Introduction
Meditation on the self certainly knows that something essential is decided if the question of who we are is asked or if it is not only held off but is altogether denied as a question.
Unwillingness to ask this question signifies either a shrinking back from the questionable truth about the human being or a propagating of the conviction that who we are has been decided for all eternity.Footnote 1
In January of 2013, The Smithsonian published an article that posed in its title two seemingly innocuous questions: ‘What Is The Anthropocene and Are We In It?’.Footnote 2 It answered these questions in ways that have since become commonplace in the social sciences and International Relations (IR). First, it described the Anthropocene as a new ‘buzzword’ referring to a profound shift in geological timescales and humanity's relation to the Earth. Quoting scientist Will Steffen, the article noted that ‘we are now having undeniable impacts on the environment at the scale of the planet as a whole, so much so that a new geological epoch has begun’.Footnote 3 Thanks to the wanton impact of ‘human-kind’ and ‘human beings’ upon their planet, the safety and stability of the Earth's Holocene epoch of the past 11,700 years – the period of geological time in which ‘humanity’ thrived and its civilisations developed – is coming to an end. Hence, the combination of ‘man’ (anthropos) and ‘cene’ (new) into the neologism of the Anthropocene epoch. Second, the article highlighted the ongoing debates over whether or not ‘we’ are actually in the Anthropocene at all. On the one hand, some scientists argue that a new epoch must be established upon clear changes in particular geological and stratigraphic conditions (such as alterations to rock layers).Footnote 4 On the other hand, some scientists argue that a new epoch such as the Anthropocene embodies a far more expansive global transformation than what is captured by stratigraphy, pointing towards the emerging concept and object of the Earth System as a single holistic totality. Far beyond the compartmentalised layers of geology or the isolated environmental systems previously studied by scientists, the Anthropocene, to this latter group, is therefore the story of an emergent and total Earth system that is now changing beyond all recognition.Footnote 5
With its direct emphasis on globality, the fate of the Earth, and the potential self-destruction of the entire human species and modern civilisation as we know it, it is ‘perplexing’ that IR has largely ignored both of these questions for nearly two decades.Footnote 6 Only recently is the Anthropocene finding a home in studies of world and geopolitics. Some scholars enthusiastically promote the immediate adoption of the concept so as to reckon with its looming and catastrophic implications.Footnote 7 Others, however, remain cautious about normalising the Anthropocene, questioning whether or not it is a Pandora's Box that conceals unexamined yet powerful philosophical or metaphysical problems that have not been sufficiently explored before warranting its celebrated use.Footnote 8
What is interesting, however, is not merely the differences between these groups – from stratigraphy to the Earth System, or from post-humanist thought in IR to its critics – but rather, what shared philosophical arguments undergird and support each of these debates and perspectives. Indeed, throughout each is the common and shared assumption that ‘We’ – planetary humanity, the human species, mankind, the West, academia, nation-states, etc. – are a single group or collective, now careening together over the edge of the Holocene's precipice into the Anthropocene's future of a shared, planetary, permanent state of crisis and uncertainty. Interestingly, the shared concept of this planetary ‘We’ has gone without sustained interrogation or examination in IR's recent ‘Anthropocene turn’. Once we are attuned to its presence, however, the use of this concept and discourse of the ‘We’ appears uniformly and ubiquitously across debates and disciplines discussing the Anthropocene and its associated crises such as anthropogenic climate change. If IR scholars are now arguing that ‘We cannot survive without accepting the cosmopolitan and enmeshed nature of this world. We are an array of bodies connected and interconnected in complex ways that have little to do with nationality’,Footnote 9 and if IR is indeed taking its cue from Earth Systems scientists declaring that we – humanity – have ushered in ‘a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined’,Footnote 10 then an important and unexamined question emerges: whom or what exactly is this ubiquitous global ‘We’ of humanity that is now supposedly planetary in scope and scale? As Nigel ClarkFootnote 11 cautions, ‘who exactly the “we” is in this [discourse] raises questions of its own – inviting us to consider the historical and geographical depth of the human experience of living through environmental extremes.’ It is the goal of this article to answer this question in an exploratory fashion, hoping to shine some light into the cavernous depths of a nascent discourse of planetary humanity, in the hopes that others may explore them in the future.
If ‘We’ are causing climate change and the Anthropocene epoch, then who or what is the ‘We’? This article argues that the omnipresent use of the term ‘We’ in Anthropocene and climate change discourse does not arise automatically from the new spatial and temporal scales these crises reveal as operating beyond the limits of individuality or local geographies. It is not a flippant, vestigial by-product conjured by scholars thinking in international or planetary terms. Nor is the ‘We’ an innocuous or neutral concept or word, serving as a placeholder for ‘humanity's’ new role in the Anthropocene. Rather, this article argues that the new assertion and inclusion of all humanity into a shared planetary ‘We’ indicates something larger and more profound, something that lingers beneath the surface of the Anthropocene's eminent claims to existential and global catastrophe. Rather than a mere simple word or turn of phrase, the ‘We’ encapsulates a deepening shift in the way that a human self represents itself, ontologically and epistemologically, in the world today. In other words, the planetary ‘We’ points to a transformation in the fundamental historical constitution of human selfhood; a shift away from subjectivity as we know it, into something new: from the subjectivity of the individual, Cartesian ‘I’, to the subjectivity of the collective, planetary ‘We’.
Ontologically, ‘We’ are now all cast into this scenario of future uncertainty as human organisms co-habiting (and co-creating) the crisis of our changing Earth system. In sum, ‘We are no longer insignificant.’Footnote 12 In geologic time and space, ‘we’ are making a new origin and ending story for our entire species.Footnote 13 Epistemologically, ‘we have become potent enough to change the course of the Earth yet seem unable to regulate ourselves’,Footnote 14 and so in fields such as IR ‘[w]e don't need more reports or policy debates. We need new practices, new ideas, stories, and myths.’Footnote 15 We need, according to these accounts, a new, non-binary, non-Cartesian subjectivity. As Clive HamiltonFootnote 16 stresses, if one accepts the basic premise of the Anthropocene – that a profound and unpredictable transformation of an Earth system that ‘We’ have always taken for granted, awaits us – then basic forms of human subjectivity and agency will shift as we enter this uncharted existential territory. The Anthropocene's ‘injection of human will into the functioning of the Earth System’ means that ‘humankind is no longer the anomaly, the freak of nature. We become the key to nature-as-a-whole’.Footnote 17
This article explores how the current discourse of the Anthropocene implies this shift in subjectivity, from the Holocene's individual ‘I’ to the planetary anthropos as ‘We’. It proceeds in three steps. First, an overview of the concept of the Anthropocene will be provided, describing why some scholars assert it to be a paradigm shift: because of the technological rigour of Earth System Science (ESS), which ‘replaces our current scientific conception of the Earth as a whole and supersedes traditional geographical, geological and ecological thinking (and all compartmentalised scientific disciplines)’.Footnote 18
Second, the philosophical foundations of the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ are considered by analysing the effect of ESS upon subjectivity using Martin Heidegger's metaphysics of technology.Footnote 19 Although some scholars have long criticised the Anthropocene's portent of a homogenous planetary humanity,Footnote 20 these critiques focus mostly on the specific ethical, historical, and economic actors that have caused the Anthropocene to occur, aiming to highlight disparities in economic and political power relations and bring guilty parties to account. What the ‘We’ actually is, on a philosophical level, remains ignored. Hence, this article contributes a new perspective to IR and the social sciences by describing how this transformation of subjectivity, certainty, and technology was anticipated decades ago by Heidegger as a great metaphysical danger.Footnote 21
Third, using Heidegger's insights into technology and subjectivity, the article describes the transformation of human subjectivity from the Cartesian ‘I’ to the ‘We’ of anthropos by examining the recent work of historian Dipesh ChakrabartyFootnote 22 and philosopher Clive Hamilton.Footnote 23 Each thinker claims that ‘We’ are entering an ‘epochal consciousness’ in which humanity will become reconceived collectively as a geological species stretching across the deep time horizon of the Anthropocene. Importantly, their accounts make explicit for us what lies implicitly in every discussion of the Anthropocene crisis: an unprecedented existential and temporal uncertainty concerning the future of human subjectivity, and of the Earth itself. With the future of the individual ‘I’ uncertain, selfhood as a planetary ‘We’ gains in certainty, familiarity, and effect.
Finally, the article concludes with a brief warning about the risks of this emerging political subjectivity of the ‘We’. It cautions that, rather than foster any cosmopolitan democracy or planetary stability, moving from the I to the We foments a divisive and exclusionary rationality of planetary identity politics. As Amartya Sen argues ‘The implicit belief in the overarching power of a singular classification can make the world thoroughly flammable.’Footnote 24 And in the case of the Anthropocene, there is no singular classification more powerful than its claim to be an agent encompassing all of humanity itself. The recent ‘flammability’ of global politics is perhaps due, therefore, not only to rising global temperatures wrought by the firepower of fossil fuel combustion,Footnote 25 but also to an underlying shift in the boundaries of a global-technological political subjectivity that seeks to absorb every human into a homogenous classification. As identity moves upwards from the ‘I’ to larger group identities, it fosters expanding and conflicting tribalisms in turn.Footnote 26 Aspiring towards the ultimate certainty of the ‘We’ of humanity, therefore, there exists a danger that must be countered.
I am a person, We are a species
Since its inception by Crutzen and Stoermer,Footnote 27 the concept of the Anthropocene has exploded across the social and natural sciences. It spreads through what Timothy W. LukeFootnote 28 describes as its ‘tremendous framing capacity’ to work as an all-purpose noun, verb, and adjective, combining a myriad of places, spaces, times, forms, economies, cultures, nations, political systems, etc., into one unified master-concept. This concept describes the destructive and transformative impact that ‘humanity’ or anthropos as a collective whole is now wreaking upon the Earth. The impact of anthropos is so extensive that an entirely new geological time period is beginning.Footnote 29
In IR, the ‘framing capacity’ of the Anthropocene is typically used to upend the tired theoretical paradigms of the discipline. From realism to liberalism, IR theories tend to assume a background condition of stability upon which sovereign states and their international system of relations proceed indefinitely.Footnote 30 These accounts illustrate how the sovereign state was long ago constructed on Holocene assumptions about (states of) nature and political borders that will be no longer viable in the Anthropocene's transforming environment of instability and change.
As Eva Lövbrand et al.Footnote 31 note, since the Anthropocene emerged in the natural and environmental sciences, it accidentally privileges scientific and quantitative narratives that are at odds with more interpretive and qualitative approaches that are needed to fully understand the sociopolitical behaviour of anthropos. As its ‘entangled relations between natural, social and cultural worlds’Footnote 32 are untangled, they unfurl in disparate and contradictory ways that make the Anthropocene far from a settled scientific concept.Footnote 33 It is thus viewed through lenses of global capitalism as capitalocene;Footnote 34 through gendered and toxic masculinities as manthropocene;Footnote 35 and through the eyes of the disempowered victims forced to suffer its early consequences in forced migration as the Oliganthropocene.Footnote 36
Despite these many differences, Lövbrand et al. highlight how ‘there is a distinct story emerging from the global environmental change research community that is affecting how the conversation on the future of Earth currently is unfolding.’Footnote 37 To get at the heart of this story, they isolate three conceptual pillars of the Anthropocene: First, a ‘post-natural ontology’ that posits humanity as a global-scale force of Nature. Second, a ‘post-social ontology’ that merges all human difference and plurality into a single notion of planetary anthropos. Third, a ‘post-political ontology’ that frames the Anthropocene as an unprecedented crisis of instability and change, moving beyond the purview of normal Holocene politics. Taken together, Lövbrand et al. claim that these create the demand for critical social science to analyse the plural relations of race, class, gender, society, economy, etc., that comprise the pages of the Anthropocene's story, thereby broadening the three narrowing scientific boundaries framing the ‘post’-ontologies.
The danger here is the assumption that the conceptual foundations of the Anthropocene's ‘scientific community’ are somehow different than those of the social science community. On the explicit surface of research subject matter and technique, this appears obvious. Yet, what if, on a deeper and more implicit level, the emerging story of the Anthropocene is written on the same historical and philosophical level that scaffolds both the natural and the social sciences? Will not applying ‘critical’ social science to the scientific Anthropocene crisis, simply add more fuel to the fire?
Although accounts of post-natural and post-political ontologies have been provided elsewhere,Footnote 38 this article answers this question by outlining the shared metaphysical grounds of the social and natural sciences. It does so by unpacking what Lövbrand et al. call ‘post-social ontology’, the flattening of the most distinct features of human beings into the generalised planetary humanity of anthropos; what is identified above as the ‘We’. As Andreas Malm succinctly laments, ‘This is one of the most common tropes in the [Anthropocene's] discourse: we, all of us, you and I, have created this mess together and make it worse each day.’Footnote 39 Indeed, it is common to read statements such as: ‘Humanity does not act on the backdrop of an unchangeable nature but is deeply woven into its very fabric, shaping both its imminent and distant future.’Footnote 40 Even IR's most critical manifestos succumb to framing the ‘We’ – planetary humanity – as this planetary agent of change and locus of action in Anthropocene discourse. ‘The planet has long been that space which bears the scars of human will’, note Burke et al., for ‘in transforming the world into our world, we damaged and transformed it to suit our purposes.’Footnote 41 David P. Turner's recent book sums up this tendency well, capturing the new agency being attributed to the We:
Until very recently, our species had only a minor influence on the global biogeochemical cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen, and other elements critical to life. However, in the past century we have become one of the dominant forces in those cycles. We are increasing the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration by burning fossil fuels and converting forest land to cropland.Footnote 42
The point here is that literatures across IR, the social sciences, and the natural sciences embrace this post-social ontology, moving from individual, local, and international society outwards and upwards to the planetary We as the new agent to blame. Notably, in most cases, they frame anthropos as a species.Footnote 43 From prominent economists,Footnote 44 to postcolonial historians,Footnote 45 to philosopher-ethicists,Footnote 46 scholars not only describe the We as the human species, but actively promote and advocate for this interpretation. For instance, famed biologists such as E. O. Wilson assert that ‘[w]e are smart enough and now, one hopes, well informed enough to achieve self-understanding as a unified species’, which is apparently the most ‘realistic and pragmatic’ approach to the Anthropocene.Footnote 47 ‘To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human’, notes Chakrabarty,Footnote 48 and yet this imagination is possible across the ‘deep’ time of the Anthropocene only in one way: as making the human agent akin to other lifeforms on this planet that are traceable and cognisable across geologic epochs and stratigraphic layers as a species. Hence why ‘[t]he story of humans-as-just-another-species cannot withstand the arrival of the Anthropocene’, claims Clive Hamilton, because the ‘new epoch is the ultimate demonstration that, however networked into the natural world we are (as the post-humanists have shown), humans do stand out’.Footnote 49 And so, the common ‘trope’ that we are special as a species that has caused climatic change; we have caused the Anthropocene; we are harbingers of global ecological catastrophe.
This is not to say that the ‘We’ is entering our lexicon without protest. Scholars troubled by this planetary species-being have voiced concern. Matthew Lepori lambastes what he calls the ‘species-talk’ of the ‘We’, us, humanity, etc., as ‘dangerous’. Why? ‘In species-talk, all living and dead humans are absorbed into a single body (e.g. humankind) that becomes the universal subject of history.’Footnote 50 This universal not only conceals the complex struggles and uneven power-relations that have shaped contemporary social and political order, but most importantly, it prevents the attribution of responsibility to the specific humans, states, corporations, and economies that spawned the Anthropocene in the first place.Footnote 51 As Luke argues, ‘blaming human species-being in these renewed global histories of excessive greenhouse gassing marvellously mystifies the moves of a few people who accrue great material gain for themselves by blaming all human beings as “the we” responsible for rapid climate change in the Anthropocene’.Footnote 52 Indeed, when viewed through the lens of this type of historical materialism, ‘the ecological crisis is not the result of a universal subject (the human species, We) but rather the creation of a universal object, the reduction of nature to resource or material to be extracted and manipulated for the sake of the economy’.Footnote 53 Malm sums up this species-talk well: by framing ‘humankind as one big villain driving the train’, thinking in terms of the We, humanity, and species, ‘only induces paralysis. If everyone is to blame, then no one is.’Footnote 54
In IR, as noted above, Lövbrand et al. similarly reject this post-natural and post-social ontology of a homogenous planetary We. Despite this, however, they fail to ask what the ‘we’ actually is, or what effect it might have on us conceptually and subjectively.
The We – planetary humanity conceived of as a species – is thus assumed away as a secondary symptom or vestigial result of a deeper structural and economic malady; one that scholars believe can be cured by paying greater attention to micro-level variables that can link the natural and social sciences together by accounting for agency, economic and social responsibility, ethics, plurality and difference, religion, etc. Yet, if the We is indeed – as these authors imply, but do not explore – more than a flippant word or contingent effect of capitalism, but a deeper concept packed with hidden meaning, then a more intensive analysis of the increasingly ubiquitous ‘We’ is required.
It is here where Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology and subjectivity is helpful. Although little attention in IR has been paid to his Contributions of Philosophy: (Of the Event) (1989), it builds a complex philosophical and metaphysical answer to what Heidegger argues is the most dangerous – and hidden – question of contemporary politics: ‘who are we?’.Footnote 55 Heidegger argues that the We contains within it a new and troubling representation of selfhood, politics, community, and how it is possible for a human being to exist in a shared world. ‘Unwillingness to ask this question’ of who or what ‘We’ are, for Heidegger, ‘signifies either a shrinking back from the questionable truth about the human being or a propagating of the conviction that who we are has been decided for all eternity.’Footnote 56 In other words, the more comfortably and expansively that ‘we’ describe ourselves as a shared global group, the greater this hidden metaphysical danger becomes. Why?
As Richard Polt notes, in the We, Heidegger sees a point of culmination, a bubbling over of the underlying tendency of Western metaphysics to make human selfhood into a subjective Cartesian ‘I’ that calculates and measures itself always in relation to ‘objective’ things and events.Footnote 57 The We remains a subjectivism, but one now turned away from the ‘I’ towards the community or group as the new bedrock for its identity. Hence, the danger here is the same plaguing every modern ideology and worldview, from Liberalism, to Communism, Marxism, and even Nazism: lumping individual subjects together within some type of larger, homogenous, circumscribed whole, as creatures, class, race, nation, etc. ‘The most dangerous [worldviews and ideologies] are those in which the worldless “I” has apparently given itself up and devoted itself to something else that is “greater” than it, and to which it is assigned as a piece or member. The dissolution of the “I” into “life” as people – here an overcoming of the “I” is prepared at the price of the first condition for such an overcoming, namely, reflection on Being-a-self and its essence.’Footnote 58
Is the dissolution of the I into the We of the Anthropocene, precisely this danger cautioned by Heidegger? To answer this question requires a comparison of the way in which the metaphysics of the I and the We are made thinkable today in our (supposed!) Anthropocene condition: through the digital complexities of ESS.
The Earth as system
As noted above, there remains substantial debate concerning how best to approach the role of anthropos – humanity – in the Anthropocene: through the stratigraphic approach or the Earth System Science approach.Footnote 59 On the one hand, scientists such as Mark A. Maslin and Simon L. LewisFootnote 60 emphasise the importance of synchronous global anthropogenic signatures deposited in the geological stratigraphic record. For instance, they identify two potential boundaries for being a Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), or a ‘Golden Spike’ marking a human-induced change that is visible across the Earth's ice, rock, glacier, or marine sediment. First, 1610 (the ‘orbis’ drop of global atmospheric CO2 concentrations due to the extreme death of human populations and biota wrought by the colonialisation of South America by the ‘Old World’). Second, 1964 (the global deposition of radionuclide carbon-14 atoms from nuclear bomb tests). However, this emphasis on the formal designation of a globally synchronous golden spike is challenged by philosophers and ethicists now viewing the Anthropocene as ‘the very recent rupture in Earth history arising from the impact of human activity on the Earth System as a whole’.Footnote 61 For this latter group, the environmental conditions determining the stale formality of a rock or sediment layer simply pales in comparison to a ‘radically new’ and ‘paradigm-shifting’ form of scientific inquiry: Earth System Science (ESS). ESS, for this latter camp, illuminates a new understanding not only of the Earth, but of reality itself.
ESS studies the Earth as a single integrated planetary system in which ‘life’ – the biosphere – is an active component, and in which one species in particular – homo sapiens, or anthropos – has acquired the power to alter and threaten the biotic and abiotic processes upon which all (human) life depends.Footnote 62 ESS has become a powerful and highly interdisciplinary field ‘that aims to build a holistic understanding of our evolving planet’ by building upon the geosciences and ‘recent system-level thinking applied to the climate and the biosphere’.Footnote 63
In general, ESS synthesises four areas of research: (a) the social understanding of ‘spaceship earth’ as a self-contained entity; (b) global databases and global scale phenomena that demand collaboration for the integration of data; (c) enhanced computing power, allowing for increasingly complex models to be used and disseminated; and (d) ‘global observation systems [that] allow scientists to apply concepts there were only previously applicable at sub-system, regional or local scale to the Earth as a whole. The Earth itself is a system.’Footnote 64
With the advent of the Anthropocene, stratigraphic and Earth System approaches have become intertwined and today integrate and feed into each other in complex and symbiotic ways.Footnote 65 This article places greater emphasis on ESS than stratigraphy for three reasons. First, although they are intertwined, ESS and its aim at achieving holistic planetary integration remains the more dominant approach of the two. ‘It is no accident that the proposal for the Anthropocene Epoch arose out of the Earth System science community, in particular out of the synthesis project of the IGBP [International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme].’Footnote 66 The initial concept of the Anthropocene itselfFootnote 67 first emerged from scholars modelling the complex dynamics of atmospheric and other Earth systems, applying them to terra firma. Second, agreeing with Gerard Delanty and Aurea Mota, although geologists insist on identifying a specific Golden Spike in the GST, ‘It may be objected that this preoccupation of geologists with pinpointing an exact date for the emergence of the Anthropocene is pointless for purposes other than demarcating boundaries in geological time scales.’Footnote 68 Echoing Chakrabarty, Delanty and Mota note that ‘For human history, which does not have the golden spikes of geology, this [precise hierarchical dating] is clearly impossible.’ Hence why the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’ describing humanity's progressively increasing impact upon the entire Earth system after WWII, takes prominence over Maslin and Lewis's attempt to entrench 1610 or 1964 as specific and momentary stratigraphic golden spikes.
This ties into the third aspect that makes ESS highly relevant to the ‘We’. As a computerised integration of increasingly complex systems, ESS aims to expand and assimilate every external object into itself, striving for complete totality or holism. It is thus opposed to the maintaining of compartmentalised, plural, fixed, and regimented hierarchical boundaries (including those demarking sovereign nation states, citizens, and their unique cultures and attributes). As phrased succinctly in 2001's standard textbook for ESS, the IGBP's Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure: ‘Science has crossed the threshold of a profound shift in the perception of the human-environment relationship, operating across humanity as a whole and at the scale of the Earth as a single system.’Footnote 69 The point here is to calculate the parameters of a planetary humanity and integrate it with Nature in a new form of unity: not religious or spiritual unity, but scientific and technological uniformity. There is no differentiation under this totalising and collectivising gaze, and hence, as its critics note, the allocation of responsibility is subtly cast aside as all humans are included regardless of their actual culpability. ‘If not every human is responsible for bringing on the Anthropocene, every human is destined to live in it.’Footnote 70 With no divisions between nations, cultures, languages, histories, or worlds, the ESS's ‘paradigm-shifting’ rationality thus works by assimilating everything – from academic disciplines, to modes of economic production, to religions – into the same synthetic and holistic planetary system.Footnote 71
What is fascinating here is how the popularity and spread of the ‘We’ and ESS is based so subtly, yet crucially, upon this technological drive for increasing calculation and assimilation. This point bears further exploration, because Clive Hamilton and other ESS advocates confidently assert that it is actually ESS's drive towards precisely this integrated planetary totality that gives it true novelty. This, however, is misleading in two ways. First, although it is indeed common to read how the Anthropocene is an all-encompassing spatial and temporal force, expanding beyond all previous political and conceptual boundaries – a hyperobject, in the words of Timothy MortonFootnote 72 – the expanding planetary scale of this hyperobject depends fundamentally on corresponding advances in ESS technology: ‘the Anthropocene concept cannot legitimately be separated from Earth System science, and that Earth System science represents a recent paradigm shift in the earth and life sciences’.Footnote 73 Without ESS, the Anthropocene loses its force as a hyperobject.
Second, these emphatic declarations of a new and urgent type of totalising globality are not novel or original. In fact, these claims have been a regular feature of discourses of so-called ‘modernity’ for over one hundred years. As Jo-Ann Pemberton has traced in Global Metaphors: Modernity and the Quest for One World, ‘the trend of thought from the early twentieth century onwards was in the direction of a planetary commonwealth’, which reflected ‘a spiritual yearning for wholeness however much it was defended in technical-rational and utilitarian terms’.Footnote 74 Indeed, even a cursory glance into historical literature reveals today's ‘trope’ of the Anthropocene's encroaching globality to echo many narratives of the past. For instance, H. G. Wells himself was fond of the concept of a world state engendered by Nature, arguing for an inevitable ‘larger synthesis’ of the world: ‘The whole trend of forces in the world is against the preservation of local social systems, however greatly and spaciously conceived’, he argued.Footnote 75 Instead, the larger world synthesis was something so spatially and temporally new, that its culmination ‘may work out to its end vastly, and yet at times almost imperceptibly, as some huge secular movement in Nature’.Footnote 76
The twentieth century produced a myriad of similar claims that ‘mankind’ or humanity was moving towards a holistic planetary commonwealth. Some accounts based their world-state on fears of a post-Second World War nuclear holocaust,Footnote 77 while others made prescient bio- and geo-physical claims for globality.Footnote 78 This is interesting because Clive Hamilton and Jacques GrinevaldFootnote 79 berate any contemporary scholar that likens the Anthropocene to bygone concepts or precursors, such as Vernadksy's or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere. For Hamilton and Grinevald, these comparisons suffer from ‘precursitisis’, a scholarly disease that entails symptoms of seeking illusory historical precursors to modern crises. By mistakenly privileging past semantic and historical concepts, precusititis deflates the power of the Anthropocene by reading it as a progressive and continuing development or stage of humanity, rather than the Anthropocene's sudden rift or rupture in the Earth System that is revealed only though ESS.Footnote 80
Despite Hamilton and Grinevald's claim of ESS and the Anthropocene as a complete paradigm shift or rupture, it is disconcerting how some of the ‘precursi’ they debase echo the Anthropocene nearly verbatim. For example, made more than eighty years ago, W. I. Vernadsky's comments on the noosphere (1945) as a geological planetary totality are at times eerily similar to contemporary Anthropocene discourse. ‘The noosphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet’, Vernadsky declared. ‘In it for the first time man becomes a large-scale geological force.’ With this geological force, ‘[t]here arises the problem of the reconstruction of the biosphere in the interests of freely thinking humanity as a single totality. This new state of the biosphere, which we approach without our noticing it, is the noosphere.’Footnote 81 Vernadsky also asserts that ‘the face of our planet, the biosphere, is being sharply changed by man, consciously, and even more so, unconsciously’, through the process of humanity discovering newfound agency as a geological, ‘single totality’.Footnote 82 It is ironic that these claims so closely resemble much of Clive Hamilton's many assertions of the We's totality as species, writing, for instance, that ‘humanity’ is now fostering ‘the arrival of a new stage in geohistory, blending human will with geological processes, … The fact that we are now able to recognize this implicates us and our world-making capability more deeply in the totality.’Footnote 83
Hamilton and Grinevald are indeed correct to note clear differences between the Anthropocene and the noosphere. First, Vernadsky was referring to a teleological state of progress where mind (noos) and biosphere fuse, creating a new stage of cosmic evolution. Second, there was obviously no ESS in 1938 at the time of Vernadsky's writing, so Hamilton and Grinevald repeat ad nauseam the fact that ‘there were no precursors to the notion of the Anthropocene and that there could not have been because the concept [ESS] (put forward in the year 2000) is an outgrowth of the recent interdisciplinary understanding of the Earth’ revealed as ‘the Earth system’.Footnote 84 However, in their quest to cure the Anthropocene of its precursitis by reifying ESS, these authors ignore the many clear similarities that should warrant more attention, and could yield interesting insights into the conceptual foundations of the Anthropocene that are otherwise taken for granted.
What is therefore novel in ESS and Anthropocene discourse is not, as these scholars currently claim, a holistic and totalising geological, spatial, and temporal scope. As past literature ranging from Vernadsky to Pemberton makes abundantly clear, the absorption of individuality or plurality into a planetary totality is nothing novel.Footnote 85 While Vernadsky lamented the fact that ‘the natural laws of the biosphere’ were intruding into the free, ‘everyday life’ of the individual, Footnote 86 sixty years later Chakrabarty repeats this combination of history, geology, biology, and humanity, merging it once more into totality: ‘Climate change is an unintended consequence of human actions and shows, only through scientific analysis, the effects of our actions as a species.’Footnote 87 So, what is it that now motivates the Anthropocene's portent of totality and catastrophe to revolve around this new discourse of humanity, the species, or the ‘We’?
It is not simply the presence of ESS, nor the concepts of systemic and/or planetary species or totality, that makes the discourse of the Anthropocene so effective. As we know, ‘To portray certain social relations as the natural properties of the species is nothing new.’Footnote 88 ‘Dehistoricizing, universalizing, eternalizing, and naturalizing a mode of production specific to a certain time and place – these are the classic strategies of ideological legitimation.’Footnote 89 Rather, what is new is the underlying manner in which the technologies of ESS shape, delimit, and construct the concepts of climate change, Nature, and humanity as thinkable; not simply as ‘species’, but the even more subtle collective ‘We’ that is now brought together and made intersubjective through computerized algorithms integrating every quantified system of Nature.Footnote 90 What is new is the increasingly technological foundation of the concept of the Anthropocene.
We begin to recognise this digital totality by outlining the history of the concept of the Anthropocene. In the 1980s, IGBP scientists realised that the global form of knowledge required to understand the entire Earth as one single integrated system did not yet exist. Thus began ‘one of the largest scientific projects ever undertaken, one that require[d] us to think about our planet in an entirely new way’.Footnote 91 Indeed, what plagued and hindered climate scientists throughout the 1970s and 1980s was not only rudimentary computer technologies, but a lack of international integration of the data these technologies produced.Footnote 92 Hence, the IGBP embarked on ‘the largest, most complex, and most ambitious program of international scientific cooperation ever to be organized’, fostering ‘a revolutionary shift in the scientific view of Earth, comparable to the sixteenth-century discovery by Copernicus that the Earth orbits the sun’.Footnote 93 The ‘revolution’ emerged here not from the holistic aim to cover the globe – as noted, an ancient aspiration – but in its unparalleled integration of international computational systems now using coeval forms of data. In other words, what was novel in this new study of the Earth system was its use of a single form of technological representation that could finally be disseminated to, and thought by, all involved.Footnote 94 This was the new quantitative mathematical language of Nature upon which the ESS was built. Paul N. Edwards hits upon a key point in his claim that ‘[v]irtually everything we know about the Anthropocene as a geophysical, ecological, and social phenomenon’, ‘comes to us from scientific knowledge infrastructures built in the 20th century.’Footnote 95 The infrastructure of ESS is that of computer data generated from a wide variety of systematic monitors – ranging from in-situ observations and measurements, to Global Climate Models (GCMs) and Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) – being combined into a form of ‘infrastructural globalism’.Footnote 96 Without this technological globalism of computerised data, there would be no ESS.
The tension produced in ESS is that its technological ‘datafication’Footnote 97 excludes the social and qualitative facets of human existence; traits such as history, culture, language, religion, politics, and anything unable to be calculated within ‘macroeconomic optimization paradigms’.Footnote 98 It then doubles-down on predicting the future behaviour of anthropos based on macroeconomic models, creating a basic but important problem: ‘Associated problems of parameterizing social dynamics, such as individual behaviour, governance and macro-economic shifts are profound and probably intractable over the near future. Complex dynamical systems are inherently unpredictable – especially when they include humans.’Footnote 99 In other words, the more ESS calculates the future behaviour of anthropos, the more uncertain anthropos actually becomes, since humanity's agency as the We is not easily amenable to quantification in the present, let alone decades and centuries into the future.Footnote 100
This places ‘uncertainty’ front-and-centre in attempts to predict the future behaviour of the human species and the Earth System. Explicitly, we see it in the famous Planetary Boundaries model: ‘Much of the uncertainty in quantifying planetary boundaries is due to our lack of scientific knowledge about the nature of the biophysical thresholds themselves, [and] the intrinsic uncertainty of how complex systems behave.’Footnote 101 Implicitly, this uncertainty goes even deeper,Footnote 102 gluing the pieces of the global ‘We’ together using the technological infrastructure of ESS as a new form of certainty: ‘we must embrace a multi-species, multi-disciplinary action plan. And we must do it now. We cannot unravel time and restore lost species to life, but we can fight for this planet we call a home. What other choice do we have?’.Footnote 103 The collective planetary ‘We’, in other words, appears as a new object of certainty in the unpredictable globality of ESS and the Anthropocene. As this article will now argue, the certainty of the ‘We’ is no mere discursive invention. It represents a metaphysical and technological understanding of the Earth and humanity – replete with a new representation of selfhood – that moves the ‘We’ beyond previous understandings of the world state, planetary commonwealth, or spread of Western modernity.
The metaphysics of our planetary (un)certainty
It is becoming certain in IR and the social sciences that ‘We’ are destroying the Earth. That we are causing climate change, and now, that we are entering the Anthropocene epoch. Important questions thus arise: what role do ‘I’ play in this catastrophe ‘We’ are creating, and what relation does the individual ‘I’ have to the planetary ‘We’?
It is a common practice for scholars to simply assume that the Cartesian ‘I’, human consciousness, and ‘subjectivity’, are the exact same thing.Footnote 104 This is a mistake. The concepts of the Cartesian I and the planetary We are different metaphysical possibilities or forms of selfhood. For Heidegger, ‘metaphysics’ is nothing magical, mystical, or anti-scientific. It describes the unique and specific conceptual ‘grounds’ of an age, ‘in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it [metaphysics] gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed’.Footnote 105 Metaphysics, in other words, refers to what IR scholars label as the constitution of our political and ‘social episteme’,Footnote 106 or the intersubjectively shared boundaries of thought and action that allow members of state's society to function cohesively together. Metaphysics shapes and underpins a self's being-in-the-world, by placing humans within a shared ‘cultural paradigm’.Footnote 107 As different variants of the self, the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ emerge from the same underlying, shared, historical, understanding of reality – what Heidegger calls a ‘metaphysics of presence’.Footnote 108 How?
As Polt has described it, a metaphysics of presence ‘pictures the human situation in terms of the subject, the object, and a representational connection between the two’.Footnote 109 The human subject, as a Cartesian I, represents and measures itself in relation to external objects in the world. Things a self sees as existing externally from itself, as objects, therefore have an ‘object-ive’ presence to a subject-ive self. Hence, this metaphysical ‘subjectivism’ of presence is one in which the self conceives of itself as an ‘I’ of subjectivity, ‘presenting itself with the object by representing it’, or picturing the object to itself – literally, re-presenting objects back to itself as subject.Footnote 110
Essential to understanding Heidegger's reading of the Cartesian (and hence, modern and Western) metaphysics of the I and the We is his definition of the subject as subiectum. It is a translation of the ancient Greek word hypokeimenon: ‘The word names that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself.’Footnote 111 In other words, the Greek ‘subject’ was never a thinking human subjectivity. The Greek subiectum was whatever thing or entity was apprehended by a human self's senses, as ‘something lying before from out of itself, which, as such, simultaneously lies at the foundation of its own fixed qualities and changing circumstances’.Footnote 112 Crucially, prior to modern times, the subject was not the human self's own observing and measuring of its ‘objective’ circumstance. Rather, the subiectum referred to the fundamental grounds for what entities were entering into Being and thought.Footnote 113 The point here is that the ‘subject’ has not always been the human self, and hence ‘subjectivity’ has not always been the ‘I’. ‘This metaphysical meaning of the concept of subject [hypokeimenon] has first of all no special relationship to man and none at all to the I.’Footnote 114
‘Certainty’ first became aligned with the human self when the ancient subiectum shifted away from the capacity of the human senses to reveal being(s), to the Divine Word of God as put forth in medieval Christian doctrine. Truth no longer lay in the revealing of the presence of things, but in ‘the claim of man to a fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritatis (self-supported, unshakable foundation of truth, in the sense of certainty)’.Footnote 115 Truth lay in scripture, and certainty within the pious self. Hence why the ‘history of modern mankind, … was mediately prepared by Christian man, who was oriented toward the certitude of salvation’.Footnote 116 However, it was the philosophy of René Descartes that transformed our understanding of ‘truth’, moving it away from the certainty of salvation found in Christian doctrine, towards something new: certainty of the human self. ‘The essence of the modern age’, wrote Heidegger, ‘can be seen in the fact that man frees himself from the bonds of the Middle Ages in freeing himself to himself.’Footnote 117 This ‘freeing’ is not accomplished through mere Cartesian doubt of the senses, which is conjured up in Descartes's famous phrase, cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Instead, Descartes's truly revolutionary move was to make the subiectum into the human self, assimilating the certainty of the subject with the ‘I’.Footnote 118 Now, the self, as subiectum or subject, can be certain of re-presenting external and objective being(s) back to itself, as subjective representations. ‘It means simply this: to be subject now becomes the distinction of man as the thinking-representing being. The I of man is placed in the service of this subiectum … Certainty is binding for every I as such, i.e., for every I as subiectum.’Footnote 119 The Cartesian ‘I’, therefore, was here made coterminous, and has since become conflated with, subjectivity as self-certainty.
What does the metaphysical structure of the ‘I’ of subjectivity have to do with the Anthropocene? The subjectivism of the ‘I’ shares with modern science and technology the same metaphysics of presence. It is this subjectivist metaphysics that is accelerating and culminating in advanced technologies such as ESS. As Heidegger stresses, it is a ‘deceptive illusion’Footnote 120 that modern science and technology – ranging from machinery, to quantum physics, lasers, nuclear reactors, computers, and even ESS – are instrumental or applied sciences, somehow beyond or different from the everyday workings of human thought. On the contrary, what makes the ‘I’ as subiectum ‘technological’ is the manner in which both science and the I represent or ‘reveal’ being(s) in the world: as external objects made knowable through calculation, quantification, measurement, and finally, representation back to the self as objects to a subject. Here, ‘truth’ is the scientific representation and measurement of external objects linking the self to its world.
Importantly, the subject's ‘picturing’ or re-presentation of objective reality back to the ‘I’, is what Heidegger calls our metaphysical world picture.Footnote 121 Despite its name, the ‘world picture’ has no spatial relation to the scale of the Earth or the globe, nor to actual pictures of the world, nor concepts of globality. Instead, ‘the world picture’ refers to the metaphysical state in which contemporary subjectivity, as an I, imagines or ‘pictures’ the world as an external object, to be re-presented back to subjectivity.Footnote 122 Certainty becomes the security of technological representation; the self-certain I. Yet, this world picture depends upon an increasingly orderable, objective, mathematical representation of a ‘nature that reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remains orderable as a system of information’.Footnote 123 Both technology and subjectivism, therefore, posit objective nature as an external, calculable reality that must be increasingly revealed and made known through specific and intensifying modes of quantification and calculation.
What drives the ‘I’ forth to picture the world and its components in this way, is its uncertainty about external reality. As the gap between subject and object is navigated, both the ‘I’, and technology, are forever engaged in a Sisyphean pursuit to acquire more and more – potentially, infinite – knowledge about object-ive reality. There is always a gap between objects and the subiectum; there is always more to be measured and known. In order to be certain about Nature, whether it is through conducting a complex scientific experiment or a simple subjective reflection about the world, this is a ‘way of being human which mans the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole’.Footnote 124 In sum, the world picture strives for achieving certainty through integrating as many objective representations as it can, into itself and into its own picture, so that ‘all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it – [is] as a system’.Footnote 125 What subjectivity as ‘I’ shares with technology, therefore, is a drive to endlessly systematise all Being and knowledge into an ongoing attempt to reduce objective uncertainty. It is an endless acquisition of knowledge so as to secure itself as certain.
The danger, however, is when the subiectum – the fundamental ground for certainty, or today, the ‘I’ – becomes itself drawn into the process of ever expanding systemic calculations being made in the quest for total certainty. This occurs when ‘what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes precisely through this, incalculable’.Footnote 126 Here, when chasing total technological certainty, the individual subject and the objects measured by the ‘I’, are assimilated and lost in an ever-expanding ‘objectlessness’ of the system; what Heidegger calls the ‘gigantic’.
It is precisely here in the objectlessness of endless systemic calculation that Heidegger warns about the emergence of the ‘We’. He cautions that ‘[s]ubjective egoism, for which mostly without its knowing it the I is determined beforehand as subject, can be cancelled out through the insertion of the I into the we. Through this, subjectivity only gains in power.’Footnote 127 In other words, in objectlessness, subjectivity must shift from the I to the ‘We’ because the certainty of the I as subiectum, is lost. When there is no possibility of ‘certainty’ of the self as I, then certainty of the self as ‘We’ is possible if buttressed by a larger, collective technological system. If a system's uniformity of shared and global technological representations is rigorous enough, then ‘the subjectivism of man attains its acme, from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly establish itself’.Footnote 128 ‘This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e., technological, rule over the earth.’ If the I is made metaphysically and technologically uncertain, then a new certainty of the ‘We’ can become the new subiectum.
As noted above, it is precisely the incredibly complex technological foundations of ESS that now places the existential uncertainty of humanity – and hence, of the contemporary self – into a future that is certain of only one thing: that ‘We’ have spawned the Anthropocene and that ‘We’ are only recognisable in this geological timescale as a collective species.
I am uncertain but We are not
The Anthropocene integrates humanity and Nature into a system of incomprehensible complexity. We must recall, as Clive Hamilton stresses, ‘It is a transdisciplinary and holistic approach integrating earth sciences and life sciences, as well as the “industrial metabolism” of humankind, all within a systems way of thinking, with special focus on the non-linear dynamics of a system.’Footnote 129 When Heidegger describes the emergence of the We in a ‘planetary imperialism of technologically organized man’, therefore, he is not referring to physical spatiality, statist colonialism or political conquest, nor to any material or instrumental technologies. Metaphysics does not mean ideological, cultural, linguistic, religious, etc. differences, but goes much deeper. Instead, a metaphysical imperialism describes the spread of a new subiectum relying exactly on such systems thinking as embraced in ESS: a certainty of Nature and Earth that is conceived through a technological world picture that makes the self certain only by securing its place as a quantified collective entity within endless and ongoing processes of a homogenous system. Hence why, today, we hear so many refrains from even the most esteemed and critical scholars, celebrating and declaring the totalising and universalizing aspects of the Anthropocene and ESS. ‘The Anthropocene arrives as the totalizing event par excellence … every human is destined to live in it.’Footnote 130 For Chakrabarty, the Anthropocene manifests a ‘mood of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity’,Footnote 131 demanding a rethinking of how to exist across scales of deep time: only as a collective species, the We of collective humanity.
Chakrabarty goes one step further than C. Hamilton by denying what he calls the ‘phenomenology of us as a species’. Chakrabarty asks: ‘Who is the we? We humans never experience ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the human species but never experience it as such.’Footnote 132 His point is that the universal ‘We’ is real, but as a concept it cannot be truly understood by the ‘I’ that he claims is shaped by dynamics of capitalism. However, what Chakrabarty omits in his argument is what the metaphysical history of subjectivity clarifies. The new subiectum, a human self that ‘empowers himself as lord of the earth’,Footnote 133 is the same subjectivity that is now described as emerging in the Anthropocene: the We that ‘shows up humans as super-agents, powerful even beyond the imaginings of the Moderns’.Footnote 134 Hence, while the ‘I’ could have no phenomenology of the human species, the ‘We’ of the Anthropocene opens a new ‘cultural paradigm’ where this phenomenology may become more normal and commonsensical than the ‘I’. This is the emerging cultural paradigm of the We.
So, now is a time when assertions that ‘We’ have caused global climate change and the Anthropocene are becoming commonplace, because ‘We’ are gaining a new subiectum through a technological metaphysics of planetary (un)certainty. Unlike politics-as-usual, therefore, ‘Rather, we must embrace a multi-species, multi-disciplinary action plan. And we must do it now. We cannot unravel time and restore our lost species to life, but we can fight for this planet we call a home.’Footnote 135 Yet what type of politics does this ‘fight’ imply? Whom are ‘we’ fighting against?
With the movement of the subiectum from the ‘I’ to the ‘We’, a new perspective on the recent surge of nationalism, populism, racism, and various forms of identity politics visible across the globe may be sketched out.Footnote 136 Piet Strydom has succinctly expressed how a change in epochs should change subjectivity in turn: ‘Subject-formation is thus inevitably and fundamentally affected by a transition from one geological epoch to another and the unavoidable concomitant reconfiguration of the sociocultural world.’Footnote 137 Indeed, what this article has argued is that the ‘We’ underlying the Anthropocene's sociocultural world – a collective political globality of human-made crises and uncertainty – rests upon a transforming metaphysical representation of human subjectivity, from the individual I to the collective group or humanity as species. If states and the ‘I’ are only recent historical developments, then it is obvious that new subjectivities and discourses will foment new scales and forms of politics.Footnote 138 Indeed, ‘Man as a rational being of the age of the Enlightenment is no less subject than is man who grasps himself as a nation, wills himself as a people, fosters himself as a race, and, finally, empowers himself as lord of the earth.’Footnote 139 The modern Western identity of the liberal individual as an I, therefore, fades in the Anthropocene into a new and strange form of subjectivist identity: the self and subject as group identity.
Why does the subject as planetary We not foster a cosmopolitan or peaceful global holism, instead of the conflictual and divisive identity politics we see developing today? As Amartya Sen has argued, a drive towards unity, holism, and universalism risks obfuscating the rich fabrics underpinning sociocultural pluralism. ‘The implicit belief in the overarching power of a singular classification’, Sen writes, ‘can make the world thoroughly flammable.’Footnote 140 The promotion of one singular identity endangers the multiple identities – national, religious, cultural, gendered, racial, economic, etc. – that a ‘self’ as an ‘I’ might today possess. ‘The art of constructing hatred takes the form of invoking the magical power of some allegedly predominant identity that drowns other affiliations, and in a conveniently bellicose form can also overpower any human sympathy or natural kindness that we may normally have.’Footnote 141 And yet, it is precisely this singular identity of the planetary species of the ‘We’ that scholars like Chakrabarty and C. Hamilton now actively strive towards. With subjectivity left to derive certainty from what ESS constructs as its future, collective, singular identity, there remain no places for the classical Cartesian ‘I’ to be sheltered. And so, ‘When groups feel threatened’, notes Amy Chua, commenting on the surge of identity politics in the USA after the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, ‘they retreat into tribalism.’Footnote 142 What we see in recent racist and populist calls for ‘culture’ and/or nationalism, therefore, is the political future of the Anthropocene contained today within the domestic framework of the ‘I’. The danger of the objectlessness of the We, therefore, is not only that anthropos becomes this ‘choiceless singularity of human identity [that] not only diminishes us all’, but makes the world more ‘flammable’Footnote 143 – but that its technological metaphysics subsumes the concept of plurality and difference altogether. All that remains in ESS is the system, the totality, the gigantic. ‘The gigantic presses forward in a form that actually seems to make it disappear’, Heidegger wrote.Footnote 144 The danger of the planetary imperialism of technological metaphysics is, ironically, the ESS goal where ‘the quantitative becomes a special quality and thus a remarkable kind of greatness … and what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable’.Footnote 145
It is here where any collectivising system of thought – from liberalism to communism, etc. – shares the same metaphysical root: ‘Every nationalism is metaphysically an anthropologism, and as such subjectivism’,Footnote 146 because every nationalism (or subjectivism) is a mode of thinking that has pre-determined what the ‘human self’ is as a subject, and how its objective reality ought to be related, before any analysis begins. ‘For ideologies that are based on self-presence, we can do all sorts of things and achieve all sorts of things, but who we are remains certain and self-evident – and, consequently, the meaning of Being itself remains unquestioned.’Footnote 147
Going forth, therefore, IR has to engage and fight against the assimilation of plurality and difference in two ways: First, to protest collectivising modes of thought that assert what the self, humanity, or Nature is (or is not), such as the ESS. Second, to be wary of embracing the new planetary ‘We’ that Heidegger considers ‘an ahistorical collectivism’ representing ‘the subjectivity of man in totality’.Footnote 148 Perhaps it is best for IR to advocate for what Polt describes as a non-subjectivist metaphysics; a mode of thinking that recognises the danger of both individualism and planetary collectivism, seeking to circumvent both through concerted and local political action and engagement.Footnote 149 The goal of such a non-subjectivist metaphysics is to disclose new aspects of politics and Nature through human interaction and open dialogue, rather than assimilating and systematising them into any objective or overarching framework.
Conclusion
When faced with anthropogenic climate change, it is easy for individuals to conjure a plethora of options they can engage in that might ameliorate this looming global crisis. Recycling, monitoring one's carbon footprint, purchasing carbon offsets, cycling to work, etc., are all choices that foster a sense of individual agency and control over both climate change and one's own sense of self in the face of a global catastrophe.Footnote 150 When considering the Anthropocene, however, there are no such options for the ‘individual’ to pursue. The Anthropocene's temporal, spatial, and existential implications are not only far beyond ‘climate change’, but they are also beyond the conceptual boundaries of the Cartesian ‘I’ of the Holocene. In the epochal thinking of anthropos, only the planetary collective – the species, the group, the ‘We’ – can have any real agency. ‘I can't do anything; but We might!’
To be clear, this author is wary and unnerved by this portent of the ‘We.’ Its focus on a singular humanity as anthropos is reminiscent of a restrictive Schmittian or authoritarian call to arms. It implies a denial of local practices, cultures, languages, histories, and colonial legacies of violence and terror. The objectlessness of the ‘We’ dissolves the multitude of overlapping worlds and forms of being(s) existing around us today, into an abyss of geologic time and incalculable Earthly systems. It is, of course, impossible to foretell whether or how a transition into objectlessness through the ESS's complex ‘datafication’ of planetary systems will spell an improvement for humanity and the Earth, or if it will help to facilitate the ultimate destruction of both. Heidegger described these entangled possibilities as a simultaneous ‘saving power’ and ‘the danger’.Footnote 151 Either a new cultural paradigm opened by the Anthropocene will safeguard and protect the self, Nature, and Earth in new and unimaginable ways, or, it will obfuscate them beyond all recognition through endless waves of calculation.
To predict which of these possibilities will emerge in time is far beyond the scope of this article. Its aim was to highlight how the ubiquitous ‘We’ now appearing in discourses of globality concerning the Anthropocene and climate change is becoming more and more common, and hence, more and more ‘real’ as a shared social fact. Why the ‘We’ is so prominent in these discourses is typically overlooked. The point of this article is that the planetary ‘We’ should be regarded with great caution. It is not an innocuous linguistic addition to our lexicon, but it represents an important and subtle shift in the manner in which human beings access and engage the Earth, their world, each other, and themselves. It hints at a fundamental transition of the human subiectum – the fundamental certainty of Being – from the Cartesian ‘I’ to the planetary collective of ‘We’. In the Anthropocene, I am uncertain, but We are not.
If the certainty of the ‘I’ was once derived from the Cartesian ‘I think, therefore I am’, then certainty in the Anthropocene epoch might become: ‘We are, because of what We have done.’ Whether this will become the foundation of ‘the danger’ or ‘the saving power’ is yet to be decided, and it hopefully remains a question that is not too late for each of us to answer.
Acknowledgements
I thank David Chandler and Garnet Kindervater for their invitation to present a rough first draft of this article in their panel ‘The Politics of the Anthropocene’ at the 2018 International Studies Association (ISA) conference in San Francisco. I also thank the panel's participants and audience members for their helpful comments. My thanks also go to Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby, Caleb Lauer, Kathryn Hamilton, Hoxton Hamilton, Chet Finamore, Benjamin Martill, and Josefin Graef for their excellent suggestions along the way. The editors and reviewers of RIS have also provided exceptional feedback and suggestions for revisions that have greatly improved the piece. Support for this research was provided by the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
