by Johannes Waßmer
The Vagueness of a World in Flames
“The world is on fire” (Saito 2022, 1). The Japanese philosopher and Marxist Kohei Saito begins his book Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism with the image of a world in flames. He repeats the historical-philosophical thesis of the imminent ‘end of history’ – in his case with an apocalyptic undertone – and sees “democracy, capitalism and ecological systems in [a] chronic crisis” (Saito 2022, 1). For him, this crisis has a name: the Anthropocene. And for him, it has an associated cause: capitalism. “[T]he modern world presupposed for a long time is gone for good because global capitalism considerably modified the entire planet, leaving no pristine nature untouched. This situation is now generally called the Anthropocene” (Saito 2022, 2).
Saito is not alone in this diagnosis of the Anthropocene world on fire. The sociologist and Latour disciple Nikolaj Schultz as well as the Japanese entrepreneur and philanthropist Soichiro Fukutake describe a world on fire threatened with extinction. In his confessional book Land Sickness, Schultz states: “It seems the Anthropocene is not a nice place to sleep” (Schultz 2023, 8). The first sentence of Fukutakeʼs book on Revitalizing Rural Communities is similar to those of Saito and Schultz: “Rapid climate change and excessive urbanisation are harming our world” (Fukutake/Henderson 2020, 3).
Although all three books differ in terms of objectives and academic backgrounds, they all refer to the Anthropocene. Saito even includes the term in the main title of his book: Marx in the Anthropocene. But the term itself remains strangely vague. With Paul Crutzen, Saito defines the Anthropocene as the epoch in which “humankind has become a ‘major geological force’”. He associates it with the “massive scientific and technological power to transform the entire planet on an unprecedented scale” and includes “[c]limate change” and, in general, a nature that is increasingly beyond human control (Saito 2022, 2f.).
There is undoubtedly a consensus in the sciences and humanities across all disciplines that these and similar descriptions of the current state of the Earth are generally accurate and that the various ecological, climatic, political and economic changes are interacting. It is therefore useful to choose a key concept that shows that these phenomena cannot be considered in isolation: The Anthropocene.
However, for a concept that claims to be scientifically valid and which, as a catchword, gives Saito’s book a programmatic direction, the definition of the Anthropocene is blurred. Since geology has refused to classify the Anthropocene as an epoch and thus to describe humankind as a current ‘geological force’ based on stratigraphic data, (cf. e.g. ICS 2024; Crutzen/Stoermer 2000; Waters, Williams, Zalasiewicz 2014) the question must even be asked: What exactly does the Anthropocene actually refer to? Why and how is it used scientifically? In this blogpost I lead up to the topic in my talk in Constance in showing that the Anthropocene is used as a guiding concept that refers to the newly developed awareness of the intensity of human impact on planet Earth.
The Epoch: concept and consciousness
According to the founders of the concept, Stoermer and Crutzen, the Anthropocene refers to the geological epoch that follows the Holocene. As a concept for an epoch, it historicises a certain type of influence of the human species (anthropos) on earth (cf. Chakrabarty 2015, 159). More precisely, the concept denotes an epoch with a double time structure, extra-human and intra-human. With reference to Karl Jaspers, Dipesh Chakrabarty understands the Anthropocene as an “epochal consciousness” of humanity for its own present (ibid., 142). Humankind has become aware of its lasting impact on earth. This epochal consciousness has also found its way into numerous disciplines of academia. It is applied to disciplinary knowledge and the methods of knowledge production.
The starting point of the Anthropocene epoch depends on which discipline sets it and which impact of humankind on its environment is considered to be particularly threatening. The ‘Great Acceleration’ (oil and nuclear age), the Industrial Revolution (coal), the ‘Columbian exchange’ (European colonialism) or the ‘early Anthropocene’ (equated with the Holocene) have been chosen to define its beginning. The Anthropocene is supposed to capture the “non-human aspects of climate” (Trexler 2015, 5) or to describe the realisation that the previous binary distinctions between ‘local and global, natural and artificial’ are no longer sufficient to describe the world (cf. Völker 2023, 23).
Consequently, the concept of the Anthropocene always expresses a critique of an epoch or a time regime: “Modernity has designed a time regime of progress and endless growth. / The Anthropocene is the fulfilment of this time regime and future regime. But its fulfilment reveals the very aporias of the modern temporal regime: its tendency towards monstrous growth and increased acceleration, the negation of the finiteness of resources, the brevity of the time horizons considered” (Horn 2020, 28, transl. J.W.). The concept of the Anthropocene thus exhibits the rapid dynamization of our concepts of time (cf. ibid, 29f.). This dynamization has been comprehensively described since the late 1970s (cf. Virilio 1977, 1999).
Obviously, the Anthropocene refers both to the discourse on a specific relationship between humanity and the earth and to the discourse on humanity’s awareness of its relationship to earth and the conceptual and temporal forms of describing this relationship. The boundaries of both discourses are blurred. What these humankind’s influence consists of and what characterises humankind’s consciousness of it is not precisely defined. The discourse statements about the Anthropocene have in common the assumption that the influence of humankind on earth exist and that there is an awareness of this influence. The Anthropocene is a “global ecological diagnosis” of a current “planetary emergency” with various “interdependencies between localities, actors, technologies, and ecological processes” (Horn/Bergthaller 2020, 142, 154). It is therefore by no means (only) a geochronological concept.
Guiding concept
The discourse power of the concept of the Anthropocene is based on its academic nature. Those who use the term Anthropocene refer to research findings from various academic fields. Saito can use it to title a Marxist book because the term is perceived as academically serious and can be grasped scientifically. We have reason to know that the concept of the Anthropocene is an appropriate concept to describe the current state of earth, for we can gather numerous scientifically valid reasons from different disciplines in favour of this thesis. The concept obviously expresses a body of knowledge.
For this reason, Saito can use the term to gain other knowledge in another discipline. Thus, the Anthropocene not only provides insight into a concept, but also serves as a concept that opens new possibilities for knowledge. Its mediating position between known and new knowledge and in between academic disciplines makes it a guiding epistemic concept.
Foucault understands the episteme as “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems” and “the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities” (Foucault 1973, 191). I understand an epistemic guiding concept to be a concept that decisively controls the discourse practices in academia and their relationships with one another. This applies to the Anthropocene.
The use of the Anthropocene concept changes the possibilities and rules for gaining knowledge in academia. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Eva Horn and Solvejg Nitzjke, Gabriele Dürbeck et al. and others have already drawn attention to this (cf. Chakrabarty 2009, Dürbeck/Probst/Schaub (eds.) 2022, Nitzke/Horn 2020). They have named narratives associated with the concept or the demand for an anthropodecentric approach linked to it and they pointed out its connectivity to different disciplines in academia. For the Anthropocene as an epistemic guiding concept its political relevance in the public sphere is not that decisive (cf. Horn 2020, 26). Rather, as a concept the Anthropocene bundles sub-concepts that are themselves widely used: Climate change, globalisation, resource consumption, etc. and it is used in numerous scientific disciplines.
In my talk in Constance, I aim to lay a foundation for this understanding of the Anthropocene as a guiding concept in academia by showing its meanings in different academic disciplines and its function as a concept that organises academic research and defines boundaries. Although I fully agree with Horn’s and Bergthaller’s statement that the Anthropocene “calls for a new cooperation between academic fields, be it in the form of a mutual exchange of data, concepts and hypotheses, or in the form of complementary approaches to shared problems” (Horn/Bergthaller 2020, 6) and strongly support intensive interdisciplinary cooperation, I will argue for maintaining disciplinary boundaries in sciences and humanities. There are epistemological, methodological and science policy reasons for this. Specifically, in my lecture I will argue for maintaining the boundaries between historiography, literary studies and literature, especially in view of the Anthropocene.
Works cited
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2015): The Human Condition in the Anthropocene. The Tanner Lectures in Human Values, Yale University.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2009): The Climate of History: Four Theses, in: Critical Inquiry 35, Nr. 2, 197-222.
Crutzen, Paul J./Stoermer, Eugene F. (2000): The Anthropocene, in: Global Change Newsletter 41, 17-18.
Foucault, Michel (1972): The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon.
Fukutake, Soichiro/Henderson, Jay (2020): With Art As My Weapon: Revitalizing Rural Communities and Introducing Public Interest Capitalism, San Francisco: Long River.
Horn, Eva (2020): Anthropozän, in: Michael Gamper/Helmut Hühn/Steffen Richter (eds.): Formen der Zeit. Ein Wörterbuch der ästhetischen Eigenzeiten, Hannover: Wehrhahn.
Horn, Eva/Bergthaller, Hannes (2020): The Anthropocene. Key Issues for the Humanities, London/New York: Routledge.
ICS: Joint statement by the IUGS and ICS on the vote by the ICS Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, online: https://stratigraphy.org/news/152, 08/20/2024.
Nitzke, Solvejg/Horn, Eva (2020): Cultures of Climate. On Bodies and Atmospheres in Modern Fiction: An Introduction, in: Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11, Nr. 1, 1-8.
Saito, Kohei (2022): Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Schultz, Nikolaj (2023): Land Sickness, Cambridge: polity.
Trexler, Adam (2015): Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Charlottesville/London.
Virilio, Paul (1977): Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. New York: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, Paul (1999): Polar Inertia. London: Sage.
Völker, Oliver (2021): Langsame Katastrophen. Eine Poetik der Erdgeschichte, Göttingen: Wallstein.
Zalasiewicz, Jan/Williams, Mark/Waters, Colin N. (2014): Can an Anthropocene Series be defined and recognized, in: Geological Society, London, Special Publications 2014, 39-53.