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The end of the end of nature: the Anthropocene and the fate of the human 1

BRONISLAW SZERSZYNSKI
Department of Sociology
Bowland North
Lancaster University
LA1 4YT
bron@lancaster.ac.uk
[Please do not cite without permission. A revised version of this paper will appear in Oxford Literary Review
34 (2) , December 2012 a special issue on Deconstruction in the Anthropocene.]

Abstract
In this paper I explore the metaphor of the strata of the earth as great stone book of nature, and the
Anthropocene epoch as its latest chapter. Debates about the geological status of the Anthropocene focus on
the identification of stratigraphic signals that might be being laid down for the geologist-to-come, but I
suggest that marking the base of the Anthropocene layer is not a merely technical task but one which is
entangled with questions about the human about the Anthropos of the Anthropocene. Who would be the
onomatophore of the Anthropocene, would carry the name of Anthropos? I consider a number of ways of
characterising the geological force of the Anthropocene Homo faber, Homo consumens and Homo
gubernans. But I then situate this dispersal of the Anthropos into syntypes against the background of a more
general dispersal of man that is occasioned when human meets geology. I do this by bringing into dialogue
two works: Foucaults Order of Things, and Derridas Of Grammatology, focusing on their passages about the
end of man and the end of the book respectively. I suggest the becoming geological of the human in the
Anthropocene is both the end of the great stone book of nature and the Aufhebung of man both his
apotheosis and his eclipse.

The Stone Book of Nature


There is a minor tradition in Christian and post-Christian societies of making stone books.2 More recent
examples can be safely classed as folk art end-of-day whimsies carved by craftsmen for a relative or friend.
But older specimens seem to have had religious significance. Some are open, signifying revelation; but most
are closed. Some of the latter were probably blessed by a priest and used in place of a printed bible as a
protective amulet, by those who could not afford or even read a printed bible. Some, especially those made in
the late eighteenth century, were probably used as a memento mori, a reminder of mortality or as a
memorial to a deceased person, the closedness of the book signifying that nothing more could be added to
their story.
Others seem to have signified the names of the dead who will be admitted into heaven, a tradition
that manifests in both the Old and New Testaments. As the writer of Revelations puts it:
And another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those
things which were written in the books, according to their works. And whosoever was not found
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written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
Yet there is another kind of stone book, one that can be opened and read. For the nineteenth-century
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geologist David Thomas Ansted (18141880), geology was the reading of the great stone book of nature. In
his book of that name, he argues that the vast knowledge of the Earth lies open to anyone who practises
careful personal observation and who has an acquaintance with the language of nature (5). To such a careful
observer, he suggests, the inscrutable closed mass of the earth becomes book-like, both in its readability and
in the coherence of the single, unified story that it tells: [t]he earth contains its own history within itself (5).
And in the stratigraphic record we do seem to see something like a book, the leaves of which are the various
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and successive layers of earth and rock that make up the whole solid mass laid bare occasionally in the cliff and
the quarry, but generally concealed beneath the soil (45). If so, then this is a book lying on its front, to be
read from bottom to top by thumbing through the layers of rock that have been laid down over time, one
above the other.
These leaves, as they were formed, were at the same time impressed with meaningful signs for the
geologist to come. For Ansted, these fossils were the pictures of the great stone book, the picturesque
remains of its former inhabitants, now long since passed away (5). We might instead want to think of them as
writing writing not on but in the page, writing that will tell our geologist-to-come which page they are
looking at, writing that will be made up of just the hard consonants of shells and skeletons because the
vowels of soft bodies and life processes will leave little or no trace, and will have to be filled in by the reader of
the stone book like the reader of Hebrew.
To extend our metaphor, the great stone book of geology also resembles literal, literary books in the
relationships that obtain, both materially and semiotically, between its parts. In the stone book, each mark and
each passage of marks gains its wider significance and meaning from its position in ever greater wholes. A
literal book is made materially from sheets, folded to make folios, stitched into sections, gatherings and
signatures; semiotically, though, it is made from sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters and parts. Our
stone book too can be divided into nesting material wholes stages, series, systems, erathems, eonothems
yet here the material structure coincides with its semiotic structure, since each unit of time-rock can be read
to reveal corresponding nesting periods of rock-time ages, epochs, periods, eras, aeons, each divided by
moments of dramatic change in the Earth system. Time thus defines space, and space defines time. Though
the pages may be worn, tilted, crumpled, bent, sheared, even inverted, their proper, original, irreversible order
can be reconstructed, as if the pages were numbered as if time thus had the final say over space.
Each passage in the great stone book also gains further meaning from its relationship with other
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marks and passages within the book. As Ansted says, [t]he leaves of the stone book may be carefully conned:
what is found in one may be compared carefully with what is contained in another (56). Furthermore, the
stone book had a beginning, and proceeds towards some kind of end or at least, for now, towards the point
at which it is yet being written. And as it proceeds it gains ever more signification for us in both relevance and
pace: the illustrations, ancient and modern, may be studied; and if, in this as in many other books, the early
pages should seem dry and barren of incident, still, as we advance, the plot thickens, and the denouement,
when reached, interests us all directly and personally (6).
Of course, Ansted would say that he is merely deploying the image of nature as a book as a fanciful
metaphor. He was writing during the time that geology was establishing itself as a modern science, and
breaking with the explicitly theological approach that had previously dominated the reading of the natural
world. But there are reasons to take Ansteds literary image more seriously than he himself appears to. For a
start, as Victor R. Baker argued in his Presidential address at the in 1998 Annual Meeting of the Geological
Society of America, there are grounds for classifying geology as a semiotic science. Unlike physics, which is
nomothetic, dealing with general laws, geology is ideographic, dealing with particular entities such as outcrops
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and rock formations. And, in ways that parallel other ideographic disciplines such as medicine, rendering
these particularities meaningful involves the reading of signs in order to infer what underlies them, in both
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space and time.
And the idea of nature as a book has a long history, particularly in European Christianity, with the
book of nature often described as a complement to the book of scripture, with both equally authored by God.
In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida talks about this tradition of nature as divine writing, and specifically as a
book.8 The main example that Derrida uses, and to which he applies his deconstructive approach, is that of the
Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau (17121778), who insists that in order to find truth
you must return to the holy voice of nature. In book IV of Emile, Rousseaus novelistic treatise on how to
educate a child, is the famous section that got the book banned the Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar.
Derrida quotes the passage where Rousseau has his fictional priest say I looked for truth in books: I found in
them nothing but lies and error.9 By contrast, he goes on to say, [t]hat of nature lies open to every eye: It is
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from this sublime and wonderful volume that I learn to serve and adore its Divine Author. No person is
excusable for neglecting to read in this book, as it is written in an universal language, intelligible to all
mankind.10
Derrida locates the idea of the inerrant book of nature in the context of a wider tradition that
distinguishes between fallen and pure writing between literal writing, in the form of marks on surfaces
made by people; and metaphorical writing, inscribed in the soul and in nature. There is thus writing that is
human, fallen, finite, artificial, instituted, fallible, often deceptive, that takes us away from presence; and then
there is writing that is natural or divine, the self-grounding meaning towards which words point. It is this latter
notion of a pure writing that Derrida sees as lying behind the notion of presence, of the voice of which writing
is only a fallible copy. But the idea of a pure writing is also assumed by the idea of the book of nature, an idea
that still haunts the project to create a scientific knowledge of nature that is immune to the vagaries and
errors of literal, fallen writing.
But of course Derrida rejects any final separation between natural and artificial writing. This is why he
also rejects semiology, the science of how signs link marks to meanings, in favour of what he calls
grammatology, the investigation of how signs are always haunted by the trace of another sign that is not
present, how meaning is unsettled by diffrance, and how the unity of the book is thus shattered.11 Such ideas,
combined with Michel Foucaults archaeological account of the development of modern thought in The Order
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of Things, will help us to understand how it is that the stoney mass of the Earth came to resemble a book in
human thought in the ways I have described above. But they will also help us to think about what happens
when the human starts to be written into the geological record what kind of coming-to-an-end of the great
stone book of nature this might represent, and what this might mean for our understanding of the human
itself.

From the Holocene to the Anthropocene


For there is increasing discussion about whether we may have entered a new unit of geological time, one in
which human beings are such a major determining force on the Earth that the unit should be named after
them a denouement that would indeed interest us all directly, to use Ansteds words. Up until now, the
latest chapter in the book of geochronology has been the Holocene, the most recent division, or epoch, of the
Quaternary period. The earlier epoch in the Quaternary was the Pleistocene, starting about 2.588 Ma13, with
its oscillation between glacial and interglacial periods. The Holocene, which started about 12 Ka, around the
time that humans started clearing forests for agriculture, has been a long period of unusually clement and
stable climate.14 But since the late nineteenth century a number of authors attempted to articulate the idea
that the system of the Earth might have entered a radically new state, one in which humans had become a
major planetary force. Thus, for example, we had in turn Stoppanis notion of the anthropozoic era (1873),
Vernadsky, Le Roy, and Teilhard de Chardins nosphere (1922), Revkins anthrocene (1992), and Samwayss
homogenocene (1999).
But it was the suggestion in 2000 by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer and atmospheric chemist Paul
Crutzen that we are now not in the Holocene but the Anthropocene that has gained the most scientific
attention.15 In 2008 a proposal was presented to the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of
London that the Anthropocene be made a formal unit of geological time, arguing that, in many of earths
processes, the influence of humans prosthetically extended through technology and fossil-fuel energy is
eclipsing that of the rest of nature. To become such, it has to be recognized as such by the International
Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) of the International Union of Geological Sciences. Since then, members of an
Anthropocene Working Group set up by the ICS have been gathering evidence for the Anthropocene, and
argue that we have entered a distinctive phase of Earths evolution that satisfies geologists criteria for its
recognition as a distinctive stratigraphic unit.16
But as the debate about the status of the Anthropocene continues, it is important to realise that the
truth of the Anthropocene is less about what humanity is doing, than the traces that humanity will leave
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behind. In terms of environmental ethics, one might say that geology is brutally consequentialist it does not
matter what one does, or why one did it, just what consequences it will leave behind. Geological accountability
all depends on the account that is laid down in the great book now not in heaven, but in the rocks of the
Earth. Thus geologists true to geologys semiotic character talk about the Anthropocene in terms of
signals laid down for future geologists. So, in a number of papers Zalasiewicz et al. argue for the acceptance
of the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch on the basis of:
a distinct lithostratigraphic signal a trace in the actual composition of the rock being formed
produced by: dramatically changing patterns of sedimentation due to the alteration of rivers and
coastlines; and the creation of novel strata what geologists call made ground, such as cities and
transport infrastructures, mines, wells and boreholes, excavated or in-filled ground, and preserved
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artefacts;
a distinct chemostratigraphic signal, comprising layers of pollution and altered geochemical
composition, for example: that produced by the doubling of reactive nitrogen on the earths surface
and in the oceans due to the industrial Haber-Bosch process; the accumulation of novel compounds
from industrial processes and nuclear fission; and the effects of increased CO2 in atmosphere and
oceans, both directly on the formation of minerals and indirectly via its effects on temperature, sea
level and biota;
a distinct biostratigraphic signal, generated by: the widespread replacement of natural vegetation
with agricultural monocultures; the alteration of marine biotic communities by trawling, especially
the bottom trawling of continental shelves; increased rates of species extinction, species migration
and invasive species; and the effects of anthropogenic chemical change on ecosystems;
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and finally a distinct sequence stratigraphic signal, produced by a potential large sea-level rise.
But even supposing the Anthropocene is accepted as a new unit of geochronology, the question remains of
how the date of commencement of the new epoch should be determined. There are two ways of officially
settling points of transition between units of geological time. The one usually used for very early points
where, as Ansted says, the pages of the stone book are dry and barren of incident, before the emergence of
the copious visible signs of life that give the present Phanerozoic (visible life) aeon its name an absolute
age is used, known as a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age. For example, it is decreed that the Proterozoic eon
that preceded the Phanerozoic commenced at 2,500 Ma. However, for more recent transition points, the
preference is for a golden spike marker set at a particular point in a particular sequence of strata at a
particular location a GSSP (Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point). The golden, round, visible end of
the spike typically has the letters GSSP, the name of the geological time unit of which it marks the start, the
year of its placement, and a line that marks the exact plane of transition in the rock. These spikes are thus like
permanent bookmarks in the stone book of nature, marking the boundary between its parts, chapters and
sections.
The ICS, which formally defines units of the Geologic Time Scale, has since 1977 placed more than 60
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such golden spikes. For example, in 2005 a spike was placed in a formation in Australia to mark the base of
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the Ediacaran period (so far the most recently designated unit of geological time) at about 635 Ma. Some
spikes are at the first or last appearance of a fossil creature; some are just placed at a crucial change in the
character of the rock; some are at a chemical layer for example, the bottom of the Ediacaran Period is
defined by a chemically distinctive carbonate layer left after last great snowball earth, when the whole Earth
had been frozen during the Cryogenian period.
But if a spike were placed to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene, at what point in geological
time should it be set? The standard model follows Paul Crutzens idea that the Anthropocene was inaugurated
around 1800 with the advent of fossil-fuelled industrial modernity, and the population explosion this made
possible. By contrast, palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman claims that it started with the mass clearing of
forests for agriculture 8,000 years earlier that without this transformation of the Earths surface there
would have been ice ages since then, and much of Canada would today still be frozen. The stratigraphers will
try to determine which of these is the most important point; so far, Crutzens position has the day, though the
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different stratigraphic signals listed above will all make themselves felt at very different timescales, and often
in complex patterns of diffusion across the globe.21
But there is at least one more possibility: that we may still just be seeing the birth pangs of the
Anthropocene proper. After all, the human is the first geological force to become conscious of its geological
role. So maybe the Anthropocene in all its geohistorical specificity really starts when humans become aware of
their role in shaping climate, and this awareness shapes their active relationship with the environment. Steffen
et al. suggest something along these lines with their idea of stage 3 of the Anthropocene. For them, stage 1
started with the industrial revolution around 1800 and stage 2 consists of the period since 1945 during which a
Great Acceleration in population growth and economic growth has produced a dramatic intensification of the
human alteration of Earth systems. Stage 3 will commence when awareness of anthropogenic change of the
Earth system starts to affect societys decision-making processes. However, they acknowledge that it is as yet
unclear whether this putative third stage of the Anthropocene would take the form of a deliberate reigning in
of our technological impact on the environment, or a dramatic radicalisation of it within a logic of planetary
management.22
The latter option, promoted enthusiastically by commentators such as Mark Lynas,23 has been
explored by the free-market Breakthrough Institute in the United States and in an online debate initiated by
the New York Times on 23 May 2011. During the latter, commentators such as the ecologist Earle Ellis and the
journalist Ronald Bailey of the libertarian Reason magazine celebrated the idea that the bad Anthropocene of
the last two centuries may be superseded by a good Anthropocene or, as Cameron Keys of Arizona State
University calls it, the Greater Anthropocene as humanitys awareness of its geological consequentiality
prompts it to take conscious control of planetary processes using high technology techniques such as genetic
modification and geoengineering.
So maybe the Anthropocene proper is still to come, and its character still to be determined. But more
fundamentally, however, perhaps there is something intrinsically odd about asking where this particular
golden spike should go. Is its appropriate position a technical matter, to be determined by objective tests? Or
does it depend in some sense on our understanding of the human of the Anthropos of the Anthropocene?
Furthermore, to whom is the plaque-like end of the spike addressed, and when is it to be read? If by present
humanity, is it a badge of pride or of shame? If by some future observer, is it an invocation, the summoning
into being of the God Species, that must grasp the vocation of planetary management? Or is the implied
audience an imagined future geologist? Is the spike thus more similar to Carl Sagans gold-anodised aluminium
plaques that were sent off on the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft in 1972 and 1973 on their voyages out of the
solar system, addressed to (scientifically literate) extra-terrestrials? Or to the signs and sculptures being
designed to warn future inhabitants of the earth who may or may not have written language of the
dangerous presence of nuclear waste? And where will the top of the Anthropocene layer be? Can there be a
top? Or is this the last layer, the end of layers a chapter that renders the book of geology both impossible to
continue and impossible to complete?

The Anthropos of the Anthropocene


But whose name would we be putting on the Anthropocene golden spike if one were ever placed in the great
stone book? What is this species which is supposed to have become so consequential for the planet that it may
have a unit of geological time named after it? Some vocabulary from the practice of biological taxonomy may
be helpful here, concerning the relationship between a species name and individual specimens. While the
name of each species refers to all of its members, certain members have a privileged relationship to that
name, in that they are used as agreed reference points for the species characteristics. Such members are
known as onomatophores name-bearers. If a species has only one specimen that acts as an
onomatophore, the latter is known as a holotype, but if there is more than one, each of these are called
syntypes. Finally, if one syntype is then selected to act as the sole onomatophore, then it becomes a
lectotype (from the Greek lektos, chosen).24
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In these terms, type is used in the sense of an example that somehow exemplifies the group to
which it belongs. But of course the selection of something as typical, as capable of standing (in) for a wider
group, is never innocent, and could always have been made otherwise. This was clearly illustrated by the
controversy over the male and female Caucasian figures chosen to represent humanity on Sagans Pioneer
plaques. So who would be the onomatophore of the Anthropocene? Who would carry the name of
Anthropos? Let us consider a number of ways of characterising the maker of worlds that is the geological force
of the Anthropocene.

Homo faber
The first candidate as onomatophore must surely be Homo faber, the human being as maker, who in Hannah
Arendts terms acts according to the goal-directed, means-ends logic of utility.25 Out of the endless flux of
nature Homo faber carves an enduring world, an ensemble of objects and structures that serve as a stable
setting for human affairs. Homo faber is the end of nature to which I refer in my title: that being in which the
rest of nature can appear to find its purpose and meaning. Homo faber, the human as fabricator, not only acts
as the conqueror of nature, removing material from its location and from the cycles of growth and decay in
order to make enduring things.26 It is in respect of Homo faber that the idea of the end of nature can even
arise. Living things qua living things are so caught up the flows and cycles of nature that in respect of them it
makes no sense to separate means and ends. It is only Homo faber, who raises the question of utility, for
whom the distinction becomes intelligible, and who can imagine themselves as elevated into the status of that
being for whom the rest of nature exists.27
If Homo faber is a plausible candidate for the name-bearer of the new geological epoch, it is because
in the Anthropocene the boundary of the world of made things seems to being extended to include the whole
geosphere. For example, 3050% of the land surface has been transformed by human action, more than half of
all accessible fresh water is used by mankind and more nitrogen is now fixed synthetically and applied as
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fertilisers in agriculture than is fixed naturally in terrestrial ecosystems. It is estimated that since the 1950s
the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Productivity (HANPP) the proportion of the global biospheres
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yearly biomass flow that is used by humans has increased from 3% to around 24%. The Anthropocene,
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then, might indeed appear to be the final triumph of Homo faber, of man the maker, as geophysical
processes are brought from the realm of necessity into the realm of utility, channelled into the household of
the Anthropos.

Homo consumens
However, perhaps Homo faber can be absolved of either blame or credit for the Anthropocene at least until
now. The bad Anthropocene of the last two centuries has arguably not so much been made directly through
means-ends agency, but brought about indirectly through another kind of activity or agency that of
consumption. The term I am using here, Homo consumens, was coined by Erich Fromm and used in a number
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of his works, but we could also follow William Catton and use Homo colossus to capture the way that
contemporary humans are able to consume exhaustible resources at an increasing rate and turn land over to
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ecologically unproductive uses. For Catton, Homo colossus is a detritovore, like the worm or the slug in
this case, able to consume the the transformed organic remains called fossil fuels. Like other detritovore
communities, that also depend on exhaustible accumulations of dead organic matter for their sustenance,
and thereby lack the life-sustaining biogeochemical circularity of other kinds of ecosystems, Homo colossus is
caught in a bloom and crash cycle.
Recall that many of the signals that collectively signify the Anthropocene in the stone book are not
about made things, about permanence or utility. They are about processes, and alterations in processes the
fluxes and flows of substances such as CO2, SO2 and NO; the migrations of species; the transformation of
ecological communities; accelerated erosion and denudation. What is in the ascendant is thus not the durable
world of things made by Homo faber, but impermanence and change. Arendt herself argued that in modern
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society Homo faber had been eclipsed: rather than a world of enduring objects being created by finite,
purposeful activities, humans and things are being absorbed into an endless round of production and
consumption where questions of utility of what is being done for the sake of what become as impossible
to answer and as irrelevant as they are in nature. And if the bad Anthropocene has indeed been this
grotesque parody of the cycles of nature a growth without decay, a piling up of things which are at once
consumed, a technological metabolism which turns nature into commodities without replenishing natures
self-reproductive powers33 then it has been not the apotheosis but the eclipse of man as Homo faber: the
end of the end of nature. It would thus be Homo consumens, that other-than-human assemblage of humans,
technology, fossil fuels and capitalist relations, that should be crowned as the onomatophore of the
Anthropocene.

Homo gubernans
But perhaps Homo faber might yet come into his own? Many proponents of the coming good or greater
Anthropocene certainly suggest that scientific and technological progress are such that humanity will before
long be able to engineer the planet, to take control of key planetary systems in order to optimise them for
human habitation and prevent ecological collapse.34 And it is true, for example, that the picture of the maker
of climate which currently dominates the contemporary discourse of climate engineering is an idealised figure
who knows in advance the form that they want the climate to take; who can identify the process whereby they
can provoke the climate to take it; who can carry out that process and bring the matter of climate into the
desired form; and for whom any uncertainties are exogenous factors that are in principle capable of being
eradicated by future technical refinements. 35 Homo faber, it appears, will return to impress a desired form
onto the pliant matter of the Earth system, and create a stable home for the Anthropos, whose name he can
then claim to bear.
Yet the Earth system is not simply a passive material that can be induced to take a prespecified form;
it is a metastable entity with its own intensities, inconsistencies and potentialities, and in continual formation,
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characteristics which would radically condition any act of making. The actions of any maker of the Earth
system would thus be determined not just by human will, but also by the resistances and inclinations of matter
like the craftsman of preindustrial societies who, because of the simple tools at their disposal, had to learn
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and perform repetitive gestures and actions in order to complete any technical operation. So a third
candidate for the onomatophore of the Anthropocene suggests itself one we might call Homo gubernans:
man the helmsman. As Michel Serres summarises it, a helmsman is an agent whose will acts on the vessel,
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which acts on the obstacle, which acts on his will, in a series of circular interactions. Even in the throwing of
a clay pot, the final shape of the pot and of the potters hands during the act of shaping is determined by
the nature of the clay as much as by any image in the potters mind; how much more so when the matter
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being sculpted is a tangle of resonating dissipative structures in constant becoming. Serres argues that the
governing which is the core activity of the politician is becoming less and less like that of the shepherd of
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beasts, and more and more like that of the helmsman; this would only be intensified if humanity attempts to
modulate the dynamics of natures becoming on a global scale. In a good Anthropocene, the intentions of
man will inevitably become conditioned by those of the matter he attempts to steer, as he progressively
entangle himself in the potentialities of matter.
Homo faber, Homo consumens, Homo gubernans we could doubtless multiply these syntypes further, these
candidates for the onomatophore of the Anthropocene. But whose name is Anthropos? Can a stable
lectotype be chosen? Or should they all remain as syntypes, in tension with each other? In the final section of
my paper I will situate this dispersal of the Anthropos into syntypes against the background of a more general
dispersal of man that I argue is occasioned by the Anthropocene. I will do this by bringing into dialogue two
works: Foucaults Order of Things, and Derridas Of Grammatology, published in 1966 and 1967 respectively. In
particular, I will focus on two messianic passages in these books, about the end of man and the end of the
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book respectively, because they will help us think about what happens when human meets geology in the
Anthropocene. But first we have to understand the way that Foucaults thought can illuminate the emergence
of contemporary ideas of the geological, in order to prepare the ground for my linking of the fate of the stone
book and that of man.

The archaeology of geology


A useful starting point is the collapse in the late eighteenth century of what Foucault calls the Classical
episteme or way of knowing that had been characteristic of the scientific revolution, and its replacement by a
very different, Modern episteme. The Classical episteme was a science of order, based on visible similarities
and differences, analysis and recombination, and its paradigmatic form was a static table that orders the
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similarities and differences operating in any given field. So, for example, the study of living things took the
form of a natural history, a classification of plants and animals based on observable characteristics. Crucially,
the Classical way of thinking was not strongly historical; there may be change in nature, but this is only against
the background of a timeless grid of potential identities and oppositions.
Foucaults archaeological approach to knowledge as lying in superposed, internally coherent but
incommensurable historical strata, rather than developing continuously over time can shed light on the
transformation in ways of thinking about the Earth in that period. For example, Martin Rudwick describes five
more-or-less distinct sciences of the earth that were practiced in the late eighteenth century, all of which can
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be seen as operating within Foucaults Classical episteme. The first three were all branches of natural history,
attempting to extend the descriptive, taxonomic approach that had been so productive in the study of living
things to the mineral world. Firstly, the indoor science of mineralogy was a science of collections and
classifications, arranging rocks and fossils according to their supposed natural kinds rather than linking them
to the time and place of their formation. Secondly, physical geography was an outdoor practice, in which
fieldwork was not a temporary stage but the main activity. It studied major visible features of the earths
surface, atmosphere and oceans mountains, hurricanes, and so on but was still a science of classification
rather than causal explanation or historical understanding. Thirdly, geognosy (literally, earth knowledge)
or for some Italian practitioners anatomia della terra, demonstrating the parallels with anatomical practices
at that time extended the descriptive classificatory gaze downwards, often through fieldwork in mines. It
used visual techniques to comprehend the three-dimensional mass of mountains, dividing rock masses, for
example into the lower primaries without any clear strata, seen as foundational, the layered secondaries,
formless superficials and so on, but priority here was to classification and structure, rather than to anything
like the geohistorical understanding of stratigraphy that was to emerge in the nineteenth century. The other
two sciences were more modelled on Newtons revolution in classical mechanics. The fourth, physique de la
terre, earth physics, sought to derive causal explanations for the specific features described by the three
sciences above stretching the scientific imagination of time, but still seeking ahistorical explanations. The
fifth, geotheory, consisted of a number of competing, abstract, speculative theories of the Earth as a system.
Modern geology depended as much on the epistemic shift away from this Classical episteme that
Foucault describes as do the disciplines of philology, economics and biology on which he concentrates.
Foucault describes the Modern episteme as employing a very different spatial metaphor to the Classical not
a flat table that arranged entities according to their visible characteristics, but a new language of surfaces and
depths: beneath the surface separateness and complexity of visible things, such as different animals or
different languages, lie hidden unities of function. But each discipline that the new episteme made possible
also understood its subject matter as radically historical; understanding something now involved locating it in
the specific, contingent historical development proper to its domain. The existence of man including even
the knowledge that is possible for him is thus seen as conditioned by a number of historical positivities of
organic life, of language and of economic production which cannot be subordinated to human chronology
or will.

While geology poses some interesting challenges to Foucaults account of the rise of the human sciences
that cannot be gone into here, it nevertheless clearly belongs to the Modern episteme. Georges Cuvier, as
instrumental in the emergence of modern geological science as he was biology, adopted the geotheoretical
term geology for his idea of a science that would build historical accounts of the Earths structure through
patient empirical inquiry, replacing both taxonomic geognosy and speculative geotheory in one stroke. This
new, geohistorical approach to the Earth drew on the practices of erudite and antiquarian history, which used
textual and non-textual artefacts to reconstruct human history as a contingent, intrinsically unpredictable
sequence. Applied to the Earth, this made possible a new reading of the Earths anatomy, in terms not of
taxonomy or universal causal laws, but of a history of the Earth a history that extends in deep time,
independent of human history or even human existence. The key concepts of the new geology illustrate how
far we have travelled from the Classical sciences of the Earth. For the earlier, taxonomic and causal earth
sciences, the key entities to be identified were natural kinds such as basalt; for geohistorical geology, by
contrast, the crucial entities were the events of geohistory, but also specific formations, each to be
understood in terms of its own contingent, situated history.43 The new geology also progressively gathered the
Earth together as a system, the diversity of its visible, surface features understood as the result of slow,
invisible unifying forces such as sedimentation, volcanism and tectonics.
It is as much due to the Modern-episteme features of modern geological practice described above the
centrality of the geological gaze in the field, the linear but contingent deep history, the constant move from
surface differences to deep unities as it is the page-and-writing structure of strata and fossil through which
the Earth seems to write its own history, that makes the stone book such a powerful metaphor for the Earth as
it is experienced today. But can we put man in that book, and expect it still to function as a book, as a totality
of signification? And will man in the sense we have come to understand him survive the encounter either?
Will there really be an Anthropos in the Anthropocene?

Geology and the end of man


When Derrida foretells the end of the book in Of Grammatology he does not mean empirical books, or writing
per se. By the book, Derrida means the idea of a totality ... of the signifier, a natural totality. The book, for
Derrida, is the enclosure within and through which the good, pure writing that I mentioned earlier is kept good
and pure; it has to be enveloped in a volume or a book, to be rendered a complete, coherent whole. The
book in this sense is for Derrida thus profoundly alien to the sense of writing, to its aphoristic energy, and to
difference in general (18).
Derridas announcement of the end of the book is in some sense perfomative, bringing about what it
names through the inauguration of the science of grammatology. And with the end of the book, the end of the
idea of a unified semiotic whole which guarantees the relation between signifier and signified, there also
comes the end of the self-present human subject, understood as speech, as pure writing. The end of linear
writing is indeed the end of the book (86), and the death of the book would be a new situation for speech, of
its subordination within a structure of which it shall no longer be the archon (8).
What of the stone book of nature, the one that we imagined had been opened by geology? Man as
subject position as the natural being whose role it was to know nature was the condition of possibility of
geology as he was of the other sciences of the Modern episteme. It was man who was at once determined by
the positivity of the things that surround him, but also interpellated by them as that being whose nature is
to know nature, and itself, in consequence, as a natural being.44 But in the Anthropocene man has become a
destratifying force, the diffrance that explodes the book of geology, and thereby its condition of impossibility.
The taking up by man of a geological object position his pressing into geological service, a becomingmineral, to be contemplated by the geologist-to-come is not so much interpellation as interpolation the
process of inserting new material within and falsification of the original text of the great stone book of nature.
As the Anthropos turns from reading to writing the stone book of nature, this is a being written that
seems to disrupt the order and meaning of all the other pages of that written being. What we as humans put
9

down in the stone book is the disruption of other layers, a rifling through the pages, as we drill, mine and
extract. We are volcanic, creating extrusive and intrusive formations that break the logic of superposition and
burst the relation between space and time in the stone book. Just as magma fills fissures and then cools to
create dikes thin sheets of igneous rock that lie discordantly across existing strata we create pages at
strange angles, generating a Rubiks book that would need to be read through in all directions
simultaneously. The Anthropos will thus lie in the strata in a different sense, in a different plane, not true
as a perjurer, disrupting the semiotic logic of geology as much as its materiality.
Let us now turn to Foucaults famous, comparable passage about the end of man, which considers
man as a particular historical figure that was constituted by the shift from Classical to Modern thought at the
close of the eighteenth century. Only in the Modern episteme, he suggests, can man appear not just as a
represented being as Carl Linnaeus classified Homo sapiens within his table but as a representing being,
one who is at once conditioned by the positivities of life, labour and language and thereby able to comprehend
them. But at the end of The Order of Things Foucault asks , if man was constituted by such a shift, can he just
as easily end? If the modern episteme were to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did at the end of
the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at
the edge of the sea.45
The event which Foucault anticipated in such messianic tones is not the Anthropocene, but it can help
us understand the latters significance. Yet now the fate of man in the Anthropocene is not that he will be
erased, but that he will be made immortal, as a trace preserved forever in the rock. To use Arendts language,
with the Anthropocene, mortal humans are being promised a this-worldly, earthly immortality, through which
they would be at home in everlastingness, and would find their place in a cosmos where everything is
46
immortal except themselves. But, in contrast to Arendts classicism, in which the medium of the potential
immortality of deeds is that of language and collective memory, here, moral significance is inscribed in the
rocks in the marks that our landfills and mass extinctions will leave in the fossil record. The coming layer of
the Anthropocene, which as we speak is being built up across the globe, is itself a memento mori like the stone
books which I discussed at the beginning of this paper: a reminder of our incipient minerality.
This becoming geological of the human is a denouement which is both our apotheosis and our
eclipse. The Anthropocene is the relve, the Aufhebung of man that is, an elevation which is at once a
47
negation. Man will be lifted up, to the status of onomatophore, made relevant. But he will also be relieved,
made to stand down, his status as the end of nature over. And just as Aufheben, to lift up, means both to
preserve and to abolish, so too can we say that the Anthropos of the Anthropocene will be laid down in both
senses at once instituted and rendered inoperative. The Anthropocene strata will thus be both laid down
and built up, and both instituted and abolished, in the same gesture. And as Homo faber, Homo consumens or
Homo gubernans, man reaches his end, in all the equivocality that that word also possesses end as telos
48
and as terminus.
Just as human meets geology in the Anthropocene, disrupts and disperses the pages of the stone
book, the Anthropos is also dispersed into a series of syntypes, multiple subject and object positions: as the
end of nature, the maker of the world, now relieved from his work, made irrelevant; as the hypertrophy of
natures becoming, the detritovore that booms and crashes; and as the helmsman, who feels the pull on his
tiller as natures becoming rushes past his rudder. But also as the lay-er who writes, who lays down,
inaugurates the strata; as the lay-ee, that which is written, is laid down; and as the subject who must read
who is necessary to convene the layers into a great book and give it its unity and meaning, but who can no
longer do so. Geology may be our fate, but our encounter with it disrupts our understanding both of geology
and of the human. So if we are to discern a geoethics for the Anthropocene, it cannot take the form of a
good, pure writing, enclosed in and stabilised by the volume of the book of nature, or by the self-present
human subject. It will take place in and be conditioned by the much more unstable volume opened up by this
multiple dispersal of the human.

10

Notes
1

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the conference Natura Loquens: Eruptive Dialogues,
Disruptive Discourses, organised by the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and
Environment (EASLCE) at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, 2729 June 2012. I am very grateful to Tim
Clark, Tim Dant, Ursula Heise and participants at the EASLCE conference for extremely helpful comments. The
paper has also greatly benefited from conversations with Nigel Clark, Kathryn Yusoff and Maialen Galarraga,
also at Lancaster University, about a potential geophysical turn in social and political theory.
2
Many thanks are due to Gionni Digravio of the University of Newcastle, Australia and Ian Berke of San
Francisco for sharing their knowledge and interpretations of these curious objects.
3
Revelations 20: 12, 15.
4
David Thomas Ansted, The Great Stone Book of Nature (London: Macmillan & Co., 1863).
5
To con is an archaic verb meaning to study or to examine carefully.
6
Victor R. Baker, Geosemiosis, Geological Society of America Bulletin, 111:5 (1999), 633-45.
7
Robert Frodeman, Geo-Logic: Breaking Ground between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2003), 107; Andrew Graciano, The Book of Nature Is Open to All Men:
Geology, Mining, and History in Joseph Wrights Derbyshire Landscapes, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68:4
(2005), 583-600, 5902.
8
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976).
9
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 134.
10
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius: Or, a Treatise of Education, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson, 1768), 182.
11
Derrida, Of Grammatology.
12
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002).
13
Ma means millions of years before the present and Ka thousands of years before the present.
14
That this has been the period in which human civilization emerged and flourished is probably not a
coincidence see Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Smith, Tiffany L. Barry, Paul R. Bown, Peter Rawson,
Patrick Brenchley, David Cantrill, Angela L. Coe, Andrew Gale, Philip L. Gibbard, F.John Gregory, Mark W.
Hounslow, Andrew C. Kerr, Paul Pearson, Robert Knox, John Powell, Colin Waters, John Marshall, Michael
Oates and Philip Stone, Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?, GSA Today, 18:2 (2008), 4-8, 5.
15
P.J. Crutzen and E.F. Stoermer, The "Anthropocene", IGBP Newsletter, 41 (2000), 17-8.
16
Zalasiewicz et al., Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?, 6.
17
Simon J. Price, Jonathan R. Ford, Anthony H. Cooper and Catherine Neal, Humans as Major Geological and
Geomorphological Agents in the Anthropocene: The Significance of Artificial Ground in Great Britain,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369:1938 (2011), 1056-84.
18
Zalasiewicz et al., Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?; Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Richard Fortey,
Alan Smith, Tiffany L. Barry, Angela L. Coe, Paul R. Bown, Peter F. Rawson, Andrew Gale, Philip Gibbard, F. John
Gregory, Mark W. Hounslow, Andrew C. Kerr, Paul Pearson, Robert Knox, John Powell, Colin Water, John
Marshall, Michael Oates and Philip Stone, Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene, Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society A, 369:1938 (2011), 1036-55.
19
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/geoscientist/geonews/page10267.html.
20
The top of the Ediacaran at 542 Ma marks the bottom of the Cambrian period and hence of the Phanerozoic.
21
Zalasiewicz et al., Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene.
22
Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill, The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the
Great Forces of Nature?, Ambio, 36:8 (2007).
23
Mark Lynas, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans (London: Fourth Estate, 2011).
24
Type itself has an original meaning of an image (Latin typus) or impression (Greek tupos).
25
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). To be consistent with the
rules of Linnaean binomial classification, I am capitalising the first word in each of my lectotypes, such as Homo
faber.
26
Arendt, Human Condition, 139.
27
Arendt, Human Condition, 156.
28
Crutzen and Stoermer, The "Anthropocene".
29
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Global_human_appropriation_of_net_primary_production_(HANPP).
30
I am following the convention of using man and he to refer to these mythic versions of the human, though
a feminist counter-reading would also be very fruitful.
31
For example, Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
11

32

William Robert Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1980), 274, 169.
33
Teresa Brennan, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), 5.
34
For example, Lynas, God Species.
35
Maia Galarraga and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Making Climates: Solar Radiation Management and the Ethics of
Fabrication, in Christopher Preston (ed.), Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management
(Lexington, MA: Lexington, 2012), pp. 211-25.
36
Galarraga and Szerszynski, Making Climates.
37
Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode Dexistence Des Objets Techniques, third edition (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 779.
38
Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, tr. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1995), 42.
39
Ilya Prigogine and Paul Glansdorff, Thermodynamic Theory of Structure, Stability and Fluctuations (New York:
Wiley, 1971).
40
Serres, Natural Contract, 18.
41
Foucault, Order of Things, 81.
42
M. J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 59131.
43
Rachel Laudan, From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987), 6.
44
Foucault, Order of Things, 341, 338.
45
Foucault, Order of Things, 422.
46
Arendt, Human Condition, 19.
47
Jacques Derrida, The Ends of Man, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp.
109-36, 121.
48
Derrida, Ends of Man, 134.

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