Anthropocene

I believe that growth will grind to a halt. The total collapse of the industrial monopoly on production will be the result of synergy in the failure of the multiple systems that fed its expansion (…) This crisis may be triggered by an unforeseen event, as the Great Depression was touched off by the Wall Street Crash. Some fortuitous coincidence will render publicly obvious the structural contradictions between stated purposes and effective results in our major institutions. People will suddenly find obvious what is now evident to only a few: that the organization of the entire economy toward the “better” life has become the major enemy of the good life.

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973

The literature on the Anthropocene is abundant and extremely diverse. The term “Anthropocene” resurfaced at the end of the 20th century to characterize a new geological era in which human influence would be the major geological force shaping the future of our planet (CRUTZEN & STOERMER 2000). Even if Bruno LATOUR considers that “the Anthropocene is the most decisive philosophical, religious, anthropological and political concept ever produced as an alternative to the ideas of modernity” (2015, 77), this denomination, like the observation it denotes, is still the subject of much debate and controversy: some doubt its dating (LEWIS & MASLIN 2015), others its relevance (e.g. DEMOS 2017), or the epistemological, ethical and political postulates that underpin it (e.g. CHAKRABARTY 2009; MARRIS 2015). Multiple readings abound in its regard, depending on whether we conceive of it from the standpoint of the earth sciences (WATERS et al. 2014) or the social sciences (CHERNILO 2017), in a variety of critical postures such as political economy (MANN & WAINWRIGHT 2018), feminist and queer (GRUSIN 2017) or postcolonial (YUSOFF 2018) thought, or new materialism (CONTY 2018).

For our part, we’ll regard the term as problematic in its own right, and welcome the existence of this plurality of approaches, without considering the anthropocene as a certainty or a thing, but rather, with Christophe BONNEUIL and Jean-Baptiste FRESSOZ as an event, to “better revolutionize the worldviews that have become dominant with the affirmation of fossil fuel-based industrial capitalism” (2016, 13). For us, the Anthropocene is above all, as we say in Quebec, a bundle of troubles: a troubled and uncertain concept, a set of narratives with antagonistic interpretations, but also, and above all, a major problem: how to inhabit this trouble? (CAEYMEX, DESPRET & PIERON 2019) In this sense, we are deeply inspired by the work of Donna HARAWAY (1991; 1997; 2008; 2016).

Like Richard GRUSIN (2017, viii), we have indeed noted that “the anthropocene is a particularly resonant reiteration of a feminist problematic powerfully articulated in 1985 by Donna Haraway.” This problematic, that of her Cyborg Manifesto (1991, 149-181), insists on “the inextricable links that bind humans to non-humans, nature to culture, and which warns us that the consequences of attempts to dominate human and non-human nature can be both extremely devastating and productively perverse” (GRUSIN 2016, viii). At the heart of this problematic lies for us the notion of symbiosis, even if Donna Haraway defined the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism” (1991, 149). We prefer to use the term symbiosis rather than hybrid, firstly because hybrids are often sterile, and secondly because one of the primary intuitions of 1960s computer science research (cf. LICKLIDER 1960) was precisely to elevate cybernetic systems to the status of life forms (HELMREICH & ROOSTH 2010). Our cybryonts will be other-than-human cyborgs, sympoietic entities.

All together, we, the Critical Gardeners’ Collective, thus found with the bipolar mosses our medium of choice to practice the kind of modest ecophilia we aspire to. We are definitely wary of two kinds of “green trends” we encounter too often: the catastrophist (aka the collapsologists—it is now a neologism in French!) and the solutionist. We know that the ecological catastrophe is coming, but we do not see any point in the gloom for the sake of gloom; we care for technology, and yet we do not think that technology alone will solve the problem. We are bipolar with respect to the ecological catastrophe and its technological fix—alternatively for one and the other. Above all, we would love for people to contemplate, ponder, and think. What better than a moss garden to do that — think Saihō-ji garden, near Kyoto… 

Bibliographie

BONNEUIL, C. & FRESSOZ, J.-B. 2016. L’événement Anthropocène, 2ème édition. Paris : Seuil.
CHAKRABARTY, D. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, Critical Inquiry 35(2): 197-222.
CHERNILO, D. 2017. “The question of the human in the Anthropocene debate”, European Journal of Social Theory 20(1): 44-60.
CONTY, A. F. 2018. “The Politics of Nature: New Materialist Responses to the Anthropocene” Theory Culture & Society 35(7-8): 73-96.
CRUTZEN, P. J. et STOERMER, E. F. 2000. « The “Anthropocene” », Global Change 41: 17-18. 
DEMOS, T. J. 2017. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin:  Sternberg Press.
GRUSIN, D. dir. 2017. Anthropocene Feminism. University of Minnesota Press.
HARAWAY, D. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Rouledge.
HELMREICH, S. & ROOSTH, S. 2010. “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry”, Representations 112: 27-53.
LATOUR, B. 2015. Face à Gaia. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris: La Découverte.
LEWIS, S. L. & MASLIN, M. A. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene”, Nature, 519: 171-180. 
LICKLIDER, J. C. R. 1960. “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, (March): 4-11.
MANN, G. & WAINWRIGHT, J. 2018. Cliamte Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future. London: Verso.
MARIS, V. 2015. “Back to the Holocene: A conceptual, and possibly practical, return to a nature not intended for humans” dans The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, sous la direction de C. Hamilton, C. Bonneuil, F. Gemenne,  pp. 123-133, New York, Routledge, 2015.
WATERS, C.N., ZALASIEWICZ, J.A., WILLIAMS, M., ELLIS, M.A. & SNELLING, A.M. 2014. A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene, Geological Society of London.
YUSOFF, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press.