Emancipation in the Anthropocene: taking the dialectic seriously
Andrew Dobson
Abstract
This article outlines a conception of emancipation for the Anthropocene. First, the Kantian roots of emancipation understood as the capacity of rational beings to act according to self-chosen ends are explained. It is shown that this conception of emancipation sets the realm of beings capable of autonomy - humans - over the realm of heteronomous beings. Accounts of the ‘humanisation of nature’ are analysed as incomplete attempts to overcome this dualism. It is argued that the root of this incompleteness lies in the application of analytical rather than dialectical reason to the human-nature interaction. The Anthropocene is presented as the geological-historical moment when at same time as nature is being humanised, humans are being made aware of themselves as animal. This gives way to a conception of Anthropocene emancipation which will be described in a fourth section. The article concludes with reflections on Covid-19 as a ‘disease of the Anthropocene’ and as an opportunity reflexively, and at unprecedented scale, to internalise our heteronomy and to live an emancipation fit for a terraforming species.
Keywords
Emancipation, heteronomy, dialectic, Anthropocene, Covid-19
At the heart of the political ideology of ecologism (let us call it that; Dobson, 1990) lies the injunction for individuals to live sustainable lives, and this injunction potentially puts the ideology on a collision course with the idea and practice of emancipation, understood generically here as freedom from constraint or controlling influences.
This is so for two reasons, which we could call ‘practical’ and ‘ontological’. The practical reason derives from the concern that emancipation might be understood as freedom from what greens often refer to as natural constraints. The idea of constraining limits is central to green politics and, importantly, these limits are non-negotiable. On this reading, a sustainable society must live in what is sometimes called the ‘safe operating space’ defined by nine geophysical planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). Any notion of emancipation that involves overstepping these limits is called into question by ecologism.
The ontological reason is that an ecological theory of being calls into question the Kantian distinction between the human realm and the realm of nature, which underpins the notion of emancipation as autonomous action (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 19). This will be explained in greater detail in the next section; suffice to say now that green theory resists the dualism that separates the two realms in favour of a rough-and-ready monism captured by the aphorism that humans are a part of nature rather than apart from it.
The relationship between these two reasons for ecologism’s uncomfortable relationship with emancipation is also important because it underpins one approach greens have taken to political change. This approach involves cementing the ontological shift so firmly in people’s minds that it moves their behaviour in the direction of living within natural limits. The recognition that we are a part of nature is supposed to rein in any Promethean intent we might have to slip the bonds of our condition as beings embedded in a web of natural, non-negotiable constraints. This discussion of emancipation is thus closely linked to the broader issue of social, political and economic change.
On the face of it, this approach to transformation has failed. With climate change and bio-extinction accelerating and inequality deepening, we are as far away as ever – perhaps further – from a just sustainability. Indeed even the most Panglossian among us will surely note how, as far as environmental issues are concerned, we seem to be stuck on ‘repeat’. Chosen almost at random, here is an extract from an August 2018 letter in one of the UK’s national newspapers:
We … call on our government to play its part, alongside other countries that are experiencing the early stages of climate change. We want action now to halt climate change; not in five, 10 or 20 years’ time but today. We must reduce CO2 emissions before it is too late (if it isn’t already) and address immediately the industrial and agricultural pollution of our environment. If we don’t, we should be ashamed of ourselves. (Hoare and Hoare, 2018)
Making allowances for the environmental problem in question (in the past it might have been acid rain, the ozone hole or oil spills) this letter could have been written in August 2008, 1998, 1988, 1978 or 1968. Even the air of resigned hopelessness – ‘If we don’t, we should be ashamed of ourselves’ – is relentlessly familiar.
Of course not all the blame for the failure to bring about change can, or should, be laid at the door of the ontological approach to transformation or its critique of emancipation as freedom from the constraints of ecological embeddedness. A whole host of methods have been enlisted to try to bring about a just sustainability. At local, regional, national and international levels, green movements, civil society organisations, direct action groups and political parties have taken to the streets and online, and worked the corridors of power in an attempt to shift society in a more just and sustainable direction. Dead ends, all-too partial victories and outright failures can be found in each and every one of these sectors – but this is not the place to carry out a full analysis of the failure of the green movement to bring about significant change. It will be argued here that the green practical and ontological critiques of emancipation are in any case largely convincing, and that if the theory of transformation derived from them has its shortcomings this is less to do with the theory itself and more with the historical and material circumstances in which it has been deployed.
This will be explained as follows. First, the Kantian roots of emancipation understood as the capacity of rational beings to act according to self-chosen ends will be explained. It will be shown that this conception of emancipation drives a wedge between the realm of humans and the realm of nature at the very outset, and sets the former realm over the latter. As Gerard Delanty and Aurea Mota point out, ‘Modernity gave rise to the notion of the autonomy of the human being and heralded a view of history as the emancipation of humanity from nature, a condition that was equated with domination’ (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 18). Second, accounts of the ‘humanisation of nature’ will be examined, and analysed as incomplete attempts to overcome the dualism of the human/nature split. It will be shown that the root of this incompleteness lies in the application of analytical rather than dialectical reason to the human-nature interaction.
Third, the Anthropocene will be presented as the geological-historical moment at which it becomes clear, through the operation of the dialectic, that at the same time as nature is being humanised (a common trope in political-ecological thought), humans are being naturalised, or being made aware of themselves as animal. At this point, the autonomous being that lies at the heart of Kant-based notions of emancipation cedes ground to the heteronomous being of the Anthropocene. This gives way to a new conception of emancipation which will be described in a fourth section. The article concludes with reflections on Covid-19 as a ‘disease of the Anthropocene’ (O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antó, 2020), and, therefore, as an event in which our Anthropocene heteronomous condition is the lived experience of billions of people across the planet. Covid-19 is therefore an opportunity reflexively, and at unprecedented scale, to internalise our heteronomy and to live an emancipation fit for a terraforming species.
Kant, autonomy and emancipation
Kantian ontology lies at the heart of the idea of emancipation understood in terms of the autonomous subject (‘the normative core of modern democracy’; Blühdorn, 2020). It was Kant who most systematically made the case for a realm of autonomy and – crucially – constructed it as a realm superior to that of its inferior counterpart, the realm of heteronomy, whose denizens (including those human beings who Kant believed to be not fully capable of the use of reason) are by definition subject to external domination.
This distinction between the realm of autonomy and the realm of heteronomy lies at the basis of his theory of morality, and is both a condition for, and an objective of, emancipation. It is fundamental to Kant’s moral theory because ethical behaviour can only be demanded of autonomous beings with the capacity to choose between courses of action. So it is a condition for emancipation in that only potentially autonomous beings – those possessing the capacity for reason – can conceive of emancipation as acting according to the dictates of reason. And it is an objective of emancipation in that the more one acts according to the dictates of reason, the more one realises one’s uniquely human capacity to act autonomously.
For greens there are two problems with this. First, this conception of emancipation as acting according to self-chosen ends, an option only available to those capable of exercising reason, could legitimise attempts to free oneself from the natural constraints which greens regard as an ineluctable feature of the human condition. Second, Kant-based notions of emancipation depend on a dualistic ontology which separates rational beings from nature in a way greens regard as an obstacle to right behaviour. Much green theory has been devoted to overcoming this dualism in the belief that if rational beings come to regard themselves as a part of nature rather than apart from it, they will internalise their treatment of nature as a matter of ethical and practical consequence, rather than (to use a term from economics) as an externality.
Of course it might be objected that greens can believe in nature-based constraints on behaviour and still endorse a notion of emancipation as acting according to self-chosen ends according to the imperatives of reason. Might we not simply choose to act in accordance with those constraints, and would this not still be an emancipated act – because it is self-chosen? But this would imply that any self-chosen act would be an act of emancipation, even one which undermined political notions of what emancipation has come to mean. At this reductio ad absurdum point, the concept of emancipation might remain internally robust, but at the cost of losing all its power as a socio-political rallying cry and objective. So at what point does an act become non-emancipatory even if it is self-chosen? At the point, I suggest, at which emancipation becomes definitionally impossible – in other words, once one crosses the border that separates the autonomous realm from the realm of heteronomy. The inhabitants of this latter realm are dependent creatures, capable of neither the self-chosen act nor of emancipation. The border between these two realms is carefully patrolled by those for whom the concept and practice of emancipation rests on keeping the autonomous and heteronomous realms apart, precisely because crossing it involves embracing heteronomy and abandoning autonomy – and therefore abandoning emancipation in the senses in which it has come to drive a host of leftist, progressive movements.
Ingolfur Blühdorn is surely right to say that ‘the autonomous subject has always been a promise and ambition rather than an accomplished reality’ (Blühdorn, 2020) and it is exactly the unachieved nature of the ideal that has driven the countless movements designed to realise it – as well the countless theories trying to account for emancipatory shortfall. Some green theoretical currents are unusual in that they resist the ontological dualism that undergirds autonomy/emancipation (e.g. Naess, 1973; Sessions, 1995). One way they have done this is to point to the steady humanisation of nature as the reach and range of human activity has increased, and to this we turn now.
Humanised nature
One striking evocation of the extent of the humanisation of nature is Bill McKibben’s 1989 The End of Nature. Nature has ended, in his view, because that which defined it – its independence from human influence – has been fatally undermined by climate change. McKibben writes that:
By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial …. If you travel by plane and dog team and snowshoe to the farthest corner of the Arctic and it is a mild summer day, you will not know whether the temperature is what it is ‘supposed’ to be, or whether, thanks to the extra carbon dioxide, you are standing in the equivalent of a heated room …. [I]f in July there’s a heat wave in London, it won’t be a natural phenomenon. It will be a man-made phenomenon … A child born now will never know a natural summer, a natural autumn, winter, or spring. Summer is going extinct, replaced by something else that will be called ‘summer’. This new summer will retain some of its relative characteristics – it will be hotter than the rest of the year, for instance, and the time of the year when crops grow – but it will not be summer, just as even the best prosthesis is not a leg. (McKibben, 1989: 59)
In McKibben’s view for the first time in human history there is not one spot on earth without the mark of the human upon it. There have been huge human empires – the Roman Empire and the British Empire – but there has never, he explains, been a phenomenon like climate change, with a truly global reach and range. In a typically florid turn of phrase, McKibben suggests that climate change has brought ‘every inch and hour of the globe’ (McKibben, 1989: 46) under human jurisdiction. If we take modernity to be a project entailing increasing human influence on the non-human natural world, then we truly are – he claims – at the high point of modernity. In accounts like McKibben’s the gap between the human and natural realms has been closed as nature has been humanised.
Mainstream political theory tends to take the gap between the human and more-than-human worlds for granted, with the result that the differences between the two are exaggerated, the similarities underestimated, and the agency claims of the more-than-human mostly ignored. Critically, in the context of this article, there is little acknowledgement of the constraining and dependence-inducing embeddedness of the human being in a socio-ecological context.
There is some political theory, though, which takes seriously the closing gap between the human and natural realms. What is required, says philosopher Roy Bhaskar, for example, is an account of ‘embodied human agency’ (Bhaskar, 1991: 53) – one which challenges Kant and recognises that we have one foot in the heteronomous realm as well as one in the realm of autonomy. Indeed, one striking feature of the development of the idea of emancipation as the exercise of autonomy is the way encumbrance and embodiedness have been largely ignored as conditioning factors.
This may be harder to do from now on. Writing in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, never have so many of us been more aware of our encumbrance and embodiedness than now. Nor more aware of our fragility: the species that moves mountains is discovering that it can be brought to its knees by a particle a millionth of an inch long whose defences are destroyed by washing our hands in soap and water for 20 seconds.
Alasdair MacIntyre sums up these themes of ecological, social and cultural embeddedness with the expressive title of his book: Dependent Rational Animals (MacIntyre, 1999). His starting point is that humans are animals and that they are dependent – a very different beginning to that offered by Kant, and which has constituted the dominant way we think of ourselves (autonomous and ‘un-animal’), in the minority world in particular. This shift of starting point is important because, ‘In philosophy where one begins generally makes a difference to the outcome of one’s enquiries’ (MacIntyre, 1999: 4).
Near the beginning of Dependent Rational Animals, and with reference to his earlier work, MacIntyre writes, ‘I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible’ (MacIntyre, 1999: 9). The principal reason for this judgement is his conviction that an ethic that pays no mind to the circumstances of its possibility is an inadequate ethic. More particularly, any reasonable account of an ethics must take into consideration our condition as biological beings because ‘no account of the goods, rules and virtues that are definitive of our moral life can be adequate that does not explain … how that form of life is possible for beings who are biologically constituted as we are’ (MacIntyre, 1999: 10; see also Pellizzoni in this Special Issue). It is, he says, a mistake to be ‘forgetful of our bodies’, and important to take our ‘human animality more seriously’ (MacIntyre, 1999: 5; emphasis added). This is clearly significant in the context of our discussion of the green critique of emancipation as freedom from natural constraint, because MacIntyre is offering an account of human being in which our ‘biology’ is constitutively constraining if not determining.
This is important because the modern ‘forgetting’ of ourselves as animals has had a significant effect on a range of our habits and practices, a number of which are relevant to the human condition in an era of humanised nature. As Bhaskar puts it:
To fail to see … that there are physical (natural) constraints on human social life … is a charter for ecological disaster, if not indeed (species) suicide … there may be some absolutes (universals, constants) of significance for human beings – which they just have to accept or ‘recognize’. For example, fundamental laws of nature, the scarcity of some natural resources, upper limits to ecologically sustainable economic growth, aspects of human nature, the fact of the finitude (if not the precise duration) of human existence. (Bhaskar, 1991: 73)
Bhaskar’s remarks amount to a critique of emancipation as freedom from natural constraint. They could also stand for much of the environmental movement’s warnings regarding the dangers of human hubris. To the extent that the movement has a theory of economic, social and political change, it is in part based on spreading this message – closely linked to its critique of emancipation understood as freedom from constraint – as widely as possible and trusting that individuals, groups and societies will come to their senses and alter their practices to bring them into line with the logic of limits.
Clearly this hasn’t worked. This is because the green movement has underestimated the importance of material conditions for recalibrating emancipation and prompting change. ‘Men make their own history,’ Marx reminds us, ‘but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1852). In general, green thinking has been too voluntarist, as if a just sustainability can simply be acted into existence irrespective of the prevailing material and cultural conditions. Calls for more ‘humility, respect and restraint’ (Fremaux and Barry, 2019: 2), ‘more modesty’ and a ‘re-embedding in nature’ (Fremaux and Barry, 2019: 4) are unobjectionable in themselves, but repetition alone will not bring them into being. The injunction must have a basis in material circumstances such that it resonates with a felt material need. As Marx points out, the ‘existing circumstances’ have to contain the possibility of change and this has not been the case – until now.
The next section introduces just such a change in existing circumstances, a literally epochal shift in the materiality of human life entailing, a) a superseding (aufheben) of the human-nature dualism, which b) understood dialectically leads to c) a conception of the human agent as constitutively heteronomous as well as autonomous, and hence d) to a reconfigured understanding of emancipation beyond Kantian dualism.
From Holocene to Anthropocene
The shift in question is the one taking us from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch. At the heart of this transition is a changed relationship between human beings and nature which has implications for political theory and practice, and for the terms that structure political debate and action – particularly, here, the idea of emancipation. This changed relationship has nothing to do with re-enchantment, or re-embedding, or any of the other stewardship tropes that have monopolised green political theory for too long (for example Berman, 1981 and Berry, 2006).
Green politics has been dominated by the question of what ‘we’ are doing to nature. Along the way we have completely forgotten to ask what our acting-on-the-world is doing to us. The theory of dialectics tells us that in an interacting relationship between two entities, neither entity remains the same as it was before the encounter (Hegel, 2010). The dialectical relationship between humanity and nature has now got to the historical point (the Anthropocene) at which both ‘actants’ – to borrow from Bruno Latour (Latour, 2004) – are irrevocably different to what they were before that moment. We are used to that thought in connection with nature (usually expressed in terms such as ‘humanised nature’, as we saw), but what of humanity? What is happening to us – that is a historically materialist, species-level, ‘us’ – at the dawn of the Anthropocene? In brief, my argument here is that the Holocene produced a progressive politics dominated by the regulative ideal of independent, reasoning, disembodied minds. As I shall show, the Anthropocene makes us (better: we make ourselves) dependent, choice-making, embodied animals – with all that this entails for emancipation and for our propositions, projects and programmes.
The origins of the Anthropocene as a subject of geological significance are usually traced back to a short article published by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme’s (IGBP) Global Change Newsletter in May 2000. There they write that, due to ‘major and still-growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing the term “anthropocene” for the current geological epoch’ (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000: 17).
Rapidly the Anthropocene moved from the back pages of the IGBP’s newsletter to a mainstream concept. For example, the first thing that delegates to the Rio+20 Summit saw when they sat down to the opening Plenary in 2012 was a slick 5-minute video outlining the origins, effects, and possible futures of the Anthropocene (UN Web TV, 2012). It was taken for granted by these policy makers that we have indeed passed into a new epoch which changes the terms of reference of the struggle for justice and sustainability, and in 2016 the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy voted in favour of the formalisation of the Anthropocene at the level of epoch (Bostock and Lowe, 2018). Subject to ratification from several other organisations, the Holocene Epoch is to be terminated ‘at some point in next year or two’ (Lowe, 2018).
As far as the human sciences are concerned, the significance of the Anthropocene has generally been taken to mean that that it heralds the moment in the history of homo sapiens at which the species has become a geological agent in its own right. The implications of this entirely new scale of agency (humans move more material than any other geomorphic agent, including rivers and glaciers) are the subject of intense debate (Luke, 2017) and in this article I offer an analysis which suggests that the Anthropocene prompts a reassessment of emancipation and social agency as far-reaching as its geological counterpart.
In brief, we are the generation that is living through the kind of change that last took place 11,700 years ago (the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene). It would be strange indeed if a transformation of this magnitude were not accompanied by a shift in the nature of the human condition. This is the shift being analysed here, and it can only be properly understood by using dialectical rather than analytical reason. Once dialectical reason is deployed, the way in which the human species, as well as nature, is being transformed in the Anthropocene becomes clear. The terms of reference with which we in the minority world have become so familiar in the Holocene that they appear immutable, turn out to be historical; that is to say, the product of particular historical circumstances. The apparently settled ontological understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature that gave rise to Kant-based theories of autonomy and emancipation is being unravelled by the Anthropocene.
Analysed appropriately – i.e. dialectically – it becomes clear how the Anthropocene is converting Bhaskar’s speculative remarks regarding ‘physical (natural) constraints on human social life’ into lived experience – le vécu – for increasing numbers of people, especially in ‘developed’ countries. Up to now (August 2020), climate change has been the best example of the socio-demographic spread of the unintended consequences of the Anthropocene takeover of the planet, beginning to affect even hitherto relatively protected populations, as in the devastating wildfires in California (BBC, 2020) and south east Australia (Center for Disaster Philanthropy, 2019).
But this is as nothing compared to Covid-19, with over half the world’s population in lockdown and experiencing the effects of a badly handled ‘prophylactic’ transition (Dobson, 2021) from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. This is crucial, because as we observed earlier the likelihood of change is in part a function of a felt material need. The wider and broader this experience is, the more convincing arguments addressing that felt need will be. Outside of world wars, Covid-19 is the most widely shared experience for over a century and, moreover, it has its origins in the very human-nature nexus with which this article is dealing, at the dawn of the Anthropocene.
For Covid-19 is an Anthropocene event. Research suggests that the Anthropocene takeover of the planet is at the heart of zoonotic (species-jumping) diseases and their spread (Vidal, 2020). Logging, mining, population growth, deforestation, forest road-building and population increase are taking us into ever more remote parts of the planet and drawing ever more ‘exotic species’ into the web of human contact and commerce. According to Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, there is an ‘amplification effect’ in degraded environments where ecosystem disruption produces the conditions in which the barriers between a pathogen’s natural host and human beings are broken down (in Vidal, 2020). The focal point of this process is the ‘wet market’ like the one in Wuhan where fresh wild animals such as live wild pups, salamanders, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, squirrels, foxes, civets and turtles are traded. These markets are ‘assemblages’ in the Latourian sense, unruly comings-together of species in unnatural spaces. The Wuhan market truly is an Anthropo-scene, and Covid-19 is what the Anthropocene as a historical process can do – in practical material fact – to the human being.
As we have seen, a dominant green trope of the Anthropocene is as an epoch in which the whole of nature has the mark of the human on it, a moment at which ‘nature’ has become ‘humanised’. This is as far as analytical reason can take us. The crucial insight from dialectical reason is that humans are not left unchanged by this encounter. Rather, we are always already enacting a dialectical exchange in which as nature is humanised, humans are simultaneously naturalized. This is Jean-Paul Sartre’s point when he writes in his monumental enquiry into the nature and effects of dialectical reason that, ‘Human history … is in fact also defined in the present by the fact that something is happening to men’ (Sartre, 1976: 122; emphasis in the original). This is the process underlying Delanty and Mota’s perceptive and, in the literature, all too infrequent, comment that, ‘In acting upon nature as a biomorphic force and later as a geophysical force, humans are also transforming themselves’ (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 19; emphasis added), and ‘human beings are themselves transformed as a result of their very agency’(Delanty and Mota, 2017: 22).
Sartre himself offers an example of this process at work: deforestation in China in the 1950s. Here, the humanising of nature (clearing trees to free land for cultivation) creates a sphere of humanised nature (Sartre calls this the ‘practico-inert’) which returns to act on humans (now naturalised in the sense of ‘at the mercy of humanized nature’) in the form of floods:
… deforestation as the elimination of obstacles becomes negatively a lack of protection: since the loess [wind-blown silt] of the mountains and peneplains [low- relief plains formed by protracted erosion] is no longer retained by trees, it congests the rivers, raising them higher than the plains and bottling them up in their lower reaches, and forcing them to overflow their banks. Thus the whole history of the terrible Chinese floods appears as an intentionally constructed mechanism … the positive system of agriculture was transformed into an infernal machine. (Sartre, 1976: 162; emphasis added)
This example, from someone much better known for his existentialism than his environmentalism, is of striking contemporary relevance because it shows that it is humanised nature to which we are in thrall, not nature. This is nature transformed by our work on it, the sedimented result of our action in and on the world, Sartre’s ‘practico-inert’. This is no less true of Covid-19. As we have seen, the disease most likely originated with the trafficking of wild animals in a market in Wuhan, China. This is a human practice, so in this sense Covid-19 is as anthropogenic as climate change or bio-extinction.
As far as the focus of this Special Issue is concerned, there have been two contesting views of the dialectic of emancipation, one in which the dialectic results in the progressive overcoming of domination, and one in which emancipation exists in a dialectical relation with domination. In this latter case, the process of emancipation always already generates the conditions for its undermining, resulting in new instances and incarnations of domination. This is the nature of the dialectic being discussed here – the dialectic that has ‘produced’ the Anthropocene. ‘The positive system of agriculture was transformed into an infernal machine’, writes Sartre – and if he were writing today he might use exactly the same terms to describe the way the Industrial Revolution gave rise to climate change, or how the buying and selling of live wild animals produced Covid-19.
Analytical reason suggests that it makes no sense to say that as we exert increasing influence over the natural world we simultaneously and progressively come under its sway. It has no resources to explain how a series of emancipatory praxes – emancipatory when taken in analytical isolation, that is – can produce the conditions under which new forms of domination may emerge. Dialectical reason, in contrast, shows how the new emancipatory praxis works back on the emancipated subject in such a way that the praxis is experienced by the subject as domination. This is the Covid-19 experience: a series of emancipatory practices (for some, at least) involving an accelerating casting-off of constraint in respect of mobility and consumption have led to the creation of a disease vector – the jet aircraft – which has ‘enabled’ a worldwide pandemic.
In the Anthropocene ever greater numbers of people are experiencing that what pre-moderns experienced: heteronomy and dependence – with the difference that it is now not nature that appears as the untranscendable horizon, but humanised nature. We are, to this degree, complicit in the production of our new dependency – and therefore in the possibility of understanding it and its ramifications. For as Marx wrote in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ‘mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation’ (Marx, 1904: 12–13).
The relevant ‘material conditions’ here are those that have produced the Anthropocene – conditions which can be read as the opportunity reflexively (Wissenburg, 2018; see also Arías Maldonado in this Special Issue) to understand ourselves as dependent, choice-making animals with all that entails for living the good life. This is one way of reading the Covid-19 crisis: like never before the virus offers us a Faustian opportunity to understand ourselves as a planetary force and to think through the implications of this for our politics, economics and society. This is the new background against which debates about emancipation, equality and inequality, markets and state, must be framed.
It needs to be pointed out that the effects of the Anthropocene are experienced unevenly. The Covid-19 example makes it quite clear that socio-economic factors are key to understanding the incidence of the disease (Blundell et al., 2020), and it is likely that the pandemic will exacerbate already-existing inequalities (Stiglitz, 2020). Given this disaggregated experience, can we legitimately talk of the Anthropocene as a species-level event, or is this article’s analysis fatally undermined by the multiple subjectivities that constitute affected populations?
Those who adopt a universalist use of the term Anthropocene have been charged with naivety. As Matthew Lepori writes:
The power of the Anthropocene lies precisely within the name itself and in the universalist discourse it engenders. It is an accusation, a responsibilization, and a call to action levied upon humankind. And here, in the assimilation of all social difference, in the elimination of differential political-economic histories and the power relations therein, and in the obscuring of the particular institutions that govern our (side of the) relationship with nature, begin the politics of the Anthropocene. (Lepori, 2015: 104)
The point that Lepori and many others (e.g. Malm, 2015) make is that the very word ‘Anthropocene’ serves to obscure the source of responsibility for environmental and associated degradation – not just now, but from the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. In the dominant account of the Anthropocene the ‘battle’ between humans and nature – the Anthropos and nature – takes precedence over the social struggles within the Anthropos. The concept of the Anthropocene thus plays an ideological role by obscuring the relative roles of rich and poor in bringing about environmental and social problems.
This is a powerful analysis of the causes of the Anthropocene, and Lepori and others are right that a failure to take account of the differentiated contributions to the processes that have led to the Anthropocene could absolve the rich and powerful from their overwhelming historical responsibility for the unsustainability and injustice we are examining . And as far as the current situation is concerned, as we observed above, it is true that the effects of the Anthropocene are also experienced unevenly and it is likely that this will lead to differentiated responses to its consequences.
At the same time, though, the example of Covid-19 suggests that one characteristic, epidemiologically-speaking, is its indiscriminate nature. While the powerful and wealthy (and those with gardens) are of course better placed to weather the Covid storm than others, everyone can in principle contract the disease. In this regard Covid-19 is a species experience as well as a socially differentiated one: ‘the notion of a single human species is a powerful normative regulative idea that has particular relevance to the challenges of the Anthropocene’ (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 26). So to the extent that Covid-19 is an Anthropocene event, as argued above, it seems legitimate to speak of the Anthropocene in universalist terms as well as in terms of differentiation (see also Arías Maldonado in this Special Issue).
Emancipation in the Anthropocene
We are now in a position to sketch the contours of Anthropocene emancipation. It has been argued that the regulative ideal of autonomous, reasoning, disembodied minds that underpinned late-Holocene notions of emancipation cannot survive the transition to the Anthropocene. This is because in humanising nature we have ‘naturalised’ ourselves, and if we are to talk of emancipation at all it must be in the context of the beings we have made ourselves, in the Anthropocene, through working on the world: that is to say, dependent, choice-making, embodied animals.
Put differently, the Kantian regulative ideal of a realm of autonomy inhabited by self-directed beings seems less and less plausible when measured against this new reality of the Anthropocene. Of course, the relationship between reality and a regulative ideal is tendentious. By definition, there will always be a quite proper sense in which the ideal does not correspond to reality: if the ideal mapped exactly on to the reality it would no longer be an ideal (just as Jorge Luis Borges’ map that coincides point to point with the region it maps is no longer a map; Borges, 1999). For an ideal to have any political or ethical purchase it must depart from the reality which it critiques. But if the ideal being proposed is based on a category mistake (if it is clearly a map of Aeolis Palus on Mars when what I wanted was to find my way to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna) then perhaps we would be best advised to rethink the ideal. In this case, if the regulative ideal (autonomy) conflicts with the facts on the ground (the steady, historical and practical ‘heteronomising’ of the being previously regarded as constitutively autonomous), then the ideal needs to be recast since it assumes a property – autonomy – to which the (Anthropocene) human can no longer uncomplicatedly lay claim.
Given our Anthropocene embodied animality and the dependency it seems to suggest (Macintyre, 1999), it is tempting to follow Engels down the road signposted by his aphorism ‘freedom is the recognition of necessity’ (i.e. recognition of the necessity imposed on us by our embodied animality). This is the definition of freedom for which Engels is perhaps best known, but in fact in his Anti-Dühring Engels offers two definitions of freedom. The first involves freedom as a function of the possession of knowledge: ‘Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject’ (Engels, 1966: 130). The second involves freedom as control: ‘Freedom… consists in … control over ourselves and over external nature’ (Engels, 1966: 131).
The connection between the two for Engels is that knowledge increases in relation to, and enables more, control over nature. This is the dialectic that so troubled the Frankfurt School who argued that the emancipation secured by control over external nature always already results in new forms of domination (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002). Given this, one way of reading the transition to the Anthropocene is as the moment when the Holocene process of controlling external nature reunited the human species with external nature via the nature-humanised/humans-naturalised dialectic that was explained earlier.
But of course there is one major difference compared to Engels’ analysis, or indeed that of the Frankfurt School: in the Anthropocene there is no longer an external nature with which to be reconciled, there is only Sartre’s practico-inert. Thus Engels’ second understanding of freedom – control over external nature – makes no ontological sense because there is no longer an external nature over which to exert control. Engels could of course hardly have been expected to anticipate this turn of events. Indeed, ‘how young the whole of human history still is,’ he himself wrote (Engels, 1966: 131), ‘and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views’.
Engels could not know that human praxis in the world, beginning with ‘the generation of fire by friction [which] gave man for the first time control over one of the forces of nature, and thereby separated him for ever from the animal kingdom’ (Engels, 1966: 131) would eventually reunite the species with what he calls the animal kingdom through the experience of Sartre’s ‘infernal machine’ and its associated contingency and dependence. Indeed it is clear that for Engels, freedom as both knowledge and control is measured by the distance humans achieve from their animal condition. (This should remind us of Kant and his separation of the human realm and the realm of nature. Kant and Engels are so distant in so many ways, yet looked at from an epochal perspective they share key traits of late-Holocene dominant thought – chief among them the idea that freedom should be understood as distancing the human from the non-human as far as possible).
As Engels writes, ‘The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom’ (Engels, 1966: 131). This might have made sense in the late-nineteenth century, but it now seems clear that each step forward was a step taking the human species from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, with each one spiralling the species towards heteronomy.
This takes us back to Engels’ first notion of freedom, involving knowledge. As he writes, ‘Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends’ (Engels, 1966: 130). Stripped of late-Holocene instrumentality in regard to the function and purpose of knowledge, this is an approximation for the foundations of Anthropocene emancipation. Updated, we might say that the lived experience of heteronomy can lead to reflection on the constrained circumstances that mark the human experience in the Anthropocene, and to plans and programmes that are consonant with our condition as – now, at this historical Covid-19 suffused juncture – choice-making heteronomous beings. This, then, is Anthropocene emancipation.
This returns us to the beginning of the article where it was suggested that the environmental injunction to ‘live sustainable lives … potentially puts the ideology on a collision course with the idea and practice of emancipation, understood generically here as freedom from constraint or controlling influences’. Ingolfur Blühdorn has written that ‘emancipatory social movements and critical sociologists have never managed to supplement their logic of liberation with an equally powerful logic of limitation and restraint’ (in this Special Issue). It has been argued here that Anthropocene emancipation involves, precisely, the recognition of dependence and constraint, and that this recognition is made both more urgent and more possible by the dialectical ‘naturalising of the human’ process described earlier. Cashing out what this might mean in practical terms would take us beyond this article’s remit, but it would almost certainly involve application of the ‘precautionary principle’ to decision-making (Hanson, 2003). It is widely recognised that this principle recognises the uncertainty of knowledge and the unpredictability of the effects of interventions in the socio-ecological sphere. Now we can add that it also represents, in the sphere of policy-making principle, heteronomous choice-making and the recognition of dependency – precisely two of the features of Anthropocene emancipation described above.
It should be clear now that this article’s contribution to Anthropocene social theory is absolutely not an endorsement of the technocentric, managerialist, earth-system approach described by, for example, Mark Lynas (2011). For some critics of the Lynas perspective (e.g. Luke, 2017), the Anthropocene trope of the ‘end of nature’ automatically entails an endorsement of turbo-charged geo-engineering and a rejection of environmentalism understood as conservation and protection of the non-human natural world, because there is no nature left to protect (Luke, 2017: 90).
This is a false choice. The suggestion here is that a dialectical analysis of the human-nature nexus in the Anthropocene makes clear a) the hitherto utopian (in the Marxist sense) nature of conservation and nature protection, and, simultaneously, b) the increased likelihood of their being realised precisely because the Anthropocene is creating the conditions for their realisation, at the same time as ecologism’s objectives are being reformulated by the dialectical rearrangement of both ‘nature’ and ‘humanity’. Rather than rejecting the Anthropocene as a socio-ecological framing because of its apparently ineluctable connection with Promethean managerialism, then, critics of the framing would do well to mine it for its progressive promise as a moment with the potential for a ‘new kind of historical self-understanding’ (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 9).
Conclusion
Our generation is living through an epochal change taking us from the Holocene into the Anthropocene. For the first time in the history of the planet one species has become a geological force in its own right. Most of our social, economic and political thinking to date – including about emancipation – has been based on a set of assumptions which no longer hold, regarding the kind of being we are.
As we enter the Anthropocene we see that the regulative ideal of the independent rational mind has contributed to the creation an ‘infernal machine’ in whose thrall we increasingly find ourselves, and of which Covid-19 is a dramatic example. Theorists such as Bruno Latour (2004) and Jane Bennett (2010) speak of an ontology of ‘assemblages’ and human and non-human ‘actants’ co-producing their lives and the circumstances in which they live them. This is a move away from the ‘hierarchy of being’ that has dominated Western thought for over 2000 years, the modern version of which has ‘man’ at the top and other species arrayed beneath, mutely waiting for us to act on them. Non-human beings have their own form of agency, acting on human beings in ways we can neither predict nor control. In this new configuration, in which human beings increasingly experience the world as heteronomous animals, emancipation as the exercise of autonomy makes little sense.
Non-human agency is not purposive in the sense of conforming to a plan conceived by a rational mind and put into action, but it is hard to avoid anthropomorphising Covid-19 in an attempt to make sense of its effects. So while the virus is not ‘teaching us a lesson’ nor ‘giving us a wake-up call’ in the sense of having decided to do so, the pandemic is certainly an invitation to reflect on its origins so as to avoid more outbreaks in the future – or manage them – and, by extension, the Anthropocene – better.
This is likely to get more important as the Anthropocene annexation of the planet gathers pace and we blunder deeper into its assemblages. Ebola, bird ‘flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Rift Valley fever, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus and Zika virus all cross from animals to humans – and they are all recent diseases. The disease gives us the opportunity to ask the central question of our times: how to live as a member of the assemblage. Unfortunately, in the midst of the understandable scramble to save Covid lives, this opportunity has been largely spurned (but see Delanty, 2020 and Dobson, 2021).
The Anthropocene has succeeded the Holocene because we are geological agents of deep time, capable of bringing about the profoundest of changes in the lifeworld in the geological blink of an eye. We snap our fingers and the climate changes, species go extinct, and viruses shut down the global economy. This is not how dependent, choice-making, embodied animals who have become a geological force should behave. The Anthropocene notion of emancipation outlined above, rooted in a conception of human beings as choice-making heteronomous beings, suggests we should act slowly, with consideration and precaution.
Covid-19 reminds us that we are not in control. Will we react to this experience by trying to re-exert Enlightenment emancipatory control in an ever-lengthening spiral of human and planetary lockdown? Or will we learn to live with the human and non-human assemblages that are ineluctably part of the Anthropocene condition? This is the crucial ‘crossroads’ question, the answer to which underpins other more quotidian ones. Covid-19 helps us to see that while we can put our mark on every single inch of the globe we cannot control the effects of that exercise in planetary enclosure.
This contradictory moment contains the seeds for a new understanding of ourselves as dependent, choice-making animals. And this new understanding opens up the possibility of a profound practical and conceptual realignment – one in which the Holocene’s Prometheus gives way to the Anthropocene’s King Canute who, despite the protestations of his courtiers, knew that he could not hold back the rising tide and would have to live with it.
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Andrew Dobson
Abstract
This article outlines a conception of emancipation for the Anthropocene. First, the Kantian roots of emancipation understood as the capacity of rational beings to act according to self-chosen ends are explained. It is shown that this conception of emancipation sets the realm of beings capable of autonomy - humans - over the realm of heteronomous beings. Accounts of the ‘humanisation of nature’ are analysed as incomplete attempts to overcome this dualism. It is argued that the root of this incompleteness lies in the application of analytical rather than dialectical reason to the human-nature interaction. The Anthropocene is presented as the geological-historical moment when at same time as nature is being humanised, humans are being made aware of themselves as animal. This gives way to a conception of Anthropocene emancipation which will be described in a fourth section. The article concludes with reflections on Covid-19 as a ‘disease of the Anthropocene’ and as an opportunity reflexively, and at unprecedented scale, to internalise our heteronomy and to live an emancipation fit for a terraforming species.
Keywords
Emancipation, heteronomy, dialectic, Anthropocene, Covid-19
At the heart of the political ideology of ecologism (let us call it that; Dobson, 1990) lies the injunction for individuals to live sustainable lives, and this injunction potentially puts the ideology on a collision course with the idea and practice of emancipation, understood generically here as freedom from constraint or controlling influences.
This is so for two reasons, which we could call ‘practical’ and ‘ontological’. The practical reason derives from the concern that emancipation might be understood as freedom from what greens often refer to as natural constraints. The idea of constraining limits is central to green politics and, importantly, these limits are non-negotiable. On this reading, a sustainable society must live in what is sometimes called the ‘safe operating space’ defined by nine geophysical planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). Any notion of emancipation that involves overstepping these limits is called into question by ecologism.
The ontological reason is that an ecological theory of being calls into question the Kantian distinction between the human realm and the realm of nature, which underpins the notion of emancipation as autonomous action (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 19). This will be explained in greater detail in the next section; suffice to say now that green theory resists the dualism that separates the two realms in favour of a rough-and-ready monism captured by the aphorism that humans are a part of nature rather than apart from it.
The relationship between these two reasons for ecologism’s uncomfortable relationship with emancipation is also important because it underpins one approach greens have taken to political change. This approach involves cementing the ontological shift so firmly in people’s minds that it moves their behaviour in the direction of living within natural limits. The recognition that we are a part of nature is supposed to rein in any Promethean intent we might have to slip the bonds of our condition as beings embedded in a web of natural, non-negotiable constraints. This discussion of emancipation is thus closely linked to the broader issue of social, political and economic change.
On the face of it, this approach to transformation has failed. With climate change and bio-extinction accelerating and inequality deepening, we are as far away as ever – perhaps further – from a just sustainability. Indeed even the most Panglossian among us will surely note how, as far as environmental issues are concerned, we seem to be stuck on ‘repeat’. Chosen almost at random, here is an extract from an August 2018 letter in one of the UK’s national newspapers:
We … call on our government to play its part, alongside other countries that are experiencing the early stages of climate change. We want action now to halt climate change; not in five, 10 or 20 years’ time but today. We must reduce CO2 emissions before it is too late (if it isn’t already) and address immediately the industrial and agricultural pollution of our environment. If we don’t, we should be ashamed of ourselves. (Hoare and Hoare, 2018)
Making allowances for the environmental problem in question (in the past it might have been acid rain, the ozone hole or oil spills) this letter could have been written in August 2008, 1998, 1988, 1978 or 1968. Even the air of resigned hopelessness – ‘If we don’t, we should be ashamed of ourselves’ – is relentlessly familiar.
Of course not all the blame for the failure to bring about change can, or should, be laid at the door of the ontological approach to transformation or its critique of emancipation as freedom from the constraints of ecological embeddedness. A whole host of methods have been enlisted to try to bring about a just sustainability. At local, regional, national and international levels, green movements, civil society organisations, direct action groups and political parties have taken to the streets and online, and worked the corridors of power in an attempt to shift society in a more just and sustainable direction. Dead ends, all-too partial victories and outright failures can be found in each and every one of these sectors – but this is not the place to carry out a full analysis of the failure of the green movement to bring about significant change. It will be argued here that the green practical and ontological critiques of emancipation are in any case largely convincing, and that if the theory of transformation derived from them has its shortcomings this is less to do with the theory itself and more with the historical and material circumstances in which it has been deployed.
This will be explained as follows. First, the Kantian roots of emancipation understood as the capacity of rational beings to act according to self-chosen ends will be explained. It will be shown that this conception of emancipation drives a wedge between the realm of humans and the realm of nature at the very outset, and sets the former realm over the latter. As Gerard Delanty and Aurea Mota point out, ‘Modernity gave rise to the notion of the autonomy of the human being and heralded a view of history as the emancipation of humanity from nature, a condition that was equated with domination’ (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 18). Second, accounts of the ‘humanisation of nature’ will be examined, and analysed as incomplete attempts to overcome the dualism of the human/nature split. It will be shown that the root of this incompleteness lies in the application of analytical rather than dialectical reason to the human-nature interaction.
Third, the Anthropocene will be presented as the geological-historical moment at which it becomes clear, through the operation of the dialectic, that at the same time as nature is being humanised (a common trope in political-ecological thought), humans are being naturalised, or being made aware of themselves as animal. At this point, the autonomous being that lies at the heart of Kant-based notions of emancipation cedes ground to the heteronomous being of the Anthropocene. This gives way to a new conception of emancipation which will be described in a fourth section. The article concludes with reflections on Covid-19 as a ‘disease of the Anthropocene’ (O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antó, 2020), and, therefore, as an event in which our Anthropocene heteronomous condition is the lived experience of billions of people across the planet. Covid-19 is therefore an opportunity reflexively, and at unprecedented scale, to internalise our heteronomy and to live an emancipation fit for a terraforming species.
Kant, autonomy and emancipation
Kantian ontology lies at the heart of the idea of emancipation understood in terms of the autonomous subject (‘the normative core of modern democracy’; Blühdorn, 2020). It was Kant who most systematically made the case for a realm of autonomy and – crucially – constructed it as a realm superior to that of its inferior counterpart, the realm of heteronomy, whose denizens (including those human beings who Kant believed to be not fully capable of the use of reason) are by definition subject to external domination.
This distinction between the realm of autonomy and the realm of heteronomy lies at the basis of his theory of morality, and is both a condition for, and an objective of, emancipation. It is fundamental to Kant’s moral theory because ethical behaviour can only be demanded of autonomous beings with the capacity to choose between courses of action. So it is a condition for emancipation in that only potentially autonomous beings – those possessing the capacity for reason – can conceive of emancipation as acting according to the dictates of reason. And it is an objective of emancipation in that the more one acts according to the dictates of reason, the more one realises one’s uniquely human capacity to act autonomously.
For greens there are two problems with this. First, this conception of emancipation as acting according to self-chosen ends, an option only available to those capable of exercising reason, could legitimise attempts to free oneself from the natural constraints which greens regard as an ineluctable feature of the human condition. Second, Kant-based notions of emancipation depend on a dualistic ontology which separates rational beings from nature in a way greens regard as an obstacle to right behaviour. Much green theory has been devoted to overcoming this dualism in the belief that if rational beings come to regard themselves as a part of nature rather than apart from it, they will internalise their treatment of nature as a matter of ethical and practical consequence, rather than (to use a term from economics) as an externality.
Of course it might be objected that greens can believe in nature-based constraints on behaviour and still endorse a notion of emancipation as acting according to self-chosen ends according to the imperatives of reason. Might we not simply choose to act in accordance with those constraints, and would this not still be an emancipated act – because it is self-chosen? But this would imply that any self-chosen act would be an act of emancipation, even one which undermined political notions of what emancipation has come to mean. At this reductio ad absurdum point, the concept of emancipation might remain internally robust, but at the cost of losing all its power as a socio-political rallying cry and objective. So at what point does an act become non-emancipatory even if it is self-chosen? At the point, I suggest, at which emancipation becomes definitionally impossible – in other words, once one crosses the border that separates the autonomous realm from the realm of heteronomy. The inhabitants of this latter realm are dependent creatures, capable of neither the self-chosen act nor of emancipation. The border between these two realms is carefully patrolled by those for whom the concept and practice of emancipation rests on keeping the autonomous and heteronomous realms apart, precisely because crossing it involves embracing heteronomy and abandoning autonomy – and therefore abandoning emancipation in the senses in which it has come to drive a host of leftist, progressive movements.
Ingolfur Blühdorn is surely right to say that ‘the autonomous subject has always been a promise and ambition rather than an accomplished reality’ (Blühdorn, 2020) and it is exactly the unachieved nature of the ideal that has driven the countless movements designed to realise it – as well the countless theories trying to account for emancipatory shortfall. Some green theoretical currents are unusual in that they resist the ontological dualism that undergirds autonomy/emancipation (e.g. Naess, 1973; Sessions, 1995). One way they have done this is to point to the steady humanisation of nature as the reach and range of human activity has increased, and to this we turn now.
Humanised nature
One striking evocation of the extent of the humanisation of nature is Bill McKibben’s 1989 The End of Nature. Nature has ended, in his view, because that which defined it – its independence from human influence – has been fatally undermined by climate change. McKibben writes that:
By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial …. If you travel by plane and dog team and snowshoe to the farthest corner of the Arctic and it is a mild summer day, you will not know whether the temperature is what it is ‘supposed’ to be, or whether, thanks to the extra carbon dioxide, you are standing in the equivalent of a heated room …. [I]f in July there’s a heat wave in London, it won’t be a natural phenomenon. It will be a man-made phenomenon … A child born now will never know a natural summer, a natural autumn, winter, or spring. Summer is going extinct, replaced by something else that will be called ‘summer’. This new summer will retain some of its relative characteristics – it will be hotter than the rest of the year, for instance, and the time of the year when crops grow – but it will not be summer, just as even the best prosthesis is not a leg. (McKibben, 1989: 59)
In McKibben’s view for the first time in human history there is not one spot on earth without the mark of the human upon it. There have been huge human empires – the Roman Empire and the British Empire – but there has never, he explains, been a phenomenon like climate change, with a truly global reach and range. In a typically florid turn of phrase, McKibben suggests that climate change has brought ‘every inch and hour of the globe’ (McKibben, 1989: 46) under human jurisdiction. If we take modernity to be a project entailing increasing human influence on the non-human natural world, then we truly are – he claims – at the high point of modernity. In accounts like McKibben’s the gap between the human and natural realms has been closed as nature has been humanised.
Mainstream political theory tends to take the gap between the human and more-than-human worlds for granted, with the result that the differences between the two are exaggerated, the similarities underestimated, and the agency claims of the more-than-human mostly ignored. Critically, in the context of this article, there is little acknowledgement of the constraining and dependence-inducing embeddedness of the human being in a socio-ecological context.
There is some political theory, though, which takes seriously the closing gap between the human and natural realms. What is required, says philosopher Roy Bhaskar, for example, is an account of ‘embodied human agency’ (Bhaskar, 1991: 53) – one which challenges Kant and recognises that we have one foot in the heteronomous realm as well as one in the realm of autonomy. Indeed, one striking feature of the development of the idea of emancipation as the exercise of autonomy is the way encumbrance and embodiedness have been largely ignored as conditioning factors.
This may be harder to do from now on. Writing in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, never have so many of us been more aware of our encumbrance and embodiedness than now. Nor more aware of our fragility: the species that moves mountains is discovering that it can be brought to its knees by a particle a millionth of an inch long whose defences are destroyed by washing our hands in soap and water for 20 seconds.
Alasdair MacIntyre sums up these themes of ecological, social and cultural embeddedness with the expressive title of his book: Dependent Rational Animals (MacIntyre, 1999). His starting point is that humans are animals and that they are dependent – a very different beginning to that offered by Kant, and which has constituted the dominant way we think of ourselves (autonomous and ‘un-animal’), in the minority world in particular. This shift of starting point is important because, ‘In philosophy where one begins generally makes a difference to the outcome of one’s enquiries’ (MacIntyre, 1999: 4).
Near the beginning of Dependent Rational Animals, and with reference to his earlier work, MacIntyre writes, ‘I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible’ (MacIntyre, 1999: 9). The principal reason for this judgement is his conviction that an ethic that pays no mind to the circumstances of its possibility is an inadequate ethic. More particularly, any reasonable account of an ethics must take into consideration our condition as biological beings because ‘no account of the goods, rules and virtues that are definitive of our moral life can be adequate that does not explain … how that form of life is possible for beings who are biologically constituted as we are’ (MacIntyre, 1999: 10; see also Pellizzoni in this Special Issue). It is, he says, a mistake to be ‘forgetful of our bodies’, and important to take our ‘human animality more seriously’ (MacIntyre, 1999: 5; emphasis added). This is clearly significant in the context of our discussion of the green critique of emancipation as freedom from natural constraint, because MacIntyre is offering an account of human being in which our ‘biology’ is constitutively constraining if not determining.
This is important because the modern ‘forgetting’ of ourselves as animals has had a significant effect on a range of our habits and practices, a number of which are relevant to the human condition in an era of humanised nature. As Bhaskar puts it:
To fail to see … that there are physical (natural) constraints on human social life … is a charter for ecological disaster, if not indeed (species) suicide … there may be some absolutes (universals, constants) of significance for human beings – which they just have to accept or ‘recognize’. For example, fundamental laws of nature, the scarcity of some natural resources, upper limits to ecologically sustainable economic growth, aspects of human nature, the fact of the finitude (if not the precise duration) of human existence. (Bhaskar, 1991: 73)
Bhaskar’s remarks amount to a critique of emancipation as freedom from natural constraint. They could also stand for much of the environmental movement’s warnings regarding the dangers of human hubris. To the extent that the movement has a theory of economic, social and political change, it is in part based on spreading this message – closely linked to its critique of emancipation understood as freedom from constraint – as widely as possible and trusting that individuals, groups and societies will come to their senses and alter their practices to bring them into line with the logic of limits.
Clearly this hasn’t worked. This is because the green movement has underestimated the importance of material conditions for recalibrating emancipation and prompting change. ‘Men make their own history,’ Marx reminds us, ‘but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1852). In general, green thinking has been too voluntarist, as if a just sustainability can simply be acted into existence irrespective of the prevailing material and cultural conditions. Calls for more ‘humility, respect and restraint’ (Fremaux and Barry, 2019: 2), ‘more modesty’ and a ‘re-embedding in nature’ (Fremaux and Barry, 2019: 4) are unobjectionable in themselves, but repetition alone will not bring them into being. The injunction must have a basis in material circumstances such that it resonates with a felt material need. As Marx points out, the ‘existing circumstances’ have to contain the possibility of change and this has not been the case – until now.
The next section introduces just such a change in existing circumstances, a literally epochal shift in the materiality of human life entailing, a) a superseding (aufheben) of the human-nature dualism, which b) understood dialectically leads to c) a conception of the human agent as constitutively heteronomous as well as autonomous, and hence d) to a reconfigured understanding of emancipation beyond Kantian dualism.
From Holocene to Anthropocene
The shift in question is the one taking us from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch. At the heart of this transition is a changed relationship between human beings and nature which has implications for political theory and practice, and for the terms that structure political debate and action – particularly, here, the idea of emancipation. This changed relationship has nothing to do with re-enchantment, or re-embedding, or any of the other stewardship tropes that have monopolised green political theory for too long (for example Berman, 1981 and Berry, 2006).
Green politics has been dominated by the question of what ‘we’ are doing to nature. Along the way we have completely forgotten to ask what our acting-on-the-world is doing to us. The theory of dialectics tells us that in an interacting relationship between two entities, neither entity remains the same as it was before the encounter (Hegel, 2010). The dialectical relationship between humanity and nature has now got to the historical point (the Anthropocene) at which both ‘actants’ – to borrow from Bruno Latour (Latour, 2004) – are irrevocably different to what they were before that moment. We are used to that thought in connection with nature (usually expressed in terms such as ‘humanised nature’, as we saw), but what of humanity? What is happening to us – that is a historically materialist, species-level, ‘us’ – at the dawn of the Anthropocene? In brief, my argument here is that the Holocene produced a progressive politics dominated by the regulative ideal of independent, reasoning, disembodied minds. As I shall show, the Anthropocene makes us (better: we make ourselves) dependent, choice-making, embodied animals – with all that this entails for emancipation and for our propositions, projects and programmes.
The origins of the Anthropocene as a subject of geological significance are usually traced back to a short article published by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme’s (IGBP) Global Change Newsletter in May 2000. There they write that, due to ‘major and still-growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing the term “anthropocene” for the current geological epoch’ (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000: 17).
Rapidly the Anthropocene moved from the back pages of the IGBP’s newsletter to a mainstream concept. For example, the first thing that delegates to the Rio+20 Summit saw when they sat down to the opening Plenary in 2012 was a slick 5-minute video outlining the origins, effects, and possible futures of the Anthropocene (UN Web TV, 2012). It was taken for granted by these policy makers that we have indeed passed into a new epoch which changes the terms of reference of the struggle for justice and sustainability, and in 2016 the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy voted in favour of the formalisation of the Anthropocene at the level of epoch (Bostock and Lowe, 2018). Subject to ratification from several other organisations, the Holocene Epoch is to be terminated ‘at some point in next year or two’ (Lowe, 2018).
As far as the human sciences are concerned, the significance of the Anthropocene has generally been taken to mean that that it heralds the moment in the history of homo sapiens at which the species has become a geological agent in its own right. The implications of this entirely new scale of agency (humans move more material than any other geomorphic agent, including rivers and glaciers) are the subject of intense debate (Luke, 2017) and in this article I offer an analysis which suggests that the Anthropocene prompts a reassessment of emancipation and social agency as far-reaching as its geological counterpart.
In brief, we are the generation that is living through the kind of change that last took place 11,700 years ago (the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene). It would be strange indeed if a transformation of this magnitude were not accompanied by a shift in the nature of the human condition. This is the shift being analysed here, and it can only be properly understood by using dialectical rather than analytical reason. Once dialectical reason is deployed, the way in which the human species, as well as nature, is being transformed in the Anthropocene becomes clear. The terms of reference with which we in the minority world have become so familiar in the Holocene that they appear immutable, turn out to be historical; that is to say, the product of particular historical circumstances. The apparently settled ontological understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature that gave rise to Kant-based theories of autonomy and emancipation is being unravelled by the Anthropocene.
Analysed appropriately – i.e. dialectically – it becomes clear how the Anthropocene is converting Bhaskar’s speculative remarks regarding ‘physical (natural) constraints on human social life’ into lived experience – le vécu – for increasing numbers of people, especially in ‘developed’ countries. Up to now (August 2020), climate change has been the best example of the socio-demographic spread of the unintended consequences of the Anthropocene takeover of the planet, beginning to affect even hitherto relatively protected populations, as in the devastating wildfires in California (BBC, 2020) and south east Australia (Center for Disaster Philanthropy, 2019).
But this is as nothing compared to Covid-19, with over half the world’s population in lockdown and experiencing the effects of a badly handled ‘prophylactic’ transition (Dobson, 2021) from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. This is crucial, because as we observed earlier the likelihood of change is in part a function of a felt material need. The wider and broader this experience is, the more convincing arguments addressing that felt need will be. Outside of world wars, Covid-19 is the most widely shared experience for over a century and, moreover, it has its origins in the very human-nature nexus with which this article is dealing, at the dawn of the Anthropocene.
For Covid-19 is an Anthropocene event. Research suggests that the Anthropocene takeover of the planet is at the heart of zoonotic (species-jumping) diseases and their spread (Vidal, 2020). Logging, mining, population growth, deforestation, forest road-building and population increase are taking us into ever more remote parts of the planet and drawing ever more ‘exotic species’ into the web of human contact and commerce. According to Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, there is an ‘amplification effect’ in degraded environments where ecosystem disruption produces the conditions in which the barriers between a pathogen’s natural host and human beings are broken down (in Vidal, 2020). The focal point of this process is the ‘wet market’ like the one in Wuhan where fresh wild animals such as live wild pups, salamanders, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, squirrels, foxes, civets and turtles are traded. These markets are ‘assemblages’ in the Latourian sense, unruly comings-together of species in unnatural spaces. The Wuhan market truly is an Anthropo-scene, and Covid-19 is what the Anthropocene as a historical process can do – in practical material fact – to the human being.
As we have seen, a dominant green trope of the Anthropocene is as an epoch in which the whole of nature has the mark of the human on it, a moment at which ‘nature’ has become ‘humanised’. This is as far as analytical reason can take us. The crucial insight from dialectical reason is that humans are not left unchanged by this encounter. Rather, we are always already enacting a dialectical exchange in which as nature is humanised, humans are simultaneously naturalized. This is Jean-Paul Sartre’s point when he writes in his monumental enquiry into the nature and effects of dialectical reason that, ‘Human history … is in fact also defined in the present by the fact that something is happening to men’ (Sartre, 1976: 122; emphasis in the original). This is the process underlying Delanty and Mota’s perceptive and, in the literature, all too infrequent, comment that, ‘In acting upon nature as a biomorphic force and later as a geophysical force, humans are also transforming themselves’ (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 19; emphasis added), and ‘human beings are themselves transformed as a result of their very agency’(Delanty and Mota, 2017: 22).
Sartre himself offers an example of this process at work: deforestation in China in the 1950s. Here, the humanising of nature (clearing trees to free land for cultivation) creates a sphere of humanised nature (Sartre calls this the ‘practico-inert’) which returns to act on humans (now naturalised in the sense of ‘at the mercy of humanized nature’) in the form of floods:
… deforestation as the elimination of obstacles becomes negatively a lack of protection: since the loess [wind-blown silt] of the mountains and peneplains [low- relief plains formed by protracted erosion] is no longer retained by trees, it congests the rivers, raising them higher than the plains and bottling them up in their lower reaches, and forcing them to overflow their banks. Thus the whole history of the terrible Chinese floods appears as an intentionally constructed mechanism … the positive system of agriculture was transformed into an infernal machine. (Sartre, 1976: 162; emphasis added)
This example, from someone much better known for his existentialism than his environmentalism, is of striking contemporary relevance because it shows that it is humanised nature to which we are in thrall, not nature. This is nature transformed by our work on it, the sedimented result of our action in and on the world, Sartre’s ‘practico-inert’. This is no less true of Covid-19. As we have seen, the disease most likely originated with the trafficking of wild animals in a market in Wuhan, China. This is a human practice, so in this sense Covid-19 is as anthropogenic as climate change or bio-extinction.
As far as the focus of this Special Issue is concerned, there have been two contesting views of the dialectic of emancipation, one in which the dialectic results in the progressive overcoming of domination, and one in which emancipation exists in a dialectical relation with domination. In this latter case, the process of emancipation always already generates the conditions for its undermining, resulting in new instances and incarnations of domination. This is the nature of the dialectic being discussed here – the dialectic that has ‘produced’ the Anthropocene. ‘The positive system of agriculture was transformed into an infernal machine’, writes Sartre – and if he were writing today he might use exactly the same terms to describe the way the Industrial Revolution gave rise to climate change, or how the buying and selling of live wild animals produced Covid-19.
Analytical reason suggests that it makes no sense to say that as we exert increasing influence over the natural world we simultaneously and progressively come under its sway. It has no resources to explain how a series of emancipatory praxes – emancipatory when taken in analytical isolation, that is – can produce the conditions under which new forms of domination may emerge. Dialectical reason, in contrast, shows how the new emancipatory praxis works back on the emancipated subject in such a way that the praxis is experienced by the subject as domination. This is the Covid-19 experience: a series of emancipatory practices (for some, at least) involving an accelerating casting-off of constraint in respect of mobility and consumption have led to the creation of a disease vector – the jet aircraft – which has ‘enabled’ a worldwide pandemic.
In the Anthropocene ever greater numbers of people are experiencing that what pre-moderns experienced: heteronomy and dependence – with the difference that it is now not nature that appears as the untranscendable horizon, but humanised nature. We are, to this degree, complicit in the production of our new dependency – and therefore in the possibility of understanding it and its ramifications. For as Marx wrote in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ‘mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation’ (Marx, 1904: 12–13).
The relevant ‘material conditions’ here are those that have produced the Anthropocene – conditions which can be read as the opportunity reflexively (Wissenburg, 2018; see also Arías Maldonado in this Special Issue) to understand ourselves as dependent, choice-making animals with all that entails for living the good life. This is one way of reading the Covid-19 crisis: like never before the virus offers us a Faustian opportunity to understand ourselves as a planetary force and to think through the implications of this for our politics, economics and society. This is the new background against which debates about emancipation, equality and inequality, markets and state, must be framed.
It needs to be pointed out that the effects of the Anthropocene are experienced unevenly. The Covid-19 example makes it quite clear that socio-economic factors are key to understanding the incidence of the disease (Blundell et al., 2020), and it is likely that the pandemic will exacerbate already-existing inequalities (Stiglitz, 2020). Given this disaggregated experience, can we legitimately talk of the Anthropocene as a species-level event, or is this article’s analysis fatally undermined by the multiple subjectivities that constitute affected populations?
Those who adopt a universalist use of the term Anthropocene have been charged with naivety. As Matthew Lepori writes:
The power of the Anthropocene lies precisely within the name itself and in the universalist discourse it engenders. It is an accusation, a responsibilization, and a call to action levied upon humankind. And here, in the assimilation of all social difference, in the elimination of differential political-economic histories and the power relations therein, and in the obscuring of the particular institutions that govern our (side of the) relationship with nature, begin the politics of the Anthropocene. (Lepori, 2015: 104)
The point that Lepori and many others (e.g. Malm, 2015) make is that the very word ‘Anthropocene’ serves to obscure the source of responsibility for environmental and associated degradation – not just now, but from the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. In the dominant account of the Anthropocene the ‘battle’ between humans and nature – the Anthropos and nature – takes precedence over the social struggles within the Anthropos. The concept of the Anthropocene thus plays an ideological role by obscuring the relative roles of rich and poor in bringing about environmental and social problems.
This is a powerful analysis of the causes of the Anthropocene, and Lepori and others are right that a failure to take account of the differentiated contributions to the processes that have led to the Anthropocene could absolve the rich and powerful from their overwhelming historical responsibility for the unsustainability and injustice we are examining . And as far as the current situation is concerned, as we observed above, it is true that the effects of the Anthropocene are also experienced unevenly and it is likely that this will lead to differentiated responses to its consequences.
At the same time, though, the example of Covid-19 suggests that one characteristic, epidemiologically-speaking, is its indiscriminate nature. While the powerful and wealthy (and those with gardens) are of course better placed to weather the Covid storm than others, everyone can in principle contract the disease. In this regard Covid-19 is a species experience as well as a socially differentiated one: ‘the notion of a single human species is a powerful normative regulative idea that has particular relevance to the challenges of the Anthropocene’ (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 26). So to the extent that Covid-19 is an Anthropocene event, as argued above, it seems legitimate to speak of the Anthropocene in universalist terms as well as in terms of differentiation (see also Arías Maldonado in this Special Issue).
Emancipation in the Anthropocene
We are now in a position to sketch the contours of Anthropocene emancipation. It has been argued that the regulative ideal of autonomous, reasoning, disembodied minds that underpinned late-Holocene notions of emancipation cannot survive the transition to the Anthropocene. This is because in humanising nature we have ‘naturalised’ ourselves, and if we are to talk of emancipation at all it must be in the context of the beings we have made ourselves, in the Anthropocene, through working on the world: that is to say, dependent, choice-making, embodied animals.
Put differently, the Kantian regulative ideal of a realm of autonomy inhabited by self-directed beings seems less and less plausible when measured against this new reality of the Anthropocene. Of course, the relationship between reality and a regulative ideal is tendentious. By definition, there will always be a quite proper sense in which the ideal does not correspond to reality: if the ideal mapped exactly on to the reality it would no longer be an ideal (just as Jorge Luis Borges’ map that coincides point to point with the region it maps is no longer a map; Borges, 1999). For an ideal to have any political or ethical purchase it must depart from the reality which it critiques. But if the ideal being proposed is based on a category mistake (if it is clearly a map of Aeolis Palus on Mars when what I wanted was to find my way to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna) then perhaps we would be best advised to rethink the ideal. In this case, if the regulative ideal (autonomy) conflicts with the facts on the ground (the steady, historical and practical ‘heteronomising’ of the being previously regarded as constitutively autonomous), then the ideal needs to be recast since it assumes a property – autonomy – to which the (Anthropocene) human can no longer uncomplicatedly lay claim.
Given our Anthropocene embodied animality and the dependency it seems to suggest (Macintyre, 1999), it is tempting to follow Engels down the road signposted by his aphorism ‘freedom is the recognition of necessity’ (i.e. recognition of the necessity imposed on us by our embodied animality). This is the definition of freedom for which Engels is perhaps best known, but in fact in his Anti-Dühring Engels offers two definitions of freedom. The first involves freedom as a function of the possession of knowledge: ‘Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject’ (Engels, 1966: 130). The second involves freedom as control: ‘Freedom… consists in … control over ourselves and over external nature’ (Engels, 1966: 131).
The connection between the two for Engels is that knowledge increases in relation to, and enables more, control over nature. This is the dialectic that so troubled the Frankfurt School who argued that the emancipation secured by control over external nature always already results in new forms of domination (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002). Given this, one way of reading the transition to the Anthropocene is as the moment when the Holocene process of controlling external nature reunited the human species with external nature via the nature-humanised/humans-naturalised dialectic that was explained earlier.
But of course there is one major difference compared to Engels’ analysis, or indeed that of the Frankfurt School: in the Anthropocene there is no longer an external nature with which to be reconciled, there is only Sartre’s practico-inert. Thus Engels’ second understanding of freedom – control over external nature – makes no ontological sense because there is no longer an external nature over which to exert control. Engels could of course hardly have been expected to anticipate this turn of events. Indeed, ‘how young the whole of human history still is,’ he himself wrote (Engels, 1966: 131), ‘and how ridiculous it would be to attempt to ascribe any absolute validity to our present views’.
Engels could not know that human praxis in the world, beginning with ‘the generation of fire by friction [which] gave man for the first time control over one of the forces of nature, and thereby separated him for ever from the animal kingdom’ (Engels, 1966: 131) would eventually reunite the species with what he calls the animal kingdom through the experience of Sartre’s ‘infernal machine’ and its associated contingency and dependence. Indeed it is clear that for Engels, freedom as both knowledge and control is measured by the distance humans achieve from their animal condition. (This should remind us of Kant and his separation of the human realm and the realm of nature. Kant and Engels are so distant in so many ways, yet looked at from an epochal perspective they share key traits of late-Holocene dominant thought – chief among them the idea that freedom should be understood as distancing the human from the non-human as far as possible).
As Engels writes, ‘The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom’ (Engels, 1966: 131). This might have made sense in the late-nineteenth century, but it now seems clear that each step forward was a step taking the human species from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, with each one spiralling the species towards heteronomy.
This takes us back to Engels’ first notion of freedom, involving knowledge. As he writes, ‘Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends’ (Engels, 1966: 130). Stripped of late-Holocene instrumentality in regard to the function and purpose of knowledge, this is an approximation for the foundations of Anthropocene emancipation. Updated, we might say that the lived experience of heteronomy can lead to reflection on the constrained circumstances that mark the human experience in the Anthropocene, and to plans and programmes that are consonant with our condition as – now, at this historical Covid-19 suffused juncture – choice-making heteronomous beings. This, then, is Anthropocene emancipation.
This returns us to the beginning of the article where it was suggested that the environmental injunction to ‘live sustainable lives … potentially puts the ideology on a collision course with the idea and practice of emancipation, understood generically here as freedom from constraint or controlling influences’. Ingolfur Blühdorn has written that ‘emancipatory social movements and critical sociologists have never managed to supplement their logic of liberation with an equally powerful logic of limitation and restraint’ (in this Special Issue). It has been argued here that Anthropocene emancipation involves, precisely, the recognition of dependence and constraint, and that this recognition is made both more urgent and more possible by the dialectical ‘naturalising of the human’ process described earlier. Cashing out what this might mean in practical terms would take us beyond this article’s remit, but it would almost certainly involve application of the ‘precautionary principle’ to decision-making (Hanson, 2003). It is widely recognised that this principle recognises the uncertainty of knowledge and the unpredictability of the effects of interventions in the socio-ecological sphere. Now we can add that it also represents, in the sphere of policy-making principle, heteronomous choice-making and the recognition of dependency – precisely two of the features of Anthropocene emancipation described above.
It should be clear now that this article’s contribution to Anthropocene social theory is absolutely not an endorsement of the technocentric, managerialist, earth-system approach described by, for example, Mark Lynas (2011). For some critics of the Lynas perspective (e.g. Luke, 2017), the Anthropocene trope of the ‘end of nature’ automatically entails an endorsement of turbo-charged geo-engineering and a rejection of environmentalism understood as conservation and protection of the non-human natural world, because there is no nature left to protect (Luke, 2017: 90).
This is a false choice. The suggestion here is that a dialectical analysis of the human-nature nexus in the Anthropocene makes clear a) the hitherto utopian (in the Marxist sense) nature of conservation and nature protection, and, simultaneously, b) the increased likelihood of their being realised precisely because the Anthropocene is creating the conditions for their realisation, at the same time as ecologism’s objectives are being reformulated by the dialectical rearrangement of both ‘nature’ and ‘humanity’. Rather than rejecting the Anthropocene as a socio-ecological framing because of its apparently ineluctable connection with Promethean managerialism, then, critics of the framing would do well to mine it for its progressive promise as a moment with the potential for a ‘new kind of historical self-understanding’ (Delanty and Mota, 2017: 9).
Conclusion
Our generation is living through an epochal change taking us from the Holocene into the Anthropocene. For the first time in the history of the planet one species has become a geological force in its own right. Most of our social, economic and political thinking to date – including about emancipation – has been based on a set of assumptions which no longer hold, regarding the kind of being we are.
As we enter the Anthropocene we see that the regulative ideal of the independent rational mind has contributed to the creation an ‘infernal machine’ in whose thrall we increasingly find ourselves, and of which Covid-19 is a dramatic example. Theorists such as Bruno Latour (2004) and Jane Bennett (2010) speak of an ontology of ‘assemblages’ and human and non-human ‘actants’ co-producing their lives and the circumstances in which they live them. This is a move away from the ‘hierarchy of being’ that has dominated Western thought for over 2000 years, the modern version of which has ‘man’ at the top and other species arrayed beneath, mutely waiting for us to act on them. Non-human beings have their own form of agency, acting on human beings in ways we can neither predict nor control. In this new configuration, in which human beings increasingly experience the world as heteronomous animals, emancipation as the exercise of autonomy makes little sense.
Non-human agency is not purposive in the sense of conforming to a plan conceived by a rational mind and put into action, but it is hard to avoid anthropomorphising Covid-19 in an attempt to make sense of its effects. So while the virus is not ‘teaching us a lesson’ nor ‘giving us a wake-up call’ in the sense of having decided to do so, the pandemic is certainly an invitation to reflect on its origins so as to avoid more outbreaks in the future – or manage them – and, by extension, the Anthropocene – better.
This is likely to get more important as the Anthropocene annexation of the planet gathers pace and we blunder deeper into its assemblages. Ebola, bird ‘flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Rift Valley fever, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus and Zika virus all cross from animals to humans – and they are all recent diseases. The disease gives us the opportunity to ask the central question of our times: how to live as a member of the assemblage. Unfortunately, in the midst of the understandable scramble to save Covid lives, this opportunity has been largely spurned (but see Delanty, 2020 and Dobson, 2021).
The Anthropocene has succeeded the Holocene because we are geological agents of deep time, capable of bringing about the profoundest of changes in the lifeworld in the geological blink of an eye. We snap our fingers and the climate changes, species go extinct, and viruses shut down the global economy. This is not how dependent, choice-making, embodied animals who have become a geological force should behave. The Anthropocene notion of emancipation outlined above, rooted in a conception of human beings as choice-making heteronomous beings, suggests we should act slowly, with consideration and precaution.
Covid-19 reminds us that we are not in control. Will we react to this experience by trying to re-exert Enlightenment emancipatory control in an ever-lengthening spiral of human and planetary lockdown? Or will we learn to live with the human and non-human assemblages that are ineluctably part of the Anthropocene condition? This is the crucial ‘crossroads’ question, the answer to which underpins other more quotidian ones. Covid-19 helps us to see that while we can put our mark on every single inch of the globe we cannot control the effects of that exercise in planetary enclosure.
This contradictory moment contains the seeds for a new understanding of ourselves as dependent, choice-making animals. And this new understanding opens up the possibility of a profound practical and conceptual realignment – one in which the Holocene’s Prometheus gives way to the Anthropocene’s King Canute who, despite the protestations of his courtiers, knew that he could not hold back the rising tide and would have to live with it.
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