Politics of the Anthropocene: Formation of the Commons as a Geologic Process

Abstract

In the Anthropocene humanity acquires a new collective geologic identity. There are two contradictory movements in this Anthropocenic thought; first, the Anthropocenic trace in the geologic record names a commons from below insomuch as humanity is named as an undifferentiated “event” of geology; second, the Anthropocene highlights the material diversities of geologic bodies formed through historical material processes. This paper addresses the consequences of this geologic subjectivity for political thought beyond a conceptualization of the commons as a set of standing reserves. Discourses of limits and planetary boundaries are contrasted with the exuberance and surplus of fossil‐fuelled energy. Drawing on the political economy of Georges Bataille and the material communism of Maurice Blanchot, I argue for the necessity of a political aesthetics that can traverse the difference between common and uncommon experience in the formation of an Anthropocene commons.

The Inhumanities

“…Black and Indigenous studies have been theorizing a nonnormative materiality for years, precisely because the black and Indigenous subject is historically irreducible to the normative (humanist) subject. Furthermore, this antiblack and brownness is materially and theoretically made concurrently with the inscription of the earth through the grammars of geology within colonial praxis and its afterlives (Yusoff 2018c). The natality of this emergence can be said to constitute an ontological inscription of black, Indigenous, and earth as the ground for the "natural" right of whiteness to consolidate the planet for the generation of value (also see Bonds and Inwood 2016;Baldwin and Erickson 2020).…”

“…The political importance of reconceptualizing the inhuman in its material, epistemic, and conceptual forms is part of understanding the material transformation of the planet (Clark 2010) and how geologic grammars do geopolitical and geophysical work (Yusoff 2018c). This is also to understand how and where matter relations organize and arrange particular enduring forms of oppression, as extraction economies traverse subjective and material regimes of value.…”

“…The material incorporation of the European subject (and its settler colonial kin) in terms of value, accumulation, and subjective forms was defined against what was classified as fossil nature (indigeneity) and fossil energy (the enslaved) to transform the ecological and energetic organization of the world as a global geography. As the Anthropocene empirically describes a new field of geologically informed power relations that focuses attention on the geographies of the inhuman, geologic forces, and the politics of nonlife, it also represents an explicit formation of political geology that is racialized from its onset in the geologies of colonialism since 1492 (Lewis and Maslin 2015;Yusoff 2018c). My argument is not just about the recognition of geographies of colonialization as a spatial apparatus but as a set of interlocking affectual architectures and geophysical relations that constitute an antiblack and colonial earth in the present tense.…”

Integrative Geographie neu denken – z.B. anthropozänisch

“…z.B. Clark und Yusoff, 2017;Clark und Gunaratnam, 2017;Dalby, 2014Dalby, , 2016Dalby, , 2017Yusoff, 2016Yusoff, , 2017a sowie explizit wirtschaftsgeographische Arbeiten, die relational-postmodern (Bergmann, 2017), radikalneomarxistisch (Millar und Mitchell, 2017) oder heterodoxlebensweltlich (Gibson-Graham und Miller, 2015 konzipiert sind.…”

Anticipating Ruinations: Ecologies of ‘Make Do’ and ‘Left With’

“…That said, as posthumanists theorizing human–nonhuman relationships, media scholars will have to find space-times and frameworks to ‘politicize outrage’ at environmental racism that keeps wealth and toxicity at a distance from each other (Cubitt, 2017: 14). Anthropocenic subjectivity, while hailing all of humanity into one planetary subject, might perpetuate social exclusions while executing such a (political) project of forming geological commons (see Yusoff, 2017). Caution needs to be exercised as academics meld together the biopolitics of neoliberal capitalist extraction with ‘geontologies’ (Povinelli, 2016) in search of novel ecological materialisms.…”