« The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living », writes Marx in The 18thBrumaire of Louis BonaparteKarl Marx 1818-1883, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Translated by Daniel De Leon (New York, New York : Labor News, 1951), https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999840044202121.. This sentence takes on another meaning for us today: the current instantiations of global warming do not fully belong to the present, they are the product of past emissions that were accumulated to such an extent that we experience their effects only now: a strange cocktail of timescales.
The victims of fossil-fuel combustion did not yet exist at the time they were burnt. Ecosystems act as media for the slow violence of fossil economies. The more it continues, the more history falls in on the present, the more the past quite literally breathes down our necks.
The negative universalism which the concept of the Anthropocene attempts to register is an involuntary one. Indebted to the natural sciences, it describes the passage of the power to shape the climate from nature into the human realm.
From the perspective of the natural sciences, the role of man in climate change is evident. Yet, the scale on which the natural sciences operate is, in Chakrabarty’s conceptualization, « planetary timeDipesh Chakrabarty, « The Climate of History: Four Theses, » Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (January 2009): 197–222, https://doi.org/10.1086/596640. ». Planetary time functions as a proto-transcendental antinomic to the scale of human history. In other words, the relation between historical time and planetary time is a non-relation: on the one hand, Chakrabarty argues planetary time can only come to the fore in the medium of historical time. On the other, historical time finds itself unable to express or think it, it constitutes an aporia manifest within historical time, a limit, which makes it ideal, in so far as it retains an epistemic impasse, an otherness that cannot be tamed. The only figure which we encounter it in is its masks, its stand-ins, particular catastrophes.
There is something peculiar in this tension between historical and planetary time. Planetary time operates on a scale that is seemingly infinite. And its infinity grants a finitude to historical time. Now, with global warming, planetary time itself appears to us as finite in the figure of ecocide. We thus find ourselves with a limit within the historical time in which we are inevitably thrown in, itself in turn limited by the consequences of what occurred in historical time. In other words, the aporia of historical time has been cannibalized by its products, finitude has taken on a double meaning through the phenomenon of climate change and our discourse around it. The idea of an end of the planet is not new, but it used to be granted from something imagined as transcendent. Modernity has brought about ever-more potent scenarios of man-made apocalypse – yet none has been as cumulative, involuntarily species-bound and scientifically sustained than that of ecocide through the emissions of greenhouse gases.
The infinity of planetary time that acted as asymptote to historical time is itself rendered finite; planetary time finds a new limit through historical time. This shuffle of finitude, the cut-off of planetary time that has become thinkable through global warming, weighs heavily on our epoch, because it invites us to substantialize our present as an end-time. This coping mechanism is at once tempting, depoliticizing, and at risk of turning finitude into the infinite: if the finitude of the planet invites us to add a full stop to human history in a defeatist, nihilist erasure of uncertainty, history would finally be substantial, natural, inevitable, and, as substance, timeless.
Chakrabarty stresses the impossibility of collapsing the two scales, and of their irreconcilability. It is on the level of human history and historiography that there is a possibility for action.
Let us assume that the openness of historical time rests on its relation to its limit, planetary time, priorly thought of as infinite in the form of an idea of nature whose loops and cycles were already constructed in contrast to human intervention through technics. Global warming has forced this limit. Forcing this limit implies a closure of historical time. Yet it is within historical time that this limit must be restored, addressed. In other words, history must be broken open again to prevent this double finitude from becoming actual.
This opening of history cannot proceed through a denial of the temporality of the planet. But an immediate acknowledgement, a direct translation is equally impossible and problematic, because it renders us inattentive to the history of how this situation arose. Let us briefly examine the technical, social, and economic factors that brought us into this too-lateness.
In his historiography of fossil capitalism, Andreas Malm attempts to reconstruct the birth of fossil-fuel driven global warmingAndreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).. This history originates in Britain, which, in the 1820s, was responsible for 80 percent of global CO2 emissions, 62 percent in 1850, with more than half of the world’s emissions stemming from Britain far into the 19thcentury. In the early 19th century, most of the British economy, in particular its largest industry, that of cotton, ran on water. Water on the British Isles was abundant, free, and already efficiently used through waterwheels. The flow of water became a problem for the economy only because of the conflict between two social forces, labor and capital. Capital sought to extend production times as much as was possible, while labor bore an antithetical interest in securing part of the day for its own needs. The flow of water was liable to standstills, the stock that coal represented as the result of past photosynthesis buried in the earth, could be fired anytime. The introduction of coal as a main energy source allowed for the spatial dissociation of energy source and converter. The engine could be anywhere. While water was a source of energy through natural motion, the stock that is fossil fuels is static, it needs to be extracted by labor. This relation is inversed from the standpoint of capital: waterflow is stationary, stock is on the move, in so far as labor can be commanded. Unlike coal, water, light, and air are commons, it is physically impossible to capture them for an entirely exclusive appropriation, such that their use would require planning, coordination, and collective decision-making. In 19thcentury England, waterpower was abundant, cheaper than steam and technically viable. Projects for reservoirs or innovations in terms of water-wheels required skills in engineering and management that would have raised demands on intelligence and education. The introduction of steam allowed for what we would today call « managerial de-skilling », in other words, the steam engine won because it was the less advanced productive force, it had no intrinsic technical advantage at the time of the shift. Standing between the lower and upper levels of the social, steam allowed British capitalists to put an end to a major wave of unionization that was the British factory movement, which secured significant gains for workers and their families even as the British economy went through its first major financial crisis with the crash of 1825 (due to cheap lending). The scarcity of water in Britain never became a matter of concern until today – and British factories were never dependent on wood or other possibly scarce resources. There is thus no natural nor technical explanation for why this transition came about, nor do any of the common economic narratives (neo-malthusian, Ricardian, techno-determinists etc.) fit. Malm’s argument is thus that the capitalist relations of production, which preceded the steam engine, coalesced in a factory system based on waterpower. The incompatibility between them and the flow of energy is what induced the transition. The power of technologies to change the climate has thus followed from their value for their owners as distinct from their non-owners. The birth of the fossil economy in 19th century Britain even coincided with an under-utilization of the commons: water- and windmills closed. As capitalists fled into the isolation of coal, they unfolded a new spatial logic of centralization, producing an abstract space that is at once imminently terrestrial, enabled by concentrated strata of energy that allow for the mobility of capital in space.
As the history of fossil capitalism beyond England shows us, all succeeding mechanizations have not led to less labor – rather, mechanizations have always produced new dependencies on human labor: machines must be produced and manipulated, fuels must be extracted, goods transported (water as an energy source was not produced, whereas coal had to be extracted with labor).
With Malm’s historiography, we can see how this collapse of scales occurred, namely through the creation of an abstract space of capital, through the interface of immobile stocks of energy in need of extraction, serving the mobility of capital just as much as an abstract time. The substitution operative in the transition of fossil fuel is not transhistorical, it is a process that must be maintained and repeated, it is a valence of power, it is never at rest and at once only ever formal. The unintended outcome, the current climate catastrophe, is thus an obvious instance of power, in the double sense of the term.
The timelessness of the stock of fossil fuels became, with the industrial revolution, a prosthesis for the abstraction of time. This prosthetic function is still operative today whenever an argument against the reduction of fossil fuel consumption is countered, as an utter refusal of positionality and situatedness, a « so what » characteristic of the cunning of reason in its capacity of denegation.
Against this, the concept of the Anthropocene was developed and took on a dimension at once descriptive and prescriptive. At first, the concept first attempted a de-naturalization: climate change is now driven by a single species. Yet, when it is immediately bound to an innate human trait, a re-naturalization occurs.
This re-naturalization appears all over in both pop-science laments and scholarship, when global warming is causally tied to either the human use of fire or other species-based attributes, or when there is an attempt, as that of the psychoanalyst John Keene, to attribute global warming to the unconscious belief that « the planet is an unlimited “toilet-mother”, capable of absorbing our toxic products to infinitySally Weintrobe, ed., Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, The New Library of Psychoanalysis (London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 146. ».
There is an enjoyment in immediately jumping across scales: faced with the new protagonist of planetary time, human history is brushed over, subsumed, in what is either a warning or an expression of stasis, a melancholic position. While the ability to manipulate fire was a necessary condition of the advent of the fossil economy, it would be absurd to ascribe the current crisis to it – and worse, it would obfuscate its origins. The question of origins is both impossible and inevitable – and the current concurrence of narratives illustrates both the importance to posit them, and the political implications of such narratives.
To quote Malm, « Capitalists in a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation of the fossil economy; at no moment did the species vote for it either with feet or ballots, or march in mechanical unison, or exercise any sort of shared authority over its own destiny and that of the earth system. It did not figure as an actor on the historical stageMalm, Fossil Capital, 267.. »
Assuming this is true, is a rhetoric that seeks to ground climate change in the attributes of a species not a category error? Intra-species contradictions conditioned the assent of the fossil economy; it was forced upon the rest of society. Ironically, the ability to manipulate fire, a trivial cause in which some seek to ground the advent of climate change, has been one of the main tools to resist it (burning down a machine was punishable by death as soon as the British industry had fully adopted steam). There has not been any democratic deliberation in the institution of fossil fuels.
The latest UN-Climate Inequality Report, published in May 2023, highlights that 75% of the relative losses of income due to climate change will affect the bottom 50% (whereas the top 10% will only bear 3% of the relative losses. The poorest 45 % of humanity generate 7% of current emissions, the richest 7% are responsible for over 50%Lucas Chancel, Philipp Bothe, and Tancrède Voituriez, « 2023 United Nations Climate Inequality Report, » accessed July 11, 2024, https://wid.world/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CBV2023-ClimateInequalityReport-2.pdf..
This widening polarization and worsening condition is not reconcilable with « humankind » as a whole as a geological agent. Population growth, often advanced as a « liberal » argument for the geological role of humanity, increased by a factor of 6.6, whereas emissions increased by a factor of 659 between 1820 and 2010. There is even research suggesting a negative correlation between the twoMalm, Fossil Capital, 268ff..
No other species exhibits a similar internal disparity – humanity is too abstract a category to carry the burden of what has occurred. The displacement from nature into human nature washes over the sociogenic character of anthropogenic climate change. Intra-species division was an integral part of fossil-fuel combustion in the first place, which means we should be extra careful of the transposed nature narrative conveyed here, which smuggles in the present conditions in an attempt to bridge a gap between natural and social sciences that only came about because of capitalist political economies of knowledge and their divisions.
If we were penguins, otters, or platypuses, searching who is responsible for the reduction of our life-world, the perspective of the species would make sense. For us, however, it risks leading to a paralysis that fails to look closely at how much the current historical narratives lack the perspective of climate change – and how this lack is integral to the persistence of the status quo. The logic of deferral characteristic of past pollution, returns in another shape: the species writing a historiography of its inner divisions and their role, would have to be one still engaged in survival.
The concept of the Anthropocene must be defended against such a naturalization and recovered in its prosthetic dimension: what would it mean to think of it as itself historical, to view its use, within this strange present of ours, in the ambivalence that any tool carries? If the concept is meant to serve a critical purpose, it must be guarded against the substantialization of humanity it may invite. While global warming does indeed concern us as a species, blurring the distinction between the social and the natural, the subsumption operative in the concept of the Anthropocene, I suggest, must be considered an invitation to divide anew, to re-fashion our distinctions – and to render them practical. All of us already live in midst of incompatible scales and positions, our lives are filled with abstraction. The newly heightened aporias brought by planetary time must not lead to yet another melancholia – we must invent, joyously, the kind of weapons needed to act.