Academic trend watchers will be interested to see how the digital and the Anthropocene have catapulted to the top of hot topics at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference. (A few others are mentioned here and here, Bruno Latour’s keynote being one of them. Here’s a collection of tweets on Latour’s talk, most of them by Jenny Carlson. And for those with more catching up to do, see the series on the ontological turn last year, and my own account of missing Latour then.)
John Hartigan has an interesting post on Somatosphere that compares the suddenly off-the-scale theoretical cachet attained by the term “Anthropocene” against the funkier, more earthbound, and more discipline specific term “multispecies” (its disciplinary specificity still mostly confined to anthropologists and STS folks).
“What just happened in Anthropology?” Hartigan asks.
“In the 2013 annual meeting there were zero abstracts or paper or panel titles featuring the word “Anthropocene”; this year there were 64! Compare that with “multispecies,” which has held steady at between 16-23 invocations after it first made its appearance in the program in 2010.[i] Why the surge of interest? More importantly, given overlapping concerns highlighted by these two keywords, why the sudden prevalence of one over the other?”
Hartigan argues that the “charismatic mega-category” (I love it) of “the Anthropocene”
takes in millennia and it frames the vast scale of industrialization and globalization. Also, because it focuses on climatic change and risk, the term orients to policy forums and managerial practices concerning environmental resources. In contrast, “multispecies” emerged from more boutique fields, cultural studies broadly (e.g. philosophical posthumanism and Donna Haraway’s companion species, etc) and ethnography in particular. Plus it’s mostly still associated with a method: ethnographic accounting for located relationships and encounters among species. But also its connotations are just weird and disconcerting, in a way that even global apocalypse is not, since that’s been lushly imagined actively over the last two thousand years at least.
Where the Anthropocene is, as its critics have pointed out, an anthropocentric category,
“multispecies” is first and foremost an effort to dethrone the dominance of the human, which solutions to the crisis of the Anthropocene must entail.
I’ve been seeing “multispecies” as part of the larger mix of discourses and methods drawn upon by post-humanists, new materialists, new (/political) ontologists, critical animal scholars, actor-network theorists, Deleuzians, biosemioticians, and others. Hartigan’s comparison suggests that “multispecies” has the potential to rise to the top and perhaps even unify the others around it.
Among empirical scholars utilizing ethnographic methods, I think it could do that (to a degree), but I’m not sure how it would do that among more abstract theorists. (I tried to suggest something like that several years ago with the term “multicultural ecology,” where culture wouldn’t be confined to the human; but that needed more development.)
Hartigan, unfortunately, doesn’t develop the idea further in the blog post mentioned above. But it’s worth reading and building on. Read his post here.
I’m stilled puzzled by folks who seem to think (pace Derrida/Wittgenstein) in a some sort of ordering/limiting
author-ity to words themselves as if they didn’t get their (many&ever evolving) meanings from our uses of them. Seems especially ironic in anthropology/STS/ANT…
dmf –
I’m not sure that the two — the authority of words, and our ability to reshape them through our use of them — are opposed to each other. Words do get their meaning from “our” uses of them, but the “our” (“we”) is hardly a known and controllable entity. Words also give shape to that “we”: big words (like Anthropocene, globalization, neoliberalism, democracy, objectivity, knowledge, et al.) are vehicles for framing who and what we are, what our relations are and should be (among ourselves and with others), and so on.
If words like these are ways of invoking realities into existence (or at least coalitions around potential realities), then it’s worth debating which words will do that better than others, no?
but it’s how we use them to shape coalitions (and if we repeat them they are never quite the same, the “frames” don’t stay on their own, we are always already re-assembling)and such that matters, there are no predetermined/ruled practices/responses within the words themselves, “anthropocene” isn’t a sort of computer-code that people will respond to in some uniform way because of some imagined history of anthro or such and people act as if these terms are somehow set and setting.
I think you can do a posthumanist reading of the Anthropocene. Or at least, I tried to here:http://minnesotareview.dukejournals.org/content/current
It doesn’t necessarily have to be treated as an anthropocentric category. I think one problem with the Anthropocene discourse is that it treats the human “species” as the cause of the mutations of the earth system that some geologists and climate scientists think deserving of a new name. But if you embrace even a basic assemblage theory of agency or an approach such as Latour’s actor-network theory, ‘Anthropocene’ would be an ironic name. ‘Species’ is the wrong name for the cause, even if it’s human in a broader sense.
Maybe the ‘anthropos’ of anthropogenic is a multispecies assemblage and a technological assemblage too (if you embrace theories that give technology some life of its own). I think the scale problem that often comes up in Anthropocene discussions helps to demonstrate this, since the human species isn’t really a scaleable concept, and the assemblages that produce the conditions geologists are trying to describe are at work across mutliple and qualitatively different scales.
With this version, there’s less reason to hold onto the name “Anthropocene,” but then, it has a certain popular cachet that seems to invite a lot of people to think about climate change in a different register. Human aren’t just evil polluters, they’re a geological force transforming the earth for better or worse. And from there, we can re-interpret the “anthropos” along the lines of multispecies ethnography and posthumanist criticism: you don’t have the human in the first place without coevolution with other species and technologies.
Derek – Thanks for the link to your article, which looks great. I agree with you about the multispecies and assemblage nature of the transformative agency involved in ‘Anthropocenic’ changes. That’s why I prefer terms that make this clearer, e.g., compound terms like “carbon capitalist world-ecology” (Jason Moore’s work on the latter is helpful), though they tend to be a mouthful. But the naming is ultimately less important than how we conceptualize them — which should be systemically, processually, ‘multispecially,’ etc.
http://syntheticzero.net/2015/01/07/ivakhiv-on-ontology-ecology-and-the-anthroposcene/
It’s imvtearipe that more people make this exact point.
Kudos to you! I hadn’t thought of that!