The horizon toward new possibilities of the universal

Today, the planetary condition demands approaches that transcend local dimensions. Consequently, the global environmental crisis requires solutions that catalyze new forms of conflict, as the problems in the context of the Anthropocene, the technological development, and the technification of the human generate tensions between local and universal perspectives.

In this scenario, the speculative, cosmotechnical, and xenofeminist philosophical perspectives, yet different and occasionally opposing, concur in the need to reconcile the general with the particular. Even though these perspectives offer different treatments, it is both possible and suitable to connect some of their premises in the pursuit of new universals. All this with the aim of giving a critical escape to any form of reductionism that becomes inoperative when facing global range challenges.

The ideas above highlight the importance of understanding this situation through cosmopolitical views on planetary, anthropological, and technological vulnerability.¹ Therefore, efforts toward a universalist philosophy that considers technological mediation and technoscientific innovation in the resolution of human and non-human issues assume the discussion of a speculative and xenofeminist premise within this text.²

Nevertheless, how can the universal be addressed if the Anthropocene crisis is revealed as the most general condition affecting particulars? Is this new geological epoch a real expression of local (and localized) decisions that have altered the deep historical time? What if the term is rejected for not accurately reflecting an exact scientific character in ‘nature’? Or, conversely, if this crisis marks the end of any discussion about the ‘truth’? Perhaps, at this point, it is convenient to review new philosophical perspectives on the vulnerabilities previously mentioned, with the aim of investigating their implications, and clarifying how a universal that defies the premise of being against the limit of reality is profiled.³

Humanity taken as a whole: sedimentation, deep time, and a supposedly universal ‘golden spike’

If the particular effects of human action on Earth have a geohistorical incidence, then the term ‘Anthropocene’ must be understood at least in two ways: one that describes humanity “taken as a whole and as a single unit”,⁴ and another as a nomenclature indicating an ‘outdoors’ beyond human consciousness. Viewed in this light, the term seemingly implies a contradiction: it aims towards a reality independent of subjectivity which, however, as a general agency of impact on the planet, is the cause of such consequences that transcend it.

In part, the complexity of the term Anthropocene arises not only by the material character of the reality it seeks to delineate, but mainly because this materiality leads to the feature of a ‘deep time’, that is, to the inscription of its phenomena in a timeline that must have geological entities as a correlate. In other words: placing human activity in a timeline implies situating its effects from the understanding of deep time and, therefore, framing them within stratigraphic references.

Accordingly, the Anthropocene demands a historical perspective, namely an epoch defined by particular agents that, together, add up to a generality that will remain sedimented beyond the duration of anthropological existence. Thus, philosophical research is not only confronted with the need to provide explanations based on fossils and strata -as well as to develop theoretical starting points that account for the shift towards geological scientific propositions- but must also overcome anthropocentrism without obviating the historical aspect of non-human materialities.

Perhaps, at this point, it would seem strange to assume that geological changes have no historical connotation for our planet and human time, however, a review of conceptual developments in British historical geology shows otherwise. In this regard, geologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that Jammes Hutton, despite having made the conventional discovery of deep geological time, still held a general anti-historical theory because of his adamant conception of the ‘time cycle’ of a ‘world machine’:

The classical data of historical geology are fossils and strata. Obviously, we cannot charge Hutton with inattention to principles that were codified after his death. […] Hutton used the data of fossils and strata as primary empirical supports for his system, but he never invoked them as signs of history […] In the one passage where Hutton dares not deny distinctive difference in time, he manages to bypass the subject completely, using another aspect of the tale to support time’s cycle. Hutton does not argue that human life has pervaded time, but admits the scriptural tradition of recent origin. He simply acknowledges our late appearance in a sentence, then immediately moves on to extolling other fossils as indicators of deep time.⁵

Despite the empirical support in fossil and stratigraphic data, Hutton did not understand deep time with markers of distinction of particular epochs.⁶ Even his conception of the planet as a world machine allowed him to maintain that such observable data were the sample of a perfect design whose apparent variation and change belonged to a cyclic temporality of a deistic nature.⁷ In this sense, one of the lessons that this fact teaches us is not to ignore the historical and philosophical implications manifested in the empirical geological data. So, it is precisely here that the Anthropocene finds its crossroads: Has human activity left its material traces in the succession of deep time? That is, has the human species truly produced significant stratigraphic data indicating the general change of a new geological epoch? What is the most appropriate philosophical reading of the human’s capacity to become a geological force?⁸ Furthermore, if planetary collapse is near in the Anthropocene, is there some deep law or ‘anthropic principle’ that will reverse the situation?⁹

To summarize, it is useful to recall the divisions and subdivisions of geological time into decreasing order: eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages.¹⁰ According to scientific nomenclature, today our species is in the ‘Phanerozoic eon’, in the ‘Cenozoic era’,¹¹ in the ‘Quaternary period’, in the ‘Holocene epoch’ and in the ‘Megalayan age’.¹² Therefore, as a new epoch, the Anthropocene suggests a geological condition subsequent to the Holocene, and thus assumes the possibility of verifying the appearance of a series of phenomena originating from anthropogenic causes, which result in sedimented materials in the course of history. In this case, the question demands a turn towards that which properly constitutes the particular evidence or the ‘golden spike’ as a ‘Global Stratigraphic Section and Point’ (GSSP),¹³ so that, to a certain degree, geological research finds its meaning in the search for the general manifestation of the human whole turned into a stratum.

As a result, the reason for acceptance or rejection of the new epoch must go through determining a generalized particularity in the planet, and in such a significant way that it indicates the global condition of a ‘before and after’ in an Earth that transforms its terrestrial system during the vicissitudes of a deep time. However, the golden spike must come from an artificial source so that it is not the residue of the changes inherent to a planet with constant biogeochemical processes. On the contrary, stratigraphy must provide evidence of how these processes have changed their patterns for human reasons.

The declaration of an epochal change adds something else to this terrestrial pattern transformation. Such a change must be coincident with the proof of a new organization and inaugurate another kind of pattern that cannot be inferred from biogeochemical processes. In other words, this new organization must be explicable only by the artificial proceeding of something living. Hence, ‘life’, ‘organization’ and ‘artificiality’ become relative to the variation of terrestrial patterns.¹⁴ According to this approach, the Anthropocene is defined by an artificial planetary modification produced by living forms of organization. In addition, it also alludes to a modification that alters the Earth to the point of collapse of its biotic and abiotic factors. Consequently, we finally arrive at the conception of the catastrophic impact of human becoming.

With the above, the mode of organization that human beings have achieved through their artificial and technical deployment (i.e., their general forms of life), has risen to the level of a factor that transgresses the limits of the planet’s biophysical processes, altering the environment and endangering living species.¹⁵ At this point, the definitive proof of the Anthropocene’s existence is enunciated under the clause of the scientific community providing a particularity that has transformed the planet into something -moreover- vulnerable, and at the same time, away from the expected and probabilistic course of patterns that yield their regularity to the gradual randomness of entropy.

What is the singular phenomenon that becomes universal as stratigraphic data and opens the door to a new biogeochemical time? Or to express it substantially, if the Anthropocene is a fact, then stratigraphy has the minimum obligation to delimit two answers: When did it start, and what caused it? Now, without intending to enumerate the replies given to these questions along with all the proposed starting dates,¹⁶ it is worth noting that, derived from years of research and stratigraphic techniques, the Anthropocene Working Group proposed to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy the year 1952 (A.D.) as representative of the beginning of this new geological epoch. The date is due, among other things, to the detonation of thermonuclear bombs and the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the mid-20th century.¹⁷ So the golden spike was located in the sedimentation of Crawford Lake (in Ontario, Canada) due to the high levels of plutonium as scientific finding.¹⁸

As may be noted in the proposal, the pattern coming from human artificiality is manifested in the disruption of a previous pattern, in the form of radioactive isotopes sedimented in material means. On close reading, what the Anthropocene Working Group presents,¹⁹ as a philosophical implication, is the place of juxtaposition of some play between particulars and generals: a singular location representing global change, and a specific effect coming from human activities taken as a whole. Not only that, but, so to speak, Crawford Lake indicates that radioactive matter links deep (geological) time and historical (anthropological) time; and in turn: the crossing of two ontological planes, that is, the encounter between the reality of moral practices and ideologies (traditionally delimited under the rubric of the human spirit), and the reality of a robust materiality with properties not dependent on human interpretation or constructivism (a realm traditionally delimited as a world without subjectivity).

Linking historical time with the time of the ‘great outdoors’: realism of denied materiality

As will be seen in greater detail later on, the problem enunciated in this juxtaposition of planes demands rethinking the foundations of philosophy. In this respect, the emergence of the new realisms in all their variants does not seem accidental before the exhaustion of the metaphysics inherited in the humanities. As a brief parenthesis, although the present work does not take up ‘New Realism’ as the framework for setting the discussion, it is pertinent to introduce Markus Gabriel under the prior consideration that this entanglement of planes could be reformulated in terms of two fields of meaning, from which a specific object would emerge partially conjugating two orders: the symbolic-moral and the realm of natural entities.

This situation is analogous to the one seen by the philosopher regarding the phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic, where natural entities were mixed with a series of socio-economic decisions or processes,²⁰ thus causing various contingencies that damaged countries. Here, it is worth broadening the horizon for the ontological proposal in the New Realism’s ‘fields of meaning’:

Both metaphysics and constructivism fail because of an unjustified simplification of reality, in which they understand reality unilaterally either as the world without spectators or, equally one-sided, as the world of spectators. The world which I know is but always a world with spectators, in which facts that have no interest in me exist together with my interests (and perceptions, feelings, and so on). The world is neither exclusively the world without spectators nor the world of spectators. This is new realism. Old realism -that is, metaphysics- was only interested in the world without spectators, while constructivism quite narcissistically grounded the world and everything that is the case on our fantasies. Both theories lead to nothing.²¹

Following on from what has been presented, and starting from neorealist bases, it would be said that the Anthropocene’s field of meaning presents a series of objects whose reality involves the apparition of entities with different properties that cannot be reduced to a single ontological principle. However, since the proposal of the AWG involves the demand to situate the golden spike as evidence of global transition, it is relevant to accentuate the temporary and historical character that places at the forefront of philosophy a question about the possibility of thinking a reality without thought (a matter that foresees the search for an argumentative resource or ontological principle). In this discussion of philosophical starting points, as has been suggested, the link between materiality and meaning would not be called into question. For example, it would not be about denying to Crawford Lake its reality as a hybrid object (or to other stratigraphic objects that bring together the general making of human consciousness), as could be pointed out in a ‘symmetrical anthropological’ reading from Latour;²² but about stating, in fact, that the isotopic reality of the high levels of sedimented plutonium indicates an outside of consciousness (where consciousness itself had its global incidence as a particular factor).

Now, given that the plane of ‘human consciousness’ entails its deployment in political, economic and social dynamics, the epochal change calls into question the sense in which consciousness (in this case, mostly Western) self-defined itself, driven by an idea of finality that has justified the way of thinking and assuming the human and the non-human. Therefore, sought or not, the AWG’s proposal to inscribe the golden spike around 1952 is the statement of a geological phenomenon inextricably linked to the political-economic decisions of the mid-twentieth century. In such a way that the acceptance or rejection of plutonium isotopes’ radiation (as stratigraphic indicators) becomes the assumed or denied proof of the ideological failure of projects and visions about the meaning of the world and of history.²³

As a consequence, a challenge of geology will be in the way of meaning the human activity as a geological force, or in other words, to identify which anthropogenic aspects introduce an artificiality of such magnitude that they permanently modify the patterns of terrestrial processes. So, in this context, inaugurating a new geological epoch means uniting the time of humanity with the deep time of the outside, and to answer which are the particular historical facts that have been universalized to become part of the Earth.

The realist path to new universals: conclusive estimations from cosmotechnics and xenofeminism

The examination of the Gaia hypothesis, the anthropic principle and the idea of the Novacene, confirms, for the purpose of this article, the tension of three engagements between particulars and universals, as well as the way in which these are linked to three forms of vulnerability: planetary, human and technological.

Up to this point, it has been necessary to delve into the vicissitudes of planetarity in the stratigraphic discussion of the Anthropocene. However, it is worth concluding with the global vulnerability of the Earth passing to that of the human being, but through technological vulnerability. To this end, Lovelock’s reading forces us to two considerations: a) inorganic electronic life needs temperature regulation, and b) an anthropic metaphysical principle may contribute to machines being subjected to a cyborg model alienated by human intentionality. So, to address this particular-general tension of the human and technology, it will be appropriate to end with a brief cosmotechnical and xenofeminist appreciation.

Regarding the above consideration of the first clause (a): with an estimate on the thermostatic equilibrium, Lovelock analyzes that life on Earth would be unsustainable at a temperature higher than 50 °C. This fact, he argues, is fatal to all forms of human and non-human life: although electronic compounds could withstand up to 200 °C, cyborgs could not live on a planet with solar overheating because the environment would be fatally destructive.⁴⁵ This way, the vulnerability of the planet reduces the overall possibility of post-human life. However, as for the second clause (b), the anthropic principle delimits cyborg development from a universal purpose of technology. And at this point, ironically, it falls back on the same problem observed in the argument against the Anthropocene by stratigraphy, when it affirms the effects of human activity as part of the general ontological properties of technology.

It is worth remembering that in this text it was noted how the scientific rejection of the Anthropocene implies affirming an anthropological principle and an ontological property of technology, since the moment Homo sapiens is assumed to be a technical being, a margin of variability of artificial impact on the world is conceived. Therefore, the problem does not lie in the relationship between human and technique, but in the naturalization of a general and universal sense of particular technologies and their finalities. It is in this problem that the philosopher Yuk Hui’s concept of ‘cosmotechnics’ sheds light on the tension between a particular and a universal conception of technology.

As follows: if in (b) a vulnerability of machines is alleged, it is primarily because the anthropic principle Lovelock uses justifies a metaphysical thesis of technology, making it vulnerable to the subjection of a human projection in a crisis of environmental collapse. In other words, the cyborg model itself is violated by an ontological thesis of the world, of the human and of technology. Strange as it may seem, under this reading it could be declared that the ontogenesis of the cyborg is compromised -and even eclipsed- in its potentiality.⁴⁶ Similarly, technology itself finds itself in the inertia of a metaphysics that conceptualizes it in a universal and hegemonic way, restricting its development to what it supposedly is and must achieve in terms of the interplay between intelligence and information by evolutionary intentionality.

Given this problem, it is pertinent to extract anthropocentrism from the technological universal. Cosmotechnics, by the way, is a significant advance for this purpose. According to Hui, cosmotechnics is “the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making. There hasn’t been one or two technics, but many cosmotechnics”.⁴⁷ In other words, the tension between the particular and the universal in technology is resolved with a cosmopolitical premise. This implies understanding that the technological universal reflects a human tendency to produce technical facts, but that, because of the facts themselves, technical products are always particular, contingent, and situated in contexts with specific cosmic and moral visions.

In synthesis, the reconciliation of the particular-universal tension of technology is facilitated by understanding that technical facts are an anthropological tendency that responds to a multiplicity of locative senses, which hinders a philosophical framework to designate a technology as the very product of an evolutionary purpose. Now, given that technology is divided into locative uses and the notion of Homo sapiens constitutes a technical character, it is pertinent to show the particular-universal tension in the definition and meaning of the human. In this respect, xenofeminism (XF) becomes an unavoidable perspective to consider.⁴⁸

Inherited from speculative realism, xenofeminist philosophy can be synthesized as an effort to develop a left-wing accelerationist feminism.⁴⁹ This acquires a theoretical and practical body driven by three general premises: a technomaterialist vision, an anti-naturalist approach and a gender abolitionism. On the first point, technology is seen as a tool for political activism and the design of new material conditions; on the second, the ‘natural’ is thought of as a space for intervention, rejecting the idea that it is a limit (or a destiny) that establishes a normative framework for the reproduction or worth of certain corporealities (opposing in this way some ecofeminist theses of Maria Mies and Vandava Shiva); and, finally, in the third premise, abolitionism is understood as a search to transcend the gender system, so that it ceases to operate as a mechanism of oppression; therefore, in this aspect, xenofeminism insists on overcoming the restrictions associated with gender identities, seeking for them to flourish in a multiple manner.⁵⁰

On this horizon, it is appropriate to take up again the xenofeminist premise of constructing a universal considering the generality of the biological, since organic materiality can be altered in a particular way by its plastic condition. In other words, xenofeminism advocates a technopolitical anti-naturalism that does not deny biological reality as such, but rather questions it as a necessary destiny for every form of human life.⁵¹ Thus, the incorporation of technical facts into (always alienated) bodies means the achievement of general forms of life that build their own freedom.⁵²

Consequently, from xenofeminism, the field of anthropology becomes a field of plastic magnitude where new policies aiming at the universal emerge. So, it can be understood that the three forms of vulnerability (planetary, human and technological), linked to the tensions between the particular and the universal, must focus their discussion not on those discourses that construct reality, but on which theses are more adequate and pertinent due to the properties of this one.

Considering the above, the ‘postcorrelational’ planetary, anthropological and technological design invites us to consider a radical contingency that enables practices conditioned by specific ‘figures’ of reality, or “particular conditions of facticity”.⁵³ In this way, the making of the world hovers over the recognition of ontological properties that, although plastic, reveal themselves with a certain independence of historically assigned universal meanings. Hence, this situation is far from considering a reality anchored to a universal metaphysical principle or as the simple result of political and discursive practices that make of ontology a mere register of our consciousness.⁵⁴

Finally, the new realisms and materialisms, cosmotechnics and speculative realisms propose an ontological reframing of design and the search for the development of inclusive universals, beyond the constructivist formula that would reduce the planetary, the anthropological and technology to mere ideological vulnerabilities in dispute. In other words, philosophy seems to enter into the ontological investigation of golden spikes that resolve the tensions between the particular and the universal, the global and the local, with the aim of designing a posthumanity that highlights the malleable properties of the world, of the human being and of technological tools.

Perhaps, the general sense of these statements can be summarized in a reinterpretation of the words that Helen Hester devotes to the meaning of the prefix ‘xeno’. Ironically, it could be stated that the tensions that run through the humanities have the potential to indicate that the search for universals refers “not only [to] its inclusiveness and openness to difference, but [to] its strangeness regarding itself, by [conceiving itself] as a revisable project subject to continuous examination”.⁵⁵