Introduction to Focus: Exanthropic Poetics

An irony worthy of Euripides: around the turn of the millennium, Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen proposed a new geological designation, the “anthropocene,” to characterize the definitive impact of the last two centuries of human industry on global ecology; in other words, “anthropocene” nominates not just the technological ascension of humanity but its death-gurgle, its auto-asphyxiation on greenhouse gases, a post-anthropocene. Within a few years, the History Channel would score its highest ratings ever with a two-hour documentary, Life After People (2008), itself following on the heels of Alan Weisman’s bestseller The World Without Us (2007). And National Geographic Channel would produce its own version, Aftermath: Population Zero (2008), while Jan Zalasiewicz would publish a less sordid variation on the meme, The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? (2008). To be sure, eschatological fantasies have always been dear to the human imaginary, but there was, and continues to be, an especial intensity and pathos in these recent visions of a depopulated Earth. Regardless of how The End is to happen—rogue asteroid, super-volcano, robot rebellion—the upshot is the almost childish dawning that the world is not for us.

Perhaps the best antecedent in modernity, or at least the one that comes first to mind, is H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), whose protagonist flees in horror from the genetic apartheid of the Morlocks and Eloi into the ever more distant future, where enormous crab-creatures stalk the shores of a toxic ocean, and farther still, “watching the life of the old earth ebb away,” until finally, seeing all life reduced to slimy medusae hopping along the frozen sea, he returns to what we can now call the anthropocene, whose horrors, while palpable, are at least familiar. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) similarly follows the evolutionary vicissitudes of humankind who at times in the distant future degenerate into crypto-simian and seal-like creatures and at other times bioengineer their own successors. What unites Wells’s pessimism and Stapledon’s dialectical optimism is the challenge of thinking the post-anthropic as such.

For the most part, this has been a literary project. For the most part. But Jakob von Uexküll’s brilliant work of speculative biology, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (1934)—a work which attempts to describe the perceptual life-worlds (or umwelten), the biosemiotic models of various creatures (e.g., dogs, ticks, and bees) based on analysis of their sensory- and neuro-apparatuses—demonstrated that science and philosophy could try to think not just the post-anthropic, but the ex-anthropic, realities outside of or altogether apart from humans. These two threads, the post- and ex-anthropic, seem to be merging, not just in literature, but in philosophy and theory, where once again materialisms and realisms of various forms are ascendant, though not necessarily in an empirical key. Rather, empirical data are being rallied in support of fantastical, uncanny visions of organic and inorganic “life” (a term which itself, as Eugene Thacker’s After Life (2010) shows, is again sharply contested): witness the upsurge in animal studies, deep ecology, geophilosophy, radical bioethics, cybernetics and systems theory, biopolitics, posthumanism, (neo)vitalisms, mysticism and the occult, black metal studies, Lovecraftiana, thing theory, object-oriented philosophy, and on and on.

Maybe not since the Middle Ages has there been quite this kind of convergence (and not coincidentally, the Medieval is seeing a resurgence of intellectual interest as several of the titles reviewed in this issue will show). The profane chiliasm I’ve tried to describe briefly here requires a thinking of the Earth not just without people, but from an exanthropic perspective, and as this form of thought is necessarily speculative (we are, inexorably—for the time being, at least—human), it calls in its own way for new modes of thought, new poetics—which in fact may involve returning to and modifying older modes of thought, older poetics. Whether it is the mycological sublime of Richard...