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Pasi Heikkurinen^1,2, Stewart Clegg³, Ashly H. Pinnington⁴, Katerina Nicolopoulou⁵, and Jose M. Alcaraz⁶

Article Information

Volume: 34 issue: 2, page(s): 267-286

Article first published online: October 17, 2019; Issue published: June 1, 2021

https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026619881145

Abstract

This article examines how agency should be conceptualized to manage the pressing problems of the Anthropocene in support of sustainable change. The article reviews and analyzes literature on agency in relation to planetary boundaries, advancing the relational view of agency in which no actors are granted a primary ontological status, and agency is not limited to humans but may be attributed to other actors. This understanding of agency can effectively contribute to sustainable organizations; on the one hand, it enables non-anthropocentrism and on the other hand, admits that networks bind actors. We conclude that boundary blurring (between actors) and boundary formation (between actors and networks) are complementary processes. Consequently, relationality is proposed as an applicable means of respecting planetary boundaries, while recognizing that all action flows through circuits of power whose obligatory passage points are the major conduits for intervention. Intervention occurs through regulation and nudging action such as ecotaxation.

Keywords

agency, Anthropocene, boundaries, power, responsibility, relational, sustainability

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¹University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland²University of Leeds, Leeds, UK³University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia⁴The British University in Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates⁵University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK⁶Munich Business School, Munich, Germany

Corresponding author(s): Pasi Heikkurinen, Department of Economics and Management, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland. Email: pasi.heikkurinen@helsinki.fi

Introduction

The concept of the Anthropocene is now well established in both mainstream natural and social sciences (Biermann et al., 2016; Hamilton, Bonneuil, & Gemenne, 2015; Latour, 2015). In 2000, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer proposed that the impact of human beings’ organized activities on Earth is so significant that the current geological epoch can be called the Anthropocene: the age of humans (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). The challenges of the human-induced global environmental change have been extensively debated for decades (e.g., Carson, 1962; Georgescu-Roegen, 1975; Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972) but the scale of human agency on Earth systems and related processes are now more evident and quantifiable (Andonova & Mitchell, 2010; Liu et al., 2015). The concept of the Anthropocene collects social, material, ecological, and geological realities into one common context: planet Earth (Heikkurinen, 2017; Heikkurinen, Ruuska, Wilén, & Ulvila, 2019). While the notion of the Anthropocene may be typical of totalizing narratives (see Lyotard, 1979; Parker, 1995), it plays the significant discursive role of promoting global awareness and collective responsibility for unfolding multiscalar ecological crises. In addition, the notion spurs reflection on contemporary axiologies, ontologies, and epistemologies (Cunha, Rego, & Vieira de Cunha, 2008; Heikkurinen, Rinkinen, Järvensivu, Wilén, & Ruuska, 2016; Hoffman & Jennings, 2015). Latour (2014a), for example, argues for consideration of the so-called metamorphic zone in which natural and material forces amalgamate and act, including Earth itself. From this perspective, all forms of agency inhabit a flat ontology in which human actors and the networks of activities in which they are engaged have no a priori theoretical privilege as actors per se (Collinge, 2006; Latour, 1999a, 1999b, 2009; Pickering, 1995).

The Anthropocene begins with modern industrialization, the Great Acceleration (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Hamilton, 2015). In the early stages of the Anthropocene, human agency was largely unbounded in its effects on the fabric of the Earth and human life upon it, as Engels’s (1892) remarkable chronicle of 1844 reveals. Organizations that sprung up in the industrial and capitalist revolution were framing the planet’s fabric in new ways as they created new materialities. Many of these materialities were the effects of untrammeled organizational action, as the widespread degradation that Engels observed, bears testament: Dark satanic mills in which bouts of daily exploitation occurred had as their retreats dank slums in which the majority of inhabitants were housed and whatever they earned in exchange value as rent further exploited. Exploitation was careless of all forms of life as it framed and constructed new social realities premised on a world of indifference to industrially induced disease, detritus, decay, dire pollution and, as scientists became aware late in the Anthropocene, disturbing changes in climatic conditions.¹

For most organizations, most of the time, climate change has been just another externality (e.g., Banerjee, 2012; Marechal & Lazaric, 2010). The results of contestation concerning responsibility for these externalities among different organizations, such as political parties, lobby organizations, transnational corporations (TNCs), and media, has seen slow improvement, in some places, of some aspects of life on Earth. Major cities, such as London, no longer suffer the killer smog of the 1950s, since the domestic use of coal was phased out. However, externalities travel; as Beck (2009), has noted, we inhabit a global risk society. Environmental degradation and pollution produced in one place does not stay there but mingles with the air, water, and soil of the planet. In consequence, the “safe operating space for humanity” (Rockström et al., 2009; see also Barnosky et al., 2012; Steffen et al., 2015) and other forms of life diminishes both here and now and temporally: The future perfect becomes less and less an imaginary Utopia (Bauman, 2017).While the Anthropocene enfolds all forms of life, there are evident power asymmetries not only among these different forms of being but also between different regions, groups, and social classes of humans, the dominant form of life (Malm & Hornborg, 2014; Moore, 2017).

It is not humanity as a whole that is responsible for these externalities that threaten life itself, but those central to the circuits of power characterizing human life, argue contemporary prominent feminists (cf. Gibson-Graham, 2011; Haraway, 2015). Moreover, the global command of wealth and other organizational resources in organizational and actor networks straddling the globe inscribe some powerful actors with much more in the way of strategic choices over the vast range of organisms, materialities, and imaginaries within which all life thrives and dies (Anderson & Cavanagh, 1996; Malm & Hornborg, 2014; Ulvila & Wilén, 2017; Vitali, Glattfelder, & Battiston, 2011).²The aim of the present article is to outline an understanding of agency with which contemporary managers might organize their activities in relation to ecological limits. The first section positions research on the Anthropocene before reviewing agency in its light. Possible management responses that could delay, if not prevent, further extinctions are considered and policies that could serve as nudges of managerial and organizational action are proposed, centering on an example of ecotaxation.

Agency

Agency is not only an attribute of being human, agency, according to Latour (1990), is fundamentally relational and based on processes of becoming through actor–network relationships in which dynamic forms of agency are inscribed. Latour (2014a) suggests thatfar from trying to ‘reconcile’ or ‘combine’ nature and society, the task, the crucial political task, is on the contrary to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated way as possible—until, that is, we have thoroughly lost any relation between those two concepts of object and subject. (p. 17)The principle of irreducibility of agency means “nothing is inherently either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (Harman, 2007, p. 33). As agencies continuously engage, with, mobilize and translate materialities and imaginaries in and out of life’s processes, networks of “human or non-human entities, individual or collective, [are becoming] defined by their roles, their identity, and their program” (Latour, 1997, p. 55). “As long as they act, agents have meaning” (Latour, 2014a, p. 14).Social science studies of agency have tended to overemphasize the role of human actors (Fleetwood, 2005; Orlikowski, 2010).

While not reifying the products of human action, one consequence is that anthropocentric worldviews—favoring human agency at the expense of the nonhuman world—became institutionalized (Heikkurinen et al., 2016). The limitations of anthropocentrism in dealing with ecological problems have been reported over several decades (Bonnedahl & Heikkurinen, 2019; Ezzamel & Willmott, 2014; Gladwin, Kennelly, & Krause, 1995; McShane, 2007; Purser, Park, & Montuori, 1995). For example, the human–nonhuman divide makes taking the “‘intermediary’ and ambivalent status of animals in a growing number of organizational situations” problematic, note Doré and Michalon (2017, p. 15). An anthropocentric understanding of agency does not “draw a definitive boundary between the objects (them) and us” (Introna, 2009, p. 31). Hence, solving the complex ecological problems that organizations now face (see also Boons, 2013; Connolly & Cullen, 2018; Heikkurinen et al., 2016; Purser et al., 1995) requires research that moves beyond anthropocentrism. One way of doing so is to take the Anthropocene seriously as a context both for theorizing and for practice.Since the 1990s, an increasingly influential group of management scholars have expressed concerns about the roles and responsibilities of business organizations in advancing environmental sustainability. The Academy of Management established an active Organizations and Natural Environment Interest Group in 1991, but the general consensus arising from members’ published work from the outset has been that positive change was occurring far too slowly. For example, within the context of greening organizations, Shrivastava and Hart (1992) noted that despite the rise of environmentalism during the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of organizations were failing to address the major issues. Shrivastava (1995a) criticized traditional approaches to management for their outmoded assumptions based on processes of industrialization during the 19th and 20th centuries, claiming that within numerous industries managers were biased toward patterns of production and consumption motivated by financial risk.

The fundamental epistemology and ontology informing most management systems, Shrivastava argued, was anthropocentric with managers promulgating a “denatured view” of the organizational environment. Deveraux Jennings and Zandbergen (1995) advocated applying concepts from institutional theory to understand how consensus is achieved on the meaning of sustainability and how sustainability practices are developed and diffused in programs for total quality environmental management, life cycle analysis, product stewardship, ecoefficiency, pollution prevention and waste-management strategy, environmental risk and liability management, and environmental banking and investment. Application of concepts from institutional theory continues over 20 years later to be influential in academic debates on the natural environment serving as an informative means of explaining societal and organizational change (e.g., Hoffman & Jennings, 2018; Maguire & Hardy, 2009; York, Hargrave, & Pacheco, 2016). Shrivastava (1995b) argued that corporations actually have the financial resources, technological knowledge, and institutional capacity for achieving ecological sustainability, albeit sharing responsibility along with governments and consumers. “Nature must be valued for its own sake [. . .]” (p. 957), he asserted, claiming corporations could make an immediate difference through total quality environmental management and by implementing ecologically sustainable competitive strategies.In recent reflexive understandings, distributed networks of diverse entities and complex localized assemblages constituting the Anthropocene produce critical zones and potential tipping points of ecological destruction (Barnosky et al., 2012; Hoffman & Jennings, 2018; Steffen et al., 2015). Humans have the power to exercise reflexivity toward all other agencies as a result of the communicative competence afforded by various forms of natural and technical language game (Wittgenstein, 2009) in their constitution of what Giddens’s (1984) terms both practical, as in ordinary language as well as theoretical consciousness, as in the elaborated codes of scientific and related fields of practice. Understanding how human agency relates to the agency of nonhuman actors becomes a critical competence (Carolan, 2005; Ivakhiv, 2002).

It is only through the reflexive capacities which predicate the human actor that the interests of those nonhuman agencies that have material effects can be represented.Sociologically, humans and nonhumans are inextricably implicated in acts of agency in which humanity’s reflexive capabilities, by developing new scientific, social, and ethical approaches to living in the world, can work toward the collective good. Being is “inevitably endowed with a moral and political history” (Latour, 2014b, p. 4), one that is earthbound, inescapably tied to this Earth. The Earth’s agential role is to support the standing conditions that enable life on Earth. Humans’ reflexive capacity in grasping how climate interacts with humans in sustaining or threatening forms of life is increasingly channeled through technical discourses of climate science and intellectual discoveries based on detailed research investigations made within multiple disciplines increasingly (Latour, 2014c). Assembled into new sets of actions, these insights and creative ideas have the potential to lead to the development of novel competences and more responsible agency.

Boundaries and Boundedness

Contemporary reflexive capacities in the sciences are increasingly oriented to the planetary boundary (PB) framework as the relevant context for interpreting the Anthropocene (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). The PB framework encompasses nine Earth system thresholds, the standing conditions for life on Earth, the consequences of crossing which are potentially catastrophic. The PB framework directs academic and practitioner attention not merely to climate change (the topic currently attracting the most attention) but also to other Earth systems relevant to sustainable change: the rate of biodiversity loss (terrestrial and marine), interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles (e.g., from the nitrogen used in fertilizers), stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, global freshwater use, change in land use, chemical pollution, and atmospheric aerosol loading (see, e.g., Hoffman & Jennings, 2018). Embracing radical ecological relationality, identifying global hotspots, acknowledging interactions far beyond the knowledge of any singular discipline, the PB model sees the role of scientific knowledge in the preservation of the planet as a pragmatic and legitimate process requiring urgent action (Van den Bergh & Kallis, 2012; Whiteman, Walker, & Perego, 2013).The PB framework is shedding new light on “the problem of scale” (Perey, 2014, p. 215), providing insights into how to address connections between the different systems or hierarchical scales that constitute the planetary system (Boulding, 1966).

The boundaries of these are framed by strategic devices that bind and divide, through acts of defining, separating, assimilating; that stabilize, through acts of fixing, delimiting, controlling and that make visible, through acts of empirical recognition through technologies of representation and control (after Campbell, McHugh, & Ennis, 2019). In this way, boundaries are constituted that stretch from “ocean basins/biomes or sources/sinks to the level of the Earth system as a whole” (Steffen et al., 2015, p. 2). Steffen et al. (2015) observe that at least four system boundaries (rate of biodiversity loss, climate change, human interference with the nitrogen cycle, and land-system change) appear to have already been transgressed in ways that cannot be repaired or will be extremely challenging to reverse (see also Rockström, Richardson, Steffen, & Mace, 2018). These, in common with the other PBs, entail practices connecting individuals, organizations, societies, and global networks.The science behind the PBs findings is a set of resources for reflexive thinking and application of expert knowledge. The PB framework affords a relational and hierarchical understanding of the world’s systems (Heikkurinen et al., 2016; Hoffman & Jennings, 2018) that is limited in its reproduction of an exclusively anthropocentric view in which the agency of nonhuman stakeholders is recognized only insofar as it offers a more or less safe operating space for humans and other forms of life (cf. Waddock, 2011).Natural science-related questions are readily raised, such as how much freshwater from rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and renewable groundwater stores can and should be withdrawn before it constitutes a trespass over the global freshwater threshold (Rockström & Karlberg, 2010; Steffen et al., 2015).

We can seek to calibrate the precise contribution of international trade and certain industries, such as tea, sugar, textiles, and fish consumption, to the loss of biodiversity (Lenzen et al., 2012). Comparatively, we can question which agricultural regions contribute most to the biogeochemical flow (phosphorus) boundary and how can agriculture can be reorganized (globally) so that the land-use boundary is not crossed (Foley et al., 2011).These questions are not only a concern for natural science but also for social science: indeed, they are organizational in question. Organizations’ impact on Earth systems (e.g., ocean acidification, ozone layer depletion, and climate change) and on subglobal processes, such as land and water use, is well known as are the consequences of environmental degradation for human organization (Steffen et al., 2015; Steffen & Smith, 2013). Transgression of the PBs is evidence of the failure of industrial and of postindustrial societies to recognize the Anthropocene. A group of scholars in business concerned about organizations and the natural environment argue that the past few decades reveal blatant disconnection between problem recognition and positive response (Gladwin, 2012; Gladwin et al., 1995; Hoffman & Jennings, 2015). The boundary framework seeks to embed reflexive human actors in an ecological network that is ultimately a planetary process (e.g., Heikkurinen et al., 2016; Waddock, 2011). Moreover, process implies politics (Hoffman & Jennings, 2018; Orssatto & Clegg, 1999); for instance, processes of ecological destruction cause severe problems for earthbound actors the risks associated with which are not equally distributed spatially or in terms of social stratification both globally and nationally.Conventionally, time is represented in sequential process as “flows from past to present” (Latour, 2014a, p. 11). Analytically, we are aware that time’s arrow bends both back and forth; through reflexive capacities humans (at least) reassemble the past from the here and now and project the future backward by thinking in the future perfect, as Schutz (1967) explained.

Human actors have a tendency to reflect on their future plans and predictions as if they are events that have already happened. While the phenomenological instantiation of the future perfect might seem inconsequential, the scale can be changed as we build realistic scenarios of probable futures, as Pitsis, Clegg, Marosszeky, and Rura-Polley (2003) investigated empirically.Different human agencies are capable of different projections, which vary with what Jacques (1971) termed the time span of discretion, the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake and take responsibility for, a concept he addressed intraorganizationally in terms of human intelligence and capabilities. Building on the initial idea and transforming it into one capable of more global application, we can refer to the projective reach of strategic decision making. Organizationally, the most senior incumbents of high office with strategic responsibilities have the greatest time span of discretion and thus the greatest projective reach into the future.Temporal capacities provide an in-principle flat ontology in which various actors are capable of different projective reach. At the outer temporal limits, we have the projective reach of a Chernobyl or a Fukushima nuclear meltdown that renders zones of life critical into all foreseeable futures for those actors that occupy them. Nuclear reactors can be powerful autonomous actants (Ellul, 1954/1973; Vadén, 2014). It is a matter of strategy, politics, and ethics on the part of human actors whether these nonhuman actors’ powers are unleashed on Earth. In terms of a nuclear plant, the temporal horizon is effectively infinite in terms of generational life spans. One way of capturing the inequality of being is through the notion of projective reach. While all actants exist together in the horizontal and vertical “web of life” (Capra, 1995; Waddock, 2011), they do not exist equally in temporal terms: the projective reach of a nuclear plant far exceeds that of a mosquito, for instance.

The mosquito might give one a bite; the bite might produce inflammation at best; at worse it might produce a debilitating virus in a human subject. Should that subject, in a fever, have recourse to fly a plane or drive an automobile, the impact of that small insect might be far greater than one initially might envisage. The mosquito, for all intents and purposes, however, does not aim to cause harm. It has no language game that translates to humans and in which the idea of harm would make sense; instinctually, it merely seeks preferential food. It is the intentional effects of humans’ causal powers and their interactions with the causal powers of other actors that are of concern to us as social scientists seeking an organizational response to the Anthropocene.Pragmatically, if we combine the horizontally broad understanding of flat ontology that recognizes the powers of all earthbound actors with a conception of the projective reach of organizational decision making, strategic managers would become more heedful of the interaction between humans and those other powers that potentially broach PBs. Acknowledgement of the power of all actors and their interactions necessitates more enlightened scientific information gathering, decision making, and practices with respect to an audit of the future perfect impact of actions planned to be undertaken on a diverse range of interests. After all, as Collinge (2006) notes, it is by[p]rojecting a world that is divided not only into a “horizontal” structure (in which similar activities are organized at similar scales in different places) but also a “vertical” structure (in which different activities are organized at different scales covering the same places), that scale analysis acquires its conceptual power. (p. 244)There are appropriate management responses to being in the multiscalar Anthropocene society (Hoffman & Jennings, 2018); for instance, the processes of organizing might become conceived as flat and hierarchical endeavors linking those near to those distant, us to them, we to others, while maintaining pragmatic network boundaries necessary for respecting the uniqueness of all actors and their powers. In other words, apposite management of the Anthropocene would be characterized by an understanding of agency that builds on two key dimensions.

The first one is the horizontal dimension that Latourian flat ontology offers and the other is the vertical dimension from ecology, where all earthbound action is embedded in the biosphere. In terms of flat ontology, flatness is first and foremost the refusal to treat one strata of reality as predominant and superior to all others. As Latour (1988) states, nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else.³Albeit abstract, the conceptual merging of equally existent but distinctively intentional causal powers furthers the vital integration of natural and social sciences in exploring the management of business organizations. The point of the PBs is that crossing their thresholds triggers causal powers that will be extremely difficult to reverse once unleashed. Boundary claims, whether planetary or otherwise (see Latour, 1991;2012a, b) as well as claims of boundary absence, have effects that are real in their consequences. It is for this reason that politicoethical reflection and audit, as well as regulatory institutions, become important: What boundaries of future perfect projection are being audited and regulated by organizations for which managers are held responsible and what boundaries remain nonissues in organizations’ strategy?The matter of these boundaries flows down from global initiatives such as the Paris climate accord, through state regulation requiring specific forms of audit, through to initiatives undertaken on the basis of organizational volition. Ideally, at each level of the nine Earth systems identified, systematic audit should be conducted in terms of the construction of a future perfect scenario in which minimization of harm is the purpose to be achieved, cascading through the levels to the organizational and framing of the individual. The causal powers of strategic management intersect with the casual powers of two kinds of matter: first, that which matters, because it is accounted for, audited, and regulated; second, that which does not matter in terms of the intentional agency of any specific strategy as it is not accounted for, audited, or regulated. All matter might potentially be extinguished if not managed, relinquishing its casual powers, including species as well as other forms of life. Importantly, however, organizations’ strategic choices can hasten or hinder processes of extinction and the conditions of being.

Matter matters, mainly because dematerialization is a utopia (see Foster, 2012), but it does not matter with the same immediacy as does a language game in which one’s business is inscribed, irrespective of will, an inscription that enacts an economic calculation of profit and loss that is tightly temporally constrained.As a response to the Anthropocene, Hoffman and Jennings (2018) propose, informed by Perrow (2011), that there is a need for institutional entrepreneurship, social movements, and policy shifts. Theory and practice could be enlightened by more sophisticated ideas of resilience, modularity, and decoupled institutions. Cultural perspectives suffuse proactive social commitments. Managers fostering “stakeholder cultures” can shift the cultural axis from amoral, egoist, or instrumentalist cultures to constituting cultures preferentially concerned with the welfare and rights of planetary subsystems as stakeholders (Jones, Felps, & Bigley, 2007). Due to the nonanthropocentric understanding of agency, such cultures can be highly inclusive. Sophisticated ideas of procedural and distributive justice inform ethical corporate perceptions of fairness and increased contribution to social welfare (Bosse & Phillips, 2016). Ethical human resource management approaches with regard to the treatment of people are also informed by similar ideas (Bergström & Diedrich, 2011; Pinnington, Macklin, & Campbell, 2007). Adopted by CEOs and boards of directors as a core aspect of strategic management, these approaches could inform actions concerned with the well-being of nonhuman stakeholders of the nine subsystems.The multidimensional view, accompanied by temporal analysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about stakeholder salience (Bundy, Shropshire, & Buchholtz, 2013) in terms of questions of power and legitimacy (Mitchell, Agle, & Wood, 1997). These questions are deeply cultural: think of the changing treatment of human beings historically. Their instrumental use as slaves is no longer regarded as legitimate nor is the power of bondage any longer a culturally acceptable form of power. Managers always manage in complex circuits of power that are culturally constituted, institutionalized, and legitimated. Increasingly, practitioners’ legitimacy flows from being beholden in an equitable relation with nonhuman actors embedded within those ecological limits that bound action; responsibility is becoming culturally enlarged.Episodically, for responsible management in contemporary times, the precautionary principle needs to be paramount in relation to all stakeholder agencies, in addition to human agents, in various ecological systems.

Dispositionally, in terms of social integration, new sets of rules and meanings in terms of audit accountabilities need to be routinized. Facilitatively, in terms of system integration, the conception of relevant network systems needs expanding from a focus simply on sociotechnic, human and organizational systems to embrace the nine planetary subsystems identified. If multidimensionality is included in the question of agency, we will see that the biosphere as well as social systems, sets normative limits to agency: what can and should be done (see Waddock, 2011). The planetary-level boundaries are examples of the kind of limits that should not be transgressed, of causal powers that should not be triggered, of standing conditions that should not be created.The outlined perspective is likely also to lead to sensitivity toward the needs of nonhuman actors, as all actors will be considered to hold agential capacities in an interconnected web of life. Interestingly, blurring the boundaries between actors in the web can be considered a key means to acknowledging and respecting the relations between actors and their networks, that is, between the parts and the wholes. Furthermore, by cultivating multidimensional understanding, managers will develop broader ethical concerns as they begin to conceive themselves as actors amidst other earthbound beings, rather than as a privileged and dominant form of life. In consequence, organizational decision making that does not privilege egotistical, human-centric approaches will understand human agency as something enmeshed with nonhuman actors, in addition to other fellow humans and organizations.To understand human agency as something enmeshed with nonhuman actors, in addition to other fellow humans and organizations, language games must change; being in the language game and the being in the flat ontology of the Anthropocene require reconciliation.

The reconciliation cannot be one wholly of social construction; if that were the case, climate sceptics would have as much validity as climate scientists, despite the latters’ grounded, modelled, and empirical understanding of materialities’ casual powers. Without a changed understanding of agency, powerful organizations are likely to continue resisting the accountabilities and controls of environmental laws and regulatory conditions that seek to keep them within the PBs.The complexity of the Anthropocene requires more holistic modes of thinking about management (Hoffman & Ehrenfeld, 2014; Hoffman & Jennings, 2018; Waddock, 2011). Theorizing management to meet the challenges of the new geological epoch requires consideration of aspects of both nature and culture. In addition, materialities such as “partnerships, materials use and supply chains, domains of corporate activity, organizations” as well as the “economic models and the metrics that are used to measure them” (Hoffman & Ehrenfeld, 2014, p. 2), need rethinking. New language games are required because both the materialities and the language games matter. The boundaries of actor networks require collective attention and consequently new language games deploying standards, ideas, tools, and approaches that constitute less destructive collaborations across multilevel networks and assemblages.

Action

In organization theory, for sustainable development to be more than an oxymoron, as Banerjee (2003) argues, organizations of different sizes, forms, and ownership types must share responsibility for restraining action within the boundaries of safe operating spaces. Of course, as Campbell et al. (2019) assert, these boundaries may already be irretrievably breached, in which case pessimism of the intellect must retain hope in the optimism of the will (Gramsci, 1971) in order to learn how organizational forms may operate, while contributing to sustainable change, as we shall suggest. Despite the volume of growing published evidence, the majority of contemporary business organizations and institutions have demonstrated that they are not prepared to take the idea of material boundaries into consideration. Admittedly, the task of connecting causalities on multiple scales is a challenge not limited to the business sector. Institutional legislative and regulatory measures need rethinking (see, e.g., Hoffman & Jennings, 2018): As Giddens (2008) argues, the state has a prime function in tackling climate change, especially in terms of negotiating international treaties and enforcing them, advocating the creation of the “ensuring state” as an enabling state that is “expected or obligated to make sure . . . processes achieve certain defined outcomes—in the case of climate change the bottom line is meeting set targets for emissions reductions” (pp. 8-9). It is important, however, not to fall prey to naivety.

Capitalism is still capitalism and without social democratic limits to its principle of freedom to consume we may well witness the sixth mass extinctions (see Ceballos et al., 2015).The Anthropocene “forms an indeterminate but insidious threshold at which many actions previously normal or insignificant have become, often in all innocence, themselves destructive, simply by virtue of human numbers and power” (Clark, 2015, p. 61). The power of human numbers can be a force for good, however. Human numbers can nudge organizations to better organizational actions but this is unlikely to be achieved without the support of the state regulatory mechanisms. Often, strategic decision makers are not fully aware of the cumulative effects of their everyday praxis and hence many remain unpersuaded of the pressing need for change in management style and organization vision (Tourish & Pinnington, 2002). From the perspective of the Anthropocene, the bottom line to which managers attend needs to encompass at least all nine subsystems in addition to concerns over profit and people.Awareness of the “Anthropocene Society” (Hoffman & Jennings, 2018), often fostered in civil society through the learning that children bring home from school, can make a difference, eroding the pessimism of those intellects arguing against a realignment of causal powers: Sustainable change may then be more evident. Business actors in TNCs have the collective resources, capabilities, and potential power to project knowledge about the Anthropocene through all their endeavors as well as the agency to reduce the rate and extent of ecological damage. Maak and Pless (2009), for instance, have highlighted the new role of “business leaders as citizens of the world” (p. 544). Such citizens assume a disposition focused on the “distant stranger” (Dobson, 2006, p. 182), characterized by “cosmopolitanism” (Delanty, 2006, p. 44).⁴

In their longitudinal case study research, Wright and Nyberg (2017) note though the failure of corporate environmentalism to galvanize Australian firms into a cosmopolitan, collective reduction of global carbon emissions. They point to the incompatibility of stockholder accountabilities and short-term business pressures with a care for sustainability of the environment in the long-term. Nevertheless, according to Winn and Pogutz (2013), there is recent evidence of an increasing number of corporate initiatives deliberately managing ecosystem functions and monitoring biological diversity and ecosystem services, although practice in this area is well ahead of management research. Related arguments of practice being ahead of theory can be found in some of the research on cross-sectoral partnerships established to implement innovative solutions to deal with the aftermath of events causing environmental crisis (Doh, Tashman, & Benischke, 2019).On the positive side, much of the research work in business management is becoming more responsive to diverse scientific, political, commercial, and community challenges of sustainability and offers many concrete proposals advancing sustainable practice in management and organization. New frameworks are being published to assist corporations and their managers with engaging in deliberative and global governance for responsible innovation (Voegtlin & Scherer, 2017). Business and management theories are now more accustomed than they were 30 years ago to accommodating concepts of social and environmental responsibility.Institutional theory, strategic management, entrepreneurship, system dynamics, network analysis, supply chain management, and social movements are just some of the areas of business and management theory that have examined issues related to the natural environment, although within these disciplines concepts of natural resources remain markedly less prevalent than do other financial, social, and intangible concepts of organizational resources and environments (George, Schillebeeckx, & Liak, 2015).

Within “Anthropocene Society” a prima facie justification arises for scholars of organization, management, and business to enrich their theoretical, conceptual representations of the natural environment. Hoffman and Jennings (2015) remark that the distinctive contribution of much institutional theory is it “emphasizes environmental problems as being not primarily technological or economic in character but behavioral and cultural” (p. 9). In addition to institutional entrepreneurship and social movements, regulative measures on corporate actors and networks are also needed for sustainable change, as proposed by Hoffman and Jennings (2018). Owing to the power of commercial actors, the enactment of these reforms requires multilevel collaboration beyond sectorial boundaries (Bonnedahl & Heikkurinen, 2019). In business and government decision making, it is often the natural environment that loses out to finance and economics in the competition for resources (Nyberg, Wright, & Kirk, 2017); thus, its increased theoretical status and representation in the social sciences, especially those of applied business, is therefore a critical issue for theory and practice.Currently, there is both abundant information as well as management tools that are available for reducing the use of natural resources and climate emissions (e.g., Lenzen et al., 2012), but management thinking and action has not demonstrated the required will to overcome the cultural constraints across their networks of activities. The language games of temporally short term and tight profitability prevail over those of irreducible causal powers vested in materialities. Effective action in response to the challenges of the PBs requires not only highly collaborative and insightful ways of enacting responsible agency (rather than merely publishing attractive reports on corporate sustainability) but also political will and direction, a strong public sector, and an ensuring state (nationally and internationally), although there are no guarantees that knowledge about how to manage a business in the Anthropocene will lead to responsible action.

That actor networks are tightly interconnected affords reason for optimism of the will. Business leaders are astutely aware of the power of their cooperation since “ . . . nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself” (Vitali et al., 2011, p. 36). They appreciate that often “strength arises [exactly] when an entity manages to assemble as many allies as possible, while weakness emerges when it is isolated or cut off from alliances” (Harman, 2007, p. 33). In close connection with state actors, the elite group of global business organizations has successfully strengthened their agency and power across the scales. While some individual members of this group are taking sustainability action with the support of, for example, multiregional input–output models (Lenzen et al., 2012), these perform inadequately as a network in relation to the Anthropocene. Establishing an effective management response to the Anthropocene requires a collective effort, through which business actors gain momentum by assembling alliances whose agency demands changes in the industry and supports democratic mechanisms to ignite change at large (Heikkurinen & Mäkinen, 2018). While acknowledging the limits of state-oriented solutionism (e.g., Scott, 1998), there must be limits to capital and it seems that only the state could ensure them.

Responsibility

Responsibility necessitates pursuit of future perfect conditions that explicitly demonstrate care directed toward multiple stakeholders, including ecosystems (cf. Heikkurinen and Bonnedahl, 2013). Approaches analogous to actor–network theory, we propose, are supportive of increasing transdisciplinary thought and education, an area that Latour repeatedly emphasizes. Based on ideas of networks and assemblages, actor–network theory offers principles for reflexive thinking and responsible action consonant with multistakeholder partnerships incorporating the needs of ecosystems. Diverse global and local community collaborations constituted on broad and representative participation will have to be instigated and nurtured by powerful elite groups in politics and business. Many of the cross-sectoral partnerships and voluntary initiatives in soft regulation and inclusion have been characterized to-date by immediate rather than elaborated interests.Latour (2014b) asserts, “the ‘anthropos’ of the Anthropocene is not exactly any body, it is made of highly localized networks of some individual bodies whose responsibility is staggering” (p. 6). It is important to ascribe responsibility for the Anthropocene “to whom and where it belongs” (Latour, 2014, p. 7). There are Common But Differentiated Responsibilities in the Anthropocene (cf. Latour, 2009). Despite existing in webs of relations, actors (whether human or not) are never fully defined by their relationships with others (Harman, 2002, 2009; Pierides & Woodman, 2012) but embody different kinds and degrees of agency (Heikkurinen, 2018; Heikkurinen et al., 2016), with consequently different responsibilities.

Latour’s work on the Anthropocene offers a variety of intellectual and cultural approaches potentially incorporating ecological modes of perception and reasoning.Owing to anthropogenic ecological damage humans have a distinct responsibility in the Anthropocene. Nonhumans, such as organizations with fictive legal personality, might well ignite changes in the biosphere as a result of their agency but it will take human initiative in the first instance. The multidimensional perspective on agency prepares a new role for humans to be more responsible and ecologically sound (Bennett, 2010). To assign responsibility solely to corporate networks is risky, even though their potential power to make a difference is great. Political action (Heikkurinen, Lozanoska, & Tosi, 2018) and activism (Niazi, 2019) as well as grassroots innovations (Seyfang & Smith, 2007) can supply the initiative.Evidently, action by multinationals can be channeled positively or negatively. In terms of the Anthropocene, there are “obligatory passage points” (OPPs; Callon, 1986) that represent strategic devices (rhetorical and material) channeling and framing the “conduct of conduct” (Dean, 2013). Actors seek to maintain, gain, or deny strategic advantage by controlling or contesting the meaning and control of these OPPs. How these OPPs are configured also fixes, for a while, the rules guiding actors’ actions and constraining available possibilities. When successful, OPPs lead to a (temporary and partial) stabilization or fixity of rules, though one that is permanently challengeable as actors continuously deploy their strategies of and for power. The OPPs can be configured while the materialities are more difficult: Their casual powers are ontologically inherent but the standing conditions through which they are triggered are not: These are a matter of social construction. Where and how actions flow is largely dependent on those language games in which they are embedded and framed. Power always entails responsibility, as Lukes (1974) makes clear.In Clegg’s (1989) framework of “circuits of power” depicting three circuits of flows these responsibilities are variously assigned. First, the episodic circuit captures visible exercises of power by actors in particular, day-to-day encounters, seeking to obtain outcomes favoring their definition of interests, for which they are responsible. These exercises depend on the configuration of the network of relations stabilized through the other two circuits.

The circuit of social integration captures prevailing rules of practice shaping actors’ dispositions to behave in certain ways and includes rules of meaning and membership defining taken-for-granted responsibilities: These are encapsulated in specific language games whose rules guide actors in making sense of the world, events, others, and themselves, hence shaping the actors’ knowledge which, in turn, underlies their (re)actions. Considerations about actors’ appropriate action, in the context of identity assumptions and claims, given their (actual or desired) status as members of certain groups, follow. “Material conditions,” based on the application of techniques of production and discipline to materialities, through production machinery, information systems, organizational structures, and business processes, convey power as facilitative, productive, positive, in the circuit of system integration, assigning material, social, and knowledge responsibilities. Together, language games and their techniques of production and discipline positioned as OPPs frame the institutional field in which actors episodically exercise power in specific interactions, as Hoffman and Jennings (2015) acknowledge. In a nutshell, organizations need strategically to first reposition the language games they are involved in because these offer the primary point of inflection in terms of addressing the thresholds of the causal powers inscribed in the PBs. For organization to contribute to sustainable change, it must play its part in these new language games implementing collaborations across assemblages of multilevel social and physical networks supporting human development that are consonant with flourishing ecosystems. Managing in the Anthropocene demands openness to a wider set of resources for reflexive thinking. Ensuring the sustainability of future generations on Earth places greater onus on business leaders because it obliges them to demonstrate higher standards of politicoethical reflection and action than hitherto.One example of repositioning can be seen in Wiesner, Chadee, and Best’s (2017) study of leaders of small- and medium-size companies who have reputation in their industries for environmental sustainability and commit to continuous learning and improvement, influencing others and becoming “ES innovators.” Bennett (2010) notes that “corporate regulation is one place where intentions might initiate a cascade of effects” and wonders whether, perhaps “the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating” (pp. 37-38). Following this line of argumentation, it is not meaningful to discuss morality as separate from nonhuman objects or the “material” world of technology (Ivakhiv, 2002; Latour, 2002).

In circuits of power, the technical and the moral are inseparable because together they constitute the OPPs (see Clegg, 1989).While the blurring of boundaries between human and nonhuman actors must be acknowledged, this must not happen at the expense of losing those relations that make actors different. For example, it is commonly accepted that the reflexive qualities of intelligence expressed in a complex sign system of language and the exosomatic technological systems of humans are something that characterizes humankind. Consequently, only humans are able to project something like a future perfect. Empirical analyses of sustainable entrepreneurship have identified a group of cognitive, emotional, and relational competences, under the rubric of strategic management, that promote diversity, systems thinking, normative, foresight, and interpersonal relations (Ploum, Blok, Lans, & Omta, 2018). These are reflexive qualities for future perfect construction. In short, human actors have the capacity to engage in innovative forms of socioecological agency (Boons, 2013). One need not rely on the voluntarism of individual acts of entrepreneurship, however; for capacities to become practicalities, corporate networks require normative encouragement and this is where, for instance, the proposal for states’ implementing ecotaxation becomes relevant, as a nudge that may be required.The role of the state as an actor is crucial. The powers of the state include the monopoly of the right to taxation. The rate and principles of taxation are a piece of social construction in which various imaginaries can be encoded. As such, taxation changes become exogenous environmental contingencies with which organizations are obliged to deal. At present, some jurisdictions, including the United States and Australia, extend the right to tax profits globally. Taxing the foreign profits of TNCs on a global basis could be extended in a number of ways.First, it could be recognized, as the French government has proposed, that companies lacking physical presence in a country in which they are accruing profits through large numbers of online users or customers should be taxed at the same rate as bricks and mortar businesses. If this proposal were adopted by various national governments then the beginnings of a global tax scheme would be in place. Such a scheme could be extended to include ecological taxation—ecotax—that could be levied as an excess and additional tax on those business actions whose activities anywhere in the world were breaching any of the nine PBs. The state is also the only actor that could establish caps on production either directly or through Pigouvian taxes, which Alcott (2010) sees as necessary to guarantee policy success for sustainable change. The Global Resources Dividend (GRD) proposed by Pogge (2001) might be a base model. Businesses would pay a tax on any services or resources that they use or sell rated proportionately to the harm that they create in extraction or production.

Those business organizations that could establish that they had enacted policies that minimized the harm to the lowest rated harm decile of the tax register would pay a disproportionately lower tax than those businesses that could not so demonstrate that they qualified. Proportionality would vary with the demonstration of performance. Those organizational actors that could demonstrate commitment to circular economy principles would clearly be advantaged. Our line of argument is supportive of Landrum’s (2017) stages model of sustainable development where the aim is to move away from weak sustainability typical of compliance and business-centered corporate approaches toward regenerative and co-evolutionary sustainability, where the emphasis is on absolute reductions of production and consumption activities (Bonnedahl & Heikkurinen, 2019).The onus is on business organizations to demonstrate why they should not be taxed at the highest band. Tax will act as a nudge to the adoption of policies with transformative potential. Implementing some version of such an ecotax would entail not only discussions about practicality but also a normative affirmation of the power of projective reach. Again, the onus is on companies to demonstrate the precautionary principle in practice; those that fail to do so would be subject to highly discriminate taxes. If the majority of organizations were paying their GRD, the tax benefits of doing so would help deter deviance as self-interest drove responsible action. There would be added pressure on each country to enforce the gathering of GRD funds within its borders because of the tax advantages of so doing; the hosting of rogue businesses by noncompliant states could lead to these businesses being singled out for preferential and discriminatory tax treatment in the more developed states that implemented the ecotax principles.

Conclusion

In this article, we have examined how agency should be understood in order to overcome the persistent management challenges in the Anthropocene. We commenced by defining the Anthropocene not only as a geological epoch but also as a metamorphic zone in which boundaries between actors are increasingly blurred. We noted that this sets major challenges to the classic perspectives on agency; consequently, we drew on relational perspectives to meet the needs of the present age where planetary boundaries are being transgressed. Based on the observation that the boundaries between actors are increasingly unclear and that action is not predetermined, we chose to expand conceptions of agency beyond their normal locus of being situated only in humans.A multidimensional understanding of agency that could support executives in managing their business networks through compliance with systematic audit and institutions in relation to ecological limits and hence contribute to sustainable change was proposed. In the horizontal dimension, a key means of respecting nonhumans is to blur the boundaries between earthbound actors. Different forms of life unfold in a complex conjoint genesis with humans. In the vertical dimension, hierarchical relations are of central importance in defining boundaries between networks of actors in ecosystems. An analysis of the state of biodiversity would be impossible to conduct without some idea of boundaries between species as part of certain ecosystems.

Boundary blurring (between actors) and boundary formation (between actors and networks) are complementary processes. Boundaries are not simply here and now; they are also temporal in that where the boundary is drawn today has potentially profound effects on the boundaries of tomorrow—the essence of the case for action against global warming. Establishing boundaries is of crucial importance in highlighting the uniqueness of actors and acknowledging responsibilities. To the extent that the boundary blurring between human and nonhuman actors signifies a retreat from anthropocentrism, the chances of life remaining within planetary boundaries increases. In other words, if the needs of nonhuman stakeholders are taken into account and met, the rate of biodiversity loss may begin to diminish and climate change slowed. Similar desired effects might be expected in terms of the other ecological boundaries.Future studies on the Anthropocene and organizations could complement current ontological, epistemological, and axiological premises with novel positions that do not center on the human but are more inclusive in terms of actors and networks. Theoretical lenses that extend beyond anthropocentrism and empirical analysis of human and nonhuman interaction (not limited to the human point of view) will be required. To ignite sustainable change, studies could identify the powerful actors in society and connect them to their responsibility for our common earthbound future. In practice, the process of rethinking agency leads to greater consideration of the realms of actors and their interlinkages, implying greater attention on the part of those agencies with reflexive capabilities and command of key OPPs in circuits of power, the TNCs (Clegg, Geppert, & Hollinshead, 2018). Human agents, particularly managers in the most powerful TNCs, have distinct responsibility for the Anthropocene as a result of a concentration of circuits of power in their networks. Managers in TNCs can be motivated in terms of enlightened self-interest; for instance, global trajectories of action can be nudged in more ecologically responsible directions through devices such as ecotaxation.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant (Agreement No. 707652).

Notes

1.Although relatively early in the process one prominent social scientist saw the dependence of this new form of industrial capitalist form of life on the exploitation of nature: Weber (2013) concluded his investigations of the spirit of capitalism with the observation that the Puritan ethos, on which capitalism’s primitive accumulation was founded, “‘wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.’ For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt” (pp. 182-183).

2.These actor–network relations have been traced across disciplinary fields from politics and discourse theories (Luukkonen, 1997; Venturini, 2010) to managing organizational change (Blomme, 2014; Ezzamel, 1994; Lee & Hassard, 1999), learning (Fox, 2000), routines (Bapuji, Hora, & Saeed, 2012), responsibility (Helin & Babri, 2015), work (Houtbeckers & Taipale, 2017), and the environment (Magnani, 2012; Ogden et al., 2013). Critical reviews of the idea of actor–network relations have appeared in the work of McLean and Hassard (2004), Alvesson, Hardy, and Harley (2008), Whittle and Spicer (2008), and Alcadipani and Hassard (2010), among others.

3.That this is the case does not preclude the irreducible difference between a concept and an object. Language games, signifiers, signs, and sensations exist in conjunction with human actors and nonhumans.4.It is noteworthy that these are the very terms in which a recent significant retreat from cosmopolitanism has been conducted: Brexit; see Alcaraz, Sugars, Nicolopoulou, and Tirado (2016) for relevant discussion of “cosmopolitanism or globalization.”

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Author Biographies

Pasi Heikkurinen in a senior lecturer at the University of Helsinki and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Leeds.

Stewart Clegg is a distinguished professor at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Ashly H. Pinnington is a professor at the British University in Dubai.

Katerina Nicolopoulou is a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde.

Jose M. Alcaraz is a professor at the Munich Business School.

The way we talk about climate change and our effect on the planet is all wrong—and increasingly dangerous.

By David Sepkoski APRIL 16, 2021,

Welcome to the age of humans—the Anthropocene. Scientists, academics, public intellectuals, and policymakers have been using this term to describe a new geological epoch marking an unprecedented era of human impact on the natural environment. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, carrying through the development and testing of nuclear weapons, and peaking in recent decades with rapid global warming and the catastrophic depletion of the Earth’s biodiversity, the Anthropocene is often framed as an existential threat to the survival of the human species. Like some of the great environmental catastrophes of the past—such as the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago—the footprint of human activity will be present in the geological record for millions of years to come. Or so the reasoning goes.

This article is adapted from Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity From Darwin to the Anthropocene by David Sepkoski (University of Chicago Press, 360 pp., $35, September 2020).

There is every reason to be alarmed about anthropogenic climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, all of which have been accelerating in recent decades and do pose existential threats. Warming trends could cause the collapse of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets that would dramatically increase sea levels by dozens of feet by the end of this century. If that happens, say goodbye to New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Mumbai, London, Istanbul, Dubai, St. Petersburg, Mumbai, and Beijing, to name just some of the most populous cities that would be drowned. Left unchecked, climate change would also involve ocean acidification (as the oceans absorb atmospheric carbon), terrible droughts and heat waves (with equatorial regions reaching unlivable temperatures for much of the year), air pollution at unbreathable levels in many major cities, and mass extinctions of plants and animals at levels not seen since some of the greatest geological catastrophes in the Earth’s history—perhaps as severe as the “great dying” at the end of the Permian period some 250 million years ago, when as many as 96 percent of all living species may have died out. The resulting Earth from this catastrophe may become devoid not only of humans but perhaps of most complex life on land and in the seas.

Scientists have been aware of these threats for decades, but it is only recently that we’ve begun to talk about human damage to the Earth as a potential geological transformation. In the early 2000s, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen proposed formally amending the established geological timescale to acknowledge the irreversible changes that humans had wrought. These changes, Crutzen and others have argued, will be permanently recorded in the layers of the Earth: a spike in radioactivity from atomic testing, human-made microfossils of plastic and other industrial compounds that will take millions of years to decompose, and of course drastic changes to the composition of life.

The Anthropocene is a somewhat controversial notion in geology. Crutzen’s proposal has been taken up by various professional bodies responsible for ratifying changes to the geological timescale, including the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences, although no formal action has yet been taken.

As a matter of dating and stratigraphic nomenclature, this question can and will be decided on empirical grounds. But over the past decade, the Anthropocene has taken on a much broader cultural significance: Championed by observers in fields including climate science, history, and the arts, it now signifies not just a proposal about how we date the Earth’s history but an existential crisis for late modern human society and a diagnosis of its failures. As Crutzen and collaborators argued in an influential 2007 article, the Anthropocene embodies the recognition of a “profound shift in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature,” in which “[h]umankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come.” In this perspective, the Anthropocene is not merely a proposal for renaming a geological epoch but a new state of awareness about the permanence of human intervention in the natural world. It crystallizes a host of new and preexisting anxieties and ambitions relating to climate change, biodiversity preservation, geoengineering, biotechnology, human population expansion, environmental and economic justice, and the future of humankind on, or even beyond, the planet Earth.

The Anthropocene’s relevance as a cultural touchstone is indisputable. Its usefulness as a guide for how to act and feel at a time of crisis is another matter.

The Anthropocene’s relevance as a cultural touchstone is indisputable. Its usefulness as a guide for how to act and feel at a time of crisis is another matter. The Anthropocene concept is part of a long history in the West of projecting current anxieties onto imagined catastrophic futures. For nearly 2,000 years, the apocalyptic theology of the Book of Revelation has influenced Western Christian theology and culture. More recently—since the later 19th century—European and American societies have experienced waves of catastrophic thinking connected to, successively, the collapse of imperial economic systems, anxieties about globalization, the specter of nuclear war, environmental degradation, and, most recently, global warming and a biodiversity crisis poised to produce a sixth mass extinction.

Thinking catastrophically can have real value if it encourages people and policymakers to address problems of momentous import. Heightened levels of anxiety about nuclear proliferation—captured by Carl Sagan’s famous “nuclear winter” hypothesis—contributed directly to major reductions in the world’s nuclear arsenals in the 1980s and 1990s. The rallying cry presented in Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring, helped curb the use of industrial pesticides and raised awareness about environmental threats posed by pollution. More recent calls to action about global warming (such as Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth) and biodiversity conservation (E.O. Wilson’s 1992 book, The Diversity of Life, or Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction) have undoubtedly raised consciousness of these issues and have had positive effects on the policies of many governments around the world.

But what do we do when the scope of the crisis is presented as so permanent, all-encompassing, and perhaps unavoidable that it will be written into the very strata of the Earth? It’s not an idle concern to wonder whether the rhetoric around the Anthropocene is so extreme, so dispiriting, and so fatalistic that it could simply paralyze us. That has certainly been the case with some recent and notable responses: In 2015, the literary scholar Roy Scranton published a book with the cheery title Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, while David Wallace-Wells’s 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth, documents a litany of catastrophes terrifying, and paralyzing, to contemplate. And these are just two of the more prominent and popular accounts of the consequences of the Anthropocene.

I’m not for a moment questioning either the reality of the crisis these authors describe or the sincerity of their responses. But it’s fair to wonder whether the way the Anthropocene has come to dominate Westerners’ imagination of the future is even accurate or helpful.

At a very basic level, the idea of naming a geologic epoch after our own species deserves more scrutiny than it has received. Geologists normally recognize geological changes after the fact, rather than in advance. The science of stratigraphy (as the study of the Earth’s layers is known) essentially breaks the geological record up into a series of roughly equal units of time that are demarcated by observable changes in the composition of rock layers, called signals, and the distinctive types of plant and animal fossils that characterize particular layers.

It turns out that a number of these stratigraphic breaks that distinguish one period from another—we can look to the famous boundary at the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods, when the dinosaurs died out—do correspond to major environmental upheavals or mass extinctions. In the case of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, one of the most significant signals is an anomalous layer of the element iridium, which is quite rare on Earth but common elsewhere in the solar system. The discovery of this layer in the 1980s led scientists to propose (and eventually confirm) the hypothesis that a collision with a massive asteroid triggered a massive calamity that blanketed the Earth in dust and ash for more than a year, wiping out not only the dinosaurs but a host of other species on land and in the seas. More recent research has detected the signal of the wildfires and volcanic eruptions that contributed to this extinction, and it’s not unreasonable to expect that future geologists (perhaps sentient cockroaches or extraterrestrial visitors?) might detect a similar signature from our own era. But whether or not that’s the case, it will be the job of other, far-future observers to document this.

In a more basic sense, isn’t it a little grandiose to project ourselves onto geological history in the way that the Anthropocene supposes? The human species has been around for a little over 100,000 years (or a few million years if you count our direct hominid ancestors) and only dominant on a global scale during the last few thousand. That’s a vanishingly small percentage of the 4.5 billion years that the Earth has been around or even the roughly 3.5 billion years during which life has existed. The typical species longevity in the fossil record is about a million years, so we’re still well short of—and quite possibly will not achieve—even an average duration. In contrast, the dinosaurs (of course a group, not a single species) dominated for some 165 million years, and the humble cockroaches have been around for a staggering 280 million years.

Isn’t it a little grandiose to project ourselves onto geological history in the way that the Anthropocene supposes?

Beyond that, both the formal geological proposal and some of the more superheated cultural discussions of the Anthropocene seem more than a little anthropocentric. Even if the worst does come to pass and we wipe ourselves out through our actions (combined with inaction), I’m not convinced that the Earth will remember us much at all. One thing that paleontologists who have studied earlier eras of environmental crisis have discovered is that the Earth and its inhabitants tend to rebound fairly quickly: Even the great extinction event at the end of Permian period saw a fairly rapid return of life’s diversity, and of course the Cretaceous-Paleogene event that ushered out the dinosaurs simultaneously ushered in our distant mammalian ancestors. Mass extinctions, it turns out, can actually be a source of new evolutionary pathways and greater levels of species diversity.

In many cultural discussions of the Anthropocene, it’s often argued, as justification for the label, that no species has ever had such a profound impact on the Earth as a whole. That’s simply not true. Photosynthesizing cyanobacteria some 2.4 billion years ago produced perhaps the greatest environmental revolution in the Earth’s history, when in a relatively short period they drastically reduced atmospheric and marine carbon dioxide and dramatically increased levels of oxygen in what is known as the Great Oxygenation Event. This set the stage for the evolution of all complex life. Nothing we could possibly do as a species will ever rival that, but the humble blue-green algae still don’t have an epoch named after them.

There’s also a certain conflation of victimhood and hubris in some of the Anthropocene rhetoric. Anthropogenic climate change and mass extinctions are often compared to the impersonal geological triggers, like asteroids or volcanoes, of past crises. At the same time, we like to compare our fate to those of long-dead prehistoric groups. Which is it—are we the asteroid or the dinosaur? As it turns out, the dinosaurs did nothing to deserve their fate; they simply had the misfortune to have a giant rock fall on their heads, rendering their environment inhospitable to millions of years of natural selection and adaptation. Humans, on the other hand, have been making a concerted effort to transform their own environment, and on some level, proponents of the Anthropocene seem to want to give them credit for that.

One could reasonably argue that despite their relatively short presence, humans have had an outsized impact, and that’s certainly true. But the Anthropocene concept also reflects the tendency for humans to put their names on everything they touch: from prehistoric megaliths to sports stadiums to office towers. It may be appropriate to memorialize our impact with a geological epoch, or it may not be, but it’s hard to see what the rush is to do so. As the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it in a 1990 essay, from a geologist’s perspective “our planet will take good care of itself and let time clear the impact of any human malfeasance.” 

The term Anthropocene is derived from the Greek word for human, anthropos. The cultural concept, accordingly, addresses humanity as a whole, both in assigning blame for the coming catastrophe and in imagining solutions (or the lack thereof). The implication is that people, as a whole, are a problem.

Proponents of this view argue with some justification that whatever their source, the technological innovations that have produced major changes to the Earth’s climate and environment—carbon dioxide emissions, industrial pollution, artificial radioactivity, deforestation, etc.—have been global in their impact. That is certainly true. But it’s also worth asking whether the responsibility for these consequences—and, perhaps more importantly, the agency in responding to them—is distributed fairly in Anthropocene commentaries.

China and India, for example, are among the leaders in global carbon dioxide production (No. 1 and 3 respectively, sandwiching the United States at No. 2). But Europe and the United States have been releasing carbon into the atmosphere for much longer and have reaped industrialization’s social, political, and economic benefits for two centuries. Is it fair for Western observers to demand the same level of accountability from developing economies in the global south?

Moreover, as a number of recent critics have noted, the Anthropocene is tied very closely to a specific form of economic and industrial development—to capitalism, in other words. For that reason, some authors have suggested replacing “Anthropocene” with “Capitalocene,” or even“Plantationocene,” to acknowledge the roles that Western economic development and, in particular, the system of industrialized agriculture that has dominated since the late 18th century have had on climate and environmental change.

A mountain of tires in the Spanish countryside near Madrid on Sept. 24, 2014. PABLO BLAZQUEZ DOMINGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES

There are very good arguments in favor of naming and shaming the real perpetrators responsible for initiating these trends, but these alternative proposals have problems as well. In the first place, if what we’re really describing is a recent historical trend in economic policy and industrial technology, this starts to sound less and less like a genuine geological epoch. One of the signature features of the Anthropocene is its insistence on merging the scales of human and natural history and forcing humans to think about their role as agents in shaping their natural environment (something biologists call “niche construction” when discussing nonhuman species). Taken at face value, the Anthropocene involves humans, but it also involves a wide array of nonhuman actors and agents as well: the crops that make up today’s agricultural monocultures, the cows and pigs that produce atmospheric methane and other pollutants, the toxic cyanobacteria that thrive in acidifying oceans. These agents know nothing of capitalism or plantations or even of humans themselves in some cases.

On the human front, one can have real concerns about whether proposed solutions to climate and environmental crisis take into account issues of global social justice, self-determination, and agency. I am adamantly not arguing that unchecked economic development should take precedence to combating climate change, but we should be worried about who stands to benefit—and lose—in various solutions that have been proposed.

If what we’re really describing is a recent historical trend in economic policy and industrial technology, this starts to sound less and less like a genuine geological epoch.

Among those authors who have been most fatalistic about the Anthropocene, pessimistic scenarios seem to apply equally to everyone, everywhere. But as any resident of Mumbai or São Paulo will tell you, conditions are already catastrophic, with dangerous levels of air pollution and extreme heat. Among the areas projected to suffer most from rise in sea level by 2050, the vast majority are in the global south. Sure, New York and London and Amsterdam are also threatened, but they are part of societies with vastly greater economic and political resources. For residents of the global north, the effects of climate change have been—and will likely continue to be—more incremental. As the Anthropocene critic Jedediah Purdy puts it, “For all the talk of crisis that swirls around the Anthropocene, it is unlikely that a changing Earth will feel catastrophic or apocalyptic. … Indeed, the Anthropocene will be like today, only more so.” The sense of urgency, then, for immediate solutions to these problems is hardly distributed equally among those likely to be affected.

This concern applies to potential solutions as well. A variety of proposals have been floated, ranging from fairly uncontroversial steps like carbon neutrality and green architecture to the more fantastical, including broad geoengineering initiatives like carbon sequestration and giant orbital mirrors to block sunlight—and even colonies on Mars or elsewhere to escape this planet. These proposals raise the obvious concern about unintended consequences: We simply have no idea what cascading environmental effects such interventions may have, nor have most of these technologies even been invented. They also carry the hubristic sentiments present in the initial Anthropocene proposal (Crutzen and other central proponents have advocated these steps from the start) to a potentially frightening level. Blithely arguing that what technology has broken can be fixed by more technology seems dangerously oblivious to what got us into this mess in the first place.

And such steps simply underscore the inequalities that are already growing exponentially today. The vast sums of money and resources required to carry out these fanciful initiatives are clearly possible only for the richest and most developed economies—those societies that have already benefited from decades and centuries of unchecked industrialization, by the way. What guarantee do we have that those societies that pay for these solutions wouldn’t expect to benefit most from them or be particularly concerned about collateral damage to the economies and environments of societies that can’t? Again, Purdy sounds a necessary warning here, predicting that the “disasters of the Anthropocene in our near future will seem to confirm the rich countries’ resilience, flexibility, entrepreneurial capacity, and that everlasting mark of being touched by the gods, good luck, [while] amplifying existing inequality.”

To be clear, global society does face potentially catastrophic risks from anthropogenic climate change and other threats. We must act to address these problems, and we must act now. We must focus on the parts of the globe where human suffering is already extreme. But however you look at it—as a geological proposal, as a cultural touchstone, or as a set of policy solutions—the Anthropocene is overrated. It may even be dangerous.

David Sepkoski is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/16/climate-change-anthropocene-overrated-humans/

by Daniel Hartley

Against the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a term geologists have begun using to refer to a new geological epoch, in which the action of humans has had such a dramatic effect upon the Earth’s climate, land, oceans and biosphere that humanity itself must now be considered a geological force in its own right1. Whilst there is some disagreement over when precisely the Anthropocene began, scientists generally date it to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, mainly because of the newly-invented steam engine and the enormous expansion in the use of fossil fuels. The evidence adduced for the ‘Anthropocene’ is a series of stratigraphic signals – that is, lithological, geochemical and palaeobiological traces that are measured and interpreted by geologists in the present, or which will be read by imagined geologists in the future2.

Superficially, of course, there is no real problem with this. Within the strict limitations of geology as an academic discourse, the ‘Anthropocene’ is a relatively harmless term. The dangers arise, however, when geologists enter the political arena, calling for collective ecological intervention on the basis of their conception of the Anthropocene. For there exists something like a ‘spontaneous ideology’ of the scientists who have written on the Anthropocene, and whether they are aware of this problem or not, they have produced an implicit philosophy of history. This philosophy has as its theoretical corollary a specific type of abstract, naturalistic materialism, about which Marx himself wrote the following: ‘The weaknesses of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality’3.

It is just such ‘venturing beyond,’ and the incoherent discourse which inspires it, that I oppose. At the heart of the Anthropocene lies the Anthropos: the human. But what or who is this ‘Anthropos’ exactly? No clear definition is ever given, and yet the literature on the Anthropocene regularly refers to such phenomena as ‘the human enterprise’. The problem with this is that, as Marx pointed out in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ such a conception of humanity presupposes ‘an internal, ‘dumb’ generality which naturally unites the many individuals’4, as opposed to a historical conception of humanity as internally differentiated and constantly developing via internal contradictions. To speak of the ‘human enterprise’ is to make of humanity an abstract corporation in which ‘we’re all in this together’ – the David Cameron maxim of 2009 – thus belying the reality of class struggle, exploitation and oppression.

Moreover, the dating of the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution – because of the advent of the steam engine – points to its technological bias. Indeed, the Anthropocene discourse is a prime example of technological determinism: the notion that technological innovation is the motor of history, as opposed to the Marxist understanding in which historical development is driven by class struggle. As Jason W. Moore has observed, the historical roots of the phenomena covered by the term ‘Anthropocene’ lie, not in the invention of the steam engine, but in ‘the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization’5 ; this marked ‘a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities’6. Thus, inherent to the Anthropocene discourse is a conception of historical causality which is purely mechanical: a oneon-one billiard ball model of technological invention and historical effect, which is simply inadequate to explain actual social and relational modes of historical causation. The fact that technology itself is bound up with social relations, and has often been used as a weapon in class war, plays no role in this discourse whatsoever. Marx’s dictum that ‘[i]t would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against workingclass revolt’7 is unthinkable within such a purview. To put it bluntly, then, for the Anthropocene technology is not political.

Even from a literary-critical perspective the Anthropocene is problematic. Take this representative passage, for instance: ‘Pre-industrial humans, still a long way from developing the contemporary civilization that we know today, nevertheless showed some early signs of accessing the very energyintensive fossil fuels on which contemporary civilization is built’8. Just as Sartre remarked in Les mots, the biographies of ‘great men’ only ever see the child as the retrospectively projected necessity of what came after, thereby voiding the past present of its true contradictory presence, so the Anthropocene can only ever think the past in its proleptic trajectory towards our present. Its specific narrative mode translates the time of initiative and praxis into the time of pure physical necessity. Moreover, precisely because of this, it can only explain our own present as part of the empty, homogeneous time of linear succession, which increasingly contracts as ecological catastrophe approaches.

This implicit philosophy of historical temporality goes hand in hand with a Whig view of history as one endless story of human progress and enlightenment. The following two quotations clearly exemplify this tendency:

‘Migration to cities usually brings with it rising expectations and eventually rising incomes, which in turn brings an increase in consumption’
‘The onset of the Great Acceleration [scientists’ name for the period of increased ‘human’ activity following WWII] may well have been delayed by a half-century or so, interrupted by two world wars and the Great Depression’9 (my italics)

The first sentence seems almost wilfully blind to the history of mass urban poverty, gentrification and accumulation by dispossession, whilst the second seems to claim that the bloodiest century in human history – including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Dresden bombing, the Gulags, and the Holocaust – is a mere blip on the rising line of progress. Needless to say, such a view of human history is, at best, problematic.

Finally, and as a logical consequence of the four preceding problems, the majority of the solutions proposed by scientists are technical (mass climate- and geo-engineering projects, and so on) and managerial in nature – often couched in the language of ‘governance systems’ – rather than political. The scientists arrive at such apolitical solutions precisely because they never pose the Anthropocene as a political problem in the first place. Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent claim that ‘Justice has become a survival technology’10 is practically unthinkable within the presuppositions of the scientific representations of the Anthropocene. Just as they cannot see technology as a political force, so they cannot see politics as a material force. Indeed, they have a problematic conception of materiality as such.

Thus, we can see quite clearly that the mode of presentation of a particular problem will to a large extent determine the range and quality of the possible solutions one is able to develop. Sketching out the theoretical basis of a Marxist approach to the same phenomena to which the Anthropocene itself refers may help to make the political stakes – and hence the possible political solutions – somewhat clearer. Jason W. Moore’s suggestion that we replace the ‘Anthropocene’ with the term ‘Capitalocene’ – the age of capital, which would of course begin with the dawn of capitalism itself – is a very useful corrective, not only because it puts capitalism as an economic and social system at the heart of its theory, but also because it forces us to find a middle way between humanist and posthuman thought11.

Capitalocene and World-Ecology

Moore defines world-ecology as a ‘framework of historical interpretation that dialectically unifies capital, power and nature’12. As in Nancy Fraser’s recent work, Moore argues for an expanded conception of capitalism, one which goes beyond the purely economic: for him, capitalism is ‘a civilization that is co-produced by humans and the rest of nature’13. Thus, Moore’s principal aim is to overcome all accounts of human (and capitalist) history which are premised upon what he calls the ‘Cartesian divide’14 between man and nature (or nature and society).

Central to Moore’s world ecology is his reconceptualization of Marxist value theory.He writes that ‘[w]hile Marxist political economy has taken value to be an economic phenomenon with systemic implications, I argue that value-relations are a systemic phenomenon with a pivotal economic moment’15.To simplify Moore’s innovation, one might say that classical Marxism has always focused on value as ‘abstract social labour’ – and its concomitant: socially necessary labour time – within what Moore calls the ‘zone of exploitation,’ that is, the ‘hidden abode’ of capitalist commodity production, ruled by the capital-labour relation. Moore does not dispute the classical labour theory of value, but he emphasises its immanent relation to another zone: the zone of appropriation. This refers to all those realms of human and extra-human ‘unpaid work’; from women’s domestic labour or social reproduction to the colonial expropriation of natural resources. That is, capitalism cannot be reduced to the realm of paid work alone, since without the constant appropriation of unpaid work – again, human and extra-human – it could not expand and perpetuate itself. He summarizes the main points of his position thus:

If we take the nexus paid/unpaid work as our premise – implicitly suggested by ecological and feminist scholars – the implications are significant. Capitalism and value relations cannot be reduced to a relation between the owners of capital and the possessors of labor-power. To repeat: the historical condition of socially necessary labor-time is socially necessary unpaid work. This observation opens a vista on capitalism as a contradictory unity of production and reproduction that crosses the Cartesian boundary [nature/society]. The crucial divide is between the zone of paid work (the exploitation of commodified labor-power) and the zone of unpaid work (the reproduction of life). This contradictory unity works by creating a relatively narrow sphere of commodity production within which laborpower can be said to yield either rising or falling productivity … This narrow sphere, premised on the exploitation of labor-power within commodity production, operates in relation to a much more expansive sphere of appropriation, through which the diversity of nature’s ‘free gifts’ – including the reproduction of life from the family to the biosphere – may be taken up into commodity production, but not fully capitalized.16

In other words, what Moore is emphasizing is that there are two fundamental contradictions which structure capitalism as a civilization: that between capital and labour, and that between the zone of exploitation (commodity production) and the zone of appropriation (unpaid work).

Alongside ‘abstract social labour,’ then, Moore posits the existence of something he calls ‘abstract social nature’: ‘the family of processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify, measure, and code human and extra-human natures in service to capital accumulation’17. It is those sets of activities and methods that seek out and make amenable to capital realms of ‘unpaid work’ which, following Maria Mies, he summarizes as ‘women, nature and colonies’.18 Moore distinguishes ‘abstract social nature’ from what Stephen Shapiro has called the ‘cultural fix,’ which Shapiro defines as follows (Moore’s parentheses and emphases): ‘[It comprises those] social and cultural matters involving the reproduction of class identities and relations over time lengths greater than a single turnover cycle [of capital]’, which are ‘intrinsic, not superficial, to the [accumulation] of capital’.19 The cultural fix thus seems to refer to all those hegemonic and ideological processes which legitimate the long-term reproduction of the social relations of production. Moore summarizes the distinction between ‘abstract social nature’ and the ‘cultural fix’ thus: ‘If cultural fixes naturalize capitalism’s punctuated transitions in the relations of power, capital, and nature, abstract social natures make those transitions possible’20.

The problem here, however, is that the distinction between abstract social nature and the cultural fix works only so long as it is provisional, yet there is a danger that the distinction will be rendered into discret categories. There is, in other words, a danger of returning to the very dualism that worldecology seeks to avoid. For treating mapping and rationalization processes as ‘scientific,’ and ideological legitimation as ‘cultural,’ may prove insufficiently relational. Indeed, retaining the distinction may prevent Moore from taking the step that would finally allow us to overcome the binary of man and nature at the level of theory. The problem originates in the specific aims and focus of the world-ecology framework itself. Moore has developed a truly groundbreaking argument that understands historical capitalism as a series of world ecological regimes, each of which produces a unique ‘historical nature’21 arising out of, and ending in, ‘developmental’ or ‘epochal’ crisis (the latter being the case with feudalism and, potentially, neoliberalism). That is, Moore is primarily concerned with the different configurational weights that come into play during both the transition from one accumulation regime to the next and the ‘normal’ operation of those accumulation regimes in the period of their consolidation and boom. But by equating those cyclical periods of transition and stabilization with abstract social nature and the cultural fix respectively, he is in danger of overlooking the extent to which each of these processes is dialectically constituted by the other – and hence the way in which both processes are present in both periods of transition and consolidation of worldecological regimes, albeit in shifting relations of dominance. Thus, one possible development of Moore’s work would be to argue that culture is a constitutive moment of abstract social nature, and vice versa, and hence, more broadly, that it is the dialectical interrelation of abstract social nature and culture which is a constitutive moment of the value relation.

To try and make this point a little clearer, I shall give two brief examples. The purpose of these examples is not to provide an alternative model of historical explanation to Moore’s but rather to tease out one under-theorized aspect within it. The examples show the mutual imbrication of abstract social nature and the cultural fix within any period of historical capitalism, yet they do not account for the shifting configurations between abstract social nature and culture in any historically singular period of transition or consolidation. This would require a far lengthier engagement with the minutiae of Moore’s wealth of empirical examples. Nonetheless, the basic insight still holds.

In his recent book, River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson describes the way in which slaves’ bodies were standardized for the market: ‘The reports [filed by slaving firms] formalized a system of grading slaves – “Extra Men, No. 1 Men, Second Rate or Ordinary Men, Extra Girls, No. 1 Girls, Second Rate or Ordinary Girls”, and so on – which allowed them to abstract the physical differences between all kinds of human bodies into a single scale of comparison based on the price they thought a given person would bring in the market’22. Here, we see in practice what Moore refers to as ‘abstract social nature’: the bodies are being standardized and made measurable for the market. But it must be added that one of the conditions of possibility of this process of standardization is an ideological-hegemonic configuration capable not only of legitimizing this practice but of, firstly, producing the callousness of the human gaze necessary to effect this standardization and, secondly, the social and material pay-off for doing so. Indeed, in a later section on the development of racial ideology in the American South, Johnson himself writes with remarkable insight into the co implication of both what Moore would term ‘abstract social nature’ and ‘cultural fix’:

The agricultural order of the landscape, the standing. The agricultural order of the landscape, the standing order of slavery, the natural order of the races, and the divine order of earthly dominion were not separable for a man like Harper [a slaveholder]; they were fractal aspects of one another. His eschatology was rooted in his ecology. … Slaveholders were fully cognizant of slaves’ humanity – indeed, they were completely dependent on it. But they continually attempted to conscript – signify, channel, limit, and control – the forms that humanity could take in slavery. The racial ideology of Harper and Cartwright [another slaveholder] was the intellectual conjugation of the daily practice of the plantations they were defending: human beings, animals and plants forcibly reduced to limited aspects of themselves, and then deployed in concert to further slaveholding dominion.23

What Johnson achieves in this passage is something approaching a mode of historical writing which fuses ‘abstract social nature’ and the ‘cultural fix’. As already noted, however, a stand alone example like this tells us very little about the shifting mutuality of abstract social nature and the cultural fix through different world-ecological regimes.

The second example comes from Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, in which she explicates the systematic violence perpetrated against women in the transition to capitalism. This included not only the enclosure of the commons, which had been such a vital source of sociality and relative power for women in the Middle Ages, and the patriarchy of the wage – in which only men had the right to the wage, and women’s labour was simply appropriated – but also a whole series of legal, spatial, disciplinary and ideological attacks. An entire discourse was developed with the sole purpose of the vilification and inferiorization of women. Thus, if, as Marxist-feminism has made clear, women’s unpaid labour has been historically vital to the functioning of capitalism, then we must conclude from such examples that culture is not only a force of ideological legitimation, but is itself a materially constitutive moment in the value relation. The ideological attacks on women were precisely about controlling them and making their unpaid work appropriable by capital. Thus, whilst ‘abstract social nature’ and ‘cultural fix’ can be analytically separated, in practice they always go together.

The political upshot of all this is quite dramatic, since, at the extreme, it means that the battle against the capitalist production of climate change must be waged at several levels simultaneously: of course, we must attack self-evidently ‘ecological’ phenomena such as new oil pipelines, deforestation, fracking, and such like, but – and this is crucial – we must also attack those elements of capitalist civilization which appear to have no immediate relation to ecology, but which are in fact internal conditions of its possibility: violence against women both literal and symbolic, the structural obscurity of domestic labour, institutional racism, and so on. For, at its outer limit, ecological struggle is nothing but the struggle for universal emancipation. In this light, it then becomes clear why ‘world-ecology’ is potentially politically relevant: it unifies these struggles at the level of theory.

I wish to end on a more polemical note. In an otherwise thought-provoking and sophisticated 2008 article on the Anthropocene, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote that global warming will ultimately affect rich and poor alike: ‘Unlike in the crises of capitalism,’ he says, ‘there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged’24. Consequently, he suggests that we should understand humanity, not as a ‘Hegelian universal arising dialectically out of the movement of history, or a universal of capital brought forth by the present crisis,’ but rather as a ‘negative universal’ that ‘arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe’25. Chakrabarty’s argument must be categorically rejected for two reasons. Firstly, it is an example of the genre that we might call ‘survivalist reasoning’: that type of reasoning which places human survival in the abstract and at all costs above all other political commitments. I argue, however, that if Marxism for Althusser was a theoretical anti humanism, then it should also be seen as a theoretical anti-survivalism. There is no commitment more vital than the overthrow of capitalism, and – paradoxically – if there is even to be any hope of human survival in the abstract, it will come about only through the struggle against capital.

Secondly, Chakrabarty’s argument is also an example of the genre we might call ‘catastrophism’: that type of reasoning which sacrifices all determinate negations in the face of the one abstract negation of a general doom. Marxism, however, must also be a theoretical anti-catastrophism. Its ultimate horizon is not the impending doom of ecological catastrophe and human extinction: it is the capitalist mode of production and its dismantlement. Martin Luther, when asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, replied that he would plant a tree; the Marxist should reply: we will call for a general strike. I jest, of course, but it is only by fostering such indifference to catastrophe that we can ever hope to avert it.
———————–
1 Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2011; Zalasiewicz et al. 2011
2 The temporality of the Anthropocene as a periodising category is bizarre indeed, shifting as it does between the present, a retroactively posited past and an imagined future
3Marx 1981: 494
4Marx 1975: 423
5Moore 2014a: 5
6ibid., 17
7Marx, 1981: 563
8Steffen et al. 2011: 846
9Steffen et al. 2011: 850;
10Kim Stanley Robinson et al (et al. 2010: 213)
11 One of the many paradoxes of the current theoretical conjuncture is that at the very moment in which scientists are using the term Anthropocene – forcing us to focus on our natural existence as a human species and collective human agent – the speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists are trying to problematize or go beyond the ‘human’ as such. The two appear to be flipsides of one another and, arguably, equally politically toothless.
12Moore, 2014a: 2
13ibid.: 1
142014b: 3
15(ibid.).
162014b: 9
17ibid., 12
18 cited in Moore 2014b: 22, As an example, one might think of those nineteenth-century American land surveyors who measured, mapped, rationalized and parceled out the land in order to sell it to investors Cf. Johnson 2013: 34ff
19cited in Moore 2014b: 15-16;
20ibid.: 16
21ibid.: 12-19
22 2013: 41
23Johnson 2013: 206-208
25 2009: 221
25ibid.: 222

Leonie Cornips & Louis van den Hengel

Abstract

Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork at an intensive dairy farm, this chapter examines the usefulness of posthuman critical theory for developing a new sociolinguistic approach to nonhuman animal agency. We explore how dairy cows, as encaged sentient beings whose mobility is profoundly restricted by bars and fences, negotiate their environment as a material-semiotic resource in linguistic acts of place-making. Drawing on the fields of critical posthumanism, new materialism and sociolinguistics, we explain how dairy cows imbue their physical space with meaning through materiality, the body and language. By developing a non-anthropocentric approach to language as a practice of more-than-human sociality, we argue for establishing egalitarian research perspectives beyond the assumptions of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy. The chapter thus aims to contribute towards a new understanding of nonhuman agency and interspecies relationships in the Anthropocene.

Animals in Our Midst: The Challenges of Co-existing with Animals in the Anthropocene pp 177-201| 

Part of the The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics book series (LEAF, volume 33)

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1. Introduction

Human thinkers in the western philosophical tradition have long relied upon the silencing of nonhuman animal others to confirm the exceptionalism of their own species. Since Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have defined “man” as a “rational animal” distinguished from other animals by his—and, more recently, her or their—capacity for a special kind of thinking, variously described as self-consciousness, reason, or representational thought (Cull 2015, 19). If, as Eva Meijer asserts (2016, 73), in this tradition “humans are viewed as radically different from other animals,” then language is commonly seen as “one of the main ways in which this difference is expressed.” The idea that language is what makes us human, or more precisely, that the possession of language allows humans to separate themselves from nonhuman nature, including their own animality, is indeed a key component of philosophical humanism and its exclusionary conceptions of individual and collective personhood. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2004, 33) uses the term “anthropological machine” to refer to the process by which the human is defined over and against what is nonhuman or animal, thus dividing the human subject from more-than-human forms of sentience, sociality, intelligence and communication. The strict identification of the human with language, or what Agamben (2004, 38) calls an articulation between “speaking being” and “living being,” is central to the functioning of the anthropological machine, that is, the ways in which humans ought to continually create themselves as speaking political beings by creating hierarchies between human, animal, vegetable and mineral species. The traditional humanist understanding of the human as a unique creature, one that rises above the natural world of animals, plants and the physical environment, thus rests on a fundamental denial that nonhuman animals might be capable of language and other forms of complex symbolic communication.

In this chapter, we wish to move beyond the assumptions of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy in order to advance an understanding of language that displaces the centrality of the human subject. Specifically, we will explore how dairy cows, as caged living beings or what sociologist Rhoda Wilkie (2010, 115) has called “sentient commodities,” negotiate their environment as a material-semiotic resource in the production of a meaningful world. While their physical mobility is profoundly restricted by bars and fences, we will examine how dairy cows enact social and linguistic agency through complex assemblages formed by human and nonhuman bodies, materials and environments. Starting from the assumption that, within the context of dairy farming, the subjectivities of cows and humans are continuously co-produced, we want to highlight how recognizing the linguistic agency of dairy cows may allow us to resist anthropocentric understandings of interspecies relationships and to formulate a new perspective on language as a social practice of human-nonhuman interaction. The central aim of this chapter, therefore, is to elaborate a radically post- or non-anthropocentric sociolinguistic approach that may help foster more egalitarian relationships to and between different species, or, as Agamben (2004, 83) phrases it, to bring to a “standstill” the anthropological machine that has historically articulated humanity and animality through their mutual exclusion.

The chapter has four sections. The first section examines how traditional humanist conceptions of language have structured dominant philosophical and linguistic understandings of human-animal relationships. The second section discusses the cognitive, emotional and social capacities of cows as sentient and intelligent beings, and proceeds to argue for the usefulness of posthuman critical theory for expanding the linguistic research agenda to include the study of nonhuman animal languages. This sets the stage for the third section, which discusses recent fieldwork at an intensive dairy farm in order to explore how cows, as social actors, engage in processes of linguistic place-making. Drawing, on the one hand, on recent work at the intersection of critical posthumanism and applied linguistics (Pennycook 2018) and, on the other, on new materialist conceptions of agency as a distributed phenomenon (Bennett 2010), we will elaborate a non-anthropocentric approach to human and nonhuman language practices. In the last and concluding section, we consider some of the implications of our findings for negotiating, or renegotiating, contemporary questions of nonhuman animal agency. As a whole this chapter argues that acknowledging nonhuman linguistic agency is essential for thinking through and responding to the specific conditions and challenges of the Anthropocene, where the advent of the human as a global geophysical force has muddled conventional distinctions between culture and nature, human and nonhuman, self and other. If, as Donna Haraway suggests, nonhuman animals “are not here just to think with,” but rather they are here to “live with” (Haraway 2003, 5, emphasis added), then we must indeed embrace modes of inquiry suited to the task of confronting human and nonhuman acts of language, sociality and world-making.

2. Language and the Politics of Human Exceptionalism

The view that nonhuman animals have no speech, and therefore cannot establish themselves as ethical, juridical and political subjects, goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. In a well-known passage of his Politics, Aristotle associates the formation of political community with the supposedly unique human capacity for reasoned speech. Aristotle insists that the capacity for speech informed by reason (logos) is what separates “man”, as a political animal, from the mere beasts who do not speak but simply produce sound (phonè):

And so the reason why man is a political animal more than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we often say, does nothing in vain; and man alone of the animals possesses speech (logos). The mere voice (phonè), it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is available in the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far as to have feelings of pain and pleasure and to signify them to one another), but speech, for its part, is designed to express the useful and the harmful and therefore also the just and the unjust.¹

Because nonhuman animals are incapable of speech, Aristotle argues, they cannot express the civic and moral virtues that he considered essential for the wellbeing of the household and the city-state. Aristotle, as Derrida explains in The Beast and the Sovereign (2009, 343–349), thus makes a categorical distinction between human and nonhuman animals to posit an inextricable link between language and the political sphere. His philosophy therefore not only delimits political agency to certain privileged human beings—the free adult male citizens that make up the polis—but also actively excludes nonhuman animal voices from the definition of language itself.

Many later philosophers have followed Aristotle in rejecting the linguistic and cognitive abilities of nonhuman animals (Meijer 2016, 75–76). Descartes, for example, argued that animals do not think because they cannot speak: he regarded nonhuman animals as machines, governed by the laws of physical matter alone and hence devoid of mind and self-awareness.² Although he did recognize that animals such as magpies and parrots can utter words, and that dogs make noises that might resemble speech, Descartes maintained that other animals “cannot speak as we do: that is, they cannot show that they are thinking what they are saying” (Descartes 1985, 140). Heidegger, despite his phenomenological critique of Descartes, also claimed that nonhuman animals are incapable of language and therefore lack access to what he called “world-formation”, that is, the ability to form true and conscious relationships with others and with their environment. According to Heidegger, nonhuman animals are unable to apprehend the world as such—that is to say, in the world-forming ways that language, understood as logos, allows for—because they are captivated by their instincts and bound to their environments. Animals do have access to the world—they are not, like stones and other inert objects, what Heidegger calls “worldless” (weltlos)—but their relationship to it is an impoverished one: Heidegger calls nonhuman animals “poor in world” (weltarm), whereas humans are deemed to be world-forming (weltbildend). Insofar as an animal is essentially absorbed in its environment (Umwelt), it cannot truly act in relation to the world (Welt) as such, or, as Heidegger puts it (1995, 239), an animal “behaves within an environment but never within a world.”

Although Heidegger repeatedly observes that “the relation between poverty in world and world-formation does not entail hierarchical assessment” (1995, 192), he does nonetheless privilege human beings to the extent that, in his view, only language, by which he means human language, is capable of disclosing the world as an intelligible and meaningful place. “Language alone,” he writes, “brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of what is, and consequently no openness either of what is not” (Heidegger 1971, 73). In foregrounding human language as central to the practice of world-formation, Heidegger not only seeks to demarcate human from nonhuman animals, but also postulates a distinction between language and communication that echoes Aristotle’s assumption of a fundamental difference between speech and sound, between logos and phonè, as well as Descartes’ view on animals as mindless machines. For Heidegger, language is “not only and not primarily an audible and written expression of what is to be communicated” (ibid.), but rather it serves to manifest the world as such as a field of significance: an open space of possibilities, as opposed to an animal’s instinctual captivation. Language, in this view, is thus what separates human being-in-the-world, or Dasein, from the being of other animals, which, as Heidegger writes, “has nothing to do with the selfhood of the human being comporting him- or herself as a person” (Heidegger 1995, 238–239).

Linguistics, no less than philosophy, has long reiterated the humanist understanding of language as a fundamental dividing line between human and nonhuman animals, thus reinforcing the predominant view of language as the essence of human personhood. Aristotle’s distinction between logos and phonè is still holding ground in concepts of language as either a mental or social construct in two dominant contemporary linguistic theories, namely generative grammar (Chomsky 2002, 2006) and (variationist) sociolinguistics (Labov 1994, 2001). The generative framework, advanced since the late 1950 s by Noam Chomsky and others, theorizes language as a human mental construct where processes of thinking and knowledge about abstract symbols are generated: a cognitive system or “inner mental tool” (Berwick and Chomsky 2016, 164) that works independently from phonetics or the speaking voice (phonè), which is assigned to language-in-use. This view consolidates the older assumption that the primary function of language is for human thought rather than for external communication. Even though language can, of course, be used to communicate with others, most of speech is inner speech, or, as Chomsky (2002, 148) puts it: “almost all the use of language is to oneself.” In suggesting that language, defined in the narrow sense of an abstract computational system for thought, does not occur beyond the human brain, Chomsky gives a new inflection to the Cartesian understanding of language as essentially disembodied and non-social, while at the same time reinforcing the anthropocentric idea that language constitutes “a yawning chasm between what we [humans] can do and what other animals cannot” (Berwick and Chomsky 2016, 110).³

Language, in generative linguistics, is thus seen as a species-specific ability that sets human beings apart from nonhuman animal others: “When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the ‘human essence’, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man (sic)” (Chomsky 2006, 88). Even though, in a paper coauthored for Science, Chomsky has acknowledged that “available data suggest a much stronger continuity between animals and humans with respect to speech than previously believed” (Hauser et al. 2002, 1574), he nonetheless maintains his faith in a uniquely human property of language, located either in the capacity for recursion—the ability to “generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements” (ibid.)—or in what he calls the “creative aspect” of language use, that is, the “distinctively human ability to express new thoughts and to understand entirely new expressions of thought” (Chomsky 2006, 6).⁴ And while Chomsky, as Donna Haraway notes, has been cautious enough to present the idea of linguistic uniqueness as “a testable hypothesis, not an assumption rooted in premises of human exceptionalism” (Haraway 2008, 373 note 44), there is no doubt that the tradition of anthropocentric thought assumed in the generative framework has been a serious obstacle to investigating the linguistic, rather than communicative, abilities of nonhuman animals.

In contrast to Chomsky’s non-social view of language, sociolinguistic research has built on the pioneering work of William Labov and others to theorize language as both dependent on cognition and interconnected with the workings of society and culture.⁵ In the sociolinguistic framework, language is understood as a social construct stemming from the need to contextualize how humans use language in interaction with others, aiming to find out how and why languages vary and change, and how (groups of) speakers employ linguistic resources to shape individual and collective identities, communities and social hierarchies. This view converges with recent approaches to language as an embodied (Bucholtz and Hall 2016), multimodal (Müller et al. 2013) and multisensory (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015) phenomenon that includes not only verbal speech but, among others, bodily gestures and facial expressions, actions, movements, sensorial practices of meaning-making through tasting, touching, seeing and smelling, as well as the mediation of embodiment by material objects, spaces and environments. Encompassing a wide range of research areas, including the social meaning of different language varieties, the role of stylization in language use, the construction of social identity categories like class and gender through language practices, bi- and multilingualism, and social norms and attitudes towards linguistic diversity, sociolinguistics has opened valuable new avenues for researchers interested in the manifold relationships between language, identity and power.

Although much sociolinguistic research remains faithful to the human as the most important user of language—in fact, the very notion that humans may use certain linguistic skills and resources is in no small part dependent on liberal humanist conceptions of choice and agency—this framework is nevertheless promising for a linguistics that wishes to be inclusive of human and nonhuman actors (Cornips 2019). By approaching language as both embodied and embedded in a variety of interactive social practices, contexts and environments, sociolinguistic studies challenge the anthropocentric understanding of a language as an exclusively verbal, decontextualized object that is completely autonomous, inaccessible from outside the mind, and therefore somehow fixed in character. In this perspective, embodiment is central to the production and interpretation of language as a form of social practice, while bodies, in turn, are themselves part of the semiotic landscape as they are “imbricated in complex arrangements that include nonhuman as well as human participants, whether animals, epidemics, objects, or technologies” (Bucholtz and Hall 2016, 186).

Broadening up the concept of language (grammar) to include multimodal and multisensory practices of meaning-making allows us to foreground nonhuman semiotic capacities, including specific sensorial abilities such as olfactory ones for cows and dogs, as language-specific grammatical means. It thus provides a useful framework to analyze differences between and among human and nonhuman animals in terms of grammatical possibilities and expressions instead of simply ascribing deficiencies to the latter (Kulick 2017, 373). For example, if a cow in an indoor dairy farm steps back and withdraws her face through the iron bars when humans approach her, this bodily movement combined with head positioning, gaze direction and the sound of the moving iron bar may be analyzed equally to how human animals phrase negation as in the sentence do NOT approach me (Cornips and van Koppen 2019). Further below, we will demonstrate how recent scholarship produced at the intersection of sociolinguistic theory and critical posthumanism will allow us to take the study of language beyond the speaking human subject and into the more-than-human material world. But first, let us discuss the linguistic abilities and communicative competence of cows in more detail. What can a non-anthropocentric approach to language contribute to our understanding of the ways in which cows speak to each other and to humans? And how can this understanding, in turn, help us confront, and respond to, the enabling and constraining conditions under which dairy cows, as speaking beings, participate in the formation of a meaningful world?

3. Cows as Social and Linguistic Beings

Human thinkers, as we have seen, have produced the idea of language as a uniquely human trait by categorically marginalizing nonhuman animal speakers, denying them recognition as linguistic subjects. But, as Eva Meijer suggests, learning about how other animals use language “can help us understand them better, and build new relations with them; challenging an anthropocentric view of language can help us see animals of other species, and their languages, differently” (Meijer 2016, 74). Recent research into how different animal species communicate, ranging from birds and bees to whales, apes and cephalopods, indeed suggests that there may not be a “sharp divide between human language and nonhuman communicative systems” (Evans 2014, 258; see also Meijer 2019). This does not mean that human and nonhuman forms of communication are the same, but, as Alastair Pennycook (2018, 82) notes, “it is an argument against human exceptionalism.” In this chapter, we take the view that both human and other animals create meaning through language conceptualized as a social, spatial and artefactual resource. By theorizing language in terms of material-semiotic assemblages and spatial repertoires (Pennycook 2017), we wish to avoid an anthropocentric definition of language that not only a priori excludes nonhuman animals, but also neglects all other aspects of language beyond the “distinctive qualities of mind” so often privileged in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science.

Cows, including domestic dairy cows, have distinct personalities and stable personality characteristics and have a clear capacity to lead rich and socially complex lives. Measured assessments of cows’ cognitive, emotional and social abilities provide scientific support for what people familiar with cows already know, namely that cows demonstrate intelligence, experience a range of emotions and display a high level of social complexity, including social learning, in ways that human animals can recognize (Marino and Allen 2017; Colvin et al. 2017). When given the opportunity, cows form strongly bonded social groups, with mother cows and calves sharing an especially powerful emotional connection that, in part, depends upon the possibility for the mother to be able to lick her child for several hours after birth (Marino and Allen 2017, 484). Cows are competent learners and possess both short- and long-term memories: they are capable of discriminating between different objects, colors and geometric shapes, and are able to learn and recognize individual differences among humans, as well as conspecifics, under a variety of circumstances.⁶ These abilities show that cows do not merely respond to external stimuli but engage in the formation and categorization of mental concepts (Colvin et al. 2017, 7). Moreover, cows display emotional reactions to their own learning and in response to each other’s feelings, which has been suggested to reflect sophisticated levels of psychological capacities such as self-awareness and empathy (Hagen and Broom 2004; Marino and Allen 2017, 482–483).⁷

As social mammals, cows depend on each other for interaction and emotional support; social isolation therefore inflicts great stress on them, as does the immediate, and life-long, postpartum separation of mothers and calves in intensive dairy farming. In commercial settings, where human-cow relations are deeply instrumentalized and commodified, the possibilities for cows to express species-appropriate behavior are severely compromised by periods of confinement in indoor housing, health problems due to higher milk yields and distress caused by various forms of social separation. As caged living beings, with little or no opportunity to escape their exploitation by humans, cows raised for food in factory farms experience “unnatural conditions from birth to slaughter” (Marino and Allen 2017, 474), including procedures that cause severe pain and suffering such as dehorning and disbudding. In these circumstances, where young calves are raised individually and cows are killed before their time, social bonding formation is extremely difficult to establish and maintain (McLennan 2013), which has devastating consequences for their well-being and welfare. It is decidedly problematic, then, that most research into the lives of cows is done within the framework of their use as “livestock” for human consumption. As the scientific literature on cow psychology and behavior is dominated by an applied science perspective mainly relevant to human practices of intensive farming (e.g. training cows to use automatic feeders) (Marino and Allen 2017, 475), there is a felt need to understand, and relate to, cows on their own terms.

While it is undeniable that dairy cows are always already caught in the anthropological machine of industrial animal production—an “apparatus” (Despret 2008) that essentially prevents them from experiencing a full quality of life—we do believe that an inquiry into how dairy cows make use of language, conceptualized in a non-anthropocentric manner, can help human animals to get to know cows better and to understand them as “the someones they actually are” (Colvin et al 2017, 3). This will, in turn, allow us to respond to the question of nonhuman animal agency in new ways that not only serve to challenge established structures of species hierarchy, but also entail a fundamental rethinking of how agency is enacted in and through language as a practice of human-nonhuman sociality. In the context of what has been termed the “cage age,” it is routinely assumed that the restrictive and monotonous captive environments in which domesticated animals usually live, will “limit the frequency and diversity with which [their] agency is expressed” (Špinka and Wemelsfelder 2011, 34). Yet, as we will demonstrate below, these same restrictive conditions can, paradoxically, also give rise to new modes of linguistic agency and resilience, revealing the copious ways in which dairy cows, as speaking beings, orient themselves towards the world.Dairy farmers bring their own perspectives on how cows, as social and sentient beings whose freedom of movement is nevertheless severely restricted, give meaning to their physical environment and negotiate their housing conditions. A female dairy farmer based in the south of the Netherlands recently provided this chapter’s first author with a hand-written letter with some of her thoughts in preparation of an interview addressing how cows and farmers communicate with each other.⁸ She wrote:

A true story: Cows are herd animals and they have a leader who will inform the others what to expect. Mientje was always the first waiting by the fence for the farmer to collect them [from the meadow] to be milked. The cows would first be treated to snacks in the barn which is a feast. They might become so impatient as children, and Mientje always watched carefully how the farmer would unlock the fence. An iron slide bolt. For days she would be licking that bolt and the farmer assumed she liked the taste of it, but actually she was practicing how to accomplish that [unlocking the bolt] by sliding it across with her tongue bit by bit long enough, and yes the farmer stayed away for too long and she opened the fence by herself, moved a bit backwards so that the fence could open further and so she managed to steer all the cows to the barn where there were no snacks present since it was no milking time yet. The barn was an overshitted barn that first had to be cleaned with very restless cows back in the meadow. The blacksmith made a new bolt.

Mientje, in the narrative above, is clearly positioned as an actor, even though her actions arise from within a state of unfreedom that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to draw sharp boundaries between action and passion, between doing and suffering. Seemingly functionless activities such as repetitive licking and/or biting of non-food objects, including bars and fences, are common stereotypic behaviors in captive ungulates and are caused by the frustration of natural behavior patterns or by repeated attempts to deal with some problem (Bergeron et al. 2006). Tongue rolling, object licking and biting at fences—important indicators of compromised animal welfare—are especially prevalent among intensively housed cattle, as they are routinely deprived of the freedom to pursue natural patterns of grazing and rumination (Moran and Doyle 2015, 47). Nevertheless, it is also clear that Mientje’s actions are not at all inconsequential or meaningless. On the contrary, by unlocking the bolt, leading the herd to the barn in the expectation of finding some snacks and by shitting the barn when they find nothing there, Mientje and the other cows not only spur their humans into action (cleaning the barn, producing a new bolt) but also engage in linguistic acts of place-making by transforming their shared living space into a site for negotiating, or renegotiating, the semantics of power, resistance and belonging.

A place, in the sociolinguistic sense, is not simply a fixed geographic location but rather a changeable site of symbolic meaning as well as a material assemblage of objects or things that mediate social processes and relationships (Johnstone 2011; Cornips and de Rooij 2018a; Peck et al. 2019). Place-making, then, involves the assigning, through interaction and other forms of connectivity, of social meanings to physical (and, increasingly, digital) spaces, thereby “creating places that are perceived as the basis of belonging” (Cornips and de Rooij 2018b, 7–8). In contrast to other branches of linguistics where languages are seen as “naturally” anchored to specific spaces—a view that only holds if a language is conceptualized as a monolithic and identifiable object detached from real-time practices—a sociolinguistics of place takes a practice-based approach focused on speakers and their activities. This shifts the focus from the linguistic system or structure to a whole range of situated practices in which speech is produced, so that what is typically labelled as a language is reconceived as a linguistic resource that only becomes socially meaningful in combination with other material-semiotic resources distributed across people, places and environments (Pennycook 2017).

Although previous sociolinguistic research has conceptualized place-making primarily or even exclusively in terms of human practices and institutions, we suggest that other animals, like cows, also engage their senses, thoughts and emotions in the material-semiotic production of the world as a meaningful place. This entails a clear break away from the previously discussed humanist conceptualizations of language as a computational system located exclusively within the human mind—a view on language which, as we have seen, is itself informed by a desire to place the human above all other animals—and steers us towards an understanding of language as a distributed phenomenon, an emergent property deriving from the interactions and interrelations between human and nonhuman actors, including spatial resources and things usually seen as inanimate (Cowley 2011; Pennycook 2017). This shift in thinking corresponds to the critical posthumanist “turn” that has been put on the linguistic research agenda recently by Alastair Pennycook, who urges us “not just to broaden an understanding of communication but to relocate where social semiosis occurs” (Pennycook 2016, 446). Once we acknowledge that, as Pennycook (2018, 51) notes, “linguistic and other semiotic resources are not contained in someone’s head, nor just choices available within a speech community, but are spatially distributed,” we can begin to explore how dairy cows, such as Mientje, engage in linguistic place-making in relation to other cows, farmers, fences, iron bars and spaces such as barns and meadows, as well as through embodied acts of looking, smelling, licking, walking, eating, defecating, playing and listening.

4. Linguistic Place-Making in an Intensive Dairy Farm

In the previous section, we suggested that cows, as sentient and intelligent beings, engage their cognitive, emotional and social abilities in practices of linguistic place-making. Just as for people, we assume that the formation of meaningful bonds between cows and a place is “a powerful factor in social life… and is often based on the social relationships that are enacted in a place” (Schieffelin 2018, 35). In this section and the next, we will examine in more detail how intensively housed cows engage in place-making through language, understood as a distributed phenomenon emerging from within “material webs of human and nonhuman assemblages” (Pennycook 2017, 279). Drawing on recent fieldwork at an intensive dairy farm, we seek to demonstrate how in this context linguistic place-making occurs through multimodal and multilingual repertoires where human and nonhuman bodies, materials and environments come together in co-shaping motion. We will pay special attention to the questions of material and nonhuman animal agency, not merely because “processes of place-making and place itself are always sensible to power dynamics and asymmetries” (Schieffelin 2018, 34), but also because these questions are crucial for thinking through the challenges of human-nonhuman coexistence in the current context of the Anthropocene.

First, a cow becomes connected to her place as a “territory of knowledge” (Schieffelin 2018, 30, citing Århem 1998) through her verbal practices. While cattle vocalizations are often proposed as indicators of animal welfare, scientific analysis of naturally occurring contact calls produced by crossbred beef cows and their calves have provided insight into the acoustic structure and information encoded in these vocalizations. One study showed that calf calls encode age, but not sex, and are produced (F0 = 142.8 ± 1.80 Hz) when separated from their mothers and preceded suckling (Padilla de la Torre et al. 2015, 58). Also, indoor housed calves produce individually recognizable calls to their mothers and vice versa whereas indoor housed cows signal verbally that they are hungry, sexually aroused, and experience milking delay in distinctive ways (Jahns 2013, 247). Thus, although cow sounds may be meaningless to most human animals, they constitute meaningful signs recognizable by mother cows and their calves, as well as by fellow cows as a sociolinguistic community of practice.

Further, cows establish place-making through visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile practices, as well as through creative behavior such as play. Sight is a cow’s most dominant sense, with a field of vision of at least 330° and a fine eye for details. Cows pay more attention to moving objects than ones that remain still, such as bars, and they are often “spooked” by sudden movements. A cow’s hearing is better than that of horses, but she is less able to locate sounds compared to goats, dogs and humans. She has an acute sense of touch, which enables her to enjoy some forms of tactile contact, such as scratching behind the ears, but it also means that the conditions of industrial farming cause her considerable pain. Olfaction plays an important role in cows’ social lives, and there is evidence that they can detect the scent of stress hormones present in the urine of fellow cows (Marino and Allen 2017, 475–476). Cows engage in all forms of play found in mammals, including gamboling and running, playing with objects such as balls and social play with members of other species. While play is an important indication of an animal’s pleasure, curiosity and capacity to innovate, and as such it “forms the basis for complex object-related and social abilities” (Marino and Allen 2017, 481), play behavior in captive animals is also dependent on their housing conditions; for example, being released from confinement will increase the frequency of movement-based forms of play such as galloping and bucking. In what follows, we will discuss specific examples from field research to demonstrate how dairy cows can mobilize these structural constraints to imbue their environment with linguistic meanings and thus negotiate their positioning within an anthropological machine that is, by and large, designed to deprive them from the opportunity to speak.

4.1 The Fieldwork Site

From May 2018 through 15 February 2019, this chapter’s first author conducted fieldwork in three dairy farms in the south and west of the Netherlands and in one small dairy farm in Norway. The observations presented in this chapter are based on data collection at Farm 1 in the south of the Netherlands, where the first author spent several weeks during her holidays in May and which subsequently became the site for three days of ethnographic observation, including two days of gathering audio- and video recordings.⁹ The dairy farm counts about 150 adult cows, heifers and calves. The dairy cows are milked by robots, while an automatic feeder takes care of pushing the food towards them, minimizing embodied practices between farmers and cows. A small camp site and some holiday apartments accompany the farm, as so often in the south. Many tourists, children in particular, seek contact with the newly born calves, as well as with the older calves and heifers to be discussed below, petting them and speaking to them. Feeding the newly born calves, who are housed individually in fiberglass cages outside the barn, is an especially popular activity among the human visitors. During the on-site observations, the cows would often reach through the bars and fences to touch the farmers, tourists and field worker through licking and nuzzling. They would also establish contact through nonverbal interactions such as eye gaze and body positioning, as well as by using language in the form of rumbling, calling, hooting, sniffing and coughing. These practices would happen frequently, even though neither humans nor cows were able to traverse to sharing space with each other directly.Farmers usually assign dairy cows to fixed places in artificial groupings based on their age without male peers, revealing extreme power asymmetries between cows and humans. In the farm under observation, cows are assigned to eight distinct places differentiated by age: new-born calves, older calves up until a few weeks of age, young heifers, older and oldest heifers, dry cows (pregnant cows), and dairy cows. As noted, new-born female calves are separated from their mothers immediately after birth and isolated in fiberglass enclosures, so-called “igloos,” for about three weeks. In Farm 1, these igloos are placed in the open air facing the dairy cows in the open barn. After this period, the somewhat older calves are housed together with their age mates in igloos holding up to four or five animals, positioned sideways to the open barn so that visual contact with the older cows is much more restricted. Growing older, the calves are placed in the so-called jongveestal (young cattle barn) in four different age groups (see Fig. 1). The dry cows are housed in a separate space and the dairy cows reside in the large open barn that also contains three milking robots. In spring and summer, the dry cows and dairy cows can graze in the meadow during the day and, when it is very hot, during the late evening and night. The assignment to specific physical places in distinct housings prevents the calves, heifers and cows from forming a natural herd that would include a matrilineal social structure with strongly clustered networks and many non-random attachment and avoidance relationships (Marino and Allen 2017, 488). It also prevents the younger ones from engaging in processes of cognitive and social learning, and deprives them from being comforted by older conspecifics, including mother cows.

The fieldwork took place in the jongveestal, where audio and video recordings were made while observing the calves and heifers. The jongveestal is an oblong building, about twenty by ten meters, with half bowed windows, touching the house where the farmer’s family lives. It is the oldest barn on site with a main entrance in the middle of the long front side and a full opening at one of the short sides. The cattle stay indoors: their day includes some combinations of eating, lying and standing. The oldest heifers were about one year old during the fieldwork.¹⁰ In May, swallows would fly in and out to take care of their new-born in the many nests they had fabricated under the beams of this old building. The floor of the jongveestal consists of cubicle divisions for calves and heifers to lie down and stand up (see Picture 3 below), while in-between the cubicles, they can stand or walk on discrete beams where feces and urine pass.

In the jongveestal, the calves and heifers (n = 36) were spatially positioned in four sections divided by iron bars, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The calves and heifers in the jongveestal are thus profoundly restricted in their mobility—much more so than the adult cows who are able to graze in the meadow, but less than the new-born calves confined to the small igloos. Consequently, from birth onwards throughout their lives, calves, heifers and dairy cows—either individually or with same-sex and age mates—are confined to human-made physical spaces. How, then, do they manage to assign their own meanings to the restricted environment in which they are placed?

4.2 Place-Making Through Practices of Sociality and Multilingualism

The housing conditions of the jongveestal not only restrict mobility but also limit the visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile practices that calves and heifers may display under less restrictive conditions. This significantly affects their modes of sociality and processes of belonging: calves and heifers cannot touch and/or allogroom each other cross-sectionally; a lack of daylight hinders optimal vision and the walls obstruct a far vision; the sound of tractors may penetrate; calves and heifers are dependent on the farmer for how to lie down as well as for when, what and how to eat (with no attention for individual food preferences); ventilation is often not optimal so that calves and heifers, whose sense of smell is far superior to that of humans, deal with omnipresent scents of ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen sulfide (Vallez 2013, 12); and the beams on the floor, often slippery due to feces and urine, impede playing and running (see Picture 3). Limited space allowance furthermore makes it difficult to maintain a preferred distance to neighbors with whom the individual likes to bond or not. The spatial distance that cows establish between each other is affected by their relationship and proximity might indicate the existence of a social bond (McLennan 2013, 26). Under more natural conditions, cows seem to engage with particular individuals with whom they prefer to spend their time, creating voluntary bonds while grazing and lying together in close proximity (McLennan 2013, 49–50). In the captive environment of the jongveestal, however, a calf or heifer who is a non-preferred partner may stand, lie down or eat in closer proximity than would naturally occur, which may lead to feelings of uneasiness and has been suggested to have negative consequences for animal welfare (McLennan 2013, 52).How, if at all, do calves and heifers in the jongveestal create sociality under these conditions? And how is this sociality mobilized in and through material-semiotic practices of place-making? Fieldwork observations show that the calves and heifers in their cubicle divisions (see Fig. 1) may not show any sign of interaction or connectivity, thus is it not self-evident for individuals who are placed in a restricted space to construe it together as a social place. Picture 1 shows an example: four older calves stand in the second section of the jongveestal. Although they share a restricted physical space, their body positioning does not reveal any form of co-shaping the act of standing together. The calves position their bottoms to each other, taking diverging positions, avoiding eye contact and body contact. Although the calves in the right corner seem to align sideways, there is no form of interaction. Their bodies don’t touch and while the calf in the middle bows her head, the calf in the right corner is rubbing her chin at the iron bar and wooden demarcation while establishing eye contact with the fieldworker, as shown in Picture 2.

Both pictures also show that in the second section of the barn four cows are standing on their feet whereas two cows are lying down in cubicle divisions. The calf to the right in Picture 2 was headbutted by another for about two seconds when trying to move over to the most right-hand section of the barn (not visible in the picture). Picture 3, however, shows calves in section 2 mirroring each other’s body positions when lying down in the cubicles. Although their bodies do not touch and they are not able to lie down in a circle as less restrictive settings, they are able to choose to lie down all together in the same way at the same time. The two calves in the cubicles in the back are facing each other whereas the two shown in the foreground do not. Note that the younger calf in section 1 has decided to look out of the window instead of synchronizing with the others.

As a material-semiotic resource, bodily synchronizing can be seen as part of what Frans de Waal has described as “identification” with the other, a process of “bodily mapping the self onto the other (or the other onto the self)” which not only relates to a capacity for shared neural representation, but also forms “a precondition for imitation and empathy” (De Waal 2012, 123). During the fieldwork, a clear practice of bodily synchronizing—which we consider here as a social form of meaning-making typical for encaged dairy cows—emerged during the communicative event of feeding (by the farmer) and eating (by the cows). The farmer feeds the calves twice a day by putting upside down a wheelbarrow loaded with food on the ground before them. An iron feed fence separates the human and nonhuman animals during this event while at the same time it mediates the meanings that arise from their mutual interaction. The farmer provides the food from one side of the fence whereas the calves on the other side need to position themselves before individual openings and put their heads through the bars in order to reach the food below. Since there are only as many openings as calves, every individual has to touch her neighbor to secure a place (see Pictures 4 a, b).

As the calves put their heads through the iron bars they simultaneously bow their heads forward and downward to pick up the food from the ground, taking a slightly more upward head position in order to chew. Within this joint “embodiment of movement,” a collective form of sociality in which each calf will instantaneously “follow and lead” (Argent 2012, 120),¹¹ the calves engage one another and the space around them in bodily acts of identification that articulate the jongveestal as a shared social place. Thus, although for encaged calves feeding is clearly a habitual and routinized practice, from a sociolinguistic perspective it also entails creative acts of place-making through what Argent calls “kinesic, haptic, and proxemic communication modes” (Argent 2012, 119). The synchrony of movement that occurs in and through the spacing of interactional distances not only orients calves to group living, but also enables them to imbue their restricted environment with meaning in the form of social bonding and thus constitute themselves as linguistic agents.

Specifically, we argue that nonhuman practices of place-making in an intensive dairy farm can be seen as a form of bi- or multilingualism peculiar to the context of industrial animal production. The iron bars make sound when the synchronizing calves put their heads through them and move their faces up and down in co-motion to reach for the food on the ground during eating practice. These sounds are not meaningless or arbitrary but constitute a semiotic resource for calves to reinforce social bonding, specifically since the sounds of the iron bars and bodies co-shape each other acoustically. Eating practices in the jongveestal, then, are acts of place-making where calves do not only use their vocal tract to produce language, but also establish themselves as linguistic beings through the rhythmic clattering of the iron bars that shapes the synchronizing bodies into socially meaningful sounds. In other words, these calves engage in a process of nonhuman place-making not only by producing one language with their own bodies, that is, the words or vocalizations for “greeting” and “hunger” which are inextricably combined with multimodal and multisensory ways of meaning-making through body positioning and visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile practices, but also by producing a second language with the material-semiotic means that both compose and transcend their restricted environment.

Being socialized into the environment of an industrial dairy farm, then, for cows implies being or becoming bilingual, where bilingualism is to be understood as a “complex set of practices” (Heller 2007, 15) which draw on linguistic resources that belong to two codes which are structurally maximally divergent (see Auer, forthcoming, 8), in this case one code produced by vocal tract and one code produced by synchronizing bodies and iron bars. The latter language is more context-dependent than the former because of its restriction to the practice of feeding in conditions of captivity. These two codes thus reveal structural constraints in the linguistic sense: they can combine together in a multimodal way but cannot be mixed. The observations do not show that calves alternate between the two codes within one single discourse—the social practice of eating together—even if both codes are part of the broader material-semiotic assemblage through which place-making is established. In the sociolinguistic framework, the two codes might be said to correspond to different social functions and identities, since different languages, or language varieties, are associated with diverging “processes of construction of social difference and social inequality” (Heller 2007, 15). The “bars and bodies” code will be associated primarily with encaged individuals, suggesting that this form of bilingualism is specific to the complex network of connections among human and nonhuman agents that constitutes daily life at an intensive dairy farm.

Crucially, the material presence of the feed fence, which both enables and constrains the expression of linguistic agency in this context, should be understood not merely as a demarcation of physical space, but as belonging to the spatial repertoire through which language is produced as a “distributed effect of a range of interacting objects, people and places” (Pennycook 2017, 278). As an embodied and embedded practice, linguistic place-making in the jongveestal is thus not simply a conditioned response to an unresponsive environment, nor does it arise from the individual communicative competence of calves and heifers; rather, it emerges from within a complex assemblage of material-semiotic resources distributed across human and nonhuman subjects, artefacts and environments, including the means of confinement by which humans seek to restrict the freedom of other animals. In other words, the conditions of captivity in an intensive dairy farm are not external but intrinsic to how cows engage in acts of place-making that we, in Heideggerian terms, might understand as linguistic practices of world-formation. This view, as we will conclude, has significant consequences for how we may conceptualize the expression of nonhuman animal agency, in particular linguistic agency, in the troubling context of the Anthropocene.

5. Conclusion

From a traditional humanist perspective, domesticated captive animals are doubly barred from entering into a meaningful relationship with the world: not only are nonhuman animals, in this view, by nature captivated in their environment (as Heidegger and many others have suggested), it is also assumed that confinement in cages does nothing but further limit their natural instincts and capabilities. This view effectively renders nonhuman animals, cows in particular, mute and dumb, while at the same time it reinforces a traditional mechanistic worldview where both nature and matter are considered to be passive and inert, available for manipulation by humans and exploitable for profit (Merchant 1992, 48–55). The critically posthumanist perspective developed in this chapter, by contrast, not only acknowledges cows as the social and intelligent speaking beings that they are, but also approaches their material encagement—the bars and fences meant as barriers to prevent calves and heifers from freely going wherever they want—as a social and spatial artefactual resource for building a meaningful world. Paradoxically, then, it is their state of unfreedom that allows dairy cows to open up the restricted environment of industrial animal farming, exemplified here by the young cattle barn, as a linguistically meaningful place.

In drawing attention to the linguistic agency of dairy cows, we do not wish to reiterate the familiar observation that “agency is intrinsic to the way animals behave” (Špinka and Wemelsfelder 2011, 34), nor are we suggesting that the capacity of captive animals to act is somehow “expanded” or “curtailed” through acts of linguistic place-making. In the context of industrial dairy farming, where categorical boundaries between humans and other animals, as well as between organisms and machines, have collapsed—a condition exemplifying the “implosion of nature and culture” (Haraway 2003, 16) that marks the Anthropocene—neither agency nor language can be understood as a property of individual persons or collectivities. Rather, we must account for how different forms of agency, including linguistic agency, emerge from within what political theorist Jane Bennett (2010, 107) has called “agentic assemblages,” that is, networks of human and nonhuman actors living together in relations of systemic inequality. In this chapter, therefore, we have tried to show how a non-anthropocentric approach to linguistic place-making, understood as a practice of more-than-human sociality, can help us reckon with the question of nonhuman animal agency in new ways.

Assemblages, as Pennycook (2017, 278) notes, “describe the way things are brought together and function in new ways” and as such they provide a way of thinking about agency as a distributed force, much like we described language and cognition as spatially distributed. Bennett, indeed, suggests that we think of agency as “distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts” (Bennett 2010, 23). Linguistic agency, then, is not an individual or collective competence that can be “mastered” or “possessed” but should rather be seen as a processually emergent quality arising from multiple assemblages of human and nonhuman elements, including material things, artefacts and spaces. This conception of agency, rooted in what Bennett (2010) calls a “vital materialism” and what Pennycook (2018) describes as a “posthumanist applied linguistics,” disturbs the traditional understanding of agency as the capacity for self-willed action, linked especially to human subjectivity and intentionality, as well as the corollary presumption that the more-than-human material world—including other animals and the physical environment—is essentially passive, inert and predetermined in its operations.

Throughout this chapter, we have sought to demonstrate the usefulness of a non-anthropocentric approach to language and language practices in light of a long history of human exceptionalism that has routinely denied nonhuman animals the freedom and ability to speak. We have elaborated a posthumanist conception of language as a distributed effect of multiple interacting bodies in order to foreground the fluidity through which a cow, a calf, calves, a wheelbarrow, a farmer, an iron feed fence, a lock, the clattering of bars, sounds of chewing, sounds of puffing, sounds of urinating, the smell of food, urine, feces, other bodies in proximity or distance, movements up and down, become relationally entangled with one another and, crucially, with the anthropological machine of industrial animal production. Furthermore, we have shown how rethinking nonhuman animal agency in terms of material-semiotic assemblages, as an equally distributed effect of linguistic interactions and social processes, allows us to break away from the idea of lifeless matter, including the Cartesian understanding of nonhuman animals as mindless machines, an idea which has shaped the pervasive modes of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism that have traditionally characterized the humanist agenda and which continue to inform ideas about the “muteness” and “bruteness” of nonhuman creatures today. In this way, we hope to contribute to a greater recognition among humans of other animals, not only as sentient living beings, but as intelligent, social, speaking beings, linguistic agents who even under poor conditions form rich and complex relationships with the world to make it a meaningful place.

Footnotes

1. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. Translation by Louis van den Hengel.
2. Most commentators attribute to Descartes the concomitant view that animals, because they cannot think, have no feelings and do not suffer pain, yet some scholars (Harrison 1992; Cottingham 2008, 163–173) have sought to contest this interpretation.
3. In his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger in a similar manner suggests that nonhuman animals are “separated from man by an abyss” (1995, 26, emphasis added). Because nonhuman animals lack language, they cannot apprehend other beings conceptually, as beings: for Heidegger, only humans are capable of grasping that which is as such.
4. In this view, the linguistic ability to innovate—to form new statements that express new thoughts appropriate to but not directly caused by their immediate contexts—is considered a fundamental factor that distinguishes human language, seen as free from control by any detectable stimuli, from nonhuman animal communication, which is assumed to occur only in response to an external environment or to internal drives.
5. Neither generative nor sociolinguistic theory has questioned the legitimacy of each other’s discipline, yet attempts to integrate both have not been successful (Cornips and Gregersen 2016).
6. In one study, cows have been demonstrated, within a few training sessions, an ability to discriminate photographs of different cows’ faces from faces of other species. A later study has shown that heifers can differentiate between two-dimensional facial images of familiar and unfamiliar cows, treating these images as mental representations of real individuals (Marino and Allen 2017, 478–479). So far, there is no knowledge yet on social learning from humans or the use of human-given cues in cattle (Nawroth et al. 2019, 5).
7. Emotional reactions to learning in cows have to do with “the positive emotions and excitement that go with realizing one is controlling a situation” (Marino and Allen 2017, 482). This does not merely show that cows understand the causal relation between accomplishing a task and receiving a reward, but rather it suggests that they learn to experience task solving as intrinsically rewarding by adopting “an emotional perspective on their own agency” (Hagen and Broom 2004, 212).
8. The interview anticipated in the letter took place at the second farm (Farm 2) in the south of the Netherlands where the first author conducted her field research which is further discussed below. This interview took place on 15 February 2019 and is not discussed further in the current chapter.
9. The fieldwork took place on 25 July (observation), 26 July and 17 August 2018 (audio- and video recordings). A written and signed consent form by the owners of Farm 1 was obtained abiding by the guidelines for research as stated in the protocol of the Ethics Assessment Committee Humanities of the Radboud University Nijmegen and adopted by the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). From the perspective of establishing egalitarian research methods for interspecies collaboration, there is a need to examine how to receive permission from the nonhuman animals under study, while at the same time one should interrogate how the bioethical framework of “informed consent” is set up through human-centred discourses of rational agency and choice.
10. During her holidays in May, the first author frequently visited the jongveestal since there was one heifer who was very much looking for contact with human animals. She was positioned near the main entrance and would nearly jump towards the author to put her head on her shoulder. This extravert expression of contact seeking behavior might be interpreted as indicative of a willingness to engage in interspecies collaboration.
11. Argent writes about synchronizing between horses and riders.

Notes

Acknowledgements

The first author is very grateful to the participating farmer for all support, the opportunity to make recordings, and time.

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About this chapter

CrossMark Cite this chapter as: Cornips L., van den Hengel L. (2021) Place-Making by Cows in an Intensive Dairy Farm: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Nonhuman Animal Agency. In: Bovenkerk B., Keulartz J. (eds) Animals in Our Midst: The Challenges of Co-existing with Animals in the Anthropocene. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63523-7_11

NILS BUBANDT

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THE UNCANNY VALLEYS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Psychologist Sigmund Freud described phenomena that are familiar and foreign at the same time as uncanny. Unheimlich – the German word for uncanny – literally means “unhomely” and captures the paradoxical mix of the homely and the strange that goes into the feeling of the uncanny (Freud 2013 [1919]). Ghosts, gods, spirits, and specters are classical icons of the uncanny. These entities are uncanny because they disturb the proper and familiar separation of things: the separation between the living and the dead, between the imaginary and the real, between the virtual and the actual. Ghosts, gods, specters and spirits are invisible apparitions, a paradoxical NO THING, a “between that is tainted with strangeness” (Cixous 1976: 543). But in 1970, the Japanese robotics engineer, Masahiro Mori, suggested that robots, too, become uncanny when they increasingly approach but still fail to achieve full human likeness. A prosthetic hand that has the fleshy look but not the proper fleshy feel of a human hand is, Mori suggested, as uncanny as a ghost. Mori called the experiential space of such phenomena “the uncanny valley”: the space where the function of increased likeness intersects with the function of decreased familiarity (Mori 2012)

In Mori’s chart of the uncanny valley, corpses and zombies share quarters with only one human invention: the prosthetic hand. But since 1970, it is fair to say, Mori’s uncanny valley has become radically crowded with new beings far beyond robotics. Advances in genetic technology and bioengineering have added cloned animals, gene-modified crops and a host of other familiar-yet-strange denizens to the uncanny valleys of our time. The overpopulation of these uncanny valleys has also arguably grown exponentially after anthropogenic environmental disturbance has begun denaturalizing nature itself: jelly fish blooms, freak storms, and factory chicken are examples of this kind of environmental uncanniness. What are we, for instance, to make of the fact that the total biomass of the 20 billion chickens in the world’s industrial mega-farms is three times that of all wild birds combined (Bar-On et al. 2018)? A chicken is a very familiar bird for sure. But when the chicken is well on the way to becoming the signature, and one day soon perhaps the only, bird in the world, its very familiarity takes on a distinctly uncanny hue. Ecological uncanniness, one might call this.

SCIENCE AND THE REAL: NATURAL-SUPERNATURAL-UNNATURAL

If the uncanny represents a “crisis of the natural” (Royle 2003: 1), the Anthropocene is a truly an uncanny time, a time when the proper separation between things – between culture and nature, subject and object, human and nonhuman, life and non-life – is collapsing. The concept “Anthropocene” was born when geologists and climate chemists had to acknowledge that their natural objects of study was infused by human agency, but in ways that produced their own forms of more-than-human unpredictability. In the J-curves of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015) an uncanny valley opened up when scientists had to acknowledge that the familiar promise of endless growth had led to environmental decline and climatic chaos. Climate change is the perhaps most evident example of a human caused but also uncannily run-away process. Consider, for instance, the uncanny rift between familiar experiences of weather and the statistics of climate. Many people across an ordinarily sun-starved northern Europe welcomed the exceptionally warm May of 2018 as an early start to a great summer. But by the end of the month, May turned out to also be the hottest month of May on record in the northern parts of Europe and the contiguous US (NOAA 6.6.2018). And the heat just continued. The hottest temperature ever in Africa was recorded in Algeria in the summer of 2018, and temperature records were broken in Taiwan, Central Asia, Europe, Canada, and the Western US. What was initially experienced as a pleasantly warm weather streak by heat-starving northern Europeans was by July revealed as the hottest El Niña year on record. The hemispheric scale of the heat meant that it began, eerily, to point to more than itself. In early July, a group of leading climate scientists hypothesized that positive feedback loops between changing climate, ocean currents, and other Earth systems could cause cascading effects that would catapult Earth into a “hothouse” state well before current predictions. This, they suggested, would have massive effects on global environment, societies and economies (Steffen et al. 2018). Hoping against all hope that they were wrong, one of the authors said that it was urgent to pose this possibility in the context of the unexpected nature of the ongoing summer heatwave of 2018. It was, in fact, “one of the most urgent existential questions in science” (Watts 2018b). In the course of a few months in 2018, weather had become uncanny, at once familiar and strange, urgent and unknowable. This meant something: namely a shift in how we will be able to experience weather in the future. After 2018, it has arguably become impossible to enjoy a sunny day without a certain frisson – an emotional shiver that is at once existential and epistemological. For while it is “difficult”, as researchers from the World Meteorological Organization put it, to ascribe any individual hot weather streak to climate change, when taken together, all the hot days across the northern hemisphere in 2018 became strong indications of global warming (Watts 2018a). On its own, each freak event is nothing. Together however, the freak events point to a new freaky climate reality, made all the more uncanny by being both perceptible and imperceptible (Hulme 2009). Climate, like ghosts and witches, teeters on the border between being-there and not-being-there (Bubandt 2014). In a time of global warming, weather is no longer innocent and given: from now on, weather is by necessity always-already haunted by the specter of anthropogenic climate change.

But weather is not alone in having become eerie in the Anthropocene. Nature has, too. What may once have been “natural” (but then who knows?) increasingly evades experience and language because “nature” itself has lost its proper place. Natural events have increasingly become “unnatural” by default, uncannily monstrous rather than homey and seemingly maternal (Stengers 2015). Take, the 2011 tsunami and nuclear power disaster in Japan, a disaster both natural and thoroughly unnatural (Bestor 2013). As a result, “nature” takes on the uncanny characteristics of those forms of the supernatural that never had a proper place of their own in the modern West: spirits, monsters, ghosts (Bubandt and van Beek 2011). This uncanny monstrosity gels poorly with hegemonic accounts of the Anthropocene where humans are said to be forceful agents acting upon a passive world. But far from being an epoch when humans have become “a force of nature” (Steffen et al. 2007), the Anthropocene names a time when human industry has conjured into existence nonhuman life forces that the modern prophets of industry – those who announced humans to be the only true agents in the world – had declared to be dead. The Anthropocene is a time when ghostly forces come to life in ways that are tainted through and through with strangeness. Take, for instance, the unpredictable agency of anthropogenic earthquakes in the fracked landscapes of Oklahoma (Hand 2014), the explosive but still contested methane flammability of a thawing Siberian tundra (The Siberian Times 2017), or the rapid but poorly understood decline of flyinginsects from the landscapes across Europe in the last 25 years (Carrington 2017). Or, take the global spread of the chytrid fungus by that favored medical animal, the African clawed frog, which is exacerbating the extinction crisis of the world’s amphibians. Or take the vanishing of the bees, or the collapse of fish stocks following the uncontrolled blooms of the planktonic ctenophore Mnemiopsis in the Black Sea and other central Asian bodies of water (Measey et al. 2012; Shiganova and Bulgakova 2000): all ghostly events marked by eerie disappearance or proliferation; all events that straggle the borders between life and death.

BIOLOGICAL HAUNTINGS

In the midst of such disastrous versions of ghostliness out there in the world, ghosts well up in enigmatic forms within science labs and science literature as well. Biology, for instance, is haunted by new insights that challenge conventional ideas about its research object: life. Take tardigrades, a phylum of over 1200 species of microanimals found on both land and in water. Some land-based tardigrades have an ability called cryptobiosis that allows them to lay dormant for decades, entirely desiccated, only to come back to life, when conditions change. Other species of tardigrades are hardy enough to survive almost any imaginable astronomical (or human-caused) disaster. They can, for instance, withstand radiation energy blasts that would be enough to evaporate the planet’s oceans (Temming 2017). The indestructibility of tardigrades, beings also known as “water bears”, has made them prime candidates for optomechanical experiments that seek to establish where the mind-bending laws of quantum mechanics end and the physical laws of “classical reality” begin. Dutch scientists plan to place a tardigrade on a millimeter-size silicon nitride membrane. Using a laser beam, the researchers hope to bring the membrane into an oscillation pattern that is so fast that it, and the tardigrade on it, will be pushed into a quantum superposition – a condition of being where the tardigrade would be nowhere and everywhere on the oscillation curve at the same time (Folger 2018). The tardigrade in a quantum superposition would cease to “be there” in any classical physical or common-sensical way. It would be the first biological entity to be scientifically induced into a ghostly state of pure potentiality. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” as the so-called third law of science-fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, has it (1962: 21). The possibility of a scientifically produced ghost tardigrade begs the question: what are we, in turn, to make of the reality of magic in the face of such technology?

If the charismatic-looking tardigrades are the ghosts of biology – uncanny specters at the beginning and the end of the world as we know it – then Symbions are its category-breaking queer spirits. Symbions are microscopic symbiotic animal that live on the mouthparts of some Atlantic shellfish, where they feed on food leftovers. Legless and with a nervous system that is entirely unique in the biological world, Symbions belong to their own phylum called Cycliophora, named by AURA collaborator and biologist, Peter Funch, along with colleague Reinhardt Kristensen in 1995. Symbions have a strange and complex reproduction system: they reproduce sexually as well as asexually. Every adult Symbion has a female inside its body. This female is fertilized, inside the adult body, by males that have been produced and grown inside a different larval form also produced by the adult. The fertilized female leaves the adult body and settles elsewhere on the lobster mouth part, where – inside its body – a new larvae destined to become a new adult, is produced. A Pandora’s box of beings within beings, multiply sexed and cryptically reproducing, Symbions have what some have called “the most bizarre life story on Earth” (Marshall 2010). The evolutionary origin and phylogenetic position of the Symbion are still debated, failing as they do to properly fit the morphological and ontogenetic criteria of animal life.

TOWARDS A NONSECULAR ANALYTIC OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

There is, so it seems to us, an absence of sustained, empirical exploration of the ephemeral, spiritual, magical qualities of the nonhuman agency that has come to take center stage in the Anthropocene. We mean empirical in a critical not a naïvely empiricist sense. Wealso think of being empirical in a non-normative sense, an empirical attention to the world that seeks to study the ephemeral in ways that move beyond the sterile choice between secular or religious sympathies. The lack of a critical, non-normative and empirical approach to the ephemeral and uncommon sensical in Anthropocene scholarship is all the more jarring given what one might call the latent promise of the Anthropocene debate: namely, its claim that in Anthropocene scholarship the “common-sensical” divide between the human and the nonhuman, the living and the non-living is no longer operable. In the wake of this claim, studies of the nonhuman remain strikingly and one-dimensionally secular. Inspired by the epistemological instability between the human and the nonhuman, between life and non-life, that the Anthropocene portends, we ask: Does not the nonhuman entail more than flora, fauna, and geology? How do we include spirits, specters and ghosts in the study of the nonhuman or more-than-human? Might the break-down of the human-nonhuman divide, which destabilizes the distinction between humans and nature and the distinction between humans and technology, not also destabilize the distinction between the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, the skeptical and the superstitious? Might the Anthropocene, in other words, not also be a nonsecular Anthropocene?

The concept “Anthropocene” is the buzzword, the mot de jour, of the current moment. Like other buzzwords before it which sought to describe something essential about “the current moment” – modernity, globalization, capitalism, democracy – the word Anthropocene means different things to different people (Swanson et al. 2015; see also Howe and Pandian 2016). The conventional Anthropocene story, the story of the Anthropocene that most often makes it into the public news, is however an “all-to human” story: “we humans”, so this story goes, have through our carbon-driven industry caused massive changes to the ecological and bio-chemical systems of the globe (Crutzen 2002: 23). This all-too-human story is one of tragic irony, a story of harvesting the sour grapes of our own progress. It is a Zivilizationskritik as told through the human destruction of the fragile environment around us. It is an apt and useful story, but also a very specific story: one that insists, yet again, on putting Man (capital M) and Western Man (capital W and capital M) at its center. It is a story which has one of two endings: either apocalypse of one kind or another or salvation through some technological fix (embodied in dreams of machines to sequester carbon, of gene banks to store the DNA of extinct species, or of an exodus to Mars) (Haraway 2016).

We want to tell other and more-Earthbound stories of the Anthropocene that challenge this anthropocentric and euro-centric story. We want to tell multi-species stories about the more-than-human socialities that we humans cultivate, in many different ways, with the bacteria, the fungi, the protists, the animals and the plants around us. This interest in more-than-human-socialities have drawn us into collaboration with biologists, through whom we have come to learn hugely interesting stories about the magic of symbiotic evolution, about the alien and space-defying life-cycles of the tardigrade, and about the uncanny reproduction of the Symbion. And it is here that the conversation about “lack” and “latent promise” comes in: for what kind of conversation might be possible, we wonder, between these biological insights into the magic, the alien, the uncanniness of the lives of animals, plants and fungi on the one hand, and the anthropological engagement with the magic, the alien and the uncanny in fieldwork, on the other? Might we learn to take both kinds of magic – the magic of the natural world and the magic of what is erroneously called “the supernatural world” – equally seriously? To think critically and curiously across the realities opened up by each of them? To think of magical ecologies as both biological AND full of the unknown, the magical, the unusual? To engage empirically with the unnatural in order to better understand a natural world gone awry (Bubandt 2017)? More-than-human sociality might in this light, for anthropologists, be more than a foray into new terrains of biology, technology, and geology but also a rediscovery of some old terrain: the anthropological study of that which our secular language does not allow us to say without secretly snickering: the spiritual, the cosmological, the magical, the ancestral. Secularist reason, ironically, obliges us to dismiss and distance ourselves from these dimensions in spite of the fact that the magic, the alien, the spiritual is found not only in exotic settings far away but may also be found in our global financial markets, in “natural” disasters, in voting booths, and on an optomechanical membrane. Far more than that, magic – so we suggest – is woven into the very fabric of co-species relations of a ruined world.

So could not, and should not, Anthropocene scholarship also be an engagement with and a critique of the secular language and secular common-sense that shore it up? For this language and the common-sense view of the world that it affords prevent us from properly – that is, critical and empirically – exploring the uncommon and uncanny forms of agency and enchantment that are called into being in the Anthropocene (Szerszynski 2017; Buck 2015; Latour 2014). The idea of a nonsecular Anthropocene, for us, does not point to a place, a domain outside of the secular. Rather a nonsecular Anthropocene seeks to name an analytical perspective, a different kind of language and a different way of seeing. In fashioning the vocabularies and spectacles for this perspective, we are helped a great deal by existing research. Elisabeth Povinelli’s study of geo-ontologies seeks to probe the distinction between animate and inanimate the structures modern, neo-liberal and secular power – a distinction that is fundamentally challenged on its own terms in a time when both rivers and companies have become legal persons (Povinelli 2016). Marisol de la Cadena’s notion of cosmo-politics and her argument that the Anthropocene is haunted by the Anthropo-unseen also points to what we call a nonsecular Anthropocene (de la Cadena 2015), as does Timothy Morton’s call to magical re alismas a necessary perspective for the study of hyper-objects such as global warming and species extinction (Morton 2013).

And like the recent publication Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Tsing et al. 2017), we ask what kinds of ghosts and monsters, ancestors and gods inhabit the ruined landscapes of the Anthropocene. How, in other words, might the study of biological landscapes be brought into a conversation with the study of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene? By bringing the empirical study of landscape ecology into conversation with the critical study of the multiple ontologies of the uncanny valleys of the new reality named the Anthropocene we hope to build a nonsecular approach to the more-than-human ecologies of contemporary environmental crisis. Such an approach might, we propose, begin with an empirical study of the eco-theologies of co-species life to then ask questions about the links between political ecology and political theology. If political ecology seeks to describe the relationship between politics and the environment, and political theology that between politics and the realm of gods and spirits, the study of an Anthropocene uncanny would seek to explore what happens in the links between these. For how do the politics of nature and the politics of religion relate in the Anthropocene? Bruno Latour began an answer to this question in his 2013 Gifford lectures on Gaia which he subtitled Six Lectures on the political theology of nature (2013; see also Latour 2017). In these lectures, he started by dismissing “religion” and “nature” as useful categories in the Anthropocene, partly because, as he put it, “they share too many attributes”, and partly because they fail to adequately name “the agencies that populate the Earth”: those humans and nonhumans that are called into being and into action by the changing world they inhabit together. So, the Anthropocene seems to be a critical moment in which to reinquire into how we might best study those beings that used to be contained either in “nature” or in “religion”. Beings that used to be neatly separated into each their proper domain – ghosts, spirits, gods and specters within the domain of “belief” and “religion” and tardigrades, carbon particles, methanogenic bacteria within the domain of “fact” and “nature” – now roam the same uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene. The contributions to A Nonsecular Anthropocene make a common call to study these uncommon beings and their reality effects on all of us. There is no easy way to study the afterlives of nature and religion in these uncanny valleys, but they are too omnipresent and important to be ignored.

When US President Donald Trump in 2017 announced the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change, following pre-election tweets that he believed global warming to be a Chinese hoax perpetrated to financially trick America (White House Briefing 2017; Pierre-Louis 2017), he was roundly criticized for withdrawing from the global accounting system for a nation-based reduction to carbon-emission (itself not an ideal system) – not only by other political leaders, but also by Pope Francis. In his 2015 Encyclical letter, Pope Francis had already declared the climate to be a common good and the earth the “common home” of humankind. Following earlier Papal calls for a “global ecological conversion”, Pope Francis announced the need for a dialogue between science and religion to address an ecological crisis that was caused by humans and through which “humanity has disappointed God” (Pope Francis 2015: 44). The entanglements of belief and skepticism, of the homely and the uncanny, are thick and spectacularly ambiguous in this melting pot of political doubt, scientific truth and religious morality. In an Anthropocene twist of modernity, belief and skepticism have themselves become unrecognizable, uncanny: doubt today aligns easily with populism and corporate-financed conspiracy theory (Oreskes and Conway 2010), while science today finds new alliances with theology. If it is true that nature has no proper place in the Anthropocene, it is equally true that “politics”, “religion”, and “science” longer look the same either. A nonsecular approach to the Anthropocene begins by taking this twist seriously by studying how – in contrast to conventional accounts of secular modernity – environmental and climatic crisis appears to give center stage to new alignments of truth and belief, politics and doubt in multiple ways and how in the wake of these realignments the possibility of gods and ghosts irrupts from within the politics and sciences that not so long ago insisted on banishing ghosts and gods to a putative elsewhere – to the exotic other, to the naïve and uneducated or to our own pre-Enlightenment ancestors. This banishment from the realm of the real is no longer so easy to maintain. Unexpectedly, and unwantedly, ghosts and monsters have now come to occupy the place of the real, of the deadly serious, in novel and unexpected ways. Nature-as-we-knew-it may be have ceased to be, but what has taken its place? What is the reality of nature after its death? Nature as ghost? As imagination? As calculation? As conspiracy? As hyper-object? As monster?

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