Metamorphoses in the Anthropocene

In recent years, posthuman studies has established transdisciplinary bridges with the Earth system sciences to account for a new geological epoch that reframes the very concept of the human within the geological formation and transformation of planet Earth. While the concept of the Anthropocene has caused much debate in recent years, and geologists have not yet officially accepted it as the epoch that follows the 10,000 years of ecological stability that made the spread of humans on the planet possible (or Holocene), there is little reason to doubt that we have entered a new, unprecedented, and catastrophic age of radical metamorphoses for humans and nonhuman life alike, including for the geology of planet Earth itself.[1]

As its contested designation suggests, the Anthropocene remains in the shadow of the humanistic figure (“man”) posthumanism seeks to move beyond—which does not mean that the Anthropocene is simply anthropocentric. Quite the contrary. Introduced in 2001 by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, the “Anthropocene” designates a “new” (cene) geological epoch of “man” (anthropos) in which humans, albeit with radically different degrees of agency, intensity, and responsibility, operate as a “major geological force”[2] on planet Earth. In or about 1800, the growth of the human population changed. Where it took the entire history of human evolution (say, ca. 300,000 years) to reach a billion people near the beginning of the nineteenth century, the world population has now skyrocketed to over 8 billion. The curve is steep and is not slowing down. Meanwhile, since the industrial revolution, humans have been altering the climate, causing not only rising temperatures but also acidification of oceans, deforestation, glacier melting, rising oceans, and ozone depletion, all of which are currently generating a cascade of systemic effects that have already started a sixth species extinction. The anthropos that triggered the climate crisis is tragically implicated in a demise of its own making.

It is still up for debate whether this new geological epoch starts with the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century, stretches back to the birth of agriculture, or, more likely, picks ups speed with the Great Acceleration of 1945. Equally debatable is whether we should call it “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” “Plantationocene,” “Chthulucene,”[3] or any of the other original denominations proposed in recent years to avoid the universalizing fiction of a homogeneous anthropos erasing the radically different degrees of agentic impact on the environment, and thus responsibility for climate catastrophes. What is certain is that a growing number of people in the Global South are already in the process of being deterritorialized by the troubling epoch created by privileged consumer-driven, fossil fuel-dependent, neoliberal countries of the Global North.

Given the posthuman critique of anthropocentrism, the return to the centrality of the category of anthropos is not without ironies. As Bruno Latour puts it: “At the very moment when it was becoming fashionable to speak of post-human … Anthropos is back—and has returned with a vengeance.”[4] This re-turn of the effects of past human agency haunting, phantom-like, present and, especially, future generations should indeed lead posthumanists to think in terms of genealogical continuities and discontinuities across generations. Critical posthumanists, for instance, were quick to incorporate the concept of the Anthropocene and its alternative denominations. They did so to promote metamorphic transformations for the better, giving rise to productive intersections of “posthuman ecologies” attentive to “complex relations … constituted by circulations of affects,”[5] for instance. As the genealogy of homo mimeticus 2.0 makes clear, this affective and infective circulation is constitutive of an embodied, relational, suggestible species that finds in modernist literary precursors with direct experience in navigating catastrophic disturbances of the atmosphere important starting points to face catastrophic ecologies in the making.[6]

What we must add now from the perspective of mimetic posthumanism is that these affects circulate via imperceptible forms of imitation, or micro-imitation, which generate complex patho(-)logical effects. For instance, most humans are by now conscious that a catastrophic transformation of the planet is well underway, at least in theory. And yet, in daily practice, unless prevented by pandemic lockdowns which, for a brief moment, offered a window of hope that humans could change habits, the vast majority continues to be driven by the same patterns of traveling too much, fossil-fuel dependency, and consumerist excess. This disconcerting fact flies in the face of Homo sapiens, generating a schizophrenic split between theory and practice, what we know and how we act. Still, this schizophrenia appears less surprising if we consider that for humans and posthumans alike, habits do not operate on a disembodied consciousness that takes its lead from the order of rational discourse, or logos. On the contrary, habits operate via an affective pathos rooted in a “mimetic unconscious,”[7] by which I mean an embodied, habitual, automatic, and intersubjective unconscious with the affective power to induce semi-hypnotic practices of somnambulistic consumption, exploitation, and pollution.

Via pervasive cultural influences (advertisement, tourism), repeated patterns of behavior (consumerism, travel), shared ideologies mediated by modern technologies of communication (film, social media), and daily repetitions now reloaded via good doses of algorithmic influences, practices of pollution become second nature over time, ingrained in both bodies and minds, individually and collectively. This is perhaps the reason Latour, drawing on the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, writes that with respect to the climate crisis, “we have progressed like somnambulists.”[8] Somnambulism is, indeed, an exemplary manifestation of the mimetic unconscious. Tarde, among other modernist theorists, relied on hypnosis, suggestions, and somnambulism to account for the imitative and unconscious dimension of social behavior in his classic, The Laws of Imitation (1890). As he puts it: “having only suggested ideas and believing them to be spontaneous: this is the illusion proper to the somnambulist and to social beings.”[9] Somnambulism is only aggravated in the digital age by new media that operate as black mirrors with powers to fixate the gaze and induce hypnosis (from hypnos, sleep). As sci-fi films from Avatar to Black Mirror make clear, the magnetizing spell of such mirrors generates mimetic or, better, hypermimetic forms of psychic dispossessions that now punctuate everyday life, making trance states the norm rather than the exceptions.[10] This “mimetic madness,” as Stiegler also calls it, generates a will to conform that operates below conscious awareness, dissolves the boundaries of individuation, turns egos into phantom egos, and is largely responsible for the fact that “we live in a herd-society”[11]—which does not mean that mimesis cannot be put to productive, diagnostic, or patho-logical use.

As we move deeper into the epoch of the Anthropocene, one among many paradoxes constitutive of both mimetic studies and posthuman studies sets up a magnifying mirror to the predicament of the mimetic/posthuman subject: Depending on the models we imitate, be they real or fictional, human or nonhuman, online or offline, technological or natural, among a plurality of possibilities, posthuman mimesis in the digital age is certainly capable of furthering liberating discourses, or logoi, that were already central to poststructuralism and contribute to cultivating a life worth living. They include, feminist emancipation, promotion of racial diversity, sensitivity for sexual differences, support for disabilities, social justice and equality, openness to migrants, and increased ecological awareness, among other life-affirmative modes of existence that all benefit from new media that do not simply copy or represent the world from a distance, but rather contribute to forming and transforming subjects receptive to the proximity of mimetic affect, or pathos. At the same time, and perhaps more visibly in the last decades aggravated by multiple (economic, pandemic, humanitarian, environmental) crises, the same technologies are driven by profit-oriented corporations that program algorithms in new media to cast a hypermimetic spell on users with pathological effects: from new media violence to the rise of (new) fascist movements, online vitriol to offline addictions, conspiracy theories to insurrectionist practices, among other symptoms that are currently generating contagious and thus mimetic forms of pathological behavior that operate for the worse—a Janus-faced, “patho(-)logical” lesson that is constitutive of the genealogy of mimetic studies[12] and is as old as the mythic birth of technics itself.

There are thus significant ethical, political, and environmental reasons for posthuman studies to come to a better understanding of mimetic processes central to our ongoing metamorphoses, if only because the geology of the Earth itself is already changing due to an all too mimetic human behavior. The goal for us affirming survival in the Anthropocene, then, is now no longer limited to Enlightenment ideals of daring to understand or know (saper aude), characteristic of transcendental theories rooted in theological beliefs in afterworlds. It is, rather, to draw on the vast spectrum of (un)consciousness animating homo mimeticus 2.0, so as to mimetically foster, encourage, or performatively induce life-affirmative mutations, transformations, or metamorphoses in immanent practices (mutare aude). Similarly, the question for us reloading mimesis in the twenty-first century is no longer how to reach a better, more ideal, disembodied, and perhaps even eternal life in digital second lives already animated by a multiplicity of avatars—as a metaphysical tradition that goes from Plato to The Matrix suggests. Rather, it entails heeding the Nietzschean imperative to “remain true to the earth and do not believe those who talk of over-earthly hopes!”[13]—as an immanent tradition attentive to the contagious powers of mimetic pathos taught us to affirm.

For both good and ill, logical and pathological reasons, then, the relational, embodied, affective, and plastic characteristics of homo mimeticus 2.0 render us radically open to influences and will continue to play a major role in our posthuman becoming in the Anthropocene. This is what precursors of the mimetic turn like Nietzsche already recognized. Under the mimetic mask of Zarathustra, he stated for instance that “a polluted stream is the human,”[14] urging his readers to go through a mimetic metamorphosis of the sprit beyond the human. As Bruno Latour more recently puts it, renewing the Nietzschean imperative to remain faithful to the Earth from the perspective of the Anthropocene, it is now a question of charting a map that will allow us to find “where to land” (où atterir):[15] namely, on the only planet we have.

Landing entails a downward, delicate, and perilous movement that is subjected to an immanent gravitational pull; yet, if the conditions are right, a good pilot manages to partially control this pull via a deft maneuver, change of speed, and inclination vital to avoid catastrophe. Taken as an imperfect metaphor for collective survival (there is currently no pilot in charge, alas), this all-too-human will to land entails, at least in theory, a radical shift of perspective away from the image of planet Earth seen from a gravitation-free, extra-terrestrial, and somewhat disembodied distance familiar since the Moon landing.

Figure 1. Apollo 17 Blue Marble original orientation (AS17-148-22727). Photo courtesy NASA.                     

This is, indeed, a view from nowhere that we have by now become mimetically accustomed to due to endless reproductions and iterations. Mesmerizing in its aesthetic beauty that operates on vision alone, the blue marble planet seen from space appears to be objective in abstract theory, at least if we focus on the Earth understood as an object represented. And yet, if we overturn perspectives to pay attention to the subject of representation, we soon realize that this view from nowhere is neither human nor posthuman—very few members of Homo sapiens have experienced this gravitation-free point of view from space, and not for long. Upon reflection, this omniscient perspective rests on an anthropocentric ideal centered on humans as sovereign, autonomous, and semi-divine figures who, via millennia of idealist beliefs—be they Platonic or Christian—now supplemented by the material power of technology, have deluded themselves that they can occupy such a position beyond the world in the first place. As Latour puts it: “Those who look at the Earth and see a Globe always take themselves for a God.”[16] This is, indeed, the mythic view the demigod Prometheus made technically possible in the sphere of myth, as we shall see. And yet, this does not mean that the semi-god himself could occupy such a metaphysical position for long. Quite the contrary. Even the Titan was tied to the Earth via a cautionary myth that, as we shall hear, speaks, perhaps more than ever, to the present hubris of anthropos.

Now, if we want to promote our chances of landing by furthering life-affirmative metamorphoses in the Anthropocene, this reassuringly distant perspective of the Globe must be replaced by a more affectively close view of what Latour calls “Earth” (Terre). This entails taking hold of the fact that life on Earth is only possible within a thin atmospheric zone, or Critical Zone, which spans only a little over 10,000 km and offers a rather different picture of where landing can perhaps take place.

Figure 2. The Critical Zone. Photo from Pixabay.

This is, indeed, the Critical Zone, or as Latour also calls it, “the metamorphic zone” where life on Earth is at all possible. It is called critical because it is critical to the existence of life. The fact that we are radically dependent on this thin atmospheric layer for basic physiological functions like breathing and nourishment turns the abstract globe into a fragile surface or skin that should at least generate a feeling of modesty. It should also shatter the imaginary feeling of omniscient distance induced by the globe. Instead, it suggests a subjective feeling, or pathos, that, as Nietzsche foresaw, roots us to the Earth and renders metamorphoses possible in the first place. To put it in the equally earthly language of Latour, “a metamorphic zone can capture in a word all the ‘morphisms’ that we will have to register,”[17] including posthuman, all-too-human metamorphoses for the future. If the linguistic turn taught us that there is nothing outside the text, the metamorphic turn should teach us that there is—not nothing, for the universe is infinitely vast—but no human or nonhuman life so far attested outside the Critical Zone.

In order not to fatally mistake Homo sapiens for homo deus, a metamorphosis is thus in order, as historian Yuval Harari also suggests.[18] Given that imitation is constitutive of subject formation, the mimetic turn has a role to play in this transformation of consciousness—though new models are urgently needed. The good news is that a theory of homo mimeticus provides an immanent, relational, and intersubjective principle that accounts for humans’ chameleon-like metamorphoses over the epochs; the sad news is that mimetic metamorphoses tend to follow the dominant models in power. If, for a long time, a Christian world rested on a theocentric tradition that promoted the imitation of Christ (or imitatio Christi) as the model of moral virtue leading to imaginary rewards in a paradisiac afterworld, and in an overturning of perspectives, humanism replaced this divine model with an all-too-human model still aspiring to a sapient sovereign position of omniscience, the posthuman will have to find or, rather, create new, postanthropocentric ways of life that can inspire future generations.[19] Writing contra dominant neoliberal models of mass consumption and exploitation, a long genealogy of thinkers that goes from Friedrich Nietzsche to Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway to Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour to Rosi Braidotti to Bernard Stiegler, and others tends to agree, from different perspectives, with the fundamental assumption now driving the mimetic turn in posthuman studies: namely, that posthumans are not only conscious but also unconscious; not solely driven by the mind but also by bodily affects; not distinct from nonhuman animals but part of a spectrum of mimetic animals; not divided from nature but deeply rooted in, composed, and decomposed by nature; not simply rational and moved by an abstract logos but also irrational and animated by affective experiences, or pathos, open to both contagious pathologies that spread from self to others, online and offline. For these and other reasons, new diagnostic discourses (logoi) on the dynamic of mimetic affect (pathos) are urgently needed in the epoch of the Anthropocene.

The vertiginous technological innovations that propel us into the future make it tempting for transhumanists to merge anthropocentrism with theocentrism, to embrace phantasies of technological will to power, and to mistake themselves for gods who can take flight to imaginary afterworlds and perhaps even dream of immortality. These are not new ideals. They are as old as Platonism. As an immanent counterbalancing move, it might thus be sobering to revisit the myth of a demigod who is mostly remembered for his technological gift to humans to reorient ourselves, change course, and aim to land back on planet Earth. As Braidotti also puts it, metamorphosis leads us “to think through the body, not in flight from it.”[20] And who more than Prometheus reminds us that our all-too-human body is bound to Earth? After all, he is the son of Gaia.

As we turn to see, the Greek demigod may not offer the omniscient point of view from nowhere that his gift of technology made possible. His position is much more modest, embodied, and Earth-bound. Still, the myth sets up a self-reflective mirror to techno-patho(-)logies we need to re-evaluate, at least if we want to deepen our self-knowledge and affirm life-affirmative metamorphoses in the future here on Earth.

[1] The literature on the Anthropocene has exploded in recent years, but a good place to start is still Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2017).

[2] Paul J. Crutzen and Eugen F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18.

[3] See Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, or the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. by Jason W. Moore (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2016); and Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).

[4] Bruno Latour, Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique (Paris: La Découverte, 2015), 155 (my translation).

[5] Simone Bignall and Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Systems” in Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze, ed. by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 1–16, 5.

[6] See Nidesh Lawtoo, “Conrad in the Anthropocene: Steps to an Ecology of Catastrophe,” in Conrad and Nature: Essays, ed. by Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, and John G. Peters (New York: Routledge, 2019), 43–67; William E. Connolly and Nidesh Lawtoo, “Planetary Conrad: William Connolly and Nidesh Lawtoo in Dialogue,” The Conradian 46, no. 2 (2021): 144–171. On the political implication of facing catastrophes, see William E. Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).

[7] See Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013). I discuss the relevance of the mimetic unconscious for posthuman studies in Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis I: Concepts for the Mimetic Turn,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 101–14.

[8] Latour, Face à Gaïa, 18.

[9] Gabriel Tarde, Les Lois de l’imitation (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 137 (my translation).

[10] See Nidesh Lawtoo, “Avatar Simulation in 3Ts: Techne, Trance, Transformation,” Science Fiction Studies 42 (2015): 132–50; Nidesh Lawtoo, “Black Mirrors: Reflecting (on) Hypermimesis,” Philosophy Today 65, no. 3 (2021): 523–47.

[11] Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, trans. David Barison (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 70, 48.

[12] I first defined patho(-)logies as both sickness and therapy in Lawtoo, Phantom of the Ego, 6–9; see also, Nidesh Lawtoo, Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious: Vol. 2 The Affective Hypothesis (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2023).

[13] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 12.

[14] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 12.

[15] Bruno Latour, Où Atterir: Comment s’orienter en politique (Paris: La Découverte, 2017).

[16] Latour, Face à Gaïa, 180.

[17] Latour, Face à Gaïa, 79.

[18] See Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper Collins, 2017).

[19] An innovative postanthropocentric perspective comes from the area of biomimicry, which suggests taking nature not only as a “model” for technological innovation but also as a mentor for “measure.” See Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: Harper Collins, 1997). For a rich study that gives philosophical foundations to biomimicry in ways that contribute directly to mimetic studies, see Henry Dicks, The Biomimicry Revolution: Learning from Nature How to Inhabit the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).

[20] Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 5.