Abstract
This article examines Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ecological theory to explore inherent tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions concerning human agency in Anthropocene discourse. Contra most commentators, I argue that Chakrabarty’s account of the Anthropocene remains neither modernistic nor posthumanistic per se because his view of the human turns out to be consistently inconsistent. Chakrabarty apparently advances an anti-anthropocentric and posthumanist explanation of the climate crisis by shifting his focus from the ‘species’ to the ‘planet’. However, his account of the planet remains within the modernistic paradigm that privileges progress, rationality, and human agency because he tacitly embraces the narrative of enlightenment, or transition from ignorance to knowledge, when describing a passage from the global to the planetary. Chakrabarty’s narrative of enlightenment thus epitomizes the remains of anthropocentrism in Anthropocene discourse, registering the extent to which it retains beliefs in human agency, rationality, and singularity.
I Introduction
The concept of the Anthropocene raises questions about the meaning of the anthropos or the place of the human being in the age of anthropogenic climate change. The Anthropocene, which has in recent decades become a key term in environmental studies and other scholarly fields, refers to a new geological period in which humans have transformed the earth system on an unprecedently great scale, turning it into an unhabitable space by contributing to increasingly disruptive and unpredictable climate events. 1 In this ‘age of humanity’, as environmental theorists (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016: 21; Davies, 2016: 70–76; Hamilton, 2017: 40–44; Horn and Bergthaller, 2020: 67–81; Purdy, 2015: 266–82; Szerszynski, 2012: 181) suggest, human beings play a double role. On the one hand, humans act as the agents of power, making disruptive transformations in the earth system, and stamping human fingerprints all over the natural world. On the other hand, human beings serve as a force of nature that is subordinated to ecological processes, remaining susceptible to climate cataclysms that are of their own making and yet out of their control. Hence, Anthropocene scholars point to the ‘powerful impotence’ of humanity (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016: 24), or the ‘antinomy of the Anthropocene’ (Hamilton, 2017: 40). The concept of the Anthropocene assumes paradoxical, if not contradictory, views of the human being, framing her as a powerful agent and a vulnerable participant in the ecological system, as a master of nature who also remains subject to nature.
Indeed, the Anthropocene’s double take on human agency is testified by the heterogeneity of Anthropocene discourse itself. Recent discussions of the Anthropocene promote a wide range of perspectives. On the one extreme, some scholars (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015) promote ecomodernism, a contemporary version of enlightenment optimism that finds human ingenuity and technology to be powerful tools for tackling the climate crisis. On the other extreme, other scholars (Haraway, 2016; Latour, 2014, 2017, 2018 [2017]) address ecological issues from the perspective of posthumanism, which recognizes shared materiality and agency among humans, living creatures, and inanimate beings. 2 In diagnosing the current ecological crisis, then, ecomodernists and posthumanists rely on diametrically opposite views of human agency that can be characterized as modernistic and anti-modernistic, respectively: the former endorses the privileged status of the human being as a rational subject capable of managing and controlling the natural environment, while the latter challenges such human exceptionalism.
This article examines Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ecological theory to address these tensions and contradictions within Anthropocene discourse, especially one that skirts around the Scylla of posthumanism and the Charybdis of enlightenment modernism. Chakrabarty (2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2021) has been one of the leading theorists of the Anthropocene: his work on climate change and environmental history has helped to rethink such fundamental concepts as scale, temporality, history, and agency in this age of human-induced ecological catastrophe. 3 While scholars have acknowledged his contribution to environmental theory, they have also been critical of his views, often on diametrically different grounds. Some commentators (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016: 67; Boscov-Ellen, 2020; Davies, 2016: 61–2; Hamilton, 2017: 49–51; Malm and Hornborg, 2014: 66–7; Žižek, 2010: 332–4) take him to be a (covert) modernist, whose concept of the ‘species’ entails anthropocentric, enlightenment ideals such as universality and human agency. Other scholars (Baucom, 2020: 44–50, 67–70) view him as a posthumanist eco-theorist, whose concept of the ‘planet’ deconstructs the human-centered worldview without properly addressing the political and ethical challenges in times of global ecological crisis. 4
Contra these commentators, I argue that Chakrabarty’s account of the Anthropocene remains neither covertly modernistic nor posthumanistic per se because his views of the human turn out to be consistently inconsistent. Further, Chakrabarty’s equivocal stance does not only betoken the problems and the problematics of his ecological theory but also reflects a broader theoretical dilemma in recent environmentalism that stems from the antinomy of the Anthropocene. Although Chakrabarty apparently advances an anti-anthropocentric and posthumanistic explanation of ecological crisis by shifting his focus from the ‘species’ to the ‘planet’, his account turns out to remain within the modernistic and enlightenment paradigm that privileges progress, rationality, and human agency. His ambivalence towards modernist thinking is most evident when he tacitly embraces one of the most widespread narratives of Anthropocene discourse: namely, that of enlightenment, or transition from ignorance to knowledge. Thus, Chakrabarty’s ecological theory epitomizes the remains of anthropocentrism in Anthropocene discourse, registering the extent to which recent environmental discourse retains the narrative of enlightenment and, by extension, beliefs in human agency, rationality, and singularity.
In what follows, I first analyze the narrative of enlightenment in Anthropocene discourse (Section II), and then demonstrate how Chakrabarty’s tacit embrace of this narrative makes his ecological theory fundamentally ambivalent (Sections III and IV); finally, I suggest that theoretical conundrums in Chakrabarty’s discussions of climate change are symptomatic of the challenges that environmental theorists and critics face today, calling for a radical rethinking of the human beyond traditional binaries (Section V).
II The Narrative of Awakening in Anthropocene Discourse
For the last two decades, scientists and environmental theorists have attempted to understand unprecedented disruptive transformations in the earth system in the name of the Anthropocene. While their accounts of the Anthropocene vary in terms of their causes, histories, and prospects, one of its most typical narratives remains ‘a story of awakening’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016: xiii). 5 Facing human-induced ecological catastrophe of an unprecedented scale, the story goes, we now understand the destructive impact of human activities on ecosystems, which we did not recognize at the onset of this new age of humans around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As environmental historians (Locher and Fressoz, 2012: 580) put it, ‘[a]fter three centuries of frenetic modernism, we entered, at last, an enlightened era of environmental awareness’. This master narrative of the Anthropocene amounts to a modernist fable in embracing one of the foundational concepts of modernity: the Kantian notion of enlightenment, or a passage from a state of naivety and ignorance to that of self-knowledge (see Kant, 1996 [1784]: 17).
More specifically, the modernist narrative of enlightenment in Anthropocene discourse consists of three stages: ignorance, awakening, and action. First, the narrative of environmental awakening assumes ignorance in the past. According to scientists and historians, citizens in modern, capitalist societies have sought to maximize profits so zealously that they turn a blind eye to damage to ecosystems committed by themselves. Steffen et al. (2011a: 850, 852), for example, describe the lack of interest in environmental issues during the Great Acceleration – that is, a period after the mid-20th century in which the exponential growth of economy and populations accelerated anthropogenic climate change: ‘Environmental problems received little attention during much of the Great Acceleration’; and ‘the emerging global environmental problems were largely ignored’ during the same period. 6
Moreover, the ignorance of humans explains, and sometimes justifies, their self-destructive acts. According to the narrative of enlightenment, we have damaged and destabilized ecosystems unintentionally because we did not understand the consequences of our actions. As Lovelock (2006: 10) puts it, ‘by changing the environment we have unknowingly declared war on Gaia’ (emphasis mine). McNeill and Engelke (2016: 209), in chronicling the history of the Great Acceleration, make similar points: ‘So far humankind has influenced basic Earth systems only by accident, as an unforeseen and unintended by-product of actions undertaken for routine quests for wealth, power, and contentment’ (emphasis mine). For these historians and scientists, humans have transformed the earth system ‘by accident’ without intending or predicting it in the process of ‘routine quests’ for pleasure and self-interest. The narrative of awakening thus not only postulates the ignorance of human beings, but it also proposes their ignorance to be a reason, and in fact an excuse, for their actions: humans have destroyed and destabilized ecosystems because they did not know what they were doing. As Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016: 73) observe, this modernist fable could serve as an exonerating narrative because in underscoring ignorance of humans in the past, it exempts moral responsibility from the perpetrators of environmental degradation.
The second stage of this Anthropocene narrative consists of awakening in the present. Now that we have transformed the planet earth, that is, we confront the influence of humans on the non-human world and its devastating effects. For Steffen et al. (2011b: 757), ‘We are the first generation with the knowledge of how our activities influence the Earth system’. According to scholars of the Anthropocene, humans have gained environmental awareness only in recent years, not only by developing scientific knowledge and technology but also by encountering climate disasters that have become more frequent and severe than before.
The final stage of the story of awakening involves action in the future. Since we recognize our role in damaging and mutilating ecosystems, that is, we will act to redress ecological catastrophe of our own making. Recall, for example, Steffen et al.’s (2011b: 757) remarks that we discussed above and notice how he correlates knowledge and action: ‘We are the first generation with the knowledge of how our activities influence the Earth system, and thus the first generation with the power and the responsibility to change our relationship with the planet’ (emphasis mine). As the conjunction ‘thus’ suggests, for environmental historians, our understanding of humanity’s role in climate change not only confers on us moral responsibility for redressing the current ecological crisis but also confirms the capacity for doing so. Put differently, because we know that we have destroyed nature, we are not only obliged to restore it but also capable of recuperating it. Indeed, Crutzen’s and Stoermer’s 2000 article that first articulated the concept of the Anthropocene demonstrates this optimistic belief in the human power for managing the environmental crisis. In their view, humans in transforming the earth system have become a force of nature and, by the same token, will remain as such in the future as well: ‘mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come’ (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000: 18). Because humans have come to possess great power as a geological force, they may as well restore ecosystems that they endangered themselves. Hence, when Crutzen and Stoermer (2000: 18) propose to work toward the ‘global, sustainable, environmental management’ of the earth system, they describe this task as ‘exciting’, as well as ‘difficult and daunting’. Their expression of excitement at the prospect of ecological crisis registers their belief in the power of humanity to which the advancement of the Anthropocene attests. In other words, humans can undo the damage that they have inflicted on the planet because they are the ones who caused it in the first place.
A similar association between knowledge, power, and action can be found in a more pronounced form in McNeill’s and Engelke’s account of the Great Acceleration: Now that climate is less stable and the Earth system is charting a new course never experienced before, thought and institutions will evolve in new directions more compatible with the Anthropocene. Since we cannot exit the Anthropocene, we will adjust to it, one way or another. (McNeill and Engelke, 2016: 211)
Living in the Anthropocene, in their view, means to come to terms with a new reality of climate uncertainty and volatility. In making this claim, they make two suggestions: that we now understand that ecological catastrophe is imminent and inevitable; and that we will act upon knowledge of a new climate regime (very likely) with success: ‘Since we cannot exit the Anthropocene, we will adjust to it, one way or another’. For McNeill and Engelke (as for Crutzen and Stoermer), an awakening to the impending environmental crisis leads to urgent action to mitigate and resolve it. These environmental historians and scientists then assume a (quasi-)causal relationship between past, present, and future actions. On the one hand, because we did not know in the past, we committed irrevocable harm to the natural environment; on the other hand, because we now know what we did, we can, must, and will overcome current and imminent ecological cataclysms. In other words, the narrative of enlightenment proposes the most likely or natural response to the Anthropocene to involve a transition from ignorance to knowledge and to praxis.
Now it should be noted that the story of awakening in Anthropocene discourse amounts to a modernist fable in a dialectical sense. This narrative of enlightenment not only promotes but also undermines modernist ideals of freedom, rationality, and agency because it acknowledges the limitation of human power. When scholars of the Anthropocene describe ignorance of humans in the past, for example, they admit flaws in the project of modernization that aims to dominate and control nature through the exercise of reason. In this sense, they register something similar to what Horkheimer and Adorno (2002 [1947]) term the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’: namely, the human mastery of nature is bound to fail, bringing in the domination of humans by nature. For Anthropocene scholars, when humans exploit and extract natural resources for their own benefit, they unwittingly and unintentionally imperil a common place of dwelling that is shared by all living creatures, including humans themselves. The more humans appropriate nature for pleasure and self-interest, the harder nature strikes back, putting at risk the survival of humanity.
These anti-modernist insights notwithstanding, however, the narrative of enlightenment in Anthropocene discourse remains modernist to the extent that it registers progress from ignorance to knowledge and to action. As Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016: 78) suggest, this master narrative of the Anthropocene amounts to ‘a new modernist fable’, or an anti-modernist modernist tale. In other words, the narrative of enlightenment reiterates ‘the grand narrative of modernity, that of Man moving from environmental obliviousness to environmental consciousness, of Man equaling Nature’s power, of Man repairing Nature’ (Bonneuil, 2015: 23). The story of awakening restores rationality and human agency that it appears to undermine, for it registers a progressive trajectory of human history from a state of ignorance to that of knowledge. Ultimately, this narrative suggests the emergence of environmental awareness (however belated it may be) and the prospect of successful management of the earth system (however uncertain it may be).
In this respect, the narrative of enlightenment can be problematic due to its historical inaccuracy and political inefficacy. This narrative assumes that scientific knowledge or public awareness of the ecological crisis somehow naturally translates into collective action to amend it. However, this story does not always reflect reality, as scholars (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016: 170–97; Weart, 2008: 177–96) point to a rift between knowledge and action in climate politics. Moreover, the narrative of enlightenment tends to take ecological awakening to be a fait accompli in the age of climate catastrophe while it is not the case. As many scholars (Ghosh, 2016: 1–27; Mann, 2021; Oreskes and Conway, 2011) have observed, the denial of climate change still remains widespread. Hence, when taken uncritically, this story could provide an illusion of awakening, hindering the real work that is required to address the climate crisis, i.e. raising public consciousness of environmental crises and mobilizing a political force to fight against climate denial by fossil capital. As I discuss below, Chakrabarty’s ecological theory maintains a fraught relationship with this modernist narrative of enlightenment and with anthropocentric Anthropocene discourse in general. Although he does participate in a posthumanist critique of the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty ends up reproducing one of its master narratives – the story of awakening.
III Chakrabarty’s Ecological Posthumanism: From the Species to the Planet
In his widely read 2009 article, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Dipesh Chakrabarty makes a significant intervention in environmental theory by underscoring the double temporality of the Anthropocene. For him, the Anthropocene poses challenges to humanist historiography in raising the question of scale: it demands that we consider a much more long-term scale than the one that measures a recorded history of human civilization and of its progress in modernity. As humans have ushered in an unprecedented period of climate catastrophe by making disruptive interventions in ecosystems, the emergence of the Anthropocene involves histories of both human and inhuman scales. On the one hand, the climate crisis is in part a human-scale event in that humans have served as the primary driver of global warming, expanding the capitalist economy over the globe. On the other hand, climate change is also an inhuman-scale event because it involves geological processes whose temporal scale surpasses that of human history. Hence, the Anthropocene entails ‘the history of the planet, the history of life on the planet, and the history of the globe made by the logics of empires, capital, and technology’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 68). 7
In rethinking scale, time, and history in the age of climate change, moreover, Chakrabarty proposes the ‘species’ as a key concept for understanding the double temporality of the Anthropocene. For him, human beings as a species have become a force of nature, or ‘a planetary geological agent’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 31), when they have so profoundly transformed the earth system that they now imperil it. The human species as such then participates both in human-scale and in inhuman-scale temporalities. As humans have developed a system of mass production and consumption that relies heavily on fossil fuels, their actions produce exceedingly long-term effects on ecosystems. When they emit greenhouse gases in consuming fossil fuels, for example, they induce a long-term process of global warming that can continue for the next hundred or hundred thousand years. In the process, further, they disrupt extant cycles of climate events such as glaciation, which may proceed for several hundred thousand or even million years. Human actions thus have consequences of an inhuman, geological scale that extend to both ‘deep’ history and the far future. The age of anthropogenic climate change then witnesses the convergence of human history and geological time, of human-scale histories (those of capital, modernization, and industrialization) and inhuman-scale histories (those of geological transformation, climate cycles, and biological evolution); and the human species as a geological force embodies this convergence of the human and the inhuman scales.
While Chakrabarty continues to explore the double temporality of the Anthropocene, his theory gradually makes a ‘posthumanist’ turn (albeit insufficiently), shifting its focus from the species to the planet. Indeed, Chakrabarty seldom mentions the species in his works published after the 2009 article – except when he (Chakrabarty, 2017: 33–4) defends his species thinking against its critics. Instead, his essays and lectures have centered around the concept of the planet since the mid-2010s. This planetary turn of Chakrabarty’s represents his attempt to develop a more consistently non-anthropocentric theory of the Anthropocene in response to the criticisms of his species thinking and under the influence of posthumanist ecological theory. Commentators of Chakrabarty (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016: 67; Boscov-Ellen, 2020; Davies, 2016: 60–61; Hamilton, 2017: 49–51; Malm and Hornborg, 2014: 66–7; Žižek, 2010: 332–4) have taken issue with his concept of the species, accusing him of maintaining a modernistic and universalist viewpoint that simplifies and depoliticizes the history of climate change. In their view, when he proposes the human species to be the agent of climate change, rather than differentiated individuals, Chakrabarty resorts to an enlightenment paradigm that presumes humanity as a unified entity. In doing so, he ignores historical differences in the contribution of individual actors, groups, and nations to global warming, thereby hampering an effective response to global ecological catastrophe based on the understanding of climate inequality and injustice.
Facing this criticism of anthropocentric modernism, I suggest, Chakrabarty develops his theory in a direction that is closely aligned with ‘ecological posthumanism’ (Horn and Bergthaller, 2020: 72–4), or the ‘interdependence narrative’ of the Anthropocene (Dürbeck, 2018: 13–15). Theorists like Bruno Latour and Donna J. Haraway have analyzed the problems and problematics of the Anthropocene from the perspective of posthumanism. Their ecological works can be considered posthumanist in orientation in positing anti-anthropocentrism, ontological entanglement, and distributed agency. These theorists (Haraway, 2016: 30, 33; Latour, 2017: 118) challenge modernist anthropocentrism that separates humanity from nature and assumes the superiority of the former over the latter, treating the human being as the sole bearer of agency and subjectivity in the world. Moreover, dispensing with human exceptionalism, posthumanist thinkers (Haraway, 2016: 100) underscore the interconnectedness or entanglement of human and non-human beings, subjects and objects, the living and the non-living – binaries that have been conceived of as ontologically different and hierarchical. Finally, these theorists (Latour, 2014, 2017: 41–74; 2018 [2017]: 76) tend to accentuate the distributed nature of non-human agency. For them, agency remains not an exclusive property of humans but belongs to non-human beings as well, and the capacity for making change should be diversely attributed to or distributed among various beings and things.
Indeed, Chakrabarty suggests influence by posthumanist thinkers most evidently in his 2016 article (which is dedicated to Latour himself).
8
There, he takes issue with the binary of human and natural realm in recent environmental discourse, which presumes humans to be separate from and superior to natural beings. Hence, Chakrabarty (2016: 391–4) calls for replacing a humancentric perspective with a biocentric one, following Latour’s lead: We [i.e. human beings] do not represent any point of culmination in the story of the planet. This is where Latour’s – and some other scholars’ attempts – to open up vistas of aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical thought help us to develop points of view that seek to place the current constellation of environmental crises in the larger context of the deeper history of natural reproductive life on this planet. (Chakrabarty, 2016: 394)
If Chakrabarty urges others to embrace a posthumanist approach that centers around a non-human being like the planet, he makes this demand not only to others but also to himself.
Indeed, Chakrabarty develops a more consistently posthumanistic and explicitly anti-anthropocentric theory by elaborating on the concept of the planet in his post-2009 works. Chakrabarty still remains interested in analyzing the double scale of the Anthropocene, but he addresses this issue by distinguishing the globe and the planet in his recent lectures and essays – most notably, ‘Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories’ (Chakrabarty, 2014) and ‘The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category?’ (Chakrabarty, 2019). There Chakrabarty contrasts a human-scale (or ‘homocentric’) account of the Anthropocene with an inhuman-scale (or ‘zoecentric’) one; and in the process, he associates the ‘globe’ with the former and the ‘planet’ with the latter. 9 By the ‘globe’, Chakrabarty refers to the earth that serves as an object of domination and exploitation, being subject to the globalization of the capitalist economy. For Chakrabarty (2021), the globe of globalization assumes a human-scale and human-centered perspective: ‘The story of globalization has humans at its center’ (p. 71). To treat the earth as the globe means to take the natural environment, as well as persons who are considered inhuman or subhuman, as mere resources that exist only to benefit humankind; and such anthropocentric thinking behind the global has fueled the development of colonialism, racism, and capitalism (see Chakrabarty, 2021: 71). The history of the Anthropocene thus converges with that of the global, if partially: it emerges from the process by which humans have subjugated the non-human in such a violent and exhaustible manner that they threaten all life on earth.
By contrast, the ‘planet’ for Chakrabarty indicates the earth that operates on an inhuman scale as a system of interlocking ecological processes. To take the earth as the planet means to consider it from a non-humancentric perspective as if one views it from a vantage point in the universe: ‘the planetary places humans against an unhuman backdrop’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 89). From this planetary perspective, the earth amounts to the ‘earth system’, a concept that scientists first proposed in the 1960s: it refers to ‘a dynamic ensemble of relationships’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 70), of interwoven, chemico-physical mechanisms at work in all spheres of the earth, from the atmosphere to oceans, land, and deep earth. Such planetary understanding of the earth as the earth system resists anthropocentric thinking in two ways. First, the earth system remains independent of human influence; it works by following its own rules and principles, such as laws of physics and chemistry, ‘regardless of how human societies are internally structured’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 57). Moreover, this complex system of ecological processes provides conditions of existence for all living and non-living beings – not exclusively for humanity. From the planetary perspective, humans do not maintain a privileged status but remain equal participants with other beings on the earth: ‘with regard to the planet . . . we are no more special than other forms of life. The planet puts us in the same position as any other creature’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 90). Taken as one of the planets in the universe, the earth is not so much a dwelling reserved for humans as a self-sufficient system that operates independently of humans; hence, it amounts to the other, or an inhuman space that is ‘anterior to humans’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 87). The history of the Anthropocene thus entails that of the planetary, an inhuman-scale history without the human at the center.
In contrasting the globe with the planet, then, Chakrabarty adopts a posthumanistic and anti-modernistic stance that deconstructs the singularity of the human being as a rational master of nature (although his views oscillate, as we shall see). Indeed, one of his purposes for delineating the planetary in contrast with the global is to identify a reductive account of the Anthropocene that embraces humancentric thinking in considering the global only. In his view, two groups of theorists have simplified the emergence of the Anthropocene as the history of the global. First, eco-Marxists tend to attribute the climate crisis to human factors only when they identify the history of global warming with that of global capitalism, thereby proposing to redefine the Anthropocene as the ‘Capitalocene’ (see Chakrabarty, 2017: 29–31). 10 Second, some technocratic scholars believe technology to be a sufficient and effective tool for tackling ecological catastrophes. For example, they aspire to mitigate the climate crisis through geoengineering – which aims to curb global warming by shooting chemicals into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight (see Chakrabarty, 2021: 87–9). Thus, both Marxists and technocratic scientists consider the Anthropocene on the level of the global only because they reduce the climate crisis to a human-scale event, to a human-made disaster that has human-made remedies.
For Chakrabarty, this reductive understanding of the Anthropocene is problematic because it champions human agency and intelligence in such a way as to deny the otherness of the earth system, or the planet. The anthropocentric bias of Anthropocene discourse is, for example, manifest in the idea of human stewardship. In Chakrabarty’s view, this idea of human stewardship or management of the planet replicates the ‘Kantian fable’ (which is a version of the narrative of enlightenment discussed above): it espouses an essential difference between humanity and the natural world in such a way as to assume the superiority of human beings to non-humans, as well as the moral responsibility of the former for the latter (see Chakrabarty, 2016: 383–8). According to scientists, theorists, and policy makers, who advocate for technological solutions to the climate crisis, humans are obliged to take care of the planet because they alone can do so. Among all natural creatures, human beings are the sole actors capable of resolving ecological crises because they possess greater agency than any other species, and because the natural environment lacks the capacity for salvaging itself, consisting of inert matter.
In promoting anthropocentric thinking, further, the human-scale viewpoint on the climate crisis ignores the ‘radical otherness’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 87) of the earth system. For instance, when scientists and economists attempt to manage future climate events based on data and modellings, they consider climate change as a natural phenomenon that can be fully measured and comprehended. In doing so, they obscure the uncertainty of planetary processes of the earth system, which involve a series of chain reactions and feedback loops, and whose consequences cannot be calculated due to multiple factors involved in them (see Chakrabarty, 2021: 52–6). This unknowability and otherness of the earth system is perhaps best exemplified by the concept of the tipping point, ‘a point beyond which global warming could be catastrophic for humans’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 54). This idea of a threshold in the earth system lays bare the limits of human knowledge (we cannot pinpoint a tipping point because it is determined by too complex factors), as well as those of human agency (we cannot avoid or reverse climate disasters once we step over a certain point). Hence, when some scholars seek to acquire complete knowledge of the earth system, they fail to comprehend its status as the planet, or the other whose workings remain unintelligible and unpredictable due to their complexity.
Thus, Chakrabarty makes a distinction between the globe and the planet to critique an anthropocentric strand of Anthropocene discourse that considers a human-scale aspect of climate change or the global only. In his view, some scholars take into account ‘the global regime of historicity’, but not ‘the planetary regime of historicity’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 68); and in doing so, they ‘bring into the fold of the global an aspect of what we have called the planetary’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 85), reducing the planetary event of climate change to a global or human-scale phenomenon. Ultimately, Chakrabarty finds the ‘global’ account of the Anthropocene to be limited because it is anthropocentric in a self-perpetuating and self-defeating manner. Its tendency to globalize the planetary, to reduce the planet to the globe, is in effect ‘symptomatic of the predicament that the Anthropocene is’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 90). When scholars of the Anthropocene understand climate change from a human perspective exclusively by treating it as a comprehensible and manageable crisis, they endorse and reinforce beliefs in the exceptional capacity of humankind for transforming the natural environment – the very anthropocentric thinking that has justified and fueled the exploitation and destruction of nature, the unrestrained consumption of resources, and the denial of humanity’s dependence on non-human beings. In embracing a humancentric perspective, Anthropocene discourse unwittingly consolidates the worldview that has contributed to the ecological catastrophe that we face now.
In proposing the concept of the planet, Chakrabarty then develops a posthumanist critique of Anthropocene discourse not unlike Latour and Haraway. Haraway, for example, critiques the concept of the Anthropocene, as well as its alternatives such as the ‘Capitalocene’, which places responsibility for today’s ecological crisis on capitalists and colonists. For Haraway (as well as for Chakrabarty), the concepts of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene regard humans as the main actors in the ecological system. Hence, she proposes to replace these concepts with the ‘Chthulucene’, a term that captures the inextricable coexistence of diverse species and beings: ‘the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times’ (Haraway, 2016: 55). In it, ‘human beings are not the only important actors’; ‘[they] are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story’ (Haraway, 2016: 55). Latour (2017) similarly criticizes Anthropocene discourse for failing to recognize the entanglement of human and non-human beings, thereby calling for ‘a radically new distribution of the forms granted to humans, societies, nonhumans, and divinities’ (p. 119). For him, the Anthropocene witnesses ‘a fusion of geohistorical forces in what truly resembles a witch’s cauldron’ (Latour, 2017: 116). Hence, the history of the Anthropocene amounts not to a human history but to a ‘geohistory’ that is shared by all beings on the earth, whose existence is conditioned by the earth system (Latour, 2014: 16; 2018 [2017]: 42), or what he calls ‘the Earthbound’ (Latour, 2017: 251). According to these posthumanist theorists, the drama of the Anthropocene pertains to the web of life in which human beings and non-human actors are inseparably intermingled – whether they are called ‘kins’ (i.e. multispecies assemblies) (Haraway), or ‘the Earthbound’ (Latour); for Chakrabarty, it belongs to the planet.
IV Chakrabarty’s Equivocal Posthumanism: From the Global to the Planetary
While Chakrabarty appears to privilege a posthumanistic account of the Anthropocene over a human-scale and human-centered one, his ecological theory turns out to be equivocal, if not self-contradictory. Chakrabarty’s ambiguity toward human agency is most manifest in his tacit embrace of a modernist narrative of enlightenment. As I demonstrate, Chakrabarty resorts to anthropocentric thinking when he acknowledges the privileged status of the human being as the agent of power and knowledge by positing an emergence of environmental awareness.
Consider, for example, how Chakrabarty employs the narrative of enlightenment in discussing the universal nature of climate catastrophe in his 2017 article, ‘The Politics of Climate Change Is More Than the Politics of Capitalism’. In it, he contends that the climate crisis impacts both developed and developing countries, rather than having disproportionately devastating effects on poor nations, as eco-Marxists tend to claim (see Chakrabarty, 2017: 31). As he (Chakrabarty, 2021: 45) puts it elsewhere, ‘there are no lifeboats . . . for the rich and the privileged’ in the face of climate catastrophe. In making these claims, moreover, Chakrabarty presents the rich countries in the Global North as rational actors, who act out of ‘their enlightened self-interest’ (Chakrabarty, 2017: 31, emphasis mine). These countries have actively instigated various policies to tackle the climate crisis because they know that it will not spare them, because increasingly frequent catastrophic events would either directly threaten their survival or destabilize the market from which they profit. Chakrabarty thus represents the developed countries’ proactive measures as typical of the human response to the Anthropocene. In the process, he implicitly posits a transition from ignorance to knowledge and to action in the age of climate change, viewing the developed countries as mature, rational subjects, who can translate their knowledge of urgent environmental problems into action.
Moreover, one may identify the modernist narrative of enlightenment in his discussions of such key concepts as the globe and the planet, as well as the double scale of the Anthropocene. In his 2009 article, as we saw above, Chakrabarty proposes the Anthropocene to be involving human and inhuman scales. In the process, he underscores the contingent process by which humans ushered in the age of humanity (see Chakrabarty, 2021: 34, 39–40, 67, 75). As Chakrabarty (2021) repeatedly asserts, human beings ‘tumbled into’ or ‘stumbled into’ the Anthropocene (pp. 34, 40), because it has been ‘an unintended consequence of human choices’ (with a few exceptions of such corporations as Exxon that covered up scientific data about climate change; p. 34). For him, the accidental emergence of the Anthropocene is best exemplified by the transition of energy sources that paved the way for fossil capitalism. The energy transition from water and wood to coal was not ‘an inevitable happening’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 39); it was driven not so much by political necessity or economic profits as by such factors as geographical location – as in the case of Great Britain initiating the Industrial Revolution. 11 In foregrounding the contingency of the Anthropocene, then, Chakrabarty’s account resembles the story of awakening that we saw above. Like other Anthropocene scholars, he admits ignorance of humans in the past: he assumes they precipitated climate change unknowingly by accident. Although Chakrabarty does not describe the process by which humans awaken to the reality of environmental crises in his 2009 article, his emphasis on ignorance in the past anticipates the ways in which his later works register a transition from ignorance to knowledge.
Indeed, Chakrabarty employs a narrative of enlightenment most extensively when he posits a passage from the global to the planetary in his 2014 and 2019 articles. As we examined above, Chakrabarty contrasts the ‘globe’ (i.e. the earth as an object of appropriation and exploitation) with the ‘planet’ (the earth as an autonomous system of ecological processes). Yet Chakrabarty, I want to add, considers the globe and the planet not simply as oppositional concepts but rather as dialectical ones. As Chakrabarty (2021: 80) repeatedly asserts, ‘the global discloses to humans the domain of the planetary’ (original emphasis). 12 Here his enigmatic axiom can be understood as follows: if we caused ecological cataclysms by exploiting the non-human world without restraint in pursuit of limitless profits, these egotistic and humancentric acts serve to reveal the planetary, enabling us to discover the inhuman realm of the earth that remains beyond human knowledge and control. Put differently: ‘Planet emerged from the project of globalization, from “destruction” and the futile project of human mastery’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 69, original emphasis). For him, the futile attempt to expand the globe ironically leads to the discovery of the planet. Because humans have attempted but failed at the mastery of nature, bringing about ecological crises that threaten their own survival, they awaken to the realm of the natural world that defies human control and understanding – or, in his words, the planet. Hence, the global paves the way for the planetary.
Chakrabarty further elaborates on this dialectical transition from the global to the planetary by discussing the cases of deep earth and the earth system. In his view, the global discloses the planetary, for instance, in the form of deep earth (see Chakrabarty, 2021: 70, 81). It is in the process of reinforcing the global, of exploring and extracting natural resources in geological strata, that we came to encounter deep earth – the planetary or inhuman realm that remained inaccessible to humans. A similar process takes place in the discovery of the earth system. Indeed, most of the earth system scientists were US astronomers who developed technologies for space exploration in collaboration with NASA to reinforce American military power during the Cold War. In accelerating the global by strengthening American hegemony, however, they encountered the planetary realm of the earth – namely, the earth system, or the ecological whole that James Lovelock designated as Gaia: ‘[I]t was the very technology of space exploration that came out of the Cold War and the growing weaponization of atmosphere and space that eventually brought the Gaia moment into our awareness’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 80–81). Thus, it is through the expansion of the global that humans have glimpsed the earth’s planetary status as an autonomous system of ecological processes.
Moreover, Chakrabarty suggests that the same dialectical process applies to the emergence of environmental awareness in general. For him, the acceleration of the global through technological innovation, economic exploitation, and political domination has resulted in the development of the global capitalist system that relies heavily on fossil fuels. However, the drastic social, economic, and natural transformations that took place in the process (called the Great Acceleration) paradoxically contributed to a better understanding of the planetary aspect of the earth: ‘The planetary now bears down on our everyday consciousness precisely because the accentuation of the global in the last seventy or so years – all that is summed up in the expression “the great acceleration” – has opened up for humanist intellectuals the domain of the planetary’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 85). As humans have expanded the globe to its limit, the current generation of scientists and scholars faces the planet that has remained behind the globe. Having appropriated and degraded the non-human world that serves to sustain human life, we confront the planet now that we are about to lose it.
In describing a passage from the global to the planetary, then, Chakrabarty registers a transition from ignorance to knowledge in the age of climate catastrophe. Although he tends to conceal the agent of recognition by avoiding the human subject (it is always the global that discloses the planetary to humans), Chakrabarty acknowledges that the revelation of the planetary entails a cognitive event: we encounter, discover, and recognize the planetary through the global. Consider, for instance, his language of awareness and consciousness: [T]he very technology of space exploration that came out of the Cold War and the growing weaponization of atmosphere and space [. . .] eventually brought the Gaia moment into our awareness. (Chakrabarty, 2021: 80–81) The planetary now bears down on our everyday consciousness . . . (Chakrabarty, 2021: 85) [We experience] an awakening to the consciousness that we are not always in practical and/or aesthetic relationship with the planet and yet, without it, we do not exist. (Chakrabarty, 2021: 182)
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Central to Chakrabarty’s ecological theory is thus the moment of awakening in which the realm of the planetary enters human consciousness. For him, humans have undergone a process of intellectual maturation in the face of environmental catastrophe, attaining awareness of ecological processes at work in the earth system. In elucidating the dialectical relationship between the globe and the planet, Chakrabarty registers the emergence of planetary awareness, of the ecological understanding of the earth as the other.
His account of the planetary, then, reproduces the narrative of awakening in Anthropocene discourse in sharing its progressive and dialectical trajectory. Not unlike Anthropocene scholars, Chakrabarty registers a process of retrospective recognition in delineating a transition from the global to the planetary paradigm in the Anthropocene: we did not know the planet then, but we now understand it better than ever before. Moreover, similarly to the narrative of awakening, Chakrabarty’s account of intellectual progress entails the irony that ignorance conditions and necessitates knowledge. He articulates this paradoxical process of awakening by suggesting mutual reinforcement of the global and the planetary: ‘the harder we work the earth in our increasing quest for profit and power, the more we encounter the planet’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 69–70); and ‘the harder we “work” the earth in pursuit of the worldly flourishing of a great number of humans, the more we encounter the planet’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 91). 14 The more relentlessly we attempt to exploit nature for our self-interest, he suggests, the more readily we gain awareness of nature’s autonomy and otherness.
This strange mutuality between the global and the planetary reflects a paradoxical relationship between ignorance and knowledge: we come to understand the planet thanks to our ignorance of it. Because we lacked planetary awareness, viewing the earth as the globe of globalization, we have exploited the non-human world without restraint; and because we have imperiled the earth system in the process of pursuing the global, we now realize its hitherto-neglected aspect of the earth as the planet. In other words, only after disrupting the planetary processes out of ignorance do we awaken to the realm of the planetary; ignorance serves as a conduit for knowledge.
V Toward ‘a New Philosophical Anthropology’
As I have argued, Chakrabarty’s discussion of the Anthropocene remains fundamentally equivocal in that it decenters the place of the human only to restore it, if unwittingly, in (re)telling a story of ecological awakening. This contradiction within his ecological thinking between modernistic and posthumanistic perspectives reflects a gap or disjunction between content and form. On the one hand, Chakrabarty advances a posthumanistic account of the Anthropocene when he proposes to view the earth as the ‘planet’ – the earth system operating independently of human factors. On the other hand, his theoretical analysis embraces a modernistic and anthropocentric narrative in positing emerging awareness of the planetary in the Anthropocene. For him, environmental obliviousness in the age of the global paved the way for environmental awakening in the age of the planetary. In making these claims, Chakrabarty reproduces one of the most typical narratives in Anthropocene discourse that affirms human initiative and intelligence: namely, a narrative of enlightenment.
Despite his equivocal stance, Chakrabarty’s ecological theory remains instructive and productive because these ambiguities and inconsistencies symptomize internal tensions within recent environmentalism. If his account of the planet testifies to the prevalence of the narrative of enlightenment in discussions of the Anthropocene, it also helps illuminate a residue of anthropocentrism in recent ecological discourse that tends to repudiate human-centered views by embracing posthumanist ontology. Indeed, it is not too difficult to find notable ecological critics who can be seen to employ a narrative of awakening. Consider, for example, how ecocritics of different theoretical orientations, such as the posthumanist Timothy Morton and the postcolonialist Amitav Ghosh, describe the propagation of ecological thinking. Here is how Morton accounts for ecological thought: Like a virus, the ecological thought infects other systems of thinking and alters them from within, gradually disabling the incompatible ones. The infection has only just begun. (Morton, 2010: 19)
Similarly, Ghosh predicts the expansion of ecological awareness in the near future. For instance, he explains how civilians and religious institutions like the Catholic Church have promoted global counter-cultural movements that aim to restore the ‘green’ ways of living: If these admittedly disparate groups [i.e. Catholics and other ecologically-minded persons] can find common ground in an Earth-centered mass movement, then it is not impossible, as Taylor suggests, that they could start a ‘social epidemic’ that would bring about ‘wide-scale political, economic and ecological changes’. (Ghosh, 2021: 244)
Not unlike Chakrabarty (and other Anthropocene scholars who subscribe to the narrative of enlightenment), Morton and Ghosh describe a quasi-automatic process by which the public effortlessly attains environmental awareness in the imminent future. Their metaphors of contagion (‘a virus’, ‘infection’, ‘social epidemic’) suggest that in these times of ecological awakening, humans would instantly discover intricate interconnections among them and non-human beings as if they were infected by the same virus. In assuming such a facile transition from ignorance to knowledge, then, these ecocritics propagate the modernist narrative of awakening that is not only theoretically inconsistent but also politically ineffective. In taking for granted the ecological awakening of the public, they obscure a historical reality that we live in the age of the ‘great derangement’ (as Ghosh [2016: 11] himself calls it elsewhere), in which many remain ignorant of or willingly refuse to acknowledge the severity, inevitability, and unpredictability of human-induced climate disasters. In other words, their modernist tales lead us to bypass psychological and political challenges that remain central in addressing current ecological crises – such as how to redress skepticism and denial about climate change, and how to mobilize collective movements to resist and overcome fossil capitalism.
Moreover, the examples of Morton and Ghosh evidence the spectres of modernistic anthropocentrism in recent environmental discourse that decenters the human without dispensing with beliefs in human agency, rationality, and singularity. In this context, Chakrabarty’s ambivalence toward human agency and enlightenment modernism can be seen as indicative of theoretical tasks that eco-theorists face today. In order to understand and overcome ecological crises, that is, one ought to address the antinomy of the Anthropocene, thinking through the doubleness of the human being as a ‘master’ of nature that is subjected to ecological processes. More specifically, theorists should try to reconcile anthropocentric modernism and posthumanism: it remains imperative to achieve collective awakening to the interdependence and ontological intermingling of human and non-human beings without denying such ‘human’ qualities as ethical responsibility and the power of action that pertain to humans; and conversely, it is essential to undertake ethical acts of taking care of all living and non-living beings on the earth without maintaining obsolete ideas of human exceptionalism or superiority.
For this purpose, theorists need to rethink human agency and the human in the Anthropocene beyond the binaries of humanity and nature, action and passivity, political and biological life, humancentrism and biocentrism. Indeed, Chakrabarty himself seems to be aware of these conundrums when he concludes his essays by calling for ‘a new philosophical anthropology’ (Chakrabarty, 2021: 91), or reflections on ‘the “new” humanities of our times’ (Chakrabarty, 2016: 394). If he has addressed these theoretical challenges in an equivocal manner, Chakrabarty (2021: 67) may in passing suggest a direction for new thinking when urging us to view humans no longer as ‘possessive hosts’ but as ‘passing guests’ on the earth. If only tentatively, he proposes the (post)human in the Anthropocene to be the host that is also the ‘hostage’ to and for the planet. 15
