The Anthropocene Narrative: Apocalyptic Tropes and Human Upgrade, Exams of Ethics

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The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse

[author’s manuscript] Joanna Zylinska

Contents First as Tragedy… Apocalypse, Now! Man’s Tragic Worldview Men Repair the World for Me Project Man 2. Exit Man The End of the White Man The End of Men? A Feminist Counter-apocalypse Coda: Sensing the Anthropocene Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography

in which human influence on the geo- and biosphere has been irreversible, the Anthropocene has become a new epistemological filter through which we humans can see ourselves. It has also triggered the production of multiple images and narratives about ourselves and about the world around us. The Anthropocene is often presented as a consequence of the excessive use of the resources of our planet, whereby seemingly interminable growth eventually leads to depletion, scarcity, and the crisis of life in its biological and social aspects. The term encapsulates not just “peak oil,” “peak red meat,” “peak growth,” and “peak stuff,”^1 but also, more ominously perhaps, “peak man.” The Anthropocene is therefore a story about a presently unfolding planetary emergency that affects both rich and poor regions of the world—although not all of them with the same impact or intensity. Yet it is worth pointing out that the apocalyptic tropes that underpin the Anthropocene narrative have actually been reoccurring through Western (and non-Western) cultural history—from pre-modern religious texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Book of Daniel, and the Book of Revelation (aka the Apocalypse of St. John), through to contemporary cultural productions such as Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita , Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels including The Handmaid’s Tale and MaddAddam , and TV series such as Survivors and The Walking Dead. Critic Frank Kermode has pointed out that “[a]pocalypse and the related themes are strikingly long-lived,” while theologian Catherine Keller has gone so far as to suggest that “we stand … in an unfinished history of apocalyptic finalities.”^2 At the same time, the reoccurring apocalyptic narrative, in all its deadly guises, has acquired a new lease of life and a new sense of direction after becoming linked to the Anthropocene. Although the latter term has only gained currency in scientific and popular debates in the last few years, the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch is variously dated to the early days of agriculture, the launch of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, and

the “great acceleration” of population growth and energy use in the years after 1945. Human and nonhuman extinction, and the destruction of life as we know it on our planet, loom as the endpoint of this epoch. Interestingly, the inflection of this particular apocalyptic narrative changes depending on who is telling the story. For example, the concept of the Anthropocene can be used to establish an inherent link between capitalism and the modern way of life,^3 and thus alert us to the injustices of the ever-encroaching neoliberal market logic that has now absorbed nature and climate under its remit. But it can also be mobilized to praise human ingenuity and problem-solving skills, and to promote capital-driven solutions to climate change, such as nuclear fission, carbon-offsetting, and geoengineering.^4 Scientists still have not unequivocally agreed that the declaration of a new epoch is warranted, yet the Anthropocene has already been renamed by cultural and political theorists as the Anthrobscene, the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, the Eurocene, the Plantationocene, and the Technocene, by way of challenging the inequality and injustice the original name was said to perpetuate. So even though we are nowhere near solving the climate issues, in some areas of critical theory we already find ourselves post-Anthropocene, it seems.^5 My own critical intervention involves delving into this knot of material processes, objects, and meanings that have accrued around this term in recent years, in a variety of academic disciplines and in the wider cultural and media landscape. Rather than attempt to offer large-scale solutions to global ecological problems, or even undertake a detailed critique of the various positions on the Anthropocene that have emerged from different intellectual and political quarters, my aims in this book are more modest. I am interested predominantly in exploring the “structures of mourning”^6 that the Anthropocene has both drawn upon and ushered in, as its affective framework and intellectual foundation. My focus is on the aforementioned “peak man,”

around the Anthropocene—and to carve a better, more responsive and more responsible, picture of ourselves, here and now. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to break what Keller has termed “an apocalypse habit.” This habit manifests itself in a “wider matrix of unconscious tendencies”^7 that shape finalist thinking, with its moralistic underpinnings, whereby moralism comes at the expense of the analysis of power relations on the ground. My method involves working through and across various academic and popular narratives on the Anthropocene. Temporally, The End of Man is a follow-up to my earlier book, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene ,^8 but it is also a parallel or even an alternative project. While it shares with the previous volume the conceptual spectrum and the minimalism of form, as well as a desire to make a critical intervention into debates about the world in all its geophysical formations, The End of Man also offers a different pathway through the Anthropocene debate. This path does not lead so much via philosophy and ethics, but rather traces the adaptation and transformation of philosophical ideas in a broader set of cultural scripts: journalism and wider media debates, sci-tech industry narratives, explicit and implicit religious beliefs, political events. Man’s Tragic Worldview Apocalyptic thinking is an aspect of what has been termed “the tragic worldview”: a cognitive framework that stands for the human’s ability to reflect on life’s finitude, coupled with the human’s inability to come to terms with this finitude. This tension between cognitive states evokes a sense of tragedy in the human, with apocalypse becoming a symptom of thinking in tragic terms. Citing historian of religion Mircea Eliade, Polish philosopher Wojciech Załuski claims that the tragic worldview, which is still with us, superseded the prehistorical mental

schema linked with the early cosmic religions. In that originary schema the human experienced him- or herself as an undifferentiated part of nature, with death being sensed as just a temporary and insignificant disturbance within the ongoing permanence of life. Then, through the historical process of individuation, the human gradually became separated from the natural world, while also learning to grasp the discontinuity of life—both human and nonhuman. For Załuski, a conservative Catholic thinker, the tragic worldview thus presents itself as a logical consequence of the human’s separation from nature. The tragedy arises out of the impossibility of reconciling the appreciation of life in an amoral sense, i.e., the ability to experience wonder and admire beauty as such, with the inability to hold on to those sensations—and to the objects from which they arise. The sense of the world’s evanescence is thus a cornerstone of the tragic worldview.^9 The tragic worldview arguably manifests itself in the fatalism of Homer and other ancient Greek thinkers, but it also returns, in a modern guise, in the Dionysianism of Friedrich Nietzsche as well as the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Significantly, the pre-tragic worldview associated with early naturalistic religions, and with alternative cosmologies that Western thought subsequently deemed “primitive,” has never been entirely superseded: it has become manifest in philosophies as diverse as Epicurean hedonism, Stoicism, and Buddhism. Yet Załuski, in his attachment to his own religious framework, sees the transition from the cosmic to the tragic worldview as a sign of the maturation of the human mind, and thus as a teleological process of growth and progression beyond the state of nature. The philosophy of immanence developed, for example, by Gilles Deleuze would therefore be seen as immature from a particularist Christian viewpoint. Indeed, for Załuski, the process of human maturation as a species entails the gradual discovery of an authentic human condition—which is the condition of the fall from grace, or separation from God as the fullness of being. The very existence in, and

This kind of Biblical apocalyptic imaginary has provided modern humans with a framing device for understanding many of the current issues surrounding the Anthropocene: we can think here of the images of the blackening of the sun as a result of fossil fuel use; of pictures of land erosion and collapse (or “heaven falling unto the earth”) due to mining; or of reports of lands such as the Solomon Islands and the Maldives being “moved out of their places” due to the rising ocean levels. Yet, more worryingly, it is not just for diagnostic purposes that redemptive apocalyptic tropes are being mobilized today: they are also resorted to when solutions are offered. Indeed, there is a very clear sense in many of the science papers on the Anthropocene and their popularized media versions that the salvation from the Anthropocene’s alleged finalism will come from a secularized yet godlike elsewhere: an escape to heavens (i.e., a planetary relocation), or an actual upgrade of humans to the status of Homo deus. In both of these narratives Man arrives in the post-Anthropocene New Jerusalem fully redeemed—and redesigned. This supposedly individuated Man remains undifferentiated, both sexually and biologically. Indeed, the Man of the tragic worldview achieves his status at the cost of sacrificing sexual and biological difference that is always more than one. Disavowing his kinship with women and those of non-binary gender, with animals, microbes, and fungi, Man separates from “nature” to emerge standing, proudly erect, yet already threatened with contamination, shrinkage, and evanescence. This disavowal is a condition of the preservation of Man’s self- belief and self-appointed authority, allowing him continued “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”^12

Men Repair the World for Me In a 2008 essay titled “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit, an accomplished writer, recounts her encounter at a party in Aspen with “an imposing man who’d made a lot of money.”^13 Having just published a book on time, space, and technology in the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, Solnit responded to the man’s query about her writing career with an attempt to describe her latest project, only to be interrupted and told that another “very important book” on the subject had come out recently, and that he had read about it in the New York Times Book Review. Her friend’s multiple interjections that it was actually Solnit’s book the man was talking about were consistently ignored—until he eventually took it in, “went ashen,” and then “began holding forth again.” “Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about,” concludes Solnit. “Some men.”^14 The essay struck a nerve with many readers, and with women readers in particular, because it captured, wittingly and poignantly, the ongoing gendering of dominant epistemologies. While I am wary of scoring points too easily by essentializing the political argument by pinning it to its author’s gender identity—indeed, I would much rather quote Barack Obama than Sarah Palin on healthcare, Alain Juppé than Marine Le Pen on immigration, and Jeremy Corbyn than Theresa May on austerity—Solnit’s intimations seem regrettably pertinent when it comes to the shaping of the Anthropocene narrative and the way it has been transmitted in both scholarly and mainstream literature. This is why I have decided to adapt her tongue-in-cheek phrase as a frame for approaching the Anthropocene story here. Interestingly, its central protagonist, Anthropocene Man, arrives on stage already lacking. Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook ponder whether this Man isn’t perhaps just “an effect of its own delusions of self-erasure.”^15 They then go on to suggest that “Humanity comes into being, late in the day, when it declares itself to no

coupled with its key authors’ blindness to their own discursive tropes and points of reference, not to mention the sources drawn on and the authors cited. And thus men explain the Anthropocene to me: I’m thinking here not just of the members of the Stratigraphy committee under the leadership of Jan Zalasiewicz; but also others scientists and science writers, culture managers, and humanities scholars. Stephen Emmott, head of Microsoft’s Computational Science research and author of the book Ten Billion , has declared “an unprecedented planetary emergency;”^20 Bernd M. Scherer, Director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin which ran a two-year Anthropocene project, has announced that “We have reached a Tipping Point ;”^21 while postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has claimed that “what scientists have said about climate change challenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also the analytic strategies that postcolonial and post-imperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the post-war scenario of decolonization and globalization.”^22 The latter is particularly telling because, in the disciplinary conjuncture that has been at the forefront of challenging the normative gendering and racialization of the human subject, the return to the human as the agent of history has ushered back in many previously contested concepts and units of analysis: science, objectivity, nature, environment, crisis—with the sexless yet so-very-gendered Man being elevated back to the center point of both investigation and action. And thus, as Colebrook highlights, “After years of theory that contested every naturalization of what was ultimately historical and political, ‘man’ has returned.”^23 Chakrabarty and others seem to be telling us that there is no time for textualist language games and other humanities pastimes any more because “scientists,” telling it like it is , have issued us with a more urgent task: we have to save the world and ourselves in it. The Anthropocene narrative therefore carries with it in an injunction issued to “humanity as

such” to move quickly, and urgently, forward—while there is still time. Significantly, Cohen and Colebrook point out that the narrative of humans as a destructive species has not only generated the imperative to survive—“if ‘we’ discover ourselves to be an agent of destruction, then ‘we’ must re-form, re-group and live on;”^24 it has also produced what they have termed a hyper- humanism—which I would like to rename here as Project Man 2.0. Project Man 2. As background to these developments, the temporality of the Anthropocene has brought with it a return to more interconnected models of understanding the world that have much in common with premodern frameworks: the ecological thinking that arises out of Earth systems science; the related notion of the world as Gaia promoted by Bruno Latour and Isabel Stengers; the idea of species companionship proposed by Donna Haraway; or the entangled human-nonhuman ontologies of Karen Barad and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Indeed, Tsing highlights that “interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists, who show how life requires the interplay of many kinds of beings.”^25 In a seeming rebuke to the teleological and progressivist narrative of Man’s cognitive ascent, she also points out that “women and men from around the world have clamored to be included in the status once given to Man. Our riotous presence undermines the moral intentionality of Man’s Christian masculinity, which separated Man from Nature.”^26 This new post-Enlightenment mode of thinking that demotes the White Christian Man from his position of the subject of reason and the telos of our planet entails a promise of decolonizing our established frameworks of thought. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it also becomes a horizon against which a

genome Venter had developed in his lab in 2010 started reproducing—except it is not the full story. Venter’s team had to insert the computer-manufactured genome into an already existing non-synthetic wet bacterial cell from which its native DNA had been extracted, thus merely enacting some lifelike processes in a medium that already supported what biology conventionally recognizes as life, rather than creating any such life from scratch. This small ontological distinction notwithstanding, Lynas positions Venter as a kind of mischievous hacker of not just life as we know it but also of the Book of Genesis, with “God’s power … now increasingly being exercised by us.”^31 This is the story of creation as rewritten by venture capitalists, asserting “unchallenged dominion over all living things.”^32 Yet Lynas seems oblivious to the political consequences of this shift. Indeed, his description of it by means of theological metaphors obscures the unequal distribution of the consequences of human-induced planetary intervention, positioning the Anthropocene instead in terms of a supposedly eternal struggle of Man vs. Nature. Our recently acquired godlike status still needs some tweaking, though. Lynas admits that all is not yet quite well in the Anthropocene paradise. “As if God were blind, deaf, and dumb, we blunder on without any apparent understanding of either our power or our potential.”^33 But it is just a matter of time, and more importantly, technological innovation and economic investment, before things get sorted. We thus needn’t worry: our “rebel nature” is a guarantee of success. In fact, Lynas admits to being tired of “the idea of perennial human victimhood,”^34 and thus offers to reboot the human as a god species whose only trajectory is upwards—as long as we do not get bogged down by the melancholy narratives of the anti-progress brigade. His is therefore a version of what another eco-entrepreneur Erle Ellis has called “a good Anthropocene”: one in which humans can be proud of their achievements rather than lose too much sleep over the side

effects. This approach is premised on “loving and embracing our human nature.”^35 But “The Good Anthropocene”^36 is really a new version of The Good Man, a prelapsarian Adam that can go back to and commune with God—while also knowing that God is nothing else but a mirror image of his own self. At the end of the day there is just Adam : a white Christian Adam, playing with himself. There’s no God, no serpent—and, perhaps more significantly of all, no Eve. Indeed, no Eve gets a say in Lynas’s New Jerusalem, as it has been designed as a safe space in which the White Man can safely rejoice in his own ingeniousness. There is also no dissensus, no conflict, and no inherent contradiction in the wishes and desires of the inhabitants of this safe space—because they are all just (imaginary) clones of our Man 2.0. It is therefore perhaps understandable that Lynas should joyfully declare: “this is no time for pessimism.”^37 However, when listening to his story about planetary catastrophes and ways of overcoming them we should be mindful of Keller’s reflection that an apocalyptic narrative is “absolutely optimistic for its own believers, though radically pessimistic as to human historical aspirations.”^38 In the world of Lynas and his post-nature ecomates, it is Eve and other earthly creatures that have become extinct. These historical aspirations on the part of the human may soon be superseded anyway because their holder will himself undergo a planetary transformation. The apocalyptic-sounding “end of man” will therefore rather be an upgrade: an evolution of the fleshy model that is becoming obsolete in the face of the current planetary challenges. And thus if the planet is proving to be more and more uninhabitable, the next logical step for the redeemers of today is to reach for what Lynas calls, without irony, a “technofix.” This perhaps explains the renewed interest, on the part of Silicon Valley visionaries, in 1980s cyborg discourses, which are now returning in the guise of human enhancement research, gerontology and, mutatis mutandis, AI. It

Dataism which rebrands humans as data processing units and then sets off to reap the benefits of this rebranding. Yet Homo Deus actually preserves a rather conservative version of Man as a future-proofed survivor, with his organs regenerated and his tissue replenished for generations to come—or replaced by more durable nonorganic parts. Such developments occur against the Uncanny Valley of Silicon Capital, with its geo-economic fault lines obscured by the Nasdaq indices. Even though Harari mischievously recognizes that any effort to predict what the world will look like in a hundred or two hundred years is “a waste of time,” as “[a]ny worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible,”^45 his present account of the developmental direction is still focused on the human as a stand-alone, discrete entity. Harari’s chapter on the Anthropocene thus ends with an unacknowledged humanist triumphalism, whereby the ostensible critique of the humanist model, propped up by notions such as the soul, language, or individuality, ends up celebrating human ingenuity. This is the ingenuity of the human subject who will eventually upgrade himself into a god thanks to his evolved ability to cooperate with others—but also of the male human author who is narrating this story of the secular human’s return to the Biblical Tree of Knowledge, via physics, chemistry, and biology. What is missing from Harari’s account is an awareness and acknowledgement of the very gesture on the part of this human author to carve out the Homo sapiens as a discrete entity, to extricate him from the various material and political entanglements and dependencies, and to speculate about his developmental trajectory into the future, his radical evolution of the mind, his “merging with robots and computers.”^46 Harari does recognize that the human is just another kind of animal, and actually makes numerous pitches for veganism as the only ethically defensible stance with regard to coexisting with other species. Yet the epistemological orientation of his time travel remains firmly in place: Harari’s arrow of time

still flies alongside the history of Man as we know him, only slightly more reengineered. The problem therefore lies not with the cognitive restrictions that the future imposes on us. The problem lies rather with the cognitive blind spot Harari himself brings to his own understanding of the human as a discrete subject of history: a diminished yet ultimately solipsistic Robocop, who may just succeed in getting away with the whole Anthropocene unpleasantness because he is better than other species at teaming up with other Robocops, and at inventing stories and transmitting them to his genetic kin. (Rats, cockroaches, and microbes, no obvious story-tellers as far as we can tell, will most likely prove him wrong…) Exit Man Should Man’s upgrade process fail or take too long, however, an alternative counter- Anthropocene plan is currently under development: Man’s planetary relocation. Faced with the prospect of an impending apocalypse on Earth, many scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs are already lining up to embark on a celestial trip. Wheelchair-bound theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has joined the queue, announcing recently that: we need a new generation of explorers to venture out into our solar system and beyond. These first private astronauts will be pioneers, and I hope to be among them. … I believe in the possibility of commercial space travel—for exploration and for the preservation of humanity. I believe that life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as a sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go to space.^47