ABSTRACT
This book has analysed the emergence of new modes of governance grounded and enabled by the ontopolitics of the Anthropocene. In developing the categories of Mapping, Sensing and Hacking to distinguish specific modes of governance, it has sought to highlight the increasingly positive affirmation of the new epoch of the Anthropocene. This chapter seeks to draw out further the links between the ontopolitical assumptions of the Anthropocene and new modes of governance. Its subject is the transvaluation of critique. It seeks to emphasise that the affirmation of the Anthropocene is neither driven merely by concerns over climate change and global warming, if anything these concerns would make the Anthropocene problematic, but nor is it driven merely by a critique of modernist modes of political theorising. This chapter focuses on what is unique about the affirmation of the Anthropocene and what makes it distinct from critical, neo-Marxist or cultural critiques of modernity: the fact that the critique of modernity is not built on the basis that modernity was dehumanising, separating man from nature, but its inversion: that modernity was not dehumanising enough. The problem is no longer seen to be the lack of reason of modernist rationalism but the lack of reason of the world itself. The ‘Left’ critique of modernity is thus transvalued in the affirmation of the Anthropocene. The ontopolitical assumptions which ground the new 190modes of governance of the Anthropocene do not raise the possibility of alternatives – any alternative would merely reconstitute man as a knowing subject separated from the world – but instead seek to affirm the world as it currently exists. Thus the ontopolitics of the Anthropocene are necessarily hostile to critique – they ontologise politics, seeking to ground a new metaphysical set of assertions of the limits of governance.
