Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene

Interruptions and Possibilities

Henrik Ernstson, Erik Swyngedouw, Henrik Ernstson, Erik Swyngedouw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351809931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia urbana

Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities centres on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism.

Across its theoretical and empirical chapters, written by leading scholars from anthropology, geography, urban studies, and political science, the book explores new political possibilities that are opening up in an age marked by proliferating contestations, sharpening socio-ecological inequalities, and planetary processes of urbanization and environmental change. A deepened conversation between urban environmental studies and political theory is mobilized to chart a radically new direction for the field of urban political ecology and cognate disciplines: What could emancipatory politics be about in our time? What does a return of the political under the aegis of equality and freedom signal today in theory and in practice? How do political movements emerge that could re-invent equality and freedom as actually existing socio-ecological practices? The hope is to contribute discussions that can expand and rearrange critical environmental studies to remain relevant in a time of deepening depoliticization and the rise of post-truth politics.

Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene will be of interest to postgraduates, established scholars, and upper level undergraduates from any discipline or field with an interest in the interface between the urban, the environment, and the political, including: geography, urban studies, environmental studies, and political science.

Part I

The political

2

O Tempora! O Mores!

Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene

Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson

Introduction¹

“The Anthropocene” has become a popularized term to denote a proposed new geological era during which humans have arguably acquired planetary geophysical agency. Despite wide-ranging engagement with the term by natural scientists and geo-engineers to social scientists and humanities scholars (see e.g. Castree 2014a; 2014b; 2014c; Hamilton, Bonneuil and Gemenne 2015), which seemingly indicates the term’s heterogeneous and contentious meaning, we intend to show how the Anthropocene is a depoliticizing notion that risks deepening further an already disastrous capitalist project and its exploitative socio-ecological relations. This disavowal of the political operates, we contend, through the creation of particular “earthly” narratives that lay claim on how humans and non-human materials and organisms interrelate and function as assembled imbroglios. These narratives, albeit by no means homogeneous, constitute what we refer to as “AnthropoScenes” that on-stage certain relations and possibilities, while off-staging others. In contradistinction to the Anthropocene, we propose the term the Anthropo-obScene. Awkward as it may sound, this signifier hacks a popularized term to render its uncanny underbelly visible and sensible. The term draws upon classic Greek theatre’s understanding of “the obscene,” which precisely meant the off-staging of dramatic action that was considered to be too emotionally intense to be shown explicitly, such as sexual conduct, extreme violence, or expressing deep anguish and fear. These acts were still performed, however, but hidden behind a curtain or behind the stage. Out of view and off-staged, the spectator was nonetheless uncannily aware of their invisible and disturbing presence. It is from this perspective that we mobilize “the Anthropo-obScene” as our tactic to both attest to and undermine the performativity of the utterly depoliticizing stories of the Anthropocene.

In the following, we shall first argue that the Anthropocene constructs a set of stages and performances that disavows a range of voices and ways of seeing. Its ontological constitution renders some forms of acting (human, non-human, and more-than-human) off-stage. More specifically, we interrogate how much Anthropocene-talk has forced things and beings, human and non-human, into a relational and all-inclusive straightjacket that does not allow a remainder, an excess, or outside, thereby permitting and nurturing specific ways of seeing and doing, while prohibiting others. To politicize urbanization and its planetary socio-ecological metabolism, will require, we contend, the foregrounding of how such off-staging is a decidedly political gesture, followed by voicing, naming, and making sensible what has been censored and rendered obscene.

In this chapter, we build on a post-foundational view of the political. This perspective understands the political in terms of performance and following Jacques Rancière we view politics as non-ontological and radically contingent.² The political is understood as the interruptive staging of equality by the “part that has no-part” (Rancière 1998). The political appears when those that are not normally counted make themselves heard and seen—that is, as perceptible and countable—in the name of equality. The political as performance is thus more concerned with forms of appearance than with existing institutions or processes of policy formulation and mediation (see Žižek 1999; Kalyvas 2009; Swyngedouw 2011). It is this notion of the political, as a form of interruptive acting over and beyond what holds socio-ecological assemblages together, that we are interested in bringing into urban political ecology (UPE) and “Anthropocene”-discussions more generally. Political acting subtracts—or adds—from what is given in any situation. It is the voice, the body, the critter, the organ, the process, for which the normalized order has no name and which cannot be symbolized within the existing order of the sensible. Put simply, the political is the signifier that stands for the immanent rupturing of relations, thereby exploding the myth of the possibility of a fully closed relational constellation.³ With this strictly performative perspective of politics, there is no grounding in any current or historical order or ontological logic, based on, say, race or class, or the Anthropocene, but the political turns into an aesthetic affair understood as the ability to disrupt, disturb, and reconfigure what is perceptible, sensible, and countable. To politicize thus means to focus on supernumerary forms of acting—human, non-human, more-than-human—that trespass, undermine, and exceed existing situations and relational configurations. This is the dividing line we are seeking to make explicit. We argue that the Anthropocene hinges on a fully closed relational configuration that disavows the political as interruptive performance, making the political unthinkable and un-actable. Our key intervention is to move from a political ontology that grounds itself in certain Anthropocenic narratives, to a situation that foregrounds an ontology of the political as performative (see Pellizzoni 2015).

The chapter is organized in three parts. In the first part, we engage with “the event of the Anthropocene” as Bonneuil and Fressoz (2013; 2016) call it. They suggest how this event inaugurates the recognition of the active role of humans in co-constructing Earth’s deep geo-historical time and problematize this new ontological framing of relational symmetry between humans and non-humans. Yesterday’s ontology was, or so the Anthropocene argument goes, predicated upon externalizing Nature (while nonetheless increasingly socializing the non-human) in a manner that nurtured human mastery over Nature. In the second part, we interrogate how this emergent symmetrical relational ontology, variously referred to as more-than-human or object-oriented ontology, which accompanies part of the Anthropocenic narratives, fuels the possibility of a new cosmology, a new ordering of socionatural relations (Stengers 2003; Latour 2005; Coole and Frost 2010; Braun and Whatmore 2010; Morton 2013). Despite its radical presumptions, we contend that this new cosmology permits deepening particular capitalist forms of human/non-human entanglements and that it can be re-inscribed in a hyper-accelerationist eco-modernist vision and practice in which big science and big capital can gesture to be joining hands to save Earth and humanity within a broadening neoliberal frame. We shall argue how such a symmetrical framing articulates with a deepening of what Roberto Esposito (2008) calls an immunological biopolitics, the always failing attempt to immunologize life from harmful intruders or potential disintegration. In the third part, we develop the Anthropo-obScene as a discourse and performance that aims to recast the depoliticized story of the Anthropocene. Here we explore the contours of a new politicization of the socio-ecological conundrum we are in, while fully and radically embracing our interdependence with non-humans. It is a view that recognizes exteriority and separation as the condition of possibility for interdependence and relationality. We insist that relationality implies a certain separation and, thereby, the always-immanent possibility of acting that undermines, transforms, or supersedes the existing relational configuration. This opening of the political is predicated on foregrounding the alterities, the radical differences, and heterogeneities that both sustain and undermine any relational configuration and that open up all manner of possibilities for excessive acting that cut through any relational assemblage and render it ultimately unstable and precarious. This is a form of politicization that does not legitimize itself on the basis of an ontology of Nature, whether Anthropocenic or otherwise, but through the performative staging of equality.

AnthropoScenes: Staging the Anthropocene

As Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz observed, the notion of the Anthropocene implies an AnthropoScene, the staging of a narrative (or set of narratives) with profound implications that require careful attention (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). They offer a range of alternative narratives such as, among others, thermocene, thanatocene, phagocene, capitalocene, and polemocene. William Cronon had already remarked, more than 20 years ago, that any environmental history and re-presentation implies a storyline with its theatrical setting that stages a particular cast of key actors, agents, props, and relations, while of necessity excluding other potential performers and relations (Cronon 1992). Such staged narratives, in both their showing and non-showing, obscure as much as they elucidate. The irremediable gap between history, as the unfolding of the Real of history on the one hand, and the Story as history’s fractured symbolic reconstruction on the other, has to be fundamentally endorsed in an attempt at revealing the Imaginary that desperately tries to cover up the gap, so that we may discern the abyss, the uncanny remainder, that lurks in-between.⁴ Of course, the notion of the Anthropocene resonates widely among scientific and lay publics alike. Its appeal and rapid proliferation, from discussions among climate change scientists, environmental humanists and artists, to a catchword among social scientists and politicians, the signifier “Anthropocene” conveys a particular set of messages and signals and potential courses for future action (Castree 2014c). Let us delve into some of the key contours of the AnthropoScenic stage-set and its underbelly.

A temporal disjuncture

First, the stories of the Anthropocene reflect a strange temporal disjuncture that splits modernity into two—the before and the after. Irrespective of the ongoing debate over the exact moment of its inauguration (Lewis and Maslin 2015; Steffen et al. 2011a), the event of the Anthropocene presumably announces a new socio-geophysical era, one that recognizes that human kind, as a species, has acquired deep-time geological agency.⁵ This gesture prompted Dipesh Chakrabarty, among many others, to call for a retroactive re-writing of the world’s environmental-cum-social history (Chakrabarty 2009; 2014; 2015) where humans as a generic category have to be inserted in the world’s geophysical history as active agents in the making of their own combined earthly past and future. With this move, the “modernist” split between the physical world and humans is finally relegated to the dustbin as an archaic, uneducated view that can be transcended through a new relational web of mutual determination between humans and nature—or so it seems. What we note here however is how this retroactive re-writing of the world’s geo-social history radically obscures and silences what has been an integral part of the modernist trajectory all along. Throughout modernity, many interlocutors already recognized the role of (some) humans as active agents of Earth’s transformation, and this has been a key ingredient of many modernist visions and analytical frameworks. At least since the eighteenth century, political economics and geo-scientists avant la lettre insisted on how human history is a history of rekindling the Earth in an intimate relational articulation. Marx (1959 [1844]) famously quipped: “That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” Charles Fourier, another nineteenth century thinker, lamented in his De la déterioration materielle de la planète (1847 [1821]) that “climate disorders are a vice inherent to civilized culture,” going on to argue that a more socio-ecological benign Earth would require a transformation of this civilization (cf. Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, 257; Fressoz and Locher 2010). In fact, Bonneuil and Fressoz demonstrate how modernity has been marked by a continuous battle unfolding between, on one the hand, advocates of a sustained society–nature dichotomy and man’s (sic) manifest destiny to be master and commander of his external conditions of existence and, on the other hand, proponents of a more modest and socio-ecologically sensitive mode of conduct and engagement, a process that would require a transformation of both social and ecological relations.⁶ The long genealogy of intellectuals, who already in the nineteenth century called for what we might today label an AnthropoScenic storyline, one that emphasizes co-construction between humans and nature, continue to be scripted out and silenced, thereby skilfully forgetting—yet again—that the nature–society split that is customarily deemed to belong uniquely to the singular core and backbone of modernization, signals just the victory of one side in a fierce confrontation between radically opposing views (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). It is for this reason that Bonneuil and Fressoz suggest the name “Polemocene”’ to signal the deeply polemical, contested, and conflicting cosmologies and political views that animated and still animate the unfolding of modernity and the making of the Anthropocene.

The event of the Anthropocene is nonetheless foregrounded by most analysts as a moment of rupture of the temporality of modernity understood as monolithic and total, thereby dividing its history in an arguably un-reflexive (pre-)modernity and a post-evental reflexive (post-)modernity, a simple before and after. It is just a matter for the International Commission on Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences to decide on the exact date. The proposed rupture splits time and its geo-history into two. In doing so, modernization as an internally fractured and highly contentious process of continuous conflicting and politically contested transformations becomes reframed as a singular and teleological movement of the unfolding of modernity’s history. Yet modernity is not a single-headed process that now has been surpassed. As Frédéric Neyrat (2016, 117, our translation) attests:

Instead of a division of modernity between a before and an after [the event of the Anthropocene], a modernity initially ignorant, but later educated, it is a division in modernity that we need to consider. In place of a chronological division, [it is] a political division.

It is the double-headed internal struggle between those that view nature as outside, as extra-terrestrials, and those who fight from the inside, as Earthlings working in and with the non-human, where the political battle-lines need to be drawn and which predate as well as postdate the event of the Anthropocene. This includes recognizing that the Earthlings are configured within heterogeneous and power-laden i...