The measure of all things? The Anthropocene as a global biopolitics of carbon
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Scott Hamilton |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066116683831 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116683831
European Journal of
International Relations
2018, Vol. 24(1) 33 –57
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066116683831
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The measure of all things?
The Anthropocene as a global
biopolitics of carbon
Scott Hamilton
The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
We are now told to welcome ourselves to the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch
where humanity is ‘literally making’ the planet (Dalby, 2014). Yet, the underlying
philosophical foundations of this human-made epoch remain relatively unexplored.
This article makes a new contribution by problematizing the Anthropocene using the
philosophies of Arendt, Foucault and Heidegger. It argues that the Anthropocene is
a new and global form of biopolitics that asserts the essence of all (human) life and
industry — the carbon atom — as the measure and centre of everything. When Nature
is pre-reflectively projected, quantified and conceived as a calculable and carbonic
human construction, then every thinkable object becomes related back to the human
as its creator and steward. This is argued by tracing the entwining of computerized
general circulation models, nuclear technologies and Earth system science, as well
as by critiquing applicationist uses of biopolitics and governmentality in International
Relations. What emerges in the Anthropocene, therefore, is an implicit yet powerful
form of subjectivism ranging from atomic to global scales, or what is defined here as
‘relationality’. Echoing Heidegger (1977a: 27), in the Anthropocene, ‘It seems as though
man everywhere and always encounters only himself’. Welcome, Anthropos, not to an
epoch you are making, but to your new global biopolitics of carbon.
Keywords
Anthropocene, biopolitics, carbon, Earth system science, nature, subjectivism
Corresponding author:
Scott Hamilton, International Relations Department, London School of Economics and Political Science,
Houghton St, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: s.t.hamilton@lse.ac.uk
683831EJT0010.1177/1354066116683831European Journal of International RelationsHamilton
research-article2016
Article
34 European Journal of International Relations 24(1)
Take away our ability to shape the environment, and human civilization
becomes meaningless. A degree of control over the environment is what
distinguishes civilizations from hunter-gatherer societies, and we clearly
cannot afford to let it go. (Friedrichs, 2013: 172)
only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will
we be able to grasp what biopolitics is. (Foucault, 2008: 22)
Introduction: International Relations’ new world
In the discipline of International Relations (IR), we are now commonly told that we are
entering ‘a postmodern world, one in which the key distinctions of modernity no longer
hold as useful categories for either analyses or action’ (Dalby, 2014: 4). In this world, IR
must rethink its foundational categories and definitions, re-conceptualizing the political,
the social, the ecological, the international and even the global. ‘At its most basic, this
means that our fundamental image of the world must be revolutionised. Our existence is
neither international nor global, but planetary’ (Burke et al., 2016: 504). Why have our
traditional images of the world become so problematic? As declared from the echelons
of the natural sciences, recent human interference with the Earth’s systems has inter-
rupted the operation of geophysical processes and cycles. This has created an unprece-
dented uncertainty concerning the capacity of the Earth to sustain humanity’s
encroachment (Biermann, 2007). As such, ‘“business-as-usual” cannot continue. We are
passing into a new phase of human experience and entering a new world that will be
qualitatively and quantitatively different from the one we have known’ (Steffen et al.,
2011: 756). In this new world, the ‘Earth is now a human planet’, and ‘humanity has
become a geophysical force on par with the earth-shattering asteroids and planet-cloak-
ing volcanoes that defined past eras’ (Vince, 2014: 5). In other words, IR, ‘Welcome to
the Anthropocene!’ (Dalby, 2013: 5).
First outlined by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000
(Crutzen, 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), ‘the Anthropocene’ has since fostered
boisterous debates among natural and social scientists alike (see Galaz, 2015). The con-
cept describes a geologic epoch that is so transformed by humanity’s impact on the
Earth’s natural systems that it is stratigraphically distinct from the previous 11,700 years
of its Holocene precursor. Humanity has now forever etched itself in stone upon the
Earth. The concept’s multidisciplinary appeal stems from its broad and inclusive scope.
To think about the Anthropocene is ‘to think together Earth processes, life, human enter-
prise and time into a totalizing framework’ (Hamilton et al., 2015: 2). By asserting human
agency as a new ‘global geophysical force, equal to “some of the great forces of Nature”
in terms of Earth System functioning’ (Steffen et al., 2011: 741), the Anthropocene
upsets the classical (meta)theoretical assumptions of IR and its billiard-ball models of
states and international systems. No longer assuming a stable environment as its back-
ground context, it thus encourages IR scholars to question how statist ontologies and
their concomitant Western and Enlightenment epistemological binaries of human–nature,
inside–outside and subject–object operate within a transforming Earth system (see
Fagan, 2016; Harrington, 2016). IR, therefore, must either reorient its focus on national
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