The politics of the unseen: speculative, pragmatic and nihilist hope in the anthropocene

This paper explores hope as a dominant framing for critical social theory in the era of the Anthropocene. It suggests that with the dissolution of modernist assumptions of human exceptionality, universal causality and temporal progress, critical social theory can be understood as having shifted fields. This shift is from the field of the seen – the field of appearances (i.e. the world of politics, of rational subjects, instrumental rationality and aspirations of progress) – to the field of the unseen (towards approaches which can be understood as working with or drawing upon a world which is beyond or below appearances). It will be argued that the Anthropocene is central to this shift from the centrality of questions of transparency and of politics to those of opacity and hope. This is in part because the Anthropocene is seen to have emerged behind the backs of political reason, unseen and unintended. If the Anthropocene as a condition is the product of taking a narrow reductive approach to the world, as framed in the modern ontology, then access to the unseen world becomes a necessity. The different forms of hope engaged with in this paper articulate distinct understandings of this ‘other world’ beyond appearances.