Anthropocene Oscillations

In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by researcher and lecturer Alex Damianos and architect John Palmesino of Territorial Agency. Two years after the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy's decision to reject the proposal to recognise the Anthropocene as a geological unit, they discuss where the Anthropocene is today and where the debates are heading. 

Host: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
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Territorial Agency
Dr Alexander Damianos

Transcript

Alex Damianos: The Anthropocene is a scientific hypothesis with a strong political dimension. And it's a political claim with a strong scientific dimension. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to Art Is Not a Thing, the podcast series about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world building. My name is Ana Carabelea and on this podcast, I talk to artists and researchers whose work questions and reimagines our practices in and of the world. 

In this episode, I'm joined by researcher and lecturer Alex Damianos and architect John Palmesino of Territorial Agency. Their interdisciplinary residency as part of the EU-funded project Studiotopia addressed the urgent need to update the Great Acceleration graphs of the Anthropocene and consider the feedback and correlations between Earth system processes and the rapid change in world systems. In 2024, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy rejected the proposal to recognize the Anthropocene as a geological unit. Two years from that decision, we discuss where the Anthropocene is today and where the debates are heading. 

Welcome. It's great to have you both on this episode. Thank you so much for joining me. 

John Palmesino: Hello, Anna.  

Alex: Hello. Thank you. 

Ana: I wanted to dive straight into the discussion about the Anthropocene. This is a term that's become very popular in recent years. Everyone, by now, has an understanding of it, or at least some associations with it. I believe, Alex, you were mentioning in a previous discussion that there might be as many definitions of the Anthropocene as there are people trying to put forth one. Which is why I thought it was important from the start to clarify what you mean when you speak about the Anthropocene. So how do you define the Anthropocene? 

John: The incursion of Paul Crutzen into the contemporary understanding of the Earth is a proposition to change the terms of engagement. And it is probably the most radical intrusion in the discourses of humanity that we've experienced. The Anthropocene is a word that was uttered in context of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program by Professor Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. And, notoriously, he articulated the fact that the Earth that was being described by this incredible effort by scientists to understand the relationship between life and the planet, was no longer in the parameters that were defined by science, and that science had to change completely its parameters. And he uttered this incredible phrase that we are no longer in the Holocene, we are.... 

Then he somehow looked for a word and came up with the Anthropocene, which is an older word, but immediately that word changes completely, almost in a stealth revolution, the conditions of engagement, of what we mean by the relationship between life and planet. And I think, for me, the Anthropocene is really this incursion by Crutzen into the very complex challenges of modernity. 

Alex: The Anthropocene is... I mean, this question has no answer. It has many answers, some of which I think are more useful than others or generative than others. I think in a way, the Anthropocene is a political statement with a strong scientific dimension to it, at the same time that it is a scientific statement or hypothesis with a strong political dimension to it. And those two simultaneous aspects of the Anthropocene are what has made it so generative as a term. I think that the term Anthropocene has emerged and captured attention and imagination so much because it responds to a very obvious and increasingly apparent disparity between how much we know about climate change and how little we act or how fragmented the action that we take on the basis of that knowledge is. And I think that, to some extent, terms like the Anthropocene, but also tipping points, planetary boundaries, are ways for scientists to fill the gap that constitutes that difference between what we know and how we act. Essentially, in some ways, replacing the traditional function of normative actors like politicians, policy actors, lawyers, by creating a term that sparks public debate, sparks public engagement. 

What characterizes, I think in general, the kind of decline of liberalism that we're seeing right now, is the fact that the space for public debate has been largely outsourced to allegedly neutral metrics. 

The idea is that actually the best way to deal with political and ethical issues is to be neutral. That doesn't really work. That space, the vacancy that leaves, the vacuum that leaves, is traditionally filled by populist rhetoric. But the Anthropocene is a rare exception to that insofar as it's an informed attempt to generate constructive dialogue, informed debate about how we ought to act on the basis of what we know. That's why the Anthropocene has sparked, I think, this plurality of scenes, the kind of et cetera scenes, which I think, in a way, are an attempt to push back against the entropic quality of any effort to congeal a single definition. Why? Because even though the factual evidence that underpins the working group's definition is not disputable, even the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, who rejected the AWG's (Anthropocene Working Group) proposal, never, at least to my knowledge, said we disagree with the fact of a mid-20th century increase in a variety of factors–not only the Great Acceleration, but also Plutonium fallouts. They never disputed those facts. But what has been disputed is how we ought to act on those facts. And that's precisely because ‘we’ is the decisive question here. Who constitutes the anthropos? 

Ana: That sets me up really nicely for my next question. Thank you, Alex. Because as you said, it's a very generative term that has sparked quite a lot of debate, including some critique. And we've seen people that have addressed this, that have formulated critiques of the Anthropocene that point to the uneven histories of human life on Earth–the decolonial perspective, the feminist perspective–that really take issue with the prefix anthropos and the way that responsibility is distributed for the changes caused. And that has given us all the other scenes, the Capitaloscene, the Plantationocene, to name just a few. I think, John, you're working on a comprehensive list of this, which I'd really love to see one day. So, I was wondering how you engage with or incorporate this into your work... these alternative discourses that have sprung from the discussion about the Anthropocene. 

John: The work that Crutzen, Will Steffen, then the Anthropocene Working Group, and all the other scientists and scholars from law, from international law, from history, from anthropology, from contemporary critical theory, from the arts, have engaged when thinking of the Anthropocene is not simply showing the Anthropocene. It's not that science and the work done on the Anthropocene simply shows the Anthropocene as if it was already there. It is a complex recalibration of aesthetics. It's a complex reorganization of networks, alliances. And it requires a very deep shift because it's a radical, I would say, also revolutionary transformation of the way in which we define where we are, who we are. The Anthropocene, I think, is radically an aesthetic condition. It's a condition of sensing and perceiving. And it's a cognitive dimension. It doesn't preexist its uttering. The uttering mobilizes a completely different shift. I think that's how we approach the question of the Anthropocene. 

Alex: I agree with a lot of that. In a way, what John points to there, that it doesn't preexist its utterance, suggests that it also poses a challenge to the boundary between discovery and invention. And this is where I think it's both a scientific concept with a political dimension and vice versa, because as a scientific hypothesis, it's this premise that there's a chronostratigraphic or geochronological unit that's definable with reference to the material evidence, but also the procedures according to which units are formalized in this, you know, bureaucracy of the SQS (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy) and the timescale. And then, yeah, as I mentioned before, the political dimension emerges around this ‘we.’ And in a sense, on the one hand, I think it's important to record the different kind of–you know, it's kind of like a rhizome–the different mushrooms that have popped up on the basis of the Anthropocene, so the Capitalocene, the Wastocene, the list is endless... of cenes. And on the other hand, I think that part of what makes the Anthropocene so generative is precisely that there's no end to that process of eternal reconfiguration or kind of new sprouts emerging from this rhizome. And in a way, I mean, that kind of mirrors, I think, the way that we approached, or the way that I approach this residency, kind of by trying to say that the process of updating the Great Acceleration charts shouldn't simply be to extend the X axis, you know, to extend the data to the present day, but also to reflect critically on what updating means in the sense of how the very notion of the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene has created new ways of apprehending the political and scientific problems of today, or the way that science responds to political problems, or that science mobilizes political problems. 

I don't know if that answers the question. I suppose I'm trying to say that may there be so many more versions of the Anthropocene, but at the same time it's useful for there to be a scientific definition that those can play off of. 

John: I guess the fact that it exists across so many different variances, I think is a testament on many levels of the shift that this word has created. And it has generated so many reactions, rejections of policies, rejections of scientific evidence, antagonism towards particular ways of articulating public discourse which characterize our contemporary political and cultural conditions. So, I would like to focus on the fact that the Anthropocene cuts across all those preexisting boundaries and it's not innocuous. It really shapes in very violent way our contemporary discourse. It changes completely in terms of engagement, and it imposes us to abandon very rapid unifications. It is inherently focused on entanglement, on the conditions of impurity, of hybridity. And this is where I think it's extremely prolific. 

Alex: I mean, I think it's interesting that The Anthropocene Working Group continues from the perspective of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. The idea is that following the submission of the proposal, allegedly the Anthropocene Working Group are no longer kind of commissioned by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy to pursue their remit to define the Anthropocene. And yet they continue now, which I think shows how the Anthropocene, again, as I was saying before, is not really just about a scientific hypothesis. It's about creating a space for a form of political engagement that I think has otherwise been asphyxiated by the tendencies of social media and populist rhetoric to require binary positions. And that's what the Capitaloscene, the et cetera scenes point to demonstrate. 

John: And in this sense, it's understanding politics, of course, not as party politics, but as the construction of cohabitation. 

[Music] 

Ana: Dr Alex Damianos is a lecturer in environmental law at the University of Kent. His book Science, Politics and the Anthropocene Working Group: What Was the Anthropocene? came out in 2025 with Routledge and presents the first ethnographic study of the effort to formalize the Anthropocene as a geological unit. 

Established by architects Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino, Territorial Agency combines contemporary architecture, science, art, advocacy and action to promote comprehensive territorial transformations in the Anthropocene. Their work focuses on the integration of science, architecture, and art in the challenges posed by climate change and on complex representations of the transformations of the physical structures of contemporary inhabited territories. 

[Music] 

Ana: I actually wanted to ask about that because I think one of perhaps the most productive aspects of the Anthropocene is this discussion about how it's impacted our relationship to the planet, planetary territorialities and nature in general. And I think there's a political imaginary that it opens up. I just wanted to invite you to expand a bit on that. 

Alex: I think this points to a pharmacological aspect of the Anthropocene: that the Anthropocene has the propensity to promote something positive, which is a greater capacity or threshold for plurality within science. Which is important, given that I think there's the general expectation of science that it produces certainty, whereas actually, if you speak to scientists, the understanding is that certainty is not obtainable. There's always room for falsification and that's what allows it to evolve. And that's very different from what I think are some of the potentially harmful capacities of the Anthropocene to be misread as a reinforcement of Anthropocentric thinking. I mean, there's a strange question around the fact that Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene and also was someone who... So, Paul Crutzen is someone who demonstrated that scientific research can be mobilized to provide solutions, for example, to the hole in the ozone layer. But he was also a huge proponent of geoengineering, which I think is... That is an example of how sometimes technocratic expertise, scientific expertise, when they take on a technocratic capacity, can be authoritarian. Because who makes the decision to, you know, just start doing large scale engineering, interventionist experiments on a planetary scale? It certainly shouldn't be an old white man from Holland. How do we create the capacity to have that kind of dialogue in an inclusive and participatory way? So that's what I mean by the pharmakon, that thing that can both be generative and potentially harmful. 

Ana: An approach that, in fact, would kind of counteract the issues with modernity that I think John was pointing out earlier. 

John: The Anthropocene does something weird. It props up modernist imaginaries. And in that sense, it's really interesting. It's really interesting because of course, none of the conditions that we're describing, are to be understood in the Anthropocene as a continuation of modernity. On the contrary, it's really the undermining of the project. It's the undermining also of the counter systemic projects of modernity. This is really the shaking up of the Anthropocene and it creates a lot of scattering, a lot of reverberation and long growls of empire. And it's really a very complex moment aesthetically, which is really fascinating. 

Ana: I wanted to end by speaking a bit more about the residency that you were both part of. Just for a bit of context. It was a residency that flipped the roles in the sense that instead of artists in residence, we had Alex in the role of the researcher in residence and Territorial Agency as mentoring artists. And I was wondering, maybe you can tell us a bit about your experience as part of the residency. How has it informed your practice and why, and if this format is relevant for the work that you both do? 

John: Our practice, in spite of intercepting and being hosted by many art institutions, is clearly not an art practice. We arrive at the semantic ambiguities and the complex construction of meaning that are akin to contemporary art from a completely different trajectory. We somehow spun out of and continue to look out from architecture. And that, in particular, is the relationship between material structures and the form of cohabitation, and the polities that shape contemporaneity. The residency with Alex, in this sense, is a double twist, because Alex is nominally selected as our scientist in residence and we the artists, but we are not artists, and Alex is a scholar of contemporary environmental law. And so, the discussions and articulations of the residency have been really interesting. Exactly, because the Great Acceleration that shapes somehow the entire debate on the Anthropocene in itself questions the possibilities of having a stable set of knowledges. And so, I think that from the outset, this was a very interesting way of approaching this question, or the multiple questions associated with the notion of update of that acceleration, which knowledges, which practices do we need to somehow activate? 

Alex: For me, the residency was very interesting because it encouraged the kind of dialogue that I think is increasingly necessary to address these kinds of questions of enormous complexity, whereby addressing them from one perspective alone is simply not sufficient. I mean, that's something I see in my practice as an environmental law scholar, that the practice of environmental law is entirely dependent upon scientific expertise, and likewise, I think scientific experts look to normative actors like lawyers and politicians to act on the urgency their findings demonstrate. So, this was, as John said, kind of an especially fortunate opportunity because I think Territorial Agency conducts their practice in a way that resonates with my interest in not really fitting in any one place specifically or neatly and doing that intentionally. 

Ana: Yeah, I mean, even the fact that at the start of the episode I introduced you as the researcher in residence and artists/mentors, where neither of you really identify with these labels, probably says quite a lot about the gaps in language to speak about the interdisciplinarity. 

I'm afraid this is all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much, John and Alex, for being here with me today. 

John: Thank you very much, Ana. 

Alex: Thank you so much. 

Ana: That's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed it. Join us next month for a new episode and in the meantime, follow us or share the show with someone you think might like it.