742170

research-article2017
ANR0010.1177/2053019617742170The Anthropocene ReviewSimon

Perspectives and controversies

The Anthropocene Review

Why the Anthropocene has no

2017, Vol. 4(3) 239­–245
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/2053019617742170
https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019617742170
journals.sagepub.com/home/anr

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

Abstract
This paper argues that the tendency to invoke modern historical thinking in trying to make sense
of the Anthropocene amounts to an untenable, self-contradictory, and self-defeating enterprise.
There is a fundamental contradiction between the prospect of unprecedented change as entailed
by the Anthropocene and the deep continuity of a processual historical change. On the one
hand, conceiving the Anthropocene as the prospect of the unprecedented creates a demand for
immediate action to prevent future catastrophe. On the other hand, pointing out the inequalities
in the historical process of bringing about the Anthropocene creates a demand for social justice.
Although both are legitimate and important demands, they are incompatible. They represent
different temporalities, different conceptions of change, and different modes of action. Inasmuch
as the Anthropocene appears as unprecedented, it does not have a processual history; and
inasmuch as it has a processual history, it is not the Anthropocene.

Keywords
Anthropocene, historical thinking, history, preventive action, social justice, unprecedented
change

The notion of the Anthropocene conquered the humanities at an extraordinary pace. At its incep-
tion, it marked a geological epoch of human-induced change, but it quickly transformed into a far
broader concept. Since the landmark article of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), even historical studies
were captivated by the notion of the Anthropocene, despite the reputation of the discipline as not
being the utmost academic innovator. The appeal of the notion is due to the fact that historical stud-
ies, like many of its fellow disciplines in the humanities, became professionalized and institutional-
ized as the study of human beings. If Foucault (2002) is right in claiming that the so-called human
sciences of modernity constituted the human as their shared object of knowledge, then it hardly
comes as a surprise that the Anthropos (human in Greek) of the Anthropocene resonates with these

Bielefeld University, Germany Corresponding author:

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, Faculty of History, Philosophy
and Theology, Bielefeld University, Universitätsstraße 25,
Bielefeld 33615, Germany.
Email: zoltanbsimon@uni-bielefeld.de
240 The Anthropocene Review 4(3)

disciplines. More surprising is the speed with which the Anthropocene has spread over the discipli-
nary landscape and the magnitude of the claims attached to the notion.
As to the ferocious tempo, there is a rapidly increasing number of articles and books devoted to
the question of what happens to a particular subject ‘in (the age of) the Anthropocene’. A title-
based search in Google Scholar promptly reveals that ‘archeology’ (Lane, 2015) and ‘doing inter-
disciplinary Asian studies’ (Philip, 2014) are suddenly ‘in the age of the Anthropocene’ today,
while ‘digital humanities’ (Nowviskie, 2015), ‘culture, environment, and education’ (Greenwood,
2014) or ‘history and biology’ (Thomas 2014) find themselves simply ‘in the Anthropocene’. As to
the tectonic claims, they are related to the aforementioned invocation of the Anthropos. For if the
Anthropocene has to do with the Anthropos, and if history and its fellow disciplines have the
human as their shared object of knowledge, then the claims of these disciplines must concern the
figure of the human. In the humanities and social sciences, the Anthropocene indeed appears
accompanied by claims no smaller than it offers a reconceptualization of the human condition
(Palsson et al., 2013) or that it introduces a ‘human turn’ (Raffnsøe, 2016).
Oddly enough, the human component also constitutes the biggest obstacle to the acknowledg-
ment of the Anthropocene as an Anthropo-cene. After decades of postcolonial and gender criticism
targeting the idea that there could be a ‘humanity’ or ‘human being’ as the unitary subject of an
overall historical process, the implicit universalism of the Anthropocene often has a repulsive
effect. Dipesh Chakrabarty – who had an eminent role in dismantling Western universalism – is
acutely aware of the fact that the simultaneous appeal to an inherently universal notion and to
postcolonial criticism results in a dilemma. When introducing the notion of the Anthropocene to
historical studies, Chakrabarty (2009: 219–220) captured it in the following question: ‘how do we
relate to a universal history of life – to universal thought, that is – while retaining what is of obvi-
ous value in our postcolonial suspicion of the universal?’.
Whereas Chakrabarty (2014) still struggles with trying to resolve the dilemma, much of
humanities and social science research chooses either the rejection or the approval of universal-
ism. Both choices are apparent in the tendency to propose alternative names for the Anthropocene.
According to already influential arguments, the notion in its current form enshrouds social, cul-
tural, and political inequalities effective in bringing about the broader condition otherwise associ-
ated with the Anthropocene. Hence it would be more accurate to talk about the Technocene
(Hornborg, 2015) or the Capitalocene (Moore, 2017). By invoking technology and capitalism as
notions more sensitive to inequalities, these alternatives offer powerful corrections to the univer-
salism of the Anthropocene. At the same time and on the other edge of the spectrum, the idea of a
Cosmopolocene (Delanty and Mota, 2017) affirms universalism by assuming that the Anthropocene
provides the condition of possibility for the establishment of a global and truly cosmopolitan poli-
tics. Contrary to appearance, the Cosmopolocene is very far from being the complete opposite of
the Technocene and the Capitalocene. It is rather their supplement that attributes a desired future
direction to the same socio-political development whose past is outlined by the Capitalocene and
the Technocene. Whereas the latter notions point to the origins of a present condition in terms of
inequality, the Cosmopolocene entails a normative take on how the very same inequality may be
overcome in future.
It can easily be seen how these alternative names intend to add new dimensions to our under-
standing of what natural sciences came to call the Anthropocene. Regardless of whether one agrees
or not with the particular ethical and political take of any of the individual alternatives, their work
is indispensable in thematizing the relationship between the social world and nature from the view-
point of the former. But is the case the same as seen from the natural sciences? Does geology know
inequality among humans? Is a geological or an ecological perspective capable of distinguishing
Simon 241

which humans under what socio-political conditions brought about the Anthropocene in the first
place? Should it be capable? Or, at the most general, does it matter to nature (as we conceive of
nature) that along certain human conceptualizations of social divisions certain humans are greatly
responsible for launching the Anthropocene, while others are not? And even if it did, would it be
the reigning natural scientific understanding of the Anthropocene (which criticism in the humani-
ties would identify again as specifically Western) to which all the alternative names add new
dimensions? Or would it be rather a parallel discourse?
These are, I believe, deeply troubling questions. Yet it seems to me that talking about the
Technocene, the Capitalocene or the Cosmpolocene amounts to, simply and plainly, talking about
something other than the Anthropocene. They are not alternative names for the same thing, but
names for entirely different and yet heavily interconnected things and phenomena. Even when the
name is retained, the humanities and the social sciences debate things that are different in kind
while they both appear to debate the Anthropocene. Despite the fact that in the larger debate both
natural and human sciences appeal to the satisfaction of wider societal concerns, their respective
concerns conflict and thus seem incompatible.
To unpack the situation, the conflict boils down to contradictory sets of societal demands. On
the one hand, the necessity to recognize the Anthropocene as an epochal transformation in nature
(and the way in which nature changes) is based on a future prospect. In this prospect, human activ-
ity transforms the environmental conditions to the extent that the planet becomes either hardly
habitable or wholly inhabitable by humans. An indicative example of a future scenario of partial
human extinction is outlined by Oreskes and Conway (2014), demanding action by sketching a
history written from the viewpoint of a fictitious catastrophic future in which the human population
of Australia and Africa go extinct. The worst case scenario is, however, the prospect of a wholesale
human extinction, which is precisely what motivated Chakrabarty (2009: 197–198) to engage with
human-induced climate change in the first place. Either way, this future prospect creates a demand
for preventive action, accompanied by a strong sense of urgency. Furthermore, all this qualifies as
an ‘anthropogenic existential risk’, a term borrowed from Nick Bostrom (2013: 16). Although
Bostrom reserves the most threatening prospect of extinction that arises out of human activity for
potential technological innovations, it stands to reason that the future entailed by the Anthropocene
is just as much an existential risk as the future entailed by artificial intelligence research.
Contrary to this, debates about the Technocene, the Capitalocene, and even discussions under
the retained name of the Anthropocene in the humanities and social sciences, are based on the
primacy of a retrospective stance. Such a stance looks backward in time in order to explain how the
current state of affairs has developed out of past conditions. The Cosmopolocene adds to this
operation a maintained utopian imperative in the shape of a desirable future cosmopolitanism. On
the one hand, it counters the natural scientific future prospect of the Anthropocene as catastrophic;
on the other, just as the Technocene and the Capitalocene, it reserves the catastrophic take for the
past. For it is only with comparison to the past that the future may look better, which clearly points
to the imperative implied by these alternative names: the demand for social justice. Whereas the
Technocene and the Capitalocene point to the roots of social injustice, the Cosmopolocene also
imagines a future condition in which social justice may be reached. The normative condition of
social justice may be different for practically any individual conceptualization. What binds all of
them together is not their particular stance on what constitutes social justice, but the sheer fact that
they either tacitly or deliberately demand such justice in one form or another.
However, the difference between the diverging imperatives of the ways in which the humanities
and the natural sciences conceptualize human-induced climate change is most apparent in their
views on the character of required agency. The demand for social justice relies on a mode of action
242 The Anthropocene Review 4(3)

completely different than what the demand for preventive action calls for. Whereas the former
urges action in order to realize a desired outcome, the latter calls for action as a response to a threat
posed by an undesired future. In other words, whereas the demand for social justice constitutes a
proactive mode of action, the demand for preventive action is – by definition – a reactive one. Both
demands and modes of action are legitimate and important, but they seem utterly incompatible.
Now, in what sense exactly are these demands incompatible? It must be clear that the incompat-
ibility does not mean that the concerns of the demands do not meet in any sense whatsoever. First
of all, both ground their respective calls for societal engagement in the present impact of human
activity on natural activity. What is more, despite their respective focus in the past and in the future,
both demands invoke both the past and the future to a certain extent. As mentioned earlier, a retro-
spective stance seeking for social justice implies a future in which such justice can be reached.
Similarly, a prospective stance urging preventive action implies a past state of affairs compared
with which the future appears as radically other. Hence the diverging demands are deeply con-
nected in that they both invoke a conception of change over time that encompasses past, present,
and future state of affairs. However, what seems to bind them together is precisely what ultimately
sets them apart. For, on a more primordial level, the diverging demands and modes of action rely
on two different temporalities and thereby two different conceptions of change over time. Whereas
the demand for immediate action revolves around a temporality of what I have conceptualized
elsewhere as unprecedented change (Simon, 2015), the demand for social justice is grounded in the
processual change of modern (Western) historical sensibility.
To begin with the latter, critics of the notion of the Anthropocene are well aware of the fact that
what they recourse to is historical thinking. Malm and Hornborg (2014: 63) are explicit in that it is
‘the historical origins of anthropogenic climate change’ that ‘were predicated on highly inequitable
global processes from the start’. Similarly, Moore (2017: 594) already makes it clear in the abstract
that arguing for the Capitalocene means nothing other than arguing ‘for the centrality of historical
thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century’. Finally,
in a complementary manner, when advocating the universalist idea of the Cosmopolocene, Delanty
and Mota (2017: 11) state that it is insofar as ‘consciousness of the new human condition enters
into historical self-understanding’ that the Anthropocene ‘can be seen as a new cultural model that
is constitutive of a new object of knowledge and an order of governance’.
Invoking the modern concept of history and historical thinking in trying to make sense of the
Anthropocene amounts to the creation of a historical trajectory into which the Anthropocene
(Capitalocene, Technocene, Cosmopolocene) can be accommodated as a new stage of a long-term
development. It amounts to the creation of a deep temporal continuity by assuming that a particular
event or phenomena perceived as something new makes sense only as seen within a larger histori-
cal process. According to the philosophical investigations of Hannah Arendt into the modern con-
cept of history, conceiving of change as processual both in nature and in the domain of human
affairs is what ‘separated the modern age from the past more profoundly than any other single idea’
(Arendt, 1961: 63). This processual temporality underlying the modern Western concept of history,
rather obviously, also informs the discipline of history as a study of human beings. For Chakrabarty
(2009: 197), it means that ‘the discipline of history exists on the assumption that our past, present,
and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience’. And the challenge of the
Anthropocene is precisely that ‘the current crisis can precipitate a sense of the present that discon-
nects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the grasp of historical sensibility’
(Chakrabarty, 2009: 197).
What this means is that the challenge of the Anthropocene’s future prospect is a challenge to
nothing other than modern historical thinking itself. In such a prospect, the Anthropocene appears
Simon 243

as rupture as Hamilton (2016) argues, although for Hamilton it is not the vision of the future that
introduces the rupture. Nevertheless, what the rupture entails is the same: the sudden occurrence of
a novelty that is not the result of a continuous long-term development that originates in the deep
past. This is what I call the prospect of unprecedented change, the prospect of a singular event
expected to defy all previous human experience. It appears as the ultimate threat insofar as the
future becomes incomprehensible to human cognition, due to the possibility of losing control over
what originally was a human-induced change. The possibility of reaching a point when nature
takes over anthropogenic climate change is the singular event whose consequences are inaccessible
not only to human cognition, but inasmuch as all previous human experience is defied, even to
human imagination.
By unprecedented change, however, I do not mean merely a synonym for the future prospect of
the Anthropocene. The concept is intended to encompass perceptions of change over time not only
in the geological and ecological domains but also in the realm of technology (Simon, 2018). For it
must be clear that ‘the age of the Anthropocene’ is not the only ‘age’ that appears as unprecedented
today. The ‘information age’ following the ‘digital revolution’ or the ‘atomic age’ may be the most
obvious instances of a postwar tendency to perceive of the future as promising to bring about
something unprecedented. Like the Anthropocene, these prospects also entail the eradication of
human life at worst or the sudden alteration of it beyond recognition at best. The prospect of global
nuclear warfare appears just as much unprecedented as the prospect of human extinction entailed
by the Anthropocene. But the most illustrative example is the creation of a non-human but greater-
than-human superintelligence, which is conceptualized by Vernor Vinge (1993) as ‘technological
singularity’. It is likely followed by an ‘intelligence explosion’ of greater-than-human intelligence
creating even greater non-human intelligence with unimaginable speed. As a sudden singular
event, it also entails the prospect of losing control of an originally human-induced activity, with
possible consequences impenetrable to the human mind.
Although for the time being technological singularity belongs to the realm of mere speculation,
the effects of anthropogenic climate change are already felt. Hence the vision of the future entailed
by the notion of the Anthropocene is far more tangible than other prospects of unprecedented
change. When the humanities and social sciences invoke modern historical thinking in trying to
make sense of it, they do more damage than good to its recognition. By creating deep continuities
of historical trajectories, they incapacitate the demand for immediate and preventive action that
derives from the prospect of the unprecedented. Some historians are very well aware of such perils
within their craft. As Libby Robin (2013: 336) warns, historians ‘can “discount the present” by
providing a deep past’. In the case of the Anthropocene it is nevertheless the future and its per-
ceived threat that can be discounted by modern historical thinking. What this means is that the
deeper and longer-term history of the Anthropocene one tries to write, the deeper and longer con-
tinuity one implies and the farther away one moves from a sense of urgency for action. The less one
thinks that what one faces is the unprecedented, the more one thinks that all this is business as
usual. The deeper one looks into the past to find the origin out of which the Anthropocene devel-
ops, the more one thinks that this is how things have always been.
In the final analysis, modern historical thinking – once a vehicle of social change and social
action – appears today as an obstacle to the recognition of newly emerging concerns which revolve
around a completely different conception of change and mode of action. However, this is not to say
that modern historical thinking is an obstacle to every change; it is still the condition of possibility
of social emancipation. Nor is this to say that anything that qualifies as history and historical think-
ing is an obstacle. This is only to say that the modern (Western) conception of history which ideas
such as the Technocene, the Capitalocene or the Cosmopolocene rely on is an obstacle to the rec-
ognition of the Anthropocene as unprecedented.
244 The Anthropocene Review 4(3)

Yet, in principle, nothing excludes the possibility to conceptualize another notion of history
capable of recognizing the unprecedented. After all, it is still about change over time in human
affairs. In fact, historians and philosophers of history are already engaged in the task of conceptual-
izing a historical sensibility other than processual (Kleinberg, 2017; Lorenz and Bevernage, 2013;
Runia, 2006; Simon, 2016). Accordingly, the claim I wish to make is restricted to the still-dominant
mode of historical thinking and it goes as follows: attempting to write the history of the Anthropocene
by invoking modern processual historical thinking is an untenable, self-contradictory, and self-
defeating enterprise. For inasmuch as the Anthropocene appears as unprecedented, it does not have
a processual history; and inasmuch as it has a processual history, it is not the Anthropocene (but the
Capitalocene, the Technocene or the Cosmopolocene).

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

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