The Anthropocenic Turn

The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age

GABRIELE DÜRBECK, PHILIP HÜPKES, GABRIELE DÜRBECK, PHILIP HÜPKES

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000058307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria y naturaleza

This interdisciplinary volume discusses whether the increasing salience of the Anthropocene concept in the humanities and the social sciences constitutes an "Anthropocenic turn." The Anthropocene discourse creates novel conceptual configurations and enables scholars to re-negotiate and re-contextualize long-established paradigms, premises, theories and methodologies. These innovative constellations stimulate fresh research in many areas of thought and practice. The contributors to this volume respond to the proposition of an "Anthropocene turn" from the perspective of diverse research fields, including history of science, philosophy, environmental humanities and political science as well as literary, art and media studies. Altogether, the collection reveals to which extent the Anthropocene concept challenges deep-seated assumptions across disciplines. It invites readers to explore the wealth of scholarly perspectives on the Anthropocene as well as unexpected inter- and transdisciplinary connections.

Section 1
Creating Knowledge in the Anthropocene

1 The “Material Turn” and the “Anthropocenic Turn” from a History of Science Perspective¹

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Introduction

This chapter is intended as a contribution to an archeology of what today is being discussed under the umbrella term of the Anthropocene. The question for me to start with has been whether the material turn in the history of knowledge has anything to do with conceptualizing our contemporary relation to the world in a qualitatively new way. That there is such a link I hope I will be able to show. The chapter focuses on the late Michel Serres’ ([1990] 1995) The Natural Contract and can also be read as an homage to this thinker, who is, in my opinion, the most important pioneer of the Anthropocene concept avant la lettre, at least as seen from the perspective of epistemology and history of science, and way before the term itself was coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer (2000). It is not my intention, however, to enter into a discussion about the many meanings of the Anthropocene concept. What I would rather like to do is to engage in a close reading of several passages of Michel Serres’ The Natural Contract and to relate them to Lynn Margulis’ work on the bio-geosphere as well as the role symbiosis played in evolution, on the one hand, and to the contemporary practice orientation of historical epistemology on the other hand.

In October 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the Bay Area of San Francisco, and around the same time in Europe, a different type of “seismic” event brought the Berlin Wall down. Meanwhile, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Michel Serres was writing the last pages of his manuscript on The Natural Contract. The book was published in the spring of 1990 in Paris and evoked a veritable storm of theoretical outrage. The scandal concerned the following question: how could one dare to ascribe to nature the character of a contractual subject? Ten years later, during his invitation from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Serres revisited his book and its underlying rationale. Here, he formulated that rationale as follows:

The subject becomes object. We become victims of our victories, the passivity of our activities, medical objects of our actions as subjects. And the global object becomes the subject, for it reacts to our actions.

(Serres 2000, 17, own translation)

He was advocating that humankind should forgo its parasitic relation to nature and convert to a symbiotic relation. “Rights of symbiosis,” we read in The Natural Contract, “are defined by reciprocity: however much nature gives man, man must give that much back to nature, now a legal subject” (Serres 1995, 38). But, Serres asks, “[w]hat language do the things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with them, contractually?” and promptly answers: “In fact, the Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds and interactions, and that’s enough to make a contract” (39). Thus, it was eventually an earthquake, of all the forces of nature the one least subject to human influence, that led Serres to perceive such a symbiosis as being inescapable.

The Symbiotic Planet

That brings me to a digression before plunging deeper into Serres’ jurisprudential argumentation, which in turn rests on an observation derived from history of science. In 1998, the year of Serres’ retrospective review of his book The Natural Contract at the French National Library, another significant book was published, The Symbiotic Planet. It was the summation of 30 years of research on evolutionary symbiosis by the American biologist Lynn Margulis (1998). Serres could not yet have read this book when he lectured at the French National Library on January 14, but the endosymbiont theory developed by Margulis was already widely accepted at that time, and its academic presence was pervasive. Serres did not mention Margulis—in fact, his entire book was written without a footnote and without references. We can nevertheless safely assume that he was familiar with her theory. On the one hand, Serres had recourse to the metaphorology of biological relations, which he had referred to already in 1980 in his well-known book The Parasite ([1980] 1982). On the other hand, Margulis are without doubt his reference with respect to symbiosis.

Margulis received her education in biology in the late 1950s and early 1960s at the universities of Chicago, Madison and Berkeley. In 1967, after several failed attempts, she succeeded in publishing her first article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, in which she expounded the general outline of her view on the succession of endosymbiotic events in evolution (serial endosymbiont theory, SET) (Sagan [Margulis] 1967). At that time, the first ribonucleic acid had just been sequenced—a yeast alanine transfer RNA with a length of about 80 nucleotides. Ten years later, sequences of nucleic acids from mitochondria and chloroplasts had become available, and their bacterial origin could no longer be doubted. When I finished my studies in biology at the end of the 1970s, this “weak” form of the endosymbiont theory of evolution, as Margulis called it, was common wisdom in the new textbooks on the molecular biology of the cell. The biochemistry of nucleic acids had forcefully supported the conjectures of the biologist Margulis. This support paved the way for her future work.

That work proceeded in several directions. On the one hand, Margulis found pieces of evidence for another evolutionary endosymbiosis: that of bacterial spirochetes and archebacterial thermoplasms that led to cells with a nucleus—the precursors of all extant higher organisms. Margulis (1998, 52) summarized her view in an evolutionary generalization: “Anastomosis,”—symbiotic as well as endosymbiotic fusion—“although less frequent, is as important as branching.” With that, Darwin’s principle of “divergence,” which dominates his tree of life is symmetrically complemented by a principle of “convergence.” The principle of competition is complemented by that of cooperation, which is evident on every biological level: as horizontal gene transfer particularly in bacteria, as endosymbiosis in early evolution and as organismic symbiosis in its manifold manifestations in the evolving world of organisms. Last but not least, it is realized in the sexuality of eukaryotic organisms that Margulis appropriately designates as “cyclical symbiosis” (103). This evolutionary legacy puts her, for the 20th century, on a par with Charles Darwin. In fact, her modus operandi was very similar to Darwin’s: collecting widely scattered pieces of evidence and analyzing them from a particular perspective, which she pursued throughout her life. The similarities go further: she could recount stories like Darwin as well. “Even scientists,” she acknowledged, “need to narrate, to integrate their observations into origin stories” (70). In the same way as Darwin’s “struggle for survival” advanced to the position of a social slogan in the 19th century and has remained so to this day, symbiosis should have advanced long since to become a byword of the same order. But that has not happened yet. Apparently, imaginative storytelling is one thing; social resonance is another. An increasing number of people argue like Margulis and Serres—but still not enough.²

At the same time, Margulis combined her lifelong fascination with the world of unicellular organisms with wide-ranging reflections about the evolution and regulation of the whole biosphere of our planet. In this context, she adopted the notion of “Gaia,” as it was used by James Lovelock, the British chemist, medical doctor and inventor. Often described as a maverick, Lovelock had laid the foundations of his theory of the metastability of the earth’s geosphere, biosphere and atmosphere in the 1970s and became famous for his various popular writings in the 1980s. Margulis (1998, 118) remarks: “The name caught on. Environmentalists and religiously inclined people, attracted to the idea of a native goddess with power, latched onto it, giving Gaia a distinctly nonscientific connotation.” For Margulis (123), however, the advantages outweighed the disadvantages of this ambivalence, and she herself jumped on the Gaia bandwagon, not without emphasizing again and again: “My Gaia is no vague, quaint notion of a mother Earth who nurtures us. The Gaia hypothesis is science. The surface of the planet, Gaia theory posits, behaves as a physiological system in certain limited ways.”

Now, the decisive character of physiological systems is that they dampen perturbations—within certain limits—but they can break down if these limits are exceeded. The concept of metastability means just this. The prospect of breakdown should actually suffice as an argument for adopting a principle of precaution and acting accordingly in terms of both ecology and climate. Margulis has always considered herself a natural scientist, not a preacher. “Gaia theory is useful science” (1998, 125)—thus her dry resumé at the end of the book. She does not even urge people to draw ecological consequences from it. Instead, she simply states: “We people are just like our planetmates. We cannot put an end to nature; we can only pose a threat to ourselves” (128). And she concludes: “The sum of planetary life, Gaia, displays a physiology that we recognize as environmental regulation” (119). But she immediately makes clear: “More an enormous collection of interacting ecosystems, the Earth as Gaian regulatory physiology transcends all individual organisms” (120). It is exactly this array of regulations, this enormous interaction, which is in danger of getting out of control due to the physical presence of human beings on earth and the impact of their technical activities on the planet in the Anthropocene.

The Natural Contract

This is the point at which Michel Serres homes in. He too relies on scientific observations, but he speaks as a philosopher who sees it as the task of philosophy “to anticipate the future” (Serres 2000, 22). In other words, he is no owl of Minerva. Serres was a thinker of the Anthropocene before the term came into use. It is well worth looking at his argumentation in more detail. This is the focus of the second part of this chapter.

Michel Serres finds drastic images for the current situation. His book begins with the portrayal of a painting by Francisco de Goya (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Duelo a Garrotazos, 1820–1823, Técnica mixta. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado, courtesy Museo del Prado.

Two youngsters are fighting with batons on a dune. Each of them tries to hit the other with his rod. All the while, however, they do not realize that they are sinking deeper into the sand with each blow. The ground they are standing on is going to swallow them. They have lost sight of the thing that sustains both of them, the third party that mediates their relationship and their social interaction. Thus, Serres (1995, 3) argues:

Take away the world around the battles, keep only conflicts or debates, thick with humanity and purified of things, and you obtain stage theater, most of our narratives and philosophies, history, and all of social science: the interesting spectacle they call cultural. Does anyone ever say where the master and slave fight it out? Our culture abhors the world.

He then asks: “But aren’t we forgetting the world of things themselves, the sand, the water, the mud, the reeds of the marsh?” (2) and concludes:

We have lost the world. We’ve transformed things into fetishes or commodities, the stakes of our stratagems; and our a-cosmic philosophies, for almost half a century now, have been holding forth only on language or politics, writing or logic.

(29)

For the philosophers, Serres’ somber diagnosis is that “Nature is reduced to human nature, which is reduced to either history or reason. The world has disappeared” (35). Serres’ chiding of the philosophers comes to a halt in the face of the sciences of nature. Not that the sciences were not also socially constituted and did not rest on a contract as well, but they simply could not ignore the recalcitrance of their objects.

In other words,...