Uncategorized – Page 16 – Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene

First Published September 5, 2019

Research Article https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819871964

Article first published online: September 5, 2019; Issue published: February 1, 2020

Arun Saldanha, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. Email: saldanha@umn.edu

Abstract

The Anthropocene names the epoch wherein humans have become the main geological agent on the planet’s surface. But which humans, and since when? Dating the onset of the Anthropocene is a political and ontological as much as a scientific act. This essay argues the Anthropocene is inexorably racial because it flows out of a capitalist system which requires racializing populations and environments from early modernity to the present and into the future. The essay contends that racial capitalism should be a central category in explaining the onset of the Anthropocene. The focus will be on investigating whether it makes sense to take the European discovery of the Americas and the genocide against its original inhabitants as threshold of a new geological epoch. Following the radicalization of Marx in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, it will be suggested that though colonization and slavery were essential for modern globalization to emerge, capital embarked on its self-perpetuating destructive trajectory through industrialization. Structural racism was transmuted and continues to characterize the global ecological crisis.

Keywords Anthropocene, racial capitalism, capital, Orbis hypothesis, genocide of Indigenous Americans, industrialization

Introduction

The Anthropocene names the epoch wherein humans have become the main geological agent on the planet’s surface. The impact of human activity on the planet is such that a hundred millions years from now, hypothetical geologists will be able to notice the earth went through changes that will still be measurable. But which changes do we select as definite, and when did they happen? Which humans? Dating the onset of the Anthropocene is a political and ontological as much as a scientific act, as scientists realize very well, though seldom admit. Defining the Anthropocene intrinsically carries with it a laying of culpability for the past and a responsibility for the future, while the research on how geological agency is distributed across time and across species cannot but involve the deepest of moral conundrums. Since the processes gathered under the Anthropocene umbrella are almost all self-reinforcing and nefarious for ecosystems, hence possibly jeopardizing the viability of our species itself, the question is properly existential: who or what is to take care of humanity’s survival?

Some social science scholars and political activists have sought to debunk the Anthropocene concept altogether, pointing out that only a small proportion of the human population has in the last few centuries caused the discussed immense environmental changes, from the annihilation of Indigenous ecologies and the ever more desperate mining of fossil fuels and rare earths, to overfishing and agribusiness. As Oxfam (2015) pointed out during the Paris climate negotiations, the carbon footprint of the world’s richest 1% could be as much as 175 times that of the poorest 10%. With that 1% owning half the world’s wealth, decisions on how the economy runs are obscenely skewed. Poverty and vulnerability are just like in colonial times concentrated in Africa, South America, and Asia. On a deeper level, the Promethean subjugation of ecosystems and the exploitative division of labor has from ancient times been premised on patriarchy, that is, the usurpation of social power and discourse itself by adult men. Rather than humanity as such, which has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, these critics (e.g. Mirzoeff, 2016) point out that it is the white captains of the capitalist system who have created a new geological epoch.

With help from renegade Marxists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this essay agrees the key agent behind environmental destruction is the capitalist system as fed by European colonization and patriarchy, yet emphasizes the power of those captains depends on the inhuman self-replication of capital, that is, on the most deterritorialized and deterritorializing force of modernity. For sure, in certain corners of critical geography, “capital” accrued such an expansive explanatory force that it became taken-for-granted and perhaps quasi-theological. Even if Marx first formulated a systematic concept of capital, this essay attempts to rediscover this category after the critiques of the sclerotic tendencies of Marxism by poststructuralist, feminist, black, postcolonial, Indigenous, environmentalist, and other left theorists. To offer a starting date for the Anthropocene and explaining capitalism, one cannot but inhabit the productive tensions between Marxism and these cognate critical discourses.

In this essay, I will keep the term Anthropocene, then, precisely in order to wrest it from the mainstream mystifications of how the planet came to this situation. Following the recent suggestion of Françoise Vergès (2017), we can call the Anthropocene an inexorably racial regime because modern society has at crucial junctures had to discriminate populations in order to expand itself. We will see one crucial debate involves the proposition of Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2018) that the Anthropocene is based on the decimation of Indigenous Americans. The emergence of capitalism in Europe was built on the displacement and exploitation of others elsewhere, especially but not only across the Atlantic Ocean, a process we will see is captured well by the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation. But I will argue a framework is required to explain racial capitalism’s more recent developments as well, after it abandoned displacement and slave-trade as central features. That the new planetary phase is intrinsically a “racial” phenomenon means that contingently distinguishable human bodies are differentially positioned in relation to not just the state and the city, but the profound geological and ecological transformations which were required for “modern” society to emerge at all. The racializing effects of capital have been intrinsic, though they continually shift.

Hence anthropos as a site of (r)evolutionary thresholds is always already subdivided into subsets which are interpellated in sharply different ways by the earth and by world-history. As Indigenous, feminist, black, and critical race theorists have long since demonstrated, the discursive figure of “man” belies structural injustices so entrenched that upending them requires redefining the basic terms for talking about the social at all (Mbembe, 2017; Mirzoeff, 2016; Sharpe, 2016; Wynter, 2013). Anthropos is fundamentally at odds with itself, and this is what makes it thoroughly political (see also Clark and Gunaratnam, 2017). When the extreme geographic disparities highlighted by the umbrella term “Anthropocene”—of footprints, consumption levels, vulnerability—are explained, the concept of “the human species” loses its humanist innocence. Geographers have long pointed out that what is called development in one place happens within the same global ecosystem making life tougher or impossible elsewhere (Harvey, 2010; Yusoff, 2018). The prospect of hundreds of millions of so-called climate refugees follows from the fact that the distribution of mobility and war technologies is already highly racialized, and it has been for centuries (Baldwin and Bettini, 2017). To retrieve a radical potential of the Anthropocene concept is to alert publics of the possibility that imminent catastrophes are to be appreciated on the scale of millions of years, requiring concomitantly epochal forms of responsibility, solidarity, and upheaval. While the left has long pointed out the status quo’s hidden destructiveness, now even the most cautious mainstream science is understanding intergenerational injustices are built into the economic megamachine itself.

When the Anthropocene was first proposed as new geological epoch or era in earth science, it was suggested it started with the initial Industrial Revolution as fuelled by coal-powered steam engines (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). The search has since then been for a so-called golden spike or Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), a location and date at which planet-wide signals are sufficiently measurable that a qualitative shift from the Holocene can be inferred. On this criterion of detectability, radioactive fallout from nuclear testing is a clearer marker than changes in the carbon, nitrogen, and other cycles (or presumed future fossils for that matter). As reported by Jan Zalasiewicz et al. (2015), earth science is now leaning towards determining a GSSP in the 1950s or 1960s, but the decision is still to be made. This essay agrees with the initial intuition that the onset of the Anthropocene lies in the later 18th century, not on empirical grounds, however, which are beyond my expertise, but explicitly starting from theoretical principles in the humanities insofar as they are coterminous with understanding the particularity of modern times. Alongside the quantitative empiricism of science, we should remember debates about human–environment relations ineluctably involve concepts which have been discussed for centuries and have recently been given new political salience in various left (feminist, black, Marxist, decolonial, etc.) discourses: market society, oppression, universality, the “New World,” “nature,” technology, and so on. Here, the focus will be on the concept of racial capitalism as elaborated through the nonhuman aspect of capital, and we devote a section to other prevalent approaches to racial capitalism. After introducing the politics of the dating debate, we will consider the analysis of the trans-Atlantic contact event in greater detail. Though appreciative of Lewis and Maslin’s suggestion the mass death of native Americans be taken as indicative of the Anthropocene, and though recent developments in the theorization of slavery and blackness are sharpening our views of the profundity of racist violences, I will suggest industrialization has been, in retrospect, more consequential for the planet, even if mass death and slave labor had prepared for it, and will continue to characterize it into the future.

One or several Anthropocenes?

As an intrinsically temporal concept, the Anthropocene cannot but be dated. Moreover, as it pertains to a geological series, it must abide by or at least engage the methodological rules of that series for its coherence. That is, it must be based on a signal (fossil, sedimentary, chemical, radiometric, geomagnetic, etc.), a condensation in a certain location on Earth representing the planetary average and detectible millions of years from now. In August 2016, the International Congress of the Geological Sciences voted in Cape Town that the Anthropocene is real, but when it followed the Holocene is yet to be decided. Amongst scientists, the debate about the start date, technically called the GSSP, continues to rage (Zalasiewicz et al., 2015). The propositions that an “early Anthropocene” began with the human use of fire between two and one million years ago, which incrementally changed the distribution of vegetation and animals and levels of atmospheric carbon, and the more influential theory that irreversible anthropogenic planetary changes commenced 10,000–8000 BCE, the period of the Neolithic Revolution in agriculture and settlement, are clearly defended by more conservative earth scientists, archeologists, and paleontologists. When we analyze earth science’s premises and methods, it quickly becomes clear it inevitably comprises an ideological struggle, insofar as evidence is interpreted and conceptualized in conflicting ways (see Angus, 2016). For both science and the humanities, it does not make sense to locate the cusp of the new epoch thousands of years ago if the recent changes associated with “modern times” are more consequential. But by asking when the Anthropocene commenced after the medieval period, we are forced to confront some productive tensions.

While there might be broad agreement amongst many in activist circles and the critical humanities and social science literature that a confluence of oppressive social relations lies at the heart of the global environmental crisis, there are many ways of understanding “racism” and “capitalism” and how they relate to colonial settlement, heteropatriarchy, science and technology, and nonhuman entities. Indigenous and decolonial critiques in the Americas have emphasized the arrival of Columbus and the subsequent and ongoing process of eliminating the socioecological arrangements of the original inhabitants (Davis and Todd, 2017). Black and critical race theorists have unearthed the basis of globalization in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery (Wynter, 2013; Yusoff, 2018). Postcolonial and subaltern studies focus more on the question how peoples in Asia and Africa could acquiesce to Europeans transforming their economies and ecologies for the profit of the metropoles, a question less of extermination or enslavement than of subordination (Chakrabarty, 2012). Pacifists point out the world’s nuclear arsenal is capable of destroying the entire terrestrial habitat several times over (Schell, 1982), while futurists, both utopian and dystopian, argue the profound dependency of human life on computers should be central to how our common future is to be thought (compare Bastani, 2019 and Berry, 2018). Some radical environmentalists lay the blame with civilization or even humanity itself (Jensen, 2016). Finally, Marxist discourse seeks to provide these relatively newer progressive positions the crucial concept of capitalism, demonstrating how conquest, enslavement, and cultural and technological domination have been intrinsic to Europe’s ascendance into industrial hegemony (Foster et al., 2010). So different thematic foci can correspond to different starting dates for our planetary emergency: the dawn of Homo sapiens, the Neolithic Revolution, 1492, the centuries over which trans-Atlantic slavery was institutionalized, the Industrial Revolution from about 1750, the age of empires and nationalisms, the atom bomb and Cold War, the birth of mass consumption in the 1950s, or the advent of the internet.

Could we not be content with a pluralist approach in which there are multiple Anthropocenes without one exact start date, which would have always in some way accompanied the human species and which have merely intensified with each of these thresholds? If stratigraphy itself requires strict periodization, could “Anthropocene” not mean different things in different discourses, for different political aims? It is true periodization is often a teleological exercise, its Eurocentric totalizing tendencies on a par with those of cartography and Linnaean taxonomy. Just like with the related concepts civilization, progress, evolution, modernity, and globalization, the debate about the Anthropocene’s starting date is ridden with the problem of how to locate places as “further” on a trajectory of change which is then taken to be desirable or inevitable. But the most important argument against the skepticism about the term amongst social scientists (Bonneil and Fressoz, 2016; Malm, 2015) is that in sharp contrast to the discourses of modernization and progress, almost all uses of the term are tinged with deep worry about the future. Certainly, the alarmism has a tendency towards ethnocentrism and is increasingly hijacked by racist nationalism and Malthusian pseudo-solutions. But simultaneously, it cannot be favorable to those in power if they can be shown to be maintaining a trajectory possibly leading, if not to the extinction of humans, at least to massive deprivation and uncertainty. As climate activists across the world from a wide range of backgrounds show, the deep worry intrinsic to the Anthropocene concept can be politicized.

Joining the dating debate therefore does not necessarily erect the new geological epoch as monolithic or transcendent, a grand end-point which European men as privileged bearers of history (or even of evolution) led the rest of the world to. It is precisely to demonstrate how the processes that led to the new earthly reality are highly uneven and fiercely contested. Far from allowing the Anthropocene concept to once again reinforce hegemonic sentiments about societal maturation, deciding on a start date could underline the utterly contingent nature of all life if it can be shown to follow from assemblages (of capital, patriarchy, and racism) that could well not have existed at all. Another epistemico-political aim here, however, is to urge critical human geography to engage Western physical science so that they can urge it to become politicized (see also Clark and Gunaratnam, 2017). Even if it turns out the humanities suggest a different start date than scientists do, it will be because the former can lay claim to a more rigorous understanding of what exactly is anthropogenic about the new epoch—what makes the world of anthropos go around.

Primitive accumulation and racial capitalism

The tendency towards orthodoxy in the Marxist legacy has often blocked it from enriching itself with other critical or left discourses. The concept of “racial capitalism” as propounded by Cedric Robinson (1983), for example, is first of all meant to correct Marx’s and socialism’s relative neglect of the physical violence and ideological processes of slavery, racism, and nationalism, which modernity is constructed from. Eric Williams’ classic Capitalism and Slavery (Williams, 1944) had already demonstrated how the wealth amassed from the plantation economies in the Caribbean and the southern United States was directly fed into the burgeoning landscapes of factories and rapid urbanization of Northern England, and then the rest of Europe. We can conclude from Robinson’s wide-ranging historical analysis that capitalism is from the beginning not just transcontinental and transoceanic but a runaway process intrinsically geared to expand itself by exploiting populations deemed less worthy of life, without concern for long-term ramifications. While Marx downplays the role of race in the development of capitalism, his overall framework allows for correcting his own oversight. Something Robinson lays less stress on but what is crucial for my argument here is that once capital was established as feedback loop by the factories of Northern England after some two centuries of slavery, it insinuated itself into one social formation after another. No guild, ethnic prejudice, border, or sultan could hold back the new magic formula of making profits through industrial technologies and wage-labor.

Though manufacturing, credit/debt, and reinvestment had existed for many centuries, the abstract as well as violent force of money could only come into its own with luxury commodities, especially spices and sugar, and textiles, first wool then cotton (Beckert, 2014; Eichen, 2019). In the last chapters of Volume 1 of Capital, Marx (1992) famously writes of what the bourgeois political economists before him called “primitive” (a better translation is original or primary) accumulation, the concentration of wealth before and necessary for industrialization. From the later Middle Ages, as trade increased amongst market towns, landowners in Europe gradually consolidated land by both legal and violent means, causing mass impoverishment amongst peasants, whose labor was henceforth available at very low wages and whose itinerancy was often made illegal (cf. Federici, 2004).

The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat. (Marx, 1992: 895)

In the British Isles especially, the policy of so-called enclosure was often difficult to distinguish from legalized theft. It displaced thousands of small farmers and over some three centuries (14th to 18th) created the propertyless masses which the factories would put to work at new, more efficient machinery. Some Marxist historians like Ellen Meiksins Wood (1999) argue England’s strong economic position was chiefly thanks to these enclosures, a large domestic market, and durable infrastructure. However, the theory of primitive accumulation (even in its mainstream versions) holds that there was already a world-system of transoceanic interactions which industrialization could tap into. The profits amassed in the Italian city-states from maritime trade, and then in the Iberian peninsula from its ruthless plunder of the Americas, especially of their precious metals, was a necessary buildup for the rise of Northwestern Europe, as the latter could benefit from the credit and the geographical connections forged by the former (Arrighi, 2009). Furthermore, as the Dutch, British, French, then Belgians and Germans started colonizing as well, it would become clear how primitive accumulation in the colonies became a sort of enclosure policy continued by other means, a general process of soft and hard coercion David Harvey renamed accumulation by dispossession (see Harvey, 2010). To understand why the capitalist state is intrinsically expansionist and racialized, the concept of primitive accumulation is crucial.

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black-skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. (Marx, 1992: 1147)

Updating these illustrious remarks about modernity’s “idyllic” origins, Silvia Federici (2004) theorizes early-modern misogynous violence like witch-hunting, the origins of the nuclear family, and subordination of women’s labor as entirely implicated in the establishment of the capitalist system. Jason Moore (2015) has added that primitive accumulation also encompasses a belligerent exploitation of slaves both Indigenous and imported as well as nonhuman forces like minerals, energy sources, and fertilizers (what Moore calls “cheap nature”). Racialization can be considered a requirement, seen in hindsight, for capitalism to take hold as intercontinental economic system (Eichen, 2019). Following Robinson and Moore, Vergès (2017) argues for defining the Anthropocene/Capitalocene as deeply racialized, against the natural scientists and environmental historians who often erase systemic violence from their narratives of ecological change. Echoing environmental justice advocates, Vergès points out the adverse effects of global warming and pollution (think of plastics, e-waste, and noise) are felt more intensely by brown and black populations. Just like early-modern Europeans claimed entire continents and oceans and grew powerful from coerced labor, the vulnerability to environmental disaster of some groups today systematically follows from the actions of still mostly white elites.

While the first defenders of the Anthropocene idea in earth science noted a threshold of the earth’s environmental systems was crossed in Britain in the latter 18th century (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), they refrain from unpacking why this event occurred at all. In science, capital’s violent logic is obscured just as it is elsewhere. Following the liberal canon, Crutzen takes steam-power to be the driving force of industrialization and 1784, the year James Watt patented his second steam engine, as symbolic of the threshold between Holocene and Anthropocene, even if it cannot be a GSSP because nothing geologically discernible occurred that year. But Andreas Malm (2016) argues the liberal canon is historically inaccurate: the coal-powered steam engine became central to industry only later, and British factories were during their initial boom mostly powered by water. Retrieving Marx’s classic argument, Malm argues it is not steam but the increasing availability of capital and cheap labor which triggered the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Technology is given shape only within the matrix of socioeconomic difference, as are its disastrous effects. Capitalism’s love affair with fossil fuels and the resulting unprecedented changes to atmospheric chemistry were not inaugurated with Watt’s engines, but by capital amassed through primitive accumulation.

It is important to understand how racial capitalism reproduces itself ideologically by masking its systematic violences while providing benefits to those in power. Even if capital is itself an unintentional process, its relentless logic of self-enrichment makes individual capitalists, politicians, and bureaucrats make decisions with increasingly adverse effects on others and the environment. Malm writes in the beginning of his book:

Global warming is the unintended by-product par excellence. A cotton manufacturer of early nineteenth-century Lancashire who decided to forgo his old waterwheel and invest in a steam engine, erect a chimney and order coal from a nearby pit did not, in all likelihood, entertain the possibility that his act could have any kind of relationship to the extent of the Artic sea ice […] Whether one chooses to ignore, suppress, deny or agonise over the knowledge of what is happening, it is there, in the air, heavier by the year. And yet the descendants of the Lancashire manufacturers, whose dominion now span the globe, are taking decisions on a daily basis to invest in new oil wells, new coal-fired power plants, new airports, new highways, new liquified natural gas facilities, new machines to replace human workers, so that emissions are not only continuing to grow but are doing so at a higher speed. […] How did we get caught up in this mess? (2016: 1–3, my italics)

These kinds of observations need to be read with an attention to embodied difference traditionally underplayed in the Marxist literature. Against the hegemonic liberal idea that racism is mostly about interpersonal prejudice, the question whether a cotton manufacturer is “a racist” is moot. What is incontrovertible is that he profits from an overall circuit involving the displacement of Indigenous Americans, the capture of slaves within Africa, brutal labor practices in the plantations, corrupt monopolies in Asia, surplus-labor in his factory, cut-throat competition in London, geopoliticking across European capital cities, warfare everywhere between, and millennia of patriarchy (Beckert, 2014; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Williams, 1944). Similarly, in the 20th century, the infrastructures around oil and automobility are steeped in institutional racism, from the demolishment of black neighborhoods for the highways facilitating white flight in the US to Bangladeshi construction workers in the Qatari desert and Chinese-led mineral extraction in central Africa. And it is essential to note the “yet” in Malm’s quote: what motivates humans to continue on the path of obvious destruction of other people, other species? Which tiny groups benefit from a disastrous system? Why do millions vote liars and sociopaths into office? And how long can the facts of geophysics be ignored? Addressing today’s planetary “mess” will require a concept of racial and gender ideology lacking in most accounts of it.

Capital as axiomatic

In order to understand the seeming inexorability of the Anthropocene and its devastating racializing effects, the traditional Marxist focus of class and political-economic analysis seems insufficient. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) nevertheless strictly follow Marx when they conceptualize capital as an abstract, altogether inhuman form of exchange. For the “mature” Marx of Capital, the irrational nature of capital is exactly what makes it capable of reorganizing the earth in its own image, regardless of ideology and tradition. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (2005) still identified the bourgeoisie as the revolutionary subject of modernity, but we should reread its famous passages as conceptualizations of capital instead:

The bourgeoisie [capital] cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois [capitalist] epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie [capital] over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. (Marx and Engels, 2005: 44)

Capital’s essence is to penetrate, scoop up, and render exchangeable all bodies, things, and landscapes, and meanwhile obfuscate its own workings. Deleuze and Guattari put emphasis on the mysterious power of money to put a value on absolutely anything. But they also follow Marx in insisting that capital requires barriers in order to renew itself, an argument well-known in geography through Harvey’s work (see Harvey, 2010). Capital became the determining factor only because it is hindered by political and traditional as well as geophysical and physiological obstacles. There is no space here to fully elaborate a Deleuze–Guattarian critical-geographical framework, but it starts by radicalizing the Marxian concept of capital and critique of state power (Alliez and Lazzarato, 2018; Sibertin-Blanc, 2016). Against both their faddish reputation in the humanities and a suspicion amongst Marxists, Deleuze and Guattari are far from vitalist mystics unencumbered with geographical injustices. In fact, the attention in their work, especially A Thousand Plateaus (1987), to the unsurpassable fluidity of capital in conjunction with sexual desires, racist imagery (or “faciality”), and mechanization, as well as their idea of “the earth” as factor in world-history, can entwine fruitfully with feminist and decolonial discourses and potentially overcome the tendencies towards philosophical dualism and reductionism which continue to plague the more traditional Marxist critiques (Saldanha, 2017).

The central concept Deleuze and Guattari (1987) propose to highlight the inhuman explosiveness of capital is the “axiomatic.” The capitalist economy continually invents quasi-automatic mechanisms for profit-making they call “axioms.” Far from being in essence linked to liberal democracy, capitalism takes many forms, with authoritarian, criminal, and even state-socialist regimes all procuring ever-new ways of feeding the feedback loop of money. Following world-systems theory (see also Arrighi, 2009), Deleuze and Guattari contend this continual reinvention of capital as it spreads explains the geographic unevenness of the system in which even noncapitalism (economies without banking, cross-border trade, or reinvestment of profits) continues to exist:

the international capitalist axiomatic effectively assures the isomorphy of the diverse formations only where the domestic market is developing and expanding, in other words, in ‘the center’. But it tolerates, in fact it requires, a certain peripheral polymorphy, to the extent that it is not saturated, to the extent that it actively repels its own limits; this explains the existence, at the periphery, of heteromorphic social formations, which certainly do not constitute vestiges or transitional forms since they realize an ultramodern capitalist production (oil, mines, plantations, industrial equipment, steel, chemistry), but which are nonetheless precapitalist, or extracapitalist, owing to other aspects of their production and to the forced inadequacy of their domestic market in relation to the world market. When international organization becomes the capitalist axiomatic, it continues to imply a heterogeneity of social formations, it gives rise to and organizes its ‘Third World’. (1987: 436–437)

Capital’s paradox is that it is both immensely productive and immensely destructive of social formations and ecologies, and that it homogenizes the world by encouraging heterogeneity. But with feminist and decolonial critiques in mind, we should add the renown “creative destruction” neoliberal economists elevate to quasi-divine principle has an intrinsic racial and gender bias insofar as bosses and politicians of the core countries make decisions that cause unemployment, war, famine, pollution, extreme weather, and stressed households in the peripheries, continuing the callousness of colonial days. Men in suits make decisions about arms and mining or food and fuel prices on Wall Street and in the City of London, but also in Hong Kong and Riyadh, driving farmers to suicide in India and refugees to flee Yemen or East Congo. But the men in suits must continually reinvest their profits or they risk being outcompeted: nobody masters capital’s fluidity. The institutional racism inheres in the fact that in the process of fiercely competing with one another, these capitalists can lay entire societies and ecosystems to waste and justify it as bringing “development” or simply “doing business.”

Empires and wealthy merchants have been aggressively expanding their reach for millennia. However, thanks to its enigmatic and singularly effective axiomatic, only capital could have pursued a truly “planetary” agenda. This diffusedness and proliferating reliance on other forces is exactly what amounts to its capacity to create a new phase in the evolution of the earth. Analyses of the role of capital in global environmental destruction show the disaster-prone nature of capital is part of its normal functioning (Angus, 2016; Foster et al., 2010; Kovel, 2007). The child soldiers, toxic sludge, detention camps, sex tourism, ocean garbage patches, smog, and unfinished ghost cities are the logical result of the self-augmentation of capital as much as the glitzier spaces of airports and cyberspace. All the famous hockey-stick graphs associated with the Anthropocene are ultimately materializations of the exponential spirality of capital, and even mainstream commentators are anxious about where these compound processes are heading. Qua axiomatic capital has no conscience, because it is not conscious. It is a very simple algorithmic process capitalists themselves are caught up in. The Anthropocene could only emerge because of such a runaway process, whereas previous transformations brought to the planet by humans, from fire to polders, all had their geographic limitations built into them. Though Deleuze and Guattari (1987) are in broad agreement with Harvey’s (2010) characterization of capital as the quintessential productive principle of globalization, especially in the form of finance, their concept of axiomatic places more emphasis on capital’s uncontrollable and inhuman aspects while never losing sight of how money enlists consumers’, bankers’, and politician’s desires.

It makes philosophical sense, then, to date the Anthropocene’s beginning to late-18th-century Lancashire and its new wage-labor-powered industrial regime. Certainly, this emergence was no simple “point” because it was made possible by financial inputs from London and the East India Company as well as the Atlantic slave economy set up much earlier by the Iberians and Italians. But what is important to note for understanding our global predicament is that the techno-economic magic which happened there would become planet-wide over the following two centuries. This becoming-global of the capitalist formula only happened because it could not have been invented and commanded by any one state or group in any one ecosystem, yet could overtake them all. But the way in which money pits populations against each other is all too human. That capital is a quasi-automatic process tending toward ubiquity does not mean that it has not been profusely contested at every moment it conjured another commodity-chain and marketplace.

Given the fundamental driver of the Anthropocene is capital, calling our epoch the “Capitalocene” with Jason Moore (2015: chapter 7) could seem attractive. He dates its onset in “the long sixteenth century” because the twin forces of genocide and slavery were then consolidated in conjunction with banking. But aiming to critique geology from the outside, Moore’s term betrays its political color without being able to do much about the spread of the term it deprecates. By emphasizing only capital, it has to underestimate the profundity of the earth processes occurring under and before capitalism, thereby missing the extreme contingency of the capture of flows of matter, energy, and labor-power which capital must continually attempt. The axiomatic comes into existence precisely because this capture is often fraught with tensions and setbacks. Similarly, when Jake Kovel (2007) calls capital the “enemy of nature,” he cancels the possibility of a geohistorical understanding of capitalism as emergent from socioecological assemblages which have to align to create value. In the Deleuze–Guattarian framework, capital is instead fully part of the biophysical world, uniquely able to bend nonhuman forces to its wishes, very friendly indeed to human desire and the generativity of life forms and minerals. Naming capital the sovereign force over and against “nature” swings us back into the kind of determinism in which technology or the bourgeoisie is in control of life, when what is needed is a paradigm shift acknowledging that capital entirely depends on and is ever vulnerable to earthly exigencies. For that, I would suggest the Enlightenment concept of “nature” which Marxism inherited be replaced with Deleuze and Guattri’s ontology of multiplicity and flow.

To conclude, while Marxists are correct to call out the technocratic and teleological biases in mainstream stories about industrialization, Malm (2015) is wrong to call the Anthropocene but a bourgeois “myth.” No doubt the Anthropocene concept potentially reinforces the most Promethean and Eurocentric mythologies ever, but that shows just how important it is to redefine it. There needs to be a modicum of agreement that Earth has indeed gone through a qualitative shift in order for the debate about what caused it to be held convincingly, even if mainstream science habitually ignores racism, capital, and patriarchy as explanatory factors. When the name “Anthropocene” is decried in advance because of its sensationalism or partiality, the opportunity is missed for partaking in what may prove to be the most important naming debate of our lifetime.

Ontologies of blackness and indigeneity

A growing number of theorists are elaborating on racial capitalism, though not always using the term, working broadly in the Fanonian tradition but pushing the ontological envelope on how race pries open the consistency of the notion of humanity as such (from Chakrabarty, 2012 in postcolonial theory to Yusoff, 2018 in new-materialist feminism via Mirzoeff, 2016 in critical race studies). It can be said there is an “ontological turn” in the theorization of race in that long-standing philosophical questions of “man,” being, life, death, temporality, historicity, embodiment, the thing, the earth, language as such, and the limits of knowledge have come to the fore (Wynter, 2013). In black studies, the ontological turn often has implicit and explicit echoes of Heidegger, ethically assuming an “Afropessimist” or even black-nihilist stance in that the hopefulness associated with African American political aspirations is shown to itself perpetuate the structural erasure of the possibility of black human-being as inaugurated in the Middle Passage and the commodification of African bodies, which are continued directly in the present (Sexton, 2016; Sharpe, 2016; Warren, 2018). Antiblackness is in this literature a fundamental feature of both modernity and scholarly thought itself. The erasure of Indigenous peoples has a similar and related profundity, and the category of settler-colonialism has in recent years allowed Indigenous scholars to radically question the legal, metaphysical, and political parameters of the socius (Byrd, 2011; Coulthard, 2014; Whyte, 2018; Wolfe, 2016). While there is no space to do justice to the nuances and sophistication of this new effervescence in black, Indigenous, and decolonial theoretical discourse—in particular their varying relations to Marxism, feminism, ecological thought, and poststructuralism—their growing international influence warrants some brief comments to distinguish the approach sketched here.

First, while the social death imparted on Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans are certainly two originary catastrophes forming the basis of global modernity and systematically repressed in discourse, the question is not only how they are entwined, but how they interact with later violent as well as ostensibly more benevolent racializing processes, from the European conquest of the Pacific to multiculturalism in Scandinavia and Singapore, from Soviet Union ethnic policies to the exploitation of South Asian workers in the Middle East and Palestinian workers in Israel. Insofar as capital intrinsically “aims” to become-planetary, we cannot limit ourselves to the Atlantic world, or even primitive accumulation, when explaining its racial implications. Following internationalist black feminists like Angela Davis and historians of global settler-colonialism like Patrick Wolfe (2016), racial capitalism can be seen to have from the beginning involved multiple continents at once, potentializing all of the human species and planet for marketization, with varying degrees of annihilatory biopower and differential inclusion.

Second, pointing out that coercion, warfare, and letting die are at the heart of the global system does not necessarily deny the forcefulness of more seductive ideological processes. To put it bluntly, there must be more benignness to the capitalist system or it would have been overthrown long ago. Deleuze and Guattari’s work insists on the immense functionality of consumerism in chaining populations to the very megamachine which oppresses them. When Glen Coulthard (2014) takes aim at Canada’s liberal politics of recognition which slots its Indigenous peoples into a capitalist state while leaving intact the property codes which have always benefited white settlers, he tells Marx(ists) primitive accumulation encompasses not only the violences of genocide but an inculcation of possessive individualism amongst Native populations which continues unabated today (cf. Hartman, 1997 on such individualism amongst legally emancipated African Americans). If Wolfe and Coulthard conceive settler-colonialism (and primitive accumulation) as a “structure” rather than an “event,” they are in effect saying it had to transform itself from a regime of outright elimination and dispossession into a more subtle one of legalistic recognition, exploitation, and sentimental exoticization. This is not to say physical violence against Indigenous peoples is no longer prevalent. Ontologically, however, following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), more than annihilation, it is life, flow, desire, and productivity that racial capitalism feeds off, and this makes it all the more insidious.

In Christina Sharpe’s influential theorization (2016), blackness is a hole in human “being” itself, the reduction of a part of humanity to thinghood. Like others in the Afropessimist idiom, Sharpe (2016: 11–14) challenges the hegemonic assumption that the Shoah embodies modernity’s most radical evil, noting the violences of trans-Atlantic slavery not only include the still-ongoing eradication of sociocultural rootedness but have been neglected and misrepresented. In a move parallel to Coulthard’s on settler-colonialism, Sharpe conceives slavery not as a past event but the anchor of the structure of (Euro-American) society, which is in itself “antiblack” in that it is premised on the total suppression of black subjecthood. She thereby formally emulates a line of European thinkers like Giorgio Agamben on the role that the absolute abjection of Auschwitz plays in constituting the humanist mythology of modernity: if the intrinsic link between modernity and the Shoah must be disavowed for humanity to continue conceiving itself in liberal-progressivist vein, the more unspeakable disaster for Sharpe is that of slavery. But while European Jewishness constituted itself successfully after its near eradication—controversially in the form of Zionism—black being is for Sharpe always already a structural impossibility (black ~~being~~ as written in Heideggerian typography by Warren, 2018).

Rethinking blackness by way of modernity’s effort to extirpate it, Afropessimism’s position is radical, and it is conscious of the risk of repeating the oft-noted exceptionalist manner in which Israel puts the Shoah to use towards settler-colonial ends (see Wolfe, 2016). Black activists including Angela Davis (in a YouTube video, 2018, with Gayatri Spivak agreeing) have taken issue with this exceptionalist tendency, as inscribed in the term antiblackness and the resurgence of a black nationalism (see also Olaloku-Teriba, 2018 amongst others). Notwithstanding Sharpe’s eloquence in tracing antiblackness from the Middle Passage to refugee drownings in the Mediterranean, a Deleuze–Guattarian approach to racial capitalism differs markedly in that it seeks to map the specific modalities, gradients, and absurdities of institutional racism. Comprehending police brutality, for example, requires concepts like gentrification, securitization, and masculinity, and cannot follow directly from a negativity of blackness at the metaphysical level. We thereby avoid the quasi-theological dispute about which group has historically endured the most suffering. And while the global archives of violence against black peoples must continue to be elaborated, is it the case that slavery and racism seek to absolutely evacuate humanity from the enslaved or incarcerated body? Is it not precisely as humans capable of resistance, farming, crime, and sex that slaves were savagely oppressed? While conceptualizing blackness as dehumanized “nonbeing” makes sense in a Heideggerian framework, for Deleuze and Guattari and (broadly internationalist) feminists like Davis and Spivak, there can be no such sweeping binary between black and everything else (another critique of Afropessimist binarization is found in Day, 2015).

Finally, the historical question is how genocide and slavery prepared for capitalism. The integration of the United States of America as a white-majority nation-state and superpower could only be achieved with rapid immigration, urbanization, and fossil-fuelled transport. During the time when “pioneer” families and farmers were moving in, there were still sizeable areas controlled by Native confederations. When we look at specific regions like William Cronon (1991) does with the Midwest, the eradication of Native ecosystems and the concomitant creation of new European-derived ones—what Alfred Crosby (1986) from a more conservative angle calls “Neo-Europes”—became possible with aggressive new urban assemblages and foodways. White farmers and Indigenous populations have lived in constant tension on the Great Plains. What environmental histories like Cronon show, complementing accounts like Coulthard’s, is that there was a decisive shift in the settling of the American interior when banks could supply loans for parceling land and establishing large infrastructure and industry projects. Tellingly, movies and museums fantasize about the fleeting symbiotic relationships which are supposed to have existed between Indigenous and white. In retrospect, however, such fantasies and the ensuing lamentations about the vanishing Indian were but ideological fig leaves hiding how industrialization in Britain, intra-European imperial wars, and mass consumerism conspired to continue genocide by other means (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). If Indigenous populations had somehow become resistant to Old World diseases and continued using guns and horses efficiently, it is conceivable a patchwork of white and Indigenous states might have persisted, if it were not for a giant wave of capital and migrants coming over from Europe (and later elsewhere). With Indigenous Americans contained and plantation slavery and its quasi-feudal and patriarchal ways outlawed, capital could wipe the continent clean for a new megamachinic arrangement.

Hence ontologizing racial capitalism as always already tethered to slavery and/or genocide avoids the question when exactly “modernity” and the Anthropocene started. For the perspective I am developing, industrialization and related transformations like wage-labor, urbanization, motorized transport, and mass communications are fundamental shifts. While the slave trade and the displacement of Indigenous peoples were essential to enriching Europe for global hegemony, it is manufacturing with its intrinsic relation to proletarianization and slums, accelerating technological innovation, and an irrepressible invitation to consume which spread around the planet, which meant that extermination and coerced labor became slower and more covert processes. Doubtless there are work and mobility conditions approaching chattel slavery in all continents, and there is plenty of biopolitical domination approaching genocide even during alleged peace times. But it is difficult to see how multinational corporations, megacities, and mass migration could have obtained were it not for industrial capitalism overcoming the severe limitations built into the mercantile, plantation, colonial, and eliminationist models.

In the US itself, as scholars from WEB Du Bois (1935) onwards have shown, slavery had to be formally abolished for manufacturing and cities to kick off, spurring processes like the Great Migration of African Americans and, more fortuitously, black music. Following Deleuze and Guattari (and Marx), however dire the extraction of surplus-value from the laboring body, racial capitalism involves some degree (and ideology) of “freedom.” Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) excavation of the terroristic, legal, and psychical aspects of slavery living on after legal Emancipation demonstrates there are strong but disavowed continuities in institutional racism and misogyny. But however violent the post-Emancipation United States has been, from lynching to the prison-industrial complex to the war on crack, there was also the slow rise of black subjectivity, as testified by the black radical tradition to which Hartman herself belongs. She presents one of the finest analyses of the libidinal economies and legal codifications precluding a real black liberation from racial capitalism and individualism, hence of the hypocrisy underneath the official nationalist ideology of “we the people.” Yet an overemphasis on abjection deters from appreciating the enduring plasticity of racism.¹ Politically speaking, there must be room, as there is for Du Bois, Fanon, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers, for theorizing how a black elite could possibly emerge against such backdrop of violence and despair, and why it does not dismantle the system of privilege it gains from itself (from Booker Washington to Jay Z). To wit, if blackness is modernity’s quintessential site of abjection, it becomes difficult to explain why the “most powerful man on Earth” has been black. Afropessimists have of course passionately critiqued the deep complicity with an antiblack system shaping Barack Obama and all liberal antiracism, but true to their pessimistic stance consistently eschew formulating where exactly hope for black people (and other minorities) could come from.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can understand why capital was compelled to expunge slavery and feudal territorialities, often pitting itself explicitly against older forms of racism and sexism, as well as colonialism and nationalism. After the Second World War, the system of United Nations and Bretton-Woods explicitly aimed to allow capital to flow planet-wide so as to transcend the genocidal nationalisms and imperialisms which had just led to such destruction, even though the world remained catastrophically divided between East and West. Formal decolonization was on the one hand an egalitarian antiracist project often inspired by Marxism-Leninism, but on the other, it turned out to be a new phase in capital’s expansion under the rubric of development, with China now occupying the strangest systemic role. However hypocritical the reproach of premodern brutalities by industrial capitalism, it has proven tremendously effective.

Following feminist, black, postcolonial/decolonial, Indigenous, and queer critiques, capital cannot be the only system of violence, even if it posits itself as the dominant one. For Deleuze and Guattari, capital is always reconfiguring the “despotic” or “barbarian” assemblages of patriarchy, religion, kinship, cruelty, extraction of resources, and domestication of plants and animals, all with their various racial dimensions (Saldanha and Adams, 2013). There can only be an extreme fluidity of money by virtue of the fixities of borders, commodification, and biopower. And these pseudo-archaic forces, these reterritorializations through the deterritorializing impetus of capital, have their own ecohistories which the multidisciplinary conversations around the Anthropocene are bringing to light. What is required is a nonreductionist ontology which grants that capital strives to bring all of life, in fact all of the thinkable universe, into its preternatural ambit, but it can do so only by virtue of the biophysical and sociocultural characteristics of what it captures. Capital is such a formidable genie precisely because it is conjured from deep within the earth.

The Orbis hypothesis

Two physical geographers, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, have recently suggested our new geological epoch be dated to the near-disappearance of the Indigenous societies of the Americas, that is, the beginning of the 17th instead of the end of the 18th century. The link between planetary transformation and the colonization of the Americas has made their 2015 article in Nature an instant classic (the thesis is taken up again in the general-audience book The Human Planet; Lewis and Maslin, 2018). Ice core samples reveal that in 1610 a peak occurred in a temporary downward trend in global CO₂ levels. The general trend is that CO₂ has been increasing steadily since the Neolithic because of deforestation and combustion, and accelerating since the industrial and fossil fuel revolutions. For Lewis and Martin, changes in the composition of Earth’s atmosphere are the best indicators of the new geological epoch because unlike fossilized remains, ice sheets, or deposits, they can be easily averaged and are planet-wide. The greenhouse effect caused by accumulated carbon in the atmosphere has drastically changed biological regimes on Earth before and will do so again this very century, ensuring the Anthropocene’s detectability into the far future.

Looking at this 1610 pike, scientists are asking what massive change happened over the 16th century that could suck up 7–10 parts per million of atmospheric CO₂ and buck the general trend. Apparently—an irony in world-history—this carbon sequestration happened a mere century before carbon levels would start increasing exponentially. The only reasonable conjecture, Lewis and Maslin argue, is that the dip is an effect of the reforestation that occurred after the quasi-annihilation of Indigenous ecologies by Europeans. Of a population of between 60 and 100 million, within a century, at least 50 million Indigenous Americans perished from enslavement, warfare, epidemics, displacement, and starvation, a formative event in racist violence which David Stannard (1992) calls the American Holocaust. While violence, environmental injustice, and health disparity continue to characterize the relationship between Native and settler from the Arctic to the Amazon, the genocidal and ecological scale of the disappearance of Native Americans in early modernity remains unparalleled (see Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). With Indigenous agriculture, hunting, and use of fire abruptly declining across vast stretches of the coastal Americas, vegetation returned and CO₂ levels decreased, lowering the greenhouse effect and cooling the planet, hence extending the so-called Little Ice Age (a cooler period following the Middle Ages with more complex causes). As Charles Mann (2005) has summarized, only recently have non-Indigenous historians and ecologists started accepting the extent to which the pre-Columbian landscape was shaped by burning, farming, cities, trade-networks, empires, and their attendant governance and cosmologies. Of course, the same argument from Indigenous activists and writers has for many decades been marginalized by the mainstream.

There is no scientific consensus yet on whether the planetary effects of the depopulation and reforestation of the Americans could have offset those of the increase in the European settler population with their own agriculture and timber needs, not to forget the growing populations in the rest of the world. But what is intriguing about Lewis and Maslin’s line of argument is that just like the extinction events for earlier geological epochs, the mass death of Indigenous Americans might be of measurable environmental significance. Though they obviously risk “naturalizing” the Columbian holocaust as unavoidable implication of the struggle of survival amongst populations, they also show just how profoundly consequential, indeed contemporary, the genocide is. Understanding there is a geochemistry to the American Holocaust and creation of a “New World” through primitive accumulation can be a powerful counterhistorical rejoinder to the hegemonic forgetting of how the current world-order came into existence. The sheer scale of the intoxicating greed and religious self-righteousness of the conquistadores long noted by Indigenous activists and psychoanalyzed by Stannard becomes all the more breathtaking: the newly systematized racism of early modernity will be legible in tree rings and ice cores thousands or millions of years into the future.

There is a lot to be said for taking 1610 as the golden spike for the Anthropocene, the official year it began. Lewis and Maslin’s “Orbis hypothesis” is the only one proposed which takes the interplay of political-economic and geochemical processes seriously as measurable at the global level (orbis, “world”). Their effort is commendable for appreciating that the decimation—literally, with some ninety percent eliminated—of Indigenous America was, in hindsight, a necessary condition for European global dominance and anthropogenic climate change. Even so, some seemingly naive questions alert us to the moral conundrum immediately presenting itself here: if the Columbian holocaust evidently sequestered carbon, were Native Americans not emitting CO₂ into the atmosphere? Yes, but more so were Europe, China, and India, whose agriculture and trade were more intense (see Pomeranz, 2000). And is population decline the answer to excessive greenhouse effect? Obviously not, as it all depends on the unequal footprints of sectors of populations. It must be remembered the footprint of Indigenous fire and agricultural regimes pales in comparison to the onslaught on ecosystems unleashed by elites under colonialism and industrialization. What transpires from the Orbis hypothesis is not only that reforestation is indeed essential to climatic equilibrium, as conservative environmentalists have long maintained, but that an exceptionally violent episode of world-history defines our geological present. At the very least, its moral implications would be to shun the thirst for profit which has demonstrably turned genocidal in the past.

In their call to decolonize the Anthropocene concept, Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017) welcome the 1610 date above the other candidates. They appreciate Lewis and Maslin’s more-than-geological framework but take another step by critiquing science’s universalism and demanding a place in the Anthropocene dating debates for embodied and Indigenous ways of knowing. Notwithstanding the importance of analyzing the colonialist orientations of science and the role non-Western cosmologies and practices should play in building sustainable economies, however, this effort to pluralize the Anthropocene concept may dilute its epistemic force, which derives precisely from a stringent yet open scientificity heavily debated in the International Commission on Stratigraphy. If Indigenous and embodied ways of knowing, including art and religion, are critical for understanding the versatility and the violences of human–environment relations, the question is how they can enter the stratigraphic debate about which earth signals will be measurable in the far future. It is important to question the legitimacy of science and its intrinsic Eurocentrism and masculinism, but doing so without engaging it on its own terms leaves its hegemonic position intact, which could impede interdisciplinary and international solidarities in face of the problems both scientists and activists chart. The universality of science is its tremendous strength, but “universality” is universalizability, a potentiality not a given. Like cricket or punk rock, that stratigraphy or evolutionary biology has mostly been the business of white men does not mean others do not or should not participate in it. Furthermore, the scientific imagination certainly can and does learn from traditional cosmologies, just as environmental justice advocates use scientific methods. As geologists come to a decision on the Anthropocene’s GSSP, the “-cene” (kainos, “new”) part of the Anthropocene, the humanities, social sciences, and activists can interrogate anthropos as an embodied reality shaped by the ravages of colonization, industrialization, and patriarchy.

Deciding on a date

There is no doubt the post-Columbian genocide is a defining event in human evolution, partly because its still-existing causes and impacts are so systematically repressed. The question is whether it can satisfactorily explain not just trans-Atlantic mobilities but subsequent developments like the East India companies, the Scramble for Africa, two World Wars, decolonization, the ascendancy of the Arab emirates and China, and the revolution in electronics. The missing concept for understanding all these facets of globalization is capital. While it is encouraging to see “capitalism” mentioned repeatedly in Lewis and Maslin’s book (2018) and they show familiarity with world-systems theory, their take-home message is that the environmental consequences of the European settling of the Americas are a fundamental marker of modernity. As can be inferred even from non-Marxist environmental-historical perspectives on globalization’s unevennesses like that of Kenneth Pomeranz (2000), however important the conquest of the Americas was as condition for “the great divergence” between Europe and China, the take-off of industrialization required, in addition, a radically different way of appropriating minerals and labor-power. The genealogy (or stratigraphy) of the shift from mercantilist to monetary biopower offered in Deleuze and Guattari (1987) changes the importance of Columbus. Though epochal in many ways, and though settler-colonialism continues today, 1492 seems less consequential for the subsequent global order than the conjunction of deterritorialized labor-power and deterritorializing money in Britain from circa 1750. While scholars like Sharpe (2016) hypostatize the Middle Passage and its reach into (Atlantic) modernity, there is sometimes an overemphasis on the event of conquest in Indigenous and decolonial literature, which for both comes at the detriment of theorizing how industrial and postindustrial capitalism’s extreme elasticity, indeed seductiveness, perpetuates and exacerbates its racial regimes.

Most earth scientists have now abandoned Crutzen’s focus on the Industrial Revolution and are leaning towards the mid-20th century as golden spike of the Anthropocene. To many physicists, the epoch-defining feature of modernity is the mobilization of the stupendous energy deriving from the splitting of the atomic nucleus, a scientific as much as geopolitical and theological feat. July 16, 1945, when the first nuclear bomb was detonated with the suitably metaphysical name of the Trinity Test, could be considered the Anthropocene’s symbolic starting date, not a GSSP but a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age, a geological marker out of convenience (Zalasiewicz et al., 2015). The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened a few weeks later. (The citation from the Bhagavad Gita at the Trinity Test by theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atom bomb,” is justifiably famous: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”) This frightful arrival of the possibility of instant annihilation of cities and of human extinction by accident or evil intent has accompanied decades of frantic nuclear development, with no end in sight. For the humanities and social sciences, what makes 1945 compelling as contender for the Anthropocene’s start date is furthermore the monetary and postcolonial liberal-humanitarian order around the United Nations and the so-called Bretton Woods system instituted in the wake of massive casualties and the Holocaust, enabling what environmental historians call the Great Acceleration of baby boom, mass consumption, and mobility, with their attendant environmental impacts (McNeill and Engelke, 2016). Since the Trinity Test, over 2000 nuclear bombs have been exploded, and their fallout is planet-wide and easily measurable. Many earth scientists, including Lewis and Maslin, suggest 1964 is a very good candidate for GSSP because of a clearly legible peak in radioactive carbon-14 in sediments and trees that year. While Lewis and Maslin prefer 1610 because of the conceptual link with the colonization of the Americas, there is no doubt radioactive dust will be a clear-cut marker for thousands of years.

The discussion revolves around the practice of geological periodization itself. Either we choose the geosynchronous signal of radionuclides, or we grant that the multi-factor, uneven, protracted modifications by industrialization have been more consequential, even if no one geological signal can be agreed upon to capture those modifications. If it is not the mid-20th century or 1610 or 1492, we have seen why 1784 makes an inadequate Anthropocenic boundary as proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000). From the Deleuzo-Marxist perspective, steam-power and the use of coal (and gas and oil) are secondary to the more fundamental event of capital encountering displaced peasants looking for work, while for stratigraphers that year is meaningless if there is no strong signal associated with it. If we pick “Lancashire in the late eighteenth century” as spatiotemporal threshold of the Anthropocene, this will not satisfy the requirements of a GSSP, but there seems to be no single geologically significant marker that can point to the beginnings of the capitalist system. It might appear this brings us to an impasse: I would like to identify the geological term “Anthropocene” with the planetary state of racializing industrial capitalism, but I cannot suggest how this epoch be measured as demanded by geological method. Interestingly, when Crutzen suggested 1784 as starting date, he too appears to have overlooked the GSSP requirements. It is conceivable earth science decides the Anthropocene, as “our” present geological epoch, is the only one defined by a more fuzzy symbolic starting date instead of a golden spike, but by now unlikely as some will speak of anthropocentrism and demand technical consistency.

Another option presents itself: simply continue using “Anthropocene” in an informal and capacious manner and accept there are many environmental and sociological markers which together point to North England at the end of the 18th century as its beginning. Between earth science and other practices, we can inhabit the impasse instead of ignoring it. If it turns out the Anthropocene officially starts in 1964, those outside earth science will have to accept that conclusion. But explaining the radioactive stratum will still require explaining Mutually Assured Destruction, industrial technology, and empire, and these have their roots in the racializing capitalisms of early modernity. What after all is the Great Acceleration an acceleration of? The destructive apparatuses of the World Wars and then the Cold War are culminations of geopolitical, technological, and legal processes which first took form much earlier (think of the papally backed Treaty of Tordesillas between Portugal and Spain of 1498 dividing the world for colonization). But this essay has argued it is the transition to an economy of perpetual speeding-up that is definitive, more than either the beginnings of colonial arrogance or the mad resort to nuclear arsenals. The military–industrial complex has been spectacularly wasteful and dangerous, but it is instigated by the growth imperative, by the “miracle” of the conjoining of primitive accumulation, gendered wage-labor, and commodification in little North English towns (compare Alliez and Lazzarato, 2018; Jones, 1981). The political upshot is that to avoid this system’s catastrophic exponentialities, it will not be possible to simply slow it down.

Concluding thoughts: Life through the Trumpocene

Since their inception in the Enlightenment, both the humanities and left politics have a lot to offer the science of nonhuman processes insofar as all three study the conditions of possibility of human life itself. The anthropos has always been an open question, a site of fundamental antagonism not a monolithic agent, defined by multi-layered and conflicting temporalities. The most promising premise of the Anthropocene concept is that it comes from such unlikely allies of the left, not just ecologists and epidemiologists but geochemists, paleontologists, oceanographers, astrobiologists, and complexity mathematicians. Few scientists, environmentalists, or diplomats follow a simplistic neo-Malthusian line for which it is overpopulation as such that is responsible for ecological devastation (Angus, 2016). Unwittingly, earth scientists in fact provide the Marxian, decolonial, and feminist critiques their most rigorous and affective impetus ever. Critical theorists have an opportunity for pushing scientists and laypeople further to acknowledging racial capitalism as what explains the Anthropocene and its stark inequalities and technologies of mass destruction. That can be done by co-claiming the term while respecting that the scientific rules governing its definitional procedure have their own consistency. It is true that as part of their habitus most physical scientists are unwilling to interrogate their ideological presumptions, but it also behooves the humanities and activists to be alert to the sharp and reasoned disagreements within science. In any case, stratigraphy can no longer proceed without intervention from the humanities, because the strata discussed can only be fully explained and responded to through the concepts the humanities have so long argued over. Just like with previous debates about human destiny, but unlike with most other geological periodizations, the Anthropocene debate has immediate political implications.

Let us recapitulate the argument about race and capital. This essay has argued globalization is based on racial capitalism as brought about by slavery and genocide, but partially overcoming them through the Industrial Revolution. If colonization was essential to the emergence of capitalism, today’s retrospection allows us to identify a “proto-racist” sense of privilege to others’ ecosystems and cultures that inflected the colonial projects (Saldanha, 2013). Liberal and conservative historians argue it was mutual competition, supposedly an inevitable fact amongst all human groups, that drove Western European powers to expand (Crosby, 1986; Jones, 1981). The discords of early modernity are undeniable, of course, but the question is how Europeans could transpose their conflicts anywhere they wanted on the globe, starting with the Crusades and the Treaty of Tordesillas. One can only imagine if competition between China, Japan, and India were to be played out by carving out Europe as Europe did Africa. The aggressive usurpation of land, labor, and resources that colonial capitalism necessarily consists of corresponds with annihilating anthropogenic ecologies that had developed over generations. Following critical race scholars (Wynter, 2013), such annihilation cannot but be termed racist, as it was and is based on the certainty that some people, somehow, have a divine, legal, or rational “right” to appropriate other social formations and landscapes for the enrichment of their fatherland.

Public discourse is changing. Carbon inequality and climate justice are becoming mainstream progressive terms. Even lifestyle magazines like Essence now decry the structural racism inherent in the climate denialism of tycoons like Donald Trump (Sanders, 2017). Indeed, Trump embodies, in however contradictory a fashion, the coming-together of reactionary forces that had been accruing for decades, or rather centuries. As evinced by the spread of the word “Trumpocene,” the president’s cynical selfishness is likely to become more prevalent in the Anthropocene than humanitarian interventionism and the erstwhile calls for universal human rights and cooperation (see Kaplan, 2016; Myer, 2016). When Trump designates countries in the Global South as “shitholes,” attacks brown and black Congresswomen, and refuses to criticize white fascists, he provides a lucid formulation of the logic of racial capitalism: the material positionality of a power elite obsessed with self-enrichment, a denial about the US’s own catastrophic levels of gun violence and plutocracy, and a paranoia about immigration from the areas of poverty this elite causes elsewhere, as a kind of excrement of the capitalist system. With the election of Jair Bolsonaro, Trumpism has been replicated in Brazil, its president openly imagining exterminating Indigenous Amazonians to make room for export beef. From Europe’s far-right parties to corrupt elites in the Global South, the global growth of Trumpism will no doubt deepen the racialized dimensions of capitalism.

One should not be blinded, however, by the abrasiveness of authoritarians like Trump and Bolsonaro: they are the condensation of a liberal-democratic order in crisis. An irony of Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is that just when the most openly racist and sexist US president ever comes to lead the last white-supremacist empire—which, though crumbling, or perhaps because of that, has been most responsible for the world’s catastrophic state—he accelerates that empire’s decline and nefarious effects with as much bravado as ineptitude. The desperate anti-environmentalism and heteronormativity of the US Republicans and Bolsonaro must be seen as part and parcel of a fascist turn which, as history show, accompanies states of profound collective malaise. With the Industrial Revolution, the formal abolition of slavery, the welfare state, mass consumption, neoliberalism, and now a crypto-fascist turn, capital requires drastic axiomatic transformations for its own survival. Trump and Bolsonaro show that Nick Mirzoeff (2016) has a point in calling the Anthropocene “the White-Supremacy-Scene,” but racial capitalism operates through more than violence, and its start date is the late 18th century not the 16th.

The global system of race constantly has to restabilize itself across the centuries and across locations and scales. This article revisited processes whereby capital aggressively remade the earth in its own image and hence posited the white bourgeoisie as explicit standard for the entire species. But capital is a force uncontainable by any one racial or ruling class. If by the year 2120 on a viciously hot planet China turns out to be the dominant superpower, Arab city-states have successfully navigated peak oil, Europe is riven with separatist warfare, and US cities are burnt-out and flooded wastelands, inequalities in life expectancy will most probably still be indexed on phenotypical differences. Sinocentric or Arab-centric versions of structural racism and ecological destruction might be less genocidal than the white-supremacist ones—indeed, the truculent policies of the “emerging economies” often justify themselves as different from Europe’s arrogance even while they import the same methods—but that could render them more effective. Even if in this scenario white supremacy is superseded, it is certain the inhuman vortex of capital would continue to wreak havoc on racialized others, animals, and ecosystems. As a broadening coalition of activists, theorists, and scientists is showing, the time is now for conceiving and struggling for an Anthropocene freed from capital’s axiomatic of growth. Whenever the Anthropocene started, whether it engenders collapse, slow degradation, or a different system altogether is a political question of unprecedented magnitude.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the perceptive criticisms of the three anonymous reviewers, special issue editors Bruce Erickson and Andrew Baldwin, and the journal editors, this essay has gone through an extraordinary amount of rewriting. Even while I am sure there remains plenty to argue about, I am immensely grateful for their engagements.

I revised this paper while I was Visiting Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Globalisation and Citizenship, Deakin University, Melbourne, Visiting Professor at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University. Many thanks to Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff for ongoing conversations about all this.

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) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1“It is not my intention to argue that the differences between slavery and freedom were negligible; certainly such an assertion would be ridiculous. Rather, it is to examine the shifting and transformed relations of power that brought about the resubordination of the emancipated, the control and domination of the free black population, and the persistent production of blackness as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational, and infectious” (Hartman, 1997: 116).

This essay argues the differences between slavery and “freedom” must be theorized. With the emergence of black working and middle-classes and the struggle for civil rights, there were profound shifts in racial capitalism. Recent protest movements have correctly flagged the continuity in the racist tropes Hartman identifies here, but this very gesture sustains the possibility of politics and disproves the identification of blackness with abjection.

References

Alliez, E, Lazzarato, M (2016) Wars and Capital, Trans. A Hodges. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
Google Scholar

Angus, I (2016) Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Google Scholar

Arrighi, G (2009) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time. Second edition. London, UK: Verso.
Google Scholar

Baldwin, A, Bettini, G (eds) (2017) Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration, Critique. London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield.
Google Scholar

Bastani, A (2019) Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. London, UK: Verso.
Google Scholar

Beckert, S (2014) Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism. London, UK: Allen Lane.
Google Scholar

Berry, W (2018) Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer. London, UK: Penguin.
Google Scholar

Bonneil, C, Fressoz, J-P (2016) The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, Trans. D Fernbach. London, UK: Verso.
Google Scholar

Byrd, J (2011) The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Google Scholar | Crossref

Chakrabarty, D (2012) Postcolonial studies and the challenge of climate change. New Literary History 43(1): 1–18.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI

Clark, N, Gunaratnam, Y (2017) Earthing the anthropos? From ‘socializing the Anthropocene’ to geologizing the social. European Journal of Social Theory 20(1): 146–163.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI

Coulthard, GS (2014) Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Google Scholar | Crossref

Cronon, W (1991) Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York, NY: Norton.
Google Scholar

Crosby, AW (1986) Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar

Crutzen, P, Stoermer, EF (2000) The ‘Anthropocene’. Global Change: Newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program 41(May): 17–18.
Google Scholar

Davis, A (2018) Angela Davis on anti-blackness, Afro-pessimism, and black nationalism. YouTube video. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVjg6l-4LS8 (accessed 17 August 2019).
Google Scholar

Davis, H, Todd, Z (2017) On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4): 761–780.
Google Scholar

Day, I (2015) Being or nothingness: Indigeneity, antiblackness, and settler-colonial critique. Critical Ethnic Studies 1(2): 102–121.
Google Scholar | Crossref

Deleuze, G, Guattari, F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. B Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Google Scholar

Du Bois, WEB (1935) Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and Co.
Google Scholar

Dunbar-Ortiz, R (2014) An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Google Scholar

Eichen J (2019) Cheapness and (labor-)power: the role of early modern Brazilian sugar plantations in the racializing Capitalocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. DOI: 10.1177/0263775818798035.
Google Scholar

Federici, S (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
Google Scholar

Foster, JF, Clark, B, York, R (2010) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Google Scholar

Jensen, D (2016) The Myth of Human Supremacy. New York, NY: Seven Stories.
Google Scholar

Jones, E (1981) The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar

Hartman, S (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar

Harvey, D (2010) The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar

Kaplan, S (2016) Scientists prepare to fight for their work during ‘the Trumpocene’. The Washington Post, December 15.
Google Scholar

Kovel, J (2007) The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Second edition. London, UK: Zed.
Google Scholar

Lewis, S, Maslin, M (2018) The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London, UK: Penguin.
Google Scholar

Malm, A (2015) The Anthropocene myth. Jacobin Magazine, 30 March.
Google Scholar

Malm, A (2016) Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London, UK: Verso.
Google Scholar

Mann, C (2005) 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York, NY: Vintage.
Google Scholar

Marx, K (1992) Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes. London, UK: Penguin.
Google Scholar

Marx, K, Engels, F (2005) The Communist Manifesto, Gasper P (ed.). Chicago, IL, Haymarket.
Google Scholar

Mbembe, A (2017) Critique of Black Reason, Trans. Dubois L. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Google Scholar | Crossref

McNeill, JR, Engelke, P (2016) The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. New Haven, CT: Belknap.
Google Scholar | Crossref

Mirzoeff, N (2016) It’s not the Anthropocene, it’s the white supremacy scene, or, the geological color line. In: Grusin, R (ed.) After Extinction. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Google Scholar

Moore, J (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London, UK: Verso.
Google Scholar

Myer, R (2016) Donald Trump is the first demagogue of the Anthropocene. The Atlantic, October 19.
Google Scholar

Olaloku-Teriba A (2018) Afro-pessimism and the logic of anti-blackness. Historical Materialism 26(2): 96–122.
Google Scholar

Oxfam (2015) Extreme carbon inequality: Why the Paris climate deal must put the poorest, lowest emitting and most vulnerable people first. Media briefing, December 2. Available at: https://d1tn3vj7xz9fdh.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf (accessed 19 August 2019).
Google Scholar

Pomeranz, K (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Google Scholar | Crossref

Robinson, C (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London, UK: Zed.
Google Scholar

Saldanha, A (2013) Monopoly’s violence: Georges Bataille explains the early Dutch spice trade. In: Slocum, R, Saldanha, A (eds) Geographies of Race and Food: Fields, Bodies, Markets. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 313–330.
Google Scholar

Saldanha, A (2017) Space after Deleuze. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
Google Scholar

Saldanha, A, Adams, JM (2013) Deleuze and Race. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Google Scholar

Sanders, SD (2017) Examining environmental racism: How Trump’s blatant disregard for climate change affects people of color. Essence magazine, 2 June.
Google Scholar

Schell, J (1982) The Fate of the Earth. New York, NY: Knopf.
Google Scholar

Sexton, J (2016) Afro-pessimism: The unclear word. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29. Available at: http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/sexton.html (accessed 19 August 2019).
Google Scholar

Sharpe, C (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Google Scholar | Crossref

Sibertin-Blanc, G (2016) State and Politics: Deleuze and Guattari on Marx, trans. A Hodges. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
Google Scholar

Stannard, D (1992) American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar

Vergès, F (2017) Racial capitalocene. In: Johnson, GT, Lubin, A (eds) Futures of Black Radicalism. London, UK: Verso.
Google Scholar

Williams, E (1944) Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Google Scholar

Wood, EM (1999) The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London, UK: Verso.
Google Scholar

Yusoff, K (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Google Scholar | Crossref

Warren, CL (2018) Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Google Scholar | Crossref

Whyte, KP (2018) Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1–2): 224–242.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals

Wolfe P (2016) Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. London: Verso.
Google Scholar

Wynter, S (2013) Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337.
Google Scholar | Crossref

Zalasiewicz, J, Waters, CN, Williams, M, et al. (2015) When did the Anthropocene being? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal. Quaternary International 383: 196–203.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI

Arun Saldanha is Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA. Saldanha is the author of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Space After Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2017), and coeditor with Hoon Song of Sexual Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism (Routledge, 2013), with Rachel Slocum of Geographies of Race and Food: Fields Bodies Markets (Ashgate, 2013), and with Jason Michael Adams of Deleuze and Race (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Uncategorized

Managing the Anthropocene: Relational Agency and Power to Respect Planetary Boundaries

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

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.”

References

Alcadipani R., Hassard J. (2010). Actor-network theory, organizations and critique: Towards a politics of organizing. Organization, 17, 419-435.

Alcaraz J. M., Sugars K., Nicolopoulou K., Tirado F. (2016). Cosmopolitanism or globalization: The Anthropocene turn. Society and Business Review, 11, 313-332.

Alcott B. (2010). Impact caps: Why population, affluence and technology strategies should be abandoned. Journal of Cleaner Production, 18, 552-560.

Alvesson M., Hardy C., Harley B. (2008). Reflecting on reflexivity: Reflexive textual practices in organization and management theory. Journal of Management Studies, 45, 480-501.

Anderson S. D., Cavanagh J. (1996). The Top 200: The rise of global corporate power. Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies.

Andonova L. B., Mitchell R. B. (2010). The rescaling of global environmental politics. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 35, 255-282.

Banerjee S. B. (2003). Who sustains whose development? Sustainable development and the reinvention of nature. Organization Studies, 24, 143-180.

Banerjee S. B. (2012). A climate for change? Critical reflections on the Durban United Nations climate change conference. Organization Studies, 33, 1761-1786.

Bapuji H., Hora M., Saeed A. M. (2012). Intentions, intermediaries, and interaction: Examining the emergence of routines. Journal of Management Studies, 49, 1586-1607.

Barnosky A. D., Hadly E. A., Bascompte J., Berlow E. L., Brown J. H., Fortelius M., . . . Smith A. B. (2012). Approaching a state shift in earth’s biosphere. Nature, 486, 52-58.

Bauman Z. (2017). Retrotopia. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.Beck U. (2009). World at risk. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Bennett J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bergström O., Diedrich A. (2011). Exercising social responsibility in downsizing: Enrolling and mobilizing actors at a Swedish high-tech company. Organization Studies, 32, 897-919.

Biermann F., Bai X., Bondre N., Broadgate W., Chen C-T. A., Dube O. P., . . . Seto K. C. (2016). Down to earth: Contextualizing the Anthropocene. Global Environmental Change, 39, 341-350.

Blomme R. J. (2014). Organisational change processes and emergence: Latourian, Weickean and Bourdieuian perspectives revisited. International Journal of Strategic Change Management, 5, 332-347.

Bonnedahl K., Heikkurinen P. (Eds.). (2019). Strongly sustainable societies: Organizing activities of a hot and full Earth. London, England: Routledge.

Boons F. (2013). Organizing within dynamic ecosystems: Conceptualizing socio-ecological mechanisms. Organization & Environment, 26, 281-297.

Bosse D. A., Phillips R. A. (2016). Agency theory and bounded self-interest. Academy of Management Review, 41, 276-297.

Boulding K. E. (1966). The economics of the coming spaceship earth. In Jarrett H. (Ed.), Environmental quality in a growing economy (pp. 3-14). London, England; Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bundy J., Shropshire C., Buchholtz A. K. (2013). Strategic cognition and issue salience: Toward an explanation of firm responsiveness to stakeholder concerns. Academy of Management Review, 38, 352-376.

Callon M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fisherman of St Brieuc bay. In Law J. (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge (pp. 196-232). London, England: Routledge.

Campbell N., McHugh G., Ennis P. J. (2019). Climate change is not a problem: Speculative realism at the end of organization. Organization Studies, 40, 725-744. Crossref

Capra F. (1995). The web of life. New York, NY: Anchor Doubleday.

Carolan M. S. (2005). Society, biology, and ecology. Organization & Environment, 18, 393-421.

Carson R. (1962). Silent spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Clark T. (2015). Ecocriticism on the edge: The Anthropocene as a threshold concept. London, England: Bloomsbury.

Ceballos G., Ehrlich P. R., Barnosky A. D., García A., Pringle R. M., Palmer T. M. (2015). Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction. Science Advances, 1, e1400253.

Clegg S., Geppert M., Hollinshead G. (2018). Politicization and political contests in and around contemporary multinational corporations: An introduction. Human Relations, 71, 745-765.

Clegg S. R. (1989). Frameworks of power. London, England: Sage.

Collinge C. (2006). Flat ontology and the deconstruction of scale: A response to Marston, Jones and Woodward. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31, 244-251.

Connolly L., Cullen J. (2018). Animals and organisations: An ethic of care framework. Organization & Environment, 31, 406-424. Crossref

Crutzen P. J., Stoermer E. F. (2000). The Anthropocene. IGBP Newsletter, 41. Retrieved from http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf

Cunha M. P.e., Rego A., Vieira de Cunha J. (2008). Ecocentric management: An update. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 15, 311-321.

Dean M. (2013). The signature of power: Sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics. London, England: Sage.

Delanty G. (2006). The cosmopolitan imagination: Critical cosmopolitanism and social theory. British Journal of Sociology, 57, 25-47.

Dobson A (2006). Thick cosmopolitanism. Political Studies, 54, 165-184.

Doh J. P., Tashman P., Benischke M. (2019). Adapting to grand environmental challenges through collective entrepreneurship. Academy of Management Perspectives, 33, 450-468. Crossref

Doré A., Michalon J. (2017). What makes human–animal relations “organizational”? The description of anthrozootechnical agencements. Organization, 24, 761-780. Crossref

Ellul J. (1973). The technological society (Wilkinson J., Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Originally published in 1954)

Engels F. (1892). The condition of the working class in England in 1844. London, England: Allen & Unwin.

Ezzamel M. (1994). Organizational change and accounting: Understanding the budgeting system in its organizational context. Organization Studies, 15, 213-240.

Ezzamel M., Willmott H. (2014). Registering “the ethical” in organization theory formation: Towards the disclosure of an “invisible force.” Organization Studies, 35, 1013-1039.

Fleetwood S. (2005). Ontology in organization and management studies: A critical realist perspective. Organization, 12, 197-222.

Foley J., Ramankutty N., Brauman K., Cassidy E., Gerber J., Johnston M., . . . Zaks D. (2011). Solutions for a cultivated planet. Nature, 478, 337-342.

Foster J. B. (2012). The planetary rift and the new human exemptionalism: A political-economic critique of ecological modernization theory. Organization & Environment, 25, 211-237.

Fox S. (2000). Communities of practice, Foucault and actor-network theory. Journal of Management Studies, 37, 853-868.

George G., Schillebeeckx S. J. D., Liak T. L. (2015). From the editors: The management of natural resources: An overview and research agenda. Academy of Management Journal, 58, 1595-1613.

Georgescu-Roegen N. (1975). Energy and economic myths. Southern Economic Journal, 41, 347-381.

Gibson-Graham J. K. (2011). A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene. Gender, Place and Culture, 18, 1-21.

Giddens A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Giddens A. (2008). The politics of climate change: National responses to the challenge of global warming (Policy network paper). London, England: Policy Network.

Gladwin T. D. (2012). Capitalism critique: Systemic limits on business harmony with nature. In Bansal P., Hoffman A. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of business and the environment (pp. 657-674). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Gladwin T. N., Kennelly J. J., Krause T. S. (1995). Shifting paradigms for sustainable development: Implications for management theory and research. Academy of Management Review, 20, 874-907.

Gramsci A., (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Hoare Q., Trans., & Nowell G., Ed.). London, England: Lawrence & Wishart.

Hamilton C. (2015). Getting the Anthropocene so wrong. Anthropocene Review, 2, 102-107.

Hamilton C., Bonneuil C., Gemenne F. (2015). Thinking the Anthropocene: The Anthropocene and the global environmental crisis. New York, NY: Routledge.

Haraway D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159-165.

Harman G. (2002). Tool-being: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects. Chicago, IL: Open Court.

Harman G. (2007). The importance of Bruno Latour for philosophy. Cultural Studies Review, 13(1), 31-49.

Harman G. (2009). Prince of networks: Bruno Latour and metaphysics. Prahran, Victoria, Australia: Re.press.

Heikkurinen P. (Ed.). (2017). Sustainability and peaceful coexistence for the Anthropocene. New York, NY: Routledge.

Heikkurinen P. (2018). Degrowth by means of technology? A treatise for an ethos of releasement. Journal of Cleaner Production, 197, 1654-1665.

Heikkurinen P., Bonnedahl K. J. (2013). Corporate responsibility for sustainable development: A review and conceptual comparison of market- and stakeholder-oriented strategies. Journal of Cleaner Production, 43, 191-198.

Heikkurinen P., Lozanoska J., Tosi P. (2018). Activities of degrowth and political change. Journal of Cleaner Production, 211, 555-565.

Heikkurinen P., Mäkinen J. (2018). Synthesising corporate responsibility on organisational and societal levels of analysis: An integrative perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 149, 589-607.

Heikkurinen P., Rinkinen J., Järvensivu T., Wilén K., Ruuska T. (2016). Organising in the Anthropocene: An ontological outline for ecocentric theorising. Journal of Cleaner Production, 113, 705-714.

Heikkurinen P., Ruuska T., Wilén K., Ulvila M., (2019). The Anthropocene exit: Reconciling discursive tensions on the new geological epoch. Ecological Economics, 164, 106369.

Helin S., Babri M. (2015). Travelling with a code of ethics: A contextual study of a Swedish MNC auditing a Chinese supplier. Journal of Cleaner Production, 107, 41-53.

Hoffman A., Ehrenfeld J. (2014). The fourth wave, management science and practice in the age of the Anthropocene. In Lawler E., Mohrman S., O’Toole J. (Eds.), Corporate stewardship: Achieving sustainable effectiveness (pp. 228-246). Sheffield, England: Greenleaf.

Hoffman A. J., Jennings P. D. (2015). Institutional theory and the natural environment: Research in (and on) the Anthropocene. Organization & Environment, 28, 8-31.

Hoffman A. J., Jennings P. D. (2018). Re-engaging with sustainability in the Anthropocene era: An institutional approach. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Houtbeckers E., Taipale T. (2017). Conceptualising worker agency for the challenges of the Anthropocene: Examples from recycling work in the global north. In Heikkurinen P. (Ed.), Sustainability and peaceful coexistence for the Anthropocene (pp. 140-162). New York, NY: Routledge.

Introna L. D. (2009). Ethics and the speaking of things. Theory, Culture & Society, 26, 25-46.

Ivakhiv A. (2002). Toward a multicultural ecology. Organization & Environment, 15, 389-409.

Jacques E. (1971). Time-span handbook: The use of time-span of discretion to measure the level of work in employment roles and to arrange an equitable payment structure. London, England: Heinemann.

Jennings P. D., Zandbergen P. A. (1995). Ecologically sustainable organizations: An institutional approach. Academy of Management Review, 20, 1015-1052.

Jones T. M., Felps W., Bigley G. A. (2007). Ethical theory and stakeholder-related decisions: The role of stakeholder culture. Academy of Management Review, 32, 137-155.

Landrum N. E. (2017). Stages of corporate sustainability: Integrating the strong sustainability worldview. Organization & Environment, 31, 287-313. Crossref

Latour B. (1988). Irréductions. In The Pasteurisation of France (pp. 153-236). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour B. (1990). Technology is society made durable. Sociological Review, 38(Suppl. 1), 103-131.

Latour B. (1997). On recalling ANT. Keynote speech presented at “Actor Network and After” Workshop at Keele University, England.

Latour B. (1999a). On recalling ANT. Sociological Review, 47(Suppl. 1), 15-25.

Latour B. (1999b). Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour B. (2002). Morality and technology: The end of the means (Venn Couze, Trans.). Theory, Culture & Society, 19, 247-260.

Latour B. (2009). Politics of nature. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour B. (2012a). Waiting for Gaia: Composing the common world through arts and politics. Equilibri, 16, 515-538.

Latour B. (2012b). We have never been modern. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. (Originally published in 1991)

Latour B. (2014a). Agency at the time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History, 45, 1-18.

Latour B. (2014b, November 5). Anthropology at the time of the Anthropocene: A personal view of what is to be studied (Distinguished lecture, draft for comments, pp. 1-16). Presented at the 113th American Association of Anthropologists Meeting, Washington, D.C.

Latour B. (2014c, March 26-27). How better to register the agency of things. Paper presented at Tanner Lectures, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Latour B. (2015). Telling friends from foes at the time of the Anthropocene. In Hamilton C., Bonneuil C., Gemenne F. (Eds.), The Anthropocene and the global environment crisis: Rethinking modernity in a new epoch (pp. 145-155). London, England: Routledge. (Originally given as a lecture, Thinking the Anthropocene, EHESS, Paris, November 14-15, 2013.)

Lee N., Hassard J. (1999). Organization unbound: Actor-network theory, research strategy and institutional flexibility. Organization, 6, 391-404.

Lenzen M., Moran D., Kanemoto K., Foran B., Lobefaro L., Geschke A. (2012). International trade drives biodiversity threats in developing nations. Nature, 486, 109-112.

Liu J., Mooney H., Hull V., Davis S. J., Gaskell J., Hertel T., . . . Li S. (2015). Systems integration for global sustainability. Science, 347, 1258832.Lukes S., (1974). Power: A radical view. London and New York: Macmillan.

Luukkonen T. (1997). Why has Latour’s theory of citations been ignored by the bibliometric community? Discussion of sociological interpretations of citation analysis. Scientometrics, 38, 27-37.

Lyotard J-F. (1979). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.

Maak T., Pless N. M. (2009). Business leaders as citizens of the world: Advancing humanism on a global scale. Journal of Business Ethics, 88, 537-550.

Magnani N. (2012). Nonhuman actors, hybrid networks, and conflicts over municipal waste incinerators. Organization & Environment, 25, 131-145.

Maguire S., Hardy C. (2009). Discourse and deinstitutionalization: The decline of DDT. Academy of Management Journal, 52, 148-178.

Malm A., Hornborg A. (2014). The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative. Anthropocene Review, 1, 62-69.

Marechal K., Lazaric N. (2010). Overcoming inertia: Insights from evolutionary economics into improved energy and climate policies. Climate Policy, 10, 103-119.

McLean C., Hassard J. (2004). Symmetrical absence/symmetrical absurdity: Critical notes on the production of actor-network accounts. Journal of Management Studies, 41, 493-519.

McShane K. (2007). Anthropocentrism vs. nonanthropocentrism: Why should we care? Environmental Values, 16, 169-185.

Meadows D. H., Meadows D. L., Randers J., Behrens W. W. (1972). The limits to growth. New York, NY: Universe Books.

Mitchell R. K., Agle B. R., Wood D. J. (1997). Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts. Academy of Management Review, 22, 853-886.

Moore J. W. (2017). The Capitalocene, Part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. Journal of Peasant Studies, 44, 594-630. Crossref

Niazi T. (2019). Contesting instrumental knowledge with communicative action: Why Kalabagh dam (Pakistan) remains unbuilt. Organization & Environment, 32, 441-465.

Nyberg D., Wright C., Kirk J. (2017). Fracking the future: Temporality, framing and the politics of unconventional fossil fuels. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2017, 10744. Crossref

Ogden L., Heynen N., Oslender U., West P., Kassam K. A., Robbins P. (2013). Global assemblages, resilience, and earth stewardship in the Anthropocene. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 11, 341-347.

Orlikowski W. J. (2010). The sociomateriality of organisational life: Considering technology in management research. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34, 125-141.

Orssatto R. J., Clegg S. R. (1999). The political ecology of organizations: Toward a framework for analyzing business-environment relationships. Organization & Environment, 12, 263-279.

Parker M. (1995). Critique in the name of what? Postmodernism and critical approaches to organization. Organization Studies, 16, 553-564.

Perey R. (2014). Organizing sustainability and the problem of scale: Local, global or fractal. Organization & Environment, 27, 215-222.

Perrow C. (2011). The next catastrophe: Reducing our vulnerabilities to natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pickering A. (1995). The mangle of practice: Time, agency and science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Pierides D., Woodman D. (2012). Object-oriented sociology and organizing in the face of emergency: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and the material turn. British Journal of Sociology, 63, 662-679.

Pinnington A., Macklin R., Campbell T. (Eds.). (2007). Human resource management: Ethics and employment. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Pitsis T., Clegg S. R., Marosszeky M., Rura-Polley T. (2003). Constructing the Olympic dream: Managing innovation through the future perfect. Organization Science, 14, 574-590.

Ploum L., Blok V., Lans T., Omta O. (2018). Towards a validated competence framework for sustainable entrepreneurship. Organization & Environment, 31, 113-132.

Pogge T. W. (2001). Eradicating systemic poverty: Brief for a global resources dividend. Journal of Human Development, 2(1), 59-77.

Purser R. E., Park C., Montuori A. (1995). Limits to anthropocentrism: Toward an ecocentric organization paradigm? Academy of Management Review, 20, 1053-1089.

Rockström J., Karlberg L. (2010). The quadruple squeeze: Defining the safe operating space for freshwater use to achieve a triply green revolution in the Anthropocene. Ambio, 39, 257-265.

Rockström J., Richardson K., Steffen W., Mace G. (2018). Planetary boundaries: Separating fact from fiction. A response to Montoya et al. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 33, 233-234.

Rockström J., Steffen W., Noone K., Persson A., Chapin F. S.III, Lambin E., . . . Foley J. (2009). Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society, 14, 32.

Schutz A. (1967). The phenomenology of the social world. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Originally published in 1932)

Scott J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Seyfang G., Smith A. (2007). Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda. Environmental Politics, 16, 584-603.

Shrivastava P. (1995a). Ecocentric management for a risk society. Academy of Management Review, 20, 118-137.

Shrivastava P. (1995b). The role of corporations in achieving ecological sustainability. Academy of Management Review, 20, 936-960.

Shrivastava P., Hart S. L. (1992). Greening organizations. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, 52, 185-189.

Steffen W., Richardson K., Rockström J., Cornell S. E., Fetzer I., Bennett E. M., . . . Sörlin S. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347, 1259855.

Steffen W., Smith M. (2013). Planetary boundaries, equity and global sustainability: Why wealthy countries could benefit from more equity. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 5, 403-408.

Tourish D. J., Pinnington A. H. (2002). Transformational leadership, corporate cultism and the spirituality paradigm: An unholy trinity in the workplace? Human Relations, 55, 147-172.

Ulvila M., Wilén K. (2017). Engaging with the Plutocene: Moving towards degrowth and post-capitalistic futures. In Heikkurinen P. (Ed.), Sustainability and peaceful coexistence for the Anthropocene (pp. 119-139). London, England: Routledge.

Vadén T. (2014). Next nature and the curse of oil. Next Nature. Retrieved from https://www.nextnature.net/2014/02/next-nature-and-the-curse-of-oil/

Van den Bergh J. C., Kallis G. (2012). Growth, a-growth or degrowth to stay within planetary boundaries? Journal of Economic Issues, 46, 909-920.

Venturini T. (2010). Diving in magma: How to explore controversies with actor-network theory. Public Understanding of Science, 19, 258-273.

Vitali S., Glattfelder J. B., Battiston S. (2011). The network of global corporate control. PLoS One, 6, e25995.

Voegtlin C., Scherer G. A. (2017). Responsible innovation and the innovation of responsibility: Governing sustainable development in a globalized world. Journal of Business Ethics, 143, 227-243.

Waddock S. (2011). We are all stakeholders of Gaia: A normative perspective on stakeholder thinking. Organization & Environment, 24, 192-212.

Weber M. (2013). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London, England: Routledge.

Wiesner R., Chadee D., Best P. (2017). Managing change toward environmental sustainability: A conceptual model in small and medium enterprises. Organization & Environment, 31, 152-177.

Whiteman G., Walker B., Perego P. (2013). Planetary boundaries: Ecological foundations for corporate sustainability. Journal of Management Studies, 50, 307-336.

Whittle A., Spicer A. (2008). Is actor network theory critique? Organization Studies, 29, 611-629.

Winn M. I., Pogutz S. (2013). Business, ecosystems, and biodiversity: New horizons for management research. Organization & Environment, 26, 203-229.

Wittgenstein L. (2009). Philosophical investigations. London, England:

Wiley.Wright C., Nyberg D. (2017). An inconvenient truth: How organizations translate climate change into business as usual. Academy of Management Journal, 60, 1633-1661.

York J. G., Hargrave T. J., Pacheco D. F. (2016). Converging winds: Logic hybridization in Colorado wind energy field. Academy of Management Journal, 59, 579-610.

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.

Uncategorized

The Anthropocene Is Overrated

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/

Uncategorized

Against the Anthropocene

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

Uncategorized

Place-Making by Cows in an Intensive Dairy Farm: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Nonhuman Animal Agency

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)

Download chapter PDF

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.

Fig. 11.1 — Fig. 1. Jongveestal (“young cattle barn”), housing 36 calves and heifers (Friday 17 August 2018, 2.30–6 p.m.)

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.

Picture 11.1 — Picture 1. Standing in the jongveestal (Farm 1, 17 August 2018)

Picture 11.2 — Picture 2. Calf is rubbing her chin at the fence while establishing eye contact with the fieldworker (Farm 1, 17 August 2018)

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.

Picture 11.3 — Picture 3. Bodily synchronizing in cubicle divisions in the jongveestal (Farm 1, 17 August 2018)

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).

Picture 11.4 — Picture 4a. The calves positioning themselves at the feed fence (wheelbarrow on the right); b The. calves are synchronizing during their eating practice

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

Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. Translation by Louis van den Hengel.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.

References

Agamben, G. 2004. The open: Man and animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Argent, G. 2012. Toward a privileging of the nonverbal: Communication, corporeal synchrony, and transcendence in humans and horses. In Experiencing animal minds: An anthology of animal-human encounters, ed. J.A. Smith and R.W. Mitchell, 111–128. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Århem, K. 1998. Powers of place: Landscape, territory and local belonging in Northwest Amazonia. In Locality and belonging, ed. N. Lovell, 78–102. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Auer, P. forthcoming. “Translanguaging” or “doing languages”? Multilingual practices and the notion of “codes”. In Language(s): Multilingualism and it consequences, ed. J. MacSwann. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332593230_‘Translanguaging’_or_‘doing_languages’_Multilingual_practices_and_the_notion_of_‘codes’.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham and London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bergeron, R., A.J. Badnell-Waters, S. Lambton, and G. Mason. 2006. Stereotypic oral behaviour in captive ungulates: Foraging, diet and gastrointestinal function. In Stereotypic animal behaviour: Fundamentals and applications to welfare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Mason and J. Rushen, 19–57. Wallingford and Cambridge: CABI.Google Scholar
Berwick, R.C., and N. Chomsky. 2016. Why only us: Language and evolution. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, M., and K. Hall. 2016. Embodied sociolinguistics. In Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates, ed. N. Coupland, 173–197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. 2002. On nature and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. 2006. Language and mind, 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Colvin, C.M., K. Allen, and L. Marino. 2017. Thinking cows: A review of cognition, emotion, and the social lives of domestic cows. https://www.farmsanctuary.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/TSP_COWS_WhitePaper_vF_web-v2.pdf.
Cornips, L. 2019. The final frontier: Non-human animals on the linguistic research agenda. Linguistics in the Netherlands 36 (1): 13–19.Google Scholar
Cornips, L., and F. Gregersen. 2016. The impact of Labov’s contribution to general linguistic theory. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20 (4): 498–524. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12197.
Cornips, L., and V. de Rooij (eds.). 2018a. The sociolinguistics of place and belonging: Perspectives from the margins. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cornips, L., and V. de Rooij. 2018b. Introduction: Belonging through linguistic place-making in center-periphery constellations. In The sociolinguistics of place and belonging: Perspectives from the margins, ed. L. Cornips and V. de Rooij, 1–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cornips, L., and M. van Koppen. 2019. Embodied grammar in Dutch dairy cows. Poster presented at the workshop Animal Linguistics: Take the Leap!, L’École normale supérieure, Paris, June 17.Google Scholar
Cottingham, J. 2008. Cartesian reflections: Essays on Descartes’ philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cowley, S.J. 2011. Distributed language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cull, L. 2015. From homo performans to interspecies collaboration: Expanding the concept of performance to include animals. In Performing animality: Animals in performance practices, ed. L. Orozco and J. Parker-Starbuck, 19–36. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
De Waal, F. 2012. A bottom-up view of empathy. In The primate mind: Built to connect with other minds, ed. F. de Waal and P.F. Ferrari, 121–138. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, J. 2009. The beast and the sovereign: Volume 1, trans. G. Bennington. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Descartes, R. 1985. Discourse on the method. In The philosophical writings of Descartes: Volume 1, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, 111–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Despret, V. 2008. The becomings of subjectivity in animal worlds. Subjectivity 23: 123–139. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.15.
Evans, V. 2014. The language myth: Why language is not an instinct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hagen, K., and D.M. Broom. 2004. Emotional reactions to learning in cattle. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 85: 203–213.Google Scholar
Haraway, D. 2003. The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.Google Scholar
Haraway, D. 2008. When species meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Harrison, P. 1992. Descartes on animals. The Philosophical Quarterly 42 (167): 219–227. https://doi.org/10.2307/2220217.
Hauser, M.D., N. Chomsky, and W.T. Fitch. 2002. The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298 (5598): 1569–1579. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.298.5598.1569.
Heidegger, M. 1971. Poetry, language, thought, trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Heidegger, M. 1995. The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Heller, M. 2007. Bilingualism as ideology and practice. In Bilingualism: A social approach, ed. M. Heller, 1–22. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Jahns, G. 2013. Computational intelligence to recognize animal vocalization and diagnose animal health status. In Computational intelligence in intelligent data analysis, ed. C. Moewes and A. Nürnberger, 239–249. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Johnstone, B. 2011. Language and place. In The Cambridge handbook of sociolinguistics, ed. R. Mesthrie, 203–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511997068.017.
Kulick, D. 2017. Human-animal communication. Annual Review of Anthropology 46: 357–378. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041723.
Labov, W. 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 1: Internal factors. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, W. 2001. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 2: Social factors. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Marino, L., and K. Allen 2017. The psychology of cows. Animal Behavior and Cognition 4 (4): 474–498. https://dx.doi.org/10.26451/abc.04.04.06.2017.
McLennan, K.M. 2013. Social bonds in dairy cattle: The effect of dynamic group systems on welfare and productivity. Doctoral thesis, The University of Northampton. http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/6466/.
Meijer, E. 2016. Speaking with animals: Philosophical interspecies investigations. In Thinking about animals in the age of the Anthropocene, ed. M. Tønnessen, K. Armstrong Oma, and S. Rattasepp, 73–88. Lanham: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Meijer, E. 2019. Animal languages: The secret conversations of the natural world. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Merchant, C. 1992. Radical ecology: The search for a livable world. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Moran, J., and R. Doyle. 2015. Cow talk: Understanding dairy cow behavior to improve their welfare on Asian farms. Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing. http://www.publish.csiro.au/ebook/7929.
Müller, C., J. Bressem, and S.H. Ladewig. 2013. Towards a grammar of gestures: A form-based view. In Body—Language—Communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction, ed. C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S.H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, and S. Tessendorf, 707–733. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Nawroth, C., J. Langbein, M. Coulon, V. Gabor, S. Oesterwind, J. Benz-Schwarzburg, and E. von Borell. 2019. Farm animal cognition: Linking behavior, welfare and ethics. Frontiers in Veterinary Science 6 (24): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2019.00024.
Padilla de la Torre, M., E.F. Briefer, T. Reader, and A.G. McElligott. 2015. Acoustic analysis of cattle (Bos taurus) mother-offspring contact calls from a source-filter theory perspective. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 163: 58–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2014.11.017.
Peck, A., C. Stroud, and Q. Williams (eds.). 2019. Making sense of people and place in linguistic landscapes. London and New York: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Pennycook, A. 2016. Posthumanist applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 39 (4): 445–461. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amw016.
Pennycook, A. 2017. Translanguaging and semiotic assemblages. International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (3): 269–282. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2017.1315810.
Pennycook, A. 2018. Posthumanist applied linguistics. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pennycook, A., and E. Otsuji. 2015. Making scents of the landscape. Linguistic Landscape 1 (3): 191–212. https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.1.3.01pen.
Schieffelin, B.B. 2018. Language socialization and making sense of place. In The sociolinguistics of place and belonging: Perspectives from the margins, ed. L. Cornips and V. de Rooij, 27–54. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Špinka, M., and F. Wemelsfelder 2011. Environmental challenge and animal agency. In Animal welfare, 2nd ed., ed. M.C. Appleby, J.A. Mench, I.A.S. Olsson, and B.O. Hughes, 27–43. Wallingford and Cambridge: CABI.Google Scholar
Vallez, T. 2013. Huisvesting van jongvee op een melkveebedrijf. Master thesis, Ghent University. https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/062/712/RUG01-002062712_2013_0001_AC.pdf.
Wilkie, R.M. 2010. Livestock/deadstock: Working with farm animals from birth to slaughter. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar

Copyright information

Open Access

This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

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

Arun Saldanha

Introduction

One or several Anthropocenes?

Primitive accumulation and racial capitalism

Capital as axiomatic

Ontologies of blackness and indigeneity

The Orbis hypothesis

Deciding on a date

Concluding thoughts: Life through the Trumpocene

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Notes

References

Pasi Heikkurinen1,2, Stewart Clegg3, Ashly H. Pinnington4, Katerina Nicolopoulou5, and Jose M. Alcaraz6

Article Information

Abstract

Introduction

Agency

Boundaries and Boundedness

Action

Responsibility

Conclusion

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Notes

References

Author Biographies

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

by Daniel Hartley

Capitalocene and World-Ecology

Leonie Cornips & Louis van den Hengel

Abstract

1. Introduction

2. Language and the Politics of Human Exceptionalism

3. Cows as Social and Linguistic Beings

4. Linguistic Place-Making in an Intensive Dairy Farm

4.1 The Fieldwork Site

4.2 Place-Making Through Practices of Sociality and Multilingualism

5. Conclusion

Footnotes

Notes

Acknowledgements

References

Copyright information

About this chapter

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