The Anthropocene as Speculative Space for Environmental Negotiations of Human-Nature Histories

• In Event: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Understandings of history play a crucial role in constructing our futures, as propositions for actions to alleviate a crisis depend on how we perceive the historical trajectories and processes that led to it. This central position of historical understanding strikingly manifests in the enormous, almost instant spread and establishing in academic scholarship of the Anthropocene as an epochal construct to help get a grip on our historical situation. It proves even more pronounced since there hardly is a clear agreement on a definition of the Anthropocene, despite all attempts of limiting it first and foremost to a geological concept. Instead, various disciplinary discourses appear to construct their very own versions. Owed to this indistinctive attraction of the concept and its productivity, extending also to its criticism and counterproposals, I will argue in my paper how the Anthropocene can be perceived as far more than an analytic, even speculative analytic concept to be merely affirmed or rejected. Instead, I suggest that the Anthropocene as a concept and the discourse around it present an obfuscated, quasi-speculative space, or that it functions as a quasi-speculative hook or anchor for ambiguous readings of the crisis. I thus propose to perceive and read it as a speculative space of negotiating our historical relationship to nature. In my paper, I will first elaborate further theoretically on the Anthropocene as mediation of our current historical environmental situation. Secondly, I will offer a selective critical analysis of how the Anthropocene discourse negotiates human-nature histories since its emergence in 2000. Such an analysis of the Anthropocene concept and the way it is being discussed and discursively constructed promises to offer a better understanding of the way culture perceives, experiences and negotiates its historical relationship to nature, with consequences for how it opens up possible futures.

Author

• André Krebber, University of Kassel