The limits of Anthropocene narratives

TL;DR: The authors argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition, but rather, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told.

Abstract: The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told What we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the Anthropocene as our current predicament

Summary

The Many Stories of the Anthropocene

• Critics point out that even though the natural sciences have done an invaluable service in calling attention to human-induced changes in the Earth system and their potential consequences, the social embeddedness of the supposedly universal humanity that features as the novel geological agent in Anthropocene narratives of the Earth system should receive just as much attention.
• They are simply based on conflicting imperatives.
• In the coming pages, I argue that the challenge the authors face today does not merely lie in developing either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene stories to come to terms with their current condition.

Narrative Understanding and the Anthropocene

• Telling Anthropocene stories is, so to say, only half of the story.
• As an assemblage of positions on the question of the role of narrative in history, it is nevertheless indicative enough concerning the dominance of the theoretical understanding of the historical enterprise as a narrative one in the second half of the last century (while the theoretical field moves towards other kinds of concerns since then).
• The felt need of crafting Anthropocene narratives is nevertheless not confined to historical studies.
• In the former two scales, the main character is an internally divided humanity.
• 154-165, 167-173) even widens this distinction into homocentric and zoecentric views of the world, which respectively account for histories revolving around humans understood in sociopolitical terms and histories in which humans are conceived of within a larger scheme of life (zoe), also known as Chakrabarty (2015.

Unprecedented Change, Rupture, Shock, Event

• The extent to which the Anthropocene resists processual narratives on all scales is the extent to which it defies, as Chakrabarty says, the continuity of human experience.
• If the Anthropocene predicament includes such prospect of unprecedentedness as disconnection from the past without being restricted to it, then the question is how to reconcile this with their storytelling activity in which the authors manifest the continuity of their experience.
• The notion of unprecedented change is not the only conceptualization of the radical novelty of the Anthropocene predicament.
• As it gathers pace the tyranny of the Earth System will overrule the plurality of local stories and cultures.

A Politics for the Anthropocene

• The single most important contention of narrativism for recent efforts to understand the Anthropocene predicament is that the stories the authors tell domesticate that which they are about.
• Besides, according to another essay of White (1987: 58-82) , this domesticating effect constitutes the 'politics of historical interpretation'.
• But it must equally be clear that this humanity under threat has not much to do with humanity as the universal subject expected to come to the happy fulfillment of its inherent capacities over the course of a developmental historical process -the notion of humanity targeted by humanities and social scientific criticism in the last decades.
• True enough, these stories reconfigure the scale of political thinking and the role of the human with respect both to interspecies and intraspecies justice.
• This precisely is the case with the telling Anthropocene stories on the one hand and recognizing the shock and the unprecedented change of the Anthropocene on the other.

Notes

• Alternative proposals to date the Anthropocene vary from the domestication of animals to the postwar period.
• It rather means an existential bond between the two which still remain, in many contexts, distinguishable.
• See also Hornborg (2017) arguing against a tendency in recent (post)humanities scholarship to abolish analytical distinctions.
• The distinction between homocentric and zoecentric worldviews corresponds to the more recent distinction of Chakrabarty (2018: 22-29) between human-centered and planet-centered ways of thinking.

Full text

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The Limits of Anthropocene Narratives
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
Bielefeld University
This is a draft version.
For the published article follow the link to the
European Journal of Social Theory (2018)
Abstract
The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of
Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene
predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption,
this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in
telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to
come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to
grips with how the stories we can tell in the Anthropocene relate to the radical
novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. What
we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to
narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the
Anthropocene as our current predicament.
Keywords
Anthropocene, domesticating the new, historical narrative, humanity, politics,
storytelling, unprecedented change

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The Many Stories of the Anthropocene
What kinds of stories does the Anthropocene challenge us to tell? Historians,
social scientists, and literary scholars seem just as eager to answer this question
today as earth scientists, geologists, and human geographers do. The answers
themselves may be discipline-specific, and, among many other factors, largely
vary along how one defines the Anthropocene and what one considers to be the
beginning of the story.
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Stories that understand the Anthropocene as a geological
epoch or stories that regard the notion as being integral to the relatively new
knowledge formation known as Earth system science may take radically different
twists and turns than stories that refer to a cultural condition or to a general
human imprint on nature. Besides, a story based on stratigraphic data (Zalasiewicz
et al., 2011)
, a story about biodiversity loss (Seddon et al., 2016), and a story that
revolves around the mischiefs and wrongdoings of the central villain named
capitalism (Moore, 2015), may not even have much in common.
I will come back to the question of differences soon. For now, the more
important thing to note is that talking about the Anthropocene as a geological
epoch-marker with a beginning makes sense only against the backdrop of an
implied story. No wonder that the humanities and the social sciences – and lately
especially the discipline of history – have found their way to join the discussion
initiated by the natural sciences. Despite the large variety of approaches to
Anthropocene narratives, a shared sense has already been developed that the most
plausible stories should somehow feature multiple timescales – from
industrialization processes to planetary histories – and achieve a transdisciplinary
character by bringing most of the above concerns and elements together. Such an
expectation has already been present in Paul Crutzen’s brief essay in Nature, which
kick-started the spectacular career of the term at the beginning of the new
millennium. In suggesting the eighteenth century as the onset of the
Anthropocene, Crutzen (2002: 23) referred to ‘analyses of air trapped in polar ice’
that ‘showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide
and methane’ in this period, and also noted that this data ‘happens to coincide
with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784’.
Noting a coincidence between possible Anthropocene stories told by the
natural sciences on the one hand and the humanities and social sciences on the
other does not, however, put the respective stories into any meaningful relation to
each other. The same applies to the ‘Great Acceleration’ thesis, which sets the

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beginning of the Anthropocene in the early postwar years. The thesis works from
an Earth system science point of view, which brings together various disciplines
of the natural sciences in considering the Earth as a whole, an integrated system
on its own. The term ‘Great Acceleration’ refers to a simultaneous postwar
runaway of socio-economic trends (including urban population, water use, GDP,
or transportation) and Earth system indicators (such as stratospheric ozone, ocean
acidification, shrimp aquaculture, or terrestrial biosphere degradation). Although
its advocates are aware of the fact that ‘correlation in time does not prove cause-
and-effect’, they think that ‘there is a vast amount of evidence that the changes
and in the structure and functioning of the Earth System […] are primarily driven
by human activities’ (Steffen et al, 2015: 92).
But even if the cause-and-effect relationship between histories of the human
world and histories of the Earth system could be established, from the viewpoint
of the humanities and social sciences this would typically result in rather
unsophisticated narratives. It would still be the standard Earth story, the latest
episode of which features human beings as new geological agents. Needless to
say, according to much of humanities and social sciences criticism, this actually is
the paradigmatic Anthropocene story as told by the natural sciences. Critics point
out that even though the natural sciences have done an invaluable service in
calling attention to human-induced changes in the Earth system and their
potential consequences, the social embeddedness of the supposedly universal
humanity that features as the novel geological agent in Anthropocene narratives
of the Earth system should receive just as much attention.
Going back to Crutzen’s temporal coincidence between what stratigraphic
data shows and Watt’s steam engine, Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014: 92)
tell a completely different story, in which ‘capitalists in a small corner of a the
Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation stone for fossil economy’.
In offering a brief sketch of the history of this fossil economy, they emphasize the
responsibility of ‘advanced capitalist countries’ in bringing about the current
situation. Malm and Hornborg (2014: 64) note that ‘in the early 21st century, the
poorest 45% of the human population accounted for 7% of emissions, while the
richest 7% produced 50%’ and go on to ask the rhetorical question: ‘Are these basic
facts reconcilable with a view of humankind as the new geological agent?’
Eventually, Malm and Hornborg (2014: 66) end up claiming that the
standard natural scientific Anthropocene story represents ‘an illogical and

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ultimately self-defeating foray of the natural sciences – responsible for the original
discovery of climate change – into the domain of human affairs’, and that ‘in
Anthropocene thinking, natural scientists extend their world views to society’.
And they are not the only ones to think so. The recent book of historians
Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (the
2016 translation of the French book originally published in 2013), rhymes off these
sentiments, depicting the same scientific Anthropocene narrative as if it conveyed
the hidden agenda of science aspiring world governance. Although Bonneuil and
Fressoz start out by crediting the sciences of doing a great job at recognizing and
establishing the situation to face, they accuse natural sciences with a
depoliticization of very situation they describe. They think that there is one
‘official’ Anthropocene narrative out there that must be bitterly countered, and
that a proper understanding of the Anthropocene must be based on historical
Anthropocene narratives that tell how a differentiated human world arrived at the
present situation.
There are nevertheless good arguments indicating that this kind of
animosity, just as well as the idea that scientific Anthropocene stories wish to
intrude and overtake the way we think about the human world, is unjustified and
misplaced. First, if anything, such stories seem to be either of the completely
opposite effect or of the implausibility to think about nature and the human world
in terms of one dominating the other. What they are trying to convince us about
is not that we should look at the human world ‘scientifically’, but that this human
world – with all that comes with it – is now irreversibly acting into and
transforming the order of nature, compelling us to redefine the way we think
about the relationship between nature and the human world as intertwined.
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What is more, most scientific Anthropocene narratives entail a kind of
anthropocentrism manifested in the acknowledgement of the unprecedented
powers of human beings in transforming the Earth system. Even if they abandon
the idea of human exceptionalism by collapsing a strict conceptual separation
between nature and the human world, what they are often being criticized by the
emerging discourses of anti-anthropocentric critical posthumanism and ecological
humanities of human-nonhuman kinship (Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2016) is
precisely their anthropocentrism.
Second, as Julia Adeney Thomas (2018: 177) notes, scientific Anthropocene
stories and ‘ESS [Earth system science] scientists are not in the business of blame’.

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Dipesh Chakrabarty (2017: 28) makes the same point when claiming that the
notion of the Anthropocene as emerged in the natural sciences ‘refers more to
(mostly human-driven) changes to the Earth system as a whole and less about
moral culpability of humans (or some humans) in causing them’. Finally, in his
recent book, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (2017), Clive
Hamilton even provides an explanation for the confusion in arguing that the
Anthropocene represents a paradigm shift inseparable from the new-born Earth
System science. In Hamilton’s view, it is within this new knowledge formation –
which may indeed be new in the sense of emerging in the broadly construed
postwar period – that the Anthropocene has been conceived as a novel
understanding of humanity’s role in the equally novel conception of the Earth as
an integral system. The problem with the understanding of the situation by much
of humanities and social sciences scholarship is, accordingly, that they ‘read the
Anthropocene into the old disciplines with which they are comfortable’
(Hamilton, 2017: 20).
I think that these latter remarks raise a valid point. Many interventions into
what is conceived of as a monumental Anthropocene story of the natural sciences
oftentimes result in nonetheless standard evocations of what, by now, appears as
a rather conventional and predictable critical arsenal of humanities and social
sciences scholarship. Motivated by the anxiety that scientific Anthropocene stories
erase their categories of understanding out of the picture, humanities and social
science engagements with the Anthropocene can easily be just as reductionist and
one-sided as, in their view, natural scientific Anthropocene narratives are. While
claiming to balance the overall picture, often they gesture toward the other
extreme pole.
Such sense of mutual exclusivity derives from the assumption that telling
one kind of Anthropocene story may render other kinds impossible to tell. In turn,
the assumption that different kinds of Anthropocene narratives anaesthetize (at
best) or inactivate (at worst) each other is based on the deeper conviction that these
stories are about the same thing, and that the plausibility of one kind of narrative
must come at the expense of the plausibility of other kinds. Contrary to this, it
seems to me that scientific Anthropocene narratives on the one hand and socio-
political ones on the other are typically about different things. They are simply
based on conflicting imperatives. Whereas scientific Anthropocene narratives
demand preemptive action in facing an existential risk, the narratives of the

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "The limits of anthropocene narratives" ?

Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge the authors are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with their current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories the authors can tell in the Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. 

Q2. What are the main difficulties to overcome for entangled Anthropocene stories?

Questions of the diverging scales, the different paces, and multiple protagonists of change are the main difficulties to overcome for entangled Anthropocene stories. 

Q3. How many philosophers have answered the question of narrative in the last half century?

Philosophers of history and theoretically minded historians have answered the question of narrative affirmatively in the last more than half-century. 

Q4. What is the meaning of the term ‘resisting storytelling’?

The Anthropocene can be conceived of as resisting storytelling by means other than its future prospect and with respect to domains other than human affairs. 

Q5. What is the main challenge of Chakrabarty’s work?

Already in his initial engagement with the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty (2009: 197, 220) phrased the main challenge as the collapse of historical understanding in facing an extreme Anthropocene prospect of a ‘world without us’ that defies the ‘continuity of human experience’. 

Q6. What is the puzzling question today?

The most puzzling question today is not that of how to handle various scales, speeds, and actors of stories, all of which are constructed along a shared type of change, but that of how far the authors can go on in telling suchstories of processes when the Anthropocene confronts us with a type of perceived change that is anything but processual. 

Q7. What is the striking feature of recent Anthropocene discussions?

The most striking feature of recent Anthropocene discussions is precisely that most of the participants seem to be right in one way or another, despite the fact that their ways of understanding oftentimes conflict and contradict each other. 

Q8. What is the challenge of resolving the Anthropocene?

What the authors need is to find meaningful ways to reconcile what apparently is a retained commitment to narrative understanding with the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of comprehending the Anthropocene as their current predicament. 

Q9. What is the problem with the understanding of the situation by much of humanities and social sciences scholarship?

The problem with the understanding of the situation by much of humanities and social sciences scholarship is, accordingly, that they ‘read the Anthropocene into the old disciplines with which they are comfortable’ (Hamilton, 2017: 20). 

Q10. What does White say about the domesticating effect of all historical writing?

according to another essay of White (1987: 58– 82), this domesticating effect constitutes the ‘politics of historical interpretation’.