ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the rhetoric of climate change has obscured what is unchanging in the Anthropocene: the nature of capitalist production and the contemporary regime of its governmentality. It argues that the Anthropocene not just as a planetary crisis but also as a problem of representation- the problem, namely, of representing the planet as a stable and predictable object of knowledge. To theorize the Anthropocene as a problem of knowledge embedded in an issue of power, the chapter traces the lineaments of governmentality at the geological level- or geopower. It suggests that geopower is subtended by a realist mode of figuration whose function is to present Nature as sustainable and self-replicating, and thus entirely open to capitalist exploitation. The chapter shows that the dual effect of this realism has been to naturalize and dematerialize its object: Nature.
