Human Agency in the Anthropocene

https://www.historians.org/publications-anddirectories/perspectives-on-history/december-2012/the-futureof-the-discipline/human-agency-in-the-anthropocene
Dipesh Chakrabarty, December 2012
The drought that affected Australia in the first decade of this century
got me interested in questions of climate change. That drought created
massive bushfires in a continent that was already dry, destroying
nature-spots I loved and devastating many forms of life. Intellectually,
however, what gave me a jolt was the propositionput forward in 2002
by the scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermerthat humans had
most likely brought about a new geological period in the history of the
planet, one they named the Anthropocene, a time when humans acted
as a major geophysical force determining the climate and the history of
life on earth.
I found the idea that humans, collectively, had become capable of
changing the climate of the planet for the next hundred thousand
years awesome in its implications for historians who normally acquire
specialist knowledge of particular groups of people at particular places,
and that too covering a few hundred years at most. As a historian, I
had grown up to have a deep interest in European thought, mainly
political thought, and the way it had transformed lives outside Europe
and been transformed in the process. I was used to the various
critiques of the 1980s and later that sought to democratize the
historical discipline in the Anglo-American academe: feminist critiques
of patriarchy, nationalist critiques of imperialism, subaltern critiques of
elitism, global critiques of Euro-centrism, semiotic critiques of
ideological sign-systems, poststructuralist critiques of the subject,
deconstructionist critiques of logocentrism, Marxist and liberal critiques
of inequality and injustice, and, of course, critiques of history as a

discipline made by those championing the cause of memory and

identity. I was sympathetic to Marxist criticisms of capitalism in their
broad outlines. All these critiques that shared much ground between
them had made me interested in imagining the human in a particular
way: as having the capacity to exercise rights, autonomy, and choice in
his or her everyday lifethat is to say, as an agency that could
experience the world and communicate that experience. The universal
human I assumed in my work, even when I emphasized the politics of
difference, was the human that is the subject of phenomenology. But I
saw no contradiction in this. For the phenomenological human was
folded into my mental picture of the political human. The
poststructuralist interrogation of the subject, I assumed with Foucault
as he put it in his foreword to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, was
in aid of a search for nonfascist forms of life. In other words, what I had
learned about the nature of power in human societies had disabused
me of nave ideas about "human freedom" and justice, but the search
of justice and freedom underpinned much of the history I read and
wrote. The particular intellectual endeavor I was associated with
throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, Subaltern Studies, was
profoundly affected by these critiques.
The scholarship of the likes of Alfred Crosby and William McNeill
brought something new to the table. They made us aware of the fact
that humans, themselves biological entities, lived among insects,
plants, animals, birds, viruses, bacteria, and other life-forms, and their
interaction needed to be made a part of the human story. I say "part of
the human story" advisedly. For these historians were, understandably,
not trying to do the opposite, that is, to make humans a part of the
story of a virus or an insect or even to write history of humans from an
animal point of view. Such a project would be impossible, for the
readers of these histories were ultimately humans; so it was no wonder
that the metaphors (of conquest and invasion, for example) and other
figures of speech deployed by Crosby or McNeill sought to bring a
sense of human drama to bear on stories of nonhuman agents
sometimes just chemical compounds such as proteinsthat in
themselves would be blind to the dramatic. This emphasis on the
biological by the pioneers of environmental history was instructive no
doubt but it did not pose any fundamental challenge to the idea of
human agency as such. The biologically evolved human capacity to be
healthy or diseased, to feel oppressed in slavery and joyous in liberty
as opposed to the DNA-driven "slavery" of the worker bee, for example
was assumed in radical social or "new cultural" history. Indeed,
where would "contact histories" of the New World be without at least
the assumption of a biological capacity that humans have to recognize
each other as human even before they can share language or habitat?

The science of climate change speaks of a new kind of agency on the

part of humans: a geological agency. It is collective; planetary in scope;
it is not immediately available to human experience though its effects
are; it is a byproduct of what we have come to regard as civilization
(which needs energy to be available aplenty and cheap). There are two
aspects to this proposition that interest me. First, understanding the
nature of geological agency of the human and its socio-political
consequences requires the historian to expand his or her imagination
over a very large scale, for, as the work of the geophysicist David
Archer shows, we do not understand the implications of humans'
geophysical agency without learning something about both the history
of earth-systems and the history of life on the planet. This is a big ask
and, of course, I do not expect professional historians to be researchers
in this field, but reading paleoclimatologists on the current crisis
changes the "background noise" in historians' heads and affects the
silent metanarratives we carry over into the microstories we tell.
Secondly, the proposition has the potential to reinvigorate debates
about the nature and history of capitalism and global modernity. Some
scholars argue that it is not human agency as such that has become a
planetary force, climate change is simply a result of capitalist
development. "It is capitalism, stupid!" is their refrain. If you pointed
out to them that a Soviet-type modernization of the world would have
produced very similar consequences, some of them would engage in a
lot of theoretic jiu-jitsu to prove that Soviet socialism was actually
capitalism in another form! (Of course, one can't argue about a "true
socialism" that nobody has seen.) Some blame climate changewith
justiceonly on the rich countries of the world. But, going forward,
what will matter in terms of emissions is not just the lifestyles of the
rich but also the number of additional people who embrace existing
models of economic growth and development. And most of these
people are in China and India. Is the population explosion in India and
China through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s to be blamed mainly on the
rich countries of the West? I have had that argument put to me but the
reasoning never seemed obvious. Climate change at least poses the
question of one human history even if we are not politically one.
It is precisely because we are not politically one that histories of
intrahuman (in)justice will remain relevant and necessary. But we will
probably have to think of them in the much larger context of the
history of life, how earth-history connects to it, and where humans
figure in it overall.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service
Professor in the Departments of History, South Asian Languages &
Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the

author of several books, including Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial

Thought and Historical Difference.