Can the Nonhuman Speak?: Breaking the Chain of Being in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The fact that nonhuman animals share the power of communication, plus the likelihood that some share our capacity for ideation, demands reevaluation of why human ideas matter, and especially whether they adequately convey a sense of our place within the rest of nature. Nonhuman beings and phenomena may be intrinsically unhuman, but are not necessarily less important than us. Analysis of this difference-as-significance is an ongoing problem of the Anthropocene. This essay focuses on Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being and Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime, describing alternative ways of situating humans in relation to the nonhuman.

Domesticating the future through history

“…This is how, in the quoted passage, the Anthropocene predicament becomes as broad in the redefinitions as "the enormity of the natural world" and "its resistance to our efforts to control it." Thus defined, precedents are indeed easy to find in the idea of the sublime, which, in the mid-eighteenthcentury writings of Edmund Burke, entails, very conveniently, precisely the very same "paradoxical allure of something beyond human control" (Chaplin, 2017: 525) that is a perfect match to the broad redescription of the Anthropocene condition in the quoted passage. What the result does not match though is the ESS Anthropocene as introduced earlier.…”

“…The second is a passage from Joyce Chaplin’s article “Can the Nonhuman Speak? Breaking the chain of Being in the Anthropocene” (2017), which seeks precedents slightly earlier in the early-modern period. Finally, the third example is the argument of the article “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene” by Davis and Todd (2017), which links the Anthropocene with European expansion and the colonization of the Americas.…”

“…In putting temporal domestication to work, the essay proceeds in a slightly less straightforward way than the previous example, through an engagement with the question of scale in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009). In its first interpretive move, Chaplin (2017: 522) attributes the view to Chakrabarty that the “element of scale is assumed to be unprecedented, therefore hard for humanity to confront.” Then, in a second move, she challenges this view by claiming that it reflectsthe high-modern assumption that human control of the natural world should be the default; comprehension is supposed to yield a manageable and predictable future. But it is not the case that thinking about the enormity of the natural world , pondering its alterity and complexity, and confronting its resistance to our efforts to control it are anything new .…”

The Transformation of Historical Time

“…Again, the list could be continued with far more examples. But the tendency is hopefully already displayed: with or without much conceptual innovations, both within a narrowly defined historical studies (Chaplin 2017) Given such blending of concerns and temporalities in discourses and views of today, the main question is that of how processual and evental dispositions of historical time relate to each other today. To begin to answer this question from a bit afar, the first thing to note is that both processual and evental temporalities can be labeled as "historical" inasmuch as they configure large-scale change over time in the world without the assumption of otherworldly intervention, either divine or supernatural.…”

Revisiting the history of ideas: A forgotten resource for historians of geography

“…The main emphasis in this newer incarnation of history of ideas is the temporal ambition of this approach, the longue durée (Armitage, 2012; McMahon & Moyn, 2014), as well as the crossing of all kinds of boundaries and boundaries beyond “the material” as in the immediacy of specific places (Goering, 2017). The call for a long‐term, large‐scale‐ and non‐elitist history of ideas is also perceptible in papers published in the Journal of the History of Ideas over recent years (e.g., Chaplin, 2017; De Bont, 2015; Shogimen, 2016), one example being De Bont's inquiry into international conservation and the shift of discourses of exclusion to discourse of inclusion, considering the knowledges of indigenous people between 1910 and 1975 (De Bont, 2015).…”