Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene

TLDR

The Anthropocene marks a new epoch of thought, materiality, and historicity, where human and inhuman histories collide in the strata, creating a novel subjectivity that redefines temporal, material, and spatial orders. The paper argues that the Anthropocene contains Anthropogenesis—a new origin story and ontic framework that redefines life from biopolitical to geophysical terms, posits a mythic geologic world‑maker and an evolutionary narrative, and calls for a nuanced notion of geologic life to counter the homogeneous, undifferentiated social stratification of the Anthropocene. The author defines Anthropogenesis to indicate that naming the Anthropocene produces a mythic geologic world‑maker/destroyer and a material evolutionary narrative that reimagines human origins and endings within a geologic context.

Abstract

If the Anthropocene represents a new epoch of thought, it also represents a new form of materiality and historicity for the human as strata and stratigrapher of the geologic record. This collision of human and inhuman histories in the strata is a new formation of subjectivity within a geologic horizon that redefines temporal, material, and spatial orders of the human (and thus nature). I argue that the Anthropocene contains within it a form of Anthropogenesis – a new origin story and ontics for man – that radically rewrites material modes of differentiation and concepts of life, from predominantly biopolitical notions of life toward an understanding of life’s geophysical origination (geontics). Here, I use the term Anthropogenesis to suggest that two things explicitly happen in the nomination of the Anthropocene: 1) the production of a mythic Anthropos as geologic world-maker/destroyer of worlds, and 2) a material, evolutionary narrative that re-imagines human origins and endings within a geologic rather than an exclusively biological context. In contrast to the homogeneous geomorphizing of the Anthropocene, I suggest that socializing the strata needs a more nuanced notion of ‘geologic life’ that challenges the construction of the Anthropocene as an undifferentiated social stratification.