14 - The Brain of History, or, The Mentality of the Anthropocene

Summary

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This essay is a response to the highly challenging topic on which Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelsky asked me to elaborate: ‘For your contribution’, they wrote, ‘we would be particularly interested in an essay that investigates the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience as it relates to climate change’ (10 October 2015). After some time, I decided to explore the link between the current constitution of the brain as the new subject of history and the type of awareness demanded by the Anthropocene.

An immediate answer to Baucom and Omelsky's challenge would have been an exploration of the relationship between the brain and the ‘environment’. It is, of course, a widespread idea in global change literature that ‘the Anthropocene idea abolishes the break between nature and culture, between human history and the history of life and Earth’, as well as between ‘environment and society’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: 19, 37). The blurring of these frontiers, of course, necessitates a study of the profound interaction between the sociological and the ecological, understanding them as part of the same metabolism. I believe that this notion of ‘interaction’ requires closer analysis, though, and renders necessary a preliminary study of the specific concept of history in which it currently takes place.

If the Anthropocene acquires the status of a true geological epoch, it is obvious that such an epoch will determine the historical representation as well as the social and political meaning of the events occurring in it. In other words, this new geological era will not and cannot have the neutrality and a-subjectivity characteristic of geological eras in general. The Anthropocene situates the human being itself between nature and history. On the one hand, it is still the subject of its own history, responsible and conscious. Consciousness of history, or ‘historicity’, is not separable from history itself. It entails memory, capacity to change and, precisely, responsibility. On the other hand, the human of the Anthropocene, defined as a geological force, must be seen as neutral and indifferent, as a geological reality itself. The two sides of this new identity cannot mirror each other, causing a break in reflexivity.