Symposium on Timothy W. Luke's Anthropocene Alerts at New Political Science

The new issue of the journal New Political Science features a review symposium on Timothy W. Luke's Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory of the Contemporary as Ecocritique, published by Telos Press Publishing. For one week only, save 30% on your purchase of Anthropocene Alerts by using the coupon code ALERTS30 during checkout in our online store.

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Scientific Modeling and the Environment: Toward the Establishment of Michel Serres's Natural Contract

Pamela Carralero’s “Scientific Modeling and the Environment: Toward the Establishment of Michel Serres’s Natural Contract” appears in Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.

In the sciences, the hypotheses driving the exploration of the natural world are often investigated via analogical transfer, meaning that the crux of scientific activity resides in the use and interpretation of models as tools that facilitate an accurate description of natural laws. The exact status of the model’s role and its lasting importance, however, remains a controversial topic among scientists and philosophers. For some, the model is a way of reaching a conclusive theorem or systematic statement; for others, including French philosopher Michel Serres, the model is a multifaceted space of translation that asks its interpreters to meditate on the inaccessible nature of what it makes accessible via ideogrammatic transcription.

Placing Serres in conversation with Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, this article argues that Serres provides the tools to theorize models as mediums through which to acknowledge and interact with the environment as that which is innately inaccessible to human knowledge. This is a first step toward establishing what he calls a “natural contract,” a union of life-giving reciprocity between humans and nonhumans that offers new conceptualizations of knowledge and science as practices free from the totalizing codifications of human verdicts. More specifically, this article imagines models as gateways between the inaccessible and accessible, arguing their value as a setting for the construction and play of scientific interpretations. It concludes by examining the relationship between modern climate models and the inaccessible in order to propose a techno-scientific, intra-temporal mentality of uncertainty from which a natural contract can develop.

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Telos 177 (Winter 2016): Rethinking Nature in the Anthropocene

Telos 177 (Winter 2016) is now available for purchase in our store.

While the term Anthropocene was used in the USSR already in the 1960s to refer to the late Quaternary era, it rose to prominence more recently when introduced by Eugene F. Stoermer and Paul J. Crutzen. As the very word indicates, this is an epoch when humanity has taken center stage in the sense that its activities now have a major, global, and lethal impact. The shadow of human-caused global destruction and mass death haunts this epoch, and indeed, humanity’s newly acquired capacity for devastation is one of the Anthropocene’s most marked traits. While mass extinctions are hardly new phenomena and while the specter of the extinction of humanity due to some sudden catastrophe was there even before human beings were aware of it in scientific terms, the actual capacity of humanity to extinguish itself along with a large swath of other species on the planet is new, and the stakes of human action are higher.

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Telos 172 (Fall 2015): Political Critiques of the Anthropocene

Telos 172 (Fall 2015) is now available for purchase in our store.

Rapid climate change today is attributed to the profligate use of fossil fuels, and this consumption of hydrocarbon energy has worldwide, albeit uneven and discontinuous, cultural and economic patterns to it. Nonetheless, it is more than plausible to spin up the frameworks for a universal history of humanity based upon modern society’s increasing combustion of the planet’s biotic prehistory as fossil fuel energy. As the carbon of antediluvian plant matter is burned to light homes, run factories, and propel vehicles, the history of the present becomes materially universalized as the exhausted energy of the distant past released along with its soot, smog, and smoke.

Thus, noxious by-products of production and consumption ironically become the crown of commodified creation at the end of history, whose ultimate historical ends, as Fukuyama reaffirms, are tied to the “endless accumulation” of wealth. Little did he know, this outcome also would entail nonstop increases in greenhouse gases and rapid climate change; but, environmentalists, historians, sociologists, and technologists are more than willing now to seize upon this curious outcome for the crisis narratives of a universal history framed by the concept of “the Anthropocene.”

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