Sustainability

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Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 00(0), pp 1–8 xxx 2014. © Cambridge University Press, 2014 doi:10.1017/pli.2014.15

1How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Term 2Anthropocene 3Timothy MortonQ1 4Rice University

5Not a day goes by in the 2010s without some humanities scholars becoming quite 6exercised about the term Anthropocene. In case we need reminding, Anthropocene 7names the geological period starting in the later eighteenth century when, after the 8invention of the steam engine, humans began to deposit layers of carbon in Earth’s 9crust. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term has been current since 2000.1 In 101945, there occurred “The Great Acceleration,” a huge data spike in the graph 11of human involvement in Earth systems. (The title’s Kubrick joke stems from the 12crustal deposition of radioactive materials since 1945.) Like Marx, Crutzen sees the 13steam engine as iconic. As this is written, geologists such as Jan Zalasiewicz are 14convincing the Royal Society of Geologists to make the term official.

15Keywords: Anthropocene, global warming

16The term is remarkable: it names the intersection of human history with geological 17time, as Baucom argues. Anthropocene ends the concept nature: a stable, nonhuman 18background to (human) history. Should this not be welcome for scholars rightly wary of 19setting artificial boundaries around history’s reach? 20The term has arisen at a most inconvenient moment. Anthropocene might sound 21to post-humanists like an anthropocentric symptom of a sclerotic era. Taking their cue 22from the anti-humanism of Foucault and to some extent Derrida, others may readily 23recall the close of Foucault’s The Order of Things: the “man” is like a face drawn in 24sand, eventually wiped away by the ocean tides.2 Foucault, grandfather of post- 25humanism, appears less upset than the Matthew Arnold of “Dover Beach” at the 26prospect of this construct’s obliteration. 27What a weirdly prescient image of global warming, with its rising sea levels and 28underwater government meetings.3 But how ironic, given that humans evidently

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Wellek Lectures in theory at University of California–Irvine in 2014. He is the author of Hyperobjects, The Ecological Thought, Ecology without Nature, nine other books, and one hundred essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food, and music. 1 Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41.1 (2000): 17–18. 2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1994), 387. 3 I refer to the action performed by the government of the Maldives in 2009.

29created global warming, an entity massively distributed in both time and space, an 30entity persisting for one hundred thousand years.4 There we were, happily getting on 31with the obliteration business, when this term shows up. Within it, the human returns 32at a far deeper geological level than mere sand. 33Moreover, global warming’s erasure of the human by Earth systems such as the 34water cycle happens in a grittier way than the “discourse of man,” which is what 35Foucault meant. It is more than a semiotic obliteration. Gladly, to use Anthropocene is 36not simply to talk of power-knowledge institutions disposing humans, nor even of 37dispositifs that include nonhumans. What Anthropocene names is mass extinction—the 38sixth one in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of life on Earth. This is indeed an 39inconvenient truth for scholars convinced that any hint of talk about reality smacks of 40reactionary fantasy. 41The Sixth Mass Extinction Event, caused by humans—not jellyfish, not dolphins, 42not coral. The panic seems more than a little disingenuous, given what we know about 43global warming, and given what we humanities scholars think we like to say about the 44role of humans in creating it, as opposed to, say, Pat Robertson or UKIP (the UK 45Independence Party). Fredric Jameson would perhaps smile somewhat ruefully at the 46dialectic of scholars who refuse the very concept of reality and totalization, while 47global mega-corporations frack in their backyards. 48One simply cannot just palm off global warming on other beings or even on a 49particular group of humans, or argue that the Sixth Mass Extinction Event doesn’t 50really exist. The humanities have often argued via Foucault via Heidegger via Kant that 51there are no accessible things in themselves, only thing-positings, or thingings of 52Da-sein, or thing discourses. Only things insofar as they correlate to some version of 53the (human) subject. The blank screen on which these fantasies are projected turns 54out not to be blank at all, but rather to consist of unique, discrete entities (a new 55philosophical movement, derived from the obverse of Heidegger, calls them objects) 56with a “life” of their own no matter whether a (human) subject has opened the 57epistemological refrigerator door to see whether they are lit up in the clearing. And 58some entities formerly known as blank screens (and violently treated as such) are 59overwhelming human beings. 60Foucault’s image of the sandy face is a metaphor for what some now call corre- 61lationism.5 Correlationism asserts that reality cannot be seen directly, but can only be 62correlated with something like a (human) subject. The “man” episteme begins for 63Foucault in 1800. To say the least, this is ecologically uncanny. The year 1800 is the 64moment of the steam engine—the veritable the engine of the Anthropocene; it is also 65the moment of Hume and Kant, whose thought inaugurated correlationism: Hume by 66arguing that cause and effect was a construct based on a congeries of associations, 67Kant by grounding this argument in synthetic judgments a priori by a transcendental 68subject (a subject that isn’t “little me”). At the very moment at which philosophy says 69you can’t directly access the real, humans are drilling down ever deeper into it.

4 I call such entities hyperobjects. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 5 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2009), 5.

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70But what is this “human”? Evidently the term as used here is not essentialist, if 71essentialist means metaphysically present—here I do align myself with Kant and his 72subsequent lineage holders, including Heidegger, who inspired Lacan, who taught 73Foucault. This presence derives ultimately from a persistent default ontology in the 74long moment in which the Anthropocene is a rather disturbing fluctuation. This is 75the ten-thousand-year “present” I call agrilogistics, the time of a certain logistics of 76agriculture that arose in the Fertile Crescent and went viral, eventually requiring steam 77engines and industry to endure.6 The algorithm of Fertile Crescent agriculture consists 78of numerous subroutines: eliminate contradiction and anomaly, establish boundaries 79between the human and the nonhuman, maximize existence over and above any 80quality of existing. Now that agrilogistics covers most of Earth’s surface, we can see its 81effects as in a polymerase chain reaction: they are catastrophic. 82Social space is in a sense physical, lived philosophy. So it might be important to 83get at what is driving the Anthropocene and its global warming. The metaphysics of 84presence is intimately caught in the history of global warming. Derrida and Heidegger 85were rightly determined to perform some form of Destruktion upon it. Reverse 86engineering agrilogistics, one discovers its occluded inner logic. A piece of that logic 87asserts that to exist is to be constantly present. Here is the field, I can plough it, sow it 88with this or that, or nothing, yet it remains, constantly. The entire system is construed 89as constantly present, rigidly bounded, separated from nonhuman systems—despite 90the obvious existence of nonhumans to maintain it (try to ignore the cats). To achieve 91constant presence, not just in thought but also in social and physical space requires 92persistent acts of violence, and such an achievement is itself violence.7 Why? Because it 93goes against the grain of (ecological) reality, which consists of porous boundaries and 94interlinked loops, rather like Derrida’s arche-writing, subtending the very scripts that 95underwrite agrilogistical space, with its neatly ploughed lines of words, many of their 96first lines pertaining to cattle—a one-size-fits-all term for anything a (male) human 97owns. Patriarchy, rigid social hierarchies, and general conditions approaching near 98death (Agamben’s bare life or Derek Parfit’s bad level) were the almost immediate 99consequence, yet the virus persisted, like an earworm or a chair, no matter how 100destructive to the humans who had devised it.8

101Humans, not lemons, generated the logistics of agriculture that now covers most 102of Earth and is responsible for an alarming amount of global warming emissions all by 103itself. Its generation had unintentional or unconscious dimensions. No one likes 104having their unconscious pointed out, and ecological awareness is all about having it 105pointed out. That alone explains some negative reactions to Anthropocene. 106That I claim humans exist and made the Anthropocene by literally drilling into 107rock does indeed make me a kind of essentialist. Because my essentialism is without a 108metaphysics of presence, however, I am a weird essentialist, in the lineage of Irigaray,

an avatar of this line of (non-agrilogistical) thought: to exist is to flicker with

6 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 7 Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 79–153. 8 Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover Magazine (May 1987), 64–66. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 381–390, 419–441.

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109nothingness, defying the supposed law of noncontradiction hardwired into 110agrilogistical space. 111Such a thought seems as ridiculous as the idea that I might be suggesting that we 112regress to a pre-agrilogistical time. One of the rituals of theory class is that as a 113condition of inclusion one is expected to convey something like “Well, I’m not an 114essentialist”; “Well, I’m not endorsing that French feminist biological essentialism.” 115Inert as that characterization is—of Irigaray, Cixous, and essentialism—this is something 116that comes out of our mouths as easily as things come out of an Easy Bake Oven. 117Likewise, the ridicule with which the idea of social spaces that are not agrilo- 118gistical (hence not traditionally capitalist, communist, or feudal, or any manner of 119formations over its ten-thousand-year span) is greeted, as is the inverse variant, the 120insistence that humans should exert enough violence to “return” themselves to a pre- 121agrilogistical existence (John Zerzan, archivist of the Unabomber Ted Kaczinski). Such 122reactions are both symptoms of agrilogistical space as such—both assume that to have 123a politics is to have an enormous, overarching, Easy Think concept. So one is derided 124as a primitivist or an anarchist. The editing of laughter out of thought is curious and 125should be studied. “Of course, I’m not advocating that we actually try a social space 126that includes nonhumans in a noncoercive and nonutilitarian mode. That would be 127loopy.” Or “Eliminate the evil loops of the human stain. Anyone with prosthetic 128devices such as glasses is suspect. Return to year zero.” A taboo against loops operates 129in both cases. This is significant because loops characterize ecological systems—and 130ecological awareness, which takes an uncanny noir form as the detective with the 131fancy gizmos finds out that he is the criminal—having used the fancy gizmos to make 132fancy gizmos to perceive that very thing. 133Aside from claims of anthropocentrism and essentialism, let us examine more 134closely the modes in which denial of the Anthropocene speaks. 135First of all, colonialism: the Anthropocene is the product of Western humans, 136mostly Americans; the term unjustly lumps together the whole human race. 137Although the desire for it emerged in America first, chronologically, it turns out 138that everyone wants air-conditioning. On this issue, I am in perfect accord with 139Dipesh Chakrabarty.9 Likewise, obesity is not simply American, for the same reason. 140Desire is the logical structure of consumerism, and desire is logically prior to whatever 141“need” is (as Lacan argues)—histories of consumerism notwithstanding, histories that 142tend to repeat fall narratives not unrelated to ecology: “First we needed things, then at 143point x we wanted things, and that put us into an evil loop.” Neanderthals would have 144loved Coca Cola Zero. 145Secondly, racism: the term implies that humans altogether are responsible. Yet the 146term really means white humans, and they go unmarked: blaming all people for a 147white problem whose whiteness is suppressed. 148Yet human need not be something that is ontically given: we can’t see or touch or 149designate it as present in some way (as whiteness, or not-blackness, and so on). There 150is no positive content to the human that one can directly perceive. So Anthropocene 151isn’t racist. Racism exists when one fills in the gap between what one can see (all kinds

9 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222.

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152of beings starting car engines and shoveling coal into steam engines) and what these 153entities are with some kind of aesthetic putty, such as whiteness. Racism effectively 154erases the gap, implicitly reacting against what Hume and Kant did to reality (hence 155Heidegger hence Derrida and so on). Since Kant, there has been some kind of irre- 156ducible rift between what an entity is and how it appears, such that science handles 157data, not actual things. 158It should now be evident that I am myself a correlationist. I do not believe that the 159finitude of the human–world correlate is incorrect; I do not claim that it can be burst 160asunder, for instance by mathematics.10 I merely hold that we should release the 161anthropocentric copyright control on correlationism, allowing nonhumans like fish (and 162perhaps even fish forks) the fun of being incapable of accessing the in itself, whether by 163knowledge or by perception or by some other means, such as physical proximity. 164Anthropocene may not be colonialist or racist, but surely it must be a blatant 165example of speciesism? Is it not claiming that humans are special and different in 166having created it? 167Indeed, humans and not dolphins invented steam engines and drilled for oil, but 168this is not a sufficient reason to suppose them special or different. Etymology not- 169withstanding, species and specialness sharply differ. Darwin’s Origin of Species is iro- 170nically titled. There are no species—and yet there are. They have no origin—and yet 171they do. A human consists of nonhuman components and is directly related to 172nonhumans. Yet a human is not a fish. A swim bladder, from which lungs derive, is 173not a lung in waiting. There is nothing remotely lunglike about it.11 A life-form is what 174Derrida calls arrivant, or what I call strange stranger: it is itself, yet uncannily not itself 175at the same time.12

176The Darwinian concept is precisely not the Easy Think, Aristotelian tool for 177telling telologically what species are for: ducks are for swimming, Greeks are for 178enslaving barbarians. . . . Marx adored Darwin for that.13 Because species in this sense 179does not coincide with me, an actual human being as opposed to a pencil or a duck, it 180is not speciesist. Like the racist, the speciesist fills the gap between phenomenon and 181thing with a kind of paste, an easy-to-identify content. That is precisely what one is 182incapable of seeing, yet there are ducks and spoonbills, which are not humans. 183Species appears superficially easy to think: after all, contemporary texts from 184Sesame Street (“We Are All Earthlings”) to Live Aid’s “We Are the World” appear to 185convey it, along with racism and speciesism.14 Yet for me to know, through the very 186reasoning with which I discern the transcendental gap between phenomenon and 187thing, the being that manifests this reasoning, might be like a serpent swallowing its 188own tail, putting itself in a loop. What appears to be superficially the nearest—my

10 Meillassoux and Ray Brassier hold this position. 11 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 160. 12 Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki, trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Matlock, 5.3 (December 2000): 3–18; Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14–15, 17–19, 38–50. 13 Gillian Beer, “Introduction,” in Darwin, The Origin of Species, vii–xxviii (xxvii–xviii). 14 Sesame Street, “We Are All Earthlings,” Sesame Street Platinum All-Time Favorites (Sony, 1995); USA for Africa, “We Are the World” (Columbia, 1985).

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189existence qua this actual entity—is phenomenologically the most distant thing in the 190universe? The Muppets and so on inhibit the necessary ecological thought—the 191uncanny realization that every time I turned my car ignition key I was contributing to 192global warming and yet was performing actions that are statistically meaningless. 193When I think myself as a member of the human species, I lose “little me”—yet it 194wasn’t tortoises that caused global warming. 195Fourthly, there is the idea that Anthropocene is hubristic. Yet the term deploys 196the concept species as something unconscious, not as some entity that can ever be 197totally explicit. Humans did it, but they did it with the aid of prostheses and non- 198humans such as engines, factories, and cows—let alone viral ideas about agricultural 199logistics living rent-free in minds. So Anthropocene is not hubristic at all. It means 200humans—already a mess of lungs and bacteria and nonhuman ancestors and so 201on—along with their agents such as cows and factories and thoughts, agents that can’t 202be reduced to their merely human use or exchange value. For instance, these 203assemblages can violently disrupt both use and exchange value in unanticipated 204(unconscious) ways: one cannot eat a California lemon in a drought. 205So the Anthropocene is the first truly anti-anthropocentric concept. The fact that it 206is far from hubristic is also why geoengineers are incorrect, if they think it means we 207now have carte blanche to put gigantic mirrors in space or flood the ocean with iron 208filings. Earth is not just a blank sheet for the projection of human desire: this desire 209loop is predicated on entities (Earth, coral, clouds) that also exist in loop form, in 210relation to one another and in relation to humans. The argument for geoengineering 211goes like this: “We have always been terraforming, so let’s do it consciously from now 212on.”15 Yet making something conscious doesn’t mean it’s nice. We have always been 213murdering people. How is deliberate murder more moral? Psychopaths are exquisitely 214aware of the suffering they consciously inflict. In relation to life-forms and Earth 215systems, humans have often played the role of the Walrus concerning the oysters:

216“I weep for you,” the Walrus said: 217“I deeply sympathize.” 218 219With sobs and tears he sorted out 220Those of the largest size, 221Holding his pocket-handkerchief 222Before his streaming eyes.16

223Consider the Freudian-slip absurdity of James Lovelock’s analogy of Jekyll and Hyde 224for science and engineering: “Only big science can save us. We know big science has 225been like Mr. Hyde for the last two centuries, but please know, we have a kindly inner 226doctor Jekyll. Let us be Jekyll. Please. Please trust us, trust us.”17 Unaware of its tone, 227Lovelock’s sentences sound exactly like Mr. Hyde, as does Jekyll’s own self-justification in

15 See for instance Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (New York: Random House, 1993); Green Mars (New York: Random House, 1995); Blue Mars (New York: Random House, 1997). 16 Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass in The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Norton, 2000), 187. 17 James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 6–7.

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228the eponymous novel. Moreover, one can’t get rid of the unconscious that easily. Here is 229an example: “I know I’m an addict so now I’m going to drink fully aware of that fact.” 230And being aware of “unconscious biases” is a contradiction in terms. 231The concept unconscious is profoundly related to the notion of interdependence, the 232ecological fact par excellence. It is weird, which is to say, in a loop: weird derives from the 233Old Norse, urth, meaning twisted or entwined.18 Be nice to bunnies and you are not being 234nice to bunny parasites. I am far from asserting that we should not care because we cannot 235get ecological action perfect: quite the opposite. In an ecological age, cynical reason 236collapses into just another form of hypocrisy. Ecological awareness is about becoming 237friendly with hypocrisy, not because one doesn’t care but because one does.19

238There are some substitutes. For instance, why not call it Homogenocene? This is 239just a euphemism. The substitute is true insofar as the logistics driving the Anthro- 240pocene depends upon an implicit ontology of the Easy Think Substance. In a more 241urgent sense, however, the concept is false and truly anthropocentric. The iron 242deposits in Earth’s crust made by bacteria are also homogeneous. Oxygen, caused by 243an unintended consequence of bacterial respiration, is a homogenous part of the air. 244Humans are not the only homogenizers. 245Having attuned to an Anthropocene we humanities scholars might accept, let us 246consider some significant aspects of the Anthropocene that are highly congruent with 247the humanities. 248Crutzen himself is now having cold feet about 1784, his initial dating. He sees the 249data spike of 1945 called The Great Acceleration, and believes, like most good sci- 250entists, in the law of non-contradiction. The data spike looks present and self-evident 251in that metaphysical way objected to previously. The boundary between this true 252beginning and what came before must be rigid and thin. There cannot be two 253boundaries at once, or a fuzzy boundary, but mathematicians, philosophers, literature 254scholars, and artists are not bound by this law. (Nor indeed are contemporary young 255quantum theorists, who are beginning to assume that there is not a boundary between 256the classical and quantum levels.)20

257One could imagine The Great Acceleration differently. One could see it as a 258catastrophic yet logical extension of the smooth-seeming periodicity of agrilogistics. In 259the humanities we have been thinking for a while about how historical moments are 260never rigidly bounded. Yet feudalism is not capitalism. The Renaissance is not post- 261modernism. Rather, they exist but are retroactively posited and necessarily contested, 262and not thin and easy to identify. More fundamentally, time as such cannot be 263established as an Easy Think substance, as a linear succession of atomic now points, 264no matter how large or small; otherwise Zeno’s paradoxes arise. The present can be 265defined to arbitrary size: one nanosecond, a billion years. We are living “in” a present 266moment that includes, to name a few, the Anthropocene and agrilogistics and the 267catastrophe (if you are anaerobic) called oxygen: an ever-widening set of concentric 268temporalities. The reader will immediately note the congruence with Baucom’s essay.

18 Oxford English Dictionary, weird, adj. www.oed.com, accessed April 9, 2014. 19 Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 134–158. 20 See for instance Aaron O’Connell et al., “Quantum Ground State and Single Phonon Control of a Mechanical Ground Resonator,” Nature 464 (March 17, 2010): 697–703.

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269There is a finite already, a sort of longtime-already (as opposed to an always- 270already). Agrilogistics began as a smooth wave that lurched into the Anthropocene. 271Earth systems were in a harmonious-seeming periodic cycle for ten thousand years.21

272We have become accustomed to call the periodic cycling of Earth systems nature; the 273term’s ecological value is dangerously overrated. Nature as such is a ten-thousand- 274year-old human product—not just a discursive product, but also a geological one. Its 275wavy elegance was simply revealed as inherently violent, as when in an epileptic fit 276one’s brainwaves become smooth right up until one goes into seizure. 277Yet alongside the longtime-already, there may indeed be an always-already. How 278did humans fall for agrilogistics in the first place? There must be something in the 279structure of thought that locks onto the human desire to abolish anxiety and know 280where the next meal is coming from. Humanities scholars, supposed experts in what 281human being might be, need to examine the structure of thought. How did human minds 282get behind a scheme now known as both cockamamie and seemingly incontestable? 283

21 Jan Zalasiewicz, presentation at “History and Politics of the Anthropocene,” University of Chicago, May 2013.

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