The end of the end of nature: the Anthropocene and the fate of the human 1 BRONISLAW SZERSZYNSKI Department of Sociology Bowland North Lancaster University LA1 4YT bron@lancaster.ac.uk [Please do not cite without permission. A revised version of this paper will appear in Oxford Literary Review 34 (2) , December 2012 — a special issue on ‘Deconstruction in the Anthropocene’.] Abstract In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as ‘great stone book of nature’, and the Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. Debates about the geological status of the Anthropocene focus on the identification of stratigraphic ‘signals’ that might be being laid down for the geologist-to-come, but I suggest that marking the base of the Anthropocene layer is not a merely technical task but one which is entangled with questions about the human — about the Anthropos of the Anthropocene. Who would be the ‘onomatophore’ of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of Anthropos? I consider a number of ways of characterising the geological force of the Anthropocene – Homo faber, Homo consumens and Homo gubernans. But I then situate this dispersal of the Anthropos into ‘syntypes’ against the background of a more general dispersal of ‘man’ that is occasioned when human meets geology. I do this by bringing into dialogue two works: Foucault’s Order of Things, and Derrida’s Of Grammatology, focusing on their passages about the end of ‘man’ and the end of ‘the book’ respectively. I suggest the becoming geological of the human in the Anthropocene is both the end of the great stone book of nature and the Aufhebung of ‘man’ —both his apotheosis and his eclipse. The Stone Book of Nature There is a minor tradition in Christian and post-Christian societies of making stone books.2 More recent examples can be safely classed as folk art — end-of-day whimsies carved by craftsmen for a relative or friend. But older specimens seem to have had religious significance. Some are open, signifying revelation; but most are closed. Some of the latter were probably blessed by a priest and used in place of a printed bible as a protective amulet, by those who could not afford or even read a printed bible. Some, especially those made in the late eighteenth century, were probably used as a memento mori, a reminder of mortality — or as a memorial to a deceased person, the closedness of the book signifying that nothing more could be added to their story. Others seem to have signified the names of the dead who will be admitted into heaven, a tradition that manifests in both the Old and New Testaments. As the writer of Revelations puts it: ‘And another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. … And whosoever was not found 3 written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.’ Yet there is another kind of stone book, one that can be opened and read. For the nineteenth-century 4 geologist David Thomas Ansted (1814–1880), geology was the reading of ‘the great stone book of nature’. In his book of that name, he argues that the vast knowledge of the Earth lies open to anyone who practises ‘careful personal observation’ and who has ‘an acquaintance with the language of nature’ (5). To such a careful observer, he suggests, the inscrutable closed mass of the earth becomes book-like, both in its readability and in the coherence of the single, unified story that it tells: ‘[t]he earth contains its own history within itself’ (5). And in the stratigraphic record we do seem to see something like a book, the leaves of which ‘are the various 1 and successive layers of earth and rock that make up the whole solid mass laid bare occasionally in the cliff and the quarry, but generally concealed beneath the soil’ (4–5). If so, then this is a book lying on its front, to be read from bottom to top by thumbing through the layers of rock that have been laid down over time, one above the other. These leaves, as they were formed, were at the same time impressed with meaningful signs for the geologist to come. For Ansted, these fossils were the pictures of the great stone book, the ‘picturesque remains of its former inhabitants, now long since passed away’ (5). We might instead want to think of them as writing — writing not on but in the page, writing that will tell our geologist-to-come which page they are looking at, writing that will be made up of just the hard consonants of shells and skeletons — because the vowels of soft bodies and life processes will leave little or no trace, and will have to be filled in by the reader of the stone book like the reader of Hebrew. To extend our metaphor, the great stone book of geology also resembles literal, literary books in the relationships that obtain, both materially and semiotically, between its parts. In the stone book, each mark and each passage of marks gains its wider significance and meaning from its position in ever greater wholes. A literal book is made materially from sheets, folded to make folios, stitched into sections, gatherings and signatures; semiotically, though, it is made from sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters and parts. Our stone book too can be divided into nesting material wholes — stages, series, systems, erathems, eonothems — yet here the material structure coincides with its semiotic structure, since each unit of time-rock can be read to reveal corresponding nesting periods of rock-time — ages, epochs, periods, eras, aeons, each divided by moments of dramatic change in the Earth system. Time thus defines space, and space defines time. Though the pages may be worn, tilted, crumpled, bent, sheared, even inverted, their proper, original, irreversible order can be reconstructed, as if the pages were numbered — as if time thus had the final say over space. Each passage in the great stone book also gains further meaning from its relationship with other 5 marks and passages within the book. As Ansted says, ‘[t]he leaves of the stone book may be carefully conned: what is found in one may be compared carefully with what is contained in another’ (5–6). Furthermore, the stone book had a beginning, and proceeds towards some kind of end — or at least, for now, towards the point at which it is yet being written. And as it proceeds it gains ever more signification for us in both relevance and pace: ‘the illustrations, ancient and modern, may be studied; and if, in this as in many other books, the early pages should seem dry and barren of incident, still, as we advance, the plot thickens, and the denouement, when reached, interests us all directly and personally’ (6). Of course, Ansted would say that he is merely deploying the image of nature as a book as a fanciful metaphor. He was writing during the time that geology was establishing itself as a modern science, and breaking with the explicitly theological approach that had previously dominated the reading of the natural world. But there are reasons to take Ansted’s literary image more seriously than he himself appears to. For a start, as Victor R. Baker argued in his Presidential address at the in 1998 Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, there are grounds for classifying geology as a semiotic science. Unlike physics, which is nomothetic, dealing with general laws, geology is ideographic, dealing with particular entities such as outcrops 6 and rock formations. And, in ways that parallel other ideographic disciplines such as medicine, rendering these particularities meaningful involves the reading of signs in order to infer what underlies them, in both 7 space and time. And the idea of nature as a book has a long history, particularly in European Christianity, with the book of nature often described as a complement to the book of scripture, with both equally authored by God. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida talks about this tradition of nature as divine writing, and specifically as a book.8 The main example that Derrida uses, and to which he applies his deconstructive approach, is that of the Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who insists that in order to find truth you must return to the ‘holy voice of nature’. In book IV of Emile, Rousseau’s novelistic treatise on how to educate a child, is the famous section that got the book banned — the ‘Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar’. Derrida quotes the passage where Rousseau has his fictional priest say ‘I looked for truth in books: I found in them nothing but lies and error.’9 By contrast, he goes on to say, ‘[t]hat of nature lies open to every eye: It is 2 from this sublime and wonderful volume that I learn to serve and adore its Divine Author. No person is excusable for neglecting to read in this book, as it is written in an universal language, intelligible to all mankind’.10 Derrida locates the idea of the inerrant book of nature in the context of a wider tradition that distinguishes between fallen and pure writing — between literal writing, in the form of marks on surfaces made by people; and metaphorical writing, inscribed in the soul and in nature. There is thus writing that is human, fallen, finite, artificial, instituted, fallible, often deceptive, that takes us away from presence; and then there is writing that is natural or divine, the self-grounding meaning towards which words point. It is this latter notion of a pure writing that Derrida sees as lying behind the notion of presence, of the voice of which writing is only a fallible copy. But the idea of a pure writing is also assumed by the idea of ‘the book of nature’, an idea that still haunts the project to create a scientific knowledge of nature that is immune to the vagaries and errors of literal, fallen writing. But of course Derrida rejects any final separation between natural and artificial writing. This is why he also rejects semiology, the science of how signs link marks to meanings, in favour of what he calls grammatology, the investigation of how signs are always haunted by the trace of another sign that is not present, how meaning is unsettled by différance, and how the unity of the book is thus shattered.11 Such ideas, combined with Michel Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ account of the development of modern thought in The Order 12 of Things, will help us to understand how it is that the stoney mass of the Earth came to resemble a book in human thought in the ways I have described above. But they will also help us to think about what happens when the human starts to be written into the geological record — what kind of coming-to-an-end of the great stone book of nature this might represent, and what this might mean for our understanding of the human itself. From the Holocene to the Anthropocene For there is increasing discussion about whether we may have entered a new unit of geological time, one in which human beings are such a major determining force on the Earth that the unit should be named after them — a ‘denouement’ that would indeed ‘interest us all directly’, to use Ansted’s words. Up until now, the latest chapter in the book of geochronology has been the Holocene, the most recent division, or epoch, of the Quaternary period. The earlier epoch in the Quaternary was the Pleistocene, starting about 2.588 Ma13, with its oscillation between glacial and interglacial periods. The Holocene, which started about 12 Ka, around the time that humans started clearing forests for agriculture, has been a long period of unusually clement and stable climate.14 But since the late nineteenth century a number of authors attempted to articulate the idea that the system of the Earth might have entered a radically new state, one in which humans had become a major planetary force. Thus, for example, we had in turn Stoppani’s notion of the ‘anthropozoic era’ (1873), Vernadsky, Le Roy, and Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noösphere’ (1922), Revkin’s ‘anthrocene’ (1992), and Samways’s ‘homogenocene’ (1999). But it was the suggestion in 2000 by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen that we are now not in the Holocene but the ‘Anthropocene’ that has gained the most scientific attention.15 In 2008 a proposal was presented to the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London that the Anthropocene be made a formal unit of geological time, arguing that, in many of earth’s processes, the influence of humans — prosthetically extended through technology and fossil-fuel energy — is eclipsing that of the rest of nature. To become such, it has to be recognized as such by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) of the International Union of Geological Sciences. Since then, members of an Anthropocene Working Group set up by the ICS have been gathering evidence for the Anthropocene, and argue that ‘we have entered a distinctive phase of Earth’s evolution that satisfies geologists’ criteria for its recognition as a distinctive stratigraphic unit’.16 But as the debate about the status of the Anthropocene continues, it is important to realise that the truth of the Anthropocene is less about what humanity is doing, than the traces that humanity will leave 3 behind. In terms of environmental ethics, one might say that geology is brutally consequentialist — it does not matter what one does, or why one did it, just what consequences it will leave behind. Geological accountability all depends on the account that is laid down in the great book —now not in heaven, but in the rocks of the Earth. Thus geologists — true to geology’s semiotic character — talk about the Anthropocene in terms of ‘signals’ laid down for future geologists. So, in a number of papers Zalasiewicz et al. argue for the acceptance of the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch on the basis of: a distinct lithostratigraphic signal — a trace in the actual composition of the rock being formed — produced by: dramatically changing patterns of sedimentation due to the alteration of rivers and coastlines; and the creation of novel strata — what geologists call ‘made ground’, such as cities and transport infrastructures, mines, wells and boreholes, excavated or in-filled ground, and preserved 17 artefacts; a distinct chemostratigraphic signal, comprising layers of pollution and altered geochemical composition, for example: that produced by the doubling of reactive nitrogen on the earth’s surface and in the oceans due to the industrial Haber-Bosch process; the accumulation of novel compounds from industrial processes and nuclear fission; and the effects of increased CO2 in atmosphere and oceans, both directly on the formation of minerals and indirectly via its effects on temperature, sea level and biota; a distinct biostratigraphic signal, generated by: the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures; the alteration of marine biotic communities by trawling, especially the bottom trawling of continental shelves; increased rates of species extinction, species migration and invasive species; and the effects of anthropogenic chemical change on ecosystems; 18 and finally a distinct ‘sequence stratigraphic’ signal, produced by a potential large sea-level rise. But even supposing the Anthropocene is accepted as a new unit of geochronology, the question remains of how the date of commencement of the new epoch should be determined. There are two ways of officially settling points of transition between units of geological time. The one usually used for very early points — where, as Ansted says, the pages of the stone book are ‘dry and barren of incident’, before the emergence of the copious visible signs of life that give the present Phanerozoic (‘visible life’) aeon its name — an absolute age is used, known as a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age. For example, it is decreed that the Proterozoic eon that preceded the Phanerozoic commenced at 2,500 Ma. However, for more recent transition points, the preference is for a ‘golden spike’ marker set at a particular point in a particular sequence of strata at a particular location — a GSSP (Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point). The golden, round, visible end of the spike typically has the letters GSSP, the name of the geological time unit of which it marks the start, the year of its placement, and a line that marks the exact plane of transition in the rock. These spikes are thus like permanent bookmarks in the stone book of nature, marking the boundary between its parts, chapters and sections. The ICS, which formally defines units of the Geologic Time Scale, has since 1977 placed more than 60 19 such golden spikes. For example, in 2005 a spike was placed in a formation in Australia to mark the base of 20 the Ediacaran period (so far the most recently designated unit of geological time) at about 635 Ma. Some spikes are at the first or last appearance of a fossil creature; some are just placed at a crucial change in the character of the rock; some are at a chemical layer — for example, the bottom of the Ediacaran Period is defined by a chemically distinctive carbonate layer left after last great snowball earth, when the whole Earth had been frozen during the Cryogenian period. But if a spike were placed to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene, at what point in geological time should it be set? The standard model follows Paul Crutzen’s idea that the Anthropocene was inaugurated around 1800 with the advent of fossil-fuelled industrial modernity, and the population explosion this made possible. By contrast, palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman claims that it started with the mass clearing of forests for agriculture 8,000 years earlier — that without this transformation of the Earth’s surface there would have been ice ages since then, and much of Canada would today still be frozen. The stratigraphers will try to determine which of these is the most important point; so far, Crutzen’s position has the day, though the 4 different stratigraphic signals listed above will all make themselves felt at very different timescales, and often in complex patterns of diffusion across the globe.21 But there is at least one more possibility: that we may still just be seeing the birth pangs of the Anthropocene proper. After all, the human is the first geological force to become conscious of its geological role. So maybe the Anthropocene in all its geohistorical specificity really starts when humans become aware of their role in shaping climate, and this awareness shapes their active relationship with the environment. Steffen et al. suggest something along these lines with their idea of stage 3 of the Anthropocene. For them, stage 1 started with the industrial revolution around 1800 and stage 2 consists of the period since 1945 during which a ‘Great Acceleration’ in population growth and economic growth has produced a dramatic intensification of the human alteration of Earth systems. Stage 3 will commence when awareness of anthropogenic change of the Earth system starts to affect society’s decision-making processes. However, they acknowledge that it is as yet unclear whether this putative third stage of the Anthropocene would take the form of a deliberate reigning in of our technological impact on the environment, or a dramatic radicalisation of it within a logic of planetary management.22 The latter option, promoted enthusiastically by commentators such as Mark Lynas,23 has been explored by the free-market Breakthrough Institute in the United States and in an online debate initiated by the New York Times on 23 May 2011. During the latter, commentators such as the ecologist Earle Ellis and the journalist Ronald Bailey of the libertarian Reason magazine celebrated the idea that the ‘bad Anthropocene’ of the last two centuries may be superseded by a ‘good Anthropocene’ — or, as Cameron Keys of Arizona State University calls it, the ‘Greater Anthropocene’ — as humanity’s awareness of its geological consequentiality prompts it to take conscious control of planetary processes using high technology techniques such as genetic modification and geoengineering. So maybe the Anthropocene proper is still to come, and its character still to be determined. But more fundamentally, however, perhaps there is something intrinsically odd about asking where this particular golden spike should go. Is its appropriate position a technical matter, to be determined by objective tests? Or does it depend in some sense on our understanding of the human — of the Anthropos of the Anthropocene? Furthermore, to whom is the plaque-like end of the spike addressed, and when is it to be read? If by present humanity, is it a badge of pride or of shame? If by some future observer, is it an invocation, the summoning into being of the God Species, that must grasp the vocation of planetary management? Or is the implied audience an imagined future geologist? Is the spike thus more similar to Carl Sagan’s gold-anodised aluminium plaques that were sent off on the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft in 1972 and 1973 on their voyages out of the solar system, addressed to (scientifically literate) extra-terrestrials? Or to the signs and sculptures being designed to warn future inhabitants of the earth — who may or may not have written language — of the dangerous presence of nuclear waste? And where will the top of the Anthropocene layer be? Can there be a top? Or is this the last layer, the end of layers — a chapter that renders the book of geology both impossible to continue and impossible to complete? The ‘Anthropos’ of the Anthropocene But whose name would we be putting on the Anthropocene golden spike if one were ever placed in the great stone book? What is this species which is supposed to have become so consequential for the planet that it may have a unit of geological time named after it? Some vocabulary from the practice of biological taxonomy may be helpful here, concerning the relationship between a species name and individual specimens. While the name of each species refers to all of its members, certain members have a privileged relationship to that name, in that they are used as agreed reference points for the species’ characteristics. Such members are known as ‘onomatophores’ — name-bearers. If a species has only one specimen that acts as an onomatophore, the latter is known as a ‘holotype’, but if there is more than one, each of these are called ‘syntypes’. Finally, if one syntype is then selected to act as the sole onomatophore, then it becomes a lectotype (from the Greek lektos, ‘chosen’).24 5 In these terms, ‘type’ is used in the sense of an example that somehow exemplifies the group to which it belongs. But of course the selection of something as ‘typical’, as capable of standing (in) for a wider group, is never innocent, and could always have been made otherwise. This was clearly illustrated by the controversy over the male and female Caucasian figures chosen to represent humanity on Sagan’s ‘Pioneer plaques’. So who would be the onomatophore of the Anthropocene? Who would carry the name of Anthropos? Let us consider a number of ways of characterising the maker of worlds that is the geological force of the Anthropocene. Homo faber The first candidate as onomatophore must surely be Homo faber, the human being as maker, who in Hannah Arendt’s terms acts according to the goal-directed, means-ends logic of utility.25 Out of the endless flux of nature Homo faber carves an enduring ‘world’, an ensemble of objects and structures that serve as a stable setting for human affairs. Homo faber is the ‘end of nature’ to which I refer in my title: that being in which the rest of nature can appear to find its purpose and meaning. Homo faber, the human as fabricator, not only acts as the conqueror of nature, removing material from its location and from the cycles of growth and decay in order to make enduring things.26 It is in respect of Homo faber that the idea of the end of nature can even arise. Living things qua living things are so caught up the flows and cycles of nature that in respect of them it makes no sense to separate means and ends. It is only Homo faber, who raises the question of utility, for whom the distinction becomes intelligible, and who can imagine themselves as elevated into the status of that being for whom the rest of nature exists.27 If Homo faber is a plausible candidate for the name-bearer of the new geological epoch, it is because in the Anthropocene the boundary of the world of made things seems to being extended to include the whole geosphere. For example, 30–50% of the land surface has been transformed by human action, more than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind and more nitrogen is now fixed synthetically and applied as 28 fertilisers in agriculture than is fixed naturally in terrestrial ecosystems. It is estimated that since the 1950s the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Productivity (HANPP) — the proportion of the global biosphere’s 29 yearly biomass flow that is used by humans — has increased from 3% to around 24%. The Anthropocene, 30 then, might indeed appear to be the final triumph of Homo faber, of man the maker, as geophysical processes are brought from the realm of necessity into the realm of utility, channelled into the household of the Anthropos. Homo consumens However, perhaps Homo faber can be absolved of either blame or credit for the Anthropocene — at least until now. The ‘bad’ Anthropocene of the last two centuries has arguably not so much been ‘made’ directly through means-ends agency, but brought about indirectly through another kind of activity or agency — that of consumption. The term I am using here, Homo consumens, was coined by Erich Fromm and used in a number 31 of his works, but we could also follow William Catton and use ‘Homo colossus’ to capture the way that contemporary humans are able to consume exhaustible resources at an increasing rate and turn land over to 32 ecologically unproductive uses. For Catton, Homo colossus is a detritovore, like the worm or the slug — in this case, able to consume the ‘the transformed organic remains called “fossil fuels.”’ Like other detritovore communities, that also ‘depend on exhaustible accumulations of dead organic matter for their sustenance’, and thereby ‘lack the life-sustaining biogeochemical circularity of other kinds of ecosystems’, Homo colossus is caught in a ‘bloom and crash’ cycle. Recall that many of the ‘signals’ that collectively signify the Anthropocene in the stone book are not about made things, about permanence or utility. They are about processes, and alterations in processes — the fluxes and flows of substances such as CO2, SO2 and NO; the migrations of species; the transformation of ecological communities; accelerated erosion and denudation. What is in the ascendant is thus not the durable world of things made by Homo faber, but impermanence and change. Arendt herself argued that in modern 6 society Homo faber had been eclipsed: rather than a world of enduring objects being created by finite, purposeful activities, humans and things are being absorbed into an endless round of production and consumption where questions of utility — of what is being done for the sake of what — become as impossible to answer and as irrelevant as they are in nature. And if the ‘bad’ Anthropocene has indeed been this grotesque parody of the cycles of nature — a growth without decay, a piling up of things which are at once consumed, a technological metabolism which turns nature into commodities without replenishing nature’s self-reproductive powers33 — then it has been not the apotheosis but the eclipse of man as Homo faber: the end of the end of nature. It would thus be Homo consumens, that other-than-human assemblage of humans, technology, fossil fuels and capitalist relations, that should be crowned as the onomatophore of the Anthropocene. Homo gubernans But perhaps Homo faber might yet come into his own? Many proponents of the coming ‘good’ or ‘greater’ Anthropocene certainly suggest that scientific and technological progress are such that humanity will before long be able to ‘engineer’ the planet, to take control of key planetary systems in order to optimise them for human habitation and prevent ecological collapse. 34 And it is true, for example, that the picture of the ‘maker of climate’ which currently dominates the contemporary discourse of climate engineering is an idealised figure who knows in advance the form that they want the climate to take; who can identify the process whereby they can provoke the climate to take it; who can carry out that process and bring the matter of climate into the desired form; and for whom any uncertainties are exogenous factors that are in principle capable of being eradicated by future technical refinements. 35 Homo faber, it appears, will return to impress a desired form onto the pliant matter of the Earth system, and create a stable home for the Anthropos, whose name he can then claim to bear. Yet the Earth system is not simply a passive material that can be induced to take a prespecified form; it is a metastable entity with its own intensities, inconsistencies and potentialities, and in continual formation, 36 characteristics which would radically condition any act of making. The actions of any maker of the Earth system would thus be determined not just by human will, but also by the resistances and inclinations of matter — like the craftsman of preindustrial societies who, because of the simple tools at their disposal, had to learn 37 and perform repetitive gestures and actions in order to complete any technical operation. So a third candidate for the onomatophore of the Anthropocene suggests itself — one we might call Homo gubernans: man the helmsman. As Michel Serres summarises it, a helmsman is an agent whose will ‘acts on the vessel, 38 which acts on the obstacle, which acts on his will, in a series of circular interactions’. Even in the throwing of a clay pot, the final shape of the pot — and of the potter’s hands during the act of shaping — is determined by the nature of the clay as much as by any image in the potter’s mind; how much more so when the matter 39 being sculpted is a tangle of resonating dissipative structures in constant becoming. Serres argues that the ‘governing’ which is the core activity of the politician is becoming less and less like that of the shepherd of 40 beasts, and more and more like that of the helmsman; this would only be intensified if humanity attempts to modulate the dynamics of nature’s becoming on a global scale. In a good Anthropocene, the intentions of ‘man’ will inevitably become conditioned by those of the matter he attempts to steer, as he progressively entangle himself in the potentialities of matter. Homo faber, Homo consumens, Homo gubernans – we could doubtless multiply these syntypes further, these candidates for the onomatophore of the Anthropocene. But whose name is ‘Anthropos’? Can a stable lectotype be chosen? Or should they all remain as syntypes, in tension with each other? In the final section of my paper I will situate this dispersal of the Anthropos into syntypes against the background of a more general dispersal of ‘man’ that I argue is occasioned by the Anthropocene. I will do this by bringing into dialogue two works: Foucault’s Order of Things, and Derrida’s Of Grammatology, published in 1966 and 1967 respectively. In particular, I will focus on two messianic passages in these books, about the end of ‘man’ and the end of the 7 book respectively, because they will help us think about what happens when human meets geology in the Anthropocene. But first we have to understand the way that Foucault’s thought can illuminate the emergence of contemporary ideas of the geological, in order to prepare the ground for my linking of the fate of the stone book and that of ‘man’. The archaeology of geology A useful starting point is the collapse in the late eighteenth century of what Foucault calls the ‘Classical episteme’ or way of knowing that had been characteristic of the scientific revolution, and its replacement by a very different, ‘Modern episteme’. The Classical episteme was a science of order, based on visible similarities and differences, analysis and recombination, and its paradigmatic form was a static table that orders the 41 similarities and differences operating in any given field. So, for example, the study of living things took the form of a natural history, a classification of plants and animals based on observable characteristics. Crucially, the Classical way of thinking was not strongly historical; there may be change in nature, but this is only against the background of a timeless grid of potential identities and oppositions. Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ approach to knowledge— as lying in superposed, internally coherent but incommensurable historical strata, rather than developing continuously over time — can shed light on the transformation in ways of thinking about the Earth in that period. For example, Martin Rudwick describes five more-or-less distinct sciences of the earth that were practiced in the late eighteenth century, all of which can 42 be seen as operating within Foucault’s Classical episteme. The first three were all branches of natural history, attempting to extend the descriptive, taxonomic approach that had been so productive in the study of living things to the mineral world. Firstly, the indoor science of ‘mineralogy’ was a science of collections and classifications, arranging rocks and fossils according to their supposed ‘natural kinds’ rather than linking them to the time and place of their formation. Secondly, ‘physical geography’ was an outdoor practice, in which fieldwork was not a temporary stage but the main activity. It studied major visible features of the earth’s surface, atmosphere and oceans — mountains, hurricanes, and so on — but was still a science of classification rather than causal explanation or historical understanding. Thirdly, ‘geognosy’ (literally, ‘earth knowledge’) — or for some Italian practitioners ‘anatomia della terra’, demonstrating the parallels with anatomical practices at that time — extended the descriptive classificatory gaze downwards, often through fieldwork in mines. It used visual techniques to comprehend the three-dimensional mass of mountains, dividing rock masses, for example into the lower ‘primaries’ without any clear strata, seen as foundational, the layered ‘secondaries’, formless ‘superficials’ and so on, but priority here was to classification and structure, rather than to anything like the geohistorical understanding of stratigraphy that was to emerge in the nineteenth century. The other two sciences were more modelled on Newton’s revolution in classical mechanics. The fourth, ‘physique de la terre’, ‘earth physics’, sought to derive causal explanations for the specific features described by the three sciences above — stretching the scientific imagination of time, but still seeking ahistorical explanations. The fifth, ‘geotheory’, consisted of a number of competing, abstract, speculative theories of the Earth as a system. Modern geology depended as much on the epistemic shift away from this Classical episteme that Foucault describes as do the disciplines of philology, economics and biology on which he concentrates. Foucault describes the Modern episteme as employing a very different spatial metaphor to the Classical — not a flat table that arranged entities according to their visible characteristics, but a new language of surfaces and depths: beneath the surface separateness and complexity of visible things, such as different animals or different languages, lie hidden unities of function. But each discipline that the new episteme made possible also understood its subject matter as radically historical; understanding something now involved locating it in the specific, contingent historical development proper to its domain. The existence of ‘man’ — including even the knowledge that is possible for him — is thus seen as conditioned by a number of historical positivities — of organic life, of language and of economic production — which cannot be subordinated to human chronology or will. 8 While geology poses some interesting challenges to Foucault’s account of the rise of the human sciences that cannot be gone into here, it nevertheless clearly belongs to the Modern episteme. Georges Cuvier, as instrumental in the emergence of modern geological science as he was biology, adopted the geotheoretical term ‘geology’ for his idea of a science that would build historical accounts of the Earth’s structure through patient empirical inquiry, replacing both taxonomic geognosy and speculative geotheory in one stroke. This new, geohistorical approach to the Earth drew on the practices of erudite and antiquarian history, which used textual and non-textual artefacts to reconstruct human history as a contingent, intrinsically unpredictable sequence. Applied to the Earth, this made possible a new reading of the Earth’s ‘anatomy’, in terms not of taxonomy or universal causal laws, but of a history of the Earth — a history that extends in deep time, independent of human history or even human existence. The key concepts of the new geology illustrate how far we have travelled from the Classical sciences of the Earth. For the earlier, taxonomic and causal earth sciences, the key entities to be identified were ‘natural kinds’ such as basalt; for geohistorical geology, by contrast, the crucial entities were the events of geohistory, but also specific ‘formations’, each to be understood in terms of its own contingent, situated history.43 The new geology also progressively gathered the Earth together as a system, the diversity of its visible, surface features understood as the result of slow, invisible unifying forces such as sedimentation, volcanism and tectonics. It is as much due to the Modern-episteme features of modern geological practice described above — the centrality of the geological ‘gaze’ in the field, the linear but contingent deep history, the constant move from surface differences to deep unities — as it is the page-and-writing structure of strata and fossil through which the Earth seems to write its own history, that makes the stone book such a powerful metaphor for the Earth as it is experienced today. But can we put ‘man’ in that book, and expect it still to function as a book, as a totality of signification? And will ‘man’ in the sense we have come to understand him survive the encounter either? Will there really be an Anthropos in the Anthropocene? Geology and the end of ‘man’ When Derrida foretells the end of the book in Of Grammatology he does not mean empirical books, or writing per se. By ‘the book’, Derrida means ‘the idea of a totality ... of the signifier’, ‘a natural totality’. The book, for Derrida, is the enclosure within and through which the good, pure writing that I mentioned earlier is kept good and pure; it has to be ‘enveloped in a volume or a book’, to be rendered a complete, coherent whole. The book in this sense is for Derrida thus ‘profoundly alien to the sense of writing’, to ‘ its aphoristic energy’, and to ‘difference in general’ (18). Derrida’s announcement of the end of the book is in some sense perfomative, bringing about what it names through the inauguration of the science of grammatology. And with the end of the book, the end of the idea of a unified semiotic whole which guarantees the relation between signifier and signified, there also comes the end of the self-present human subject, understood as speech, as pure writing. ‘The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book’ (86), and the death of the book would be ‘a new situation for speech, of its subordination within a structure of which it shall no longer be the archon’ (8). What of the stone book of nature, the one that we imagined had been opened by geology? ‘Man’ as subject position – as the natural being whose role it was to know nature — was the condition of possibility of geology as he was of the other sciences of the Modern episteme. It was ‘man’ who was at once determined by the positivity of the things that surround him, but also interpellated by them as that ‘being whose nature … is to know nature, and itself, in consequence, as a natural being’.44 But in the Anthropocene ‘man’ has become a destratifying force, the différance that explodes the book of geology, and thereby its condition of impossibility. The taking up by ‘man’ of a geological object position — his pressing into geological service, a becomingmineral, to be contemplated by the geologist-to-come — is not so much interpellation as interpolation — the process of inserting new material within and falsification of the original text of the great stone book of nature. As the Anthropos turns from reading to writing the stone book of nature, this is a ‘being written’ that seems to disrupt the order and meaning of all the other pages of that ‘written being’. What we as humans put 9 down in the stone book is the disruption of other layers, a rifling through the pages, as we drill, mine and extract. We are volcanic, creating extrusive and intrusive formations that break the logic of superposition and burst the relation between space and time in the stone book. Just as magma fills fissures and then cools to create ‘dikes’ — thin sheets of igneous rock that lie discordantly across existing strata — we create pages at strange angles, generating a ‘Rubik’s book’ that would need to be read through in all directions simultaneously. The Anthropos will thus ‘lie’ in the strata in a different sense, in a different plane, not ‘true’ — as a perjurer, disrupting the semiotic logic of geology as much as its materiality. Let us now turn to Foucault’s famous, comparable passage about the end of ‘man’, which considers ‘man’ as a particular historical figure that was constituted by the shift from Classical to Modern thought at the close of the eighteenth century. Only in the Modern episteme, he suggests, can ‘man’ appear not just as a represented being — as Carl Linnaeus classified Homo sapiens within his table — but as a representing being, one who is at once conditioned by the positivities of life, labour and language and thereby able to comprehend them. But at the end of The Order of Things Foucault asks , if ‘man’ was constituted by such a shift, can he just as easily end? If the modern episteme were to crumble, ‘as the ground of Classical thought did at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.45 The event which Foucault anticipated in such messianic tones is not the Anthropocene, but it can help us understand the latter’s significance. Yet now the fate of ‘man’ in the Anthropocene is not that he will be erased, but that he will be made immortal, as a trace preserved forever in the rock. To use Arendt’s language, with the Anthropocene, mortal humans are being promised a this-worldly, earthly immortality, through which they would be ‘at home in everlastingness’, and would ‘find their place in a cosmos where everything is 46 immortal except themselves’. But, in contrast to Arendt’s classicism, in which the medium of the potential immortality of deeds is that of language and collective memory, here, moral significance is inscribed in the rocks — in the marks that our landfills and mass extinctions will leave in the fossil record. The coming layer of the Anthropocene, which as we speak is being built up across the globe, is itself a memento mori like the stone books which I discussed at the beginning of this paper: a reminder of our incipient minerality. This becoming geological of the human is a ‘denouement’ which is both our apotheosis and our eclipse. The Anthropocene is the relève, the Aufhebung of ‘man’ – that is, an elevation which is at once a 47 negation. ‘Man’ will be lifted up, to the status of onomatophore, made relevant. But he will also be relieved, made to stand down, his status as the end of nature over. And just as Aufheben, ‘to lift up’, means both to preserve and to abolish, so too can we say that the Anthropos of the Anthropocene will be ‘laid down’ in both senses — at once instituted and rendered inoperative. The Anthropocene strata will thus be both laid down and built up, and both instituted and abolished, in the same gesture. And as Homo faber, Homo consumens or Homo gubernans, ‘man’ reaches his ‘end’, in all the equivocality that that word also possesses — end as telos 48 and as terminus. Just as human meets geology in the Anthropocene, disrupts and disperses the pages of the stone book, the Anthropos is also dispersed into a series of syntypes, multiple subject and object positions: as the end of nature, the maker of the world, now relieved from his work, made irrelevant; as the hypertrophy of nature’s becoming, the detritovore that booms and crashes; and as the helmsman, who feels the pull on his tiller as nature’s becoming rushes past his rudder. But also as the lay-er — who writes, who lays down, inaugurates the strata; as the lay-ee, that which is written, is laid down; and as the subject who must read – who is necessary to convene the layers into a great book and give it its unity and meaning, but who can no longer do so. Geology may be our fate, but our encounter with it disrupts our understanding both of geology and of the human. So if we are to discern a ‘geoethics’ for the Anthropocene, it cannot take the form of a good, pure writing, enclosed in and stabilised by the volume of the book of nature, or by the self-present human subject. It will take place in and be conditioned by the much more unstable volume opened up by this multiple dispersal of the human. 10 Notes 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented to the conference Natura Loquens: Eruptive Dialogues, Disruptive Discourses, organised by the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment (EASLCE) at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, 27–29 June 2012. I am very grateful to Tim Clark, Tim Dant, Ursula Heise and participants at the EASLCE conference for extremely helpful comments. The paper has also greatly benefited from conversations with Nigel Clark, Kathryn Yusoff and Maialen Galarraga, also at Lancaster University, about a potential ‘geophysical turn’ in social and political theory. 2 Many thanks are due to Gionni Digravio of the University of Newcastle, Australia and Ian Berke of San Francisco for sharing their knowledge and interpretations of these curious objects. 3 Revelations 20: 12, 15. 4 David Thomas Ansted, The Great Stone Book of Nature (London: Macmillan & Co., 1863). 5 ‘To con’ is an archaic verb meaning ‘to study’ or ‘to examine carefully’. 6 Victor R. Baker, ‘Geosemiosis’, Geological Society of America Bulletin, 111:5 (1999), 633-45. 7 Robert Frodeman, Geo-Logic: Breaking Ground between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 107; Andrew Graciano, ‘“The Book of Nature Is Open to All Men”: Geology, Mining, and History in Joseph Wright’s Derbyshire Landscapes’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68:4 (2005), 583-600, 590–2. 8 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976). 9 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 134. 10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius: Or, a Treatise of Education, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson, 1768), 182. 11 Derrida, Of Grammatology. 12 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002). 13 ‘Ma’ means millions of years before the present and ‘Ka’ thousands of years before the present. 14 That this has been the period in which human civilization emerged and flourished is probably not a coincidence — see Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Smith, Tiffany L. Barry, Paul R. Bown, Peter Rawson, Patrick Brenchley, David Cantrill, Angela L. Coe, Andrew Gale, Philip L. Gibbard, F.John Gregory, Mark W. Hounslow, Andrew C. Kerr, Paul Pearson, Robert Knox, John Powell, Colin Waters, John Marshall, Michael Oates and Philip Stone, ‘Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?’, GSA Today, 18:2 (2008), 4-8, 5. 15 P.J. Crutzen and E.F. Stoermer, ‘The "Anthropocene"’, IGBP Newsletter, 41 (2000), 17-8. 16 Zalasiewicz et al., ‘Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?’, 6. 17 Simon J. Price, Jonathan R. Ford, Anthony H. Cooper and Catherine Neal, ‘Humans as Major Geological and Geomorphological Agents in the Anthropocene: The Significance of Artificial Ground in Great Britain’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369:1938 (2011), 1056-84. 18 Zalasiewicz et al., ‘Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?’; Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Richard Fortey, Alan Smith, Tiffany L. Barry, Angela L. Coe, Paul R. Bown, Peter F. Rawson, Andrew Gale, Philip Gibbard, F. John Gregory, Mark W. Hounslow, Andrew C. Kerr, Paul Pearson, Robert Knox, John Powell, Colin Water, John Marshall, Michael Oates and Philip Stone, ‘Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369:1938 (2011), 1036-55. 19 http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/geoscientist/geonews/page10267.html. 20 The top of the Ediacaran at 542 Ma marks the bottom of the Cambrian period and hence of the Phanerozoic. 21 Zalasiewicz et al., ‘Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene’. 22 Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’, Ambio, 36:8 (2007). 23 Mark Lynas, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans (London: Fourth Estate, 2011). 24 ‘Type’ itself has an original meaning of an image (Latin typus) or impression (Greek tupos). 25 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). To be consistent with the rules of Linnaean binomial classification, I am capitalising the first word in each of my lectotypes, such as Homo faber. 26 Arendt, Human Condition, 139. 27 Arendt, Human Condition, 156. 28 Crutzen and Stoermer, ‘The "Anthropocene"’. 29 http://www.eoearth.org/article/Global_human_appropriation_of_net_primary_production_(HANPP). 30 I am following the convention of using ‘man’ and ‘he’ to refer to these mythic versions of the human, though a feminist counter-reading would also be very fruitful. 31 For example, Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). 11 32 William Robert Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 274, 169. 33 Teresa Brennan, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), 5. 34 For example, Lynas, God Species. 35 Maia Galarraga and Bronislaw Szerszynski, ‘Making Climates: Solar Radiation Management and the Ethics of Fabrication’, in Christopher Preston (ed.), Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management (Lexington, MA: Lexington, 2012), pp. 211-25. 36 Galarraga and Szerszynski, ‘Making Climates’. 37 Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode D’existence Des Objets Techniques, third edition (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 77–9. 38 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, tr. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 42. 39 Ilya Prigogine and Paul Glansdorff, Thermodynamic Theory of Structure, Stability and Fluctuations (New York: Wiley, 1971). 40 Serres, Natural Contract, 18. 41 Foucault, Order of Things, 81. 42 M. J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 59–131. 43 Rachel Laudan, From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 6. 44 Foucault, Order of Things, 341, 338. 45 Foucault, Order of Things, 422. 46 Arendt, Human Condition, 19. 47 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 109-36, 121. 48 Derrida, ‘Ends of Man’, 134. 12