Human and Non-human Agencies in the Anthropocene // Agencialidades humanas y no-humanas en el Antropoceno (original) (raw)
Related papers
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 nonhuman agencies.
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...
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.
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.
More-than-humanizing the Anthropocene
The Trumpeter, 2017
The concept 'human' has to be more-than-humanized, a project Abram initiated but left incomplete in his study of language. Doing so is a powerful antidote to some of the more anthropocentric consequences of Anthropocenic thinking. Crucial to this project is uncovering the ways in which human agency is permeated by and circulates within vast causal relationships. Shifting from ecologically destructive patterns suggests completing this phenomenological project by uncovering the sense that the 'human' is in no simple sense, 'steering this vessel.' Not even the pervasive and perpetual arrogance about our own powers is incontrovertibly 'our own.' Humility and awe before these wild and undomesticatable processes cycling through us and carrying us in their currents can correct hubristic assumptions about our power for good or evil, and thereby also perhaps these destructive patterns.