Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene

An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking

David Chandler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138570566
• eBook ISBN: 9781351335911
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Anthropocene captures more than a debate over how to address the problems of climate change and global warming. Increasingly, it is seen to signify the end of the modern condition itself and potentially to open up a new era of political possibilities. This is the first book to look at the new forms of governance emerging in the epoch of the Anthropocene. Forms of rule, which seek to govern without the handrails of modernist assumptions of 'command and control' from the top-down; taking on board new ontopolitical understandings of the need to govern on the grounds of non-linearity, complexity and entanglement.

The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a distinct mode or understanding of governance: Mapping, Sensing and Hacking. Mapping looks at attempts to govern through designing adaptive interventions into processes of interaction. Sensing considers ways of developing greater real time sensitivity to changes in relations, often deploying new technologies of Big Data and the Internet of Things. Hacking analyses the development of ways of 'becoming with', working to recomposition and reassemble relations in new and creative forms.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international politics, international security and international relations theory and those interested in critical theory and the way this is impacted by contemporary developments.

PART I

Introduction

1

Introduction

Affirming the Anthropocene

Introduction

This book is an analysis of the ontopolitical assumptions of the Anthropocene and engages these assumptions through establishing and introducing the reader to the three distinct modes of governance grounded upon them: Mapping, Sensing and Hacking.¹ It considers each mode as providing a distinct conceptualisation of governance in a world framed as complex, entangled and unpredictable.² The articulation of these distinct modes of governance is my own attempt to parse and to clarify the, often unclear, forms through which political thought expresses and reflects new ways of developing policy, of engaging with problems, of deriving knowledge and of thinking about political agency in the 21st century. This is not a work on ontology, therefore it does not assert what the Anthropocene is or what humans are or are not. It operates within the discipline of international relations, in terms of its focus being the new forms of governance that Anthropocene ontopolitics are understood to engender. Its concern is a critical one; the book analyses these modes for the purposes of understanding their inner logics and their consequences for the policies and practices of governance. I do not seek to argue that these modes necessarily operate in a pure form, without overlaps or interconnections, but I do suggest that heuristically drawing out their distinctive logics is useful for understanding their development, their limits and their aporias or contradictions. I do not advocate for any particular one of these modes, nor the underlying ontopolitical claims seen to necessitate them, but seek to examine them to clarify what is at stake in the ontopolitics of the Anthropocene.

The three governance modes of Mapping, Sensing and Hacking claim to start from the empirical reality of the world as it appears rather than from assumptions of modernist progress, universal knowledge or linear causality. The ontopolitical claim informing these modes is the assertion that in the Anthropocene the world is much less addressable by modernist constructions and assumptions; it is more contingent, plural and complex: thereby less amenable to the applications of ‘technological solutionism’³ or ‘lessons learned’, which can be generalised and applied. Each mode reflects a shift from liberal or modernist understandings towards an affirmation of the Anthropocene, by which I mean governance discourses becoming more at home with discursive framings of contingency and complexity. With this affirmative shift, there is a sense that there is something positive in the realisation that the Anthropocene cannot be secured, governed or engaged with in traditional ways. As will be discussed below, this affirmation of the Anthropocene can be seen in Mapping (designing indirect interventions based on tracing or mapping assemblages of interactive emergence), in Sensing (with the boosting of Big Data and the Internet of Things as able to provide real time responses to ‘pre-event’ problems) and in Hacking (with new creative ways of engaging on the basis of repurposing, recompositioning and finding the play in already existing arrangements and practices).

This introductory chapter is organised in five sections. The next section provides an introduction to the concept of the Anthropocene and what is considered to be at stake in the discussion of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch and, more importantly, as marking the end of modernist views of progress. The second section introduces the idea that the Anthropocene should be affirmed rather than being seen to be problematic and the following sections introduce the implications for governing in the Anthropocene without the epistemological and ontopolitical assumptions of modernity. Three arising modes of governance, grounded on the ontopolitical assumptions of the Anthropocene, are then identified with distinct logics: Mapping, Sensing and Hacking. The final section outlines the contents of the following chapters.

A new epoch

The Anthropocene – a concept coined by Eugene Stormer in the 1980s and popularised by Paul Crutzen in the 2000s⁴ – is a disputed term, which refers to a new geological epoch,⁵ in which human activity is seen to have profound and irreparable effects on the environment.⁶ This attention to a new epoch in which humanity appears to have impacted the earth in ways which mean that natural processes can no longer be separated from historical, social, economic and political effects has powerfully challenged the modernist understanding of the nature/culture divide, separating social and natural science, destabilising the assumptions of both. Nature can no longer be understood as operating on fixed or natural laws, while politics and culture can no longer be understood as operating in a separate sphere of autonomy and freedom. These assumptions, in both spheres, were central to modernist constructions of Enlightenment progress, which is now seen to no longer exist or to have always been problematic.⁷ Jeremy Davies argues that: ‘The idea of the Anthropocene makes this state of being in between epochs the starting point for political thinking.’⁸ As Bruno Latour, one of the most prolific and widely influential theorists articulating the Anthropocene as a break with modernity, highlights: the fact that it is science itself that appears to lead the questioning of modernist constructions of the world is highly significant, considering the impact this has for ways in which we can imagine politics and governance:

But what is even more extraordinary is that it’s the brainchild of stern, earnest and sun-tanned geologists who, until recently, had been wholly unconcerned by the tours and detours of the humanities. No postmodern philosopher, no reflexive anthropologist, no liberal theologian, no political thinker would have dared to weigh the influence of humans on the same historical scale as rivers, floods, erosion and biochemistry.⁹

This book is not directly concerned with debates and discussions around the dating of the Anthropocene as a geological era,¹⁰ whether to start with 1492 with Columbus and the European holocaust in the Americas,¹¹ in 1784 with the invention of the steam engine by James Watt, which ushered in the industrial revolution, with the explosion of the atom bomb in 1945 or with the ‘Great Acceleration’, the spread of industrialisation across the world since.¹² The conclusion of the discussion, regardless of dating, is a shared one: that today human history cannot be understood as separate to geological history:

The Anthropocene, as the reunion of human (historical) time and Earth (geological) time, between human agency and non-human agency, gives the lie to this – temporal, ontological, epistemological and institutional – great divide between nature and society … It signals the return of the Earth into a world that Western industrial modernity on the whole represented to itself as above the earthly foundation. (emphasis in original)¹³

Natural time is no longer somehow slow in comparison to the speed of human or cultural time. ‘What is sure is that glaciers appear to slide quicker, ice to melt faster, species to disappear at a greater speed, than the slow, gigantic, majestic, inertial pace of politics, consciousness and sensibilities.’¹⁴ Nature or the ‘environment’ is no longer to be seen as merely the ‘background’, but is itself a ‘protagonist’.¹⁵ Thus, the division between agential ‘man’ and passive ‘nature’ is fundamentally challenged, with catastrophic events which seemed to be exceptional or highly improbable in the past, becoming increasingly regular, even in the advanced West: ‘in the era of global warming, nothing is really far away; there is no place where the orderly expectations of bourgeois life hold unchallenged sway.’¹⁶ As Amitav Ghosh powerfully notes, expectations of normality, balance and order that defined the modern world view, appear from today’s vantage point to be a terrible error or hubris: as carried to the point of ‘great derangement’.¹⁷ There is a contemporary consensus that: ‘There can be no more talk of a linear and inexorable progress’.¹⁸

For Timothy Morton: ‘In an age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no foreground. It is the end of the world, since worlds depend on backgrounds and foregrounds.’¹⁹ What was taken for granted is now revealed to be much more contingent, fragile and unpredictable; for Morton, the world is no longer an object, fixed, passive and external to us, thus there can be no such thing as a human ‘lifeworld’ shaped within this.²⁰ As Latour states, the positions are reversed, the background becomes foreground: ‘what was until now a mere décor for human history is becoming the principal actor’.²¹ So much so that it could be said that the Anthropocene does not just overcome the culture/nature divide, ‘it bypasses it entirely’:²²

everything that was part of the background has now melted into the foreground. There is no environment any more, and thus no longer a need for environmentalism. We are post-natural for good. With the end of the political epistemology of the past that insured the presence of an indisputable outside arbiter – namely, Nature known by Science – we are left without a land and without a body politic.²³

This book is also not directly concerned with the causal drivers of the Anthropocene and debates over whether responsibility lies with the Enlightenment, with capitalism,²⁴ with modernity, with mass consumerism, with the organisation, industrialisation and commercialisation of agriculture, with colonialism and imperialism, with economic theory, with the extraction of and dependency upon fossil fuels, with the rise of the military-industrial complex etc.²⁵ In fact it is often argued that the more narratives there are, ‘from many voices and many places, rather than a single narrative from nowhere, from space or from the species’, the more the ‘black boxes of the Anthropocene discourse’ can be opened and repoliticised.²⁶ Regardless of where authors stand on the allocation of blame or responsibility for the contemporary condition – or whether it is named Anthropocene, Capitalocene²⁷ or by some other concept, such as Donna Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ – the descriptive and analytical conclusions fall into a similar set of ontological framings. Whatever the driving forces, the conclusion is common across them, that there is no longer a separation between culture and nature: there is no longer an ‘outside’ or an ‘away’. What happens ‘sticks’ with us, like Styrofoam cups or plastic bags that stay in the enviro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART I: Introduction
• PART II: Mapping
• PART III: Sensing
• PART IV: Hacking
• PART V: Stakes
• References
• Index