Literary and critical encounters with the Anthropocene: An interview with Seán Hand

Zou Li (hereafter Zou): Dear Professor Hand, thanks for your kind agreement to have this interview via email. Your talk at Shanghai Jiao Tong University about the “Anthropocene” was inspiring and insightful. I agree with you that the “Anthropocene” has been one of the major concerns for both humanity studies and natural science research. However, there are some misconceptions about the “Anthropocene”. For instance, some people believe that the “Anthropocene” is already an official epoch (Rull 2017: 1057), although this is far from true. Therefore, shall we start our interview with these two questions: what do you think about the current misconceptions about the “Anthropocene”? How can we use this term properly?

Seán Hand (hereafter Hand): It’s true that the term Anthropocene is neither formalized in certain key quarters, nor accepted by all intellectual approaches. For example, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has not yet included the term in its set of chronostratigraphic units – though there is a Working Group in this area that has accumulated data to present to the Commission. And of course, there are political pressures applied to mitigate predictive models of catastrophe and the serious scaling-back of consumption that they urgently suggest, into a rhetoric of concern that relocates blame and delocalizes accountability.

In parallel to this, we have the inevitable competition of intellectual visions. So certain critics insist instead on speaking of the Capitalocene, since they stress how global warming, uncontrollable rapidity of viral growth, and destabilising and destructive socio-economic inequality are traceable in their analyses to the effects of a generalised capitalist system arising from the 15th century onwards. They insist, in other words, on the centrality of historical and economically focused analysis to an understanding of current conditions, and want to avoid or reject a term like Anthropocene that carries with it a generalising blame, or a dehistoricized dimension of tragedy.

In conjunction with this approach, we also have a branch of focused humanities that prefers to employ the term Plantationocene. This locates the origins of current tipping-point changes more precisely again in colonialist exploitation and its massive effects of natural and human destabilisation, as well as a legacy of racial hierarchisation, and continuing negative consequences for economic, environmental, human and social structures.

The inspiring feminist, and multispecies-focused, thinker Donna Haraway prefers another term again, namely the Chthulucene, the etymology of which points to the underground or underworld, as a place where life emerges, and which also connects to a neologism used by the fantasy fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Haraway therefore prefers to conceptualize this epoch not in terms that focus attention still on Anthropos or the human, but instead on the complete imbrication and common sourcing of human and non-human. One of her key points of insistence is that we must see ourselves as involved in a making-with, not in a self-making, if we are – as she puts it – to learn to stay with the trouble of building a liveable future for all species on one damaged earth.

And we should note that even the assumed continuation of the human, which the term Anthropos might at least imply, is not universally accepted. In a 2019 book entitled Novacene, James Lovelock, famous for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, acknowledged how capitalist market forces and the Industrial Revolution, in radically altering environment to suit demand, created the Anthropocene. But he views this as an epoch that will in time become superseded by one that employs cyborgs or super-intelligent robots that have achieved a singularity. Eschewing any nostalgic dimension to Anthropocene realisations, then, Lovelock happily speculates on a post-human prospering of the earth, as part of his vision of Gaia, where a superior intelligence will mark the next stage of the evolution of the cosmos.

It is not surprising that we should have different formulations for the prospect of a new epoch for planetary existence! So my own focus is not on micromanaging labels, but on stressing the common warning of consequences at planetary scale that are arising from the untrammelled and still rewarded actions of humans on the one life-world. As I emphasized in my lecture, I am happy to retain the term Anthropocene, therefore, since my particular intervention concerns the realisations that our human disciplines of literary and critical studies can develop as a form of what I termed ecosophical practice. This seems to me to be what we can add to the general debates and projections. In reflecting on the frameworks and assumptions that sustain our reading and practice, we can develop formulations and approaches that reflect authentically this radical uncertainty about how we “live on”, and use our human schools of appreciation of the non-human (into which category I could also place the cultural artifacts we evaluate) to offer renewed ways of being with – rather than over against – the web of life that we inhabit.

Zou: I completely agree that intellectual versions of the Anthropocene and our disciplines of literary and critical studies can develop a form of “ecosophical practice”. Therefore, will different intellectual versions lead to different forms of “ecosophical practice”? How do different understandings of reality shape the frameworks and assumptions of our reading and interpretation of literary works?

Hand: I have no prescribed view of what an ecosophical practice might be beyond its cultivation of an awareness of the entangled nature of the human with its umwelt. As such, I hope that there would be many different intellectual versions of such a practice, rather than the emergence of a dominating and domesticating method that produces a template, of the kind I was evoking earlier. Of course different understandings of reality will necessarily shape assumptions and insights. That is surely the premise of much counter-hegemonic critical work, whether that be Orientalism or feminism or queer theory. It is presumably the very basis of a discipline like ethnography. It is arguably a core argument for the formation of ethics. And so on. Your question may have to do with adjudication, or what Levinas would see as the introduction of the Third, or justice. This ultimately brings us from an ideal discussion about ethics into a more polluted realm of politics. Perhaps our very practice here in this interview evidences how the two realms have to carry on debating with one another, influencing, rebuttting, testing, and intermittently agreeing. At the same time, our different understandings of reality, in the context of the Anthropocene, might recall the final classification of animals in a supposed Chinese encyclopaedia mentioned in the Borges short story “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”: “que de lejos parecen moscas”, that is, those animals that from far off look like flies! Our different understandings concern one planetary condition and one connected fate.

Zou: Since the Anthropocene has been a major focus of literary and critical academia, could you please tell us what are the major challenges of the “Anthropocene” for literary and critical studies in the contemporary era?

Hand: Well, the term Anthropocene is used in many fields of discussion and analysis to evoke collectively a whole set of planetary phenomena and consequences whose common cause is generally acknowledged now to be the negative effects on our one world produced by our human activity. These phenomena include remarkable increases in erosion and sediment transportation caused by urbanization and agriculture, and major disturbances to the cycles of elements like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals, together with new chemical compounds. They equally entail sometimes extreme and unstable environmental alteration that we often refer to as global warming, but which involves a series of effects including sea-level rise, acidification of our oceans, and spreading oceanic “dead zones”. They also involve dramatic and potentially disastrous changes in our biosphere, both on land and in the sea, with habitat loss and species invasion. And of course, we have created and dispersed whole new mineral-like substances such as concrete or plastics, and generated technofossils. Finally, we observe major disturbance of human social habitats and economic rhythms whose cause is clearly a disequilibrium produced both by these consequences and by the globalised acceleration in human exploitation of the planet’s resources and thereby of populations in different parts of the world.

This is clearly the major challenge for any aspect of our epoch. So literary and critical studies ought to want to contribute to understanding the issue, and to reflect the scale and urgency in its practice. Yet it still often seems as though scientific and technological analyses proceed in advance of or separate to the generation of debate and narrativization within philosophical and humanities fields of study. This is whether the more dominant discourses focus on ethical containment of technical responses, or speculate excitedly about transhumanity. This lack of leadership or at least command on the part of humanities is of course symptomatic of the modern era’s technologization of humanity’s relationship to the world around us. So literary and critical studies already have a crucial function here in calling attention to our actions, renewing our connection and commitment to the life-web we inhabit, and lastly engaging critically with technology, which should include a self-transformation involving our own critical de-technologization.

By that last point, I want to suggest that literary and critical studies have sometimes sought to remain relevant in the modern world by presenting themselves as also being a science of sorts. In certain quarters, and driven by motives that parallel technological reward, critical theory has generated its own versions and performances of extractivism and exploitation, materialism and productivism, forces that have helped to generate the Anthropocene condition that we now acknowledge.

So there is indeed a logical challenge here for literary and critical studies, and it is to strive to formulate ways of appreciation and insight, valorization and alertness that constitute a semiotics of urgency, accountability and agency. This is not to remain in thrall to the latest scientific schedule; instead, it can involve reclaiming a traditional function of the humanities, which involves placing narratives of ethical and aesthetic power at the heart of a general wisdom, and restoring our subdued senses of sustainability, reciprocity and even wonder for planetary existence. I don’t accept that there is anything politically quietist in this, by the way: on the contrary, I think that this is the overarching political question for our time. And as I am suggesting, it is a question that can start with a mea culpa in literary and critical studies, since our own work to a degree has internalised models of rationality, profitability, instrumentalism and de-affectivity.

Zou: You mentioned that “[i]n certain quarters, and driven by motives that parallel technological reward, critical theory has generated its own versions and performances of extractivism and exploitation, materialism and productivism, forces that have helped to generate the Anthropocene condition that we now acknowledge”. Could you please further explain the way critical theory generates “its own versions and performances of extractivism and exploitation, materialism and productivism”?

Hand: It is ironic that critical theory may have originated in Western societies through a public intellectual desire to develop a critique of political and economic controls, and gradually became another product in those same systems. Its own hermeneutics of suspicion, if you will, developed into a tool used to interrogate literature or other artistic productions as though they were mere accomplices in hegemonic forces. As this became institutionalised in contemporary academic practice, we ended up with wearisome spectacles wherein writers or thinkers could be righteously denounced in a way that turned critical theory into one more tool of appropriation, and a profitable exercise in professional self-advancement. It’s bad enough when critical theory starts to behave like a fosssil fuel extraction industry towards the raw material of literature. It’s hypocrisy when it weaponises writing for the purposes of material gain or celebrity. I don’t wish to sound merely pious or romantic here: I too swim in these waters. I am not suggesting that we reverse a hermeneutics of suspicion into a hermeneutics of faith. Nor do I wish to promote a rearguard revival of Geisteswissenschaften in the struggle between Truth and Method. On the contrary, what I was suggesting is that literary and critical studies should strive to be in the vanguard of critical enquiries that pursue fascinated exploration with empathy as well as acumen. There is perhaps something inherently interdisciplinary in this dynamic, given the preference in what I am articulating for discovery over denunciation, and suspenceful intelligence over intentional suspicion. Anna Tsing expresses something like this in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2021) when she writes of stretching imagination to grasp the implications of precarity, advocates using disciplines such as ethnography and natural history to better analyse indeterminate encounters, and recognizes that our research object here is now always and necessarily going to be a contaminated diversity.

Zou: In your talk at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, you discussed the emergence of the “non-human turn” as well as the “post-human turn” in the contemporary world. Could you please tell us what is the relationship between them? Are the two terms different or inter-connected? What is the significance of these two terms in our present humanity, social and cultural studies?

Hand: Well, we are back with conflicting, confusing, and sometimes just confused terminology! And I have to say that announcement of something as a “turn” asserts a sense of accomplishment and major step forward that does not always convince on closer scrutiny. I think that in my talk I had actually acknowledged both these labels rather in passing, since they are obviously evoked in debates. In very general terms, then, the post-human is what is being gestured to quite happily by Lovelock when I cited him a moment ago. That is, it is a stage that can apparently be reached by humans that would exist beyond the human as we currently categorise it. In science fiction terms this does usually manifest (rather laughably, to be honest) as a kind of cybernetic organism – hence the term cyborg. But in more critical or philosophical terms, a post-human perspective challenges the bases or assumptions of a humanist outlook that places the human at the centre and as the universal. The anticipated “singularity” of our growing machine-based computation, which might reach a level of “consciousness” (depending on a particular definition of that state) and so seem to surpass human capability, can be figured in this general area, I imagine. There is a significant literature by now on this prospect, following Kurzweil’s lead, that either suggests “treacherous turn” moments or “malignant failure” modes in this new superintelligence, or more banally enjoins us to develop determined competency in order to reduce risk. A more interesting human question here is posed by Stuart Russell in his book Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control (2019), which is that the problem of control fundamentally concerns less machine learning than human motivation and the instability of that.

In contrast, the non-human could be thought of as altogether more grounded in today’s, and perhaps yesterday’s, reality, and is less insistently connected to a teleological notion of development or progress or transformation into a “beyond”. It is therefore more materially and strictly attentive to the ways in which humans from the beginning have always been in coexistence with the non-human, however we figure that for ourselves – as animals or plants or ecologies or organisms or climates.

In our current context, we encounter many examples gesturing to one or other of these categories. The post-human does bring us into certain science-fiction scenarios, which some rather excited projections for AI can feed into. The non-human brings us into the worlds of the animal and plant kingdoms, and symbioses within those. I naturally privileged the non-human in my talk since I wanted to think less about technological solutions brought about by humans than about an intimate sense of critical proximity that already inhabits us. However, reflecting on that now, I concede that I did not recognize all the technological assistance that we already draw on almost casually to the extent of living with it as a prosthesis of our sense of being in the world. For example, the already old technology of pacemakers, hearing aids, voice boxes, and so on. So, perhaps one day humans will inhabit the internet of things. With social media, second life projections, so-called “open” AI and seemingly grafted “smart” phones integrated into adoptive identities, we’re arguably halfway there.

You can hear, though, that I want again to state quietly that I am not very interested in enlarging differences and talking up “schools” or “turns”, but instead prefer to argue for a critical, aesthetic and ethical approach that acknowledges in radical ways a kinship with otherness that can inflect our determinations in the Anthropocene epoch. I think that this is probably why I am also not very absorbed in detailed discussion of smart cities on one hand or degrowth economics on the other, however much both these areas may have very laudable aims. My own concerns are less driven by soft governance, and more by post-phenomenological attentiveness and critical development. I think that this can be the contribution of people working in our area, and I believe this contribution is both urgently necessary and as important as technological or economic ones.

At one level, this could be an updating of Murdochian attention and its moral self-transformation (though I am aware of the amusing Lovibond rejoinder about a focus on the still world and the microcosmic: not more bloody stones!), and its ethical basis does of course entail the Nussbaum addition about letting oneself be seen – the erotics of that interestingly can come close to some aspects of Levinasian substitution. However, this new sense of attention, given the surveillance and data power that we increasingly dwell within, and which challenge liberal evocations of “world citizenship” or “humanity”, raises the question about what, in our Anthropocene collection of conditions and developments, we can still isolate and designate as the “inner” life. This is more than an assumption of vulnerability or permeability or post-national species identity. The question might concern a non-human validation of my identity and my recognition of separateness within that. And this might lead me into trying fully to realise non-human pain and endurance, not just as a “do no harm”, but as a new location of recognition that isn’t only bounded by the human or the humanly tragic. I’m obviously thinking here in part about Cavell on Lear.

Zou: Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most eminent philosophers in the contemporary period regarding his insights about post-human ethics and encountering the other. You have published extensively on Levinas’s philosophy. Apart from numerous articles, such as “Levinas, Literature, and Philosophy” in The Oxford Handbook of Levinas (2019) and “Being for every other: Levinas in the Anthropocene” in Frontiers of Narrative Studies (2021), you authored three well-received books on his theories, namely, The Levinas Reader (1989), Facing the Other: The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (1996) and Emmanuel Levinas (2008). In these articles and books, you reveal the increasing importance of Levinas’s theories in the study of literature and culture today. As an expert on Levinas studies, could you please tell us what are the core insights of Levinas’s ethical philosophy? What is their significance? What is the influence of Levinas’s philosophy upon research in social science and humanity studies?

Hand: Well, a proper answer to that question would have to be at least as large as yet another book! Levinas’s progress from the teachings of Husserl and Heidegger towards a post-war formulation of the radical other as the non-reductive basis and infinite answerability of being is well known. The formulations of this asymmetry become increasingly extreme in keeping with the nature of the inexpiable demand. But while development towards the limits of philosophical language in his 1974 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence certainly transformed his metaethics from a series of tableaux wherein ethical agency still resides with the subject, into the notion and language of being hostage to the other, there are still limits to Levinas’s ethical and even intellectual encounters here. If we wish to highlight the significance of Levinas for post-human ethics, or for a relocation of the human within the affected worlds of the Anthropocene, then we do so beyond the conscious insights of his philosophy, to use the terms of your question. And this is legitimate and even logical in my view, since it involves both the inclusion of Levinas’s il y a and the recognition of infinitude which his metaethics requires. That is indeed both the challenge and the significance, since it precisely places subjectivity from the beginning in the accusative mode, which is what Levinas presents as the state of being in substitution for the other. To use Levinas’s own description of this being as substitution, the subject can very appropriately be confounded by the “wordless accusation” of non-human lifeforms for which we are ethically responsible. Levinas’s own actual envisioning of the non-human was very limited to the extent of being the inhuman in certain scenarios, but this is why a radical development of Levinasian insights into an ethical ecology for the Anthropocene would be of great value, in my view. I say that with caution, however, since a merely passionate deployment of his language and vision in this space would just elide or abuse quite fundamental elements in his ethics. However, the questions that Levinasian ethics and Anthropocene concerns could pose to one another might well produce a transformative moment that for people concerned with an ecosophical practice might disrupt the self-defeating mechanism of understanding the planetary consequences of rationalised exploitation through a well-rehearsed academic performance of an associated mindset.

Zou: Levinas uses the notion of “alterity” to discuss the difference and relations between the other and the subject (Wright et al. 1988:170). Could Levinas’s insights on alterity and on the relations between the other and the subject give us some inspiration on dealing with the intercultural and international discords and conflicts in the capitalist world system?

Hand: I mentioned earlier the necessary move of ethical discussion into the more mediated world of politics. It is there, in notions of justice, that I think we’d be better situated if we want to apply Levinasian invocations to international relations – and not only in ways that critique capitalist systems, of course, though Levinas’s most nuanced remarks grow out of contemplation of modern Western liberal States. You will recall at the same time that the anteriority of ethics in Levinas, a meta-ethics in effect, means that politics for him still comes “after”, at least in the philosophy. (In the Difficult Freedom [1960] essays there is a more acknowledged – if never definitively scored – line from ethics to Judaism and the State of Israel. I am reminded, just now, of the “hatred of America” moment in Cavell’s essay on Lear.) In effect, he stopped short of taking this step into politics in Totality and Infinity (1961), though he had logically been brought to this point. Instead, we have a domesticated and still idealized version of politics played out within the unit of the family. We do not move out to the State.

More generally, we have to be sure how we envisage here a universalization of ethics. On the one hand, we can advocate this kind of extension when we are thinking about an ethical cultivation in terms of humanity, including when we are talking about the concerns of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, we can pursue universalization of values as the ethical stress being brought to bear all the time on a politics, including of an international order, which again can have direct implications on issues central to the Anthropocene mission. In Levinas, this move, from a responsibility that begins with me and is not ever fully dischargable, to a politics conceived in pragmatic and negotiated ways, is always very tentative, and rightly so given the manner in which the latter will happily co-opt the former to justify or exculpate itself.

When it comes to alterity, I’d say similarly that Levinas’s use of this term was part of his philosophical desire to break with Western traditions that for him had led to the ultimate international discord of totalitarian regimes and Nazi horror. I’m not sure, therefore, that I’d want to introduce it here as an instrument. The postwar Existence and Existents (1978) therefore emphasized how the absolute notion of the alterity of the other human being broke the definitiveness of the I but without this relation with the other thereby forming any new bond such as a bond with another I. As a term it is designed to remain irreducible, to denote the verticality of a relation based on irreducible answerability and responsibility. It is not conceived just as a synonym for a cultural or political difference that may be reduced through dialogue. This in itself might give us some insights regarding conflict resolution, but that insight would be that we should have to follow Levinas’s whole trajectory from the alterity emphasized in Totality and Infinity (1961) through to the move towards proximity in Otherwise than Being. I don’t feel, incidentally, that, in the context of the Anthropocene, Levinas’s perspectives can be easily applied, and I have tried elsewhere to isolate some of the problems inherent in this importation of his terms. Derrida’s extension of the idea of hospitality inspired by Levinas works is a greater inspiration here. And I appreciate how the Levinasian inflections of Corine Pelluchon’s work on Nourishment also seek to bring a Levinasian being-for-the-other into Anthropocene questions of upholding justice for all of the biosphere.

Zou: As an established scholar, could you please give some suggestions on the career development of young scholars?

Hand: I am tempted to say that my generation looks to you to fix our development, and that we are not your best guides as you face the challenges previous generations – including most certainly mine – have bequeathed you! None the less, I think it is clear from everything I have noted that we must be able to develop our collective and collaborative engagement with Anthropocene challenges via multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and international encounters, so that we engender both a knowledge and a sensitivity that can deal with all scientific, social, behavioural and affective ramifications. We shall need to develop a lexicon and a skillset that enable us to describe and revise our being in the Anthropocene world. It is clear that we need an imaginative as well as a scientific elevation that can move us collectively and massively away from what Amitav Ghosh rightly called the great derangement, and into new modes of comprehension of our sociality, planetarity, interdependency, and responsibility that in turn initiate concerted action on a global scale. I believe that students of literary and critical studies, with their already developed skills of deep reading, intercultural attentiveness, and persuasive communication, can make a vital difference here in translating technical acknowledgement into a great human vocation. And in the process, I’d hope that the practices that we support become again the basis for judging how we should attend to the complexities of the world we share.

Zou: It’s true that “multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary encounters” play an important role in developing our “collective and collaborative engagement with Anthropocene challenges”. Could you please tell us more about how to do cross-disciplinary research in literary and critical studies?

Hand: Inter-disciplinary encounters in literary and critical studies have always existed, but in the past century these became codified by the almost industrial production of antagonistic and simplifying schools of explication: Marxist, psychoanalytic, formalist, structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, post-colonial, post-human... We could carry on like this. Each approach in its most reductionist form sought to reshape literature to its ideological truth, in crudely procrustean fashion. Of course, a supposedly theory-free approach to literature is in fact itself already a claim massively laden with theory. And we have always seen literary studies reflect sociological, ethnographic, political or positivist views. So really what I was advocating here was the involvement of our literary and critical studies in the sciences that are currently engaging most urgently with Anthropocene concerns, whether these are in psychological areas that encourage a collective or “nudged” support for sustainability, or in the areas of otherwise merely technological development of what is termed artificial intelligence. Humanities scholars have an important role to play here, not of course in helping to produce a softer image for technocratic control, but rather in keeping creative and ethical concerns to the forefront of development, and thereby insisting on beneficent advancement. It’s precisely because I am aware, as we all are, of that Utopia of Certainty, as Shoshana Zuboff terms it, wherein prediction models come to define and control collective knowledge, that our Humanities studies need also to educate themselves to the point of being influential in these rapidly emerging fields. I think the pay-off, if you will, is that literary and critical studies may in the process free themselves from the underwhelming practice of producing manuals for the masterful utilisation of a work, and permit fascination, curiosity, failure and greater conceptual complexity to play their part in understanding and encouraging artistic activity and possibility. To that extent, literary and critical studies do need to get outside themselves, not in order to imitate technocratic mastery, but to be guided by the best narratives of fascinated intelligent enquiry. For example, I am very drawn at the moment to recent investigative accounts of the genomic revolution by people like Siddhartha Mukherjee, and to the “entangled life” of fungi as recounted by Merlin Sheldrake. I enjoy the involving stories as a reader, and I appreciate the lessons in complexity as a humanities analyst.

Zou: Thank you for accepting the interview and for your informative and insightful answers!