Being against the Anthropocene

In this book T. J. Demos, professor of art history and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, characterizes the Anthropocene as an abstract concept that offers a reductive approach to understanding humanity. As Demos makes evident, the label Anthropocene seems to be a manipulative construct of capitalism designed to assimilate, control, and mask the differential nature of humanity. In contrast, Demos, an art historian and cultural critic, depicts humanity as a vibrating field of differences that is reluctant to express itself as oneness. Through this insistence Demos enables us to see how capitalist interests appropriate the universalizing logic of the Anthropocene to blame humanity in its entirety as responsible for environmental devastation brought about by the capitalists, the corporations, and the petrochemical industries. According to Demos, it is necessary to resist obscuring corporate accountability by partaking in an overarching narrative like the Anthropocene that posits contemporary naturalization of the consumerist human activity as sole perpetrator of environmental degradation. Instead, we must give attention to environmental activists and powerless communities that fight against, or stand as victims of environmental degradation, and in the process make anthropocentrism untenable. In the first two chapters of his book, Demos throws light on capitalist stratagems that keep the concept of the Anthropocene afloat. He shows how capitalism uses satelliteguided images of ecodestructive human activities to implicate the whole of humanity. These images provide the foundation for B o o k R e v i e w