one should think of turns in the
plural. Such criticism and recalibration of our thinking about turns
would apply, it seems, in particular to the Anthropocene, as the concept
tends to appear as a holistic “story of scale that stretches from the deep-
est lithic recesses of the Earth to its unsheltered atmospheric expanses”
(Oppermann 2018, 2). Furthermore, the Anthropocene has been cri-
tiqued for providing a “master narrative” of humanity, which supports
the idea “of a totalization of the entirety of human actions into a sin-
gle ‘human activity’ generating a single human footprint on the Earth”
(Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017, 45). For various scholars, a problematic
result of the suggestion that anthropos is the protagonist of an entire
geological unit of time consists in the exclusion of the other, more dif-
ferentiated perspectives on the causation of phenomena such as climate
change, as well as in the marginalization of nonhuman forms of agency
and matter. One of the most important arguments made in this respect
concerns the undifferentiated attribution of responsibility as “stewards
of the Earth system” (Steffen et al. 2007, 618) to humanity in general.
Various scholars argue in slightly differing ways that the “true” sub-
ject of the Anthropocene is only a minor—capitalist, European or west-
ern, wealthy, post-industrial, white and male—part of humanity (e.g.
Hornborg and Malm 2014; Ropohl 2014; Cunha 2015; Moore 2016; Di
Chiro 2017). Another critique draws on the idea that anthropogenic im-
pacts are themselves effects of—or entangled with—far more complex
forms of mattering and “terraforming assemblages” (Woods 2014, 134)
consisting, for instance, also of micro-organisms (Haraway 2015, 2016)
and media-technologies (Parikka 2014, 2015).
Hence, three problems seem to complicate the idea of an Anthropoce-
nic turn: (1) the Anthropocene concept and its implications could be con-
sidered to be parts of a far more encompassing intellectual turn toward
natural scientific, and most of all ecological, planetary and geological
issues; (2) the Anthropocene concept may ultimately prove to have a far
less enduring impact than expected—which would stand in contradiction
to the strong and durable notion of a turn; (3) the Anthropocene concept
may appear holistic in a way that undermines or at least complicates to
grasp the true complexity of anthropogenic causation or of the entan-
glement of humans and nonhumans in a differentiated approach. In this
respect, it could be argued that an Anthropocenic turn would affirm and
strengthen a holistic and undifferentiated account of what in reality is far
more complex. However, we argue that the role which the Anthropocene
concept plays in various disciplines and in inter- and transdisciplinary
approaches suggests a far less problematic notion of a turn. Each of the
problems can be related to a corresponding counter-argument, which
rejects an all too skeptical perspective on the Anthropocene concept in
favor of a more affirmative point of view on its novelty.
The Anthropocene as a Large-Scale Framework

In order to understand the innovative potential of the Anthropocene
concept, it is important to keep in mind its genealogy. The Anthro-
pocene is not an ecological concept, nor is it, even though it could be
assumed, a distinctly geological one. In fact, originally, it is an earth sys-
tem scientific concept. It grounded in a scientific development of the sec-
ond half of the 20th century, which signified a “paradigm shift,” (Kuhn
1962) for the earth sciences (Hamilton and Grinevald 2015; Hamilton
2016). Earth system science understands the earth as a single, complex
and processual (bio-cybernetic) system, which is far more than the mere
sum of its parts. Its scientific interest is not primarily directed toward
single (sub-)systems, i.e. rather “local” ecologies, but more toward the
non-linear, positive and negative feedback relations between systems at
different temporal and spatial scales and in their relation to the scale of
the earth system. From the point of view of earth system scientists, the
central hypothesis of the Anthropocene concept is that anthropogenic
impact on manifold earth subsystems might lead to an irreversible, earth
historical “rupture” (Hamilton 2016, 94) in the overall functioning of
the earth system.
Therefore, the novelty of the Anthropocene lies in its planetary-scale,
earth systemic perspective on human-environment interactions. The
epistemic consequence of this is two-fold. As Bonneuil and Fressoz (2017,
xi) remark, the Anthropocene is “a sign of our power, but also of our
impotence.” That is to say, the earth systemic perspective on the Anthro-
pocene brings into view the fundamental impact of anthropogenic activ-
ities not only on particular ecologies, such as the Amazonian rain forest,
or on particular systems, such as the climate, but on the metastability
of negative feedback loops between them. As a “sign of our power,” the
Anthropocene concept testifies to the (unconscious, nonintentional) ca-
pacity to amplify positive feedback loops between earth systems. Thus,
ex negativo it makes visible not only the terraforming power of anthro-
pos, but also the vulnerability of earth’s systemic equilibrium and the
potentially disastrous effects on the existence of the human species.
If the Anthropocene concept is more than a minor variant of a gen-
eral turn toward ecology, it is so because of its large-scale, basically
all-encompassing perspective on human-environment interactions,
and—as a result of this perspective—of its foregrounding of an anthro-
pogenically amplified change of the state of the earth. That is to say,
the Anthropocene concept triggers discussions in various disciplines and
beyond about a changing earth. It does so, however, without being re-
stricted to the methodological and theoretical framework of individual
disciplines such as ecology or geology. The Anthropocene exemplifies a
scientific point of view, which recognizes that ecological, geological and
planetary phenomena and research objects have to be thought of in close
relation to each other as well as to the larger-scale system of the earth.
The vast interest in the Anthropocene concept could thus be understood
as an opportunity to reformulate the turns toward ecological, geologi-
cal and planetary issues under an even more encompassing framework
which, at the same time, allows to relate them more strongly to social,
political and ethical questions (for instance of the human responsibility
for the earth system).
The Anthropocene as an Ontological Shift

Despite its earth systemic implications, the Anthropocene distinctly
names a geological epoch and has been a matter of concern for geolo-
gists from the very beginning. As a geological research issue, however,
the Anthropocene still has to approve its sustained role in the history of
geology as an explanatory concept. But could the Anthropocene concept
still play an important role in the humanities and the social sciences if it
became insignificant in geology?
One could reformulate this problem in the style of a slightly reversed
version of James Hutton’s famous concluding statement of his Theory
of the Earth (1788). 5 In the Anthropocene, we find no vestige of an
end, since the Anthropocene is said to have only begun, but at the
same time, no definite prospect of a beginning, since there are vari-
ous propositions for starting dates competing with each other. From
a geological point of view, the novelty of the Anthropocene concept
consists in its designation of a recent geological epoch which, unlike
the Holocene, involves humanity as its driving force. Whereas earth
system science can detect anthropogenic influence on earth subsystems
as significant causes of environmental change, the formalization of the
Anthropocene as a geochronological unit requires that the vast scale of
anthropogenic impact is also traceable in the stratigraphic record. For
stratigraphers, the determination of a starting point of the Anthropo-
cene poses a problem of measurability not entirely different from that
one implied by Hutton: how can one detect anthropogenic evidence
strong enough to be in line with earth systemic “tipping points” among
a vast accumulation of major and minor traces of human activity in
the stratigraphic record? The work of the interdisciplinary Anthropo-
cene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigra-
phy (ICS), led by paleo-biologist Jan Zalasiewicz, makes clear that the
question of finding a starting point of the Anthropocene is one that
geology can only answer in cooperation with scholars capable of ad-
dressing the more-than-geological implications of the Anthropocene.
However, as long as this problem remains unsolved, it—at least at first
glance—seems questionable to assume that the Anthropocene concept
will have an impact on the humanities and the social sciences, which is
enduring enough to conceive of it as a turn. But, we argue that even if
the Anthropocene concept might ultimately have only a life as a short
episode for geology, it nevertheless has the potential to significantly
influence the humanities and the social sciences, mainly due to two
interconnected reasons.
(1) The epistemic access to the Anthropocene is set on slightly differ-
ent premises for humanities and social sciences scholars. Sticking with
the example of geologic timescale, humanities scholars might consider
the question of dating the Anthropocene not only as an issue of measur-
ability, but as one rooted in the relationship between human imagina-
tion and the immensity of geologic time. James Hutton’s conclusion at
the end of his Theory points toward the impression of a timescale be-
yond measure. When Hutton, alongside his student John Playfair (1805,
73), gazed into the “abyss of time,” he conceived of geological time not
only as a problem of measure, but also as one of the imagination. John
McPhee (1981) has coined the term “deep time” in order to emphasize
this subjective, “sensory” dimension of geologic time. McPhee stresses
that although geologic time has increasingly become measurable in line
with the advances of modern geology, its “depth” nonetheless prevents
us from gaining any clear and precise idea of its scale as such: “Numbers
do not seem to work with regard to deep time. Any number above a cou-
ple of thousand years—fifty thousand, fifty million—will with nearly
equal effect awe the imagination” (McPhee 1981, 21). In accordance
with McPhee, Stephen Jay Gould (1987) has, therefore, proposed to con-
sider that the discovery of deep time has had the effect of drastically
marginalizing the temporal scope of human history. The immensity of
deep time takes yet another form in the Anthropocene. Given that much
of the geological evidence of anthropogenic traces is assumed to deposit
in the strata, which are, however, themselves effects of long-term geo-
logic processes spanning beyond the present, deep time eventually ex-
pands from earth’s past to a “deep future” (Chakrabarty 2016, 380).
Although the stratigraphic determination of an Anthropocene starting
date will presumably not take future anthropogenic impact or future
stratigraphic records into consideration, the idea of humanity’s impact
that reaches into distant futures challenges ideas of the Anthropocene as
a clearly detectable temporal unit: why not assume that future anthro-
pogenic impact on the earth system delivers a far more evident “golden
spike” than the proposed starting dates set in the past? While geology
is primarily concerned with the empirical detection of a golden spike or
an GSSP (Global Stratotype Section and Point), the various disciplines
of the humanities might rather reflect upon the underlying implications
regarding the imaginative, epistemic, phenomenological, theoretical and
ontological challenges and implications of the temporality implied in
processes of human inscription into earth.
One considerable “marker” of the different premises of the human-
ities approach to the Anthropocene is their strong interest in issues of
“scale.” Such issues are inherent to the Anthropocene concept, not only
because of its geological meaning as a new unit of the geological times-
cale, but also because it challenges and confuses assumptions of scale by
attributing to anthropos the capacity to operate as a “major geological
force” (Steffen et al. 2007, 618). For various scholars in the humanities,
the thesis that the accumulated impact of anthropogenic activities has
come to matter at the spatial and temporal scale of earth systemic pro-
cesses entails an imaginative, or phenomenological, dimension as well.
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009, 220), for instance, has pointed toward the
problem that it is not possible to experience oneself as part of a collec-
tive species-subject that operates at a planetary scale. He argues that
the Anthropocene poses the (impossible?) challenge of having to rethink
the human over disjunctive scales at once (Chakrabarty 2012, 2). Fur-
thermore, the Anthropocene frames various environmental phenomena
such as climate change which matter, but which are at the same time
drastically inaccessible to (immediate) sense experience due to their dis-
persed and distributed nature—a problem for which Timothy Morton
(2013 has coined the term “hyperobject.” If such issues of scale are made
graspable by the Anthropocene concept, they invite us to rethink philo-
sophical, social and political concepts such as experience, (eco-)justice,
democracy, responsibility and, above all, “the human” in its entangle-
ments with “nature,” across disjunctive spatial and temporal levels of
size.6 Such engagements are not necessarily bound to the continuing sig-
nificance of the geological Anthropocene concept.
(2) Whereas the “success” of the geological concept entirely depends
on its approval as a geological unit of time, its ontological dimension
goes far beyond that. The Anthropocene concept articulates various
phenomena that imply transitions in the material world, i.e. transitions
of how planetary systems, environmental processes, human and non-
human agents are entangled, how they matter for each other. It testifies
to an increased observability and measurability of such transitions, but
the latter are not restricted to their epistemic accessibility. In our view,
the Anthropocene concept assembles a range of phenomena which mark
an ontological shift. This shift is brought into view by its vast concep-
tual scale, but is not dependent on the scientific approval of the geo-
logical Anthropocene concept. The earth systemic “rupture,” speaking
again with Clive Hamilton, corresponds to an “ontological rupture” that
might best be described by what James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis
have termed “Gaia.”7 For Isabelle Stengers (2015, 42), the “intrusion of
Gaia” is not reducible to the increased awareness of the effects of human
and technological enquiries and the resulting shift in the epistemology
of human-nature relationships. On the contrary, Stengers’ “Gaia” desig-
nates a—processual, non-static—state of the earth that has been pushed
out of equilibrium to reveal its indifference to the well-being of individual
subsystems such as the human species: “Naming Gaia as ‘the one who
intrudes’ is […] to characterize her as blind to the damages she causes”
(Stengers 2015, 43). Latour’s (2013, 81) evocation of the Anthropocene
as a “post-natural epoch” responds to the necessity to conceive of the
rapidly changing earth system not only as a matter of epistemology—i.e.
of being able to recognize that “nature” has always been an assemblage
of “complex non-linear couplings between processes that compose and
sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering sys-
temic whole” (Haraway 2016, 43), but that this very assemblage has
changed in a way that could ultimately lead to a “sixth extinction”
(Kolbert 2014) respectively to “a world without us” (Weisman 2007).
The epistemic relevance of the ontological shifts, summarized in the
term Gaia, for the humanities and the social sciences is genuinely in-
dependent from the approval of the Anthropocene concept, since such
shifts do not stop to exist if this concept does. But the innovation of the
latter, and presumably the reason for its success beyond geology and
earth system science, lies in the vastness of its conceptual framework
which allows to reflect upon such shifts as heterogeneous, disjunctive,
but still interconnected parts of a larger scale development. The often-
times criticized “holistic,” all-encompassing scope of the Anthropocene
framework may at the same time be a reason for its relevance across the
humanities and the social sciences.
But this might also be the reason why a number of critical approaches
tend to reject the Anthropocene because of its anthropocentrism and its
undifferentiated account on anthropos in favor of more differentiated
concepts still refer to the Anthropocene’s terminology and semantical
implications. Prominent examples are the concepts “Capitalocene”
(Malm 2015; Moore 2016), “Chthulucene” (Haraway 2015, 2016),
“Technocene” (Hornborg 2015), “Eurocene” (Sloterdijk 2015, 2016), or
“Neganthropocene” (Stiegler 2018) to name but a few. The Anthropo-
cene is such a widely debated research topic among scholars from the hu-
manities and the social sciences not so much because of the “Antropo-”
or its particular protagonist, but because of the “-cene,” i.e., because of
its large, “epochal” scope.
The Anthropocene and (Inter-/Trans-)Disciplinary

Engagements
Instead of being limited to undifferentiated reflections on the human
as a protagonist of a geological epoch, the conceptual broadness of
the Anthropocene opens up a shared frame of reference for heteroge-
neous engagements with theories of posthumanism, new materialism,
object-oriented-ontology, postcolonialism, ecojustice or cybernetics. If
one would identify the Anthropocene as a return of the “grand narra-
tive,” this would ignore the heterogeneity and variability of approaches.
The Anthropocene concept, we argue, invites scholars to reframe,
rethink and to strengthen the methodological and analytical boundar-
ies of their respective fields, challenging every discipline to articulate
the particularity and relevance of its specific engagement with this con-
cept and discourse. As a result, the Anthropocene serves as a generative
framework for a plurality of different discipline-specific topics. Several
new approaches in the humanities contribute to it: literary studies, for
instance, consider the Anthropocene as a “threshold concept” (Clark
2015) that opens new opportunities for ecocritical literary research
(Wilke and Johnstone 2017; Schaumann and Sullivan 2018): for instance,
the re-classification of climate fiction as a part of the broader field of
“Anthropocene fiction” (Trexler 2015); the transfer of the materiality of
geologic formations and timespans into literary reading practices as well
as an expansion of the focus on the symbolic indices of human social
interactions to planetary flows of energy and matter (Menely and Taylor
2017); the question of how literature and literary reading practices can
represent scalar magnitudes, complex feedback loops of the Anthropo-
cene earth system, and planetary effects of anthropogenic activity such
as climate change or biodiversity loss (e.g. Morton 2012, 2013, 2014,
2016; Bartosch 2015; Morgan 2017; Woods 2014, 2017); an examina-
tion of the implications of the Anthropocene for literary history concern-
ing contemporary fiction’s tendency of embedding its plots in geological
epochal timeframes (Marshall 2015); or the analysis of the relationship
between scientific and literary knowledge production with regard to the
genuine narrativity of Anthropocene discourses (Dürbeck 2018, 2019).
For some scholars, the Anthropocene concept challenges the most
fundamental implications of their research field. For historian Dipesh
Chakrabarty, the Anthropocene poses an epistemological problem in the
sense that it blurs the long-lasting differentiation between natural and
human history, dissolving their boundaries into the timescale of “deep
time” and making it necessary to rethink humanity as a “negative uni-
versal history” (Chakrabarty 2009, 222). According to the media theo-
retician Jussi Parikka (2014, 2015), the Anthropocene requires scholars
to frame the materiality of contemporary media technologies within
the scale of geologic time by ascribing a mediality to geologic forma-
tions, inorganic matter and “natural” entities; this widens the scope of
media studies into the domain of “natural” sciences (see also Durham
Peters 2015). Philosophically informed scholars such as Bruno Latour
(e.g. 2013, 2014, 2017), Isabelle Stengers (2015), Donna Haraway (2015,
2016), Claire Colebrook (e.g. 2014, 2016) and Rosi Braidotti (2013) high-
light the idea that the Anthropocene challenges fundamental categories
of Western Enlightenment thought such as the dichotomies of subject/
object or nature/culture. This opens a more reflexive perspective on the
Anthropocene that emphasizes relational, process- and agency-oriented,
posthumanist ontologies of mutual multispecies “entanglements” (Barad
2007). As a result, the theoretical models of posthumanism as well as of
comparable theoretical approaches such as new materialism (e.g. Bennett
2010; Alaimo 2016) or object-oriented ontology (Morton 2013, 2016)
have gained tremendous attention in the Anthropocene debate.
However, the original scientific Anthropocene concept refers to a
well-confined set of theoretical assumptions, scientific observations
and implications (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002). Conse-
quently, most publications on the Anthropocene, despite disciplinary
differences and conflicting interests, share a limited vocabulary of prem-
ises. In this respect, the overarching framework of the Anthropocene
consists of a plurality of heterogeneous discourses and interests, but also
builds bridges between various scientific disciplines. On the one hand,
geologists and environmental scientists, for example, publish with his-
torians and push into the field of ethics or adopt methods of cultural
studies; on the other hand, philosophers develop a new “political the-
ology of nature” (Latour 2013) or a “political anthropology” (Sloter-
dijk (2015, 43). The effect is a blurring of disciplinary boundaries that
triggers new forms of dialogue. The field of environmental humanities,
which has emerged in the last decade, can be regarded as an index of
such a reorientation. So, the Anthropocene plays a central role in many
relevant publications in this field (DeLoughrey et al. 2015; Emmett and
Nye 2017; Heise et al. 2017; Oppermann and Iovino 2017).
In light of these scientific developments, we argue that although the
Anthropocene has a (not unproblematic) tendency toward holism, it does
not take the role of a “master narrative” predetermining the ways in
which one can speak, think and write about it. On the contrary, it seems
to function as a driver of disciplinary, inter- and transdisciplinary rear-
rangements, re-framings and actualizations within the humanities and
the social sciences. It is for this reason that we assume that, at least for
the humanities and the social sciences, the Anthropocene will continue
to play a considerable role in the theoretical and methodological organi-
zation of particular disciplines and their interrelations with each other.
On this Volume: Objectives and Chapters

This volume builds on the results of an international conference entitled
Anthropocenic Turn? Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Anthropo-
cene Concept (September 13–15, 2018), which took place at the Univer-
sity of Vechta, Germany. At the same time, it is part of a research project
(2017–2020) on “Narratives of the Anthropocene in Science and Liter-
ature. Structures, Themes, Poetics,” funded by the German Research
Foundation (DFG). The starting point of the conference was to examine
the prospects and possibilities of approaching the Anthropocene against
the backdrop of a seemingly ubiquitous fascination for it, at least in the
European-American-Australian academic world (di Chiro 2017). For this
purpose, the conference sought to provide a space for dialogue between
distinguished Anthropocene scholars from the history of science, the so-
cial sciences and various disciplines of the humanities in order to chal-
lenge the limitations of disciplinary boundaries and to build new bridges.
Against this background, the volume seeks to critically assess whether
the Anthropocene concept has affected—or is currently affecting—a
“turn” in various disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research fields. In
particular, we ask whether the Anthropocene concept effectively chal-
lenges the parameters of observing, measuring, experiencing and pro-
ducing (scientific) reality by rearranging them in a geologic timescale
and at a planetary scale. All chapters respond to the idea of a “turn”
with regard to the scale in which the Anthropocene challenges existing
assumptions of the authors’ specific research fields.
We assume that the overarching concept of the Anthropocene tran-
scends strict disciplinary frameworks. Thus, the structure of this volume
is meant to invite readers to reflect upon inter- and transdisciplinary con-
nections, thoughts and theses across the individual chapters. In order to
relate the plurality of discipline-specific approaches back to the holistic
framework of the Anthropocene we structured the book not according
to disciplines, but according to different practices: “Creating Knowl-
edge in the Anthropocene” (Section 1), “Narrating the Anthropocene”
(Section 2) and “Sensing the Anthropocene” (Section 3). These practices
transgress conventional disciplinary boundaries and, therefore, unfold
shared spaces of interest and arguments. The underlying idea of this
interplay between a disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective is to
address the necessity to overcome disciplinary boundaries in light of the
Anthropocene concept. This means not only to understand the disci-
plinary premises of every research perspective on the Anthropocene but
also to acknowledge their limitations concerning temporal and spatial
dimensions at the planetary scale and the far-reaching, dramatic impacts
of human agency on the earth system. Practices of creating knowledge,
narrating and sensing are considered not only as fundamental ways of
dealing with the Anthropocene, but also as markers to indicate and an-
alyze transgressions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary interests.
Section 1: “Creating Knowledge in the Anthropocene”

The Anthropocene concept clearly poses a number of epistemological prob-
lems. Practices of creating knowledge include all attempts of rethinking and
actualizing fundamental epistemological categories. Historian of science
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger opens the first section with his chapter “The
‘Material Turn’ and the ‘Anthropocenic Turn’ from a History of Science
Perspective.” The article is dedicated to Michel Serres and positions him
as a thinker of the Anthropocene avant la lettre and as the epistemological
predecessor of Bruno Latour’s influential arguments about Gaia and the
Anthropocene. Rheinberger unfolds a close reading of Serres’ The Natural
Contract, arguing that it allows for a re-interpretation of the Gaia-hypothesis
by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. This archaeology of knowledge
proves fruitful in the context of the Gaia-hypothesis’ different actualizations
in the Anthropocene context (e.g., recent publications of Bruno Latour).
In his chapter “The Anthropocene and the History of Science,” his-
torian of science Jürgen Renn explores the possible role of the history
of science for a deeper understanding of the Anthropocene. Arguing
against the idea of a new fashionable “turn,” Renn contends that the
complexity of the Anthropocene and of the wide array of issues it brings
into view require a far broader number of different approaches that al-
low to scientifically grasp the social and material as well the epistemic
implications of the new concept. On this basis, Renn outlines not only
an approach to cultural evolution, which foregrounds the importance
of the transformations of knowledge across time, but also calls for an
approach to historical network analysis. Beyond the geological concept
and earth system analysis he sketches the idea of a new transdisciplinary
research field which he calls “geoanthropology.”
Environmental historian Franz Mauelshagen’s chapter “The Dirty
Metaphysics of Fossil Freedom” examines the Anthropocene as an era in
which we face a deep crisis of fossil energy regimes. Analyzing this crisis
from the viewpoint of energy history, Mauelshagen brings into view how
traditional energy regimes were regulated by a “biomass-climate-nexus”
which is broken up with accumulated human activities since industri-
alization and the great acceleration. In light of limited fossil resources,
humanity in the Anthropocene is instigated to redefine freedom accord-
ing to a disruptive earth system which strongly affects societies. With
“dirty metaphysics” Mauelshagen points to “the transcendence of the
biosphere” and to a better control over its resources.
In his chapter “Oriental Wisdom for the Planet?” literary and envi-
ronmental humanities scholar Hannes Bergthaller turns toward an
issue which has been largely ignored in Anthropocene discourse up to
this point: the lack of attention toward the Anthropocene concept in
Asian countries, academia and public arenas. Bergthaller observes that
the weak interest in the Anthropocene stands in stark contrast to the
decisive role which Asian countries, and in particular China, play in the
Anthropocene. Exploring the question why this is the case, Bergthaller
argues that reactions to the Anthropocene are strongly affected by the
experience of western modernity and by forms of knowledge embed-
ded distinctly in western thought and knowledge. Following a pathway
similar to, yet historically also very different from the developments of
western countries, China can serve both as a model and as a warning for
how biopolitical futures will unfold in the Anthropocene.
Section 2: “Narrating the Anthropocene”

The second section focuses on the Anthropocene as a framework for
the reformulation of existing as well as for the emergence of new nar-
ratives. Not only has the Anthropocene triggered new narratives—of
humanity as geophysical force and as a factor in the earth system—it
has also brought into view the necessity to reinterpret existing narra-
tives under the new premises presented by the Anthropocene—among
them are partly opposing, partly overlapping narratives of extinction
and disaster, of justice and nature-culture interdependency, or of the
‘Great Transformation’ and biotechnological progress (Dürbeck 2018,
2019). The practice of narrating plays a crucial role in how environmen-
tal phenomena such as climate change or the idea of a geophysical scale
of human imprint can become intelligible.
The section starts with literary scholar and philosopher Bernhard
Malkmus’ text “Safe Conduct: The Anthropocene and the Tragic,”
which focuses on an examination of the potential role of tragic narratives
for an understanding of human agency in the Anthropocene. Following
thinkers such as Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Günther Anders, Jean-Pierre
Dupuy and Hannah Arendt, Malkmus argues that the episteme of the
Anthropocene has the potential of being experienced as “tragic.” By ex-
ploring two of the defining conditions of the Anthropocene, the nuclear
bomb and the technosphere, Malkmus argues that it is in fact character-
ized by a blurring of ontological distinctions, which would erase expe-
riences of alterity and chance that stand at the core of tragic thinking in
modernity and need to be revived.
In his chapter “Literature Pedagogy and the Anthropocene,” literary
scholar Roman Bartosch employs a didactic approach in order to en-
gage the challenges of scale posed by the Anthropocene concept. Taking
his theoretical vantage point from the discussion of different concepts
of “scale” and “scaling,” he argues that scale representation as well as
“readerly scaling” are helpful tools in grasping the complexities of the
Anthropocene. In turning toward readings of texts by Barbara King-
solver, T.C. Boyle and Nathaniel Rich, Bartosch outlines the fruitful-
ness of understanding and analyzing literary fiction through notions of
scaling and complexity, with particular regard to its implications for
teaching literature.
In “Dating the Anthropocene,” Philipp Pattberg and Michael
Davies-Venn frame the complex and ongoing debates on the various
potential start dates of the Anthropocene epoch. Analyzing the five most
important suggested start dates—15–12,100 years BP; around 8,000
BP; 1570–1620 with the orbis spike; industrial revolution; great acceler-
ation from 1950 onward—they argue that the definitive decision on one
start date can potentially enable new narratives of the Anthropocene
which could shape future societal and governance debates on the An-
thropocene in significant ways. Pattberg and Davies-Venn conclude with
the suggestion of overarching narratives for each start date and related
implications for governance.
Cultural philosopher Bernd Scherer’s chapter “When Humans
Become Nature” unfolds a number of narratives which illuminate the
role of technologies often marginalized in the more human-centered
debates on the Anthropocene. Analyzing notions of the technosphere
as well as the role of digital technologies, cyberspace, bureaucracy and
scientific knowledge production, Scherer contends that the Anthropo-
cene stands for more than environmental phenomena such as climate
change or biodiversity loss. It signals a “fundamental paradigm shift
in our understanding of the world and of humankind.” Arguing for the
necessity of an “Anthropocenic turn” in order to create new forms of
knowledge (production), he suggests that the conception of “rehearsal
stages” enables productive interactions between social actors, scien-
tists and artists on the entanglements of subjective, social, technologi-
cal and cultural phenomena with which humans are confronted in the
Anthropocene.
Section 3: “Sensing the Anthropocene”

Extending the scale of anthropogenic purview beyond the scope of im-
mediate human experience, the Anthropocene fundamentally questions
conventional modes of representation as well as theories of perception.
Thus, the third section focusses on practices that relate to the dimen-
sion of the Anthropocene aesthetic (in the sense of aisthesis: perception),
considering them as a forms for the articulation of new ways of repre-
senting as well as of sensing an anthropocenic reality.
In the first contribution to this section, literary scholar Eva Horn ar-
gues, in her chapter “Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene,”
that the Anthropocene raises for art the necessity and challenge to address
issues of form in theory and in practice. Asking how to conceive of an aes-
thetics suitable to the transformations of the world in the Anthropocene
and the human subject’s deformed relationship with it, Horn sketches
three formal challenges which art has to address in the Anthropocene:
latency, entanglement and scale. Latency draws on the fact that climate
change and earth system processes, although they can be modelled, elude
our perceptual and representational capacities; entanglement points to the
interdependencies between humans and earth systemic complexities; and
scale to the fact that humans are confronted with processes and objects
occurring at scales of magnitude beyond direct accessibility in terms of
human understanding or control.
The chapter “The Urgency of a New Humanities” by Gregers
Andersen and Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen explores the ways in
which the “new humanities” sense the Anthropocene as a state of excep-
tion. Against the backdrop of the growing number of warnings from the
scientific community about the threats of the Anthropocene, Andersen
and Jacobsen see a sense of urgency which humanities shall take up as
central concern. The authors offer a critique of three epistemic problems
which appear characteristic for the environmental humanities under
conditions of the Anthropocene: the idealization of slowness, the pursuit
of conceptual thickness and the embrace of posthumanism. In contrast,
they argue for an attempt to synchronize the speed of the humanities
with the rapidly accelerating and changing world of the Anthropocene.
Media scholar and image theorist Julia Bee’s chapter “Filming through
the Milieu: Becoming Extinct” discusses the entanglements between the
medium of film and the concept of the Anthropocene. Focusing on re-
cent films by German filmmaker and activist Elke Marhöfer—Becoming
Extinct (Wild Grass) and Prendas, ngangas, enquisos, machines. Each
part welcomes the other without saying—as well as on concepts of sub-
jectivity following Félix Guattari in particular, but also Gilles Deleuze,
William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Bee explores which sites
of subjectivation could be specifically rooted in film viewing. She argues
for the necessity of thinking and evaluating new modes of subjectivity
through the medium of film in order to face the challenges of sensing
the Anthropocene. Instead of merely transmitting information, docu-
mentary films, particularly the ones discussed in this chapter, enable the
exploration of new forms of perception, experience and perspectives as
parts of ecological subjectivities.
The chapter “Seeds—Boundary Objects of the Anthropocene” by
artist researcher Alexandra R. Toland explores Susan Leigh Star’s
concept of “boundary objects” as a way of framing the role and rele-
vance of artistic research within the broader discourses of the Anthro-
pocene. The article refers to a live performance where self-made seed
packets with meaningful inscriptions were passed to the recipients at
the beginning and popcorn to eat at the end. Toland argues that seeds
may be seen as boundary objects and function as theoretical devices
for interdisciplinary work. After contextualizing the history and the
theoretical and practical scope of boundary objects, she presents two
case studies of artworks as examples of a weakly-structured boundary
objects of the Anthropocene to illustrate new modes of research practice
for artist researchers.
In the volume’s last chapter “Art, Media, and the Dilemmas of the An-
thropocene,” literary and environmental humanities scholar Serenella
Iovino explores the role of gardens as a cultural and artistic strategy
of survival in the Anthropocene. Iovino’s reflections on the entangle-
ments between art, media and the becoming-geological of the human
are based on an examination of the artwork Gardens of the Anthro-
pocene by eco-artist Tamiko Thiel, the Parco Arte Vivente in Turin,
and the Japanese gardens described by Italo Calvino in his Collection
of Sand. Her chapter conceives of the garden as a means to reflect upon
how various forms of aestheticization of nature have an impact on the
geology of planet earth—both in terms of power and depletion, and in
terms of resistance and creativity.
As readers will recognize throughout the following chapters, the dif-
ferent approaches toward the Anthropocene collected in this volume
address the “Anthropocene” through differing discipline-specific meth-
odologies and theoretical assumptions. Without doubt, the Anthro-
pocene concept may be the source of very heterogeneous approaches,
depending on the different research traditions, premises and discourses
of each discipline. But vice versa, the Anthropocene provides a large-
scale framework that instigates shared matters of concern and research
interests, transgresses the limitations of disciplinary boundaries and
indicates the overarching relevance of an ontological shift, which has
occurred in the relationship between humans and the earth system. The
idea behind the structure of this volume—its division into three sec-
tions corresponding to different types of practices—is to invite readers
to explore different, potentially fruitful crosslinks, but also differences,
between the disciplines and their approaches. In the emergence of epis-
temic interstices between them, i.e. of shared issues of relevance caused
by the increasing relevance of the Anthropocene concept, we witness an
Anthropocenic turn in the making.
Acknowledgments
This introduction draws on results from the research project “Narratives
of the Anthropocene in Science and Literature,” which is funded by the
German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number DU 320/8-1.
The helpful advice and overall assistance in the production of this volume
generously provided by editorial assistant Mitchell Manners (Routledge)
and editor Jennifer Abbott (Routledge) was greatly appreciated. We thank
Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta) and Peter Feindt (Humboldt Uni-
versity, Berlin) very much for reading earlier versions of this introduction.
Moreover, we are indebted to our colleagues Monika Albrecht (University
of Vechta) and Jonas Nesselhauf (Saarland University) for their help and
advice in publishing this volume, and to Anna-Sophie Schönrock (Univer-
sity of Vechta) for her assistance in preparing the manuscript.
Notes

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International.
Taylor & Francis
Section 1
Creating Knowledge in the

Anthropocene
Taylor & Francis
1 The “Material Turn” and
the “Anthropocenic Turn”
from a History of Science
Perspective1
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Introduction
This chapter is intended as a contribution to an archeology of what today
is being discussed under the umbrella term of the Anthropocene. The ques-
tion for me to start with has been whether the material turn in the history
of knowledge has anything to do with conceptualizing our contemporary
relation to the world in a qualitatively new way. That there is such a link I
hope I will be able to show. The chapter focuses on the late Michel Serres’
([1990] 1995) The Natural Contract and can also be read as an homage
to this thinker, who is, in my opinion, the most important pioneer of the
Anthropocene concept avant la lettre, at least as seen from the perspective
of epistemology and history of science, and way before the term itself was
coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer (2000). It is not my inten-
tion, however, to enter into a discussion about the many meanings of the
Anthropocene concept. What I would rather like to do is to engage in a
close reading of several passages of Michel Serres’ The Natural Contract
and to relate them to Lynn Margulis’ work on the bio-geosphere as well as
the role symbiosis played in evolution, on the one hand, and to the contem-
porary practice orientation of historical epistemology on the other hand.
In October 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the Bay Area of San
Francisco, and around the same time in Europe, a different type of “seis-
mic” event brought the Berlin Wall down. Meanwhile, at Stanford Univer-
sity in Palo Alto, Michel Serres was writing the last pages of his manuscript
on The Natural Contract. The book was published in the spring of 1990
in Paris and evoked a veritable storm of theoretical outrage. The scandal
concerned the following question: how could one dare to ascribe to nature
the character of a contractual subject? Ten years later, during his invitation
from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Serres revisited his book and
its underlying rationale. Here, he formulated that rationale as follows:
The subject becomes object. We become victims of our victories, the

passivity of our activities, medical objects of our actions as subjects.
And the global object becomes the subject, for it reacts to our actions.
(Serres 2000, 17, own translation)
28 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
He was advocating that humankind should forgo its parasitic relation
to nature and convert to a symbiotic relation. “Rights of symbiosis,”
we read in The Natural Contract, “are defined by reciprocity: however
much nature gives man, man must give that much back to nature, now a
legal subject” (Serres 1995, 38). But, Serres asks, “[w]hat language do the
things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with
them, contractually?” and promptly answers: “In fact, the Earth speaks
to us in terms of forces, bonds and interactions, and that’s enough to
make a contract” (39). Thus, it was eventually an earthquake, of all the
forces of nature the one least subject to human influence, that led Serres
to perceive such a symbiosis as being inescapable.
The Symbiotic Planet

That brings me to a digression before plunging deeper into Serres’ juris-
prudential argumentation, which in turn rests on an observation derived
from history of science. In 1998, the year of Serres’ retrospective review
of his book The Natural Contract at the French National Library, an-
other significant book was published, The Symbiotic Planet. It was the
summation of 30 years of research on evolutionary symbiosis by the
American biologist Lynn Margulis (1998). Serres could not yet have read
this book when he lectured at the French National Library on January
14, but the endosymbiont theory developed by Margulis was already
widely accepted at that time, and its academic presence was pervasive.
Serres did not mention Margulis—in fact, his entire book was written
without a footnote and without references. We can nevertheless safely
assume that he was familiar with her theory. On the one hand, Serres
had recourse to the metaphorology of biological relations, which he had
referred to already in 1980 in his well-known book The Parasite ([1980]
1982). On the other hand, Margulis are without doubt his reference with
respect to symbiosis.
Margulis received her education in biology in the late 1950s and early
1960s at the universities of Chicago, Madison and Berkeley. In 1967, af-
ter several failed attempts, she succeeded in publishing her first article in
the Journal of Theoretical Biology, in which she expounded the general
outline of her view on the succession of endosymbiotic events in evolu-
tion (serial endosymbiont theory, SET) (Sagan [Margulis] 1967). At that
time, the first ribonucleic acid had just been sequenced—a yeast alanine
transfer RNA with a length of about 80 nucleotides. Ten years later, se-
quences of nucleic acids from mitochondria and chloroplasts had become
available, and their bacterial origin could no longer be doubted. When
I finished my studies in biology at the end of the 1970s, this “weak”
form of the endosymbiont theory of evolution, as Margulis called it,
was common wisdom in the new textbooks on the molecular biology of
the cell. The biochemistry of nucleic acids had forcefully supported the
The “Material Turn” and “Anthropocenic Turn” 29
conjectures of the biologist Margulis. This support paved the way for
her future work.
That work proceeded in several directions. On the one hand, Margu-
lis found pieces of evidence for another evolutionary endosymbiosis: that
of bacterial spirochetes and archebacterial thermoplasms that led to cells
with a nucleus—the precursors of all extant higher organisms. Margu-
lis (1998, 52) summarized her view in an evolutionary generalization:
“Anastomosis,”—symbiotic as well as endosymbiotic fusion—“although
less frequent, is as important as branching.” With that, Darwin’s prin-
ciple of “divergence,” which dominates his tree of life is symmetrically
complemented by a principle of “convergence.” The principle of compe-
tition is complemented by that of cooperation, which is evident on every
biological level: as horizontal gene transfer particularly in bacteria, as
endosymbiosis in early evolution and as organismic symbiosis in its man-
ifold manifestations in the evolving world of organisms. Last but not
least, it is realized in the sexuality of eukaryotic organisms that Margu-
lis appropriately designates as “cyclical symbiosis” (103). This evolution-
ary legacy puts her, for the 20th century, on a par with Charles Darwin.
In fact, her modus operandi was very similar to Darwin’s: collecting
widely scattered pieces of evidence and analyzing them from a particular
perspective, which she pursued throughout her life. The similarities go
further: she could recount stories like Darwin as well. “Even scientists,”
she acknowledged, “need to narrate, to integrate their observations into
origin stories” (70). In the same way as Darwin’s “struggle for survival”
advanced to the position of a social slogan in the 19th century and has
remained so to this day, symbiosis should have advanced long since to
become a byword of the same order. But that has not happened yet.
Apparently, imaginative storytelling is one thing; social resonance is an-
other. An increasing number of people argue like Margulis and Serres—
but still not enough.2
At the same time, Margulis combined her lifelong fascination with the
world of unicellular organisms with wide-ranging reflections about the
evolution and regulation of the whole biosphere of our planet. In this
context, she adopted the notion of “Gaia,” as it was used by James Love-
lock, the British chemist, medical doctor and inventor. Often described
as a maverick, Lovelock had laid the foundations of his theory of the
metastability of the earth’s geosphere, biosphere and atmosphere in the
1970s and became famous for his various popular writings in the 1980s.
Margulis (1998, 118) remarks: “The name caught on. Environmentalists
and religiously inclined people, attracted to the idea of a native god-
dess with power, latched onto it, giving Gaia a distinctly nonscientific
connotation.” For Margulis (123), however, the advantages outweighed
the disadvantages of this ambivalence, and she herself jumped on the
Gaia bandwagon, not without emphasizing again and again: “My Gaia
is no vague, quaint notion of a mother Earth who nurtures us. The Gaia
hypothesis is science. The surface of the planet, Gaia theory posits, be-
haves as a physiological system in certain limited ways.”
Now, the decisive character of physiological systems is that they
dampen perturbations—within certain limits—but they can break down
if these limits are exceeded. The concept of metastability means just
this. The prospect of breakdown should actually suffice as an argument
for adopting a principle of precaution and acting accordingly in terms
of both ecology and climate. Margulis has always considered herself a
natural scientist, not a preacher. “Gaia theory is useful science” (1998,
125)—thus her dry resumé at the end of the book. She does not even
urge people to draw ecological consequences from it. Instead, she sim-
ply states: “We people are just like our planetmates. We cannot put an
end to nature; we can only pose a threat to ourselves” (128). And she
concludes: “The sum of planetary life, Gaia, displays a physiology that
we recognize as environmental regulation” (119). But she immediately
makes clear: “More an enormous collection of interacting ecosystems,
the Earth as Gaian regulatory physiology transcends all individual or-
ganisms” (120). It is exactly this array of regulations, this enormous
interaction, which is in danger of getting out of control due to the physi-
cal presence of human beings on earth and the impact of their technical
activities on the planet in the Anthropocene.
The Natural Contract

This is the point at which Michel Serres homes in. He too relies on scien-
tific observations, but he speaks as a philosopher who sees it as the task of
philosophy “to anticipate the future” (Serres 2000, 22). In other words,
he is no owl of Minerva. Serres was a thinker of the Anthropocene before
the term came into use. It is well worth looking at his argumentation in
more detail. This is the focus of the second part of this chapter.
Michel Serres finds drastic images for the current situation. His book
begins with the portrayal of a painting by Francisco de Goya (Figure 1.1).
Two youngsters are fighting with batons on a dune. Each of them tries
to hit the other with his rod. All the while, however, they do not realize
that they are sinking deeper into the sand with each blow. The ground
they are standing on is going to swallow them. They have lost sight of
the thing that sustains both of them, the third party that mediates their
relationship and their social interaction. Thus, Serres (1995, 3) argues:
Take away the world around the battles, keep only conflicts or de-
bates, thick with humanity and purified of things, and you obtain
stage theater, most of our narratives and philosophies, history, and
all of social science: the interesting spectacle they call cultural. Does
anyone ever say where the master and slave fight it out? Our culture
abhors the world.
Figure 1.1 Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Duelo a Garrotazos, 1820–1823,

Técnica mixta. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado,
courtesy Museo del Prado.
He then asks: “But aren’t we forgetting the world of things them-

selves, the sand, the water, the mud, the reeds of the marsh?” (2) and
concludes:
We have lost the world. We’ve transformed things into fetishes or

commodities, the stakes of our stratagems; and our a-cosmic philos-
ophies, for almost half a century now, have been holding forth only
on language or politics, writing or logic.
(29)
For the philosophers, Serres’ somber diagnosis is that “Nature is reduced

to human nature, which is reduced to either history or reason. The world
has disappeared” (35). Serres’ chiding of the philosophers comes to a
halt in the face of the sciences of nature. Not that the sciences were not
also socially constituted and did not rest on a contract as well, but they
simply could not ignore the recalcitrance of their objects.
In other words, scientific knowledge results from the passage that

changes a cause into a thing and a thing into a cause, that makes
a fact become a law, de facto become de jure, and vice versa. The
reciprocal transformation of cause into thing and of law into fact
explains the double situation of scientific knowledge, which is, on
the one hand, arbitrary convention, as is all speculative theory, and,
on the other hand, the faithful and exact objectivity that underlies
every application.
(22)
Serres repeatedly returns to this “double situation” and revolves around
it again and again, as if he struggled with an analytically non-resolvable
problem.
In his Méditations pascaliennes, Pierre Bourdieu (1997, 109) charac-
terized this dilemma as the inescapable “dual face” of scientific reason.
He found the following words for it:
While it forbids one to move fictitiously beyond the uncrossable lim-

its of history, a realist vision of history leads one to examine how,
and in what historical conditions, history can be made to yield some
truths irreducible to history. We have to acknowledge that reason
did not fall from heaven as a mysterious and forever inexplicable
gift, and that it is therefore historical through and through; but we
are not forced to conclude, as is often supposed, that it is reducible
to history. It is in history, and in history alone, that we must seek the
principle of the relative independence of reason from the history of
which it is the product; or more precisely, in the strictly historical,
but entirely specific logic through which the exceptional universes
in which the singular history of reason is fulfilled were established.
The sciences have an equally inextricable double face in the “world

drama,” the subject of Serres’ The Natural Contract. He (1995, 15) ar-
gues that it is to their reifications that we owe those “world-objects,” that
is, those “artifacts that have at least one global-scale dimension (such as
time, space, speed, or energy).” And he lists: “A satellite regarding speed,
an atomic bomb for its energy, the internet with respect to space, atomic
waste for time […] these are four examples of world-objects” (12). These
are the objects that stand for the global effects of mankind on the planet
which is the one main issue of the Anthropocene hypothesis. For Serres,
the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the turning point
where the new era definitely has begun. Through these bombs, “my
generation learned, as the first generation in history, that mankind as a
whole faced the risk of extinction” (Serres 2010, 10).
On the other hand, of the three powers that, according to Serres, de-
termine our view on the world—administrators, journalists, scientists—
science is the only one oriented toward the future: “Continuity belongs
to administrators, the day-by-day to the media, and to science belong the
only plans for the future we have left” (1995, 30). It thus remains as a task
for science to care about “the greatest object of scientific knowledge and
practice, the Planet Earth, this new nature” (30). And although today all
three of the subcultures mentioned by Serres (31) are driven by short-term
concerns, it is the sciences that are most likely qualified to induce that
“harrowing revision of today’s culture” (93) necessary to keep the planet
habitable. “Today,” Serres sums up, “our collectivity can equally well die
of the productions of reason or safeguard itself through them” (93).
Elements of a History of Science
This privileging of the sciences also makes it easier to understand why
Michel Serres, in parallel to the preparatory work for his book on The
Natural Contract, had assembled a group of younger historians of sci-
ence around himself, with whose help he aimed to realize a new, un-
precedented project in the history of science. Its result was published
in 1989, one year before The Natural Contract, under the title A His-
tory of Scientific Thought: Elements of a History of Science (Serres
1995). It comprised contributions by eleven authors with a philosoph-
ical, a historical and a mathematical background—among them Berna-
dette Bensaude-Vincent, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Spanning
history from antiquity to the present, they all tried to understand the
concrete conditions under which the material objects of the different
sciences took shape and became themselves something like actors in the
development of the respective fields of knowledge. Despite the mislead-
ing first part of the English title, the book stands as an example for the
“material turn” in the history of science.
In The Natural Contract, Serres continually talks about the history of
the sciences. In this book, he narrates it in broad strokes as a history of
objects constituted by judicial shifts and relocations. Drawing boundar-
ies appears as the motor of scientific development from the beginning:
“We don’t know how lucky we are that our minds are relieved of this
social cord”—the Greek polis—: “as a result, they can turn to real sci-
ences!” (69). He describes the state of mind of that Greek polis with
flowery phrases: “What is nature? The city’s or culture’s hell. The place
where the banished king was cast out, the city’s outskirts, suburbs” (73).
For a long time it was the cup of hemlock that stood as a punishment for
the exclusive occupation with nature, instead of the affairs of the city.
Gradually,
the sciences split off from politics, their terrain is distinguished from
collective space, their contract differs from the social contract, their
language is neither spoken nor written like public discourse, and the
history of their truths is full of bifurcations.
(78)
Today, however, the sciences themselves have turned into an “all-

encompassing social fact” that tends to dictate its truths to jurisprudence
and politics. But the sciences must beware of betraying their painstak-
ingly achieved lay status as a result of this development: their core con-
sists, paradoxically speaking, in the right to be wrong. Here again, what
is necessary for Serres is a new contract. No party can exist any longer
without the others, but they also cannot be reduced to each other, or
fused together.
Thus it is better to make peace by a new contract between the sci-
ences, which deal relevantly with the things of the world and their
relations, and judgment, which decides on men and their relations. It
is better to make peace between the two types of reason in conflict
today, because their fates are henceforth crossed and blended, and
because our own fate depends on their alliance.
(92)
If the sciences derive from the right to err, law derives from death. But
today we no longer live—as since time immemorial—in the face of in-
dividual death, but of a possible collective death. Confronted with this
new death, Serres argues that “We need both reasons, faithful knowl-
edge and prudent judgment” (93).
One of the younger people which Serres gathered around him in his
project on the history of science was Bruno Latour. His conversations
with Serres, reproduced in Eclaircissements (Serres and Latour 1995),
are still as worth reading and relevant today as they were back then.
Serres’ themes of the time form the background of Latour’s actor network
theory (ANT) that later became so prominent. His book on the Pasteuri-
zation of France (Latour 1993b), destined to give a historical foundation
to ANT, took shape in the years of collaborative work with Serres. As is
well known, Latour has turned to Gaia in recent years, taking up one of
Serres’ preoccupations from the late 1980s, and adding his voice to the
acknowledgment of its urgency. In his Facing Gaia (2017), Latour makes
use of all the conceptual and rhetorical tools at his disposal to convey
this sense of urgency without, on the other hand, and not unlike Mar-
gulis, giving way to the “mother earth” connotations that his concept
carries with it. Since the book is being widely discussed at the moment,
I would like to conclude with a brief look at it. In good company with
Margulis, Latour is outspoken about denying Gaia a “supreme Final
Cause” (100). But Margulis would not agree with the characterization
of the surface of the earth and its atmosphere as simply a “fine muddle”
(100). Margulis’ whole argument revolves around the possibility that it
is not. But it can, as a metastable system, collapse into such a muddle. It
is the preservation of this metastable state that Serres demanded so elo-
quently in his book The Natural Contract. With his lectures on Facing
Gaia, Latour has sharpened and focused his critique on the dichotomy
of nature and culture, this conceptual invention of modernity that the
makers of the modern epoch themselves in all their doings have never
respected. This was Latour’s theme since We Have Never Been Mod-
ern (Latour [1991] 1993a), that small but influential book published in
the wake of Serres’ The Natural Contract. Latour’s latest, radicalized
conclusion is: “Besides, the notion of culture itself—together with the
notion of nature—has vanished. We are post-natural—that is true; but
also post-cultural” (Latour 2012, 185, own translation). How far such
wording will take us is open for debate. Concerning the foreseeable fu-
ture, I personally stick to Serres, who wrote in his Biogée—we could call
it an autobiography:
My hope lies on the actual development of knowledge. Simple and

facile, our old sciences were based on analysis that breaks up and
dissects, a decomposition that separates the subjects from its ob-
jects. […] Complicated, global, and networked, the—new—sciences
of life and earth presuppose communications, interferences, trans-
lations, distributions, and transitions. […] Let us recognize, with
Empedocles, the urgency of a union between wisdom and knowl-
edge, and that upon pain of collective eradication.
(Serres 2010, 81–82, own translation)
In a recent interview, Stéphanie Posthumus has observed that the figures

who give The Natural Contract its narrative imprint are the peasant,
the mariner and the wanderer. These personae are to be understood,
not in their traditional ways of living, but in their attitude toward the
worlds that lie behind them, and that have tended to be forgotten over
the course of time:
The peasant lives with all the other living beings around him under
one roof and believes in a soul of things and of the world. The mari-
ner obeys an ethics of governance in his handling of wind and water
that is shaped by precaution and by prudence. The wanderer finally
is the model of an aleatoric and creative choice of moving forward.
He does not follow one method in the sense of the one right path,
irrespective of the places that he traverses. He respects the particular
conditions of the real world he encounters.
(Posthumus 2018, 53)
It is these attitudes toward the world that Serres, under the particular con-
ditions of the present, calls for recouping with his book The Natural Con-
tract. This is by no means meant as a step back to the good old times; rather,
Serres invites to reconsider the relations that mankind, including all its sci-
entific and technical sophistication, will have to establish with the planet
if future generations shall have the option to live in a livable environment.
Notes
1 I dedicate this chapter to the memory of Michel Serres who died on the first
of June 2019.
2 Compare, among other recent events, the Symbiosis Congresses of 2012,
2015, 2018 that Peter Berz mentions in his Afterword to the German trans-
lation of The Symbiotic Planet (Margulis 2017, I–XVI). Compare also the
Anthropocene Project of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (www.
hkw.de/anthropocene).
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don: Weidenfels & Nicolson.
Margulis, Lynn. 2017. Der symbiotische Planet, oder Wie die Evolution
wirklich verlief. Frankfurt am Main: Westend Verlag.
Posthumus, Stéphanie. 2018. “Un contrat mondial longue durée. Entretien avec
Stéphanie Posthumus. Propos recueillis par Emmanuel Levine.” Philosophie
Magazine. Hors série “Michel Serres,” Autumn–Winter.
Sagan (Margulis), Lynn. 1967. “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells.” Journal of
Theoretical Biology 14 (3): 225–274.
Serres, Michel. [1980] 1982. The Parasite. Translated, with notes, by Lawrence
R. Schehr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Serres, Michel, ed. [1989] 1995. A History of Scientific Thought: Elements of a
History of Science. Oxford: Blackwell.
Serres, Michel. [1990] 1995. The Natural Contract. Translated by Elizabeth
MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Serres, Michel. 2000. Retour au contrat naturel. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale
de France.
Serres, Michel. 2010. Biogée. Brest: Editions Dialogues.
Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture,
and Time. Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Mich-
igan Press.
2 The Anthropocene and the
History of Science1
Jürgen Renn
Introduction
What can the Anthropocene possibly mean for a history of science or
a history of knowledge? Which new perspectives does it entail? Will it
just lead to the next, fashionable turn? Evidently, there are many per-
spectives on the history of science, some of which may now appear to
be old fashioned or outdated. In my view, however, even in the face of
the new challenges to humanity to which the Anthropocene points our
attention, the older, more traditional approaches to history of science,
such as the careful exegesis of texts or detailed reconstructions of cog-
nitive processes, have by no means become obsolete. We should get out
of the habit of following fashions or turns and of playing different meth-
odological approaches and knowledge interests against each other. They
may all be valuable in their own right and will probably continue to be
so in the future. What is more important, they may complement each
other. Only by taking such a pluralistic approach can we guard against
ideological prejudice and muster the intellectual resources necessary to
confront the serious intellectual and practical challenges with which the
Anthropocene confronts us.
Such complementarity and open-mindedness is indeed needed when
considering the complex material, social and mental dynamics that mark
humanity’s transformation into a geological force shaping our planet.
Take for example the material turn of the history of science. This has
clearly demonstrated the productive role of epistemic objects, experi-
mental systems and large-scale infrastructures. Its one-sided radicaliza-
tion, however, may also lead to an underestimation of the mental, social
and political dimensions of knowledge systems that we need in order to
understand the coupling of the development of science and technology
with an extractive economy responsible for the ongoing environmental
changes. Or take the social constructivist attempt to understand sci-
entific practice, for instance from the perspective of epistemic virtues.
While this has given us new insights into cultural contexts and their
role for the production and validation of scientific knowledge, it focuses
almost exclusively on local settings, often at the expense of the larger
38 Jürgen Renn
economic and political contexts relevant to the understanding of the
Anthropocene.
The currently widespread trend of moving from history of science to
history of knowledge has brought long-neglected dimensions also of sci-
entific knowledge into focus, such as the intuitive, practical and craft
knowledge within and outside of science. Today we see historical scien-
tific knowledge more and more as the tip of an iceberg whose substance
is manifold forms of world knowledge such as the practical knowledge
of Renaissance engineers and artisans crucial to the Scientific Revolu-
tion. The history of knowledge has opened up new vistas for the history
of science also by paying greater attention to environmental and global
history, for instance by taking into account the global circulation of
knowledge on plants and animals.
A highly diluted history of knowledge may run, however, also the
danger of losing track of science itself. It may thus fail to consider the
central role that science and technology have played and are still playing
for the onset of the Anthropocene and no longer take as a challenge the
special role they appear to have for other cultural processes. A history
of knowledge, on the one hand, rightly denies the older history of prog-
ress and other grand narratives but offers, on the other hand, little in
their place. Can the Anthropocene concept perhaps help us to develop a
novel, overarching intellectual framework binding together the different
approaches to the history of science? Before I come back to this ques-
tion, let me take a step back and ask: Why are we even doing history
of science? Do we still follow the motives of the Enlightenment? Do we
still hope for science as a model case of reason, as the Vienna circle did?
Or is the history of science rather a counter-movement that criticizes the
dominance of certain forms of rationality or even the epistemic division
of subject and object in the name of a new Gaia philosophy allegedly in
response to the challenges of the Anthropocene? Are we concerned with
justice, for instance global or gender justice, or are we pursuing the his-
tory of science purely for the sake of knowledge? Can a history of knowl-
edge critically accompany science and perhaps even draw attention to
neglected alternatives, suppressed or missing knowledge? Within the his-
tory of science, such motives often remain implicit, but we should keep
reminding ourselves that approaches to the history of science based on
topical issues are indeed legitimate and should not be dismissed lightly
with the thoughtless blanket judgment of “wiggishness.”
A Brief Review of the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is precisely such a challenge. The term “Anthropo-
cene” was first suggested in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel
Prize winner Paul Crutzen at a conference in Mexico City on Earth sys-
tem research. Crutzen suddenly felt an aversion to the characterization
Anthropocene and the History of Science 39
of the present state as part of the Holocene as this seemed to downplay
the influence of humankind on the Earth system. He urged the delegates
to stop using the term Holocene and sought a better term, even during
his lecture: “We are no longer in the Holocene; we are in the … the … the
Anthropocene!” It later transpired that the term had a longer history. 2
In my view, the history of science and of knowledge can make a de-
cisive contribution to the understanding of the Anthropocene, but only
if they overcome the one-sidedness of current approaches that still tend
to focus on highly localized narratives or on fashionable viewpoints.
In other words, the theme of the Anthropocene is also an opportunity
for the history of science to break out of its occasionally scholastic or
post-modern fragmentation in order to confront a much larger picture.
At the same time, it invites us to bring together many lessons of the
past: without extending the history of science to a history of knowl-
edge, the Anthropocene can hardly be tackled with, nor can it be under-
stood without taking into account long-term development processes and
global history (Renn 2012; Brentjes/Renn 2016).3 In the face of the An-
thropocene, there can be no question of a history of progress, of course,
but rather of an evolutionary history of knowledge for which material,
cognitive and social dimensions are equally relevant.4
By means of science and technology, the human race has massively
changed the planet, and this has had dramatic consequences. Some of
these changes have taken place at a much faster pace than natural pro-
cesses. There is barely any pristine nature on the planet. 5 A large part
of the Earth’s surface that is not covered by ice has been transformed.
The polar ice is melting, the oceans’ water level is rising, and coastal
and marine habitats are being massively transformed. More than half
of Earth’s fresh water is exploited by humans. Oceans are being acidi-
fied and contaminated by aquacultures and plastic. The construction of
dams and extensive deforestation is massively affecting water circulation
and erosion rates and, therefore, the evolution and geographical spread
of numerous species. The loss of biodiversity is much greater by orders
of magnitude than it would have been without human intervention (Kol-
bert 2014). On average, every second nitrogen atom in the biosphere has
been processed once by the fertilizer industry. Most of the biomass of all
living mammals is made up of humans and domesticated animals.
Through energy-intensive chemical processes, humans have created
functional materials (which are rare under natural conditions) and brought
them into wide circulation. Among these are elemental aluminum, lead,
cadmium and mercury, fly ash residues from the high-temperature com-
bustion of coal and oil, and also concrete, plastic and other man-made
materials, many of them displaying properties that are alien to the nat-
ural world. Plutonium from atmospheric nuclear testing will persist in
the sedimentary record for the next several hundred thousand years as
it decays into uranium and then into lead. We are measuring the highest
40 Jürgen Renn
atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and
methane in at least 800,000 years (Lüthi et al. 2005). Even if the use of
fossil energy resources were to stop immediately, it would take thou-
sands of years before that concentration sank to pre-industrial levels.
Some changes have occurred at a much brisker pace than natural pro-
cesses. The present concentration of carbon dioxide has been reached
at a rate that is at least ten, and possibly one hundred times faster than
increases at any time during the previous 420,000 years (Petit et al.
1999). Simultaneously, new diseases have spread through carriers whose
rapid life cycles allow them to adapt quickly to new conditions. But how
quickly will human societies be able to adapt to new conditions? Ongo-
ing changes will affect different parts of the globe in different ways and
the global nature of these changes will not always be easy to recognize
for those who suffer from them. Developed countries may actually ap-
pear to benefit from climate change, while developing countries suffer—
but ultimately everyone will lose. There will be no escape, not even for
the rich. In short, the Earth is changing with irrevocable consequences.
There is no hope of ever returning to a “natural state” of things. People
do not act against the backdrop of unchangeable nature, but are deeply
interwoven with the Earth system and shape both its immediate and
distant future.
The fundamental revision of our understanding of the predicament
of our planet can be compared with the revolutions of the physical
conceptions of space and time, which were the direct consequences of
Einstein’s theories of relativity. In classical physics, space and time ap-
peared as the fixed stage on which world events took place. Following
Einstein’s theory, however, this stage is no longer fixed but part of the
piece itself; there is no longer an absolute distinction between the ac-
tors and the stage. Space and time do not remain in the background of
physical processes but participate in their dynamics, just as the Earth
system can no longer be conceived of as a stable background for human
actions.
The Anthropocene concept has created a bridge between geological
and historical times. It is now apparent that the time scale of human
history is inextricably linked to the geological time scale. Our economic
metabolism consumes fossil fuels and, over a period of decades, con-
sumes resources that have taken hundreds of millions of years to form.
To put it another way, we are currently burning so much coal, natural
gas and oil in the world in one single day as nature has accumulated in
500,000 days (Krauter 2006, XI)—and this tendency is rising! And just
as geological time becomes historical time, our influence as a geolog-
ical force makes human history an integral part of geological history
(Chakrabarty 2009). At the same time, the Anthropocene constitutes its
own, completely new epoch, in which geological changes take place more
rapidly than in earlier geological times. In view of the massive impact of
human interventions on the planet’s environment, the traditional divid-
ing lines between nature and culture have become problematic because,
as Karl Marx put it, we are living in an “anthropological nature” that
has resulted from these interventions (Marx [1844] 1970, 143).
The Beginnings of the Anthropocene

But when did the Anthropocene actually begin? This question has a dou-
ble meaning, which has to do with its complex conceptual configuration:
first of all, it is a stratigraphic question because the Anthropocene is
researched as a geological epoch. The geological significance of the term
is being analyzed by the Anthropocene Working Group, which in turn
reports to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) of the
International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS).6
But whatever the final decision of the geology experts may be, the
Anthropocene concept has already opened our eyes to a fundamentally
changed global environment. It is therefore fitting that also historians
and historians of science collaborate in the Anthropocene Working
Group. The sediments being investigated (e.g., the plutonium signal orig-
inating from atomic bomb explosions) result, after all, from historical
and in particular scientific and technological historical processes. The
current recommendation amounts to a determination of the beginning
of the Anthropocene to the time immediately after the Second World
War (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017).
But determining a stratigraphic starting point does not serve as a
causal explanation of the dynamics carrying the planet into the Anthro-
pocene. This is where other dimensions of the Anthropocene concept
come into play. The Anthropocene as a concept is also the result of a
new kind of Earth science, a transition from geology to Earth system
science, whereby our planet can be understood as a non-linear complex
system with many feedback loops. According to this new understanding,
the Earth system is not only subject to uniform change processes, but
can also achieve tipping points that lead to such catastrophic changes as
Snowball-Earth events, which have happened several times in the past.
This is why some also speak of a “new catastrophism” (Urry 2011, 36
ff.). It has long been known that the biosphere has played a crucial role
in such events since the beginning of its existence. Earth system scientists
have realized that this may also apply to the “anthroposphere” (Edu-
ard Suess) or “technosphere” (Peter Haff). The reconstruction of past
climates and of climate changes plays a key role in assessing boundary
conditions for the future of the global climate.7
The comparison of man-made global warming with previous climate
events not only shows that if we continue like this, the Earth system will
inevitably shift to a hot-house state in which we are exposed to com-
pletely new, extremely inhospitable living conditions at some places on
42 Jürgen Renn
the planet. It also shows that the speed of change and the state we are in
has little comparison in Earth history. Earth system scientists therefore
speak not only of urgent political and economic measures to prevent
this, but of the need for Earth system stewardship (e.g. Crutzen and
Steffen 2003, 256) in order to keep the Earth within planetary limits
under which we can maintain cultural evolution as we know it. This
raises fundamental ethical and political questions (Steffen et al. 2018).
Whatever actions we take, they will depend substantially on the
knowledge available about the interaction between the Earth system and
its human components. We are performing a global experiment with a
system that itself is already changing. Although our interventions are
knowledge-based, they always have unintended consequences; they lead
to second-order changes, both of the Earth system and of our knowledge
systems. Consequently, more than ever, we have made ourselves depen-
dent on our understanding of the human-Earth system as a complex
dynamic system. Understanding the evolution of knowledge is therefore
central to our future in the Anthropocene.
For a historian of science, the first question to look at is how on earth
did we get to this point? After all, no one seriously wanted to destroy the
planet. Let us therefore consider some possible answers to this question.
An obvious answer is the reference to industrialization, and especially
to resource-consuming global capitalism. In speaking of the Anthropo-
cene, some have therefore suggested to speak instead of a “capitalocene,”
in order to draw attention to that part of humanity, or rather to those
socio-economic mechanisms that are mainly responsible for the acceler-
ating dynamics of global change (Altvater 2016). But a semantic shift of
this kind could run risk of trivializing the problem because what really
matters is not naming the culprits, but rather understanding complex
planetary processes—especially with the perspective of having to shape
them differently in the future. Moreover, proposals to rename the An-
thropocene risk destroying the bridge that this term has created between
the natural and the human sciences, a bridge that has opened up com-
pletely new perspectives also for the history of science and technology.
The question of which processes and dynamics have led us into the
Anthropocene is currently widely discussed (Davis 2016; Zalasiewicz
et al. 2018). Proposals range from the invention of fire, the mass extinc-
tion of megafauna in the late Pleistocene, through the Neolithic period,
the early modern era, the Industrial Revolution, up to the Great Accel-
eration of the 1950s. All of these milestones have left their mark on the
history of the planet: the loss of biodiversity and predominance of do-
mesticated animals and plants, the integration of geologically separated
flora and fauna by the colonization of America, the rapid increase in
CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution, the exponential increase
of critical parameters of the Earth system since the Great Acceleration,
and so forth. All of these milestones have also changed human options
for action, which have been expanded by science and technology, but in
terms of path dependencies, also been seriously restricted.
These large-scale entanglements between the human sphere and the
Earth system can only be understood against the background of a con-
ception of cultural evolution that confers an important role to knowledge
and also to science. Conversely, this also gives a new scope to the history
of science. Historical epistemology, as it has been practiced since the
1990s, has linked history of science, philosophy and cognitive science.
The material turn has brought the history of science closer to media stud-
ies, art history and the technical sciences, whereas social constructivism
has introduced important perspectives of sociology and science studies.
The Anthropocene can only be understood if all these dimensions are
considered and, moreover, if the fundamental challenge to understand
the large-scale dynamics of cultural evolution is also taken into account.
The Anthropocene from the Perspective of

Cultural Evolution
So far, cultural evolution has been viewed as being more or less analo-
gous to biological evolution, or more specifically, to a traditional view of
biological evolution that focuses on mechanisms of heredity and selec-
tion and on the role of fitness landscapes. As a basis for an understand-
ing of cultural evolution, this is a reductionist view, which is rightly
regarded with skepticism by most scholars from the humanities and so-
cial sciences.8 But from the point of view of modern evolutionary theory,
a position that exclusively emphasizes statistical population dynamics
also falls short when it comes to understanding the enablement, preser-
vation or prevention of innovation.
In a more differentiated view of biological evolution, two other factors
play an important role: regulatory mechanisms governing the develop-
mental dynamics of an organism, discussed under the heading of “evo-
devo,” and the role of the environmental feedbacks brought about by the
organisms themselves, which is discussed under the heading of “niche
construction” (Tomlinson 2018). From the perspective of cultural evolu-
tion, both are obviously crucial factors. The culture of human societies
is not simply a collection of memes, some of which are handed down
and others not, but is subject to complex regulatory mechanisms that
are traditionally the subject of the cultural and social sciences. Only a
consideration of these manifold regulatory structures of social systems
makes a description of cultural development realistic, without reducing
it to simple analogies of mechanisms of transmission and selection of
single cultural elements. And, of course, human culture essentially con-
sists in niche construction, that is, in the construction and transmission
of material environments, from architecture through infrastructures,
production systems and technology to the symbol systems on which the
44 Jürgen Renn
transmission of knowledge, in particular also of scientific knowledge is
based.
The role of knowledge is dramatically underestimated in the current,
very technical, discussion of cultural evolution. An important task for
the history of science and knowledge could therefore be to fill this very
gap and, conversely, to also benefit from the broad perspective of cul-
tural evolution. The study of knowledge and cultural evolution could
even offer important general insights into the nature of evolution: in
knowledge evolution, it is obvious that constructed niches such as the
material and symbolic environments of human societies not only revert
to the evolutionary process by altering the external fitness landscape
under which systems evolve, but also function as extended components
of the evolving systems themselves and thus play a regulatory role. Af-
ter all, our ways of acting and thinking are essentially shaped by the
historically available material and symbolic culture, which must there-
fore be considered as an integral part of the regulatory structures of
human societies.
Abstract concepts such as number, weight, space, time or force, for
example, could only be formed on the basis of certain shared experi-
ences and their representation by material tools, artifacts and symbol
systems. The emergence of the concept of energy, for instance, was only
possible once actual transformations of motive power (e.g., the replace-
ment of human force by wind or waterpower, and later by the steam
engine) emerged historically as material practices. For the emergence of
certain forms of thinking or action, such as mathematics, we may also
consider the crucial role of such “external representations” of knowledge
as writing or symbol systems, which are part of the material culture of
a society.9 In order to describe the role of this material culture as a plat-
form enabling specific human practices, we thus speak of “regulatory
networks and niche construction,” a concept essential to what has been
called “extended evolution,” an approach that combines ideas of the the-
ory of complex regulatory systems with the theory of niche construction
(Laubichler and Renn 2015).
Conceiving cultural evolution, in this sense, as extended evolution
also opens up a new perspective on the Anthropocene: from this per-
spective, it is important to understand how, over the course of history,
regulatory structures of human societies have materialized in changes of
our planetary environment, and how these changes in turn have enabled
or prevented the emergence of novel regulatory structures, possibly giv-
ing rise to feedback loops ultimately involving the Earth system dynam-
ics and coupling human activities and Earth system cycles. A glimpse at
the long-term path dependencies that are triggered by these processes
is enlightening: environmental contingencies such as the availability of
domesticable plants and animals and historical constellations and events
such as the European colonization of the Americas may affect long-term
developments, even if their direct causal effect has long ceased to exist
(e.g. Diamond 2005).
This approach to cultural evolution may help the history of science to
escape from hesitating between its traditional belief in progress and its
post-modern resignation to a relativist historicism. On the one hand, an
evolutionary perspective indeed entitles us to speak of functional differ-
entiation and the accumulation of options for action but it also forces
us, on the other hand, to recognize that these may only be local adjust-
ments and optimizations under contingent circumstances and under the
narrow constraints of path dependencies, while there is no guarantee of
overall progress—and certainly no promise that the processes of knowl-
edge production, which have brought us into the Anthropocene, will
also suffice for surviving in it.
In the transition from biological to cultural evolution, the role of
“niche construction” has been transformed from one among several as-
pects of biological evolution into an essential feature of cultural evolu-
tion, as the role of material culture and tool use for the very emergence of
modern humans illustrates. Given the increasing significance of scientific
and technological knowledge for mastering the challenges of the Anthro-
pocene, we might be facing a next stage in a cascade of evolutionary pro-
cesses, “epistemic evolution.” In the transition from cultural to epistemic
evolution, the role of scientific knowledge may be similarly turned from
an initially marginal aspect into a characteristic feature of novel evolu-
tionary dynamics. If this is indeed the case, the future of cultural evolu-
tion, or even the survival of our species, might well become dependent on
the generation and circulation of the right kind of knowledge.
What does such a perspective entail for a history of science in the
Anthropocene and the novel problems it might address? It could, for
instance, investigate the dynamics of human-environment interac-
tions that have intensified over long periods of time and analyze the
interaction of material and epistemic practices in the context of spe-
cific knowledge economies.10 “Knowledge economy” here refers to the
totality of social institutions and processes that produce, reproduce,
circulate and control the knowledge available to a society and, in par-
ticular, the knowledge upon which its reproduction as a whole is based.
While knowledge enables individuals to plan their actions and reflect
on their outcomes, a society or institution cannot “think” but merely
anticipate the consequences of their actions within a specific knowledge
economy. The limitations of historical knowledge economies may have
played a crucial role in the collapse phenomena of past societies, as is
suggested by the examples considered by the evolutionary biologist Jared
Diamond (2005). A history of knowledge of the Anthropocene should
therefore also include a history of knowledge economies in which knowl-
edge with ultimately planetary effects has been produced, shared and
reproduced—or failed to be produced.
46 Jürgen Renn
Decisive for changes in knowledge and knowledge economies is the
co-evolution of knowledge systems and knowledge communities. Under-
standing this co-evolution is basically the problem that Thomas Kuhn
attempted to solve with his concept of “paradigm shift” (Kuhn 1973;
Blum et al. 2016). However, according to Kuhn, scientific communities
are typically elitist and intrinsically conservative communities of ex-
perts practicing “normal science” at a certain distance from society at
large. In his neglect of the role of larger economic and political contexts,
but also of practical knowledge, Kuhn was evidently influenced by the
anti-communist spirit of the Cold War. This distinguishes him, for ex-
ample, from Ludwik Fleck ([1935] 1979), and even more from the Marx-
ist tradition of Boris Hessen or Henryk Grossmann, who emphasized the
enabling role of the material culture of a society, as well as of broader
knowledge traditions for science (Freudenthal and McLaughlin 2009).11
To understand the epistemological dimension of the Anthropocene,
the role of materiality is crucial, if only because the term calls into ques-
tion the strict distinction between the spheres of nature and culture. If,
for example, the sediments to which the stratigraphy of the Anthropo-
cene refers are no longer deposits of distinct natural processes, but hybrid
residuals in which natural and human processes and their respective time
dimensions are inextricably fused, then these natural-cultural strata and
the “techno fossils” they contain become challenging objects, not only
for geology and historical science, but also for a scientific rationality to
which the distinction between natural and cultural sciences is inscribed
as a form of organization (Klingan et al. 2014; Nelson et al. 2017).
The Anthropocene as a Challenge for the

History of Science
But also as a historical transformation of the earth sciences, the Anthro-
pocene can hardly be understood in terms of a sudden Kuhnian paradigm
shift. Like all transformation processes of knowledge systems and knowl-
edge economies, this concept and the pertinent epistemic community did
not result from a single revolutionary turning point, but instead from a
long-term, protracted development.12 The idea that the Earth has been
fundamentally changed by human activities is anything but new. The
popularization of the Anthropocene concept has even led to a now ca-
nonical list of precursors, including Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon in
the 18th century, George Perkins Marsh in the 19th century and Russian
biogeochemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky in the first half of the 20th century
(cf. Trischler 2016). This list, however, does not adequately reflect the
complex changes in knowledge production that underlie the new concept
and the formation of a community around it.13 Here, system theory and
cybernetics as well as the institutionalization of the Earth system sciences
have played a crucial role, as has the International Geosphere-Biosphere
Program (at whose meeting in Mexico Paul Crutzen put forward his ob-
jection to the Holocene) and, more generally, the growing importance of
international governance of environmental programs.
If one wants to examine more closely such a long-term and complicated
process, in which not only many scientists and scientific organizations
but also NGOs and politicians have participated, one also needs suitable
procedures to deal with historical Big Data. This requires methods of
computational humanities, in particular methods of analysis that can be
applied to tens of thousands of publications from diverse fields, but also
a fundamentally new approach to understanding the co-evolution of
knowledge structures and knowledge communities. One such approach
is the epistemic network analysis that is currently undertaken at the Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science.14 The first challenge of such a
network analysis is to conceptualize the interaction between social and
semantic networks, mediated by external representations of knowledge.
To speak in Kuhnian terms, the emergence of a new paradigm can only
be understood as a combination of societal and epistemic dynamics, but
including the catalytic function of material and symbolic culture.
The key to understanding the interaction between social and seman-
tic networks within a given knowledge economy lies in the realization
that this interaction is mediated by the material and symbolic culture
of science comprising infrastructures, experimental systems, modeling
capabilities and scientific publications. These external representations
of knowledge make it possible for an emerging community to cluster
around a particular experimental arrangement or a set of mutually re-
lated important papers. These elements of the material culture, for their
part, can be understood as parts of a semiotic network so that the an-
alytical problem lies in understanding the interaction of three different
types of networks: the social network of persons and institutions, the
semantic network of concepts and ideas and the semiotic network of
artifacts, publications and other material representations of knowledge.
The emergence of epistemic communities and clusters of concepts, which
go on to become the core of a new knowledge system, manifests itself in
the changes of these network structures and their mutual relation.
The analysis of such network interactions has challenged mathema-
ticians and computer scientists to develop new algorithms and methods
for analyzing processes of self-organization resulting from a co-evolution
of knowledge systems and communities of knowledge (e.g. Wintergrün
2019). I will briefly mention two case studies although they are not re-
lated to the theme of the Anthropocene. They relate instead to the cos-
mography of the early modern period and to the development of the
general theory of relativity after the Second World War, respectively.
The case of medieval and early modern cosmography has been ana-
lyzed by Matteo Valleriani (2017) and his collaborators on the basis of a
systematic survey of hundreds of editions of The Sphere by Johannes de
48 Jürgen Renn
Sacrobosco published between 1472 and 1650. They were able to show
how the various treatises, which have been re-annotated and published
over centuries, functioned as a kind of repository for the new knowledge
that was disseminated by these tracts throughout Europe, that is, the
knowledge that was gained through the great overseas expeditions of the
time and also through the study of new astronomy. An epistemic com-
munity thus emerged, which shaped this new canon of knowledge and
the socio-epistemic basis on which the transformation of astronomical
knowledge eventually contributed to the emergence of the worldview of
modern science.
The other example is the emergence of a scientific community around
the general theory of relativity in the 1950s and early 1960s (Blum et al.
2018). Applying network analysis to a large corpus of scientific publica-
tions, Roberto Lalli and colleagues have reconstructed this development
as a process of self-organization in which cognitive and social dynamics
were combined in a way that only became possible through a certain
knowledge economy, involving international conferences, the exchange
of postdocs and the emergence of textbooks and new journals. Only
in the course of this process did Einstein’s theory of general relativity
emerge as a second pillar of modern fundamental physics, next to quan-
tum theory.
Evidently, it seems promising to extend such approaches also to an
understanding of the Anthropocene and its intellectual career as a novel
unifying concept integrating Earth system science and the study of hu-
man societies. But from the perspective of a theory of knowledge evolu-
tion, even more profound questions come into view, regarding the very
emergence of the new geological epoch as a result of the long-term his-
tory of human societies. To begin with, one may ask how the various
proposals for the beginning of the Anthropocene are related to each
other from such a perspective. They have, in any case, built on each
other in a way that needs to be explained in more detail by future re-
search: for example, without the so-called Neolithic Revolution, the ur-
ban revolution would be inconceivable; without the urban revolution,
there would probably be no science because of the lack of a division
between intellectual and manual labor which was characteristic of the
urban revolution—and without this division of labor no Scientific Revo-
lution would have been possible; and, probably, there would also be no
Industrial Revolution without the Scientific Revolution. Of course, this
chain of events is not inevitable but it may be a sequence of necessary
prerequisites—this remains, however, to be examined in more detail.
It seems, in any case, remarkable that some of these developments can
be understood as the—in part accidental—emergence and accumulation
of self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms within an increasingly complex
and an increasingly connected world system. Consider, for example, the
question of the relation between the scientific and industrial revolutions,
central to the work of the economic historian Joel Mokyr (2002). What-
ever the precise causal relation between these two transformations may
be, it is undisputed that, during the so-called Second Industrial Revolu-
tion at the latest, scientific and technological development were closely
intertwined with industrial production.
Since then, technological development, scientific innovation and
economic growth have not only been mutually reinforcing, but also
began to involve more and more areas of socioeconomic development
in an accelerated growth, including population growth, the exploita-
tion of global resources, as well as global mobility and interconnected-
ness. This mutual reinforcement and expansion eventually resulted in
the so-called Great Acceleration which is reflected, or at least clearly
recognizable since the 1950s, in correspondingly rapid changes of crit-
ical parameters of the Earth system, such as the increase in greenhouse
gases and soil erosion (McNeill and Engelke 2014; Steffen et al. 2015).
In other words, the Earth system is actually no longer an Earth system,
but a coupled human-Earth system. Besides the atmosphere, lithosphere
and biosphere, a technosphere (Haff 2014) has evolved, with its very
own dynamics.
The self-reinforcing global feedback of economic- and scientific-
technological expansion during the first and second Industrial Revolu-
tions is just one obvious example of such dynamic mechanisms. How
other related feedback mechanisms have unfolded is a question that re-
quires further research at the interface between the history of knowl-
edge and other disciplines, not only with economic and social history,
but also with environmental history and the history of materials. Most
likely, there is not simply one universal mechanism at work here, but
rather historically specific interactions that are deeply influenced by
their materiality.
A history of knowledge relevant to the Anthropocene must therefore
include material histories as well, for example of key substances such as
carbon, nitrogen or phosphorus, Stoffgeschichten, as the chemist Armin
Reller has called them.15 In the following, I consider two examples in
greater detail, the global history of coal and the role of nitrogen-based
fertilizers for the transition into the Anthropocene.
Toward a Global History of Coal

Under what ecological, social and epistemic conditions could coal be-
come a key material of the Industrial Revolution?16 It is obvious that
specific local prerequisites were required to start the self-accelerating
and, ultimately, global dynamics in the use of coal. But was there just
one such starting point or were there many, how many early attempts
were aborted, which global dynamics were involved for the ultimate tri-
umph of coal, and which are the conditions for its global demise?
50 Jürgen Renn
A well-known example of the local beginning of such dynamics is the
use of primitive steam engines for pumping groundwater from English
coal mines in the 18th century.17 Because of abundant fuel supplies, in-
efficiency did not hinder the use of such machines, and the interaction
of specific ecological and technological factors created an incubator for
the gradual development of such machines. The initially very inefficient
steam engine thus developed in a local environment in which efficiency
played virtually no role (Jevons 1865, 117). In the 18th century, the
“baseload” of the British fuel economy only gradually shifted from heat-
ing to industrial production. Only toward the end of the century, when
the steam engine, coking processes and new smelting furnaces had pre-
vailed did the consumption of fuel for production surpass that of house-
holds in terms of volume (Nef 1932, 190 ff.). The protracted energy
transition from wood to coal was essentially a consequence of social and
technological innovations that have prevailed in the course of around
one century under favorable local ecological conditions.
In addition to local factors, also global factors, especially Euro-
pean colonialism, influenced the energy transition from wood to coal.
Manufacturing systems were also converted in colonial regions, as well
as in China and the independent Latin American states. By using more
workers, products that were in high demand in Europe could be produced
in larger quantities. This so-called “industrious revolution” not only in-
creased consumption on the European market, but also presented a cer-
tain degree of competition (De Vries 2012). The global dominance of the
European powers kept this competition to a minimum, however, and ul-
timately strengthened the position of the coal-focused European industry
over possible competitors and alternative forms for the economy. This
functioned, for example, by investing British capital in non-European
mining activities, or by monopolizing European manufacturing, for ex-
ample, by excluding Indian cotton from the European market.
Coal was increasingly used primarily in those areas where there was
already intensive use of charcoal: for smelting or forging metal. But also in
the blanching, brewing and dying industries, coal use hinged on the use of
lignite. Over varying time periods, a changeover process began that gener-
ated a wealth of new knowledge in the different branches of production. In
addition, new uses developed for the large number of waste products: coal
gas from the coking process became a new source of light and tar from
the same production was used in the growing chemical industry. Aniline is
representative of the breadth of chemicals that could be profitably isolated
in increasingly complex distillations from the original material: coal.
Many other couplings, such as those between coal as an energy carrier
and iron as a building material for machines, ultimately contributed to
the great transformation that we call the Industrial Revolution. While
such couplings have been well studied, especially for the Industrial Revo-
lution, other mechanisms that have catapulted us into the Anthropocene
epoch are still largely research desiderata, for example, the role of catal-
ysis, one of the cornerstones of the 20th-century chemical industry, and
at the core of the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis.18
Chemical Fertilizers and the Anthropocene

The Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process was crucial for both fer-
tilizer and ammunition production (Steininger 2015; Renn et al. 2017).
This dual-use character led to the First World War becoming itself a cat-
alyst that significantly accelerated the development of a particular type of
chemical industry. Ammonia synthesis interfered in one of the most basic
metabolic systems: the central production of foodstuffs. Until the begin-
ning of the 20th century, agriculture and thus the nutrition of a noticeably
growing world population depended on natural nitrogen fertilizers based
on Chile saltpeter, that is, on geostrategically unfavorable and limited
resources. With the ammonia synthesis, synthetic, chemical-industrially
manufactured nitrogen fertilizers were introduced. It is because of these
synthetic fertilizers that the world population today can be fed. Without
mineral fertilizer, the Earth could only feed about 1.5 billion people. To
put it bluntly, the rest are alive thanks to the insights of modern chemistry.
An annual production of about 150 million tons of ammonia provides,
however, not only desirable and positive growth. In Haber-Bosch plants
throughout the world, there is just as much nitrogen from the air being fixed
in ammonia as there is in all global bacteria put together. Over-fertilized
soils can no longer absorb this flood of nitrates. The nitrogen cycle, which
such chemists as Justus von Liebig and Fritz Haber dreamed of controlling
and completing, has been reopened on a dramatic scale. Agriculture has
been transformed from a facility for the accumulation of solar energy into
a subsystem of fossil energy transformation. By using artificial fertilizers
from ammonia, far more fossil energy is invested in food production than
in the solar energy that is bound in them via photosynthesis. We thus rec-
ognize as characteristics of the Anthropocene an increasing dependence
on human interventions in cycles of the Earth system, interventions that,
in turn, depend on scientific-technical knowledge. But we also recognize
how far we are from mastering the systemic consequences of these inter-
ventions, even at the level of scientific understanding.
The success of nitrate chemistry had far-going consequences, initiat-
ing further self-accelerating developments, such as the rise of the petro-
chemical industry, as pointed out by the historian of science Benjamin
Steininger (2018, 22):
The superorganism of industrial petrochemistry could only arise in

the cross-fertilization of nitrate, coal, and petroleum chemistry, and
in the transfer of high-pressure processes and catalyst technology
from the chemistry of nitrogen to the chemistry of coal and then oil.
52 Jürgen Renn
According to Steininger, the materiality of the 20th century largely arose
on the eve of the First World War, in particular due to the transfer of the
potential of multi-step catalysts from nitrate to hydrocarbon chemistry.
The Digital Transformation and the Anthropocene

Another example for the coupling of different transformation pro-
cesses is the connection between the digital transformation and the
Great Acceleration of the second half of the 20th century. Digitization
is evidently closely related to other global transformation processes,
but these relations are as yet poorly understood. It is clear, however,
that without the new communication and information technologies,
the rapid economic growth after the end of World War II, as well as
the great acceleration in all areas of human productivity and resource
exploitation, would have been unthinkable. It is also evident that in
the face of such global challenges as climate change and the necessary
transformation of our energy systems, in the future we will need new
digital control options, but there is also reason to fear that we are
running the risk of being increasingly regulated by the very control
instruments that we ourselves created.
How can we overcome this dilemma? How can we generate a techni-
cal civilization without abandoning our human values? With regards to
our current understanding of the digital transformation, we may be at
about the same level as climate research was 30 years ago at the begin-
ning of Earth system research (for an overview see Rosol et al. 2018). In
view of the urgent need to better understand global transformation pro-
cesses and their interconnections, the Max Planck Society is currently
considering a project, or perhaps even the creation a new institute, ded-
icated to investigating such processes under the preliminary heading of
“geoanthropology.”
Knowledge Production for the Anthropocene

In closing, let me return to the challenge that the Anthropocene implies
for the history of science, which does not lie only in new questions,
topics and methodological approaches. The history of science may also
gain new opportunities to use its insights and reflective potential for the
development of innovative forms of knowledge production. As an exam-
ple, I just mention the need for a reorientation of the current knowledge
economy away from increasingly specialized, fragmented knowledge
production toward more reflection, greater attention to systemic as-
pects, transformative processes and global responsibility, including an
emphasis on local perspectives and historical contexts. The historian of
science Yehuda Elkana (2012, 610) captured such a change in perspec-
tive with his suggestion for a shift “from local universalism to global
contextualism.”
At present, such novel forms of co-operative knowledge production
are being tested, for instance, within the framework of the “Anthropo-
cene Curriculum,” a kind of global intellectual laboratory involving ac-
ademics as well as civil society.19 By curating new forms of engagement
at the interface of the natural sciences, the humanities, art and design,
the Campus initiative, jointly initiated by the Haus der Kulturen der
Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, attempts
to productively combine many facets of Anthropocene research and to
use this also as a stimulus for the history of science and knowledge, and
conversely, to bring the history of science into many other discourses. 20
Acknowledgments
For their generous support in the preparation of the presentation on which
this text is based, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science, Lindy Divarci, Giulia Rispoli, Chris-
toph Rosol, Benjamin Steininger, Thomas Turnbull and Helge Wendt.
Notes

54 Jürgen Renn

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3 The Dirty Metaphysics of
Fossil Freedom
Franz Mauelshagen
An Exercise in Dirty Metaphysics

“Climate change” and the “Anthropocene” are more than just scientific
concepts. In real life, they represent a general crisis in human-nature re-
lations; a crisis in the earth system that is shifting into a new and unpre-
dictable state (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015); and a major
crisis in the history of life on earth as we know it (Kolbert 2014). Were
it not for the fact that these crises are translating into a crisis of fossil
freedom, we might ignore all of this. By “fossil freedom” I refer to the
totality of liberations enabled by the burning of fossil fuels from previ-
ously existing limits to human action—liberations, which have changed
our individual and collective lives.
“Fossil freedom” is a coinage similar to, and inspired by, Timothy
Mitchell’s (2011) “carbon democracy.” The difference is in the adjective
“fossil,” which emphasizes the geological origins of the resources we are
burning, rather than their main chemical component, carbon. But this
is no more than a nuance with little relevance. Both terms are similar in
that they combine words belonging to separate spheres, or realms: the
physical realm of necessity, where natural laws rule, and the metaphys-
ical realm of freedom, where legal and ethical norms are supposed to
limit our actions so they do not harm other people’s freedom. Logical,
as this distinction looks philosophically, it is an illusion to believe that
the two realms exist in splendid isolation from one another in our social
worlds so that one, the realm of freedom, can expand unchecked by the
other. In reality, they cannot but coevolve, and energy history is a way
to describe this coevolution. Expressions such as “carbon democracy”
and “fossil freedom” venture to suggest that the realm of freedom is con-
taminated with “dirt” from the sphere of necessity. Therefore, a study
in fossil freedom is an exercise in dirty metaphysics. This essay is about
dirty metaphysics.
In principle, there is little new about questioning the philosophical du-
alism we have inherited from European enlightenment philosophy. Di-
alectical materialism did the same more than 150 years ago by showing
how material inequality privileges some people over others. Karl Marx
60 Franz Mauelshagen
found that control over the means of production shapes the realm of
freedom, because it is key to how material wealth and physical labor are
distributed within society. Understanding how the realms of necessity
and freedom interfere with each other was a key element in Marx’ think-
ing. In volume three of Das Kapital (1894) he wrote:
In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour

which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations
ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere
of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with
Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must
civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under
all possible modes of production. With his development this realm
of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the
same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also
increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man,
the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange
with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of
being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving
this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most
favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless
still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development
of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of free-
dom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of
necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic
prerequisite.
(Marx 1894, 593)
No matter, whether we agree or disagree with the idea of socialism,

we must acknowledge that Marx had a clear understanding of dirty
metaphysics. And yet, 150 years make a huge difference in the way we
approach this subject. It was beyond imagination for Marx and his con-
temporaries that climate change and other anthropogenic modifications
of the earth system would start interfering with the realm of freedom
in such a way that setting limits to our actions are considered a matter
of saving the future of modern civilizations. The expansion of material
flows between “nature” and society has become a driving force of earth
systems change, and we are changing the earth at breath-taking speed.
This is in essence what earth system scientists and geologists mean when
they describe humanity as a geophysical force. It implies that the way we
organize material flows not only changes our freedoms, but also impacts
the physical world we live in, the earth.
In the Anthropocene, the question of freedom reaches beyond dis-
tribution of material wealth in a given society. Now it also involves
the question of limitation of material resources, which might set
The Dirty Metaphysics of Fossil Freedom 61
limits to population growth, economic growth, the accumulation of
wealth and all the (other) fossil freedoms we are still used to take for
granted. This is how the Anthropocene adds a new dimension to the
problem of entanglement between the physical world of matter and
the metaphysical world of our freedom. For the very same reason,
the Anthropocene challenges the academic world to bridge the divide
between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities
(Mauelshagen 2017).
In the following, I will refrain from any attempt at giving a compre-
hensive account of the history of fossil freedom since the dawn of indus-
trialization. Instead, I shall approach the crisis of fossil freedom from
the point of view of energy history. This allows a description of fossil
freedom in relation to preceding energy regimes, which depended on the
“biomass-climate nexus,” by which I refer to the sum of local environ-
mental conditions for biomass production as affected by the climate sys-
tem and its variability. Showing how and why climate has been a prime
mover in (energy) history is key to a deeper historical understanding of
the fossil turn in relation to the earth’s climate that is anthropogenic
climate change. In the final part of this chapter I will return to the crisis
of fossil freedom in the Anthropocene. In essence, I will argue that this
crisis is a symptom of the transcendence of the biosphere that is showing
in our material worlds.
The Biomass-Climate Nexus

Pre-industrial societies relied on plants and animals as biological con-
verters of energy. The organic matter of plants and animals, that is
biomass, was by far the dominant source of energy that pre-industrial
societies accessed and processed. Fossil energy resources also originate
from biomass; but they are organic matter transformed by anaerobic
decomposition and geological processes (heat and pressure) leading, af-
ter millions of years, to the compressed forms of energy that is known
as coal, oil and gas. It is basically the lack of control of these geologi-
cal processes that place fossil fuels outside the range of renewability. In
contrast, biomass production is renewable on timescales—sub-annual,
annual or decadal—that societies have learnt to handle way back in
human history. Organizing pre-fossil energy regimes involved tapping
into, controlling and modifying biomass (re-)production and its natural
cycles. To some degree, these cycles can be regarded the material forces
underlying cyclical concepts of historical time, and its many cultural
variants, in practically all forms of pre-industrial societies. Theories of
history are yet to take note of this, as are mainstream cultural theories
of time and temporality that fail to connect cultural with environmental
diversity, be it for mere ignorance toward any relation between the two,
or for fear of environmental determinism (Mauelshagen 2016).
What is more important here, the control of biomass production in
agrarian societies is restricted to a small selection of plants and animals
suitable for domestication. The control of energy flows from the bio-
sphere works by means of human cooperation with these plants and ani-
mal species. The concrete mix of these elements used to depend on local
environments, and it still does today, despite the fact that the ties with
local environments have been loosened in a world with global exchanges
of resources and goods and biotechnologies allowing genetic modifica-
tion. In any case, hidden behind the facades of this general and abstract
description is a truly remarkable diversity of traditional agrarian biocul-
tures, to which the spatial or geographic variability of the climate system
is key (on biocultures see Maffi 2001, 2007; Loh and Harmon 2005;
Maffi and Woodley 2010; Sobo 2013).
To make that argument, it is worth noting that primary biomass
production, or plant growth, is generally more important in defining
the local character of any biocultural regime than secondary biomass
production (animals). Primary production relies on the photosynthesis
exercised by autotrophic organisms using sunlight to chemically con-
vert carbon dioxide and water into sugar (e.g. glucose) and oxygen. The
heterotrophic organisms of secondary biomass production, to which we
humans belong as citizens of the animal kingdom, build on primary
production.
Conventional energy histories follow a tradition of characterizing en-
ergy regimes based on biomass production as solar, thus ignoring the role
of climate. Looking back, though only briefly, into the history of climate
science illustrates how counter-intuitive this is, because the emergence of
climatology as a modern science cannot be separated from plant geogra-
phy. Knowledge of both was intimately tied together. Plant geography was
what motivated Alexander von Humboldt to ask questions of heat distri-
bution on the surface of the earth (Humboldt 1817a; Meinardus 1899,
63–64; Humboldt 2008, 6–7). It was Humboldt’s innovation in 1817 to
map temperature along isothermal lines for the purpose of what he called
comparative climatology (Humboldt 1817b). He shared with many scien-
tists of his time an intuitive understanding of the relation between climate
variability and plant geography, despite his and his contemporaries’ lack
of understanding of photosynthesis. The process of converting light en-
ergy into chemical energy known as photosynthesis was discovered only
later in the 19th century (Nickelsen 2015). Its biochemistry fully explains
why climate is a key to primary biomass production. Not only does the
climate system regulate distribution and duration of sunlight (solar irradi-
ance) in the course of the annual cycle; but, through atmospheric circula-
tion, it also regulates the distribution of heat and moisture.
Solar radiation passes through the atmosphere before it reaches the
earth’s surface where the biosphere proliferates. Its density and distri-
bution are influenced by a variety of processes and feedbacks in the
earth system. The sum of these factors is what we call the earth’s cli-
mate system, a large and complex “machine” that distributes solar en-
ergy (radiation) around the planet in various forms and rather unevenly.
Temperature can be regarded a measure of heat energy (Brown 2016).
In modern climate science, calculations of radiative forcing, measured
in Watts per square meter (Wm –2), are an even more obvious and direct
measure of energy, as it expresses the balance between incoming short-
wave radiation (solar insolation) and outgoing long-wave radiation. The
fundamental energy sources that drive the climate system are solar radi-
ation and gravitation. The climate system itself lends complexity to this
general description, because it is the cause of uneven distribution of solar
energy flows.
Despite a number of excellent accounts that describe energy con-
version and flows within the climate system (Trenberth and Stepaniak
2004; Trenberth and Fasullo 2009), energy and economic historians,
with rare exceptions (e.g. Malanima 2006), have practically failed to
acknowledge that the climate system regulates the distribution of solar
energy on the earth’s surface. To name but a few processes here, radiant
energy is transformed into various other forms of energy in a thermo-
dynamic mix: internal heat, potential energy, latent energy and kinetic
energy. This energy mix drives the climate system. Heat is moved around
in various ways, mainly by atmospheric and ocean currents. Most im-
portantly, both the oceans and the atmosphere are transporting energy
poleward from the equator, thus balancing the equator-to-pole tempera-
ture gradient influenced by latitudinal differences in insolation. Energy
is also stored differently (and sequestered), depending mostly on heat
capacity, which varies between the ocean (water), atmosphere, land and
ice components of the climate system.
There are two very simple and obvious ways to illustrate the effect of
climatic variability on primary biomass production: one short-term, the
other long-term. Short-term fluctuations in plant growth over the an-
nual cycle reveal the influence of seasonal variability. This effect is most
pronounced by opposite seasons in the northern and the southern hemi-
spheres. Long-term fluctuations during the Late Pleistocene (roughly the
last 126,000 years) show an oscillation between glacial and interglacial
episodes. During the cold glacial episodes plant growth was limited by
the expansion of polar ice toward the equator, particularly in the north-
ern hemisphere. The unusually long interglacial period we live in, the
Holocene, has provided warm and stable conditions long enough for
agrarian civilizations to emerge and expand from their multiple origins
in tropical and subtropical locations to more extreme climates, particu-
larly in the North (Weisdorf 2005; Cowan et al. 2006). I shall emphasize
that there is nothing deterministic in making this statement. It does not
mean that agrarian civilizations emerged—or had to emerge by any form
of necessity—because of the “long summer” of the Holocene, nor that it
expanded (exclusively) for that reason, although some researchers have
endorsed such ideas (e.g. Dow et al. 2009; more references in Richerson
et al. 2001). All it does is stress the boundary conditions that were cru-
cial to the emergence and geographic expansion of agrarian civilizations.
Constraints in Biomass Production

Pre-industrial agrarian societies had no other ways to access greater
amounts of energy than through intensification or spatial expansion of
biomass production. Early uses of coal in China and Europe remained
quantitatively insignificant (Smith 1997; Dodson et al. 2014; Smil 2017,
164–169). Even after the invention of windmills and sailing ships, wind
and water energy amounted only to a tiny percentage in agrarian re-
gimes. Lacking energy storage technologies and chemical converters set
limits to mobility and the transportation of goods, trade in particular.
The food requirements of draft animals restricted land transportation
economically (Sieferle 2004). Downriver was the fastest lane for the
transport of goods. It looks like the dominance of biomass as an energy
resource also created path dependencies limiting the scope of innovation
to irrigation, fertilization, crop diversification and the organization of
work (Smil 2017, 65–109). Innovation in wind energy, for example, came
late. The Netherlands are an interesting example in this regard, because
the expansion of windmill farms preceded industrialization, while their
use peaked in the 19th century overlapping with the fossil energy tran-
sition of the country. Windmills were mainly used for pumping water
out of the lowlands in order to make fertile soils available for farming.
In other words, their usage remained tied to the agrarian regime of the
country and its main purpose of increasing primary biomass production
by reclaiming fertile soils from the sea.
Returning to the role of climate in agrarian regimes, adaptation of
the latter to local conditions was the main option in a dynamic relation-
ship. The variety of available adaptive strategies and the vulnerability
to climatic variability depended on concrete local factors, the selection
of plant and animal species embedded in a local environment that pro-
vided the conditions for biomass production. Agrarian regimes relied on
recurring weather conditions allowing them to perpetuate the rhythm
of sowing, plant-growing and harvesting. In most places on the earth,
growing of crops is seasonal. Growing seasons may be once or twice
annually. This is why, throughout the history of farming, annual or
seasonal variability in solar radiation, precipitation, more short-term
weather extremes and natural hazards have always left their marks on
crop yields. Larger losses could be bridged in different ways, for example
by way of importing food or food storage. However, economically, there
was a marginal utility limiting these strategies temporally in such a way
that repeated crop failures and other types of disaster like cattle disease
and epidemics would lead to long-lasting crises with strong feedbacks on
all aspects of social and political life.
While intensive land use may have impacted local climates or even mod-
ified the atmosphere to some degree (Ruddiman 2003, 2005a, 2005b),
climatic fluctuations and changes remained beyond human control. How-
ever, throughout their history, agrarian societies have experimented with
new species of crops and animals, which is symptomatic for the type and
continuity of their innovations (Smil 2017, 85–87). Selecting a species
for cultivation or breeding highly depended on its adaptability to local
climatic conditions. All historical processes of colonization are a treasure
trove of examples for the required trial-and-error approach. Experiment-
ing with new plant and animal species was a major concern through-
out the European expansion from the late 15th century until the dawn
of industrialization. Crops, agrarian products and forced labor (slavery)
became as important goods in the “Columbian Exchange” as gold and
silver (Crosby 1972; Schiebinger 2004; Schiebinger and Swan 2004).
In sum, in this and the previous section I have argued that climatic fac-
tors set temporal and spatial limits to natural as well as human-controlled
biomass production and that the climate system needs to be acknowl-
edged as a prime mover not only in the history of life, but also in human
history. From the point of view of energy history, on-surface solar radi-
ation, the distribution of heat and moisture were key to pre-industrial
agrarian societies in that they defined local conditions for, and limita-
tions to, their bio-cultural evolution (Ali 2013). These include constraints
on growth of populations and their economies, on the accumulation of
capital, on material wealth, on construction, trade and mobility.
The Fossil Turn in Climate Relations

The experience of fossil freedom was, in many ways, relative to the con-
straints of agrarian societies. Historians of industrialization have de-
scribed the character of its liberations based on numerous accounts by
eyewitnesses of technological progress, its influence on everyday life and
its multiple transformations. The liberations of industrialism are a re-
curring theme in 19th- and 20th-century records, a theme that can be
traced through all technological and commercial innovations of the last
two and a half centuries like a leitmotiv in music. And yet, conventional
histories of “modern societies” remain quite reserved when it comes to
recognizing their fossil foundations. Energy history is still considered
a specialized branch of historical study apparently deserving no more
than a niche in the complex architecture of historiography. Among other
things, this essay is an attempt to pull it out of that niche.
Fossil fuels, which include lignite, anthracite coal, peat, natural gas and
crude oil, develop from geologically compressed biomass and are highly
concentrated reservoirs of stored energy. Key technological innovations
have enabled industrial societies separating the reservoir from the con-
verter and transforming chemical into electric energy, and kinetic into
thermal energy. By controlling these processes technologically, energy
availability has been detached from actual solar radiation and its un-
equal distribution through the climate system. This is a crucial advantage
over the biological converters of traditional farming, which, while renew-
able, have a shorter lifespan than fossil fuels. Logically, the temporal and
spatial properties of fossil regimes differ from any of the pre-industrial
agrarian regimes. The geological forces involved in the making of fossil
fuels make all the difference. Among other things, they lack renewability
relative to human timescales, which are, for example: a lifetime of an in-
dividual human being, which exceeds a hundred years only very rarely, or
the lifetime of institutions, states or civilizations, which sometimes lasts
up to a thousand years or two (e.g. the Catholic Church).
Industrial energy regimes have built a material world on top of the
agrarian sector and transformed food production along the way. The
primary sector has been re-modelled. Through motorization and fertil-
izers agriculture has been turned from a source of net energy production
into an energy sink. It is, however, the industrial expansion of the agrar-
ian sector that has enabled bailout from pre-industrial limits to growth
by loosening up the biomass-climate nexus. While there is still vulnera-
bility of the agrarian sector to such climatic fluctuations, extremes and
hazards, industrialized nations have no longer been hit by traditional
subsistence crises in the past 150 years. This has been called the escape
from the Malthusian trap (Brandenberger 2004). In fact, it is a rupture
in the coevolution between the earth system and human culture due to
the transcendence of the biosphere. Breaking up the biomass-climate
nexus underlying that transcendence has a lot to do with the fact that
fossil energy resources are retrieved from the crust of the earth. They
can be dislocated cost-efficiently; and their usage is detached from the
places they come from. The latter may have been the case for some of the
biomass production of traditional agrarian regimes as well, and it is cer-
tainly the case for a wide spectrum of agrarian products today, though
global distribution of these goods has been enabled by the accelerated
cargo system of motorized vessels and preservatives slowing down the
decay of foodstuff.
Breaking up the biomass-climate nexus, while it continues to apply in
a mitigated form to the primary sector, is the undercurrent of some of
the profound transformations the fossil energy regime has brought about
in our social worlds. It all started with the industrial transformation of
labor that Marx was concerned with. Agricultural vehicles running on
fossil fuels have released human labor previously required for field work.
The yield increase of a technologically and bio-chemically armed agrar-
ian system enabled a drastic redistribution of the human labor force
between economic sectors. The ratio of 80%–90% of the population
which was bound to working the soil was reversed. In our day, the share
of the agrarian sector in the labor force of the nations of early industri-
alization has fallen below 5% (Allen 2000; Tilly 2010: table 2).
Labor has been in a turmoil ever since. Its history mirrors all techno-
logical transformations and the acceleration of change they have brought
along. Fears of unemployment and structural loss of jobs through mecha-
nization has never gone away since the early days of industrialization. It is
the red thread that goes through labor history, including the digital revo-
lution today. Hardly, if ever, will such fears be comforted by the uncertain
prospect of a better life and better work sometime in the distant future.
This brings us back to Marx’ point about labor as the barometer of all
relations between the realms of necessity and freedom. Early liberal eco-
nomics created an almost forgotten (utopian) vision of universal wealth
and liberation from the pains of physical labor—a vision that included
freedom and better education for increasing numbers of the population
of a nation, which was supposed to become the source of never-ending
scientific progress. Marxism questioned such visions pointing its finger
at the problem underlying the idea that the wealth of nations would
merely profit from private initiative and capital. The unequal distribu-
tion of capital would lead to huge and unjust inequality within societies
and between them, creating potential for political unrest and instability
along the way, with the invisible hand of the market doing little but
enhance it. However, Marxism also developed its own utopian vision of
liberation founded on the same optimistic enlightenment anthropology
of perfectibility, not only of humans, but of nature as a whole. In the
course of the transformation that Marx envisioned for the future of in-
dustrialization, human work (or power, if you will), by using the means
of knowledge and technology, would transform the first given nature
into an improved “second nature” and, finally, overcome the alienation
from nature (Marx 2005, 279–400).
It needs to be mentioned, if only briefly, that the perfectibility of
“man” and nature were ideas deeply involved with enlightenment and
colonialism, although the idea has survived colonialism’s historical ex-
istence in time and space. Stalin’s “Great Plan for the Transformation
of Nature” is as striking an example as countless development projects
around the world, under either capitalist or communist guidance (Krech
et al. 2004, 1077; Olsáková 2016). All of them are cases to deeper study
the complexities and contradictions of dirty metaphysics.
There is, nevertheless, a core of liberating effects brought about by
fossil energy regimes that have been praised as civilizational achieve-
ments. As much as such praise needs to be dismantled, the liberations
of fossil freedom are not easily dismissed. The transformation of mobil-
ity, the end of (colonial) slavery, the escape from the Malthusian trap,
as mentioned above, or electrification and artificial light as opportu-
nities for better education (still important today, for example: in rural
India) were perceived as liberations, as many historical accounts have
proven. And there are many more examples. What fossil energy regimes
achieved was leaving behind previous material and energy constraints in
agrarian societies. This is no news, of course, to the history of energy
transformations and its analysis, though easily overlooked today outside
that specialization.
That said, it is even more important to understand the evolution of
fossil regimes into a state—perhaps of its own “success”—, where con-
straints of a new order of magnitude are beginning to take their toll on
our freedom. It is a clear sign of this integral dialectic that environmental
consequences became included at some point in our visions of technolog-
ical progress. This is perhaps why the cyber-worlds of digitalization sur-
rounded themselves with the myth of their cleanliness and immateriality.
The invisibility and opaqueness of information infrastructures appar-
ently helped disguise the enormous amounts of electric power (bitcoin!)
and the great variety of (often critical) metals they are made of, as well
as the pollution they produce (e.g. Lécuyer 2017). Challenging the “dig-
ital utopian vision” of immateriality reveals that neither Daniel Bell’s
“post-industrial society,” nor James Martin’s “Wired Society” are what
they claimed to be: “rendered free from the material constraints that gov-
erned the material world” of industrialism. Quite the contrary! Cloud
technologies resemble “simply a reconfigured network of industrial-era
physical infrastructures” (Ensmenger and Slayton 2017, 296–298; see
also Ensmenger 2013). This is why our current state of the economy
in “the West” and elsewhere should be labeled “post-industrial” only
with caution. While labor markets have experienced a shift from the
industrial to the service sector since the 1970s, the energy regime has
remained quite the same.
Transcending the Biosphere

Our fossil freedoms have established a new relationship with the climate
system, its temporal and spatial properties on planet earth. They are the
effect of the loosening of our ties with primary and secondary biomass
production—liberations from (some of) the constraints imposed upon us
by our evolution from, and coevolution with, the biosphere. However,
fossil freedom has not left the climate system behind, which is a strange
thought per se. Rather, it has expanded so significantly that a new re-
lationship with the climate system has been established: one of alter-
ing it significantly and rapidly on the timescales of human actions (and
their history), while the planetary effects are operating on the geological
timescale. According to recent model simulations, anthropogenic green-
house gas emissions have caused a delay of the onset of the next glacial
period of at least 100,000 years (Ganopolski et al. 2016). Some of the
traces we have left in recent sediments will be preserved in future rock
even for much longer. This is how human history is suddenly converging
with earth history in the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 2015).
Anthropogenic climate change has been the most obvious and po-
litically pressing symptom of crisis of fossil freedom. The need to re-
duce greenhouse gas emissions quickly might, if realized, spell the end
of the fossil energy regime decades, if not centuries, before we will be
running out of oil, gas and coal. The purpose of controlling anthropo-
genic climate change within the scientifically recommended +2°C above
pre-industrial levels, upon which the parties of the UNFCC agreed in
Paris 2015, defines the limits of the fossil energy regime. Like any agree-
ment, this is an act out of free will (of the participating nations), which
belongs to the realm of freedom. However, it is an act out of free will
executed with regard to the realm of necessity and informed by climate
scientists. It is founded on evidence confirming that anthropogenic forc-
ing is dominating global warming. Without this evidence, an act out of
free will would be senseless and easily dismissed as wishful thinking.
Despite its enormity, anthropogenic climate change is only where the
crisis of fossil freedom begins. The Anthropocene is a step further in
describing the constraints lying ahead of us. It includes climate change as
a key factor but goes far beyond it in reflecting the sum of human action
as the equivalent of a geophysical force in the earth system (Steffen et al.
2011a, 741). Underlying it is once again the energy anomaly created by
the fossil regime, which has fundamentally altered the character of ma-
terial flows from the physical environment into society, as well as from
society back into the environment (emissions and waste). On a global
scale, they are no longer dominated by biomass, as they used to be, but
by materials extracted from the crust of the earth. As a result, the worlds
of construction we have created and we live in today are predominantly
“lithospheric,” as is most visible in modern cities. Handling rock for
construction is an extremely energy-intensive undertaking, and so is dig-
ging deep and deeper into the earth.
Statistics of global material extraction over the course of the 20th
century display a transition that occurred shortly after 1950 (Kraus-
mann et al. 2009). Biomass still made up for slightly more than 50% of
total extractions around 1950, while afterwards, their percentage (or
relative share of total) dropped quickly below that mark. This was not
merely the continuation of an existing trend already established in the
coal era, but an effect of the Great Acceleration driven by cheap oil in
the long boom that lasted from the 1950s until the oil crisis in 1973
(Pfister 2010; Mauelshagen and Pfister 2010). However, the same statis-
tics also indicate another important dimension of the lithospheric shift
in material cultures brought about by the fossil energy regime, which is
intensification of human control over the biosphere. While the share of
biomass went down, its absolute input into societal material circulation
still increased significantly.
The enormous variety of materials we make use of today is already
mirrored in the most recent sediments that the geologists of the Anthro-
pocene Working Group (AWG) are analyzing. What their high-resolution
stratigraphy for the 20th-century brings to the fore is a huge number of
technofossils. They reflect the evolution of the technosphere and its enor-
mous expansion nurtured by the fossil energy regime of industrialism
(Zalasiewicz et al. 2017; Haff 2014; Klingan and Rosol 2018). Industrial
technologies have produced an unprecedented increase in material vari-
ety, making it an anomaly in the history of social metabolism (Mauelsha-
gen 2019). Synthetic materials such as plastics have contributed to it as
well as new raw materials for industrial mass production or unprece-
dented amounts of materials already used (Bardi 2014). As a result, the
material culture of industrial energy regimes is markedly distinct from
anything we find in pre-industrial worlds: for example, we are now liv-
ing in an “all-metals” era, which means that all metals and semi-metals
from the periodical system have become components to building our
material world (Exner et al. 2016; Held et al. 2018). Twentieth-century
stratigraphy—the technofossils geologists find in it—is the signature of
fossil material culture (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). The so-called material
turn in the humanities and social sciences is only beginning to discover
this dimension, and it still seems a long way away from systematically
considering “materiality” in context with climate, the environment and
the earth system (Leggewie and Mauelshagen 2018, 5).
Transcendence of the biosphere and intensification of the control of
biospheric resources appear to be the trademark of the Anthropocene.
The consequences are far-reaching: Dependence on lithospheric mate-
rials means our material worlds have moved outside the rhythms of re-
newability that rule the reproduction of biomass in the biosphere, based
on co-evolution with the climate system and its variability in time and
space. Instead, industrial material cultures are now predominantly in-
terfering with the realm of geology, driven by long-term processes such
as weathering, which, even if cyclical in some cases, imply that there is
no renewability. This applies to fossil energy resources as well as to all
materials extracted from the earth’s crust. Combined with the danger
that toxic release of many of these materials into the biosphere pose to
the preservation of life on earth, it may be concluded that the bound-
ary conditions of fossil freedom are pushed to the limits the further ad-
vanced the detachment of our material culture from the biosphere. These
boundary conditions define the constraints for the future evolution of
fossil cultures—constraints that are now planetary in dimension.
While awareness of these constraints is only beginning to rise, fossil
freedom has altered our perceptions of the earth as an open space for hu-
man expansion from the beginning. The experiences of acceleration and
speed in the early days of motorized mobility were expressed in the meta-
phors of a shrinking earth. And indeed, the earth has shrunk considerably
in relation to the sheer number of people around today compared with,
say, half a century back; or in relation to the rapid expansion of the tech-
nosphere and the amount of material accumulated in it; or our capacity
to move faster, and access and allocate material resources. The earth has
also shrunk in relation to our growing capacity to destroy it, or parts of it.
Pinpointing the exact moment when the earth as a whole was begin-
ning to look like a place vulnerable to human action in scientific and pub-
lic consciousness may be disputable. Yet, the atomic age that followed the
detonation of the first nuclear weapon is a strong candidate. It coincides
with a potential geological marker for the lower boundary (or beginning)
of the Anthropocene around 1950 favored by a majority of members of
the AWG (Waters et al. 2016; Zalasiewicz et al. 2018).1 The threat of
mutual nuclear destruction between the superpowers of the Cold War
definitely turned the earth from a place capable of providing seemingly
endless resources and opportunities for waste disposal into something
much more limited and vulnerable to human action (Mauelshagen 2020).
This is precisely why earth system scientists and geologists advocating the
Anthropocene have argued that the sum of our actions is now the equiv-
alent of a geophysical force (Steffen et al. 2011b, 741). It also means that
we are hitting the limits of the earth system, at least with regard to the
relatively stable state of the Holocene, the interglacial that has lasted for
the past 11,700 years (Walker et al. 2009). The continuation of this sta-
bility is now under threat from the accumulated effects of fossil freedom.
Approaching fossil freedom from the point of view of the Anthropo-
cene suggests that what enlightenment utopias envisioned as liberation
from, and control of, nature is better described as transcendence of the
biosphere, acceleration of its modification and enhancement of control
over its resources enabled by the fossil energy regime. The downside can
no longer be overlooked, as the material world that has emerged from
that regime has intensified dependence on geological resources to main-
tain the technological infrastructures of the constructed world, or tech-
nosphere, we depend on. Maintenance of the technosphere is an issue
of vital importance to modern civilizations. But it is a conundrum how
this can be achieved without destroying its non-renewable foundations
in the long run. Hence, the Anthropocene raises the question of entropy
in society. To approach it, the entropy (or dissipation) of the material
worlds we have built becomes a crucial issue. This is the dirt of our
freedom. Controlling its damaging impact requires to voluntarily and
collectively set limits to fossil freedom. In effect, I expect this to termi-
nate liberal traditions of defining the limits of our actions merely by the
individualistic nucleus of our freedom’s relation to the freedom of other
people’s actions. The legal and ethical rules that have emerged from this
self-referential system have basically made our relations with the earth
a by-product. As the dirt of our metaphysics is getting back to us, this is
beginning to look like a recipe for disaster.
Note

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4 Thoughts on Asia and the
Anthropocene
Hannes Bergthaller
Asia and the Limits of Modernity

My starting point for the following discussion is a personal observa-
tion: in Taiwan, where I live and teach, the Anthropocene arrived only
with considerable delay and has attracted much less public attention
than in Germany or the Anglophone countries. The Anthropocene nei-
ther made it onto the cover pages of important news magazines, nor
did it become the subject of bestselling popular science books and TV
specials (it was however, prominently featured at the Taipei Fine Arts
Museum’s 2018 Biennial Exhibition). Few of the people I talk to have
even heard of the term, and when I tell them about my research, they do
not seem overly preoccupied by the idea that human activities have pro-
pelled the Earth into a new geological age. Nor does this appear to be
a Taiwanese peculiarity: from discussions with friends and colleagues,
I gather that much the same can be said about Japan, the People’s Re-
public of China or South Korea—and it probably holds true for other
parts of Asia, as well.
At the same time, however, there is a growing recognition that Asia
plays a crucial role in the social and ecological dynamics that are shaping
our geo-historical moment (as indicated, for example, by Routledge’s re-
cently inaugurated book series Studies on Asia and the Anthropocene).
The principal reason why all the curves of the “Great Acceleration” are
still pointing relentlessly upwards (with the notable exception of that
for population; cf. McNeill and Engelke 2014, Steffen et al. 2015) is the
spread of middle class consumption patterns around the world, if by
middle class we understand people with a household income sufficient
to purchase consumer durables (such as refrigerators, washing machines
or motorcycles), to spend money on entertainment and on the occasional
vacation. As recently as 2000, about 80% of this “global middle class”
was living in Europe and North America (Kharas 2017). Already by
2015, their share had dropped to about 35%, due largely to the rapid
expansion of the middle class in Asia. It is projected that by 2030, the
Asian middle class will be at least three times larger than that of the old
78 Hannes Bergthaller
“West,” accounting for two thirds of the world’s total (Kharas 2017,
14). Here is how this remarkable development is summarized in a recent
report:
It was only around 1985 that the middle class reached 1 billion peo-
ple, about 150 years after the start of the Industrial Revolution in
Europe. It then took 21 years, until 2006, for the middle class to add
a second billion; much of this reflects the extraordinary growth of
China. The third billion was added to the global middle class in nine
years. Today we are on pace to add another billion in seven years
and a fifth billion in six more years, by 2028.
(11)
The implications of this development for the Anthropocene are clear: the
ecological transformation that ushered in the new geological epoch may
initially have been driven by developments in the West, but how it plays
out in the longer run will be determined in Asia, more than anywhere
else. While the cumulative CO2 emissions of the West since the begin-
ning of the industrial revolution still dwarf those of Asian nations, the
latter have already begun to outstrip the former, and China in particular
has now “become the world’s largest economy and its worst polluter
with per capita greenhouse gas emissions surpassing the EU average”
(Spangenberg 2014, 1). The future trajectory of the Anthropocene will
depend on what form middle class consumption patterns take there,
and to what extent governments will be willing and able to steer their
economies toward more sustainable paths of development. Any talk of
how “we” should comport ourselves in the face of the Anthropocene
that does not take into account the outsized role Asia will play in it is
pointless.
None of this should come as news, of course, and it surely isn’t news
to a lot of people in Asia. It is important to emphasize that the relative
lack of resonance of the Anthropocene concept does not reflect a general
lack of interest in environmental issues. In Taiwan, to stick to the ex-
ample I am most familiar with, people are well aware of climate change
and frequently express their concern over it. There are fairly influential
environmental movements advocating against both nuclear power and
coal power plants, for a transition to sustainable agriculture, the protec-
tion of endangered species, of the oceans from plastic waste, etc. (Grano
2015). Green consumerism is popular among those who can afford it
(Ting et al. 2019). And yet, the reframing of all these issues in terms of
the Anthropocene does not seem to hold the obvious fascination that it
does for many intellectuals in the West.
Rather than seeing Asian indifference toward the concept of the An-
thropocene as peculiar, then, perhaps we should turn the tables and ask:
why exactly is it that “we” in the West have become so besotted with it?
Thoughts on Asia and the Anthropocene 79
Given that Anthropocene discourse proliferated primarily within the
context of “Euro-Australo-American academic environmental studies
and environmental politics” (di Chiro 2016, 364), what are the features
of the concept that are particularly attuned to “Western” ways of think-
ing? And can we bring these features into better focus if we look at the
Anthropocene from an Asian perspective—one informed, for example,
by the historical experience of a country such as China? This is an im-
portant question insofar as the concept of the Anthropocene so obvi-
ously appeals to, and draws its rhetorical force, from a sense of human
universality: it posits “humanity” as the agent that propelled the Earth
into a new geological epoch; it anticipates ecological changes that will
affect all humans on the planet, in one way or another, no matter where
and under what conditions they live; and it suggests that mitigating cli-
mate changes and the host of adverse ecological changes that accompany
it is a collective task for all of humanity. But of course, such presump-
tions of universality are a long-standing feature of Western thought, and
one that has been most fiercely contested.
Indeed, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh has suggested that the role
of Asia in the drama of world history has precisely been to reveal the
presumed universality of Western modernity as a sham. With feigned
humility, he casts the continent as “the simpleton who, in his blunder-
ing progress across the stage, unwittingly stumbles upon the secret that
is the key to the plot”—the secret being that “the patterns of life that
modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the
world’s population” (Ghosh 2016, 92). Ghosh argues that many thinkers
from this continent understood already very early on that the attempt to
bring the amenities of Western modernity to the vast populations of their
world region would be courting disaster. This point is forcefully brought
home by a quote from a speech of the Mahatma Gandhi, held in 1928:
“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the man-
ner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar
economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts” (qtd.
in Ghosh 2016, 111). The universalistic pretensions of Western moder-
nity are undone by scale—and it is Asia, whose population has always
dwarfed that of Europe and the Americas, where this conclusion became
inescapable long before Westerners gave it serious thought. Ghosh points
to the example of Japan, where, he argues, “awareness of natural con-
straints became a part of […] official ideology,” and industrialization
was a much less wasteful process than its Western analogues (112).
One might want to object that the “awareness of natural constraints”
was hardly a distinguishing feature of Asian thinking—Ghosh’s exam-
ples line up rather neatly with the Malthusian fears that were a constant
counterpart to the dream of universal progress in Western modernity,
and given that he received his academic education in late Victorian
England, Thomas Malthus would appear to be as likely a source of
inspiration for Gandhi’s remarks as are the ancient sources of Indian
wisdom. Also, one can legitimately ask whether such fears really ended
up having more of a practical import in Asia than they did in the West.
None of this, however, should detract from Ghosh’s underlying point:
the Asian experience of modernity differed substantially from that of the
West. If the Anthropocene comes as a shock, it is because it shatters the
“horizon of expectations” that had been shaped by the experience of
modernity (Koselleck [1979] 2004, 255). Insofar as people in Asia do
not share this horizon of expectations, it is unsurprising that they are
also less impressed by its imminent implosion.
Spiritual Traditions, Material Histories

The central question, then, is how modernity was experienced in Asia,
and how this experience differed from that of the West. This is, of course,
an extravagantly ambitious question to which I cannot pretend to offer
anything but the barest outline of an answer. It is also a different ques-
tion from the one that is most often asked when Asian cultures are ad-
dressed in the context of ecological crisis—namely, the question whether
the spiritual traditions of Asia might offer an alternative conception of
the human relationship to the world which might help us to steer away
from the ecocidal madness of Western modernity. This idea has been
around for as long as the environmental movement, and at the very least
since the historian Lynn White Jr. famously located the “roots of eco-
logical crisis” in Western Christianity—“the most anthropocentric reli-
gion the world has ever seen”—and off-handedly praised the beatniks
for looking to Zen Buddhism in their quest for a new religion that might
set the “man-nature relationship” aright (White 1967, 1206). Accord-
ing to White, the instrumentalist mindset of the West which views all
non-human beings as entirely subordinate to human ends is an unal-
loyed product of Christian monotheism: “By destroying pagan animism,
Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference
to the feelings of natural objects” (1205).
Many critiques of the Anthropocene concept are based on one version
or another of this underlying argument, even if they do not necessarily
focus on Christianity as the main culprit but rather, say, on “the Enlight-
enment” (Tsing 2015, vii), capitalism (Moore 2015), or on the world view
that emerged along with modern techno-science, which Bruno Latour
(2017) in his Gaia lectures explicitly characterizes as a crypto-religious
belief system—one that compares poorly to the various forms of animist
beliefs that most pre-modern cultures adhered to. Coming to terms with
the Anthropocene, in this view, is to try to undo the damage done by sec-
ular modernity, to invent new gods and perhaps reinstate some old ones
(Szerszinsky 2017). In the context of this project, it makes perfect sense
to look to pre-modern or non-Western belief systems for guidance and,
for example, recommend ancient Chinese Daoism as an “an antidote to
“Western” anthropocentrism” (Xu 2016, 282).
This is not the line of argument I will pursue in the following. Rather,
I will take my cue from an early critique of White’s hypothesis which
poured cold water on the notion that the spiritual traditions of Asia
could teach us how to stop ecological destruction in its tracks. The ge-
ographer Yi-Fu Tuan conceded the general validity of the commonplace
view that “the European sees nature as subordinate to him whereas the
Chinese sees himself as part of nature” (Tuan 1968, 176), an idea which
he saw “illustrated with diagrammatic force” by the different kinds of
gardens that flourished contemporaneously at the court of Louis XIV of
France and in China under the Qing dynasty: the former is “a grandiose
setting for man; in deference to him, nature is straitjacketed in court
dress”; in the latter, which is not organized around a central axis of vi-
sion but leads the visitor along winding paths, “it is man who must lay
aside his formalistic pretensions in order to enter nature.” The two styles
of gardening encode attitudes toward nature that could hardly be any
more different—and yet, Tuan points out, the level of artifice involved
in the creation of both and the sheer “tonnage of earth” that had to be
moved differed hardly at all (176–177).
Thinking about Asia and the Anthropocene, there are two important
points to take away from Tuan’s argument. Firstly, if our aim is to ar-
rive at an understanding of how humans became a geological force, the
belief systems they espouse may be an unreliable guide. As humanists,
we are trained to focus our gaze on cultural differences, but with regard
to the processes that matter in the Anthropocene, what counts the most
may well be the crudest similarities and material factors that leave little
trace in the artifacts of high culture (Horn and Bergthaller 2020, 132).
Secondly, and more particularly to the point of this essay, it is a miscon-
ception that China or any of the other ancient Asian civilizations treaded
more lightly on the natural world than those of Europe—indeed, there
is plenty of evidence that leads very nearly to the opposite conclusion.
Rather than accept the official image of harmonious coexistence with
nature as it emerges from literary documents at face value, we need to
attend to the “green paradoxes” that emerge once the material record is
taken more fully into account (Tong 2019, 249).
The archeologist Kathleen D. Morrison, for example, has pointed out
that irrigated rice farming on terraced hillsides, an ancient technology
that probably originated more than 6,000 years ago in the lower Yang-
tze valley, has transformed many Asian landscapes to a degree that rivals
“modern monocropped fields” (Morrison 2018, n.p.). Current models of
the Earth System tend to underestimate the global impact of these highly
sophisticated forms of agriculture because they take European farming
practices as the baseline for their calculations. Morrison argues that the
massive amounts of CO2 that wet rice farming releases speak in favor of
William Ruddiman’s “Early Anthropocene” hypothesis (2003), which
suggests that the Anthropocene basically coincides with the Holocene.
A greater familiarity with the environmental history of Asia, Morrison
suggests, will make it clear that “anthropogenic change actually has a
longer, more complex, or more variable trajectory than is generally as-
sumed” (ibid.).
Let me further illustrate this point with the example of China. The
environmental historian Mark Elvin (2004) has argued that the Chi-
nese deeply transformed their ecological environment long before the
arrival of modernity (it should be noted that in this context, the term
“Chinese” is little more than a semantic crutch designating a histori-
cal entity that is far from homogenous; cf. Tong 2019, 243). The early
rise of large and efficient bureaucratic state apparatuses allowed for
the creation and maintenance of a vast infrastructure which in turn
enabled an exploitation of ecological resources that was far more in-
tensive than that in most European regions. Perhaps the most impres-
sive example of this is the so-called Grand Canal, an artificial river
first constructed during the Sui dynasty (6th century BCE) to ship
grain from the Yangtze valley to the capital cities of Chang’an and
Luoyang in the North, over a distance of about 1,700 km. It remained
in operation more or less continuously until the 19th century (Xiong
2006, 86–93). Already by the 13th century, China had developed a
highly labor-intensive system of agriculture which was able to sup-
port about twice the number of people per hectare than its European
counterparts—owing not only to a constant improvement of farm-
ing techniques (such as irrigation pumps and the introduction of rice
strains that allowed for multiple harvests per year), but also due to
a declining use of animal labor and a predominantly vegetarian diet
(Krausmann et al. 2008, 642).
But this system also proved to be highly vulnerable to social and eco-
logical disruptions. During the dynastic transition from the Ming to the
Qing dynasty, between 1626 and 1646, China suffered a catastrophic
decline of its human population from about 100 million to less than 90
million (by 11.4%; Lee and Zhang 2013, 285). Over the next two cen-
turies, the population grew at an unprecedented pace—by the middle of
the 19th century, it had more than quadrupled to almost 440 million,
almost four times the combined population of North-Western Europe
at the time (Anderson 1988, 3). Some of the causes of this development
were probably similar to those that led to a contemporaneous, although
somewhat less pronounced growth spurt in Europe: the introduction of
New World crops, especially maize and sweet potatoes, made it possible
to open up marginal lands for farming. This development was enhanced
by an active state policy of resettling farmers in the Empire’s periphery,
as well as a sophisticated system that provided disaster relief to ailing
farmers (Deng 2015, 47).
There are many indications that around 1800, this large population
was already straining against the limits of the carrying capacity of the
land. There was simply no more “ecological slack” (Pomeranz 2000, 213)
left in the system that would have allowed it to remain resilient in the face
of disturbances. As China’s climate entered a period of cooling in the
late 18th century, harvests began to drop to a point where the imperial
system of granaries became unable to prevent wide-spread famine and
subsequent disease (Lee and Zhang 2013, 295). The problem was com-
pounded by catastrophic floods that occurred with increasing frequency
due to deforestation and the silting up of riverbeds which were themselves
a direct consequence of agricultural expansion over the previous century
(Ho 1959). In 1851, the steady uptick in local peasant revolts culminated
in the outbreak of the Taiping rebellion, the bloodiest civil war in world
history. By the time the Taiping were put down, China’s population had
collapsed from 440 million to about 358 million—a staggering decline of
18.6% in less than two decades (Lee and Zhang 2013, 295).
Here, then, is a point where China’s experience of modernity diverged
sharply from that of the West. During the exact same historical period
when the European countries were, in Emmanuel Ladurie LeRoy’s for-
mulation, finally lifting the “Malthusian curse” (Le Roy Ladurie [1966]
1976, 311), China appears to have suffered through a Malthusian crisis
of almost unimaginable proportions. In the first edition of his treatise
on The Principle of Population, Malthus himself had speculated that
the agricultural system of China had advanced to a level that allowed
for no further increases in productivity, and that, given the prevalence
of early marriage, there should exist a large “redundant population”
that must be “repressed by occasional famines […] or the custom of
exposing children” (Malthus 1798, 19). In the case of Europe, Malthus’
prediction that population growth will inevitably overshoot the means
of subsistence, leading to immiseration and barbarism, turned out to be
famously wrong. Instead, the industrializing nations entered a period
during which their populations grew faster than ever even while their
living standards rose steadily. But this transition to what economic his-
torians describe as “modern economic growth” did not take place in
China (Kuznets 1966, 490–500). At the beginning of the 19th century,
it had been the most populous and by many accounts the wealthiest na-
tion in the world. By the century’s end, it remained the most populous
nation, but a majority of its people had been reduced to abject poverty,
the formidable administrative apparatus of the Qing Empire had fallen
into disarray, “much of Northern China was an ecological disaster area”
(Pomeranz 2000, 234), and the country as a whole was wracked by for-
eign military interventions and civil war.
It would seem, then, that Malthus was wrong about Europe, but
right about China. However, more recent historical research indicates
that it might be more accurate to say that he was wrong about China
and doubly wrong about Europe. Of course, Malthus himself was well
aware that his proclamations about China were based on little more
than hearsay, and it is hardly surprising that many of his assumptions
have turned out to be unfounded. Social historians have shown that
even during the most rapid phases of population growth in the 18th
century, China’s birthrates were considerably lower than those in most
of Europe (between seven and eight children per woman, as opposed to
ten or eleven; Wolf 2001, 137). According to James Z. Lee and Wang
Fang, this was the result of “a demographic system” characterized by
“low marital fertility, moderate mortality, but high rates of female in-
fanticide, and consequently of persistent male celibacy” (Lee and Wang
1999, 105). Fertility was no less socially controlled than in Malthus’
England— albeit not through individual decisions, but rather by a com-
plex system of collective biopolitical decision-making about matters of
marriage, birth and death.
With regard to Europe, Malthus was wrong not only in arguing that
population growth would inevitably lead to misery, but more impor-
tantly because the fact that Britain did not suffer the same fate as China
had very little to do with the kind of straight-laced sexual mores the
honorable parson sought to inculcate among his own parishioners. In
fact, there is abundant evidence that England’s ecological position in
the late 18th century was no less precarious than that of China. Defor-
estation in England, France and parts of Germany was probably worse
than it was even in the most densely populated provinces of the Qing
Empire (Pomeranz 2000, 227–228). Firewood had become almost un-
affordable to the poor, and ship-building had largely been shifted to
the colonies (220–221). Food production was lagging behind population
growth, and while there was still some room for increasing agricultural
productivity through more labor-intensive forms of cultivation, such a
shift would have been difficult to pull off quickly enough to avoid crisis,
especially because agricultural practices in Europe were depleting the
soil much more rapidly than those in China (224).
So how was Western Europe able not only to pass through this “eco-
logical bottleneck” unscathed (30), but even to emerge from it as the
geopolitical center of a new world order? Technological and institutional
innovation surely played an important role in this development, but the
historian Kenneth Pomeranz has convincingly argued that it would have
been impossible without the transition to fossil fuels as a primary source
of energy, on the one hand, and the massive “ecological windfall” of the
New World, on the other (23). The Americas provided not only an abun-
dant source of cheap calories and raw materials, but also a bottomless
sink for the dispossessed rural populations which resulted from enclo-
sure and early industrialization. It was, in other words, a magnificent
opportunity for kicking the can down the road. This brings us back to
the present.
China and the Biopolitics of the Anthropocene
What, then, can the historical experience of China tell us about the An-
thropocene? For one thing, it makes the dire forecasts for what we must
expect from the Anthropocene look not so much like a dramatic depar-
ture from the historical norm, but merely like the replay of an old story
on a much grander, planetary stage. In Bruno Latour’s terminology, one
might say that the Chinese never had the luxury to forget that they were
indeed “earthbound” (Latour 2017, 38). But this only serves to highlight
why a characterization of the difference between China and the West
in terms of their adhering to different “ontologies” stops well short of
conveying the messy actuality of what this meant in practice. It may well
be true that the rigorous separation of nature and society in Western
thought has no equivalent in Chinese culture, but even if this is so, it
clearly did very little to temper the human impact on the Earth system
in China. If Chinese history does hold any lessons for humanity in the
Anthropocene, they may have to do less with different ways of conceptu-
alizing humanity’s position in relation to other beings, less with systems
of religious belief such as those of Daoism or Buddhism, and rather more
with forms of governance and administrative techniques for regulating
a large human population straining against ecological limits. They may
be a matter of different ways of demarcating the boundaries separating
the public and the private sphere, and of a different understanding of the
relationship between the institutions of the state and the people that they
govern. They may, in other words, be a matter not so much of spiritual-
ity, but rather of biopolitics.
Of course, the particular form which China’s rise over the past few
decades has taken offers precious little support to the idea that the rul-
ing elite view the situation of their country in terms of the story I have
just sketched—except perhaps in the sense that they are utterly deter-
mined to restore China to the position of geopolitical centrality it en-
joyed before its disastrous 19th century. The Communist Party has been
remarkably successful in improving the living conditions of hundreds
of millions of people, but at considerable ecological costs, and not only
to China. Just as modernization in Europe was made possible by the
use of fossil fuels and imports of calories and raw materials from the
colonial periphery, China’s spectacular economic rise over the past few
decades has been fueled by cheap coal power and massive inflows of raw
materials from all over the globe, but especially from those dwindling
areas of the world that still remain unenclosed, mainly in South East
Asia, South America and Africa. But even if China is today engaging in
feats of “environmental load displacement” which fully match those of
the West during the previous two centuries (Hornborg 2013, 49–54),
hardly anyone today will still labor under the illusion that the Chinese
are merely retreading Europe’s path into modernity. With regard to their
system of political governance, they have clearly rejected Western mod-
els, along with their pretensions to universality. For the future trajectory
of the Anthropocene, the most decisive question is whether they will also
hew their own path in terms of ecological governance, and what such a
path might look like.
There are indications that China’s leadership is taking these issues very
seriously, if only because ecological blow-back is now posing an obvi-
ous threat to the country’s newly regained prosperity and, by extension,
the legitimacy of communist rule. Since the turn of the millennium, the
ideal of an “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming, 生态文明) has
come to play an increasingly prominent role in the political agenda of the
Chinese Communist Party (Heurtebise and Gaffric 2017). In his address
to the 19th national congress of the party, Xi Jinping listed “harmony
between human and nature” among the fourteen goals to which the gov-
ernment ought to devote itself over the next five years (Xi 2017). Just like
in ancient times, it seems that this “harmony” will be underwritten by
massive, state-sponsored infrastructure projects. As the Guardian has
reported, “since 2003, China has poured more concrete every two years
than the US managed in the entire 20th century” (Hawkins 2019, n.p.).
The old Grand Canal has received a new lease on life, although this
time around its purpose will be to move water rather than grain from
the Yangtze valley to the more arid North of the country. In little over a
decade, China has constructed the largest system of high-speed railways
in the world, making local flights, such as environmentalists are still
unsuccessfully trying to curtail in the West, more or less superfluous.
For 2019, China has mandated that at least 10% of all new cars sold in
the country will have to rely on electric power, with the percentage to be
raised steadily in coming years.
Over the past years, local governments in China have also begun
to experiment with a so-called “green GDP”—a measure of economic
growth which would factor in ecological costs. While the technical
hurdles of putting such a system into practice have proven to be con-
siderable, there is a real chance that it will eventually be introduced
nationally and become part of the criteria for the evaluation of party
cadres. If this were to happen, it would also be very likely that the vast
digital surveillance apparatus China is presently constructing in order
to keep tabs on its population will be harnessed to monitor their con-
sumer behavior, because
Green GDP accounting needs to include data on how individuals use

rare resources such as water and energy, treat their waste and take
care of their health by eating what they are supposed to eat, sticking
to their daily sport activities and refraining from […] drinking and
smoking.
(Weigelin-Schwiedrzik 2018, 34)
In combination with a social credit system, such as the Chinese gov-
ernment has begun to introduce over the past few years, this could give
rise to a comprehensive system of biopolitical control which completely
dissolves the boundary between the private and the public sphere.
I confess that I find this entire prospect to be deeply unsettling, espe-
cially because where I live, the People’s Republic of China is not a distant
abstraction but a presence that looms larger and more threatening with
every passing year. From my viewpoint, it is difficult to share the opti-
mism which informs the scenarios sketched, for example, by Naomi Ore-
skes and Erik M. Conway (2014) or by Kim Stanley Robinson (2018), who
anticipate that China will blaze the path into a more sustainable future.
There are valid reasons to believe that the large-scale engineering projects
that the communist party is so fond of will in the end do more ecological
harm than good, and the country’s much-taunted Belt and Road initia-
tive is already wreaking massive environmental damage across Africa and
Asia (Tracy et al. 2017). However, warranted as such caveats surely are,
they should not serve to deflect the uncomfortable questions that China
poses for environmentalists. Western scholars assert with ritualized reg-
ularity that only a democratic, emancipatory politics will be able to meet
the challenges of the Anthropocene (e.g. Purdy 2015; Bonneuil and Fres-
soz 2016). But what if such an emancipatory politics is itself a product
of the brief historical interlude, a mere two centuries, during which the
West vainly imagined itself as having slipped the yoke of nature? Dipesh
Chakrabarty has famously asserted that “the mansion of modern free-
doms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuels” (Chakrabarty
2009, 208). An exceedingly unpleasant corollary of this statement is that
at least some of the freedoms which Western modernity imagined to be
universal will fall by the wayside in societies that understand their ener-
getic base to be finite. It is very easy to berate China for the failure of its
political system to conform to Western ideals, and it is almost as easy to
imagine that its spiritual traditions will help the West to overcome its own
shortcomings. It is much more difficult to acknowledge the possibility that
Chinese society as it exists today might be the product of a struggle with
ecological pressures that were of a different order than those faced by the
European nations. The story of how China managed to muddle through
these problems, with something that cannot fairly be described in such
simple terms as “failure” or “success,” may indeed hold lessons for the
Anthropocene—important lessons, and perhaps even universal ones.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Chia-ju Chang, Hans-Georg
Moeller and Hans-Rudolf Kantor for their helpful comments on earlier
drafts of this chapter. This work is supported in part by the Ministry of
Education, Taiwan, R.O.C. under the Higher Education Sprout Project.
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Section 2
Narrating the
Anthropocene
Taylor & Francis
5 Safe Conduct
The Anthropocene and the
Tragic
Bernhard Malkmus
Most of us take it for granted that we live in a profoundly non-tragic

age. One would be hard-pushed to find a theatre-goer these days who is
“shattered by the fate of the heroes, but reconciled fundamentally,” or
an armchair reader of plays who subscribes to an “eternal justice,” as
Hegel (1970, 526) saw it epitomized in ancient Greek tragedy. And who
would want to expose themselves to the ridicule of our zeitgeist man-
darins by professing that such a sense of justice “saves and maintains”
the “substance of the ethical order” against unilateral mythical powers?
(Ibid.) For Hegel, tragic form is one possible manifestation of a historical
dialectics that lends expression to incompatible claims of incompatible
moral orders, for example the conflicting demands of family and the
Gods in Sophocles’ Antigone. Similarly, in his ruminations on Socrates’
death he pits the divine right of the polis against the right of individual
pursuit of knowledge:
In what is truly tragic there must be valid moral powers on both

sides which come into collision […]. Two opposed rights come into
collision, and the one destroys the other. Thus both suffer loss and
yet both are mutually justified […].
(Hegel 2003, 441)1
He formulates his theory of tragedy decisively as an invective against the

Subjektphilosophie of the Romantics. The attempts to theorize moder-
nity have, however, followed the Romantics, and so have many patterns
of perception, epistemic structures and sensibilities to this very day. 2
While post-Enlightenment thinking was originally, in thinkers such
as Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling, marked by a conceptual use of the
tragic as a reflection of the difficulty to theorize the difference between
critical and practical reason, between scientific knowledge and moral
judgment, their subsequent apologists, with the notable exception of
Nietzsche, found it harder and harder to defend tragic thinking as a
mode of probing the modern human condition. Schopenhauer is a case
in point, and Walter Benjamin’s seemingly radical distinction between
the supposedly a historical tragedy, on the one hand, and the historical
94 Bernhard Malkmus
Trauerspiel since the 1700s, on the other hand, forms a first climax. The
Trauerspiel, he claims, is marked by the mourning of the fact that it is no
longer possible to be a hero with a tragic flaw. Modernity, he suggests,
reduces history to human history, which is to say a history of power that
cannot be re-translated into mythic time. Bertolt Brecht’s critique, recur-
ring throughout his writings on theatre, goes further by asserting that
the tragic form was misappropriated by bourgeois culture and evokes a
fatalism of suffering in audiences—a critique continued by thinkers as
different as Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes.
The conviction that tragedy is dangerously obsolete is particularly
prominent in an early example of ecocriticism, Joseph W. Meeker’s The
Comedy of Survival from 1974. “Noble traditions” such as literary trag-
edy and philosophical humanism, he announces with bravado, had run
their course since they “have flattered the human ego while jeopardizing
the survival of our species” (Meeker 1997, 10). In a blend of vulgarized
ecology and literary history, he identifies comedy as a literary genre that
corresponds with evolutionary mechanisms and tragedy as an expres-
sion of human hubris. For him, tragic imagination and reckless utilitar-
ianism have the same roots:
The rejection of the tragic view of life may be necessary in order

to end the long and disastrous warfare between mankind and the
natural world. Freedom from the need for tragedy is an important
precondition for the avoidance of ecological catastrophe.
(59)
This essay argues the opposite case: A reflection on why we find it so

difficult to regard the Anthropocene as a tragic age is the precondition
for comprehending the human condition today. More importantly, iden-
tifying the tragic flaws inherent in our condition has the potential to
inform ethical conduct under these conditions. The argument will focus
on two central contexts that resist the anti-tragic consensus: the role
of the atomic bomb in our contemporary worldview, on the one hand,
and the increasing dissociation between the natural cycles of matter and
life (the biosphere, Greek phýsis) and an anthropogenic “second na-
ture” (the technosphere, Greek thései or nómos), on the other hand. The
moral demands our systemic understanding of the biosphere is making
on western lifestyles are similarly incommensurable with the equation of
individual freedom with mobility and consumption as the moral orders
of family and divinity in Hegel’s reading of Greek tragedy. After all,
the “mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of
fossil-fuel use” (Chakrabarty 2009, 208). In other words, the central
tragedy of the Anthropocene is the incompatibility of the moral order of
the biosphere (“Gaia”) and the moral order of post-Enlightenment hu-
manism. The global macrosystemic implosions (and the human fixation
The Anthropocene and the Tragic 95
on technology to respond to these implosions) can be read as manifesta-
tions of that tragic incompatibility.
This essay, therefore, explores the potential relevance of tragic nar-
ratives for an understanding of human agency or inaction in the An-
thropocene. The Anthropocene episteme is marked by convergences
between geological, evolutionary and human temporal scales. These
would have the potential to be experienced as tragic incompatibilities
between different moral obligations, in Hegel’s sense. Yet, they are, in
fact, experienced as (1) concurrent histories of accelerated differentiation
and a meta-history of homogenization; (2) an ethical externalization as
“fate”; and (3) the autopoiesis of an increasingly autonomous techno-
sphere. Consequently, meaningful experiences of alterity, disruption and
chance—which formed, in different ways, the underpinning of tragic
thinking in modernity from Hegel to Nietzsche—are increasingly erased
in a worldview that blurs ontological distinctions. The more we lose the
experience of alterity in the present, the more we project a sense of total
alterity into the future.
The Contemporary Human Condition and Tragedy

The contemporary discontent with a tragic worldview is deeply embed-
ded in hidden epistemic assumptions about what it means to inhabit
the world. The Earth is not, as it was during most phases of human
history, regarded as sacred, but as a seemingly unlimited and endlessly
exploitable resource—or as Martin Heidegger (2008, 328–330) calls
it, a “standing-reserve” (Bestand). This clinamen is inextricably inter-
twined with paradigmatic changes regarding the concept of the future:
the human ability to live in the future is not deducted anymore from
one’s metabolic relationship with the biosphere, but from one’s access
to technologies that wield power over nature. Humans are “enframed”
by the very technology for whose power they become a medium. As a
consequence of this, they lose the ability to “reveal” alternative worl-
dviews: “The essential unfolding of technology threatens revealing,
threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in
ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconceal-
ment of standing-reserve” (339). Nature and its power to regenerate it-
self autopoietically, as implied by the ancient Greek concept of phýsis,
is systematically replaced by a second nature that follows the rules and
laws set by humans, denoted by the ancient Greek concepts of thései and
nómos (Dietz 1989).3
Humans, under these auspices, lose the vital ability to understand
loss as “irreplaceable loss,” which John Orr (1981, xii) defined as the
“essential tragic experience.” The gradual replacement of the inherent
logic of phýsis by the inherent logic of thései in present-day human
world-forming leads to an increasing disconnect from the history of life.
96 Bernhard Malkmus
However, as Terry Eagleton has argued, it is precisely the acceptance of
one’s createdness or “species-being” that forms the basis of the human
as political being:
It is true that there is much about our species-being which is passive,

constrained and inert. But this may be a source of radical politics,
not an obstacle to it. Our passivity, for example, is closely bound up
with our frailty and vulnerability, in which any authentic politics
must be anchored. Tragedy can be among other things a symbolic
coming to terms with our finitude and fragility, without which any
political project is likely to founder.
(Eagleton 2003, xv)4
Yet, in a climate dominated by constructivism, the intellectual reflex

to denigrate any reference to external entities outside the representa-
tions of human self-reflection is looming large. Nature, including human
“species-being,” is merely seen as yet another construct, the epiphenom-
enon of its representation, i.e., always already an integral part of the
social metabolism. This prevents a hard look at the potentially tragic
dimensions of the cognitive and epistemic structures we have inherited.
The Anthropological Premises

Humans are always torn between the prerogatives of their ecological,
social and physical living conditions, on the one hand, and the utopian
human ability to project themselves into future and virtual worlds, on
the other. This duality between being a body-mind (that is embedded
in environmental exchanges) and having a body-mind (that is shaped
according to concepts and projections) is explored, most compellingly
by phenomenology and philosophical anthropology, as the “eccentric
positionality” of humans (Plessner 1975, 289):
We have to make ourselves, and our making is also an unmaking.

We are, like other things, physico-chemical systems; we live, like
other animals, bodily lives dependent on bodily needs and functions,
but we exist as human beings on the edge between nature and art,
reality and its denial. That is both our peril and our opportunity.
(Grene 1974, 360)
Eagleton’s point that contemporary cultural theory, though obsessed

with bodies, is neglectful of the history of the body as an intrinsic
part of human history and thus cannot adequately address suffering as
one of the central issues of human life is part of the anthropological
tragic blind spot of human utopianism that becomes oblivious of its
“physico-chemical” history (Plessner 1975, 317). The Anthropocene is
an age during which this neglect becomes symptomatic both as megalo-
mania and as paranoid ecological disengagement.
Secularism and “Exclusive Humanism”

The flipside of this oblivion is the historical genesis of an increasing priv-
ileging of “objective reality.” As Charles Taylor (2007, 15) has shown,
modern secularism is part of that development, shifting vital experiences
of “fullness” and “resonance” away from a realm beyond human life
and firmly embedding them within human life. Contrary to widely held
assumptions about the genesis of the modern worldview, Taylor stresses
these changes were not bringing forth a rational essence of the human
that was deemed previously hidden. Rather, the epistemic changes of the
18th century were an “invention” of “an immanent order in Nature”
that heavily relied on the autonomy of “disengaged reason” and the in-
dividual (22). By hindsight, we can now better understand the tragic
ambivalence in this emancipatory narrative: it gives “rise to a society
in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism
came to be a widely available option” (18). Reverence and self-reverence
become one; they form the epistemic background for the two central
anthropocentric shifts around 1,700, the eclipse of a further purpose
beyond human flourishing and the eclipse of human reliance on divine
grace: “The order God designed was there for reason to see. By rea-
son and discipline, humans could rise to the challenge and realize it”
(222). This implied giving up a theological sense of transfiguration and
replacing it by a focus on gradual human perfectibility, thus ultimately
subjecting everything to a question of moral conduct. Against this worl-
dview, from which the reflector excludes himself, the civilization process
focuses more and more on economic activity, thus bolstering what Tay-
lor calls “buffered identity, capable of disciplined control and benevo-
lence”; this “generated its own sense of dignity and power, its own inner
satisfactions and these could tilt in favor of exclusive humanism” (262).
Western modernity is, thus, inheriting the joined forces of two anthro-
pocentric mindsets: Judeo-Christian exceptionalism and exclusive hu-
manism. While exceptionalism exacerbated the human cognitive ability
to disengage itself from natural environments, exclusive humanism led
to a deluded sense of human invulnerability. The aggregation of these
two developments led to an increasing oblivion of the human embedded-
ness in the history of life.
The “Ecodicy” of Individualism

Exclusive humanism is thus both an epiphenomenon of secularization
and the catalyst of a gradual reinvention of moral human agency as dis-
engaged reason impartially reordering the world. From there it was only
98 Bernhard Malkmus
a small step to conflate universal benevolence with private gains. In his
Fable of the Bee, Bernard Mandeville famously equated private vices
and public benefits. Adam Smith’s moral philosophy acknowledges the
human ambivalence between rationality and emotion and assumes that
self-interest will ultimately benefit the common good. The assumption of
an invisible hand governing the market forces only makes sense against
a backdrop of a fully-fledged naturalization of an economic social imag-
inary. Mandeville and Smith
assumed a population already imbued with a ‘bourgeois’ ethics of

disciplined production, rather than an ethic of military adventure.
The very fact that the first of these came to be seen as ‘natural’
says volumes for the confidence that Western European élites were
beginning to have in the order that they had been building. They
felt secure enough in them to begin to see them as first, rather than
second nature.
(229)
In the wake of the epistemic reordering of human self, social imag-

inaries and soteriology, moral agency is encoded not as a collective
reasoning, but rather as a utilitarian deliberation. It is this restriction
that, according to Joseph Vogl (2014, 34), amounts to an “ecodicy,” i.e.
the legitimation of the market as a benevolent regulatory force even in
moments of crisis. The rendition of the market as “nature” or “fate”
has loomed large ever since the 18th century. The combination of dis-
engaged reason, governed by “objectivity,” and self-interest, harnessed
by an “invisible hand,” has produced a deep disorientation about how
to connect individual action to moral reasoning. Under these circum-
stances, current discussions about shedding consumerist habits often
appear as yet another manifestation of Taylor’s modern “buffered self.”
More often than not they are merely forms of individual self-realization
rather than what they could potentially be: a tragic moment of com-
munal recognition (as the anagnórisis in Greek tragedy) and new
community-building.
If we consider the Anthropocene as an epochal threshold that allows
us to reflect upon our epistemic a priori, rather than as a new grand
narrative, then we cannot afford eschewing the tragic as a mode of
self-reflection. The tragic comprises different dimensions that cannot
be separated from each other. Today, a diffuse usage has loosened the
connection of the word “tragic” to the literary genre format. “This
was a tragedy waiting to happen,” for example, reads a headline of an
interview about the death of contract workers in a container ship; as
Adrian Poole (2005, 6–7) notes, this headline yokes together, in the
term “tragedy,” two incompatible concepts, namely the inevitable and
the accidental. It is a pure coincidence (the fact that this time people
happened to die) that provides us with the evidence for an outrageous
situation we have suspected all along, thus confirming our premonition
of systematic abuse in illegal labor migration. What counts as “tragic”
in common parlance, the headline seems to suggest, is not the injustice,
but the fact that, in this case, people did die (rather than continuing to
live in precarity). On second thoughts, the implications of this seem-
ingly careless usage of a literary genre reference may run deeper. Only
through the actual casualties does the precarity of migrant workers
enter the public sphere—as the germ of a tragic plot. The actual tragic
dimension of these casualties is not constituted by the injustice as such
but by its dependence on mere coincidence to be publicly regarded as
injustice. 5
In tragedy, we project ourselves into a future after the catastrophic event
and regard that event by hindsight as both necessary and improbable:
That our purposes are outstripped by their effects, that we may not
measure up to our own actions, that we always to some degree act
in the dark, that understanding is always after the event—these are
insights common alike to Hegel and Sophocles.
(Eagleton 2003, 108)
And it is quintessentially Anthropocenic, making us think about the

present through the lens of the future perfect. It is this ability that predis-
poses tragic plotting and thinking for our time and age. The less tragic
our age becomes, the more important it is to understand the genealogy
of our age and our own epistemic limitations as tragic ones. This is par-
ticularly relevant with regard to the autopoietic momentum inherent in
the technosphere:
In emerging as a global phenomenon, the technosphere has joined

the classical spheres [atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and bio-
sphere] to become an autonomous Earth system, operating without
direct human control. […] the technosphere is currently overwhelm-
ing the ability of other spheres to meet its demands for raw materials
and essential services such as waste recycling. […] the technosphere
itself is endowed with its intrinsic purposiveness.
(Haff 2019, 139)
Tragically, humans are clinging to the belief that they control and reg-
ulate the technosphere and are reveling in the individual powers it af-
fords. Since human imagination and cognitive energy are increasingly
shaped by the momentum of an increasingly differentiated technosphere,
humans are losing their ability to reflect upon the dissociation of their
sense of risk from an actual embeddedness in lifeworlds. The most evi-
dent form of this dissociation is the nómos of the atomic bomb.
100 Bernhard Malkmus
The Nómos of the Bomb
On August 6th 1945, human character changed: Nuclear weapons had
not only been built but were also dropped upon people. Jean-Pierre Du-
puy (2007, 231) modified a central passage from Goethe’s Faust I to
characterize the nuclear age: To Faust’s question “who are you, then?,”
Mephistopheles answers: “Part of that force which would / Do ever evil,
and does ever good.” Human beings in the nuclear age, however, had to
conceive of themselves as “part of that force which would do ever good,
and does ever evil.”6 Arguably, this is the most concise formulation of
the human tragic flaw in the Anthropocene. In a similar vein, Hannah
Arendt elaborated on the unbridgeable discrepancy between the techno-
logical application of knowledge and its reflection:
[…] it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have
begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever
be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things
which nevertheless we are able to do.
And she adds what sounds prophetic today:
In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the

physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow
what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial
machines to do our thinking and speaking.
(Arendt 1998, 3)
For Arendt, the writing on the wall after 1945 is the portentous ability of
our gadgets to outstrip our imagination and “no longer lend themselves
to normal expression in speech and thought” (3).
Her erstwhile husband Günther Anders dedicated his entire life to
fathoming the ramifications of this widening gap between the autopoi-
etic momentum of human inventions and our ability to comprehend
their ethical implications. He captures this discrepancy with a word-
play: herstellen (“to produce”) vs. vorstellen (“to imagine”) (Anders
2018, vii). In his correspondence with the Hiroshima pilot Claude
Eatherley, Anders described this discrepancy between the capability to
operationalize the technosphere and the ability to comprehend its long-
term impacts as central problem of our age. Sooner or later everyone in
the northern hemisphere will be in the same position as Eatherley, he
claims, referring to the industrial-military momentum of the Cold War.
We are in a state of being “guiltlessly guilty,” both complicit in and
victims of that discrepancy (Anders 1962, 65). What is more, we are
interfering in brutal ways with life opportunities for future generations,
without fully grasping the nature of these changes or the magnitude of
injustice they might unleash.
Rampant consumerism is remodeling the biosphere and the rapid ad-
vances in bio- and information technologies are changing the course of
evolutionary history. The degree to which we submit decisions about life
to instrumental reason and technocratic necessities will shape the biopo-
litical framing of future social and psychological life at large:
The irony of our age lies in the fact that, on the one hand, we pay
homage to an apotheosis of the individual, for whose longevity and
integrity we sacrifice everything, while, on the other hand, we desa-
cralize life as such, and that means also the living conditions for the
survival of the own species, the biosphere. This is particularly evi-
dent in two central aspects of the Anthropocene: 1. The decision to
use the atomic bomb; 2. The transformation of the scientist’s role in
the wake of the ‘NBIC convergence’, the interrelation of nano, bio,
information technologies and cognitive sciences. In the former case
we are dealing with technologies of death, in the latter with technol-
ogies of life. The most astonishing feature of our time and age is the
fact that this difference does not make a difference.
(Dupuy 2007, 231)
Dupuy’s use of the word “irony,” however, fails to convince; “hubris”

or “tragedy” would be more appropriate. After all, he is describing this
dual frame as the outcome of two tragic flaws: (1) the inability to imag-
ine what we produce any longer; (2) the exclusive-humanist focus on the
needs of the individual at the expense of the continuity of the species and
biosphere. The tragic core of this situation is repeatedly stressed by An-
ders, who regards the boundlessness or omnipotence of human actions as
the only limiting factor for humans in the nuclear age. It is thus not some
defect in the technosphere by virtue of which humans lose their grip on
what they have created—it is “by design” (242). This loss of control “by
design” in an ethical context of being “guiltlessly guilty” encapsulates the
tragic situation of the Anthropocene. What makes it truly tragic, how-
ever, is the fact that this existential tragedy is magnified by an epistemo-
logical tragedy, namely our inability to read the tragedy as tragic.
Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem “Freies Geleit (Aria II),” published in
1957, is a literary reflection of the human condition in the atomic age:
Mit schlaftrunkenen Vögeln

und winddurchschossenen Bäumen
steht der Tag auf, und das Meer
leert einen schäumenden Becher auf ihn.
Die Flüsse wallen ans große Wasser,

und das Land legt Liebesversprechen
der reinen Luft in den Mund
mit frischen Blumen.
Die Erde will keinen Rauchpilz tragen,
kein Geschöpf ausspeien vorm Himmel,
mit Regen und Zornesblitzen abschaffen
die unerhörten Stimmen des Verderbens.
Mit uns will sie die bunten Brüder

und grauen Schwestern erwachen sehn,
den König Fisch, die Hoheit Nachtigall
und den Feuerfürsten Salamander.
Für uns pflanzt sie Korallen ins Meer.

Wäldern befiehlt sie, Ruhe zu halten,
dem Marmor, die schöne Ader zu schwellen,
noch einmal dem Tau, über die Asche zu gehn.
Die Erde will ein freies Geleit ins All

jeden Tag aus der Nacht haben,
daß noch tausend und ein Morgen wird
von der alten Schönheit jungen Gnaden.7
The title of the poem appears out of place when we read the initial hymn
to the inexhaustible regenerative powers of life. Everything surges and
foams and is permeated by all-encompassing “love vows.” The reader
is already tempted to interpret “safe conduct” not as a legal or military
term but rather as a free association, when the connection to Prometheus
is spelt out at the beginning of the third stanza: “The Earth will have
no mushroom cloud, / nor spit out any creature towards heaven.” Planet
Earth demands, as the final stanza announces, “ein freies Geleit ins
All”—somewhat mistakenly translated as “safe conduct in its orbit.” It
is only through this cosmic exile, the final lines suggest that Earth could
vouchsafe for the fact that “a thousand and one mornings will arise.”
By referring to One Thousand and One Nights, Bachmann cites one of
the existential motivations for storytelling: as a survival tool that keeps
the enemy engaged, entertained, enthralled (and erotically entangled).
Scheherazade lures the Sassanid king Shahryar into 1,001 instalments of
her stories and thus manages to avert her death sentence (and ultimately
persuade him to marry her). It is a bold extended metaphor that com-
pares Earth to Scheherazade and puts mankind (from whose grip Earth
seems to beg safe conduct) into the position of tyrannical power. This
strained metaphor is out of joint with the craftsmanship of the rest of
the poem: its epic point of comparison—the postponement that leads to
a narrative dénouement—remains vacuous; the narrative connection be-
tween the aesthetics of deferral in A Thousand and One Nights and the
implications of the safe conduct metaphor remain opaque. Yet, maybe
we should address this convoluted reference as an inexpressibility trope
(adynaton) whose hyperbolic gestures point primarily at the inadequacy
of language. It thus becomes a despondent rendition of social life under
the conditions of the atomic bomb “as the endlessly provisional result of
negating an act of self-destruction” (Dupuy 2002, 216). The apocalypse
has, this implies, already taken place.
The term “safe conduct” refers to the ius conducendi in military law,
according to which emissaries or peace negotiators are guaranteed the
passage of a territory with impunity, since it is assumed their mission
serves a mutual interest. Bachmann’s central metaphor resonates with
associations, but it adds another centrifugal momentum to the narrative
architecture of the poem. The dramaturgic relationship between the pro-
tagonists is not elaborated and hardly conceivable: who demands safe
conduct from whom? Is the Earth imploring a dematerialized mankind
(or its disembodied collective “reason”) or some panentheistic divinity
or an abstract conscience? Who could possibly be in the position to grant
such a safe conduct? Safe conduct is imagined as a repeated retreat of
earth from its tormentor into exile. During the night, the final stanza
insinuates, Earth would return to itself to keep life alive on planet Earth.
The convolution of Bachmann’s narrative scopus is telling: she compares
mankind to a tyrant of lore, yet describes the blossoming of culture in
Promethean terms. The actual agency of humans remains ambivalent.
That which makes humans self-destructive is also what is at the very
root of their creativity. Yet, she does not spell out this rupture as a Pro-
methean tragedy.8
The elements of air, earth and water that are choreographed in the
first two stanzas are complemented, in the third stanza, by the element
of fire—in the form of mushroom cloud of the detonating atomic bomb.
The art of this poem lies in the skill to turn a well-wrought classicist
form that dominates the first four stanzas into a vessel for something
that exceeds human imagination. This excess finds its formal correspon-
dence in the rhetorical inconsistencies of the final extended metaphor.
What is more, the poem choreographs a human attitude that is mirrored
in its form: symmetry, correspondence, dialogue. The “safe conduct”
desired by the planet requires a high degree of self-discipline reflected
in the poem’s formal rigor. Implicitly, Bachmann thereby formulates a
radical concept of nature in the atomic age—a nature that can only be
sustained as sustenance for future human life by virtue of major col-
lective cultural efforts. Bachmann’s metaphor of safe conduct is a very
early appeal to a collective planetary conscience, created by the shock
of as the potential of Promethean self-destruction and anticipating what
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009, 221–222) has called “a negative universal
identity” emerging from “a shared consciousness of a catastrophe” that
exceeds our ability to experience the world. Through the readiness and
ability to facilitate this “safe conduct” and thus practice an attitude of
humility, Bachmann seems to suggest, humankind would live up to the
“love vows” that Earth has pledged—and is still pledging. In doing so,
she constructs a narrative that avoids the fundamentally tragic roots of
the human condition in the atomic age and unwittingly perpetuates a
humanistic etiology and teleology.
The psychological background of the tragedy that Bachmann does not
spell out as tragedy is the globalization and totalization of risk through
the doctrine of deterrence. The cold war logic of Mutually Assured De-
struction (MAD) led to an equilibrium of horror that was gradually ac-
cepted as transcendent fate, thus concealing its anthropogenic causality.
Dupuy offers a psychoanalytic reading of this by describing the Pro-
methean power of humankind as the projection of its own suppressed
destructive agency into a fateful agency imagined to be beyond its con-
trol. This externalization moved the issue outside the public sphere and
into a dangerous oblivion. Thus, we successfully manage to ignore the
disabling and denial of the tragic moment of the Anthropocene, which is
most clearly formulated in Anders’ attempt to capture the moral conun-
drum of the atomic age: “The possibility of ultimate destruction is, even
if it does not occur, the ultimate destruction of our possibilities” (Anders
1981, vi). The power to inflict “ultimate destruction” upon themselves,
Anders suggests, excludes humans from the history of life—an exclusion
that antagonizes “life” and “the human” and thus forms the very blue-
print of a tragic plot.
This predicament reaches further back and is shaped by a tragic
meta-noetic failure. As Taylor (2007, 54–59) has shown, Judeo-Christian
history is also a history of the bifurcation between experiencing the
earth as immanent and experiencing soteriology as “high times,” i.e., as
a time order ontologically removed from the physical world. If this sote-
riological temporal alterity is conflated with immanence in the wake of
secularization, humans are thrown upon one sole resource: a desacral-
ized world that they have been called upon to transform in a progressive
effort of perpetual self-overcoming. Such a world of perpetual transgres-
sion from phýsis into thései, Dupuy argues, leads to a tragic blindness
vis-à-vis the difference between phýsis and thései: if
our striving leads to nature becoming, in its entirety, that which

we make of it, then it is evident that nothing remains outside the
human realm and that sooner or later everything in the world will
become a representation of that which humans do or don’t do, aim
at or neglect.
(Dupuy 2007, 245)
It is the experience that there is no force beyond humans that would pre-
vent humans from the horror of human action transcending any human
scale that, in Anders’ negative theology, qualifies as religious. Bereft of the
ability to confine itself, humankind has to resort to the atomic bomb and
the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction as the only transcendent
categories in an otherwise unconfined momentum of self-transcending.
This radically anti-teleological replacement of the ultimate end through
the ultimate means marks our human condition. “Fate” in the nuclear
age is conceived of as the ineluctable externalization of human power
over other humans. What prevents us from regarding this equivocal ex-
ternalization of human agency as tragic is that humans now regard solely
their own monstrosity as a limiting factor or fateful lawgiver.
In Anders’ terms, the actual tragedy is the fact that humans still lay
claim to the fallacies and limitations of the human species while they do
already wield the power and exert the impact of (ancient) Gods. How-
ever, in the inability to distinguish between the two, they fall prey to a
hamartía or tragic flaw: in externalizing the anthropogenic dynamic of
the atomic age as “fate,” they revert to a mythic way of thinking that
allows them to envisage themselves as sacrificial victims. Anders devel-
ops an apocalyptic vision of a humankind that is incapable of tragic
entanglement. The technocracies of the future will be radically inhuman
precisely because they will have eradicated human emotions such as ha-
tred: “[T]his absence of hatred will be the most inhuman absence of
hatred that has ever existed; absence of hatred and absence of scruples
will henceforth be one and the same” (Anders 1995, 202). While the an-
cient Greeks, as Hegel thought, dramatized the incompatibility between
human nómos and divine law as a mutually limiting horizon that facil-
itated its “sublation,” human beings in the Anthropocene do not even
intuit this incompatibility as tragic incompatibility anymore.
Biosphere Without Phýsis

Subjecting the world in its totality to an anthropomorphic imaginary
has led to a principal distrust of life that is historically related to the
contradictions of utilitarianism and its concrete manifestation as lib-
eral meliorism during the 19th century. The utilitarian and rational con-
vergence of democracy and capitalism leads to a risky and irrational
fixation of all governance structures on the short-term maximizing of
profits. This fixation sclerotizes human ability to imagine possible fu-
tures and gives rise to a structural blindness that ignores the long-term
effects of decisions made today. This problem is epitomized by Garrett
Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) that is often used as a cen-
tral moral parable of our contemporary moral conundrum: sooner or
later, a shepherd whose herds graze on commons will consider expand-
ing his herd. In doing so, he weighs short-term economic benefit against
the disadvantages of long-term degradation. However, profit is an indi-
vidual concern, whereas ecological systems stability is a collective one.
As a consequence, the two cannot be balanced in a cost-benefit calcu-
lation: while it is rational, from the collective’s perspective, to restrict
oneself, it is rational, from the individual’s perspective, not to do so. It is
this incompatibility that lies at the root of the tragedy of the commons.
However, this incompatibility of rationalities only turns into a tragic
situation due to its temporal dynamic: the sum of miniscule rational
individual decisions leads, over time, to irrational consequences for soci-
ety at large. Historically, this conflict has led to a gradual expansion of
herds, systematic overgrazing and ultimately ecological collapse of the
commons (cf. Hardin 1968).
Needless to say, with regard to some of the macrosystemic changes
in the Anthropocene such as climate change the situation is more com-
plex: cause and effect are, in terms of time and space, even more mis-
aligned; cause and effect are multifactorial or even ambiguous; and
existing governance structures are overtaxed in dealing with the con-
sequences. On top of all this, Stephen Gardiner argues, we are suc-
cumbing to a “tyranny of the contemporary”: the uncertainty of world
climate prognosis— complicated by spatial dispersion, temporal delay,
macrosystems dynamics—is fed back into a meta-level cost-benefit cal-
culation that is being used to justify inaction—or even endorse it as the
economically only viable course of action (Gardiner 2011, 33–41).
By highlighting the shortcomings of Hardin’s model and by fathoming
the ethical implications of climate change, Gardiner seeks to deepen the
tragic understanding of our present time, which he sees confronted with
“a perfect moral storm” (9). This “storm” is constituted “by an unusual
convergence of independently harmful factors where this convergence is
likely to result in substantial, and possibly, negative outcomes” (22–23)
and to corrupt our ability to judge and act ethically: (1) asymmetry of
power: affluent nations bear a disproportionally high responsibility for
climate change and will be exposed disproportionally little to its conse-
quences; (2) intergenerational injustice; (3) the lack of ethical orientation
on the levels (1) and (2) leads to an aggregation of moral corruption: we
focus on “shadow responses” to avert our gaze from the real challenges:
As a matter of public discourse, the geopolitical disaster has been

facilitated by the fact that the current generation in the developed
countries has spent much of the last two decades conveniently dis-
tracted and confused about the problem. […] Unfortunately, in a
perfect moral storm, it makes perfect sense. The temptation to pass
the buck on to the future, the poor, and nature is very strong.
(9)
From Gardiner’s analysis, we can distil three dimensions of the tragic:

first, the aggregation of various dimensions of the three ethical prob-
lems into a “perfect moral storm.” Second, the blind spots engendered
through the underdeveloped governance structures of sustainable poli-
cies, leading to the paralysis of individual action. Third, the increasing
incompatibility of contrary narratives about “reality,” e.g., analysis of
tipping points in Earth systems theory vs. neoclassical economic analysis
of systems development. Each of these dimensions of ethical judgment
and action leave individuals in a perpetual state of tragic ignorance. Yet,
none of these dimensions is spelt out as a tragic plot that would help us
identify with the protagonists and their tragic flaws.
The tragedy on top of this is what Gardiner calls an “intergenerational
arms race”:
Since subsequent generations have no reason to comply if their pre-

decessors do not, non-compliance by the first generation reverber-
ates so as to undermine the collective project. If the first generation
does not cooperate, then the second generation does not gain from
cooperation, and so is put in the same position as the first.
(37)
In other words, the longer “we”—embroiled in the three tragic flaws

of our worldview adumbrated above—fail to act, the more license we
give future generations to emulate our model of inaction. Implicitly,
this suggests a tragic peripeteia: we have, due to our tragic ignorance,
already passed systemic tipping points and future generations will not
be able to avert the dynamic after the peripeteia. They will be in the
unfortunate position of having to stage the fourth and fifth acts of the
tragedy. Gardiner includes certain aspects of the planetary imaginary
of the Anthropocene debate and even his own ethical thinking about
a “perfect moral storm” as potentially complicit in this, i.e., as par-
ticularly “deep” modes of obfuscating “our understanding of what is
at stake” (45). While claiming to disrupt the tragic ignorance of our
ethics, he suggests, our Anthropocenic obsession with “the planetary”
may, in fact, deepen our hamartía, in particular with regard to intergen-
erational justice. While the ability of human consciousness to distance
itself from nature allowed humankind to transform the biosphere, we
regard the dynamic of the technosphere as an imperative as impossible
to disobey as a natural law. Dupuy spells out the hamartía of the con-
temporary condition:
If it [the contemporary apocalypse] has the appearance of something

fixed and ineluctable, this is not because it is fated to occur; it is be-
cause a multitude of decisions of all kinds, the product more of myo-
pia than of malice or selfishness, bring forth a whole that hangs over
its parts, as it were, and whose menace is generated by a process of
self-exteriorization, or self-transcendence. This evil is neither moral
nor natural. It is a third type, which I call systemic evil. Its form is
identical with that of the sacred.
(Dupuy 2015, 57)
Dupuy here implicitly refers to the theological concept of “structural
sin,” i.e., our unwitting embeddedness in structures that inadvertently
engender “guilt.” Theologically speaking, this embeddedness is ambiv-
alent: it makes us guilty from birth, but it also is the seed for redemp-
tion, captured in the concept of felix culpa (“happy guilt”), emphasized,
most influentially, by Augustine and reverberating as theologoumena
throughout the works of thinkers such as Benjamin, Agamben and Es-
posito. In the notion of “structural sin,” Dupuy seems to imply, lies a
fundamentally tragic understanding of existence, which was gradually
reduced to the status of a problem amenable to human solutions: “Be-
cause the future is thought to be something that we make ourselves, it is
as indeterminate as our free will; and since we invent it, there can be no
science of the future” (59).
For many contemporaries, World War I was experienced as the to-
tal becoming-history of a technological logic (as one of nature’s po-
tentials), for which humans have become the medium and agent. In
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence describes this experience as
a post-apocalyptic one of no-return and gradual re-appropriation—in
terms that are uncannily reminiscent of Anders:
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to
build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard
work: there is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or
scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many
skies have fallen.
(Lawrence 1994, 5)
Yet, building up “new little habitats” may prove even harder in the
atomic age and the Anthropocene. Not only have we lost the sense that
we are “among ruins,” we have also taught ourselves that the world
as a whole is not a web of life but a series of problems to be solved.
As Taylor has shown, the history of modern secularization is predom-
inantly about teaching ourselves to believe that we are the sole cause
of what will occur to us in the future. We are now even faced with the
paradox that, at the moment of our severest fragility as a species, we
embrace a total engineering approach to the planet, thus arrogating
divine responsibility.
Conclusion
For the first time in the ecological history of Homo sapiens, the individ-
ual is barred from a positive functional relationship to the well-being of
the community or species. Most individuals’ existence today is a bur-
den to the life-systems rather than a force of improvement for future
generations. Not only is our ecological dignity as individuals shattered,
we also are unable to buy into the tragic illusions of modern humanism
any longer. In an age that is marked by global homogenization that will
make a tragic self-reflection of humans increasingly difficult, retaining
the ability to interpret one’s social and psychological genealogy as trag-
edy may become a necessary epistemological ruse. In an increasingly bu-
reaucratized and formalized management of risk, it will be of paramount
importance to disaggregate the human ability to respond to uncertainty
from the temptations of solutionism. As Nietzsche (1967, 1019) reminds
us: “the whole history of culture represents a diminuition of this fear of
chance, the uncertain, the sudden. For culture means learning to calcu-
late, to think causally, to forestall, to believe in necessity.” The ability
to insert ourselves into tragic narratives about our human condition is a
form of resisting these conditions.
Socrates’ separation of the realm of phýsis and the realm of nómos
has led to a history of ill-fated attempts to purge the realm of the
human from the realm of nature. In the Anthropocene, separating a
realm of (natural) causes from a realm of (human) reasons becomes
ever more difficult. If information technology and biological sciences
change the fundamental components of life, who then is responsible
for the potential suffering these changes inflict on individuals and col-
lectives? The tragic dimension of life under the auspices of the techno-
sphere is not any longer Dupuy’s loss of our ability to understand some
concealed but retrievable tragic theology of life; it rather lies in the fact
that a meaningful notion of alterity cannot be located anywhere in the
way we are talking about the world anymore—and thus seems irre-
trievable for social practice. We have replaced negotiating what “good
life” should be like with expert analysis of what life is, from which
we expect guidance. However, as Heidegger has repeatedly stressed
that analysis does not take place from a disinterested outside perspec-
tive; it is conducted from within a worldview that turns every life form
into a representation. Consequently, it is a manifestation of the “des-
tining” (Geschick) of technology, i.e. the becoming-historical of the
technosphere that does not allow for relationships to nature other than
through instrumental reason (Heidegger 2008, 329–330). Yet, there is
the rub, for—as Georg Simmel (1968, 43) remarks with unfailing in-
tuition about the innermost psychological motivation for tragedy—“in
general we call a relationship tragic—in contrast to merely sad or ex-
trinsically destructive—when the destructive forces directed against
some beings spring from the deepest levels of that very being.” What
we haven’t even begun to consider in the Anthropocene debate is the
motivational force of self-destruction. Viewed this way, the ecological
consequences of the human attempt to decamp from the biosphere and
inhabit a world governed by the technosphere are, indeed, a “tragedy
bound to happen.”
Notes

Safe Conduct (Aria II)

With birds drunk with sleep
and trees shot through with wind
the day awakens, and the sea empties
a foaming cup to honor it.
Rivers surge towards the wide water,
and the land lays loving vows
of pure air inside the mouth
with its fresh flowers.
The Earth will have no mushroom cloud,
nor spit out any creature towards heaven,
with rain and thunderbolts it abolishes
the unbearable voice of destruction.
In us it wants the lively brothers
and to see the grey sisters awakened,
the King of Fish, the Royal Nightingale,
and, Prince of Fire, the Salamander.
For us it plants corals in the sea.
It orders forests to maintain the quiet,
for marble to swell its beautiful veins,
and once more for dew to settle on ashes.
Earth wants safe conduct in its orbit,
each day we have in the face of night,
so that from ancient beauty renewed graces
on a thousand and one mornings will arise.

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6 Literature Pedagogy and the
Anthropocene
Roman Bartosch
The Anthropocene seems here to stay. Despite ongoing discussions in the

scientific disciplines where the term had originally been proposed, the en-
vironmental humanities and social sciences have quickly embraced the
concept and its potential for epistemic and ethical critique (see Clark
2011; Garrard et al. 2014, 150–151). This has led to sometimes heated
debates on the intricacies especially of the term’s underlying notion of
the anthropos whose time has come (or is about to end soon) as well
as the implications for action and agency (Szerszynski 2012; Latour
2014). Some understand the Anthropocene as just the latest fad in hu-
man hubris and challenge its anthropocentric subtext (e.g., Haraway
2015); others wonder about its precision and suggest alternatives sto-
ries with alternative villains, most prominently capitalism rather than
human(ism) (Crist 2016; Moore 2016). And others still understand the
Anthropocene as a welcome term that invites us to reframe established
disciplinary orders and research protocols since “the current conjunc-
ture of globalization and global warming leaves us with the challenge
of having to think of human agency over multiple and incommensurable
scales at once.” (Chakrabarty 2012, 1) It is this latter focus on scale, and
potential “derangements of scale” (Clark 2015) that this chapter takes as
its starting point for a discussion of the role of literature and the imagi-
nation of scale, particularly in, but in no way restricted to, educational
contexts. It argues that literary fiction and its grappling with scale can
be theorized from the vantage points of both philology and pedagogy
because reading and teaching “Anthropocene fictions” (Trexler 2015)
requires an awareness of textual as well as readerly scaling procedures
and can, as this chapter suggests, be understood as a form of imaginative
modeling. It is, then, through the notion of such modeling that the af-
fordances of fiction, and potential implications for an education in times
of the Anthropocene, can and should be apprehended and scrutinized.
In order to make this argument, this chapter will first present selected
findings on the role of scale and scaling in literary but also ethical de-
bate. Drawing on, and in keeping with, current research on the cultural
dimensions of modeling, it will then discuss literary framing through
scientific and mathematical notions pertaining to incrementing risk as
114 Roman Bartosch
inherently related to a readerly ability to scale perspectives and engage
with scalar incommensurability. Its key concern will be with the unique
role of literature and the arts to experience such an incommensurability
and to engage an understanding of the experiential confusion that Tim-
othy Clark has dubbed “Anthropocene disorder” (2015). For this case
to be made, the chapter will present select readings of fiction as well as
comment on the scaling procedures which each text engages with and
takes as its diegetic and formal problem. In an attempt to move from a
“derangement” to an understanding of the “affordances” of scale, it will
eventually propose that modeling the Anthropocene through literature
has different interpretive, educational and ethical implications for un-
derstanding human agency in potentially efficacious ways.
Scale in Literary and Ethical Debate

One of the crucial challenges of thinking and experiencing the Anthropo-
cene has to do with scale. While parameters of discussion encompass deep
time, the impact of humanity “as a whole,” and the planetary scope of
climate change, its normative and politicoethical demands are situated on
a much smaller scale of individual or communal, political agency—in the
form of legislation, say, and the claims that individual consumer choices
matter just as much as one’s personal “carbon footprint.” Derek Woods
has, therefore, cautioned not to confuse calls for an all-encompassing hu-
manity as the main driver of climate change with the idea that it is humans
deliberately acting toward or bringing about the change we are begin-
ning to witness with ever more clarity. Instead, we encounter “distributed
agencies” and are confronted with “the sum of terraforming assemblages
composed of humans, nonhuman species, and technics” (Woods 2014,
134). The historian, Dipesh Chakrabarty, has moreover pointed to the
problems coming with demands on “humanity” understood as a single
agentic identity and bearer of responsibility since “a form of collective
existence […] has no ontological dimension”: “A geophysical force […]
is neither subject nor object. A force is the capacity to move things. It is
pure, nonontological agency” (Chakrabarty 2012, 13). Literary scholar
Greg Garrard has described this conundrum of agency as the “unbear-
able lightness of green,” writing that “human population simultaneously
magnifies the cumulative impact of our actions and dilutes my individual
agency. The heavier we get, the lighter I become” (Garrard 2013, 185;
original emphasis). In a similar vein, Timothy Clark has diagnosed an
“Anthropocene disorder,” the contemporaneous malady resulting from
“scale effects” and concomitant “derangements of scale”:
scale effects are confusing because they take the easy, daily equa-
tions of moral and political accounting and drop into them both a
zero and an infinity: the greater the number of people engaged in
Literature Pedagogy and the Anthropocene 115
modern forms of consumption then the less the relative influence or
responsibility of each but the worse the cumulative impact of their
insignificance.
(Clark 2012, 150)
It seems safe to say that scale effects, or “derangements of scale,” are

at the heart of numerous conflicts associated with the Anthropocene
concept (an inconclusive list would contain various texts and references
in Garrard 2012; contributions in Siperstein et al. 2017, especially the
ethical critique by Callicott; cf. also Clark 2015). And contrary to some
environmental or ecocentric beliefs, there is no solution in “scaling up”
perspectives to some hypothetical, planetary view from nowhere since,
as Dipesh Chakrabarty correctly reminds us, the different scales—of hu-
man subjectivity, political agency and the idea of a global humanity—“do
not supersede one another. One cannot put them along a continuum of
progress. No one view is rendered invalid by the presence of others. They
are simply disjunctive” (Chakrabarty 2012, 2).
In my view, literary fiction is one of the imaginative tools that can
help us grapple with the intricacies and divergent imaginaries of scale
by bringing disjunctive scales, as identified by Clark and others, into
fruitful tension as well as pointing out their distinctiveness in the first
place. Through fictional negotiations of scale, the literary imagination
of different scalar perspectives, or the scaling of readerly perspectives
themselves, literature can turn, I wish to argue, derangements of scales
into affordances. This at least seems to be what the more successful
climate change novels do. At the center of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight
Behaviour, for instance, we find Dellarobia Turnbow, lower-class and
struggling housewife on the brink of cheating on her husband. In order
to meet with another man, she climbs a mountain in the Appalachians,
where her husband’s family owns a sheep farm—and is met with a mir-
acle. The mountain is aflame, and the sublime effect of its silent fire
throws Dellarobia into the tumultuous experience of epiphany:
No words to put on a table as Moses had when he marched down his

mountain. But like Moses she had come home rattled and impatient
with the pettiness of people’s everyday affairs. She felt ashamed by
her made-up passion and injuries she’d been ready to inflict. […]
They built their tidy houses of self-importance and special blessing
and went inside and slammed the door, unaware the mountain be-
hind them was aflame.
(Kingsolver 2013, 30–31)
While this religious experience helps her refigure her and her people’s “pet-
tiness,” transcending the individual for the sake of the numinous, Dellaro-
bia soon learns that this spiritual awakening had been caused by her having
116 Roman Bartosch
forgotten to bring her glasses: instead of heavenly fire, she witnessed a vast
number of Monarch butterflies, apparently stopping in the Midwest on
their migratory route. This, on the one hand, seems rather mundane; but
it also has great communal effects, since people from all over the US want
to come and see the butterflies, helping the community businesses and
even creating new business opportunities and attracting the attention of
scientists from the urban centers. As is clear from this short description,
the novel engages in scaling repeatedly by drawing on the transcenden-
tal and the mundane, the sublime and the minute, individual experience
and larger social and communal relations, economics and, as readers soon
learn, global ecology, since the local event of hibernating butterflies has
serious planetary implications: their new route of migration, an ecologist
tells Dellarobia, is a disconcerting sign of climate change.1
Clark’s notion of a “derangement of scales” can help illustrate the
novel’s compositional complexity. Discussing the effect of the globally
ecological scale that most often finds application in Anthropocene dis-
course, Clark describes an “emergent unreadability” of fiction (2015,
62) and avers that “[t]he scale at which one reads a text, and the scale
effects implicated, drastically alter the kinds of significance attached to
elements of it.” Therefore, he suggests that generally speaking “[t]hree
scales can be used”:
we could read the text on a (critically naïve) personal scale that takes
into account only the narrator’s immediate circle of family and ac-
quaintances over a timeframe of several years. […] A second scale
at which to read the text is that […] of a national culture and its
inhabitants, with a time frame of perhaps a few decades, a ‘histori-
cal period’ of some kind. […] A third, larger, hypothetical scale […]
would be, spatially, that of the whole earth and its inhabitants.
(Clark 2015, 99–100)
And indeed, the novel not only explicitly mobilizes these scales in juxta-
posing Dellarobia’s marital crisis, US rural economic crises and ecologi-
cal disaster, it also constantly suggests the relevance of all these scales by
naming each chapter according to their respective scope and reach: the
first chapter is called “The Measure of Man,” the second and third scale
up to “Family Territory” and “Congregational Space,” while Chapter 5
reminds readers of “National Proportions” and Chapter 9 arrives as the
notion of a “Continental Ecosystem.” Likewise, metaphors and images
underline different yet entangled scales on the levels of perception and
language, for instance when Dellarobia compares the seasonal shifts and
their disturbance to human sickness: “The trees had lost their leaves
early in the unrelenting rain. After a brief fling with coloration they
dropped their tresses in clumps like a chemo patient losing her hair”
(Kingsolver 2013, 67).
This latter example of a language that mixes different scales is of
course not an exclusive property of literary language. For example,
in her discussion of the fictionalized documentary The Age of Stupid,
Sherily MacGregor points to the film’s strategy of using temporal as well
as perspectival scaling to bring home its cautionary point: the film “of-
fers a dystopian image of a devastated world in 2055 and a backward
look at missed opportunities for averting the ‘suicide of the species,’” she
recounts, remarking that “[t]o tell the tale, […] [it] shows a video mon-
tage of the lives of six real people living in 2008” (Mac Gregor 2014,
617). Through a flexible use of time frames and by linking individual life
stories and the global issue of climate change, the film tries to imagine
the scale and scope of the Anthropocene as well as points of connection
for individual viewers. A similar blending of individual, communal and
global scales can be found in the rhetoric of the UK-based “10:10” cam-
paign, an NGO dedicated to a 10% annual reduction of carbon dioxide
emissions in the United Kingdom. Its website claims that “politicians so
far have failed to do what needs to be done, so it’s time for ordinary peo-
ple to step in and show that we’re ready to defend our children’s future”
(quoted ibid., 618). Again, we find scaling at the heart of the text’s rhet-
oric, blending politics and individual action as well as contemporaneous
and future (“our children’s”) perspectives.
Examples such as the ones above are legion and can be found in jour-
nalism and science communication, and in expression and images such
as the “carbon footprint,” or comparisons such as the Great Pacific Gar-
bage Patch, conceived of in the popular imagination as an island-like,
visible structure of trash whose size is often described as being “three
times the size of France” (N-TV, March 24, 2018 or “twice the size of
Texas”), depending on the locale of the authors describing it as well as
the intended readership.2 The function of such scaling procedures seems
obvious enough; but scaling in the hands of writers of literary fiction can
deliberately put scale—and what Timothy Clark calls “scale disorder”—
to more nuanced epistemic use.
What is remarkable in the context of literature, then, is that a delib-
erate formal decision to use scaling implies different meanings on dif-
ferent scales that all interact, contradict each other and supplement the
other perspectives’ shortcomings. While Flight Behaviour provides am-
ple connections with climate change debates and their respective topics
and themes, especially through the character of the above-mentioned
ecologist, Ovid Byron, it can also be read, as Sylvia Mayer argues, as a
“female bildungsroman […] that provides direct insight into the develop-
ment of a specific subjectivity” (Mayer 2016, 217). In other words, the
interpretive result is partly determined by the different scale effects to
which any reader refers. This explains the text’s potential to also high-
light rather local and political problems in climate-related debate, since
US-American culture is presented as deeply divided between the rural
118 Roman Bartosch
working class and the urban intelligentsia whose favorite pastime it is
to make fun of “rednecks” in their satirical news comedies on TV. In
pitting against each other individual, communal and global ecological
issues, such deliberate “derangement of scales” can shed light on the
complexity of climate change by charting “interactions between local
and planetary environments, prompting readers to contextualize the mi-
cro […] within the macro context of the Anthropocene,” as the literary
scholars, Christopher Lloyd and Jessica Rapson (2017, 911), have argued.
The novel, they claim, “urges us to see ourselves within a planetary per-
spective without leaving our very human, localized attachments” (913)
and offers “a vision of climate fiction that clearly emphasizes both the
importance of place […] and a sense of planet” (917).
In a notable scene, Dellarobia is addressed by a young environmental-
ist presenting his “Sustainability Pledge” that urges people to “[b]ring
[their] own Tupperware to a restaurant for leftovers, as often as possi-
ble” (Kingsolver 2013, 451). Dellarobia remarks, “I’ve not eaten in a
restaurant in over two years.” Asked by the pledge to “reduce the intake
of red meat in [their] diet,” she responds: “Are you crazy? I’m trying to
increase our intake of red meat” (451–452). The novel thus shows that
the phenomena that make environmental crises are significantly differ-
ent for different people:
‘Okay, this is the last one,’ [the environmentalist] said. ‘Fly less.’ ‘Fly
less,’ she repeated. [Her interlocutor] looked at his paper as if receiv-
ing orders from some higher authority. ‘That’s all she [the leader of
the environmental group] wrote. Fly less’.
(454)
Dellarobia—and, I would argue, readers by now familiar with the hard-

ships of the rural populations’ lives—is stunned. She has never flown,
and probably never will. Climate change and its ethical implications play
out differently and unevenly—the anthropos of the Anthropocene in-
deed is a “tragic environmental Leviathan” consisting of “people to get
by as best as they can” while all the same creating a “powerful single
entity that is far more than the sum of its parts” (Clark 2015, 14).
This is of course not meant to invalidate climate change research or
diminish the anthropogenic nature of disaster, nor does it mean that the
statistics behind the Anthropocene concept are wrong. It is rather that
through a deliberate “oscillation between […] scales,” the novel “pro-
duces its own ‘scale effect’ in the structural signposting of transitions
from one scale to another” (Lloyd and Rapson 2017, 918), adding more
dimensions of meaning and understanding to an otherwise homoge-
nizing discourse. While different disciplines have their distinct ways of
world-making—statistical, social-scientific, individually ethical etc.—
literary scaling shows that these ways cannot make sense independently
of each other but have to be thought together in the readings of different
scales that pay “particular attention to the strain that this puts on given
critical assumptions and currently dominant modes of reading” (Clark
2015, 97). Same, but also different: literary fiction can help understand
in how far the Anthropocene makes us all equal and uneven at the same
time as it turns “derangements” into literary affordances.
Let us turn to another instance of fiction turning irresolvable conflict
into affordance to illustrate the potential of scaling, this time with re-
gard to human-animal relations. Debates of scale and literary scaling do
not after all have to be restricted to the temporal and spatial diffusion
of human and environmental agencies. In that it points to what media
and linguistic research refers to as “granularity,” scaling takes places
across different arenas of conflict and discourse domains. Let me illus-
trate this by showing in which ways scaling takes place in narratives that
focus on conflicts over ecological and animal rights. Since I believe that
fiction is effective not only in complex novels but also in short stories, I
will now turn to T.C. Boyle’s “Question 62” for that.3 At the center of
“Question 62” is the complicated relationship between a nurse, Anita,
and a stranger with whom she falls in and out of skin-deep love, the rela-
tionship of humans to other animals, some deemed pets and other pests,
as well as the political history of the American genocide of the First Na-
tions. To understand these different levels and see their interconnection
means to engage in scaling.
The narrative strands of “Question 62” are framed by a wondrous
account of Anita’s sister Mae’s chancing on a tiger while gardening; this
surprise encounter already sensitizes readers to the significance of scale:
“She was out in the flower bed, crushing snails,” the tale begins, “when
she happened to glance into the burning eyes of an optical illusion” (Boyle
2010, 37). Her musings on annoying snails, on her recovery from car-
cinosis, and her difficulties in understanding climate change, described
as “the thinning—or was it thickening?—of the atmosphere” (37), are
brought to an abrupt end at the sight of a tiger that takes her “deep
into the realm of fascination, of magic and wonder and the compelling
strangeness of the moment” (41).4 Mae first deems the tiger “a big cat,”
then “a big striped cat the size of a pony,” then a tiger ready to “leap
over the fence” (38) that could possibly devour her, until, eventually,
she recognizes “a pet. […] It was probably hungry. Bewildered. Tired”
(38). These processes of scaling her perception are in line with other
scale-related elements. Amongst those is Mae’s “basal cell carcinoma”
and its relation to “the hole in the ozone layer” and the paradox that
Mae, as a vegetarian and animal lover who would not even kill “the flies
that gathered in fumbling flotillas on the windowsill” (37), has entered
an all-out war: “The snails were an invasive species, […] brought here by
a French chef who was a little lax in keeping them in their pens or cages
or wherever. They were destroying her plants, so she was destroying
120 Roman Bartosch
them” (38). The similarly political and ecological terminology of inva-
sion and the conflict between an individual specimen of the charismatic
megafauna and the nameless, faceless mass of ‘invasive animals’ sets the
stage for the story’s negotiation of different scale orders.
That scales matter when encountering animals is underlined by her
and the stranger’s conflict: animals are sometimes seen as individuals,
pets that are potentially “hungry. Bewildered. Tired.” Or they can be
seen as invaders, “bird killers […]. Big time” (Boyle 2010, 45), dangerous
to ecosystems on a species scale, as the stranger reminds Anita. As early
as 2007, Rebecca Raglon and Marian Scholtmeijer described the incom-
mensurability of ecocriticism, understood as the study of writing con-
cerned with environmental issues, and animal studies as a problem of
diverging scales of interest. The ecological, large-scale view, on the one
hand, and the more individualized animal advocacy perspective, on the
other hand, follows different interpretive trajectories. This makes it dif-
ficult to bring epistemological and ethical demands of both disciplines
in line. Read as a conflict of scale, however, this very conflict enables us
to see their tricky connections.
This is also how the ending of the story might be read: the eponymous
“Question 62” turns out to be a legal pledge for the systematic extermi-
nation of feral cats—or is it individual creatures? Mae and the stranger
fall out over this question—and Mae cannot stop thinking about the
other 61 questions from this perspective: “What had Question 61 been,
or Question 50, Question 29? Pave over the land? Pollute the streams?
Kill the buffalo?” (Boyle 2010, 56) Creating a temporal order of envi-
ronmental degradation through policy decision leads her to conclude:
“That must have been it: Kill off the Indians.” (57) Scaling not only
points to ethical conundrums of perception generally. In this particular
case, the musings on individual ethical obligations and ecological, sta-
tistical notions of invasive species eventually and shockingly reveal the
origin and significance of the pledge at the heart of the story: biophobia
and racist imperialism. The private and the ecological turn out to be
political indeed.
Scale, Risk and the Need for Literary Modeling

In a different context, I have described the emplotment of incommensu-
rable scales and the narrative prerogative for bringing these scales into
fruitful tension as “transcultural ecology” (Bartosch 2019). My main
argument there and here is that if literary fiction is understood as a form
of semiotic energy that critically and integratively engages with social
and cultural evolution (see Zapf 2016), then the notions of scale and
scaling are helpful for understanding the frictions engendered by the
Anthropocene’s derangements (Bartosch 2018; see also Ghosh 2016).
With an eye on the question of the “newness” of the Anthropocene,
I would like to suggest that in this new, transdisciplinary endeavor to
understand complex environmental conundrums, scaling allows for
texts to be understood as models of Anthropocene complexity, as the
following sections will argue. In climate change research, models are of
course ubiquitous. The notion of literary modeling can help make sense
of the complex cultural negotiations that are part and parcel of environ-
mental disaster. Cultural research on climate change often identifies and
classifies narrative patterns as, for instance, techno-optimist or apoca-
lyptical (see Dürbeck 2018). But as my above reading indicates, a text
model would differ because it presents less of a reading or interpretation
of a specific phenomenon or endorses a specific stance but builds on an
insightful play and the tensions and incommensurabilities of different
scales or perspectivized discourse.
While understanding texts as literary models can of course not gen-
erate new data and thus help calculate causalities in the same way that
mathematical models strive to do, fictional narratives do reintegrate the
factors and dimensions overlooked by the other models. This points to
the role of the humanities in complex modeling (cf. Gurr 2014)—but
it also cautions humanist scholarship to not simply embrace scientific
findings and blow the trumpet of Anthropocene and Apocalypse on the
infirm grounds of interdisciplinary foraging. As Wolfram Mauser con-
cludes, “it is necessary to engage with current research in earth systems,
based on simulation and modeling, from a humanities and social science
perspective in order to eventually begin to integrate the sociosphere”
(2013, 280, my translation). One step in this direction is to understand
in how far literature also provides simulation and modeling—and that
it can compensate for some of the weaknesses of other modeling pro-
cedures that lack exactly what literature can do best: complexify and
integrate the local and the short-span in a network of diverging and
often incommensurable scales. Turning derangements into affordances,
as it were.
The potential of such a view on textual modeling is, therefore, twofold.
Firstly, textual modeling takes full advantage of incommensurability and
ambiguity of different scales; in contrast to other, more exacting models
known from the natural sciences or the STEM disciplines, its main focus
is on complex and ambivalent emergences. This is specifically relevant
in the mostly science-dominated debates on climate change as well as in
the cases of resistance to climate change science from so-called climate
“sceptics.” As Jay Odenbaugh argues with an eye on such climate change
“skepticism,” “[i]n debates over global climate change, much is made
over the consensus concerning the effects of human-induced greenhouse
gas emissions on the Earth’s temperature. Contrarians correctly note
that science is partially structured around dissent and criticism” (2012,
137; see also Garrard et al. 2019). This does not mean that skepticism
of this kind is an appropriate reaction. But fiction goes a long way in
122 Roman Bartosch
bringing home an idea of the relevance of taking heed of resisting and
ambivalent readings of the same phenomenon as it models complexity,
as shown in my reading of scale in Kingsolver’s novel and Boyle’s story.
What is more, in bringing tension and incommensurability to bear on
the imagination, literary fiction complements each perspective’s blind
spots in productive ways. Since climate change is both alarmingly real and,
still, a concept only “contained in models and brains” (Odenbaugh 2012,
4), it requires making sense of the bifurcated nature of the phenomenon.
In literary fiction, this interdiscursive work (cf. Zapf 2016, 114–121) is
mostly done by juxtaposing an often scientific take on climate change with
numerous other ways of world-making, from individual apprehension to
communal cultural negotiations, or by deliberately pitting against each
other signal words from different discourse domains and their reframing
on different scales. Such signal words contain, in the above examples, the
question of “invasive species” versus “pets”; the concept of war in the con-
text of killing snails, or a spiritual terminology in an otherwise abstract
scientific domain. A different meaning, as I will show now, is the use of
allegedly non-literary, mathematical expressions that cue readers for the
intricacies and phenomenological challenge of risk perception.
There is hardly a novel that does this with greater clarity and alacrity
than Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013).5 In this story
about nerdy and socially awkward Mitchell, whose paranoia and anxi-
ety surrounding large-scale catastrophe and the mathematical calcula-
tion of its risk render him a shooting star and almost-guru flair after a
terrible flooding devastates New York. The mixing of mathematical and
phenomenological domains causes much of the novel’s poignancy and
humor. The numerical and the human are in no way completely at odds
but both rely on the human faculty of imagination, as is made clear in a
short dialogue between Mitchell and a fellow student about another col-
league from university suffering from a potentially deadly heart disease:
“‘Can you imagine?’ he said. […] She’s a walking worst-case scenario.
How does she get out of bed?” (Rich 2013, 10).
That risk perception is largely a cultural, and, therefore, also imagina-
tive, enterprise has long been shown by extant research on cultures and
histories of risk (Arnoldi 2009; Heise 2009). The notion of modeling,
however, adds the insight that, in the case of Odds Against Tomorrow, it
is through the humorous bringing together of the mathematical and the
personal dimension that literary writing can be understood as a comple-
mentation of other models that are unable to take into account, or locate
on an altogether different plane, the all-too human.6 In other words, it
takes terms from one discourse domain—“Event trees, optimism bias,
binomial distribution, base rate fallacy” (Rich 2013, 18–19) or calcu-
lations reprinted on the page without further comment or explanation
(“ʎCMTC = ʎ IE P1 P 2 P3,” 107)—and integrates them into the narrative
storyworld and plotlines. When Mitchell is asked to “calculate the price
of each […] employee’s life” (19), or when he discusses the financial ben-
efits of disaster, the potential of such modeling becomes manifest: when
catastrophe hits, Mitchell’s boss “appeared at the doorway. ‘They’re
calling. They want meetings. And meetings mean more money. Money,
money, money […]’” (124, original emphasis). Communal or even global
disaster appears serendipitous for some—this simple truth, and this de-
rangement of scale, is probably best communicated in the form of com-
plex narrative: “‘This may be our first live disaster. […]’ ‘Where is it
going to make landfall? […] Ocean City would be very bad—Atlantic
City would be catastrophic.’ ‘Let’s pray for Atlantic City!’” (127).
Personal economic success and the pitting against each other of the
ecologically and socially disastrous are modeled through the notion of
risk and its link with scalar perception: “That’s the thing—the scale is
too great. It’s impossible. We can only see what’s immediately in front of
us. It’s difficult to imagine the next avenue, let alone the entire city. All
the people” (190). In a clever play of scaling, Mitchell tells this in the con-
crete situation of having to navigate a canoe through flooded Manhattan;
in this memorable image of the canoe and of going through the debris of
civilization, the novel brings personal and global aporias into sync.
A quick look at almost all extant scientific models of climate systems
shows that these models are marked by both a heightened interest in com-
plex relations between highly diverse geophysical systems and a conspicu-
ous absence of cultural complexity and the potentially emergent effects in
this domain (e.g., Trenberth 2010). Paradoxically, the human factor plays
hardly a role in such modeling—with the exception of data concerning
emission and resource depletion and the like—while the very phenomenon
in question is anthropogenic climate change. But “culture” and cultural
complexities seem in conflict with modeling as they are marked by a strong
resistance to predictability and statistical validity. Despite, or rather be-
cause, of this restriction, novels can indeed provide a deeper “understand-
ing of […] complexity that cannot be measured, [numerically] modeled,
classified or studied in terms of information theory” (Gurr 2014, 146).
Literary modeling that could accommodate such factors would for ex-
ample pay heed to the very enmeshment of nature and culture in the An-
thropocene; an issue that many novels have for quite some time been very
attentive to (see Grimm and Bartosch 2018). Besides representing such
enmeshments, even on the level of language and metaphor, narratives
such as Odds Against Tomorrow rely on this fusion of allegedly separate
spheres: for instance, we learn that the windows of a conference room
were fogged over with the mist that rose from the ocean. The execu-
tives hovered like seagulls over a spread of bagels, los and sturgeon.
The expensive fish seethed a salty, humid aroma, indistinguishable
from the smell of dirty dollar bills.
(13–14)
124 Roman Bartosch
Here, we have not only a reasonable account of geothermal effects on
the urban architecture of Manhattan but an insightful semiotic abduc-
tion that contrastively links corporate management and scavenging,
something fishy and capitalism. Likewise, the novel generates significant
amounts of its narrative force by linking the business of risk prediction
and natural disaster with other discursive fields, such as religious es-
chatology and forms of animism. As the floating particles of soil that
portend extensive drought become more and more and cover the city in
unreal, apocalyptic blackness, and as this drought eventually leads to
a deluge that destroys Manhattan, Mitchell realizes that as he and his
fellows become victims of catastrophe, “the wind was calling to them”:
“Oooh, it said” (150) at first, then “Unnh” (152), “Whee!” (154) until,
eventually, “Whaaah!! Aaaah! The wind screamed murder” (155; all
emphases original). Though ultimately incomprehensible, there is little
doubt that nature has a voice indeed—one that Mitchell so far has been
unable to include in his calculations.
Remarkably, this link between the spheres of risk calculation and the
multimodal, multidimensional nature of disaster is created through and
across different scales whose repercussions register on the linguistic level
as well: “Rain in and of itself is not a bad thing. But all the analytics
indicate that this storm is going to bring excessive rain. The drought has
inhibited the land’s ability to accommodate sudden large amounts of
precipitation” (121). As we move from “rain” to “analytics” of “exces-
sive rain” and finally to “the land’s ability to accommodate sudden large
amounts of precipitation,” and thus across different registers with dif-
ferent meaning domains of the very same phenomenon, the novel helps
to experience scale impressively.
From “Derangements” to “Affordances” of Scale:

Learning to Read (in) the Anthropocene
I would like to conclude this chapter by pointing to some of the impli-
cations and, indeed, potentials of analyzing and discussing scale and
scaling as an interpretive practice for the teaching of literature and
argue that literature can teach us an important lesson concerning the
Anthropocene. That complexities of scale should lend themselves to
being applied in educational contexts does not come as a surprise. In
recent years, theories of learning—especially in the fields of language
and literature pedagogy but also, more broadly, in political and citi-
zenship education—have embraced what Claire Kramsch calls an “eco-
logical perspective” on learning processes. This perspective integrates
findings from complexity theory and notably speaks about language as
a “non-linear, emergent phenomenon,” the study of which necessitates
an understanding of different timescales, “fractal figures” and the im-
portance of “‘distributed’ symbolic competence” (Kramsch 2008, 389,
391, 400). Although I cannot do justice to the theoretical and empirical
context and data presented by Kramsch, I wish to point out that the
ideas developed here fit well with her claim that complex understanding
hinges on the ability to reframe—in my terminology: scale— perspectives
and meanings with the help of literary modeling.
Scaling and modeling, this chapter has argued, help complexify the
issues at stake in climate change discourse and serve as a useful comple-
mentation of perspectives from other, especially scientific, disciplines.
This also has implications for reading practices and, therefore, for our
ways of teaching literature. In the recent past, much has been made of
“ecocentric” writing and reading. And yet, in light of the above, it seems
more promising to focus on the tensions produced by literary scaling as
well as the affordances of literary modeling instead of literature’s poten-
tial to “go global.” “Perhaps, the critical emphasis placed on the scaling
up of the literary, and interpretive, imagination risks distracting from
issues of mediation” (Craps and Crownshaw 2018, 4). I wholeheartedly
agree and will close with a few educational suggestions drawing on the
affordance of scale as described by Pippa Marland:
Once you have zoomed out in order to see the big picture, you might
find, upon zooming in again, that your perspective on the human
and on the earth, and on the place of the mortal human upon that
earth, has subtly changed.
(2018, 62)
Instead of more the same globalizing discourse, readers of fiction can

and ought to learn to become more flexible in their perception of com-
plex scalar dimensionality; they should, in other words, become experts
in scaling. I am convinced that literary fiction provides the right models
for this enterprise.
One of the reasons why I prefer scaling over more mono-perspectival,
global approaches to the imagination lie in the pedagogic, but also indi-
vidual, context of the literary reading experience. Despite the importance
of an all-encompassing view of humanity in Anthropocene discourse,
the primary addressee of both schooling and literary writing remains
the subject. It is subjective agency that education has in mind and it is in
individual acts of reception that literature takes its effect. Moreover, it is,
after all, the cumulative effect of individual action that lies at the heart
of the ominous anthropos as well. But this does not mean that instead of
the all-encompassing global viewpoint, an individual perspective could
ever suffice. It is true, in frameworks and international mandates in sus-
tainability education, we often find tasks and competence descriptions
that aim at individual action—“would you be willing to pay more money
to eat more organically?”; “would you reconsider international flights for
the sake of local holidays?” and so forth. And yet, such an individualistic
126 Roman Bartosch
view has been criticized, rightly I think, for its depoliticizing, or neolib-
eral, stance. This is because climate change is not (only) the result of indi-
vidual consumer choices but of political and cultural decision making; it
is not just about “humanity as a whole” but about political communities
and their particular agencies such as law- and policy-making. We are,
therefore, confronted again with the tripartite levels of micro-, meso- and
macro-orders of the individual, the social and the global. Scaling now
tells us that there is no need, indeed: no option, to choose one perspective
over the other—all scales are relevant, different, incommensurable to a
certain extent. While it is undoubtedly an important consideration to
think of humanity and its cumulative effect, this perspective has its short-
comings. As many have remarked, it levels out significant differences and
uneven development; it poses great legal and moral challenges when it
comes to responsibilities—and it creates a deadlock: no legislator makes
a move if not every legislator makes a move.
Just as each scale has its particular epistemic affordances, it also has
specific educational and political implications pertaining to agency and
responsibility. Individual action matters—but to reduce responsibility to
consumer choices is reductive and wrong. Political action matters—but
to underestimate the new challenges of a cumulative humanity, a “tragic
environmental Leviathan” (Clark), is reductive and wrong. And while a
focus on this statistical notion of humanity seems necessary and intellec-
tually helpful, to wait for some collective ethical or political awakening
may well end in disaster. This seems to me to be the most important
lesson literature and pedagogy have to offer to the Anthropocene debate:
while fiction goes a long way in staging and helping experience global
complexities, to uncritically embrace the language and mindset of large-
scale, statistical globalism misconstrues the intricacies of both climate
change and literature. One task, therefore, is to pay close attention to
the concept of the “Anthropocene” itself: if it sensitizes people to their
complex scalar enmeshments, it might prove useful indeed. If it further
underlines the globalism of the single big picture of the planetary over
and against other relevant perspectives, we might as well get rid of it.
Notes
1 The discussion of Kingsolver’s novel draws on, and extends, an argument I
have first developed in “Scale, Climate Change, and the Pedagogic Potential
of Literature: Scaling (in) the Work of Barbara Kingsolver and T.C. Boyle”,
published with Open Library of Humanities (2018).
2 See the website “The Ocean Clean-Up,” Accessed March 12, 2019. https://
theoceancleanup.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch/.
3 Readers can however also find more detailed engagements with the ethical
dilemma in Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done (2011).
4 For the role and significance of epiphanic moments in animal stories, see
Bartosch (2017).

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7 Dating the Anthropocene
Philipp Pattberg and Michael Davies-Venn
Introduction
The Anthropocene has become a widely discussed narrative for our
relationship with the natural environment and planet Earth. At its core
stands the idea that the scale and scope of environmental challenges
have significantly broadened and deepened, signifying an epoch of
planetary-scale changes that threaten the very processes—from a stable
climate to biodiversity—on which life on earth in general and human
development in particular are based. Surprisingly, the exact meaning
of the Anthropocene is still widely contested among specialists. As
Pattberg and Zelli (2016, 1) observe “No agreement exists concern-
ing a number of important issues, including the exact start date and
appropriate stratigraphic markers, its normative implications and po-
litical consequences.” Since 2016 and confirmed again in May 2019,
this is starting to change. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)
has confirmed that (1) the Anthropocene should be treated as a formal
chrono-stratigraphic unit defined by a global standard stratotype sec-
tion and point (GSSP); and (2) that the base of the Anthropocene should
be one of the stratigraphic signals around the mid-20th century of the
Common Era (AWG 2019).
In this chapter, we argue that deciding on an appropriate start date and
related marker is more than a technical-administrative act. In this deci-
sion are embedded potentially different narratives of the Anthropocene,
which, depending on the choices made, will shape future governance
and societal debates. In particular and irrespective of the actual formal
decision by the relevant scientific authorities, alternative dates matter,
as they discursively broaden different ideas around the Anthropocene.
Consequently, we analyze five suggested start dates (but see Lewis and
Maslin 2018 for an alternative suggestion) along the following ques-
tions: What golden spike/GSSP is proposed? Which activity caused it?
Who was the main agent behind that activity? What were the immediate
impacts of that activity and how are these impacts evaluated by audi-
ences today? And finally, what possible governance responses are related
to a specific start date?
Dating the Anthropocene 131
The chapter proceeds as follows: first, we describe in more detail the
International Union of Geological Sciences and its International Com-
mission on Stratigraphy along with the Subcommission on Quaternary
Stratigraphy (SQS) and its adjacent Anthropocene Working Group
(AWG), which all have a role to play in deciding on an adequate start
date and related markers for the suggested Anthropocene. We are par-
ticularly interested in procedures, membership, decisions reached to
date and challenges encountered on the way. Section 3 consequently
introduces our argument about narratives and their political meaning
before introducing and scrutinizing five concrete Anthropocene start
dates: (1) Pleistocene fire; (2) early Anthropocene; (3) Orbis hypothesis;
(4) Industrial revolution and (5) Great acceleration. We conclude in Sec-
tion 4 with suggesting overarching narratives to capture each start date,
marker and possible governance implications.
The International Union of Geological Sciences and

Its Central Role in Dating the Anthropocene
Overview of Relevant Scientific Bodies and Processes

Scholars in the geosciences, principally stratigraphers and geologists, de-
cide and define global units used for dating planet Earth. The Interna-
tional Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) exercises ultimate authority
over such geological science through the International Commission on
Stratigraphy (ICS), which has 16 sub commissions, including the SQS.
The latter is concerned with the geological time scale of the past 2.7 mil-
lion years to date, as opposed to other sub commissions, such as Jurassic
stratigraphy, which is focused on specific geological periods. The ICS reg-
ularly meets during the quadrennial International Geological Congress,
the IUGS’ main scientific forum (IUGS 2016), held around the world
since 1878. The next congress is scheduled for 2024 in Busan, Korea.
With about a million scientists from some 120 countries, the In-
ternational Union of Geological Sciences is one of the world’s largest
scientific organizations. The IUGS was founded in 1961 in order to co-
ordinate better international geoscientific research (IUGS 2016). As a
global scientific body, it puts emphasis on its international scope in its
aim to “unite the global geological community” by contributing to sci-
entific studies, the results of which are applied “to sustain Earth’s nat-
ural environment”; promote education, awareness and participation in
geoscience. It seeks also to facilitate and encourage “from all parts of
the world” interaction and participation among and between scientists
“regardless of race, citizenship, language, political stance or gender”
(ibid.). The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) is one of
seven IUGS commissions with explicit aim to coordinate “long-term in-
ternational cooperative investigations” (ibid.).
132 Philipp Pattberg and Michael Davies-Venn
The statutory purpose of ICS “is to promote international cooperation
in stratigraphy” (Cowie et al. 1986, 11). Its governance structure in-
cludes an Executive Committee and the 16 chairs of its sub commissions.
These make up the Voting Commission, which represents the entire field
of stratigraphy (Cowie et al. 1986) and the IUGS. Sub commissions, cre-
ated after a ballot by ICS Voting Members and ratification by the IUGS
Executive Committee, undertake scientific work of the ICS. This in-
cludes “standardization of stratigraphic units, documentation and com-
munication of major stratigraphic data and international stratigraphic
cooperation” (ICS 2017). One important output is the development and
publication of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart. The ICS
Executive Committee or sub commissions—for example the Subcom-
mission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS)—have the right to establish
Working Groups to conduct “short-term scientific” tasks for up to eight
years (ibid.). “Critical scientific issues” (ibid.) within sub commissions
and working groups are resolved by ballot.
Unlike other sub commissions within the ICS that study specific geo-
logical times, the SQS is unique in its focus on the planet’s “geological
column” (SQS, n.d.) or Quaternary, covering the past 2.7 million years
to the present day. But like its umbrella groups, the scope of its science
must be international. Thus, guided by the ICS statutory scientific goals,
the SQS tasks include establishing formal and standardized stratigraphic
scales, organizing and coordinating global stratigraphic scientific knowl-
edge, evaluating and integrating new methods into multidisciplinary
stratigraphy and defining and classifying stratigraphic principles, terms
and procedures (SQS, n.d.). The SQS produces the global chronostrati-
graphical correlation table. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)
is one of four Working Groups presently working within the SQS.
The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)

A key expected outcome of the scientific work of the AWG is that the
proposed Anthropocene concept may literally change the geological
time scale. But for that to happen, the concept must pass rigorous and
critical scientific analysis and bureaucratic procedures, starting at the
AWG and ending at the IUGS. In 2009, the AWG was established to
critically “examine the status, hierarchical level and definition of the
Anthropocene as a potential new formal division of the Geological Time
Scale” (AWG 2009, 1). Further, the AWG must identify a Global Bound-
ary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), that may be used for dating
the Anthropocene. “The correctly selected GSSP gives an actual point in
rock and is not an abstract concept—all other methods can prove to be
diachronic” (Cowie et al. 1986, 5). This point must exist in a “specific
geographical location” (ibid.). Six requirements must be met for a GSSP
to be accepted by the ICS and subsequently ratified by the IUGS. In the
words of Cowie and colleagues (7): “One of the main aims of the bound-
ary stratotype procedure of lCS is to attain a common language of stra-
tigraphy that will serve geologists worldwide and avoid the dissipation
of energy in petty argument and unproductive controversy.” The group’s
tasks should be completed in consistence with rules and procedures at
the ICS and IUGS. We will now briefly discuss AWG membership, spe-
cific challenges to its mandate and outcomes to date.
Membership
The AWG membership fluctuated throughout, from 16 in 2009 to 44 in
2018 (AWG 2018). The group is “ideally to be composed of Earth scien-
tists with worldwide representation” and with “deep time stratigraphic
history” (AWG 2009, 1). The chair of SQS, AWG’s sub-commission,
“suggested” the group’s leader, who administer the AWG along with
a secretary. The secretary was selected for “practical reasons” because
the offices of both officers are “next door” to each other. Members were
informed that “these roles will rotate among the Working Group over
time” (AWG 2009, 3). This never happened with the chair’s position, a
new secretary was named. But this did not change the leadership of the
group which remains in the UK (AWG 2011).
Throughout the years, the AWG’s global representation was primarily
limited to the Global North. Fifty percent of AWG founding members
are from the UK, which maintains a majority membership to date. The
next largest group is from the US, with Germany, Switzerland, France
and Canada following with two members each. And Norway, Spain,
Austria, Australia and Poland each with a single member. Representa-
tion from the Global South was from Asia, South America and Africa:
One member from China, two from Brazil, and two from the continent
of Africa, one each from Kenya and South Africa. What little geographic
diversity the AWG had was reduced by 2018 after a member from Brazil
left the group. And despite the AWG’s ultimate parent body, the IUGS
having worldwide membership, through its Adhering Organizations in
26 African countries (IUGS 2019), representation of the continent in the
AWG was reduced to one, following departure of a member from South
Africa. Two members from the US and five from the UK leaving did not
reduce the latter’s dominant membership within the AWG.
For a group tasked with considering the possibility of how impacts
from human activities may have transformed the planet, it carried out
its mandate with seeming tremendous lack of foresight, indicative in
the small diversity of disciplines in the AWG membership. For exam-
ple, scholars from anthropology, arts or sociology were not represented
in the beginning. Within a decade after the AWG was established, it
became clear that the Anthropocene concept has wider implications
beyond stratigraphy, not least because it differs from the Holocene.
“The scale and rate of recent and contemporary geological change—is
clearly of considerable significance to both science and society” (AWG
2013, 2). Subsequently, “evidence from, and collaboration with, sources
from outside our membership” (AWG 2013, 3) were sought. But despite
the “extraordinary interest in the Anthropocene concept, from both
within the Earth sciences (writ large) and beyond it,” (AWG 2013, 2)
and the “multi-dimensional” (AWG 2014) context of a term that “is
being found widely useful,” (AWG 2013, 2) to the point of what “one
might term ‘Anthropocene studies’” (AWG 2014, 2), the diversity of dis-
ciplines in the AWG’s membership did not significantly change in a de-
cade. It was, as it is today, primarily constituted of geoscientists, such as
geologists, palaeobiologists and palaeontologists. Subsequently, five-sub
groups established within the AWG studied topics in relation to the An-
thropocene from those disciplines. These included, lithostratigraphic and
biostratigraphic signals, global sea level trends and chemostratigraphy
(AWG 2010, 6). Nevertheless, the group’s summary evidence and recom-
mendation on the Anthropocene claims, “from the beginning, the AWG
represented a broader community than is typical of ICS working groups”
(Zalasiewicz et al. 2017, 56). This alleged change, from being dominated
by “mostly or entirely of stratigraphers and palaeontologists,” common
to other ICS groups, afforded the AWG a “breadth of expertise” that
reflects the potential diverse utility of the Anthropocene (ibid.).
The diversity of expertise in the AWG was anything but broad. Be-
tween 2009 and 2018, the AWG had one journalist, an archaeologist,
a botanist specializing in plant physiology, two historians, and one law
and international governance scholar. By 2018, the botanist had left, as
did the journalist and archaeologist. And it appears replacements are not
meant to improve on disciplinary diversity of the group. New members
are being sought to fill “specialisms not currently covered by the group
that are necessary for analyzing proxy marker” (AWG 2018, 24).
The gender constituent of the AWG is inconsistent with the aim of the
group’s ultimate parent body, the IUGS, which fosters among other mod-
ern values, non-gendered interaction among and between scientists. With
only eight women members between 2009 and 2018, it cannot be credibly
suggested that gender equity in the AWG membership was a desired pri-
ority. And of these, none served in the group’s leadership positions.
In the beginning, a plant botanist from South Africa, who has since
left, was the only female scientist. Four others joined in 2013, which saw
the largest increase of female scientists to the AWG, four years after the
group was established. Of these, three were geoscientists and an archae-
ologist. The following year, two more geoscientists joined, along with
an historian. Under-representation of the Global South within the AWG
is also observed among female members, who are predominantly from
Europe, including two from the UK, one of whom has also left. Only one
female scientist from the south remains, a Brazilian.
The scientific case for the Anthropocene by the AWG was primarily
made in three British publications. The Royal Society of Great Britain
“accepted a proposal for a thematic set of papers on the Anthropo-
cene” (AWG 2009, 5) that was published in 2011, “The Anthropo-
cene: a new epoch of geological time?” (Zalasiewicz et al. 2011). The
Royal Society of London published A Stratigraphical Basis for the
Anthropocene (C. N. Waters et al. 2014) “the results of this exercise
should feed usefully into our discussions” (AWG 2009, 6). And The
Anthropocene as a geological time unit, A Guide to the Scientific
Evidence and Current Debate (Zalasiewicz, Waters, Williams, et al.
2019), which summarizes “evidence” for the Anthropocene (AWG
2014, 4) and will “form the basis for the AWG’s submission to the
ICS” (AWG 2015, 11). Published in 2019 by Cambridge University
Press, the almost 300-page volume of this latter work, was, as were
the previous two key publications, edited by the group’s chair, along
with other UK members.
As early as February 2008, the AWG chair had argued that the An-
thropocene is distinct from the Holocene: “recent assessment by the
Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London […]
suggested a case for formally incorporating the term into the Geo-
logical Time Scale” (AWG 2009, 1). That assessment was made in a
co-authored paper, published by the Geological Society of America.
The authors argued that “Earth has endured changes sufficient to
leave a global stratigraphic signature distinct from that of the Holo-
cene or of previous Pleistocene interglacial phases” (Zalasiewicz et al.
2008, 4). These included “novel biotic, sedimentary, and geochem-
ical change” (ibid.), dating back to the Industrial Revolution. The
changes are assessed as “sufficiently distinct and robustly established
for suggestions of a Holocene Anthropocene boundary in the recent
historical past to be geologically reasonable” (ibid.).
Scientific contributions to the three major AWG publications mir-
ror the gender bias of the group membership. Of the three publica-
tions that assembled the scientific evidence in support of studying
the Anthropocene, contributions came from only half the group of
female scientists, all of whom are geoscientists from Europe. The first
publication had no female contributor, the second only one and the
third saw contributions from three female scientists. A record that
hardly reflects the IUGS’s ambition to promote interaction and par-
ticipation among scientists irrespective of gender. Based on the ma-
jor works from the group, the case for the Anthropocene appears to
have been made without significant scientific contributions from the
Global South, regardless of gender. Only one scholar, from China,
contributed to just one of the three works, an observation that does
not support an aim of the IUGS, to facilitate and encourage global
participation.
Challenges for the AWG
The AWG mandate is challenging for several reasons. First, scientific
evidence for the Anthropocene, the so-called “Geology of mankind”
(Crutzen 2002, 23), cannot be found only in ice-cores or rock sediments
but in other places as well. Relatedly, time is continuous, as is exem-
plified in over-lapping geological boundaries. For example, within the
present Holocene epoch, which represents the “uppermost chronostrati-
graphic unit,” three boundaries, Greenlandian, Northgrippian and Me-
ghalayan, are identified and were ratified in June 2018 (Walker et al.
2018, 213). Second, the AWG must provide scientific answers to complex
questions with varied societal implications, a task compounded by an
ever-growing global interest in the Anthropocene concept, within and
outside academia. For examples, the AWG “has been particularly suc-
cessful in obtaining funding owing to the high visibility of the Anthropo-
cene topic” (ICS 2018), for example the Spanish Ministry of Education
financing a three-year project, Anthropocene sedimentary record in the
Cantabrian coastal environments (Antropicosta) (AWG 2014, 12). And
numerous new journals that have emerged in response to the proposed
concept, including Quaternary, Anthropocene, Elementa—Science of the
Anthropocene, The Anthropocene and The Anthropocene Review, are
also evidence of the broad interest in the concept beyond stratigraphy.
Furthermore, it is not readily discernible whether the group has been fo-
cused on its scientific purpose to “critically consider the case for a formal
Anthropocene” (AWG 2009, 1), or, whether some members have instead
been advancing arguments for formal recognition of the concept. The
group’s mandate requires members to decide the hierarchy, or level, of the
proposed concept, for example, whether the Anthropocene is categorized
as an Epoch, Era, or Age. Hope was expressed that group members would
reach “some consensus” within four years on “whether or not to formal-
ize the Anthropocene and, if so, at what level” (AWG 2013, 7). But years
before making public its “interim report,” the AWG chair informed mem-
bers that “we are considering it as a potential Epoch” (AWG 2013, 2). It
is not clear why or when this “working hypothesis,” which aimed to put
the group in “sharp focus” (AWG 2013, 2), was abandoned. Years before
members in 2016 voted on whether the concept should be treated as a
chronostratigraphic unit, a necessary step before selecting and voting on
a GSSP, the decision on whether to consider the concept for formalization
seemed a foregone conclusion. Members were informed prior to the ballot
in Cape Town, in 2016, that better understanding of the “the anthropo-
genic signal” which is complex “in time and space” will help select po-
tential candidates for the beginning of the Anthropocene (AWG 2013, 7).
“This aspect has been highlighted in the NERC IOF grant application (see
above) with emphasis on ‘mapping the Anthropocene’; the GLOBE work
of Erle Ellis (see above) will also help advance knowledge here.”
Coalescing divergent views is another challenge within the AWG. Five
years after it was established, the AWG chair recognized that the public
interest in the Anthropocene (beyond the narrow academy) makes com-
bining “scientific rigor” with “accessibility” a difficult task “but one
that we can collectively manage” (AWG 2014, 19). Group members were
informed that “the Anthropocene is still a young concept, with much to
develop both in its ‘narrow’ stratographic analysis” and in relation to
other studies and communities. (AWG 2015, 3).
Around 2013, “strengthened consensus,” though certainly not una-
nimity, was reached within the group. Those members who agreed to the
group’s provisional scientific conclusions accepted the following; that
the Anthropocene is real as a stratigraphically, different from the Ho-
locene; that a specific global marker dating from the mid-20th century
exists; and that it can be formalized as an Epoch (AWG 2015, 2). This
paved way for the next task for group members who were then asked to
contemplate again the ever-pressing and difficult question on the start
date of the Anthropocene (AWG 2014).
Outcomes
The AWG met four times between 2009 and 2017. First, during a three-
day AWG conference in Berlin in October, 2014, where the concept
“gain[ed] coherence” among stratigraphers (AWG 2015, 2). At this inau-
gural meeting, members were confronted with old and new questions that
never strayed far from the dominant disciplinary constitution of the group,
including some that cast doubts on the usefulness of the AWG. “What is
the relative value of formalizing the ‘Anthropocene’ chronostratigraphic/
geochronological unit as opposed to leaving it as an informal term?” Could
there be, worldwide, “a well-documented and significant stratigraphic re-
cord for the ‘Anthropocene?’” Members further contemplated defining a
base, with choices between “a physical reference section (‘golden spike’ or
GSSP) or in terms of a numerical date (GSSA)” and whether the Anthropo-
cene is “a unit of Earth history or human history?” (AWG 2015, 4).
Concerning a possible “hierarchy” of the Anthropocene, members
only contemplated whether it should be an Epoch or Age. For the “Early
Anthropocene,” “Industrial Revolution,” and “Great Acceleration” (see
below for more detail), dates were considered (AWG 2015). Some AWG
members consider the latter date “a pronounced and sharp threshold in
human modification of the global environment” (AWG 2015, 5)—a view
clearly not shared by other AWG members. Whereas climate change is
generally understood outside academia as evidence of the Anthropo-
cene, the observation that “modern climate has barely increased in its
mean temperature by close to 1°C” (AWG 2015, 5) was used to question
whether there is “a connection—a signal—of climate change in the evi-
dence base for the Anthropocene?” (AWG 2015, 5).
The second group meeting was held at Cambridge, UK, and was at-
tended only by AWG members from the Global North. Majority in at-
tendance were UK founding members, followed by those from the US,
with members from Germany, Norway and Australia. Three others
who never joined the group also attended. Deliberations were focused
mainly on topics in geology but the outcome was “widely regarded
as a considerable success” (AWG 2015, 1). Just four months before
the AWG submitted its preliminary findings to the ICS, at the AWG’s
third meeting in Norway in April 2016, members were still rejecting
a key task of the group, to scientifically assess whether the Anthropo-
cene could be formally recognized as a geological unit (AWG 2017).
They also raised questions on issues that some within the group may
have taken for granted, such as “key signals” to use, potential GSSP
locations, and on the “societal (political) relevance of the Anthro-
pocene” (AWG 2017). Again, the disciplinary focus excluded schol-
ars from the humanities and social sciences, even though the group’s
chair, acknowledged “our many colleagues beyond the AWG, whose
work has been so helpful to advancing the study of the Anthropocene”
(AWG 2017, 3).
The International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa,
in August 2016, marked the “end of one era for the AWG.” (AWG 2017,
3). The AWG secretary, who earlier proposed in Berlin the “Great Accel-
eration” hypothesis, presented the group’s “main preliminary findings”
and “interim recommendations” after members voted (AWG 2017). It
was agreed that “the Anthropocene possesses geological reality”; that it
is best considered at epoch/series level; that it is best defined beginning
in the mid-20th century with the “Great Acceleration”; that it should be
defined by a GSSP (“golden spike”) and for a “formal proposal to for-
ward for consideration, initially, to the Subcommission of Quaternary
Stratigraphy” (AWG 2017, 3).
But the Great Acceleration hypothesis (see also below for more de-
tails) was challenged at the same meeting in Cape Town where the group
presented its “consensus statement,” by an AWG member who provided
“evidence of a pre-Industrial Revolution metal smelting signal” (AWG
2017, 13). As well, the still disputed but accepted Great Acceleration
hypothesis does not appear to have settled questions on “the primary
signal” or “marker” to define the Anthropocene. The group remained
divided over that issue (AWG 2017, 3). However, according to the AWG,
the globally distributed signature of the nuclear “bomb spike” of the
1950s and early 1960s seems to be the most promising candidate (AWG
2017, 3). But where on Earth exactly the “spike” or “GSSP environ-
ments” can be found remains unanswered. In its 2018 report to the
IUGS, the ICS mentioned a marine site in China and “meromictic varved
deposits” in Crawford Lake, Southern Ontario, in Canada, as two “pro-
spective GSSP sites” for dating the Anthropocene (ICS 2018).
Despite reaching some key conclusions in the 2016 meeting in South
Africa that concluded “the Anthropocene possesses geological reality”
(AWG 2017, 3), deep divisions remained. Thus, following that meeting,
the SQS and ICS provided “guidance” (AWG/SQS, n.d.) to the AWG,
and subsequently a second ballot was held “to affirm some of the key
questions that were voted on and agreed at the IGC Cape Town meeting
in 2016.” (AWG/SQS, n.d.) Two questions were placed on the ballot:
“should the Anthropocene be treated as a formal chrono-stratigraphic
unit defined by a GSSP” (AWG/SQS n.d.), “should the primary guide for
the base of the Anthropocene be one of the stratigraphic signals around
the mid-20th century of the Common Era?” (AWG/SQS, n.d.). With
97% of members responding, the results of the binding vote on both
questions were consistently the same; 29 members voted in favor and 4
against (AWG/SQS, n.d.). The required 60% threshold rule was reached,
and the Anthropocene concept was saved. Meanwhile, the AWG was un-
successful in its application to the Belmont Forum for funds to conduct
“multi-proxy analysis of candidate GSSP localities” (AWG 2017, 5).
Why Different Suggested Start Dates Matter: Analyzing

Political Narratives of the Anthropocene
Deciding on the geological time of planet Earth has been primarily an
intra-disciplinary process within the geosciences. However, in case of the
Anthropocene, the debate has become much broader, also incorporating
non-geological and non-academic inputs. It has taken a decade, since its
establishment, for the AWG to agree to formally study the Anthropocene
for possible formal addition to the geological time scale. Meanwhile, de-
bates on dating the Anthropocene have not abated. Several hypotheses
have been suggested. Some span (Certini and Scalenghe 2011) the orig-
inally suggested date—the “latter part of the 18th century,”— (Crutzen
and Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002) others overlap with other dates,
while others again have been proposed and roundly rejected (Steffen
et al. 2011; Balter 2013; Marlon et al. 2013; Lewis and Maslin 2015),
within and across disciplines (Vidas 2010; Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2014;
Abrams and Nowacki 2015). For examples, a philosophical argument
proposes an indefinite deferment on formally dating the Anthropocene
because “extant geological changes don’t reach the thresholds neces-
sary to define a new epoch” (Santana 2018, 6), while others defend the
concept as distinct from its “anthropogenic counterparts” (Zalasiewicz
et al. 2019, 2).
Given the centrality of human activities in the Anthropocene, each
proposal on the question when humans have begun to transform the
physical and atmospheric structures of the planet has political implica-
tions. To be more precise, each respective start date, whether selected
or rejected by the official geosciences, supports and enables specific
narratives surrounding governance in the Anthropocene. While select-
ing a global “golden spike” seems apolitical, deciding on a start date for
the Anthropocene, and thereby rejecting others, is potentially deeply po-
litical. Five key factors play a role in narrating the Anthropocene raising
the following questions: What golden spike/GSSP is proposed? Which
human activity or activities caused it? Who were the main agents? What
were the immediate impacts of the activities and how are these impacts
evaluated today? And finally, what responses flow narratively from each
proposed start date? We will analyze these five factors as they relate to
each suggested start date. Consequently, our aim is to identify a broader
narrative that encompasses the Anthropocene start date in question and
to discuss the hypothetical political implications. We analyze the follow-
ing suggested Anthropocene start dates: (1) Paleoanthropocene and fire;
(2) early Anthropocene; (3) Orbis hypothesis; (4) Industrial revolution;
and (5) Great Acceleration.
Paloeanthropocene and Fire

The method-specific “Early Anthropocene burning hypothesis” (Abrams
and Nowacki 2015, 30), also referred to as the Paleoanthropocene, pos-
its that “anthropogenic fire has been a factor in shaping plant commu-
nities through human prehistory” (Pinter et al. 2011, 269). Fire and its
ignition “have rendered Homo a unique genus from the minimum age
of >1.8 million years (Ma) ago, regarded as a turning point in biological
evolution and termed here Early Anthropocene” (Glikson 2013, 89). It
is suggested that human-induced abrupt climatic changes started during
the last glacial-interglacial transition, between 15 and 12 thousand years
before the present (Marlon et al. 2009, 2519). Evidence includes “clear
links between large climate changes and fire activity” (ibid.), “rapid de-
cline of rainforest gymnosperms” fauna and so-called megaherbivores
extinctions along with “devegetation” (Pinter et al. 2011, 269), and
“lack of lightning ignitions for most of the eastern US” (Abrams and
Nowacki 2015, 44). The latter suggests that fire in this region results
from human activities. Finally, global “charcoal records” (Marlon et al.
2013, 9) show that “novel anthropogenic sources of ignition,” used by
small groups such as hunter gatherers, have transformed landscapes and
ecosystems globally (Pinter et al. 2011, 270).
In this narrative, the Anthropocene is no longer different from the
Holocene. What has become its unique signifier, the transformative
impacts of human agency on a planetary scale, is projected back to the
beginnings of mankind. If humans have arguably changed Earth since
they managed to discover and control fire, then our current predica-
ment is nothing else than human nature. One implication is that it, then,
may not be geologically possible, given the requirements for effecting
changes to the geological time scale, to formalize the Anthropocene.
In terms of governance, the paleoanthropocene hypothesis supports
arguments that humanity is able to manage human-environment inter-
actions on a planetary scale, because this ability has developed gradu-
ally over time.
Early Anthropocene
The “Early Anthropocene” hypothesis (Ruddiman 2003) claims that
agriculture and technological innovations 8,000 years ago marks the
start of the Anthropocene. Ruddiman argues that there was a rise in
CO2 and CH4 emissions between 8000 BP and 1800 AD, resulting
from “deforestation by humans” that was helped by “innovations in
agriculture” (273). Additional evidence is culled from megafauna ex-
tinction during the Pleistocene, in which humans “played a significant
role” (Steffen et al. 2011) with evidence having been found in 28 sites
on the Australian continent (Roberts 2001, 1888), in North America
from “random hunting, and low maximum hunting,” which also con-
tributed to mass megafauna extinction (Alroy 2001, 1893), and from
the development of irrigated rice cultivation about 5,000 years ago
(Steffen et al. 2011, 847).
Other suggestions for Anthropocene start dates that qualify as early
include the “Anthropocene soil” hypothesis (Certini and Scalenghe
2011), which suggests to use widespread changes in the pedosphere to
mark the beginning of the Anthropocene around 2000 years ago, and
suggestions for using early mining and smelting signals, using possi-
ble peak lead pollution in the Northern hemisphere staring some 7000
years ago as a marker (Radivojevic et al. 2010). Other studies again have
identified large-scale Greek-Roman lead-silver smelting activities as the
probable cause of a fourfold Pb increase between 2500 BC and 1700 that
significantly departs from earlier minimal natural increases (Hong et al.
1994, 1842).
In this narrative, the start of the Anthropocene coincides with the
emergence of social, cultural and technical transformations that we of-
ten equate with civilization: the beginnings of agriculture, sedentary
lifestyles and early urban cultures. Surplus energy generated by farming
resulted in greater societal division of labor, specializations, arts and
culture and the scientific enterprise. Agents of this early Anthropocene
are the early advanced civilizations who managed to maintain politi-
cal order over larger territories for longer time periods. Like the paleo-
anthropocene but different from all other suggested dates, the “Early
Anthropocene” seems the most positive in its implied balance between
impacts and gains. Consequently, governance might be understood as
unnecessary, as the Anthropocene is tangent to evolution of human civ-
ilization and progress toward higher forms of development, notably so-
cial, technological and cultural.
Orbis Spike
An intermediate position between the early anthropogenic hypothesis and
the great acceleration hypothesis is taken by Lewis and Maslin (2015)
who propose the noticeable decline in atmospheric CO2 concentrations
between 1570 and 1620 as a good marker for the start of the Anthropo-
cene. On this account, the European expansion into the Americas resulted
in the death of some 50 million indigenous people by 1650, triggering a
re-growth of abandoned agricultural lands and causing a measurable de-
crease in CO2 concentrations. The widespread death of indigenous people
in the Americas induced two related outcomes with severe atmospheric
impact: first, near-cessation of farming and reduction in the use of fire;
and second, the regeneration of over 50 million hectares of forest (175).
These events contributed to a “swift, ongoing, radical reorganization of
life on Earth without geological precedent” (174), such as reduced atmo-
spheric C02 concentrations of 7–10 ppm between 1570 and 1620 (175).
The “Orbis hypothesis” is interesting from a social sciences perspec-
tive, as the observed atmospheric changes coincide with the emergence
of the capitalist world system in general (Wallerstein 1974) and the
emergence of the plantation system more specifically (Haraway 2015).
The meeting of European and American cultures and the related decline
in atmospheric CO2 concentrations (with the start of CO2 reduction
in 1610 as a possible marker) illustrate a complex and unpredictable
outcome of human-nature interactions. Agents in this story are the Eu-
ropean explorers and by extension, early-modern European capitalist
dynasties (see also Moore 2017 on the Anthropocene as Capitalocene).
The direct outcomes include death and destruction, and a broader sys-
temic impact was the emergence of an unequal global capitalist system
that has by and large maintained its structure.
Unlike the other narratives, the Orbis hypothesis evokes questions of
global justice and inequity, and projects the Anthropocene consequently,
first and foremost, as a social phenomenon. The Orbis hypothesis offers
a promising opportunity to properly address the challenges of global
environmental change. Governance emanating from this interpretation
might address global power inequalities, principally between developing
and developed regions, much more centrally than more techno-optimist
narratives such as the Great Acceleration. In addition, the differentiated
nature of responsibility becomes more visible in this narrative, aligning
with postcolonial studies, which also do not imply a collective “we” as
agency in the Anthropocene but emphasize a diverse and differentiated
humankind (Dürbeck 2019).
Industrial Revolution
In their original proposal of the Anthropocene, Crutzen and Stoermer
(2007, 17) suggest the early Industrial Revolution as an appropriate start
date. In their own words: “To assign a more specific date to the onset of
the Anthropocene seems somewhat arbitrary, but we propose the latter
part of the 18th century.” A combination of political and economic fac-
tors and their interactions contributed to stimulating geological changes
on the planet. A global “growing energy bottleneck” (Steffen et al.
2011, 848) is at the core of this interaction. The discovery of fossil fuels
allowed a sharp increase of human energy use, such that “industrial
societies used four or five times as much energy as their agrarian prede-
cessors, who in turn used three or four times as much as our hunting and
gathering forebears” (ibid.). Population growth from about one billion
to six billion within 200 years, surface land use increases from about
ten to about 25–30%, and rise in greenhouse gases are all evidence to
support this theory. Whereas as the industrial revolution theory does not
propose a specific date, “the year AD 1800 could reasonably be chosen
as the beginning of the Anthropocene” (849). While a concrete GSSP is
difficult to find, suggestions have also included the year 1750, often used
to mark the so-called pre-industrial average of greenhouse gas concen-
trations and mean temperature.
The Industrial Revolution narrative is essentially one of fossil fuel
extraction. Consequently, the agents in this story are the early indus-
trializing countries of the European heartland and the implications are
largely synonymous with global warming. As the consequences of cli-
mate change are feared by societies around the globe, and are becoming
increasingly visible, the Industrial Revolution start date arguably entails
the strongest call for immediate action to halt the negative development
which started with the Industrial Revolution in England. Given that its
impact cannot reasonably be divorced from climate change, impacts of
the Industrial Revolution also invariably introduces notions of climate
justice and (in)equity. Governance in an Industrial Revolution Anthropo-
cene would probably evolve around drastic, sustained and system-wide
mitigation and adaptation measures that should have transformative im-
pacts, and normatively around ideas of responsibility and compensation
(with the 2015 Paris Agreement as a blueprint).
Great Acceleration
At first glance, the “Great Acceleration” seems as an extension and
radicalization of the Industrial Revolution and as such shares similar
indicators. However, with its focus on the nuclear age of hyper con-
sumption, it weaves a different narrative. The “Great Acceleration” is
commonly understood to span the period 1945 to 2000+ (Steffen et al.
2011). The period is marked by increases at different scales, in popula-
tion, from “3 to 6 billion in just 50 years” (849), economic activities,
globalization, scientific knowledge, technological innovation, motor
vehicles, international travel, consumption, environmental pollution,
particularly CO2 emissions, economic growth and related stimulants
such as public-private partnerships with academia, industry and govern-
ments, electronic communication and urban growth. Often understood
as indicators of human progress, these rapid changes have moved the
Earth system “outside the envelope of Holocene variability” (850). For
example, intensified agricultural practiced on a mass scale since the past
century, in response to growing global demand for food, has severely
damaged “the nitrogen economy of the planet [that] will persist for de-
cades, possibly centuries” (Canfield et al. 2010, 192).
The most successful candidate for conclusive evidence is the “signal
provided by the 1950s rise in radiocarbon caused by atmospheric nu-
clear tests” (Fairchild and Frisia 2014, 239). A tongue-in-cheek sug-
gestion for 1969 as a potential golden spike by an astrobiologist also
underscores the techno-rational characteristic of the Great Acceleration.
“Mare Tranquillitatis where Apollo astronauts first stepped onto an-
other world,” and left “man-made” objects is a suggested “golden spike”
(Grinspoon 2016). These artefacts have arguably altered the landscape
and “will be detectable for as long as there is an Earth and a Moon”
(ibid.). Both proposals for a marker, the nuclear and the lunar, point to
techno-optimist man as the agent behind the Anthropocene.
The impacts of the observed behavioral patterns (economic ratio-
nalization and growth, globalization and integration) are decidedly
Janus-faced. Signifying progress on the one hand, the Great Acceleration
has, on the other, led to a transgression of several of Earth’s planetary
boundaries (Rockström et al. 2009). Consequently, normative assess-
ments of a Great Acceleration Anthropocene remain multi-faceted. Nu-
clear technology (both military and industrial) might be seen critical
in some places and by some actors (see for example Latour 2012 on
the ecomodernist narrative). However, globally, nuclear technology has
had a renaissance of its own. This observation is an important reminder
for those contemplating the governance of the Great Acceleration. In-
stead of a narrative of despair and human failure, proponents of the
so-called “Good Anthropocene” point to potential unique opportuni-
ties that global-scale human management of the Earth System might
bring. On this account, staying within the planetary boundaries and
possibly re-engineering the Holocene will be realized with the same
techno-optimist mind-set that brought about the Great Acceleration.
Conclusion
The concept “Anthropocene,” describing system-wide impacts of hu-
man activities on the Earth system and the related changes to these sys-
tems. Scientists have observed, among others, increase in erosion and
sediment transport, abrupt changes in the cycles of elements such as
carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals together with new
chemical compounds, environmental changes generated by these per-
turbations (e.g., sea-level rise and ocean acidification), rapid biodiver-
sity loss both on land and in the sea, and the global distribution of
anthropogenic materials, including concrete, plastics and “the myriad
‘technofossils’ produced from these and other materials” (AWG 2019).
Against this background, geoscientists are currently debating the An-
thropocene as a new official part of the geological time scale. The AWG
has made a recommendation to accept the Anthropocene as a formal
chrono-stratigraphic unit defined by a GSSP, and to use stratigraphic ev-
idence from mid-20th century. Notwithstanding this development, other
start dates have been suggested throughout the last years. We assume
that these suggested start dates of the Anthropocene are political via the
broader narratives they are embedded in.
Consequently, in this contribution, we have discussed five possible start
dates for the Anthropocene -Paleoanthropocene and fire; early Anthro-
pocene; Orbis hypothesis; Industrial Revolution; Great Acceleration—
with a view toward identifying the underlying narratives surrounding
each suggested date along with possible global governance implications.
Our core argument is that specific narratives emerging around the start
dates are political and include political implications, irrespective of their
chances of being officially accepted or rejected by the AWG, the ICS and
IUGS. We will briefly summarize these narratives and political implica-
tions here.
A Paleoanthropocene narrative refers to a more gradual understanding
of human-environment interactions and the argument that the Anthro-
pocene coincides with the arrival of modern humans. A benign Anthro-
pocene narrative would include the parallel development of agriculture,
high civilizations and increased system-wide impacts (such as increase in
Pb levels), while focusing on important benefits such as progress toward
higher forms of development, notably social, technological and cultural.
A Colonial Anthropocene would rather focus on negative consequences
such as inequalities and global power-differentials in the form of global
trade and colonialism. On this account, the Anthropocene signifies not
only human domination of nature, but also human domination by hu-
mans. The fossil Anthropocene is largely focused on carbon as the main
signifier of planetary change and climate change as its possible disrup-
tive impact. Finally, a Nuclear Anthropocene is narrated via the Great
Acceleration trope and suggest the ultimate techno-rational signifier,
nuclear weapons and resulting radioactivity, as an appropriate marker.
It is likely to assume that the IUGS will decide on accepting the An-
thropocene as part of the geological time scale before 2025. However,
irrespective of this decision, the societal discourse on the Anthropocene,
its significance, its agency and responsibility, and eventually its gover-
nance, is in full motion (Biermann and Lövbrand 2019). In this contri-
bution, we have outlined the institutional and procedural conditions for
“dating the Anthropocene,” discussed various suggested start dates and
evaluated these with a view toward governance implications. We hope
that this approach contributes to a critical analysis of the Anthropocene
concept beyond its official status as a geoscientific concept.
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8 When Humans Become Nature
Bernd Scherer
Engineers and designers make the world. Intellectuals think about the
world. Over recent decades these two processes have been drifting apart
at an increasing rate. While the main instrument of thought employed
within the humanities was deconstruction, the engineers and designers
were primarily engaged in constructing new worlds. While the former in-
creasingly lost sight of the material world, the material hyper-production
of ever new generations of technology was largely removed from any
critical reflection of their societal impacts. This separation must be
overcome, since it precludes any thorough understanding of life in the
Anthropocene.
In the fall of 2017, at a conference on cosmism at the Haus der
Kulturen der Welt shortly after the hurricane season in the US, artist
Hito Steyerl pointed to a seemingly paradoxical situation, by asking:
“Where is ground control?” Her answer was: “Houston, Texas.” For
Steyerl, the city then flooded by hurricane Harvey, illustrates a fun-
damental problem. Houston is the location of the Mission Control
Center, which coordinates NASA’s manned space flights and also the
center of the oil industry, which fueled the 20th century like no other.
And in September 2017, this entire world with its highly sophisticated
technological and scientific infrastructure was put out of action by a
storm, the size of which, in all probability, was the consequence of
global warming, which itself is a product of this technical-industrial
“Houston System.”
How did it come to this? The answer to this question takes us to
a location close to Mexico City at the turn of the millennium. It was
here that earth system scientists met for a conference of the Interna-
tional Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP). Talk repeatedly re-
turned to the Holocene, officially our contemporary geological epoch,
when Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist largely responsible for
explaining ozone (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize) sud-
denly stood up and said: “Stop using the word Holocene! We’re not in
the Holocene anymore. We’re in the…the…the Anthropocene!” Crut-
zen was clearly searching for words when delivering this final sentence
(Davies 2016, 42).
When Humans Become Nature 151
What had happened? What occasioned one of the most important
scientists of our age to struggle for words and then suddenly proclaim
a new epoch? A few years after this incident, scientists from the IGBP
presented curve diagrams depicting essential parameters of the earth
system: from population growth and the rise in gross domestic prod-
uct, to the construction of dams, water consumption, the increase in
the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and plastic pro-
duction, to the shrinking of rain forests and biodiversity in general. All
these curves have a similar shape: beginning in the middle of the 20th
century, they rise suddenly and steeply. These so-called hockey curves
point to a dramatic development. Earth system scientists refer to this as
the “Great Acceleration.” As all these curves can be traced back to de-
velopments triggered by humans, by the “Anthropos,” Crutzen’s choice
of word seems to have been validated (Zalasiewicz et al. 2019). And it is
the task of the Anthropocene Working Group to formalize the concept
of the Anthropocene in scientific terms.
Humans have become geological agents very recently in human his-

tory. In that sense, we can say that it is only very recently that the
distinction between human and natural histories—much of which
had been preserved even in environmental histories that saw the two
entities in interaction—has begun to collapse.
(Chakrabarty 2009, 207)
What made it possible for humans to generate planetary transforma-

tions? This capacity is in great part a result of the planet’s accumulated
“deep time” entering the “now” of humankind in the form of fossil fuels.
Through the process of refining, the raw fossil product, which the planet
has been manufacturing over millions of years by way of biochemical
processes and pressure, is being transformed into energy to power our
mobility (Steininger 2015, 210–225). An immense compression of time
is happening: planetary time is being transformed into human time. This
refinement, distribution and consumption of fossil fuel is a particularly
prominent case, though not the only one, in which technologies contrib-
ute to the large scale transformation of the world.
How do technologies change our world? Generally speaking, tech-
nologies serve the function of transforming a state A into a state B, thus
saving the intellectual or physical labor of humans. Our everyday rou-
tines are now saturated with such technologies. We turn on the light
without having to think about where its energy comes from. We drive
a car without knowing how an engine works. We fly around the world
without even understanding how an airplane manages to take off. We
communicate with the whole world via the Internet without knowing the
algorithms that make this possible. Huge, planetary infrastructures have
been created around these activities: from gas and oil pipelines, freeways
152 Bernd Scherer
and airports, to continental electricity and data networks. These infra-
structures form the nature of the Anthropocene world. Without these
technologies, life as we know it would no longer be possible. One only
needs to imagine the consequences of a week-long power failure in
wintertime.
During this transformation of the planet, the main goal of cultural ac-
tivity seems to be the creation of a second nature through technology. The
development of this technosphere is accompanied by the economization
of society, as a result of which human activity is commodified, namely
as a saleable and purchasable commodity, and thus further naturalized.
This economization can also be regarded as a technology, whose modus
operandi can be demonstrated using the example of money. The mon-
etary economy is a precursor to other disruptive technologies of today
that drive the dynamics of the Anthropocene and it seems to culminate
in the financial economy of today. The monetary economy is disruptive
with regard to time since its system of loans and bonds makes the future
available as a resource (Streeck 2015; Nowotny 2016, 32–68). Only by
borrowing from the future can the major infrastructure projects of today
be funded in the first place. But the monetary economy is also disruptive
in that it connects various areas and spheres from completely different
categories. Inventions, discoveries or cultural achievements can be com-
pared via monetary abstraction. In this process of abstraction, cultural
acts themselves take the form of objects and are thus naturalized.
Abstraction processes like these are also fundamental to the use of
digital technologies whose disruptive nature further fuels the dynamics
of the Anthropocene. An example: In 2012, it was reported in the US
that a father learned of his teenage daughters pregnancy through adver-
tisements that she received from the chain store Target (Kashmir 2012).
With the help of statistics genius Andrew Pole, Target had developed a
new method of consumer tracking. Pole identified 25 products which, if
women showed an interest in them, indicated that they were pregnant.
Target used this information to send coupons to pregnant women who
were in the process of changing their lifestyles, and thus their shopping
patterns.
What is happening here? A certain phase in a person’s life, which is
characterized by different emotions, hopes, partnerships etc. is being
reduced to 25 products that establish a correlation between a person’s
life and a chain store’s retail products. This information is not just ab-
stracted from a concrete and complex life, but is also, and this is decisive,
injected into it, exercising its influence. Characteristics of human subjec-
tivity and commodity attributes are fused. Such disruptive developments
by means of algorithms occur on a daily basis. Subjective experiences
are being transformed into objects, sales models turn feelings into goods
and people begin to place more trust in the data they are being fed than
in their own experiences. Thus, in everyday life, our view of the world is
transformed through these daily interactions with machines controlled
by algorithms.
Cyberspace is not a world alongside or outside the real world; instead
it increasingly interacts with it, penetrating ever deeper layers of our
social and psychological life (Stalder 2018, 41–42). The extent to which
the virtual world has already been diffused with the real world and the
confusion this has caused can be observed in the radicalization of people
via the Internet. Time and again, we encounter instances of otherwise
unobtrusive citizens issuing online death threats to politicians on ac-
count of refugee policy. Closer examination of these cases often reveals
that the citizens in question originally consulted the Internet in search of
information and only rather unwittingly encountered scenes of violence
that captivated their attention. Algorithms then registered the users’
click behavior, offering more and more of these videos, featuring even
more extreme forms of violence. The users in question were then quickly
swallowed up by this world of violence, evoked through the pictorial
language of the algorithm, which had begun to replace the real world in
their heads. It is crucial to note here that the algorithm itself has no sig-
nificance; it is merely syntax. Yet, simply through a quantified register,
it creates connections which not only are of significance, but which also
generate their own pragmatics by intervening in reality. The algorithm,
it could be argued, is developing its own role as a player.
The paradoxes of knowledge are becoming paradoxes of life in a very
precise sense. In classical philosophy, paradoxes arise because of a lack
of categories with which to understand the world. Today, as the “Tar-
get” example demonstrates, we are confronted with problems in life be-
cause a man-made computer generates a section of the world in which
objective and subjective categories are mixed up. It is important to real-
ize that these technologies form the basis for the planet-wide removal of
local limits to human modes of acting and experiencing within the An-
thropocene. They are the response to the leaps in scale which enable, for
example, huge quantities of energy to be released at the touch of a but-
ton, or companies and production processes to be controlled globally.
At the same time, however, the production of knowledge in the sciences
is itself being subjected to the aforementioned processes of economiza-
tion and naturalization. Standardization is aimed at making distinct sci-
entific products comparable, thus turning research into a product. This
product can then be assigned with a numerical and ultimately economic
value (Thacker 2010, 117–118; Galloway 2014, xix).
On the one hand, this development facilitates the control of these pro-
cesses by bureaucracies that do not necessarily need to have any par-
ticular understanding of the individual processes (Graeber, 2015). On
the other hand, these products can then be marketed as items of knowl-
edge. In order to develop these technologies, to which standardization
and knowledge management belong, great creative and hence cultural
154 Bernd Scherer
achievements are necessary. The less thought has to be put into their use,
the greater their benefit: in other words, the more they are incorporated
into natural processes, the better.
Yet these developments also have far-reaching social, political and
economic consequences. All that is required to develop and regulate
technological infrastructures is a small number of highly skilled people;
still, everybody is affected by their implications. Economically, this de-
velopment represents an accumulation of power in the hands of the few
who control the infrastructure, be it physical or virtual. Politically, it
represents the disenfranchisement of a majority that is no longer permit-
ted to have a say in decisions on the developments that shape their lives.
The very lives of this majority are becoming part of complex technolog-
ical control processes. Governance is replacing politics (Vogl 2015). The
smooth control of social processes is increasingly replacing a political
discussion about society. Empowered citizens are being replaced by ex-
perts. The control of societies by technocracies and commercial enter-
prises is being made possible by the increasing naturalization of social
processes and their availability in the form of data. This naturalization
and the disenfranchisement of large sections of society as a consequence
of the delimitation and planetization of human activity, is one reason for
the prevailing dissatisfaction, noticeable especially in affluent societies.
Thus understood, the Anthropocene not only refers to the aforemen-
tioned phenomena such as climate change, the decline in biodiversity
etc.; but more significantly, it stands for a fundamental paradigm shift
in our understanding of the world and of humankind. As a result, the
ostensibly clear dividing line between nature and culture is giving way
to a dynamic interweaving of cultural and natural processes, a develop-
ment which is now manifesting itself in the increasing naturalization of
various areas of human life. Knowledge of the world is being replaced
by navigation processes in which constructing and knowing the world
continually interact. These processes can no longer be solely grasped
by scientific disciplines themselves defined by demarcation. We need an
“Anthropocenic Turn” in order to develop new forms of knowledge pro-
duction. What is to be done?
The answer to this question can begin with a remark by the scientist
Richard Feynman that is often repeatedly evoked by synthetic biologists,
“What I cannot create, I do not understand” (Roosth 2017, 4). On the
one hand, this sentence is correct, while, on the other, it harbors a fun-
damental problem. Feynman is right insofar as genuinely “new” knowl-
edge that goes beyond the existing frame of reference can only be created
on the basis of a changed practice. In this sense, neither can discussions
about the new knowledge lead us any further, nor can innovation be
simply categorized. The problematic implications of Feynman’s remark
concern the imperative to create. We live in times where the pressure
to innovate is so immense that the ability to make something all too
quickly leads to de-facto-level manufacturing. Production in the name
of science thus often inadvertently leads to the transformation of reality.
A new technology is founded on the facticity of manufacturability. Yet
normativity can only be negotiated in a societal discourse.
Another problem arises with the implementation of a new technology
into society. The new technologies, e.g., in the field of synthetic biology
or digitalization interfere deeply with social and individual lives; that is,
the new reality exists not only in a new technological object but also in a
complex arrangement of object, behavior, etc. (Malabou 2008). Health
apps record and disseminate all data relevant to personal health. These
datasets are supposed to change the behavior of the person using the app.
That person’s view of himself or herself changes in the process. Facts
and figures relating to certain parameters complement and/or contradict
feelings and perceptions. The datasets are collected by health insurance
providers and thus lead to product developments in the field of health,
maybe even to changes in how we perceive the terms “health” and “sick-
ness” in general. Complex psychological and socio-technological envi-
ronments replace technological objects.
If people affected by these developments are to be allowed sovereignty,
they must be involved in the processes of creating these new realities.
Thus social players may act as experts in the everyday situations that are
to be changed. Instead of the classic laboratory in which trained experts
conduct research, we need rehearsal stages for the new phenomena, on
which subjective, social, technological and cultural phenomena are wo-
ven together. On these stages, social actors, scientists and artists may
rehearse together. On the one hand, the rehearsal stages are places of
practice in which world sections are created. On the other hand, they are
places of the imagination in the sense of artistic practice. The rehearsal
stages are not about creating facts but about providing a blueprint for
possibilities in order to rehearse various options in a social process, to
experiment with ways of thinking or ways of perceiving, before some-
thing is actually realized.
Against this background, it becomes obvious why most efforts to
transmit scientific information to third parties fail. The crucial factor is
making knowledge developed by experts comprehensible to third parties.
There are those who know, the experts; and those who do not know, the
general population. The phenomena of the Anthropocene however, as
demonstrated, demand an entirely new concept of knowledge and ex-
pertise. We need rehearsal stages for the creation of knowledge and our
world, on which those affected by the development of the Anthropocene
become actors. This also applies in global terms, in that those affected
by something e.g., climate change are often not its cause.
It is necessary that we culturalize the processes of the postmodern world
in which we become nature and, true to the Kantian sense of enlighten-
ment, lead our societies out of our “self-inflicted disenfranchisement”.
156 Bernd Scherer
The new rehearsal stages are a central form of the “Anthropocenic Turn”
because they mediate new forms of aesthetic and conceptual knowledge
production and socio-political processes. They are the new theatres of
the Anthropocene, in which new forms of world creation take place.
References
Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222.
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Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. New York, NY: Melville House Publishing.
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figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#5445c7ea6668
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Evidence and Current Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Section 3
Sensing the Anthropocene

Taylor & Francis
9 Challenges for an Aesthetics
of the Anthropocene
Eva Horn
How to conceive of an aesthetics of the Anthropocene? While it has

proven to be a particularly productive concept in the arts and the hu-
manities, the Anthropocene has also shown a tendency to devolve into
a fashionable buzzword. The concept is often used to vaguely refer to
the “ecological crisis,” “global warming,” “the human footprint,” or to
more specific problems such as pollution, species extinction, or issues
of coexistence with other species. While such topics do not imply an
aesthetic program, they often come with a set of expectations about the
purpose and relevance of art:
As the vehicle of aesthesis, [art] is central to thinking with and feel-

ing through the Anthropocene […]. Art provides […] a non-moral
form of address that offers a range of discursive, visual and sensual
strategies that are not confined by the regimes of scientific objectiv-
ity, political moralism, or psychological depression.
(Davis and Turpin 2015, 3–4)
Art is expected to raise awareness and convey a sense of urgency in the

face of the ecological crisis.
In a similar way, “Anthropocene art” is frequently understood to rep-
resent certain themes such as climate change, the destruction of ecosys-
tems, species loss and, more recently, geological history and stratigraphy
(e.g., see Trexler 2015, whose study on “Anthropocene fictions” is es-
sentially a book on Cli-Fi). A genuine aesthetics of the Anthropocene,
however, cannot be limited to thematic references and the rhetoric of
political mobilization. In what follows, I would like to argue that an
aesthetics of the Anthropocene needs to deal with questions of form,
not of content or themes. The notion of the Anthropocene implies a
profound transformation of the human position within and relationship
to the world. Living in the Anthropocene means a new form of being-
in-the-world, and being in a radically changed world. The journalist
Thomas Friedman has offered the succinct expression “global weirding”
as a replacement for the notion of “global warming” (Friedman 2010).
The Anthropocene is about global weirding—the weirding of a natural
160 Eva Horn
world that can no longer be separated from human interference, but also
the weirding of human existence that has become a “geological force,”
beyond control and intention.
Aesthetic form in the age of the Anthropocene, I will argue, needs to
deal with three challenges: (1) latency, the fact that the transformation
of the world is happening not in the form of cataclysmic events but in
imperceptible and unpredictable processes; (2) entanglement, the fact
that the modern separation between the human and “the world” has dis-
solved into uncanny dependencies, unintended consequences and unpre-
dictable side-effects; (3) a clash of scales, the fact that the environmental
crisis of the Anthropocene unfolds on very different spatial, temporal
and quantitative scales. These challenges are of an epistemic and aes-
thetic nature; they concern the conditions of cognition as well as those
of representation. And they do not pertain to the realm of art’s content,
but to its form.
For an understanding of the issue of form in the Anthropocene, Bruno
Latour in his Gaia Lectures has given us a highly instructive example
in his reading of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Great Enclo-
sure Near Dresden (1832) (Latour 2017, 222, Figure 9.1). The painting
shows the muddy floodplain of the river Elbe, dotted with pools of wa-
ter. Latour observes that this landscape appears oddly warped, as if one
Figure 9.1 Casper David Friedrich, The Great Enclosure Near Dresden, 1831/1832,
Oil on Canvas. © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Photo: Jürgen
Karpinski, © bpk-Bildagentur, courtesy bpk-Bildagentur.
Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene 161
were seeing the curvature of the globe itself. The sky is similarly arched,
displaying a concave upward curve. Only the horizon line is straight,
separating the two distorted spaces of earth and sky. Because of this dis-
tortion of pictorial space, the viewer’s vantage point is difficult to make
out. It seems to be neither on the level of the foreground, nor on any de-
terminable higher location. It is this strange distortion of space that for
Latour epitomizes the human relationship to the world brought about
by the Anthropocene. If the Anthropocene heralds nothing less than a
new way of being-in-the-world, it solicits an epistemological question-
ing regarding the modes of access to, and forms of knowledge of, the
non-human. But it also begs the question as to how this relationship
might be aesthetically represented.
In Friedrich’s painting, the classic formal convention of European art
history, according to which space is to be rendered from a fixed vantage
point, is suspended. This convention, according to Latour, perfectly ex-
pressed the Western relationship to nature: nature is subordinated to an
objectifying gaze (Latour 2017, 17). Although Friedrich’s painting cites
these conventions—its pictorial space is oriented toward a vanishing
point—this only highlights the extent to which it deviates from them.
As Latour writes “This is not a landscape that someone might contem-
plate. It offers no possible stability […]” (222). Latour sees the curved,
non-Euclidean space of the picture and the free-floating gaze of the dis-
oriented viewer as an allegory of the human standpoint with regard to a
nature in which humans no longer have a secure place. In the Anthropo-
cene, nature can no longer be represented as a simple given entity which
the viewer comprehends in a single gaze. In the Anthropocene, “nature”
can no longer be totalized or objectified, neither by scientific nor aes-
thetic representation. Friedrich’s painting traps the viewer in this space,
in a wavering, uncertain position. In Latour’s words:
What is brilliant about this painting is the way it marks the instabil-
ity of every point of view, whether it’s a matter of seeing the world
from above, from below, or from the middle. With the Great Enclo-
sure, the great impossibility is not being imprisoned on Earth, it is
believing that Earth can be grasped as a reasonable and coherent
Whole, by piling up scales one on top of another, from the most lo-
cal to the most global—and vice versa—or thinking that one could
be content with one’s own little plot in which to cultivate a garden.
(223)
Latour’s reading is exemplary of what an “aesthetics of the Anthro-

pocene” might involve. At first glance, Friedrich’s painting appears to
be a fairly straightforward representation of a landscape. In fact, how-
ever, it introduces a small twist in its form that makes all the differ-
ence. The painting abandons the presupposition of a transparent, readily
162 Eva Horn
intelligible structure of the world which the work of art reflects. The
classical perspective of landscape painting is replaced by a disorientation
which is as subtle as it is profound, encompassing both the position of
the viewer and the space of representation. The painting thereby per-
forms a veritable “mutation of the relation to the world” (7) as well as of
the categories of subject and object, human and non-human, whole and
part. It is no accident that this effect is not achieved by what the picture
depicts, but rather by how it brings the world into a specific form.
The modern construction of nature, which Latour sees unsettled in
Friedrich’s painting, was based on a fundamental dualism between sub-
ject and object. While the subject was traditionally understood to be a
cognitive, reflective and affective being, nature—as observed by such
a subject—was conceived as devoid of intention, perception and con-
sciousness. It was taken to be stable, inert matter which obeyed a fixed
set of “laws of nature”—laws which were furthermore believed to be
fundamentally intelligible to the human subject. Based on this under-
standing, nature could be systematically observed, broken down into its
constituent parts, subjected to experiments and technologically manip-
ulated. With the demise of this modern conception of nature, a different
nature emerges, characterized by manifold, complex interdependencies,
discontinuities and surprises. This nature cannot be “objectified,” i.e.,
epistemologically held at a distance, nor can it be divided up into parts
without losing sight of the essential interconnectedness of its many ac-
tive elements. Ecology played an important role in bringing into focus
this interconnectedness, as well as the entanglement of human beings in
the larger fabric of life. And Earth system science has presented us with
nature as a self-regulating system, with cycles, networks, feedback loops
and tipping points (see Horn and Bergthaller 2020, 51–66).
The Return of the Sublime?

The modern dualism between the idea of an “objectifiable” nature and a
human observer has formed the basis of the modern aesthetics of nature
(Böhme 2002, 1988). Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of the Power of
Judgment (1790), the most influential expression of such an aesthetics,
argued that aesthetic experience complements the scientific and techni-
cal approach to nature. According to Kant, the aesthetic experience of
nature does not originate in the object itself but rather in the attitude of
the subject when they perceive an object as either “beautiful” or “sub-
lime.” Whereas “the beauty of nature,” Kant writes, reveals to us “a
technique of nature,” thus making known its inner purposiveness and
coherence (Kant [1790] 2000, 129), “the sublime” is an experience of
being overwhelmed by the object of contemplation. In the experience of
the sublime, the object appears “in its form to be contrapurposive for
our power of judgment, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and
as it were doing violence to our imagination” (129). In the sublime, the
human capacity for perception, imagination and judgment is pushed to
its limits. Tellingly, Kant’s examples are mainly natural phenomena such
as mountains, glaciers, icebergs, thunderstorms, towering rocks, raging
streams or desolate wastelands, but also disasters such as shipwrecks.
Essential to such an experience, however, is the reflexive distancing of
the viewer. The sense of the sublime conveys both the experience of be-
ing overwhelmed, and, at the same time, the capacity to reflect on that
experience. The sublime overpowers the senses, but it is mastered and
contained by reason. Kant thus construes the negative experience of hor-
ror and awe as ultimately an occasion for the self-assertion of the sub-
ject’s cognitive faculty.
Nature, in modern aesthetics, has been seen for the most part as
something which creates a sense of loss or alienation. Aesthetic repre-
sentation would then be the attempt to either repair this loss—in the
form of nature writing, for example—or to reflect upon it. Jean-François
Lyotard sees in the sublime the signature of a postmodern aesthetic that
“denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which
would make it possible to share the nostalgia for the unattainable”
(Lyotard 1984, 81). Instead, the postmodern sublime “searches for new
presentations, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to impart ‘a
stronger sense of the unpresentable” (81, emphasis added). An aesthetic
theory of the Anthropocene might well take up Lyotard’s diagnosis of
the sublime object’s resistance to representation. However, it cannot re-
treat into a Kantian aesthetics of nature, nor to figures of alienation or a
nostalgia for the unattainable. Instead, it must question the very notion
of nature as the other of the human. Timothy Morton has proposed
that an aesthetics of nature adequate to the ecological crisis must do
away with any emphatic notion of “nature,” hence the programmatic
title of his book on the paradoxes of nature writing: Ecology without
Nature (Morton 2007).
Rather than discarding “nature” altogether, however, it may prove
more fruitful to acknowledge that, in the Anthropocene, both the con-
cepts of “nature” and of the “human” are fundamentally transformed.
An aesthetics of the Anthropocene therefore needs to deal with an even
deeper alienation—not the “loss,” but the uncanniness of the life-world.
Amitav Ghosh, for example, has argued that nature suddenly appears
alive, threatening, unpredictable, sentient and temperamental: “This is
one of the uncanniest effects of the Anthropocene, this renewed aware-
ness of the elements of agency and consciousness that humans share
with many other beings, and even perhaps with the planet itself” (Ghosh
2016, 63). Nature demands “re-cognition”—both in the sense of recov-
ering a knowledge that has been lost and in the sense of a renewed re-
spect for the non-human as an idiosyncratic, heteroclite and potentially
dangerous force. Once the emphatic concept of nature as the other of
164 Eva Horn
culture is abandoned, the sense of separation between the human and
the natural disappears, disclosing the indissoluble interconnectedness of
humans with and in the world.
Humans thus no longer find themselves standing above a world
of objects but rather caught up in the midst of things—in the midst
of climate change, of coexisting forms of life, of technologies and its
consequences—and, at the same time, dependent on capital flows and
the circulation of material resources which uncontrollably transform the
economic and ecological conditions of human existence. The world in-
volves and affects humans in all kinds of ways, imposing responsibilities
and material risks on them, and continually overtaxing their capacity
to perceive and understand. Art in the Anthropocene, if it is to be more
than a thematic endeavor, must address these cognitive and ethical diffi-
culties as a question of form: art as an effort to render visually, sensually,
affectively, or conceptually phenomena which otherwise elude experi-
ence. It involves an uncanny—uncontrollable, unmanageable—intimacy
with things, in a world that is hypercomplex and multidimensional. The
“things” of the Anthropocene are too close to be objectified, too big to
be pictured, too complex to be fully accounted for.
On this basis, we can distinguish the three fundamental, yet inter-
twined, difficulties for an aesthetics of the Anthropocene that I have
put forward at the start of this article: (1) latency, the withdrawal
from perceptibility and representability; (2) entanglement, a new
awareness of coexistence and immanence of the human within the
non-human; and (3) scale, the clash of incompatible orders of magni-
tude. What latency, entanglement and scale have in common is that
they cannot be addressed simply as topics or themes, but only as prob-
lems of form. They defy representation, and, moreover, they involve
one another. Processes in the Anthropocene can be, as Timothy Clark
has pointed out, too big, too many, too fast or too slow in their tem-
poral, spatial or quantitative scale (Clark 2015) to be perceived and
represented and thus remain latent. Yet, they can also be too familiar,
too ordinary, too close to reveal our intimate dependencies and en-
tanglements with them. Human entanglements with the non-human
(even that technological non-human constructed by humans) can hap-
pen on scales too small or too grand for humans to even be aware of,
and thus remain latent.
In a strange return of a seemingly outdated concept, all these diffi-
culties of representation in the Anthropocene coalesce in the concept
of the sublime, which is why several theorists have raised the ques-
tion of an “Anthropocene sublime” (Kainulainen 2013; Guénin 2016;
Williston 2016). Kant’s concept of the “mathematical sublime” had
already explicitly addressed the problem of incommensurable scales:
the sublime is that which is not great relative to something else, i.e.,
on the same scale, but “absolutely great,” i.e., on an entirely different
scale (Kant [1790] 2000, 131). Especially photography, in the work,
for example, of David Maisel, Edward Burtynsky or Andreas Gursky,
is using scale—often in the form of a remote gaze from above—as an
aesthetic means to showcase the immensity of the human transforma-
tion of the world. The bird’s-eye view from above or from a distance
makes tangible the magnitude of ecological destruction (as in much
of Burtynsky’s photographic work, and his recent film The Anthro-
pocene Project, 2018), the massive transformation of landscapes (in
Maisel’s work or Gursky’s Dubai World series, 2007), or the excesses
of human consumption (emblematically rendered in Gursky’s 99 Cent,
1999). Such works attempt to visually capture the almost incompre-
hensibly vast—in Kant’s terms: “absolutely great”—scope of anthropo-
genic impact. The distant, devastated, artificial yet often demonically
beautiful landscapes presented in these photographs bring the sites of
environmental destruction out of their obscurity, yet without any doc-
umentary intention. Cast in the style of grandiose landscape aesthetics,
the hellish yet hidden sites of resource extraction, toxic waste, algae
blooms or desertification rise to the status of aesthetic objects. In the
same vein, we are overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude that Gursky’s
photographs lend to the temples of modern capitalism, be it a depart-
ment store (99 Cents, Figure 9.2) or the New York Stock Exchange (in
his series Stock Exchanges, 1990–2009). Thus, the latent infrastruc-
tures of the Anthropocene—supermarkets, oilfields, highways, mines,
junkyards, oil palm plantations, stock exchanges, artificial landscapes
etc.—suddenly take center stage, evoking humanity’s abstract power,
yet also its vital dependency on these structures.
Figure 9.2 Andreas Gursky, 99 Cents, 1999. © Andreas Gursky / Bildrecht,

Vienna, 2019, courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London.
166 Eva Horn
However, the return of the sublime in Anthropocene art has also
raised criticism: Science historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, for example,
sees in it the aesthetic celebration of a desire for demiurgic control and
epistemic distance. The iconography of disaster and the penchant for
displays of technological domination (as technological sublime) for
him reveal a feeling of guilty pleasure and the apolitical, technocratic
ideology that lies at the core of the concept of the Anthropocene:
“It seems more exciting to wonder at the dynamism of a humanity
that has become a telluric force than to think about the transforma-
tion of an economic system” (Fressoz 2016, 49, own translation). For
Fressoz, the distanced view from above insofar as it celebrates the
dominance of the viewer over its object represents this complicity of
art with modern technology and capitalism. Other theorists of the
aesthetics of the Anthropocene understand the sublime rather as the
mark of an inescapable entanglement in the world (e.g., Kainulainen
2013; Williston 2016). In their view, the sublime of the Anthropocene
dramatizes profound human implication with a non-natural nature
over which, however, it is impossible to gain an overall “objective”
perspective. The Anthropocene sublime would thus disclose a condi-
tion of responsibility without mastery. Here, no aesthetic distance is
possible; rather, the aesthetic experience is one of radical immanence.
The reflexive freedom Kant associated with sublime experience gives
way to a disturbing intimacy with a world that can no longer be taken
for granted.
Non-Natural Nature
In line with this re-emergence of the concept, Timothy Morton has
turned Kant’s sublime on its head in his concept of the “hyperobject”
(Morton 2013). What for Kant had been an experience of the subject
in Morton becomes the ontological quality of an object, albeit one that
radically resists objectification. Hyperobjects, Morton (2013, 1) writes,
“are things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to
humans.” Anything that exceeds human sensory experience can be de-
scribed as a hyperobject—a black hole, climate change, the Florida Ever-
glades. Morton thus converts the experience of immanence disclosed by
the sublime into an ontology of uncanny, “dark” coexistence (Morton
2016). The hyperobject shatters the categories of perception which de-
fine human access to the world—and thus the idea of the “lifeworld” as
such. The epistemological problem posed by latency, the human entan-
glement with the non-human and the clash of scales in the Anthropocene
is thus turned into an ontological problem. This ontologization of the
sublime replaces questions of epistemology and aesthetic representation
with a fundamental “darkness” and “withdrawal” of the things them-
selves (ibid.).
From this perspective, questions of form become questions of being.
Let me illustrate this with an example, one that Morton explicitly refers
to. The American artist Tara Donovan uses industrial materials and ev-
eryday objects (plastic cups, industrial tubing, paper or foil) to construct
large installations. Plastic cups, stuck together in their thousands, are
shaped into fractal objects that look like a frozen wave, a gigantic pile of
foam, or cumulus clouds (Figure 9.3).
On account of their massive accumulation, the translucent material of
the cups becomes opaque and their conical shape is subsumed into the
rounded surfaces. The resulting objects have the appearance of mon-
strously enlarged organic structures or natural forms. Using some of the
emblematic materials of the Anthropocene (plastic, polystyrene, cardboard
etc.) and the disposable articles produced from them, Donovan creates a
new, entirely post-natural-nature: forms that look like moss or mildew,
vegetal growths, stones, waves or clouds. Morton (2013, 114) writes: “In
massive piles the cups reveal properties hidden from the view of a person
who uses a single cup at a time, a viscous (in my terms) malleability.” In
Donovan’s installations he sees the revelation of a hidden property of the
object itself. However, if we consider it in aesthetic rather than ontological
terms, Donovan’s operation can be better understood as a game of scales
Figure 9.3 Tara Donovan, Untitled (Plastic Cups), 2006, Installation (plastic
cups), at: New York: Pace Gallery, © Tara Donovan, courtesy Pace
Gallery, Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery.
168 Eva Horn
which reflects the cumulative scale effects of the Anthropocene: One plas-
tic cup is just a flimsy piece of plastic or polystyrene, billions of them are
an ecological disaster. In their thousand-fold multiplication, the transition
from the small to the enormous, and in their arrangement into structures
that cite organic forms, a new object emerges, evoking an entirely differ-
ent experience of the everyday object. At the same time, by citing natural
forms, Donovan’s installations inflate microscopic organic structures to
unfamiliar magnitudes. While Morton emphasizes the plasticity or “mal-
leability” of Donovan’s works he entirely overlooks the ultimative form of
the installation—a form that twists the toxic plastic cup into the figure of
a fascinating, shimmering natural object. Donovan’s work both amplifies
and erases the material properties of the object: out of industrially pro-
duced, mass-consumed waste, she conjures an illusion of organic growth
and spontaneous emergence. The structures of her installations mimic
those generated by natural processes of self-organization, as in clouds,
sand dunes, ripples, waves etc. Deliberately and with great precision, Don-
ovan plays with the form-giving processes of nature, pulling them out of
latency through a translation in scale. Using non-natural, industrial mate-
rials she re-creates a non-natural nature, imitating what nature itself does,
when, for example, grains of sand pile up into a dune, molecules arrange
themselves into crystals, or birds into an undulating flock.
In contrast to Morton, who believes that an aesthetics for the An-
thropocene must start with an inquiry into modes of being, I argue
that it must above all deal with questions of form. The visual arts have
developed a panoply of different strategies for translating the transfor-
mative processes of the Anthropocene, such as climate change, from
their latency into something perceptible. This is not only the case in
contemporary photography or Donovan’s post-natural installations. It
can also be seen in the subtle, eerily beautiful techno-organic hybrids of
the British artist duo Ackroyd & Harvey; in the artificial atmospheres
of Philippe Rahm or Olafur Eliasson; or in such artistic experiments as
Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene project (Horn 2018). Works in other media,
sound installations for example, seek to make the inaudible audible, the
non-perceptible perceptible. Felix Hess’s infrasound installations (2001)
make it possible to hear fluctuations of atmospheric pressure across the
Atlantic, while John Luther Adams’s installation The Place Where You
Go to Listen translates seismological, geomagnetic and meteorological
data from Alaska into light and sound (Adams and Ross 2009).
As it grapples with problems of latency, entanglement and the clash
of scales, an aesthetics of the Anthropocene is not ultimately concerned
with a world of objects that altogether resist representation, but in-
volves an analytical, often experimental and highly knowledge-based
making-explicit of processes, objects and practices which are murky not
for ontological, but for epistemological reasons. Anthropocene art ad-
dresses our inability to get these obscure zones of latency into proper
focus, and the difficulty of casting them into a form which would allow us
to deal with them—aesthetically, epistemologically and also politically.
Narrating Entanglement
In literature the same problem arises, albeit in a medium which is always
already culturally coded and thus lends itself less easily to an ontological
approach. In spite of what many critics suggest (e.g., Trexler 2015), I be-
lieve that the task of a “literature for the Anthropocene” is not primarily
addressing particular themes (e.g., climate change, ecological disasters,
species loss, etc.). As in the art forms already discussed, the challenge for
literature lies first of all in the development of poetic and narrative forms
which are adequate to the problems of latency, entanglement and scale
that the Anthropocene confronts us with. In literature, however, the for-
mal problem of rendering the latent explicitly presents itself in a very dif-
ferent way. Since I do not have the space to address the intricate problems
of poetry (see, e.g., Bristow 2015), I limit myself to literary narratives
here. Narratives are always highly coded cultural projections which not
only represent, but organize reality. They give structure to temporal se-
quences and causal relationships, distinguish between active protagonists
and passive backgrounds and they cannot but employ established sym-
bolic systems; they establish a spatial order; and they determine the per-
spective from which events can be narrated. Narratives are thus defined
by laws of genre which prescribe what material is to be in- or excluded,
which settings, characters and action can be described, and in what lit-
erary form. Literary narratives which seek to narrate climate change are
now frequently subsumed as a distinctive genre: “Cli-Fi” (climate change
fiction) (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 2018). However, the vast majority of
these texts would otherwise be categorized as thrillers, science fiction, or
dystopian fiction. For Amitav Ghosh, the fact that a subject as momen-
tous as climate change is mostly confined to genres which many critics
still consider “sub-literary,” points to a deeper problem of genre.
According to Ghosh, the modern novel treated nature mostly as an
aspect of “setting”—a part of the background against which the narra-
tive unfolds—rather than as an actor in its own right. Furthermore, the
genre conventions of the novel require that the narrative be situated in
a recognizable time and place and cover a time span no longer than the
lives of a limited cast of characters. The focus lies on the psychological
development of these characters, who exemplify a particular social mi-
lieu, and the plot must be plausible, i.e., reflect common assumptions
about the world. As Ghosh writes:
The longue durée is not the territory of the novel. […] Within the
mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents
were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of
170 Eva Horn
years […]. But the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world
of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are
nothing if not inconceivably vast.
(Ghosh 2016, 62)
Ghosh clearly pinpoints the challenges of a poetics of the Anthropocene:

the difficulty of casting the longue durée of geological time, imperceptible
transformations and catastrophic breaks, hyper-complex entanglements
and non-human agency into narrative form. As an alternative to the strict
limitations imposed by the modern novel, Amitav Ghosh (2016) proposes
a return to older and non-European genres—especially the epic.
But maybe Gosh underestimates the flexibility and capaciousness
of the modern novel. In fact, novelists have always experimented with
the conventions of their genre, for example by unsettling narrative per-
spectives and introducing unreliable narrators, playing with narrative
chronology, or introducing non-human actors. Furthermore, it is ques-
tionable whether a literary form that was as tightly embedded in tra-
ditional forms of life as the epic can actually be updated for a literary
aesthetic of the Anthropocene (Bergthaller 2018). To narrate “global
weirding” can only mean developing narrative forms that take up and
continue the formal experiments which shaped the modern novel—but
doing so in a way that responds to the specific challenges presented by
the Anthropocene.
Such literary experiments with form can pursue many different strat-
egies. The hyper-complexity of the ecological relationships in which hu-
mans are implicated can be translated narratively into a de-centered,
multi-layered web of narrative. This is the case, for example, in David
Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (2004), whose interwoven plotlines unfold
over centuries into a distant future, while the text incorporates a wide
variety of literary genres, from diaries and letters to thrillers and science
fiction. It can also take the shape of a narrative excavation, digging into
the layers of deep time sedimented in a particular landscape, as in Don
DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) or William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth
(1991). Anthropocene literature can furthermore attempt to locate the
human being in the deep time of geological history, as in Max Frisch’s
Man in the Holocene ([1979] 1980). Employing the technique of literary
collage, Frisch’s short novel combines the reflections of an unreliable
narrator with encyclopedia entries about paleoanthropology and geo-
logical history in order to reflect on humankind’s precarious position in
nature. Alternatively, such an experimental poetics might indeed explore
what an “epic” might be in the Anthropocene—for example in David
Brin’s science fiction novel Earth (1990) or in Allison Cobb’s book-
length poem Green-Wood ([2010] 2018), which turns a fabled cemetery
in Brooklyn into a cosmological metaphor for the modern conquest of
nature and its ruinous consequences.
In all of these literary experiments, the protagonists and their inner
worlds, and the narrator as observer and organizer of events, lose their
central significance in the text, or are marginalized as in Frisch’s novel.
The traditional placeholders for the human in the text, the “anthropo-
morphism” of narrative, take a back seat. The background or setting be-
comes the actual protagonist, while the human actors function merely as
nodes in the entanglements and transformations of a world that extends
far beyond them. Anthropocene narratives will continue to interrogate
such anthropomorphisms and perhaps leave them behind as they expand
the possibilities of story-telling. The formal inventiveness of modern and
postmodern literature—the many self-imposed interdictions, the experi-
ments with focalization and narrative time, the intertextual and metafic-
tional games and the programmatic distrust of narrative—testifies to a
quest for forms of representation that can stand up to the complexity of
the world we find ourselves in. Whatever else they may be about, such
texts also speak to the importance of not allowing ourselves to “get
bamboozled by our desire for a good story” (Bergthaller 2018, 14).
References
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Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Bergthaller, Hannes. 2018. “Climate Change and Un-Narratability.” Metaphora
2. Accessed 14 April 2019. metaphora.univie.ac.at/3-Edited_Volumes/23-
Volume_2/29-climate_change_and_un-narratability.
Böhme, Hartmut. 1988. Natur und Subjekt. Frankfurt am Main: Edition
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Böhme, Hartmut. 2002. “Natürlich/Natur.” In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe.
Vol. 4, edited by Karlheinz Barck, Markus Fotius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Bur-
khart Steinwachs and Friedrich Wolfzettel, 432–498. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Brin, David, 1990. Earth. New York: Bantam Books.
Bristow, Tom. 2015. The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Po-
etry, Person, Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian.
Threshold Concept. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Cobb, Allison. [2010] 2018. Green-Wood. New York: Nightboat Books.
Davis, Heather, and Turpin, Etienne. 2015. Art in the Anthropocene, Encoun-
ters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London:
Open Humanities Press.
DeLillo, Don. 2010. Point Omega. New York: Scribner.
Dürbeck, Gabriele. 2014. „Ambivalent Characters and Fragmented Poetics in
Anthropocenic Literature (Max Frisch, Iliya Trojanow).” The Minnesota Re-
view 83 [Special Issue: Writing the Anthropocene, edited by Kate Marshall
und Tobias Boes], 112–121.
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Friedman, Thomas. 2010. “Global Weirding is Here.” The New York Times,
February 17.
Frisch, Max. [1979] 1980. Man in the Holocene. Translated by Geoffrey Skel-
ton. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
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thinkable. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
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pulses and Aesthetic Distanciation in German Climate Change Fiction.” Eco-
zon@ 4 (2): 92–102.
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don: Peter Lang.
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Verlag.
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the Humanities. London: Routledge.
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the Problem of Representation.” Symploke 21 (1–2): 109–123.
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Trexler, Adam. 2015. Anthropocene Fictions, the Novel in a Time of Climate
Williston, Byron. 2016. “The Sublime Anthropocene.” Environmental Philos-
ophy 13 (2): 155–174.
10 The Urgency of a New
Humanities
Gregers Andersen and Stefan
Gaarsmand Jacobsen
In November 2017, more than 15,000 researchers from 184 countries

issued an open warning to humanity. Their message was that the hu-
man impact on the Earth System was approaching a point of no return,
i.e., a point beyond which the acceleration of global warming and the
destruction of ecosystems could no longer be put to a halt. What fuelled
this extraordinary piece of scientific collaboration was not just a shared
feeling of ethical obligation. Although clearly expressing the apprehen-
sion that researchers have a responsibility to broadly disseminate their
knowledge, the warning also emanated from a shared sense of urgency,
a collective experience that “time is running out” (Ripple et al. 2017).
At first glance, this experience does of course not herald something
new. Natural scientists have at least since the Club of Rome’s publication
of The Limits to Growth in 1972 been warning that the overexploitation
of the Earth System could not continue without severely deteriorating
the general living conditions of humanity. Yet, a new way of expressing
this experience is at play, which cuts across scientific assessments, main-
stream politics and radical activism. In a broad sense, it does not mat-
ter whether we listen to the warning of the more than 15,000 worried
scientists addressing humanity in alarm. If we watch a Youtube video
with former US President Barack Obama telling us that “we are the first
generation to feel the impact of climate change, and the last generation
that can do something about it” (CBSN 2015). If we read in one of
the proposals for the Paris Agreement on climate change “that climate
change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human
societies and the planet” (United Nations 2015, ch. 21). Or, if we are met
with the call for a “climate emergency” put forward on streets across
the world by activists from UK-based campaign Extinction Rebellion.
What saturates this spectrum of statements is a desperate invocation of
urgency that cannot be reduced to a pure echo of warnings that have
already been issued in the past.
Our arguments in this article spring from the perception that the ur-
gencies transmitted through each of these statements are ways of sens-
ing the Anthropocene. Following Hamilton et al. (2015) we take the
humanist meaning of the Anthropocene to be less about geological
174 Gregers Andersen and Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen
periodization and more about the current and future state of the Earth
System. The core message of the Anthropocene is in this interpretation
that humanity “will face, in a time lapse of just a few decades, global
environmental shifts of an unprecedented scale and speed” (4). This en-
tails threats that are more than likely to culminate in cataclysms all over
the planet, but with effects that are not equally distributed (Diffenbaugh
and Burke 2019). The problem is, however, not just that the advent of
the Anthropocene amplifies well-known injustices. Even more worry-
ingly, it is also highly likely to enforce the conditions that embody these
injustices many centuries into the future. As global warming and other
environmental shifts accelerate, many of the most difficult places to live
on Earth are destined to turn uninhabitable (Wallace-Wells 2019), leav-
ing their populations with the choice of either migrating or facing slow
death. The prospect of current global injustices becoming endemic is
so to speak part of the complex of highly diverse threats that emerge
with the Anthropocene. And in this sense it is one of the most press-
ing reasons to why the global efforts to keep the average rise in global
temperature below the 1,5–2 degree threshold (accentuated in the Paris
Agreement) need to accelerate rapidly. Hence the 1,5–2 degree threshold
has been singled out exactly because it risks becoming a point of no re-
turn, after which the warming of the Earth System will activate several
feedback loops and become irreversible (IPCC 2018; Steffen et al. 2018).
Two recent projections may give us a clearer idea of what rapidly
means here. Leading Earth System scientists have concluded global CO2
emissions must peak by 2020 to avert the 2 degree threshold (Rock-
strøm et al. 2017). And the IPCC has warned that our species only have
until 2030 to implement the changes needed to avert transgressing the
1,5 degree threshold (IPCC 2018). These timelines lead, therefore, in-
evitably to the question: what is implied to avert the transgressions of
these thresholds even by a little given the risks? Before we introduce our
critical aim, let us, therefore, first draw attention to an argument that
forcefully disregards the discrepancy between the laws of nature and the
laws of societies. Rockstrøm et al. (2017, 1269) “propose framing the
decarbonization challenge in terms of a global decadal roadmap based
on a simple heuristic—a ‘carbon law’—of halving gross anthropogenic
carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions every decade.” This roadmap is helpful
for conceiving the scope of the radical transformations that must be initi-
ated and maintained, if global scale catastrophe is to be averted. Indeed,
if the events of COP 21 in Paris are to go down in history as anything but
a manipulative scheme, a well performed, but deceitfully orchestrated
circus, there is no way around it. Moreover, since Rockstrøm et al. pres-
ents the roadmap as a way of implementing a law, this language can be
interpreted as an attempt to transform the scientific consensus to a sense
of urgency in lawmakers. Indeed, we see this attempt of “translating”
the laws of nature into national and international law as a proposition
The Urgency of a New Humanities 175
of how scientific leaders could make the Anthropocene tangible.1 In this
sense, the roadmap represents a crude yet highly revealing lens when it
comes to judging the sustainability of any form of social and political
action. In fact, this does not least apply to the action that is research, i.e.,
the practices we undertake at universities, and, for our purposes, more
particularly in humanities departments.
The question we wish to approach is, therefore, this: is there a suf-
ficient sense of urgency in the humanities in light of the immense task
formulated by Rockstrøm et al.? That is in light of a situation, in which—
starting from 2020—humanity needs to halve its carbon-dioxide emis-
sions every decade to avert dangerous resource scarcities and existential
risks to societies (Spratt and Dunlop 2018). Due to atmospheric accu-
mulation of greenhouse gasses, this is a much higher reduction speed
than if initiated at the beginning of public scientific concerns in the late
1980s. 2 An obvious conclusion would, therefore, be that the humanities
have been “napping,” while humanity has with increasing force put its
ecologically “safe-operating space” at risk (Rockstrøm et al. 2009, 472).
But this is not necessarily the case. An increasing number of humanities
scholars have in fact directed their attention toward environmental is-
sues in the last two decades. And more recent still, the interpretations
and conceptualization of the Anthropocene, emerging from Earth Sys-
tem Sciences, have become central to humanities scholars from a large
number of disciplines (cf. Hamilton et al. 2015). The central question,
therefore, remains: does this attention match the scale of the emergency?
Faced with this difficult question we offer an analysis that takes the
sense of time and urgency as the central concern for the humanities in
the Anthropocene. What we aim to explicate below is thus that the En-
vironmental Humanities (EH) suffer from three epistemic problems: the
idealization of slowness, the pursuit of conceptual thickness and the em-
brace of posthumanism. These problems each embed academic practices
of increasing prestige and power. Yet, as we intend to show, they are also
obstacles in the attempt to bring the humanities up to speed with a new
world. A world, which is not only undergoing accelerating geophysical
changes, but which is also rapidly changing due to new technologies and
political polarizations.
Sensing Thanatopolitics in a State of Exception

Before we substantiate our critique of these epistemic problems, we
wish, however, to make a risky analogy. Taking inspiration from the
fact that (as of July 2019) more than 800 jurisdictions at different levels
in 17 countries globally, including the governments of Ireland and Scot-
land, have declared a climate emergency (Carrell 2019; ICEF 2019), we
believe that there is a case for perceiving the coming decade as a state
of exception for the humanities and for humanity in general.3 In view
of the fact that each coming year is highly likely to have a major impact
on the development of the Earth System many of thousands of years
into the future (Schellnhuber 2018), we thus take this period to be of
such importance that it justifies the suspension of current structures in
the humanities.4 By this we do not only imply that the humanities should
reconfigure its institutions to comply with the roadmap (i.e., carbon law)
proposed by Rockstrøm et al. That is that they should radically mitigate
their carbon footprints with the aim of net zero (just as anybody else).
More importantly, we think this suspension must entail the rise of hu-
manities institutions that much more actively defend humanism in the
face of existential risks.
What prompts us to make this suggestion is the prospect of an An-
thropocene trajectory that amplifies interhuman violence. Hence, it does
not matter whether we carefully read the latest IPCC-report projecting
decreases in ecosystems and natural resources. Whether we visit the ar-
ray of non-fictions that predict these decreases to culminate in future
wars or read some of the post-apocalyptic fictions that attempt to in-
crease the tangibility of the Anthropocene risks, the driving force behind
these texts is the same, namely the danger that the Anthropocene will
magnify the scale and impact of what Rob Nixon (2011, 2) laments as
the “slow violence” of ecological destruction. A danger, which we may
in reminiscence of the genocides of the 20th century even associate with
the more active production of what Michel Foucault termed “thanato-
politics” (Foucault 1988, 160).5
Thanatopolitics refers to a politics that—in contrast to biopolitics—
does not regulate life with the aim of preserving it, but rather goad the
mass production of death. It is, therefore, relevant to warn against it at
a time when risks of future genocidal politics have become part of the
debate on global human security and environmental humanitarianism
(Zimmerer 2014; Burke et al. 2016) and the most critical voices emerg-
ing from UN deliberations on climate and food work from the premise
that if direct or indirect interhuman violence asserts itself as genocidal,
there are (thanato-)political processes behind the developments (Ziegler
2011; Pashley 2019). The point is, therefore, not just that scholars in the
humanities must acknowledge these causalities i.e., acknowledge that
the conditions for thanatopolitics are highly likely to intensify the more
the average global temperature rises. They must also sense them in order
to fight the present destructive politics of the Anthropocene.
In fact, if we turn to humanities scholarship, the possible link between
a rise in average global temperature and the proliferation of thanatopol-
itics has already prompted academic authors from various disciplines to
unleash a small “flood” of dystopian visions. German social psycholo-
gist, Harald Welzer, asserts for example that “violence has a great fu-
ture ahead of it. We shall see not only mass migration but also violent
solutions to refugee problems, not only tensions over water or mining
rights but also resource wars” (Welzer 2012, 6). While British historian
Timothy Snyder has gone a step further by claiming that “the planet is
changing in ways that might make Hitlerian descriptions of life, space,
and time more plausible” (Snyder 2016, 327).
It is, therefore, in this context of projected futures that we find it
important to probe whether the humanities could become more active
defenders of humanism. As cultural theorist Irit Rogoff (2008, 98) re-
minded us off more than a decade ago, “urgent concerns” are after all
not something that researchers ought to repress. Instead of staying true
to the dusty epistemology of the so called “emotionally distanced and
politically neutral scientist,” it makes much better sense to conceive ur-
gency as an essential invigorator of research, as an affect that should
stimulate science, rather than be banned from it. For example, in her
essay “What is a Theorist?” Rogoff presents a very rough sketch of how
urgent concerns have served this function within her own career:
In the 1980s a concern with gender and sexual difference […] re-
sulted in an explosion of feminist epistemologies. In the 1990s a
concern with race and cultural difference […] resulted in trying to
take on the authority of ‘geography’ as a body of knowledge with
political implications. And currently [in the 2000s] a concern with
questions of democracy [has resulted in] an exploration [of] what it
means to take part in visual culture beyond the roles it allots us as
viewers or listeners.
(Rogoff 2008, 98–99)
One may of course contest the historical influence and alignment of these
examples. However, the point is simply that today a new form of urgency
adds itself to the ongoing struggles for gender and race equality, sexual
liberation, social justice etc. (Jacobsen 2018). Hence, not only does the
struggle against the destructive acceleration of the Anthropocene often
intersect with these other struggles. It is also projected to have negative
impacts on human lives globally that will strengthen existing patterns of
inequality (Tschakert et al. 2013). Just as inhumane treatment has in the
past propelled the humanities to react on issues of race, gender, sexuality
and economic injustice, so the humanities are today called upon to fight
the inhumane conditions that maturate with the Anthropocene.
The Idealization of Slowness

It should by now, however, also be clear that very little is won by simply
urging the humanities to recognize the acceleration of the Anthropocene
as an urgent concern. The matter is far more complex, as the number of
institutions and programs for EH has “exploded” in tandem with the in-
creasing public awareness of the dangers of the Anthropocene (Emmett
and Nye 2018). In fact, this prompts us to posit that the recent growth
of EH can, to a large degree, be explained as a reaction to the mounting
concerns about the health of the Earth System that emerge from the nat-
ural sciences. Albeit the diversity of EH, the task is, therefore, to probe
the guiding principles of this research i.e., question them in light of the
scale of the emergency. And while perceiving EH through the lens of the
carbon law will in this respect not leave us with some definitive answers,
it discloses some important weaknesses.
For instance, the pressing lack of time signaled by the carbon law does
not sit well with the assumption “that the humanities are, by their very
nature, slow” and that this slowness represents an important virtue in
the attempts to mitigate climate change and other environmental risks
(Bergthaller et al. 2014, 265). It is, therefore, necessary to discard many
of the arguments put forward by a group of prominent ecocritics and
environmental historians in an article published in the journal Environ-
mental Humanities in 2014. Starting with the claim that “humanities
research runs counter to current demands of academic speed,” the group
of authors ends with the conclusion that “it takes slow scholarship to
bring [the human dimension of climate change] into view” (265–266).
This seems, however, strange considering that the authors acknowl-
edge that the context of humanities research is changing in ways “inim-
ical to the forms of patient, open-ended deliberation” which their article
idealizes (Bergthaller et al. 2014, 265–266). According to the authors it
is thus not only the demand for academic speed and the “market-oriented
vision of universities” that currently make slow scholarship difficult
(265). They also describe it as standing in opposition to the modus ope-
randi of the modern media and emphasize that this is a problem EH
“cannot afford to ignore” (267). Nevertheless, one does not find any
explorations in the article of how EH may solve this problem. Having
pointed to the lacuna between their ideal and the speed with which in-
formation presently spreads, the authors leave it at that. The reason be-
ing that their grounding in hermeneutical theory—and Schleiermacher’s
200 year old idea that humanities research “involves shuttling back and
forth between the whole and its parts”—give little answer to how the
knowledge production of the humanities can compete with other types
of communications in a digitalized world (265). Instead the authors sim-
ply insist that “it is essential to take stock of ideas as they evolve and
come to be couched in common parlance, even—or especially—when
things seem most urgent” (265–266).
However, while it may seem wise to approach urgency claims with
precaution, how should EH scholars decide when geophysical dan-
gers do not only seem, but are in fact very urgent? In addition, if the
slowness is so central to EH scholarship, should we opt out of research
dialogues that demand a recognition of the urgency of change? The
problem with the idealization of slowness at this general level is that the
Anthropocene—in the interpretation of Earth System Sciences—has ur-
gent demands for societal transformation at its core (Steffen et al. 2018).
Of course, there is a task of minimizing scholarly mistakes in times of
urgency, but this applies to all scientific areas, not just EH.
Rather than idealizing slowness, EH should, therefore, gear itself to
a world saturated by new forms of speed. That is a world where dubi-
ous statements and alternative facts flourish and, in terms of attention,
often have the upper hand compared to the information spread through
hard scientific work. The thing to appreciate here is that more speed
would not necessarily equate more output from existing humanities de-
partments. We share the concern about austerity’s potential to damage
research processes (Berg and Seeber 2016), but the connection between
speed and crude productivity is not inescapable. In fact, we are quite cer-
tain that the answer is not for the humanities to speed up its production
of peer-reviewed monographs, articles or number of teaching modules.
Or to quote an old remark by Deleuze and Guattari:
We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much

of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The cre-
ation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and
people that do not yet exist.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 108)
That said, we should not be so foolish as to pretend that creating new

concepts will in itself be enough to push humanity in the direction of
the carbon law. Indeed, as we will demonstrate more thoroughly in a
moment such an assumption represents an epistemic problem of its own.
However, if we interpret “resistance to the present” to mean a break
with the business-as-usual that accelerates the Anthropocene, then “cre-
ation” must, in our eyes, imply the genesis of interdisciplinary collabora-
tions which deliberately use the power of their assembled knowledge to
advance rapid political and societal transformations (Fazey et al. 2018).
The Pursuit of Conceptual Thickness

However critical we are of the creed Deleuze and Guattari placed in the
subversive potential of concept-creation, we are not just reiterating their
30 year old remark here to take a swipe at how academic production
have more and more become communication just for the sake of it. The
schema for resistance transmitted to us by Deleuze and Guattari is not
entirely unfounded considering the value of new concepts such as “the
Anthropocene,” “The Great Acceleration,” “The Planetary Boundar-
ies,” and “The Carbon Law,” The problem is rather that the meanings of
these concepts have—to a certain extent—been misinterpreted by EH.
By this we do not mean that EH scholars have failed to comprehend
what these concepts are. The point is rather that large parts of the re-
search in EH seem to underappreciate the specific call to action under-
lying these concepts.
Indeed, we do not believe it is unfair to claim that the introduction of
the concept of the Anthropocene has disclosed an unfamiliarity within
the humanities with the norms of the natural sciences. It is, for instance,
important to stress how the natural scientists most influential in the ef-
forts to prove the scientific legitimacy of the Anthropocene have stepped
out of the comfort zones of their disciplines. Paul Crutzen and Eugene
Stoermer were of course the first to do so, when back in 2000 they sug-
gested the term in the natural scientific newsletter IGBP. But, it is at least
as important to note how the work of Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams
and Colin N. Waters have from the outset faced strong collegial oppo-
sition. As the arguably three most renowned scientists of the working
group gathering scientific evidence of the Anthropocene, Zalasiewicz,
Williams and Waters have repeatedly been forced to defend their en-
gagement with the Anthropocene to other geologists and archaeologists,
who question the scientific necessity of an epochal denominator that
breaks with deep-seated scientific traditions.6 Moreover, as a theoretical
prism, the Anthropocene was not new in 2000, but Crutzen and Stoer-
mer (2000) revived it to “develop a worldwide accepted strategy leading
to sustainability of ecosystems against human induced stresses.” This
clearly suggests that the concept “the Anthropocene” has not exclusively
been born to serve a descriptive function within the sciences, but also
to serve a larger normative aim. That is, we must partly see the concept
as a transdisciplinary construction, which utilizes geological expertise
to disseminate climatic and ecological urgency within the sciences and
beyond.
It is, however, exactly this urgency that the humanities have so far
failed to institute as a primal focus for collaborate work (Castree et al.
2014; Malm 2018). In light of how radical a shift in ontology the geo-
logical formalization of the Anthropocene entails, it is thus striking how
composedly or even reserved many branches of the humanities have re-
acted to it. Even EH scholars have at large approached the Anthropo-
cene as if the concept was indeed strictly a descriptive denomination and
treated it in the same way as the humanities have traditionally treated
cultural phenomena, i.e., by adding to its conceptual pluralism or its
“thickness.” Let us in order to substantiate this for a moment return
to Clifford Geertz’ famous remark that “culture is not a power, some-
thing to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can
be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can
be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described” (Geertz 1973, 14). Hence
our claim is that although many analyses in EH do in fact problematize
the injustices emerging from the Anthropocene, the overall direction of
debates functions as if one could replace Anthropocene with “culture”
in the quote above—that is as a context for thick description, not “a
power” that demands strategic countermeasures.
The many neologisms that have materialized out of Crutzen’s and
Stoermer’s original concept testify this. The Capitalocene (Malm 2015;
Moore 2016), the Chthulucene, the Plantationocene (Haraway 2015),
the Technocene (Hornborg, 2015), the Carbocene (LeCain, 2015), the
Machinocene (Andersen 2016), the Necrocene (McBrian 2016), the
White (M)Anthropocene (di Chiro 2016) and the Wasteocene (Armiero
and Angelis, 2017) are all constructs which offer “thickened” under-
standings of the Anthropocene. In spite of this, it would be unfair to
postulate that nothing good has come from these constructs and their
attempts to thicken the understanding of the Anthropocene. Rather, in
many of the texts unfolding these constructs, the thickening process
paves the way for normative descriptions of what action might mean
at this critical point in human history. That is, the thickening process
points toward macro- and micropolitical strategies and tools (Deleuze
and Guattari 2003) that the texts suggest to be deployed in order to
fight off the acceleration of the Anthropocene. This is, therefore, also a
good case for further explaining what we mean when we claim that the
humanities should conceive themselves as being in a state of exception.
Hence, one of the things we believe that the carbon law compels the
humanities—and especially EH—to do, is to short-circuit these steps
i.e., cut short the thickening process by replacing the pursuit of concep-
tual thickness with a more substantial pursuit of political thickness.
To be more exact, this pursuit (of substantial political thickness) should
aim at sharpening and enhancing the catalogue of effective political ac-
tions available to all those willing to prevent “the [scientifically modelled]
cascade of feedbacks [which] could push the Earth System irreversibly
onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway” (Steffen et al. 2018, 8254). For in-
stance, it should most definitely aim at providing a growing repertoire of
viable macro- and micropolitical strategies and tools to the youth, who
are in large numbers taking to the streets to express their concern for the
future. While it must more generally aim at making people capable of op-
posing, resisting and revoking the policies which regulate societies with
the intention of maintaining (at all costs) the high consumption lifestyles
of the Global North and elites elsewhere (Bendell 2018).
The Embrace of Posthumanism

Deleuze and Guattari were adamant that revolutions are as depending on
changes in micropolitics as they are on changes on the level of macropol-
itics (Deleuze and Guattari 2003).7 And it is indeed hard to imagine that
the changes it will take in global policies to decelerate the Anthropocene
will materialize without revolutions in human desire, sensibility, logic
etc. This means more broadly speaking fundamental transformations in
anthropologies, sociologies and ontologies—yes, basically, in all ways
of human life. However, this does not mean that any endeavor to de-
construct these fundamental categories should be uncritically welcomed.
In fact, if we again look to EH what we discover is an abundance of
texts dedicated to a particular form of deconstruction, namely the de-
construction of the idea that humans can be separated from non-human
entities. Under the heading of posthumanism environmental humanities
scholars have been particularly eager to dissolve “Cartesian distinctions
[…] between subject and object, society and nature, and human and
non-human” (Hornborg 2017a, 96). To a certain extent, this has been
both refreshing and relevant, as far as these “Cartesian distinctions”
have played a significant role in shaping modernity as it materialized
with The Great Acceleration. However, it has also worked as a lure that
has led EH away from the political battle against ecological destruction.
It thus seems uncontroversial to point out that in their embrace of post-
humanism, many EH scholars have become occupied with small biologi-
cal units. By delving into for example quantum mechanics (Barad 2007),
DNA (Morton 2010), bacteria (Braidotti 2018), fungi (Tsing 2015) and
various forms of “vibrant matters” (Bennett 2010), EH scholars have in-
deed gained new grounds for ecocritical thinking. However, we might
also see in these investigations a reproduction of a weakness, which has
haunted parts of the academic discipline of anthropology. Whereas an-
thropology has often distanced itself from the centers of political and
economical power and moved deeper and deeper into the periphery, in
observing radically different living humans, we are now seeing the danger
that EH may emulate this movement (Hornborg 2017b). The only differ-
ence is that instead of “going deeper and deeper into the jungle” (e.g., in
search of undiscovered indigenous communities), parts of EH are now go-
ing “deeper and deeper into the microscope” (in search of different ways
to extrapolate how humans are fundamentally linked to the biosphere).
We are by no means the first to argue that EH scholars thereby risk
distancing themselves from the centers of political and economic power
driving the acceleration of the Anthropocene. In recent years, a sim-
ilar argument have been raised by scholars rooted in Marxism and
post-marxist thought (Cotter et al. 2016; Hornborg 2017b; Alliez and
Lazzarato 2018; Malm 2018). The critique coming from these scholars
has many layers, but they generally share the perception that:
[…] by treating humanism as a way of thinking that needs to be

negated by new thinking, posthumanism simply substitutes a new
ethics of commonality among human and nonhuman life without
addressing the material relations that, in the class interests of a few
humans, systematically put all other human and nonhuman life at
risk.
(Cotter et al. 2016, 2)
To emphasize this claim, Malm’s term “the Capitalocene” is very often
utilized by eco-marxists, as it reframes the Anthropocene as a product
of injustices inherent to capitalism and hence as an arena for struggles
between those responsible for the acceleration of the Anthropocene and
those who suffer (and will suffer) most from it. What we want to add to
this critique is that the humanities scholars have an obligation to place
themselves more visibly on the side of all those humans who will suffer
as the Anthropocene accelerates. This includes harnessing the privilege of
complex analysis produced in EH as a resource to defend those humans
who are stripped of privileges at an intensifying rate in the Anthropocene.
At the surface, this may not seem to oppose any of the goals, which
the posthumanist branches of the EH are trying to achieve. But the real-
ity is that certain posthumanist assumptions make it difficult to defend
humanism, as such a defense could endanger the realization of “the new
ethics of commonality among human and nonhuman life” (Cotter et al.
2016, 2). Or to put this in more blunt and provocative terms: it appears
very hard for posthumanists to actively protect the large vulnerable
groups in the Global South, who are suffering and dying due to the ac-
celeration of the Anthropocene, because a widespread problem analysis
in posthumanism seems—if not explicitly, then at least implicitly—to be
that high population numbers stand in the way for what posthumanism
would ideally mean.
Donna Haraway, a key reference point of many scholars inspired by
posthumanism within EH, encourages us for example to perceive “kin
making as a means of reducing human numbers” and in general does
little hide to that to her posthumanism means “to reduce radically the
burdens of human numbers across the earth” (Haraway 2016, 138, 139).
More precisely, Haraway envisions large reductions in human numbers
“over five generations” emphasizing how this would require that humans
learn to “die well,” i.e., accept that they belong to the same “compost
pile” as all other creatures (97, 136, 150). In our eyes, this is, however,
a type of radical biopolitics that attempts to reconceptualize the relation
between human life and death abstractedly based on the very real exis-
tential threats of the Anthropocene. In fact, it is not just in Haraway that
we trace this kind of biopolitics. It is, for example, also latently present,
when Rosi Braidotti states that:
Death is the becoming-imperceptible of the posthuman subject and

as such it is part of the cycles of becoming, yet another form of
interconnectedness, a vital relationship that links one with other,
multiple forces.
(Braidotti 2013, 137)
Still, it would be unfair, if not incriminating, to claim that Haraway and

Braidotti actively promote thanatopolitics. Indeed, it is very much worth
stressing that their writings are solidly rooted in a humanistic tradition
that speaks against all sorts of interhuman violence. But, to iterate the
problem: their rootedness in this tradition is unfortunately overshad-
owed by their focus on human and non-human connectedness making
their writings characteristic examples of how the embrace of posthu-
manism are not only leading EH away from the battleground of contem-
porary realpolitik, but thereby also crippling its defense of humanism.
Conclusion—Toward New Forms of Engagement

The humanities need to develop a broader, stronger and more urgent sense
of the Anthropocene risks predicted by Earth Systems Sciences, the IPCC
and other relevant bodies of geophysical expertise. This short-term goal of
sensing the urgency of the Anthropocene should result in what we could
call “peaking”—its intended ambiguity. Whereas the debate over resource
peaks in the past (e.g., “peak coal,” “peak oil,” “peak population” etc.)
has turned on statistically predicting a moment of change in the future,
peaking as a verb can describe new forms of active and timely political
and scientific engagement. Humanities scholars must thus peak in social,
political and cultural impact to help reach a timely peak in greenhouse
gasses and contribute to the general deceleration of the Anthropocene.
Importantly, and as argued above, this should not lead to more stressed
and burned out colleagues, but to scholars that use the time they have on
providing analyses and tools that can help those willing to prevent the
Hothouse Earth pathway. This means aiding and promoting the vast,
but overlooked social and cultural resources to counter the crises, which
EH scholars might formulate as an alternative to the dominance of risky
technical “solutions” in the form of bio- or geoengineering (Tiessen
2018). We recognize that even if there is agreement among scholars on
such a principle, organizational structures might stand in the way. How-
ever, a first step is to become explicit about the need for fundamental
changes and accept that the most effective forms of expression might be
different from those currently shaping the majority of EH.
For instance, recent scientific support for the street protests for cli-
mate action is a good example of how interdisciplinary collaboration
can be used to generate societal attention and impact. In January 2019,
more than 3.400 Belgian researchers signed a public letter with the key
message: “As scientists, and on the basis of scientific facts, we declare:
the climate activists are right!” (Scientist4Climate 2019a). And, in the
weeks before the international school strikes on March 23, 2019 (Fridays
for Future), over 26.800 researchers in the German-speaking countries
signed a letter with the similar statement that “the concerns” of the pro-
testers “are justified and supported by the best available science” (Scien-
tists4future 2019b). Both letters seem to us be an attempt at providing
the protesters with more and stronger arguments for the continuous
pressure on the political systems for faster climate action. Primarily, the
tools provided from the scientists to the youth are of a statistical sort.
That is, the translation of the climate crisis into dramatic numbers. In
our eyes, there is a great potential in EH scholars collaborating to de-
velop tools for the protesters that are not primarily number-based.
We began this text with a brief overview of some of the existing cul-
tural and political interpretations of the risks connected to a Hothouse
Earth pathway. We believe that a similar attention to the acceleration
of the negative effects and consequences of human impact on the Earth
System in the Anthropocene could be paid by a vast array of disciplines
and research programs in the humanities. In lack of a better word, this
would imply a translation of the impending climate crisis and ecological
breakdown at all levels of cultural and societal analysis. This transla-
tion should be interdisciplinary and provide answers to questions such as:
what are the normative calls for action from EH in the face of overshoot-
ing the limits of greenhouse gases according to the IPCC and biodiversity
loss according to IPBES? What could it mean socially and politically to
enter an era with a publicly accepted threat of civilizational collapse?
More generally, what cultural and social resources for change—which
often stay hidden to scholars in engineering, economics and Earth System
Sciences—are scholars in the humanities able to agree upon? This implies
harnessing insights, practices and creativity from historical, cultural, lo-
cal and global contexts in light of the ongoing anthropogenic destruction.
Here there is inspiration to be found in the work of colleagues, who
have aimed their work in the humanities at large scale social change.
For example, Vandana Shiva has been combining environmental activism
with feminist theoretical work since the 1970s, providing political tools
across the Global South (Shiva 2016; Jacobsen 2018). The 1990s saw a
number of humanities scholars engaging in the creation of the World
Social Forums, which in turn has continued to inspire ideas relevant for
humanities research (De Sousa Santos 2005). A large number of Marxist
scholars have been able to make their cultural analyses relevant for wider
social movements and action researchers have long collaborated with dif-
ferent environmental justice movements (Martinez-Alier et al. 2014).
Certainly, we do not want to suggest a closing down of the debate on
posthumanism, slow scholarship or any other new idea or sensibility
pertaining to the Anthropocene. Rather we want to create an awareness
about the conditions that can support future possibilities of free thought
and action. Overshooting on the demands of the Paris Agreement should
be considered an overarching danger to all the avenues of future think-
ing in the (post-)humanities. If indeed, we will end up with transgressing
the threshold to dramatic tipping points, leading either to the Thanato-
politics or a reliance on the political Damocles Sword of geo- or climate
engineering, then there seems to be historical precedent of a sustained
and mounting pressure on the resources and freedom that humanistic
research is based upon. Sensing this pressure in as many registers as pos-
sible is, therefore, crucial for a timely reorientation of the humanities.
Notes

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11 Filming through the Milieu
Becoming Extinct
Julia Bee
Introduction
The concept of the Anthropocene has been widely discussed from different
perspectives beyond the scope of geology. Feminism and postcolonial the-
ory have critiqued it as a new master narration and specifically the notion
of the human as a problematic signifier of a very limited group of people
having enduring impact on the planet’s atmosphere as well as on geology.
In opposition to the concept of the Anthropocene, Donna Haraway has
proposed the “Chtulhucene” (2015, 2016) as an age centered on relations
instead of re-affirming the (destructive) agency of the human by making
it a geological force. Jason Moore (2016) in his notion of “Capitalocene”
has, in turn, advanced the Anthropocene as a capitalistic endeavor which
is closely connected to the industrial exploitation of the earth’s and human
resources. In this regard, extractivism can be seen as a principle of taking
different resources from the earth and humans like minerals and labor as
well as from data in data mining (Mezzadra and Neilson 2017).
The proliferation of many -cenes thus demonstrates the controversial
nature of conceptualizing climate catastrophe as challenging already ex-
isting concepts of human-Earth relations. For heuristic reasons, I will keep
the notion of the Anthropocene here since it combines different and het-
erogeneous approaches following the originally geological paper of Paul
Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000). To this already complex and het-
erogeneous debate, I want to add an argument on the psycho-cultural pro-
cesses of negotiating relations to “the” earth from the angle of film studies.
The Anthropocene has become a highly mediated assemblage of dis-
courses and phenomena regulating relations between humans and the
earth as a central focus point for subjectivities in transformation. De-
spite its controversial character, the Anthropocene as a (visual) discourse
as addressed by the editors of this volume has a fundamental and on-
going impact on practices of representation and, therefore, forces us to
rethink social, ecological as well as aesthetic practices. One of the major
issues among different societies today is confronting the threatened state
of the earth and its relation to the “position” of the human. This re-
newal of positioning as cultural technique of situating and place making
192 Julia Bee
has aesthetic as well as psycho-cultural implications and places images,
films, narrations and cultural productions, in general, in the position of
negotiating the role of human agency and human-Earth relations.
Far from all imagery dealing with the Anthropocene contains critical
elements. Much imagery even bears a catastrophic or elegiac tone (see
e.g., on disaster trauma films Ann Kaplan 2017, 2016), sometimes revi-
talizing totalitarian phantasies. Besides, much older forms of commu-
nicating with the earth exist among different societal groups, different
cultures, religions and cosmologies beyond the (visual) discourse of the
Anthropocene. This calls for a discussion about the relation of humans
to the earth as aesthetic and psycho-cultural force.
The older notion of World Image (Weltbild in German)1 refers to the
earth as image—fundamentally re-conceptualized by “Blue Marble”
(1972) as a first account of the “whole earth” (Diederichsen/Franke 2013)
from above. Very different to the imag(in)ing the earth as a whole being,
I analyze how film deals with the Anthropocene by inventing and taking
up older forms of an aesthetic of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 21)
term “the middle.” In this chapter, I address this from the perspective of
documentary art film in the lineage of ethnographic filmmaking which by
now has produced images of humans and their milieu for over 100 years.
Since documentary film works with material from the very world we live
in, it is poised as an instrument to experiment with the relation toward
the world. In this chapter I will consider how film’s existential function
can be understood in relation to inventing and facilitating ecological sub-
jectivities by drawing on three films by filmmaker Elke Marhöfer.
Film and the Anthropocene

Today, humans once more need to develop new subject positions for an
age of the Anthropocene. This process is by no means a linear develop-
ment that follows one direction around the planet. There are still violent
resistances and deep resentments not only expressed by the followers of
fake news and climate deniers. In this light, the films I want to focus
on here do not represent a general change in film industry, let alone in-
dustrial societies in general but offer a glimpse of the potential of ex-
perimental film. They are influenced by what can be termed a “shared
anthropology” (Rouch 2003, 44), in line with anthropological filmmaker
Rouch, on the one side and sensory ethnography, on the other. Both ten-
dencies put forward an experimental film research on ecological think-
ing, what I choose to define as “filming through the milieu” following
Alanna Thain’s (2015) reading of Leviathan (2012). By its very material-
ity, documentary enthnographic film can invent new positions triggering
the production of new subjectivities, however situational and temporary
a viewing experience might be (Guattari 2011). Félix Guattari (1995)
believes in the potential of film to create and facilitate subjectivities.
Filming through the Milieu: Becoming Extinct 193
By creating affects and percepts, film, for him, produces not identifica-
tions but subject positions. Describing the production of subjectivities he
proposes to combine mental, ecological and psychosocial realms assem-
bled. An ecological subjectivity refers to a transversal thinking of these
realms of the natural, the psychic and the social. In difference to Jean-
Louis Baudry’s (among others) dispositive theory in film studies, sub-
jectivities are temporary and not structured only along the unconscious
laws of language in the dispositive of the cinematic apparatus. Although
Guattari ([1975] 2011, 15) takes language into account, he focuses on
affects and percepts in the reception of films. Guattari (2015) in his later
work turned to the regulating function of the exchange between the mi-
lieu and subjectivities. Subjectivities, for him, are already contained in
the milieu; they operate as potentialities of new self-relations and new
ways of perceiving the self and the milieu. The perceptions of being of
the world and not in the world as well of activity and passivity at the very
same time are a crucial strategy to relate anew to “the” world. Subjectiv-
ity seen through Guattari’s eyes is not an inherent property of a human
but a self-relation of milieus running across humans (and others).
By perceiving the world as an ever-ongoing change and in transition,
film not only becomes a “better” representation of the Anthropocene, but
rather than serving as a general device to display information, it creates
new perceptions of the world by making itself part of the world. Docu-
mentary film is, therefore, not only of interest because it (importantly)
tells us about today’s increased forms of agricultural (slow) violence,
car fetishizing and the toxicity of industrial lifestyles, but it can also
contribute to much more radical transitions of giving up the presumed
central position the human on the planet. The Anthropocene makes peo-
ple think about a reeducation of sensibility and the de-partition of sen-
sibility (Rancière 2000).
Film can, in this way, become an “existential territory” (Goffey in
Guattari 2015, xii) for new subjectivities. These subjectivities display as
self-relations. A subject does not make experiences but experiences create
subjectivities.2 By turning toward experience, film, as I want to point out
here, has re-activated its sensual productivity over the past few years and
has lost its ties to language as the main signifier in documentary film.
By investigating landscape-making practices, Elke Marhöfers’ films
contribute to the project of transforming film into a critical cultural tech-
nique of the Anthropocene. She focuses on inter-species communication
with various complex beings like bacteria and soil micro-organisms. In
her films, Marhöfer explicitly rejects a narrator’s voice or voice-over ex-
planation. The imagery emancipates itself from the function of informa-
tion or the framing of a god-like commentary that glues together seeing
and hearing in order to install a documentary authority. Most of her re-
cent films deal with human’s impact on landscapes and the multiple pro-
cesses of restoring soil or grasslands, and in particular of self-restoring
194 Julia Bee
practices between human cultural practices and natural ways of recover-
ing. Marhöfer is interested in practices of human-soil interaction in dif-
ferent places like Cuba (Prendas, Ngangas, Enquisos, Machines. Each
part welcomes the other without saying 2014), Japan (Shape shifting
2015, in collaboration with Mikhail Lylov, Who does the earth think it
is? Becoming Fire 2019), Russia (Becoming Extinct 2018) or China (Is
there something else I’ve lost 2011). Unlike in reportage style, activities
are accompanied by the camera without any explanation. The place or
milieu is allowed to matter for itself in both senses of the word. By writ-
ing about the topics in papers and her dissertation, Marhöfer (2016)
combines writing and filming but keeps each medium distinct from the
other so that film is not a mere appendix of text and conversely, her texts
are not the interpretation of her films.
In searching for ways to conduct research film is meaningful to create
new perspectives on the nature of knowledge in the Anthropocene. Film
can serve as such a new scenery for working between knowledge and
experience, experience is not to be understood as data. Following the
onto-epistemology of Karen Barad (2007), one can say film is knowl-
edge itself; it does not only communicate knowledge, rather it embod-
ies it. In Marhöfer’s film Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass), landscape is
knowledge; it consists of sediments of knowledge that bear the traces of
radioactive toxicity and witness the extinction of many species in this
environment. Marhöfer writes about plants communicating with soil to
trigger nutrition in order to facilitate the plant’s growth. Knowledge is,
in this way, embodied by different actors like plants and bacteria (Barad
2007, 392). Extinction of entities here portraits a form of violence that
generates new interspecies relations without offering a comforting po-
sition for the human. In this case, nature is nothing eternal but a con-
stant process of change, a “naturing nature” (Massumi 2009).3 Most
importantly, film’s materiality does not become invisible by doing this.
Percepts and affects create material “machinic” perspectives (Marhöfer
2019, 21) in and through the very aesthetics of film.4 This is addressed
by the perspective of the camera, the cut, the length of the take amongst
other aesthetic choices. I refer to this interplay of techniques as the cre-
ation of a “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1989), the creation of time-
spaces that facilitate a self-understanding of positioning as immanent to
what is shown (Barad 2007, 376). In a similar understanding, Deleuze
and Guattari (1987, 23) have criticized the problematic logic of represen-
tation since it differentiates between the world, the book (here the film)
and the author instead of positioning them on one plane of production:5
It is not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down
on them from above or up to them from below, or from left to right
or right to left: try it and you’ll see that everything changes. It’s not
easy to see the grass in things and in words.
Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass)
The perspective of the middle is with the things. It represents its be-
coming by co-becoming—a perspective which can be extended to the
filmmaker (i.e., author), the film (i.e., book) and the spectator, all posi-
tioned on one plane of experience.6 In Becoming Extinct, a 23 minutes
short film shot on 16 mm, the notion of becoming includes growth as
well as degrowth, as Deleuze and Guattari have suggested. Becom-
ing and undoing at the same time (Grosz 2011). Becoming Extinct is
not only an affirmation of the dying of a landscape but the complex
thinking and sensing of landscape as dying/becoming at the same time.
The mode of extinction performs becoming as an omnidirectional
movement.
The epistemology of documentary film reflects its way of perceiving
the world in different ways. In Marhöfers’ films, destruction carries out
its own aesthetics—often paradoxically beautiful—the latter becoming a
key issue over the last few years. Who does the earth think it is? Becom-
ing Fire (2019), for example, interrelates soils and agricultural production
with cycles of destruction in swidden farming techniques in Japan.
Becoming Extinct appears as a “stream of consciousness” (James
1892) combining multiple perspectives and heterogeneous points of
view touching on germs of narrative micro pieces. However, it is not
a fluid montage but a (jump) cutting of every image into micro move-
ments by constantly shifting angle, distance and frame even in one
shot. In one shot it assembles perspectives like close-ups and semi
close-ups without smooth transitions. Activities of animals such as
bumble bees and a dog, wild horses and a research station are cut
together in a flickering shacking manner, altered by black and white
frames. Nothing conciliatory or forgiving, comparable to phoenix in
the ashes can be sensed about this place that borders on the wasteland
of industrial agriculture and radioactive areas impacted by Chernobyl
(Figure 11.1).
Becoming Extinct is a collage of perceptions. Similar to Re-assemblage
(1983), Trinh Minh Ha’s filmic intervention in realistic modes of rep-
resentation in ethnographic filmmaking, the power of the filmmaking
aesthetics is less subtle and much more presented by the filmmaker her-
self. The montage “cut[s] ‘things’ together and apart,” it simultaneously
connects as it divides (Barad 2007, 179). It embodies a thinking about
interconnection of species by interconnecting perspectives and experi-
ences. Here, different scales of imagery act together like micro-images of
the landscape mixed with aesthetic forms to investigate this landscape.
In this way, Marhöfer collages not only images but also species and cul-
tural techniques (like excavation and reforesting), so that the montage
becomes a way of assembling species as well as parts of species with
practices in and of the image. Typical for her works in general, Becoming
Extinct assembles perspectives of parts of animals. Also Prendas begins
196 Julia Bee
Figure 11.1 Elke

Marhöfer, Becoming extinct (Wild Grass), 2018, Filmstills
(TC 20:3; TC 16:18; TC 6:15; TC 9:13) © Elke Marhöfer, courtesy
Elke Marhöfer.
by showing the skin of a horse and then its legs before one perceives
it visually as situated fully inside the cadre of film. Marhöfer discards
perspectives introducing the spectator to an overview of a place and
refuses to offer a perspective of oversight and, accordingly, a viewing
position in which subject and object are divided. By beginning a scene
with the direct skin contact of an animal with the camera producing a
haptic sight, objectification is prevented as Laura Marks (2000) argued
for the realm of transcultural video. This aesthetic strategy can be seen
as a meta-commentary on ethnographic filmmaking to which Marhöfer
implicitly refers in her work. The sectional or partial views refuse to
represent a being with fixed bodily borders but underline much more
the power of the perspective and of film as investigator of materials and
structures, such as for instance the fur of a dog playing in the toxic land-
scape in Becoming Extinct.
Although one of Marhöfer’s other films, Is there something else I’ve
lost?, deploys much longer shots than Becoming Extinct, it also reorga-
nizes the relation between image and sound. The on-site interviews on
urban gardening Marhöfer conducts in Is there something else I’ve lost?
are mostly accompanied by a black frame. The spectator hears the voices
but does not see their visual equivalence, rather, he/she is prevented from
seeing anything at all. This underlines critically how seeing and hearing
usually stabilize each other and thereby create evidence in documentary
films. The powerful situation of conducting an ethnographic interview
becomes split in different modalities of senses like hearing and seeing and
refuses to become an evidential image. Again, this can be regarded as
a cinematic intervention in ethnographic styles. The black image, how-
ever, is not a lack but a transfer of the capacity of combining hearing and
seeing. It foregrounds hearing (and reading the subtitles if one does not
understand Chinese/Mandarin) as a complex activity of different layers
combining natural and cultural techniques. This mirrors what the spec-
tator perceives in the film, namely the self-supporting micro-gardening
culture as it is threatened by urban development: urban gardening figures
as a cultural technique assembling social activities like chatting in the gar-
dens, regional production and ecological and self-sufficient ways of pro-
ducing vegetables: a niche activity threatened with extinction. Marhöfer’s
film makes women’s work visible in displaying intersecting techniques of
place-making. Without using direct verbal commentary, she introduces
the audience to an atmosphere of gardening. It is an activity that produces
affects and percepts at the same time as it produces vegetables.
In both films—Is there something else I’ve lost? and Becoming
Extinct—the notion of extinction refers to the colonial context of the
discourse of the Anthropocene (Demos 2016; Mirzoeff 2016) and the
ethnographic filmmaking and photography that seek to “preserve” hu-
man groups threatened by extinction. Ethnographic filmmaking has of-
ten combined this with a romanticized point of view and a humanist
approach that has naturalized extinction and underplayed the role of
colonizers who actively did harm and destruction to social groups and
places as part of the larger project of appropriating space and resources.
Contrary to the above-mentioned colonialist underpinnings, re-
cent ethnographic film in the wider discourse of the Anthropocene is
based on how film shifts in its history from an instrument of geopoliti-
cal power and anthropometric dehumanizing to the production of new
relations between human and others. Cinematic space can present the
land as something empty and to be owned by colonizers in a so-called
imperial gaze on the one hand (Kaplan 1997), but, on the other hand,
film can also present space as a complex process re-emerging with media
techniques.
In Becoming Extinct, Marhöfer takes up the idea of “becoming with”
which already appears in the film’s title, provocatively combining it with
extinction. This plays with the fear of humans Becoming Extinct through
“empty” landscapes before and after western colonization. Thus, the
imagery of imagined “emptiness” is questioned—as precursor of settler
colonialism as well as in the Anthropocene. This play with emptiness
also hints at the notion of the human as Becoming Extinct by giving up
his or her special position in the world. It follows that the concept of the
human really does become extinct.
198 Julia Bee
Becoming Extinct is part of a research project situated on the plateau
of Divnogorye Natural Museum Reserve as part of the Eurasian Steppe
Belt “stretching east to west, from Mongolia to Kazakhstan to Russia
to Ukraine to Romania” (Marhöfer 2019, manuscript 8). The project
includes texts on species extinction in combination with archaeological,
biological and cultural theory as well as other fields: it “focuses on plant
sensing; an archeological excavation of horses from the late Palaeolithic
period; an ecological restoration project of grassland; and cyanobacte-
ria” (Marhöfer 2018, n.p.).
The film is part of a collaboration with a research project by Misha
Lylov. Its scope includes publications, research and public discussions as
well as the making of a film. On the one hand, film becomes a medium
of research among other forms and, on the other hand, this research net-
work demonstrates the ways in which arts and science have been seeking
new forms of collaboration in recent years. This is not about using film
as a distributor to reach wider audiences or representing scientific de-
velopments. Becoming Extinct rather shows the vivid dialogue between
visual and textual forms of producing knowledge as one of the outcomes
of the Anthropocene discourse and its implications of delving into the
meanings of knowledge.
In addition to the collaboration of science and humanities in order to
study complex interplays of nature and culture, film is also (re-)discov-
ered as a medium of research being “natural” and cultural technique
at the same time. In particular, the turn toward experiences in recent
years has transformed audiovisual forms of research into a medium to
represent a complex spectrum of sensual perception not limited to seeing
as complicit with the (colonial) gaze. Furthermore, forms of research by
artists meet forms of investigation by other artists, scholars and citizens.
Becoming Extinct is an investigation of a micro zone of a place which
is renewed: “Becoming-with-the-dead mobilizes our imagination for
a future life without reconciliation or a place to hide. It embraces the
struggle for a collective survival together with the nonhuman” (Marhöfer
2018, n.p.). The filmmaker informs the viewer on her vimeo website:
we might need to establish an inclusive approach to ecological con-

servation and survival, where human reproduction is not the most
important factor. We might begin by perceiving the world not as
“our” environment, “our” climate, “our” epoch, “our” survival,
‘our’ films, or ‘our’ images.
(Marhöfer 2018, n.p.)
In this case, she deploys not only the notion of survival but brings up
film in the same sentence and suggests a close connection between both.
The decentering of the human as the ‘most important being’ to be con-
served throughout the transformation of the planet and its climate is
related to the imagery (Schneider and Nocke 2014). Film imagery here
can be regarded as modality to create new perceptions which facilitate
these transformations instead of stabilizing existing viewing positions.
Becoming Extinct, as other films by Marhöfer emphasize, does not only
represent other life forms but also aims at finding new ways of creating
relations and herewith a new aesthetics. The experience of transforma-
tion and its agents become debatable themselves and produce new aes-
thetic strategies in films. Before one translates the scaling of the planet
and re-connects it to individual behavior, film can create a point of entry
toward ecologies of perception. Also ecologies need to be considered as
consisting of different experiences as forms of becoming, of various life
forms and most importantly, of their interconnection. Film cannot only
capture a-modal (synesthetic) forms of perceptions but forms of move-
ment by movement itself (Deleuze 1989).
Processes of extinction can be found in nuce in the southern Russian
steppes where Becoming Extinct was shot. Extinction is neither happen-
ing in the far away future as one of the very extreme scenarios of dys-
topic films nor is it a phenomenon of the colonial past where groups were
depicted to “save” an imagery before people’s extinction— something
often not traced back to colonial genocide but more to a “sad” but
somehow “natural” process. It is a phenomenon of the very present con-
cerning micro species in the cities and the agro-industrial areas across
the globe (see for a critical account of Brazilian colonialism Viveiros de
Castro/Danowski 2017).
In Becoming Extinct, the camera often closely studies and thereby
“moves with movement” in the environment, like the wind folding the
plants or following the line of the horizon with the camera, or following
a tree trunk up and down between soil and treetop. Slow and long takes
are combined with hectic and fast cuts as if the film seeks to embody the
very different speeds and slowness acting together in the steppe. These
different speeds feed into the different forms and beings like soil and
stone, plant and weather. All consist of different forms and processes of
time (or movement) turned into matter by slowing down (Bergson 1990).
The camera traces not only lines or silhouettes but also movements. Such
movement can also be found in one shot in Prendas and seems to be a
precarious and volatile perspective searching for an object. At the same
time, it underlines that the object cannot exist because one has to face
an ecology of heterogeneous and often violent interacting forces. In this
very image of searching for a position, the aim of becoming part of the
milieu without becoming invisible or adapted to the milieu appears as
a symbolic form of the search for a position as a filmmaker which is
simultaneously inside and outside of the depicted events. Every milieu
is characterized by being in-between and not serving as a container or
an object one could become simply a part of. The search for a position
is not to be understood in a negative way: as a lack of a fixed and stable
200 Julia Bee
position. Nor is it an image metaphorically figuring for the search of
a new place in nature following the romantic paradigm. It is rather an
experimental gesture in need of the construction of new perceptions that
concentrate not only on the human experience. Again, space is not to
be mastered visually and centrally organized by perspective but rather
a topology Deleuze terms “any-space-whatever” (Deleuze 1986, 109).
Centering on the human is even the case when researchers in the
movement of sensory ethnography deploy phenomenological forms of
experience. In the end, phenomenology, although centered on multiple
senses, does begin—and, therefore, must conclude with—the human
perception. For William James (1912), experience is much more abstract
and much more concrete at the same time: it is the change felt (James
1912, 161; Massumi 2011, 1). When Marhöfer writes she works with
plant sensing, this does not only mean sensing a plant rather it is a form
of prehension of growing by light and water and communicating with
soil and other plants around (Marhöfer 2018, n.p.).
Film is a direct form of “machinic” perception able to de-center hu-
man perspectives. The turn toward sensory experience in ethnography
will be extended here by a turn toward experience as becoming “ex-
tinct”: becoming and fading at the same time, as James in Psychology
has characterized experiences, reverberates Deleuze’s becoming as an
undoing. Becoming is not the becoming of someone or something but,
again, a multidirectional movement. In film, an image is a process cut-
ting through processes, as Deleuze (1986, 1989) has pointed out in his
books on cinema. This becoming also has a form and a history. Film
creates a form for this becoming, but does not represent the becoming of
form. This form can be an existential territory, not a given place but an
ongoing place-time-making.
In the Anthropocene, new images of the human-milieu relation
emerge (or are re-discovered) and it can be argued that they emerge as
new images of experience. Becoming in Becoming Extinct does not copy
a bumble bee by mimicking its view with the camera (by “flying” from
flower to flower) but by working with the cinematic space, its sound
and its kinesis among others. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 10) write
“The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp;
but the wasp reterritorializes on that image.” Like the rhizome emerging
between wasp and orchid in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Becoming
Extinct becomes in relation to the landscape and not as a copy of it.
Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the book is not a representation of the
world. Building up on this, films like Becoming Extinct experiment with
maps of co-becoming as well. These include maps of situating viewers
in between things which means being no longer the human toward the
milieu or in the milieu but a complex assemblage in which the human is
diffracted as a being (cf. Nitzke and Pethes 2017). In Becoming Extinct a
holistic perception of the environment gets de-naturalized and becomes
a shattered collage. Like cut and continuity, the montage resembles the
principle of becoming and undoing on a visual and acoustic plane. The
form of micro rupturing very much embodies a thinking about cut as
end and cut as new connection, of continuity and discontinuity of life
(Deleuze and Guattari 2000, 38).
As the landscape in Becoming Extinct becomes fractured into many
becomings and undoings by violent transformations, the camera refuses
a position as fixed and stable, creating oversight. Landscape as a homog-
enous narrative space needs to be deconstructed. It no longer serves the
human as a basis for narration as a projection for human emotions. At
the same time, this refusal to anthropomorphize the landscape points to
a immanent politics of nature.
Filming through the Milieu

To “film through a milieu” does not mean to make film part of the
nature or even to naturalize documentary film images as authentic or
truthful. Becoming Extinct escapes being an invisible medium by gen-
erating extra immersive perspectives. It acknowledges film’s agency not
only as inscription into a natural milieu but turns film in an actor itself,
as autonomous, embedded and relational. Both processes intersect. This
paradox is related to film being at the same time a device to depict a
milieu and being part of the milieu itself by changing it from within.
By making itself accountable, film highlights itself as an element of the
landscape. That is also why Marhöfer shot many images of the very
interaction of flowers with the camera or the tactile structure of a stray
dog’s fur in extreme close up as if it were a landscape itself. These are
images embodying relationality: relative positions between elements of
the research and the researcher instead of subjects studying objects.
Movements of the camera and movements of the landscape interre-
late and different rhythms intersect: the cry of a cuckoo (in stress) and
the cut of the images, the hand grasping the flower, the wind moving.
The 16mm film flickers and micro movements run through the spool
in the case, the light flickers on film, the hand holds a thin stick inter-
acting with a flickering plant and examines its material that also be-
comes shaky, while the clouds change the light on the scenery. All these
stream-like movements do not form a whole impression (in the sense of
being impressionistic) they create a perception of the heterogeneity of an
ecology in transition.
The many different parallel perceptions cut across the species and form
events of perceptions: micro rhythms of perceptions neither representing
a single being nor belonging to it in the film, be it a horse, a flower or
even the filmmaker. Like Virginia Woolf who once described the garden
in The Waves (1931) from the perspective of flowers growing, Becoming
Extinct forms a stream of perceptions, too. The grassland inspires a
202 Julia Bee
rhythm of sound, vision, movement and haptics in a montage-oriented
style focusing on the interplay of sensual perceptions.
The re-valuation of film as a tool for research over the last few years
is closely related to the turn toward highlighting experience and the sen-
sory already found in observational cinema’s aim to depict atmospheres
and social aesthetics (MacDougall 2006; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009).
Showing or sharing multisensory experience is something particularly
characteristic to film in comparison to text. Images in the films of Mar-
höfer, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, Stephanie Spray and
many other recent filmmakers can matter without verbal commentary.
They deliver atmospheres of places, gestures, textures and impressions to
the viewer. Unlike other filmmakers in sensory ethnography, Marhöfer
writes texts about the subject of her work in addition to the filmmaking
process and thereby creates dialogues between film and text without
the text explaining her film or vice versa. Her film although unique re-
flect a general turn to be observed in experimental documentary: by
foregrounding experience instead of information, film grows more and
more apart from its supplementary and illustrative position. Milieus and
human-nonhuman assemblages gain importance as subject and as aes-
thetic strategy. The turn toward experience in ethnographic filmmaking
overlaps with anthropocenic filmmaking studying nature_cultures.
The sensory in Marhöfer’s work follows an autonomous interpreta-
tion refusing phenomenological positions and empathy. Marhöfer uses
her camera as an apparatus that diffracts the landscape and produces
very specific imagery aware of the artificiality of the images. Here, she
moves away from long shots and an observational style. The creative
work of the camera is more foregrounded as well as the creativity of
the landscape itself which also inscribes itself into the film. Again, this
is not indexical truth but a complex process of translation between the
becoming of nature and filmmaking. This process is very much consid-
ered since Marhöfer uses 16mm film and works with the materiality of
the light as an artefact causing visual interference patterns in the film.
By capturing sounds and echoes, the diffraction pattern of light re-
flection is carried out by immanence and not by the distancing of the
camera allowing the viewer to gain oversight. We do see the work of
the camera and post-production, but we also sense different experiences
informing these techniques. Instead of these techniques becoming natu-
ralized, the already existing complex techniques of naturing inform the
montage. Nature here becomes a technique, entangled with other tech-
niques like refostering the ground, excavation, montage and perspective.
These experiences of different natural and cultural techniques form a
milieu of experiences entangled with the landscape. Perceptions here are
not secondary—neither is the reflection of the camera, which does not
want to alienate or distance itself as often found in the aesthetics of
critical documentary. As nature, the cinematic perception is creative and
productive. Film figures as an element of nature, without again natural-
izing nature or the imagery as a naturalized part of nature.
Becoming Extinct operates very much as an element of broader re-
search on bacteria, horses and plants, taking place at the southern
Russian steppe. Like excavation, film becomes a research technique by
intra-acting with other media forming the larger network of research
methodologies. It translates the rhythms perceived in the environment
into the montage. The strong and rhythmic dis/harmonic montage also
points to a reflexive role of the film. Here again, film becomes a rela-
tional technique by foregrounding its own capacities, materiality and
agency. “Within this mode of film practice, images are not just index-
ical mirrors of the world, but self-expressive beings” (Marhöfer 2019,
Manuscript 3).
Prendas, Ngangas, Enquisos, Machines (Each Part

Welcomes the Other without Saying)
Prendas, ngangas, enquisos, machines (each part welcomes the other
without saying) (2014) was shot in Cuba in 2010–2012. Prendas and
ngangas are the containers through which Palo communication takes
place. The film does not follow the animistic, so-called pre-modern be-
lief but adapts it as an contemporary practice for filmmaking. In Pren-
das, the camera often deploys long shots, listens to the wind in the
trees, studies bones and skulls of animals in the woods, the sun over
the corn fields and the slipping of a small chick out of an egg. The film
becomes a device to question what is living and how agency is usually
organized by film. Since the filming takes place in Cuba, the specta-
tor might expect a travelogue or ethnographic documentary made by
a Western-based filmmaker. But the animistic theme becomes a way of
filmic communication with the landscape. Without exoticizing the land-
scape as pre-modern, it specifically creates images between colonialist
plantation-scapes and Palo.
As in Becoming Extinct, in Prendas, images of humans are rare. We
get to hear voices of people riding on the train although the image does
not screen human bodies but only the view from the window onto the
forests and plantations. The human here is already contained in the
landscape: through her impact, she is in the landscape but herself invisi-
ble. This complicates what can be seen and what is invisible in Prendas.
Even if there are just micro movements we constantly see transforma-
tions, nothing ever stands still: goats are eating, chickens are running,
clouds are moving in the sky, the wind is constantly blowing and the
light is changing. All of these are interfering movements; small move-
ments like the slipping chicken cracking the egg, the leaves moving with
the wind and the train cutting through the landscape. Landscape be-
comes a complex interplay of movements (Bee and Egert 2018).
204 Julia Bee
Weather and sun form the place as sugar cane production does. By lis-
tening to the wind and studying the light, the film evokes romantic pic-
tures of the landscapes. But since this landscape is shown from within,
from an immanent perspective, it is neither an overwhelming other nor
a harmonic habitat for studying cultural practices. By taking up move-
ments, the boundary between what is living and what is dead is recon-
ceptualized, as Ingold notes: “We are not required to believe that the
wind is a being that blows, or that thunder is a being that claps. Rather,
the wind is blowing, and the thunder is clapping […]” (Ingold 2011, 73).
Here, the relation between things before the camera and the camera
person itself becomes the subject of the film without Prendas becoming
a travelogue focusing on the subjective experiences of the filmmaker.
Rather, it creates a milieu of experiences which are not necessarily the
kind of subjective ones of the filmmaker who makes an essay film out of
these experiences (Figure 11.2).
The opposition and the imagination of total harmony between humans
and landscapes through art, film and other visual media have produced
positions of sublimity of the landscape. Much of the relation between
humans and nature is produced by visual media as well as by cultural
techniques like agriculture. These different forms of cultural techniques
Figure 11.2 Elke

Marhöfer, Prendas ngangas, enquisos, machines. Each part
welcomes the other without saying, 2014, Filmstills (TC 24:45;
TC 24:48; TC 3:32; TC 20:15) © Elke Marhöfer, courtesy Elke
Marhöfer.
become subjects in Marhöfers’ films. She does not suggest only a more
harmonic relation with natures but seeks to embody a search for the
position by pointing toward the relation in the production of film and
visual media. Like the agro-industrial techniques rooted in colonialism,
film has had a history of visual violence toward the other and produced
powerful forms of looking (Kaplan 1987). Marhöfer studies these forms
of violence and at the same time, new forms of life that emerge at places
deeply impacted by historic and recent forms of violence.
Prendas shows how film as a relational technique can become a device
to research positions that negotiate the fragile boundary between the liv-
ing and the dead that Kathryn Yusoff (2019) described as a key for the
colonial discourse in the Anthropocene. Since film itself is animistic and
brings images “to life,” the relation between the medium and the topic of
Prendas can be seen as echoing one another. By negotiating imagery about
landscapes and the history of the colonial gaze, Prendas also reflects on the
role of film in the production of milieus and landscapes as affective spaces.
Instead of filming people or rituals, Prendas refuses a narration in
the form of climax. In the last shot already first under than behind the
credits, some Palo bins and a candle appear—shot rather en passant
than as a central reference to decode the imagery. From the margin of
the film an image appears imagined to be central to the understanding
of animism. It gives the practice of searching for forms of life its rele-
vance. The convention of the ethnographic film is diffracted by refusing
any exotistic or voyeuristic views. We do, however, see the Palo ritual
containers and create connections between the other images of the film
and Palo retrospectively. Palo is not reduced to a dramatized ritual but
becomes graspable as a way of sensing, a connection of landscape, agri-
cultural techniques, wind, and of the living and the dead which appears
in the interstices of what can be seen and can be sensed otherwise.
Film with its many modalities and perspectives is an ideal medium
to do research on the new relation of human and world. Film can be
conceived as a medium of ecology (Ivakhiv 2013), not by representing
ecological topics but by creating perspectives of the milieu. The world
shows itself and this includes media which is located on the same plane
as that what it shows.7 The human being here no longer admires the
gloriousness of nature or is dwarfed by the overwhelming beauty of the
landscape. Rather, the film makes the search for new positions perceiv-
able, a processual positioning that informs larger cultural movements of
ecological practices in a wider sense.
Anthropocenic Negotiations
Documentary film has gained importance in the negotiation of
human-milieu activities over the last few years. The documentary eth-
nographic or anthropological film produces new perspectives of human
206 Julia Bee
positions in nature_cultures. By emancipating itself from being a repre-
sentation of anthropological research and developing its own materiality
and autonomy toward the anthropological text, film has increasingly
turned to sensory experience (Pink 2009).
The concept of experience is often seen as unpolitical. Since scaling
is, however, one of the major issues in the human perception of her-
self as impact in the climate change, experience becomes a major factor
offering new ways of relating to ecologies. These relations can also be
seen as “territories” for new subjectivities, as Guattari has pointed out.
By going through different techniques of sensual filmmaking, Marhöfer
proposes in her film what can be termed a filming through the milieu
(see Thain 2015). Isabelle Stengers (2005), by describing practices in the
laboratory, has coined this term to describe an “ecology of practices.” By
“thinking par le milieu,” she refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy
(187). Since filmmaking nowadays creates audiovisual concepts about
the condition of the world and operates as a relational technique, I adopt
this phrase to propose sensory ethnographic film as a possible strategy
of becoming with the milieu.
In recent years it is the documentary that forms a field for these aes-
thetic ways of dealing with the earth’s condition. The films discussed
above are ecological films, precisely because they address positions and
perspectives of human-nature interactions.
Films, like those by Elke Marhöfer, are situated knowledge (Haraway
1998) proposing immanent positions. They do research and facilitate
humans to find a new position by thinking about position by the very
medium of positions (i.e., perspectives)—and be it to not have a position
fundamentally or ontologically separated from other species. Documen-
tary film is one of the significant fields for these audiovisual negotiations
because it intensely deals with relations to what is—or what co-becomes.
It chooses the “muddiness” of the very world as point of view, as Donna
Haraway (2008, 14) has described it. The relation of media to the world
is at stake and this can be seen in the multiple artistic projects dealing
with (postcinematic) documentary modes. Particularly the films of Har-
vard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab have helped to articulate new perspec-
tives of humans, machines, things and animals all together by taking
milieus as a subject and as a mode of investigation. In Marhöfers’ and
other recent art films such as Harvard’s SEL, film also has its own mate-
riality and adds to the milieu as a becoming part of it. It does not seek to
represent a reality apart from itself but very much foregrounds its own
agency. In this way, film not only explores the human-Earth relation,
i.e., about what it actually means to inhabit the world and not just to be
in the world, but it also thinks about its own role in creating these spe-
cific and affective relations. For media scholar Andrew Murphie (2014),
for example, the world becomes its medium by articulating the voices
of nonhumans and thereby using nature as a medium: film articulates
itself as nature does. Reflexivity is no longer a privilege of text alone. Be-
coming Extinct and other recent sensory films reflect on this new form
of multispecies audio-visuality in the Anthropocene. The production of
documentary forms throughout media and the arts can be understood
in the discourse of the Anthropocene in a broader sense including hu-
man fears and narrations about the future. Film itself forms a passage
in the search for new positions of the researcher-filmmaker who creates
and affirms a less detached position toward the world: “Deriving from
direct entanglements, this ethics has nothing to do with self-reflectivity,
or identification, but rather with pre-individual interspecies immersions
and mutations” (Marhöfer 2019, 4–5).
Like Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s Leviathan (2012), Marhöfer’s Be-
coming Extinct, Is there something else I’ve lost? and Prendas reflect the
paradoxical agency of the human between the inscription into earth’s
history while showing that the age of the human on the planet is only
one of the ages of the earth among many others. The use of media tech-
nology in the representation of nature becomes re-politicized through
the creation of imagery in which the human agency in the earth history
is paralleled in the use of media: media’s self-consciousness (like in Mar-
höfer’s films) articulates other than human agencies by (paradoxically)
underlining the agency of the medium as the one directed by the human.
Coda
Documentary film produces a specific way to negotiate the role of the
human discussed in the Anthropocene discourse. This broad scientific
and public discourse has also created a psycho-cultural dynamic of the
production of subjectivity deeply entangled with forms of media. Film
brings forth potential “existential territories” (Goffey in Guattari 2015,
xii), as has already been suggested by Guattari. These are closely entan-
gled with the aesthetics of media, especially in experiments in documen-
tary film today.
In experimental documentary like Marhöfer’s the earth becomes
a reference point of belonging for subjectivities. More and other
psycho-cultural connections emerge alongside those that have long ex-
isted in different cosmologies and cultural practices (see, for example,
in Sun Ra’s Afrofuturisms or Amerindian perspectivism). Images can
express the concern between humans and the world without relying on
representation or information. Furthermore, they do so without a patri-
archal ideology of caring for the earth, as Bruno Latour (2017) once put
it. Images become techniques of locating oneself in the world (Povinelli
2016) and most importantly with the world (Haraway 2008, 3). New
subjectivities can emerge on the existential territory of experiences, pro-
liferated and created by documentary art film. Its role cannot be sensed
apart from an ecological consciousness, but this is much more than a
208 Julia Bee
rationalization of behavior, it includes aesthetics as well. Ecological aes-
thetics extend beyond the eco movement of the 1980s and 1990s that
first have raised an awareness of the finiteness of the human on the earth,
at least in the industrialized north of the globe. Films like Leviathan and
Sweet Grass (2009) by the SEL as well as Becoming Extinct reflect the
paradoxical position of humans as a geological force and at the very
same time being reduced to one of many ages of the earth. Ethnographic
and ecological art film today is less a self-affirmation of “the” human
and human technology but more an apparatus of contingency splitting
the human into many diverse images of what has long been the colonial
European human white man.
There are other possible aesthetics and many recent forms to be found
dealing with the discourse on the Anthropocene. Moreover, film or au-
diovisual installations are by no means the only possible medium which
experiments with aesthesis and perceptions. But what is characteristic
for some of the recent art projects that take up the Anthropocene dis-
course is the aim to become part of a milieu and to break with the his-
tory of the human view as above or distanced from things. They, instead,
invent and reinvent filming a milieu through the middle.
Notes

writes of ‘the world as medium’ (1978, 286) within which multiple vec-
tors of feeling move, assemble and then disperse to be taken up elsewhere.
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12 Seeds—Boundary Objects
of the Anthropocene
Alexandra R. Toland
Open Bracket (passing out seed packets)
This is an exercise.
(Because not all artistic activity needs to be framed as

a project or a product or a practice.)
This is an experiment. It might horribly backfire,

but that’s the nature of experimentation. (This could
explode.)
This is an experiment that’s been done before.
(In other words, this is a re-enactment of something

else.)
This is an artwork.
(It could also just be a symbolic gesture of artistic

knowledge sharing and not an artwork after all.)
This is a gift.
It’s a rather paradoxical gift, though – because you’re

not supposed to open it.
This is made out of very specific materials. Feel its

weight, its texture, and look at its shiny surface.
This is a result of mental work. Try to imagine the

thoughts that passed through the mind during the process
of making: Do I have enough time for a break before the
paint gets too sticky? Or, do these irregularities pass
as uniqueness or just sloppy handicraft?
This is a result of physical work. Try to imagine the

sensations that passed through body during the process
of making: the tightness in the lower arms from pushing
paint through a screen; the feeling of paper on finger-
tips; the smell of drying acrylic and stale cigarette
Seeds—Boundary Objects of the Anthropocene 213
smoke from the kitchen down the hall...
This is a seed packet.
(And what a curious object that is, with life on the in-
side and handy directions on the outside.)
These are seeds of plenty.
These seeds are representative of only one species in a

panoply of terrestrial biodiversity in which each spe-
cies carries its own legacy of ecological and cultural
meaning. The fact that we are in the middle of the 6th
great mass extinction has no bearing on these seeds of
plenty.
This is an epistemic artefact.
(It is a lens for seeing and understanding the world.)
This package, and the seeds within it, are boundary

objects. They’re ideas that can galvanize action across
different communities and across different disciplines.
These ones are objects of research for scientists con-

cerned with issues of plant pathology, genetic diver-
sity, food security, and species distribution in a drier
climate.
These ones are a life source for seed savers and indepen-
dent growers, at the edge of bankruptcy and no turning
back.
These ones are a meme for political activism against in-

dustrial agriculture and its history of pollution and
economic conquest.
These ones are a free sample provided by a well-meaning

agri-business corporation trying to feed the world.
These ones are for the backyard birds.
Can you open this package without an expectation of the

contents inside?
Can you open this package without judgement of what is to

come?
Can you open this package and still take joy in

germination?
Can you take this thing, this object, and transform it

into something meaningful to you?
214 Alexandra R. Toland
A Short History of Boundary Objects and Their
Potential in Artistic Practice
Imagine a feather. A feather could represent something completely dif-
ferent to someone studying aerodynamics, architecture, evolutionary
biology or fashion design. This was the example used by Edith Kollath
and Katja Marie Voigt to visualize the concept of boundary objects at
a 2018 graduate workshop for PhD students at the Bauhaus-Universität
Weimar. Similarly, the concept of distance, however it is visually or ver-
bally represented, was presented as a boundary object at a subsequent
workshop for art and design students. Ideas about distance change if
you have a background as a traffic planner, an astrophysicist, a pilot,
a performance artist or a marathon runner. Both examples are specific
enough to guide conversation, but flexible enough to be creatively rein-
terpreted based on individual experience and disciplinary background.
This is Bauhaus, after all, where a chair is not always a chair. To put
these examples into context, I will explore Susan Leigh Star’s concept of
boundary objects as a means of anchoring artistic research in the greater
discourse surrounding the Anthropocene. After outlining the history,
scope and strengths of the concept, I present two case studies of recent
artworks that posit seeds as boundary objects of the Anthropocene. The
essay is itself “bounded” by two reflections as part of a live performance
of this chapter in which I passed out silk screen printed seed packets at
the beginning and bags of salted popcorn at the end (Figure 12.1).
Figure 12.1 A lexandra R. Toland, Seed Packets, “Do Not Open”, 2018. Photo:
Alexandra R. Toland.
The concept of boundary objects as things or ideas situated at the
intersection of distinct disciplines and social worlds was first intro-
duced by the sociologists and scholars of science and technology stud-
ies (STS), Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer in 1989 and then
further developed by Star and others.1 Boundary objects are simply
defined as conceptual entities that bridge different understandings
of information by different user groups (Star and Griesemer, 1989).
Boundary objects are interpreted differently depending on the group,
but contain enough content to allow members of different disciplines
and social groups to talk and work together (ibid.). They can be con-
crete or conceptual in nature, but must be specific enough to keep
discussions focused and avoid superficiality, and yet general enough
to allow new ideas and possibly new boundary objects to emerge and
conversation to remain open. Star (2015, 157) explains that bound-
ary objects both “inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy
the informational requirements of each […]” and “are both plastic
enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties
employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity
across sites.” Boundary objects may furthermore be “weakly struc-
tured” as they are identified in common use, such as the examples
given above, or “strongly structured” in more specialized, localized
and situation-specific contexts.
In contrast to weakly structured boundary objects, strongly-structured
boundary objects can be used as precision tools to sharpen the focus
of interdisciplinary collaboration, especially under time and resource
constraints. My first practical teaching experience using the boundary
objects concept brought me together with Dr. Bettina König, an agricul-
tural economist from the IRI-Thesis Excellence Cluster at the Humboldt
University Berlin, her colleagues Anett Kuntosch, who is a geographer,
ethnographer and science communications officer Anne Dumbrowski
and Prof. Myriel Milicevic, who is an interaction designer and Professor
of Elemental Design from the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam
(FHP). The goal of our first course, which consisted of a mixed group
of students from the Humboldt University and the FHP, was to create
“knowledge maps” visualizing the scientific and social networks behind
sustainable animal husbandry, especially in sustainable chicken and egg
production and marketing contexts.2 Even though the boundary objects
were highly specific or “strongly structured” in Star and Griesemer’s
terms (e.g., designed, informational objects about chicken farming), the
results offered a wide range of ways to engage with the topic, from a card
game to an online arcade game, from a political mini-zine to a children’s
book or from an info-graphic wall installation.3
A consecutive project with the same group of instructors tasked inter-
disciplinary student groups with the creation of audio works addressing
land use change in the Spreewald region south of Berlin. The engagement
with boundary objects in the two teaching scenarios at the Humboldt
University was conducted in a relatively top-down fashion, agreed upon
by us instructors as a way of quickly organizing the class based on
shared research goals. Given the time limitations (we only had 90 min-
utes a week for one semester of six months), the strongly-structured ap-
proach put realistic limitations on interdisciplinary work, which all too
often remains on a superficial level of encounter between the sciences
and the arts. Rather than a space of open-ended idea generation between
the different user groups, the emphasis was instead on skill and knowl-
edge sharing, as well as creative interaction within a basic conceptual
framework. The two courses examined particular examples of “wicked
problems,” or problems of immense socioecological complexity, in man-
aging rural landscapes and agricultural practices before the backdrop of
climate change, desertification and the myriad challenges to sustainabile
land use in the current era.4 Agriculture in the Anthropocene became
tangible and thus debatable through the use of boundary objects.
In a weakly structured sense, similar to the examples of distance and
feather given above, the Anthropocene itself could be considered as a
boundary object of contemporary society, albeit an uncomfortably un-
wieldy one. Through the lectures, exhibitions, publications and ongoing
intellectual work e.g., at the House of World Cultures (HKW) in Berlin,
the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Stockholm Re-
silience Centre, the Science Gallery Dublin, the Rachel Carson Center
for Environment and Society and other organizations, it has been shown
time and time again that the Anthropocene is addressed quite differ-
ently by members of different disciplines. Reframed as the Capitalocene
(Moore 2016), the Plantationocene (Tsing 2012; McKittrick 2013), the
Chthulucene (Haraway 2015) and the Technocene (Sloterdijk 2015; Cera
2017), the concept of the Anthropocene (as well as its many alternatives)
continues to serve as an instigative boundary object that has the power
of bringing together thinkers and practitioners from disciplines far afield
to reflect on the rapidly changing state of the world and humanity’s role
within it. In so doing, the Anthropocene becomes a framework for re-
search that displays a range of different “paradigms, premises, theories
and methodologies (that) are re-negotiated and re-embedded into novel
conceptual configurations,” many of which are presented in this volume
(Introduction in this volume).
While it challenges epistemological tropes of nature and culture, the
Anthropocene can simultaneously be differentiated from other conceptual
entities, such as preceding geological eras (i.e., the Anthropocene contains
indicators in the geological record that make it markedly different from
the Holocene), alternative sociopolitical systems (i.e., the Anthropocene
is an undeniable result of capitalist societies) and non-human biological
groups (i.e., the Anthropocene’s very name refers to the human, Greek:
Anthropos). Its discursive specificity, and at the same time far-reaching
theoretical scope and ability to spawn new boundary objects, make the
Anthropocene something like a “super” boundary object, unclaimable
and untamable by any single discipline, institution, or author.
Within this super boundary object, a number of subsidiary boundary
objects emerge. For example, Egon Becker of the Frankfurt Institute for
Social-Ecological Research (ISOE 2010) argues that the idea of reliance
has emerged as one of the fundamental concepts of Anthropocene re-
search, ranging from an analytical term in ecology and population biol-
ogy to a more general way of thinking about complex socio-ecological
systems. Becker (1), referring to Carl Folke (2006) of the Stockholm Cen-
tre for Transdisciplinary Environmental Research, defines resilience as
“the capability of a system to retain similar structures and functioning
after disturbances, thus ensuring continuous development.” Operating
across sites and disciplinary worldviews, resilience appears to be an im-
portant thread in the web of Anthropocene research, in that it grounds
affective responses of hope and empowerment to a boundary object that
can be investigated with different models, methods and meanings. Ac-
cording to David Chandler and Kevin Grove (2017, 79), “it is within the
field of resilience thinking that the implications of the Anthropocene
for forms of governance are beginning to be sketched out and experi-
mental practices are undertaken.” From the perspective of a drylands
entomologist, a cultural anthropologist, an environmental economist,
or a dancer, resilience takes on shades and textures of physicality as a
weakly structured but conceptually and politically powerful daughter of
the Anthropocene as super boundary object.
While resilience has been primarily investigated by natural scientists,
social scientists and humanities scholars have also engaged its power un-
der the pressures of the Anthropocene. This is exemplified in the work of
Anna Tsing, Elaine Gan and others (2017) focused on counter-capitalist,
more-than-human narratives of resilience and the “Arts of Living on a
Damaged Planet.” Artists have been championing the concept since the
socially engaged public art of the 1990s and earlier examples of agit-
prop dating back to the 1920s. At every major climate conference, sum-
mit meeting or international forum on environmental governance over
the last twenty-five years, it is common to see artists enacting power-
ful public interventions, organizing activist-inspired performances, and
producing works in collaborative, participatory and interdisciplinary
contexts that posit resilience as an emancipatory and affective alter-
native to despair.5 Resilience is the face of “invasive” species on city
streets, or extremophile bacteria in scorched and inhospitable niches,
or moments of protest and occupation. Resilience is the sub-narrative of
the Anthropocene dystopia, rich with aesthetic possibility and worthy of
artistic investigation.
But let’s go back to a time before the terminology of the Anthropocene
was commonplace, before Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellions.
In their original article from 1989, Star and Griesemer describe the
significance of boundary objects in the creation and curatorial develop-
ment of the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Uncannily, we find
foreshadowing of the Anthropocene in early debates on sustainability
and local ecological health. Founded in 1907, the museum was a good
early example of a transdisciplinary stakeholder interface or a private
public partnership long before such terms were coined. Created as a bi-
ological research institute as part of the University of California and
funded by a wealthy lesbian naturalist and benefactor, Annie Alexander,
the museum aimed to record and study the flux of native animal popu-
lations in California.6 This was something seemingly new, compared to
major museums on the American East coast and in Europe that boasted
broader overviews of natural history around the world through their
collections accrued through far-reaching colonial powers. By focusing
on the local, beginning with Alexander’s own extensive collection of
thousands of natural artifacts, the museum was able to establish itself
as an authority on bioregional phenomena. As such, it was one of the
first institutions to uncover evidence of biodiversity loss, a key planetary
boundary of the Anthropocene, before either of those terms were coined
either. As a model for knowledge creation and distribution, the museum
was way ahead of its time, foreshadowing the interdisciplinary interests
and moral concerns about biological, social and political resilience asso-
ciated with Anthropocene research today.
For Star and Griesemer, the museum was seen as an institution for
information processing and programming in which a host of different
participants came together to overcome problems of complexity, coordi-
nation and communication, and in the end, to serve the goals of nature
conservation. The boundary objects they listed included animal speci-
mens, field notes and thematic maps, methods of collection, and other
tools and objects. They studied how members of different social groups
interacted with each other through and because of these objects. These
groups included amateur collectors, hunters, trappers, traders, trained
biologists, museum employees and university administrators. Through
their interactions with each other, “mixed economies of information”
emerged that were based on the currency of objects (Star and Griesemer
1989, 194). Animals were exchanged for other animals. Scientific classi-
fication was exchanged for lists and other standardized information col-
lected by field naturalists. Prestige in environmental circles was exchanged
for financial support of the museum. In some cases, rare specimens were
traded for hard cash or meat from more common game animals. The au-
thors also acknowledged an unintentional cooperation on the part of the
non-human actors for the sake of recording and distributing knowledge
of natural history through the medium of the museum (ibid.).
The differentiation between boundary objects and other sorts of ob-
jects is a tricky business. In his analysis of Social-Ecological Systems
(SES), Egon Becker (2012, 2) cites four kinds of objects that are central
to discussions on the Anthropocene. These are: (1) real objects, which
are often collected as data for modelling environmental phenomena; (2)
boundary objects, “situated at the intersections of individual fields of
research and disciplinary settings”; (3) Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s idea of
epistemic objects, or “things that humans can and want to know about”;
and (4) Bruno Latour’s idea of hybrid objects or objects that are both
natural and cultural at the same time (6). We can add to this list Timothy
Morton’s (2013) idea of hyperobjects, or massively distributed things in
time and space that relate to human beings, based on Morton’s theory
of Object-Oriented Ontology; Jocelyn Scheirer and Rosalind Picard’s
(2000) conception of affective objects, or objects which have the ability
to sense or record emotional data from a person and communicate that
information back expressively; and Kristina Niedderer (2007, 3) concep-
tion of performative objects or objects which “can stimulate the user’s
behavior by means of their function, thus causing mindful reflection”
and symbolic social interactions. The list of types of objects central to
the Anthropocene is certainly not limited to those mentioned here, and
would require a more in-depth exploration than can be provided here,
with regards to how each object relates to the work of understanding,
communicating and resisting the Anthropocene.
Becker (2012, 8) goes on to point out that boundary objects, in com-
parison with other objects, have a social function as well as a cognitive
function, serving on the one hand as a tool for communication between
different communities, and on the other hand, as guideline for under-
standing particular concepts and methods. Becker argues for a trans-
formation of boundary objects into epistemic objects in order to fully
benefit from their cognitive function (18). This would be necessary for
large transdisciplinary projects involving multiple institutions, for ex-
ample, in modelling resilience in particular bioregions. The cognitive
function of boundary objects enables researchers on a pragmatic level
to achieve common goals of understanding each other and formulat-
ing “deliverables” in joint research projects. In Becker’s study, framing
socio-ecological systems (SES) as weakly structured boundary objects
implies the existence of multiple “mental models” to achieve such a
transformation:
The transformation of a vaguely defined boundary object into a

strongly structured epistemic object is guided, explicitly or implic-
itly, by pre-analytic ideas, general world-views and ontological con-
victions (that…) function as mental models of the part of the world,
together with its major problems […].
(18)
Equipped with their own mental models, artists, art theorists and artis-
tic researchers are called to develop their own taxonomies of boundary
objects and their own methods of making sense of weakly structured
concepts into powerful artistic statements, or what Becker might de-
scribe as strongly structured epistemic objects. Becker’s paper among
other analyses of boundary objects (not least of which Star and Griese-
mer’s) begs the question: how can artists engage in the discourse on
boundary objects, especially when they might unknowingly already be
using them in their collaborative practices?
At this point, I want to turn the conversation around and look at
objectness from the point of view of artistic cognition. Despite fun-
damental shifts toward engaging with process (rather than product)
and performativity over the past fifty years, artists are still to a great
extent in the business of thinking about, designing, testing, making
and displaying objects, making the argument for boundary objects,
among other objects Becker describes, as an attractive working con-
cept. As with other boundary objects, the objects artists use in interdis-
ciplinary settings can be concrete forms or more abstract interventions,
fluid experiences, or performed enactments. In other words, they can
be strongly or weakly structured, similar to how they are strongly or
weakly structured in scientific contexts. Furthermore, from an artistic
point of view, boundary objects perform aesthetic functions in addi-
tion to social and cognitive functions. They embody cultural values ex-
pressed through recognizable, decodable symbolic forms, and they may
be composed, choreographed or otherwise aesthetically manipulated to
provide sensory experience.
The use of the boundary object concept in making and thinking about
art, however, is relatively new. The term has been dominated by the
history of science rather than the history of art, but finds new alliances
in the age of the Anthropocene. Recent publications by Johanna Schin-
dler (2018), who takes an inductive approach to identifying boundary
objects in artistic research, and Ruth Benschop (2009) and Dehlia Han-
nah (2013), who both look at the value of STS in art critique, as well as
several exhibitions, such as the Boundary Objects Exhibition curated
by Sophie Goltz (Kunsthaus Dresden 2015), provide fertile ground for
further developing Star’s concept through art practice and critique. Star
herself (1994, 143–167) admits this underlying bias in an essay reflecting
on the “misplaced concretism” of boundary objects as a methodology,
thus inviting scholars from other fields, including the arts, to investi-
gate where she leaves off. “In studying scientific problem solving,” Star
(2015, 156) writes,
I have been concerned […] [with] how scientists could operate with-
out agreeing about the nature of objects. In developing models for
this work, I coined the term ‘boundary objects’ to talk about how
scientists do this. I do not think the term is exclusive to science but I
think science is an interesting place to study them […].
Between the attraction to objectness as a concept artists can work with,
to the positioning of boundary objects as aesthetic entities that can be
sensed and interjected into different social settings, the unfinished work
of Susan Leigh Star opens up a wealth of possibilities that situate artistic
practice in STS discourse and challenge earlier arguments against the
danger of instrumentalizing the arts for the benefit of other disciplinary
endeavors. In many science-art exchanges there is usually an awkward
wariness on the part of artists toward an unspoken expectation to trans-
late, represent, educate, or otherwise communicate scientific knowledge.
The golden rule of autonomy in artistic practice is seemingly broken in
the moment when an artist steps out of her studio and into an interdis-
ciplinary setting. But the boundary object model offers a way out of this
dilemma. In their analysis of methods, Star and Griesemer (1989, 404)
note that in the case of the Vertebrate Zoology Museum:
different social worlds maintained a good deal of autonomy in

parallel work situations. Only those parts of the work essential to
maintaining coherent information were pooled in the intersection
of information; the others were left alone. Participants developed
extremely flexible, heterogeneous economies of information and
materials, in which needed objects could be bartered, traded, and
bought or sold. Such economies maximized the autonomy of work
considerations in intersecting worlds while ensuring “trade” across
world boundaries.
In such a trade across boundaries, artists have much to exchange, while

maintaining their autonomy of perspective. Besides being in engaged
with designing and making objects, artists are also making meaning
out of discrete objects, events and relationships as they interact in differ-
ent social worlds—let’s call them audiences—and out of endeavors with
practitioners from other fields—let’s call them collaborations. In so far
as meaning making is guided by specific objects in specific situations,
autonomy can be upheld. The use of boundary objects allows artists,
scientists and others to maintain their own position while empowering
each party to handle those objects within their own scope of (re)presen-
tation, (re)configuration and (re)interpretation.
In the end, the social nature of knowledge creation and knowledge
sharing is and always was about work—cognitive work but also physical
labor, administrative paper pushing and pragmatic organizational work
that allows new discoveries to be made and theories to evolve. What is
left out of most publications on the use of boundary objects in transdis-
ciplinary research is an explicit recognition that Star’s original interests
were grounded in a feminist philosophy concerned with the invisible
work behind scientific knowledge production. These include the contri-
butions of hunters and trappers in Star and Griesemer’s original article,
to the work of lab technicians, janitors, secretaries and grad students
examined in other papers.7 Like the sociologist (exemplified by Star),
the artist is similarly tasked with making the invisible visible, carrying
the responsibility of any good researcher in her choice of what to make
visible and how. Through their intimate relationship with objects, artists
serve as vital intermediaries, political whistleblowers and critical knowl-
edge brokers of the Anthropocene.
In the following two case studies, I argue that seeds may be seen as
boundary objects to help direct attention toward particular phenom-
ena that can be addressed across different disciplinary sites and social
worlds. They are surely not the only examples of artists collecting and
saving seeds in the context of the Anthropocene,8 but they do well to
demonstrate the idea of boundary objects as theoretical devices for inter-
disciplinary work. As such, the projects may be understood as contain-
ers for different sets of ideas and ideals, much like the seeds they feature
in various forms. The framing of the two cases as wild and cultivated
appears at once to suggest a binary categorization of types of seeds ac-
cording to human convenience. On the contrary, the examples challenge
such binaries by honoring the fluidity of exchange between species and
acknowledging the wild, experimental nature of evolutionary adapta-
tion and humanity’s attempt to understand and dance with it.
“Wild Seeds” and the Fallout of Disrupted Ecologies:

Andrew Yang’s Flying Gardens of Maybe
Let us zoom ahead from the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berke-
ley during the first decades of the last century in Star and Griesemer’s
case study to about a hundred years later—to the Field Museum of
Natural History in Chicago. The goals and conditions of the two mu-
seums are strikingly similar: biologists, amateur naturalists, museum
administrators and collectors all collaborate on understanding local
ecologies with wider concerns for nature conservation worldwide.
Both institutions employ staff scientists who conduct research in mu-
seum labs, fieldwork and libraries as well as an unsung army of vol-
unteers who help clean, catalogue and archive various artefacts, and
conduct hours of pro-bono monitoring work as birdwatchers, hikers
and backyard nature enthusiasts. Both museums boast extensive col-
lections of objects in well-established archival systems. And both have
extensive educational programming. But this last point is what nota-
bly distinguishes one museum from another. While the Field Museum
of Chicago was a direct result of collections gathered for the World’s
Fair in 1893, Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology was initiated
as a research institution and remains to this day closed to the pub-
lic.9 While the Berkeley Museum retains its original focus, offering its
knowledge through loans, research fellowships and University courses,
the Field Museum actively reaches out to the greater public through
tours and exhibitions, citizen science initiatives, urban gardening ini-
tiatives, wildlife classes and art.10
In 2012, Chicago-based artist, zoologist and professor at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago, Andrew Yang, collaborated with the
Field Museum on a project to visualize the “ecologies of interruption”
that all too often characterize the everyday reality of the Anthropocene
(Yang 2019a, 242). As an associate researcher at the Field Museum,
Yang noticed that hundreds of dead birds were being collected each year
from the sidewalks beneath Chicago’s majestic skyscrapers. Members
of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors (CBCM), a diverse group of
birdwatchers and urban naturalists, would bring in dead birds from the
city streets to the Museum. These were then identified and cleaned to
become part of the museum’s collection as well as raw data in a larger
study of migratory patterns. The tall buildings served as an informal
means of sampling migratory bird populations, showing which species
migrate at which times on their ways to northern breeding habitats or
southern feeding grounds. The practice of carcass handling in the Field
Museum eerily evokes Star’s work in the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology decades earlier: “I first noticed the phenomenon in studying
where the specimens of dead birds had very different meanings to am-
ateur birdwatchers and professional biologists, but ‘the same’ bird was
used by each group” (Star and Griesemer 1989, 157).
Yang took an interest in the hidden ecologies of the avian deceased,
or in his words, the “ignored entanglements” of Chicago’s iconic sky-
line (Yang in a Skype interview with the author on September 7, 2018).
He noticed that after teams of volunteers cleaned and de-feathered the
birds, only the skeletons were kept for the museum’s collection. The
innards were discarded, and along with them, the seeds they carried
within. While the birds themselves were the primary boundary objects
for (1) collision monitors, who were concerned with protecting local bird
populations; (2) biologists, who were concerned with understanding mi-
gratory routes; and (3) museum administrators, who were concerned
with extending their collections, the birds’ relationships to other species,
namely the plants that nourished and sustained them, encapsulated in
the seeds, were discarded as waste. Yang began saving and dissecting the
innards to reveal a greater picture of biodiversity beyond the individual
birds intercepted by the edgy inhabitable surfaces of the contemporary
city. A collection of wild seeds was ultimately revealed as a secondary
or nested boundary object connecting the work that humans do to the
work that birds do, namely, helping or hindering the spread of plant life
through daily species-specific activity (Figure 12.2).
As an artist-researcher, Yang was interested in visualizing the rela-
tionships between different species, individuals, disciplines, events and
urban spaces. Seeds became the connecting force or boundary object
Figure 12.2 Andrew S. Yang, Ecologies of Interruption (Flying Gardens of

Maybe), 2013. Photo: © Andrew S. Yang, courtesy Andrew S.
Yang.
that expressed meaning via multiple aesthetic forms: first, as specimens

in labeled containers, then, as birdseeds, arranged as frames around por-
traits of the deceased, then as postcards with the seeds arranged in geo-
metric mandalas with information on the back, and finally, as seedlings
in handcrafted clay vessels modelled after the plumage of different bird
species. Presented in these different forms, the seeds take on different
roles as they are interpreted by different communities. As specimens,
they became data to museum biologists who could study the diets of
birds as well as the distribution of different plant species. As birdseed,
they became fodder for other birds, insects and mammals who could
carry out the unfinished task of their dead compatriots—eating and then
spreading seeds to the world beyond. As postcards, they became means
of educating the public about the unfortunate reality of bird collisions in
the city. And as potted plants, they became an allegoric memorialization
of the hidden ecologies disrupted by glass and steel. Titled Flying Gar-
dens of Maybe (2012-ongoing),11 Yang’s work attempts to problematize,
and maybe also repair broken links in an urban ecosystem, by humanly
aiding seed distribution when it is otherwise brutally interrupted by hu-
man infrastructure and intervention.
Yang’s work finally brings together different understandings of “ecol-
ogy” that play out in the larger discourse surrounding the Anthropo-
cene. In addition to being a distinct scientific field within the natural
sciences, “ecology” has also become a metaphor for social and labor
relationships. Isabelle Stengers’ (2005, 185) notion of “ecologies of prac-
tice,” for example, envisions an ecology as
a tool for thinking through what is happening […]. A tool can be

passed from hand to hand, but each time the gesture of taking it in
hand will be a particular one—(where) the gesture of taking in hand
is not justified by, but both producing and produced by, the relation-
ship of relevance between the situation and the tool.
Such a conceptual appropriation of “ecology” renders ecology a weakly

structured boundary object similar to concepts of resilience or the An-
thropocene discussed above. Yang, perhaps because of his dual back-
ground as visual artist and biologist, is able to navigate between multiple
“ecologies,” shedding light on interspecies relationships in urban ecol-
ogies in a stricter sense, and connected agencies in the “ecology” of the
museum in a larger metaphoric sense. Speaking with Yang in an inter-
view from September 7, 2018, the hidden details of artistic work came
alive in a way that confirmed Star’s ideas of an economy of knowledge
facilitated through the use of boundary objects, as well as her assertion
that autonomy can be maintained by different groups using those ob-
jects. Yang’s project shows that visualizing the invisible ecologies of the
Anthropocene does not necessarily need to be a one-way translation of
scientific knowledge made palatable for the general public.
In the economy of knowledge embodied by the dead birds and the
seeds they carried inside their bodies, an exchange of information and
goods develops that echoes Star’s original findings, despite the differ-
ences of the two museums. Yang spoke to me at length about the role of
amateurs in the collection of “data” in the form of dead birds and the ac-
tual work involved in preparing each specimen for archival—“a tedious
but social process of sitting around together and de-feathering over ca-
sual conversation” (Yang 2018). He was convinced that the amateurs
were there for the sake of satisfying a deep curiosity about the world
and to become part of something bigger than their own backyards. The
biologists, on the other hand, received access to the museum’s collec-
tions and the resulting work of the amateurs. They potentially could
receive professional advancement in their own careers in the form of new
publications based on their work at the Field Museum, and in turn pro-
vided new knowledge for the wider scientific community, for example,
on migratory patterns or seed distribution. The administrators mean-
while facilitated a system for enabling the archival of local biodiversity
and in turn received a steady supply of new artifacts for their collection.
And the artist? He received raw materials from the amateurs, taxonomic
advice from the biologists, a place to work from the administrators, and
new human connections to everyone involved in the process, in return
for making the invisible visible. What, where and how Yang chooses to
tell the story of avian flux in the Anthropocene lies completely within his
autonomy, while what we actually see in the end is nothing more than a
collection of wild seeds on their way from one place to another—a flying
garden of maybe.
Cultivated Seeds and the Tragedy of the Commons:

Flatbread Society’s Seed Journey
The “economy of knowledge” described by Star and Griesemer and exem-
plified by Andrew Yang’s description of his work with the Field Museum
consists of relatively straightforward relationships between autonomous
individuals or groups of individuals representing clearly identifiable
communities—e.g., the bird collision monitors, the museum scientists
and administrators, and an artist-biologist. What happens when those
disciplinary and social groupings are more diffuse, and when the au-
tonomy of individuals is exchanged for a collective agency involving the
intellectual contribution of a large and diverse group of people? Elinor
Ostrom’s idea of the commons12 as community designed governance of
resources and knowledge, or more abstractly, Aristotle’s synergistic con-
cept of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, is a good way to
begin describing the work of the Flatbread Society. The Flatbread Society
is a long-term arts collective initiated by the group Futurefarmers, which
in turn is another long-term collective of diverse practitioners at the in-
tersection of public art, politics and civil society. Both are conceptually
spearheaded by the California-based artist Amy Franceschini.
Flatbread Society is a loosely knit group of farmers, traditional oven
builders and bakers, artists, amateur astronomers, anthropologists and
others brought together through a common interest in the long and com-
plex relationships of human cultures with grain.13 Since 2012, the group
has been cultivating a demonstration field on public property in down-
town Oslo devoted to growing heritage wheat varieties long fallen out of
production and popular memory. Flatbread Society also runs an experi-
mental, multi-functional bake house that offers public programs around
shared themes and of course a place to bake, eat and talk about bread.
The group shares a similar aim of preserving biodiversity with the
Svalbard Seed Vault in “nearby” Spitsbergen, but exercises a very differ-
ent approach. Under the motto, “We don’t need a museum for conserv-
ing varieties. What we want is to grow them,” coined by the biodynamic
farmer Johan Swärd, the group experiments with old grain varieties that
fell out of production after the “green revolution” and homogenization
of grains by powerful industrial growers.14 Amy Franceschini (2016),
one of the principal artists involved with the project, describes the seeds
grown in the demonstration field as being “rescued” from past landraces
in order to ensure future resilience through biodiversity.15 Through their
historical fieldwork and activist farming practices, Flatbread Society
preserves not only the grains they have rescued along their journeys, but
also uncovers a rich collection of stories about how different grains were
originally cultivated and how they have been rediscovered.
Most notable in the collection are some seeds from the Vavilov In-
stitute as well as an obscure variety of Finnish Rye found in an aban-
doned Sauna by amateur anthropologists.16 The first example honors
grains which were handed down as part of the legacy left behind by
the Russian agronomist, botanist and father of modern genetics, Nicolai
Vavilov. Interested in food security issues prior to World War II, Vavilov
dedicated his life studying the origins of cultivated plants from around
the world, conducted excursions to the far corners of the earth to col-
lect grains from different soils and climatic zones, and established the
world’s largest seed bank at the time in Leningrad (what is now Saint
Petersburg). After falling out of favor with Stalin, Vavilov was sentenced
to death and died in prison of starvation. The tragic irony of one of the
most respected crop scientists of the day dying of starvation extended to
the social ecosystem of the institution itself. During the 28-month Siege
of Leningrad, dedicated scientists took turns guarding the seed bank
with their lives, refusing to eat its contents even while they and the local
population starved to death.17 Today, the Institute still carries on its
founder’s original mission and remains one of the largest collections of
cultivated grains worldwide.
In 2016, members of the Flatbread Society set sail on a former rescue
vessel from the Port of Oslo on a Seed Journey that would trace the his-
tory of grains back to the Fertile Crescent. The seeds and stories of Vavi-
lov’s Institute as well as many others from formal and informal sources
make up the precious cargo of a ship sailing through the rough waters
of the Anthropocentric unknown. On board the ship is an assortment
of hybrid tools, including painted maps, a baker’s telescope and a tiny
makeshift tabernacle holding a variety of ancient grains from landraces
from around the world. Flatbread Society’s rotating crew steered the
vessel from Oslo to Santander Spain via Antwerp and London, with
plans to sail on to Istanbul and Amman. The route retraces the history
of grain cultivation in reverse, going back in time from Europe to the
Middle East in a symbolic “rescue mission” to raise awareness about
the loss of agricultural biodiversity through the patenting, marketing
and distribution of homogenized seed varieties by large multinational
conglomerates. What once belonged to the commons in a hand-to-hand
trading of knowledge and goods is now dominated by the very few, who
peddle seed as globalized commodity in the name of capital, under the
chivalric guise of feeding the planet.
In Seed Journey and other ongoing works of the Flatbread Society, seeds
can be understood as boundary objects in a larger discourse on biological
commons and cultural heritage. While agronomists, rural sociologists and
activists debate the terminology of food security and food sovereignty in
scientific papers, meetings and marches, it is the juxtapositioning of seeds
with other objects that illuminate the unique role of artists and designers
in visualizing the social dimensions of agriculture in the Anthropocene.
Art scholar and Flatbread Society member, Charlotte Blanche Myrvold
(2016),18 notes that “objects can belong to different realms of competence,
and, by displacing them from their designated place, some of the unsettling
potential of art described by Rancière is acted out.” She describes how the
objects used by Flatbread Society are central to the larger discourse they
pursue. For example, the baker’s telescope, a rolling pin that doubles as
a telescope, evokes historical connections between grain cultivation and
forgotten cosmologies. Myrvold continues,
the object materially brings together an instrument of astronomy

and an instrument of baking, and thus the two practices are symbol-
ically fused. Objects and people are connected through competence.
The astronomer-baker […] resonates with the imaginative projec-
tion of moons and planets on the surface of the baked flatbread. The
Flatbread Society traces the astronomer-baker to ancient Mesopota-
mia, where the oldest practice of collective astronomic observation
has been practiced. At night, the guarding posts of the grain storages
were also used for star observation, thus the grain was the source of
knowledge of both the heavens and the soil (ibid.).
Regarding “economies of knowledge” in interdisciplinary practice con-

ducted as a framework for research in the Anthropocene, the work of
Flatbread Society challenges traditional modes of artistic autonomy in a
second and critical way. Singular identity is traded for a timely cultural
need to return to the commons. In the works of the Flatbread Society
it is difficult to distinguish single elements from the larger project or
to identify the “handwriting” of any one individual author or artist.
All float and sail together on a mission to rescue the future through
the practice of being present for and toward one another. Although in-
dividual objects and texts can eventually be traced back to particular
authors, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. And while
individual contributions are overshadowed by a deep commitment to
community, the “handwriting” of Flatbread Society, and undoubtedly
the artistic organization behind it, Future Farmers, is unmistakable in its
style of object-making, place-making and community-building. Under
one brand, or rather one nautical flag, “the voyage—its crew and cargo
are agents that link the commons as they relate to local networks and
a more global complex of seed savers and stewards of the land, air and
water” (Myrvold 2016, Figures 12.3 and 12.4).
Figure 12.3 Futurefarmers, Flatbread Society Seed Collection, 2014. Photo: ©

Futurefarmers, courtesy Futurefarmers.
Figure 12.4 A lexandra R. Toland, Closeup Eating Popcorn, 2018. Photo: Al-
exandra R. Toland.
Closed Bracket (passing out popcorn)
In lieu of a conclusion, I invite you to share another

aesthetic experience with me.
(Pass out bowls of popcorn)
These seeds are boundary objects of the Anthropocene.

Overproduced, overbred, overestimated, a product of a
swollen, soulless agriculture, in oversized portions
for oversized people, too many of us in one space at one
time, with too much of everything.
Can you hear it yet? (popping) Can you smell it? (butter,
starch, salt)? Can you taste it, hold it, crunch it,
swallow it? See how much space it takes up in this box,
in this tiny room, on this tiny planet. Feel how much
space it takes up in your mouth.
This would-be brainchild of western agronomy and the

entertainment industry is an older story than you may
think. Far before the dawn of cinema or football, popcorn
was introduced to European immigrants in North American
by native people, who cultivated hundreds of different
varieties of corn that would later be homogenized and
corporatized by their colonizers.
What you’re tasting is an indigenous technology appropri-

ated by imperial powers. It is an Orbis Spike Snack, with
another interesting fact:
So far, the genetic code for corn – for direct consump-

tion by humans – has not been opened for commercial use.
You can literally explode the kernel but legally, geneti-
cally you can’t open it.
Like the shiny promise of precision agriculture, or the

green revolution before it, or the European Fantasy of
the New World before it, this packaging does not reflect
the true contents. Inside the gilded package, made by
hand with artisanal care, is commercial, industrial grade
popcorn of the cheapest kind. It’s fast food in a fancy
container, a moment of irony with no real value unless
you sit with it for a while and appreciate it as a bound-
ary object.
It’s something completely ordinary bracketed by the

extraordinary – because that’s what artists do. Artists
package ideas to be eaten in another way. And if you
don’t like the packaging metaphor, than use another one.
Artists encapsulate, frame, capture, re-contextualize,
or otherwise visually transport objects from one social
space to another to facilitate multi-sensory aesthetic
experience. In so doing they push others to do the same.
This is the open-ended nature of artistic knowledge

transfer. You can open the package if you like, or leave
it closed as the directions suggest. You can eat these
seeds. You can grind them into cornmeal. You can pop
them. You can compost them. You can plant them and make
more seeds. You can sell them. You can trade them. You
can give them away. You can throw them away. You can re-
frame them, rename them, remake them, re-ingest them into
your own experience. This, for me, is the nature of ar-
tistic knowledge transfer within a framework of boundary
objects.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Andrew Yang and Amy Franceschini for sharing their
incredible ideas and visual magic with me and the rest of the (art)world.
Thanks also to Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes for the kind in-
vitation to contribute to the conversations on the Antropocenic Turn,
and to Friederike Landau and Maud Canisius for editorial suggestions
and editing assistance. This chapter was presented as a performance
lecture at the International Conference‚ Anthropocenic Turn?‘ Inter-
disciplinary Perspectives on the Anthropocene on September 13, 2018,
at the University of Vechta, and again as my inaugural lecture at the
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar on January 28, 2019, as part of the ACC
Monday Night Lecture Series.
Notes

discourse. For example, large-scale adaptations to climate change and
biodiversity loss are difficult to plan, especially regarding policy develop-
ment and implementation, becuase of the complexity of pluralistic social
structures.
5 See for example the works of ArtCOP21, a network of hundreds of thou-
sands of people that in protest of the “business as usual” handling of climate
change in parliamentary halls and boardrooms, initiated a worldwide move-
ment including cultural protests, “installations, plays, exhibitions, concerts,
performances, talks, conferences, workshops, family events and screenings”
(https://www.artcop21.com).
6 For a detailed biography of Annie Alexander, see Stein (2001) as well as the
UCMP’s biographical websites (https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/alexan-
der.html; https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/archives/alexanderpapers/).
7 See for example, Star and Bowker (1999).
8 For other inspiring examples, see the works: Next Epoch Seed Library
(NESL), a crowd-sourced collection of seeds initiated by artists Ellie Irons
and Anne Percoco and housed at the NATURE Lab in Troy, New York;
Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, hosted by El Beir Arts
and Seeds, which aims “to find and preserve ancient seed varieties and tra-
ditional farming practices” (see Sansour’s interview for visibleproject.org:
www.visibleproject.org/blog/project/palestine-heirloom-seed-library; Tat-
tfoo Tan’s Sustainable Organic Stewardship (S.O.S.) Free Seeds Library,
that focuses on community food justice in Nashville Tenessee; and Ines
Doujak’s Siegesgärten (Victory Gardens) at the 2007 dOCUMENTA12 in
Kassel).
9 See the history of Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 2015. In their
online archive: http://mvz.berkeley.edu/DoingNaturalHistory/history.html.
10 See public outreach efforts of Field Museum of Chicago. 2018. www.field-
museum.org/.
11 See full documentation of the Flying Gardens of Maybe exhibition at An-
drew S. Yang’s artist website (2019b): www.andrewyang.net/.
12
See Ostrom (1990), and Ostrom (2007).
13 See: Flatbread Society (2019a).
14 See: ‘Svedjerug: A Video Essay’ by Futurefarmers (2015) and online docu-
mentation: www.flatbreadsociety.net/actions/37/we-don-t-need-a-museum-
for-conserving-varieties-what-we-want-is-to-grow-them.
15 See, e.g., Franceschini, Amy. 2016. Flatbread Society Seed Journey. On
the Delfina Foundation’s website: www.delfinafoundation.com/platform/
the-politics-of-food-flatbread-society-seed-journey-with-amy-franceschini/.
16 Read this and other stories on the Flatbread Society’s website (2019b).
17 See, for example, the scientific biopic, Pringle (2008), as well as Alexanyan
and Krivchenko (1991) for the Journal Diversity.
18 The following excerpts were cited from a web version of Myrvold’s
(2016) original text entitled “Flatbread Society and the Discourse on
the Soil” (cited September 16, 2019 from: www.flatbreadsociety.net/
actions/39/a-boat-walking-on-land).
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13 Art, Media, and the Dilemmas
of the Anthropocene1
Serenella Iovino
In the heart of Turin there is a museum with a unique name: Parco Arte
Vivente, the Park of Living Art (PAV). You can access it through a modern
building, a house full of light contained by glass and wooden walls. Seen
from the inside, the museum, with its educational labs and temporary ex-
hibits, is not particularly extensive. The larger part is outside. A garden sur-
rounds the house, with a gigantic clover leaf—Trèfle (2006) by Dominique
Gonzalez-Foerster—carved into the ground. Completely covered with ivy,
the small wall surrounding this artwork is formed using the materials that
were excavated for the park’s construction. Spreading over the museum’s
roof is another garden, Jardin Mandala, designed by the French landscape
architect Gilles Clément: a self-propagating collection of resilient plants
that interact perfectly with the surrounding flora. Bees, temporary installa-
tions, urban vegetable gardens and sundry emergences of natural-cultural
creativity inhabit this former industrial area, expanding over nearly 2,5
hectares, where every project lives in co-evolution with the place and the
other artworks. Inaugurated in 2008, the PAV was designed by Piero Gi-
lardi, the father of the Arte Povera movement. In Gilardi’s words, the PAV
is “a public art institution with the political goal of creating an ‘incubator’
of ecological awareness,” whose driving force is the “co-creation” between
artists and visitors, humans and nonhumans (Gilardi 2016, 7). That this
garden is an epitome of contemporary hybrid landscapes is evident to the
visitors to the park. Surrounded by buildings, cut through by traffic arter-
ies, and practically merging with the site of the city’s waste-management
company AMIAT (which is one of the museum’s donors), the PAV is a
metaphor for the Anthropocene garden: a residual and resilient nature with
which schoolchildren can play and experiment, something to protect be-
fore it gets strangled by the smog and concrete of the city’s embrace.
Every time I find myself in this inspiring setting, I cannot help mulling
over this encountering of garden, art and ecology. And punctually, the
old question that Joseph Meeker asked about the evolutionary role of
literature and its creation starts resonating in my mind:
Is it an activity which adapts us better to the world or one which

estranges us from it? From the unforgiving perspective of evolution
Art, Media, and Dilemmas of Anthropocene 237
and natural selection, does [it] contribute more to our survival than
it does to our extinction?
(Meeker 1972, 3–4)
Inevitably, I ask myself: what are the implications of thinking together

the garden and the Anthropocene? What do we discover if we read these
two natural-cultural figures with and through one another?
My response to these questions will sound like a provocation—and
perhaps it is.
For centuries, the garden has been at once a theory and a practice
for creating order out of chaos. Whether shaped according to the laws
of geometry or modeled upon an ideal of “freedom,” gardens indeed
are embodiments of the human aspiration to redeem and remake na-
ture, turning it into an exquisite and reassuring dwelling. Considered
more closely, however, this aspiration is also part of the discourse that
has supposedly plunged the planet into the Anthropocene. Seen in this
light, the Anthropocene, too, is a garden: a colossal, dysfunctional and
hubris-ridden garden, escaped from the hands of those who triggered
it and populated by the material consequences of their ideals and ide-
ologies. I am not implying that “Anthropocene” and “garden” are two
equivalent concepts (or, even less, equivalent realities). It is, however, a
matter of fact that, just as the latter emerges from the desire to give na-
ture a neutralized shape that brings its creativity closer to our visions, in
the former a hybrid, out-of-control, techno-geological agency comes to
remind us about the abstractedness of our dreams of shaping natural dy-
namics. Even more remarkable, both the garden and the Anthropocene
are enabled by “transfers of wealth and waste” (Gan et al. 2017, G4): the
apparently infinite plunder of resources and the practice of externalizing
the diverse metabolic costs of their transformation. However, while the
garden might disguise its externalities by shaping them into aesthetic
artifices, in the Anthropocene world the mere idea of externality is no
longer possible—and for a simple reason: there is no outside anymore,
whether in time (the future) or in space (ocean, atmosphere, colonial
lands, the poor’s backyards). David Wood calls this condition the “loss
of externalities” (Wood 2005). As Timothy Clark (2014, 82) writes,
[t]o live in a space in which illusions of externality have dissolved is

to see the slow erosion of the distinction between the distant waste
dump and the housing estate, between the air and the sewer, be-
tween an open road and a car park, and between a self-satisfied
affluence of a Sydney suburb and a drowning village in Bangladesh.
That is one of the consequences of our becoming geological: all that

happens, happens here and now; the ripples of our actions, as well as of
our visions, will sooner or later reverberate right at our feet, directly in
238 Serenella Iovino
our gardens. This future tense is actually inappropriate: they already do
so—the extent to which we experience these backlashes only depends on
how socially privileged or geopolitically fortunate we are.
The end of externalities means that everything stays here: we have to deal
with the consequences of what we do, of our actions as well as our visions:
we have to “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway (2016) put it. In
many respects, therefore, our oikos—the planet, this tantalizing garden in
which we are at home—becomes unheimlich, uncanny and unfamiliar. This
postnatural environment is populated by eerily denizens, including absent
beings and unwanted presences: these are the ghosts and monsters of the
Anthropocene, as Anna Tsing and a collective of anthropologists suggest
in their inspiring volume Arts of Living in the Anthropocene (Tsing et al.
2017). As they explain, “Our ghosts are the traces of more-than-human
histories through which ecologies are made and unmade. […] Every land-
scape is haunted by past ways of life” (Gan et al. 2017, G1–4). Think, for
instance, of the traces of old cities now erased by layers of time and con-
crete. Think of the historical ecologies emerging from the ruins of “past
landscapes of cultivation,” “ghostly presences” now returned to semi-wild
conditions (Mathews 2017, G146). Or think of the vestiges of former lives,
like the vanished bee species whose existence we only know of thanks to the
fact that “a living flower”—an orchid—“still looks like the erotic organs of
the avid female bee hungry for copulation” (Haraway 2017, M33).
The emotional constellation of these landscapes is one of sorrow,
bewilderment and amnesia. The ghosts that we find here both prompt
and challenge our memories about the lost beings. On the one hand,
they stand like empty spots awaiting signification in the midst of a sat-
urated territory where “life persists in the shadow of mass death” (Gan
et al. 2017, G8). On the other hand, their emptiness is compensated by
something that continues the symbiogenetic dynamics in unpredicted
conditions, driven more by the effects of contaminations than by evo-
lutionary processes. Such are the monsters, and they are “the wonders
of symbiosis and the threats of ecological disruption” characterizing
our time (Swanson et al. 2017, M2). From over-proliferating jellyfish to
radioactive mutations, these monsters “ask us to consider the wonders
and terrors of symbiotic entanglements in the Anthropocene” (M2).
Postnatural Gardens: Tamiko Thiel’s Augmented

Reality Installations
Uncanny metamorphics and extinct beings, monsters and ghosts are the
two faces of this garden where we can cultivate memory only through
hints and traces. Here, to borrow from Cate Sandilands (2017), we learn
to mourn and love through the trauma of loss and transformation.
But the Anthropocene has the power to mobilize our imagination, too,
and this power is key to find new venues and expressive modes for such
a collective trauma. Media art is a powerful tool in this strategy, and I
would like to bring into this conversation an interesting case. Monsters and
ghosts, indeed, populate the experimental scenery of “new natural forms”
appearing in the artworks of Tamiko Thiel, an American-Japanese artist
now based in Munich, Germany. Internationally acknowledged for her pi-
oneering experiments in the fields of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented
Reality (AR), Thiel is an engineer by training and a founding member of
the artist group Manifest.AR. An eco-art activist, she animated guerrilla
AR interventions and uninvited performances in prestigious sites such as
New York City’s MoMA and the Venice Biennale.2
In Thiel’s spectacular installations, the garden undergoes a curious
metamorphosis: from being a symbolic embodiment of harmony between
fauna and vegetation, it becomes a laboratory for the bio-technological
hybrids of this extranatural phase of earthly life. Her Gardens of the
Anthropocene, in particular, is an attempt to challenge indifference and
amnesia by creating what the artist calls “poetic spaces of memory” of
planetary life forms—spaces where, at the same time, the simulation of
an accelerated techno-natural evolution also expands our temporal per-
ception. In doing so, Thiel designs a virtual “topography of memory”
(Schliephake 2016, 575), in which past or endangered species visually
converge with their monstrous metamorphoses. Aesthetically remindful
of Yayoi Kusama’s work, Gardens of the Anthropocene is a public space
Augmented Reality Installation, which was originally commissioned for
the Seattle Art Museum Olympic Sculpture Park in 2016, and then dis-
seminated to other sites such as the Pioneer Works Art Center, Brooklyn,
New York, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site in Massachusetts,
and more recently the Stanford University campus.3
As Thiel explains, Gardens of the Anthropocene “posits a science-
fiction future in which native aquatic and terrestrial plants have mutated
to cope with the increasing unpredictable and erratic climate swings”
(2016). Taking its cue from scientific grounds, the installation pictures a
dystopian scenario in which plants (all modeled on the native vegetation)
face a techno-biological mutation: while the “originals” are capable of
extracting nutrients from sunlight and soil, the mutant ones feed on the
electromagnetic radiation of mobile devices and artificial structures such
as road signs or light posts.4 The new creatures “breach natural bound-
aries,” eliding not only the physical divide between underwater and dry
land, but also the ontological-taxonomic frontier between “reactive flora
and active fauna” (Thiel 2016).
To all these mutants the artist gives both a common and Linnaean
name. For example, “Bullwhip kelp drones—Nereocystis Volans” is
a mutation of Nereocystis luetkeana or bullwhip kelp, an alga trans-
muted into amphibious flying drones. Or Clarkia antenna, a mutation
of Clarkia amoena or Farewell to Spring, here mutated into a succulent,
whose petals have developed small antennas that detect the presence of
mobile devices, feeding off the electromagnetic emissions: “The behavior
of the flowers is unnerving, but does not produce any known ill effects
in humans,” Thiel explains. Other examples include Camassia radaria
or Radar Camas, a mutation of “Blue Camas” or Camassia quamash,
with pistils morphed into radars; or the airborne algae Alexandrium
giganteum or Alexandrium aerium, a mutation of the single-celled mi-
croscopic algae Alexandrium catenella, which infests the Puget Sound
causing toxic “red tides” and is expected to thrive in warming waters.
Suspended between the tongue-in-cheek and the unheimlich, these bi-
zarre creatures represent Thiel’s artistic way of mobilizing the narrative
of the Anthropocene. Her strategy is extraordinarily fruitful. On the one
hand, she fills an existing landscape with presences that fall into the inter-
secting perimeters of our imagination and of our perception, inviting us to
be part—at once cocreators and characters—of this narrative. What also
clearly emerges, however, is that the direction taken by this narrative might
be diverging from our expectations. This makes her work an ante-rem cau-
tionary tale, halfway between our actual world and its possible futures.
The technology on which Thiel’s art is based is a key element in this
discourse. In terms of memory strategies as well as ecological awareness,
in fact, AR eco-art has powerful effects, moving memory “from the inter-
nally imagined landscapes of ars memoriae to the real, concrete spaces of
the physical world” (Schliephake 2016, 574), and potentially turning into
a precious ally of the environmental imagination. As a matter of fact, these
“holistic and integrated” artworks can magnify our capacity to visualize
“the impact humans have on ecosystems, the places where we live, and the
other species with whom we share these places” (Irland 2016, 60). Pointing
out the ability of eco-media to affect our cognitive-emotional sphere Al-
enda Chang and John Parham remark that virtual reality can “immerse us
in environments while narrating ecological interrelationship,” intensifying
the “linkage between body, environment, and narrative forged in motion
pictures” (2017, 9). With its interactive aesthetics and fuzzy techno-natures,
Gardens of the Anthropocene is not simply a prompt to reflect on the fluc-
tuating boundary between organic and inorganic, but also the site for re-
inventing and problematizing the notion of kinship. Surrounded by these
eerie presences, we cannot help interrogating how akin our reality is to the
“reality” of the Gardens and, even more, how akin we are to these mutants.
Far from being merely an unusual experience, finding ourselves vis-à-vis
giant lilies or algae-drones might bring about modes of “becoming-with”
and stimulate our response-ability toward the changing planetary configu-
rations (cf. Bianchi 2017, 147).
Geological Gardens: The Deep Time of the Media

But other questions arise if you step outside the aesthetic-conceptual cir-
cle, and observe this edifice from an external perspective. To what extent
are these gardens entangled with the Anthropocene’s dynamics? How real
are these monsters? After all, one could say, Thiel’s mutant gardens are
only immaterial presences in a landscape inhabited by other, much richer
materialities. Compared to the heavy reality of contaminations, waste and
bio-social crises, virtual art appears thin, light, almost imperceptible. But
is it really so? If we consider the relationship between these gardens and
the unsustainable landscapes of the Anthropocene, in fact, we will see that
virtuality— in all its forms, and certainly not just in Thiel’s installations—
conceals a dilemma. To solve this quandary, we should more closely examine
this technology. AR indeed has numerous applications, which can be ludic
as well as educational or military. In many cases—geolocalization, virtual
tags, social networks—we employ AR without even realizing that we are
doing so. All these functions depend on a “technology that superimposes a
computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus provid-
ing a composite view” (Maxwell 2009). This implies a combination of real
settings and computer-generated objects that “augment” our experience of
the world. Given a real or, as in this case, artistic subject, captured on video
or camera, AR computational technology expands that image with extra
layers of digital information. To summarize: with the help of a digital device
(a smartphone, a tablet, or smartglasses) and a connection to a data server,
this technology recreates reality from within an already existing reality,
transforming a static image into a dynamically interactive environment. In
this way, the Seattle Art Museum—and any other technologically equipped
site to which the artwork is moved—can become the setting for Anthropo-
cene gardens populated by mutant presences, and by us along with them.
Yet, the question remains: Where do these virtual monsters exist
bodily? Is their immateriality factual or pretended? These are not rhetor-
ical questions. There is indeed nothing more material—and collectively
so—than the so-called virtual. The digital forms we see wherever these
mutant gardens appear exist thanks to the network of silica, minerals,
metals, plastics and electricity whose tentacles spread, via a very mate-
rial “cloud,” to our very material cell phones or tablets. And so, these
gardens are real, and they are literally the Anthropocene gardens: their
topography—a topography of “servers, wires, undersea cables, micro-
wave towers, satellites, data centers, and water and energy resources”
(Carruth 2014, 342–343)—is the very topography of the Anthropocene.
This is the landscape behind the aerial metaphor of the “cloud”—an
entity that also conceals the intricate and massive business of the “cor-
porate bodies [that] produce, operate, sell, profit, and mine individual
data from networked systems” (Chang and Parham 2017, 3). Ecomedia
scholars have seen very clearly.5 The Anthropocene is connected to a
“geology of media,” localized in the mineral and metallic components
of our computers, televisions, batteries and electronic devices in general,
whose lithic parts include rare-earth elements and metallic ores such as
the conflict-ridden coltan, or precious metals like gold and platinum.
This close-up into the unseen side of our everyday media experience
suggests that “a deep time of the planet is inside our machines, crystal-
lized as part of the contemporary political economy: material histories
of labor and the planet are entangled in devices, which, however, unfold
as part of planetary histories” (Parikka 2015, 50). Far from being thin,
our shining clouds obscure an entire world of mines and elements that
are in fact as heavy and ancient as the universe. These digital gardens are
yet another outburst of our becoming-geological.
Virtual Epiphanies and Aesthetic Events

I have seen—with dazzling wonder—another specimen of Thiel’s An-
thropocene gardens at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, in the
company of the artist. It was a cold January afternoon in 2018. The
installation’s title was Wild Garden. Thanks to an app I downloaded
directly from the Museum’s Wi-Fi network by scanning a QR code with
my smartphone, gigantic water lilies, flying engines and huge flowers
started materializing around me (Figures 13.1–13.3).
Figure 13.1 S erenella Iovino, Image of Tamiko Thiel’s installation Wild Garden
at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, 2018. Photo: Serenella Iovino.
Figure 13.2 Serenella Iovino, Image of Tamiko Thiel’s installation Wild Garden
Figure 13.3 Serenella Iovino, Image of Tamiko Thiel’s installation Wild Garden
On my cellphone screen, I was literally seeing the ghosts that sur-
rounded me—ghosts previously invisible to my naked eye. And they
were there, not only on the screens of our tablets: they were at once the
ghosts and the monsters of the Anthropocene.
However innocent and aesthetically sublime, these virtual creatures
are part of “the sphere of medianatures” (Parikka 2015, 13):
a regime constituted as much by the work of micro-organisms, chem-

ical components, minerals and metals as by the work of underpaid
laborers in mines or in high-tech entertainment device component
production factories, or people in Pakistan and China sacrificing
their health for scraps of leftover electronics.
(14)
The reality of this network of agents is displayed in the extreme contexts

of environmental devastation and biopolitical abuse, where exploited
people, nonhuman natures and entire habitats are crushed by the same
fate that shapes the unequal sociosphere of the Anthropocene. Here we
encounter the enslaved people extracting coltan in a Congo that has never
ceased to be a “Heart of Darkness”; the forty thousand children that,
according to estimates by UNICEF and Amnesty International, extract
cobalt from African mines without any protection and who are exposed
to abuse and violence; and the violence—both fast and slow—of an eter-
nal colonialism which is invisible only to those who refuse to see it.6 And
the picture is completed if you include the role played by such technolo-
gies in military contexts, in apparatuses of control and surveillance and
all their ripples on everyday life. It is in this complex network of forces
that, post-Foucauldian political theorists maintain, lies “geopower,” a
power whose goal is “allowing asymmetrical planetary circulations of
energy, materials, species and information to take place, ensuring that
living and nonliving things are in movement but in such a way that the
balance of power is preserved” (Luisetti 2018, 10).7 And there is the
problem of waste: because the accumulation of electronic scraps is itself
a huge socioenvironmental issue. As Jared Farmer incisively put it, “dead
media are in fact undead” (192). However unpleasant it might be, all our
cultural activities that depend on these materials and these technologies,
including art, might be involuntarily complicit with such systems.
It is our missed realization of these processes that, according to art
scholars Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, makes the Anthropocene
an “aesthetic event” (2015, 11). The Anthropocene is, in other words,
an event that changes our “sensorial perception” (in Greek, aesthesis)
of the world. Its underlying dynamics—from petro-politics to chemi-
cal pollution—are inevitably part of our experience, but their scale and
complexity make them elude our awareness. This new “Anthropocene
aesthetic” also has, therefore, a double face: if, on the one hand, we
might become more sensitive to the transformations and threats we
are exposed to, on the other hand we are almost “anesthetized” to the
shapes they assume. These shapes might even acquire the status of a new
sublime, just like the “colourful sunsets caused by particulate matter in
the atmosphere, or […] the aestheticized presentation of environmen-
tal destruction or explosive urbanization in the photographs of Edward
Burtynksy and Vincent Laforet, respectively” (Davis and Turpin 2015,
11). Here lies the ambivalence of the Anthropocene as an “aesthetic
event”: it enables us to see more, feel more, perceive more and makes us
blind and insensitive at the same time.
Many questions arose during my conversation with Tamiko. The most
important ones, however, remained unexpressed on that enchanted af-
ternoon, on which I was able to see the flying objects revealed to me
by her art and the Pinakothek’s cloud—even in the subway station at
Marienplatz. These questions continue resonating inside me: Is this
mise-en-abîme of virtual and material integral to the poetics of AR? Is
an Anthropocene garden aware of its dilemma? What if the price of this
exquisite immaterial experience is the wildness of this time?
Thiel’s Gardens are literally Anthropocenic—namely, geological—
gardens. In them, everything depends exclusively on our typically
human-centered use of resources. These monsters, however, also draw
attention to the risks and potentials of our time. They lay bare, for exam-
ple, the latent frontiers of symbiosis: our mutual symbiosis with the silica
of our cellphones, the strange symbiosis that governs the dependence of
the heart on the bowel. Perhaps AR art is here to stress the fact that, just
as art is an episode of our natural history, the geology of media is an-
other emergence of our evolution. And here more questions arise: How
to deal with the fact that, like Thiel’s artworks, this essay also comes
from the same geology, the same network of “electronic waste, resource
depletion, and globally unevenly distributed relations of labor” (Parikka
2015, 14) that makes the substance of the Anthropocene? What are the
ghosts and monsters hidden in our own Anthropocene gardens? And
what if, in order to survive in these gardens, we do need these ghosts
and monsters?
The Dilemma of the Sublime

In his volume Collezione di sabia (1984), Italo Calvino devotes an entire
section to Japan. Japanese gardens, in particular, attract his attention.
In an essay titled “Il rovescio del sublime” (“The reverse of the sublime”)
the garden is described as the quintessence of human-made perfection,
where artifice must be visible in every detail.8 Nature is graciously cor-
rected in these exquisite places where everything “has to seem spon-
taneous and for that reason everything is calculated” (Calvino 2013,
161). From stones to sand to trees to wooden temples, subject to their
“natural” decay: all is perfectly planned and curated. To use the famous
words of Alexander Pope, here, literally, “All Nature is but Art.”
Here, too, however, the sublime comes at a price. As he muses about
the sublimity of these places, Calvino fulminates over the observation
of a Japanese student who accompanies him. In his sober Italian, the
student asks: “Do you like all this?” and adds: “I cannot help thinking
that this perfection and harmony cost so much misery to millions of
people over the centuries” (164). Calvino’s response is at once bitter and
historically lucid:
But isn’t the cost of culture always this?… Creating a space and time
for reflection and imagination and study presupposes an accumula-
tion of wealth, and behind every accumulation of wealth there are
obscure lives subject to labour and sacrifices and oppression with-
out any hope. Every project or image that allows us to reach out
towards another way of being outside the injustice that surrounds
us carries the mark of the injustice without which it could not have
been conceived.
(165)
This cycle of culture and injustice materializes when the visitors ar-
rive at a bed of stones, all perfectly harmonized in shape and color—
impeccably oval, flawlessly smooth, bright grey and dark grey. These
pebbles, the guide explains, came here in the 17th century from every
corner of Japan. Each bag of stones was repaid by the Emperor with a
bag of rice. Calvino writes:
We seem to see the queue of peasants conjured up by those words

bent double under the bags of stones, snaking across the little bridges
and paths. They deposit the loads they have carried from distant re-
gions in front of the Emperor, who examines the stones one by one,
places one in the water, another one on the side of the lake, and re-
jects many others. Meanwhile the attendants busy themselves round
the scales: on one dish there are stones, on the other rice…
(165)
This is the dark side, the reverse of the sublime: the fact that, behind each
garden, the map of planetary extractivism is hidden—the extractivism
of both human and nonhuman resources, with their networks of crises,
conflicts and biopolitical predicaments. And here, perhaps, Calvino was
also thinking about the dynamics affecting his native Ligurian landscape
whose rugged and uneven territory would mutate, during his lifetime,
into an industrial garden for the production of flowers and a continuous
city of “cementified” parks for speculators and tourists. The growing
ecologies of globalization lying behind this metamorphosis—with its
people, territories and myriads of nonhuman actors—is the reverse of
the sublime, too.
Yet, we do need to see these ghosts. Their presence is a story em-
bedded in this landscape like the stories of coevolution we have now
lost or forgotten. Art helps us to see these ghosts and recognize these
monsters—whether embodied in AR installations, or in a Japanese gar-
den. In doing so, it can help us recreate these lost memories, even if it
comes at the cost of adding more layers to the monstrosity. This is indeed
a dilemma, but it is the dilemma on which civilization is based. This
might produce more costs now, but it might also be conducive to a world
in which the awareness of the unjust will be in-built in the fabric of our
biopolitical values, actions and visions.
Epilogue: Resisting Gardens

Calvino’s and Thiel’s works are powerful examples of how thinking the
garden and the Anthropocene with one another—through one another—
is important for illuminating the epoch in which we are living. But here,
one thing must be stated clearly: thinking the garden and the Anthro-
pocene through one another does not mean equating them with one an-
other. Although they might fit into a similar framework, gardens and the
Anthropocene are not exactly the same. In fact, despite all its contradic-
tions, the garden also discloses unexpected resources. Re-situated in the
problematic landscape of our epoch, and rethought as a figure, a place
and a practice, it can indeed become a symbol of resistance to the An-
thropocene. The theorist of the “Planetary Garden,” Gilles Clément, has
coined the expression “jardins de résistance,” “gardens of resistance”
(Clément, undated). These gardens, Clément maintains, are places where
biocultural diversity, interdependence and creativity—both natural and
technological—can thrive. Gardens of resistance are the landscapes of
“a life style that, in a larger sense, reflects the relationship” between
humans and their “sociobiological environment” (Clément, undated).9 I
have written this chapter in Munich, the city with one of the biggest ur-
ban parks on the planet: the Englischer Garten (375 hectares). Planned
at the end of the 18th century, the English Garden was meant to become
a garden for the entire population, a collective space of urban ecology.
There are gardens available everywhere to everyone, in Munich. Even
the “social institution” of the city, the Biergarten is an ideally demo-
cratic way to take the garden outside class enclosures and deliver it to
the urban population, making it accessible and transforming it into an
affordable place for sharing and conviviality.
Of course, these gardens have an environmental impact, but their
positive influence on people’s lives and on the health of urban ecosys-
tems is evidently more significant than the costs. The same applies,
even though differently, to Turin’s PAV: it is an oasis, but an oasis
for the entire city, where educational programs and a unique project
of natural-artistic cocreativity constitute an opportunity for actively
rethinking the Anthropocene. A combination of art, resistance and
political ecology, the PAV is in fact an island of sense carved within
the Anthropocene—a garden struggling to preserve the beauty and its
stories, and yet aware of their costs. As a place, it embodies literally the
attempt to go outside itself and to be a counterpoint to the overwhelm-
ing concrete of its surroundings. This is why gardens are so important
in the Anthropocene: they are one of the last Holocene presidia—as
we know from the famous example of Gezi Park in Istanbul, where
the threat to destroy an island of flora and fauna in order to make
room for yet another shopping mall and another waterfall of concrete
disguised under the slogan “Justice and Development” (the name of Er-
dogan’s party) provoked riots and an upsurge of thousands of citizens.
The urban revolt is a way to “Occupy the Anthropocene” (Armiero
2015), rethinking the garden as a coalition of humans, flora and fauna
through culture.
Probably (and hopefully) there is no way out of culture. What we
can cultivate, though, is a landscape where gardens do not depend on
exploited natures, and where we have learned the lesson of preserv-
ing without killing. In this landscape, Anthropocene gardens can be
presidia of resistance against the dynamics that triggered the Anthro-
pocene itself. Be it Munich’s English Garden, Istanbul’s Gezi Park,
Turin’s PAV, and even Tamiko Thiel’s Anthropocene Gardens and the
Japanese Zen gardens visited by Calvino: we need gardens of resis-
tance and not of destruction, gardens of memory and not sites where
the future is only an externality for our excesses. If the price we pay
for culture is the reverse of the sublime, maybe we might use culture—
and the garden—as a fair, non-competitive companion to nature. De-
spite being an expression of our inescapable humanism, culture can
indeed suggest a non-anthropocentric strategy, and allow us to culti-
vate more-than-human coalitions.
Notes
1 A longer version of this essay, featuring a conversation with the artist Ta-
miko Thiel, appeared as “The Reverse of the Sublime: Dilemmas (and Re-
sources) of the Anthropocene Garden,” RCC Perspectives: Transformations
in Environment and Society 2019, no. 3. (Reprinted with Permission. Copy-
right: © The Author.)
2 Tamiko Thiel’s eco-artistic itinerary is explored in Iovino (2019, 29–35).
3 All the images of this installation are visible online at Thiel (2016).
4 The scientific premises of Thiel’s artwork are accurately summarized in
“Gardens of the Anthropocene: Project Background” (Thiel 2016).
5 See for example Cubitt (2017); Rust, Monani, and Cubitt (2016); Zielinski
(2006); Parikka (2014, 2015).
6 On child laborers in Congo mines, see Walter (2012).

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Notes on Contributors
Gregers Andersen is postdoctoral researcher in environmental human-

ities at the department of English, Stockholm University. He earned
his PhD from the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on
how literature, film and philosophy contribute to the understanding
of life in the Anthropocene. He is the author of the monograph Cli-
mate Fiction and Cultural Analysis. A New Perspective on Life in
the Anthropocene (Routledge 2019), and he has published articles in
journals such ISLE, Symplokē, The Journal of Popular Culture, and
Deleuze Studies.
Roman Bartosch holds the Junior Professorship for Literatures and Cul-
tures of the Anglophone World and English Language Teaching at
the English Department of the University of Cologne. He received
his PhD at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research includes
literature and cultural theory, transcultural ecology, human-animal
studies and ecocriticism. Recent publications include Literature, Ped-
agogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); (ed.) “Animal Poetics. Special Focus Sec-
tion of English Studies” (Anglistik – International Journal of English
Studies, 2016); (ed.) Beyond the Human-Animal Divide. Creaturely
Lives in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Envi-
ronMentality. Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction
(Brill Rodopi, 2013).
Julia Bee is Assistant Professor for Image Theory at Bauhaus University,
Weimar. She works on perception and desire, visual anthropology
and images-based research practices. Recent publications: “Film-
ische Trans/Individuationen, Ansprache, Affekte und die Konstitu-
tion von feministischen Kollektiven in Long Story Short und Yours in
Sisterhood” [“Trans/Individuations of Film. Addressing the Other,
Affect and the Constitution of Feminist Collectives in Long Story
Short and Yours in Sisterhood”] (nachdemfilm, 2019); “Erfahrungs-
bilder und Fabulationen. Im Archiv der Visuellen Anthropologie”
[“Experience-Images and Fabulation. In the Archive of Visual An-
thropology”] (Sichtbar-machen. Politiken des Dokumentarischen,
254 Notes on Contributors
Vorwerk, 2017) “‘Die Welt spielt’. Spiel, Animation und Wahrneh-
mung” [“The World Plays. Play, Animation and Perception”] (Denk-
weisen des Spiels Turia und Kant, 2017).
Hannes Bergthaller is Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages
and Literatures of the National Chung-Hsing University, Taichung
(Taiwan). His research areas include literary and systems theory,
ecocriticism and environmental humanities. Recent publications:
„Ecological Immunity and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312” (Journal
of Ecocriticism, 2018); „Malthusian Biopolitics, Ecological Immu-
nity, and the Anthropocene” (Ecozon@, 2018); „Climate Change and
Un-Narratability” (Metaphora, 2018); „Beyond Ecological Crisis:
Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems” (Ecological Thought in
German Literature and Culture, Lexington, 2017). He is a founding
member and former vice-president of the European Association for
the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE) as
well as of ASLE Taiwan. Furthermore, he is the book review editor of
Ecozon@, a European online journal for ecocriticism.
Gabriele Dürbeck is Professor of Literature and Culture Studies at the
University of Vechta. Her research includes German literature from
the 18th–21st century, postdramatic theater, travel literature, postco-
lonialism, ecocriticism and narratives of the Anthropocene. She has
authored “Ambivalent characters and fragmented poetics in Anthro-
pocenic literature (Max Frisch, Iliya Trojanow)” (The Minnesota Re-
view, 2014) and co-authored “Human and Non-human Agencies in
the Anthropocene” (Ecozona, 2015). She is co-editor of Ecocriticism.
Eine Einführung (Böhlau, 2015); Ecological Thought in German Lit-
erature and Culture (Lexington, 2017); Handbuch Postkolonialismus
und Literatur (Metzler, 2017); Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschen
Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts—neue Perspektiven und An-
sätze (Peter Lang, 2018); Repräsentationsweisen des Anthropozän in
Literatur und Medien/Representing the Anthropocene in Literature
and Media (Peter Lang, 2019).
Michael Davies-Venn is Research Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit, Am-
sterdam. His research on global environmental governance addresses
topics including climate finance, climate mitigation and climate adap-
tation between developed and developing regions. He also addresses
socio-legal questions on environmental degradation and law, includ-
ing human rights and climate induced migration. A policy analyst and
communication professional, he also publishes in popular media with
recent articles: “The ‘Klimakanzlerin’ Takes a Bow and Leaves a Vac-
uum” (Social Europe Journal, 2018); “Climate Finance: Waiting For
The First EU $1 From Pledged $100 Billion” (Social Europe Journal,
2017); “Vanuatu: The Challenging Path to Achieve Redress for Loss
and Damage” (Climate Policy Journal, 2019).
Eva Horn is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Univer-
sity of Vienna. Her areas of research include literature and political
theory, disaster imagination in modern literature and film, cultural
conceptions of climate, and the Anthropocene. She is author of The
Secret War. Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction (Northwest-
ern University Press, 2013), The Future as Catastrophe (Columbia
University Press, 2018), and, together with Hannes Bergthaller: The
Anthropocene—Key Issues for the Humanities (Routledge, 2019).
Philip Hüpkes is Research Assistant at the Institute for Media and
Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, and
a PhD-candidate (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Dürbeck) at the
University of Vechta. From 2017 until 2019, he was employed as
research assistant in the DFG-funded research project “Narratives
of the Anthropocene in Science and Literature. Themes, Struc-
tures, Poetics” at the University of Vechta. Recent publications
include: “Der Anthropos als Skalenproblem” (Der Anthropos im
Anthropozän: Die Wiederkehr des Menschen im Moment seiner
vermeintlich endgültigen Verabschiedung, de Gruyter, 2020); “An-
thropocenic Earth Mediality: On Scaling and Deep Time in the
Anthropocene” (Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene, Cam-
bridge Scholars, 2019).
Serenella Iovino is Professor of Italian Studies and Environmental
Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A
research fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation and
the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, she is a
founding member and former President of EASLCE, the European
Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environ-
ment. She has written on a wide range of topics, including environ-
mental ethics and ecocritical theory, bioregionalism and landscape
studies, ecofeminism and posthumanism, comparative literature,
eco-art, and environmental humanities. Her recent publications in-
clude Material Ecocriticism (Indiana University Press, 2014), En-
vironmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (Rowman
& Littlefield, 2017, both co-edited with Serpil Oppermann, and
Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures,
Ecologies (University of Virginia Press, 2018, co-ed. with Enrico
Cesaretti and Elena Past). Her last monograph, Ecocriticism and
Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation (Bloomsbury, 2016) has
been awarded the Book Prize of the American Association for Ital-
ian Studies and the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for
Italian Studies.
Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen is Associate Professor of Global History
at Roskilde University and recently completed the project “Sustain-
able Rationalities” funded by the Danish Research Council, which
examined the economic ideas and innovations of radical climate
activists and green organizations over the past decades. This work
resulted in the book Climate Justice and the Economy: Social Mo-
bilization, Knowledge and the Political (Routledge, 2018). Further,
Jacobsen has written about climate action temporalities in a global
context and innovations for rapid transition at a local level.
Bernhard Malkmus, Professor of German Studies at Newcastle Univer-
sity, has a particular interest in the history and philosophy of biology
and ecology and their aesthetic rendition in poetry, narrative litera-
ture and the visual arts. His work reflects on the ways humans have
imagined and envisaged their relation to nature, their role in the his-
tory of life, and their position in the web of life throughout modernity.
He has published widely on 20th-century and contemporary literature
as well as the relation between ethics and aesthetics. He edited, with
Heather Sullivan, a special issue of New German Critique entitled
The Challenge of Ecology to the Humanities and is currently working
on a book-length essay on living in an anthropomorphic world as well
as a cultural history of the lynx.
Franz Mauelshagen is a Senior Scientist working for the Vienna Anthro-
pocene Network. His work as an environmental historian focuses
on climate history and the Anthropocene. His recent research is on
planetary politics, particularly the role of science-policy cooperation,
climate engineering, the history of climatology, and modeling land
use change and its earth system impacts. Recent publications include:
The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History (Palgrave 2018), Climate
Change and Cultural Transition in Europe (Brill, 2018), and The Little
Ice Age (2020).
Philipp Pattberg is Professor of Transnational Environmental Gov-
ernance and Policy and Head of the Department of Environmental
Policy Analysis, Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM), Vrije Uni-
versiteit, Amsterdam. Philipp chairs the board of the newly-founded
interdisciplinary Amsterdam Sustainability Institute (ASI). He teaches
Master’s courses in environmental governance at the Faculty of Sci-
ences and the Faculty of Social Sciences. Philipp specializes in the study
of global environmental politics, with a focus on private transnational
governance, multi-stakeholder partnerships, network theory and in-
stitutional analysis. His work has been published in leading scientific
journals including Annual Review of Environment and Resources,
European Journal of International Relations, Global Environmental
Politics, Governance, and Science. Philipp’s most recent book is The
Anthropocene Debate and Political Science (co-edited with Sabine
Weiland, Lena Partzsch and Thomas Hickmann, Routledge 2018).
Jürgen Renn is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of
Science in Berlin (MPIWG). His research focuses on long-term de-
velopments of knowledge while taking into account processes of glo-
balization and the historical origins and co-evolutionary dynamics
leading into the Anthropocene. Over more than two decades at the
MPIWG, his many research projects have dealt with a number of dif-
ferent historical developments. Among them was the development of
mechanics from antiquity until the twentieth century, including the
origins of mechanics in China, the transformation of ancient knowl-
edge, and the exchange of knowledge between Europe and China in
the early modern period. Another main focus is the history of modern
physics, investigating the origin and development of the general the-
ory of relativity and of quantum theory. His most recent publication
is The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthro-
pocene (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger was Director at the Max Planck Institute for

the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin (1997–2014), where he has
since served as an emeritus scientific member. Furthermore, he has
been honorary professor at the Technical University of Berlin since
1998, received an honorary doctorate from the ETH Zurich in 2006
and is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. His research fo-
cuses on the history and epistemology of experimental systems and
on the structures of the experimental situation in the life sciences.
Important publications include: Experimentalität. Im Gespräch über
Labor, Atelier und Archiv (Kadmos, 2018); Der Kupferstecher und
der Philosoph (Diaphanes, 2016); Experimentalsysteme und episte-
mische Dinge. Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas
(Suhrkamp, 2006); Epistemologie des Konkreten: Studien zur Ges-
chichte der modernen Biologie (Suhrkamp, 2006); Iterationen
(Merve, 2005); Toward a History of Epistemic Things (Wallstein,
2001).
Bernd Scherer is Director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
in Berlin and Honorary Professor at the Institute for European Eth-
nology of the Humboldt University, Berlin. In his projects at HKW,
Bernd Scherer deals with a broad field of cultural, technological,
media- philosophical, and aesthetical issues in many different for-
mats. Recent publications include: Wörterbuch der Gegenwart
(Matthes & Seitz, 2018); Zeit der Algorithmen (Matthes & Seitz,
2016); Das Anthropozän. Ein Zwischenbericht (Matthes & Seitz,
2015); “Three Galleries of the Anthropocene” (The Anthropocene
Review, 2014).
Alexandra R. Toland is Junior Professor for Arts and Research, Dean
of Student Affairs and Director of the Ph.D. Programme for Art and
Design at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Faculty of Art and De-
sign. Her work focuses on soil and art, urban ecology, and the An-
thropocene. Toland completed her doctorate in 2015 at the Institute
for Ecology of the Technical University of Berlin, where she worked
as a postdoctoral fellow until 2016. Recent publications include: Field
to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene (co-edited
volume, CRC Press, 2018) and “Dust Blooms: A Research Narrative
in Artistic Ecology” (Lasst Blumen sprechen! Blumen und künstliche
Natur seit 1960, Wienand Verlag, 2016).
Index
Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n”

denote endnotes
actor network theory (ANT) 34, 244 augmented reality (AR) installations
Adams, J.L. 168 238–240
Adorno, T. 94 Augustine 108
aesthetics of the Anthropocene 208, Australia/n 12, 133, 138, 141
244–245
affective objects 219 Bachmann, I. 101–104
Africa 85, 87, 133, 244 Bachmann-Medick, D. 4
Agamben, G. 108 Baichwal, J. 2
Alexander, A. 218 Barad, K. 194
Americas 44, 79, 84, 142 Barthes, R. 94
ammonia synthesis 51 Baudry, J.-L. 193
anastomosis 29 Becker, E. 217–220
Anders, G. 100, 101, 104, 105 Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) 16
Anthropocene Curriculum 53 being-in-the-world 159, 161
Anthropocene Project (2011–2013) 2 Bell, D. 68
Anthopocene epoch/age 2–3, 6, 7, Belt and Road initiative 87
10, 15, 40, 41, 48, 78, 79, 98, 130, Benjamin, W. 93, 108
135–137, 139, 150 Bensaude-Vincent, B. 33
Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) Benschop, R. 220
70, 71, 130, 137–138, 145 Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate
anthropology 11, 67, 96–97, 133, Zoology 222
182, 192 biodiversity 1, 10, 15, 130, 151, 154,
anthropomorphism of narrative 171 213, 218, 223, 225
anthropos 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 113, 118, biodiversity loss 39, 42, 145, 185,
125, 151, 216 232n4
anthroposphere 41 biodiversity preservation 226–227
Arendt, H. 14, 100 biomass-climate nexus 13; biomass
Arte Povera movement 236 production constraints 64–65;
artistic knowledge sharing 212 primary biomass production 62
Asia 14, 77–82, 85, 87, 133 biopolitics 14, 85–87, 244, 246–247
assemblages 4, 9, 114, 191, 195, 200, biosphere 14, 29, 39, 41, 49, 61, 62,
202, 208n5 66, 68–71, 94, 95, 99, 101, 105,
atomic age 3, 71, 100, 101, 103–105, 107, 109, 182
108, 143 “Blue Marble” (1972) 192
atomic bomb; nuclear testing 14, 32, Bonneuil, C. 5
29, 41, 71, 94, 99, 101, 103, 104, boundary objects of the Anthropocene
138, 144, 145 17, 212–235
260 Index
Bourdieu, P. 32 Columbian Exchange 65
Boyle, T.C. 15, 119 comedy 94
Braidotti, R. 11, 183 commons, idea of 226, 228; tragedy
Brazil 113, 133, 134, 186n7, 199 of the commons 105–106, 226
Brecht, B. 94 compositional complexity 116
Brin, D. 170 computational humanities 47
Burtynsky, E. 2, 165, 245 conceptual pluralism 180
Byron, O. 117 consumerism 101
Conway, E.M. 87
Calvino, I. 245–247 cosmism 150
capitalism 4, 42, 67, 80, 105, 113, Critique of the Power of Judgment
124, 142, 165, 166, 183, 191, 216 (Kant) 162
Capitalocene 10, 42, 142, 181, 183, Crutzen, P.J. 1, 27, 38, 142, 150, 180,
191, 216 181, 191
carbon democracy 59 cultural evolution 43–46
carbon footprint 78, 117, 174, “cultural turns” 4
175, 186n2 cybernetics 3
carbon law 174 cyberspace 15, 153
Cartesian distinctions 182
Castaing-Taylor, Lucien 207 Darwin, C. 29
Chakrabarty, D. 1, 8, 11, 87, 103, Davis, H. 244
114, 115 de Buffon, G.-L.L. 46
Chandler, D. 217 deep time 7–8, 11, 53n7, 114, 133,
Chernobyl 195 151, 170, 240, 241
China 14, 50, 64, 77–87, 133, 135, Deleuze, G. 16, 179, 181, 192, 194,
138, 194, 244 200, 206
Chinese Daoism 81 DeLillo, D. 170
Chthulhucene 10, 181, 191, 216 de Pencier, N. 2
Clark, T. 10, 114–117, 164, 237 de Sacrobosco, J. 48
Clément, G. 236, 247 Deutsches Museum 2
climate change 1, 4, 8, 10, 14–16, dialectical materialism 59–60
40, 41, 52, 59–61, 69, 78, 79, Diamond, J. 45
106, 114–119, 121–123, 125, dichotomy of nature and culture 1,
126, 137, 140, 143, 145, 154, 34, 162
155, 159, 164, 166, 168, 169, digital transformation 52, 67;
173, 175, 178, 186n1, 206, 216, digitalization 15, 68, 152,
232n4, 239; climate crisis 185; 155, 178
climate catastrophe 191; climate dirty metaphysics 13–14, 59–61
emergency 173, 175 disciplinary engagements 10–12
climate activists 184 disenfranchisement 154
climate justice 143 Divnogorye Natural Museum
climate system 63, 65–66, 68, 70, 123 Reserve 198
climate fiction/cli-fi 10, 118, 159, 169 Donovan, T. 167, 168
climate sceptics 121; climate Dumbrowski, A. 215
deniers 192 Dupuy, J.-P. 100, 101, 104, 107–109
coal 39, 40, 49–51, 61, 64, 65, 69, 78,
85, 184 Eagleton, T. 96
Cobb, A. 170 early Anthropocene burning
coevolution 59 hypothesis 140–141
co-evolution of knowledge systems earth system1, 2, 6–10, 13, 14, 16, 17,
and communities 46 39–44, 49, 51, 52, 60, 63, 66, 69,
Colebrook, C. 11 70, 81, 85, 107, 144, 173–176, 178,
colonialism 50, 67, 85, 145, 197, 199, 181, 185; earth system scientific
203, 205, 208, 218, 237, 244 concept 5–6, 39, 41; earth system
Index 261
science 5, 7, 9, 13, 18n7, 38, 46, 48, fossil energy 51, 151; fossil freedom
71, 121, 150, 151, 162, 179, 184 13, 59, 61
earth system stewardship 4, 42 Franceschini, A. 226
Eatherley, C. 100 Fressoz, J.-B. 5, 166
eco-art 17, 239–240, 248n1 Friedman, T. 159
ecocentrism 115, 125 Friedrich, C.D. 160–162
“ecodicy” of individualism 97–99 Frisch, M. 170, 171
ecological disruption 238 functional materials 39–40
ecological systems stability 105 Future Farmers 228, 229
ecologies of interruption 223
economy 37, 68, 78, 152 Gaia theory 9, 13, 18n7, 29–30, 34,
economy of knowledge 45, 47, 48, 50, 38, 80, 160
52, 225–226 Gandhi, M. 79, 80
Einstein’s theories of relativity 40, Gan, E. 217
47, 48 garden and Anthropocene 17,
Elkana, Y. 52 236–237, 239, 240; digital gardens
endosymbiont theory of evolution 242; geological gardens 240–242;
28–29 “gardens of resistance” 247;
entanglement 164, 166, 169–171 postnatural gardens 238–240
environmental humanities (EH) 16 Gardiner, S. 106, 107
epiphany experience 115–116 Garrard, G. 114
epistemic evolution 45 Geertz, C. 180
epistemological problem 11 geoanthropology 13, 52
Esposito, R. 108 geoengineering 87, 108, 144; climate
Europe/European 4, 12, 27, 44, 48, engineering 185
50, 59, 64, 65, 77, 79, 81–85, 87, “geology of media” 241
98, 134, 135, 142–143, 161, 208, geopolitical 84–85, 106, 197, 238
218, 227, 230 “geopower” 244, 249n6
eternal justice 93 Germany 12, 77, 84, 133, 138, 239
evolution 28, 29, 43; evolutionary Ghosh, A. 79, 80, 163, 169, 170
symbiosis 27, 28; cyclical Global Boundary Stratotype Section
symbiosis 29 and Point (GSSP) 8, 132
exceptionalism 97 Global South 133–135, 183, 185
existential tragedy 101–102 global warming 41–42, 69, 113, 143,
extended evolution 44–45 150, 159, 173, 174
extinction (risk of) 1, 9, 14, 32, 42, global weirding 159–160, 170
140, 141, 159, 194, 195, 197–199, Goethe, J.W. 100
213, 237 “golden spike” 8, 130, 137, 138,
Extinction Rebellion 173, 217 140, 144
Goltz, S. 220
Facing Gaia (Latour) 34 Gonzalez-Foerster, D. 236
facticity of manufacturability 155 Gould, S.J. 7
Farmer, J. 244 “grand narrative” 10
feedback mechanisms 5, 6, 10, 41, 44, granularity 119
48–49, 162, 174, 181 Great Acceleration 13, 15, 42–43, 49,
felix culpa (“happy guilt”) 108 52, 69, 77, 131, 137–138, 142–145,
fertilizers, chemical 39, 49, 51–52, 66 151, 179, 182
Feynman, R. 154 “Great Plan for the Transformation of
Field Museum of Chicago 222–223 Nature” 67
Flatbread Society 226–228 green consumerism 78
Fleck, L. 46 greenhouse emissions 86, 175
Folke, C. 217 green gross domestic product (GDP) 78
formal chrono-stratigraphic unit 130, Griesemer, J. 215, 217, 218, 221,
139, 145 222, 226
262 Index
Grossmann, H. 46 International Union of Geological
Grove, K. 217 Sciences (IUGS) 131
Guattari, F. 16, 179, 181, 186n7, International Commission on
192–195, 200, 201, 206, 207 Stratigraphy (ICS) 131–132
Gursky, A. 165 Italy/Italian 186n5, 246, 249n7
Guzzo, G. 3
James, W. 16, 200
Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis 51 Jardin Mandala 236
hamartía/tragic flaw 105, 107
Hamilton, C. 9, 173 Kant, I. 162–166
Hannah, D. 220 Kingsolver, B. 15, 115
Haraway, D. 11, 183, 191, 238 knowledge economy 45–46
Hardin, G. 105, 106 knowledge evolution 44; knowledge
Haus der Kulturen der Welt production 52–53
(HKW) 2, 150 Kollath, E. 214
Heat-Moon, W.L. 170 König, B. 215
Hegel, G.W.F 93, 95, 99, 105 Kramsch, C. 124, 125
Heidegger, M. 95, 109 Kuhn, T. 5, 46, 47
hermeneutical theory 178 Kusama, Y. 239
Hessen, B. 46
Hess, F. 168 Laforet, V. 245
history of knowledge 37–39 large-scale framework 5–6
history of sciene 37–58 Latour, B. 9, 11, 13, 33–34, 80, 85,
holism 11, 12 144, 160–162, 207, 219
Hörl, E. 3 Lawrence, D.H. 108
Holocene 4, 7, 39, 47, 63, 71, 82, Lee, J.Z. 84
133, 135–137, 140, 144, 150, 170, Lewis, S.L. 142
216, 248 The Limits to Growth 173
‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway 181, linguistic turn 4
184–185 literature 10, 15, 113–117, 119–121,
“Houston System” 150 124–126, 159, 169–170, 176, 236,
humanities 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 12, 217 245–246
humanism, exclusive 97 literary tragedy 93, 94, 110n2
human subjectivity and literature pedagogy 15, 113, 124
commodity 152 Lloyd, C. 118
humanity 3–4, 7, 8, 11, 14, 30, 37, 42, Louis XIV 81
60, 79, 85, 114, 115, 125–126, 141, Lovelock, J. 9, 13
165, 166, 173–175, 179, 216, 222 Lylov, M. 198
Hutton, J. 6, 7 Lyotard, J.-F. 163
hyperobject 8, 166, 219
MacGregor, S. 117
idealization of slowness 177–179 Maisel, D. 165
imagination, human 7–8, 60, 94, Malm, A. 183
99, 100, 103, 113, 125, 163, Malthusian crisis 83–84
198, 204, 238, 240, 246; literary Malthus, T. 79, 83, 84
imagination 115, 122; artistic Mandeville, B. 98
imagination 155 Margulis, L. 9, 13, 27–30, 34
industrial materials 168 Marhöfers, E. 16, 193–197, 199–202,
Industrial Revolution 50, 142–143 205, 207
interhuman violence 184 Mark, E. 82
International Commission on Marks, L. 196
Stratigraphy (ICS) 41 Marland, P. 125
International Geosphere-Biosphere Marsh, G.P. 46
Programme (IGBP) 46, 150, 151 Martin, J. 68
Index 263
Marx, K. 41, 59, 60, 67 ontologization 166
Marxism 67 Orbis hypothesis 142
Maslin, M.A. 142 Orbis Spike Snack 229, 230
material culture 44 Oreskes, N. 87
material hyper-production 150 Orr, J. 95
material inequality 59–60 overarching framework 11, 12,
material resources limitation 15, 38
60–61
material turn 33, 43, 70 Paloeanthropocene 140–141
mathematical sublime 164–165 paradigm shift 46
Mauser, W. 121 Paravel, V.207
McPhee, J. 7 Parco Arte Vivente (Park of Living
media art 238–239 Art, PAV) 236, 247–248
Meeker, J.W. 94, 236–237 Parikka, J. 11
metastability 30, 34 perception 15–16, 93, 116, 119, 120,
media (studies) 2, 11, 17, 43, 123, 125, 163, 166, 173, 182,
119, 168, 178, 204–207, 238, 198–202, 206, 239–240, 244
240–241, 244 performative objects 219
media-technology 5, 11 philosophical dualism 59
Milicevic, M. 215 phýsis 95, 104
Mitchell, D. 170 Picard, R. 219
Mitchell, T. 59 plasticity/malleability 168
modernity 94 Playfair, J. 7
Mokyr, J. 49 Pole, A. 152
Moore, J. 191 politics, political 1–4, 6, 8, 37–38,
Morrison, K.D. 81, 82 42, 46, 67, 69, 86–87, 96, 115,
Morton, T. 8, 163, 166–168, 219 117, 120, 126, 131, 138–141, 145,
Murphie, A. 206 154, 159, 169, 175, 179, 181–182,
mutation of algae 239–240 184–185, 213, 215, 217, 218, 222,
Mutually Assured Destruction 236, 241, 248; see also biopolitics
(MAD) 104, 105 and geopolitical
Myrvold, C.B. 228 “political theology of nature” 11
Pomeranz, K. 84
The Natural Contract (Serres) 27–28, Poole, A. 98
30–32, 31 Pope, A. 246
natural cycles of matter and life 94 posthumanism 11, 16, 175,
naturalization 98, 153, 154 181–184, 186
naturing nature 194, 208n3 Posthumus, S. 35
“negative universal history” 11, 103 post-natural-nature 167
network analysis 13, 47–48 psycho-cultural processes 191–192
niche construction 43–45 pursuit of conceptual thickness
Niedderer, K. 219 179–181
Nietzsche, F. 109
99 Cents (Gursky) 165 Raglon, R. 120
nitrate chemistry 51–52 Rapson, J. 118
Nixon, R. 176 Reller, A. 49
North America/USA 77, 117, 133, renewability 66
141, 230 resilience 217, 225, 227
resilient plants 236
Obama, B. 173 resisting gardens 247–248
objectness 220, 221 resource-consuming global
Odenbaugh, J. 121 capitalism 42
ontological rupture 9 Rich, N. 15, 122
ontological shift 6–10 Robinson, K.S. 87
264 Index
Rockstrøm, J. 174–176 steam engine 50
Rogoff, I. 177 Steininger, B. 51, 52
Ruddiman, W.F. 82, 141 Stengers, I. 9, 11, 33, 206, 225
Russia(n) 46, 194, 198, 199, 203, 227 Stoermer, E.F. 1, 27, 142, 180,
181, 191
Saraceno, T. 168 Subcommission on Quaternary
scale 1–3, 5, 7, 9, 13–17, 18n6, 32, Stratigraphy (SQS) 41, 132
37, 43, 51, 69, 87, 95, 104, 113, subjectivity, ecological 16, 193
114, 117, 119–122, 125–126, Subjektphilosophie of the
130, 141, 143, 144, 151, 153, Romantics 93
164–165, 167–169, 174, 176, 185, sublime: “absolutely great” 165;
195, 208n4, 232n4, 244, 246; dilemma of 245–247; mathematical
timescale 7, 8, 11, 12, 40, 61, 66, sublime 164–165; technological
68, 95, 131, 132, 135, 139, 140, sublime 166
145, 186n6; derangements of scale sustainabile land use 215–216
113–116, 118, 123, 124, 160, sustainable future 87
166; “affordances” of scale 114, Swärd, J. 226
118–119, 124–126 symbiosis 28; symbiogenetic
Scheirer, J. 219 dynamics 238
Schindler, J. 220 The Symbiotic Planet (Margulis)
Scholtmeijer, M. 120 28–30
“second nature” 67, 94–95, 152
secularism 97 Taiping rebellion 83
Seed Journey 226–228, 230–231 Taylor, C. 97, 104, 108
seed packet 17, 212–214 technofossils 46, 70
self-reinforcing feedback technologies 70, 95, 101, 151–153,
mechanisms 48–49 155, 164, 175, 244
serial endosymbiont theory (SET) 28 technosphere 14, 15, 41, 49, 70, 71,
Serres, M. 27, 28, 30–34 94–95, 99–101, 107, 109, 152
shared anthropology 192 Thain, A. 192
Shiva, V. 185 thanatopolitics 175–176, 183, 185,
Simmel, G. 109 186n5
slow violence of ecological thései 95, 104
destruction 176 Thiel, T. 17, 239, 240, 245, 247, 248
Smith, A. 98 “threshold concept” 10, 98, 137
Snowball-Earth events 41 tragic age 93–95
Snyder, T. 177 tragic ignorance 106–107
social and semantic networks “transcultural ecology” 120
interaction 47 Trinh Minh Ha 195
Social-Ecological Systems (SES) Tsing, A. 217, 238
218–219 Turnbow, D. 115, 116, 118
socialism 60 Turpin, E. 244
social sciences 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 30,
43, 61, 70, 113, 121, 138, 142 uncanniness 163–164
Socrates 109 urban revolution 48
Sophocles 93, 99 urgency 16, 159, 173–180, 184
South Africa 133, 134, 138–139 utilitarianism 94, 105
South America 95, 133
“species-being” 96, 110n4 Valleriani, M. 47
Stalin, J. 67 Vavilov, N. 227
standardization and knowledge Vernadsky, V.I. 18n3, 46
management 153–154 Vertebrate Zoology Museum 221
Star, S.L. 17, 214, 215, 217, 218, virtual epiphanies and aesthetic events
220–222, 225, 226 242, 242, 243, 244–245
Index 265
Vogl, J. 98 White, L. Jr. 80, 81
Voigt, K.M. 214 Wild Garden 242, 242, 243
von Humboldt, A. 62, 215 Williams, M. 180
von Liebig, J. 51 windmill farms 64
Woods, D. 114, 237
Wang Fang 84 Woolf, V. 201
waste 50, 69, 71, 78, 86, 99, 165, 168,
181, 223, 236, 237, 241, 244, 245 Xi Jinping 86
Waters, C.N. 180, 186n6
The Waves (1931) 201 Yang, A. 223–226
Welzer, H. 176 Yi-Fu Tuan 81
“western” 4, 14, 79–87, 94, 97, 161, Yusoff, K. 205
197, 203, 230
Western Enlightenment 11, 38, 59, 67, Zalasiewicz, J. 1, 7, 180, 186n6
71, 80, 155 Zelli, F. 130
Whitehead, A.N. 16 Zen Buddhism 80
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The Anthropocenic Turn

This interdisciplinary volume discusses whether the increasing salience

Gabriele Dürbeck is professor of literature and culture studies at the

Philip Hüpkes is research assistant at the Institute for Media and

ISBN: 978-0-367-48015-8 (hbk)

1 The “Material Turn” and the “Anthropocenic Turn”

2 The Anthropocene and the History of Science 37

3 The Dirty Metaphysics of Fossil Freedom 59

4 Thoughts on Asia and the Anthropocene 77

5 Safe Conduct: The Anthropocene and the Tragic 93

6 Literature Pedagogy and the Anthropocene 113

8 When Humans Become Nature 150

9 Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Anthropocene 159

Notes on Contributors 253

1.1 Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Duelo a Garrotazos,

Yet Another Turn?

The Anthropocene as a Large-Scale Framework

The Anthropocene as an Ontological Shift

The Anthropocene and (Inter-/Trans-)Disciplinary

On this Volume: Objectives and Chapters

Section 1: “Creating Knowledge in the Anthropocene”

Section 2: “Narrating the Anthropocene”

Section 3: “Sensing the Anthropocene”

Creating Knowledge in the

The subject becomes object. We become victims of our victories, the

The Symbiotic Planet

The Natural Contract

Figure 1.1 Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Duelo a Garrotazos, 1820–1823,

He then asks: “But aren’t we forgetting the world of things them-

We have lost the world. We’ve transformed things into fetishes or

For the philosophers, Serres’ somber diagnosis is that “Nature is reduced

In other words, scientific knowledge results from the passage that

While it forbids one to move fictitiously beyond the uncrossable lim-

The sciences have an equally inextricable double face in the “world

Today, however, the sciences themselves have turned into an “all-

My hope lies on the actual development of knowledge. Simple and

In a recent interview, Stéphanie Posthumus has observed that the figures

A Brief Review of the Anthropocene

The Beginnings of the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene from the Perspective of

The Anthropocene as a Challenge for the

Toward a Global History of Coal

Chemical Fertilizers and the Anthropocene

The superorganism of industrial petrochemistry could only arise in

The Digital Transformation and the Anthropocene

Knowledge Production for the Anthropocene

An Exercise in Dirty Metaphysics

In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour

No matter, whether we agree or disagree with the idea of socialism,

The Biomass-Climate Nexus

Constraints in Biomass Production

The Fossil Turn in Climate Relations

Transcending the Biosphere

Asia and the Limits of Modernity

Spiritual Traditions, Material Histories

Green GDP accounting needs to include data on how individuals use

Most of us take it for granted that we live in a profoundly non-tragic

In what is truly tragic there must be valid moral powers on both

He formulates his theory of tragedy decisively as an invective against the

The rejection of the tragic view of life may be necessary in order

This essay argues the opposite case: A reflection on why we find it so

The Contemporary Human Condition and Tragedy

It is true that there is much about our species-being which is passive,

Figure 9.2 Andreas Gursky, 99 Cents, 1999. © Andreas Gursky / Bildrecht,