After dinner ©M_Collette on Agfa XRG200
What if the Anthropocene was not a new era (gr. kainos) but a trophic state of the biosphere: man’s main meal (lat. cena)? A state which, needless to say, is also catastrophic, and appears to be the dark epilogue of a purely Western anthropization process.
We consume the Earth. Literally. Maybe that’s what this age is all about. And in fact, this is the most acceptable meaning of the word “Anthropocene”: the meal (cena) of humans (anthropoi), or at least some of them… The least acceptable meaning is indeed the prevailing one, which makes mankind – A.K.A. Sapiens – the cause of the current climatic and ecological upheavals, forgetting that the vast majority of human beings, especially indigenous peoples (but also to a large extent women), have never played more than a minor, and despised, role in this great story of man’s domination of nature.
And what is being devoured (or consumed) is the very world that supports and welcomes life. In other words, our own reservoir of possibilities for (well)being. But there’s not much new here. The contemporary era of ecological awareness is an epilogue to the great anthropocentric project, which is Western in origin and essence. In the end, the Earth breaks up into particles and whispers from its deep entrails: “This is my body. Take. Eat. And drop dead…”
« Anthropocene is not so much a geological era as our monstrous reflection on the surface of a troubled world
Anthoropo-cena, thus, replacing the Greek kainos with the Latin cena. A twisted etymology, deliberately, to tell the story of the twists and turns of a civilizational destiny that was first domination, then colonization and finally consumption and consummation. The State, the Empire, the Market. The story of a humanistic narcissism that, underhandedly, writes off the living world.
Consequently, the Anthropocene is inextricably a Geophagy. And therefore a Geocene. A few years ago, I wrote an article that enjoyed a modest but persistent career on the internet*. In it, I proposed replacing “Anthropocene” with “Entropocene” – an age of accelerated physical, societal and mental disorder and dissipation, under the influence of global Technocapitalism. Like everyone else, I had simply forgotten to include Gaia, the Earth and living worlds, in the equation. I hope that I have corrected this injustice here.
Finally, and if we still want to talk about culture separated from nature, the Anthropocene is all about our contemporary society of immediate consumption, and the realization that our trajectory is collapsing into nothingness. It’s not so much a geological era of Man as our monstrous, frightening reflection on the surface of the world, troubled by our own (self)destruction.
*Read also: Goodbye Anthropocene, Hello Entropocene.
symbiosphere 