Abstract
It is somewhat ironic that just when scholars seem to be reaching an academic consensus critiquing the human exceptionalism of modern humanism, and to be replacing such an exceptionalism with a contextual and processual understanding of the human species, we are suddenly told that we are living in a new geological era named The Anthropocene. Just when we had begun to overthrow such anthropic tendencies in philosophy and the social sciences, we are faced with the undeniable presence of the human in the entire eco-system, from deet-resistant mosquitoes to the o-zone hole in the heavens. If humanism understood the role of the human as exceptional in the positive sense of enacting progressive transformation on the world as defined by the Enlightenment, the centrality of the human in the Anthropocene lies in a different and regressive transformation, not of the cultural world but of the geological earth, in what is an unprecedented ecological decline. Such a dissolution of the nature/culture divide is thus also a dissolution of the disciplinary divide between natural and human sciences, since moral issues can no longer be separated from biological concerns, and politics can no longer be separated from nature. To resolve the Anthropocene will thus require the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines addressing both scale and value, for though we must measure the o-zone and the acidification of the oceans, we must also revise the ecological soundness of our political and economic practices and ideologies, establish a new understanding of the collective co-determination of human and other forms of life, and educate our species about its newfound responsibilities for both the human world and the nonhuman earth. Yet notwithstanding widespread recognition of the dissolution of the nature/culture divide that is intrinsic to Anthropocene discourse, there is considerable disagreement about when and how such a divide came about, and the role his divide plays as cause and/or effect of the Anthropocene. The scientific discourse claims that prior to the Anthropocene, human niche culture in the Holocene did not interfere in any significant way with natural processes, which were independent of human society. Actor-Network Theory and many social scientists claim on the other hand that the nature/culture divide has never existed, and that it was simply a short-lived invention of modernity to set an active subject against a passive world to be exploited. Yet other social scientists disagree with both of these positions, and claim that not only has the distinction between nature and culture always existed, but it continues to exist in the Anthropocene, requiring social scientific rather than scientific expertise in order to come to terms with its political and economic causes. For these scholars, the Anthropocene term is itself misleading for its universalizing of homo sapiensas responsible for the geological shift. What are we to make of these conflicting interpretations of the nature/culture divide, and how might they influence our understanding of the Anthropocene, and of possible responses to it? With such contradictory interpretations, the Anthropocene has come to represent the node in a theory debate with important consequences for understanding who we are and how to respond to the crisis and envision our future on the planet earth. This paper will seek to disentangle these different positions, and evaluate the solutions each position provides to ensure a future for life on the planet. If the scientific position reduces nature to a garden that must be managed by technology to allow for neoliberal lifestyles to continue and Actor-Network Theory reduces human agency to a material force no different from that of technological tools and thereby justifies a form of technological determinism where might makes right, the political positions either call for the demolition of capitalism and with it the nature/culture divide it created, or for the rehabilitation of the nature/culture divide that was destroyed by scientific determinism in order for a social critique of the Anthropocene to be possible at all. Though each position helps us to understand the stakes of the Anthropocene, none are able to develop a politics of nature that interprets the dissolution of the nature/culture divide in such a way as to imagine a polis shared by human and non-human actors. Instead of reducing such politics to a play of material forces or to the human management of the non-human world, such a shared polis requires a transversal ecology capable of rehabilitating solidarity and communication between human and non-human actors. The ecosophy developed by philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari will be proposed as just such a transversal solution, since it develops a mental, social and environmental ecology that is able to incorporate the perspectives of human and non-human subjects into a shared politics of nature.
