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Responsibility Towards Life in the Early

AnthropocenePaul Alberts

a

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To cite this article: Paul Alberts (2011): Responsibility Towards Life in the Early Anthropocene,

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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 16 number 4 December 2011

introduction

What is the Anthropocene? In one sense, anaming just established a proper namethat differs yet intersects with modernitys

predilection for periodization, since it designates

not just a human-defined interval in historical,

cultural or political terms, of which we have

many, but, for the first time, the humanrecalibrated as geological agent. The emerging

epoch of anthropos signifies that human effects

on the planet are the determining forces in the

emerging disruption of the current interglacial

climate period. Humanitys recent activities can

be measured now at a scale commensurate with

the geomorphologic narrative of the planet, which

extends across thousands, millions, even hun-

dreds of millions of years. In rapidly altering the

biosphere, the domain of possibility for all life,modern society has influenced its natural setting

at such a pace that it compares with natural

periods of change that took thousands of years

to accomplish. Put in those terms, the

Anthropocene can appear as an abrupt contem-

porary move past established conditions.

However, that would not be accurate, and it

should not be aligned with the post conditions

familiar to the Humanities for example, the

postmodern, post-human or post-political since

the Anthropocene does not refer to a passage out

of certain social conditions, or name the human

as surpassing existing self-definitions. Rather

more prosaically, it names a new measurement

of the recent past and present as a global physical

effect an empirical measurement established

through the natural sciences, but one that

promises to reconfigure how we think of the

consequences of the collective conditions of

modern life.1

This essay pursues a line of investigation that

has become insistent in many different contem-

porary discourses, but one particularly urgent for

the Humanities: the question of human respon-

sibility in the emerging Anthropocene. The

intense industrial dynamics of modernity are

held to be causally responsible for the

Anthropocene that much is clear. But from

this we must ask of the character of human

responsiveness the normative responsibility of

valuing and deciding the worth of planetary life

in the face of the sustained crisis that the

Anthropocene represents. While this is altogether

too large and complex a problem to be examined

totally, the goal here is a more modest one of

clearing a particular theoretical view of the

paul alberts

RESPONSIBILITY

TOWARDS LIFE IN

THE EARLYANTHROPOCENE

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altered conditions for thinking the ethics and

politics of life. The Anthropocene, it will be

argued, suggests a reframing of normative

traditions towards human and non-human life,

and a challenge to reconsider collective human

responsibility. Two important philosophical con-

tributions are brought together to attempt to

answer this challenge: the seminal Imperative of

Responsibility (1979) by Hans Jonas, and the

later biopolitical works of Michel Foucault.

Jonas directly espoused an ethics of responsibility

for the future of human life, and was one of the

first to incorporate environmental thinking into a

systematic philosophical ethics. Foucault pro-

vided a highly influential critical narrative of how

human life has been placed at the heart ofmodern political strategies. One approach is

avowedly normative, the other not, but they

both focus on the way in which the forces of

modern industrial society have brought the

biological facts and potentials of human existence

into ethical and political calculation, with the

stark possibilities of genocide or future impover-

ishment of the conditions for life in general

inscribed within such a calculation. This essay

draws them together both positively, as crucialphilosophical insights into the question of

responsibility for life, but also critically, since

understanding the Anthropocene suggests they

insufficiently articulated the place of non-human

species and ecological contexts in their perspec-

tives. We can reread Jonas and Foucault

productively on the question of responsibilities

to human life, but conditions for life in general

are also increasingly relevant. Overcoming such

deficiencies and integrating understanding of the

Anthropocene into theoretical discourse in the

Humanities will not be comfortable, but the order

of discomfort is negligible compared to the

threatened discomforts predicted for the near

future. The difficulties of adequately setting out

responsibilities towards life can be immediately

seen in the situation that the Anthropocene

represents.

paradoxes of the anthropoceneThe Anthropocene, according now to most

geologists (not all), begins approximately in the

late 1700s with crucial technical leaps: the steam

engine replaces human and animal labour in

transport and routine mechanical tasks, then

rapid exploitation of fossil fuels for energy

conversion, and the explosion of modern industry

through the nineteenth century catapults Homosapiens into a prominence over all other species

(Crutzen 1416). Enormous energy consumption,

rapacious mining, deforestation, agricultural

expansion, human population explosions, and

urban development the spectacular story of two

centuries of modernization increasingly secures

modern human life and leaves a distinct mark

on the geomorphology of the planet (Zalasiewicz

et al., New World 222831; Anthropocene

48; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 61421).Atmospheric changes, notably carbon dioxide

and methane concentrations, alterations to ocean

temperature and acidification, and redistributions

of flora and fauna irredeemably change the

geological surface composition of the planet,

and, therefore, over time, the strata markers laid

down and read to establish geological period-

ization (Zalasiewicz et al., New World 2230).

Modernity alters and marks the biospheres

condition and sets in motion an altered trajectoryof climate and biochemistry. The intensity of

these processes means, Paul Crutzen predicts,

Without major catastrophes . . . mankind will

remain a major geological force for many

millennia, maybe millions of years, to come

(17). In the space of a mere two centuries, the

defining limits for all life on Earth are now

human-altered and will continue to be human-

altered into the distant future.

The threat implied by the emergent

Anthropocene is that increasingly urbanized

human life paradoxically places its very continua-

tion and the continuation of many other species

under question by virtue of its success.2

Continued industrial expansion threatens climate

stability and the carrying capacity of the bio-

sphere, and although such predictions remain

contested in terms of severity, the prominence of

such debates attests to the increasingly real

concern over the need for suitable response and

responsibility to be international if not globally

organized.3 Population dislocation and war are

genuine threats under scenarios of business as

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usual. Modernitys promise now appears

threatening and unsustainable. Casting an eye

back across its span, the Wests commitments to

technical innovation, nation-state stabilization

(democratic or enforced), and enhanced indivi-

dual liberties appeared to have lifted manyurbanized populations out of and above natural

constraints. Metropolitan life seemed close to

synchronizing the great modern dreams of

emancipation and self-realization with technical

accomplishment. But, the limits and failures of

these dynamics are now becoming violently

apparent. The globe responds against prodi-

gious human expansion through producing

changed physical conditions with trajectories

that can only be interpreted as inimical to thebest hopes of modernization. As agents of a

situation that currently escapes available means

of control, how is the assertion of the human

species on the planet to be understood against a

natural world that now does not stand beneath

the human as the secure stage to its self-defined

projects?

This is a normative question, but also meta-

ethical, since the very frameworks of human

valuation per se are surely called into question.Anthropocentric traditions have delivered

immensely successful dominion; yet also now

reveal destructive potentials. The Anthropocene

must then signify a critical juncture for received

anthropocentric values unless we were to

bizarrely accept the recently revealed possibility

of rapid mass extinctions as somehow a reason-

able outcome of human ascendancy; for the logic

of anthropocentrism, or any reconstruction of its

tenets, must contain at least a minimal commit-

ment to suitable life on an inhabitable Earth,

something which appears less guaranteed day by

day.4 Suitable life will necessarily involve many

species besides the human, but do they remain

circulating around the human centre? As many

environmentalists ask will it be possible to

engage alternatively in biocentric projects

defending the diversity of species life on the

planet, when normative traditions have been so

human focused?5 Despite the important gains

made through animal rights movements and

successful environmental legislation in the past

three decades, extending moral considerability

outside the human species remains a tentative

ethical project.6 Piecemeal revisions to moral

considerability, which include certain species, on

certain grounds, answer but only a small part of

the challenge to rearticulate normative frame-

works. The Anthropocene is a type of limitrecognition or emerging limit experience. The

conditions for all species life are now subject to

human decisions. Having accelerated exponen-

tially in force and effect across the last two

centuries those human decisions appear today as

almost impossible to alter, and increasingly

heading towards unwanted futures. To strive to

step beyond the frames of anthropocentrism

implies striving to deal with thinking those

emerging consequences of the power of humandecisions that we are tying the conditions for all

species into a future trajectory that needs to be

altered, yet the scale of that situation reaches to

the extent of the biosphere.

One influential starting point in addressing

such concerns has been the later (post-Second

World War) Heideggers perspective from texts

such as The Question Concerning Technology

and Letter on Humanism, which attempted to

ground concerns for values, ethical and political,within ontological descriptions of human empla-

cement. The enframing [Gestell] he determined

as the appropriation of the world through human

demand, and which instigated critical reflections

on technological domination, led him towards a

prophetic anti-modernism with conservative ten-

dencies, and some would say dangerous political

implications not amenable to environmental

philosophys opposition to authoritarian solu-

tions.7 Far more prescient was one of his

students, Hans Jonas, whose diagnosis in The

Imperative of Responsibility argued that modern

technological reach into the worlds environment

demands that ethical paradigms, shaped as they

were in pre-modern times of small societies and

close personal contact across single life-spans, be

rewritten to reflect that altered power: No

previous ethics had to consider the global

condition of human life and the far-off

future . . . previous ethics and metaphysics

provide not even the principles, let alone a

ready doctrine (8). Human decision and power,

for Jonas, have now paradoxically eclipsed

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traditions of justification which we inherited from

the past and supposed as logically commensurate

with the problems of judgement we encounter.

What is required is a new principle of commit-

ment to the continuation of human life a duty

to future humanity, to maintain genuine humanexistence (Jonas 4043). On Jonas view, a

renovated contemporary philosophy of nature

could (meta-ethically) bridge the alleged chasm

between the facts of our place in the world and

the issues of what ought to be done (x). Modelled

on the archetype of the parent with power and

responsibility for a child, Jonas principle of duty

ties human will to a sense of obligation through

recognition of human power, and power over

nature (129). We should will human existence tocontinue, he argues, because our natural powers

are joined with knowledge and freedom, and we

must therefore reiterate the yes of life that we

know we enjoy, and re-create in successive

generations (82, 129). The imperative of respon-

sibility therefore runs as: Act so that the effects

of your action are compatible with the perma-

nence of genuine human life (11). This neat

categorical imperative might well continue to

motivate and inspire amongst the contradictionsof valuing human well-being and environmental

well-being.

However, even if we accept the claim of this

life affirmation, which seems in important

respects self-grounding and simply asserted as

transcendent belief, the Anthropocene suggests a

state beyond what Jonas envisaged as the

environmental challenge in the 1970s: human

force is already met with the counter-forces of

climate change and a biosphere perturbed into

new dynamics which are proving inimical to the

continued material and energy demands of

human metropolitan life. The restraint of moral

duty on human power increasingly is itself

constrained and recontextualized by shifting

objective conditions the force of planetary

dynamics altered, and the possible need for rapid

technical interventions to stave off the worst

possibilities. Rationally grounded moral duty to a

future also supposes the effective voice of

enlightened human subjectivity a possibility

increasingly difficult to sustain in the

globalizing neoliberal social conditions of the

early twenty-first century. Jonas perspective,

while surely correctly future oriented to the

scale of human decision and effect, doesnt take

fully into account the severity of the global

dynamic increasingly apparent, and the uneven-

ness of the ontological conditions of industria-lized human life. The political turn in his account

of responsibility, which re-interpreted the poten-

tials in Marxism and renounced lingering nave

utopianism, doesnt excavate the conditions

under which human life in modernity has been

administered and the particular emergent condi-

tions of the Anthropocene, which constrain and

delimit in new intensities. We can see this

through a brief consideration of two important

additional stresses that the Anthropoceneengenders.

First, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently

written, the Anthropocene upsets the time-

honoured distinction between natural and

human histories: the accumulation of human

events, understood in human social terms, is now

folded back into the natural history of the

planet, since the Anthropocene recalibrates our

measures of human activity (Chakrabarty,

Climate of History 206). The natural sciencesaccount of the location and evolution of biological

life on the planet is conjoined with our human-

centred accounts of modern historical develop-

ment. Non-human nature, traditionally posited as

a constant metaphysical background, has been

correspondingly destabilized, as global dynamics

are no longer inviolate (Chakrabarty, Climate of

History 206). This leads to profound and

destabilizing questions. We can think of human

projects in the order of a decade or even a

generation, but what does it mean to influence

a hundred human generations to come, or

determine planetary life for perhaps

hundreds of millennia? (Chakrabarty, Between

Globalisation). The aporia here cannot be

readily solved or even easily reconfigured.

Perhaps we are now forced to think in terms of

an emergent human-technico-natural hybrid con-

dition, as some environmentalists have been

attempting for some time.8 Tied into the carbon

cycle and altering atmosphere and ocean, non-

human nature is made part-artefact, the by-

product of accumulating human history.9 But we

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can only partially understand the trajectory to

which we are now committed, since non-human

nature and its dynamics are only still partially

beyond the grasp of human knowledge, and

natural systems interact with the forces of

industrial modernity in ways even less amenableto human understanding. As the expanding

literature on climate change attests, two centuries

of industrial penetration now incite thresholds

and tipping points of environmental change

and degradation, the timing and severity of which

are unclear. Predictions can only be in terms of

modelled probabilities.10 Or even worse, human

interaction with the atmosphere and ecosystems

creates fundamentally new forms of non-predict-

ability.11

Risk assessments of climate change canonly deal with specific variables and struggle to

calculate flow-on effects and the appearance of

new factors or perturbations.12 While humans

have always struggled with uncertainty, both

aleatory in-the-world and epistemic, our emer-

ging hybrid state stresses existing normative

judgement. Uncertainty typically defers action,

and often makes procrastination the default

stance. The early politics of the Anthropocene

could then be described as an interregnum periodwithout a clear ascendant order. Many questions

arise as to what political arrangements will

prevail: what type of international agreements,

principles of environmental justice and policy

goals will be effectively set, if any? Precautionary

principles, though increasingly discussed, remain

decidedly fragile, and alternative scepticisms

about reasonable precaution often beg the

question of their own justification (Gardiner,

Precautionary; Moral Storm). The peculia-

rities of these emergent forms of uncertainty and

the difficulties of response are only gradually

making their way into critical reflections on the

administration of life, and remain a challenge to

discourses traditionally oriented towards sure

descriptions of states and causal logics of

change.13

Second, the Anthropocene lifts the critical

question of human exceptionality to a new level

of intensity.14 If we are challenged to understand

the interlocking of the human with the natural, as

the prodigious force and pace of modernity

reaches across the entire biosphere, then the

human exception is increasingly a paradox.

Humanity makes itself successfully distinct, but

the scale of this now increases our recuperation

by natural constraints. One way to configure this

is as a type of self-sustained velocity of human

cultural development across a relative short span.

J. Baird Callicotts analysis of ecological, geolo-

gical and human temporal scales and their

boundaries depicts modernitys environmental

situation as a type of boundary interaction.

Human cultural domains over time exceed the

pace of genetic inheritance by a large factor:

. . . Homo sapiens evolved culture . . . [which]

became in effect a selective environment in

which Homo evolved. . .

But because thetemporal scale of cultural evolution, vis-a-vis

biological evolution, is so disparate, [culture]

has propelled Homo sapiens out of nature.

The disparity, moreover, between the human

and the natural worlds is increasing precisely

because the rate of cultural evolution is

increasing . . . [W]hile the rate of biological

evolution remains constant, the rate of cultural

evolution increases dramatically. (Callicott,

Lamarck Redux 1415)

Human culture achieves its semblance of removal

from nature by the speed of its maintenance and

inheritance, which Callicott dubs Lamarckian

(characteristics acquired during a lifetime trans-

ferred to the next generation), compared with the

slower Darwinian evolutionary pace, which can be

perceived only across many generations (14).

Human domination of the biosphere is based in

part on repeated cultural transmission of techni-

ques of alteration, improving them rapidly across

generations. Human exceptionalism is then less a

matter of simple chauvinism alone, or a static

value hierarchy over other creatures, and more

the reinforcement of cultural processes of

reiteration with difference as a successful

enclosed form of rapid evolution.15 The

character of human exception is based in part

on the effective pace of alteration, which occludes

the reality of human embedding in the natural

world. On this crucial issue, Callicott shares with

a number of writers, including the renowned

biologist Edward O. Wilson, the view that human

history can be understood as the progressive

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fabrication of human enclosures, which (in

Wilsons terms) are accumulated environmental

prostheses requiring ever-more demanding

regimes of management (Wilson 316). Such

human exceptionality depends in important

ways on sustaining cultural speed over the

top of the long rhythms of non-human nature a

violence of human assertion that often occludes

the ways in which the human cannot transcend

non-human nature, and must, as some ecologists

describe, nest within it. Only a few decades

ago, Soviet historian Pokrovskiy could proclaim

that nature will become soft wax in his [mans]

hands which he will be able to cast into whatever

form he chooses (qtd in Passmore 25). The

Anthropocene names a recent recognition thatsuch modern-progressivist delusions are effec-

tively at an end, and that responsibility for life

has to deal with the enframed and interlocked

condition of human and non-human.

rephrasing responsibility

Jonas awareness of the need for a new

responsibility towards life keenly understood

the urgency of overcoming progressivismsblindness to non-human natures fragility. He

reframes responsibility by extending his meta-

ethical frame outwards, from a first command-

ment of responsibility towards other humans to

an inclusion of other species and inanimate

things. Thus, he posits an ethics of human

responsibility to the future conditions of life in

general that aims not to risk the demise of

humanity (37). But this reframing still supposes

the human-to-human relation, and potential

reciprocity between human self and others to be

fundamental first principles, since every

human a priori can be responsible, and also

(minimally) must have been the responsibility of

another at least through birth. The human bond

still stands above all else as the motivating

relation the archetype. For Jonas, only

humans can be responsible beyond the human

species, but then only to non-human living

things, and their naturally given self-purposes

(98). In this crucial posture, he partially reiterates

traditional human exceptionality, and fails to

evoke the sort of critical recognition that Callicott

and others announce of the illusions of standing

above non-human nature, self-concerned in our

social bonds, as we continue to diminish the

physical conditions for life. The valuable and

influential claim to responsibility that he inaugu-

rated could not then countenance the (admit-tedly) difficult shift towards a primary ecocentric

or biocentric responsibility, which would poten-

tially include the non-living, or a conception of

Nature as a whole. He mentions this possibility

briefly but steps back from a full analysis (8). The

emergence of new uncertainty in the

Anthropocene challenges us with the possibility

that valuation of the non-human world will

become increasingly relevant as derangements

to existing patterns in the biosphere increase. Ofcourse, this is not to determine in advance the

probability of a paradigm shift towards valuing

the non-human world as intrinsically valuable,

but the Anthropocenes unnerving revelation of a

finite biosphere and increasingly hostile condi-

tions for human life have certainly put the

interrelation with non-human nature as necessa-

rily at the heart of normative re-evaluation. If this

interpretive choice is sustained, then, paradoxi-

cally, the Anthropocene marks a type of return toproblems of the agonistic character of perceived

sovereignty over non-human nature that the

pace of modernitys apparent eclipse of natural

boundaries is potentially a failed struggle, and

modernitys achievements the most pyrrhic of

victories.

These threshold issues suggest the relevance of

another theorist of modernity with a particular

focus on the same (approximate) period of the

Anthropocene Michel Foucault, and his texts on

governance, security, and biopolitics. These are

characterized by concerns for the centuries of

rapid reorganization of human life in European

societies, and focused on dimensions of force and

conflict transformed into rules and new social

institutions. Foucaults Nietzschean approach is,

of course, not a ready direct source of ethical

respect or responsibility for non-human nature

far from it.16 However, Foucaults project of

revealing the rearticulation of sovereign power in

modernity has also provided detailed genealogies

of how traditional attitudes towards life have been

narrowed to a particular technical administration

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of human life. While this narrative can be shown

to reiterate anthropocentric perspectives, it can

also then be read as suggestive of how modern

power extended its logics across species.

It effects, in a limited way, a meta-ethical

displacement, in that the genealogy of sovereignpower has altered how we think of the modern

autonomous subject acting responsibly, and can

similarly indicate the particular framing of

responsibility, towards other non-human life

and conditions.

Foucaults Discipline and Punish famously

begins with the spectacular torture and slow

public death of the attempted regicide Robert-

Francois Damiens in 1757. In the described scene

he is cut, burned in different ways, drawn andpulled apart by horses, dismembered, and the

parts incinerated (37). As an example of the

revengeful power of the sovereign, the power to

deduct life, to inflict pain on bodies threatening

the royal body, it is highly memorable and

indeed much quoted in glosses on Foucaults

histories. Contrasted then, in the space of a page,

with a timetable for young prisoners a few

decades later, Foucault instantiates the remark-

able shift to disciplinary power, the governmentalrationality increasingly invested in human life as

controllable, normalized, optimized resource. The

focus is, of course, on human bodies and lives

brutalized, then later harnessed and managed. An

alternative focus on life human and non-human

might also read in the report that Foucault quotes

that the horses used to quarter Damiens are made

to labour with extreme difficulty against the

sinew of his flesh. Extra horses are called for and

they are forced to struggle until one of them is

exhausted and falls to the ground, spent (3).

Thus, animal labour participates intimately in the

scene to support human political sovereignty and

the ceremony of its violent reassertion. The

horses both work for human order, and symbolize

dominion over the animal world: assumed

sovereignty across species reinforces human

hierarchy and its laws. A dog is pointedly

mentioned at the end of the description as

lurking on the warmed ground of the execution

bonfire, as if a talisman of the bestial character of

the punishment, disturbing town folk. Horses and

dogs, which we neglect in absorbing the scene of

Damiens torture, were the domesticated, inti-

mate co-dwellers in European societies, and were

tied both into the daily logics of human life and

sovereign power sedimenting its hold on geogra-

phical regions and indigenous populations. The

profound violence of the scene, which predomi-nantly warns of the reassertion of human order,

nonetheless also repeats inter-species hierarchy

and animal appropriation. Correspondingly, in

the lecture series from this period (197475),

Foucault recounts a similar execution from the

seventeenth century: the executioner using an

iron club like those used in an abattoir to

smash the victims head, then gutting the

criminal of his organs, and, as the observer

notes . . .

he dissects them and cuts them intopieces that he puts on the other hooks as he

works, just as one does with an animal

(Abnormal 85). Pre-modern punishment thus

mimics human usage of the animal in the acts of

sovereign reassertion, evoking the Right of

human hierarchy over animal. In the shift to

modernity, Foucault reads the currents of power

as essentially stemming from the human domain:

relations of obligation and responsibility refracted

and refined from human-to-human violenceconstruct the early modern properof sovereignty.

However, this is only achieved on top of the

infrastructure of inter-species domination that

withdraws gradually from the scenes of sovereign

display into the domesticated domains of agri-

culture and companion relations (Foucault,

Society 87114). The animal and plant increas-

ingly obey. The history of the refinement of

human domination is then paralleled by a history

of refined animal and plant domestication.

Modern micro-physics of power works over

human bodies, changing brutal punishments to

disciplines and investments. The increasing turn

to correction and associated utilitarian atti-

tudes in governmentality aim to maximize

socially useful human behaviour, and the quite

dramatic shifts in agriculture, management of

animals, and the symbolic places assigned to

nature and animal life are part of the same

scaffold that Foucault explains as arranging

life. The fear of life-threatening violence, perhaps

best articulated in Hobbes ever-present possibi-

lity of descent into the anarchy ofbellum omnium

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contra omnes, is tamed both by modern political

order and the retreat of wilderness, the outlawed

and incalculable. Pacifying pre-modern society

through the institutionalization that Foucaults

later genealogical accounts explore extended from

human social activities to practices of domesticat-ing the non-human, so that the margins of civil

society were gradually enveloped and policed, as

the margins of possible brutality within

subjects were also successfully muted.

In the various lecture series of the 1970s,

Foucault examines transformations in sovereignty

that included doctrines and attitudes towards

naturally given territory and any scarcities, all the

hazards and uncertainties that surround citizens,

which governments gradually sought to under-stand and then moderate.17 Knowledge of the

non-human was thus partially integrated with the

desire to control effects on the human. This

intersection generated the crucial figure of

population, which was posited as a natural

phenomenon in governmental knowledge.

Human population was considered as varying

according to the climate, terrain, means of

subsistence, and then composed in terms of the

desires of individual members (Foucault, Security7073). Sovereign power aimed to assess what

variables were capable of modification for

successful governance. From this complex of

ordering, . . . mankind as a species, within a field

of the definition of all living species appears,

and develops alongside modern biology (Security

75). This pathway leads through Cuvier and

Lamarck and finally to Darwin, and the break-

through recognition of natural selection at work

through species populations. Foucault reprises

some of his earlier arguments from The Order of

Things to argue that population thus figures as an

operator in transitions of knowledges, includ-

ing the sciences of life (Security 78). The

intersection of knowledge between the non-

human and the human thus helps to reorganize

the principles of sovereign power.

Foucault shows that the investment in optimiz-

ing human life came at a cost of politicizing life

potentials and risking whole populations. The

famous claim that . . .

modern man is an animal

whose politics places his existence as a living

being in question, though not extended in

Foucaults texts to an adequate analysis of non-

human life, surely has as one premise that

modern politics also places non-human existence

in question (The Will1: 143). If biopolitical logic

raised human-life optimization to a pre-eminent

place in governmental reason, then that ascen-dancy was only possible in part by subjecting

non-human life to similar control and calculated

risk. In this he opened up an understanding of

responsibility as instrumentalized and politicized

in particular ways, since modern subjects

existence is located finally under the auspices of

governmental power. Non-human life is therefore

increasingly controlled when useful, and indeed is

brought into being in vast agricultural fields or

animal herds for food production, and thenterminated at the designated moments of eco-

nomic efficiency. Life becomes partnered with

harvesting, or, rather, species lives exist in

service to the values of human life. This type of

administered responsibility is modulated by the

way in which governmentality views its human

population, and its needs. Foucault recognized by

the later lecture series on governmentality that

subjects demands for health, happiness, and

personal freedom came to be answered throughthe provision of civil space for the expression of

individual interests (The Will 1: 145).

Governmentality thus remains withdrawn from

some parts of subjects existence as part of a

regulative tactic. This liberal domain for modern

subjects, which allows for certain autonomies,

gives relatively free reign to commerce since

private economic activity belongs in civil society,

and economics is only lateral, Foucault asserts,

to the art of government proper (Biopolitics 287).

Liberal governmentality only partially concerns

itself with how human lives are affected by

economic activity, and sometimes waits for the

problems of harms and demands from subjects,

rather than interceding more directly. Biopolitics

has thus generated a particular mitigated respon-

sibility to environmental problems; one that is

typically reactive and has, for example, only

relatively recently accepted various precautionary

principles (Boehmer-Christiansen 3160). It con-

tinues in a providential relationship with subjects,

allowing the expansion of metropolitan life as

being responsible to the material well-being of

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citizens. Similarly, allowing exploitation of nat-

ural resources, and diminishment of ecosystems

is justified through the demands of growing

human populations. Whether it can now alter the

character of such particular responsibility as

environmental problems increase remains to be

seen. Governmentality is confronted with the fact

that guaranteeing the well-being of human

populations is becoming difficult using the

established liberal formulae of encouraging

ever-more economic growth at the expense of

non-human life and environmental stability.

conclusion

Foucaults important contributions to under-standing sovereignty the explanation in terms

of power methodologically replacing Sovereign

Right, of diffuse capillary power from the

bottom up miss the biotic and abiotic settings,

and neglect the ways in which environmental

stresses emerge in modernity as part conse-

quences of that same sovereign logic. A biopoli-

tical perspective also has to show complex human

dependency on the other species that are gathered

and tethered to the human, and even the extent towhich the gathering and manipulation of species

depend on conceptions of properly organizing the

material settings for species life. The removal of

pre-modern symbolics of sovereign Nature and

various conceptions of animality, monstrosity,

savagery, barbarism, States of Nature (all ana-

lysed by Foucault) gave way to practices of

industrializing animal life for food, crafting

landscapes for human dominion, drawing out

sources of energy in ever-growing amounts,

necessary for maintaining voracious modern

neoliberal governmentality. Foucaults biopolitics

therefore both explores the rise of modernitys

particular responsibilities towards life, and yet

unevenly recapitulates anthropocentric perspec-

tives that set aside the history of inter-species

dependency and the various figures of environ-

ment that became increasingly important for

modernization. Ecology, invented in the nine-

teenth century, comes to influence the nascent

preservation and resource conservation move-

ments, which began to rationalize species and

land management as essential for planning

modern metropolitan life: Foucaults biopolitics

misses the importance of this conjunction

(Worster 26171).

In reading Foucault on human life in this

ambivalent manner, we are partially aligned with

one of the opening claims of Giorgio Agambensproject that there exists a need to correct or

complete the Foucauldian thesis, to deal with a

blind spot in the biopolitical thesis: the

exemplary sites of modern biopolitics the

concentration camp and the structure of the great

totalitarian states of the twentieth century

(Agamben 4). However, Agamben in effect

opens only one trajectory of correction or

completion, and a highly contentious one at

that, denying the importance and effectiveness ofliberalism. Alternatively, several writers have

perspicaciously recognized the homologies

between the modern processing of animals

for food and hides, and the logics of concentra-

tion camps (Patterson; Shulkin; Wadiwel;

Thierman). These arguments can probably be

extended further to include the various ways in

which animals are institutionalized, and tied in

with patterns of enforced responsibility towards

delimited life. If authoritarianism is in fact moreimportant to the rise of biopolitics, it may be that

it has been used for a terrible acceleration of life-

processing, as much tied to economic logic as

sovereign decision. If there is a corrective to

the biopolitical perspective, it is more that human

authority has excluded from its self-conceptions

the long historical connections between species

essential to formation of human order and states.

The Anthropocene, which is a landscape

surprising us regularly with shocks of unforeseen

natural disasters and rapidly altering climatic

conditions, can be well understood through

Foucauldian governmental terms, as an emerging

state built from particular political responsibil-

ities towards life regulation that have become

shaped and instituted across centuries. Indeed,

the intersection of scientific knowledge and

governmental policy settings is obviously the

primary contemporary locus for confronting

climate change: increasingly, the knowledge

bases of ecology, geography and climatology are

tied to governmental dictates, and perhaps for

some this knowledge formation represents the

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hope of emerging decision procedures. However,

the far more difficult challenge that Foucaults

biopolitics suggests is whether the neoliberal

formula that trades a generous space for civil

society to pursue individual material well-being

with the demanding efficiency of normalized

management of life can be altered or resisted

as the constraints of a finite biosphere deter

continued expansion. Can an ethics of unfettered

private material accumulation even be realisti-

cally asserted at the same time as resource

finitude and biosphere degradation now present

as genuine horizons delimiting human possibility?

Responsibility for life in the Anthropocene if

framed from this critical perspective challenges

us to understand that more than a well-meaningembrace of other species and ecosystem

integrity will be required to avoid the worst

possibilities that global human action now

implies. Anthropocentrism today has a particular

logic established across centuries of modern

social transformation, in which certain responsi-

bilities towards human life have been shaped and

set into our patterns of existence, and others

marginalized. Non-human life has had to become

both useful and shaped to human demands, orforced aside. We have become comfortable with an

apparent ascendancy over the non-human, and

hope always to control the effects of uncertainty,

yet human success now paradoxically disallows

moving beyond those conditions. Responsibility

towards life as a project for the early

Anthropocene begins from the difficulties of that

situation, and needs to under-

stand anthropocentric power and

perspectives as drawing fromthose established settings.

notes

1 Perhaps Slavoj Zizek recently in Living in the End

Times has most closely suggested tying the

Anthropocene to both post-political and

Hegelian perspectives through a brief

contextualization in terms of renderings of climate

change (336).

2 The grim scenarios for rapid climate change

across the twenty-first century reveal the serious

threats: see Barnosky; Lynas.

3 See, for example, on crises of carrying capacity

and over-shoot, Meadows, Randers, and

Meadows; Cohen. Many other primers and

popular texts have also disseminated widely the

predictions for ecological crisis or human

economic collapse.

4 A number of scholarly predictive works on cli-

mate change scenarios explain various alarming

possibilities for very large and sudden extinction

events: see, for example, leading climate scientist

Hansen.

5 SeeTaylor for one recent sophisticated example

of an attempt to broaden ethics to a biocentrism

beyond concern only for human beings.

6 See Elliot for a compact analysis of positions

both normative and meta-ethical on valuing

nature; Singers In Defense of Animals presents a

range of discussions of how far the animal rights

movements have successfully influenced attitudes

and ethics towards non-human species.

7 Zimmerman assesses the prospects and pro-

blems of a Heideggerian deep ecology, including

his own previous enthusiasm.

8 See, for example, Callicott, Metaphysical

Implications; Wilshire and Cooper.

9 As McKibben, amongst others, argued some

two decades ago.

10 The IPCC reports on climate change are the

most extensive attempt at long-term global pre-

diction demonstrating predictive uncertainties

and the assignment of probabilities. See Climate

Change 2007.

11 An enormous body of literature from various

disciplinary directions on uncertainty and climate

change (as a crucial marker of the Anthropocene)is available: see, for example, Edwards; Heal and

Kristrom; Allen et al.; Eden.

12 One well-known starting point in the exten-

sive literature on climate change risk assessment

is Stern.

13 One significant contribution to the emerging

problems of uncertainty is the work of Beck on

risk, recently World at Risk.

14 The termexceptionalism is closely associated

with anthropocentrism and long traditions

extending into the mythic and religious underpin-

nings of the West which posit the human as the

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exception from other living things, or the

exceptional in creation. See Haraway on human

exceptionalism to be overcome; Plumwood

doesnt use the term exceptionalism, but

discusses similar anthropocentric logic in some

detail. Sociological literature has discussed theterm across at least the last three decades: see,

for example, Dunlap and Catton.

15 This needs further discussion beyond the space

of this paper, pursuing the very large questions of

how human language and knowledge proved to be

evolutionarily useful in taking the genus Homo out

of what we consider was a limited and relatively

fragile place in the biosphere. See, for example,

Deacon as a very sophisticated attempt.

Callicotts take on human culture is generalizing

and homogenizing, but stems from an ecologicalperspective of the rise ofHomo sapiens in the bio-

logical domain.

16 Lemm offers an interesting interpretation of

Nietzsches conjunction of animality and the

human within the human that does not annul or

refuse animality, but develops and pluralizes it as a

positive overcoming (23).

17 For example, the lectures of 11 and 18 January

1978, in Foucault, Security 1^ 49.

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Paul Alberts

School of Humanities and Communication

Arts

University of Western Sydney

Locked Bag 1797

Penrith, NSW 2751Australia

E-mail: p.alberts@uws.edu.au

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