Human and Non-human Agencies in the Anthropocene // Agencialidades humanas y no-humanas en el Antropoceno (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment
The era of human impact throughout the Earth’s biosphere since the Industrial Revolution that has recently been named the Anthropocene poses many challenges to the humanities, particularly in terms of human and non-human agency. Using diverse examples from literature, travel reflections, and science that document a wide range of agencies beyond the human including landscape, ice, weather, volcanic energy or gastropods, and insects, this essay seeks to formulate a broader sense of agency. All of our examples probe new kinds of relationships between humans and nature. By configuring a close interconnection and interdependence between these entities, the Anthropocene discourse defines such relationships anew. On the one hand, our examples highlight the negative effects of anthropocentric control and supremacy over nature, but on the other, they depict ambivalent positions ranging from surrender and ecstasy to menace and demise that go hand in hand with the acknowledgment of non-human a...
Human and Non-human Agencies in the Anthropocene
Ecozon@, 2015
The era of human impact throughout the Earth’s biosphere since the Industrial Revolution that has recently been named the Anthropocene poses many challenges to the humanities, particularly in terms of human and non-human agency. Using diverse examples from literature, travel reflections, and science that document a wide range of agencies beyond the human including landscape, ice, weather, volcanic energy or gastropods, and insects, this essay seeks to formulate a broader sense of agency. All of our examples probe new kinds of relationships between humans and nature. By configuring a close interconnection and interdependence between these entities, the Anthropocene discourse defines such relationships anew. On the one hand, our examples highlight the negative effects of anthropocentric control and supremacy over nature, but on the other, they depict ambivalent positions ranging from surrender and ecstasy to menace and demise that go hand in hand with the acknowledgment of non-human agencies.
Posthumanism or Ecohumanism? Environmental Studies in the Anthropocene
Journal of Ecohumanism, 2022
The paper discusses two of the currently most influential discourses in the environmental humanities, posthumanism and the Anthropocene, in the light of the concept of ‘ecohumanism’ suggested by the title of the present new journal. This concept resonates with the approach of a cultural ecology in literary studies and the environmental humanities, which takes an in-between stance between a radically ecocentric posthumanism and a narrowly anthropocentric humanism. The paper addresses four different domains in which such an ecologically redefined humanism can productively respond to some of the paradoxes and unresolved questions in current environmental studies: (1) the ambiguous role of science and the search for a valid basis of scholarly truth-claims; (2) the question of the subject, and of personal vs. impersonal agency; (3) the role of the archive and of the cultural past in Anthropocene thought and writing; and (4) the relation of the human and the non-human, and of the future o...
The end of the end of nature: the Anthropocene and the fate of the human
In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as ‘great stone book of nature’, and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. Debates about the geological status of the Anthropocene focus on the identification of stratigraphic ‘signals’ that might be being laid down for the geologist-to-come, but I suggest that marking the base of the Anthropocene layer is not a merely technical task but one which is entangled with questions about the human — about the Anthropos of the Anthropocene. Who would be the ‘onomatophore’ of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of Anthropos? I consider a number of ways of characterising the geological force of the Anthropocene – Homo faber, Homo consumens and Homo gubernans. But I then situate this dispersal of the Anthropos into ‘syntypes’ against the background of a more general dispersal of ‘man’ that is occasioned when human meets geology. I do this by bringing into dialogue two works: Foucault’s Order of Things, and Derrida’s Of Grammatology, focusing on their passages about the end of ‘man’ and the end of ‘the book’ respectively. I suggest the becoming geological of the human in the Anthropocene is both the end of the great stone book of nature and the Aufhebung of ‘man’ —both his apotheosis and his eclipse.
The Politics of the Anthropogenic*
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2012
The term anthropogenic takes its meaning from an implied contrast to an idealist notion of nature as separate from humans and endowed with a timeless or cyclical equilibrium. In recent decades, however, scientists have concluded that human influences now dominate nature at global and geological scales, reflected in the contention that Earth has entered a new epoch called the Anthropocene. Anthropogenic global warming is central to these developments, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change obligates the international community of nations to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Scientific debates surrounding anthropogenic impacts on the environment have a much longer history, however, revealing chronic empirical difficulties with the human-nature dualism combined with an inability to overcome it conceptually. Anthropologists have a key role to play in emerging transdisciplinary efforts to understand the anthropogenic across sca...
Editors' introduction to the Special Section: The ethics and politics of the Anthropocene
In recent years "the Anthropocene" has come to represent a new milestone for human-induced destruction of the environment. There is a widespread consensus that industrialization processes within capitalist modernity have ushered humanity into a new geological epoch bearing little resemblance to the climatic stability of "the Holocene," the roughly 10,000-year span within which all known human civilizations were established. Furthermore, there is general agreement that the ending of climatic stability will have a devasting impact on the Earth's ecosystems, making long-term human settlement and global supply chains difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. This Special Section aims to stimulate critical social theories to explore ways of thinking and acting that would equip us humans better to respond to the multiple challenges we face from the increasingly inescapable reach of ecological disaster. In all five contributions, "the Anthropocene" names a historical moment in which we must reconsider the very category of the human and our constitutive interdependencies with the other-than-human. Challenging the view that only humans possess intrinsic value, Arne Vetlesen calls on us to regard other-than-human beings as moral addressees in their own right. At the same time, he argues that only humans can be considered moral agents due to their powers of reflexivity, abstraction, imagination, and future oriented thinking. These powers make humans alone responsible for their actions. Although at first glance his asymmetric model may seem in tension with it, Vetlesen's argument resonates with Maeve Cooke's call for ecologically attuned relationships between humans and other-than-humans, in which human knowledges are not deemed in principle superior to the knowledges of other-than-human entities and ethical goodness is not determined solely by human concerns and interests but has a partial independence of them. Nonetheless, like Vetlesen, she highlights the continued importance of ethically motivated human action, leading her to propose a reimagined, rearticulated conception of human freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming agency. The proposed conception aims to break decisively with the ideal of the sovereign subject as it has emerged within capitalist modernity. Yann Allard-Tremblay makes a similar argument, urging us to recognize our embeddedness in the natural world while at the same time asserting our capacity for reflexive, responsible self-direction; he calls on us to seek concrete ways in which our relationships to one another and to other-than-humans can be renewed in their localized contexts. For Indigenous peoples, this process necessitates political resurgence and the revitalization of lifeways impacted by the destructive legacy of colonialism. In the case of non-Indigenous peoples, it may require far-reaching, transformations in relation to the land they live upon. John McGuire, too, holds onto the value of selfdetermining human agency, while drawing attention to its historical entanglement with notions of autarkic mastery and warning against the uncritical embrace of technological innovation as the surest means of meliorating ecological disaster. In the same vein, Karim Sadek contends that any adequate response to our ecologically disastrous situation is predicated on the human agent's ability to move beyond an egocentric mode of being that generates, shapes, and nourishes self-centered, self-driven, and self-concerned perceiving, thinking, and acting. Like the other contributors, This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
PERSPECTIVES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: Beyond Nature and Culture?
Itinerari: LIX, 2020
The contributions collected in this volume compare the views of phi- losophers, literary and cultural theorists, and political philosophers, con- cerning what in recent years has become a much discussed issue: the Anthropocene. Although there are no longer any doubts about the reality of this new era, understood as the epoch of signi cant human impacts on the planet, a wide and controversial debate has developed around the use of this term and on the de nition to be given to it. The Anthropocene cannot only be understood as the perpetuation of an anthropogenic and anthropocentric perspective, it can also give rise to a critical paradigm of inquiry into a series of problems such as climate and geological changes produced by humans. The complexity of the notion of Anthropocene can also be defined as a semi-empty signifer, which is once of the most interesting and stimulating aspects of the Anthropocene, one that invites and stimulates us, sometimes even provocatively, to imagine different scenarios and ho- rizons as alternatives to the present. The contributions collected here speak to this richness and breadth, and also to the “irritating” nature of this term, Anthropocene.
An Analysis of Rethinking Humanity in the Anthropocene: The Long View of Humans and Nature
The purpose of this article is to present a brief analysis of the book “The Posthuman” by R. Braidotti (2013) to reconsider the long view of humanity in the Anthropocene, to view humans and nature. Our perception of the future of the planet and humanity is a significant political and social issue. Yet the general flow of an unequivocal debate for a fully human relationship with the earth is still greatly hindered. Until such a conflict becomes clear, it is unlikely that we will begin to reign in environmental change because we are creatures of topographic energy who have created Anthropocene. We need to consider whether it is possible to bring about social change with an alternative view of what our identity is, what it was, and what could upset the existing perception of human’s relationship with nature. A rational sense of sustainable and developmental substance that manages human culture within a wider world is an important extens2ion to the totality of political activity.
2016
This article accounts for an environmental standpoint to be part of the post-human approach by accessing the post-human as a post-humanism, a post-anthropocentrism and a post-dual-ism. The main goal of this paper is to call for a post-anthropocentric turn by emphasizing the fact that the Anthropocene and the actual ecological collapse are only the symptoms; it is time to address the causes, which have been detected in the anthropocentric worldview based on an autonomous conception of the human as a self-defying agent. An urgent answer to this scenario lays in philosophy, and specifically, in a theoretical and pragmatical post-anthropo-centric shift in the current perception of the human. This article reflects on the ideal, but also uneasy, practices of letting go of anthropocentric privileges. Such changes can only result by fully acknowledging the human species in relation to the environment. The Anthropocene shall thus be addressed, together with sustainable forms of producing (less), recycling and co-existing with other species, with a socio-political and cultural shift: a passage from human-ism to post-humanism, here underlined in its specific meaning of post-anthropocentrism. The methodology of this article develops as an assemblage of theoretical thinking, creative writing and artistic image analysis.