Madeleine Fagan

This article argues that the Anthropocene produces a paradox when thinking about political mobilization. I show how the knowledge production practices that render the Anthropocene visible and actionable, including planetary boundaries, Earth System Science modeling of earth systems, and geological strata, also circulate a security rationality. This rationality is one that attempts to manage, co-opt, or productively direct processes of becoming, which limits possibilities for mobilization. A lens that assumes political mobilization is a function of increased knowledge, understanding, and evidence contributes to this problem. By starting instead with an understanding of possibilities for mobilization as emerging from social relations, the article highlights the way in which the security rationality circulated by Anthropocene knowledge production risks transforming those social relations into security relations. Netting the planet and the human together through the practices of calculation and representation that make the Anthropocene visible produces a decontextualized, disaggregated, and dispersed subject and so limits possibilities for collective political mobilization.

‘When’ is the Anthropocene and who are its subjects? This article seeks to demonstrate the ways in which engaging with the question of the ‘who’ of the Anthropocene also entails assumptions about the ‘when’ which rely on a transposition of geological onto historical and political periodization. The idea of the Anthropocene as a new epoch, with the associated focus on appropriate starting dates, novelty, and periodization, raises difficulties for attempts to construct alternatives to the ecologically problematic temporal discourse of modernity, the subjects thereby produced, and the critical resources with which to engage these. The inscription of these temporal boundaries in the anthropocene debate provides a framework which limits attempts to engage with the mobility of the human/nature border and associated arguments for an expanded (in both spatial and species terms) political constituency through which to engage the ecological challenges of the anthropocene. Such a framework obscures the ways in which the non-human is already integral to dominant political conceptual structures and the article proposes that instead of a focus on whether the non-human can/should be brought into an Anthropocene politics, we need first to re-examine how it already is.

Contemporary representations of environmental futures often feature apocalyptic scenarios, particularly in film and popular culture. However, these dire warnings have seemingly been ineffective at motivating action on climate change. In response, there has been a call for specifically ethical engagement to provide an alternative means of motivation. This article offers an analysis of the effects of ecological apocalypse narratives on the (re)production of the ethical subject of climate change. The article illustrates the intertextual production of the ethics and apocalypse discourses in order to argue that rather than providing an alternative, the ethical motivation approach in fact (re)produces the assumptions and effects of apocalyptic narratives in a way that sediments a non-relational logic of the ethical subject, in both spatial and temporal terms. Such a logic makes responsive ethical or political engagement with ecological futures very difficult and limits possibilities for thinking progressively about climate change.