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To celebrate Antipode’s 50th anniversary, we’ve brought together 50 short keyword essays by a range of
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scholars at varying career stages who all, in some way, have some kind of affinity with Antipode’s radical geo-
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all speak to our discipline’s past, present and future in exciting and suggestive ways. Contributors have taken
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Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50

Table of Contents
Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin
Mercury Monument New Left Offshore Organising Peace
A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation, Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations
Bench Ansfield
Unsettling “Inner City”: Liberal Protestantism and the Postwar Origins of a Keyword in Urban Studies
Political Consciousness Pride/Shame Prisons Racial Banishment
Bosman Batubara, Michelle Kooy, and Margreet Zwarteveen
Uneven Urbanisation: Connecting Flows of Water to Flows of Labour and Capital Through Jakarta’s Flood Infrastructure Radical Rifts Seeing The Anthropo(Obs)cene The Common
Jessica Blythe, Jennifer Silver, Louisa Evans, Derek Armitage, Nathan J. Bennett, Michele-Lee Moore, Tiffany H. Morrison,
and Katrina Brown
The Dark Side of Transformation: Latent Risks in Contemporary Sustainability Discourse The Union of Socialist Geographers Value Vulnerability Wiggle Room
Kate Cairns
Youth, Temporality, and Territorial Stigma: Finding Good in Camden, New Jersey
Thomas Cowan
The Urban Village, Agrarian Transformation, and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon, India
Kathryn Gillespie

Keywords
Placing Angola: Racialisation, Anthropocentrism, and Settler Colonialism at the Louisiana State Penitentiary’s Angola Rodeo
Edited by the Antipode
Miles Kenney-Lazar, Diana Suhardiman, and Michael B. Dwyer
State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos Editorial Collective
Lusi Morhayim
Nightscapes of Play: Enjoyment of Architecture and Urban Space through Bicycling
Neil Nunn
Toxic Encounters, Settler Logics of Elimination, and the Future of a Continent
Sharri Plonski
Material Footprints: The Struggle for Borders by Bedouin-Palestinians in Israel
in Radical
Geography:
Lela Rekhviashvili and Wladimir Sgibnev
Placing Transport Workers on the Agenda: The Conflicting Logics of Governing Mobility on Bishkek’s Marshrutkas
Laura Smith
What if Edward Abbey's “Monkey Wrench Gang” had Succeeded? The Ghosts of Glen Canyon Past, Present, and Future

Antipode at 50
Joaquín Villanueva, Martín Cobián, and Félix Rodríguez
San Juan, the Fragile City: Finance Capital, Class, and the Making of Puerto Rico’s Economic Crisis

Referees, July 2017–June 2018

 The Anthropo(Obs)cene

Erik Swyngedouw
Department of Geography, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK;
erik.swyngedouw@manchester.ac.uk

Politicising the Anthropo(Obs)cene

The “Anthropocene” is now commonly mobilised by geologists, Earth Systems sci-
entists, and scholars from the humanities and social sciences as the name to
denote the new geological era during which humans have arguably acquired
planetary geo-physical agency. While recognising a wide-ranging and often con-
tentious debate (see e.g. Castree 2014a, 2014b, 2014c; Hamilton et al. 2015), I
argue that the Anthropocene is a deeply depoliticising notion that off-stages polit-
ical possibilities. This off-staging unfolds through the creation of “Anthropo-
Scenes”, the mise-en-sce ne of a particular set of narratives that are by no means
homogeneous, but which broadly share the effect of silencing certain voices and
forms of acting (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). The notion of the Anthropo(Obs)-
cene then, is a tactic to both attest to and undermine the performativity of the
depoliticising stories of “the Anthropocene” (see Swyngedouw and Ernstson
2018).
Earth scientists, who coined the term “Anthropocene” (see Crutzen 2002), now
overwhelmingly understand the earth as a complex, non-linear, and indetermi-
nate system with multiple feedback loops and heterogeneous dynamics in which
(some) human activities are integral parts of these terraforming processes. The
capitalist forms of uneven and combined physico-geo-social transformation are
now generally recognised as key drivers of anthropogenic climate change and
other deep-time socio-environmental transformations that gave the Anthropocene
its name (Moore 2016). Both human and non-human futures are irrevocably
bound up in this intimate and intensifying metabolic—but highly contentious—
symbiosis. The configuration of this relationship has now been elevated to the
dignity of global public concern as deteriorating socio-ecological conditions might
jeopardise the continuation of civilisation as we know it.
Indeed, a global intellectual and professional technocracy has spurred a frantic
search for “smart”, “sustainable”, “resilient”, and/or “adaptive” socio-ecological
management and seeks out the socio-ecological qualities of eco-development, ret-
rofitting, inclusive governance, the making of new inter-species eco-topes, geo-
engineering, and technologically innovative—but fundamentally market-conform-
ing—eco-design in the making of a “good” Anthropocene. These techno-man-
agerial dispositifs that search for eco-prophylactic remedies for the predicament
we are in have entered the standard vocabulary of both governmental and private
actors, and are presumably capable of saving both city and planet, while assuring
that civilisation as we know it can continue for a little longer. Under the banner

Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, First Edition. Edited by the Antipode Editorial Collective.
ª 2019 The Authors/Antipode Foundation Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
254 Antipode

of radical techno-managerial restructuring, the focus is now squarely on how to

“change” so that nothing really has to change!

A More-Than-Human Ontology?
The proliferation of prophylactic socio-technical assemblages to make our socio-
ecological metabolism “sustainable” and “resilient” coincided with the emer-
gence of a radical ontological shift articulated around non-linearity, complexity,
contingency, “risk”, and “uncertainty”. In addition, theorists from both the
social sciences and the humanities mobilised these new earthly cosmologies to
propose new materialist perspectives and more-than-human ontologies that
point towards grasping earthly matters in more symmetrical human/non-human,
if not post-human, constellations. This symmetrical relational ontology, variously
referred to as more-than-human, post-human, or object-oriented ontology, fuels
the possibility of formulating a new cosmology, a new and more symmetrical
ordering of socio-natural relations (see e.g. Coole and Frost 2010; Harman
2016; Morton 2013). Nonetheless and despite its radical presumptions, we con-
tend that these cosmologies also open up the spectre, albeit by no means nec-
essarily so, for deepening particular capitalist forms of human–non-human
entanglements and can be corralled to sustain the possibility for a hyper-accel-
erationist eco-modernist vision and practice in which science, design, geo-engi-
neering, terraforming technologies, and big capital join to save both earth and
earthlings (Neyrat 2016). In the process, the matter of ecology is fundamentally
de-politicised.
The geo-sciences and, in particular, Earth System experts discern indeed in
the advent of the Anthropocene the possibility, if not necessity, for a careful
“adaptive” and “resilient” massaging of the totality of the Earth System. The
recognition of the earth as an intricately intertwined, but indeterminate, socio-
natural constellation opens up the possibility that the earth, with loving supervi-
sion, intelligent crafting, reflexive techno-natural nurturing and ethical manicur-
ing, can be terraformed in manners that sustain a deepening of the eco-
modernising and eco-capitalist process. As Bruce Braun (2015) insisted in his dis-
section of the historiographies of the new materialisms, the parallel between
non-deterministic geo-science, “resilience” studies, and the varieties of new
materialisms associated with a more-than-human ontology within neoliberalism
are not difficult to discern. Indeed, in this staging of the “good” Anthropocene,
the new symmetrical relational ontology can function as a philosophical quilt for
sustaining and advocating accelerationist hyper-modernising manifestos (Neyrat
2014). To save the world and ourselves, we need not less capitalism, but a dee-
per, a more intense and radically reflexive form, one that works to terraform
earth in a mutually benign and ethically caring co-constitution. Covering up the
multiple contradictions of capitalist eco-modernisation, the apparently revolu-
tionary new material ontologies offer new storylines, new symbolisations of the
earth’s past and future that can be corralled to help perform the ideological
groundwork required. In the next section, we shall show how this perspective
Politicising the Anthropo(Obs)cene 255

enters the field of politics, the governing of things and people in common in
troublingly de-politicising manners.

The De-politicised Politics of the Anthropocene as

Immuno-biopolitical Fantasy
As suggested above, some Anthroposcenic narratives provide for an apparently
immunological prophylactic against the threat of a hitherto presumably irre-
deemably external and revengeful nature. In what ways can the mainstreaming
of critical and radical new ontologies whose explicit objective was and is the
unsettling of modernist cosmologies be understood? Roberto Esposito’s analysis
of bio-political governmentality, enhanced by Frederic Neyrat’s psychoanalytical
interpretation, may begin to shed some light on this (Esposito 2008, 2011;
Neyrat 2010). Esposito’s main claim expands on Michel Foucault’s notion of
biopolitical governmentality as the quintessential form of modern liberal state
governance by demonstrating how this biopolitical frame today is increasingly
sutured by an immunological drive, a mission to seal off objects of govern-
ment (the population) from possibly harmful intruders and recalcitrant or
destabilising outsiders who threaten the bio-happiness, if not sheer survival, of
the population, and guarantees that life can continue to be lived. Immuno-
biopolitics are clearly at work, for example, in hegemonic Western practices
around immigration, health, or international terrorism. Is it not also the case
that many of the sustainability, “resilience”, “smart” technologies, and adaptive
eco-managerial policies and practices are precisely aimed at re-enforcing the
immunological prowess of the immune system of the body politic against
recalcitrant, if not threatening, outsiders (like CO2, waste, bacteria, refugees,
viruses, Jihadis, ozone, financial crises, and the like) so that life as we know it
can continue?
Alain Brossat (2003) calls this a fantasy of immunitary democracy. This is a
dangerous fantasy, as the immunitary logic entails nothing else than the
destruction of community, of politics. Necessarily, this immunitary logic creates
the continuous production of the exposed and the exiled (the non-immunised
—the dying ones) as the flipside of the immunised body, and leads to de-poli-
ticisation. As Esposito argues further, the immunological biopolitical dispositif
turns indeed into a thanatopolitics, of who should live or die; it turns into
making life and making die (Mbembe 2003). In the excessive acting of the
immunological drive, the dispositif turns against what it should protect. It
becomes self-destructive in a process of auto-immunisation. The construction of
eco-bubbles and “sustainable” enclaves for the privileged produces simultane-
ously the unprotected exiles and deepening socio-ecological destruction else-
where. This is eco-gentrification elevated to new heights. In other words, the
processes that secure life in some places end up threatening its very continua-
tion elsewhere, at all geographical scales. This infernal dialectic, Neyrat argues,
is predicated upon re-doubling the fantasy of absolute immunisation, that is
the fantasy that despite the fact we (the immunised) know very well we shall
die, we act and organise things as if life will go on forever (Neyrat et al.
256 Antipode

2014). The symmetrical human–non-human ontology on which the Anthropo-

(Obs)cene rests promises to cut through the unbearable deadlock between
immuno- and thanato-politics without really having to alter the trajectory of
socio-ecological change. It is the process that makes sure that we can go on
living without staring the Real of eventual (ex-)termination in the eye. It is the
hysterical position that guarantees that death remains obscure and distant, an
obscene impossibility.

Re-Centring the Political

While the controversies over the Anthropocene are mobilised in all manner of
ways, suggesting indeed a politicisation of the stuff of things, the “political”
cannot and should not be grounded on the eventual truth of the Anthro-
pocene. There is no code, injunction, ontology in the Anthropocenic narratives
that can or should found a new political or politicising ecology. The ultimate
de-politicising gesture resides precisely in letting the naming of a geo-social
epoch and a contingent “truth” of nature decide our politics, thereby disavow-
ing that the “our” or “the human” does not exist. It is yet again a failing
attempt to found a new politics on a contested truth of nature. What is
required is to assume fully the trauma that the decision is ours and ours only
to make.
It is indeed surprising that post-foundational political thought is rarely articu-
lated with more-than-human ontologies of the stuff of matter. Indeed, the post-
foundational intellectual landscape that brought into conversation complexity the-
ory and the new materialisms, and claims to open up radical new possibilities, is
symptomatically silent of the post-foundational political thought that emerged
alongside and in a comparable context. Jacques Ranciere (1998), for example,
understands the political as the interruptive staging of equality by the “part of
no-part”. The political appears when those that are not counted within the count
of the situation (the excluded, the mute, the exposed, and exiled) make them-
selves heard and seen—that is, perceptible and countable—in staging equality.
For these thinkers, the political emerges symptomatically as an immanent practice
of appearance—as Hannah Arendt would put it, or an event in Alain Badiou’s ter-
minology (Badiou 2007), that interrupts a given relational configuration or con-
stellation. This performative perspective of politics needs no grounding in any
current or historical order or logic, based on say nature, the non-human, ecology,
race, class, abilities, or gender. The political is a public aesthetic affair understood
as the ability to disrupt, disturb, and reconfigure what is perceptible, sensible,
and countable (Ranci ere 2004).
Indeed, a wide range of political theorists, despite their often radically oppos-
ing views, share this search for renewing political thought in a post-foundational
ontological landscape characterised by inconsistency, radical heterogeneity and
incalculable immanence. Badiou (2008), for example, insists that the attempts
to re-found the political philosophically are in fact an integral part of what he
diagnoses as a pervasive process of depoliticisation. For him, “ecology is the
new opium of the masses”. A re-emergence of the political, he insists, resides in
Politicising the Anthropo(Obs)cene 257

fidelity, manifested in militant acting, to egalitarian political events that might

open a political truth procedure. Turning a politically progressive event into a
political truth procedure requires the emergence of political subjects that main-
tain a fidelity to the inaugural egalitarian event, aspire to its generalisation and
coming into being through sustained actions and militant organisation. It is a
fidelity to the practical possibility of the coming community, but without ulti-
mate ontological guarantee in history, theory, technology, nature, ecology, the
Party, or the State. Yet it is one that slowly and relentlessly carves out a new
socio-physical and socio-ecological reality, often in the face of the most formid-
able repression and violence. This requires sustained action, painstaking organi-
sation, and the lengthy process of radical egalitarian transformation. Above all,
it necessitates embracing the trauma of freedom and abandoning the fear of
failing as fail we shall; more-than-human unpredictable and uncaring behaviour
guarantees that.

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