The recent International Union of Geological Sciences decision to reject the proposed “Anthropocene epoch” might seem confusing. Here’s a piece of draft material from my forthcoming book-in-progress, The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds, that attempts to bring the situation up to date. Comments welcome! Please note that the references to signs, signatures, and indexicality come from the book’s (processual-) semiotic approach to understanding images; if they seem abstruse, the first half of the book explains them clearly.
While it had some forerunners, the concept of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch was first proposed by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and limnologist Eugene Stoermer in the year 2000. Within a few years, geologists were taking the concept as a serious proposal to mark a new epoch in the history of planet Earth, an epoch brought about by human activities.
For geologists, an epoch is not just any time period; it is part of a nested set of delineations: from smallest to largest and most encompassing, these are known as ages, epochs, periods, eras, and eons. Each is a geochronological unit, that is, a unit of time as marked by Earth history (geology) and determined through the practice of chronostratigraphy, or the reading and writing (-graphy) of layers of rock (strata) marking time (chronos). The entirety is based on the long verified observation that the remnants of the earth’s surface lay themselves down in horizontal layers, with the more recent laid on top of the less recent. The smaller chronostratographic units denote smaller levels of change over time; these combine to make up the larger ones, which denote larger changes.
The geologic time scale provides a kind of chronostratigraphic “address” for anything in the geologic record. We who live today are said to find ourselves “in” the Holocene or—if it should come to be accepted—the Anthropocene epoch, which are respectively the second and potentially third epochs of the third period (Quaternary) of the third era (Cenozoic) of the fourth eon (Phanerozoic) since the formation of the Earth. The Holocene, which began about 11,700 years ago, is roughly the thirty-eighth epoch in Earth’s history.
To say that we are in it, however, or in the Anthropocene, is to presume that we, or someone, could step out of time and see ourselves inside it. We cannot: we are at the leading edge (one of an infinity of leading edges) of a set of dynamic processes that unfolds not with the flatness of a unrolling roll of paper, but with noticeable folds, twists, and lumps. Whether today’s present will one day appear smooth or lumpy, or even form a dramatic twist in the geochronological fabric, cannot possibly be known until that present has become past. It will take additional layering on top of it—further epochs or ages at the very least—to see what it will look like once it is lain down. Geology is, after all (at least in its stratigraphic form), a reading of the past in the rockscape of the present.* Its ability to read the present is constrained by the fact that the present is not yet past. Its layering can only be predicted or, perhaps, divined.
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