Читать книгу Risks and the Anthropocene - Julien Rebotier - Страница 17

As a result of the disciplinary divisions, the truth of geology is not the same as that of the social sciences. Framing effects are at work here. Under cover of the authority of the discourses produced by legitimate sciences, we can convey ways of seeing the world. It is the role of the social sciences to identify the meanings produced, to identify the sources of the arguments on which they are based, as well as the interests, the expectations or the benefits linked to social positions. Numerous works contribute to exploring the social scope of the controversies surrounding the Anthropocene (Lorimer 2017), to making explicit the images of the world conveyed (Bonneuil 2015), and even to considering the agenda of autonomous research on the subject (Lövbrand et al. 2015; Davis and Todd 2017).

In this respect, the identification of major narratives conveyed by the Anthropocene is instructive of the possible contributions of social sciences (Bonneuil 2015):

 – Earth sciences introduce a naturalistic narrative, which separates man and nature, by giving science and technology the means to sound the alarm and to find solutions. The advent of a global and homogeneous environmental conscience justifies that problems and solutions draw from the same source (Crutzen and Stroemer 2000);

 – the postnature narrative does not recognize the modern separation between nature and culture. It comes into play to the extent that it recognizes that the outcome of actions is beyond the control of the will alone. We humans “become geology” (Latour 2015) and the emerging reflexive subject must acknowledge this (Beck 1992). The great divide between nature and culture blurs to define a common hybrid, of humans and non-humans, able to identify the environmental question as superior and ultimate;

 – the ecocatastrophic narrative has been a recent bestseller (Servigne and Stevens 2015), while at the same time reviving the apocalyptic reflections of the post-Second World War era (Anders 1995) or those dealing with the autonomy of technology (Mumford 1950). From the limits of the planet to the prospect of collapse, it is impossible for societies to think of themselves as being alone in the maneuver. The capacity for action is shifted toward a kind of ecomodernism that would allow us to act in a more relational way on/with the environment (of which societies are part);

 – the ecomarxist narrative applies the grid of reading historical materialist antagonisms (Keucheyan 2014; Moore 2017a), opposing classes and interests. The Anthropocene moment is the contemporary theater of the contradictions of capitalism, especially those that confront it with the depletion of resources in a finite world. The environmental crisis is the manifestation of an asymmetrical globalization of the economic world, reactivating the themes of inequality, exploitation and domination;

 – the feminist political ecology narrative links the mechanisms of economic exploitation that transpire during the Anthropocene to other strands of domination. Issues of gender, community, racialization, sexual orientation, or faith, from an intersectional perspective (Gandy 2015; Yusoff 2018), weave the differentiated fabric of environmental crisis.

The work of contextualizing and explicating the grand narratives that accompany possible Anthropocenes also concerns the discourses held by the social sciences themselves (Lövbrand et al. 2015). Social science knowledge is always produced in the plural, under social conditions that need to be identified, both within the scientific field and in the social world (Bourdieu 2001).